I walked around the Stanford Dish once.

I love when old, important pieces of software are open sourced.

Modern PHP isn’t too bad though, especially with modern frameworks like Laravel. A lot of the bad parts of the language have been deprecated or removed over time.

A lot of the “PHP bad” crowd haven’t used it in 20 years.

To get started, I’d say to get a cheap block account from the Reddit Usenet deals wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. A block account gives you a fixed amount of download (1TB, 2TB, whatever) that lasts indefinitely. If you use it just for music or books (for example), one block could last you a very long time. If you find yourself needing more data, you can get a monthly subscription with unlimited data.

You also need an indexer, which is how you search for content. DrunkenSlug, NZBGeek, and NZBPlanet are popular. These cost money, but sometimes they have a lifetime plan where you just pay once. Sometimes they have open registration, but other times you need to get an invite from an existing user. There’s free indexers like NZBKing, but they’re often full of junk, and lack encrypted content.

SABnzbd is the most popular downloader software. It’s free and open-source.

• Add account to SAB.
• Search for what you want on the indexer.
• Download the nzb file (points to where the files are located on Usenet) and add it to SAB to download the contents.

I think that’s it for the basics. There’s more to it - different backbones have different data so one provider might have data that a different provider is missing , you can fully automate downloads with Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr/Readarr, you can aggregate results from multiple indexers using NZBHydra/Prowlarr - but you can figure that out as you go :)

• KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses

There’s still a few P2P systems from that era that are still around. Soulseek is still doing very well for music, and some users on there have a bunch of things you can’t easily find anywhere else. DC++ and eMule/eDonkey2000 are still around but with much smaller networks.

One of the OG P2P file sharing methods (dating back to 1990) is still around too - IRC DCC.

Interesting - I didn’t see that. They say “You can add your own copyright as well”, so you don’t have to give up your rights to the code. They do still need to comply with the terms of the Apache license.

Their contribution agreement forces you to give up copyright to them.

The license just looks like the standard Apache license though, which doesn’t require this. With the Apache license, contributors still own the copyright to their code, but they license it to the project. Did you see a document in the repo that says something different?

if you need a POSIX interface

SSHFS isn’t POSIX compliant. It doesn’t support hard links, file locking, atomic renames, full support for changing file permissions, umasks, and probably other things.

Versity S3 Gateway is another option that’s trying to focus on simplicity. https://github.com/versity/versitygw

Out of all these, SeaweedFS is the most scalable. Seaweed’s design is based off some of Facebook’s whitepapers about their warm storage system, and it works especially well for use cases that have a very large number of small files (like images).

SSHFS is very unreliable. At least use NFSv4 or even SMB/CIFS.

Practically every other object storage provider offers an S3-compatible API.

Monochrome? It still works.

They really are turning the frogs gay

Maybe I just haven’t encountered any bugs that took a long time to fix. It’s been pretty reliable for me.

I’m a software developer that focuses on front end development (full-stack but I like frontend more) so I’m pretty picky about UI/UX. Boost feels very nice and polished.

I like Boost.

Last time I said this, I got shunned for recommending a closed-source app. I generally try to stick to open-source, but Boost has a good UI, works well, and bugs are fixed quickly.

I started looking into it for radio - unifying paid SiriusXM, free TuneIn, and free Shoutcast/Icecast powered radio stations, in a single system.

My idea was to show a list of our favourite radio stations on a dashboard tablet, with buttons to play them on particular media players (Google speakers, etc)

I set it up and started making a Home Assistant dashboard that shows the list. It took a while to figure out how to properly display the list of all the stations, but I ended up figuring it out using the flex table card component: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/dynamic-buttons-based-on-template-sensor/917207

I didn’t end up finishing the project though, and put it on hold while working on other things. I’ll revisit it one day.

It can also pull from Plex, but I haven’t tried that. At the moment, I usually cast from Plexamp to my speakers when I want to play something.

If you’re fine pulling with legit services then https://monochrome.tf/ is probably the easiest to use (or their backend service if you want to automate it).

Musicbrainz is fine; it’s just Lidarr’s usage of it that’s a problem. Lidarr uses its own mirror of Musicbrainz, plus its own custom search code, and it’s not as reliable.

Other apps that use Musicbrainz data, like Beets and Picard, don’t have the same issues that Lidarr has.

Yes, unstructured. Every script is its own special snowflake that does things a bit differently.

There’s no guarantee of the verbs that the script implements. start, stop and restart are common, but the implementation is up to each individual script. I’m most familiar with Debian where some service (but not all) implemented it with start-stop-daemon, but other distros and OSes handled it differently.

Basic, commonly needed functionality, like restarting a crashed service after waiting for some delay, need to be implemented per app.

When sysvinit was widespread, there was a reason a lot of people used systems line supervisord to deploy services, rather than dealing with sysvinit scripts. It was a pain.

Systemd units were a logical progression from supervisord services.