efaardvark

Cells at Work. This guy has got to be the most unlucky guy alive. I'm only on episode 7 and he's already had pneumonia, influenza, an allergy attack, food poisoning, a parasitic infection, an infected scrape, heat stroke, and now he's got cancer! He needs to take better care of himself!

That is a problem, but I'll take what I can get at this point. That was the beauty of fictionwise. They had a large selection of material from different authors and genres. Not just obscure stuff either. I found a bunch of my favorites there too.. Niven, Bear, Silverberg, Spinrad, Stine, Ellison, Weber. (I'm into SF, but they also had other genres like mystery, fantasy, etc.) Even collections like magazines like Analog or anthologies where it is typically hard to get all of the authors to grant permission for e-release were there. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. I spent a small fortune there.

Yes, nice that they offer PDFs too, which is what I have kind of gravitated to for my own library. The old fictionwise site also had PDFs and quite a lot of my e-library is PDF as a consequence, including about 3 years of a SF magazine called Analog that I have subscribed to since I was 12. For a while that site alone made me think that ebooks were finally a thing, and I was glad to give them my money. Then they shut down. Fortunately all the stuff I bought from them is still safely stored on my NAS. (Dont try this with "your" kindle collection btw.) Anyway, yes, sites like emanga and fictionwise, and efforts like crossroads are why I keep trying this e-thing. FWIW, my favorite ebook to date is probably that Cassini picture book released a couple years ago. Sorry, not anime/manga related, but cool nevertheless.

Welcome Raven! Hmmm... 54 here. When does this tapering off that you speak of start to kick in? Then again I still enjoy legos and video games too. Maybe it is just me. 🤔

I played with my mom's kindle for a while so I'm familiar with those methods. Not really interested in jumping through those sorts of hoops anymore though. If they don't want to sell what I want on the up-and-up then I'll oblige by not buying. There's plenty of content out there that does give me what I want without the hassles. Don't get me wrong... I have no problem paying for what I want, and I'd like to support the actual content creators with my $$$, but they made their choice and I can do without the toll booth operators taking their ridiculous "overhead" (usually many multiples of what the artists themselves get).

Binged As Miss Beelzebub Likes it. Cute, but a bit too "fluffy" for me. Next is Goblin Slayer. Definitely not "fluffy".

That's assuming you can get the drive connected hardware-wise in the first place. Some of this stuff is so old that even that is a problem. My current motherboard doesn't have either IDE or SCSI connectors for instance. I've had some luck with an IDE to USB adapter for the former. The SCSI is still a problem in some cases however. One of the reasons that I still have that old dual-athlon system for instance is because that RAID card is the only way I have to interface with the drives connected to it. Unfortunately it is a proprietary interface that doesn't support direct interface with the drives from the OS. (The RAID card announces itself to the OS as one huge drive, but manages the individual drives "privately". Otherwise I'd just use linux's "dd" utility to overwrite all the blocks with zeros and be done with it.) I do have a USB->SCSI adapter as well, but it is the 50-pin variety and these use the 78(?) pin LVD interface. I kind of painted myself into a corner with those drives.

Then you would love my junk boxen. I've got an old dual athlon, ECC memory system that used to be my household server before I got my Synology NAS. I turned it off and set it aside a few years ago, but never tore it down. Still has the RAID card and drive array that was my very first experience with setting up a RAID. It has to be at least a decade old at this point. Also nearby is an "EP-MVP3G5" socket-7 motherboard ca. 1999, with ISA, PCI (original), and AGP slots. That was my do-anything system for many years. I kept it around "just in case" I needed to access some old tech, but I haven't even seen an ISA card for over a decade. I used to have a lot more but that's pretty much all I have left. I had a bin in the garage and for a long time I just threw the old stuff in there when I built a new system. It kind of took on a life of its own after a while. As I get time & energy & enthusiasm over the last few months I've been going through it all and slowly getting rid of it. One problem was/is that I didn't destroy the old drives, and I'm not sure enough of the contents to just throw them in the trash. I made copies of everything on the new system(s), but there might be things like old tax or other financial records still on the old drives. As soon as I'm sure I don't have any old media (I even have an old ZIP drive and a "PD" optical drive - both SCSI) that I want to format over and/or copy to the NAS it is all going out the door. Kind of fun going through it all one last time too.

For anyone interested in what personal computers were like back in the last century... https://youtu.be/sewt2pqc3us

I agree. Hardware-wise things are pretty bulletproof these days. Virtually all the modern slots and connectors (PCIe, M.2, SATA, memory, etc.) are keyed so that you physically can't connect things wrong. There's still ways to configure things wrong, or at least non-optimally, software-wise but a modern BIOS on modern hardware pretty much won't let you do things so wrong that you let the magic smoke out. Occasionally I run into difficulties getting legacy components working but that's getting more rare every year. Pretty much anything that doesn't autoconfig correctly these days I consider to be broken. The only things you do have to be careful about are static discharges (I always wear a grounded wrist-strap) and working with the CPU. All those pins on the CPU chip are extremely susceptible to damage if mishandled so you want to be very careful when handling the chip and plugging it in or taking it out of the CPU socket. Making sure the heatsink is on securely and the fan(s) connected is also critical, though not especially hard.

I'm a big reader and I'd like to get into e-books. I've tried a couple times and never really got hooked. Kindle is ubiquitous, and I do like their e-ink "paperwhite" display, but Amazon is way, way too restrictive with their content. I also would like a larger reader that handles full-sized content like you would find in magazines or professional journals. Ideally I'd like one that I can take notes with and/or sketch into too so I can get rid of both my book pile and my composition/note book. The best reader I've used to date (IMHO) was the ill-fated ILiad reader, if anyone remembers that. Honestly, it wasn't that great an experience, but it did have potential and did (most of) what I wanted without throwing unnecessary digital restrictions or proprietary format issues in my face. These days it would probably be one of the larger-format Oynx Boox devices. Their latest device looks pretty awesome, though quite expensive. Anyway, I'm guessing most people here might not care about most of that but I'm thinking of making another go of getting into e-reading and one of the things I would like to do with it is read manga. Just wondering if anyone here is doing that and if they have any advice on what features to look for or avoid, or if anyone has an ereader that they really love or hate. Where do you get your e-manga? TIA...