



I think I’ve bought from 7digital a time or two in the past and had no problems. Obviously there are issues with Amazon as a company, but I think they were the first big name to offer DRM-free MP3 purchases and I used it a lot back when it first launched, especially since they offered a selection of albums each month for just $5. They should have most mainstream music available for purchase, depending on which country you’re in. According to this Wikipedia page listing music stores they only offer 256 kbps MP3 but I was sure most if not all were upgraded to 320 kbps now, although of course you would have to re-download anything if you had downloaded the lower-quality version previously. That Wikipedia page is a good link to other stores as well, with a number I’d never heard of including specialty stores.
Also, along with someone else’s comment mentioning ripping CDs like the old days, check to see if you have a local record store. It’s been a mantra since at least the Gen-X days to “support your local scene.” I know in Raleigh the longtime staple Schoolkids Records is still alive and kicking, although their Chapel Hill store closed last year. It might take some digging but it can be worth seeing if there’s a local store in your area.
Self-hosting there are some ways to fight back, or depending on your opinions on Cloudflare it seems they’re fairly effective at blocking the AI crawlers.
There’s actually a surprising amount of free static website hosting out there. Besides GitHub, GitLab, Cloudflare, and Netlify come to mind offhand.
It’s from ClickHole, which is a site The Onion started parodying viral content sites like BuzzFeed or Bored Panda. It was sold to Cards Against Humanity in 2020.
That’s fair, and I think a lot of the problems with that software was the internal developer/administrator for the software (I think it marketed itself as Open Source but was probably more accurately Source Available to customers) had taken it hostage with no one else allowed to touch it. I think it had become the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code that had guaranteed a permanent job for this guy because if he left the entire business would fall apart, including an inability to bring in revenue. Everyone knew he was a problem, except perhaps his boss, the CFO. When our companies merged they were originally supposed to join us on NetSuite (not without its problems of course but definitely better than the other software) but the hostage taker supposedly convinced the CFO that NetSuite wouldn’t be able to produce a report the CFO liked and we wound up moving to theirs instead. It was also supposed to save money by having lower user licensing costs. They brought in an outside consultant for our transition because the internal guy was too busy but then it turned out the internal guy was doing a bunch of non-standard stuff that didn’t work with the consultant’s design and the internal guy had to redo it anyways. When I left two and a half years later the company had spent millions on the transition and two different additional major pieces of software (the second replacing the first) trying to replicate what we’d had in NetSuite but was still lacking much of that functionality.
The advantage browser-based ones have is it’s generally easy to copy/paste any text you need. I used one that ran as its own desktop software and made many of the key text fields uneditable, instead of letting you copy text from them but refusing to save any changes to those fields that must not change. Want to grab the order number for this customer? Too bad! Type it yourself or export it to PDF and copy it from there! I was so happy when I discovered a little program that lets you copy any text on the screen by effectively taking a screenshot, running OCR on the screenshot, and putting the output onto your clipboard. Still took more effort than simply right-clicking the text and hitting copy, though, or double-clicking and hitting Ctrl-C.
Sadly not even the worst I’ve ever used as an end-user


If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.
If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.
I remember as a child my cousin’s siblings would sometimes call her “lizard breath” instead of Elizabeth


I liked this read when considering legal ramifications for hosting content. It is U.S. focused so it might not be applicable to someone in another country.
@Moredekai@lemmy.world posted a detailed explanation of what it’s doing, but just to chime in that it’s an extremely basic part of programming. Probably a first week of class if not first day of class thing that would be taught. I haven’t done anything that could be considered programming since 2002 and took my first class as an elective in high school in 2000 but still recognize it.
Your website hasa banner that says it uses cookies and that by using it I acknowledge having read the privacy policy, but if I click More Information it takes me to a page the wiki says want created yet.


I’m guessing this is nothing to do with the plant that can grow on amusing terra cotta sculptures?


I have not used them myself, but M-DISC sounds like what you’re looking for. There are a few other alternatives listed on that Wikipedia article, too.


I was just looking into this and going to post a similar question to the community. I saw a post recently about Friendica and thought that and Pixelfed might be things I’d be interested in self-hosting my own accounts, since I’d probably want those to be things I keep followers-only and connect only with people I know IRL. I’ve only used shared web hosting before and Friendica looked straightforward enough, but Pixelfed seemed much more involved. I’ve never done anything with a VPS before; I think I could do it but if anything went wrong I might be in trouble. Would that be an okay starting point or is that jumping in the deep end? I assume I’d be able to host both on the same VPS?
I wonder if it was more effective in his era, late 19th century? Leisure travel wasn’t as much of a thing then, especially to other countries/continents, and the tourism industry didn’t exist nearly as much
What if the secret ingredient in Slurm is people?