#brainiac #emacs #productivity #system

Dear All,

It's time to release a new version of Brainiac.

These are the highlights of the release:

• ollama-pal, which is based on the mini version of ollama-buddy, implements everything I deem necessary for “chatting with your documents”. You can find detaills on the implementation here, but the major additions are:

  • Multilingual RAG pipeline (including OCR garbage detection) backed by a reasoning model of your choice. This performs very well even with small reasoning models that can run on CPU only.
  • Deep Research Mode that expands queries and context before reasoning, increasing the relevant context that the model gets. But this takes longer time to process, although I still find it acceptable with the default qwen models.
  • Deep Search through all your notes, documents, and images. This works wonders, when you have a lot of screenshots and other types of documents, that are not pure text. As the information is extracted and then stored as chunks in the chromadb, we can do a sort of semantic search, when the classical keyword search produces no results.
  • Other additions are multi-session support, switch system prompts etc.

• I also added br-abbrev-picker for AI prompts, templates, etc., integrated with abbrev-mode. This makes it very easy to pick reusable prompts you defined by yourself.

Most of the improvements have been implemented using AI coding agents. It was fun playing with them, experimenting with this new way of working and basically implementing things, which I would never do due to my low-level coding skills.

Get the release here.

Keep on hacking!

#brainiac #emacs #productivity #system

Every knowledge worker, and especially every leader, needs some sort of a productivity system. This system can be digital, analog, commercial, self-built, text based, image driven etc. What you choose depends on what works best for you and what your mind finds amusing 🙂. Whatever you choose, it is crucial that you are able to offload your tasks, obligations, notes, etc., very fast into this system and not be worried that the information will be lost. Also this system has to be able to give you an overview of your most important tasks at a glance and surface information when you need it, fast and reliable.

Brainiac started as a way for me to organize my own work: meeting notes with my team, technical reflections, tasks, and the many small but important thoughts that accumulate over the course of real engineering work. Over time, it became a stable personal system that supports both focused technical work and leadership responsibilities, without getting in the way.

In it's core this is a minimal Emacs configuration, built around the great Org-mode, with additional external tools mixed in to build a complete, sustainable, flexible productivity system. As it's built around text files, it can be synced across multiple devices with ease using e.g. Syncthing, Nextcloud, git, etc. It is complimented nicely with mobile apps like Beorg, Orgzly, etc. The system works reliably with bigger collections of tasks and notes. Currently I have around 100 000 lines of text in it, and searching thru it is a breeze.

Brainiac is not meant to be a polished product. It’s a living system, shaped by everyday use — the kind of system you build when you care about clarity, continuity, and reducing friction in knowledge work. If you use it, feel free to reach out with feedback, ideas, or improvements. Shared practice tends to evolve better than isolated solutions.

I host stable versions of Brainiac on Codeberg.

You can find all Brainiac related blog posts here. Below are some screenshots and videos of Brainiac in action.

Process of the Weekly Review.

Capturing information for a new project.

#emacs #brainiac #productivity #systems

Hello everyone!

I have been using the Brainiac intensively over the last months and made some changes to the configuration along the way. Get your update here or from Codeberg.

Improvements:

• Added journal.org to the list of refile targets.
• Reduced the width of comment, source, etc. boxes in brainiac.css.
• The attached items are now visibly listed in the drawer of the headline.
• Minor changes in the configuration, e.g. increase of idle time etc.

New things:

• Added org-crypt to the config, so that sensitive information can be encrypted if storing files on public servers.
• To integrate Brainiac into your system menu, I propose the following: copy brainiac.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications and brainiac.svg to ~/.local/share/icons.
• I added basic AI support by using a customized ollama-buddy-mini and running models locally with ollama. Although I previously stated that Brainiac would not have AI, the chosen combination presents a nice compromise between functionality and privacy.
• I also introduced the abbrev-mode as a template storage for some useful org templates and as a mechanism for storing AI prompts for future usage.
• In order to consolidate important functions and keystrokes, I configured a menu which can be reached by pressing C-c b using transient.

#productivity #reflection

I often read about people „living“ in their TODO list, meaning everything that comes to mind, is seen on the net, needs to be done someday (maybe), … gets jotted down and processed thru their productivity system. The purpose of this is to not forget anything and to live a quantified, but relaxed life, as everything is recorded and nothing is forgotten.

Although I can relate to the „nothing gets forgotten“ part, because I need this to ease my mind, having everything I need to do in a day, week, … added to my TODO list, makes me feel like a machine and I actually feel psychological pressure to „get those tasks done“. I do not like it.

Every once in a while I fall down that rabbit hole and start filling my main.org with everything possible. But then at some point the list gets too long and I start feeling that pressure of still having „so many open tasks“ when the day is done. The only thing that helps then is to radically go thru the list and delete all the junk that is not 100% a real task, that has to get done, or a note which has value and shall be kept.

#book #productivity

I read the nice book from Tiago Forte “Building a Second Brain” and in order to understand the concepts better, I created this small Mindmap as a summary.

As I like to play around Emacs, I used PlantUML and generated the Mindmap using Org-mode.