I tried to break from Windows back in college after Windows 8 was such a disaster. Set up an Arch dual boot over a weekend and tried to use it whenever I could. Unfortunately found myself using the Windows partition far more often mostly because of gaming compatibility. Shelved it and suffered through MS’s bullshit ever since.

10 years later on the dot, I went on a huge degoogling/de-MS push this past winter/spring. Set up GrapheneOS on my phone, moved away from as many big tech services and tools as I could, changed my email, and eventually said fuck it and installed CachyOS on my brand new desktop to give it a go. It’s been my daily driver ever since. The whole degoogling push also got me to set up a home server and go down the entire selfhosting rabbit hole but that’s a discussion for another day.

The Steam Deck is what really reintroduced me to it and showed me how insane Proton is for compatibility, and with all the garbage big tech and fascists want to throw at us, this year was definitely time to make the switch.

Which reminds me, I should probably wipe that Windows partition that still gathers dust.

I finally finished my unhinged marathon of the entire Yakuza franchise that started when Infinite Wealth launched. At the time I’d played all the games up to that point but never really went for 100%, but that game’s platinum was so easy and the nostalgia bait in the second half of the game both made me want to replay all the games and go through spinoffs that I hadn’t played yet.

Right after IW I went back through the mainline starting from 0 (followed by the Kiwami remakes rather than the originals, but we’ll get there). Burnt out on 5 which I’d argue is the actual most tedious plat in the series, but got back to it a few months later, then breezed through the rest just in time for Pirates (which was certainly a game of all time…).

With the mainline out of the way, I replayed Judgment and LJ, finally played through Kaito Files for the first time, and then started working through spinoffs. I also got through the original PS2 games twice each - once in English emulated just to experience them, then again on the Japanese HD port on the PS3 for the trophy list. I still have nightmares of the 20 Home Run thing for Y1. Dead Souls was actually fun, Kurohyou 1 and 2 were fantastic games but incredibly grindy (and buggy) for 100%. Ishin’s plat wasn’t actually nearly as bad as people say. Through in Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise for good measure. Finally, got through Kenzan for the first time and its completion list with the help of way too many translation guides.

So, all that being said, at the time I was satisfied with achievement lists for games that had them, and completion lists for those that didn’t, but a handful of games don’t actually require full completion lists for plat (off the top of my head I think 3, 4, Dead Souls, 6, 7, Gaiden, IW, and Pirates). So I said fuck it, run it back and wrap them up.

About a year and a half later, I could say I’d just about 100%'d the entire franchise. I think the only thing I didn’t do was the Haruka’s Trust bullshit in games that didn’t require it.

I will add right now that I’m NOT currently planning on playing Kiwami 3 due to the Kagawa situation and just how the franchise is being handled in general. I’m happy calling this my stopping point if they don’t recast him.

When I first set up my server this year it was a VERY easy decision between this and jellyfin. Why would I ever go with the corporate, closed source option?

I set this up a while back (and recently moved to Forgejo, see the update note at the beginning of the article):

https://nickcunningh.am/blog/how-to-automate-version-updates-for-your-self-hosted-docker-containers-with-gitea-renovate-and-komodo

Probably a tad overkill honestly but it works amazingly well, and turns every potential upgrade into an approval process so nothing will update when you don’t want it to.

Their usage is basically just the same old machine learning that’s existed for ages, long before the genAI bubble started. They really should avoid the buzzword for accuracy’s sake but it’s far removed from all the LLM generative dogshit.

I started using the same one after this weirdo started trying (and failing) to doxx me for like 3 months. A bit pricy but they definitely work. Tried looking myself up a couple months in and I couldn’t find shit.

It definitely feels a bit uncomfortable giving them all the information they need to do the job though I’ll admit. It makes sense, but I can definitely see why people would question if they’re legit. I think I researched for hours before going with it just to make sure it was real.

Though spam calls have definitely been a nuisance again this past month or so.

I’ve got 2 sitting around, never use it but it’s a neat gimmick and I know a lot of folks still swear by this thing. I love how all 3 of these new things are just major upgrades to hardware from like 2016ish

Oh this looks promising. TS + Gluetun does tend to be super slow, so routing just the outbound traffic through the chained VPN is excellent. I’ll give this a try this weekend.

I haven’t used Mumble since like 2010, looks like it’s still the exact same tool as it ever was, and that’s honestly all it really needs to be. Love to see it

Hell, I route a TS exit node through gluetun so I can access my LAN while also covering my outbound traffic.

This is gonna get a bit into my particular setup but sure

Explo’s a super early in development “discover weekly” generator, relies on Listenbrainz scrobbling and runs on a cron job to download the playlist from your connected source (in my case slskd), put it in a folder, and create a Navidrome playlist out of it. I use the SLSKD_MIGRATE option (my feedback is actually the reason the dev even added it), so my files are downloaded to my slskd dir and explo moves them to a separate library.

I’m very particular about my library though so I don’t want it just throwing everything into the same folder as the rest of my music, and I have 2 users, so my directories are like:

• /music/me
• /music/wife
• /discover/me
• /discover/wife

Keeping the discover folders for Explo completely outside the main library, but mounted in Navidrome as additional libraries, helps keep things very separate. Explo’s also smart enough to check with Navidrome before searching for a track - if it already exists in the library, then it won’t redownload it.

I run 2 Explo instances, 2 hours apart, and in between those runs I have another cron job that wipes out my slskd downloads directory for a clean slate.

One small catch I ran into: Explo needs a Navidrome admin account to kick off the library scan, but my users aren’t admins (since an admin automatically has access to every single library). So each week when it runs I need to log in as an admin and re-assign each playlist accordingly. Not a big deal, and the dev already has some ideas in mind to address this in the future. This also becomes a small bit of an issue with the whole “don’t download existing tracks” thing - Explo’s looking at the admin’s library which is everything, not the individual users’ libraries. So if one user’s playlist has a track that’s in the other user’s library, it won’t be properly added. Not the end of the world, but a mild annoyance.

I will say (and this isn’t a fault of Explo), I’m not a big fan of Listenbrainz’s weekly playlist algorithm. About 2/3 of the playlist tends to be artists that I already listen to, so it feels like a bit of a waste. I hope down the road we can plug in last.fm or something which tends to be a bit better for that.

Yep! They released it like a week after I just set up a second instance lmao

The only catch I noticed is that the default “/music” library can’t be changed, so I set up my directories in the container like:

• /user1/music
• /user1/discover
• /user2/music
• /user2/discover
• /shared

All 5 are set up as separate libraries, and I keep "/music/ in the container mounted to an empty directory. The discover folders are populated when Explo runs each week, that’s a whole project of its own.

Navidrome even supports multiple libraries now. I was using 2 instances for a bit for my wife and I, but now it’s all in one.

I’m in the middle of writing up a novel about my music stack since I’ve just about gotten it exactly where I want it. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here and it’s difficult to really replicate the behavior of major streaming services.

The short version of what I have set up:

• Backend: Navidrome

• Frontends: Feishin (both desktop and hosted) and Symfonium

• Remote access: Pangolin (this does involve keeping a Navidrome rest endpoint totally exposed so Tailscale/Netbird/Wireguard are fine too, but I wanted to be sure my wife can access it from her work PC in the office)

• Library and metadata management: Lidarr, beets, and metadata-remote. Lidarr does the bulk (one instance per user/library), beets handles manual imports, and MDRM is for fine-tuning and really obscure stuff

• Searching/Downloading: Lidarr + Tubifarry + slskd. Also support smaller artists as much as possible, bandcamp purchases and merch and whatever go a long way.

• Discovery: Explo

I’ll have a full beginning to end writeup pretty soon hopefully. It’s still not perfect, and juggling multiple users adds a huge layer of complexity, but I’m happy with where it’s at.

Oh this is the first I’m hearing of this one. I’m liking OpenCloud so far but the setup process and bizarre OIDC implementation don’t leave me too confident in it. I’ll keep an eye on this one.

It’s definitely a bit of a behemoth, and the dated php codebase doesn’t really help either. I set up OpenCloud last week and aside from the struggle getting it working with a single compose and Authentik for OIDC, it’s been exactly what I’ve been looking for. Simpler, faster, and only does the things I need it to do.

Pangolin with an Authentik login required. Jellyfin’s set up with OIDC too but that’s more for convenience than security (especially since password auth doesn’t seem possible to disable, so it’s just hidden with CSS which does jack shit for security).

I’m paranoid so I only expose 3 services total without Pangolin/Authentik in front of them: Authentik itself, headscale, and navidrome’s rest endpoint (the last one skeeves me a bit but it’s mandatory for it to work remotely in the situations I want it, like a web player on work machines). Anything else I personally need remote access to, I can get through tailscale - Pangolin for me covers friends and family usage and a few niche situations.

I went with a Racknerd debian 12 box, DigitalOcean is a bit overpriced for what you get. There’s a whole list of recommendations in Pangolin’s wiki iirc

The variant version of number 2, which is more work to set up of course, is Pangolin on a VPS. Basically serves the same purpose but skips Cloudflare entirely.

I’m in the process of setting up Pangolin and Headscale on a VPS to expose a small handful of services and to replace my wg-easy setup. Currently chaining wg-easy through a gluetun container, so with a single VPN connection I get LAN access and protect my outbound traffic, but I can’t for the life of me get the same setup working on wg-easy v15, so I’m going to give tailscale/headscale a try with a gluetun exit node.

He took the money from that franchise and went wild with it, doing whatever crazy ass roles he wants and it’s so good to see. Not to mention how incredibly outspoken he’s been about trans rights and JKR’s bigotry.