I looked into this a while back and gave up.

I didn’t find any (good) models I wouldn’t have to pay for, but some of the paid STL sites had sets available for really reasonable prices, so that wasn’t really a blocker.

But FDM is basically incapable of printing any interesting models. Even if you’re printing good layers, most interesting models aren’t geometrically compatible with how an FDM model prints. You can print with supports, but removing supports from such thin, fragile bits of a model is nigh impossible without doing damage.

I went as far as shopping around for a resin printer, but I didn’t like all the ventilation cautions I read. Adding a printer is one thing, but having a well ventilated area that overlaps with where I’d want a printer was an unsolveable problem in my home.

If you just want to give it a try, grab a model off Thingiverse and see how your printer does. If you can get a piece you’d be happy to proceed with painting, that might be worth a few more iterations to see if it’s workable for your setup.

I don’t pirate software anymore. If I do the math on how much enjoyment I get even from a mediocre AAA game title, it is dwarfed by what I’d spend on a night out, so the value is there for me. On top of that the risk of malware (or the effort in mitigating it) isn’t really worth it.

Tv and movies? Pirate it. The streaming services are garbage and the content has too much crap for me to want to pay a corporation for it. If it became too hard to pirate I just wouldn’t watch it anymore.

Books kind of fall in the middle. Happy to pay for ebooks if the author makes it practical, but I’m not keen on buying through Amazon.

It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.

Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.

If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.

I thought about hypothetically confirming that Usenet indexers have this show right up to the latest episode.

You should think of Overseerr as a single install the same way you think of Plex. For instance, you don’t install Plex Media Server on every device you have, and then copy all your media to each device, right? Same principle applies here.

You want one Overseerr instance to live in one place (why not the machine you run Plex on?), then have everybody connect to THAT machine using their web browser. If you’re all on the same network it’s easy, though you might need to open up some ports on your firewall. If you want it to work over the internet, you’ve got a little more work to do.

If you want to automate that a bit, set up https://github.com/meeb/tubesync.

It’ll watch any YouTube playlists you specify (I created one called “Save to Plex”) and automatically download them and import them into Plex. Adding videos is as easy as sticking them into your playlist from whatever YouTube client you use.

Sonarr and Radarr are there for managing your requests, so they’ll handle things like downloading it when it’s available (either because it’s a new release or because the torrent/nzb weren’t readily available at the time you added it), upgrading an existing file to a higher quality version if it becomes available, sourcing a new copy if you mark the one it found as bad (e.g. huge, hard-coded Korean subtitles ruining your movie).

If you’re trying to find new stuff based on vague conditions (like “90s action movie), I don’t think any of the self hosted apps are a huge help. You’re probably better off sourcing ideas from an external site like IMDb or tvdb (maybe even Rotten Tomatoes?). Those sites maintain their own rich indexes of content and tags, whereas the self hosted stuff seems to be built more around the “I’ll make an api request once I know what you’re looking for”, which sucks when you don’t really know what you’re looking for.

I think there are even browser extensions for IMDb that will add a button to the IMDb movie page letting you automatically add it to Radarr if you like the look of it.

I can’t recommend an all-in-one primer, but if you want to look up guides independently, you’ll probably be most interested in these tools/services:

• a Usenet host (paid. they’re largely the same. Look for deals)
• a Usenet indexer site (analogous to a Pirate Bay type search engine). I like nzbgeek but there are hundreds. Many require a small annual fee and this may be worth it to you, but you can use free ones to test your initial setup.

A Usenet indexer is going to let you download .nzb files, which is analogous to downloading .torrent files from a torrent indexer. The nzb describes what posts in what newsgroups contain the files for a particular release.

• SABnzbd (download client, analogous to a torrent client like Transmission)
• browser plugins to simplify clicking an nzb download link and sending it to SABnzbd (not always needed if you’re running everything on your local machine, but important if your SAB instance runs on another server or in a Docker container)

If you’re looking to set up some extra infrastructure for automating a lot of steps, there’s also web apps to cover a ton of video use cases, like:

• Sonarr and Radarr (for monitoring specific tv shows and movies and automatically searching for nzbs, downloading them, and moving them to a final home on disk)
• Plex or Jellyfin (for providing a Netflix-like UI you can use to look for something to watch and then stream it to your browser/phone/TV)
• Overseerr (for a single interface to look for shows and movies and have them automatically added to Sonarr/Radarr.

I’d highly recommend setting up Docker and putting all of these apps into separate containers. Linuxserver creates easy to setup and update Docker packages for all these things. It’s also a great resource for finding other web apps you didn’t know you needed.

Link for the lazy: https://youtu.be/o4GZUCwVRLs

Definitely worth a watch.

Did you give up any Plex features you miss? I’ve been running a Plex server for years without serious issues, but I’m tired of seeing my CPUs getting hammered so bad when it doesn’t seem justifiable.

I, uhh, keep the original media safe in a storage locker!

The domain is .rs which is Serbian, but I dunno about their actual hosting.

It’s still up today, anyway. 🤞

Unfortunately, in doing so, Signal became Yet Another Messaging App. It really damaged their value proposition in my eyes.

If I need a separate app for SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc, it just becomes a chore to find enough friends willing to move to it exclusively.

The IM ecosystem really needs to be harmonized on the user end. I remember Trillian was this great app back in the day that brokered all your MSM, Google Chat, etc IM accounts into a single app that let you just focus on messaging people and not worrying about what platform was being used. We badly need this again.

This post made me nostalgic for the days when uTorrent was the shit. Man, how the mighty have fallen.