LINUX Unplugged - 471: The Cottonwood Disaster

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Our garage Linux server has died, and this time we’re looking at data loss. We attempt to revive our zombie box and reflect on what went wrong. Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

Microsoft's done it again. They've open sourced another project. Oh, is it big this time? I think so. Okay, let's see if we can figure it out. Don't tell us what it is. I got one hint for you. Okay. Part of the reason Microsoft says it's open sourcing X is the changing state of work. Oh, it's probably something to do with Teams then. That sounds very Teams-y.

There may be a Teams connection. Hmm, have they open sourced something in with Skype that wasn't open sourced before? That's my guess. You boys have a guess? You got anything? I think it's an open cookbook. It sounds like maybe that's the state of work that's changing. I'm going to go with open sourcing the Windows kernel. Whoa, that's bold. That would really change the face of work. That would really change the industry. That would be history right now.

I wish. All right. So what is it? I had a 1500 3D emoji sound. Emojis? Oh my God. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, you handsome devils coming up on the show this week. Well, we blew it. We knew it was going to happen. We warned you this was going to happen. This is your chance to say, told you so.

Our little server, our humble garage box, has died again. Join us this week as we attempt to save our little zombie server, bring it back from the death. And this time we may be looking at data loss. So we'll lay out what we're going to do in the future and our plans going forward. Then we'll round out the show with some great JB news, some boosts, some picks, and more. So before we go any further, let's bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello, friends. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hello, Wes. Hello, Alex and Brent.

Hello. Hello, on-air. Hello, quiet listening. We offer both to our Mumble Room. If you'd like to just join and get a low latency Opus stream, you absolutely can. And of course, you're always welcome to get in that on listening and share your thoughts with us as we go live. The only thing we do is we just kind of like check to make sure you got a mic that works for us. And as long as it passes the sniff test, which is actually a listen test, we'll put you on air and you can get in that virtual log. And of course, you can always jump in. Just tag me in the chat room and I'll try to work into the conversation. Sometime, you know, eventually Mumble will get those smells via wire, but we're not there yet. I have been using the heck out of Tailscale this weekend. So go over to Tailscale.com and say good morning from Linux Unplugged, would you? Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Get it on any device in seconds.

And I mean it. Mobile, ARM device, x86 box, by WireGuard. Get it on any device in seconds, and I mean it. Mobile, ARM device, x86 box, VM, VPS, do it. Build yourself a mesh network with WireGuard. We love it. It'll change your game. Go say good morning. Try it out for 20 devices for free at tailscale.com. Yeah, I wish you'd stop making me time you setting up Tailscale. It's getting old. You're fast. I get it. It's fun. It's fun.

All right, So let me take you all back in time a little bit. Years ago, we identified that sometimes there are just certain jobs that work better locally. Perhaps it's an old archive of your past productions. You want to save the raw files. Maybe it's movies you've backed up via the DVD or the Blu-ray. Love you, Maybe it's movies you've backed up via the DVD or the Blu-ray. Love you, MakeMKV. Oh, or maybe it's just something that's really not something your team needs access to very often, so it just doesn't make sense to store it in the cloud. My friends, enter in our legacy server hardware,

which we have been running out of the garage here at the studio since about 2014-ish. We bought the box used at the time, and it's been serving a lot of great little duties for us. Then within the last year, we had a couple of very generous audience members donate us brand new used server hardware, new to us. And we jumped into action and moved some of the services over. It's been a process, an ongoing process, you might say. Yeah, and we've gone through several summers where this box gets really hot. And we've tried to come up with various solutions because it is a garage that the afternoon sun hits. And every now and then I pull in there with my hot car, too.

And so sometimes the ambient temperature can be 95 degrees. hot car too. And so sometimes the ambient temperature can be 95 degrees. So we've come up with various strategies over the years to try to accommodate for this high temperature, less than ideal production environment. We get the palm leaves, we take turns in there. It's rough. So I've set up this year, what I did was like a whole air cooling system. I created a holistic approach to my temperature management, Wes. I cracked the garage door. Okay. All right.

And then I set a box fan in the doorway. Oh, now we've got some, we've got, you know, outside, we've got airflow. These are good ingredients. Then further down the hallway, I set up a second box fan. And then for like the real like cooling like finality piece i open the back door so i create a cross breeze through the entire house it creates a wind tunnel that sucks the hot air out of the garage and vents it out the back of the studio and it actually does work to a degree and it's ridiculous because um a cat came in and pissed in the garage as a result of this. Oh, man.

It's not the traditional hazards that most servers encounter. No. And this will come into play later. Also, there was a lot of, you know when cotton trees bloom and there's like this cotton that goes in the air in the Pacific? It's like it's snowing for a day. Well, a lot of that came into the wind tunnel. Oh, Chris. And so, the entire garage got covered in cotton.

Rolling around in the cat piss. Getting in the server. Getting stuck in the cat piss. This the server getting stuck in the cat piss has really happened so it's coming i'm picturing this cartoon with you know the chicken that falls into tar or something and then people throw feathers at it yeah yeah then levi got in there fast forward uh to last week thursday i realized it was getting hot again. Not even that particularly hot. Just kind of back to hot. Hot enough that the garage is getting warm.

And so my protocol is around 1, 2 o'clock, right about now, actually, as we record, I would shut the server down because the temperatures are just getting too high. And we don't have a better solution than that with what I've done. And I would shut it down and then we wouldn't use it for a bit.

So I migrated a couple of more essential services off each individual server up onto Linode and I kind of kind of spread things out so like certain batch jobs are happening on one server like the the Plex and the Jellyfin media has happened on one server like I've kind of spread the load out a little bit so if one box dies not everything goes and then I would shut them down in in like right about now and then the next day in the morning I get in about 7 a.m and I turn them on and run them till about 1 p.m you know let them get caught up on their work and whatnot do their backups and so Thursday evening it was a busy day and I didn't make it out there till like four o'clock

and I get out there and it's 92 degrees in the garage, and all the servers are going. So I go to each one, I shut them all down, and I go to our oldest server. The one that has, like, our historic projects on it, the ones that go back from the very beginning of time, and the one that has all of my media library, which... Chris's private selection. 70, 80% I've hand-ripped, right?

Like, pride has gone into creating these rips funny enough almost like a weird like movie foreshadow the day before i'm not even kidding you had he was like should we just throw away all this physical media because i've got like crates of it under the server of physical media and she's like we don't watch dvds or blu-ray should i just like sell this or get rid of it like what do what do you want me? I'm like, I don't know. Let's hold on to it for a little bit longer. I like having the source copies. Let's hold on to it for a little bit longer. That was the previous day. The next day I go out there, I go to do a halt, you know, like a pseudo shutdown kind of a thing. And it tells me the binary cannot be executed. That's a good sign. Just always a great sign that your system's working normally.

So then I have my laptop. So I fire my laptop. I go to SSH in. SSH connection refused. I'm like, well, the box is up. I'm standing right here. So I do the control delete, you know, the six times. And it starts to reboot.

And I get cannot unmount. And it's this ZFS path. Cannot unmount this ZFS path. Cannot unmount this ZFS. And it's this ZFS path. Cannot unmount this ZFS path. Cannot unmount this ZFS. And it's all screen after screen. ZFS error, ZFS error, ZFS error, ZFS error. And then cannot execute shutdown. So I shut it off and it's too hot.

And I'm like, I'm not going to stand out here in 90 plus degree weather and troubleshoot this thing. And I'm not going to run it in 90 plus degree weather. So I shut it down Thursday night. I got in my car and I left and I went home and I was like in a bad place I was like oh just mostly because even if I could re-rip all of that stuff and even if I could reset up the server like how many days of work am I looking at right just that right I was sitting with like oh my god this is gonna be weeks of work right and i so i get over it i get home and i think well i'll go down there tomorrow friday and boot it up get like get it going off a usb disk get the lay of the land at least yeah so uh that was sort of my mindset i was like maybe it'll be

all right i'll get in there see if the dfs is fine. Maybe it's just the boot disk that failed because that is its own separate disk that is super jank outside the case, not properly cooled. Oh, this keeps getting better. It was like not a great setup. So I figured if there was going to be a point of failure, that's where it was going to fail. So Friday morning, I come out really kind of early,

like 7 a.m. because I had an 8 a.m. call, and then I had a 9 a.m. recording. And I knew I did not have much time to look at this, but I thought, I'll get out there while it's still like 65 degrees in the garage and get this thing booted. It's the next morning. I've been standing here for a little bit. It's still pretty early. I want to do this while it's cold out. But I've been just trying to strategize and honestly kind of reflect on what I'm going to do if this thing doesn't work. Like after I press this power button, I'm either going

to have a massive pain in my butt or everything's going to be fine with some logs I need to review. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it on and then I'm just going to listen. I suspect maybe the OS drive has died, but we'll see. Here we go. All right, everything's coming on. Monitor's powering up. Drives have lit up. No red lights yet. Drives have lit up, no red lights yet. I'll be closely watching both the post boot screen and also, of course, once the OS starts to load. Just kind of in that window right now.

Or I just have to wait. The screen hasn't turned up. I just have to wait. Come on't turned up i just have to wait come on screen show me a post show me a post ah here we go okay no bios errors or ipmi module error or usb controller error the disks are all passed through so there's no i wouldn't expect any kind of controller error, but we'll see. Oh, there we go.

Oh, that moment. Okay, we're getting to grub now. Oh, no. Reboot and select a proper boot device or install boot media in the selected boot device and press a key. I think our OS drive is indeed dead. I'm touching what I think this is the OS drive.

It's hard to tell, but I don't think it's spinning. Better than the array, but man, what a pain in the butt. So at this point, I'm pretty sure the data is probably good. And what I'm thinking is I'll go grab Ventoy. I'll boot Ubuntu 22.04 because it's got built-in ZFS support. Sure. I'll get SSH going on this thing thing and then we'll get it restored right it's like not ideal but this seems like something we could actually recover from and of course i

ran out of time and i had to go to record and do it do a call which was i was totally down for doing because uh we're working on some great swag for the west coast road trip so i was like i had to go to take care of that. So it's worth it. But, you know, the job demands I move on. I'm not a server admin by my day trade anymore. Just a nice little hobby you have sometimes. So in the back of my mind, right, I'm thinking, I'm strategizing without really realizing I'm doing it.

I'm thinking, all right, I'm going to get that vent toy. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. So I sneak out there in the middle of the day. And I pop the vent toy in the back. for whatever reason the super micro it doesn't have any usb ports in the front and man is that annoying like come on reach away in the back so i'm doing this thing where i'm trying to get it way back in there but of course i have the mvme and this big housing that has c and a on both ends of the connector for usb so it's like it's

this big fat mother and i'm trying to get it in there and but it's only got two usb anyways it was super you need to be looking at it and rotate the whole thing but i get the ventoy attached i reboot it and i get this strange strange boot error like it's totally the obviously the ventoy is completely incompatible this is like three releases ago vento it's obviously totally incompatible with the super micro bios well okay so i gotta go flash this up into image directly to a usb thumb drive sure okay fine This is like three releases ago. It's obviously totally incompatible with the Supermicrobios. Okay, so I got to go flash this Ubuntu image directly to a USB thumb drive. Sure. Okay, fine.

Well, I don't got time for that right now. So I was like, okay, well, there goes my 15 minutes to try to solve this. So I move on and I keep working to finish off my Friday. I record a Bitcoin dad pod and I go home because I got the kids. Kids are over. We got stuff going on. It's weekend time. Saturday, same thing. It's too hot hot i can't really go down there and work on it saturday take the kids out for a hike which was also brutal and then get home it's like the evening i think i could go

down to the studio and get it going now because i want to make it ready for us to get it up right now and get it repaired my thought is i could do the whole usb thing. I got the ISO image. I've got a USB thumb drive. Good to go. Screw it. I'll come in Sunday morning. So I get in early this morning before the show while the server room is still nice and cool. And I'm looking at the other servers that are off, the other new servers that have been contributed by audience members. And I just thought while they're off off maybe i should just do a health check on these things too before these things end up dying on me i open it up

and it is covered in cottonwood i open up the other server covered in cottonwood i pull out the drive trays all of the air intakes totally covered so i i kid you not i spent an hour and 45 minutes this morning cleaning servers with cotton, vacuuming. I'm pulling out every single disc, vacuuming them, putting them back in. Because everything's down, so might as well do it now, right? Hey, I have a top tip for that. If you have a leaf blower or some compressed air, that's the best way because you don't need to touch things that way rather than vacuum well and you know the whole thing was all i had out there was a shop vac i

wasn't expecting this right but then i thought i should check this yeah so then i think well i should probably go look how old fake naz is doing right how's old fake naz doing and i go and i didn't expect any of this i didn didn't even get the USB disk inserted before I started discovering something was a little strange. This is a pretty old box and one of the things I just want to double check before I write this hard drive off completely is that the power is good

and the data is good because the power is actually, I just noticed, coming off a little splitter here. So I'm going to get rid of this splitter and then run it directly to the hard drive. Now, the hard drive itself is a Western Digital. It's one of those Velociraptor drives, so it's like 10,000 RPM. Honestly, I would actually expect this thing to die, right? The other ones are all 7,200, but this thing, not only was it not getting the proper cooling because the case was cracked but it's also a 10 000 rpm disc but we'll see running i'm running different power and i'm running slightly better spot here in terms of

hopefully it would get better cooling i doubt it i'm actually just more kind of banking on the power situation. That adapter looked a little sketch. I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Okay. Here we go. It's actually a decent box. It has two L5640 Xeon CPUs in it at 2.27 gigahertz each.

And, I don't know, something like 48 gigs of RAM, 64 gigs of RAM, quite a bit of RAM. So, you know, it's lasted quite a long time for us. It's definitely served its purpose, I should say. I could just use a couple of more months. Come on. Come on. Keep going. Show me grub. Show me that grub. Boot, baby, boot on come on it's booting systemd version 249.5 dash 3 dash arch yes this box is still running arch um i can't believe it that is gonna be the luckiest play ever because i had a ton of errors when I shut this thing down. So maybe that thing just got hot. I don't know.

Maybe that adapter got hot. It's booting right now. Drives are flashing. Okay, I got a snapshot failure here, but that's not a big deal. Come on. I can hear the hard drive clicking. Come on. please boot. I do not need this project right now.

Uh-oh. Oh, no. There we go. Okay, so one network interface didn't start, but that's not even the primary network interface. We're up. We're up. I'm going to go check services. But the disks are flashing away. They look so happy.

They look like a date of Christmas tree. I don't remember why we did it, but when we hooked up that extra OS boot drive we added last minute, we hooked it up to a splitter, and I think that splitter was just done. It was dead. We hooked it up to a splitter, and I think that splitter was just done. It was dead. Now, obviously, clearly, this is like the third time we have pulled the server back from the absolute brink of death. And this time I really got a lesson learned. I never want this to happen again. So we'll get to that here in a second. But what I was thinking, Wes, is what we ought to do is log into that thing

and let's get it up to date we better get it up today while you know while we can while we're working on it because i don't think it's been since we've done it on the show and you know these arch boxes they tend to break when you uh go months without updating them so why don't we do it now live on the show if you wouldn't mind sshing into there, I checked earlier. I believe we have about a gigabyte worth of packages to download. With a net upgrade size of 152 megabytes. It's essentially every system package. Every app, every package on there.

You love updates. So let's do it. Let's get it all up to date. Let's get this thing done and make sure it's in a good spot for the rest of the road trip. And then I'll tell you what I'm thinking about. You're going to make me help you rip these Blu-rays if this doesn't work, aren't you? We'll come back to that. We'll see how you do, Wes. You let us know, okay?

Oh, net upgrade size, 150 megabytes. Yeah, isn't that great? Just what a thing. It is pretty great. I've realized we should colo these. These probably shouldn't be in my garage anymore. It's been fun, and I've got away with it for years. But when the cottonwood came in, it made me realize that this is just not a, this is not a doable thing anymore.

And so if anyone out there in the audience in the Pacific Northwest area happens to work at a data center or a colo location where we could take two or three boxes and put them in a rack where they could be properly taken care of, please reach out Chris at Jupiter broadcasting.com or Linux unplugged.com slash contact. We'd be willing to work out a deal i need to get him out of this garage it's just time you know like i thought we'd get air

conditioning but we didn't and i figured we'd the shutting them down would be enough but it clearly wasn't because there was just some time when just things happened and when i went out there and i touched that box that that thursday night that evening it was so hot i could barely keep my hands on it that's you know it's like how can this system last right it just it possibly could make it a little bit longer but eventually this box is going to die and those boxes that have been given to us by the audience are going to die and it's not like they're you know especially that box it's not in in the show path. We don't need it to do our recording. Yeah.

We just got to get it. We got to get it hosted and co-load. It's been a fun experiment, but if anybody out there has any ideas or going to hook us up, let us know. Because I think, what are you laughing about? I just like the idea of, you know, you sort of taking care of these things, trundling out to the garage,

you know, checking on them, touching them, logging in the old-fashioned way with the little ancient LCD monitor. It's my first LCD screen I bought ever, 100 years ago. 4-3 ratio, right? Yep, of course. I think it's a 14-inch screen, which it's a KDS, which I don't even think that brand is around anymore.

I think they died a long time ago. I just think now you get credentials to go into a data center that could potentially lock you out if there's a BGP error. How much fun would that be? I know. This is where I'm not really a big fan of this idea. The whole idea with these is it's like large data, stuff that you'd really only want to transfer over a gigabit LAN anyways,

like source files or media files or things that we want to do. Like we want to take 15 MP3 files, convert them or FLAC files, convert them to MP3 and upload them to our radio stream. Like you don't want to do that necessarily on a cloud box, but. Maybe we just got to accept we don't have servers in the summer. It's just a wintertime thing that we do. Yeah, maybe. You know, one thing that's been really handy

is I've broken the tasks up a little bit. So, Jupes has its own network. So, like, my immediate media files and whatnot and my home assistant, I'll run on a local network on a Raspberry Pi. And then here I have a home assistant, Blue, that runs the home assistant automations for the studio. Right. And then we have

one of the Dell systems that we've set up that's running a lot of the automated tasks that's good to go. and another system that's running a lot of the data storage. And that's been fine. And those don't even need to be on 24-7. So I can just leave them off for days at a time. But fake NAS was like, I needed to turn it on like once a day. You know, it's not always great to turn a server on and off all the time either. You know, they tend to just like to stay on at a good even temperature.

I feel bad. It's like they're my garden either you know they tend to just like to stay on at a good even temperature i feel bad it's like they're my garden you know and i'm not being very good some weird fruit yeah i got weeds in my garden i'm not watering them properly you know that's chris you were gonna touch on lessons learned i i i feel like we can make quite a list out of that story do you think that's a nice idea yeah my lesson is colo that's my lesson that's that's the overall lesson but i feel like try not to get cottonwood in your servers that's a good lesson right rule number one maybe the wind tunnel wasn't the best idea get some filters for your wind tunnel yeah, and then pull the trigger on setting up that whole temperature sensor thing with the smart plugs that you were going to do last year. Like a year ago. Yeah, it would also be good, like,

maybe we shouldn't have put everything into production until we had the cooling and the rack solution done, because I thought we would get that done. That's my fault. I'm going to take that one. Alex, do you have any advice? Nothing that hasn't already been said i mean it's it's all it's all obvious isn't it back up your configs kids this is uh this is uncle chris telling you right now i just had a brush with death and my first thought was i don't

know if i backed up the configs leno.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and it's just a great way to support the show and check something great out. Linode is fast, reliable cloud hosting with the best support in the business. Underscore that. Real humans all the time. Take out your highlighter, even though sometimes it makes the ink blur a little bit. Highlight this.

The best support in the business. Man, does that matter when it really matters. You know, thinking about it, I've been getting notes from audience members who were maybe on a different cloud provider who's been changing things recently and they're just not very happy anymore and they're looking to migrate.

I've also heard from some of you out there who have looked for like the ultimate budget provider because you just got a cheap machine you're throwing together. And the next thing you know, it's been running for three months. It's kind of important to you. And now you want it somewhere better. Well, that credit works for you, too. Go to lino.com slash unplugged and just try it out for a bit.

It could also be a great way to try out something like a multi-cloud strategy this summer. Our garage slash server room in air air quotes, to the extreme, it's getting up to like 90 degrees, 92 degrees, 93 degrees some days, especially if I park the hot car in there. And the reality is it's been a peace of mind knowing during the summer, I just moved some of this stuff over to Linode and I don't really need it here in the garage. Sure, I'd like to have access on my land, but the reality is, Linode's infrastructure

is so fast that it's typically faster than my own gear anyways, like even locally. It's crazy because they are their own ISP. And they have 11 data centers around the world. So for this kind of stuff, I'll just pick the one on the West Coast. Right? You pick the one closest to you. And then they have MVME disks

in there. They have AMD EPYC processors for the dedicated GPU machines. In fact, if you want physical hardware too, they can work with you on that. Linode's constantly adding new features like database as a service. So that way, if you just want Linode to run your Postgres or MySQL, your Mongo, they'll do it for you. They'll bring their expertise that they've collected for the last 19 years and they'll bring it to something like a hosted database service. Nobody else has this combination of features. And this is the place you go to support the show, too.

It's a win-win. So go check it out. I think you're really going to like it. If you've been considering it, maybe migrating from one of those other providers, maybe you're just done with the hyperscalers crap, go try out Linode. You know what's up. Linode.com slash unplugged. One more time, just go to Linode.com slash unplugged.

Matrix chat room that are keeping updated on the new website, which is pretty amazing. And I was able to recently convince Alex to jump into the project. And I think that was a good thing. What have you been up to this week? What haven't I been up to? We've been doing a lot of infrastructure work, a lot of basic plumbing and stuff like that, that actually just needs the JB crew, I suppose, to do it really, because there are servers at the end of the day. We're using GitHub Actions to fully automate the deployment of the building of the Hugo site and then deploying that to a Linode node. I never know what to call them.

I used to call them droplets back in the day, but, you know, Linode nodes. We changed the url of the website and you did some fancy dns stuff didn't you ah yes this this was a long time ago actually uh the orange one and i wrote some pretty ninja level which probably means hacky as f ansible code which automatically scans the Docker Compose file for the relevant traffic labels, and then automatically updates the Cloudflare DNS records using Ansible under the hood. So you could, for example, spin up a new container, have the correct traffic label against that container,

and not need to open Cloudflare and type it all in and all that kind of stuff. Now, you could argue you could do that using Terraform, but the advantage of doing it this way with Ansible is it's just one command. It's all in one place and it's all automated. That's awesome. And we do have a new URL that we want everybody to use. And also, please, we need some people to test the new website. So Alex, what did you make the new URL? We thought long and hard, deep into the night, about how to name this thing. new.jupiterbroadcasting.com So that's where the new website is being sort of tested for now. If you just go to jupiterbroadcasting.com,

it's currently the old WordPress website that's still functional and still up to date and everything. But the new website that we're building is at new.jupiterbroadcasting.com. And if you want to get more involved, please join our Matrix room and also check out our GitHub. Don't forget, also coming up in this week's Office Hours,

we're going to do a deep dive into a lot more of the configuration and the plans for continuous integration and feature branches and all that kind of stuff. I'm looking forward to that. A lot of good stuff. Yeah, so if you're coming in and you're going, new website, what are you guys talking about? Yeah, we've been covering this in officehours.hair.

This is a new community project that's just absolutely incredible, and it's coming along. Brent says small updates, huge updates. Huge. It's a whole brand new website statically generated on demand when we publish a new episode. And it's coming together. And we're kind of in the final stretch. And we'd love your feedback. So we do have our GitHub page where you can give us some feedback.

But just go check it out at new.jupyterbroadcasting. Chris, you got a nice new feature as well this week, didn't you? This is so cool. Oh, man, this is a great time to be building this website because we're kind of embracing new ideas and new ways of doing stuff. And one of them is PeerTube. Yeah. We're back on the PeerTube bandwagon, baby, at jupiter.tube. And we want to start using that for our live stream in bed because, you know, just today as we were getting ready to start the show,

we started playing a song and we realized, oh no, this might actually get us kicked off of YouTube just playing this. And so as we move forward, it's like, why do we want to keep promoting Google's platform or Amazon's platform with Twitch? Like, why not promote our own free software platform that's not going to take us down? And so then the next question was, well, shouldn't we be using that as our embed? But how are we going to do that? Are we going to, like, do a new embed for PeerTube every single time we want to do a live stream? How's that going to work? And we've been kicking that around. And this is a great example of our community came in with a solution that is so slick, so elegant. And they're using a lot of

like native technologies that we're just now implementing like PeerTube. And they're using a lot of native technologies that we're just now implementing, like PeerTube. And they're looking at the PeerTube API and they're saying, how can we use this to properly embed a live stream on the new website? And the guys dug through it. And they found a way where when we go live on PeerTube, it can automatically update the website. And I don't know if it's changing the embed at the website or if the embed is just somehow auto-updating. But it is so slow. I don't do anything but go live and the website automatically gets the new embedded live stream from peer tube just how it should be it's so cool it's so cool like we're building and we're building a page that talks

about how to do boost so that way we have all that explained in one place and in the future i imagine you'll actually be able to boost from there we've've got a page for the memberships. We've got a page for all of the hosts, our swag store, the calendar. And of course, the new player is so slick. It supports chapters. It supports a lot of the new podcasting 2.0 spec. It's an open source player itself, Podverse. I'll talk about that more in the show. It's all coming together in one statically generated website that's going to just load beautifully and fast for everybody hopefully and the neat thing is like you know you mentioned the player well the podverse player mitch over there um was happy to collaborate with us and we went back and forth for i don't know something

like two weeks sending some requests for certain features and they built it in and then they'd send a request from us to do something a little differently it's been really cool to interact with other open source projects as well in our efforts so i think everyone over at the website creation team i think big applause and thank you for making this so much fun yeah i think that actually is worth just talking about a little bit more is we didn't intend for this to happen but there's been some other projects that have gotten bug fixes and they've made some improvements and changes as we've been building this website. It really has been a collaborative open source project, which is just really awesome.

We didn't necessarily intend for that to happen, but freaking open source. Yep. And all of this that we're doing, it's all up on our GitHub. It's all there. While we're talking about pod verse, I might as well mention that the Android and iOS clients are getting boost support.

It's in F-Droid right now. As we record, I believe this morning it's landing in the Play Store, and it is currently in review on the Apple iOS Store. But version 4.6.0 has boosting in the mobile client as well. But version 4.6.0 has boosting in the mobile client as well. So Podverse is one of these podcasting 2.0 clients we like a lot because they have an iOS, Android, and web player. It's all GPL. It's available in F-Droid if you'd like it. And it's embeddable, too, as a player. So you, as a listener, could create a Podverse FM account with the online player.

as a listener could create a Podverse FM account with the online player. And then when you go to our website, you can play it in there. You could click a little button and bring it into your overall Podverse list of podcasts. It's going to be very slick. So do check out Podverse. They are iterating quickly, and it'll be landing in Play and the App Store this week. And it's already in F-Droid, a brand new version with lots of fancy features. And they're just a great team. Like Brent said, we worked with them on the website. It's already in F-Droid, a brand new version with lots of fancy features. And they're just a great team.

Like Brent said, we worked with him on the website. It's been awesome. So podverse.fm for that. I think Brent's found a new calling. I don't know if he realizes it quite yet, but a new calling as being a scrum master or some kind of a project manager because he wakes up and I know the first thing he does is he looks at his phone and checks just how many pull requests have been opened that night and how many issues.

But the other thing I think that we need to just underscore is how Brent's really driven this community engagement. I know that you're my friend and everything, but I think you've done a great job with it. Well done. Well, thank you. Round of applause. And we're just, and really,

not to early celebrate, but we're really close to the. Round of applause. And we're just, and really, not to early celebrate, but we're really close to the finish line, right? Like, we're so close. And I don't think we'd be there if it wasn't for Brent's work. Absolutely. Of course, Stefan, and really, there is an entire team of people. If you go to GitHub. There's a huge team.

Go to GitHub. Look at the Jupyter Broadcasting comm insights. And look at the last 30 days. It's going to blow your mind. It's so awesome. Isn't it? It's incredible incredible it's really amazing yeah i think uh it outpaced what we were expecting and i think that's really exciting

i you know in like 14 15 years i think it's the most successful community project jv's ever done so and a big part of that is thanks to brent big part of that thanks is to fawn and really just incredible community we've built and the philosophy of value for value because it's not always just sats and dollars it's time and talent as well absolutely bitwarden.com slash linux go there to get started with a free trial for an individual or a business it's bitwarden.com slash linux it's just the easiest way for you or a team of people to manage secrets and passphrases, things that really are important. And Bitwarden is open source, so you know that their security is audible, it's open,

it's transparent, and it's trusted by millions of individuals and teams in their community. It's what we use to manage our passwords, our two-factor codes, and other sensitive recovery keys for the applications that require that. And then it's also how I manage to have complex secure passwords on my mobile device because I also have Bitward installed on my mobile devices. I put it in my browser. I grab the app from Flathub because I've got a flat pack of Bitwarden, which is great for getting a new system set up.

And I put it on my mobile devices. And I always appreciate the little changes that come down the pipe from Bitwarden, the little improvements, the tweaks, the iteration on the UI, the things that just make the workflow smoother, like account switching. And recently, I mean, like just last week, they got support for cross-domain identity management right there in Bitwarden. So like for enterprises, it makes it so much easier now to provision Bitwarden for your users. They also recently added a username

generator so that way you can have a unique username and a unique password for every website and service that you sign up for. But not just username and password, they also have an option to create an email alias for each service or website that you sign up for. You know, it just routes it through simple logon or Firefox relay. And then the service doesn't doesn't know really anything about you. And if they get a breach, which a service I use just had a breach last week, then it doesn't share your identifying information, something that you might use on another site or service. Right. It's just that site and services information. So it's limited in its damage. information, so it's limited in its damage it's going to do. Just small things like that,

using a password manager, using a unique password, using a unique username, and even a unique email address for every website and service you use is going to greatly enhance your online privacy and security. It might just be the number one thing you can do. And Bitwarden is the tool that makes this actually doable and manageable. So go try it out for yourself or your business. Go try it for free at bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's also a great way to support the show. Maybe you already know all this, but maybe somebody you know, maybe a teammate at work needs to hear this. Maybe a friend-ish.

I mean, if they're a friend, you've already had them switch to Bitwarden. But I'm not going to make judgments. Maybe a family member you don't talk to very often. We'll frame it that way. Maybe they need to know about Bitwarden. Send them over to bitwarden.com slash Linux. One more time, to support the show, it's bitwarden.com slash Linux. Now, you know we have some meetups to talk about here.

Let's get a little bit of meetup going here. We have not one, not two, but maybe like four or five coming up. September 20th, Southern Oregon. September 23rd, Northern California. September 29th, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. September 30th, Southern California. October 7th, Northern Oregon. All of them.

Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. If you're in the area, let's meet up. We're going to also have some swag on board. But we'll also, even if you can't make it to the meetup, have something for you. Brand new idea. We're going to stash little geocaches along the way. And then we'll give you hints in the show where you can find them. So even if you can't make it to the meetup, maybe you can still get some swag.

We're leaving something behind for you. I got to pick up like some Tupperware containers, I'm thinking. Don't give it all away. No, I'm going to put some swag, you know, like shirt stickers, some stuff in there. Can we do like perishable food items? That's probably a single hair in each. Probably shouldn't do like a banana. Probably shouldn't do a banana. Probably shouldn't.

Oh, okay. All right. Although, how impressive- That'll tell you how long it's been in there. Right. Maple syrup? What if somebody found it and then took a picture with a still edible banana? That'd be very impressive, right?

Right. Maybe we should put a banana in there. I think there's an argument for a banana. Now get finding, y'all. Yeah. So we'll let you know. As we hit the road, we'll hide them along the way. And I give you hints here in the show.

But come say hi to us. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. You know what it is. I think it's time for some feedback. Yeah. Up first is actually a listener who found their way here after you were a guest over on the Podcasting 2.0 show. Oh, cool.

Yeah, Arno writes in and has got some questions about the Raspberry Pi. Maybe you can help us out here, Chris. All right. Do you know of any solution for using the Pi on battery power? Now, specifically with the SmartPi Touch 2, which I guess is like a fancy case that includes a screen unfortunately pi juice does not work i guess the developer says that the pi and the screen draws too much power using a power bank with extra cable isn't very portable oh well okay i was gonna say that's really how you do it right because then you can size it to how you needs it

but of course i'm thinking not so portable how would you do that portably the only thing i could really think of is like something like the moto dock but i don't know if that's going to be really easy to get your hands on these days i think you got to build yourself essentially a tupperware container with a banana and then you put all that in the Tupperware container, and then you just make the Tupperware container portable. Okay, okay. Well, swing and a miss maybe, but... Maybe somebody listening has a better idea.

Here's a second chance over here. Okay, all right, all right. Do you have any advice for, like, a good microphone or audio setup to use with the Pi? I think Arnos tried a USB stick with pcm 2902 and a three and a half millimeter jack playback was fine but input does not seem to work now i don't know how you're doing your storage so this is going to be the problem but you absolutely got to go usb audio interface i think something like the audio technica atr could possibly do in this scenario

i don't know if the blue icicle is still easily available, too, but that'll take any XLR mic and make it into a USB mic with just one device. It's kind of a big device, bigger than the Raspberry Pi, but it's a thing. That's probably how I would do it, Wes. The other thing, although we had limited success with it, is you could look at that Raspberry Pi Ninja project. Maybe they'd have more success than we did. If so, write back in and let us know.

Ninja project, maybe they'd have more success than we did. If so, write back in and let us know. Another feedback item today from Paul responding to Linux Unplugged 468, the read-only scenario. Before listening, if you had asked me what distros I'd recommend to a new or long-term Linux user, I would not have even thought about suggesting Endless. But after Lub468, I think I have to say it's an awesome and no nonsense distro. Years ago, I heard about Endless and the

Endless computer, and I thought it'd be a great idea for my children, you know, encourage them to start learn coding, that kind of thing. Anyway, long story short, the laptop was not really used much by my children, but since my Mac was aging, already no longer receiving updates, I started using the endless computer.

While my use case is really just web browsing, email, word processing, and the occasional spreadsheet, it performs perfectly, especially as this is a pretty low-cost machine. In the time we've had this laptop, I've never had any issue with updates or day-to-day use, and we've never had to open the command line to fix or rectify anything. Now, this could be attributed to our basic use case, the well-thought-out operating system, or a combination of both. I propose we do have a bit of an endless blind spot.

I think that is true. I think we don't think about endless very much, because I think they haven't targeted our user base very much. Yeah. But then as we start talking about these immutable systems that we want to just work out of the box for workstations, I start thinking maybe we should have been looking at Endless more. So that's great feedback. Thank you for that. I will put that into the back of my mind.

I feel like we've done the immutable thing quite a bit. Do we need to do another one? But Endless is kind of its own thing. When was the last time we really gave it a go? We've never. I don't think we've ever looked at Endless. Infinity got it. Really?

You know, the Endless computer kind of piques my interest from what we've been talking about lately with these low-end computers as well. So it's almost like a two-episode hit here. I was going to say we could send Brent off for a field report. I'm not sure I follow the logic. It's not like we wouldn't cover Arch if we just covered Ubuntu though, is it? So not covering it because we already just covered Nix. They're different things. Yeah, you're right. No, you're right. You're right. I feel like too, where it fits is I think it could be a solid competitor to Pop or Elementary or Mint. I think if you're one of those users.

One of those users. What are you saying? One of those Pop users. Wait, don't we sometimes? I just like a lot of punctuation in my Linux distribution. Okay, man. I think sometimes. Wait a minute.

That's us sometimes. Wait. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. You right. All right. You guys are probably right. I imagine.

I mean, we should probably look at it. I don't know. Okay. You know, I don't mind trying it. I think I've had Fedora on this laptop for a little bit. It's been a mixed bag that maybe we'll talk about. I don't mind jumping on it unless given that show. He says so casually over there.

These little nuggets. I would like a long-term review. and then maybe we should do this next week. The more we talk about it, the more I'm kind of wanting to do it. All right. Okay. We'll put it up for discussion in the committee after the show. And now it is time for Le Boost. Wooden 501 wrote in with 3,000 sats.

Have two B-Link Mini-S systems and an Asus PN41 that I'll be using to learn Kubernetes on. An actual tiny cluster of systems. They're all running NixOS with GNOME wonderfully with a combined TDP. What's TDP? I'm out of the loop here. Oh, total, total, Alex, total Alex total power I think power draw draw power total draw power that's my best guess of only 36 watts which was definitely a major consideration when my electric supply cost more than doubled this year all three ran Windows 11 fine for all the five minutes each it took to get the Windows license registered with the account. Not that I'm ever likely to use those licenses.

Not related to the question, but TDP is thermal design power. Yeah, that's what I said. You're close. Definitely close. Definitely. Definitely close. Wooten501 also sent in an off-air boost. Now, Chris, what's an off-air boost? So one of the things we've decided to do is i think we're i think i can't remember honestly because we're kind of flying by the seat of our pants here don't reveal our secrets man i think it's a 2000 sat limit to get on air it might have been a

thousand i can't remember i think you said a thousand last episode but i can be misremembering you should have just said a row of days here's the thing chris you said a thousand in lop and then it said 2000 and so i posted i think that's where you're confused. And Coder, right? Because I'm trying to realize, because I'm just, we want to keep it tight. But we also will read every single boost that's sent in. And every now and then we'll pull one forward. And so Wooden had 1,000 boost here, and I thought, you know, we should read this one. Because he says that E-Ink display tablet you got could be a good boost board.

And I agree. Brent's got a node. Oh, that's a good idea. You'd basically need to get like Firefox or something working. That's all you'd really need to display it. Seems a little heavy on that, but we'll see. Everything's possible. I think going forward to keep the segment tight, we're going

to set the minimum at 2,000 boosts for an on-air read. 2,000 stats. But we'll read 100% all of them sent into the show. And maybe every now and then pull one or two of them ahead. Rastacalevera, AKA Rastacastiversa. Give that man a banana.

Wrote in with a row of ducks. Thank you kindly. Apparently Chris really butchered his name last week. So apologies there. Yeah. Apologies. I like Rastacic casta versa i think that's a great name so rustic classic calavera uh rodent uh suggesting should i try that again

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious okay i am now rustic casta versa and expect the Rust audio clip when I boost. They write, Brent, you should start a Calibre web instance and send cool things to that E-Ink display. Or use it as a GPS navigator when you drive. That's not a bad idea. I'm thinking a Mario-like map that shows you moving around the country. Meetups are all the bonus levels. Hey, that's a fun idea.

What's the castle is my real question. Hmm, the studio and your place and Alex's place, like, you know, major landmarks could be castles. Don't you think? Should we do that? I think maybe we'll do the live tracker again for this road trip if we can get all our ducks in a row i think uh we should do the live tracker again because that the nice thing about that is it did lead to a few micro meetups one two three four

people very true yeah that was fun it's fun following you along yeah so just is we might set up the tracker again we only got a few creeps. It was fun. Yeah, it was totally good. All right, next boost comes in from DFJ225 with 16,000 sats. Hey folks, I've been itching to use Rust for a project and I've got a few raspberry pies laying around wondering if you've got any recommendations for a useful or fun project idea. Thanks. And Wes, you just tossed a link here in the notes. Yeah, I mean, it can be a little tricky, A, because you can do so much on the Raspberry Pi, and then B, of course, you know,

you can do a lot of things with Rust, so it kind of depends on what areas you're interested in. But it looks like there's a Raspberry Pi operating system, like writing an embedded OS in Rust targeting the Pi. And, I mean, I might have to try that because that sounds fun. Interesting. Well, that's pretty great. I was just going to suggest put Linux on there and get the Rust tools installed and just play around with some different projects. And it's fun just to be on an ARM system and all.

Yeah. I mean, there is a little bit of, like, getting used to that as well. All right. 4.12 Linux boosts in with 2048 sats, which I think is actually a gigabyte boost. Is this live audio from the server room? Oh, the cottonwood's back. Oh, no. It's almost that old.

It is almost that old. He says, I agree that the boosts do provide an easy way to get feedback into the show. I've been listening to the podcast. I've been listening to your podcast since 2005, and many things have gotten easier regarding podcasts. It used to take effort to get podcasts onto mobile devices. I mean, remember having to use juice? Now it just happens automatically on our pocket computers. Boosts are the next evolution for easy feedback. Straight up from the app, Pocket computers. Boosts are the next evolution for easy feedback. Straight up from the app.

I listen right there, and I can send it from my pocket computer while I listen. Great content as usual. Thanks, everyone. Great job. Well, thank you very much, 412. That's incredible. I mean, you're a podcast OG, so I respect your opinion on that. Dev writes in, before really I was firm on the 1,000 or 2,000 sat thing,

so he's making it under the wire. So you mean before like five minutes ago? Yeah, like five minutes ago. Gotcha. Also, and Nev's like such a long timer that I feel like, you know. Coming in hot with the boost. Nev boosts in with a hot 1877. 1877 sats is the year Ernst Warner, Von Siemens, invented the first ever moving coil microphone.

How about that? That's great to know, Nev. Also, PSA, Ohio Linux Fest will be soon, coming up soon at the Hamilton Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, December 2nd to the 3rd. That's not that soon. But it is a good amount of notice to get your plans in order. Get your plans in order.

With the price of tickets, it's a good idea. Of course, Nev's going to be there. Would love to hear if the community wants to put a meetup together. I know a couple of decent spots in Columbus. Nice. All right. We've got to figure this out. Maybe we should create a Columbus Matrix room.

So let's make a note. We'll make a Columbus Matrix room, and we'll link to it in the show notes. It'll also be listed in the overall space. We've got to remember to do this. Christmas in Columbus. Yeah, Christmas in Columbus. I don't know if we'll be there, but I really don't feel like that should be a reason these meetups shouldn't happen. We're starting to see these self-organized

and why the hell not? Because the audience is full of awesome people. Think about it. Think about what the chances are. If somebody else is also a listener to this show, it's likely you're going to get along. Such taste it's crazy how well it works all right marcel boosts in with some dirty 30 sats 30 30 yeah that's the kool-aid man by the way if you didn't know yeah uh because if you are uh in your 30s you know who the kool-aid man is is this the original kool-aid man or is this the family guy pastiche of Kool-Aid Man?

To stay true to the medium, I looked up how many years ago was 30 years ago, which is like the early 90s, of course, obviously. I think you'll find it was exactly 30 years ago. Yeah, it turns out. And I went and found commercials on YouTube from that time. And then I grabbed the Kool-Aid Man from the summer commercials of that era. And that's why this show is technically historical fiction. That's right. And I'm just putting it out there.

Like, if you wanted to help with the booze sound clips, you want to get some variety into the show, this is my process. You know, I was like, okay, 30 years ago. All right, let's go to what it was on TV. And I just went and got something. And we'll never talk about it again. And you'll only know if you've listened to this episode what that's a reference to. And that's just how it works.

There we go. All right, moving on. This is a crazy episode. Marcel writes, for the member bet line, we were talking in the post show about how to create a system for the members of Un can really do these days is boosting the member feed. You'd need to set up a wallet and you'd need to have like maybe some expectations on your end of lower amounts. But I know some people don't like the boosts or they don't want to get into it. So maybe a secret web form could work. It's a bit high friction. Maybe a secret matrix channel. Yeah, we're thinking about a bat line for the members. Matrix Channel came in a couple of times as a suggestion. I wonder how feasible that is. Would it stay secret? Would it?

Huh. I don't know. But we're going to figure something out. Yeah, there's a lot of good options. Let us know if you have any thoughts. Next up in the Boost department, from the PMO fam, with a row of ducks. This old duck still got it. Giving Fountain a try on Android. Sending a row of ducks. This old duck still got it. Giving Fountain a try on Android.

Sending a row of ducks for Brent's gas tank. Aw. Aw, thank you. Thanks, fam. Ooh, thanks. It runs on fuel, but ducks will work, too. Oh, and, you know, the PMO fan did not stop there. Another row of ducks.

Oh, double boost. And, you know. I guess tossing in the talent of agreement here, the package manager debate is annoying as hell. Oy to all the vays. Can I just say, this week alone, there was at least two different threads on our Linux about package managers. Again, can we just like, here's a wild proposal. managers again can we just like here's here's a wild proposal could we just get some sort of group consensus to stop talking about it and just let the market decide and whichever end users end up using we just go with and we stop debating it endlessly yeah but what if it snaps yeah that's true what if it is that's a Wes. I can't argue with that.

Space Ninja wrote in as well with 15,703 sats. Oh! I've been running Mint on an HP ProBook from 2011 that has a dual-core i5 and 8 gigs of RAM since about Mint 18. I love it as a mobile just hop in and write some code device. It's been really stable and I just upgrade only every couple of years. Oh, that sounds dangerous, but apparently works fine. I don't know. If it works, how nice would that be? Sounds hassle-free to me, you know? They continue, my custom main rig has had just about every distro on it, but I recently circled back to Mint because I'm done fiddling because of lack of time. So it's VM only for testing and Mint 7365 every day of the year.

I've only loved watching this little distro since about version 15. Hey, that's way better than going back to the mac or windows am i right yeah if that works for you and in fact i really appreciate that it does give us good perspective that's a really good use case to keep in mind well and i feel like maybe mint hasn't really changed that much much since back then i i used to use it i think it was around 17 17 is when i first got in right up to 19. And the way that it doesn't like totally change the paradigm is also, I think, maybe an advantage. Yeah, it's a feature. Sure. For certain workloads. Yeah. Mvon also wrote in with 2000 sats. Thanks for the weekly episodes. Plenty of material to get me through 30 hours of driving out to the East Coast. 30 hours. 30 hours.

You know, when you say something like that, that's such a tease. Envy, you got to boost it and tell us, like, where are you driving? Give us more. Because the commuter is the original podcaster's friend, and there's less and less, and now we're hearing about new ways

people are finding to listen to podcasts. I'm always curious, like, if you were a commuter and you transitioned to, like, listening to the show during a different routine, what it and how did it go and are you able to stay current i guess i'll find out boost and let us know but also mv what are you doing what are you driving 30 hours of driving is that per day are you driving more than there are hours in the day are you a time traveler you got to give us more details man is that there and back or just one way well it's clearly just got to be it's one way right i mean it's got to give us more details, man. Is that there and back or just one way? Well, it's clearly just got to be one way, right?

I mean, it's got to be. There's no details, I assume. I assume. Robin Webb, 7'4", also wrote in with 3,000 cents. Coming in hot with the boost. Hello from Slovenia. How many listeners do we have from my country? I like your shows.

Thank you. I'll be first to say Slovenia isn't like the top of our list. But a lovely place. I'd love to visit. You know, an interesting factoid about Slovenia is that they have a reciprocal arrangement with Slovakia, that they actually return each other's posts with the wrong address on it because they get confused so often. That's amazing. Well, I did look up the numbers before the show. We have just over 10,000 listeners as of this morning in that area

that is impressive which is just beating out the republic of lithuania where we have 9.2 000 listeners uh and just above slovenia is croatia with 10.6 000 listeners well we love all of you and it's not a contest don't worry but it might kind of be a contest. Yeah, it might be. It might be. But that's the, isn't that neat though? That's amazing. Yeah.

And of course, in that same region is Turkey and Saudi Arabia, kind of in those same numbers, a little bit more, about 12,000 in Turkey. I was blown away when I saw that. Absolutely blown away. And a little, a little humble reminder that this is your world's largest Linux podcast and the numbers show it. And those are to the hundreds. I mean, like right down, I'm telling you,

Republic of Lithuania, I can tell you 9,217, right? Like, it's beautiful. This old duck still got it. Lower Third writes in, long-time listener, first-time booster. It's a real Mario and Luigi situation when it comes to Linux hardware on the cheap, but it's good to know that Mate, Mint, and XFC have us covered.

Great show. Or is it more of a Wario and Waluigi type situation? I don't know. Wes. I love it when we get a longtime listener, first-time booster. That's growing the Lightning Network. And the Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer free software network. And we are seeing more ander free software network. And we

are seeing more and more free software projects come on. And that means, imagine the day when your favorite free software project, maybe it's VLC, maybe it's Nano, if you're a gentleman, you know, your favorite free software project comes online to the Lightning Network and you've got a wallet full of Satoshis because you've been listening to our podcasts. That's how you start to monetize free software is we're building a network right now. It's going to make a difference. And so when we get Chiron,

aka Lower Third, coming on for the first time after listening, we're building to that network. And there are now over 7,000, almost 8,000 podcasts on the Lightning Network. So that is pretty gosh darn exciting. Mr. Quackers comes okay mr quackers comes in with 2,222 cents another road ducks quacka wacka it's a treasure yippee

uh they say the asus vivo book l3MA, 175 bones on Amazon. It's small, not very powerful, but Fedora and KDE works just fine on there. It's not necessarily compatible with a FWEP manager, you know, for your LVFS. Your old FWEPD? Yeah. But you still can update the BIOS from the USB old school style. I use it if I'm going somewhere and I don't really care if it gets lost or stolen. It's just not a big deal. I haven't used it in a while, but you

know what? The battery, when I did use it, lasted eight to 10 hours. I also have an X1 Carbon Fedora edition. I think the recent BIOS update, or maybe it was a kernel version, increased my battery life to an extra hour. Have you experienced that? So my X1 Carbon has gotten better with time on Fedora as well, Quackers, and Nix as well. It is better now. It's still not the battery life where I'd like it to be, but I swear it is better than where it was when I first got it, which when does that happen?

And, you know, Wes and I follow the kernel updates pretty closely for the Linux Action News over there, and we have definitely seen a stream of Intel driver updates and improvements for power management from both AMD and Intel in the last year. So I think it's absolutely the case that when you get a newer kernel, when people say, why do you want a new kernel in your Linux? Well, because it's usually faster and it has more hardware support and improvements, that's why, obviously.

But yeah, I think a kernel update does improve your battery life because I've seen it happen. Quackers came in with a dubs boost with a row of ducks things are looking up for all that duck uh just to clarify i did mean the asus vivo book l203ma ultra thin edition it does look pretty nice you know it's got one of those 180 degree like fold flat screen kind of thing it's pretty light it's got usbc really not bad for like 175 100 what 184 at the time i'm looking at this all right even still but you know you could get it by friday i mean that's not bad right that's not bad a machine by friday during these days not so bad uh source d just comes in with nothing but a row of ducks. That's my humble personal love of you.

Thank you for the ducks. We also got some thank you booths that I wanted to cover on the show. I'll just do a selection of these under the 2000 mark. 1701 sats from True Grits. Also doubling down on the idea of an unplugged core members matrix exclusive chat room. I don't know how the heck we do it. Maybe just a private URL. But all right.

We got a few plus ones for that. Megastrike3 sent in 2,000 sats. Just gas money for Brent. Thank you, thank you. And we got 1,000 sats from iBookie with a question that I wanted to cover. So what happens if I send a boost in and I think you guys missed it? What should you do?

So the easiest resolution is if you're, when you boost in, if your username matches your Matrix username, a lot of times I'll just coordinate with you on Matrix. We'll get boosts in under 2,000 sats, and I will follow up with them on Matrix. The Golden Dragon boosted in just under 2,000 sats, and so we were talking about a new board that he has that I think would be good for home assistant. Because he uses the same username in the boosts that he uses on the Matrix, right? So I can track him down that way. But otherwise, just if you're not on matrix,

you can always send me an email, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Just give me a, you know, like a screenshot or like a copy of it and we'll get it all sorted out. I try to read 100% of them, but I am but one man. However, Wes Payne has concocted a few ideas on how we'll be able to actually just import those messages into our various channels as appropriate down the road in the future which is going to be really cool because it's all turns out i'm not even kidding all of these boosts live in a database that has

a rust front end with an api well you just don't you won't even install non-rust software anymore i keep trying to get you to consider some fun picks, but you just won't. That Dave Jones, he did it right. So, yeah, we'll have that coming soon. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, go grab a new podcast app

at newpodcastapps.com. You can also check out Podverse. We mentioned that earlier. That's going to now have boosts on your mobile clients. And then if you really want to make it nerdy, boost CLI.

Although I think you've got to have your own node and you've got to have a command line client. So it's like... Don't think of those as bad things. Just think of them as additional challenges to get your Boost to the next level. Chris, I wonder, will you commit to reading all the Boost CLI? All right, for next week.

Yeah. Yeah, for next week. We'll do it. We'll do it. Because I think it's so cool, because you've got to get a bunch of free software going to make it happen. Got a couple of picks for you this week. I have been trying out Fluffy Chat.

You guys familiar with Fluffy Chat? It's one of the ones that have come up when we rattled off alternative matrix clients to Element. And I thought, let's give it a go. They've got a desktop version. They've got a mobile version. It's even an F-Droid. It's in the App StoreDroid. It's in the app store for Apple. It's in the Play Store for Googs. You can run it in your browser. It's

also available as a flat pack and a snap. All right. So all of the bases are covered and it looks like a telegram UI on top of Matrix or maybe a more traditional chat client. And so the idea is something other than Element to kind of make the matrix chat experience a little more palatable. It's early, but I like it. And I think it's really, really good for one or two matrix instances you're on, maybe for friends and family. I can see it really useful for that. Does it do threads? Yeah, I think so. I actually don't know if I've engaged in any threads, but I think so. Does it do encrypted DMs? Yeah, yeah, it does do that.

And it supports spaces and that kind of stuff. It's actually really, it's got most of the chat experience you want. And it is open source as well. So it's up on GitLab. And there is an FDroid repo for it. How fluffy is it? It's pretty fluffy. I miss Element

when I use it, I have to be honest. It really does get that like base experience with. I gave, I set my wife up with Element so that way she could participate in our West Coast crew matrix room for the road trip. And I gave her Element and it's been fine, but I realized afterwards maybe that would have been a good opportunity for FluffyChat because it just operates and looks more like a traditional chat client. I don't know how else to put it. And so if Element has been the sticky point for you in adopting Matrix, I think FluffyChat is worth looking at. For myself, after using Element for a while, I am no longer really suffering from those pain points that I was.

My brain has made the adaptations necessary and the Element team has made some of the improvements, and we just kind of met halfway. So you said pretty fluffy, but I think it's more of like a zero to Cottonwood in your server kind of scale today. Yeah, I'd say it's Cottonwood. I'd say it's Cottonwood, but not like jammed up your air vents so your hard drives are overheating Cottonwood or plugging up your power splitters kind of Cottonwood.

It's just like fluffy, nice- see cottonwood going through the air. And you're like, oh, it's like it's snowing in August. Wes, you found us a little command line tool for the learning and the educationals. Yeah, that's right. Maybe you're trying to do some kind of spaced repetition. You've got something you're studying for. Now, there is the great Anki program that maybe folks have used open source great little powerful intelligent flash card system but it can be kind of a lot sometimes if you

you know you're the kind of person that might procrastinate by fiddling with things and trying to set up their new tool more than just using that tool which has happened to me before so uh try learn lrn it's just a simple little terminal app You can pre-fill it with a bunch of self-prepared questions or flashcards, and then you've got two modes. In the match mode, you type an answer to a question. Otherwise, you can do like a cards mode that's more like just a traditional little flashcard where you get to see the question and then flip to the answer, and you kind of decide if you knew it or not.

And it's all in the command line. I'm sure you said that, but it's all in the command line, so you can just bring it up in your terminal and get to learning. That's pretty great. LRN. We'll put a link to that in the show notes too. You can find all that at linuxunplugged.com slash 471. And I'd love some suggestions for picks as well. You can send them in via the contact page, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, or you can boost them in with your new podcast app as you do. And of course, I want to invite you live. Get in here. Join us.

It's an experience to watch us live. I mean, kind of takes some of the shine off, I have to say. Because, you know, it's like you can really enjoy a hot dog. But then when you go to the factory and see how they make the hot dog. Yeah. Brent won't put, he just won't put on a shirt. Yeah.

So, I mean, you could take the factory tour if you like over at Jupiter dot tube. Uh, we do the show live every Sunday at noon Pacific, which is like 3 PM East coast time, 3 PM Alex time over at Jupiter dot tube. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

And a big, very hearty thank you to our members who help give us the runway to talk to the sponsors we feel are appropriate for our audience. They give us the flexibility to say no to those weird emails that come in. And of course, they help orient us from a business perspective towards our audience. And of course, they help orient us from a business perspective towards our audience. You can become an Unplugged Core member over at unpluggedcore.com or support the entire network of shows over at jupiter.party. And last but not least, if you'd like to contribute a bit of value in the time and talent sense, go check out new.jupiterbroadcasting.com. Get a look-see-on. Hook your peepers on the new website. And then head over to our GitHub.

You'll find our jupiterbroadcasting.com GitHub project. And give us your feedbacks. And maybe contribute your time for your fixings and your codes. That's a thing, right? Who knows? You might just see a wild Brent. You never know. And then last but not least, if you want more news, you want more Linux,

you want to know what's going on in the world of open source, LinuxActionNews.com. Thanks so much for joining us. See you right back here next Sunday. so so Hey, breaking news here. I bet you, but I've just been informed by Kenji over in the chat room. Turns out me accidentally mentioning Anki, a little, you know, flashcard app. They're converting their Python code base to Rust. Oh, no.

Sneaky last minute Rust pick. Can't escape it today. Love it. That's three different Rust. Oh, no. Sneaky last-minute Rust pick. Can't escape it today. Love it. That's three different Rust drops in one show, and Linux 6.0 isn't even here yet. We need to follow up on that server update, Wes. You got your SSH session still going over there? Oh, I do.

Ooh. Come on now. You forgot all about it, didn't you? No, no. Well, because Arch is running Gen 2, we've been building our AUR helper. Oh, good. I'm glad we're doing the AUR updates, too. Wouldn't want to miss the AUR updates.

I mean, hey, DFS, DKMS is in there. That's actually true, yeah. Oh, right. That is a problem with the way we do it on Arch, is the DKMS module for ZFS is in there. Is it the only problem? So where is it at right now? Still building. But, you know, all the main AUR updates, we did have a whole lot of GPG signatures to update,

so I just ended up doing that in a separate step to before because that was going to be simpler. That is the biggest problem when you don't update an Archbox in a while is all the GPG keys. But after that, main upgrade went totally smooth. All right. So our main upgrade is done. We're just doing the A1 now. Yeah, we got a new kernel and stuff. We're going to get some updated ZFS.

Going to make sure that that's going to build. Find out next week, I guess.