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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

#181

Post by gildas »

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…

> nothing beats print-to-PDF. Its just awesome.

HTML largely beats PDF for this use case. And if you want something that produces a file in which you can easily extract resources from the saved page, see [1]. There is an option to automatically save the pages you add to your bookmark. There's also an option to make the text of the files indexable without unzipping them.

[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFileZ

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

#182

Post by fit2rule »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #158
fit2rule wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inasmuch as every PDF still has the URL to the original page, for my uses - I'd say yes, it is bookmarking. Its not like I'd cut the spine off every book in my library and create an index out of the covers ..

Apparently only Firefox saves the source URL. In PDFs saved from Safari or Chrome on macOS I can't find the URL anywhere. Maybe I'm missing something.

Interesting. For me, its right there on the bottom-left of the footer, always.

/tmpᐅ pdftotext Add\ Comment\ -\ Hacker\ News.pdf - |grep http

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23232588&goto=threads%...

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

#183

Post by fauigerzigerk »

fit2rule wrote: post #182
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently only Firefox saves the source URL. In PDFs saved from Safari or Chrome on macOS I can't find the URL anywhere. Maybe I'm missing something.

Interesting. For me, its right there on the bottom-left of the footer, always. /tmpᐅ pdftotext Add\ Comment\ -\ Hacker\ News.pdf - |grep http https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=23232588&goto=threads%...

Weird. It's not in there when I store it.

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

#184

Post by detaro »

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…

I really hate this kind of response. No, your thing is not strictly better. It's cool, it might be better for you and many others, but it doesn't even do the same thing (archive all visited pages)!

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

#185

Post by burntsushi »

snazz wrote: post #35
gregsadetsky wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, makes sense.

> 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…

ripgrep can actually do this seamlessly with its preprocessors: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/b72ad8f8aa897191c...

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

#186

Post by Semaphor »

BlackForestBoy wrote: post #165
Semaphor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it still buggy? I had a similar experience, but it looks and feels a lot smoother and faster now.

It's way better now but still some way to go! Kind of a bummer that this trended one week too early - next week we'll publish a big release with performance, UX and stability improvements.

Been running it in the background since this thread came up. Everything is stable and fast so far. I’ll see what happens after I import my history tonight ;)

But that is great to know, I’ll hold out for that update then, even if I have some problems. And I’m happy to see you finished premium, that didn’t exist the last time.

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

#187

Post by andrepd »

fit2rule wrote: post #135
andrepd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Open the page and you will probably realise that unless you want to pay for sync, this extention works offline.

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

#188

Post by egberts1 »

Awful lot of different overhead for a server. What I am still waiting for is a nice single command (or Docker) to host this privately without the use of a 3rd-party go-between (even if it is E2E-secured.

Closest thing I’ve found is Mozilla Sync but none of their mobile app are configurable to use your own server ... yet.

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

#189

Post by kilroy123 »

methou wrote: post #123

I remember using this software last time, it is wayyyy~ too buggy, it stalls, crashes, and slows down the browser. Also that import feature is actually crawling the site, beware if you are using a proxy or something with rate limit.

That was my experience as well. I really gave it a good try for two days. After that, I got fed up and deleted it.

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

#190

Post by dangoljames »

This extension (Memex) flies wide of the mark. I won't elaborate beyond saying that as a tool it suffers technically from the constraints imposed by the operational context of browser extensions and as a business enterprise it's focus on revenue generation cripples it as an effective tool in the technical sense. Additionally, it lacks much of the functionality one anticipates in the most simple of tools of any abstraction, such as the ability to directly and conveniently edit previously committed atomic text.

Also you guys' successful use of pdfs for offline preservation is intriguing and I find it interesting that it satisfies your needs, but I think it only half a solution. I need something that can periodically and passively digest my annotated bookmarks semantically, producing a pool of 'hot terms', deep search the web for them in the background, and bring to my attention things that meet a configurable 'level of interest'. Additionally I'd want such a system to be a core part of a personal research management tool that would integrate any content I might drop on it in the deliberate, overt sense as well.

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