Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @[email protected]

  • 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Tailscale is great. You should use it. Most of their code is open-source. Their coordination server is closed-source, however there’s a self-hostable open-source reimplemention called Headscale if you want a fully-open-source Tailscale stack.

    Tailscale is a peer to peer VPN, meaning there’s no central server like with OpenVPN. Systems on the VPN connect directly to each other. You can also use Wireguard in this way if you configure it as a mesh (every device on the VPN has every other device configured as a peer, and for each pair, at least one of them has the port open and forwarded). Tailscale is more reliable for that as it uses several NAT traversal techniques, so you don’t need to open the port and it works even if both ends are behind NAT.

    Immich doesn’t rely on Tailscale; you can use any VPN. They don’t recommend exposing it to the public internet at the moment though, which is why you’d use a VPN (edit: as per a reply, this is not the case any more). In general, never expose anything publicly unless it absolutely has to be (like a website that anyone can access). For giving access to friends, you can share a device with them via Tailscale and configure an ACL so they can only access particular services on it.

    For the drives, I’d recommend ZFS instead of Ext4 or NTFS. ZFS can detect bitrot and corruption using checksums, which neither Ext4 nor NTFS can do. NTFS isn’t recommended unless you’re running Windows Server, but you already said you’re using Proxmox.

    IMO, use Syncthing instead of Nextcloud, unless you’ll be using all the other apps that come with Nextcloud (calendar, office tools, chat, etc). Syncthing does one thing and it does it well, which is almost always better than using software that tries doing a large number of things. Consider Seafile too.

    For backups, I’d recommend Borgbackup and Borgmatic. Get a cheap storage VPS to store it. You should be able to get a deal for less than $2/TB/month during the current Black Friday sales. Check LowEndTalk for deals. A Hetzner storage box would work great too.


  • Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

    There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:

    • Cross-fading when playing random tracks, but gapless playback when playing an album in order
    • Analysis of the music using a local neutral network, such that you can tell it to play play “similar” sounding songs to the current one
    • Automatic playlists - liked songs, decades, etc
    • Downloads for offline playback
    • Multiple libraries, for example I keep regular music separate from DJ mixes
    • Equalizer with presets for common headphones

    And probably other things I’m forgetting.





  • Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

    In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.

    A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.

    Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.







  • The healthcare system in the US isn’t great, but you do get a decent experience if you have an employer that offers good insurance. My employer pays most of the cost of my health insurance. I pay around $200/month for my wife and I, but that’s pre-tax money, and the plan is great for US standards. $15 for doctor visits and $100 maximum for ER visits.

    In Australia we pay a 1.5% tax to fund the public health care system, so for a $60k salary that’s $900/year.




  • us software salaries are insanely high compared to the rest of the world, because the cost of living in SV is insanely high.

    I moved from Australia to the San Francisco Bay Area. My starting income was maybe 3x what I was getting paid in Australia, but the cost of living definitely wasn’t 3x higher. Major Australian cities are considered HCOL (high cost of living) areas too. Some things like electronics and food were cheaper in the USA too, at least until inflation and tariffs made everything go up.



  • If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB mount in the file explorer and double click it. On Windows you can mount it as a network drive (like V: for videos) so even non-technical users understand it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

    With systems like Jellyfin and Plex, you can (and should!) turn off transcoding when streaming at home. The only times you should enable transcoding are when:

    1. You’re away from home on a slow internet connection (or your home internet has slow upload speed); or
    2. You’re streaming to a less powerful device that can’t handle the full bitrate of the video.

    Transcoding is very useful, because otherwise you’d need multiple copies of the same movie to handle different environments. Transcoding can dynamically adjust the bitrate based on the connection speed.