I bought a minipc and put OPNsense on it. Its been just over a year now. Very flexible, very easy, and rock solid.

I used wireguard, then switched to Pangolin. Wireguard was simpler and worked better with mobile apps though. I’ll prob switch back for most apps.

It was live streamed on YouTube. Many YouTube channels have the trial in it’s entirety. It’s not very long as trials go. Maybe 10 hours over a few days (or something like that). I’ve only watched part of it so far.

Ah, I see the unclear part. I read this line…

I imagine sitting on coach, searching for show. Then you want to watch some, and then you have to wait half an hour for full episode (or even season?) to download.

As if OP already had a media library, and was outside of their home, sitting on a coach (bus?) and wanting to watch something from their existing library on their phone/laptop/tablet, thinking they’d have to wait for the entire thing to download. This would not be the case. If OP had no content library, and wanted to browse for something new, then yes, you’d need to download the entire thing and add it to your media library first.

1. Getting stuff into your media library require downloading the thing.
2. Watching stuff (even remotely) that already exists in your library does not require downloading the whole thing.

attempts to query 8.8.8.8, regardless of your DNS settings.

Streaming box / stream app makers have been working around local DNS for a long time. Sometimes of course they’re assholes that want to do shitty things and do this to make interdiction harder. But sometimes there are legitimate reasons. Ones I remember… users who don’t really understand what they’re doing can be overly aggressive with blocking and block things that are necessary for a particular service (causing support problems). Sometimes the ISPs DNS servers have shit performance, and using a well known commercial provider like cloudflare or google can improve performance at scale. It’s not always evil.

You can’t watch media before it’s completely downloaded.

This is not true for just about any use case.

If you use *arr, you’ll likely use Plex or Jellyfin for a media server. That server will do progressive streaming. Netflix by contrast does dynamic adaptive progressive streaming.

Progressive streaming means that playback will start once your client has downloaded and buffered enough of the selected content from the server. The amount is typically a fairly small portion of the stream, like 10 seconds or so, though the specifics are left to the server and client configs.

Dynamic adaptive progressive streaming has a multiplicty of streams optimized for different devices, formats, and quality levels. This might be a few hundred copies of the same video asset, but in a few different codecs, a few different color encodings (ie HDR, SDR), and a quality ladder of maybe 10 steps ranging from low quality SD to moderate quality UHD (like maybe 300kbps at the low end, and 40Mbps at the high end. And these will be cached around the world for delivery efficiency. On playback, the client (player) will constantly test your network throughput in the background, and “seamlessly” adjust stream quality during playback to give you the best stream your network and client can support without stopping to rebuffer.

For example, if you’re on a 4K/HDR TV with Atmos sound, and great network throughput, you’ll get the highest quality HDR streams and Atmos audio. Conversely, if you’re on mobile that doesn’t support HDR and only stereo audio, you’ll get much more efficiently coded HD video (or maybe SD) and stereo audio streams that are more suited to playback on that device. It would be impractical (huge cost and minor benefit) to try to replicate dynamic adaptive streaming just for yourself.

In any case, even if you’re just pulling off a NAS, you shouldn’t need to wait for the entire file to download before you can start playback. If your files are properly coded, you should be able to do progressive streaming in just about any use case.

No. Debian on the server. CachyOS on the laptop OPNsense / FreeBSD on the router-firewall appliance.

I don’t really feel like I need a single OS across everything. The lack of that has never been an issue.

We’ve had hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear energy for a long time.

I have opnsense, and it was pretty easy. I use DNS overrides and a local reverse proxy. When I’m on the home network, the local dns overrides point to the local reverse proxy. When I’m outside the home, public DNS records point to my VPS, which reverse proxies the traffic to my home machine. This way I’m only hitting the VPS when I’m outside the home. Much more efficient.

I think Side of Burritos’ youtube channel has a guide on how to set this up, but it’s fairly straightforward.

Something maybe wrong? I have 58k photos and it didn’t take anywhere near that long. If memory serves, I just let it rip overnight and it was done the next day.

OK, so after a bit of poking at it:

1. I agree. The OnlyOffice mobile Android app (called Documents) is a much better mobile spreadsheet viewer/editor than Collabora.
2. What’s even cooler is that the app works with Nextcloud as a cloud backend. So I can log into my existing Nextcloud instance and get the benefit of the better sheets editor on my existing files with no extra work at all!
3. They say that OnlyOffice supports markdown as of version 9, but I think they mean the broader platform itself, not the Android app. For example, you cannot create a new .md file from the mobile app, and if you try to open an existing .md file, it displays a “wrong file type” error, but it does successfully open it as a .docx.

In any case, since it works with Nextcloud, the app, out of the box, is already a more functional mobile spreadsheet editor. That’s a big win in my book. Thanks!

Haven’t tried it. Is it better in this regard?

Yeah. That’s what opencloud uses. Their app does a handoff to Collabora.

Ill have a look at Joplin. Thanks.

I’m not having any issues with my current setup

I’m lazy. I just want things to work. So in your shoes, I wouldn’t go trying to create work if things work fine.

I run Debian on my home server and my VPS, but I chose it for familiarity and stability. I wouldn’t say Debian is inherently barebones; you can add/build whatever you want. It is a longstanding, capable distro that is the base of many other distros. It’s a solid choice that favors stability. And if things are working with Mint, why break them?

By contrast, I run CachyOS on my laptop because it’s a newer laptop and the rolling release model of CachyOS (and Arch, which it’s built on) gets the updates and hardware support I need to make my laptop work. It’s simpler, better, and less work, and significantly more functional than it’s be with Debian, because the rolling release distro moves fast. My home server is 10 year old hardware, so the more stable Debian is fine.

Long before Tesla existed, the Hurst tool (aka Jaws of Life) was created. It’s like a giant can opener for cars, and firemen love to use it. The lack of door handles, locked doors, and even smashed and jammed doors,don’t really stop firefighters from getting in. This has been a thing since the 80s at least. Also, Teslas do have mechanical door handles on the inside, so occupants can open doors without power, but these factoids don’t make for good rage bait.

I tried Zulip for a small org. Used their hosted version since it’s quite generous for nonprofits. I personally liked it, but I was very much in the minority. Most of our people didn’t like it. I don’t think anyone articulated very well why they didn’t like it so it’s hard for me to characterize it other than people bitched about the UI a lot. I personally think it works fine, just be ready for some pushback.

We also tried Mattermost, and the uptake seemed a little easier. If you’re used to slack, discord, etc., most of them are pretty easy to transition to, but if you’re dealing with people that never used a real time chat platform, all of them (even slack) are like pushing a rock uphill because people can be impressively resistant to sensible change.

I remember reading a thread like this a while back and saw Home Assistant. I thought I don’t need that.

It’s probably the most used self hosted app we have.

Gradually, the migration to new platforms will take place

I’m not sure that will (or should) happen. Mainstream social media has an awful lot of shit that wouldn’t exist (or wouldn’t exist in the same way) on federated social media. For things that are purely commercial (which is a lot) the effort is higher and the payoff is smaller in a federated system. There’s a lot of social media that thrives only because it’s fundamentally commercial. That segment would never embrace federated social media willingly.

Then of course there’s the trigger-reward cycle you talk about. People might know it’s unhealthy, but they still do it. Not having that as part of the user experience a big adjustment coming to federated social media.

Test it. Seriously.

There are likely roadblocks you haven’t seen. For example, it is increasingly true that login & password aren’t good enough to access most commercial systems. So many businesses rely on active session cookies to determine identity, and if that’s missing, they’ll fallback to email or SMS based one-time passwords. And if they don’t have access to your laptop or phone, it might be impossible for them to gain access.

I do, and it’s probably the main reason I started self hosting.

Managing parents estate made me want to get my shit in order for my own kids in the event I die. There’s a good chance that if I die, my cell phone is gonna die with me. And commercial services from Apple, Google, banks, and other institutions are increasingly tied to a single cell phone as “identity.” If you try to login on a device with no session cookies, they treat it as hostile, and do all sorts of oddball stuff that almost always requires the cellphone to access. And if you don’t have that phone, it’s incredibly hard.

By self hosting, I can choose to make access to that most of that data much easier for my family if I die and my cellphone dies with me. I don’t expect them to continue self-hosting, but I do want them to have easy access to files so they can move them to some system they are comfortable with.