Continuing on the homelab series. I have to say, it is amazing what one can do with a simple setup. I knew I was going to automatize certain aspects of my life with it, be this is beyond what I was hoping for. Let's start by going back to my document manager that I wrote about last year. I kept on working on the UI for this document manager until September. Effectively making a FastAPI - htmx webapp that displayed a simplistic window to view the uploaded documents and the status, with the ability to create a tag, show the machine learning classification result. I was pretty happy with the result. And a few weeks after y first working prototype, what did I discover while browsing my google news feed? An article about paperless-ngx. Paperless-ngx, as you might have guessed from the name, is a self-hosted webapp that is basically what I was trying to create. Upload a image, pdf, document. Get it classified and tagged into a database. Except this project has 35k stars on github, 400 contributors, and seemingly years of advance compared to my own little solo project. At the time, it pissed me greatly that I didn't discovered it earlier. I also didn't have the homelab setup ready for it too, so I didn't try it, but it made me stop working on my own implementation. After all, I had learn all I wanted from my project:

  • Learning more about docker
  • Creating simple FastAPI - htmx apps
  • Using a pre-trained model to create a tailored model on my own documents for classification

As the saying goes, it takes 20% of the time to reach 80% of the project, and 80% of the time to end the project. What was left was effectively tedious work to make it look nice and fix small bugs. Some that I would eventually find when it is too late even. So I decided to stop there and when the homelab was ready, early January, I gave paperless-ngx a go, and yes, it is everything I was dreaming for my own little project. So now, I try to spend 10 min every day scanning documents to add to my paperless database and it feels great.

The second service I started running was Immich. Immich is an alternative to google photos. It does most of what google photo does, without too much crap that I don't use anyway. I especially want to use it as a way to sync my phone's photo to my NAS. I have indeed realized I was overwhelmingly dependent on the US architecture to save my data, especially ma pictures. Between Dropbox, Google drive, Microsoft onedrive, etc... my data is scattered all over the US data servers. And it would be fine, if it was not for the election of a certain orange (p)r(e)si(d)ent(o), and his nutjob administration (JFK Jr.'s scientific denial, ICE gestapo, etc... ) that has shown the world how unreliable the US can be at time. As it turned out, I had to update my credit card info and it showed me how much I was paying to US companies to use the cloud services, for streaming, etc... And seeing how these big companies were wiling to bend the knee to Trump last year, and seeing the murders of Good and Pretty, the detention of children in camps that looked a little too familiar to the European eyes, the threats of Greenland invasion for shits and giggles, I'm sorry, to "secure the US interests against a potential war in the Arctic"... It utterly disgusted me that I was giving money that was eventually contributing to all of this. So until the US is able to handle this the only way it can (impeach this moron and come back to your senses), I have decided to withdraw as much possible from the US data architecture, and try to embrace local European services, even if they are slightly less polished. What does this mean in practice? Withdrawal of most of my data from cloud services hosted on US data centers. Slow migration out of gmail to protonmail. Use of european located cloud. Self hosting alternatives everything I can. It really pisses me out, but maybe even ditch Apple for an European brand alternative, as my experience with my homelab pc with debian and KDE has been stellar so far.

Ah, I digress. Immich. Right. I started to use it as a backup alternative to the "native" Microsoft onedrive in my Samsung phone. And it works as well. Syncs my phones photos to the NAS immediately. Simple access through tailscale. No problem so far.

Jellyfin is running smoothly since early December for movies and TV shows.

Navidrome running also smoothly since a few weeks for music.

I have to say that I am becoming more and more hostile to streaming services like Disney plus and Netflix and Spotify and the like. Beyond their support to the Trump regime (again), the whole model makes less and less sense to me. I enjoy movies and series and music. Like everyone else. But I noticed that I don't really enjoy a genre per se. I enjoy what a certain director, a certain compositor is doing. I don't enjoy Hip-hop or RnB as a whole, but I enjoy what Childish Gambino is doing, that is what I am saying. Same for movies, I enjoy movies from Denis Villeneuve, David Lynch, Tarantino, the Cohen Brothers, etc.. I know, pretty mainstream. And here is the issue. Paying a subscription to Netflix or Spotify gets me access to a range of movies, songs. Here is my biff: I have the distinct impression that the money I pay to these services doesn't go to the people I follow and like. I feel like a large part is diverted to places where it doesn't contribute to what I want to contribute. Look at the finale of stranger thing. Pure garbage that cost how much? 500 Million of dollars? For a story that makes little sense, VFX that are meh, actors that, for the most part, look bored to be there? Nothing against them really, they were just acting how they were told to act, I assume. The point is, 500M was not spent there. No way. I do believe that 500M disappeared in that project, but it is not possible that the result is worth 500M. No way. Something is wrong. Not to mention the great shows that Netflix destroyed because of greed (Arrested development season 4 and 5, milked till death), and the shows that Netflix decided were no longer interesting somehow (The OA?? it was great!), or shows that they canceled because... I don't know? (1899??????? Come on...) Then you have Spotify. Now allowing AI music in. Spotify's CEO financing a military tech company. I also find that reprehensible to listen to a service that allow the gestapo/ICE to place ads. I can't help to think that a portion of my money is being sent there, to allow for future drone strikes, to support ICE. I also invest, and I make sure not to invest in companies that do weapons, or extract oil and liquid energy. So I will move from Spotify to Bandcamp (already used it for a while) to pay directly the artists I like, and download their music and serve it from Navidrome to me. Seems perfectly fair to me and everyone involved. Same for movies. I will just buy the DVD, digitalize it and serve it to myself. No harm done, I still pay for what I enjoy and I know my money will go to people that I support. Only thing is I wish there was some way to be able to pay for the movies and music and being allowed to download the stuff so I can self host to myself. Right now, the only way is DVD ripping or torrenting or other ways.

Again, I digress.

Duplicati for creating backups of several databases. Also rather smoothly integrated with filen. I did have some issue with the 2FA setup, and it seems that it doesn't perfectly work, even now, so I buffed the password and disabled 2FA, and for now, it is working. When they get the 2FA working again, I will use that as well.

Grafana to monitor everything with Prometheus and Loki. Great way to overview the whole system

My own Django app for this very website: No issues so far.

I did try Affine, as a replacement to Notion. It did work well. I exported my whole Notion and imported it to Affine and started to work a little with it. Eventually, I went back to notion. Not sure why. Affine felt slightly off, although it is very nice. I have been a Notion aficionado a quite some time and still want to support them a little. But in the event where I learn something bad about them, I will not hesitate to take the plunge and go for Affine.

Lastly, I also tried Ghostly, as a finance and investing app. I looked to change the currency to CHF. Saw it was only possible to use USD and USX. Cursed a few minutes and turned it down. Too bad, it seemed like an interesting service to host.

The future eventually would be cloud self hosting. Maybe Nextcloud, maybe Owncloud... I still don't know. For now, I don't really need it.

Another thing will be moving out of Docker to Podman. But this will be done slowly, step by step.

At least, the paperless-ngx is allowing me to finish a project of mine, which allowed me to learn new skills, and this is all that matters.