3 Must-Use Commands With Tupperbox in Discord

For the last few months, I’ve been using Discord, Slack, Hangouts, Signal, Skype, and Teams for chatting with friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Discord is very like Slack, with a few differences because it’s geared toward gamers while Slack focuses on businesses.

Both Slack and Discord support add-ons in the form of ‘bots (robots, or programs that watch for certain events and respond to them). Tupperbox is a robot that has popped up on a couple of servers on which I role-play. It’s used to let you assign actions to issue different responses, based on the inputs. In my most frequent use case, I give it a trigger phrase and it takes whatever follows and makes the text appear to have come from someone else. I can use the robot to make a sentence I type look like it came from one of my characters instead of myself. Instead of “Peter Nikolaidis says that Hector Roundtree says ‘Forsooth!'” you would see “Hector Rountree: ‘Forsooth!'”

The trick is that I need to register every character and its associated trigger phrase, and this confuses me every time, despite the built in help. So I figured I’d document the exact characters I typed right here for next time (and for you, of course, dear reader)!

How register a new character/avatar/name:

tul!register "Hector Roundtree" hrtext

Any time I start a message with the letters “hr” and repackage anything after that to appear to have come from “Hector Roundtree” himself.

I also like to have a different icon for each of my characters. The first step is to upload a small (thumbnail) image, preferably a square with the face in the center, to a publicly reachable URL. I’ve had zero luck linking to OneDrive or iCloud photos, so I upload them to my WordPress site and reference them from there.

tul!avatar "Hector Roundtree" https://example.com/uploads/images/hector-roundtree.png

The above text will register the image with posts made by Sir Hector, instead of a big question mark icon.
Update: Another option I only recently discovered is to drag and drop the avatar picture right into the post, instead of giving a URL. This is a much simpler option!

What if you goof and want to start over? You can always remove and re-register. For example, I registered “JJ:” for one of my characters, and “hr” for another. The problem? For one, the colon is extraneous. I could use “JJ” instead. Also case matters, so “JJ” is not the same as “jj” or “Jj.” I often type posts from my phone, which likes to autocorrect things. For instance, if I start a new post by typing a letter ‘h’ and an ‘r’ by default this will be “Hr.” Great, except I registered “hr” so every time I want to post as Hector, I have to uncapitalize the ‘H’ first. What a pain! That’s where the remove command comes in.

tul!remove "Hector Roundtree"

The above text will remove Hector, letting me re-add him with a simpler trigger phrase. This time I’ll use “Hr” to make for easier posting from my phone.

tul!register "Hector Roundtree" Hrtext

My Journey Into Analyzing Apple Health Data

I’ve owned an Apple Watch for years – since the Series 2. I’ve also been running consistently for years – three of them, to be precise. I also like data. I’ve been collecting data on my workouts via my phone and watch for years, but getting data off of the iPhone’s small screen has always been problematic.

“But Peter!” you say “Apple lets you export data from the Health app!” Yes, it does. Have you ever looked at it? It looks something like this. Correction – it looks EXACTLY like this.

Well-structured XML

It’s XML data, and that doesn’t easily lend itself to a graph. Also, my data is over 1.3GB at present. That’s a lot of data for one guy. So I looked around for how to analyze my iOS Health data. The first site I found that looked promising was Analyze the Crap Out of Your Apple Health/HealthKit Data (sep.com) and GitHub – jonfuller/health-parse: Parses an Apple Health data export… for reasons. The developer offers an email address – email your health data to [email protected] and it will send back parsed stuff. Sure. I’ll email you my 1.3GB of Apple Health Data. Let me know when you get it. Okay, no, I did not try that because it’s never going to work. So I downloaded his code from Github, but I couldn’t get it to compile. Seems like I’m not the only one, as others reported the same issue.

Next I tried the Heartwatch app for iOS. So close! It generates some nice reports but only goes back one year. I want to track data over multiple years. I emailed the developer, and he said he’d consider it.

Then I tried the YouTube video (1) How to download, graph and assess physical activity and exercise data from Apple Watch – YouTube. OMG hilarious. Fail. 

Something in Python perhaps?  Analyze Your iOS Health Data With Python | by Guido Casiraghi | Better Programming | Medium Prerequisites: You know the basics of Pandas. I don’t even know what pandas is, other than a big bear-like thing that lives in China. 

I tried to import the XML files into Excel. Hahahaha. I’m running the 32-bit version. It cannot open a 1.3GB XML file. 

I poked around and found this article by Taras Kaduk: Analyze and visualize your iPhone’s Health app data in R. I was told R is easy to learn and use, so I figured I’d give it a try.

I installed R for Windows. The UI seems a bit dated and barebones. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (case.edu) How do I install libraries, anyway?  HodentekHelp: How do you install the XML library for R programming? Okay, manual process, must select stuff from a list by point and click. Yuck. 

How do I change directories in R?  how to set path in R on Windows – Google Search

Hm. This looks kinda neat and more polished.   Download the RStudio IDE – RStudioHave to install those libraries, but at least I can type their names in a comma-separated list. Much quicker. 

How do I change directories in R again?  getwd, setwd | R Function of the Day

What’s the path to my files in my OneDrive folder without spaces in it?  Use PowerShell to display Short File and Folder Names | Scripting Blog (microsoft.com)

How do you comment in R? Comments in R – GeeksforGeeks

How do you print more lines than it’s showing me?  how to increase the limit for max.print in R – Stack Overflow

What does that %>% do?  Simplify Your Code with %>% ยท UC Business Analytics R Programming Guide (uc-r.github.io)

Oof. Guess I should take a lesson. Learn R | Codecademy

Yup, that did it! The following R code imports my Health XML data and spits out a CSV. And yeah, it took a lot of floundering to get these few lines of code:

library(XML)
library(dplyr)
xml <- xmlParse('export.xml')
df_workout <-  XML:::xmlAttrsToDataFrame(xml["//Workout"])
write_csv(df_workout,'health_export.csv')

Now I have a CSV file! Great! I’ll make a chart in Excel. OMFG Excel charting is beyond convoluted. Why is it so F***ING COMPLICATED?!?! 

Google Sheets to the rescue. Finally. I have what I have sought for months.

I realized that with the right libraries, I likely could have accomplished the same thing with Perl or Python, but learning R has been fun and I may have applications for this professionally as well as personally. Also, I should be able to generate the graphs directly from R, but haven’t learned that yet. Finally, I will likely need to dive deeper into the data to incorporate steps per minute and heartrate into the above chart. I’m really interested in overlaying my steps per minute and average heartrate to see how this affects energy used and pace. So while I’ve taken the first step (no pun intended), I’m not done yet!

How to Hold Your Foot in a Strap With Minimal Effort

I like to use a strap in leg extensions, especially in long-held Yin poses. The problem? Holding the strap gets tiring! Looping it around the fingers can hurt after a while, and even if you hold it around the meaty part of the hand, it still takes some muscle power.
The solution? Loop the strap around both wrists so that it holds itself in place. Start by making a loop.

Take the bottom of the loop and lift it toward its center so as to make two smaller loops toward the bottom.

Slide your hands through the small loops.

Grasping the strap, loop it over your foot, so that your hands rest lightly on the strap and are held in place by it.

Recline, extend, and relax!
Here’s a video where I walk through the process.

Focus

Inspired by a newsletter email from the folks at RescueTime, I’ve decided to give single-tasking another shot. Hopefully my meditation training will help. In recent months, I’ve noticed an increasing tendency to get distracted while – wait for it – multitasking. Despite having known this was a bad practice for years, I still find myself doing it. Well, I’m going to work on fixing this – again. The last time I did so was quite some time ago. Here are some tricks I’ll be trying.

  1. Less playing of podcasts in the background for “background noise.”
  2. Fewer windows open at once. So much for those investments in all those big flat panel displays.
  3. Taking one on one calls with my reports on my phone as opposed to on a computer, and insisting they do the same.
  4. Closing all those extra tabs and getting back to checking email on a schedule (except of course if I’m on call and need to be responsive in a more timely fashion).

Got any other tips or tricks? Let me know!