ai tools

A New System for a New Year

From secure note-taking to a personal music streaming service.

Marius Jopen

27 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

Dear friends,

I recently integrated three amazing new tools into my digital life:

NotebookLM

It is a tool by Google where you can upload your own documents. This includes PDFs, websites, audio, and video files.

The AI analyzes the content and lets you ask questions about it. It goes way beyond a normal chat like ChatGPT or Gemini. It really helps you make sense of a lot of content and draw new connections.

Also you can generate a podcast where two voices discuss your uploaded files. It is really good at summarizing complex topics.

If you are doing research, writing a book or trying to organize a lot of files, this is really helpful.

Obsidian

I do love notes. Small thoughts or ideas, lists of movies, diaries, website-bookmarks, research or life-strategies.

In the past, I used Notion for all of this. But when they started adding AI by default, I did not feel good about having all my data sitting on a server of a random US company. Who knows what they do with it or who has access to my files?

I looked for a more secure alternative and found Obsidian. It stores everything as simple text files on your own computer. You own your data, not a cloud company.

But it takes some time to get into it. If you just like to take quick notes, maybe stick to the Apple Notes app. But if you are into collecting all your inspiration, thoughts, favorite films, and research material in one place, it is incredible.

There is a big community and many plugins to custom-tailor it. You can even code your own functions. For example, I wrote a script that automatically tags all my notes with AI.

I spent some nights setting it up, but now I have a system that really does what I need.

iBroadcast

I was cleaning up my apartment and found an old hard drive with 900GB of music. I collected this from people around the world. It ranges from experimental ambient and dark wave to Chicago house and Jazz. Basically everything.

Instead of leaving it on this hard drive, I uploaded it to iBroadcast. This is a streaming app that lets you enjoy your own music collection via a nicely designed app on your phone or computer.

So instead of listening to what everybody listens to on Spotify, I can now browse through this massive collection of niche and non-mainstream music which I built some years ago. Feels so good!