Memos is a privacy-focused passive recording project. It can automatically record screen content, build intelligent indices, and provide a convenient web interface to retrieve historical records.

This project draws heavily from two other projects: one called Rewind and another called Windows Recall. However, unlike both of them, Memos allows you to have complete control over your data, avoiding the transfer of data to untrusted data centers.

Everything you ever do with your computer while using this is subpoenable. To quote Dick Jones: "He's a cyborg, you idiot! He recorded every word you said. His memory's admissible as evidence!"

I gave a bad name "memos" for the project. But there is a great open source project named "memos" over there. So I quickly changed the name to "Pensieve". Sorry for giving such confusing...

I deleted Rewinds over the weekend, after I noticed it had eaten 20gb of storage.

I hadn’t used it since installing it. So that came as a surprise.

I then tried using it, and couldn’t get it to find things I knew were in my history. (Basic keywords match)

So I deleted it.

I like the idea of this app. It ticks all the boxes. But I haven’t found any value on this category of app yet.

Ah, I see the commit that renamed the repo[1] because the title says "Memos" and the URL says "/memos" but the repo was different. I similarly got confused while reading the readme thinking Pensieve was a dependency or something

1: https://github.com/arkohut/pensieve/commit/e81057d5bebcf9cab...

Great work, op. As others have said, encryption is vital to such a project. In fact if your ethos is privacy, it would be great marketing material to assure users that this is in fact resistant to basic infiltration. I think recall is a fantastic idea, even for professionals and corporate env. But the kind of sensitive information that is handled by employees cannot risk being leaked from such a tool.

I once saw a news segment about people with photographic memories. They were miserable, they wanted to forget, but the worst days of their lives, as well as the best, were as through they had just happened.

I came away quite glad I don’t suffer from a photographic memory, and while I applaud the project, I prefer to forget things.

strongly recommend you check out the built in Swift APIs for screen capture and OCR. They’re heavily optimized for energy usage, and allow much finer grained controls on what apps are white/blacklisted for privacy

Another similar project: https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall

Are there any similar options that work on Linux?

How’s the performance with Python? What’s the overhead?