So, you’re using HabitRPG to gamify your life, right? You should be; what could be better than collecting XP and gold for fixing bugs and doing chores and flossing your teeth, and developing a totally kick-arse character you’d want to show off to all your friends?

Oh yeah, doing all that from the command-line. ;)

So, I present to you [hrpg](https://metacpan.org/module/hrpg), a command-line tool to integrate with HabitRPG. It’s still new, but it’s very full featured.

There’s an excellent website called iDoneThis.com which implements the most simple yet brilliant of services. Every day, you record the list of things you’ve done, and it gives you a check-mark for that day. This was motivating in two ways: firstly, the desire to keep that chain of check-marks running (what’s known as a ‘chain calendar’ or a ‘Seinfeld calendar’), and secondly by emailing you your memories of what you were doing a year (or a week, or a month) ago.

For me, knowing what I was doing a year ago was really good. I loved waking up each morning to be reminding of something I might otherwise not think of again. The good memories I was emailed would make me feel good again, and bad memories? Well, they’d often make me feel good that I wasn’t going through that anymore, or they’d be insightful if I was encountering similar issues now.

I loved the memory service, and so did my friends, even if they didn’t use it. I’d often send them messages about what awesome adventures we were up to a year ago, and that would often make their day.

Unfortunately, a few months ago, iDoneThis discontinued their memory-posting service. I don’t know why; I can only assume they’re focusing on the more corporate part of their service, and the network costs of all the personal emails wasn’t worth it.

Today, as part of a productivity spiral, I reimplemented the old memories service. The code isn’t pretty—unfortunately iDoneThis doesn’t (yet) provide an API—but I have a bot that can log-in and fetch a day’s worth of data. Best of all, that code is open source, and available from the CPAN, so you can download and use it yourself.

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The Perl Renaissance is in full swing. Object frameworks and syntax have been undated, web frameworks are easy and powerful, and modules are easy to manage and install.

Dear Everyone,

I have depression.

This isn’t the sort of sadness that sticks around for a week and then goes away. It’s not the sort of thing that even has a good reason, although there might have been one originally. It’s the sort of thing that can stick with you for months or even years, is a recognised illness, and is one of the worst possible states a human can experience.

Every year I go travelling, and every year my bank suspends my credit card due to “suspicious behaviour”. Luckily, it’s easy to get the stops removed… too easy, in fact.

Today, when calling the bank to confirm that I had purchased a US phone service, I was asked only a single piece of identifying information, and that was my surname.  The bank’s representative revealed—without my prompting—the last four digits of my credit card, and the full details of the transaction that was considered suspicious.

The thing is, if you’re the one making fraudulent transactions on a card, then you probably already know the cardholder’s surname, and you definitely know some recent suspicious transactions.