Faceman🇦🇺

I run two synchonised Adguard instances on two different devices as DNS servers for the house (and for my work PC via vpn). on top of that I run local ad blockers on top of that. I dont care that my DNS ping times are a few ms longer. I dont want to be pestered, tracked, solicited or interrupted.

I cant stand the barrage of ads, especially on mobile websites, like its at the point where you want to read an article and you get two lines of text and the entire rest of the screen is ads you have to navigate.

direct from the artists whenever possible, Bandcamp, Patreon, merch and physical media, gigs when possible. lots of smaller artists are on bandcamp because it seems reasonably well run, pays the artists fairly (especially on “bandcamp friday” sale days, where the artist gets 100% of the revenue)

if you have contact details for an artist contact them directly, dont give them your life story or act like a crazy stalker, just say hi, explain you prefer to buy music directly when possible and you dont want to support companies like Spotify. This method is mainly for niche music and new artists that struggle to find audiences in the traditional algorithm based machine but it doesn’t hurt to try.

I’ll download music from Soulseek (and I share TBs of it too) when all else fails, or in a try before you buy type of arrangement.

I’ve always kept my apps and databases on solid state media, putting them on spinning rust, even in a well tuned ZFS pool with lots of disks is way too slow for their (admittedly inefficient) database.

It absolutely does but you have to do it yourself, they dont accept any liability for doing that and nor should they, so if you dont know how to do it with at least the minimal level of safety and security and accept that risk yourself then you really shouldn’t try. Ideally you would only do it via a private VPN to trusted users.

Plex has some features built in to make just opening the port reasonably safe, though I’d still recommend against that. They also have a reasonably secure account verification system, and the software itself has proven to be somewhat safe.

Jellyfin has very little security built in and is not intended to be public facing, it also has the double edged sword of being open source, so you could read through all the code and pick it apart for flaws and exploits if you wanted to and we all just trust that when exploits or flaws are found they are reported properly.

JF is great but you are on your own if you want to make it available via WAN.

honestly Wholfin being so nice to use was my last hurdle to getting the whole house over the JF from Plex, just a few remote users with uncommon players that still need Plex and once they upgrade I can be done with it for good after starting out with OSXBMC way back in the day and being a lifetime licence holder from the start of paid plans.

Most people just use Sonarr/Radarr for this, though it can be tricky with anime specifically because you are pretty much locked into TMDB metadata, which might not be what you want for some series (alternate orders, absolute or series numbering, season 2/3 being different shows entirely, side series being specials not a season etc. etc. etc).

I’ve used TinyMediaManager before, not open source (other than a very old version that is still out there last time I checked), but the free version is reasonably powerful, especially if you want to customise the details of your naming/folder structures or do custom metadata or ordering. has some CLI functions but is mostly intended as a gui app.

apart from the usual suspect like, Jellyfin+Plex (still have some straggler users that need to upgrade their players for JF to work properly), Immich, nextcloud etc, I really like running Birdnet-Go. I give it my CCTV camera feeds and it uses a NN to identify birds it hears.

I get statistics about species heard around the property, charts to correlate detections to seasons and weather, and some interesting info about rarer species that I didn’t know were in my area. Every morning I check it to see if there was anything new recorded.

it doesn’t really have a purpose, though the data can be submitted to larger databases, but it’s just a nice thing to have.

EDIT: Also Vaultwarden, forgot about that, super happy to be hosting my own password manager instead of trusting (and paying for) companies like Dashlane to host it like I used to.