Spying myself through the lense of Google Maps Timeline data

I took an export of my Google Maps Timeline data and discovered it to be a treasure trove of information. I was initially only interested in seeing how often I visit the local boulder gym, but I found myself soon digging into more such details.

The data consist of activities and place visits. An activity looks like this:

You can peek through the internals in a way since you can see which options for a given activity Google algorithms have considered.

A place visit, on the other hand, is:

As you can see, the data contains not just the place you can see from Maps you have visited but actually the metadata and the confidence scores of where Google thinks you have been.

Using the dataset, it is pretty easy to find out which locations you have visited and how long you have stayed. I co-authored with ChatGPT this simple script that outputs how many hours and times you have visited a given place.

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RocksDB data recovery

I recently needed to do some maintenance on a RocksDB key-value store. The task was simple enough, just delete some keys as the db served as a cache and did not contain any permanent data. I used the RocksDB cli administration tool ldb to erase the keys. After running a key scan with it, I got this error Failed: Corruption: Snappy not supported or corrupted Snappy compressed block contents So a damaged database. Fortunately, there's a tool to fix it, and after running it, I had access to the db via the admin tool. All the data was lost though. Adding and removing keys worked fine but all the old keys were gone. It turned out that the corrupted data was all the data there was. The recovery tool made a backup folder, and I recovered the data by taking the files from the backup folder and manually changing the CURRENT file to point to the old MANIFEST file which is apparently how RocksDB knows which sst (table) files to use. I could not access the data with the admin tool, ...

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PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

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