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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)

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.

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.

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