In 1977, Charles and Ray Eames filmed a journey from a picnic blanket to the edge of the universe and back, one power of ten at a time. This is that journey taken through time instead of space - from a century of my family's letters down to a single captured second. I'm Adam Thede. This is my life, measured in seconds.
They wrote constantly - their courtship, their hopes, their ordinary days - and both sides of the conversation survive: her letters to him, his letters to her. They married. A generation later, letters crossed the Atlantic from a warship. A generation after that, my father began writing a letter to his mother every week - and he is writing them still.
I have held this paper in my hands. Paper from 1910. Paper from a warship. Paper from the kitchen table where my father sits on Sunday afternoons. Four generations understood something I inherited before I had words for it: the act of recording a life gives it meaning beyond itself.
In 2001, helping my grandparents move to assisted living, I stayed behind to sort the closets: tintypes from the 1870s, film reels, VHS tapes, letters tied with ribbon. I became the family's archivist that day - hundreds of tapes, nearly a hundred reels, thousands of photographs digitized over two decades. In one reel, my mother is a girl on a fishing trip at Maple Lane Resort in Minnesota - a lake her grandparents had been coming to for decades - in footage her father shot on 8mm film.
In 2012 I tried to build the successor to the letters - a life-capture startup called LifeTagr. It failed; I couldn't build it myself and didn't yet know how to bootstrap a build I couldn't do. So I learned. Code school at 35. A decade-plus shipping production software. Becoming the CTO I couldn't afford to hire.
A container for the digital exhaust of a life: the who, what, when, where, and why of my days. Places, people, photographs, experiences. Your devices fill it. Your thoughts make it yours. I have used it every day for nearly a decade - it has already outlived most of the services that failed me.
And they did fail me. Moves, Basis, Narrative, Automatic, Limitless - each one shut down, each time the same ritual: the frantic export, the orphaned folders. That history is why Silo is built the way it is - open exports, no lock-in, paid plainly, permanence over growth - with a written promise that if the worst ever happens, you leave with everything. In April 2026 the iOS companion shipped: fourteen years after LifeTagr, the vision finally exists end-to-end.
ECOSYSTEM the tractor harvests · the silo stores↗The Big Letter is a family newsletter synthesized from everything the ecosystem captures - the month's places, projects, and photographs, what had my attention, what the kids said at dinner. Drafted with AI in my own voice, every vignette citing its sources, finished by hand. The first issue shipped in April 2026.
My father has been making this exact artifact by hand for decades. The loop from 1910 closes every month - digital exhaust becoming a warm, durable thing my family can hold, and my kids will inherit.
Answers2Answers is the asking machine - a family Q&A digest that sends a question on a cadence, gathers answers in writing or in voice, and weaves them into something the whole family reads. It began as a family digest app years ago; I'm rebuilding it now as an audio-first iOS product, with a year-plus of the original family answers preserved and honored inside it.
Where the silo captures a life passively, this one draws a life out of the people you love - the interview half of the family record. The letters were never written to be archives either. They were just people answering each other, week after week.
The phone keeps the day's path - Silo iOS tracks places, check-ins, voice memos, photographs, as the day is lived. On the desk, Lens watches the working hours: screen, webcam, focus - then an AI model running entirely on my Mac writes the day's journal. Nothing leaves the machine. The PKM vault does the same for paper - documents ingested and enriched locally, because the most sensitive records should never touch a cloud.
That is the local-inference thesis I'm testing in public: the most personal synthesis should happen on hardware you own. The frontier still lives in the cloud - I'll say so plainly - but the journal of your day belongs to you.
INSTRUMENTS Silo iOS · Lens · PKM Vault↗A voice memo at a trailhead. A check-in at a diner. A paragraph written by a local vision model describing a photograph from the family archive - who is in it, what is happening - on the workbench I built for the job: a describer for old photographs, a transcriber for voice and tape, a slideshow engine that turns archives into films for the family's picture frames.
This is the middle of the method, where raw capture becomes memory: AI does the cataloging, and I add the part only I know. Metrics describe. Memory means.
Somewhere in Nashville, a photograph is taken. It will be captured tonight, enriched this week, synthesized into a letter this month, kept in the silo for a lifetime - and inherited, someday, by people who will want to know who I was.
This is the whole idea, at every scale: a second, a day, a month, a life, a century. Capture it. Enrich it. Synthesize it. Pass it on.
"Recording a life lets you live it twice."Pull back from the single second and the pattern repeats all the way up - the day assembles into the week, the week into the month, the month into a life, the life into the record a family keeps for a century.
Capture a life so the people you love can know it. My great-grandparents didn't know their letters would survive a century - they were just writing to each other. I don't know who will read the record of my life. Maybe my kids. Maybe their kids. But keeping it has made me more present in the living of it.
If you've lost data to a service that shut down, you're welcome here. If you want to document your life for those who come after, you're welcome here. If you're an asker of questions and a seeker of stories - you're welcome here.