LINUX Unplugged - 503: Berlin with Brent

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Brent dives deep into Nextcloud's new release from inside their offices, and takes an unexpected dip in the local lake with a listener.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Ich heiße Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Yes, Brent is still in Berlin, coming up on the show today. We're going to get the inside scoop from the Nextcloud offices. What do you learn if you camp out for a week in the Nextcloud office when they have a brand new release?

Well, something special is brewing in Berlin, and we'll get into that. Plus, we'll round out the show with some great booze, some pics and a lot more. So before we get into any of that, I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. That's right, WireGuard, the best in the VPN business. It'll build a mesh network in minutes, regardless of your device, regardless of OS. Go try it out. It's going to change your networking game. I no longer have any inbound firewall ports on any network that i manage and i love it try it out at tailscale.com for free for up to 20 devices and if you get it if you know i don't know if you get a chance tell them linux unplug sent you

because how else would they know so maybe let them know that linux unplug sent you tailscale.com and before we get into the rest of the show, we got to say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, virtual lug. Hello. Hello. Hello, guys. Hello, Russ. Hello, Brent.

Hello. It is so nice to have you joining us from all around the world as we travel around this week. Well, we don't travel. Russ and I sit here in the studio and watch Brent travel. We're trying really hard to live through Brent. He's told us to give him a little alone time. Is this vicarious podcasting? Is that what we're doing right now?

It's at least vicarious JB traveling, I think. We should have gotten him a little lapel mic so he could be streaming to us, and then we could just come check in on him constantly. Well, when we're big time, we'll have, we'll have like a camera crew following Brent around on his worldwide travels. Well,

I'm, I'm actually quite into that. Bring it on. Speaking of worldwide, worldwide travels, um, you are in Berlin again. You are in the next cloud office for week number two.

I think I'm making friends because I actually have the co-founder's keys in my pocket, and that's how I got in today. So things are going well here. You're such a charmer. You really are such a charmer. So I imagine you've gotten yourself into all kinds of adventures. And paint us a picture. I'm curious to know what you've gotten yourself into.

Besides, we'll get into the NextCloud stuff and the secrets you've learned. But outside of that, what have you gotten yourself into? Yeah, it's been a really wild week. I can't believe it's only been a week since I arrived, but it's really my adventure yesterday that really, I think, is worth highlighting. Listener Tomash, I think I got that right. Listener Tomas, who's a triathloner, and that'll come in in a little bit. I met him for dinner the other night. He couldn't make the meetup that we had here on Friday. And so we did dinner the night before and we basically shut down the local brew pub that we were at. We had a great time. We were probably way too late

and it was great. And he offered to take me on an adventure. And I thought, so tell me about the brew pub. What did you eat? What did you drink? Well, okay. What did I drink was cider, but you know, you go to a brew pub, you get cider. It's kind of an afterthought. Well, this place, these are like some of the best ciders I've ever had. One of them had cardamom mixed in there. That's just fabulous. So if you're going to come to town, I think cider is a thing you need to try, which nobody told me that was on the list,

but it really made me quite pleased because that's my drink of choice. And how was the food? Yeah, I broke a few rules you'll probably like. That does mean it's a special trip. Yeah, you know it's a good place when Brent's breaking the rules. Yeah, this was the kind of place that's a bit more local than every other food place I've been to. So the language barrier was a little higher,

which was actually a great experience. You just smile a lot and they help you out. But Tomas, I i said what would you order if you know you're sitting here in town i mean you always get something great and he got me the goulash uh which we were able to make like gluten-free and such for the things i really need but uh you know it was basically a plate of meat which is how do you make goulash gluten-free well Well, it was a fancy one. It came with these steamed buns and things. So anyways.

Oh. It was a great place. I feel like we should have gotten more pictures. I'm beginning to suspect. It's fine. Okay. It's fine. It's fine.

You're eating my dinner out there, but that's fine. It's fine. So it was a lovely, yeah, lovely experience. And what did you guys talk about what did you get into did you geek out on any particular topic well i think considering we were there for like three and a half hours we geeked out about all sorts of topics but really what i learned the most was a ton of like culture in berlin everything from like the every single neighborhood has a feel to it and a history and like a typical crowd of people that live there. And not everyone's German, of course.

It's a multicultural place. And so just tons of things, tons and tons and tons of context. Did you get a sense of the Linux community at all? Like how popular Linux was or if there was industry that uses Linux? Did you get any sense of that? Well, as you might imagine, it's far more prevalent here than it is in North America.

You know, I'm used to being the only person in the room who even knows the word Linux. And it seems like out here, it's at least the principles of being a little bit more open and are just far more prevalent, especially in government and stuff like that.

So I think I might want to move here, guys. I know. I can tell you really like it. Well, that means we could visit him. Yeah. Yeah. And there's got to be some way to make that a business expense, I imagine. You know, going to see our co-host.

You get this great dinner. You discuss the local flavor, and does it end there, or did you end up continuing on? Well, by the end of the night, I got an invitation to do a big cycling trip and then sort of a cold dive into a local lake. What? See, this is why he was too busy to investigate Linux usage. And this is why we weren't getting pictures. That's right. Yeah, he's taking cold dips. What? Yeah, this is why he was too busy to investigate Linux usage. And this is why we weren't getting pictures. That's right. Yeah, he's taking cold dips.

What? Yeah, I thought I, like, I can't say no to this, right? And so Tosh was kind enough to repair a bicycle for me, which was actually his wife's bicycle that was in parts, apparently, when he made this offer. And so he repaired the bicycle and invited me into his home, which was lovely. And I got to meet his family who were lovely. And then we immediately, well, he gave me a ton of clothing. It turns out if you're going to be pretty serious with cycling, especially because it was pouring rain when we decided to do this, uh, you need like some clothing. So Tomash and I are the same size, which is thank, thank goodness. And, uh,

we headed out on the road and we did like in total of 40 kilometer cycling tour of mostly like the Eastern part of Berlin, which was amazing. And also, you know, you're cycling with traffic and all of that. I don't know if you boys have ever done this, but it's an experience, you know, luckily usually the traffic, You are the traffic. Luckily, not my first time on a bicycle. So, and you know how it started. I said, well, one of my favorite ways to see a new city is to cycle. And I don't know how to do that.

And that's how this all came to be. But halfway, you know, at our destination, there was a giant lake and Tomas is a triathloner and wanted to start his swimming practice you know in the cold and so this lake turns out it was 10 degrees celsius which is 50 degrees fahrenheit that's a big shock that's that's about half the difference of your body temperature and we had another fellow listener who was supposed to join us and bring an extra wetsuit for me, but... Wait, wait. Another listener was going to join you to do this craziness?

It's true, but they ended up not being able to join, and so I didn't actually have a wetsuit. Tell me you just stripped down naked and just jumped in. I sure did. You did? As a Canadian, you know, you got to do the right thing. He's prepared for this. Born for it. Apparently in Germany, just swimming kind of mostly nude is not a problem at all.

Okay. When in Berlin. Well, when a Canadian is in Rome, right? I guess. This is incredible. And I'm picturing myself, if I'd gone on this trip, I would not be doing this. You just gotta follow

Brent. Yeah, right. I realize now. So this is quite the experience so far, and such an incredible commentary on how amazing the community is. Right? Yeah. This was, like, not announced. It wasn't like you planned this a year

ahead of time and you know you and tomas was like we're gonna figure this out and you come over here no this was a really kind of last of kind of the last minute kind of planning sort of situation and yet it really sounds like uh you got a first class kind of treatment i have to say the first class treatment has happened this entire week from next cloud taking me in and inviting me to check out what they're releasing this week, which is amazing. And we'll get into that very shortly. But also just every single listener I've met, which has been a lot of them. This was like super last minute me coming here. And I organized a JB meetup, which happened on Friday, which was incredible.

And far more people showed up than I even expected. We had something like 15 to 17 people like come in and out. And we hosted it here at the next cloud office, which was amazing. And as you might imagine, we, again, just like hung out all evening from like, I think it was from like 6pm till one o'clock in the morning, just chatting about all sorts of stuff and playing ping pong and just like, it was amazing. So did a lot of them speak English where it was? How was that? Everyone spoke English. Yeah. I think, I think the tech industry here from what I'm gathering is extremely multicultural. People move here to work here and English is sort of the common language that's spoken. And so I haven't

really had an issue at all. I've been trying to pick up a little German here and there, but it's really not been a necessity. Mostly. How much have you picked up? An embarrassingly small amount, mostly because either, either the folks speak English, which is helpful, or I have a trustee listener with me who is willing to translate. So, well, that's, that's great. There's no accounting for hospitality. Yeah. I mean, really that speaks to how, how hospitable folks have been really that you haven't had

to figure a whole bunch out. It's been really lovely. So I, I think this coming Tuesday in office hours, we'll talk more about the meetup and the people I met there and some little audio clips from that had a great time. And you boys were very much missed. You, you, you would have absolutely loved it. Very jealous. Very jealous. I'm looking forward to hearing how that went because I would love to have been there for the meetup. Well, let's discuss why you were actually there because NextCloud had quite a bit to announce. And, you know, sometimes we get kind of a heads up about stuff before it comes out. And we got a heads up about this one in a new way.

We were told like, hey, something's coming and we're really proud of it. And we'd like to have you guys cover it because we think this is going to be a big deal because we're really focusing on a couple of areas that you guys talk a lot about. Sovereignty and ethical AI and implementing open source AI. And I was like, OK, that's interesting. See where this goes. in source ai and i was like okay that's interesting see where this goes and uh we ended up kind of chatting more and just kind of getting a little teeny tiny glimpse into what was coming up and i was like okay all right this sounds like it's worth us figuring out a way to cover we were blown away by the announcement when it came out wes and i both uh took a look at it wes being the

maniac that he is got a really early build installed in production on our Jupiter Broadcasting Next cloud server. Who, me? Before I was ready. You know, I shared a link with Yos here, his co-founder, and he was like, oh, now I can check which version you guys run. And he's like, oh, you're running the latest version. Like, why are you doing that? That seems like very bold. I can't believe you're doing that latest version. Like, why are you doing that? It seems like very bold. I can't believe you're doing that in production.

Why are you doing that this way? I mean, the announcement said it was ready to go. We were ready to go, too. You know what, Yas? Tell me you don't listen to the show without telling me you don't listen to the show. Well, then his immediate reaction after saying that was, oh, wait. That's how you guys do it, isn't it?

Of course, yeah. Okay, good, good. Yeah, and we really wanted to get some hands-on with it so we could talk about it in Linux Action News, and you could talk about it today because we couldn't go to Berlin, but we wanted to try to see what they were doing here. So they've announced NextCloud Hub 4. And NextCloud Hub 4 is kind of a continuation of a collection of apps that you can install on top of an existing NextCloud instance that turn it into a collaborative suite that's competitive with, say, Office 365 or the Google stuff.

And the idea being that you could host it yourself on-premises, you could host it on Linode, you could host it on some sort of service provider that does hosted NextCloud. And you get like a set of features with these hub releases. And it's a collection of apps that you could go into the app section and install the app store, if you will, and just install all of these apps that comprise of the hub experience. And starting in hub four, not to sound cliche, but they're deeply integrating a lot of the open source technologies around AI that you've been hearing about recently. Chat GPT, stable diffusion, whisper transcription, among others. ethical AI rating system that they will be posting on their website how and what and when things transmit information to third parties. And so you can make a judgment call on which ones you're comfortable with, like something like Whisper, for example, which can run entirely local and do transcription of voice notes and audio files and video files versus something like ChatGPT,

which inevitably has to send information off-site to OpenAI. And they make it really clear on when those lines are crossed. And that's where they're coming up with this ethical AI rating system. You know, I'd seen over on Reddit some folks kind of asking, like, are things like LibreOffice and, you know, various open-source productivity software, are they going to still like libre office and you know various open source productivity software are they going to still be relevant when you know office 365 has all these smart crazy ai tools built in that maybe we just can't met and so it's interesting to see next cloud trying to

approach that problem but clearly yeah thinking like how do we do this in a way where you you can use those tools but you have some more insight and control over like when you use them and which ones you use rather than it just being a transparent feature that appears and you have no control over where that data and a lot clearer lines right this is going to go off site and be processed by a third party but you get these benefits and i know that ethical ai and trying to give users that clear information was a big thing that you talked about with the net cloud stuff like that's something they clearly focused a lot. They put a lot of energy and focus into for this release. Yeah, you know, I was really worried when I first heard about integrating AI

because I thought, oh no, this is, you know, a company that I've kind of respected for a long time. I've loved their stuff for about five years now. And they're going down the path of a thing that I, you know, feel like might eat away at their ideals. They're chasing a trend. The most negative interpretation is they're trend chasing. thoughtfulness that went into integrating all of this. And what I have come to appreciate is that they think just like we do. They're like, well, there are some implications here, but that technology is also really fascinating. And so how do we do this in a way that is transparent and also in a way that's optional? You know, you can disable some of these functions as an

administrator if you'd like. And so I think that's actually amazingly powerful and has been really neat to see how that was integrated and just how it can be customized, really. And controlled by the user. And I think the way to think about this is these features of ChatGPT where it can generate text for you or StableDiffusion where it can generate images for you or stable diffusion where it can generate images for you

or whisper where it can transcribe audio and video for you. Some of this is open source stuff that they can bundle into products. And over the rest of this year, you're going to see different vendors from NextCloud to Apple announce different layers of integration with this stuff, right? And some of it's going to be really worthless. It's going to be like clippy type crap. And some of it's going to be really worthless.

It's going to be like clippy type crap. And some of it's going to be thoughtful and useful. And a little example that we did on the pre-show here was we generated a note in NextCloud. Then now in NextCloud Hub 4, they have this thing called the smart picker. And you hit the slash key in next cloud and it brings up kind of like a launcher sort of looks like a like a like a launcher maybe like you launcher or

spotify and in there you can access some of the ai features and so i had a brand new note and i wanted to make a note about doing a car oil change so i hit the slash button after after i created the new note i hit the slash button and i brought up the chat GPT prompt right there in the launcher. And I said, give me the basic steps for an oil change. And it spit out a nine step process for doing an oil change, which then I could modify in that note. I've used this is in creating sort of like references for myself. Like when was this thing created? Like that, you know, maybe something about like a, like a car part or something like that,

or give me the information when this project launched X, Y, Z, like Firefox and manifest version three extensions. And it can give me the dates and the numbers. And I can add that to the note in line while I'm making the note. It's not like kind of like a, a gimmick.

It's kind of like a, um, like a, like a helper. It gets's kind of like a like a like a helper. It's built in that can add information to an existing project that you're working on. And an example that I saw somebody doing in a video was they went into the next cloud office document creator and they wanted to create a letter of resignation. And so they asked the chat GPT to give them a basic letter of resignation, which they then went and tweaked. And they had it ready to go. Yeah, get the skeleton of it, kind of the structure of it, what's a standard one look like, and then, okay, yeah, fill in your particulars.

So that kind of stuff is actually useful. But you want to know what you're giving up when you do that. You know, but that's not the only thing that they've released in Nextcloud Hub 4. The list is like massive the developers i i and and the open source community i don't know how they've come out with so many features in like what next cloud hub 3 came out in october or something like yesterday but sure yeah yeah and and so i you know as a very short list of things that i'm personally excited about um the versioning system got a bunch of upgrades. So it was like a basic versioning system previously. And now

you're able to like name versions and those will be kept forever. And you're able to describe how often you want to keep versions like in an automated fashion. I think that's pretty great. There's also an end to end encrypted file drop, uh, which has been, it's complex. You also went into details with me about it for quite some time and it is complex. It's a hard thing to do and I think they've done it right. So that's worth looking at as well. And there's a whole bunch of other like groupware upgrades for, you know, if you're running a larger business, things like shared mailboxes, which is a pretty neat feature.

larger business, things like shared mailboxes, which is a pretty neat feature. Other things like SMIME support and like the feature list just goes on and on and on and on. So I think worth having a look at that. Yeah, they seem to me to be going directly after the Office 365 and the Google Workspace crap, whatever it is. And they're bringing in, you know, now with their, like, the talk stuff and the call stuff, they're bringing in the transcription capabilities with Whisper. That's nice. I think they're ahead of the pack here.

It's funny. I have to remind myself as a business that NextCloud has all of this stuff available to me because it's sort of just kind of default that there's momentum around using Google Docs and Google Sheets and that kind of stuff. And I have to remind myself, oh, wait, no, we have it on the Nextcloud server. And it's kind of powerful when it already has access to a bunch of other stuff that we, you know, that we're storing on there.

And now, I mean, if there are, you know, if they're kind of Nextcloud's outreach for developers is successful and we see more apps, they will also have access to these various integrations that are getting added as part of this AI work. Yeah, one of the other things that I thought was pretty nice was that integration with the deck, which is their Kanban project system, where you could be in a chat environment and you can kind of invoke the embedding of a deck project file,

stuff like that. If you're a small team, this seems like a no-brainer. Why would you go pay money for some hosted office solution when you could just use Nextcloud? And if you're a big team, there's some hosted solutions out there that would probably be pretty useful. I still, I kind of, like, deep down inside, I really want to see, like, Nextcloud Hub 5, the performance release, where they really focus in and just make everything screaming fast however i am reminded that sometimes that is also just on us like you did some maintenance that did

improve the performance of our next cloud instance and i need to do some maintenance on my personal next cloud server too um i need to move from sqlite to something like you know, MariahDB or Postgres or something like that but you also kind of shored up the JB instance which we've been using for several years what did you do to make our system run even just a little bit faster? just basics? yeah, just sort of normal database maintenance so we just vacuumed, analyzed, and re-indexed

that's all it really takes, it's just some of the basics sometimes and it turns out, performance improves and that's all I really have to do. And I can't really blame NextCloud for that, but I would love to see hub five, the performance turbocharged edition, right? Where they really just focus on making that thing fast. Cause sometimes you want to pull something up. You're in the middle of a meeting, you know, you're waiting for the dashboard to load and all that kind of stuff. And you're like, I just want to get to this file so fast. That's all I want. If they could come up with some way to make that quicker and more accessible, I'd love that.

You know, Chris, I know they did improve a lot of performance in at least the talk application, like by orders of magnitude, it sounds like. So maybe they're going through and fulfilling your wish, and maybe you'll see those speed improvements throughout. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account, and it's a great way to support the show while you are checking out fast, reliable cloud hosting that we have been using personally for years.

For my personal stuff and my business stuff, I run it at Linode. It's reliable, it's fast, reliable cloud hosting that we have been using personally for years. For my personal stuff and my business stuff, I run it at Linode. It's reliable, it's fast, and they have the best support in the business. Our new website, yeah, we deployed it immediately on Linode. It is the service, it is the performance, it's also the tooling. And to be honest with you, it's the reliability, the support, like all of it coming together. It's not just one thing I can say, oh, Linode does X, Y, Z really great because Linode's been around for nearly 19 years, surviving on the merits of the product, looking at what they had to do to survive in a marketplace that was dominated by competitors that could just get injected by millions of VC and never have to

earn a profit for 10 years, right? That just isn't how Linode operated for the last 19 years. They had to survive on the merit of the product, and so they developed the best performance. They deployed 11 data centers around the world for you to choose from. They have great features like S3-compatible object storage, easy-to-understand backups, a cloud firewall that stops the traffic from ever even hitting your rig, Kubernetes and Terraform and Ansible support if you want to snap it into an existing infrastructure management.

It's really nice. And a bunch of one-click deployment apps to get up and going quick. I was just looking and they've updated a bunch of database one-click deployments that are in cluster mode. So if you want to play around with Redis or Mongo or Postgres and others in a clustered setup, they've got one-click deployments now for clustered database setups. Of course, they also have managed database, they have bare metal systems, and they're deploying another dozen data centers this year. Linode just keeps turning up past 11. So go try it, get the $100, and support the show.

It's a great chance to build something, to learn an open-source project that you've been wanting to try to demo something, or set something up for yourself, your family, or your business. And that $100 means you can really try it, you can really kick for yourself, your family, or your business. And that $100 means you can really try it. You can really kick the tires and you can support the show. So you go to linode.com slash unplugged. You get that a hundred bucks for 60 days on that new account and you support the show. It's easy. It's linode.com slash unplugged. Now, one of the highlights of this week, other than getting to hang out in the office here at next cloud and just getting to chat with everyone who's working here throughout the week was their

big hub for release event and this was an impressive presentation they invited a whole bunch of local media and i guess a few of us as well. There was me and Brandon from TechHut who they brought out as well from overseas. And the NextCloud team put on a big show. They had an amazing event where a bunch of the team went on stage and described their sort of favorite feature or the features they worked on in this newest release. I got to drive there with Frank and Maria through the city of Berlin and got a personal tour along the way. And that means I got there a little early. Things are just buzzing. I'm here early, arrived with Frank earlier, and things are just getting set up and there is an energy here that is contagious.

People are excited. They're also nervous about just announcing what is one of the biggest releases for Nextcloud. And I have had a sneak peek at what's going to be released here today. And it is exciting. So I'm looking forward to seeing how the presentation goes. And I wish you could be here with me. It's just feeling great. Oh, man. I know that vibe. I'm getting jealous as I listen to it, Brent. Give me a little kind of, like, paint the scene for me. Give me a little bit of a mental picture. A little context for you. So this building we were in was, as you might imagine, quite a historical building. It must have been an old factory or something that was just totally decked out.

It was immense. I got lost several times in this place. But it was set up as a co-working space and an incubator space. So there were tons of these little businesses throughout all of the corridors, which was really fascinating to see there. There was like artwork everywhere and you, you know, glass doors on these places. So I saw one,

actually, you might like this, Chris, it was a 3d printing business. And, uh, in one of their huge, massive 3d printers,

they had a rocket there. I thought you would probably enjoy that. That's great. Yeah. So the whole building had this like kind of tech happening energy to it. And I think that was a perfect place to host the event where they really gave us a tour of all the new features. And I, but I got to sit down cause I'm lucky, with Frank Karliczek, the CEO and founder of NextCloud. And we got to discuss one-on-one the new features and why he feels they're important and some of the challenges with integrating the AI into this newest release of NextCloud. Now, the main reason you've invited me here to Berlin for this week is the big announcement for this latest Nextcloud release.

I'm curious for you, what feels like the shining part of this release? I think I know what your answer will be, but maybe you have a different one. I don't know. I mean, there are different perspectives. I mean, first of all, I think it's important to start with the mission of what we want to do here in the first place, because that's what we're working towards. And the idea is, of course, that Nextlot tries to be or is collaboration software similar to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. With the key difference, of course, that it's like completely open source and you can host it and run it wherever you want. You can really run it as a Raspberry Pi for your family, for, I don't know, three people.

But you can also run it for hundreds of thousands or millions of users if you're a big government or a big organization. So that's what we do. what we do and to be successful there first of all you need to have all the expected functionalities and features that the others have and and with this release we really closed a lot of open holes we had for a long time but of course there's also a component where you really want to be innovative and look into the future. Because, at least for me, that's the fun part is also like to innovate. It's not, I don't know, just re implementing something that I don't know, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and so on does and then I don't know, that's a bit boring. And also want to do something forward looking and also in in a good way so in this release

as i said we plugged a lot of open holes for example the next lot talk this is our chat and video conferencing application we have like call recording and breakout rooms and even a preview for our desktop client these are all features that just our users expected and came to us and said, hey, we need this and this and this. And we plugged a lot of holes here. Very similar to in other areas, for example, in the group area where we have this Exchange connector now. Because a lot of organizations, they they introduce next cloud but they also still

have some microsoft tools to fill those gaps yeah and you cannot really even if you want to migrate from from microsoft to next cloud you cannot really do this in one day so you always have this parallel infrastructure parallel situation And for that it was requested a lot to be able to connect Nexclr to an exchange server, basically. And that's something we implemented for the feature request.

And there are many more areas in this area. But as I said, also the shiny new thing it's important and comes to no surprise um of course that is the whole ai area where everybody's talking about everybody's showing nice features nice functionalities like google microsoft their show presented interesting features lately the last few weeks.

And yeah, that's something where we also are also innovating. Of course, again, like following our values. So we actually integrated because we sort of had to chat to VT and DALI and all these services. And they're nice and powerful and integrated like in all applications or most applications. But for us, it's also important to have things that run locally, that are privacy aware, they're not discriminating. And we create this whole framework

around ethical AI, where we basically are super transparent to our users, like which feature is basically does what. Because I don't know if a lot of people realize that if you use some translation system, as it's available in a lot of applications, that most of them or all of them are sending their data to this other service,

and then they have all the documents and all the chat messages and all the emails and everything. That's not good. So we implement, for example, a translation system that runs on device, which is purely open source on your server. Same as with dictation and same as document classification and other things. So we, yeah, we are doing innovative, interesting AI stuff, but yeah yeah following our values i would imagine when you first thought that artificial intelligence was something that you should integrate into next cloud did you

struggle with how to do that in a way that felt to still be following the values of the project and the business and the people working here? I wouldn't say struggling, but I mean, it was a challenge. And there was also a time when I thought it's not even possible. But then it became clear that there are options, that there are actually nicely pre-trained machine learning models out there that are small enough that you can run them locally and there were some first experiments in the in our community for example there was one developer who implemented like a face and object recognition

using a freely available model running on device and yeah we hired him then nowadays smart decision yeah nowadays has a like a real team uh for ai topics now and um yeah we're constantly trying to explore what we can do whether yeah where the boundaries are yeah and i'm glad they are looking at that. Because as I listen to this, I think, I like this approach. You can just not use it if you don't want it. But you're also not getting left out because you're somebody who's self-hosting

or somebody who's using free software. It's nice not to be left out. You know, they also shared with me that this AI measurement system that they're talking about, the ethical AI rating system, they mentioned that they thought of doing this in a collaborative way with other businesses and companies and decided to do it just for Nextcloud in-house for this particular reason. But I wonder if that'll come. And it sounds like a very interesting idea as well to me.

I think other folks are thinking along the same lines. I saw another business that was sort of discussing this. It kind of just seems like this is something we're going to sort out over the next year or so. Well, yeah, right. I mean, the data matters. You have concerns that are really powerful. But you want to know, you want to make sure you're making the right tradeoffs. You know, Chris, you mentioned this SmartPicker, that's kind of the launcher that allows you to

have access to all these, well, many of these new features. And I got to chat with a few people who designed it, a few people who thought up the idea. And so Daphne gave me a little intro and how SmartPicker came to be. My name is Daphne. I am manager alliances, ecosystem and support for Nextcloud. Indeed, I do many different things, so a lot of variety in my day and I get to know the entire organization very well. I'm very proud of the work that one of my team members developed, which is the SmartPicker.

It's an element that is introduced. It was kind of a joke in the beginning because it started with me complaining that I wanted an implementation with Giphy to have funny cats to send to colleagues. And then it was Christmas and my colleague said, hello, Daphne, I have a present for you. And that's how it started.

We decided to see if we could make it a more general component that could enable much more integrations and features. And then we realized quite quickly that we could use it to integrate anything from OpenStreetMap to several artificial intelligence features like JetGPT. And we also figured out that it was not so hard to implement this component in many different Nextcloud apps. So you can now insert getGIFs not only in talk, but also in text, deck, notes, mail.

Everywhere. And in collectives. But that's lovely because it sounds like what was an internal joke and an ask, really, is like serving your own interests with how Nextcloud can evolve also helps everyone else. And it sounds like that led to all sorts of opportunities. Exactly. And there's also a strategy behind it. It's not only joke.

It's also how we work. So we encourage creativity, we encourage hacking, and we don't only encourage that the wonderful implementations, but we also say to people, look, here's an easy tutorial. You can use this component on your own and create your own apps with it. SmartPicker started out as a joke, right? Can we write that down as that is the bombshell of this episode? Because I would predict if this was our predictions episode that this smart picker is going to become the definitive interface differentiator of NextCloud. This Giphy integration with it. It's a nice integration. It's really snappy. It just loads quick.

It's a pleasant to use. I'm in. I'm into it. Watch out, rest of you NextCloud users. If you've never used a desktop launcher like uLauncher or there's lots. There's Albert. There's so many. It is so quick. And for NextCloud

to be building this into the NextCloud UI, it is genius. It is going to be one of the key differentiators of all of the other collaboration suites. And so the idea, my prediction, it's basic now, it's version one, maybe 0.5 really,

but it is the primary way you get access to the new AI features in NextCloud is through the smart picker. And the smart picker, I think, will evolve into a launcher that, you know, today I complain about the dashboard, but imagine when the first, like, next cloud page loads and I just hit slash and I can just start typing the very first

couple of characters of what I need, maybe a file or it's a calendar, and then I hit enter with that smart picker and it takes me there. It's going to be as fast as you can get it on native desktop applications. That's where they're going. That's where they're going. That's where they're going.

So the idea that it started as a joke and to get that nugget here on the show, ooh boy, that's fantastic. I love that, Brent. You know, part of my favorite aspect of being here is just to get all these little stories that you don't get from a feature release note page. So another person I got to talk to who was fascinating was Nimisha, who works on the UI and UX design you were just raving about. My name is Nimisha, and I work as a designer at Nextcloud,

and I'm involved in UI and UX design. So anything that you see as a part of the product, I have maybe worked on it. Hopefully I've worked on it. That's great. Well, I already love you. Thank you. She also revealed to me her favorite feature from this release

that I think you'll find interesting. Oh, I mean, I don't think it's kind of an obscure feature. I don't think it came up ever, but it's called the Smart Picker. Yeah, I think that's that's the most exciting feature because i think how it sort of came about was kind of funny because there was this um it was actually uh you know it actually came out of a community discussion which is i mean which i just remember that and that's actually pretty cool. So I think someone raised an issue or something like that in the forum, saying it would be really nice to have some way to link any different type of object

or something along those lines. And we were like, okay, we can take this up in the weekly design review calls that we do. So that's a regular thing, and people from the community can get involved if they would like. So we did that, and things were quiet for a few weeks. And then there was this one pull request about reference any object in Nextcloud. And we were like, okay, that's pretty cool. And from there, it just snowballed into,

you know, we can link deck cards and GitHub issues and, you know, YouTube and PeerTube and, you know, like, freaking tablesTube and, you know, like, like freaking tables. And then like towards the end, like the developers, like we can do chat GPT and stuff. And I'm like, wait, what's happening? Like, that's so cool. Like, it's like, it's absurd,

like how fast it snowballed into being something that can be used everywhere and is so useful. So I think that's the, like, that's the most exciting feature for me, for sure. Me too. I agree. I think it really is. I think this is going to be one of the defining features of Nextcloud as it evolves over the next few releases. And it's already the way you get access to the coolest new features of Nextcloud. So the smart picker for the win. Did you hear that little hint there, Chris? I heard PeerTube get mentioned. So you can also

do these linking to PeerTube instances, which is pretty cool. We talk about some of the new features in detail in Linux Action News. And one of the scenarios we talk about is essentially planning a meetup, which we do all the time. Yes, we do.

Where you can pull in like a template to announce the meetup with ChatGPT while we're all talking about this in NextCloud Talk. And then you can pull in like a template to announce the meetup with chat GPT while we're all talking about this in next cloud talk. And then you can pull in obviously some, some artwork to supply the meetup page, then using stable diffusion. And then later on, you can pull in open street maps to get the location.

So we're all in sync on where to meet up at. And then when you're all done, when you wanted to share the video of the event, you go back to the chat and using the smart picker, you easily just invoke access to your PeerTube instance and you pull in the link for the video of the event and you add that to the chat. And it all just kind of works. Do you remember a few months ago when we were asking for an alternative to meetup.com? Yeah. Well, I wonder if they're making it for us here.

Eventually. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wonder if they're making it for us here. Eventually. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some, the thing about NextCloud that I appreciate now more so than I think I did a year ago or less is that, maybe even less, yeah. It is a platform that you can build stuff on. You know, you build on top of it. And it just, to have this extra element now.

And there's just a lot of common features you can build off of and things you can, you know, interact with. Yeah. There's just more and more. You know, one aspect

I was really interested in was how they interact with the open source community. Because I know open source developers are a big part of the add-ons that get added to Nextcloud.

So Namisha had some insights about how a design team connects with an open source community that I thought was fascinating. Formally, it's a two-person team, but there are a lot of other engineers who have a really good eye for design. So, you know, I really consider them

as part of the design team as well. Plus so many members from the community also end up, you know, like raising so many, like really, really, really valid points and basically doing my job a lot of the time. So yeah, it's really not just two people. And so can you talk a little bit about applying those open source concepts to design work? Because that isn't always, it's not that common.

So I'm curious how that's been going. Yeah, that's actually how I got involved in Nextcloud in the first place. I have an engineering background, so I was interested in open source from there. And I started getting more and more interested in design over the last few years of university. And I was like, hmm, why isn't there an open source design presence? And I did a little digging on the internet and I found Nextcloud. And I was like, oh, there is a designer, which is like way more than enough for me. So I was like, hey, can I please get involved?

And since then, you know, I've been a part of Nextcloud. So I think the fact that Nextcloud is open source is kind of integral to how we work. You know, it doesn't stay just within the team the design decisions it's always out in the open and it's super transparent I think that really helps any design decisions that we make are published as issues or PRs or whatever and people who from the community who have anything to comment on it can comment or a lot of times there are members in the community who have anything to comment on it can comment or a lot of times there are members in the community who raise issues themselves so I love this aspect of working collaboratively with the community and I think that's only possible in an open source organization

so I mean that this is my first like design job so I don't know how it works in a closed organization but I really love how it works over here. So I got lucky there. I love that you captured her thoughts as a new contributor to an open-source organization doing design. She said, and they're doing design in an open-source organization. A totally different thing, but she's really embracing it. Yeah, that was such a wild concept to me when I first met her, because it was like those two, I mean, as a photographer, that's part of the reason I got interested in open source and wanted to fight the Adobe's so much, you know, is that so often those tools, you know, design and open source are just so far from each other. And to learn that they were doing it collaboratively

and openly, I was just endlessly fascinated. So we had tons of discussions that I didn't get a chance to record. But yeah, that whole concept just kind of blew my mind. I also got to ask Daphne about the developer program, because we're touching on developer topics here a little bit. And I thought, oh, why not dive in a little bit? On stage, you were discussing the developer program and how there are some new features for the developers specifically. Can you go into that a little? Of course, our community is super important for Nextcloud. It is one of the main ways in which we can provide super useful software comparable to Big Tech.

in which we can provide super useful software comparable to Big Tech. So we wanted to invest more in our developer program. We announced this for the 25 release. And now with the 26 release, I had the honor to explain what we did. So we asked for feedback on our forums, and we got several pieces of feedback back that we could easily implement. Would you be willing to go into one or two of those pieces of feedback that were most impactful for you or surprising? For example, one of the mentioned pieces of feedback

was that we had a lack of easy-to-follow tutorials. Maybe you have had a similar experience as me, but many of the tutorials are either poorly written or they miss important steps because they assume that you know, but you don't. Yeah, we had a similar problem. Our tutorial was not only not working anymore, it was dated, but it also assumed pre-knowledge that people did not have.

So we improved the tutorials by making a series of five tutorials that guide people from setting up their development environment through creating simple hello world type of apps. And then when people understand how such an app is structured, we challenge them to develop something that would be app store ready. Lovely. And so it sounds like you're now helping guide developers through the Nextcloud ecosystem to become perhaps long-term developers for creating all sorts of technologies in the application ecosystem. And I would imagine that's a good feeling.

Yeah, that's an amazing feeling because that's, of course, exactly what we need. We don't only need extra apps in the app store, but we also need people to contribute to the core of Nextcloud and to help with fixing bugs or implementing new features. It was mentioned during the presentation that around 2,000 developers helped work on some of these new features that were announced. That must be exciting for you and for the team to have that many people collaborating together. Of course, it's exciting. And it's also, to be honest, sometimes overwhelming. Because, yeah, you can imagine that those people are not equally spread all across the project.

So in some repositories, like the server repository, we have more pull requests than we can possibly keep up with, which is perhaps a luxury problem. But it makes people feel guilty for not approving the PRs fast enough, for example. And other repositories, like the text repository, don't have a lot of community engagement. And so what would you say to try to attract someone there? Maybe one of our listeners might be interested How do you think they can contribute to that repository specifically? For the text repository we developed insanely detailed and good first issues So you can really find good first issues that suit for your level

Some only require one line change Others will teach you more about how the code base is structured. We also provide mentorship in those repositories. So if you want to start on it and you have a question, then we can get on a call with you. Yeah, and also the technology of the text repository is interesting to work on and develop by very good people. You know, Brent, I think what you've managed to do, which is something that I have wanted to accomplish for years and you've finally done it, is you've really told the human side of the Nextcloud project here.

You know, I think Nextcloud as a project has focused so often on the features and the benefits of the project, and they've really kind of tried to speak to that to be, you know, considered alongside the large enterprise competitor like Office from Microsoft or Google. And so they don't really talk about the human side of it. But what I like about what we've just gone through here is you really did touch on that. I, you know, I really feel connected with the human side of the NextCloud story, and that's always the aspect that has fascinated me

about this super quintessential and super important free software project. You know, it's one thing I learned at the very moment that I even showed up to the offices here. Well, actually, it started even before then. Marius came and picked me up from the airport. I got a ride from the airport to the office here, which was amazing. And as soon as I arrived, just everyone was excited to meet me and I as excited to meet them as well. And all of the conversations just started

happening. It was sort of very similar to our meetups where you just have so much to connect with, you know, so many shared ideals and exciting technologies that you're looking forward to. And it was just a real connective human experience here this entire week. And I'm glad that came through because it's been like the most overwhelmingly lovely part of this entire experience while I've been here in Berlin. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go right now to get started with a free trial for an individual or Berlin. customizable and the best part in my opinion it's open source and bitwarden's vaults they're end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption so even if that information were to leak out there's nothing anybody can do with it and bitwarden is constantly iterating on their security making it better they're not standing still if you're on a different password manager

i understand what it's like you got it all set up you got it on your devices and it's just working for you you know they've got security problems they're know, they're not as good as Bitwarden because they're not Bitwarden. But who wants to migrate, right? It's a big hassle. Well, I did it a couple of years ago and I wish I would have done it sooner. Wes did it before me and he was right. Bitwarden.com slash migrate. They make it so simple.

Do me a favor and go to slash Linux first. But when you go to slash migrate, they make it so straightforward. I felt silly for not doing it sooner. It's just now a no brainer. And now I use it to manage my passwords, my secrets, my recovery codes, two factor tokens, all in one place. And Bitwarden keeps on adding great features. They've really improved on their username auto generator, and they've included now an email generator. So you can have a unique email, a unique username, and a unique password for every site, service, and app you use. Now, that's the low-hanging fruit that's actually accessible when you use Bitwarden.

They can actually make a significant improvement with your online security. And you know this is true for yourself. You know this is true for your friends, your family, your workplace. They probably all need to go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. And you might just be the tech person in their life that often gives them those kinds of recommendation. And Bitwarden makes it really easy to switch between like your work stuff and your personal stuff or your project stuff and your personal stuff.

And of course it works across all your devices, including they have a desktop Linux app and they're always improving the software too. They've really made it simpler to get signed in. They added fantastic improvements for enterprises, always new things coming to Bitwarden. They added fantastic improvements for enterprises. Always new things coming to Bitwarden. So it just keeps on paying to be a Bitwarden customer.

It's an incredible deal. You can try it for free right now when you go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. And of course, if you're a business, I highly recommend that you have something like this in place. Probably one of my number one recommendations, really. I'd be shocked if I came into a place that wasn't using something like Bitwarden please don't let it be spreadsheets please don't let it be sticky notes under keyboards please send everybody to bitwarden.com slash linux and tell them they can migrate too if they have something but it's not good enough bitwarden.com slash migrate it's the best tooling out there to do this that's why we recommend it i'm so grateful that it's open source it's trusted

by our community and we use it for years now and just keep on spreading the love. So go try it, sign up, support the show. It all starts at bitwarden.com slash Linux. That's bitwarden.com slash Linux. Well, as you might imagine, when you throw a Brent in Berlin, there's all sorts of content. So I got a chance to sit down for like a brunch with Brent style conversation with both Frank and Jos. That'll come out in a few weeks. We will certainly tease that more. You can go to brunch.show to check out some previous ones if you haven't seen those yet. Also, we might just release some full length interviews in the extras feed in maybe a week or two.

So check out their extras dot show. And I also wanted to thank a bunch of folks who were just super kind to me. And I can't thank everyone. I met a ton of great people here. But I would say, Frank and Yos, thank you so much for inviting us to hang out here, basically in the office, even after hours, on the weekends, everything. Handing me your keys to the office, which is such a great thing. So thank you. Maria and Daphne were also so sweet to me and made sure I had everything I needed. And of course, provided tons of amazing conversations. The entire team at NextCloud,

who was here, we just had so much fun. They make me just not want to leave really. But a huge thanks to Marius who really made all this possible. He provided us with extra gear. I'm using tons of his gear here now. He's not even in town anymore. He needs to have this gear shipped to him. That's how dedicated he was to helping us out. Wow. Just amazing. And like providing hotels and all that stuff. So I just huge thank you to everyone at NextCloud and to everyone at JB who showed up for the meetup.

We'll chat a little bit more about that in office hours this week. So stay tuned to catch some audio from that and probably some stories too. And now it is time for the boost. So before we get to all of the boosts, if you send in a boost about Giraffe OS, obviously we didn't talk about Giraffe OS this week, but we're going to talk about it next week. I saved all of the boosts about that to next week.

And so you have more time to send one in. If you're thinking or have switched to Graphene OS, Drafene OS, send it in and we'll talk about it next week. We're collecting them all up. Your questions, your experience, etc. It's a big old boost bucket. Maybe or maybe

not. It depends on the audience. That's how this entire segment functions. Speaking of which sir sean of the algeny that's the best i got valley boosts in with one wanted to hear how you were all right okay all right you got me you got me in uh in respect of sir sean uh i'll give it a shot uh of the uhgonene Valley. Is that is that close? I mean, I'm going I say vote for it.

That's great. All right. 150,000, 650 sats. Yes, sir. Hey, rich lobster. Keep up the Linuxy nerdness and drop the least significant digit for the zip code to get the location. So you got to drop, I think, what, the zero there to get 150650? Oh, nope. Drop the zero, Chris.

Drop the zero. He just said it. You know, I really love this. The zip code boost is one of my favorite things recently, because if you can imagine somebody who's been doing this for nearly 16 years, you get to a point where you really want to start kind of actualizing the listeners. Right. Because what's your motivation after 16 years of doing this and understanding where people are and putting names to locations? It makes us feel just that much closer. It does.

It's really nice. It connects us to the audience in a way that is really validating and also kind of fulfilling and kind of, I don't know, actualizing is the only word I can think of. You go from this kind of nebulous number to a real person who lives in an area where they've got planet fitnesses and they've got walmarts yeah like we know you're out there but now we we know you're out there yeah it that's the most interesting thing about the boost segment i have to tell you okay we were missing an e i think that's allegheny or something something closer to that thank you

thank you thank you so there is no planet fitness there. That's a bummer because if you're a hashtag van lifer, it's great for showers. Oh, no? Turn. Yeah, you're right. You're right. All right. Boost onward. Yes, thank you. And moving right along, Sir Lurks-a-Lot comes in with 97,630 sets. I hoard that which your kind covet.

He says, happy belated 500. Well, thank you, Lurks. I hoard that which your kind covet. This is happy belated 500. Well, thank you, Lurks. I appreciate that. He says, I think TechSnap was the first JB show I found maybe seven or eight years ago with Chris and Alan. It was a great time to enter JB, really. Ah, yeah, man. We talked about Bitcoin back in the very early days. So that was really something, you you know and dropbox and all

these kinds of just different security issues he then goes on to say lurks a lot goes on to say i quickly found lass no no one ever fixed his what is what is that what is the triptych three of something i don't know but i have invited noah to join us at linux fest northwest so let's ask him you know somebody make a note. He says, he says, good shows have come and gone and, and she's come and gone.

Hey, Andrew's at the recent meetup. She's still out there. Indeed. Still listening. It says, I've been lurking a long time. I've loved all the great JB content.

Thanks so much. It's better than Star Trek. Whoa. I can't take that. I can't take that. He says, by he says by the way this was a follow-up late boost by the way my boost amount was my zip code did you look it up there Westpain computing uh Lake County Oregon ah what lurks a lot I'm sorry did we meet i hope so i hope we got to meet lurks a lot lurks we need to talk follow up lurks uh if if we did a beat up say at the end of april in olympia would you make it

would you make it lurks because we're thinking about it let us know marcel comes in with 74,656 sats i had a great time at the Berlin meetup. I'm boosting some sats back to say thanks for organizing the meetup and for all the stickers. It was great to meet some other listeners and, of course, to meet Brent. Thanks to Nextcloud for hosting as well. So I like that Brent came in second there. I didn't notice that. I know my place.

You must have been busy. You must have been busy. You must have been busy. No, that's the sign that there was enough people at the meetup that you must have been circling around and doing the thing that we inevitably do, which is we try to talk to everybody and it means we don't spend time with anyone particular. You know how it is. But actually what was brilliant about this meetup, Chris, that I think was a little unique is that here at the office, they've got this massive table with a bunch of benches around it. And so at most points, actually, it was just all of us sitting in on the same discussion and getting like seven different perspectives all at the same time. It was brilliant. And I didn't plan that.

I just used whatever was here. But man, these listeners, they know how to meet. That is really cool. Wow. You should have filmed that. Marcel also came in this week with 86,167 sats. Hey, rich lobster! Marcel writes, I'm not sure if the international postal or zip codes really work. I remember hearing sometime before that when Chris looked one up, it was still in the U.S. and it was somewhere in the States.

But I'm curious. Can you find me based on this boost? Canadian codes also don't work because they have letters and are six digits, which is, to be honest, a lot of sats. Yeah, fair. That's fair. Yeah, I understand, Marcel. I understand. He goes on to write, It's not because the rest of the world is afraid of sats. Anyways, looking forward to meeting Brent and the other listeners tomorrow.

Oh, we should have reversed these boosts looking back at it. Yeah, that would have maybe made sense. It's fine. It's fine. Marcel, it is great to hear you. You know what? A meetup report via a boost might be my favorite thing ever. That's great. So is Marcel in live in Germany?

I see there's a German postal code Augsburg, but I don't know if that's right. Maybe Brent knows. Well, Brent on the scene. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It turns out that Marcel traveled the furthest. Well, other than me, we'll just scratch me for now. Traveled the furthest to get to the Berlin meetup. They do live in, well, Germany at least, but a five hour train ride away. Wow, okay. I think you did get it right, but they're also Canadian. So I was wearing a Waterloo, University of Waterloo shirt on, and I was like, hey, team. Two Canadians in Berlin.

How about that? Marcel, that's so perfect. Thank you for taking the time to travel that far. It really matters to us. These booths are as close as it gets, and the only thing better is in-person meetups do you know what i mean right it's like the boost is the closest thing we have from a technology standpoint to really have that connection with you but when you boost and you meet us in person

i can't even imagine i mean and then it makes all the future boosts like that much better yes you know you've got that image now but also i mean you guys know the numbers we're dealing with here. You guys know what we're talking about. We're talking about 0.9% of the audience that ever gets to do this. I mean, it is remarkable. And even when it comes to boosts, we're talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the audience that gets to actually boost in and does actually boost in and it's our boost buddies it's incredible and we really appreciate it and you know these meetups and these boosts they sustain us in a way you know when we're rounding

16 years that nothing nothing else would not a dollar amount not a download figure it's uh it's really awesome duke silver boosts in with 50 000 sets and this year this year is a thank you boost because duke silver writes i wanted to boost to thank cg bass player for all the assistance and training on contributing to jb's github and yeah just mad props to cg for being a wonderful ambassador and caretaker over at our website repo. Yeah, and both Duke and CG are also fantastic members of our Matrix community.

I saw Duke and other members in the Matrix community celebrating this boost when it went through. Yeah, I have to third that one. CG-based player has really taken the reins since I've been busy, I guess, in the last few weeks traveling all over the place. And so I just want to say massive thank you. I saw tons of messages in our website matrix room, and it was always CG Baseplayer trying to help someone out. So huge thank you. You know, thank you, CG. It takes just a few

members of the community who step up that makes something better for thousands of listeners really appreciate it you know what chris i i think i'm gonna promote cg base player in our github yeah i think we're gonna let's do it i'm gonna give him extra privileges he's been such an awesome member it it so shall be deemed in episode 503 of the Unplugged program. CG gets an upgrade. No going back now. Lucas Burlingham boosts in with 28,310 Satoshis. Coming in hot with the boost. Been listening since around episode 300 and love the show.

Just wanted to get in on the whole zip code thing and show my appreciation. Can't wait to see where y'all are in another 500 episodes. Thank you, Lucas. Isn't that sweet? Did you already look it up, Wes? Doing it now, doing it now. I'm surprised. I thought, you know, a lot of times I see you over there.

I do. Yeah. You preload them. You know, he's been paying attention is odd. I know. Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Awesome. I have a sense that North Carolina is hot right now.

I've traveled the world. Well, that's not true. But I've definitely traveled the country. That's a part of the world. They feel hot. They feel hot, you know? Yarg32 comes in with... More of a Yarg64 kind of guy I don't really think there's very many Yarg32 anymore but I guess if you want to spend your time on it they came in with

a 16,384 Satoshis here's a bump for the post 500 slump I got these sats by trading CureCoin that I was rewarded by doing. What? Folding at home, of course. Okay.

And of course, I did it on Linux. Cheers from NorCal Bay Area, and keep up the good work. Well, let's look up CureCoin. Okay, so CureCoin is currently worth a penny. Ooh, that's rough, man. That's more than Criscoin. Yeah, would it, though? Actually, if I launched Criscoin, it'd be based on Satoshi.

I mean, look at this. It got up to 30 cents. It got up to 30 cents. It's a protein research-based proof of work. Is it now? Yeah. Your computer does the research. You get the coins.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Start folding now. Is it an ERC-20 token? Let's find out how it works. So there's this, you know, for those who don't care about crypto, there's this thing called Ethereum. And they have this thing called an ERC-20 token,

which you can probably already guess by my whole uh tone here it lets you just spin up your own random crap coin just just on the ethereum network and you can just make a coin and so many of the bogus crypto coins that are out there are just basic simple erc20 tokens that like people like copy a github repo they like fork a github repo they like rename it and and they just spin it up on ethereum so i don't know if uh cure coin is one of those it's not apparently it's been around since like 2014 okay so okay so it's definitely legit then uh too bad it's only at 11 cents right now if you look at the price chart it's yeah it doesn't look like it's doing so good that's not not great i say good move on uh the boosters part sell that

sob into sats i think that was the way to go yard i think you made a good move i thought it was yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah dark year elite boosts in with 5,240 cents. Boost! Just wanted to boost in since it's a long time ago. To make this thing exciting, this is my zip code. Ah! Or more precisely, it is in my language translated to English, either postcode or post number. What country and what city do I live in?

Best to you all. Enjoy listening every day to many podcasts from JB and to 2.5 admins. 5240. All right. When I search for 5240 on Google Maps, I get a pizza place. I'm getting Denmark?

What? I'm guessing Denmark. How did I get a pizza place? In Denmark getting Denmark? What? I'm guessing Denmark. How did I get a pizza place? In Denmark. I think you might just be hungry. Yeah, that could be. It does know me, you know. You know, Google knows me.

All right, so Denmark. Let us know if we got it right. Yeah, thank you, Dark Year. Yeah, appreciate the boost. If we're saying that right. All right, well, Woodcarver boosted in with $20,500. Woodcarver boosted in with 20,500 cents. My next cloud install has been running for six years and has gradually replaced more and more cloud services

while teaching me systems administration in a friendly way. Truly a remarkable open source project. Wow, Woodcarver, that is fantastic to hear. Six years of uptime is serious. Doing better than Chris. No, that is fantastic to hear. Six years of uptime is serious. Doing better than Chris. No, wait. Whoa. Whoa.

Shade Throne. I had a couple of days where my SQLite installation goes sideways. Yeah, we're going to talk about that in the Graphene OS update, which is coming up. But what I have really enjoyed about having Nextcloud deployed is it's created like this base system. Collaboration hub? No, no. Actually, don't use it for any of that. Not yet.

Not yet, not yet. Maybe one day. But it has created this platform which I can tie a whole bunch of different stuff to, like over WebDAV or over apis via apps that can sync and do different stuff and like that is really useful like map location and phone tracking and contact information and email and calendar having all of that sync through a system that is kind of like just the perfect version for me because i get a little bit of web view stuff if i it, I can sync it to clients and there's lots of nice mobile apps like for the cookbook stuff that has been really nice. So for me,

next cloud has kind of been like this platform. I describe it of which I have built a lot of self-hosted other infrastructure on top of. So I'm glad to hear it's worked really well for you. Woodcarver. Chris, how many next cloud servers do you have access to right now? Like concurrently?

You bastard. I think it's at least, why would you do that? I don't know. It have access to right now, like concurrently? You bastard. I think it's at least... Why would you do that? I don't know. It's a fun little game, isn't it? You make me sound like a maniac, you know? No, no, no, no. Just proficient.

Maybe. Well, on the daily, three. But if I think about it, probably more than that. The tuxes, right? Oh, four. Okay, there's the four. Okay, four. There's four.

But I don't really use tuxes on the daily but we do have a fourth deployment we have one on premise here at the studio we have one up in the cloud which we all use as a team to share like resources for editing and clips and all that kind of stuff and then i personally have one that i use with the wife and i think my because i don't know if you guys know this, I'm an Android user now. I sync all my Android phones. I saw your bumper sticker when I got here. Yeah, I use Android. And I'm an iOS convert.

And I replace the cloud with NextCloud. I'm trying to just make sure I hit all the key points. Yeah. But I still feel like a NextCloud noob. I have to be honest with you. I really do this is the way it goes anonymous boosts in with

18,438 cents there's coffee in that nebula the one time I'm on vacation there's a meetup in my hometown I can't believe it. Have fun in Berlin, Brent. Greetings from South Africa.

Yeah, so anonymous. They just missed you. That's Brent's fault. And I would probably completely and entirely blame Brent for that. And if you meant to have a username on there and you want to boost in and let us know who you are, let us know. But if you forgot or it didn't work out, that's probably also Brent's fault. So that's something we're working out. Scientifically, we think we can prove that. Yeah. Multiple realities and such. I will say, you know, I'm sure this isn't the only one we're going to get. I will say in the future, sorry to everyone who is just hearing this episode

and the previous one and is like, Brent's in Berlin, but it's already happened and you've totally missed me. It would have been great to meet you, but next time. We'll get you next time. Yeah, that'll happen real soon, so don't worry about it. Opie1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. And before we get into this, guys, you ever feel like sometimes you're just along for the ride and you realize the audience has their own little joke that they're sharing with themselves? Well, Opie shines a light on that and just says, I just wanted to let that the booster known as Internet Explorer. I got your joke, though. It would have been funnier if you had waited a few more episodes what are they talking about what are they talking about you have any idea you don't do something

about the episode number something also what did i unleash on chris i feel like i'm dr frankenstein i've created a monster and i've lost control of it. He's referring, of course, to the fact that he's the one that started the Enterprise boost. And 4,000 sats ain't even close. Not even sneezing distance to get me to play that boost. So I don't mind it if somebody boosts in the amount. What amount did we set? I don't know. They got to tell me.

It's a lot, though. I know I'm going to know it's the right amount because you're going to be like, holy s**t, somebody actually spent that amount. Well, we're going to be on the top charts for a bit. Low palm boosts in with 3,006 sats. Chris might want to check out Latestream.io to continuously replicate a SQLite database instead of switching away from SQLite. Hmm. You know, I was actually thinking about switching away from SQLite after the show, and I actually already have a MariahDB instance running on my Odroid, but I have not moved Nextcloud

over yet. And then this boost comes in, and it just upsets the whole thing. Lightstream is the standalone disaster recovery tool for SQLite. It runs as a background process and safely replicates changes incrementally to another file or to S3. That does sound nice. LullPalm kept boosting in. They also have a page on alternatives,

Lightstream.io, lightstream.io slash alternatives. That was another 1,002 sets and another 1,003. I'm setting up NextCloud for it, and I might just do SQLite with some backup strategy. It's so simple. It is simple, but I'm not sure what other advantage it has. It doesn't seem to have the performance advantage. What I have learned, and I talked about this in Self-Hosted recently, is it seems perhaps the upstream developers are not developing with SQLite in mind 100% of the time.

I say this diplomatically and with much love and respect, but I had an issue during my last NextCloud update where my SQLite database broke and we had to run a SQLite repair. And when you trace the issue, it seems that perhaps there was a comment or something added to the database that sqlite just simply doesn't support and upstream wasn't really checking for that because they just kind of tell you not to use sqlite in a whole bunch of different ways

and so they just kind of published the first update assuming everybody wasn't on sqlite or they just never checked for it. And they will check for it in the future, but it made me realize that the Nextcloud developers themselves aren't using SQLite. And if you want to use it in production, you probably want to use it as close to what the actual developers are targeting as possible. And I think MariaDB is probably it. Although I love this lightstream.io. It looks really nice. And if you do have to use SQLite, it seems like a pretty solid way to use it safely.

But if you're going to use Nextcloud in a serious production environment, I think I have to recommend you use something besides SQLite, even with Lightstream.io. You know, like Postgres. Yeah, or Postgres, right? Postgres seems really nice and solid. That was just me trying to rib you for not using it.

MariaDB is no good to you? What? MariaDB is no good? No, it's fine. It's fine. It's good. I'll just turn it down. I'll turn it off.

It's just a container. It's fine. The Golden Dragon comes in with a row of ducks. It's disheartening to hear that Docker is doing this to open source projects, but I suppose they have to make money somehow. Well, we have a little update. Indeed, we do. Golden update. Indeed we do. Golden Drake and worry no more.

Docker has kind of just about faced on everything, haven't they? We're reversing course, they write. Yeah. And so I think they're just going to maybe take the lesson on this one, if you will. It's hard not to come out and just say well you could have avoided the whole thing right but um they could have avoided the whole thing uh at this point and i feel like the damage is done however it is really great to see that they won't be putting the hammer down

on open source projects that so many of us depend but i think what golden dragon was relaying and i agree with is this is a warning shot and perhaps we take this as our opportunity to move on before it is absolutely dire 412 linux comes in with 4,000 96 cents greetings gentlemen i wanted to boost in because episode 502 was a banger. Thank you. Thank you for boosting in when you think we have a good episode. Love that. That is really appreciated in the value for value model. He says, I really enjoyed the deep dive into the topic.

I didn't feel like the boost overshadowed the main topic. That's always something we're looking at 2, 4, 12. You know, we also chapter marker everything. But when we incorporate the boost, we end up talking about stuff we'd never expected so for us it's sometimes the most fun we get to have during the episode is just sort of this surprise we're going to talk about this moment so sometimes the boosts do go on for a bit but it's just because we're really enjoying them he writes i appreciate the overview inland followed up with a deeper dive in Linux Unplugged. Keep up the good work.

Also, welcome to all the new listeners. Do yourself a favor and become a member. The member feed is awesome. Aw, 412. 412. And then I wanted to pull forward Pengu's boost. We have a 2,000 sat limit to get on the show, but I wanted to pull this one forward. So we read them all.

And Pengu98 boosted it with some baby ducks awesome show guys keep it coming it's insanely technical that's when i love it i love the next challenge now i i take that boost seriously i think we do our best when we go really technical and i'd like to know the audience's opinion on this uh because as podcasters and content creators, we're always debating, should we be creating content for newbies and people who don't quite understand this, or should we go as deep as we possibly can and just assume people will fill it in? Is there something in between?

That's always something we'd like your opinion on, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And of course, I'd like your take in the boost. But Pingu likes it. He says, when it's technical, I love it. I love the next challenge. I've been trying to install Nix on my pine rock pro 64 for a while now booting arm is always a challenge maybe one day i'll get it working get an odroid pingu the odroid you are just such a changed man

i know i know i i mean i had so many pies and was just thinking this. I'm not even S-ing you. The other day, Friday, I updated all of my stuff on my Odroid. Like, you know, I updated Nix. I updated all the containers. I got all the different apps. Update day. It was, home assistant got done on the home assistant yellow. Just got it all. Just checked all the boxes. It felt so good, Wes.

And when I was done with it all, the thing that I really appreciated is the Odroid is so much faster at that stuff. All that kind of like right into the file system, reboot, come back up. Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 5 needs to have a totally new disk IO or I'm not even looking back. Odroid all the way. If you'd like to send a boost into the show, there's a couple of different paths. My friend, you're standing at a fork in the road.

You can take the path of the new podcasting standards, transcripts, chapters, and much, much more, like boosts. And you can get a whole new podcasting app at newpodcastapps.com. Things like Podverse, which are GPL, cross-platform, web, Android, web, Android, iOS,

or Fountain, which streams you sats while you listen. And of course, Castomatic on iOS and many more. A brand new journey awaits at newpodcastapps.com.

But, young Padawan, if you're not quite ready, I understand. Perhaps you love your damn podcast app. I do get it. You can boost into the show without switching

podcast apps just go to get albie.com get albie that lets you send boosts on the web top that off either with the built-in moon pay system or you know i don't know maybe our long term we got some sats and then head over to the podcast index we got linked in the show notes but you can look for linux unplugged on the podcast index and send a boost into the show via their website. Once you have Albi topped off, you go over there. There's just like an embedded thing to boost right there.

No podcast app switcheroo required. So nice. I love it. And Albi is good software with a good team, great open source at getalbi.com. I'm going to make that my pick this week.

Getalbi.com. Go check it out. That's a great software i'm biased isn't it i'm biased i talked to the team and they really impressed me and then i went and installed it and i've been playing around with it i've i've watched them when we started doing boost there was no albie and then like three four months into us doing boost on the show this thing called albie came along and now a year into us taking boost on the show i'm like you gotta get this thing called Albi.

It's a total game changer. And it really is fantastic to see it go. And you know, it's free software. They're implementing new standards. There's so many cool things going on right now. I mean, it just makes it such a nice little onboarding sort of try things out,

get your feet wet, play. Yeah. A friend of mine, I won't say their name, but a friend of mine recently said, there's just nothing going on, like nothing really being developed.

Everything's just kind of in hibernation right now. And I said, well, then you're not paying attention to Albie and the Lightning ecosystem because it is blowing up right now. Get Albie.com. Also, our friends over at Podverse, which is a GPL podcasting 2.0 app that I think is fantastic. They're looking for some sharp Android developers to help contribute to their community, help them get a good Kotlin development environment going, and help them understand and wrap their heads around that because, you know, they focus a lot on iOS because they're iOS developers,

but they really want to make the Android app great. So the Podverse team is looking for a little bit of help, and if you're a little Kotlin familiar, maybe go talk to them. We'll put a link to the Podverse GitHub page in the show notes too. And of course, links to everything we talked about today.

Those are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 503. Well, Brentley, I guess we don't really know if you're going to end up spending another week in Berlin. You may be in Berlin for the next episode or you may be home.

We don't know at this point. Well, one of the factors is there's a transportation strike here starting tomorrow, which is, of course, exactly the day I'm supposed to be leaving. So we're going to find out next week. And I think it's an office hours week, too. So which means we got to figure out maybe you'll be in Berlin for Tuesday's show.

Maybe you won't. If you do have to change your flight, maybe just change it to Seattle. Oh, Wes, don't tempt me like that that might be easier you know what because c-tac is a nice big international airport could just make things smoother brent you know there's a couch here with your name on it you know alex did already tempt me he beat you to it he did tell me that of course he did and i i understand it's a shorter flight too but Alex doesn't have Levi yeah that is very true

that is very true I know hey don't throw shade on Archie Archie's great Archie's great but you don't see Archie on a t-shirt you know what I'm saying

alright we'll be live next week Brent may be home he may be in North Carolina he may be in Berlin but we will be live over at jupiter.tube

Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, if you want more show, go to linuxactionnews.com. We break down some of the core features of NextCloud Hub 4 and a lot more going on in the world of Linux and open source. And that's probably the best way to get more Wes Payne directly in your ear balls. LinuxActionNews.com. And of course, what else? What else do we have to mention at this point? The Mumble Room. Let's talk about the Mumble Room. Mumble Room's great. That's great. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash mumble. And Matrix. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash matrix.

I don't know. It's a website. There's stuff over there. Do I have to explain it all every time? Feels exhausting. I think you get it. That is kind of your job. Alright. Well, see you back here next Sunday. Thank you.