Here’s a problem specific to people who rip their own discs: you’re standing in a thrift store holding a $3 Blu-ray, and you genuinely cannot remember whether it’s already in your library. Pull out your phone, squint at a media app, type the title, hope you spelled it like the metadata does… by which point you’ve put it back.

So I built jf-barcode-search: point your phone camera at the barcode on the case, and it tells you instantly whether that title is already in your Jellyfin library. It’s a small Flask app, and this post covers both what it does and — because I decided to open-source it — the pre-flight review that makes a homelab repo safe to publish, which is a checklist worth having regardless of what you’re releasing.

If my main Docker host died tomorrow, how fast could I rebuild it? For a long time the honest answer was “slowly, and from memory.” The fix is to treat the box’s configuration as code: every docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile, and config file committed to a private git repo, so reimaging is a git clone and a handful of docker compose up commands.

The trap is that a live Docker tree is a minefield of secrets — .env files, TLS private keys, API tokens hardcoded into compose files — and pushing any of them to GitHub, even a private repo, is a bell you can’t fully un-ring. This post is the repeatable procedure I landed on: what to commit, what to never commit, and the automated checks that keep the second category out.

Build your own static blog from scratch using Hugo and NGINX. This comprehensive guide covers installation, Git configuration, NGINX setup, and generating static content—everything you need to launch your self-hosted blog on Linux.