July 1, 2020

After much deliberating, I was able to kind of get ’transmission’ working on both my local machine and my Raspberry Pi since I wanted to download safe files like Linux distro ISOs, wallpapers, etc.

Think of ’transmission’ as one of your typical BitTorrenting clients, but with a bit more control, and a heck of a lot of less ads and potential for getting viruses.

The reason why you would want to have ’transmission’ on a Raspberry Pi device is that you don’t want to waste so much power downloading things like torrents, images, etc, when you can do it on a low power device to do it all day for you if needed. The capabilities of this kind of setup are cool because if you hook up an external HDD to a Raspberry Pi, you can also debate how to make it work on scraping the internet for data with cool scraper projects.

For example, I would love to somehow scrape the “Wayback Machine” for old school icons, and early internet assets as it brings lovely memories of Yahoo! Geocities back to mind. Ah yes, back when everyone had their own personal website, although heavily templated. Looking back, its easy to say that having your own site WAS the internet, and the direction it took really sucks.

Face it, its pretty sad when most people only can think of maybe 5 major sites that they visit on a daily basis. Back then, you had tons of splintering personal sites, all for the basis of being able to express yourself freely. Sure the DotCom bubble was a meme in itself, but I remember all of those weird personal pages that had highly specific content. Ex: If you searched for old school game art on Yahoo! back then, you would likely land on some dude’s personal website where he hoarded tons of video game sprite sheets that he somehow collected from using ROM palette tools. Sure there’s tons of community sites that still do this, but it meant more when a guy’s whole personal page was just dedicated to solely that purpose, which shows the life and soul of the early internet.

That makes me want to grab every Pokemon based sprite sheet from late 90’s websites from The Wayback Machine ASAP :), good times.

‘The Wayback Machine’ can be found here, and chances are, your old personal website or favorite site was archived, so check it out: https://web.archive.org/

You can also laugh and see how badly I designed this site over time, but also keep in mind just how restricted I was in terms of being able to develop this site while on my lunch break at my first tech job. Geez, I used to have to SSH into a shared hosted site just to be able to modify this website, but nowadays I just work on this site locally, and then use ‘rsync’ to post my changes onto the website that’s hosted by a private VPS.

Here’s the old past history of ‘musimatic.net’ for you to enjoy (and wow did I love a good purple color scheme early on haha): https://web.archive.org/web/2019*/www.musimatic.net

Back to the topic of ’transmission’: I tried to make it easy by modifying the ‘settings.json’ file in the ‘/etc/transmission-daemon’ directory to accommdate the ‘~/Downloads’ folder. However, after trying two or three workarounds in this Stack Exchange post, I gave up: https://askubuntu.com/questions/221081/permission-denied-when-downloading-with-transmission-daemon

However, I will work on creating a related symlink that will link to the ‘var/lib/transmission-daemon/downloads’ directory as ’torrents’ or something in my ‘~’ home directory.

I believe all I would maybe have to do is just to add the ‘sam’ user to the ‘debian-transmission’ group anyway. This is important because for the time being, in order to access that particular directory, ‘/var/lib/transmission-daemon/downloads’, I would literally have to use sudo priviledges to do so. This is fine for now, but might be easier if I just add the user to the ‘debian-transmission’ group appropriately.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy it works at least, but let’s just say ’transmission’ out of the box is NOT newbie friendly in that respect. However, it is a pretty powerful torrenting tool that can be run on any lower end PC if needed, which is super cool.

’transmission’ can be found here, and can be used with CLI or with a GUI; https://transmissionbt.com/

Also, if you’re someone like me who’s just looking for legit torrents for nice purposes like ‘wallpapers’, Linux ISOs, etc, I found a good blog post for relevant torrent sites in 2020, which is new to me as I only knew Pirate Bay back in the day like everyone else: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/10-best-torrent-websites/

As always, try the CLI version of ’transmission’ instead.

In Debian distributions, you’re gonna need ’transmission-daemon’ and ’transmission-remote-cli’ installed, so you’re going to want to do the following command in terminal to install the terminal version of transmission:

apt install transmission-daemon transmission-remote-cli

After installing the two parts listed above, I would follow along with gotbletu’s YouTube videos on the topic as its not too easy to figure out on your own, so here’s a related playlist to help figure it out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqv94xWU9zZ05Dbc551z14Eerj2xPWyVt

‘gotbletu’ shows a lot of bash aliases you can put in your .bashrc config to make using ’transmission’ a lot easier too, so I highly recommend checking those out, and any of his other videos since he’s pretty good at just demoing Linux utilities in general.

Plus, you can always access your downloads at any time in any browser by going to this website URL once you have the transmission daemon up and running: http://localhost:9091/transmission/web/

One more good thing taken care of this week.

Next, I’ll attempt adding a private ‘Searx’ instance. It’s a dang shame about how badly Jitsi Meet doesn’t play well with latest Debian or Ubuntu distros though. However, I learned a lot in attempting to deploy it though. I probably might even resort to just deploying an IRC based server like ‘XMPP’ or something: https://xmpp.org

Also, I’d like to do a few screencasts with gifs using ‘screenkey’ as well as the idea of being able to showcase Linux utilities with screencasts is probably the next best thing I could do to emulate my favorite Inconsolation blog. That and being able to utilize thumbnails correctly with Emacs Org mode would help as I’d love to replicate his Wordpress site’s ability to just do thumbnails out of the box.

Here’s ‘screenkey’ for reference: https://gitlab.com/screenkey/screenkey

Stay tuned :)