PebbleTape A note from the developer
The idea behind PebbleTape
A mirror for your
digital day.
See where your day actually went.
I’m not building PebbleTape to tell you whether you worked hard enough. I’m building it to help you remember your computer day more clearly—and decide for yourself what to do with that knowledge.
“I was busy all morning.” What actually happened?
At the end of a day, it’s easy to remember the intention and lose the interruptions. A morning spent moving between a code editor, a browser, and a conversation can become one neat memory: “I spent the morning developing.”
A timeline offers something less polished, but more useful: a record you can look back at.
| Time | Foreground application |
|---|---|
| 9:00–10:20 AM | Code editor |
| 10:20–10:47 AM | Browser |
| 10:47–11:05 AM | ChatGPT |
| 11:05–11:43 AM | Browser |
| 11:43 AM–12:10 PM | Code editor |
This does not prove how much work got done. The browser might have been research. The conversation might have solved a difficult problem. Application names alone cannot tell that story.
What the record can do is give you a better starting point than memory alone. You can notice the switches, recall what they meant, and make your own assessment.
Record the facts. Leave the judgment to you.
I don’t want a “Productivity Score: 63.” I don’t want a red warning telling you that you wasted two hours, or a message saying you failed your goal.
Those labels turn a personal record into a system that grades you. That isn’t the job of PebbleTape.
A mirror doesn’t tell you who to be. It helps you see what’s there.
You might look at your timeline and think, “I switched to the browser more often than I realized.” You might also think, “That research was exactly what I needed.” Both are yours to decide.
Memory → Awareness → Better choices
First, memory.
“What was I doing yesterday around three?” A personal timeline can be an external memory for the part of life that happens on a computer.
Then, awareness.
Over time, patterns become easier to notice: long stretches in one application, frequent switches, or a day that felt very different from the record.
Then, your choices.
You can adjust a habit, make room for focused work, or change nothing at all. Any self-discipline should come from understanding your own day—not from software scolding you.
The point is not to squeeze every minute into a metric. It’s to reduce the gap between the day you remember and the day you can actually review.
A private record of my own time.
This is for you to look at, not for a company to monitor. That’s why local storage, encryption, and password-protected viewing belong to the product’s design—not to a paid upgrade or an optional privacy pitch.
Everything stays on your PC.
No account. No cloud. No tracking server.
The direction is simple: recording runs quietly, while opening the timeline requires your password. In the automatic-start mode, Windows protects a local recording key for your Windows account. A stricter setting can require a password before recording starts after a full exit or restart.
Privacy also needs honest limits. Password-protected viewing is not a defense against malware, an administrator, or someone who controls your unlocked Windows account. If you share a computer, separate Windows accounts matter.
PebbleTape is not an employee-monitoring tool. It is not a screenshot recorder, a focus timer, or a coach that tells you how to spend your life. It’s a record you own, for a day only you can interpret.
Useful, quiet, and yours.
That’s the product I want to build: something you don’t have to think about while using your computer, and something worth opening when you want to remember.
There will be a link to HandyPebble for people who want to visit. Clicking it is your choice. Your activity record isn’t attached to it, and the desktop app doesn’t need my server to do its job.