Author
154 articles
Milan Buha is the founder and editor of VoidInsider. Curious by default, he likes understanding things from the inside — the technology he depends on every day, the systems behind everyday money decisions, the fine print everyone else skips. He writes about what he's tried, checked, and actually uses, the way he'd explain it to a friend.
A fingerprinting headline or a slow, ad-tracker-choked page load sends people searching for the "best private browser." Here is how Brave, hardened Firefox, and LibreWolf actually differ day to day.
A headline about Telegram not being encrypted or Meta sharing WhatsApp metadata resurfaces the same guilty question: what does each app actually protect by default, and is switching worth the hassle?
Restart policy, networking, volumes, secrets, build vs pull, logs, and teardown — the seven decisions a self-hosted Docker Compose stack forces, mapped in one guide with a real annotated compose.yaml and links to a deep dive on each.
A fixed triage order for a Docker Compose service that won't start: docker compose ps, logs --tail, the exit code, and the healthcheck status -- in that order, before restarting anything, plus how to tell a real crash loop from a slow first boot.
Two things flip the old advice in 2026: Spotify now has real lossless audio, and Apple Music is cheaper on most tiers. A decision table routing you to the one factor that should decide it, plus links to the full sound-quality, price, and three-way breakdowns.
Spotify Family now costs $21.99/mo. A real cost and maintenance-time comparison against self-hosting Navidrome on hardware you already own, a dedicated Pi, or a cheap cloud VPS -- and when it's actually worth ditching streaming.
I pasted a fresh Postgres password straight into environment: on a new compose file, then stopped with my cursor over git add . That password was about to sit in plain text in a repo I push to self-hosted Gitea, not because I was careless, but because environment: is the path of least resistance.
I edited a Dockerfile, ran docker compose up -d, and the container came back up running the exact same code it had before. No error, no warning, just silence, and a service that looked started but was not the one I had just changed.
I ran docker compose stop expecting the stack to fully disappear. A few seconds later, docker compose ps still listed every container and the default network was still there, nothing had been removed, just stopped.
The power blipped, the host rebooted, and half the homelab stack came back up on its own — the other half just sat there, exited. Every container had a restart: line; they weren't all the same line.
Two containers on the same host could reach each other, and neither one was supposed to. Both had landed on Docker Compose's default bridge network — a network that doesn't ask permission before connecting things.
I ran docker compose down -v to force a clean restart, out of muscle memory from a different project where that flag was harmless. It wasn't harmless here — it deleted a named volume along with the containers.