[theptrk]

The "me database" tracking my gps for physical location, urls visited, etc..

This way I can search through all my physical and computer activity to answer questions like: how many times did I go to the gym last year? or how many leetcode questions did I do this month?

Wrote a summary here (https://theptrk.com/2024/09/27/me-database-master-plan/)

[josters]

I also played with this idea of a Memex [1] a few times already, but I always struggle with the actual usefulness of the data. Most of the time, the greatest fun for me is setting up the systems and seeing it all come together in a single database, but I tend to fall behind as soon as it is manual work to keep something updated.

For location, I found that the easiest and most privacy-friendly way of doing this without wrecking the battery of my main phone was to get a cheap used Android phone with dual GPS (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed and then pipe the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network [3] when I am home.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex [2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.eneiluj.nextcloud.phonet... [3]: https://github.com/gitc23/phonetrack-server

[theptrk]

thanks for the tip. my battery is definitely getting crushed so i might need to mirror that local logging for ios. But yes, the usefulness of it all will be the big question.

I tracked a work log in a "did" list for work and that was useful because you often need regular reporting (standups, perf reviews).

No one needs any location updates on how often I've been to the gym.

[josters]

Exactly. In my case, I noticed that having an extra device also helped me to not obsess about tracking. I started taking it with me only when I knew that I would be going an interesting route or on a trip to a place I haven’t been before.

Seeing a map with many different paths is way more fun than seeing the same paths just thicker. Interestingly, this also made me take more detours and explore my city and surrounding areas more even if it was a „boring“ route.

[TechDebtDevin]

Nice I plan on doing this for a whole year, hopefully 2025, but with lots of sleep data possibly with openBCI components and other devices and see if I can gain insight into some weird health phenomenons I've been experiencing.

[theptrk]

Oh nice. I feel like so many things affect my sleep including diet, mood, how long it’s been since I doom scrolled. I wonder if any of that can help you investigate.