A dead simple commandline utility to remind the user to blink within a given interval of time.

Skip to the Installation for quickstart. Continue, if you are interested in the origin of blynk.

Being a freelancer, I work a lot, actually more than I hafta. Which means excess amount of screen-time. Then, the usual stuffs like reddit scrooling, Netflix binging, Telegram chats etc. While these are fun and all, they come at a cost, actually many cost to the health.

Screen-time is a concerning health-deterioting-factor in my opinion.

The more you stare, the more you wear 😉.

for me, I started noticing eye problems like dried-up , red-gushing and sometimes hard to focus nearby objects. From few lookups, I found not blinking the eye for a long period might cause these. Not might anymore, it is. Long screen-time also means, you lack to blink.

Although blink frequently is a well-heard fact, I had to realize the hard way. So I set Window's Clock App and ran timer for 25 minutes with label ...

"Blink 😉 ryt fuqing NOW!"

This was a solution, but being a nict-picker, I couldn't fight the fact, it is just a timer, but devours almost 30 MB of memory and 5% of CPU time (of 2.7GHz; that's almost 13x10⁶ clock-cycles) and now-and-then network ping(I don't like this one a bit, 🙅‍♂️) by the app itself, occasionally.

So, I started this side-project, THE blynk.

blynk is a self-contained binary executable. It is a commandline utility with a very small footprint(atleast it tries to 😉). The goal of this project when I started is a very much dead-simple & just-works reminder that just reminds me to blink.

blynk toats a notification to the user in between given interval with a given message. Iterates this steps till it is terminated/killed!

blynk achieves its functionality via rust and a cargo notify-rust.

blynk is a self-contained binary, thus no installation required 🎉!

Refer to

1. download the latest release from the RELEASE page
2. extract the downloaded artifact
3. place blynk binary in any desired folder

place blynk binary in the PATH directories for convienience run

As of July 2022, blynk can be updated to latest version by iterating above steps again and replacing the binary.

But, future releases may notify for new major releases and might even have option to do the procedure itself.

blynk of latest is always supported and any previous versions will be deprecated at the time of release!

Any kind of contributions are welcome! Please refer Contributing Guide and the Code of Conduct.

blynk is lincensed under Apache License version 2.0.0

Well, that's it for now, till then this is me the BE, signing off 😘. 👨‍💻 in Jaffna, Sri Lanka with ❤.