I did say fancy.

Aren’t sqilte files themselves (like most other things) just fancy text files?

I think the more nuanced take is that we should be making “piracy” legal by expanding and protecting fair use and rights to make personal copies. There are lots of things that are called piracy now that really shouldn’t be. Making “piracy” legal still leaves plenty of room for artists to get paid.

If you think doing research doesn’t include asking questions, maybe you should do some better research on doing research.

Original? No. Usenet, BBS, IRC are the originals. Napster made it hip. Soul seek made it better. Then there was Limewire, DirectConnect, and some others. Then there was BitTorrent, which I really did use to download Linux ISOs before the rise of popular public and private trackers.

Wait, you mean after a simple kernel update? Not a release upgrade obviously because arch uses a rolling release cycle?

No way to live.

I’m not sad that Google turned out to be evil because I care about Google. I don’t care about Google. I’m disappointed in no longer being able to search for and find the things online on any search engine.

You just described the categories pages many search engines had before Google. Or proto Web 2.0 bookmark sharing sites like del.icio.us. Sites like Metafilter also existed as a kind of Internet index before everyone was adding reddit.com to their Googling. It’s a laudable idea, but these systems all seem to fall prey to market manipulation in much the same way that SEO helped kill Google.

You don’t need to get too complicated with scripts if you let Picard do all the tagging and renaming. In my experience it works pretty well with the default out of the box configuration. Just don’t try to do your whole library at once, just go album by album and check each one is matching with the correct release. I was in the same boat about a decade ago and did the same, just a few albums a day getting tagged and renamed into a fresh music directory. And of course, make a backup first, just in case.

Lately I’ve been going through this process again because I messed up configuring Lidarr and many files got improperly renamed. Since they were all still properly tagged, fixing them has been easy, especially with Picard. I haven’t really bothered to find all the stray files yet (they’re still roughly in the right location) because Plex ignores the paths and just reads the tags so the misnamed files aren’t even noticable in Plex

When you say Plex interface remotely, are you referring to the Plex app or PlexAmp app? I feel like PlexAmp fixed all of my complaints about listening to music through Plex (the same app I use for videos).

Easytag works pretty well for me on Linux, when I’m not just using Picard. I use EasyTag mostly for fixing and normalizing the tags on audiobooks these days.

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This article and similar threads keeps popping up in my feed, so I’m going to keep spreading this tip around. (I’m using Android.)

I use tasker to automatically lockdown my phone based on accelerometer and Bluetooth. A sharp tap to my phone or being disconnected from Bluetooth is enough to lockdown my phone and disable all biometric access. I dialed in the sensitivity so that it doesn’t take much, just a tap on my pocket, being set down a little too aggressively, pulled from my car and thrown to the ground is all it takes. I set it to notify me with a quick vibrate when it does this for a little added confidence that it is behaving as expected.

For a little added effort I can have tasker snap a photo that gets backed up to the cloud any time there is a failed unlock attempt, just be prepared for some unflattering photos of yourself looking like an aging male boomer posting selfies to the facebook.

Jack of all trades, master of none. Forcing a router reboot to get the home Internet working again has become a thing of the past since I set up a unifi router and APs.

I’d had router/WiFi combos before running either dd-wrt, open-wrt, or tomato. None of them were stable. But I suspect that was because the hardware just couldn’t keep up, not because the open source software was faulty.

I agree, I just factor the cost of my time into the balance of the cost of a fix vs. a replacement. Cleaning doesn’t really count in my opinion, that’s something any device will require. For a $35 thing that lasts a decade and is made of plastic that will have eroded or fatigued significantly over that time anyway, the cost/benefit doesn’t really work it favor of repair, unless like you I enjoy the repair. For most people, the economics of the repair make even less sense.

I got used to windows overwriting the MBR and could generally work around that. But the last time I tried windows/Linux dual boot, it was windows that got caught in a recovery loop after a windows update. Linux was fine. I was impressed at how thoroughly Windows had killed itself on a basic unmolested install. At that point I decided I was done with windows on bare metal unless it was the only thing running. Windows goes in the virtual sandbox or plays by itself.

I suppose you’re asking rhetorically, but I’m gonna blunder though this rant anyway. I applaud your frugality and self reliance though.

Avoiding the hassle of disassembling delicate plastics parts, reassembling a potentially complicated and finicky device, and soldering (and resoldering) a small switch on a small PCB or wire correctly and safely is worth at least $34 to 99% of the market. Hell, I’m confident I could do it (badly) and have (admittedly the cheapest version of) the necessary tools, but finding the correct replacement switch still isn’t worth the hassle (to me) if mine were to break.

Love my M570, btw. I abuse it on a daily basis with excessive clicks, but so far the worst I’ve had to do was clean some lint out of it. If it were a $70 device instead of a $35 device, I might feel differently. But at that, price point I’d probably expect better and replace it with a different brand.

You can still be a kind of garden hermit if you get certain jobs in science and ecology.

Those communities got a little stale when enough people started reporting uptime in decades. Also, unless you’re on a flavor that can upgrade the kernel while the system is live, good uptimes these days are just the time between kernel updates.

Lol. No you.