laleck

Yes, but I have a big pet peeve about the offline experience.

In iOS Music, tapping the artist name on a song launches the artist’s cloud Apple Music page —- even if you’ve hidden paid Apple Music.

Disabling cellular data for the Music app fixes this by showing an album view of the downloaded music from the artist. However, the cloud version is unavoidable on WiFi. It’s a small but annoying example of how Apple made the classic experience worse to push their subscription product.

There are a couple projects dedicated to making "tv channels" from media servers like jellyfin. See: https://ersatztv.org or https://www.quasitv.app

For #2, on iOS, you can move photos to shared albums and then safely delete them from library while retaining them in shared album. Shared albums use iCloud space, so it’s not ideal.

Not OP but there are a few open source options. GNU cash is friendlier for beginners due to the GUI. I like plain text accounting, specifically beancount.

As far as integrations, GNU cash lets you import from various formats like quicken while beancount has lots of plugins from the community like importers for various banks. I don’t believe either offer invoicing but you could integrate it yourself or just manually record.

IMO, the hardest part of keeping your own books is learning double entry accounting.

You’re limited to buying Blu rays and ripping to digital. Technically, that might not even be legal in the US because the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) forbids circumventing DRM.

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-con...

> In the end, I'm mystified it's still so hard to buy older movies so I can watch them on my networked devices. You'd think Hollywood would've learned from the music industry that if you just let people legally pay for non-DRM media, and make the process easy and convenient (certainly more convenient than sailing the seven seas or ripping discs), people will pay.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-bl...

To the author's point about not wanting to always run a music server like Plex or Jellyfin.

In Plexamp, browsing is heavily restricted in offline mode and very "flat." Downloaded albums, artists, and playlists are respectively grouped in a single list in the downloads tab. Clicking on any collection gives you a big list of songs with no further filtering or searching available.

Independent apps like Prism for Plex and Manet for JellyFin offer more iPod-like offline experiences with multiple layers of browsing and searching downloads. Prism syncs back changes (ratings, playlists) to Plex once server connectivity is restored. Though, Prism does not offer transcoding to save storage like Plexamp does.

I think these companion apps solve the major weakness of server based music hosting and offer an easier and more flexible alternative compared to the set up in the linked article.

> There is no good reason why my iPhone shouldn’t let me play local music.

I imagine this is a combination of low user demand, Apple's "walled garden" mentality, and Apple's perverse incentive to nudge people into paid Apple Music subscriptions.

Additionally, they took down all of their accounting articles without notice. They had valuable summaries on various tax topics. Thankfully, Wayback Machine has archives of my bookmarks.

All the more reason to self-host your own archived versions of bookmarks...