The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

When an AWS service outage in US-East-1 knocks out like half the internet.

Impacts my employer's products as well. What's most frustrating is when I have clients who know there's a global AWS outage and that this is the root cause, because it's knocked out like four or five of services on their side as well...yet they still feel the need to ping us for updates every twenty minutes.

Like, dude, we're both watching the same status page. What the **** do you think I can do about it?

DNS and IAM. The Amazon AWS in Europe is using those.

Can be DNS or BGP to cause such.

Re: allyoureggsinonebasket.com is down
Yeah, it sucks[*]
* Instructions on how to sucks eggs are not currently available due to technical difficulties.

Re: DNS
DNS or BGP outage?
Vodafone say "why not both".


See also "No Silver Lining" Fantasy, but the technology is real.

The Cloud is someone else's server. Sometimes that's OK.

[DNSB]

I have to agree with Cactus Chef about the customers who seem to expect you to be able to fix issues with cloud services. Though the current AWS outage did give me a chuckle when one company I dealt with complained that they were unable to login since they had moved everything to the cloud. A move which I argued against when the original decision was being made. At that time, I was just being old fashioned in wanting enough on premise services for minimal operation. Now that they have had at least three outages, they are discussing bringing those minimal services back in house. Admittedly, one of the outages was when their fibre line was damaged during construction so not cloud services related.

[ratinox]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Attachment 218756

Best. Haiku. Evar.
I'm stealing that image.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ratinox

Best. Haiku. Evar.
I'm stealing that image.

I stole it from one of the Discord servers I'm on, so fair game

[madelonw]

When Amazon took to sending Kindle books in .kfx format, I spent several days coming up with a workaround to get these books into Calibre in a form I could use.

NOTE: Do not reply to this with the "use Kindle for PC" solution. For me, it does not work. I have too many Kindle books and the app is not robust. At last count, I have 92,990 Kindle books - mostly because I am an unabashed troller for freebies. (Retiree, fixed income, and some damn fine free books to read)

So, when it was announced that after February 26, 2025 books were being delivered in .kfx format I went to work on a solution. This is what I came up with AT THAT TIME.

This method is for books purchased after February 26, 2025. I "purchase" freebies daily, so I had quite a few books in Content and Devices to deal with. This works once you have installed DeDRM 10.0.9 in Calibre. This method does not use any version of Kindle for PC.

1. Send books to your Kindle device (I can't say whether this works if you don't have a device)
2. Once the books appear as downloaded on the device, plug the device into your computer
3. When the File Explorer window opens, navigate to documents > Downloads > Items01
4. Select all the books with the .KFX extension. (If you are reading a book in the list, deselect it - [Ctrl + click])
5. Open Calibre and drag and drop the selected books to Calibre. The new entries should have a KFX format.
a. If you see a KFX.ZIP format, you need to delete that item and resend it to your device.

At this point, I delete the books from my device that I just dropped into Calibre. Your Kindle device needs to be plugged into your computer otherwise you will need to delete them from the device one by one. If you are playing catch up, as I am, you might want to delete these books as well. If you delete the books, you should also delete their corresponding folders. Once you have made these deletions, eject the Kindle device. I use Eject this device from the Device dropdown in Calibre.

You must copy (drag and drop) books from your Kindle device directly into Calibre or this method will not work. If you copy them into a folder on your computer, they will import as KFX.ZIP. You cannot convert or open these files.

If you use the Count Pages plugin, it doesn't (yet) work with the KFX format. However, you can convert KFX books to MOBI (or EPUB) to use Count Pages.

I have used this method to add 395 books to Calibre. Once added I was able to convert all but 3 to MOBI format and Count Pages. Of the 3, only 1 produced an error message during the attempted conversion. I was able to open 2 of the 3 in the Calibre built-in ebook reader.

Fast forward to October 2025: My idea of deleting .kfx-zip files and redownloading them no longer works. I have not yet figured that problem out, but I'm hoping someone else is also looking into it.

I have noticed that not all Kindle books download as .kfx-zip files and that I am able to use my original method to get them into Calibre, convert them, and count pages. My dilemma is how do I keep track of all the .kfx-zip files until somebody comes up with a fix.

I am considering just sending all Kindle books to my trusty Kindle device, uploading them into Calibre, converting what I can and hope something shakes out soon. If anyone can suggest a better way to do this, I'm all ears. To borrow a line from The Wrath of Kahn - "He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! ..." Amazon tasks me and I shall have them!

[DNSB]

The easiest solution is to purchase a KT4 or PW1 (strictly PaperWhite 5th generation) making sure to ask first if the device is blacklisted. The files will be downloaded as .azw which will be imported into calibre using a USB connection as azw3/KF8 files with the occasional .mobi just for variety.

Since these devices are too old to get software updates, they will work until our good friends at Amazon decide to disable downloads for them.