And we are live. Hello again, everyone. It's been a while. I've been on break for the last
one hour. It feels like I've been really far. I'm with David. Hi, David. How are you doing?
Hi, Leo. I'm good. Thank you for having me on.
So David, you do have the pad open in front of you.
That's right.
Yes. I think Sasha is putting up the pad for us so that they don't have to look at my very
tiny face on BBB. I'm very small. I'm trying to push the boundaries. David, if you want
to take some questions, I'm sorry, I've got hells whispering in my ears at the same time.
Give me just a second. David, can you maybe read the first question and try to answer
them?
Sure. Question one. Excuse me. Do you use this just for yourself or do you use this
to discuss or show with doctors or health professionals? The answer is it is useful
for me and it's useful for health care providers. So it's not I'm not just able to see connections
myself, even if we're not seeing a connection. If I'm talking to someone, if I'm talking
to a clinician, I have brought this in on a tablet. If it's an in-person thing or on
the phone, if it's a video appointment with someone, just send it in an email. It's very
convenient to just send the graph around as a screenshot. So it's definitely been really
useful to because one thing that I touch on in the talk is that let's say that we're talking
about depression, for example. Let's say, oh, well, how have you been sleeping this
week? Well, if you had objective information, that's perfect. Go ahead.
Oh, sorry. I was mispressing my button for production. You're good.
Oh, it just caught a little clip of sound. I see. Okay. Sorry. Yes. So where was I? I
would say, okay, so on the one hand, having objective information is good not only for
you, but when it's time to speak to someone and give them a picture of what's going on,
you don't have to generalize. Even if you're having a good day, generalizing can be really
like, oh, well, how are you sleeping? Oh, well, this day I woke up that, but which way
was that Wednesday or Thursday? And then I remember this friend came over, so it must
have been Friday. That's not I've discovered that actually just first thing in the morning
waking up recording. How many pieces of gum did I have yesterday? How much did I sleep?
Okay. So someone else, this segues right into the next question. How do you input the health
data? Semi-automated with Org Mode capture templates, copy paste, automated with a smart
watch, and if this, then that. Tasker, Org Mode document to automatically add stuff like
sleeping data. Which parts are and are not automated? Okay. So it turns out I'm using
an Org Mode capture template to automate the insertion of all the little category tags
in the property drawer, but not the values. I'm not using a smart watch or anything whatsoever.
I am just, I look at the clock when I go to bed and I look at the bed when I wake, look
at the clock when I wake up. The very first thing I do is turn on my computer and turn
on Emacs and enter that data. So, you know, it would be really cool if we could get some
kind of data, you know, because if it's all, you know, if it's be able to be massaged into
Org Mode format, it can then go into Org GNU plot. Or maybe you could cut Org Mode out
of the equation if you find a way to go directly from that data to either CSV, which Org Mode,
I'm sorry, which GNU plot can read, or, you know, whether you have to wear a little script
in between. And the next question, how do you track the various health statistics that
you're gathering? The ones, you know, for example, nicotine is an estimate. I'm pretty
sure it was six. It was pretty sure it was seven. You know what I mean? It's pretty close
because I do count and I think I could at most be off by one or two. So it's not fatal
to the enterprise of collecting data. The same thing with sleep. I look at the clock,
but I only count half hours. I say, oh, I slept seven hours, you know, seven and a half.
It's very much a back of the napkin thing, but it's precise enough overall that as you
can see from the data in the talk, you can see that my sleep declined pretty steadily
over the course of that. So even if some of the values are off a little bit, you're still
seeing trends and you can still see connections. So it's not perfect. I would love to have
some type of more automated data, but all right. So I'm going to move on to the next
question. It's possible to download data from Apple Watch's health app. Is it easy enough
to incorporate those.csv files into your implementation of gnuplot? Okay. So I think
what it would involve if you wanted to use my template generator, it would involve making
your template, but then modifying the gnuplot script to read from that file instead of from
an org mode table. So I think that what you would want to do is select the, yeah, I mean,
and if you want, you know, I'll be around in the IRC after and I might even be able
to look at their documentation or something, just even just give a peek at it to give a
better answer to this question.
Cool. And just to remind everyone, so, sorry, let me try to put up, okay. I did crush Dev
earlier when trying to switch window. Oh, okay. I managed to do it. Yes, I still have
it in me. So let me, slightly later, we will also be opening the discussion. So this BBB
instance in which we are currently, we will be opening it so that people can come in with
questions and maybe you're considering the personal nature of this talk, you know, maybe
try to be a little wary of sharing personal information, especially if the stream is live,
but otherwise you can have a chat with David, provide to David you're still available in,
you know, 10, 20 minutes and feel free to come in and ask questions because really that's
what Emacs Conf is about. It's about getting in touch with the speakers and this is the
opportunity that you have to have a one-on-one with them rather than an asynchronous one
with a pad. Sorry for the interruption. I just felt I remember. We're probably going
to open the chat in about five to 10 minutes. We still have a lot of questions and I know
I'd prefer if David focused on those questions. So please go ahead, David.
Thank you so much, Leo. And yes, I am available for after, so I'll stick around. Okay. So
regarding the medication tracking, you only have the option to record missed or not. If
one needs to take multiple medications throughout the day, how would you propose to track that
within GNU plot or separate? Okay. Yeah, as it is, I don't record which medication because
it's the one I miss is typically just the same one. So the deal is, is that you would
probably want to, you could count it as either doses or milligrams. The problem with tracking
as milligrams, and yes, you would want to use separate variables for those. And probably
what would make sense is either to record some lines as doses, meaning that one, whatever
that ends up being, if it's a tablet or if it's the proper dose. And then that way, if
one medication is late and another is not, or whatever you need to record, they're on
separate lines, separate columns of the CSV file or I'm sorry, not CSV file of your org
mode, separate property drawer entries in your capture template. I'm trying to think.
It would be a little bit more work, but you could track that. The problem with tracking
milligrams is that some medications, you would have a large range on the chart because some
medications are a few milligrams and some medications are lots and lots for a dose.
So tracking it as single doses might make sense. All right. So how's the workflow? This
is the next question here. How's the workflow when working on the canoe plot code? Can you
control C, control C and the SVG output on the right is updated automatically? The answer
is yes. You can use something called auto revert tail mode. So you hit meta X to get
the command and then auto revert tail mode. And that will cause the SVG file to automatically
update every time you hit control C, control C on the canoe plot file, provided that you're
viewing the same file that the canoe plot is going to overwrite. Let's see. Question.
How much time does it take to process the amount of data that you add inside canoe Emacs?
So at this point I have three or four months of data and it takes to update the whole thing,
like, you know, get capture all the entries. It takes like a second or two. And this is
a pretty decent PC. So we're not talking about something that takes a long time each day
I updated. It's just, it's done pretty quick. All right. Next question. Will indent guide
behave well with YAML files for Helm? I don't know the answer to that. Indent guide is really
nice and it seems to behave pretty reasonably, but I wouldn't be able to speak to that.
Okay. Just a quick interruption. So we have opened the chats now for people to join us
on BBB. So you can go to the talk page on Emacs. You go to David's talk, which is called
health and you should be able to join the BBB. So if you have questions that you'd like
to ask with your voice to David, feel free to join us. And David, in the meantime, you
can reply to the last question you have.
Okay. Thank you. Great. The last question is, have you noticed your behavior changing
as a result of tracking your data? And the answer is yes. The accountability has given,
it draws habits, good or bad habits. It illustrates them in sharp relief. All of a sudden it's
very clear what's going on, what's not going on. And it illuminates a sense of fog because
it's hard to generalize when your awareness is changing over time. It's hard to generalize
about what's going on each day and having the objective information. Yes, I'd say it
has changed my behavior in a good way.
I mean, that's a very good thing, I suppose. The whole point of tracking so much stuff,
tracking people, it's an interesting angle that you have because you're creating data
on a lot of health aspects. And people usually when they talk about using Emacs to better
their life, they talk about all, they talk about getting things done. They talk about
all the usual suspects when it comes to task organization. But plotting over time is something
that is technically possible and that people talk about, but I feel like you've gone way
far into this particular topic. So well done you. And you feel as a result you have a particular
insight into seeing the curves evolve basically over time. And I think it provides very interesting
data, something that is more easily understandable than just a list of to-dos in an agenda over
time.
Yeah. And what's nice is that I still can have to-dos and notes in that same file that
produces my chart and that has all the data in it. And I keep that in version control,
which stays in a private repo. And what's nice about that is everything's backed up.
You know what I mean? Pardon me. I'm going to have a sip of water here.
Please do. I mean, I'm actually down to termite. It's the good floral for thermos. And I've
down two since we started EmacsCon today.
Oh, wow. Yeah. And so I lost my train of thought.
Take your time to find it. We still have about eight minutes of Q&A. By the way, I'll remind
people we have opened the BBB room. So if you want to join us and ask live questions
to David, feel free to do so. I'm sorry. Could you repeat that? I was asking you if you found
the train of thought again.
Hold on. Hold on. The last question, have I noticed behavior changing? Yeah. Then we
talked about, oh, I talked about the fact that you can have to do the notes and appointments
and all that kind of stuff. Like, for example, one of my next. Well, oh, now I remember the
point that I was going to get into. The point is that once I have this routine of getting
up every single morning and first thing, putting in my information. That habit, I feel like
build on. For example, I added a new variable the other day. You know, I can add I thought
of something. I'm like, hey, I should track that in my data. It reminds me I say, hey,
there's not enough green triangles. I need to get some exercise this week. You know,
the weather, I haven't wanted to get outside because the weather's been so dismal. So it's
absolutely been a game changer. It really has been. And it doesn't have to be. Oh, go
ahead. Go ahead. No, no, no. I was going to say that it's really good to hear that software
can have such a potent impact, just the ability to track your data over time. Because the
thing is, I think whatever you're feeling, you know, whenever you have mental ailments
or whatnot, it's really hard to to have a healthy relationship to the chronology of
feeling better. And it's easy to get lost into the immediate sensation. But I feel like
being able to track over time that, you know, this daily checking in that you do in the
morning of keeping track of your health data. I think it's the first step that shows you
over time that, oh, yes, I am actually feeling better. And so as a result, being able to
visually see, oh, yes, I am actually doing better. It must be reassuring, I assume.
It is. I think that's a really interesting turn of phrase you had there earlier when
you said it's harder to have a healthy relationship to the chronology of getting better. I think
those were your exact words there. You know, the idea that, you know, if you've got to
manage something, if you've got to roll with the punches, then seeing what you've accomplished,
seeing yourself bounce back, you know, and then being able to see a trend, you might
not notice unless you're tracking per the clock that sleep has started to decline and
that it's time to start keeping your eye out. And it is reassuring, and you're right about
that, you know. It's not always easy to be in the mindset of saying, hey, these lines
move and they'll move again.
Yeah, and I feel also it's kind of like having a scientific take on your well-being because
you are parameter, okay, really tough word to say for the Frenchman that I am, but parameterizing
the elements of your life, such as sleep, and we already have sleep is already more
or less of a parameter in our lives. You know, we know, oh, you should sleep at least eight
hours. You should have one hour, 30 blocks of sleep all the time. So this is a well parameterized
element of our lives. But other elements that you're doing or the conflation of different
curves feels like it's pointing out, it's providing more data and being able to see
the trend, which is a key word in your presentation in what you do. I think that's really good.
Chronology and trends and being able to see what works. I just have this example crossing
my mind. Some people are plagued with canker sores, which are really nasty stuff that you
get in mouth. But more often than not, it's really hard to track why you're getting them.
A lot of people say it's due to stress or to poor sleep or to deficiency in iron or
whatnot, or you're toothpaste. You might have understood that I actually suffer from them.
So I actually know a lot of the reasons. But being able to track health data like this
feels like it would be able to correlate the appearance of canker sores with maybe poor
sleep or maybe changing medication or maybe stress at work or stuff like this. I really
like this stance and I think you're really onto something here.
Yeah. And if people wanted to chat about that more in terms of putting people's heads together,
because let's say someone who has a more sophisticated medication tracking need, maybe they come
up with a solution and they share their config. There's one thing I didn't talk about in the
talk, which is I had one line where I have a formula instead, because Canoe can plot
all kinds of formulas. So I have it plot an overall trouble score, which I did not show
in the video, but I had it assigned three points for every hour above or below the goal
of eight hours. So too much would give me lots of points on the trouble and too little
will give me lots of points. So the relation to the goal or whatever, if stress is high,
then the overall, if the anxiety line is high, then the overall trouble line should get high.
And what I found is that that trouble line really did track with my recollection of
how the last few weeks had gone. And so that trouble line is, you can see when it's trending
even if it's not super obvious from the other lines. And maybe I'll share that too.
All right, David, we are about at the end of time for the Q&A. Thank you so much for
answering all the questions. I think it was very valuable to not only have your long presentation,
which was very detailed, but also have this Q&A where you got the chance to answer one,
two, three, four, five, more than seven questions, which is great.
That's fantastic. And thank you so much for joining in and for being here. And thank you
for having me at the conference. It's really amazing to be part of the community. And I'm
happy to stick around. Do you want me to drop to IRC or just keep answering questions in
voice? I don't think they're going to go on the pad, are they?
So actually what we can do, we can leave the BBB room standing for now. If people want
to join, they can do so. Maybe Corwin will come back to close the room afterwards. But
for now, you can stay in the room. And if people want to unmute themselves after we
go off stream, that would be good.
So we are about to go into the next talk in about 30 seconds. Let me just talk to production
real quick. So, yes, we are going to go into the next talk pretty soon. You should still
be able to hear me, I think. Nope, they cannot. Okay. Well, David, I leave you in the room.
I'll be in touch within five minutes to see if people are not showing up.
Thank you, Leo.
Yes, sorry. I'm dealing with many things at the same time. So I'm going to stop the recording.
No, I'm going to leave the recording on. Is there anyone in the room that want to unmute?
We are not on the stream anymore now. Does anyone want to say something or talk with
David? Or do we want to close the room?
Even if it's just by line. Okay, cool. So what are we going to do then? David, thank
you so much for your time. We're actually going to close the room right now. I'm going
to stop the recording.