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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 18th, 2025

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  • I started my homelab with a couple exposed services, but frankly the security upkeep and networking headaches weren’t worth the effort when 99% of this server’s usage is at home anyway.

    I’ve considered going the Pangolin route to expose a handful of things for family but even that’s just way too much effort for very little added value (plus moving my reverse proxy to a VPS doesn’t sound ideal in case the internet here goes down).

    Getting 2 or 3 extra folks on to wireguard as necessary is just much easier.





  • The industry is pretty fucked right now to be brutally honest. I was let go a few years ago after nearly a decade along with another member of our team. Took a full year and easily 1000+ applications for me to find something new, and even longer for my former team member.

    Didn’t get back into SWE either. I work in software support now, making literally half of what I used to make, and I believe my friend is in a sort of sysadmin role.

    The best thing I could say is expand your options. Between RTO mandates, huge pushes for genAI bullshit, and just complete oversaturation of the market, SWE is a hellhole right now. The job market as a whole is a disaster right now, but tech is on another level. Expand your options to different roles and tune your resume to get past the automated bullshit systems and read by real people. I hate to be pessimistic but frankly I would not expect to get into another SWE role with how things are right now. Software support is a strong adjacent field but don’t expect anywhere near the same salary.







  • I decided to experiment a bit with Headscale when the wg-easy v15 update broke my chained VPN setup. Got it all set up with Headplane for a UI, worked amazingly, until I learned I was supposed to set it all up on a VPS instead and couldn’t actually access it if I wasn’t initially on my home network, oops.

    I might play around with it again down the road with a cheap VPS, didn’t take long to get it going, but realistically my setup’s access is 95% me and 5% my wife so Wireguard works fine (reverted back to wg-easy v14 until v15 allows disabling ipv6 though, since that seemed to be what was causing the issues I’ve been seeing).




  • I tried Jellyfin for music in addition to tv and movies, but ended up dropping that part. I set up Navidrome with beets - the adjustment is using album artist instead of just artist everywhere.

    Full stack:

    • Navidrome server
    • beets for management
    • Feishin client (local on my desktop, though I do have it hosted too for the hell of it)
    • Symfonium (mobile app, abour $6 but absolutely worth it)
    • Lidarr
    • slskd
    • Soularr (integrates the two above - it’s a bit hacky but it works fairly well)


  • It’s a little bit of everything.

    I haven’t really dabbled with tech much outside of work since college. This year, I started on a huge journey to change that for a couple of reasons:

    • The ongoing technofascist shitshow was the biggest motivator. I want to move as far away from big tech as possible. I’m sick of passively supporting companies that supply and fund genocides, steal and cheat their way to billions, and shove AI bullshit into everything.
    • Regaining control and privacy. This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. Complacency is part of how we got here.
    • On a personal note, I quit Twitch streaming last year after a decade, and frankly just needed a new hobby.
    • The Steam Deck showed me that gaming on Linux day-to-day is extremely viable after all these years. Last time I tried a Linux desktop, it was practically non-existent outside of Valve porting the Orange Box.
    • It just makes for some interesting projects

    I’ve done all of this in the past 5 months:

    • Got a new desktop (I just needed the upgrade in general), tweaked the hell out of Windows on it, but wanted more
    • Scrapped that plan and set up a CachyOS dual boot. I’ve touched Windows maybe 5 times since then. I keep it around just in case but I never use it.
    • Wiped my bloated phone and installed GrapheneOS
    • Started making some moves on the software side: finally bought a good VPN, moved off GMail to Tuta, started using LibreWolf and Fennec, etc etc.
    • In that process, I got a cheap VPS and set up NextCloud as a Drive replacement. No idea what I was doing, security nightmare I’m sure, and I ended up scrapping that and going the full selfhost route
    • Now I’m selfhosting 40ish services on a mini PC that not only replace big tech products I used to use, but also add so much more utility

  • I grew out of just about everything in my old digital library so it’s been long gone, but I didn’t realize just how much stuff I had on my old bandcamp account already. Grabbed all of that, bought a bunch more, obtained everything else from my Tidal rotations and slapped it all into Navidrome.

    The initial setup is definitely a pain but the payoff has been tremendous. Not financially though - I spent more buying new shit from small artists than I would spend on a streaming service in a year. But that goes so much further for them than streaming does anyway.


  • My wife was mentioning the other day that if something happened to me she’d have absolutely no idea how to work any of this shit and that convinced me to actually start documenting it LMAO

    Good time to start doing it too. Aside from setting up a NAS this weekend and figuring out an audiobook solution (not something I’ve ever dabbled with but I really should start reading some communist theory), I’ve got this project right where I want it for a long while.


  • I’m putting together a pretty simple one this week. Got a used HP Elitedesk G4 SSF for around $150, already have 2 8TB external drives lying around that are easy enough to shuck and slap into it. Should be pretty easy to just slap TrueNAS Scale onto it, set up a mirror with the 2 drives, and be good to go for a while.

    I’ll definitely need more space down the road and this thing can’t fit more than 2 drives without some modifications (3 is doable, but 4 will take some 3D printed parts which I believe someone’s still working on fine-tuning). But it’s good enough for me for now, still got 2.5TB I’m not using.

    If I thought about storage a bit more before starting this project, I probably would’ve just gotten the same SSF but with some slightly better specs to use as the entire server, rather than running 2 different machines, but oh well.

    Edit: Slight change of plans, got a 12tb drive free through a program at work, so gonna go with UnRAID instead. The license fee is a bit disappointing but it seems to suit my needs better, and being able to mix and match drives of any size at will is pretty nice