Not sure if my setup is unique or wrong but here’s what I use:

1. I registered a domain with Name cheap and created subdomains for the tools I wanted to access (i.e. jellyfin.domain.tld, sonarr.domain.tld)
2. A DDNS client on my OpenWRT router updates the IP address for those subdomains. Traffic for each subdomain is pointed at my server.
3. Nginx Reverse Proxy runs on my server. This provides HTTPS certificates and is pretty straightforward.

I also use Tailscale for remote access and I’m not sure that my friends and family are ready for that. (Admittedly, I’m still on Plex.) Registering your own domain and using a DDNS service and reverse proxy will give your users an easier experience than Tailscale. I can give an easy-to-remember URL to folks rather than a new VPN platform to learn.

If security is more important, Tailscale is the best option for remote connections.

Why don’t we need this for Plex? Because Plex has all of the above steps baked into its service.

I wish someone would make a new RTS with the Halo Wars control scheme. It works so well on the Steam Deck. I played Halo Wars 2 on the Xbox and I was disappointed by the new gameplay.

It drives me crazy when Reagan is treated as a god :)

South Dakota is an interesting place. I live here and it’s a Republican supermajority at the state level, so Trump supporters enjoy an extraordinary level of comfort.

This place is the perfect example to show how the conservative political machine have taken root across rural America. It started with Nixon’s silent majority and has only grown more powerful through the Reagan and Bush II administrations. All of the seeds that Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh sowed in the nineties have grown into an angry, bitter rabble out here.

People here are led to believe that there are dark forces at the gates both domestic and abroad. Those liberals in other states want to convert South Dakota into a woke hellscape. The farm crisis in the eighties made people distrust Washington D.C. and foreign trade. Lots of people think we need to completely revert back to an imaginary time and place.

I was born after George McGovern but it’s fascinating to think of a time that this state would have a democratic, anti-war governor who would run for president. That was the seventies and we had democratic U.S. representatives until the Tea Party movement pushed them out.

Since then, we have but a handful of left-leaning political leaders in the state. The Democrats are effectively powerless outside of larger towns and reservations. Neoliberalism died here about 20 years ago, so any establishment Democrat has a snowball’s chance in Hell to run here.

I’m rambling but I wanted to give some insight from someone who lives here. I’m not hopeful that much will change here politically. I’ve felt marginized by the national Democratic party since I graduated high school, so they aren’t going to come “rescue” us from this mess. Talking about this place online only draws ridicule from other liberals and left-wing folks.

There are some bright spots, as we had 5,000 people show up at one of our Hands Off rallies:

https://www.sdpb.org/politics/2025-04-07/nationwide-hands-off-protests-draw-thousands-across-south-dakota

Flauncher is a great pick too

🤘 I love the whole album, especially Marching Song (Of The First Arkansas Negro Regiment) https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfefCi8-gbrYOMtW76B4VUIvyMkJIM-Fw

I use the ONN 4K Pro and the ProjectIvy launcher. You can completely hide the standard Android TV OS launcher and its ads. Button Mapper is another good app to have on Android boxes. The remote is full of app-specific buttons that I’ve either disabled or remapped to alternative apps

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.projengmenu

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flar2.homebutton

I have no idea which codecs are supported.

I think hindsight bias is always a factor when talking about old video games. The N64 was a runt in sales but the library was stacked in my opinion. But it sold nearly as many U.S. units as the SNES or Genesis, so the fact that the PS1 was such a blockbuster doesn’t reduce the N64’s quality.

Catalog wise, I always felt that the N64 had enough games until at least 1999 when the PS1 pulled away. It had better shooters (with awesome multiplayer) and great party games.

People in 2025 should remember that some folks were lucky enough to have both systems, which plays a factor too.

Gene Hackman had a pretty good run

A shame too because it was such a waste to use Walken and Duran Duran in such a crappy movie.

I recently lost a media drive and Radarr was a godsend. I’ve made database backups a priority. It’s also much easier to recover from a dead drive with access to a private BitTorrent tracker that allows free leeching.

After I stopped other programs except for Radarr and qBitTorrent, I let those two with for two days and got most of everything back. There are a few more movies that I need to manually recover and I should properly back those up. Besides that, it worked very well.

I like Flauncher or ProjectIvy. I’m using the latter on the living room TV and it works great.

More or less. There aren’t as many bots, and everyone is generally aware of traditional Internet etiquette (i.e. don’t be an asshole). Lemmy also feels as homogenous as early Reddit: college-educated white people in western countries.

I started joining forums back in the late nineties and I’ve learned every place on the Internet is in flux. Things always change. Back in the day, stuff would happen like we would lose hosting because someone got sick of running a niche phpBB forum or the moderation team would change. When social media kicked off, changes were driven by money. Facebook was a big gaming platform in my college years (Farmville), which feels completely foreign to today’s Facebook.

The smaller the community, the more stable it is. Some of those 20-year forums still exist, albeit in a much more diminished state. If a site/platform gets popular, that’s when things can change quickly.

Lemmy has already changed since I joined and I’m sure it will become something different in the future.

Thanks everyone, I feel much better about moving forward. I’m leaning towards Proxmox at this point because I could still run Windows as a VM while playing around and setting up a new drive pool. I’d like a setup that I can gradually upgrade because I don’t often have a full day to dedicate to these matters.

MergerFS still seems like a good fit for my media pool, simply only to solve an issue where one media type is filling a whole drive as another sits at 50% capacity. I’ve lost this data before and it was easy to recover by way of my preferred backup method (private torrent tracker with paid freeleech). A parity drive with SnapRaid might be a nice stop gap. I don’t think I feel confident enough with ZFS to potentially sacrifice uptime.

My dockers and server databases, however, are on a separate SSD that could benefit from ZFS. These files are backed up regularly so I can recover easily and I’d like as many failsafes as possible to protect myself. Having my Radarr database was indispensable when I lost a media drive a few weeks ago.

Good catch, yes my drives are 12TB. My brain is still stuck in 2005. :)

I still use Plex because they offer the product I bought, an easy way to stream content on my devices. Others have technical or philosophical issues, which I totally understand. Plex is the easiest option for my situation as of now. It is working great for me and my family.

Nothing lasts forever so it’s good to realistic about the future. If I start having technical issues, it’s Jellyfin. If Plex doubles down on subscriptions, it’s Jellyfin.

If you’re like me, a lifetime Plex Pass holder, I would experiment with Nginx Reverse Proxy now so you understand how it works. I have Overseerr running through a reverse proxy now.

I think it’s a matter of when, not if, Plex will make a business decision that pushes me off their platform. It’s a company focused on profit and that’s fine. And it would be good to be prepared for the future.

Do a barrel roll!

That’s Apple engineering for you: 60 percent of the time it works every time. I grew up with Apple products and the company’s history is lined with head-scratching design choices. It’s been like that since the Lisa.

I like repairable, self-built desktop PCs myself. But for work, the MacBook has been a tank.

My MacBook survived after I left it on top of my car as I drove off. It was flung off into a pedestrian area at the first intersection and has a nice dent on the corner.

Daylight savings time moves the clock to match sunrise and the time we wake up.

I live in the northern hemisphere and the days are shorter in the winter. The sunrise is 8 a.m. on the shortest day (December 21), while sunrise on the longest day (June 21) is 5:45 a.m.

If I’m a farmer and I get up for my chores at 5 a.m. everyday, it’s nice and sunny in the warmer months. By the time it’s October, I wake up well before the sun so I might as well wait another hour. Lots of people had the same idea. Eventually everyone agreed on a day, called it daylight savings time and figured moving the clocks by one hour was simple enough.

But now it’s the 21st century, we have atomic clocks and most people live in the city but it’s hard to break tradition.