Plex can be set to auto delete. You can set it to delete after something has been watched (after a delay if you want), or to keep a pre-set number of items (e.g. only keep the five latest episodes of show X) or a combination.

Just make sure you set up the *arrs to not re-download the thing that Plex auto deletes.

I’m a hoarder so I keep a lot, but anything that’s time-sensitive like current affairs shows, I delete after watch and set to only keep the latest three episodes.

It was, yeah. The market crashed pretty much over night too. Really obvious in hindsight, but if you’re making six figures from reselling the things you’re probably too close to really notice the wider picture.

The service I used to use shut down about six months ago and I’m yet to find a good replacement. So if anyone wants to put some words in my mouth (ugh, not sure I should have gone with that phrase) I’ll gladly accept. Seems like most of the “recommended” ones are referrals to scams, or have weird limitations (like not making the M3Us available, so you can’t hook in to Plex, for example).

Homepage is great. I like that you get little snippets from the apps it links through but is more customisable than something like Heimdall which does similar. It’s become my go-to having tried pretty much every other dashboard out there over the years.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

I think they might mean bricked up, as in the windows have been bricked over?

Or maybe they’re associated with buildings built during a certain period that are now mostly empty due to a boom and bust cycle?

Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it’s so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they’re non-specific about the unit you get, so it’s very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.

It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.

I moved from Organizr to Homepage via Heimdall.

I had no end of issues with Organizr. It felt like something broke with each update and performance was pretty bad (not to mention some apps just not working with it). Seemed to be pretty common when I last tried it a couple of years ago, there were lots of similar complaints.

The good thing about Homepage is that the widgets mean you rarely have to go in to each app’s ui, so it actually saves me time.

Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a proper iPad version of Apollo. It was on the dev’s to-do list but obviously he’s never going to get round to it now, which is a real shame. The scaled-up iPhone version you do get on iPad is still probably the best iPad version of reddit though, not that there’s a great deal of competition. It’s not the best way to experience Apollo though.

Having played a bit of Zelda recently, micromanaging weapons. Oh, I’ve got this metal broad sword and I’ve used it to to stab an unarmored fleshy bad guy and oh it’s broken after three stabs.

I get that weapon degradation is a real thing that happens, as they become blunt or potentially fragile, but Zelda BOTW and TOTK take it way too far to the point of it being a real chore. I thought they’d fix it after all the BOTW complaints but TOTK is just as bad.