snuggledick

joined 2 years ago
[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 1 points 7 hours ago

Way better than Google and I especially love that in translatons they also seamlessly convert weirdo imperial units to metric so you don't have to deal with cups and feet or whatever.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Kinda funny because just recently Sweden canceled plans to build new wind farms because they'd interfere with their radars. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-sweden-nixed-new-wind-farms-for-fear-of-missing-russian-missiles/

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Haven't used it myself yet so can't talk about it their recommendation algorithm, but Qobuz has been recommended several times here, it's French and apparently has a very good payout to artists per play compared to others.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 1 points 15 hours ago

Regarding prices, one thing to consider is that even if a company has their chips produced in China, they had the costs of design and development, while Chinese just steal/copy those designs and therefore can sell them cheaper. I heard a joke long time ago from some hobby electronics nerd that went like "if you want your circuit board design etched for cheap, just send it to a Chinese manufacturer asking for a quotation, and a few weeks/months later you can buy your own PCB mass produced on AliExpress", and I think that's pretty accurate.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 1 points 15 hours ago

That looks much better, thanks!

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

The 70s was before my time, I remember the Canadian flag thing though. But as I understood that's more about not wanting to be associated with other American tourists who can behave quite obnoxiously when traveling in groups and taking full advantage of strong cheap local beers and the lower legal drinking age. There is and always was some degree of anti-americanism from the left, but on a political level and not something you'd have to worry about as an individual tourist. The headline is also a bit misleading in that sense, this "anti-americanism" is directed at Trump's shenanigans, not random tourists.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I gave it a shot but without public transport navigation it's pretty useless for me. Also I don't enjoy being bugged to create an account or pay 19€ for a "premium user badge" just to make that "please give us money" button go away that's permanently covering part of the map.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago

I read a more in-depth analysis some time ago and a lot of them are just desperate people with financial or other problems, and becoming a Reichsbürger is more like a form of escapism from reality than something they really believe in. Imagine you have a crippling amount of debt and/or are about to be evicted for example, and then you read on some nutjob website that the state actually doesn't exist so you don't owe them anything and they have no authority to evict you, doesn't that sound great? All your problems solved by just burning your German ID card and printing out a new one of some made-up country. Of course reality gets them eventually but psychologically it's easier to bear for some people to believe that they're the victim of a huge conspiracy rather than face the fact that they fucked up and are screwed.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Reminds me of the time when Switzerland (or was it Austria?) had a huge problem with their air force because the cowbells of all the cow herds running around in the alps were fucking with their radar systems.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 9 points 2 weeks ago

Him recognizing shit doesn't make it so though.

 

Heyho! Last few days I've been working on leaving Amazon and in particular Kindle for ebooks, so I've been looking for alternatives for my reading needs. While I can't recommend a specific book shop yet I'd like to recommend checking if your country's or city's public libraries allow you to take out ebooks online.

I'm living in Germany and found that there's an app called Onleihe which lets you read books from German public libraries as ebook for basically free, you just pay a tiny fee for your library card which you can get online as well. I registered with VÖBB Berlin for example which is some kind of union of all public libraries in Berlin.

Pros:

  • Flat rate reading – library card costs 10€ per year, discounts available for students, unemployed or disabled people etc.
  • Huge selection of not only books but also audio books, magazines and even movies.

Cons:

  • If you don't like the built-in reader of the Onleihe app there's an option to read ebooks in an external app, however that app as to support DRM and as far as I can tell that limits the options to PocketBook Reader (which isn't too shabby though and made in Switzerland). You also have to register with Adobe to get some kind of DRM decoding account or whatever, which is an annoyance but free.
  • Taking out ebooks works the same as with physical books, meaning you can only take out books for a limited duration (maximum 21 days) before it's "returned", and for a lot of new or very popular books you have to wait until someone else has "returned" their ebook before you can have it. Yes that's stupid given were talking about ebooks, I assume it's due to licensing stuff or whatever.

My conclusion: if you need a specific book NOW, you might be out of luck and better off buying it somewhere. If you just wanna browse a huge selection and look for something for entertainment then a reading flat rate for 10€ per year is a great deal.

Either way, might be worth it checking out if there's something similar available where you live. If there is please share!

 

Hey there, I wanted to get away from Amazon Kindle but of course take all my ebooks with me, I paid for them after all. Unfortunately Amazon tries really hard to stop you from doing this by introducing new file formats, DRM and encryption, disabling functionality on their website and so on, making this endeavor quite a hassle, but I finally managed to liberate my books so I can use them with other ebook readers. There's a bunch of different tutorials for this out there, but I found each of them lacks one or two crucial points that prevent it from working, so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial with all the bits of information collected from all over the web and save you some frustration and time (took me a couple of hours to make this work).

I'm not sure if this is the best community to post this to, if you know a better one please let me know or feel free to cross-post it there.

So here's how to get all your ebooks out of Amazon, strip them of DRM/copy protection and convert them to EPUB for use with other ebook readers:

  1. Install Calibre (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) using whatever method works best for your operating system. I'm using Arch Linux and running "sudo pacman -S calibre" did the trick.

  2. Download the latest release CANDIDATE! of the DeDRM plugin, NOT! the latest release! All tutorials I found referred to the stable release v10.0.3, which does NOT work with Amazon's latest DRM shit. At the time of writing this "RC1 v10.0.9" was the latest available version. You'll find it here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

  3. Download the plugin "KFX Input.zip" at the bottom of this forum post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290

  4. Unzip the DeDRM release you downloaded, inside you'll find a file "DeDRM_plugin.zip" which is the actual plugin. The KFX Input plugin does NOT need to be unzipped.

  5. Start Calibre, go to "Preferences / Advanced / Plugins" and with the button "Load plugin from file" install the two plugins you downloaded. For the DeDRM plugin make sure you select the unzipped file "DeDRM_plugin.zip", not the downloaded release package.

  6. Restart Calibre.

  7. Go to your "My Devices" page on Amazon (I can't provide a direct link here because it's different for every country, but you should be able to find it). Select your Kindle device and copy its serial number. Alternatively you can look it up on your Kindle itself in the device information in the settings, however you obivously can't copy/paste it from there and I found it hard tell letter O and digit 0 apart, so the first method is probably less error prone.

  8. Back in Calibre open the plugins section in the preferences again, search for the DeDRM plugin and double-click it. In the new dialog click "Kindle eInk ebooks", then the green plus icon and paste your Kindle's serial number. The fact that you need the serial number was also missing in most tutorials, took me ages to figure that out.

  9. Optional step: Go to your "My Content" page on Amazon where all your purchased ebooks are listed. Select all and click "deliver to device" or whatever it's called in your localized Amazon, and select your Kindle. Hit sync on your Kindle device. This is to make sure that all your purchased ebooks are actually saved on the device as we're gonna copy the files from there in the next step. You can skip this if all your books are already downloaded to your Kindle or if you only want those that are.

  10. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB. Calibre should automatically detect it. Make sure your Kindle is in "USB Drive Mode", not "Charging Mode", so Calibre can access the files on it. For me this was the default when plugging the USB cable in.

  11. In the top menu in Calibre click on "Device", this should give you a list of all books on your Kindle.

  12. Select all or some books you want to liberate, right click and click "Add books to library" in the context menu. Your books should now be all be copied to your library on your computer, but they're still in Amazon's proprietary AZW or KFX format

  13. To make them usable with other ebook readers switch back to your local library ("Libary" button in the top menu) where you should now find all the books you just copied. Again select all books in the list and click "Convert" in the top menu. In the new dialog tweak the options as you wish or just hit "OK" to start. Depending on how many books you got this may take a little while.

  14. Done! You now got a bunch of DRM-free EPUB files in your library that you can use with whatever ebook reader you want.

Few notes:

  • If you get errors like "books can't be converted because of DRM" in step 13, make sure that the correct version of the DeDRM plugin is properly installed and you configured the correct serial number and start over from step 11.

  • A bunch of sites tell you that you can download AZW directly from your "My Content" page on Amazon, but they removed that function in February 2025.

  • If you've tried this before you probably stumbled upon a tool called "epubor" quite often which is trash and tries to make you pay for liberating the ebooks you already own, it doesn't offer anything that Calibre doesn't do for free.

 

Macron, who has been calling for years to direct defense spending toward EU products, said he wants to convince other European countries that are currently “buying American” to shift to local options.

 

I've been using their app for some time now and really like the concept: Basically it allows restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets etc to announce when they have stuff leftover that they'd usually throw away at the end of the day. You can browse those nearby shops in the app and reserve a "surprise bag" for a small amount, usually around a third of the regular price, but it varies. In the pickup timeframe (usally around 30-60min before their closing time) you go there, show that you've reserved the bag in your app, confirm that you've received it and happily walk home with a ton of surprise food for super cheap.

After using it for a while I can especially recommend looking for food stalls at farmers markets as they often have lots of stuff leftover that they don't want to take back home when packing up so they're often super generous. Bakeries are also great, I regularly get a week's supply of bread, buns, pastries and cake for like 3-5€.

EDIT: While it's made in Denmark the app works globally or at least all of EuropeAFAIK, definitely works fine with lots of participating shops in Germany.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 6 points 2 weeks ago

Bring it on then, who gives a fuck at this point.

[–] snuggledick@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Will "it would've been way cheaper if they hadn't ignored every single wake-up call in the last 10 years and started investing in defense earlier but it still needs to get fucking done and FAST or there won't be a democracy with polls anymore and your precious money is taken by Russian occupiers" be an option in that poll?

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