League of Geeks, Episode #24: Track Yourself
Last month I gave my second presentation at the local League of Geeks event series. Here is the abstract:
Don’t let the big players have all the fun – collect data yourself and profit from it! Most of us already collect a lot of data about ourselves by using various devices and services in our daily lives. Whether you decide to go the extra mile and collect as much as possible or not, it’s always worth trying to gain insight from the data you have. After sharing personal examples from his quantified self, Manuel will give a broad overview of current trends in health and fitness tracking, and discusses potentials and risks of it.
As it wasn’t a very technical topic this time I went with my favorite way of presenting and used a metric ton of slides (over 16MB) – but without my speaker notes they won’t be of much use on their own. You can watch the talk on YouTube:
Of course you won’t actually spend 50 minutes on it, so instead you can enjoy some bite-sized highlights:
- Where I show one of the best t-shirts ever because I ❤️ Last.fm.
- Where I profess my undying love for Trakt.tv and their amazing service. 🥰
- Where I talk about the weird shit you have to do to get some good data from gaming consoles. 👪
- Where I tell everyone how insanely great Celeste is. 🎮 (Separate blog post on this in the works already, because oh my god it is SO fucking good.)
- Where I try to be super deep about how your smartphone photos have GPS data. 🤯
- Where I pull a total dad joke on the audience and then talk about how tracking your expenses saves you money. 💰
- Where I shit on Mars bars and then give the audience Mars bars. 🍫
- Where I brag about how long my running headphones have endured, just so they could literally die on me the week after the talk. 😭
- Where I show an anonymized Strava activity from Sebastian only to totally de-anonymize it by tagging him in a tweet now. 😬
- Where I tell the story of how my Watch tried to kill me. 😵
- Where I managed to find very mild words regarding my utter hate and contempt for our current hellscape of surveillance capitalism before going into how I’m a bit of a psychopath when it comes to consistent data. 💩
- Where I try to end on a somewhat positive note, but not without using the opportunity to publicly shit on Philipp’s favorite sport. 🏎