Updates 2023/Q1

The first quarter includes a mix of personal and open source project updates.

Personal things

The year began with an injury of my foot, which apparently was significant enough to make it swell and hurt for a few days. I can’t even tell for sure how that happened in first place and I assume it was either due to my worn out Air Jordans or during one of my workouts. Whatever it was, it luckily resolved within two weeks. I’ve also struggled with some other health related things, which did mess with my workout routine.

Speaking of workouts, I nevertheless made significant progress and cut back to some decent definition, after a prolonged, Covid-induced period of slacking. I focused on cutting for the majority of Q1 and reached a point where I can now switch to clean building again. My food consisted of mainly eggs, steak, salmon and chicken for proteins, as well as small portions of quinoa and rice for some carbs every other day, and giant amounts of vegetables like fresh bell peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, onions and coleslaw. Every once in a while I replaced the vegetables in a meal with half a pineapple to keep my sweet tooth at bay. The most important thing however was avoiding refined sugars, dairy, flours and even pasta. I kept it strict with only the basics, no sauces and only water or lemon-ginger tea for drinking. I was able to significantly cut back on body fat.

In the upcoming months I’m going to move closer to a ratio of 40% protein, 25% carbs and 35% fats per day and increase the overall calorie intake as well as calorie burn per day. I will be increasing the portions of meat and fish, as I’m not looking to reintroduce protein shakes or too much dairy.

Being 6'1"/1.85m I’m looking to keep my weight at around 187lbs/85kg, ideally with less than 16% body fat. I might reintroduce cardio at some point, although I really dislike running in the gym – and with outside temperatures of over 32°C and humidity levels around 80% it’s not that easy to keep a consistency with running outdoors, to say the least.

Open source projects

I had a bit of time on my hands to pursue my open source projects. Most repositories have received at least dependency upgrades/security fixes, while others have advanced quite a bit as well. Let me highlight the most significant updates down below.

Neon Modem Overdrive

At the beginning of January I released the very first version of what I had teased in the last status update: Neon Modem Overdrive

Neon Modem Overdrive is a BBS-style command line client that supports Discourse, Lemmy, Lobsters and Hacker News as backends, and seamlessly integrates all of them into a streamlined TUI.

Neon Modem is built in Go, using Charm’s Bubble Tea TUI framework, but implements an own window manager (or compositor if you want) that allows it to use a third dimension, on top of the two dimensional rendering that Bubble Tea offers today. With that it is possible to display dialog windows on top of one another, in order to offer a smoother UI experience.

You can find out more about Neon Modem Overdrive in this dedicated post and on GitHub

WTH

I continued work on WTH, a better personal information dashboard for the terminal, and an alternative to WTF.

For years I’ve been trying to make use of WTF but have always been thrown off by quirks in it’s “modules” and its non-responsive TUI. I decided to give it a try and build an alternative that’s actually modular, using Bubble Tea for the TUI and actual Go modules for its modules. And I called it What the Heck, or WTH.

While WTH doesn’t (yet) have the large amount of modules that WTF offers, it does provide a command module that can be used in combination with Gum to build scripts that integrate neatly into WTH and can display all sorts of info, without the need to extend WTH’s code base.

Native Go modules for WTH can be built using libwth and are build as actual .so files, so that they can be maintained and shipped independently of WTH itself. This way it’s possible to extend WTH in whatever way people want it, without the necessity to commit the new modules to the WTH main repo – as it is the case with WTF. WTF modules are built into WTF, while WTH can be extended independently.

WTH is also responsive, meaning that you don’t specify actual module sizes but rather proportions and let WTH do the resizing magic. This way it’s possible to enlarge and shrink the terminal or tmux pane that runs WTH, without cutting off modules. Modules will take care to make their content fit no matter their individual size.

WTH is in its early stages of development, but if you fancy the idea I’d appreciate you giving it a try and maybe even contribute own modules for it!

mercator

Another new project is mercator. It is a super lightweight OpenStreetMap browser as terminal user interface program. It also uses Bubble Tea and hence offers the map view as an actual Bubble you could integrate into your own Bubble Tea application.

mercator renders tiles as ANSI, so you can run it on every terminal – even over serial. Especially the satellite view (mercator -style 11 ...) looks pretty cool on the terminal.

I’m considering investing some more effort into it to remove any labels on the tiles and instead have them display as actual text, so that street and city names become readable. This way mercator could serve an actual purpose over just looking cool on the terminal.