Immich is a wonderful bit of software, but since it holds all your private photos it's best to keep it fully locked down. This presents a problem when you want to share a photo or a gallery with someone. To view a shared album in Immich, you need access to the /api/ path. If you're sharing a gallery with the public, you need to make that path public. Any existing or future vulnerability has the potential to compromise your Immich instance. I'm not aware of any such vulnerability existing right now.

Immich Public Proxy provides a barrier of security between the public and Immich, and only allows through requests which you have publicly shared.

It is stateless and does not know anything about your Immich instance. It does not require an API key which reduces the attack surface even further. The only things that the proxy can access are photos that you have made publicly available in Immich, and it strips out most metadata such as locations, camera details, comments, etc.

This video will show how it operates and give some pointer son setting it up, and will also show a workaround I'm using to provide a public landing page for all your shared links on Immich, and how to nest a group of sub-albums on a webpage.

Intro 00:00

Immich Public Proxy GitHub project https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #selfhosting #photoalbums #Immich

Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager designed to collect, organize, and archive webpages. Its main goal is to help individuals and teams manage useful webpages and articles in one centralized place, while also preserving copies of those pages-such as screenshots and PDFs-to protect against “link rot” (when web content disappears or changes over time).

My video highlights what it does (and how it can be more useful than just using The Internet Archive), I show how its user interface works, the menu settings, how to add a link using LinkDroid on a mobile phone, how to follow public collections using RSS, and discus how to sync it with your browser bookmarks. This is a very slick and useful application to self-host and keep track of bookmarks that you either want to share with others, or want to have available in the future.

If you really want to do document archiving, then have a look at my video about Paperless-ngx at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urwuTnrYEWE.

What Does It Do? 00:00

Linkwarden website https://linkwarden.app

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #bookmarks

I bought two of these enclosures recently to help transition from my existing 2.5" USB connected external hard drives, to 3.5" eSATA connected external drives. So I was looking for a drive enclosure that could house both drive sizes, and also handle both connector types.

One of my 2.5" external drives started failing, so I bought a Seagate IronWolf drive to replace (NAS compatible to run 24/7 unlike the failed Seagate Barracuda drive). I also wanted to transition to eSATA connectors because my OpenMediaVault server does software RAID, but does not want to use USB connections for that.

I show the drive enclosure that will be housing the new 3.5" drive. This drive has already been set up to operate as the first drive in a 2-drive RAID 1 array (mirrored). As I do not yet have the second new drive, it will run in a degraded array (missing drives) and I will do a scheduled nightly rsync to the second drive over the USB connection.

When the new second drive arrives, that will go into the other enclosure on its eSATA connector, and the RAID will be complete and do its mirroring in the background automatically.

I searched for, and bought, these enclosures on my own, so there is no sponsorship of any sort or kind for this video.

Intro 00:00

Vantec site: https://www.vantecusa.com/products_detail.php?p_id=302

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #driveenclosure #externaldrive #vantec

GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme. It could be seen a GUI equivalent to Conky.

It is easy to configure and runs well on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It will show monitors for a host of sensors and activities on your PC, and you can even set alarms to alert you when thresholds are exceeded. There are also numerous plugins that further extend its capabilities.

My video shows what it looks like, what sorts of themes there are, what menu options there are, and how to set audible alerts. I also contrast various aspects of GKrellM with Conky itself.

Intro 00:00

GKrellM Website - https://gkrellm.srcbox.net/

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #GKrellM #systemmonitor #opensource

Bitfocus Companion enables the reasonably priced Elgato Streamdeck and other controllers to be a professional shotbox surface for an increasing amount of different presentation switchers, video playback software and broadcast equipment. It has over 500 ready-to-use connectors to interface with numerous hardware devices (for presentations, music and video production work, cameras, etc) and for software services (YouTube, Twitch, Google Sheets, Zoom, OBS Studio, Slack, Home Assistant, etc).

In this video, I show how I'm using it for general gaming and productivity use at home. I show examples of how to start creating buttons, how to use delays and feedbacks, and some workarounds for auto-page changing (if you have a small deck), using global shortcut keys under Wayland and X11, opening an Obsidian Note, running OS updates, and more. I also show a workaround I use in gaming to hold a button to execute repairs whilst I do other things in the War Thunder game, like shooting back at the enemy.

My Stream Deck also works as a mini-dashboard for my Home Assistant to alert me of warning conditions for my solar system, home router, server, etc.

I spend some time too on the page I use for OBS Studio which has a button that visually shows the microphone recording level, zooming controls, warnings for microphone muted, etc.

The video is intended to give you a feeling of what this software can do and what its interface looks like. I also do a quick high-level comparison of how it compares to the StreamController software, which I did a video about a month or two back. In that video, I also showed how I use a Stream Deck to automate some spreadsheet functionality.

Intro 00:00

Bitfocus Companion Github site https://github.com/bitfocus/companion

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #streamdeck #opensource #productivity

A link shortening service translates any web URL link into a custom, and typically shorter and more manageable link.

A link shortening service is useful for a number of reasons:

My video goes over how YOURLS can be used, and includes a few tips that I picked up for installing php-zip for the download plugin, as well as how to deal with any plugins which break the service.

Intro 00:00

YOURLS website https://yourls.org

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #YOURLS

This video will help if you need to execute various OS commands from a Stream Deck and you want to have your buttons show what the status is of what was executed. I demonstrate how a button that toggles the mute status of a microphone, or the speakers, can change the button between green and red colours to indicate the status.

The only proviso is that there should be an OS command that can query the status of whatever you want to monitor.

A further example shown uses a curl command to fetch information via the API from OPNsense to display the OPNsense firewall temperature and disk space used on the Stream Deck. This could be expanded to use any of the other available API functions too.

So whilst having some connectors provided by Bitfocus and the community, there is no need to be limited to only having those to use on Bitfocus Companion. Using script files and curl commands, can open up a whole new world of possibilities.

If any other Stream Deck app (or any app) can execute OS commands and do something with the feedback, this video may also be of use for that type of scenario too.

This video follows on from my first video I did about Bitfocus Companion. It is worth watching the first video if you want to get a better overview of Companion and how it works with some existing connectors to VLC, Home Assistant, opening apps, etc.

Intro 00:00

Bitfocus Companion https://bitfocus.io/companion

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #streamdeck #bitfocuscompanion

Monitor web pages for changes - (such as watching prices, restock notifications), to deep inspection such as PDF text support, JSON and XML monitoring and extensive text triggers. Get notifications when a website updates.

The service is not only useful for bargain hunters but also those who monitor websites for defacement, or important regulatory changes, and lots more.

The video will look at ChangeDetction.io's features, what it can be used for, how to add watches, and also useful some tips on how to use it. It also gets contrasted with Distill.io at an overview level.

Intro 00:00

ChangeDetection.io website https://changedetection.io/

My Docker compose file for Changedetection.io https://links.gadgeteer.co.za/changedetdocker

Vote here for my next video https://links.gadgeteer.co.za/votevideo. You can view the global results after voting.

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #opensource #selfhosting #privacy

This video will show how to link any bash script file to a right-click menu on Linux, by creating a .desktop file. I'm using it to select a few .mp4 video files, and then to batch convert their AAC audio codec to PCM audio codec. But you can link any script file that you want to use on your files.

I also explain how to change the context so that the script would only show in the menu for a particular MIME type e.g. video, audio, text, etc files.

I intended this to work for DaVinci Resolve as it does not support the decoding of AAC audio codecs at all on Linux (free or paid version). At the end of this video, I demonstrate how I can now quickly convert any video with AAC audio codecs, within a few seconds, from "inside" DaVinci Resolve.

The bash script file has been modified, after I recorded the video, to now handle single or multiple audio track conversions.

Intro 00:00

Link to the bash script file https://links.gadgeteer.co.za/convertaac

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #Linux #bash #DaVinciResolve

Pastebin is a long text and code snippet sharing site. The site has some limitations for free accounts, and does not allow file uploads.

Pastebin recently flagged one of my pastes as spam, so I needed to look for an alternative. The best two open source self-hosted alternatives I found were PrivateBin and MicroBin, both of which do what Pastebin does, and sharing of files. My video takes you through a comparison I did to try to decide which of the two would be best for me to use. I also mention a workaround for not being able to remove a MicroBin paste, and demonstrate how both these applications work.

Intro 00:00

PrivateBin website https://privatebin.info

MicroBin project site https://github.com/szabodanika/microbin

My daily tech blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog

#technology #opensource #alternativesto #pastebin #selfhosting