MudMan

I absolutely don’t understand Calibre at all. That’s been my point all along.

I can tell you that I’ve actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I’m currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.

Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn’t have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.

Because that’s how it still works as of today, as it turns out.

And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than… I don’t know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I’m being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.

Hah. You get the “FOSS gets to be crap because you can’t do it yourself” cop out often, but rarely when you haven’t actually complained about it.

I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don’t get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don’t even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It’s like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.

Unless you’re Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don’t see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I’ve seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I’m not sure he’d take it as an insult and I don’t mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn’t made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.

But since I’m at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it’s FOSS. If you put it out there don’t be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don’t need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that’s annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.

Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it’s old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.

It’s not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there’s all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.

I’ve been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it’s weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.

There’s a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.

A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it’s inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.

See also: Gnome.

Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can’t even remember.

In any case I’m part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I’m married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.

Hah. Good to know. I haven’t refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn’t considered it. Makes a lot of sense to consolidate all the media server options into one package, though. I’ll take a peek at the new one.

I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.

Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.

Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.

I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.

I wish you didn’t have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of “programmer-knows-better” software ever engineered.

Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.

You can try to use Komga instead, but it’s mostly meant for comic books and it’s kinda heavy, honestly.

For the record, I’m not American and I live in a country that has non-democratic regimes well within living memory.

You don’t come across to me as particularly savvy, or as some form of a realist compared to the cushy liberal democracy children. You come across as deeply confusing cynicism with political insight for online brownie points.

Do with that assessment what you will.

I guess it’s a lot easier to “look at history” a certain way if you make up the history.

I have too much to do today to deliberate the specifics of your historical fan fiction, man. You do you.

It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.

I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).

Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.

I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.

Semi-genuine question, had you heard of Venezuela before today?

Like, in your view, had the successive US leaders just decided to ignore Maduro (and Chávez before him) for the past 25 years out of… what? Not having noticed they had a ton of oil? Venezuela nationalized their oil in the 70s, pivoted to China in the 00s. They stole the election while Biden was still in office. Chávez changed the Constitution when Clinton was in office, FFS.

Apparently Trump’s key differentiating attribute now is efficiency, because it seems in your broad strokes, the-rest-is-noise worldview the Dems were just about to throw a sack over Maduro’s head, they had just been procrastinating about it for a decade or two.

This is, sincerely, a profoundly stupid conversation we’re having. They really do let people just say things on the Internet.

No, that’s not a remotely acceptable representation of what happened today, of the policies and strategies at play or the history of the situation. At all.

Does the US have a history of intervening in foreign regimes? Sure. For access to natural resources? Definitely. Except in Latin America the Monroe doctrine had been phased out since the Cold War, and whatever version of it got implemented as the “War on Terror” in the Middle East was patently a disaster and very much a contentious issue that was not widely bipartisan in the first place.

This is a “neocolonial legacy” spanning all political sides in the same way France suddenly deciding to invade Vietnam in 2026 would be a continuation of a colonial legacy. Which is to say only in the most superficial, entirely ahistorical reading possible.

Which is, incidentally, why Maduro was currently in power when he very likely had stolen the election, was actively disputed and actively hostile to every party in the US political spectrum. Not because the US was setting up a coup, but because they were… not doing that despite some pressure, internally and externally, to do so.

And in turn it’s presumably why Trump is out there saying he has no intention to give the country over to Machado and nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

So no, the outcome wouldn’t be the same, the process wouldn’t be the same. The geopolitical view underpinning the situation wouldn’t have been the same (in that this is bucking a trend that started in what? the 80s?) and it’s not all part of the same, bipartisan approach to geopolitics. If you squint any harder to make it seem that way you may pop out an eyeball.

I had no particular desier to see Maduro remain in power indefinitely, but holy hell is the notion of looking at the Trump blitzkrieg play out and go “Harris would have been doing the same, just nicer” a massive, epoch-defining missing of the point. It’d be funny if it wasn’t horrifying.

See, unlike people willing to retroactively support their preferred choices I am making zero assumptions about what’s going to happen.

What Trump says is going to happen and what happens don’t necessarily line up, and there is zero indication that under a different US regime the outcome would be anywhere close to Maduro being deposed. That ship seemed to have very thoroughly sailed at the time of the election.

And certainly, CERTAINLY not this way. Not by kidnapping Maduro by force and hoping that somehow the internal opposition groups are spooked enough to put forward zero resistance to an opposition government as a US puppet. Even if that is nominally implemented at any point, that’s a whole bunch of new ships that need sailing.

So no, not at all the same, not at all an outcome you would have expected from a dem government and not at all something consistent with US geopolitical stances in the past what? thirty, forty years?

The one thing I’ve learned today is that cosplay online leftists will say pretty much anything and that I’m pretty sure any even vaguely left of center leader in the Americas is currently re-reading their emergency protocols. Including those in Canada. And certainly in Greenland.

I fully believe that you can write fan fiction for evil dems that will take you to whatever arbitrary ending this situation happens to have.

It’s a prodigious stretch to argue that “the outcome is the same” at this point, though. Especially since there is every justification for a solution without Maduro in power that isn’t an illegitimate coup. Because… you know, Maduro did not have legitimacy in the first pace, arguably.

But hey, who cares about details like what was actually happening or what people actually said or did, right? If you squint hard enough it all blurs together sufficiently to keep posting simplistic crap online.

The argument from authority doesn’t make the point more or less valid.

If anything, bringing the quote over out of context shows how chillingly unserious it is:

Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

Well, where was the left? Where in the ballot was El-Akkad? Where were the righteousy outraged when something could have been done other than comfortable in their outrage and abdicating responsibility?

Being on the right side of the argument and having no power to enact the right decision is equivalent to not being right at all. And yes, once all other possibilities are boiled down to two, you have to pick one. If you do not, then you picked the one that won.

And that may not be the best way to do it, but until such time as Omar and you have successfully revolted and implemented a superior alternative, that’s how it works. And work it did. So not Palestine is seriously considered as a potential location for a strip mall and Nicolás Maduro is presumably sitting on some CIA dark site somewhere because holy crap, dumbest dystopia.

Anyway, whatever. Not worth going back and forth on this. The blame adjudication is useless and, more to the point, entirely up to me. You can tell Omar I blame him, too, if he ever signs your moral justification pamphlet for fascism.

You do know it.

Be honest for a second.

You know.

FWIW, I don’t think it’d be a particularly unpopular opinion to support an intervention of some kind after the presidential election went the way it went. There are still plenty of people out there disingenuously pretending this is that.

But this is obviously not that. This is absolute insanity.

You said it, not me.

Yes, the lesser of two evil is still evil. And that’s the one you vote for, or want the locals to vote for, because we’re not running on Hannah Barbera levels of cartoon logic.

I swear, burn down the Internet. It was all a mistake.

They demonstrably do not, on account of one of the two just having, and I can’t believe I have to keep typing this out, just kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife.

I am pretty sure that’s not some bipartisan policy. That’s the ending of a Metal Gear sequel.

That’s the lesson, isn’t it? People just say things online, and the things need to get entirely dissociated from basic reality before it starts showing that they’re just things people say on the Internet.

Screw under-16s. Social media should be banned altogether.