LINUX Unplugged - 279: WireGuardians of the Galaxy

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

We have a WireGuard success story to share, and it's probably not what you're expecting. Plus we check in on Ubuntu 19.04, start the search for an Emby replacement, and how to use Reddit on the commandline. Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

I wanted a good keyboard, and there weren't any out there. I figured, well, how hard could this be? And then we built the best keyboard we possibly could. It's not what you'd expect from a keyboard, but people love it. Creating a keyboard is kind of a weird thing. It's been an obsession. All right, Wes. Can you master the keyboardio that runs Linux in a beautiful hardware body?

It is the keyboardio, a mechanical switch keyboard, custom-sculpted keycaps. It's a dream to type on, and it sells for $329. Wes Payne has it here in studio, hooked up USB-C to his laptop. It has Arduino boards inside. Wes Payne, can you light the keyboardio on fire? What do you think, sir? Well, it's either going to look beautiful or turn into a brick. One way or the other, a lot of fun.

We'll do it live on this week's episode of Linux Unplugged Keyboardio, the only keyboard where you can install plugins that make it look like your keyboard is on fire. This is Linux Unplugged, episode weekly Linux talk show that's making its list and checking it twice. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I'm very excited about today's show. Not only because you're lighting your keyboard on fire, you maniac,

but we're going to share a WireGuard success story this week. We implemented that brand new Linux VPN in production here at Jupyter Broadcasting, and it kicked butt. Yeah, Chris doesn't hate it. I mean, that's how you know. No, it was really great. And man, is it fast.

We'll tell you about our WireGuard success story. But first, we're going to start out with a big batch of community news, a little check-in on the Ubuntu 19.04 development cycle. I'm running it here today in the studio. And a potential fix for that crazy CPU SystemD dominating issue I talked about last week that was wrecking my box. And then we'll finally introduce the name of our automation system that you voted on.

You did it. Not our fault. Can't blame us for this one. We're innocent. We totally. And then we'll wrap up the show, if time allows, you know, because time. Actually, it's Joe, really. If Joe allows. He gets mad.

He does. He gets mad. But if Joe allows and time permits, we have not one, but two fantastic frickin' picks this week that are really great. And one of them that just might bring me back to Reddit. But before we go any further, we've got to bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Good morning.

Hello. Hi. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hello, Mr. Badger, Mini-Mac Sean, and the Silent Drifter. It's good to see you. And we have a whole bunch up in quiet listening, too.

Wes, how are you doing? You feeling all right? You good? You didn't get sick? Yeah, no, I don't. I think I've recovered any amount of... I was pretty tired. We got back and I definitely crashed.

But after that... I was exhausted. I was convinced I was going to get sick. Wes and I just got back from the Linux Academy holiday party. And we're like, hoorah, full of team spirit. It really... You know, and they do these, and I'm like, roll my eyes. I'm like, oh, team building exercises. I will admit to being conditioned from some of my past employers

to have a very similar attitude. But the game shows that were hosted by Tom Haslett were pretty good. And one of the final questions, it was like a family feud style. I was wondering if you were going to mention this. Dude, how can I not? You have to, yeah. I'm still sore. I am still upset about this.

This was like Friday morning this happened, and now it's Tuesday of the next week, and I'm still upset. So it's family feud style, name Linux distributions, right? And so if you surveyed Google or people or whatever the scenario was, these were the top 10 Linux distributions, the top five Linux distributions. And so, you know, first group, first table shouts out Ubuntu,

you know, because it's their turn, that family. Ubuntu goes up, boom, number one on the board. Of course. Of course, right? So then they shout out another distribution. I can't remember what it was. And it wasn't on the board. So, you know, so they lose.

Switches to our table, the other family. And at this point, like, it's a process of elimination, and it's down to us and them. And I'm all in. And I'm like, this is my domain. I know what the popular distros are. This is what you were hired for. Right.

So he turns to me, you know, Mr. Fisher, what's your answer? I say, Tom, Linux Mint. Right? Because that's a huge, lots of desktop users use. I mean, we don't talk about it a ton because we don't use it. But lots of new users to Linux use Linux Mint. Ubuntu made sense. Linux Mint.

Not on the list. Not on the list. Nothing. You know what was on the top five list? Manjaro. Not Linux Mint, but Manjaro. How can I not be sore about that? How can I not be sore about that? How can I not be sore about that?

I tell you what. Now apparently this was sourced from Google, so maybe there's something there. I'm using Manjaro right now. You are not helping at all. You know what it is? With KDE though, so it's all fine. I'm just saying, would anybody in this mumble room

disagree with the statement that Mint is way larger than Manjaro? No. I mean, it's a great distribution. Mumble Room disagree with the statement that Mint is way larger than Manjaro. No. No. No, right? I mean, it's a great distribution. I've never actually met a Mint user in real life, though. I will disagree.

Oh, gee. Just for the sake of disagreement. Oh, yeah. And there's Dar. Dar's made it to the Mumble Room. I'll say this, though. Great fun. There's a lot of really smart people we're going to start

figuring out how to get some of them on the shows because these people really think about this stuff a lot you made some friends you were really

you know Wes Payne Wes Payne is a gentleman socializer I'll tell you shucking and jiving out there well I mean it was nice right

especially at a company where most people work remotely this was a great opportunity to get to meet some people and yeah everyone's nice, and they just want to help people learn cool new stuff.

My biggest regret, really, is that we didn't bring Joe out. We were on the fence. We're like, it's not enough time. We should have known more. It just didn't work out this time. So we'll have to treat him well at Linux Fest. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we'll treat him well at Linux Fest.

All right, well, while Wes is hacking away, are you actually doing your input over the keyboardio right now? I started to, and then it was very, very slow. It's an unusual layout. It's not QWERTY. It's not QWERTY. It is not. No.

I think I could get used to it with time, but for the sake of, you know, we have a small amount of time, that Joe, as we said, I'm cheating a bit. Okay. All right, well, we'll check in with you later on the show and see how it's going. So we had a tweet come in to me and the Ubuntu podcast from Crimbus. He says, Yo, at Chris Lass, I'm tired of depending on our internet to play movies for the kiddo.

I was trying to rip some DVDs tonight using VLC and Acid Rip in hopes to run them off of a home server. But either the video ends up glitchy AF, as he says, or there's no audio. Any suggestions? Now, I gave him a quick rundown of the tools I use, like MakeMKV and Handbrake. Oh, yeah, those are both great. If you want full quality, MakeMKV, bring it in via Blu-ray and just put it. You just drop all of the different video files and languages you don't need, and you end up with a large-ish file, but it's the exact encoding right off the disk.

So it's as good as it's going to be on the disk. If you need it smaller from there, so like in Krimbus' case here, he's making it for the kiddos. Kiddos, you know what, they don't care if it's 720p versus 1080p or 4K. You can put it in 720p and upscale it, and they're going to be okay. And so you can run it through Handbrake and get yourself a nice small file. Yeah, that adds up if you have a lot of those, you know. So that was the tools part. But then the big question is how do you serve this up to the kiddos?

And my answer from when he tweeted this to what I'm going to say now has dramatically changed in the last week. Thanks to the people over at MB. I was going to be really derogatory i'll just say the people over at mb who are shattering our dreams of an open source plex competitor this week by announcing that they're shifting to a closed source core with open source components which is the exact model plex uses actually in fact it may be now at this point Plex has more open source code in it than MB does, depending on

where they fall on this whole thing, where it all falls down. And MB is sort of botching the communication. In their release, there's some implications that make you read between the lines, and then when people ask for clarification on GitHub, the project came out and explained in further detail what was going on. It does seem like communication has been one of

those things that the community has not always been happy with for a couple of years in this project. This is a big shame because this was, I think, its biggest feature for our community, was the fact that it was open source. You could use it without having to have an MB Cloud account if you wanted to. I have it running on a droplet for ages now

and here at the studio, and I like it so much, I didn't want them to change anything. I became a premium subscriber just to support them. I wanted them to stick around. I did the same exact thing. It's a real shame. And it was nice too, right? Because it was open source, so it was easy to package.

I have an Arch system that's running it, and it was just install MB and away you go. Yeah, and it feels like this is still kind of developing, so we don't have all the details yet. So I don't want to raise the full panic flag. I want to give them time to communicate better what's going on. It couldn't have come at a worse time either. The whole Plex community over the last couple of months on Reddit

has been getting slowly more and more toxic. Go figure, it's Reddit, right? But the Plex clients and uis have been going through all sorts of crazy my my uncle is in vancouver and he streams from my plex server all the time and they updated his roku this week and he's been texting me all week he's 70 right he's been texting me all week how do i use this new version of plex i'm like i don't know i don't have a roku i can't help and so now he's stuck and so thanks plex for that so i think um there was a lot of people in a similar situation looking for a decent alternative and mb is was it um but

now uh i don't know yeah drifter have you run into this with your Roku? Oh, absolutely. And it's really obnoxious, too, because not only did they not really tell you about it, it just kind of all of a sudden you went to go use it, and it was completely different. Oh, yeah, it's good stuff. That's exactly what you want on the TV, when you want to just sit down, turn it on, and chill out. It's so frustrating. Yeah, I think the problem with Plex is they've been taking their eye off the ball a little

bit, and they're trying to focus, ironically for me to say this, but they're trying to focus on web media, like podcasts and stuff. And while I'm kind of like, cool, another platform to distribute our shows on, that's good as the content creator, but the viewer of me is like, no. I just want this to work really well. I have a whole bunch of offline media I want to watch. I've got a USB drive plugged into this machine, and I just want you to index it really well

and keep track of what I've watched and make it possible for me to watch it on my portable devices. And I think in the past, MB has benefited. It had great integration with Kodi, which I use a lot and that works very well. So I think there's been some of that spirit, right? It's open, you can kind of hack on it as you need to.

You can make this sort of rich ecosystem around it. I don't know, I kind of worry about that now too. Yeah, yeah. So I use the NVIDIA Shield, which I know you do too, Chris. Love it. And the Plex Android client has gotten slowly less and less, like you just want to click on something and it just should just work first time every time.

And it tries to transcode everything. So to fix that, i have gone into the into kodi and installed plex for kodi and now everything plays direct play first time every time so along the same lines as wes really like kodi thank god is the answer yeah that's exactly how i use it now too because a lot of times when i'm in the RV, I'm connected via a MiFi. And if it's going out to the Plex cloud to even broker the connection over my LAN, which sometimes even I'm trying to play over my LAN, it wants to broker a connection over the internet. Kodi solves that problem every single damn time. So whatever we land on here in this

conversation, keep that in the back of your mind. Kodi is a great tool for that. So we had a little look around, and Wes, you found a couple of things. First of all, let's just start with the one-to-one replacement. Jellyfin has been announced, which is a fork of Envy, right? Are you laughing at my pronunciation of it? No, I was just enjoying it. How would you say it? I'm not arguing. Would you say

gel? No, because it's got a... Jellyfin. I think jellyfin. Jellyfin. I'm just enjoying it. You said it so well. Thank you. If I'm going to mispronounce it, I'm going to try to mispronounce it with some level of confidence, just so that way it doesn't make people...

It's not distracting, right? Exactly. Because if I sit here and i and i torture myself over it that's distracting like this conversation is um they forked it right at the point before all this happened and did you know in here too that they they talk about they're rebasing some of it on dotnet core as well hey that's kind of neat isn't that fascinating uh so jellyfin is a fork of MB. The MB crew basically said, good luck with that. That was essentially their response to it. So we'll see what that means. Yeah, right. I mean, yeah.

How many people move over? Will there be a new community over at Jellyfin? Maybe, maybe. Well, all we need to do is these fork guys to actually set up a subscription model. We subscribe there and we let them see who actually had a good luck. Yeah. Yeah, possibly.

Yeah. But Wes, you also found this streamserver.org. Is that what it is? Is that what the URL is? Streamserver.org or Streama? Streama. Streama. Streamaserver.org, which is a really kind of low feature.

It's an MVP. Lightweight. Yeah, it's like a minimum viable streaming system. But it is, in fact, a video library organizer and streamer that apparently also has a Google Play app. I did also notice one feature, which I have not tried, although it was pretty easy to get running. I have not been able to make it run in a way that we could actually use it,

but it is just a war file that you can execute if you have Java, so that's easy. It says here, live sync watching. Watch with your loved ones remotely with sync for play, pause, and scrubbing. And if that is true, game changer. That's something that Wes and I have been trying to figure out because when I'm traveling, I have to stop watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine. And I've been marathoning Deep Space Nine.

Nothing makes it grumpy when you don't get your nine. And now season five is taking forever, right? So if we could do this, that would be huge. That would be huge. All right, you got to get that. You got to try that, Wes. That would be great. And I know you want to try to solve the same thing.

So Streama is the one that may also be an alternative if Kodi doesn't work for you. I don't know about that, though. So it's a Java app is what it is. It's all Java. I mean, I guess that's fine. Or.NET Core. Yeah, no, I guess that's fine. Java is cross-platform, man.

No, I know, I know, I know. It's true. It's just, I don't know. I don't know why. It just gives me pause. I shouldn't, right? I'm bad. I shouldn't. It probably makes it even easier to run it on any Linux distro and stuff like that. So I guess in a lot of ways, it's pretty good. Yeah, I already had Java installed.

All right. Well, so a little sneaky fact here, even though I already told you. I've been running Ubuntu 19.04 all day here on our production system just to give it a go off of a live USB 3. And I thought maybe we'd do a little Disco Dingo roundup. Everybody do it. Disco, disco, disco. Disco, disco, disco. Turn your love.

Turn your love. So, Disco Dingo is set to be released on February 12th, I think. No, it's the feature freeze. Feature freeze is February 21st, 2019. And the UI freeze, March 4th, 2019. And the kernel freeze, April 1st. Wow. That is a lot of specific dates. This is an article that Joey wrote for OMG Ubuntu.

And the release date is April 18th, 2019. That's right, April 18th. Look forward to it. I'm thrilled, Wes. I'm thrilled. So this is kind of fun to just sort of take a look at where it's at right now. If all goes to plan, it'll be shipping GNOME 3.32,

Linux kernel 5.0, possibly, if it's ready. If it's ready. And a bunch of other little performance tweaks to GNOME. Well, I actually shouldn't say little. In fact, there's some pretty significant performance tweaks to GNOME Shell in 1904. In fact, enough that's kind of got me a little tempted to give this a go once it's released. Not that Plasma has still been doing great, but if they shook out a lot of the performance fixes, Wes... The call of Gnome.

I can see it in your eyes. Well... You've gone mad. The area where they're doing extensive work right now is in multi-monitor performance and management and that is an area in which I am struggling right now, now that I've got that dock with three monitors. You're in a new world. It's a new multi-monitor world. Who would have thought that's what would

bring you back to Gnome? Not me. Not me. Not me. No. Is there anything that jumps out at you about the, you know, so this is a Pharonix article here that talks about some of the performance fixes. Is there any in particular in this roundup that Michael's done here that jump out at you? Okay, well, they are working on showing pending kernel live patches

via the update manager user interface. That would be nice. Yeah, because right now you don't get to see that at all. No, and live patches are kind of a nice feature that you might not get, or at least as well integrated on some other distros. Yeah, I use it on these two systems. Oh, really? Yeah, on these two on the desk here.

Yeah, that's nice, I think. Of course, you know, there's like latest packages and all the other goodies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, except for Nautilus. Except for Nautilus. packages and all the other goodies. Yeah, except for Nautilus. I have been following their Trello,

which is public, turns out, for Ubuntu 19.04. And this is where I started to get an idea of the level of fixes that are coming into Gnome Shell. I'm not positive all of this is going to be upstream. I mean, they're submitting it upstream. You never know what's actually going to get taken. I'm not, yeah, exactly. I'm not sure it's getting accepted. Important question. How much of these fixes that are being pushed for are advent of IBM acquisition?

Oh, no, I think a lot of this has been in play since Canonical switched to GNOME because a couple of the individuals, I've met them at an Ubuntu rally. And while, I mean, this was, was this April of last year? Was that April? That was April of last year. Yep. Where they were talking about how they were going to start working on fixing performance issues upstream in GNOME. And they did a lot of that recently. But 1904 seems, when I read through their Trello,

it seems like it's a huge list of them. And it just makes me wonder if maybe it's going to be time to give GNOME another go, and if maybe the Ubuntu spin of GNOME might be of particular performance. I don't know. It's just worth trying, I think. Well, I mean, and we were coming into our own, right?

I mean, it's not that long that they switched back to GNOME in the first place. So now we're kind of seeing some of the, we've lived here for a while, what do we got to fix? So I've been trying it here. It pretty much right now

looks like 18.10 theme-wise and look-wise. It's got the, you know, more updated apps. It's got the new GNOME shell including that new GNOME to-do list manager

which we were playing around with on the pre-show stream. Yeah, it looks nice. Yeah, it is nice. And you know what? It is very quick. Even for running off a usb3 thumb drive it's very quick it's very very quick so it's got that new fresh feel so it's you know you have to know what you're doing the show here today no problem yeah yeah the only thing i don't have is our highlights for the

for the shows but i suppose i can probably figure that out but yeah it's not bad and um the gnome ui itself i like some of the tweaks canonical's done i really like their dock and i don't use it I suppose I can probably figure that out. But yeah, it's not bad. And the GNOME UI itself, I like some of the tweaks Canonical's done. I really like their dock. And I don't use it a lot, you know, because I'm a Plasma user, so I haven't used their version of GNOME pretty much since they've launched it. That was pretty much when I switched to Plasma.

But it's not bad. It's actually a pretty damn good implementation. And you combine it with the new GNOME 3 settings screen, you know, that's been around for a while. I like it. It feels kind of simple. Yeah, simple and polished. Yeah, it's simple and polished. And the Thunderbolt 3 support now is also extra appreciated.

More than ever. More than ever, Wes. So, yeah, I give it the old thumbs up here on the Linux Unplugged review. I'd say they're in the right direction stability-wise. I've just been running it for the day. So I can't make like a firm like, oh, yeah, it's the right direction stability wise. I've just been running it for the day. So I can't make like a firm like, oh yeah, it's the most stable release ever. But

legitimately in the past I did have Gnome Shell Crash on me at this point. Like it didn't take more than an eight hour work day to have Gnome Shell Crash on me. And I made it that far. So that's pretty good. That is pretty good. I'm looking forward to the Disco Dingo! Gotta play it twice, you know, because it's so great. It's the first thing I thought of when they made it.

Amazing. Isn't that great? It is great. But Canonical is also making some news this week in the enterprise space. It is Cubicon. Cubicon North America is going on just down the street from us this week. And Canonical is making some noise really before the event has even opened its doors. And they've been working in the Kubernetes space since 2014.

But this year, I think they're really trying to say this is our offering. Yeah, that is right. One of those things that got people talking was micro K8s. What? Yeah, micro, Chris. Is this already a known thing, a micro K8, or is this something they've made up? As far as you know. Well, it's a new project. It's there, it's there. There's already, you know, there's already

attempts like Minikube to get a system running just for development. You don't want to play with it on one box. I asked you to set up that Kubernetes cluster weeks ago and you still haven't finished tying all the string together. That is true. That is true. Well, now with the Snap install micro K8s, that job would be done for you. Oh, I see. So That is true. Well, now, with the Snap install Micro K8s, that job would be done

for you. Oh, I see. So it's like a full, complete, ready-to-go, out-of-the-box, or out-of-the-snap Kubernetes environment. Yeah, full-featured

includes automatic updates, well-defined security capabilities, and some of Canonical's open-source add-on services, such as a container registry, storage pass-through,

and native GPGPU enablement for hardware acceleration and machine learning workflows. That's nice. Yeah, if you've got those GPGs. If you've got those GPUs, too many Gs and too many P's. If you need to compute those GPGs on those GPUs, then you're set. Oh, yeah, in the cloud.

And with this now, you can see the game they're playing is they're wrapping it up with that Ubuntu Advantage support as well. So now they're making this an offering for their enterprises and Ubuntu Advantage subscription. So if you need canonical support and taking care of managing all of this. And yeah, a big thing about that too is that you can get that support for

clusters you've built with KubeAdmin. And so if you already just built your own cluster and then you want canonicals help managing it, you don't have to have it all set up, customized by them to get started with that. So that's a big selling point. That's what a hungry company does. Hungry in a good way.

Doug, we know this will be painful. Probably you've done some things wrong that we would have never done, but we want your business and we want to help. Yeah, and that is a way Canonical, isn't that a great example of how Canonical can be competitive in a way that IBM can't? They'll come in and charge you to fix it, but what IBM wants is you do it to the standard.

That's what Red Hat wants, too, is you do it to their standard. And if you deviate from the standard, it may not be a supported configuration. And what Canonical is implicitly saying here is, we'll bail you out. And that cluster F that you've built, we'll manage it for you and fix it up. And that's a hungry play, and I like it. They were also talking about some new partnerships with people like Dell EMC and Supermicro. So those are both big names in big server business.

So they are really trying to get their name out there in that space, which has been kind of dominated by Red Hat, at least in the Kubernetes area. Yeah, it has. I kind of found out a really interesting tidbit. Do you know why it's called K8s? You probably do. I only least in the Kubernetes area. Yeah, it has. I kind of found out a really interesting tidbit. Do you know why it's called K8s? You probably do. I only found out the other day. It's because they took eight letters out of the middle

of Kubernetes. Okay, that's what it is. I could have sworn that when we were we did an episode for TechSnap and I did a ton of research and I think I've unlearned a lot of the things I learned from that episode because that was in there. That's funny. That's good. I don't think also, it's no small achievement

here that you can now get a as they call it a micro Kubernetes setup with a snap install command. That is a pretty good showcase of what snaps can offer in the enterprise. You can take this really complicated system and you can boil

it down to a single snap command. Oh, and by the way, it's also going to get updated. Yeah, right. And you can go poke at it, see what's in there, go take a look at the YAML file, see how it's put together, play with it yourself. Ah, well, that'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think that's a space they can be pretty competitive in.

And just kind of anecdotally today, I think it was Badger that mentioned when he got in here that DigitalOcean has taken their Kubernetes support out of beta and made it like an official thing. So you could have Ubuntu boxes on-premises, you could have Ubuntu boxes on different cloud providers, and you're managing all from one Kubernetes system. Not to sound too much like you six weeks ago before you got bought out, but I span up a Kubernetes cluster on DO in maybe three minutes. That's pretty nice. And you only pay for the app nodes. You don't pay for the workers or anything.

So it's kind of like the GKS or the EKS model, ECS model, sorry. Rumor on the street has it you can still get $100 credit if you go to do.co slash LNL. That's the rumor. I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not,

but if you still want to try out Kubernetes, if you want to go try out, you know what, because the thing is we're both still Kubernetes, if you want to go try out... You know what? Because the thing is, we're both still users. Were you not using DigitalOcean this weekend? This weekend? I spun up a high CPU droplet last night. Oh, last night. That's when it was, yeah. A high CPU

droplet, huh? What were you doing? Video encoding? Video encoding, weren't you? You were doing something with video. High CPU? No, math? You were doing something with math. You were doing math-y stuff? He's a math nerd, guys. He doesn't talk about it much on air, but Wes is a math nerd. There was doing something with video. Maybe a little bit. High CPU? No, math? You're doing something with math. Yeah, that's true. You're doing math-y stuff? He's a math nerd, guys. He doesn't talk about it much on air, but Wes is a math nerd. There's a lot going on.

Well, yeah, but this isn't a spiel. Oh, you don't want to say. You want to tell me off air. Oh, okay. Oh, I like that even better. All right. Well, this next story is rather interesting. Wouldn't this be a cool feature to come to the x86 side of the house?

But for right now, and probably forever, this is a feature coming to the ARM side of Linux, and it's a pretty cool one. It's energy-aware scheduling for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies. Energy-aware scheduling is designed to take into account information from the ARM energy model framework. So you can make better scheduling decisions based upon the topology of the CPU cores and the performance and power characteristics, right? Because you might have this sort of arm board that's put together with all kinds of different components and that can vary widely depending on is this for a smart fridge, right? Or is it for your NVIDIA Shield device?

And those are pretty different. That's nice. And the work for supporting energy aware scheduling in the mainline kernel has been in the works for months. And you're not going to be surprised when you learn that Google's Android kernel team has already been supporting this technology in their fork. Of course. But this, you know, getting this in the mainline means one less thing that's in the Android kernel only. So that's kind of nice.

Yeah, and if you look at some of the patchwork, the churn of all the work going on here, it's starting to settle down. Hopefully that means it won't be much longer until we say it's in the mainline. An energy-aware scheduler sounds pretty neat. Pretty, pretty neat. I think that'd be a good addition. Go down the road a few years, some of us might be rocking some Linux ARM laptop of some form,

and you could have just fantastic battery life with something like that. That could be really cool. Unless systemd udev is eating 100% of your CPU, then your battery life's going to be horrible regardless of your CPU architecture. And that's what was happening to me last week. Talked about it on the show. Short version is after I got this Thunderbolt 3 dock with a GPU, and I installed the NVIDIA drivers, and then disconnected my system and booted it without the dock connected, systemd udev went crazy,

eating up 100% of one of my cores, constantly trying to find the NVIDIA adapter, connect and authorize it, and initialize the driver. And then when that would fail because the hardware didn't exist because the dock was disconnected, it would freak out and use 100% of my CPU. And I discovered I could stop and start UDEV manually

and essentially solve this, but I'd have to do it per boot when I'm not connected. Oh, that's pretty annoying. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. But Mike wrote in with a systemd UDEV fix. What's he doing here, Wes? What's he essentially accomplished with this? I mean, he's basically doing what you were doing

on an offhand manner, making it happen for you at boot time. So you install the new service, and then all that service is doing is stopping all the various UDEV things and the sockets that they listen on, starting it back up. And then the rest of his article is telling you

just how to get that all enabled so that every time you boot up, that'll happen automatically. That's not a bad workaround. I mean, it's a hack, yeah. It's unfortunate that Udev won't figure it out for itself. But what I like about it is I don't have to uninstall the NVIDIA driver. But my question would be, what happens when I am connected to the dock?

Don't I want that process to work? Well, you are restarting it, so I say you should do some research and find out. And report back to us here next week. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.

I will. I will. I'll try to figure that out. All right, well, before we get into more, like our WireGuard success story, I'm very excited

about WireGuard now. We've been talking about it in the theory sense for a while, and this travel week was our opportunity to actually put it in production, and it freaking worked. But a little housekeeping before we go any further in the show. A couple things we need to let you know about. This is your chance, Wes, to get some progress on that keyboardio. First of all, if you want to get a hold of us, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, please go there.

Sign us in your app picks. I'm going to try to do more of those in every episode. And I've got my own feeds, of course, but if there's a command line app that you've been loving, oh, we can't say that. That's command line Lervis. If there is a command line app that you find to be quite swell. Something you're fond of, you think about at night

when you're falling asleep. No, okay. That's a whole other thing, Wes. But at night when you're falling asleep. No, okay. That's a whole other thing, Wes. But maybe. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Also, just kind of fun, a little heads up. Wes and I, at the end of this week, are heading to System76 to tour their factory in Denver, Colorado, and sniff out the Thelio hardware and just get a sense for what kind of scale of an operation they got over there.

So I'm really looking forward to that. I know. Exciting. Wes and I, after just getting to hang out in Texas, are going to get to go hang out in Denver. They are flying us out there as well as a bunch of other media, and they're doing a tour. And I think I've been talking to them about this for three months now, about doing this,

and just trying to really, I mean, I've been a bit skeptical. And they know that. And that's actually kind of what I respect about them willing to do this, is I've been pretty skeptical about Pop! OS. I mean, I'm still reserving judgment. I want to give it like three. Time to bake, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I want to give it like three or so years to really fully realize. But, you know, I've been pretty skeptical about Pop OS. I'm kind of skeptical about a small operation opening up a U.S. manufacturing plant in Denver. I mean, we're not talking like... Denver's hard. We're not talking Arizona or West Texas, where land, where they basically are paying you to take the land. We're talking about Denver, right? So I've been a little skeptical. And I feel like they're so important to take the land. We're talking about Denver, right? So I've been a little skeptical.

And I feel like they're so important to the Linux community. There was a conversation at Linux Academy. Like, we want to add another Linux hardware vendor. Who should we add? And the first name that came into the list was System76. And I want to be able to say with confidence, do it.

So this is hopefully what we're going to find out. So we're going there at the end of the week. They're going to give us the tour, and then we'll be back next week, and we'll report what we found. I think, nonetheless, we're going to have a great time. I know that's going to happen. I know we're going to have a great time.

So System76, props to them for being willing to bring a critic out there at times. I just try to be honest, because you guys also know I've been a 10-year customer, well, more than that now. So still got three System76 rigs. Yeah, I mean, right. I think that's probably an important perspective of... Yeah.

I'm a concerned long-term customer. ...to tell you guys about it. But also, yeah, we want to buy some of these rigs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that should be good. We'll have a report next week when we get back. And we also have the results of our automation naming system.

We've been building a system behind the scenes. We talked about it over the last few episodes. I don't know actually when, but we have talked about it over a few episodes. And it's pretty fun because it's not only solving some problems here at Jupyter Broadcasting, but it's given us an opportunity

to think about releasing our own open source project. And that has been the most fun. And when all is said and done, that is our goal, is to release something that other podcasters can utilize to automate production, increase quality and accuracy, and maybe even eventually a lot more. I don't want to commit yet, but we have some really great long-term plans. And so we asked you guys, what should we name this tool?

This is a tool that we're going to be running all of our shows through. It'll be like a verb. Make sure you run it through XYZ because it's got to get posted today. Or did that go through XYZ? And we asked you guys. We put it all out there. And we had a bunch of really great suggestions. We got a decent sample size, even for not plugging it too much, 272 votes.

Nice. I'll take it. You'd be surprised. That actually does end up being decently representative. It doesn't seem like it would be for tens of thousands of downloads, but it actually, experience tells me it does. So one of the submissions with 8% of the votes was Jupiter Podcaster. That's not bad.

Jpublish was another popular one, also at 8%. Jupitercaster, 11% of the votes. Podpusher, which is very close to what Wimpy and Popy have, came in at 11% of the votes. Pod Pusher, which is very close to what Wimpy and Popy have, came in at 11% of the votes. But the number two suggestion, which is pretty good, which you could, you know, if you're thinking about this as an open source project, this might be the better name of the, but it's not the one that the people decided.

But I like it. It's called Autopod. It's not bad. Autopod. It almost sounds like a podcast app on a phone though you know like a client assemble yeah running through autopod sounds to me one of those sorry tasker auto tools the guy names everything literally auto something yeah true right there's that danger yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was there though. That was number two. But with 26%, 72 votes,

26% of the vote, and I think we swung it. I'm going to, I'll own that. But it's Casta Blasta. Casta Blasta, which is a callback to the very first podcast that myself, Brian, and John ever did before we even formed a network. We did a show called Casta Blasta together, which was really where we learned how to record our audio, edit, and all that stuff.

Just starting out. Yeah. And when we launched Linux Action Show and Radio Revolver and other shows, Castablasta was still on the air at that time. So it ran for many years of our origin. So I think it's kind of fun now that we are part of Linux Academy and we've gone through all of these evolutions over the years and we're building a system that is really kind of a serious professional system, right? There's some, I don't know, there's something sweet about calling it Casta Blast,

which is when we were so raw and amateur and just at beginning and saying really stupid stuff into microphones that today you could not say into a microphone. No, no. You would not say those things. And we said those things. And some other things.

Yeah, it was good stuff. It was really good. And so I think it's sort of fitting and it's like you're blasting it out there too so we're going to call it Castablasta thank you everyone

who did vote and look for more about the Castablasta project very soon we have we've taken a page from Microsoft's book where they

like they call the surface three different things now you know so we're I guess that's the hip thing to do you sound a bit like Mark Wahlberg saying that Castablasta Castablasta yeah yeah Castablasta that's the hip thing to do. You sound a bit like Mark Wahlberg saying that,

cast your blaster. Cast a blaster. Yeah, yeah, cast a blaster. That's how he used to say it, is cast a blaster. You put it through the blaster. And then last bit of housekeeping before we move on with the show is LinuxFest Northwest. Last but absolutely not least, April 26th through the 28th,

2019 at the Bellingham Technical College. If you're international or you're around the States, you fly into SeaTac, you can get shuttles up there. There are car pools that are forming and Bellingham is beautiful. The Pacific Northwest is gorgeous. And the Technical College is one of the better campuses I've ever attended an event on. Been to a few of these now. And the great thing about the Technical College is that it's that same place every single year. And this is the 20th year of LinuxFest Northwest.

So it's a well-oiled machine. They figured out all the issues you run into the first or second time you're there. We know where our booth is. You know where our booth is. I know right where it is. You know right where it's at, right? And as does anyone else who's been there

in the past however many years. It's so nice. And you know what rooms to go to and you know where the food's going to be at. And because of that, the lug that puts on the blog that puts this on, the Bellingham Linux Users Group that puts this on, can focus on all of the other stuff. You know, the content, the talks, the great organizations they have. That's so huge.

And this is their 20th year. They're doing a theme, past, present, and future. We're going to be there. Joe's flying in. We're going to try to bring as much of the crew in as we can. We've got to remember to talk to System76 about doing a party. Oh, yes. I'm going to be bringing Lady Jupes, parking her

in the parking lot, doing barbecue, grilling. Not barbecuing. Sorry, Noah. Grilling for everybody. If you'll let me put my meat in your mouth, you can come there and eat my meat. Well, I'm in. All right. Very good. Very good.

So LinuxFestNorthwest.org if you want to check that out and if you're interested in going. I just say this because I still need to submit talks. I bet you do too. We both need to submit our talks. I'm thinking about doing a talk about Castablasta. So who can end Castablasta separately possibly? Or we could do a combo talk. So we should talk about that. Let's talk about thatablasta. So, who can end Castablasta separately, possibly? Or we could do a combo talk, so we should talk about that. Yeah, let's talk about that. And then...

Audio routing on Linux, you could definitely teach us a thing or two on that. Oh, we totally could do, we could do our Jack segment as a talk. Why not? Oh, man. Because, you know, there's people there, I already know, there's going to be people like, how to podcast on Linux. There's always like two presenters that do that, and I'm always like, oh, son. Oh, child. You know? Like, I'm always like, oh son. Oh child. You know?

I'm always like, oh, yes, how you doing? And I don't mean to be demeaning, but it's always like no, that's not going to work. That could have a good Q&A section too. It'll be so much fun. Anyways, what I'm getting at is I'm hoping that if we can get enough talks together,

including from somebody that you guys haven't heard of yet and from the people that you know about on air, maybe we could have a whole dedicated room at LinuxFest Northwest that's just the

Jupyter Broadcasting room. So, that'd be really cool. Just another reason that this is the year to go if you've been thinking about it. Giving talks all day, having a booth, live streaming,

doing live Linux action news. Barbecues, maybe? Barbecue, and I mean, it's our big get-together. I know it's a big ask to travel that far, but if you can make it. And the side benefit is, you know, even if you end up hating Linux Fest Northwest,

which you won't. You won't, no. Bellingham's great. The Pacific Northwest is lovely. So just, you know, you can go on a surprise little summer vacation. Yeah. Early summer.

Yeah, you know, and come see everybody. That's always part of the fun is like, there's a whole bunch of people there that love talking about what you're interested in. And that's just really rewarding. Anyways, that's all the housekeeping for this week. So let's move on to our WireGuard in production success story. So we set up here at the studio on my workstation. I thought, well, just let's give it a go. It was one of those projects where I'm like, I'll just, I'll just see how hard this is and how far I can

get. And then I got all the way and I'm like oh, well, now I've just put this in production on my workstation. Oops. But I'll circle back to that. So WireGuard is a VPN that is built. Well, is it mainline now? It is mainline now, right, in the Linux kernel. It is now mainline, I believe, in the Linux kernel. I don't know if it's in kernel 4.15 because you need a DKMS.

You have to build a DKMS module to actually get it to work in 1804. But I set it up on an 1804 workstation. There's PPAs available, and it just builds super quick, and it's installed immediately. And what you essentially get is the ability to start a new virtual interface, in a sense. It looks like another network interface on your Linux box. And you interact with it like you would any other interface. You can assign it an IP address. You can use IP tables to route traffic.

It is like you have another network card in your box. You create it with IP link and then make a new one and just say type WireGuard. Yeah, and then it's up to the kernel to figure out what to do with traffic that's sent and received to this new interface. And that's where WireGuard comes in. And

it's so great for somebody like me because I know how to work with network interfaces and IP tables and all of that. So within minutes, I had it up and installed. And then it was like, okay, well, now that I have an interface, I need to route traffic. So I'm going to need to set up some IP tables rules to route that traffic.

And it was just obvious. It was just obvious what the next step is. Yeah, I mean, that wasn't the hardest part at all for you. No, no, really. No, it wasn't. The hardest part was modifying our microtech router OS firewall. That's where I got hung up. Go figure.

But no, what I expected to be the hard part was the fact that because I'm apparently a masochist, I wanted to connect to the WireGuard VPN running on my Ubuntu box from an iPad. Well, of course you do. I know. iOS. I'll tell you why.

So we have the Behringer X32 mixer, and it's got a Linux-powered. Yeah, it runs Linux. Our mixer runs Linux. And it's got a really awesome set of remote control capabilities, so much so that even the dials and sliders on this mixer are motorized. So if in software I pull down on a pot line, which is what these are called, the actual physical slider in the studio moves.

the actual physical slider in the studio moves. And they have a touch app for the iPad that happens to fit the exact amount of channels that we use on the screen with real-time levels, individual channel control. And if I slide or mute or do anything on that iPad, it's physically represented in studio. Oh, yeah, it's wild. It just moves. Which is great because when you're here sitting in the seat that I normally sit in

and you're sitting in front of the mixer and I'm in Texas, you can actually see me moving sliders. And you can see me moving them both ways. It's so, so great. It's really nice. So this is why I wanted to be able to do a WireGuard VPN from the iPad so I could have touch control of our mixer when I'm remote and I could see everybody's levels, the mumble room, Wes's, mine, remote hosts, everything. But iOS is a son

of a bitch. You can't just go to the app store and install a WireGuard app. That's not a thing. That's not how it, that's not how- Yeah, what do you think this is, Android? Yeah, what do you get, a sideload? You can go screw yourself if you want to sideload. So the way you have to do it is you have to join the test flight beta for WireGuard. And there's only a limited amount of slots. But I will have a link in the show notes if this is something you're interested in.

Get in early. LinuxUnplugged.com slash 279. They have been granted a networking stack privilege extension by Apple where they're able to do a network-level VPN connection. So it is a true kernel-level VPN from the iOS device to my WireGuard system. And the traffic is then routed to my WireGuard box, and my iPad is essentially on the LAN.

And I am completely capable of controlling the X32 mixer it's just amazing it was I mean it was really slick when we were playing with it in the studio because you just

I mean we just hit like you tap a button you tap a button start it up yeah and then it's live and it was it's so fast too

yeah it's so fast like the connection is instant and then you wouldn't even know you're going over there's like for what I've done I've seen very little penalty

for the VPN overhead. It's pretty amazing. And I think the entire thing took a 30-minute investment. You know, I had to ask you a couple things because you had done it before, so I bounced a couple ideas off you when I was...

Oh, it was the remote connection stuff I was troubleshooting, yeah. And once we got that solved with Wes's help, it was just boom, done. Wes got router OS into submission and we were good. There's, there's areas of improvement, I think. I would like to explore using it for persistent connections between say the studio in Texas or the studio in Texas and the RV, like maybe a way to like do sort of like kind of, Oh, not a mesh, but almost like a tink style VPN. I don't know.

Yeah. But like do like a wire guard connection from the RV to the system in Texas and from the system in Texas to the studio and from the studio to RV and you know, like do a complete, I don't know. That's something for the future I want to play with. Also, another thing that should probably happen is I should probably move it off of my workstation in my office. Maybe pick something a little more permanent. Yeah, I was like, but where? Like, I could throw it up in a VM on the FreeNAS box, possibly. Oh, yeah, that could work. We also have that dedicated KVM system running CentOS, but it's really old. It's like when Bitcoin was first released old. That's how old it is. That's how I measure it. Okay, well maybe the workstation's looking better.

Better and better. And you were playing with it off of a droplet too, right? Oh yeah, it works great. The connection establishes so damn fast that I literally do a ping every time just to make sure it's working because I'm like, how can it connect that fast? I have to go

ping the other machine on the other end just to make sure. No working because I'm like, how can it connect that fast? I have to go ping the other machine on the other end just to make sure. No way, it's possible. I was really impressed with it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the nice features about it, right, is the way it doesn't have this kind of older style, really complicated persistent connection to do. It's smart enough to just pick up when you've got a new one, it picks up and realizes, oh, hey, you're talking to me.

The public key matches. Are you in my allowed IP set? Yes. All right, there you go my allowed IP set? Yes. All right. There you go. Connection made. Yeah. So if you feel like this, I guess it doesn't even, there's so many uses for VPNs these days.

I wouldn't even put it in any particular box. But what was the, was it NordVPN that did a commercial? I think there's several now, but yeah. Okay. So it is something, WireGuard is something that the commercial VPN providers are starting to introduce. So you could play with it that way too if you just wanted to mess around with the client side of it.

But I got to say, WireGuard, the WireGuard hype is real and it's pretty great. And it's pretty easy to get running on a current released version of a Linux distro. You don't have to wait for it to show up baked into the kernel. It's super simple. How did you guys find that compared to Tink VPN to set up?

It's both simpler and slightly more complicated. There's a couple things to do in terms of exchanging keys that it's closer to SSH and Tink is, I guess Tink is about the same. Does Tink have any GUI front end to set it up? There might be some. I have not used that. Because that's an area of WireGuard.

I mean, if there was like a network manager front end to WireGuard, that would be really great. I guess I'd have to say it's simpler because it has similar stuff around some of the key management. Which one? WireGuard. But then you don't have to use the actual, you know, there's no program to run.

You just install the module and then create the interface. That is really nice. It's system level. It's just baked in. Now, you don't get Tink's magic of, you know, magically making a mesh and connecting peers and all that stuff. But it's kind of, so in that sense,

it's a little more complicated or it's a lower level primitive that you could build more elaborate networks with. I wonder if there could be a, like a hosted key sharing system. Like could Keybase, for example, could,

could Keybase, could you add, could, could they, could there be like a front end, a wire guard key exchanging that would make that a little easier? Cause it's got these, it's,

I like this key system. I think that's a good way to do it. But exchanging keys is, it's going to be like over email or chat. And those are vulnerable channels of communication. So it would be nice if there was a Keybase.io kind of way to... Would HashiCorp Vault work, maybe? I don't know, maybe.

Maybe. That's a good question. That would be interesting. Either way, very happy with WireGuard. Yeah, I mean, I have a Tink system set up now that I'll, part of it is a backbone from my parents' networks, my home network that I use so I can get in and troubleshoot stuff for them, whatever. What do you think? You're going to replace that with WireGuard? I think so. Really? No, why?

Why not stick with Tink? You know, I wanted to do some maintenance in that system anyway and while I've been enjoying Tink, I just don't have that, I don't have a big enough mesh where I really need that sort of, you know, Tink is great for creating one whole new overlay network that you want on top of everything, but I have more security domains than I want.

I don't want one big one, it turns out. And I think WireGuard will be a very low-maintenance backbone VPN connection. Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Which, to be fair, Tink has too. I don't ever have to fuss with it, and it does just work. But I also see myself using WireGuard more often, so should I need to do any troubleshooting,

it'll be fresh in my mind. Yeah, and it seems like the way of the future. Way of the future. Way of the future. I really liked it. And it's going to be way faster than a lot of the competitors. And if Apple is allowing it on test flight, then there's a good chance they're going to allow it in the App Store,

and so there's a really good chance that we're going to have pretty good mobile OS support for WireGuard. And I think that's really, really important. And the fact that it's so fast means that it's not a big deal for mobile travelers to just tap it on and go. And you've already got stuff like

a Go version, various Userland versions. I heard there was talk about maybe a FreeBSD kernel version sometime down the road. No way, really? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. They already have one in ports for the user land stuff too. So it's like, you know, the availability is really climbing.

Yeah. Well, how about we switch gears and talk about some app picks? What? Love the app picks. App picks. Now, I've been on a really slow decline with Reddit. Like, it's been really since, I don't know, two years, three years. I can't even remember. Like's been really since, I don't know, two years, three years. I can't even remember.

It's just, I don't know, slowly and slowly I use Reddit less and less. And I find myself using smaller and smaller subreddits. So the subreddits that I enjoy the most are the really small ones with less than a thousand. A really focused community. There's not a lot

of room for random trolls to come invade. Yeah. When you get above 5,000, I just, I don't know, it starts to turn toxic, I feel like. But one way that I have been, and it's just a visual differentiator, but one way that I have been processing Reddit a lot easier is on the terminal. And I've been using an app that's likely in the repo. I thought you were going to say, I mean, just based on this, you know,

an iPad Pro application that was the best way to browse Reddit. No, man, I don't like the Reddit mobile app. And I also really freaking hate that when I go to Reddit on the web on a mobile device, they're like taking up a solid fourth of the screen. It's huge, yeah. It's very annoying. A third of the screen, really. It's a third of the screen. Almost half of the screen. It's huge, yeah. It's very annoying. A third of the screen, really. It's a third of the screen.

Almost half of the screen. They're taking up... The full screen is taking up... They're taking up your entire screen. And then there's that annoying nag they've put in lately, which is, do you want to use our mobile app?

Yes, I'm talking about that. No, no, no, no, I don't. That's why I'm not using it. Go away. That is what I'm talking about. That thing that takes up basically half the screen. Three quarters, isn't it? It's so annoying. It takes up the whole screen, Wes thing that takes up basically half the screen. Three quarters.

It's so annoying. It takes up the whole screen, Wes. Come on. Yeah, full screen, full screen, full screen. It's got to go. In the meantime, though, if you're on a Linux box, see if you have RTV in your repo. RTV is a terminal user interface for Reddit that allows logging into your Reddit account

so you get your subreddits. I do. I do have it in my repo. You do. You do. Yeah. And you can use external tools like it will launch your web browser or it can launch, you know, like a YouTube player.

It's just a simple – oh, it's Python. It's a Python application. I thought it was something – it's a Python application. It's just a simple Python application. Browse Reddit. It has clipboard support. You can open media links in your preferred media player. It's got easy navigation through the front page.

You can jump to your fav subreddits. You can open up specific user pages if you want to, like, go get creepy on a user. You can browse multi-Reddits. It's got support for multi-Reddits. Nice. Okay. And search. And you can do it all from the command line.

You've got support from multi-reddits. Nice, okay. And search. And you can do it all from the command line. Something about seeing Reddit on the terminal makes it way more palatable for me. Okay, that was pretty easy. Now I'm browsing R and Linux from the command line. Isn't that great?

Yeah, if you're on Ubuntu, it's in the repo already. It's on a lot of repos, actually. I think it's in Fedora's, too. So that's pick number one this week. Now, pick number two. Pick number two was to replace functionality on a Mac. The Mac, if you ever dip your toe into the Mac, like we've got, you know,

Final Cut on the Mac here that we used to use, thankfully. Thankfully, that's no longer the thing. And the occasional Photoshop file. So, you know, I dabble from time to time. Haven't had to for a while. But one of the things that I noticed about the Mac is they got all these little one-off applications like we have on Linux for everything.

But they're all like pay-for applications. Of course. They're all like $5, $10. They got that healthy app store, Chris. Yeah, they sure do. Well, actually, it's struggling, but they still like to charge for applications. They're all like $5, $10. They do have that healthy app store, Chris. Yeah, they sure do. Well, actually, it's struggling, but they still like to charge for everything. But on the Linux side,

a lot of this stuff is free. It's something we don't talk a lot about, maybe because we want people to make money and we want them to be able to make money making software. That's a thing we all want. But there's so much shit that you get for free besides just the desktop. There's so much stuff. And, and some of this stuff on the Mac users have no idea about, and this is one of them you can really rub in their face because this is hard to get on the Mac. That's decent quality. It isn't at least 20 bucks and you may have heard of

it, but I got to tell you about it. It's called sound converter and it's perfect for my workflow and sound converter is exactly what it sounds like. It's an easy wayverter, and it's perfect for my workflow. And Sound Converter is exactly what it sounds like. It's an easy way to set up a preset. You drop some files in there, you hit go, and it converts them all to that, which, as Wes probably has already guessed, is great for our production flow here because we can record in a multi-track editor in huge WAV files, and then I can drop all these WAV files in Sound Converter. It spits them out as monoflac files and sends them off to Joe. Boom. Done. And it's the same thing like if you want to convert a whole bunch of stuff to Og Vorbis or MP3,

you just drop them all in here and you hit go. It saves you from writing out this whole complicated command line syntax. And the batch support sounds pretty nice there. And it has the benefit of giving you a GUI to expose all of the options you might possibly use, which is always really nice when you're getting started with conversion of media. You don't even know always what you can do. And this has the option of doing resample

or like in my case, dropping it to mono. It has the option of transcoding to a different format if it can or just copying it if it's going to the same format. I like that Opus is a handy default input right there. Yeah, and it basically supports everything. I'm sure it's just using FFmpeg and a bunch of other great stuff under the hood, but honey badger over here, I don't care. This is just a great way to use it because I can go from the file manager,

boom, I hit start, it puts it right in the directory I want, that syncs up to Joe, and I'm done. And it's just so nice because there was an application on the Mac that used to do that, and it was legitimately like $20. And I just see that kind of stuff, and I'm just overwhelmingly appreciative of how enabling open source software can be for people that don't have immaculate, huge, ginormous, you know, Uncle Scrooge-sized budgets. I think that's a really good point, right?

Because sometimes we're talking from the perspective of professionals or business or just high-end people at home, and that's very different from sort of the baseline. What should you be able to do with a computer for free? You just, if you just install this, you get that. And it's, because there's so many options, it's easy to forget how valuable that is.

And then, but when I switched over to the Mac and I'm like, I mean, this is something I can do for free. You're telling me I got to spend 20 bucks. Like this is ridiculous. And I was incensed by it. And then it's like, I have lost that appreciation for just how much comes with Linux that is just totally free besides the desktop itself. And I feel like the conversation is always around the value of the desktop. But it's really, it's the entire ecosystem, right? It's the applications. It's the support. It's all of it that's free.

And that's huge. So, and this is just one of those great applications. You can get it. We'll have a link in the show notes. Linuxunplugged.com slash 279. And go there and get links to everything we talked about. There's also the contact page there. If you would like to send us some of your feedback. We have the subscribe link there if you want to get this show every single week, and we encourage that.

Just around the corner is our predictions episode and our roundup and look back and our future casting is what I'm going to call it. If we had a magic wand, if we could just make something happen, what would that be? Not constrained by the sad bounds of reality. No, no, no. And of course, it's a great opportunity for you to get involved in that virtual lug. Give us your predictions and all of that. So we'll do one the day after Christmas,

Wednesday the 26th. Escape your family. You're tired of visiting with them. Come hang out with us. You got a hangover? Just sit in your chair and chat in our mumble room in Futurecast. Eggnog is welcome and allowed. And then the day after New Year's. We'll have a show then, too, and you can make your predictions.

Get it on the record. And I have been keeping a list of predictions and checking it twice, and I'm feeling really good about my predictions this year. I think it's my best year ever of predictions. So you better get started, Mr. Payne. Oh, boy, don't tell. This is tough. Go get more, Wes. So you better get started. Oh boy. Okay. This is, this is tough. Go get more Wes over

at techsnap.systems. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. The Unplugged Show. There we go, $2.79 in the can. Let's go pick our title. And Mr. Payne, without further ado.

How's that keyboard over there? Uh-oh. It's not quite in flames. Yeah, it doesn't look like it's on fire right now. We're having a little bit of a compilation error that I'm working through right now. All right, well, you got a post show. But there's a lot of C++ here to go through. I feel like you do well under pressure.

You'll get this. All right, we'll check back in with Wes Payne and how he's doing on getting his keyboardio on fire. We have to also pick our titles, so we still have some housekeeping to get to. Thank you, Mumbleroom. Always enjoy having you guys. Wire Guardians of the Galaxy. That is good. Yeah?

Yeah, I agree. Wow. Yeah. What does that have to do with anything? Where did that come from? Wire Guard? Oh, Wire Guard. I see.

Ah, I see. Come on. Oh, I see. You just heard the galaxy. I did, yeah. Dar, are you on the Dex doc again this week? Yes, I see. Come on. Oh, I see. You just heard the Galaxy. I did, yeah. Dar, are you on the Dex doc again this week? Yes, I am. You maniac.

You maniac. Well, I am doing a TOR experiment, so yeah. I'm also using the IconX headphones, so. Ah. I do. I also like Embarrassing, Embarrassing. That's pretty good. Wire Guardians of the Galaxy, those are really great.

Man, those are some good ones. MBR-ising is also pretty good. It's hard to say, though. Micro K8s on Ubuntu. I no longer MBU. Oh. I like you. I no longer MBU.

This is the good one. Oh, does anybody, okay. All right, so does anybody have any travel hacks for me? Doing a lot of travel these days. You guys have any tips to make travel easier? Have you got one of those little, what's it called? I've got this on my desk here. It's a little travel router, smart router,

and it runs OpenWRT or something, and it connects to hotel Wi-Fi, so you do the captive portal once and then all your devices are magic like a Chromecast just works it's great I have been thinking more and more about that because I could also wire guard from that right so that could establish a wire guard connection back to the studio yeah and that could be extremely useful and I could just route the 192 network over there. So I used it in the summer when I was over to get BBC iPlayer

in America. So I just VPN back to England using that little box. Is it a GLI-Net one? Yes, I have the GLMT300N. GLI-Net stuff is great. Lens, OpenWrt

right out of the box. They don't do too much. They do have their own custom interface, but that's not too bad. You should throw a link. I have like three of them. Link it up. Put it in the chatroom. So does OpenWrt have capacity for connecting to MiFis too? And what about the double NAT issue, Badger?

Do you have issues with double NAT when you do this? It will repeat Wi-Fi just fine. And double NAT, I don't know because I'm only ever going outbound because I'm usually where the thing is. So I haven't tried. I'm worried about NAT too much. Sorry. I got to check this out. We got to link this up because this could be nice. The other thing that we were playing with is a little project called Iodine. And this has a lot of potential. Iodine allows you to, and correct me if I'm wrong,

tunnel TCP traffic over DNS. Yep. Try out SSH Shuttle for that. It's much easier to set up. It just works over SSH. I'll look into this too, SSH Shuttle for that. It's much easier to set up. It just works over SSH. I'll look into this too. SSH Shuttle. But the nice thing about Iodine is it has...

DNS has to work for a lot of these captive portals to work. So if you're on a network that has a captive portal, in order for the page to load, DNS is likely working. And so you can exploit that to get access to the internet without having to accept the captive portal, which I think has a lot of potential.

It is not super fast. No, it's like you can hold for maybe like 200 kilobits per second or something. Yeah, it's straight up. Is it shuttle with two S's or is it? Yeah. I just dropped a link into IRC for you. Okay. All right. All right. All right. This is happening.

We're getting down on all of this. I'll see you for you. Okay. All right. All right. All right. This is happening. We're getting down on all of this.

So iodine has the potential to keep me connected in situations, maybe like when I'm in the air, that I normally couldn't be connected. For text messaging and email and IRC and Slack and Telegram. Not live streaming. No. Not for Netflix or anything like that. I did see somebody trying to watch Netflix on the airplane on the flight back. Oh, really? How did that go for them? Because I phone those connections to vary a lot. I don't, I didn't watch closely. You download, man. That's why Netflix on

mobile devices allows you to download content before you travel. Maybe they downloaded. That might be it. Maybe they downloaded. Yeah. So S Shuttle, is that what I'm looking for here? Yeah, this looks... SSH Shuttle. Yeah, S Shuttle, I suppose it is. I've just put some aliases in the IRC for you too, so it puts the PID file

up so you can run it as a daemon in the background. Oh, very nice. Very nice. Yeah. Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN, forwards over SSH, doesn't require admin, supports DNS tunneling. That's great. I've used it for just the regular stuff,

but I didn't know it had the DNS component. DNS tunneling could be pretty great. It's in the repo too. So it's a pretty low barrier of entry here. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. I think this is also worth checking out. Thank you, sir. That's a good travel hack. Yeah, so that's the kind of stuff I'm entry here. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. I think this is also worth checking out. Thank you, sir. That's a good travel hack.

Yeah, so that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I like this stuff. I use it to get around corporate firewalls. So your mileage, because you can put SSH on port 443 and then use corkscrew to tunnel your SSH through on port 443. So most proxies can't tell the difference between that and SSH traffic. Right. Yeah. And the thing about DNS tunneling

is they can't shut down DNS or else that breaks a lot of stuff, so they're kind of stuck. DNS is sort of essential for all this to work. So that's what's great about being able to tunnel over DNS is sort of the gotcha maneuver. Well, I like that. Thank you. I'll take a look into all of that.

If anybody else has any travel tips, travel hack tips. Yeah, we can all get by better together. Yeah, yeah. At Chris Elias. Oh, Badger, it looks like J6 is saying in the chat room that there's actually a system disservice for S Shuttle 2. So that could be the way to go. Yeah, I can imagine there is.

All right, Mr. Payne. It's the last check-in of the show. How we doing over there? How is the keyboardio treating you? Okay, well, I was able to build the clean firmware for the keyboard. Okay. Now I haven't tested it yet, so we can do that. Oh, really?

So you rebuilt the entire firmware? Yes. Oh my goodness. And you're about to deploy it to the keyboard? Well, we certainly, I mean, that's the next step. Now it doesn't have the plugin modifications. Oh. That's going to be the, that'll be the trick after this. Assuming, assuming this works.

All right, let's do it. So let's, let's send that new interface over. So this firmware, by the way, so the interface is USB-C, but the keyboards themselves are actually in two pieces. Combined together, they look like butterfly wings. And they're connected with what seems to be an Ethernet cable between the two different keyboards. Wes Payne plugging it in right now,

getting ready to deploy the new Keyboardio firmware. Yeah, let's see here. Custom firmware for a custom keyboard with beautiful mechanical key switches, a nice maple wood enclosure, and Linux firmware inside the hardware. Alright, Wes. Alright.

I mean, it's kind of anticlimactic. It is, right? Well, there's a lot of steps here, okay? You know what? You know what we'll have to say is I guess tune in next week to find out if it worked. That's right. Tune in next week where I'll be exclusively using the keyboardio.

Really? Do we get that handy dandy music again next week? Yes.