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I had just added six commentary volumes to my Bible search. I asked it a question about the fruit in the garden of Eden. The answer came back with sermons and Bible verses. Not one of the six new books was among the sources. The books were in the database. The search just did not pick them. The Need: A Source You Added Must Be Able to Appear If a new source never shows up, you cannot tell whether it is broken or simply ranked low. You only see the answer, and the answer looks fine. It is easy to think “the system works” and move on. ...

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. ...

The Need: a big pile of old books, as plain text, on your own disk Maybe you want a private source of classic books for your own projects. Maybe you just don’t want your reading to depend on someone else’s website. Either way, the same question comes up: how big is it, and will it fit on my NAS? For one public-domain library, the answer was 28.1 GiB for 78,990 plain-text files. That fits on a home NAS with room to spare. This post shows the numbers, the commands, and the checks I ran afterwards. ...

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”. ...

A transcript without speaker names is hard to use. If an audio file has two people talking, I need to know which words came from which person. My pipeline can label speakers automatically. The question was whether I could trust the labels. I did not want to trust them just because the output looked clean. So I made an answer key by hand, and I let the computer grade itself against it. ...

Two weeks ago I wrote about adding voice commands to my daughter’s media player, so a parent in the car can say “[tab name] [song title]” instead of scrolling a phone screen while driving. In that post I said a few tabs were left out on purpose. One of them was a math picture-book tab: 42 books, each with a story audio track and a song. At the time, the reason sounded sensible. The reason didn’t hold up for long. ...

If you keep an archive long enough, the same thing ends up in it twice. The copies rarely have the same name. They are hard to spot by eye, and even harder once one copy has a transcript and the other doesn’t. The Need: Two Copies That Don’t Look Like Copies I run a small, password-protected site at home for one teacher’s recorded lectures. Each episode has audio, video, and (for most of them) a searchable transcript. It lives on my NAS and is sorted into year tabs. ...

My podcast app has one job: every morning at 6 AM, it pulls the newest talks from one lecturer’s feed — AI and Christian-missions topics, mixed — downloads the audio, and adds it to a list I browse and play from my phone. Six hundred-some episodes now, sorted by category, searchable by title. It does that one job well. Then I found a novel online I wanted narrated into it, and there was no button for that. ...