yote_zip

You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you're concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It's a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They're also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Possibly, though I suspect that releasing your new DRM early is a good way to have it broken by the time you actually want to protect something with it.

I knew there was something wrong when my pirated copies of these games suddenly started vanishing from my hard drive! Curse you, DRM!

~ What the execs think will happen, I guess? What is the point of applying DRM to a game that has already released?

Yeah there's a few ways they could be acquired. I don't do Amazon or Kindle but they appear to be on Kindle Unlimited. They've also apparently been sent out for free a few times. I feel like it puts a bad taste in my mouth either way; even if I could sidestep the cost, by reading them it would still be supporting the books and therefore the gouging of others, in an indirect sense.

I haven't read this series yet but it's on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I've recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.

I'm lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I'm not sure if I ever will.

I wrote a short guide on this method recently: https://lemmy.ml/comment/6708735

You can export your Amazon library at the current moment, as long as the books aren't published (or maybe purchased?) after 2023.

I did this for a friend recently and my steps were:

1. Started a Windows VM (if you're not using Windows)
2. Install Kindle for PC app, latest version
3. Log in and download every book (I didn't know how to do this in bulk so I literally right click -> downloaded every book)
4. Install Calibre on the same PC (I think this is necessary so it can access the Kindle encryption keys?)
5. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Get new plugins: KFX Input plugin
6. Install a plugin by navigating to Preferences -> Plugins -> Load plugin from file, using DeDRM 10.0.9's "DeDRM_tools_10.0.9.zip"
7. Restart Calibre
8. At the top of Calibre, right click "Add books" and pick "Add from folder and sub-folders"
9. Navigate to your documents and pick "My Kindle Content", then select "Yes" to "All ebook files are multiple formats etc"
10. Wait for it all to import
11. Select all books, then right click "Remove books" at the top and pick "Remove files of a specific format from selected books"
12. Pick "MD" and click "OK"
13. With all books selected, click "Edit metadata" at the top
14. Pick "Set metadata (except cover) from the e-book files", then click OK
15. Done, sort of. The DRM should all be broken, and you can convert the books to EPUB or whatever format using Calibre from this point forward, even if Amazon breaks this method in the future.

Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they're doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say 'thank you'.

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it's more like gambling with your wallet if you don't get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that's not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it's served as WebP it's 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It's a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that's used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can't tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people's data for no reason.

I like stories to have stuff to aspire to, rather than characters that share the pains of a hopeless millenial.

Yeah I feel that. I wouldn't call it a light read if you're feeling depressed, and there's some clear parallels and lessons from the book's world to be applied to ours. The story likes to punch you in the guts whenever it feels like it, and a hopeless feeling lingers throughout. I should make an amended edition where the characters frequently get the hugs they deserve.

it’s hard to come by good furry literature

Surely. Oftentimes it feels like any furry media that exists has to have a compelling reason why the people are animals, with human-based stories being the default if you can't think of a good one. It's nice to have a good story regardless, with the animalistic flavor largely just being garnish on top.

helping attract some more attention to a project

Hopefully at some point it will stick and be properly recognized. It was released in 2017 and has excellent Goodreads reviews, but the author is young and surely will eventually make waves if they can keep the creative spark going.