Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
21–30 of 161 posts
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#22My use case for Pocket is completely different from the author’s. I use it every day to get web content onto a Kobo ereader. It strips ads and often gets stuff behind paywalls. My family shares the same pocket account and we often end up discussing things that get synced to all the kobos in the house. This functionality is so useful and seems like a well kept secret. If it went away I’d really be upset.
someone from Mozilla and Kobo should be reading this - you just came up with a reason to use Pocket which is the whole thing they were missing.
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life. otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time. that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced…
The only revenue stream that isn’t user-hostile is subscriptions. And people generally hate that: imo, the web ended up ad-supported because users did not want to pay every website they used directly and it remains ad-supported because users continue to reject the viable alternatives (subscriptions, services like Blendle, some micropayment scheme).
Yeah, subscriptions is tough for this because it needs to be a solution which lasts a lifetime - it's hard to confidently subscribe to something that I may end up paying for decades, especially if it may turn out not to be the right solution in the long-run.
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#24I’ve tried all the third party services for archiving interesting things over the years but nothing beats saving everything to your local filesystem using [SingleFile](https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile) and using a full-text search frontend over the directory (something like Houdahspot, for example).
SingleFile even has an iOS extension (and easySearch is very nice for iOS search - although not quite as nice as a desktop experience, owing to iOS limitations).
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…
i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life. otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time. that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced…
Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
by saving things for later you mean that a site copy is stored somewhere, so you could find it again years later?
The paid version does this. It keeps the text even if the original article was removed.
ok, then the free version is just like the bookmarks.
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#27Pocket isn’t a bookmark database, it is a tool for saving things to read later. The user interface is primarily built for reading, not organizing. I use Pocket extensively for reading, but I use Raindrop separately for organizing and managing content that I want to archive for future access with proper search, filtering, and categorization. To me, these apps serve separate functions and need different user interfaces…
I don't understand. How is that different from bookmarks?
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?
Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…
I’d love to hear a bit about how often you actually search, and some examples you’ve found valuable.
I have ambitions to do this occasionally, and I tracked things and took notes a lot for a while, but I never found myself using it.
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You need notes that you can search through, and useful information that you've collected. Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction. My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+…
i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life. otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time. that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced…
Agree with the plainest-of-plain-text approach. For me, the more structured the note system, the less it is used. I have a simple script called `n` that operates on a `notes.txt` on my NAS. If given arguments, it appends a timestamp and the arguments (verbatim) to the notes file. This serves as a super quick way to jot something down or log an action (`n determined Krylon adheres best for project X`, `n timestamp placeholder for server X reboot`). Alternatively, calling it with no arguments appends a timestamp and opens vim in insert mode at the bottom of the file. Finally, I have an alias `nt` to open `less` at the bottom of the notes file, for quick review (`alias nt=less +G ~/share/notes.txt`).
The main script is:
~$ cat share/bin/n
#! /usr/bin/env bash
cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
echo >> notes.txt
echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
echo ' #' >> notes.txt
if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
echo $@ >> notes.txt
tail notes.txt
else
vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
fi
More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.
All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.
Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)
#30Pinboard.in has been the perfect long term bookmark solution for me. It has simple tagging, the site is clean and easy to read, search is excellent. Have gladly paid year over year the 22 bucks for the full shebang.