“Some practical notes”

Looks inside

Three slop in a trenchcoat

Do you need a Github link? Assuming recent-ish LG, should he the same.

I have a lot of custom stuff, esp. regarding HomeAssistant integrations. But my favorite “stupid/not stupid if it works” solution is the following:

I have an LG TV and attached Nvidia Shield. The Shield is the only input we ever use on the TV, and since its remote also can turn the TV on/off and control volume, its all we need. Which is pretty neat, only one remote.

Except for image settings (i.e. proper bright picture during the day, different less bright image mode during the night). I don’t want to keep the extra remote on the couch just for that, but unfortunately, these settings are not exposed via HDMI CEC.

They are, however, exposed via a web API on LG TVs. So my utterly stupid solution is this:

• install quick actions app on the shield
• reconfigure Netflix button on the shield remote to open quick actions popup
• add two quick actions, night and day, that curl simple HTTP endpoints on a VM I set up
• on the VM, a simple flask server listens, and then sends the (too complex for the quick actions app) API request to the TV.

(I feel the need to add: the TV is in an isolated subnet and has never once communicated with the internet, and it will damn well die an internet virgin.)

Anyways, this has been working flawlessly for 2+ years! I also have toggles in HA for the same endpoints, but honestly, never use them. It’s so nice to just be able to toggle the image via remote.

Fleet Commander 🚀

• Fleet: 6–10 devices · 11–20 TB
• Motivation: Privacy & data ownership, Independence from Big Tech & subscriptions, Learning & experimenting
• My MVPs: Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Proxmox VE, nixos-mailserver

Sure, but when people here comment “drinking urine is super unhealthy” the “…even in normal small-ish amounts” part is clearly implied.

Well I am German, so if that adds to my credentials…

Also… I’m not exactly vanilla myself, and yeah: one of the things even the most depraved toiletplay enthusiasts know is “human waste is not good for you”.

Absolutely. TBF urine also isn’t as bad for you as some people here make it out to be (in moderation… With plenty of hydration on both sides…), but the idea of “let’s ingest the stuff my body has decided is unwanted waste, I’m sure that’s GREAT for me” is hilarious.

Yeah so I have a kink around something closely related. I have zero issues with drinking piss for, uh, fun purposes.

Those are my credentials, the following is my expert opinion:

Wtf this is just stupid.

Or just configure all the machines to auto-update from the flake at the repo. Doing this for my VMs. I have a CI machine that builds my pinned flake from the repo tip, and about 30 other VMs check nightly if the repo tip has moved, and if so, rebuild from the new tip; which, thanks to the CI machine, means just downloading and activating a new generation, nothing compute heavy.

Finally. Been saying for years, NixOS is the obvious choice for a gov distro.

Does it actually? My VM has a lot of RAM, and Proxmox reports usage always around 90%, but that’s no matter how much RAM it ACTUALLY has, because almost all of that is cache and not strictly necessary. free -m shows Jellyfin using maybe 2 Gigs.

Haha. Might have slightly exaggerated. But only slightly.

The Proxmox host in question has a 1Gbit connection to the NAS. (Unfortunately. The other hosts don’t have a GPU, but SPF+… Oh well, can’t have everything.)

At some point in the last couple of months, it must have been damaged, and negotiated down to only 100Mbit. This must roughly have coincided with the Jellyfin 10.11 update, since I remember thinking that it must be the cause, due to close proximity of update and first issues.

Anyways. For basically everything in my library, 100Mbit is fine. Streaming an episode NAS->Jellyfin and Jellyfin->TV at the same time basically never saturates the link.

BUT, from what I’ve gathered by digging through Jellyfin issues and PRs, there’s a separate issue where Jellyfin will pull the episode, and if you need subtitles extracted from the episode file server-side (to transcode them in, if the clients can’t play them), it will at the same time pull the episode AGAIN, and together with the Jellyfin->TV direction, that’s frequently enough that it saturates the link.

Symptoms is (was) either a 20-30s wait before the episode would start playing, or complete freeze.

However, I believe this particular issues has been solved for a while. I’m not sure, because I instead opted for the Subtitles Extractor Plugin, which runs nightly and pre-fetches all the subtitles and stores them on the Jellyfin VM itself.

Where it was still noticeable though was if one of [Library Scan/Trick-play Extraction/Subtitle Extraction/Media Segment Scan] ran while playing an episode, the server would completely lock up.

Long story short: cable swapped, 1Gbit, all issues gone.

Sorry, but why not just fetch a single media file with multiple languages?

Domain + reverse proxy. The security issues some people here claim are significantly overblown.

Can’t speak to that, I’m not involved. All I know is that,

• Jellyfin server gets significant upgrades in subtitle capabilities and performance,
• Jellyfin AdroidTV just released an RC that finally includes direct play for ASS/SSA subtitles,
• and on Monday, I FINALLY resolved a hardware issue (faulty cable) that made my Jellyfin almost unusable whenever ASS/SSA needed to be played (and only in that situation. Fun!)

So yeah, I don’t know or really care about leadership change, I just know it’s gonna run like a rocket now 😄

Now THAT is a changelog.

Really excited about the query performance improvements, and the improvements to subtitle handling.

Monkey’s paw curled, huh

Yes

Quick! Get this person a series A, B and C funding!

1. Signal
2. XMPP
3. Matrix

In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

So why Signal above XMPP?

Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.

I’ll second Pocket-ID.

I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)