When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning.

When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything.

The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing.

My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre).

Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.

I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.

Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.

Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.

I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.

I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.

Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spend decades creating.

I might put a SD card taped in the front of each one with a video too, so someone can watch it in the future.

As a separate aside, I also found old Canon photo printers (Selphy models) on ebay for about £5! Some need the little white gear inside glueing back on (there's a video on YouTube about it), and they DO NOT work with Windows anymore, but gutenprint supports them fine on Linux, so I have been printing photos (postcard size) at home. The colour isn't going to win awards and the saturation needs boosting slightly in the printer options compared to default, but it's a wonderful way to finally get some photos from trips on the walls.

We have started asking old family members to send us whatsapp audios with tales and things they remember from long-passed away family members; and what was life like in the 1930-40-50s. I want to start organizing all the info and data we have, my father has built a couple family trees, but this wiki format is indeed very promising. I'll keep an eye on this and see if we can use it.

I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.

The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it.

They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it.

I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.

Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but sharing all my financial and location details with any service seems like opening the floodgates to my house.

My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing all my most private data with any service. There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.

Obviously not everyone has same needs or wants to retain stories and memories but lack of social structures and solutions seems like weird mishap.

Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen.

In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi.

I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that.

(no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!)

That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me.

Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories.

Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

Though from the title I didn't expect family history, I thought it was going to be more of a project like this: https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Know...

I had started something similar with my mom over Christmas in '24. About half way through the collection she asked to stop. We would do the rest on her next visit.

Well. It never came to that as she passed away completely unexpected in March last year.

I’ll never get the chance to record the other stories. The stories from the second half of the photo collection.

I cheer for projects like this.

Secondly, the home page seems like I am reading a family history page more than talking about the software. It is confusing to me.

Thanks for sharing.

I would probably have ended well before "I exported my Google Maps location history, Uber trips, bank transactions, and Shazam history."

Aside: I've started seeing lot of AI projects in this category say some variation of:

> it runs on your machine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it

I don’t think people fully appreciate the tension in those claims, especially when the model most area reaching for is Claude or GPT or Gemini. I think these things need more precise language about where data actually goes and what tradeoffs users are implicitly accepting.

I do like the idea of building up this history of people, and maybe when my parents pass I'll make theirs public and so on. Great work, dude! I love it.

Sure, the wiki is private. However, in the process your data is being uploaded straight to an AI company. Of course local LLMs exist but that’s seemingly not supported here and I think the statement on privacy could be clearer.

The family has a TON of videos and photos, but no resource to guide us through what is what.

The bank transaction + location cross referencing to figure out which restaurants you went to is pretty cool. Would be great if this could pull in social media exports too. Point it at your X, IG, FB archives, let it draft pages/content from that.

Any plan for a timeline view? Wiki format works well for depth but sometimes you just want to scroll through a year.

Right now, my wife and I are sticking to annual photo albums. They're already fun to flip through and we're not even that old yet.

Nice work!

I'll look into this more: Most appreciated, thank you.

Each year I have the wife take curated photos from our shared accounts with an overview of the event photographed.

This is then bound into a 1/2 inch book with 50 pages. We now have a dozen years of annualized memories that we can pass around with physical access.

She has done this for others with great success. The personal touches make it well worth what she charges.

I started running an private MediaWiki instance during the pandemic as I wanted something with a nice editing experience rather than editing markdown documents. I almost went with a self-hosted Confluence instance :P

Mediawiki is very very nice and it has a lot of cool features i've been loving over the years.

One of the things i like the most is the ability to embed a PDF document so that it's both downloadable and browsable from the wiki page itself (it embeds the browser pdf engine).

This means that i can, say, have a page for my microwave oven and have its user manual easily available.

Lately I've been thinking how to connect that with some LLM, most likely there's a chance to do some interesting things :)

The product naming is becoming harassment. When it's in the title, at least we know. When it's in the intro, we know what we are getting into.

What really pinch is that this project could have easily been done with some scripting, open sourced, and anyone could do it at zero cost, with total privacy.

> The model traced the arc of our friendships through the messages, pulled out the life episodes we had talked each other through, and wove them into multiple pages that read like it was written by someone who knew us both. When I shared the pages with my friends, they wanted to read every single one.

This is a stunning violation of the privacy of your friends.

If someone uploaded every single private conversation I had had with them to Anthropic, they would no longer be my friend.

And that brings me to my point. I've been thinking a lot lately about digital legacy. When I was a kid, it was neat to see photo books that showed my parents as kids, living their lives, having fun. Though those memories stand out to me, it's not something you revisit often. With digital memories, you can share them constantly, in great quantities. But what if you want them to stick around?

First, I think in early 2000s brain, and I think about how I've got domain names and web sites, and some of them include family photos and forums. The only way to keep them around is some kind of durable host, and a way for someone interested to get to that hosted data. Cloud + domain names = unmaintained software but subscription-based expense in perpetuity.

What about a box? A server you could plug in anywhere, uses dynamic DNS to "hook in" to the internet, and you just maintain a domain name. You could update it while you're alive, but eventually it would just be a "photo book" people could choose to pass around and connect if they so wished. And the domain name could be pre-paid for a while, but eventually die, many years after you.

Now whether you need/want a digital legacy is probably more a question of ego, and how much those you leave behind want a way to revisit memories of your life and the lives of those you touched. But if you do want that, it's not as easy as printing out a photo book, or printing photos and sliding them behind those plastic sleeves, and passing that from household to household.

I'm currently in the very early stages of going through several DVDs worth of digital photos my late grandmother took, and thinking of ways to organize them and share them with my family. And I'm wondering if I can make whatever I come up with "reasonably" durable.

This chap made it a labor of love.

This project I thought was a nice creative project. But then, as with all creative projects, I get the nagging question - who is going to use/read/wear the outputs of this work? But that's not really the point for a hobby is it? My conclusion: I should be less negative :D

Then I forgot about it. It’s not like the data is lost, but availability is. Bringing it back up is a pain. I could probably do it in a full day of work.

What I learned: Static HTML export on every change by default is a must. I don’t think HTML will cease to be easily readable in our lifetimes.

It's magical watching people learn about hyperlinks. Even technical people don't always seem to know the power of a string that says, "Go to this server and fetch this document". Love it

Video >photo >audio >text