I’ve never been good at remembering things. I can’t really pinpoint when it started but I’ve mostly moved through life with a fuzzy memory on good days and told by those who are close to me that I’m forgetful. This has caused problems for me, some problems. Some say it’s trauma, I say we are not molded from the same clay.
I haven’t been medically diagnosed with a memory issue, mostly because I haven’t gotten tested. maybe I should.
A large majority of my recollectable childhood memories are rooted in pain; arguing and fighting with my siblings to the point of almost poking one of eye ball out during the fight. I might have been a troublesome kid at some point. Things like this, I would gladly pay good money to forget in exchange for remembering the faces and voice of past family members.
A couple of months ago, I lost 2 older family members relatively close to me. The first few days after finding out was coupled with shock and general sadness of not being around them during their final times. My last phyiscal interaction with either of them was in 2024.
Slowly, I became to try and recollect their faces, voice and the memories we shared together. I didn’t care whether they were pleasant or not, I just wanted to remember them.
I hit a hall. I really couldn’t remember much. I remembered their faces sure, but I could barely remember anything with them. My first course of action was to find something to trigger my memory. Going through 5 years old photos and scrolling through the family group chat to find a voice or video recording of them. This was a futile attempt. I couldn’t find anything substantial. Either a lack of me taking photos and videos with them or just general neglence on my part.
Either ways, I decided I should take steps to make this less likely to happen. Hence tackling the grander problem at hand. Not remembering things. The goal is simple, take a more intentional approach to remembering everyday life, one form of media at a time.
This documents how I plan to make and store such media.
Thoughts, emotions and general day to day events are collected & stored journal entries. I write at least twice a day; when I sit behind my workstation to start work & usually around 18:00 before I get up to go make dinner. I also have sparodic mini-sessions during work whenever anything of importance comes up.
I started off with pen and paper. The tried and tested method. I loved it for the most parts. But I can’t search it, I can’t post it into Claude to give me a summary of the week & I have to actually store the notebooks. This is a hassle.
The first alternative was to move to something akin to digital. Write on paper, take a photo and use the OCR on the iPhone photos app to select the text and paste into notes. Unfornately, I have to manually correct some of the text. Too much work, I’m too lazy.
I’ve tried alot note-taking apps. Notion was the first, started off very well, very fast and easy to use and worked on even the shitties of connections. Then it got too bloated for me. I just want to write, that’s all, none of plenty features. Then I became data & privacy nut all thanks to David & Notion doesn’t have good offline first support, at least not when I was actively using it.
Moved to Supernotes, Obsidian, Apple Notes & a few other apps. Obsidian in my opinion the best one out there. But it still didn’t solve all my problems. I want local first but I also want to sync & easy AI features. I am hard to please.
So like every engineer before me, I decided make my own. Just mine, how I like it, want it to work, look and what AI features I want and all the while keeping my data on my homelab & accessing it the server via tailscale when I’m not home.
I started working on Aether last year & it’s been good to me. Still no AI features yet but satisfies all needs. Discovered WhisprFlow which makes it signaficantly easier to document daily changes and events.
My memories have generally been stored across multiple mediums and platforms from iCloud to ssd drives lying around in the house. iCloud usually hold the most intimate ones, typically from my phone & I kept my travel/camera photos on ssd drives.
For a while, I played around with idea of a custom platform with David to store, manage and manipulate this media with Orbit. A dropbox like alternative built to be hosted locally with backup solutions to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup rule. Unfornately because of time, work and the complex of this, the project has currently on pause. Maybe with AI agents getting soo good, I might actually build it to a point that’s usable.
The solution I settled on is a combination of as NAS (Network Attached Storage) and Immich as the software of choice for managing and previewing my media. The NAS is a supermicro server, (insert specs here) running TrueNAS. This server stores all every digital file I own. Yes, I also scan my phyiscal documents for processing. TrueNAS provides an easy to use interface & NFS to move files across the network. 1Gbs up/down stream is plenty enough for my needs atm.
Immich is like Google Photos, only better in the sense that it runs purely on own hardware & you own your data. Geotagging, people & all the nice features that Google Photos is known for are also available.
I’m still yet to figure out a simpler solution for backups. I’m currently looking into Blaze & S3 as the cloud service of choice for my backups. I would have preferred to move have it on iCloud storage but I haven’t found a way to get it working yet. If you have, please reach out.
I spend most of day on a computer, what I see, what I read, links I find. There’s alot of context here that’s lost by end of day and in my case, forgotten. I was over the moon when I first read the release announcement of Rewind.
Advertisered as the all seeing, all hearing personal companion that has all the context needed to help you remember. That’s a general gist of what it does, and prior to the AI burst, they didn’t even call themselves an AI company. The Rewind app records your screen and audio whilst you use your mac, store the data locally and allow you to go back in time with their timeline system. They also allow you to search for any word seen or heard and also summarizes your meetings for you among other things. They deliver on their promise really well and the UI is quite delightful to use.
My only issue I had was the size it builds up after a while, I have roughly 100gb of my ssd filled up with their data after using it for a couple of months. It’s understanble considering the quality of the screen recording. The size is also based on how frequently you use it. This has started causing my workstations starting to slow down.
The solution for that was to offload the excess recorded data to NAS and build a renderer on top of it to view the content. Ideally this would be automatic and upload the data on schedule, twice a month. The hard part would be the renderer to be able to perform the search and summarization but one thing at a time since the locally saved data is encrypted.
Unfornately, Rewind’s parent company was acquired by Meta & whilst they said they are not going to train their AIs on user data, no one trusts Meta with anything. They also announced that they will be sunsetting the service. This is a hard one for me because I really found the app very useful. I’ve seen a few alternatives but not up to the quality of Rewind.
I’m contemplating throwing the problem at Claude and Codex to solve it. At least a rudimentary version of it that allows me to always record my screen, do OCR on the content, store it locally and allow me to go back in time and see what I was doing at a particular time & try and also solve the storage size issue. I’ve already made a plan with Claude and will probably let the agents build it for better or worse. I need this back in my life.
This isn’t the definitive fix to me forgetting stuff but they would definitely make it easier to recollect whilst I’m trying to actually fix the issue with my memory, if it can be fixed at all.