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…
I suppose each developers have their own basic browsers to fallback to. If it works on this browser, it’s likely going to run on all browser. My go-to browser, especially for apps that offer web UI, is Firefox. Part of the reason why I haven’t moved to Chrome — aside from the usual memory jokes…
Firefox is giving me different varieties of issues lately. Partly, because I think most apps are now geared toward Chrome and Safari — the most popular on all platforms or the most popular on single platform browsers. But that’s an excuse for Firefox not working with websites and web UIs, not the Firefox’s own bookmarks…
I had covered this issue before using a dedicated add-on on browsers. While it worked, there were two problems, at least in my opinion: a. it’s a separate app just for one website, b. it’s not available on iOS. Granted, I was not able to find a universal user script that works on both platforms,…
What I like about Firefox and its community-driven open source nature really coincides with a lot of what I like about Python. There are always like-minded people trying to solve a problem that is often too niche for other browsers. Having said all the that, Safari, as a browser platform, lacks that community attention yet.…
Back in 2000s, when I got my hands on Intel Mac for the first time, there were two things that immediately caught my attention: Spotlight, the functioning search tool on OS, and DevonThink, the highly regarded documents management software beloved by many Mac users. Some even called DevonThink to be the savior of Macintosh lineage…
I suppose it needs some context to explain what even is a “VPN server on a router” for home and small offices. If you have a home lab, DIY projects, or even a simple NAS, chances are, you don’t want to have them all exposed to the internet. Prudence dictates every device should have its…
As I am still doing migration projects from Pi (the hardware) to everything hosted on NAS, there were few things I wanted to try. One of which is open-source community-backed DBs. So far, not all of them were as good as I thought, but every projects I had seen so far showed the signs of…
As I am migrating from Pi setups to one NAS, one of the immediate upside and downside was HDD. I get more storage out of the physical machine, but HDDs are still slower than microSD cards on Pi. Fortunately, I had some old NVMe drives sitting around and decided to make use of it. The…
I’m still in the process of retiring old projects. While I’m at it, I wanted a backup solution that will work over network. Putting a USB stick to a working Pi is a solution, only when that Pi is not headless (i.e. stuck away in a network closet). As far as I know, and this…
There are many web-based YouTube downloaders out there, but I thought to share one that is known to work locally. Instead of worrying about which button is the real “download” on the web, I thought why not use a program that runs locally and possibly from more reputable sources. yt-dlp is an open source, command-line…
I still have an account from Twitter days, I rarely it. X, or formerly Twitter, is simply not my style. While I appreciate some official communications done through X as a backup in rapid response (e.g. service status), I wouldn’t mind it if the same memos were written on Bluesky, or else. In fact, I…
The official YouTube app is mostly hit-and-miss on mobile devices. I can’t speak for all experiences, but on iOS, the YouTube app does not support subtitles or CC on PiP, or picture in picture. I had tried using YouTube Premium for this very purpose, but it was up to no avail. For the records, it…
Synology offers an official version of BitTorrent client, Download Station, but it lacks many features I would consider given in this day and age: a. it would need comprehensive web UI to manage BitTorrent traffic, and b. it would need VPN or proxy support natively. Neither were the case when I gave Download Station a…