A music journal is not a chart. It is a date next to a song.
Streaming remembers everything you played and throws away which day. Wrapped is an aggregate, and an aggregate is the opposite of a music journal.
deariary blog
July 2026
31 articles from July 2026.
← All months-
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The peak-end rule: why your quietest good months vanish
You judge a period by its worst moment and its ending. Duration barely counts. Which means a calm, contented month leaves almost no trace at all.
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Obsidian daily notes into your diary, via webhook
There is no native Obsidian integration. There is a webhook, and daily notes are plain text, so the bridge is about ten lines of shell.
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I built deariary with Claude Code
What actually changed when I built a 13-integration product with an AI coding agent: the context file matters more than the prompts, and review became the bottleneck.
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Your college years, automatically recorded
A student journal is the one nobody keeps and everybody wants later. The years are structurally hard to remember, and the tools already hold most of the record.
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Your film journal, without the film school
A film journal asks for criticism on a schedule. Criticism does not arrive on a schedule. That is why the habit collapses, and the fix is structural.
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A memory journal that writes itself
People searching for a memory journal want three different products. Only one of them can be automated, and it is the one that quietly fails most often.
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Finch vs deariary: a pet to care for vs a day to read
Finch makes self-care something you do for a bird. deariary writes down what your day contained. Two products solving different problems with the word journal in them.
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The ADHD journal you do not have to remember to write
Every ADHD journal recommendation asks you to remember to write down that you forget things. An automatic diary removes the step that fails.
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What your tools know about you that you have forgotten
Your forgotten memories are not entirely gone. Pieces of them are sitting in the services you use every day, in a shape that is useless as memory.
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Source monitoring: where your memories came from
Memory keeps what happened but not reliably where it came from. Source monitoring research explains the gap, and why a sourced record closes it.
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Best Windows diary app for effortless journaling
A journal app for Windows used to mean settling. Now there are real options. Six picks, ranked by how much daily effort each one asks.
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The explorer diary stack: Swarm, Calendar, Bluesky
Swarm, Google Calendar, and Bluesky cover the plan, the route, and the voice of a trip. Together they make a travel diary app that fills itself.
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Transactive memory: you outsourced facts, not your days
Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner showed the internet became our transactive memory for facts. The one memory you never found a partner for is your own days.
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Is there a Google journal app? (Not yet. Here is the closest thing.)
There is no Google journal app the way Apple has one. Here is why, what Google locked away, and the closest thing you can actually use today.
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Your weekday diary vs your weekend diary
A diary that captures your whole life reads differently on a Tuesday than on a Saturday. Why the weekday vs weekend contrast is worth building a stack for.
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Best Mac journal app that writes itself
A comparison of journal apps for Mac, ranked by how much of the entry each one writes for you. From suggestion cards to fully automatic prose.
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The reminiscence bump: why your twenties feel longer in memory
The reminiscence bump clusters your most vivid memories in your twenties. That density is also why the decade feels longer when you look back at it.
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Journaling is overrated. Remembering is not.
Journaling is the writing. Remembering is the point. They share one word, which is why your journaling time keeps buying the wrong thing.
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The social diary stack: Bluesky, Discord, Last.fm
Bluesky, Discord, and Last.fm each hold a slice of your online life. Together they form a social media diary that reads like a day, not three feeds.
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Best Android diary app for people who don't journal
Android ships with no diary app. Six picks for the best diary app for Android, arranged by how much each one leans on what your phone already knows.
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Fading affect bias: why your past looks better than it was
The fading affect bias means negative feelings fade faster than positive ones. Walker and Skowronski's research explains why memory tilts your past rosy.
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Therapists prescribe looking back. Your diary already does it.
Reminiscence therapy is a clinically prescribed treatment. It runs on specific, dated memory, the exact thing depression erodes and a diary preserves.
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Game log recipe: Discord channel + Steam
Create a Discord #game-log channel, post screenshots and reactions while you play, and let Steam track the hours. A gaming journal that writes itself.
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Best iPhone journaling app for automatic entries
Most journaling apps for iPhone collect your day but still hand you the keyboard. A look at which ones come closest to an entry that writes itself.
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The self-reference effect: you remember what feels like you
The self-reference effect explains why some days stick. It is not a memory aid you switch on. It is a filter, always running, deciding what counts as you.
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Your YouTube watch history is a diary you have been keeping without knowing
Your YouTube video watch history records the tutorials, the music, and the 2am rabbit holes. It is the most honest diary you own. Here is how to keep it.
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Plex scrobble recipe: Plex to Trakt to deariary
deariary has no native Plex integration. Your Plex watch history can still flow into your diary today, by scrobbling Plex plays to Trakt and connecting Trakt to deariary.
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What your completed Todoist tasks say about your day
Your completed Todoist tasks are a behavioral profile of how you spent yourself. Read as a flat list they read flat. Read as a day they read differently.
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Weekend diary recipe: Trakt, Swarm, and Bluesky
Three integrations capture a weekend from three angles: where you went, what you watched, and what you said about it. The result is a weekend diary that writes itself.
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Grid Diary vs deariary: nine prompts vs zero prompts
Grid Diary asks you nine questions to fill in. deariary writes the entry from your data. Two answers to the blank-page problem, opposite directions.