I’ve always found that thinking out loud helps me better understand things. Whether it’s something that happened at work, an idea I’m trying to articulate, or just thoughts I want to remember. The problem is that most of those thoughts disappear as soon as I’ve had them.
A little over a year ago, I decided to build a Mac app to do something about that. I called it Captain’s Log, after Star Trek. I’ve always liked the scenes where my childhood hero, Jean-Luc Picard starts with “Captain’s Log, Stardate 41153.7” and then simply tells the computer what’s been happening. I wanted something like that for myself.
I originally started building it as a kind of second brain, but soon discovered that just being able to talk to my computer and keeping a written record was useful enough. I now use it several times a week, for different things:
- Looking back on my workweek and figuring out where my time went.
- Recording thoughts about my family, friends, and everyday life.
- Articulating new ideas by talking about them.
- Practicing presentations or talks.
The app records your voice, transcribes it with Whisper, and uses a local language model (Qwen) to clean up the text. It fixes transcription mistakes, adds paragraphs, corrects names based on a personal list, and sorts your notes into categories.
Everything happens on your Mac. No accounts, no cloud services, and none of your recordings or notes leave your computer.
It’s a fairly simple app, but I’ve come to rely on it. And although I originally built it just for myself, I’ve decided to make it open source and free for anyone to use or build upon. You can install it with Homebrew:
brew install --cask vnglst/tap/captainslog
Or point your favorite AI coding agent at the GitHub repository and have it build the app from source. I haven’t paid the Apple developer fee yet, so the Homebrew version isn’t notarized. Here’s a short video showing how it works.