aldalire

Let's just all stop and appreciate that libgen is a thing in the internet. It has saved me so much money with very overpriced math textbooks during college when my family was low-income. It contains virtually all the books, and even obscure ones. It provides low barriers to entry for knowledge for people wanting to advance their career, and perfect for finding epubs for books to send to my kindle. (I buy physical copies of books, it's just convenient to have a kindle instead of volumes of lord of the rings while travelling)

Overall, this is what the internet promised. Fast, easy, universal access to information. It sucks that governments are trying to take it down, and do what governments do best which is to restrict the flow of information and restrict freedom.

10/10, libgen is the best thing in the internet. Long live libgen

I remember 5 years ago Musescore allowed free downloads of sheet music with an account. Now, I'm trying to get back in to playing the piano, and I was surprised that they're requiring you to pay, so fuck em

Pretty easy to do with Tampermonkey. They also show you how to set it up on iOS, which is pretty convenient for nabbing sheet music in my iPad

Found this cool vid on twitter https://x.com/KevOnStage/status/1798744950236131379

Wanted to download it. However big tech doesn't want its users to be in control of their own data and does not show the option of downloading the video from their site. Big tech can suck my dick.

https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1798744879654371329/vid/avc1/576x1024/Fq7Vs_JLyX7wQqln.mp4?tag=14

Paste Shitter links here: https://cobalt.tools/

Edit: also try out yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Best item in Starbucks! Completely free and 100% organic and natural! Nothing else is worth getting in my opinion.

Please donate moneys to the communist cause for giving me more squid pizzas

XMR: 87QzevaAWiUUiwgpCSJ1hFe1j9NbdZhZuBToCsabwLfsYk8s1TU3Fja4XdWwYFgnaEUVoe8Xmfr4Q4VF3L6XqcQ2TcTDfJL

My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex. So, is it necessary to teach them how to stay safe in the sea? How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.

I definitely want my kids to know about libgen. Want a book you want to read about? Wanna learn about dinosaurs from a college level textbook for whatever reason? Just go to libgen, son!

And I attribute most of my computer literacy and education to piracy, trying to install cracks to various games, trying to make games work, and modding the fuck out of skyrim as a young teenager. That, and also jailbreaking android phones. All the interesting things i’ve ever done with computers was probably against some BS terms of service.

So, is piracy something you would actively teach your kids? Sit them down and teach them how to install a Fallout 3 FitGirl repack? Or is this something you’d want them to figure out themselves?

I realize that, after all this time, I have never payed for my all-time favorite games I grew up playing (Fallout 3 & Skyrim). I can pay for it, but I really do not want to pay the money to the Bethesda’s marketing team, CEO, and whoever bullshit middle man who wants a cut of that. I want to give directly to the team that made the damn game, the artists, the sound designers, the voice actors, the programmers. If there was a way to do that, i’d be more happily inclined to spend my money on a decade year old game.

Just thinking

Apparently Apple can end-to-end encrypt your iCloud, but it’s opt in because they still want to profit off your data >_<

To enable this, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Advanced Data Protection

You need to have all the devices under your apple account to be fully updated, and you’ll need to remember a 28-key passphrase for recovery

I hate how big tech treats privacy as an afterthought. This should have been the default. But oh well. Spread the world people.

Hello Pirates.

Let me tell you a tale of a bounty I am proud of partaking. I have installed Risk of Rain Returns on a fresh Arch Linux distro, Wayland (i also needed XWayland) , KDE plasma 6, and GPU-accelerated.

Moreover, I have used another laptop i have at my disposal to become a 24/7 i2p router, which is able to capture the warez that were necessary to perform this bounty. This bounty can be obtained without the use of a vpn, since the game can be downloaded from the i2p postman site.

Because it was an exe file, I had to take certain steps to allow it to execute on my system. I installed lutris, as well as the arch linux dependencies that it required, and launched the installation executable through lutris

This journey was not without its challenges and setbacks. One such challenge I had to face to secure this bounty was to install the xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync patch. The nvidia drivers 550 is weird when playing games through XWayland, because it would render frames out of order. Applying this patch, as well as using envycontrol to switch to nvidia mode (i am on a dual-gpu laptop) worked in fixing this issue

overall, I am happy with this bounty. I actually feel morally regretful when pirating games, more so than pirating movies, because of just how much sweat and tears developers had to put in to making it happen. But I am broke, and I have bought Risk of Rain and its DLC in the past, so in the moral calculus of piracy I think I've balanced it out. I am quite broke right now, however, so games are outside of my price point and I'd rather have something to eat.

I love i2p. There's so many cool warez in there, and I believe it's the future of piracy. It allows us to decouple ourselves from VPN providers, because who knows how long until they turn against us.

I believe that the only two privacy extensions you really need to meet 90% of your privacy goals are uBlock origin + NoScript

uBlock origin is effective because it stops the injection of ads which might contain and inject code. NoScript forces you to look at which scripts you really need for the website to function. Say you visit a trusted site, like your lemmy instance, then you can enable running of javascript by default the next time you visit the site. You'll be surprised how functional some sites are even without javascript. I did not like the idea of browsers having Javascript: it's remote code execution and if there's anything malicious in there and your browser is not patched against it you're fucked. This way yeah it'll be annoying when you first visit a site but it remembers your settings for the next time you visit.

When I was configuring my searxng I noticed a search engine that piqued my interest. Link: yep.com

From their about page:

Here's how it works.

We offer an unbiased, private search experience that rewards and compensates the makers behind the content. To do this, we use a 90/10 revenue share business model where we pay 90% of advertising revenue directly to these makers.

Simply put, when you use Yep, you’re directly putting money in the pockets of your favorite content creators.