For holiday gift I was thinking of making USB/microSDs full of TV/movies. The intended recipients are not tech savvy types. They would be using windows computers, normal TVs etc.

What kind of file formats/encodings would be good to package the files in? What is safe and universally usable? And which ones are to be avoided? I'd like to guarentee they'll play without any fooling around with drivers or software.

And I want them to be as small as possible so that I can fit more stuff.

Is there any simple vector drawing application that can let me make rough sketches with arbitrary units?

For example, I want to be able to draw a rectangle that is exactly 2'6 x 12".

If I scale it by 50% it should be 15" x 6". I want to be able to measure distances. I don't want to keep track of a scale/conversion/ratio in my head, that's a perfect job for computer.

In the old Sketchup software (RIP) you could type the measurements in while drawing or manipulating objects. It was extremely fast and intuitive. I don't need 3d modelling; it was just a great UI.

All I can find is CAD and it is way overkill. Not gonna design a cotton gin or a circuit board. I just want to make a simple floor plan to see if the furniture would fit the way I want to arrange it. Or estimate material requirements for projects.

Desired features: Layers, customizable/smart keyboard shortcuts, colors, rectangle circle lines, transform/scale/skew/rotate, group/lock objects, rulers grids guide snapping.

anything?

Why is it that on social platforms, the date stamps are obscured? It there some sort of security or other technical reason for this? Is it user oriented somehow that I am failing to consider?

I want to see, select and copy the dates associated with posts. Ideally everywhere on the web. Bypass? Can ublock origin do anything about this?

On dbz for example, you get a relative time only unless you hover to see the specific time:

Piefed and reddit both do this.

Additionally, the text that displays the relative time is often not normal and cannot be selected and copied. "Select all" skips it:

Here's how dates look in the source. lemmy.dbzer0.com:

<span class="moment-time pointer unselectable" data-tippy-content="Sunday, August 31st, 2025 at 3:58:32 AM GMT+00:00">6 hours ago</span>

I see there is class unselectable. I don't know what exactly is going on.

On PieFed you can select/copy the relative time stamp, like "2 years ago", but still not the actual date.

Mastodon displays recent posts with a relative time like "12h" but at some point things get old enough to graduate to just the date: "Dec 9, 2023". And you can select the text as normal.

edit: title "why do web developers ~~want to~~ make it hard to see/copy the date of posts and comments?"

I went to https://selfh.st/ because someone posted a link to a github repo that had some tracking appended to the URL (?ref=selfh.st). OK your marketing worked on me I'm a mark.

I still have an aversion to this kind of tracking. Maybe considering how old-fashioned it it compared to the undetectable and nearly impossible to evade tracking methods currently deployed, that's wrong. Maybe this is just charming and quaint.

Disregarding the above, I liked the site enough to subscribe to their RSS feed https://selfh.st/rss/. Well that was pointless, as there is no content in the feed. Each entry like this:

Self-hosted news, updates, launches, and content for the week ending Friday, August 1, 2025

Continue reading on selfh.st...

I kind of expect a meaningful RSS feed these days. It sign of participating in the Libre internet.

Workaround: I have used Kill the Newsletter! (which kicks ass) to convert the email newsletter to an Atom feed which appears to work. Got the confirmation email, now need to wait for a post to be made.

What do you all think?

1. Link tracking: yay or nay?

2. Placeholder RSS: Rude or acceptable?

With Lidarr being not very functional due to the Unable to communicate with LidarrAPI - Lidarr API "Internal Server Error" 500 | Invalid response received from LidarrAPI | HTTP Request Timeout · Issue #5498 · Lidarr/Lidarr I have been thinking about getting rid of it altogether. I have only started using it recently and don't like it.

What I use Lidarr for:

• Find metadata for music
  • organize files in a consistent way base on metadata
  • obtain album art
  • create .nfo or other files
• Identify desired music and instruct download utility to get it (this is optional for me--- I can handle myself if needed)
• Do the above via a web interface which can be browsed nicely

I don't like about Lidarr:

• The not-really-open-source nature of it, e.g. this current problem, where you are reliant on their external server to run your own home server. I feel this might be a more pervasive issue in the Arrs but not sure of all the implications
• How unsupported it is to include work that the lidarr servers don't know about. There will never be a metadata database which includes all music. There is just too much music in the world!
• no audiobook/podcast support

I also have Jellyfin going for the actual serving/streaming of the music. Am not sure if it is able to fully manage the metadata and files?

Lots of options in the awesome-selfhosted list.

I could use a linux desktop app if it was better than a selfhosted server.

Thoughts?

UPDATE after 2 days and 16 total comments on the thread

As suggested by many people, I gave MusicBrainz Picard a try. It is actually quite straight forward functionality-wise. You do have to babysit it for sure, but it gets fairly close a lot of the time.

It would be very much improved by coming with more presets for file naming. Constructing them is obtuse python stuff. Something like how Trash Guides gives you naming schemes that account for many possibilities. No reason the user should need to do all that on their own from scratch.

Being native linux applications is a big plus, it is smooth to run. Would be nice to have some workflow aides like keyboard shortcuts available.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47871600

(I am not affiliated with the project at all, just an end user.)

Announcement: Retirement of Readarr

We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.

Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we're not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.

Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.

Key Points

• Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
• Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
• Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
• Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
• Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.

Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.

Sincerely,
The Servarr Team

The github repo has been archived.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47871600

(I am not affiliated with the project at all, just an end user.)

Announcement: Retirement of Readarr

We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.

Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we're not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.

Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.

Key Points

• Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
• Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
• Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
• Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
• Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.

Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.

Sincerely,
The Servarr Team

The github repo has been archived.

(I am not affiliated with the project at all, just an end user.)

Announcement: Retirement of Readarr

We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.

Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we're not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.

Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.

Key Points

• Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
• Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
• Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
• Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
• Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.

Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.

Sincerely,
The Servarr Team

The github repo has been archived.

I have been playing around with chmod, chown, setfacl and special bits trying to get multiple system/full users in same group correct access permissions to my media collection.

But I've messed it up somehow and now I'm having weird problems that are hard to track.

I would like to set my whole collection back to the defaults.

What is the best way to do this?

One problem I've had when making changes to so many files is the process seems to go forever without completing. Eventually it gets killed so my filesystem has variable attributes throughout. how can this be worked around?

I want everything to be owned by myuser, group media, everything else default I will sort it from there once I have a fresh slate.

And is there a way to backup these attributes only? I don't have enough storage to backup the files themselves.

It is Debian with ext4 filesystem.

Edit to add: Media collection is on its own separate drive/filesystem; this has no impact on anything else on the computer.

obsidian has callouts, and collapsible headings/codeblocks. So that's the native way.

There are a couple plugins for other styles of spoilers. but lemmy's spoilers are weird.

I want to work with lemmy-style markdown in obsidian.

Is there some plugin or other method that would facilitate it?

code:

what's in here?
nothing :(
> nothing at all
___

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