push.cx
Peter Bhat Harkins
Queue Zero
Almost exactly a year ago, I posted about Sizing Up My Queue to count up how much video and audio I had downloaded to watch. The final tally?
queue: 877 files, 674007 seconds = 7d:19h:13m:27s total duration
I’ve been running that script almost every day, and for the first time it said:
queue: 0 files, 0 seconds = 0d:00h:00m:00s total duration
I did track values over time, and after a lot of frustration LibreOffice permitted this hideous graph - the Y axis is how many days of media remain:
{.aligncenter .size-medium .wp-image-2752 .content width=”300” height=”172”}
- Most of the early drop was me shrugging and saying “yeah, OK, I’m really not interested enough in that podcast to actually listen to it”
- The half-day jump in December is when I fixed the script to include
.movfiles - Big gap and accumulation in March/April is when I was working on my talk and book
- About half of the drop at the end was archiving a video site I finished scraping
- I almost exclusively listen to podcasts when doing chores or playing video games, so I’d have hit zero a month earlier if I didn’t play ~65 hours of Crypt of the Necrodancer
- The last file was the recording of my 2015 RailsConf talk - watching my own presentations really makes me squirm, though it’s invaluable for improving as a speaker
This was a fun little project.
There’s still a few thousand files in ~/queue.
It’s a bit of a junk drawer (games waiting for me to have Windows again, photos to file away, archived web pages), but the majority of it is books and papers.
I suppose next I could write a script to take the word count of epub/mobi/pdf/html files... it’d be a bit of fiddling running different commands to dump word counts from the various formats, but it could work.
Well, it could work in that, yes, I could technically write that script. I’ve known for decades that my to-read list has been growing faster than I read.