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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2025

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  • Holy shit… This is so incredibly out of touch… I can’t even…

    The Basics That Blow Minds

    Lol no… yt-dlp is a bit nifty, but everything else here is utterly expected of any media solution… Exactly zero minds were blown here…

    No transcoding

    Damn that sucks when the destination device isn’t capable of hardware decoding the media file, and too slow to software decode it… (also, you do know that you can just disable transcoding in Plex/Jellyfin, right?)

    No server

    SMB and NFS are both servers.

    Send someone an SMB/NFS share to your media

    Jesus, are you directly exposing SMB and NFS to the Internet? NFS is entirely unencrypted, and SMB has super scary vulnerabilities regularly…

    Zero server maintenance

    I really hope you are patching the OS, to avoid vulnerabilities in SMB and NFS which you are exposing to the Internet…

    Plays literally any codec without setup

    Sure, provided the device supports hardware decoding the codec or is fast enough to software decode it…

    Works offline/online seamlessly

    So does both Jellyfin and Plex (plex needs a one liner config change, though, to be fair)

    cross-platform

    How about TVs? How about Mobile?

    Or just… teach them? play movie.mkv isn’t rocket science.

    My mom has needed to call me and be guided over the phone 100% of the times that she has needed to scan a document… How do you think teaching her to navigate a file structure in a terminal is going to go?

    My daughter still needs us to spell out the cheat codes for her The Sims game… Do you think she’ll remember the terminal commands.

    If I forced any of my friends and family to use the command line to play media, they would just watch something else from a streaming service that actually offers some User Experience… Or do something else entirely.

    write a simple script or just… remember what you watched?

    Dunno… That seems like a hassle when it’s a built in feature in Plex/Jellyfin

    It’s literally a config file. If you can set up Jellyfin, you can handle this.

    No… It’s a config file per device, and SMB/NFS mounts per device. Now you need to handle syncing that config file, and any other user of the server will need their own config files…

    … And what about other features…

    • How do you browse metadata for your movies and series? I often like to read a summary about a movie to know a bit about what to expect. I also like being able to search for an actor, and see the cover art.
    • How do you group your movies with the extra features for that movie?
    • How do you stream your media to your TV?
    • How do you easily fetch subtitles for a movie that didn’t come with any subtitles?
    • When you are away from home on a heavily bandwidth constrained connection, how do you watch your nice high-quality movies?

    Back when I lived alone, attaching my media drive directly to my desktop computer made perfect sense, it was the only screen I owned that I wanted to watch anything on… And I didn’t need to share anything with anyone… And I could easily use mpv or vlc to watch anything I want…

    But now that other people are in the mix, and I like the convenience of using whichever screen I’m currently near, a simple network share + mpv falls so far short it isn’t even funny.


  • I have a few Aqara smart socket with power monitoring, and they ask great, but also expensive.

    I had a bunch of the old style of IKEA smart sockets without power monitoring. They work just fine, but they are quite clunky…

    I recently bought a couple of the new IKEA smart sockets with power monitoring, and they are almost on par with the Aqara ones, but less than half the price.



  • That’s not correct. Under the GDPR, the data that Facebook collects on you makes them the Data Controller. Any partners they share data with would be considered Data Processors. When you invoke your right to be forgotten under the GDPR, then both Data Controllers and Data Processors must delete your data. So if Facebook partners isn’t deleting your data after you filed a request to Facebook, then they are violating the GDPR.

    That said Facebook is certainly violating the GDPR left and right. For example with their “Pay or Consent” model…



  • Yes, the WD Red line used to be for NAS use, but suddenly they started including SMR drives in their WD Red lineup, people got pissed because SMR isn’t a good fit for RAID setups which NASes usually are.

    WD continued the practice, but introduced the WD Red Pro line. So now regular WD Reds could be either CMR or SMR, but WD Red Pro are guaranteed to be CMR.

    In my opinion it’s still misleading to even brand the regular WD Red line as suitable for NAS use, but at least now you can specifically pick a drive that fits your needs.







  • The idea is that you could have your data stored encrypted, such that the entity that is storing your data can’t read any of your data, but can still make calculations or updates to your data without ever learning anything about your data.

    The use cases seems rather narrow to me, but there are probably many that I just can’t think of at the moment.

    One idea could be something like a VPN service that wants to store as little data about the customer as possible. They could keep the account balance in an encrypted format. When you then add money to the balance, they can increment your balance by however much you paid, without knowing what your old balance was or what the new balance is. And they could then have another homomorphic function that can check whether your balance is positive. If your balance is positive you are allowed onto the service, if it’s not positive you don’t get access. And the company wouldn’t be able to know whether you had $5 in your account or $5000, just that your balance is currently positive.

    So yeah fundamentally it’s just being able to store and update some data, while the data is fully encrypted, never decrypting the data, to ensure some form of privacy or confidentiality



  • I have been on Arch , and I’m now running NixOS as my daily driver… IMO NixOS is less of a hassle to set up, and nearly maintenance free compared to Arch… Twice a year when the channel updates there’s a bit of stuff, but every change I need to make is usually explained in the output of my nixos-rebuild… If something suddenly breaks in an update, I just boot into my previous generation, roll back my flake.lock and wait a few days for a fix to be available…