Every community I care about is dead

  • 11 Posts
  • 307 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I haven’t read this series yet but it’s on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I’ve recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.

    I’m lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I’m not sure if I ever will.



  • You can export your Amazon library at the current moment, as long as the books aren’t published (or maybe purchased?) after 2023.

    I did this for a friend recently and my steps were:

    1. Started a Windows VM (if you’re not using Windows)
    2. Install Kindle for PC app, latest version
    3. Log in and download every book (I didn’t know how to do this in bulk so I literally right click -> downloaded every book)
    4. Install Calibre on the same PC (I think this is necessary so it can access the Kindle encryption keys?)
    5. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Get new plugins: KFX Input plugin
    6. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Load plugin from file, using DeDRM 10.0.9’s “DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip”
    7. Restart Calibre
    8. At the top of Calibre, right click “Add books” and pick “Add from folder and sub-folders”
    9. Navigate to your documents and pick “My Kindle Content”, then select “Yes” to “All ebook files are multiple formats etc”
    10. Wait for it all to import
    11. Select all books, then right click “Remove books” at the top and pick “Remove files of a specific format from selected books”
    12. Pick “MD” and click “OK”
    13. With all books selected, click “Edit metadata” at the top
    14. Pick “Set metadata (except cover) from the e-book files”, then click OK
    15. Done, sort of. The DRM should all be broken, and you can convert the books to EPUB or whatever format using Calibre from this point forward, even if Amazon breaks this method in the future.



  • Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.




  • You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.



  • Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.


  • That was my takeaway from this video as well. It was a lot of “aw shucks can’t we all just get along” and not understanding that in today’s world, getting along is a left-wing policy. I think there is still merit to saying that part of the reason we’re so divided nowadays is that we are forced to interact more often, but it shouldn’t be represented as the entire problem. In a way, I think a video like this is actually worse for discourse because it might convince people that there is only one problem that needs to be solved.


  • You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.