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:

Exocortex Blog

Release! - Exocortex Blog

A story and the release of Exocortex Blog

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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:

Exocortex Log

A life logger

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

Working on a website for a while until you look at it in chrome and it's horrible and you remember your dark mode plugin has been messing with it to make it look sane and dark. 😆 Gotta remember to turn these things off for the sites you're developing.

So the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent. None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name. The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power. Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists. They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good. Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making. For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top. They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people. Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage. #yourParty #ukpol

Huh, I see that Zip Car UK is closing down, which would be a right pain if I hadn't bought a car last year. That's a lot of parking spaces about to be freed up I suppose. And a lot of easy-rental cars lying around the city disappearing. Guess they just weren't making enough money? #zipCar #uk

conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in. Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves. Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south. I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems. There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done. Can it work? I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry. I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here. Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries. And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system. I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it and welcome new followers. I mostly don't talk about bitcoin very much because money isn't really very interesting and I'm fast from expert on it. #bitfest #bitcoin

Finally, Martin from BTC Prague wonders how to empower bitcoiners in the UK. He's inspired by many UK scientists and artists and creators. But he thinks it's declining. Socialism and regulation reducing freedom. His home country had a peaceful velvet revolution, ending communism in the 80s. And it now has a law that there is no capital gains tax on long term held bitcoin! The UK, he thinks, needs to build new strong bitcoin based money to have it's own peaceful revolution. #bitfest #bitcoin #uk

Thomas voegtlin talks about nostr spam. It's very censorship resistance means spam can't be stopped by moderators. One way to stop spam is require proof of work before your client accepts a message. A large difficult hash. But big hashing machines are more available to spammers than people. Can't use likes or zaps cuz they can be faked with sybil attacks. Instead: notaries and proveably burned satoshis. Your public messages are classified as ham rather than spam if you burn enough money. Nostr event types to prove it are suggested. Including burning to upvote others messages Don't think I like deliberately burning the money, and seems to me a web of trust might work without doing that? Pay to post also peanizes there poor. But it isn't really burned here, it's shaed out to miners to continue a subsidy when the block rewards run out. So paying miners and these notaries rather than really burning. Okay. Maybe better, but still makes messages mostly for the rich? #bitfest #bitcoin #nostr

A panel on bitcoin treasury companies. Because investment law makes it hard for institutions to buy bitcoin in their funds. You can't own BTC in you tax free ISA. So some companies that do hold bitcoin, notably microstrategy, became proxy investments. If you can't hold BTC you could maybe own a company that owns BTC instead. Microstrategy started because it's ceo realized it's dollar treasury was being debased by dollar printing. So tried buying BTC instead, with fantastic success. Copycat companies proliferated. They boomed and then busted. One panelist calls that a grift. A way to memeticly pump share price. A line can be drawn between profitable companies just storing their profit in bitcoin Vs those raising debt to buy without having a profitable business. Imagine a world transiting from using seashells for money to using gold coins. A company gathers seashells from investors to buy gold coins, which will do better than sea shells. Trouble is the next step where the company pays back it's investors with... More seashells. If you own shares in the company, you do not own bitcoin. You'll just get more old fashioned bank money. Still. It's worked as marketing, more people being convinced BTC has value. If you do buy a treasury company, check it's bitcoin not "digital assets" including shitcoins. #bitfest #bitcoin #bitcoinTreasuryCompanies

Gaskell of Sundial is presenting on a layer two protocol designed to enable bitcoin to generate yield. Most bitcoin is still, in long term hodl. Not helping anyone. Sure, you could lend your bitcoin for interest but that would count as a tax event and also involve losing custody. What if a programmable sidechain to help with scaling, allow borrowing and lending and products retail and institutions like? His solution is called Sundial and doesn't need new protocol changes or forks. Hard to say what it actually does though? Presumably something like liquidity in sidechains? Didn't really seem to get what he actually is building. 🤷 #bitfest #bitcoin

The conference also has a cinema room, showing bitcoin based films. Not mine, but I'm here for "finding home" by avi burra. Who did q&a after. A short Travelog about a visit a cypherpunk in Prague for BTC Prague. Which was a much bigger bitcoin conference. Lots of shots of a beautiful European city, and brief interviews with the people there. Many at restaurants where meals are paid for with bitcoin. I guess they have a circular economy there of some sort. Conclusion seems to be that fixing the money is important but building community is even more importanter. #bitfest #film #bitcoin

Not sure what the difference between a panel and a"fireside chat" is. There is no fire. But here's a fireside chat on what nostr is. Nostr is freedom for Identity. Accounts without hosts. Publishing without publidhers. Censorship resistance without platforms deciding who gets to say what. It's not a silo in which you can be tapped as the service enshitifies, since it's a protocol with accounts you control, you can't switch clients or relays without loosing social graph or contacts. Nostr is notes and Other Stuff, what other stuff? the panel is working on an audiobook publishing system with perhaps a required payment and affiliate revenue share. E-commerce, video publishing, zap stream for live video with zap payments. Onboarding can be tricky with private key management needing to be understood and such a range of options of clients and what relays are. Can we make it easier? Perhaps by abstracting away the fact it's nostr at all. Devine users don't even know they are using nostr. But this robs users of the understanding they may need to move clients or use the same account for video and notes, say. Perhaps by making a private messagnger, the panel thinks people are used to using multiple messenger apps. Though I find they hate that, and that's why they refuse to install signal. They feel they don't need it since they already have WhatsApp with a bigger network. In the end it's education. We have to teach literacy so people can read and write, we have to teach public keys encryption so people can do so securely. #bitfest #nostr

Geyser is a crowdfunding system. Lots of history of patrons raising funds from the public for art works or public infrastructure. Kickstarter and the like on the internet made this much easier. But it's all bank money which is conservative and restrictive. Not global. High fees and middle men. So doing it freely with bitcoin makes some sense. Censorship resistance and global scope. Geyser has been running and funding projects for a while. Non custodial and money goes to creators only if target reached in time, otherwise returned. All open source in smart contracts on chain. #bitfest #bitcoin #crowdfunding

Daniel prince from Once Bitten podcast on usury and banking. Usury is lending money, charging interest. Aristotle thought money was for use not for interest. He thought usury unnatural. Many religious quotes saying not to extract interest. "Money is power" but this is not gold or paper money. It's credit. Infinite money with interest. Which breaks everything. Imagine a mortgage. Prices of homes inflated by available interest. You have to give a deposit but the bank creates ten times that in new money! Who gets rich here? Banks are printing money. That inflates prices and dilutes money purchase power. Not just mortgages. Business loans, repair loans, global scale of all of this. Not only did they create that money, the charge interest on the money they created! And if you don't pay, they take the house. One judge found this all illegal, but was soon overruled and found mysteriously dead. What can you do eh? Only opt out. Don't take loans. Use a money that stores value instead of losing it. #bitfest #bitcoin #banking

Kitchen Mishap takes us through some bitcoin visualisations. Max keiser promoted KM to buy, and he learned from antonopolis book. So he started trying to graph it since software for money is scary if there's bugs you can lose lots of other people's money. He spirals blocks around the years, rendering views of the whole chain. #bitfest #bitcoin #dataVis

Day two introduced again by Mad bitcoins . Then the history of art on bitcoin includes satoshi and his original logo, ASCII art in the Blockchain, Cassius coins with scratch off keys, these pictured images of fake satoshi and 200 logos. Exploded from there, trading cards, the rare Pepe's. What makes it bitcoin art? Symbology. The logo. Religious symbology. Is it a cult? Memes. Memes catch and go in a fashion which is unpredictable and fits the whole history to a timeline. Art builds culture and heros proliferate bitcoin culture for all. Art traditionally goes up in value but none of it seems to outpace bitcoin itself. Some is for sale in the gallery but it'll unlikely be a better but then 30 percent discount bitcoin today 😆 #bitfest #art #bitcoin

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin. Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors. She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works. The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined. But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist. When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero. #bitfest #bitcoin

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin. Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors. She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works. The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined. But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist. When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero. #bitfest #bitcoin

Short panel on merchant adoption. Hipster burgers here in Manchester takes bitcoin. The owner says people are generally more curious than dismissive. Gresham's law implies that people spend their worst money first. They want rid of it. When you give merchants your bank money you give them the worst money. Be kinder to merchants! Ben from lnbits, the first merchant point of sales lightning devices, says merchants are interested because they want to have a broad portfolio. Accepting bitcoin is the easiest way to get it, without "know your customers" banking rules. #bitfest #bitcoin

Prem ghinde thinks that Alan is killing bitcoin. Alan is paid in government money, and saves in bitcoin. He's an imaginary straw man. Alan doesn't plan to spend his bitcoin though. Just stack it until he sells it. And this doesn't build the bitcoin network. Without transitions, when the block rewards run out, there will be no money for miners. Miners will need fees, which means transactions. Since he's paying in bank money, he's funding bankers instead of miners. He's encouraging retail to accept bank money instead of miners and lightning liquidity providers. Unlike Alan, Prem lives on the bitcoin standard. All in. Spending sats because he has no bank money to spend. It can be done, he insists. Today. Mostly by using gift vouchers bought with bitcoin. He's sad that people here are buying drinks from the hotel with bank cards instead of lightning. Stop watching the price, he says, it's only a measure of government money's collapse. Change your yardstick. Account in bitcoin. Dollars aren't even money, they are currency. If you must measure, do it against gold. Since moving to el Salvador he had learned Spanish, until he even dreams in Spanish. Try to dream in bitcoin. Every transaction is a vote, so stop voting for bank money. I think the main trouble with this is that tax event in every purchase, and the fact my employer won't set a wage in bitcoin even if they would convert to bitcoin to pay me. #bitcoin #bitfest