Luke

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything better than Calibre at the moment. (Though, I’m happy to be proven wrong!) Nothing against Calibre, it’s functionally amazing free software and it works very well; I said “unfortunately” because the interface is extremely dated and clunky and confusing to operate. Once you get it working, it’s very nice though. As long as you never have to go fiddling with it again, because every time you’ve gotta reacquaint with it’s weird UI. Still, it really is the best available at the moment, and it’s free so that’s awesome.

My favorite way to set it up is using the linuxserver image, which has a web-based VNC built into it, so you can remotely run the app on a headless server and then use your browser to interact with it.

I have Calibre configured to monitor a folder for new stuff I throw into it, where it’ll automatically fetch metadata and put it into the database. Calibre also has an OPDS server built in, to which I point a nicer frontend for reading comics. Currently that is Kavita which provides a decent web UI for both books and comics.

Anyhow, I believe you could enter data about your physical comics into the Calibre database, and then view the metadata with something like Kavita, though of course you’d be skipping the reading features.

Oh no, somebody who might be Russian took a family vacation to go fishing with their loved ones!? What an orgy of indulgence! The audacity!

These fuckers should just release digital first, and physical comes when it’s done being printed and distributed. This anxiety over “oh no a finished game got leaked early” is manufactured drama. If the game is done, then it doesn’t matter when it gets released, except for artificial marketing angst. Make a good game that players want, and it’ll be purchased. Eventually. It doesn’t have to all happen at exactly the predicted moment.

This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

• ad infested apps and websites
• gaming microtransactions
• a new phone every year
• cable service
• insurance
• HOAs
• gasoline
• Amazon
• pants and dresses without pockets

Looking through their comment history, they proclaim their honesty quite often, it’s pretty funny when you’re looking for it 😆

I’ve now tagged them so I’ll remember that they are very honest:

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

Vortex seems to work fine using Lutris now. I’m not sure when it changed, but at some point recently I figured I’d give it a shot again and just downloaded and ran their installer exe and it worked.

I’m not sure what else they would need to do. You can just install Plex or Jellyfin on your Steamdeck right now, and you’ve got yourself an HTPC. It works great!

What are the missing pieces you’re still looking for?

What I’ve done in the past is to copy the URL of the unavailable video (if it’s still accessible via the playlist entry, sometimes it isn’t which is annoying) and feed it into the Wayback Machine in the hopes that it got archived at some point. The video stream isn’t usually available that way, but at least the page title sometimes is, and then I can search for other versions of it.

Still want to add a few bits of info to it, but I’m pretty happy with the dashboard for my kitchen display that sits on top of the fridge where I can see it from the living room as well:

Uses the excellent LCARS theme by th3jesta via HACS.

Almost everything shown is just standard markdown cards, with minor tweaks by card-mod, with the exception of the 2 weather widgets shown (also via HACS):

• Hourly Weather Card
• Weather Chart Card

It’s not downloadable software, but you might check out WordPress if you haven’t recently, it’s open source and free (though you do need to host it somewhere).

It used to have kind of a bad reputation for being a horrible hodgepodge of bad editing UI and random plugins that do things in wildly different ways, but the WordPress team has really stepped up their game in the last few years and it’s actually very nice now as long as you stay away from the commercial plugins. There’s almost always an open source plugin available for anything you’d want to do, but the out of box experience is plenty good for most pages you’d be likely to need.

WordPress has a very nice “block editor” enabled by default these days, which is essentially just their name for a WYSIWYG interface. Use drag and drop to design the pages, and then click a button to see it in a “code editor” that shows the HTML if you’d rather edit that way.

Anyhow, I know it’s not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I’d mention it since you did say you are open to something web based.

A foyer, essentially, but a lot smaller and almost strictly utilitarian. You take off and store your shoes, boots, jackets, etc there.

I usually interpret the phrase “drop in” to mean that the replacement being referenced will also work with everything written for the original. Does “drop in” in this case mean that Immich will transparently replace Google Photos, similar to how libretube replaces YouTube? That would be amazing!

Self hosting Gitlab or Gitea is always an option. Dead simple to do with docker (which the HA devs obviously are very comfortable using).

My worker cooperative helps authors self-publish, and we use as much open-source as possible to do that. We rely almost exclusively on a number of tools which are all better than proprietary counterparts for one reason or another (sometimes merely because they are free and allow us to keep costs minimal) but the main reason is most of our clients value unquestioned data ownership over anything else. We avoid corporate cloud services and self-host as much as possible, for example.

Having said that, IMO many of these are also better designed and better UI than comparable paid tools. Blender being the obvious best example, but WordPress is another one. I used to ignorantly shit on WP so much when I was working in the professional startup industry as a web developer. Since then, I’ve learned to my delight that it’s awesome if you don’t bog it down with a bunch of horrible plugins, and the latest versions with their block editor approach are so good for easy and quick theming.

Here’s a list off the top of my head of our regularly used software. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and many of these are going to be unsurprising:

• Linux (seems obvious, but definitely worth mentioning. We primarily use Ubuntu and Debian based images.)
• Blender (2D/3D graphics)
• GIMP (raster image editing)
• Inkscape (vector image editing)
• calibre (creating ebooks)
• InvoiceNinja (generating invoices, tracking hours, payments, expenses, general accounting)
• NextCloud (storage and collaboration on files, passwords, office editing)
• Gitlab (git repository tracking, deployment management)
• WordPress (client websites)
• Caddy (web server with dead-simple config and automatic https support)
• Zulip (chat, the threading style they use is so effective for organizing discussions about client work, it’s miles beyond Slack or any other options we’ve all used in past corporate lives)