Drop #579 (2024-12-19): Favicons wRapped
Image-ening Your Year Of Browsing With RStats
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.comI’ve noticed a few “Wrapped” browser extensions popping up that purport to be super-safe and let you see your year of browsing statistics. I didn’t really feel like downloading each of them, popping them open, and poking at the sources of each to see if their safety assertions were true. So, I cannot safely recommend you use any of them.
Truth be told, you don’t need to use them if you can muster up some SQL, RStats or some lesser language.
I worked in Perplexity to make a page that shows where you can find the “history” SQLite database on each platform. The schema is pretty straightforward, and I’m confident virtually every reader can do the equivalent of “COUNT” and “ORDER BY” without my aid. One note is necessary because the Chromium team is daft and the visit_time value (y’know, the one you’d need to narrow down entries to this year) need to be divided by 1,000,000 and then have 11,644,473,600 subtracted from that resultant value in order to get something you can convert into a proper timestamp.
But, who wants to know that they visited Kagi 3 billion times, followed by Google Drive/Apps (or Microsoft’s equally horrible equivalent) 1 billion times, etc. Do you really want to know how many sad hours a day you spent clicking in your browser on some glowing rectangle?
Let’s do something a bit more visually fun with some artifacts of our browsing adventures: favicons.
wRapping Favicons For Fun And No Profit
Favicons are also usually stored in a SQLite database (it’s the single most popular database in the world!, as John Cleese might say if there had been a SQL Shop Sketch on Monty Python’s Flying Circus). Given that every daft browser on every daft operating system does things just a bit (daft) differently, I also worked in Perplexity to make a page that explains the locations of all of them. I’ll be using one from my most used browser of the year, Arc.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to shunt you to the Drops’ companion site to read the code/rest of the post , since the newsletter layout will make the R code we’re about to play with nigh unreadable.
FIN
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