Hacker News Reader

Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

I've been shooting short clips from interesting moments of my day. I've accumulated enough that I can go back to previous year and see what I was doing that day. I rollerblade a lot, so I have a large amount of these clips. And overall, I seem to do a lot of the same things over and over. I don't know if thats good or bad, but these clips definitely point out the patterns in my life. The interesting part I found looking them over is the day by day change of seasons. I now have a record of when the leaves fell off the trees, and when the first snow fell in my region. So I'm more aware when these changes will happen this year. I also seem to be fixing things a lot. So it made me more conscious of buying so many things, that will just break. Birthdays, and family dinners stand out as happy moments.

View on HN

I'm building something around this general idea. I found that my photo timeline gives me a good idea of what's going on in my life. I'm now extending that timeline with geolocation history, social media posts, calendar events, expenses etc.

I'm curious to see what sorts of patterns will crop up.

> geolocation history

I realize the pandemic is temporary but I was amused at the thought of just how useless that feature would be for me at present.

That would be a really neat tool though - I hope it makes an appearance on HN once you get it working.

I had my own geotracker running pre-pandemic and it is very nice. When you run this long enough you get very nice heatmaps out of it. (Can't share mine for obvious privacy reasons) They are something very personal, almost worthy putting on the wall ;)

It's still cool to know when you last left the house!

I would love to hear more. I badly want the same thing. I take on average ~10,000 pictures a year.

I do the poor mans version of this:

- Look at all my pictures in chronological order on apple photos.

- Open: http://maps.google.com/locationhistory

- Look at my journal for that day

From all that, I can kind of piece together where I was and what I was doing. I would love one app that does all of this seamlessly.

One tool I use is this python script called Sort Photos. It will organize photos and videos into folders by date. It especially use full when you use multiple cameras.

https://github.com/andrewning/sortphotos

I call it from a batch file that will pull in photos from SD cards. I have a few cameras, and my phone will let me backup photos/video to an SD card. This will organize everything into a folder structure by year/month/day.

python ./sortphotos.py "/Volumes/CANON_DC" "/volumes/Seagate_2019/Photos" -r --keep-duplicates --sort %Y/%b/%d-%b

I have a few lines of these in the batch file, one for each SD card name. So I don't even have to think about the paths. I just put in the SD card and run the batch file to import.

That's more or less what I'm building. I'm building it for myself with little concern for distribution, but you can find it here: https://github.com/nicbou/backups

The biggest challenge is to extract stuff from all those data silos. For geolocation, I'm using the excellent OwnTracks, and I plan to write my own receiver to replace the one in Nextcloud. I also extract geolocation from images.

My girlfriend has done this for the last 5 years using the App "One Second Everyday".

She's super disciplined to make sure she gets one everyday, and it's awesome being able to watch back days, and remember things that you might never have committed to memory. Nice little moments that pass you by.

Highly recommend. We store the end result on some hard drives (locally) and also on google drive. And then they are also uploaded to some hosting sites (I believe Youtube atm).

I love this approach. Have you considered the longevity aspect of it? Do you think you will have a device that can play the video formats of today 10–20 years from now? Is that even something that you care about?

I've been thinking of a similar approach but recording audio of important events in my life instead, with the thought that audio formats might be slightly more stable than video formats. But I'm not sure.

Have a look at “one second a day”. I’ve been taking videos everyday for 6 years with the intention of creating a movie later on. One year will take around 6 minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com