Daily - 2025-11-30

Previously…

Yesterday recap

Even though I have one more week of work until I go on winter hibernation, I am in full winter mode. My days consist of random projects, chores, and distractions.

The only thing I didn’t get done yesterday was going through the pantry. Wife moved her grocery shopping day to Friday, so I have until then to get her a list of the replacement food we need.

I worked on my EDC kit. Added data and imported that into various apps. Got books into Calibre, movies/TV into Kodi, homelab data into a couple containers, and scrcpy configured. Next was figuring out networking. I want to be able to setup a small LAN while on the road and it ended up being an easier project than I thought. I forgot I had bought a MiFi device at The Goodwill like a month ago, which was a slam dunk for this project. I wrote up some notes for the blog, too.

Late afternoon we started watching Survivor Series. Meh. WWE has been less interesting since the Cody Rhodes v. Roman story ended the previous Wrestlemania. It is not the wrestling, but the writing.

Dinner and then I started a new project. Literally the only reason I stick with Android TV is for SmartTube. It is an Android TV YouTube client that blocks ads and has DeArrow and SponsorBlock integrated. I refuse to watch YouTube any other way. Well, there is some weird stuff happening with the project and the app currently doesn’t work due to a signing key being lost.

However, the way the dev is talking about it, the lack of transparency, and the way it is being handled makes me think there’s something else going on and I’m staying away from it. We exclusively watch my Jellyfin server and YouTube. I am not subscribed to any streaming services and we don’t watch the free-to-play channels like Tubi. This all got me thinking about a HTPC again. I had switched away from a dedicated home theater PC because of the energy usage and a lack of good lean back YouTube experience. I did some searching around and found VacuumTube which fits perfectly. So I got busy building a new HTPC to test and it is what we are using today. It is just Ubuntu desktop with Kodi set to launch on boot and a shortcut to VacuumTube. Kodi connects to Jellyfin so I can keep watch status, so Kodi is essentially just a leanback frontend for Jellyfin.

This HTPC will send me down a rabbit hole for other stuff I can do with it. We don’t get any OTA channels with an antenna, so I can’t setup a live TV DVR. I know I’ll add some retro gaming. Maybe move some “media containers” so things are downloaded there and then move keepers to the nas? I don’t know yet.

After the gorls went to bed we kicked off the holiday season with our annual watch of Die Hard.

How are you feeling today?

Essentially the same as yesterday.

Gratitude

My wife, son, and I watched Die Hard together. I love that, even at 19, my son likes to come down and watch movies with us. Doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but he still does.

Todo

Chores

• Carry over: Go through our pantry and pull out expired or soon to be expired food.
• Replace an outlet in my sons room. Occasionally the breaker gets tripped and I think I’ve narrowed it down to this one outlet. I’m going to try replacing it to fix the problem. The part is like $2 and I know how to do it.
• Hopefully last truck loadout of the year.
• Normal Sunday chores.

Fun

• Watch NFL football with the boy.

Projects

• I want to read more about the new Webtop containers from LinuxServer.io. It is a lot more configurable with higher performance compared to what it was a couple years ago. I’d love to have a dedicated machine in my homelab that is for GUI VMs and containerized virtual desktops. Seems like the golden age for it with Webtop, Winboat, Sunshine/Moonlight, and traditional virtual machines.

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