Closest thing I have to a formal education in IT is taking keyboarding, QB, then VB in high school in the early 00s. The only thing I came away with from that was the basic concepts; variables, integers, strings, loops, functions, recursion, etc. I remember nearly nothing about VB. Self taught some Python after that, went to Linux and started learning Bash, CLI tooling, editing confs, working on small portions of languages I didn’t know like Haskell (Xmonad) and eLisp (emacs), running containers… Long enough ago I remember manually setting up Apache and MySQL a few times, editing whatever init system I was using to ensure they started, etc.

Time and cost are big determining factors. Sometimes I’d like to know more but never enough to become indebted to educational bills for something I’m not making a career out of. Same reason I can install, remove, rekey and pick various locks, and have installed some access control stuff in the past under an employer, but I’m not shelling out to become licensed Locksmith or Security Systems Technician myself. Tools are comparatively inexpensive, and I have many from past employment, and YouTube is still free and archiveable… add in a bit of “dorking” to find manuals and whatnot and self-teaching just makes more sense for me. Same reasons I’m entering my shade tree mechanic arc these days - it’s not worth paying to become an auto tech but it is worth saving thousands on the repairs I can do. Plus it’s just fun to learn and work with my hands.

Gotcha, that sheds more light. For your use case you’d need to script up some solution that parses the URLs from the feed(s) and sends them to TA’s API. I don’t think it’d be terribly difficult but, if I wasn’t concerned with actually saving the content, I’d turn to something like SmartTube/FreeTube/etc for simplicity and to just stream it.

For OP’s use case, throwing specific URLs at something which will download them and then have them pop up in Jellyfin, I can’t think of anything easier (at least after the initial setup) than TA. Unless any of the other suggestions here can also handle the metadata for JF, there’s gonna be a lot of manual work involved to have videos show up meaningfully and organized in JF.

TA is probably perfect, really. You get the TA Jellyfin plugin , mount TA’s library directory as read-only in Jellyfin, and add that mount as a “Shows” library with TA as the sole metadata provider. Channels become “Show” names and “Seasons” are the upload year. One-way or bi-directional watch progress between JF and TA. I don’t use the feature but I think it supports some sort of organizing by YouTube playlist these days too, maybe as “Collections.”

The only issue I’ve had is JF seems to do some built-in stuff when it comes to filling in metadata based on file names. Occasionally an “S0” or “E12”, as examples, will erroneously put a video into “Specials” (Season 0) or give an “Episode 12” where there shouldn’t be if those or similar substrings are in the Video ID (which is also the filename). My hackish solution, for a while, was a script that ran a sqlite command against the Jellyfin DB to find any videos in the YouTube library with not null episode numbers and set them to null, and also set unexpected seasons to the year of the video’s upload.

I had it automated to run right after my scheduled TA downloads completed but it felt a bit wrong doing that on live DB. So now I just periodically run the query, sans the updating, then fix the metadata from within JF’s UI if there are any query results. I could see that being a little irksome, and beyond what non-hobbyists could figure out, but it’s honestly a small price for me when it means I have all my archived YouTube content organized, with descriptions and thumbnails, with no other real work on my part.

Don’t know if I can pick a favorite but I’m often the most happy when I’m actively using Homebox and LubeLogger. I track my tools with the former and track service records, parts inventory, mileage and such with the latter. If I’m using those services extensively it’s because I’m wrenching on something and adding more RockAuto magnets to my collection. Even when the circumstances suck, I genuinely enjoy an opportunity to take things apart, tinker and repair them.

I’ve got the family’s vehicles in LubeLogger, having become the mechanic for anything short of transmission problems or requiring welding or a machine shop. The riding mower is in there too just because. It’s never often enough and I’m tempted to find a bike or an old beater I can tune up just to have a project that doesn’t have me sitting at the keyboard.

Fave is (Doom) Emacs, even though I haven’t used it in a while. It was fun and mostly painless to customize it a tad with no prior Lisp experience. Things like Org Mode and Org Babel let me write a short story around my code blocks if I needed one to remember concepts, purposes, etc in a language I was tinkering with. They could execute in-document or I could tangle them to where they belonged. That just seemed brilliant to me. It being essentially an eLisp interpreter at its core, with the editor functionality and everything else built on top, it was neat being able to just pop open an interpreter window or tab and use what I learned for quick calculations or whatever. Previously I’d open a new terminal or tmux pane and use Python for that purpose. And currently mostly Bash and CLI utils over Python.

Pretty sure my first was EDIT.COM on MS-DOS but I would’ve been a single-digit age at the time and mostly clueless so I say notepad.exe instead. The window in which I used DOS was very short before the family computer started running Win 3.1. Then 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista… every version except 2000 and 8. We had 8 long enough to back up our data and revert to 7

Future, I’ll probably keep trucking with nvim.

Honorable mention, gedit. My first GUI editor on Linux desktop before I leaned heavy into CLI applications.

Loathed, VSCode. I’m not a dev so it was just too much. A Vim plugin made it usable for editing, and I liked how easy plugins were to find/install, but I’m not a dev and full IDEs are wasted on me. Same reason I finally stopped trying to turn nvim into one and minimized my plugins for it.

Current is nvim. I like modal editing and its particular keybinds. I like regex search and find/replace. Multiline editing, motions, and macros defined on the fly. I bet I haven’t read 2% of the built-in documentation and know it already does more than I’d ever need right out of the box. For the same reason I still often find neat things I didn’t know about it and try to commit to memory for my future editing.

Longest is n/vim. That probably won’t ever change for the same reasons above.

This has been my solution. Subscribe to a playlist or an entire channel, set up the schedule, and you’re done. If you’re a supporter of the project I believe it has real-time monitoring for new uploads.

I will note that, somewhat recently, YouTube changed the URL format for playlists and this has broken subscribing/downloading playlists that use the new format. I haven’t checked today but there’s a patch that was still waiting to be merged. Unless there’s a new release incorporating it, you’ll have to apply it yourself or feed the URLs in manually for now.

Beets for importing, ascii only, lastgenre, fetchart, whatever other plugins I’m forgetting, /artist/yyyy_album_name/ directory structure, 01_title.ext for single disc, 01-01_title.ext for multi disc. I invoke beets manually just to keep an eye on how things get matched up and tagged during the process. I deal in full albums, LPs, compilations and such because it’s often easier to maintain and match metadata than with individual tracks. I guess it’s a data hoarder / archivist compulsion too, but it’s rare I can’t find at least one other track on an album appreciable so… why not?

A weekly rsync pushes the beets DB and library from my TrueNAS server to another server with a 8TB external dedicated to backing up my most important stuff (personal projects, password store, compose files, confs, etc). I’ve got an rsync alias set up on my laptop I invoke manually because I’m nearing the limit of what I want to allot to music. At least until I decide to get a larger drive.

That’s local in triplicate, with zraid on the NAS and a fourth copy on my phone, which leaves me feeling pretty good about not losing any music outside of a house fire or tornado. I was also rsync’ing all my media (music, movies, shows) to another TrueNAS setup at a relative’s but some things have changed with that so it’s on hold. Not fond of missing my off-site backup but hopefully can resolve it soon.

Everything is local only right now. The library is mounted read-only in Jellyfin so can play music from pretty much any phone, TV, computer, my Steam Deck, etc throughout the house. If I ever decide to open things up, reverse proxy or whatever, I might look into Finamp but I buy a flagship phone every six to ten years for the storage space so I can just take my music with me. Might eventually switch that to a dedicated music device.

Desktop design decisions. A lot of folks hated Unity. I know I did - they turned something familiar into something Apple like and I couldn’t stand it. I’m genuinely not a fan of the unified menus and such. It didn’t help that users were basically forced out of Gnome 2 into it when Unity became the default.

Within Unity they Integrated Amazon results into the Desktop Search. That was likened to spyware since your queries were being shared with Amazon, much like MS integrating web results into their own search. Ubuntu fucked up harder because, absent any filtering, their search occasionally produced adult products in the results - ie sex toys and such. Imagine telling your kid Fluffy needs a new knotted rope chew toy. They start searching “dog knot toy” just to have the results filled with BadDragon knockoffs.

They’ve leaned heavier into enterprise over the years and that has alienated a lot of the Desktop audience which helped bring attention to OS in the first place. They went from “Linux for Human Beings,” making desktop computing more accessible throughout the world, to becoming essentially the Microsoft of the Linux world.

Their snap backend is proprietary. You can’t just host your own snap repository. Even if you host your own local snap cache, it ultimately must point to and retrieve from their repository to populate that cache.

I’m sure there’s other stuff worth pointing out that I’ve forgotten.

So the people who “can barely run their phones” are also the ones consciously seeking out adb files and acknowledging the warning that pops up when they proceed to install them? Because it seems like every single time I heard of a bunch of rubes being pwnt, they’d all installed some fake tool or Jerry Smith tier bubble popping game that unsurprisingly ended up being malware… distributed by the fucking Play Store. When Google’s “Play Protect” doesn’t seem to actually matter, why would anyone want to allow them to then monopolize app distribution under the false flag of “security?”

Yeah, Jellyfin was my best example. I’ve got the motions memorized, to get to the admin panel, as well but Homepage is my homepage so it saves those few seconds. I agree otherwise about urgent messages. Important stuff of mine hits a Discord webhook for now.

Eventually I’ll set up some other alternative to get push notifications. I took the time to write a few half-assed cogs for pycord, and I enjoy(ed) the process and using them, but I don’t really trust the platform. I might need to give good old IRC a go again. I’m sure some Android client can do push notifications on a specific channel/sender basis.

Most are definitely just showing off; “Look at how many photos I have stored,” “I have so many podcasts and ebooks,” “Bow to me, mortals!”

On the flip, some are useful. PeaNUT gives UPS off/on line power status at a glance, Jellyfin shows active streams iirc, FreshRSS shows if there are unread feeds, Portainer shows if any containers have stopped, etc. Jellyfin is a big one since I don’t have to get into the WebUI to see if updates or whatever are going to interrupt someone. Otherwise I’m mostly in agreement and just use links in lieu of widgets and silly API calls.

I took a break from my X-Files binge to watch Mr. Inbetween. I thought it was phenomenal, if not a bit short. The YouTube algo kept pushing it on me so, when I finally caved, I was surprised to find out the episodes were only about 23m (half hour with commercials). The vibe I got, from the clips, was that episodes would certainly be hour-block to contain and meaningfully convey everything they had to. In reality the story is just very fat-free and told well. It parallels Ray’s spartan demeanor. I wish it was longer, and it easily could have been, but it wrapped up properly before it had any chance of going downhill.

There’s a tool, whose name I forget, which is included in Kali NetHunter to do just that. It does whatever trickery is needed to present the phone/tablet as a bootable thumb drive. It requires root and, to my dismay when I needed it, I never owned a device that was rootable to fully use NetHunter. It could do a lot of other cool stuff via USB too; phone as a Bad USB, Rubber Ducky, automated Windows login bypasses, etc.

First played it on my Sega Dreamcast. Probably the only way I could still play now since I don’t have a CRT anymore for light guns.

I’m not 100% sold on running actual ads although, if I recreated Nickelodeon, it might be fun to throw in commercials for stuff like Gak or the old Stick Stickley bits (provided I could find those). Maybe roll my own Snick and Nick-at-Nite blocks. For the latter it’d be neat to have some more period-correct stuff - even if it’s just Fred Flintstone hocking cigarettes or whatever.

I’d probably need to significantly expand my storage and media collection to make more than a couple channels doable. Definitely a bunch of bumps, “coming up next,” etc if I want to keep a strict 15/30/60 type schedule. And a 24/7 weather channel with the old WeatherStar 4000 style.

If you find the channel, let us know. I’d probably be keen to pull at least a handful of old adverts for padding.

I can’t find the video anymore but I remember someone recreating retro cable TV using dizquetv and an RPi (maybe just for the “receiver”). Searching now, I mostly find that ErsatzTV and FieldStation42 seem to be the goto options. I keep bouncing the idea around of setting up actual “channels” for Jellyfin, complete with silly self-recorded ads/bumps/promos/etc, but haven’t decided on a solution.

If you’re already doing so, do you have any insights? At a glance, ErsatzTV Next appears the most dynamic but also most barebones in that focus is mainly on the streaming. Library management and station programming looks to be external, which would mean having to roll my own scripts or whatever.

Eh, Windows still needs PowerToys (mainly FancyZones) for a better experience. I like around a 30/70 split between Windows Terminal (for PowerShell and WSL) on the left and some primary application like a browser on the right. It does have keybinds for shuffling through a stack of windows but only on the side that has focus. It still really needs a way to swap focus between zones that isn’t Alt-Tab’ing until you’re on the desired one or grabbing a mouse to click a program in another stack.

What are your other hobbies/interests? What are some things you’re completely uninterested in but it’s annoying shit you would really like a better way of handling? Got some answers? Now check the awesome self hosted page to see if there are any existing solutions that look promising. If so, now you know at least some things to host.

How to go about it? When I started I was an idiot kid, on Windows ninety-something (or maybe ME), running Apache, MySQL and phpBB. Copy-pasting snippets in Notepad and not comprehending everything. I found desktop Linux later, learned about init systems, watched that go out the window with systemd, etc. I was installing Ubuntu on every beige clunker I could get my hands on back when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop video went semi-viral. Eventually moved on to Arch, learned more about CLI tools, editing configs, etc. If you have something that can host VMs, and you want to play with mock bare-metal setups where you create the users, directories, set permissions, blah blah blah - VMs aren’t a bad way to go. It’s good stuff to learn and know. Gives you an excuse to play with tmux’s synchronized input feature, maybe learn some Ansible, and whatever else. If you just have one dust collector sitting around, start trying distros on it. Mess with stuff til it breaks, boot into install/recovery media and try to unbreak it, repeat. As long as it’s fun (or tolerably annoying enough to reach some end goal).

I’ve personally gotten lazy and I’m nearly all-in on containers. A few things are manual but I’ve come to like Docker. I do still manage mine with compose files, even on my TrueNAS system with their “apps,” because compose files are easy to read, keep track of, and modify. My non-TrueNAS machines, I use Docker + Portainer. I should maybe look into podman and quadlets but haven’t bothered yet.

My recent hardware went from RPi4B to Thinkcentre mini PC to building out a 2U TrueNAS system. A PoE switch powers a Home Assistant Yellow and a few cameras. The RPi was repurposed to only host Homepage, NUT (server, watches my UPS and tells more power hungry machines to shut down during outages) and might eventually host Grafana if I ever get into learning it. Another 4B is my Pi-Hole. The Thinkcentre has an 8TB external plugged in and scheduled rsync tasks, on the TrueNAS machine, push back ups of my more important files to it. It also has a couple users set up strictly for running game servers (ioquake and teeworlds at the moment). Those aren’t containerized and things like rcon, config management, map rotation, mods, etc are all handled manually.

TrueNAS hosts everything else. If you need ideas based on what others are hosting, here’s some of what is on it:

• Jellyfin, for TA (see below) and my legally obtained DVD backups.
• TubeArchivist, (TA) for backing up YouTube videos, descriptions, comments. Has a Jellyfin plugin so your backup library is watchable in JF
• Homebox, for home inventory management. I use it to keep track of my tools mostly. You can have locations, sub locations, items… if I pull a rail of sockets, stick them in my toolbag, then carry it out to the shed - so long as I bothered to update their locations in Homebox I won’t waste time digging in the back of my truck, tool chest or other bags because I can’t remember where I last used my 1/2" drive 14mm deep impact. It’s a mildly inconvenient extra step to essentially “check in/out” my own tools, as if I’m working in an aircraft hangar or I’m doing IT asset management, but I find it worth it.
• LubeLogger, for keeping track of vehicle service. Early this year I put a lot of money into fixing my truck. A lot of tools, fluids, and parts to handle a broken water pump and do some preventative maintenance. Still a quarter of what a shop might’ve charged. Since I’m becoming my own mechanic, I wanted something to properly record what I do and how much I spend on it. LubeLogger fits the bill.
• Factorio, for the factory must grow.
• Dawarich, self hosted GPS logs. Seems decent but I might shop around still. I just wanted an alternative to Google Maps for tracking my travel history.
• Audiobookshelf, for some audiobooks but mainly for archiving a small handful of podcasts.
• Romm, because I’m compelled to hoard old games and occasionally even play them.
• Immich, because I’m not paying Google to store my photos.
• FreshRSS, because there’s still a dwindling number of sites that don’t force you to visit them to read an article in its entirety. Mainly for Hack A Day, a couple devlogs from game makers, the latest CVEs, some global news sites, NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD), etc.
• Samba, for some SMB shares that family can dump files into
• ClamAV, because family is dumping files into their SMB shares

I’m looking at hosting lemon-manuals (successor to charm.li). It’s basically a massive collection of service procedures, bulletins, fluid/torque/etc specs, and so on for decades worth of automobiles. Stuff the industry would like to force you into paying AllData, Identifix, or whoever for. I just haven’t had a chance to review their provided “server.” It’s also over 1TB. It’s overkill when I’m only working on three vehicles (mine and my folks’) but I’d like to have it all in case an auto industry lawyer tries to shut them down or i inevitably get a new set of wheels.

I’ve also got intentions of implementing some sort of documentation system but I haven’t settled on one yet. It’s not really for me. I can read my configs and go off plain text. Mainly it needs to be simple enough for my family to work with. My homelab has a bus factor of Me. Whoever has to deal with it when I’m gone needs to know enough to retrieve my encrypted password database so they can get into my emails/bank account to cancel/pay for things or whatever, back up any media of mine they want to keep, back up their own stuff, probably some instructions on how to burn their shows/movies/music back to discs, and shut everything down. Because one day things will break, servers they don’t understand will have failures, they’ll sell the hardware or give it away to designated friends/family members who can hopefully use it… all that unhappy stuff most of us don’t think about until it happens. In fact some sort of contingency plan should probably have been the first thing I recommended, but with some luck you’ve read this far and will put your own into place.

Anyway, hopefully something in the above rambling helps you on your way.

I think you misinterpreted their message. Their argument is that it’s an expectation that the professional RTFM (more accurately, to have already done so) which shouldn’t carry over to hobbyists. At least not as strictly. Put another way, “The certified Toyota technician needs to have the fancy book learnin’ while the weekend wrencher or shadetree mechanic shouldn’t be held to the same standard.”

I disagree insofar as, short of inaccessible resources (sadly becoming more common in my automotive example) or a lack of time and money, there’s no reason a hobbyist shouldn’t strive to educate themselves and achieve professional level of excellence. So long as they enjoy it, anyway. That’s really the point of a hobby.

Counterpoint: Aside from disabilities which specifically impact reading, why wouldn’t someone want to read when it comes to their hobbies? A hobby is something one intentionally devotes time to, typically unpaid and nonprofessionally, because they enjoy it and they want to learn more about it. A large amount of my enjoyment is derived from learning more about the things I enjoy, so not wanting to consume that information makes no sense to me.

I can understand, for example, gaming as a hobby and wanting quick answers if one is jumping ship from Windows to Linux. Linux isn’t the hobby there; just a means to an end. I’d still argue the gamer should develop some level of proficiency with their underlying OS. Otherwise it’s like having trail riding as a hobby without any knowledge or tools to patch a tube, tension a chain or tighten a bolt. One might end up in a situation where they can’t just get an instant answer. Investing a little time in the mechanics could keep a short ride from turning into a long trudge out with a bike over the shoulder.

In the context of “Linux”, broadly, as a hobby - what even is that hobby if it isn’t making an honest effort to learn broadly about various tools, the kernel, scripting and programming languages, and so forth? Linux always struck me as a hobby for people who collect hobbies. Or people that have “learning” as a hobby. It’s why, while I’ll probably never work a day of my life in IT, I know how to do some basic SQL queries, hit an API and parse the JSON, do a little scripting in Bash and Python, utilize a load of CLI tooling much more efficiently than any Windows GUI I’ve ever used, and so on. I’ll never know it all but part of the fun is trying anyway.