Cid Vicious

Getting an account on a big general tracker like TorrentLeech is a pretty good foot in the door. They do open signups frequently. There’s also IPtorrents and their whole network, although they’re pretty looked down upon by the private trackers community. If you want to start working towards invites to more selective trackers, MAM, OPS, and RED all have an interview process. MAM is by far the easiest one to build a ratio on, although note that they do not like to be thought of as a stepping stone.

The specific devices impacted by this are pretty old (I think only the first and second gen ones? So at latest 2009), so honestly I doubt they’re very worried about it.

You can still use calibre to sideload onto them. Where you get the books is another issue.

I’m curious how well polished the stuff you get off of soulseek is. Private music trackers have pretty strict standards for uploads, which generally means making sure that everything is organized consistently, that all tracks are tagged correctly, and that things are encoded to high standards (filtering things like bad transcodes). If you’re having to manually check all of this stuff, it would be pretty time consuming for a large collection.

OPS is probably the one you want. RED has more selection but also a very difficult economy. OPS still has a great library and the economy is far more manageable. Of course you will still need to build up a ratio if you’re planning to download a lot

You might want to get on a general tracker like TorrentLeech that has 0day scene releases. But you won’t find as good retention on older releases. It works as a nice supplement to a more selective tracker.

You mention that PayPal was bought by eBay (in 2002) but not that it was spun off again in 2015. They’re separate companies. If anything, Venmo is a competitor of PayPal.

Apple basically killed any chance ogg had by not supporting it on ipods. Which was unfortunate.

Most people are archiving in FLAC but the reality is that almost nobody can hear the difference between 320 (or even V0) and FLAC. So in cases where the disk space makes a difference mp3 still makes sense.