Live data from Hacker News

Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

web.archive.org

151–160 of 161 posts

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onyx BOOX Max Lumi here, 13'3 inches of 2200x1650 pixel, 220 dpi, 16 greyscale goodness. The device is quite frankly fantastic, despite a somewhat anemic (for my purposes) onboard storage of 64 GB (doubled in the follow-in Max Lumi 2). (I'm perennially well above 90% utilised, though a good chunk of that are podcasts.) I've written about that at length in other HN comments, search should turn those up for anyone inte…

I was considered 13” Onyx Boox Lumi Max, and still do, but couldn’t justify as I don’t do that much organized reading. Onyx made annoying product decision to not include microSD to expensive 10 and 13 inch models, while still keeping it on 8” Leaf2 and Page. Are you using written notes while reading on your Lumi Max or typing only? With such reading system I would look into Obsidian/Notion/Readwise/Logseq/Tana runnin…

The BOOX devices do come with an OTG port, and it's possible to attach a MicroSD card via that, though the arrangement is somewhat perilous (risking physical damage to the card, OTG attachment, and port) and not ideal.

I too would have preferred an integrated MicroSD slot. Current cards are available in 1TB+ sizes, which should satisfy even my prodigious appetite.

I do make use of handwritten notes as well, both in documents (Neoreader) and in the notetaking app. I've found that far more useful than I'd anticipated, though searching notes is of course challenging.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I was on a flight so I downloaded some paywalled articles on my phone using safari reading list. Once we took off and I lost connectivity I opened the article and saw - the paywall page. I tried looking for mobile read later apps that save offline and save what I saw not what their servers see, but not much luck. I’ve my own app which can save pages as I saw them and create reader views out of them, but no…

That’s really rough. Instapaper (free version) and GoodLinks ($5) both work perfectly for me without internet access. Haven’t tried substacks in GoodLinks, but Instapaper grabs them without issue. Nice to hear about hamsterbase, will check it out.

I should mention, archive search in Instapaper doesn’t work without a premium subscription, but works fine for the 500 articles you can keep offline on your device.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pla…

Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my career, I've never kept significant notes and never found myself missing them. I'm wondering if there's something I don't know that I don't know here.

I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject

I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour

I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#155
post #114

Wrong tool for the job. If you want to do serious research and archival, use something like DevonThink. I have 20 GB+ worth of stuff there (millions of items including 10 year email history) and it still does full-text search in under 500ms.

I have an information triage process that ends with DEVONThink. I save bookmarks to drafts app, go through them when I have time. And if they are worth it, I save then in DEVONThink where I go through and mark them up.

DEVONThink rocks.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#156

Most "read it later" services save web pages on their servers, which cannot preserve paywalls, ad-free content, pages that require login or registration, and pages on a local network. Sharing why I decided to develop my own "read it later" software. 1. I have a habit of saving web pages I like, most of which are in MHTML format, some are saved as single-file HTML, and others are web archives saved on iOS. Altogether,…

My understanding is that Readwise uses the HTML you're seeing on your browser to make the copy and this works with paywalls better than most services I've tried. The downside is you need to give their desktop browser plugin more permissions than is ideal and this doesn't work when saving from mobile.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value

I'm not the op but posted about my own text system. In short, I never used images in my notes even when adding them was easy, so I saved myself the trouble of having to deal with rich document formats. With the goal of portability and tool agnosticism in mind, I believe a plain text file is better for me. Everything can break or be replaced, yet I'll be able to continue my work habits using nothing more than notepad…

Markdown and html can display local images. The only tricky thing is if you want to place images in separate folders and how you maintain that structure over time.

I believe that charts and diagrams convey a lot of information that cannot be easily reproduced with raw text. I guess it ultimately depends on the topic you are reviewing.

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#158
post #3

The Pocket thing was when I started to feel Mozilla lost their way. For a while I tried to maintain a patch that completely removed it. But, that's not fun. The Idea of Pocket is great - seems everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base. And the archival feature was/is cool (I added the same to my own PKB). And Pocket for organizing, messy like the article says. I do tagging and SQLite FTS - works a treat.

The times I might use pocket I almost always definitively prefer using httrack.... And the rest I just save a copy of the site to a file....

Re: Pocket gets worse the more you use it (2019)

#159

Re: tags > It takes me 45 seconds just to scroll from the top of the list to the end on the Android app. There's the problem with over classification. Having had the same problem, I've reduced the tags to around 10 which is also a bit too much. Sometimes I think 3 should be enough: low, medium and high priority.

I'd be curious what those tags are, and how you use them.
Post reply on HN