laleck (u/laleck) - Readit News

laleck commented on Everyone Is Stealing TV theverge.com/streaming/87... · Posted by u/naves

MisterTea · 10 days ago

Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.

Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.

laleck · 10 days ago

There are a couple projects dedicated to making "tv channels" from media servers like jellyfin. See: https://ersatztv.org or https://www.quasitv.app

laleck commented on Pixel 10 Phones blog.google/products/pixe... · Posted by u/gotmedium

mg · 6 months ago

The people at Google seem to think much more like me than the people at Apple.

There are 3 primary decisions Google made that click with me, while Apple's choices are a mystery to me:

1: When I put a Pixel on a table, it sits there stable. Because the backside is symmetrical. When I put an iPhone on a table, it wobbles.

2: When I sort my photos on a Pixel, I sort them in folders. The "camera" folder is where the unsorted photos are. When I sit in a bus or in a cafe, I go through it and sort the new photos into folders. This seems impossible on iPhones. Everything stays in the main folder forever. You can add photos to albums, but that does not remove them from the main folder. So there is no way to know which photos I have already sorted.

3: On Android I can use Chrome. Which means web apps can use the File System Access API. This makes web apps first class productivity applications I can use to work on my local files. Impossible on iPhones.

I'm sure people who prefer iPhones have their own set of "this clicks with me on iPhones and puzzles me on Pixels" aspects?

Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?

laleck · 6 months ago

For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.

laleck commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025) · Posted by u/david927

thomasstuttard · a year ago

What accounting software would you recommend for first-time entrepreneurs? Are their any open-source solutions that can be self hosted that integrate with existing solutions?

I am just starting my journey into entrepreneurship, and have yet to choose a bank or accounting software, and would appreciate guidance. I am based in the UK, and will only be conducting business in the UK to start off with.

laleck · 10 months ago

Not OP but there are a few open source options. GNU cash is friendlier for beginners due to the GUI. I like plain text accounting, specifically beancount.

As far as integrations, GNU cash lets you import from various formats like quicken while beancount has lots of plugins from the community like importers for various banks. I don’t believe either offer invoicing but you could integrate it yourself or just manually record.

IMO, the hardest part of keeping your own books is learning double entry accounting.

laleck commented on Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System jellyfin.org/... · Posted by u/doener

gutomotta · a year ago

How do you usually go about acquiring the media? I know there are people that simply download movies via torrent, but what are the legal ways of buying video files of TV shows or movies, specially the more recent ones?

laleck · a year ago

You’re limited to buying Blu rays and ripping to digital. Technically, that might not even be legal in the US because the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) forbids circumventing DRM.

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-con...

> In the end, I'm mystified it's still so hard to buy older movies so I can watch them on my networked devices. You'd think Hollywood would've learned from the music industry that if you just let people legally pay for non-DRM media, and make the process easy and convenient (certainly more convenient than sailing the seven seas or ripping discs), people will pay.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-bl...

laleck commented on You can still own music ergaster.org/posts/2025/0... · Posted by u/LorenDB

laleck · a year ago

To the author's point about not wanting to always run a music server like Plex or Jellyfin.

In Plexamp, browsing is heavily restricted in offline mode and very "flat." Downloaded albums, artists, and playlists are respectively grouped in a single list in the downloads tab. Clicking on any collection gives you a big list of songs with no further filtering or searching available.

Independent apps like Prism for Plex and Manet for JellyFin offer more iPod-like offline experiences with multiple layers of browsing and searching downloads. Prism syncs back changes (ratings, playlists) to Plex once server connectivity is restored. Though, Prism does not offer transcoding to save storage like Plexamp does.

I think these companion apps solve the major weakness of server based music hosting and offer an easier and more flexible alternative compared to the set up in the linked article.

> There is no good reason why my iPhone shouldn’t let me play local music.

I imagine this is a combination of low user demand, Apple's "walled garden" mentality, and Apple's perverse incentive to nudge people into paid Apple Music subscriptions.

laleck commented on Bench accounting services shutting down bench.co/... · Posted by u/knuckleheads

avs733 · a year ago

is there an easy solution for this? I recently found myself looking through old bookmarks from a long previous project and only about 1/3 worked and it made me sad.

laleck · a year ago

This open-source bookmark manager, hoarder, was posted recently and offers local archiving: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485746

Recently, I've started messing around with vimwiki and saving pages as PDF or as safari web archive.

laleck commented on Bench accounting services shutting down bench.co/... · Posted by u/knuckleheads

porter · a year ago

What are the best alternatives?

laleck · a year ago

For pure bookkeeping at a small scale, I really like plain text accounting with beancount and fava

Bookkeeping is easy but labor intensive. Dealing with US tax law... That's when you spend on a local CPA.

laleck commented on Bench accounting services shutting down bench.co/... · Posted by u/knuckleheads

mgkimsal · a year ago

FYI: "You will have until Friday, March 7th at 5:00pm ET to download your Bench data from this website."

laleck · a year ago

Additionally, they took down all of their accounting articles without notice. They had valuable summaries on various tax topics. Thankfully, Wayback Machine has archives of my bookmarks.

All the more reason to self-host your own archived versions of bookmarks...