If you're on mac I would strongly recommend Notational Velocity (or the Alt version), if they still run (I know Apple likes to break compatibility).
I've tried dozens of notetaking apps and that's the only one that truly felt like a second brain.
It's because of the speed. Infuriatingly, Obsidian for example can search just as fast, but they intentionally programmed in a lag after each keystroke... (I know because I removed it.)
Dear Lord, why would they do such a thing. I think I've experienced this, and decided I hated Obsidian because it made my computer feel slow (it's not).
I don't know about Obsidian, but delay before search prevents a bunch of useless queries to the prefixes of your search terms. If search is slow, adding a delay to prevent extra searches might make searching feel faster.
Alternatively, you could get near-zero delay and no spurious queries by requiring the user type Enter or click a button... but that design is much less common these days.
Re: "useless searches": my point in the comment above was that this is what Notational Velocity does--instantly updates search list on every keystroke--and it's the reason I like it significantly more than anything else I've tried.
Obsidian is not open source so it's minified and hard to read. But I was able to find the relevant code and just set the delay to 0.
(I'm away from computer now, I'll see if I can find the code later.)
What also helped is that all Electron apps are just Chromium so you can run the dev tools and the debugger! I think the hotkey is F12, and/or Ctrl+Shift+J.
Would some summary of previous day would be helpful to you? Is your memory problem only episodic, or does it extend to factual and kinesthetic as well?
I want a body cam that I wear and it transcribes into something searchable from things I did...
Basically like a gopro on steroids with searchable context - or even the ability for me to say outloud "KEEP A NOTE OF THIS" and it will keep a segment tagged and can give me summaries of moments I wanted particularly logged...
I applied to YC with an idea 'sorta' like this almost a decade ago.
The idea was to have a timeline of communications between all my contacts such that I could side-scroll a timeline with dots of actions such a "sent email" "made call" "sent text" received txt" and I could see all these in filters by contacts/day whatever...
This was pre-snowden, so I didnt have confirmation that there were already people doing this for me, just not letting me browse my own data ;-)
> Basically like a gopro on steroids with searchable context - or even the ability for me to say outloud "KEEP A NOTE OF THIS" and it will keep a segment tagged and can give me summaries of moments I wanted particularly logged...
This is generally called Lifelogging. https://roberdam.com/en/wisper.html - roberdam@ created basically what you just said, but focused on Audio, not Video.
Likewise! That was one of the impulses behind working on Khoj -- we have all this data about places we go to, things we do, websites we traffic, but such poor tooling into how to actually retrieve that information right now.
For example, if I stayed at an Airbnb last year in Houston and needed to lookup the address for some reason, I'd be going either to gmail and running some keywords searches ("Houston", "Airbnb"), or going to my Airbnb app.
Really, I want a single endpoint where all my personal data can be made available to me, ideally without sacrificing my privacy. Location's a cool use case.
Might look into some of the tools like novoids Memacs. Notion here is to build tools that push feeds, history data, into Emacs. Using org in your use case with the Khoj tool, could be the "glue" you need to tie it all together. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs#readme.
Why should you turn that off? If you're afraid of being tracked, it's too late, you're already being tracked by your carrier via the IMEI of your phone, without your consent. Location history is there for your convenience so you can relive where you were a year ago.
I quite like this concept. It would be neat if you could relay the data to a personal server for processing and insight extraction. Seems feasible with phone camera. I think gopros would be limited based on battery life (in my experience).
I wonder if this is a better use case for “smart” eyeglasses? Audio as the input at first, have the audio files sync wirelessly to your phone, and apply the ML transcription and prompt keys locally.
