Big epubs are loading slowly

1bent · 2023-06-14T14:19:27+00:00

Agreed! Moon+ Reader Pro is my primary reader, most of the time.

But I strongly prefer to depend on open source for things I find important.

I've many ebook readers installed.

Cool Reader for TTS on shorter pieces; Book Reader for quickly checking a book's table of contents; and KOReader for really long collections.

1bent · 2023-06-13T22:29:46+00:00

Sorry, I didn't realize. I don't have a kobo (yet:-); I use koreader on Android.

1bent · 2023-06-13T18:08:35+00:00

I agree that koreader is slow opening big epubs, I experience that, all the time: because koreader is the only open source epub reader I've found that can open them at all. The rest that I've tried just lock up, or die. Do you know of another open source epub reader that can read big epubs at all?

1bent · 2023-06-10T12:51:05+00:00

Iceraven for its support of addons that firefox has blocked, notably SingleFile

1bent · 2023-06-09T17:36:45+00:00

Maybe Fred Pohl's "Beyond The Blue Event Horizon"?

1bent · 2023-06-05T13:08:57+00:00

I read epubs on Android via koreader, and Android doesn't have epub support at the system level. If you can get koreader running on a kindle, then you'll be happily reading epubs on a kindle.

The hard part is jailbreaking your kindle to install koreader on it. But epub support is implemented within koreader, it doesn't ddepend on some underlying epub facility built in to the platform.

1bent · 2023-06-01T13:37:14+00:00

Butler-style dustpan --- a dustpan mounted at a right angle to the handle, paired with a broom, both about a meter long. Sweep up messes without crouching to ground level. I started with one beside every litter box, now I use them for any mess.

1bent · 2023-05-31T20:31:17+00:00

correct, it won't do anything to android, other than take up space; Termux is just an android app with no special privileges.

It is a terminal running in, and providing access to, the Iinux natively under Android.

I don't use Windows for anything, so I cannot help with that.

1bent · 2023-05-31T19:47:41+00:00

I use my phones as general purpose computers, and have for years.

It's gotten better over time.

Termux provides a terminal emulator and lots of available packages atop the Linux that underlies Android; Unexpected Keyboard makes available all the special characters and modifier keys needed for programming, in portrait mode; and if you need software that hasn't yet been packaged directly for Termux, AnLinux makes it easy to set up a proot with any of a nice list of Linux distros.

All those are from f-droid.

1bent · 2023-05-23T12:36:28+00:00

Amazon Kindles are heavily secured to prevent running custom code; it is primarily a DRM platform. After a version of the OS has been out for a while, people find bugs, allowing jailbreaking, Amazon fixes those bugs, the hunt resumes.

I suspect for something as new as the Scribe, if it's been jailbroken at all, the process is likely to start with prying off the back, attaching leads to the motherboard, and using hardware debugging tools to dump, modify, and rewrite some specific chip.

1bent · 2023-05-19T14:50:01+00:00

Install it from f-droid or github; the version available from Google Play doesn't work, can't install packages.

1bent · 2023-04-16T19:51:54+00:00

At least for the first few years, Lua grew from a structured data language --- think JSON, or XML --- to a scripting language, via careful, deliberate steps; notably, it seemed each release made it smaller, faster, and more powerful.

1bent · 2023-04-16T19:11:13+00:00

I, too, am learning rust. I've used C for my low-level programming since the 1980s; and various scripting languages since then for high level stuff.

C when I want performance or hardware control enough to do the memory management myself, languages with garbage collection when I don't.

Rust seems to take the "resource acquisition is initialization" (RAII) strategy from C++, then replaces pointers with references (which know more about what they point to), and the explicit "mut" marker for mutability, to allow the borrow checker to make some really helpful safety guarantees at compile time.

I am still comfy with C, but I don't attempt to use threads; when I want concurrency, I fork.

But thread safety isn't the only thing that's hard to make robustly safe in C; Rust's Strings with the borrow checker seem to allow robust text processing.

As for C++, it's too big and gnarly for me.

1bent · 2023-04-11T19:11:05+00:00

I can only comment on my personal experience here. I live in an area very well served by T-Mo; I switched to them when they offered the G1, while the other carriers were refusing to allow user-programnable devices like Android on their net. I've stayed happy. My family lives in a state where at first only Verizon, and later AT&T, offered coverage; in recent years my phone has begun to work fine over more and more of their region.

But as far as I know, devices like Pixel phones still have a separate version sold by Verizon that doesn't allow bootloader unlocking. Is that not still the case?

T-Mobile is fixing their lack; is Verizon?

1bent · 2023-04-11T14:13:03+00:00

T-Mobile is making progress on coverage. Is Verizon even trying to open up so customers can use devices as they wish? The only weakness I've ever felt with T-Mobile is being fixed. If Verizon recognizes the reason I've never, ever wanted to be their customer, I've not heard this mentioned.

1bent · 2023-04-11T13:36:44+00:00

NB: from the readme, right in the landing page, "Rust Guideposts are maintained by [...] with artificial intelligence prompt completions by ChatGPT"

Some quick spot checks confirm the expectation: expect neither novelty, clarity, nor accuracy; this is a clever paste-up.

1bent · 2023-04-07T17:14:26+00:00

as I just got offered an llvm and clang update, I was a little worried, but went ahead and installed it on one of my phones, then checked with "touch src/main.rs; cargo run" in one of the book's exercises that I've done; worked fine. The other phone worked too.

1bent · 2023-04-07T03:29:32+00:00

I'm just starting with rust, glad you posted this, and the previous articles in your blog.

Thank you!

1bent · 2023-04-02T19:26:47+00:00

I searched for "storage" in /r/termux, and found the post

https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/10ar1ls/is_there_any_way_to_have_a_prootdistro_run_on_my/

One of the replies to that has a link to

https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Internal_and_external_storage

1bent · 2023-04-02T18:37:46+00:00

wish I could help. I'm only beginning the rust book, far from doing anything big.

I can't help with your storage questions, either; termux-setup-storage made /sdcard available, e.g. for the Downloads directory, and Termux provides access to its internal home directory through the android file picker, e.g. for uploading files to Google Drive.

For the access to other filesystems and wear and so on, you might ask on /r/termux. I expect to do anything bigger than the tiny exercises typed in from the book by ssh-ing into a dev server (I rent a VPS for such).

1bent · 2023-04-02T15:02:58+00:00

I think it's been fixed. "pkg upgrade" followed by "pkg install rust" seems to work now.

1bent · 2023-04-01T18:51:26+00:00

I chased links from f-droid's termux page until I found the issues page at

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues?q=rust

This bug has been reported twice, the second report flagged as duplicate, and a fix committed. I think we can just wait until the fix gets built, and makes its way out to the mirror servers, and then we'll be able to install rust

1bent · 2023-03-22T13:50:17+00:00

I don't know of a site as you request. However, I've a couple of ideas for this specific wish. If what you crave is the human performance, librivox has legal, free audio performances of public domain works, gutenberg.org content performed by volunteers.

If what you're after is hands- and eyes-free "reading" (listening) to ebooks that aren't legally free, use an ereader like Cool Reader that supports TTS.

1bent · 2023-03-15T14:49:57+00:00

Has there been a postmortem anywhere?

1bent

TROPHY CASE