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practical_romantic  1yr ago (text post)   3280 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can anyone who's beaten a tab addiction share their strategy?

I have something like 1900 tabs open on my PC browser (only a few hundred on phone!) Some of this is old research that I can't close yet, like the heat pump pages I'll be using for the wrap-up post on that project. A lot of it is old motte convos I opened "for future reference, just in case". Lots of them are articles I... really should get around to reading someday. And some of it is literally just crud like youtube music that stopped playing and got forgotten about, recipes I was looking up, or last month's weather forecast.

Things only got out of hand this summer when my PC use dropped to almost nothing, leaving me just enough time to get on, check updates, open a bunch of stuff to read, and then whoops gotta go.

The one big advantage is that I don't have any bookmarks to organize, and tab unloading means there's little/no memory cost.

Is there a saner way to organize this sort of thing? I never had to deal with urls in college, only notes and bibliography info in .txt files on my desktop. How can I save old forum conversations in an easily searchable way? (Help me gattsuru, you're my only hope)

Have you tried Tab Snooze browser extension?

It's one of these "do you stand up to wipe your butt?" questions, because I don't understand people who have thousands, hundreds or even dozens of tabs open. I just close every tab I don't need and don't use tabs to store pages that might come in handy later. My browser on this PC (work laptop) has just one permanently open tab for the teleconferencing website, and only because I have to go to the developer tools to get it to load. When I'm done reading this thread I'll just close the tab and open a new one later when I want to read the new comments.

I am mystified by the butt-wiping question, because I quite literally can't reach my butt while sitting on the toilet. I would assume that it's basically the same for anyone. So how on earth is anyone not standing up?

I am mystified that you can't reach your own butt! (I also don't keep tabs open)

The only thing to do is to get a comprehensive study of butt wiping going. And something about tabs I guess.

I think we have the makings of an Aella Twitter poll here.

What's your method for saving things for later? For example, for that upcoming post I have about 40 articles and forum posts to quote-mine, some PDFs to cite, and a couple of online tables/spreadsheets to generate examples with. How would you go about organizing a project like that?

I simply don't have an urge to save that many things for later, I don't like writing citation and reference-heavy prose (I doubt I would make a good PhD student). If it's something really useful, it goes into Telegram saved messages or Google Keep, and then I purge them a few times a year.

Yeah, I just have my browser set to start with a single tab open to a blank page on startup, so whenever I close it any open tabs are gone.

Tabs are way better than bookmarks, imho. Tabs have the advantage of keeping things stored in memory so it's always accessible

Lots of them are articles I... really should get around to reading someday.

read em or nuke em/ probably not missing out on much

I started splitting my tabs into different windows for different contexts, then I started just bookmarking all the tabs into a bookmark folder when I was done with the subject.

For example, I would sort all Blender related or specific university course related tabs in a single window. Or my EVE or Stellaris related searches. It's a lot easier to bookmark and close a window when it's all related to one topic, and you have some trigger to reopen the bookmark folder once you come back to the topic. Makes it feel less like it's lost to the void.

I also started separating my tabs based on type even if it's not strictly not one subject. Like separating forum posts from YouTube videos from Wikipedia rabbit holes. Every bit of organization also helps to spot things you plainly don't have interest in anymore. At some point I just give up on an old video essay and put it in the watch later folder because I never check the watch later YouTube page (I don't check the folder either). I also use Tree Style Tabs, which makes it easier to rip out some recursive new tab spree onto its own context.

I can't say I've fully beaten the tab addiction though. Now I've just got a lot of windows littering my taskbar as well. I started doing things like putting my video windows or language stuff on another monitor as well as putting my study related things to another desktop (as in Win + Tab). It's certainly more organized, and I've got the satisfaction of knowing I could close these windows if I really wanted to.

Thanks. That's similar to but better than some of my coping strategies. Tree style tabs was definitely the enabler for hundreds of tabs per window!

I was using per-project session backups at one point, but it got too annoying to have to open half a dozen saved windows just to find one particular tab.

Moving things to different windows does make it easier to say "right, everything here is crap." Last time I sat down at the PC with a coffee I managed to close 3 with several hundred tabs, so realistically a few hours of dedicated time should be enough to at least get rid of everything unimportant.

I use either bookmarks or the Google Keeps extension for websites I want to save. Bookmarks are good but can make a bit disorganized and crowded easily. If you don't like Google, I'm sure there are a billion other extensions out there that will save URLs with a click of a button.

Yeah, I used to use bookmarks, and ended up with thousands of them that never got clicked again. Eventually they all got lost when I copied the wrong Firefox profile over during a drive swap.

Half of them were probably dead of linkrot, but I still have this horrible missing limb sensation that I lost something important lol.

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