I built an interactive Linux distribution chooser that runs with no trackers or cookies and doesn't push any particular distro. Free to use and no data stored.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.

Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.

True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

Quick guide on how to safely upgrade Jellyfin to version 12 following the latest release just a few days ago.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

My feeds have been flooded with it over the past 24 hours, and even some prominent privacy groups have been amplifying the hysteria. The panic claims everyone is about to lose full phone access unless they submit to digital ID checks.

While the actual situation stems from recent Westminster pressure on tech giants around device-level age controls and online safety, the viral framing is completely overblown. There's no law turning every adult's phone into a brick tomorrow.

That said, the underlying trend of pushing age-verification and filtering hooks deeper into OS-level infrastructure is still a massive red flag for encryption and digital sovereignty.

I recently came across a video by Loyal Moses titled "They're Banning Your Home Server".

This got me thinking about what it means for anyone who likes running their own gear.

The industry lobby's framing around private servers feels like a major mask-off moment for big tech, treating user-controlled hardware as a threat.

I have written a short piece in reaction to the video and would love to hear your thoughts.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

Navidrome is great for streaming self-hosted FLACs, but checking what my kids are listening to meant constantly logging in and out of different accounts and since playback history lives entirely in client apps, past history vanishes into the void.

Instead of fighting third-party scrobblers or writing complicated webhooks, I just pointed a tiny Python script straight at the local SQLite DB. Now, a regular cron job drops a clean, zero-tracker static HTML dashboard into an Nginx container. No cloud services, no telemetry, just a local page to see family play counts.

Navidrome Dashboard can be found on my tools page here: 🔗 https://unknownuniverse.uk/tools

With the July Steam survey clearing the 4% desktop mark, corporate tech is finally starting to look our way. GOG, Epic, and NVIDIA are pushing native or Flatpak tools, and even EA is rumbling about Proton anti-cheat support.

It’s easy to get excited, but let’s be real, a few corporate launchers and job listings aren't a victory. Valve and the open-source community did all the heavy lifting to get us here; big tech is only showing up now because the numbers are too big to ignore. Still, it's a fascinating milestone.

Thoughts on whether we'll ever see real movement on the anti-cheat front, or are we always going to be locked out of the big multiplayer titles?

After coming close to running out of resources last week and having to re-purpose another device turning it into a 3rd Proxmox node, it got me thinking about how easily ZFS ARC cache and VM overhead sneak up on you.

So, I built a basic tool for rough guidance.

It calculates vCPU overcommit ratios and RAM allocation locally in your browser. Just pure client-side math so you don't accidentally OOM your hypervisor like I almost did. Inputs stay right in your browser and aren't saved anywhere.

Feedback or sanity checks on the math are welcome.

https://unknownuniverse.uk/tools/proxmox-calculator/

My blog has been up and running for a few months now and I wanted to have a better idea of what sort of visitor numbers I was getting but as it is a blog about FOSS, self-hosting and privacy I wasn't just about to hand data to Google.

I managed to set up a self hosted instance of Rybbit but it was a bit heavier resource wise than other options I have looked at so I had to have a major overhaul in my Proxmox node layout!

Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.

Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.

I’ve been using a de-Googled Android setup and found myself running into the same issue a lot of people probably do: the privacy-first option is great right up until the everyday stuff stops working properly.

In my case, banking apps and Android Auto were the sticking points. GrapheneOS was excellent in principle, but iodéOS ended up being the more practical fit for my actual use case.

I’d be interested to hear where other people draw that line between privacy, convenience, and reliability.

As a Linux user forced into a temporary truce with Windows for gaming handheld compatibility, I refuse to run the OS in its "out of the box" state. I’ve put together a manual optimisation guide that skips the "one-click" de-bloat scripts and focuses on permanent Group Policy (gpedit) and system-level tweaks to make the OS semi-tolerable.

The Guide Covers:

Killing AI Spyware: Disabling the "Recall" background service, snapshot recording, and "Click to Do" screen scraping.

Telemetry Lockdown: Redirecting "Allow Diagnostic Data" to the Security level (0).

Start Menu Surgery: Decoupling search from Bing to keep local file searches actually local.

Performance recovery: Disabling Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) and background hypervisors for bare-metal gaming speed.

Edge/Widget Removal: Stopping background "loitering" and accidental UI stutters.

This is a reproducible, manual workflow for those who want a clean(er) environment without relying on third-party scripts.