You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you’re concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It’s a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They’re also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Possibly, though I suspect that releasing your new DRM early is a good way to have it broken by the time you actually want to protect something with it.

I knew there was something wrong when my pirated copies of these games suddenly started vanishing from my hard drive! Curse you, DRM!

~ What the execs think will happen, I guess? What is the point of applying DRM to a game that has already released?

Yeah there’s a few ways they could be acquired. I don’t do Amazon or Kindle but they appear to be on Kindle Unlimited. They’ve also apparently been sent out for free a few times. I feel like it puts a bad taste in my mouth either way; even if I could sidestep the cost, by reading them it would still be supporting the books and therefore the gouging of others, in an indirect sense.

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.

I wrote a short guide on this method recently: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6708735

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

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.

This is all I needed to do so: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314220

Run the script from the second post, then eject the Kobo and let it install. Afterwards you can open it from the new NickelMenu button at the bottom right. My Kobo just stays in KOReader mode all the time.

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.

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.

Garf

It has a very high opinion of itself.

JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.

Yes it’s lossless. JPG->JXL lossless compression is generally 20% savings for free.

The real problem is that everyone is using the “All” tab as a content feed. Ideally everyone would subscribe to communities and then they wouldn’t have to worry about seeing things they don’t want to see. Lemmy needs to be bigger before we can break that anti-pattern.

Semi-related, can these automations really be relied upon for quality, or is there a system to help find the best copy? When I’m downloading books I do it manually through Anna’s Archive and I always download as many unique versions of a book that I see, then open them all and compare their internals to see which one I keep. Often not many ebooks are suitable for using my own font and layouts with Koreader.

Arch should be fine for university stuff. The main problem with Arch is not Arch itself, but all the software it tracks being very fresh. You’ll be pulling updates as they come down the line, and that may result in temporary bugs or day-to-day workflow changes - caused by the software developers themselves. I don’t think an Arch system is unusually unstable or prone to breaking, but last year they did brick everyone’s GRUB loaders by pushing an update too early (post-mortem here). It’s up to you, but if you want to err on the side of system/software stability I would go for Mint/OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Debian.

I don’t have any practical experience with EndeavourOS but TMK it’s just preconfigured Arch and it uses the default repos, so that sounds good to me. Vanilla Arch is not inherently better or worse, it’s just a more minimal starting point.