djdarren

I’ve spent far too much time these past couple of years, wondering whether the folks who used to believe in the properly mad conspiracy theories started off feeling the way I do now.

Because, like, the shit I believe to be true appears to be right there on the surface, painfully obvious.

Ah, but Linux is faultless, so no such thread could ever happen.

Yeah, the one and only PC on which I ever used Vista was a comically under powered laptop that my Mum bought. If it was running XP it would have been solid, but alas, it had 512mb RAM and Vista was thiiiirsty.

I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.

Debian is great. Boring, and great.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3*, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn’t 5* that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn’t rated, I could spin up a rating and it’d get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it’s not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I’ve got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

Just be aware that if you want anyone else to connect to your Jellyfin, you’ll still have to route it through a domain and reverse proxy, unless you’re comfortable letting them log in to your tailnet.

It’s a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it’s done it’s quite satisfying.

I remember installing Arch on an ancient MacBook I’ve got. Set the installer going then put it to one side knowing it was going to take a while.

It took about 7 minutes.

Of course, I then spent two hours trying to get the fucking Broadcom drivers to work, but that’s by the by.

I use Navidrome, and have set up Lidarr to feed it if I’m feeling a little hook-handed, if you get my meaning. Lidarr was a bit of a bollocks to set up, but once it’s running it’s pretty neat. I access it via Tailscale so can add stuff to the library wherever I am.

As for accessing it: again, I use Tailscale to run it through a reverse proxy on my website, so I connect to it using a subdomain. But as long as I’ve got Tailscale active on my phone, I could always access it that way. As others have suggested, I use Symfonium on my phone, and I use Feishin on everything else.

It all works pretty well, to the point that I don’t really use Apple Music anymore.

Funny enough, the other day when the Steam Machine pricing was announced, I noted that where Valve are charging £90 per 500gb for storage when upgrading from 500gb to 2tb, Apple were charging £267 per 500gb for the same upgrade in an iPad Pro.

That has now changed.

Apple are now charging £300 per 500gb when upgrading from a 500gb ipad to a 2tb iPad.

Three. Hundred. Pounds.