I hope to be on that path. I’m in my 40s and tired of the grind. Nowhere close to retirement yet, but I am likely on track to pay off my house early in the next two years (maybe 7 years into a 30 year mortgage) which will go a long way.

I’m saving as much as I can and hoping I can retire lean in my mid or late 50s.

Right now though all I can think of is that I need a sabbatical after my current job ends (either layoffs or just quitting) because I really need a break.

Maybe consider some of us just want to play with friends and/or spouses or partners.

Reintroduce LAN play and locally hosted multiplayer servers. IDGAF about playing with randos, I just want to play with my wife, and I’d prefer it to not be something that can shut down because the company went broke or didn’t care anymore.

Just finished the Live-A-Live remake last night. Highly recommend. It’s absolutely bonkers.

The inspiration for Octopath Traveler is obvious, but it’s got none of the fluff, and there’s essentially zero grinding at all until the final chapter.

I finished it in around 28 hours at a leisurely pace.

———

Rest of the week will likely be playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my wife and maybe picking up Megacopter: Blades of the Goddess to play solo.

Been on a mission this year to play through the backlog and there’s a lot of games on the list.

I do this with my Wiims already, no account needed. They support speaker linking and whole home playback, or just linking individual devices.

I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.

The Xeon server would be a good bet. Your other machine would be potentially bottleneck for memory (though it meets min spec if the server isn’t doing anything else). There’s a NOAVX docker deployment available, would be slower but should work fine. Just be sure to disable anything associated with lyric detection, it’s an absolute performance nightmare.

I ran it on a Ryzen 5500u mini-PC with 32 GB RAM with the standard deployment with AVX2 support and scaled up to three worker threads. For a collection of 53k tracks it was processing about 100 per hour that way with lyrics/whisper translation enabled, but once I turned that off it was doing 1300-1400 tracks per hour.

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Edit - the 6600T would work too. I found with lyrics disabled, each worker only used between 500MB and 2 GB of RAM. Long as the server isn’t under load while scanning I think that would work, and would be faster for having AVX2 support.

Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.

I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).

I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.

TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.

Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.

Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080).

4k content is a bit sharper, but I can barely notice the difference, in games or video content at TV viewing distance.

I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.

I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.

If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.

Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.

Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.

Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).

Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.

And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).

ಠ__ಠ

Don’t forget about ollama.

Paying for plex pass gets you hardware transcoding (GPU), and access to Plexamp if you use it for music. Also the ability to use it remotely outside your network I think (dunno, I don’t use that feature) It’s good stuff, but nowhere near worth what they’re charging. I paid $80 for my lifetime Plex pass some years back.

Honestly, even without the $750 pricing, they’ve been consistently raising it for years now, presumably to encourage monthly subscriptions. I don’t trust them, and it’s falling into the category of “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” The other day I even read something about a user losing access to their Plex because Plex themselves didn’t renew their certificate and they had to reach out to support to sort it out. That’s… just completely fucked up. I hate that it requires an online account to access your local content. They did that years ago, and it’s led to me wanting to use it less and less.

I have a Jellyfin server as backup, and have already moved away from Plexamp to use Lyrion and Navidrome instead for music.

The only reason I still use Plex at all is because I watch a lot of foreign content and Swiftfin hasn’t yet updated to use Apple TV’s accessibility settings for captions (Plex lets you override subtitles with the Apple TV caption settings for readability and consistency). Though I saw the Jellyfin team merged the change the other day, so I expect a fix for that to come with the next major update. If that works out, I’ll be deleting Plex from my Proxmox server finally.

That’s great if you have a Roku or Shield. I don’t. I’ve owned both in the past and don’t want either because they’re both an absolute mess of advertising. I currently have an Apple TV and an Android tablet. Jellyfin is okay on Android (and I emphasize okay and not amazing or great), but the Apple TV is may main viewing device and Swiftfin is the best option and still miles behind Plex.

Particularly because on Apple TV with Plex you can override built in subs with the closed caption styles, meaning literally all subs that aren’t explicitly burned into the image can be made consistent and easy to read. Haven’t seen that feature anywhere else, including on the Shield TV/Pro (I used to own one, got rid of it when Android TV updated to the ad-riddled version it is today). It’s a really amazing feature IMO to be able to have full control of subtitle font, size, style, color, outline, and spacing, no matter what you’re watching.

I have a Jellyfin server as backup, but its clients are shit for anything that uses subtitles. I bought plex pass years back for $80 on sale, can’t complain, but I’m never going to wholly rely on something closed source that requires online credentials.

Hot take: This is to stop the slop tsunami.

When any idiot can vibe code some slop app, things are going to get out of hand very fast.

But the play store is already completely filled with slop garbage, AI notwithstanding.

All good, and picking it up on sale is a good idea. I finished it today. It’s a good game and the gameplay loop is fun, but the story was just… ugh, convoluted to fit into Final Fantasy canon. The plot suffered from “good idea, poor execution.”

I game often, and 100% on Linux. Unless you’re doing competitive multiplayer games with kernel level anti-cheat (read: rootkit malware), games run perfectly fine.

The iPhone’s auto-correct is the worst by far. And I don’t get it because it was actually good around iOS 16 or so. Since 17 it’s been utterly terrible and constantly corrects words that are already what I wanted, making them wrong.