TLDR: I’m using HPI (Human Programming Interface) package as a means of unifying, accessing and interacting with all of my personal data.

It’s a Python library (named my), a collection of modules for:

social networks: posts, comments, favorites
reading: e-books and pdfs
annotations: highlights and comments
todos and notes
health data: sleep, exercise, weight, heart rate, and other body metrics
location
photos & videos
browser history
instant messaging

The package hides the gory details of locating data, parsing, error handling and caching. You simply ‘import’ your data and get to work with familiar Python types and data structures.

Here’s a short example to give you an idea: “which subreddits I find the most interesting?”

import my.reddit
from collections import Counter
return Counter(s.subreddit for s in my.reddit.saved()).most_common(4)

orgmode	62
emacs	60
selfhosted	51
QuantifiedSelf	46

I consider my digital trace an important part of my identity. (#extendedmind) The fact that the data is siloed, and accessing it is inconvenient and borderline frustrating feels very wrong.

Once the data is available as Python objects, I can easily plug it into existing tools, libraries and frameworks. It makes building new tools considerably easier and allows creating new ways of interacting with the data.

I tried different things over the years and I think I’m getting to the point where other people can also benefit from my code by ‘just’ plugging in their data, and that’s why I’m sharing this.

Imagine if all your life was reflected digitally and available at your fingertips. This library is my attempt to achieve this vision.

If you’re in a hurry, feel free to jump straight to the demos.

For installation/configuration/development guide, see SETUP.org.

Table of contents:

Why?
How does a Python package help?
- Why don’t you just put everything in a massive database?
What’s inside?
How do you use it?
Ad-hoc and interactive
- What were my music listening stats for 2018?
- What are the most interesting Slate Star Codex posts I’ve read?
- Accessing exercise data
- Book reading progress
- Messenger stats
How does it get input data?
Q & A
- Why Python?
- Can anyone use it?
- How easy is it to use?
- What about privacy?
- But should I use it?
- Would it suit me?
- What it isn’t?
Related links
–

Why?

The main reason that led me to develop this is the dissatisfaction of the current situation:

Our personal data is siloed and trapped across cloud services and various devices
Even when it’s possible to access it via the API, it’s hardly useful, unless you’re an experienced programmer, willing to invest your time and infrastructure.
We have insane amounts of data scattered across the cloud, yet we’re left at the mercy of those who collect it to provide something useful based on it
Integrations of data across silo boundaries are almost non-existent. There is so much potential and it’s all wasted.
I’m not willing to wait till some vaporwave project reinvents the whole computing model from scratch
As a programmer, I am in capacity to do something right now, even though it’s not necessarily perfect and consistent.

I’ve written a lot about it here, so allow me to simply quote:

search and information access

Why can’t I search over all of my personal chat history with a friend, whether it’s ICQ logs from 2005 or Whatsapp logs from 2019?

Why can’t I have incremental search over my tweets? Or browser bookmarks? Or over everything I’ve ever typed/read on the Internet?

Why can’t I search across my watched youtube videos, even though most of them have subtitles hence allowing for full text search?

Why can’t I see the places my friends recommended me on Google maps (or any other maps app)?

productivity

Why can’t my Google Home add shopping list items to Google Keep? Let alone other todo-list apps.

Why can’t I create a task in my todo list or calendar from a conversation on Facebook Messenger/Whatsapp/VK.com/Telegram?

journaling and history

Why do I have to lose all my browser history if I decide to switch browsers?

Why can’t I see all the places I traveled to on a single map and photos alongside?

Why can’t I see what my heart rate (i.e. excitement) and speed were side by side with the video I recorded on GoPro while skiing?

Why can’t I easily transfer all my books and metadata if I decide to switch from Kindle to PocketBook or vice versa?

consuming digital content

Why can’t I see stuff I highlighted on Instapaper as an overlay on top of web page?

Why can’t I have single ‘read it later’ list, unifying all things saved on Reddit/Hackernews/Pocket?

Why can’t I use my todo app instead of ‘Watch later’ playlist on youtube?

Why can’t I ‘follow’ some user on Hackernews?

Why can’t I see if I’ve run across a Youtube video because my friend sent me a link months ago?

Why can’t I have uniform music listening stats based on my Last.fm/iTunes/Bandcamp/Spotify/Youtube?

Why am I forced to use Spotify’s music recommendation algorithm and don’t have an option to try something else?

Why can’t I easily see what were the books/music/art recommended by my friends or some specific Twitter/Reddit/Hackernews users?

Why my otherwise perfect hackernews app for Android doesn’t share saved posts/comments with the website?

health and body maintenance

Why can’t I tell if I was more sedentary than usual during the past week and whether I need to compensate by doing a bit more exercise?

Why can’t I see what’s the impact of aerobic exercise on my resting HR?

Why can’t I have a dashboard for all of my health: food, exercise and sleep to see baselines and trends?

Why can’t I see the impact of temperature or CO2 concentration in room on my sleep?

Why can’t I see how holidays (as in, not going to work) impact my stress levels?

Why can’t I take my Headspace app data and see how/if meditation impacts my sleep?

Why can’t I run a short snippet of code and check some random health advice on the Internet against my health data.

personal finance

Why am I forced to manually copy transactions from different banking apps into a spreadsheet?

Why can’t I easily match my Amazon/Ebay orders with my bank transactions?

why I can’t do anything when I’m offline or have a wonky connection?

tools for thinking and learning

Why when something like ‘mind palace’ is literally possible with VR technology, we don’t see any in use?

Why can’t I easily convert select Instapaper highlights or new foreign words I encountered on my Kindle into Anki flashcards?

mediocre interfaces

Why do I have to suffer from poor management and design decisions in UI changes, even if the interface is not the main reason I’m using the product?

Why can’t I leave priorities and notes on my saved Reddit/Hackernews items?

Why can’t I leave private notes on Deliveroo restaurants/dishes, so I’d remember what to order/not to order next time?

Why do people have to suffer from Google Inbox shutdown?

communication and collaboration

Why can’t I easily share my web or book highlights with a friend? Or just make highlights in select books public?

Why can’t I easily find out other person’s expertise without interrogating them, just by looking what they read instead?

backups

Why do I have to think about it and actively invest time and effort?

I’m tired of having to use multiple different messengers and social networks
I’m tired of shitty bloated interfaces
Why do we have to be at mercy of their developers, designers and product managers? If we had our data at hand, we could fine-tune interfaces for our needs.
I’m tired of mediocre search experience
Text search is something computers do exceptionally well. Yet, often it’s not available offline, it’s not incremental, everyone reinvents their own query language, and so on.
I’m frustrated by poor information exploring and processing experience
While for many people, services like Reddit or Twitter are simply time killers (and I don’t judge), some want to use them efficiently, as a source of information/research. Modern bookmarking experience makes it far from perfect.

You can dismiss this as a list of first-world problems, and you would be right, they are. But the major reason I want to solve these problems is to be better at learning and working with knowledge, so I could be better at solving the real problems.

How does a Python package help?

When I started solving some of these problems for myself, I’ve noticed a common pattern: the hardest bit is actually getting your data in the first place. It’s inherently error-prone and frustrating.

But once you have the data in a convenient representation, working with it is pleasant – you get to explore and build instead of fighting with yet another stupid REST API.

This python package knows how to find data, deserialize it and normalize it to the convenient representation. You have the full power of the programming language to transform the data and do whatever comes to your mind.

Why don’t you just put everything in a massive database?

Glad you’ve asked! I wrote a whole post about it.

In short: while databases are efficient and easy to read from, often they aren’t flexible enough to fit your data. You’re probably going to end up writing code anyway.

While working with your data, you’ll inevitably notice common patterns and code repetition, which you’ll probably want to extract somewhere. That’s where a Python package comes in.

What’s inside?

Here’s an (incomplete) list of the modules in the public package:

my.bluemaestro	Bluemaestro temperature/humidity/pressure monitor
my.body.blood	Blood tracking
my.body.weight	Weight data (manually logged)
my.books.kobo	Kobo e-ink reader: annotations and reading stats
my.calendar.holidays	Provides data on days off work (based on public holidays + manual inputs)
my.coding.commits	Git commits data: crawls filesystem
my.coding.github	Github events and their metadata: comments/issues/pull requests
my.emfit	Emfit QS sleep tracker
my.fbmessenger	Module for Facebook Messenger messages
my.feedbin	Module for Feedbin RSS reader
my.feedly	Module for Feedly RSS reader
my.hypothesis	Hypothes.is highlights and annotations
my.instapaper	Instapaper bookmarks, highlights and annotations
my.location.takeout	Module for Google Takeout data
my.materialistic	Module for Materialistic app for Hackernews
my.notes.orgmode	Programmatic access and queries to org-mode files on the filesystem
my.photos	Module for accessing photos and videos, with their GPS and timestamps
my.pinboard	Module for pinboard.in bookmarks
my.reading.polar	Module for Polar articles and highlights
my.reddit	Module for Reddit data: saved items/comments/upvotes etc
my.rtm	Remember The Milk tasks and notes
my.smscalls	Phone calls and SMS messages
my.twitter	Module for Twitter (uses official twitter archive export)

Some modules are private, and need a bit of cleanup before merging:

my.workouts	Exercise activity, from Endomondo and manual logs
my.sleep.manual	Subjective sleep data, manually logged
my.nutrition	Food and drink consumption data, logged manually from different sources
my.money	Expenses and shopping data
my.webhistory	Browsing history (part of promnesia)

How do you use it?

Mainly I use it as a data provider for my scripts, tools, and dashboards.

Also, check out my infrastructure map. It’s a draft at the moment, but it might be helpful for understanding what’s my vision on HPI.

Instant search

Typical search interfaces make me unhappy as they are siloed, slow, awkward to use and don’t work offline. So I built my own ways around it! I write about it in detail here.

In essence, I’m mirroring most of my online data like chat logs, comments, etc., as plaintext. I can overview it in any text editor, and incrementally search over all of it in a single keypress.

orger

orger is a tool and set of modules for accessing data via org-mode. It allows searching and overviewing, and in addition, I’m using it for creating tasks straight from native app interfaces (e.g. Reddit/Telegram) and spaced repetition via org-drill.

I write about it in detail here and here.

promnesia

promnesia is a browser extension I’m working on to escape silos by unifying annotations and browsing history from different data sources.

I’ve been using it for more than a year now and working on final touches to properly release it for other people.

dashboard

As a big fan of #quantified-self, I’m working on personal health, sleep and exercise dashboard, built from various data sources.

I’m working on making it public, you can see some screenshots here.

timeline

Timeline is a #lifelogging project I’m working on.

I want to see all my digital history, search in it, filter, easily jump at a specific point in time and see the context when it happened. That way it works as a sort of external memory.

Ideally, it would look similar to Andrew Louis’s Memex, or might even reuse his interface if he open sources it. I highly recommend watching his talk for inspiration.

Ad-hoc and interactive

What were my music listening stats for 2018?

Single import away from getting tracks you listened to:

from my.lastfm import get_scrobbles
scrobbles = get_scrobbles()
scrobbles[200: 205]

[Scrobble(raw={'album': 'Nevermind', 'artist': 'Nirvana', 'date': '1282488504', 'name': 'Drain You'}),
 Scrobble(raw={'album': 'Dirt', 'artist': 'Alice in Chains', 'date': '1282489764', 'name': 'Would?'}),
 Scrobble(raw={'album': 'Bob Dylan: The Collection', 'artist': 'Bob Dylan', 'date': '1282493517', 'name': 'Like a Rolling Stone'}),
 Scrobble(raw={'album': 'Dark Passion Play', 'artist': 'Nightwish', 'date': '1282493819', 'name': 'Amaranth'}),
 Scrobble(raw={'album': 'Rolled Gold +', 'artist': 'The Rolling Stones', 'date': '1282494161', 'name': "You Can't Always Get What You Want"})]

Or, as a pandas frame to make it pretty:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([{
    'dt': s.dt,
    'track': s.track,
} for s in scrobbles])
cdf = df.set_index('dt')
cdf[200: 205]

                                                                       track
dt                                                                          
2010-08-22 14:48:24+00:00                                Nirvana — Drain You
2010-08-22 15:09:24+00:00                           Alice in Chains — Would?
2010-08-22 16:11:57+00:00                   Bob Dylan — Like a Rolling Stone
2010-08-22 16:16:59+00:00                               Nightwish — Amaranth
2010-08-22 16:22:41+00:00  The Rolling Stones — You Can't Always Get What...

We can use calmap library to plot a github-style music listening activity heatmap:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 2.3))

import calmap
cdf = cdf.set_index(cdf.index.tz_localize(None)) # calmap expects tz-unaware dates
calmap.yearplot(cdf['track'], how='count', year=2018)

plt.tight_layout()
plt.title('My music listening activity for 2018')
plot_file = 'lastfm_2018.png'
plt.savefig(plot_file)
plot_file

This isn’t necessarily very insightful data, but fun to look at now and then!

What are the most interesting Slate Star Codex posts I’ve read?

My friend asked me if I could recommend them posts I found interesting on Slate Star Codex. With few lines of Python I can quickly recommend them posts I engaged most with, i.e. the ones I annotated most on Hypothesis.

from my.hypothesis import get_pages
from collections import Counter
cc = Counter({p.url: len(p.highlights) for p in get_pages() if 'slatestarcodex' in p.url})
return cc.most_common(10)

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/	32
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/	17
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/	16
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/	16
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/	12
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/	11
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/	11
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/	10
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-treatment-for-attempted-suicide/	9
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/	9

Accessing exercise data

E.g. see use of my.workouts here.

Book reading progress

I publish my reading stats on Goodreads so other people can see what I’m reading/have read, but Kobo lacks integration with Goodreads. I’m using kobuddy to access my my Kobo data, and I’ve got a regular task that reminds me to sync my progress once a month.

The task looks like this:

* TODO [#C] sync [[https://goodreads.com][reading progress]] with kobo
  DEADLINE: <2019-11-24 Sun .+4w -0d>
[[eshell: with_my python3 -c 'import my.books.kobo as kobo; kobo.print_progress()']]

With a single Enter keypress on the inlined eshell: command I can print the progress and fill in the completed books on Goodreads, e.g.:

A_Mathematician's_Apology by G. H. Hardy
Started : 21 Aug 2018 11:44
Finished: 22 Aug 2018 12:32

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (Vintage) by Thompson, Hunter S.
Started : 06 Sep 2018 05:54
Finished: 09 Sep 2018 12:21

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Started : 09 Sep 2018 12:22
Finished: 16 Sep 2018 07:25

Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Started : 31 Jul 2018 22:54
Finished: 16 Sep 2018 07:25

Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts
Started : 20 Aug 2018 21:16
Finished: 16 Sep 2018 07:26

Messenger stats

How much do I chat on Facebook Messenger?

from my.fbmessenger import messages

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df = pd.DataFrame({'dt': m.dt, 'messages': 1} for m in messages())
df.set_index('dt', inplace=True)

df = df.resample('M').sum() # by month
df = df.loc['2016-01-01':'2019-01-01'] # past subset for determinism

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(15, 5))
df.plot(kind='bar', ax=ax)

# todo wonder if that vvv can be less verbose...
x_labels = df.index.strftime('%Y %b')
ax.set_xticklabels(x_labels)

plot_file = 'messenger_2016_to_2019.png'
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig(plot_file)
return plot_file

How does it get input data?

If you’re curious about any specific data sources I’m using, I’ve written it up in detail.

In short:

The data is periodically synchronized from the services (cloud or not) locally, on the filesystem
As a result, you get JSONs/sqlite (or other formats, depending on the service) on your disk.

Once you have it, it’s trivial to back it up and synchronize to other computers/phones, if necessary.

To schedule periodic sync, I’m using cron.
my. package only accesses the data on the filesystem
That makes it extremely fast, reliable, and fully offline capable.

As you can see, in such a setup, the data is lagging behind the ‘realtime’. I consider it a necessary sacrifice to make everything fast and resilient.

In theory, it’s possible to make the system almost realtime by having a service that sucks in data continuously (rather than periodically), but it’s harder as well.

Q & A

Why Python?

I don’t consider Python unique as a language suitable for such a project. It just happens to be the one I’m most comfortable with. I do have some reasons that I think make it specifically good, but explaining them is out of this post’s scope.

In addition, Python offers a very rich ecosystem for data analysis, which we can use to our benefit.

That said, I’ve never seen anything similar in other programming languages, and I would be really interested in, so please send me links if you know some. I’ve heard LISPs are great for data? ;)

Overall, I wish FFIs were a bit more mature, so we didn’t have to think about specific programming languages at all.

Can anyone use it?

Yes!

you can plug in your own data
most modules are isolated, so you can only use the ones that you want to
everything is easily extensible
Starting from simply adding new modules to any dynamic hackery you can possibly imagine within Python.

How easy is it to use?

The whole setup requires some basic programmer literacy:

installing/running and potentially modifying Python code
using symlinks
potentially running Cron jobs

If you have any ideas on making the setup simpler, please let me know!

What about privacy?

The modules contain no data, only code to operate on the data.

Everything is local fist, the input data is on your filesystem. If you’re truly paranoid, you can even wrap it in a Docker container.

There is still a question of whether you trust yourself at even keeping all the data on your disk, but it is out of the scope of this post.

If you’d rather keep some code private too, it’s also trivial to achieve with a private subpackage.

But should I use it?

Sure, maybe you can achieve a perfect system where you can instantly find and recall anything that you’ve done. Do you really want it? Wouldn’t that, like, make you less human?

I’m not a gatekeeper of what it means to be human, but I don’t think that the shortcomings of the human brain are what makes us such.

So I can’t answer that for you. I certainly want it though. I’m quite open about my goals – I’d happily get merged/augmented with a computer to enhance my thinking and analytical abilities.

While at the moment we don’t even remotely understand what would such merging or “mind uploading” entail exactly, I can clearly delegate some tasks, like long term memory, information lookup, and data processing to a computer. They can already handle it really well.

What about these people who have perfect recall and wish they hadn’t.

Sure, maybe it sucks. At the moment though, I don’t anything close to it and this only annoys me. I want to have a choice at least, and digital tools give me this choice.

Would it suit me?

Probably, at least to some extent.

First, our lives are different, so our APIs might be different too. This is more of a demonstration of what’s I’m using, although I did spend effort towards making it as modular and extensible as possible, so other people could use it too. It’s easy to modify code, add extra methods and modules. You can even keep all your modifications private.

But after all, we’ve all sharing many similar activities and using the same products, so there is a huge overlap. I’m not sure how far we can stretch it and keep modules generic enough to be used by multiple people. But let’s give it a try perhaps? :)

Second, interacting with your data through the code is the central idea of the project. That kind of cuts off people without technical skills, and even many people capable of coding, who dislike the idea of writing code outside of work.

It might be possible to expose some no-code interfaces, but I still feel that wouldn’t be enough.

I’m not sure whether it’s a solvable problem at this point, but happy to hear any suggestions!

What it isn’t?

It’s not vaporwave
The project is a little crude, but it’s real and working. I’ve been using it for a long time now, and find it fairly sustainable to keep using for the foreseeable future.
It’s not going to be another silo
While I don’t have anything against commercial use (and I believe any work in this area will benefit all of us), I’m not planning to build a product out of it.

I really hope it can grow into or inspire some mature open source system.

Please take my ideas and code and build something cool from it!

–

Open to any feedback and thoughts!

Also, don’t hesitate to raise an issue, or reach me personally if you want to try using it, and find the instructions confusing. Your questions would help me to make it simpler!

In some near future I will write more about:

specific technical decisions and patterns
challenges I had so solve
more use-cases and demos – it’s impossible to fit everything in one post!

, but happy to answer any questions on these topics now!

miguelrochefort/HPI