Use qbittorrent. It has torrent search and download integrated.

Try Usenet and a Usenet indexer. There are multiple guides on the internet on how to set up and use it, even automatically with some r-apps on a home server.

downloading torrents is very 2010s. Now we use Stremio app with torrentio plugin (or MediaFusion, or Comet). You get streaming from many torrent sites. Works on ios, android, many tvs, pc, whatever. There's tons of other addons too like trakt.tv integration, etc. If you setup RealDebrid (paid, but cheap) thats even better, it acts as one big server with massive library of torrents, but provides very high download speeds, so you don't need to worry about dead torrents or lack of seeders. I watch 4k movies without any problems.

The trick is to sign up to private trackers. Sometimes they have a open signups period.

1. Get a good VPN that allows port forwarding. I can recommend AirVPN
2. Use Linux (of course)
3. Install qBittorrent as the torrent client.
4. Enable the search tab, under plugins install the Jackett plugin
5. Install jackett (on NixOS it is easy, otherwise you can use podman or docker to run the container image (preferrably NOT from docker hub but this registry, use podman)
6. Open 127.0.0.1:9117 in your browser and set an admin password, copy the API key. Add all public torrent sites possible, it will take a long while and might make your computer go wroom.
7. Search for something in qBittorrent, you will get an error as you dont have the API key configured.
8. Open the description page, it opens the browser and explains where to find the configuration file. Add the API key here
9. Search things
10. More advanced shit

I will make a post about my setup

Basically, dont use the sites directly, use a search engine that scrapes them. You need flaresolverr for some sites using Cloudflare. Apply for some private trackers, join communities to get invites. Remember to seed as much as possible and avoid hit-and-run.

@Imhotep A German onlineshop that evolved from mailorder.

For other alternatives:

https://www.goeuropean.org/
https://european-alternatives.eu/

yup, gotta change up your media consumption.

oh wow thank you for your input.

I was weighing the option of getting an USB dvd drive for my laptop for the same reason. I'm still afraid that buying dvds could quickly add up.

I do understand that it is indeed a much better way to enjoy movies, it's just that it's still quite expensive (for me).

What I did do is I got a library card and German Libraries have their own streaming platform which is amazing.

The Snowsky... I'm always thinking of getting one because of the nostalgic vibe. I have lots of iPods, beginning with the 1st model, though, so I think I'm good when it's about music players...

fairphones have support for e/OS

Not OP but I've had my fairphone for a couple of months and I love it. I use e/OS on it so being free of googles clutches alone feels great. But what I really like is the thought that I will most likely keep this phone for well over 5 years.

yeah, I get your point and technically you're right.

I was going along the lines a small step is better than nothing.

Thank you for the info! I didn't know that. But still not EU 😁

Oh wow, what a great resource!

Thank you for the tip! (that's what she said)

firefox to icecat

Use Vivaldi only for Gather.town at work. PITA with FF

Mootes & Tiger platinum blades.

@Padit @Kennystillalive Merkur handle or the Feather one (the cheap one, not the all metal) and Feather blades

Glenmorangie is a good "entry level" Scotch that isn't smokey and peaty at all.
But if you like the taste of bourbon and don't like smokey and peaty, there's nothing wrong with sticking to Irish whiskies. Or Swedish. Or Canadian.
They're more similar to bourbon.

Balblair 12 year old.

I did not consider Tuta at the time. It either was not around yet or too new.

I compared Posteo and Mailbox. Since Mailbox gives me the option to use my own domain, I picked that one. (I don't have my own domain 🤡)

Mailbox provides normal IMAP access. I use Thunderbird and the iOS Mail app as clients. (Annoying: iOS Mail does not delete mails in a way that is recognized by Thunderbird)

Lol nobody supports trump, they had one unfortunate post on twitter that some people (un) intentionally misinterpreted. The drama is over, so maybe time to move on?

What’s up with all these # ?

Couldn’t you just write normally?

@halfdane Ok, brevity is sometimes the enemy of clarity... I used to have a Murena Fairphone and switched from there. I learned only later there is a community port for Sailfish on FP.

Sailfish I run on the Jolla C2 and it is little different from eOS, Graphene or Lineage without MicroG that I also tried. My bank is Triodos NL and that works fine for now. MFA I use the Ente Auth Android App also no issues. Sometimes Android App support crashes and I need to reboot, thats it.

@halfdane If you already made your infrastructure so that you can run fine on degoogled phones, Sailfish SHOULD work for you.

It was fiddly in the beginning but minimizing my dependencies helped. Took me several attempts to get Signal (Android App) working.

What I especially like: it isn't made for the attention economy. Less distractions. My phone is a tool again, not a digital pacifier....

@halfdane Oh and one more thing? Battery life is AMAZING. Sometimes three days on one charge.

It isn't, but it is definitely the best switch if you have privacy in mind. A lot of other options have various areas they are lacking in. Signal is a real gold standard of privacy and security, and open-source, so location matters much less.

I found a few sales on avocadostore. With the sale prices they were the same as other slavemade brands on normal price.

Yes, but most of the time more durable, fair working conditions etc

What items do you have in mind?

A good "gateway drug" is buying second hand. It lets you get acknowledged with a brand and let you decide if you'd like to drop the retail or sale price on an item from them in the future. They don't necessarily even need to be made in EU, just they need to come from a higher price bracket.

Here are my Vinted filters for mostly EU brands (only some are made in EU), they link to the Polish Vinted so maybe change the .pl to your region:

• Pants
• Shoes
• Scarves
• Belts
• French workwear
• Knitwear

Poland has the most connected regions on Vinted so your results may vary.

Sister, but yeah. It's fantastic.

Banking worked once I added a Google account to microg. Which is not the best I know, but thats a compromise for now. With e/os and others you also habe to keep in mind that not all images allow you to lock your bootloader.

Only with MicroG. My workaround is to have a compromised computer at home that stays in my house, and then not have google on my phone at all. It's an added layer that is supposed to obfuscate details about the user, but I don't trust it. Also, you have a tracker that tries to call home, but you can disable it.

I just don't do banking or make transactions in it. It's setup with MicroG by default. I used developer mode to get all that off and stop the attempts of google to call home. I guess without the ability to do those things they would lose market share. If you're like me and refuse to tolerate, just remove it. Other defaults are fine. I didn't like that I had to go through Dev mode if I wanted to remove the native maps app, but I ended up keeping it anyway.

Here is what's good: modular design so you can replace parts,

battery is absolutely amazing, after two months it has never wen dead, best battery life I've ever seen

Ethical building, part of build in China is performed under a fair labor plan

Spoofs your ip

Fakes your geolocation

Has app tracker detection and blocks leaks

Forums with helpful community

No bloatware, just normal stuff

I have had no issues with this phone. Accessories are high but they are not a big company, so... You can use NextDNS to see any tracker queries if you want. You are able to disable the google tracker in MicroG if you just go to community forum and read how. If you block in NextDNS first you will not need to worry anyways.

Yes! The US economy relies so much on overinvestment. All the American giants and startups had international investment fueling them for years before they made profits. The dollar relies on everybody securing savings in US treasury. The less of it the better.

And my diversified European, Latin American, and Asian stocks slap as well (⌐■_■) I need to get more stuff from Canada!

Can't you pay with Swish?

Yes!

Whereabouts do you buy your blades? I'm in Canada but fuck me sideways they've been hard to find. I found one retailer who was doing sample packs buy they didn't have any packs without at least one Russian set of blades which isn't much better than buying american...

OK still a good move but they could do better. PayPal is a useless middleman if wero is around.

We had Payconiq in Belgium (100% Belgian), now they're forcing us to use Wero.

The market is already taken by Satispay.

Yeah. Is a strange security feature for doucments with limited viewer groups that auth towards the customer server. Requires full AD and everything. Even Winboat does not work due to VM detection. It's very obscure,but these two clients are somewhat important to us so we jump through the hoops

But,well, basically we only boot into that machine twice a month so I can live with that.

Thanks anyway!

Everything else by now is Linux and either self hosted or with a European provider - funny enough we were a 100% MS shop once and work 100% remote (all my staff work from home and with almost fully flexible scheduling). And what should I say? Not only does it save money, makes us far more flexible, my staff by now prefers it by far. (And none has any IT background, all with a healthcare background - which is a sector notorious for their lack of IT skills normally) Two weeks ago OI assisted one of them to reinstall her private machine. (The fact that KDE Plasma is gorgeous helps a lot here)

The only software we universally find lacking is Libre Office - Libre is simply not quite there yet for collaboration and large documents. (And our work often includes advisory opinions that can easily a few hundred pages). We are currently looking into the option of creating our own "document composer" based on Collabora and Latex. But that is a project for 2027.

And sadly CAD is a shitshow on Linux - FreeCAD is totally useless for our use, can not handle the filesize the projects we have and is an nightmare to use and BricsCAD is extremly buggy. Luckily we only need that occasionally so this machine is rarely booted up. (And there is one Windows based speciality application that requires Windows but that thing happily lives in a VM).

But I can live with that. Besides the mobile phones(Samsung Android due to the MDM requirements) we are fully "Europeanized" by now.

Really?? And I went through the whole process of removing Windows and installing Fedora 🙃. I didn't know! Well, guess I'm going to Ubuntu then. Thanks!

@sjosjo @GMac @JensSpahnpasta

It is an American company, therefore bound to US law, which means NSA involvement, which means guaranteed backdoors to encryption.

That’s a very strong assertion and, given an open-source client and a documented protocol, one that is very easy to prove if true. So I presume you can point at what, in the Signal protocol, is a backdoor in the encryption.

As has been better posed in another reply, unless you have some evidence of backdoors for end to end encryption of Signal, I'm going to personally dismiss your comments as bullshit.

In any case, even using the signal app, Signal don't have the scale or the commercial interest to weaponise my metadata in the way that meta can from WhatsApp use.

I'll stand by my comment that not all is EU, but signal remains a move in the right direction to improve privacy and security and reduce the US economic value extracted from my personal activity.

@running_system @porcoesphino To be fair... I stopped #streaming altogether and reverted back to owning my media again. Buying CDs and ripping them and play them on my phone and a Fiio Snowsky Echo (amazing MP3 player for 60 EUR).

CD's are cheap as chips today in yardsales, fleamarkets. And even new ones don't really break the bank. And the artists are paid way more fairly as well as supporting your local recordstore.

There is also something about coverart and leaflets...

Fair.

I did actually migrate YouTube Music -> Spotify -> Deezer but failed a bit posting

No, in the Nordics. Olvid is definitely not popular here but I'm converting friends and family one by one.

@kaulquappus yeah, the level of content is nowwhere to be near, but Monnett is shaping up to be a real instagram replacement once they roll out the major changes they have planned. When you say educational content, is something specific that you have in mind? Asking because youtube with adblock (ran on vivaldi on my phone with free background playing) covers this need for me entirely