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Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

timelinize.com

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Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#31

Post by mholt »

Tepix wrote: post #30

Nice project! If you don't like "timelinize" - have you looked at latin names? Perhaps something like Temperi? In terms of Features, i'd like to see support for FindPenguins. A lot of interesting data (photos, videos, GPS coordinates, text) is already there.

A few latin names have been suggested, but nothing has stuck. The problem is they are usually difficult to spell and pronounce, which isn't really an improvement over the current situation :)

FindPenguins is cool! I don't use it myself, but anyone is welcome to implement a data source for it.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#32

Post by mholt »

TheTaytay wrote: post #22

I really like the local storage of this. Files and folders are the best! (When noodling on this, I’ve also been wondering about putting metadata for files in sidecar files next to the files they describe, rather than a centralized SQLite database. Did you experiment with anything like that by any chance?)

Why sidecar metadata files? In general I've tried to minimize the number of files on disk since that makes copying slow and error-prone. (A future version of Timelinize will likely support storing ALL the data in a DB to make for faster, easier copying.) We'd still need a DB for the index anyway, which essentially becomes a copy of the metadata.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#33

Post by mholt »

bun_at_work wrote: post #25

Hey - this is awesome. I've been working on a small local app like this to import financial data and present a dashboard, for the family to use together (wife and I). So yeah - great work here, taking control of your data. I'm curious about real-time data, or cron jobs, though. I love the idea of importing my data into this, but it would be nicer if I could set it up to automatically poll for new data somehow. Does T…

Cool, yeah, the finance use case seems very relevant. Someday it'd be cool to have a Finance exploration page, like we do for other kinds of data.

Real-time/polling imports aren't yet supported, but that's not too difficult once we land on the right design for that feature.

I tinkered with a "drop zone" where you could designate a folder that, when you add files to it, Timelinize immediately imports it (then deletes the file from the drop zone).

But putting imports on a timer would be trivial.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#34

Post by mholt »

sureglymop wrote: post #23

This is great. I want this but for much more. I want it to also be a nextcloud and zotero replacement, storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write. I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I press. I want a record of everything I do in the digital world that is searc…

> I want it to also be a nextcloud and zotero replacement, storing all my documents and books and documenting when I added, opened, edited them. I want it to store all notes that I write.

Sounds in-scope so far. Long-term, perhaps, and maybe optional add-on features rather than built-in, but we'll see.

> I want it to record and display all browser tabs I open, when I do so, everything I copy and paste, every key I press.

That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself.

But hey, the vision is pretty similar. We are generating all sorts of data to document and understand our lives -- we don't even have to deliberately write a journal -- but we have no way of comprehending it. This app is an attempt to solve that.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#36

Post by coffeecoders »

Love the grind! One suggestion would be to add a demo link with some test data so we can see it in action.

I am also slowly "offlining" my life. Currently, it is a mix of synology, hard drives and all.

I have always thought about building a little dashboard to access everything really. Build a financial dashboard[1] and now onto photos.

[1] https://github.com/neberej/freemycash/

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#37

Post by wizzard0 »

Wow that's great! Interesting if it's possible to use not just a folder but like a s3-compatible backend for photos and for db backups as well

(I don't think all my photo/video archives would fit on my laptop, though the thumbnails definitely would, while minio or something replicated between my desktop plus a backup machine at Hetzner or something would definitely do the thing)

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#38

Post by mholt »

coffeecoders wrote: post #36

Love the grind! One suggestion would be to add a demo link with some test data so we can see it in action. I am also slowly "offlining" my life. Currently, it is a mix of synology, hard drives and all. I have always thought about building a little dashboard to access everything really. Build a financial dashboard[1] and now onto photos. [1] https://github.com/neberej/freemycash/

A live demo would be great, but I'm not sure how to generate the fake data in a way that imitates real data patterns. That's originally how I wanted to demo things, but the results weren't compelling. (It was a half-hearted effort, I admit.) So I switched to obfuscating real data.

FreeMyCash looks great! Yours is the second financial application I've heard of; maybe we need to look at adding some finance features soon.

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#39

Post by mholt »

mtyurt wrote: post #35

Very nice project! Curiousity question: since you are taking data dumps once-twice a year, and let's say you also copy the photos as well, do you do any updates incrementally or just replace the old one with new dump?

Timelinize doesn't import duplicates by default, so you can just import the whole new Takeout and it will only keep what is new.

But you have control over this:

- You can customize what makes an item a duplicate or unique

- You can choose whether to update existing items, and how to update them (what to keep of the incoming item versus the existing one)

Re: Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

#40

Post by mholt »

wizzard0 wrote: post #37

Wow that's great! Interesting if it's possible to use not just a folder but like a s3-compatible backend for photos and for db backups as well (I don't think all my photo/video archives would fit on my laptop, though the thumbnails definitely would, while minio or something replicated between my desktop plus a backup machine at Hetzner or something would definitely do the thing)

I don't think sqlite runs very well on S3 file systems. I think it would also be insufferably slow.

I even encountered crashes within sqlite when using ExFAT -- so file system choice is definitely important! (I've since implemented a workaround for this bug by detecting exfat and configuring sqlite to avoid WAL mode, so it's just... much slower.)

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