This has been my solution. Subscribe to a playlist or an entire channel, set up the schedule, and you’re done. If you’re a supporter of the project I believe it has real-time monitoring for new uploads.

I will note that, somewhat recently, YouTube changed the URL format for playlists and this has broken subscribing/downloading playlists that use the new format. I haven’t checked today but there’s a patch that was still waiting to be merged. Unless there’s a new release incorporating it, you’ll have to apply it yourself or feed the URLs in manually for now.

Beets for importing, ascii only, lastgenre, fetchart, whatever other plugins I’m forgetting, /artist/yyyy_album_name/ directory structure, 01_title.ext for single disc, 01-01_title.ext for multi disc. I invoke beets manually just to keep an eye on how things get matched up and tagged during the process. I deal in full albums, LPs, compilations and such because it’s often easier to maintain and match metadata than with individual tracks. I guess it’s a data hoarder / archivist compulsion too, but it’s rare I can’t find at least one other track on an album appreciable so… why not?

A weekly rsync pushes the beets DB and library from my TrueNAS server to another server with a 8TB external dedicated to backing up my most important stuff (personal projects, password store, compose files, confs, etc). I’ve got an rsync alias set up on my laptop I invoke manually because I’m nearing the limit of what I want to allot to music. At least until I decide to get a larger drive.

That’s local in triplicate, with zraid on the NAS and a fourth copy on my phone, which leaves me feeling pretty good about not losing any music outside of a house fire or tornado. I was also rsync’ing all my media (music, movies, shows) to another TrueNAS setup at a relative’s but some things have changed with that so it’s on hold. Not fond of missing my off-site backup but hopefully can resolve it soon.

Everything is local only right now. The library is mounted read-only in Jellyfin so can play music from pretty much any phone, TV, computer, my Steam Deck, etc throughout the house. If I ever decide to open things up, reverse proxy or whatever, I might look into Finamp but I buy a flagship phone every six to ten years for the storage space so I can just take my music with me. Might eventually switch that to a dedicated music device.

Desktop design decisions. A lot of folks hated Unity. I know I did - they turned something familiar into something Apple like and I couldn’t stand it. I’m genuinely not a fan of the unified menus and such. It didn’t help that users were basically forced out of Gnome 2 into it when Unity became the default.

Within Unity they Integrated Amazon results into the Desktop Search. That was likened to spyware since your queries were being shared with Amazon, much like MS integrating web results into their own search. Ubuntu fucked up harder because, absent any filtering, their search occasionally produced adult products in the results - ie sex toys and such. Imagine telling your kid Fluffy needs a new knotted rope chew toy. They start searching “dog knot toy” just to have the results filled with BadDragon knockoffs.

They’ve leaned heavier into enterprise over the years and that has alienated a lot of the Desktop audience which helped bring attention to OS in the first place. They went from “Linux for Human Beings,” making desktop computing more accessible throughout the world, to becoming essentially the Microsoft of the Linux world.

Their snap backend is proprietary. You can’t just host your own snap repository. Even if you host your own local snap cache, it ultimately must point to and retrieve from their repository to populate that cache.

I’m sure there’s other stuff worth pointing out that I’ve forgotten.

I can give another good anecdote for this.

Crank shaft holder for Toyota/Lexus. You attach it to a breaker bar, that you can let pin itself against the frame or ground, while reefing on a torque wrench to get the crank nut back on - something like 283 ft-lb for my truck iirc. Not a small amount of force if something breaks or slips and things go flying.

One of the good, brand name options is made by Oni. It’s also over $60. You can get a knockoff for between $15 to $25. The bad knockoffs are just the ring portion shoddily welded to the “arm” (where you connect your breaker bar), and those two halves often come apart at the welds under use. The good knockoffs are obviously cast as one piece from a mold that was probably made from an Oni or similar. They get a questionable dull black coating, lacking the polish and clean finish of the name brand, but they’re still a singular solid tool.

Not knowing which one will hold up and which one might give you summer teeth is a huge risk for any uninformed home gamer just trying to DIY some auto repairs on the cheap.

So the people who “can barely run their phones” are also the ones consciously seeking out adb files and acknowledging the warning that pops up when they proceed to install them? Because it seems like every single time I heard of a bunch of rubes being pwnt, they’d all installed some fake tool or Jerry Smith tier bubble popping game that unsurprisingly ended up being malware… distributed by the fucking Play Store. When Google’s “Play Protect” doesn’t seem to actually matter, why would anyone want to allow them to then monopolize app distribution under the false flag of “security?”

Yeah, Jellyfin was my best example. I’ve got the motions memorized, to get to the admin panel, as well but Homepage is my homepage so it saves those few seconds. I agree otherwise about urgent messages. Important stuff of mine hits a Discord webhook for now.

Eventually I’ll set up some other alternative to get push notifications. I took the time to write a few half-assed cogs for pycord, and I enjoy(ed) the process and using them, but I don’t really trust the platform. I might need to give good old IRC a go again. I’m sure some Android client can do push notifications on a specific channel/sender basis.

Most are definitely just showing off; “Look at how many photos I have stored,” “I have so many podcasts and ebooks,” “Bow to me, mortals!”

On the flip, some are useful. PeaNUT gives UPS off/on line power status at a glance, Jellyfin shows active streams iirc, FreshRSS shows if there are unread feeds, Portainer shows if any containers have stopped, etc. Jellyfin is a big one since I don’t have to get into the WebUI to see if updates or whatever are going to interrupt someone. Otherwise I’m mostly in agreement and just use links in lieu of widgets and silly API calls.