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Timothy W Macinta - Contract Software Development
About Tim Macinta Labs R&D

Over time I have written a lot of software for my personal use and for projects that I have worked on where I have retained the copyright on and rights to the software. The software is typically fully functional and in some cases already in constant use, although it has not been packaged for public consumption or distributed to the public. I would like to publicly release all of this software in one form or another, but as this process takes time I have created the "Tim Macinta Labs Research and Development" set of web pages to solicit feedback on what projects people would find most useful so that they can be released first.

You are currently viewing the web page describing the Personal Electronic Feedback Loop project. This is one of many projects that I would like to publicly release and your feedback will help me to decide what to release first. Please take a look at my complete list of unreleased projects and contact me with feedback on what you would personally like to see released and why.

Tim Macinta Labs Research and Development: Personal Electronic Feedback Loop

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The ultimate goal of this project is to monitor and record everything I do every moment of the day primarily so that I can analyze the logs later to determine what I spend my time on, what I should be spending more time on, what I should be spending less time on, and what I should make more efficient use of my time on. I eventually want to have this monitor everything I do - it will know when I'm sleeping, when I'm eating, when I watch TV (and what I watch), when I take a walk (and where I go), when I'm working on my taxes, and when I help my landlady take out the trash. That level of pervasive knowledge will require a great deal of work, and in the meantime I have begun work on a version of the system that will track everything I do on my computer. I spend most of my time on my computer anyway, so this is actually quite a comprehensive first step for my own use, though it would obviously not be as applicable to the general public who don't spend all day on a computer.

A major question that remains to be answered before I will consider releasing this in any capacity is how to safeguard privacy. I intend to use this system solely to monitor my own actions in order to give myself feedback and I would be glad to see others use it to monitor their own actions as well. However, I feel that it could be far too easy to point the recorder at somebody else either without their knowledge or under duress. I don't want software that I have written with good intentions to be used to violate human rights and I will not release it until this possibility can be minimized. I would, perhaps, agree to jointly developing the system with other developers who agree to a restrictive covenant that keeps the system confidential and agrees to only use it to monitor their own activities.

Currently, the portion of the system that I have implemented monitors a good portion of what I do on my desktop. If you are interested in using such a system and collaborating on its development, please contact me. I run RedHat Linux on my desktop and the software I have written for this project thus far is Linux specific. While it will probably work on most other Unix variants as well, it will not work on Windows. However, some pieces which I intend to implement in the next phase will likely work on Windows as well.


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