Your SparkBox week — Sep 24
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: • The home page cards on the new dashboard got an overhaul. There is a Weather card (today and the next four days, °C or °F, pick your city; your server fetches it and never locates you by IP). Legend boxes also get Now streaming (who is watching what on Jellyfin), Coming up (this week's episodes and movie releases) and Requests (what your household asked for and what each request is waiting on). Your storage card shows the space apps can really use and roughly when the disk will be full at this rate, and every card has a small Ask button that opens Tom AI already asking about that card. • Several home page card bugs are fixed: the media pipeline card no longer gets hidden by a layout, Reset layout no longer brings back old cards, Container health no longer says "Loading…" forever on a new box, and free space no longer counts the part of the disk only the system can use. Resource usage and the old VPN tunnel card are replaced by Server pulse and Your connection. • You can now ask Tom AI about your own SparkBox, not only about problems: what is filling your disk, what was watched this week, whether anything is reachable from the internet, and what changed recently. Ask "what should we watch?" or "something like Severance?" and it suggests only films and shows you already have. After you confirm, it can set up a Jellyfin login for a child that only shows PG titles, switch new downloads between 1080p and 4K, and add an app by what it does ("a music server"). Legend boxes also get a short weekly note on the home page. • Some search sources sit behind an "are you human?" check that SparkBox answers for you. It can take a minute, and on some setups SparkBox gave up too early, so Prowlarr's Test button spun and then failed. SparkBox now allows two minutes, puts each search source you add onto the helper by itself within a few minutes (and leaves it alone if you take it off), and sudo sparkbox doctor names a site whose checks keep failing. • After a fresh reinstall, the pop-up with each app's new username and password shows again the first time you open Jellyfin or Seerr. Before, your browser remembered the old install and skipped it, so the new passwords never appeared. • "Add your own app" can be reached from the Version 2 and 3 dashboards: Settings has an "Open Your box" button that opens that page in Classic just for this, and your dashboard choice stays as you set it. • On a fresh Usenet setup, Radarr and Sonarr no longer warn that SABnzbd's download folder "does not appear to exist inside the container". SABnzbd only makes its movies and TV folders when the first download finishes, so SparkBox now creates them in advance. A Completed folder you moved outside your media folder is left alone. • Running the installer on a Mac now stops straight away and says how a Mac can run SparkBox (install Ubuntu on an Intel Mac, or run SparkBox on another box and open the dashboard from the Mac), instead of failing partway through with no reason given. 📣 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-2026-09-21 Previous weeks: This week in SparkBox: Sep 13 – Sep 19, 2026 — https://tomsparkbox.com/blog/this-week-in-sparkbox-2026-09-19