Technical on Tom Guernier's Blog

Kitbashing a QR Code Alarm in Android Tasker and val.town

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:56:24 +0000

Recently I built my own bespoke sleep tracking system using Beeminder and Tasker. At the time I wrote my first post on the system, it was working but it had a few awkward elements to it. For one thing, all the maths was done in Tasker’s extremely awkward XML-based scripting system, meaning that any modifications to the formula would involve either editing it on the phone itself¹. Also, the alarm app I was using started showing me ads. So, not my ideal system by any means.

My Beeminder Sleep Tracking System

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:40:16 +0000

Lately I’ve been having to get up earlier than I am used to (around 6:30am to 7am) for work reasons. I’m usually fine with getting up early, but the problem is I like sleeping in too much, so over the weekend I stay in bed a couple hours later (even past 10am sometimes) and completely mess up my sleep schedule for the oncoming week.

I could just set a flat wake up time that I stick to every day, but the thing with sleep ins is that I genuinely enjoy them, and so I don’t want to give them up completely¹. Luckily, I have a convenient system that can track any values I want into it and binds me (with real money!) to sticking to whatever goal I want to track. But then I need a way to reliably track the time I wake up. I could just enter in data points manually each time I wake up, but…

My Beeminder + Obsidian + Shell scripts setup

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:12:00 +0000

Disclaimer: The methods described in this post involves fiddly complicated scripting stuff that probably need some prior experience with shell commands and automation to understand. Also this setup has also only been tested on my Linux machine. You might be able to get this working on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux or else translating the shell commands to PowerShell, but no guarantees.

This post also won’t really make any sense if you don’t know how Beeminder works.