First and foremost, I’d prefer to be honest about my use of AI:

Testing – writing tests, test plans and QA: Pair

That’s it! I think my commit history will speak for itself.

I've been a member of this community for a very long time now (ever since the Reddit API crisis and my move to Lemmy) and for several years now, I’ve been thinking about sharing my personal project with you. There is a good reason why I’ve hesitated for so long : I’m happy with what I’ve done, but I haven’t been a professional developer for a long time, and it shows in my UI :D

But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and that’s why I’m taking the plunge today to introduce you to a timeline management tool.

It’s simple, still a bit rough around the edges in some respects (particularly the table-based editing mode), and you’ll certainly find some features missing, but it does the job for me at the moment.

I’m sharing this with you today for two reasons:

• To showcase my work, and perhaps give you a pleasant surprise
• To get your feedback on what you see, and any missing features that might make you want to use it

Because if I’m going to spend my evenings working on a project like this for several years, it might as well be of use.

Here are a few ideas for features I’m currently thinking about :

• Implementing other types of charts (like gantt)
• New options to customize color
• Zooming in/out on your charts
• Implement the option to enable authentication on your instance
• Implement the option to enable the organisational principle for grouping and sharing creations by different users

The product can be tested online completely free of charge or tested using its Docker image

Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider my project. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Hi there my dear people of r/selfhosted! Fresh bunch of Dawarich news is due, make yourself comfortable :) To whom it may concern, Dawarich — is your (is and always will be) a free open source self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline.

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

---

Our links:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

---

Nine releases, what a month! And not a puny ones, this time we managed to speedrocket Dawarich performance in browser. If you have hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) of points and you'd love to see them all on the map, previously that would be not an easy task for Dawarich. It would crash your browser, as many times as you try loading the data. But no more! Our very own community member, the man behind the Docker image we're using to run Photon, Robin (https://github.com/rtuszik) suggested a fresh approach to loading points: just render them as map tiles! Together we brought this idea to life and now my own dataset consisting of 957,350 geo points gets loaded in less than 1 second! That's kinda insane to me, to be honest. And yeah, instead of ~590MB of JSON transferred to your browser, it took uhhh 150KB? Just don't forget to enable the toggle in the map settings.

---

If you want to drag your points, do disable it though, seamless points editing will be added bit later. Oh, and tracks are being now served in the same manner, too. And routes, and fog of war layers. It's all a lot faster now! Dawarich now speaks 6 languages! German, Spanish, French, Polish and Catalan were added to the default English. Simplified Chinese is on the way, and feel free to suggest your own locales :) You can change it in Settings -> General

---

Visit detection was rebuilt from scratch and it's finally useful. God knows I procrastinated this feature long enough, but now it's in a very good shape. Suggests real places I visited, and community members are also confirming it's not just me — for them it also yielded very relevant results. By the way, you'll no longer see the annoying "99+" counter of the visits on your timeline button. We all hated the feeling of an unfinished job but let's be real ain't nobody got time to click all the suggested visits. Now they are just there, without the irritating counter, sitting patiently, waiting for you to delete them or... just let them be. They are precise enough now, after all, so why not, right?

Deleting a visit also leaves an invisible tombstone now, so the visit won't be resuggested again. And the Timeline panel got much cleaner. I'm still not entirely satisfied with its state, so some changes are due, I want smoother UX.

By the way, one of former Dawarich user mentioned something like we're making the Timeline "less and less useful with each release", so here I'd like to use the opportunity and ask you guys, do you share same feeling? What's good about Timeline, what's not so good? I'd love it to be as useful and convenient as possible, so your feedback is very important. Thank you!

Transportation modes, also rebuilt. This one is a lot trickier and even Google itself fails to properly attribute the way a human being moved (suggesting driving over train ride for example), but it's still got significantly more reliable. I have some cool work ahead of me to make it even better, but that's a secret.

---

Videos are finally here! God I love videos. The Video Studio first was released as a free tool on our website (https://dawarich.app/tools/route-video-maker/), and then I added it to Dawarich itself, which makes it easier to use your own routes to create a video.

Check it out!

And here's an actual video produced by Dawarich Video Studio: https://youtube.com/shorts/mEUe4RktKSg

Also, the "Share" button on the map page now also has a way for you to create and share a poster or a video. Your memories were never more material!

Rendering is being done in your browser, and it allowed me to not cram another backend service into the Dawarich stack, neat.

---

Map v1 (Leaflet) is gone. I'm surprised nobody really complained about it. I'll take it as a sign that Maplibre version is a lot better!

---

Geocoding settings are now available in Settings->Integrations, with selection of providers supported by Dawarich and appropriate settings available for them. The ENV vars are still there and take precedence over what's configured in the UI, so no breaking changes.

---

Imports got smarter:

• Google Takeout & Polarsteps now extract visits, named places, tracks and the source app's tication — not just raw GPS points. Google's own place names (Home, Work…) are kept. Older imports: "Extract additional data" in the Imports list. "Remove extracted data" undoes it without touching your points.
• FIT files with developer data fields (Wahoo devices) now import instead of failing to parse
• Traccar KML exports now import LineString points instead of finishing with zero.
• Google Timeline: fixed altitude/accuracy/speed being silently dropped from rawSignals, and estamps no longer scramble path order.
• Imports finishing with zero saved points now tell you instead of completing silently.
• Tracks no longer stitch two different devices together (Records.json contains every device

---

Tracks calculation got a lot smarter: fewer skims along the route, better anomaly points detection, better distinction between different devices tracking simultaneously, hence stats distance calculation now has better precision.

---

Preparation work is being done for the Family feature coming to our mobile apps. We're currently testing it internally and are hoping to release it there soon. Also, OwnTracks' HTTP mode now can show your family members in the app: every upload is answered witveryone sharing with you.

---

Database optimisation works are also in progress: most of the August releases are containing some changes to how Dawarich writes and serves your data, it may lead to bigger space consumption. In the end, when the process is done (hopefully before end of September), I'll provide an instruction on how to shrink your databases with no data loss. If you'd like to do it now — do the full vacuum to the points table. For the rest of you — please wait for the next post or keep an eye on our changelogs, it will be there.

⚠️ If you're upgrading from 1.10.x, do these once

• Restart the app after migrations have run — until then, deleting a visit looks like it worked without saving.
• Settings -> Visits -> re-detect (self-hosted does this fleet-wide automatically; SKIP_VISITS_FLEET_REDETECT=1 to opt out).
• Map settings -> Transportation Mode Detection → "Re-classify my history."
• Map v2 -> Settings -> "Recalculate tracks & stats" to apply the gap-distance fix to past months.
• Expect background backfills to run for a while on big histories. Progress is under Background jobs settings.

---

Mobile app UI was updated! It now includes better navigation between days, you can select date range to show your data, and you can also replay your day on the map. We added new layers: points and heatmap, more to follow.

If you're hosting Dawarich behind cloudflared or similar gateway, you can now benefit from custom HTTP headers to connect your mobile app to your Dawarich instance.

We added Smart Tracking mode for Android and Continuous Tracking mode for iOS. Enable precise tracking mode to see the toggle. Both modes use motion-aware updates to toggle tracking on and off to save your battery life.

---

Well, I guess, that's it for today?

And as always, our links one more time to save you a scroll:

Github: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

Website: https://dawarich.app/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dawarich/id6739544999

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.dawarich.Dawarich

Donate: https://www.patreon.com/freika / https://github.com/sponsors/Freika/

---

P.S. 1st of October I'll be speaking at Berlin's Geomob event ( https://thegeomob.com/ ) come and say hi!

See y'all soon!

I think a couple of months ago I found out about Dawarich here on this community as the author posted here. I installed a couple of days ago on a VM I run and have been impressed so far. I started logging track 10 years ago when I found out about OsmAND and never really knew what I would do with those tracks until I discovered Dawarich. Interesting piece of software. With the "trips" function, it reminded me of my trip to Scotland and all the places I had seen on which day.

Now the challenge is to understand why Owntracks feeds it a couple of points a day and only when I'm at home. I thought Owntracks would log locally on mobile phone and then download everything on Dawarich when it was back online on the VLAN at home (i don't have external access setup and don't want to for now). Is this some server side problem or a app problem? I've not changed the default settings of either the Dawarich server or the app. Any clues? I was goign to try the Dawarich android app but its not on f-droid so will need to wait until it is (strictly on GOS and no Google where I live ;-)

Oracle recently changed their free VPS allowances, taking down my Nextcloud instance. I'm moving my file sync to a local machine but was wondering if anyone had any experience with alternatives, as Nextcloud AIO was a major pain in the ass to set up last time.

I used it for sharing WIP music projects so having a web interface where I can listen to audio files from a browser was really convenient. It seems however, that all apps offering this feature are just as heavy as NC.

I tried installing cloudreve, but the web media player seems borked on firefox.

Does anyone know any good alternatives, preferably ones which can run off a single docker compose file?

I have a BRAVIA 4K AE1 android/google TV.

Since a few weeks I observe the following:

If it's disconnected from the internet for some time, 1 or 2 weeks maybe, it hides all my installed apps. Enabling internet immediately restores everything for a few days.

I tried installing a custom launcher and set it as default launcher - TV still boots into its system launcher.

Any ideas what else to try?

Self hosting relevant because jellyfin

Edit Fixed by enabling accessibility for this app. Thanks everyone who helped and @ryannathans@aussie.zone for pointing this out.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/44873486

I'm continuing to use an original Pi Zero and Pi Zero W, for breadboard experiments.

Self hosted trail mapping and GPS tracking with Wanderer

@selfhosted

I deployed an instance of Wanderer and defined a route in preparation for my upcoming trip to The Great Smokey Mountains National Park next week. This service uses #ActivityPub but I haven't been able to follow my account from #Mastodon yet... Even so I'm glad to add this to my #selfhosted arsenal. I will be live streaming on #Owncast during my hike, and I'll also edit the footage for #PeerTube.

https://wanderer.eom.dev/trail/view/@eric@wanderer.eom.dev/7eb769b9157c8c7?share=ojps3c4mo6q0v169l14sj4i5dkje867s

Every public request to one of my sites used to go through a Cloudflare tunnel. I had a cloudflared deployment in my cluster, some routing rules, and everything just worked. And it was free! But that bugged me. TANSTAAFL right? The whole point of selfhosting is to not rely on big cloud company, and there are few bigger than Cloudflare. And Cloudflare’s tunnels decrypt every single packet, so they see everything you do. I really don’t like that.

So I’ve replaced Cloudflare tunnels with Erwan Leboucher’s towonel, a selfhosted tunnel implementation. I still have my DNS on Cloudflare, but no data is moving through them any more.

...

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title: "Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT" url: "https://dreamstation.systems/personal/ntppost.html"

---

File Transfer, Randall Munroe, https://xkcd.com/949, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5

In this comic, the concept of an ordinary person having an FTP server is quickly dismissed. And yes, it’s not common. To the average computer user, the idea that someone could just… connect to your computer feels exotic, or even dangerous — see the very common ironic fear of your IP address being known to other people on the internet.

If you take someone who’s “good with computers” but not a networking person, their mental model of The Internet probably involves a definition of “servers” or “the cloud” that distinguishes them from personal computers in some meaningful way. True peer‐to‐peer, if they ever think about it, is an endeavor: WebRTC, STUN, TURN, ICE, what have you. Given that we live in a world of NAT, CGNAT, and restrictive ISPs, this isn’t entirely wrong, but it breaks the elegant design of the original Internet.

Why you don’t have an FTP server

Network address translation (NAT) was first formally proposed in RFC 1631 in 1994. In its abstract, it says:

The two most compelling problems facing the IP Internet are IP address depletion and scaling in routing. Long‐term and short‐term solutions to these problems are being developed. The short‐term solution is CIDR (Classless InterDomain Routing). The long‐term solutions consist of various proposals for new internet protocols with larger addresses.

Classless interdomain routing is not the point of this post, but basically we started giving people more options for network sizes, and while complex in implementation, it was philosophically virtually uncontroversial.

RFC 1631 proposed a second short‐term solution to IP address depletion and scaling in routing: NAT. While it is not exactly the same type of NAT omnipresent on home routers today, the basic idea is the same: it allows multiple devices to share an IP address (from the perspective of a device on the other end of a routing device) by modifying the network address information in the IP packet headers while transferring the packet across a traffic routing device. We then later reserved certain addresses for private use, and these things are used in conjunction on most IP networks — private addresses within the network, NATing to one public address at the router. On your typical home router, here’s how you usually connect to an external server with NAT 1:

1. Your computer sends a packet like this:

   | Source IP | 10.11.70.21 | | Source Port | 50413 | | Destination IP | 67.215.249.229 | | Destination Port | 70 |

2. It hits your router, and it modifies it to this:

   | Source IP | 146.7.15.85 | | Source Port | 60612 | | Destination IP | 67.215.249.229 | | Destination Port | 70 |

3. The server replies:

   | Destination IP | 146.7.15.85 | | Destination Port | 60612 |

4. Your router rewrites it back:

   | Destination IP | 10.11.70.21 | | Destination Port | 50413 |

If you’ve thought this through, you might be asking: in the situation that an external server wants to talk to you first, how does that happen? It sends a packet to 146.7.15.85, and your router…

Oh no. It has no idea where to send it.

Working around it

Naturally, people noticed this was a problem almost immediately, because people have wanted to run game servers, FTP servers, and web servers from their bedrooms since roughly the beginning of time. So a whole ecosystem of workarounds grew up around NAT, none of which restore the fundamental intention of the internet, and none of which work for everything.

Port forwarding

The most direct fix is to just tell your router “hey, when a packet comes in on port 60612, send it to 10.11.70.21 on port 50413, no questions asked.” This is port forwarding, and it’s the workaround to NAT that the most people are aware of. One of the problems with port forwarding, conceptually, is that one public IP+port can still only map to one device at a time, which means that two devices can’t operate a service on the same public IP+port at the same time. This is more of a problem than it sounds like; on big enterprise or university networks that choke down to a small number or even just one private IP, this basically kills on‐prem hosting without doing even more complicated shit. And sometimes, your ISP has put your external IP behind NAT too — which is called carrier‐grade NAT (CGNAT) — and now you don’t control the device doing the translation, so you can’t forward a port. You’re getting a fraction of a fraction of an IP address.

Also, another problem with NAT is that nobody wants to bother with it, which is why we invented:

UPnP

UPnP, and its modern cousins NAT‐PMP and PCP, tried to solve the “nobody wants to bother with it” problem by letting software ask the router directly to forward ports. Like manual port forwarding, it’s a request to your router — if your ISP is screwing with you, you’re out of luck. It’s also frequently disabled because of misguided security thinking — partially because of a couple buggy early implementations, and partially because the idea that someone could just connect to your computer feels exotic or even dangerous to a lot of people. There are plenty of valid reasons to want a firewall, but if you do, intentionally implement one instead of relying on NAT just not knowing where to send packets.

STUN, TURN, and ICE

STUN

Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN), instead of trying to get cooperation from the firewall, simply asks a server on the public internet “what does my packet look like by the time it gets to you?” The STUN server hands back the public IP and port your NAT assigned, say, 146.7.15.85:60612. Under a “cone NAT”, where the router uses an identical external port mapping for all outbound connections, this works great. You can tell this mapping to a peer, and then they can send packets directly to you. This technique is known as hole punching. However, under a “symmetric NAT” — common on CGNAT and institutional networks — you get a different public port for every distinct destination. In this case, the STUN mapping is useless for connecting to a peer, since they'll see you differently than the STUN server..

TURN: giving up

Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) is simply just passing traffic through a relay server, with both sides speaking to it outbound. This works mostly everywhere, but since someone has to run a server that should be unnecessary and you have to eat the added latency of every packet detouring through a third party, this really sucks.

ICE: trying everything

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) accepts that no technique is reliable and tries all of them in order of preference. Consider everything: direct connect, STUN‐discovered external address, a TURN relay), exchange the list with the other side, and throw shit at the wall until something works. This is what WebRTC does, and it’s the best you’ll get on today’s internet. But we’ve replaced a simple direct connection with, mostly, external infrastructure.

The long‐term solution that wasn’t

The principal “long-term solution” in the works that RFC 1631 was referring to was IPv6, and it was supposed to fix this; give everyone a real globally unique address and obviate NAT. However, the sigmoid function of IPv6 adoption seems to be stalling out too early, and even where it is implemented, many ISPs and institutional networks keep doing NATy stuff out of inertia and even more misguided security thinking: firewalls that refuse inbound because that’s we’re used to NAT doing that, or completely unnecessarily applying actual NAT to IPv6  — often deploying Unique Local Addresses (fc00::/7) the way they use private RFC1918 space on IPv4 — which is baffling to me.

The consequences for the Internet

There’s lots of things you can blame for killing the open Internet, but I think NAT was one of the earliest. Running a server used to be trivial: run an executable, tell people your address, done. Now, if you’re lucky, you probably have to configure port forwarding, which you often can’t even do if you’re behind CGNAT or on an institutional network.

It also trained everyone to think client‐server is natural. “My device talks to The Cloud which talks to other devices” feels normal, when that feeling originated as an artifact of address scarcity. The problem the people in the XKCD comic at the top are facing is the absurdity of trying to establish a one-to-one communication using only outbound connections on both sides. Even more ironic is that NAT got normalized as a security feature  — “your devices are hidden!” — which is one of the things that made people resist the thing that would fix it.

NAT certainly isn’t the only reason why the modern internet is full of centralized walled gardens, but it was the first — it’s why it’s hard to send a file to someone, it’s why you don’t run your email on your own computer, and why running your own services at all is difficult and often expensive (if you can’t port forward from your own internet connection, you have to buy a VPS instead of using hardware you already have).

I've been increasingly getting into the idea of hosting some servers for classic PC games like Counter Strike 1.6 and various Half-Life mods, but I'm curious what the consensus is for what the best options are for doing so right now.

I have some experience hosting servers at home in a "homelab" kind of context (mostly for stuff like Jellyfin, Samba, etc.), and I know how to spin up docker containers and administer a Linux computer decently for LAN use. Right now I use tailscale to access my homelab stuff remotely, but I don't know if that would work well in the context of hosting a public game server.

Generally I don't have much knowledge about safely exposing my local hardware to the wider internet for my circle of ~20 friends to join.

So basically I'm wondering what you all would do for hosting game servers if you were going to start today...

Would you use local hardware with port forwarding? Or would you go with a VPS (and if so, can you recommend one for North America)?

I currently use Borg for all my backups. To have a remote backup I placed my old Synology NAS at a family member and connected it to tailscale (via a tailscale docker container). That way I could also can do Borg backups to that remote NAS.

Though I have problems with the stability of the tailscale connection from the NAS. And honestly, I'm a bit tired to fix these problems.

I would like to have a self hosted backup solution, that can reach the synology NAS. I would like to avoid port forwarding at my family members network (for obvious reasons). I have a VPS in the internet that I can use for a common self hosted contact point (like I setup headscale there instead of using official Tailscale servers).

What would be your way for handling these remote backups?

So, just as the title says, I wanna know if anyone here uses a proxy as a way to access a private network instead of a VPN.

In my server i just use nginx to reverse proxy through different webapps, and now the time has arrived for nextcloud, now I'm thinking that I'd rather have such services more isolated from the wider web, and I like the simplicity of a proxy login. Though I am skeptical of the user/password model for proxying into a server. Afaik all proxy server logins work within that framework.

So, does anyone do this??

Edit: I know I can find a config wherever in the web, the post is more about experiences or thoughts about using a proxy instead of the common recommendation of a VPN. Thats all. :)

Hi, folks! I was happy to finally get my domain set up and directing traffic to a couple of hosted services. Unfortunately, my domain only works from external networks and not my own. I can ping my domain from my internal network just fine, and I can see a response time of 0.12ms against my public facing IP address, but putting the URL into my web browser to hit my web apps just times out. If I run the test on my phone, same thing; however, if I disconnect from wi-fi and do the same thing over cell network, the page works as I'd expect. My friends are able to access my hosted services via URL as I'd expect.

Given that I can ping the address and it resolves to an IP, I'm guessing this isn't a DNS issue. My OPNsense setup is that I've got my 192.168.1.X VLAN and my hosted services are isolated on the 192.168.10.X VLAN. The 1 VLAN can reach 10, but 10 can't reach 1. I can still use my hosted services via IP address and port, but I'd rather just use the URL and hit my reverse proxy so that I don't have to change the server address while navigating in and out of my apartment on my phone.

I've got two goals here in resolving this problem.

1. I'd like to understand why it won't resolve my URL on my local network and fix it. This is mostly just a learning experience thing given goal #2.
2. After that's working, I'd like to set up local DNS so that calls to reach my reverse proxy will never leave my home network, because I want to have access to my full bandwidth without running into my ISP's bandwidth limits. After this is setup, I'm curious how I would verify that my call to the server is not leaving my apartment.

I'd appreciate any help you folks can offer!

EDIT: I believe this is solved? @redlemace@lemmy.world correctly identified this as a NAT issue. The same solution appears to resolve goal #1 and #2 at the same time. This is the part where "solved" has a question mark after it. I basically just went to the traffic graph in OPNsense and compared it before and after streaming a video. The VLAN 10 traffic matched the LAN traffic, and the WAN traffic appears unmoved. Because my new NAT rules (which I picked up from redlemace's link to OPNsense documentation) are applying the port forwarding to the WAN, VL10, and LAN interfaces, I don't believe the traffic ever leaves my home network when the destination is my external IP address. Of course, if you have reason to believe I didn't actually solve my issue, feel free to quote some part of this paragraph and point it out to me. Always good to learn!

Hello folks!

I would like to share an update about BentoPDF. It's an open source privacy first PDF toolkit that runs in your browser.

1. You can now actually edit text inside PDFs

BentoPDF now allows you to click existing text, edit it, and have the text reflow while preserving the original fonts and styling.

It also includes:

• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, font family/size, colours, outlines, character spacing and line spacing
• Left, centre, right and justified alignment
• Bulleted and numbered lists with indentation
• RTL and LTR text alignment
• Find and replace across the document
• Edit images by rotating, flipping, duplicating, resizing or deleting them
• Object alignment, distribution, rotation, flipping, duplication

Please note this is a work in progress. You may encounter bugs, which you can report and I will look into.

2. Hyper Compress

Hyper is an open source PDF compression engine built to solve specific problems.

• Compression sometimes returns a file larger than the original. Hyper's result is always binary: it either produces a smaller PDF or returns the original. This helps create predictable workflows.
• Hyper includes a true lossless mode. It preserves searchable text, document structure and PDF conformance, rather than rebuilding the document from scratch like Ghostscript.
• It runs everywhere: CLI, Node SDK, C API, self hosted service, and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-hyper-compress

I also compared it to Adobe's compression API, but only managed around 100 PDFs where results were within 5%. Testing on a bigger corpus got expensive.

3. Kura

Kura is a PDF standards, conversion and preflight engine.

It supports:

• All 11 PDF/A conformance levels: PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u, PDF/A-4, PDF/A-4e and PDF/A-4f
• Accessibility: PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2
• Print production: PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4, PDF/X-4p, PDF/X-5g, PDF/X-5n and PDF/X-5pg
• Engineering and variable data printing: PDF/E-1 and PDF/VT
• E-invoices: Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, XRechnung and Order-X
• 396 bundled print-preflight profiles

It has been tested against several standards suites, including the veraPDF corpus, Isartor, BFO, Ghent Output Suite 5.0, the PDF/UA Reference Suite and Cal Poly's PDF/VT suite.

Across 30,677 PDF conversions it had zero crashes and zero timeouts, with a 0.05 second median conversion time.

Like Hyper, it ships as a CLI, C library, npm package, Docker image and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-kura

The release also contains other improvements and bug fixes: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf/releases/tag/v2.8.8

Thank you and have a great weekend!

So I have a new desktop PC and my old desktop PC that was broken for some time, now revived and I want to make it a home server and selfhost various apps.

I'm running Debian Trixie and plan to run the same (but headless) on the server.

My old PC had a 1TB SATA SSD (one of the Samsung EVO models from around 2013/2014). It's an old drive and it's been in use probably for 8 years in total (initially as the system disk, then for local backup). The motherboard only has 1 m2 slot with PCIe x3.

My new PC has two 2TB nvmes, the high end Samsung 9100 PRO and Samsung 990 PRO. The first disk is my system disk so it stays. But the 990 currently is almost empty and used only for a local Restic backup. I over purchased, wasn't sure which one to keep and my return window passed so both stayed.

I also have an external 2TB SSD on USB 3.

Now I have a few scenarios in mind and I'm having trouble making a decision. I need a 3-2-1 backup solution on both machines.

I won't have too many services and won't have much traffic.

I can put the 1TB SATA SSD in the server, make it the system disk. Then have the 2TB USB SSD for local backup. Or backup over SFTP to my desktop's 990. The desktop PC stays as is with two nvme disks.

I can move the 990 PRO from my desktop PC to the server and make it the system disk. I'd use the SATA SSD in one computer and the USB SSD in the other one for local backup. My server won't utilize 990's speed because of PCIe x3 being the ceiling.

There are various combinations and I suffer from decision paralysis.

Re the backup, I currently do hourly local backups and daily cloud backups.

I'd rather not buy another disk due to how expensive they are.

I don't have that much data, I won't even use 1TB. I probably have less than 250GB counting all my documents, important files, ebooks, photos.

Any hints?

Fathom is an all-in-one client for Jellyfin, on Linux, Windows, and Android (with experimental Android TV). It puts movies, shows, music, and Live TV in one window, with most of Jellyfin's server-side management built in, plus optional Seerr requests and a full YouTube client. Everything plays through mpv (via media_kit), so you get direct play, hardware decoding, and real subtitle and audio track control. Free and open source (AGPL-3.0), built by one person. This is my first update post since the v0.11.0 rundown, so here's what's new across v0.11.1 and v0.12.0.

Feedback is very welcome: bug reports and feature requests on GitHub Issues, questions in Discussions.

Downloads

Downloads is now a full offline library instead of a flat list: separate Movies, TV Shows, Recordings, and Music sections, with the same poster covers and rating badges as the regular library.

A downloaded title opens the same detail page as its library page (backdrop, cast, ratings, overview), scoped to what's downloaded: only the episodes you have, with local-only play, mark watched, and remove that never touch the server.

Download a whole series or season in one go, picking a scope, plus a download option on every episode's own menu.

Download music too, a single track or a whole album or artist, and it plays in the music player with the familiar album view, fully offline.

Live TV recordings can be downloaded as well, and can be found in their own Recordings section.

YouTube

Fixed playback being blocked entirely by YouTube's "confirm you're not a bot" gate.

Fixed multi-language videos defaulting to a dubbed audio track instead of the original.

Shuffle and repeat for background audio, plus skip back to the previous track.

Live streams start in a couple of seconds instead of tens of seconds.

Account and updates

Change your own password from the Profile screen (current, new, confirm). Leaving the new password blank removes it, the same option the official Jellyfin clients offer.

Update checks now have a frequency setting: on or off, plus Every Launch, Daily, or Weekly.

A new build is announced with a floating banner and a native system notification on Linux and Android.

Also since v0.11.0

Tapping an episode row opens its page; the thumbnail or play icon plays it directly.

Background audio no longer freezes on an unplayable track, and recovers from brief network drops.

Saved radio stations are no longer left out of settings backups.

Importing YouTube subscriptions on Android no longer greys out cloud-storage files.

Settings and your Jellyfin login now persist on minimal Linux desktops where the system keyring starts cold, such as Hyprland.

In-app updates on Android work again; a build-numbering issue was rejecting newer builds as a downgrade.

A Nix flake for Linux, so you can build and run Fathom with nix build / nix run.

Platforms: Linux and Windows (self-contained downloads) and Android (APK; Android TV experimental). macOS and iOS still need Mac hardware I don't have yet.

Links

Repo: https://github.com/Fathom-Media/fathom

Latest release: https://github.com/Fathom-Media/fathom/releases/latest

Bugs and feature requests: https://github.com/Fathom-Media/fathom/issues

Docs: https://fathom-media.github.io/fathom

AI Disclosure

Per Rule 7 / [AIP] disclosure requirements, AI was used during development as a coding assistant. Level per category:

• Design (architecture, system design): Hint — I make the architectural calls; AI suggests trade-offs and edge cases I might have missed.
• Implementation (production code): Pair — roughly 50/50. AI drafts, I review, adjust, test on real hardware, and only commit what I've verified. Every commit is manually reviewed before it goes to my dev repo.
• Testing (writing tests, test plans, QA): Assisted — real-device testing is manual (I test on my own PC and mobile devices before every release). AI helps draft test plans and think through edge cases.
• Documentation (docs, comments, README, CHANGELOG): Pair — release notes and changelog entries are drafted with AI then edited for tone; comments and code docs are mostly Pair as well.
• Review (code review, PR feedback): Assisted — I'm the reviewer; AI helps with security sweeps, audit passes on complex changes, and consistency checks.
• Deployment (CI/CD, release pipeline): Hint — GitHub Actions and the release pipeline are largely conventional; AI-suggested improvements only.

I'm interested to hear what do people use as their cloud backup and the cost of it. I currently use idrive e2 storage at 5$ per TB a month. Trying to see if there is any better deal anywhere and just curious on everyone's thoughts.

This seems like what I wanted on my first rpi over a decade ago.

Install, add ~15000 games from archive.org romsets, maybe a few bios files.

Shit just works.

~1970-2000, done

Hi,

I finally got around to migrate PdfDing from github to Codeberg. Hopefully, I will see some of you over there.

PdfDing is a PDF manager, viewer and editor that you can host yourself. It offers a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It's designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

I was reading a homelab discussion about NUTs (Network UPS Tools) that left me scratching my head and wondering "...why? Is complexity for complexities sake part of homelabs? Isn't this a huge overkill for one machine? Just...use a UPS? "

Then I got to thinking more broadly about homelabbing and I started to wonder if there weren't maybe (at least) two different schools of thought.

Using home media as example -

• Store the original.
• Detect the client.
• Transcode when required.
• Monitor the GPU.
• Add reverse proxy et al
• Track bandwidth.
• Add user accounts
• Add failover.
• Graph the result.
• Dashboard.

Vs

• Store a common compatible file for your devices.
• Play it directly.

Which school of thought are you and why?

PS: not throwing shade. I get it; for some people, complexity, learning infrastructure, practicing skills for work etc is part of the why. For me, complexity as recreation is suspiciously like work after work.

Perhaps there's an odd Venn diagram between homelabbing, interest in ownership / useful capability and infrastructure that could make for a fun discussion. For you, is homelabbing a means to an end or is it an end in itself?

EDIT: Feel free to consider "home-lab" and "self hosted" as synonyms for the purpose of this discussion (although I am aware they are somewhat different in scope).

2.5 years ago, I migrated all my services hosted on a cloud provider to a homeserver.

This homeserver is also my workstation/gaming/dev/everything. I use QubesOS (an operating system based on the Xen hypervisor), and wrote some document about it: https://neowutran.ovh/qubes/articles/homeserver.pdf

Basically, I am hosting:

• DNS
• Matrix
• Email
• Jitsi
• Mumble
• Peertube
• Screego
• Nextcloud
• Searxng
• Tor
• Wireguard VPN
• Copy of wikipedia
• Personal website And others.

And for TLS, to have better security, and to avoid relying on third party company/providers, I am using DANE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities

https://sr.ht/~yukikoo/dane_without_root/

https://github.com/buffrr/letsdane

The "dane_without_root" is one of my projects and I am welcoming review / feedback on it

( I also posted about it on the QubesOS forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/highlighting-neowutrans-technical-doc-about-qubes )

Pic is how I feel acquiring more software to replace my Big Tech dependency.

(Not all services could be listed here, obviously. Just the ones I personally use)