Calibre is an excellent ebook collection manager, and there are plugins to help strip drm from your ebooks so you can keep backups.
1,264 karma · joined September 21, 2011
The flip side argument for an early stage company is that if they can’t move fast they may not survive. Not having tech debt is great, but it’s better to have tech debt and be alive than no tech debt and out of business.
To be clear, I’m not personally taking a hardline position on either side here. I think these kinds of choices are always a balancing act. Moving too fast can kill your business just as effectively as moving too slow: it’s just as hard to ship changes to a permanently on fire ball of spaghetti as it is a pristinely typed piece of clockwork, and sometimes harder.
I long ago made it clear to my family they should just donate to charity in my name at holidays except in rare cases when I specifically say I want something. Took some convincing, but now everyone sees it as normal and I think it’s fulfilling for everyone involved.
I did the same for a work Secret Santa thing for several years and the givers who got me always appreciated that as well.
If I’m super into topic X and you’re not, there’s a good chance whatever you get will either not be of interest (e.g. bad beans) or just redundant (I can only use so many mugs or grinders).
Obviously the thought is always appreciated, and gift buying can be hard, I get it. But receiving a gift also creates an obligation to at least perform enjoyment of the gift and now it’s another thing I have to own (consumables at least are temporary if you’re not into them, so that helps).
There’s a sweet spot in gift giving of looking for something the receiver is into and will want (but not already have) but also something the giver is knowledgeable enough to make an informed decision on. So, again, the thought is always appreciated, but if the giver can’t operate a k-cup maybe leave your coffee snob friends to buy their own beans :).
- Multiple accounts: I have a per-account config file with the relevant specifics (https://github.com/wfleming/dotfiles/tree/arch-linux/home/co...) and use folder hooks to apply those depending on which mailbox I'm viewing (https://github.com/wfleming/dotfiles/blob/arch-linux/home/co...). (Plus a keybinding in each account file to make flipping to the next account easy.)
- Non-standard auth:
- I use offlineimap to sync my mail, and it supports oauth2 for Gmail. The arch wiki has helpful details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/OfflineIMAP#Configuring_OAuth2_and_getting_access_tokens_via_mailctl
- For sending mail, I use msmtp, which also supports oauth2. Again, arch wiki has some helpful details. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Msmtp#OAuth2_Setup
I bought a Samsung S9 in 2018. After a year the case was kind of coming apart, but I’d come to like Android and so I replaced it with a Pixel 4 and hoped first-party hardware would be better. Nope. After like 6 months the NFC stopped working, which I tolerated. After a year the back case adhesive was failing and the case was, again, coming apart. I replaced the back case and adhesive. It held for almost another year, then failed again.
I bought an iPhone 13 mini and it’s been less than a year but so far it seems just as reliable as my previous iPhones and much sturdier than either Android I had. There were a lot of things I liked about Android, and I realize I’m a sample of one but after back-to-back poor hardware experiences I’m skeptical of Android phone quality even for flagships.
I’ll be sad if I can’t get a similar mini form factor when I do eventually need to upgrade, but Android phones weren’t getting any smaller either so that’s a whole separate thing.
Is OpenSearch Dashboards (their Kibana fork) any good/is AWS being a good steward and moving it forward?
I ask because I’m in the process of updating some AWS infra in an org that uses Kibana. Our version is quite old and I’d like to upgrade both it & the ES storage layer to use newer APM features, etc.
I sympathize with Elastic’s position & their licensing change but as pragmatically I’d like to use an OpenSearch cluster and not be responsible for administering an ES cluster myself. But Kibana refuses to run pointing at an OpenSearch cluster.
So the question is, I guess, if I go all-in on OpenSearch does that seem like a sound long term choice? Alternatively, is Elastic.co’s cloud hosting competitive (from a run through their pricing calculator I think it would be more expensive)?
I think GP was referring to the fact that Japan has an over 99% conviction rate.
Even if we presume that Japan has unusually high quality prosecutors and judges, that rate is so high that I think it’s reasonable to presume a fair number of innocent people are getting convicted (which happens lots of places, of course, but Japan’s conviction rate is still unusual).
Navidrome supports the Subsonic API, so there are a number of native clients compatible with it. I chose Substreamer on iOS. It’s not free, but it’s a one-time cost that doesn’t try and drag you into any subscriptions or anything. There are free alternatives like iSub, but I found their UI lacking & decided Substreamer was worth the few bucks.
FWIW I was also an i3 user for a long time (and xmonad before that), and I’m a very happy convert to Sway.
Even their games, though, although they are famously and genuinely difficult, do try and guide the player to success. They just do it in somewhat subtle ways by trying to kill you a lot. I’ve been watching a let’s play series on YouTube of Dark Souls I & III for a while (“Souls Academy”), and one of things I enjoy about it is how they often talk about what skills particular bosses or game areas are trying to teach you, so that you can be successful with later, harder challenges.
But you’re completely right that these games aren’t “hard not to finish”. They’re extremely hard to finish!
My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate why they're not happy with the results. DDG does do a lot of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago, like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful details, but it doesn't try to be so smart that you as a user stop being able to understand what it's doing under the hood.
Libraries do have to make curatorial choices about what to stock, both physically and digitally. So it’s not surprising a lot of libraries don’t stock a book that was never widely published or sold many copies, regardless of political connotations. And as controversial books go, I don’t think the Turner Diaries is one of the ones that necessarily merits wider availability for “historical interest”. I’ve never read it, maybe you have, but from I understand it’s not even a particularly interesting book it itself, only for it’s connection to some right-wing terrorists like McVeigh. The fact it never sold much sort of indicates not many people want to read it, a good reason not to carry it!
And for ebooks in particular, it’s worth remembering most libraries (including Brooklyn) outsource their digital catalog to a third party provider. So their curatorial choices are potentially limited by that as well. Again, self published book never widely published or sold: not surprising to me that the major ebook providers for libraries might not have it.
As a litmus test against your litmus test, it’s worth noting that the BK library does carry other controversial books like Mein Kampf, physically and digitally.
All of this to say that while politics is always going to influence curatorial choices of “merit”, I think suggesting that the Brooklyn library “banned” The Turner Diaries merely due to its absence from the catalog is a bit of a stretched conclusion.
As a point of minor interest I also avoid `down` vs `stop` because `down` can remove volumes. Reading the `--help` now (I'm not about to actually try it for reasons that will be clear shortly), it appears that's not the default behavior, but I'm pretty sure it was at one point. I `docker-compose down`-ed once and wiped out my local databases and that was an unpleasant morning, and ever since I've avoided it.
That's a round-a-about way of explaining that a certain amount of my programming habits are certainly born of having stepped on numerous rakes in the past, but some of those rakes don't really exist anymore and I don't always notice when they go away. So I appreciate you prompting me to re-examine this particular habit as being out of date.
I mostly like docker-compose just fine, but this is an annoyance & when I first started using docker-compose some years back I definitely lost more time than I would have liked trying to figure out why some change I'd just made didn't seem to have applied. I feel like destroying/creating containers is pretty cheap (that's one of the great things about containers!), so I'm not sure why docker-compose behaves this way. I presume it's for historical reasons and they don't feel comfortable changing it because of backwards compatibility.
Python is a "simpler" language with its preference for "one obvious way", and it does tend to support fewer paradigms than Ruby. Ruby is a more complex language, supporting many approaches. But if you are familiar with the various approaches, that can be "simpler" if it allows you to choose the most fitting approach for whatever problem you have at hand.
To put it another way, "simple" can mean "the language is small/has an obvious way it wants you to do things", or "simple" can mean "the language is flexible enough to be used to model your problem in the most appropriate way". Python is the first kind of simple, Ruby is the second.
IMHO Ruby is much more expressive than Python, and the stdlib is better designed and less crufty. Ruby really has one of the best stdlibs around, I think, and a lot of languages could learn a lot from it - particularly the design of `Enumerable`.
So I prefer Ruby when I have the choice. Part of that is probably just familiarity, but I've been a full time dev on both Ruby & Python projects for long stretches of time so I think I'm in a decent position to compare them. My personal preferences/taste is another aspect, of course, and there's no objective accounting for that.
The case where I often will prefer Python is if I'm scripting something that needs some degree of portability. If you pick a random Linux box it's much more likely to have some version of Python installed than Ruby, so if I'm writing something that should be easy to copy to a box and use without additional setup, I'm more likely to pick Python.