Random Topics. A simple record.
Quickly written. Lightly edited.
Python continues to be a joy for scripting; shaving time off repetitive tasks and allowing for much more standard output. My primary project last year focused on setting up and printing a church calendar.
I’m grateful for the people who have created libraries like parsimonious, Pillow, PyYAML, and reportlab. Those tools greatly simplified the task at hand.
The Android version of Garmin Connect app was recently updated. The update improved the overall look of the app which was something I appreciated. However, the update also changed the way step counts are presented. In the process, the app no longer presents the data I have chosen to use as my primary metric—a metric view that presented data in a stable manner.1 In its place, they now provide a view older data that changes every day!2 update: Garmin did eventually update the app to contain a view of older data that lumps together the data for each calendar month. I’ve appreciated that addition – and still use the python generated view I write about in this note on a daily basis.
This chage was quite frustrating. Information I used to get with a quick glance was now going to require keeping several numbers in my head while flipping through several pages in the app.
After a little digging, I discovered that someone had already created a python module that will interface with Garmin’s servers and extract, among other things, historical steps data.
Thanks to that module, I’ve been able to pull together a python script that automatically downloads the data from Garmin, caches the information locally, and then creates a webpage with the data I want to see. It was a fun little project which occupied a few evenings—and has simplified keeping track of my daily, monthly, and annual step counts.
They now provide a “weeks” view, but the weeks are always counted backward from “today”. You can see what you did in the last six days (and today), and then the seven days before that, and then the seven days before that. This means the day data is always sliding backward in the slots and total step counts for prior weeks constantly change.
I can understand the logic of the choice: you are always comparing “this past week” to a comparable timeframe.
However, I’m much more geared to think about life by organizing it in weeks, months, and years with fixed beginnings. And, I prefer my retrospective data to be stable from day to day.
I wrote to customer support to express my preference for the prior view. The representative responded in the passive voice to describe the change (it was something that happened to them) and said it would likely be changed in a future update. The response did point out that their website continues to offer the view (on a not-very-mobile-friendly website).
returnSITE: I’ve made a few additional tweaks to the css on the site and learned a little more about hugo taxonomies. This really should be the end of focusing on appearance until I’ve written enough to make the site worth visiting.
SITE: I’ve added a few more tweaks to the look of the site. In particular, I changed the main fonts from Roboto Slab & Lato to Domine & Barlow Semi Condensed. All of these are available as Google Fonts. The big thing that needs to change: I need to create content.
SITE: Reworked how footnotes work: stopped using the markdown footnote – because the new hugo markdown parser (“Goldmark”) does not generate unique footnote references on list pages. Created hugo shortcodes to do the work instead. Lightly altered the javascript to make it work.
SITE: My first attempt at javascript footnotes1 is live. It has quite a bit further to go.
I used information from hugo footnotes popup and javascript documentation to pull this together. Time will tell how much more I need to tweak the script.
The basic style was insipired by Five Thirty Eight’s footnote displays.
And, this paragraph contains another example footnote.2 It isn’t here to do all that much, but I do want to try a multiparagraph footnote that contains a link to another document.
This is the first paragraph of the footnote. Normally, you’d find something of interest that doesn’t need to be said in the main document. But, for this trial run, all you’ll find is this.
Yet, there is a second paragraph in the footnote. And, you’ll also find a link to the about page of my original website. But, beyond the link, there is nothing much to see here.
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