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?

as a USian lemme say, hell yes

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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://europe.pub/post/7501

What European email services do you use?

Please recommend other interesting email services by your experience.

I have switched from Google's Gmail to ProtonMail and kMail. I really like both, kMail (by Infomaniak) have very similar app interface to Gmail so you will get used to it very fast and also have big storage for free and very good offers for paid plans 👍🏼

Originally posted on Reddit

Today I deleted my Amazon-account. I'm optimistic, that I can live without it, since there are alternatives in Germany.

Step by step I'm moving forward.

The topic everyone was impatiently waiting for, we can all agree.

Ballpoint pens and fountain pens

If you did not knew it already the Cristal Bic, the world most used ballpoint pen, is French and even though the brand is now global and have factories in many countries (including the US, among other brands they own the US Waterman), they still made part of their production in the EU, in France and Spain.

(For those like me who worries about plastic/throw away pens, you may not know that Bic has recently started selling an aluminum body that's shaped like the cristal Bic that you can insert a refill in. Also, and for much longer, they make it possible to buy refills for the cheap plastic cristal Bic by packs of 50—so, you can keep using the same single clear plastic body for much longer only replacing the ink. Alas, those refills are not as readily available as the Bic itself.)

If you're interested in Bic history, and want to know more about what they do, they have this PDF available for download.

I'm not affiliated with them, I just have been chewing on one or another of their Bic pens for well over 50 years now and I quite like them. And that is coming from a lifelong fountain pen user...

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Also, I think they look gorgeous with their bright flashy colors :p

(colored) Pencils

If you're more into pencils, may I suggest you check the German FaberCastell or the Swiss Caran d'Ache? They're very different kind of pencils but they're also both amazingly good, be it their 'cheaper' lines (say, for kids) as well as, obviously, their artist lines (much more expensive too).

Watercolors

For watercolors, I would suggest the Dutch Royal Talens. Their student-grade paint 'Van Gogh' is unbelievably good for its price, as well as their artist-grade 'Rembrandt'. Heck, even their cheapest 'ArtCreation' line is nice (and it also offers truly excellent and cheap sketchbooks)

Obviously, the English Winsor & Newton whose artist grade paints are now made in France if I'm not mistaken, as well as their Cotman student-grade—but if you go the student grade road, I would strongly suggest you give Royal Talens 'Van Gogh' a try, like really, as you may be surprised.

The French Sennelier, they have a honey-based artist-grade watercolors that are so bright <3. They also have a student grade called 'La Petite Aquarelle'.

Last but certainly not least, I would not want to forget the Ukrainian's Rosa. A recent discovery for me (a little over a year ago) which I quite like.

One should also talk about paint brushes for watercolors, and about inks for fountain pens as in both cases there are excellent EU brands, but this is already way too long ;)

Your turn! Do you know any other European brand of pens, pencils or watercolors?

Edit: updated the title from 'in the EU' to 'in Europe'