Archiving all my data and learning with AI.
Pt.1 Video
Intro
All my life memories are spread across loose hard drives, SD cards, and pages of journals stuffed in dusty drawers.
So the goal of this project is to unify my life into a central archive.
A Big Place to Store Everything
This started by first converting my old gaming PC into a NAS storage server, facing problems, and then building a whole new PC.
The end result is a PC with these specs. With 24TB of drive space (5x 8TB WD drives in RAID 6). Nothing crazy, but it's more than enough storage space to get started.
Turning Analog to Digital
I have bins full of sketchbooks and journals, so I built a simple app (React Native if you're curious) to digitize them quickly.
This made it much much faster to:
- Capture an image of each page
- Transcribe any writing
- Describe some thoughts / add more context about the page
- Add some basic tags to categorize things
Despite building an app to speed this process up, going through every sketchbook and journal was laborious to say the least. Not sure if this saved me tons of time, but it worked well enough.
As of working on this project (2024) image to text AI (for handwriting as messy as mine) was not quite good enough, would much rather have skipped this step haha!
Visualizing the Data
Explorable Maps of Knowledge (v1 - January 2025)
I'm fascinated by the idea of turning my knowledge into an explorable map or space. Creating a virtual territory where like a video game I can move around, remember things, and discover new things. Below are some of my very initial experiments with this idea.
An embedding space of the raw images of journal/sketchbook pages.
This is a 'mountain range' created from embedding all my notes into a 1000x1000 canvas, setting the y axis to the average word count, and doing some smoothing / texturing.
