I had been using chatgpt for something similar in the past. I like the fact that you are integrating a timer and music into it. How do you set yourself apart beyond that? Chatgpt, for instance, could also help with things like "I want to work on foo, can you help me break it down into tasks?".
I see a lot of potential in this - for instance, you might be able to integrate calendar integration for picking time slots for non-immediate tasks a la Office 365 which auto-creates focus times. Also, it would be good if I could curate a subset of tasks suggested by the tool as a list outside of the immediate short term memory of the coach.
We're trying to hone into reducing the friction with the specifically tailored prompts to break down tasks and provide suggested responses, alongside the integrated tools. The timer and Spotify are just small steps towards a lot more widget functionality, so I'm glad you also see the potential.
I like those two ideas. We were thinking of similar calendar functionality and then a todo list that's generated as you talk with the coach. Some other ideas I had were
- speech to mindmap brainstorming (i like to speak and see visual output)
- simplify cooking recipes to the smallest pieces (get 3 eggs, and come back, etc..)
- open up a widget to put your phone # for accountability where someone calls you
- open up FocusMate body doubling session
- email visual drag and drop builder (i hate sending emails)
- you put money into a virtual piggy bank and it gives you
access to the money if you send an image or something or a completed task (kinda like beeminder but you hide the money behind completing a task)
- discord bot version that has emojis as the suggestion buttons to click
We're trying to work more on our personalization aspect to differentiate ourselves from ChatGPT so as you keep using the app, it is a lot more streamlined to know what you need. Thanks for your thoughts!
Having the note text in the URL can be good in some cases. Storing the note as a bookmark becomes possible, as does storing a note in a URL shortening service. Opening a fork of a note from a different device also becomes possible this way. (eg. on Chrome, using "Send to Your Devices")
Localstorage (as far as I know) isn't easy to move across devices or share, and notes being a bit ephemeral is part of the idea of this. I think anyone who wants to save notes indefinitely is probably better off with one of the cloud-based note-taking apps.
One idea is that the url makes it immediately shareable. You can send your note to your phone in a text message without any uploads due to it being encoded in the url.
You can easily set up sync using SyncThing or Dropbox or any other tool that syncs directories between devices. I did pay $25 because I enjoy using Obsidian - but I don't think there is anything missing in the free version. The best part is that everything including themes, plugins and themes are synced perfectly between desktop and mobile.
I installed iSH [0] (Alpine linux emulator) on my iPad and sync obsidian directories between my laptop and the iPad using git and ssh. Works like a charm.
One folder- a Notes folder where all your "vault"s are- on your phone. That syncs with a folder on the cloud. Then get the sync app client on your laptop/PC. Then sync a local folder from your laptop with the cloud folder.
The Obsidian for desktop app is pretty great.
The whole thing works great for me.
So it's like this-
_______ _________________ ________
|phone |---------------> |cloud |<--------------------- |laptop|
|notes | (2 way sync) |folder of | (2 way sync) |notes |
|folder|<-------------- |MEGA/DB/box/sync|---------------------> |folder|
------- ------------------ --------
This method is tried and platform agnostic. All you need is a client that is available for your platform.
I’m iPhone & Pop_os! . There are some obsidian forum threads that can help, I think this is the one that I used for my setup (1).
It is not completely obvious in the UI, but the basic idea is that you use a iOS git app (I use the excellent Working Copy) to just push and pull everything to GitHub, working around some inherent iOS limitations. As a bonus, you can setup the Shortcuts app to auto push and pull with closing and opening obsidian. There’s a git sync extension for obsidian, makes it all pretty seamless once it’s set-up.
If you choose to straddle ecosystems there really isn't that much that the likes of Obsidian can do to help though (especially when it comes to iPhone). I use Obsidian with Mac + Android (Synced via Dropbox, and backed up using git) and it works. Little bit of manual setup, but I can handle that.
At the end of the day Obsidian is just a directory structure of Markdown files. If needed, you can edit them with Obsidian (say using the Dropbox app).
You set up all your vaults under the same folder. You 2-way sync that folder to a cloud folder- Dropbox, MEGA, sync, box- whatever. You then create a folder with the same name on another device, and then use the client for your cloud service for that platform, and then set up two way sync with that folder on the cloud.
Works great with my Android-PopOS system.
Also tried it with Android-macOS, and iOS-Windows.
Okay, yes, but to date, to a first approximation, nobody does that. And yes, that's unfortunate, but in the world we live in, and the world we will live in for the near future, environment variables seem no worse than any other option, regardless of ways that other options could be made better.
Env vars are strictly worse than files because of how easy they are to access. You need shell code of some sort to read a file assuming you don’t privilege drop whereas env vars are persistently available to everything everywhere.
Huh? Environmental variables are only available to a process, any children the process has, any other process running as the same user ID, and the root user on a given POSIX compliant system.
E.g if I do this:
export FOO=bar
processes running as other user IDs (unless root) will not know FOO is “bar”. Actually, even other processes running as me/root won’t know FOO’s value until I spawn a child process after that “export” command—environment only becomes visible outside a process when it runs execve() and passes its environment on.
An environmental variable is about as safe as a file with 600 or 700 perms (i.e. make a file be set up with POSIX ACLs to be read only by the owner of the file): If user separation is done so insecure processes run with a different user/group ID (and modern *NIX system gives each user its own default group), the cracker still has work to do before getting important secrets in our environment.
Also, FOO being bar in the environment (i.e. we can see it with getenv() ) will only be visible to the current any child process after “export FOO=bar”.
If you’re able to run getenv() to get at the environment, or able to read (in Linux) /proc/$PID/environ to see the environment of other processes running as you, you will generally also be able to run open() to get at files.
Environment leaking is a serious bug in a *NIX/POSIX system; If I can, as “Alice”, view anything in the environment belonging to “Bob”, that’s a serious security bug which needs to have a CVE number.
To be fair, while a concern, that’s not “everything everywhere”. That’s the current process, child processes (even if setuid), root, other processes running as the same user, and maybe processes with different user IDs sharing the same d-bus (D-bus is not used on servers, only desktop systems). I consider that slightly but not much more leaky than an unencrypted chmod 600 or chmod 700 permission file.
It’s more secure than, say, command line arguments (which can be seen by any process on the same system).
In my experience dbus has shown up on embedded devices, routers, servers, desktops, etc. Maybe it’s not being used and I don’t know it… Avahi (the mDNS daemon & tool), for example, uses dbus.
I would say containers are more to blame for making env var secrets pretty okay. But people should be aware of what the systemd man page says about env vars because there are scenarios where persisting secrets in a spot easily queryable via procfs and/or dbus is not okay.
And systemd provides a way to correctly pass secrets by allowing you to specify a credential blob that is accessible via the filesystem and properly restricted to the target service. So there’s an easy way to securely pass secrets, people should use that before reaching for env vars.
Thank you again for the informative reply. I saw two dbus-daemons running on my Ubuntu server; I killed the user d-bus daemon process running as me and nothing seems to break, so while it’s there, it doesn’t seem to be used by anything on my server.
While I do note that systemd man page, it goes in to no detail about how dbus leaks the environment.
Looking at the D-Bus specification [1], org.freedesktop.DBus.UpdateActivationEnvironment is the only thing which concerns itself about the environment. It says that the “session bus activated services inherit the environment of the bus daemon”, so it looks like the D-Bus leakage is any system-level environmental variables set when the D-Bus daemons are started, or any variables set using UpdateActivationEnvironment.
The concern here appears to be that system-level environmental variables aren’t safe. I don’t see anything about a user process setting something like export FOO="top secret password" being more unsafe than a chmod 700 or chmod 600 file.
I have already noted the various ways environmental variables can leak on this page:
> I saw two dbus-daemons running on my Ubuntu server; I killed the user d-bus daemon process running as me and nothing seems to break, so while it’s there, it doesn’t seem to be used by anything on my server.
Every systemd service is exposed on a dbus path in systemd. You can query a service's environment like so:
$ systemctl status foo
● foo.service - Can we read this service's environment over dbus?
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/foo.service; static)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-12-14 23:00:10 PST; 6min ago
Main PID: 104167 (sleep)
Tasks: 1 (limit: 9366)
CPU: 1ms
CGroup: /system.slice/foo.service
└─104167 sleep 3600
$ qdbus --system org.freedesktop.systemd1 /org/freedesktop/systemd1/unit/foo_2eservice org.freedesktop.systemd1.Service.Environment
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied
Rejected send message, 2 matched rules; type="method_call", sender=":1.761" (uid=1000 pid=104282 comm="/usr/lib/qt5/bin/qdbus --system org.freedesktop.sy") interface="org.freedesktop.systemd1.Service" member="Environment" error name="(unset)" requested_reply="0" destination="org.freedesktop.systemd1" (uid=0 pid=1 comm="/sbin/init splash ")
$ sudo qdbus --system org.freedesktop.systemd1 /org/freedesktop/systemd1/unit/foo_2eservice org.freedesktop.systemd1.Service.Environment
FOO=secret-secret
So you can read it but it seems systemd does enforce some sane default permissions on who can read the environment.
I don't know why everyone always says someone or the other united all of India - they always ignore Kerala and Tamil Nadu (and often parts of Andhra Pradesh) which were neither a part of the Maurya empire - nor a part of the Mughal empire.
The native empire you mentioned, Maurya Empire abandoned the conquest through war because of the whole Kalinga episode. Ashoka was far more interested in spreading the morals around after that, so much that his son became one of the messengers.
Though because of this, Cholas rose into one of the most fascinating empires with cultural influence over all of SE Asia. Even to date, the Thai king coronation ceremony is in Sanskrit, a language foreign to the land.
I haven't used this. But i see the utility. Wouldn't having an admin UI to map ids to periodicity be better than using a hard coded subdomain? That way one can prevent bad actors from switching pace when they come to know of this site. I could also up or lower pace for an id while not having to go through the hassle of changing my mail id.. Also, doing that would let you sell the solution for use with custom domains.
I mean use github@johndoe.paced.email
And have an admin ui that lets you set "github@johndoe.paced.email" =>"weekly"
These are some great suggestions. I'm starting to think about how I could use custom domains etc. I need to figure out the next steps for the app and what people would be prepared to pay for such a tool. Ideally, I'd like to keep everything simple when it comes to pricing and not have functionality based tiers. Not sure yet.
