I only remember the lab leak theory being discussed seriously once Biden had been elected. Prior to that, it was treated as unenlightened racism.

Not that I'm a Trump fan. But the man was a lightning rod like I've never seen for the left here in America.

Then again, just flippantly referring to Covid as the "Kung Flu" just might have something to do with it.

Because when you get away from the center, you've often chosen a "team." Choosing a team clouds your judgment.

If you only want one entity having your data, you're better off being abused by Apple. Google invites all his friends over to run a train on you.

Why do you think that Apple doesnt do that?

Although to be fair, the next paragraph says, "Surprisingly, Google offers a similar deal. The company collects and uses your personal data for targeted advertising, but it doesn’t sell it to third-party advertisers. So it means advertisers can pay Google or Apple to be seen on your iPhone or Android device. However, the advertisers can’t know who you are and come after you on their own."

I just find Google to be an advertising company that happens to produce software.

ah, yeah i kind of consider that as data selling anyways. Not outright selling, you are right there. Selling in bulk would be dumb for these companies when they have ad networks in place, though. Its like the DRM for ads.

Fair points all around.

And by the way? I'm an android fan. Though Apple is more secure in some ways, I would much rather have control over my device.

We need multiple large companies, not a few huge ones.

Google's "internet DRM" web integrity API is honestly frightening stuff. The Internet as we know it would change.

Arch is so good. I really enjoyed running it for a couple years, but then that grub issue last year made me look at other distros, eventually ending up on Fedora.

I'm coming home. Fedora just does wonky stuff on my computers. I haven't enjoyed it at all.

Debian on my homelab, Arch on my main. I'm done distrohopping.

I also spent quite a few years away from arch. Arch is also my home

Completely forgot about the grub issue. At some point I gave systemd-boot a try and never went back.

I just ran away from Fedora. I was running Fedora server, and my files were depopulating on my podman containers. Xml files still existed, but were BLANK. Strange behavior.

And then I was running kinoite on my main gaming rig, and the wifi driver just stopped working. No amount of tinkering fixed it.

I've gotten debian on my server, though that's ongoing. Once the server is up, I think I'm going back to Arch on my main. They may have ticked me off with that grub thing last year, but prior to that it was smooth as silk.

I think certain mobile websites are terrible on purpose, because they want to put their spyware on your phone.

Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.

I hand-change every file name.

Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.

The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.

These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.

You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.

Oh, I will most definitely be checking that out. Thank you so much.

It's funny, I've heard of radarr and sonarr, but I never looked into them because I was learning other stuff.

Also check out Ombi once you have the arrs set up. It's a combined UI for your users (or just yourself) to request a movie or show and then you just wait a bit and it shows up in Plex/Jelly.

Maybe it's just me, but ombi was no end of issues for me (and resource hungry). I switched to Overseerr a while back and haven't looked back. Would highly recommend giving it a try. I found it to be a very polished experience and has been set and forget.

...super cool. Man, glad I had this conversation. I have projects again.

The *arr applications can automate it but I personally don’t like doing it that way, unless you are good with your quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it’s not the best with removing unnecessary files

I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and move files.

So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename, skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to move em

I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will recognise.

The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been brave enough to try that feature.

For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.

Same here! But for me it was "Title (year in Sumerian Ur dynasty calendar).type"

The only format that stands the test of time, IMO

something like tinymediamanager?

I'll look into it as well. Thank you.

And oddly enough, I just canceled them today.

Hello, fiber. Goodbye unilaterally-decided bullshit data caps.