HPI VS grasp

If this is interesting to you, you should check out the interesting work that karlicoss and others have done with "Human Programming Interface" [0] / [1].

I've been kicking this idea around for quite a few years and have gone through multiple iterations before finding HPI and tossing out all my work in favor of building off theirs.

HPI is a great platform to build your own stuff off and benefit from all the work that has already been done because imo building a good foundation is the hardest part. Sean Breckenridge's HPI-API is super interesting and useful, could likely be worked into this search engine concept, quite sure Sean actually has both newsboat and Firefox modules already made.

I wrote modules of my own and made an authentication wrapped HPI-API and a GraphQL instance but currently in the middle of an infra move so nothing super cool to show off.

Lots of interesting stuff in collecting and leveraging your data. If any of this stuff catches your eye, I highly encourage browsing karlicoss' exobrain [2] because there are some interesting things in there.

[0]: https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1]: my own stuff, not trying to step on Karli, just wanted a 3 letter org for my stuff: https://github.com/hpi

[2]: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html

My version of this: Human Programming Interface https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

It's a bit heavier on the automatic data aggregation side, but has some manual inputs as data sources too.

This is my approach!

I'm using HPI [0] as a sort of universal API for almost all of my data (manual notes, bookmarks, instant messages, internet comments, etc)

Then I use it in tools like Orger [1] and Promnesia [2] which function as my second brain

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/orger

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

I suppose HPI[0] kind of is that? ;)

A community repository would be super nice for those. Something along the lines of DefinitelyTyped[1], all managed through git, easily integrates with other stuff (like shown on npmjs.org when the @types package exists), allows maintainers to "own" the adapters they contribute. It's really the N adapters * T time per adapter that really makes it hard for one person to do. That plus monitoring API changes/flakiness of each adapter to make sure the data is still solid.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI

[1] https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped

I'm working on tools/projects to unify, access, interact and use my personal data for quantified self, knowledge management, etc.

A couple of examples:

- https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme

- https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#readme

Would very much love to discuss it with other people, collaborate etc.

Emacs is born as a human-computer interface, not specifically a PIM/PKM systems (Personal Information Management systems, Personal Knowledge Management systems), those are born at Xerox Parc and they never really took off, unfortunately. You can find a small intro like https://doi.org/10.1145/1480506.1480524 you can find many research articles and thesis on the ACM and other places, try https://karl-voit.at/tagstore/downloads/Voit2011.pdf by /u/publicvoit today in Emacs the most popular of such systems in org-roam, a wrapper/accessing tool for org-mode, witch is probably one of the most powerful, Memacs is another classic one that do something more and something less, Dimitri Gerasimov have it's own public HPI https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html with Grasp and Promnesia extensions for Emacs and probably many others do exists but they are used/developed by a small community and while in the "old" wiki book before, "personal note/evernote boom", now "zettelkasten boom" interest keep being there documentation especially at newcomer level is nearly zero... There are research papers, few whole books, tons of articles, but nothing like a complete and simple learning path...

Their author have developed a more complex script collection (HPI, https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html) witch is a bit confuse, but seems alive and for certain aspects do extra things then memacs (https://github.com/novoid/Memacs).

Side note: His Promnesia and HPI projects are just mind blowing!

Some of my favourites:

- "5. Life engine" and "92. Personal Data API"

   I'm working on this in "Human Programming Interface" :) https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme It's far from solving these in general, but it works for me very well.

There is an extension called Grasp which acts as a web clipper, you highlight the relevant part & add a tag. It's pretty great. But it only appends to a file. https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html witch is another small example of automation to a certain extent.

I use grasp to capture links from the browser. It also captures any text you have selected on the page and you can add tags and a description.

I'm not using browser bookmarks anymore, instead I am just using plaintext files (org-mode in my case). When I want to make a bookmark I use grasp [0] to simply capture in in the 'links.org' file, possibly with some notes/selected text and tags. Now and then I would skim through this file, refile the most important/interesting things to other files, and put the rest into 'later.org' (things I might never look at again :) ). The upside is that bookmarks become alive this way, you can easily edit them, add more context, interlink, etc.

I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].

Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.

That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507

In tech terms, behind the scene, yes is complex, but in practical terms just see https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp/ :-)

Grasp (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasp and https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html for the system/python listener) and Promnesia (https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html) help me "import" quick bookmarks to org-mode (I can't use org-protocol with firejail, at least I have to tweak firejail and I never tried to do so). They demand a small effort (perhaps a quick python venv somewhere in the home to remain self-contained) but they are helpful.

for reading, I'm currently trying to set up elfeed and come sort of capture like grasp. My idea is to use org-mode to also log those things (kinda) effortless.