DonnieDarkmode

@DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I get rid of my dead name in iPadOS settings?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  On Steam, click your username in the top bar, and select “profile” from the dropdown menu. On the profile page, there’s an “edit profile” button near the top right corner, underneath your level. In the “General” tab, the field “real name” should be the second one down

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a right-wing source in and of itself, but Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind explores the history and philosophical underpinnings of conservative thought from Burke/Hobbes on through the 21st century, on a variety of different topics. It’s a serious engagement with the ideas, and attempt to understand them and their origins

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder how much sense that would actually make for them. All the major console makers subsidize their products through game sales and online subscriptions. Valve already does the former, but that’s because they’re a game marketplace and it’s how they make money to begin with. I’m not sure what a steam subscription service (that’s not a game pass) would look like, since Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo offer online play and cloud saves for the cost of a subscription, whereas Valve makes those available for free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why wasn't former President Bush of the USA, charged with any crimes, when we marched into Afghanistan and Iraq by his orders, under pretenses?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think OP means in 2001, not in the 80s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah my actual workflow to create a book was horribly inefficient and time-consuming. How automated is that HTML export and chunking process? Are you still going through and manually adding in every last <p></p> and href?

  I’m curious about your use case, because I was doing this with a book that was hundreds of pages long, full of photos and footnotes, which added lots of tedium.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I had this exact question myself a little while ago, so I’ll share what I learned. I don’t know your level of knowledge with these things so forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know. And spoiler alert, the answer is “technically, but not how you’d like”

  An EPUB “file” is really a folder containing a bunch of individual HTML files which hold the text for the book as well as things like the table of contents, and photos (if your ebook has pictures), with CSS for styling. This is the exact medium you’d work in if you were designing a web page, but with en ebook there are different best practices and considerations.

  Now assuming that your PDF has a good OCR (optical character recognition) layer, then it will be possible for calibre and other programs to grab the text of the PDF, and even to create an epub with it. But as you’ve noticed, they don’t do a good job of this. The fundamental problem is that creating an epub is something of an art, with best practices and personal choices as far as layout and file structure. When you “convert”, you’re not changing the file type from PDF to EPUB; you’re grabbing the text from the PDF and then sticking it into multiple different files, with HTML and CSS instructions throughout to tell the EReader how to lay things out, which footnotes link to which annotations, where to display pictures, etc.

  As far as I’m aware, this basically can’t be done (well) with dumb, automatic programs like what Calibre offers because there’s too much “thinking” involved. Perhaps an AI tool could be created that would handle this better, but I’m not aware of one, and it’s a pretty specialised application so it’s possible you’ll need to wait a while before someone gets around to that.

  So I realised that if I wanted an EPUB version, I’d need to make it myself. I used Sigil, a free EPUB creation tool, to do it, which gave me some nice features to help speed up the process, but it’s a big time commitment (unless you’re working with a very short PDF), especially for your first EPUB where you’re still learning what to do while making it. You’ll also need to learn HTML and CSS if you haven’t already.

  I did it as a sort of fun side project in my free time to learn a new skill, but unfortunately other than that, I don’t think there’s such thing as an “EPUBinator” that’s gonna take your PDF and create a well-made ebook.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

  The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

  The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

  FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I find news without using Social Media?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Get an RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire on iOS and Mac but there’s a huge variety out there to choose from. Once you’ve made your choice, you can add RSS feeds from different websites (Reuters, NPR, etc.), so you can have one feed that aggregates articles from all the news sources you’ve selected, or customise different feeds focusing on politics, economics, cars, whatever you want. I can even add in different substacks I’m subscribed to. Once upon a time you could also add your Twitter and Reddit feeds, but with the API shenanigans that’s not available anymore sadly

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New bot rules, Lemmy 0.18.3, and a message about alternative Lemmy frontends on lemm.ee⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This seems like a good opportunity to point out that sunaurus pays for this instance out of pocket, and you can go to the GitHub sponsors page if you want to help financially support this instance!