Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've been tracking everything about myself

aprilzero.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 163 posts

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#81

Post by k-mcgrady »

hunvreus wrote: post #48
k-mcgrady wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster. Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinki…

IMHO, you don't need personalized data for this kind of stuff. More seriously, there's plenty of literature out there about these things; spend 5 minutes on Google and you'll find all of these recommendations. You'll know that exercising will help you sleep. You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns. These are becoming common sense and shouldn't require you to run you own little experimen…

/*

- Exercise more, - Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...), - Sleep more, - Drink less.

*/

And as an insomniac I was having trouble with 'sleep more'. People with worse insomnia than me have to go sleep clinics to work out how to improve their situation. Mine wasn't bad enough to warrant that but fortunately there was an app to allow me to do a little of my own research. Without it I wouldn't be able to tell the time it took me to fall asleep - as I would be asleep.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#82

Post by k-mcgrady »

alanthonyc wrote: post #42
k-mcgrady wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster. Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinki…

Which app do you use, may I ask?

'Sleep Cycle'. Orange icon with a clock on it. I was always quite skeptical of it and didn't download it until recently. It's been one of the top apps for a few years and has good reviews. I've found it to be quite accurate. It recommends that you keep your iPhone connected to a charger and under your sheet as you sleep but I've found just placing the device next to my pillow works fine and only uses about 25-30% battery life per night.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#83

Post by ChuckMcM »

If the cops ever ask you "Where were you last week on Tuesday at 8AM?" you'll have a solid answer for them :-). My question is 104 days and no journal entries? Is the author reflecting on this information or just logging it?

I ask because I have a lot of unformed questions and thoughts about what is known as the 'quantified self' movement. Given the technological memory of all these things, what insights or changes do you draw/make?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#84

Post by k-mcgrady »

hawkharris wrote: post #41

Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started. It's also smart to record the data yourself instead of sharing it with a health tracking app. With due respect to those projects, I draw a line at sharing specific and private hea…

>> "Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started."

I agree but recently I read that doctors tend to completely discount this type of data provided by a patient as they can't verify it's accuracy (did the patient collect the data correctly) and it would be risky to base their diagnosis on it.

Even if that is the case I think it can be very useful for people with chronic conditions. They can find out ways to minimise their pain through this kind of tracking/trial and error which a doctor would never have the time to do.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#85

Post by PStamatiou »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #83

If the cops ever ask you "Where were you last week on Tuesday at 8AM?" you'll have a solid answer for them :-). My question is 104 days and no journal entries? Is the author reflecting on this information or just logging it? I ask because I have a lot of unformed questions and thoughts about what is known as the 'quantified self' movement. Given the technological memory of all these things, what insights or changes d…

Yeah he's (my roommate) been working on building the site and hasn't gotten around to any journal entries yet. He just launched this yesterday. I've been egging him on to put more time into the blog component though, so expect some posts about how he built it and why he wants to log everything..

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#86

Post by wicker »

tarere wrote: post #72
afro88 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only frightening if it's not deliberate / you don't know it's happening. This is beautiful, voluntary and insightful.

So when they'll stick a tracker in the ass of every new babyborn you'll say "hurray, this is beautiful !" The world you're creating is just insane. One will have to kill me before seeing me wearing a tracking device.

Not to feed the trolls, but I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with my smartphone and the societal expectations of availability lately. Phones are effectively tracking devices.

Are you saying you don't carry a cellphone? How has that decision impacted your daily life?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#87

Post by gress »

gress wrote: post #49

This is an astonishingly beautiful website, and clearly shows the technical and design skill of Anand. However, I'm genuinely not sure what the purpose of this dashboard is other than as a résumé piece. What questions does it answer? How is it better than doing specific investigations using R?

Seriously, how is this downvoted? It's a sincere question. I enjoyed looking at the site, and I loved the interface, but I didn't get any insight into the data. Can someone enlighten me?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#88

Post by [deleted] »

mirashii wrote: post #44
Jemaclus wrote: post #36

I like it. My big beef with it so far is that it looks like most of this stuff is input manually by Anand. (The 1200+ commits suggests that it's manual and not automatic.) I'm not anal enough to spend that kinda time tracking things. I have a Fitbit, a scale that i step on every day, Strava to track my runs, etc, but those are all things you just put on (or push a button) and forget about. Things like climbing (which…

For what it's worth, having worked with Anand, I don't think 1200+ commits suggests it's input manually (you can see on the about page a list of some of the APIs it's pulling data from), I think it more suggests that Anand likes to commit a lot when he's building something. And for good reason, it's been really cool to check out historical revisions and see how a design changed at every step.

[deleted]

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#89

Post by Excavator »

Nemcue wrote: post #51
fuzzythinker wrote: post #46

Very beautiful animations and visualizations. What tools did you use to build them?

There is an "about this site" link at the bottom, where he lists some of the third party services used. In general he has a few global objects which seem to contain everything for each section; ajax requests, animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) etc. Most of it is done via jQuery.

> animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell)

So that's why people were calling it pretty. It does actually look good with all that prefix nonsense fixed.

Seems odd to use prefixes for things that were unprefixed 2years ago in Firefox.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/aurora-16-is-out/

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#90

Post by eevilspock »

aprilzero wrote: post #80
Jemaclus wrote: post #36

I like it. My big beef with it so far is that it looks like most of this stuff is input manually by Anand. (The 1200+ commits suggests that it's manual and not automatic.) I'm not anal enough to spend that kinda time tracking things. I have a Fitbit, a scale that i step on every day, Strava to track my runs, etc, but those are all things you just put on (or push a button) and forget about. Things like climbing (which…

Most of those commits are from designing or building the site

Will you make your code public on GitHub? I checked https://github.com/charm and nothing there.
Post reply on HN