• 9 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 13th, 2023

help-circle





  • Not a perma ban but still.

    Back when I used to be on Reddit much, I got auto banned from r/latestagecapitalism for having too much karma on certain subreddit they disliked. They weren’t necessarily political in nature (I think I only frequented couple of political subs then and they were non US in nature) but apparently the concept of not breaking any rules on your sub but still being banned just because I participate in some place they dislike was dubious.

    Not related, but I think I was very active on reddit from 2016-2021. I had gone through couple of user IDs then (stupidly forgotten the 2FA mechanism for both and never backed the recovery code :p) and had a decent curated feed. I still sporadically open it but hardly participate / post. The only thing worth keeping me there is old Reddit and RES which makes keyboard navigation a breeze.


  • If one donates to Soulseek( on their official website a certain amount), they get privileges. If you have privileges, then your downloads will be queued ahead of other users (basically you side step a long queue for downloading).

    I use Nicotine, and when I open the client, it shows for a couple of seconds at the bottom/tray No active Soulseek privileges before vanishing. That’s the only clue.

    In practise, my downloads usually go through normally. The 5 days I had privileges I honestly didn’t notice much difference. Some users have an automated script that crawls one’s folder whenever you download from them, so as long as one has decent amount of shares, it’s alright. (I only have shared 40 odd gigs but it’s decent enough).




  • I use RedReader sporadically for browsing Reddit. I like it’s compact UI style and customizability. Even when I had proper paid Boost for Reddit back in the day, somehow, the UI of RedReader made it more intuitive for me to use it.

    I think one can technically use Boost still via patching it, but it’s a grey area and not worth going after when RedReader exists.

    Either case, the official Reddit app has to be purposefully coded to be as unoptimized and useless as possible. The bloat, the wasted white space; it all stands testament to the travesty that is modern software design.



  • Haven’t Spotify mods already been clamped down in one way or the other(in terms of having a trimmed down feature set)? I used to follow Balatan’s mod from Mobilism and last I saw, Atleast some stuff was server sided.

    Either case, mods can only go so far. I only used Spotify Premium once for a short while before returning back to YT Music and one of the things I liked was third party clients on desktop. ncspot is a terminal based client for Spotify that rakes in one tenth of memory requirements but sadly requires Premium and I don’t think there is any way to bypass that as of now. (though of course, most users won’t even care about such a niche client)

    But if someone is serious about music, then Soulseek is the way to go. It has most genres of music, usually in flac and locally stored music is any day superior to cloud.





  • I use Obtanium actually since my main mobile browser is Iceraven which isn’t on F-Droid by default. [It supports sideloading extensions that official Firefox doesn’t].

    IIRC, Pano Scrobbler is free but has a premium version as well on Google Play. I scanned through their Github and as of August 2024, the dev was working on implementing payment features without Play integration [like donating to the app and then getting a key for it which will be validated against license servers]. I used to sideload Premium variant of Pano Scrobbler before from Mobilism.


  • Reminds me somewhat of the Pocketcasts app. It had a one time purchase option once but then switched to a subscription tier instead. Ironically, if Google Podcasts were alive and being developed, then no one would have any need for Pocketcasts since the former had desktop playback and Google would have developed a first party Wear OS app as well(like Pocketcasts).

    However, as is evident, Google killed the app and YT Music is not at all built for podcasts. If it categories as a podcast app, then it is the single worst I have seen for podcasts.