I’ve wanted to put together a post about my self hosting and media consumption for a while now. I also feel like an annual self-hosting review would be a neat thing for reflection. I didn’t intend to combine these posts but a few events recently caused me to change a lot of my home infrastructure. Because that was media driven, I figured I’d combine them.

I have been focusing a lot of physical and offline media in recent days. This was spurred on by YouTube getting more aggressive about third party applications and by Amazon removing a movie and an album that I had purchased. I knew these services were prone to being anti-consumer but I just got too comfortable.

Regarding Amazon: my household has several streaming subscriptions. I tend not to use them but I will occasionally. For my own streaming, I’ll subscribe to Fanatiz breifly when I want to watch football and I keep a PBS subscription going (which is a battle itself, maybe for another post). I had hoped that the content I had “purchased” on Amazon would remain available but I’m definitely not immune to problems when they lose licensing. This is really anoying.

Enter the YouTube issue: it feels like it’s getting substantially more difficult to access YouTube without an account (which is by design). The constant cat and mouse with yt-dlp backed programs finally got to be too much and my home IP was banned. My family members use Google accounts to watch YouTube but I refuse to. I tend to use FreeTube and NewPipe to watch things. I know I can change VPN endpoints but that’s quite inconvenient. I think for now I will just stop checking the YouTube channels I enjoy following and try to ignore the service alltogether like I do with Reddit.

With the recent history update out of the way, here’s the current lay of the land for my home network and my media consumption practices:

Home Infrastructure and Services

I currently use a handful of devices regularly and I’m OK with them not being fully synced with each other. I do use syncthing for some redudance and a couple of cloud services but I don’t go out of my way to have everything on everything all the time. My current devices in regular rotation are:

• Personal desktop (Beelink mini pc)
• Work laptop (Thinkpad)
• Pixel 7 Pro
• Kobo Libra H2O
• Stock 2017 Nvidia Shield Pro “Home Server” (that does not act as a server)
• Stock PS4
• Modded Switch
• Modded 2DS XL
• FiiO DM13 CD Player

I won’t go into too much detail about how the data is synced between all of them in this post but I mention them to color the information about the actual infra and services I have running. Maybe I’ll go into data sync in future post. This post will be a rambling stream of consciousness so buckle up if you’re going to continue reading…

My home network gets complicated when it goes beyond my own walls because there are two other adjacent properties that I interface with. I’ll leave those out of the post for now because they’re ancillary and I don’t use those networks often, myself. I simply support them.

For the last few years and up until late last year I was heavily using devices in the TP-Link Omada ecosystem. I wanted to move to WiFi 6 with a good mesh because it is very difficult to run cables in my home. I ended up purchasing the wrong access points and returned them. In a bit of a fit of frustration, I bought four ASUS XT9 access points rather than the more expensive replacements.

So far these have worked well. I get fair reception and good speeds. It’s definitely not as good as my gigabit connection but it’s good enough for my needs. The only issue I have is that the mesh will drop once every few days for about 30 seconds. It appears as if the nodes are rebooting themselves. This is a known problem without a solution. A minor annoyance not worth chasing down (yet).

Currently I have two servers in the house, both mini-pcs. One is quite old and I’ll need to replace it soon. The second is a newer Beelink mini pc that I used to run as my desktop. I run proxmox on the old server and Fedora Workstation on the new one.

The old server hosts Home Assistant with a Zigbee radio for all of my fancy lights. It also hosts pi-hole. Finally it has a VM runing podman which runs two containers: Uptime Kuma for monitoring all of my services (plus some client services) and Kanboard for managing my work projects.

The new server hosts Jellyfin for video/music, PinchFlat for pulling some YouTube channels, FreshRSS for blog posts, and Cockpit for managing the server (as well as a couple of ancillary services to support these). I connect to this one with both SSH and RDP. Plus it’s plugged into a TV so it can be used as an HTPC, which is why I went with Fedora Workstation instead of another Proxmox node.

I prefer to run podman instead of docker for my containers, mostly to explore the technology but also to have rootless containers. My only issue so far has been that file permissions and UUIDs are kind of a pain in the neck with podman and often don’t match docker instructions. I’ll admit to using Claude on a couple of occasions to help me build composefiles for podman out of frustration.

I keep threatening to automate the building of all of this with OpenTofu and Ansible, however I do a lot of that in my daily work. “The cobbler’s children have no shoes”, or so the saying goes.

Media Consumption

The major themes for my media consumption is that I generally want offline access to things and I don’t want subscriptions or DRM. I want to keep and play my media when I want to. I also understand that it’s not always possible so I make concessions where I can. Finally, I want my media consumption to be intentional and as far removed from brainrot doom-scrolling as I can.

Video:

For video, I have tried to hard-pivot to offline media. I recently set up my Jellyfin server to host a bunch of the stray videos I have laying around. It’s mostly old movies I bought from GOG (back when they sold movies!), some documentaries I bought from indie outlets, and old DVD rips from back before I got rid of my DVDs. Plus with Jellyfin, I can connect to some of my friends' instances and watch from their libraries (a not-offline bonus).

I have also jumped back into buying physical video. I have a tenuous relationship with movies/TV. I have rarely been able to sit through such things but I’m getting more relaxed in life and I’m finding enjoyment in them now. What’s more is that physical copies are really nice to hold. There’s great art and I can watch them whenever I like. I have focused on bluray for my physical purchases and DVD when bluray isn’t available. I should probably slow down on this front, though. I have spent more than I intended to and I have limited space. I would like to focus more on curation than collection.

As I mentioned, I’m trying to avoid YouTube. I used to passively watch a few creators by way of FreeTube and Newpipe. Now I’m just leaving those applications closed and I have added a small number of creators I enjoy to Pinchflat. If the videos get downloaded, cool. If not… cool.

To replace YouTube, I started supporting a few creators on Patreon. I’m also following PeerTube accounts with my Mastodon account and I am trying to navigate Odysee (though I fear this one may be a dud). Lastly I’ve tried to follow a few folks on Twitch but livestreams are overwhelming to me with all the chat and extra attention economy engagement bits.

Music:

Ages ago I had a ton of CDs and I had ripped a lot of them into a music collection. The CDs weren’t kept in a nice climate controlled environment so they deteriorated and I had to toss them. I’m pretty sad about it but I still have the rips. I have nearly 15,000 songs in my collection, a third of which probably came from those CDs.

I have started buying CDs again and listening to them on my FiiO DM13 CD player and I love the experience. My van also has a full CD/DVD/Bluray entertainment setup with a hard drive so I can enjoy the media in there as well. This has been great.

The bulk of the rest of my music collection has come from Bandcamp, Amazon Music (which I now download IMMEDIATELY), and more recently Qobuz. I am using PowerAmp on my phone and Strawberry on my desktop to listen to these. Jellyfin handles music playback on the Shield incredibly well.

Finally for streaming music, I really love radio-browser.info. I listen to streaming radio stations pretty regularly and that website has so many aggregated. It’s almost like an open version of the brief “WiFi Radio” idea that several of the niche radio manufacturers tried to implement. I listen to those streams with GNOME Shortwave on my desktop and RadioDroid on my phone. I would like to find a good app for this on the shield.

It’s worth noting that I go through periods of an intense annoyance with music that I have been calling “music fatigue”. I find that every now and then I will go through a span of time anywhere between a few days and a year where hearing any music at all makes me irrationally annoyed and angry. I don’t know what causes this but switching back to offline music away from the infinite choice of services like spotify has helped this problem greatly.

Books/Magazines:

My favorite form of reading content is magazines and periodicals. Sadly these days I no longer have magazine subscriptions because they get out of control. I haven’t checked my local library for physical magazines yet since I’ve switched libraries but I may do this. A not-great but good-enough replacement for me in this area has been the Libby app by my library. They keep a lot of titles in languages that I speak with content I’m interested in.

For books, I prefer physical (especially if it’s manga). Mostly because my eyes get tired with screens and light. I do, however, have an extensive eBook collection and I love it. Most of my books have come from bookshop.org, Kobo, or Humble Bundle with several acquired from smaller parties. I like to read them on my Kobo Libra. I begrudgingly manage them with Calibre, which is incredibly powerful/useful but has absolutely trash UI.

Games:

My primary focus on games is being able to acquire games that I can keep. I’m not a big fan of modern AAA live service titles. I mostly only play those to socialize with friends and it’s pretty sparringly. If a game won’t run on one of my devices or if it requires AAA rootkits, I’ll run it through my GeForce Now subscription. This seems counter to most of my practices but it fills the niche well.

The first place I check for games is GOG, because they are typically DRM free. After that I’ll try to find a physical copy for the PS4, Switch, or 2DS. If I can’t get something in one of those ways, I’ll turn to Steam, Android, or maybe emulation if it’s very old and hard to obtain.

I have about 250 games the last time I checked. I would like to get better at taking inventory of them but it’s slipped a bit in recent history and I’m not sure the best way to go about that. I’d like to inventory most of my media overall, I guess.

Online Media:

So online media doesn’t quite fit into any sort of offline or permanent storage solution and that’s fine. I do spend a lot of time online and I’ve tried to be substantially more mindful of what I consume.

For more than a decade, I avoided the major social media sites. I dropped many of my accounts in the early 2010s. In 2023 I signed up for Facebook and Instagram because friends from the gym used them. I have since deleted my IG account but I’ve kept my FB account so I can get notices from the gym. I check it approximately weekly.

Social networks are a different story… I am a long time member of the Fediverse and I joined back in the StatusNet days. At the moment, I have a Mastodon account and I am trying out Bookwyrm. In the past I’ve had a Pixelfed account. I’ve been considering going back to that because I have a point and shoot camera and it might be fun to do some uploads there.

Given the state of the world, I fell into a dark hole of Reddit and the major national news outlets. It was awful and it affected my mood terribly. It made me very depressed. To combat this, I’ve cut out Reddit almost entirely and I only check Kagi News a couple times per week just to stay somewhat up to date. I also check my local newspaper a couple times per month by way of the local library. This has been a boon for my overall mental health.

For podcasts, I use Antennapod on my phone. I pull subscriptions from its search feature and more recently from Patreon. I like the idea that I can directly support creators and wish I was doing this before. I also wish that the grind wasn’t so hard on creators. It’s sad to see the bullshit treadmill they have to walk just to eek out a living.

I’ve also returned to RSS feeds. I set up FreshRSS in a container locally. I use Capy Reader on my phone and Newsflash on my desktop. I often send articles to Instapaper so I can read them on my Kobo. I am now on the hunt for interesting things to add to it, please reach out if you know any good feeds!