v0.13.1: Nightly Sessions and Place Names

The nightly session runs again

Every night at eleven, Remember This is supposed to go over what's new in your library and write things up. Since v0.10.0 it hasn't, and the reason is duller than you'd hope: the part of the app that starts background workers was asking for one by a name that nothing answered to, and when a name doesn't match, it prints a line saying that worker isn't available on this platform. On a Mac that reads like a decision somebody made on purpose, so for about a year nobody looked at it twice. Anything you started yourself went down a different path and worked fine, so the only thing that was actually dead was the schedule, which is the hardest kind of thing to notice.

It runs again now, at eleven at night, and it's on. Worth knowing before it happens rather than after: these sessions run Claude, so they spend whatever Claude quota you're on, and a night of work is not nothing. You can move the hour in Settings under Dreamer. There's no switch there for turning the schedule off entirely yet, and that's the obvious next thing to add.

Photos get their place names

A photo taken on a phone carries the coordinates it was taken at, and Remember This has always read those, but turning a pair of coordinates into a name like Bromma or Värmdö had never once worked. The call it makes to macOS for that answer hands the reply back on the app's main thread, and the background helper's main thread is permanently busy doing something else, so every one of those calls sat there until it timed out. That had been happening for as long as the feature existed. Nothing was counting successes, only attempts, so a library with nothing left to look up and a library where nothing worked at all produced exactly the same line in the log.

On the Mac this gets built on, 129,533 photos had coordinates and 289 of them had a place name. That work happens in its own short-lived process now, a few hundred photos at a time in the background, and the answers are kept so the same street doesn't get looked up twice. Expect names to fill in over a few days rather than all at once, because Apple rate-limits the lookups and there's no point being rude about it.

The voice memos Apple filed differently

Apple Voice Memos writes most recordings as .m4a files and some of them as .qta, and every part of this app that goes looking for recordings asked for .m4a by name. So the .qta ones were skipped, and skipped quietly, because a list of allowed file extensions turns a file away by simply not mentioning it. On the development Mac that was fourteen recordings going back to March, one of them an hour and a half long. They get picked up now, and what decides is the first few bytes of the file rather than what it's called, so the next time Apple files one differently it won't matter.

Your folder keeps a history of itself

This one is new and it's on, so it's better said here than found later. Remember This now keeps a local history of your folder: when notes and registry files change it waits for things to settle and writes a commit, the way you would if you kept the folder in git yourself. If it isn't a git repository already it becomes one, with a .gitignore that keeps your photos and recordings out of the history, since those are large and the originals are already on the Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere — there's no remote, and pushing stays off until you turn it on for a particular folder. The commit messages are counts of files, never anything you wrote.

What it's for is two Macs holding the same folder without either of them losing an edit, and on its own it's also an undo that goes back further than you'd otherwise have. If you'd rather not have it, it's vault_sync_commit in config.json, and there's no switch for it in Settings yet, which there should be.

Underneath

Most of the rest is the background helper doing less work. It was compiling a fresh search pattern for every single file it looked at, which turned out to be the largest thing it spent processor time on at all, and two of its queues could never finish, so they kept asking the same questions. The time-tracking rollups were regenerating all ten and a half thousand of their files every thirty seconds whether or not a single time log had changed, and they only run when something has actually moved now. Photos you copy into the Media folder yourself are dated by when the photo was taken rather than by when you copied it. None of this is visible as a feature, and all of it shows up as a Mac that's quieter.