Days Since `pacman -Syu`
Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat and realize it’s been three weeks since I ran pacman -Syu. No more. I use GNOME (btw), so I made a little GNOME shell extension for myself, constantly showing how long it’s been in the top bar.
That 1d means I updated my packages one day ago. If it’s been ten days or more, the number turns yellow.
As far as engineering goes, the process was pretty unremarkable. LLMs make it easier than ever to turn the sparkle of an idea into a single-hour project. The GNOME extensions project has a reasonable no-vibe-coding policy, so I took care to tend to the business logic by hand and trim down the generated fluff.
In this age, a not-too-serious project like this feels like an opportunity to leave a human mark on a program: a silly variable name, or a funny code golf trick that a machine would never generate. Did you know there are 864e5 milliseconds in a day?
You can install Days Since Update here.