I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. At one point, we found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: I couldn’t place exactly why I’d been there before. Geocaching, possibly: I couldn’t see any on the map but perhaps they’d been since archived?
Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I’ve been in the last decade or two, so I was able to run a quick query and discover that I’d walked out here on a geohashing expedition in 2024.
Personal location tracking continues to be awesome. Being able to both forwards-search (“where was I on this date?”) and reverse-search (“when was I last within this area?”) unlocks a wealth of aides mémoire that are otherwise hard to come by.
It’s hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it’s a slow-burner – you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! – but I still recommend it.
This is why I’m one of the few remaining regular daily users of Swarm (formerly Foursquare). The social features aren’t useful anymore, but I can see everywhere of note that I’ve been since 2011.
When they finally sunset, I’ll have to figure out something else.