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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.



  • If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

    I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

    There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

    Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.



  • Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

    And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.



  • I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post’s photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.



  • Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.





  • With no more due process, an ID and proof of citizenship do not matter at all. They’re not checking ID’s before hauling people away. And given ICE is going around masked and without uniforms there is no way to verify their authority either. I absolutely loath violence to a point, and that tipping point is the safety of the people in my family and community, regardless of their citizenship. If a group of unidentified masked gunman are attempting to kidnap someone, the only truly patriotic American response is to defend their liberty with all necessary force. Given the murder happy training of our law enforcement, that will obviously result in tragic deaths. But that, protecting the people (all the people, not just citizens) from a corrupt government, is the fundamental justification for the 2nd amendment, always has been.




  • Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.