I spent some time today finally creating a (publicly available) export handling code for Time Atlas app. While I enjoyed using (and developing) the app to some extent, it no longer fulfills some of my wishes and I no longer work there, so I deleted the app (and no longer have access to internal tooling for dealing with GPX exports).

What could be better in the app

  • I miss the old comments to journal notes that pre-1.0 versions had (this export tool preserves them)
  • The battery usage was and is bit janky (and could be optimized, but has not been)
  • GPS track (when actually tracking) is suboptimal compared to what is available (I rather filter stuff myself, than get filtered data for my long term storage; storing infrequent points isn’t really helping battery usage much, compared to just keeping the radio off when it is not really needed). Storage is cheap, but if you don’t have the (original) data, you don’t have the option to refine the data further later on if you come up with better analysis algorithm or more ways to use the raw data.

Switch .. somewhere ..

This week I figured I might as well switch to another GPS tracker app, and move my journal entries back to Bear, where I have 27 years of journal entries and some posts of some of my blogs as well.

I decided to create the tool using Codex CLI. fingon/ta-export: Time Atlas export handler was created using 4 iterations of:

  • long plan that I write up
  • Codex 5.3 (high) looks at, asks questions, I correct it, etc, and then
  • Codex 5.3 (medium) implements the iteration

Beyond the 4 longish prompts, there were generic (global) AGENTS.md instructions I have in place for all of my coding tools, but they don’t even have Python specific rules as I don’t use them to create Python that I actually care about.

The outcome is exactly what I wanted. I am not sure how long it took me, perhaps two hours total, while working on another side project in different window. And it is (minimally) unit tested tool that does EXACTLY what I wanted, ~1k LoC.

So I got my GPX files for my mapping maps, and the markdown files for Bear (apparently I wrote something in 203 days over the last year - which is more than my average ( ~4300 over 27 years = 160).

What’s next?

Perhaps I will write about the different GPS tracking applications I have been looking at next time, or not. Time will tell, this blog is all about random things I feel like writing about 😃