20241112-invidious_down.txt

I had been using Invidious (IV) to download and play YT videos. It was
good for me because I didn't actually have to leave the terminal to do
so. And yes, I know yt-dl exists, but it has never worked for me. It's
incredibly disheartening because the past few weeks (maybe a couple
months), I have not been able to view anything on IV. 

So recently I had been using default YT (with adblock, of course) and
was reminded just why I don't really like default YT (the website, not
the app). My recommendations there have been totally nuked and random.
I guess Big G loves ruining all their algorithms.

But I remembered a binary that was I had used before IV, and it
thankfully still works. I won't name it here because I don't want to
tip off the Big G gestapo, but there are thankfully many solutions. I
just wish I could still use the IV solution I found.

Off-topic: My favorite team finally fired some coaches. This is the
worst season I can remember. I also have been trying to use my
Pinephone more, but it's a challenge. I don't use it as a phone. It
seems slightly more stable, but that could be because it got updated
since I got it. But it's still a really poor experience. Example:
often trying to play a video in VLC, it will force close when I try to
go fullscreen... It has worked a couple times, but the performance is
just terrible. It also gets hot a lot. I realize it's a "beta" product
(see my previous glog entry), but it's still a miserable experience.
I'm glad I don't have to rely on it.

To be fair, VLC is not listed as "mobile-friendly", but it's really
crazy that I can barely play a video with a decent bitrate on a Linux
phone. I can see why so many Linux phone OSes are just meant to be
hacked onto existing non-Linux phones. I couldn't even find mplayer,
which was a bit weird. But Postmarket OS uses apk to install programs
(not to be confused with Android apks) instead of yum, pacman, or apt.
I'll still try to use it, but to me it's like installing a new OS:
it's not going to be easy or fun and you have to have plenty of time
to account for things going wrong... At least that's how how I usually
install OSes: I have to redo it a few times because I didn't check the
right options during install. At least I have the excuse that I
typically do very nonstandard and often different installs each time
(e.g. I've recently been puting /home on a different partition and
making it my default storage "drive" instead of a legacy workflow
where I had a partition that could be shared between Win and
GNU/Linux).