I’ve been using Emby for a few years after Plex just became worse and worse, relying on cloud logins and being unreliable, pushing their own junk content above my library etc. Emby reminds me of what plex used to be, it’s amazing!

And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.

Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.

I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.

No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.

Other than Disney stuff, you can’t really guarantee on your kids favorite show or movie always being available on a streaming service you’re already paying for. Jellyfin has been great for those moments. Used to use Plex, and it’s very good software, but I got tired of the non-free aspects. Made me feel like I was subscribing to one more streaming service.

i have tried N8N, but still prefer node-red. any reason why N8N?

yeah, password manager for me. love it. I am looking at using the home assistant addon to manage it now, it may make life a little easier.

This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don’t trust the cloud providers.

I was thinking about doing this but you can be a suspect on a criminal case if Tor is relaying ilegall activities.

I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It’s a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn’t give you a call weekly.

It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn’t make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they’re forced to kill my connection if situation doesn’t improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that’s not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.

If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don’t have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.

And of course there’s legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you’re living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.

That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn’t have e.g. OCR features, it’s pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!

Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?

How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?

Commenting here to save this and also to create engagement.

I feel like this one needs to be higher up. It so immediately and instantly changes your browsing experience (especially on a phone), that I VPN into my own home network when I’m out just to stay on the PiHole.

Plus, when you get further along in your selfhosting journey you can use the custom DNS to re-route domain names so you never need to leave your network to use your own services.

I’ve never self hosted, started maybe two years ago. First I’ve started with a Raspberry Pi 3, but quickly decided that 1GB of ram, and limited power was not enough for my needs. I’ve got myself a Dell OptiPlex SFF (used), it came with 16GBs of ram, then I’ve added a 4TB HDD. I’d say, this is an “entry” piece of hardware, as it’s cheap and sips power (around 15-20W at idle). If you don’t need the disk space or much power, go with a SSFF (whichever manufacturer you chose, HP, Dell, IBM), they’re cute little boxes that make a RasPi seem both underpowered and overpriced (for a used one anyway).

An old PC uses significantly more power than e.g. a RPI or a NUC. Something to keep in mind.

You can get yourself a 1L pc from Dell, Lenovo, or HP 8th gen or newer for pretty cheap. Great little work horses. You can find Dell Optiplexes on any second hand sites in your area really cheap too.

But in all reality, the old machine you already have is the best solution. If you got an old computer from an upgrade years ago, that's great to play on