Man I love organizing data

[anomalymonster]

Name/Pseudonym: An ongoing debate but Monsters, Anomaly, and Pomeg work

Hobbies/interests: Pokemon, alterhumanity and plurality, web development, art and writing, video games, cartoons

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard?: We're still getting into it and might not consider ourselves a data hoarder per say but we've been adjacent to data hoarding for some time now. We discovered Hydrus Client and Zotero a few years back so we've been steadily building a collection of saved images, websites, and music.

We have a external HD on the backburner of stuff to buy, but for now we have two 1TB SSDs with the second being regulated to the media SSD. Though we've been learning how to use a web scraper which is going to help with the process of getting and tagging our files at least a lot easier.

Why do you data hoard: It started with the annoyance of not being able to find what we were looking for again once we lost it - both with websites and images. We aren't too as focused on preservation so much as the freedom of having our own library, but being on the internet for long enough means we've lost a lot of things we once liked to being deleted or privated.

Anything else?: We're a professional web developer but it's more "thing we do to make money" than thing we're good at. Some day we will learn how to do things with Python to make both of these easier.

We're also a multiple system, hence the plural pronouns.

how to use MakeMKV to losslessly rip your DVDs and blu-ray discs!

[luckyzukky]

hi hello! are you interested in ripping a copy-protected DVD or blu-ray, in the best quality possible, without having to jump through hoops to break said copy protection? i'd like to introduce you to MakeMKV! it's a nifty little multi-platform program that's capable of cracking most methods of disc copyright protection, and rips the entirety of a disc (or just certain chapters, if you'd like) into lossless MKV format.

this guide serves as an introduction to using makeMKV, as well as re-encoding the MKV files it produces into a codec friendlier for media streaming, local or server-based (for example, if you use VLC media player, or use a media server such as plex or jellyfin), and to shrink the (somewhat large) resulting file sizes with little to no visual loss in quality using ffmpeg.

( click here for guide )

Intro! Data Hoarders Unite!

[gze]

Name: We're a plural system; our main hoarders go by G (they/them) and E (xey/xem/xeyr) respectively!

Hobbies/interests: alterhumanity, video games, writing, canines, D&D, toku, overthinking, drawing

Do you data hoard? If so, what do you hoard? Yes! We consider it our dragon's hoard. In no particular order, we've saved fanart, videos, music, fanfic, photos, personal records, health tips, community essays, screenshots of cool or informative posts we've come across, D&D notes, references, manuals, Game FAQs, language study guides, memes..... One of our oldest files is from 2003 that we found on an old floppy disk, a terrible school PowerPoint filled with pictures of George Bush, clipart, and Hamtaro characters????

(Organizing those files into folders is a very calming (and sometimes time sinking) activity, would recommend when needing an anxiety distractor.)

Why do you data hoard? For personal historical preservation, mainly! For some things it was to be able to watch offline in case the internet failed. Once we started really understanding that stuff online is not permanent and can be taken down at any time, and that hard drives can fail (or be stolen, both of which have happened to us before), it really made us paranoid want to archive stuff we really enjoy, or even stuff we don't fully enjoy but still want to look back on. This also includes our old chat histories, emails, screenshots of sites we were on in the past that we want to keep record of, the list goes on. Our first memory of doing this is keeping notebooks we passed back and forth with a friend in elementary school, and we are super grateful to still have them!

We also agree it's important to 'circulate the tapes' of media that is otherwise inaccessible, because capitalism sucks and preservation is very important. With unlimited time/resources/energy we would love to scan/rip all our rare media and archive those too.

Anything else? We're taking this love to grad school and starting a Master's in Information Science this coming spring! We hope to learn even more about archival and preservation that we can then take to our hoarding. For now, we're excited to learn new techniques and see posts from others who understand our niche interest! Already it's fun reading the intro posts to see what others have been hoarding!