https://github.com/deniscerri/ytdlnis

For a couple of weeks I'd automated myself out of on-call by hooking that to an automation that fired every time I got paged. I wasn't brave enough to keep it going in the long term, but it was the best two weeks of sleep I had at that place.

I take notes, do programming, remote into computers, investigate networks, download and play back music/podcasts/web radio, surf the web with w3m, run background services, pretty much anything I'd use a terminal emulator for on a laptop computer.

Eventually I expect more people to move off Discord and the like so I can easily have them in terminal chat software instead.

So almost everything is text (with markup/markdown) and can thus easily be synced and merged between devices via rsync, ssh and perl or shell scripts.

Example: when I want to look up notes in either markor's or diary's files, that's easily accomplished with a shell script, e.g.

  cd ~/storage/shared/Documents/markor
  if [[ $# == 0 ]] ; then
     exec zsh
  else
    grep -i "$@" **/*(.) | less
  fi

  python -m http.server $PORT --bind 0.0.0.0

And there's exiftool, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, scripting languages, all in reach, wherever I go.

Markor: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor

Diary: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.billthefarmer.diary

For anyone who already is familiar with a linux terminal, termux is a great way to use a lot of the open-source tools you're already familiar with instead of trying to find a dozen different apps instead (that all probably show ads, spy on you, or require a subscription). There are also several apps that use it as a necessary backbone for their functionality, and require it to be installed.

Termux makes it super easy to pull up a Janet REPL on my phone and try some things out before I reply. You could do the same with node or Python or anything else with a CLI REPL.

[0] https://janet-lang.org

- Using vim/neovim is way better than I'd expect on a phone keyboard, because you can move around faster with less keypresses.

- My terminal sessions are wrapped in tmux, so switching between devices is seamless (tmux panes resize without any problems to match your device dimensions/aspect ratio as soon as you interact with the terminal - nothing ever breaks). You can do the pinch gesture to change the text size, depending on what you need to see at the moment.

- Both devices are using tailscale, so all I need is cellular data connection. For low quality network coverage I use mosh, which makes the session truly unkillable and makes sure it will recover when the connection comes back, albeit I ran into some annoying limitations with text scrollback.

With the recent development of agents, it becomes even more effective, since I can just open up claude session, type the prompt and have the agent do the heavy-lifting (mostly writing large chunks of code). This greatly compresses the amount of text you'd have to type and makes phone-only coding more viable than ever.