The Need: a book you want to search, but it is only paper I have a 19th-century commentary on the five books of Moses. It has six volumes. I wanted all of it inside my own search tool, so I could ask a question in Korean and get the commentary back as one of the sources. The usual way is to scan the pages and turn them into text. That worked badly for me, and the way it worked badly led to the cheaper answer. ...
I have a lot of Bible material that I cannot search together. Sermon recordings turned into text. A commentary that I scanned page by page. A few Bible translations. Each one has its own search, or no search at all. When I wonder “what did the Bible and the preachers say about this?”, I open four things and read. So I built one box where I type a question, and it answers using all of them, with a number after every claim that points to the exact source. ...
A transcript is a record of what a person said. If an AI “fixes” it into what the person should have said, it is no longer a record. I learned this on my own archive of Korean sermon recordings. The Need: Fix the Mistakes, Keep the Speaker Speech-to-text gets Bible words wrong. It writes a hardship word for a different hardship word, a town name as nonsense, a book of the Bible as another book. For a searchable archive, that matters, because people search for those names. ...
I like the idea of running my own AI. No bill, no data leaving my house. So when I needed to clean up a long transcript, I tried the local way first. The result changed my mind about when “free and local” is worth it. The Need: Speech-to-Text Gets Names Wrong Whisper turns a Korean sermon into text very well, but it makes a certain kind of mistake. It hears Bible words as ordinary words. A town name becomes a nonsense word. A book of the Bible becomes a different book. And one example I like: the Korean word for Psalms, sipyeon (시편), sounds almost like “ten pyeon” (10편). Whisper wrote “10” where the speaker said “Psalms”. ...
I have a custom command called /wrap. When I finish a work session, I type it. It commits the code, writes down what changed, and makes a backup zip on my NAS. I use it many times a day, across a dozen projects. This week I looked at my token usage data. One line stood out: /wrap was 30% of everything I spent. The Need: The Cheap-Looking Thing Was the Expensive Thing If you use Claude Code with a subscription, your allowance runs out before the week does. Mine did. So I stopped asking “what can I build next?” and started asking “where are my tokens going?” ...
There is a 1974 German theology book that exists in almost no library. One copy lives with its owner here in Korea. He wanted it translated into Korean. I offered to help. First step: get it scanned properly. I visited a professional scanning company. They said the book needed to be taken apart — pages separated, binding cut — before they could run it through their equipment. I relayed this to the owner. He said: do not cut this book. The scanning company said: then we cannot help you. ...