I’m not an “imagephile”, my eyes can tell the difference between 4k & 1080p but for a 45 min TV show I couldn’t care less if its in standard def.

We have an HTPC handling all media including TV recrdings so I took a USB with a few media files of differing qualities & tested them on TV’s in the store - no way I’m buying a TV without seeing how it handles everyday stuff that isnt the ridiculous over bright awful motion smoothed in store demo scenes.

I’d never use the “smart” features of a TV, that thing is never going online.

Last 3 TV’s have been Panasonic. One of them was a lower priced set but still fantastic picture. Not the best UI & to be honest a nightmare menu system but excellent panels & no ads or BS in the UI.

The way the tech overlords are heading I’m not looking forward to replacing our set when it eventually needs it

Wouldn’t say scam but potentially unsustainable. Some years ago I signed up for a brand new startup Nextcloud service which was priced far too low & went under very quickly. Switched to a hosted Nextcloud provider who had been around a long time (still around). They were really good but after a short time I decided to learn how to host it myself.

Hardware wise you don’t need much, I upgraded to a used Pi5 8GB with fanless heatsink case & added an m.2 SSD. Only 1 user on my instance but I often share folders with others, it’s robust & never once crashed.

If exposing to www you need to keep your network secure. There’s a learning curve but self hosting can be rewarding. Any if you’re lucky you might get to spend hours & hours problem solving when something breaks 😉😁

I use Keepass but I recommended Bitwarden to less nerdy family members as it syncs out of the box & does what they need it to do. Sync is simple enough to set up with Keepass & the big plus for me is that it allows storage of files/documents. Last time I checked this was a limited/paid feature on Bitwarden

Nothing exciting I’m afraid - a few football related feeds (Guardian & Telegraph are solid for football stories, usually interesting articles rather than made up transfer horseshit) plus some general news headlines/generic/“top stories” type feeds & a couple of tech bits like Ars Technica.

A few I’ve not seen mentioned yet:

• Equate - calculator/converter etc
• Feeder - RSS client
• Immich - Photos. App for self hostable server
• Jellyfin - media client
• Joplin - notes
• MJ PDF - PDF viewer with extras
• PDF Converter - handy PDF tool
• Squawker - view the cesspit, follow stuff etc
• Subz - track your subscriptions
• Untracker - removes tracking info before sharing links
• Whobird - Shazam for birds

Never knew I needed? Another vote for Paperless-ngx. I still feel like I’m living in the future using it. The trick I’ve found was initially setting up a good document naming & management convention & following it religiously for every document. The search function is fantastic at narrowing down results. Used in conjunction with specific coloured tags I can immediately see what I need from search results.

Fired up Immich recently. Amazing. Will be donating as I like their stance.

I also enjoy Linkwarden. Switched from the also excellent Hoarder as I prefer the UI.

Most used? Nextcloud with Joplin.

For sure. Its a race to the bottom. I was only talking about this last night with my other half. I’m a tech nerd & I yearn for the pre internet days when stuff was fun & we weren’t getting stiffed at every opportunity by “The Man”

I moved from Nextcloudpi some time back & found THIS TUTORIAL far & away the most useful. Instead of just saying copy/paste a Docker Compose file he shows how to build it step by step using Portainer so i found it invaluable for future projects.

It seems a bit overwhelming initially but once you’ve installed it a few times you’ll be able to do it from scratch in less than an hour. Probably less as it sounds like you already know what’s what having used Ansible

“What madness is this?” 😉

Earthbound was great!

I bought an i7 NUC to use as HTPC some years ago. It has W10 IoT on it. Handles Dolby Atmos like a charm & 4K to a degree (YouTube. Last time i checked, Windows still liked to give 4K media files a purple hue)

Crap, I literally just bought a GL.iNet GL-MT600 Flint 2 which runs GL.iNet skin over OpenWrt & it has an option in its settings to switch direcrly to OpenWRT if you prefer, or you can also flash OpenWRT onto it yourself too.

Loved it & used it for such a long time because at the time it was the only android browser with extension capability …but it’s on an outdated version of Chromium & development seems to have ceased. Switched to Firefox which is great, though I still miss “open new tab in group”

You made me do it, ive ordered one. Having spent money I guess that means we’re all in on Jellyfin now …but if its no good I’ll be sending the boys round for a full refund lol.

Will keep you posted, might save you some money if you can hold out, cheers

Thanks for the info, I’ll look a little deeper into the live TV side of Jellyfin. Ive not heard of FLIRC USB before. Very interesting, I’d love to know how that goes, thank you

I’ve liked the sound of Plex forever but after it taking years for the wife to finally be comfortable finding her way around Kodi I couldn’t really try it.

Just last week I fancied a tinker & I’d heard Plex has potentially begun to enshittify so I ended up putting Jellyfin on our htpc just to test it. As well as all the usual groups, it was simple to create additional collections for stuff only the wife wants to see rather than things we’ll watch together. Within a day or so she’s already flying round it so we’ve pretty much moved to Jellyfin. It doesnt seem to like IR remote control like Kodi does which is a shame & I’m struggling a little with the live TV aspect which was also very straightforward on Kodi but I havent looked too closely into it yet.

Overall very impressed with Jellyfin.

Tech has definitely become worse since megacorps killed the little guys & sucked the fun out of everything. Open source & self hosting is becoming/has become the only way. So glad I taught myself how to do it

I’ve found Canon printers to be generally good overall but this is BS. If its any consolation I have a Canon printer with WiFi. Win 10 is so shit the scanner literally never scans over WiFi & ive given in using the printer over WiFi for anything & just use it via a cable

A close friend sells a product on eBay. A product most households have & my friend collects when it’s no longer wanted which is cleaned, sorted & resold. Has now left 9-5 job to run it as a business.

This friend is exceptional at exploiting niches & will likely become amongst leading sellers of this type (is well on the way already having done it before with a particular collectible). Interestingly, reading through the suggestions here, previously collected & sold scrap before pivoting.

I’m very proud of them!

For me it’s the first thing i learned how to self host: Nextcloud …which in turn allows me to sync Joplin notes, which I use constantly