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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. T

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.

zagrebian 3y ago
> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?
- simonw 3y ago
  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/ https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+ public GitHub repositories for code and issue notes, 100+ private repositories for private code and private issue notes, a Pocket account with 8700 items in it, plus the contents of my 15+ year old Dropbox folder structure, an old Evernote dump and a continually growing S3 bucket of larger things. I tried to tie it all together with a unified search engine, but that needs some more work: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/ https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...
  - serf 3y ago
    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) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good. Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
      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).
      - simonw 3y ago
        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.
        fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
        I think some combination of a subscription and source escrow would be ideal here: if the service goes under, some third-party releases the source to subscribed customers.
    - BigElephant 3y ago
      Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value
      - progman32 3y ago
        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 or even EDIT.EXE. I'm reasonably confident markdown or html will be readable for a long time, but I value ultra simplicity here. I think ultimately it's a matter of personal taste. When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    I just use OneNote.
  - FemmeAndroid 3y ago
    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.
  - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
    As the island of your knowledge grows larger, the shores of your ignorance grow even faster.
  - blairbeckwith 3y ago
    You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind. This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your way through the western canon you’re wasting your life.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      I eventually settled on a hardback A4 notebook. I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand. Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function. Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.
      - a1o 3y ago
        I met plenty of productive people who do so with hardback notebooks and a pencil, you are good. Other thing I saw is once they are done with it they glue a paper on the cover and notedown some things and throw the notebook in a big plastic box for archival. Recently finished notebooks tend to find some time living in their desks before going into the box.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    Looking through your notes, I noticed that this link was already purple: https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-password-specific-command https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-passw... Yup, I read that just a few weeks ago. Thank you!
- djbusby 3y ago
  > What is that? For me it's a web-app tied to a PG database. But I started on SQLite. And it keeps notes, links (tagged), archive-page, put my own notes on it, etc. Many folk use things like Evernote, Pocket, Notion, DokuWiki, etc for their "stuff".
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Also vimwiki
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jck 3y ago
I remember that mozilla promised to open source the pocket backend and that went nowhere
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  There is an iOS app repo, though none for Android that I can find: <https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios> And nothing server-side either, which I suspect is what you're referring to.
jacquesm 3y ago
Pocket could have been the 'Memex', but they decided to do it server side, possibly as a way to get people to start using Mozilla/FireFox accounts. If it had been local with an email backend (IMAP or so) that would have been great.
DropInIn 3y ago
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....

zagrebian 3y ago

> everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base What is that? Do I need it?

simonw 3y ago
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/ https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+ public GitHub repositories for code and issue notes, 100+ private repositories for private code and private issue notes, a Pocket account with 8700 items in it, plus the contents of my 15+ year old Dropbox folder structure, an old Evernote dump and a continually growing S3 bucket of larger things. I tried to tie it all together with a unified search engine, but that needs some more work: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/ https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...
- serf 3y ago
  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) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good. Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    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).
    - simonw 3y ago
      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.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
        I think some combination of a subscription and source escrow would be ideal here: if the service goes under, some third-party releases the source to subscribed customers.
  - BigElephant 3y ago
    Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value
    - progman32 3y ago
      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 or even EDIT.EXE. I'm reasonably confident markdown or html will be readable for a long time, but I value ultra simplicity here. I think ultimately it's a matter of personal taste. When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".
- LegitShady 3y ago
  I just use OneNote.
- FemmeAndroid 3y ago
  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.
- FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  As the island of your knowledge grows larger, the shores of your ignorance grow even faster.
- blairbeckwith 3y ago
  You certainly don’t need - I know and have worked with many successful people who don’t have any sort of meaningful (beyond grocery list type) notes or externally-stored knowledge of any kind. This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your way through the western canon you’re wasting your life.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    I eventually settled on a hardback A4 notebook. I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand. Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function. Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.
    - a1o 3y ago
      I met plenty of productive people who do so with hardback notebooks and a pencil, you are good. Other thing I saw is once they are done with it they glue a paper on the cover and notedown some things and throw the notebook in a big plastic box for archival. Recently finished notebooks tend to find some time living in their desks before going into the box.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Looking through your notes, I noticed that this link was already purple: https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-password-specific-command https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-passw... Yup, I read that just a few weeks ago. Thank you!
djbusby 3y ago
> What is that? For me it's a web-app tied to a PG database. But I started on SQLite. And it keeps notes, links (tagged), archive-page, put my own notes on it, etc. Many folk use things like Evernote, Pocket, Notion, DokuWiki, etc for their "stuff".
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Also vimwiki
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jck 3y ago

I remember that mozilla promised to open source the pocket backend and that went nowhere

dredmorbius 3y ago
There is an iOS app repo, though none for Android that I can find: <https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios> And nothing server-side either, which I suspect is what you're referring to.

jacquesm 3y ago

Pocket could have been the 'Memex', but they decided to do it server side, possibly as a way to get people to start using Mozilla/FireFox accounts. If it had been local with an email backend (IMAP or so) that would have been great.

DropInIn 3y ago

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....