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Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

getpolarized.io

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Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#101

Post by slaymaker1907 »

My favorite tools for this sort of thing have been TiddlyWiki as well as Scribble (Racket language). An essential feature present in both is that they both are incredibly hackable and customizeable since most products don't support enough organization for me.

However, my main complaint with these tools is that while they are customizeable, it is sometimes nice to have a WYSIWIG since some notes I take will only every be looked at as I am writing them so having instant feedback is nice, even if the resulting document is imperfect.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#102

Post by slaymaker1907 »

eslaught wrote: post #68
burtonator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Key point of order. We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so you have the original in your archive. This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that this isn't just conversion to PDF. > Don't get me…

> But I don't get your point about a missing tag. At least in my experience, interfaces that use tags (Gmail, Google Docs prior to the Drive upgrade) end up being a massive global heap that make it impossible to find anything. Tags help but only marginally, and only when I'm very selective about applying them. When a tag becomes too big it, it's just the soup problem all over again. In my experience with Gmail/Docs I…

Tags can work very well, but only if you have a very customizeable query system for them. In fact, as TiddlyWiki demonstrates you can basically implement a hierarchical system based on tags.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#103

Post by apostacy »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #101

My favorite tools for this sort of thing have been TiddlyWiki as well as Scribble (Racket language). An essential feature present in both is that they both are incredibly hackable and customizeable since most products don't support enough organization for me. However, my main complaint with these tools is that while they are customizeable, it is sometimes nice to have a WYSIWIG since some notes I take will only every…

I used TiddlyWiki for awhile, and it will always have a place in my heart. But it just wasn't portable enough for me.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#104

Post by qwerty456127 »

I failed to find how to create notes (it should be able to create and interlink all kinds of them if it's meant to be a knowledge repository: notes attached do a particular document, attached to a particular place in a document and not attached to anything, all notes should be taggable).

Lack of support for any formats other than PDF (it should at least support EPUB, all other formats if possible: AZW, DJVU, FB2, Markdown, single-file HTML) limits its usage for studying e-books.

And it's annoyingly slow (but I'd consider this tolerable if it was really helpful).

I just hope this is just the beginning and Polar is actually going to improve.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#105

Post by jively »

This is extremely cool, I've been wondering about how I can create subject matter repositories of various media types and then enhance that data with my own findings.

What would be cool here would be the ability to reference between documents and notes, like you would with hypertext.

Imagine you write an essay or blog post, and you want to instantly browse the citations and quotes you use. That document could live inside polar, maybe as a simple MarkDown editor.

Either way I've downloaded and installed. I wonder if I can get some fancy PDF scanning gear so I can get book segments into it.

/ramble

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#106

Post by allochthon »

I am tackling a related challenge with Digraph, an app I'm working on [0]. My project is focused less on providing an infrastructure for learning and retention, and more on simply organizing the vast amount of information that each of us reads every day, month and year into a collection that is coherent and growing and that builds upon itself.

The long-term vision is a crowd-sourced alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. But the short-term focus is on something targeted and immediately useful.

> If the company that runs your PKR goes out of business you’re entire education might be in jeopardy.

I'm dealing with this problem in part by making the Digraph source available under the MIT license.

[0] https://digraph.app/, https://digraph.app/about

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#107

Post by ajvs »

burtonator wrote: post #67

Also, wanted to thanks all you guys for reviewing Polar and there's a lot of good feedback here. In a nutshell: 1. I'm working on more document formats including Markdown and ePub. 2. I'm working on some preliminary support for reference management so we can lookup the full reference info via DOI and have reference formatters for you to use for your research. Some of the DOI storage is already done. 3. I'm working on…

> 8. Yes. Polar isn't fully self hosted but that defeats the point. My cure hypothesis is that knowledge benefits from being social which is the main thing I'm trying to test. By the time I'm done I think 95% of you would agree that keeping it private is insane as you don't benefit from the community.

Then why are you calling it a Personal Knowledge Repository? It sounds more like you're trying to make it a social media network.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#108

Post by apostacy »

sjy wrote: post #74
ausjke wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you tried git-annex? I found it to be a simpler, more git-like solution to the large binaries problem than LFS, which seemed like a centralised system that would be painful to set up.

Git-annex is amazing. It has changed the way I manage my data.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#109

Post by mongol »

2sk21 wrote: post #54
prepend wrote: 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…

Inspired by the work of the famous psychologist Endel Tulving ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Tulving ), I have come up with a simple technique that works for me. I simply keep two text files called "Episodic" and "Semantic" in Dropbox corresponding to the two major forms of human memory. Episodic memory is associated with specific episodes while Semantic memory is simply facts that we have accumulated througho…

Do you keep everything in just those files? How are the files themselves structured?
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