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

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101–110 of 215 posts

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

#101

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…

> How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory?

I do all the time. Behold.

I don't have a particular refined process or taxonomy. Just Pinboard and tags.

One tool I use to keep things circulating is a daily script that emails me 5 random bookmarks from my Pinboard account each morning. Stole the idea from this HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15451912

Run a local cron job (actually a local Jenkins job) and use this Python library:

https://github.com/lionheart/pinboard.py

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

#102
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 have a similar setup for my note/bookmarking needs, I added abo-abo's org-download in case the page has an interesting image: https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download

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

#103
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grep is not much of an advantage when Mac, Windows and Linux all have as-you-type full-text search of common formats like HTML and PDF.

Can you point me to the as-you-type full-text search on Mac for a directory transitively containing 20,000 pdfs?

I use Apple’s built-in Spotlight search to search in Markdown files and PDF documents, albeit I do not have 20,000 of them. Would it be a problem for Spotlight to index 20,000 PDF documents?

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

#105
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.

Maybe Archivebox ( https://archivebox.io/ ) can suit your needs ? Archiving is what it does, but there's nothing built-in for searching

The ArchiveBox wiki also has a list of many similar projects even if you don't even up using ArchiveBox itself:

https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Comm...

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

#106

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…

Are you manually printing each page to PDF? I would love to have an automated way to do this but haven't figured out how to deal with logging into subscription based site and all that. There is also some degree of messiness even with printing to PDF. For example let's say I want to save an HN or Reddit discussion along with the comments - I would need to make sure I capture all the comments that overflow to "More" on…

ArchiveBox.io saves to PDF and to screenshot and WARC, and HTML to avoid issues that PDF alone has, but the feature that allows archiving sites behind a login isn't completely finished yet.

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

#107
post #2

I'm excited for this resurgence of archiving, searching, highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, etc

I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.

This stores locally, and if you want sync you can use use Dropbox or Google Drive or roll out your own with rsync and cron jobs. How can it be any more self hosted than this?

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad browsers don't have an easy way to print to browser-page-sized PDF. Standard 8.5x11/A4 paper sized PDFs of webpages tend to look pretty terrible. I used to use the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox but I realized for the most part just plaintext might be best. So I'm in the process of setting up a workflow that will save article in markdown in one click and sync between my phone and my computer.

Safari on iPhone can do this: https://images.macrumors.com/t/zbOsBhKGQj6VvA9oq8KaZkLxXUc=/... (note the scrollable preview at right edge of screen, the main preview is only showing a small fraction of the document)

Yeah, but there’s a length limit. And I hit that limit frequently, so it’s only usable (for me) about 50% of the time. Bug? Not sure.

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

#109
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I suspect you may have misunderstood the spirit of my comment. I believe that computing should be accessible to everyone, and can guarantee that the harsh thoughts you put in my head are far from my intent.

Let's say you want to enable someone to make coffee at home. One could imagine two different approaches:

a) you give that person a bean grinder, some equipment to match their taste (e.g. an espresso machine or a chemex), and teach them how to make a tasty cup of coffee in their kitchen.

b) you give that person a nespresso machine, and tell them to order capsules once a month from amazon.com

Computing used to be much more like the former approach, philosophically. The foundations that we rely on today were about small, composable, modular programs, operating using well documented open standards and protocols. This approach gave us things like UNIX/POSIX and the internet.

However, mainstream computing has shifted towards much more about the latter kind of approaches. You stay in the walled gardens, you have no way to directly manipulate your data, and you're reliant on _features_ to get anything done.

In our previous coffee example, "pulling a long shot" would have to be a "feature" on the Nespresso machine, that the designers at Nespresso decided to surface on their machine as a switch of some sort for the end user to access. For approach a) though, it's something you can naturally do as part of the process.

One could also argue that a) is also maybe more aligned with the hacker ethos.

That's where my frustration at overzealous productization in computing comes from.

That's not even getting into how approach b) tends to be consistently worse for the environment and society.

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