They just fixed this. They raised the price of the kids version, ads turn back on if you turn kids mode off.

You can sideload on to any kindle.

Paperwhite (non-SE) is the version to go for. They go on sale every month or two, check camelcamelcamel.

https://singlelogin.re/
https://calibre-ebook.com/

Have fun.

I’ve used PIA for five years now. Never had an issue. It’s plenty fast for my needs; I’ve seen sustained ~450 Mbps downloads from a transatlantic endpoint. (I honestly don’t know what is typical with other VPN services but I’m not feeling choked out so I’ve never investigated.)

They run frequent deals and you can stack a promo code, check slickdeals and/or set an alert if there is not a current promotion. I believe my current three year sub worked out to ~$1.80/month. It is suspiciously cheap.

I’m sure others are “better” and “you get what you pay for” but PIA is good enough for the price for me.

I finally set up radarr and sonarr (and prowlarr.) Radarr’s list feature pulls in new titles to check out. With a bunch of shitty public indexers it manages to find what is being looked for without making me wade through the muck.

https://vuniper.com/ shows new blurays which is nice.

Everyone could easily seed 2:1 if they wanted to

This is literally impossible, which is the point parent poster is making. Seed:leech is always 1.0, for every uploaded chunk there must be a willing downloader on the other side.

The more seeders >1.0 a torrent has, the harder it is for other people to reach 1. Rewarding obscene ratios (as TL does with literal “achievements”) creates a toxic scenario where everyone is scrambling for a limited commodity in a zero-sum scenario.

If you want to play the “0.8 ratio required” game then a seeder should be forcefully removed from a healthy swarm once they reached some threshold around 1.2-1.5. If you want “high quality seeds” to stay connected, the “required” ratio should be dropped accordingly. But you cannot simultaneously have everyone “contribute evenly” with 0.8 and also award ratios of >5.0 etc.

Your “freeleech for weeks, get upload credit” “trick” just takes advantage of the 10-day seed time HnR timer. In short, it works because of their arbitrary silly rules, not because you’re contributing to the total health of the torrent swarms.