cli-cube-timer

Who?

A lot of people solve the Rubik’s Cube competitively. The World Cube Association organises periodic competitions throughout the globe. Before going to these competitions, people practice their Rubik’s Cube solving skills at home.

For this, most people use a computer and timer software. Some common browser based timers are csTimer and qqTimer. There are also several apps on the Play Store that emulate the functionality of the offical timers.

Especially with browser based timers, the times are stored in JavaScript’s LocalStorage. That is an extremely unstable form of storage because it gets cleared whenever you delete the cached images, files and cookies (periodically doing that speeds up your browser). I was frustrated with losing 100s of solve times and the statistics related to that, because of mistakenly clearing the cache or uninstalling and re-installing the browser in the attempt to solve a completely unrelated problem.

So?

This module is my way around that. The times are now stored safely on your hard disk. You can’t clear this file, unless you go hunting for it and then delete it.

But, of course, there might be a catastrophic hard disk failure. You must have a backup.

backup

So, always back your times up on a Gist. You need a GitHub account to store your solves on a Gist.

Some screenshots!

A solving session

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Statistics

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Logging into GitHub

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Pushing your solves to a Gist

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What does the Gist look like?

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  1. Help text

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Help text from the module

solve

Primary command line executable name.

This will begin a solving session. All session statistics will be stored locally for this session.

solve stats

View your lifetime statistics

This will show you the mean, the standard deviation and the distribution of your solve times. This part section is always open for improvement. The code for this is implemented using fast-stats and fast-csv node modules. So, this is one thing that you can always contribute to!

solve push

Push all your solves to a gist

Ever wanted to take a backup? Well, do this, and everything stays backed up! Psst, You can always add more data to your gist, from any other place that you may have recorded solves previously, and this app will automatically account for that when calculating stats using solve stats. Handy, huh?

solve login

One time GitHub authentication

This will make some API calls to GitHub’s OAuth Authorizations API, and exchange your username and password for an OAuth token, that it will store locally, on your machine. So, you don’t have to enter the username and password everytime you want to push, and the OAuth token stays safe. Psst, you can delete and create a new OAuth token using this command at any time, just in case you think there was a breach! (Everything will work exactly like before!)

solve –show gist

Print the URL where all your times are stored

This will print the URL to your gist, using your username and the gist ID that we have stored on your machine.

Contributing

I would love to have your help on this! Do check out the issues dashboard of this repository, and submit a PR on any one of those issues, and I will be happy to merge! If there are no issues on the dashboard, please do feel free to create new ones!

Code licensed under MIT.

This project page uses the Cayman theme.

Copyright Siddharth Kannan 2017