Yea, I’ve wanted to get on that for a while, but I don’t meet the requirements

Reminds me of this old article (surprised the site is still operating, also archive link)

LOA was the group that first installed Linux on a Shetland pony in 2003, but growing competition from other hacker groups have shut them out in the past five years.

Yep, living the dream will do that some times.

I wish there was a more focused metal channel. There probably is, I just don’t know about it. If you follow KEXP, Audiotree, and Amoeba Green Room Sessions they do have those kinds of performances from time to time, though.

One of the biggest problems with the site is that it doesn’t archive the linked material. So you can have a bunch of dead links to older historical entries, which undermines the value over long terms.

You know, that’s an excellent point. I am surprised that, in 2025, there isn’t an automatic Internet Archive service in place that does that for any link added to a Wiki entry.

ETA: logistically, there’s quite a bit entailed thinking on it more. Besides developing a queue system for existing and new links on Wikipedia’s side, they’d now be non-trivial extra traffic on IA’s side. Probably need to have some deal in place first. Otherwise, Wikipedia would need to run their own archive service, which instantly adds to the overall size. As of Jan 2024, it’s already ~88GB for just raw text.

I miss What.CD so much for this reason. They had the “Artist Web” on every artist and album page that linked you to similar music, and even showing which links were higher percentage matches.

Discovering new music on there was so easy and fun. I even ran across several people that released their music exclusively on What.CD through those webs.

Someone else mentioned a similar comment. Pirating isn’t the only option in escaping the streaming services, though. BandCamp, for instance, you can download your music. They even have a special day every year where 100% of every sale that day goes directly to the artist. They just did that yesterday, actually.

I tried Spotify for a couple of years, paid for it even. I have nothing good to say about it, not even the music discovery part. At least, in terms of personal use. It prevented me from listening to what I wanted to listen to more than half the time, even if what I wanted to hear was on the platform.

I get what you’re saying. You’re right that they are different things in some scenarios. For a generic DJ (think weddings, school dances, etc.), it becomes a crucial utility. Service almost any request without having to lug around hard drives/records and have to anticipate what will be requested. Although arguably, that was part of the art of being a DJ for hire at one time, knowing your audience and music well enough so you only bring what you’ll need.

At the end of the day, said services can just disappear for several reasons. That happens, and you’re shit out of luck. You’ll have to either start pirating or start paying for a new service. Either way you’re rebuilding your library.

Start following YT channels like NPR Tiny Desk Concerts and KEXP. You won’t have to do the leg work, new music (good and bad) will be in your feed all the time.

Having said that, the hunt is part of the fun for me.

This is why I miss scrobbling. I think scrobbling is still a thing, but far less so now with the social media psychology being applied to music streaming.

Me and my music nerd friends all loved seeing each others’ habits, so we linked our local Clementine players with Last.FM, and could see all the stats for each other that way.

Exactly. Happy to say I’ve never experienced this issue in my entire life. Like how I’ve never experienced buffering issues where the quality drops, or doesn’t playback at all; never had to pay for a second service because the first one I chose has album A but not album B; never had a power or internet outage stop the music.

It’s amazing that you can do so much more for so much less cost, yet people just keep giving these rich sheisters all their money they don’t have. I think based on my last comment, it’s laziness and convenience is just a spin to make it sound more acceptable.

I dunno why you left! I’ve never understood what was good or better than pirating about these streaming services. Everyone says convenience, but I don’t think that’s the real reason, because ads and service interruptions seem way more inconvenient to me than not having my music.

I randomly think about something I want, and then usually find it here. Used to be a GitHub repo, but it got so popular and useful they got a nice site with search and all, now.

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/

I don’t have as much running anymore outside media/games, but I do still run Stirling PDF as an Acrobat Pro alternative.

Yup, looks like you beat me to it. As you can see, problematic.

Besides, their entire ecosystem at Proton is proprietary and closed-off, just like Google and everybody else that wants to harvest your life. That should be red flag number one, besides the CEO bits.

Everybody expects Google to become Skynet. I guess SpaceX are going to be the ones to create HAL9000.

If your name is Dave or Frank, don’t become an astronaut right now.

I would recommend Mullvad over Proton. Proton’s CEO is problematic and a bit of a wild card. They also have proven that they care more about money than privacy. They want to be a Google ecosystem and constantly push more product on you. Someone else mentioned this and it’s a good thing to live by: if a company’s service is free, you are the product. When it comes to being an application that has full control and insight into your network traffic, no thanks.

Mullvad is disgustingly cheap, costing only $5/month. I’ve been using Mullvad for 15 years now, and it’s always been $5/month. You get DAITA plus a whole host of other necessary sailing accoutrements. They have one of the best track records in terms of not shoving marketing bullshit down your throat and being true to what their website and documentation says. The only limitation in terms of network usage is that you can only have 5 devices tied to a single account. It’s mega easy to remove a device to free up a slot, though.

Zero consideration for anything but promoting their “clever name and aesthetic.” Feels like this is close to what a legal document from Idiocracy would look like, might be an unfortunate step in that direction.

If anything, this article is a warning to never contact Dragon Lawyers. If they can’t see how a full color watermark causes issues on a legal document that might be copied or faxed, well I don’t trust them to see the details they need to see in my case.