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Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

getpolarized.io

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Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#111

Post by equalunique »

Today I first discovered that Pocket, which is the integrated service associated with that odd icon in FireFox that I had never clicked on before. It's like Instapaper, which is also something I have never used. Both of those seem to be online services, like Polar, with APIs to support browser extensions, Android integration, and other stuff like that.

I was pretty disappointed that FireFox integrated a service that was proprietary and not even one that was GDPR-compliant.

I have been looking for a hackable alternative to Google Keep. In the past, Pinboard.io had served me well, but now I am looking for something more. I want not just to store bookmarks, not just to archive web pages, but really to have all these at my fingertips for analysis. I want to shift the balance I have between consuming new information and munging on the information that's already come my way.

Polar seems to be a great alternative because it's a computer application that's 100% self-hosted. I would like something that could be run in a federated way, like Mastodon, but this is still _very_ nice. Since I own the data, I'm not worried about any limitations. I especially like that various forms of cloud sync are supported (looking at you, Syncthing).

I see Electron bashed on HN from time to time. I have no opinion about it personally. Even if there were some noticeable overhead, the capabilities this offers are probably worth it.

Super exciting. I'll give it a go.

Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository

#112

Post by 2sk21 »

mongol wrote: post #109
2sk21 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inspired by the work of the famous psychologist Endel Tulving ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Tulving ), I have come up with a simple technique that works for me. I simply keep two text files called "Episodic" and "Semantic" in Dropbox corresponding to the two major forms of human memory. Episodic memory is associated with specific episodes while Semantic memory is simply facts that we have accumulated througho…

Do you keep everything in just those files? How are the files themselves structured?

At the moment, these are just text files and I keep all of the facts that I need to know in them. The "semantic" file is organized by topic and the "episodic" file is like a diary. As I said, this is very low tech but it somehow works well.
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