I keep making bookmarks, but I don't know why... I never, ever, ever, ever go back and use them. I even think about how I'm not going to use a bookmark as I create it. :-\
I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.
I suffer from the same affliction for the most part, but I do end up capturing sets of bookmarks related to research or projects that I share with colleagues. It also sometimes happens that I start a new browser profile for learning a tech and save all my bookmarks from that with the code. That has helped when it's a case of "how did I do this one thing I know I did in throwaway project X?"
OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that).
And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later.
Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications.
But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more.
Kindof like a bookmark.
This is the only reliable way for me to find something I have a vague recollection of, which happens quite often. In the past I used to simply type whatever I could recall into Google search and often find it, but that just doesn't work any more. It's not just the SEO stuff, also the bias towards recent content seems to have increased, and obviously the pace of content generation as well. The haystack is much bigger now than it used to be.
But don't let its attempt at a friendly README fool you, it's personal-grade software of "works-on-my-machine", and barely, quality.
If you want to look at something more polished, I think https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo and https://github.com/thesephist/monocle are worth taking a look.
Also there's the https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI library, which you could build on, though it mainly relies on data dumps from the different services instead of crawling and fetching through APIs, which is why I didn't use it. Keeping up with API changes is bad enough, I don't want to deal with undocumented dump formats...
The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.
Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.
How do you work with physical sources?
What makes you think it's a pipe dream?
My Pipe dream... I wonder what the actual quantity of unique text a human actually sees in their lifetime. Could this be easily stored? Like every word I ever read anytime?
The minimum useful version for me would be something that recognizes all media types AND allows commenting/notes in a standard format that links between them and is easily manageable.
In particular that would mean for me:
- read/highlight/notate/manage/organize functionality for epubs, PDFs.
- import physical books via ISBN and allow me to attach my notes there (ideally with a companion phone app that lets me scan/photograph relevant sections.
- photo library (ideally containing the aforementioned book pics while leaving them linked to the notes).
- multiple routes for surfacing old stuff.
But in all honesty: the reason I think it’s a pipe dream is because I’m fairly certain the limiting factor is being human, not the technology. Like I’m kind of hoping for a new paradigm for digesting media, but I also recognize that’s a pretty steep ask.
Relatedly I’ve been trying to build what I’m talking about out of emacs since COVID started, and I get some of the way there by org roam + org noter, but the difficulty of connecting emacs with various work cloud services and such has proved quite daunting.
But I’m still at it, because most tools of this nature are dev centric, whereas I’m prose centric, so much of my frustration comes from having tools that are CLOSE but fall apart in the last mile workflow (for my purposes).
Honorable mention to hookapp for mac, which I’m still wrapping my head around but may end up solving some of my nicher problem areas.
Would it be useful to create a 3D world where those PDFs take up space and stay where they're put? Let's say you open an app on your computer that shows you a virtual room, and there's a menu that lets you select a folder from your computer full of PDFs. You open the folder and a pile of physical documents appears as either a stack, a spread, or something messier.
Viewing from there would be really important. You'd need to bring the camera in really close to give you the ability to read anything. Or magnifying glasses. Maybe the ability to clone and transform pages and parts of pages while leaving them linked to their parent documents.
A mix of AR glasses and physical simulacra is where I expect it to go eventually. As in, I have 10 book “blanks”, and when I use AR glasses, they become whatever I wish (from my library). Ideally I could then flip around the blanks and see the content of the books — making it much more like my actual physical workflow.
Tl;dr you’re 100% right that the means and method of viewing are critical to what I’m after. But I think the main through line for me is that if I’m having to manipulate the camera AND the content, it leads back to the same issues I currently face. The point for me is being able to interact as I usually do, but with access to “physical” versions of everything I have digital (albeit with digital convenience — such as exif data readily available on the “back” of a photograph).
Hope that all makes sense and thanks for treating this so seriously!
I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.
https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...