T KOLSTO · Tagged sidequest

Eight Arms, All Billable

Thomas Kolstø — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 05:15:00 +0000

I used to perform a ritual every Friday that I suspect you’ll recognize. Timesheets were due in xledger—hours split across projects and activities because my time belonged to multiple budgets. I would fill them out with the confidence of someone who had been present all week, only to realize I couldn’t recall what I’d actually done.

So, I reconstructed it: running git log --since=monday across repos, checking calendars for meetings, and scrolling Slack history to account for missing time. Then I translated this archaeology into tidy quarter-hour blocks and submitted it as fact.

Memory is the worst database. It lacks a write-ahead log, runs compaction nightly whether you like it or not, and every query returns a plausible answer with no indication of its truthfulness.

The tools are all wrong

The obvious fix is a timer: start when working, stop when done, making Friday an export button. But manual trackers fail because they require remembering to use them. I don’t forget how to work; I forget to say that I am working. Any tool relying on me forming a new habit at the precise moment my brain is busy with something else is designed to fail. My collection of abandoned timewarrior databases proves this.

At the other end are “automatic” trackers. They solve forgetting by removing you from the loop entirely. They screenshot your screen every thirty seconds, run it through AI, and upload “productivity insights” to a cloud dashboard—often read by your manager. I work with patient data for a telemedicine company. A tool that photographs my display and posts it to someone else’s cloud isn’t an aid; it’s an incident report with a subscription fee.

This leaves a gap: one end trusts you to remember, the other doesn’t trust you at all.

The sidequest

So, obviously, I built one. This is a proper sidequest: no cloud, no accounts, no roadmap committee, and no ambitions of becoming a company. Just the tracker I wanted, built how any tool touching my work machine should be.

It’s called Clocktopus. Eight arms, all billable.

The insight is embarrassingly simple: your machine already knows what you’re working on. Not via AI—but via pwd. My shells are cd’d into a client’s repo. My tmux panes sit in project directories. A running process has a working directory that names the project outright. The frontmost window title shows the open codebase. None of this needs a vision model; it needs a scorer over deterministic signals and a config file where you write the rules:

toml

[[project]]
name = "Initech"
xledger_project = "T200001"
xledger_activity = "DEV"
dirs = ["~/src/initech*"] # shell / tmux / AI-agent cwds
keywords = ["initech"] # frontmost window title

Longest prefix wins, so ~/src/initech-api beats your ~/src catch-all. Every rule is yours, in a version-controllable TOML file, and every guess shows exactly which signals fired. No vibes.

Suggest, never surveil

This is the core feature. When a project holds my focus for minutes, Clocktopus doesn’t clock me in. It asks. A dashed ghost block appears on the day timeline—“is this Initech?"—with evidence attached. One click confirms it, backfilling to when I started (the whole point: the app remembers the start time I was too busy to announce). One click dismisses it. Nothing lands in the database without my say-so.

The surveillance question is settled by architecture, not policy: the app makes zero network requests. Not for sync, telemetry, or updates—grep the source. Your hours are one SQLite file in ~/Library/Application Support, and the only thing leaving the machine is the CSV you export yourself.

Friday, after

The ritual now: open the week grid (ISO weeks, Monday start), with per-project totals already rounded to the billing increment. I skim it, nudge a block edge if the octopus and I disagree about lunch, and export. The CSV speaks xledger’s upload dialect—semicolon-separated, yyyymmdd dates, decimal hours—because that’s what my Fridays demanded, but it’s just CSV; point it at whatever your accounting department worships.

The archaeology is gone. That’s the entire return on investment, and it pays out weekly.

Questions you’re already typing

“Why not ActivityWatch?” A genuinely good project for passive analytics—it lets you study yourself afterwards. Clocktopus is suggest-and-confirm for billing: nothing is recorded until you approve it, and the output is a timesheet, not a chart. And timewarrior is fine, but it still trusts me to remember. We’ve established how that goes.

“Linux port?” The core—domain models, scoring, rounding, export, ~90 tests—is a pure SwiftPM package with no AppKit, so it’s portable-ish. Signal collectors are the macOS-specific part. If cwd-sniffing on Linux sounds interesting, the repo is MIT.

“Why isn’t it notarized?” An Apple Developer ID is $99/year, and this octopus is young. The release build is ad-hoc signed: right-click to open the first time, or build from source (Gatekeeper has no opinions).

“Can a tmux pane I forgot about bill a client from three days ago?” No. This was the heuristic I sweated most. Background signals—parked panes, long-running agent sessions—can only reinforce a project that also has foreground evidence. A forgotten pane can’t clock you in on its own; it can only corroborate what you are demonstrably looking at.

Coda

Clocktopus is on GitHub, MIT licensed, macOS 13+, Swift/SwiftUI, native menubar app. It has exactly one user in production, whose Fridays are much improved. If your accounting department also worships a CSV, maybe it’ll improve yours.

In other news

Thomas Kolstø — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:20:26 +0200

I’ve been investing some of my spare time creating this news channel aggregator, recorder and (re-)mixer -thing lately, something that had been bubbling in the back of my mind since at least 2008.

I also had to brush up on my ffmpeg-fu for some actual work related stuff, so this project ended up serving as a playground for doing both.

The start was an idea that it might be interesting to see how the different news outlets prioritises and covers (or not) the events that unfolds around the world. Then I figured it would also be nice to archive this for some period of time, so that if world war 3 were to break out while I’m walking the dogs, I can just check the instant replay (… or not.)

Way too many hours was spent looking into how to interpret the output of running encoders, and restarting them when needed; I’m relying on some rather unreliable/poorly connected sources for some of the channels. If anyone has any suggestions to how to improve this or have some private feeds to share I’m all ears.

There is a (limited) mechanism for “private” channels in which I’ve added a couple of commercial ones that I pay for just myself. I should probably do a writeup some day on how I ended up with OBS running in x11vnc doing screen-grabbing of firefox. It is nothing else than a hack, but as hacks go this one seems to work rather well.

~~Try it out over at ser.du.no and please let me know what you think.~~

Features:

15+ live news channels from around the world, most in English
7 days backlog segmented by channel/day for all channels
Rotate/view multiple channels simultaneous in 1x1 2x2 and 3x3 matrixes
Embedded chat with live-breaking-news-alert-bot v0.1
Loop video to make it easy to extract soundbites
Chromecast & Airplay support (on some of the streams)

Todo:

Chat/live-breaking-news-alert-bot needs serious work to provide less comedic relief. OCR is hard.
Re-enable DASH tech for video.js. Something broke with last version.
Make youtube-tech optional via selection, it’s not that great for matrixes (slow)
Create Recording/Export module for video.js
Set up nginx hls/dash secure links
Add moar channels. Linux/PC based sat recievers might be the way to go.
Make channel-matrixes refresh one by one instead of all of them at the same time somewhat fixed for 3x3
#hindenburg { float: none; }. I am not a designer. The lack of design + related issues will forever be banished to the end of this list, unless someone wants to help.

WebGL Traffic Analyzer

Thomas Kolstø — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 14:45:00 +0200

Last weekend I created a WebGL Traffic Globe Analyzer thing for our operations centre video wall.

Here it is.

Project is deeply inspired by a similar globe I once saw in a lobby somewhere in Silicon Valley, but that one was “just” displaying aggregate search traffic. I’ve tried to mix in some sensor data from our IDS system and firewalls to make it a bit more interesting to look at with our comparatively humble dataset.

It’s really more eye candy than useful, especially since only I know what the different colors represent (..but maybe you can guess some of them?).

You know what they say, there are only two kinds of people in this world — those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets…