How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

I’ll try these fixes, thanks!

I used to self-host an Invidious instance on my home server for personal use, but at some point it stopped working and I haven’t tried it again. I might give it another try along with Piped.

But as bad as YT is, by this point I have trained “The Algorithm” well enough that the home feed suggestions are pretty good at pointing me to stuff I actually would watch (mainly tech, science and engineering topics), I think none of the alternative frontend does suggestions, right?

Forget about the neighborhood; the whole city’s omae wa mou shindeiru along with the suburbs.

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

Having faced the same situation, here’s my 2 cents:

• OMV is the best solution for reusing/upcycling old consumer grade PC hardware. Your storage pool is easily expandable using MergerFS, you don’t need 16+ GB of RAM, and you certainly don’t need server-grade hardware. But you won’t have the bells and whistles the ZFS offers (yes, there is ZFS plugin, but at this point, why not just use TrueNAS?).
• TrueNAS if you intend to build a “serious” storage server with many GB-s of ECC RAM, multi-Gbit networking and all that jazz. And if you have the budget to buy 5 or 6 large HDD-s at once to start out your storage pool with a single vdev using RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 (or buy 2 HDDs for a single mirrored vdev with a whopping 50% of all your current and future storage going to redundancy). As I understand it, ZFS expandability is in the works, but not production-ready yet—which makes ZFS less suitable for ad hoc grow-it-as-you-go storage solution.

In the end, OMV won it out for me, the 10TB motley crew of various HDD-s has served me well and I can expand cheaply when my needs grow.

Those small AMD boxes are great. I set up 3 MSI ones as Kodi/LibreELEC media boxes and they work very well, stay cool and quiet while having plenty of horsepower for 4k.

I haven’t really used smart playlists, so I cannot comment on that

And another vote for Navidrome. I use it vith DSub frontend (the only one I’ve found that supports DLNA, for playing back on any DLNA renderer device) and Tailscale for remote access.

Yes, Tailscale starts up with Windows and doesn’t require any interaction.

One caveat, DLNA/casting/KDE Connect don’t work when Tailscale is active. Seems to be a limitation with multicasting not playing well with VPN-s in general.

Capitalists are behind the most prelavent economic school (neoliberalism) today—just look at the history of the “Chicago school”. I doubt the capitalists themselves believe that BS, but it’s profitable for them to make the rest of the world to believe it.

I highly recommend evonomics.com, some rally good essays on there about the cult-like economic beliefs of today. Written by economists who’ve seen through the BS.