If you cannot find what to watch on streaming services, but you have a bunch of your own media, like Youtube downloads or DVD rips, then you may be interested in creating your own local IPTV channels.

I have been experimenting lately with ErsatzTV, a Github project which you self host and can connect to your Emby, Jellyfin and Plex servers to retrieve media, or can simply read it off the local file system.

You can create schedules of programming with more options than I can honestly currently understand, then create playouts of these schedules onto channels. Each channel can have a name and even a watermark in the corner. If you are really adventurous, you can even populate the spots between your programming so everything correctly starts on the half hour or hour. I've seen some impressive examples of recreating mid-80's and 90's television with period appropriate bumpers and breaks.

Once you are done, it can publish M3U and XMLTV feeds for you. These should be usable in a lot of different IPTV software apps, but I am using Plex with the DVR support. Each of my "fake" channels appears in Plex and I can "tune" into them and see what is currently playing.

I am still learning what is possible, but tuning into my music video channel is a good way to have something on in the background while working.

I don't have many problems with WiFi (I use an Asus RT-AX82U). But for my Synology and other mini PCs mentioned earlier, it's just better if they're on Ethernet. But despite my best efforts while they were building our house, the builders wouldn't put Ethernet cable in for me, so I must resort to retrofitting.

As I'm trying to avoid drilling holes in all my walls and ceilings, I first turned to Powerline adapters. But despite trying three different models from different suppliers, none of them worked reliably, especially across different floors of my house. This was the case in my previous house too, they just never work for me.

But like most new-build houses in the UK (our house is 8 years old), I have old-fashioned RF aerial sockets in each of the rooms, all of which go to an aerial booster in the loft. This is so I can receive over-the-air television, also known as Freeview in the UK.

After a bunch of hunting, I discovered this goCoax MoCA 2.5 Adapter (sold out as I write this). MoCA is known as "Multimedia Over Coax", which is a very American sounding protocol for sending ethernet over existing coax cabling. I bought two of these and installed one downstairs attached to my router and plugged into the aerial socket behind my TV, and the other one upstairs in my office. Along with a little Netgear Switch, it has allowed me to extend my network with minimal of effort.

I do have an aerial booster in the loft, so I did switch that off. I don't have any TV's plugged into the aerial sockets anyway, because my kids don't know what linear TV is. I'm not 100% sure if this is necessary, but I found some advice online that it was, and I did have some additional difficulty getting things to connect.

It's been 4 months since I installed this and it has been 100% reliable. No drilling required. I just wish there was an aerial socket in my garage and I could extend it further.

I've been having great fun recently using Mini PCs using older laptop chips from one of the many sellers on Amazon, installing Proxmox on them, and using them as a host for virtual machines and Docker containers.

First, you put the Proxmox ISO on a USB stick, boot the machine from it, and install it as your operating system. It'll wipe the Windows installation that came with the device. It'll then give you the local network address so you can connect to it's control panel in a web browser.

Within Proxmox you can then easily upload ISO images and create virtual machines from them, like Home Assistant. I always find it easier to manage when you install it as the Operating System version rather than as Docker container, as you get better support for auto-updating and add-ons. Proxmox also supports Linux Containers, or LXCs, which I'd say was a less popular version of the container concept than Docker is. There are several easy scripts to help you launch popular apps in this format.

If you do want to use Docker, then Portainer is also a good option. Create a VM with a Portainer install within it, and you can use that VM to host all your Docker instances with a nice UI.

Proxmox also lets you setup easy backup routines, so you can have all your VMs backup every night to an external disk or NAS.

If you have more than one device you can easily make them a cluster by entering the IP address of your second device into the Proxmox control panel. Then both of them will appear within a single interface. A cluster means that if one of them fails, or you need to switch it off and move it, that the VMs running on it can start on another device. This will work best if you can offload the VM storage onto a NAS.

What seems like magic is moving a VM from one host to another while it's running, without needing to stop it. I was using VMware ESX with this feature many, many years ago. It was magic then and it's magic now.

As well as HAOS, I'm also trying out Immich for photo hosting, Hoarder for bookmarking, ErstatzTV for custom IPTV channels from my own content, and a homepage dashboard so I don't have to remember all the URLs.