Nice! I’m glad you were able to figure it out :)

Let it rest on the 7th day and then there will be light.

I was not actually presenting a scenario where my grandmother would use a VPN.

I was pointing out that this community is full of people who are perfectly capable of learning to use a VPN. In response to this comment:

Unfortunately, not everyone is tech-literate enough nowadays to understand how a VPN works, nor do they want to

That’s a true statement about ‘everyone’ i.e. the entire population of the planet… but true about everyone here in this community.

What do you mean by stuttering? It’s not keeping the buffer filled for the player? It contains extraneous consonants?

Is this happening in the web interface? Android App? Jellyfin Media Player? Roku? Xbox? PS4? a Tesla dashboard?

Is Jellyfin running in a container? Linux? Windows? TempleOS?

But, to be serious, What have you tried so far? The answer is almost always some form of ‘look at the logs’ and ‘use Google on any errors that occur’ or if you’re not rabidly anti-AI and have access to an agentic AI with web access you can go that route.

Nah, if it works for you then use it. There are no rules here!

Look at Tailscale (or self-host headscale)

It’s a bit of learning (like all of these other things) but it’s a very powerful tool.

I do agree with the general point that Jellyfin shouldn’t require a VPN.

But yeah, if I was alone and only had a pile of anime I’d already seen before, which I only watched from my Linux devices, Samba and VLC would do me fine 😛

Use NFS for your sanity. Linux samba/CIFS is annoying to deal with.

Also, mpv

Yes, not everyone. My grandmother would struggle setting up a VPN, for example.

However, a community member of the selfhosted community is perfectly capable of reading a manual and learning the software.

That’s how you become tech literate in the first place, and you’re already on that path if you’re commenting/reading here.

You only have to give them access to a specific port on a specific machine, not your entire LAN.

My VPN has a ‘media’ usergroup who can only access the, read-only, NFS exports of my media library.

If you’re just installing Wireguard and enabling IP forwarding, yeah it would not be secure. But using a mesh VPN, like Tailscale/Headscale, gives you A LOT more tools to control access.

Audiobookshelf is probably what you’re after.

It supports both e-books and audiobooks. It has a web interface and a native Android app. It saves your reading/audiobook progress in your account so you will always be in the same spot no matter which way you access it. It also allows you to make multiple accounts if you have multiple users.

Docker/Podman containers available and it’s possible to run the server on Windows, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s the docs: https://www.audiobookshelf.org/docs

Web UI:

Browsing a Library:

Browsing e-book info:

Reader and chapter selection:

And, I’m going to guess that you like statistics:

e: Put the images in spoilers to save the reader’s scrolling strength e2: oops header tag is double #, not single x.x

Another option is that instead of trying the bare metal install, get docker working: https://gist.github.com/manoedinata/d93549d85acbee94f37683fa6cbd626e

Then you can just use the pihole container.

I’m mostly looking for something that works out of the box without needing too much setup.

Sir, this is a c/selfhosted.

Building systems to solve problems is the hobby. You understand the motivation, you have a problem and there are not any easy solutions. At this level it’s a lot like working with Legos, there’s a bunch of software that you can snap together to get result that you’re looking for, though you will sometimes need some scripts to glue it all together.

But if you know any simple way to plug LLM into Beeper without getting too technical, would love to hear about it.

n8n is useful for creating arbitrary AI workflows. Designing a workflow is mostly graphical though a bit of simple scripting could be useful, depending on your requirements. It looks like it has a Matrix node already: https://docs.n8n.io/integrations/builtin/app-nodes/n8n-nodes-base.matrix/

Typically a coding LLM can cover your bases on this kind of simple scripting, even if you don’t personally know how to code (though, as with all LLM code output, test it on dummy data before you plug it into production).

I stopped the tailscale service…

… while ssh’d through the tailscale interface.

Luckily, it was my home server and I had to drive there anyway.

git commit --message 'So that when setting up a new system, you can migrate all your user configuration easily, while also version-controlling it.'

or learn emacs

I made a git repo and started putting all of my dot files in a Stow and then I forgot why I was doing it in the first place.

The comments in this thread have collectively created thousands of person-hours worth of work for us all…

Oh. You don’t. Well, that’s probably okay. I mean, nothing will probably go wrong and render a device in need of being forcibly rebooted when you’re physically away from home.

*furiously adds a new item to the TODO list*

This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’

You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.

Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.

If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.

The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.

People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.