I am far from innocent here but I'm gonna say no. You are saying IoT is far from a worthy cause. Really? Is it not worthy that my aging grandparents can open the door from their bed and not have to go downstairs, turn on their lights in the dead of night from their phone so they don't have to risk stumbling and falling when reaching for the light switch, or even just more accurate track their health? I think those are all pretty worthy causes.
The problem with IoT is that people in other countries can also theoretically open the door and turn on the lights from THEIR phone if the grandparents don’t keep everything updated.
Excuse me, but a an analog electrical switch to open the front door remotely works just fine. If you must insist on a digital one, OK, though I fail to see why you would complicate things. An internet connected one though: just NO.
I don't know if that's a great use case. My experience with old people says that they (mostly) hate tech and cannot operate it without someone else.
Also with old people you'd want the tech to be familiar to them so that you don't have to video call them to show them how to reset the WiFi.
And if you're talking about old people who cannot even walk without stumbling their memory would be so far gone that they'd forget how to operate half the devices half the time.
Maybe it would be more helpful to future old people such as ourselves, but I think simpler, robust, and familiar tech is better for old people.
I'll second this. I'm pretty techno-savvy if I do say so myself but I haven't the slightest when it comes to self-hosting and security concerns also prevent me from doing it.
I thought "Debt" was absolutely fantastic and "Bullshit Jobs" was err.. complete bullshit. To best honest, the very premise of that view - that the only thing that matters is people's own opinions of their job - is one of the dumbest things I've ever read and it's probably downright harmful to people that adopt it.
There are essential jobs that need doing regardless of the opinions of the workers who perform them. In fact, if people focused on the value their so-called "bullshit" jobs provide other people, rather than on their own assessment of how meaningful their job is, they would likely end up much happier.
It's an incredibly condescending and self-centered way to look at the world.
The whole premise is broken to me so the more he tries to dig in it just feels like deeper and deeper bs to me.
Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's perception of their contribution has essentially 0 importance in this interaction. A better definition of a bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.
So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your job.
So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally broken premise.
> Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee.
This is a handwaving assertion. It happens to be strongly correlated with the way our society(ies) allocates labor, but is not something inherent to the labor/wage relationship. It's not hard to imagine a world in which people do things because those things matter to them, or are interesting to them, or both.
Graeber didn't call them "Bullshit Jobs" because the jobs required dealing with bullshit, he called them "Bullshift Jobs" because the actual stated purpose of the job was at best deeply suspect and at worst, well, bullshit.
There is a better fundamental critique of "Bullshit Jobs" which is a little more sophisticated, I think. That critique says that the reason people get confused about the meaning and importance of their job is that our economic system has grown too complex for them to really understand the role they play. The division of labor has reached such extreme levels that it is very difficult for many individuals to grasp how their "apparently meaningless aka bullshit" jobs could be contributing anything at all to the world. But their inability to understand or visualize this does not mean that their work is, in fact, meaningless or without value.
Sure but if both parties freely decide to engage in this time money trad what do you propose to do?
Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.
It turns out the Nash equilibrium of the world is that some people have jobs that seem silly on the surface but end up being the optimal move for everyone involved. Out of all the problems in the world this seems like a weird one to fixate on.
Graeber didn't fixate on this. He saw it as a sad reflection of what the supposedly "best economic system in the history of man" had ended up creating in terms of meaningful work for actual human beings.
Graeber believes that our current state is a local minima (or maxima depending on your perspective) and there are social, political, and economic options that result in systems without these "bullshit" outcomes. His underlying beliefs are anarchist, he believes people can self-organize without many of the concerns we have in modern society.
The reason he is interesting is that his underlying views of society are of those from way outside of the Overton Window, so he sees some things more clearly than those with more "normal" viewpoints. While I do not agree with him on many things, all his books are critiques of the entirety of the modern socioeconomic system.
> Do we want some congressional committee to sit around and decide which jobs are bullshit? I sure don't.
The suggestion that he thought the government should decide which jobs are real and which are bullshit is antithetical to everything he believed. He would argue that the fact that you can only see it as a question of either "free market" or "government managed" is a part of the oppressive system itself.
I'm a little surprised at that reading, but fair enough.
I admit I only skimmed it, but I thought the point was "the employer" is not a homogeneous entity. "The employer" therefore doesn't make the wage decision. Managers with some extreme perverse incentives do.
What's bullshit is the idea that as soon as an enterprise does something inefficient, boom, they'll be outcompeted. They might, eventually, if no market failures or regulatory capture exists. So in reality, large and even small/medium organization with a successful pattern can tolerate a lot of bullshit.
Personally experienced this. I bookmarked a keyboard I was interested in purchasing in a month or so. When I went back it was a completely different item with the same reviews. Just today in fact, I was looking for an office chair seat cushion and found a very telling reddit comment from 3 years ago[1].
I know Amazon has a bulletproof return policy for the most part but I don't want to be hassled with returning everything. This just results in me just not using Amazon. You may be able to justify it for large purchases because of Amazon's return policy but for something as mundane as a can opener or seat cushion? Just shop elsewhere.
I received a different bike light than I ordered on Amazon (a literal Chinese knockoff) and submitted it for a replacement because it worked poorly. What I got back was another Chinese not-what-I-ordered knockoff, but it worked well... So I kept it.
Even though I came out happy it further inched me to my current position of "never buy from Amazon".
No, because some minimum wage worker has to unpack it. You don't tskr revenge on the people responsible, but on a poor sob that just wanted to earn a living.
Going to somewhat hijack this to ask a question. Are there any popular non-Rails uses for Ruby? I'd like to learn Ruby but it seems that Python and Ruby occupy the same space and use cases so you really only need to know one of them.
No. I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Ruby isn't popular itself (with or without Rails). It's barely more popular than Fortran, according to TIOBE[1]. It cracks the top 10 according to Redmonk, but has been generally declining since 2012[2].
Somewhat shockingly, it's even less widely used than Rust according to Stack Overflow[3].
They also found Ruby has a 53% loved vs. 47% dreaded score, compared to Python's 68% and 32%. It's especially surprising that Stack Overflow's respondents like Ruby less than JavaScript and SQL, the two most frustrating languages I have ever been forced to work with myself.
> Python and Ruby occupy the same space and use cases
This is absolutely untrue. I personally loathe Python, but it is perhaps the most useful language you can learn right now, and it barely overlaps with Ruby.
It's huge in statistics/data science and machine learning. It's not the most common web backend, but it still has a fairly large ecosystem for the web. It's rapidly rising in popularity, too.
Tiobe and Stack Overflow rankings don't mean much. Look how popular Tiobe ranks VB due to Excel macros, or SO ranks Bash and PowerShell very highly simply because people ask a lot of questions about it.
I cited the three most popular rankings. I don't know what else to do here.
My own personal experience as a CTO and startup investor: I haven't seen Ruby (or even met someone whose primary language is Ruby) in a long time.
I think it had a moment ~10 years ago when a lot of people started companies using Rails. Some of them still use it, most of them just went out of business.
It hasn't been big since then. It seemed to only ever have become popular in a fairly limited bubble of startups, especially in Silicon Valley.
I mean, it's not Java, C#, Go or JS. It never was that big.
But some pretty successful startups used it and some successful companies today use it. It's been a tool used to spawn quite a few billion+ dollar companies.
Popular as in industry usage? Which is comparatively very small.
Smt88 is correct in that it is increasingly a niche. Churn rate is greater than retention rate. Junior Developers cant find jobs with Ruby and Rails, and they switch to others that do find them jobs. Companies only want to hire experience Ruby Rails developers but some of them moved on. It is a vicious cycle.
The point is even if Reddit was written in Arc, it has no bearing on Arc's industry status. It needs to be in a self sustainable ecosystem.
Not yet, but it's now in the category of "You won't get fired for picking X". It's seen as enterprise-y and 'safe' and yes, is definitely quite used.
The fact it's used internally at Google and MS alone means it's got traction. I'm willing to bet lots of enterprise shops are using it for things, even if it's not #1.
The important question is would you have enough choices in Job Hunting if all you know is Go. And Go seems to be close to if not already a self sustainable status.
You're right, although doesn't really change my premise. I use Bash everyday, even though I have never tried learning it, don't really care about it, etc...
I really don't think Bash and Powershell are more popular for actual development than C++ and Go respectively. People just use them because they're there... Making the rankings a lot less meaningful.
This can be taken a few ways. I don't use Go, but I interact with Bash. So you're right in a sense.
I'd also never write a web-app in bash, nor a non-trivial program, nor anything that isn't a shell script. So is it really meaningful when people are looking for a language to write a GUI app, web app, mobile app or game in?
Ok the Tiobe => Fortran is complete horse shit and we all know it. Fortan and Perl are both more popular than Go in that ranking I mean come on. But sure I agree Ruby is a nichey language, usage-wise about the same as Swift/Scala or maybe even Go. Somewhere in the top 10-15 I'd guess. If you look at web backend languages (e.g remove C/Visual Basic/C++) Ruby is probably top 10.
There are definitely uses cases for Ruby without Rails. It's a great command-line scripting language, for example, filling the slot of an evolved Perl. There are also lighter-weight approaches to web scripting, such as Sinatra and bare Rack HTTP servers. I have no idea how prevalent that is. I did it for several small but well used apps.
Ruby and Python share a lot of commonalities as languages. But their constituencies vary substantially, and that matters. Academic, probably Python. Working "interactive" agency, probably Ruby. Process automation, probably Ruby again. Author's implementation of new algo paper, probably Python.
I wouldn't think either-or. If it's worth familiarizing with one, it's probably one more weekend to be walk-on-ready for both.
As a Ruby developer, I really fail to see any benefit or Ruby over Python (or even Node) for commandline scripting.
Other than "I already know Ruby". In fact, I'll often go for the -for me- more unfamiliar Python for such tools. Knowing it will cost me more effort, but also knowing that the libraries, documentation, education and off-the-shelve solutions are far, far better and move available.
What have you built lately in Python/Node that "the libraries, documentation, education and off-the-shelve solutions are far, far better and move available." ?
I'm not saying those use cases don't exist at all, but I don't think it's as common as you're making it up to be. As a Ruby dev the last 8 years I didn't have many times when some key functionality was only available in Python/Node. I can see it happening in web crawling or data science but those aren't common to every day web development.
Panda's et all do investigate Data. There are tools in Ruby for Datascience but the resources are thin or completely lacking.
A scraper using Scrapy. Had a tool in Ruby with Hydra (multitreaded) and message cueus and whatnot to speed it up. Spidy is just faster. Not because of the language, but because the tooling is much further along and has far more effort poored into.
Server/infra management: ported from chef to ansible. Not for speed, but because stability and availability (of a.o. resources). Unexpected side-effect was that ansible was actually faster and used far less resources on the servers (chef-deamon was notoriously bad). Not sure why, but I don't think its the language design.
FluentD, moved to flowgger and plain-old-syslog. FluentD is an awesome piece of software, but it was hogging our (micro)servers enough to be noticable, measurable and show up in the billing (as higher CPU/memory vpses).
If nothing else, Python’s miserable package management ecosystem makes me reach for Ruby instead. I’ll take Bundler over requirements.txt, pipenv, poetry, etc. any day.
I use Ruby without rails all the time. It’s extremely convenient for shell scripting (basically anywhere I might have used Perl in the past).
The Sequel gem (rather than ActiveRecord) and the Parallel gem play really well together. Anytime I need to do some scripting against a database it’s very convenient.
> It’s extremely convenient for shell scripting (basically anywhere I might have used Perl in the past).
Exactly the uses cases that I want to "steal" from Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.
Not because Next Generation Shell is "better" but because it's focused on the use cases - https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs/wiki/Use-Cases ... while still being a "real" programming language.
A lot of iOS build automation tooling is dependent on Ruby. fastlane is the de-facto standard in this space, which is a Ruby gem and CLI application. As a result, every iOS developer almost inevitably has to learn at least some basic Ruby to cobble together a deployment pipeline for their app.
It's a great example though, I really like how readable Homebrew formulae are. Run "brew edit go" or "brew edit pkg-config" to take a look at how things are downloaded and built.
I like ruby but the recent static typing feels a step backwards having have to write a separate file, unlike typescript where you can incrementally add typing to the actual source code.
And when I saw ruby isn't included in the list of supported language for the next gen JetBrains editor, perhaps due to low sales of RubyMine, I felt its best days may be over.
Dragon Ruby is a relatively recent game making toolkit with one of the main devs being also one of the main SDL devs. It's a full programming language so you can use it for whatever you want, it just is most popularly used for RoR.
I have a bunch of APIs running in AWS that are written in pure Ruby. My Slack status automation is written in pure Ruby. Most of the things I integrate with have SDKs for Ruby.
As long as Shopify keeps using it, Ruby will have a place in the world!
Hardly. And that bothers me as a Ruby (not rails) developer.
There was Chef, still is around, but Chef "lost" from Ansible and Terraform.
There are some commandline tools, but I slowly see them replaced by Go, Rust, node or Python versions. `github`, `heroku` etc.
And there are numerous small or tiny platforms, systems and toolkits that failed to get traction and live a (happy!) live with a tiny audience. Think about sinatra, sequent, gosu, (the ruby version of) cucumber, kiba-etl, etc.
But I'm pretty sure most of these tools, frameworks and platforms are there because or Rails. To cater people, shops and teams "that already know Ruby inside out" (because of Rails) and therefore choose their, say, ETL system in Ruby too.
I use Ruby for Rails and for scripting. I script in Ruby anything I used to write in Perl up to about 2010 and I feel too complex to write in Bash. JavaScript is a no go in that space because of async, Python (which I make more money from than from Ruby) is just (subjectively) uglier and less convenient. Maybe this is because I was more in love with Perl than with C in the 90s.
Watching HN debate unions is always a good time. Blizzard is right, being in a union generally means you can't negotiate for yourself but seeing as the workers are in this position to begin with, negotiating for themselves clearly wasn't working out.
Tried Wayland recently on Fedora 35 with an AMD GPU and found that it causes issues with a lot of Proton games that I don't have on X.org. So, Wayland is still a "no thanks" for me.
Same. I had weird issues when playing Diablo II: Resurrected with menu items not being clickable or other jank that was not present with xorg. It's almost there though. I'm excited when features like this are pushed as defaults because it means more feedback, more pressure to fix remaining issues.
I saw this a while ago and wanted to contribute so I found my way to their source. Unfortunately, this was my first interaction with SourceHut, the site they use as their central point of development, and found it completely unintuitive. After 15 minutes of fumbling around I basically just said "I'll try it again later" and never got back to it. This might just be because this was my first encounter with the site.
we keep a mirror there if you prefer to use github (https://github.com/zrythm/zrythm) but we don't actually use github for development
if you really want to use github pull requests instead of sending patches feel free to do that and I'll still look at them but we recommend patches via email because it's an open and standard system
I do wish we had an open standard for things like issues, pull requests, etc. that was a little more "featureful" than plain email. At least platforms like Gitlab, Gitea, etc. are self-hostable and open source, which is a start.
ForgeFed[1] seems to be an attempt in that direction built on top of ActivityPub[2], but (from my very brief impression) seems to be stuck in something of a development hell. I’m willing to believe it’ll get done at some point, but whether it’ll get traction—or how a project of this sort should even go about that in general—is anybody’s guess.
Just wanted to say that I personally really appreciate the setup, workflow and the way you are organized! It looks like you are really caring about building upon open tech both in development and communication. Actually made me very curious.
Same for the choice of dependencies and the documentation in place, was surprised with how easy it was to compile myself. Hadn't had the time to give the program itself a full try yet, but I'm actually looking forward to do try some recordings with it next week.
> Remarkable is advertised as an E-Ink reader as well as a writing device. In reality, this only works if you have e-pub books on your hard drive. Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere
What? I'll give you that the two largest distributors, Amazon and Barnes and Nobles don't sell epub but pretty much everyone else who sells ebooks does including Google Books. Also, you can use Calibre to turn any other ebook format into an epub.
Does Remarkable support Adobe DRM? If not, then the vast majority of places you can get ePubs either (a) won't be compatible, or (b) won't have the ebooks you care about (because publishers only sell them with DRM).
So no, unless you're going out of your way to use a workflow that's unsupported and of questionable legality (DRM stripping), you probably can't read ebooks you care about on this device.
To be frank I don't know if there's any serious 'workflow' involving ebooks that doesn't involve using calibre or equivalent software to ensure they're DRM free and in the format you want.
If readers didn't care about anything besides comfort then they'd just download the DRM free epubs from z-library for free, which is even less hassle then dealing with amazon kindle.
I still own a Kindle and buy books through it, but it's just false that this is the least hassle option.
Z library has a button to email/send the ebook to your kindle, so it's done after the first step. You can do that on your phone or kindle itself depending on the model.
I think you have entirely missed an entirely different comparison. The median hourly wage is about $15 an hour and virtually everyone already has a smartphone.
Option 1: Work 14 hours for money to buy kindle paper paperwhite and 10 9.99 ebooks. Proceed to click and buy as you desire.
Option 2: Work zero hours and click and download epubs and other formats on your phone which can accommodate multiple formats including the incredibly common on pirated sites epub format.
Also honestly it doesn't help much to list the steps out when both options take less than 90 seconds and you have already decided to invest 2-10 hours in reading the book. I will happily spend more than an hour reading descriptions and reviews of different books to decide what I would prefer to read next.
I think you have entirely missed the topic of this thread: the comfort of obtaining the book. The list of steps addresses exactly that, whereas reading the book has nothing to do with it.
Time and money are fungible resources what costs one costs the other. The 4 steps so described are only as described if one insists both on using a separate device which you happen to already own vs your perfectly capable smartphone and in ignoring possible optimizations. They are also oddly thought out wherein the entire process of shopping for a book to read which may take tens of minutes and involve reading reviews or snippets of a book and which will certainly be completely unusable on your kindle is considered 1 step but so is the act of actuating a single button.
It's also probably wrong to list converting to a kindle compatible format and copying to your kindle as 2 separate operations when one in fact can perform them both by clicking one button or indeed avoid conversion altogether by downloading the appropriate format.
For your consideration.
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up your store app/website/device, navigate to the desired book, buy, and download it.
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it.
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it.
3. Import into calibre and either automatically convert on import or have it automatically converted when you click send to device
vs
1. Spend time on your computer/smartphone/in person discovering interesting things to read.
2. Open up zlibrary/libgen navigate to the desired book and download it to a folder which is watched by calibre whereupon it will automatically import, convert, and email it to your kindle in the correct format.
This isn't twice as hard and it buys you a copy of your ebook on your computer and device which can be backed up with the rest of your files and which will never stop working because someone else says so. It's also trivial to share with anyone you like just as easily as you can add to your own device. You also get a great search experience on your computer and on your phone if you use calibre companion which incidentally you can use to wirelessly send to your non kindle device.
I’m guessing if you took a poll of 1000 random people and asked them if they know what z-library is you’d be lucky to find more than 1 person. I’d never heard of it until a year ago and nobody in my friends group had either.
Does “comfort” not include ease of use and discovery?
I’m on Kobo and I’m a nerd and I have “workflows” for content I already paid for but isn’t Pocket compatible (lookin at you, NYRB!) and I’ve never even heard of z-library.
There's also library genesis that is very good for the more technical content.
Especially because a lot of technical books are really hard too find in Europe in digital format. Very often I get the "not available in your region" message.
Often it's not. I remember cleaning up MP3 headers from all the stupid 'downloaded from TUNEZ4U.blah - <real title>', weeding out tracks that were clipping or with their volume way too low. Or bad quality or weird codecs etc.. It was a lot of work!
Something like Spotify really makes it worth it then. Totally better than downloading and the convenience is easily worth the price.
I buy most of my ebooks as well as I like the sync between the Kindle app and the real Kindle. And most of them are well priced anyway.
For video the convenience argument worked well too with Netflix for a while but now that the landscape had fragmented so much the whole "paid content is more convenient" thing is under a lot of pressure. It's not even the price that's an issue as you can subscribe to most services by the month to see one thing. It's the hassle of signing up, cancelling and downloading all their separate apps. So there the downloaded content is becoming more convenient again.
Couldn't agree more. For me certainly not worth the hassle to save $3 on a reduced book that will magically appear on my kindle after I clicked 1-click-buy, compared to pirating it.
I remember how upon Radiohead's release of 'In Rainbows' people would argue that the fact that people would still download an album from Kazaa that you can legally download for free from the artists website proves how rotten everyone is. No - it's just that the UX of doing it legally sucked so much more.
This. I have a Boox Note 2 that I love. I sync DRM free books to it via my NextCloud and I can draw/type notes in them and sync back to my computer. I've also got the Kindle and Adobe reader apps installed so I get instant when I want it too. (I'm an academic so a lot of my reading comes via library downloads DRM'd with Adobe). It can take hand written notes in a separate app, but I don't bother because my handwriting is as bad as the authors so I just type my notes up and sync them with NextCloud too.
My wife isn't a tech nerd, she has a Kindle, she wants a book, she presses a couple of times on the screen and she has the book. Sure she might pay more than I would, but the time/convenience factor clearly outweighs that.
You can configure an email address in you Amazon account <youralias>@kindle.com. Sending any DRM free .mobi or .pdf to that address makes it magically appear on your Kindle.
I think that is a great feature as most people know how to create an email with an attachment.
And as a side effect you can send friends ebooks directly to their devices if they shared their @kindle aliases with you.
The downside is that you're very limited in what file works. Mobi is ancient and lacks a lot of the improvements that Amazon made with AZW3 and KFX in regards to what it supports and how it's rendered. So no improved typography, no features like full screen images in digital manga or comics, etc. Sometimes you can do a hacky workaround and send an ePub as .png and it will give you an AZW3 but sometimes it just doesn't work. With my Boox reader I can just shove the file in my OneDrive and have it appear there.
Were you trying to convert a PDF or something? Tech books that are in an HTML-based format (epub or mobi) work just fine in Calibre because the diagrams and equations actually have a machine-readable format and can be converted from format to format losslessly. PDFs are pretty much only designed to be printed (they are really just modified Postscript documents, where Postscript is the language used by many printers)
The only two places I know that haven’t criminalised the circumvention of technical protection measures are Israel and Afghanistan. I’d love to be told different.
(I feel there’s still an opportunity to challenge DMCA 1201 in the US, and then there’s also the triennial review. It’s harder in places where the exemptions are hard-coded — but maybe you know of one that includes an exemption for this kind of DRM removal?).
It’s not quite as bad as that: according to the IIPA, “Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Norway, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as smaller markets,
such as Bolivia, Brunei, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda” haven’t implemented it.
At least in terms of law as it's applied it's definitely not true. Either your sources are not correct, or "circumvention" is described very differently in other places.
You’re right. It’s in the realm of not paying sales tax on stuff you buy out of state. No one keeps track of that shit but also it’s illegal to not do that.
There may not be, but it's a pain in the ass. To strip Kindle books, you need to use an outdated Kindle PC client that uses an old encryption and may or may not break at any point in time, stop it from updating, track down some shifty plugin for Calibre that handles like a house of cards, etc.
Years ago, yeah. It took some time to figure out the new .kfx format. Now? If you're on a macOS/Windows no setup is necessary, provided you have the Kindle app installed. If you have a physical Kindle and you use Linux, the setup is as easy as looking up a serial number in settings and entering it into the plugin's settings. If you don't have a physical one and no access to a Windows machine, then it is a bit tricky, yeah. That said, I assume this doesn't apply to at least 70% of its users.
As for the plugin's stability, I have yet to experience a problem after like 7-8 years of usage. I've upgraded from Calibre v4 to v5 before the plugin supported v5, but that's about it.
Appropriate any pointers, as I want to copy and paste from an book on the Kindle ended up camera photo to ocr. I am on Linux (Debian) and struggle to complete this task. Either I am not good a google or need to re-try.
I think things are beginning to change. My impression is more publishers sell watermarked but DRM free PDFs.
BTW I personally find it odd the OP wants to reads epubs on the remarkable. The remarkable is good for reading PDFs. The epub experience is rather meh.
>Remarkable is advertised as an E-Ink reader as well as a writing device. In reality, this only works if you have e-pub books on your hard drive. Where can you get e-pub books? Basically nowhere
Is this really worth the hassle given the prevalence of resources that don't require membership? I've only ever joined one private tracker and it wasn't materially better than what could be found for free and it was run by raging assholes. Kind of colored my view of that scene.
I own a Remarkable 2 and really love it, but I agree that the lack of some kind of integrated ebook marketplace is a missed opportunity. I would love to be able to just buy a bestselling book through the device (or it's accompanying app) and read it immediately. Is there anyone the company could partner with to enable such a feature? I don't want to pirate books or hassle with Calibre, I just want to read books on this very well-designed device and I'm willing to pay $$ to do that.
That's not a missed opportunity. Not every company has to be some megacorp doing everything and siphoning off all data from every pore of the planet. Why can't you just make hardware and call it a day ?
Personally I use a Boox e-Ink tablet, which just runs Android. That means I can just install the Kindle app and read Kindle books without any fuss. I do hate DRM with a passion but sometimes I just want to get on with my day and this solution works for me.
I really like the look of the Remarkable though, I just wish it ran Android.
I'm doing exactly the same, I'm using almost exclusively the Kindle app and it works fine on my Boox tablet.
What disappointed me is the slowness of the refreshing. I guess it's because I hadn't used any e-reader before. I bought my Boox with the idea that I could also run other apps on it, since after all it ran on Android.
Running other apps is possible but it's just really a pain, even web browsing is just too slow.
Web browsing on e-ink is widely known to be barely usable, and not what e-readers are made to do. So usage of "even" word is hard to explain here really.
I admitted I didn't have any experience using e-readers before, so please forgive my ignorance. But in defence of me and all the other ignorant buyers, when a device is sold with the argument that it is a fully functional Android device, one might suspect that you'd be able to run some apps on it without too many problems.
This is from the Boox site itself:
> The book is based on the Android 10.0 operating system, which allows third-party applications to be installed on the device and significantly expands the scope of its application
Marketing texts happen to be misleading more often than not. But this exact excerpt you cited looks innocent to me. "Significantly" is subjective, of course, but other than that it's correct.
For me I don't spend much time in those other apps, but it's really nice to have the ability to install Google Drive, GMail, Slack, Notion, Dropbox, and stuff like that so I can easily open up documents that are sent to me through the normal channels I use and never have to worry about actually "transferring" anything to my tablet.
I also keep all my sheet music and academic papers to-read on Google Drive.
How is it? Does it feel fast like iPad? Or at least responsive even if not that that fast? I have Paperwhite and while I still love it to death after 8 years, I just can’t live with the lag with traditional e-ink tablets like Paperwhite.
No, it's super laggy just like all e-Ink devices, except for the natively-optimized note taking app which feels fine for writing and taking notes.
Don't expect an iPad experience at all.
The reasons I use it are
- To get eye strain relief when reading ebooks, academic papers, or long PDF documents
- To be able to read those things in bright sunlight while outdoors
- Insanely good battery life compared to a traditional tablet, I only charge mine about once a week
- Screen continues to display while consuming zero power, after device goes to sleep, which is useful for practicing music, and for placing reference documents on the table while I work on e.g. electronics, or recipes while working in the kitchen. I don't have to keep smacking it every 2 minutes to wake it up, and it won't run out of battery displaying a single PDF page for several days
Boox tablets seem to refresh faster than Kindle Paperwhites, but the appearance can be janky looking because Android isn't optimized for running on eInk. It takes some time to adjust to.
This isn't a big problem for reading, but navigating through the general system UI and Android apps can be offputting.
You can tweak some of the refresh rate settings. My experience is it's a lot faster than a paperwhite (to the point that now when I use the kindle I wonder why it's so slow), but nowhere close to an ipad.
Well, even if you do that, the e-reader on the Remarkable is really, really poor. It’s a note taking device that can be hacked into doing some other stuff with varying degrees of success.
I am far from innocent here but I'm gonna say no. You are saying IoT is far from a worthy cause. Really? Is it not worthy that my aging grandparents can open the door from their bed and not have to go downstairs, turn on their lights in the dead of night from their phone so they don't have to risk stumbling and falling when reaching for the light switch, or even just more accurate track their health? I think those are all pretty worthy causes.