I will definitely put AudiobookShelf at the top of my most impactful self hosted app list. I listen to audio books all the time and I used to use Voice, a foss app, but switching to AudiobookShelf has improved the experience significantly. I spend a little time importing books and then they just look so neat and tidy, I love it.

I both agree and don’t about the certification.

Most of the reason we have certifications and the like is not actually to prevent harm to the user of the product, it is for managing liability. If you make a product and it causes harm that creates a litigation risk and companies try to avoid being sued because it reduces profit.

In the open source community people want to make good things. They want to solve a problem by making the software or hardware they are working on. It isn’t about the profit motive, it is about making something good because you want that thing to exist.

Under that set of motivations I think certification can still be useful, but it is much less important than it is for companies making a profit. You don’t need to balance the drive to make profit against the risk of causing harm because the profit motive is not involved.

Tbh, I prefer the acronyms. I would much rather have acronyms than have to remember or say the full name of something like that. Sometimes they are overused but I think if you want clarity acronyms are a useful tool.

Medical equipment. The software for medical equipment is super arcane stuff, locked behind patents and licensing that only serves to drive the price up. For someone in a less economically powerful country the cost is increased and the quality of care is reduced massively by this licensing. If an open source version of the software for things like an MRI, CAT scanner, ultrasound, and so on could be made it would enable the updating of old hardware to keep it running longer and also make repairs much more affordable. I also think that internal defribulators would benefit enormously from being open source as under the current system they are hackable and can be exploited to wirelessly trigger a shock which can be fatal.

Also consider continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps. By combining those two technologies you can essentially make an artificial pancreas and make diabetes much more manageable. The hurdle here is not technological, it is legal. The thing that has slowed down the production of an artificial pancreas is software licensing and legal risk management, nothing technical. Consider this applied to the possibility of a continuous allergy monitoring device which could detect anaphylaxis and administer adrenaline, or maybe markers of a seizure approaching to trigger a much smaller dose of an anti epileptic medication. All unavailable because the development of that technology would not be feasible under the current licensing and liability system we have.

To be clear, I am not saying any of these cure the underlying condition, just that if medical software (and ideally hardware) was required to be open source more of these tools could be developed to help people live better lives independently and safely, and at a lower cost.

The white one is the foot from a pedestal fan. They have pair of legs at the bottom which cross at 90° and on the ends of the legs they have these little plastic snap in feed. They raise the metal off the ground and balance the whole fan, but if you step on the leg the foot bit flies out like a weapon.

I have tried Umbrella and CasaOS and they are really very similar. That said, learning to use portainer allows you to understand the underlying technology of docker much better and also allowd you to do cool things like making a stack of containers that work together and saving that stack in a single config file. The GUI of Umbrel and CasaOS are basically the same and they only differ a little in their internals, so I would say switching shouldn’t be too hard, but if you have found yourself struggling to get something working on CasaOS you will probably have the same issue on Umbrel.

The web interface with all the links to your services can be achieved with things like Homarr and you can manage storage on the back end with Open Media Vault or something similar to make things more accessible. If you can have your data files accessible on a single BTRFS or similar partition with folder level sharing then you can have files hard linked between your downloading application and your media serving application, say Deluge and Jellyfin. The files download in /share/Downloads and then on completion get linked into /share/Imports and Jellyfin can manage moving them into /share/Movies or /share/TV as needed, and the same would go for something like Subsonic or AudiobookShelf.

Personally I have a wonderful set up with AudiobookShelf which syncs to my phone ereader. I can have books for my ereader with all the metadata and it is accessible via WiFi so I can just pick a book and get the epub delivered directly, no Calibre or USB cable required. It also works nicely for the audiobook side by letting me tell a whole series to download to my phone so I can listen back to back without worrying and I can always make space if I need to by clearing things out. Oh, and I can set my default listen speed to 2.0x and that carries over on other devices, so I don’t have to constantly fuss with it.

Overall, super fun, I would recommend learning about Portainer if that appeals to you, maybe consider setting it up on an old laptop and playing with it there, and if it works out nicely then you can redo your server and get it all working nicely there.

Something to note is in the earlier years of computing software being copy written was not really a thing. The big thing was software for getting a specific piece of hardware to work. Most people were just concerned with getting things working, so when people came along with software they wanted you to pay for it was not really normal. Making the software something you paid for was a change, and so making it difficult to copy or distribute the software was not incentivised.

I expect the first breach of license was probably not because of intentional piracy, rather it was probably just a mistake or misunderstanding.