#tech #my-site

as part of my ongoing project to set up a home lab, i’ve started self-hosting yamtrack, a media tracker that can track all sorts of media – video games, books, movies, manga, etc. up until now i’ve been using various online services like anilist for anime/manga and infinitebacklog for video games for basic tracking, plus offline tools like obsidian and anytype for noting down my personal thoughts and organizing things i’ve watched by language. it’s never really bothered me, using multiple services for all the types of media i like, but after finally getting everything imported, i gotta say… it’s pretty nice being able to just see everything i’m watching/reading/playing at the moment, all in one place, and being able to create lists including all forms of media. also, after the ordeal of actually getting everything imported, including from services that don’t have an official export option (looking at you, mydramalist) i can safely say i’m never going back to a service that doesn’t offer simple csv exports lol. not even json – i love json, but i shouldn’t have to brush up on my jq skills just to see the start and end date of when i watched something. thankfully yamtrack does, so once i was done i exported my data just to see what the csv file looked like… and after filtering out the things that were marked to watch/read/play, i still had nearly 600 entries 😐 i really don’t feel like i consume THAT much media, especially since the last two or three years a lot of the time i used to spend watching anime or gaming i now spend watching thai and japanese youtube (which i only track as time spent watching, not number of videos watched) or sometimes tv/movies/games (which takes much longer to finish than in english)… guess i was wrong 😅 and here i was thinking that i was going to use it to build a page on my site with my complete media log, but once i actually scripted a bare bones version of the page, it was just… too much. once i really thought about it, i realized i get more value out of reading smaller, curated lists of media people love or want to share than just a huge list of everything they’ve ever laid their eyes upon, especially if there’s no reviews or ratings system. so i think i’ll rework the code a bit and post just the subset of my favorite things… eventually….

a lot of the services i’ve set up in my home lab use third party APIs to fetch metadata about media on the server, including yamtrack. for books, it uses hardcover, so i’ve been trying to migrate my own data on storygraph to hardcover too to find what’s missing in hardcover’s database, filling out the missing data myself and hopefully making the data yamtrack pulls more accurate. but i swear, it’s like hardcover actively doesn’t want me to help make its database more accurate. more than half the time i try to add a new edition to an already existing book, when i submit the isbn of the alternate edition it says it’s auto-fetching the information for it, just to go back to the original edition -_- does hardcover have beef with people who listen to audiobooks or something…

even though i’ve been trying to move as much of my data as i can to my new server, i’m realizing now just how hard it is to break free from Big Tech’s grasp. for example, even though i’ve mainly relied on sites like storygraph and worldcat to get book info, amazon-owned goodreads is still the only place i’ve been able to reliably get edition information on thai translations of books. so even if i keep all my book notes in plain markdown on my computer or try to contribute to an independent database like hardcover, i’ll inevitably rely on some tech giant’s database or infrastructure. now i’m not a FOSS+decentralized-or-bust kinda girlie – while i’m probably more privacy conscious than most people (based off the confused looks i get from most people irl when i mention trying to avoid using services by companies like google or meta when i can), i’m not above using these services when i feel like i get more out of it than i risk or when i have no other alternative. but sometimes it makes me wonder what’s the point in spending so much time and mental bandwidth on trying to minimize my reliance on them if i already know i’m not going to go 100% of the way in removing them from my life. then there are times i feel like i’ve learned so much in the process of prioritizing software not owned by the Big Five the last 2-3 years – from learning basic programming to more easily organize and process local text and media files, to now trying to run my own server teaching me about networking and system administration – that, even if its futile and google already knows my social security number or someone at apple’s already made deepfake nudes of me or whatever, the effort i’ve made hasn’t been entirely for nothing.

#tech

recently i’ve been messing around with self-hosting. i think i mentioned that last year i installed ubuntu 24 server edition on an old 2010 macbook pro with the intention of turning it into a home server, but that ended up going nowhere. at the time i was very new to linux, having only used it on my main computer for about two months, and couldn’t figure why the wifi worked but was prone to random bouts of slowness and disconnecting, which basically meant it was useless at being a server.

fast forward to two months ago, when i was looking for an alternative to feedbro, a browser extension for subscribing to and reading rss/atom feeds. as much as i liked it, i wanted something that i could access from my phone. after looking for alternatives, i couldn’t find a service that seemed to fit my needs that was free, and i wasn’t convinced that i use my rss reader enough to justify paying for a subscription. what i did find though were numerous self-hostable rss aggregators – freshrss, miniflux, tiny tiny rss, commafeed, nextcloud news – which i decided to try installing on my primary computer. after figuring out how the whole installing stuff with docker thing worked and trying some containers, it got me thinking about my old macbook again. i hoped maybe an extra year and a half of linux experience would help me troubleshoot my issue more easily.… well low and behold all i had to do was install a single package, edit one file, reboot the computer and connect to the wifi again 🙃. so now that i’ve finally got the wifi working on it then set up tailscale on all my devices so i can connect to my server when i’m not at home, this fifteen year old laptop is finally getting a second chance at life.

one of the most commonly recommended self hosted apps is immich, a photo/video backup and organizer commonly used as a FOSS alternative to google or apple photos. like those services, it has an automatic facial recognition feature, but unlike those services it can be disabled, and you can choose to host the machine learning algorithm on the same computer or connect it to another, more powerful one. i’ve always liked that feature on my phone despite knowing how much of a privacy concern it poses, even if apple says it all happens locally and doesn’t connect to apple’s servers…. needless to say i was very eager to set immich up and see how well it works. after uploading all my phone’s photos to the server and letting it process overnight, i opened immich up the next morning to see how well it worked. it never dawned on me that it would work on all the faces in my photos, since apple photos usually only shows me people i know irl, but when i opened the “people” section this is what i was greeted with:

somebody explain to me why i have more photos of goro majima on my phone than i do of my own mother 😭

my mom bought a new laptop recently and gave me her old ones. they've been slow af and prone to crashes for years so she's been using her phone to watch youtube (so much that it's caused screen burn in -_-). i installed new operating systems on both of them and they seem to function better now (ubuntu server on the 2010 macbook pro and archcraft on the 2012 macbook air). i don't really have much of a use for them but it was fun trying to get them running again. i might mess around with them in the future... they both have surprisingly nice screens for decade old laptops and i feel kinda bad for turning the pro into a server ^^;

i'm not much of an apple fan; my current phone is an iphone xr and the only apple product i've ever bought new. throughout high school and most of college i had this one friend who would tease me, my brother, and another friend of ours for being the only people in our friend group who used android, therefore messing up imessage group chats. now that the three of us are on iphones.... honestly he had a point, imessage is really convenient when literally all your friends also have iphones. the battery on my phone is still good despite being almost five years old so i hope i can still get a couple years out of it before needing to replace it. probably with a used iphone... these days i really only use my phone to call, text, and listen to audiobooks so i don't see the benefits of buying new, and while i really dislike how much less access to FOSS software and easy control over my files the iphone has, ultimately a phone is a tool to communicate and currently an iphone provides me the least amount of friction to keeping in touch with my friends.

my current daily driver laptop is a thinkpad p52, but when i was in high school i had a couple different apple laptops. i still have the one on the left, a 17" 2007 macbook pro. about six months ago i ripped out the 1tb hard drive i had left languishing in there for nearly 10 years and put it in my current laptop's 2.5" drive bay when i started messing with dualbooting linux and needed more space on my ssds, so this laptop doesn't turn on anymore. i actually had another laptop that was a similar model that i harvested parts from to fix up the one pictured, including replacing the screen. when i was in high school my mom loved browsing craiglist to try to find good deals on used tech (especially macbooks... i still don't understand why she insists on paying a premium for apple computers when all she does is watch youtube), except she doesn't actually understand anything about technology so i was always the one who had to fix things and get them in working order. i guess it was good to learn how to do basic computer upgrades and repair, and even now i still use craiglist to buy used tech instead of buying new (i scored my current laptop for only $200!), but i could've done without the being forced on my mother's whim to spend the occasional evening setting up meetings with strangers who sometimes live an hour away just to come back and have to spend hours googling how to fix some random thing i didn't notice when inspecting it -_- the laptop i remember most fondly though that i don't have anymore was an apple ibook g3. it's THE quintessential frutiger aero piece of tech and every day i rue the fact that tech doesn't look like this anymore. the case on the macbook air i have now is translucent and the same shade of teal as the ibook i use to have (like the ad pictured below), so i guess it can be my old ibook's spiritual successor. honestly why does everything only come in like matte black or brushed aluminum these days... i was particularly fond of the charger, which is like a yo-yo since you wrap the wire around a disk.