I have a Raspberry Pi with a Wireguard VPN on it. So on my android phone, I connect to the Wireguard VPN, and then I use this app to trigger the WakeOnLan:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitklog.wolon

Holy shit… This is so incredibly out of touch… I can’t even…

The Basics That Blow Minds

Lol no… yt-dlp is a bit nifty, but everything else here is utterly expected of any media solution… Exactly zero minds were blown here…

No transcoding

Damn that sucks when the destination device isn’t capable of hardware decoding the media file, and too slow to software decode it… (also, you do know that you can just disable transcoding in Plex/Jellyfin, right?)

No server

SMB and NFS are both servers.

Send someone an SMB/NFS share to your media

Jesus, are you directly exposing SMB and NFS to the Internet? NFS is entirely unencrypted, and SMB has super scary vulnerabilities regularly…

Zero server maintenance

I really hope you are patching the OS, to avoid vulnerabilities in SMB and NFS which you are exposing to the Internet…

Plays literally any codec without setup

Sure, provided the device supports hardware decoding the codec or is fast enough to software decode it…

Works offline/online seamlessly

So does both Jellyfin and Plex (plex needs a one liner config change, though, to be fair)

cross-platform

How about TVs? How about Mobile?

Or just… teach them? play movie.mkv isn’t rocket science.

My mom has needed to call me and be guided over the phone 100% of the times that she has needed to scan a document… How do you think teaching her to navigate a file structure in a terminal is going to go?

My daughter still needs us to spell out the cheat codes for her The Sims game… Do you think she’ll remember the terminal commands.

If I forced any of my friends and family to use the command line to play media, they would just watch something else from a streaming service that actually offers some User Experience… Or do something else entirely.

write a simple script or just… remember what you watched?

Dunno… That seems like a hassle when it’s a built in feature in Plex/Jellyfin

It’s literally a config file. If you can set up Jellyfin, you can handle this.

No… It’s a config file per device, and SMB/NFS mounts per device. Now you need to handle syncing that config file, and any other user of the server will need their own config files…

… And what about other features…

• How do you browse metadata for your movies and series? I often like to read a summary about a movie to know a bit about what to expect. I also like being able to search for an actor, and see the cover art.
• How do you group your movies with the extra features for that movie?
• How do you stream your media to your TV?
• How do you easily fetch subtitles for a movie that didn’t come with any subtitles?
• When you are away from home on a heavily bandwidth constrained connection, how do you watch your nice high-quality movies?

Back when I lived alone, attaching my media drive directly to my desktop computer made perfect sense, it was the only screen I owned that I wanted to watch anything on… And I didn’t need to share anything with anyone… And I could easily use mpv or vlc to watch anything I want…

But now that other people are in the mix, and I like the convenience of using whichever screen I’m currently near, a simple network share + mpv falls so far short it isn’t even funny.

Yeah, depending on the heatpump, the outdoor temperature, and the target temperature, a heatpump can reach up to 5.5x heat output. That means for every 1 kWh of electricity you use to run the pump, the pump will output 5.5 kWh of heat energy.

I used to be a software engineer, but moved into infrastructure instead, so I haven’t really been programming much for few years. But all the vibe coding I see around me is making me yearn for coding the old-school way. And I’ve been searching a bit for something to apply that drive to…

I have a few Aqara smart socket with power monitoring, and they ask great, but also expensive.

I had a bunch of the old style of IKEA smart sockets without power monitoring. They work just fine, but they are quite clunky…

I recently bought a couple of the new IKEA smart sockets with power monitoring, and they are almost on par with the Aqara ones, but less than half the price.

The problem is that they don’t have to prevent encryption at all…

Many governments are already recording and storing incredible amounts of your Internet traffic.

With this new legislation they want to require all companies, that offer some form of encrypted communication, to submit all the messages for scanning before they are encrypted. So they want to force Facebook and many others to actually intercept the messages before they get “end-to-end” encrypted, so they can get scanned by AI and other systems to look for CSAM.

Of course they can’t prevent encryption… Anyone can get some encryption software that doesn’t submit the messages to scanning before encrypting…

Now you as a person have the options of either using a platform that scans your messages, or finding something that actually offers privacy.

If the government then decides that they want to investigate you, then they just dig into their trove of intercepted messages. If you only used scanned services, then they can see all your messages and probably find something in them to prosecute you over. But if you used any encrypted services they don’t have access to, then they can just start prosecuting you for using encryption that they can’t spy on…

In either case you lose, and they gain the ability to practically put anyone they want behind bars.

And who knows who will wield these tools at a later point, and what they might decide should be illegal, which they can then immediately dig for in all their previously stored and scanned messages.

They were briefly, but that was reversed on 2024-08-01

Why not just write your YAML files in JSON syntax?

JSON is a valid subset of YAML

Yes, the WD Red line used to be for NAS use, but suddenly they started including SMR drives in their WD Red lineup, people got pissed because SMR isn’t a good fit for RAID setups which NASes usually are.

WD continued the practice, but introduced the WD Red Pro line. So now regular WD Reds could be either CMR or SMR, but WD Red Pro are guaranteed to be CMR.

In my opinion it’s still misleading to even brand the regular WD Red line as suitable for NAS use, but at least now you can specifically pick a drive that fits your needs.