Found an old notebook buried in a drawer today and decided to digitize it.

I pointed my phone at each page, ran the images through gemma3 27b with 4-bit quantization, and watched it convert handwritten notes to markdown. Nearly perfect transcription. This is running on my Mac—no cloud, no API keys, no data leaving my house.

A few years ago, this would have been science fiction. Or at least required sending my personal notes to some tech giant’s servers. Now it’s just another Tuesday afternoon project with a mid-tier quantized model, and asking Claude Code to build a script to run the images through the local model.

These are personal notebooks. Random thoughts, half-baked ideas, things I would like to search through, but wouldn’t want in a training dataset somewhere. It feels great not having to make that trade-off anymore.