cobysev

It’s not FOSS, but Plex does that. I host my music from a server I built at home (you can literally just use your desktop PC) and then I have access to it from anywhere. I like to stream it to the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth, then I have my own homemade “radio” on the go. No ads, just my own music that I can shuffle through.

I paid for the Lifetime Plex Pass, which gave me full access to all their features and apps. It’s expensive, but it’s a one-time payment, vs. their monthly subscription which can add up over time.

I actually got annoyed at Plex for remembering exactly where I was in every song. I’d return to an album I hadn’t heard in a while and it would skip right to where I left off in each song instead of playing from the beginning of the song

Sometimes while trying to find a particular song, I’d skip around in a track, then move to the next until I found it. Then when I returned to that album later, every song would start somewhere in the middle. I eventually needed to turn that feature off. It still remembers exactly where I left off the last time I played music, but it doesn’t save my place in each individual song anymore. Just the last one I played.

On the app, it keeps a list of all the playlists I’ve recently played, so I can pick up on my latest playlist or scroll back in the history and start up one I played a while ago. This is great because I like to just shuffle my entire library as a playlist while I’m mowing my lawn, but my wife likes to hear specific genres or bands while we’re riding in the car together. So I can just keep alternating back and forth between playlists depending on the situation and it remembers where I left off in each one.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.

I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.

I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.

Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

I think it was paid… But it’s been years so I couldn’t tell you.

It’s currently $3.99 in the Play Store for me, with a crossed-out list price of $6.49. Not a bad deal.

I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn’t use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.

Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.

Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn’t install any software on them that wasn’t on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.

I didn’t get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they’ve been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can’t reuse passwords, can’t write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.

Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it’s been wonderful.

I don’t know why the military doesn’t get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they’ve been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I’d forget them (and again, we weren’t allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don’t even need to remember it. I love it!

Years ago, when I learned that World of Warcraft allowed you to either speak in common tongue or your character’s native racial tongue, I would park my night elf in capital cities and shout in Darnassian about how night elves are superior to all other races. Got a lot of LOLs from other night elves.

There was one low-level night elf who popped up once to rant back in Darnassian about how dwarves were the superior race. Guess someone made a new character to see what all the shouting was about and got offended. We had a pretty fun debate over the characteristics of both races, and it came down to personal preference by the end.

I miss old WoW.

Be careful… Don’t just click “Reject All.” There’s a category called “Legitimate Interest” that will still be enabled.

It was meant to be a way for websites to collect relevant data for adjusting content to your interests, but it’s been so loosely defined in legal requirements that literally any advertiser could pull your personal data through that category and use it however they want. This legal loophole is how websites continue to collect data and build profiles on you without violating the law. And clicking “Reject All” won’t disable anything in that category.

As much as it sucks, you still need to review all categories and manually change your advertising settings, then click “save preferences” (or however it’s specifically worded) instead of just clicking “Reject All.”

[…] I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them.

Correct. Even Google, one of the richest companies in the world, is struggling to afford the massive infrastructure required to run YouTube. That’s why they’ve been cracking down on ad-blocking software lately.

Also, this is likely why they’ve been pushing their new updated Chromium-based infrastructure for web browsers, which will prevent ad-blockers from working on websites. If you’re not using Firefox or Safari to browse the Internet by now, you should switch. They’re the only independent browsers not using the Chromium framework.

I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn’t have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it’s not going to be anywhere near as good.

I mean, these new tires do deform with the ground. That’s the “revolutionary tech” they brag about; the rings are designed to compress a bit and deform to compensate for impact, but always bounce back to their original shape no matter how much force is exerted on them. So you get a simulated air pressure.