While many great puzzle games have a fixed number of levels, I’d like to find more with procedurally-generated levels to maximize replay value. Aside from Minesweeper games, so far I’ve found the following ones:...
While many great puzzle games have a fixed number of levels, I’d like to find more with procedurally-generated levels to maximize replay value. Aside from Minesweeper games, so far I’ve found the following ones:...
While Minesweeper’s a great example, since random levels are a feature of nearly every Minesweeper iteration in existence, I mentioned in my post that I was excluding such games from the list. For those looking for such a game though, Globesweeper and Tilesweeper are great options.
While it seems that the new startup movie is exclusive to the 1TB OLED model, is that model’s exclusive keyboard theme the same as the prior 512GB Steam Deck (DEX-85) or a new one?
If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name....
Proton VPN since it’s cheaper than ExpressVPN but apparently faster than other paid VPN options, while also having port forwarding to improve torrent connectivity.
Frugal Usenet is on the same backbone as Usenet.Farm, so a better block account option would be Newsdemon on the UsenetExpress backbone. Apparently the Frugal Usenet year plan comes with a BlockNews block (Omicron backbone) as well, which seems to have a retention length closer to that of Eweka.
Edit: My mistake, only the Frugal Usenet bonus server is on the Usenet.Farm backbone.
I use a seedbox to run qBittorrent with Jackett, and have a bunch of sources on there. I know there are other methods, but that works for me and I’m comfortable with it....
For some shows I’ve noticed that it’s not too difficult to get around half of their seasons in 4K, with the 4K releases for the remaining seasons being seemingly nowhere, whether it be on public trackers, private trackers, or usenet. Doesn’t seem to be an issue of shows only being shot in 4K after their first few seasons, as in some cases the 1st and 3rd seasons may have 4K releases without the 2nd season having one, for instance.
While ‘the paywall for access’ argument can be made for usenet indexers (which just index NZB files, not the releases themselves, with most still allowing up to 5 downloads a day via free membership tiers), in contrast to torrenting, usenet providers cache newsgroup binaries (the actual releases) on the servers of their respective usenet backbone. Because of that, releases that might run out of active seeders on public or even private torrent trackers after a few years are sometimes available for significantly longer on usenet.
Edit: While it’s not an excuse for the usenet indexers, rather the providers, usenet newsgroup binaries are downloaded directly from the servers of providers, and are thus not P2P like bittorrent is.
Admittedly, if you’re already using private torrent trackers, you’ll probably find more missing releases by working towards joining higher tier trackers than usenet alone has. Usenet is more worthwhile for people without high enough bandwidth to build the ratio needed to join such trackers.
I’ve been meaning to do a puzzle game recommendation overview on kbin after forgetting to back up an old post on the subject before purging my Reddit account, but I’ll share a few recommendations for the time being. Given that lots of Steam games are a much better deal if you wait for the Winter or Summer sales, I’ll list the regular and expected sale prices as such: (Regular/Sale). Since you’ve played the Portal Games and TSP, other three-dimensional exploration puzzle games in that vein include The Witness ($40/$10), The Talos Principle ($30/$4.50), Quern: Undying Thoughts ($25/$10), and Lightmatter ($20/$7). Among those, I think Quern is the best due to its resemblance to Myst without the solutions to most puzzles being overly obscure. Other three-dimensional puzzle games that focus less on exploration and more on puzzles include The Room Collection ($25/$7) and The House of Da Vinci Complete Bundle ($54/$27), with both series sold as individual games as well.
In terms of longevity, some 2D puzzle games have—in addition to their regular puzzle sets—daily puzzle sets or custom puzzle generation, adding to replay value at the cost of a degree of repetitiveness. These include LYNE ($3/$1.50) and LOOP: A Tranquil Puzzle Game ($5/$2.50), among others.
A remake of Riven in the same vein as the latest Myst remake is among the next projects that Cyan Worlds is working on, so it might be worth waiting until it releases to play Riven.
Unfortunate that they purge their database of unseeded torrents. While there wouldn’t be the same incentive as on a private tracker for people to come back and reseed something, removing them decreases the likelihood that niche releases stay available in the long term.
While long term availability seems to be a problem for lots of reality TV shows, usenet or a private torrent tracker like TorrentLeech should work if the show you’re looking for is popular enough. As datacap-free usenet access is usually at least $50 a year ($52 a year for Frugal Usenet + NZBGeek; forgoing the latter would reduce it to $40 a year, but might take a while for several seasons of TV shows since free indexers only offer up to 5 downloads a day each), private torrent trackers would ideally be better, particularly given that they often bundle episodes into season packs. As public trackers have a lower proportion of seeders in comparison, they generally only have the latest seasons of most reality TV shows.
Clearly they’re just looking for a scapegoat to justify yearly price hikes. If it were anything else, they might have realized that the increased revenue stream isn’t actually going to the people involved in content production…
Don’t have the *arr stack setup myself, but as to managing a library of of releases with both English and French dubbed audio I’ve found that looking for releases with ‘Multi’ in their names to be a relatively effective solution, though in trying to find releases on a handful of public French trackers looking for releases with ‘VFF’ (didn’t see standalone ‘VFQ’ releases, though some VFF releases have VFQ audio tracks included as well) worked in that case as well. This seems to only work for popular movies, however, with TV shows and less popular movies, while sometimes being dubbed into French, seemingly not having those audio tracks anywhere I’ve looked (suggestions for good French torrent trackers would be welcome!), with the likelihood of finding English dubbed audio for releases originally in French appearing to be even more remote.
If you find a release with both audio tracks but want to use them with the video track of a better optimized monolingual release of the same movie, if the video tracks of two releases are the same length, or you can determine the exact offset between them, you can use MKVToolNix GUI to re-encode your preferred combination of video, audio, and subtitle tracks. A bit tedious compared to the automation of the *arr stack or simply keeping the default multilingual release of a movie, but at least it allows for fine-tuning individual releases on an as needed basis.
If you decide to make use of usenet at some point, I’ve found that some usenet indexers, such as NZBGeek, show in their search results the languages of additional audio tracks included in multilingual releases.
The monetary barrier to usenet is probably why torrent trackers would be more popular, and thus more likely to be blocked by national regulators. As to why you’re far more likely to get an ISP letter for torrenting than for using usenet, while the bittorrent protocol means than if you download a release you’re also seeding it to others, paying usenet providers for access to their cached releases means that you’re only downloading releases from them, and not uploading anything. Usenet providers do sometimes have to remove releases from their databases upon request, which is why paying for providers on at least two nodes can help in mitigating the odds of a release not being available.
Comparing the cost of a VPN to Real-Debrid + a Usenet Indexer + A Usenet Provider depends on which services you choose, but in the case of ProtonVPN , NZBGeek, and Frugal Usenet it comes to $72 vs $84 a year, with the latter being more if you want to add a backup usenet block plan from a different node (block plans have a one-time upfront cost and last until you use up the plan’s download capacity). If you forgo the additional block plan and NZBGeek, instead using a combination of the free tiers from indexers such as Tabula Rasa, NZB Finder, Miatrix, and DrunkenSlug (most allowing for 5 free downloads a day), Real-Debrid + Frugal Usenet is the same as ProtonVPN at $72 a year. Also note that Real-Debrid is able to cache torrents on request as long as someone’s currently seeding them on public torrent trackers, and that with usenet to download a release that is X days old, you need a usenet provider with at least X days of retention.
A usenet download can either fail due to being taken down after a DMCA or similar request, not being in one of the newsgroups cached by one’s usenet provider, or because one’s usenet provider has fewer days of retention than the age of the usenet release. In terms of telling a binary newsreader program (i.e. downloader) such as SABnzbd or NZBGet what your provider is, there’s a page in the settings of those and similar applications to enter the domain name, port, username, and password associated with any usenet provider subscriptions and/or block plans you have.
Unfortunately as most usenet indexers aren’t usenet providers or vise versa, as far as I know there isn’t a way for indexers to know which backbones have cached a given release or not. If any are able to deliver that it would be Easynews, which is both an indexer and provider, but even then that would just be for releases indexed by Easynews itself.
In retrospect I regret drinking the Nintendo koolaid for so long, but turning what used to be the fairly equitable Virtual Console system into a ROM rental service made me jump ship to the Steam Deck and it’s been smooth sailing since.
I’m looking to go into Usenet / premiumize / real Debrid but I don’t know which ones are reputable. Which ones have you all had luck with or liked? And what was the cost?
While the paid tier for NZBGeek is a good deal, I also use DrunkenSlug, Miatrix, and NZB Finder since they sometimes have releases that are missing on NZBGeek. Tabula Rasa isn’t bad either, although didn’t seem to have anything missing from the other ones I use when I tried it.
All of them have non-expiry free tiers (5 downloads a day each except Miatrix, which is two a day) except NZBGeek, which has a 3 day, 15 download trial. Of the recommended indexers with free tiers, DrunkenSlug and Tabula Rasa (as well as DogNZB and NinjaCentral) require invites to join. Each one has a premium tier that gives you more downloads for paying per month or per year, of which NZBGeek is among the cheaper options. Using usenet as a complement to what can be more easily found on public and private torrent trackers, I’ve found the free usenet indexer tiers to usually be enough. Another benefit of having accounts on multiple indexers is that as some releases may be indexed by one and not another, it can be helpful to search for releases on alternate indexers if your preferred one doesn’t return any results.
Note that you’ll also need also need to buy a usenet provider subscription or block plan to be able to download the indexed releases, as well as download a usenet binary newsreader such as SABnzbd or NZBGet. As having providers on at least two nodes mitigates the risk that a release is missing from either, I’ve found having a Frugal Usenet subscription plus a Newsdemon block plan to be a relatively low cost combination. Something to note when picking a usenet provider is retention, i.e. how many days worth of releases they have available. To download releases that are more than a few years old, you’ll need a provider with that many days worth of retention.
The problem with private trackers that don’t have open registration periods from time to time is that unless you have enough upload bandwidth it’s nearly impossible to build ratio on torrent trackers unless you pay for a seedbox subscription. While TorrentLeech is great, it’s still missing a lot, with only 25Mbps download bandwidth and 5Mbps upload bandwidth I can’t reach the requirements one would need to apply to higher-tier trackers.
A shame that Valve after all this time has yet to leave the Russian market given how many other companies took their losses and left, albeit most of them only doing so to avoid negative reputational impact.
Edit: I’m not against the wellbeing of peaceful Russian citizens who don’t have a say in the crimes that their government and military commit, but as every product sold in Russia directly supports its government via sales tax revenue, each company that continues to operate there makes it easier for the Russian government to find a surplus in its budget for military spending.
In navigating Lemmyverse for potential communities to subscribe to, it would be helpful to be able to redirect links to my home instance in a new tab to facilitate sorting through multiple communities at a time. Ideally, the option would be implemented with the ability to enable or disable either of the two context menu items to...
Given how many audiobooks Audiobookbay seems to be missing it would certainly be helpful to have a complementary source given that even private torrent trackers and usenet aren’t much better for that than public torrent trackers it seems…
iTunes is a double edged sword in that regard, given that while it initially innovated as a digital music distribution storefront, as more and more features were added to it, it started juggling too many tasks at once instead of continuing to innovate with just one.
Got reminded of this while reading about ProtonMail. The reason I haven't gotten into proper #piracy is that I don't have a VPN for torrenting, and the reason I don't have a VPN is that I don't #torrent. So it would be nice if I got a good VPN while #degoogling myself.
Will ProtonVPN rat me out to Comcast? I know some VPNs don't hide what you're downloading from your ISP, for reasons I don't fully understand.
Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.Multiple commenters are saying I’m off base about the 75% price increase. My payment less than a year ago was $79.99. Here’s the proof.
It’s unreasonable in the context that while streaming services were intended to be an affordable alternative to cable without sacrificing content variety, having the same level of variety now requires four or five subscriptions. Not an issue unique to Disney, but they and other movie studios have hiked movie rental costs, along with maintaining unreasonable pricing for BluRay releases, as a means of inflating the valuation of their IP catalog.
The fact that — in contrast to having four or five subscriptions over the span of two years— it’s economical to run one’s own 16TB or 32TB capacity media server (and even subsequently pay for replacement hard drives as needed) demonstrates that the subscription platforms, able to run such servers far more economically per user than anyone can do themselves, are retaining excessively high profit margins in contrast to the compensation paid to the people actually involved in producing content.
The best way to build ratio on TorrentLeech regardless of one’s download or upload bandwidth is to use about 2GB of the initial 15GB given to new accounts to download 100 torrents that are at least 15MB, subsequently seeding those torrents 24/7 to maximize continuous TL point gain. After getting enough points you can use them to boost your ratio.
Without a high enough upload bandwidth (only have 5Mbps myself), even with freeleech not counting against one’s download for the ratio it’s unlikely that peers will stay connected to download seeded releases when other people with far higher upload bandwidth or seedboxes can maximize their download bandwidth. Not a problem for everyone of course, but the 100-torrent method works whether someone has an upload bandwidth of 1 Mbps or 1000Mbps.
While TorrentLeech is great, the demise of FileList makes me want to diversify my catalogue of tracker options in case something were to happen to it as well. Popular releases are usually available on public trackers for a while, with some releases findable on usenet as well, but are there any easily-joinable private trackers as...
While many popular English language TV shows seem to be dubbed into other widely-spoken languages (looking for French, personally), the releases that include those audio tracks unfortunately often either have lower bitrates than their English-only counterparts (which only include subtitles for other languages) or only have one...
Having already configured a VLC-powered Google TV configuration with USB hard drives for a relative without the router or download speed needed for reliable streaming, I’m now trying to configure a similar setup for another relative with a non-smart TV and an even slower download speed....
Good point; something I’ll have to try before I decide on buying anything. Problem with some media players could be the lack of support for changing between audio and subtitle tracks on the fly for multilingual support, so in both the case of the TV itself and anything I plan on buying I’ll have to do more research first I guess, since unfortunately Amazon listings are often bereft of non surface-level technical specs.
Definitely true; while it would have been more fun setting up something like a Pi4 with Plasma Bigscreen to avoid content ecosystems, it seems that choosing between a Google TV or Fire TV stick or a USB-supporting BluRay player will be a more economical option. Haven’t delved much into custom launchers before, but it seems that might be a good solution for the sort of minimalistic UI I’m looking for.
Seems like the recommended sunxdcc.com has some 2160p releases, though not anything that usenet or private trackers wouldn’t already have better versions of (from what I can tell).
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite (lemmy.ml)
Puzzle games with procedurally-generated levels?
While many great puzzle games have a fixed number of levels, I’d like to find more with procedurally-generated levels to maximize replay value. Aside from Minesweeper games, so far I’ve found the following ones:...
Puzzle games with procedurally-generated levels?
While many great puzzle games have a fixed number of levels, I’d like to find more with procedurally-generated levels to maximize replay value. Aside from Minesweeper games, so far I’ve found the following ones:...
[News] Steam Deck OLED review: Includes specs on new screen and other improvements (www.polygon.com)
This is the best coverage of the new Deck that I’ve seen yet....
What VPN do you use and why?
If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name....
Where to find Usenet black Friday deals?
Anyone have good places to watch for deals?
Have 4K TV show torrents entirely disappeared from public trackers?
I use a seedbox to run qBittorrent with Jackett, and have a bunch of sources on there. I know there are other methods, but that works for me and I’m comfortable with it....
Game Recommendation?
Edit...
Looking for Home/Flipping Shows Sites (like HGTV content)
As the title says, I’m looking for sites that have home show or flipping show type content (basically like stuff on HGTV)....
The pirates are back - Panda Security (www.pandasecurity.com)
*Arr stack and tips
Recently setup the *Arr stack&transmission+ JellyFin and loving it… (linux user, with always on server at home, behind a 5G unlimited connection)...
Usenet and Debrid
I have been doing torrents + VPN for years now and thinking about switching....
Gaming Companies Flag 'Highly Skilled Hackers' as Emerging Piracy Threat (torrentfreak.com)
Usenet communities?
I’m looking to go into Usenet / premiumize / real Debrid but I don’t know which ones are reputable. Which ones have you all had luck with or liked? And what was the cost?
Good IRC Servers for Piracy
Hello all,...
Steam Deck sales could already reach 3-4 million units, with US, China, and Russia among top countries (gameworldobserver.com)
[Request] Add 'Redirect to home instance in new tab' option to browser context menu
In navigating Lemmyverse for potential communities to subscribe to, it would be helpful to be able to redirect links to my home instance in a new tab to facilitate sorting through multiple communities at a time. Ideally, the option would be implemented with the ability to enable or disable either of the two context menu items to...
Why so many *arr services? Why not 1 service that works with all media types?
I am almost done building my first self hosted streambox through Docker. That’s a total of 16 instances, each fulfilling 1 specific role....
Trackers for audio content
What public indexers do people advise for audio?...
Announcing doubling cube support at bgammon.org (Go & Ebitengine) (bgammon.org)
bgammon.org is a free online multiplayer backgammon service without any ads....
Disney is gouging customers with a near doubling of subscription costs. (sh.itjust.works)
Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.Multiple commenters are saying I’m off base about the 75% price increase. My payment less than a year ago was $79.99. Here’s the proof.
Private torrent trackers accepting new users
Hi everyone,...
Alternatives to TorrentLeech
While TorrentLeech is great, the demise of FileList makes me want to diversify my catalogue of tracker options in case something were to happen to it as well. Popular releases are usually available on public trackers for a while, with some releases findable on usenet as well, but are there any easily-joinable private trackers as...
Sources for Movie and TV dubbed audio tracks
While many popular English language TV shows seem to be dubbed into other widely-spoken languages (looking for French, personally), the releases that include those audio tracks unfortunately often either have lower bitrates than their English-only counterparts (which only include subtitles for other languages) or only have one...
Looking for the simplest means of playing videos from a USB storage device on a non-smart TV
Having already configured a VLC-powered Google TV configuration with USB hard drives for a relative without the router or download speed needed for reliable streaming, I’m now trying to configure a similar setup for another relative with a non-smart TV and an even slower download speed....
Have you considered IRC?
Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”...