LINUX Unplugged - 476: Canary in the Photo Mine

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

We've gone deep to find our perfect Google Photos replacement. This week we'll share our setup that we think works great, is easy to use, and is fully backed up.

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. All of us are in studio gathered together for two episodes today. We're going to record them back to back to get us ready to hit the road for our West Coast tour. So coming up on this episode, we dug deep this week

to find our perfect Google Photos replacement. So this week, we'll share our setups that we think work great, are easy to use, and are fully backed up. Get rid of Google google plus a new tool that might help do just that for google maps and well at least the hopes and dreams i have for it and why it might just be landing at the perfect time then we'll round out the show with some great boosts some pics and a lot more so before we go any further guys let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room oh hello guys chris hello benson hello we also have a whole bunch of people up and quiet listening because the well they get a low latency opus stream when they do it that way and of course there's jblive.fm and jupiter.2

we are live on sundays except for next sunday we're not going to be live we're going to be pre-recorded uh then after that we're doing that just to buy ourselves one easy Sunday on the road. That's the first Sunday. Sunday the 25th. Yeah, thank you. That'll probably be a pretty, either we're going to be napping

because we'll have been exhausted by that point, or we're going to be trying to put in miles. I'm not sure which one, but we needed that flexibility. So we're going to do a pre-record for one of them. But then from then on, all the other shows are going to be from the road hey we better start thinking about that huh yeah yeah we probably yeah we maybe we should chat and you know how we're going to stay connected while

we do that tailscale so go over and give a good old good morning to tailscale tailscale.com it's a mesh vpn protected by wireguards protocol. It's really straightforward to use, super secure because it's using WireGuard's tech, and really, really easy to set up. Really easy. Two minutes per device, maybe? I don't know. So go say good morning. Try it up to 20 devices for free at tailscale.com. You know, I've been using Tailscale this week to set up my new dev one, which we'll talk

about in next episode. And it's been amazing. I've just been using it to shorthand host names because I'm here at the studio and I don't know what the heck all the IPs are and stuff. It makes things so easy. It's a use case I haven't used yet and I was so

thankful for it. It was just super simple. So thanks, Tailscale. And you could just set your bookmarks and stuff to use that tailscale ip and I'm using the magic dns actually and didn't you test that if you're on the same network they actually do transfer locally even when you're using the tailscale ips yeah I was doing some r syncing using that and it was real fast yeah it was really a wonderful beautiful like transparent operation I really loved it. You can just always use the tail scale. That's it.

You just memorize that one. Yeah. So great. All right. Let's talk about headway. This is essentially your own Google maps in a box. Now let's not oversell. I'm sure this is a very hard job and I'm sure it's not complete,

but the idea of this resonates so strongly with me that I wanted to talk about it on the show. And they write on the GitHub page, quote, with just a few commands, you can bring up your own fully functional map server. This includes a front end, a base map, a geocoder, and a routing engine. Choose one of the 200 plus predefined cities or provide your own open street map extract covering any area from the neighborhood to the whole planet i have for so so long wanted to run my own mapping software on my raspberry pi server in lady jupes i, it just makes so much sense. First of all, it's one of the ultimate tracking tools for Google. I mean, everywhere you go, right? Yeah. But also, there are so many scenarios where I'm offline and I want to do route planning and I don't have

access to anything. And wouldn't it be great if I started building these routes and all these favorite locations for camping or great signal or quiet spot to record, I've always, always wanted a database like that. But I don't want to like build it around Google Maps. And the idea that maybe I could install Headway and create something like that on my mobile RV. Such a cool idea. such a cool idea so it sounds like it's maybe the uh sort of the open source components for maps.earth uh which you can go try i assume that gives you a little bit of a somewhat of a preview of what you might get out of the box it could at least route us from the studio to jpl so that's promising i think we got it we absolutely got to play with this after the show headway is working

on amd 64 machines i don't know about arm machines but you know for this test i totally do it on a laptop or something as far as the project status they say headway is currently capable of showing a map searching for points of interest and addresses within open street map extracts and providing directions between two places with the within that extract supported modes include driving, cycling, and walking. Transit is a work in progress. Oh, exciting. Now, obviously, for something like we do,

you also need another form of routing, which is basically like commercial truck routing. You need large vehicle routing and extra tall vehicle routing because there's overpasses that are under a dozen feet or something like that. What are you saying about Jubes? She's tall. She's proud and tall.

And so you have to use special routing software that takes her dimensions into consideration. That sounds expensive. It does. But, you know, in theory, someone could build something like that for a tool like this. Yeah, that's what's so neat about it. And some folks in our matrix are making just this point that OpenStreetMaps is a great project because now you can get this data and sort of a common language

and place for all this to collaborate around and then you can build your own ideas into this stuff. You know I've been using OpenStreetMaps as a back end for my navigation apps for years and years now actually and it's gotten a lot better so I would imagine the more stuff like

this gets out there and the easier it is to use and the easier it is to sort of update all the maps as well from a user standpoint the better and better it'll get so it's like open source long game always wins yeah that's a fair point you're sitting in that seat right now having used an open street map powered app do you want to mention what it is and maybe make some disclaimers about it i mean it's not. And that's probably the caveat with all this is how could anything be as good as Google Maps when you have so many users constantly providing data and you have the financial budget that Google does to actually invest in routing it, taking pictures, getting satellite imagery. So clearly it's going to have its limitations.

But Brent, you're relatively an authority on this, having just driven from Canada to Seattle using this. And I know you used it in our Denver trip as well. With only a few small incidents here and there. Only three extra mountain passes. It was fine. Wes, you'll probably find this while I'm chatting about it. Almost exactly a year ago, Chris, if you remember on Self Hosted, we sort of explored using some of these open mapping applications. And I know some of us suffered a little. And some of us had some more experience. You were fresh at it, I think. I think you had a hard time with it in Denver.

It really struggled with the complexity of that city, we've got to say. So the application I'm using primarily is OSMand. It's an Android application. And there are a few others. Some of them are more simplistic or more user-friendly, perhaps. I'll put it that way. I'm not quite remembering them to mind in memory. But I generally really think it's great for going between large places. So between cities,

things like that, that has worked out fabulously for me. And I find it quite accurate. What I appreciate about it is the customizability of the interface itself. So you can add different layers and, and, you know, I have mine in dark mode all the time because I like it that way. And those are some things you can't do layers and, you know, I have mine in dark mode all the time because I like it that way. And those are some things you can't do with some of the other, you know, bigger proprietary apps. So, right. And you've also, I, one of the things I like about your UI that I wish I could do is you've configured it to show not just the next turn, but the turn after that. So you can start doing some of the math ahead of time and only some nav units do that. And you can just turn that on in yours yeah actually i wonder if that's a symptom now but i found it really super

useful to know you know as a driver whenever i have time i could just look down and just have an idea of what's coming up next next yeah get an idea of which lane to be in it's helpful for just for quick turns right yeah because sometimes especially when you're downtown they have four lanes to get across. Although now that we're talking about it, I wonder if it's a symptom of the fact that I've noticed that this mapping application has a bit more of a delay.

So I find sometimes the turn, you know, I'm right up on the turn, and then it sort of suggests that I'm there. So I have found the interface lags a little bit from reality compared to some of the other alternatives. So I wonder if that's just my way of trying to solve that, is to get ahead of the turns. It still seems useful to me.

I wish I could turn it on. It is kind of, isn't that somewhat common sometimes in some open source things? Like, all right, there's some deficiencies, but you can customize it so you could probably work around them. And no one's spying on you. I mean, there's that now. And that's becoming more important to me as time goes on.

The other thing I appreciate is that I can bring up, you know, on the heads up display, whatever I want, really. There's tons of options. And so some of them that I like is, you know, navigational directions, like compass directions a certain way. But also like total distance that I have to go, what time I'm going to arrive there, things like that. But I find the layout, I guess, more predictable. Like all that information is in the same place. I was using Google Maps a little bit recently and I found it difficult because that information kept moving around. And I found that kind of tricky.

So I tend to go to it first but i will say if you're trying to get to like a business address especially in you know a city that businesses change quite often the search is is tricky um you can search by like address but you kind of have to do it backwards you have to search by you know province or state first and then city and then street name and then number so it's a little bit backwards from like human readability yeah then number. So it's a little bit backwards from human readability in that sense. That's a little annoying, but understandable. I understand it's a hierarchy, so that makes sense once you get used to it. But as a first-time user, you're like, what?

I've seen that in some of the built-in navigation systems as well, like stuff in car. I was thinking the same. I like, though, that OpenStreetMaps, first of all, makes apps like that possible. I think it's such an important project. The other thing, too, is if you had a tool like Headway, which is what we started talking about

the self-hosted solution in theory Brent, you could kind of plan ahead and then just supply the needed information to the nav unit right? Yeah, that's a great idea. And then you could plan on your larger screen on your laptop or whatever which I think would be preferable too. Yeah, get it all sketched out in advance. Yeah, that's how I like to do it and i like to like look for parking spots

and all that kind of stuff you could even like print it out if you need it do you remember did you ever drive when that was a thing map quest oh yeah yeah totally map quest printouts and stuff and they sucked and of course you had to have like the get to the interstate on ramp all that stuff oh yeah and then towards the end some of them will let you like microsoft had one that let you like drop off some of the first steps i know how to get to the freeway i'm good you know and the big innovation with uh on your phone is you could you could start the nav once you're on the freeway and you didn't have to get all the uh i want to just mention because i know people are going to ask me what i do use for the rv navigation right now if you have a large vehicle, I think the Garmin RV780 is a really good device.

And it'll take into all that. I like having a dedicated device, too. I could see replacing it one day. I think that'd be pretty cool. Replace it with like a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen, running headway, and some open street maps. All taking into account how big Jupes is. Well, a boy can dream chris i'm curious you mentioned you want to eventually put this on a raspberry pi do you think the pi can handle it

well i don't know have to find out by the time chris gets around to that pile have like 32 gigs i'm starting pi 7 will be out i'm already planning projects for the pi 5 boys i'm already waiting soon as they announce I'm ready to go. Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit, and you can go there to support the show. Linode is easy, accessible, affordable cloud hosting. And you get that $100, you can really try it out

and see why we rave about Linode, why we have for years. Linode is how we run everything, including our new website that we've built recently. And it's in part because of the great performance. I mean, that's an absolute minimum line for me. It's got to meet Linode's level of performance now if I'm ever going to switch away, which just honestly nobody does.

They got 11 data centers around the world. They're constantly investing in their infrastructure, improving the hardware, instead of just like, you know, coasting like some companies do, and then milking that hardware for like 10 years and charging you the same thing. They're charging you the same great price,

which is 30 to 50% cheaper than the major hyperscalers out there. And just behind the scenes, they're constantly upgrading things, making things things better both on the hardware side but on the ui interface side too they just introduced a brand new marketplace interface that's what they call their one-click application deployment screen their marketplace you don't really buy these things i mean they're open source free software in fact sometimes i go there and i just look at some of the different projects and see what i want to play around with for the evening. And they've made that even easier now because they now highlight the new applications that have been added to the marketplace and they're adding more than ever now. So that's a really cool tool. And honestly, it's all really cool. That's what I love about Linode's interface. And not only are they always upgrading the hardware and the infrastructure, but they're also upgrading the user interface, the front end.

And they've just recently introduced their new Linode marketplace interface, which is what they call their front end to let you see the different projects that you can just one-click deploy on the Linode infrastructure. They're always adding new stuff, but they made it even easier now. They have a filter on just the new apps.

And I go there and I look at that and I think, all right, let's check it out. And I found myself just discovering and tinkering around with new, cool, free software projects. It's the best. I love it when they add features like that, just incrementally making it better all the time. That's why they've survived nearly 19 years in this business without VC funding, without raising crazy loans, but just by making a great product and selling it. And on top of that, you get some of the best support in the business. You get full Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible support,

and you also get something that's 30 to 50% cheaper than the major hyperscalers out there. That's a big deal when you combine that with the support, and it's a great way to support the show. Go try it out. See why we've been building our future infrastructure on Linode and why I think you will too for yourself or for your business. Linode.com slash unplugged. One more

time to support the show. It's Linode.com slash unplugged. All right, Wes brought the vacuum, so it's time to clean up a little bit around here. So thanks to our generous audience. Brent's tank was fueled with sats and he took a really cool route out here yeah I think we should share that route actually yeah I just wouldn't take it at night or when it's raining well it was only

partly at night and only partly raining in the mountains but the most treacherous part was at night we do tell a little story in office hours 12 of that adventure that I think is probably worth hearing. I don't know if you caught it, Wes. I did. Okay, all right.

If you hadn't, we'd have to tell you. Yeah. Also, we had a little surprise outage that left Wes and I scrambling after we launched the website. And we talk about that in Office Hours 12 as well. Yep. All good, though. All fixed up now. Those West Coast meetups are coming up.

Our first one is on the 20th, which is two days from now as we record. How is that going to work? I'm going to be in Southern Oregon in two days. Wrap your mind around that. Especially, that's tricky considering I'm going to be recording Coder right here in the studio on Monday. At this point, two shows to go.

Yeah. Yeah, but the meetups are logged in. Details at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. It turned out we're doing a West Coast brewery tour. All of the meetups are at really great brewery locations that can accommodate us and feed us and supply us with beverage.

We'd love to have you there, but do sign up so we know. And it's getting down to the final moment. Meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. And if you need any deets, you want to figure out like carpool and stuff like that, bit.ly slash West Coast Crew is the chat room for that. And we'll spin up other regions we have. There's actually a whole bunch of regions already, but we'll spin up more regions as the meetups extend out. So do get yourself a Matrix client. It'll be coming up soon. We do have a couple of baller boosts this week.

The biggest boost that come into the show we read early. And John A. comes in for a third week in a row with 50 sats. Gentlemen, how about that? That is amazing.

Keep the change, you filthy animal. I guess we better start dancing. Yeah. Can he keep the streak up? Because here's the tricky thing. We're pre-recorded next week. Oh. And he's on a really solid streak right now.

Four episodes in a row. Nobody's ever done that before. So we'll see if he can pull it off. I don't know how he possibly could, but we'll see. He says in his boost, thank you for doing a show dedicated to all the reasons I love Gnome and for validating my preferences.

Did I do that? I thought I did the opposite. You know, we have to say Nate reached out to us. Nate writes the This Week in KDE blog, and he offered to come on and chat about some of those problems. Not so much as like an argument, but just kind of a back and forth to get an understanding of where the project's at and that stuff. And I think we're going to probably take him up on that.

It's just a travel schedule and all of that. But I think that'd be a great conversation. We figured we'd give a little more time for Brent to find additional bugs, just to stock up. Oh, I've got a list. Oh, Brent Lee, of course you do. It's to help. I think that's

in the name of progress right sure awesome matt was also very generously one of our baller boosts this episode with 30 000 sats he clipped that he says also i think part of the problem with the baller clip in general is that it's just been one clip all the other boosts get some variety. They don't get old because they largely have some variety. I think there should be a small pool of baller boosts that you can pull from depending on the mood and ambiance. Yeah, I think we're getting that. We have some really great submissions on a GitHub link that we'll put in the notes. We'd like some more. And the community is coming together and

really, I think, coming up with some great ones. So thank you, everybody notes we'd like some more and the community is coming together and been really i think coming up with some great ones so thank you everybody who's contributed to that github thread and thank you awesome matt for that and our last baller boost we're actually we're very privileged we've actually gotten three baller boosts and that one came from gene bean with 25 000 sats i hoard that which your kind covet brent i'd love to see you dig into this KDE topic in a brunch with Brent. Maybe that includes Michael Tunnell from Tux Digital and maybe whoever hosts the KDE Corner on Late Night Linux. Ah, Phelan, yeah. Maybe the cross-section of y'all's experiences would be really interesting to hear.

That's a great idea. Thank you. Yeah, we can get that cooking. We can at least get it cooking. I don't know if we can get it pulled off while we're on the road. That would be tricky, but we can at least get that ball rolling. Nice to have projects to come home to. True. I also just want to say thank you to Gene Bean. He sends in a lot of high signal boosts just under the 2K level, so we have the option of reading them or not.

And that works great for us. We read them all. We bring some of them to the show. And I just want to say thank you to Gene Bean because just a ton of great support yeah thank you we really appreciate it so let's talk about how we are finally divorcing from google photos a topic that has come up on the show before something we are following closely on self-hosted there's a several projects in the works like image Something that really was finally motivated by that story that involved Google sending over a dad's entire Google account

history to the police when they incorrectly identified a CSAM flag on his Google Photos account. And that was really just the, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I've got kids. I use telemedicine. I've got Google Photos turned on on one of my devices, really just was the line that was too far for me. And since then, I have been actively looking at ways of just getting myself off of Google because these models only increase, what they're looking for only increases,

the accuracy is so-so, and the automatic nature in how they transferred all of that guy's information to the authorities for him to review every chat, every email, every purchase. It's gross. It's also like Google Photos is less of a good deal than it once was. You know, they kind of tried to sucker everyone in and then changed the terms, which is fair. And that's part of the risk of I'm going to put all my photos with you and then you've got them and can have me pay whatever you'd like.

It feels like the tradeoff cost has shifted more and more to the negative. And now the tradeoffs of having a system that isn't fully managed, that doesn't essentially have infinite storage, that doesn't have maybe the best machine learning discovery, the tradeoffs of that are worth it now, I think. are worth it now, I think. So we wanted to build something that pretty much anyone listening could deploy. Something that would run for years, that wouldn't be super expensive and would be fully backed up. And I'm on iOS.

You gentlemen are on Android. We wanted something that accomplishes both. I know, you still won't text with me. They're green, Wes. They're green. And if I was on Android, I have to admit this may have been slightly easier because on ios you have the challenge of background tasks are heavily throttled better or worse hard to compete with the built-in you know apple photos magic right yeah exactly and you don't have all of the tools. Like you Android users can use SyncThing.

I love SyncThing. SyncThing doesn't like iOS. They don't want to release SyncThing for iOS. Now, Mobius Sync has come along. I think it might have been Gamma that told me about this, which is a third-party app for SyncThing that allows you to use SyncThing on iOS. Oh, that's just crazy.

And other devices. And Wes, it is a full SyncThing on iOS. Oh, that's just crazy. And other devices. And Wes, it is a full SyncThing instance. I couldn't believe it. Like when you install it and you run the app, it just brings up the whole SyncThing UI. That's just SyncThing right there. Isn't that funny? And it's pretty limited in what it can get access to because iOS.

It's pretty limited in what it can get access to because iOS. And there are some hacky ways you could possibly get it to look at your photos and back your photos up. But it's not ideal. But it would work for like, can you get access to various documents or some other? What can it see? It can see like its own folders. So you could put stuff in its own folders. So if you wanted to sync stuff to have handy on your phone, that could work for that yeah yeah that yeah that would work yeah exactly but not a great solution for what i'm looking at and so if i was on android maybe i

would use just sync thing i don't know i can't say but that wasn't an option for me and we got a bunch of different solutions and i tried most of them that seemed reasonable. And the one that stuck, and I think Brent saw my kind of, because he's been here at the studio for a few days, he saw my kind of evolution of going through these different apps and finding the one that really seems stable and reliable and ran in the background and supported everything I needed. And that absolutely, hands down, was Photosync. Photosync-app.com. This is a really good piece of engineering. How often have you heard me come on here and say how good an app is engineered?

This thing is beautiful. Photosync will transfer to just about darn near any network protocol. Whatever you got, Samba, SFTP, WebDAV, it'll work with that. You got NextCloud, you got a Western Digital MyCloud, you got TrueNAS, Open Media Vault, Seagate. What do you got? It'll support that, right? It'll do just straight up file protocols that you got, or it'll work with specific

services that have APIs, including PhotoPrism. It has direct support for PhotoPrism. We'll get to that in a moment. But I want to stick just for a little bit longer with PhotoSync because this is a really impressive app. This is a critical component for me, getting the photos off of my phone because that's my primary device. And PhotoSync has really intelligent syncing abilities,

really easy to select what you want and what you don't want sent up to the server, crazy easy to manage that to happen automatically. It works with so many different services. And on top of that, and I think this is just a great feature because I actually was doing this already. If you plug in a SD card reader to your phone

and transfer your photos off of your digital camera. Photosync will read those and it can sync them up to your service. See, that's nice. It's super nice, Wes. It's super, super nice. So yes, it has camera support. It'll also do Wi-Fi cameras. It can connect to your Wi-Fi camera and transfer all the photos off of that. It'll also do like a

USB flash drive. It has baked-in Amazon S3, Backblaze, and Wasabi support. If you don't want to go to your own server, you just want to send it off to the cloud as a backup option, and you're happy with just having local photos on your phone just backed up, Photosync will do that. That's handy.

So Photosync could be, basically, for some people, the entire solution. Such a simple app. It's available for iOS and Android. I really like it. It does have a premium version, which I haven't gone with yet. Now, I was going to ask you about that because it seemed like maybe you needed the premium if you wanted the automatic sort of in the background. You got it. Yeah, that's the thing. And then the models are a little different, it looks like. I

played a little bit with Photosync and I tried some other software just to mix it up here. But you have the premium version on iOS and then on Android, there's various sort of extensions you can get so you can get a pack if you just need a little bit more protocols or you can get like a sort of premium equivalent pack that has all those standard extensions built in yeah yeah it's a little confusing um maybe a little bit better of a deal on the android side it does seem that way yeah but i'm i'm cool with the premium version because that automatic backup is big for me and i it also feels like the kind of project you want to support and keep it around because you want to just use it for years right you want to keep i'm not going to stop taking photos if anything it goes the opposite yeah only more right and i wanted something too that would handle large pro res video and 4k video and

stuff like that and it it handles all of that. I also simulated, like, I crashed the app. I forced close the app mid-transfer. I put the phone to sleep. Yeah, you got a phone call during one of your transfers. I got a phone call, which canceled the transfer, and made sure that every time I opened it up, it just figured out what it needed to do, finished it up,

and it didn't have any weird, like, orphan files on the server or anything like that. So really got the solid confidence in photosync to use it as my daily backup solution to get the photos off of my phone there is like a companion app for the commercial os's i don't know what that does maybe it backs up the photos yeah i think it does allow you if you put the sd card on your mac desktop or whatever. Okay. All right. Yeah, that'd be really nice too, I suppose. So then you have the whole matter of how do you display your photos? How do you search your photos?

How do you collect them? Yeah, because right now you can just go to photos.google.com, right? And everything's there. Search for RV. And, you know, the RV shows up. I do that kind of crap on the stream all the time. Or when I'm making like a home video, you know, Dylan Christmas tree and boom, it shows up Dylan with a Christmas tree.

And because you've had those features available, right? You're not necessarily, I mean, sure you build some albums, but you can kind of rely on just if I need to find something by theme, it's auto done that for me. Totally. That is so true. It's a little lazy, but I just don't have time to sit there and go through all the photos. Just the amount of photos and stuff. I don't, right? You take it and you forget it so photoprism comes in and

we've talked about photoprism before i'm going to talk about it now because it's gotten a lot better since we've talked about it it is an ai powered photos app which they say is for the decentralized web all right talking my language makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find your pictures automatically in the background. You could even run it on a Raspberry Pi. It's going to be a little slow, but you could run it on a Raspberry Pi and it will do face detection. It'll classify pictures based on their content and location. It can identify animals.

But one of the things that I really want in an app like this is i want i want to discover old memories i want to be reminded about things i want to see things and i really enjoy just the process of browsing through photoprism and remembering moments one of the ways they do that is they have the map interface and they'll show you where you've taken various photos in different places. And, you know, like I can go in and I can look at some of our favorite Montana moments and be like, oh yeah, that was great when we went there. Or Brent and I were planning to take a little bit of the coast on the road trip. And we'll look, here's, here's the first photo of Jupes on my very first road trip when we took the coast.

I was like, oh yeah, boy, how much have we learned, right? And it's just re-experiencing those photos because otherwise they just sit there and they do nothing. Lost to time. And PhotoPrism is really good. The other thing it does at helping you discover them is it has this thing called labels. And it automatically categorizes the pictures.

Like here's aircraft. Theseizes the pictures like here's uh aircraft these are the pictures when listener mike took us up for a ride in denver when we went on the denver road trip and here's a here's a video because it also works on video right here's a video of that moment of us walking out on the tarmac to go ride in listener mike's airplane and what an incredible memory that was and it just automatically tagged that. I didn't have to do that. There's a tag for Levi, I think, as well. I spent a lot of time in that one.

Yeah, there's a tag for Beach. There's a tag for Camper or something, whatever they call it, Zoops. Isn't that the European term for it? Yeah. The Levi tag automatically just finds all these great photos. When you hover over the photos, if they're a live photo it'll automatically animate them i kind of witnessed you going through this memory uh palace let's call it um when you were first setting this up and and not everything was loaded yet because it was just just really fresh yeah still classifying i can say confidently that yes, this, you know, photo prism did it for you because we sat

there for maybe, what was it like 15 minutes, just going through a bunch of memories and like, oh yeah, check out when we were at the coast and we, you know, this is one of our favorite camp spots. And, and we spent that quality time, you know, just you and I going through those memories. So I can imagine when you sit down with your family and do the same thing, how, how really great that'll be. Yeah. And PhotoPrism just makes it easy to have that experience,

to casually do it because the PhotoSync software is sending them up via WebDAV, really, in the backend. Right. To PhotoPrism, but it's pinging its API. So somehow,

maybe it's file system events, maybe it's an API ping, but PhotoPrism is immediately aware of the moment a photo lands. Ah, see, that's a nice little test, right? Like, how long is it from take it on your app, take it on your phone, and it actually makes it all the way into your... Right. You want to look at it sometimes right away. And so I ran it

in verbose mode, the server in verbose mode for a couple of days, just so I could see what it was doing on the back end, and it'll go through everything, it'll process everything, and then the last thing it does when it's all done is then it does the face analysis. And you you can really you can see it light the cores up man like it really does it it cooks that thing for a bit but it it rips through it much faster i don't have like a coral accelerator or anything like that i'm just doing it right on the old cpu and it's it's working

pretty quick so it's um it's a great experience in just using it day to day and just staying on top of your photos. And I've been checking it throughout the weeks, seeing, you know, to make sure that it's captured everything that I've taken. And they're all in there. It's all working just as expected. One thing I noticed, Chris, that you may not have, is I noticed that there were some RAW photos from, I believe it was your phone.

I think they were Apple RAW format. And those just came out as white, just white squares. Did you notice that? Yeah. That is actually Alex's Canon R6. Was it? Okay. And I don't know why. There is a premium version, a membership version of Photo Prism, but it doesn't give you any more formats. Well, I know from my work in professional photography stuff that sometimes those raw formats are really tricky, especially for open source projects. I mean, there's a lot

of work that has gone into that, you know, like dark table and raw therapy and stuff. They've, they've kind of reverse engineered a lot of those formats, but it's possible that maybe either the software hasn't tapped into those resources yet, or that it just hasn't been reverse engineered. I mean, I don't think Alex would be able to tell us because i think he's still using some of the the big software let's just call it well and the and the truth is is google photos didn't have that problem you know i didn't even know those were a special format got it um until i imported i imported the originals of everything when i was doing this i went back and got the originals of everything and so i just threw it all up there and discovered some of that was different formats and it handled everything but those.

Now, Chris, I wondered, did you try going through the exercise of exporting from Google Photos and importing it into here? And because I would imagine that's a workflow that would be pretty common if you're trying to switch from one to the other. No, because I have the originals still and Google Photos is just my backup. But it'd be an interesting experiment. I have in the past done that with some other apps. And it's doable. It's a big download. Yeah, right.

For PhotoPrism itself, they recommend two cores for your CPU, at least three gigs of RAM, and a 64-bit operating system to get all of the face finding and stuff like that. And the automatic classifications. And I'll link in the notes a demo they have. have a demo app too of their classification support and they give you an idea of the range from animals to cars to pieces of land to it has this thing called moments too

and i don't know i don't know what it's doing but it's like a it's a moment that it thinks is like something special to you or something like that and it's it's actually really nice. And it was a surprising label that I had no idea what it did, but then I started looking at it. I like all of them. They have fantastic documentation, really good docs to getting all of this set up. They support some external sharing. Okay.

It's hit and miss. Like they'll let you share to Twitter and Instagram, but purple dog using breeze boosted in with a row of ducks. And I agree. He says, the thing I'm missing is I want to be able to share an album and it doesn't really support that. I agree.

The sharing support's not a big, big aspect for me, but it is not as strong as I would like it with Photo Prism. But the free version that I am using, the community edition includes nearly everything except for vector image support. And you get simple maps instead of like fancy, really accurate maps and hardware transcoding for the videos is limited to the paid version wasn't an issue for me though and private support chat is limited to the membered version

that's reasonable otherwise it's pretty much everything i did notice i think as a photographer anyways or someone who has you, a fancier camera and likes to do some extra editing on the side, you need to keep in mind that PhotoPrism is basically a really nice viewing suite. It doesn't do any editing capabilities. You know, if you want to crop a photo or anything, I at least haven't found that yet. I've been poking around, not extensively, but I haven't found that anywhere. So I think that is something maybe that'll come in the future. Some simple editing tools might be nice if you want to, you know, edit something quickly there and then export it and share it with some family or something. But that's something to keep in mind.

I got an idea for that. I haven't done this part yet, but this is like my to-do when I get back. I don't see any reason I couldn't point SyncThing at the PhotoPrism libraries because they're just folders on my hard drive. And use SyncThing in send-only mode from the server, if I want, and receive-only mode on the client. So you could have just a mirrored copy on your workstation using SyncThing, or you could do it in send and receive mode. And in theory, it would actually work fine if you made an edit on your workstation and then use sync thing to sync that back to the PhotoPrism directory. I think since PhotoPrism is just reading from the file system, I think it'd be fine.

And that might be a really, if as long as you had enough local storage to have a copy of your entire photo database or maybe a subfolder, then you could essentially just open them up in whatever editing app you like. It'd be a local file. You'd make the changes you want. You hit save, and then SyncThing would send it back up to PhotoPrism. PhotoPrism would re-index it,

and it would be available to you. So I'm going to experiment with that further, but that's how I'm planning to address that. If anybody out there has tried something like that, please let me know. It would also be interesting in that vein to know if you know if you have some xmp files or something for your raw raw format if it keeps track of those that would be actually kind of amazing

somebody with some experience out there let us know we'll find out eventually though so that's okay so we're getting it off our device it could be you could use photosync to get it off your digital camera you could use photosync to get it off your digital camera you could use photosync to get it off of your phone there's other tools out there i really like photosync and also photoprism recommends photosync as well we'll have links to this in the show notes we're using photoprism to view it search it categorize it how do we back it up and i got a lot of photos i got a lot of photos. I got a lot of photos and I'm looking to save a buck, but I want them protected. So I needed an edge. I needed something a little different because everything out there wasn't going to work for me. I mean, I'll consider others. I'm not completely sold on this, but it

sounds pretty amazing. It's called storage. They bill themselves as fast, secure, decentralized cloud storage. They also call themselves a Web3 company. So red flag. Danger. I'm not sold yet. Go on. I found out about them through iX Systems, who has announced integration with TrueNAS. So they seem to think it's legitimate.

So that raised it up a little notch in my book. They call themselves the first open source decentralized cloud storage layer that's private by design and secure by default. They say when an object is uploaded into the storage DCS, it is encrypted, split up into 80 or more pieces and distributed across thousands of diverse nodes and ISPs in nearly a hundred different countries. There's no single point of failure or centralized location. So there's no outages, downtime, or bit rot. Ransomware doesn't affect you and data breaches are virtually impossible. The node goes offline for any reason. Your file can be reconstituted from just 29 of its distributed pieces. I do have a link that has a video that explains how it all works.

I don't know, guys. I mean, it sounds almost too good to be true when it comes to storage. It is usually too good to be true if it sounds like it. But what they're essentially doing is they have a plan that anybody can participate in. Maybe this is the Web3 part. I don't know. And you can essentially somehow get into this program and allocate some of your data center storage to their network or something like that i really i've genuinely tried to get to the bottom of how it can be so cheap and i am still a little unsure but here's the pricing the free plan which i'm currently using which i'll have to

upgrade from is you get 150 gigs of s3 compatible object storage for free. It's pretty good. Then after that, you get a pro plan. The pro plan can still includes the 150 gigs for free. And then it's $4 a terabyte after that, which is a really good price and a $7 a terabyte transfer rate. That is way lower than just about anywhere else I can find. And it also claims to be fully encrypted and fully distributed and it claims to be all open source and and i can verify this at least

it is fully s3 compatible it's just too good not to try i don't know anything else about storage i always go into low-cost storage extremely skeptical but if it's true that they really are distributing it like this and they really are distributing it like this and they're splitting it up like this and they're encrypting it by default like this. And you're going to test it for us on the show with it being the sole backup of all your photos? I am doing it right now.

Here we go, buddy. Well, I'm also, that's why I'm going to sync thing it to my workstation and stuff. So, I mean, I'm not crazy. Okay. But I haven't set that up yet. So, currently it is the way I'm doing it. And here is the beauty thing about storage. It's S-t-o-r-j by the way um but here's the great

thing about it my backup app of choice that i'm already using to back up all my server configs and all my docker composes duplicati has built-in support for storage is that right yeah and duplicati is such a great tool if you haven't checked it out it's really easy to get going it supports a ton of cloud storage options it'll do local aes encryption first so one of the things i do is i save my home assistant databases on google drive but i encrypt them completely locally with Duplicati. And then Google just gets this big old encrypted tar file that just sits on Google Drive. And then Duplicati can download it if I ever need to restore, manage all of the encryption. It is like an old school program where you actually can like browse and restore individual

files if you want. You can get status of your backups. It's really a great backup program. I've been using it for years. So the fact that storage support was built right in and they have docs on how to set it up was so killer for me because it meant I didn't have to like learn a new backup application or implement something entirely new.

I just added one more additional backup config to my existing application, which was brilliant. And set it up. Duplicati sends all my photos up to storage. It's been doing it for days. It's been working great. It was really easy to get going. So if you have never tried Duplicati, even if you don't use storage, this could be a great tool to backup. You could go to Amazon S3. You could go to Dropbox, you could go to Linode's S3 object storage, all kinds of services in there. Really like that application.

I also noticed when I was investigating storage that they have a canary on their website. You might have seen this with other privacy-conscious VPNs and such. And the purpose, as far as I understand, is to just kind of make that canary vanish if they ever get, of course you would understand this better, but if they ever get sort of subpoenaed to give information that they are typically unwilling to give that they've they've made this like they've been given this order and they've disclosed information to the government they can't say that they're they're under an embargo when they get served an NDA but when you pull a canary you're not saying anything you're removing some a statement that you had previously before so you make a statement saying

we've never been served this and then when that disappears you know that it's happened without them having to come out and say it that's the canary it's kind of wild that that's the world we live in right it's a bit of a loophole i think thanks george bush appreciate that patriot act so there you go that's uh storage has a canary it has a warrant canary which is actually really a good thing to see. And it's actually one of the best I've ever seen. They include like recent news headlines in the canary just to prove the fact that the date would be accurate. So you can kind of do your own homework to make sure that it actually was. And they do say, oh, we'll send this canary once a month, this warranty canary and include headlines and such. And I thought that was really neat until I noticed that the date is from last, uh, it's actually from July. And so I wonder if the canary's out or not, or someone just

forgot to update. No, cause you're supposed to pull it. That's the idea, right? You pull it when that's happened. But yeah, I don't know if you're, if you set the expectation, you're going to update it. You better keep updating it. So the pro plan is you pay for what you use. Essentially. I haven't gotten to that tier yet. I'm so skeptical on this kind of stuff, you guys, but they're checking all the boxes. And I felt like I wanted to get my hands on it so I could at least come on the show and give you my experience in a bit.

So I'm trying it out. This is what I'm using for my backup. I really like it so far. I think the pricing's ridiculous and I'm going to, I'm going to embrace it while I can. And the fact that I can integrate it with Duplicati is just a huge win for me. Yeah. I feel like if you're doing the encryption on your side, that makes me feel a lot better. Yeah, I agree. That's the thing I want. I want to control that encryption on my side. I want it to require my key on the restoring side to actually decrypt that stuff.

So I know, Wes, that you've been digging into this too. You've been solving this problem for a while. Tell me what tools you've strung together. Well, you know, there are a lot of different options in this space. One I noticed that I'm not using, but I thought was an interesting approach, is called Stingle. And the client is all open source, but they do the hosting on the backend. So it doesn't really fit with the whole self-host everything,

but if what you were looking for is, you know, something that is at least partially open source, but isn't sending things to Google in particular. Yeah, that's the key, right? Then this might be for you. The app looks quite nice. It's simple. You just pay, you know, for the backend hosting costs.

So right there, you're at least paying for what you're using. Seems reasonable to me. Now, I don't know anything about them. I don't know. Would I trust that as my sole backup of my photos? Are they going to disappear at some point? And can you get your photos out? I'm not sure.

But you do have some options if you're not quite willing to take on the full load of like, oh, I got to find storage for these things. And I got to make sure that my server's up and the sync is going. Right. That does sound nice. And it would at least get you off of the Google threat model. Right. Yeah.

At least there. I don't think Stingle at least has as many GPUs to mine all of your data from. Also a great name. Exactly. Stingle. Stingle. Yeah, that's great.

I love it. No, you're right. I have been using SyncThing for a long time to do photo sync. And I mean, what can you say? SyncThing really just works. It just syncs. It keeps going.

I think using it for photos can certainly work on android pretty well you do kind of have to know and understand a bit about sync thing i think to feel fully comfortable with it so i don't know that i would recommend that maybe for like a grandma type figure in your life especially because you might need a couple you might need to think about the model you can kind of play with like send or receive only but then if you're deleting stuff from your phone there might there's sometimes like a notification that's like, hey, just so you know you're out of sync.

You could ignore that. Everything still works fine. Another approach is you could just imagine it as a sort of bi-directional setup all the time, where you're just imagining that you're making a copy of whatever's on your phone on a server somewhere, and then you have a separate sync process that sort of copies from there

and syncs whatever's new that shows up to your real backend folder, where whatever photo viewer or gallery is actually going to pull from. So if you're comfortable with that, or let's say you already are using the sync thing, you have a sync thing network going, you have other stuff on your phone you want to sync to or from, that seems like a really solid option. I did look a bit at photosync. It does seem like, I mean, I think that is probably what I would recommend for someone who wasn't super competent, but just wanted to suck photos off their phone because it's polished.

It's been around for a long time. It's like an appliance kind of app. Yeah, exactly. But I knew you were playing with that. I wanted to try something a little bit different. So I found Lumerage. Okay. Oh, you can give it a shot of pronouncing if you prefer.

Lumerage? I almost think it's like something to do with lighting, but I don't know. Yeah. It is definitely not as polished, but it does have an iOS and Android app, as well as actually a Windows and a Mac desktop version. I haven't tried those. No version for Linux just yet. It's pretty bare bones, but it comes with a lot of the features.

Not all of them as shiny as say Photo Prism has, but it has a built-in gallery, which also means from your phone, if you're looking at a photo, you can share it right there from the app on your phone. And it just has a little token that embeds. You can send that link. So that's pretty handy.

That is. I should mention Photo Prism has a progressive web app, a PWA, that does work pretty good on mobile. But the sharing is still, I'm not my, I think that's its weakest area. So far, I've been pretty impressed with the actual sync functionality. You know, the Android app connected right away. It held right up.

I synced like the full backlog of however many thousands of photos I had sitting on my phone. And then over the past week or so, it's been, you know, sucking up new ones as I go on walks with the dogs and go explore the neighborhood. It's not the easiest to configure. It's definitely not a pretty app. It's more of like a, you know, like a technical user's app. But unlike the experience you get with sync thing, it's focused on photos. So like when you open the app up, it shows you all your photos right there. You can view them there and it'll tell you like, oh, you sync this. You can configure which folders you want to sync. You could, instead of doing all of them, if you just wanted to sort of manually

pick and choose, it makes it really easy to sync individual photos that you can just select or group. I mean, it looks like they got pretty good docs too for the server installation. I mean, look at this. They got Docker, they got App,

they got Raspbian images, they got Unraid, Synology, OpenWrt. That's awesome. I love to see that. Yeah, it's pretty lightweight as well. So you don't need, you know, it's not super heavy. It doesn't have a ton of functionality,

especially the gallery that you get on the web. Like it's not super fancy, but you can go scroll through them. You can, as I said, you can link from it. One downside is it doesn't seem like the client is open source. Now that doesn't seem, there's no ads. There's no, doesn't seem to be any spine that I could find, but yeah, you got to weigh that. It seems like, unfortunately, we're, besides the same thing,

there's not a ton of great open source options maybe because we do want something that's really polished and reliable yeah maybe that maybe it just takes a lot of investment of time and so people want to make a buck off of it again like you're saying though it's sort of the threat of uh lumerage how are we going to say it? Lume range, Luma range, uh, Luma rage. You got to give a shot, Brad. Oh,

well, I don't know why I want to say it in French, but I'd say Lomerage. Lomerage. Okay. All right. I've been saying Lomo. Maybe they're dirty French Canadians.

I don't know, but I, I don't think they're going to be profiling me, indexing all of my data, analyzing my photos for CSAM violations, and then sending my entire account history to the police automatically and then shutting my account down, including disconnecting my phone service. I doubt there's that risk, you know, so this is better. And it's not it doesn't seem to have a huge team of development, but I've seen the developers active on some subreddits. It doesn't seem to have a huge team of development,

but I've seen the developers active on some subreddits. The GitHub repo does have some recent commits. So it seems to be, if not the fastest project, at least a project that it's steadily adding features and continuing to be worked on. They also had a blog post from earlier in this year talking about how it works just fine with PhotoPrism. So, you know, it's a good, they sort of promote right out of the gate,

like, yeah, you know, you can use this for sync, you can use it for more, mix and match with whatever tools, other tools you might want to use well that's a great that could have best of both worlds right there very nice i did take a look at a couple of different options on the view side too i feel like we should mention pie gallery too just because it's been around for for a while and it's just a simple app if all you're looking for is something that can easily display photos, no editing capabilities, nothing super fancy,

but it has a nice snappy UI. And because it's meant to run on a Pi, you know, it's easy for these things to take more resources than they should. But this is like legit snappy, even if you've got thousands of photos or big photos. And what I like about this too

is you could still use a tool like Photosync or Foldersync or Lumeridge and, you know and you move it over and you can manage it and organize it yourself on the file system and then just throw this on top of it. And it's a really simple, straightforward Raspberry Pi with a big old USB disk

hanging off it, problem solved kind of solution. I also like that it supports both OpenStreetMap and Mapbox. Some of the ones I checked out, they mostly just had Mapbox support, which is fine, but you need to go like register for a key and you know it's only freed up to some amount all reasonable but it was nice to have sort of options there the other two i took a look at

photoprism seems really nice but again i knew you've been playing with it so i wanted to you know go farther afield i took a look at photo view. Ah, okay. I've heard of LibrePhotos. Yeah, PhotoView seems to be a little bit newer on the scene. It has some of the same aims as Photoprism, but at this point, it's just a fair bit simpler. It does have some auto-smarts

to try to build albums for you and figure out your timeline. It does have map support as well, but you do need to go set that up. That was kind of a theme here, is like if you wanted some of the extras like map support, you kind of had to do that plumbing. That was kind of a theme here is like, if you wanted some of the extras like map support, you kind of had to do that plumbing.

It didn't work right out of the box, but it had no problems identifying all of my dumb selfies right out of the way. It found dog pics and it found some, I mean, kind of its own weird set of tags, which was fun. I think one it found was shrubbery. Yes.

Was it pictures of shrubbery? Was it accurate? Yeah. Well, there you go. Not a shrubbery? Was it accurate? Yeah. Well, there you go. Not a shrubbery. And then Libre Photos, a little fancier, not quite up to the level of Photo Prism, but it's got things like a place tree. It can do word clouds. It has a timeline.

It has a social graph. It also kind of looks for face clusters in the data. They've also got a nice little sharing functionality built right in that has a concept of public photos. So you can mark some photos as public if you're just like maybe you're trying to want to display some of the stuff that you don't mind the public world seeing. Does it spin up a web server for people to view them? Yeah, and you can just link

to it from the web server that it's got. And then you can share stuff between different users. That's one thing. Both of these support having different users on the server, which is nice. So if you did want to have maybe just a gallery that you didn't share with the wider world, but you had some friends that you go on trips with, or you have some family that are all using the same system. Yeah. Occasional things like family events and whatnot. Totally. Right. So you can give them a sort of internal access to it without having to

worry about the whole world having access. That's a really nice feature. I like that a lot. That's the kind of sharing stuff I'd love to see come to PhotoPrism. I don't know if I want it in a web server locally. I know they do offer some cloud stuff. They may offer some cloud sharing with the membership program, but that sounds like what you just described there sounds really great. And that's LibrePhotos that does that. Now, one other piece that I'm kind of watching for you, I can't, you can't easily try it out yet is I found a LibrePhotos Android client. Looks pretty modern. So modern that it's actually in private beta right now. So I haven't actually tried it, but it looks really nice.

It's trying to add that mobile front component to it, right? So trying to compete a little bit more with Google Photos, have a really rich client right there on the device, and then handle the syncing for you if you want a little more fully baked together platform experience. Image, I-M-M-C-H or something like that, is doing something similar. That's one we're watching closely on self-hosted. This is a category, like I mentioned, that self-hosted tracks because I think going through this, looking at what you found and looking at the tooling and hearing Brent's thoughts about PhotoPrism, where I'm at right now is it's there. The tooling's there. The capability is there. It is absolutely, totally possible to replace

Google Photos now. It's just up to people to decide if they want to do it or not. It's absolutely a doable thing. It's totally manageable, even for people that are really busy. Because a lot of this is you set it up, you get the plumbing done once, and then it's just going to run. Because a lot of this is you set it up, you get the plumbing done once, and then it's just going to run. I really like these selections. That's Uhura Photos is what it's called. Uhura Photos is the LibrePhotos client app for Android that's under development. And the UI is very similar to Google Photos.

I think this is one Android users should definitely keep an eye on. That looks really good, Wes. And with all these, you know, if you've just got photos in some folders, all of these were friendly with that. Like, they didn't necessarily need to have their own proprietary database. They would build that on top. Now, you might want a solution down the road to help you organize things, but I think that was nice because I didn't

feel locked in. You know, I had all of them stand up on top of my synced data with low mirage, so I didn't have to, you know So I could try them all out easily. I didn't have to migrate things between them or worry that one of them was going to muck up the structure and then the other one could no longer read it. So that was handy.

As for backing things up, Lomarage did have an interesting, I think they're kind of imagining you're doing this at home. You're syncing things to your house. So they've got this concept of a backup drive. So it's got a primary target that it's going to stick things to. And if that fills up or is unavailable, you can configure it with an automatic backup.

So I thought that could be handy maybe if you want to stick things on some spendier cloud storage that you've got mounted, but you don't always want things. So you could have S3 at home. You know, you could have it dumped S3 if you've run out of stuff at home,

if you're worried about that, but not always have things on there. I was lazy though. So I just started with S3 or S3-compatible storage right from the get-go. You know, S3FS has an option. You can supply your own key if you want to have things encrypted on the back end using the key that you provide. So that's a real low, you know, you don't have to worry about extra programs. If you just want to use S3FS, have it mount that storage, and then, you know, the containers underneath are none the wiser. That's a great idea. That's sneaky, and performance is fine for what you're just willing to use s3fs have it mount that storage and then you know the containers underneath are none the wiser that's a great idea that's sneaky and performance is fine for what you're doing yeah it was totally fine that's good now one question i've kind of

been having and i haven't totally resolved do i want all of my photos hot forever yeah or am i willing to set some horizons somewhere where i'm like, willing to transfer those to something else? I don't always, you know, that could be in something like Amazon's Glacier maybe, or if you got your own tape backups, I don't know. I could see a work case for that. So that'd be one workflow I haven't fully thought through yet. It's like, do I want to put stuff in longer term storage that I just don't need access to if it's over 10 years old, say, or. I feel like for my use case, I want all of them online so that I can use that location thing that shows all the photos you took in this place or all the faces of the kids right so you want the whole history but not everybody has those use cases i could definitely see especially if there was a way to do a low res jpeg preview of the image and then store the

really big version like on Glacier or something. That would be really nice, wouldn't it? Yeah. Something you know, like, okay, I can at least check to see if I want to go pull the full thing without getting, without paying for it to go find it. Yeah, I could see that. Maybe people out there are doing something like that. For now, I think I'm taking your route though.

I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna pay for the photos I take and so be it. Well, we got a lot of great links in the notes today. There is some really good resources in there and of course we haven't touched on every possible permutation or setup so yeah you know in the past i'd used i just seen matrix folks talking about this i had used next cloud um to do photo sync and that was all right i found it to be annoying in some of the particulars of the weird photo formats so like i would take um one of those you those fancy fake bokeh type portrait mode photos and worked fine. But each one of those would make a little folder on the Android disk on the file

system. And then Nextcloud would tell me it discovered a new photo or a new folder. Oh, it's going to sync that for you. Yeah. I don't ever need to see it. So in the particulars, I was less pleased. Yeah. I mean, if NextCloud's working for folks, then, you know, you could take out Lumeridge or SyncThing or Photosync in my case, and you could just use that. For me, NextCloud's just way more than I want for this whole pipeline. I don't want this. I don't want it involved. I just don't want it. And I would still throw a photo prism on top of it anyways.

And it's harder to do because NextCloud's got, you know, it's mapped all the files through its database most of the time. True. But, you know, if it was working for you, it was one that got sent in a lot. We got a ton of great ideas and setups that helped us tinker with different stuff and try different tools. So thank you, everybody, who sent in your emails and gave us ideas and inspirations. And we'd love to keep hearing them. And, of course, the Boots are welcome as well.

I think, though, for us, this is our working setup setup i can safely say i'm done with google photos and now i just got to actually take the next step and go on there and tell it to delete all my data bitwarden.com slash linux go get started with a free trial for a team or an enterprise or yourself as an individual at bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is simply the easiest way for yourself or your business to store, share, and sync your sensitive data. I love that Bitwarden can be customizable. You can turn certain features on and off in the enterprise that you don't want with policies or as just a user yourself. And of course, Bitwarden being open source and the fact that it's trusted by millions in the community gives me confidence.

I know that even way, way down the road, I'm going to have access to my passwords. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords and also other sensitive data, too, like two-factor codes, some passphrases for some of my apps like Matrix. And Bitwarden just keeps getting better all the time. So they make these reads really easy because it's great to see them add fast mail alias generation now. Picture it, Sicily, 1984. You're creating your first online service. You're logging in for the very first time.

You want to make a complicated password. You make a, like, oh, this is a good password. You write it down. You come up with your clever, clever username. Oh, it's a good one. And you write it down and you sign up. You fast forward. Now it's 2022. You're still using that same username. You're still using that same password or you have used it in a lot of places. That's no good. You know it. I know it. The whole internet knows it. Everybody knows it. It's probably been leaked more than a dozen times. Now with Bitwarden, you can generate a unique username, a unique password, and a unique email address that's only to that site and to that service. So if anything goes sideways, you know exactly where it came from. But also, you know you're only compromised just in that one unique set of credentials. Everything else is safe.

unique set of credentials. Everything else is safe. Nothing feels better than that. When that situation happens, nothing feels better than that. It is so great. And of course, Bitwarden is always adding new features, both to the browser extension, to the mobile app, even to the desktop apps. Go check out Bitwarden at bitwarden.com slash Linux. See why we like it so much. And then if you know someone out there who is not practicing safe passwords, maybe point them to that URL. Get them on board. It's probably the number one thing they could do to improve their online security if they're not doing that right now. Come on. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Let's all go over there.

Help out family or friends or workplace or I don't know, a stranger on the cornerwarden.com slash Linux. Let's all go over there. How about family or friends or workplace or I don't know, a stranger on the corner. Everybody could use better passwords. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. I did want to say thank you to the listeners for sending in some great feedback. We got a lot of suggestions on which photo applications to try. So thank you for sending all of those in. Bob did write in about Kasa OS. Hey guys, what do you think about Kasa OS? Looks interesting to me, but I'm just a noob. I want something to run on my Pi 3B Plus, just doing document MP3 and photo sharing mainly. What do you think? Community-based open-source software focused on delivering simple home cloud experience around a Docker ecosystem.

It's a project that's focused on leading with the best dashboard, the prettiest dashboard. Yeah, wow. That's clearly their focus. None of us have used it, but it's that kind of typical Linux system with a Docker plumbing underneath.

These seem to be really solid and popular, but I think each has to be evaluated on their own. And, you know, I really like Umbral, and they've just added a bunch of really great stuff, but these projects are all still really early days, and some of them have some security considerations and whatnot. Hey, you know, consoleasa OS has PhotoPresent. I was just going to say that.

That was totally unintentional, but very, very nice. It also works with, looks like it makes Home Assistant easy to deploy. You know, these can be really compelling. The thing that's tricky is like Home Assistant also wants to do this job where it wants to be your applications platform. Everyone wants to manage your apps. So it's getting to the point where there's almost

too many of these, but Kasa does, I have to say, look like a decent one just going through their website, but I definitely have to try it to know more. And it does seem like an area

that's useful, at least if we want broader adoption of some of these stuff, right? We might be comfortable spending a day or two figuring out, oh, this project

has Docker commands, but I got to put that in a compose file or they have instructions for the base OS, but that's fine. I know I can just stick it over here or let me go find and vet an image that someone else has built for this. But what are you going to do if you want, you know, some of your friends who want to take over some of their self-control, but they have less skills? You know, I was trying to figure out if we had talked about

this on the network previously, and I did a little search at notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com and i think it's important to note that you shouldn't get confused uh between casa os and nubu casa which i was like oh yeah we've definitely talked about that but they're two distinct things yeah nabucasa is the company behind home assistant and casa os is a Linux distro-based server platform, I guess. A friend of the show wrote in as well regarding the conversations we've been having recently about malware on Linux and how to protect yourself. They write, I run hundreds of servers, many with well-known public IPs, IPs from decades-old running Class A networks. Yeah, those Class As. Oh, fun.

I have some straightforward suggestions that have kept my public-facing bits from getting owned. Okay. I'd be happy to elaborate, but basically, number one, fail to ban. Fail to ban everywhere. Number two, SSHD config with a permit root without password. So that means to only allow root SSH logins when using private keys. And number three, OSSEC and Waza or other log reading aggregators for when you miss things. I've been told that many people turn off SELinux on their servers during the

kickstart installation script. I would not know about that though, but it hasn't seemed to hurt them yet. Wouldn't recommend. That's one of those. Don't do as I actually do, but do as I say things. All of us at some point have probably disabled SE Linux a few more times than we should have.

Let's admit it now. It's true. It's true. It's getting better. It's getting better on newer Fedora installs, but if you can get it working, it is a nice little peace of mind, I have to say. Jason also wrote in a bit on malware and security. modern and collaborative behavior detection engine coupled with a global IP reputation network. It stacks on failed bands philosophy, but is IPv6 compatible and about 60 times faster. So it's Go versus Python.

Uses Grok patterns to parse logs and YAML scenarios to identify behaviors. CrowdSec is engineered for modern cloud containers and VM-based infrastructures by decoupling detection and remediation. Once detected, you can remedy the threat with various bouncers, firewalls, NGINX, HTTP 403s, CAPTCHAs, etc., while the aggressive IPs can be sent to CrowdSec for curation before being shared among all users to further improve everyone's security. You know, I believe Wes Payne has a global IP reputation network he runs as well. Yeah, I sure do.

Now, I do have to send you the IPs in the mail, so it's not the fastest to get identified, but I do send them. You do, and it's been a really good system. It's just something Wes does for free in his spare time. Don't know why. But, you know, Jason, we've got a lot of people that said crowd sec is a must recommend uh and um i'm really glad i don't have to think about these things anymore very very very glad there was a time and a place that time and places no more i keep i keep all my systems behind firewalls i no longer have any inbound ports on any of my firewalls except for one of the ones here at the studio.

I just realized I was saying that. But that's the problem with them. You forget about them, right? Yeah. But, you know, I feel a lot better. I don't really, I don't worry about it too much. We could probably think about this for our cloud instances, though. I'm impressed recently with how this kind of crowdsource security is getting pretty common.

I'm thinking also of crowdsource like ad blocking and such. I think in the last few years, these have shown up and it's impressive what all of us kind of working together can come up with. I really like that concept. Yes. As long as it isn't abused. These things are always have that potential. I'm just thinking of spam, blacklists. They're mostly good, but they also have made it nearly impossible to self-host your own email now because of these shared blacklists. If you accidentally get on one for some stupid reason.

Right, but are there processes in place? Who do you appeal to to remedy things if anyone or at all and now it is time for the boost we got some great boosts into the show this week and i want to mention if you don't hear your boosts on here we are recording two shows today so we save some for this episode and we save some for other episodes and we're curating them now we're picking certain boosts we're reading all of them and getting some of them onto the air and hey citizen boosted in last week with 69 69 sats hey citizen and it gives me just an opportunity to talk about something i love he says he loves linux and he loves lit now pop quiz for you guys can any of you guys describe what lit is what does it mean if our show is lit

no i should i mean i know in the sense of the fire emoji i should i'm on board with that yeah that's true i see here it's you've spelt it specifically or they've spelt it specifically capital l uh small i capital t so maybe that's an indicator, Wes, for you. I can give you a hint, but I might give it away. So I'll just tell you. It is the live item tag in the podcasting 2.0 space. Oh, that's embarrassing now. Yeah. And so apps like Podverse and others

have the ability to actually stream our live stream in their app. And you're just looking at your podcasts, you know, your list of shows to listen to. And Linux Unplugged shows up with a little live badge in their app. And you're just looking at your podcasts, you know, this is your list of shows to listen to. And Linux Unplugged shows up with a little live badge next to it. Who wouldn't click that?

And what's brilliant about it is it's just done through the RSS feed. And this is one of the namespaces in there. It's this live item tag. You put that in there and then the podcast catcher sees that and it just adds it to the list as a live show. And it's one of the beauties of the podcasting 2-0-0 stuff.

So much good stuff getting developed over there. Yep. So I just appreciate the opportunity to actually talk about that because I love it. And I think it'll come. It'll be here one day. We first have to get to the stage of completely generating all our own RSS feeds on our own. We'll experiment with office hours and member feeds, and then we'll roll it out to all the shows someday in the near future.

Yeah, stay tuned. And hey, pro tip to you boosters out there. If you mention Podcasting 2.0, you're pretty likely to get on there. That's true. Blake Collin boosted in with 10,001 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. I love that one. He's got a pro tip.

Speaking of Podcasting 2.0, you can boost from the podcast index web page. Our Linux Unplugged entry there. Oh, right from the source. Just have to have the Albi extension, which is top-notch software. And we have a link to the Linux Unplugged entry at podcastindex.org. But yeah, you don't need a mobile app. You could actually do it from your web browser on your fancy laptop or desktop from the podcast index page and blake sent in 10,001 sats doing that and then i i guess i just picked all the ones i felt like talking about today uh molamum boosted

with just 500 sats but i like the message she says i don't like crypto at all but i love the idea of the lightning network and the use for stuff like this, or maybe a game server you're playing on could see how being able to boost into a game server would be extremely useful. I agree. I don't like crypto either. Don't like it. Don't like Web3 so far. It hasn't impressed me much. Maybe one day it will. So far it has not. And we get into all of that in Office Hours 9 we hate crypto 2 and i try to explain the difference between bitcoin and crypto the green eagle boosted in with 2000 sets i'm still using sync thing to backup photos off mine and my wife's phone as a bonus it allows me to sync other files like notes unfortunately though I'm still using Google for sharing, organizing, searching,

etc. So SyncThing is really only a secondary backup. I always intended to self-host a solution, but I'm afraid the effort won't be worth it because the bar for spouse approval is too high. I run into that issue every time I start down the path of switching something off a google service yeah that's an important consideration and uh i i i strongly believe that the setup i described today with photosync and photoprism and duplicati is a totally spouse approved stack because the ui on photosync is great the ui on photoprism is great you can have different user accounts on photoprism so they can have their own login with their own albums and stuff if you want to do that. Really top-notch stuff. And then Duplicati, you know, she's never really going to have to see that, but if I were sick and she needed to check the status of the backup, she could just check the

bookmark I have, and it's all in a web UI, and it gives you error messages that are clear and easy to read for the most part. So I think that stack is probably as close as you can get to a commercial product in terms of polish of UI. And it seems like things are only getting better, right? I mean, you mentioned image and just more solutions coming along to try to fit that role, more polish over time and more on the whole pipeline in one place,

which is just fewer moving pieces. And I'd say this, Westpain, PhotoPrism has gotten noticeably better since we talked about it last time on the show. So solid, continuous improvements over there, too. The whole stack. Also, Green Eagle, if your wife is unhappy, I mean, you can just blame Chris.

Yeah, that's totally cool, man. People do it all the time. He guaranteed that's basketball approval. Belfwinny? Belf-in-we? Chris, you do this one. I think you'll get this one. Belf-in-we. I like it. All right. Belf-in-wee? Chris, you do this one. I think you'll get this one. Belf-in-wee. I like it.

All right. It's Belf-in-wee. Well done. Boosted it with 512 sets. They say, love the show and so glad you talked about Linux Mint every now and then as it was my first distribution and still my favorite. Also trying boosts for the first time after listening to this episode and noticed a few days ago my boosts stopped accumulating in my wallet oh what probably talking about uh fountain

urn there i'd imagine right yeah probably talking about fountain perhaps yeah perhaps i love when we get the first boosters into the show so 512 stats good enough for me i love hearing that that's so great and also yeah we try to be aware of the fact that there are a decent amount of Mint users out there. And even though it's not our daily driver, as they say, we still want to try to be representative from time to time as best we can as non-Mint users ourselves. You know, I started on Mint as well. Oh. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. I started on XFCE, but we don't talk about that too often.

Banned from the show. Yeah, I was on there for a year, but then moved to Linux Mint for many, many years and really loved it. And still have a few friends that I support who are using it and still loving it. So it's just like the distro that just keeps on ticking. I know you've told me, but you were a Cinnamon user at that time too, right? Yeah, yeah. but you were a cinnamon user at that time too right yeah yeah um i i think i originally moved to cinnamon because it was okay i did a bunch of research because i loved gnome 2 at the time and i knew yeah i knew at the time moving moving to gnome 3 was a we all hot topic we all had feels

about a brand yeah yeah so i thought cinnamon Cinnamon being a fork might be a nice thing. And it was not the most stable thing back then, but it seemed to be getting a ton of development. I mean, they even had a button to restart Cinnamon. That was just a built-in feature, which was, if you remember. Is that still there, Wes? I think you might have. Yeah, I think so. I say keep it.

But it actually, for the most part, was really great and was just customizable enough. And so, yeah, it was a great experience. Nothing wrong with that. And I'm proud to say that I used Mint for a while. T. Cario boosts in with 10,000 sets. Boost! With all the decentralized and open source software that you all use at JB, I've been wondering, what the heck are you using meetups for?

There appear to be options like Mobilizom, GetTogether, and I believe meetups is paid. So perhaps some of that funding you're using on meetups could go towards another open source project instead. Though I acknowledge you may lose some of the organic discovery provided by Meetup and their network effect. It'd be great to hear what y'all think about it, though. That's a great question. I feel like we kind of, over time, move to decentralized or free software tools as that tooling kind of meets our needs. And in some areas, like the Hackintoshes

were a great example and Wirecast, for a long time we had to just live with a proprietary solution that was just painful. From the business perspective, you kind of start with the, like, we need to do X because we've determined we need to do X to accomplish the goals we're doing. And then ideally we can do that with open source decentralized software, but you've got to start from that angle. There's definitely that aspect of it. And then i mean not to not to be this guy but there is some truth to this is like sometimes we're just early and we start using something and there isn't a free software solution available like that we've been using meetup for ever before it was ridiculously

expensive to use right but meetup is like number one with a bullet on our services list that we use that we want to replace. We've experimented with GetTogether and we haven't been super happy with it. We would love to use something that our community could also use to self-organize their own meetups because we've heard from dozens of people that want to organize meetups in their area

with other JB audience members, but we just don't dozens of people that want to organize meetups in their area with other JB audience members, but we just don't have a platform for them to use. So it seems like whatever we switch to should probably be the same tooling. And then that just like is a huge lift. And that's where we're at right now. But it is number one with a bullet. And in the meantime, it gets sort of a pass because of that network effect that you mentioned. It is valuable to let people know, hey, we got a new meetup in this area. But we would hope they would come over to whatever new platform we have. And we're not using it. I mean, it's quite public in one sense, but on the other hand, it's, you know, we add some entries there and there's a little bit of

back and forth. We put some details, maybe some comments, but it's not. Otherwise, it's sort of tertiary to a lot of the rest of the systems. Yeah. Wise Papa John boosts in with 2,674 Satoshis. B-O-O-S-T! I'm a serial audiobook listener, and I only listen to podcasts between books, so I'm usually two or three episodes behind, and I actually enjoy having a handful of episodes to binge all at once. I get that. I get that. I continue to request people send in your listening habits. I've been doing this for 15 years and I still find it absolutely fascinating. Oh, yeah.

I want to know how you find the show. I want to know how you listen to the show. I want to know how far behind you are. These are all things that we try to factor in when we're planning content. So actually having that information, super valuable. Do you use the chapters? Do you need us to do stuff that makes it easier? The chapters. Did you know we have chapters? We have chapters.

Did you know everything is chaptered? These features let us know because, you know, as podcasters, we don't get a lot of data. That's the way this decentralized system works is we don't really know. We just put an MP3 for it. That's it. And I think everybody likes it that way so let's just keep it that way so just tell us because you know some of these podcasts out there with their dynamic ads they want all this data you guys know what i'm talking about

hey i wanted to say thank you to a group out there too first of all we don't read all of the boosts on the air we do have another episode coming up but not everything makes it on the air we are curating the boost these days but we read all of them and it still makes me smile every time it comes in brent knows it now that he's here yeah you hear the little pew that pew that we play the uh helipad interface plays that in real time and also does an explosion of confetti and it's a real celebration every time a boost comes in in this studio it's great it makes us smile so shout out in in this studio. It's great. It makes us smile. So shout out to Bon who just caught up on the show and got current after falling behind. Great to have you back on board.

We got 1,500 sats from Prozac who just wanted to toss a little bit to Brent's Gas Fund. Thank you. We super appreciate that. What an amazing thing that's been. We're going to talk more about that on the road. We have plans to talk about that. It's just stuff we're not getting to today. We got a row of ducks from elry elry i thought we decided we were just calling them 741 the old seven yeah um lucky number he's thanking us though for trying to get the name

right still trying and it's i think i think i have like name aphasia or something like word aphasia okay because like um i just it doesn't stick and i've read that is actually a problem for add people so there you go if you if you wanted a symptom here it is i'd also like to do a an extra shout out to elray and chance as well and also cg bass player um while i've been traveling this week and just totally wrapped up in all of the studio projects we've been doing some may have noticed that I've done a little less appearing on our website project on GitHub. But the three of them have really taken things up and have been committing, you know, there were some merges that I wasn't even aware of. Chris and I visited the website.

I was like, oh, look, there's a new feature. Isn't that amazing? It's incredible. Can we just stop for a second to acknowledge how incredible that is? How incredible that is. Our community is improving our website while we are heads down preparing for this road trip and planning multiple shows. And Brent and I have been working very diligently on a project that we cannot

tell you about yet. That has also been consuming a ton of our time and he's been traveling and we're going to be away traveling and so to have our community keep that going and add new features that we've talked about but it's just it's kind of perfect too right because like I mean I don't really use the website right

I mean it's not for me we're behind the scenes but it's the audience's website that's why we have it it's for them to make the show accessible and so they have way better ideas on how to make it awesome than I've ever had. This is the true incredible aspect of value for value, right? I mean, the kind of value they're returning right now, it's just amazing. So yeah, we absolutely should be thanking them.

And don't worry, I'll be back in time. But I think they should be generous. We're going to be a little slow on Matrix and Telegram. We're going to be kind of slow on the GitHub because we're like we're gonna be a little slow on matrix and telegram we're gonna be kind of slow on the github because we're gonna be we're either driving sleeping or recording for like three weeks straight it's we see you and appreciate yeah regardless we will still be looking uh as much as we can and all the messages and checking the helipads and all of that too um we got um a hello out there to mr uh i'm going to say Bench. Yeah. He just found LUP for the first time.

Wow, that's awesome. The fountain charts. So thanks to the boosting we're getting. No way. I'm getting this message a lot. How do you predict these things? I'm getting this message a lot. I'm getting it a lot because what happens is people send in their baller boosts using the fountain app. We show up on the charts and then people say

well this must be a good show because people are actually wrong, but they get, but anyways, bench, thanks for joining us. Thank you everybody who boosts in. We do appreciate it. If you'd like to join the fun,

you can go to new podcast apps.com and get a new podcast app, or you can actually just boost from the podcast index.org website. If you've got the Albie extension, or you can really be a geek and get Boost CLI set up. I feel like there's a whole other world of self hosting you have to wrap your head around. So if you manage to get Boost CLI up and running, I think that's legitimately one of the more impressive technical tasks you could pull off right now. So boost into the show if you get Boost CLI working. And that brings us to the end of this

week's episode of the Unplugged program. Links to all of the really great tools we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 476. 476. Really simple there. And of course, you can also get it at the new website at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Now, just a note, we will not be live next week, but you will have an episode in your feeds for our members and for our regular listeners. And thank you to our members too, who really invest in the ongoing content creation here at Linux Unplugged. You can become a member at unpluggedcore.com or support

all the shows at jupiter.party. You got to get Linux action news. That show continues to roll on. We're going to be recording that live from the road, covering the world of Linux and open source. Linux don't stop. We can't. It sure don't. And it's a real companion to this show. We got some great clips from the Plumbers Conference, the announcement of the Linux Foundation Europe edition. Yeah, Chris will only let me nerd out about

eBPF or IO Euring so much on love these days, so I just cram it in Linux Action News. You managed to get a K-Exec story in there recently, too. So go check that out at LinuxActionNews.com. Just get more Linux. Also, thanks for listening. You can check out the live versions of Jupyter.tube, and we'll see you right back here in a couple

of weeks. Thank you.