Also me:
[email protected]
Also using whatbox.ca for a long time now. I remember quite a few years ago I received an email notification about them making changes to my plan, and I panicked for a moment until I finished reading and realized they were increasing my storage by 5x and my traffic limit by 2x, but my monthly price would remain the same.
Probably not a very practical answer, but I moved to a city known for being full of tech bros, then went to a bunch of general interest meetups organized mostly by tech bros, where I made friends with tech bros, and one of them randomly offered me an invite.
TL;DR: Great to have if you’re looking for less popular content, high quality files, and/or are concerned about copyright notices, but the rules that keep the niche content alive make them less appealing for super popular content.
I randomly made friends IRL about a year ago and got an invite to BTN & PTP. I don’t watch/download a lot of movies, so my account at PTP has lapsed, but I’ve kept my account with BTN.
From my recent searches, BTN tends to have higher quality files and more seeders than public trackers, but since a) I have a seed box, which provides a line of defense against copyright notices, and is only strengthened my my *aars (gets me in & out of the swarm before the studios find it), b) I usually can’t tell the difference in quality from the devices I’m using (and my friends/family most definitely don’t notice/care), c) seed ratio or time doesn’t impact access to public trackers, and d) I prefer to keep public torrents alive, I usually lean towards public trackers, and only use the private trackers for things that are harder to find and/or things I want in high quality.
I still try to seed to a minimum ratio of 3.0 on popular files (public or private), and ∞ for more niche files, but sometimes demand is so low, and I need to move files off of my seed box. While a ratio below 1.0 makes me feel “stuck” no matter where I got the file from, private tracker rules definitely amplify that feeling.
TIL that I’m a man.
In the US and currently fully WFH, but if I need to go into the office for some reason, it’s a 10-15 minute walk.
Walkability is pretty important to me, so I moved to a city with decent public transportation and don’t currently own a car. I use ride sharing apps or traditional car rentals on the rare occasion that I need a car, and even though they feel expensive, my annual car expenses are still significantly less than what I’d pay for parking alone if I owned a car.
Looks like Sonarr grabbed it for me from a private tracker about 5 hours ago. I’m sure it will hit public trackers later today, if it hasn’t already.
I think many people may view those sort of costs differently than the monthly subscription costs of Netflix, etc. Hardware is generally seen as a “one time” cost, and the added electricity costs are difficult to tease out from all the other variable electricity costs.
My personal argument is that I pay a monthly subscription ($15/mo) for a seed box, which is roughly the same cost as subscribing to a single streaming service.
Back before the password sharing crackdown, I had access to my parents’ Netflix account, and every once in a while, I’d try it out, but I’d always quickly get annoyed and would finish watching whatever I was watching via my Plex server.
I don’t have any experience with Usenet or any current DDL sources. I generally check public trackers first, then private trackers, and mostly use private trackers when I can’t find something on public trackers.
My selfish reasoning is that with public trackers, I don’t have to worry about my seed ratio, etc. I generally seed to a 3.0 ratio, and I do have some older/more niche stuff set to infinity, but when I need to clear some space in my seed box, it’s nice to be able to delete stuff without worrying I’ll be penalized.
From a less selfish perspective, if it exists in decent quality on public trackers, I’d rather contribute to keeping it alive there, where more people can access it.
Right as cold/flu season was taking off, the location near me went and removed over half of the equipment cleaning stations (paper towel dispensers & spray bottles), so I decided to cancel my membership. After hearing so many horror stores like yours, I was shocked at how easy it was, since I was able to cancel mine online.
Although, I did quickly learn that I had also effectively prepaid for another 3 months, so even though I cancelled on October 31st, and was not charged for anything after that date, my access didn’t end until January 31st. I think part of it was credits from the COVID times, but I never went back to test it, so if anyone reading this is thinking about cancelling, be aware that you may have access for quite some time after cancelling!
The only reason I check Reddit with any regularity anymore is for content local to where I live. There’s a few communities on the fediverse for my area, but with only minimal, sporadic activity.
I would love to see more activity around fostering animals, particularly cats. I started !fosteranimals and have participated over at !fosterkittens, but it seems there’s not many of us so far.
Edit: No clue why I can only get 1 of the 2 links to work correctly, but FosterAnimals is on kbin.social, and FosterKittens is on lemmy.world.
I’m a millennial, and I will abandon my basket 99% of the time when there’s not a staffed cashier lane available, especially if I’m trying to buy more than 2 items.
I actually tried to use the self-checkout at the airport recently when I was buying a single bottle of water, and the cashier jumped in almost immediately to assist anyway. I forget exactly what happened, but it was definitely overly complicated compared to the staffed checkout that I used at the same shop the previous time I flew through that airport.
Yup. Use an instance that makes that data visible, such as kbin. It takes a few clicks, but it’s there for anyone to see.
Yeah, my numbers were definitely very round, but if we are trying to get more exact, aren’t there only 52 weeks per year, so 4.33 weeks per month?
It’s late, so I could be making dumb mistakes here, but I think the numbers are at least loosely factoring in those sort of expenses. It’s not 100 hours/week just to cover rent, it’s 100 hours/week to actually maybe afford that rent.
$7.25/hour x 40 hours/week x 4 weeks/month = $1160/month gross income
Assuming a maximum of 1/3 of gross income goes to housing, that’s $383/month available for rent. The site calculates $377/month as “affordable rent” for the minimum wage worker, so for the sake of the argument, I think my calculations are close enough.
So, that means for every hour worked, about $2.39 is going towards rent ($7.25x0.33).
$2.39/hour x 106 hours/week x 4 weeks/month = $1013, which is just over their “1-Bedroom Fair Market Rent” rate of $1002/month.
Nothing. I don’t want random junk and I don’t want to feel obligated to buy random junk for others.
Where do you get groceries? The only grocery store near me without any self checkout is Trader Joe’s, and while I usually shop there first, there’s always something I need that they don’t carry.
Hahaha. I guess I might have some unreasonably high expectations of myself. Most of mine tasted okay and looked much better than his. I did 3 batches of batter, and for each batch of batter, I had at least 3 trays of cookies, so I tried different cooking times/temperatures. While some of my issues were more along the lines of appearances (lumpy, browning, cracking), the bigger issue was with cookies being too dry/crumbly or too chewy/tough. It was almost a year ago, so my memory is a bit hazy now, but I might still give it another shot when I have access to a good kitchen again.
Only thing I’ve run into so far that I still wasn’t happy with after 3 tries is French macarons. They were definitely edible, but still not close enough to the real thing.
I’ve never actually tested that out. If it’s content I want long term, I simply download it to my local storage before deleting from Whatbox.
What I’ve found works best for me when using public trackers for new content is to set up a max seeding ratio and whatever relevant *arrs. Doing it that way means that I’ve usually been able to download the content and stop seeding before the swarm is discovered/monitored by those sending the notices.
Oh wow! That’s awesome! I wonder if I’ll see another upgrade soon too? I have a similar setup going too. Seed box for active torrents and other recently acquired files, and then anything I want to keep long term eventually gets moved to my local server.
I had tried a VPN + kill switch before getting a seed box, but it failed on me a few times. Plus, I was in school at the time, spending very little time at home, and my ISP increased their rates AGAIN, so I just cancelled my home internet. Trying to torrent through my laptop on public WiFi was a pain, but with a seed box it was way easier, and just needed to download the files to my laptop if I wanted to watch at home, which was also never a problem on public WiFi.