Faceman🇦🇺

I run two synchonised Adguard instances on two different devices as DNS servers for the house (and for my work PC via vpn). on top of that I run local ad blockers on top of that. I dont care that my DNS ping times are a few ms longer. I dont want to be pestered, tracked, solicited or interrupted.

I cant stand the barrage of ads, especially on mobile websites, like its at the point where you want to read an article and you get two lines of text and the entire rest of the screen is ads you have to navigate.

direct from the artists whenever possible, Bandcamp, Patreon, merch and physical media, gigs when possible. lots of smaller artists are on bandcamp because it seems reasonably well run, pays the artists fairly (especially on “bandcamp friday” sale days, where the artist gets 100% of the revenue)

if you have contact details for an artist contact them directly, dont give them your life story or act like a crazy stalker, just say hi, explain you prefer to buy music directly when possible and you dont want to support companies like Spotify. This method is mainly for niche music and new artists that struggle to find audiences in the traditional algorithm based machine but it doesn’t hurt to try.

I’ll download music from Soulseek (and I share TBs of it too) when all else fails, or in a try before you buy type of arrangement.

I’m either going to go into an anxiety hole due to having to make a choice about something, or I’m going to go hard on research for as long as possible to make a decision, then feel the same anxiety afterwards.

I like vinyl rips, for older music where vinyl is the best source if tape is not available. and I do like to have original versions alongside modern remasters where possible.

for new music it just seems like extra steps and it seems like there are more and more low quality rippers that have no idea what they are doing, have dirty records, and low quality gear.

lots of people using Usenet.

I have 2 main servers on 2 different networks, plus some block accounts as backup and a couple of indexers.

But for music, especially if its anything unusual, rare, or otherwise difficult to locate elsewhere, get onto soulseek. I use N+ personally and have uploaded ~80TB this year so far and downloaded about 600Gb. I dont do torrents very often so SLSK is how I give back to the community.

Soulseek is an old school free file sharing P2P platform, like limewire, kazaa, winmx, ed2k etc. just like the good old days.

Yep, before I got a real, actual static IP I had a “sticky” IP that only changed once over 5 years, and they sent an email warning of it first. but most ISPs will offer a static IP upgrade for a reasonable price, even if they dont advertise it.

now I have a static IP and a giant IPV6 allocation to play with too.

I’ve always kept my apps and databases on solid state media, putting them on spinning rust, even in a well tuned ZFS pool with lots of disks is way too slow for their (admittedly inefficient) database.

It absolutely does but you have to do it yourself, they dont accept any liability for doing that and nor should they, so if you dont know how to do it with at least the minimal level of safety and security and accept that risk yourself then you really shouldn’t try. Ideally you would only do it via a private VPN to trusted users.

Plex has some features built in to make just opening the port reasonably safe, though I’d still recommend against that. They also have a reasonably secure account verification system, and the software itself has proven to be somewhat safe.

Jellyfin has very little security built in and is not intended to be public facing, it also has the double edged sword of being open source, so you could read through all the code and pick it apart for flaws and exploits if you wanted to and we all just trust that when exploits or flaws are found they are reported properly.

JF is great but you are on your own if you want to make it available via WAN.

honestly Wholfin being so nice to use was my last hurdle to getting the whole house over the JF from Plex, just a few remote users with uncommon players that still need Plex and once they upgrade I can be done with it for good after starting out with OSXBMC way back in the day and being a lifetime licence holder from the start of paid plans.

I do this with MKVToolNix, as long as the source and destination files are the same “cut” it will line up.

Most people just use Sonarr/Radarr for this, though it can be tricky with anime specifically because you are pretty much locked into TMDB metadata, which might not be what you want for some series (alternate orders, absolute or series numbering, season 2/3 being different shows entirely, side series being specials not a season etc. etc. etc).

I’ve used TinyMediaManager before, not open source (other than a very old version that is still out there last time I checked), but the free version is reasonably powerful, especially if you want to customise the details of your naming/folder structures or do custom metadata or ordering. has some CLI functions but is mostly intended as a gui app.

apart from the usual suspect like, Jellyfin+Plex (still have some straggler users that need to upgrade their players for JF to work properly), Immich, nextcloud etc, I really like running Birdnet-Go. I give it my CCTV camera feeds and it uses a NN to identify birds it hears.

I get statistics about species heard around the property, charts to correlate detections to seasons and weather, and some interesting info about rarer species that I didn’t know were in my area. Every morning I check it to see if there was anything new recorded.

it doesn’t really have a purpose, though the data can be submitted to larger databases, but it’s just a nice thing to have.

EDIT: Also Vaultwarden, forgot about that, super happy to be hosting my own password manager instead of trusting (and paying for) companies like Dashlane to host it like I used to.

you can root and mod some boox tablets AFAIK, but I dont know how far you can get in de-china-ing them.

as for open hardware, it’s slim pickings.

I guess there is a decent market for small readers, but man I’ve gotten so used to reading on my 10" boox tablet that reading on a standard 6" kindle makes my brain hurt, probably couldn’t manage on a 4".

yet another reason why I dont like Teslas, or honestly any vehicles with onboard video recording and cellular connections.

there are a couple of projects I’ve seen, and surely people will fork off one of the open robo-vac projects to spin knives.

Robot mowers are in this grey area where if you have a big enough area to mow that you cant walk it in 15-30 minutes with a push mower, you could get a small riding mower for the same price, and now you also have a handy tractor too.

I like them, but that’s because i’m a lazy tech head, but just like high end robot vacuums they seem like one of those things that you spend good money on, they work reasonably well for a while, then break and are unfixable and the company behind them doesn’t help.

that said… there is a decent crossover in the region of “lazy tech head” and “enough disposable income” that would use a robot mower on a small lawn.

My 2021 car has this. it has no cellular data connection or significant internal storage and the camera just has what I assume is a very basic neural net that looks for signs of distraction. like the eye tracker modules some phones and laptops have. These are low-res greyscale IR cameras usually.

I’m OK with it, and it’s helped me out a few times, though I know some cars are more aggressive and beep at you just for looking at your own mirrors.

Some cars however have full time cabin recording that you dont have much control over, and some do have full time data connections that could theoretically send some kind of snapshots on events, but they arent going to do full time video streaming or uploading large video files.

for a beginner with just a few remote clients, tailscale all the way.

though I still like doing it the old way with a custom nginx setup, fail2ban and a domain name, but its more work to make it secure and even then it’s still somewhat of a liability.

yea, very easy to fall back into the bad habit of blindly updating without giving the release notes a skim.

immich hasnt had any major breaking changes for a while in my experience using it for a few years, anything that does break is probably some third party integration or plugin that would have to wait for it’s own maintainer to fix, that’s pretty normal in the open source world.