When I needed to download a free linux distro iso image, I realized I can use inbuilt search in bittorrent clients like qbittorent. No need for web trackers. There were even very recent releases.
I sent the email and got response from Czech Pirate MEP:
[..]
The bad news is already circulating—the EU Council is now led by the Danes, who would like to push their position of unrestricted surveillance through among the other member states.
Just a few months ago, however, a vote—only to reopen the discussion!—was supposed to take place, and most states blocked it. So the Danes may try to gain a majority, but we have no indication that the positions in the Council will change significantly. For now.
The bad news, of course, is that as parliamentary elections take place in the coming years in the national states (for example in Czechia in a month), the positions of the states may change. [0]
This needs to be noted, and if it starts to change to our disadvantage, sound the alarm with the new (czech) government.
However, I also have some good news for you in general—for the next four years. :)
Legislation in the EU is approved in such a way that the Parliament and the Council create a position, and then they must work together to reach a compromise.
The current situation is blocked because there is no Council position. However, even if the Council were to finally approve a position and it were terrible, the Parliament's position is strongly against the proposal, and after discussions with other rapporteurs, I can assure you that nothing will change (only the KDU-CSL (a czech christian-democratic party) is causing problems ;)). So no "spying compromise" will pass through us.
[end of translated citation]
[0] There will be parliamentary elections in autumn 2025 in Czechia, and the populist parties are leading the polls, most notable Ano 2011 led by A. Babis (a mid-left party). I don't know what's their position on Chat Control, but I guess it will be whatever they estimate is going to gain them most votes in elections coming up next.
Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/<auhtor's name>` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device.
For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo.
I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I didn't like the interface and I'm happy I don't have to use it, or any other application like that, anymore.
This is actually one of the reasons why I bought a Kobo instead of a Kindle or whatever else was available a few years ago. When you plug them in they mount like any other USB mass storage and you copy your stuff to them… no need for special formats or anything either, standards like ePub work great.
It kinda made me wonder how Kindles remain so popular. First mover’s advantage? I dunno, but an eReader that can’t read ePubs and PDFs feels a bit like an audio player that can’t play MP3s and AAC.
Most readers only buy books from their device’s store, so they don’t need to worry about sideloading. And then once they’ve done so, they are hesitant to switch because it’s hard or impossible to extract yourself from Amazon or B&N or Apple’s ecosystem without losing content.
Ideally everybody would only buy DRM-free ePubs and audiobooks but realistically people don’t care. And I don’t see a repeat of Apple forcing DRM-free music happening here.
FWIW, in case it's useful to other readers: removing the DRM from a Kindle ebook is super easy using Calibre and the DeDRM plugin. You put in your Kindle's serial number into the plugin, download the ebook from Amazon, drag-n-drop into Calibre. From there you can convert it to pdf for specific formats, e.g. I use the Supernote A5X which is a great reading and annotation experience.
I think there's a lot of sideloading. Buying non-{english,mandarin,spanish} books happens often in other book eshops, usually language- or -country specific. If you supply your kindle ID, they are able to send it straight to the reader, but the book collection is then stored in the local eshop (or more eshops if you buy from multiple). That's why Calibre exists.
At least the Books app on Apple iOS/macOS will manage and read plain old epubs and PDFs without issue, even if you’ve already bought DRM’d books from Apple’s store.
It’s really only big name e-ink readers other than Kobo that have this issue.
It's not "other than Kobo", though; it's Kindle specifically (and only with ePub, it takes PDFs). The other devices will happily take both PDF and ePub.
As for Kindle... for most users Send to Kindle is going to be more convenient than sideloading anyways, and that does take ePubs now, so it's not a huge usability hit.
All Kindles I had (the latest is paperwhite from 2020 or so) mounted on USB as mass storage and supported pdf. They also supported epub since 2014 at least.
You're wrong about that last bit. Kindles still don't support just dropping an ePub into their storage -- you have to convert to a supported format first, either manually (or through Calibre), or by using the Send to Kindle service to get them into your Amazon library. Said service only started supporting ePubs itself in late 2022, also.
I just email my ePub to my Kindle's email. It then appears on the Kindle. I also email stuff that my dad reads - to his Kindle. This is easier than "USB mass storage" and does not require connecting the device.
Its been forever since I set it up but you can also sync via ssh, so, wirelessly recursively sync a directory.
I think I loaded my books over USB, then synced daily news and additional books via rsync. Some of the content was auto generated and dumped into the dir like some auto fetch and email subscriptions, some was manual like copying in a new book after purchase.
But its not a very complicated problem, calibre just does a ton of other stuff too outside of copying books into a specific folder structure.
Yeah I was quite surprised when I found out that that works! I thought Calibre was doing something special. That's why Citadel has a "copy to folder" — you can copy an ebook to an external drive. I'm not sure that it's really easier than just opening the folder to copy + paste it, but Citadel updates a metadata file Calibre uses when detecting what books are on the device to avoid having to read every file in the folder.
Google says that only since Feb 2022, and the article was written in 2021, but I think it was a planned feature and if the author did some research, he'd realize that generics are coming.
At first I thought that in effect, this project only removes a couple of Ctrl+Enter keystrokes in Jupyter-notebook workflow. But after trying out the intro I think it looks good, I really like the simple convert to a webapp.
I wonder if the state/data in the generated app are stored server-side of sent to browser.
I went through the slider example in the intro and I noticed that when I change the icon, the slider position goes back to 1. I tried to fix it so that the slider-selected value is preserved over icon changes, but didn't manage, it doesn't seem straightforward.
Why does Carta have Linear CAP table? I mean what service they're offering that it's worth for startups to have this info managed by other party? CAP table sounds like sth that could be stored in a spreadheet.
