Keeping with last year’s tradition, this post comes when we are almost 1/5th through this year.

2022 projects

Expense Tracker

I built a personal Expense Tracker over the month of October using SQLite and Streamlit, because I wasn’t comfortable sharing my financial data with a 3rd party. I’ve tried to keep it simple, so it’s not a pain to use. But, I’ve also tried to keep it extensible, for others to try and use.

The last few months have been quite busy personally, and I haven’t been able to use it as much as I would like to, but hopefully things will settle down soon. A couple of things that I’d like to improve:

• The Sqlite file is stored locally, and the data is not synced between different computers.

• The tagging/categorization of expenses is very manual, and a little bit more automation would be handy.

artful-dodger

A Next.js project for hosting an art/photo gallery with metadata stored in a Google Spreadsheet and images in a Google Drive (with an optional CDN, recommended). I built this for a friend, who is experimenting with creating “a more equitable model for curating, buying, and selling art”. The gallery is currently in “private beta”, and I can’t link to it. But, here’s a sample gallery here, whose configuration lives here.

ox-gist

I released my first Emacs MELPA package – ox-gist – an Orgmode backend to export and update sub-trees and buffers to GitHub gists. It was a great experience contributing to MELPA. I wrote a blog post about it too.

Termux scripts

I’ve started using Termux on my Android phone and have found the Text-to-Speech (TTS) API quite handy. I’ve a couple of scripts on my phone that lets me use TTS to read out contents on the clipboard or an article from my browser.

Fantasy League Site

With help from a bunch of volunteers collecting and validating data, Jonny and I built a website for the Fantasy League for Indian Ultimate State Championships. There was nothing technically challenging about the project, but it just involved a lot of data cleaning and co-ordination between the volunteers. The data was collected using pen and paper, instead of a digital app for collecting the stats. This made the data cleaning and validation significantly harder. I’d definitely push for digital data collection if people try to do something like this again.

Bookmarklets

A web-page with a bunch of Bookmarklets from my browser’s Bookmarks bar. I’ve had most of them around for a while, but putting them on a web page makes it easy to share and find myself on other browsers/computers.

Music

Unlike 2021, I’ve only been able to record a couple of songs. And this year (2023) hasn’t been any better, so far. I hope I’ll be able to make amends to this, soon, though.

Review of 2021 projects

Earworm

I didn’t make any updates to the package, not because it’s perfect but because I didn’t use it much in 2022 – thanks to how little I’ve been able to record.

While, writing this blog post I realized that workflow had a couple of annoyances. I improved the code to fix them.

1. I need to move an audio file back-and-forth between my phone and my laptop, one full round trip to add ID3 tags and cover image. This makes me put off uploading recorded files to the site. Also, the new media file needs to be named in a specific format. I’ve added a new CLI subcommand to automate all of this for me.

2. I always need the full collection of the music files on the computer, where I’m updating the site from. I can just scp the existing site onto my computer and merge the media directories.

Ukulele Tutorials Aggregator

The job of manually updating the site is a lot of work, and I haven’t had the interest to keep doing it.

RPi Server and Phone Backup

The physical setup was accidentally dismantled by folks I share my physical space with, and I haven’t been able to put back everything in place, yet. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back to doing this at some point this year.

Outro

I’ve already built a couple of small things in 2023, and I hope I am able to find some interesting things to do this year.

Link to the 2021 post.