LINUX Unplugged - 409: Launch Your Memories Into the Future

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

We discuss old and new ways to manage, organize, index, and search your photo collection. It's our favorite Google Photo's alternatives. Plus Chris' hands-on review of System76's customizable Launch keyboard. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

I don't know if we've talked about our clone before, Wes. Maybe we have. But I've been thinking about our clone again in the context of getting my stuff out of Google Photos. And I decided to give it a go. And it has this nice, I guess you could call it a wizard. It's a text-based thing that runs you through connecting to the various services, in this case Google Photos. And then it does this little, I don't know if you'd call it a hack, but it does this little trick where it runs a local web server, it spins one up just to collect the Google authorization token that gets returned from Google. And then it immediately shuts down the web server, configures your permissions,

and then you can just go in there and start copying down your Google Photos. It'll even do specific albums or things like that if you want. But I learned it's not exactly perfect. No, no, it's not. I mean, our clone is great. The issue is more on Google's side. So issue number one is right now downloads strips the exif location. This is a known limitation of the API and there's an open bug about it, but who knows when that will get fixed.

That's kind of a bummer. It sure is. But number two might be even worse because right now the API, which our clone uses, does not allow photos to be downloaded at their original resolution. So they might still be useful. You could still process them and post them on Instagram or whatever you're trying to do. But if you're trying to use this as a way to have Google Photos be your backup and then make a, you know, a second copy of your backups,

that might not work. And you might instead need to use something like Google Takeout. It's almost as if the best solution might be just don't use Google Photos. News. Google Photos. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. It's good to be back from the Montana trip. This episode is brought to you by A Cloud Guru. You know, they are the leader in learning for Cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, get learning at a cloud guru dot com.

Coming up on the show today, are you like me and Wes having a hard time kicking the Google Photos habit? Maybe you're looking for a self-hostable alternative. They did just recently make a few changes to the Google Photos deal. And let's be honest, there is that whole privacy thing to consider. So coming up on the show this week, our buddies Brent, a professional photographer, and Alex, my co-host on the self-hosted podcast, and a home lab master, really, discuss new and old ways to manage, organize, index, and search your photo collection, sort of Google Photo style. in Search Your Photo Collection, sort of Google Photo style. And if that wasn't enough, I spent the weekend, a long weekend,

started on Thursday with something special, the new System76 Launch Keyboard. They're built in Denver, created from scratch, right there in Colorado, keyboard. I rushed back from Montana to receive this package, and I'm going to share my thoughts on the keyboard that I say redefines what customizable even means. But first, with the powers vested in me, I declare a warm, time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello, everybody. Wow. Wow. Wow. What a group we have today. 25 of you in there, just solid.

And it's nice to be back. I missed everybody while I was in Montana. But, you know, it was a good family trip. We had some adversities and we had some triumphs and we got a lot of swimming. And I got back to this launch keyboard from System76. It's right here. I have it plugged in over USB-C to my studio computer. It is now my studio keyboard.

You haven't switched back, I was wondering. I got it with the Royal keycaps, I think it is, the slightly quieter ones. And I've swapped out a few of the keys already because it's pretty easy to do that. It comes with a little key cap remover in the box and it comes with a couple alternative keys that you might want to go with right away. It's got a USB hub on the back, some A and some C. It works on Linux. It works on Windows and it works on Mac OS. The keyboard is 100% open source. The hardware design and the software that runs on it is all open source.

So, of course, those right there check a lot of boxes for me. I've also recently gotten a little more into mechanical keyboards thanks to the bad, I'd say, the bad influence from my co-host, Mike, on Coder Radio. I've gotten a little more into them. Let's just say it appears in the studio that keyboards breed something like bunnies. Or tribbles, in my case, yeah. So I got it out of the box and it immediately had a very solid feel

to it. It looks deceivingly simple, but when you pick it up, there's a lot of heft in a way that feels like quality. The Royal Keys are not quite as quiet as I expected. That was my first impression when I started typing. So maybe I should have just gone with the jades. And it's set by default to a rotating space backlight theme, which I like. It circles through different colors that you maybe would call like galaxy colors, I guess. So I just kept it the default. But job one for me, when I got this thing, was rearrange the control, alt, and super and function key layout. By default, System76 ships it with control key, alt, Fn, super.

And that's fine, but not how I like it. You know, I like it more traditional. So I quickly just swapped it to control, Fn, super, alt, swapped the keycaps, and then I went and grabbed their software to configure the keyboard and I was curious what this experience was going to be like because I'm not on Pop! OS and I'm on Fedora which is not even a Debian based distro and so I'm like am I going to be able to grab this or what so I go over to their page download it off their github and it's an app image so you mark that sucker executable and you double click on it it asks for your root password because it's an app image. So you mark that sucker executable and you double click on it.

It asks for your root password because it's going to scan your bus. And then it comes up and it gives you a really clever layout. It's a visualization of the keyboard, which works really well for how my brain works. And it makes it simple to like click this or hold this and map this function. And within a couple of minutes,

I was mapping multiple keys to a single key press. And I like that a lot. Additionally, this thing supports four layers of customizable keys. In other words, you can essentially have four different layouts in this one keyboard, and you can toggle through them with different key combinations. I have my right Fn key set to switch to layer 2, which is the default. But one of the things I've done, and layer 2 is where I have some of my combos, I've set a different backlighting scheme for layer 2. And you can do this with each layer.

You can do options like only light up the keys that have a function assigned to them. So when I hold down layer two, only half a dozen keys light up. And those are just the ones I've mapped something to and the rest all stay off. Layer three switches to a vertical scan pattern of LED lights. So I know I'm on, I'm on layer three because the keyboard lights switch pattern. And then when I release, it goes back to the layer one pattern of lights. That simple little thing was the trick I needed to keep all of this straight. I was worried that I would get lost in a sea of customization with this thing.

And I would not be able to map in my brain what's on what layer, etc. But being able to control the LED lights and colors and patterns or just do the single light light-ups for ones that have function, gave me the visual trick I needed, combined with their software configurator that gives you a visual on-screen layout of what you're doing, with a representation of the keyboard up on screen, it really actually clicked, and I've been able to keep with it. So the software really gives you a sense of how far you can actually take this keyboard. I mean, you can read the specs on their website, but when you plug it in and then you open up the software, it redefines what customizable is. This thing is truly next level.

And then the beautiful thing is, everything is then saved back to the keyboard immediately. So as soon as I change it, it's applied to the keyboard. I can unplug it from this computer and I can go plug it into an entirely separate machine, a different operating system. It doesn't have any of the firmware or any keyboard software on it. And it will still all work because it's saved locally

on the keyboard. That is huge for me because I don't want to have to load the software on every single machine that I want to use this thing on. And it also is showed right up in the Gnome firmware tool that uses LVFS. So it's completely supported by LVFS for updates. And I like seeing that. And somehow you haven't even mentioned that their customization tool is powered by Rust. Oh, I'm sorry. What was that, Wes? It was powered by Rust. And I wasn't really 100% sure, despite all of that, if it was really worth $285, because that seems like a lot of money for a keyboard. So what I did is I went to Amazon,

and I looked at some of their best, highest-rated mechanical keyboards. And I went for the cheapest mechanical keyboard I could find, and I found one for $35. And I went for the cheapest mechanical keyboard I could find. And I found one for $35. So I thought, let's see how this $35 keyboard stacks up against the $285 System76 keyboard. And there's obvious things like this one sort of has a more muted sound. It doesn't quite feel quite as good. I mean, that's not a huge surprise. It's also plasticky and light.

In fact, it even flexes a little bit when I twist it where I could win a knife fight with the launch as a weapon. It's very solid. And, you know, those things were kind of like, okay, I went into a $30 keyboard expecting that. That's not really where I'm going to judge this on. I put them down side by side. And Wes was here on Sunday and we were doing Linux Action News. And I didn't even prompt Wes. I didn't say anything to Wes. You brought it up to me. You said you're typing faster than I've ever seen you type on the launch. That I did.

I mean, you seemed kind of naturally at home. Admittedly, you had a different mechanical keyboard currently in use at the studio for a while, which didn't seem to be jiving with you, but it was clear that this was a new keyboard you were going to keep using. Yeah. So that other keyboard we tried that I hadn't here for a while was the Keytron K3. And I really wanted to like it because it was a good size. That was one that, that Keytron's a little bit smaller than the $35 Amazon one. The $35 Amazon one is a little wider. But the Keytron and the Launch are about the same desk size.

They're about the same size. And I can type significantly faster on the Launch. And I think it is the layout a bit. It is also the way the keys feel. I think all of those, I think it's like three or four things about the design of the keyboard that come together to make it actually really fast. But I noticed it too. Even though I hadn't said anything to you about it, that weekend, I used the keyboard to write all of the notes for Linux Action News, and I was flying.

I was like really enjoying the typing experience. And I know that sounds kind of cliche, but that matters a lot to me because I'm touching this damn thing every day, all damn day. And it matters to me that I smile when I look down at it. And it matters to me that it feels good every time I press on it. That's what you're paying for, right? I mean, if it works and with the durability that it looks like this thing has, I mean, it could be your keyboard for the next decade. There's absolutely no question about it. It's USB-C with its customizability.

I will use this keyboard forever. It's going to last a very long time, and keyboards do for me in general. If it was $185 or $200, I would have already ordered another one. I absolutely would. At $285, it's kind of a special treat. And so it's going to be what we use in the studio.

That feels kind of appropriate because it's kind of a specialty item. And then that plays a role for me too, right? This feels a bit like a bespoke item. It feels like something that my friends hand-built in Denver, you know, like people that are part of my community hand-built something and I can buy it from them. And that's special too. And that's also the reason why I bought the Librem 15, because it also had that unique kind of collector almost feel to it. And that's why I bought the Atari VCS as well, even though I haven't received that one, because again, it's kind of a unique item that comes from somebody that is working in the Linux

community. And this launch encompasses that even so much more. I mean, they've been around now for well over 10 years now, but this represents a new milestone and a first for their business and a first for a Linux vendor. And so I wanted to have it for that reason too. And I mention that because those thoughts are invoked every time I look down at it, And that makes me happy as well. And so for me, it is worth the $285.

And the $35 keyboard and the Keytron, which is $85, are all good keyboards, but they have things that are frustrating about them where the launch really doesn't have any compromises. I didn't want a numpad. I know for some people that is an issue. But for me, this keyboard doesn't really have the compromises that those other two have. And a lot of times when you get to the higher end gear, like in Wes, Wes and I talked about this over the weekend, when it comes

to like our microphones, you start to get to the $500, $600, $1,000 microphones. They don't sound $500 better than a 200 microphone. They don't sound $1,000 better than a $100 microphone. They sound $50, $80 better, to be realistic about it. The drop-off is kind of dramatic when it comes into high-end professional audio gear. Some of that is true when it comes to high-end computer gear. I don't think that drop-off is as dramatic here with the keyboard. But when I look at this $85 Keytron, this launches another $200. Is it $200 better? I can't say. But I can say it is much better. I don't know if it's $200, but that's just going to be a personal value call each person makes. I, however, am very happy with it and will spend, you know, a very long time using the keyboard. And I think, you know, in four or five years, I'm not even going to be thinking about the $285 price. I'm just going to be thinking about how great this keyboard still is. And I imagine it will remain my favorite keyboard

for a long time until I get another one. There's also the aspect here that, you know, because it's open source, all of the openness about it, you can be a little less worried that support's going to drop or somehow, you know, System76, God forbid, goes out of business and you can no longer update or, you know or there's no more updates to their configuration utility or they somehow don't host the proprietary EXE download anymore. Seems like you can put your faith that, A, this thing's going to be around as long as you need it, and B, I mean, you're helping System76 out by giving them some cash

and maybe there'll be some future keyboards that are even nicer. I talked to my buddy Mike in Coder Radio this week about his experiences using it. He tested it on a Mac and it works there too, spoiler alert. So that's pretty impressive, the fact that I got it working on a Neon install and a Fedora box and he has it working on a Mac. And it seems to be fully functional there as well. And it's really easy to swap the keys around to your liking and then just go map them in the software and they're making the software available for Windows and the Mac too. And all of these things just kind of come together to make it feel like it's a bit of a new milestone for System76. I mean, think about what they had to do to build this thing and actually ship it

to customers from just like a project management standpoint and a process development standpoint for a business, right? And then you think about where this leads now that they've, this is their first shot. And I'm sitting here telling you, I really like it. It could have been junk. It could have been crappy to type on. It's not like they've built a lot of keyboards before. So if they took something like this and they put this, something like this in a laptop, that was like something they moved on to is building a laptop that just runs Linux and has

a keyboard like this on it. I think that'd be an extremely compelling project. And this is obviously the first step on a much longer journey and checking in on goalpost one, they nailed it. And I think that's really the takeaway here is wherever they end up taking this, if this is step one, well, they nailed step one. So the way I look at this, when you first mentioned this keyboard, I had a similar reaction of how much? This is way too much. There's no way anybody's going to spend 285 bucks on a keyboard. But then I started thinking about the equivalent in different industries. You know, cars is a perfect example. I have a premium version of a Golf sat on my driveway, a very average economy car that's had a bigger engine and whatever put into it.

I don't need that bigger engine. I don't need the four wheel drive system, but yet I'm happy to pay extra because it gives me those feels when I get into it. I look down and I see the fact that it has the flappy paddles on the steering wheel. And I think to myself, yeah, this is nice. This makes me feel good. And if you're getting that same feeling from the keyboard, something that you touch and see all day, every day for half a decade, maybe longer. Sure. I think it's worth it. Don't you? That is my math on it. I know for some, though, I think maybe for Neo, if it's not full size, it doesn't really work for you, does it? Yeah, I actually use my number pad quite a lot. And I mean, I can obviously get away with it without not without having it because my laptops don't have it. I actually hate having the number pad on the laptops because it makes them

cramped. But when I'm working on a desktop and I'm going to have an external keyboard, I really want a full size one because I take advantage of the real estate and I like the more space in the keys and a lot more even layout. That said, I'm super excited about this. And if they had a regular version of it with a full layout and even maybe some multimedia keys and some extra little, you know, quality of life additions, I'd be down for it. Maybe they will have multiple. I've wondered. Or like a volume knob that some of those fancy keyboards have. I'd take that. Yeah. I love the volume. I do too. It's my, it's my like volume knob. And so like legit, I use my media keys a lot. I have the volume control, the play, pause, back, forward, like, and the mute button,

the mute button gets hit a lot. I use, I use those. And so having those on a keyboard is important for me. Right. I am very, very, very fond of compact keyboards here in the studio and in my recording setup in my mobile setup in Lady Jupiter. But at my desk, I agree with you there. I like a full-size keyboard, and I think maybe that's one of the reasons I'm not putting the launch at my office desk. I'm putting it here in the studio. And then also because it's a bit of a conversation piece

in the studio as well. But yeah, that's very true. And I would love to see one day, you know, multiple versions of the launch. That could be pretty cool. What would you have on your keyboard, Wes, on your custom launch keyboard? Oh, yeah, okay.

Well, I definitely want the volume knob and then as many possible LEDs as they could pack. And pipe dream here, what about something like a System76 pure open source powered touch bar? Well, first in the housekeeping, I wanted to let you know that our buddies across the pond have a bit of a party this Saturday. Foss Talk Live starts at 7 p.m. their local time on their YouTube channel. You can go over there and get subscribed and then that will just go live. So we are recording this on June 8th. So it is the Saturday we're recording, which is June 12th, 2021. Foss Talk Live, 7 p.m. their local time.

And it's a crossover event, too. So Wes and I will have it up. We'll have the popcorn going and we'll be cracking jokes at our friends' expense. It should be a good time. You know it. Also, we'd love to hear from you. Some ideas that we have on this show, some of the segments, like today's episode, are inspired by our audience. We get emails into the show and then we pursue an answer.

So we'd love to get your questions, your feedback, all of it at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Of course, there is a whole network, and the conversation is always rolling in our Telegram channel. You can join that at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram, and the conversation goes 24-7, and many of us are popping in and out there throughout the day linode.com slash unplugged go there to get 100 in credit for 60 days on your new account and of course you support the show make it possible for us to release free content linode is our hosting provider of choice you guys know that but i was reflecting on one of the things i really appreciate about Linode while I was traveling. And as you can

probably guess, that was making it possible for us to keep services up, even though I was mostly AFK. So I'm traveling. And of course, as you would expect, I get an alert. That alert tells me that network traffic has gone crazy on one of our boxes. But the great thing about Linode, and honestly, yeah, I could do this myself. In fact, some of our Linodes, we do have our own software and alerting on there. And yeah, I can set up monitoring and alerting. But it's table stakes with Linode.

That's the great thing is there's a baseline. And getting alerts on things like excessive network traffic is almost always a tell that something is wrong on a box. I mean, maybe you're just having a great day. That's good to know too, actually. That's kind of like, yeah, hell yeah, we're doing great. But no, not in this case. But the thing that is really slick

is it's easy to work with a team. And so Wes got the alert and was able to get logged in and fix the issue before I even read the email. He gave me a status update. And I just sat there thinking to myself, man, am I really grateful that these kinds of basics are taken care of? And that, you know, I pop into the dashboard, I can see the history, I can see what's going on. And even if you're not a pro, the cloud dashboard Linode has built is so straightforward that you're going to get access to this information right

away. And they kind of just abstract away the fact that you get 11 data centers to choose from that have crazy fast connections between them. And that you have everything from these $5 a month rigs, which, you know, it's amazing how many things you can run on has these complicated, horrible UIs, often with some sort of funky secondary business model behind them. Where Linode, they're truly independent. In fact, they are the largest independent cloud provider. And I love that about them. They've been around since 2003. The Linode infrastructure is solid. You can focus on your project and not having to build

and manage all of that stuff. And you get alerts when something goes sideways too, and that's pretty great. So head over to linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 credit for your new account

and try this stuff out. Go build something, learn something, maybe deliver something online. There's a lot of ways to host things. There's a lot of companies that offer a lot of different options at crazy different price points.

But none of them, none of them are Linode. None of them bring it all together. None of them are the largest independent cloud provider. And none of them have been involved in the Linux community as long as Linode. Because they've been doing it before everybody else. So go get $100 and support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. Dries from Belgium wrote in, I'm a long-term Mac user dipping my toes in Linux with a second-hand

ThinkPad running Pop! OS. That sounds like a nice setup. I also have an iPhone and a Canon M50. I'm wondering what photo managing solution do you all recommend? I think privacy is very important. I want to add right here. And I'd also like a local copy as well as ideally a cloud backup. I've also got a Raspberry Pi laying around, which I could use if I was going to self-host something. What are your photo managing and backup workflows? Local? Cloud? Both? Uh-oh, I have to admit something on the episode now. Right here, I gotta say, I have slipped back into using Google Photos as my backup backup. You kind of have that second backup. And truthfully, I have found part of the reason I've been drawn back to it is the front end client features of being able to search for objects like

dog and Christmas tree or pictures of my son in Idaho has just drawn me back to using Google Photos because the front end makes it easy to find photos that I can then pull and send to a family member really quick. And that practical functionality brought me back. And so I use on my phone the Google Photo backup app to send my photos off site. Yeah, I have to admit, I'm in the same boat. I used to have a sort of custom sync thing solution going, which worked pretty well. But honestly, the network effect kind of pulled me back into Google photos. I mean, one, I had bought a pixel and so it was kind of, you know, opted in anyway. And then I went on some vacations and this was a few years ago, but,

you know, my friends, they were on there too. They were starting an album. I was sort of, I had to upload some things to Google photos regardless. And once I was there, it was, it's just so easy to stay, you know, that's, that's the trick. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. So the problem actually is, is we're going to admit Google photos is a good product, but recently Google has made change to the pricing structure and taken away some of the incentives that they used to actually get us using it in the first place. And with any kind of Google thing, it's kind of like, how long is this going to be around?

Is this really a long-term solution? And what about the privacy aspects of it and the ongoing cost? And I don't know, do you agree, Alex? Is part of the problem Google Photos is just kind of, well, it's damn good. I do, absolutely. Yes, hello, everybody. They've done the old bait and switch there, haven't they? The first hit is free. Exactly. They drew me in. And then because I was already paying for Google Storage for my backups, it wasn't like this, oh, no, now I have to pay.

It was like, oh, well, I'm already paying. So I guess I can just keep using it. Now, for those that aren't familiar, what's actually changing is that as of June 1st, 2021, the account storage is shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos, but any new photos and videos you upload will now count towards the free 15 gigabytes of storage that comes with every Google account. Now, the reason that's changed is before, they had this kind of compressed high quality in air quotes that didn't count towards that quota, but now everything does no matter what.

Yeah, and I wasn't using all 10 terabytes, so it wasn't a huge hit to me, but it woke me up and reminded me how precarious the situation is when I'm using a hosted service like this. And how they always, so far, Alex, have inevitably bit me in the butt, and a lot of times have done so in such a way that inspired us to start the self-hosted podcast. So that, I know, is well-covered ground for us, but

yet, yet, here I am, knowing better, knowing the privacy implications of Google, all of that, the transparent background uploads, the sharing features that Wes touched on, and then the searching features are very good. And you could make the argument that now that Google is making you pay for this, it actually makes Google Photos sustainable, so it'll be around for a long time. So I think it remains a very viable option, but I know I should be probably looking into other things. Well, when we look at the whole picture here, you've got to take into consideration who owns the data, what are they going to do with it? How much is it going to cost? You know, not just in terms of it's going to cost

me, you know, a couple of dollars every month, but in terms of the cost to humanity, I suppose, in not having a fully open solution. And, you know, what I've come to find writing this piece is that there isn't one size fits all self-hosted photo management solution. There are several very good options, but all of them check different boxes and miss other really basic stuff. You know, LibrePhotos, for example, is one of the apps we'll come on to later. It doesn't let you delete a photo from an album. It just boggles my mind that such a basic thing gets missed from some of this stuff, you know.

But, you know, the other angle of self-hosting is that you have to have a server. You have to pay, you know, either Linode or build one and stick it in your basement or a closet or whatever it is. And so there's a cost not only in terms of financial stuff upfront for self-hosting, but also in terms of my time to research and set these things up as well. And if Google Photos ends up being around for 10, 15 years, is it likely that you're going to build and self-host something that will also be around for 10 or 15 years? That's what I was thinking. I'm okay running some of my infrastructure, 15 years, is it likely that you're going to build and self-host something that will also be

around for 10 or 15 years? That's what I was thinking. I'm okay running some of my infrastructure, but photos are some things I'd like to not lose if I make a mistake as a novice admin, say. I always find it useful whenever we talk in such large timescales to just remind you, 10 years ago was 2011. What were you doing then with your photos? Just picture how far the industry's come in that decade and think about how far it might go in the next. It seems like what really is the killer next generation feature is object recognition, face recognition, location recognition, and then an interface that allows you to manage all of that. That's what Google nailed early with Google Photos.

It isn't necessarily impossible to get in something you could run yourself. And I know you've looked at several of them. Well, if I was reviewing Google Photos, one of the things I would probably put in the negative column is that it doesn't have an awful lot in the way of organizational features. It has basic album support, and that's pretty much much it compare that to a lot of the other

options that we'll talk about today and google managed to sidestep a lot of that by having awesome machine learning and when you have an interface that is literally like you said in the beginning search for photos of dylan in idaho like You don't need a directory structure that organizes everything. You don't need to spend hours tagging things that their algorithms have done all that work for you. And machine learning, it's a bit of a buzzword in the industry, but if we think about it in its simplest form, it's just pattern matching. So all the algorithms are looking for are certain groupings of pixels that it think, well, maybe that's a tree. Maybe that's a face. Maybe that's a monkey.

Or a hot dog. Or a hot dog. Yes. Have you seen that Silicon Valley episode? And machine learning really is everywhere these days. And I was watching, I think it was a Marques Brownlee video, MKBHD on YouTube, talking about how farmers are using machine learning to identify weeds in their crops so that they use 90% less pesticides. So there are some significant use cases for machine learning outside of photos. But of course, where it gets interesting is it reduces your overhead of organization. Right. Because you don't have to go

through and tag, this is a Dylan picture. This is a Chris picture. This is an Idaho picture. It just does all that for you and then makes it available as search criteria. Absolutely. Now, when we thinking about this, this space, we've got to think about the workflow, right? And I think we've got Brent on the line as well. And as a professional photographer, I'm sure he can add something into the conversation about workflows. But what I'm primarily looking to back up here are the images I take on my smartphone. I do take a lot of images with my SLR when I'm traveling,

but for most of the rest of the time, I will dump those at the end of a trip and it's two weeks worth of images, bang, and I'm done. What I'm more interested in is that kind of daily minutiae kind of automation and getting those images off my mobile device in a never compressed format. Now, I use NextCloud to do this. What do you use? Actually, Alex, I'm using NextCloud as well.

And in the beginning, it was a little clumsy. But these days, I'm finding it just very seamless. Is that your experience as well? It just works. Yeah. And that's the best kind of works. Does it run automatically in the background? Yeah. It has this nice feature where it's just called auto upload and you can add any folder that detects media on your phone. So it could be even just like downloads and things like that, not just the photos from your camera, which I found really helpful to back up things like backups of my signal database that happens automatically, things like that. Oh, that's a good idea. There you go. But for photographs, it's great because

as a professional photographer, I have this sort of constant fear of losing any photographs. Of course. That's been baked into my mind for a really long time. And so I call it the sort of run over by a dump truck situation. You know, if your phone gets run over by a dump truck while you're out on some experience that you want to remember forever, well, it uploads your photos as you take them. And I think that's a really nice feature. And, um, nextCloud has been really seamless doing that. So in terms of at least that auto backup feature, it's really solid, really, really solid, not to mention solving a bunch of other neat things for us outside of

photos. So there's several ways to get the photos off the phone. Like Alex and I recently talked about Folder Sync, which is another Android application that does this. Of course, I guess the obvious other one would be Dropbox. They offer to do this, and they'll get it on a file system for you, right? So it seems like there are several ways to solve that with various pluses and minuses, but that's not really what my problem is in getting the photo off the device. I don't even mind, like you, Alex. I'll sit down after a trip, and I'll dump the photos off of the SD card for the device. I don't even mind like you, Alex, I'll sit down after a

trip and I'll dump the photos off of the SD card for the drone. You know, I'll manually do that. There's nothing automated about that, but there's kind of a ritual about it. And I'm pretty good about doing that one, one thing that I got down. It is honestly, it's the organization. I guess I don't want to say I'm lazy. Young Chris kept everything in folders on his file system and managed his music and his pictures that way and loved it. And it was a system that really worked for him. But now, present Chris looks back at that guy and goes, boy, what a waste of my time. Like, I'm not doing that. But yet, I consider these photos extremely important. It's this weird dichotomy that I find

myself in. And so it's not so much the uploading of the photos, it is the managing of the photos. And I'm trying to find something that isn't a proprietary system that isn't locked to Apple or Google. It's really easy to do that kind of organization when you have a trip to aim at, you know, 2015 road trip, Southwest USA, for example, or like family reunion 2021. But if it's just a random Tuesday where you've snapped to your kid being cute, it's a bit harder to get that into some kind of folder other than MISC, right? Yeah, or just even spend the time to do it in the daily flow like that.

And one of those things that slips, right? Maybe you try to do it on Sundays, but then something came up and someone came over and then you missed it. How important do we think open source versus closed source is in this space? Boy, that's tough. That's tough. That is tricky because I often consider the essential applications to be the most important open source free software applications. That's generally my default. But I'm

worried, to be honest with you, Alex, that the machine learning stuff or whatever GPU acceleration stuff that's going to be necessary to get what I want is all going to be proprietary. Well, good news there. Most of the apps that we'll talk about today use TensorFlow, which is a Google machine learning algorithm. There's another one that we'll talk about called PhotoStructure, which has a closed source and it's also a paid product as well. But the developer has committed, if anything happens to him or his company, to open source the product. Does that count for you? It's definitely a plus anyway.

I mean, I'm not, I guess I can handle proprietary software, but I'd like to understand some of the motivations and think that there's something long-term that I can depend on at the very least. I mean, there's clear advantages to an open source project if it has a sizable user base and a sustainable development model. You get visibility into the direction of the project.

And photos is a pretty important possession. And so having that kind of forward looking guidance on a project gives me peace of mind. But we talked about Beersmith in episode 400. Yeah. That's a proprietary application, but it is built by a developer who's dedicating his life to that. And it's got a good user base and he's not going away. Or, I mean, we're recording this right now in Reaper, which is also a proprietary application,

but one that we love and absolutely depend on. Yeah. So if the tool's clever enough and it looks sustainable, I'd consider it. It's the age-old question of how do you monetize open source? Right. Yes. I think it's a problem that will bother us for many years yet. Well, and Alex, it's also pragmatism versus idealism.

It's that question too. And you're coming to something like your precious life photos and you're like in this war of like, well, do I want something that's only free software or am I willing to settle it? It's like, where do you fall in that whole pragmatism versus idealism line? Well, I think if you're going full pragmatist,

you'll just use Google Photos, right? Yeah, and I think that's what's been gnawing at both Wes and I. Full pragmatist also means you're fully vulnerable to whatever that service provider does. And that's uncomfortable. We were looking a little bit before the show and playing around with Google Photos Sync, like a Python daemon that'll sync stuff down from Google.

So I wonder if there's maybe some happy mediums there where you still might want a backup. Maybe you even want sort of a read-only view of a local web interface of those backed up files. But, you know, you use Google Photos for sharing with family. Right, and so you have local copies and then you have the copies on Google Photos. Or maybe it goes the other way and you sync it locally and then upload them to Google Photos for sharing with family. Right, and so you have local copies and then you have the copies on Google Photos. Or maybe it goes the other way and you sync it locally and then

upload them to Google Photos on the side. I'm not sure. It seems like there's a lot of options, though. Or maybe something else entirely. You could argue, right, that Google Photos, being a completely proprietary service, is irrelevant as long as the export tools are good enough. And Google loved to promote

this Google Takeout tool. But when I was writing this piece, you know, it's taken me a week or so, I, on the first night I was writing, I went to Google Takeout and pressed the give me my photos button. We are about eight or nine days now, and I still haven't gotten the download link. Really? Wow. That doesn't give you confidence. Not really. Although I have to say, I think if Google Photos was going to shut down, they would probably give people a pretty good grace period to get their data out of there. I don't think Google would just turn it off.

I think what is actually more likely, Alex, is that something happens to my Google account and I lose access to my Google account, thus my photos. Now, I know that Brent, you have a fully open sourced workflow, so you must have some opinions on this, right? Well, I started tackling this problem much before we had mobile phones. And so I will say my solutions are a bit archaic, but they are solid. Stay a while and listen. And so one thing, one criteria I had that's still very strong for me is to always have the ability to put my photos somewhere on a file system without dependency on anything. So anything includes a company, a web service, a database. You know, if I can have access to them always, then that's really super important. And so Chris,

when you said, oh, if I lose access to my Google account, I started cringing and I, my palms are sweating and I, that makes me super uncomfortable because that's something I've seen happen a lot to very well-meaning people. And I've tried to help people get in and sometimes it's impossible. And so that actually, that's even worse than having your phone run over by a dump truck because it's, it's all of the photos spanning across, you know, several generations of phones that you've had and not to mention other things you've uploaded there. So, uh, I think having that in mind, you know, being able to export your photos meaningfully, which Alex, it sounds like they failed there for you.

That's extremely important. So I for me, that's that's the top one. And that's the one that's kept me from using Google Photos all these years is that it just makes me really uncomfortable. And so some of the tools I've relied on have been a little bit more offline tools for that reason. And like I said, I've developed my pipeline to have longevity to it. And so it's worked up to this point. Because you're even allergic to stuff like Lightroom, right? You really don't want to even go as far as paying Adobe any, I don't know, what's the word I'm looking for?

You don't want to give Adobe credit for going to a subscription model or whatever it is. You use a dark table if I'm not mistaken, right? I do. Yeah. And, um, you know, Alex, you touch on a little piece of my past there. So Lightroom was sort of the de facto and where I learned doing a lot of, uh, really efficient photo manipulation. And I got bit by early versions of Lightroom because their libraries weren't compatible between different versions sometimes, depending. But also they would get corrupted. And so that was where both this desire

to get away from a dependency on some of those functions came from, but also where I got introduced to open software in the first place, uh, to open source software. And so it's funny that you mentioned Lightroom because it's the reason that I have these philosophies now and that I looked for alternatives that didn't tile my metadata into, you know, a neat little database that could get corrupted or lost. I think it's better these days, but back then it just sort of informed my decisions. So all right, Alex, give us a rundown of some of the apps you've come across.

One of the first apps I picked out was Photonics. Now this one, its headline feature is machine learning object detection. There's currently no face detection with this one, but there is active development in this area. And I ended up really liking this app for a while. And then the more I used it, the more I disliked it. I just found the interface kind of really cluttered. Now, the way I like to describe this is kind of designed by developer.

It's one of those interfaces where clearly the people working on the project know every little bell and whistle every little knob and dial to turn but as a user coming to it fresh I don't need to be presented with everything all at once with a photo app in particular the content should be front and center and then everything else should be available if I want it there is a demo of photonics at demo.photonics.org. Now, the next one was actually a really interesting project. So it used to be called Own Photos,

and recently it was forked into the new project called Libre Photos. This was probably, it was certainly in my top three of the apps I looked at, and there's a lot to like here. It's got all the important stuff like face recognition, geo lookups, object detection. And the developer recently added video support as well. And having just had a kid, I have totally changed my tune on video. Yeah, take as much video as you can.

That's my advice. And particularly if it displays, you know, just like Google Photos does, in the feed, in the timeline view, just like a photo would do. Also, and this one, Brent, might be of interest for you, it has a direct integration with NextCloud via WebDAV, which enables a seamless import of images between those two applications. See, I like that because it starts to combine some applications to solve the whole solution space that Google Photos is offering,

where it seems like so far some of these are little bits and pieces. Is that what I'm getting? Right, whereas this is a sync and the photo library. And I also like in here they have a data visualization section that shows you timeline and word clouds and places tree. Oh, wow. That stuff's fun. I actually really do like the timeline stuff because I can go through there and look at, you know, just discover a whole time period.

And then pretty soon I'm starting to send pictures to my wife. Oh, remember this? All of that kind of little thing, things just kind of built into Google Photos and other software. It's nice to see that here in Libre Photos. That's cool. built into Google Photos and other software. It's nice to see that here in LibrePhotos. That's cool.

Those data visualizations are cool, but ultimately, particularly the word cloud, I found it just to be a bit pointless. Like maybe if in the word cloud that's generated, so what happens is LibrePhotos will go through and scan your images and tag it with all the different objects it's found, you know, tree, monkey, dog. Hot dog.

Hot dog. Hot dog. And it will generate a word cloud, and obviously the more times it finds the same word, the bigger the word becomes in the word cloud, right? Just like you'd expect. What I would expect when that happens is that I would then be able to click on that word in the web interface,

and it would take me to that category of images. Yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that right now. Ooh, you've got to be kidding. word in the web interface and it would take me to that category of images yeah unfortunately uh it doesn't do that right now oh you gotta you gotta be you gotta be kidding what's the point that's no good it's a small thing but again it's just another example of how it's designed by a developer as opposed to someone who's more focused perhaps on the user experience yeah okay all right so um librae photos could be a contender, especially if you're in the next cloud space, but I have a sense there's something else out there.

Honestly, man, there are so many, there are so many, you know, I started off trying to write a couple of thousand word article over a week later, I'm tearing my hair out thinking, Oh, there's so many options options so if I miss your favorite option or we don't talk about it today please it's not a slight against you just let us know linuxunplugged.com slash contact all right so uh the next one I'm going to talk about is photo structure now this is the one that's got the really interesting kind of open source um going on. So the application itself is closed source. There are several features that the developer has open sourced and upstreamed to various different projects.

So it's closed source, but it's aware of the open source ecosystem. So it's not on Adobe. It's not, you know, like an Oracle kind of level of closed source evilness, but it's also not full on freedom, hippie, open source either. Somewhere in the middle. Interesting. Yeah. Bear that in mind. The killer features of this app are based around photo organization.

So Chris, this might be one for you. There are zero machine learning features, unfortunately, but what this one really excels at is image ingestion and management. So if you point this at a directory, it will support either existing file systems or it will ingest and import images into its own file structure, which is still readable. It's not a database. It's just a bunch of files organized properly. It will also deduplicate images and run on any major OS as a kind of a web app, but as a service, if that makes sense. So I run everything in a container that we're talking about here. And if you're saying that's the way you'll go to, but this one runs on

any major OS that you'd like. Oh, okay. And it says it's been designed to handle a lifetime of photos and videos. Like all the best software, this one scratches an itch for the developer. And so it is closed source, but you can self-host it. You can run it on your own system. So it's a sustainable project, right? The developer can eat. And I think that's important. A lot of these projects are kind of one or two man operations and photo structure is a one man operation, but it's his full time job. And he can pay the bills and his mortgage with it. So he's motivated to keep working on it and

add new features. And as a paid customer for PhotoStruxure, you get the ability to vote on the next features coming along. And it's a meritocracy. So obviously the features with the most votes are the ones that he will work on, because the people paying the bills have asked him to do so. I like that. Always nice to see software that runs and targets Linux, and they mention Docker right there pretty prominently. Wonderful. I can live with that. All right, so PhotoStruxure looks like a serious contender, as long as I don't want the machine learning, like, base-tagging stuff. Yeah, that is a shame.

And I think, obviously, with time, those features will get added to it. But the thing I picked up most talking to Matthew was just how much care and attention and craftsmanship has gone into the backend of what's already there. By far and away, it's the most performant of any of the products that we're talking about today or any of the projects we're talking about. And, uh And I think the project has a bright future. Nice one. That had not been on my radar before. What else do we got? Well, we're moving into the kind of gallery apps. Actually, no, before we do, I'll just talk about PhotoPrism. This one is open source and there's a link to the demo in the show notes.

Much like LibrePhotos and Photonics, it also uses Google TensorFlow to do machine learning. It can automatically classify objects, but as of today, there's no face detection. Okay. Now, like our emailer, he only had a Raspberry Pi 3, so I don't think he can do TensorFlow. What kind of requirements do I need? Do I need to have a NVIDIA Tesla GPU

to be able to use TensorFlow? I mean, you certainly could. You could use CUDA, I think is the NVIDIA library that does that kind of stuff. But I'm just running this on an i5 8th gen CPU. So it's only got six cores. It's not, you know, a superpower house or anything. Maybe it is compared to a Raspberry Pi, but it's not a data center. All right, that sounds pretty reasonable. So PhotoPrism uses TensorFlow to do all of that, and it also gives you a gallery to sort through all of that. I would imagine exposing the metadata and all that kind of stuff.

I remember the UI. I remember checking it out for self-hosted, and it felt like it was really clean and simple and straightforward. I actually ended up growing to hate it this week. Again's a design by developer problem so if you look at the interface that i've got here it's got you know eight pictures of airplanes actually some of those were taken at the studio by the way do you remember when there was those planes flying around at the sprint yeah a couple of those are from then if you look at the the pictures what would if you click on an image what would you you expect to happen? I would expect the image to open.

Nope. Wrong. Guess again. Oh, no. What happens? What? What happens here is it begins a multi-image selection process. No.

That's unacceptable. To open the image, you have to click on the tiny, tiny little translucent camera icon up in the top left. Yeah, that does seem kind of like a really simple thing, yet very frustrating thing. Which is also sometimes a magnifying glass with a plus in the middle of it. Right, right, right. And also sometimes a play button. And because it's a web app, God only knows what could be going on with your web browser

at that moment where the first click isn't even registered. Right. So there are little things with PhotoPrism that could use work. And again, it's mostly user interface and experience stuff. They do have really great documentation on a web dev feature. So much like LibrePhotos, you can integrate this with NextCloud,

but also you can mount this via web dev from your desktop computer. So Brent, maybe this could be one for you. I'm thinking with like Digicam or Darktable or something. Yeah, it does sound really interesting because it seems to blend the internet world with my here at home in my cave world. And here's what I'm trying to wrap my head around, Brent. So you take all these photos, you know, you got a whole, I would imagine a nice library of faces

and objects. Have you ever considered how nice it would be to be able to just expose like every picture of this particular face or person or every photo that has this plant in it like that seems like that would be extremely useful for a professional it's a feature i've dreamt of for decades all right uh and so i will say i will admit to absolutely everyone that my methods are deprecated and only because they've worked and i haven't really needed a better way. Although you guys are all making me realize that I'm suffering a little bit without some of these features. So I am all ears.

Hey, Alex, I'm thinking we do a total self-hosted makeover for the photos for Brent in a future episode of self-hosted. It's an intervention. Yeah, we'll show up. We'll have like this whole server set up for you. We'll show you the whole workflow and get the Brent stamp of approval and then deploy it and get all of your images recognized. And it'll be a full photo makeover. I'll expect a link to the gallery of that event.

Okay, so that's PhotoPrism. And it is open source. So that checks a box. It supports WebDAV. So that makes it pretty flexible. Is there any other ones we should mention? Because, you know, I wanted to mention, I think it was at Leachy. We've used that before.

I think we still have that somewhere. We do. Gallery.selfhosted.show. There's a few of my own personal images in there. And this one's really interesting because it kind of somewhat blurs the line between a straightforward gallery app and a photo management app. a straightforward gallery app and a photo management app. And the reason I say that is because you can organize images into albums, but you can also edit the metadata of these images. Now, a lot of these programs that we've talked about have next to no image editing features. Not a single one on this list allows you to crop an image. A couple of them allow you to rotate,

single one on this list allows you to crop an image a couple of them allow you to rotate like choose one of those but i mean i can't crop an image in any of these i was i couldn't believe that yeah i think i'm kind of coming to the conclusion that my strategy for that would be local editing so something like shot well or dark table for local edits which i think that's what you're doing now wes yeah and um so that's that's why the ones that support WebDAV are kind of appealing to me because I could see using both tools. One is a viewing and searching tool and discovery tool that I can, oh, look at this great pic. I can quickly copy it and paste it into Telegram, right? That's one tool. And then the other tool is that one where I've gone a little bit in and I maybe cropped something to make it a nicer shot or something like that.

And I can save it back to the same source location? During one of those editing sessions, maybe, when you have the itch, or you're getting back from a trip and you're kind of going through things. Right, right. What would be a really nice feature is if you could use some of these apps we're talking about as your sort of photo organization method, and then have this, you know, let me dream here for a moment, have this method to just sort of, I don't know, you can't right click in here, but right click and go, you know, open in dark table or open in glimpse or something like that, and then do your cropping and your photo adjusting. And that way they don't have to sort of rely on that stuff. Yeah. I think you've just described the mobile experience now. Exactly. Dang it.

Well, and the reality is, whenever you want to share stuff with family, oftentimes you're on the go, or you've got five minutes while you're waiting, you know, on somebody else to do something, or in a lineup at the bank. I say the bank. Who goes to the bank anymore? But, you know what I mean. Hey, I went and deposited a check in person this

week for the first time in a long time. Retro. Look at caveman. Welcome back. But I found even for me, I'm sharing most of my stuff from mobile, not to clients, but to everybody else. And so that's an essential feature. I'll tell you what, Brent, sharing images via link is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to get right, apparently, in this space. Lychee does this best, in my opinion. It allows you to generate different URLs for social media, but also, and this is a really cool feature,

Lychee will let you generate images automatically scaled to certain resolutions directly in its sharing pane. That's Lychee, L-Y-C-H-E-E. And if you want to see an example of it, you can go to gallery.selfhosted.show. And it's pretty straightforward. Do you think maybe this is the most straightforward of all of them to get up and running and just share photos with somebody?

Yeah, I think it's probably my favorite app overall in this entire rundown. The downside is it has no machine learning features. So if you want that kind of search organization, it doesn't have that. Like you say in your article, it's a great front end to whatever else you're using to make your photos look great and organize them well. That's where it shines. So I have a link to some of these projects that we've mentioned here on the show. So that way, you don't have to worry about the weird names at linuxunplugged.com slash 409.

If I could just do one final little honorable mention, I came across an app called FileRun on self-hosted a few months ago, and I actually ended up using it quite a bit for photos because it has a bunch of image processing stuff in the background. And all FileRun does is it's a web app that presents an underlying file system in the web browser, and it supports full text and has metadata search as well, which if you think about it, apart from the machine learning stuff it's missing, is actually half the battle. So this is at filerun.com. And this would totally be one of our tools in the total photo makeover for Brent Alex. And the UI is surprisingly nice

for something that I've wanted for so long, Just your files available in mobile or in a full web version in a really nice UI. And although I don't really think you probably use this much, but it has plugins too for things like Google Apps and Office 365 and Autodesk and a lot of those things. Autodesk? What? Yeah. So you can pull in CAD files. Isn't that funny?

Why not, man? And if all you have lying around is a Raspberry Pi, this might be pull in CAD files. Isn't that funny? Why not, man? And if all you have lying around is a Raspberry Pi, this might be the way to go. Yeah. Throw FileRun on there, do your file uploads right there, and then maybe Leachy on none of these apps check all of these boxes. You're going to have to have probably NextCloud to get the images off your device, and then something else to organize and edit them. Well, actually something else to organize them, something else to edit them, like a Digicam or whatever it might be, and then something else maybe to display them as well. So very quickly, you've got a stack of three or four apps here. And I ended up coming to the conclusion that unless some of these apps

are able to kind of pool together their resources, we're not going to see a true Google Photos alternative that ticks all the boxes for some time. Yeah. And then it just has to, I suppose, be that question of pragmatism versus idealism and how much work are you willing to put in for your photos. Right. Here you get to and have to build your own pipeline

with Google Photos. They've done it for you, but you don't get any input on how it works. And maybe for something like your photos that you want to have a 25-year grasp on or something like that at a time, maybe that's worth getting out the old, you know, artisan, craftsman kind of mindset and building something. I think it might be for me. I've always been teetering on this. And I also sometimes wonder if perhaps it isn't maybe the perfect sweet spot to build something locally that's like this and maybe still loop in some service to do

backups because that's how important the photos are to me. Well, Google Photos, I think, is still an excellent choice for your offsite backup. If you're following the 3-2-1 principle for your backups, Google Photos is a fantastic choice. I should also mention at this point that Amazon, if you're a Prime subscriber, has free unlimited photo storage. For now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yep.

That's just it. And it may be in some weird, twisted way, Google's transition to actually making you pay for the storage that you use for Google Photos may actually be the thing that makes it sustainable and stick around for a long time. And maybe that is, in some weird ways, a good thing. It doesn't mean they're not mining your data, but at least they're not just going to randomly shut down the service on you. So if you want to add it to your arsenal of photo options,

that's a great way to go. I think it works best as a complimentary offsite backup and not the primary. And I think that's where having a local cache that I can then throw into these tools that we've just covered is going to make me feel a lot more comfortable. So thanks for the rundown, Alex. Absolutely. You're very welcome. I mean, there's, like I say, there's loads and loads of other options we didn't get time to talk about today.

You know, PyWeGo, PyGallery2, PixelFed, PhotoView, ThumbsUp, Koken. I mean, the list goes on and on. JupyterGarage.com is getting restocked with some brand new items. They're not in yet, but for the first time, we've reached that goal of clearing out a lot of the old, not everything, not everything, but we have made enough room to bring in some of the new, which was always, always the goal. We are beginning that process right now. I'm going to keep it simple and humble like we have been, baby steps here. But I'm pretty excited about that milestone. In the meantime, you can grab the seasoned Tux tee on sale right now.

That's a shirt that I created. It's a new item. It is an all-black t-shirt with a gray and dark gray bearded version of the tux holding the Jupiter Broadcasting Rocket. The seasoned tux, as I call it. And it's on sale right now at jupitergarage.com if you'd like to grab one. And now for some feedback. Mark from Lenovo writes in. Hello, Chris and Wes. I'm the technical lead for the Linux PC team at Lenovo.

Hello, Mark. I was listening to episode 405, and you mentioned the battery life on the X1 Carbon. I figured it would be interesting to reach out to the firmware slash hardware team here for their input. I've now got a bunch of battery-related ACPI APIs that I need to go through and see how they fit in to what the kernel has, although most of them are there already. But I also got some feedback on battery charging thresholds. on battery charging thresholds. Looking through the docs,

one of the things I noted is that charging thresholds really depend on typical usage. So here's the scenario. If you regularly fully discharge the battery, then actually the default setting of starting to charge at 95% and going up to 100% is apparently fine. But in a different scenario, if you regularly somewhat discharge the battery,

but not all the way, say operating between 50% and 100%, then the techs recommend starting charging at 75% and stopping at 80%. And for a final scenario, if you're connected to power, the majority of the time, in that case, you want to start at 45, stop at 50. I was surprised, frankly, at how small the windows were. I expected to see something more like 30% to 80%. And I've also got some questions in to better understand typical degradation, like is dropping

to 96% in the first six months actually normal? No idea what the curve looks like in most cases. Holler if you have any questions. Happy to forward those on to the hardware team to Mark. Well, thanks, Mark. I think the bit that stands out, and that's from the Lenovo team that stands out to me, is if you're connected to power the majority of the time with your ThinkPad, you should try to keep your battery charge in the 45 to 50% range. I wish I knew that earlier.

Yeah, and Mark's right. That is a really, that's a 5% range. That is really small. I am achieving that with TLP right now. And it bit me once because, of course, I was off grid, opened up the laptop. It only had 50% battery. And I'm like, oh, right. I need to take action beforehand. But we got a bunch of feedback in about how people are extending battery life or managing TLP on Linux. So if you've already sent an email to that regard, we received it. But if you haven't yet and you have some battery management tips or the ways that you've used TLP or things that you found that have extended your Linux battery life, please get those in now at linuxunplugged.com contact. Because I think we're going to do a batch of feedback next week and kind of put a cap on this battery discussion.

Because I have received a few cool tricks from the audience that I want to relay to everybody. And I went on this trip the entire time using TLP, have some regrets, but also I think there was some positives to it. So we'll follow up next episode on that. And thank you to Mark for reaching out from Lenovo and getting some info straight from the team. I really appreciate the ability to pass on that to the community because, you know, that's straight from, as they say, the horse's mouth.

So linuxunplugged.com slash contact for your feedback and whatnot. We are back to our regular live time, so if you'd like to join us for a live episode, we do them on Tuesdays

at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. Thank you to our members. Those of you who have become members, you get access to the limited ad version of the show and the full live stream.

So thank you very much to our Unplugged core members. You all are the very best. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. That's right. Either way, it comes out every week over at LinuxUnplugged.com. You can go to LinuxUnplugged.com

slash subscribe to get the feeds for all the different players that you like. And you can follow the show on the Twitter We'll see you next time. contact page. That works probably the best. But you know, I haven't mentioned the matrix in a while and the matrix community continues to grow despite that. Shout out to them. Info at linuxunplugged.com slash matrix. We're in there. We're hanging out. It's a great spot. It's a great spot. So thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Hey! So has anybody given the old Google takeout a try to get their photos out? Alex, I know you were experimenting with that. We talked about it in the show briefly, didn't we? And my link came in today, funnily enough. And I have, I'm now the proud owner of 144 two gigabyte files.

That's how they gave me the takeout stuff. Holy, and then how do you download that? What's the UI to download? Is it a URL? It's an email with 144 individual links in it. There's no download all button. You just have to go through them one by one. That's interesting because with Google Play Music,

you had the option of downloading everything as a large zip file. That doesn't really seem like that great of an option, Alex, I got to say. But yeah, I mean, come on. I've got 10, 15 years worth of images in there. And every SLR image I've ever taken, every mobile image, there's a lot of data in there. So one massive zip file wouldn't really be very feasible, I don't think.