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What Two Weeks Built

ยท 3 min read
Andy Reid
Andy Reid
Andy the Muppit

I wanted a journaling system but ended up with a personal data hub.

Two weeks ago I was staring at a blank screen, unable to create my year-in-review. Now I have years of scattered data in a single, queryable knowledge base that loads fast on both desktop and mobile.

Movie view showing 299 movies with covers and metadata

Book view showing 185 books with covers, authors, and genres

Series view showing 159 TV series with status and watch dates

Battlestar Galactica episode list with watch counts and dates

Calendar week view showing shows, workouts, books, and health colour coded

Every book is tracked with Google Books or Apple Books search via a visual picker with author and genre notes auto-created and linked. AI summaries are generated via local Ollama running on my Mac, and batch import from Amazon and Apple CSVs handles duplicate detection.

Every movie and episode is logged with TMDB metadata and artwork. Watch counts track rewatches, and Chrome extensions for Prime and Netflix import directly to the vault.

Daily health metrics import automatically including steps, HRV, sleep, and weight. The pipeline runs every morning with three years of historical data imported in one batch. Seeing that data visualised for the first time was satisfying.

Every workout is tracked with duration, calories, and distance. Workout type notes link everything together.

I built a custom calendar plugin showing everything with month, week, and list views, multiple sources with colour coding. Click any day to open the notes.

The numbers: 4 domains (Books, Shows, Health, Fitness), 2 Chrome extensions (Prime, Netflix), 1 custom plugin (Calendar View), 3 community plugins (Git, QuickAdd, Local REST API), and 100% iOS compatible. What surprised me was how little I needed. Three community plugins and one I built myself. The rest is JavaScript running inside Obsidian.

I am not finished gathering my 2025 data yet and I still have to decide how to visualise it. This year, my 2026 year-in-review will be done by end of December. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly views will show trends as they happen. If something is going in the wrong direction, I will see it before it becomes a problem.

I started this because I am rubbish at journaling and I am still rubbish at journaling. The system captures data automatically where it can, makes manual capture fast where it cannot, and links everything so I can explore my history like a knowledge graph. All in plain text files I own forever.

I keep finding gaps. LinkedIn posts are not in there. My electric bike rides are missing because Bosch does not connect to Garmin, so I bought a hardware module called Bulcan, built in Spain, to extract that data and it's on its way (then I will figure out how to get it into my vault). The system is never done.

I'm Andy, I may suck at many things but that doesn't stop me from trying.

Read more: Personal Data Hub