⭐ Memex

Memex is a system that keeps all your data and acts as an ultimate interface to it. It gives you fast (ideally instant access), convenient interfaces and ultimately makes you better at thinking and analysing, acting as an auxiliary brain. Arguably so far none have been built :)

I write more on why would you want it in The sad state of personal data and infrastructure.

[#A] * my current progress

My Memex so far isn’t a single unified system, but has multiple facets and interfaces.

Human Programming Interface

The backbone of my memex, providing data for other components.

promnesia

Promnesia connects the web browser to the rest of your personal data.

dashboard

My quantified self component to Memex.

orger

Reflects my data for easier search, providing a plaintext interface.

timeline

[#A] * prior art & inspiration

[#A] [2020-03-07] Memex by Andrew Louis + RubyConf 2018 talk

whoa, this is awesome he mentions the same problems I struggled with literally in the same words!

STRT [#B] [2021-07-09] @thesephist: “personal search engine” https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1413395289638150150

@thesephist: NEW PROJECT — I made a "personal search engine" that lets me search all my blogs, tweets, journals, notes, contacts, & more at once
It's called Monocle, and features a full text search system written in Ink

github https://github.com/thesephist/monocle demo https://monocle.surge.sh/

[2024-01-10] looks very nice – working demo, simple (in a good way) and instant search

[#C] [2020-05-25] Memri: a promising project with the focus on user data ownership and privacy

[2024-01-10] not sure, the gitlab seems down, they kinda pivoted into AI, and demo doesn’t seem usable? (very slow)

[#D] [2021-01-31] NickSto/life-browser: View a timeline of your own history through your personal data.

This is a project I began to try to collate all the digital breadcrumbs of my life and show them in an easily viewable timeline.

[2021-04-27] ok, interesting, but looks fairly basic, no UI yet and only contacts/location/hangouts/voice
[2024-01-10] no updates for 3 years

[#D] [2021-03-15] Heapy/Komodo-CRM: Life and collaboration assistant.

ran into it from Heapy/komok#72 some interesting notes on unified timeline-like view as well

[2024-01-10] doesn’t look like there is any actual code there?

[#E] [2021-01-21] steve-1820/memex: A brief POC of what a Memex could potentially be.

ok, so it’s more of a prototype at this point? and they are reinventing editor/annotation… not sure

[2024-01-10] no updates for 3 years

[#B] * remembrance agents

Remembrance Agents are a set of applications that watch over a user’s shoulder and suggest information relevant to the current situation

STRT [#C] [2020-01-06] Remembrance Agent: A continuously running automated information retrieval system (1997)

This looks cool, but doesn’t seem to work anymore?

[2019-12-28] The Remembrance Agent | Hacker News

[#C] [2020-04-28] A Desktop Remembrance Agent

As you type, every five seconds the prior 60 characters of your keyboard buffer are sent to the RA. Suggestions are presented as clickable buttons

Ok, this looks pretty cool.. maybe need to contact them and discuss

[#B] * ideas & concepts

[#B] [2020-06-06] hyfen.net/memex/updates/bad-remembrance-machines triplestore

This maps pretty well to the triplestore architecture that stores triples of subject-predicate-object

[#B] [2019-12-03] Digital Tools I Wish Existed: A centralized search interface for my digital brain

This tool should: accept and parse the following queries:
 spacex announcement type:video 2016
 links from:jon@test.org topic:python
 paper on temperature, productivity referenced in book:Uninhabitable Earth
 type:pdf habits digital interfaces
 reading comprehension type:blog post
 printer ink receipt
 type:book read:2017 finance
 file:py datetime parse

[#C] [2020-05-10] lehrjulian/status/1259526773236215814

I like the idea of converting a calendar into a diary / life log by integrating different data layers.
Other layers I'd like to add:
• Locations (Google Maps, Swarm)
• Media consumption (books, Netflix)
• Browser history / Screentime
• Stress levels (Oura, Apple Watch)

@aaronzlewis : concept: a Spotify calendar integration that lets you see what you were listening to alongside your old meetings and events. revisit the vibe of any moment with the Musical Time Machine

[#C] maybe prolog for queries?

[#B] [2020-01-08] samsquire/ideas: life engine

Life engine is a dashboard that attempts to collect information about your life and display relevant data on a single screen.

STRT [#C] [2021-03-22] What have you failed to build? | Lobsters

I’ve been dreaming of making a “semantic history” browser add-on for ages, but never started.
(As in something that would collect all the RDFa/microdata/microformats/JSON-LD/… objects on web pages you’ve seen, and give you an interface to browse not just pages, but these various objects like Organization, Person, Article, etc.    )

[#C] * features & usecases

[#C] show random photos

[#B] [2021-03-26] Nextcloud - Wikipedia

Viewer for Maps

hmm, wonder if it could replace gmaps?

[#C] * communities

This is something we can’t build alone. Let’s find each other and cooperate.

[#B] [2020-05-28] karlicoss/status/1266090022123470851

I think I want to create some sort of community chat on the topic of knowledge management and tools around it, with the emphasis on interoperability, malleability, owning your data, local-first, org-mode etc.

[2020-06-18] I think I want the focus on existing tools and setup rather than discussing mockups and vague concepts. both are important, but I want to build something now
[2020-06-18] I want it to be a space to discuss configuration, and get detailed technical help etc. So needs to be more like an IM chat, with fine grained topics (so you can steer off a discussion without spamming everyone)

[2021-01-04] sadly haven’t had time to set up something so far, also wouldn’t want to overlap with existing ones

Some existing communities:

Malleable Systems Collective + Matrix chat
https://thinkingtools.space
The Productivitst Discord
dendron Discord
logseq Discord

[#C] * building blocks and infrastructure

[#B] exobrain page on maps software

STRT [#B] for IM interface, could use some open source messaging infra capable of fully offline sync?

[2024-01-10] started using Zulip for it

[2022-08-22] Cache all messages · Issue #2150 · vector-im/element-android

shit.. seems that Element isn’t really able to cache all messages offline sigh.. tbh something with Telegram UI would be perfect

[#B] [2021-04-16] SQLite the only database you will ever need in most cases | Lobsters

I used to use SQLite all the time for geospatial data using the SpatiaLite extensions, it made dealing with data in many different formats much easier (and scriptable) and just simplified a lot of the work we had to do to manage weird datasets on nationalmap.gov.au(/renewables - sadly recently made defunct due to lack of government funding).
We’d pretty regularly get CSVs with columns for LAT and LON, and need to do some actual work with the data, or turn it into another format like GeoJSON. Or we’d get a bunch of GeoJSON data that we wanted to manipulate.

[#C] [2018-09-04] for OCR tesseract is best apparently? but it couldn’t handle photos of elliptical machine

[#D] * random thoughts

[#B] [2020-10-07] eh, would be really nice to have some sort of memex at this point

maybe it could have some basic core (e.g. with couchdb), and then used in different apps? e.g. promnesia uses it to jump and browse the history dashboard uses to display all events timeline – similarly for all life events

[#B] ugh. it’s still more convenient to use google location than any of my tools..

[2021-02-22] to be fair I didn’t really do much on it yet

[#D] [2020-08-28] from email discussion

Having stale data from manual exports is still useful, but adds a lot of mental friction ("is the export up-to-date enough to actually have what I need?").
Very good point! Just thought, perhaps some meta information about the 'recency' of the data could be included in the interface, that might remove some of the friction.

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