doublethink

A few months ago I built a really simple web app to add tasks in bulk to Remember The Milk. It was straightforward to make and pretty easy to use, but there was one little niggle with it.

I’d decided to use HTML5 local storage to save the lists of tasks as key/value pairs. This was great as it allowed me to avoid building a server-side system to store this data. However, it also meant that the lists were only available on the device they were originally entered on. This was a pain, as what I really wanted was to be able to compile the lists on a computer, but then to be able to use them on my phone.

What I needed was a way to synchronise the data between all my different devices, but without having to run a server-side system just for this very simple app. The right solution may well have been out there, but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to build my own.

And that’s what Quolace is, it’s a key/value store for simple, single-page, web apps. You simply add the JavaScript library to your page, hook up all the get and set commands, and your users will be able to use their data and settings on whatever computer they want.

I’ll probably be using it from now on for all the little things I throw together in an afternoon, and I’d love other people to make use of it too. If you’d like to give it a go then there’s documentation and a demo app available to help you get your head round it. Do let me know if you find any problems, it’s all still quite new so there might be a bug or two lurking in there.

Last Easter I helped out with the youth work at a church conference. Part of the programme was “the question box”.

This was exactly what it sounds like. The teenagers would write questions about some part of Christianity and put them in a box. We’d then do our best to answer them.

I hope that my answers helped the young people explore their fledging faith. I certainly found the whole process great for making me think about all sorts of nooks and crannies in my knowledge and opinions of God. Being put on the spot like that forces you to articulate what you really think and feel.

I kept all the question cards that the teenagers wrote and now I’ve made a website with some of them on. The idea is simple: run through a few questions and see if you can put your own answer into words. Try speaking it out loud if you find that helpful.

If there are any questions you think should be there then you can suggest them in the comments section below this post.

I’ve been using Remember the Milk for a few months now to keep track of all the things I need to do. It’s been great for getting my life in order and motivating me to get round to all the stuff I’ve been putting off for months.

One feature that’s missing though is the ability to add lists of tasks in one go. For example every few days I want to add this set of tasks:

• “Washing - put on” for today
• “Washing - hang up to dry” for today
• “Washing - put away” for tomorrow

It doesn’t happen after a regular number days so I can’t use a repeating task, I just need a way of keeping a list of tasks somewhere that I can submit to Remember the Milk with one click.

Of course, the nice thing about being able to program is that when you have a problem like this you can write something to solve it. So I’ve written RTM bulk add, a little web page that hooks in with Remember the Milk’s API and can submit lists of tasks. You can also use RTM’s smart add syntax to set the due date, which list to put it in, etc.

For example the list above would look like this:

Simply press “Send to RTM” and the tasks will be added to the “Home” list.

The page is free for anyone to use. It stores all data in your browser and doesn’t send anything to my server, so you don’t need to worry about privacy.

The Listening Room Chrome extension has been collecting chart data since the middle of May this year. This chart data has been available via a JSON API at http://lrdata.alnorth.com for all this time. However, there doesn’t seem much point in keeping the data site going now that Listening Room has shut down.

So that this data isn’t lost forever I’m taking one of the daily backups and making it downloadable by anyone who wants it. It’s a MySQL backup and should be quite easy to restore should anyone want to play with it.

Hopefully the data structure is self explanatory. One annoyance is that room names aren’t included, only room IDs. The room ID for qwantz was 4d6f04d78dc336ba42000005, but I don’t know any others. Hopefully you can figure it out by connecting users to track_plays to rooms.

Here’s the data.

Update: Listening Room closed down on the second day of December 2011. This Chrome extension no longer does anything.

A few weeks ago I spent a few evenings writing a Chrome extension to add a few features to Listening Room. The main features it adds is scrobbling to Last.fm, but there’s a few other GUI improvements too.

According to the Chrome Web Store it’s currently got 59 users which must be a fair percentage of the beta testers for Listening Room. It’s nice to know that it’s useful to people.

I start a lot of software projects in my spare time but it’s really rare that any of them get past the experimental stage and become something. In that sense this is a bit of a success for me, in that it’s actually being used by someone else.

I’m thinking I might move on to other things now but I’m sure there are still features to be added. To allow other people to spend time on it and improve it if they want to I’ve put the code up on GitHub. I’m happy to review pull requests and add them to the main extension if they’re good enough.

It’s been great catching up with Samuel and hearing about all that’s been going on at CHAD over the last few years.

One of the struggles has been that as the children get older the cost of their education goes up. Several of them are now studying at college, which involves registration fees and examination fees. When you’ve got to pay these for so many children it all adds up.

He’s been running a number of businesses to try and generate some money. The most successful seems to be Wheels of Champions car hire, which has also evolved into a car import and second hand dealership as well. So, if you’re ever in Malawi and need to hire a car, they’re the place to go!

There don’t seem to be current websites for either CHAD or Wheels of Champions. Hopefully that’s something I can help out with.