Remember when buying software meant you actually owned it? Those days are gone, and the subscription economy has turned us all into permanent tenants of our own digital lives.

Plex Pass isn’t a scam, but paying a monthly fee to unlock features on a server you already own and run yourself is a hard argument to make. Here’s where Emby ships what Plex sells.

The labels aren’t wrong that AI music changes everything. They’re just wrong about which part of “everything” they should be worried about.

I spent 55 years running on a brain nobody had a name for. Turns out it built something real anyway — but not without a cost worth being honest about.

I built a media server empire spanning four NAS units and a dedicated Emby setup. My family mostly watches the same twelve things on repeat.

The industry spent twenty years building a mythology around who belongs in technology. Most of it was never true, and the parts that were true stopped being true a long time ago.

Self-hosting a blog on your own hardware sounds like the power move. And it is. But nobody tells you what you’re signing up for when the glamour wears off.

There’s a short list of tools I’d trust with my life, and a longer list of tools I reach for without thinking. The gap between those two lists is where most of my real opinions live.

At 55, I’ve made peace with being a guy who doesn’t fit cleanly into any category the internet has invented for people like me. That peace took longer than it should have.

Flash, our Miniature Dachshund, lived 16 years in this house and left a hole that doesn’t make sense on paper. This is an honest account of what that actually means.