Data on Guy Freeman

A Content-Addressed Foundation for Personal Knowledge

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have about eleven million words of personal documents. Contracts, invoices, court filings, medical notes, research papers, travel itineraries, conversation transcripts, CVs of various vintages, takeaway menus from restaurants that have since closed. A decade of Syncthing directories and Dropbox archives and email attachments saved twice because I wasn’t sure which copy was authoritative.

I would like to ask questions about this corpus. Not vague questions — specific ones:

When did I last see my doctor?
What did Velotix pay me in September 2024?
Which of my subscriptions auto-renew in the next sixty days?
What’s the warranty status on the water heater?

Each of these fails on a different existing tool, for a different reason.

On Owning Your Data

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I step on a bathroom scale and my body fat percentage gets beamed to a server in Shenzhen. This is the arrangement. In exchange for this intimacy, the app suggests I upgrade to premium, which I find touching in a way the developers probably didn’t intend.

I don’t have a problem with companies making money — I have a problem with the default. The default is: your body’s measurements belong to someone else’s database, and you’re welcome to look at them through their app, on their terms, until they pivot to a different business model or get acqui-hired and shut down the API. The data isn’t especially sensitive on its own. Nobody is going to blackmail me with my impedance readings. But if I can’t own the numbers that describe my own physical form, what exactly can I own? It’s a question worth asking, even if the answer turns out to be “not much, but you should try anyway.”

Scalibur: Reading Body Composition from a Cheap Bluetooth Scale

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Body composition scales are, on their own terms, genuinely useful devices. Step on, wait a few seconds, receive a small dossier on your own physical form: weight, body fat percentage, muscle mass, and several other numbers whose accuracy I’m diplomatically not questioning here. The problem is what happens next. Your data vanishes into whichever proprietary app the manufacturer saw fit to build, typically bundled with aggressive upsells and privacy practices that would make a data broker wince.

Hanukkah of Data 5783

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The madpersons behind the retro-chic data analysis tool VisiData have created an alternative to the infamous “Advent of Code”. Instead of programming to solve yet more optimisation puzzles, and instead of the hackneyed Christmas theme, the Hanukkah of Data requires data analysis to solve a ~~murder mystery~~ rug-finding mission.

I only just found out about it, so although one puzzle was released for each day of real-life Chanukah, I was able to gorge on the first 7 puzzles, needing only to wait for the last one. Each puzzle is represented by an ASCII candle in an ASCII world — quite an impressive achievement in its own right.