djdarren

I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.

Debian is great. Boring, and great.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn’t 5 that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn’t rated, I could spin up a rating and it’d get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it’s not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I’ve got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

Just be aware that if you want anyone else to connect to your Jellyfin, you’ll still have to route it through a domain and reverse proxy, unless you’re comfortable letting them log in to your tailnet.

It’s a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it’s done it’s quite satisfying.

I use Navidrome, and have set up Lidarr to feed it if I’m feeling a little hook-handed, if you get my meaning. Lidarr was a bit of a bollocks to set up, but once it’s running it’s pretty neat. I access it via Tailscale so can add stuff to the library wherever I am.

As for accessing it: again, I use Tailscale to run it through a reverse proxy on my website, so I connect to it using a subdomain. But as long as I’ve got Tailscale active on my phone, I could always access it that way. As others have suggested, I use Symfonium on my phone, and I use Feishin on everything else.

It all works pretty well, to the point that I don’t really use Apple Music anymore.

It’s not cope, it’s biology.

Our bodies have evolved to protect against weight loss. We like to think we’re modern, enlightened creatures, but we’re still a collection of biological processes that are centred around survival in an unforgiving world. Most of us no longer live in that world.

As a result, when we diet our bodies trigger processes that limit the effects of nutritional deficit. And sure, we’ll lose weight to start with, but that hits a plateau surprisingly quickly as our metabolism catches up.

Then add into that things like ADHD (which is something affects me personally), whereby when weight loss slows to a crawl after a few weeks I get frustrated and lose interest in keeping it up. So I’m 140kg with no sign of that going anywhere any time soon.

I’ve been think quite a lot lately about how a tech company announces that something is now The Truth, and all the media posts stories about The Truth, and that therefore becomes The Truth and that’s that. It’s always been that way, I know, but it feels like these past few years, with crypto, NFTs, and now AI, it’s become more blatant.

Tech Bros say “AI is the future”, then force AI into everything, and that’s that. No one was asked, we were just given it, because they’ve spent a lot of money on it and need us to believe them.