Stuff and things
I don't even know what that means. I think things have gotten over-complicated, but the idea that I can write on my computer and publish using a git commit is pretty cool. So that's what I'm doing now thanks to Netlify. The barrier to posting was "Do I want to do a merge with SFTP" and the answer is very often "nah." This is cooler, plus I can do it from multiple computers if I wanted to.
A while back I started getting nervous about hosted services. Google starting to limit storage, Amazon killing off their music hosting, all of these were catalysts but a desire for privacy and a kind of old-school internet experience also drove my plans.
After some semi-successful experimentation with Plex on a Raspberry Pi, I started thinking about how the same priciple could be applied to other services, like photo galleries. Turns out that not only are there a ton of self-hosted, open-source options for doing a lot of things you might want to do, most of them have been containerized to run in Docker.
My machine is not that powerful. It's a 4-core Pentium Lenovo Thinkstation with its main drive replaced with an SSD. It previously ran Mint desktop as a basic home computer. But after I got an old Macbook I didn't really need it, so it seemed like a perfect box to repurpose.
Far and away the most popular operating system for these kinds of boxes is openmediavault, a Debian distro with no desktop but a convenient web interface that allows even a relative dumbo like myself to mount drives and share them with services like SMB or FTP.
As you might imagine, the web UI of OMV makes one want to do everything via your browser. SSH is not super hard, but it's mighty convenient to use Portainer, a great web UI for Docker.
After spending what I consider to be too much money to watch my own stuff (PlexPass at $5/month), I went with Jellyfin, an open-source fork of Emby. I tell you what, we've come a long way since the old XBMC running on an overheating computer attached directly to the TV. It has clients for our computers, iOS and Android devices, and Roku, and perhaps because it doesn't need to do transcoding for those devices, the old computer barely even has to work when streaming to two different devices.
Music was never a strong point of Plex, though it was capable. Navidrome implements the Subsonic API, which is pretty well supported in a range of (admittedly varying-quality) third party apps, though it's better than Subsonic itself, which is Java. Is it your personal Spotify? Not quite, but close enough.
Of course, right? We have a laser printer with no built-in network capabilities, and frankly we've had better luck using this old box than a dedicated print server from Monoprice.
This is a really great document archive system that lets you specify all kinds of great metadata for finding your stuff when you need it (say, tax time or when the insurance company asks for documentation). An iOS app scans directly into it, where the server then OCRs all documents. From there, machine learning tools start trying to automatically apply metadata based on your defined patterns of text.
It's a GUI backup tool. Easy cheesy, and now all my stuff is backed up in Backblaze B2.
This is a whole other post. What a fun and frustrating journey.
It's hard to overstate the usefulness of /r/selfhosted as well as the subreddits for all the individual tools. Lots of people of varying levels of expertise willing to help.
If you have any questions on how I did some of this stuff, hit me on twitter/cohost/FB/whatever and I can try to explain it in my just-enough-to-be-dangerous way.
Are these the only posts I write anymore? Talk about a legend right here, Burt Bacharach shuffled off at 94. I have to say that's a good run.
The man, along with Hal David turned complex, jazz-derived chords and combinations into sublime, accessible pop. He collaborated with Elvis Costello and of course Dionne Warwick, among others, and inspired not just easy-listening mellow cats, but a huge range of artists that included Arthur Lee and his proto-punk band Love.
A true titan of music. Rest well and thanks for the music.
This one is a little late. But here's a guy who was the vocalist and drummer of the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra, and then — like his other two bandmates — went on to an almost equally-legendary solo discography. Like Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Robert Fripp, Takahashi is a big inspiration on everything I do that involves "songs" or "musicality." He never strayed away from pop or accessibility, but always kept it a little left-of-center.
Here's an insanely 80s video for the title track of my favorite of his, Murdered By The Music.
Lately I've been doing more fighting with Plex (slogan: "Pay $5 a month to use your own server") and my Raspberry Pi-based media server than actually watching or listening anything, so I tried a few new things.
Unfortunately, Tailscale doesn't let Roku type devices get on my tunnel, so maybe I'll use the old Pi for some kind of perma-VPN or reverse proxy or some shit I clearly do not understand.
But I've found Jellyfin to be more bare-bones yet also much more performant, more likely to direct stream than attempt to transcode, and really a breeze to work with. If you've ever wondered about switching from Plex, it might be for you. If you are wondering about Emby, don't — Jellyfin is an open-sourced fork that is more up to date.
I always do this, but honestly it was not a huge year for me in terms of listening to new music. I'm still jamming Necrot's Mortal (2020) on the regular and couldn't tell you much about what new death metal is out there. And two of my favorite bands were cut down by tragedy: Low due to Mimi Parker's untimely death from cancer, and Neurosis from the revelation that Scott Kelly was an abusive sociopath.
That was in no particular order, but I think the top spot is occupied by Haunted Horses' The Worst Has Finally Happened. Monstrous and unique. It does the things I like. Check it out.
If the memes and jokes are to be believed, 2022 wasn't any more of a picnic than any year since the pandemic started. Or since 2015 maybe. Or the century. Or eternity maybe. But truly, we did lose some real ones in the music world.
If you haven't heard of any of these folks, I suggest you check them out. There's a lot of great art here.
I feel like I've been posting a lot of these RIP things lately. The Specials were, in hindsight a big deal for me. Ska was a sound that was punk-approved. And other than hip-hop, it was the first music I got into on my own that wasn't "loud guitar music." That certainly opened up the way for so many of the things I love, from James Brown to Autechre. Arguably the only band more important for my branching-out was Joy Division.
And I can't get enough of watching them play in their heyday. They looked impossibly cool, a wild mass of energy and high pants cuffs. And there was Terry Hall at the center, totally serious and almost menacing while chaos erupted.
The guy had a terrible life story with great pain in his childhood, but he translated that into a great thoughtfulness and empathy for the less fortunate in the Thatcher era. It was through him that the great contrast of the Specials — fun Jamaican-inspired music with black-humor or straight-up dark punk lyrics — manifested, and without him they've been only half of their glory.
Instead of a classic Special song, here's the video for "Our Lips Are Sealed," which Hall cowrote, and in which he looks like Robert Smith.
Yes, Lite XL happened this year and it's been great on Linux but is a little janky on Mac. So I've stuck with what I know, which is the electron-based Atom by Github. Imagine my surprise when I went to make a couple CSS tweaks to this site today and found that Atom will be sunset... tomorrow.
So here I am with VSCodium, the MS-telemetry-free version of their VS Code. I'd like to take the opportunity to try something that isn't electron (even though a text editor for web projects might be the most logical use of the technology), but I need to get some requisite Python tools to make CudaText work and the list is actually pretty short these days. Seems that if you have the money for Sublime you're using it, and if you don't you're on VS Code. Oh well.
First Julee Cruise, now Angelo Badalamenti. One was estranged, one was presumably still a close friend. But either way, the David Lynch musical universe is a silent place now.
Here's the maestro talking about building perhaps his most iconic piece, Laura Palmer's Theme.
Rest well and thanks for the music.
