You can see screenshots, screencast and the code on his website:
http://www.devl.org/stuffkeeper/.

Now we need some data-collectors plugins so stuffkeeper will rock more!

Personally I think stuffkeeper is my best program yet  (idea wise, not code wise), but it has a long long way to go.

Pope vs. Magere Hein.

I gave my desktop a small update. I must be one off the rare people that has a pope on his background.

screenshot

PWM & K8055

I have 3x20W halogen light bulbs for soldering and stuff, but for normal computer work, this is way to much light. So I had a nice little led strip for more ‘mood lighting’.

Recently I added 2x3W led spots (I bought cheaply), they have a nice fairly pleasant light, and (for  monitor work) are better positions then the halogen, but still a lot of light. So with some parts I had still lying around, a K8055 velleman board (piece of utter crap) and a few n-fet’s  I made them computer controllable.  So I can now set them at a pleasant level.  So if I could get my dockstar working again, I could add some ambient light sensor and make it even a bit nicer. (The led lights control amazingly well using pwm, earlier attempt with some more expensive bulbs (that had step down converter in them) did not dim this nicely.)

Stuffkeeper

I don’t know if more then 10 people use it, but I made some good updates to stuffkeeper lately. They improve usability a lot. (looks not very nice, work good).  It allows you to quickly tag, remove tag and create tags from items. Also several uses with the barcode plugin (I still need to put online) are made.   I can now hold a box (with a stuffkeeper printed label on them, the box represents a tag in stuffkeeper), see a nice little popup showing what is in the box. (an slightly outdated video is here: here)

A movie says more then 1000 words:

?http://random.sarine.nl/stuffkeeper-generic-input2.ogv (the  inserting of new item is so slow because of sqlite doing a sync on ext4 and the hdd’s cache is 64 mb, this will be faster normally )

stuffkeeper-generic-input2.ogv

This was allready somewhat possible with the link entry. But this is nicer for linking files in an item.

The files are not copied in the database, because off the simple reason I do not want the duplicate files and so. (could be done offcourse).

What is stuffkeeper

Stuffkeeper is a catelog program. Unlike many other catalog programs, it is not bound to a specific type. I wrote stuffkeeper because I wanted a program where I could ‘catalog’  any item in one database.

This is exactly what stuffkeeper does, you define a set of types (for example Audio CD, DVD, Gadgets, Books, Websites). You can define the fields each item should hold, and the basic layout of that item.

Then you can add as many items of each type in one big list.

Doesn’t this get chaotic?

It probably will, that is why you have tags and you can define filters.

You can for example create a filter that only displays items of the type book, and has patterson in the author field.

Or a filter that only shows items that have a tag containing “desk drawer”.

What more?

Stuffkeeper is not build to be innovative or have schockingly complex features.  It is written to be easy to use and responds how you expect.

It is f.e. fully instant-apply. If you have 3 books open, and you add a field to the book type, all the book types will instantly update, and the new view will be visible. But also if you have the same item open multiple times (yes this is possible) moving the slider in one view, will instantly update the sliders in the other view. No more  pressing save, accidently overwriting changes done in other windows etc.

If you wrote a type, you can export this type and share it with others.

But it also has some more advanced features

There is a html export function, that can be tweaked by writing templates.

Example 1: http://random.sarine.nl/database.html

Example 2: http://random.sarine.nl/database2.html

If you have a gpg key, you can use this key to encrypt important fields (e.g. passwords).

Plugin support, you can easily write plugins to extend functionality. This plugin can be written in either C or vala.

2 proof of concepts plugins are available a tag cloud plugin and a musicbrainz lookup plugin.

Is it done?

No, stuffkeeper is far from done. A lot of work is still needed, but it is functional.

Website:  http://www.stuffkeeper.org/

Bugtracer:  http://bugtracker.sarine.nl/

Screenshots

Showing an item:

Showing the edit type window: (this needs improving)

The main window

Tag cloud example plugin

For more screenshots, see the website.

So this now works: (yes it does nothing usefull):

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using GLib;
using Stuffkeeper;
public class Test : Stuffkeeper.Plugin {
 
public override PluginType get_plugin_type()
{
return PluginType.MENU;
}
 
public override weak string get_name()
{
return "Vala Test Plugin";
}
public override void run_menu(Stuffkeeper.DataBackend skdb)
{
weak List list = skdb.get_items();
 
foreach (Stuffkeeper.DataItem item in list){
stdout.printf("%s\n", item.get_title());
}
 
}
 
}
 
[ModuleInit]
public GLib.Type register_plugin()
{
return typeof(Test);
}

Because a very very busy time this release is later then I planned it, but it is here now. Enjoy.

Added features:

• For debugging you can now get more info about timing, how long it took to load the db, load the items, etc.
• Shadow and border around the images.
• Images smaller then the maximum image size are no longer scaled up.
• Allow dragging and dropping images from any (gio supported) location. With progress bar and cancel button.
• New date widget. The widget no longer supports time, it does however support “no date” and obeys localization. Also allows for custom markup.

Bug fixes:

• Improved plugin api.
  • Icon support.
  • Fallback functions implemented.
• Cleaned up the public api used by plugins.
  • Make the internal dependencies correct.
  • Don’t force plugins to compile against sqlite for the sqlHandle.
  • Hide internal functions.
• Added README and INSTALL file.
• Localization on the date field.
• Show image preview in the file-chooser.
• Add file-filters to the file-chooser.
• Code Cleanups.
• More Code Cleanups.

Download

Download stuffkeeper-0.11.0

You can wrap fields in horizontal or vertical boxes, and nest these. (it is a stack based system.).

This allows for some nicer looking item view, but makes it more complex.

So I need to find a nice system to let the user edit the layout, currently it is kind of tricky to setup.

See screenshot:

http://stuffkeeper.org/images/6/69/Sk_split.jpg

http://images.sarine.nl/stuffkeeper-book-layout2.png

http://images.sarine.nl/stuffkeeper-book-layout.png

So I went looking for the bottleneck, it turned out to be in the loading of an item from the db. More specific the finding of the tags belonging to that item.The sql statement filtering those out was slow. So after adding an index to that table (based on the ItemId), the loading time reduced to less then 1 second.

In my normal 200 items db the loading time also went down by a factor 2.5.

So if you are running stuffkeeper from git, please update.

Q