• 6 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • I just started properly tagging new music at some point and now my library is largely tagged correctly.

    For tagging I use kid3, great KDE application for that.

    I also sort my music into a folder layout like this to know where I got it from and potentially upgrade the quality.

    MusicRaw
      - Artist1
        - Bandcamp
          - Album1
        - Tidal
          - Album2
          - Album3
        - Youtube
          - ytrip album
      - Artist2
        - Album1 (not moved to a separate source)
        - Tidal
          - Album2
          - Album3
        - ytrip album
    

    I then have a script to loudness-normalize (come fight me) all music and write it to another subfolder.
    A second script takes those normalized files and symlinks them into a structure like this:

    Music
      - Artist1
          - Album1
          - Album2
          - Album3
          - ytrip album
      - Artist2
          - Album1
          - Album2
          - ytrip album
    

    I tried switching to Picard, but for somewhat obvious reasons it doesn’t support my insane structure.





    • Hetzner: I’ve rented a dedicated server with them for years and it’s been very solid. There are reports of people getting blocked during the first sign up, but I didn’t have that problem nor any other issue since. For bulk data storage their file share offering is also unbeatable imo, I’ve also used that for years and my Nextcloud files plus acquired media still live on such a share.
    • Netcup: I have a small VPS here for monitoring, also no issues. It’s somewhat annoying that you need to take the server offline and run a media optimisation task when you delete snapshots (not sure how necessary it actually is, but you get a warning at least)

    Some anti-recommendations as well

    • Vultr: Years ago I wanted to get their very cheapest VPS offering, but that is only available sometimes in certain locations and at the time they didn’t tell you any of that before you signed up and deposited their minimum fee. I did get the money back though
    • Contabo: My previous monitoring VPS lived here. After a while they declared the VPS I was using was a “legacy” product and wanted more money to keep running it. I feel this could have been handled with a forced migration of some sort.
    • Digital Ocean: They just donated 3 million USD to a racist’s pet project financing other weird guys









  • Self hosted networking! Legitimately one of my favourite topics

    You won’t get around the requirement of a publicly reachable endpoint. That can either be a small server with a public ip or dynamic DNS to your home with port forwarding for the VPN.

    A classic option is OpenVPN. You can run it on Port 443 in TCP mode and while it won’t be performant, it has a better chance of bypassing most simple blocks

    Other than that I’m a fan of completely decentralized mesh VPNs.

    The one I use and am most familiar with is Yggdrasil. Connections can be established over TCP, TLS or QUIC on any port you want.
    I’ve written a somewhat lengthy comment under this post. One advantage to Yggdrasil would be its existing public network. If you can firewall of your home lab to the point where joining the public network doesn’t expose a security risk to your local network, you could use that to transport your traffic instead of having your own public node or port forwarding.

    The same post also mentions Anywherelan, it’s intended to have better NAT handling out of the box by using community nodes.

    Then there’s also EasyTier mentioned at the bottom, it is a Chinese project and those tend to have good censorship resistance.

    Finally I’ll mention Nebula, it requires at least one coordination server but might also be an option