What it does

Blinko is a self-hosted note-taking app built around quick capture: jot a thought as plain text or Markdown, and the app stores it locally in your own Postgres-backed instance. A one-line curl installer spits out a Docker container, and there are native desktop builds via Tauri for macOS, Windows, Linux, and Android.

The interesting bit

The hook is RAG retrieval over your own corpus. Instead of scrolling through tags or folders, you ask natural-language questions and the system surfaces relevant cards. It is the rare “AI note app” that keeps the model’s eyes on your hardware, not someone else’s cloud.

Key highlights

• Self-hosted by default: data stays on your infrastructure, not a SaaS silo.
• AI search via RAG: query notes conversationally rather than keyword-hunting.
• Markdown-native: no proprietary format lock-in; plain text plus formatting.
• Cross-platform clients: Tauri-based builds for desktop and mobile, plus the web/Docker route.
• Live demo available: blinko / blinko at demo.blinko.space.

Caveats

• macOS desktop builds are unsigned; you will need to strip the quarantine attribute manually (xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine).
• The README is light on technical depth: no mention of which embedding or LLM backends are used, how RAG is configured, or whether you can bring your own API keys.

Verdict

Worth a spin if you want Obsidian-style ownership with a conversational search layer on top. Skip it if you need deep plugin ecosystems or detailed docs on the AI plumbing.