5 Random Things I Did This Weekend

In the style of DC Rainmaker I am going to try and write one of these each weekend in part to recognize the things that I do.

London bouldering at The Arch Bermondsey

I met up with some of my London friends at the Arch climbing gym in Bermondsey. It's a great facility if crowded on a Sunday morning. There are real differences in setting style from my usual haunt, the Circuit bouldering gym in Portland, Or.

I burned a few flashes while getting used to matching the top hold for the finish rather than the top of the wall. I was surprised by the relative absence of crimps with more slopers, mantels and jugs than I am used to seeing.

Pub Lunch

After a morning climbing I refuelled in the traditional way with a Sunday roast at the pub. A delicous pork roast helped down by a pint of Guiness. I sneaked a few fork fulls of eton mess to complete the occassion.

Boris biking

Partly to deal with the consequences of a heavy meal I decided to take one of the many cycle share bikes. After clicking through about 12 different disclaimers and paying the £2 fee I took my bike from the rack and promptly headed off in the wrong direction. My poor navigation skills did give me a chance to ride on one of the still under construction cycle superhighways. These are separated from the road and in theory dedicated to cyclists. It did make navigating the Mile End road easier but there is clearly still plenty of work to be done to finsh them.

A new challenge

While at lunch I made a bet with a good friend. I now have to nail a 30 second freestanding handstand before he does or I am buying the beers at the next pub lunch. Practice starts Monday.

Thames walk

Finally on arriving back in Richmond I decided to skip the 20 min bus journey back to my parents home and instead opted for a beautiful if chilly walk along the Thames. Walking in the evening with no crowds and a beautiful sunset to light the way made for a surprisingly pleasant walk despite the weight of groceries on my pack.

Test Post

Test from Desk.app

IFTTT, Hazel and Day One

I have been expirementing with integrating more passive data collection into Day One. As Day One doesnt have a cloud service to push data through it requires a slightly more complex workflow. While researching a way of getting more of my internet data into Day One I came across this article on poor signal showing how to integrate IFTTT, Hazel, Dropbox and Day One.

So what data am I collecting in Day One.

• The tracks I play on Rdio via lastfm.
• Fitbit Daily Stats
• Fitbit Weight
• Pocket new articles
• Pinboard new bookmarks
• A selfie snapped automatically from macbook pro facetime camera
• A note every time I go to the climbing gym or weights gym
• New Linkedin contacts

All this gives me a personal archive of all the data that I create passively.

Script to add a selfie every day to Day One

I was looking over an old backup when I came across a series of photos that I had taken as part of a picture a day project. Looking back on the photos was interesting; the different places, clothes and hairstyles that are the boring minutae of most days are rendered fascinating by their setting in a sequence. These were all ungaurded moments that reminded moI liked the photos but I wanted a better place to put them. Day One seemed like the perfect answer I was alredy using it for journaling and it supports a great command line interface.

What does it do? Snaps a photo at startup from your macbookpro camera and at 9:30 every morning. It then saves that image to a folder using the date for the filename and posts it to your day one journal.

What does it need to work

ImageSnap A comman line utility for taking pictures with the built-in isight camera. The easiest way to install this is via homebrew: brew install imagesnap

Day One A fantastic journaling application

Day One Command Line Tools Command line tools for Day One

Once you have all these installed you can use the following simple script to link it all together.

#!/bin/bash    


# The file name here we are using the date in Y-M-D format
FILE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").jpg

# the image path to save the image
IMAGEPATH=/Users/jkellerman/Dropbox/Images/me/


FILEPATH="$IMAGEPATH$FILE"


# Snap the photo
/usr/local/bin/imagesnap "$FILEPATH"
    
# Add the iamge to dayone
echo "Daily Image" | /usr/local/bin/dayone -j="path to dayone   journal" -p="$FILEPATH" new

# Sleep to stop lauchd thinking we are just dying
sleep 10s

The last thing you need is a launctl plist file that tells the script when to run. Here is the one I am using to run the script every day at 9:30am. This lives in /Library/LaunchDaemons/

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN
           http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >
           <plist version="1.0">
           <dict>
                <key>Label</key>
                <string>com.example.exampled</string>
                <key>ProgramArguments</key>
                <array>
                    <string>/bin/sh</string>
                    <string>/Users/jkellerman/scripts/isighttodayone.sh</string>
                </array>
                
                <key>KeepAlive</key>
                <false/>

                <key>RunAtLoad</key>
                <true/>

                <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
                <dict>
                    <key>Hour</key>
                    <integer>9</integer>
                    <key>Minute</key>
                    <integer>30</integer>
                </dict>


           </dict>
           </plist>