Pretty happy with this selection of apps. For those who are curious, here's what I'm running currently
Server Stuff
↳ Dockhand: the best docker web app I've used yet. Easy to understand, full featured, and lightweight.
↳ Copyparty: a retro-themed but very powerful server file browser. It can play back almost any file type, compress files/folders for download, and offers multi-user support with varying permissions
↳ Glance: the dashboard shown in the image below. Coded in YAML with a bunch of community support and documentation, making assisted customization very easy.
The ARR Stack
↳ Gluetun: forces containers to run external traffic through VPN always
↳ qBittorrent: downloader of things
↳ Sonarr (shows), Radarr (movies), Bookshelf (books/audiobooks), Lidarr (music): automated media downloaders
↳ Prowlarr: manages the torrent indexers that connect to the other ARR apps
↳ Flaresolverr: prevents cloudflare from blocking ARR apps access to torrent sites
↳ Bitmagnet: my own private torrent indexer. It crawls a decentalized hash table of all publicly broadcast torrents
↳ Huntarr: I just added this. It monitors your requests and library to determine which items are still missing, looks for them, and forces them into your ARR processes.
↳ Cleanuparr: Also new. It monitors your downloads and kills stalled downloads as well as maintains your seed ratio and cleans up unnecessary uploads.
↳ Bazarr: automatically finds subtitles for your media and adds it to the folder.
↳ Jellyseer: the beautiful front-end for requesting TV and Movies from Sonarr and Radarr. I mostly access Jellyseer via an app called Pocket for Jellyseer on iPhone, making requests dead simple
↳ Nicotine+: A client for the Soulseek P2P network. Great for sharing music with other music lovers.
And of course, Jellyfin: the open source Plex alternative that now hosts all my movies, tv, music, and audiobooks. I can stream this content to my phone, computer, and AppleTV via web browsers or any number of apps. I've listed my favourites in other threads.
Pretty proud of this Glance dashboard I vibe coded up over the past couple days.
What a versatile and awesome platform. Much less finicky and resource intensive than Homarr, and I love how it looks.
When I open Brave now, I'm automatically taken to the "Startpage" where I can see if my docker containers are running, if my VPN is configured, and if my indexers are pulling torrents—like these Linux ISOs and public domain goodies.
That's not all, still on the Startpage, I have the date, local weather (with hourly forecast), and air quality reading. Then on the second page, I've got relevant youtube channels and subreddits plus links to all the documentation and github's for everything I use.
All I want is to be able to use Uno and/or Quorum without needing to use TestFlight.
Every crypto app I’ve test flown (🤔) has gone on to never be publicly released and probably harvested all kinds of device and location information from me. I don’t mess with that anymore.
But I really do need a new FC client. Alas, I’ll have to be patient.
I haven’t played much with graze. All I know is that it’s a tool to customize your Bluesky algorithm, like feeds but a step further.
This particular one looks pretty great and might be popular with those of you who find Bluesky too abrasive/political.
I can not recommend enough, that you run your music files through MusicBrainz Picard (https://picard.musicbrainz.org/)
It will make your Jellyfin, Plex, or other listening experience far better. You can even boost/normalize volume with the ReplayGain plugin.
But most importantly, this will ensure you have all the right genre tags, images, artist IDs, and your app can pick up the correct lyrics files.
Updates:
🐳 I’ve switched from Portainer to Dockhand. So far, I massively prefer this interface.
👀 I’ve switched to testing Glance as Homarr seemed to crash my system (still unsure of the cause; Postgres error maybe?)
🧲 My BitMagnet instance has over 1.5M indexed public torrents, and I’ve added a private tracker, for which I paid for access using ETH 💪
🦡 Speaking of paying with crypto, I got a year of Mullvad with XMR. I intended to run my arr stack through it, but it doesn’t support port forwarding (I had no idea!), so now I’m back on ProtonVPN. I think I will use Mullvad for my personal VPN and keep Proton for backend/WireGuard.
Thoughts? Advice?
I would say that my number one trusted sources these days are Democracy Now! and Drop Site. They’re just so consistently rigorous in the amount of information they provide, their principal bias being an anti-war/pro human rights stance, and their years of independence from corporate sponsorship.
But here’s a list of all the sites I find myself going through for information about current events as they unfold. The inclusion of any source is not an endorsement. Just that over the years, including when I very briefly worked for a newspaper and considered going to journalism school, these are the sources I’ve found to be the least inclined to outright lie.
What are yours? And why?
God I hate when people cite the NYT.
It’s 2026. This rag has been mask off for most of a decade, and discredited for 50+ years as the consent manufacturer of the American empire through every one of its unlawful wars.
When you cite them, no matter whether their bias in your preferred article reads more Democrat or more Republican, you are still showing your allegiance to the toxic narratives of empire over truth.
Revoke your subscriptions, don’t repost their articles, and move on. This should be everyone’s New Year’s resolution.
This.
The US being able to unilaterally decide who is legitimate, who is subject to US law—rather than international law—and who can be attacked, abducted, or assasinated is incredibly dangerous.
Imagine any other country doing this. Imagine Russia, or China, or Iran doing this. You won’t have to imagine, sadly. Now that the US and Israel have undermined the role of the UN and international law, global war is all but inevitable.
Helmarr is a pretty impressive app. It’s paid, but the way it brings together all your arr apps in one super polished interface is really cool.
Not sure it’s worth choosing over Pocket (for Jellyseerr) + qRemote (for qBittorrent web), both of which are free, but it does a lot more in a lot prettier way.
https://helmarr.com/
Holy shit. Clicks Communicator looks great. I’ve been eyeing the Sidephone and I’m still more into that, but this could be more compelling.
https://youtu.be/69VgtIJOtdQ
If you don’t regularly tell your LLM that it’s wrong, you are being led astray significantly.
The reality of this, which represents that these are simple computing tools which still require task-specific knowledge and expertise, is what worries me most about stupid (or at least overconfident, uncritical) people using LLMs.
On Mastodon, I can use any of a handful of apps and have the full feature-set; plus extras like translation, gifs, etc. My current go-tos are Mona and Ice Cubes. There’s even alternate mode apps like Pixelfed (Instagram classic/Flickr), and Loops (TikTok).
On Bluesky, I can use one of several apps (my current go-to is Skeets), and have the full feature-set; plus extras. There’s even alternate mode apps like Flashes (Instagram classic), and Skylight (TikTok). Plus entirely different modalities like Anisota and Leaflet.
Both Bluesky and Mastodon can be accessed via the multi-protocol apps Openvibe and Croissant.
In this area, Farcaster is *far* behind. There are several apps but most don’t even offer the full feature set of the core app. None offers bookmarks or messages. None, except base allow for creating accounts. Some are novel, like Cura and Scout in the way the emphasize channels and users over algorithmic feeds.
Additionally, Farcaster can be accessed via the multiprotocol app Firefly.
But outside of the upcoming app Uno, it seems the community of builders Farcaster has attracted is only interested in building to extract. Prediction betting markets and coining everything. It is not nearly as grassroots of a network and it really shows. It is a VC network. I hope this changes.
This is fascinating.
Retro-inspired OS, where you install all your games on SD card “cartridges” and the OS handles save files like PS1/Gamecube.
All offline, low-tech, Linux based.
https://kazeta.org/
