It’s not as elegant but you could always try to use a smart plug to turn the TV on or off instead (if it turns on automatically when the plug is switched on)

It’s not as elegant but you could always try to use a smart plug to turn the TV on or off instead (if it turns on automatically when the plug is switched on)

I found it a real struggle with the TV to find a non smart one, especially as the smart ones are cheaper. Best bet is to get a TV stick and never connect the TV to the internet

I have a Nvidia Shield (bought used on eBay) and works fine with my LG Smart TV, which has never touched the internet. I have a Xiami Mii TV S on another TV, which is the closest to stock android TV I found. Do not get a firestick! Both have 4k, can control TV volume through the remote, have auto turn on/off, plus the TV just goes to that channel so don’t have to touch the TV remotes ever. The Shield is faster and easier to setup but much more expensive.

You could also buy a mini PC but can be harder for certain apps and full video and sound quality (avoid if you want Netflix and other apps). I have stremio (with Real Debrid), jellyfin and TiviMate (IPTV) for all of our needs so could get away with a mini PC but considering the effort I decided not to.

Not sure about the sound bar as bought sonos years ago. It works flawlessly with the TV and runs through home assistant now (responds to Shield remote volume control or can play music through HA BUT I set it up with the original app so can’t comment on that part). It has great audio quality but agree that I would look elsewhere if looking now (although would still consider it).

I also use pihole to try to block any trackers etc.

Sorry, I didn’t actually realise it was not an open link as thought they had a few free queries. Just replace it with searching for “UK tower blocks” in your search of choice and hopefully you’ll see my message.

On Kagi, I have to say though, I happily pay for it. If it’s free, you are the product, so not sure how it could be worse privacy wise. That’s not mental gymnastics to me, I never saw an advert for it and chose it after seeing it recommended a lot on Lemmy. Tried it out and was sold with the results.

I know there were some gripes around some potential, small funding of a Russian search engine (if I remember but happy to be corrected) but it felt like it was in the area of don’t let perfect get in the way of good, and they are so much better than any of the free alternatives. I don’t see ads, promoted results, AI crap and can customise my searches to suit me. They realease lots of upgrades that make the experience better for me instead of corporate advertisers. I used DuckDuckGo for years but started to see really bad results. Give me an alternative and I’ll try it out!

Oh, actually that does make sense. They say they’re only targeting “illegal” immigrants and have no authority to police against citizens so this adds to the blatant lies. Thanks for the input.

It is still galling to see though so hope you can see that it is horrible to see, especially as a minority. It’s hard not to interpret as only citizens (or in some way white people) matter

Oh wow, I didn’t realise (parts of) Japan, Korea, India, and fucking UK (https://kagi.com/images?q=tower+blocks+uk) are all socialist hellholes because of their apartment blocks…

Why does it matter if he is a US citizen? Speaks volumes about what is getting covered and what is not

The worst part of this is they see it as a “look, you’re going to defend your people so don’t come after ours, checkmate, we’re super brainy, our way wins” whereas in reality, if they broke the law, fuck em. Anybody who breaks the law and pulls some shit deserves what they get, regardless of “politic view”

I would highly suggest a UPS. I use random external hard drives without RAID as part of my media setup. The electric went out overnight last year. I knew it had happened as my oven was flashing. The server restarted itself so thought everything was fine.

Then some things were glitchy and it took me a few days to release one of the drives was not mounting. Luckily I did not lose the data but it still took a while to fix. It takes even longer to restore a backup.

To mainly save myself time and effort, I bought a basic UPS with 2 plugs. It keeps the server and main router on for 15 minutes but I’ve set it up to send a command to shut down asap just in case. My server seems to automatically switch on when power comes back so not had any issues since.

I have a vps (hetzner dedicated server auction) as well as my home servers. The vps has a fixed IP so ive setup wireguard endpoints to all point to it with forwarding on so can access every device indirectly through the vps. It allows them to work across DDNS or remotely.

I used this guide (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-wireguard-on-ubuntu-20-04). Tried different tools gui’s and other methods but always came back to this to work the best

Yeah, first try your ISP to see if you can get a dynamic or fixed IP instead. Check if their website/FAQ mentions dynamic IP or cgnat. They might outright reject it, or try to upgrade you to an extortionate business package though. I signed up for my service and checked the cgnat before signing up but they hadn’t got around to updating their website that they changed their policy. After the surprise of being behind cgnat and after screenshotting their own website, I complained and hit upgraded to a higher level package for free.

You can use tailscale to get around it, but then you need to install it on all devices and login. You can use cloudflare tunnels and think you can set it to not require login for some services. Both rely on third parties. Both are also safer than exposing directly to the public internet.

If you want full control, you have to rent a cheap vps and setup a tunnel between that and your home server, then use the public IP of the vps for your services. Wireguard is probably the best choice for VPN. You could try pangolin, which is an open source cloudflare tunnel so is more complicated than a VPN but also includes a reverse proxy.

In an ideal world this should be the case but I can’t afford to do this practically and my business is a service, based on UK laws and requirements, available to UK residents only. The website is for information only and nothing is new or interesting to anybody but a few potential clients, and if theyre looking at it on holiday, theres something wrong with them! Nobody is going to reach out based on my website from abroad and if they did, I would not trust them at all. They would reach out through personal contacts or linkedin. If the bots stop spamming my site or server, I can stop limiting it.

Another option to reduce (but not eliminate) this traffic is a country limit. In cloudflare you can set a manual security rule to do this. There are self hosted options too but harder to setup. It depends what country you are and where your users are based. My website is a business one so I only allow my own country (and if on holiday I might open that country if I need to check it’s working, although usually I just use a paid vpn back to my country so no need). You can also block specific countries. So many of my blocked requests are from USA, China, Russia etc

I didn’t know that, thanks for sharing

You could be behind CGNAT - I’m not sure the best way to tell but it could be the reason.

I would also highly recommend buying a cheap domain to use - it would be the price of a coffee per year but makes life so much easier and you don’t have to depend on duckdns. You can buy through cloudflare, porkbun or many other options which you can search for a good DDNS service to update them.

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Never tried it but heard so much talk about jellyfin I tried that and it seems to work pretty well so far. Is there any advantages of emby over jellyfin?

This is good to know, thanks for sharing. I’ve only got it local for now after installing at the weekend and wasn’t sure how secure it was for external access.

Same. I finally switched over to jellyfin recently as it was low down on a long list of stuff I want to do, let alone need to do. I feel like I got my worth and if things mess up with jellyfin, I’ve got a temporary backup option to spin up without having to give a single penny more. Fingers crossed, no more of my data either seeing as it’s all uninstalled.

I’m sure you are far outweighed by users like me who keep one for when traveling away from home and working in public spaces (i do two days a week on average). Most days is no bandwidth and when there is usage its pretty low as limited to the public WiFi so just syncing files for local changes and general internet use / research. I could do and sometimes use a VPN to my home server but I don’t want the risk I can’t work anywhere if something happens.