I hacked my first Alfred extension together to solve a pain that I run into sometimes at work. Unix time is about as nerdy of a measurement as you can get. It’s a count (in seconds) since the arbitrary date of Thursday, January 1st, 1970 UTC which is used throughout Unix environments as a timestamp. It’s often used in databases as unique timestamps for rows of data and often enough (before adding human-readable columns into our tables) I need to convert epoch time into something I can read. In comes Alfred. The simple extension contains one line of Ruby (which I didn’t even write myself) and takes the input of your Alfred query.
- Copy the unix timestamp.
- Activate Alfred and use the keyword “epoch”.
- Paste in the timestamp.
- The extension puts the human-readable timestamp in your clipboard.
The current output of the extension is in the YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS format and can be configured however you want in the settings.
If converting Unix time is something you have enough nerd-cred to do, download the extension here.