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jrnl, a Command Line Journal

Posted on by Jim Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment
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There are few things more satisfying than using a well-made tool. ‘jrnl‘ is one of them–a simple, well-made program for taking notes and journal entries, so well-written that it feels like a native Unix utility.

Creating an entry is simple:

$ jrnl This is a journal entry. It will be automatically date-stamped
 [10:18:44] [Journal created at /home/jim/journal.txt]
 [Entry added to default journal
]

It creates a simple text file:

$ cat journal.txt


[10:18:52] 2018-03-09 10:18 This is a journal entry.

It will be automatically date-stamped

If you wanted to create an entry for something in the past or future, it’s simple: (jrnl keeps them sorted by date, too!)

  $ jrnl at April 1, 1918 4:10AM: I was Born
 [10:20:09] [Entry added to default journal]

jrnl doesn’t use a proprietary format,  just a simple text file, so you can edit it and read it with anything.

You’re not limited to raw text, though.  You can export to a variety of formats. Here’s JSON:

$ jrnl --export json                                                                                                                                        [10:54:46] {
 "entries": [
 {
 "title": "I was Born",
 "date": "1918-04-01",
 "time": "04:10",
 "body": "\n",
 "starred": false
 },
 {
 "title": "This is a journal entry.",
 "date": "2018-03-09",
 "time": "10:18",
 "body": "It will be automatically date-stamped\n",
 "starred": false
 }
 ],
 "tags": {}
 }

Installation is easy, if you have Python and PIP installed and configured:

 pip install jrnl

jrnl- The Command Line Journal

jrnl- The Command Line Journal

jrnl has a natural-language interface so you don’t have to remember cryptic shortcuts when you’re writing down your thoughts.

Source: jrnl.sh/

Hello, Again

Posted on by Jim Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment
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Hey there. 
It’s been a while.
How’ve you been?

I’ve been good, I guess. Still in the US, still in PA.

And now after years of hiatus, again taking a stab at blogging.
Back when I started blogging, before anyone even called it that, I used to hand-edit my site in vim or notepad and change the top page as stuff happened.
Later, around 2003 or so, I started using MovableType, then later WordPress and it seemed like blogs were the most important form of communication imaginable. Back then, I could take a picture somewhere on the streets of Tokyo, where I was living, post it to my site , and within a day, a couple thousand people had seen it.
That was cool, but I don’t expect to ever see those kinds of stats again.
(Anyone else remember Daypop‘s top 40? Get on *that* and you’d be up all night trying to keep your server from crashing under the load.)

RSS was new and shiny and did for sites what Facebook and Reddit do now with your content, but without keeping your eyeballs glued to their own ads. Some of you still use RSS readers, I see, while I was setting up this site today and ‘tail -f’ing access logs, I saw a couple of hits from news readers. They inspired me to write this post, actually.

If you look up at the URL of the site, you’ll see I finally got around to moving to HTTPS, using the very excellent Let’s Encrypt. I take it that browsers are going to start calling you out if you don’t encrypt, so I might as well, I guess.

Well, I’m going to get going for now. If you happen to see this, leave a comment below.