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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Self-hosting is inherently not low effort. This isn’t memes or shitposts. This is people helping people that are trying to help themselves, a.k.a. people making an effort. Communities rely on the discretion of mods and rules specific to the community focus. If this community didn’t have some kind of bar to meet for low effort posts it would drive away participants and contributors more interested in higher effort and more interesting topics. It gets real old seeing people ask and answer the same basic questions about Plex, Jellyfin, *arrs, and docker all the time. Worrying about if this rule will be abused seems premature. Besides (as others have pointed out) there are other communities with similar interests, if you’re that concerned that your spammy no-context YouTube video got deleted, please go try your luck elsewhere.




  • You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.


  • The article is saying that these sharks aren’t really sharking though. The sharks behavior has been changed by environmental factors (regular human feeding and humans raising the local sea temperature by dumping warm water from the desalination plant).

    1. Sharks are attracted by usually warm water from desalination plant.
    2. Tourist guide boats start chumming the waters to keep the sharks around for tourists.
    3. The attraction of so many mostly harmless sharks changes their feeding dynamic. Ever tried eating an ice cream cone near a small child? Ever tried pushing an ice cream cart through a crowd of small kids? Way different dynamic as supply and demand changes as the crowd grows.
    4. Formerly mostly harmless and “shy around humans” sharks start directly approaching humans as a source of food.
    5. Sharks investigate human, beg for food. How do sharks investigate? By biting, nibbles really, or bumping into people swimming.
    6. The first bite generates a predictably violent reaction from the humans, which triggers a feeding frenzy response. Humans aren’t equipped to defend or escape this.

    The point is that at every step of the way, these sharks are acting in a very strange way (for them) as a direct result of human action. We’ve seen this kind of thing before when people feed wild animals, strange and dangerous human seeking behaviors develop: alligators, bears, moose, etc. Dangerous animals? Yes, but the behaviors that result in human deaths are in no way natural.


  • I think our brains are pretty good at ignoring or abstracting/simplifying things we see that we don’t understand, almost too good. That’s just magic, optical illusion, or hallucination. Getting high is like chemical circuit bending. I feel staring into the void alone won’t be enough drive one mad, it’s when the void stares back and forces awareness, or knowing, that one has to worry. The non-euclidian architecture of R’leyh is just unsettling, but the stare of a multidimensional being can’t help but bend your circuits beyond their limits.

    There was that one short story though about FTL travel, wherein the conscious passengers must be asleep for the journey through hyperspace (or whatever that story called it). Some people stated awake through the trip and came out the other side mad. The hyperspace itself wasn’t enough to break their brains though, it was just that an instantaneous trip from the sleepers’ perspective, became an infinitely long (in time) trip from the waking conscious perspective. At that point, what they saw didn’t really matter, it was a forced perception or awareness without the solice of “not knowing” that broke their brains.

    None of this is science, just rambling nonsense.




  • Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.



  • If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

    I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

    There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

    Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.


  • Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

    And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.





  • I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.


  • This whole idea that they “saved” it is philosophically flawed and deeply problematic from a moral and ecological perspective. Claiming that the mother “abandoned” it demonstrates ignorance of the way these animals live and care for their young.

    Regardless, a proper wildlife rehabilitation program by a zoologist would have actually kept the moose alive and been in a position to judge if the moose was safe to be re-released. Your moose story could have easily ended in the death of people in addition to the moose. This isn’t some kind of vain high horse I’m on. It’s just simple facts learned through decades of direct experience with wild animals in the wild, in rehabilitation, and in zoos. I stand by my earlier statements. I’m sorry this bitter pill is hard for you to swallow I guess. So it goes.


  • Feeding wildlife, even one treated as a “pet”, is a death sentence for them just as surely as if you had fired the gun yourself. Your neighbor killed that moose.

    Other prime examples include: feeding alligators (now you’ve created a danger to others as well, so you’ve not just killed the animal, which will need to be destroyed by officials, you’ve potentially maimed or killed a person); feeding ducks and geese (I once has a neighbor that would feed ducks in the parking island adjacent to the main entry to our apartment complex, no surprise to me that we saw many near misses and a few dead ducks in our driveway); bears (this one should be obvious, same scenario as the gators except bears are faster, climb trees, and are probably smarter than the average person they are going to encounter when they leave the woods looking for human food).

    Undomesticated animals (wildlife/wild animals) are not pets. They’re never going to be pets. They’ve just learned to manipulate some humans for food or shelter. Maybe you’ll get along for a little while with them, but that relationship has poisoned the fear keeping them safe for and from other humans.


  • Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

    I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.