Welcome to my personal website repository

This contains the source code for my website.

Apple Books highlights sync

/books displays highlights I've enjoyed in the Apple Books I've read so far.

This is done using a small script that exports your Apple Books highlights into static/data/books-highlights.json, which powers the /books page.

Requirements

• macOS (Apple Books stores its data locally in macOS app container databases)
• Node.js + npm

Run a manual sync

From the repo root:

npm run sync-books

This will:

• Read Apple Books SQLite databases from ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/
• Write the generated JSON to static/data/books-highlights.json
• Preserve spotlight highlights: The sync automatically saves and restores any spotlight flags and spotlightNote data

If you need to run a raw sync without preserving spotlight data:

npm run sync-books-raw

Optional: daily cron sync

A helper script exists to create a daily sync runner:

bash scripts/setup-cron.sh

Then follow the printed instructions to add the generated daily-sync.sh script to your crontab.

Troubleshooting

• No highlights exported
  • Make sure you actually have highlights in Apple Books.
  • Open Apple Books once before syncing (so the databases exist locally).
• Permissions / file not found
  • Apple may restrict access to ~/Library/Containers/... depending on your macOS privacy settings.
  • Confirm the folders exist:
    • ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/AEAnnotation/
    • ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKLibrary/