DeDRM only works for Kindles 4 and earlier, which is the biggest reason Amazon is discontinuing support for them. So as of May 20, there is no practical way to decrypt Kindle books and back them up any longer.

Obviously there are some other reasons for dropping support including the fact that older Kindles don't support formats like epub with more advanced layout and formatting options. But it still stinks.

Sadly I don't know of any decent alternative to buy ebooks at a reasonable price that I can back up to my local calibre library. I guess one alternative is to keep buying Kindle books, but then download them from the usual grey market online libraries. Anyway I'm going to make a list of books I want to buy and get them bought before the May 20th deadline and then import them into Calibre from my Kindle 3.

Someone gave a nice tip about picking up a Kindle e-ink screen driver so I can at least use the screens for projects.

That's part of the reason they are discontinuing support for these devices. It's nearly impossible on the newer Kindles to backup your purchases. They really are just rentals. Hence I'll be spending no more money on Kindle from here on. It used to be Kindle plus audible was actually pretty fantastic and affordable and both were easy to decrypt and back up.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Web sites are within their rights to deny access without showing advertising, but the browser is running on my computer and I can have it manipulate the data how I want. That's why I no longer use Chrome or any Chromium-based browser since Google deliberately blocked Manifest v2 extensions such as uBlock Origni.

Firefox is the only browser that has uBlock Origin now. And vertical tabs of course. There's so much to dislike about Mozilla and horrible Firefox UI choices, but as far as safety goes, it's the only game in town.

They survived by manually moving the cattle frequently, using fences and gates. This worked pretty well when you've got lots of cheap labor. Heck people used to live amongst the flocks, keeping an eye on them, and driving them to the better pastures.

I'm not sure you've actually ever seen cattle grazing. They will graze the good grass right to the ground, leaving the other grasses they don't like as much, and then they'll follow each other to some other area. It's not random; you can't just expect that over time cattle will graze equally every square foot. It's far better to move them on before the grass gets that short and essentially removed in favor of the poorer grasses. This is part of what these collars do. They really do work. My family's been using collars like these on some cattle for a couple of years now. It's really been a boon. You can graze more cattle on less land with healthier pasture.

Great points. I forgot about those other aspects. E-sheperd sends a warning to the phone if an animal doesn't move for a while.

That said, herding definitely is a part of it. These systems can actually move cattle around a pasture. The cattle learn pretty quickly what the collar is trying to get them to do.

It really does work. My family's ranch has been using a similar product called e-shepherd for a couple of years now. Doesn't take the cattle very long to learn what they collars want them to do.

I can tell you are not a rancher.

There's a Canadian company doing something similar called e-shepherd. It's more than a virtual fence. It's part of an integrated grazing plan. Currently there's a certain number of acres required for a certain number of cattle. The cattle don't graze randomly, so you end up getting areas that are overgrazed and the grass damaged. With e-shepherd or a system like this one, the cattle can be slowly moved around the pasture. This basically allows you to keep the same amount of cattle in a much smaller area, as you can move them more frequently without a lot of gates and fences. It doesn't take long for the cattle to figure it out, and it's quite remarkable how the collars can train them to move when you (or the AI!) want them too. It really does work.

Who's dumb?

You talk as if NASA just up and went to the moon in a matter of months in the late 1960s. Despite JFK's speech, the preparation to go to the moon began a long time before, and involved three separate families of rockets. Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo. It was really Gemini that that developed the technologies that eventually made the moon landing possible. There were a lot of test flights. Granted back then there was more political will than there is now. But it was always a battle with Congress and the president. If you think we can just skip all that development and testing phase now just because we once did it years ago, you are mistaken.

It's hard to talk about goals when the folks controlling the purse keep changing their mind.

For about $3000 USD you can buy an AMD Ryzen AI 395 with 128 GB of integrated RAM, which I'm tempted to do to run coding models. Although it seems to me that 256 GB is more of the sweet spot for local LLMs that can do things at a decent speed. For that size of RAM, the only real game in town is the Mac Studio, will cost about $10k (and rising). Of course even $10k is cheaper than a personal assistant. Now with the true cost of agentic AI starting to fall on the customer, $10k doesn't seem so ridiculous.

Current spacecraft velocity relative to earth is 3697 kph according to the latest spacecraft status display.

La Nina turned out to be extremely weak. It basically ended last month. We're already seeing indications that we're swinging back towards La Nino again.