You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.

And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.

If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?

As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.

But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?

So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.

The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.

Try it

Try it out: https://exocortexlog.com

Accept a month of demo test data, add a few events for what you’ve done so far today, look at the summary and stats tools.

No install needed, the app lives on a web page.

If you decide to start logging what you’re doing, clear the DB and start again. Maybe install it for offline use then. Maybe set a reoccurring alarm to get you into the habit of doing it. See if you find it a useful memory aid after a few weeks.

And next time a detective asks you what you were doing a month last Tuesday, maybe you’ll be able to answer!

Privacy

The thing about a life-logger, is you input sensitive data about your life, lifestyle and activities, so privacy and data-integrity are some of the most important issues.

There can be no server, the data has to be yours and yours alone. Because you can’t tell what is happening to the data in a closed-source app, it must be completely free and open source.

You can’t trust a corporate diary, they must sell to anyone offering enough money.

So it is with my life log app, all data completely in your own device. No home server ever sees anything.

There is no home server. Just the code.

To achieve this Exocortex Log is a Progressive Web App. It downloads when you are online at the website and can be installed onto the homepage of your phone.

It keeps all data on the local device using indexdb.

This means you must be responsible for your own backups. Be sure to export and back up your data regularly. I have gaps in my ten year record where my phone was stolen and most recent backup was months prior.

Once installed it will work offline, airplane mode, no internet, down in the tube station at midnight, anywhere.

Roadmap

I have like ten years of data in my log, converted from those prior prototypes. I will be adding ways to more usefully compare and analyse data going this far back.

It could maybe use a milestone function, to track singular events which don’t take actual time so don’t spread on the grid. Snack tracking and the like.

It could likely use a flashcard system, with spaced repetition to review the flashcards, for better memory and recall.

Synching between devices might be nice, and lots will suggest doing that through Nostr, but Nostr is a bit public. Would need an encryption layer. Do nostr relays want to relay encrypted data from one user to themselves? I suspect Veilid would be a better option. The “no servers” ethos probably includes nostr relays.

Mostly I plan just more and better ways to view the ten years and growing of data I already have.

Why now?

Why is it finally ready now after ten years of being a barely functional input-only android app?

A few weeks ago I saw @derekross@grownostr.org giving a talk and demo of Shakespeare, a Chrome app for vibe-coding.

Explain the app you want, and the model you select will build it. Don’t even need to be a dev they reckon.

So I figured I’d give it a try.

Start again from scratch, import the old data.

In about a week of work this app has progressed far beyond the prototypes that spent more then ten years as half-running shoddy input-only systems that I couldn’t be arsed to expand further.

It went pretty well to start with, something even a non-dev could do, then ceased up, unable to really understand the codebase it’d written until I spend a fairly long day manually cleaning up it’s mess.

So Shakespeare (and presumably all the other tools I haven’t tried) seems okay for a non-dev to prototype a small app but currently the models are writing code so sloppy that they can’t then later understand it themselves. Still needing a dev’s guiding hand to keep it from repeating itself or creating complex unorganized unmanageable code.