I think I was one of the only people who saw Microsoft's announced Recall feature and thought it was a good idea. So good of an idea in fact that I had already built something similar, stealing the idea from rewind.ai, which was no doubt the inspiration for Microsoft's product.
The version I created was ScreenDiary. It fulfilled the basic idea but I found it was too resource intensive to regularly have an instance of tesseract doing OCR on everything on screen. The implementation was also overly complex as I was building it specifically for my KDE layout on Wayland, which has now completley changed in appearance and functionality. I am now using Karousel, a scrolling WM implemented as a KWin Script.
Some number of months later I decided to revisit the idea. I had again found myself in a situation where I had a vague memory of a thing I had read that I wanted to find, and the keywords I was able to remember were not in the title or URL, so history search was useless.
Redux
I realized at the core of it what I really want is to be able to have full recall on my browser history, as that's where I consume 99% of the content I interact with daily. This lead me to create Browser Recall.
The idea is pretty simple, a browser extension sends the URL of the page you're looking at to a backend server which scrapes the page into markdown and stores it all in a SQLite database. Additionally it imports your browser history and backfills those items into the database with a crawler on a scheduled task.
Re-Redux
The original implementation was a vibe coded hot mess that included a semi-functional UI and a poorly implemented full-text search.
I've since blown up the entire project and significantly simplified the implementation. The UI is gone for now but I'll probably revisit it soon.
Next Steps
I'll eventually get a UI around this and a better implementation of FTS that actually works properly, but for now I'm actually focused on a completely different use case for this data.
I am kicking around thoughts on how to implement something like a Spotify Wrapped, but for the content I view in a browser. So at the end of each week I'll get a nice summary of everything I've consumed that week in the browser.
Security?
I'm sure someone is going to comment something about how this is a security risk. If you're at a level of access where you can read an arbirtrary file (the sqlite database) from my disk, I'm already cooked. At that point you could have just as easily run a tool that does the same exfiltration of my browser history, and so much more...
