User ID: mio
Subject: For 2024

Hello again, it has been a while.
I apologise for the lack of updates; I had intended to write an update in September, but the motivation to work on any project was hard to come by. This lack of motivation continued until mid-November, although development is still slow. With the new year starting tomorrow, I decided to write a sort of recap.

2023

In my notebook I wrote down some goals for 2023. Regrettably, I didn't achieve any of them. The ones relating to programming were:

January

I started work on eiv, whose entire existence is based on my use of Liferea (it is used as a hook to view remote images). The source code wasn't available at first because I chose to use Mercurial for version control and OSDN for hosting. OSDN vets every project submitted for hosting, so I was waiting for eiv to be approved before publishing the source code.

If my notes on the homepage can be trusted, it seems that I also made magickd, pixivd, and pixiv_down public. Despite what the git logs might tell you, pixiv_down has existed for at least as long as pixivd has; though it has probably been longer since it couldn't download Ugoira (GIFs) without using magickd to create the GIF files.

February

luce seemed to be the focus this month: version 0.1.0, version 0.2.0, and version 0.3.0 were released.

medialist also saw some improvements throughout February: changes to use CNI for configuration, the implementation of the "export" and "import" commands. It also saw the change from erasing a list to trashing a list, allowing people to restore the list (via another program) if they had accidentally deleted.

There was also a little work on fanbox_down, mainly fixing bugs.

March

Not too much happened in March. OSDN approved eiv allowing me to publish the source code. medialist also saw a slew of changes, mainly implementing nothrow variants of all the library functions and preparing for the 0.4 release.

A bit of work was also done on luce.

April

Once again there wasn't anything too exciting this month. medialist-cli version 0.4 was released with the main improvement being the "export" and "import" commands. umi received a bit of tidying up and luce also got a few fixes.

May

I will gloss over May a little bit. The only highlight was the release of luce version 0.4.0. Some work was also done on magickd.

June

The help messages in pixiv_down were improved, as were some of the default behaviours of the commands to provide a better experience (e.g. when downloading an artist, download both manga and illustrations by default, rather than requiring --type manga to download manga). The ability to download multiple artists in succession was also implemented.

magickd also received a small rework, in the C bindings that is. In D version 2.104, a method of automatically passing D strings as C strings was deprecated. Not a fun change, but better than seeing 100+ deprecation messages.

July

July was a rather quiet month. The move of mlib from OSDN to Codeberg was the only notable highlight.

August

A new project! manga_down. No idea if it still works, as I haven't used it for a few months, but it was quite fun. As the name suggests, it is a manga downloader (from mangadex.org).

Partial download support was added to pixiv_down meaning you could interrupt (^C) the download of an image, and the next time you download the same image, it should pick up where it left off.

Another new project! crystal-haiku. I've been wanting to use the Haiku Operating System, for a while, but neither the D nor the Crystal programming languages are supported. This is an attempt to get Crystal to work on Haiku. It doesn't work yet, and I need to update my LLVM version to continue working on it, but hopefully I'll get there.

September

Another quiet month. Incredibly quiet. Just a few fixes for pixiv_down and manga_down.

October

Following on from the quiet month of September (due to a lack of motivation), not much happened in October either. Just some fixes for luce and pixiv_down.

November

A couple of changes to the configparser module in mlib (mainly to implement the ConfigParser#write methods), and some small changes to fanbox_down and pixiv_down. That was about it.

December

A new module for mlib: search_params. This implements (most?) of the URLSearchParams section of the URL specification.

luce has received some love and is probably close to a 0.5.0 (or even 1.0.0) release.

pixiv_down received a new command: "compact". This goes through all downloaded content and removes any duplicates.

I've also started work on another project, although I haven't released it yet. Not that it is anything too big, but it has taken up most of of my programming attention recently.

2024

I'm not fond of New Year's resolutions, so I won't make any here. That said, a new release of luce and pixiv_down are on the agenda, as well as the release of new project I started this month.

It's not much, but that's about it for next year at the moment. Of course, making this website more useful is also a goal. To be honest, the bigger changes for next year are the projects I won't be working on.

Archiving

medialist
Initially I wrote a long piece about medialist here, but I'll save that for a port-mortem or something. Although I started work on pixiv_down before medialist, I would say medialist is my first major project. Downloading content from websites can be relatively easy (and it is for pixiv), so to me medialist felt bigger to me than pixiv_down. I enjoyed working on it, but I don't use it anymore.
pixivd
This is going to be merged with pixiv_down. Eventually.
pixivd-tools
This project served two purposes: provide examples on how to use pixivd, and provide useful programs. As pixivd is going to be archived, these programs are going to (or have been) merged in to pixiv_down.

Possibly Archiving

eiv
As mention in January, the entire existance of this project relies on my use of liferea. Not that I necessarily plan on changing RSS readers, but I do want to play around with other ones.
manga_down
It kinda served its purpose? But there may be more manga that I want to download so who knows.
crystal-haiku
As much as I would enjoy having Crystal work on Haiku, I'm not sure I can dedicate the time needed to developing it.

So there we go.
I hope you had a decent year.