cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47932261

Fuck you Abbot and the horse you ride on.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1189213/doctors-and-nhs-could-be-sued-for-mistakes-made-by-ai-tools-report-warns

Hi everyone

I posted before here. I'll try once more but don't want to get over bearing.

I'm trying to self host all my contacts and my calendar.

I've managed to install radicale but there very little ui and I'm not actually sure how to import my contacts and calendar, or how to start using it with a client.

This is all I see

I've set up the calendar and contacts server but I can't find any security settings to password protect it

Any guidance would be awesome, thank you

This seems really interesting? Kind of like a rimworld mmo with less violence is sounds like.

It seems promising? Has anyone been in the playtests yet?

I read every single day. At home it's on my Kobo running KOReader (yes, I'm that open-source guy), and I love it. The problem: I don't always have the e-reader on me. On the train, at work, waiting somewhere — I just have my phone.

I tried Kobo's own Android app to bridge the gap and... I really didn't like it. Promos everywhere, adding your own books is a pain, the reader itself feels clunky, and the Wi-Fi handling is annoying.

So I built my own thing: Varbook, a small self-hosted EPUB library.

You drop EPUBs into it in one click. From there:

• They're readable on your phone through a simple but well-made PWA. Books are cached locally, so you can read offline; when you're back online your reading position syncs to the server.
• The server exposes everything over OPDS, so any compatible app works (KOReader, Moon+ Reader, etc.).
• I also wrote a KOReader plugin that pushes/pulls your reading position to the server in a single gesture.

My actual daily workflow:

• Evening, at home: I wake up my Kobo in KOReader, tap the top-right corner → Wi-Fi turns on, my current book jumps to the right position, Wi-Fi turns back off to save battery.
• I read.
• Done reading: tap the top-right corner again → Wi-Fi on, my reading time + position sync to the server.
• Next day, at work: I open the PWA on my phone. It drops me exactly where I left off, and syncs my position on every page turn.
• Evening: back to the Kobo, which picks up my position from the phone.

All of this with fully open-source software, no commercial service in the loop, my books staying on my own server.

The trickiest part was cross-device position sync — every reader engine (epub.js in the browser, KOReader's CREngine, Moon+) tracks position differently. Varbook uses a "pivot" format based on EPUB spine items (chapter index + percentage) so your position survives the jump from one device to another without throwing you 30 pages off.

It's open source (MIT), built with Laravel + React, and ships as a single Docker container (SQLite by default, no external DB needed). The entire UI is translated in English, French, and Spanish.

Honest disclaimer: a good chunk of this is vibe-coded. That said, I've been a developer for 20 years, so it's opinionated vibe-coding — I know what I'm looking at. It's been used daily and intensively by about 5 people for the last 3 months, and I keep improving it regularly. It's not bug-free, but I'd call it reasonably stable. I'm being upfront so you know what you're getting into.

There's a free public instance if you just want to try it without installing anything: https://varbook.hophop.be/

• Full write-up on my blog: https://trucs.hophop.be/en/blog/varbook-bibliotheque-epub-self-hosted
• Code: https://github.com/ndieschburg/varbook
• KOReader plugin: https://github.com/ndieschburg/varbook.koplugin

Happy to answer questions or hear what's missing — it scratches my own itch, but I'd love to know if it's useful to anyone else.

So far, my self-hosting has been limited to Pi-Hole, and a static website. I now want to try out something new, an **Immich ** server.

I have a static IP from my ISP, so I don’t need to rent out a VPS. However, given that this IS a home internet, I want to be extra sure that it is going to be secure.

In my existing website, I use Fail2Ban + BadBotBlocker + Anubis + Nginx rate limits to protect it from scrapers, bots and malicious users, and it works well. With photos (especially family photos) at stake, I just want to know more on how to protect my server.

Russia on Wednesday lifted restrictions on popular children’s gaming platform Roblox, saying the company “has fully complied with Russian legal requirements aimed at ensuring user safety.” “The company has implemented a range of additional child-protection measures,” the Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Ministry said in a statement. “Roblox pledged to continue efforts to combat the spread of undesirable content on the platform,” the ministry said.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1188778/libreoffice-slams-euro-office-as-de-facto-ally-of-microsoft

Lobsters.

I would like to populate my navidrome server.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/56230

The first published live observations of the rare goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni) in its natural deep-ocean habitat were reported in a new paper by a University of Hawai'i at Mānoa-led team of oceanographers. In the past, goblin sharks were filmed and reported alive only after being hooked on a fishing line and hauled to the surface, where divers could observe them and where they soon died. The new study, published in Journal of Fish Biology, documents two live observations of one of the most elusive yet iconic sharks on the planet—one at a seamount near Jarvis Island and another on the slope of the Tonga Trench.

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