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Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

getpolarized.io

21–30 of 112 posts

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#21
post #19

This would be neater as a self hosted system. I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead. I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one. I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then…

I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#23
A personal knowledge management app that can:

    1. deal with various file formats(pdf,markdown,code,flashcards,etc)
    2. easy to annotate, tag, highlight
    3. works across web and smartphone
    4. can be self-hosted and portable
will be very valuable, I'm willing to pay for it if it exists, though an OSS version is optimal. No I don't want to store all my personal notes on any cloud storage so self-host is a must.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#24
post #16

I started keeping favorite quotes in Hypercard back in 1987. I didn't pay attention when Hypercard went extinct 15 years later, and failed to do the work to extract the data. Now I keep info in text files and grep is my friend. No spaced repetition, but tags go in as grep-able raw text too. Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?

What do you do about more structured data, such as Excel files?

Great question: If it were just columnized data you could keep it in csv format, but Excel supports way more than that.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#25

I liked the idea but couldn't quite get the anki workflow running smoothly. To be fair I tried this because of the anki integration but I don't think that's what it's meant for

Indeed, it's painful to get notes into Anki currently. I would prefer if I could get any text selected into a new Anki note with minimum number of keypresses, rather than creating flashcards in Polar and then syncing them, which seems rather inefficient.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#26
post #20

very interesting, however: "We use cookies to track your usage. We use cookies to track your usage and to determine which features are used to improve the quality of Polar. Additionally, we track application errors which helps us find bugs and to prioritize which issues to fix. This data is sent to 3rd parties which provide the infrastructure necessary to provide the analytics services needed to analyze and store the…

the entire platform is based on Electron (Node + Chromium)

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#27

I like the idea of the Personal Knowledge Repository, but I don't like having a 3rd party app for it. 3rd Party Apps are good for creating and editing content, because there's a lot of different ways things can be made. Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, storing content is basically the same, and OS's do it well.

> Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content,

Depends upon internally-created data or external. If you talk about exposing internal data there‘s /Interoperability Problems/.

You don‘t have to think about other apps creating invalid files. State stored won’t vanish because another app decided it‘s not needed and ignores it during editing+resaving. And all the other interoperability problems you may encounter.

If its external files I may agree.

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