The Vent and Rant Thread

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've seen Craig's List (Craigslist?) mentioned quite often on the internet. I don't know what to compare it to, to be honest.

Marktplaats, and Speurders are sites specific to the Netherlands. You put something on there, and people can contact you if they want to buy it. They can come and get it and pay cash, or you send it to them after they pay. It doesn't cost anything, except when you want specific things, such as "Bump this to the top of the advertisements", or "Give this a background color"; that sort of thing. That'll cost you something, like €1 to €10 depending on what you want to do.

You just described Craig's List.

[drjd]

While searching some old mail reference from my mailboxes, I just found that I had registered with MR once during 2008, when I had bought my first ereader. I remained a silent lurker then, and being busy in other activities of life, lost my connections with the forum for next 7 years until I again joined with my current identity. Now I feel I have a long relationship with MR, and I am enjoying my presence here now.

[Katsunami]

I see it now

You have made 9644 posts in about one year?

You certainly made up for 7 years of lurking. Actually, you may need help (The same goes for Cinisajoy I think...)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've seen Craig's List (Craigslist?) mentioned quite often on the internet. I don't know what to compare it to, to be honest.

It's an alternative to and replacement for a lot of the classified advertising newspapers ran where people wanted to buy or sell things. These days, they likely use Craig's List instead. It's part of the woes affecting newspapers here. A lot of newspaper salaries were actually paid out of classified ad revenue. As classified ads went away, newspaper jobs went with them.
______
Dennis

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Your plight reminded me of my own lost luggage experience -- I flew from Columbus, OH (I was attending Ohio State Univ. then) into Louisville, KY for a conference held on Dec. 26 (lower air rates on the day after Xmas) -- and the plane I was on was filled with mostly attendees from OSU for this conference. The airline 'kindly' sent all of our luggage to Maine. We were a motley, grubby group in the cocktail lounge, and later at dinner, as the hotel scrambled to provide us with basic toiletries. I was lying on my bed (fully clothed - no PJs) after dinner when my luggage finally arrived -- I was so overjoyed at the prospect of clean underwear that I almost hugged the bellboy. He hurried away without waiting for a tip.

My bag just arrived. 11pm local time. I arrived at 6pm on Sunday. I had to go out and buy shirt, pants, socks, toiletries already though, so I'll be claiming for those.

At least it's not Christmas

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The main complaints are:

- It is extremely complicated
- It is ugly
- It's slow
- They don't like that it is updated every week or two weeks

Well, it's as complicated as you make it. If you want, you can use only the Metadata window, convert books, and send/remove them from your device. That is exceedingly simple, and for many people, it's enough; Calibre's defaults are sensible.

Generally speaking, what Calibre does by default is what you would expect it to do.

I did just find myself readjusting. My default eBook view is an Android tablet, and I have several. Two have identical hardware but different Android versions - 4.4 KitKat and 5.1 Lollipop, respectively. I transfer books to the tablets via USB cable, but Android handles that differently in 5.1 than it did in 4.4. One difference meant that I had to go through device configuration and specify the location Calibre transferred books to. There's a default list, and it transfers to the first location in the list that exists on the target device. That meant that books got transferred to a Books directory on my external card when they actually live in eBooks. FBReader was configured to look in /mnt/extsd/eBooks for new additions, and never saw the stuff sent to Books. "Wait a minute! Calibre said it transferred those books. Where are they? Oh. That's where they went. Remove and re-add to the correct place..."

With regard to looks, I'm not a fan of the default interface either, but I have removed all the big icons. I only have three menu's: Main, Add Books, and Preferences, and all book-related options are in the context menu. I've also installed an alternative icon set (Monstre), and Calibre looks very clean now.

I haven't thoroughly redone the interface yet. I did dispense with the large icons and substituted the smaller ones, but I need to redo where various plugins appear.

You can have a look at the attachment to see how my main calibre interface looks. (Yes, I'm running over 500 jobs, because I've changed some options, and I now need to polish those into the EPUBs, and I also own over 50 Delphi Classics, of which I won't ever read everything )

I've never gotten that enthusiastic. I did just go through an exercise of standardization. My default eBook viewer these days is an Android tablet, using the open source FBReader for Android as the viewer. FBReader handles ePub, Mobi, FB2 and a few other things native, and PDF, DjVu, and CBR/CBZ via plugins. I decided to standardize on ePub, and went through a conversion exercise to get a lot of things originally acquired as Mobi files into ePub format., and delete the formats that weren't ePub. I do still have a Palm TX PDA with a Palm Mobi viewer on it, but it's the work of a moment to do an ePub->Mobi conversion for stuff I might want on it.

(I did once see Calibre want so much memory Windows increased the size of the page file, but that was a special case.)

On speed, I have to say that calibre indeed isn't very fast, but it's fast enough for most things. It doesn't NEED to be blisteringly fast. Some people just state that "it should have been written in C++", unhindered by any knowledge regarding programming. If Kovid had written calibre in C++, we would probably have seen one release every half a year, and it'd probably have 20% of the features it has now.

Kovid writes in Python That provides much faster development, and Calibre is inherently cross platform because Python his been ported to just about everything.

One thing I find significant is the effect of steady increases in hardware power. You no longer have to write in a compiled language like C++ to get acceptable speed, because the hardware can run stuff written in Python or Java with adequate performance.

I do note from poking around elsewhere that Kovid seems to have an experimental port to C# in the works. Microsoft has officially made .NET open source and has been contributing to the Mono project that brings .NET to Linux. This provides C# under Linux as well, and OS/X.

C# may well be faster than Python, so it will be interesting to see this develop.

On updates, I can only say: "Who cares?" Would you rather wait 6 months for a bug fix? Nobody forces you with a gun to your head to install all updates. For my part, Kovid could update calibre twice a day, or every hour, should there be a way to do so short of running from source. I'm not obliged to install them. Sometimes, I don't connect my reader to the computer nor do any organizing for weeks on end. Calibre then just sits idle, or is used very little. Then, at some point, I'm starting to use it seriously again (adding new books, organizing unorganized parts of the library), and then I'll update everything.

I prefer to keep current, and it's about 5 minutes to update here. (I have a 100mbit/sec Internet connection, so getting the new release is quick.) I have the 64bit Windows version, the 32 bit Portable version on a USB drive, and the Linux version since I dual boot.

The bugs fixed are generally things that don't bite me, but Kovid is constantly adding features, too, so keeping current is useful.
______
Dennis

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I see it now

You have made 9644 posts in about one year?

You certainly made up for 7 years of lurking. Actually, you may need help (The same goes for Cinisajoy I think...)

What do I need help with?
Oh and 2989 of my posts are in one thread.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I see it now

You have made 9644 posts in about one year?

You certainly made up for 7 years of lurking. Actually, you may need help (The same goes for Cinisajoy I think...)

Apparently the number of posts is directly proportional to the spare time on hand.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Aren't there any second hand websites? (edit: "Websites for second hand stuff", I mean.)

Just put five of those toys on the internet at a time. After you sell one, put up the next. It may take a year or so, but in the end, they'll be all gone.

Yes there are various options, including a local Facebook account for selling to neighbours, but right now I can't be bothered to post and maintain, or do all the post and packing... The idea of a one-off sale, like a garage sale, is a much more attractive proposition.

[WT Sharpe]

I bought a clearly marked recycle can for our kitchen. I told everyone that it was for recyclable goods only. The family and ext. family didn't seem to understand, so I recently added a sign over the can that reads "Recycle Can" with an arrow pointing down to it.

I just took out the trash. There are flies in the curbside recycle can.

Somebody's doing it wrong.

[Rumpelteazer]

I'm having a sneaky suspicion that the proverbial poop will hit the fan in the family.

This Sunday we'll be scattering the ashes of my grandmother. On Monday 11.30pm I got a private message on Facebook from one the cousins if my uncle knows about Sunday. It wasn't the same cousin as last month, but her older sister. My parents and I had agreed that any such questions they would handle, and my father wanted to first confer with my aunt.

My father wrote an email telling my cousin that on August 1 an email had been send to my uncle telling him the scattering would be happening (no date was known then) and that if he wanted to attend he should let us know, so that the people who want to avoid him can do so. He never replied, so we assumed that either he wasn't interested. The email was send on Tuesday evening. Yesterday morning my cousin posted on the family message group about her father and minutes later that she had received my father's email. Then nothing.

Until this morning. At about 6am I used the toilet and when I got back both my tablet and phone chimed that there was a PM on Facebook. I decided to let it wait until after my alarm went off, I suspected that I wouldn't be able to sleep after reading a message. Fifteen minutes later I realized that I wouldn't sleep if I didn't read it, either. But when I checked there was no message. So either Facebook made a mistake or the message was deleted by its poster.

To be honest I'm very close in just not going. During the lunch after my grandmother's funeral all the grandchildren agreed we shouldn't let the Family Thing get between us, but my uncle's kids don't really act that way. If we hear before hand that my uncle will be attending I won't. If he just shows up I'll go wait in the car.

I know I shouldn't let him get to me, but since I had to organize this in early August I've been on the brink of an anxiety attack and the last couple of days I'm having extreme heartburn problem. And I know that if I have to be around my uncle it'll only get worse.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

If we hear before hand that my uncle will be attending I won't. If he just shows up I'll go wait in the car.

He shouldn't be allowed to mess up other's enjoyments. But, that said, the above is a perfectly acceptable plan, if you need to use it.

I hope his not responding previously means he won't be attending.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

He shouldn't be allowed to mess up other's enjoyments. But, that said, the above is a perfectly acceptable plan, if you need to use it.

I hope his not responding previously means he won't be attending.

He probably doesn't want to risk a confrontation where his kids hear the truth about what kind of email he has been been sending to us and my aunt and how he treated my grandmother the last couple of years. But still, I worry.

[badgoodDeb]

Sounds like you should send them copies of the email anyway. In advance, perhaps. Or maybe afterward would lead to a less confrontational day on Sunday.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Sounds like you should send them copies of the email anyway. In advance, perhaps. Or maybe afterward would lead to a less confrontational day on Sunday.

We thought about it, but we don't want to come between them and their father. Their relationship, especially since he divorced their mother, has been rocky. If push comes to shove we will, but for now we're taking the high road.