As if my current projects slate wasn't full enough, I did admittedly spend some time this weekend thinking how nice it would be to have a few other little utilities to solve a bunch of problems I don't currently have nice solutions for.
1) A Mastodon Archives/Live-Feed viewer - Mainly for searching for past posts (and/or managing ones you no longer want to keep up) - e.g. to extract a bunch to a blog post for easier access in future (e.g. similar to how this post came about).
2) A personal "boss mode" ish dashboard screen that can be launched with a single keypress, and can be used to put up a placeholder / dashboardy type screen that allows monitoring a whole bunch of feeds = info that you'd like to keep an eye on, while you step away from your machine OR are interrupted (and/or don't want others to look at what you were doing)... Sort of like the lock screen, but more fully featured, and maybe also a bit like the
Now, both of these "ideas" aren't really something I plan to go "all in" on. But, having had the thought, they are tempting enough to at least toy around with to see if I can clobber together some prototypes (or at least draft designs) - as a bit of an "itch scratching" exercise in creativity. Whether I ultimately built these properly for my own use (or even for others) is moot... it's likely I won't get that far, as these are not really priorities! But still, it's fun to tinker with!
The following is just a dump of my original posts about this, that I'm archiving here to refer back to these later - and are just more for my own records than anything else... (Of course, if any of these inspire anyone to build a working solution, they'd be more than welcome!)
1) Mastodon Archives Viewer
I'd been toying with figuring out how the Mastodon API works, so that I can maybe build a personal viewer (for live data OR loaded from the zip archive), to do exactly 2 things:
1) Allow filtering my own posts to a particular date-time range, excluding boosts, and only showing both ALL top-level posts AND any replies to threads I've made... AND maybe grouping reply chains into threads that only appear once
2) Full text search, for when I can't remember when I posted about something - but filtered to only show the above
3) I should also add the ability to log in and delete things I've flagged up for deletion, once I find them 😜
Use Case for 1+2:
Finding old threads of interest, and converting them into named blog posts for easier retrieval in future
2) Dashboard
And of course, once I do that, I may end up looking into my other harebrained project that I really shouldn't sink time into:
A "personal dashboard" / "boss mode" placeholder screen I can pull up on a keypress to show the following:
* Time + Date in fancy way
* Weather - Specifically current temp, sun/rain/cloud condition, with the trends (hourly), AND with option to dial in the radar map too (+ maybe tie in the lightning trackers)
* Flight Radar (alongside that weather display)
* World Time/Temperature gallery
* Tracking status panel for current parcels being tracked
* Whether I have had any new or unread emails / IM messages / missed calls in the last hour or so, and from whom (but NOT the contents, so no embarrassing context leaks when AFK)
* News headlines aggregated from all the main news sites I check
* Mastodon feeds view/lists
* Rotating "blast from the past" gallery of the day (but restricted those "starred" good images only, to avoid nasty surprises)
* Ability to pin a bunch of photos / page screenshots and keep them visible for a while
* Todolist panes + scratchpads - All backed to simple files on disk for no lock-in / data loss
* CPU / Memory / IO / Network stats graphs + dials
* Maybe tailored app / folder launchers - both quick launch buttons and KRunner style search-prompt box
All this in presented in a style somewhere between skeuomorphic desk/particle board (with moody lampshades) and/or frosted glass + blooming clouds + animated pond/aquarium (or maybe all of those in some kind of fancy agglomation)
Of course, I haven't even figured out how to make a layout for all that which I would even like + can fit all that!
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