THEWASTELANDER.COM // FIELD DOCUMENTATION  //  LATEST: YOU DON'T OWN ANYTHING. YET. ● TRANSMITTING
Field Documentation // Homelab, Builds & Digital Rights

The Wastelander

Surviving the tech wasteland — one build at a time
DOMAIN thewastelander.com
HOST Cloudflare Pages
STATUS ● ONLINE

Welcome to The Wastelander — a field journal documenting homelab builds, hardware experiments, self-hosting guides, and the ongoing fight for digital ownership. No cloud dependencies. No monthly fees. No one else's rules.

Projects span a full home network overhaul, a 3-machine Proxmox homelab, a self-hosted media stack, and a running commentary on why you don't actually own the things you think you've paid for — and what to do about it.

Guides About
// System Status
Home NetworkIn Progress
HomelabPlanning
Unraid NASMigrating
Proxmox BackupPending
Media StackPending
thewastelander.comOnline
//

Latest Dispatches

Latest // Digital Rights
You Don't Own Anything. Yet.
2025 — Most Recent
Your movies, music, and photos live on someone else's server under someone else's rules. Streaming platforms pull content. Ebook sellers delete libraries. Here's how self-hosting gives you back control — and why that old laptop is your first step.
→

Remember that movie you "bought" on Vudu? That album in your Google Play library? That show you watched a dozen times? One day — no warning — it's just gone. Pulled. Delisted. Because you never actually owned it. You rented the right to watch it.

Streaming platforms remove content constantly. Studios fight over licensing. Services shut down. Your digital "purchases" are licenses — and licenses can be revoked. Your photos on iCloud, Google Photos? Those live on someone else's hardware, subject to someone else's terms of service. Even ebooks from Amazon can vanish from your Kindle overnight. DRM — Digital Rights Management — is the lock they put on the media you think you own.

The Fix
Self-host your media. Run your own server. Own your files. Control your data.

Jellyfin — Your own Netflix. Stream your movies and TV to any device, anywhere. Free. No subscription. Nobody pulls your library.

Immich — Your own Google Photos. Every picture from your phone backed up automatically — to YOUR hardware. Private. Permanent.

Navidrome — Your own Spotify. Your music, your rules.

DRM-free ebooks from Humble Bundle or Standard Ebooks, managed in Calibre. Nobody deletes your bookshelf.

Got an old laptop from 2015? A desktop collecting dust? That's a server. Most home media setups run beautifully on hardware people throw away — an old i5, 8GB RAM, a couple of hard drives. You don't need new hardware. You need the right setup. I'll take old computers and hardware in trade for server setup or computer work.

PUBLISHED
Digital Rights // Self-Hosting // 2025

All Posts

Digital Rights
You Don't Own Anything. Yet.
2025
Your movies, music, and photos live on someone else's server under someone else's rules.
→

Remember that movie you "bought" on Vudu? That album in your Google Play library? That show you watched a dozen times? One day — no warning — it's just gone. Pulled. Delisted. Because you never actually owned it. You rented the right to watch it.

Streaming platforms remove content constantly. Studios fight over licensing. Services shut down. Your digital "purchases" are licenses — and licenses can be revoked. Your photos on iCloud, Google Photos? Those live on someone else's hardware, subject to someone else's terms of service. Even ebooks from Amazon can vanish from your Kindle overnight. DRM — Digital Rights Management — is the lock they put on the media you think you own.

The Fix
Self-host your media. Run your own server. Own your files. Control your data.

Jellyfin — Your own Netflix. Stream your movies and TV to any device, anywhere. Free. No subscription. Nobody pulls your library.

Immich — Your own Google Photos. Every picture from your phone backed up automatically — to YOUR hardware. Private. Permanent.

Navidrome — Your own Spotify. Your music, your rules.

DRM-free ebooks from Humble Bundle or Standard Ebooks, managed in Calibre. Nobody deletes your bookshelf.

Got an old laptop from 2015? A desktop collecting dust? That's a server. Most home media setups run beautifully on hardware people throw away — an old i5, 8GB RAM, a couple of hard drives. You don't need new hardware. You need the right setup. I'll take old computers and hardware in trade for server setup or computer work.

PUBLISHED
Digital Rights // 2025
01

About

The Wastelander is a personal build documentation site and field journal — a place to record what works, what doesn't, and why certain decisions were made. The wasteland is unforgiving, but knowledge endures.

Projects documented here include a full home network rebuild, a three-machine homelab running Proxmox VE and Unraid, a self-hosted media and music stack, and various 3D printing builds designed to hold it all together physically. On the other side of that: writing about digital rights, the slow con the tech industry has been running on all of us, and what regular people can do about it.

Everything is documented as it happens — including the mistakes. Especially the mistakes.

Philosophy
Self-hosted where possible. Local-first always. Cloud only when there's no reasonable alternative. Technology should work for the person who owns it — not for the company that sold it to them.

I help regular people build personal servers, repair computers, and take back control of their data. Old hardware accepted in trade. No jargon. No judgment. Just results.

// Site Info
HostCloudflare Pages
Domainthewastelander.com
DNSCloudflare
SSLActive
Git RepoGitHub → Gitea
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