Trying to be as helpful as I can, I think you might consider streaming (Plex/Jellyfin) and downloading (*arrs) as two seperate concerns.

Arrs:

For now don’t worry about anything other than sonarr (tv shows) or radarr (movies). you can add the more complexity once you get it working.

These *arrs do two main things:

• Connect to a “transport” to get new media or update existing media. This is a torrent client or a nzb/usenet client.
• Manage your media files (such as storage strategies).

I would create a minimum viable config like this:

[sonarr] ----> [transmission or whatever torrent/nzb client]

at that point you should be able to download tv shows and you can building on it. Next steps might be nzbget, radarr or seerr (which is a very nice way to surface this functionality to your users), or connect things like prowlarr.

The other thing I would say is use something like Docker for this. Easy to make changes that way and provision new services. Here’s my arrs stack’s docker-compose.yml (which is by far not best practice, but it might help you)

services:

  ##############################
  # Transport
  ##############################
  sabnzbd:
    image: 'linuxserver/sabnzbd:latest'
    container_name: sabnzbd

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: large

    networks:
      - arrs-edge

    volumes:
      - './sabnzbd:/config'
      - '/media/web/downloads:/downloads'
      - '/media/web/incomplete-downloads:/incomplete-downloads'
      - '/media/web/watched:/watched'

  transmission-openvpn:
    image: haugene/transmission-openvpn
    container_name: transmission

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: large

    networks:
      - arrs-edge

    devices:
      - /dev/net/tun

    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN

    ports:
      - 9091:9091

    volumes:
      - /media/web/torrent-data:/data
      - /media/web/books-import/torrents:/data/watch
      - ./transmission/config:/config



  ##############################
  # Arrs
  ##############################
  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: nolimit

    # environment:
    #   - UMASK=022

    volumes:
      - './radarr:/config'
      - '/media/movies:/movies'
      - '/media/web/downloads:/downloads'
      - '/media/web/torrent-data:/torrent-data'

    networks:
      - arrs-edge

  sonarr:
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:develop
    container_name: sonarr

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: nolimit

    volumes:
      - './sonarr:/config'
      - '/media/tv-shows-1:/tv-shows'
      - '/media/web/downloads:/downloads'
      - '/media/web/torrent-data:/torrent-data'
      - '/media/web/torrent-data/completed/sonarr:/data/completed/sonarr'
      - '/media/tv-shows-3:/tv-shows-2'

    networks:
      - arrs-edge

  prowlarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/prowlarr:latest
    container_name: prowlarr

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: medium

    volumes:
      - ./prowlarr:/config

    networks:
      - arrs-edge

  seerr:
    image: ghcr.io/seerr-team/seerr:latest
    init: true
    container_name: seerr

    extends:
      file: ../_templates/template.yaml
      service: medium

    volumes:
      - ./seerr:/app/config

    networks:
      - arrs-edge
      - pangolin-arrs-edge

    healthcheck:
      test: wget --no-verbose --tries=1 --spider http://localhost:5055/api/v1/status || exit 1
      start_period: 20s
      timeout: 3s
      interval: 15s
      retries: 3

    restart: unless-stopped

networks:
  arrs-edge:
    external: true
  pangolin-arrs-edge:
    external: true

Plex vs Jellyfin

Everyone one loves to talk about how they use jellyfin, but I suspect many more people quietly run Plex. You should probably try both, but some things to be aware:

Jellyfin:

Pros:

• Very configurable and extensible with a massive plugin library
• Free
• No bloat
• Excellent codec support

Cons:

• No streaming tunnel. If you use cloudflare tunnel, you aren’t allowed to stream media. If you use pangolin, you can create something on Oracle’s free teir that should be good enough. but you need to configure and set that up. Plex just works out of the box
• Significant security issues. I really don’t wont to start a flame war, but there are issues that I find concerning such as streams being no-auth etc. In their defence, they’re working through the issues. You could probably manage this with some good reverse proxy configs.
• UI can be a bit slow on older hardware. Plex isn’t great either, but in my experience, Jellyfin is worse.

Plex

Pros:

• Has an included tunnel service for remote access which requires very little configuration
• Everything just works
• UI is pretty responsive. Better than AWS Prime apps on my tv, worse than netflix/youtube.

Cons:

• Not free. However, they frequently have significant sales on their lifetime membership.
• Spammy home view. You can disable this on each client, but its just an extra level of confusion for non techies connecting to your system.
• Very little extensibility. They use to support plugins but those days are pretty much gone.
• It chokes on some HDR codecs on my 5 year old tv I find, where as jellyfin doesn’t

Personally, I think Plex is best if you want to access this stuff remotely and you haven’t yet configured a reverse tunnel that can stream media. If you have a pangolin, or you’re comfortable opening a port on your home router, or you have no need to stream remotely, then Jellyfin might be worth looking at if for no other reason than its ecosystem of plugins. I have both available remotely, but I use Plex more than I use Jellyfin.

My servers are one NUC clone and a 4*16tb NAS. I have a lot of docker containers running constantly and yet cooling has never really been an issue for me. A larger concern is I would rather not see it, so It’s hidden it under furniture. The fans on the NAS have attracted a layer of dust, and one day I might clean it. Kidding. I wont.

My security team involves a bull dog named Sophie, who has never done more than lick any other being, but I’m banking on burglars not knowing this.

I don’t mind smart products, though I’m not sure what problem is solved by a screen on a fridge. That said, I do hate it when these devices need to rely on the cloud to function, and Ads I can’t tolerate–I usually try to block the DNS address for things that like to spy on me or show me ads.

This sort of stuff damages the Samsung as a brand. It makes me unlikely to consider Samsung for other products like TVs.

I’ll add it to my linked in profile to warn potential coworkers.

I think that’s a pretty good response. More details will probably emerge in the next few days that could change my mind, but for now that gives me a bit of confidence in their platform.

In comparison, a few years ago I was a patient at an IVF clinic in Sydney. I saw some absolutely bonkers security and repeatedly raised it with them. They wouldn’t hear it, and almost expectedly they were hacked and now my sperm count is public information. Their response was delayed and appalling. If my medical records were treated a severely as a streaming platform, I would have been happy.

Maybe there’s more to it, but I really don’t get the last note about Tidal: Essentially, if you use Tidal, you should know the CEO is has a large ego and is a crypto bro.

I’m sure he’s very annoying, but I’m not inviting him to my house for dinner.

I’m a dev and I think my experience is mostly similar to yours. Where AI seems to work well, is when the boundaries of the problem are very well defined. For example : “Take this C++ implementation of the LCS algorithm and convert it to JS”. That would have taken me a few hours at least, but AI appears to have nailed it. However, anything where a large amount of context is needed and it starts to fail fast, and suggest absolutely insane things. I have turned of copilot on my IDE because it slows me down, but I will still ask questions to chatgpt when I have a specific problem I think it can help me with. I also will ask pointed questions when I review other dev’s code, and my expectation is the author can explain why they wrote it.

I use authentik and like it. The learning curve isn’t that steep so not a lot of wasted investment if you decide to ditch it for something else. No password flow with webauthn is pretty cool.

I tried Kagi because I was excited by the hype and would gladly pay a fee for superior search thats not google. But, my experience wasn’t great:

1. Couldn’t reliably give me local results. E.g., searching for “pizza near me” would render results from a combination of my local city, Sydney and those in Singapore.
2. UI needs some basic improvements. Rules of font spacing for starters.
3. It was slow. like at least 500 ms for me to get a page of results, even though I was pretty sure it was using my closest AWS region.

I hope this doesn’t come off as too negative–I don’t want to be disparaging. Contrarily, I would love to hear your thoughts as a supporter of the platform. It could be that I was using it wrong, or theres some mitigating features that I missed. As I said, I would gladly pay to not be the product.

Like most things, it depends on your jurisdiction and the policies of your ISP. But as a general rule, yes, you should take steps to hide your IP.

Probably a good case example is to look at how many people in your area were sued for torrenting. For example, the rights holders to Dallas Buyer’s Club famously went nuclear on torrenters, so maybe start by searching that. Of course none of this is legal advice.

PIA is pretty reliable in my experience and their three year plan is quite affordable.

I agree. About 10 years ago I had a some unstable dependencies hit in the middle of a major crunch/product release at work. When it was vital I was productive, I was instead trouble shooting my laptop. I moved to mac the next day and was surprised how far the OS had come, and that I could run zsh, nvim etc. Not to mention since apple silicon its rare I need to take a charger with me anywhere.

I still have a linux thinkpad for personal use, and all my personal servers are linux. My heart is linux, but a lot will have to change to take me away from a macbook.

For what its worth, I’ve been using this container for years and have never had any issues https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/

I think I might have seen a build or two even back then. However, what I need from a mobile app isn’t to provide all of emacs, but rather just satisfy a few key use cases. Providing everything comes at the cost of usability, which is a key requirement for a mobile app. Really I just need to capture notes and tasks and see task lists, but trying to use the mobile emacs in the middle of a conversation, commuting, or grabbing coffee isn’t ideal.

There were a couple of 3rd party apps that were designed for orgmode, but after I trialled, but they all fell short for me.

Even if it had the best mobile app now however, I wouldn’t go back to emacs. Each to their own, but I’ve become way more aligned with the unix philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well”, where as I see emacs more as “lets do as much as we can in one app”. IMO Ofc.

I went the ohterway with Emacs -> Logseq -> Obsidian, but with several things in between. Emacs isn’t for me, I did give it a red hot go and coded off it for a good year or two about 10-15 years ago.

HOWEVER, I have to agree. Emac’s Orgmode is first class and I’ve never been as satisfied with a task app since. However, at the time I was using it, mobile support was pretty much nonexistent, and I was missing vim too much, so I eventually abandoned it.

Now i just use a selfhosted instance of memos, which is sparse on its feature set, but works well for me.

IMO, you want ram more than you want processing power. 16 gig ought to be enough. Most of the time your containers will sit dormant and just consume memory. However since you want to run Jellyfin, get a recent CPU which can do hardware decoding of popular codecs. There’s charts online that show what generation can handle what codecs. Ideally you don’t want that done by software. You should still be able to find something cheap.

In terms of placement. It depends a lot on noise IMO. If you’re running something small without magnetic storage, you’re probably fine to stick it anywhere. If you have several data-centre grade hard drives, you will probably want to keep it somewhere where you wont hear it all day.

In terms of upgrading, I’m not sure if its as much of a concern as you might think. I run probably about 30 docker containers off a NUC clone and a seperate NAS, and that has worked pretty well for the last few years. I can always add more drives to the NAS, but otherwise its fine. Also, many of my services scale to zero with sablier+traefik, and I schedule filesharing for low bandwidth times. This makes things pretty manageable.

I did the same but joined Tidal for the same reason. Their app isn’t terrible—could do with more features but it’s been robust in my experience.

I was also forced to use it at uni (a few decades ago), but didn’t start using it until professionally until several years into my dev career. I promise that I don’t think I’m superior because I use it. But I do encourage junior developers to learn it for reasons that appealed to me.

Among other things, appealing things are modal editing (the biggest advantage IMO), it runs on pretty much on any server you will be ssh’ing into, less IDE lock in. And, there’s a bunch of additional things that other editors do that I think Vim does better: regex is first class in the environment, extensible workflows, macros. Then there are definite advantages being able to quickly navigate from the home row.

I agree that some people will demonstrate their enthusiasm by bragging and being pretentious. But I don’t think that’s why they stick with Vim.

I’m aware. You may have missed that I made that distinction in my first sentence.

With modern Usenet there are about 8 or so backbones used for file sharing. Your Usenet provider/server would connect to one or more of these backbones.

Its true Usenet is designed for federation, and in the 80s and 90s it was thousands of servers but today commercial Usenet providers just resell these 8 backbones.