Never knew I needed? Another vote for Paperless-ngx. I still feel like I'm living in the future using it. The trick I've found was initially setting up a good document naming & management convention & following it religiously for every document. The search function is fantastic at narrowing down results. Used in conjunction with specific coloured tags I can immediately see what I need from search results.

Fired up Immich recently. Amazing. Will be donating as I like their stance.

I also enjoy Linkwarden. Switched from the also excellent Hoarder as I prefer the UI.

Most used? Nextcloud with Joplin.

For sure. Its a race to the bottom. I was only talking about this last night with my other half. I'm a tech nerd & I yearn for the pre internet days when stuff was fun & we weren't getting stiffed at every opportunity by "The Man"

I moved from Nextcloudpi some time back & found THIS TUTORIAL far & away the most useful. Instead of just saying copy/paste a Docker Compose file he shows how to build it step by step using Portainer so i found it invaluable for future projects.

It seems a bit overwhelming initially but once you've installed it a few times you'll be able to do it from scratch in less than an hour. Probably less as it sounds like you already know what's what having used Ansible

"What madness is this?" 😉

Earthbound was great!

I bought an i7 NUC to use as HTPC some years ago. It has W10 IoT on it. Handles Dolby Atmos like a charm & 4K to a degree (YouTube. Last time i checked, Windows still liked to give 4K media files a purple hue)

Crap, I literally just bought a GL.iNet GL-MT600 Flint 2 which runs GL.iNet skin over OpenWrt & it has an option in its settings to switch direcrly to OpenWRT if you prefer, or you can also flash OpenWRT onto it yourself too.

Loved it & used it for such a long time because at the time it was the only android browser with extension capability ...but it's on an outdated version of Chromium & development seems to have ceased. Switched to Firefox which is great, though I still miss "open new tab in group"

You made me do it, ive ordered one. Having spent money I guess that means we're all in on Jellyfin now ...but if its no good I'll be sending the boys round for a full refund lol.

Will keep you posted, might save you some money if you can hold out, cheers

Thanks for the info, I'll look a little deeper into the live TV side of Jellyfin. Ive not heard of FLIRC USB before. Very interesting, I'd love to know how that goes, thank you

I've liked the sound of Plex forever but after it taking years for the wife to finally be comfortable finding her way around Kodi I couldn't really try it.

Just last week I fancied a tinker & I'd heard Plex has potentially begun to enshittify so I ended up putting Jellyfin on our htpc just to test it. As well as all the usual groups, it was simple to create additional collections for stuff only the wife wants to see rather than things we'll watch together. Within a day or so she's already flying round it so we've pretty much moved to Jellyfin. It doesnt seem to like IR remote control like Kodi does which is a shame & I'm struggling a little with the live TV aspect which was also very straightforward on Kodi but I havent looked too closely into it yet.

Overall very impressed with Jellyfin.

Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it

I've found Canon printers to be generally good overall but this is BS. If its any consolation I have a Canon printer with WiFi. Win 10 is so shit the scanner literally never scans over WiFi & ive given in using the printer over WiFi for anything & just use it via a cable

A close friend sells a product on eBay. A product most households have & my friend collects when it's no longer wanted which is cleaned, sorted & resold. Has now left 9-5 job to run it as a business.

This friend is exceptional at exploiting niches & will likely become amongst leading sellers of this type (is well on the way already having done it before with a particular collectible). Interestingly, reading through the suggestions here, previously collected & sold scrap before pivoting.

I'm very proud of them!

For me it's the first thing i learned how to self host: Nextcloud ...which in turn allows me to sync Joplin notes, which I use constantly

Never directly watch any ads. We record everything on HTPC (NextPVR), ads are cut before the recordings get thrown into Jellyfin. Ads in general simply dont happen in our household

Anyone for a quick game of ET?!

A simple question with a mind boggling variety of solutions.

I was in same boat as you, I knew absolutely nothing & was bamboozled by the volume of different answers, often none of which worked. But I kept battling away & am now self hosting various platforms. None of which are music but here goes 😁

1. Choose your hardware. If you've not got spare hardware a Pi would work. I'd try to look at Pi4B or Pi5. Look at adding either external drive or SSD. If you go external drive route you'll need to learn how to format, mount & auto mount the drive
2. Choose a good notes app & make clear notes as you go. You'll be referring to them again at some point!
3. Its advantageous to be able to create a static IP address on your router. Consider picking up a cheap router preinstalled with OpenWRT (very powerful open source firmware). OpenWRT itself is complicated but the basics like port forwarding & static IP are straightforward
4. Install Docker. This keeps keeps your programs in separate containers. Allows you to stop & remove containers without interfering with other containers
5. Install Portainer. This was a light bulb moment for me - as soon as I realised you can build your own Docker containers and add your own Docker Compose files (add Compose files as a stack) from within Portainer. Allows you to easily control the containers from a web UI. This great tutorial is the most straightforward & outright useful tutorial I found on how to use Portainer (thank you Synthetic Everything if you ever read this): Install Nextcloud via Portainer & secure it with Nginx Proxy Manager
6. From here its a question of building a Jellyfin Docker container or editing a suitable Compose file you find online into Portainer so that it suits your needs
7. Decide whether you want to expose your setup to www if so look into Nginx proxy manager. Traffic to your domain such as Cloudflare or a free service is pointed to one port on your router which is exposed to www (WAN). Traffic to this port is handled by Nginx & forwarded to the relevant device IP address on your network (LAN). Nginx handles SSL certificates, is Open source & is brilliant. Free DDNS such as DuckDNS domain name can easily be set up in Portainer.
8. If not, you'll need to access your network externally. Tailscale is the current stock answer. Alternatively look into setting up Wireguard VPN. Once a device is granted access through a secure Wireguard connection you can access any device or its web UI on your network if you know its IP address (no need to remember them, this is what password managers are for, right?)

Good luck

• Mullvad
• Addy.io
• A TV EPG provider so i can set my HTPC USB receivers to record stuff each week for the family (1. It details for specific channels new series/new episodes for the week aired between certain times of day which websites dont seem to do 2. Its cheaper & far more efficient than a TV mag/newspaper 3. Its extremely cheap so great value)
• I donate to some open source projects/devs when I find I'm using a product regularly

I'm also waaaay late but posting for those that might be interested. https://lemmy.ml/c/videos seems to be predominantly political type videos (warning: I dont watch them, they could be balanced/propaganda/rage bait/conspiratorial).

PS I'd also have voted to keep them separate.