What are you trying to find

I ended up picking up smoking in college in the early 2000s and I have to wonder if the constant exposure to second hand smoke in places I worked, in cars from family members, etc, was a factor

I was disgusted at the time but then I fell into it. I quit eventually, which was a nightmare, but I do think the exposure to second hand nicotine from the age of like 2 was maybe a factor

I remember working in restaurants in high school, coming home, showering, and the stench of cigarette smoke just releasing itself from my hair

Fun times

That’s correct, I misspoke, I clarified that with the rest of my post though

I don’t understand what you are arguing?

If you’re arguing that downloading remuxes and only flac is foolish then yeah, 99.8% of the time h264 and 320 mp3 are going to be indistinguishable on most setups with most content. H265 will be the same on like 99.5% of setups with slightly less content and will save tons of space. Sure. But this assumes the lossy encodes were done properly from a lossless master

if you encode lossy to lossy it will result in visible and audible distortion of the image and audio. Sometimes it’s minimal, sometimes it’s quite bad, sometimes it’s masked by your equipment, but it’s always there. Further, you’d spend more money on electricity running your cpu on full blast encoding terabytes of video files when you could simply just redownload your library in whatever format by someone who knows what they’re doing (if you’re so concerned about space and don’t care about quality go av1)

But you do you

Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.

You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc

Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside

Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion

That’s similar to the isolated vlan but someone who knows more about networking than me will probably be able to explain why the vlan is superior. I would imagine it’s failsafeness, the vlan is just its own thing

The benefit of doing the domain specific firewall blocking would be if you wanted your printer to otherwise have internet access (eg to check octoprint remotely). I don’t print when I’m not home due to the risk of fire and I don’t trust opening up my printer to the web, so I don’t bother with this. Others may have different opinions on acceptable risk

Easy mode: don’t connect it to internet

Slightly harder: add exceptions for bambus servers in your routers firewall so that requests to that domain are blocked

Dependent on hardware that you own and less likely to exist on basic routers: create a virtual lan for your 3d printer that does not have internet access but has intranet access, allowing you to connect between computers but not to the web (my preferred solution)

It’s a three way street though. Lazy consumers are to blame for enabling but bad companies are worse for having anti consumer practices to begin with. And the biggest failure of all is our government for allowing anti consumer behavior to run rampant and not allow any meaningful regulation to go through because they’re utterly corrupted and pro corporation.

In the “normies” defense in a functional society I shouldn’t have to research every purchase I make to ensure it is not hostile against me. However, we live in a dystopia where it is necessary to either manufacture your own foss solution or research for the purchasable option (that is often just the least hostile but still fairly hostile)

We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore

Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”

Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit

I build an original voron 1.0, reused the parts to build a 2.0, and built that into a 2.4 with mostly newer parts because the frame was just fucked from all that nonsense. I have a very low serial from back when they did that on the subreddit, not sure if that’s still a thing

Even with the raggedy frame it was a great printer. But building it properly it’s bulletproof. Costly but if you want a forever printer that you can mod it’s the way to go imo

Oh right duh. Disregard what I said, obviously. Been ages since I’ve used a setup that’s not one big pool

Do you have sonarr set to copy or hard link on import

Copy will fuck over your ability to seed, hard link will result in the files staying on your torrenting drive

Oh right I totally skipped tv shows haha

Depends on how picky you are as well to a degree. I’m an “archival” person - I download shit in remux and flac pretty exclusively. When it comes to anime I have some strong opinions about what fan subs are the best and what ones are total shit (to the point where I pretty regularly mux my own releases). If you can get an AB account I would highly recommend, imo best of the three

tv shows i agree usenet and western movies usenet most of the time. Unless you want a specific high quality release group (wildcats, 3L, etc) instead of framestor and random groups, who dominate usenet releases.

The only thing with tv shows and usenet: if you want a long running tv show, say the Simpsons. Torrents easier 100% of the time. If you’re manually downloading through an nzb site then it’s still faster because I guarantee you at least one torrent site you’re on will have a set of season or series packs that works; the season packs on Usenet are often the quickest things to die.

If you’re grabbing with sonarr I guarantee you will get a ton of shit that sucks, especially for an old show like that. Like some of the old episodes will be the ones they upscaled and stretched to 16:9 by zooming in and erasing a third of the image. A bunch will be in German, even with trash guide filters, because German dub people don’t tag their releases in ways that play well with any of trash guides regex. Even if you adjust your regex to scan for it (German in title, basically) then you have the occasional issue if the episode name has the word German (plus other dubs that are labeled poorly)

And for any hbo tv show and many Netflix tv shows (tho nf is far less aggressive) you will often find a sea of dead postings where torrents are fine. Like a remux of the sopranos? Better hope it was posted very recently, like in the past few days, because hbo monitors usenet like crazy. Netflix does too but not as strictly. Dmcas everywhere.

It’s still worth having of course and I use it a lot. Like you said it’s my go to for western movies and certain western shows. Especially when they’re actively airing. But there’s a lot of scenarios where it sucks

Usenet: you missed the window but Black Friday and Labor Day are in my experience the best time to sign up. I pay $35/yr unlimited.

Private tracker: it’s not as hard as you think

Get in red: either via invite (easy mode) or do their interview (not that difficult). Once you do you need to upload 25gb of stuff and have a (I think) 0.7 ratio (maybe 1.0?).

Easiest way is to rip songs from streaming sites: https://github.com/nathom/streamrip and upload. If you’re fast and get a hot album you can literally get it in like 2 days. Don’t bother with insanely popular albums like if charli xcx or Tyler the creator or whoever drops something. Old heads on the site will have that shit scripted and dropped so fast. Or browse requests with bounty and upload whatever.

Then you open up the invite forum. Then you ask for invites to wherever. Then you maintain ratio to not fuck over the person who invited you. Then you’re done, basically

Usenet is good for some things, torrents are still king for others

Like if I want a specific release of a movie in a certain quality, like a dv remux then I might pop on blu or ptp. 90% of the time I’ll just grab a dv/hdr10 remux on usenet though

Anime is all about trackers, ab/baka/nyaa destroy usenet. Animetosho makes usenet passable but still destroyed by the first three

Music is the same. If I want some basic mainstream release in scene quality then sure usenet is fine. If I want to be sure it’s tagged decently and actually a solid 16bit flac? Red/orpheus. If I want anything remotely niche, international artists, indie shit, like even singles and eps by popular artists? Or I’ll pop on soulseek but the downside there is I can’t figure out how to automate it

Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)

While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.

They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.

So you were administering systems or something similar? Then sure, I am sure for you and your team it brought you together (and maybe some tension at times). Glad it went well. But society as a whole? Eh

That’s the challenge though. On a micro level it’s easy. I work in mental health and I have similar stories from my days working in hospitals (I do outpatient work now) where our unit staff have banded together for challenges. Covid was like that at the beginning. Then it fell apart because everything became politicized thanks to our dogshit leadership at the time

But finding something that can (for the most part) unite all of society? Even limiting it to just the US that’s a talllllll order. Especially if you also don’t want it to fall apart after a month like the Covid thing