WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

wolfhumble wrote: post #95

fit2rule wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1: Force of habit, since I use grep and silversearcher elsewhere a lot, but 2: I hate the mdfind indexer service putting garbage all over my disks, so I've turned it off and forgotten about it.

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

#132

Post by Galaco » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:50 AM UTC

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…

To be a little pedantic, while this is a fantastic idea, is it really bookmarking?

What you’ve done instead is compiled a personal digital library; akin to a Kindle

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

#133

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:52 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #72

fit2rule wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the site - but I haven't found 'lost formatting' to be an issue at all - since, when I want to do a granular search I'm using 'pdftotext' to search on plaintext, and when I find a PDF of interest, I open it and can go directly back to the web page from which it was printed by way of the footer/header which contains a clickable URL. Most of the time though, the formatting isn't an issue. It depends on th…

Ok, so we seem to agree print-to-pdf loses formatting. I share your interest in and fascination with this (weirdly irksome and edgecasey) problem but just about any modern browser provides better facilities for saving web pages with higher fidelity than 'print to pdf'. Print to pdf is so easy to beat, you'd have to go out of your way to find a way to not-beat it - say, saving just 'page source'.

PDF gives me an off-line readable version of the website, and is pretty compatible with pdftotext as a pipeline tool... I'm not sure that formatting is such a huge issue - I'm yet to find a web page I can't extract some meaningful info from, later on ..

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

#134

Post by yewenjie » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

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…

Big shoutout to karlicoss for doing amazing things in the Personal Knowledge Management space.

Also, it would be great to see a Memex-to-Org tool from you.

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

#135

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #78

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…

How is this "not as powerful"? What is this tool lacking that save to pdf provides? I can see at least one way it is vastly inferior, in that you break formatting by converting to a horrendous paper page-based format.

Off-line mode, my data is my data, and I can process the data freely and easily using my own local tools without getting anyone else' CPU involved.

And the formatting issue isn't really that big of a deal, if I'm honest. The formatting did its work in the initial contact of the web page - beyond that, to me anyway, its superfluous to the later task of finding the reference again. pdftotext don't care about the formatting, either.

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

#136

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #73

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…

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…

Yes, manually, but as I stated elsewhere: its muscle memory and smooth as an operation for me locally anyway now.

I often go through the archive, find the HN comment PDF's I've created, and then automatically update them to get whatever new comments have occurred in the meantime. Haven't figured out how to navigate to the 'next' comment page automatically though - some pages detect they're being printed and use a print-friendly layout, though, which is nice .. would be cool to see more of that.

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

#137

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #84

fit2rule wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I need to save a page I've read on mobile, I mail myself the link to my desktop and print it there, where the PDF Archive lives. Its muscle memory at this point. Still, would be nice if the Browser vendors would cotton on to how powerful this is, and make the whole thing a bit more seamless for the mobile/desktop bridge, or just make Print-to-PDF work more smoothly for this case on mobile. Either way, I also have…

The advantage of doing it on the desktop is that you get to print the desktop version of the site. There probably is an avenue to automate printing from your desktop as soon as it receives the email; who knows, maybe even The inconvenient of your way is that your bookmarks are only available on the Desktop, from your mobile all you can have is the list of URLs you sent yourself. It's still probably better than having…

I print to the Desktop, then clean it up at the end of the day by moving the files into what is admittedly a massive collection of files in a single directory .. On one hand, it seems messy - but on the other hand, its incredibly useful to use shell tools to manipulate/harvest the data in that directory.

And as for the mobile/desktop issue: I just sync my PDF dir to my mobile phone, and carry it all with me, anyway. The mobile version is not as grep'able, but its pretty neat to have every interesting website I've ever cared enough about to print-to-PDF with me in my pocket, even if it is a nearly un-navigable list of 20,000+ files to scroll through, hehe ..

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

#138

Post by yewenjie » Tue, May 19, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

abuiles wrote: post #110

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://web.hypothes.is/ --- it's a non-profit trying to solve the same idea. They are actually trying to advance on the ideas of the w3c annotation's working group and do everything open source.

It really frustrates me that its 2020 and they still don't have a real extension for Firefox, the only thing preventing me from regularly using it.

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

#139

Post by fit2rule » Tue, May 19, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

GuiA wrote: post #109

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

What I think is interesting is that this simple technique, which was so obvious to me having grown up with computers before there were filesystems, really - is now an interesting technique worth productising. To me, that indicates a bit of amnesia in the industry, specifically around how to be a productive user of file systems. If only there had been less intention to eradicate filesystem proficiency in generations of users by certain computer manufacturers, who wanted to productize things like that, away from the user ...

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

#140

Post by yewenjie » Tue, May 19, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

I have been using Memex for more than a year now. Here are the things that really annoy me

- occasional freezing and sudden disappearance of your bookmarks

- no real way to programmatically access your Memex database. I know they have released the storage backend, but the lack of helpful documentation is a deal-breaker.

- lack of collaborative annotation (the way Hypothesis does)

- only few results in search results!