It's been a while since I've watched an old TV show. We've had widescreen TVs in our houses for decades now. When HD and digital video came into the scene, it basically came hand in hand with the 16:9 aspect ratio. It was more cinematic. It was basically a mark of quality in and of itself.

On a whim, I decided to watch Wolf's Rain, an original Bones anime that was produced in 4:3. I thought it would be difficult to adapt to the more narrow screen. I was thinking what I'd be missing out on by the missing part of the screen.

In hindsight, those thoughts were pretty rediculous. The people who made the show knew they were going to target that aspect ratio, so they built the entire show around it. It's animation: every frame is literally a painting. The aspect ratio was never a limitation to the artist because it was effectively the same limitation any given piece of paper or canvas they would apply their art to.

By no longer producing video in 4:3, we have lost something important to framing: verticality and angularity. 16:9 means there's a lot more room to the left and right than there is up and down, and because you have so much more horizontal view dutch angles tend to be extra disorienting. While Wolf's Rain doesn't use dutch angles very often, vertical framing is extremely common. One early episode has a particularly striking scene where a white wolf is running vertically up a cliff towards the moon. Other times it's used to show off the scale of large structures, which can better express a sense of dread or oppression. The show also often has circular framing; where characters and objects are arranged in a circle, which doesn't seem to work quite as well aesthetically on widescreen formats.

Now that I've started thinking about this, I started to think about what a shame it is that we are actually losing some of our treasured 4:3 shows from the past. TV shows aren't terribly well archived in general outside of ultra-popular shows, and even then many old shows that were made for 4:3 have been bowdlerized into 16:9. Many shows have been stretched out or had their tops and bottoms deleted in order to fit into 16:9. Some shows were shot on film and had new scans done in order to use the parts that were originally designed to be cropped out. But because they are ruining the intent of the cinematographers, the addition is not necessarily a good one.

But what do you think? I know this is probably not a popular opinion, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks this.

I usually generate ebooks in two ways. One is to export directly from Emacs Org-Mode with ox-epub. That doesn't give me a lot of control and export options are a bit of a crapshoot. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The other is to export from Org-Mode to either odt or docx and use Libreoffice Writer to export to EPUB. I will then open the ebook on Calibre to fix the metadata, the table of contents., and generate a cover.

That works fine for my personal use, but in the near future I may need to generate an ebook that looks proper and professional. I don't even know what "proper and professional" really means for an ebook, but I assume there must be tools and practices that are universally recomended that I am not following.

Hence the question: are there "pro" tools for authoring ebooks? Are there any rules, standards, workflows, or guidelines I should be following? If those exist, where can I find tutorials and documentation on how to generate the best books?

EDIT: I use Windows and Linux.

Thanks!

I was wondering what the best open source EPUB reader was, for both Android and Windows 10/11. It's ok if it's a different app for each platform.

I don't need to be able to convert EPUB to proprietary formats, I just need to be able to read some DRM-free EPUBs I have, preferably on an app that's open source so just does its job without collecting a bunch of data.

I am looking for an e reader with specific features, honestly I don't know if what I want even exists, but I figured this might be a good place to ask. Here's my wants:

• Charge via USB-C
• Open, allows .epub files (I understand some brands don't)
• interfaces with Calibre
• Does not have any wireless radios ie bluetooth, wifi (I know lots of people would say just turn those features off, but I would just prefer the device doesn't have them to begin with)

Have you guys seen any devices that meet this criteria?

A recent post here made me realize how much I really wish I just could pop in a CD while driving (you can skip those, and I can make mix CDs, so no need for cassettes haha). I commute a decent amount and I'm using a Pixel with GrapheneOS. Adding a streaming service would just be one more piece of Google I'd have to add to my "work" profile. I'm listening to some great podcasts, but I'd rather go full nostalgia without ripping all my CDs.

That being said, I'd like any recommendations. USB would be nice for the constant power option, but blutooth is doable as well. TIA!

What do you guys do to really listen to music in a mindful manner?

I don't do streaming, but I have a really big collection of albums in digital format, but the way I listen to music is to just shuffle everything and listen while doing other things.

I was contemplating entering the vinyl hobby, but living in Brazil this gets extremely expensive just to start. This would allow me to bring back the "ritualistic" aspect of listening to music and have good equipment to focus on what's being played.

I guess I could just force myself to not pirate music and buy an album a month on bandcamp. That would at least assure that I have good quality flac files instead of trusting random people on soulseek, but in the end it would probably end up in the shuffle pile.

Do you guys do something to try to be mindful of the music you are listening?

I have tried Calibre & SumatraPDF, I was so excited for Calibre until it never worked properly on the one textbook I needed. For example, whenever I went to the next page it would stall on loading forever, and this is apparently a known issue that's [according to the posts I read from the owner] caused by a graphics driver that I'm not interested in delving into just to read an ebook.

The ebook itself is pretty large with a lot of mathematical equations and images, but nothing my computer should be stalling on. The issue with SumatraPDF is that it can't seem to render the mathematical equations properly, and I couldn't find any simple way to load them without having to do more work.

I have a large music collection and I buy some vinyl, some CDs, but mostly MP3s. I've been using 7digital lately but I don't like how they have enlisted Paypal as their payment service. Is there any other sites out there to buy MP3s legitimately?