I’ll bet those boots taste disgusting.

Should I Buy One?

That’s up to you, champ. I’m not your real dad and I’m not trying to take his place. But I’m here for you if you need me.

Love it. 🤣🤣🤣

You can probably just use ollama and import the model.

It’s really just that only Amazon uses AZW3 and KFX. MOBI is deprecated, and nobody really uses it anymore, not even Amazon. KFX is DRMed to hell, and I’m not sure about it, but most AZW3 files are just DRM wrappers for EPUB anyway. This is why the KindleUnpack plugin for Calibre can strip out EPUBs from most AZW3 files and retain formatting without needing conversion.

Basically, AZW3 and KFX are for Kindle, and only for Kindle. EPUB is an open standard that literally every device that’s not a Kindle uses.

I already own a non-Amazon reader that’s my main reader, and I want to move away from Amazon’s ecosystem.

No, Amazon took away the “Download and transfer via USB” option when downloading your books. Making it more difficult to strip DRM, but also to conveniently add it to multiple devices. I prefer to keep my eReaders offline and manage them with Calibre.

Regarding sideloading EPUBs with Calibre, it’s not really doing that. Under normal circumstances Kindle can’t read EPUB format at all, so Calibre will convert it to a native format, either MOBI or AZW3 generally. But with a jailbroken Kindle and KOReader, you can actually read EPUBs natively. I’ve actually converted my entire collection to EPUB and deleted the AZW3 and KFX files.

Depends on the model and firmware, but for most, Winterbreak is the current method.

Do note if your Kindle is updated to version 5.18.x currently it’s not possible to jailbreak. There is ongoing work on a new exploit though, and a new jailbreak method (or update to Winterbreak) is expected later this year.

Edit - actually, if you’re on firmware 5.18.0 the jailbreak may work. 5.18.1 and above it definitely doesn’t.

I never found much worth watching on Prime, to be honest, even before the ads issue.

As for Prime, I still benefit from the Prime shipping, but a lot of stores on Amazon ship free now even without Prime, and given where I live, 2-day shipping is not a thing. It’s usually more like 4 to 7 days. I’m generally in no rush either way.

My main benefits were shipping and books, plus free games on Prime and GOG. But now the shipping is almost irrelevant, they’ve screwed the book thing, so all that’s left is the games, many of which I won’t even play.

Not this one. I’ve been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I’m done.

• Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
• Ads in Prime Video
• Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
• Now this, and I don’t even own an Alexa device

I’m done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I’ve found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I’ve jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn’t a hard transition since I’ve had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I’ve started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.

Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It’ll be less convenient, and I’ll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I’d like to minimize that now.

I’ve already used Cachy, but went back to Endeavour. I found Cachy’s “optimizations” to be a bit janky. At the time they enabled some items for ntsync that were clearly not ready for primetime.

Performance-wise, I compared the two head to head and found Cachy and Endeavor to be equally performant for gaming. Cachy just didn’t offer anything for me that Endeavor didn’t already do.

On top of this, I found Cachy’s packages to lag a bit behind the Arch and Endeavor repos, particularly in the Cachy-extras repository, and it ended up causing me issues with things I used from the AUR due to packaging conflicts (the old Manjaro type crap).

Cachy isn’t for me, though I get why people like it.

Seems a little extreme. If you’re new to Linux every distro is going to have a learning curve and you’ll start at first boot not understanding it.

If you’re not new to Linux, then it’s just another distro. For me, the only “new” thing was learning pacman’s option flags since I’d only ever used yum/dnf and apt. And of course, finding out the joy that is yay and the AUR.

Not everyone wants to spend a bunch of time tuning the install just so, and just want to be up and running fast with the bare essentials they need. For me, Endeavour is a clean and fast, has rapid kernel updates, and includes most of the things I need right out of the gate.

More people should use EndeavourOS. It’s fantastic for gaming.

See my previous comment, I’m 100% on board with Lyrion server and client these days.

I only use Plexamp now for local music when I’m driving.

Disclaimer: Plexamp used to be great, but it’s stagnated badly. It was a good reason to buy plex pass at one point, though I don’t think it’s worth it now.

I’m not familiar with Symfonium, but the major defining thing with plexamp is the DJ features for exploring your local music library.

Unfortunately, some months back Tidal support was removed from Plexamp and that was kind of a deal breaker because now it’s only local library, and its “killer app” feature was using the DJ mixes in conjunction with Tidal to do real time mixes with your local and streaming music together.

I’ve switched to using Lyrion instead, along with the Blissmix and “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins with LastFM support. It integrates with Tidal, Deezer, or Qobuz (and I think Spotify, but not sure, I only use hifi streaming services). They work similarly, and in some ways better because you have full control over Blissmix’s functionality for chroma, timbre, tempo, album and track repeats, and more. Also, Lyrion can stream directly over DLNA to a client, whereas Plexamp was just Airplay/Bluetooth/Google Cast (I have Apple stuff, but Airplay is terrible quality).

It’s sad, but plexamp is just my “local download” player now on my phone for when I’m driving, since it downconverts flac to Opus at higher quality than MP3 and at smaller sizes.

I highly recommend trying out Lyrion. I’ve used nearly everything for music in the past, including even having a year of Roon, but Lyrion has replaced pretty much everything.

They have sales, and it’s not really worth paying the “MSRP” price. My wife got Plex Pass for $80 back in 2023, and I got it late last year for $90.

Plexamp is (or at least was) pretty awesome. It requires plex and plex pass for its full features. Jellyfin doesn’t have anything remotely comparable (though you could always just run Lyrion).

Oh nice. I dunno what changes would need a restart, I just vaguely remember reading that. I’ll get the plug-in installed and test it out.

Edit - oh, different plug-in, it was Reshadeck I’m thinking of.

I gotta check out that plug-in. I used the script before I knew about it, and then just kept using it since I read the deck plug-in needs a game restart for any changes, but I’m still curious.

That’s great, until you want to switch devices while still keeping your progress.

I knew it was gonna be Audiobookshelf as soon as I saw the headline. Great software. My wife has all her books hosted on it on our NAS, and it barely takes any resources. I have it hosted alongside Plex in a VM on a teeny tiny Ryzen 5500u Mini-PC.

Edit - I’m even more amused that I have almost the same configuration as the article author, Proxmox server hosting the guest, just mine’s an Ubuntu 24.04 server VM instead of LXC. That little server hosts Plex, Audiobookshelf, Lyrion, and AssetUPnP, pretty much handles all my media stuff, plus a separate Home Assistant VM, and has resources to spare.

You didn’t mention your budget. That will impact things.

If you have a closet with a rack you have a lot of options, hardware-wise. If you’ll be running this in your living room, for sake of your sanity, something like an AMD mini-PC with a small NAS for additional hosted storage via NFS would probably be your best bet.

A PC with Proxmox could do this handily. I have a cheap Ryzen 5500u mini PC hosting my Plex server, audiobookshelf, home assistant, and DLNA server (AssetUPnP). It’s only 6 core/12 thread and32GB RAM but still has resources to spare. You could totally do an 8c/16t one and throw more RAM at it.

——

Edit - oh, and don’t forget that if you’re going to be hosting a public instance, you’ll need a good internet connection (with good up and down speed, generally fiber is good for that) and a public IP.