LINUX Unplugged - 492: A New Challenge Approaches

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Join us on a journey to true software freedom. We embark on our 30-day challenge and discover a whole new philosophy that will change the way you think about technology. Special Guest: Alex Kretzschmar.

Now, take this with a grain of salt, but PC World, or I guess it's PCMag, has a post, I guess from today. As we go on the air, they just posted this a couple hours ago. Mastodon sees a dip in active users after the Twitter exodus surge. They say in the first week of January, the site had roughly 1.8 million active users, a contrast peak of 2.5 million active users in early December. So they're saying in one month, they've seen this big decline. I don't know. Do you guys think if this was true,

what would be the reason? Why would Mastodon be seeing a decline right now? Oh, I think a lot of people had the week off and they just went and did better, bigger and better things. I've seen some folks that just decided, you know, social media, maybe I don't need a whole lot of it in this year. That's what I'm wondering.

If people are doing like a New Year's resolution of just, you know what, I already took off Twitter. Maybe I'll just stop using social media altogether. And I think, you know, there's going to be different areas of, you know, sub communities of Twitter that have seen greater or lesser exodus, you know. And so the longer Twitter goes that it's not a complete garbage fire. It's just like it's easier to just keep using it or stay on it, or maybe you were using both, but then, you know, fewer people migrated than you expected, and it's easy enough

to just stay on Twitter. I also think we have to go in pretty skeptical. It's already, you know, we know how hard it is to measure how many Linux users are out there. I was going to ask, how are they measuring this? I've not looked into that. I'm sure you could measure a few centralized locations, but after many, many years of looking at all these reports

of Linux market usage and Linux user share, I'm just very skeptical when they try to measure this kind of stuff. I bet you, I don't know. I bet you this is off. That's my gut instinct. It's based off of some reporting from various different outlets. I don't think PCMag did the actual research themselves. So I would bet the flaw probably is somewhere in the data.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And my name is Alex. Hello, gentlemen. Yes, Alex, it's great to have you on board. Stand by, I'll tell you why Alex is here this week,

because we have kind of a theme for kicking off the new year, and it's going to involve a little raw honesty with you guys. And today we'll share a unique quality that I think Linux and free software has that no other operating system could match and kind of how that's going to influence some of our thinking for this year and probably why it makes us stick with Linux in the long haul, even when there are problems.

So if you're challenged right now, this might be good for you to hear. Plus, we're also kicking off the Jellyfin January Challenge. We're going to tell you all about that in just a little bit. And then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts,

some picks, and a lot more, including some good feedback. So I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Oh, Tailscale. This was a treat in my holiday stocking. It is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. It is so great. It's the only way I run my NextCloud now. It's going to change your game.

Say goodbye to inbound ports. Turn them all off and go with Tailscale. so go say good morning at tailscale.com get it for free up to 20 devices and of course we have to say good morning to our virtual lug time appropriate greetings mumble room hello hello good evening guys science hello hello everyone happy science indeed um you know that virtual lug could get a little more real if you're going to be at scale this year, March 9th through the 12th at the Pasadena Convention Center. Linux Unplugged is going to be there. Crazy. You know, I've never been.

What? I know. We had plans in early 2020 to go. And, well, we all know what happened then. So I've never been. This will be a new experience for me. I am shocked by that. I am absolutely shocked by that.

Well, you remember for a while they weren't letting Canadians through the border. I honestly don't remember a time before Brent. So, you know. Fair. It's best to black those out right away. You know, I've traveled across parts of the country with Brent in my home. And so in my mind, he's just gone. He's everywhere.

He's always there. Wow. That's really something. You do have that photo of me on with Brent in my home. And so in my mind, he's just gone and he's everywhere. He's always there. Wow. That's really something. You do have that photo of me on the, on your fridge that goes everywhere. So there's that. I am not particularly jazzed about returning to Pasadena. I mean,

we were just there. It's a great place, but we were just there, but I felt like it's important. Here's my rough idea for how we're going to handle scale boys is it's going to be a little bit different this year. We're not going to take Jupes, number one. And Crazy Jeff, even though he's already more than halfway to Scale, Crazy Jeff has offered to come up to the studio and help us out with a few projects around here.

What? So then it got me thinking, what if we also flew in Brentskies a few days before Scale? And we all kind of, you came came up we all kind of got together and we did a little bit of a sprint a little mini sprint got a few projects banged out here at the studio oh that sounds like a great idea this is like 50 days away it's not that far away and if time allows i'd like to do a little mini meetup up in my hometown of mount vernon at a brewery there with, you know, audience welcome. We just hang out. They got a great open area. They could probably receive up to about a hundred people. So plenty of space and they're totally down with it. We've already

chatted with them about it. And so I'm thinking like, it'll be the week before scale. We'll do a little meetup here in the Pacific Northwest. We'll go down. We'll probably do a caravan for anybody that wants to join us down to scale and get another Airbnb down in Pasadena again and do that whole thing. You and I have a couple of shows we'll have to record down there. There'll be a LEP and a LAN. And it may be just around episode 500. Oh, boy. I don't know what we're going to do for that. But it might be like that week of scales, like episode 500. Oh boy. I don't know. I don't know what we're going to, I don't know what we're going to do for that. I don't know, but it might be like that week of scales,

like episode 500. So it's going to be fun. I don't know if we'll be there for all four days, but yeah, that sounds risky. Yeah, I agree. It is a little, it is a little crazy,

but we're going to put it all together. It's a little mini meetup, a little sprint at the studio, and then we're going down to scale. And of course we'll have to do a meetup down there too. Well, yeah, it's the only reason I really go.

I just want to see everybody. So that's all coming up. I just kind of realized it all this weekend, so I don't have dates. I don't have meetup pages yet. More of those to come. Yeah, but I wanted everybody to put it on their radar if they're thinking about scale or they're in the general area. Do you think we might have one of these fancy matrix rooms for that? Or will we use the West Coast crew one? I can see a scale chat room or something. We're going to get into a couple of things today in the show. And Alex is here to help us get into the Jellyfin January challenge that we're doing across Linux Unplugged and self-hosted. So we're going to tell you a little bit about that here in a moment. And this got me thinking more broadly about themes that we might reflect on for the year

for the show. And when I looked back at our 2022 arc, I saw really two strong themes stand out. One was decentralization and the other was immutability. And if we really thought about it, we could probably come up with some other ones. And I was thinking for this year, maybe we'd be a little more intentional. And I thought if I were thinking about themes for 2023, sovereignty around data, self-hosted services, licenses and software, ownership around the things that you actually get like Giraffian OS on a Pixel 7, and quality. And quality. And I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about what quality is, because I think when you think of quality, you probably think of like how well something is built. Yeah. The seams around like the phone or the seams of a Tesla.

That's when you think of quality, right? Fit and finish. Yeah, right. But there is a different kind of quality, too, right? There are other qualities that you can appreciate. So I want to talk about why Linux has a couple of those that I think are more important than any of the other kind of like fit and finish type quality stuff. And so those are themes I want to talk about throughout the whole year is quality, ownership of what you actually have, you know, you get root access, you have control over it, you have sovereignty over it. I'm wondering if you

guys have any other suggestions of like themes that we might kind of look at through the year? I think there's something to be said for longevity. I know, you know, Alex, for instance, is a guy who's constantly tinkering on something. But I think there's an importance to having like permanence to the things that you're learning. So if you implement something, it will last more than, you know, it'll serve you more than a month. For instance, it'll, maybe it lasts a year, maybe it lasts two years. So I feel like some skills that you know, it'll serve you more than a month, for instance. Maybe it lasts a year, maybe it lasts two years. So I feel like some skills that you can gain and build into something that helps your everyday life for maybe even years to come, that's a theme I'd like to explore. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, though.

We all know this to be true. But that's where declarative configurations and such come to mind for me and alex i know you're a big fan of that oh yeah yeah that's a great example of build it once and then you can repeat it rebuild it again and again what about us you have any thoughts of like a theme that might be a lens we look at things through 2023 perhaps some simplicity, maintainability. Like we have a lot of these options that we can do, but how do we decide like which ones we can do well and that are worth the trade-off at our time? Yeah, and I think along with that,

maybe repairability too, which is, I don't know if that's quite the right word, but the ability to take something that's failed and replace a component and then continue to use it. So you don't have to throw out the whole thing because a singular widget failed. And make it easy that you can like understand all of the components that are a part of your system that you need it to be operating. Mm hmm. Yeah.

It was really nice because we had a we had a DC electrical issue for the first time in Jupes this last week. It was great. Our electricity stopped working. Yeah. jupes this last week it was great our electricity stopped working yeah actually wasn't so bad because it was just the dc uh reading lights along the driver side of jupes so that was all that was it died and it was uh we were we were replacing a bulb and some junk fell in there and it created an arc and then it just blew the fuse and so we knew why and so it wasn't like a big deal so we contacted thor the manufacturers and it was amazing they sent us like diagrams

of everything for the electrical and where it's all going everything all all the categorizations of the different things and what fuses they go into oh that's great and oh my god this is so much more now manageable for us right like we don't have to take it into a shop now to get these things fixed. We can just fix it ourselves now. So that's not necessarily simpler because I have to do that work now or Hadea has to do that work now, but it's, I guess it's simpler in the fact that we don't have to drive into the shop and pay somebody to fix it. We just now have the ability to fix it. I mean, there's something to be said for transparency too. With those diagrams, now you have more transparency into what's happening, you know, under the hood, let's say, of Lady Jupes. And I feel like that's one of the strengths of open source, too, is if you want, you can go have a look and see it's not directly relevant to linux but it's relevant to freedom and open source and stuff like that so for sending in the schematics for this electrical

system that's incredible so many manufacturers for other products sit on that stuff as proprietary information they don't want to give you the part numbers the widgets or whatever because they will be able to sell you or upsell you on either a full replacement for the entire system or widget or whatever it is or make you have to go to their specific service provider who's been air quotes certified on their special source but prusa when everybody asks me what what printer should I buy? And they're saying, well, the Ender 3 is only $200 or $300 and the Prusa is $750. I'm like, yeah, but everything about that Prusa is completely open source. All the hardware schematics are available. All of the parts,

apart from the metal ones, you can 3D print yourself with freely available models and that kind of thing. And I just think that kind of openness and that kind of, it's almost like a right to repair kind of mindset, but not just in physical stuff, but in software as well. That kind of thing for me is just so, so important these days. And the more you do it, the more powerful it feels. You realize there's a big idea behind it. There's something to this because it makes it, you're no longer subscribed to that company or that organization for making that thing better or improving it or keeping it going. Well, and yeah, the keeping it going part especially, right? With so many things that have cloud components now, whether it's a proprietary product or just in some sort of

consumer gadget, you just have to sort of hope that the business remains good, that it's still useful in there, or they don't decide to dramatically pivot their product line. Yeah. And I think a lot of us have been burned by stuff like that over the years. We've seen it at night. Just when you get really used to it. I put a line here in the doc, and I feel like this is sort of sums it up is we're not control freaks we're just control enthusiasts and the idea is is like there's a whole world of stuff we have no control over especially i think 2023 it's really going to feel like that and you just kind of have to come to a certain piece with that but there are things that we can elect to have absolute control over and i think you can enjoy that and you can kind of enthusiastically take control over those things and i think users have more power with free software because of that right we have the power

to select what we invest our time in so that's more control you have the power to invest your time and to learn certain things that's something you can absolutely control and you can repair things and choosing things that you can repair is something you can control software or hardware and i think if you accept what you can't control and you embrace and enjoy what you can control it could bring a certain i don't know it's like it's not quite a life philosophy but it almost feels like it it almost feels like you come into a certain life philosophy that can kind of bring you some peace i i really like it well, Brent and I were talking just this week about him building a new NAS, which I think we'll come on to later in the episode. And he was saying to me, I want to do this once and I want it to last a long time. And I said, well, why don't you

automate it? You could almost hear the gears in his mind going, but isn't automation for stuff I'm going to do all the time. And during our conversation, it became clear to me that actually the building blocks, the modular components of this automation, the different Ansible roles in this case that we were using, they form easily understandable chunks of stuff that he can deploy Samba and then deploy a certain other service and just have a different role specialized for each task, and then lift and shift and reuse those specific components on different projects in the future, or just have it documented for this thing that he's built

until the end of time. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's self-documenting, and I think that's exactly where we should take this next. Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. And it's a great way to support the show

while you're checking out the best, fast, reliable cloud hosting in the business. You got to try it for your next project or the next thing you want to learn. If it's internal stuff to you or if it's something people are going to use externally,

I wholly recommend Linode, especially just because they continue to make it better and better. Linode is turning up past 11 this year. They're adding a dozen new data centers. That's remarkable. They've rolled out NVMe storage to their rigs, which just have incredible IOPS per gigabyte. They've got AMD EPYC CPUs. You can go with GPU rigs if you like. And they've got these systems that are these perfectly priced nanodes.

So no matter what you're trying to hit price to performance, Linode has something for you. That's that's like, you know, kind of steak and potatoes thing about about these different hosting providers. But it's something you need to know. But I think what takes Linode above and beyond everybody else is their 19-year track record of just killing it, right? Building a great product, making it super stable, and then backing it with support that's one phone call away, one ticket, one email, one chat, 365. That gives you the peace of mind when you're running it for a business or when it's running infrastructure that's important to you, your family, your team, whatever it might be, right? I mean, you don't just accidentally make it this long in this business when you're solely surviving on the product. Like that doesn't just accidentally happen. And along the way, their guiding stone

has been Linux. When they became their own ISPs, they needed to do something a little extra beyond what any other provider had done before. And there just wasn't really a great technology stack to provide it. So they built it on top of Linux. One of the very first companies to use Linux-powered routers, to use Linux in places nobody had ever considered using Linux in the data center before. Linode had to do that, not to be flashy, not to brag about it, but to build the best product. That runs deep throughout Linode.

And I also want to mention they have not just a one click deployment, but a really nice guide to go along with it to deploy Mastodon in just a few minutes. I don't know, maybe you're not going to have a thousand users on there. Maybe you will. But I think one nice thing about the Fediverse is you can stand up your own instance with your own domain name, your own identity, and then you can join the federation and participate as much or as little as you want, but you have your home base. And Linode makes it so simple to do that. And why not try it with our $100 credit, support the show,

and play around with the backend of Mastodon. You've probably heard all about Mastodon. Maybe you've even been talking about Mastodon, maybe even advocating Mastodon. But if you actually deployed it, now's your chance. Why not? You got a hundred bucks to play around with

on the best cloud host in the biz. Go to linode.com slash unplugged, grab that hundred bucks, support the show, and try something out. Linode.com slash unplugged. I thought maybe we could set the vibe here for this discussion a little bit. There's a quote that I shared with you earlier this week, Chris, that I think you appreciated as well. It's from one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett. He's brilliant, hilarious, very observant, and some nice, wry commentary on, you know,

our society and how we structure things. This is a quote from his book, Men at Arms. The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take Boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots,

which were sort of okay for a season or two, and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. Those were the kinds of boots Grafimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morkborg on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years' time, while the poor man

who could afford only cheap boots would have spent $100 on dry in 10 years time. While the poor man who could afford only cheap boots don't have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was Captain Samuel Lime's boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness. You know, it reminds me so much of what I did this week, which is that server builds that I've been doing with this NAS. And Alex, I think you spent

most of your time coaching me with a bit of humor because I was taking like disparate parts from all these machines that I have laying around that I haven't used in a while and trying to clump them all together into one working system for me. How old was the oldest component you found? Wasn't it like 13 years? No years no no it was like 19 you researched that's right it was that ati radeon 9800 or something gpu 9800 x xl i'm amazed that thing didn't even use an agp slot never mind pcr right did you say 19 years did you say 19 years and i didn't even realize this thing was this old. And okay, it was like my first computer.

But I feel like in the spirit of this discussion, I had it on hand. It was in a case that could take a lot of drives. And so it was already in there. So I figured, well, geez, maybe I'll just try booting up this thing and getting it working. And you have components from your first computer. I mean, the rest of this neat project aside, that's beautiful. I lost those years ago. Or he's a pack rat.

Well, I think I always had this machine with this purpose in mind, which is like the case itself is a useful thing. And like cases, you know, the technology in cases doesn't really change much. It's the guts that change. Right. And so I just thought, okay, I've been wanting to do this for years. And I've, I've had this like janky Franken NAS thing going on with this X two 20 laptop that I have connected a few USB drives into.

But that thing during this jellyfin challenge, we've been doing this last few days that we'll touch on in a sec. I ran into a few issues that I was like, USB controlled hard drives. This is not going to work for me. We've all been there, Brent. It turns out the 19 year old hardware was giving me a lot of problems and I couldn't find a power connector for the graphics card because it was so old. So I, Alex was like, come on, just scrap this like 20 year old hardware and use something more modern. So I, Alex was like, come on, just scrap this like 20 year old hardware and use something more modern. So I got my modern hardware out, which was only 12 years old, but I built this thing. And I think as a NAS, you know, it is completely an acceptable reuse of what was once

built as quite a powerful workstation for me to do video editing and photo editing on. And I use that thing for years. And so in the spirit of like reusing equipment and changing it and modifying it, I took it from one case that wouldn't accept very many hard jobs at all through it in this, you know, 20 year old case. And now all of a sudden I have a completely different use for hardware that I've had kicking around that was originally intended for a specific purpose and now is doing something completely different, but with extremely modern software on it as well. And I think that's a beautiful thing. That's one of the great things about Linux right there, right? Yes, it absolutely is. And if you look back at where, I guess, cell phones were 12 years ago,

I mean, every year, hardware updates were were meaningful you know pcs in that time from that 19 to 12 year period were like phones have been between that 12 to i guess seven six year period from from now and i think you know if you if you have hardware that's sort of five or six years old it's almost as good as hardware that's brand new today. Yes, things today are more powerful and more energy efficient and what have you, but there's still a big gulf between something that's six years old and 12 years old, much more so than six and zero years. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think when you are doing something that's limited by network speed,

you have a little bit more play there on the actual performance. But when it's something that's more limited on computer disk IO, then it's going to hurt a little bit more play there on the actual performance. But when it's something that's more limited on the computer disk IO, then it's going to hurt a little bit more. I think maybe there's also a theme here of trade-offs as part of how we're going to have to implement things. And so you have to decide, well, maybe I can reuse this. It's not going to be quite as fast, but what are my needs? Maybe I'd like it to be faster. Can I put up with it not being faster because it lets me continue using the stuff I've already invested in that I'm not quite ready to get rid of? Typically for a NAS, the single limiting

factor on performance is transcoding media. In the old days, it used to be CPU performance. We had software encoding with FFmpeg was the standard, right? So you wanted more cores, more threads, faster this, faster that. And it scaled very, very well from the more of those that you had. So if you had a dual Xeon box, you got a very fast transcode. Whereas nowadays with QuickSync, you know, something from like the 600, the HD 600 generation or newer. So that's the eighth gen Intel or newer. You just don't need a powerful cpu anymore because it's all offloaded to hardware and chris you've got the odroid h3 plus which is a perfect example

of that yeah just a little little tiny intel cpu i mean the thing just pulls two three watts at idle absolutely nothing and then you throw a quick sync in there and it's basically got hardware chips dedicated to processing H.264 video. And it means for me to like a whole other angle, but not really worth getting into this episode is power usage too, is an aspect for me. And that's quite it because sometimes like the Linux desktop can be more complicated in some senses, you know what I mean? But there's still a simplicity at the abstract There's less black box magic going on, if you want to figure out

why something's misbehaving you can go spelunking right the way down and figure out what it is with Linux I think part of it is, you're right, and especially like fully configured, full-fledged desktops, but you have the option and you can kind of build the system that you want,

you know, and you can choose, it depends on the experience again, but you can set things up like, I understand the components that went into this system, you know, yeah, exactly as Alex is saying, right? It's like, I can see this because I've set them aside versus, you know, on other operating systems, you end up sort of having to discover

what they've set up for you. And you may or may not be able to disable it or control it or tell it to run less often. Or you put a good example in our doc of NextCloud using NextCloud plugins and building that up versus using dedicated apps. And it's a personal choice. It'll depend on the scenarios, right? But are you trying to build the best version of the thing

or a version that's robust enough to meet your use cases? And then can you, you know, is that, I mean, is that just one less thing you have to maintain that you cannot worry about if it meets your goals and helps you keep that in house and you're not tempted to, you know, put it into a proprietary service. Or I think like another example would be one of the reasons I choose to use

podverse, podverse.fm, the podcast client is because it's GPL and it's on Android. It's on iOS. It's on the web. I feel like it's rug pull immune. Whereas an app like pocketcast god bless has been moved around several times it's been bought and sold there's just i'm not as comfortable with that

and if when i think about things that are important my media and my podcast consumption is one of those is something i'm trying to become more self-sovereign again about i guess and i don't want my podcast app to all of a sudden be pulled in one direction by a strategy tax. And I feel like free software is more immune to that. And so that's why even if Podverse doesn't have every single feature, like one feature I kind of miss from Overcast is Overcast has a really good voice boost system. So if the podcast doesn't have great audio, you hit that, it basically does inline compression and EQ. I love that feature. I miss having that feature, but the ultimate long-term goal of not having any surprises

and about always having this available to me is more important than the voice boost feature. Well, it seems like a fitting thing, too, for podcasts in particular, right? Because here you have this delightful just throw up an RSS feed decentralized system and to then be dependent or worried about your proprietary or just sort of not trustworthy client at the end.

Sure, it's, you know, relatively simple to switch, but if you listen to a lot of podcasts, why bother? These are the same forces that had me thinking about Jellyfin again. And we mentioned it in Self Hosted 87, where you and I, Chris, have skipped off the atmosphere of Jellyfin several times over the last couple of years, and always ended up going back to Plex because it's just comfortable. It just seems to have that bit more fit and finish and polish. But we both know deep down that the business objectives of

Plex as a company are at odds with what we want as self-hosters and people who want to invest in a solution for the long term. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial, or as an individual, just get it right now at Bitwarden.com slash Linux. This is also great for businesses, open source teams, Bitwarden.com slash Linux. This is also great for businesses, open source teams, maybe more so than ever. Bitwarden is a great product. It's what Wes and I use.

It's open source. It's been vetted by the community. Millions of eyeballs. And Bitwarden vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. That even includes the URLs for the websites that are saved in there. That's better than the other products out there. And if you're, say, a little disappointed in LastPass right now, like so many of us are,

there is actually a really handy Bitwarden migration kit at bitwarden.com slash migrate. That's how I moved over to Bitwarden years ago, and it took minutes. I felt silly for not doing it sooner because Bitwarden is clearly a better product, and it's so simple to transition from LastPass. It's just the best thing to store, manage, and share secrets and sensitive data out there.

And the mobile apps are top tier mobile apps. They integrate so nicely with the OS, iOS, and Android, they make it no problem at all to have a unique username, a unique password, and even a unique email address for every site, service, and app that you use. Whether it's on the desktop, it's in the web, it's on a mobile app, Bitwarden just makes it easy across all those apps and services. And one thing that gives us confidence about Bitwarden is that it's open source. That's a key thing for us. And they're always rolling out fantastic updates to make the experience even better.

As long as I've been a Bitwarden customer, it's just gotten better and better. You know, how often do you get to say that about something, especially something as important as this? Now, maybe you already know about Bitwarden, but maybe you know somebody who's using a different app or they're not using anything at all and they could use a little help, a little guidance.

Gently send them over to bitwarden.com slash linux as well. Great for your business as well. I know a lot of companies out there are doing things the old way. God, so many spreadsheets with so many passwords. Let's stop doing that. Let's all work together to stop that. Let's all go try Bitwarden. Bitwarden.com slash linux. One more time to support the show. It is bitwarden.com slash Linux. Well, with self-sovereignty and self-hosting in mind, this is probably the perfect time to announce a new challenge going on this month, Jellyfin January.

Alex is here today with us to tell us more. I remember Linux Action Show back in the old days. The Arch 30-day challenge was about the first set of episodes that I came in on. And so I thought we haven't done one of those as a network in some time. Why don't we do Jellyfin January? Yeah, across multiple shows. I think it's a great idea. Love it. So for the month of January, the idea is that Chris, Wes, Brent and I turn off our Plex servers and migrate to Jellyfin, warts and all. And you'll hear in episode 87 of Self Hosted that I'm not super positive about the outlook for this challenge. However, we're what, eight days in as we record this?

And I am loving it it is it the honeymoon phase or will it stick that's the question i wondered this i wondered this because there are a couple of things i haven't solved yet like remote access for friends and family ah yeah and audiobooks for the wife oh we'd better get that one solved she's actually going to come on to the episode on i think think, the 27th of January and give us a wife's approval factor of Jellyfin on self-hosted. Oh, good. So if you're interested in hearing what my wife thinks, she'll be on that one.

But we had a few grand rules of engagement. So Plex servers must be offline. No just leaving it off in the background, leaving it on in the background, just thinking, well, if Jellyfin screws up, i can just app switch back to the old one because that's what we've always done in the past i want to hold you gents accountable who's who's turned their plex off well i never had one so mine's been off i don't know if west ever had a plex uh i did uh but i mostly just used it for interrupt with other folks who were already on the plex ecosystem you know but nope that's uh that's turned down.

I thought about, I thought about starting up my Plex client to check to see if any of you guys had your Plex servers on. I noticed Drew still has his on. Oh, Drew, come on. Oh, Drew, we're outing you, boy. Oh, we got him. Maybe Drew should, you know, like unshare with, with, with us for the duration of the month.

I feel like a bit of a cheater, though. I really, I do feel like a bit of a cheater because I, on the Apple TV, I'm still just using Infuse. They have the SwiftFin app, which is a dedicated Swift-based Jellyfin app for the Apple TV. Sounds promising. But it's only in beta, and Apple has this ludicrous limit on how many beta testers you can have. And it's filled up. Is that right? I think it came out a couple of days after self-hosting.

No, I don't think so, but I will switch the moment it comes out. Okay. I promise. So for me, the switch has been pretty minor, other than I didn't find the script that was sent into the show to sync my watch status. And that hurts because I was in the middle of a couple of shows. Oh, no. And then I thought I didn't even think about it. But of course, the kids also have a couple of shows.

And like, so The Simpsons, that's like 33 seasons that all got reset. You know, it's no good. Well, I wondered if one of you would figure that out, how to do some migration of metadata. We did get an email and a boost into self-hosted that suggested an app. Oh, very nice. I think we might have one in this episode too. Stay tuned for that. I can't remember.

I was going to pull it up, but I think I forgot. There's a few ways you can do it. If you want to do it completely offline, it gets a little more complicated. Probably the easiest way is to sync it through tracked.tv, T-A-R-K-T.TV. But then you're uploading your watch history to a cloud service, which is possibly one of the reasons you're migrating away from Plex in the first place. So is that really the solution? I don't know.

But it is one of the things that we should probably look at as part of this challenge. Now, some of the other criteria was getting things like hardware transcoding working. QuickSync support for me has been absolutely flawless. So I just checked one box or selected one item in a drop-down box in the server settings, and it worked perfectly. And that's on an Intel i5-8500. How's that Odroid treating you, Chris? Well, I haven't got any errors, so I think that means it's working, but I don't know how to absolutely verify it. I think the absence of FFmpeg errors means that it's functional, but I'm wondering, did you pass through, because I think I just passed through dev, DRI, device zero, but then I just passed that on the container side just to dev,

DRI. Slash dev slash DRI. That's all I do. Okay, that's all I did inside the container. It picks up the render device that way. But it's super easy to check. You just log in to the host via SSH and then do a sudo intel underscore GPU underscore top. And that gives you a dedicated little application that gives you basically like top for your Intel iGPU. Oh, that's great.

What was it again? Intel underscore GPU underscore top. Okay. I'll look into that. I'll check that because I knew there must have been a better way. I will play a video and then run that. My other issue is I may not have, because I'm such a fancy boy, I may not have any videos on there at the moment that aren't just natively played back by the client too.

Well, it's the best case scenario, isn't it? But I'm sure I could dig something up. That is one of my absolute favorite things about Jellyfin so far. When it decides to transcode something, I can go into my server dashboard and click on the little information icon on the now playing stream.

And it will give me a really thorough rundown i'll say this video codec is not supported uh by this client and this is the reason it's transcoding or the video codec is supported but the audio codec isn't so this is why it's transcoding at this number of frames per second etc etc geez that is great yeah freaking rad it's lovely It's so nice. I do like the dashboard and admin stuff in Jellyfin better so far. And the reporting's got so much better. So again, in self-hosted, we talked about Tautuli and how I was going to really miss that.

But actually, because there's now a server reporting plugin that does 90% of what Tautuli does, I don't miss it at all. That's great news. Okay. I was wondering about that. So I'll play around with that. I'm really happy with my setup so far, guys. Can I share it with you?

Please do. So for people that are not familiar with, Jellyfin is a web app that supports native clients for like your set-top box, and it can stream media on your server of various formats. And you can have user accounts, so you can have different profiles, so you can have your kids have an account, or your wife could have their own account, your significant other, whatever. You can even have just anonymous access if you want. Totally.

So I've set it up where I have movies for parents and TV for parents, and then I have movies for kids and TV for kids. And that's how I've separated out my libraries. And so that way, when the kids are watching, when they go in here, it's just stuff that's safe for them to watch. And when Hadiyah and I sit down to watch TV and there's no kids around, we go into stuff that's more suited for the parents to watch. Just started Who's the Boss, by the way.

Starts in 1984. It's such a trip. It's really great. That's my new old sitcom that I'm into right now is who's the boss by the way starts in 1984 it's such a trip it's really great that's my new old sitcom that i'm into right now is who's the boss and of course it does other nice features like it tracks your watch status so if you're watching a series um it'll mark when everything's been watched for you and you can get episode metadata and summaries and things like that and this is easy to stream to the television it's easy to stream remotely and it also suggests so you don't have to like go find the next episode, right? It's just like, yes, here's the next one to watch for you, buddy. And you can also use it for music and other things like that. And I just, so far, you know, I find it to be really, really smooth. I think

where things are going to get challenging is if the playback client is a little sketch or something like that, if I have to switch away from using infuse and i've had issues with version compatibility problems between the android client and the jellyfin server in the past i.e if you update the jellyfin server or you update the android app and they're not in sync version wise sometimes they don't talk i've had those problems in the past but so far i haven't run into that these are the sorts of things though that take more than three or four weeks to kind of shake down aren't they though yeah just before we did this challenge the android tv client got a big update so 0.15 and for me i have two nvidia shields in the house that's my primary playback client and i'm really appreciating all the work that's gone into that client because it's

it's just really smooth and really slick the only thing that i haven't solved and i don't know how i'm going to solve it yet is remote access i do not want to open any ports in my firewall yeah just to give my family access to jellyfin number one that's a philosophical thing that i just don't want to open any ports and number two i don't necessarily trust jellyfins you know to be a secure application as a web-facing application as it's doing authentication and that kind of stuff. Jellyfin has an LDAP authentication plugin, which may or may not solve that issue. But what I was hoping maybe we could crowdsource from the audience are your ideas on how you're opening your Jellyfin to non-technical friends and family members that supports the widest range of clients i got some advice on reddit and i haven't tried it yet but to use the software authentic and some fail to ban kind of rules to limit to certain geographic ip blocks and that kind of stuff but

that feels kind of clunky to me so if you have have a good solution, write in, let us know. I know Wes's. Wes just throws like a temporary jellyfin up on Linode, and then the series he's going to watch with friends or whatever, and he just puts it on there, and here you go. I have indeed done that, yeah. Let's go.

I don't worry about, you know, whatever. Something bad happened. So far it hasn't, but throw it away at the end. To save the obvious answer that everybody's going to write in yes of course you could just share out you could do tail scale acls and just share out that machine but then everybody would have to be on tail scale right right and that's just it a lot of my family members use roku's or google chromecasts can you do it i mean yeah if you did the subnet if you did the subnet advertising and then you did the routing you could do it but it's you know that's extra configuration you did the subnet advertising and then you did the routing, you could do it. But that's extra configuration.

You did say non-technical user. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I just wanted to give you that answer because I figure that'll probably preempt about 30% of the emails and get it focused. Yeah, lots of options. Yeah, those are kinds of things we have to work out. I have to work out the client stuff and get that sorted out. those are kinds of things we have to work out. I have to work out the client stuff and get that sorted out.

And then ultimately part of this is the friends and family that I support that run Plex now that I've helped them set up their own instances. I'm going to have to go around and move those over as well. If I think of the sticks and just because I don't want to be supporting both. Yeah. If you're going to spend all this time to do that and then have to just go back for support, that's rough. I want to say I have a lot of respect for plex and the plex leadership because you know brent and i were talking about this on

the uh like our little get together before the show and uh you know he made a great point that in this last year or so it could have been so easy for plex to get into like nfts that you display on your tv or some sort of stupid coin that you know was a total scam and it could have been so easy for them to get sucked up in that because they're i believe ultimately my issue with plex is that i'm i'm afraid they're constantly searching for a viable business model that doesn't make it look like they're enabling privacy or piracy i'm not really interested in where that leads them ultimately and i expect one day something's going to happen there's going to be some news story and our result our reaction is all going

to be oh yeah i saw that coming yep saw that coming a million miles away and i just want to get out of the way of that train before it even happens i say that though with so much respect for what they've built how they validated this area of the market and how they didn't get sucked into stupid crazy get rich rich scams while they were looking for viable business models. I appreciate all of that. And I think they've done a really good job. Ultimately, for me, though, everything we talked about earlier is at play here.

Moving to something that for me is more personally maintainable, sustainable and works 100% offline. There's no weird authentication stuff, nothing. That's the like, it feels to me a little more like a sort of Linux-y tool. Like, it's not as much of a polished solution, and you have to make some trade-offs, at least at the moment, for some of the, you know,

quality and fit and finish and that kind of thing. But if I want to do something weird with it, I totally can. Like, I love that it makes it really easy to just get, like, a direct stream URL or even just download the files if you turn those settings on. Because, like, sometimes maybe you've got some weird firewall issues or something, but I've manually Chromecasted a link that Jellyfin had to stream it, and, like, that worked great. I love that you can pull in RTSP feeds into the live TV section.

Oh, yeah. I could try that. That sounds fun. Yeah. I know, Alex. It's great. You can throw just regular camera feeds, my local news. Brent's log stream.

Yeah, or that security camera that I hacked in Brent's house. Yeah, all of that. Have you discovered the per user profile video audio transcoding settings yet? So you can force specific users to always transcode or to never transcode or whatever. No. That's great. I'm sure I'm going to get into that as I expand out who I forced to use. And you can do it on a network level basis. So video quality, for example, exposes doing a certain quality on a home network or a certain

quality on Google Cast or just an overall maximum allowed video resolution. Oh, very nice. That's really nice. That's really nice. It's so nice. Like I just saw these options and I just went, oh, thank you. This is what I've been wanting for so long. Yeah, there's something to that too.

They'll make sometimes geekier, nichier features because there's more of that in the user base. Yeah, sort of funny. We got feedback into Linux Unplugged before we even announced this challenge on Linux Unplugged. And I feel like, thanks to our amazing listeners, Joe wrote in twice in the last week or so, which was fun for me to read because I saw his transition through the Jellyfin experience. And I thought we'd touch on a little section of what he wrote here and likely answer the rest of it in self-hosted. Joe writes, for Christmas, my boy got the Star Trek Voyager box set.

Oh, right. That's a great gift. Yeah. After the first several discs, I remembered how annoying swapping discs while watching TV was. So I started messing with Jellyfin and ripping my media. I started by installing Jellyfin on ripping my media. I started by installing Jellyfin on my Windows laptop, had an old 2009 external DVD reader, and was able to use MakeMKV to rip the seven seasons, running them in Jellyfin on my laptop and watch the show on our Android TV

using the Jellyfin app. Then I heard self-hosted 87, the Jellyfin January Challenge, where you were going all in on Jellyfin for the month of January and thought, I got a series of questions. And his first question is, how do you recommend first installing Jellyfin and getting started with it if you've never run Jellyfin? That's a great question. We probably should have covered that earlier. Well, the first couple of times I ever took a pass at Jellyfin, I used the Linux Server I.O. container because I used several of their other containers, and I think it's

pretty solid stuff. However, this time around, Wes suggested, I think, or something, I decided to use the upstream image. I think I just said that's what I've been using for a while. Yeah, me too. And this time I had no issues, as far as I can tell, with QuickSync. Oh, good. So, as far as I can tell, I'll double-check with the GPU top. But last time, when I tried it with the Linux Server I. tell with QuickSync. Oh, good. So as far as I can tell, I'll double check with the GPU top.

But last time when I tried it with the Linux server IO image, I was getting FFmpeg QuickSync errors. And this time I did not. So I just used the upstream image. I think it's great. I believe one of the only reasons to use the Linux server image these days is for their Docker mod support. So you can add custom scripts in very, very easily in a modular fashion

that will help in things like HDR tone mapping and that kind of stuff when you're transcoding and doing playback. But for me, just the upstream Jellyfin Docker image. Super easy, super simple. There's a link in the show notes to my Ansible repo that configures and templates out the Docker Compose. You should be able to reverse engineer from there how to deploy it. And if you manage to get intro skipping working perfectly, let us know. That's the only thing, isn't it, so far that's hurting, really, is intro skipping. It's been a long time.

Yeah, you have a particularly bad case. That's one where I just haven't got used to it yet, so I am not missing it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you just never used Plex, you didn't get hooked on the intro skipping. Yeah, I feel lucky there. But I get it. I mean, I'll probably, if we get a nice setup, I'm going to set it up. Yeah, and when they ship it, which they are working on upstream right now,

when they ship it and you turn it on, you will love it. I should say as well that with Jellyfin not having this cloud authentication say as well that uh with jellyfin not having this cloud authentication aspect you don't get the app dot plex dot tv kind of batteries included remote access reverse proxy out of the box kind of solution that that plex gives you you can um just access jellyfin through the ip address and port number of course but i use traffic for all of my composed services, Docker composed services, and it's really super simple. Just a couple of lines of config

to expose a specific DNS entry, jellyfin.domain.com, for example. And then you're off to the races. You have full Let's Encrypt TLS certificates and all the clients love you because the SSL, the TLS certificates are all signed properly. You'd have to click on that annoying

ignore advanced settings. Yes. That is a great tip right there because yeah, some of the clients are real upset about that. And I think even some of the Chromecast ones won't let you do it, at least on the desktop. It's really worth putting the effort in to get it behind a reverse proxy. It ones won't let you do it, at least on the desktop.

It's really worth putting the effort in to get it behind a reverse proxy. It's never been easier to do so, but it's worth putting in the effort to do that with a valid TLS set. Wes and I may do that tonight after the show. After we get done eating our pork shoulder, we may do a little bit of that on my Odroid. Great. So hopefully that's a good starting point for you there joe let us know how it goes and

then also uh we're going to tag that for self-hosted as well so we can cover some of that uh expanded your further questions and stuff yeah joe included other great questions such as you know is this a good time to get into ansible and other really great things that i always a good time to get into ansible see i knew he would say that what keep it for the show alex alex likes ansible but it's like i i remember the first time i um play with jellyfin last year it was around this time so almost exactly a year ago that's that was the opportunity for me to first dive into docker i'd never really played with docker at all so if if you want to try docker it's on your list of things to try maybe this is a good time of year for you

jellyfin's the perfect thing to start with how much of what you did a year ago do you remember just out of interest well it's still there it's all it's all written down in the documentation that's my point right that's my point exactly right you solved that problem a year ago and you're still benefiting now and you can look at the decisions you took and probably remember a little bit as to why you took some of them as well. Yeah, and the nice thing has been, you know, for this challenge that we're doing this month, I was able to just kind of drop in and update all the instances that I had running because I got one at my brother's place too. And it was just great. So I have to say that the work you put in to learn some of these things could be a little bit of fun, but it just pays off over time. So it sticks with our themes we were talking about earlier.

Our Brent Lee is growing up so quick. And now it is time for the boost. All right. So Sir Lurks A Lot is our baller this week with 202,200 sats and lurks included a never have i ever linux uh he says never have i ever been to a linux meetup a lug conference or a fest of any kind or worked at a linux centric centric shop or had a linux buddy or a friend I could chat and relay with, I started using computers in 1982 and went hard Linux only in my home in 2004. I listened to Linux podcasts outside, but no one else has a sense of community that JB has.

You're my virtual Linux family, and I love you for that. Happy holidays. Thank you, Lurkslot. And Lurkslot sent a follow-up who's too sane, of course. Other podcasts have fantastic communities as well. But I agree. Think about it. The entire time we've been doing this show, we've had an open mumble room.

The entire time. And we've had amazing contributors. They sit there. Everybody is respectful. You know, they're not trolly. They work to have good audio. Like, just with these boosts that come in, you can tell the signal is super high. Every time you can get a little indication of our community, they're just super high quality, high signal people.

We have such a great community. And we get out there and we get to travel. We get to really physically experience that. It's really inspiring because we want to live up to the community, right? Like we got to do right by them because they can and should and do have high standards. That's right. And I think I feel like there is a bit of a, it's like it's like a network of friends out there. Like, if we were out on a road trip somewhere doing shows and we broke down somewhere and we put out the word, we'd have 20 listeners show up.

No doubt. Isn't that wild? It's just a little great. Yeah, I feel like that friendship kind of goes both ways, too. It's just so great. Yeah, I feel like that friendship kind of goes both ways, too. Like the number of friends that we made, Chris, on just our adventure down through the coast this year to JPL. Like it goes both ways. You're making friends with us when we do meetups and stuff like that or even just in our Matrix chat and things like that.

But I've benefited so much this last year of getting to know listeners and building friendships. Like I have these conversations with listeners every single day and it's such a wonderful thing. So it works in both directions. So thank you Lurks for constantly boosting in and letting us know you're out there. I needed a piece of wood sawing in half this week. So I just reached out to the Raleigh room, a bunch of people that Brent and I made friends with whilst he was staying at my house.

And I was making a cabinet and I needed a piece of walnut resawing in half lengthways, you know, like 10 inch wide cut. Really difficult thing to make. It's mostly because he did an error in his design and had to fix it. Yeah, I screwed up and I was trying

to fix it. And someone in the room was like yeah you could come around mine and just cut it in half and it's a great community it's a lovely thing to be a part of that's so great that's such a great that's such a great like i don't know just slice of alex's life right there i need a piece of wood cut so i got in the matrix room for the raleigh rally and uh it's so great yeah it's so nice that we get to, you know, I think we all care about other people, right? But like, it can be awkward. It can be difficult.

You may not have occasions to do those sorts of things in like normal everyday life, except for like your friends and family. So it's so nice that there's this sort of outlet and community that there's just, for some reason, because everyone's awesome, this base level of trust. Yeah. I think there's a science behind it. You know, what Lurk's a lot touched on there is, you know, there's nobody in his day-to-day life that he gets to talk about Linux. So we all share that, right? And that kind of all of the things around Linux, too. Self-hosting, all the things we've talked about today.

And then you also have sort of the catalyzing events of the shows. The shows are TikTok every week. We release a show. We don't miss weeks. The shows are always happening. There's always an interactive process with the shows. The shows are tick tock every week. We release a show. We don't miss weeks. The shows are always happening. There's always an interactive process with the shows. There's the matrix rooms, the telegram groups, et cetera. And I feel like, so those are catalyzing events in a community. So there's sort of multiple components that I think kind of make itself organized into a pretty good group of people. I have to say these challenges do that for me as

well. They force us all to kind of work on a similar problem and to solve it and share resources. I love when we do these challenges. Magnolia Mayhem boosts in with 23,456 stats. Great. Thank you. Just now listening to level 491 and I have to say plus one to what the Golden Dragon said. It always bothered me that I may be boosting in too much. And I realized while listening to that episode that this community is why I enjoy it like I do. A lot of us don't have anyone to talk about the tech world to, especially when we don't work in it.

And the community takes that place. Maybe getting involved with Matrix can help me with this boosting madness. Either way, thanks to this great community. Oh, mayhem. That's so great. And don't worry. Don't ever worry about boosting too much. That's silly because A, we moderate the boost to make it into the show. If we don't read your boost too, it's not a comment on the quality of the boost. Sometimes we're trying to keep it on theme, right? These boosts have a theme. So these two went in. Sometimes we're trying to keep it on theme, right? These booths have a theme. So these two went in. But remember, even if your message doesn't make it, you're still sending value into the show. You are helping us build an open source, transparent way to fund independent media. And I think the ramifications of that are going to take another two years for others to figure out. But you're helping us do it today. And your boosts are great. Like, I love your boosts. In fact, your series that you sent in a couple of weeks ago,

when we were doing the holiday pre-records, I'm going to read them in the post-show. So they're still going to get on air. I just think they're fantastic. So keep it up. We appreciate the support. Iroq wrote in with 2000 sats. I can't wait for someone other than OpenAI to make a GPT-based search engine. That way, Chris's prediction will be wrong on a technicality. Yeah, you caught me. I was too specific, wasn't I?

However, I think that prediction is going to come true because Microsoft announced that they're working on integrating OpenAI search into Bing. Yes, they did. You always have one prediction that comes true like within a couple weeks it's so weird it's so strange it's like you've got a little crystal ball that you look i think maybe i'm just good at near-term predicting is what that is 90 days i'm pretty good at i don't think that's what that tells you that wouldn't explain your stock market though hmm yeah i predict that at some point in 2023, Chris and Wes will enjoy a delicious pork shoulder. Oh, hmm, hmm, that might come true.

If not, we're doing something wrong. Johnny Mac wrote in with 1,100 sats as well. Congrats on getting number five for most supported shows on Fountain for the entire year of 2022. This is a huge honor coda radio and self-hosted also very very high on the list total number of lightning podcasts now 11 000 podcasts now getting boosts when we started it was 4 000 it's incredible uh 2.1 bitcoin in total sent to podcasters through fountain fm that's just fountain wow 2.1 bitcoin fountain listeners earned 1.1 bitcoin collectively 77 000 boosts were sent just using fountain fm alone that's incredible and uh yeah as you just said um the number five most supported show out of all of them was this here humble podcast and i have to say as a result thanks to everyone's very generous

support this show just clocked its best numbers in the run as we are getting to 500 episodes we just clocked our best numbers ever and i attribute that to being at the top of this list because then we're at the top of the discovery chart office hours came in at number 38 which i'm perfectly happy with yeah coder radio at number 16 the bitcoin dad pod which i do with my buddy the bitcoin dad number 24 and self-hosted right there at number 25 out of all of the shows in the freaking world, you guys. Out of 11,000 shows that are getting boosts now. Just absolutely humbling and great. That's really a huge thank you to the listeners.

You know, we're not boosting ourselves. You're boosting us. So thank you. Yeah. And I figure it won't last forever, right? As, you know, because Linux is a niche and all of that. As other bigger podcasts get onto the Lightning Network. And we did not even make it in the top 10 this last week.

Over the holidays, it faded a little bit, but it is such a nice thing to see. And the other thing that's really neat about the growth of the show is it means that we're kind of expanding to a group of a new type of Linux user who I think is probably just in the process of discovering Linux. But they're coming at it from a background of, I think, self-hosting and sovereignty. That's probably why they're using Fountain, probably why they're using Sats. And it's a real nice cross-section. It's neat to see different communities who have sometimes shared goals sort of work together. Yeah. Dan Johansson boosts in with 1701 Satoshis. Oh, you know what that is?

That's an enterprise boost. Make it so. I finally bolt myself together and started the journey of watching star trek wow congrats oh to be at the very beginning of that journey that'd be oh that'd be like never discovering top gear until now or rick and morty or something i mean it's just like oh that's amazing wait you never heard of seinfeld right right the plan is to go chronologically currently at the last couple of episodes of season one. It's funny how it's a five year mission,

but the series was canceled after three seasons. Oh, Dan, it's, it's both tragic and historic. The, the arc of that show. Oh,

and you finished it. It might be fun, Dan, to go read about how it started. They had a failed pilot and they actually got a second shot which is remarkable in the history of television and then desi and lucy stepped in to save it at one point to keep it on the air and then the third season is so rough but also has a couple of gems but the budget was essentially cut to almost nothing uh by the third season they're not they don't even have the ability to ever do

another new external shot all of the external shots of the enterprise every planet everything in season three is a remake from season one and two they cooked recooked somehow it was real bad but some great gems in there so stick with it because while it's maybe not peak star trek necessarily it influences so much of what's to come yes and it's kind of nice to set the tone, especially the one Roddenberry was the most involved with. Yeah. The question is, do you go Enterprise next? I was going to mention,

on the show notes, there's a couple links that I like, and there's a few of these out there, but people have compiled Star Trek episodes sorted by... Timeline. By stardate. Yeah.

Or you can also do kind of fun sorted by original air date. And that way, when you get to like the nineties track, yeah. Mix like TNG, DS nine and Voyager. Wow. I do think that would be a good idea because especially when DS nine is

launching and then Voyager is launching, there's a lot of crossover, but, uh, I definitely recommend holding enterprise until after Voyager having, I'm in season three of enterprise right now. And the beautiful thing about Enterprise is you get to see some of your favorite character actors

that have been in some of your favorite roles in the other Star Trek series show up in Enterprise doing new roles, and it pays off so much more that way. That is great. Yeah, yeah. So I'd say save Enterprise until after Voyager. Keep us posted, Dan.

That's great. The Golden Dragon came in there in there wes you want to get golden's uh booster ruskies oh yeah golden boosted in with 1900 sets first boost of the year here's to many more years of boosting and chatting thanks dragon nice to have you up there in the quiet listening chase nine boosted in with 5 000 sets fellas fellas we don never get called fellas that's great fellas i had to set up boosting to let you know the truth about mate the reason it came in last in the tuxes is because you're pronouncing it all wrong true mate fans know the proper form is to embrace your inner pirate and call it matey chase nine sent in 4 500 additional s sets to throw some sats to lock in a boon to matey as the pronunciation on the show.

A boon to matey. Oh, it continues. I wasn't sure if this was going to be something this year, but here we go. Well, I think here's what we should do. I think we should be a little more responsible and mature about how we

pronounce things in 2023. And I think for a new pronunciation to get an update in the show and i consider this a patch it's a fork it's a patch whatever uh i think i think a mispronunciation has to be seconded by a booster so if a second booster comes in and confirms it then i think that might be locking in the new pronunciation and then it can be undone by a baller baller comes in undoes it can i request someone boost in with mvme because why don't we just start tweaking all this stuff so i don't have to struggle i can just you know run my mouth what's the name of that uh open source nvidia graphics the uh new driver

is it is it uh what's what's the other one I like to have fun with? Yeah, no, it's Sumerian. It's Xamarin. It's Xamarin. You know, I like, there's just sometimes it's too fun. Peg.boosted in with 3,333 sets. It says, hi, I don't see a reason not to use audiobook shelf. I define the goal as moving from a closed source like Plex system to an open source system, Jellyfin.

If there's a great open source audiobook app, why not just use it instead of the mediocre implementation on Jellyfin? The iOS app is in test flight right now, so it's not in the app store yet, but keep up the great content. Well, I'm not going to answer this now because I'm not the audiobook aficionado in this household. That is my good lady wife. She's going to come on self-hosted 89 and give you her full experiences of audio bookshelf. Cause I thrust that down her throat this week. All right.

I'm not flavor of the week. She loves prologue with Plex. So it's going to be a tough one for me to separate her from. Same situation over here. Pixel Jones came in with 3000 sets. Happy holidays in a new year. I'm a first time booster. Thank you,

man. Thank you. We're podcasting, man. Electric boosted in with 9,810 sats. Thanks for all the great shows. Longtime listener. First time booster.

You're sending you all the sats. I've earned it from fountain. Oh, well, first of all, thank you for that. And second of all, 9,810 sats is a serious amount of listening,

dude. Good job on you. Podcasters all around the world. Thank you. Also, I want to say thank you to everyone who sent it. I said pretty nice, healthy size boost, but just no message. You know, we've got a couple like 3,000, 4,000, 2,000 boosts, just no message. Um, and then we got several people that were streaming their sets and I have a new analytics system where I can look at when people stream sats. And I see you out there streaming. So thank you, everybody, who's doing that. I'm sending people to Albi now if you want to boost in.

Open source, good team behind it. It does it right from the web browser. Getalbi.com. That's what I've been using since you suggested I try it. And I've been enjoying it. Yeah, you and I had a lot of fun that day. We figured out how to do it all it's it's you know there's no like particularly easy on-ramp because you're basically exiting the economic system of the west and entering into like this crazy open source

you know peer-to-peer decentralized currency so there's no like super easy on-ramp but what albie is doing and what fountain f FM is also doing soon, new Fountain FM is choice, brand new update, huge update, huge update. I might have to use Fountain for a little while, but they're making it possible to purchase the Bitcoin or the stats right there inside the app. Going to make it even easier to boost in now. Albie is integrated with MoonPay.

All of these require that you give them a bit of information so that way they can prove you're not a terrorist because there's money laundering laws that the u.s has so you gotta identify yourself they call it kyc know your customer just like when you open a bank account or yeah so there's a process you have to go through if you want to avoid that i really like robosats but you gotta have tor browser and then robosats you just go buy it whatever currency works for you you know amazon gift cards even don't matter but anyways i love albie get albie you go over there you get your you get your sats and then you can boost in from the podcast index website you can go to the linux unplugged listing on the podcast index and just boost right in from the website don't even

get a new app you don't want you can get a new app you don't gotta get a new app i don't think it's pretty good. You know what? New app. New podcast app's gonna come. Brentley and I found a couple of really handy ButterFS picks. Oh, yes. In the spirit of keeping things running, keeping things smooth, maintaining what you got, this felt like a good one. I think you found the ButterFS maintenance package, right? I did. I was doing a deep dive on ButterFS earlier this week, which led to me rebuilding my NAS computer, specifically because ButterFS is one of the things I really want to learn this year. I really want to dive in.

You've both been telling me for years it's the way to go. But I have to admit, I'm not that well versed in it. So I was doing a bunch of research and I came across ButterFS maintenance, which is a bunch of scripts for ButterFS that kind of automate its maintenance tasks like periodic scrubbing and balancing and trims and defrags and things like that. And there's kind of some great documentation on their GitHub. So totally worth reading and worth trying. I don't have any experience with it. So if you do have experience with it, I'd love to hear that.

You can share that linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I like that they have both crons and service files for systemd setup. Yeah. Whatever you got going. If it's maybe a file server and you want to do a couple of these automatically, you could just set it and forget it.

I guess my question for you both might be, have you used anything like this? do you do it manually or do you just not do any of this maintenance at all i've set up like manual scrubs and stuff before or not manual but automated ones for various file systems i've not used like a pre-packaged sort of uh script though and then for most of mine i don't i think i've set it up to the, that the trim just happens. And yeah, I don't know that I have needed to do a crazy amount of balance or defragging at least, uh, from having like diagnosed the system to get there. Yeah. I haven't needed to do that much. I have done a couple things here and there, but what I like about your pick Brent is all the tools that it gives you documentation on. So it's kind of just a good refresher.

You could, you could do without their scripts. You could just learn about those particular tools. Right. Here are some options you can do. Here are some ways to maintain your file system. Yeah. I learned the most just by reading their documentation, to be honest. And I haven't even used it yet. Something, something, ZFS. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. If you're, just in case you're not.

I know. I know. It's boring because it just works. It does. Until you one day have a kernel module that breaks. I'd be really interested to hear, like, Alex do a ButterFS challenge for a month. See how that goes. Oh, man. 2023 is the year.

There are no months beginning with B, are there? So we're okay. Yeah, no alliteration. February file system. Data loss December. Data loss December. Data loss December. This sounds terrible. Yes, that would be ButterFS's time to shine.

Hey, I know a joke when I see one. I've been using BTDU. And if you're familiar with the DU app, this is a ButterFS specific one. Now, why would you want something like this? Well, ButterFS has a bunch of really cool features that can make it tricky to estimate what disk space is actually being used for. Because you have sub-volumes, you have compression, you have copy-on-write, you have all these little things that can maybe add metadata for like snapshots that are technically available to the OS, but also technically being used on disk. And. Well, and right, you can do these shallow copies.

So you could have a giant folder of videos that you've just reflinked. Yes. And a normal tool will have no idea that those are not taking up all that space. It's a very handy feature, but it can confuse the basic DU tool. So BTDU solves that. And it gives you a nice overview in your terminal of where and what is using space. And it's a great way, like to SSH into a box, you run BTDU

in a directory, and then you can see where all your storage space is getting used up. And then you realize you had your container configured wrong and it wrote everything to var, and now you've got to go solve that. We'll have a link to BTDU and, of course, the Bodos maintenance toolbox

in the show notes at linux unplugged.com slash 492 i i do think we're going to be in the scale area for 500 that's sort of appropriate because it's what it's it's like our first big old linux conference back for like the network you know a big group alex inspired me arriving tomorrow assuming i'm here to sign for it because it requires signature is an x32 rack mount portable mixer oh it begins you can have a cabinet for it yeah we get a cabinet going then we take that thing down to scale i don't know if we want to do it at scale or maybe a venue near scale but i'm just saying it's a possibility it's something I'd like to start thinking about.

Could happen. In the meantime, though, we'll just keep on streaming right here at jupiter.tube every single Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, there's a lot more going on in the world of Linux and open source.

Go to linuxactiondews.com where Wes and I break down the news that changed the Linux world every single week. More show over there. And of course, go get Alex and myself

over on Self Hosted. Go hug your self hoster at selfhosted.show. Some more content over there than you can really shake a stick at. Maybe two sticks?

Maybe. Well, that's why you've got to automate the stick shaking. You've got to automate that. Shake the sticking. Automate all of it. You want to automate the shakes steak you got to automate the stick shaking you got to automate shaking automate all of it you want to shake the sticks yeah with robots that show self-hosted that show all right you're drunk thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode and we'll see you right back here next sunday Thank you. all right gentlemen well i believe that brings us to the end of the program now i just want to go home and watch tv you know but you could always go and play with the new

frigate update that's coming out 0.12 remember the cctv self-hosted system they are adding support for intel igpus as well as you know it had support for the coral before for the object detection huge yeah potentially i mean it's still in in beta so who knows how good it is or isn't, but it's there if you want to try it. Or it's coming soon.