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Why oh why did we not include Vi? Why oh why don’t we include bibliographies? Why oh why do we hate 32-bit so very much?
Moah reading!
I have had Calibre for a few years now. Although I have always wanted software that would allow me to put all my books online and make them readily accessible to my phone or tablet, I never even knew the software had that capability till Nick Peers’ article showed me how to set it up. Awesome. I’ve passed this info on to friends who themselves have similar libraries they want online.
Now, onto other pressing matters. Would there exist in any previous issues any articles having to do with building a server strictly for streaming purposes? I would like to create a small streaming service but I have no idea how to proceed. Would there be any upcoming issues/articles on the topic?
Tim Duckett
Neil says…
I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear that Calibre version four has been released! We’ve had a good bit of feedback on Nick’s Calibre tutorial, so it seems you lot do indeed like reading. Who’d have thought?
As for a media server article, we try to semi-regularly run a streaming issue – he says, checking and seeing the last was LXF230 – and we do have another lined up in the next few issues. A minor issue is that all the good solutions – Plex, Emby et al – end up being proprietary due to the complexities and cost of modern codecs and the like. We’re planning on looking at the relatively new project https://jellyfin.org next time around. We’ve reviewed it in this very issue in Roundup, see page 26.
The Economist, 20 July 2019, page 58 (Schumpeter) mentions that Mozilla is developing something called Common Voice as a rival to Siri. Any chance of an article?
T Groves, Kent
Jonni says…
We did mention Mozilla’s Common Voice effort briefly in our voice assistant feature in LXF249, which focused on
the Mycroft home assistant (https://mycroft.ai). The community is very active, check the discussions at https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/voice to see what’s new. It’s something of a game-changer.
Vi oh Vi?
Seriously? You do a text editor Roundup and include Emacs but not Vi? At the very least you could have replaced Emacs with Nano, or something like Sublime
Text (not free or open source, but can easily be used without registration or purchase) or MS Visual Studio
Code. I think you’re in danger of starting a Holy War here. I’d cancel my subscription, but I still really enjoy it so I will have to live with the shame. Andrew Appleton
Neil says…
Vi. The idea was to offer a range of different types of editors to readers. Anyone that knows about editors will be very well aware of Vi and Emacs, so it seemed pointless including both, but including one seem required to show the spectrum available.
Vi is mentioned in the ‘Also consider’ box, as a consolation! Holy Wars didn’t really cross my mind as I think the majority of the readership just want something that works for them.
Neil says…
The issue is (in my opinion) that Canonical wants to concentrate on its business (no matter how wrong anyone feels that is) over perhaps fully supporting the wider community. I’m totally for extending the life of usable hardware, but there is a best-before date on hardware. The last mainstream desktop Intel 32-bit CPU – the Pentium 4 – was manufactured around 2008. Sure, there were a few odd Atom models in 2015 – so on the whole we’re talking desktop systems at least a decade old, if not a lot more.
My point? The real issue isn’t supporting old hardware, it’s supporting old software. Being hard-nosed about things, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 32-bit will get support updates until 2028, so there’s always that as an option, but it’s not my job to defend Canonical or the many other distros dropping 32-bit support…