themadturk

Ah, well, you missed an important (and obviously beloved) part of microcomputer culture. I haven't thought about him for years, but read his columns in PC Magazine religiously. I didn't always like him, but I always read him.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Still irritating. I tend to use Firefox for Reddit now.

Nickel, the stock firmware on Kobo, is pretty decent. KOReader is better, though. The Kobo is a pretty hackable device. I pair my Kobo Clara BW with BookFusion, which gives me portability between any KOReader device, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

When DRM is used, it is because publishers have required it, not because booksellers require it. Is that a better way of putting it?

I don't think stevia is classified the same way; it's a natural sweetener with zero calories. I think the others are "artificial" sweeteners.

That's my issue as well.

I use Safari all the time as well, but it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems. Other than that, it works for 99.9% of everything else.

Hah! This was me, as well...first a Timex, then a C=64.

I (a youngish adult, in the US) had a 1541 drive that broke. I was in love with the "Silent Service" submarine game, and found an ad in one of the computer magazines for a cassette version of the game that I ordered from England. It arrived in a couple weeks, and I had my favorite game again! Thank heavens the lower tech Brits!

"Selling" doesn't require DRM; publishers require DRM. So not every book you want to buy or can buy is available without DRM. Not even authors especially want DRM. Kobo will only let you buy a book without DRM if the publisher makes it available that way.

Kobos have web browsers, and they have be in "beta" forever as well.

Most publishers demand their ebooks be sold with DRM. This can be seen as an aspect of "evil."

A Remarkable tablet was the first thing I thought of, but it was still so unclear I had to click through to actually understand (more or less) what was going on.

My mistake!

I ended up with two disk drives, and a RAM expansion, so I was able to run GEOS. But it took a good while to build up to that (I was a married, childless adult when I used the C=64, if that's any comfort).

At least some Tor.com ebooks are available DRM-free through Amazon. Honor Of The Queen, 2nd in the Honor Harrington Series, specifically says it's sold without DRM on Amazon.

Yes, but from some of those places the authors receive no compensation.

My own novel, The Immortal Remains, is DRM-free on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and other platforms (maybe Apple as well, I'm not sure). Other authors, such as Cory Doctorow, sell their books DRM-free as well.

British TV in that era was enormously, shall we say, frugal. As soon as they discovered videotape, which was both cheaper than film and reusable, they went all in on it. BBC especially (and ITV as well, it appears) often wiped their tapes and recorded over them to save money, since they saw no reason to think anyone would be interested in their shows in the future. For this reason, some early episodes of Doctor Who are lost forever, at least until some foreign TV station finds copies in their vaults, which has happened over the years.

I complained about this style of writing on Medium a few months ago. The author of the article replied that it's a preferred style if you anticipate your writing to be read on a small smartphone screen. This kind of makes sense. Whether that article (or this one) was AI-generated or not, I don't know.

I consider myself an "intelligent general reader" and read this last month, producing my own much briefer review [0]. Such a good book! I read a lot of popular history, but not usually written by actual practicing historians (who usually probably don't write "popular history"). Good stuff, and highly recommended.

[0] https://www.the-recliner.com/the-sixteenth-book-of-2026-inve...

I learned this as "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them."

Adobe Digital Editions runs on my MacBook Air M3 with macOS Tahoe. What problem do you see?

(FWIW, ADE will probably die when Rosetta support goes away with MacOS 28, but one of the de-DRM plugins will read acsm files directly and bring in the books.)

You can also play with Calibre's default transfer template so all book files go into a single folder of your choice on the device. Then you can set your KOReader home or favorites folder and see everything in one place.

The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.

As a recent retiree from a Fortune 500 company...no, there's no such thing as an upgrade. We were virtually exclusively laptops on the desktop. It was full replacement every time.

I believe Dosbox-X had native Apple Silicon support…at least it has an Apple Silicon installer.

The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.

Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.

They've already taken it; what are you going to do about it?

But the writer is an end user. How does his perspective not regard the end user?