October 28, 2020

From Gerald R. Lucas

Bye-bye, Nextcloud covid-19: day 221 | US: GA | info | act

OK, I’ve had enough. I tried it for at least a year, and Nextcloud just keeps getting worse. Not only does it choke randomly on some files, but my various instances on several computers are all out of sync. When I delete files on a computer, it just replaces them. It’s a pain to update on the server, and the user clients are clunky and ugly. Why can’t is just work, like Dropbox? I’ve had enough. Bye-bye Nextcloud.

For now, I’m just going to move my files to Syncthing, a product that seems to just work, even with multiple clients. I still need to put it through its paces. I would use Dropbox, but I will not pay them $120 a year. Sorry, guys, that’s just too much.

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Reading Vonnegut on my beautiful Kindle Paperwhite.

I’ve been getting used to Calibre as a tool for keeping my growing ebook library organized. Talk about clunky: it seems like it was written for Windoze 98. That said, it is powerful. I like: the conversion features; the auto downloading of metadata and book covers (though it’s slow); the web server option. I wish it made editing the look of files easier, and I’d also like to see a cloud server where it syncs with my Kindle and keeps annotations, etc., on the server. Maybe it could communicate with Goodreads, since Amazon locks out any books that you don’t purchase from them.[1]

Still, Calibre’s really the only game in town for the home lab.

Another cool feature wold be a reading queue that would feed me the next book on my list as I finish the previous one. I get new books all the time and sometimes I forget about them. It would be cool to have a queue to remind me just why I got the book in the first place. Better yet: have multiple reading lists, like one for literary fiction and another for science fiction. It could use the keywords, like “deep time” or “cosmic horror.” Am I just dreaming?

I should also be able to run the server on a headless Raspberry Pi, dontcha think? OK, maybe I can.



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  1. That’s a bunch of BS. Why aren’t their alternatives to Goodreads yet, like my long-lost Readmill? And, seriously, could Goodreads be more clunky? C’mon, guys, it took me several minutes to figure how to update my reading progress on Aurora this morning.