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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it’s not quite what I meant.

    Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn’t solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don’t have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:

    • choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
    • certificates for that,
    • paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
    • making sure that works,
    • chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc

    Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.

    By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?

    1. Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it’s assumed)
    2. Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
    3. Set up users
    4. Done, it now works and doesn’t need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.

    By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that’s more to the point), auth and so on. It’s many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.

    My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we’d spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don’t want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.




  • There is AFAIK no way to do this.

    Apple’s never open-sourced the APIs and interfaces and it only works on Macs and Windows. For this you will need to have either a Windows install (recommend separate drive so it doesn’t break Linux bootloader) or a persistent or not Windows VM with USB passthrough. I’m not even sure how well the VM situation works but it probably should. You don’t even have to have a license for Windows, you can just run it in the VM for this purpose alone but it does mean oh at least 40GB set aside on your drive for the VM image plus more if you want to do things like back-up the phone.


  • Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).

    And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it’s even possible, on smart-tvs it’s almost always not, and I don’t think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it’s an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.

    I’m not talking about streaming video’s through someone else’s servers or using their bandwidth. I’m talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.

    Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they’d get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they’re clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).

    Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it’s not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it’s still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn’t either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.


  • Yeah GIMP is more than a decade behind Photoshop and a lot of other software in many respects.

    It’s frustrating. Basic things like content-aware fill for small spaces, not even AI generating huge things for large missing pieces but removing some text over a person’s cheek or plaid shirt, something in total 100x100 pixels big or so. Just doesn’t exist. You can clone stuff but it’s not aware of things like the gradient of a shadow that it should match or a highlight or other basic things so you’re left doing extensive work using layers and then cleaning it up to be visually acceptable using multiple tools over 10 minutes of time whereas Photoshop does it with one tool in an instant.


  • Incredible. This is one of those hard to believe moments.

    It’s been 21 years since the release of GIMP 2.0.

    It’s been more than 10 years since work on a majorly overhauled GIMP 3.0 was announced and initiated.

    And it’s been 7 years since the last major release (2.10).

    I can’t wait for the non-destructive text effects. After all these years of dealing with the fact applying drop shadows meant the text couldn’t be edited, at last it’s no longer an issue.



  • Whisper is open source and free AI model for transcription. If you’re not comfortable setting it up Audacity has a whisper plugin you can easily add and use.

    As to how good it is, it really varies a lot but it is free. You need another plugin to export to a subtitle file.

    Edit: Actually the program Subtitleedit (https://www.nikse.dk/) has the ability to run whisper models and you can download them from within the app, also no need for another plug to export so that’s probably the easiest. Once it’s as text you can use the translate menu within SE to translate. You need an API key (paid) for most of the truly good services but you can use basic google translate for free and it should give you the gist of things.



  • Look less suspicious. Be fingerprintable easily. Look unique but in a normal way. Be logged in. Look like a “normal” web user not using a hardened browser. That’s what tends to trigger them and what tends to escalate them to demanding more work to get past them.

    There’s no turn-key solution that fakes all of this flawlessly I’m afraid.





  • People are right that they’d die. They’d die or be irrelevant or so full of security holes that many sites would block them on principle of protecting their users.

    The reason why they might die sooner rather than later with the corporate and (western) government led seizure and lock-down of the open internet is that a company like Google could introduce a slew of new web standards and just completely overwhelm any devs trying to carry on the work of keeping the code alive. They could in other words bury it in a couple years with a mountain of complex new standards and possibly regulations (another thing big companies love doing when they capture the regulatory agencies is use them to keep out the little alternatives by burdening them with things they with their money and huge size can easily bear).

    But whether that happens or whether even with security incidents it struggles on for 4-5 years the open web is at that point doomed. It’s doomed short of some very large and powerful actor deciding to take up the mantle. Once upon a time the EU might have wanted to do that but all the talk of chat control, all the desire for anti-piracy crackdowns, etc it’s not going to be the EU. If I had to make a guess if there is any chance it’s that China or some massive Chinese company does it. But I wouldn’t count on it. However they’re the only ones with anything to gain at all really who might entirely for their own reasons want to create a browser stack entirely free of the west’s control and might open source huge chunks of it to the point open source devs could do the rest.


  • can they be added to the search function in qbittorrent?

    Nearly all can. All the one’s you’d want anyways work with Jackett. They don’t work via direct plugins but just run Jackett, follow its instructions and connect it to qBittorrent and you’re good to go searching just the same as before. Some annoying ones occasionally require setting up another software like Flaresolver but for the most part the big easy to get into ones that open their doors annually work without that.

    While there will likely be some openings throughout the year the fact is most trackers open in the period from Thanksgiving/late November through early January. TL opens then basically every year, a number of more exclusive trackers do open signups then, some for only 24 hours so get an RSS feed of that and remember to sign up IMMEDIATELY as soon as you see a post as the post on reddit may have been made 22 hours into a 24 hour open window, you just don’t know. TL though at least tends to stay open for several days. So if you have no luck before then, wait until that time of the year and then check daily or even twice daily if you can, once before bed, once earlier when you get up or lunch or after work, whatever.


  • It just does more and more easily. It styles things better, makes them more professional looking with a click. It can do certain things like nested tables in Word that Writer cannot do. Excel is much more powerful than calc, it has more functions, more refined functions, it’s easier to work with, has more and prettier chart options. And oh you can create tables in Excel that are sortable. There are many other cases.

    Now for the last two the die-hards will whine and whinge about how you should just use a software for creating charts and a database but sometimes you just want to make something quick, sometimes that’s overkill for what you need. Grandpa doesn’t need to learn how to deal with databases just to make a sortable list of books he’s read, he can just use excel and the Libreoffice people telling him to pound sand because they won’t add that feature to calc because it doesn’t belong there means he and many other people don’t use calc, they use MS office. Likewise the Libreoffice defense force saying of making graphs and charts to just use dedicated software, well many corporate types, business people, white collar workers don’t understand those things and may not be able to get them installed, what they understand, what they already have is MS office and it works and has lots of pretty, professional, very slick options which don’t make them look poorly in office meeting presentations.

    Just on the sortable tables front, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into hobby stuff that’s based on an excel file with tables that rely on being sortable. From stat sheet creators to mini-databases (<2000 rows) on some game created by fans.

    It’s useful for those who need the very bare basics of being able to open and read basic MS word documents, csv files, excel files, and to write an occasional letter. But the moment you need to start doing beyond basic formatting or dealing with files that have that, you run into issues.

    You have this gulf of usability, it’s useful for people at the very bottom of the basic needs pole, barely computer literate types who think facebook is the internet and it’s useful for highly technically competent people who can and do use other dedicated software, often without GUIs to solve problems, it’s a frustration for the middle 60% of the population who are more than basically computer literate but not scientifically trained, not CS or IT.


  • If by mainstream channels you mean major streaming services then there is no perfectly private option. But I would recommend an AppleTV as the closest thing (it also doesn’t have ads which I really appreciate).

    Other than that your options are devices that can’t access major streaming services at greater than 720p and are hackily put together on multiple levels but are fine for streaming local media you host yourself or more expensive than ATV devices and modding them with alternative launchers.



  • I doubt they would be allowed to hand out keys (which they do not hold) to another government that would compromise American businesses, agencies, etc.

    Um, yes they would. The very point of eyes agreements is they allow countries intelligence agencies which aren’t allowed to spy on their own people to spy on each other’s people then pass each other the data. Snowden revealed this all a decade ago.

    The CIA and FBI do not store classified sensitive info on iPhones that are backed up anywhere. At least not anything that would come as a surprise to the British or be a risk. Nothing they wouldn’t have access to via the existing intelligence sharing.

    The UK and the US are thick as thieves and have been since the end of WW2.