[HN Gopher] Life Monitor
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       Life Monitor
        
       Author : kkleindev
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2022-05-23 11:53 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (kevinkle.in)
 (TXT) w3m dump (kevinkle.in)
        
       | Archelaos wrote:
       | The cumulative distance of running since 1 January of each year
       | is not particularly meaningful. Instead, the cumulative distance
       | in the previous 365 days for each day would be a better metric.
       | In such a diagram it would be easier to spot in which periods the
       | performance is above or below avarge (or any other benchmark).
        
         | kkleindev wrote:
         | I agree that what you suggest is more useful in many scenarios,
         | particularly when one care about _monitoring_ of performance.
         | 
         | Unlike the rest of the notifications, my ambition with this
         | cumulative distance plot was rather to intervene by cheering
         | than to observe by analyzing. Put differently, I tried to
         | gamify the yearly distance - as if I was racing against last
         | year's version of myself. I'm not advocating for this, I just
         | liked the idea at some point.
        
       | mxstbr wrote:
       | I was very impressed by Felix Krause, who collected more than
       | 380.000 data points over 3 years about his life in a single
       | database and shared many of his learnings publicly:
       | https://krausefx.com/blog/how-i-put-my-whole-life-into-a-sin...
        
       | mdrzn wrote:
       | Love stuff like this, even tried logging a full year in Excel in
       | 15min increments (a project seen here on HN), but nothing was
       | ever as complete or automatable as I needed it.
       | 
       | I have Google Fit on my phone, I have a MiBand which tracks steps
       | + heartbeat + sleep stats, is there a way to import these daily?
       | And generate stats from them?
        
         | awiesenhofer wrote:
         | Since you mention a mi band, gadgetbridge should have you
         | covered - never tried to export data myself though.
         | 
         | https://gadgetbridge.org/
         | 
         | https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/wiki/Data-E...
        
           | mdrzn wrote:
           | Cheers, tried exporting using something similar like 4 years
           | ago on a MiBand 2 and it was soooo much data unformatted.
           | I'll check it out again.
        
       | tra3 wrote:
       | I got myself a Garmin watch at the beginning of the year, to
       | collect various metrics automatically. The watch uses the built
       | in heart rate monitor/sensors to derive various data
       | specifically:
       | 
       | - sleep hours (including the sleep phase type: deep sleep etc)
       | 
       | - stress amounts (via heart rate variability)
       | 
       | - energy levels ("Body battery" in Garmin speak)
       | 
       | I've been feeling quite drained the last couple of weeks so I
       | wanted to see if the data I've collected over the last 3 months
       | or so would match what I was subjectively feeling.
       | 
       | Interestingly Garmin does not provide any functionality to
       | analyze long term trends, but there's an open source project to
       | extract data from Garmin [0].
       | 
       | I used the tool to generate some graphs [1] that, do indeed, seem
       | to indicate a rising level of stress over the last few months.
       | 
       | I'm going to try the moving average next to see if it's better
       | than the naive approach I used, but ultimately my goal is the
       | same as author's. I want a warning to sound off based on
       | sleep/stress/energy levels trends. I have a tendency to overdo
       | things sometimes. My theory is that a day off taken before some
       | critical level is better than a week off after the burn out.
       | 
       | Here's the PR with the Jupyter notebook that generates the graph
       | in the link based on Garmin Data [2].
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/tcgoetz/GarminDB
       | 
       | [1] https://imgur.com/a/Q7MJqMB
       | 
       | [2] https://github.com/tcgoetz/GarminDB/pull/155
        
         | Taylor_OD wrote:
         | Can you link to which watch you purchased?
        
       | nicbou wrote:
       | You might want to look into my timeline thing [0]. At it's core,
       | it's a database of Entries with different schemas.
       | 
       | - Input: There's an API you can add Entries with, and Sources
       | that automatically pull them from somewhere.
       | 
       | - Output: There's an API you can query Entries from, and
       | Destinations that automatically export them.
       | 
       | It's meant to be more like a diary and less like a dashboard, but
       | once you have the data in a single database, it's easy to do
       | other things with it.
       | 
       | A while ago, I made a map of my recent geolocation. It took maybe
       | an hour, and allowed my dad to follow me during a trip. I wanted
       | to make a maintenance schedule view for my vehicles, a budget
       | view, and a few other things.
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/nicbou/timeline
        
       | imdsm wrote:
       | Stressful year, Kevin. Hope it gets easier!
        
       | webmaven wrote:
       | _> Yet, this tendency for myopia and prioritization of spectacle
       | seems not align with many interests of mine. I find that a lot of
       | the most significant levers on my life, both good and bad, seem
       | to rely on compounding, on consistency and longer time periods._
       | 
       | This is quite insightful. It applies even more so to groups of
       | people collectively (I'm sure I need not point out specific
       | instances). All the more so when the data is noisy, and a bit of
       | selectivity in setting the date range for analysis can result in
       | the trend being minimized or reversed.
       | 
       | A moving average graph can help dispell this illusion, but the
       | more aggressive the averaging the more it becomes a trailing
       | indicator. One way to adjust for this is to use two moving
       | averages (one longer one shorter) and plotting the difference
       | between them. That will give you a fairly clear idea of whether
       | the trend you're looking at is getting stronger, weaker, or
       | reversing. It is still a trailing indicator but the trend-of-the-
       | trend knowledge helps adjust for that.
        
         | kkleindev wrote:
         | That's a great point! I vaguely tried to go in that direction
         | by plotting the average over the past 7 days, the average over
         | the 7 days before and the average over the year to date. Yet, I
         | fully agree one might want to push this a little further and do
         | as you describe. Thanks for the suggestion!
        
           | webmaven wrote:
           | It's a common technique in stock market analysis:
           | 
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MACD
        
       | You-Are-Right wrote:
        
       | datene wrote:
       | I've been working on a platform that allows you to log and track
       | daily events https://www.simplejournal.online/
       | 
       | I've been more focused on collecting rather than processing the
       | data and giving automated feedback, like what you're doing with
       | your telegram bot. I really like that aspect. Very cool setup
        
         | jrib wrote:
         | Just want to reinforce what others are saying: I visited the
         | site and was intrigued. I wanted to see what the experience was
         | like. So I clicked "try it" but instead of getting to try it, I
         | was presented with a sign-up form.
         | 
         | Would be really great to let people try the experience and then
         | prompt them to sign up to save it.
        
           | datene wrote:
           | Thank you for the feedback, that's a good point. I was toying
           | with the idea before but not quite sure what the right
           | approach would be, from a technical perspective. I suppose I
           | could just save everything on a dummy user and clean them up
           | every 24 hours or something. I'll have to look into it.
           | 
           | On the topic of the platform. I started out making it for
           | myself and some friends, with some success. Some time ago I
           | did a Show HN where I didn't get any feedback at all, and
           | since then I've been a bit hesitant to put in any more dev
           | hours. So it's good to hear that you were intrigued
        
         | mszcz wrote:
         | It looks interesting. However, there are a couple of issues
         | here.
         | 
         | - The page is missing even a vague privacy policy. I get it
         | that that might not be a priority when you're just working on
         | the MVP but, IMHO, you should put at least a couple of words on
         | what you're doing with users data.
         | 
         | - There's a single word on the page that says "Encryption" and
         | that's it. This makes me more nervous, not less.
         | 
         | - No information on the company that's selling this.
         | 
         | - No screenshots.
        
           | datene wrote:
           | Thank you for your feedback. Yes, I'll make sure to add a
           | privacy policy soon. Basically the email address is just to
           | send you an email in case you forget your password. Content
           | is encrypted using https://github.com/ankane/lockbox default
           | setup I've been considering adding optional end-to-end
           | encryption as well, but am a bit afraid people might lose
           | access to content forever if they lose access to keys. Thanks
           | also on the remark about the company, looking at it I can see
           | how it might be a bit ambiguous. I'll make sure to clarify it
           | further on the about page. Basically it's a company called
           | Unless which is my business entity as a freelancer. I am Lars
           | Bohm, webdeveloper/designer from Amsterdam. If you have any
           | further feedback it is always appreciated, and thank you
           | again
        
         | thelittleone wrote:
         | Interesting, would you consider adding a bit more information
         | and perhaps some screenshots on the home page? I don't want to
         | sign up to find out.
        
           | datene wrote:
           | Good point, I'll add some photos and a video later this week.
           | There are a few screenshots on Producthunt here:
           | https://www.producthunt.com/posts/simple-journal
        
       | kyriakosel wrote:
       | You can use Terra (tryterra.co) to access your garmin data !
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-25 23:02 UTC)