LINUX Unplugged - 287: Clean up After Yourself

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Why FOSDEM might be the quintessential community event, and our thoughts after playing with Pi-Hole. Plus community news for everyone’s favorite video player, GNOME Shell gets a major speed boost, and why cryptocurrency might truly be dead. Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Danielle Foré, and Martin Wimpress.

I watched Mad Dog's 50 years of Unix and Linux advances talk. It's great, wasn't it? That room was so full. It was standing room only. Yeah, that looked like it was a good talk. And he made a great point that if we're going to call it GNU slash Linux, we should probably also call it GNU slash Linux, MIT slash Linux, BSD slash Linux, you know, insert license here because it's all,

the user land now is full of so many different licenses that it might be time to update that whole naming thing. I think I called that a couple of years ago. Isn't it systemd slash Linux now? This is Linux Unplugged, episode weekly Linux talk show that's hunkered down in a windstorm. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And Wes, you're hunkered down in a snowstorm, but that's not what we're here to talk about today.

No, no, we have some community news, including everyone's favorite media player getting a major update and everyone's favorite desktop. Well, at least that's what the stats would tell us. Gnome Shell is getting a major speed boost. We'll talk a little about open source cryptocurrency crashes, some big updates in housekeeping, and then a FOSDEM check-in. Not only do we have a couple of choice moments from FOSDEM, but the one and only Good Smelling Popey joins us. There's nobody else that smells as good as Popey does, and he joins us this week to talk about FOSDEM, maybe his lightning talk, and other observations. In fact, we've got a mumble room full of people, so we'll see. Perhaps they have some experiences as well. But later on in the show, something Wes and I have been wanting to do for a good long while now,

but we've never really had the opportunity. It just never really came up in the cycle of things until this week. Piehole, everyone's favorite network-wide ad blocker, has a big update, version 4.2 this week. So we're going to kick the tires, give you a rundown of pie hole, how it works, what makes it tick the open source projects it's using to accomplish what it does. And Wes's experience is giving it a go and how you can also install it and

other things besides a raspberry pie. And then we'll wrap it all up with another excellent pick as we do. But before we go any further, you know what we gots to do. We got to bring in that virtual lug. Time, appropriate greetings. Hello. We have quite the show today,

so it's appropriate that we have quite the show. We have Brent, Bruce, Cubicle Nate, Dan, Rabbit, Foursquare, Popey, Sean, Skull, TechMav, ThisGeekTweets, William on his iPhone XS Max, and Mr. Martin Wimpress, all joining us in our virtual lug today. We have the first study group after the show today, so stick around, guys, and learn some YAML.

I think it's going to be a great episode. Yeah, first you get to goof off with us here on Unplugged, and then we can get some serious studying done. I think it's going to be good. I think it's going to be good. I really do, because we've gotten a lot of interest. We set up a meetup. We got people voting on topics.

I'm just going to say, pretty excited, Wes. Pretty excited. Now, I'm in, I think it's like a desert, Palm Desert. I'm in some desert area in California. It's like, yeah, it's like Palm Desert. And you are up at the studio where we are both in very different weather conditions. So if you hear a bunch of crazy sounds in my background, it's not me like throwing things at the dog or wife. It is a big windstorm, like 40, 50, 65 mile per hour winds that are coming at us in three different directions.

We're like in the center of this valley where all this wind is being funneled in from the polar vortex. And it's, it's just, it's what it is. It's going to be in the background a little bit this week. Not ideal podcasting weather. It turns out that is a thing. Yeah. But I mean, thankfully now that, you know, Joe is our full-time editor, anything that

sounds weird, you can just blame on Joe. It's not my fault. You know, it's not my fault. He must have just missed it in the edit. Fix everything in post. How are the doggies holding up in the snow there you have in the Pacific Northwest? Oh, they're having a great time. Actually, they really like the snow. Do they love it?

Yeah, we went on a big hike on Sunday, and it was just as the snow was starting to hit. So we left, trail was clear, just a nice kind of soggy Pacific Northwest day. By the time we got back, covered in snow. Oh, man. Dogs playing in the snow, along with kids. left. Trail was clear, just a nice kind of soggy Pacific Northwest day by the time we got back covered in snow. Oh man, dogs playing in the snow, along with kids, one of the most adorable things ever. And they get so tired, right? And then they just take

naps later. It's great. You can get some work done. It's the best. It is the best. Alright, well we gotta start the show out with the breaking news this week. This is CNN Breaking News. That's right. Right here on the show, developing as we record, the plus is being dropped from GTK.

What do you think of this, Wes? What are you learning now, Wes, while you're on the scene? Well, there's kind of a gnarly little commit diff here, mostly because you have to rebalance all the careful equal signs you've placed underneath the titles. Yeah, this commit is great because it's basically the same thing that's always been there, but it's just everything without the plus. So they've removed the plus from everything, and it's a pretty huge commit.

And can I just be the first to say congratulations? Congratulations to the GTK team for making this move. It is high time that the plus dies. It goes away. It needs to be done. I find it offensive. I find it revolting, and I am happy to see it go. I think this is a move for the user. This is a move for usability, and clearly now we should all switch to GNOME and the GTK stack. Your thoughts? It's nice to see them taking things so seriously. I actually do. I am somewhat serious about that, though.

I do think it is a much more user-friendly facing look. I know it's a weird thing to comment on, but it makes it, when it's GTK+, I don't know, it's just something about it. It's a little more techie. It's sort of like, what does the plus mean? What's happening here? GTK, at least, is some sort of just like a normal three-letter acronym. And our lives will never be the same. Everything has changed.

The story continues to develop. So you're pleased to see the plus go away from GTK, right? Oh, I hated it. I was so bothered by the plus, you know? Huh, okay. What's your opinion on pop OS? Wait, is it, wait, the, the intercapping, the underscore or the exclamation mark? Which part of it?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. What's your opinion on pop OS? I just wish they'd change it to a dash instead of an underscore and then I'd be fine. That's the thing. You see, the underscore is part of the overall brand strategy. You see, the underscore is representative of the System76 name, and they like to have that underscore throughout. So it's not going away. It's not going away.

And I think my thoughts on that are clear, actually. Now, there's everybody's favorite media player, although I happen to love MPV, but I did have love for many years for VLC. Now it's like we're still on good terms. I still have it installed on my machine, but it's not my default media player. Maybe that'll change, though.

This is coming out of FOSDEM this week. We'll be talking more about FOSDEM in a moment, but the lead developer, Jean-Baptiste, has announced some solid details around version 4.0, which, among many things, will be sporting a new playlist, redone user interfaces, a new video output architecture, which supports VR. Thank you. I'm sure Wimpy's been waiting for that. And the removal of some old platforms.

Oh, yeah. That includes stuff in there like 360-degree video, which I'm sure you're all using, 3D audio to go along, support for the desktop VR head-mounted displays, so stuff like the HTC Vive and Oculus, and just a whole bunch of stuff for various things like better HDR support. Yeah. I mean, that I actually kind of think is pretty great.

But probably the most user-facing change is the new interface. There will be GNOME and KDE adaptations of it, but my understanding is this new user interface is using QML, and it looks very clean. It looks a lot actually like GNOME MPV in some regards. It's got a transparent play bar down at the bottom the playlist looks different it's an overlay that's you can see through it um along with all of the standard gtk and cute versions they'll also make sure it works with client-side decorations server-side decorations wayland and x11 as well. So when you think about what it takes now to be a full class, full fledged desktop Linux

application, this is kind of insane. You got to have a Qt version, a GTK version, an X version and a Wayland version. You got to support server sideside decorations and client-side decorations. Now, you don't have to, but every time you don't support one of those, somebody on one of the distros on one Linux desktop is going to be making a compromise. Yeah, see, I was just thinking to myself there, like, it's like they're really taking this seriously. Doesn't it show like that the project's doing, must be doing pretty great if they're doing all these things. But yeah, the flip side is exactly what you're saying. That's a lot to do. It is a lot to do. And Popey, I'm wondering, do you think I'm

exaggerating what it takes to be a full-fledged Linux desktop? Or do you think that's the reality of it right now if you want to support all that stuff? I think VLC is in a very particular position in that they're used everywhere. You know, it's used on Mac and Windows and every single Linux distribution. And they have a lot of work to make it look good and consistent across all of those platforms. I think they do a great job. I'm also interested to point out that you can, of course, track VLC from the Edge channel in the Snap Store, and you'll get daily builds of version 4. So when this stuff lands, you'll get it right on your desktop directly from the developers.

There it is. There it is. That's some good sauce. So Dan, what are your thoughts on something like this? I think this is the problem. And I think, I honestly think this is something that elementary OS could aim to solve. If you really want to be a full-fledged

Linux desktop application, there's so many different camps you need to make sure you make happy. Qt, GTK, client-side, server-side, Wayland, X11, and that's not even getting into the actual look and design of the application. You know, I remember a long time ago having a conversation with the CEO over at Yorba and telling him, you know, this is the future that the quote unquote Linux desktop is going toward. It's not a unified thing. Like the Linux desktop is not a platform. That Linux is a kernel. And there are so many different desktops. I think that as application developers, you should pick a camp and cross-platform development is super expensive,

super difficult to do right. And for most application developers, it's not worth it. Just write for the industry you use and be happy that you have a set of users that like the thing that you made. Yeah, I feel like what's going to happen is developers will look at all the options and go, eeny, meeny, miny, electron. And they'll just ship everything with electron and be like, all right, good enough. Everybody's happy. The right answer. Actually, it's interesting you should say that.

I know we'll come to Fosdeme later, but there was an interesting talk about using Go and HTML to build lean desktop applications rather than it was a counterpoint to big fat Electron apps. And they were talking about how you can use Go as your runtime and HTML for rendering. And so there are people exploring different ways to make cross-platform applications that are not Electron.

I'll give it a couple of years. Go plus FFmpeg plus another interpreted language plus a toolkit will be as fat as mustard before too long. Yeah. I mean, that's where you get eventually when you want all the things. Yeah. Hmm.

Well, that does sound promising. I mean, I think the idea is obviously proven out. And so now how do we make it as palatable as possible becomes the next challenge. And hopefully they can figure it out. But the thing I didn't hear in all of that was Rust. So not really convinced. They put Rust in there.

I've seen Rust on the desktop a desktop oh yeah it was something on gnome or no it's pop os again oh good right they're trailblazing with the stylized name and the use of rust and everything that's true they are in fact there's some rust fans there at that system 76 that's a a good point. Now, the GNOME Shell, on the other side of the, I don't know, on the other side of what? I guess I felt like, oh, yeah, because we're talking QML. There's a lot of good performance fixes coming to GNOME. The work around Mutter has seen a lot of bug fixes and performance fixes. There's different camps involved.

Obviously, canonicals help tackle stutter, latency, CPU issues within GNOME Shell. We've seen that trickling in over the last couple of months. And I got a hands-on experience with it on Ubuntu 19.04, and I noticed I actually just could perceive it. It is a perceivable performance improvement. That's the kind of, I mean, that's the level we're talking about here. When you, when you can start to perceive it, that's, that's, that means a lot of things have had to go into that to actually make that. Does it also mean though, that they, they kind of needed that sizable of a change? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe somebody can talk me out of this funk, but I look at this and I think, A, very appreciative of this work. They're doing the people's work here with this stuff.

There's also a developer over at Endless recently that submitted some performance fixes upstream. There's multiple camps now doing the people's work, but it's still really not there. And the fundamental issue is still that architecture where it's a lot of things writing on a single process from mutter to extensions. It's just an architecture issue. And it is definitely appreciated that it is faster and it is a better end user experience. And I'll take that and I will happily use that. But I can't help but have this sinking feeling in the back of my head. It's still not a workstation-grade desktop.

It still feels very consumer. I don't know what the right word I'm looking for there, because I wouldn't even say consumer. If the architecture is fundamentally busted, what does it really matter if it's getting near 60 frames per second animation? I mean, it matters, but it's kind of like saying that you have really great appliances and you redid your kitchen counters and cabinetry in your home, but your foundation is crumbling. I mean, I guess it depends on who it matters for.

And I guess it seems like it has bad foundations to us now, but at one time it was probably fine. I mean, we were just kind of talking the other day about how just like running on a laptop, GNOME does pretty well. And honestly, on my ThinkPad, I've had way more Plasma desktop crashes than I have GNOME crashes.

Oh, really? Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, not major crashes, but like just this morning, I was working on show prep, and all the title bars disappeared, and I couldn't alt-tab, I couldn't change which window was selected anymore, and I just had to log out and log back in.

Your server-side decorations died. Yeah, totally gone. Whereas with GNOME, by and large it kind of just worked. But you're right, it obviously is running into limitations of its design now but maybe it worked for a while and it's also probably difficult too because I think we ended up

using the older versions of GNOME in workstation type things. It'd been really proved out. It would kind of fit in that space. And obviously GNOME's kind of targeting something else now. I think you're being a little unfair. There are millions of people right now using GNOME as their workstation platform. They're running it for either gaming for consumers, but also tons of developers have developer-oriented things,

IDEs, Android Studio, Atom, VS Code, all these kind of applications they're using on a daily basis to do development on a Linux desktop. They might not be developing for a Linux desktop. They might be developing Java business applications, or they might be developing Android apps, but there definitely are many, many people using GNOME desktop as a workstation machine on a daily basis and they get on just fine.

Yeah, I think I have to acknowledge that. That's fact. So there's no getting around that. It's sort of one of those confidence issues. It'd be just like if I had a beautiful car, you know, put up the hood and it was just a mess underneath the hood. It would betray my confidence in that vehicle to really carry me the distance. You probably have other objectives too, right? Like you don't really care, for instance, if like the swarm animation got a little more fluid. You want a desktop that you would know is rock solid, won't crash and won't ever lose your work. I've had so few crashes in GNOME Shell. solid won't crash and won't ever lose your work i've had so few crashes in gnome shell like i i am the epitome of that person who leaves their machine on all the time like days and days and

days and days i have very long uptime on my gnome shell desktop with multiple screens with very long running applications that eat tons and tons of memory and i almost never restart gnome shell almost ever log out almost never reboot andnome Shell, almost never log out, almost never reboot. And I cannot remember the last crash that I had. The most annoying things I have are actually things to do with the things beneath that, like the NVIDIA driver. Like Ubuntu itself, not Ubuntu, Gnome itself. It's actually more rock solid now than I've ever seen it before. Huh. Huh.

Okay. You know, you're making me want to stick with it even more, which really gets under my skin because that's going to make Wes Payne's prediction. It's going to, I mean, I think I still have like a month to like, to get out of this, but it's not trending in the right direction. I have been really impressed. Now I haven't gone all cray-cray with external video cards and multiple monitors and stuff like that. The real pressure test, right?

Right. That was where my love affair with Plasma started. It's not that I don't like it still. It's just that I've started to hit up against a set of cracks that I hadn't encountered before. And that, so far, I have not fully, fully tested. I've done a brief test where I hooked up to all the screens and things seemed like they were working well. And I went, okay, cool. And I, you know, three hours later I was done. Like I, but I need to spend days with it

still. So I have a feeling that's, that's going to happen. I, I, I should write a book about the perpetual distro hopper and desktop hopper, I've been doing this now since the 90s. And I don't know. I mean, I'm pretty much sticking with the Ubuntu base these days. You know, I've slowed down my base hopping where I was on Arch for a while. And then I came back to Ubuntu. And, like, if I ever jumped again, you know, to, like, say something like Debian or something, I feel like it would be a good five-year run. I'm slowing down the base, but the desktops, I'm still at a six

to nine-month clip. How long have we been on Plasma, Wes? I guess it's been since LinuxFest last year, so it's almost been a year that I made it for Plasma. Now, you do seem tempted every now and again when we review a particularly good Fedora workstation, I will say. I think it's been longer than a year, because we were with you in Seattle this time last year when you did the Plasma Challenge, and that's when Papy switched. Right.

Yeah, that's when I did it on the plane, and I still have that same install. Okay. Okay, so that is a pretty good run for me. That's a pretty good run, actually. Huh. So I don't have to really beat up on myself for trying out GNOME again

because that would be a reasonable thing to do after a period of time is to try out GNOME again to see if it... And there it is. There's the personal acceptance and where your protection is about to come true. Yep.

There's the self-justification. Job done. Thank you, gentlemen. All right. Well, we've got to talk Bitcoin. Oh, no, please no. justification job thank you gentlemen all right well we gotta talk bitcoin oh no please no yeah just you know i i i don't know what you guys make of this is it done now is are we so it's around 3400 us greenbacks is the average price of bitcoin but if you look at the trading volumes on cryptic cryptocurrency exchanges they've dipped to new lows in January, according to an analysis that was published on the 4th.

So that would be yesterday. Since the beginning of the year, the digital currency exchanges have reportedly registered lower trading volumes, marking new lows that have not been recorded since 2017. Since 2017 is kind of forever in the Bitcoin world. Mm-hmm. That has been a long, long time. Can I just say I enjoy not having to talk about it all the time? That has been nice. Yeah, you're right.

Coinbase also chimed in and says they're experiencing lows which they haven't seen since May of 2017. So what does that tell us? Is the cryptocurrency hype dead and we're just seeing like the base market at play here now or is the whole idea kind of over i think the more interesting metric is the cost of ethereum over the last say 14 months because when the whole crypto boom happened and people were off buying gpus like they were going out of fashion and driving up the cost of gpus they were mining ethereum in order to turn ethereum into bitcoin ultimately because you can still mine ethereum

you know on not asics and that's dropped in price from about $1,400 to a touch over $100 in the same period. I wonder, so this geek tweets, do you think if we had a killer app all of a sudden spring up that used Bitcoin, it'd be better off? You think the issue is that there just isn't really any sign of a resurgence coming to Bitcoin's aid here? I don't think there is in terms of financial transactions, but if there is an application for it, then potentially, but I don't really see one at the moment. It worked well for me, like doing some actual financial transactions

way back when it was like $200 a coin. And, you know, I think that was like fast enough. You could get through. I paid for some like seed boxes and stuff with it, and that was fine. But these days there's just other payment methods have gotten better. Credit card processing is a little faster.

It's hard to say that there is a killer app out there besides all the other sort of like distributed ledger research the bigger companies are doing. Yeah, I think it's in part that the cost to get your Bitcoin transaction approved fast got kind of high as the network got really busy.

But also, there's like a dozen different ways now to easily send cash directly between people, at least here in the States, and I think it's even better in some countries outside the States. Like, for example, the Cash application or Google Pay or Apple Pay make it very simple now to just use a messaging system and send somebody some money. And that direct person-to-person transfer, which is behind the scenes, really probably ACH transfers between banks

and all kinds of complicated things. Complicated fronting to make it seem like it shows up. Right. That's got to be happening, which isn't necessary with Bitcoin. But the banks are willing to operate at that risk level and they're willing to do all the behind the scenes work to make it seem very seamless. You know, from our perspective, using the Cash App, I could send 100 bucks to Hadiyah in two minutes and she could transfer to her account in two minutes after that. And it's essentially as good as using Bitcoin in that regard. So you have that downward pressure for consumers,

plus you have the challenges they hit as the network grew and then some of the challenges they continue to have just as the cryptocurrency market matures. And it really kind of just comes down to your perspective. If you bought into Bitcoin when it was $11, when I came to Bitcoin, it was $11, when I came to Bitcoin, it was between $2 and $11. And that's when we started covering it on the TechSnap program. And so if you bought in at $11, then $3,400 is still a pretty fantastic return. It's not $21,000,

but it's still pretty fantastic. Yeah. The last time I actually paid for Bitcoin, but it's still pretty fantastic. Yeah, the last time I actually paid for Bitcoin, like bought Bitcoin, I was paying $100 a coin. So even that is a good return on today's prices. But I don't think it's going to last for much longer. I think it's on the edge of capitulating completely. Well, Skull Eater, what do you think?

Maybe the currency goes away, but the blockchain technology sticks around? Yeah, I think that most businesses are looking at blockchain, especially with IoT, as a method of exchange. And I think that's what's going to stay. I think Bitcoin is a store of value. It's just, it's untenable. You know, the higher it got, the more transactions cost, the longer it took. You know, the higher it got, the more transactions cost, the longer it took. But blockchain is for, you know, doing you're pointing out, Poppy, I could clearly see that. Or just between companies that don't necessarily trust each other.

There's a lot of value in being able to have a document that they can rely on. It almost writes its own checks in that case, at least I think. So, Dan, I was thinking about it in the context of taking online payments. To me, I always thought the ideal situation would be is if Bitcoin was a successful trend, not only just a transfer mechanism is what I was going to call it, but also if it was a stable store of value. So say it was pegged at $100 US and it was that way for five years and you knew for five years one Bitcoin was $100. I actually thought this would be the perfect way for open source projects to take in donations from different currencies, convert it to one common currency, and then cash it out in whatever country they're at. And same with things like app stores. Do you think that's a legitimate use for something like a cryptocurrency, assuming some of those things are standardized and normalized? I think some of the big problems we have is just not technology, but it's also on the legal side. And so something that we get from a payment

processor like Stripe isn't just the ability to process credit cards, but they also keep track of things like which countries are on the U.S. sanctions list that we're not allowed to do business with when the government's going to come after us. So it's stuff that we have to be really careful with on the legal side. And just solving the technology piece doesn't really help us as a business stay in the kind of legal area we need to be in. Right. Fair enough. And when you have things like GDPR and other countries that are thinking about adopting policies like GDPR, it's nice to know that there's companies whose business it is, is to navigate that kind of thing and make sure that you're not going to get in trouble. Because that's not your

core competency. You've got a distribution to build, you know? And we don't want to be lawyers. We don't want to have a big legal team and do all these kind of things. So it is really nice to offload that off onto another team that does want to be in that business. And it keeps us writing software instead of doing all these other things. Right. Fair enough. Well, so you've got to imagine it's things like that and a million others that are applying downward pressure. And we just have to wait and see where things fall. I think ultimately there's a use for the technology.

I think the current price even is ridiculous. And maybe that's because I've been coming in for forever now. And so I've seen it when it was very cheap, but to me, really a ridiculous price right now. And I could see it falling much, much further. But even if Bitcoins were only worth a few dollars or a hundred dollars, there's still a market for them. Some of it's illegal, but there's still a market for them. And so I don't think they're going away completely. I want to do a FOSDEM check-in and we got to talk about pie holes. So let's do a moment of housekeeping first,

just here about midway through the show. This is a tricky one. I've never really done this on air before. Ooh, a big wind, big winds are hitting me right now. I've never done this on air before, but I'm going to ask if a few of you wouldn't kindly mind updating our Wikipedia entry. It's pretty out of date now. And there's probably more source material coming soon that could go on there, like new logos and descriptions of our hosts like Jim and Jason that have joined recently and L who we just met last week. So there's a lot of stuff that we don't have source material for to use from. So unless,

unless you happen to just know it all, I understand. And don't worry, we are working on that. But yeah, if you have a free time, free moment, a free second, a reason to edit Wikipedia and would like to update some of that stuff that you know of, I'd appreciate that. Because as you know, I'm not supposed to be the one to update the entry, which is understandable, but also kind of silly because I could just write all that stuff. I could just write all the stuff that's not on our website that needs to be on our website. But that's cool. I understand that's how the system works.

Also, looking for somebody who might be interested in continuing the development of our Roku application. It seems Roku as a platform is continuing to grow and our application is very old. And it is an open source project that is up on our Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub. Sibujar has donated his time so far to maintain it, but I don't even think he has a Roku anymore. And we would definitely love to have somebody help us update that, and then, you know, maybe we would submit it to the store. I don't really know how that process works, but that's something that Wes and I are thinking about,

is maybe, you know, we have a community-maintained, open-source Roku app that other podcast networks could also use to host their shows, or get their shows up on Roku, because that's the thing people like to do. You know, a lot of times you just need to like sort of, you know, it might have like a tiny little theme or skin to it. And then it's basically implementing whatever video player they ship in their SDK and pointing

it at one of our URLs. Yeah. We also have JSON feeds and stuff that we didn't have before when that application was originally written. So maybe there's a different way. I don't know. So that's just something to think about. If you want to participate in that, keep in mind, we also have an art refresh coming to

our shows. So if you do maintain a JB related application, keep that in mind. And if you want to get the new art when it's ready, you can contact Angela or you can join our Jupyter Broadcasting Telegram group for Jupyter developers, which we have linked in the show notes, the Jupyter Dev Telegram, which I think, Wes, you're in there, I'm in there. I sure am.

So, if you want to work with us on updating an application or have one that you maintain, do be aware that new art is coming in the near future, and you'll need to grab that stuff, because it's good stuff. Yeah, but now's a good time to go figure out, like, yeah, what platform should we be on?

What are we missing now, and how do we make it happen? I have been thinking about that. I have been wondering what other platforms we should get on. We've gotten everybody who has now, but we're on Spotify like everybody else is now, which is kind of cool, I suppose. And I don't think they re-host. Have you guys considered using BitChute yet?

Hmm. I can't remember if we actually got around to testing it or not. It has been discussed, absolutely, but I can't remember if we actually got around to testing it. I might circle back to BitChute. And, of course, we have the PeerTube instance as well. And now, another bit, one more thing. Well, actually, we have two more things,

but something that we just open source. Mr. Wes Payne, software developer and podcaster and man about town has released FM, which is a simple script that takes in an RTMP stream from anything that you can get RTMP stream from. And then we'll restream the audio of that to an ice cast server. Wes, uh, why don't you tell people like how we have this set up, why we have this set up, like the,

the, the, the way it's running, like all of the, like any of the kind of details would be cool to share. Cause this is a neat stuff. You know, I was just, I was just pleased to know that besides being able to send an RTMP stream,

well, FFA peg can receive one. So you don't have to set up a complicated stateful server to handle all that stuff. We ran into this problem because, well, we used to do a lot of video shows. That's not really the case anymore. Maybe that will change. We will see.

So our main streaming rig is all set up to operate around OBS and sending video streams up to Scale Engine and YouTube and everywhere else that you can find us. Turns out we also like to have an audio stream, especially since we're doing so many audio shows. Unfortunately, the various things and codecs that play over in RTMP world, not so friendly over in Icecast. So we needed a little bridge to connect our already existing Icecast server

with our live streams from ScaleLenshin. So that's what FM does. It's not super complicated, but if anyone else runs into that situation, it might be handy. It just runs on a little Docker file, runs in a loop. And then once we start a live stream,

Scale Engine says an RTMP push over to FM. Yeah, it's actually, it's really simple and straightforward in that Wes put it all up in a container. We have it up on a DigitalOcean droplet that we run for other things. So it doesn't take a ton of resources. It's basically as much as like a VLC would pulling in a video stream,

and then it's stripping the audio and sending it back out. And we have that streaming at jblive.fm. And what's great is it's actually, I think in most cases, ahead of the video streams because of the way the whole RTMP streaming order works over at Scale Engine. Like it's the first feed for JBLive.fm. So now our audio streams, I think, are our lowest delay

stream. It'll be right there with RTMP. They'll be real close, but everything else will be behind. Yeah, that's pretty great. And it works great in the mobile web browser too, JBLive.fm. And if you, for some reason, ever need to take audio off of a RTMP stream and

restream it, go grab Wes's open source code. We have it up on github.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. All right. That's a lot of stuff, but we're trying to figure out a way to talk about some of the open source projects we're beginning to release in a way that doesn't drag down the show, but still lets you know they're out there because what's the point of releasing them if we don't tell you? So hopefully, hopefully this format works. I suppose in the future,

if it was some massive project, we might dedicate a show to it, but right now we'll put it in the housekeeping section. And last but not least, we have the votes open for a March study group. We've gotten so many good meetup signups, feedback, people already beginning to vote because we released it earlier.

Like there's just so much feedback already coming in before we even held the first study group that we decided we'd try another one in March and let you vote on what the topic's going to be. There's a couple in there that are really good. So I'll have a link to that in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 287. You know, I see, I see Vim,

the improved editor. That's an option. I vote for that already just so we can finally get you to learn. You bastard. How come there's not one on Nano in there? I should go create a Nano Essentials course. You have fun with that. It'd probably be the least viewed course on

the platform. There's some good things in here. Visual Studio Code Essentials course, surely. Yeah, that would be good, wouldn't it? The first step when setting up a Linux studio is to set your editor back to nano after Wes Payne's been in there changing things to Vim. Like I wouldn't notice.

Like I wouldn't notice. Yeah, there's also LXC and LXD, deep dive in here. Big Data Essentials, if you want to wrap your head around that, or DevOps Essentials. But the one that I'm kind of hoping people vote for is either Linux, I'm not going to, I don't want to sway it, but I'm just going to say there's a Git Quickstart and a Linux Operating System

Fundamentals in there. We'll be doing future study groups on. And those study groups will be taking place after Linux Unplugged. It's not in the show, it's just, it's not part of the show. If you want, it's not part of the show. If you want to join us, go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting for the details on that.

All right, well, that's the housekeeping. So, oh, you know, while we're just talking about network stuff, Mr. Wes Payne has been on the Coder Radio program while I have been in Texas and killing it. I just think you've been doing a great job. So if you haven't checked out Coder Radio, coder.show, go listen to the last few episodes. I think the last one was your guys' best episode, Wes.

I think it was a really good one. Oh, well, thank you. Having lots of fun chatting with Mike and getting to pick his weird Floridian brain. Yeah, it is that, isn't it? All right, well, let's talk a little bit about FOSDEM 2019. isn't it? All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about FOSDEM 2019. It was something that I had really, really, really high hopes of attending, and it did not work out for multiple reasons. But I did manage to catch a flavor of FOSDEM by watching the live streams. Good morning, everyone. I hope you can all find a seat somewhere. There's plenty of them available.

I hope you can all find a seat somewhere. There's plenty of them available. So welcome to FOSM 2019. It's a bit more snowy than we expected. I hope you all got here safely. But yeah, at least some of you made it, so that's good. Some of you, like Mr. Popey, made it. It was a pretty big crowd, it looked like, from the streams that I saw, Popey. And I don't know

if you got any idea of how many people attended lots uh thousands um the the main room uh is called jansen and that's where all the keynotes happen and the reported capacity for that room is like 1400 people and it was people sat all up and down all the stairs so every chair was full they were like demanding people move into the middle of the rows so everyone could get a seat and then there were people spilling out all over the floor like people coming in all through all the talks and sitting all over the floor it was there was a ton of people there and every room was busy some of them obviously most of the rooms are much smaller than that and it got to the point where some of the rooms were just rammed all day

there's like a dns room and it was just full all day every day and if you go to a room there are people queuing to get in waiting to get in if someone goes out to the toilet they're like busting to get in um but the good news is every room was live streamed so if you couldn't get in the room you could stand outside and get your phone out or your laptop out and there were people just standing around watching live streams or huddled around a laptop to watch a stream of a room they're standing next to. It was quite amazing. Wow. That is an impressive feat. That is. I feel like I have a bond now with them because I was doing a lot of that online. And they are also posting a lot of these talks. It takes a while to get all of them out there,

but they've already posted a whole bunch, which we will have linked in the notes. The way they do it is the speaker gets an email after their talk and the speaker gets to review it. And once they review it, it goes live shortly after that. But it's pretty much all automated. It's pretty amazing the way they've got it working now. It's really, really good. So is it too much? Is it too big? Is it too many things? Like looking at the schedule, it just seems there's so much FOMO because you can't make it to any of that stuff. You can only make it to one thing at a time.

And then you add the crowds and how packed the rooms are. Is it too much? I think they constantly have to think about, you know, what venue they use. And it is a sizable venue. There's 63 tracks, 43 dev rooms. And then there's exhibition space as well with 65 stands. So there's a lot of space taken up and they use a lot of rooms spread across loads of buildings. of rooms spread across loads of buildings um you know you have to hurry from one room to another and or you you get embedded in one room for a talk that you want to see in three hours time but

you get in there early in order to sit through two talks and then and you might even be watching a talk from another room while you're waiting for the talk that you actually want to see coming up i mean it's a bit ludicrous but that's mitigated by all the all the live streaming and the recorded video that's published afterwards so they have an app so you can sit there and tag all the things that you want to go and see and it will remind you when they're coming or it's got a little map and it will navigate you to the room you want to go to so it's just so well run really really well done and it's all community run uh by an organizing committee it's not a corporate event by any stretch um they have a a few sponsors the the university itself in solbosh in brussels is the main sponsor google and red hat also sponsor at a high tier and then there's like 10 other sponsors including us

um but it's um it's it's a major event and and you walk the halls and as i'm walking along i you know you get that little flutter of celebrity you see you know all your friends but also you see loads of other people from the open source world like anyone you can name not just the like uber celebrities who've been around for years and years like john mad dog hall but you know you can see leonard pottering and um people from other podcasts and developers who work on that favorite project that you have. It's, there's so many people go to this event. Yes.

And I'm sure they do their absolute best to get people in the rooms, but it is very difficult. So that was going to be my next question was, is the, is the meet space meetings, is that, is it very valuable? Because I know you, you know, you're a great person to ask that question to, because you've gone to so many different Linux events in different countries and literally all around the world. And so I'm wondering how this kind of stacks up that sort of meet space value compared to some of the other events. It's great. It's got one of the better social calendars of any, because there's, there's opportunity to talk to so many different

people. I mean, there's also opportunity to miss conversations with people because there are so many people there. It's not like, um, you know, there's only one person that you're likely to want to talk to. I missed conversations with so many people. I had great meetings with people from the KDE community and people from the GNOME community and bumped into my old boss who now works at GitLab. And, you know, you bump into podcasters who you haven't seen for years. And it was just lovely to meet up with those people in corridors and just like bump into them. And people would come up to me and shake my hand. In fact, it became a running joke of Fosden with my friends because people came up to me and were like, oh, you're Alan Pope, aren't you? And I

shake my hands, really like the podcast. And to the point where that is now something my friends say to me in real life. Oh, you're that podcaster, aren't you? Just to take the mix. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. But it's a great event. It's so well run.

And the facilities are great. There's food and drink nearby. And there's public transport. You can get a tram or a bus or if you have to, you can get an Uber. And there are even little Lime scooters you can jump on and scoot around the place. It's just, it's really worth going. And there's so many great talks as well. So they have tracks for loads of different subjects, but obviously there's keynotes that are definitely worth seeing.

And there was one at the very start with Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler talking about is it possible to live a life of only using free software and talking about the challenges that come with, you know, if you work for a company that mandate you shouldn't demand that anyone has to use proprietary software, that you should only use free software if you possibly can. know it's quite a challenge to do that and i'm sure many people appreciate that and there are other talks like um uh the tour project gave a talk about the state of tour and the matrix project talks about how matrix is being adopted by french government and they're using it internally and the amount of changes they've had to make

and user interface changes to Matrix in order to facilitate that. And it's, yeah, there's so many talks, but the great thing is because it's archived, I can queue them up and sit and watch them later. True. I'll link to the John Mad Dog one because that would look like just I watched the whole thing live. It was 50 years of Unix and Linux advances.

And it's really poignant right now, especially in the age of the cloud. I don't know if I 100% agree with all of his conclusions, but if he isn't just one of the best speakers in our community. Right. That was like sitting around the campfire with granddad telling you stories of the last 50 years, but the grandchildren being like 2,000 of them in the room. And it was very well received, that talk. I think it's one of my favorite random moments that's ever happened to me still

is when I was at LinuxFest Northwest many years ago while we were live on air. The guys around the booth funneled John Mad Dog Hall down to sit next to me. And I just got this completely unplanned, unexpected interview with John Mad Dog. And it was just great. I just really enjoyed the conversation. And I noted in his talk that he said he's going to stop traveling around to these events in 2025. So there's only a few more years of this.

So I will have that linked in the show notes. Also, I'll have linked in the show notes, Mr. Popey did a lightning talk. So you were in the lightning talk track. What was that like being involved in that process? So that is interesting because like most conferences I go to, lightning talks is like they set aside a portion of a day for lightning talks but no not FOSDEM it's like all day both days Saturday and Sunday solid lightning talks all day and so there's a constant change there's like your 15 minute talk and then five minutes change over 15 minute talk

five minutes change over and they are strict super strict there's a clock like a little um I don't know if it's Arduino or Raspberry Pi based digital clock on the desk, which faces both you as the speaker and it faces the audience. So everyone knows whether you're going to overrun or not, and they don't let it happen. So it's, it's very much kept to time. And so I, I went in the room that I was going to be in, I was giving my talk in a few talks ahead of time. So I was well prepared and I could make sure my slides worked and laptop works and all that kind of stuff. Um, and, um, I learned some things. Um, for example, there was a lightning talk about an application called

Monica that I had never heard of. And I'm sure most people haven't heard of it. So, and it's a thing I totally need. And I never knew I needed it. It's like a personal relationship manager. They call it, it's, it's, it's a database in which you can put all your memories, like, you know, remembering who that cousin is married to and what the names of their children are. And when was the last time you went out with this person and, you know, when so-and-so's anniversary and all those things that you try and keep in your head and you forget and you know like when you get old you forget that stuff and it's all local it's all stored internally it's never meant to be shared it's not like facebook it's not it's not social network it's just a little bit and i and i'd never heard of this and the guy gave a lightning talk before i went on

and i was like this is fantastic this is exactly why i come to fosden because learn about stuff that i would never discover otherwise it was brilliant and then i gave a lightning talk and it was all right so yeah it's good now do you have to so you have to for the lightning talks is like you have to stick to the 15 minutes no more is it 10 minutes is it yes 15 minutes uh and then a five minute change over so you got an ability way to get off the stage and get back on and the next one to get on i burned through my slides in about 10 minutes and left time for questions because whenever i talk about snaps and snapcraft there are always questions it's never like oh that was interesting and then everyone gets up and leaves what's the most common like when you're

in a group setting what's the most common one so usually there's something about security something about the fact that you're bundling libraries in and who's responsible for security of course that question came up uh there was a question this time about um parallel installs of snaps like having multiple snaps of different versions on the system and i didn't realize that that feature has actually landed like this weekend so i said oh it's coming and it's actually all right um that worked out and then there was the inevitable question I always get is, how does this compare to Flatpak? Which, like, please could you compare this to Flatpak? And I had two and a half minutes left on the clock.

And I was like, no, I'm not going to compare them in two and a half minutes. So, yeah, I kind of ducked that one. But it was really, really good. Really, really good. That does make me want to make sure I try to get it to FOSDEM 2020. Wow, 2020. Jeez, that's crazy. Yeah, it's the 20th one next year, I think.

Joe always says it's the worst time of year to travel, though, because everybody's sick. Did you manage to avoid the con crud? I haven't come down with anything yet. I did notice a few likely patient zeros who were kind enough not to shake my hand, and they realized they were patient zero and didn't want to spread it uh but you know it's very difficult when you're in a room full of people but um the travel uh i went on the eurostar so i just get a train from my place to london uh which is like 45 minutes and then cross london it's like 20 minutes on the underground

and then get on the eurostar and it's's a train direct from London all the way through the Channel Tunnel, through France, into Belgium, get out, quick cab ride or bus or tram, and you're at the hotel. It's fantastic. It's a great way. If you're coming from my house, it's great. If you're coming from where you are, Chris, maybe not so much. Yeah, no.

No, it's not. It's a slight distance uh difference i guess it's also important to understand that joe is something of a delicate flower when it comes to conference attendance and getting sick and being concerned about getting sick so you need to bear that in mind as well hey as the boss i i got to respect the fact that the man wants to make sure his voice is functional uh because i got a lot of shows that go out of business if he's too sick so also he is a bit taller than me and it is a bit cramped on the Eurostar unless you're able to pay a little bit extra.

Actually, the fact that Chris has never met Joe, it's going to be interesting to see that first encounter when Chris is staring squarely at Joe's navel when they meet for the first time. Brent, you had a great question to ask Popey. Yeah, my question actually was with LinuxFest Northwest coming up. I know it's the 20th anniversary, and I just wondered if you think that the rooms will be just as packed with how it's the 20th anniversary

and how that's going to affect sort of that closeness that it feels like at LinuxFest Northwest. That's one for you, Chris. I've never been to LinuxFest Northwest. This is my first time. You'll be able to answer, won't you, soon? Yeah, yeah, totally. I think what your answer would be,

and I'm just going to guess, it would be great if we could remember to go back to this, but I think what your answer would be, Popey, is that the size is much more manageable at LinuxFest Northwest. Like, you can find a seat. You can make your way to a talk in time.

But there's just also not going to be necessarily all of the same selection. And that's the tricky part about some of these. The thing about FOSDEM is it's kind of a unique event in the sense that

there's some folks that only make the trip to FOSDEM, just like there's some folks that only make the trip to LinuxFest or only make the trip to scale. That's why they're all unique.

Same with all the different events. So I bet that would be your takeaway, but I might be wrong. I don't want to put words in your mouth. Yeah, Chris, I think the crux of my question is, judging by how last year was pretty full, and this year there's, you know, only in this chat room,

there's a bunch of people coming for the first time from overseas. I know, we're bringing a big crowd this year. Is that an indicator of what might happen, right? I mean, I hope so. The Bellingham Technical College is a large campus and they've been very generous. Perhaps they'd open up more space, more space in the future. You know what they need to do is they need to adopt a policy like FOSDEM has. Out of all the events I've gone to, I've never heard this line before. Please also make sure to clean up after yourselves.

That's fantastic. Yeah, us nerds, we're not always the cleanliest people, are we? Yeah, and because you can buy beer and Club Mate, there's always glasses clinking around as people are moving in and out of the room. People put the glass down on the floor, there's nowhere else to put it. I've just put an image in IRC. You might want to have a look at it. You can find this yourself if you do an online search

for FOSDEM Richard Stallman. Oh, yeah. Preaching to the Converted, I think the image is called. And it's a panorama of the main room, Janssen. And so that room, that photo, if you go and find it, is from 2005 and it's Richard Stallman. I was there. I'm right at the back of that picture. And when Mad Dog was there this year, you imagine every single one of those seats full. This room isn't full in 2005. All of

that full and people all the way up the stairs either side and sat around the front as well. It was mad. I will put a link to the 2005 photo in the show notes if people want to compare. Yeah, you're right. That's a good point. I think when it's a community event, it also leaves room for slight rough edges. Going back to the cleanup thing, I laugh, but they have a real community attitude about it. We have to pack up tomorrow in about two hours' time. We have to be out of the buildings come 9 o'clock tomorrow evening.

So there's not a lot of time to do the cleanup. If you do the bulk of the work, that leaves less work for us. So we'd be very grateful if you would do that. Not only is it something that you just wouldn't really hear in the States, like just their general attitude about the event. It's not the same attitude that you you just wouldn't really hear in the States, like this, their general attitude about the event is not one. It's not the same attitude that you have here in the States. So it's different in that regard, but it really does have that community feeling to it.

Even watching from afar. So thank you, Mr. Popey for the recap. I, I really, I loved, I love living vicariously through you.

I wish I could have made it. Well, I would encourage your listeners. If you get an opportunity next year, you might want to book early to avoid disappointment. You don't have to pay for tickets, by the way. It's a completely free event. You've just got to pay for your travel and accommodation.

But book early because I suspect it's going to be even more full next year. So you might want to make sure you can get accommodation and all that stuff ahead of time. And look out for the announcement when that comes later in the year. Very good. Let's take a moment in the show now and talk about the new release of Piehole. Piehole version 4.2 is now available with shared memory, new blocking modes, and much, much more. And Mr. Wes and I were chatting before the show.

We said, this is it. This is now our chance. Talk about Piehole. And you did a deep dive, Wes. You went all in into the Piehole. Oh, yeah is it. This is now our chance. Talk about Piehole. And you did a deep dive, Wes. You went all in into the Piehole. Oh, yeah. I'm stuck down in there now. It's running on my laptop. It's running on my network. I can't escape. So did you really? Okay. So you did a laptop install. I mean, not to throw us off course here, but maybe that's not a bad place to start. Like this isn't actually something you have to install on a Raspberry Pi. I think everybody knows that,

but this is proof positive right here. Yeah, it's kind of a little bit different of a project because it doesn't come on like an SD card that you just flash and stick into your Pi. It's really just an installer script. So they have a set of supported operating systems. And honestly, it's pretty wide, you know, Raspbian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS even.

And on most of those, they also support ARM. So whether you want to use the script on your Raspberry Pi or on your server, it doesn't really matter. It just sets everything up the same. Yeah. So PiHole is a network-wide DNS-based advertising blocking appliance. It uses several different technologies like DNS Mask, which is a lightweight DNS server. It can also do DHCP. It uses Curl

for transferring data with different URL syntaxes between things. HTTP D for the web server to manage it. PHP, which is the web interface I believe is written in. And the admin dashboard is based on Admin LTE. All of that sits on top of Linux, using these open source technologies to intercept DNS requests and use what's called, I think the Pi hole comes from like DNS blackholing of things, right, Wes?

That's where the name comes from. It's essentially a DNS blackhole for things like ad sites and malware and whatnot. Yeah, exactly. So usually what you do is you install in a Pi or in a VM or a container. Or sinkholing, sinkholing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you, you know, once you've done that, you usually update your router to push a DHCP option that says like, hey, go use this for DNS.

Or you could obviously go manually edit your DNS configuration on whatever client you want to use. Right. You do have to adjust your client DNS. That's a good point to mention, right? Because otherwise, if you're not doing it at the DHCP level, then you need to go adjust the DNS at anything that you want to use this thing.

Yeah, exactly. Go point it at whatever IP you've given wherever you installed it. And then from there, it's got a modified, a forked version of DNS mask that it's using to go block all these things you can load in. Honestly, the web UI, it's pretty decent. They've got these fun little glowing counters, so every time

it blocks a new request, you see that kind of count up, and you're like, oh yeah, more ads that got killed. And it makes it easy, too. You could do this, obviously, I mean, I run DNS Mask, I'm sure many of our listeners do, for exactly those things. DHCP, DNS. But their forked version's got some improvements,

and with the web UI, it makes it really easy to go manage what block list you're using, kind of tweak that, because maybe you're really privacy conscious and you want to block every single thing from Facebook, all their IP space, anything even remotely associated with it. That works for some people, but kind of would hurt, you know, if your kids are on there or your family members, that's not going to work.

Yeah, well, if you use, like, for example, there's a bunch of default lists that you can subscribe to during the installation. And when you subscribe to just those defaults, there's even parts of YouTube that don't render quite right. And there's not as much of a direct action as you can take when you're using an ad blocker in your web browser, because you could just go to the toolbar and turn it off for a brief moment. Then the broken webpage renders properly. When you do it at the network level, there's a little more work involved to fix that. But the advantage is, A, you don't have to install ad blocking software on the individual end machines, but B, it's also preventing tracking and advertising on any of the devices on your network.

So a smart television, your phones, your tablets, things that aren't web browsers that you can't install ad blocking extensions into can also be protected. And that's even more important now with smart televisions that basically ship from every manufacturer that monitor what you do. That's really nice.

And it's not 100% peace of mind, but it's a bit more peace of mind. No, that's a great point. I wouldn't, you know, I'm not going to remove any of the, like, application-specific ad blockers. Because kind of like you said, you know, because they block it at a DNS level, you do sometimes see a space that was made for an ad that was supposed to be there but doesn't load. So you don't see the ad, but it's not quite as seamless as some of the fancy ad blockers we have today. But with all the changes we've seen, browsers making some moves to make that harder, it's a nice fallback that you can have

at the edge of your network. And like I said, if you just have like a stock router that you got from your ISP and you're not already managing your DNS and DHCP and you're all interested, this is a great first step because it's all the same technology under the hood

with a nice interface to manage it. And even if the ad blocking isn't perfect, it still does those other services. So you only have something to gain. And there is a moderate performance improvement if you switch from checking a DNS lookup across the internet versus checking for that DNS lookup on your local LAN. It's just a faster response time. And DNS masks will start to cache those things. And then when another machine looks up google.com,

it doesn't go all the way out to the internet or your ISP or Google DNS. It can just get it from your local DNS mask server. But I guess the skeptic in me would be listening to this right now, and I would challenge this, Wes. I would say, why not just use something like my own local files, like Etsy hosts and others, where I could create my own sinkholes. And I could essentially do what PyHole is doing just using my local configs. Yeah, you certainly could.

But honestly, I don't see you doing that. Whereas using the GUI for PyHole, you probably would. And you're always going to have devices. Maybe you're just trying out a new distro or you've opened something in incognito tab and you forgot to enable the specific ad blocker extension in incognito. Well, you still get all the benefits. So you could still do it, but they have it pretty easy. People have a lot of scripts out there that have compatible blocking lists.

And actually, Popey makes a great point. You can also add whitelists if you're having trouble or you always want to know, like, all the requests to work, always allow those. Yeah, I use PyHole at home. And one of the things we do is send out some marketing emails and we use a third party service. And unfortunately, that's blocked by PyHole because for some reason people think that's spam and uh i need to see those and so i just whitelist that service on my piehole so that i can see it but the thing you won't do if i mean you could you could just go and put like these big lists of uh blocked hosts in your etc host file and you're done right you could do that but you've got to keep that up to date and piehole has an

automatic update system right um also pihole has a really nice reporting system so you can actually see the top blocked domains the top related domains top clients on your network so i can see which machines on my network are doing the most dns requests and where they're going and i can make decisions that can affect the decisions i make about the software that i install or services that I enable and what extra things I might want to take belt and braces to block. I think it's an amazing project and the guys behind it have the absolute best intentions for it. It's just such a wholesome project. It's fantastic. I love it. That's a great point. It is. I mean, kind of,

it's just DNS mask on steroids, but with a whole bunch of supporting community members and a lot of active development. Chris, you also found, so like part of that is they've been working, part of this update is using shared memory to make exporting all the statistics they gather more efficient, and then they're implementing a Rust API

to just be able to grab that. Part of that means you can also have things like this neat little GTK control panel you found that'll show you all the things that you're blocking. Yeah, right there on your desktop, you can get the stats from your Pi hole system. Oh, really? Yeah, isn't that neat?

Yeah, it's a GTK Python app. I had no idea. I'm logged into the web admin tool and I look at the pretty graphs and I see spikes at certain times of the day when I know I've got cron jobs that are doing loads of busy stuff and i can see when the kids come home because all their devices ip addresses start showing up and i can see they're all using youtube and snapchat and instagram and

all that kind of stuff is i just love it it's and the web admin tool is nice it's yeah it's good enough that's all you need i just uh i dropped a link to it in the irc but also i'll put a link to it in the show notes. Awesome. I'm totally getting that. Now, the other thing that I was curious about is we've gotten a lot of emails from the audience about using this in a FreeNAS VM or on a PF or doing like a KVM box with PFSense in a VM, FreeNAS in a VM and PyHole in a VM.

And each one of these, obviously, each one of these use cases, they're not using a Raspberry Pi at all, but they're taking advantage of the automated installation where it walks you through how to get all the subscriptions, how to set all that up. And obviously, they're taking advantage of the updates. And it's still very much like an appliance. So you don't have to run it on a Raspberry Pi,

but you can just get the image and then flash it to the Raspberry Pi. But they've also now started shipping it as a Docker container as well. That's what I'm using to run it on my laptop. And honestly, it works pretty well. You got to go fiddle with a few environmental variables and supply those with your, like, you know, the IP address of the machine that Docker is running on stuff like that. But honestly, they have decent instructions and it just works. Now, do be aware, they've only recently got the cadence switched

so that when new releases come out, new Docker builds are available. But the Docker files aren't that complicated. You can build it yourself. And kind of the question, when you look at all of those emails that came in, the core of it is, could this work for an enterprise LAN?

And when you look at the underlying technology like DNS mask and whatnot, it absolutely holds up. It really just depends on the resources of the machines you deploy it on. You could absolutely use this to provide ad blocking and malware blocking across an entire LAN of employees. I think you could certainly test it out on a subset of your estate like try out on the techies first and then add add this you talk dhcp leases for for some parts of your user base and slowly roll it out and you as you add departments you'd find uh well you know so and so in accounts needs access to this thing and we need to add a white list for that you know so i thought i certainly think if you rolled it out in a managed way

you could use something like this, definitely. Yeah, you could just additionally a handful of users where you switch their DNS manually and just see how that goes for even one lease cycle of the DHCP lease. You could just see what happens. And the admin is really easy. While I've been talking to you, I remembered, oh, I haven't updated it for a while. So I just SSHed into my Pi and ran pi-hole-up,

and it's updated while I'm talking to you. It's brilliant. That's cool. So what do you think, Wes? After trying it out for the show, are you going to stick with it at the home network? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I really don't see why not.

I've been doing some rebuilding in the home network anyway, simplifying things. And I like having, right now, my DNS and routing stuff is a little too commingled for my tastes. And if I can have an appliance that does the same thing, I'm in. I like having, right now, my DNS and routing stuff is a little too commingled for my tastes. And if I can have an appliance that does the same thing, I'm in. I like that. We'll have some of Wes's notes linked in our Linux Unplugged blog, which is linked up at the top of LinuxUnplugged.com site.

And he's got information here about versions that they officially support that aren't on Raspberry Pi on there, whitelist, blacklist information, how to run the Docker container, how to add additional block lists, how to just grab the Pi hole installer and run it on your own Linux, all of that. So that, as well as additional resources, are linked in the show notes.

And please do let us know your experiences with it. I know it's been around for a while. It's on us that we haven't talked about it. Really, that's our bad. And so this was our chance to do it. Let us know your experiences, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And I don't know, Mr. Payne, is there anything else we should relay about PyHole and the new version 4.2?

No, it's really easy. If you're interested in trying it out, there's no reason not to. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, it gets the Linux Unplugged seal of approval. And I have a sense we'll be talking about more in the post show. But I do want to head out of here with an app pick. It's great to see it. If you've decided to spend the money like Mr.

Wimpers has on a nice fancy and video card and you look over at the folks on windows and you see them with their graphical overclocking tools and you think to yourself, why, why can't I have that? I am green with envy. Well, I have good news for you because that is a new tool designed to let you manage your fans, your CPU, I guess the GPU of your NVIDIA card under Linux. And it's literally called green with envy. with some screenshots over at omgabuntu.co.uk if you want to check it out. You'll generally get general CPU stats, I'm sorry, GPU stats, power, clock information,

like the rate, GPU temperature, the fan speed. You can set up custom fan profiles. You can view historical data. And yes, yes, you can overclock. Finally, Mr. Wimpress, are you going to give this a go? No, because it's easier to do through the API and the script. So I've already put the effort in. Yeah, I've got a script and yeah. I mean, certainly having a GUI is a great thing, right? Because when you buy the

NVIDIA cards and you get your Windows drivers from insert name of board partner of NVIDIA, you get your Windows drivers from insert name of board partner of NVIDIA. They have their own, you know, skin on top of the drivers and their own overclocking utilities. And they're all pushing the same parameters around. You know, it's all about clock speed, memory frequency, fan profile and power limit. They're basically the four things that you can tweak. And you can do that through NVIDIA settings and NVIDIA SMI and stuff like that.

But having a GUI, which reproduces the custom UIs that you see on these board partners' Windows drivers, is no bad thing, and it's a little bit more computing parity for Linux users. Yep, completely agree. I don't actually think I'm going to do it, but I'd love to see it. Oh, you should totally do it really oh i'm squeezing tons more performance out of my 1080 ti with this really it's astonishing yeah i've got over a gigahertz uh memory um clock uplift on my 1080 ti and um i think between 350 and 500 megahertz core clock, and that requires that you up the power limit. So the power governor for NVIDIA cards is quite constrained.

And so you push the power limit up, which means you can push more juice into the card in order to support those clock and memory frequencies. And then, of course, to do that, you then need to configure the fan profile to make sure you don't burn the thing out. So, yeah, all the tools are there. Not even sure if my GPU dock has a fan. So what I have discovered is if you've got mobile NVIDIA things, so the M series from the 9 series and the 10 series and the Max-Q stuff, so far, I've only got a few of those available to me so far you're not able to overclock those even if you turn on all the magic

bits to strictly enable that when you actually try and poke at those values they all come back as their read-only and you can't actually change them so question for the audience, have you got a Max Q or a mobile series and video chipset and have you figured out how to overclock it? If so, come and join us next week and tell us how. Yeah, tell us how to do that. That would be really good to know. Well, all right. So, hey, while I've got you for a moment, I saw there was a flash update over on the Ubuntu podcast feeds, a flash podcast with a very important announcement about a community meetup on March 16th. That's a Saturday. What do people need to know? Yeah, we're breaking with tradition a little bit this year on the Ubuntu

podcast, and we're going to have a listener get together ahead of the next season to have a chat with the listeners, find out what they like, what they like to hear more of, and use their feedback to go into our curry meetup where we decide what we're going to do for the coming year. So, yeah, it's going to be in Reading in the UK on March 16th. If you go to, oh goodness, if you go to UbuntuPodcast.org and look at the most recent episode, all of the links to where you need to go to sign up and register to that event are there. But we're currently sorting out the final location at the moment and details will be posted soon.

Very good. Speaking of March, we will be at Scale, Scale 17X, March 7th through the 10th. Mr. Payne, Elle, and myself will be there. Any of your friends from Canonical going to Scale this year, gentlemen? Maybe. Yes, certainly people are going. We're just trying to figure out who is going. We'll let you know. Oh, very good. Well, there you have it. Last minute updates here on the Unplugged program. We start with breaking news and we end with in-development last minute updates. So UbuntuPodcast.org

for more information on that. Go join Wes Payne and Jim Salter on the revamped TechSnap show Better Than Ever with new details about ZFS rebasing on Linux and much, much more. Where can they find you on Twitter, Mr. Payne?

I'm at Wes Payne. Beautiful. I am at Chris LAS. The whole network is at Jupiter Signal. If you're listening live, stick around because we're about to kick off our first ever study group. I am super excited about that. If you want to know more about when we're doing those and other kinds of meetups online or in person, you can go to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting for all of those.

Thank you so much for joining us. And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you Mumble Room for being here. I enjoyed that show. That was amazing. And boy, look at the size of that Mumble Room. It just warms my heart. It's huge. It's great.

So the link that Martin couldn't remember is gettogether.community. It's great. So the link that Martin couldn't remember is gettogether.community. It's a website that Michael Hall, ex-community manager at Canonical, now works for the Linux Foundation on Edge X Foundry. He has created this in his spare time. It's like a free software alternative to Meetup. Oh, that's great.

That is cool. It's really, really good. What is it again? gettogether.community. Huh. Have you seen, I don't know how much you've plugged around in the LinuxFest Northwest website, but that is a whole event system that was created by the OpenSUSE folks.

Like it's a whole CMS for events. It's MIT licensed and it's up on GitHub. Yeah, it's called OSEM and it's on the OpenSUSE GitHub repo. It's the open source event manager, an event management tool tailored to free and open source software conferences. So it does like the speaker papers. So all of us that have submitted talks,

you're using that system. For people that are just registering to go, the whole thing's an open source platform. It's pretty neat.