Journal

Writing about the step everyone skips: getting the words out of a video or a recording, and then doing something with them. No tool roundups, no predictions.

• 2 March 2026 / 5 min read

  From transcript to post: turning what you watched into something publishable

  Summarising a video is the failure mode. Take a position, borrow three things from the source, credit it properly, and cut the opening paragraph.

• 23 February 2026 / 5 min read

  What a public knowledge ledger is and why we built one

  Every public video gets transcribed thousands of times over and every copy is lost in a private folder. A public feed of summaries fixes that, if it has a quality floor.

• 16 February 2026 / 5 min read

  Using your own API keys to cut AI costs, and when not to

  BYOK means the tool does the work and your provider account pays for it. Real savings for heavy users, a bad trade for everybody else. Here's how to tell which one you are.

• 9 February 2026 / 5 min read

  Watch less, keep more: a system for remembering what you watch

  Forgetting what you watched is a system problem, not a memory problem. Four steps, no folders, no tags, and one rule that keeps the whole thing alive.

• 2 February 2026 / 6 min read

  How to summarize a two hour talk without watching it twice

  Two hours of conference talk holds about twenty minutes of content. Convert first, triage in ninety seconds, then search the transcript for the one thing you came for.

• 26 January 2026 / 5 min read

  Getting the text out of TikToks, Reels and Shorts

  Burned in captions are pixels, not text, and often wrong. Pull the audio instead, work in batches, and check anything you plan to quote.

• 19 January 2026 / 5 min read

  Turn a podcast episode into notes you'll actually reread

  Most podcast notes fail at the moment of writing. Discipline is rarely the missing piece. What works is a format built for retrieval instead of one that feels productive.

• 12 January 2026 / 6 min read

  How to get the full transcript of any YouTube video

  Captions, automatic captions and real speech to text are three different things. Which one you get explains most of the frustration, and only one of them works when captions are off.