I’m on the new HTPC version installed as a snap. I can see that it’s meant to work with passthrough, but I find that it… doesn’t.

I haven’t tried in a few versions. Maybe I should give it another crack.

I used MythTV for decades. I really loved the “raw” digital output of the music player. It would casually hop from 44/16/2.0 to 96/24/5.1 between songs and my amp would decode it. I even contributed a small patch to make the visualizer work with 24bit audio.

The live TV hardware accelerated deinterlacing was really good too. TV recording was super reliable.

The TVDb lookup was a tad glitchy. It turns out that it didn’t include the year in the lookup. I wrote a patch that did it (and improved my metadata lookups heaps) but never made a PR.

I jumped to Plex around 2020. Mostly for things like streaming to my phone so I can have my music on the train. I believe Myth was better for HTPC, but Plex isn’t too far off.

I’m not a fan of Plex audio. Every time I try to make it do AC3 passthrough or skip the OS mixers, the whole thing breaks.

Printers are always horrible to administer. Brother are typically the best on Linux. I wrote a massive instructional blog a few weeks ago because it took so much work to get my HL-3150CDN working over USB. I had to repackage a Frankenstein’s monster of a driver because my printer never got 64-bit CUPS filters.

The longest outage I’ve had in a decade is when my primary SSD died a 2 months ago and I had to reinstall using config backups. It was down for around a day.

I’ve thrown a UPS on it and flown overseas for a week or two. It’s basically just email for me and the kids.

I’ve had longer outages on hosted services, TBH.

I host my own mail. When it’s down, the mail just gets delivered after I get online again. Almost all mail servers are configured to retry over a period of several days before giving up.

Once my health insurer sent me mail by post to tell me that my mail server was down. That was kinda funny.

TightVNC. Use TightVNC.

I wrote a blog about it last year with my method of deduplicating. I really need to update that bit because steam keeps writing files that don’t uphold the group permissions, and others get permission errors that need to be fixed by admin. Steam also failed to determine free space on a drive when symlinks were involved.

I even found recently that steam would write files in /tmp/ as one user, and fail when you logged in as another user and tried to write the same file. Multi-user breaks even without messing around.

My current solution doesn’t use symlinks. I just add two libraries for each user. One in their respective home directory, and another shared in /mnt/steam. It means that any user can update a game in /mnt/steam, and it cleanly updates for all users at once.

OK I just measured mine. I have 459GiB of games on the drive, consuming 368GiB of space. That’s about 25% compression. I’m using compress=zstd:9.

I should try deduplication. I have 4 steam users and I’ve created an ACL hell to prevent the same game being downloaded and installed twice.

Btrfs is amazing for a steam library. The single best feature is the compression. Games tend to have lot of unoptimized assets which compress really well. Because decompression is typically faster than your disk, it can potentially make games load faster too.

I put a second dedicated nvme drive in my PC just for steam. It’s only 512GB but it holds a surprisingly large library.

I did have LUKS and a USB flash drive with a key to be inserted on boot. It was definitely difficult and caused performance issues. It was particularly difficult to add/remove drives from the array. These days I only encrypt my off-site backups that sit at the office where my coworkers potentially have physical access.

There have been recent advancements in TPM so disk encryption is easier to maintain and doesn’t affect performance. I’ll need to investigate this one day. My server/NAS is a 4th-gen i5, so it may not support the functions I would need. Full disk encryption will land in Ubuntu soon. I’m hanging out for that.

I personally would flick through the OpenWRT supported devices and pick the best supported device with 802.11ax.

Haha that’s what I was poking at. You won’t find it on tap in an Australian pub. I don’t even see it in bottle shops.

I don’t think Fosters is associated with a country. Maybe Japan or England.

I would love it if Valve secretly checked if Windows was genuine and put it in their stats.

It’s interesting that Asia is boosting Linux numbers when the Valve hardware survey showed the opposite. The numbers were recently updated to include China and it caused every OS to lose ground to Win10.

Everything exposed except NFS, CUPS and Samba. They absolutely cannot be exposed.

Like, even my DNS server is public because I use DoT for AdBlock on my phone.

Nextcloud, IMAP, SMTP, Plex, SSH, NTP, WordPress, ZoneMinder are all public facing (and mostly passworded).

A fun note: All of it is dual-stacked except SSH. Fail2Ban comparatively picks up almost zero activity on IPv6.

Testdisk and photorec? It’s saved me heaps of times.

Gmail works with it.

But Gmail could technically pump the same ads over IMAP if they wanted to.

I’m an app developer. My company makes an iOS version, and it’s damn near impossible to deal with Apple’s shit.

Imagine buying a piece of hardware and actually owning it.