Recently I switched to a new calorie counting app, Cronometer. I’m quite happy with it. It’s a huge improvement over MyFitnessPal (MFP) or Lose It and is not exploitative like Noom.

The key improvement with Cronometer is accuracy, particularly good data sources for nutrition information. MFP offered obviously wrong entries from random people, sapping my confidence. Also it’s quicker to log things from a trusted database.

And the app works well. Cronometer’s UI is modern and easy to use. It doesn’t display extra distractions. MFP’s insistence on scolding me about things I don’t care about was a bummer. The data sync is fast. And they have a good data export, something MFP won’t do.

I have some minor complaints. Cronometer is very excited to track macros and every single obscure nutrient (threonine, selenium?!). I really only want to track calories. Fortunately the other things don’t take up too much space. They also display ridiculous calorie precision in the diary. But that feels like a rare UI mistake, not a general design ethos.

The free version is pretty complete. The $55/year paid plan adds a bunch of stuff, the one I care about is dividing your diary up into individual meals.

I have a long history with food diaries, more off than on. Having a good app that I trust and is easy to use is important.

This is gonna sound silly but one of the nicest home improvements we’ve done recently is install a new garage door opener, the Liftmaster 87504-267. It works so much better than my ancient old insecure garage door!

Internet access is the surprise best feature; I use it all the time. Mostly to walk in and out of the garage door without my car. There’s also a keypad remote I can mount outside so someone can punch in a code to open the door. Setting this all up was easy and reliable. There’s even a way to give Amazon access to open your garage for deliveries.

The opener also has a camera. I would have skipped that

• • • if I’d known, saved some money. But it’s actually quite useful! If I get a notification the garage door opens I can easily see on my phone what’s going on. Basic live views seem to be free, there’s a subscription if you want stored video.

Ken’s favorite feature is the motion sensor that turns the light on. The lights on the unit are bright, it’s enough to light the whole garage without having to flip a switch. I also appreciate there’s a battery backup built-in so if the power goes out I can still easily open the door. The drive itself is smooth and quiet too, belt drives are a real improvement.

The #1 upgrade you should do for an older house is a dishwasher; they got a lot better about 15 years ago. But #2 may well be the garage door opener.

After my Goodreads disaster I went and got dumps from every cloud service I care about that I could think to try. 13 in total, Twitter and Facebook and others. I’m impressed with the results.

The best of the data exports comes from Google Takeout. They were a pioneer in making a proper product out of data export and the Google Data Liberation Front did a lot of activism both within Google and externally to sell the idea. It’s not an obvious thing for a company to do; letting customers download all their data opens the door to competitors. But it’s the decent and right thing to do and it allows your power users to do complex things without much support.

Data export is also increasingly the legally required thing to do. The GDPR enshrines a right to data portability in the law governing businesses in the EU. California’s CCPA also has a data access right. It’s a little weaker than GDPR’s but a lot of sites seem to just provide GDPR to everyone, or at least to Californians. These are excellent regulations; they protect consumers and enable competition. They do put a regulatory burden on the companies implementing them but it’s not too huge and the technical infrastructure has other uses too. (Imagine, Goodreads could have backups of user data!)

One thing I hadn’t appreciated is how hard it is to build something to use the data. Recreating a product like Goodreads or Gmail is a lot of work! In practice the exports seem most useful when some other commercial service is designed to import them. There’s not a big ecosystem of open source tools to work with export data. Some of the data exports I got are pretty rough, low level dumps in CSV or JSON format. Then again Twitter has a whole working live webapp, you can browse and search nicely formatted tweets right from the files.

My Google data is the most valuable to me; I wrote up notes on what I found in my 67GB export. It’s impressive; Takeout covers some 50+ Google products, many of which have done a thoughtful job making their exports another designed product feature. Not only did the Data Liberation Front get the company to export the data but they created an infrastructure and culture of supporting and improving those exports. It’s a good thing.