djdarren

I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.

Debian is great. Boring, and great.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3*, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn’t 5* that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn’t rated, I could spin up a rating and it’d get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it’s not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I’ve got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

Just be aware that if you want anyone else to connect to your Jellyfin, you’ll still have to route it through a domain and reverse proxy, unless you’re comfortable letting them log in to your tailnet.

It’s a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it’s done it’s quite satisfying.

I use Navidrome, and have set up Lidarr to feed it if I’m feeling a little hook-handed, if you get my meaning. Lidarr was a bit of a bollocks to set up, but once it’s running it’s pretty neat. I access it via Tailscale so can add stuff to the library wherever I am.

As for accessing it: again, I use Tailscale to run it through a reverse proxy on my website, so I connect to it using a subdomain. But as long as I’ve got Tailscale active on my phone, I could always access it that way. As others have suggested, I use Symfonium on my phone, and I use Feishin on everything else.

It all works pretty well, to the point that I don’t really use Apple Music anymore.

Thinking on it, I suppose the biggest cost is in terms of my time.

Up until this point, I’ve put quite a bit of time into learning how things work, and how to deploy things I’d find useful, and that can replace paid for services. Even now things are set up and running, I still have a tendency to fiddle with things. I’ve spent far more time on my Navidrome server than I ever did on Apple Music, put it that way. The same amount of time listening, mind.

Technically, £0

I do have use Mullvad VPN, but not really for any of my hosting, and I do have a Hetzner VPS for my own site, which I have started using to access things. But I can access it all with Tailscale, which is free, as long as I can remember port numbers.

But with those taken into account;

Mullvad: £5 VPS: £15 Domain registration: £35pa

So all told it’s about £22 a month.

I do need to look into donating to some of the services I use the most though.

Electricity $200 Off-site backup $130 FOSS project donations $800 Thigh-high socks $3600 Domains £150

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

I’ve used SyncThing for over a year from Graphene to, well, any computer I have. But I’ve never been able to work out: is it possible to set ST so that it doesn’t take up space on a device, like how cloud storage platforms do?