Yeah. CBZ files have no metadata (I think there is actually a semi-standardized way to add it but almost nobody does?) so it won’t work well with metadata based systems. From discussions we had back in the day, the cbz/r/7z/tgz/whatever archives were mostly a necessary evil for file sharing. As long as you didn’t modify the scans, people could re-compress or whatever their files and still have a good chance of coming up as alternatives in DC++ and the like. And, at the time, PDF readers were basically Adobe Acrobat and not much else.

These days? Nobody really used DC++ anymore and the general etiquette is to keep an un-touched version in your torrent folder if you want to seed. And basically every web browser is a better PDF reader than anything before 2020. So there isn’t much value in not just reformatting to a PDF and removing the need for a special cbz reader.

All that said: I haven’t followed the changelog, but it might be worth checking if you have the latest Calibre version. Basically all the package managers are months, if not years, out of date and a LOT of work has been put in to making Kobos a first class citizen.

KOReader is trivial to install but I would also say it is nowhere near as “required” as it used to be for the majority of readers.

In fact, a few months (year or two?) back when amazon started this bullshit in earnest, the main dev(s) behind Calibre finally picked up Kobos and DRASTICALLY improved support for the devices. Still some wonkiness with usually having to eject and re-connect to actually update metadata but everything “just works”.

I rock a Kobo and used an Onyx for almost a year and they are indeed great (Onyx especially if you want to still use Kindle and don’t mind a free 5G Modem).

The issue is the ecosystem. Kindle Unlimited is, even with the current Amazon bullshit, a SPECTACULAR resource for self-published authors. And it restricts what authors can sell in terms of ebooks.

There are-ish ways around it (drying up every day as per the article). But if you are buying an ereader it is generally because you like to read a lot. And the Amazon ecosystem is still nigh unbeatable.

To clarify:

“Traditionally published” books and even many “self published” books are sold in all major storefronts and often on the author’s website (if they have one).

The issue is that Amazon has REALLY REALLY good tools for self publishing and, at least until recently, Kindle Unlimited (?) was a great way for authors to make money without the power of a traditional publisher or the grindset for true self publishing. And Kindle Unlimited requires amazon exclusivity.

The “good” news is that Amazon is dicking everyone over with changes to Audible and the like (it is allegedly a big reason why Sanderson basically made his own publishing house) and a lot of the big names in SFF are increasingly considering their options. That is a drop in the bucket compared to Romantasy and the like, but it is not nothing.

So best recommendation is to politely nudge your favorite authors and to signal boost booktube/booktok/bookgram/whatever to keep pushing on this. One of my guilty pleasure “litrpg” authors has been open about this in the past that they use Kindle Unlimited but, at least on their discord, are increasingly looking into alternatives because so many of the diehard fans actively don’t want to give Amazon money but still want to give them cash.

Just to keep adding on: Funny enough, Christopher Ruocchio’s “whatever happened between him and DAW” is actually increasingly being used as an argument for why it is okay to change publishing formats. For those unaware, Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series is spectacular in that it starts as Space Rome and Barbarians At The Gates before… going places. But he had scope creep and wanted to do an extra book but his publisher (DAW) had given him a specific deal and did not want to renegotiate and it was a huge clusterfuck that more or less led to him changing publishers midstream.

Which is generally acknowledged as a death sentence for a series because it makes any form of promotion nigh impossible because the old publisher actively does not want to encourage sales of new books (that is “their” money) and the new publisher can’t sell the books that are generally required reading for the new ones. But between a lot of fans who had fallen in love with the series and prominent booktube influencers going REAL hard on it, he managed to successfully switch publishers and should be finishing up early next year?

But considering how many authors are in essentially the same mess where the first ten books are on Kindle but the next twenty might be on Kindle+Kobo+whatever? It is a very scary prospect that could literally end their literary career but… it is also increasingly doable.

First and foremost: That is not what this is about. Well, that isn’t what the sane parts of this is about. It isn’t that tiktok is too popular.

It is that it is very blatantly a tool of the CCP. Much like facebook and twitter are tools of the US government. There are many articles documenting how facebook has been used to steal elections and… fuel coups. And musk et al are pretty open that they did the same with twitter and the 2024 US Presidential election. And… it is hard to not be suspicious when “tiktok is the only streaming platform that is willing to talk about the genocide in Palestine” and “I refuse to vote for genocide, full stop” were so tightly coupled.

No country should allow such blatant manipulation of its people by a foreign nation. Whether it is the US, Russia (see: RT getting banned the fuck out of most western nations), China, or even frigging Mauritius.

Second… Do you really think People have that much agency? Not individuals, but People.

Fair enough. I was mostly just thinking back to when I was researching luggage tags and the general guidance was “airtags have the best coverage in the US and some Western European countries. For East Asia, it is generally fine but a lot more hit and miss as most countries vastly prefer Samsung Androids”. And my experience in Japan and Korea lined up with that where my luggage had ridiculously high fidelity with a samsung tag or whatever they are called.

But the point still stands. If you have a high end phone that basically nobody around you will have, you’ll stand out.

Oh I 500% assume racism is a big part of this too.

Not familiar with Catalonia but I assume there are at least a few ethnic groups that are associated with “rich” and this is a way to group them in.

Which, funny enough, was also kind of the deal with Blackberries. Yeah, Dealers had them. Because Dealers like buying expensive shit (See also: really expensive Rolex in a neighborhood where everyone is on food stamps) AND because they were ridiculously ahead of their time tech wise. You know who else had them? Business and (proto-)tech folk. And cops LOVED to say that the kid who actually made something of themselves going back home to visit family must be a Dealer because they have the same phone all their co-workers do.

Which gets back to: As part of an investigation, it is good. It is one part of a potential puzzle. In the reality of ACAB… ACAB.

Funny enough, I actually have tried with chatgpt. The problem is the same one with all these LLM based tools: Training data.

And if you actually google this yourself, the vast majority of what you find are people not understanding what is being asked or referencing a REALLY REALLY old UI (possibly dating to the open or even star days). And the LLMs are effectively scraping that so you get the equivalent of “This was already answered HERE. Closing duplicate question” response.

(I usually DO end up figuring it out after a bit of deep diving when I really care but I go through so much FUD in the process that I inevitably forget a month or two later).

Those articles don’t really support the claim? At all?

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crime-preferred-phone-3573578/ is unsourced but, taking at face value, seems like what one would expect. People aren’t getting stopped at checkpoints and forced to divulge what OS their phone is running and being taken to a black site if they run GrapheneOS. But someone holding up a pixel in a sea of cheap motorolas DOES raise some eyebrows. Same as someone with a ridiculously expensive rolex walking around The Hood and so forth. And, presumably, people who have been arrested for other reasons raise even more eyebrows if their phone isn’t running a stock OS which…

Look, with a just police force (ha!), that actually is a very reasonable stance. Back in the day it was having a Blackberry. For a decade or so it was having two phones until people learned to not do anything personal on a work phone and that became kinda normal. There are activities that are generally associated with “weirdos” and “criminals” and I think even the GraphenOS devs would acknowledge their userbase fall firmly into the former. If you see someone with a Blackberry hanging out leaning against a 7-11? You maybe hang out across the street for an hour and keep an eye on them. Arrest someone and they have three burner phones in their pants pockets? Maybe you look a bit deeper.

That is actual investigative work. Of course, the problem is that it instead becomes “That gameboy looks like a drug dealer’s phone. We are going to stop and frisk you and maybe sexually assault you in the back of the cruiser if we are bored”.

I’m keyed in on a lot of “high level” protest discussion as well as what investigative journalists need to do for actual safety. And one of the biggest topics that regularly comes up is the idea of “the burner”. In theory, if you are crossing a questionable border or think you might be stopped, you bring a completely blank burner. If they hack into it, you are safe, right?

Wrong. Because you are now an anomaly. NOBODY has no social media and NOBODY has no documents on their laptop. So what are you hiding? Let’s beat it out of you.

Which is why general best practices are often considered to have a real device that you actually use everyday and take through those checkpoints and on the riskier protests. But you make damned sure there is nothing incriminating or sensitive on there. Optimally through having your “burner” be the one you do said activities on, but also through just removing it well before you get on the plane or get in the car.

And a lot of that applies to device choice too. That cool ass Linux Phone might seem like a great idea but now you stand out from the crowd quite a bit. Same with taking your top of the line iphone to Korea where Samsungs grow on trees and so forth.

Its worth understanding that microsoft, like most companies, is rapidly rebranding most of their existing stuff as “AI”. A couple weeks (months?) back at work we managed to convince the boss that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to put all of our sensitive internal data into Teams and convinced him to turn off copilot. Literally minutes later he lost his shit because auto-transcripts no longer worked and IT turned it back on.

But that is what we are seeing with a LOT of companies. ANYTHING that can be sold as “AI” is getting re-branded as it. So it makes perfect sense that MS will rebrand it as “installing copilot AI” rather than “not removing clippy”.

That said: MS have also been ahead of the curve on adding even more bullshit and spyware to everything they do so… have you heard the good word about Linux? Libre Office gets personal users most of the way there (and if they worked on their documentation, all the way there. I STILL don’t fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc…). And for business/power use, the browser/cloud based solutions are probably what you want anyway since none of that data should live on your laptop/desktop and should instead live in the company approved data store.

I am not going to say people should buy a Samsung appliance especially with this nonsense.

But you’re falling for, and propagating, a pretty common fallacy. it isn’t that Samsung appliances are significantly worse (Consumer Reports puts them in the bottom half of the ranking but they are very much “fine”). It is that people buy them a lot.

You see this with all kinds of brands. “Never buy Shark. Everyone who buys a Shark comes back and return it or buy a new vacuum in a few years”. It isn’t that Sharks are failing more than others (they are actually #1 or #2 according to CR, depending on the metrics). It is that they are what sell the most.

Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.

NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.

If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.

And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.

If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.

The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).

Just a general warning:

It is one thing to provide something for family. It is another thing to be a person in authority providing one for an org. And kids are horrible and basically all have cameras everywhere they go. They WILL do something horrible and, depending on what that something is, you might now be liable for a lot of stuff you don’t want to be.

You don’t want that smoke. They can use google drive. Or you can talk to one of the companies that host next/own clouds for people and ask for a discount since it is the boy scouts.

If you are thinking in terms of building a widget or making an industrial process, it makes perfect sense. Something like a wristwatch is the kind of innovation a LOT of people more or less simultaneously made and it is just impossible to definitively prove what country the first watch was made in. Even figuring out who was the first to file becomes a mess. Same with factory processes where the players who would even have the ability to iterate are often counted on fingers and toes.

But software (and research) in a global society is a real mother fucker. Because now the entire world can more or less see everything and reproducing things is fairly trivial. And… it isn’t like the patents actually matter all that much when so much gets done overseas. China Don’t Care but also the EU doesn’t really either and so forth. Sure there are avenues to try to pursue a studio using the patented Nemesis System but… at best you are going to be tied up in courts for years trying to get a judge to insist that a company in Germany needs to send you a check.

For the exact same reason that “fair use” is still so incredibly nebulous and twitch streaming/let’s plays still exist.

NOBODY is crazy enough to want to take that to the courts. Because maybe you get a judge who has “common sense”. Maybe you get an old white guy who thinks Pong was too complicated and decides that you are wrong. At which point you have now made a bunch of legal precedent for REALLY stupid stuff.

Its also kind of why so much stuff about video games actually never gets patented. It is playing with fire.

I ANAL and am not a lawyer.

The verbiage on this is RIDICULOUSLY specific (as patents generally should be) to the point that I refused to even pass the PDF through an OCR system and instead will trust that site’s transcription

    (1) There must be a PC, console or other computing device and the game is stored on a drive or similar storage medium.

    (2) You can move a character in a virtual space.

    (3) You must be able to summon a character. They call it a “sub character” by which they mean it’s not the player character, but, for example, a little monster such as a Pokémon that the player character has at its disposal.

    Then the logic branches out, with items (4) and (5) being mutually exclusive scenarios, before reuniting again in item (6):

    (4) This is about summoning the “sub character” in a place where there already is another character that it will then (when instructed to do so) fight.

    (5) This alternative scenario is about summoning the “sub character” at a position where there is no other character to fight immediately.

    (6) This final step is about sending the “sub character” in a direction and then letting an automatic battle ensue with another character. It is not clear whether this is even needed if one previously executed step (4) where the “sub character” will basically be thrown at another character.

All of those criteria must be met for this trap card to be triggered (shit… Yugioh lawyers getting revved up now).

Step 4 specifically covers the case where you summon your little guy to fight someone else. As worded, that actually would impact a Summon in every JRPG and Final Fantasy just got sweaty. Step 5 summons a character as an assist or to replace the main character in a fight (so… Pokemon).

What I find most interesting is that step 6 specifically says “automatic battle”. Which… to my Not A Lawyer brain, means this doesn’t even cover Pokemon since you specifically give your mons battle commands. Err, aside from S01E01 Pikachu who did not give a fuck. And then Charizard. And probably a dozen more pokemons after I stopped watching The Son Of Mr Mime’s Adventures. But, from what little I saw of it, it DOES cover Palworld where you just summon your pals to do work for you or fight for you. And it potentially covers Final Fantasy and Ichiban’s Like a Dragons (the Poundmates, not the Sujimon)…

Which is probably the most interesting thing and why I think Pokemon Co is going to be ridiculously selective of who they try to sue. Because any of the big hitters can just say “Dumbfucks, we were doing this before Game Freak even existed”. Whereas indie devs are small enough they don’t want to risk it.

It might be worth keeping an eye on MinnMax as Haley MacLean IS a lawyer who actually specializes in video game IP but I suspect this is too close to her day job for her to publicly speak about it even with the “not legal advice” disclaimers. Which hopefully guarantees she actually talked about it on one of the podcasts this week and I just haven’t looked yet.

Too lazy to dig for it myself but would love to see someone do a deep dive on what an “upgrade” actually would be.

How many of the gen 1 parts are just plug and play in a gen2 chassis/mobo? How much of the gen2 parts can be put into the old gen 1 case? The upgraded heatpipes already make that questionable.

I am obviously not the biggest fan of Framework Corp (and I genuinely think they are contributing to significantly more e-waste than traditional “upgrade” paths). But this also feels like a good use case to study for anyone who actually thinks they are going to meaningfully upgrade their laptop every 5-10 years without just buying a new laptop.

Because didn’t the 16 just get a pretty massive (possibly backwards compatibility breaking?) design upgrade like last year? I remember all the tech youtubers (except GN for whatever reason…) talking about the adjustable keyboard layout for people who hate their wrists.

Which is also one of the dark secrets of desktop PCs. Okay, AM4 was fucking insane and that STILL gets new CPUs? But, generally speaking, if you are the kind of person who “upgrades” your PC every 6-10 years (so roughly a console gen)? Your “upgrade” is a full rebuild more often than not but you re-use that nvme so it still counts.

We are a numbers species

And we only have power when we act in numbers towards a focused goal.

This is why we (should) have (more) Unions instead of just “Negotiate for yourself and everyone will benefit”. And that, inherently, needs leaders who know how to work towards a shared purpose.

Everyone should work towards making the world a better place. But we also need to understand what we are actually working towards and what those “somethings” actually can accomplish.

The issue is what this even accomplishes.

Traction is indeed important. But people also get exhausted (how many folk were whinging about “first I needed to make my avatar a rainbow and now it needs to be black? Oh, you mean a black box. Whoopsie” back in 2020?). It is why “just do something, it doesn’t matter what” is such a stupid fucking mentality because you waste the general good will towards pointless slacktivism and then people stop caring by the time you have an idea of how to utilize them.

Which… is where the Rossman comes in. I have a lot of issues with him as a human being but as an activist he is REALLY effective… for Right to Repair… for repair shops. But he has also made his career on convincing everyday people that he is fighting for them when he is really using them as ammunition for making sure his repair shop (that totally doesn’t violate any labor laws…) can stay running because OBVIOUSLY this lobbyist movement to support activity that requires a full hotplate and high powered microscope is something that everyday consumers care about (sort of in the sense of having options, but at this scale the poison pill apple compliance is actually probably just as good, if not better, for consumers)

I haven’t been able to even find a good explanation of what this is even supposed to accomplish. But, dime to a dollar, it is Rossman et al demonstrating how quickly he can mobilize The Internet as a negotiating tactic for whatever he and his lobbyist buddies are pushing on right now.

PM->DM was a mix of making it more obvious that those were NOT private in the slightest and to better align with marketing (“send a Direct Message to the celebrity you are stalking!”)

I am not sure when “pfp” took over but I’ve noticed over the past 3 or 4 months a LOT of random requests for a DM on discord of people asking where I got my pfp… which is literally a screenshot from a cartoon in the 00s. So I assume this is related to selling avatars to people on the game social networks?