Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.

Also, a bit off-topic for this sub, but… how do you read? E-readers? Tablets? Software choices?

Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.

While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.

Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.

I think the examples in the article are a bit too high level, although accurate - even more interesting when they affect grammar, like both MS Office and Grammarly leading a crusade against the passive voice.

More interesting to me though is how Microsoft Windows (not just Office) lead to the extinction of a whole punctuation point in my native Greek. The “Greek semicolon” was not included in the default Greek keyboard layout for Windows. While it remained as an option on the IBM keyboard that big organisations could choose to order, it vanished from retail and therefore from home users and the language simply lost an entire punctuation mark within a decade.

If there’s a clear example of how technology can drive language change (to the extend that writing is part of language), I feel like that’s one of the clearest examples.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68004.html

Garrett’s post makes a great point in only a handful of lines. Strongly recommended reading for anyone who organises a community of any kind.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

Let’s not overstate Duolingo’s effectiveness for language learning.

The technological challenge to adopting a self-taught language learning method into an app is rather small. You just need the content. Either you develop the course under a Free Culture license, or you purchase the rights for an existing method and you port it. Plus maybe some volunteers to handle user-interaction.

A good example is the VHS Lernportal which implements three levels of German class in a way that actually has some pedagogical merit. It’s killer-feature is nothing technological, but that they have some teachers in the backoffice that will read your occasional text-production exercises and offer corrections (no, language tool wouldn’t be able to replace humans in that case, because language tool doesn’t know what you are trying to say and therefore gives you multiple guesses but no way to know which one you actually need).

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.

TIL, thanks. This might be a viable path for me.

I can give it a shot, certainly. One of the main contributors behind it is in my RSS reader so there’s some name recognition there. Future pricing is not final though, so I can’t budget for it before committing.

It might not be a solution for everyone, but you can self host a git repository on your static site!

I like the concept and the aesthetics, but I guess you still need to run a git server?

If you are willing to self-host and are scared of the gitea license shake-up, use forgejo.

When it comes to self-hosting, there’s also the costs. Hosting providers have been hitting me with price hikes one after another this year, so I’m looking into shutting down some servers instead.

Okay, that sounds like it hits the spot. I’ll read up on them. Happy to hear testimonials for existing users.

Oh, you are serious that you don’t get this pragmatic construction. You need not to interpret this as a literally-meant possessive, because it isn’t a literal possession. If you cannot do that, we aren’t getting anywhere.

Could you provide some German examples?

Mir ist kalt. Sie ist mir bekannt. Mir ist dieser Preis viel zu teuer.

I see your sarcasm tag so I will take this rant as lightly as possible.

In any case, not only it’s a normal turn of phrase in English, it’s also relatively common in Greek. Maybe a bit less than English, but all the examples could work.

It also reminds me of a similar but not identical construction in German, where the dative personal pronoun is used to relate an event to the person’s feelings and point of view, instead of objectively describing a situation.