I had a World of Warcraft-server running for a while, that was quite fun.

You have to maxxxx those x’es!

Among other reasons, a well-established, decentralized mesh network builds community resilience that can be very useful in emergencies where centralized infrastructure is compromised.

Most likely something on that channel is spamming multicast. That kills most consumer wifi routers (in default settings). Usually something like a sonos or Google home broadcast group.

I might (i.e. I definitely do) have a non-ideal setup at home that contributes to this, with the router/WPA, a RPi running HA with a Zigbee antenna just next to it, my server in the shelf next over and a Sonos above it. Worst of all, the server is running on WiFi and it is sat in immediate vicinity to my router. Why? Because I could not for the life of me make the ethernet transfer speeds be more than somewhere around 1-5 MiB/s, so I gave up. But considering these issues are so infrequent from this location I assume it is mostly due to outside interference.

And adding to that, …

Use an app like PingTools (Android) that can graph what is on each wifi channel. Check to find the cleanest channels in your area and configure your router to use that channel.

… this scan shows that all discovered networks are occupying the same channels (98-114 it looks like). I have still not figured out what OpenWRT option to go for (the OpenWRT One, which I had originally planned, quickly became very expensive with imports and tolls that I ended up not buying, despite having decided to go for it). So I am using the stock ISP router, which I assume everyone else in my building are as well. And I have been unable to locate an option to change channels in its interface.

If you’re curious and technically-minded, I highly recommend this write up: https://www.wiisfi.com/

That is a resource I didn’t know I needed! Thanks :)

Ah, that would make sense. I think my immediate neighbors are home, but about half of my building should be traveling for Easter (judging by the empty parking garage at least).

I use this:

rsync -rah --progress /path/on/source/ user@ip.of.local.server:/path/on/destination

I will try the ping next time I attempt this. There doesn’t seem to be a definite time when the issues start though. It tries to copy the file over, and when it is done it continues to the next. If the first one didn’t succeed, it will retry and if that also fails, it will say “ERROR verification failed - discarding update” (paraphrased) and continue to retry the next file if that also failed.

I do see some fluctuations in the transfer speeds during transfer, which could indicate the times the connection is struggling.

Makes sense that it would be able to, especially considering the flag that allows you to force an older version as the sender. Still find it strange that on equal version numbers they default to different protocol numbers. I would have at least thought there was an easy way to tell it which protocol version to use by default, but I have at least not been able to find out how.

I just joined an old-school phpBB forum dedicated to a specific topic, and it is glorious.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I wanted to share my library with someone else, I would likely stick with my system for quite some time still. But I need it to be browseable for them.

Hm, I never considered Audiobookshelf for e-books - I already have it running for audiobooks. I should check that out!

Good to know - I will keep my eyes peeled!

Grimmory looks sweet, but with the recent drama and the apparent opt-out (but not really) telemetry, the massive amount of AI-generated code etc. I will want to let the age a little before I install that on my server.

ETA: Well, I toured the Calibre-Web settings again, and now I can upload books and covers. Must have been a little tired on my first attempt. Still couldn’t get the conversion to work properly - I only have the option of going from EPUB -> KEPUB (whatever that is). I typically prefer reading PDF on my current reader, and I have users who need .azw3 for their jailbroken Kindle device. I guess the paths to the conversion tools aren’t properly configured.

ETA2: Now I got the conversion to work as well. Seems like I will be able to use it with Calibre-Web only as well. Nice!

Hm, I’m using lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web:latest, which is version 0.6.26 (5a1f3d8eec42d03228b1e5dec9bc750ca10bbc94 - 2026-02-06T20:40:07+01:00). Looked again to see if I could find a way to do it, but no.

How do you upload books directly using Calibre-Web? And do you not have Calibre running behind at all, just the original database?

An other shortcoming of Calibre-Web seems to be that I am unable to convert books from the UI (that is thankfully very easy to do in Calibre). I added some Docker mods that I thought would allow me to do this, but I have at least not found a way.

Nice to know it works with Kobo - I don’t have one, but if my current reader stops working I am likely to get one of those.

It is important. But I find the ones I have tried good, and would survive if I had to use either of them. I use KDE Plasma on my main personal laptop, I have Cinnamon running on a living room computer connected to my TV (not an ideal solution, but I’ve so far not taken the time to optimize the setup) and GNOME om my work laptop. I much prefer KDE Plasma out of them, but I like the others also.

I am not sure the shareholders will accept such a meager compensation. Did you include emotional damage in your estimate?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Anna’s archive is not giving you song downloads, but rather metadata

Were they not going to release the songs as well? They just started with the metadata?

ETA: Yes, this is from their blog post about it:

The data will be released in different stages on our Torrents page:

[X] Metadata (Dec 2025)
[ ] Music files (releasing in order of popularity)
[ ] Additional file metadata (torrent paths and checksums)
[ ] Album art
[ ] .zstdpatch files (to reconstruct original files before we added embedded metadata)

Can we also take a moment to acknowledge how utterly unhinged this part is?

“This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”

Their web installer makes degoogling accessible to everyone.

With the right hardware

I do plain text accounting with ledger-cli. Nice and future-proof, and I can easily build stuff on top of it. Other examples are plain text accounting software is hledger and beancounter, the latter which is known to have a pretty good Python-ecosystem surrounding it.

We would need open source cars which will never happen.

:'(