What I have been up to recently.

Degoogling:

I have at this point completely degoogled. The only think left to fix is my mobile phone. I need to wait a bit on that though until the librem 5 is released. Right now I am stuck on android.

Healthmon:

I have a stablish release of healthmon written.

It is completely stable enough for me. There are still tons of features I am working on. Obviously not a pretty program but I am focusing on features and performance. So I am fine with leaving the interface a bit ugly because this thing runs super quick.

Running and Cape trip:

Just got back from cape code on a nice little trip. Did some running and I have been working on my running in general. I am averaging about 3 miles per session. below is an image of the highland lighthouse that I took when I ran there from my hotel.

other software I am working on:

My next project is going to be a little meditation timer. I really can’t find anything that works the way I need it to so I am off yet again to write up a quick and dirty application to get that working.

Fixed my acoustic problem with my computer:

Finally I swapped out this really noisy fan in the desktop I built. The thing was so loud it was like flying a small prop plane any time I used my PC. I went with a noctua fan and I have to say I keep wondering if the computer is even on.

Healthmon for linux coming soon!

I have been working for a little bit in my spare time on a FLOSS replacement to loseit and fitbit. The problem with these apps is they are providing the very useful benefit of helping people to lose weight but at the cost of needing to give up your biometric information to a 3rd party. The calculations they run in order to provide their service is mostly trivial. So really they are just sucking up your data and doing a calculation that anyone could do to provide you with the statistics.

Design:

The design is based around a concept of write once run everywhere as well as data ownership. Instead of your data being on a server somewhere you have local databases that you can then sync anyway you feel comfortable doing.

Rapid Development:

To make development as fast as possible I am sticking to the easygui library. this is allowing me to write the whole program in a linear fashion as fast as possible while still providing users with a GUI that integrates into GTK.

other important modules are pyplot for graphing functionality. I intend to focus on ease of use and function over beauty. I believe if this is easy to use, fast, and helps people lose weight while preserving privacy then who cares if it’s not beautiful.

Food dictionary:

one of the biggest disadvantages at launch will be that there is going to be a very limited food dictionary. I am making the food dictionaries as csv files for ease of management. this will allow users to edit them in the program, in a spreadsheet editor, or even with a text editor. So while the dictionary will be limited at first I am hoping that the ease of adding to the dictionaries will make up for it’s limitations.

Extensibility:

because of how I am writing this I believe I will be able to make it very extensible. for instance right now in other weight loss programs there are only certain metrics that you can track and some you have to pay for. as a down the line feature I intend to make it so that you can add new metrics to track on the fly. Also because this is going to be a small program with only a few libraries anyone should be able to pick up and modify the source code very quickly.

Sensible logging:

One of the things I ran into when playing around with other apps is that they had very limited measurements. Like do I measure milk in grams? Even with conversion charts and what not I was like okay program you do that ! So I am hoping to keep the food dictionary to sensible measures. you want more types of measurements update the dictionary to include those measurements.

I will do some more posts as I make progress.