No doubt the idea of complete control of a blog at $10 a year would be appealing for many. And no doubt many would share the same concerns as I do. During the planning phase, some of the definitive downgrades I was able to come to terms with, some of the regained controls I was able to make use of, and the saved cost I was ready to file under an existing list of subscriptions. I believe there are three major concerns most bloggers may have: uptime, support, and technical debt to AI.
Tagged Self-Hosting
The Part Where I Pay, Migrating with AI Pt. 3
The plan finished baking. Reviewed, revised, the whole nine yards. I wasn’t going to execute the plan myself; I wanted to automate it as well. The only decision left was how.
Between Cost of Hosting and Effort of Self-Hosting, Migrating with AI Pt. 2
Starting a blog doesn’t cost money. At least that’s how I started back in the 2000s, and free platforms are still around. Intermediary platforms came along in the 2010s, giving some control back to bloggers or sharing the ad revenue. The way out of it all, ever since the term weblog was coined, was to run it yourself — either on a machine from a paid hosting service or on your own home server. The question was price and effort.
The Day Hosting Failed Me, Migrating with AI Pt. 1
Mad Tea Party was down for 24+ hrs. A datacenter problem. I’m not arguing a professional hosting service should have zero downtime. Failure itself is expected. Reliability is what happens after it. A full day of downtime is one full business day lost, and a good hosting service should be judged not only on physical performance, but on clear communication during a sudden failure and reasonable effort to reduce it.
App to Self-Host Location History Tracker
My last camera for the sake of pure photography, I believe I bought it around early 2010s. It was a click-and-shoot with GPS tagging. Smartphone cameras were still playing catch up, and while the GPS chip gave it more metadata, hardly any software could make use of it. The geolocation data lived by itself, not matched to a place. And it was not easy to export elsewhere, either. Scroll forward to 2026, I wish I hadn’t bought the camera at all. Smartphones genuinely provide impressive quality for a portable device, with much needed metadata (including accurate date and time), face…
App to Convert Email Notifications to App-based
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 server. If you want an instant push-based notification, there is a tool for that.
The Murky Rabbit Hole of DIY NAS
My NAS is reaching the end of its design. Twenty terabytes usable across five bays, a few hundred gigabytes left, and it’s warned me twice now that I’m nearly out. I’ve bought time where I could, moving what I can to the pool meant for cold archive. But the design is aging out on more than one front. Swapping the drives to bigger ones won’t fix the root of the problem. With the new home lab feeding the queue, the need only grows until the backlog clears. The clock is ticking.
App to Restart Unhealthy Docker Container
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 I am recommending is a more comprehensive, if not more commonly recommended, method.
How to Remedy SERVFAIL during Caddy + DuckDNS Certificate Challenge
Caddy is a tool I use for home lab HTTPS management. However, the tool is not bulletproof. It’s not a simple GUI tool to add services and forget. One such problem Caddy can introduce with HTTPS is during the challenge to obtain a certificate. Because the certificate has to be renewed periodically, even if it succeeded at one point, it may fail or give out an error tomorrow.
How to Band-aid Fix Seerr “Movie Not Found” Error
My Seerr started acting up after the migration. In the web UI, it threw “Movie Not Found” errors — not on everything, but, evidently, only on some of the movies in the library and some of the entries in trending. Both LAN and WAN were working fine. The errors weren’t persistent. They came and went, and the number of films affected kept changing.
Raspberry Pi, RAM, and Home Labs
Most of my Raspberry Pis have been decommissioned. I had used Docker and Docker only on Pis, so much of the effort was on focused compatibility and reliability of single machine (Synology NAS) doing all the work. For the record, Synology couldn’t do everything off the shelves. I had to upgrade the RAM from default 4 GB to 20 GB. And I am running most of the DBs on m.2 drives to ensure faster read and write. The question I have now is simple. What will I do with Pi boards?
How to Pass Brackets in URL Query for Komga
One of the reasons why I am still in the process of writing a piece on Komga is its weird quirks like this. As a comics and graphic novels manager, Komga has what I would consider Calibre has for graphical publications: lots of metadata managements, different lists that handle series and books, and more. But Komga has its own limits. One such limit, I have seen so many times, is that the web UI uses brackets in the URL for query. It often confuses browsers beyond limit.
App to Manage Streaming Contents and Self-Hosted Media Discoveries
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 outside of North America, two. these services are not always up to date with licensing. What it means, in the real world, is you might be buying or adding a new subscription to watch a movie or a TV show that either you already own…
App to Import and Download Films for Plex
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.
App to Import and Download Series for Plex
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 match the existing files for series, it has to be done manually; at worst, it could be a grueling work to match the show, the seasons therein, and then the episodes therein.