Luke

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything better than Calibre at the moment. (Though, I’m happy to be proven wrong!) Nothing against Calibre, it’s functionally amazing free software and it works very well; I said “unfortunately” because the interface is extremely dated and clunky and confusing to operate. Once you get it working, it’s very nice though. As long as you never have to go fiddling with it again, because every time you’ve gotta reacquaint with it’s weird UI. Still, it really is the best available at the moment, and it’s free so that’s awesome.

My favorite way to set it up is using the linuxserver image, which has a web-based VNC built into it, so you can remotely run the app on a headless server and then use your browser to interact with it.

I have Calibre configured to monitor a folder for new stuff I throw into it, where it’ll automatically fetch metadata and put it into the database. Calibre also has an OPDS server built in, to which I point a nicer frontend for reading comics. Currently that is Kavita which provides a decent web UI for both books and comics.

Anyhow, I believe you could enter data about your physical comics into the Calibre database, and then view the metadata with something like Kavita, though of course you’d be skipping the reading features.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

• ad infested apps and websites
• gaming microtransactions
• a new phone every year
• cable service
• insurance
• HOAs
• gasoline
• Amazon
• pants and dresses without pockets

Wow this is amazing, that music is perfect for it. The shots of the Enterprise heading into the cloud while accompanied by this score felt so exploratory and awe inspiring. I don’t think I’ve ever been brought to tears by the original score in that movie, but this one did it.

OnlyOffice can also be integrated with NextCloud or WordPress or a bunch of other stuff. I believe it can also be used standalone. Personally, I found it’s interface much more polished and usable than Collabora, though it’s been a couple years since I compared.

Good question… it’s not on my playlist but it’s probably actually cozy. I just don’t tend to watch that one often because it makes me feel sad.

My top 3 favorite cozy episodes are Data’s Day, Déjà Q, and Manhunt. Horny Lwaxana is an inspiration; her reactions to her daughter’s slut shaming comments are so priceless to me.

Yeah, I often fall asleep to a TNG playlist where I’ve selected all the most cozy episodes (e.g., no Borg or “4 lights!” because those are amazing but stressful) but being jolted wide awake by that jarringly loud intro music is less fun than nodding off to Picard romancing Lwaxana with Shakespeare quotes.

Wasn’t that the Loki show, where all of time is run by a boring dystopian corporate bureaucracy?

Now that I think of it, I guess you’re right, that show probably did do better than Black Adam.

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

There’s no more funny malware.

That depends who gets infected.

You or me infected by malware? No thanks!

Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!

Windows 11 is technically still Windows 10, if you go by the actual version reported by the systeminfo command. For example, my fully updated Windows 11 Pro VM reports itself as OS Version: 10.0.22631, so there might still be something to the idea that “Windows 10 is the last version” but the marketing and branding teams didn’t stay on the same message.

It’s not downloadable software, but you might check out WordPress if you haven’t recently, it’s open source and free (though you do need to host it somewhere).

It used to have kind of a bad reputation for being a horrible hodgepodge of bad editing UI and random plugins that do things in wildly different ways, but the WordPress team has really stepped up their game in the last few years and it’s actually very nice now as long as you stay away from the commercial plugins. There’s almost always an open source plugin available for anything you’d want to do, but the out of box experience is plenty good for most pages you’d be likely to need.

WordPress has a very nice “block editor” enabled by default these days, which is essentially just their name for a WYSIWYG interface. Use drag and drop to design the pages, and then click a button to see it in a “code editor” that shows the HTML if you’d rather edit that way.

Anyhow, I know it’s not exactly what you asked for, but I thought I’d mention it since you did say you are open to something web based.

I usually interpret the phrase “drop in” to mean that the replacement being referenced will also work with everything written for the original. Does “drop in” in this case mean that Immich will transparently replace Google Photos, similar to how libretube replaces YouTube? That would be amazing!

My worker cooperative helps authors self-publish, and we use as much open-source as possible to do that. We rely almost exclusively on a number of tools which are all better than proprietary counterparts for one reason or another (sometimes merely because they are free and allow us to keep costs minimal) but the main reason is most of our clients value unquestioned data ownership over anything else. We avoid corporate cloud services and self-host as much as possible, for example.

Having said that, IMO many of these are also better designed and better UI than comparable paid tools. Blender being the obvious best example, but WordPress is another one. I used to ignorantly shit on WP so much when I was working in the professional startup industry as a web developer. Since then, I’ve learned to my delight that it’s awesome if you don’t bog it down with a bunch of horrible plugins, and the latest versions with their block editor approach are so good for easy and quick theming.

Here’s a list off the top of my head of our regularly used software. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, and many of these are going to be unsurprising:

• Linux (seems obvious, but definitely worth mentioning. We primarily use Ubuntu and Debian based images.)
• Blender (2D/3D graphics)
• GIMP (raster image editing)
• Inkscape (vector image editing)
• calibre (creating ebooks)
• InvoiceNinja (generating invoices, tracking hours, payments, expenses, general accounting)
• NextCloud (storage and collaboration on files, passwords, office editing)
• Gitlab (git repository tracking, deployment management)
• WordPress (client websites)
• Caddy (web server with dead-simple config and automatic https support)
• Zulip (chat, the threading style they use is so effective for organizing discussions about client work, it’s miles beyond Slack or any other options we’ve all used in past corporate lives)

it really took away my ability to sell end to encryption to friends and family

As I understand it, SMS and MMS aren’t encrypted (and that’s why support was dropped. Unfortunately, you were never selling your friends e2e as long as they kept using SMS, even if they used it through Signal. In fact, it’s arguable that the false perception of security in “now I’m texting through Signal, and that means it’s secure!” was even more damaging than never having switched in the first place. (Unless they went all the way and stopped using SMS, of course.)

So, nothing is lost from that perspective. Now you can more accurately recommend ppl to use Signal messages instead of SMS and know that you are more accurately selling e2e with every convert because they can’t keep using insecure messaging through Signal.