Adam DallianceDec 6

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.

And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.

If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?

As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.

But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?

So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.

The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.

Try it

Try it out: https://exocortexlog.com

Accept a month of demo test data, add a few events for what you’ve done so far today, look at the summary and stats tools.

No install needed, the app lives on a web page.

If you decide to start logging what you’re doing, clear the DB and start again. Maybe install it for offline use then. Maybe set a reoccurring alarm to get you into the habit of doing it. See if you find it a useful memory aid after a few weeks.

And next time a detective asks you what you were doing a month last Tuesday, maybe you’ll be able to answer!

#lifeLog #app #memoryAid

Exocortex Log

A life logger

Show threadAdam DallianceDec 6

The thing about a life-logger, is you input sensitive data about your life, lifestyle and activities, so privacy and data-integrity are some of the most important issues.

There can be no server, the data has to be yours and yours alone. Because you can’t tell what is happening to the data in a closed-source app, it must be completely free and open source.

You can’t trust a corporate diary, they must sell to anyone offering enough money.

So it is with my life log app, all data completely in your own device. No home server ever sees anything.

There is no home server. Just the code.

To achieve this Exocortex Log is a Progressive Web App. It downloads when you are online at the website and can be installed onto the homepage of your phone.

It keeps all data on the local device using indexdb.

This means you must be responsible for your own backups. Be sure to export and back up your data regularly. I have gaps in my ten year record where my phone was stolen and most recent backup was months prior.

Once installed it will work offline, airplane mode, no internet, down in the tube station at midnight, anywhere.

There's a blog on the website saying this and more: https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-06-release/

Release! - Exocortex Blog

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night. And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away. If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?

Exocortex Blog
Show threadAdam Dalliance

Why is it finally ready now after ten years of being a barely functional input-only android app?

A few weeks ago I saw Derek Ross giving a talk and demo of Shakespeare, a Chrome app for vibe-coding.

Explain the app you want, and the model you select will build it. Don't even need to be a dev they reckon.

So I figured I'd give it a try.

Start again from scratch, import the old data.

In about a week of work this app has progressed far beyond the prototypes that spent more then ten years as half-running shoddy input-only systems that I couldn't be arsed to expand further.

It went pretty well to start with, something even a non-dev could do, then ceased up, unable to really understand the codebase it'd written until I spent a fairly long day manually cleaning up it's mess.

So Shakespeare (and presumably all the other tools I haven't tried) seems okay for a non-dev to prototype a small app but currently the models are writing code so sloppy that they can't then later understand it themselves. Still needing a dev's guiding hand to keep it from
repeating itself or creating complex unorganized unmanageable code.

#vibeCoding #shakespeare

Derek Ross

The purple pill helps the orange pill go down. Developer Relations at Soapbox. 🪺 NostrNests.com 🎙️ YakBak.app 🖼️ Zappix.app 🗓️ Plektos.app 🎶 ZapTrax.app 📈 Zaplytics.app 🎧 Podstr.org

Dec 6 at 2:12pmWeb
Show threadAdam DallianceDec 6

Future Plans:

I have like ten years of data in my log, converted from those prior prototypes. I will be adding ways to more usefully compare and analyse data going this far back.

It could maybe use a milestone function, to track singular events which don't take actual time so don't spread on the grid. Snack tracking and the like.

It could likely use a flashcard system, with spaced repetition to review the flashcards, for better memory and recall.

Synching between devices might be nice, and lots will suggest doing that through Nostr, but Nostr is a bit public. Would need an encryption layer. Do nostr relays want to relay encrypted data from one user to themselves I suspect Veilid ( https://veilid.com/ ) would be a better option. The "no servers" ethos probably includes nostr relays.

Mostly I plan just more and better ways to view the ten years and growing of data I already have. And to do some other things for a bit so my log isn't just full of "Vibecoding Exocortex" like it is the last two weeks 😉

Veilid

Veilid is an open-source, distributed application framework.

Veilid
Show threadAdam DallianceDec 6

Here's some things you'll notice the website doesn't do:

  • No cookie popups. We don't need to warn you about tracking, we just don't track.

  • No Tracking. I don't even look at the apache logs. I don't care what you do.

  • No service agreement checkbox. I'm not providing a service. Do what you want with the code but don't blame me.

  • No billing

  • No adverts

  • No paywall

  • No VPN barrier

  • No geoblocking

  • No subscription button (though RSS is provided)

Websites don't have to be shit, the surveillance capitalists just enshitify them on purpose.

Show threadAdam DallianceDec 7

Today's changes to the Exocortex Log:

Added a dialog to summarize a day and allow easy swapping for a particular day between the grid, summary, and stats view.

https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-07-daydialog/

#app #lifeLog

Day Dialog - Exocortex Blog

I added a dialog about the day

Exocortex Blog
Show threadAdam DallianceDec 8

I added a search function to the exocortex log app.

Update with the section at the bottom of the conf screen if you can’t see it.

Search for whatever words in your log, so you can see when you noted you last saw someone or had the MOT done or whatever.

https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-08-search/

#app #lifeLog

Adding Text Search - Exocortex Blog

Adding a search function the the log app

Exocortex Blog
Show threadAdam DallianceDec 9

Added a category manager and category state section to the Exocortex Log app.

Have now organized and cleaned up the categories in my ten year database and so we can get some views of the time spent in each category.

We see that through September and October I was in a routine of work and slack with a bit of social a couple of times a week, until the end of November when I went away for social at a conference all weekend. I saw a demo there of a person using Shakespeare, and then when I got back started doing some vibe-coding, shown in in Red.

A break from that to go away at the weekend to a long social party then finish it off and publish a few days ago, since when Vibe Coding has dropped off a little.

https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-09-addingcats/

#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

Show threadAdam DallianceDec 18

Added a zoom level to the Category page on the Exocortex-Log app. Can make the graphs look a lot cleaner now.

Looking back over the last 100 months here, we can see in general my social life is quite seasonal -- Festivals are a lot of social all weekend long and a couple of them in a month really bumps up the hours from my usual habit of sitting alone in a dark room pressing buttons.

The peak in 2019 is a summer filled with Glasto and Noisily and another festival or camping trip I don’t seem to have recorded the name of.

Then clearly visible is the drop-off in social activity as the COVID pandemic hit. Virtual-Social (IE zoom meetings and the like) picked up quite a bit around there but had died back to almost nothing way before the hours spent with actual people started to tick up.

Annoyingly, I have my biggest gap in data right on top of the pandemic there, where I failed to back up for months and then data became corrupted.

When the data-hole is over we see social life still not really returning until the middle of 2021 and not really getting back into stride until summer 2022.

It remains much lower now on average with lower peaks than before the pandemic too. Multiple reasons.

Work is pretty constant all the way though other than the data-hole. Dipping when I take time off for social mostly.

That data-hole is annoying. Back up your data kids.

https://exocortexlog.com/news/articles/2025-12-19-catzoom/

#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog