How Do I Find Broken Links? - Questions For Corbett #075
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Many viewers write in to ask about broken links in the archives. In the spirit of finding solutions, today James runs through a few basic methods you can use to replace broken links when you encounter the dreaded 404 error online.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds.com / YouTube or Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES:
How to Find Broken Links Online
The Library of Alexandria is on Fire
You Can’t Win. Don’t Even Try!
Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program
Filed in: Questions For Corbett
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Thanks James. Some great info here.
I do have a question though. Do you (or anyone else) have any tips on how to organize your files/documents and etc. after a downloaded? Nothing worse than having 10000+ files in a single directory/folder and trying to trawl through them, this can get very messy very quickly.
Just some ideas here. 1:Folder names for websites/article dates for example all your articles go in to ‘corbett-report’. 2: Linking files into other folders. 3: Setting up some type of database. 4 permuted indexes (great utility ‘ptx’). 5. changing the name of files to at least include a relevant date.
Victor
You could get “Obsidian” notes (free software for Mac, windows and Linux) and you could just use it as an electronic FILE CARD system….. copy paste the FILE NAME into a note and THEN under it list search terms prefixed with # and then just search the # in the app for a list of every file you marked with that #
BEST thing about that is you can open those ‘cards’ in any text editor so its mostly future proof..
https://obsidian.md/ you can get it free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBk2kg8Gm_U tags are about 3 min in… you really SHOULD watch the whole video and the one below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88
BEGINNER video… watch the hipster and he will show you all kinds of tricks… but you really only need the search bar and note making if your making a searchable index
The issue is that you need to take the time to # and list the ideas the article holds… on the bright side note taking improves your recall and comprehension
Httrack can to grab a website and organize it for offline storage and browsing…but you CAN link your local files with Obsidian if you want to
You can use also “The Brain” mindmaping software but its not as future proof or nice
Thanks Duck,
Didn’t know about obsidian. I’ll check all this out later tonight.
I knew this was likely being discussed somewhere here recently as we desperately try to save the Library of Alexandria while it’s actually ablaze.
If I understand the information you’ve offered here correctly, Obsidian is a system to organize information we download, right? I’m positive the videos you linked will help a lot to learn how to use it so thank you very much. Good thing, too, as I actually hadn’t given a thought to organization yet.
I’m sure that ppl on this site understand the sheer amount of information I want to download and save. Just know that this site is only a portion of it.
I would love any suggestions on how & where to store it. I don’t just want it on my laptop or PC. I don’t want it in a cloud – I don’t care for those clouds & had no idea I even had a personal cloud filled with stuff until I got a notification it was full & an offer to buy more cloud space.
It was mentioned the Obsidian system for organizing the documents was somewhat ‘future proof’ so that’s another thing I’d want in the storage of it.
This may sound like a stupid question but I’d rather ask it than end up w/ insufficient storage or something.
Thank you & whoever may read this, for any suggestions how to go about getting set up to start getting information safe & secured.
🙂
Common question: How to organize random files found online?
Common reaction: I don’t know where to put it, so I won’t even download it.
If you don’t have a folder to put it, make a generic one like /data/Documents/ALL and save it there until you find a better place. If possible, make sure the file name contains some meaningful keyword. Don’t waste time thinking of a great name but if it’s just called “123.pdf”, maybe name it “cia 123.pdf”.
I’m also searching for a better way to organize such things – but in any case, save important stuff in a generic place rather than discarding it because it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.
[SNIP – No urls without titles and explanations, please. -JC]
“Amazon: The Best of All Worlds.”
An incontinence-inducing quip.
On this topic, two very useful browser extensions/add-ons:
SingleFile
SingleFile is a Web Extension (and a CLI tool) compatible with Chrome, Firefox (Desktop and Mobile), Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, Waterfox, Yandex browser, and Opera. It helps you to save a complete web page into a single HTML file.
https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
Web Archives
Web Archives is a browser extension which helps you to find archived and cached versions of web pages. Searches can be initiated from the right-click context menu, the browser toolbar, or the address bar in case of a server error.
https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
Like that single file one. I tend to be old school and right click, save the file and the work the file to basically keep a text version on the article for instance.
Also: There are quite a few time traveller archives out there:
http://timetravel.mementoweb.org/about/
Also Boolean values is well, valuable knowledge to have
Thanks for that.. will take a look at single file which looks like it could tidy up my storage
If there is no proper search function on a website or if you know something you want is buried on a specific website you can use the “site:” function in any search engine. Lets say you want to find topic “broken links” on corbettreport.com, you go to your search engine of choice and type the following:
site: corbettreport.com broken links
Here is another simple first trick that works surprisingly often. If you are looking for ‘The Descent of Man’ like the person who contacted James, and it does not come up if you just enter the name of the book in the search field, try to add a space and pdf (just the three letters), and many times the book or document will come up as result. Not an earth-moving trick, and it doesn’t work every time, but useful sometimes.
Why is Duck-Duck-Go bad?
Duck-duck-go is “mostly” ok but they are getting more and more google-ized in how they slant results or at least thats what I heard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkv4rrdFBU0 video on Searx..
THIS is probably the best way to search right now… always pick a random instance.
sorry for the YT link but I’m on my other computer
EVERYTHING in tech is getting to need watching for when to hop off… once its good enough that people start using it because its free’er the big money comes and starts screwing with it….Its like Linux, its still ok for now but the SJW incursion is in no way a natural or accidental thing… they are the tools of big money.
Searx seems to be excellent. I just started using it.
It was dead easy to set up as default search engine in Microsoft Edge.
“…. in Microsoft Edge…”
🙂 lol ….
Get into Linux while its still good 🙂 even I can use something like Pop_OS or Elementary OS
https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ you can play with dozens of distros and just boot off a thumbdrive and play until you find one that works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft3ryelF9O4
Linux puts the FUN back in computers and you get to own your computer again unlike windows
Hi Duck is there a way to get into that and/or learn about that? how/what/where/who?
We can do better than DuckDuckGo – by Drew DeVault
DuckDuckGo is one of the long-time darlings of the technophile’s pro-privacy recommendations, and in fact the search engine that I use myself on the daily. They certainly present a more compelling option than many of the incumbents, like Google or Bing. Even so, DuckDuckGo is not good enough, and we ought to do better.
I have three grievances with DuckDuckGo:
1. It’s not open source. Almost all of DDG’s software is proprietary, and they’ve demonstrated gross incompetence in privacy in what little software they have made open source. Who knows what else is going on in the proprietary code?
2. DuckDuckGo is not a search engine. It’s more aptly described as a search engine frontend. They do handle features like bangs and instant answers internally, but their actual search results come from third-parties like Bing. They don’t operate a crawler for their search results, and are not independent.
3. The search results suck! The authoritative sources for anything I want to find are almost always buried beneath 2-5 results from content scrapers and blogspam. This is also true of other search engines like Google. Search engines are highly vulnerable to abuse and they aren’t doing enough to address it.
There are some FOSS attempts to do better here, but they all fall flat. searX is also a false search engine — that is, they serve someone else’s results. YaCy has their own crawler, but the distributed design makes results untolerably slow, poor quality, and vulnerable to abuse, and it’s missing strong central project leadership.
We need a real, working FOSS search engine, complete with its own crawler.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/17/Better-than-DuckDuckGo.html
Thanks for this info, it is much appreciated 🙂
I think we need to save podcasts as well.
I can no longer subscribe to The Corbett Report on Google Podcast player.
Not only did it unsubscribe me but when I try to subscribe again it freezes the whole app and it crashes.
I do also use RSS now and get emails but they can stop that at any time these days.