I did float the idea of buying a USB-C tester only to be thoroughly defeated. USB-C, as it stands, is more about the physical shape of the plug and port, not what is traveling on the cable itself. However, USB-C simply isn’t “one cable to rule them all”. Type C is more a nutrition label…
YouTube has been aggressively pushing for more ads on its platform. And their antics circumvent their own supposedly ad-free subscription. YouTube Premium, at a fixed price, is supposed to deliver the unaltered experience and more, like added functionality. But as I have covered before on the topic, YouTube is bad at keeping up with their…
Legacy projects often support legacy methods of alerting users that their home labs are in jeopardy — in email. Only that this method no longer flies. Not only do the notifications often get stopped by the automated spam filter, but these emails are also sent out by an anonymous SMTP server, not a certified known…
I thought I’d share some light-hearted news before I can drop the pessimistic read on the tech sector as a whole. Anthropic hasn’t yet shared any update on when the US government’s suspension of Fable 5 will be lifted, but there are communities voicing support for the repeal of the ban, while sharing memes around…
One of the odd features left out of the Docker ecosystem is restart on unhealthy. Docker knows the status of individual containers, but it somehow does not natively support the feature. There are yaml tricks to have a container kill itself if unhealthy, so the Docker engine restarts it based on the policy. The tool…
The home lab community has long assessed the pros and cons of NAS ecosystems and respective accessories for future expansions. Notably, Synology has been offering expansion units as a companion to their DiskStation lineup. For example, if the main unit only has 5 bays but the spec sheet says it supports up to 15 drives,…
If you are using a rule-based proxy switcher, checking IP addresses for each proxy could easily get out of hand. It is possible to stop the auto-routing and force the connection for manual testing, but that is not what I wanted to do with a browser extension. The website I recommend using for this occasion…
As I was going through my media library, there was one thing I noticed consistently — I am more or less after the fan-made subs than the rips themselves. The official subtitles tend to miss out on the clever wordplays, crude jokes, pretty much anything that is not broadcast-friendly in both literal and financial sense.…
I know the title can be mouthful. So let me start by describing the problem first. There are different services available on the internet showing what streaming services in your region carry the contents you are after. The problem I had with these services were: one. it often fails to parse the localized titles used…
This is a related post from yesterday’s. Both Plex and *arr platforms share the same categorization of video contents. They are either films or series. Sonarr handles series, Radarr handles films or theatrical runs. One would think films would have less an issue fetching metadata, but managing media libraries can create some extreme edge cases.…
One of the automation self-hosting streaming aims to achieve is matching and fetching metadata. Plex handles both rather well and is quite forgiving with file names on average. I suppose the emphasis is on average. Plex divides medias into two major categories: films (or theater) or series (TV shows, and others). If Plex fails to…
I had heard about Plex before, but I had never seriously put a thought into it. That is, until I realized how vulnerable of a geolocation I was in. If you are reading this in North America or Europe, it might not affect you as much; but geoblocking, coupled with intentional licensing lapse, it becomes…
The prevalence of web UIs with advanced DB features on them make it possible to save search queries on bookmarks. For example, I could keep track of a favorite author on a eBook platform with a url similar to service.ddns.org:port/search?=authorname. Each platforms have their own URL scheme, but the point is simple. This approach would…
I’m still in the process of writing up the Caddy + DuckDNS post, but I thought to make a separate post anyway what DDNS is and why I am writing about DuckDNS for the particular home lab setup. DDNS is often used for home or small office environment, when the IP address to the said…
Synology DSM is equipped with rudimentary level of reverse proxy feature, but after few home lab projects, I believe a user ought to notice the inherent reliability issue. In my setup, I keep my NAS unexposed the to the internet — the only way to access it is via Tailscale or VPN. The problem with…