Tinky Care

When I first started programming, I was stuck in the desert of despair for a good number of months. While I had lots of notes on research and numerical methods I’d tried with varying degrees of disaster, the package I was working on was not getting anywhere and it was hard to feel like I was doing anything of substance. A friend sent me a link to notwaldorf’s tiny-care-terminal, and I’ve been using it on and off ever since as a way to keep track of progress when it seems like I’m getting nowhere.

A few weeks ago, I finally got my hands on an Inky Impression and decided to put my own spin on tiny-care-terminal with the task tracking methods that I now use, which I’m calling Tinky Care.

Tinky Care can currently do three things, but with the large display, I could probably incorporate a few others (weather, highest priority tasks, etc.). It will give you a count of the org tasks that you’ve accomplished each day for the past week, as well as update you with the latest tweets from @selfcare_bot. You can also use the buttons on the side to activate a pomodoro timer to help you stay on task and remember to take breaks!

While tiny-care-terminal provides you with a count of the number of github commits for the past day and week, I almost exclusively use org mode for all task tracking, since my github commits are split across two accounts and several repos. For now, I didn’t want to have to sort out which ones I want to track, but maybe I’ll incorporate this as an option in the future.

You can set where your org file lives in the environment variables (see sample.env), and then use the shell scripts to push the org task count graphic from your computer to your raspberry pi periodically using scp (a Pi Zero W should be sufficient for the project). Your org file will be parsed periodically, and it should be able to pick up both one-off accomplished tasks, as well as repeating habits.

I incorporated the pomodoro timer from a smaller eink project I did last fall. You can turn it off by hitting the second from the top button, and turn it back on or reset it by hitting the bottom ‘.

For the selfcare twitterbot, you’ll need a Twitter developer account. I’ve set my twitterbot to @selfcare_bot (@tinycarebot is pretty passive aggressive these days…), but you could easily set it to your favorite twitter account in the environment variables file.

I’m still experimenting with colors and graphics, so I’ll probably update this sooner rather than later, but this was a good stopping point, and I’m all about celebrating small wins these days.