Whitney Krape

Author: Whitney Krape

  • MemTest PSA, Run MemTest before NAS OS Setup

    Pretty much the title. TrueNAS installed, ran, and mostly worked on RAM that threw so many errors in MemTest I’m surprised the system posted at all. TrueNAS, being ZFS based, uses RAM heavily for caching, reading, and writing so data was getting corrupted in weird ways with confusing errors. What made it hard to pin down was that the system ran, created pools, and overall worked unexpectedly well where another OS probably would have failing during install; in a way, the simplicity of TrueNAS hid hardware instability. The errors only showed up when starting to work with data.

    Even if you experience issues with a long running, otherwise issue free system, memtest as a first troubleshooting step. RAM can go bad over time (though that happens less often.)

    Updated 2025/11/11

  • Nevermind, Immich on a shared N150, 70k files in 1 week

    With 70k+ photos and movies coming into immich; getting all new thumbnails, and organization I thought it would be months before the limited Intel N150 would finish processing but it may just be weeks. In fact, the library was usable almost overnight. Around 20k iCloud files came in about 2-3 hours. It seems like the RAW photos and video are taking the most time, as would be expected.

    What is more, the search already is producing great results.

    Need to revisit all the numbers but so far, impressive speed, and UX is great. Not doing everything standard though. We have iCloudPD pulling in images rather than using the phone backup but will go into more detail later.

    Updated and Retried on iOS and Ubuntu 25.04 powered by an N150 and 16 GB RAM 2025/11/10

  • Jellyfin for Music so far…

    While I bought a perpetual Plex license ages ago, I haven’t tried it for music yet. I opted to try Jellyfin first out of curiosity and see how easy it would be to get going in about 1 hour. From installing Jellyfin (on a non-LTS Ubuntu) to adding media, installing an iOS client, and playing music has come in just under that.

    Main issues so far:

    1. The official Jellyfin app doesn’t keep playing music on an iOS when closed.
    2. Tried Finamp briefly, worked, but no Carplay.
    3. Moved to Manet Music (which has a paid tier for Mac support) and so far working overall.

    Might try Plex music to see how it compares. Being able to call out tracks for a toddler on a roadtrip would be a north star to aim at for sure. So far, good.

    Updated and Retried on iOS and Ubuntu 25.04 2025/11/07

  • Running Immich on an Intel N150 with 70k+ photos is, maybe, not advisable

    Running Immich on an Intel N150 with 70k+ photos is, maybe, not advisable

    Revisited: Great results here!

    Another back and forth between software options this time Immich versus Photopixel. Photopixel was, fine? But not great. So I’ve set up the Docker Compose for Immich and pointed it to 2 external libraries to start digesting. While it is surely pulling everything in it is doing so slowly. Nearly all images are showing “Error loading image” without much explanation. That said, older years are starting to show thumbnails and open fully after about 8-10 hours of processing.

    Ideally, this would be set up as a Kubernetes cluster but, not having done that before, that will take some time to learn.

    On Photopixel. I wouldn’t dissuade folks from trying it but my issues were:

    1. Performance. Thumbnails, even on a faster system, seemed to take a while to populate while scrolling. So far Immich shows blurry previews quickly and resolves to a preview much faster.
    2. UX for downloads. It was a pain to get to a download of an image. You have to go through a couple clicks to just download the file, Immich it’s right at the top.
    3. UX overall. Not going to be exhaustive here but overall Immich feels like photos stay front and center and menus are thoughtfully off to the side and laid out well in the options rather than being so front and center with Photopixel.

    Need to do a proper breakdown but happy with Immich so far, just a little painful with a large library and a fairly “slow” system.

    Updated and Retried on Ubuntu 25.04 and a 16 GB RAM Intel N150 2025/11/10

  • Moving MacOS local iOS backups for maximizing space

    Ditching all cloud services is not easy considering just how convenient so many of them are and how much space some of these services can take. Backing up a phone and tablet, particularly and iPhone and iPad Pro can take as multiple terabytes and often Mac’s have smaller primary storage. (I wonder why Apple…) Fortunately with a USB-C drive and a symlink, you can get basically unlimited storage for backing up devices.

    (Obviously update the paths for your set up as needed.)

    ln -s "/Volumes/DockedOrbit/PhoneandPadBackups/Backup" ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync

    Updated and Retried on MacOS 26.0.1 11/05/25

  • Jellyfin Docker Compose is Brilliant

    After the little snafu of DuckDuckGo’s Assist box showing non-official directions, I tried the Docker Compose install and, with just a little set up.

    My docker-compose.yml here. Most of the changes are commenting out the user, running it as root, and hiding the environment configuration for now.

    Also note using the Plex media folder for everything, which is not the best idea. Here permissions wasn’t an issue, running as root, but probably should move things around and have this properly organized. For now though, everything gets dumped in there.

    So far, using Jellyfin as a music streamer with a specific client, Finamp, works great. 

    services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    container_name: jellyfin
    # user: plex:plex
    ports:
      - 8096:8096/tcp
      - 7359:7359/udp
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache
      - type: bind
        source: /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/audio/
        target: /media
      # Optional - extra fonts to be used during transcoding with subtitle burn-in
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    # Optional - alternative address used for autodiscovery
    # environment:
      # - JELLYFIN_PublishedServerUrl=http://example.com
    # Optional - may be necessary for docker healthcheck to pass if running in host network mode
    extra_hosts:
      - 'host.docker.internal:host-gateway'

    Updated and Retried on 25.04 11/04/25