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WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

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Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#21

Post by danielecook »

fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#22

Post by rollinDyno »

karlicoss wrote: post #16
rollinDyno wrote: post #8

Something I noticed when I use "Read Later" style applications to save pages is that I will, most of the time, forget about how I arrived at a certain page. This is important to me because it gives me the context to decide a perspective on the page. If I was able to save pages while also knowing where I found them and maybe make a comment about why I found it interesting, then I would be able to organize my knowledge…

I'm working on a tool which can do exactly this (and it's only one of the features!): https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme Here's a link demonstrating the usecase you want (40 seconds video): https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_he... I discovered Worldbrain Memex way into the development (unfortunately), but in the near future I will try to evaluate to which extent it's possible to mutu…

The webm file is broken

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#23

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

you should productize this idea. I would use it.

It's a bit hassle to print to PDF every time, but if the barrier is low enough, it would be useful.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#24

Post by karlicoss »

rollinDyno wrote: post #22
karlicoss wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a tool which can do exactly this (and it's only one of the features!): https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme Here's a link demonstrating the usecase you want (40 seconds video): https://karlicoss.github.io/promnesia-demos/how_did_i_get_he... I discovered Worldbrain Memex way into the development (unfortunately), but in the near future I will try to evaluate to which extent it's possible to mutu…

The webm file is broken

sigh.. thanks, it works in Firefox, but apparently not in Chrome. I added a link to mp4 version.

upd: in case it would save someone else some pain in the future -- direct webm links don't work on raw.githubusercontent.com, but do work if you publish your repo as github pages -- then it ends up hosted on a proper CDN.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#25

Post by fit2rule »

danielecook wrote: post #21
fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?

Every web page I'll ever want to refer to, ever again. There are no good reasons for exceptions to this technique, imho.

If the PDF version is difficult to read - which it rarely is, by the way - all I need to do is open the PDF and use the links in the page header to go visit the site again - all the details about the page are still there in the PDF, links are still clickable, etc.

And if its really important, and I've taken the time, before moving to my PDF Archive, to verify that the site is not readable due to some layout inconsistency in the conversion to PDF (I do sometimes suspect this with the fancier laid out pages), I Print-to-PDF again after enabling Reader mode/view (Safari/Firefox): problem solved.

But really, there are very few web pages that don't survive the PDF conversion. And anyway, I mostly pipe the .PDF output through something like pdf2text for further grok/grep'ing...

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#26

Post by gregsadetsky »

fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

It sounds like a really good idea (in addition to images being part of this single file PDF "archive" and thus won't go missing), but the PDFs being searchable depend on how the PDF is made, no?

I printed to PDF this HN thread in Chrome (I assume that the PDF printing was done on the system level by OSX -- EDIT yes, from the file: "/Producer (macOS Version 10.15.2 \(Build 19C57\) Quartz PDFContext)"), and none of the page's strings appear as ascii or utf-8 in the document. grep is unable to find any string in that file.

Do you have a specific print to PDF setup? Or a PDF-aware grep..?

EDIT: Seeing the command-line you're using, the search you do is over the files' names, correct? The PDF/(original web page) text content is not indexed, right? Just to make sure I understand correctly.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#27

Post by fit2rule »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #23
fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

you should productize this idea. I would use it. It's a bit hassle to print to PDF every time, but if the barrier is low enough, it would be useful.

There's nothing to productize. You just use CMD[,Control}-P, select "Print to PDF", save to a relevant folder, and off you go. If that's too many steps, use Automator or whatever the equivalent is on your OS to make a shorter hotkey. (I had a Hammerspoon script for this once, but reverted to just doing it manually, since my muscle memory on the keystrokes is sufficiently well trained that it supplants my desire to find the .lua files somewhere to pass to Hammerspoon..)

The entire point is that there is absolutely no need for a third party to get involved in organising your web browsing history or remembering your bookmarks. Use the shell. Very few third-party services will be able to match the power of this tooling, for the reasons I gave above. My history = my data, for my own private purposes.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#28

Post by fit2rule »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #26
fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

It sounds like a really good idea (in addition to images being part of this single file PDF "archive" and thus won't go missing), but the PDFs being searchable depend on how the PDF is made, no? I printed to PDF this HN thread in Chrome (I assume that the PDF printing was done on the system level by OSX -- EDIT yes, from the file: "/Producer (macOS Version 10.15.2 \(Build 19C57\) Quartz PDFContext)"), and none of the…

I just use the PDF defaults from whatever browser I'm using at the time. Nothing special involved, just the defaults.

I do use 'pdftotext' to do more fine-grained searching if I need to - but for the most part I find that a simple "ls -l | grep " suffices, since this method preserves page title text too ..

I did the same thing for this thread and had no issues with this command, whatsoever:

    $ pdftotext WorldBrain\'s\ Memex:\ Bookmarking\ for\ the\ power\ users\ of\ the\ web\ \|\ Hacker\ News.pdf - | grep -i "Print-to-pdf"
Results:

".. nothing beats print-to-PDF. Its just awesome." "fancier laid out pages), I Print-to-PDF again after enabling Reader"

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#29

Post by gregsadetsky »

fit2rule wrote: post #28
gregsadetsky wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a really good idea (in addition to images being part of this single file PDF "archive" and thus won't go missing), but the PDFs being searchable depend on how the PDF is made, no? I printed to PDF this HN thread in Chrome (I assume that the PDF printing was done on the system level by OSX -- EDIT yes, from the file: "/Producer (macOS Version 10.15.2 \(Build 19C57\) Quartz PDFContext)"), and none of the…

I just use the PDF defaults from whatever browser I'm using at the time. Nothing special involved, just the defaults. I do use 'pdftotext' to do more fine-grained searching if I need to - but for the most part I find that a simple "ls -l | grep " suffices, since this method preserves page title text too .. I did the same thing for this thread and had no issues with this command, whatsoever: $ pdftotext WorldBrain\'s\…

Got it, makes sense.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#30

Post by kirubakaran »

rollinDyno wrote: post #8

Something I noticed when I use "Read Later" style applications to save pages is that I will, most of the time, forget about how I arrived at a certain page. This is important to me because it gives me the context to decide a perspective on the page. If I was able to save pages while also knowing where I found them and maybe make a comment about why I found it interesting, then I would be able to organize my knowledge…

https://histre.com/ has tree-style web history, taking notes on those web pages, and more. Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

It automatically creates a knowledge base for you. The paths you took to arrive at a piece of information is just one part of the puzzle that it puts together for you.

The main idea is that we throw away a lot of the signal we generate while doing things online and this can be put to good use for ourselves.

Some related features that Histre has: - Sharing collections of notes with your teams - Saving highlights - Hacker News integration. The stories you upvote are saved in a notebook, which can be shared with your friends, or even made public.

I'm focusing on search. Most knowledge base apps have terrible search imho.

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