Thejesh GN Blog

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Music is back at home with Navidrome and DSub/Ultrasonic

I listen to a minimal set of music. I don’t try to find new music, but I usually have my ears open. If I listen to something new and I like it, then I add it to my list. For a long time I have bought my music; in the form of cassettes, CDs, MP3s. When music moved to mainly streaming world, I almost got disconnected. That’s because I listen to a small set, again and again. I have ripped audio cassettes, CDs and have brought them to digital form. So everything was in digital form on my music players, computers, and mobile. But it lacked the features that streaming or music on the network would bring, like keeping track of album art, maintaining different versions and formats, maintaining sharable favorite lists, etc. Now that I have a fairly decent home lab, I thought its time.

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Drawings as Code – DOT and Graphviz

I like drawings to explain stuff. It’s probably the most straightforward way to document things. But the pain of traditional drawings is the inability to track changes to them. It’s easy to track changes to text or code by tracking them in a git. It’s not easy when it’s a binary blob which is what most images are. SVG format helps a lot. I use it as much as possible, but it’s still very verbose, and I think not easy to see the diff and understand what happened over time.

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Self-hosted, Always Connect IRC client on Synology

One big problem is that the IRC communities that I follow are primarily async, are in different timezones, And if you are not online, you will miss the chats. So to solve your desktop machine needs to be online Or you need to use a hosted chat client service that is always connected.

I use a service called The Lounge. It’s a web application that you install on any server (usually a cloud server). It does the same thing, but it is under your control. It’s FOSS software. In my case, I have installed it on my local NAS – Synology.