LINUX Unplugged - 504: It's a Trap!

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Why using the iPhone makes it harder to run Linux; Chris follows up on his four-month-long challenge to ditch iOS for GrapheneOS. Plus, Brent's extended stay in Berlin has led to some developments you won't want to miss.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, we've got a roundup of some Drafting OS challenges and my journey to get away from iOS and the Apple ecosystem and how I think it particularly penalizes desktop Linux users.

Then we'll find out what Brent's been up to with his extra week in Berlin because adventures are a plenty when Brent's in town and he has lots to share. And then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some feedback, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by Wirecard, the best VPN technology in the biz. A flat network you'll have set up in minutes regardless of your device. We love it. It'll change your networking game. I have no inbound firewall ports on any of my networks, thanks tail scale game changer crucial to how i use graphing os as well so go say good morning try it out for 20 devices tailscale.com and if you get a chance maybe tell them the unplugged program sent you let them know give them a little hot tip

and before we go any further let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug hello mumble room hello hello Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chase. Hello. Hey. Hello. That's a really nice showing this week. Hello, everybody. Join us live in the Mumble Room as we do this here show on a Sunday. And Brent, it's like the evening where you're at right now. That doesn't seem to be the Canadian Rockies.

No. In fact, it looks like you're in some sort of rad geek dwelling right now. So, listeners, let me paint a picture for you. Brent's in, like, my dream of a basement, maybe, because there's cool piping and plumbing behind him and shelves that have, like, toolboxes and different kinds of gadgets on them. And, I mean, it just looks like a geek bunker that you're in this week. Where are you, Brent? I think geek bunker that you're in this week. Where are you, Brent? I think geek bunker is pretty accurate. I figured, you know, having done the last two shows at NextCloud, I thought I

should do something a little bit more Berlin, right? So listener Kenji invited me to a NixOS meetup here last week, which I completely missed because we were recording office hours actually, and I got lost on the train as well. You know how it goes. But I got an amazing tour of this place called Seabase, which is, well, it depends which answer you want. But from what I understand, it's a underground hackerspace, but it is also a crashed space station that they're trying to repair. And so I thought Kenji could give us a bit more information about it because he's occasionally a member here. The Seabase is the reconstructed entrance

to the crashed space station here in Berlin. Some people might know the antenna of the space station. It's called the Berliner Fernsehturm. And hackers meet here and try to reconstruct it and get together and share information. And there's a lot of talks and a lot of gatherings here.

And we have a lot of tools also, which can be shared by everybody. Wow. A space station in Berlin? Man, we have an underground city in Seattle, but we don't have a space. We have the Space Needle, It's a needle, but... Not a space station. You just get expensive food up there, not hacker tools.

What's this place like? Is it like a big club? Is it like a big garage? Paint a picture for us. I got a tour earlier in the week, and I got another tour today, because every time you go through it, you see new things. It's the kind of space where every single square inch of the ceiling and the walls and everything is like an art installation or gadgets or

half-broken computers and flashy lights. And there are certain stations where you have to get your hand scanned just in case you have any alien implants. And so I actually had one on the way in and they didn't like that too much, but they were able to isolate it. So I was allowed in, thank goodness. But it's just a really cool place. Kenji participates in the local NixOS meetup that happens here every Tuesday. So if you're local and you're interested in that, I would say definitely come check it out. What's really fun this week is that I have three listeners here joining me. I have Pavel who's joining me and there's Kenji, of course, who was just giving us an introduction and Alex who's joining us. They were all at some of the meetups and I thought I

would invite them to come join. What's really fun is that for two of them, I'm showing them underground Berlin places and their locals. So, you know, that's pretty fun. Brent, you got yourself moved right in, don't you? Just made yourself comfortable. Good for you. That sounds like, that Seabase place sounds like an awesome location to have a NixOS meetup. Holy crap, that's so great. Well, I know you have some

tales and stories to share with us. So we're going to get to those a little bit later in the show after we talk a little Giraffine OS. There is much to share in that dimension. Let me tell you, it has been a long four months. But before we go there, I want to let everybody know that next Sunday, we're going to do a pre-record. We will be off next Sunday and we'll be pre-recording on Wednesday before self-hosted on the live stream. So if you normally join us, mumble room or others, if you normally join us Sunday live,

why not show up Wednesday? We'll have the time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And you can hang out with us there and we'll have a special pre-recording, which is going to be nice. We need your help. I mean, special pre-recording which is going to be nice we need your help i mean those pre-records who knows yeah we actually totally already know what we're going to talk about and it's a project that we have been working on kind of low-key behind the scenes for a few weeks because it's something we need to test out for a while before we share and i feel like we've done our due diligence there we still have more work

to do but by the timing of everything we should have quite an episode for you. And then, of course, we'll release like normal. Members will get a little early like they always do, but we'll just release like normal. You don't have to worry about it. And we also have some meetups. We'll try to get through these pretty quick, but we have a Raleigh meetup scheduled for Saturday, April 8th, 3 p.m. local time with Brent and Alex, because Brent is going to be traveling from Berlin to Raleigh to keep the meetup party train rolling. It looks like I figured why not go from one meetup to the next to the next? I mean, that's how this month is going so far. So why not keep that train going?

Yeah, this is this is going to be a great time because we have a really good Raleigh crew. time because we have a really good Raleigh crew. The JB Colony in Raleigh is strong and details are at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting for the Raleigh Pizza Party. And the one last little meetup and again, details at meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Sorry to be repetitive, but I just want to let everybody know we're also going to have a meetup at the end of the month of April in Olympia. So come join us if you're in the Pacific Northwest, Olympia, Washington. We haven't picked the venue yet, but we already have people that have signed up,

so we know it's going to be a good party. It's going to be in Olympia. It's going to be on Saturday, April 29th. Normally when LinuxFest traditionally would have been going on, we thought, let's get together. We can still do something Linux-y in the Pacific Northwest. We will indeed. We'll make it a Linux-y Saturday. So I'll have all that up there.

And then, while we get into talking about my switch to Draftian OS, I want to mention that the Podverse team, who creates the podcasting 2.0 open source cross-platform GPL podcasting app, GPL podcasting app, Podverse is looking for a Kotlin wizard to help them just build a sane Kotlin environment and publish a Kotlin dependency and kind of get all that sorted out. As most of the development team are iOS users, so they would like some Android expertise to help get them going in the right direction.

Not talking about a long-term commitment, but the open source project is making a call out to the community and we'll have some details linked in the show notes. Yeah. Kind of interesting. They've got a dependency on something that ultimately relies on a Kotlin project.

And, uh, you kind of want to be able to update it themselves to solve some issues in, in pod verse itself, but none of them are calling experts and it could make the Android experience better for tens of thousands of users. If you have a little bit of time to help them get started. Big deal.

Yeah. No big deal. Podverse it's no big deal. Podverse is what I've been using on my Pixel 7 running Graphing OS. I've been running this now for about 126 days. It was in episode 486 around the beginning of November, I think, or the end of November, November 27th, that I made the switch. And I said I'd try it for 30 days. And then that stuck. And then I said I'd try it until the end of January. And that stuck.

And I kept giving myself these windows. It's April now, Chris. It's April. And I've gotten a lot of questions about how it's going. So I want to talk about the ugly, the bad, and the good. And then I want to talk about how, from where I'm sitting now, four months into this, I can see the insidious problem that iOS creates for Linux adoption. And I want to kind of raise the red flag about a technical debt that you might be building today. So let's talk about, though, the bad things about switching away from iOS and Giraffian OS.

And Wes, I know you're rocking it over there as well. Yes, I am. And Brent, of course, is a longtime Lineage user, so he never really got sucked into the iOS vortex. Wes, I think maybe felt the call of the forbidden fruit. Well, actually, I started my smartphone adventures way back when on an iPhone. So it's been several generations since I used one actively,

but I certainly appreciate the platform. And I support my father who has an iPad, and I use Mac OS at work. So there's a lot of adjacent Apple. So yeah, I definitely feel the pull. I see the things that I'm like, oh, that is really nice, but I resist. Yeah, AirPlay is so much better than Chromecast.

It just is. Yeah, I recognize that. Yeah, it's local. And with AirPlay 2, much better than Chromecast. It just is. Yeah, I recognize that. Yeah. It's local, and with AirPlay 2, you automatically get control of media devices that also support AirPlay surfaced on your lock screen and on the watch, which is really nice. And there's just nothing comparable like that on Android, really. Chromecast is nice, but it's not comparable.

And so I'd say, as far as the ugly goes about switching, this is not going to shock anybody when things break that you self-host it's kind of sometimes dramatic results when it's your mobile device and so I had to self-host my own cloud infrastructure when I moved over to graphing because I wanted to keep I wanted to maximize the privacy result and I had an xCloud outage a few weeks ago that was a real eye-opener. It seems like maybe an upstream bug or some script or something kind of ate my SQLite database. I shouldn't have been using SQLite. They tell me that. There's all kinds of error messages, but I kept using it because that's what it shipped with by default. And during an upgrade, my next cloud

instance went down. We were able to fix it relatively easily, thanks to Wes's help. You know, there was even like a repair command that basically sussed it out and figured out what was wrong. So it's not like it took a huge effort, and it wasn't like I was on the verge of losing data or anything like that. But it meant for 12 hours, I didn't have phone syncing and location stuff and that kind of thing. And that was a bit of a pain in the butt. Right. And there's no, you know, it sucks when a third party service goes down. You have no control over it. You can't do anything. But the upside is you can't do anything, right? You just say like, well, I won't use that for now. I can't. But there are some sysadmins out there getting

paged right now who will be fixing it. Right. And later it'll be fixed. Meanwhile, I'm like, geez, well, I know. See, I'm going to be doing this and I got to do this with the kids and I got this thing I got to go take care of. So I think I could probably get to this tomorrow night, you know, and then so i go all day without sinking in services so that was definitely had one of those outages i was like this hurts more than i thought it would hurt but recovered and there hasn't been any problems since then uh so that was the ugly for me the bad was um i do miss having a good watch this sounds sort of like a real first world problem but when you get used to a decent watch,

I know you pebble users out there know what I'm talking about. When you get a good watch that works for you, it's really hard to try this stuff. And the thing that they nail here is media playback and volume control on the phone. So if you just like me, like to sometimes like you're doing some dishes or something and you just put the phone down and you just play a podcast because it's got good enough

speakers these days. So nice to be able to you just put the phone down and you just play a podcast because it's got good enough speakers these days. So nice to be able to pause that with the phone or clear notifications. Right. Just right there. There's no there's no watch combo that works with Android that appeals to me. That's just what it is. And this is where the Apple ecosystem kind of kind of starts to chip away. You know, this is one of the things you have to push against.

It starts kind of like making you rethink this stuff also android's performance has come a long way still not as good as ios and the if you choose to use the gesture mode which you don't have to it's optional but if you choose to use like the back gesture and the swipe up gesture so clunky compared to the iphone and there are times where i get the swipe up gesture just doesn't work and then you add the fact that my case has a bit of a lip down there, makes it even worse. That doesn't help.

I was going to say, I kind of really like the gestures. Yeah, overall, I like them. I'm just saying, if you come from a better implementation, they're really hokey. The fact that the app often can't tell if you're trying to swipe up to get the side hamburger menu or swipe to go back and you have to do these special kinds of swipes. I do think a lot of those are apps that have not updated for the gesture UI.

I was going to say, I've been surprised how many do support it. There are some though. And if you use them a lot, I'm looking at you telegram in particular that you're going to be like, okay, well this is, this is more painful than it needs to be.

Um, cameras, leggy performance stinks in the camera app. Even when I use the Google app. But I've also gotten more compliments on my Pixel 7 photos than I've gotten for a couple of years from an iPhone. Like people are really like, wow, that's a great photo. I get that a lot now. Maybe it's the magic that they do afterwards.

Like you yesterday got an incredible shot, like actually incredible to get with a smartphone. Yeah. I mean, the moon was out on a nice blue sky day and just do that 30X zoom. So I was like, all right, I got to go see if I can do this too. Because Westpain coming in with like an actual legit shot of the moon in the middle of the day on a smartphone that is actually usable. So I went to see if I could get the same image. And I'm actually pretty happy with the results it's it really does some post-processing that is impressive it is hard as hell to zoom in 30x on a tiny dot in the sky but it puts this like mini map overview i love that so smart it's so smart so like it like if you give it another

couple of years i think they're going to get there with the performance and features and performance are going to meet so if you're patient i feel the, the lagginess I have with the camera app is got to eventually go away. It's got to, right. And I'd say it kind of depends on what you do. So like for like kids stuff, action shots, that's going to be a lot harder if you're like me and you're just taking pictures of like the forest. Yeah. Yeah. Not so bad. Yeah, totally. So this is just the bad stuff, right? I do have good stuff. Hit and miss battery life. I've had to reboot sometime. And then because I'm using Graphene OS specifically, no tap to pay features.

Yep. I missed that one. Yeah. Although I don't really like Google's implementation anyways. But so I don't I'm not like dying here. But there are times and I think a summer comes and it's short season. I'm going to want that even more. Right.

And it would be nice since Graphphing os is limited to pixels it'd be nice if there were smaller even smaller pixels like iphone se size for friends and family we can hope so here's the good it feels really good to be private like i have a sense of relief i wasn't expecting using this phone you know i'm not getting tracked by push notifications i'm not getting tracked by google services i'm not getting tracked by logging into icloud there's just something kind of right about that like that's how the world should be and we've had we've developed some tooling that we'll talk about or we're using some tooling that we'll talk about in a future episode to keep this even more secure and private but i also enjoy like the extra freedom you get from android

you know as a geek i really love the fact that I can have multiple app stores, but F droid on this thing, love F droid. That's been, it honestly, it kind of reminds me a little bit of like what, what it's like to be running Nick. So S I mean,

totally different, right? I mean, this is Android and all those things, but it's like, I've got this minimal clean feeling system, but then I've got, I've still got the play store,

which maybe you could, it's like flat hub or something, you know, like I can dip in there when I need to, but I don't need to that often. Or it's the apps that I've already made compromises on and just accept that I need because, you know. Yeah. Yeah, that's very much, yeah, it's like an immutable OS and I'm going to different places and loading sometimes more cutting edge apps from some places and stuff like that too.

So there's definitely some, this is an old meme, but there's definitely some apps that are just better on iOS. That is still true today. But man, the apps that matter, they're better on Android by a mile. And I think that's just indisputable at this point. Tailscale, 24-7 connected. I sync everything. Everything I talk to my NextCloud instance, all my data syncing is done over Tailscale 24-7. My wife has to relaunch Tailscale on her phone a couple times a day to keep it connected because iOS just proactively kills stuff in the background, right? And so she wants it persistently. She has to relaunch it. Now, I have a little hack for that, and I recommend this.

You can set up a shortcut on iOS to execute something without user interaction when they plug in the phone. So I set Tailscale to launch every time she plugs in her phone or puts it on the charger. It launches Tailscale in the background, keeps her connected. So that's a little iOS trick that I learned. NextCloud, way better on Android. Way better on Android syncing, way better app, way better integration. NextCloud is better on Android. Image, I-M-M-I-C-H, which is my Google Photos replacement.

Well, they just came out. They just came out with iOS background uploading. I don't have any experience with it. But it is awesome on Android. I've been able to migrate away from Google Photos thanks to Image. And it is actually broken for me on Graphing OS. It has been for weeks to view the gallery on the phone, but the background daemon is still running,

uploading pictures. Absolutely working. The web UI works just fine. And I can just use like the open source gallery app to view my local photos. It's fine. I just can't use the Image app right now on Graphing OS to view the local photos.

It's been like that for weeks. I don't know why, but it's uploading the web ui just keeps getting better and better and the search keeps getting better so this for me these apps are some of the most quintessential mobile apps that i use and so the fact that they're better on android is a big win um and then you combine kde connect you buy you combine kde connect and you start to get to that kind of ecosystem feeling where i can share my clipboard my internet connection you know you know everybody knows about kde connect at this point we talked about it years ago too but i haven't really got to play around with it for a while no and i have it set up and god bless him man you can have it connect.

You can have it configured for multiple computers with multiple different phones. It works so good. So I can have it. I can have, I have Katie connect on a system here at the studio and I've connect Katie connect on my think pad at home. And it's so nice.

I'm working on something on here. I can just send it to the computer and keep working on it. Katie connect is fantastic software. I know everybody in the community probably already knows about it, but I wanted to give them a shout out because they really sealed the deal for me on kind of making my own ecosystem. And what I've been able to build with a combination of NextCloud and KDE Connect and Tailscale is a solid replacement for all of the things iCloud offered me, except for iMessage. So I still haven't been able to avoid that, but that is what it is. But I, you know, I had that scare with the outage. I've had some problems with image. Sometimes I have to reboot the phone to make the battery last all day. These are the downsides. But the upsides are that I was able to break free

with the exception of iMessage. But I think, you know, if I really, really wanted to, these are the downsides but the upsides are that i was able to break free with this with the exception of iMessage but i think you know if i really really wanted to i could go through the process of deregistering my iMessage account and converting friends and family over to text message just i don't really you know i don't really want to but totally could and it's been really uh overall a pretty great experience i think i'm at the point now where if I didn't have an iPhone already, I would not feel compelled to get one. Because I spent years in that iPhone ecosystem, though, I have technical debt now that I have to pay off.

You've optimized around having that ecosystem around, right? All your home, your home pods, I mean. And I feel like it could be a barrier for Linux adoption for some people because it just doesn't, the iPhone doesn't really talk to Linux. It doesn't, there's not, you know, really the way you sync your Linux desktop to an iPhone

is you sync your Linux desktop to cloud services that also sync to your iPhone. Maybe they're your own, maybe they're somebody else's cloud services, but you don't really communicate directly. There is like a KDE Connect kind of thing for iPhone and there is a couple other options, but nothing like it is with Android. And when you combine NextCloud and KDE Connect, the workflow of getting things on and off the phone is so smooth and straightforward i could just do that for years just like i record a clip or i record a video you know i just save it move it to my next cloud folder it's so simple or i use tailscale send to just send that one file it's

like the workflow is solid now and i've replaced all the individual kind of functions that i had with the iphone and and icloud except you still have this whole kind of years worth of dependencies that you've built up and i had the realization like the sooner you get out of that the easier it is to break free of it or honestly if you go the brent route and just never really get sucked into it at all looking back at it i wish i could have like said you know my younger self don't do it don't don't don't spend the money don't do it because it it will be harder the deeper you go to get out and so i feel like i'm going to be trying to still dig my way out for at least another year or two because i've got ipads

i've got home pods and i kind of want to keep some of them for some things and i have to find where that line's at yep do you keep sort of them for some things, and I have to find where that line's at. Do you keep sort of trying to build fancier interfaces to go to, like, bridge with that ecosystem, or do you just abandon it entirely? Yeah, and, you know, some of those bridges can be brittle. Right, yep. Because, I mean, they can change things whenever they want. That's what Apple do.

Yeah. So, I wish I'd done it sooner, I guess, is my advice. Graphing OS itself has been really solid. I'm wondering what your experience has been.

I've been through lots of updates. Those have all been pretty good. Just today, I think I saw a message that an update failed to install update. So,

I'm going to give that another try and see what happens. But otherwise, yeah, it's been surprisingly smooth. It does take a little while to do the app optimization after updates. That's a little

annoying. So you've got to kind of be... If you think it'll be a quick reboot, well, don't do that if you might need your phone again in the next five minutes. Doesn't regular Android updates do that still too? Yeah. It just happens to have monthly updates or whatever. You're going to see it a lot more. Yeah.

That's one thing. you want to make sure. That's one thing is you want to make sure when you reboot, you got at least a good amount of battery and you want to have some time. And if you have like 400 apps installed like I do, I have like 320 apps installed. It takes a while to optimize all those. But the flip side of that is we get so many regular updates. It's the happiest and sanest I've felt on an Android system for a long time. Yeah, and I don't feel gross about having it.

And then especially as you say with like KDE Connect, there are some apps, I try not to have them on the Linux desktop, you know, occasionally some, especially for some of our backend production or whatever. But then especially on the phone, like banking apps or whatever random tools you might need, it feels like a better bridge to that world because I can set the boundaries. I can integrate it with my Linux desktop if I want to.

Yeah, it's on the side of the compromise line that I prefer. Yeah. And that is a good feeling. And I don't really feel like I'm paying like a graphene OS tax. In performance, some say it's slightly slower. I don't really feel like i'm paying like a graphene os tax in performance some say it's slightly slower i don't know i don't notice it because i didn't really use stock android on this thing very much um and there really isn't much i can do except for android auto which is still a big hole in my life but i'm managing that's what i keep thinking about is okay well i've given giraffeen a good try i could i could try stock right i could go try it see see

what see if i like the few, you know, have them back the few things that I'm missing. And I've toyed with that, but it's just not, at the end of the day, it's just not that tempting. I'd almost rather just accept that, okay, maybe I need to carry a single credit card in my pants when otherwise I would have just had my phone. That's worth it for that compromise line, I think,

at least right now. That's where I'm at too. I do miss it, but I'm like, it's not, I have a slim wallet. It's not that big of a deal to just use my card. And that's what I've been doing. And it's totally fine. And have you kept using Magic Earth for GPS? How's that been for you? Yeah, I did install Google Maps, you know, just for... Especially when you're traveling. Yes, it's for that. But I've been enjoying Magic magic earth as the like actually going down the road one yeah more than google maps me too and uh the other day i actually had my first like uh speed trap reported on there

as i was pulling up there's like a little icon on there i'm like what's this hey that's what we that's what we need somebody else rodney's using magic earth it's a great little gps app so i i really like the way it renders the maps. I like that it's using OpenStreetMap data too. It's nice and clean. So those things have been great. There, of course, has been some rough edges. And I experimented for a short period of time with trying the work phone, home phone thing.

Because I actually think iOS may have improved on the notification experience over Android with focus mode. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll put my iphone in like a personal focus mode and that'll be my personal phone and that does work but man do i hate having two phones and then like which phone do you sync your podcast to both well yeah but that's just insanity man then you have to ask yourself okay i'm gonna listen to a podcast which phone do i listen on like it's ridiculous it's ridiculous so uh i think i'm a one phone kind of guy i think i'm phone monogamous but i i did in the back of my mind think this could be a direction i go in the future is in the evenings i use the iphone with you know with imessage and for personal stuffing because it could control my media devices and during the day i'm usingage and for personal stuff because it can control my media devices.

And during the day, I'm using the Android for work communication and that kind of stuff. Now, would you go so far as not installing work things on your iPhone? Thought about that. I could if I were going to start with a fresh phone. With the focus mode, you don't really need to because you can just hide that stuff and already have that all set up.

But you could. I was thinking also another route to go would be to take an old iphone like i have some old ones just laying around start them totally fresh and see how far i could get without connecting to apple like can i do without even logging into icloud can you do that anymore could i only use next cloud to sync the contact information because i actually tried that recently and it didn't work very well. So I wonder if people want me to experiment with it, I will. Otherwise, I'm just going to leave this to rest. I just wanted to address it because we've had a lot of people write in and ask and in the meetups, people have been asking me how it's going. So I

wanted to do a follow up. And I know a lot of you out there are also trying Graphene OS and we wanted to talk about that. In fact, I wanted to cover a couple of those. Legit Salvage came in with 50,000 satsats actually. Fantastic, sir. Saying on Graphene OS, I'm six months in on my Pixel 6a and I plan on sticking with it. I have no significant complaints. I'm using the Sandbox Play Store and services. One issue specifically is with my Reolink app not providing notifications for my doorbell and other cams. It started out not working, then started working for a week and not again. And I can't really contribute the change to any particular update.

I have tinkered a few times with some settings, but no luck. Have you seen this with any of your apps? It's a hard one to search. Oh man, I bet. That's gotta be, I would bet salvage is what's happening is maybe it's the play services or whatever background process is responsible for receiving the notification ping from their servers from their real link service.

That's probably getting the battery caused battery optimization. Yeah, battery optimization is probably pausing that. And so you could go in and turn battery optimization off on play Services or whatever it might be, and then that would solve that. It will use more battery. I believe it's like that by default on Android, but on Graphing OS, Play Services and the Play Store are treated just like any other app. And so you have to implicitly go in and allow them to have those privileges. That's kind of an interesting aspect of using Giraffine is you kind of have to learn a little bit more about how Android works. It's not necessarily bad. I mean,

it's a little more homework. So if that's not your cup of tea, just know that. But it is interesting because there's kind of little, I noticed I was trying to crop a photo and there's getting some like consistent pop-up that's like, oh, if you don't want us to bother you every time you got to go in here and just set it. And that's just a common thing is you don't realize it's always like this, right? When you switch to sort of deny by default, you start learning all the things that were happening under the hood without you really being aware of it. That is so true. Yeah. It is not uncommon for an app to come up and say, Hey man, you need to go adjust the setting for me to work properly. And you're like, Oh geez, another one that needs access to this. Like, Oh, okay.

Good to know. Zach attack came in with 10,000 sats and asked, here's what I've learned about my graphing OS journey. If you're on Google Fi, consider looking for another cell provider first, as you have to have the Google Fi app and the Play Store logged in for text messaging to work. I'll probably move to Mint Mobile soon, but I'm open to other suggestions. Next, having either NextCloud or Proton for your backend, or in my case, both, is a must to keep data synced up

and backed up from the phone. I use NextCloud for my notes, contacts, and file backup with ProtonMail and calendars. It seems to work really well for me so far. That, I think, would be a Chris and Wes supported configuration, or recommended configuration, right? Using NextCloud for notes and contacts and file backup

and Proton for email and calendar. Sounds like a nice fit. Yeah. Very smart, Zachatech. Well done, sir. Sam H comes in with 10,000 sets. Says, I'm looking forward to hearing more about Graphene OS. I'm planning to replace it on my Pixel 4a later this year when I stop receiving updates. One question I have though, why doesn't Android auto work? Seems like it should basically just be like DisplayPort and USB. I'm imagining some weird proprietary Google crap, but I'd love to hear if you have more details. So I did some digging because I wanted to know the same thing. I think that's a great question.

I mean, why, Sam? Why can't I have it? This is one thing that would really seal the deal. I have a lot of other Android stuff. What's the deal? And I'm the dummy. I'm the dummy that bought the current year model so I could have the larger screen for CarPlay or Android Auto. I could have saved a couple grand. I mean, I'm glad I didn't because it's all the other things were nice, too. But like at the time, yeah, I got that car because I really wanted that feature because, you know, it's great for road trips and stuff. with some conversations with the dev and some tweet threads is that there is actually some really, really deep

kind of creepy, invasive levels of permissions that you have to give that process. And you have to kind of unfetter other aspects of the Google stuff to also make it all work. So yeah. And then also Logic had asked, can you play Call of Duty or other similar multiplayer games or does the anti-cheat system trip up on DraftKings OS?

Well, great question, Logic. I don't normally play games on the phone, but I loaded up the Call of Duty mobs and went and shot some people in the face. We did have to turn off some of the... Exploit protection stuff. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, there was a little bit of that, but that was another one of the you got to go toggle some occasionally. But you do that and you learn about all where all the toggles are. And then it's pretty quick. And fast, reliable cloud hosting. You know, this show is made possible by everyone taking advantage of our sponsor offers.

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and support the show. You just go to Linode.com slash unplugged. out and support the show. You just go to linode.com slash unplugged. Well, somehow I'm still in Berlin. After last Linux Unplugged, I thought, why should I take a plane? I'm just going to stay another week. But it seemed like I felt pretty bad for those listeners who only heard about the meetup after it actually happened. for those listeners who only heard about the meetup after it actually happened. So maybe Brent being Brent, I decided to throw another Berlin meetup, Berlin meetup number two. And listeners in our Berlin Buds Matrix room were pretty amazing. And several of them suggested that we do an intro to the dev environment of NextCloud. I thought that was a fabulous idea.

So with the NextCloud team's help, we threw literally in the same space, same time, another meetup and a ton of people came together. It was actually super fun and I really benefited from it personally. I think I did it for me, but the listeners get to win too.

That sounds like why we do all the meetups. We really do it for us, but I think the listeners enjoy it too. Yeah, there's such a special thing. So I thought, how can I stay here and not do another meetup, especially if listeners who missed out could also join, which happened. So I'm super thankful for that. We also decided to extend the meetup to JB's online community and also the NextCloud community from an online perspective. So we had a camera in the room.

And the whole idea for this meetup was a sort of hackathon. So sort of dive into the NextCloud community ecosystem and see from your own skill sets where you could potentially contribute. And I got to say, it was a total success. It was super, super fun. And there were a ton of people online as well. One who I need to send a special shout out to, which seems like the theme recently is CG bass player. Ryan showed up and, you know, did a bunch of bug fixing in some of their tutorials.

So a huge thanks to Ryan again. That's wonderful. That is great. If you paint a picture for us a little bit, you're all in the NextCloud office. They gave you a workspace where people could set up laptops and gather around a table and kind of collaborate. and kind of collaborate. And so what we saw, you sent us some pictures, and what we saw was just a bunch of listeners and people in the area that all were huddled over their laptops,

each working on something else. So that just... This is a meetup I'm especially sad to have missed out on. Look at that. I mean, it looks like such fun. It really looks like a great time. It's the exact kind of thing you want for this type of hackathon slash listener meetup where it really looks like people were getting down to work, at least from the pictures. great time. It's the exact kind of thing you want for this type of hackathon slash listener meetup,

where it really looks like people were getting down to work, at least from the pictures. I would say the photos definitely tell the story. It was, you know, I'm recording here today from kind of an underground hackerspace, but man, did that event ever feel like it as well. And of course, meeting people is my favorite thing. I couldn't help but record some clips and well, you guys get to benefit too. And I thought I could share that with you. So this meetup was no exception. Can you introduce yourself for us? Yeah, sure.

Hi, Brent. My name is Beck. I'm a longtime listener of JB. I found you guys through Self Hosted. I listened to all the episodes. Now I'm catching up with all the Office H hours and all the other parts of the JB community. Lovely. You hear that, Chris? He's an office hours fan.

This is, you know, what do you think of what's going on here? Tell me a little bit about how it feels to be in the room. It's really cool together like this. This is my, I would say, first experience because I really started with self-hosting and learning all

hardware and software stuff about a year ago so this is really impressive, I don't even know how to express my emotions but definitely good to meet people and I really support open source projects, I'm a

software consultant so I consult on the softwares to my business clients. And now we're trying to implement open source and make my clients pay for open source as well, because you support the developers, and I think it's a good balance. Do you live here in Berlin,

or did you travel a little bit? Yes, definitely. I live in Berlin. I lived in Singapore, I lived in London, and now in Berlin. But I live in Berlin. I lived in Singapore. I lived in London and now in Berlin. But I think in terms of tech community, Berlin is still picking up, I think, compared to London, for example. But yeah, Berlin is cool. You cycle everywhere. It's a lot of cool people. Nice. And I noticed, I was peeking over your shoulder slightly, not in a creepy way, but I noticed you were working on some things. Can you give us a tour of kind of what you started diving into?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, since this is a Nextcloud-themed meetup, I am trying to work with the developers of a plugin for Nextcloud called a substitute to big tech like Google's suit or workspaces and Microsoft's Office. And LibreSign is this piece of plugin on top of Nextcloud where people can ask for signatures like DocuSign, for example. And I'm having some difficulty getting their binaries downloaded onto Nextcloud.

And we're trying to work on that with the developers, so that's what I'm working on now. That sounds fascinating. Thank you for being here. Oh, pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me. Integrating DocuSight into your Nextcloud workflow. Isn't that a great idea? Yeah, it's pretty useful.

I'm so glad I asked what people were working on, because I had no idea they were doing this cool stuff. All I see is a bunch of laptops being typed on. It does seem like a nice opportunity to leverage. You know, you've already got this hub, as they call it, of stuff that you're working on. Yeah, why not? Yeah. Good.

Also, what you probably noticed in that clip was there's a lot of like buzzing around going on in the background. And I noticed a theme, which was people coming together and working together on the same problems and so listening to Tamás and Hilmar we're working on something but I couldn't quite figure it out so I asked them too. Now gentlemen you both seem like deeply entrenched in some kind of stuff on your screens Can you introduce yourselves and then give us a sense of what you're working on? So, hello. My name is Tomasz. So my strengths lie mostly in infrastructure, cloud, stuff like this.

So I can't really do very much PHP. I decided to go and try and clean up the Docker Compose setup that developers use. I just learned that different developers use like have their own offshoots and they don't even use the official one which apparently is not even the official one it's just the most commonly used so um yeah it's like a free-for-all and i'm gonna try and first make sense of it because we tried with brand yesterday to even run this on my computer and we spent like half the evening and couldn with Brent yesterday to even run this on my computer and we spent like half the evening

and couldn't get it to work. And now I feel like I'm not much closer. And yeah, if that's the experience that a person that wants to contribute to Nextcloud has, that's their first experience, then I'd like to make that experience better because it's not what I would like to be greeted by

when you try to contribute to a fresh open source project right you don't want at least like the basic setup just works you just like make up or like docker compose up you want it to to come up and you can play around it full around and then your your open source journey starts if your open source journey starts like it did with mine yesterday before like ends before it even started that's a problem so yeah i'm gonna try and leverage my friend hilmar here to get get us to hopefully fix whatever bug that we encountered with this docker compose setup and then maybe collapse the docker compose file because it has basically like 15 different setups or something for different versions which could be solved probably with a variable and an end file, and then see where we go from there.

Sweet. Sounds like really valuable work. Hilmar, I see you're typing away like crazy, but can I interrupt you? Introduce yourself, and what are you doing over here? Sorry, my name is Hilmar. I'm also a friend of Tomasz. I just came to this meetup because it sounded interesting, and I have no idea what I'm doing. Well, it looks impressive. I mean, you've got all sorts of things going on.

I haven't been able to read it. Multiple lines at one time, so we're making progress already. Sweet, and there's someone here helping you from Nextcloud. Vitor, what's going on in this corner? I'm wrapping to start the development environment with Docker. Now,

he's using my own environment, and he's using the environment of Julius. Lovely. And, well, keep going, guys. Really, I mean, they're really getting crap done you must have been just blown away by just a solid amount of work just happening in no time well and this is like a slice in time and was fairly early on in this particular meetup and so later i checked

in with everyone and like hilmar and vitor had been working together the entire meetup. And they also unearthed like an archived chores app because Hilmar wanted to have a way with his wife to split up chores in his house. So they were like digging through source code to find an old archived thing and found it. So Hilmar is going to, I think, bring it back to life. We'll see. I'm Lucas. I'm Brazilian. I came here to Berlin just for vacationing, but now I'm looking for new job positions.

And we are now talking about tech, about keyboards, because he showed his setup for his custom keyboard, and I was talking to him. There is a guy who makes it in Brazil. But also we already talked about other stuff like Python and PHP and other stuff and you're working on some stuff

can you tell us who you are, where you're from and what are you doing over here? sure, yeah, my name is Finn and I'm just waiting for the dev environment to come up, like the Docker Compose and it's just downloading and updating stuff i hope it's working out um yeah i'm super jealous uh about lucas's monitor because it's

really cool like that's how we got talking about like gadgety tech stuff because even though it's not strictly necessary to have something like that, it is pretty nice. Maybe not ergonomic in the weight-on-your-back sense, but definitely in the screen estate sense. Yeah, that's how we got talking about ergonomics and keyboards. Lovely, and then how is it being at the meetup today? Oh, it's nice. First time for me to actually interact with the Nextcloud community,

apart from like reading issues on the GitHub to like find out why my Nextcloud is not working. But yeah, it's great to be here. I hope I can be of some use, contribute, give something back. About an hour later, I checked in with Finn again. And by that time, he was rewriting the dev environment setup in Podman with a few other listeners. So we'll see where that goes. And I don't know if you noticed yet, but there was quite a representation from Brazil at the meetup, which I thought was fascinating.

So from Lucas and the gentleman we met earlier, Vitor, from the Nextcloud team, and his wife Diane shared her excitement about the event as well. Hello, my name is Diane. I'm part of community Brazilian, Nextcloud community Brazilian. I speak about Nextcloud in my country, and I have a lot of plans to introduce about the next cloud in my country because there is very important to know more this project because I think it's real to share privacy and security to people in Brazil. Well, lovely. It sounds like very important work.

I want to say thank you for doing that. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Yeah, that is a great opportunity for her, isn't it? She's going to go advocate NextCloud to her community. What a great chance to go to the NextCloud office. I mean, you can read up about a project, but you can actually go to where they work, meet their founder,

chat with the actual people there that are working on it. Well, and we've seen from Brent's adventures, there's so much more to the project and the people behind it than you can get just from the docs or from people talking about it. I think one theme I really picked up on these last two weeks for Nextcloud is just how worldly of a

project it is, which is, of course, always fascinating, especially with open source. We were lucky enough to have Frank, the NextCloud co-finder, join us for the event as well, and he shared a few reflections on the meetup. Well, Frank, you've joined us tonight, and what do you think of this?

I mean, there's a bunch of people filling the NextCloud offices. How does it feel? I mean, that's so cool. I mean, thanks a lot for helping to organize that. I mean, I think you announced this just I don't know, two days ago, three days ago or something like that.

And a bunch of people here and happy talking, hacking and have a good time. So that's just, yeah, the power of community, I guess. Yeah, I always find it really neat when two communities can come together and help each other out. So hopefully some of Jupyter Broadcasting's folks can get more integrated into the Nextcloud community as well.

I noticed you were chatting with some folks over there. What did you get into? Yeah, I just met Thomas over there. It's actually super cool because he's a community member from Nextcloud for many, many years. And I think I never met him in person, and now I met him here. And we just said hi and talked a bit. It's amazing. Lovely.

Well, I think it seems like maybe we should try to do this more often. It seems like a great success. Absolutely. Yeah. And I totally agree with you. It's a cool idea that these two communities do it together, and we find some shared interest and cool things we can do together. So, yeah, I love it.

So I would say it was a huge success, at least for my eyes. So I want to say thank you to the entire Nextcloud team for basically allowing JB to take over their offices yet again this week. There were a handful of Nextcloud employees that showed up in person, way more than I even thought would. So that was amazing. They supported us in keeping things organized and making sure everyone in person was, you know, getting their questions answered. And there were also a few engineers and staff that joined online to facilitate things for the JB community as well. So a huge thanks there. That's, that is genuinely, I mean, that's, that's kind of a lot to ask, you know, just out of the blue for this sort of thing.

And it really, that's a commitment that shows some mutual love, I think. And I didn't even ask. They just kind of showed up. It was a beautiful thing. I think as well, there's an opportunity. I'd like to encourage those who think they might want to contribute to NextCloud. If you're interested, I mean, you don't need to do it only during the meetup. You can check it out as well. If you think

that's interesting to you, nextcloud.com slash developer is a nice place to start. And I wanted to do a few thank yous as well. Pycrash, who showed up for this meetup, took the train for like four and a half hours. So,

longest distance, other than the Brazilians, of course. So Pycrash, thank you. It was awesome to meet you. And a huge thank you to Tomas and his family. They took me in and let me stay at their place this entire week, which was like a traveler's dream to live with a local. And yeah, their family was so good to me. We had tons of adventures.

It was a beautiful thing. I also, Tomash also taught me how to use the train because I was doing it very wrong. Oh, that is particularly great. That is so helpful when you're traveling like that. Amazing. Uh,

those local pro tips. Yeah. A listener took Brent in their family, took Brent in while he's traveling. Yeah. This is the same listener that last week threw me into a cold lake. So, yeah. There's a special connection there.

Also, a thanks to Kenji, who coordinated my even being here today at Seabase. Huge thanks there. A thank you to Lucas as well, who basically gave us like a really sweet tour of sea base the other night when it was super pumping and active and uh showed me the nix os kind of stuff they've got running these crazy mate lights and stuff upstairs it's crazy oh really those run nix oh yeah come on of course pavel also offered to show me around like underground berlin scene at kit kat and such i didn't take him up on the offer but he's smiling at me right now from the other side of the glass maybe next time we'll see there will probably be up next time it sounds like it was a good enough time yeah i also this is just like a huge sign of how amazing our listeners are.

This week in particular, I got an offer to stay in some of the Nextcloud team's homes in Brazil if I wanted to at some point. I got invited to a ski trip in Austria at some point. So we'll see if that happens. And so many other folks just offered to help me this entire two weeks with like, hey, if you need anything, let me know. I'll help you out. So thank you, listeners.

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solid, safe recommendation. I use it and I think everybody else should, too. Try it out. Get started today at Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Support the show and try it at Bitwarden.com slash Linux. I think it's time for some feedback. And we have some from Eduardo, sharing some feedback on the last episode of Linux Unplugged, Erlin with Brent, that's 503. It was super cool to get the inside scoop on the next cloud developments. I especially love the interviews with the engineers that are developing

or guiding the development of the new features. Brent did an excellent job, both in his recordings and during his recaps with Chris and Wes. More interview and product focus shows, please. Consider creating a new contribution funnel to collect funds for more of these types of trips. Eduardo from Hartford, Connecticut. Thank you, Eduardo. I mean, I can't really argue with any of them. No, Brent, you did a great job. Thank you, Eduardo. I can't really argue with any of that. No, you did a great job. Thank you.

No, thanks. Yeah, I agree. More interviews and product focus. Sure. Although I don't really see it working as like setting up specific funds, maybe for some projects, maybe someday. We'll see.

2023 is going to be a tight year. So we're going to have to be very careful about where we go and when we go and how we do it. But we'll see. We'll see how it turns out. You know, I don't want to over we go and how we do it. But we'll see. We'll see how it turns out. You know, I don't want to overcommit, but I do agree. I enjoyed it quite a bit because going there and getting the story is always our preference.

Just how do you scale that? How do you scale that? And I mean, we're here jealous at home. We want to join. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we would definitely we would definitely scale it as funding allowed. I also didn't mind traveling.

So I'm always up for that. And while I was here, I also this week got to visit the Free Software Foundation Europe offices and hung out with them for an entire morning. So you'll see that in a future Linux Unplugged as well. sure linux unplugged as well boost to gray sir lurks a lot came in with a series of boosts this week uh 13 370 using boost cli like a baller he says chris unfortunately we have never met i was asking because i feel like i know lurks a lot you know i feel like i know him from the boost in in the chat room i just feel like i know him i think I think you do. Yeah. It's unconventional. It blurs the lines, Wes. It blurs the lines.

But he writes, I don't drive and I live in a remote town. Interesting. So travel takes planning. One day, though, it'd be really cool to make it to a meat space meetup. Maybe share a brew and some barbecue. But for now, it's cool. We can be slightly imaginary friends. I got you, bro.

I'll be your slightly imaginary friend. Sir Lurkslot then comes in again with another 13 370 sets noah's trip tick refers to his three panel painting that was behind him in the oh right in that video in the last video he had that three right i remember the three panel picture okay all right all right all right uh no it never rearranges them yeah that was true the camera sometimes would move though and then lurks a lot continues with another boost for what it's worth i noticed that there's a slice slight misalignment on the terminal windows you use in the obs mat when showing all three of you the one i have right now calling you out i know in a boost too well i guess if you're gonna get called, a boost is the way to do it. Wes is just a couple pixels too low, man. I agree. You know, I agree.

I've been talking to him off air about that. Yeah, I'm doing some exercises to try to help. He's also a bit close, but I think I need a wider lens. But also, you know, Lurks a lot, what it betrays is I have a really low-key approach to the video because I just don't really care. It's there on Jupiter tube for people who want it. But the audio MVP video. Yeah, it's MVP video. Exactly.

Audio is the product. And then lurks a lot. Cause he's awesome. I guess it comes in with another boost says, so I got a laugh out of my last message thinking about tiny imperfections, but he says it's those tiny imperfections that actually give things life and make them human and relatable. I'll take that.

I'll take that, I suppose. I suppose. I suppose. Right, it's those little signs of wear and the journey things have had. And then Sir Boosalot wraps us up with one last 13,370 boosts. I have to tell you guys,

I love LUPO 503. All the tech in NextCloud is cool and the ethical approach to AI is very much appreciated but Brent being Brent and the human story behind Nextcloud and the meetup and the BRRRR listeners was great yeah we gotta get over there

maybe FOSDEM I don't know one year one year when we can we'll make it over there and we'll bring Brent he'll be our local expert now. Exception boosts in with $6,810. Coming in hot with the boost! Joining the zip code trend, Linux enthusiast since 1993, a.k.a. a dinosaur, daily GNOME user, tried XFCE, it was okay.

I've not touched KDE for ages. That's like since 2004 ish apparently finding the design mindset a bit too dated at the time please convince me to find time to play with kde i love this boost idea uh so first of all i don't think you have to consider yourself a dinosaur consider yourself um seasoned, just like you were early. You're early to trends. Early adopter, yeah. You're an early adopter. You're not a dinosaur,

you're an early adopter. Daily genome user, I'm sorry, genome user, really since 2004. That's going to be a hard sell. I have to be honest. I really do. Because plasma is sort of

the anti-genome these days. Plasma lets you configure whatever you want. Their motto is simple by default, powerful when needed. And there is some truth to that. And I think Plasma 527 is a fantastic product. But I like the idea of you saying here, do you hate everything about your current desktop? Try Plasma. It's tricky. that's a tricky sell

if you were going to recommend somebody try plasma today there's a lot of questions you have to ask like to figure out what path to send them should you send them down to open soos should you send them to kabuntu should for some reason they'd be on neon um it's a really tricky thing i don't know if i don't know if i got it in me but but I love that exception A has been using Linux since 93. B was willing to try out Boost. I'd love to know the story there. If you're a long timer or if you tried it out just to get this Boost in.

And C, going by that Boost amount, it looks like they're coming in from Connecticut. Yeah, maybe I was sort of assuming maybe there's an implied leading zero here. Yeah, well. Boost back in there exception and tell us if we got that wrong also what would be your plasma pitch to exception or exception because i feel like i've really failed here i love it i'm loving it more than ever i

actually not even kidding last night was thinking i should bring my think pad in just so i can show wes how badass my plasma setup is i'm really happy with it because a new dark kind of bluish purplish theme came out just recently. If you go into the new Plasma themes, it's right there and it's at the top. It's gorgeous. So much fun. I love it. I got a great background. I got the toolbar set up just the way I like it.

I was going to literally bring the laptop in just so I could show it to you after the show. So I'm really happy with Plasma right now, but I feel like I'm failing on the sales pitch. show it to you after the show. So I'm really happy with Plasma right now, but I feel like I'm failing on the sales pitch. You know, I love, I love Genome, uh, partially because it just works so well, especially stock, uh, or just with just a few plugins, you know, I can get right to work. The workflow works for me. I know it, I'm familiar with it. It looks pretty, it's smooth. But when you want something, when you want your desktop to be more like a, like a tool that as you learn it, you like fit it to you and it becomes something that it's more tightly coupled to how you want to work, that's where Plasma really shines. And there's a reason we use Genome lots of places, but in the studio on the machines we need to get work done, it's Plasma.

Yeah. So maybe that's not what you need. That's not the use case for everything, but maybe for like your main machine, if you get a lot of, you're doing your primary work there, you want to be able to customize some of those things

you can't just really easily change or have to use a hacky plugin for in Genome. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's a pretty good pitch. That's pretty much it for a lot of us. And tried and true. They do lots of steady updates,

at least for the 4 Series and then the 5 Series. It's been fantastic. 6 Series is getting worked on now. And if they continue some of that, I think it's going to be a great little workstation. Brendan the Penguin boosts in

with 1,024 sets, saying, Yay for more technical content. I've implemented so many things based on your excitement on projects and solutions over the years. Maybe a show note link to a guide for more newbies. Keep up the great show, guys.

We have been asking for feedback on if we should skew deeper in the technical or skew more into like the introductory stuff and then link you to dive deeper. Still taking input on that. Yeah, me neither. There's a vote for technical. Little JTH boosted in with 54,022 Satoshis. Oh! Greetings from my SATS zip code. Love all the work you guys do.

Glad for the mention of Castomatic a few episodes ago. Because I also see fountain timestamp issues and Popverse can't QRSS feed episodes as none of the member feeds work. But Cast-O-Matic works and I figured out Albie. So here we are. Love you guys. Hopefully see you in my neighborhood one day.

That would be a lot of fun. Now, where are they? It looks like Wisconsin and the city is river falls ah okay well that could happen maybe you know especially if we are uh doing a little trek the uh the going back to castomatic great podcasting 2.0 app ios only right that is the thing and this is a bit of a journey right because these are new apps and each one of them are trying to find their niche and what they do best at. And so there is a bit of a journey there, but you're helping kind of build that future where we have decentralized

podcasting and these apps can follow a specific standard and still differentiate and make value each in each kind of whatever niche they end up in. And so we're watching the kind of the defining of that market with these apps right now. But that does mean it can be a little tricky when you need to find your particular combination of features that you're used to and want in an app and which ones have it. And you got it. You got it. That is that is exactly the thing. But we got a lot of good options to try. So, you know.

Yeah. Hydra Guyroom comes in with a set of enterprise sets. They wanted us to know that they enjoyed the long intro and outro music we did for episode 500 um brought back the old two-digit episode nostalgia true grits also came in with some enterprise sats and said this may be a better boost for office hours but have you guys considered using next cloud as a bit of a source of truth or a backend CMS for maybe the RSS feeds or the JB website? To which I say, no, but what we have talked about a little bit is NextCloud could act as a bit of an auth provider. That's one of the things that could, you know, be technically tied into.

Say we have like a backend administration CMS that we wanted to authenticate. We could authenticate it potentially against our NextCloud user database or something like that. to authenticate, we could authenticate it potentially against our Nextcloud user database or something like that. So there are ways we could tie it in. And it is already tied in, in some sense, just a lot of the backend stuff, just not feeding everything. And that's, you know, I think we kind of explore the edges of where it really shines and where you're, because sometimes you, you know, you can't just do it in Nextcloud because you already have a Nextcloud. and maybe it's not the best place, depending on how complicated you want, where it works for simple

things, and we're finding where those edges are and what makes sense to have in a particular location. But it's a good idea to think about. Our dear Nev boosts in with 43,331 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. So that's my zip code, but you already knew that.

But alas, it's time to have fun with numbers. First off, dividing my sats by itself is the current temperature outside in Celsius, which I'm going to assume that's one. So one degree Celsius or a little under 34 degrees Fahrenheit. So bundle up, Nev. Okay. Then if you take that set amount and divide it by the number of hosts, that's approximately how much I spent in boost attempts trying to figure out how to send one. Oh, no. In the end, I'm still not sure on Albie and Podverse.

Bad UX IMO. You could try boosting next time, Nev, from the podcast index. I think the only downside to using the podcast index is you have to approve each split unless you set a budget. It's very explicit. Yeah. And we have splits. We split. We all get a cut.

Drew gets a split. And Podverse and Fountain, we also, and the podcast index. So we're spreading the sat love. Menard boosts in with a row of ducks. Enjoying the show as usual and nice to hear from Brent in Berlin. A few days late. He is halfway to Bangalore, India, where I am. Any plans for visiting this part of the world? Thank you for the show and hope Brent is enjoying tumbleweed as I am. Take care all. Oh, no plans today, but ambitions, they're high. You know, you never know what could happen. Thanks for the very nice boost there.

Deleted. Boosted in with 50,000 sats. I'm so glad someone else got my Internet Explorer joke. I've been looking forward to making it for almost a year. Oh, gosh. I wanted to wait longer to make it, but I had to balance waiting with the risk of someone else doing it before me. As for touching some grass, we got six inches of snow over the weekend, so I can only just go back to browsing memes and listening to podcasts. Well, I'm glad we could be one of those

podcasts i suppose uh i am so ready for winter to be over you guys it pains me to hear that some of you are having to suffer with long prolonged winters i'm so ready that damn groundhog in his shadow or whatever i think that's what did it forward humor comes in with 5555 sats you know i think i agree with the comments about keeping it technical the healthy stream of humor and technical content is the reason i keep coming back well thank you they write that they're fairly new to linux and they came over to linux unplugged whenever tech snap was in was archived oh he says i keep learning a little bit each more i've been dabbling and finding ways to leverage linux at work the past several years there you go that is the path uh keep up the great work and never afraid to go deep we love it well thank

you ah the golden dragon comes in with a classic row of ducks and uh says that jb presents brent worldwide yeah now he's going to raleigh, which is still technically in the world. You know, yeah. Yeah, Brent, are you ever going to make it home? What is home? I've got homes a little all over now, it seems. So you must be leaving what, tomorrow? I'm leaving quite early tomorrow morning, which is, you know, as we record currently, it's 11 p.m. I'm sure we'll finish, I don't know, around midnight.

And then my flight is very early morning. So it's going to be a rough night. Do you know how long you'll be at Alex's yet? Or is that TBD still? Well, he booked me a ticket and I don't remember what it is. I think it's like a week and a half or something. I don't know. He's like my travel agent now.

And there you go. There's some insight into Brent's life. Copy 1984 boosts in with 2,000 sets. Okay, I'll let you all in on the joke. Internet Explorer, the browser, had a reputation for always being slow. So much so that a month after the Oscars, a meme came out with the IE logo saying, great news guys, Leo won an Oscar. Someone please boost in and say you know what I'm referencing so i don't have to go outside and touch grass i don't get it i still don't get it i try i want to understand and i don't get it but it's all right it's all right iraq comes in with 16,020 sats it's over 9,000

some amazing on the scene next cloud coverage by bre Brentley. With everything in Hub 4 and beyond, I'm even more excited than I have been in a while for what's becoming a critical application in my home environment. P.S. This boost is my zip code with a few extra steps. You can't throw a leading zero on a boost, so I had to loop it onto the end. I hope you make it up this way one of these days. I'd love to meet you all. So where are they, Westpain? Where in the world is Iraq?

Worcester, Massachusetts. Oh, very great. Worcester sounds delicious. You know what I really like about this boost and several of the others that we got commenting about Brent being on scene is this is in part how Value for Value does work, is if you get

particular value from an episode we appreciate the boost in right signal for us in fact it's stronger signal than just about anything else so really appreciate that Iraq and others who boosted to let us know when there's kind of an angle that you like it's one of the great if you need an excuse it's one of the many great excuses to boost on in. And Yarg32 sends in 4,096 sets. Yarg! I learned that, Nick, because it's my favorite backwards. It's my actual name backwards, as she writes. I had a VW R32 car, and I loved it so much.

Yes, the R32 is one of the classics. There's a whole community around just that car that love it. He says, also, my name is a callback to all things 32-bit, and it also sounds piratey. That's fun. FYI, Folding at Home is a legit citizen science project from Stanford. It helps research diseases

like cancer, and anyone can pitch in to help. Better use of GPU than my SETI at Home was, I think. I love these things. SETI at home, too. And, of course, folding at home, personally, have always been drawn to collective computing. So I did that in the early days with my Gen 2 setups. When I had Gen 2 as an infrastructure, one of the reasons I got into it was because it was the easiest way for me to do distributed computing

because I could run those kernels at the time and those latest versions of stuff that supported that. And then, you know, almost 13, whatever it was, years ago that I got into Bitcoin, it was because of the distributed computing aspect of it that drew me to Bitcoin. I just love the idea that a group of us

and I could get all my computers working together in a pool and working to solve math problems and of course it's just the beginning of a long journey so thank you i think this was commenting on some previous it was like some token some coin that was connected to doing distributed computing that we mentioned in a boost oh really of course of course there is yeah i mean hey you know there always is there's always an angle i just love distributed computing if there was a way to do like uh regular rss downloads over like distributed peer-to-peer download methods i'd be all over that right like really would just love it i think the revolution will be decentralized and i just try to embrace that kind of stuff whenever i can. Gene Bean comes in with

a row of handsome ducks and writes, Chris, I'm pretty sure that you mentioned a cookbook mobile app for NextCloud. If so, could you share it? I like your family. I am an iOS user. Not only will I share it, but it turns out a couple of members in our community, Marcel, a frequent booster being one of them, contribute to the app. So how about that? And on iOS, it is just simply called NextCloud Cookbook. I think Nook might be my preferred cookbook app. And there is a corresponding app you install on NextCloud.

And it syncs between the local app and your NextCloud instance. And it even supports YouTube DL-style ingestion from several popular recipe sites. Not all of them, but it brings in the imagery and the steps. And, you know, so instead of reading, like, the three pages of blog posts just to get the recipe, you just pull in the recipe into the app, and it saves it and gets the pictures,

supports iPad layout, supports iPhone layout, and the Nook, I think, is even a little bit nicer than that iOS app, but it's not available for iOS. So just NextCloud Cookbook. And I'll put a link to that in the notes for you, Gene Bean. And shout out to the NextCloud community members who've been working on that because that NextCloud Cookbook thing, I think we'll put it over the top for Hadea. She was like, oh, you got this NextCloud thing and we're saving stuff locally. That sounds neat.

But then when we started putting the recipes in there and I told her, yeah, even when we're off-grid boondocking, you can still pull all these up. She's like, all right, I'm in. U-S-O-B, I'm in. Alexis Boosin with a row of ducks. NextCloud AIO, enough said. Yeah, which stands for Nextcloud all in one

and is, I guess, a pretty straightforward way to deploy and maintain Nextcloud. And it's one of the options on Linode when you do one of their one clicks. Yeah, maybe you don't want to fuss around with having things broken down into different parts. You're not a sysadmin. You're not going to use any of that customizability.

Sounds pretty handy. You know, my first question is, what database is it using? That's what I want to know. Maybe you've got some homework. Because it says included our, quote, high performance backend for NextCloud files and NextCloud Talk.

And it has integrated Borg backup, too, for backup solution. Oh yeah, it's got a list of containers down in here. Uh-huh. Postgres! Wes, you want to migrate after the show? Boy, do I. I mean, for my home setup, that seems like a way

better route to go. That's what I get for using the upstream image, like a SAP, I guess. Man, that is the way to go. Nextcloud all-in-one. And it's not actually all in one it's breaking the components out into individual containers it just it's all set up to work together which is all i wanted kurt peterson comes in with 55 320 cents

i'm noticing that the ballers seem to be using podverse for the most part this week just noticing that that's interesting kurt writes uh boosting my zip zip code while I'm in the great white north on our fifth fake spring. Ouch. Feels it. I feels it. Thanks for the dive into NextCloud. It's on my home lab to-do list. Oh, that's great, Kurt.

Let us know how that goes. And where is Kurt coming in from there, Westpac? Somewhere in Minnesota. Clearwater, Silver Creek, thereabouts. Sounds like a pretty area when you call it Clearwater or Silver Creek. It sure does. Sounds gorgeous. All right. Stegosaurus 5 2050 comes in with another row of ducks. Great show. Here's a row of ducks I finally collected on Fountain. And I wanted to end on that boost because I love that that they did that it doesn't come quick a row of ducks on fountain is a lot of listening yeah you know what that's what's so neat about

this is i mean we get the ducks which is awesome thank you and then you got all the hours of podcast listening and the podcasters got you as a listener for all those hours and fountain gets a cut too and i think so this is part of the game changer about the boost that makes the podcast app ecosystem more sustainable. And I think it's something that the listeners should just take a moment to think about if they care about podcasts, because in the past, the podcast app author has been completely out of the cut, right? They create the app, but they don't make any money once it's out, unless they can come

up with a subscription program or they can come up with some sort of sponsor or they have some other weird, creepy other incentive for making the app. And they just need to get you using the app. But with Value for Value and the Boost model specifically, because it supports the splits, Fountain and Podverse and all the other apps, they make a little cut. They make a little percentage. And so it keeps financing app development just by podcasters making shows that are worthy of boosting, right? So when podcasters are hitting their mark and you're appreciating what they're doing and you're boosting them, then the people that are creating the app are also getting

paid and getting a sustainable source of income that doesn't require them selling data, that doesn't require them selling advertisements, that doesn't require them pushing some sort of creepy over-the-top plan. I really think there's something here. And I think there's also room for multiple types of models with like a membership program and boost or a membership program where you get perks with boost. I could see these things that really could become wholesome, sustainable funding models for podcast apps where a team of people can continue to iterate

and improve on it, which has not been the case. And if you watch what's happened with Pocket Cast, go look it up. Go look up what's happened to one of the great apps out there. Go look what's happened. This is the problem. And I really think people need to appreciate

that the Boost also make the app ecosystem sustainable. It's remarkable, right? Because while you're also incentivizing the creator to create content that makes their audience happy, you're also incentivizing the podcast app developers to keep going. It's a much healthier, sustainable ecosystem. And if you don't want to switch podcast apps, you don't have to. You could just go get Albie at getalbie.com. You could top it off internally and then head over to the podcast index. We'll link to the Linux Unplugged on there, but you can boost right from the webpage. And they get a small 1% cut too. All this is transparent. It's intentional. It's designed to make them sustainable. Think of it kind of like royalties in the music industry, but clear,

more upfront and transparent for everyone and in some podcast apps you can actually choose which splits to send and which one's not and all that kind of stuff too you get control over that yeah i mean it's just right there in the feed it's fantastic so thank you everybody who did boost in uh under the cutoff amount uh which right now is 2 000 sats or those of you who are streaming there, maybe there's no message, but you're just streaming as you listen. We appreciate all that. 2023, I think it's still have a lot,

has a lot to reveal how the ad market's going to go. And what helps me sleep at night is our members and the boosts and that we have those pipelines set up today. If I were hosting a podcast, especially if it was the way I made a lot of my living and I didn't have some of these other legs to stand on, I'd be having a tough time sleeping right now. So thank you to our members. You can also become a member at unpluggedcore.com. Then you get an ad-free version of the show.

You can also opt into the full live stream, which is totally unproduced. Untouched by Drew has been touched slightly by Wes to make a chapter marker or two in there, but otherwise. I have a real light touch. It is the raw feed and we try to get it published moments after the show goes off the air. So it's also the quickest way to get the show. If the regular show is unplugged, this one's like,

we're all tangled up in the cord. Yeah, man, that, that, that one makes this show look plugged in weird. I hadn't thought about that. Maybe,

maybe it's time to change the name. It's really just the bootleg. It's the bootleg of this show this show is barely on the rails as it is it's just ridiculous yeah i don't think so i do know we're live usually uh we're not going to be live next week but i know we are typically live but this week coming up we're going to be live on wednesday in the afternoon in the pacific northwest we'll get the time up at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We're taking next Sunday off and then we'll resume our regularly scheduled bat time. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station.

I just told that guy it's not the same bat time. Different bat time. Why are we paying to keep that guy in a booth? Same bat peer tube. It's just unbelievable. I give him the new script. He reads the old script. I don't even know why we have that guy. Could have just recorded him and played him as a soundbite. Would have been easier. Links to what we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 504. You'll find our contact page over there as well as our subscribe page. And of course, there's a bunch of great

shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com like Linux Action News. There's a lot going on. We break it down. In nice, easy-to-digest format. If that's a thing. Anyways, thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. See you back here next Sunday! We'll see you next time. We had an email into the show from Tomat from the Paris region, who also was able to kick Google off their phone. But they went with a different OS than Graphene OS or Calix or Lineage. Grant, was this an email that came into the show that you grabbed? Yeah, I've been trying to catch up on feedback since I've been traveling. And this one came in.

The project is named Iade, which is, from what I understand, French. Like French from France. Not if you're from Canada. You know, not those French people. And I looked into this project maybe six months ago, and it seemed really neat. They pre-install their software on some devices, which is really great. So a particular set of devices, I think it's limited to make it more efficient, I would imagine, which is always a good thing. And I would love to know how that experience is going. From what I understand, it's not quite as maybe involved technically as graphene is but did i say graphene i meant

giraffe yeah get it right it's embarrassing yeah i still get it wrong it's embarrassing um so i think those devices are some of the xiaomis which is kind of interesting because they're the ones with good cameras oh okay and so this is i think more limited to the european market much like the fairphone which i've seen a bunch of people with Fairphones this last two weeks. Oh, really? You're jealous, I'm sure. I wish I would have thought a little sooner and ordered one and maybe picked it up while I was here, but I didn't. So maybe next time. Next time. Got another reason to go back, Brent. Maybe next time.

Next time. Got another reason to go back, Brent. Right. Just one more reason. But I would love to know how that experience is going. So, Tomat, once you have, I don't know, several months in, let us know. I also want to extend, I think, a huge thanks to these three gentlemen who are joining me in the recording booth here. Cbase has been super great to us.

But having them sort of in front of me listening and watching at the same time, it's like a listening live to Linux Unplugged party. And I think it's really great. Guys, if you want to say hi. Hello. Hey, guys. Thanks for being our live audience today. Yeah, it's been crazy. Just being a listener and now being part of a show

and just being awesome having Brent here. We don't want to send him back, so Brent Lee stays. We all know that feeling. This is part of the having Brent process. We all go through it. Yeah, there's also withdrawals after he's gone, so just prepare yourself with some ice cream, chocolate. Some of us deal better than others.

It's even worse, let me tell you. It's even worse when he's been cooking for you for a week. And then you should see how Levi responds. Oh, yeah.