The return of personal media

23 Jul, 2026

In December last year, just before a large hike in the price of electronics, I made the lucky purchase of a minipc with 5TB (1+4) of storage.

I set it up, but other than Forgejo and FreshRSS, I didn't do much with it. Last week, I finally renewed my effort to self-host things again. I updated the existing software, and installed a bunch more:

• Kavita: Book and comic library and reader
• Jellyfin: Movies and TV series
• CopyParty: Remote file management
• Immich: An alternative to Google Photos
• Karakeep: Save web pages
• qBittorrent: Downloading torrents

I've taken to populating Kavita and Jellyfin with content to read or watch as well. For about two or three months, I have been watching a few movies a week, but they were just plain files on my computer. Now, it's all in a nice interface, and I can give access to my friends!

I also recovered my account on a book-related private tracker. It turns out I hadn't opened it in almost two years, and my account was locked. I made it over seven years ago! How young I was back then.

Maybe self-hosting new software, the management thereof, and adding content, is more healthy for me than writing software. At the very least, it is more in line with the energy levels I have right now. I like curating.

It's just a shame that it requires so much storage.

On another note, there's a tool I made a while ago to save a web page as a WARC file¹, using Chrome to render the page and pass anti-bot measures. I wanted to use it to archive self-publishing websites like RoyalRoad and ScribbleHub. Over the years, a lot of stories have disappeared there—even stories with hundreds of thousands of words. It's a shame. My energy for the project fizzled out back then, but I may put one or two things together, like "archive all pages of this story." Any progress is progress.

What's even more of a shame is all of the AI slop these websites are infected by. Before, there was some good writing, some mid, some bad. Now, there's some good writing, and a whole lot of AI slop. A shame.

Thanks for reading!