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

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91–100 of 215 posts

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

#91

Not sure if Memex has this, but one feature I like with Toby is that I can a save window as a "session" and it makes a "collection" of all the tabs. Works well since I do window-per-topic that I'll come back to later. I believe Toby lacks text search for the page's contents, so it's mainly just easier/better organization for bookmarks, and would be nice if the data wasn't only tied to their cloud, or if I could make…

What do you think of this? : https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ [1] You can save all the tabs into a Histre notebook. The advantages are: 1. It's a web app, so a window of tabs can be saved in Chrome and restored in Firefox, for example. 2. Searchable 3. Can be shared with your teams [1] Disclaimer: I'm the founder

It's a service, so it gets 'no' just for that reason.

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

#92

This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxo…

I have a couple thousand bookmarks in Google Bookmarks, all meticulously tagged to aid categorisation. A while ago, I came to the realisation that I never ever actually went back and referred to any them. I no longer accumulate these bookmarks but I still regard them fondly, like a well-organised bookshelf of reference material that I enjoy keeping around without ever planning to use.

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

#93

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…

> then I would be able to organize my knowledge in a way that mirrors my train of thought

I made HowTruthful for organizing trains of thought. If that's the only way you want to bookmark, you could use it. It's just that every time you save a page, you have to associate with a statement that the page is a source for.

Like Memex, the free version uses localStorage. You don't actually need to sign in to start using the Cite bookmarklet.

https://en.howtruthful.com/i/

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

#94

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…

Tip for a better use of browser's print to PDF feature: use an ad blocker (uBlock Origin in Chrome works fine) to remove noisy html elements, ads and clutter. I basically cut everything but text, even navigation elements. And this btw is where Chrome comes handy for (e.g.) Firefox users: you can browse and print separately. You always have a ready-to-print setup in Chrome (or else) while browsing somewhere else. I haven't yet looked into another promising feature though, which is (if I'm not mistaken) the availability of a CLI for this . Would be very interested to automate the process, but am concerned about whether the element blocking will work. Ideally I'd like to be able to save printed pages either automatically or via bulk selection (within my browser history) to Evernote or anything like (it seems to be the best solution for me, as it has a great indexing, fuzzy search and relevance, plus the fact that the storage is not limited unless I start to upload more than 10 GB per month which is unlikely). Anyway, would be glad to hear if anyone came up with a similar or a better solution.

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

#95
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. pdftotext gets the actual text from the PDF. I don't do this, but I'm sure that you could automate the process of generating a text file for each PDF in a directory with pdftotext and then ripgrep the text files whe…

Yeah, my computer is fast enough that I can just do "find . -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext {} \; | grep -i someSearchTerm" and come back later. Bonus points that it stays in my Terminal for reference later in the day as needed.

Is there a reason why you don't use mdfind instead (built-in spotlight search from the terminal)? That way you can search pdf files directly from the terminal without converting to text first, and the directory is already indexed.

E.g:

[$]mdfind -onlyin ~/MyDirectory someSearchTerm

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

#96
post #70

My tools of choice for advanced bookmarking and offline read: * org-mode [1]. * org-board [2] for offline archiving. * Org Capture [3] for getting links or text chunks from browser. * git repo for tracking history. With org-mode I can create really complex connections between articles and citations, add tags, have TODO lists and many more. To visualize things and connections, org-mind-map [4] can be useful. Because e…

I didn’t know about the org-board, thanks.

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

#97

This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxo…

If people's public bookmarks aren't available online, I'd encourage you to publicly post them somewhere. Even if they aren't useful to you anymore, they are good signal for good content, which I think is worth trying to preserve for future use.

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

#98
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

That’s the software economy we’re in. Everyone’s thinking in terms of “productization” and “features” and “user journeys”. Only old grumpy hackers care about minimal, composable tools anymore. Sigh.

There are tons of people who would appreciate this feature and I only brought this up because these people will definitely appreciate something like this.

Reading through your comment i can already imagine you sitting there probably thinking all these inferior "normies" who don't deserve to enjoy convenience in their lives because they don't know tech.

Well, everybody on this site is a "hacker" yet not everybody has time and discipline to devote to doing this all the time. And I don't care for learning every single esoteric automation features on my computer. It's kind of weird giving a positive comment and getting all these negative snarky comments back.

Lastly it's stupid to think "Productization" is some evil thing. Productization simply means take some process that's useful and make it easily accessible for other people. It doesn't even mean you sell it for money. If you don't care about improving other people's lives, that's fine, but don't be so condescending about people who genuinely appreciate the idea and just wanted to provide some positive feedback.

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

#100

This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxo…

I post all my notes and bookmarks online.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

And access everything super fast too using tool I made.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind

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