Quotes

How do you remember anything? I read a book, but by the time I’m done with it, I already forgot 99% of the details. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. We can’t possibly remember everything, so we just retain the biggest and the most surprising ideas.

But that seems like a lot of waste. Maybe one should be more deliberate about it and make notes as they go along. I tried that, but then I found I never returned to revisit those.

Hence, quotes. I find keeping a list of highlights or quotes to remind me of the core ideas to be a good middle ground. I collect these as general wisdoms I stumble upon, from books, articles or podcasts. Every time I go “hmm, that’s interesting”, I try to write it down.

But then, how do you recall all of this? I put all of my quotes to a D1 database and I made a simple API to retrieve them.

Then I got a bunch of E-ink devices and vibe-coded a small Arduino project that fetches a new quote every couple hours and displays it. I have these displays around my house, and since they have magnets, they’re pretty easy to place (fridge). Every time I pass by to get a drink, I have a quick glance and read one of these quotes.

So far this has been working great. One day I’d love to build an iOS widget that does the same thing on my phone.