The Semantic Self — Upcycled-Phone Life Tracker
Personal project — full stack + postmarketOS port
An old Samsung Galaxy S5 — Android wiped, postmarketOS (mainline Linux 6.15) installed — turned into an always-on, headless ARM server that runs a personal life tracker. You write a free-form diary line in plain language; a local LLM extracts structured health and habit data. Everything stays on hardware I own — no cloud, by design.
- Store-and-forward, two nodes: the S5 is the always-on collector (FastAPI + SQLite, exposed over HTTPS via a Cloudflare Tunnel); a desktop worker pulls pending entries, runs inference on Ollama (Llama3, custom Modelfile) and writes back structured JSON. The phone keeps queuing even when the PC is off.
- Privacy as a constraint: local-only pipeline, Basic Auth with constant-time comparison,
and a Modelfile that returns
nullrather than hallucinating missing fields. - Real hardware bring-up: flashed via TWRP + Odin (documented through nine real-world errors), SSH + sysfs access to a phone running pure Linux — not Termux on Android.
- E-waste reframed as homelab infrastructure; the removable battery even enables clean DC power injection for 24/7 operation. Status: foundation live and running; the automated worker loop is the next step (inference is currently triggered from the web UI).