Magical Briefings

How I use acreom to feed me analyses every morning.

I’m about as lazy as they come. I’ve been experimenting with a new note-taking app that has captured my attention for many weeks. This is uncommon. I ditched StashPad in just thirty minutes. It’s a wonderful product - very stable and relatively bug-free. It has no API or any ability to hack it, and if there’s one thing certain about note-taking or sense-making solutions I give serious consideration, it must be hackable.

To say that acreom is cool is an understatement. To say it is bug-free is a very big overstatement. It has bugs, but it’s still going through some growing pains. I would advise avoiding anything about the template features. Creating and using templates seems to create many issues.

What I really like about acreom is the underlying storage model. It is Markdown, and it is locally maintained. Which means I can edit those files directly (if I want). And this I want (of course).

Given that the database is really just a folder, I can also replicate that folder and sync it with Google Drive. And therein lies the opportunity for integration and workflow automation.

Imagine I write a few notes to myself concerning some tasks I need to follow through on the next morning. They might look something like this.

Two AutoAssist Notes

Notice that I tagged them with AutoAssist. This is an indicator of a background process in Google Apps Script that reads my next day’s tasks looking for something it can do to help me. In this case, it sees the AutoAssist tags and executes generative AI processes that embellish tomorrow’s task list like this:

Generative AI Chimes In Overnight

The workflow in Google Apps Script is simple and made possible because Google Drive keeps my acreom folder available to Google Apps Script and my integrated scripts with PaLM-2. With that array of services and data, wiring it up is a simple matter.

I use this approach for many workflows in acreom. I even use it to inject new documents in the acreom system to formulate various types of knowledge bases. Apps Script allows me to parse just about any documents - even PDFs.

Sometimes the best API is no API at all. In this case, I was able to bend acreom to my will without the complexities of writing API code.

I love being lazy.

In case you’re lazy, too - here’s the Google Apps Script. It’s rough, but it works.

Script notes:

• The folder ID (cAAFolderID) is where I map my acreom notes storage into a Google Drive sync configuration.

• The call to palmCreateTextCompletion_() is another script function also shared below. It uses my PaLM-2 API key (cPaLMAPIKey) which is loaded from script properties. You’ll have to work out that obfuscation detail.

• I have this process set up using a script trigger. It runs every night and my enhanced Today page is ready to read.