I’d like to track these things:

• movies/shows I’d like to see at some point
• movies/shows I have in my collection
• movies/shows I have watched (and when/how often)
  • and they should automatically get removed from the watchlist once watched

I believe TMDB only does the first. And self-hosting makes sure the data stays under my control and the service doesn’t vanish or gets paywalled anytime soon.

A gas-fuelled heating thingy.

Isn’t a thermostat essentially an on-off switch connected to a sensor?

Depends on your boiler. Some get a value from the thermostat depending on the difference to target temperature - which then makes the boiler control the heating intensity. And others just use an on/off kind of control.

In this place I’m renting here, there’s a Honeywell CM927 on the wall and a BDR91 which, indeed, seems to be just a simple on/off switch.

So, depending on your boiler, you could get away with a cheap Zigbee/Wifi switch module (mostly sold for lights - just make sure it has a separate switch circuit and is not sending live mains power to the boiler!) and feed room temperatures into Home Assistant via cheap temperature sensors. Then implement the whole heating logic in HA.

(nb. Most newer thermostats “learn” how long it takes to heat up the room to the target temperature and will adjust the starting time of the heating process accordingly. This way, you never have to change your schedules between winter and summer. This is also something you’d have to implement yourself, if you want HA to do all the heating.)

Or just something as simple as using a SMB/CIFS share for your data. Instead of mounting the share before running your container, you can make Docker do it by specifying it like this:

services:
  my-service:
    ...
    volumes:
      - my-smb-share:/data:rw

volumes:
  my-smb-share:
    driver_opts:
      type: "smb3"
      device: "//mynas/share"
      o: "rw,vers=3.1.1,addr=192.168.1.20,username=mbirth,password=supersecret,cache=loose,iocharset=utf8,noperm,hard"

For type you can use anything you have a mount.<type> tool available, e.g. on my Raspberry this would be:

$ ls /usr/sbin/mount.*
/usr/sbin/mount.cifs*  /usr/sbin/mount.fuse3*       /usr/sbin/mount.nilfs2*  /usr/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g@  /usr/sbin/mount.ubifs*
/usr/sbin/mount.fuse@  /usr/sbin/mount.lowntfs-3g@  /usr/sbin/mount.ntfs@    /usr/sbin/mount.smb3@

And the o parameter is everything you would put as options to the mount command (e.g. in the 4th column in /etc/fstab). In the case of smb3, you can run mount.smb3 --help to see a list of available options.

Doing it this way, Docker will make sure the share is mounted before running the container. Also, if you move the compose file to a different host, it’ll just work if the share is reachable from that new location.

I’m a long time Pushover user and recently set it up with CrowdSec.

If a curl is sufficient for ntfy as well, you should be able to adapt the http-plugin.

nmtui if you’re using NetworkManager, Or edit the /etc/netplan/*.yaml if your install uses netplan.io.

Does the data change a lot? Does it need to be a block-based backup (e.g. bootable)? Otherwise, you could go with rsync or restic or borg to only refresh your backup copy with the changed files. This should be far quicker than taking a complete backup of the whole SSD.

Where are there ads in Apple Podcasts? I’ve never seen some. The season info is clearly shown wherever it’s relevant.

I’m using News Explorer for my RSS feeds which also supports subscribing to YouTube channels. In the newer versions it even pulls the comments from YT.

The power-on hours are shown directly on the Health Info page, no need to click through to the SMART attributes.

According to my Synology:

• WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,272 hours
• WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,207 hours
• WD40EFRX-68N32N0 - 34,417 hours
• ST4000VN006-3CW104 - 10,054 hours

These variable names are dynamically parsed and used for generating the smb.conf.

And if you need a way to support underscores AND spaces (which are not allowed in a variable name), you have to get creative.

I like the solution as it allows me to encode any possible configuration value (even the most obscure one) in the compose file.

Yes, it’s explained in the documentation.

E.g.:

SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_bind_SPACE_interfaces_SPACE_only: yes

maps to:

[global]
bind interfaces only = yes

This way you don’t need to provide any extra configuration file.

There’s dockurr/samba which is also pretty easy to setup, but doesn’t allow much deviation from the defaults.

# https://github.com/ServerContainers/samba

services:
  server:
    image: ghcr.io/servercontainers/samba:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      TZ: Europe/London
      MODEL: MacSamba
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_STANZA: "vfs objects = acl_xattr catia fruit streams_xattr; fruit:nfs_aces = no; inherit permissions = yes; fruit:model = MacSamba; fruit:posix_rename = yes; fruit:veto_appledouble = no; fruit:wipe_intentionally_left_blank_rfork = yes; fruit:delete_empty_adfiles = yes; fruit:metadata = stream"
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_load_SPACE_printers: no
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_printing: bsd
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_printcap_SPACE_name: /dev/null
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_disable_SPACE_spoolss: yes
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_min_SPACE_protocol: SMB2
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_bind_SPACE_interfaces_SPACE_only: yes
      SAMBA_GLOBAL_CONFIG_interfaces: lo eth0
      SAMBA_CONF_SERVER_STRING: Docker Host Samba
      #SAMBA_CONF_LOG_LEVEL: 3
      ACCOUNT_shareuser: mypassword
      UID_shareuser: 1000
      # avahi seems to introduce issues with the share
      # "The operation can't be completed because the original item for "xxx" can't be found."
      AVAHI_DISABLE: true
      WSDD2_DISABLE: true
      #NETBIOS_DISABLE: true
      SAMBA_VOLUME_CONFIG_myshare: "[myshare]; path=/shares/myshare; valid users = shareuser; guest ok = no; read only = no; browseable = yes"
    volumes:
      - /path/to/myshare:/shares/myshare

Just make sure you don’t have any local SMB server running on the host. And if you need multiple different shares, these all need to go into the same container or you need to define different ports if you use multiple containers.

why bother with the aliases

Because once some service “loses” (or sells) your email and you start getting spam, it’s pretty easy to burn that specific email address and change it to something else with that specific service and the spam will stop.

Yeah, Synology and NFSv4 is a bit hit or miss if you don’t use a Kerberos server. I’ve experimented with that back in 2018 to no avail: https://blog.mbirth.uk/2018/01/05/synology-nfsv4-with-id-mapping.html

Well, it’s not a protocol, Subsonic is an app that became pretty famous in the MP3 era and had a nice API for which various clients were developed.

The source code was Open Source in the early days which was forked into e.g. AirSonic, MadSonic, LibreSonic.

Those projects are dormant for a few years now. That’s why new ones have emerged that simulate the same API so all the client apps can still be used with them.

EDIT: Looks like these are projects that support the Subsonic API and are still in active development:

• Funkwhale (also: federated)
• Navidrome
• Gonic
• Airsonic-Advanced
• LMS
• Astiga
• Nextcloud/ownCloud Music
• SupySonic (headless server)

Ah, so alternative implementations. I’ve still got a license for the original Subsonic, but that hasn’t been updated in years by now.

Subsonic? Is this still a thing?