Your SparkBox week — Oct 1
Posted by tomspark
Here's what shipped to every SparkBox this week — if your box is up to date, you already have all of it: • On the Version 2 and 3 dashboards, the Overview VPN card could keep saying "Not configured" after you set up Media Center and the VPN was already connected, until you reloaded the page. The card now checks the VPN again on its own every little while and whenever you come back to the tab. Nothing to do: update, then reload the dashboard once. • When downloads were stuck because nobody was sharing that copy any more, the top of the Media Pipeline card (and the System card) told you to restart the download app. A restart only reloads the same dead copies. It now says to try a different copy, which is the button under the Download app step. Restart is only suggested when the download app itself is down. • Tunarr could crash the moment a live channel started playing in Jellyfin, then Jellyfin showed "Connection refused" for Live TV. Tunarr now has enough memory for its own server, its search index and a live channel together. The app card now lists about 1 GB of memory for Tunarr instead of 400 MB. Nothing to do: the update applies it. • On the Version 3 dashboard, an app tile's ⋮ menu (Restart, Stop, Show saved password, View logs) opened in the top-left corner of the page, far from the tile. It now opens right under the ⋮ button. Reload the dashboard after updating. • On new boxes, Jellyfin called itself by a random string of letters and numbers in its header, the browser tab and every Jellyfin app's server list. It is now called SparkBox. If you already gave your server a name, it is left alone. You can rename it any time in Jellyfin under Dashboard → General. • If removing an app did not fully finish, the App Store went back to showing Install while Home kept showing the app as installed and crashing, and there was no way to remove it from the dashboard. The App Store now shows that app as installed, so Remove is there again and clears it off the box. If a removal cannot finish, the app now stays installed so you can press Remove again. Nothing to do: update, then press Remove on the app. • On a Windows PC (and some NAS models), the part of the Metrics app that reads your machine's CPU, memory and disk use never started and sat in "created", so the System dashboard in Grafana had no host data. It now starts on every box. Nothing to do: it starts after the update. A drive you plug in later shows up in the charts after the next restart or update. • Where your movies, shows, downloads and photos are kept (Media Root, Photos Path) and the video quality for new downloads could only be changed in the classic dashboard, and help pointed at a Settings → Media page that does not exist. Version 2 and 3 now have Settings → Server Config → Media folders → Open media settings, which opens those settings in the classic dashboard once without changing your dashboard choice. Tom AI and the guides now send you to Settings → Server Config → Media. 📣 Shoutouts this week: could be you. Report what's broken and you might see your name in next week's thread. Got a bug or a feature idea? Post it right here in d/sparkbox and Tom's team reads it. P.S. Tell a friend about SparkBox: you earn $10 for every Legend sale you refer, and they get $10 off. Free to join: https://tomsparkbox.com/affiliate 📖 The full write-up, with pictures: https://tomsparkbox.com/blog/this-week-in-sparkbox-2026-09-28 Previous weeks: This week in SparkBox: Sep 15 – Sep 21, 2026 — https://tomsparkbox.com/blog/this-week-in-sparkbox-2026-09-21 · This week in SparkBox: Sep 13 – Sep 19, 2026 — https://tomsparkbox.com/blog/this-week-in-sparkbox-2026-09-19