nithishbn

Watching TV at my parents' house with Jellyfin, Tailscale, and a Raspberry Pi

2026-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Yet another Tailscale post huh? Can’t blame me, can you?

There I was, back home in Seattle, my parents gone for the weekend, and I was bored. What if I watch the fourth season of the Sopranos?

Great, I’ll just watch it on my phone through my Jellyfin app… oh wait! My parents have a great LG TV that I can watch on. What if I cast the Jellyfin content from my phone to the TV? Spinny circle spinny circle, no output.

My parents’ TV has no access to my Jellyfin container all the way back in LA.

How do I solve this in an afternoon with nothing but a Raspberry Pi and some network magic?

Sharing photos from my server to my friends

2026-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

I regularly find myself wanting to share photos from my self-hosted Immich</a> instance on my server with my friends.

If you’ve followed my previous post</a> on my self-hosting journey, you’ll know I love Tailscale and its ability to let me share things with friends and family without exposing my local network. However, Tailscale obviously isn’t the best when my friends and family don’t want to install it and simply want a photo album detailing my most recent trip.

Fine.

I’ll do something about it.

What if we use Cloudflare Tunnels with custom JWT token authentication and split access to important albums and not so important albums?

Am I overengineering this? :)

Hosting a Minecraft Server without exposing my home IP

2026-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I am an avid Tailscale user. I have a homelab running on my 12 year old PC with Proxmox, and I have several containers all hooked up together. It’s great. I can backup my photos, use my NAS, and run whatever linux container I want. And I can access them from all of my devices.
But if I want to share these services with my friends and family, I need them to download Tailscale and access the nodes that I share with them. Friction.
Worse yet, Tailscale isn’t on some devices like the Nintendo Switch or the Playstation. Friction.
I want to be able to play Minecraft with my friends while hosting on my homelab, but I don’t want to portforward 25565 and share my home network IP address like it’s 2011 anymore. Surely, if we have Tailscale magic we’re past that?
Nearly! With a bit of help from our friend iptables</code> and a free vm from Oracle Cloud, we can do some networking magic to get my friends on my homelab minecraft server, and they don’t even know it!
Tour du Mont Blanc 2025-08-15T00:00:00+00:00 </a> This summer I got a chance to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc over the span of 7 days with my family. We started in Chamonix, hiked between towns, saw beautiful landscapes, and ate the most cheese I think I’ve ever had in the span of a week. I got a chance to take my friend Carmen’s film camera with me as well as my very own Fujifilm X100VI. I took so many photos. Tag along to see how I fared with minimal training! LA 2025 2025-05-30T00:00:00+00:00 </a> </figure> I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining UCLA Bioinformatics as a PhD student this Fall! This was a long time coming, and I couldn’t be happier. India 2025 2025-03-22T00:00:00+00:00 </a> It’s been a few years since I’ve been back to India. I was here last in 2021, and before that, in 2020 (yes, traveling during COVID was really rough). India hasn’t changed fundamentally in the last 4ish years. Where it has changed, though, is incredibly palpable. I’m not sure how much of this is me noticing more and how much of it is genuine change. I’m sure there’s a good mix of both. Sometimes, there is no decision 2024-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 I think everyone makes the realization at some point that they aren’t the main character. That often what we want isn’t what is possible because it requires others to believe the same thing. We’re often waiting for others, and that’s hard. Welcome - New Year's Eve 2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 Hello everyone! I decided that, on New Year’s Eve at that, my website needed a makeover and went ahead and used Tucker Siemens’ beautiful Zola based website</a> in order to create my own. I anticipate I’ll want to change this over time to suit my own needs, but I figured I’d start with this for now. I’ve started my journey into Rust and came across his article on writing a TFTP parser in Rust</a> which was beautifully written, well described, and well formatted. That’s the start of my inspiration into writing my own potential series of blog posts like it’s 2005 again.