The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.

Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.

Depends on how busy the laundromat is. In an ideal world, yes you’re correct. But there are some days where you’re lucky to grab a single washer and dryer.

The time sink is honestly the biggest part. At least when you’re doing laundry at home, you can do other things while you wait on the laundry. At a laundromat, there’s not much to do except maybe bring an iPad or e-reader. Once you’re done folding your current load of laundry, you’re just kind of stuck waiting for the next load to be done.

It always feels a little bit like when you show up 2 hours early for your flight, but then there’s no line at security and you get to your terminal in like 5 minutes. There’s nothing to do except wait. At least at home, you could go hop on your computer and get some work done, get some other cleaning done, or boot up a game console.

There is no ReVanced or uYouPlus for iOS. You have to sideload that shit, cuz YouTube is too far up Apple’s ass for them to allow something like that on the App Store.

Ironically, they allow Vinegar. But only because it’s a Safari extension (and Apple likes when people use Safari more than they like the money from YouTube.)

+1 for Vinegar. My only real complaint is that I use Firefox as a daily driver, and Vinegar only works with Safari. Even though Firefox is using the Safari engine under the hood on iOS, (because Apple doesn’t allow third party browser engines like Firefox’s Gecko, and forces everyone to use WebKit instead,) it doesn’t support Safari extensions.

I’m fine with switching to Safari to watch YouTube… But since Firefox is my default browser, YouTube links automatically open in Firefox. There isn’t a way to specify that I want everything except YouTube to open in my default browser.

Amazon is increasingly hostile with Calibre, especially within the past year or two. Things like intentionally destroying included book covers/thumbnails for books uploaded by Calibre, intentionally breaking Collection editing via Calibre so you have to do it on the Kindle directly, and not allowing users to download their Amazon-purchased books into Calibre.

Worth noting that the one exception for every e-reader is the screen. E-ink screens are very sensitive to pressure, and can be damaged internally even if the surface is totally fine. It’s not something that any one model will do better or worse, because it’s simply due to the way e-ink screens work. Fixing the issue would require inventing new e-ink tech.

Get a folio cover, with a hard/stiff fold. This will more evenly spread any pressure out across the entire screen, ensuring that no damage happens to the underlying e-ink. Nothing worse than pulling your e-reader out of your bag and discovering that it was resting up against something pointy while you walked around, and is now damaged.

That being said, the Kobo’s waterproofing is no joke. I take mine when I go camping, because I’m not worried about it getting wet at all. I could read in the middle of a monsoon, and it would be totally fine.

Yeah, I love everything about my Kindle except for the fact that it’s tied to Amazon. Calibre goes a long way in bridging the gap, (I have a fairly large personal library that isn’t tied to Amazon), but it’s no replacement for native support. If you plan on using Calibre, you should seriously consider a Kobo.

I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”

Similarly, watching the music video for Africa by Toto changes the entire vibe of the song. It’s about wanting to bang a black woman. Bless those rains, I guess.

Harris currently has like 64M votes. This same time 4 years ago, Biden had +80M.Democrat voters didn’t fucking show up.

Almost as if running a centrist platform to try to pick up republican votes was a bad idea, and only disheartened democrat voters. Only 4% of registered republicans voted for Harris, the same as Biden. Hopefully democrats learned something from this, but that’s doubtful.

Yup exactly this. Republicans tend to vote early and be in areas that get counted faster; It’s easier to count 1000 rural votes than it is to count 10000 urban votes. So he’ll take the early numbers and declare victory, then send it all the way to the SCOTUS when the blue votes begin to catch up. And (unless something drastically shifts and there is a major upset in the court) the SCOTUS will hand it to him.

Unless you’re designing the speakers’ circuitry, testing mic element response curves, designing the mic housing, etc, you’re not an engineer. You’re just a technician. This is like saying IT Help Desk is staffed by software engineers. They may have one or two actual engineers available, but you’re definitely not going to be talking to them for the daily “I don’t know the difference between rebooting and turning my monitor off and back on again” issues. IT Help Desk has techs who deal with the actual operation.

The only boots-on-the-ground position that might qualify for an actual engineering title would be the system designer, who did the math (or at least plugged all the numbers into their program) to determine where/how to set up the line arrays for adequate and even coverage throughout the room. At least they dip their toes into acousticians’ territory, so they may qualify as an engineer if you stretch the definition a little bit.

Source: Am an audio tech; Not an engineer.

I also have issues with the fact that staging refers to lighting electricians as… Well… Electricians. In other industries, an electrician will have a journeyman’s license at least. They’ll have several years of experience under their belt, and will have done a full apprenticeship under a master electrician. But in staging, an electrician is just someone who plugs lights in.

Here’s a harsh reminder that Trump is farther ahead in the polls than he was with Hillary at this same point in the election. The polls showed a landslide win for Hillary by this point, but that obviously didn’t happen. Now the polls show a much closer race for Kamala, which means (if the same thing happens again) then Trump has a very real shot at winning again.

Though to be fair, it looks like Kamala has learned from Hillary, and avoided the “we’ve got this, no problem, don’t even worry about it” attitude that Hillary had early on in the race. Hillary wanted to exude an air of confidence early on, like she had been working towards the presidential race for decades. That ended up being her downfall, because it meant a lot of democrats just fucking stayed home. Because if the person is saying not to worry about it, why do I need to bother voting? The issue is that when every person told themselves that same thing, it meant Hillary lost a lot of votes due to apathy. If you go back and look at her campaign, there was a very drastic shift in Hillary’s messaging a month or two before Election Day, when her team realized that democrat voters had become apathetic. It suddenly shifted from “we’ve got this” to “oh holy fuck please fucking please vote”

That’s likely why they said “while you still can”, but yeah.

Yup, if Trump wins and starts enacting fascist policies, I’ll 100% be defaulting to “oh who has time for politics” when anyone asks what my views are. Because I’ll have to assume that if someone is asking, it’s to report me if I’m too liberal. It’s always important to remember that the nazi camps didn’t start with Jews; It started with political prisoners and dissenters who spoke out against the government. Because when a fascist government is seizing control, the first thing they’ll do is try to silence the opposition.

I once played D&D with a paladin who basically followed this. He was an Oath of Vengeance paladin. For the unaware, OoV paladins often have zero chill. They’re typically something akin to Batman with magic powers. My goal was to avoid that.

His oath had something along the lines of “Without the capacity for violence, pacifism is not a choice. Pacifism without choice is victimhood. I will choose pacifism whenever possible, but will not watch idly when people are victimized. I will ensure the victimized are made whole, and the victimizers know the pain they have caused.”

Basically, he would try his best to talk his way through encounters first. He would give enemies every opportunity to back down. He had incredibly high charisma to try and persuade, intimidate, or deceive others out of attacking. After all, he was attempting to choose pacifism whenever possible. But if he believed that a bully was victimizing someone, the gloves came off and he channeled all of his pent-up fury into making the bully regret their actions. And since paladins use charisma to cast their spells, his smites were painful.

The DM loved it, because it helped us avoid falling into the murderhobo trope that combat-oriented D&D players often fall into. It also gave him a chance to actually flesh out some of the NPCs who would have just been throwaway no-name combatants.

You will notice that it is usually Democrats who have no qualms with cutting ties with their families over trivial ideological differences.

Because the “trivial” ideological differences aren’t a two-way street. Democrats want people to be able to live as they want. Republicans are working to exterminate certain groups. As a conservative-passing liberal, (I’m pale enough to pass for white, and work in a conservative-biased industry), it’s really really hard to stay friends with conservatives; They’ll inevitably get too comfortable and drop an N-word because they think I’m safe. Or they’ll call one of our mutual BIPOC friends “one of the good ones” like it’s supposed to be a compliment.

In short, liberals aren’t an existential threat to conservatives. Liberals may have an issue with some of conservatives’ choices, but “owning guns” isn’t something inherent to your personhood. You aren’t born with a gun in your hand, and you won’t immediately die without a gun. On the other hand, conservatives are an existential threat to liberals, because they take issue with innate traits, rather than their individual choices. You can’t choose to be black, but conservatives will judge you for it regardless.

One side is saying “I’d like people to exist without judgement” and the other is saying “you don’t have the basic human right to exist.” And then the latter makes fun of the former when the former cuts ties.

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