Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett’s post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

TIL, thanks. This might be a viable path for me.

I can give it a shot, certainly. One of the main contributors behind it is in my RSS reader so there’s some name recognition there. Future pricing is not final though, so I can’t budget for it before committing.

It might not be a solution for everyone, but you can self host a git repository on your static site!

I like the concept and the aesthetics, but I guess you still need to run a git server?

If you are willing to self-host and are scared of the gitea license shake-up, use forgejo.

When it comes to self-hosting, there’s also the costs. Hosting providers have been hitting me with price hikes one after another this year, so I’m looking into shutting down some servers instead.

Okay, that sounds like it hits the spot. I’ll read up on them. Happy to hear testimonials for existing users.

Are they asking for money

The text ends with an appeal to donate to KDE’s fund-raiser, so they are asking for money.

Whether that makes it an advertisement and/or whether all advertisements are undesirable on a link-sharing board are independent questions. Personally, even if this is an advertisement by some reasonable definition, I did find it helpful enough and KDE got one conversion out of me because I downloaded one of their apps.

The KDE Itinerary’s platform layout maps are a good sell. I’ll try it next to DB Navigator on my next trip. KDE Apps on Android are a bit unstable, at least on my phone, but at least now they load. Last time I tried I could barely get them to even do that.

I basically take the position “you need a different, non-confusing term”. Open Code is not such a term.

My view is shaped from the cultural realm more so than the software side, but I think the concern at the centre of it is transferable: it becomes extremely messy to capture the desired acceptable uses in the legal wording of an enforceable license. The outcome is that every use will have to be individually authorised.

I was helping run and occasionally held the editor role of a leftist magazine which we decided to make Free Culture under CC-BY-SA. Content using the Non Commercial clause gave us such headache, while even though we did not charge for the magazine nor we ran adverts, we accepted and strongly encouraged donations from our readers. That money went to pay off the printing costs (the NC clause already has a problem with that, but we assumed that would still be defensible), but the rest was also invested in other endeavours like public events, or eventually helping fund a community centre.

At that point, it didn’t matter if creators with NC works released them under a supposedly free license. Our -in our opinion- non-for-profit use was still so tainted with money changing hands, that we still needed to seek their consent and get a written permission on top of the original license. At the end of the day, it was the same as working with All Rights Reserved works, where we get a special license from a sympathetic creator. The NC clause solved nothing for us.

That part is, I believe, the same with software licenses. We will end up having to get 1:1 license agreements for so many things because the new anti-commercial licenses will not be able to predict all the scenarios which are “false positives” for the anti-capitalist software developer (as in, some desirable re-uses will be blocked by the license, and individual licensing agreements will be needed often).

My focus would be to fix the loopholes that go counter to the copyleft spirit in AGPL, if such loopholes are identified, and perhaps get a more reliable organisation handle the AGPL definition in the future.

What I have to give to XMPP is that it’s one of the easiest federated services to self-host. Running Prosody is super simple.

This will sound very pessimistic, but I think what you are witnessing is a more accentuated version of reality.

It’s more intense for a number of reasons (it takes less dedication to spread hate online, these communities are small so moderation isn’t as effective, the userbase is small so a few users make a bigger splash, communities of this technical nature have a historical lineage that selects for a certain strain of uncritical laissez-faire individualism, etc), but they are nothing that is totally alien to the rest of a given society.

Reality won’t let us catch a break, we are forced to actively maintain the good stuff at any given moment.

I picked up for a book club but then dropped after prolonged distress, Call Me by Your Name by Aciman.

It’s not so much the age-gap aspect (which is pushing the limits of acceptable for a reader socialised in Europe, but it’s not over those limits), but it’s the entire trope of sexual abuse as a playful flirting ritual that permeates the book that I found truly sickening.