LINUX Unplugged - 449: Bugfix and Chill

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

How each of us asks for features and help from free software projects, and one of our most prescient soapboxes in a while.

Brent, you were eating breakfast in the hot tub? Oh, yeah. What? Okay, I have so many questions about this. There's a bit of a story. Why do we need to clear this up? I'm curious. Well, because it's too distracting to do the show.

So you're in a hot tub eating breakfast with your dad and brother. And I just, okay, are you dressed? Are you wearing anything? Oh, just, yeah, you know, a bathing suit or whatever. Okay, all right. So my father is visiting from, you know, Ontario. He's been here for, I don't know, three months. He won't leave. So the one request that he had was that we get a hot tub for him so he could watch the mountains in the morning, which is hilarious. So anyways, his routine now has either been

spend time in the evening in it or in the morning, you know, having his breakfast. So wait, wait, wait, wait. So your dad's eating breakfast in the hot tub on an on regular basis, on an ongoing regular basis? Oh, yeah. You know, kids, I'd love to visit, but I just can't be bothered. And unless you get a hot tub and then, yeah, OK, I'm there. You know what? The only thing grosser than eating breakfast in a bathtub

is eating breakfast in the same bathwater over and over and over again, which sounds effectively like what he's doing here. But now I'm picturing three of you eating breakfast in this hot tub. in the same bath water over and over and over again, which sounds effectively like what he's doing here. Oh, interesting. But now I'm picturing three of you eating breakfast in this hot tub. It's just one big bowl of oatmeal, I think. Yeah, I'm just like, what happens when you drop food? Like, this is horrible. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, we really screwed up this week. This is a horrible show. Don't listen to this week's episode. I'd probably turn it off right now because about 10 minutes before we started,

we deleted nearly 11, what was it, 10,000 lines. I don't know. We basically destroyed our entire show, Doc. Thousands of characters. And decided to throw the topic out. We had gathered together today to talk about IPFS. We spent the week going deep into IPFS, watching YouTube videos, reading articles, trying out different applications, hosting websites, deploying on different machines. And we decided to throw all of that away and not do it this week.

We're going to do it in the future. But we realized that the topic was deep enough. It was like asking us to explain HTTP and distributed network storage in one episode and then going into the things that are good about it and the things that are bad about it, which there are plenty on both sides. So we decided to instead to break that off into its own thing in the future. We'll give you an update on that soon. And instead, we just have a ton of stuff that we want to cover this week anyways.

We were looking at it and realized we had two shows in one. And so we decided we just weren't really going to give you the best show on IPFS today, but we can give you a good episode if we focus on the other stuff. Hey, that means there's still time to send us feedback if you have thoughts on how we should talk about IPFS or if you got some tips for us. Yeah. Maybe before we get into the remainder

of the zombie doc this week, I want to mention the Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup. I think it's been since like 2014 since we've made it out there. And it's on. It's happening Saturday, April 9th, 2022 in Raleigh, North Carolina. We're going to meet up at a park. I think it's just outside of Raleigh.

You know, I'm not a location expert, but you generally, if it's right next to a big city, you say the big city's name, you know. But we got the address, 403 Nightdale Station, run. There you go. So it's Nightdale, North Carolina. Who would have heard of that? See, nobody. Or Kingdale?

What is that, Wes? Get in there. Is that Nightdale? I can't read. I got bad eyes now. I'm 40. Either way, you go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcast. You don't even know why you're listening to me.

You're not going to remember it anyways. So we have all the details up there. Yeah, there's a button you can click. You commit to going right there. Let us know. I think it's going to be a banger, as they say. Wes Payne's going to be there. Everybody knows Wes Payne, right?

Yeah. Yeah, you take a deep breath with a pause because he's like, I haven't booked the flight yet. I have not, but I'm going to go. Alex does have a couch for you, though. Oh, that's amazing. So you can save a little money there. Brent's going to be there on one of those couches too so Brent will be there

and our buddy Michael Dominick from the Coda Radio program is going to be there yep of course Alex from Self Hosted will be there so it's really coming together so far about 50 people have said they're coming from the community but I'm starting to suspect it's going to be more than that since we saw about a month

before it kicks off. So join us in North Carolina on April 9th. We want to see you. And I am trying to mention this ahead of time because I want you guys to understand my motivation for kind of mentioning this every episode for a bit is we have people who sometimes are a month or two behind. And so they hear about a meetup that's in their area a month after it's happened. So I try to get ahead of it as much as I can when we can and let you know what's coming. So now with the standard meetup announcement out of the way, I want to start today's episode by talking about our each individual thoughts on how to engage with an open source developer

to give them some sort of feedback or to ask for a bug fix in a project that you're working on. All three of us have recently had an experience with this. Wes, I think, really got us thinking about this last week when he mentioned his experience. I also recently had an experience asking for something. I asked for a developer who had created a hosted bot that runs on his server. I asked him to Dockerize that up and make a few modifications to make that,

you know, possible to self-host. And, you know, it's kind of a big ask, right? I'm going in there and I'm asking, hey, I know this isn't really adding a feature and you maybe have a whole strategy here, but I'd sure use and trust your application a lot more if I could self-host it. Yeah, I have no interest in all the stuff that you're setting up over there,

but can I just copy it and run it myself? And I felt a little apprehensive about asking for that. It felt a little selfish, like, you know, who am I, right? This asking this developer to divert their time. So I'll tell you how I handled that and kind of how I made that happen. And it worked out for the best, but I thought maybe we'd start with Brent this happen. And it worked out for the best. But I thought maybe we'd start with Brent this week. And Brent, I wanted to start, how would you ask an open source developer for a fix? And then could you tell us about your recent bug squashing adventures that you've been on for the last week? Sure. Yeah, I have a little story actually that happened in the Telegram chat this week.

Stay a while and listen. I was really diving into trying to do some bug testing. Ubuntu, we mentioned, was having their bug testing week. And I thought, geez, I've been trying to do that for a few years, and I'm really going to dive in this week. Nice. In the process, I ran into what I feel is a little speed bump for myself. I was using Wimpy's lovely Quick EMU to try to get some VMs up and running to run these daily images. And I had an issue with copy and pasting, despite following all of the suggestions on how to get that up and going. You know, copy and pasting between the VM and my native machine.

You had read the docs. Oh, many times over the last few months. And so I thought, geez, maybe this is something people struggle with in our community. And I wonder, I'd like to hear what you guys think, but I feel like I'm not the most technical person in our community and outside of our community that says a lot because typically I am. But I haven't struggled with, you know, it's Wimpy's app. He's a friend of ours. And so I could just like message him and say, hey, Wimpy, I'm struggling with this thing. Can you help me out? But philosophically, I felt like, well, I don't, Wimpy probably doesn't want everyone to go and, you know, DM him about a little problem they're

having with an app that he's worked on. So I thought, okay, well, how else would I do this if I didn't know Wimpy? And so I went into our community and I said, hey, I know there's people who use this app, you know, Quick EMU. It's, you know, a little outside my pay grade as far as what it's doing under the hood. And I'm having this really simple issue. And I wondered if anyone could help me. And it actually began this really fascinating discussion. Lucifer in the chat room helped me like wrap some ideas around why it was okay to just like DM Wimpy directly in our Telegram group, for instance, and say, Hey, I'm having this small little issue. And so I thought if I was the developer, I wouldn't want to be bombarded with all these like, you know, single people trying to make me solve the smallest little issues with the software, either because it is a

bug or because it's just like a use case that me as the user, I'm not, I haven't figured out yet. You know, there's a learning curve to every single application. I'd be curious to hear what the rationale was, because I also think I would be hesitant. I am every time I reach out to a developer, I am hesitant. So here's my thought on this too, is with free software, you have the opportunity to experience one of the greatest things in software development. And that is you can interact with the developer directly in the right situation, in the right scenario, in the right context, engage with them, and they will actually fix the thing that you're asking about. Like, it's such an incredible experience when you are so familiar with the commercial customer experience where you buy a product, maybe they offer support, but you could never ask them to change anything. You could never actually talk to the person creating it. And it's such an amazing experience when you have that kind of interaction. Yeah, I mean, right in the commercial world, maybe you have like a rep that you talk to and you're sort of like kind of pushing, being like, look, this really causes this problem.

But you have no insight into what happens upstream. How does that get prioritized? Are you just a small little fish? Right, because along with doing this process, there's generally a public bug tracker. So you can watch the status of your thing. And that's even if it's not going anywhere, it's at least more access than you normally get. But to properly navigate this, I think, Brent, you do have to go in with a little bit of caution like you did. I think you have to kind of suss out how does this developer prefer to be approached?

And I may actually start if I figure out how to contact them in a way that feels like it's appropriate. I may actually start with the question of what is your preferred way for me to ask for help or file a bug? Not here's my problem, but hey, I know you're busy. So I need to, I'd like to file this issue because I'd like to help you fix it. But what's the best way for me to do that? And not actually starting with the problem, but starting with the question of how do I go about asking the problem? Yeah, I hadn't considered that because I figured giving a small synopsis of what was going on would be helpful. But I think you're right. Every project seems to have a different preference on where to solve various problems. You know, a bug tracker is not the right place to ask a very simple, you know, usage question. Some projects have IRCs

for that or discords and other technologies to just get people connected for really simple questions. And so I think actually that's very simple and yet really good advice. So thank you. Yeah, I think it's like sort of an empathy thing of trying to understand some projects will have that spelled out. Other times you might need to explicitly ask because they don't yet have documentation established that might tell you where to go with that, you know, which communities or forums or methods they prefer for what types of communication. The other thing is sometimes projects have been around a while and they just have a legacy of different trackers or different places for community online. And so it's like, okay, which one do I do actually engage with? That can sometimes be a problem for podcasts too. So how does it, how did the whole bug squashing thing go and how did it go with Wimpy? Tell us

more. Did you squash any bugs? I feel like there is a conclusion to this story. Yeah, I think it's an adventure and I don't think it ever concludes. So for the small story with Wimpy, I actually had this discussion after bedtime where he's at and he never got back to me. I think because probably it went into a totally different place. You know, my original question actually evolved into a discussion about something else, which he may have been interested in. Maybe he didn't even see it.

And I just got around the copy and pasting problem because I wanted to keep going on the project. So that's where that landed. So if anyone has any ideas on how to help me with that, I'd love to hear it. So now he's turning to the audience. It's interesting because that was my original approach in the Telegram group.

And there was some great suggestions there. There was a good point that was made during that discussion, which was sometimes reaching to the community for some help on a project is sometimes detrimental because you can get information that leads you to a workaround that maybe the project doesn't necessarily think is the best solution to your problem. And that is kind of what I ended up finding, you know, on the stack exchanges and stuff like that, you end up with these potential solutions to your problem, but they're kind of hacky sometimes. And getting the answer from the project itself is probably far better. You know, there's a very interesting thing happening right now in the home assistant

community where the project is recommending, you're laughing at me, Wes, but the project is recommending that people migrate from the old Z-Wave implementation integration to Z-Wave JS. And they've even created a wizard and they've been pretty clear about it for the last six months. And they made an implicit recommendation in the last home assistant release. And in the next home assistant release. And in the next home assistant release, they're going to break the old Z-Wave integration. So you really

got to migrate. And when you go look, when you go look up how to do this migration, what you'll find, especially on Reddit, is a bunch of people telling you to do something completely different than what the project recommends. A lot more complicated, requires a lot more skill sets. It requires understanding MQTT and it's a whole different world. And there's no, like, really simple migration wizard that they've set up. And it's just, it's, like, because things become tribal knowledge. Like, this is how you do something. And so when new people come along, like, there's almost just, like, so much momentum behind recommending something.

And sometimes what happens is the project changes, right? They pivot, they choose a new direction, and the community doesn't necessarily change with them. It could be saying something as well about really great project documentation. I feel like some projects have such great documentation that's so up to date that that tends to be the go-to for this kind of knowledge. But I've often ran into projects who maybe have some stale documentation or it's not clear in its descriptions. And so often the community has to kind of use these other strategies to suggest fixes where the project isn't kind of giving the information that's required. So I wonder if as a project, that might be a place to put energy where it makes it far easier for end users to accomplish the things the project, you know, the direction the project wants to take them in. It seems like sometimes there's also a sort of dichotomy between what's happening in the pure upstream development and the various use cases downstream. It just makes me think of

GNOME and plugins. There may be something that the upstream is not really interested in continuing development work on, but the community continues to rely on or thinks is worth continued support. That's a tricky relationship. Turns out, yeah, when you think about it, it probably happens a lot in free software.

Humans. I mean, it is one of the benefits. It's just, as we know, software comes with maintenance burdens and expectations. Yeah, I follow what you're saying, but some of that also just puts more work on the project. That's why I kind of feel like in free software specifically, maybe some of that work should be taken on by the community. Like I am, when I really want a developer to fix something for me, I feel like the onus is on me to come to them, find them in the most appropriate way possible. And, you know, documentation would be great.

Right. If the developer shares a tip on how you might address something, that may be an area where the community can say like, oh, look, yeah, okay. I can add that to the wiki. Yeah. Speaking of which, it's been making me think recently that we need to like open up a bug tracker for JB, just in general, for feature requests and things like that. So that's something I think we want to talk about. So, you know, just to kind of summarize our thoughts on the topic of this, I,

when I decided to engage with the developer and ask them to dockerize the stuff, I also offered to throw them 20 bucks as a thank you, just because I felt like there, I was, it felt awkward at first, like, Hey,

I, you know, I'll give you, I'll throw money at you. But then I thought I can say, thank you. But there really is value for my, for, for them in their time for doing that work. And I'm going to get value out of having that software run on my land indefinitely now. Like it's then all of a sudden, like 20, 30, 40 bucks felt like hardly anything. I was

extremely appreciative because I started thinking of like, well, how valuable is this to me? And I actually ended up sending them a hundred bucks as a, as a thank you for getting that work done. And the other reason why I kind of kicked it up a little bit is because after they did the work, other people came and piled on and started having other issues with it that I felt like we created more work for them. So that was the other reason I kicked it up a little bit. It's just a way to say thank you. But I want to, while we're talking about value, I want to talk about a really neat experience that I had this weekend. So yesterday, listener Cole came up to Lady Joops, my RV, to see Joops, to meet me in person in the family. And Cole's been a listener for over a decade, perhaps even longer since perhaps maybe before Dylan was even born.

He's now a commercial electrician by trade. He's done the sysadmin thing and is still a big geek. Loves that stuff. And our recent conversations about value for value have sort of really resonated with him. He's never really participated in any online community, so he's never been in Mumble or Telegram. He's never emailed into the show, but he's listened to every episode. Wow. And that's not too uncommon.

I mean, that's how I am for most of the podcasts I listen to. Seriously, same. Yeah. I think it's the norm. But I think for Cole, he was trying to think of a way to contribute that wasn't just like a financial contribution, but something that would be another value contribution. And I like this concept a lot because I think it could also be applied to free software. And so I sort of feel like I have felt so down about software development funding, free software development funding since like Heartbleed and that kind of stuff. And it's starting to turn around when I'm starting to connect these pieces. And it's still early days, but I'm starting to see something here. And because it resonated with Cole too. He's like, I want to contribute. I've been listening to JB for over a decade. I've gotten value out of some of the shows and I wanted to do something for you that's valuable and I'm a commercial electrician. And he had heard

the story about the rack eating in the RV and chewing up my wiring. So we just got our slides fixed over the summer and then it freezes like a bastard here in the Pacific Northwest and rats get into my RV and they chew through the wiring and break my slides. So he said, well, let me come up and take a look at it. And I said, yeah, okay, come up. And he comes up. So I gave him the full tour, but I did a bit more of a focus on the electrical

setup and on the solar system. And I explained to him the rat situation and that the wire they chewed through and that he had fixed. And I showed him that kind of stuff uh and it was obvious that his experience was going to be instantly valuable because he kind of just pretty quickly pieced things together that i wouldn't have understood and he explained that the way these switches work there is a multiplexer sitting between the controller and the switches to send the different signals because there's two wires for in and there's two wires for out so you have each switch has four wires total that run back to a multiplexer and then the multiplexer just has one wire or two wires going to the controller so it takes all these wires and multiplexes it down

and i didn't know that but cole recognized that right away and so we started hunting for the multiplexer cole's here on the hunt for the multiplexer that is definitely a false floor if you think so it could be hidden under there there is definitely a cavity there but what i'm thinking that probably actually is is just for power and when i'm looking at it it does look like from that wiring harness it does look like from that wiring harness, the wires go in two directions. So I'm thinking that maybe the multiplexer is behind that panel.

Oh. Behind the panel itself. Yeah, which would make sense. Should we take the panel off? Yeah, I was going to see. I'd love to look behind there. Okay, let's take it apart then. Let's see if you guys are okay with me. Yeah. I would also like... Yeah, I'd be curious too to see what it looks like under there.

Yeah, yeah. And then I'm going to wring it out, see if I can see continuity between those connections and see what we can see. This is a big panel with half a dozen switches on it and LED lights to indicate sensors for tanks and all that kind of stuff. And we've never removed it from the wall, but I've always been curious what it must look like because it's just a ton of different switches and lights and stuff and sensors in one spot.

What are you? So Cole also brought like all his own tools because, you know, he knows me. He's listened for a while and he knows I'm not very handy. You don't have the tools. He's very polite about it, though. Just bring what you need, you know? Yeah, so he brought his own set, and he had that panel opened up right away.

And I tell you, what we found in there still sits with me right now in an uncomfortable way. Your problem is right here. What do you see? Oh, did they get up in the wall then? Oh, yeah. Oh, did they get up in the wall then? Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. This right here is where your problem is.

You did a fantastic job down there, I have to say. I did? Down there on that side? Yeah, you did a good job. Good. So they chewed not only the spot you fixed, Taddea, but they chewed this area. They got on the back of this board and chewed this. They

crawled up the wall. Yeah, you can see the connector here. This is why this one doesn't work. There's nothing here. Wow. There's this brown wire here. Here's the sensor wire. That's why the sensor isn't working. Yep. I can see the other end of that wire that they chewed.

Yep. That red guy up there. They were in everywhere. They got everywhere then. Yeah. So, um... That is disturbing. Yeah. It's not good, that's for sure. I'm surprised other crap isn't busted then. I just hate that they use this corn

coating. I just really... I get why they do it. They do it because people abandon cars. People leave cars around for years and years and years and years, and they don't want... It makes ecological sense. But it's basically building your house out of a snack. Can you believe this?

So it's corn wiring. Gingerbread RV over there, huh? And they love it. They love it. Cole's in the chat room right now. He says it's probably not a bunch of rats. I don't know. I don't even know.

As far as I ever saw on camera, it's hard to say because I just caught a rat on camera. I don't know if it's, you know. You know, my folks had a problem with this one of their cars, but it was like a soy-based wine. But same thing. Tasty, water-covering. Who would have thought? Yeah. Unbelievable.

So then we did a run out to the hardware store. And I'm ashamed to admit it. I don't own a soldering iron at home we have one here at the studio but we did the math and we're like do we drive to the studio and pick it up or do we just go to the hardware store that's like five minutes away and and i just have one at home too so they had a decent soldering iron but they did not have like the best solder options and stuff like that yeah of course not but he got it all done got he helped to deal learn how to do some of the soldering too.

It was her first experience and got it patched up and it's working. It's working. Oh, you're like fully back in, back in slide action. Yeah. It's, that's a quality of life improvement for us. It's a lot of value. It was huge. And it was so nice of Cole to come up and do that. Well, it's, it's almost the, um, coming full circle and just from the past year and a half

or longer, right? Like whenever, before your whole journey of preparing the slide, circle and just from the past year and a half or longer, right? Like whenever, before your whole journey of preparing this, like you just, you're actually back in a fully functional lady. Oh my gosh, man. Oh my gosh. And now I'm ready to like redo the whole tech setup. I'm not exactly sure what hardware setup I'm going with yet,

but I'm like getting in that space. I feel like talked a little bit last week about some of the software I'm going to load, like a spring reload. I assume it's going to be several Mac studios. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of Mac studios running under the booth. It's just about 12 grand of Macs in there. Yeah. Yeah. That should be great. A lot of horsepower. Of course, I think it probably all would use Intel emulation for all the software. But wow, it's been great. It's been really really great and i'll have all that figured out

soon i'll get all that and you know with cole too i was showing him some of my like where i how i my hack to bring the starlink and stuff like that nice yeah showing him ideas i had around cooling um so it's all you know it's just really great it has been it has been so like you know people say you know you can you can be wealthy in ways that are not money. But it really feels like that is true when it comes to our community. And I think we have been particularly spoiled here in the Pacific Northwest with just some really great people in this area. And then we travel. And, you know, every time we're traveling, we hear from people that are offering, you know, hey, I got a driveway.

And it's just wild, right? Like you're in a strange place and you automatically have friends. Crazy people out there. You crazy people. Linode.com slash unplugged. You know, I should call up my friends at Linode and we should talk about having them come join us at the barbecue. Because they know a great meetup when they see one. They helped us put together the Denver meetup.

They were absolutely essential in that. Go sign up at Linode and support the show by going to linode.com slash unplugged. You'll get $100 in 60-day credit on your new account. And you're going to support this here show. Linode's where we run everything up in the cloud. I'm in everything. Everything. And you can start with like a five.

This is how I personally started with Linode. I mean, you know, you do you. But I started with like a $5 a month system. I put Sync sync thing on it. I was like, well, I will use this to just move between all of my on-premises stuff. I'm just going to do all on-premises. And I did use it like that for a while. But as I started kind of just understanding more about Lenovo, the company, the culture, the people behind it, I realized that I could trust it for my business. I could trust it for my mission critical stuff. I could trust it for my wife's business. Like that kind of stuff really is what resonated with me as I just understood it better. And then, you know,

as time comes up, it has gone on. I've made friends over there and I kind of see the way they work. And I've been watching on some of the things that they're building, like their database is a service product that they're rolling out right now. And you get to choose from 11 data centers around the world. And every service level you go with, from their $5 a month system to their like crazy Bonanza Epic CPUs and NVMe storages and all that kind of stuff, they're going to give you the same great customer support. It doesn't matter.

They got the best in the business. And honestly, I've never really had to rely on it because everything's always been really great for me but i have heard such a consistent feedback from the audience that hey i got in a jam and they really helped me out i've heard that over and over again and that they've always blown away everybody's expectations so i like to mention it because i think in a moment when that matters that's going to be nearly priceless. And they're willing to do that for you with a $5 a month account. It's pretty impressive.

So go check them out. Try it out. Support the show. Go learn something. Build something. Just enjoy the performance. It's just a lot of fun to play with a system that fast.

And you get $100 to do it and it's a way to support the show. So it's linode.com slash unplugged. Well, I think it's that time again. Feedback. Ray wrote in this week talking about experience with free and open source software. Wes's recent positive experience working with an open source project inspired me to share my own. After setting up Tailscale on all my machines to experiment with mesh networking,

I took an interest in Headscale, the open-source version of the Tailscale control plane. Everything was working pretty great, but I ran into an issue adding a particular machine and went to the GitHub repo to seek some assistance. I was directed to their Discord server, and within two minutes I was talking with more than one HeadScale developer. They were welcoming and helpful, and we actually

discovered my issue was due to a bug in the HeadScale code. I filed a bug, and the fix was merged within a week. I wanted to highlight this project because the process was so pleasant and felt truly community-led. The people working on the project really believe in it and are open to input and contributions. That is great to hear. I have also had a great experience. I have a business relationship with them. They are a sponsor of Self Hosted, so disclosure there. If you'd like to sign up and get a personal account for free with up to 20 devices. It's tailscale.com slash SSH, I think. But I have interacted with them from that side. And a couple of the people I chatted with were already self-hosted listeners.

So that's always a good sign because it shows you they're really into this stuff. If they're listening to my geeky podcast, you know, they must really like this stuff. And that's kind of a sign to me that the staff are into it. And I've had a good experience. The same too, I will say, kind of a same line of thinking is I feel like I always have to give an honorable mention right here

to the Nebula project. Both Wes and I have had great interactions with the Nebula developer. It has been also a great solution for Mesh VPN network. So it's really nice to see some good options in this space right now. Now, we kind of got in trouble last week because, well, we didn't plan last week's episode much like this episode was completely unplanned.

And so we were just going with the flow, and I think we ended up hurting some sensitive ears. Yeah, we actually got a piece of mail that I think at once is both wonderful to hear and also some really good criticism that I think I agree with. So Gene wrote in about our last episode. He said, my toddler and I tend to listen to your podcasts in the car. That's the part where I think is really great. I had to turn Linux Unplugged 448 off partway through because you all were continually saying F-U-C-K, and that's not exactly what I want him parroting at daycare. I'm really disappointed that we couldn't listen to this episode together, but even more disappointed that there was no warning at the top of the show that this episode was going to not be kid-friendly. I'd really appreciate it if you all would keep kids in mind when choosing your language for the show, as I really like sharing these shows with mine. I thought that

was great feedback. It was tricky because the project itself, if you both remember, was called Brain F-E-C-K, and that was hard to get around. But any thoughts on this? You know, this is definitely something that we bounce around a lot inside, internally, because we don't believe in sort of pretense of pretending we're something we're not but at the same time, you know, I'm a dad

and I get this. I think for the most part, we have very rarely sworn on this show just because we want everybody to be able to listen and we don't want that to be able to listen. And we don't want that to be a barrier for why you listen. And we also love the idea of kids listening. I think that, you know, getting kids into technology, especially something that's focused on open source, free software and not centralized, you know, typical things like Instagram and social

media. I think that's a great, I think that's great to get kids thinking in that direction. I think where it gets maybe tricky is that we're not, we're kind of in the gray area in that I don't think we're thinking about kids explicitly when we're crafting the show or, you know, like that's not necessarily where I could target audience, even if it's a welcome subset. And then at the same time, we're not explicitly like some other podcasts. We're not explicitly saying that we're an adult only show. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So there is, it's just a balance that I think we walk. Like we don't make this show for any one particular audience, but we try to consider as many of them as possible.

That's probably the way to put that. You know, and often the feedback that we get in that regard, as you just heard, has a tone. You know, I'll just leave it at that. And so that sometimes makes it hard to internalize that feedback in a way that doesn't make me angry. But I think when you hear the message that they're trying to get to, it's pretty understandable. Yeah, I think asking for a heads up is entirely reasonable. We heard from a lot of people about Bookstack.

And David wrote in, he said, I've been using Bookstack for a few months, and I think it's superb. It's really elegant, it's easy to use, and it can be used internally for organizational info. And I also got a, I think, Cole recommended Bookstack as well. Is that right? Lyndon also wrote in, said that I'm using Bookstack for way too much. It might be too good. That's great. I like when people tell us where they're coming in from too.

Like David's coming in from Wales. That's amazing. Keep that up. I think that's great. Trev wrote in to say Trev was on fire this week. I think I saw Trev right into a couple of shows. As an Emacs user, I use the vulnerable org mode to organize my notes, agenda, reminders, and long-time tasks. Yes, we should have given org mode an honorable mention.

We did an episode of self-hosted on org mode. Yeah, that was a great episode. If you'd like to check that out all right moving right along this is a lot of feedback you guys so i'm kind of moving at a quicker clip here but uh we also got some mentions for obsidian obsidian i believe has also been talked on uh talked a bit about on self-hosted i am not somebody who i i obsidian is doesn't just doesn't work for the way I work but I think it works for a lot of people especially people who like to link things to other things and then have visuals that show them

their cluster of linkages Obsidian can be great for that and it's also a markdown Crafts on crafts on crafts Yeah Yeah Wow I gotta take a break from that

It was too much It's a lot of So this is actually maybe a chance for me to get into a little bit of a soapbox thing, if I can. Do you want the walnut soapbox? It needs to probably hold some weight for a bit. Let's be honest. I could stand to lose a few pounds. And this is a big soapbox here.

And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Boost. And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Boost. So I want to talk about these boosts for a minute, because you probably heard we've been doing these in the damn show. They hardly make any damn sense. Most of you don't know what the hell they are, and you don't know why all of a sudden we're doing them. And I want to talk about this, because this right here is, I hope,

the very groundwork for a revolutionary way to monetize free software and content that can remain independent. And I'm going to start here. We're going to have a little dad time now, and I'm just going to tell you the way something is, and you're just going to have to accept it. And that is that independent podcasting has about three years left, maybe five if you've got a huge established audience. And outside of that, it's going to be Mad Max territory for independent podcasts.

It's getting bad. YouTube is large and it is specifically reaching out to podcasters to move to its platform. But you may already heard that. What you do not know, because you have not been in these conversations, but I and friends have been in these conversations is that traditional podcast sponsors have found that YouTube works better for them than podcasts do. They're wrong, but here's their rationale. And when you hear it, you're going to see why they, why they do this. Number one, they love the idea of link down in the description.

They think that makes more engagement and they think that means that people click through easily more often because the links right there down in the description. Number two is that YouTube is a giant centralized platform that generates a lot of metadata about its audience and about the creators and about the interconnections between those creators and audience that allows sponsors to build tooling to essentially slice and dice the market up for them. So they can go in and say, I want 10,000 people that are interested in this. And I want to get, I want to get this percentage of women and I want to get a content creator who's also connected with this content creator.

And I want to ride this hype wave over here. And what they, what they do and it's disgusting is they will engage directly with these channels and they will do sponsored videos with absolutely no disclosure that that video is sponsored or it'll be like a really limp attempt at it. Like maybe down in the description, it'll say sponsored by, and it turns out like the manufacturer of the laptop was the one sponsoring the entire video, but they don't

actually say that in the video. That kind of stuff is rampant on YouTube. And the reality is sponsors love it. They love that kind of native ad stuff. They love it. They love that they can use generic tooling and they love that they can buy five or 10 creators in a couple of clicks and that those creators don't even have to disclose, even though they're supposed to, they don't even disclose that they're being sponsored. Sometimes they love that kind of stuff. Then you've got Spotify who's squeezing the market, trying to centralize over there. Now, independent podcasting that's unmonetized. Well, that's a hobby and that's going to just continue as people prefer.

But unique, crafted content that is the sole focus of content creators is fading. It's going away. I mean, honestly, how many Linux content creators do you know that actually do Linux content creation full time? Counting myself, I can think of Joe. So that's two.

Everybody else has contract work. They got side gigs. Maybe Nick over the Linux experiment is doing it full time. I'm not sure, but it's like maybe no more than three or four content creators. And then you got Larble

over at Pharonix. When you start getting into the written media, you got a little bit more. You got Joe at OMG Ubuntu. You've When you start getting into the written media, you got a little bit more. You got Joe8OMG Ubuntu. You've got LWN. But again, this is like under a dozen at all for this entire ecosystem.

Like I think our niche is particularly vulnerable to this problem. And this brings on an obvious need for a change, which is why this conversation around the boosts has been coming up more and memberships that we launched a little while ago, because I'm trying to get ahead of this thing. I have been doing this for 15 years and I figure I've got about five years left to figure out how to make

this sustainable forever. It's been a good run, but the music's coming to an end. And when I first saw boost, what I saw was, okay, that's a great way for somebody to contribute a one-off contribution. And I thought, okay, I could really see how that also work with free software. Like the two are very clear for me and we are the world's largest Linux podcast. So if we help establish a system like this, that people adopt and consider normal, then that may actually help move the needle a little bit like that. If we do the groundwork here, it may actually open the floodgates at one point. Like there's a real possibility for the show to make a difference in this area. And it's early, right? Like my peers don't even know what the hell I'm talking about.

Like they don't even know. They think I've lost my mind. They don't even have any idea because it's so new and they're focused on what they do, right? Like so it's early days still. But what I have noticed now that we've been doing the boost for a little bit is there's something extra special there. And let me give you a little bit of background here. The cheapest, easiest, simplest way to comment is always going to lead to the worst comments. YouTube and Reddit are an example of this. Very low friction to leave a comment, very little individual thought has to go into each comment, and so you just get the worst comments.

You step it up to Telegram and Twitter, things get a little bit better, but not much. You know what I'm talking about. Then you step it up to email. There, things usually get pretty good. You know, you get a range of the type of feedback, but it's generally been thought through. It's often a couple of paragraphs long. It's not very, not great on, uh, on the backend in terms of us having to process it and put it on air and try to read through it in a way that doesn't put you to sleep and that kind of stuff. But you get links, you get references, you get an actual full thought out email like that. That was what email has been the peak of feedback. And that's why we push people to the contact page. But boost hit that golden ratio in a way that is fundamentally a big improvement for the production of the show, because the feedback that comes in, because a, you have to have

one of these new podcast apps, new podcast apps.com B, you got to put some change in this wallet on this podcast app. And then C, you got to subscribe to our show or listen to our show in the podcast app and send us a boost in there. That eliminates 90% of people almost. And it's changing, right? It'll be 80%. And then it'll be 70%. Just like the Linux desktop has been just like matrix has been just like everything that our audience has pioneered. Early adopters start and our audience is always some of the very first to try something that's a sensible technology. And so it kind of self-selects who's giving us

feedback at the same time. They're like limited to 300 characters. So it's easy for us to process and consume them. And we can actually export them and sort them by show. And we can see what show they were listening to if they want to include that information. And they have the opportunity to give us a little bit of value. And sometimes it's like a hundredth of a penny, right? And sometimes it's like a couple of bucks. And it comes into a system that we can process and then put into the show in a way that's quick.

And it gives the audience a chance to buy in, right? It gives them a little bit of ownership. It gives them an opportunity to contribute something and supply a message. It's created this manageable, valuable channel for feedback and ideas that are coming into the show that are giving us ideas to try things we've never even considered before.

And I just never expected that when we started using the boost. And so that's why we've been featuring the boost more. And because I think the ideals of the podcast index and the podcasting 2.0 movement are necessary for the long-term sustainability of independent podcasting and that independent podcasting that has traditionally been ad financed is going to have to go through some bit of transition. It may not be a hundred percent transition. I don't know. It's going to be different for everybody, but that S is coming.

And I think a lot of the people around me haven't even figured out until they're listening to this episode. And then they're going to listen to the words I'm saying, and they're going to realize I've been doing this for a long time. And I know what the hell I'm talking about. And they're going to have to start making a change just like that bill's been coming due in free software. But I think we have an opportunity here to do it right. And to do it in a way that orients everyone's priorities to the audience or to the software creators. It's a huge movement that could be happening. And it's not just this show.

So I think that's the other thing to consider. So that right there is my soapbox. Why don't we do our first boost? The boost. Awesome Matt wrote in again, and he said, really enjoying episode 448. The encrypted show notes idea is great and would love to see that again. I would do it again.

I had a lot of fun doing that episode. Yeah, but you can't pick the same encryption. No, I think you're right. I think we'd have to come up with a new method. Maybe could we allow for linking to our show notes? So, like, maybe all you have to encrypt is the URL. Is that too much of a cop-out? Because then,

that wouldn't be this massive chunk of text. Yeah, right. All right. Yeah, you'd allow it? I suppose. Some sort of uniform resource locating system.

We'll start brainstorming on that. All right. Watch out, Wes. Here comes one. Oh, this one's from SexyPants. Excellent. Okay.

Maybe you should start a podcast covering your life with ADHD. There's a YouTube channel that covers it, howtodhd.com. Maybe you should reach out to them and do an interview. I don't know. I, too, suffer from the beast, and it's just such a pain and makes things so hard. What do you think about that, Chris? A podcast on it, huh? Maybe we could do an extra.

You know what's funny about that whole ADHD thing? I was diagnosed as a young lad and then re-diagnosed in my late 20s. But I feel like I was always in denial that it affected me. Like, oh, I've got control over this. I can manage this. And being a dad, I realized that is not true. I actually do. This is actually a real issue.

This ADHD thing is real. And sometimes I have no governance over what my mind switches focus to. And it can be really tricky. I mean, even when we're doing this show, I've got a pen in my hand right now so I can jot down notes. So that way, I don't squirrel away and forget that I was going to talk about something. So I've kind of, you know, created myself a few tools to manage it. But how to ADHD.com sounds like the place that he liked a lot. So thanks for sending that in. That is something to think about. I'd like to, I think talking about challenges of how to optimize how you work,

how do you get in the zone? How do you do, how do you do whatever you do really well? I love talking about that stuff. I feel like it's not like a love topic, but I'd be willing to talk about it somewhere. So maybe a live stream or something could do that. Nick wrote in,

he said, Hey guys, listening to love four, four, eight. And I just heard you mention Tor. Check out OnionShare, an open source tool that lets you share files and even host a small website. Thanks for the show.

And it's at Onionshare.org. Also, just a quick pause before we get into it. This is another thing I like about the boost is Nick sent that in while we were talking about it. So he's hearing us talk about it in the app. Right. And he's hitting the boost button while we were talking about it. So he's hearing us talk about it in the app, right? And he's hitting the boost button while we're talking about Tor, which I just think is super cool. Have we talked about OnionShare before? I feel like that must have come up on the show. You know, there's a flat pack. Yeah. Yeah. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. This is, I feel like maybe not getting enough attention when I started looking

at OnionShare because it, yeah, it lets you share files and receive files and send files and all that kind of stuff but it's also a chat client so you could do like a private chat over tor you can generate urls to link people to files and or to receive a file it's got all that kind of stuff plus it's got this static website hosting that lets you host a static website on tor. What? I mean, probably not the way you're going to want to run a serious website, but if you're just looking for something for a day or two or whatever, I mean, I don't know. This is really a lot. Like that hosting a static website kind of takes it up to the next level.

Like the sending files and chatting, that almost feels like table stakes. But then I see you host a website. I'm like, oh, damn. Looks like a nice little experience too. Yeah. So, yeah, man. Check out onions nice little experience, too. Yeah. So, yeah, man. Check out onionshare.org. That looks really good. We have been talking about

Tor behind the scenes, and interestingly, if you go into the Matrix and you look at the LUP feedback channel in Matrix, they're like, that's what they've been talking about for the last week. Tor and Onion stuff. And just discussing like how Onion URLs work.

It's actually a really cool conversation. And there's some conversation there about Obsidian as well. So onionshare.org, go check that out. And then one last thing while we're talking about podcasts and the boosts. There are now 5,000 podcasts, according to Kevin Rook, that are on the Lightning Network for monetization. 5,000 podcasts. So while it may sound early in our circle, where we are at in the Linux community, there are other communities that are making this work and have figured it out. And that's where I'm kind of seeing some parallels that I think could apply to the free software community and what we're doing here. That's it. That's it. Are you good? Are we good? I got it. I got it out of my system. Thank you for letting me get on my soapbox. It helps. You can keep the box. That's just because my feet were messy, right? Yeah. That's yeah. He spilled some onions too. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. I see you snuck a pick into today's doc there, Chris, or at least what remains of today's doc. Heroic Games Launcher, an open source GOG and Epic Games launcher, you know, for the stuff that isn't on Steam. Just basically that. And if you're getting yourself a deck, it's a lot easier to just go the flat pack route for stuff

and that's why i thought this is some pretty good timing for the heroic game launcher to land as a flat pack so i have a link to it up on flat hub and it's like what west said you can bring in your gog games and probably more importantly for me like i've got like maybe one epic game ever but and i you know what am i going to do? Install the Epic Windows software thing? It's just junk. So this lets you bypass all of that. And if you have yourself one of them Deckard Cain devices, you can put this on there. And then maybe tell us about it.

Yeah, actually. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I'd be really curious. Let us know. You can tweet us at Linux Unplugged. Or the feedback page is LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. Or, you know what? Send us a gosh darn boost.

We'd love to get those too. And we have that up during the day. I watch them come in as people say stuff to us. And then links to everything we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 449. Keep an eye out. We'll probably do some either. We'll either do an episode of Linux Unplugged, or we'll do an extra in the future all about IPFS. We did a lot of work on it.

We just feel like it deserves a little more breathing room. You know? You know, you can always subscribe to some sort of all-shows feed if you just didn't want to worry about where that might show up. Some kind of all-shows feed. Then you just get it all. The self-hosted show, the Coda radio show, Linux Action News, which is a great companion

to this show. And of course, when we do an IPFS special or an extra or whatever, and this here show. You could also become a member at jupiter.signal and support us that way, and you get access to all the shows on the network, ad-free, the extended LUP recording,

self-hosted post show, and much more at jupiter.party? I think that's what it is show, and much more at jupiter.party. I think that's what it is. Come party with us at jupiter.party. There you go. That's pretty good. Okay. All right.

See you back here next time. Thank you.