Kobo works fantastic.
If you have the ability, set up calibre and calibre-web and you can configure your Kobo to use your ebook library as the “store”.
Kobo also has at least one plugin/mod that replaces the whole reading UI with one with more features. Check out KOReader for that.
Apart from that, though, it makes little difference what ebook you get. If it allows you to load your own ebook files on manually (afaik they all do), you can do whatever you want.
I think I’m at my wit’s end with “smart” things.
Roomba? It takes less time to just vacuum the place than it does for the fucking vacuum to realize it’s been humping the same chair leg for most of its battery charge.
Assistants?
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sorry, that device hasn’t been configured yet”
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sure, turning 2 lights on”
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sure, opening the blinds”
I wasn’t ready quite yet so I put them in a bag in the freezer.
The bag got so full I had to move to a bigger bag.
My freezer is half full of brown, frozen bananas.
I don’t even like banana bread. Help.
I hung around on Reddit for like 15 years before I left, and I saw a progression from earnest debate to sarcasm becoming dominant in a lot of subs, particularly the busy ones. I imagine this holds true for any popular, long-term forums.
This is what I see:
Person A comes in and gives an opinion that is opposed to the general consensus in the community (“hive mind”).
Person B responds with a detailed explanation of why that opinion has been soundly rejected and how it maps to “the consensus”. This is the kind of quality post that made Reddit shine. It gets upvotes like crazy not because it’s “right”, but because it clearly explains how you get from opinion A to opinion B in a way anybody can follow.
Five years passes.
Person ZZZZ comes in and gives the SAME opinion as Person A.
Person B, inexplicably still a member of the community, responds with a short blast of sarcasm that makes it clear they disagree with that opinion, but long gone are the days where they bother to thoughtfully contrast the opposing views. It’s basically a snappy “you’re dumb and wrong; get fucked” comment. It gets upvoted like crazy this time not because it explains anything, but because it echoes the tired sentiment of the community.
I don’t even know if that’s a Reddit thing or just a general human experience thing. If someone were to approach you alone IRL and say they have concerns about trans athletes, you might have enough energy (and recent context) to be willing to explore the issues and explain your take on several facets of the arguments people commonly make.
If someone came up to you and said they aren’t sure about “this women voting thing”, I can’t imagine you’re going to be nearly as patient or willing to engage. Women’s suffrage has SAILED. The time for debate ended when your great grandmother died.
I saw a similar thing with the current wars. Early on there were interesting points raised. Now if someone comes in with a “unique” opinion on Ukraine or Gaza, they get buried in downvotes or told to fuck off. The time for debate has passed.
Maybe it’s an issue of people joining a debate late and wanting to understand the issues become indistinguishable from bots and trolls with a paid agenda. Volunteers can’t be arsed to waste time educating them.
“How impressed everybody is” is the basis of money, law, self-worth and our models of reality.
Can you expand on that some? On the surface, it doesn’t match my experience at all.
First post the post, I guess. I’m told all the other options are too difficult for people to understand, apparently.
The most common thing I’ve seen are projects where it acts like a screen or control panel on the wall. Something that’s a fixture or art project.
You don’t need it for anything like music or games - your new phone will be more convenient and run those things better anyway.
A friend of mine stuck an old tablet on the wall and connected it via Bluetooth to his keg system. It gave him a permanent status readout on his beer temperature and how much was left in each keg. It just had a power cable plugged in all the time so it didn’t need to be charged.
I gave up trying to maintain a principled list of companies because globalization and supply chains make it too hard to really find a single asshole.
Your chocolate was picked by slaves. Your clothes were almost certainly made by exploited workers. Does that toy have a lithium ion battery? You’re not going to like how many of the raw materials were extracted. The name of the company on the sticker of the shit you bought is just a small piece of the rot.
Yes, but not for a good reason.
I’ve asked chat bots for some services (telcos, etc) for very basic questions that you’d think would have been easy to find from a search engine or their main FAQs, but they were not. The bot was at least able to reference some obscure, super old help pages that had otherwise fallen off the radar.
The bot was a solution to a problem only caused because their website was shitty. I guess it’s cheaper to add an ai bot than it is to organize your documentation.
I think the big thing here is which colours you’re into. Tastes change over time, either because of style trends or just age.
My childhood home had disgusting orange shag carpets. A purple toilet. A turquoise toilet. Fucking hideous by today’s standards, but I guess someone in the 60s thought it was awesome.
I’d pole your kids and ask for more detail. If they’re rolling their eyes because of “colour”, tell em to shaddap. If you’re picking really, really loud colours that don’t fit any particular motif, you can of course do what you want, but they might have a point on style.
I bought Terraria when I was really into Minecraft. Didn’t like it at first because the only Minecraft thing is “pick up blocks and crafting”, but once I gave it a fair shake I absolutely loved it.
Fuck, now I have the game music stuck in my head from thinking about the game!
I have one. It’s a fucking lie.
I think that technically the vape solution is nicotine, but not tobacco. They’re “better” in that they don’t have all the side products you get from burning leaves, but it’s still nicotine and there’s now the new mix of vape chemicals that weren’t present in cigarettes. Healthier? Doubtful, but it’s less studied.
As far as teens getting their hands on them, I think this just shows how hilariously ineffective age restrictions are in preventing access to children. If vapes weren’t available, those kids would be smoking cigarettes. If cigarettes weren’t available, they would vape. If both are available (which they are, because there’s no shortage of adults who will sell these things to minors), they’ll use whatever they prefer.
Vaping is winning the popularity war with cigarettes among teenagers. I think that’s all you’re seeing.
In Canada, it’s very illegal to sell cigarettes and vaping products to minors, but it’s not illegal for them to possess or use them. That kind of brain dead gap in legislation makes it easy for politicians to say they did everything they can, and lets police say there’s nothing they can do.
My angry knives can bitch all they want. They live in a tiny ass drawer all piled on top of each other. They rarely see the light of day and I personally pay very little mind to their plight.
The good knives live in an airy, sunlit space on a magnet knife block above my sink. They get lots of fresh air, have plants nearby, and get to be a part of the family. When they are used, they’re always honed and immediately washed and dried and put away. They never mingle with the angry knives.
An angry knife was once accidentally promoted to the magnet block. It was a mistake that was quickly remedied, and it could have gotten bad.
I still have my toddler books with the graphic Struwwelpeter running in with shears and cutting the thumbs off the boy who wouldn’t stop sucking them.
It’s a… “nostalgic” childhood trauma?
I don’t pirate software anymore. If I do the math on how much enjoyment I get even from a mediocre AAA game title, it is dwarfed by what I’d spend on a night out, so the value is there for me. On top of that the risk of malware (or the effort in mitigating it) isn’t really worth it.
Tv and movies? Pirate it. The streaming services are garbage and the content has too much crap for me to want to pay a corporation for it. If it became too hard to pirate I just wouldn’t watch it anymore.
Books kind of fall in the middle. Happy to pay for ebooks if the author makes it practical, but I’m not keen on buying through Amazon.
It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.
The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.
Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.
This could be as innocent as “hiring manager was on vacation and we still have some interviews planned” or “our interviewer was caught fornicating with a chicken and we’ve had to make some internal changes”.
I would take it as a positive sign that you’re still in the running, but like others have said, I wouldn’t pause my other job searching tasks to wait for this one to play out.