Streaming is awesome, but I’ve stopped paying for streaming in most cases. Everything has gotten too expensive. When I run out of storage, I’ll start culling.

I haven’t backed up or collected movies or tv shows in a long while. Not much they’ve put out in the last ten years has been interesting to me. Music on the other hand… Lot good music has been put out recently and I’ll either buy the CD or if I have to, purchase a download. Either way, it’s going to be streaming from my server.

The only formal training I had was 20 years ago in high school when I took a pair of A+ and Networking certification electives. At the time I wanted to get into Systems Administration as a career, but no one was hiring when I graduated. Went into trucking instead.

20 years on though, I don’t really consider selfhosting a hobby, but rather the most cost effective way to achieve whatever I’m trying to accomplish for my family or myself. SAAS and subscriptions have kinda gotten out of hand, so I’ve “voted with my wallet” and just done them myself.

Mostly. I pay for email. That was a pain in the ass.

Do I still enjoy it, sure. But that’s has become secondary as my objectives have shifted over the years.

Essentially, it’s bittorrent under the hood. IP addresses are public to others watching the stream at the same time.

Depending on where you are, I would turn on your VPN before clicking that link.

There are quite a few in the US. Two off the top of my head are Slant3d and PCBWay. With all of them though, you may have to do some final post processing depending on what you are printing. 3d printing services just print the item, they don’t do much beyond that.

About the only upside to this that I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage. Everything else just sucks.

Pretty much, but I keep getting burned by “free” and sometimes non-free online services. It’s a large part of why I self host the things I do.

And alot of folks are still bitter about Google Reader being shut down.

Which might not be a bad thing in most cases, given the problems we have in policing with over aggressive behavior, lying and general “us vs them” mentality.

Not every security or safety problem can be solved by throwing bodies at it.

Meh.

Their soapbox, their rules. You don’t like their rules, self host and make your own.

Before my last printer died 5 years ago, I was getting good results with Hatchbox filament. Not sure about their current state, but they were the most reliable I had found at that time. Looks like they currently have one I would call navy blue.

My new printer is supposed to arrive today, so I’ll be going through the filament evaluation grind again soon.

Hell, a death tax on assets over $10 million would probably cover it.

I’m using NameCheap. I don’t recall them ever asking me to provide ID. They do have an api (didn’t know that till now) though I’m tired enough at the moment that I can’t make much sense of their documentation.

https://www.namecheap.com/support/api/methods/domains-dns/set-hosts/

Not sure if it’s the simplest way, but this is how I did it. I set up a reverse proxy service in a vm using caddy and then used pihole (also in a vm) to set up a local DNS record pointing to the reverse proxy. The systems need to be set up to use the pihole server as their DNS resolver.

How it works is you type audiobookshelf.local.lan in the address bar and it queries pihole which says it at 192.168.1.100 or whatever. The Caddy web server at that address then passes the request on to the service at 192.168.1.60:8080.

Setup is a bit tedious but it has worked for me.

Looks good.

Only thing I would caution on is all of that USB storage. USB isn’t exactly known for it reliability when used long term for storage devices. Given the current market, however, It will do. When you can afford to, I would move the server into a tower with the storage on SATA.

I’ve been with NameCheap for over a decade. They’re a relatively quiet company that’s been around a while.

They’ve never done anything to make me want to change providers. Have my email through them as well. Good uptime. Ok-ish prices. Good customer service the one time I’ve needed it. Web site takes some getting used to, but it’s also never changed since I started using them.

I run both Navidrome and Jellyfin. I would say that Navidrome is probably simpler of the two to setup if you’re only interested in music.

In both cases uploading new music is the same. Upload the tracks to your media directory and wait for the next scan.

:-D

I’m in no position to toss to much shade at the data hoarder community. I’m personally sitting on close to 64TB of media I’ve collected over the years. In my case, most of it legitimately acquired, either by myself or by family, but still. It adds up and most of it hasn’t been accessed more than once or twice.

So long as you don’t need to stockpile old shows you never watch, you can get by on an old laptop and possibly an external drive.

My homelab started out on a Raspberry Pi 2b. Most of the hardware Ive brought online were dumpster specials someone else didn’t want. It can be done on the cheap. Won’t necessarily be reliable, but it can be done cheap.

Well, glad I walked away from SmartThings a couple of years ago. Went with Home Assistant and have never looked back.

At the time I remember being concerned about whether they were going to kill SmartThings off or start charging a subscription as the hub called home for everything. Server time costs and they weren’t charging for it. TANSTAFL. Kinda surprised it’s still alive at all

Yes. Currently using Gemma4:12b behind OpenWebUI and Hermes Agent plus a few lighter models for OCR and tagging in Paperless.

From what I’ve noticed, yes. Considerably.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain why, but something about running Baremetal --> VM --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO is massively slower than running Baremetal --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO. Hell, Nextcloud-AIO on a Pi4 was running faster than when I put it in a much roomier VM.

Someone tried to explain it to me but all I understood was that the databases don’t like that. Something about nested virtualization restricting performance.

Oddly I didn’t run into the same issue when I ran Nextcloud-AIO off of a Digital Ocean VPS. Not sure what they are doing differently, but that was running just as fast as bare metal.