Life Wiki Selfhosted on Your NAS

Introduction I used Notion for a couple of years and found it to be one of the best tools for note-taking and building a personal wiki. Why did I stop using it? It wasn’t about the cost—Notion’s freemium plan is perfectly sufficient for personal use. Instead, there were two main issues that drove me away. First, typing math equations in Notion is cumbersome because you have to use a dedicated “Block” for them. Second, it’s difficult to export or migrate your data to other platforms, which, while not entirely Notion’s fault, still concerns me. Most importantly, I realized I should make better use of my Synology NAS. That’s why I decided to explore open-source, self-hosted alternatives. ...

January 10, 2025 · 7 min · 1338 words · Me

Build a home media server but automated

Intro In Route transmission to VPN container, I talked about how to download contents via VPN tunnel so we can get rid of some troubles. But that is far from enough for us to build a home media server which should work as Netflix and Hulu to us. We shouldn’t bother with the torrent and subtitle search. Once we add a show to our watch list, everything should be set up automatically. I will introduce the tools and necessary setup for me to build a home media server in the following sections. ...

September 16, 2023 · 3 min · 623 words · Me

How to route transmission to VPN container?

Intro When you have a NAS at home, it feel bad if you don’t keep it running for something even if you don’t use it. It is the major backup to store the photos we shoot with our iphones. However, it is just basic use and hosting a media center with it sounds more cool. I used to use transmission-openvpn and it works perfectly, however, my VPN expires and I decided to use proton free tier. This is where things go south - I spent two days on it and I cannot get it work. When I am about to give up, I found a better approach for my purpose - running transmission and vpn in separate docker container and route transmission to vpn conatiner. It sounds a great idea in the first place given we should only do one job for each service - unix’s princinple. ...

September 16, 2023 · 4 min · 750 words · Me