Memories

I've talked about my bad memory before. While the cause has become more clear every year and I'm slowly working towards fixing it, it's not something that's likely to get fixed overnight anytime soon, especially not retroactively. I am also a programmer and a dataminer, so the question of "Why do I not take it into my own hands to build something to be my memory?" has been something that's (ironically?) been kicking around in my brain for years now.

Now, I'm sure you've heard someone say that losing a parent or someone close to you is like losing a part of yourself, and I now know what that means. My mom was my knowledge base for a lot of stuff about me, and now that she's gone and to deal with this feeling of losing a part of myself, I decided to get it over with and start working on fleshing out this idea and seeing how realistic it is and what it would look like.

This is something I'm looking to build for me, tailored to me and also accessible only by me. I will be importing, digitizing and cataloguing any data I have available from my history and tracking/saving whatever current data I can, within limits.

There is also a good chance something like this already exists to an extent, but I need something to do that isn't WoW, so here we are, why not take on datamining life itself.

Features

Secure

I may be an open person, but I also care about privacy, and this is a privacy nightmare, so security will be something I'm going to take very seriously and will be at the forefront of it all. Especially considering the data I'll be saving might be very personal at times, this will have to be at a security standard beyond anything I've built for myself before. At the same time, backups will also be very important for obvious reasons, so that is something that'll have to be adequately protected as well. All of this will require me to learn some new things that I'm very excited for.

I've even considered just not talking about it publicly at all, but I think it is cool if I can manage to get something going and it will reinforce my efforts of securing it properly.

Timeline

The primary feature would be a timeline that allows me to browse, well, my life. It would list notable things on a per-day basis with the ability to zoom out to the entire of my life, with notable events highlighted. I have a few ideas for how I want this UI to look, but 0 ideas on how to implement it, so that'll be an exciting challenge!

Diary

Another feature that'll compliment/provide data for the above one is a diary feature. I currently keep a very sporadic diary on my phone, and it'd be nice to keep doing this, but also have it sync up with this project as well. I'd also like to be able to add historic diary entries, this may take the form of a memory or maybe even how I feel about something in the past whenever I come across it.

Tracking

Some sort of tracking of things that are happening to me/around me would be neat. Even if it's just basic health tracking, or manually being able to send notable news headlines to the tool for it to log them. There's also more data I want to keep synced up, but I'll dedicate a paragraph to all that below.

Portable

This is something that'll require a lot of consideration, but I'd like it to be portable in a way. I don't want to expose it to the internet or any insecure devices/networks that aren't mine, but I might still want to update some stuff, or look some stuff up, on the go. Encryption, the amount of data and how compressable/selective it can be will be make or break for this feature.

(No) AI

This is the opposite of a feature, but the obvious and applicable to the current zeitgeist thing here would be to integrate it all with a ChatGPT-like AI assistant that does stuff for me and yada yada whatever. I might make a separate blog post on my thoughts around (generative) AI and my dislike for specifically the art side of it all, but so far I am very much against integrating any sorts of AI with this project whatsoever. Not only would that require me to get over the moral issues, it'd also need a considerable hardware package and would very likely make security more complex, so nope, just nope.

DATA!!!

Data might not love me, but I love data.

News

Big happenings in the world, or my world, are a great way to keep track of time. Certain highlights from actual news sites or adding my own notable news for a day without it being a fully diary entry is something I'd like to be able to do/track.

Twitter

I'll be importing all of my posts from Twitter. Twitter, even though it has now become its ultimate worst form, has been a leyline throughout half of my life.

BlueSky

With BlueSky now being my new home in terms of social media, I want to import any posts I made there and keep track of new ones as well.

E-mail/chats

Notable e-mails or chat messages should be able to be forwarded to the application for saving/safekeeping and putting on the timeline. Obviously not going to import all my chats ever, or other people's chats, for that matter.

Phone

My phone tracks a whole bunch of stuff, my health, my whereabouts, my app usage and it serves as a camera/diary etc. I'll need some sort of secure way to sync data from my phone and keeping it updated.

Digitize old pictures/things

This one will be difficult, but I want to digitize any old pictures I can get my hand son as well as any memories I manage to dig up around them. I've already gone through one of the boxes of photos my mom gave me at some point, and boy there's a ton of different qualities, formats and whatever in there (aww, little me is washing a car). Not to mention the photo albums my grandma made as well. Lots of thinking on how to ingest that kind of information will need to be done.

Gaming

Gaming has also been a big part of my life. Any data I can get my hands on around this, including exports/tracking of WoW related data, or play/purchase histories from Steam, etc.

More

There's more I can probably come up with. I've been messing around with long-term investing of some of my savings, so maybe stocks? Maybe my work on my open-source projects? Maybe some work-related stuff too? What about finances/income? Medical data?! Hmm!

In closing

I have no idea how far I'll be able to get with this or if I'll even make any headway with it this year, but writing out this blog post was my excuse for thinking about it some more and getting that ball rolling. There's a lot I need to figure out still, both in terms of this project and my memory as a whole, but the idea of doing that alone has been rather motivational.