exu

• Hetzner: I’ve rented a dedicated server with them for years and it’s been very solid. There are retorts of people getting blocked during the first sign up, but I didn’t have that problem nor any other issue since. For bulk data storage their file share offering is also unbeatable imo, also used that for years and my Next cloud files plus acquired media still live on such a share.
• Netcup: I have a small VPS here for monitoring, also no issues. It’s somewhat annoying that you need to take the server offline and run a media optimisation task when you delete snapshots (not sure how necessary it actually is, but you get a warning at least)

Some anti-recommendations as well

• Vultr: Years ago I wanted to get their very cheapest VPS offering, but that is only available sometimes in certain locations and at the time they didn’t tell you any of that before you signed up and deposited their minimum fee. I did get the money back though
• Contabo: My previous monitoring VPS lived here. After a while they declared the VPS I was using was a “legacy” product and wanted more money to keep running it. I feel this could have been handled with a forced migration of some sort.
• Digital Ocean: They just donated 3 million USD to a racist’s pet project financing other weird guys

Unless you have fiber from your ISP you need a modem to translate from the TV or phone cable to Ethernet.

I’m not a fan of openWRT. I’d recommend you go look at NUC-style x86 mini PCs with multiple network ports instead and install OPNsense. I find the web interface much more intuitive than LuCI

Especially in an enterprise environment where plenty of people use first.lastname@company

Self hosted networking! Legitimately one of my favourite topics

You won’t get around the requirement of a publicly reachable endpoint. That can either be a small server with a public ip or dynamic DNS to your home with port forwarding for the VPN.

A classic option is OpenVPN. You can run it on Port 443 in TCP mode and while it won’t be performant, it has a better chance of bypassing most simple blocks

Other than that I’m a fan of completely decentralized mesh VPNs.

The one I use and am most familiar with is Yggdrasil. Connections can be established over TCP, TLS or QUIC on any port you want.
I’ve written a somewhat lengthy comment under this post. One advantage to Yggdrasil would be its existing public network. If you can firewall of your home lab to the point where joining the public network doesn’t expose a security risk to your local network, you could use that to transport your traffic instead of having your own public node or port forwarding.

The same post also mentions Anywherelan, it’s intended to have better NAT handling out of the box by using community nodes.

Then there’s also EasyTier mentioned at the bottom, it is a Chinese project and those tend to have good censorship resistance.

Finally I’ll mention Nebula, it requires at least one coordination server but might also be an option

For anyone who hasn’t yet, do make sure to go through the default conversion settings in Calibre and turn off all the resizing. Title image resizing is a separate option turn that off as well.
If you use Koreader or modern enough devices it’s probably fine to default to epub3 instead of epub2 as well.

Have you played anything else than $Ubisoft game$ and $lastest COD$ in the last year?

I can count up to 31 on one hand

Not the worst compatibility check to compare baskets

2b

I think Amazon and Qobuz both offer some music for purchase.

Their reasoning is literally the second sentence on that page.

Note however that the 10.Y.Z release chain represents the “cleanup” of the codebase, so it should be accepted that 10.Y.Z breaks all compatibility, at some point, with previous Emby-compatible interfaces, and may also break compatibility with previous 10.Y releases if required for later cleanup work

Any 10.Y.Z release is cleanup and can include breaking changes. That’s been the case for 10.9 and 10.10 already btw.

This is the database rework that’s been in progress for a while to remove all the bad inherited database code from when the forked Emby. No more SQL statements in code or plugins, any DB access now goes through the core library. There are a few blog posts in their website with more details.

They’ve been putting ads on your home screen for years