visual-base

The second brain from your eyes.

Other "second brain" tools ask you to do the remembering — write the note, hit the highlight, tag the page. Whatever you didn't capture is gone; what you did is a biased sample.

visual-base records what your eyes actually land on — your screen, continuously, as compressed video. The raw stream is the single source of truth; every derived artifact — activity logs, search indexes, future tool-use over the tape — comes out of it, never replaces it. If it was on your screen, it's in the tape.

What ships:

• bub_eye — background screen recorder. macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), hardware HEVC via avfoundation, ~10 MB per 15-min segment, near-zero CPU.
• bub_kimi — Kimi as the default agent for video understanding and daily-log generation.
• video-activity-log — turns any segment into an Obsidian-linkable daily log, one bullet per activity, with [[wikilinks]] on every site, app, person, and project it can identify.

Install

uv tool install visual-base

bub_eye's ffmpeg binary ships in the wheel via imageio-ffmpeg. kimi-cli auto-installs as a separate uv tool on the first Kimi call.

Authenticate Kimi once. Either log in through the TUI (after uv tool install kimi-cli):

kimi login

or set an API key via env vars:

cp .env.example .env   # then fill in BUB_KIMI_*

macOS will prompt for Screen Recording permission the first time bub_eye spawns ffmpeg. The grant is path-specific — re-grant if you switch to a system ffmpeg via BUB_EYE_FFMPEG.

For local development

uv sync
cp .env.example .env
uv run visual-base --help

just setup bundles uv sync with a pre-warmed uv tool install kimi-cli for Dockerfile / CI caches.

Run

uv tool run visual-base gateway

Starts the recorder and Kimi chat channel together. Everything lives under $BUB_HOME (default ~/.bub/):

• Video segments — ~/.bub/eye/segments/eye_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.mp4
• Daily activity logs — ~/.bub/eye/logs/YYYY-MM-DD.md