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CLI Tricks: track | |
May 31st, 2018 | |
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This is a part of a series of phlog entries where I will share | |
some of my command line tricks, tips, and scripts. | |
## track ## | |
Fitness trackers are all the rage. Chances are that you've got one | |
on you right now, weirdo. Collecting data about your own behavior | |
is pretty neat. It's extra cool if you can do it in a way that | |
doesn't also give that data away to nefarious strangers who want | |
to take over the world, but I digress. | |
I like tracking my shiz too. I've used my phone to count steps in | |
the past, and I have a scale in my bathroom, and a tape-measure | |
for my big belly. But where do I save those numbers so I can look | |
back on my amazing progress of awesomeness later? I don't really | |
want to hand that over to Google or MyFitnessPal. They don't need | |
to know that stuff. I could just store it in text files for myself | |
and parse them later. | |
And that's exactly what I decided to do. I keep some csv files in | |
dropbox, or in nextcloud, or in syncthing. But logging stuff in | |
CSV files isn't really fun, so I wrote a little tracker app to | |
help me out. | |
Now you can enjoy the glory of my crappy little program too! | |
First, grab a copy over on github [0] and install it. | |
[0] track | |
It's really easy to use. Start by checking the man page or | |
spitting out some help: | |
$ man track | |
$ track -h | |
See how to use it? Great! You're done! | |
But seriously, it is really basic. You can just add a new metric | |
to track by tracking something to it for the first time. It allows | |
only one data point per day. It doesn't care what format that data | |
is in. | |
There's probably easy ways to break it, so, um, don't do those. | |
Do you have something you want to add to it to make it better? | |
Cool! Make a pull request and gimme-gimme. I probably want that | |
feature too. | |
Oh, as a side-note, the data I used in my post "Fat" [1] all was | |
logged with this script. I have an example in that post of how to | |
generate a graph on the command line using the jp utility. Check | |
it out. | |
[1] Fat | |
Now that track is a bit more sophisticated, I can track my weight | |
by typing: | |
$ track -ac weight | jp -input csv -width 67 -height 25 | |
A bit of an improvement! |