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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I don’t think you understand Calibre at all, because you are somehow annoyed by it. I get it. But there’s no e-reader on the market that supports Calibre. Quite the contrary, there’s a titanic effort from the Calibre team (it’s been several people since 2009) to reverse engineer support with every single e-reader and tablet in the market that should not be minimized. You’re also painting a picture as if somehow Calibre is the Windows of e-book and everyone hates it but is forced to use it, when in reality that is not at all the case. Yes, it has quirks and people have constructive criticisms, but calling a guy’s name “rough” is not positive criticism. Overall, most people appreciate and like Calibre for what it has achieved and enabled for readers all around the world.

    Again, it’s fine if you don’t like it, don’t understand it, and don’t want to understand it. But that doesn’t excuse insulting a person who actively is making your petty life a bit easier and free from corporate control. It takes a very weird person to feel like commenting negatively on someone’s name is somehow appropriate, it’s bully attitude. If that is all the criticism you can bring to a discussion of software, save it for yourself and stop replying. You’re all over this thread complaining, completely unprovoked like a little wuss. No one is forcing you to use Calibre, it just so happen that no one has done anything better, as you yourself admitted in another comment.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat else should I selfhost?
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    2 months ago

    Good, so if you know what needs to be fixed it should be easy for you to make a new alternative, with modern web UX, self-hosting in mind and NO quirks whatsoever.

    Really, it’s so easy to insult those who are making solutions when you have never contributed at all. There’s constructive criticisms, but calling people who are fronting free labor for your benefit as nerd aliens is not it.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat else should I selfhost?
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    2 months ago

    Calibre is so old that it’s use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It’s not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.

    Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It’s not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.

    There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, Calibre already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that’s an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they’re not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.






  • I also tried tailscale in a docker container as a subnet handler and realized I was out of my depth. Net engineering is abstract and hard. There’s a reason there are pros making bank just doing that for big corps.

    Followed a way simpler setup. Now tailscale runs on the server bare metal and podman handles the routing automatically. I just use the magicDNS address given by tailscale and everything just works as intended. All my services are available, and apps run no issue, no matter where I am as long as I’m connected to tailscale. I will make the setup more complex as I learn more and acquire the need for more features. But so far this has met all my expectations.




  • People are using NAS for things they aren’t meant to do. They are a storage service and aren’t supposed to be anything else. In a typical data center model, NAS servers are intermediate storage. Meant for fast data transfers, massive storage capabilities and redundant disk fault tolerance. We are talking hundreds of hard drives and hundred gigabit connection speeds inside the data center. This is expensive to run, so they are also very energy efficient, meant to keep the least amount of required disks spinning at any given moment.

    They are not for video rendering, data wrangling, calculations or hosting dozens of docker containers. That’s what servers are for.

    Servers have the processing power and host the actual services. They then request data from a NAS as needed. For example, a web service with tons of images and video will only have the site logic and UI images on the server itself. The content, video and images, will be on the NAS. The server will have a temporary cache where it will copy the most frequently accessed content and new content on demand. Any format conversion, video encoding, etc. Will be done by the server, not the NAS.

    Now, on self-hosting of course, anything goes and they are just computers at the end of the day. But if a machine was purpose made for being a NAS server, it won’t have the most powerful processor, and that’s by design. They will have, however, an insane amount of sata, PCI-e channels and drive bays. And a ton of sophisticated hardware for data redundancy, hotswap capacity and high speed networks that is less frequent in servers.


  • Beware, Gnucash is meant to be pro level accounting software. Is not a simple ledger or a tech/crypto gateway. I also use it for my personal life, but there’s like 30% of features I don’t use because they’re business accounting stuff I don’t need. It predates the cloud, it cares not for the latest trends, it crunches numbers and spits out reports. That’s part of what I like about it. It is not simple but it also isn’t bloated.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat is Docker?
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    11 months ago

    On the contrary. It relies on the premise of segregating binaries, config and data. But since it is only running one app, then it is a bare minimum version of it. Most containers systems include elements that also deduplicate common required binaries. So, the containers are usually very small and efficient. While a traditional system’s libraries could balloon to dozens of gigabytes, pieces of which are only used at a time by different software. Containers can be made headless and barebones very easily. Cutting the fat, and leaving only the most essential libraries. Fitting in very tiny and underpowered hardware applications without losing functionality or performance.

    Don’t be afraid of it, it’s like Lego but for software.



  • Maybe it’s just me, but that always struck me as a theater of connection, not actual connection. I know all my friends kids, even those who live abroad. Not because of an internet social network, but because we actually talk to each other on the regular, and share pictures and video calls, directly, personally. Not informally and creepily through a capricious algorithm. My good wishes to my friends and family on special occasions go directly to them, we don’t need a middle man to choose when and where they are going to see those things, and I don’t need to perform connection for people I barely talk to. Remember that the flip side of the coin is that social networks cause isolation by making all interactions feel impersonal and distant. Facebook literally caused a loneliness crisis amongst young people, who felt compelled to compete for attention and approval, distorting their expectations, altering their sense of self-worth, exposing them to abuse. Internet social networks have a very dark side.




  • We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It’s the flipside of Wiki’s problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There’s currently nothing popular that fills the bill.