Networking

My TV antenna lived behind my TV in the living room. Reception was inconsistent: if someone walked between the antenna and the window, the signal dropped. If I forgot to pull it out and angle it before sitting down, I got nothing. I had an HDHomeRun FLEX DUO from a previous place where I had the antenna setup dialed in. I moved and never got around to setting it up again at the new apartment. The antenna behind the TV was the placeholder that never got fixed. This week I fixed it, and the same day I finished, I used it to watch the FIFA World Cup from an airport lounge and a plane on the way home from a trip, free, with no cable subscription. That felt worth writing up. ...

Two spare Pis sitting around. Already running AdGuard, so Pi-hole was off the table. I wanted something actually useful. I’ve been paying $10/month for Obsidian Sync. The vault lives on my hardware anyway — it felt like paying rent on my own stuff. The alternative: run CouchDB on a Pi, point the Self-hosted LiveSync plugin at it, and use Tailscale to make the Pi reachable from anywhere without port forwarding or a public IP. E2E encrypted, zero ongoing cost, fully under my control. ...

Correction, October 2026. The display arrived and is running, and parts of this post are wrong or no longer used. Part 2 has what ended up on the screen. I’ve left the original below as a record of what I did before the device arrived, so don’t follow it as written. Wrong: the panel is 10.3 inches at 1872 × 1404 with 16 grays, not 7.5 inches. BYOS doesn’t need the Developer Edition (step 1 under “What’s next”). And the server I run is TRMNL’s own byos_fastapi, not the project linked under “The server”. ...