The answers about using Dockerfiles are absolutely correct, but if you’re looking for a quick and simple solution that will work locally, you can always just use the “commit” docker command. This basically saves the current state of a container as a new image. You can then run new containers from that image as needed.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44480740/how-to-save-a-docker-container-state

Instead you can screw it up by having too many commas or not enough. Hardly that much of an improvement.

Yeah, this is my biggest annoyance with JSON. As a data structure it’s very elegant, but it only really makes sense to people who know how to code, and without the ability to add comments you have to rely heavily on external documentation to make it readable to most users.

No one said “Compared to the US.” You added that part yourself.

It can be simultaneously true that “The UK and Germany still have a better human rights record than the US” and “The UK and Germany are really failing at upholding human rights.”

People in the UK are being arrested for saying that the genocide in Gaza is bad. People in the UK have to submit their ID or a face scan just to log in to Discord or Spotify. Trans rights are being systematically eradicated. Are you going to tell me that those are all good things as far as human rights goes?

The worst part about the dire state of human rights in the US is that it lets everyone else get away with shit like this while saying “Hey, at least we’re not those guys.” The last thing you should be doing is supporting that kind of excuse.

How does anyone in America hear this and not immediately think “That’s dictator shit”?

The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.

The Nvidia Shield is still the best option for this. I’ve tried all kinds of homebrew solutions and always had headaches. In the two years I’ve had my Shield, I’ve never had a problem. Smart Tube Next lets me cast YouTube without ads, Kodi/Jellyfin gives me all my media library, plus I’ve got official apps for Nebula, Dropout and Spotify. Custom launcher removes what little amount of ads there were (and that was unobtrusive background banner stuff even at its worst). Plus the pro version can handle some pretty powerful emulators.

Try https://programming.dev/c/python

Seconding this. Itzg’s server is so easy, I taught my 15 year old niece to run one.

Ah, the Jordan Peterson defense. “That depends on your definition of ‘have’, ‘used’, ‘a’, and ‘computer’.”

Doesn’t this guy regularly stream from a laptop in a desperate attempt to seem cool?

Honestly, none that are all that great. I tried Kodi in various forms, LibreElec, OSMC, MythTV, Steam Big Picture, and KDE TV (or whatever its called), but you’re just never going to get a great experience with stuff like Netflix and YouTube on Linux.

In the end, I bought myself an Nvidia Shield, switched out the launcher for one without ads, installed Smart Tube Next for ad-free YouTube, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I’ve got my apps for Nebula and Dropout. I’ve got Kodi and Jellyfin for my home library. It has barely any power consumption, it boots fast, it runs a huge variety of emulators, the included remote works great (plus there’s a remote app for your phone that controls the entire system), and the wife acceptance factor is exceptional.

I’m really big on self-hosting and building all my own stuff; I use lots of repurposed hardware salvaged from companies I and my friends work at and I try to avoid off the shelf products. But I’m genuinely kicking myself for not buying a Shield sooner. It really is the best TV solution for a self hoster.

We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.

The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.

Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.

Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.

Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.

Airsonic or Navidrome server, plus one of the various Subsonic apps. I like Substreamer or Dsub but there are plenty of other options.

Using self-hosting services enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly.

As opposed to what? Using a cloud SaaS alternative, or not having that service at all?

People who influence my behavior think that I should use cloud services.

This question is going to get bad data. No one likes to think of themselves as being influenced. A more effective phrasing would be “…people I trust…”

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don’t try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you’re better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.

I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

A question I have about this setup, because I’ve been contemplating out myself: If all the traffic flows through the VPS, I presume that will count against any usage limits / cost per GB with the VPS, right? Have you found that to be a problem with large file transfers or video streaming?