Timeline / Projects

2022

mpv-osc-tethys

Source: https://github.com/Zren/mpv-osc-tethys

After my GPU died in Fall of 2021, I was stuck with mpv -vo=xorg since I couldn’t even use OpenGL buffers as my backup GPU was ancient. So I ended up trying to remake the bomi/mpvz GUI as a mpv lua theme to make the video player nicer to use.

2021

WebExtension - NewTab Recent Bookmarks

Source: https://github.com/Zren/NewTabRecentBookmarks

After moving to Firefox, I missed the ability to view my bookmarks folders as a website like chrome://bookmarks. Eventually I made this extension to list recent bookmarks on the new tab page. I even turned it into a full blown KanBan by allowing the user to pin certain bookmark folders.

QmlDevTools

Source: https://github.com/Zren/QmlDevTools

When trying to debug a widget, I dusted off this old DevTools inspector for QML I originally wrote as Plasma Widget to inspect the plasma panels. As a plasma widget, it sometimes crashed plasmashell so I never kept it installed.

Reviving it as it’s own project/window allowed me to fork plasma-sdk’s plasmoidviewer and patch the inspector into it.

2020

Plasma Widget Tutorial

Link: https://github.com/Zren/zren.github.io/issues/4
Link: https://invent.kde.org/documentation/develop-kde-org/-/merge_requests/20

I ported the Plasma Widget Tutorial I’d been working on this blog to the upstream documentation.

Gitz (Gitk clone)

Source: https://github.com/Zren/gitz

I wanted a nice GUI for skimming git log commits. I like the git log --online --graph UI in the terminal and wanted to make it interactive with the mouse or keyboard to preview the commit contents. I also liked the ability to select and copy the git log. Basically I wanted a TUI (Terminal UI) but settled for a PyGTK app.

Material KDecoration - LIM

Source: https://github.com/Zren/material-decoration

While trying to make my own C++ KDecoration theme, I came across zzag’s material-decoration which is a near skeleton project of a KDecoration plugin. It served as a great example, and I implemented the other default buttons.

With that experience, and the experience with DBusMenu, I ended up implementing the LIM (Locally Integrated Menus) feature from Unity7.

Plasma5 Widget - Condensed Weather

Link: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-condensedweather

To make a combined Current + Daily weather forecast view, I forked Daily Forecast.

2019

Plasma5 Widget - SideCalendar

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-sidecalendar

Starting in the new year, I focused on a complete rewrite of my Event Calendar widget, with the backend code being in python. The GUI was based on a Gnome Calendar mockup.

Read more: https://zren.github.io/2019/04/06/side-calendar-work-in-progress

Plasma5 Widget - Daily Forecast

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-dailyforecast

After dogfooding Simple Weather, I soon wanted the week’s forecast.

Plasma5 Widget - Simple Weather

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-simpleweather

Trying to create a Widget Tutorial video spiraled out of control when I chose to create a weather widget but found out the existing plasma widget was a terrible example to fork. So this widget was written to contain reusable code.

2018

Plasma HUD

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud

I learned from another KDE user that mate-hud worked in KDE with a few issues. While trying to fix and upstream the bugfixes, I realized that the changes that worked around the KDE implementation of the DBusMenu wouldn’t benefit the upsteam project since it basically needed a bunch of if os.env('XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP') == 'KDE' to skip code that would freeze in KDE for 30sec before timing out.

Plasma5 Widget - Plasma Widget Lib

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-lib

I grabbed all the reuseable code in my various plasma widgets and put them in a dedicated repo. The main features are Config Form Controls and translation scripts.

Plasma5 Widget - Bugzilla

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-bugzilla

I rewrote my GitHub widget to support the KDE’s Bugzilla. Needing the ability to list multiple projects, I added the ability to put a “tag” in front of the bug title, which is rather difficult in QML since it does not have the concept of mixing “inline-blocks” with text that wraps.

Plasma5 Widget - GitHub Issues

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-githubissues

GitHub does not provide an RSS feed for a repository’ issues, so I could not use an existing RSS widget to list bugs. I was forced to make a new widget that consumes GitHub’s API. After writing the Bugzilla widget, I also rewrote the GitHub widget to display multiple repositories at once.

Plasma5 Widget - System Monitor Dashboard

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-sysmonitordash

I refactored my “System Dash” widget to work for other computer by replacing all the hardcoded sensor names, labels, and colors with a configuration table.

Plasma5 Widget - KDE Connect Device

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-kdeconnectdevice

I refactored the earlier “KDE Connect Phone Charge” to have the ability to drag and drop a file/link to share it with that device. I also added a simple way to select which device the widget shows the battery for + shares with.

Plasma5 Widget - MPVZ

Source: https://github.com/Zren/mpvz

After development for the bomi video player died off, I started looking into how hard it would be to make a simple QML GUI for the mpv which overlayed the controls onto the video player when the mouse moves like practically all modern video players.

2017

WebExtension - Recent Bookmarks

Source: https://github.com/Zren/chrome-extension-recentbookmarks

When you have a ton of bookmarks, it’s annoying to find the last few added. So I made this to quickly return to a bookmark.

Plasma5 Widget - Volume Slider

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-volumeslider

After convicing my parents to use Linux on their TV PC, I needed to simplify controlling the volume for them. So I stripped a bunch of stuff out of the Win7 Volume Mixer widget for a simple horizontal slider that sits in the panel that you see in various panels in /r/unixporn.

Plasma5 Wallpaper - Inactive Blur Wallpaper

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-wallpapers/tree/master/inactiveblur

Someone on /r/unixporn had the idea of blurring the wallpaper when there was an active window, then bring it into focus when all windows are closed. I recreated the effect for plasma.

Plasma5 Wallpaper - Animated Hue Wallpaper

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-wallpapers/tree/master/animatedhue

I made a simple wallpaper plugin that would shift the hue of a wallpaper every few seconds/minutes. Creating a cheap “animated wallpaper”.

Plasma5 Widget - Workout Timer

While trying to rewrite a more customizable timer, I tried creating a multi staged timer for a complete workout. It has 5s to 15s rest period to setup the next stretch. I also downloaded a few Text To Speech (TTS) phrases from google’s API when a workout started and ended.

Dolphin - Personal Fork

Source: https://github.com/Zren/dolphin

KDE’s file manager was the most feature complete when compared to Window’s File Explorer. The major reason I didn’t stick with XFCE was because there wasn’t any development in Thunar, and there wasn’t a quick way to edit the addressbar by clicking the “empty area to the right” while keeping breadcrumb navigation. Dolphin also had a build in terminal at the bottom which was amazing.

Unfortunately, there were also a few things I missed. A nice “progress bar” that displayed how much space was left on the device. This is present in other file managers directly on the sidebar. Windows also had a “This PC” view which listed all drives, removable drives and other things. So I tried drawing a simple progressbar if the folder was a mount point. I even make it change color to red when it’s 95% full.

One annoying thing about Linux, is ~/.hiddenFiles which clutter the home folder. If you hide them all the time, there’s no problem. But if you’re a power user who just wants them always visible, then you’ll find that they’re always sorted at the top. If you have enough hidden folders, you might have to scroll down just to see ~/Desktop. This isn’t ideal, so I patched it to sort all hidden folders and files at the bottom reguardless of the current sort.

Another thing that annoyed me was that I had to waste an entire row or column to have 3-4 toolbar buttons (back/forward/up). So I made a “dockable panel” that only contained those buttons.

Plasma5 Widget - System Dash

A quick fullscreen view to see wifi speed, disk I/O, disk space, fan speeds, temperatures, and cpu/ram use. All mesured in graphs over time so that you can see how far the temperature/fan speed dropped after you exited a game. The panel button is even a CPU graph (that only shows the last 7 seconds) styled like the KSysGuard icon.

Plasma5 Widget - Terminal Update

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-terminalupdate

KDE Discover is still in active development, which isn’t the greatest thing for using as a package manager/updater. I’d usually use the terminal to perform updates, so I made a simple modification in the Discover widget to launch my custom bash scripts that call apt upgrade in Konsole.

Plasma5 Widget - Present Windows

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-presentwindows

A simple buttons that with the Windows 10 “Task View” icon that triggers the “Desktop Grid” or “Present Windows” desktop effect.

KDE / Plasma (Contributor)

Update: KDE now uses GitLab https://invent.kde.org/cholland
Link: https://phabricator.kde.org/people/commits/11270/

I started contributing patches to the Plasma desktop environment on Phabricator.

2016

Plasma5 Widget - Battery Time

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-batterytime

Made a simple widget which will always use the breeze battery icon and also shows the percentage and how many minutes are left.

Plasma5 Widget - Command Output

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-commandoutput

Simple widget that runs a command every second and display the output in the panel.

Plasma5 Widget - Tiled Menu

Link: Blog Post

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-tiledmenu

I reskinned the app menu based on the Win10 Start Menu. I mainly did this because I wanted an A-Z menu without the dashboard (and a grid of favourites).

Plasma5 Widget - KDE Connect Phone Charge

Later on, I realized that I rarely look at the desktop, so I redesigned the widget to focus primarily out of the system tray or on the panel. This time I focused on one widget per device.

I redrew the breeze battery icon using rectangles so it looks good (and is functional) on all themes. I also experimented with a battery charge over time graph.

Plasma5 Widget - KDE Connect Desktop

After KDE Connect was released, I was very interested in learning it’s API. So I made a simple list of the connected devices with their battery icon on the desktop.

Plasma5 TabBox - Thumbnail Grid

Source: https://github.com/Zren/kwin-tabbox-thumbnail_grid

Plasma ships with an odd Alt Tab skin (a scrollable list on the left side). There were a few skins similar to Window’s thumbnail skin but to my amazement, it didn’t expand to a second row, but instead scrolled in a single row. It didn’t really bother me till someone pointed it out. It’s a bit sad that this is the only downloadable skin that works. To be fair though, all the many many working skins are in KDE repos.

Plasma5 Widget - Todo List

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-todolist

The Note widget is a little ugly (all that look like a sticky note do) so I reskinned to to be a list of items with checkboxes. I also parse http links and render them as clickable links.

Plasma5 Widget - Win7 Volume Mixer

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-volumewin7mixer

I loved the look of the volume mixer in Win7. I was dissapointed that most volume applets in linux are horizontal (as is Win10’s) so I reskinned the applet to have vertical sliders. I also presented the streams similar to Win7 expanded view. 2 after writing this applet, I learned about KMix (which also had vertical sliders). Luckily it was being deprecated so my work didn’t go to waste. It’s now got a few features more than the default widget.

Plasma5 Widget - Event Calendar

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-eventcalendar

The default clock didn’t have the ability to sync with Google Calendar at the time, so I figured out how to obtain a Google API session without the browser. I added a timer and weather forecast similar to what my Android phone layout has. I also changed the scrolling over the clock to change the volume instead of time zones.

Plasma5 Widget - Win7 Show Desktop

Source: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-applet-win7showdesktop

I liked the slim little button in Windows so I modified the default widget to be visually similar. I also added the ability to control volume when scrolling over it, so that it’s easy to blindly control the volume by flicking to the bottom right corner.

NixShot

Source: https://github.com/Zren/nixshot

After moving to linux, I needed a new screenshot tool that would easily capture a region of the screen and upload it to imgur (authed to an account). While I found a few that did some of that, none of them did everything, or opened a window on completion.

In the process, I found out that KDE Global Shortcuts don’t fire immediately, causing expanded plasma widgets to start closing before the screenshot is taken. I was forced to base nixshot around xbindkeys and scrot to get an immediate capture. Unfortunately, scrot doesn’t capture the mouse cursor.

Plasma5 Theme - Breeze AlphaBlack

Source: https://github.com/Zren/breeze-alphablack

I needed a light theme with a black panel, and I wanted to make a few adjustments to the default theme.

2015

HawkenAPI - Periodic Diff Check Emails

After the responses for certain endpoints in the Hawken API started going haywire (due to Reloaded taking over), I wrote a script to check if it had changed and, if it had, send an email. I learned a little about GMail, and styling emails.

Hawken - Distribution Charts

Link: http://home.xshade.ca/users/recent/7-days/pilotlevel-distribution/

After noticing the existing MMR distribution charts were wildly inaccurate because they included users who hadn’t played in months, I made a chart fetching data from the leaderboards which filtered out older users.

Hawken - Leaderboards

Link: http://home.xshade.ca/users/leaderboard/

After data mining a list of users by name in order to add a user search function to the server list app, I decided to start mining some other data as well. I ended up making a simple leaderboard based on MMR (MatchMaking Ranking) which the community had been using for a while.

2014

QuasselPy

Source: https://github.com/Zren/QuasselPy

After being dissatisfied with quasselsuche, I decided to reinplement the feature using DataTables to have dynamic filtering.

quassel-pushbullet

Source: https://github.com/Zren/quassel-pushbullet

After toying around with quassel-webserver, I tried pulling it apart to make an always connected client that would speedup the load time. I eventually ended up creating a new “client” and hooking the new message event to send a pushbullet notification to my phone when I get highlighted. Unfortunately I have more or less abandoned this project due to libquassel’s meomory consumption.

quassel-webserver (Contributor)

Source: https://github.com/magne4000/quassel-webserver

magne4000 released a quasselclient implementation using NodeJS and socket.io. I made a number of pull requests to make the UI more similar to the desktop application. I was hoping to replace QuasselDroid with this in order to lower battery consumption on my phone.

OpenUserJS.org

After userscript.org went down due to neglect. A few replacements appeared. The mojority with a UI made by programmers. I decided to help redisign on of them. My decision to help OUJS is mainly due it being the first I was able to setup a dev environment for. I’d worked with NodeJS before, and the developer had a default remote MongoDB database which made it very easy to setup.

I ended up reskinning theming Bootstrap for them, and refactoring all the views (old frontpage). I implemented saner pagination, along with a pagination widget.

Atom - Open Recent

Source: https://github.com/Zren/atom-open-recent

Another must have feature missing from Atom was a Open Recent list in the menu. There existed a 3rd party plugin already to list recently opened files, and another for directories. I forked one of the projects, fixed the bugs, and streamlined both features to look like the menu in Sublime Text.

Atom - Windows Context Menu

Source: https://github.com/Zren/atom-windows-context-menu

After GitHub released their new text editor, one of the key features missing was being able to open Atom from the file explorer.

EggTimer

Source: https://github.com/Zren/eggtimer

Demo: http://zren.github.io/eggtimer/

A timer based on a url parameter. Based off of e.ggtimer.com. This version uses different parsing, focusing on short forms, and allows for clock times. Eg: 2:20 started at 1 PM will end at 2:20 PM. 1:10 started at 11 PM will end at 1:10 AM.

2013

ResizeYoutubePlayerToWindowSize

Source: https://github.com/Zren/ResizeYoutubePlayerToWindowSize/

After a similar userscript/extension broke, I decided to make a simplier version that would just move the video to the top of the site and scaled to the window. It got popular enough to get Lifehackered.

MultiView IRC UI In AngularJS

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/YwDPf/4/

There was a minor discussion on #quassel on UI ideas for multi split chat. I origionally set out with the idea of adding small icons next to the selected buffers in the buffer list widget to show which buffers are selected. This idea spiralled into learning a little bit of AngularJS to make a semi-functioning UI.

HexChat Theme Editor

Source: https://github.com/Zren/HexChatThemeEditor

Demo: http://zren.github.io/HexChatThemeEditor/

Trying to edit HexChat style’s was midely annoying without a live preview. So I made this.

Hawken – Player Count Graph

Link:

After Ashfire made his graphs private. I decided to go ahead with a project I’d been holding off because he had already made a solution. I installed MongoDB + PyMongo and wrote a script to poll the server list periodically, then store the resulting JSON in the database. Once that was done, I modified my flask web server for the server list to serve a simple graph using HighStocks. It uses ajax to fetch the data from the database as I did not store the derived data (the player count). Instead each request will parse X data points of server list jsons which makes it useful as a local application only.

Hawken – Server List

Link: https://hawken.herokuapp.com/

During the Beta for hawken, the developers turned off the server browser to maximize the usage of their matchmaking (in order to perfect it). This made those who wanted to setup an organized scrim very painful. I checked out how Hawken retrived the list and put together a simple interactive table using jQuery and Datatables. To actually fetch the data, I had to create a simple library in python 2.x for Hawken’s services as Javascript by itself would fail (due to some overhead required in XHRs). I then used it in combination with Flask as a proxy in order to filter and combine multiple requests together. The result would show the users on the server, the map, and the ip address + port the server is running on.

Quassel – Web Search

Finalized my first pull request to a larger Open Source project. I copied Chrome’s Search for __ when right clicking selected text in chat.

2012

Bukkit Plugin – PrideArena

I took over a writing a friend’s plugin for the Pride PvP Games server. Essentially, I put into practice the game mechanics of a Deathmatch arena in the style of the Hunger Games. Actually, it’s not that much like it as there’s no cornicopia danger. You choose a kit (class) and there a grace period when there’s no PvP. My personal highlight of this project is the that I shosed the status of the arena with signs around the portal you enter. Giving a very good user feedback about the sate of the arena. While I don’t have credit for the idea, I also added a gate that closes down to prevent people from walking though the portal (as opposed to just not teleporting them).

Quassel - Theme - Dark Monokai

Link: https://gist.github.com/Zren/2779042

Looking for an IRC client that that fully customizable skins eventually brought me to Quassel. While I love the fact everything is styleable in QSS (CSS for QT), the client itself has a few minor annoyances. Thus began my first serious foray into C++.

Bukkit Plugin – Citizens Editor

I attempted to write a GUI editor for the http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/citizens/ Bukkit plugin in order to speed up NPC/Quest creation.

Bukkit Plugin – Vault Promoter

This project was spurred by the fact that bPermissions’s promotion system limitations. While it focus’s on tracks, the actual permission node for each track uses one node per group. My desired setup was that normal users could promote Guests. Giving users the promote.User permission node would then allow users the ability to both promote to guests to User and to demote them from it. Not ideal. While I first debated forking and submitting a patch (which I half did), I also wanted the promotion commands to be more configurable. Currently they were /promote [trackname]. Which would force a mod use the command more than once to go all the way from Guest => Mod.

2011

jsPaint

Link: https://github.com/Zren/jsPaint

Demo: http://zren.github.io/jsPaint/

I wanted to create my own doodle app that would upload to imgur.com. I decided to tackle javascript and its various libraries (JQuery, fabric.js). It also made me familiar with HTML’s new canvas element, and the “HTML5″ brand’s new techniques.

MegaUpload Batch Downloader

I started watching One Piece. Unfortunately, >400 episodes to download is fairly annoying to do manually. So I fired up python and made a script to download from megaupload in a single-threaded environment using Mechanize and BeautifulSoup.

Bukkit Plugin – CellWar

I started getting re-involved with Towny’s development, and got some inspiration from users about how to do warring Nations. I also took a gander at some of the mechanics of a similar plugin that did PvP stuff right, Factions. I coded up some threaded tasks that created a huge beacon in the sky overtop the area under attack. The game mechanic was to attack and hold the area. Towny’s war event is the same thing, but there’s nothing physical. So I created a focus for the defenders. Attacking would have the attacker place a flag, which the defenders would need to break / take down. I eventually merged this into the Towny plugin.

pyTactics (PyGame)

Source: https://github.com/Zren/pyTactics

I wanted to try making my own Tactics engine, inspired from Final Fantasy Tactics and the 40 Hour challenge, I only knew Python and Java at the time, and wanted to learn more with Python. So I took a second shot at Pygame (I’d tried to port an old Turing project before). I managed to get the isometric down right, as with the height levels, but my code re-rendered the whole map every tick which was terrible so I scrapped the project.

Bukkit Plugin – Questioner

Source: https://github.com/Zren/Questioner

I wanted a way to integrate accept/deny ability to Towny’s invitation’s to join towns and other user confirmations. At the time, there was no customizable API available for the task, so I made my own.

Bukkit Plugin – Towny

Source: https://github.com/Zren/Towny

I converted Towny to Bukkit when it became apparent hMod was dieing. The initial release didn’t include the wall generation code, however I did add iConomy support as well as a taxation system. I then coded up a (rather sloppy) implementation of having residents own plots inside towns.The rewrite had me focus on getters/setters, exception handling (as well as custom exceptions), as well as focus on the inevitable problem the hMod had. hMod didn’t plan for when Minecraft would eventually allow users to move between more than one world on a single server, but the Bukkit dev’s had foresight.

Taken over by ElgarL. https://github.com/ElgarL/Towny

Then taken over by LlmDl. https://github.com/LlmDl/Towny

hMod Plugin – Arena

A server owner was asking for a plugin to kick off his server and make it more unique. Basically a new player would be forced to tackle a waves of enemies when he first joined before being able to select his faction. This was my first tackle on a paid project, and gave me a tons of experience for what to do next time.

Turing - Advanced Input Module

Link: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=29263

Turing has 2 methods of input, polling the keyboard state, and a rough key event loop. This module is to simplify if a key has just been pressed (by checking the last keyboard/mouse state).

2010

hMod Plugin – Mapper

After I first got the spark to start writing Towny, I wanted a visual representation of where the towns were. This lead me to expand on the Cartographer idea (a top down render of a minecraft world). I made it so ingame coordinates could be passed to a flatfile (type:string:x,z). I then worked on a stand alone program that would take a cartographer rendering, and draw the notes onto it. For testing, one of the types I used was all the player’s locations at the time. I like to think is the inspiration behind the current map viewers.

hMod Plugin – ChatChannels

A server I was on wanted specific channels for each faction on the server. I was partway into coding Towny, so this was a good relief and learning stepping stone. I took some idea’s from how IRC operated, but the code didn’t use much OOP.

hMod Plugin – Towny

Source: https://github.com/Zren/Towny-hMod

When hMod really started picking up heat and introduced plugins. I decided to use my Java skills I learned. I wanted a way for users to manage their own towns, and the more people in the town, the more perks. As the idea expanded, I eventually started planning that towns would be part of a hierarchy with nations at the top. I fist wrote mapper, which would show where the town was founded, but I kept getting user feedback that Towny should protect areas.

My initial code was terrible. I tried writing my own XML parser/writer for persistence.

When I finally decided on just a plain flatfile, and with the heirachy code done (but oh so buggy), I was ready to tackle integrating with another cuboid plugin for area protection. I started talking with some on IRC, and a dude was dishearted that I was just going to force players to use cuboid to select an area, and gave me the idea of having the town expand from a central point. Like a protective sphere.

I started looking into cuboid and how it did block protection. This was around the time when dev’s started talking about how checking if a block was in a list of cuboids was a terrible idea. Eventually cuboid got on the path of using K-D Tree. That threw my sphere idea out, but I started on thinking about a chunk based system.

Animated Sprites Engine

Link: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=25745

A simple engine to animate a sprite character. Character can move around and jump. Uses a bit mask to perform map collision detection. Contains a background and foreground to draw above / below the character.

2009

Snowfall Engine

Link: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=22799

A simple particle engine using trig for movement. A bit mask is used for collision detection, and the particle is drawn to the bit mask on collision (to accumulate snow).

2008

Virus (Game)

Link: http://compsci.ca/v3/viewtopic.php?t=18910

Back when I had no clue how to do 3D, I tried zooming from the center of the screen to create the top and bottom of cubes. The game is to hit the 10 or so yellow cubes while avoiding enemy dots (anti-virus). You have safe places to avoid the enemies inside green cubes, but every time you destroy a yellow cube, more and more green havens are destroyed.