I agree it’s not only the IP because there are other people on it.

I don’t have any meta apps or google accounts for years. I buy on amazon very rarely. I have no apps of any of that type installed. 98% of my apps are f-droid and I flashed a rom. I use tracker blocker to sift through all traffic and limit to only what seems required.

I think it’s very difficult to control what the phone is doing. Using the tracker blocker app has made me aware of how much data is flying all around at all times.

I should set up a pihole. It’s been on my list of 5 or 6 years.

I disabled it everywhere because all I read was confusing with the sound of being easy to fuck up.

I use reddit via the Firefox extension LibRedirect which sends you to a mirror instead. Between VPN, ublock and attempting to access dodgy mirrors, sometimes I have to reload a few times but it eventually works.

@[email protected] mentioned getting a openwrt travel router as the last and kind of most extreme thing on the list. But its the easiest thing to do. Glinet has good ones with a custom (proprietary) openWRT variant on it with a simpler GUI but they are compatible with plain openWRT if you are able to manage it its probably better.

You can do much of that other stuff on the router then connect from other devices and have it follow the rules.

Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible

Sorry I might have missed something… Is this Tony Blair’s little hobby horse for the past 30 years or is a more substantial plan in the works?

TBH I am getting discouraged on the VPN thing. I have been using it 100% of the time for years. I used to get ads corresponding to the exit location. But now I occasionally get ads corresponding to my actual location (down to the neighborhood).

But of course I do all sorts of online business where my address is provided, and when I do that I can easily be fingerprinted I assume. So somehow, it’s gotten linked up in the back end.

It’s sort of weird to upload because it’s already on the hard drive where I want it to go… Just has to get squeezed back and forth through the pipes of my LAN a few times to go through this process.

yes that is correct. it is a server/client solution so you can track you progress.

zero finding ability. try Lazy Librarian.

remember that audiobooks are relatively rare due to their high production costs. so a lot of books do not have an audio version. Could consider text to speech.

there are some massive torrents that have like thousands of audiobooks in them and you have to go and select which ones to download. I’m not sure how I stumbled on these in the past so if you figure that out let me know.

But he paid $40B for twitter. $250M is the kind of bargain you only get after prior investment.

(And I guess I found something an individual can buy for >$1B, which is even more reason to prohibit anyone from having this much money.)

I think the ballot reform really helped in this case. We need ballot reform.

AFAIK even seemingly successful musicians often don’t really make out with much cash. They incur a lot of costs even under the most “honest” industry contracts. Then there are cases of getting blatantly scammed like the Backstreet Boys or George Clinton.

because

wrong.

you can buy a lot of political favors

you could make money depreciate over time so it couldn’t be hoarded.

Readarr is just a tool that facilitates downloading via bittorrent or usenet. You can just use those the old fashioned way without it.

Edit: The program Lazy Librarian that some people are mentioning also assists with the searching and downloading, if you prefer not to do it by hand.

You can purchase audiobooks too, especially from authors who make them available on DRM-free platforms.

And there’s always https://librivox.org/

I used lazy librarian years ago; actually it was one of the first local services I ran. Tried it more recently and had install issues; I think possibly due to my squeamishness around docker. The main dev seems helpful and consistently active.

Ya I mean I understand at the end of the day the devs have the prerogative to run their project as they please. And it’s smart to have a constrained set of requirements rather than trying to be all things to all people. There’s always a cost to flexibility.

I serve my TV and movies from jellyfin and it is not as prescriptive. As an imperfect workaround, the additional files can be put into a separate directory that sonarr/radarr doesn’t have access to but jellyfin does.

For books, calibre tips the balance completely in the other direction of total flexibility. It’s very powerful and with the right skills it can be made to do all kinds of tasks. But it’s hardly the smooth initial experience of the arrs.

From my experience, the most comprehensive and robust metadata harvester is the citation manager Zotero. They have spent a lot of work on building a metadata system that is both easy to use but accounts for different versions of the same work. In academic writing you need to cite the actual document you used because it could change over time, editions, etc. Instead of making their own database, they use various 3rd party collections. And of course you must be able to customize or create items for scholarly work. There is about 15 years of chat on their forums/repos of people arguing how to best identify and apply the appropriate metadata and it’s not at all smooth going even there.

The whole collection of software forces the user to limit themselves to the single version of canonical media which has been officially sanctioned by a centralized authority.

The more mainstream and corporate your media and arts interests are, the less you will notice this problem. But even with TV and movies it is a barrier once you deviate. With music and books, which due to lower production costs are literally endless in number, variations, mixes, imprints, translations, editions, covers, releases etc, it is an impossible model.

I don’t know if it’s too much inference but I sort of feel bad for the developers. This assumption about the superiority of homogeneous media and art pervades the projects in a way which suggests it is completely invisible to them. It’s very bleak.

I’m not sure if I properly get the concept but it seems that rreading-glasses is something you use in addition to readarr not an independent application.

I can’t offer any specific advice but there seem to be a great many projects going to fill this need:

https://alternativeto.net/software/spotify/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#media-streaming---audio-streaming

I used LL years ago before I got into any of the arrs. I was planning to return to it but ran into some sort of install/dependency issues. Maybe I’ll give it another whirl in case they’ve solved spontaneously.