It’s been a busy few weeks as I reorient myself from the warm-weather version of me that spends almost zero time on personal technology projects to the cold-weather version of me that spend most of my time on personal technology projects. As always, I know I contain multitudes but sometimes the difference between some of those multitudes is downright shocking.

Anyway, I’ve setup a Jellyfin server so that I can watch a bunch of old series that I have downloaded to my media server (things like the original Tenacious D HBO episodes, Tales from the Tour Bus, etc.) This has been a fun exercise in part because I deployed it in docker and my docker-compose file has really grown over the past year or so.

From a self-hosting perspective, and all running in docker, I’ve got:

• Navidrome for my audio server. Amazing.
• Photoprism for my photo storage and archiving so the I can just keep my favorites on my iOS devices and push the rest up to this archive
• pi-hole – I go back and forth on the convienece of having this though being able to blacklist sites like news.google.com and such so that I don’t just thoughtless check the news is helpful
• watchtower to keep my docker images up to date
• homarr – a dashboard for the services that I’m self-hosting
• dash. – monitor resources on my NUC
• nginx proxy manager – an easy way to manage the nginx reverse proxy stuff so that I can access my music library when I’m outside of my house (using play:sub to listen to my navidrome library via CarPlay is killer).

On the audio front, I’m still really happy with the Cambridge Audio swap that I did for the NAD amp I used to have in my listening room. For the icing on the cake I used a room analysis tool (HouseCurve) and modified the PEQ/eq curve that I use for the room. As I expected there were some spikes down in the low frequency range and this tool helped me not only figure out the frequencies but gave me some guidance on how much to adjust.

This, combined with the small eq curve adjustments I made following my AirPod listening test (shocking I don’t have more hearing loss after so many years of standing in front of stupid-loud amps), I feel like albums just sound a bit better now though that could be totally subjective.

I recently started futzing around with Tailscale, it seems like a shockingly easy way to securely tunnel between devices but as I’ve already got reverse proxies setup for my key services, I’m not sure what I’ll use it for.