Second Brain

When your mind is bruised, momentum dies. Actually making progress meant excavating the foundation all over again, just to remember where the beams were placed the last time I sat down. That repetition is a unique kind of fatigue. To survive it, you need a tether; a reliable system that remembers the shape of your work when you cannot. I built a quiet room for my thoughts using Obsidian, away from the noise. The system is simple, but it requires you to show up. Let it hold th

I’ve migrated to Obsidian for true data sovereignty. Unlike platforms that hold notes hostage in proprietary formats, Obsidian uses local Markdown files—future-proof and private. I’m now using a local LLM to chat with my data without exposing it to external training. My "vault" currently links 21 years of salvaged Typepad posts, a year of curated AI insights, and 23 years of work history. It’s an evolving map of my life’s work, built on a foundation of total ownership.

They say the "Second Brain" was coined by Tiago Forte in 2017, but my quest to externalise my thoughts started 21 years ago. If I could summarise two decades of trial, error, and hardware graveyards in 21 seconds, it’s a frantic evolution from plastic styluses to local AI.