Buy European

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27088837

• [PDF] Letter.

Nearly 100 orgs plead for homegrown lifeline amid geopolitical tensions

cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/12592

Originally posted on Reddit

I use Strava mainly for running, but also it has a decent tracking ability for my e-bike rides. Any good non-american alternatives?

Heyho! Last few days I've been working on leaving Amazon and in particular Kindle for ebooks, so I've been looking for alternatives for my reading needs. While I can't recommend a specific book shop yet I'd like to recommend checking if your country's or city's public libraries allow you to take out ebooks online.

I'm living in Germany and found that there's an app called Onleihe which lets you read books from German public libraries as ebook for basically free, you just pay a tiny fee for your library card which you can get online as well. I registered with VÖBB Berlin for example which is some kind of union of all public libraries in Berlin.

Pros:

• Flat rate reading – library card costs 10€ per year, discounts available for students, unemployed or disabled people etc.
• Huge selection of not only books but also audio books, magazines and even movies.

Cons:

• If you don't like the built-in reader of the Onleihe app there's an option to read ebooks in an external app, however that app as to support DRM and as far as I can tell that limits the options to PocketBook Reader (which isn't too shabby though and made in Switzerland). You also have to register with Adobe to get some kind of DRM decoding account or whatever, which is an annoyance but free.
• Taking out ebooks works the same as with physical books, meaning you can only take out books for a limited duration (maximum 21 days) before it's "returned", and for a lot of new or very popular books you have to wait until someone else has "returned" their ebook before you can have it. Yes that's stupid given were talking about ebooks, I assume it's due to licensing stuff or whatever.

My conclusion: if you need a specific book NOW, you might be out of luck and better off buying it somewhere. If you just wanna browse a huge selection and look for something for entertainment then a reading flat rate for 10€ per year is a great deal.

Either way, might be worth it checking out if there's something similar available where you live. If there is please share!

as a USian lemme say, hell yes

Hey there, I wanted to get away from Amazon Kindle but of course take all my ebooks with me, I paid for them after all. Unfortunately Amazon tries really hard to stop you from doing this by introducing new file formats, DRM and encryption, disabling functionality on their website and so on, making this endeavor quite a hassle, but I finally managed to liberate my books so I can use them with other ebook readers. There's a bunch of different tutorials for this out there, but I found each of them lacks one or two crucial points that prevent it from working, so I thought I'd write up a short tutorial with all the bits of information collected from all over the web and save you some frustration and time (took me a couple of hours to make this work).

I'm not sure if this is the best community to post this to, if you know a better one please let me know or feel free to cross-post it there.

So here's how to get all your ebooks out of Amazon, strip them of DRM/copy protection and convert them to EPUB for use with other ebook readers:

1. Install Calibre (available for Linux, Windows and Mac) using whatever method works best for your operating system. I'm using Arch Linux and running "sudo pacman -S calibre" did the trick.

2. Download the latest release CANDIDATE! of the DeDRM plugin, NOT! the latest release! All tutorials I found referred to the stable release v10.0.3, which does NOT work with Amazon's latest DRM shit. At the time of writing this "RC1 v10.0.9" was the latest available version. You'll find it here: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools/releases/tag/v10.0.9

3. Download the plugin "KFX Input.zip" at the bottom of this forum post: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=291290

4. Unzip the DeDRM release you downloaded, inside you'll find a file "DeDRM_plugin.zip" which is the actual plugin. The KFX Input plugin does NOT need to be unzipped.

5. Start Calibre, go to "Preferences / Advanced / Plugins" and with the button "Load plugin from file" install the two plugins you downloaded. For the DeDRM plugin make sure you select the unzipped file "DeDRM_plugin.zip", not the downloaded release package.

6. Restart Calibre.

7. Go to your "My Devices" page on Amazon (I can't provide a direct link here because it's different for every country, but you should be able to find it). Select your Kindle device and copy its serial number. Alternatively you can look it up on your Kindle itself in the device information in the settings, however you obivously can't copy/paste it from there and I found it hard tell letter O and digit 0 apart, so the first method is probably less error prone.

8. Back in Calibre open the plugins section in the preferences again, search for the DeDRM plugin and double-click it. In the new dialog click "Kindle eInk ebooks", then the green plus icon and paste your Kindle's serial number. The fact that you need the serial number was also missing in most tutorials, took me ages to figure that out.

9. Optional step: Go to your "My Content" page on Amazon where all your purchased ebooks are listed. Select all and click "deliver to device" or whatever it's called in your localized Amazon, and select your Kindle. Hit sync on your Kindle device. This is to make sure that all your purchased ebooks are actually saved on the device as we're gonna copy the files from there in the next step. You can skip this if all your books are already downloaded to your Kindle or if you only want those that are.

10. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB. Calibre should automatically detect it. Make sure your Kindle is in "USB Drive Mode", not "Charging Mode", so Calibre can access the files on it. For me this was the default when plugging the USB cable in.

11. In the top menu in Calibre click on "Device", this should give you a list of all books on your Kindle.

12. Select all or some books you want to liberate, right click and click "Add books to library" in the context menu. Your books should now be all be copied to your library on your computer, but they're still in Amazon's proprietary AZW or KFX format

13. To make them usable with other ebook readers switch back to your local library ("Libary" button in the top menu) where you should now find all the books you just copied. Again select all books in the list and click "Convert" in the top menu. In the new dialog tweak the options as you wish or just hit "OK" to start. Depending on how many books you got this may take a little while.

14. Done! You now got a bunch of DRM-free EPUB files in your library that you can use with whatever ebook reader you want.

Few notes:

• If you get errors like "books can't be converted because of DRM" in step 13, make sure that the correct version of the DeDRM plugin is properly installed and you configured the correct serial number and start over from step 11.

• A bunch of sites tell you that you can download AZW directly from your "My Content" page on Amazon, but they removed that function in February 2025.

• If you've tried this before you probably stumbled upon a tool called "epubor" quite often which is trash and tries to make you pay for liberating the ebooks you already own, it doesn't offer anything that Calibre doesn't do for free.

Electric car buyers don’t like right-wing politics. This means Elon Musk’s position at Tesla is very vulnerable and susceptible to economic pressure.

Every since I decided to join the Buy European movement, I've been avoiding US tech as much as possible. I still have my personal accounts but I try to use fediverse and European alternatives. However I've also built my website to promote buying European products. (Non profit, I don't earn from it).

Now that got me thinking... Most people that use Fediverse are fairly in the loop on things like "buy European" and shop local etc. But who really need to hear the info is people who are not. To reach them I'd probably need to insert links to my website on "big tech" social media websites. It makes me feel like an imposterer though to do that (advice to buy European and then putting content on an American network).

Can you guys/girls/others please tell me how you would handle this situation and what you think is best?

Since I’m a more of a tablet user, my daily devices are iPhone and iPad at the moment. I’m using Safari with AdGuard and private relay, but I was thinking of switching to Vivaldi. AFAIK the engine is practically the same and doing so I would also lose private relay and extensions support. I’ve already ditched other Apple apps and switched to EU services on almost everything (also not Apple related) What do you think? What do you use on iOS?

I’m looking for a European designed and made aluminium suitcase. Seems Tumi are made is Asia…any others out there worth looking at?

Hi guys,

Please remember of EU dependency on petroleum products. So best way to buy european is to reduce its use when possible :

The United States main EU supplier of oil and petroleum products, Norway of natural gas and Australia of solid fossil fuels in 2023 In 2023, 49% of the extra-EU imports of oil and petroleum products originated from 5 countries: the United States (15%), Norway (12%), Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan (both 8%) and the United Kingdom (7%). A similar analysis shows that 71% of the EU's imports of natural gas came from Norway (27%), the United States (19%), Algeria (14%) and Russia (11%), while the biggest solid fossil fuel (mostly coal) imports originated from Australia (24%), followed by the United States (23%), Colombia (17%) and South Africa (13%).

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/23996234

The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.

Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.

“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.

While not an artist, designer nor a marketer I believe that a bit of visual identification is important. So today I woke up and made this logo for the co-op initiative. The co-op is meant to help European companies and organizations migrate away from cloud platforms from USA. What do you think about this design?

Credits:

• Cloud shape is by Ionuț Neagu found at svgrepo.com.
• The font is Agave from the Nerd Fonts collection.
• I drawn it in Inkscape on NixOS.

Hello all,

Right now I'm looking at getting myself a Smartwatch which can GPS track my runs but at best also my sleep cycle (as I post this at 3 in the morning) and some vitals. As Strava is American, I would also ask that there is an app available for easy consolidation of data.

Right now I am flirting with Polar (Finnish) which seem to offer both watches and the app. XCOAST (German) seems to be another option for the watch but I don't know about their app.

Are there any other brands to consider? These were the only two available in my local tech store but am willing to shop online (on European website of course).

Thank you all in advance!

Credits: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1jcr8ks/here_is_the_new_and_improved_guide_to_help_you/

It should have at least a web and an android app, and sync between devices

Bonus point if it's opensource and it's integrated inside a calendar

I've tried Business Calendar but I couldn't sync between devices without relying on Google calendar

Hi! I just wanted to share my progress and struggles hoping to lighten some moods.

So, i started with switching Form Dropbox to Tresorit, which was actually very easy to do and i am very happy with the change.

Next i cancelled my LinkedIn subscription. That was a bit harder because it took me quite some bravery to send out all those invites and i also lost connection to some former colleagues i really liked. But LinkedIn is bullshit and it became worst lately. Now i don't miss it at all.

At the same time i tried to convince the people arround me to switch from whatsapp to either element or session. Most oft them ignored me and i am kind of scared that noone will ever contact me again and that i will be very lonly in the future. I guess that is part of this journey. I eventually deleted my whatsapp account but not without fear.

Also very hard was cancelling spotify because of all my nice playlists. It had to be done because i used facebook to log-in. I cancelled that as well by now. That was not hard because it is unusable for some years now. I still have to get used to Qobuz but so far i like it.

I also got me one of those degoogled Fairphones which i am using now to write this post. So i will soon be able to close my Google account. Finally! One Problem about that is that it only has one physical slot for sim-cards and my other sim-card hat to become an e-sim. So i also had to switch mobile contract providers because my old one doesn't offer e-sims. That was a hassle and i still hope it will work out fine because i have had this phonenumber since probably 10+ something years and have an emotional connection to it (as it turned out).

Anyway. It is quite some effort but it helps to look back on what is already done. And in case you are also scared that noone will follow you. You are not alone :)

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day! And lo and behold it is my lucky day, as I found some charming Irish companies which all make their products in Europe, two of them exclusively in Ireland! Of course I wrote a blog post on them.

Do you know any other Irish products that are great?