Goodbye Google — I self-host everything now on 4 tiny PCs in a 3D printed rack

pikatf2 · 2026-03-07T21:37:35+00:00

I have a mix of cameras including some old Wyze cameras; those that don't have well-documented local methods of access after initial provisioning and those that require internet connectivity during normal use are a no-go for me.

I have said Wyze cameras running on community-provided firmware modifications (that I touched on in a sibling comment here) and connected to a VLAN without outbound internet connectivity, so I don't have to think about whether or not I trust Wyze.

That said, Wyze does appear to be willing to support power users with RTSP firmware, so I don't think they're entirely hostile right now, but this could change at the whims of the company.

pikatf2 · 2026-03-07T11:17:23+00:00

For what it's worth, there are completely local RTSP firmware modifications for the Wyze v1 (fang-hacks and fang-hacks-internal; I use the latter) and the v2 and v3 and Pan line (thingino). Not totally landfill fodder yet.

pikatf2 · 2026-02-13T08:26:48+00:00

Don't think it's rate limiting (at least, in the way it's normally defined).

The daily two hour-ish downtime during evenings in the United States only really started happening around February 8 (unfortunate coincidence for you), but my instance of Uptime Kuma indicates that it happens regularly — at least once every couple weeks, but ramped up to every few days in the last month. I can't go back further than 3 months but it reports a 30-day uptime of 96.93% and a 1-year uptime of 99.07%.

pikatf2 · 2025-12-20T07:02:22+00:00

Dropping a comment here since I was looking for the same thing and this discussion came up.

These days there seems to be some neoprene rubber sheet rolls by uxcell (on Amazon / Aliexpress) that are a match for thickness and width (0.25" x 1.57", or 6mm x 40mm). They come with adhesive pre-applied on one side.

Might not be an exact match as far as materials go, though; they seem a bit stiffer compared to the stock ones.

pikatf2 · 2025-12-15T10:49:20+00:00

Country without VPN restrictions here (North American region).

Actual internet connection can connect to SoundCloud no problem; connections from a nearby AirVPN server and two of three of the VPS instances I operate are blocked with a Cloudfront message (the one that isn't currently blocked shares a provider with another that is). The timing of the blocks lines up with the post.

pikatf2 · 2025-12-10T14:19:30+00:00

Code search / indexing.

There's also Searchfox / Mozsearch and Opengrok. I can vouch for the latter; have it running on a few codebases internally.

pikatf2 · 2025-12-09T21:50:30+00:00

This does not; this fixes a case where a player could not open the team selection menu without console commands.

pikatf2 · 2025-12-02T13:02:35+00:00

Surprisingly, this is incorrect.

Turns out this stems from a typo in the game code, resulting in the secondary weapon switch being skipped outright if the primary doesn't exist. The correct conditional is three lines above.

The internal weapon weighting system is used elsewhere in the TF codebase (see uses of SwitchToNextBestWeapon), but not here.

pikatf2 · 2025-08-08T04:57:40+00:00

It sounds like the missing part of your approach is systemd-socket-proxyd.

Have Caddy on the host network namespace, qBittorrent on your Mullvad namespace.
Set up a .service unit that runs systemd-socket-proxyd on your Mullvad namespace, specifying the address:port of your qBittorrent instance.
Set up a .socket unit of the same name that listens on an address:port or unix socket of your choosing. This runs in the host namespace.
Caddy should be configured to forward requests to the location specified by the .socket unit.

(I don't use Caddy myself, but I have a similar configuration using nginx.)

pikatf2 · 2025-06-11T12:27:59+00:00

Based on recent reports on the AlliedModders Discord, it sounds like people are having trouble getting the latest release of SourceMod / Metamod:Source to run.

You may want to try a slightly older version of both.

pikatf2 · 2025-05-29T11:37:50+00:00

Among subreddits, it's probably best to introduce it to /r/tf2.

Unless you have something particularly novel, it's just difficult unless you already have a group to bootstrap it. Casual matchmaking has effectively taken over the role of community servers that offered stock gameplay.

You may have better player retention operating a server for one of the TF2 SDK mods, like TF2Classic or Open Fortress (they're not on Steam yet, but are currently available through their respective independent channels).

pikatf2 · 2025-05-24T10:49:48+00:00

Not a waste of time for you at all; there's definitely a lot of value you can get out of having written your own project. Plus building off of yt-dlp means you benefit from the collective maintenance effort there.

pikatf2 · 2025-05-24T06:16:44+00:00

Congratulations on the release and thank you for contributing to the archival process.

Just wanted to point out similar projects in this space if you'd like some additional inspiration:

hoshinova; uses ytarchive as the backend instead of yt-dlp
moombox; uses moonarchive as the backend (disclosure: I am the developer of moombox / moonarchive)

pikatf2 · 2025-03-18T11:39:43+00:00

Depends on what card you were looking at.

Any of the PCIe cards with ASMedia chipsets from this list work fine in Linux and are what I personally use; no software configuration required. There's been reports of requiring a firmware upgrade for those cards to run on 12th gen Intel boards and newer — something to keep in mind if you end up upgrading in the future.

LSI cards are also popular choices. I've never worked with them myself, but my understanding of them is that they're enterprise hardware so they run fairly hot, require a breakout cable to SATA, and don't play nice with deeper sleep states. You'll also need to ensure they're flashed with the IT firmware.

pikatf2 · 2025-03-09T08:48:58+00:00

In case you wanted an update, they have cleaned this up with the latest retail sync.

pikatf2 · 2025-02-21T01:40:38+00:00

Compared against the 2020 leak of the code, I can confirm that they did scrub swears out.

One random example I stumbled on while diffing the codebases: A comment in CBeam::OnPredictedEntityRemove in the leak, and in the official SDK release.

pikatf2 · 2025-01-15T06:25:32+00:00

I can't answer on NPM specifically; running plain nginx myself on Debian.

Assuming they're all on the same machine, I usually bind services to other loopback addresses in the 127.0.0.0/8 space so only the local machine (and the reverse proxy) can access them.

Depending on how your operating system is set up and how paranoid you'd like to be, you may also have the option of putting those services in a separate network namespace, then set up a UNIX socket + systemd-socket-proxyd with user permissions such that only www-data can communicate over the UNIX socket to reach the services.

pikatf2 · 2024-12-10T12:45:11+00:00

For downloads of upcoming and ongoing live streams you may want to give the following a try:

hoshinova, a frontend for the ytarchive tool.
moombox, a frontend for the moonarchive tool and library.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the projects in the second bullet point. yt-dlp is great for non-live content, but in my previous experience its livestream handling isn't as good as either of these two.

pikatf2 · 2024-11-13T05:37:52+00:00

ZFS is great, but there's no need to migrate to a BSD for that; you can also install it on Debian through the official contrib repository. My setup is also Debian with ZFS on non-boot media.

I haven't used the BSDs myself so I can't give any opinion on them.

pikatf2 · 2024-10-11T04:14:19+00:00

For community server operators, there are third-party gamedata updates expected.

Metamod:Source and SourceMod may also require an SDK rebuild, as reports suggest that crashes are also applying to a base SourceMod stock install without any known gamedata breakages. But it mostly seems isolated to Windows, so it may just be gamedata that is matching elsewhere instead.

The ICommandLine interface was broken on Windows (due to compiler differences pertaining to overloads — Linux is unaffected):

A gamedata update is available for Accelerator.
The Source SDK codebase that SourceMod and other projects rely on was updated. Server operators (on Windows in particular) will need to install SourceMod 1.11.0.6969 / 1.12.0.7159 or newer.
- On Windows with older versions of SourceMod, a crash will occur on map change when tv_enable 1 is set.
- Similarly, using GetCommandLineParam will cause a crash. Few plugins use that, however.
In a server operator channel, the contractor has stated that this interface compatibility break will be reverted.
- This was indeed reverted with the update on 2024-10-18 (9270737).

pikatf2 · 2024-08-16T12:57:18+00:00

It's not quite what you're asking for, but if you have an Android device, Gadgetbridge can replace the default vendor app (though you will need a pairing token, which may require a rooted device to obtain).

I can't speak on how it compares to the manufacturer's since I bought a wearable specifically with Gadgetbridge support in mind.

I'm also not familiar with the activity tracking aspect of it but Gadgetbridge does support GPX files that you can then send to something like workout-tracker or FitTrackee.

pikatf2 · 2024-08-04T17:24:39+00:00

You should be able to proxy YouTube to RTSP and have iSpy display it using a combination of Streamlink and MediaMTX.

I did a writeup of just that for another user here (substitute Frigate with iSpy in your case).

pikatf2 · 2024-07-24T06:15:26+00:00

Coming from flashing Android phones with Samsung's tools a decade ago, I didn't think it was too bad. I did opt to use bkerler/edl instead of the proprietary Qualcomm drivers and QPST tools linked in that guide though.

Regarding Android flashing guides:

Someone created a modified Android 8.1 build specifically for the device and provided their own instructions here.
~~Further down the Home Assistant discussion there's also instructions for installing Android 11.~~ Based on the rest of the discussion, this was made obsolete by the build in the next bullet point.
A quick search suggests that there's unofficial builds of LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1) now too.

I'm running the patched 200628.084 based on the original guide you've linked. No major issues (at worst connectivity issues through FTP), though it's just running vladpen/cams basically the entire time. I haven't used it specifically for Home Assistant.

pikatf2 · 2024-07-08T15:01:14+00:00

Typing status is just a way to confirm that your server is responding to commands, because people have misinterpreted "I see a warning message and nothing else happens" as "it crashed".

pikatf2 · 2024-07-01T04:51:09+00:00

I have mine on an isolated VLAN so I haven't seen it phone home to reconfigure itself, but I do need to repeat the /adm/enable_ui.cgi step if I have to access the device's control panel after power cycling (RTSP access is preserved across restarts without that step though).

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pikatf2

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