tenchiken

Places that buy other companies to dismantle or lay off large chunks of staff and take over IP with minimal or absent quality to show from it. Just maximize that investor dollar.

Microsoft, Disney etc.

The harm performed far outweighs any investment from a “toward the artists” I see come back.

or even a group that funded it

I noted I’m ok with investors.

I’m against parasitic groups that feed on properties and prevent money getting to the actual dev folks.

Hey man, you can’t park that here

Ditto on Spotify. I have big love for piracy of FLAC for my personal music server, but I also have a decent rack filled with physical offerings from my favorite bands.

My Bandcamp collection is also getting up there, since a few of my favs say they are treated well there, and it’s FLAC friendly as well.

Physical media or merch directly from the band is absolutely the way to go every time if possible.

Cool argument, except a huge quantity of pirated works aren’t “owned” by the creator or even a group that funded it, but instead by parasitic companies that abuse capitalistic tools to actually steal value from those creators.

I have thousands of purchased games. 3 categories here:

1: obtained as part of a pack (humble gog etc)

2: purchased AFTER trying out via pirate copy to know if it is my kind of thing

3: picked up early access due to demo or general interest from being a known smaller dev/studio (hare brained for example)

With less and less access to shareware and viable demos, piracy is often the only conduit to prevent me getting ripped off of $80 for something that looks like a shiny sports car but end up being another “buy $800 in dlc for the full story!” Ford pinto.

Additionally, I now flat refuse to fund the likes of Denuvo, and wish that piracy actively hurt the bottom line of companies deploying that kind of anti-user shit.

Not with THAT attitude you won’t!

This is the right approach.

I personally use UniFi 6 dishes for my APs, and am never going back to “consumer”.

A note unsaid: typically these also handle band steering and roaming awareness. This means that you can walk from one AP to another and they will connect you seamlessly without fighting over who is stronger, and will adapt to prevent collisions.

Not sure about Aruba (almost guaranteed they have the same), but you want the options to deploy a Wifi config universally across your house, with each member being aware of and cooperating with the others. In UniFi case, they will occasionally scan the spectrum and auto assign the channels for what is least crowded in the range. The group automatically avoids each other during this process and it’s beautiful.

US taxes. Nearly zero value to 95+% of the people spending into it.

Cattle mutilations are up.

Nice fukkin’ model!

Honk Honk

Yes, have some.

Thanks for this. This was one of a few videos I was shown by an old friend a few days before gastric cancer took him… it was the last day where he was fully cognizant.

Nice to know this is a positive memory despite.

Not sure about your area, but a wireguard accessible OOB connection is a great piece of kit to keep handy. I use a cheap 768kbps SIM in an Ethernet connected switch into my personal systems. It’s saved my skin numerous times.

I’m sure this is obvious, especially in hindsight, but just mentioning because the existence of IoT LTE data plans for a minimal fee ( $100/year for me in Midwest US) was NOT obvious to me until 2 years ago.

Sending positive vibes, and passing offer of technical assistance once you get access again.

Hopefully it’s an easy fix once you get into things again.

Does this include media I grabbed but literally never opened or looked at?

Slackware. 1993.

I’m old lol.

Been through:

Slackware

Mandrake

Debian

Ubuntu

Redhat , old and new

Fedora

Arch

Knoppix

Pop!

CentOS

Enlightenment

Etc etc…

Right now I’m living on KDE Neon.

I don’t use it anymore myself, but a small cost nntp service and the Arr stacks automate away the piece hunting for the most part.

I’d recommend looking over things at this link for an idea on the tools. They are great and take most of the pain out of all this. It’s all open source as well.

https://wiki.servarr.com/

You would still want to find an indexer (like a tracker but for Usenet information on what files to grab) and a Usenet service, but I’ve been away from that side long enough I’d suggest getting suggestions on those from someone else.

It sounds like perhaps torrents aren’t the right solution for you. Perhaps invest in a newsgroup service instead?

You can argue what makes more sense to you as much as you like, but things work just fine for many of us.

And as to the past month or so:

That’s without the credit system, but using those same torrents that you expect to just sit on. I don’t use autobrr or anything like that, just basics like sonarr etc.

Most private trackers now implement a credit system that rewards for making seed available as well. Even without users downloading from you, you accrue credit just for keeping it alive and available.

If you are impatient, this won’t really help, but it works well enough if you actually plan to join the community instead of hit and run.

I’ve used them about a year and glad to see this kind of improvement. They are not perfect but still much better than the free options so far.

Only concern I’ve had has been around the AI stuff they are providing… So far it’s optional and a separate piece from the normal search. Time will tell there I suppose.