Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I have been toying with a similar idea for a very long time.

I want to have an all-encompassing personal history for the same reasons I want good access and error logs. I want to see when something wrong happens, and I want the means to diagnose the problem and fix the damage.

A few good examples:

- Did I forget to write down any tax-deductible expenses?

- What is my net worth? Is my current lifestyle sustainable?

- Which parts of my city have I yet to explore?

- Can I search all my conversation with John across 3 messaging apps, email, SMS and phone?

I took a few jabs at these problems. Invariably, the services I consumed data from shut down their API or hid my data better. In some cases, I wanted to use a different service, but didn't feel like updating my scripts.

I'm currently looking into this again, but this time it's also a matter of privacy. I want to own all that data I create. I'd rather integrate tools under my control than services who actively try to hold my data hostage.

> Which parts of my city have I yet to explore?

> Can I search all my conversation with John across 3 messaging apps, email, SMS and phone?

These are totally pain points for me / questions I'd love to have some answers for... Anyone tried to get the historic iOS location data to answer the first question?

If you live in Europe it should be possible..?

The GDPR says you can get access to your data. It doesn't say it should be available in a convenient, computer-friendly format.

Google Takeout gives me my location history, but getting it is a manual process.

Banks must offer an API. I just haven't looked into it yet.

Bank APIs are kind of usable it seems, at least I can now see most of my accounts across all banks I ever used from my main bank.

There is a open source digital forensics project called APOLLO (https://github.com/mac4n6/APOLLO) -- that could be used for personal use to get location information off your phone. Here's a blog post by the author, with a little bit of explanation:

https://www.mac4n6.com/blog/2019/8/21/i-know-where-you-were-...

Oh, awesome, thanks for the links!

I'm currently working on deduping and threading conversations across different mediums.

> What is my net worth? Is my current lifestyle sustainable?

YNAB's method is excellent for this. TLDR: you record your expenses for some time, and then you begin planning them ahead for each month semi-automatically, putting in money for costly purchases in advance and leaving some for when shit happens.

I've been kinda looking for an OSS/self-hosted implementation of the method, but none seem inviting so far.

(G2A seems to have a Steam key for the old version of YNAB, under ‘You Need A Budget’—which version could sync via Dropbox, without its own cloud service. But the key costs quite a bit more than what I've paid for the app back then.)

> Which parts of my city have I yet to explore?

I'm using desktop QGIS to mark my trips, while OsmAnd on the phone shows the exported GPX on the go (among other pleasant features). In theory I can use OsmAnd itself to record the trips with GPS, or any of the other dozen apps for that, but personally I don't believe that Google won't suck the location up regardless of my settings.

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