Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

IMO, Vim + Markdown is one of the best ways to take notes, brainstorm, or just explore ideas. However, I found the questions of "Where should I put the notes in my dir hierarchy?" and "How do I find the notes again?" and "How do I ensure I have my notes across all devices?" to be inhibiting.

I wrote a CLI "journal" tool that says "forget putting them into folders", dumps all the Markdowns into a single Google Drive folder, and instead focuses on providing really good search.

Now, in my day to day, I can do "journal new some-meeting-with-dan.md" and I get a fresh Markdown. I can also do "journal find" to search by name, date of creation, or tag, and then open notes in either Vim or as rendered HTML in Chrome (for copy-pasting). Behind the scenes all the information is just encoded in the filename (so it becomes "some-meeting-eith-dan~2023-04-23T22:10:23~tag1,tag2.md", with no extra DB needed).

I'm also now trying to rewrite the frontend as a Charm TUI, which is another whole fun growth path!

The goal was to have a platform that ingests the commonly enormous video files from old tapes, automatically cuts them, tags them based on content to make them easily searchable. My focus was on discoverability of scenes hidden in those long video files. The search bar would also randomly suggest tags to search for.

At some point I tried to work with a large video digitization provider and the video splitting ended up being too expensive to be viable for the proposed business model. Now it just auto generates thumbnails and lets you tag videos manually.

The project includes a business dahsboard that allows digitization businesses to send videos directly to customer accounts (deliveries need to be accepted).

Currently, I only use it for my own videos as well as for my MIL.

You can do that? Is there an API?