Plex has this Relay feature that basically pipes your traffic through their servers if direct access isn't possible for whatever reason, bypassing NAT and presumably cutting down on their support tickets. For free users the relay is capped at a measly 1 Mbps and the [ever-growing expense that is the Plex Pass subscription service only bumps this up to a whopping 2 Mbps. I can imagine this being useful for a selection of people. But as this feature is turned on by default, it's very easy for any issues with your server's network configuration to go unnoticed. It turns out my port-forwarding rule for Plex hadn't been working for several months (thanks Ubiquiti) and I never noticed because the relay feature was masking the problem. So... you're telling me Plex isn't meant to be almost unusably slow this whole time...? It doesn't help that the remote-access configuration UI has been very buggy for 6+ years, making it impossible to tell if the issue is with your server or the broken interface. So please don't make the same mistakes as me. Make sure your Plex client is actually connecting to your server directly, and use a Port Forward Checker.

Credits / Attribution Some of the art used around this blog are by other people. Here is a list of them: Smug Videah by Kelevtov Rantsona Sidebar Videah by ScruffKerfluff Callout Pixel Art Videah by lockedsdcard Videah Mutant Standard Emoji by Caius Nocturne

Whilst implementing Web Push notifications for my toy Q&A service curiouswolf I ran into an issue that led to me being stumped for hours. I was successfully receiving notifications from my server when using Chrome, but no matter what Safari was not playing ball. Web Push requires the browser maintainers to run a notification endpoint. For example, when you use Google Chrome and you enable notifications on a page, your encrypted notifications get funneled through a server Google controls. In the case of Safari however, their endpoint was returning BadJwtToken for me despite it being considered valid by Google. The Solution It turns out that Apple (and Mozilla apparently) require you to include a sub claim in your JWT with a method of contact (such as an email) for them to consider it valid. If you are providing an email, the sub claim should be prefixed with mailto: { "sub": "mailto:[email protected]", // <-- The important part "aud": "https://web.push.apple.com", "exp": "1680135079" } The reasoning behind this is to provide the operator of the endpoint with a means of contacting you if there's an issue. However, this technically goes against the Web Push spec, and it's frustrating that something like this isn't spelled out clearly in Apple or Mozilla's technical documentation. Notice the emphasis on the word MAY Apple quite regularly leave important information out of their docs for web APIs like this, but it's really messed up that the only place Mozilla talk about this is in a blog post from 2016.

Since things are uh... collapsing? I thought it'd be a good idea to finally get my blog up and running. Come in, get comfy and take a look around! Cozy right? Getting Started (Again) Ok admittedly, this is my 4th attempt at making a blog. This time I'm using Zola which is like Hugo or Jekyll but more Rust-y and less JavaScript-y. I can't make any comparisons beyond that because I haven't used either, but my initial impressions of Zola are good! The theme you're looking at I made from scratch using Tailwind which is the only way I can do frontend web stuff now. I wanted to move away from what I had been using in the past (Ghost) and have my blog sit in a git repo in plain text instead. How I currently have things set up means when I push any changes to the blog's GitHub repo an action runner will automatically build my site (in about 17ms!), compile Caddy, embed the site into the binary using caddy-embed (in... a lot more than 17ms!), then finally push it as an image to DockerHub. My server will then see this new image, hot-swap it, and start serving my blog straight from memory! Little Gremlin I hope you like my little rantsona in the sidebar! He took the longest to get working out of everything if you can believe it. I can disable him on a per-article basis, you don't have to worry about him 🤔-ing the more serious posts. You can't see him unfortunately (try looking at this page on a larger screen) but I hope you like my little rantsona in the sidebar! He took the longest to get working out of everything if you can believe it. I can disable him on a per-article basis, you don't have to worry about him 🤔-ing the more serious posts.