Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt (n.): the ship's gossip — the talk, the news, what everyone's discussing.

A local-first meeting companion that lives in your Obsidian sidebar, inspired by anarlog. Record (or import) a meeting, transcribe it against your local Whisper/vLLM server, auto-summarize it with your local LLM, review the Summary / Transcript / Memo side-by-side, then save one tidy note with a clean title and tags.

Local-first: everything runs against endpoints you configure. No cloud, no accounts.

Why "Scuttlebutt"?

On old sailing ships, the scuttlebutt was the cask of drinking water the crew gathered around — a scuttle (a hole cut in something) tapped into a butt (a large barrel). It was the ship's water cooler, and because sailors swapped news and gossip while drinking there, "scuttlebutt" came to mean the talk, the rumors, the news — what everyone's discussing.

That's exactly what this plugin captures: the scuttlebutt of your meetings, turned into notes you can keep.

What it does

record | import  →  transcribe  →  summarize (+ title + tags)  →  review in sidebar  →  save note

• Record microphone audio (optionally mixing in system audio) right from the sidebar, with a live timer, an in-sidebar audio player, and a status-bar indicator so you can keep working.
• Import an existing audio clip from your vault or upload one from disk.
• Transcribe via any OpenAI-compatible speech endpoint (vLLM Whisper, whisper.cpp server, etc.). Re-transcribe from the Transcript tab any time.
• Summarize via any OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint. Uses anarlog's summary format (h1 sections, 3+ concrete bullets, decisions & action items).
• Context files — pick any vault notes (agenda, prior meetings) to steer the summary.
• Review everything in the sidebar: edit the summary, transcript, memo, title, and tags before saving.
• Save a single note: frontmatter (title, date, tags, participants, audio), the summary, and the transcript/memo tucked into collapsible callouts.

Elegant, anarlog-style output

• Title — the LLM proposes a super-concise topic title (no punctuation clutter).
• Tags — 3–5 specific tags, reusing your existing vault tags where relevant and falling back to a sensible default vocabulary (Product, Engineering, Research, Design, …).
• File name — YYYY-MM-DD — Topic Title.md, so notes sort chronologically and read cleanly.

Install (from source)

npm install
npm run build           # or: node esbuild.js --watch  (watch mode)
bash install.sh ~/path/to/your/vault

Then enable it in Settings → Community plugins → Scuttlebutt, and click the mic ribbon icon to open the sidebar.

Configure

Open Settings → Scuttlebutt. There are two endpoints; each has a URL, API key, Test, and Model dropdown. Click Test to validate the endpoint and load its model list — on success the dropdown fills in, on failure it blanks out.

• Transcription — your Whisper/vLLM server, e.g. http://localhost:8000/v1
• Summary — your LLM/vLLM server, e.g. http://localhost:8001/v1

Other options: input device (see below), spoken/summary language, auto-summarize, title & tag suggestion, output folders, save-audio, and the summary system prompt (with a reset-to-default button).

Development

npm run build     # bundle the plugin to ./main.js
npm test          # run the unit tests (Node's built-in test runner)

The pure logic (file naming, tag/transcript parsing, multipart encoding, …) lives in src/utils.ts and is covered by tests/utils.test.ts. Obsidian- and DOM-dependent code lives in src/main.ts.

Releasing

Releases are built and published by GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/release.yml). To cut one:

1. Bump the version in manifest.json, package.json, and versions.json, and add a CHANGELOG.md entry.

2. Commit, then tag with the exact version (no v prefix) and push the tag:

   git tag 1.0.5 && git push origin 1.0.5
   

CI verifies the tag matches manifest.json, runs the tests, builds, attests the assets, and publishes the release with main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css attached individually.

Notes on system audio

Scuttlebutt runs as an Obsidian plugin (JavaScript in Electron), so it's limited to the browser's getUserMedia / getDisplayMedia APIs. On macOS those cannot capture system audio the way a native app (like anarlog, which uses Core Audio process taps) can. To record the other side of a call on macOS, install a loopback device such as BlackHole, create an Aggregate Device that includes it, and select that device under Settings → Capture → Input device. When "Capture system audio" yields no track, Scuttlebutt tells you and continues with the microphone.

Data & privacy

Scuttlebutt keeps your data on your machine and your own servers. Specifically:

• It lists file names in your vault only to power two pickers: "Pick an audio clip" (audio files) and "Add a context note" (markdown files). This listing stays local — nothing is uploaded unless you explicitly pick a file.
• It sends audio to the transcription (Whisper/vLLM) server you configure, and the transcript plus any context notes you choose to the summarization server you configure.
• Nothing else leaves your machine. There is no telemetry, and there are no third-party services beyond the servers you point it at.

Release assets (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) are built in GitHub Actions with build provenance attestations, so you can cryptographically verify they were built from this repository:

gh attestation verify main.js --repo qkm2000/Scuttlebutt

Notes

• The UI is styled entirely with Obsidian's own theme variables, so it adapts to any light/dark theme.
• Requests go through Obsidian's requestUrl, which avoids browser CORS restrictions when calling local servers.
• Desktop only (recording uses the microphone).

License

MIT © Kar Min