Doesn’t get any more secure than a battle-tested web server hosting simple MP3 files and a text file.
Convenience might be a thing, though. I’m in the Apple ecosystem so their Podcasts app shows that feed on all devices and tracks listening progress, etc.
If I didn’t have that, I’m still a lifetime customer with PocketCasts and PocketCasts Web. So, that’s that. But if you don’t have anything similar in place, a self-hosted streaming server might be the best way to go, yes.
Do you need a web player? I’ve got several years of a radio show on my web server and wrote a script that created an RSS feed for them. This way I can open that in any podcast player (even web based ones) to listen to it.
Does the paper take into account the energy required to compile the code, the complexity of debugging and thus the required re-compilations after making small changes? Because IMHO that should all be part of the equation.
I’m pretty happy with Downie (and Permute to directly convert media to whatever format I like). So far it downloads everything I throw at it. And you can create custom download handlers (using JavaScript) to make it work (without interaction) with sites that are currently not supported and would spawn the user-interactive downloader.
If you just want to download and don’t care about a nice GUI, yt-dlp probably has similar features.
If you’re on macOS, there’s blocs. It seems to pop up on BundleHunt for a fraction of their normal price every once in a while.
Then, there’s RapidWeaver Elements - which just went into Early Access.
However, you might want to evaluate whether a static site generator or some small CMS like GRAV can work for you.
A quick search says it’s an NZB site: https://usenetreviews.org/nzbsites/tabula-rasa/
EDIT: And here’s a Reddit discussion about it.
Same here. It’s probably easier to print out the QR code(s) for your home wifi network(s) on a piece of paper and hand that to guests when they come over…
Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace
I loved that book!
Looks very much like KDE Plasma. Not sure which distro, though.
Just wanted to throw Kate into the mix of suggestions…
Which Pi did you try? Since the Pi4/CM4 (can even work with SAS drives) and especially with the Pi5 you can build some nicely performing NASes.
Not sure whether Cmacked still works…
There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
Same with audiobooks. The “classic” way is to have several MP3 files - 1 for each chapter. This allows them to be played even on dumb MP3 players.
However, the M4B format allows for more modern AAC and HE-AAC encoding and adds metadata such as chapters directly into the file. This results in the whole audiobook being contained in just one single file and with much better compression than MP3. But you’ll need a compatible player to listen to them.
(I’ve transcoded most of my audiobooks to M4B as a collection of 320kbps Stereo MP3s doesn’t make sense for just spoken content.)
To add to that: The “sharing” part is what’s prohibited in German law. (Remember: when torrenting you also upload chunks of the data to others.) The pure download is kind of a grey area and won’t be prosecuted.
The version I had played around with about 10 years ago could.
There’s also The Dude - although it’s a Windows-only application. But the visualisation is great.
I’m running SpotWeb to browse spots. It’s kind of a curated list of NZBs. So, most things you can find a spot for, are still actually available to download.
It was heavily used by the Dutch to distribute movies with baked-in (“ingebakken”) Dutch subtitles for older media players.
If you’re happy with how Apple Password works for you, I can recommend StrongBox. It keeps all data in a KeePass2 database and integrates into Apple’s AutoFill API. That means it feels almost native when using it. No browser plugin needed. (At least not for Safari.) And you can decide how you sync the database file.