Yeah, I’m fucking over this clown. Every tech hobby I have is not American made, nor will it ever be, because some materials need to be imported even if they want it to be American made.

We’re on a one track train to the dark ages…

I found a decent GUI ripper for YouTube Music. I was using CLI before, but in this case a GUI was a lot faster. I’ve ripped a lot from Spotify, and I think my newest patched app lets me download directly. I agree, though; 90% of Spotify streaming apps and rippers are just taking from YouTube but using the Spotify indexer.

Yeah, I have heard a lot about Soulseek and I’ll have to check it out. That’s another service that I wasn’t aware of until recently. I do need an alternative to ripping off YouTube music soon, but for now it gets the job done. I also have my army of patched and FOSS apps for streaming (never use one; they always have downtimes, so having multiples let you jump around when waiting for fixes).

I’d like to do this, to be honest. There are a lot of good torrents from previous generations that are dead and with the newest upsurge of piracy I’d like to see them get a little more limelight again. It seems I have a lot of research and catching up to do in this community.

Ohhh! Thank you! Once I can get my Pi NAS going and have ample storage, I’d be extremely interested in archiving eventually. I should honestly start now, seeing as I have a large amount of music. I don’t have many full albums, usually just picking up songs that interest me, but all the metadata is properly tagged using MusicBrainz Picard.

I’ve never looked into private trackers, tbh, but I may keep an eye out and see what is possible. I’ll stay in with the community and maybe something will pop up, but I’m pretty happy with public. I’ve known my way around torrent safety since '07. The only cease and desist I’ve ever gotten was because of my ex at the time.

From what I understand, private trackers are something that sort of comes to you rather than asking for them. Back when Demonoid was by invite only (I haven’t been there in a long time so I’m not sure how it is now), I made friends with the right people and got in early. I managed to stay in because I was a good seeder and well trusted.

Oh wow, I missed a lot. I guess Deimos went missing? Then it looks like Demonoid got a sort of community fork, but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Huh. I’m reading that the fork didn’t focus on private trackers as much as just getting the old crowd back, it seems. Wild how things have changed.

I was pretty happy with Zen until updates started to bring in some bugs and lag. It takes up the most resources to start and the URL bar peeks out a majority of the time in compact mode. If you prefer new tabs and are in compact mode the side tabs don’t hide and cover a large part of your bookmarks bar while on a new tab page and it feels messy.

I went back to Floorp for a bit, but inevitably ended up back on Qutebrowser. The only downside to Qute is half the greasemonkey scripts to bypass YouTube ads don’t work and the python-adblock plus Brave adblock don’t block first party ads.

You can get around the first problem by adding a shortcut to bring up weblinks that open in MPV, but I haven’t found a solution to the second problem yet.

I was just thinking about this the other day after removing the fifteenth torx screw from the bottom of my Shark vacuum’s roller head. They hid screws under the pipe hatch and the two tiny friction mounted front wheels. Vacuums are triple the price and rollers are no longer removable from the outside.

45 minutes to fix what is essentially a five minute problem. They’d rather you throw it away and buy the whole head unit from the site. They even have bars blocking you from cutting hair from the roller without opening it.

Shit like this is why I still use an iPod 5th gen. No internet. No tracking apps. Just you and your hard copied music on a device that can be opened, repaired, and modded.

I wasn’t able to get this article, unfortunately. I really tried. But you can get many free articles by this author that cover this topic here: https://muckrack.com/ashoka-mody/articles

And they’re more up to date. I’ve never really used this site tbh, but the links forward you to articles that don’t have paywalls, from the few I’ve tested.