Web developer, gamer, reader, and a true ligma male

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • So my first thought is: Download the entire file BEFORE watching it. This ensures that you won’t have to buffer while watching and it’ll run 100% smoothly.

    Downloading files isn’t very difficult generally; just go to some (torrenting) website, copy the magnet or download the torrent and import it into your torrent client.

    When you have your .mp4, .mkv, .whatever file, you can simply click on it and play it on your preferred media player (such as VLC). However, you may want to watch it on some other device… Easy solution (for TVs) is just connect your laptop to your TV with an HDMI cable, duplicate your screen and start watching.

    But if you actually want to stream, you’ll have to tread into the self-hosting zone. Meaning that you run a media server that hosts all your content and your devices (whether it’s a TV, android phone, iPhone, whatever) can access and play the content from your server.

    This is a very, very big topic that I won’t cover in a single comment. I will point you in the right direction and mention Jellyfin; Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server that you can set up to manage and stream your files with




  • I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.

    Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.


  • Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.

    Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.

    Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).

    It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.

    I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.




  • Docker is a container manager, but that doesn’t say anything if you don’t know what containers are.

    Containers are basically isolated apps. For example, take something like Nextcloud. Nextcloud can run in a Docker container, which means that it runs in an isolated environment completely separated from the user’s system. If Nextcloud breaks, the user’s server won’t be affected at all, because it’s running isolated.

    Why is this useful? Well, it’s useful because dependencies and such automatically update. Nextcloud for example, is dependent on PHP and if you install Nextcloud directly on your server, you’ll need to ensure that PHP 8 has been installed and set up properly. If PHP (or the required PHP extensions) aren’t properly installed, Nextcloud won’t work. Or, maybe if there’s a Nextcloud update that requires a new version of PHP (PHP 9 or 10 in the future), you’ll have to manually update PHP to the newer version.

    All that dependency management is completely gone with containers. The container itself automatically installs and sets up a proper environment for the app that’s running. So in the case of Nextcloud, the PHP binaries, extensions, and all the other stuff is all automatically included without the developer having to do anything at all. Just run one command and your entire Nextcloud instance is automatically updated.