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thallianon KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader

The progress sync is separate from how books get onto the various devices (at least as far as I know). Something OPDS capable works well to get the actual files across a network (or calibre via usb). For progress you can use their provided sync server or run your own (the original one gave me enough trouble to write my own implementation).

thallianon Git without a forge

This is basically what I do. Gitea instance with closed registration. So far I did get three different people sending me emails with patches/contributions and all the interactions were quite nice. Of course the stuff I am doing is not well known and I do not advertise it anywhere, which is its own moat I'd say.

thallianon Fasnacht: Basel's "three most beautiful days"

To add to the melancholy: Fasnacht in Basel was cancelled twice during covid. That hit many people very hard. A small group played two well known tunes (one in a minor key instead of the usual major) up one of the towers of the minster to symbolically carry Basler Fasnacht to its grave (downstairs the police was trying to get the door open because they did not know about it). The performance is haunting and is of course on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7LRIPKREA

thallianon Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to write my own dumb and small music streaming service. Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the motivation to pick that project up again.

thallianon Universal Paperclips

Reading this while drinking from a universal paperclips mug, I can only sigh and agree.

thallianon Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy

I quite love that story and at least my age says I am an adult. Very recently I wrote a short (~320 words) review of it in preparation for my English C2 exam and it even was fun to write about it :)

thallianon Unsolved mysteries of the Warhammer 40k universe with loremaster Dan Abnett

Not 40k but the warhammer armies project with some friends (most of them started playing fantasy back during the 6th and 7th edition).

For years I mostly painted without playing (it is a great source of calmness for me), but during the pandemic, my brother got himself a capable 3D printer and we started printing models (there is a huge amount of great and affordable ones out there) and I started building an army (beastmen) to play. We all are interested in fluff and storytelling, so that usually makes a long game go by quite quickly (and makes for great and very weird conversation pieces, even years later).

I also seem to have been lucky with the girls/women in my life, never seemed mutually exclusive (one of them actually taught me how to paint in a somewhat proper way).

thallianon Firefox 85

For what it's worth, that behaviour happens to me too (on a linux system), doesn't seem consistent though (but I never really took too much note).

thallianon Pinebook Pro longer term usage report

I am using the pbp with sway (if you don't know it, an i3 like wm for wayland), works well for me. Hoping for gles 3.3 support in mesa (3.0 is experimental but there) to be able to run alacritty :)

thallianon FFmpeg 4.3

Oh, very interesting, thanks for the hint :D

thallianon FFmpeg 4.3

I have the corresponding ebooks too, so I open up the whole audiobook as one file and guess where the chapters are from the waveform. I listen to the guess and compare to the ebook, checking whether I am too far or too early. Once I find the correct position (and I got quite good at spotting it from the waveform), I set a marker and start with the next chapter. In the end I split it along the markers.

I was planning on writing something to spot when they say "chapter" as it is always the same but I never got around to that. Also, doing all that work was almost meditative :)

A way to share the corrections would be to export the markers from audacity but sadly I don't have that data anymore, though I could calculate the markers from the files I exported if you are interested.

thallianon FFmpeg 4.3

The amount of time I spent on correcting wrong chapter marks (like the first four books of the Wheel of Time) is masochistic. But I am absolutely happy that I have the possibility of doing so after the conversion :)

thallianon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Working on my own toy linux distribution and writing a (very) barebones package manager for it[0].

Also a simple music streaming server which caters exactly to my needs without taking care of others (now writing a client for it)[1].

Plus learning godot to write a small 2D game with my brother's band :D

And learning Georgian letters (they are beautiful).

[0]: https://code.vanwa.ch/sebastian/tsa [1]: https://code.vanwa.ch/sebastian/stray

thallianon Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://vanwa.ch

Mainly strange poetry and photographs, maybe that's your kind of thing.

The only technical thing on it is the link to my repositories and this: https://vanwa.ch/software/ecload/

thallianon A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

Init7 is great, I only had to tick a checkbox saying something like "I know what I am doing" and apart from providing the technical information they left me alone. Only had one problem with them that they resolved very quickly (the fiber cable got damaged somewhere in the basement).

thallianon Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms

- CDBaby (https://store.cdbaby.com) has lots of stuff (they stopped offering flac downloads but if all you're after are high quality mp3 files that's not an issue).

- Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) has interesting stuff too (they changed their pricing since my last visit a while ago, now you pay once for the whole library it seems).

- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/shop) is an absolutely fantastic resource in my opinion.

thallianon Librem 5 App Design Tutorial

lineageos + microg + playmaker for the stuff I still want from the playstore makes it almost usable for me.

But I am with op for being able to taste my desire :)

thallianon Google Is Eating Our Mail

I host my own email stuff too (private stuff and for a couple of friends) and sending to microsoft domains (hotmail, outlook.com) consistently gives me the most problems. Right now it seems to be ok again but I always make sure that people using my domains are fully aware of all these problems.

Edit: not long ago I used a gmail account to contact microsoft support to get them to remove me from their blacklist again (couldn't use my normal email for obvious reasons). Ironically enough their reply got marked as spam by gmail (something in my included message parts might very well have triggered that but I had to laugh out loud at the situation).

thallianon NixOS – Purely Functional Linux Distribution

That's the same thing I do and it is great.

I don't need much on my host server side but having that stuff be easily configurable in one place and be mostly idempotent made my life easier.

thallianon Tiny Books Fit in One Hand. Will They Change the Way We Read?

10 years ago I used to read in class on a Cowon iAudio 7, tiny screen but perfect to hide in my sleeve.

thallianon Facebook at Work spamblocks some SQL queries

10 years ago at school I could not search for documentation about strings or "insert" clauses (sql) because that would trigger the firewall. Fun times.

thallianon Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire

Sorry to nitpick but his name is Georg Kreisler ;) But apart from that I very much agree.

thallianon Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire

Mani Matter comes close for me, if not in the delivery but definitely in the lyrics. But his songs are in Swiss German (Bernese actually), so not as accessible for as many people (and I also grew up with his songs so I might be a bit biased).

thallianon Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire

Yeah, I only saw "Tom Lehrer" and "90" and that was my first sad thought then.

thallianon Wing Commander II

I absolutely loved it, especially the vast array of maps. To once again defend Minas Tirith from the Nazis...

There is also ET: Legacy, an open source implementation of the game: https://www.etlegacy.com/

But I don't really know if it's any good.

Edit: looking at it I now realise that the game already was released as open source, the ET Legacy project is based on it and fixes bugs and stuff :)

thallianon How bands are escaping the music industry snake pit

Argh, I meant Napalm Records, sorry. Now I have to go and see what nuclearblast is doing :)

thallianon How bands are escaping the music industry snake pit

The day I discovered that labels like nuclearblast are putting albums up was a bad day for my bank account.

thallianon Amazon Wants to Extend Its Dominance in Audiobooks

Not OP but these are my reasons if you're interested.

I've been using Rockbox for more than 10 years and know the interface by heart (there was one occasion where the screen broke on a player but I could still use it perfectly fine, by counting the button presses) so one part is just simple habit.

There is no personal information on the device, so there is no need to lock it and for me to try and unlock it in a hurry and if I lose it it's only annoying.

I really like the physical buttons, I don't have to look at the thing to do stuff (yes, there are other solutions to this).

Battery life is usually excellent.

At the moment I'm using a SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip. Once that thing breaks I'll probably just use my streaming server (via airsonic) on my phone and yell at the touchscreen because I have no idea what dedicated player is still usable with rockbox (apart from the refurbished old ones).

thallianon Ask HN: What books have most influenced the way you see the world?

Ha, that was the word I was looking for, thanks :)

Ok, I'll have to read this version too then (only know a german one so far). And probably learn russian.

thallianon Ask HN: What books have most influenced the way you see the world?

I love The Master and Margarita. A lithuanian friend introduced me to it and she told me that it was censored back when Lithuania was still part of the Soviet Union and they used to share those parts in secret (copied on a typewriter).