Yoruio

I just realized that this is the homeassistant community and not something more generic.

Specifically for homeassistant, Wireguard should be fine, unless you plan to do some more advanced stuff like use Alexa without a nabu casa subscription.

The times where you need access to your HA instance without being able to connect to Wireguard should be pretty limited.

To use Wireguard, you need to:

1. provision a client tunnel for every device, or at least every person who needs to access your network
2. have Wireguard downloaded and installed on every device, with the tunnels all imported.

Basically, Wireguard works really well for services that only you use, on your own devices. You set it up once per device, and you have access to every service you host on your network.

For the DuckDNS / reverse proxy route, you need to configure the reverse proxy for every service you want to expose, but don’t need to configure anything on the end user’s device.

For Jellyfin, since I have users that are not me, it is impractical to expect them to go through all the hoops to get Wireguard running just to watch some movie or tv show. I also don’t want to make new Wireguard client tunnels for every single friend that I add to my jellyfin server. This also means I can access jellyfin on devices that aren’t my own such as a friend’s TV.

For immich, my phone is a bit wonky with keeping Wireguard connected in the background, and I just don’t want to worry about if I’m connected to my vpn just so my photos will get backed up.

Different services for different use cases.

I use nginx reverse proxy behind Duckdns for anything that requires public access, or that I use very frequently, like jellyfin or immich

I use Wireguard for everything else, to expose as little as possible.

If anything, I would say that Duckdns is harder to setup than Wireguard. You will need something like nginx reverse proxy if you want to host multiple services, and also deal with SSL certificates.

In the US, publically traded companies have a legal obligation to make as much money for their shareholders as legally possible (See Ford getting sued by shareholders after giving workers raises). It would be borderline illegal for a company to adjust their algorithm in a way that makes them less competitive.

This needs to be regulated by government, not the companies themselves. Thay would mean that the companies would be forced to all change their algorithms at the same time, and not impact their competitiveness.

So the government going after tiktok is a good first step, IF it does the same thing to Facebook / instagram / YouTube / snapchat. But I’m betting it won’t be because those companies spend an absurd amount of money on lobbying.

this is just how capitalism works - you have to appeal to your audience more than your competition, and guess which kind of content teenagers want to watch more. Hell, even adults want fun content as opposed to educational content.

they’re not willingly selling a worse society for profit, that’s just the only way to stay competitive.

any platform that pushes educational content in North America would just not get any customers and go bankrupt.

edit: there’s plenty of educational video platforms out there, like Khan academy. Try and get your kids to scroll through that during their free time instead, I bet they won’t.

Carissa

If you had a Samsung fridge, and you willingly put a bomb in the fridge, would you blame Samsung when your fridge explodes?

Microsoft gives you the freedom to install software that runs with the same level of privilege as the kernel itself. You’re the one that chose to install defective software, and then give it kernel level permissions. You put a bomb in your computer and now you’re blaming Microsoft after the bomb exploded.

Microsoft didn’t make the decision to allow the faulty input, the person who installed the software did, when they gave it permission to run in kernel mode.

I don’t remember much about plex photos, but facial (and object) recognition, photo map, easy sharing through albums (without the other person needing an account), and being open source are some features I imagine plex photos does not have.

it seems barebones still, because it is a very young app, and the UI is not great, especially on mobile.

It is the best replacement for Google photos that I have seen though.

+1 to immich

However, because of the fast dev cycle, it has a lot of breaking changes, and needs regular maintenance (most notably for me, postgres docker changes. Especially if you are not giving it it’s own postgres instance and using their provided docker compose.)

You could stay pegged to a single version, but the mobile app also doesn’t have full backwards compatibility with server versions, which results in a slew of other problems (how do I do a fresh install of an older app version on a new device?)

But if you are willing to keep up and perform semi-regular maintenance, immich is great, and the rapid dev cycle means more new features faster!

netlify is amazing for static sites.

I live in Canada.

Here in Canada at least, I was taught in elementary school to capitalize all important words (i.e. other than and, or, at, in, etc.) in a title. Is it taught differently in other places?

would really spark some anger after people get stranded with disabled cars while camping for prolonged periods of time, or just parking underground while flying abroad.

yeah, not to mention the support and warranty you get with a prebuilt can be more than worth the small price premium for someone slightly less tech savvy.

You can definitely run pihole and Plex on the same machine!

I would go for a used PC over a refurb server. servers eat up a lot of electricity and will increase your electric bills quite a bit.

go for something with an Intel CPU, maybe a 10th gen i3, or even older if you want cheaper. Intel’s quicksync will let you do hardware transcoding without a GPU. you really don’t need a very powerful cpu otherwise, both Plex and pihole aren’t very heavy on the cpu.

Plex is a media server. You can think of it like an instance of Netflix that you host yourself, with all your own media.

What can it do?

It lets you keep your media on one computer, and access it from anywhere on any device.

Plex Media Server (PMS), or sometimes just referred to as Plex, Is the server itself. It tracks all your media, metadata, etc, and handles servery stuff like transcoding, and actually serving the media.

Just like any other streaming service, to connect to the server and actually play the media, you need a client. There are many different Plex clients including but not limited to:

• The webclient on the plex.tv website
• Windows / MacOS
• Android / iOS Plex apps
• Plex for HTPC
• Android TV apps
• Plexamp (solely for music) So the difference between PMS and Plex is that one is the server, and one is the client you need to access the server.

Can I access it on Chromecast?

Yes! you can cast from your phone to a Chromecast in the Plex app. If you’ve got an android TV, you can also install the native Plex app, and browse Plex like any other streaming service.

why do I even need it?

Probably because you (will) have a lot of media sitting around, and need a way to access the media without being physically in front of the computer it is stored on. Maybe you want to share your media collection with other people.

What else do I need to make it useful?

Plex works pretty well on its own! You just need to provide your own media, and point Plex at where your media is. This can be through ripping Blurays, or … less than legal means. If you plan on going the legally murky route, there are many other applications like Sonarr and Radarr that will automatically find and download media, but that’s too advanced for now.

LMK if you have any other questions, I’d be glad to give more answers.