timeline VS Simula

My timeline thing. It gathers all my crap and puts in onto a timeline. It's a more fine-grained version of scrolling to a specific date on my photo stream.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

It serves no purpose, but somehow it attracted one contributor.

It's pointless on purpose. It's the thing I work on when I want to forget about work, and build purely for myself.

Google Drive as a first line of defence. It's been solid for a really long time.

I also run hourly rsync backups to my home server, and propagate them to a Hetzner file storage server. This is done by my timeline thing [0]. The timeline thing backs up files from multiple devices, but also geolocation, social media posts, and other data I consider valuable. It's extensible, so I can add new inputs/outputs as needed.

Whatever your backup strategy is, consider the following threats:

- Your files are held hostage by ransomware, and the damage spreads to your backup

- Your house is destroyed by fire

- You lose your 2FA device

- You are locked out of your Google/Apple/Microsoft account

- You are incapacitated, and someone needs to take over

I have 4 of those factors covered. I am working on the last point.

[0] https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

My own timeline thing.

It hosts all of my data plus my personal diary. I update it at least once a day. My photos, backups and geolocation are automatically uploaded to it.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

My home server gets a lot of use too. It's mostly my own code, plus Transmission.

https://github.com/nicbou/homeserver

I also have a few lines of code that take my browser's search queries and routes them according to keywords. Browsers do this natively now, but old habits die hard. Every search query goes through it.

I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing (https://github.com/nicbou/timeline) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites.

However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us clunky one-time exports, but even those are often incomplete.

The industry has a strong incentive to kill RSS, since the readers can strip the valuable bits (content or data) from the business bits (analytics, monetisation). RSS users are hard to count or monetise.

This is a battle worth fighting, but it's not one you should expect to win.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

It regroups my personal data, and displays it on a timeline. Sort of like if Google Photos also included reddit posts, personal journal entries, text messages and other slices of life.

I do it both as a way to back up files and photos, and as a way to keep an enhanced journal.

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som/ Parser, code model, navigable browser and VM for the SOM Smalltalk dialect

- https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula A Simula 67 parser written in C++ and Qt

> do you regret those endeavours?

No, not in any way; the projects were very entertaining and gave me interesting insights.

The meta object concept of Python (both the 2 and 3 version) is rather different than the one of Smalltalk-80. Actually Smalltalk-76 and 80 have more in common with Simula (67) than the first Smalltalk (72) version. I implemented both Simula 67 and Smalltalk-80 (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/Simula/). Smalltalk implemented a lot of great ideas, but its influence on other languages (such as Python, Java, C++, etc.) is generally overestimated.