This is a little bit of an offshoot from my normal posts and rather is an idea for a program of sorts that would be a quantification of how time is spent at a computer for better or for worse. This would help identify patterns and provide a single page overview of how a day at a computer was spent. This could be expanded to multiple devices as well as integration with mobile devices that would provide a wide range of telemetry. These devices could be fitness trackers, Smart phones (with integration into people you may have spoken to, places that you could have gone, and potentially even exercise that was carried out. The idea behind this being that you wouldn’t have to turn anything on but you would have a skeleton of what you had done in that given day. Google collects location data, programs like WhatPulse tracks keystrokes and can also do network usage+application usage, Fitness trackers offer daily summaries that show what you have done in a given day. This posits the question of, well why do we need something different than the solutions already offered? Because this data is yours but it isn’t in your possession. The idea behind this being that the software would be FOSS and give full control over the data as well as the programs to the power of the user.
The beauty of this project would be that it would all be self hosted and could have both local integration and VPS integration with exactly however many modules a person could choose to integrate providing a dashboard or a high level overview of what occurred in a given day. This data is good and useful but the patterns that could be analyzed in combination with changes of habits or general mood tracking / journal keeping could be monumental in achieving goals. The data would be presented in a format that was easy to expand at a whim to see the technical details but also general enough so that it would be nice to look at. Integration with the goal achieving piece could be implementing something like the 5 minute journal alongside this data.
This top level overview offers little insight on how this would happen technically and to be frank my rudimentary understanding of C++, Python and Bash may not make this something that is feasible but the idea behind it is still interesting and ultimately worth exploring. Ideally this application would work on both Windows and GNU/Linux with Android integration planned on the mobile device side. Ideally the data would be aggregated from available open source tools and the front-end or dashboard would be the piece that would need to be developed.