[HN Gopher] Little Data: How do we query personal data? (2013)
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       Little Data: How do we query personal data? (2013)
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2024-02-29 03:32 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.petekeen.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.petekeen.net)
        
       | hmartin wrote:
       | I'm a fan on simonw's datasette/dogsheep ecosystem
       | https://datasette.io/
        
         | zrail wrote:
         | :wave: OP author here! I still haven't found any decent answers
         | to the questions from that post, but I think if I were going to
         | make another concerted effort I would absolutely start with
         | datasette.
         | 
         | Edit: link to the original HN thread with a bunch of
         | interesting comments
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718422
        
           | breck wrote:
           | It's interesting to see the founders in that thread
           | mentioning their cracks at it. All seem to be dead now except
           | for HumanAPI (which looks like was acquired by Lexis Nexis).
        
       | hellorashid wrote:
       | love it - another relevant project: https://www.mainframe.so/ -
       | its a bit finicky when i tried, but interesting.
        
         | mjwhansen wrote:
         | Interesting...
        
       | kkfx wrote:
       | On personal data, meaning data I control, I have most of my
       | digital life in org-mode, from videos (clickable links running
       | mplayer against the relevant files) to mails (notmuch:/notmuch-
       | search: links) passing from pdfs and mere text notes. For data I
       | do not really control I simply suffer.
       | 
       | My banks offer horrible MANUAL ways to export transactions, two
       | are supported by woob, but it's still a painful crappy situation
       | especially since I'm in EU so they all have OpenBank APIs between
       | them by law (similar to USA OFX feeds) BUT the laws does not
       | mandate opening the access to individual customers and so ALL
       | banks I know in EU choose not to give their customer OpenBank
       | access... There are some companies offer VERY expensive OpenBank
       | access, that's simply too expensive to be an option, so well... I
       | use BeanCount and fava from org-mode notes, but mostly done by
       | hand with templates (Emacs hydras + yasnippet).
       | 
       | Fiscal stuff are even worse, both Italian and French public
       | administrations have horrific and next-to-be-unusable porcals
       | (portals are another thing), automation is somewhat possible, if
       | the Citizen want do read obscene XML specifications that change
       | frequently enough to break simple automation, making such
       | automation no less painful than manual work.
       | 
       | My favorite supermarket offer tickets and invoices from drive via
       | it's portal, unfortunately they are ONLY very crappily formatted
       | pdfs, so parsing them is a painful exercise, with multi-line
       | entries, hard to get tables and so on.
       | 
       | My utilities have pdfs bills, no options for csv/xml or something
       | else. In Italy e-invoicing is mandatory, invoices are in XML,
       | often wrapped in a .p7m envelope to be signed, so I can formally
       | automate them with eventual openssl, xsltproc (apply the xsl
       | style to get and html version, and wkhtmltopdf to get a pdf for
       | human reading and from the xml munging the automated part.
       | Well... Specifications are so horrible that it's simpler (since I
       | do not have many, living in France) to go by hand instead...
       | 
       | My hostings thankfully offer XML and CSV for essentially
       | anything, one also offer a Python library to interact with their
       | invoicing system programmatically.
       | 
       | My IoT setup is an HA mess, too time consuming to manage it
       | properly outside the HA mess.
       | 
       | Long story short IF modern IT were designed for the user we would
       | have good automation and comfort, unfortunately it's not. So we
       | suffer since decades, even if most simple automation was there
       | since the '70s from EDIFACTS and beyond...
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-01 23:02 UTC)