• 2 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 8th, 2023

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  • As much as I’d love to, it is still one of the best places to read up on recommendations for stuff, be it hardware opinions or obscure book recommendations. It is certainly a better place for tech reviews than most of the other sites you find using search engines which just do stuff like “This is the best on a budget. This is the best for that. This is the best overall. Here is where you can buy all of that.”

    Those sites never feel like they do a genuine review of stuff but instead try to sell you something. Plus they feel like they are copy pasting from each other.






  • My solution is far from ideal but it works for me.

    I have a Chromecast connected to my TV which outputs to my stereo system. Power to TV and stereo are controlled via smart plugs that I can quickly toggle when I want to stream music.

    The good thing: It works.

    The bad things:

    • You have to connect navidrome to symfonium using the IP address and not a hostname when using a basic chromecast since that one has a hardcoded dns server. The Chromecast with google TV allows setting a dns server yourself but you loose software volume control through your phone.
    • No volume control except directly on the stereo system. This wasn’t an issue with the basic chromecast but it is now with the better one…
    • For some reason some songs crash the casting to the chromecast. Again this wasn’t an issue on the cheap Chromecast for some stupid reason






  • I managed to do it somehow without a kindle but it was an absolute pain in the ass. For my first few books I had to download then using a specific old version of the kindle desktop app so that calibre was able to remove the encryption. Apparently the encryption used by the newer kindle desktop app is different.

    For my next books that suddenly wasn’t enough and I had to use an old android app version in an emulator and get the books out of the hidden app storage using adb.

    I’m never buying an ebook of amazon again if I can avoid it



  • I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore

    Personally I try to avoid making anything in my home actually dependant on my server. I have a single lamp that can only be controlled from my phone and that’s only because it’s so rarely used that I didn’t want to put in the effort. Everything else is local first and only gets extended functionality from my server running.

    I’ve had a couple issues with my zigbee stuff over the years on the server side and I would be really pissed if I wouldn’t be able to turn my lights on because I haven’t gotten around to fixing my server yet.