pointless
Here’s another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo (including an interview with the great Alexandra Elbakyan).
Cory Doctorow recently wrote about this in some detail (incl. helpful links): https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier
The torrents are alive; as long as you can get the torrent links from libgen, you have access to the files. (No need to share whole archives either, you can pick & choose).
They’ve confused economic reality with their own ideal reality.
… and the irony in this statement is overwhelming, after the fairy tale you’ve just outlined about those providing the most value to society gathering the most power & influence.
The Nyxt browser – webkit as rendering engine, extensible by Common Lisp – was making good progress, though its progress slowed down considerably lately; and there are a few ‘showstoppers’ preventing everyday usage, at least for me.
deleted by creator
Torture device, presumably.
Michael W. Lucas’s “Networking for System Administrators” is a great resource: https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking#n4sa
chromium is based on a fork of webkit; webkit proper does remain – I don’t know how much of an influence google has on it though; all I ‘know’ is that it’s Apple’s adoption of a KDE project.
Firefox is already compatible with v3, by the way, since version 109: https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/develop/manifest-v3-migration-guide/
Another vote for Tesseract – just to clarify the terminology, though: PDF is a fragile format best used read-only; so you really don’t want to edit a pdf, but make a new one using the same (or cleaned-up) bitmaps and a new ocr text layer.
Now, tesseract is excellent at recognizing glyphs; but especially if the scanned image is a little fuzzy, the layout detection falters; and when it falters, you get redundant line breaks, & chunks of text in the wrong order – all of which gets incredibly annoying for searching & copying purposes. So if you can spare the time, and the text requires it, you may need to mark regions (paragraphs & titles mainly) on the bitmap image manually. There exist a few frontends to Tesseract that help with a task like that; check out, e.g., https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader - inside single paragraph blocks of text, Tesseract doesn’t get as easily confused; and the text output is in the correct reading order, & w/o redundant breaks.
I have a little extension of my own that just sends out selections from the <head> tag from a tab open on Firefox to my database; I haven’t been able to figure out how to add that to any collection — neither do I want to, because it’s of no use to anyone but me, as the ‘database’ in question is just postgrest running on my home router; so I don’t want to make this extension public. So for now I’m using HTTPShortcuts on Android for a similar purpose; though it can only send out a url from a ‘share’ option under Firefox.
Recently I became aware of ‘StarLite’ tablets – the prices are pretty steep, but the specs look really good, esp. wrt the screen.
Not sure what the question is – are you looking to port extensions over yourself, or are you just exclaiming, “it can’t be so hard, so why won’t someone do it!”.
There’s plenty of documentation over at MDN as to writing extensions, writing cross-browser extensions, porting mv2 firefox extensions over to mv3, the differences between Firefox’s mv3 implementation, and that found in Chrome, etc. etc. etc. The following are good starting points: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions & https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Build_a_cross_browser_extension
For ground-level, basic stuff (managing a popup, communicating between popup & a ‘background’ script, between content loaded on the browser & your scripts, managing a context menu, etc.) writing an extension is straightforward once you develop some degree of understanding of the sometimes convoluted paths the data needs to take, the permissions you need to have in order to pass messages through, etc. Larger extensions are full fledged applications in their own right, though, so tackling them introduces difficulties of a different order of magnitude.
The Falkon browser is extensible (in its own way) through QML; and the Nyxt browser is extensible in common lisp. These aren’t ‘webextensions’ in the precise sense of the term, though they could be just as useful. I wrote a basic bookmark manager that I use mainly on Firefox; but I ported its core functionality (just send the current page’s title, url, & selections from the <head> tag over to my database (postgresql via the postgrest http frontend, to which I just make a fetch request)) to QML, and it was pretty straightforward. Falkon is based on Qt’s QtWebEngine, which is Chromium-based; Nyxt is based on WebKit.
edit: There’s also luakit and qutebrowser . The former is extensible via lua 5.1 scripts, the latter, python; there isn’t a wealth of documentation & examples, though (at least there wasn’t last time I checked) so the API can be a bit of a mystery. Luakit as webkit as its engine, qutebrowser is built on QtWebEngine just like Falkon.
Yeah, I’m really happy with my Leopold which I’ve been using for the past 3 months. I used to have Unicomp before that; and while the typing feel was a little better than the brown switches I currently have on the Leopold, its build quality was lower, and eventually it just died on me thanks to what I later found out was a notoriously failure-prone controller they used to use back then. I’m told that Unicomp’s build quality has improved a lot since then.
… though the frustrating thing is that I was able to get the Unicomp only because I was living in the US at the time; and the Leopold I got thanks to relatives in S. Korea. Where I live, ‘mechanical keyboard’ is treated like a synonym for ‘gamer keyboard’, and all the BS associated with that.
So excellent off the shelf brands exist, though one has to do some local research first.
Just as a side note – if the user is ok with (or actually prefers) handling the archival & indexing of the material himself/herself, SingleFile works great as a ‘read later’ tool. It can save into a WebDAV share; can be imported into a self-baked minimal webextension as a library; & has an almost feature-complete mv3 port.
Works on Fennec (based on FFox Beta, I think) though a bit slow, unfortunately. Available otherwise on desktop FFox & Chromium.
‘Oxford Scholarship Online’ would license different sets of books to different departments; so someone from the philosophy department couldn’t get access to books classified under sociology or history.
Imagine doing something similar at the checkout table in a ‘physical’ library.