Current
Summary of historical research sessions
Problem statement
In the process of researching a single question—e.g. “which neighbourhood should I stay in, when I visit Barcelona?”—I might execute a handful of searches, then open and read 10+ results before I come to a conclusion.
The fruits of this labour feel quite ephemeral. I’ll probably “save” the final output of this research by taking a note somewhere—e.g. my trip planning doc. But it’s difficult to “drop back into” a stage of research—e.g. when planning a future trip—without taking a tedious amount of manual notes about the intermediate steps involved.
Ideas
Using https://www.rewind.ai/ and asking it to summarize the outcome of my research session, then saving that in a markdown note somewhere.
Ultra-short USB-C cable
I’ve got an Anker MagSafe battery that is very convenient for on-the-go charging because it magnetically secures itself to the back of my iPhone. The wireless charging itself though is not as good as wired charging. It’s slower, less efficient, and—in a warm environment—results in my phone getting extremely hot, and temporarily pausing charging.
So I bought this 13 cm USB-C cable to use with the magsafe charger. This solves the above issue with wireless charging. This is the shortest such cable I could find, but it’s still unnecessarily long. I’d love to have a USB-C cable that is just 3 cm long, to enable wired charging without a cable sticking out of my pocket.
Alternative to Google Timeline
Some people find Google Timeline creepy. I find it quite useful, e.g. for finding the name of that awesome restaurant I ate at in Barcelona on a trip two years ago, when a friend planning a trip asks for recommendations.
But I have been on a multi-year quest to de-google my digital life—I use Fastmail for email, Kagi for search, and Arc for browsing. It’d be nice to find a non-Google alternative for Timeline.
I tried Arc (not the browser), but it didn’t quite click. The inference of activity types is just okay, and adjusting incorrect data feels cumbersome. It also seems to lack basic settings, like preferred units of distance.
Archive
Search engine with customizable ranking
It feels like Google search has become progressively worse over the past decade. I often find myself typing a keyboard macro which expands to site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com to manually restrict results to domains that I trust.
This works okay when I can anticipate the specific domain of results I am interested in. But it doesn’t scale well to multiple domains. Why can’t I instruct Google to prefer results from certain domains, and to avoid from others?
The closest solution I’ve found is setting up a personal Google Programmable Search Engine which indexes specific domains. However, I have been entirely unsuccessful at getting it to slightly up/down-rank specific websites. If I include a more prominent domain—such as The Atlantic, it subsequently dominates more niche domains (e.g. lesswrong.com) in all queries.
Update [2023-10-01]: I came across Kagi, a new search engine which offers exactly this feature.
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