I didn’t say that ISPs are disabling IPv6 because it has any connection to Bittorrent, I said that IPv6, on one hand, and Bittorent-accelerating features, on the other hand, are two things that some ISPs in various countries may want to block.
For example, in Poland the router that Orange forced fiber customers to accept for 2019 came with closed-source firmware, and while there was a hack to enable IPv6, the ISP – who alone had superuser privileges on the device – issued a command to the router each night at midnight to disable IPv6, because it considered IPv6 a "beta" feature not meant for wide use (a limbo it has been stuck in for years now). The customer, without access to the router internals, had no way to permanently override it. Fortunately, if I understand correctly, EU legislation is phasing out any obligation to accept only the ISP-provided router.
When routers are ordered in bulk from ISPs in certain countries, the ISP is the customer, not the end user. The ISP often doesn’t want the end user to be able to do things like enable IPv6 and things that could boost the effectiveness of Bittorrent. A closed-source design ensures that only the ISP can change certain settings.
Assuming that Goyal is on the spectrum is the charitable thing to do. It allows one to excuse his brusqueness and defensiveness as simply something he was born with. That is the conclusion I gradually made over years of watching Calibre development and a conference appearance of his on YouTube. Many of his critics probably just think that he is a jerk and egomaniac who refuses to see things from others’ perspectives.
Goyal doesn’t have to be closely involved in the forum helping users. I question the importance of his doing so while the UI is what it is. It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.
You could however write a very short shell script that would do that for you. I read loads and loads of PDFs on my Kindle, and I’ve got a very simple script kindlecopy.sh that copies them to an appropriate (newly created if necessary) directory on the Kindle, based on the PDF metadata. That PDF metadata, too, can be edited with much lighter-weight tools than Calibre. Entrusting Calibre with doing all this work would mean much slower performance.
I still use Calibre for copying the occasional EPUB/MOBI to the Kindle, but I could replace that, too, with a shell script. Calibre’s ebook-convert is a standalone program, you could script that without ever opening the Calibre library-management application.
Goyal makes a lot of people uncomfortable because he is obviously on the spectrum. Of course a lot of Free Software hobbyists are, and I wouldn’t dare to exclude myself from that. But there is certainly a feeling that it would be better for a project to use neurotypical volunteers for the public-facing aspects of development, like taking feature requests. It would save both Goyal and the people posting on the various forums a lot of rancor.
> yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
Over the years, the community has volunteered time and time again to develop a new UI for Calibre that would at least bear some resemblance to all the other applications we use on our computer. They would do all the work. His response has always been no.
And there has been his hostility to criticisms of security flaws in his code.
In several countries with lockdowns where supermarkets, fast food places and petrol stations are still open, the public-health authorities have ordered toilets at those places to be locked so that customers cannot use them.
Even in countries where the situation has not got out of hand, you will still see plenty of nosiness and carping about other individuals going outside and doing exercise. Even if they are not able to call the local police and have the person stopped, they are still wont to rage about it online, and this has really poisoned the atmosphere on international fora for various hobbies.
For example, on cycling fora, people occasionally mention that they went riding, because in their country recreational cycling has not been limited by the authorities. But their posts immediately attract savage responses from people in countries with stricter lockdowns: “Stay home!”, “You are being so selfish!” “You are responsible for any deaths!!!”, etc.
I feel like some people have taken up "Stay home!" not as a rational piece of public-health advice which is interpreted differently from country to country, but rather as a meme mindlessly repeated, and they have become monsters to their peers because of it.
Strange that you think great audio is something only action films need. As soon as 5.1 mixing and encoding tools became cheap and widely available, even independent filmmakers writing "real dialog and stories" rushed to adopt them. And film schools emphasize how careful audio editing (and appropriate playback equipment) can bring a rich new dimension to one’s filmmaking, and some of the textbook examples that are used are 1960s auteur cinema like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't know that Calibre packages its own optipng, a program for which there have been some security advisories in recent years. I hope Calibre keeps pace with upstream releases of these tools.
I read most things on my Kindle, but from the moment I unboxed the Kindle I put it in airplane mode and have kept it that way. More privacy and better battery life. So, Calibre is useful as a way to get content and move it over to my e-reader over USB, and so I don't ever risk connecting to the e-reader maker's proprietary ecosystem. I would worry that even that Kobo Pocket integration is sending data to Kobo's servers.
There have been complaints about the UI since forever, and the developer is well-known for bristling at any constructive criticism and telling people to either accept the way he likes things, or simply don't use the application. Consequently, I am surprised that no one has forked Calibre, even if it was just to kept the backend but simply overhaul the UI.
Something that I would like to see in a future version of Calibre (or a fork) is news-download recipes changed to a plugin system that can be updated separately of Calibre itself. It is not ideal that if a news recipe becomes obsolete due to changes on the respective news website, one has to upgrade Calibre to a new version. For users whose distros package only a certain version of Calibre, it would be nice to continue running that distro-supported version but simply be able to update the news recipes from within the Calibre settings.
> what's the reasoning behind a strict separation of the two?
Some observant Jews choose a vegetarian option because vegetarian things are kosher by default. But if the veggie patty is cooked on the same grill as both meat and cheese, then the veggie patty becomes (according to some views) non-kosher. This is because kosher stipulates strict separation of meat and dairy: separate grills, separate sinks to wash any dishes afterwards, etc.
Not all countries have the medallion system (or that system the way it works in parts of the USA), and in some places drivers felt they were paid pretty adequately the way things were, and so they reacted very negatively to Uber drivers showing up and undercutting them.
If people go to your website to get the headlines, it is easier to monetize them because they may view ads there, you can market things to them based on their cookie history, etc. That is harder with RSS.
If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the site requires that people reguarly visit the site itself.
For example, in Poland the router that Orange forced fiber customers to accept for 2019 came with closed-source firmware, and while there was a hack to enable IPv6, the ISP – who alone had superuser privileges on the device – issued a command to the router each night at midnight to disable IPv6, because it considered IPv6 a "beta" feature not meant for wide use (a limbo it has been stuck in for years now). The customer, without access to the router internals, had no way to permanently override it. Fortunately, if I understand correctly, EU legislation is phasing out any obligation to accept only the ISP-provided router.