The progress sync is separate from how books get onto the various devices (at least as far as I know). Something OPDS capable works well to get the actual files across a network (or calibre via usb). For progress you can use their provided sync server or run your own (the original one gave me enough trouble to write my own implementation).
This is basically what I do. Gitea instance with closed registration. So far I did get three different people sending me emails with patches/contributions and all the interactions were quite nice. Of course the stuff I am doing is not well known and I do not advertise it anywhere, which is its own moat I'd say.
To add to the melancholy: Fasnacht in Basel was cancelled twice during covid. That hit many people very hard. A small group played two well known tunes (one in a minor key instead of the usual major) up one of the towers of the minster to symbolically carry Basler Fasnacht to its grave (downstairs the police was trying to get the door open because they did not know about it). The performance is haunting and is of course on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7LRIPKREA
Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to write my own dumb and small music streaming service. Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the motivation to pick that project up again.
I quite love that story and at least my age says I am an adult. Very recently I wrote a short (~320 words) review of it in preparation for my English C2 exam and it even was fun to write about it :)
Not 40k but the warhammer armies project with some friends (most of them started playing fantasy back during the 6th and 7th edition).
For years I mostly painted without playing (it is a great source of calmness for me), but during the pandemic, my brother got himself a capable 3D printer and we started printing models (there is a huge amount of great and affordable ones out there) and I started building an army (beastmen) to play. We all are interested in fluff and storytelling, so that usually makes a long game go by quite quickly (and makes for great and very weird conversation pieces, even years later).
I also seem to have been lucky with the girls/women in my life, never seemed mutually exclusive (one of them actually taught me how to paint in a somewhat proper way).
I am using the pbp with sway (if you don't know it, an i3 like wm for wayland), works well for me. Hoping for gles 3.3 support in mesa (3.0 is experimental but there) to be able to run alacritty :)
I have the corresponding ebooks too, so I open up the whole audiobook as one file and guess where the chapters are from the waveform. I listen to the guess and compare to the ebook, checking whether I am too far or too early. Once I find the correct position (and I got quite good at spotting it from the waveform), I set a marker and start with the next chapter. In the end I split it along the markers.
I was planning on writing something to spot when they say "chapter" as it is always the same but I never got around to that. Also, doing all that work was almost meditative :)
A way to share the corrections would be to export the markers from audacity but sadly I don't have that data anymore, though I could calculate the markers from the files I exported if you are interested.
The amount of time I spent on correcting wrong chapter marks (like the first four books of the Wheel of Time) is masochistic. But I am absolutely happy that I have the possibility of doing so after the conversion :)
Init7 is great, I only had to tick a checkbox saying something like "I know what I am doing" and apart from providing the technical information they left me alone. Only had one problem with them that they resolved very quickly (the fiber cable got damaged somewhere in the basement).
- CDBaby (https://store.cdbaby.com) has lots of stuff (they stopped offering flac downloads but if all you're after are high quality mp3 files that's not an issue).
- Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) has interesting stuff too (they changed their pricing since my last visit a while ago, now you pay once for the whole library it seems).
- Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (https://folkways.si.edu/shop) is an absolutely fantastic resource in my opinion.
I host my own email stuff too (private stuff and for a couple of friends) and sending to microsoft domains (hotmail, outlook.com) consistently gives me the most problems. Right now it seems to be ok again but I always make sure that people using my domains are fully aware of all these problems.
Edit: not long ago I used a gmail account to contact microsoft support to get them to remove me from their blacklist again (couldn't use my normal email for obvious reasons). Ironically enough their reply got marked as spam by gmail (something in my included message parts might very well have triggered that but I had to laugh out loud at the situation).