fit2rule

65 ms·

391.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Cool. Let me know when I can extract the full text contents from such files using common, built-in tools on your average fresh install of MacOS/Linux. PDF works just fine. It presents a feasible view of the original data, and allows
392.
by fit2rule 6y ago
PDF just has better tooling for search, which supplants my need for proper formatting since by the point I'm searching for things in my history its the content that matters to me anyway, exclusive of the original formatting.
393.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Inasmuch as every PDF still has the URL to the original page, for my uses - I'd say yes, it is bookmarking. Its not like I'd cut the spine off every book in my library and create an index out of the covers ..
394.
by fit2rule 6y ago
What I think is interesting is that this simple technique, which was so obvious to me having grown up with computers before there were filesystems, really - is now an interesting technique worth productising. To me, that indicates a bit of
395.
by fit2rule 6y ago
I print to the Desktop, then clean it up at the end of the day by moving the files into what is admittedly a massive collection of files in a single directory .. On one hand, it seems messy - but on the other hand, its incredibly useful to
396.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Yes, manually, but as I stated elsewhere: its muscle memory and smooth as an operation for me locally anyway now. I often go through the archive, find the HN comment PDF's I've created, and then automatically update them to get wh
397.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Off-line mode, my data is my data, and I can process the data freely and easily using my own local tools without getting anyone else' CPU involved. And the formatting issue isn't really that big of a deal, if I'm honest. The
398.
by fit2rule 6y ago
PDF gives me an off-line readable version of the website, and is pretty compatible with pdftotext as a pipeline tool... I'm not sure that formatting is such a huge issue - I'm yet to find a web page I can't extract some meani
399.
by fit2rule 6y ago
1: Force of habit, since I use grep and silversearcher elsewhere a lot, but 2: I hate the mdfind indexer service putting garbage all over my disks, so I've turned it off and forgotten about it.
400.
by fit2rule 6y ago
It depends on the site - but I haven't found 'lost formatting' to be an issue at all - since, when I want to do a granular search I'm using 'pdftotext' to search on plaintext, and when I find a PDF of interest,
401.
by fit2rule 6y ago
If the intention is to save data from your bank website, you're probably going to have to jump through hoops anyway, assuming your bank is doing its job. (Or just remember to use Reader mode first..) However, if the intention is to ju
402.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Good to know for future discussions about this technique. I wonder if there is a way to make Chrome on Windows behave better in this regard .. seems quite shortsighted to me that they'd remove the links, although maybe a security boff
403.
by fit2rule 6y ago
I've since learned in this thread that Chrome and Firefox are not as good as Safari for this technique - it hasn't impacted me much since I only use Chrome/Firefox for development, mostly. And although I do occasionally check
404.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Yeah, I should probably set that up some time, but I've become reliant on my muscle memory for my forwarding-to-desktop flow ..
405.
by fit2rule 6y ago
$ pdftotext | grep sometext ^^ first advantage Also: a) Formatting is not lost, it just changes to fit the default paper size I've got selected (A4) but doesn't really make much difference, since its a snapshot, and b) URL is righ
406.
by fit2rule 6y ago
If there is anyone that could successfully submit a patch containing only comment breadcrumbs, it'd be Mr. Carmack. I'd love to read it, personally.
407.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Safari for the win! ;) (Seems like a bug in Firefox to me.. maybe this should be a config option..)
408.
by fit2rule 6y ago
I use Safari and Firefox mostly, and haven't yet run into any of the issues you bring up - pdftotext gives me full text search with ease. All the links still work, PDF's are easy to read (assuming the page doesn't do weird l
409.
by fit2rule 6y ago
If I need to save a page I've read on mobile, I mail myself the link to my desktop and print it there, where the PDF Archive lives. Its muscle memory at this point. Still, would be nice if the Browser vendors would cotton on to how po
410.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Yeah, my computer is fast enough that I can just do "find . -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext {} \; | grep -i someSearchTerm" and come back later. Bonus points that it stays in my Terminal for reference later in the day as
411.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Reader View is the solution to the A4- problem, imho. But I honestly don't mind the rendering issue - this is just a reference repository, after all. If I really need the cleaner page, I either Reader-View it beforehand, or just open
412.
by fit2rule 6y ago
I just use the PDF defaults from whatever browser I'm using at the time. Nothing special involved, just the defaults. I do use 'pdftotext' to do more fine-grained searching if I need to - but for the most part I find that a
413.
by fit2rule 6y ago
There's nothing to productize. You just use CMD[,Control}-P, select "Print to PDF", save to a relevant folder, and off you go. If that's too many steps, use Automator or whatever the equivalent is on your OS to make a
414.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Every web page I'll ever want to refer to, ever again. There are no good reasons for exceptions to this technique, imho. If the PDF version is difficult to read - which it rarely is, by the way - all I need to do is open the PDF and u
415.
by fit2rule 6y ago
This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found int
416.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Ha, I had the same experience on a date with my brand new tiBook in 2001 .. wouldn't play the DVD .. but VLC, which had been released around the same time as the tiBook, did though! In my case, we'd carried my tiBook up to the law
417.
by fit2rule 6y ago
America MUST fight more wars in order to keep the US dollar primacy in world markets. If it doesn't, and if people switch to another currency (see for example the attempt by Iraq and Libya to create the African Dinar to replace US $)
418.
by fit2rule 6y ago
I have absolutely zero democratic involvement in the USA's intelligence apparatus, although I am liable to be a subject of its attention. This violates my participation in my own country's sovereign legislation designed to protec
419.
by fit2rule 6y ago
Exactly. If we spent half as much making peace as we do funding war and terror, we'd all be multilingual and a lot more tolerant of cultures not our own...
420.
by fit2rule 6y ago
>Do you understand what an 'ally' is? They're allies. Helping allies route around local legislation designed to protect the rights of citizens in one state, by using another states surveillance apparatus to violate those r

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