If you (or anyone else that’s reading this) are going to do illegal and questionable shit on the Internet, you might as well go whole hog and set up your own piracy and content distribution system on your home network.

1). First and foremost, you need to do this shit behind a VPN. You’re specifically looking for a VPN with port forwarding so you’ll get better download speeds on your torrents. I’m using ProtonVPN because when I was setting my rig up for the first time about a year ago, that was the top recommendation. Just do a little research and type in “best VPN for torrenting” into your favorite search engine. Set up your VPN as instructed. You’ll want to make special note of the “openvpn” username/password. You’ll need it later.

2). Next, you’ll need hardware. While any old laptop that’s been sitting around collecting dust is probably fine, you’ll run out of storage on it pretty fast if you want anything more than a few shows and movies. If you’re running out of storage space, I would recommend a Network Attached Storage device (NAS). There’s lots of brands to choose from, but I’m partial to Synology.

3). Next (regardless of hardware) you’ll want to be familiar with Docker and the container model. Essentially, containers allow you to run a little piece of software in a self contained virtual environment. All you have to do is tell docker the containers’ dependencies and configuration and it’ll spin up the container you ask for it.

4). Next you’ll want to get smart on the arr stack. This is a set of services that run in docker containers that can completely automate your piracy activities. At a high level, you specify the TV shows and movies you’re interested in, then the arr stack will search for the torrent, download it, and move it to where your content distribution service is scanning for new media.

5). Not sure where else to put this, but I’d recommend gluetun for the VPN client (this is where you’ll need your openvpn credentials), qBittorent for your torrent client and Jellyfin for your media distribution. These are all services that can run in Docker containers. I’d recommend using the docker containers from https://fleet.linuxserver.io/ since they tend to standardize the configuration of their docker containers.

Resources:

https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/rikthc/list_of_recommended_vpns_2022/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread

https://wiki.servarr.com/

https://trash-guides.info/

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki

It’s a lot to distill from into a single Lemmy comment, but hopefully this sets you on the right path!

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/447728-9-year-old-boy-pays-off-entire-third-grade-classs-school-lunch/

It’s a news article from 2019 for Ryan Kirkpatrick at Westpark Elementary School (a public school in Irvine California). He paid off the debt for only his 3rd grade class (not the whole school, not the whole 3rd grade, just his class). It was a total of $74.50. However, the school still serves hot lunches to kids with a negative balance on their account.

Apparently he paid it anonymously. (???)

Just stating facts above, but yeah, my opinion is that all public school lunches should be free.

If you’re just looking to get into modern torrenting, start here: https://trash-guides.info/

If you’re ready to put it into action, you might want a network attached storage device (NAS) to run your *-arr stack and store your stuff. I recommend a Synology NAS with at least 4 drive bays and a redundant drive.

You should do all of this behind a VPN. I recommend Proton.

My rig is set up to run in containers with docker-compose. I automated it all to the point that I just have to boot up my NAS and the torrenting starts up automatically. It’s all managed through websites hosted in various containers on the NAS that I can access from any other device on my network. You can read the docker docs here: https://docs.docker.com/compose/

LinuxServer.io is also a fantastic resource for docker containers: https://docs.linuxserver.io/

Also, it’s a good idea to run pi-hole for a network-wide tracker-blocker and ad-blocker. You should have your pi-hole devices on your network as a separate device that doesn’t do anything else. I have 2 pi-hole devices on my network. The hardware they run on is just the smallest Raspberry Pi’s I could find at the time. I connected them to the network via WiFi and plugged them in behind a dresser in one bedroom and next to the wifi router in the other room.

I’m a contractor at a rocket launch service provider. The final build of the ground control software is compiled and deployed to the launch pad with debug flags enabled because of a “fly like you test” mandate.

Millions of dollars and tons of time invested by brilliant people are riding on rockets that are launched using software with debug flags because of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality and archaic test strategies.

Ackchuawually, this example depicts a squish and a translation. A true scaling would have the scaling being done in place, resulting in an overlayed and smaller rectangle.

QuackGPT

When I teach masterbation, I’m always just like “have fun with it”