Thread

1. MomsAVoxell · 1789670760 · focus · HN ↗

   I attain this without involving an untrustworthy third party, with one simple trick: Print to PDF.

   Every single web page I’ve found interesting, since the advent of the Web, I have printed to PDF and stored locally for my own personal reference.

   Something like 80,000+ files - my own copy of my own Internet - indexable, searchable.

   Available offline. Something to read when I am far out to sea.

   There is no need to involve third parties in your Internet history - no matter how trustworthy they seem to want to appear.

   Print to PDF, and you’ve got everything you need, safe and sound.

   1. nottorp · 1789673087 · focus · HN ↗

      Except search. I want search. Going to try this project.

      1. MomsAVoxell · 1789681667 · focus · HN ↗

         Yeah, about search:

             $ pdfgrep -r -i -n -H "your mom" ~/PDFArchives/
         

         Very effective, very fast, very private. Bonus points if the PDF filename itself is derived from a well formulated <title> tag, such that you can just use “ls” ..

         1. nottorp · 1789765780 · focus · HN ↗

            Yes, but that's a solution for the stuff you consciously save. While this is a solution for stuff you see but decide it was interesting weeks after you closed that tab and you only have a vague memory of what it was about.

            1. MomsAVoxell · 1789821989 · focus · HN ↗

               Well, I consciously save anything I’ve been interested in for at least 2 minutes, it’s a perfectly good way to filter interests - and the PDF solution safeguards those interests from being exploited by third parties.
      2. krackers · 1789686282 · focus · HN ↗

         You could combine it with existing products like DevonThink that are meant for researchers organizing documents and provide tagging, semantic search, similarity graphs, and so on.

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