Personal Software

My daughter is three. My phone takes about 6,000 photos and videos a year — maybe more. I don’t have 6,000 interesting shots. Most of it is accidental taps, blurry motion, seventeen near-identical photos of the same bread I was about to eat. But somewhere in that pile are the clips I actually care about: her first steps, her laughing at something she found hilarious at the time, moments my wife and I know we’ll want to see again when she’s older. ...

My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...

My three-year-old daughter has a favorite show. Baby Shark. She could watch it every day, and often does. Last week, I showed her something new. Fifteen short videos of herself as a baby — the first year of her life, played one after another. She sat still for one hour. Smiling, then laughing out loud, then quiet and focused. She didn’t ask for Baby Shark once. My wife was watching from across the room. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. ...

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. ...

My wife has a habit I love. Every morning, before the day starts, she listens to a Bible teacher she has followed for years. It’s not the Sunday message from our church. It’s something quieter and more personal — a set of recordings she comes back to again and again. They calm her. There was one problem. To listen, she had to open the file manager on her phone, scroll through a long list of audio files with odd names, and tap the right one from memory. No order. No search. No “play the next one.” If she wanted a certain teaching, she usually couldn’t find it. ...