Bigue Nique @biguenique@masse.québec.tk

#astronomie
De superbes images images prises par le télescope James #Webb

Ici, Proxima du Centaure, la plus proche étoile de notre système solaire à 4 années-lumière.
De quoi faire naître de l'appétit pour l'astronomie ?
(source : twitter)

📖 #ebooks migration, from my #Kindle account to my local cloud, completed ✅

It took me a while to do the jump. I had a library on my Kindle with a few hundreds books. I invested a few hundreds bucks over more than a decade to buy ebooks and create my digital library.

I felt very uncomfortable whenever I thought of those precious resources being lost in somebody else's cloud, while the money I paid only granted me the permission to _view_ the content provided by Amazon's servers, _only_ on the devices compatible with Kindle resources, _only_ using the software built by Amazon, and _only_ using Amazon's closed formats. Anything outside of that clearly defined perimeter is illegal. A suspension of my #Amazon account would be sufficient to lock me out of my library. And I probably have no easy way of passing those books to my kid, like parents used to do with their kids before surveillance capitalism came over. I just couldn't accept all of this. But, on the other hand, Kindle provided a very comfortable ecosystem, and that motivated my reluctance.

Now I've finally made the jump though, and I couldn't be happier.

- I used #Calibre to convert all of my Kindle books to .epub. However, the DeDRM plugin (https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/releases) didn't work out of the box - Amazon has probably come up with some other twists on their KNX compression+encryption to make our lives harder. What worked though was to download the purchased books one by one through the "Download to device over USB" option at amazon.com/mycd - a lengthy process, but at least I got the ebooks in the AZW* format that Calibre and DeDRM could digest.

- I moved all the .epub files on a path shared through #NextCloud - hopefully when the ebook reader apps for NextCloud get fixed my NC interface could also become a place to read my books.

- I installed #Ubooquity (https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-ubooquity) on my local server, and enabled the #OPDS feed. Make the server accessible over my VPN, set up an nginx reverse proxy with HTTPS, and that's all you need. Big kudos to the development team for building a Java app that manages somehow to be lightweight!

- After trying many apps (most of the ebook reader apps on F-Droid have a UI that feels so 2000s), I settled for #FBReader, which comes with a decent UI and good support for OPDS feeds out of the box. The only downside is that bookmark synchronization only works over Google Drive, and it requires the version hosted on the Play Store to work. It'd be nice to support NextCloud, or (even better) any virtual storage exposed by Android.

Except for the synchronization still working over Google Drive, I'm happy for finally making the jump - now I feel like my kid will have something to read even if dad's Amazon account gets suspended, or if Amazon at some point in the future goes out of business.

I'll probably still have to buy some books from the Kindle store (especially when it comes to recent books), but I'll always make sure to convert them to .epub and add them to my open library as soon as I get them on my devices.

#Gitlab will delete repositories on free accounts that haven't recorded any activities for a year.

I still sporadically receive emails and support requests for SnortAI_Preproc, a machine learning pre-processor for Snort that I built more than 12 years ago for my M.Sc thesis. Even though the repo itself hasn't seen any activities for >10 years, it keeps getting stars and followers. Under Gitlab's new policy, I would have had to push a stupid commit every year for the past 10 years just to keep it alive.

And my project isn't even an outlier. These patterns are especially common in academic software, where a researcher or a graduate student may bump into your projects months or years after its latest commit.

And this is not to mention preservation: some software may have been actively developed and used in the past, lost momentum at some point for any variety of reasons, and deleting would prevent any later developer from resurrecting it, or from preserving it for historical purposes.

Being a large host of open-source software and planning to delete software that hasn't been updated in a while is like being in charge of a museum and destroying the items that visitors haven't shown interest in the past few months.

If Gitlab has decided to prioritize profit margins over their responsibility to reliably host our free contributions to the world, then they no longer deserve to host anything.

I'm very happy I successfully completed my migration to a self-hosted #Gitea instance just a few weeks ago, and I don't have to cope anymore with shitty companies that still think that other people's open-source software must be something to exploit for their own profit.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/

Deuxième partie de l'entrevue avec Patrick Provost, professeur et chercheur suspendu de ses fonctions par l'Université Laval pour avoir émis des doutes sur le bien-fondé de la campagne de vaccination COVID, en particulier pour les enfants. Partie 2 de 3.
https://radiomassecritique.tk/2022/08/05/patrick-provost-2-l-envers-de-la-medaille/ @steph @Jocelyn_C @biguenique
#censure #COVID19 #désinformation #injectionsgéniques #médias #PatrickProvost #professionnels #Québec #science #UnivesitéLaval

#NextCloud CEO and founder Frank Karlitschek was approached by a #Microsoft lawyer earlier this year to make a deal.

In the meeting, the Microsoft correspondent offered benefits in the form of collaboration and marketing to Nextcloud. For example, they wanted to promote the Nextcloud logo in Microsoft marketing material – if Nextcloud would consider dropping its anti-trust complaint.

Microsoft used to be a company of jerks, liars and cheaters 40 years ago, it remains a company of jerks, liars and cheaters today.

https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-in-the-wall-street-journal-microsoft-and-cookies/

Patrick Provost est l’un des rares scientifiques québécois qui a eu le courage d’exprimer ouvertement une opinion scientifique qui va à l’encontre du narratif gouvernemental concernant les risques des injections COVID sur les enfants. Partie 1 de 3.
https://radiomassecritique.tk/2022/08/02/patrick-provost-1-briser-le-silence/ @steph @Jocelyn_C @biguenique
#Canada #censure #conflitsdintérêt #conspirationnisme #COVID19 #injectionsgéniques #JournaldeMontréal #journalisme #médias #Moderna #PatrickProvost #Pfizer #professionnels #Québec #UniversitéLaval

With Europe melting away under unprecedented heat, one of the best ways to lower tempretures and protect soil and foliage from dry out is by planting trees and other plants and restoring forests and meadows. There are a few ways to do this, community gardening groups are becoming more popular, there's also a service called Bee Bombs that sells seeds to turn private gardens into wild flower patches for bees. And the ecosia search engine uses ad revenue to fund tree planting 150million+ so far.