I wrote some open source software[1] many years ago for mapping out bus routes, their stops, timetables, and everything else. It’s pretty old and probably only runs on linux.

It will let you generate GTFS data (the standard for transit), and then there are OSM importers for GTFS data.

The nice thing, is that since GTFS data has routes, stops, timetables, holidays, …, it will work with any of the routers with OSM.

[1] Subte

I would consider jellyfin + ersatztv. ersatztv lets you create “live” channels and define your own programming. Instead of the kids having a free for all of being any to stream any of the media you give them access to, you instead give them access to a few channels.

One of the nice things about it, is the channel can go “offline” at certain times. So, if you have a strict bedtime of 8pm, the shows will literally finish at 8pm, and the channel will stop. No more “let me watch on more video!”

I have several channels like:

• Cartoons
• Education
• Sing alongs
• History

that they can switch between, but that is all I give them.

Guix is very interesting to me. If fedora didn’t just work, I think that’s where I’d want to move to.

I started using Linux in '98 with Red Hat 5.2. I have swapped between many, many different distros. But for the last 10 years or so, I’ve mostly stuck with Fedora. It generally just works, is up to date, and I’ve never had issues upgrading on their 6 month release cycle. My desktop probably started on Fedora 20-something and has been upgraded to the latest (43) without ever doing a reinstall!

My primary computer is my Frame.work laptop running Fedora 43.

I still watch a lot of X-Files. However, these days I skip all the arcs and prefer the episodic monster of the day episodes.

If you don’t need transcoding, then anything should be able to handle it. But, if you are planning to stream over the Internet to your phone on LTE, you’ll “probably” want transcoding, or if you are streaming to set top boxes, they may not support the codecs you used, and will also require transcoding.

I personally am using Jellyfin, and find it to be great for TV shows, movies, and you tube (via tubearchivist + its jellyfin plugin). It’s dead simple to setup, its metadata is perfect, and there are great frontends for it. Other than the big update from about 6 months ago, it has mostly been a set it and forget it.

Some people use jellyfin for music, but I find navidrome a much better option for music.

I run my media server on a fitlet2. It isn’t super powerful, but has been a great little machine. It can transcode 1080p just fine, but would struggle for doing anything higher than that.

It hosts about 30 other things too, including my camera and NVR with frigate.

How so? From blu-ray, I can use handbrake or ffmpeg to pick the exact quality and options I want. And I can use av1, which most torrent groups still aren’t using.

I also find many of the downloads strive for smaller file size over quality. I want the opposite, as I don’t ever want to have to rip again, and I want them to look perfect.

I don’t have trouble with most blu-rays, but there are a few I have not been able to get to rip. This includes, brand new, out of the box blu-rays. I have not tried any ultra-hd blu-rays yet, even though my external blu-ray drive should support it.

I do recommend looking at the makemkv forums for blu-ray drives. Some of the cheaper external drives do not last very long! A higher quality internal drive with an external case works much better. There are some people on the makemkv forums you can buy from. They have specific drives they like and they’ll pre-flash libredrive firmware on them.

I also prefer ripping to downloading. I am quite specific about how I like my movies ripped, and like to keep embedded subtitles, extra languages, full DTS surround, and commentary tracks, which are often missing in downloads. It does take a bit more time, but I also find I am way more careful about curating my collection and keeping it high quality.

My DNS provider doesn’t have an API for setting DNS, which makes doing dns CNAME validation manual.

Therefore, what I do is:

• Have a public nginx server and point public DNS records to it, then generate certs against it
• Pull those certs to my internal nginx server in my lan
• Use pi.hole to set internal DNS records (so jellyfin.mydomain.com points to 10.10.110.23 within my network)

I haven’t kept up with wine development in many years, but they used to have (and might still) winelib, which allowed you to compile a window app against it to create a native linux binary.

Nested comments are super slow

I agree with this. I wrote a lemmy reader for emacs gnus and fetching the comments really leaves a lot to be desired! In fact, I’d say a lot of the Lemmy APIs leave a lot to be desired (no pagination with a cursor!)

I love this!

Mere was interesting, but it runs entirely offline in a browser (which is pretty cool). But, this means all data lives in your browser’s localStorage (or indexdb), which would make it hard to sync between devices.

Sure. But I’d also not host it publicly on the Internet, just on my local lan!

I have a LaView LV-N9808C8E. It is quite a bit outdated, so I would not recommend that model, as the web interface requires Silverlight and the iOS app doesn’t work on the latest iOS.

BUT, it is basically an offline NVR with 1TB harddrive that records continuously from my 6 ip cameras (all wired with PoE directly to the NVR). I think this model supports up to 8 cameras.

Then, on my home server I run frigate with a Coral USB to pull the rtsp streams and do object detection. When objects are detected, the screenshots are sent to Home Assistant for alerts.

This gives me good real time notifications and nothing is exposed to the internet or any 3rd parties.

If I want to watch real time camera feeds, and I can use my wireguard vpn + vlc to watch an individual camera via rtsp (I used to be able to use the iOS LaView app when on my vpn, but it no longer works). If I need to go back and look at recordings, since the LaView NVR is continuously recording, I can go back and pull video directly from the device for the last few days.

This is where tools like bubblewrap (bwrap) come in. For opencode, I heavily limit what it can see and what is has access to. No access to my ssh keys or aws credentials or anything else.

They also sell flac. Bandcamp is my primary but 7digital is great for popular stuff.

I have started doing something completely different than using bookmarks. I set up yacy on a personal, internal server at my home, which I can access from all my devices, since they are always on my wireguard vpn.

Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in ‘Robinson mode’ as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.

Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I’ve indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.

Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.

If I need to browse, I can go use yacy’s admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.

I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.