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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • cecilkorik@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldcalibre 8.0
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    7 hours ago

    Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.


  • cecilkorik@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldcalibre 8.0
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    7 hours ago

    All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.

    For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.



  • I agree, making a Faustian bargain with one evil authoritarian regime because we’re afraid of the prices of the evil authoritarian regime on our border is just trading one problem for another problem. Both these countries are happy to destroy our economy, destroy the environment we live in, destroy their own people, and to destroy us if they can get away with it.

    EVs are going to be expensive if they are made responsibly by people who are paid fairly. Life is going to be expensive. This is the cost of living responsibly on this planet and having a future for ourselves and our children, and it is not negotiable and cannot be dodged, hidden, offset, or rejected. Deal with it. Be prepared to change your way of life. We will manage. We are tough, resilient people, and we will lead the way into a future that, while it might not be the utopian ideal we wished it to be, will perhaps at least be a future where we can continue to breathe air and not wildfire smoke.



  • Keep in mind that “those games” also have decades of content added through expansions and mods, it’s very difficult to separate the true base games from what they have become today, in fact a lot of them were relatively simplistic and shallow in their very first releases too. Go play the first version of one of the Sims games with no expansions and tell me if you’re having a good experience with deep and interesting mechanics for your Sims, knowing what you know now of what the Sims are capable of.

    We are comparing a game in its infancy to an established giant, of course it will pale in comparison… for now, and for quite some time. The question is whether it will catch up, because if it does, it’s going to become something very, very big. Yes that’s a big if, but it’s an if worth waiting for.



  • The only way we’re ever really going to get a healthy democracy back is if people show up to VOTE. Doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely win, doesn’t matter if your candidate will definitely lose. We need HIGH TURNOUT to show ALL politicians Canadians are upset and we mean business and signal that we will hold them accountable, an engaged electorate terrifies them. They love the apathy, they love the status quo, they love how it lets them rely on the special interest groups who always vote. But those special interests don’t represent us, and the more they rely on them for votes the less they care about the rest of us. We need to scare them to get them to actually listen to us and keep them on their best behavior.

    If you don’t vote you’re not keeping your vote away from them – you’re giving it to them. Decline your ballot if you don’t want to actually vote. But you have to show up to be counted.


  • As Canadians, we’re happy to help out where we can, and glad we have an alternative source from the US too. Trump has changed everything. We can’t control what he’s done. But where one door closes another opens, and every problem is an opportunity in disguise. It’s up to us to make sure this change is change for the better, for all of us, and hopefully for the world too if we can.








  • Personally I find the complete opposite, I’ve !selfhosted@lemmy.world everything I can with open source services, to keep control of my personal data but access it from anywhere. I know where all my critical data is and I know nobody is selling it out behind the scenes.

    On my local machine, I have no concerns about running proprietary software because I can easily sandbox it and make sure it’s not going to touch anything it’s not supposed to or phone home with things I don’t want it to. Running shit like discord doesn’t really bother me because I’ve got it sandboxed away from anything valuable.

    I suppose the reason we’ve probably had such different experiences is I suspect we have different strategies for where to keep our most precious “crown jewels”. For me, I want everything on SAAS, but because I’m putting my most valuable data there it has to be MY SAAS and thus open-source and heavily secured. I suspect you on the other hand probably minimize your data’s exposure to SAAS providers which you view as potentially suspect, and keep everything valuable strictly local if you possibly can. I don’t think one way is necessarily better than the other, and I’ve definitely made my choice, but this would explain our different perspectives at least.




  • My brother is a post-grad scholarship student at an extremely prestigious and extremely left-leaning university in the US. He is terrified. I am terrified for him. He wants to come home, but doesn’t want to throw away everything he’s worked his whole academic life to achieve. He is in a safe place, surrounded by sensible people, but we all know they will become targets of this fascist regime probably sooner rather than later and I can’t stop picturing how I think that is probably going to go.