LINUX Unplugged - 330: 'Tis the SSHession

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Give the gift of remote support with our neat SSH trick. Also, Cassidy from elementary OS joins us to discuss what's great about their new release. Plus we'll share some gadget gift ideas, and what we're building for the holidays. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Cassidy James Blaede.

Are you tired of your Raspberry Pi sounding like this? Well, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has got some good news for you. It seems like the thermal performance on the old Pi Forsky is way better these days. Yeah, they've got a great blog post detailing it with some really neat thermal imaging images out there. So you can go take a look and see just where the hot spots are. And how they tested it and what you could do to test it yourself. One thing I found humorous, though, is at the very end, despite all the great improvements that the recent firmware updates have indeed provided,

their best recommendation is still to just turn the Raspberry Pi 4 on its side. You're stacking it wrong. Well, hello, friends, and welcome in to the Unplugged program. This is episode 330. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Almost forgot the number. There's too many.

Too many to count. It's a lot of numbers, Wes. Hello to Cheese and Alex, too. Hey, gentlemen. Hello, hello. Hello. Well, hello. We have a really fun show.

I'm excited to be joined by not just you, but also our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Mumble Overload. That's right. Linux Tuesday. Happy Linux Tuesday to you too, Jill. And Ace Nomad, Byte, Cassidy,

Dan, DM, and I'm going to say Jensen Gruck. Wow. Okay. So we have a lot coming up in the show today. We have some community news, but this episode is the one we've been waiting to do all year. We get to celebrate Linux as an implementation detail with the family.

That's right. I mean, we already know Linux is everywhere, but it can be a few more places, especially in your family's home. Now, if you're like me or Wes or Cheesy or Alex or pretty much anyone in the virtual lug, you've likely got a small board computer of some type, or you've thought about getting one. Well, how cool would it be if you could make some great holiday gifts out of these suckers? So we're going to talk about ways to do that, but also just some really good projects. If you want to set up backup for yourself this year, if you want to build some mini projects for people, yourself, or maybe strangers,

there's a lot of good ideas in here. This is basically all the things we love and what we're doing with them for the holidays. Really some great projects we're going to get to. Now, Mr. Payne, some really, really good news for the backers of the Librem 5 this week. It seems that backers have begun receiving their Linux phones, some mostly working, but exciting nonetheless to see this. And we all expected when people actually started receiving their devices, it would be all over the internet, and it has. Of course. I mean, who wouldn't be excited? Yeah, and these are geeks, right, that are passionate about the mission.

So they want to processize it. It's here, and it's great. And it mostly works. For the most part, things are exactly what you would expect. A little rough around the edges or completely rough around the edges. Stability issues have been mentioned. Charging issues. Doesn't charge when the device is powered up, essentially, is a current problem.

And battery only lasts about an hour. But there is, in almost all of these reviews being posted, a thread of what seems to be genuine potential. Like, they see the potential here. These people are not ripping it up. They're just setting expectations, I think. Right. I mean, you have to view this as a work in progress, an experiment, right? You're on the cutting edge of free and open source hardware.

Yeah. You can't initiate a call. You can receive a call, I believe, but I think there's something working where, like, they can't hear you, like the audio isn't routing properly or something to that effect. And, of course, the phone app tends to crash. It does seem like it's a pretty nice web browser. And while it is thicker than most phones, so far the reviewers seem to think that it's actually quite comfortable to hold.

You can get around the actual Linux underpinnings too. So if really what you want is a Linux box, I mean, it's there for that. Pretty neat to see people receiving them. It's early, early, early. Like some of these are not fully functional. Some of them are very much prototypes. They seem to vary a lot in quality,

more than I think we were led to believe. But it is nice to see it out there. And kind of along the same lines, while we're talking about these phones, there's an early look at the PinePhone Developer Edition, which is the one that I pre-ordered. Yeah, Luquez, who we've had on the show recently, did a video, which we'll have linked.

It's posted as well over at OMG Ubuntu. And, I mean, you're only getting like a 10-minute look at this thing, so it's pretty hard to really come away with a firm opinion. But it feels a lot further along, and I think a big part of that is they're leveraging an existing software stack. Right. I mean, from Pure's perspective, there's a lot of stuff that needs to get invented. And a lot of work they've done is things that aren't at that fit and finish layer,

at least not yet. And something that I only recently come to appreciate, thanks to Cheese's conversations with Pine, is that they have some genuine experience with smaller systems based around these components. Like they, the Popcorn Hour is a shipping commercial product that exists today and has existed for a very long time. Right. And that seems to be a lot of the challenges here, right? There's, it's a unique space with its own constraints and a lot of difficulty getting the right components. Good video though. So we'll have that linked in the

show notes if you want to see the status of the Pine phone. For those that are still waiting, which I don't know if I consider myself anymore, but for those of you that are still waiting for that free Linux phone, it's getting closer. It's getting closer. Yeah, really wherever we're at, it's exciting to see progress. And for all the folks that are interested in it, we're getting closer. What would be the threshold for you? So you've got a Pixel 3, right? Yeah, Pixel 3. Pretty nice phone. Yes. I mean, I'm honestly using my phone more and more as an appliance,

so I think that angle is a little easier to replace. I need a few apps, mostly for work. The camera's the kicker for me, though, because I just love having a decent camera in my pocket all day long. Yeah, the camera's really good, too, on the Pixel line. I wouldn't mind having a little full Linux device in my pocket, though, maybe not for using as a traditional phone,

but just for sitting on the couch or carrying with me as a mobile workstation. Would it be more appealing if it was a foldable device with an actual physical QWERTY keyboard? Yeah, probably. I know, isn't that funny? We've already built these. You know that they're actually working on a keyboard for the PinePhone 2. Oh, buddy.

Oh, buddy. See, that's what I'm talking about. They get me. They get me. All right. Well, so we'll have links if you guys want to read more about that. But we have some big news to talk about. A brand, shiny, fancy, fantastic release of Elementary OS.

Elementary OS 5.1. Cassidy and Dan, congratulations on the new release, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. I have been kicking the tires on this one for the weekend, and I am so impressed

with what you guys have accomplished with this release. You are truly crossing that uncanny valley that we have struggled to really fully cross for so long with desktop Linux. And now, in some areas, I think you guys are exceeding the quality of experience that you get on commercial platforms in multiple categories now. So that's like a huge achievement on its own. And there is so much in this release that

I guess I'll start with you, Dan. Why is this a.1 release? This seems like this should be like 5.5, 5.8, maybe even 6. Like there is new login screens, there's a new greeter that's the best greeter, the new onboarding app. It's the best onboarding app

on any desktop. Incredible. It's so good. It's nice, clean. The only thing I would add is maybe like a little batik style couple apps. But other than that, it's so perfect. The Flatpak integration, you nailed it. It's great. I love the dialogues I get when I'm installing Flatpaks. So why is this not just a whole new version? So Dan's internet's actually dropping out. So it's just me right now. Cassidy, answer why is this just not a whole new version? So the big thing is that it's still based on the same solid core of Juno, which means it's Ubuntu 18.04 LTS based with the Ubuntu 18.04 repositories under the hood. So it didn't feel right to say that it's a whole new

like 6.0 version. But at the same time, we wanted to like give it a new name and point release because there is just so much new stuff in this release. There's also, if I'm understanding correctly, all of the hardware enablement stuff from the underlying 1804 updates that have come along.

Exactly. So it's basically the same core as Ubuntu 1804.3 with Linux 5 dot whatever the latest is and all the hardware enablement stuff that comes along with that. That's really nice. Thanks to Canonical for all that awesome work.

And that's why we enjoy building off the LTS, because we get this really solid foundational platform, but we can have a more rolling release style on top of it. Right. You know things aren't going to change out from under you. Exactly. This is starting to address what my experience as somebody who's just a Linux desktop enthusiast and just enjoys all the different new things that are constantly being developed. My experience with elementary in the past had been, it's sort of a tease. Like I see all these other great things

like do not disturb mode and night color shifting coming to other desktops and i think oh man i really would love to have this on an elementary in the past i would have waited quite a bit longer but now these things are coming at a much faster clip and when they do land they're like the best implementation period uh the the recent uh do you call it night light the the recent tone shifting that people can turn on for nighttime color yeah nightlight yeah man uh cassidy it's just a great implementation where once you turn it on there's a little icon up in the beautiful toolbar that's i don't want you to call that the pantheon that top bar panel top panel it's gorgeous up there a little like a little sun icon shows up and you can click that and you can snooze it with one button. There's a couple of quick options.

It's so slick. It's so well done that when these features do land, they seem to be one of the best implementations of them. It's a microcosm, maybe, of the whole philosophy of Road Elementary. So what has been the enabler that's meant that I feel like this is maybe the third time

we've had a version of this conversation with this release. They're landing faster, and they're landing in the current releases. What's been the big shift that's happened? Is it a philosophical thing? Is it a resources thing? I think it's partially philosophical. We've kind of always had this mentality, but I think we've really kind of hit our stride with it now where we don't hold back features from the current release. As much and often as we can, we push out updates to the current release. It adds features, improves features, maybe even redesigns entire apps or parts of the settings

because it gives our users a better experience. So it's more of that rolling release mentality. And we've had that for the last few releases, but what's enabled it for us now is that we have so much automation going into our release process that it means somebody can report a bug or somebody can design a new feature. And then the next day that can be hitting users. So it's so fast now and it's really, really great. Wow. And that has come online between the previous release and this release?

Yeah. online between the previous release and this release? Yeah, so that's been a lot of our work over the last month or two, probably, for kind of preparing for this 5.1 release to help enable that. And so it's automating the app releases and automating the ISO building. And that all kind of came together for 5.1. That's got to feel like almost a new superpower. Like, you've been upgraded. Yeah, it's so awesome. It's really just in the last couple of weeks we've been seeing like literally somebody will report a bug and then it gets approved and merged and fixed and out the next day. And it's like, oh, that feels so good. That's where software should be. It's more continuous instead of waiting. You know, in some cases,

in some operating systems, you'd be waiting months for that update. Sure. Yeah. I think, too, the overall experience I get is I use that uncanny valley analogy. It's like, there's so many little areas that have been smoothed out that make it a more comprehensive product. I really, really like Pantheon. It is at first, not everything is super obvious, but it is pretty easy to discover. Like if you hit the super key, a menu comes up and it's very clear on what you can do. And within minutes I was, oh, so this is how I do multiple desktops. This is how I move stuff around. And it's slick, it's smooth.

Why is Pantheon so much smoother than some other projects that are based around similar technologies? What is it in there? Is it the way you guys are hitting the GPU? Is it magic? I mean, maybe a little bit of magic. But no, I think we've been working on like a decade now on UX-focused development. And all of our features are UX first. You know, we don't think about, oh, here's a new technology.

Now let's find a way to implement it in the UI. We think, what do we actually want the UI to do? And how do we want it to feel and work for the user? And then we build the technology to support that. So I think that's a big part of it. I mean, honestly, another big part is that we are building off of really solid technologies, a lot of stuff that's enabled from the GNOME upstream projects. So we're not using GNOME Shell, but we're using Mutter, which is the window manager. So improvements there trickle down into elementary OS. So we have these really solid technologies and can kind of mold them and shape them how we want

to create our own experience. I see. So that's great. I didn't quite appreciate that upstream Mutter improvements benefited the Pantheon desktop, and that kind of maybe explains some of the performance improvements that I'm noticing. Okay, so now I have a couple questions for you that are more like, why aren't you doing this questions? You're sort of one of the leading voices of a desktop standard, like a free desktop standard dark mode. I note, though, that dark mode is notably absent from elementary 5.1.

Yes, it's not perfect yet. So we're doing a lot of work under the hood and behind the scenes and working with other projects to help standardize this. But it's actually it actually hasn't been standardized yet in GTK or a free desktop spec yet. So while we could just throw in a hammer to smash dark mode onto your desktop, it still can cause breakage in certain areas. So we don't feel comfortable enabling that because it's not as good of an experience as it can be. But we are definitely working in that direction. That makes sense.

I mean, it kind of hits on what you were talking about earlier, right? Other distributions might not make that choice, but that's the way you guys are doing things. Yeah, it's part of the philosophical difference, I think, of elementary OS compared to other projects is we really, really, really, and not to say other desktops don't care about the UX, but we're kind of fanatical about it.

And so we'll be willing to not ship a feature early so that we can get it right and then ship it to users when it feels really good. Yeah, I mean, and at this point where we're sitting, I mean, that's clearly working. You can't argue with like early on. I was like, I don't know, guys, who are you to decide? But now I'm like, oh, yeah, they've got they've got this figured out. OK, so the second question is, and this kind of plays off what you were saying earlier about how you don't just go and build something once the underlying tech is there. I was surprised.

I installed one of the flat packs I decided to sideload just to experiment with this flat pack support was GNOME Firmware, which installs but then complains excessively that there's no LVFS support on the system. That doesn't come from Ubuntu automatically. Is there plans down the road to integrate that into App Center? Have you guys looked at LVFS firmware updates for laptops and whatnot? Yeah, so that's a feature that we've looked at. I've prototyped some stuff actually related to that. I think we plan to support FWEPT, the firmware update daemon, and LVFS. It's just we haven't built that out quite yet.

There's still, I think, an open question, too, of do firmware updates belong in your app store or in your system settings? So we kind of have to figure out what we want that experience to actually feel like and look like before we start building it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, and GNOME firmware is good, but I don't know if the display and the way it gives out information is really up to standard. Yeah.

And it feels pretty GNOME-y, which GNOME and elementary, we share a lot of technologies, but we have different human interface guidelines and styles. So it feels a little weird to shove a GNOME thing into elementary or an elementary thing into GNOME. So I think, I mean, right today you can do it from the command line we use you can install flipped and use it from the command line obviously that's not the best experience so we're looking at how we want to integrate it into the desktop itself but there's a means should somebody need to you know update a thinkpad or something like that that they've recently got yeah i've got a dell precision and i've run my updates from that and uh 8-bit dough controller and gotten updates for that my logitechch keyboard and stuff. So it's definitely

there and working. We just got to integrate it into the UI. There's just one other thing I thought we should touch on because you guys do such a great job at it. But I didn't really note when this started happening, but I definitely noticed it because of the new onboarding process that in the background, Elementary OS is doing

a bit of housekeeping and keeping temp files clean and logs. Is that a new-ish feature? Because that seems pretty cool. Yeah, I think that launched with Juno, with 5.0, but a lot of people didn't know about it. And that's a big reason onboarding is really nice. We've had people tweeting at us in the past couple of weeks leading up to 5.1 about things are like, Oh, I got this new 5.1 feature. It's like, well,

it's actually been in elementary OS for a while, but now that you have onboarding, you can say, Oh, nightlight's a cool feature that I didn't know about or, you know, uh, housekeeping to clean up that stuff.

So I think that's been there since 5.0 and it's enabled by the gnome settings daemon, but it's just, we've found a way to better expose it to users. It makes all the difference. And that's what's so good about that new onboarding thing. You expose really good features in a totally non-obnoxious way.

So I really appreciate that. But the one last thing I wanted to touch on, just because I think you guys are doing kind of a special job at this, is constant iteration and improvements on accessibility features. It's not something I personally follow, but I know that it matters a lot to certain people. And I know there's been some improvements in 5.1 in that regard. Yeah. So actually I recently gave a talk at the Linux

app summit about this. Our philosophy, we kind of shifted our philosophy in the last year or two that accessibility features are just features rather than kind of putting these features away in a little closet called universal access where only people who, you know, have severe physical disabilities find them. we've decided that it's better and features get better tested and more well supported if we actually just support them as a standard feature of the operating system and more people who might not think they need an accessibility feature actually end up using and benefiting from these. So that's been the focus. A lot of that has been in system settings. So things like text scaling, instead of being under an accessibility setting, it's just in the desktop settings now.

Yeah. I think that's a brilliant outlook on it because I'm one of those people. And it fits with the sort of Linux world, right? We want to be able to tinker with and modify these things. I really like the text size one specifically. That was the one I played with on this latest install just to see how do I feel about it because I'm on a 2K display and having

slightly larger text size was nice. You know me, Wes. I love the 2K resolution. You love those 2K. So I really thought that was a great idea, and I think that's a perfect outlook to have on it. Yeah, and the analogy I like to use is curb cuts. It's like where a sidewalk meets a road, and you have the curb that is like a little ramp up to the sidewalk.

Those were designed for wheelchair users originally, but those are useful features for anybody to take advantage of. So we have this effort we call curb cuts around elementary OS of things that help accessibility, but actually can be useful to everybody. And I think it's starting to show. That's a good insight into the project. And I use those curb cuts when I'm rolling around on my blades. Cheese, I know you had something too you wanted to touch on. Yeah. So I have a question for you, Cassidy. First of all, you know, I've been running the latest 5.1 here for, I don't know, a couple of hours and just tinkering with it. One thing that you guys do that's really

different from anyone else with the App Center is that you give people the opportunity to donate to these projects, to their favorite pieces of software. But one thing that I've noticed is across installs, there's no real, say, elementary account-based system like maybe you would have with macOS or something like that, where you can continue to log in. So if I reload my laptop, I can log back in and all the software that I've previously purchased is available for me to download again. Are there any plans to maybe put some sort of feature into the App Center like that so that users who have purchased software can log back into the App Center and redownload the software that they've already purchased? Yeah, definitely. Today, there's actually a way to do it from the terminal to like export your purchases and then re import them. And it's kind of hidden, not super easy. So we don't

like expose that for everybody to do because it's not the greatest experience, but it's possible. but it's possible. Kind of the holdup there today is we're very, very fanatic about not like having a server where we have user accounts and store user information. But we do have a way we can do that in the future using actually our payment processor Stripe has a customer's feature where we're not actually like storing any data about users on our infrastructure, but we could have a restore purchases option. So that's definitely something we're working on and looking into. And alongside that, actually, we're working with the folks at Flatpak and Flathub to enable payments for Flatpak themselves. Awesome. So Alexander Larson is doing some awesome work there. There's a new release of Flatpak coming out soon that should support that. And a lot of our work will be focused on enabling payments and payment restoration with Flatpaks.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to see where they go with that. That is coming soon to Flatpaks, and I think that's going to make a huge difference over at Flathub. Even if it's just for donations initially, to just say thank you for making this. Right, having it built right in. Yeah. Well, Cassidy, thank you for coming. Sorry, Dan, that your internet connection was cutting out. But Cassidy, you covered it great and really enjoying the new release.

I encourage everyone, check the link out in the show notes. Read the release notes because they're the best. And then grab an ISO because it's the best. Just such a solid release every time. I can't remember the last time we've been like, boy, that new elementary OS sure is crap. I really blew it this time, didn't I? You guys nailed it every single time. Every single time.

The wait is worth it. I say congratulations. Thank you. Go get 5.1. It's killer. Now, with that said, it's time for a little housekeeping. First and foremost, going to mention right here at the top of the housekeeping, Linux headlines are daily, every weekday, Linux podcast in three minutes or less,

everything that's happening in Linux and open source. And this thing is packed full of information. We've got a dedicated research person on there. Plus, our editors review the content. Plus, often multiple hosts review every single episode before it gets published. We're doing our real best on this thing. That's right. Every single episode is a team effort.

It's damn impressive. And you can grab it at linuxheadlines.show slash subscribe. While we're recording this here episode, another one's about to get posted. I love it. I mean, it just helps me stay up to date. And that means less time I have to spend on Linux subreddit or Hacker News or any place searching for news. We took our news pipeline collection and just grew it and expanded it. And it's really meant that everyone on the team is staying very up to date now.

And it's easy to listen to, right? is staying very up to date now. And it's easy to listen to, right? There's some support on a little smart speaker near you. Yeah, it's true. You can get it in your daily briefing if you got one of them Echo tubes. And you can just subscribe at linuxheadlines.show slash subscribe, three minutes or less, and we aim for your

afternoon commute, if you're a commuter too. So you can just pop it on before you listen to anything else and get an update. That's what I do. Just pop it on. I pop it on. That's what I do, Wes. I pop it on. There's something I'm thinking about doing this Friday. This could be a really bad idea, especially since it's like the holidays and

I already do enough as it is and you all have enough going on as it is and nobody needs one more thing, but I thought if you're around this Friday afternoon, as of when this episode's airing, maybe we do a little get-together. Some distros and drinks.

Something I'm thinking about doing. Are you supplying the drinks? No. B-Y-O-D on that one. Got it. I'll probably be sipping on a Red Bull myself, but maybe a beerski. We'll see. If enough people take me up on this, I might go get some beerski. You will be providing some tips, though, right? Yeah.

So here's the deal. I don't know if this is something I want to do all the time, but I thought I'd give it a try. And so for this week, I thought, let's do a little live setting up Plasma session, how I configure my Plasma desktop. Now that I've been back on Plasma for a few weeks, I got some things to share. So tweak your Plasma setup along with me from basic to brilliant. I will back him up. He tweaked my Plasma install, and I've been loving it. You just left it. It's great. And I'll have the Mumble Room going. I'll have the IRC going,

the Livestream going. So you can just watch along as I go from zero to hero with my Plasma setup, and maybe take a few of the suggestions yourself. I'll do a screen cap of it. I'll be on mic and walking you through it. I also thought this would be a good time to try out some meetup alternatives. Because meetup's going in a bad direction. Meetup.com has been a go-to resource, but they're charging coming and going these days. So I'm trying out gettogether.community. I'll have a link in the show notes. gettogether.community.

Distros and drinks with me on Friday at 1pm Pacific to 3.30pm Pacific. So translate that to your local time. And then just go to jblive.tv. Find all the links. Yep. We'll have all the streams up if you want to do. This might be a dumb idea. First of all, nobody uses gettogether.community.

So I'm probably not going to get people to register. So then I won't know if anybody's going to be there. And because it's Friday before the holidays, nobody's going to show up. But if you do show up and it becomes a thing, I'll probably start doing like distro reviews from time to time, try out different distros on the live stream because I got the capture all set up. So link for the get together page. I know it means like you got to create another account somewhere. It's easy though. I've tried it. Yeah, they got single sign-on, too. So that's not so bad. Hey, go check out Jupiter Extras, extras.show, Brunch with Brent.

Episode 36 of Jupiter Extras. Wow, we've done 36 of these things. But this one's a special one. He sat down with Rocco, Big Daddy Linux. Oh. Great little chat. Brunch with Brent at extras.show. And you know, rumor has it, if you fiddle around with the categories on their site,

there's a way you can get a feed just for Brunch with Brent. Oh, some sort of magical tag system? Can't confirm that. How would I know? I can't confirm that. But check that out, extras.show. It's also Jupiter Extras is up on YouTube. And hey, look, after our call out, we got 76 subscribers.

Thanks, guys. Yeah, if you'd like to be notified of new brunches or any other extra, that's probably the easiest way. We're going to need more, though, because I think you need 100 at least to get a name. We believe in you, guys. Yeah, if you'd like to be notified of new brunches or any other extra, that's probably the easiest way. We're going to need more, though, because I think you need 100 at least to get a name. We believe in you, community. So I have a link to that.

We need you to go over to our extras YouTube channel and subscribe for us so we can name our YouTube channel. It's so dumb. It's really a team effort here. It's so dumb the way YouTube works, but we would appreciate it. We'll have a link to that. And then last but not least, you know what I'm going to mention, Wes? Because I can. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash telegram.

Boom. Our telegram group is going seven days a week, 24 hours. That's amazing. I try to stop in there several times a day minimum. A lot of us are in there. So if you want to chat with us, get something in front of us, or just talk about a show episode, the community is always roaring at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. And big shout out because I often will bounce things off of people in there to get their take on it. People will give me follow-up ideas to shows in there. So just shout out to

that room. Over a thousand strong and just a bunch of awesome individuals at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. We don't mention it enough for how great it is. So go check that out. Anything else for the housekeeping there, Mr. Payne? I think that does it. All righty then. So giving the gift of Linux this year, it really is true that for most of the world,

Linux is an implementation detail. We don't like it. It drives us crazy. Hey, that Android device. Hey, that's got Linux on it. You know, they don't care. I mean, at most they give you that. Oh don't like it. It drives us crazy. Hey, that Android device. Hey, that's got Linux on it. You know, they don't care. I mean, most they give you that. Oh, yeah.

Nice. Huh. Oh, yeah. Isn't that the thing on the cloud? Yeah, it's what the cloud's made of. So I thought this time, let's just embrace it. And let's give friends and family little trinkets and gadgets and gifts. Right.

The gift to ourselves is we get to play with this stuff. And then the gift to them is some sort of working device that they don't have to know. All right. This is a little cheesy. But when you're giving gifts to friends and family that you've known for a while or acquaintances, you know, work people, whatevs, there is something about getting a custom-made gift. I know that sounds sort of cliche, but it is true. If somebody gave you something they made, I did a thing where I gave out Wi-Fi access points and picture frames one year. The family

loved it. It really was. It was a little kit I put together. Everything was all set up. The SSID, the WPA password, the photo frame. It was all good to go. Well, that's just it, right? I mean, most of the time the gifts are just something to show that you're thinking and have care for those people. And what's better than spending some time working on a project? Well, this really got kicked

off into high gear when Michael wrote into the show. This is what happens when we start reading the feedback more, Wes. He wrote in and said, I recall back in episode 230 that Wes was setting up a NAS for his family. Well, fast forward, and now I've decided that in 2020, it's my goal to do the same thing. He's wondering also if you have any updates, but wants to know, how would you do it today if you're going to go about it, and what would you build? He also says, thanks for the amazing podcast. Michael, subscribing from Germany. So he wants to know, if we were going to do the same thing, give the family or a gift of like a Linux box or something that solves a problem out of the box, what would our approach be today?

And I think it's pretty different than it was a couple of years ago. I think a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have had nearly as many small board computer type projects. They use Raspberry Pis or the Pine 64. Right. I ended up deploying a NUC at my folks' house kind of for that reason. But in those situations, it's several hundreds of dollars. And now this year, it's like, well, this is 35 bucks to do this. This one's going to be 60 bucks to do that. That's gift category, right? Exactly. So I am not doing this one, but I almost pulled this one off from my mom this year.

It just didn't quite work out. I'm really going to recommend people consider giving the gift of network backups. And you can make it really easy. There is a piece of open source software that has saved my bacon a few times, and it's called Backup PC. It's a brilliant, brilliant backup software that works over SSH and Samba and NFS and various other networking protocols. You can support all operating systems. It's easy to deploy as a Docker image. It's a little challenging to deploy on your system itself, but you can. And I think backup PC, even if it's just one or two computers and a USB hard drive plugged

into a Pi, would be a fantastic gift. And if they already have a computer on the network that would be capable of this, you could load Backup PC on that for them. Oh, right there, yeah. And it's, hmm. Backup PC gives you a nice web UI to backup and restore files.

And one of the things it's really smart about is eliminating duplicate images by looking at the block hash. Like, I don't actually recall how it does it, but I'm going, I assume it hashes the files, looks at each, it does a hash for all the files, and then it compares the hashes, and when there's duplicate hashes,

it sets up hard links instead of actually copying the file a bunch of times. And so you end up using a surprisingly little amount of disk space, having backed up network servers. So it's almost as good as ZFS? Well, you could have it all stored on ZFS. And then one other is just don't do, I'm not doing, but I think you could do,

and I almost did for my dad this year, Pihole. We talk about it a lot. Pihole is a black hole for internet advertisements. You throw it on a device, you set it up for the family members, you tweak their DHCP, and now on every device they own forever, they've got ad blocking. What I like about that is ad blocking is fairly easy if you know what you're doing, but that's not always where your family members are, right?

So this is something you can put in place. They don't have to think about it. You should probably tell them about it, I suppose. Otherwise, you won't get credit. But after that, it just works. DM, you have a backup solution for people? It's called the Veeam agent. They have a Veeam agent for They have Veeam Agent for Linux,

Veeam Agent for Windows. It's not open source, but it's really good because you can backup the system and then you can do bare metal restore. So you can pretty much restore the whole system or restore a single file. That's nice.

When you install the app, it lets you create like a recovery media. And it's, it's really good for, especially for, you know, people that, it's kind of like you back up everything and then you pick whatever you want to restore after. Right. Which most of the time people even, they don't know what they want until it's too late. And they don't,

and they don't know how valuable it is and how much they appreciate it until they need it. It really is a thing. It also does the duplication on the backup level. So you also kind of like save a lot of space on the backups and stuff. So I've been using it on a large enterprise scale, but it's also free for, you know, home users and stuff like that.

So it's not open source, but it's great. Veeam gets a plus one from me. I use it all the time in my network. Also worth an honorable mention in the Pi hole category is the newer AdGuard Home, which can also run on a Pi as well, which does much the same thing. But I find generally I prefer the interface to adguard yeah i've been meaning to try that that does look really good that's a good mention um and i thought maybe there's still a chance i might do one of these so i wanted to put them on this list

wes and i have two particular projects we are doing for our family this year which we'll tell you about but i want to take a moment to talk about the obvious elephant in the room. It is so easy these days to build a tiny little retro arcade machine. It's so easy that you could even gift it in a tiny retro NES case. What? For $30. I have it linked in the show notes. You get an NES case built to hold the Raspberry Pi. Look at that handsome thing.

You get a cooling fan. You get two USB Super Nintendo rip-off controllers that plug into the ports in the front that are USB. We won't just mix and match why that controller doesn't make sense with the case, but that's fine. If somebody were to open this and you tell them, yeah, it does HDMI out, you can plug it into your current TV and play all your old favorite games they would love this little thing I mean it is adorable right great for kids or just old farts

who still love video games I'm going on a holiday shopping trip with my dad I do it every year and I always try to drop a few hints to see like

what he bites on and this is definitely on the possibilities list because it's just the presentation of the whole thing where it's in a retro Nintendo case and you can load it with something called I'm going to say Locka just the presentation of the whole thing where it's in a it's in a it's in a retro nintendo case

and you can load it with something called i'm gonna say laka yeah i think laka l-a-k-a laka it's a diy open source retro gaming console distro that you can flash on a device so you can load on even on an x86 machine and it's's got a sort of a PlayStation-inspired UI. So if you like the PS3 UI style and the PS4. Oh, nice. It's a little more PS3, PS2, but it's nice. It's a classic side-scrolling UI. Something very easy.

Looks really good. And of course, Cheese, you love RetroArch. Yeah, RetroArch is fantastic. And you can extend that, which is basically what Locker uses on the back end, but you can extend that to all of the consoles that are out there right now. Apparently, even it supports iOS and Apple TV. So, if you're really into retro gaming, that's probably a great solution for you as well to look at.

Maybe, although you built me a little Odroid Go Game Boy-like thing that is also one of those like perfect kind of gifts at the holidays. Tell me a little bit about this because I've got it in my hands right now. It looks slick. It looks, it's got a transparent case so you can see the board in there and you can see the battery which is super cool and it's shaped like a old Game Boy. Yeah. So the Odroid Go is very similar to Adafruit's PyGirl, which it's kind of a Game Boy sort of handheld console, retro handheld console. But what differs from the PyGirl and Odroid Go, first off, Odroid makes single board computers as well. But this uses the ESP32 microcontroller instead of a Raspberry Pi. So you're going to get a lot more battery.

You're going to get a lot more playtime out of it. It also has a header on top, so you can break out that header. I think they have, there you go. I think that header will allow you to expand it and do some other things. They have some attachments for it i'm not sure exactly uh what so great uh attachments are available for it right now i think there's a microphone uh or something like that available for it and you can also just since it's a microcontroller you can play with it and you can have it do just about anything you

want so if you wanted to turn it into a portable weather station or a tricorder of sorts, you could do that with this little device. A tricorder? I don't know. And it's really, it's super simple, right? So instead of having to solder it all together, it comes as a kit and you can assemble it, but it's really easy to assemble, really easy to put together. So it's something that you could hand your kid and say, hey, you know, put this together, build something. And they would have this, this you know sense of accomplishment once they put it together and fired it up and got their first games going on it for sure yeah i love it it's one of my favorite little things and i i love also just showing it to my kids and be like here this is

what video games was like when i was your age you know i do one of those moves with it isn't it great which is extremely satisfying because i can be like, see if you can beat that kid. It's a really nice little gift and I think anybody, new or old gamer, would be very, very happy with this thing. So we have links to this stuff, the Odrego and the kit in the show notes. You gotta check that out.

But I love some of the ideas that came in from the audience. Dennis sent me an idea. He says when you have a Raspberry Pi around a 3B plus somewhere level or better, you have endless options. You have all kinds of things you can do. He built, and we'll have a link to this to check this out in the show notes, a beautiful wood case around this thing. Look at that. I mean, I don't know if he hand built this or if he assembled it from various parts or what he did, but he put an LCD screen inside a maple stained case.

It's a gorgeous little computer right there. It's got a little wireless keyboard and mouse connected. That's all you need. And he can put it in photo frame mode if he wants when he's not using it, so he's also got a little photo frame there. That's so slick. It's a great idea. So you can get a little inspiration got a little photo frame there. That's so slick. It's a great idea. So you can

get a little inspiration by checking out the pictures there. But it's also worth mentioning, you could set somebody up a Kodi Jellyfin setup on a Raspberry Pi and give it to them and say, here, plug this into your television. This is set up now to connect to my Jellyfin library. Yeah, I had that set up with

MB for a while, but I'm going to try it out with Jellyfin, I think, over this holidays. And I just like that it makes it easy to share anything I'm watching with my family. And they don't have to learn any sort of new interface. They've been using Kodi before. So once the database backend is plugged right in, and you can do the same thing with Plex, they just keep on going and magically new content appears. Yeah, it's nice to see. I figured that it would exist, but it's nice to see a Jellyfin plugin for Kodi or Jellyfin app, in Kodi so you can keep using the Kodi player and all of that, but you can get that Jellyfin database.

What a great way to share family movies, too, even if it's just for that kind of stuff. So that's an obvious one. But, Wes, you're going a whole other level with this one. For this year, you're building essentially Sonos in a box, but it's not Sonos speakers. No, it's speakers powered by the Raspberry Pi. It turns out there's a whole bunch of high-end audiophile gear that's made for the Raspberry Pi,

all kinds of different hats and attachments and DACs that you can get so that if you want to drive speakers of basically any kind, you can use a Pi properly configured to do that. And there's a whole bunch, almost too many options for Linux, of synchronizing audio to multiple devices. So if you can marry those two things, I think you're set. I haven't decided quite on the stack I want. A new one I saw was Strobe Audio, which if people remember from the Coder Radio days,

I'm a lover of things hipsters like Elm and Elixir, and both of those technologies are in Strobe. But there's also an old favorite, Snapcast, which will do the same sort of thing. Okay. I really think Strobe Audio is worth a go. It looks really solid. And the thing that this does that I think is worth just wrapping your noodle around for a second is it allows you to get synchronized audio from any speaker. You got some old computer speakers sitting around or you've got great home entertainment speakers. You've got a whole range of options, which means you can fill audio in anywhere in your home.

Like everybody probably has an old computer speaker somewhere and you want just a little bit of mid somewhere, just add it to that. So strobe audio amongst the others looks like a great option to handle all of that math over the network. Make sure everybody's talking the same lingo at the same time. Right. I mean, you know, Sonos and similar products are definitely out there. But not only are they expensive, they have their own way of operating. And I just don't think that that's right for the people in my life and the people that they know.

And something that can integrate with their existing systems and maybe even just take input from, say, a CD player, that's going to be a lot more flexible. I like this a lot because I was gifted an old set of theater speakers by my dad when he upgraded to like a Sonos soundbar or something. Of course. He's like, here, you want all these old speakers? And I'm like, dad, these are great speakers. But he doesn't want to deal with all the hassle of wiring them all up.

This I could easily use, especially with some of these DACs you link. That's really cool. So strobe audio on a Raspberry Pi and then audio out. See, what I was thinking you could do is just a really simple, cheap, just USB sound card. You don't even have to go fancy DAC unless you're really aiming at high-end speakers. But you're right, yeah, especially for things you just want something in the bathroom or a kitchen device while you're cooking. I mean, like 70% of what I would use this would be podcasts.

I want to walk around everywhere and hear the podcast. So here's another project. I didn't include it in the doc. I'd like to extend some Wi-Fi from the main house that my folks have down to their sheds. And then if I could get this going too, right? You could have same music both places. Yeah. Sonos, but not quite. have same music, both places. Yeah. Sonos, but not quite.

I like that. All right. So here's what I'm doing. This is kind of on theme for me in the last year, and especially now that Alex is the devil on my shoulder. I'm giving the gift of self-hosted automation for Christmas. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Why?

I thought you'd love the idea. I've just got this picture of a little me, me, me, me, me, me on your shoulder. Oh, that part. Yeah, I know. Tell me about it, right? Hey, Chris, buy this. No, I thought, you know what? I've got two Raspberry Pi 3s and I'm going to put

HasIO on those suckers, which we talk more about in Self Hosted, so check out selfhosted.show. And I'm going to buy it with a Kasa smart plug because Home Assistant has a built-in integration to work over the land with the Kasa smart plugs, which are made by TP-Link. And like a one pack is I think $20. You can get it or something like that. You can get a two pack for 35 bucks. Oh, we should talk. We should talk. We should get you a better plug than that. I know, but isn't for me this is for the family so i you know i i can get them this as a built-in

integration and i'm going to give them the gift of an automated smart tree because we just want something that's running taz motor that's what we want really i know if you want to send me a plug to use you got a couple of weeks i can do that but others But others, I'm going to link the TP link in there. It's all explained and self-hosted. But I think automating the Christmas tree is a great way

to make it click for people. And I'm just going to set it up for the smart plug to just have a sunrise, sunset automation. So an hour before sunset, turn the tree on. All right.

I'm stealing this because it's also great for like outside lights that you don't have to go out in the cold. Absolutely. Absolutely, yes. That would be a killer angle. I hadn't even considered the outside lights. And if you combine it, I know I have got some family members a little skeptical of all these smart devices and just what's happening with their data.

So you can also add in the gift of like, look, this is all offline. You can unplug your internet. Yes. Yeah. TP-Link also makes an outdoor smart plug that has been weatherized with like rubber covers and whatnot. And I just think it's such a great way to be like, look, this is that, for me, it's like this is that thing I talk about all the time. You know? I'm always talking about this thing.

Turns out it is useful. Yeah. And here it is. And when you put them, and I have an old Flirt case for the Raspberry Pi 3 that I never used, and I've got a Raspberry Pi 3 in the box still, and I'm just going to open them both up,

put this together. I think I'll do Raspbian, and then I'll do HasIO. Well, I'm either going to do Home Assistant or HasIO. I'm not sure. HasIO is like, it's a whole distro itself, so I could go that route. I haven't decided what, because I do like the idea of being able to put other things on there. Are you wanting to run this as an appliance?

Because that's what it boils down to. That's what I got. That's the, do I want to run this as an appliance or do I also want to do other things for them? And I think the appliance angle is the way to go. Pitch it as a complete product. It does this. Yep. And I think that's, I think I'll go HESIO.

And that's easier with all these small board computers, right? Because if you need another appliance, you don't have to combine them, you just get another one. Now, something we're going to touch on before we wrap up is a super crazy, dead easy, gnat-busting way to remote support all of these things we're giving out. I am setting up remote access on everything this year.

I am backdooring every box. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm setting up a service login on everything I give away this year. And we'll tell you how both Wes and I are doing that. But she's had a really great idea for a possible another take on the backup solution outside of my kind of half-baked idea. I've been running Open Media Vault on Orange Pi Zero now for a little bit. And it's a great little easy to use backup solution. So what I did is over Black Friday, they had the Samsung Evo

one terabyte SSDs on sale for a hundred Right. So for my brother and his entire family, immediate family, I'm odds and ends that I wanted to be able for him to use to easily back up the whole household and still have access to in case they need it. So, you know, all in, I'm looking at about 120 bucks, but for me, this is going to cover a gift for four people. So I felt it was a really reasonable amount of money to be spent for, you know, everyone to get their backup solution on. So that's, that's what I'm using. I like that. I like, see, the reason why I say mine's a half solution and yours is a complete solution is because you're going with open media vault. So it's an appliance, there's a web UI, you could even give them the URL and the login and they

could, they could futz with it. Whereas mine is like, I think I'd load Debian and then I, or Raspbian. And I think I'd do, like, mine's a half-baked idea. But that's a fully formed one. So I think that's really nice. And good call on the OrangePi Zero. That's a nice little device for this. It's questionable if I'll give them the URL to log into. I know.

You save that unless you have to. Yeah, exactly. I may just put a service door in there for myself as well. See, it's these white lies that keep families together. That's right. Everybody stays happy. So there is also a solution that's along all of these same lines that makes it really easy to one-click install things like a wiki and mumble and NextCloud. But it's not quite as DIY as everything we've been talking about.

I've never tried the Freedom Box before, but it looks like a really cool project. tried the Freedombox before, but it looks like a really cool project. Each Freedombox includes a single board computer with an ARM Cortex-A7 processor running at a gigahertz. It's got a gig of RAM, two USB, two ports. It's got gigabit, one native SATA drive, and an HDMI port. And it comes with a 32 gigabyte micro SD card that has the Freedombox software pre-installed. A couple other neat things though. Inside its little case, it has a built-in battery. It sits inside the case so the Freedombox doesn't lose power if you lose electricity. I really like that. And it's running Debian under the hood. It's all running on top of Debian. So it's kind of a,

it's a darling project of Debian. Worth checking out the Freedombox. I think it ran for 80 something dollars, 85 something dollars. And it's got a platform that lets you just choose these massive open source software stacks as like a one-click deployment, like VPSs do.

Only it's on this little tiny Freedombox that you put in your own network. It seems like a great way to introduce people who are interested in playing with this software, but maybe aren't the most technical to get some of those benefits. All right, so let's talk about giving the gift of remote support with SSH. This is something you and I decided to do just for our own convenience, and it's working out really well, so we thought we'd share it with the audience. We may have mentioned it maybe in one episode before,

but Wes and I love these self-healing reverse SSH tunnels that you set up using SystemD. Oh, yeah, it's so easy. And it's great because SystemD is aware of your network state and all of these things that make it an ideal way to keep a persistent reverse connection. We'll have a link in the show notes. In short, you create a SystemD unit file. It just sort of spells out how to do this SSH connection using the right command line flags and the right user information. And then you enable it and start it.

And then there is a persistent, always-on SSH connection to whatever you tell it to. And in my case, it's a VPS. Right. You will need some sort of publicly accessible bastion host out there to make this work really well. But, I mean, come on. A lot of us already have one of these running somewhere. Yeah.

You could also get by with, you know, something forwarded on your own network if you needed to. Yeah, if you have a public IP and you want to open the port, you could even have it connect back to an SSH. I mean, I'm sorry, you could have it connect back to a DNS address. I've hard-coded an IP, and no, actually, I did use DNS. So yeah, even if my IP changes,

it's fine. If you have dynamic DNS, you'd be fine. And the idea here is really you're just going to forward the port of your local SSH connection up onto that easily accessible server. And then you can use SSH's great support for jump host to just immediately jump right on through the bastion and get to whatever system you need no matter how many levels of NAT are involved. Okay. All right. All right. We've got to explain this just a little bit more because this is such a freaking cool thing that SSH does that it's worth just everybody understanding what

a jump host is. Right, so you used to be able to do this in all kinds of ways, including super hacky ones involving Netcat, but these days with modern SSH, the proxy jump feature is baked right in. And so you can just tell, you know, you tell SSH, hey, I want to go to this host, but you can tell it it needs a jump host. So it'll first establish a connection to the jump host,

and then on that box, using its DNS settings, whatever you need, it'll then go make the request to the host that you actually want to get to. So you can chain this, you can go many levels deep if you want to, but two is usually enough. My SSH config file is maybe 100 lines long because I just chain multiple boxes together. So I use ProxyJump every day and it's wonderful. You can also specify non-standard ports, users, all that kind of stuff in there. So the SSH config file is probably one of the most important, second probably only to my SSH keys on my systems.

And that way when the person you're supporting gives you a call and says, hey, this isn't working, you know, second probably only to my SSH keys on my systems. Right, and that way when, you know, when the person you're supporting gives you a call and says, hey, this isn't working, you don't have to worry about it. You can just type SSH, whatever name you've given it, and you're in. And what I've done is I've made little notes to myself. So this computer is this jump address.

This computer is this jump address. And when they say, hey, I need help, I'll just open up that text document, highlight, paste in my terminal, and go. And I'll be on their system. I really – because I already set up the keys and everything. So I really, really strongly recommend either for yourself if you need to get access to your machine that's – even my RV machines, which are behind double carrier-grade NATs, Bob's your uncle, man.

Works just fine. Richard is indeed my uncle. Now, we'll have links to that. We'll have links to explaining the jump post. I've mentioned links a lot, so I realize I've been throwing that out there a ton this episode and I haven't said where you get those. And I apologize. It's just an old habit.

You go to linuxunplugged.com slash 330 and we'll have all of that stuff there so you can get there. Man, all of this really started because Michael sent in an email. So thank you, Michael. We would like more of that.

If you're doing any of these or have similar projects in the works or know of some great open source software we should be using to facilitate gift ideas, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of fun stuff out there.

And if you're just even making it a project for yourself, I think it's worth checking out some of that stuff. We had something sort of amazing happen in the community that they didn't even know it happened. In my Linux Unplugged inbox came an email asking a question, and then not even an hour later, another email came into my inbox answering the previous question. So this is amazing because I was like,

okay, we'll answer this. And then the next email that came in just did it beautifully. So let's start with Malik from Germany. Malik? Malik? I'm not sure how you say it. By the way, Germany has been representing. Hard working over there, Germany. We're proud of you. I think we got like four emails from Germany in this last week.

And so Malik writes and he says, hey Chris, happy listening and I enjoy the Linux podcast quite a lot after listening to some interesting episodes on self-hosted and also your episodes on VPNs. I came to the conclusion that you might have some ideas to solve my very specific networking problem. You see, I'm a web developer

by trade and I like to tinker a bit on my home network from time to time. But there's one problem I just can't get my head around yet. When I'm out and about, I would like to VPN to all my machines, my Linux notebook, my Apple mobile devices back in my home from any of my devices. Why? Well, I love Pi hole, of course. And well, I'd like to access through Pi hole when I'm out on public internets. And I'd also like to get access to my file servers and that kind of stuff. But what's the problem, you might ask? Well, I've got no public IP4 address since my internet provider is using something called DS Lite.

Okay? I did quite a bit of research and I can't find a way to connect to my home. Okay. I did quite a bit of research and I can't find a way to connect to my home, but it seems there may be a way to do it because I have an IPv6 address available. I don't know how to use this right. So here's my question. Do you know of a specific guide or tutorial that discusses a multi-platform approach to connecting home with only an IPv6 public address available. I say, yes, we do. But then Lucas writes in. He says, hey there, I heard you had problems with carrier-grade NAT,

and I felt the urge to write in. I also sit behind a carrier-grade NAT at my German ISP. And it took me a while to find a solution that works for me. See, we're bringing Germans together on this podcast. At least with my ISP, the carrier-grade NAT is only active for IP addresses. So what I did is I rented a super small VPS at ionos.de, and I installed a tool called 6-tunnel, which allows you to tunnel IPv traffic through an IP6 connection. And this has worked brilliantly for him.

He's able to get back to his home network. I don't know if you really consider it a VPN, he says, but it sure has solved my problem. Wes, educate me a little bit about 6-Tunnel because I believe there's other solutions as well, but 6-Tunnel looks pretty straightforward. It looks pretty solutions as well, but 6-Tunnel looks pretty straightforward. Looks pretty nice. Yeah, I'd actually never used it before.

It is kept up to date at C Project over on GitHub. If you want to check it out, it'll be in the show notes. And it allows you to use services provided by IPv6 hosts with IPv4-only applications and vice versa. So it's really just a flexible little connector you can put in between things. If you're on one end and you can't talk quite what you need to, stick six tunnel in the middle and it'll figure things out for you. Yeah. It can be used as a tunnel for all combinations of IP4 traffic. So you could pretty much run anything through it. And it looks like

it also has a lot of flexibility. I have a link to the man page in the notes, and I'm reading through it right now. I'm like, okay, this is something I'm going to look into. I had also, you and I at one point had talked about other solutions using IPv6. So it seems like the audience has sort of clicked into something that you and I were also kind of orbiting around. And I want to also mention that I had a follow-up email from Ryan, the developer of Nebula.

And he gave me the suggestion of configuring both of my Nebula clients behind NAT with ports of zero. So they randomly select ports when they're trying to break through the NAT. Sounds like we've got some more testing to do. Yep. So I will test that indeed. And hopefully that answered some questions. If you've got some follow-up or feedback or ideas for the show, like Wes mentioned earlier,

linuxunplugged.com slash contact. That's how you get it into the show. We're trying to do just a little bit more of that towards the end of the year, just to hear from everybody, get some different stuff on the air because we always read the emails, but we don't always feature them on air.

But I thought something about this time of year feels like the right time to do it. I mean, it's one of the best ways we get to hear directly from you. And we love that. Now check out user air. Dan wasn't able to make it on because of internet connections, but error dot show. So good user air. One of my favorite podcasts of all time. Go check it out. And if there's one of our podcasts to share with your friends and family over this all upcoming holidays, it's user sure. It is. It's the one I listened to with the lady, and she loves it.

It makes me laugh every time. Techsnap.systems for more Wes Payne with Jim Salter, talking about things over there. And check out Alex and I on Self Hosted. Selfhosted.show. New episode is coming out this week, and it's packed. It's packed. It's packed. And don't forget

about my Friday stream. I don't know if it's a good idea or it's packed and don't forget about my friday stream i don't know if it's a good idea or not and i need you to like go to that get together thing so i know if i should even bother i know i'm very needy we listen to you but i thought this would be a good thing distros and drinks what could go wrong anyways see you back here next tuesday Thank you. All right, now we need them titles. JBTitles.com, we all go vote. Something fun. You know, I enjoyed this episode.

I think it should be a fun one. The gift of Linux is not, I think, it's a little too on the nose. Have you looked to see what's trending already? Oh, let's go check it out. JBTitles.com. Let's investigate. You know, let's just do that. I don't think we don't have enough votes, so everybody go vote.

It's urgent. I've been keeping an eye on that Gnome Shell and Mudder development blog. They're working on something really cool that is going to make Mudder even better. One of the areas they've tried to focus on is just the general improvements of Mudder, like we touched on with Cassidy, right? Well, now

they're working on really, really specific update areas. Mudder only has to update small little bits of the screen. Much quicker, less work, less overhead. Way better. Way, way better. Right, and that's exactly the kind of change that will stumble, I think, very far downstream. So as the way they put it, Mutter has received the ability to update multiple regions independently

without using bounding rectangles. I love developers. And they have some screenshots that actually, yeah, make it a little more obvious. There's a lot of other highlights on there. But like I said, like I promised, I'm keeping an eye on this Gnome Shell and Mudder development blog because it's so inspiring to see what they're working on and have a better appreciation as to, I can feel the desktop getting better, but why is it getting better?

And what are the hard parts of this that otherwise we would have no idea about? I can't help but respect their work even more when they do this. And it's a really well done post with, like I said, screenshots, but also tons of links properly laid out. There's real thought to the organization of it. There's an embedded video of the app grid improvements.

I think you really have to call out how much work that is. You've already done all the code change. That's a lot of work in and of itself. But then to go write up a blog post, that's also a significant amount of work. Yeah, it takes a long time, and they're nailing it. They've really stuck to it, so really impressed with it. I'll have a link to that as well because it's worth following. I just put it in my feed reader, and I'm just going to see what they're doing.