Nice shell and clean work.

What did you do for the joycons? The last time I went in my switch I finally bit the bullet and dropped the extra cash for Hall effect joysticks. It was pricier but not that costly (like $27 instead of the normal like $3 joycon swap) but they are far more sensitive and will last basically forever whereas I was swapping joycon sticks like once a year before bc of drift and dead zones. Absolutely crazy they didn’t go with a better design for switch 2. The ifixit guide showed the joycon stick is basically the same despite Nintendo claiming it’s sturdier.

I don’t understand what you mean by “discoverability”.

If you mean things aren’t scraping correctly you can override the incorrect scrape by clicking the three dots on the right and selecting “identify” in the webui.

Placement varies a bit depending on platform and obviously if you’re using custom css (I’m not) it changes things a lot. This brings up a custom search ui, enter the show name, click search, will return results, select the show that actually matches, click next, refresh metadata (and make sure to refresh images if the show was incorrect).

Of course if this is happening consistently read the Jellyfin docs regarding naming and folder conventions. This is one of the appeals of sonarr and radarr - they act as a precheck to ensure everything is compliant with thetvdb/moviedb, can create the proper folder structure, can rename files according to scraper guidelines, etc. if you have them set up in sonarr/radarr correctly and let them rename/manage directories Jellyfin will scrape correctly 99% of the time (sometimes it has a weird error with niche content even if it’s correct but the above trick fixes it 100% of the time in my experience).

If you mean just sorting things I have anime coupled in tv, I don’t see the point of splitting it away. It is fairly uncommon to find anime that is not in thetvdb at this point unless you have a sizable library of non English translated anime, and if that’s the case it’s still best to keep it in tv shows with anidb or whatever as a backup manual scraper (keeping it on for auto scraping will result in western shows getting a ton of garbage data in my experience, just manually scrape series that don’t work). But it’s rare even then, I (poorly) speak Japanese and have a decent library of anime that’s untranslated and far less known in the west and 85% of it just scrapes, maybe more.

Outside of that custom libraries for things that don’t “fit”: music videos, youtube videos, workout videos, etc. most of this stuff needs handwritten nfo and custom metadata tho.

Music videos have imvdb but it’s not very well managed. There’s just massive stuff missing and the model for how it works is deeply flawed. I submitted a few videos to be added a year and a half ago and logging in now they’re still sitting in the mod queue. Imagine if musicbrainz or discogs needed a 1.5yr+ moderation queue instead of just letting the community at large police things, ridiculous. We’d still be stuck on Beethoven

I also override movie titles so that they organize properly. Horror franchises where they are sometimes numbered and sometimes not is the main example I can think of. You can do this via the metadata manager in the admin panel. You change the sort title and leave the display title alone. Then Friday the 13th: the final chapter can be parsed as “Friday the 13th 4” and will be displayed in the correct order, though you have to do the entire series (especially bc they canonically did “part 2” and then “part III” which makes sorting awful. Then ones called “Jason goes to hell: the final Friday” but that isn’t the last one. Terrible)

Archive everything. A torrent isn’t perfect but it is far more resilient than a shitty site like rapidgator or mega. If all the seeds drop off they may hop back on someday, if the link is dmcad or otherwise deleted it’s gone forever.

Fuck their e-cred. It’s all stolen. The only time you don’t spread something around is when someone posts something special to a private community to only be shared within that community because leaking it outside of that community could cause them grief or even serious consequences (eg someone leaking content to a private tracker community that they fear could be traced back to them so they specifically ask to keep it within x community). Though tbh I’ve seen this happen at least 4-5x over the years and it always leaks out to the wider internet, people will always share (as they should)

It tells me microsoft is petty

Even if they’re your tapes there are trackers that value this. Home movies not so much (maybe, there are probably some out there) but trackers that value vhs rips of 80s/90s/2000s shows with the original commercials/bumpers/etc?

Most definitely, that stuff is coveted some places. Even if you don’t have the original commercials and bumpers if you just taped old shows you might be able to help restore old shows to their original glory. Like the people who take 90s cartoons and restore the cut content and original soundtracks.

Beavis and butthead, Daria, the state, etc all have torrents out there where someone went through and restored content that had been cut over the years and restored licensed music that in basically all cases has still never been restored for streaming. Even if you get paramount plus or whatever platform you can watch those shows but they are not the same, they have edits and “soundalike” music because it’s not worth the money to secure the rights that weren’t secured back when streaming or even releasing entire seasons of shows onto physical media was a thing that anyone thought would happen.

The source of the material to “fix” is a combo of rips from the streaming networks, which is much higher quality, with old vhs rips to fill in the gaps for content that was censored or cut for time over the years. when a new vhsrip of a coveted show comes out people can go a bit nuts, especially if it’s a key episode and in very good quality

So if you grew up watching them and rewatch them now you spend 14.99 to see it and a scene is missing here, a song is wrong, and it sucks. Or you can pirate it and you get what was originally released

Depends on what you value. VHS rips are trickier to find (though not impossible by any means, just need the right tracker like myspleen)

If you have the time archiving is always valued. If someone else has already archived don’t always assume theyve done a better job. With more niche stuff like vhs and vinyl rips it can be easy to assume that but you’d be surprised how often the rip is terrible, either done with awful equipment, the person had great equipment but their copy was in rough shape, or they just didn’t know what they were doing.

Especially if you have 500 tapes you’re bound to have some niche titles and gems someone is dying to see archived, guarantee it. And even the “classics” in your collection you may be surprised to see the current rips aren’t great or just don’t exist. Like 60-70% of my ratio at red is vinyl rips for this reason. I don’t have particularly fancy equipment (some people on there have $10,000+ setups, mine is a little fancy but like $300 fancy) but I do have like 1200 records

If you’re not in private trackers this could also be your way in

Even the most complicated video drm can be defeated fairly easily by recording analog output. No one does this, there are groups with fancy protected secrets to rip stuff from Netflix, Hulu, deezer, Spotify, Apple Music, etc, which is why it comes out basically immediately. And that’s probably why the rights holders don’t go to denuvo levels of drm, ultimately with video/audio as long as you can view the media you can pirate it

the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads

Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit

But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post

Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).

The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened

I never use a vpn with torrents. Private trackers in my experience have been enough to be fine. The only times in 20 years of torrenting tons of shit I’ve gotten isp letters were once I downloaded a Pokémon rom from a pubic tracker, which was stupid, and once I had a roommate that downloaded some shitty movie from a public tracker

Alternatively usenet

When it comes to builds my mentality is “save shit from the landfill and spend as little as possible” haha

I feel like there is always a push for consumerism in (basically anything, but especially this) space. You’ll read forums and watch youtube videos that show dumb nerds with sponsorships doing a build with an $1800 budget and for what? Running a nas? Jellyfin? Caldav? This stuff doesn’t take a ton of overhead

If you’re running 5 concurrent users with 2-3 transcoding quicksync should handle that. Research this more but in my experience it works fine. For reference my library is all extremely high quality either 1080 remux or 4k remux with hdr/dv whenever possible (so tonemapping is required) and lossless audio (dts-hd, atmos, etc). If your library is like mine this bumps things up a bit and will use more cores - quicksync will handle the video fine but cores will be needed for the audio and the tonemapping of hdr/dv layer. Additionally if you’re like me and have a ton of anime (or just someone who likes subtitles) another core gets taken to burn those in. For my library with 2-3 users this is fine, could probably even handle 1-2 more (maybe, depends on what they watch).

This is where scalability comes in. Pick a case and psu where you have the option for a discrete gpu if it ever becomes necessary. You extend to 15 users or decide you want to run deepseek locally? Picking a motherboard with an extra PCIE x16 slot is helpful. since you’re offloading NAS to the synology you can just get a motherboard with a pcie slot, though getting one with multiple opens the option that down the line you could add an HBA and a second array should the synology run out of space. Again, depends on your long term plans

Look on marketplace, Craigslist, eBay, etc for older hardware. Full desktops use a lot of power, which sucks, but the advantage for you is that they are expensive to ship so they can get sold a bit cheaper sometimes. Sort by distance and filter by used

Read truenas, unraid, proxmox, serve the home forums for lots of info on example builds too. But don’t worry too much about getting it perfect. Remember it can always be a little better (or a lot better) but most of the time the extra power is just going to waste your money. Unless you specifically have a need for like multiple VMs at once, serious LLM stuff, etc something seriously demanding like that?

This makes sense

No sense in getting rid of hardware that is working. I’m not familiar with ersatztv but for all the other stuff I am able to handily run it on a 10th gen intel build that is also handling nas duties fwiw. And some stuff is not ideal (cctv is handled via blue iris, which runs in windows VM, everything else is docker)

for the gpu it really depends on your needs. How many users is the big one. If you have at most 2-4 concurrent users and that is an uncommon scenario the gpu is a waste of power, money, and thermal management. Igpu will sip power and transcode (depending on library content, again av1/vp9 on a 10th gen isn’t happening) with that user load assuming you have a decent amount of ram (I have 32gb so you don’t need absurd amounts).

However if you have a lot of users hitting you, 5-6+ or more concurrent streams that all transcode, then you need to start evaluating a discrete gpu (and maybe a significant internet connection bc damn). Alternatively you can suggest your users get something like a ugoos am6b+ flashed with coreelec or a similar setup that can just direct play basically anything but that’s a bit challenging to setup

So then it may be as simple as buying some e waste pc to use a server and using the nas as its intended purpose. Frankly this is probably better, it’s worse power wise but having the storage separate from services has advantages

Define goals. What services can’t be handled?

If transcoding is a goal build around intel. Quicksync video is a no brainer, imo. GPU is unnecessary power draw (15-25w+ idle depending on card) and waste of a pcie slot unless you want to do LLM stuff. Imo 10th gen intel is the sweet spot for quicksync unless you desperately need av1/vp9. If so then you need much more expensive 13/14 gen, which use more power and have more considerations for thermal management

OS is an endless debate. Proxmox is fine and free, why not try it? Unraid is easier to get your bearings but it does cost money. Debian is also free but a bit more confusing because not purpose built. Truenas as well. All can do containers and VMs, but approach in different ways. None is “best” but some are more “free” which is nice

CPU specs are dependent on goals. For transcoding as said above quicksync is necessary and is so impressive. I can transcode a 4k remux to one device while transcoding a 1080 remux to another and direct playing a 4k remux and cpu sits under 25% load on Xeon equivalent of 10700. You don’t need a Xeon btw, I just got a great deal where this was $50 (see next point). Otherwise specs depend wildly on what you plan to do. I can run windows VMs pretty well with this though for the handful of times I need a windows machine

Prebuilt is a waste. Used hardware is cheap and gives more options and can plan more. What are you willing to buy now and what do you eventually want? My NAS started as a 36tb array with 16gb ram and no cache, now it’s 234tb and 4tb cache with 32gb ecc ram years later. Slowly building up was easier on wallet and used hardware, refurb drives, etc is 100% the build. Your goals will likely vary but figure out your roadmap and go from there

Also keep in mind that not every service benefits from running on a NAS. My homeassistant server is run on a raspberry pi for example. Easier to keep it segregated and don’t have to worry about getting zwave/zigbee/mqtt/etc all working with a docker plus dealing with any server downtime impacting home. Tbf literally everything else is run on the nas though haha

The comments on the page are likely correct - CP10356AT. Custom asic or semi custom pd controller for nintendo that supports pd 3.0+, which includes secure vendor-defined messages

The STM32G0B0 is possible but less likely if the CP10356AT is on the pd line, and the STM could coordinate handshake message success

Another scumbag move by nintendo. I hope someone figures out a way to mimic the dock response, dumps the firmware, or emulates it. That’s beyond me but fuck them. Flood the market with $15 clone docks

Edit: Thinking more on that I will say that nintendo probably did this because of third party docks damaging switches. I repaired a bunch of switches and a common issue I would see is a blown up pi3usb chip with often pcb damage leading to pin (iirc) 5. This was caused by cheap/shitty docks feeding too much power or incorrectly negotiating power delivery. It wasnt just like cheap AliExpress docks either, nyko, insignia(best buy), etc actual name brand docks would brick your switch.

Swapping the damaged chip for a good one would make the switch boot and work normally except it would only work in handheld mode. To work in dock mode you’d have to rebuild the damaged trace. Nintendo won’t do this; they would just replace the entire board, so to them this is a very costly repair (though tbf paying a tech labor to replace a chip and rebuild a trace is costly too as it’s much more skilled labor, requires more testing, and has a much higher potential for failure after repair)

That said I still think it’s a users right to use a third party dock if they so choose. Fuck nintendo. Though nyko should be on the hook to buy you a new switch if they design a piece of shit that wrecks your switch

I’ve been happy with reolink cameras fwiw though not 100% so. They do have some nonsense though

I also prefer Lutron Caseta for lighting. It’s fairly bulletproof (I’ve literally never had any connectivity issues in like 6+ years) and they haven’t pulled any tos nonsense as far as I know. Downside is pricey and the install is more complex than typical iot stuff. And while they can control outlets they are only rated for 10A lighting so keep that in mind.

The only internet requirement for both of these (not always with reolink I think but at least with the cameras I have) is that you have to allow internet once during initial setup to pair devices. Once that is done you can remove internet access and delete the app

The common thread with these is wired too. The further along I go the more I realize that 2.4ghz WiFi iot shit is garbage. going from WiFi cameras that had privacy concerns and disconnected to local only poe cameras that just work was very nice. Learn from my mistake, don’t buy bullshit eufy cameras that you then have to sell at a loss.

And for your own sanity don’t try to get smart smoke detectors. Your options are either Google/nest that apparently does work well (never tried it, fuck Google), the new kidde that is built into amazons ring platform (never tried it, fuck amazon, plus the preceding model had awful reviews), or the new firstalert that is replacing the Google/nest (again, fuck Google, but I did try the preceeding first alert and it was atrociously bad).

I mention this because this brings up a key issue with regulatory compliance in the US (and probably EU, dunno). You can also try a number of off brand detectors as well that apparently work a lot better. If you search amazon for smart detectors you’ll see stuff like x sense and these apparently have somewhat solid reviews and work okay (though getting them to work in HA is mixed).

However, what amazon fails to mention is that these types of detectors have not been submitted for regulatory compliance in the US (unlike Kidde, firstalert, etc that you’d find at a home depot). They “meet UL requirements” but they have not been submitted for testing so they cannot print the UL logo on the box (legally) but they can write “meets UL requirements”, which is misleading. Fuck amazon and fuck the us government for giving them no culpability in selling obscenely dangerous bullshit

This means if you use these and your house burns down your insurance could technically nullify your policy for not having adequate protection. Or they could not work and you could die, of course

There are smart relays you can tie into an interconnected smoke detector circuit using normal smoke detectors that are appropriately rated if you do want alerts on your phone. There are also device that will listen for chirps but these get false positives

you’re right, my bad

This has been my approach and it has gone okay so far except for 2 issues that are quite a pain:

1: you have to thoroughly research what you buy. Does it work on an isolated vlan? Just because it works with home assistant does not guarantee this. Many home assistant users are comfortable with some degree of data collection and an integration does not mean that it will work local only (nor does it mean that all features will work). If it does work local only you may sacrifice some features. Cameras are a good example. Most cameras with object/person detection do this in hardware, but not all. If you circumvent the Internet connection and proprietary app you may sacrifice this, or more likely alerts

2: there is 0 regulation binding a vendor to the terms of service agreed to at the point of sale, including making significant and sweeping changes. Case in point: I got a chamberlain myQ garage door opener. It worked well and opened my garage door. Integrated with home assistant via the API. However, chamberlain serves a lot of ads for upsells and services via their shitty app. They decided that users circumventing the app and not seeing that you could give amazon drivers access to your garage to deliver packages (seriously) or buy shitty cameras was unacceptable so they updated the TOS and revoked API access for all users. The only way it works now is via their app. I sold mine and built a ratgdo

Another example is Philips hue: while they have been able to be used local only for over a decade Philips has decided they’re going to start a subscription security service with all the devices that entails based around the hue hub. At some point in the near future if your hub updates it will require you to sign in to a Philips account and be online. This one’s way worse as some people have thousands of dollars invested in hue. I have like $300 in the fancier white hue bulbs but some people on the HA forums and reddit literally have their house decked out with like 80-100 bulbs, many of which are the RGB. Kind of silly but they do work very well, flicker free, good color, and last ages. I still have some from like 2016 going strong. Luckily here if you have the bridge on an isolated vlan it won’t update and worst case the bulbs work with zwave zigbee but the principle of the thing is ridiculous. It should be illegal for a company to change the terms this far after the contract of sale

Other examples too. Many car manufacturers (Mazda, Chevrolet, ford) because api access limited data collection for them to sell, some companies are openly hostile to home assistant and when an integration is created they will go out of their way to break it (Ariston, bambu), etc. see https://github.com/unixorn/internet-of-trash

There’s a huge degree of separation between “violent music/games has a spurious link to violent behavior” and shitty AIs that are good enough to fill the void of someone who is lonely but not good enough to manage risk

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/tech/teen-suicide-character-ai-lawsuit

“within months of starting to use the platform, Setzer became “noticeably withdrawn, spent more and more time alone in his bedroom, and began suffering from low self-esteem. He even quit the Junior Varsity basketball team at school,”

“In a later message, Setzer told the bot he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.”

The bot responded: “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it,” before going on to say, “You can’t do that!”

Garcia said she believes the exchange shows the technology’s shortcomings.

“There were no suicide pop-up boxes that said, ‘If you need help, please call the suicide crisis hotline.’ None of that,” she said. “I don’t understand how a product could allow that, where a bot is not only continuing a conversation about self-harm but also prompting it and kind of directing it.”

The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.

“Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.

Garcia said police first discovered those messages on her son’s phone, which was lying on the floor of the bathroom where he died.”

So we have a bot that is marketed for chatting, a teenager desperate for socialization that forms a relationship that is inherently parasocial because the other side is an LLM that literally can’t have opinions, it just can appear to, and then we have a terrible mismanagement of suicidal ideation.

The AI discouraged ideation, which is good, but only when it was stated in very explicit terms. What’s appalling is that it gave no crisis resources or escalation to moderation (because like most big tech shit they probably refuse to pay for anywhere near appropriate moderation teams). Then what is inexcusable is that when ideation is discussed with slightly coded language “come home” the AI misconstrues it.

This results in a training opportunity for the language model to learn that in this context with previously exhibited ideation “go home” may mean more severe ideation and danger (if character.AI bothered to update that these conversations resulted in a death). The only drawback of getting that data of course is a few dead teenagers. Gotta break a few eggs to get an omelette

This barely begins to touch on the nature of AI chatbots inherently being parasocial relationships, which is bad for mental health. This is of course not limited to AI, being obsessed with a streamer or whatever is similar, but the AI can be much more intense because it will actually engage with you and is always available.

“Mattel’s first AI product won’t be for kids under 13, suggesting that Mattel is aware of the risks of putting chatbots into the hands of younger tots. … Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a companion on the Google-backed AI platform Character.AI”

Seems like a great idea

Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP

FWIW while my hardware serving Jellyfin is more powerful, my hardware accessing is not much more, I forgot to mention that detail

I typically use a ugoos android tv box flashed with coreelec. I believe it’s more powerful than a pi for this application but it’s not particularly powerful.

I use Jellyfin for kodi over Jellycon. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve never tried jellycon, but that is what my experience is based on. In my experience initial library scans are very lengthy (building db from scratch) with the size of my library, 20-30 minutes. This never is necessary at this point though and was only needed because I was testing something for coreelecs nightlies that required me to trash my db a lot. Typically I login and it updates within a few seconds, even if I’ve recently had a somewhat hefty update. It does help that the ugoos has fairly speedy emmc here - my initial testing running coreelec off of the sd card this was a bottleneck. Flashing to internal emmc and enabling hs400 mode made this notably quicker

Pinchflat is interesting! Thanks! I have been looking for a better YouTube archival tool

IMO kodi plugins are very hit/miss. This is why I prefer the setup I have where storage nas runs Jellyfin then flashed android box runs coreelec. Kodi and Jellyfin both have IPTV plugins, for example, but they are terrible. So when I want to use IPTV I boot to the degoogled android side and use tivimate, which is much more stable and convenient. I also have an APK for youtube there with adfree and sponsor block integrated. There is a build of freetube for android but unfortunately I cannot get it to work on the box. I don’t watch a ton of youtube though