Episode 18: Smart TV, Dumb Idea

What we cover

• Geoff's high-tech Halloween escape room at the office.
• Adam's 45Drives Creator Summit recap, from the Localhost event to local AI and GPU failover.
• PHP2Shell and Geoff's Nextcloud to OpenCloud migration.
• Smart TV privacy, debloating tools, and the limits of AI-assisted device modification.

First up, Geoff takes us inside his office's Halloween decorating contest: a five-minute escape room set in a law firm run by Lucifer himself, complete with damned souls, a notice of rescission hidden in a lockbox, and a smart home setup that brought the rooms to life. Raspberry Pis, ESP32 countdown clocks, Z-Wave sensors, Home Assistant automations, pre-generated ElevenLabs audio, and WLED strips all worked together to make the puzzles react to players.

Next, Adam recaps the 45Drives Creator Summit in Wilmington North Carolina, where the Unraid team hosted an event, featuring the X4 and X15 hardware, Unraid 8 demos, a Street Fighter 6 tournament with some awesome prizes, and conversations with creators about professional workflows. The wider summit covered local and hybrid AI, RAG, creative collaboration tools, and a Proxmox cluster using Intel GPUs and SR-IOV to keep a game running through node failover.

After that, Geoff gives a brief, high-level take on the PHP2Shell vulnerability and turns to the practical self-hosting fallout. He had to take exposed services offline, including Nextcloud, and used the moment to migrate files to OpenCloud. We discuss the pros and cons to the migration.

Finally, the hosts talk about smart TV tracking, LG's privacy controversy, and the appeal, and risks, of projects that try to make TVs less intrusive. The larger point is that ad-supported TVs and other connected devices collect data in ways many owners may not expect, and user control and repairability are becoming harder to ignore.

Tags: self-hosting, unraid, 45drives, opencloud, nextcloud, php, smart-tv, privacy, local-ai, home-assistant

Links

• PHP2Shell and OpenCloud
• CISA PHP vulnerability alert - https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2026/10/21/critical-vulnerabilities-php-require-immediate-patching
• NCSC-NL PHP2Shell information - https://github.com/NCSC-NL/php2shell
• Geoff's OpenCloud Docker Compose - https://github.com/FuzzyMistborn/infra/blob/13b4412feeaaf3641141863028cc010d85777bc0/services/endowment/opencloud/compose.yml
• Smart TV cleanup
• DumbTV - https://github.com/humblemuzzu/dumbtv
• CleanYourTV - https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
• TechCrunch: AI-assisted smart-TV cleanup - https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/people-are-using-ai-to-make-their-smart-tvs-dumb-again/