How To: Rip BluRay discs on Linux

Disclaimer: Ripping BluRays with Handbrake is discouraged by its developers. They recommend using MakeMKV instead which is more robust in this respect since it’s built for the task. By now I’ve adopted this workflow myself. I recently gained a renewed interest in moving my media from discs to hard drives so I can integrate them with my media server. For music and DVDs this is fairly straightforward, although there is a hoop to jump through if you’re on Fedora because it doesn’t come with all the proprietary codecs and whatnot preinstalled....

June 13, 2023 · 2 min

How To: Create a Digital Frame with MagicMirror

I’ve wanted a digital frame at home for a while now. I’m notoriously bad at organizing pictures, even worse at sorting, printing, arranging or displaying them. So when I found out that digital frames were a thing it seemed like this would be a natural solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the commercially available ones either don’t have the features that I want (e.g. some way to connect with my images stored in my Nextcloud) or feature worrying amounts of integration with various third-party services, clouds, phone apps and whatnot....

February 8, 2023 · 5 min

Self-Hosting or How I learned to stop worrying and love the Cloud

For a few years now, I’ve hosted a small server at home. Nothing too exciting, I’d say. It all started with a Nextclound instance (see here) and sort of evolved from there. After a while I discovered docker and the amount of services saw a dramatic, albeit short-lived uptick. I tried out all kinds of things, like uptime-kuma, FreshRSS, miniflux, portainer, watchtower. At some point I came across what used to be bitwarden_rs and is now called vaultwarden, a self-hostable reimplementation of Bitwarden....

February 8, 2023 · 6 min

How To: Run Several Services Behind a Reverse Proxy

This is a follow-up article for my previous one which describes how I migrated my personal Nextcloud to a docker setup. It’s part me telling a story of what I learned and part “How To” so someone can recreate my steps. After I had managed that I figured I might as well go one or two steps further and host additional things on my home server. After all it has 4 GB of RAM, most of which is still unused....

April 13, 2022 · 8 min

How To: Set up NextcloudPi with Docker

I’ve been successfully running a Nextcloud instance for a while now and it’s quite useful. When I did the setup the first time I installed the entire stack on bare metal by hand. Raspberry Pi with Raspbian (now Raspberry Pi OS), Apache, MariaDB, PHP, the works. I closely followed tutorials on it because I knew very little of what I was doing and there’s a lot to keep in mind in terms of performance, security, configuration of various things and so on....

April 6, 2022 · 5 min