LINUX Unplugged - 505: Keep Your Darn Secrets

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

We try out the most secure messaging app in the world, and Wes’ new note system that's so great you’ll want to abandon your current one.

So guys, you know, airport washrooms, they're their own sort of weird mystery place. Yeah. Some people do the weirdest stuff in there, but the one that comes to mind on this trip was, uh, you know, in, in, in Europe, they're civilized and they have like full doors for the most part. So nice. We could learn a lot. It's great.

But as you, as you like get further and further out of Europe, the crack increases and increases. It's kind of funny. That is a sign of how many airports I was in in the last two days. But someone was having a full-on business call while sitting. No. Yes. In one of these stalls. A very sophisticated language. Not like, you know, your buddy. There must be some sort of sound transfer factor from the other stalls into the call oh easily i could hear the conversation full plain like totally clear so you gotta wonder like how does this person think this is accepted they're not even hiding the fact that they're in some airport washroom just like doing their business i think

chris was more thinking they could hear everybody else, right? And then how do you not like, I don't know, take advantage of that and just get real loud with your business? Oh, I clearly missed an opportunity. 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, boys. Well, coming up on the show today, Wes is going to blow us away with his new second brain.

There's a good chance this note system is better than yours and definitely mine. Plus, we've been trying out a, quote, 100% private chat that you can self-host. It bills itself as the first messaging platform that has no user identifiers of any kind. 100% private by design. We'll tell you about it, and then we'll round out the show with some great boosts and picks and more so before we get into all of that let's say good morning to our friends over at tailscale tailscale is a mesh vpn protected by warguard we love it it'll change your game it creates a flat network of all your machines it's like your own little internet paradise go say good morning and try it out for 20 devices for free at tailscale.com. And if you get a chance, let them know the Unplugged program sent you somehow.

Let them know. Tailscale.com. Before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello, Brent. Hi.

What a showing, especially considering we're recording away from our normal time. That's right. We're recording early. It's Sunday on a Wednesday here at Jupiter Broadcasting. We're having breakfast for dinner. And we're going to take the weekend off because it's somebody special's birthday. Aw. Wes's birthday this weekend.

And he's going to do a little traveling to celebrate. Brent and I are going to do a little traveling to celebrate. Brent and I are going to do a little healing and work to celebrate. That's what we'll be doing. I'll do the healing. You do the work. Yeah. Yeah. I got an RV to get ready for your family trip. So there's going to be plenty of things to do this weekend, but happy birthday, Wes. Thank you. We're glad you can take the day off. Yeah, me too. And thanks for doing all this hard work right now so I can do it. you can take the day off. Yeah, me too. And thanks for doing all this hard work right now so I can do it. Hard work? Are you kidding? This actually worked out perfect.

This is one of those weeks where we have been using these apps behind the scenes just to, you know, get some time with them for weeks anyway. So we were ready to talk about this at any point. So this worked out just fine. Plus, Brent, you just got stateside again. You're now hunkered down at Alex's house. Doing all right? Well, I travel the whole way home. I'm just going to make a pit stop here in my, you know, second or third home of Raleigh. Right.

Of course, I want you to make another pit stop at the end of April because we have a meetup in Olympia, Washington at the end of April. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. But before Brent even gets out of Raleigh, they have a meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. But before Brent even gets out of Raleigh, they have a meetup coming. That's right. That's right. Two meetups in the month of April, Saturday, April 8th in Raleigh.

There's a pizza party going on. And then Saturday, April 29th in Olympia, Washington, we're doing a Linux spring meetup in the capital of Washington state, meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting for details on that. So I hope you can make it to both. But I understand, Brent, if you got to go home and feed cats or something. I get it. Well, go there. Feed cats. Go to the Meetup.

Go back. You know, that's my normal lifestyle, right? Come on down. We'll do a little more car work. Well, my car will need work. It's been sitting at a hotel for a month now. Oh, man. Yeah, right. I'm down. I'm down. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. car work well my car will need work has been sitting at a hotel for a month now oh man yeah all right i'm down i'm down yeah i'm looking forward to it also i should probably mention

linux fest northwest has their call for speakers open we'll put a link in the notes for that it's running until june 4th so if you're interested in being a speaker at linux fest northwest which i think is the best fest in the country. We'll have a link and you should go submit your talk. I wonder if we, we should probably think about some talks.

We sure should. Oh yeah, we should. I'd love to see a Podcasting 2.0 talk there too to help people wrap their noodles around what's going on there because there's a lot

of overlap between the open source community and Podcasting 2.0. So we'll have that link and of course a whole other range. I think, I think that we should get

some Ansible stuff in there if people want to talk Ansible that'd be that'd be a lot of fun yeah maybe we could get alex to do a talk on that i haven't mentioned that to him but but you're just bringing it up here on the show instead of yeah okay well if we had like enough jb talks we could probably have a jb room again like we did a couple years that sounds fun where just we always have a talk going from a jb host well i think i'd like to hear two things from the audience one is what do you want to hear us talk about if you're if you're attending you know that's an easy way for us to fill in the gas but two is who else like anybody would you love to see there and maybe we can try to convince them

like i'm i'm charming right i can invite them and see if i can do something we'll stick brent on him ambassador brent once he starts feeding him brunch they can't say no that's how that works don't reveal his secrets that's how he does it he gets in and before you know it he's living at your place and you're you're okay with it you're full you're happy and somehow brent's there right it's not happening in berlin he'll do it to alex all over again eventually has to move on though he does have cats at home so one of the ways that west never forgets about his pups at home is he has great notes everybody always says that about west that west payne he has the best notes everybody always says that they sure do i've never heard that actually i've never i've never really i don't think I've heard that either. Have you had a note system

before this? I have, yeah. Although it's not super fancy. It's mostly just been, you know, I make a lot of markdown files. I've got a folder system. I've kind of got some, like, you know, daily journal-ish files. And then I've got notes for specific projects. And then, of course, a lot of things live with, you know, if there's already Git repo for that,

then maybe the notes are there. There's sort of a top-level setup for, you know, the personal day-to-day notes sounds like you've tried a few things daily journal makes me think there might be journal entries where i'm in there that's just weird i just have to process that for a second i wonder if i have any notes where you guys are mentioned by name yeah i don't know if i'm putting your name in there certainly the show's coming out there you know it's more it's more It's like a to-do and then maybe some notes or paragraphs for later or snippets of ideas. I have a note I keep my favorite quotes

from each of you. Every day we spend time together, I pick one favorite quote from the day and I throw it in there. Sounds like a blackmail document. It's going to come in handy one day. I know it. Good thing we installed that backdoor rootkit on Brentnt's laptops we have

all the blackmail we need so wes has been looking into something called log set l-o-g-s-e-q and it bills itself as a privacy first open source knowledge base and uh surprise surprise if you know anything about wes you won't be too shocked. It's using Clojure and it stores data like a human brain. And they call this a graph, a graph of nodes consisting of interconnected concepts, which is honestly what turned me off on this. When I first heard that, I'm like, well, it's not for me. I've tried like Emacs, OrgMode. I've tried that stuff. What's worked for me in the past has been Evernote, something I can just create notebooks and i can go put notes in there and categorize them by thing and then search on it later on yeah you're a long time evernote user at least you used to be yeah

i used to be yeah i hadn't really thought about changing the way i take notes and if i'm willing to entertain that i can really see LogSec as a super powerful system. So tell us a little bit about it and what drew you to it. Well, I'd seen a lot of folks I know or like follow in, you know, various tech communities start to use it. And then I've been kind of curious about upgrading my notes in general. Right now, I just don't really have a, it's not structured data, you know, it is marked down, but it's mostly organized solely by folders, and then me using RipGrep to search through the folders on the command line to go find stuff. Yeah. Which has worked, but obviously doesn't allow very many fancy features. And LogSeq,

it kind of matched the way that I was already doing notes. I think you're right that, you know, compared to something maybe like Obsidian, it is not quite as flexible in terms of like how you're going to structure things, because it really is like an outliner first. So you kind of structure all of your stuff as blocks. And if you're thinking more in like a long-term format, you can do that, but it's less optimized for that approach. But that worked for me already because I kind of think of, you know, my markdown notes are often just like sections and then basically bulleted lists already, which translates pretty easy into log seek. So I thought it was sec because it's security and privacy first, but seek is what I've heard other people call it too. But what I think the change for me is I've been always thinking, okay, I'm working on this thing.

I categorize this as this type of job. So then I put a note in this place. And it seems to me that with LogSeek, the workflow is more, I open it up. It immediately has a flashing cursor in my daily journal. That's just an, you know, it's basically a new note for the day. And as soon as the application is loaded, you start brain dumping. And then later on, it looks to me like it gives you a pretty good set of tooling to pull that information

out that you brain dumped and maybe stash that in individual places or put it on a flash card with some additional information for you to recall quickly and categorize it after the fact is that true yeah and that's i mean that's where the sort of the graph structure comes in right as you can make explicit references to things you can also have tags um so as you start making those references like you can just say, you just summon it up from the void and say, I want to start this reference. And you can immediately click on it

and go to the page itself, where you can then add whatever notes you have for that specific topic. But it'll also show you every other page. Right at the bottom of that specific page, it'll show you all the other pages, all your journal entries that have referenced it. So you can go trace all the places and that's like automatic back

references. It'll let you just go walk around your, basically get plopped into this whole graph of connected nodes that you've linked together with these tags and references. And then the editor, which is just an Electron app with ClojureScript under the hood, lets you sort of explore all around it by clicking or searching.

One thing that's really neat is it's got sort of queries, including live queries built right in. So while it may have fewer plugins than Obsidian or Joplin or some of the other bigger, longer-standing sort of notes applications, you can do some of the stuff that you might need a plugin to do in those other ecosystems using some of the advanced query functionality that it's got built in. And that was the other part I really liked about it. It felt a little more like I could just use it and start throwing the data I was already generating in and then figure out how

all the structure I'm going to want to apply to it as it goes. And it matched my workflow and it didn't need to do a bunch of plugins and customizing to get a lot of that functionality. If you want to do, if you're more interested in really fine-tuning stuff, maybe it doesn't fit with, you know, it might not be the perfect fit for you because it is a little particular. It's like, what do you prioritize?

Do you prioritize the capture of it or the categorization and sorting of it? And the thing about LogSeek's approach is you don't spend a bunch of time thinking, okay, what category is this? Where should I put it? What should I title this?

What am I going to think of when I want to search for this in the future? You don't do any of that. You just start capturing. But you mentioned the plugins. Yeah, it doesn't have the plugin ecosystem that Obsidian has, perhaps, but it has a very, very cool plugin ecosystem. So when Wes talked about this the first time, I dismissed it.

Like I said, I just like, nah, this is not for me. This is, it's nice for Wes, but it's not for me. And then this morning, we started talking about it again because I was thinking about this episode and I was like, well, I got to try it, right? I got to give it a shot.

And so I started playing with it. I'm like, oh, okay, all right. I like this UI. I can tell the UI is faster than what I use. I'm thinking about if people send in their thoughts on what they use for note systems and we get enough feedback, I might share my system next week.

We'll see. Oh. Yeah. So the feedback door and boosts are open for your log and note system out there, dear listener. And I'll share mine. But I thought, okay, well, I'll try out, I'll try out log, seek, log, seek.com S E S E Q and see what it's like. I kind of go, I'm like, okay, I like this. The performance is better than I expected. You know,

you wouldn't even know it's an electron app if you didn't know it was obviously an electronic, but then I started messing around with the plugins and man, if there's not stuff that I just do all the time, um, like it also has some services, like legit services that I like that it ties in with as well. Todoist, obviously, book summary services. It has some really great plugins for managing PDFs. So one of my common problems is I need to get like the manufacturer's PDF for a part in the RV or the car or whatever it is. And then I need to get like a few paragraphs out of a 300-page PDF. And I highlight those or whatever it is, and then I need to get a few paragraphs out of a 300-page PDF, and I highlight those or whatever, and it has a process for bringing in PDFs,

taking the sections you highlight, making them automatically a bolted list for you. I was impressed by that, honestly. Those were less essential features. I'm trying to do the knowledge capture because I'd like a tool I can use both for my personal stuff, for some JB stuff, and then one that I don't sync anywhere that I just use for proprietary work stuff, and then, you know, one that I don't sync anywhere that I just use for, like, work, proprietary work stuff so I can organize my thoughts there as well. And Logsync seemed flexible enough, and that's why I was interested,

but I was a little worried that, you know, for other use cases, if we're going to talk about on the show, were some of those rough edges, were those going to be hammered out? And for the PDF stuff in particular, yeah, that was impressively nice. I don't know how well it works on mobile, but on the desktop app, which is primarily where I would do a lot of this kind of processing, it was nice.

I also liked, I have been using Todoist for a little while. It's a good app. I've enjoyed it. But as part of this, I wanted to see if my note system and knowledge base system could also take the role of a to-do system. And Logseek's got that built right in, including time tracking on your items if you want. Oh. Yeah. So you can say like you're going to do it and then like toggle it to say,

oh, I've started working on this now. And then toggle it off when you've done. And then you can mark it complete when you've marked it complete. Boy, people who need that, that is really handy. It's also kind of neat because you can make various like pages for to-dos. And then you can just add to-dos on your various journals as you go but if you've referenced them you can still go pull all those up in one place or write a query to go find them and stick them on a page for you no wonder why you like it so much that that is that is particularly nice and then on the back end it's surprisingly simple it's a directory with markdown files.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's both an open source app itself, which I like. And then, yeah, it's following this trend of having open data on the back end. You're not locked into some proprietary format. It doesn't live on the cloud. That does mean like a lot of these things, you kind of have to figure out how you want to manage that. It's not synced around for you by default. Yeah, you got to bring your own sync.

But for me, it just that's another thing Nextcloud can do for me. Nextcloud, sync thing. There's also a popular sort of dock and workflow setup that someone's described if you wanted to use Git to do that. It's a little more manual, especially on mobile. But it might work for some folks who don't want to rely on something more active or, you know, use Git already. Yeah. And they do now have their own encrypted backend sync if you want to pay for that. Starts at $5 a month.

I think the Todoist service, their lowest paid plan was $4 a month. I think Roam Research, which is like a competitor, is somewhere closer to $15 maybe. So it seemed pretty reasonable. Plus it supports an open source project. So I thought I'd try that out just at first. I've done various bring your own syncs before

so I'm not worried about migrating off it at some point. But I just wanted to see what the UX was like. And it's pretty nice. Every graph that you initialize to be remotely synced gets its own password. It's encrypted on the client before it's synced up. I think it's definitely still new. It was in closed beta for a little while. Just

for people who supported it at a higher level. But now it's been rolled out for anyone that supports $5 or more. I think the mobile side especially is getting a little more work. It has been working, but it's not quite as snappy. I notice if I make a change on the desktop, it shows up on the mobile side pretty much instantly. But the reverse

flow is taking a little bit longer. Okay. I'll keep that in mind. I've been literally trying it since just this morning. They do make an app image available, so it's pretty quick to just get up and get going. And I think it's available for every major desktop OS. Packaged in Nix. Packaged in Nix.

There's a Flatpak as well. They do have mobile apps. The iOS one is in the App Store. The Android one is not in the Store yet, so you just got to go download the APK, but that's just on their GitHub under their releases. So if you're comfortable sideloading, that's what I've been doing.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to keep using it until our next episode and see if I want to eject my current note system, but I can tell I'm already strongly inclined. What really clicked for me is when I was willing to kind of redo the way I capture notes today. And I thought, you know, what I wanted from a notes app, I thought maybe I would never quite

get there. And yet this seems to be promising it too, because something we haven't talked about, but I'm wondering if you'll use it, is the ability to recall bits of information via flashcards seems particularly useful because what I have found with my notes over the years is I often need a specific bit of information. Like this particular thing runs at this voltage and uses this gauge wiring and uses this type of DC connector or something like that. Just like those three or four bits of details. And I don't need the entire pump manual, right? I was just telling Wes before we started the show that we just installed a new water pump last night.

And I didn't need, you know, we're sitting here going through pages on the manual trying to find, to make sure that, you know, we're not going to like overdo anything. I just need that bit of information, those three lines of information. Have you used the flashcard functionality with this yet? No, but I'm looking forward to play with that,

especially I think for maybe some of the like, you know, little snippets for programming stuff during day job activities or little scripts or doing audio work, say. That seems particularly nice.

And I think that's one area where LogSeek having a structured outline block-based sort of approach by default makes it really easy because you can just reference blocks.

You can say, easily mark that, hey, make this block a card, even though it's embedded in a larger page full of stuff, which might be docs on the whole water heater, you can just reference blocks. You can say, easily mark that, hey, make this block a card, even though it's embedded in a larger page full of stuff, which might be docs on the whole water heater. You can get that little bit here at the top that just says like, here's how you get service, here's the operating temperature, whatever the little bits of details

that you might need to have. Wes, I'm curious, compared to your previous note-taking systems, is there anything that stands out for you, at least in early days here, that is a downside or a disadvantage that you're noticing? Well, there's just a little more

setup. I wouldn't have to. You could still edit it directly yourself if you wanted to, because it is just marked down. But I am opening up an Electron app, yet another Electron app, to start taking my notes. Before, it was often just a text file,

pop up like NeoVim or something on the command line, dump in what I'm thinking about right there and go back to my business. There's a higher cost in that sense. I'm more thinking about it. Before it was just stuff that I kept in a private Git repo and didn't worry too much about it. But I was using a hodgepodge of tools

where I had something separate for it to do because that's the part that I really cared about on my phone and I wasn't really engaging with the mobile solution before. So this seemed exciting enough that it was worth shaking all that up, I guess. We'll see if I stick with it. It's still new. I've only been playing with it for the last month

or month and a half and so, and only just recently that I've kind of gone whole hog. Well, and to your point about yet another Electron app, I have tried various note-taking applications over the last few months. I think I've settled on something pretty good. It's not LogSeek right now, although now I'm re-questioning everything, and that's going to drive my wife crazy.

I just got her switched over, and it's been working well for us. You can tell I'm kind of itching to talk about it. But the thing that I realized is the apps that I have used that are native applications or whatever they are, they're all slower than LogSeek. LogSeek has a faster, snappier UI. It might be Electron, but it performs better than what I've been using. So I don't know. It just depends on what is your metric, really. I do have a trello

board you can check out if you want to see their roadmap i do see some items on there where it seems like even improving performance further is something that they're looking at i also saw it's not i don't know how close it is when we can expect it but real-time collaboration might be something that they're looking at in the future that would be pretty neat that would be they just launched whiteboards like within the past couple weeks or so. I've only dabbled a little bit, but being able to sketch things out and then maybe export them to PDF or

something could be really handy for making infrastructure diagrams or similar sort of documentation. So a couple of the plugins that I've been playing around with, one is export notes to PDF. The other is import highlights of a PDF into your note. I think that's going to be pretty great.

Another is a view that displays all your notes on a calendar view. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. And there's another one. There's a few others in there like to create note tabs and do other stuff. There's, of course, a ChatGPT plugin. So you can invoke ChatGPT. I mean, why not?

Yeah, I guess. But I didn't install that plugin yet. And then the other plugin I installed just recently is focus mode, just so I can have it on a monitor just to take notes. And just that screen is my note screen. And I could see that being really useful too on a tablet when I'm out working on a project. Like last night when we were installing the water pump,

it would have been great to just have the notes out there on a tablet and enter new information. Ready to go, yeah. Yeah. And then syncing it all with NextCloud makes it easy peasy and it should make it easy to also share my,

I guess we would call it my graph, would be the LogSeq term, my graph with the wife over, I would think, file sharing through NextCloud. Yeah, I'll be curious to hear how that goes. So I give it a really hearty recommendation and if you want to try it out with me this week, I'm going to be curious to hear how that goes. So I give it a really hearty recommendation.

And if you want to try it out with me this week, I'm going to be giving LogSeq a go at, you can try it out at logseq.com. Of course, we'll have a link

in the show notes. This is one of the more compelling note systems I've seen. And the fact that it doesn't have a login, you don't have to have an account,

you can self-host all the backend. It's just plain old markdown files. They even have a demo.logseq.com. They have to have an account. You can self-host all the back end. It's just plain old markdown files. They even have a demo.logseek.com. They do have a demo app. It looks like it doesn't work with Firefox

just yet. I mean, you can still maybe use parts of it, but if you want to open up a local folder, you need specific browser support. But if you've got a Chromium-based browser, go give that a shot. You don't even have to install anything. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account. It's a great way to support the show and a real way to check out Linode,

which has the best options for developers, Linux users, and enthusiasts all around because Linode makes it simple, affordable, and accessible to deploy and manage your project, a customer's project, whatever it might be in the cloud. I was just thinking a project we just recently used Linode for was back-end testing of transcription for our podcast, something we're working on. We want to have a transcription to go with each and every podcast. And there's a lot of ways you can experiment with something like that. But we loaded WebWhisper onto a Linode, and we started with a Nano just to experiment and see what things are like. And then it's easy to scale up.

And the great thing about putting it on a Linode is it means all of us on the team have one central server we can jump onto and test it and see what the accuracy is like and see what the load is like and see what kind of delay it adds to our encoding timeline and how we can incrementally up the hardware to see what kind of time improvement we get. how we can incrementally up the hardware to see what kind of time improvement we get. All of that testing is so straightforward for the entire team with Linode's easy-to-use interface, the API, and a dashboard, and lots of system configurations for you to choose from, or just one-click-button deployment-type stuff. It's really powerful. It's what we've built everything that we deploy publicly in the last few years since we went independent. And what I learned in that process from you guys is Linode's customer support is critical to the recipe. And they've invested big time in that. They just won the Stevia Award for fantastic customer support through the last

year. And on top of all of that, they have fantastic performance. 11 data centers today with another dozen coming online throughout the year. Great features like S3 compatible object storage, which we use for the backend of our PeerTube instance. We use that for the backend of our NextCloud instance. We use object storage just to like link files in the show notes or send files to each other. It's powerful stuff. And then the cloud firewall that stops the traffic from getting to our rigs, APIs that are clean, well-documented, and libraries already written for, backups that you can one-click restore, and a lot more.

That's why they give you the $100. So you can go see what that a lot more is and see if it works well for you. I think you're going to be really impressed. Linode has some confidence, and that's why they're giving you that $100 to go just try it for yourself because they're betting if you see it in action,

you're going to love it. So go build something. Go try an open-source app. They got like a one-click NextCloud deployment. Try it for yourself because they're betting if you see it in action, you're going to love it. So go build something. Go try an open source app. They got like a one click NextCloud deployment. Try it for yourself. Support the show. Get the hundred bucks. See what it's like.

Go to linode.com slash unplugged. And sincerely, thank you everybody who goes to linode.com slash unplugged to support the show and to try it out. You may have heard me talk about it before, but maybe this is the week you're finally going to try it out. Well, thank you. We appreciate you and enjoy. Linode.com slash unplugged. All of us have too many messaging apps, too many platforms, and too many notifications, so we thought let's add another one. Actually, maybe in an effort to sort of consolidate

and refocus on maybe just important communications between friends and family, coworkers, things you want to be private. And so we've been checking out since phone number required, no email address required. You open it up, it generates you a key and then you exchange that key with people and you begin chatting. scan or a link that you can share maybe during like a video call or maybe through matrix something like that you essentially do a key handshake and now you have two-way encrypted communications that don't go through any necessarily centralized server they're using some of the signal protocol on the back end but they're have this relay server concept and there are many relay servers including relay servers that you can host yourself, which is what we've done for testing, and then it really truly is quite decentralized

and quite private. And it's not a bad interface either, right? No, it's quite serviceable. It has some features that some of my other chat applications don't. Like they have this live chat functionality where if you hit live, it'll just sort of stream as you type into the room that you're in. So maybe you're trying to jot down something quickly.

Maybe you're in a scenario where your phone might get confiscated and you want to get that thought out as fast as you can. Yeah. Or, you know, I could just see you're trying to find each other. You know, where are you at? Oh, I'm over here. You just do it live so that way you don't even have to wait for them to hit enter and send the message. And, uh, it's, it's new. You can still tell it's new and it's got some more things to like figure out some UI little wiggly things to fix, but it's really not that bad. Um, but it is a different way to message.

It's not like signal or telegram or WhatsApp at all. It's very device-centric, right? Yeah, right. So instead of setting up some cloud-connected identity that you log in either with one of the big login providers or through your phone number, like on all too many systems these days, you just have this locally generated identity. You can export it and import it, You just have this locally generated identity. You can export it and import it, but it means you're operating in a different paradigm where you don't have a desktop client and several mobile devices all logged in,

sharing the same identity messaging as one where it's all synced between them. You've got a setup on the mobile device you set this up on, or there's also a command line client you could use on the Linux desktop if you're someone inclined. But those, if you did that, those would be separate identities because, you know,

they're just generated right on the device and they're not connected. Yep. Now you could put all of them conceivably into a group chat because it does support group chats. So you could put each one of your device identities into a group chat

and then, you know, invite other people into that. But that's not what this is for. This is for really private, secure communications that you are okay being limited to a single device that you're okay without even having read receipts, right? It's not for casual messaging.

I think that's kind of what made, has made it so fun to play with. It's almost like an experiment in seeing how good of a UX is close to a sort of traditional chat experience you can get while having really high and rigorous security and privacy goals. You do lose some things,

of course, right? There's the security convenience compromise that we're always talking about. Honestly, besides the adapting to a new world of the device-tethered identity, it's been quite pleasant.

We've been using it even while Brent's been international. It's been working pretty darn well. We can confirm we have internationally tested. That's the main reason for the trip, right? Right. Just to try that out. So there's no central server. Messages are end-to-ending We can confirm we have internationally tested. That's the main reason for the trip, right? Wasn't it? Right, right. Just to try that out. So there's no central server.

Messages are end-to-end encrypted. They are held temporarily on relays. If your phone, like if your device is offline, they will be held temporarily on a relay until your device comes back online or potentially until that relay reboots. That depends on your relay config. But could you talk a little bit about setting that up and how these relay servers work?

Yeah, it's pretty neat. By default, it comes with some relays that they are running, which is nice for onboarding and getting things done. And of course, everything's encrypted anyway, so in theory, you should be fine running them. But if you want to take things to the next step, you like to self-host everything anyway, it was actually quite easy to get going. They have a Docker image already

provided. You can build it from scratch or there's some push to the, you know, public repositories. It's a little Haskell application for you Haskell fans out there. And it operates a little bit like Redis, but it's its own sort of custom message queue system. And it basically, anyone who has the password can make new queues, and the messages get queued in there, and then pulled from the queues by the clients. Yeah. And then the SimpleX chat itself

is a pretty standard chat application with a couple of fun features. It has disappearing messages. It has delete for everyone, which allows irreversible message deletion. And of course it supports voice messages and video messages, and you can set up your own stun server for that if you like. And then Wes and I were playing around. We have a chat in here, just our direct chat, where we have it set where all the messages just automatically disappear after a week. They just auto-prune. We say a lot of dumb stuff, and it'd be a shame for that to linger.

Yeah, so why not, right? And it's just kind of common sense. For me, where SimpleX really fits in is with my family. Why not have all of my conversations with my wife and kids completely protected? Why wouldn't I do this? And they don't have to have a phone number. And their device is fine. One device for them is fine. That's all they need. I mean, it sucks for a fancy boy with two phones, but you get used to it. And it's a way to kind of isolate and separate

things out anyways. And you don't have to self-host if you don't want to. But I mean, it just adds that capability. You can still use other relay servers. Everything's encrypted. There's not a lot of information the relays get to pick up's encrypted. There's not a lot of information the relays get to pick up about you. There's not much metadata left behind, and these relays auto-clear.

Yeah, I was surprised. You know, it really was because there's really not that much state to keep besides, you know, if you want to have stuff sit around in case the client

hasn't logged on recently to collect their messages. It meant simple one container setup and away you go. You do, as you say, you will have to manually add every contact that you want to talk to.

But there's something kind of refreshing about that in our super connected, federated online identity world. You're right, it doesn't scale for everything. It really is for people you actually know or trusted contacts that you're going to have regular communications with. But there's something about, and you could do it, right?

You could actually handshake over another chat platform. I mean, that's what we did with Brent. Yeah, that is fine, right? And it works, and we tested that. We verified that works with Brent. Everyone else in here, though, I have handshaked in person. Like, I've scanned their QR code, they've scanned mine,

we've verified in person. And so every other one of these contacts is like, that's rock solid, right? That's really something. And you don't have to do it that way, but for a family or a small team, you totally could. And you're not reliant on any servers

to stay online except for your own. Well, and I also like it, as you said, so many of these platforms these days, there's several different ones, you know, between Slack and Telegram and various metrics as well that you start using at one point and you have a certain set of contacts, but because

they are all interconnected, it just sort of expands, you know? People can find you and you get notifications about other folks like on Telegram where suddenly contacts you haven't, you know, spoken to for years. You're like, oh, they're on Telegram now. Yeah, yeah.

So something that feels just a little more like a walled garden, something you control and prune carefully. Totally private. Nobody knows I'm there unless I want them to. I'll be, you know, and nobody can talk to me unless we do that handshake. discourse for persistent communications boosts for feedback and simple x for direct communications to individuals and maybe small team chats of a few people like when we're at an event or something

like that and that would be it would be so clean and it would be secure and decentralized um and powerful so there is a few trade-offs with simplex i think we should cover also i think just to make it clear because when you start talking about decentralized and keys for identities you start to wonder is there like some sort of crypto crap in here there's no crypto crap there's no cryptocurrency there's no token or anything to that regard it's just using good old classic cryptography it's new people will be talking about it more one day. But okay, trade-offs. You touched on it. I think number one with a bullet, no desktop client except for the command line. That's cool, but

that's a huge one for me. Especially as a lot of my families, and others, etc., those kinds of people are often on an app that does let me have a desktop app. And therefore, if we're having more serious conversations, I've got a full keyboard to type on. I'm a little used to that. Yeah. And even if you did fire up the command line client

and use it on your desktop, it'd be a different identity. So it's just something to consider, right? For some people, that's fine. No shared identity between devices, though. So it is tied to your device. In a way, so here I am with a Pixel 7 running Giraffing, sorry,

don't want to embarrass myself, Giraffing OS with Simplex. Or I'm sorry, Simplex. This feels like the ultimate private stack. It's powerful, right? Because even with like Matrix, the federation is keeping metadata as your message is passed through the servers. There's metadata about your activity throughout the Matrix federation, not with SimpleX. And you combine that with Graphene OS on the Pixel device.

Running your own messaging. then you combine log seek notes that are also self-hosted like the stack is so rock solid so powerful and so secure um so some of these trade-offs are kind of almost worth it just because of that kind of security and just 100 trust like it's it's a rare thing but when you when you have real true faith and trust in your devices it feels good feels good in a way that hasn't felt in a long time. And of course, because it is a new app, I think you guys would probably both agree, there's some UX stuff that still needs to be worked out.

It's pretty good. Yeah, surprisingly good, but yeah, not anywhere quite close to some of the more established players, but that's to be expected. In some ways, maybe refreshing, actually. Another trade-off that I found, especially while I was traveling, maybe just because I was relying on my phone a lot more, was the battery usage. Did you, gentlemen, run into this issue? Oh, right, right. No, but I do remember you, it was like your number one battery user. So it seems like some people are probably going to run into that. Yeah,

what's kind of neat is that they offer some options for your notification service. And so I'm on a phone that doesn't have Google Play services. So it plays totally fine without that stuff, which is, I think, built in by default. I don't even think that's an option, actually, now that I think of it. So it runs its own notification service. And it offers three options for the frequency at which it should do its thing. So one of them is just always on. So it just kind of checks for messages constantly in real time. I think that's what most people would expect. And that's what I ran as a default. But it was using up like over 25% of my battery usage on my entire phone. So it was the number one thing, even though, you know, I just

have a conversation with you two gents and we talk quite a bit, but some days we didn't use it at all. And it was still doing that kind of thing. So, so I had to click it down a notch, um, to, you know, just starts periodically, which is the next step, which is about, I think every 10 or so minutes, it, it checks for new messages. And the third option is just whenever you open the app, it just checks for new messages. But that was a huge wake-up call for me. And a bit disappointing, but I understand it's doing a lot of work on the back end.

But did you gentlemen run into that issue, or was it just me? So I did not, I'm not positive how I'm actually getting my notifications delivered. I do have it set to the most immediate frequency. So that's, I'm not sure. But on my Pixel 7, when we've been using it quite a bit today before the show, it is the last app on my list. Oh, yeah. Battery usage.

Home Assistant figures. Home Assistant, just kind of staying connected to my Home Assistant instance in the background, is using slightly more battery. My mobile network is using more. My CPU is using more.

But Simplex is coming in, or Simplex is coming in at 1% of my battery usage. That's in unrestricted mode with the notification set to immediate, and we've been using it today so i set mine to so they have a in the settings it's called notification service you've got runs when app is open starts periodically and always on which is what sounds like you're using

yeah i i went with starts periodically um and it might have delayed some of my notifications but really that's fine i didn't notice yeah it wasn't more than like 10 minutes or anything. And most times, it seemed like I was getting them sometimes before you were, at least in our group chat with Brent. All right, interesting. So I also put it on the wife's iPhone, because this is how she and I have been chatting. And the iPhone, interestingly enough, actually has a better battery usage screen now than Android, which is wild because Android's done that for years. But I went into her, like, show me your battery usage information screen in her phone, in her iPhone. And SimpleX didn't even register on the apps that are using battery. I'm sure they're using whatever the back end iOS notification system is.

But yeah, out of all of the apps on her phone, it didn't even register as one of the apps using battery. But I have to imagine, depending on your version of Android, depending on the way it's going to notify and depending on the frequency you set SimpleX, you'll probably get somewhere between what Wes and I are seeing and what Brent's seeing. So that is something to be aware of. Probably depends on like if you use some sort of hosted notification service or not or what, I don't know. I wonder, I haven't tried this, but I wonder with the ability to self-host your own message broker, could this be something that you could use also for like an internal LAN chat? If you know, you had a facility, you had some sort of, you know, you want to be able to

have secure communications, but over a private network. Yeah, I was thinking over Tailscale. Over Tailscale. Yeah, that is thinking over Tailscale. Over Tailscale. Yeah, that is interesting. Totally. I'm going to keep using it. You know what? That's my takeaway is I think this is going to be the official chat system for the wife and I.

I wish it was multi-device, but I'm going to try the group chat thing. And I'll just have a group chat between her and I and our devices. And the way you can chat with yourself too. group chat between her and I and our devices. And the way you can chat with yourself too. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go try it right now for yourself or get a free trial of their team or enterprise plan. Bitwarden

is the easiest way for a business or an individual like yourself to store, share, and sync sensitive data. I think it's also fantastic for free software projects and you're going to appreciate how customizable Bitwarden is and of course the fact that Bitwarden is open source, it's been audited, and the community's eyes are always watching it. It's what our community uses, it's what Wes and I use. Bitwarden is the safest and easiest way for you to store sensitive data, your passwords, key phrases, recovery keys, payment information, the kind of stuff you really care about, the stuff you want end-to-end encrypted before it ever leaves your machine with zero knowledge encryption.

There's no way Bitwarden can read it. If you're an existing password manager where things haven't held up so well, check out bitwarden.com slash migrate. I migrated a couple of years ago. Love it. Best thing I did. And one of the things I really noticed about Bitwarden

is they're constantly listening to the community, taking cues and integrating new features that make it better and easier to use for enterprises and individuals. They're really good at that on a near monthly basis, I believe. It's quite impressive. I've been using them for a few years and I just noticed Bitwarden keeps getting better and better. And they've made it so simple, no matter if you're on mobile or desktop or in the web, to use a unique username, password, and email address for every site, service, and app you use across all your devices. They make that possible. And you guys know that's the low-hanging fruit. That's the thing you could do today in 15 minutes to improve your security stance and your privacy

online. Or you probably know a family member or a friend or a workplace that could be doing this, send them to Bitwarden. They can't go wrong. It's continually improving. It has end-to-end encryption. It's open source. It works elegant on mobile, desktop, or any device you might have.

And they're always rolling out updates that make it better and better. So it just is the perfect answer to a very common problem and something we could all do to improve our security stance online. If you haven't tried it yet, go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. And like I say, you could also go to bitwarden.com slash migrate. That's also a great place to go, but maybe start by going to bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's open source. It's fantastic.

It's trusted by all of us and keeps getting better. Something we all need to try it out get it today bitwarden.com slash linux well i've been slowly catching up on the feedback that we've been receiving these last couple weeks i am behind so apologies there everyone but if you want to send some and increase my workload behind, so apologies there, everyone. But if you want to send some and increase my workload, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I would love to receive some things there. John wrote in about LinuxFest Northwest. I thought we could touch on that a little bit.

He says, I attended LinuxFest Northwest for about 10 years in a row. I even presented once on Security Onion. It was such an amazing event. Needless to say, when I listened to episode 500 of Linux Unplugged, I was ecstatic that you guys are helping keep this amazing event alive. I've been chatting recently with some friends who used to attend with me, and they've all expressed interest in attending again. And by the way, we all live in BC. What can I do to help? Do you need volunteers? I'll do whatever you guys

need to help out. Just let me know. And PS, I got to put the word out everywhere I can. That's great. That is so helpful just at this phase right now, John, thank you to spread the word, make sure people know it's back. So on the back end, you know, we're still organizing. We have created a matrix chat room where uh we're organizing people that want to get involved and we're going to try to get the information to them as fast as possible that is at bit.ly slash lfnw chat there's also a linux fest northwest official discourse form where there'll be some action happening. And then of course, major updates we'll bring on air as well. And as it gets closer,

I imagine we'll have a more refinement on the deets right now. We've been, we've been kind of daydreaming about the food. I guess for some reason I want to be the food services this year. You do seem to, you do seem to want that. Got a lot of brats. Actually this year tacos have come up making some tacos. It could lot of brats. Actually, this year, tacos have come up.

Making some tacos could be really good. So we're beginning to plan right now. It is still early days, but the Matrix chat room is kind of where we're organizing, engaging interest on various topics and whatnot. And now it is time for Le Boost. Hey, so a couple of notes here. And now it is time for the boost. Hey, so a couple of a couple of notes here. Number one, we're recording early this week, so we don't have all the boosts because it's Wednesday and we usually have a whole week to collect them. So if your boost has been missed, it's probably next week's episode.

But it also means that you have an opportunity to send a birthday boost wish in for Mr. Wes Payne, because he is our birthday boy this week. Aw, shucks. We were thinking like, it's got to be over 2,000 stats and it's got to have some nines in it, at least a couple of nines or a few nines in it so we know it's a Wes Payne birthday, you know. Niner Niners for Wes Payne's birthday, send in a boost with a birthday note for the Payne Meister, and we'll get to that in next week's episode our first boost came in from a big booster file selector for 777 000 sats that number was so big i almost had it i almost couldn't get it out but i got it out

uh visibility boost highest signal linux show out there now right there right there this is a thing that i fully endorse. I'm noticing the emojis. Those are becoming like emojis to make the boost stand out. And the high boost amount to help us get on top of the charts right there is greatly appreciated because you're sending value into the show

and getting the show onto the high boost charts has been amazing. It's like two for one value. And now I've seen it happen to other podcasts too. When you get on those fountain charts, the discovery is real

and it is a significant way to contribute some serious momentum to the show and also contribute value. It's powerful. So thank you FileSelector for the big boost. They say,

have you guys heard of GPing? It's a graphical ping tool that shows multiple host latency in a slick terminal UI. It's written in Rust. Oh, geez, of course it is. Well, all right, let's check this out. Now we got to check it out. It's super easy to use. You can find it on GitHub. We'll put a link in the show notes, and you guys should try it. I challenge the listeners to send in one of their favorite command line tools and boost the pod up the charts. He finishes up by saying, thanks for the show.

It really whips the llama's ass. Winner. It really whips the llama's ass. Now, that is a callback. I think FileSelector just dated themselves with that one. Gping looks pretty neat. Yeah. So GPing does look very neat.

It basically generates a graph on the command line of your ping latency. And Wes Payne, you see this? You can ping multiple hosts, too. You can also graph the execution time of a command. So that could be handy. Quick and dirty little graphs on the command line. execution time of a command. So that could be handy. Quick and dirty little graphs on the command line. And they look pretty detailed, too,

in terms of for something that renders in the command line. Well, it looks like it has a simple mode, too. So if you wanted to do it over SSH, you could put this into simple mode, although the detail mode gives you more granularity on your latency graph. I really like the layout of this GP ping app because it's got the host information along the top, your latency information,

your jitter, and then it generates kind of like end curses style, a latency graph with your latency milliseconds on the left-hand column on the vertical column and on the horizontal bottom column, the timeline, and you can specify time. So you could set it to run for like 24 hours and come back and have like a graph of your latency for 24 hours on your command line that is really cool again that's gping and we'll put a link to that in the show notes and yes please do if you have an awesome command line

app you've never heard us mentioned before or just one you think is great. Boost it in, and we'd love to geek out about it. Withers comes in with 13,319 sats. First ever, and it's a zip code boost. Loving the shows. Have you looked into EOS much? It's a privacy-centered Android OS, privacy from big tech. It's been running for a couple of years now. It's very stable. Beyond the OS, they offer opt-in service for cloud backup of photos and contacts and notes, all built on NextCloud. They aim to be a total drop-in replacement for Google. That's what EOS is about. Okay, so I've definitely heard this kicked around

and my eyes have always kind of glazed over because it's like, oh, another Android OS, great. Your favorite. However, if the encryption is legit and the hosted service is good and you can just drop in, it basically sounds like they do all the work that I've been figuring out for months by re-hosting my cloud services on NextCloud. This is just a drop-in option. That is, that's worth looking at.

That's a good tip. Thank you, Withers. Yeah, that is some value. Exception comes in with six... Oh, wait, but the zip code. Oh, right. Yeah, oh, yeah. Sorry, I totally forgot.

Withers was boosting in from Chadwick's New York. Hey, we haven't gotten a New York zip code boost in a while. Or if all, that might be one of our first ones. You know, I think Withers

just got to claim New York. I think that's just what happened. I think Withers is now the king of New York. Exception comes in with 6,810 sats. This zip code is 06810. Oh, and he's going to tell us where it is, but I'll let you reveal it here. But he says it's not Connecticut.

Oh, right. I recall. It seems I accidentally tricked you. exception easy to do exception don't worry yeah he says it's pronounced exception where i am the regular oddball in most cases as i understand it modern kde's niche is self-customization that is a selling point for me also the dark blue purple theme is appealing thanks and keep up the awesome work there is a new theme i mentioned it last week i'm going to mention it again. A new dark purple theme. If you go to Plasma and go to new themes, it's

absolute fire. Okay, so 06810 is Ankara, Turkey. Oh. Neat. Any of you boys ever been to Turkey before? Alas, not. Not yet. I hear they have a good paragliding there in Turkey.

You know the right words to send me somewhere. GTK Frank boosts in with 420,000 cents. Boosting for a couple of awesome back-to-back episodes. Some don'tiss podcasting. Thank you, GTK Frank. Appreciate the acknowledgement of some great shows recently. Brent, really, is the MVP of those episodes there. Oh, you guys, stop it.

Hey, people are noticing. People are noticing. And you know what the nice thing is? You're in the splits. So Brent gets a piece of the action, too, when people notice a good show. And, you know, Drew's had to work extra hard recently. Our editor Drew has been working extra hard because he's been moving and keeping the shows going out the door. If you can imagine what that's like. Horrible.

And we've been feeding him complicated shows. So when you boost in, Drew gets a split as well. And so does Wes and so do I. And so do Podverse and Fountain FM. It's a nice little way to spread the love around and, you know, keep it cool. GTK also wanted to share their origin story, Linux origin story, that is. Ah, I love these. I started using Linux after finding Bitcoin. I wanted something I could trust and use for years.

Fast forward, and now I build apps for the Linux desktop. And through that journey, found you guys. I think I know who GTK Frank is. That is neat. Wow. I'm not going to say. I'm not going to say, because that is not their name. But I think I know.

Show mascot the Golden Dragon boosts in with a row of ducks. Glad Brent had a great time in Berlin. Hope his next adventures are all just as fun. Great show. Yeah, now he's just got to get over that whole time zone hangover. How many days does it take?

Because day one is rough. We're running an experiment right now. Yeah, after we get done with this episode, just sleep for three days and I think you'll be all right. Hoppy 1984 boosts in with 2,000 sats. Pseudo apt-get internet explorer meme. Pseudo.

Command not found. Pseudo apt-get touch grass. This program requires the following dependencies. Doors. Install. Y or N. Y. Installed.

Please touch grass. Wow. That was a boost in the form of a command or several commands. That's a first on the show, and I am damn impressed. What's with the touch grass meme? I'm getting to be old. These memes, I'm noticing them, but I don't know what they mean. We're just here to read the boost.

That's our role. This is coming up. Something's going on. I don't understand, but I like it. Old 1984 sent in another 2,000 sats. To the listener thinking about switching to Mint Mobile, as a former customer who just switched back to Ting after two years on Mint, I highly recommend checking out Ting. For me, it was the same coverage and data amount for less cost. The

only downside is no app to monitor your account on mobile, but their site is mobile friendly. That's true. Yeah, I think Mint Mobile sold recently. Yeah, I think I saw that as well. I thought I heard about that, but I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, but it is something to be aware of. A former Gentour boosted in with the Rove Ducks. aware of. A former Gentour boosted in with the Rove Ducks. Bonjour, y'all. Here's an idea for a challenge. Leverage Plasma's extreme flexibility to mimic Vanilla's GNOME workflow as accurately as possible. I've tried this at least three times, and I always return to GNOME sad and defeated.

KDE can do a better GNOME than GNOME itself. I know in my heart it can. Would anyone out there be able to mimic pressing the super key to view and manipulate miniatures of my windows in my five workspaces? Move such windows around using those same miniatures? Start apps, perhaps? Ah, so really that whole overview thing that GNOME Shell does. GNOME shell does genome shell sorry god that's embarrassing you know i think former gen tour this is a tricky one i get where you're going i know the other popular thing people like to do is make plasma seem like unity so it's kind of like you're recreating unity 7 on plasma um and then of course there's people that try to recreate like the mac os

paradigm using plasma i don't know i think you're never going to be happy when you're trying to recreate something else because it's never going to be as good as the original and uh you know what you know what's really good at doing gnome shell genome shell and that's just the way it is but what i have done on especially on my laptops where i used to really favor genome is i I've kind of just come up with a really clean, simple sort of plasma first workflow. I almost thought about, again, bringing my laptop in to show you because I'm just so damn happy. I've got a floating plasma taskbar that's translucent and it's got a little bit of room around it. But for some reason, I just like the

way that looks. And I've got a couple of quick icons down there. I've got my system tray icons and I've got KRunner. And that paradigm on Plasma works really well. And I've just got horizontal workspaces at the moment. I seem to recall you

doing a little Plasma workflow demo a few years back. And it might be time for an update. It is. 5.27 has some new stuff. The only thing I wish I could ape from Genome genome and i know that there's people out there that are that you can do this with different k k win scripts and

patches but inside my bones i ache for the gesture swipe on the trackpad to switch desktops yes man is that great in genome you know the swipe swipe swipe oh and when you're on a laptop and you just oh nothing beats it nothing beats it and i had it working for like three days in plasma really yep it was magic wes it was what the best of times what happened i don't know just one day it wasn't working it just stopped working and like and i still to this this is like two weeks ago, and I to this day, every now and then,

like while I'm using the laptop, I try swiping to see if it just happens to start working again. So I'm just saying, former Gen Tour, the thing about Plasma is if you break it down into individual pieces, try to learn it as you go,

give yourself two weeks to change defaults, and then just try to run with it, and then just embrace new features as they introduce them, I think you're going to have a better time. Good luck. The thought criminal boosted in a row of ducks as well. Here's a

bump for the pod I love. And a shout out to Chris who gave those hard-working 2.0 devs making a sustainable open source dream come true. Heyo, that's right. Thought Criminal and you're helping too by boosting in, so thank you, sir.

Dino, aka DeanL70, boosts in with 40,000 sets. I hoard that which your kind covet. Hey team, I've been searching for a new distro for a long time. Switching between March distros, Fedora, etc. I was wondering if any of you

have looked at Tuxedo OS 2. I took the time to run it in a VM for my testing, and I have to say, I am impressed. It hasn't missed a beat. I'm interested in your observations. Keep up the great work as usual are you guys noticing that this comes up every couple of months or so somebody writes in asking

about tuxedo os which is starting to make me think maybe there's a little bit of fire to that smoke there might be i mean we were pop skeptics and now pop fans crap another distro to like it's exhausting but you know what i'm feeling like i'm feeling like we should probably take a look if we keep getting this kind of trickle of people saying hey i tried it and i'm impressed it's got pipe wire and plasma it looks like all right all right you know right. You know, it's kind of a bad time. And it does have Linux 6.1. All right. It's just kind of a bad time, I guess,

because we're just a few weeks away from the new Ubuntu release and the new Fedora release. And it's going to make some of these packages. Like, I'm looking at the Mesa 22.3.6 stack, and I'm thinking so you're saying we better try it sooner rather than later well i'm thinking maybe maybe this is our interim little fling before we have a serious relationship with one of the major you know it is time for some spring distro hobby yeah i i mean i hadn't really planned on it i was gonna take a little bit of a

break you know how it can be get a a little exhausted. But I do got to acknowledge we're seeing this come in more and more. So thank you, Dean. Or Dino. We will take a look at that. True Grits comes in with some enterprise sats. Let me tell you about a cool experience I had with KDE Connect. My work uses an obscure two-factor authentication app called Ping ID for authentication to our remote employee, Pertl. Yeah, I'm familiar with that kind of stuff. When you try to log in, it pops down with an approve or deny type dialogue.

You select the appropriate action. Well, I was logging into my computer, and i was forgetting my phone was in the other room but kde connect delivered the notification to my desktop as expected however it also gave me the ability to say approve or deny from my computer i didn't have to seek out my phone kde connect is so rad it really is really is. I remember I had been using Giraffian OS for months and two, three months into it, it was only more recently

that I put KDE Connect on there. And it was when I was thinking to myself, this is my opportunity to make this phone as integrated with Linux as the iPhone is integrated with macOS. And then I thought, how do I bridge that gap?

And then like a light bulb, it goes off, you idiot. You know about KDE Connect. You've only talked about it a thousand times. Put KDE Connect on there. And then 10 minutes later, I had the sweetest integration I've ever had. Really liked it. Gort Brown also came in with a row of ducks.

I'm a bit late to the trend, but I'm boosting from zip code 66506. You know, okay, Brown, you're supposed to, that's supposed to be what you boost in, but I got you. I got you. This is here in, oh, I'm not going to reveal it. I'll let Wes find it. All right. Manhattan, Kansas.

Ah, you got it quick. So, Brown, you get to say you're from Manhattan. That's neat. Hmm. You would do that, right? Like if you're traveling, itattan that's neat hmm i you would do that right like if you're traveling to where are you from oh i'm from manhattan you should see how many square feet i have uh brown says i'm in the same boat as you chris with the two phone thing i tried using my pine phone with some linux distro uh either mobian or mangero as the main device with an Android phone as a backup. It's definitely harder to juggle two phones. I agree.

I'm still experimenting on and off. The idea kind of being that like I put the Android phone down when I go home and I pick the iPhone up and I have it in a personal mode, which it does automatically based on location. And so it's always in personal mode when I'm at home. And then I spend the rest of my evening using the iphone so like what if i message you guys in the evening i'm on that and i'm only getting messages from you guys and family um and then i can pop out of personal mode if i want to open up the floodgates which seems like that's the way to go right you opt into the river yeah are you saying we shouldn't message you on SimpleX in the evenings?

Oh, I guess I would miss that. Yeah, you have to have my super secret, secret device ID for that one. Oh, right, right, right. I did try. You mean your iMessage ID? Wes, that burns. I'll let you have it because it's your birthday, but that stinks. Legit Salvage comes in with 50,000 cents. Man,

this is the great support. Thank you. Uh, on, on DraftingOS, uh, salvage is six months in on their pixel six a, and they plan on sticking with it.

I have no significant complaints. They're right. I'm using the sandbox to play store and play services. Yeah. That to me is what puts it over the top. One issue specifically is with my Reolink app and not providing notifications from my doorbell or other cams. It started out not working.

Then it started working for a week again and not again. I can't contribute that change to any updates, they say. I've tinkered with it a few times but no luck have you guys seen this with any of your apps it's hard one to search out well that is for sure that is i think one of the downsides of going with drafting os and kind of just esoteric android uh in in the first place is it makes searching this stuff out you basically are limited to the drafting os reddit and form i have not had this kind of problem You basically are limited to the DraftFeed OS Reddit and form. I have not had this kind of problem.

You might be looking at the battery optimization stuff again. That can kill stuff in the background. The other thing that can be tricky is the notification system. Podverse is working on that, which is good to see. There's that unified push system. You guys familiar with this?

This unified push is sort of like a self-hoster's dream really for a unified push notification system that's not dependent on google or a firebase or apple and it just requires the developers build support for it so it has to be an app that has support for that api but it sounds like Podverse is working on that which will be great because you know then the whole stack is Giraffian OS F-Droid Podverse with Unified Push

so you get live notifications. And then you're pulling from RSS feeds. Mm-hmm. That's yeah. That's beautiful.

KDE Connect so you can get the notifications on your desktop. And nobody can stop it. There's nothing in between. Nobody's monitoring. It's really a pretty pretty cool stack.

Limiting Factor comes in with our last boost this week for 16,000 sets. And this is only one I saw on this topic. These are all kind of graphing OS related. And this is our last one. Limiting Factor writes, I'd be interested in hearing about an iCloudless iphone experience i'm a lifelong android nexus slash pixel user and have no lock into the apple ecosystem but i'm considering switching to ios you're happy with your pixel 7 now but the hardware and software it won't last eventually you won't be able to make

or receive phone calls in three to two years some Some other BS is going to force you to upgrade. I, I think you're, you're probably right. Limiting factor. That is my Android experience so far. I am hoping that's changing, but that has been so far the track record.

Uh, they continue with, I want to get off that ride. I think I could be happy enough in a Google is I cloudless iPhone. Maybe I'm having the same thoughts. And if anybody out there is running an iPhone iCloud-less and it's possible, let us know. Because if I hear from people,

I may be willing to give it a shot myself. It does seem kind of like the dream. I've got an old iPhone I could try it on. Ah, yeah. Then I think you'd still get CarPlay, too. I'd consider it. If you want to get a new podcast app and try out the podcasting two-door features,

there's about almost 13,000 podcasts now that support all that, including Boost. Go to newpodcastapps.com and join the revolution. Or if you want to keep your damn podcast app, you totally can. Just get Albie. Get albie.com. Top it off with some sats. You can do that directly inside Albie if you like. And then head over to the podcast index. Just get Albie. Get Albie.com. Top it off with some sats. You can do that directly inside Albie if you like.

And then head over to the podcast index. Several of our, the big boost came in from the podcast index this week. And then you just go to their webpage and boost in there. We have a link in the notes so you don't even have to think about it too much. It's real easy. Now, I'm thinking, I didn't see a couple of these on the fountain chart. So I think for the like fountain chart stuff to help people discover the show, you have to boost in using fountain. I think that's still a thing,

even though we're sending them the boosts, I don't think it's actually representing in their charts. I don't think they have it wired up. And of course we do appreciate people helping out, discovering the show by those big boosts or fountain. And of course you can do the, the nine or nine or boosts for West birthday. It's gotta be over 2000 sats with more than a couple of nines in it and a birthday message for west and we'll read that

on next week's episode thank you everybody we appreciate the boosts now let's uh do a great pick before we get out of here this is a sneaky second notes application it's called codex docs and i actually managed to pique your interest with this one, Wes. Yeah, you did. Partially because Codex is powered by Editor.js, which I wasn't really familiar with, but it's a free open source block style editor with universal JSON output, which seems like a very powerful building block and gets put to excellent use in Codex docs because you just have all these blocks sort of built in that let you quickly and easily make a structured documentation page.

Kind of like stuff you would do in Markdown, but with a handy dandy more visual editor. Yep, and looks good on mobile as well, the project says. Of course, it makes human-readable SEO-friendly output. And like Wes said, you can also output to JSON, which is pretty damn cool. Integrates with Yandex. And they say, easy to deploy

as well via Docker, if that's your style. No database or other apps required. Yeah. Just get you going on a real quick group note system. We were looking at this with that JSON output. There's actually tooling we could use for that. you never know it might be something we end up in our workflow at some point maybe not necessarily for our notes and like our second brain type stuff but but maybe quite possibly for some production stuff that we need the output to be read by

automation you never know it could be handy there's a lot of cool tooling out there so if there is a note system or workflow or application that's worked extremely well for you please write in about it if you'd like to hear my co-host alex on self-hosted's take on obsidian which he's tried and put uh to through the works we did an episode on that recently over on the self-hosted podcast go find that at self-hosted.show and dig into there and then uh write in tell us your thoughts on all of it. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact, or of course you can send in a boost. As for us, we'll be back at our next regular time, Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And if you need a little more show. I do, I do. Go check out Linux Action News, linuxactionnews.com you know what westpain's over there sure i am just our nice tight no nonsense what you need to know about the world of open source and linux every single week and they've been some doozies so go get caught up if you've missed any linuxactionnews.com links to what we talked about today will be at linuxunplugged.com slash 505 and don't forget our Matrix room is going all the time

during our live shows as well. Details at Jupyter Broadcasting dot com slash Matrix. That's a lot of earls, but I'll just end by saying thanks to our members. You guys make it possible and we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. It's pretty exciting. I'll be celebrating your birthday by crawling under an RV and checking on an engine. That is traditional. But I'll be thinking about you. Aw. And I'll be thinking about you.

I'll send you a real nice virtual birthday cake and virtual gift. Maybe like an NFT. Would that count? Sure. I mean, as long as it's like a picture of Levi or maybe a Brent or something. Yeah, there you go. Actually, we're going to have a surprise party. Brent's going to come track you down and, you know, bring you your gift there.

Right, Brent? You're on top of that? Yeah, I think he told me where he's going to be, but I think he knows we're onto him. So it seemed strangely far away. So we'll find out. Yeah, don't worry. Don't worry. I'm sure you'll have it handled.

As long as he doesn't fall asleep.