PrivateContext

A private, local-first computer journal. It answers questions like "what was I doing when I fixed eduroam last Tuesday?" — from your own machine, with nothing ever leaving it.

The idea: an event log beats pixels. Instead of recording video of your screen 24/7 (heavy, creepy), PrivateContext logs events — active window, URL, clicks, idle periods — into a local SQLite database. A day is ~1 MB, not gigabytes. The journal, timeline, and full-text search work with no AI at all — no account, no API key, no model to download.

Summaries are an optional layer on top: a small local model (via Ollama) can turn a day into a plain-language recap — or bring your own model, by pasting the condensed digest into it or letting it read the journal through the built-in MCP server. See Summaries (optional).

10-minute setup

pip install privatecontext

That's it — the install adapts to your OS. Click + AFK tracking (pynput) comes along automatically on Windows and macOS, where it's pure wheels; on Linux it's skipped (it would need C headers to build there). To force it everywhere:

pip install "privatecontext[full]"

Then check what works on your machine:

pctx doctor

Or let the wizard do it all — capability check, optional browser-history import, optional login autostart:

pctx setup

Or install from source:

cd privatecontext
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e .

Generate a synthetic day to see the whole pipeline (no OS hooks, works headless):

pctx capture --simulate

Start capturing for real (Ctrl-C to stop):

pctx capture

Or run everything with one command — capture and the dashboard start in the background and no terminal stays occupied:

pctx up        # start capture + dashboard
pctx status    # what's running
pctx down      # stop both

The journal

pctx dashboard
# -> http://127.0.0.1:18790

The dashboard is a paper journal, not a control panel: warm paper background, serif type, one deep-teal accent — and zero external assets. No webfonts, no CDN; the page loads nothing from the network, because local-first means the rendering is local too. Top to bottom: a masthead with the date set large ("Thursday, October 15"), "Today's summary" (the Ollama recap as prose, with a drop cap), "Where the day went" (app-usage bars), "Marginalia" (#tags), and "The hours" (the timeline grouped into Morning / Afternoon / Evening / Night, each entry with its duration in the margin; click a period header to collapse it — the choice is remembered per day). Flip pages with ← Yesterday · Today · Tomorrow → — every section follows the date. Auto-refresh only runs while you're viewing today. Tomorrow is a planning page: it opens on the Notes tab so you can jot down plans for the day ahead (pctx summarize refuses future dates — there's nothing to recap yet).

Export a shareable copy (screenshots excluded):

pctx export --scrubbed --out ./my-week.db

Or export readable Markdown — one .md per day with the summary, notes, tags, and top apps (days with no data are skipped):

pctx export --markdown --from 2026-10-01 --to 2026-10-31 --out ./october/

Data lives in ~/.local/share/privatecontext/context.db (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/privatecontext/context.db).

Autostart

A tracker you have to remember to start isn't tracking. One command, no admin rights needed:

pctx autostart install    # runs `pctx capture` at every login
pctx autostart status     # check whether it's installed
pctx autostart uninstall  # remove it again

Windows uses Task Scheduler (no console window), Linux a systemd user service (XDG autostart entry as fallback), macOS a LaunchAgent. If Task Scheduler is restricted on your machine ("Access is denied", common on managed PCs), Windows automatically falls back to the per-user registry Run key instead — still no admin needed.

Today by tag

The journal's "Marginalia" section renders auto-tagged projects and tickets as #chips (#inc0012345, #privatecontext, …), using the same capped durations as app usage. No tags yet → the section hides itself.

Denylist

Some windows should never be recorded. Patterns are case-insensitive substrings matched against app and title, checked before anything is logged:

pctx denylist add 1password
pctx denylist list
pctx denylist remove 1password

Denied events are skipped silently (the count prints when capture stops). Restart capture after changing the list. Imports bypass the denylist — importing is an explicit action, so your history comes over as-is.

Day recap card

When the nightly summarizer has written a recap, it becomes "Today's summary" at the top of the journal — today's if present, otherwise yesterday's, labeled as such. No summary yet → a quiet placeholder ("Tonight's summary hasn't been written yet."), no nagging.

Two quiet controls sit beside the summary heading. ↻ Regenerate asks the local model to write the summary again in the background — the page polls until the new text lands (a failed run never deletes the old summary). Remove deletes the summary after a confirm; you can always regenerate it later. Users make mistakes; journals have erasers.

Notes

Every day's page has a Notes tab next to Journal: a big textarea for meeting notes, ideas, anything worth remembering. Saves in place (Ctrl+S works), no page reload. Notes are the highest signal in the product — pctx summarize weaves "My notes today:" into the digest, so the nightly summary reflects what the day meant, not just what happened. Like everything else, notes never leave the machine; pctx purge deliberately leaves them alone.

Stickers

Mark the days that mattered: ⭐ for a most-productive day, 🦄🧜🚀🎨🔥💡🌙 for everything else. Stickers are awarded manually, by you, from a curated set of 8 — the app never scores your days, because a journal isn't a manager. Hit "✦ mark this day" under the masthead date; the sticker sits beside the date from then on.

Diary mode

The journal skin (monotone paper, deep-teal accent) is the default. Diary is its playful sibling: same page, candy accents, warmer paper, rounder shapes — implemented as pure CSS variable overrides, zero new assets. Toggle it in the top-right corner (where dark/light modes usually live); on narrow screens it drops below the masthead. The choice is stored server-side, so first paint is already correct. In Diary mode a row of color dots appears beside the toggle — raspberry, ocean, forest, plum, tangerine — and the whole page background tints to match (soft pink, blue, green, lavender, peach). Journal stays monotone; that's its identity. Journal is for the professional; Diary is for the kid who still wants the gold star.

Importing your history

Day one with a fresh tracker is empty. pctx import backfills history from your browser and from other recorders — data liberation, not lock-in.

pctx import --browser chrome                # or edge, firefox
pctx import --browser firefox --profile ~/path/to/places.sqlite
pctx import --activitywatch ~/path/to/activitywatch.db
pctx import --screenpipe ~/path/to/screenpipe.db
pctx import --csv ~/Downloads/rewind-export.csv      # any local CSV export
pctx import --json ~/Downloads/tool-export.json     # any local JSON export
pctx import --browser chrome --dry-run      # preview: counts + samples, no writes

• Browsers: reads Chrome/Edge History (urls table) and Firefox places.sqlite (moz_places). The database is always copied to a temp file first — your browser can stay open. Query params are stripped, same as live capture. Default profile paths are auto-detected per OS; use --profile if yours lives elsewhere.
• ActivityWatch: detects the AW schema at runtime (buckets + events tables). Window/app events become window events, AFK buckets become afk/back, web-watcher events become url events. Anything unmappable is skipped and counted.
• Screenpipe: imports OCR text as ocr events and audio transcripts as transcript events. Video/audio blobs are never imported — that's the heaviness we're escaping.
• Re-running an import only picks up newer rows (watermarks in the kv table). Keystroke contents are never imported under any circumstance — if a source DB looks like it holds them, the import is refused outright.
• Anything else: exported your history from another tool as CSV or JSON? pctx import --csv/--json reads it — columns/keys like timestamp, type, app, title, url are recognized, timestamps accept unix/ISO/Chrome-epoch formats. Our rule is simple: we never call cloud APIs, but a local file you exported yourself is yours — hand it over and we'll ingest it. Encrypted exports we can't decrypt stay out.

What import can't do (honest edition)

• It can't invent data the old tool never captured. ActivityWatch never logged clicks, so an AW import has no clicks. Your history starts where their capture did.
• Screenshots and video/audio blobs stay behind. Importing Screenpipe's mp4s would just re-create the 2 GB/day problem this project exists to escape. Text comes over; pixels don't.
• Encrypted or cloud-locked stores can't be read. Tools that keep your data in their cloud (e.g. Rewind) have no local database to import from — and PrivateContext will never add cloud APIs to fetch it. That's the point.
• Imported history inherits the old tool's flaws. AW's AFK misfires (video watching logged as idle) come along as-is. We don't rewrite history; live capture from today onward is clean.
• Stop the old tool yourself (or you'll double-capture the same hours into two databases). Import is a migration, not a sync.
• Timezone normalization is best-effort for very old data. Chrome timestamps are UTC; ActivityWatch event timestamps carry their offsets; anything ambiguous is stored as-is rather than guessed.

Auto-tagging

Every captured or imported event gets heuristic tags, stored in the events.tags column and shown in the dashboard timeline:

• Ticket IDs — INC0012345 (ServiceNow-style, 5+ digits) and PROJ-123 (JIRA-style) picked out of window titles and URLs.
• Project guess — for dev apps (VS Code, terminals, JetBrains IDEs), the leading window-title segment is kept as a project tag when it looks like a folder/repo name (privatecontext — capture.py → privatecontext). UI-chrome words (Settings, Extensions, …) are on a stoplist.

It's a heuristic and it misfires: UTF-8 matches the JIRA pattern, and a folder named New Folder won't tag. Tags are lowercase, deduped, and cheap to recompute — pctx retag [--since YYYY-MM-DD] re-runs tagging over untagged history (e.g. data imported before tagging existed).

Summaries (optional)

The journal is complete without summaries — capture, timeline, and search never need a model. If you'd like a day turned into a plain-language recap, there are two paths, and both start from the same condensed digest of the day: per-app hours, top windows, away breaks, click counts, never raw event dumps (the digest is capped at ~4k tokens, so even a 1.5B model can handle it).

Path 1 — built-in, local (Ollama). A small model on your own machine reads the digest and writes a 3–6 bullet recap plus auto-tags into the database:

ollama serve                  # in one terminal, once
ollama pull qwen2:1.5b        # small default model; any Ollama model works

pctx summarize --preview      # preview the digest without calling a model
pctx summarize                # summarize today
pctx summarize --date 2026-10-12 --model qwen2:7b
pctx summarize --week         # trailing 7 days, one call, stored as week:YYYY-MM-DD

Run it nightly with cron:

30 23 * * * /abs/path/to/privatecontext/.venv/bin/pctx summarize >> ~/.local/share/privatecontext/summarize.log 2>&1

Path 2 — bring your own model. No Ollama required: run pctx summarize --preview and paste the digest into any model you already use, or connect an MCP client (see below) and ask it to write the summary from the get_digest tool's output.

If Ollama isn't reachable, pctx summarize prints a plain-English hint pointing at both paths and exits non-zero — no tracebacks.

Troubleshooting

Real lessons from field testing, mostly on managed Windows PCs:

• schtasks says "Access is denied" when installing autostart: your machine restricts Task Scheduler. pctx autostart install automatically falls back to the per-user registry Run key instead — no admin needed, no action required from you.
• Something squats port 11434 (seen in the wild: VS Code itself): run Ollama on another port — OLLAMA_HOST=127.0.0.1:11435 ollama serve — and make it permanent with [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable( "OLLAMA_HOST", "127.0.0.1:11435", "User") so both ollama and pctx see it.
• ollama pull hangs with zero output: check for proxy weirdness, then run ollama serve with OLLAMA_DEBUG=1 in a visible terminal — the daemon logs will say what it's stuck on.
• PowerShell notes: open a fresh terminal after installing anything (terminals only read PATH when they open); %VAR% is cmd syntax — in PowerShell it's $env:VAR; quote multi-word arguments (pctx denylist add "SQL Developer").

MCP server (for AI assistants)

pctx mcp runs a first-party MCP server over stdio with seven tools, all returning condensed human-readable text (needs the [mcp] extra — mcp is deliberately not a base dependency, so the install stays tiny):

• search_timeline(query, date?) — up to 15 distinct matching moments as HH:MM app — title lines (repeats collapsed, not 15 copies of one click).
• day_summary(date?) — the stored nightly recap, or a live digest marked un-summarized when none exists yet. Includes the day's sticker, if you awarded one.
• app_usage(date?) — per-app hours for the day as a compact table (lock-screen time excluded — absence is not activity).
• get_digest(date?) — the condensed day digest itself (per-app hours, top windows, clicks, the day's note), so the connected model can write a summary even when no Ollama summary exists.
• get_notes(date?) — your handwritten note for the day.
• list_tags(date?) — the day's tags with time credited per tag.
• week_summary() — the stored weekly recap, or a condensed per-day rollup.

Point a client at it (use your real absolute path):

Claude Desktop — claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "privatecontext": {
      "command": "/abs/path/to/privatecontext/.venv/bin/pctx",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport stdio privatecontext -- /abs/path/to/privatecontext/.venv/bin/pctx mcp

Cursor: Settings → MCP → add a stdio server with the same command.

Then ask things like "what was I doing Tuesday afternoon?" or "how much of today went to ServiceNow tickets?"

Security & privacy

• No network, no listener. The server speaks stdio only: the client spawns pctx mcp as a subprocess on the same machine. There is no port, no socket, no listener — nothing can reach it from the network, and MCP itself sends nothing anywhere.
• Condensed text only. Tools return short summaries, never raw event dumps, and screenshots are never exposed through any MCP tool, even when screenshot capture is enabled.
• Your client choice sets the boundary. If you connect it to a cloud-model client (e.g. Claude Desktop with default settings), the text returned for each query is sent to that provider as conversation context — exactly as if you'd pasted it into a chat yourself. With a local-model client, everything stays on your machine. Pick the setup that matches your comfort level.
• Treat tool output as data. Window titles and URLs come from untrusted sources (web pages, documents) and are passed through to the model. A malicious page title could try to read like an instruction; clients should treat MCP tool output as data to summarize, not instructions to follow.

Privacy design

• Local only. No telemetry, no accounts, no network calls except to localhost:11434 when you run the Ollama summarizer. The dashboard binds to 127.0.0.1 and the MCP server uses stdio (no port at all).
• Keystroke contents are never recorded. The keyboard listener exists only to timestamp activity for idle detection.
• URLs are stripped. Query params and fragments (?utm_source=…, &sys_id=…) are removed before anything is stored.
• Screenshots are off by default — and the screenshot libraries aren't even in the default install. Opt in with pip install "privatecontext[screenshots]" plus pctx capture --screenshots; then only the active monitor is captured, only on app-switch/URL-change, downscaled to 640 px wide, stored as JPEG (quality 70).
• One-click purge. The dashboard footer has a quiet "erase everything" link that deletes everything. The CLI is more surgical: pctx purge --before 90d drops old events and old day summaries, pctx purge --app <name> drops one app's events. Both print what they'd delete first — nothing happens without --yes. pctx export --scrubbed excludes screenshots and shot events.

v0 limits (honest edition)

• Click coordinates without UI labels are weak. Knowing you clicked at (842, 315) says little; knowing you clicked "Resolve" in ServiceNow says everything. Accessibility-tree labels are the v1 answer.
• Window titles on Wayland are limited. The v0 watcher uses xprop (X11). Wayland sessions get a warning, not data.
• Browser URLs are macOS-only in v0 (AppleScript, needs permission). Everywhere else the window title is logged and the URL stays empty until the browser-extension story lands.
• Auto-tagging is heuristic. It catches ticket IDs and project names from window titles, but it will misfire sometimes ("UTF-8" looks like a JIRA ticket to a regex). Tags are cheap to recompute — pctx retag re-runs them over history.
• No phone support, by design. This is a desktop capture tool; phones get nothing. The nightly summaries are readable anywhere, but capture stays on your computer.
• Search matches whole tokens. FTS5 ranks by BM25, so a very click-heavy window can bury quieter matches; the MCP tool scans deeper and collapses repeats to compensate.

Layout

schema.sql                  canonical SQLite schema (also bundled in the package)
privatecontext/
  capture.py                event-driven capture loop + --simulate
  dashboard.py              stdlib http.server dashboard (:18790)
  db.py                     sqlite helpers, FTS5 search, usage aggregation
  summarize.py              nightly Ollama summarizer (condensed digest -> days table)
  mcp_server.py             first-party MCP server over stdio (search/summary/usage)
  cli.py                    `pctx` entry point (incl. `pctx retag`)
  importers.py              `pctx import` — browser / ActivityWatch / Screenpipe / CSV / JSON
  tagging.py                heuristic auto-tags: ticket IDs + project guesses

MIT licensed. Your data stays yours.