Therefore, a natural idea that comes to my mind is to simply let people know when I am asleep so that they do not expect me to respond immediately.

Discord and GitHub have been among my most used platforms for some time, and they both have a feature to let users set a custom status (with a custom text and an emoji). This opens up a possibility of using a program to automatically set the status to indicate that I am asleep.

For Discord, this is as simple as invoking a REST API (Notice that this is against Discord’s ToS):

          
            # Set sleeping status

            curl -X PATCH \

            	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \

            	-H "Authorization: YoUr.DiScOrD.ToKeN" \

            	-d '{"settings":"WhwKBQoDZG5kEhMKC1NsZWVwaW5nLi4uGgTwn5i0"}' \

            	https://discord.com/api/v9/users/@me/settings-proto/1

            

            

            # Clear sleeping status

            curl -X PATCH \

            	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \

            	-H "Authorization: YoUr.DiScOrD.ToKeN" \

            	-d '{"settings":"WgoKCAoGb25saW5l"}' \

            	https://discord.com/api/v9/users/@me/settings-proto/1

          
        

If you wonder what those base64-encoded strings mean, they are actually the binary contents of protobuf-encoded messages. See this .proto file for the definition of the message structure.

# Set sleeping status
curl -X PATCH \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	-H "Authorization: YoUr.DiScOrD.ToKeN" \
	-d '{"custom_status":{"text":"Sleeping...","emoji_id":null,"emoji_name":"😴","expires_at":null},"status":"dnd"}' \
	https://discordapp.com/api/v8/users/@me/settings

# Clear sleeping status
curl -X PATCH \
	-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
	-H "Authorization: YoUr.DiScOrD.ToKeN" \
	-d '{"custom_status":null,"status":"online"}' \
	https://discordapp.com/api/v8/users/@me/settings

For GitHub, there is not a REST API for that, but you can install the user-status plugin for GitHub CLI:

          
            gh extension install vilmibm/gh-user-status

          
        

Then, you can set the status with:

          
            # Set sleeping status

            gh user-status set 'Sleeping...' --emoji='sleeping' --limited

            

            # Clear sleeping status

            gh user-status set 'null' --expiry=1s

          
        

Now, the next step is to run these commands automatically when I fall asleep and wake up. This can be done with MacroDroid, which can trigger actions based on various triggers. To run arbitrary commands, you can use the Tasker plugin for Termux. To have it working, one also needs to uncomment allow-external-apps = true in ~/.termux/termux.properties, and grant MacroDroid the permission to run Termux commands by

          
            adb shell pm grant com.arlosoft.macrodroid com.termux.permission.RUN_COMMAND

          
        

MacroDroid supports using the return value of the sleep API to trigger an action, but this tends to be quite unreliable on my device. Therefore, I use it in conjunction with a quick setting tile that I can toggle manually. The macro has two triggers:

• Fell Asleep / Woke Up (Android sleep API),
• Quick Tile On/Off,

and it has these actions:

          
            If Trigger Fired: Woke Up, or Quick Tile Off

            	If Sleeping = True

            		Clear sleeping status on Discord and GitHub

            		# Include other waking up logic here, such as turning off DND mode

            	End If

            	Sleeping = False

            Else If Trigger Fired: Fell Asleep, or Quick Tile On

            	If Sleeping = False

            		Set GitHub and Discord user status to sleeping

            		# Include other falling asleep logic here, such as turning on DND mode

            	End If

            	Sleeping = True

            End If

          
        

By the way, I have a bunch of topics that I want to write blog articles about, but I have been quite busy recently, so I may have to pause updating this blog for a while. I hope I can get back to writing soon!