The popular British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said,
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
And let me tell you all this: I’ve started practicing magic.
That quote is the third of three laws Clarke put forward, and is probably one of the most repeated and cited. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Could you imagine someone from centuries in the past time-traveling to our present day? They would think everything was foreign, or maybe even sorcery. I recently saw this concept illustrated beautifully in the classic 1993 Halloween film Hocus Pocus. It’s one that we watch at least once a year during “Spooky Season,” and the one particular scene that stands out to me these days is when one of the teen characters, Max (Omri Katz), threatens and confuses the witchy Sanderson Sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker) from the past with a power of his own: the “Burning Rain of Death,” which involves him holding a cigarette lighter to a fire suppression system and causing the sprinklers to engage. They briefly scream, assuming the falling liquid is deadly because they’d never seen a mortal child “make fire in his hand.” Clarke told no lies — the sisters witnessed Max perform actual magic.
As a lifelong Trekkie, I also like to throw it back to the ’60s. The casual Star Trek viewer might think that the technology Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew utilize is nothing short of fairy tale make-believe. But in today’s age, their hand-held wireless communicators, face-to-face video conferencing, and voice-activated digital assistants are all common tech you can find on the average device in your pocket. In fact, your iPhones and Androids are just a few small features short of literally being a “tricorder.” Recently, in one episode of Strange New Worlds (one of Star Trek‘s more recent spinoffs), the character of La’an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) makes off with vital information she found on a PADD that our new, young Scotty (Martin Quinn) had gathered. Rather than a simple prop made to look like said “PADD,” I think the series has just started using actual iPads, because I was struck by how unfuturistic the device looked… Despite the series being set hundreds of years in the future. And while scientists are still working on making them a reality, Star Trek still has plenty of tech that seems downright impossible for those of us still stuck in the past.
Well, I guess the future is now, because I’ve started learning more than I expected to when I started tinkering with an old PC of mine. I was determined to turn it into something of a “private server” for me and the family to use, however we wanted. You may recall that I initially tried to host this very website on it for roughly a month before I threw in the towel on trying to keep it up and accessible. The problem was largely that I had decided to use a platform called YunoHost (the name of which is clever internet shorthand for the question “y u no host?”), which you can install onto any available server and then run self-hosted software on it with just a few clicks. No less impressive than installing an app on your phone, really. The issue, though, is that YunoHost had a bizarre way of sinking its hooks into every part of the server’s system, which complicated the way that I wanted to host stuff outside of its services.
That was when I sorta made the hasty decision to quit the server project. I wiped the entire machine, moved this website over to a proper host (much of which you can read about in my last post), and called it a day. My brain kept thinking about it all, though, and I decided that I still wanted to experiment. Tinkering with this stuff and the feeling of creating something useful out of what was otherwise useless equipment was turning out to be a little addictive. My nephew was also still keen to at least get the Jellyfin media platform running for his library of literally hundreds of digitized movies. Plus, my frustration, in reality, stemmed from my mistake of putting all my eggs into YunoHost’s basket, not the homelab itself. So I started looking into alternative approaches to what I was already trying to accomplish.
That new approach turned out to be Docker!
For the non-technical, Docker is a platform that allows you to install services, apps, and other types of software into virtual “containers” on your computer (or a server), which not only allows for really clean and organized stacks of tech, but it also prevents software from gaining footholds in the rest of your system!!! Which I can’t emphasize enough, since that was the biggest issue from the last build that I did. Since it all stays isolated in its own little containers, you can actually test and experiment with stuff without them all conflicting with one another. Then, when you decide you aren’t going to use it or don’t like it, you can delete the whole dang container as quick as you can type docker compose down!
It’s perfect for someone like me, who mostly enjoys learning by doing. I’m still wrapping my brain around the concept of testing things before launching them or throwing open the door for others to enjoy stuff that I’m hosting, but even then, it’s still been a really fulfilling concept to learn. I had to learn how to set up network utilities like Nginx Proxy Manager and Pi-hole — the lack of which I have a sneaking suspicion may have contributed to my WordPress hosting issues before the wipe — and finally got Jellyfin up and running right before my nephew got me the media library to populate it with. I’ve even started learning how to customize the software by initializing it all via Docker Compose, a method that spins up an app based on your commands written into a docker-compose.yml file. It’s all pretty incredible, and has had me Googling topics like “fun docker images” for the past week.
Now, even my 72-year-old father can enjoy the hundreds of movies and shows we’re serving up on his TV’s Jellyfin app. Almost as if by magic. ✨
