It's happened to all of us: you remember reading or watching something on your PC, but all attempts to locate the item again prove futile. Repeating past searches does nothing and your browser history is of no use either. You're not sure where you saw the article, and eventually you start to wonder if you just imagined it.
There is an early episode of black mirror called “The Whole Story of You” in which “grain” technology allows people to record and play back their memories on demand. This episode, along with the Rewind app on macOS and FOMO (fear of missing out), led one developer to create a new open source app.
Windrecorder, the “personal memory search engine,” records everything you see and do on your screen and lets you rewind and search.
15 minute blocks
The app uses FFmpeg to record screen activity in 15-minute chunks and then indexes them using a local Windows OCR API and image embedding. It can ignore certain apps or areas of the screen, and only records one screen regardless of its settings, although multi-monitor support is planned.
The app allows you to view daily and periodic screen times and circadian summaries and can generate monthly lightboxes.
There are some disadvantages to be aware of: FFmpeg can occasionally consume a lot of memory and instant rewind is not an option. You must wait for each 15-minute video clip to finish recording before you can rewind it.
The recording is not encrypted, but if you're worried about what you do on your computer being leaked online, the good news is that everything is handled locally and nothing is uploaded to the cloud. There is also no support for AI/LLM, although it is a possibility for the future.
You can download Windrecorder from GitHub here.
