LINUX Unplugged - 506: Three Wild and Crazy Topics

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

We surprise each other with three secret topics, with one big catch.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Today on the show, we're surprising each other with three separate topics with one big catch. I actually don't know my topic yet. I have prepared three separate topics for this episode, and I've put it out to a live vote for the live stream to pick which topic I will cover. So we'll find out live in the show. I don't really

know yet. Then we'll round it out with some great boosts. We got some great support this week for Wes's birthday, some picks and more. So before we go any further, let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. We love it. It'll change your game, create a flat mesh network in seconds. You got five machines. It'll take you like three minutes to get them all going. It's fantastic. Try it for free up to 20 devices at Tailscale.com. And if you get a chance, tell them the unplugged program sent you, so we can get a little credit in there. Tailscale.com. And let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug.

Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello, everybody there in the on-air room and everybody up there in the quiet listening room. Happy Linux Sunday.

Live streaming. Lowest latency stream with Opus Audio, if you think about it. So we decided, because we love doing this from time to time because it's just fun for us, just surprising each other with three wild and crazy topics and finding out which each one of us has brought to the class today. And Brent is doing show and tell first. He just got done traveling. He's back home now and I hope recovered or at least on the mend. I've been trying to get caught up with feedback.

I kind of fell behind. And so if anyone, you know, didn't hear from me and they sent in feedback via our email, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, it's not you, it's me. That's why I haven't gotten back to you. So I apologize for that. But there's one in particular that I thought would be kind of a fun dive for us today. So I'm going to read you a note that Marco sent in. So I'm going to read you a note that Marco sent in. Dear Chris, Wes, and Brent, After years of using cloud services, such as OneDrive and Google Drive and Photos,

I'm thinking of switching back to my previous way of doing things, hosting things locally at my house. The reasons being the increasing worries on data privacy. One of the things that really triggered me, like Chris, was the article in the Wall Street Journal about the guy losing his Google account because of lack of judgment at Google. The fact that other people can look at your files and photos feels awkward as well. Plus Google handing all his data over to the police without being charged officially. I really don't want that to happen. However, and here comes my question, I worry about what happens within our family files, photos, and videos. If something happens to me, you never know what may happen in life, such as a sudden medical incident or a car crash. Working in IT myself, it's relatively easy for me to install, configure, and maintain products like Docker, NextCloud,

Jellyfin, Photoprism, Home Assistant, things like that. But I know no one can maintain a local server like I do in my family. My wife, brother, friends, they are typical end users without any form of understanding of how this technology works. That means that if something would happen to me, the nicely configured home server will run until the first technical incident happens, such as a software or hardware failure, some certificate expires perhaps, an update that causes some bug. My wife and kid would then be unable to see the files we cherish, the photos that we've collected, and the videos and other functionality such as home automation. and the videos and other functionality such as home automation,

then would I also eventually fail? Cloud services don't typically have this problem, at least not on the same scale. As long as you pay the bill, they generally continue to work, not requiring any deep technical understanding. Do you guys think about these things? Is it a consideration when hosting things locally? And what could be mitigating actions I could take?

Thank you from longtime listener Marco from the Netherlands. Marco's asking the real hard questions there. And it's the bus factor, ultimately. And how much do you think about it when you're building your own digital systems? I do think maybe there's two subtly, I mean, they're related for sure, but subtly different questions. There's sort of the ongoing services,

like the home automation, and then there's sort of like backups, history, documents. You know, they might not be able to access them, but do you have something in place so that those could be recovered and say migrated to a cloud service or whatever is available after you're gone? Yeah, I almost feel like that might be the better thing to focus on is making the data accessible through the backups because the systems themselves can be very complex and maybe without you there to operate them not really something the family member actually wants right if they have all these complexities to them and so they might not actually want the thing you built but they might want the results of that thing like for me if i had to think about how to make every single thing i create and set up at home sustainable and accessible to my family after I die, I think I'd probably never start. I think I'd probably never want to start the project. It's just because that's a huge project in itself. Yeah.

That's a project for my project, Wes. You don't even have time for the first order projects. But if you solve the problem at the backups, so the actual data, the underlying data, the notes, the recipes, the photos, the music, the e-books, whatever it might be. I think probably the biggest problem is, you know, from what it sounded like from the feedback, it's obviously privacy and security concerns. So you'd want those backups, I presume, to be encrypted. So that does add a layer of sort of like, you can't just download some tar files out of, you know, a web interface somewhere, you got to go some steps. So probably maybe the meat of this is you need either some trusted people, or maybe you could go the route of having, you know, writing up documentation, pushing whatever scripts or tools you need to somewhere that's hosted

externally, and have steps that, you know, your loved ones could then pay some third party to be like, look, we need to help with this data. We just need someone who can, you know, has basic technology skills to be able to like run this, go get these files, run this tool and turn the data over. I think using free software is actually an important step here. It's essentially using something that's standards based, that's open, that other people could read, interpret and implement. That at least gives them an option, right? If it's something closed and proprietary, they might get support from that company for a few years, they might not. But if your data is stored in standardized formats, if the things you're using are open-source applications and infrastructure, they might have to go above

and beyond, but they would at least have a means to bring in an expert. Like, when I saw this email come into the inbox, my thought was, if this happened to me, I would expect probably one of you guys would probably offer to Hadea to help her sort it out. And since all my systems are, you know, my servers at home are Nix-based, and a lot of the passwords I use, you guys actually know them, so you guys would actually get pretty far. I don't know if you'd be able to get to the backups, but you could get to the running systems.

And so there's also like maybe enabling your local network of friends or something like that. I think, too, it can be tempting to think. I mean, you're right that the cloud services run as long as you pay them. But that's only true as far as like that product exists. And so that'll work for a while. But it just points to a larger problem, I guess is what I'm saying. We're like folks that aren't even a little bit sort of digitally enabled.

It means even if you have cloud services that are meant to be user friendly, when that old camera is no longer supported and you have to go figure out how to get a new one and add it in, there's still burdens that a lot of people just won't be able to do. Or when that service just stops operating, you have to find a replacement. This has gotten me thinking even more broadly about just like digital estate planning generally. Because for instance, like I've been thinking about, okay, well, I use my password manager as like the source of truth of trying, you know, or source of access actually to get into a bunch of other things.

And so I guess that's one thing that I should probably share with someone. I think I have, I kind of forget, but there's like likely just a giant list of things that, you know, you should give access to, to your loved ones to enable even you to hire someone, you know, cause if all your data is, I don't know, sitting on an encrypted file system or something, well, that's not going to be much help you to hire someone you know because if all your data is i don't know sitting on an encrypted file system or something well that's not going to be much help if you hire someone to get in there right and so you guys thought about that like there i know some services like the big guys have some like different rule sets that they go by for doing these kind of handoffs but when you're doing everything self-hosted,

or you've got 12 systems interacting, even with just a home assistant thing, have you thought about all the other things that you should think about ahead of time? It's a tricky thing. You know, because you have a hard time keeping track of what you don't know. And so to look at it from a perspective of somebody who doesn't know.

And the home assistant one does hit because that house, that RV would be chaos without that home assistant system. It runs so much stuff now. And it really makes life livable in a small space that is poorly insulated um and so there's that awkward barrier too like once you switch those things and then i mean i've just noticed it with when you have guests or whatever right it's sort of like well well there's a whole non-standard setup that you're gonna need to know to make this work and it wasn't necessarily set up to work in the old style very well i suspect that the current system would run until equipment fails you know like because nothing nothing auto updates everything i manually update it auto downloads but doesn't

auto update but right yeah that is a hard problem i i wonder if there isn't some wisdom that the audience out there could share with us on this because you can i think you could argue well if somebody knew nix they could recreate the infrastructure by looking at my nix config or if somebody had done it all with ansible you could look at the playbook and kind of recreate. But that doesn't make it accessible to your friends or your family that don't know those things. And that gets trickier and trickier. And it's only going to become a bigger problem. My kids, and mostly me too for the most part, I've only lived in a time with digital photos.

Like film cameras were absolutely around. My school had a film development lab, but I don't have boxes of photos. No, I have a few photos, I guess. I scanned most of those and now they're digital. Now,

like, you know, my folks and the generations before them, they have a lot of important memories on physical photos. But like me, my kids will never have that unless they print them out specifically, but they'll still, it'll start as a digital photo. And so for their entire life, they are collecting data that they haven't even thought about how they're going to keep around or if they want to keep it or if they're just going to trash it. Like there's, because they're kids, they take pictures of stupid things. just going to trash it.

Like there's, because they're kids, they take pictures of stupid things. This is like, we're so early in it, right? Like, I mean,

presumably assuming our species survives and all, like we'll just need to keep figuring these things out. We're going to have more and more data to manage and we need,

you know, it seems like we also need more easy ways, especially in the free software community to let these things happen. Like if you have like a private next cloud,

if it's, if it is the same, you know, you do have that advantage. Like we be nice if there was like a trusted networkcloud, if it is the same, you know, you do have that advantage. Like it'd be nice if there was like a trusted network of like free software sysadmins for hire who could do this sort of thing or just an easier sort of on-ramp to be like, oh, well, there's vendors that I can just be like, here's the dump of my system. Can you start running this for me? Yeah.

How cool would it be if you could have a next of kin kind of password that you put that in and it gives you like a SQL dump or whatever is appropriate, right? And you don't get administrative access, but you get the data, you get some of the structure. Some kind of ripcord-like. All right. Yeah. And then it shuts down the production system, notifies the admin, hey, by the way, the ripcord's been pulled. Maybe they're not there to receive it, but if they are, you know, then something's up. Maybe there's something to that.

We haven't even started thinking about this. And then where I see people think about this the most proactively, you're not going to be surprised, is the Bitcoin community. Because one Bitcoin right now is worth like $30,000. And so people, when they have a number attached to it like that, they really start thinking about, well, how do I pass this on if something happens to me? Especially people that got in early that might have a million dollars in Bitcoin or whatever they might have. Something digital is suddenly very concrete. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think pictures strike a similar note. For me, you know, pictures of my kids are invaluable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to know. Let us know. Marco, thanks for getting us thinking all the way over there from the Netherlands. Yeah, I would be curious if some listeners have gone through this kind of process,

either with the big account holders out there or some self-hosted stuff. If you have any insights, please share them. I think we want to dive a little deeper into this one. Let's find out what Mr. Wes Payne wants to talk about. I thought we could talk a little bit about Fleek, which is a new entry in the sort of manage all the programs

you want in your.file sort of, you know, how do you set up your user environment on a new system? Obviously, it's pretty annoying to set up a computer just right if you're particular, if you need a lot of tools. It's annoying having different setups from each place like your work machine your home machine maybe you got an on-the-go laptop that's

different than your desktop and oh right that one command just isn't here that's definitely a thing and it can be a pretty big time sink to like bother to get all of that stuff configured some folks use nix and home manager for this but like some things in the Nix ecosystem, it can be a little bit to go learn. If you just want to say like, hey, I want these packages installed and a few configurations applied, suddenly you're learning a whole new

functional programming language. And then Flakes and Home Manager on top of that. Yeah, it's a lot. So this is sort of designed to be a little simpler, but give you some of that Home Manager functionality. Yes. Fleek is a user-friendly wrapper around Nix and Nix Home Manager,

but the friendly Fleek command hides all the complexity from you. You can edit a 10-line YAML file, and Fleek harnesses the power of Nix behind the scenes. And it's cross-distro, right? It's cross-distro, yeah. You just kind of get it installed. Behind the scenes, it's made in Go, so there's just static binaries available.

You can also use the power of Nix to run Fleek without installing it if you want, although that's a little more awkward if you're going to use the command line all the time. So to get started, it's pretty easy. What's nice about this is it's just your user config, and with Nix, you're not permanently installing anything. So low cost to get going, especially with Go, they've got binaries for all the usual systems on the GitHub releases, so just go give that a download. You will need Nix installed, right? This thing uses Nix behind the scenes. Nix, the package manager, which can be installed on just

about any distro and macOS. Yes, yes. You don't have to be on NixOS for this. Right. I just want to make it clear because it's confusing. There's NixOS and then there's Nix, the package manager, which is cross distro. And Fleek points to, and I wanted to give it a try, there's a new Nix installer out there that maybe you haven't tried. Determinant Systems has a Nix installer of their own that makes it pretty easy to get going. They auto-enable Fleeks for you, which is still like an experimental feature. Okay. Works well. I gave it a go this time.

Super snappy and fast. Still just a curl away, if you will. Really? And what distro did you try it on? I tried it on Fedora. Okay. I got a sense that some of the people behind Fleek are Fedora users too. When I went trolling through their GitHub the first time, Fleek came

across the radar. I love this idea because it feels to me like it's a product built on top of Nix, which feels ultimately like the direction this is going to go because Nix itself is a bit of a learning curve, but building user-friendly tooling on top of that that takes the power of Nix but makes it more approachable, that seems obvious.

I think you'll like this about the determinant systems Nix installer. They kind of list some of the platforms they support. Yeah. And of course, you know, macOS and the M1s, that's on there. Never heard of it. But so is the Valve Steam Deck. So is WSL2.

All right, now you got me. So is stuff like Podman containers. So it really, you know, this helps you get Nix on systems. Okay. And you can have Nix on a lot of systems. So this would get the Nix package manager on my Steam Deck, is what you're saying.

That sure seems like it. Oh, that's pretty cool. Nice work, guys. Nice work. But yeah, right, as you kind of hit on, Fleek's designed for people who are not familiar with Nix. I mean, it can be a little overwhelming, this initial Nix learning curve, especially if you just want to get going. But Fleek is really easy. So I got it installed.

You just download the binary, do a Fleek in it, and it kind of gets things bootstrapped for you. And then you have a YAML file you can you can edit manually or it's got an interactive command line. So let's say I wanted to use FFmpeg because I love FFmpeg. I got to have that around. Of course, you just do fleek add FFmpeg. And then in the next style, it kind of goes out there. It searches to go make sure that that's a valid next package reference. It adds the package FFmpeg. And then in the Nix style, it kind of goes out there, it searches to go make sure that that's a valid Nix package reference. It adds the package FFmpeg, it writes any configuration files that might need to get written. And then like Nix usually does, like it hasn't changed anything. To actually go make your changes, you're going to run fleek apply. That kind of goes and overwrites and like, you know, builds the whole system, sets things up for you. And then it automatically

adjusts things so that it's on your path. And after you've fleek applied, you just run FFmpeg and you got FFmpeg now. Okay, that's slick. And the other thing it looks like that is appealing to me is it seems there's a bit of a community around sharing their fleeks, I guess, on GitHub. So you can go just like grab somebody else's fleek file and use that. So say you had a perfect FFmpeg setup for the hosts. So whatever distro they want to use, we don't care anymore. They just get their fleek on, get your file

off of GitHub, pull it down, run it, and now they have like all of the binaries and all the files they'd need to participate in whatever show we're doing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and there's like you can just install any package, basically, in Nix packages. And then they have some stuff where they've got sort of by default custom configurations

that make it integrate nicely. Fleek also has like a bling setting, which I think you would like, Chris. Oh, yeah? There's like, you know, it's pretty nice by default. Does it make my windows wobble? In the command line, basically, yeah.

Like it installs a really nice Rust-based, you know, like sort of terminal prompt line for you automatically it gives you a bunch of developer tools this gets you some of those fancy newer like command line replacements like exa instead of ls or all right you got that there yeah and it makes it all installs vs code already yeah it's a nice little setup and you can just tweak it it's just one little thing in your yaml right you kind of adjust it it also looks like it's got kind of handy support for taking it with you, right? Like if you get this going, you probably want to put it in Git. If you do, there's some helpers built right in,

stuff like auto-pushing or auto-pulling the configs. It also looks like it kind of parameterizes by the host name in some of the configuration files it writes. So it knows which system you're on and can kind of figure things out. Oh, that would be... I haven't tried that part yet that's what's been pushing me towards home manager on nix and i am a little like that's almost one layer i don't down the rabbit hole i don't want to go because it it really feels like i am so committing to nix forever at that point where everything i learned with nix package manager would technically be

applicable if I just moved over to Ubuntu and installed the next package manager. And it sounds like fleek is kind of continuing that trajectory where I could absolutely take advantage of it on Nix on a desktop, but it would be portable. And if it is aware of my different systems, because I absolutely, I have a system here that's very specific.

I got, I got a laptop that's very specific. I got a workstation that's really specific to jobs a laptop that's very specific I got a workstation that's really specific to jobs oh man setup's easy too right so you basically you would go

install Nix on the system go grab fleek and then if you've already got like your repo pushed up and you're building out a new machine you go fleek in it and then you give it

the path to the get repo which could be GitHub or GitLab or whatever just a URL yeah and then it'll go like pull it all down get it all set up apply it for you.

And then, okay, so that's sort of like you want to go all in on Fleek. You're going to use Fleek to add things. You're going to use the YAML file. You can also just use Fleek as a way to sort of bootstrap and build out a Home Manager configuration for you. Then just use Home Manager.

Yeah, and you can do that at any time. There's a Fleek eject command, which sort of sets a flag like, oh, you're doing it with HomeManager now, you don't use the fleek stuff. But it renders everything out. And then you've just kind of got like templated out sort of, you know, a starter kit for a HomeManager config that you know you like from the fleek world. Which also kind of made me a little more comfortable because HomeManager has been something I want

to play with more. But I'm in a similar boat where it's like i'm still learning nix here like i haven't done the whole migration fleek was easy you know you can turn it off if you don't if you don't want it since it's just user stuff and knowing that i can upgrade later when i want to go full home manager yeah you could always bail out at any point and just go full home manager for any reason too that's great just for managing your system but fleek seems like it gets really useful if you've got multiple machines yeah it does it really does because i mean yeah they've got that built-in git support um so you kind of just push it there you pull it around and you've got fleek going now i haven't

i only just started playing with this week it just kind of popped up it's like alpha status don't go migrate your whole life to this thing. It's new, but it's, that looks, your rundown of it makes me very, very positive on it. I want to check it out. So if you also want to check it out, the URL is getfleek, F-L-E-E-K dot dev. And we'll have a link in the show notes, of course.

All right. Now I'm going to be getting my fleek on. And I'm going to be learning more YAML too, apparently. Goodness. Linode.com slash unplugged go there right now to get a hundred dollars and 60 day credit on a new account and it's a great way to support the show while you are checking out fast reliable cloud hosting with the best support in the business they got real humans all day every day 365 y'all i mean it's really nice when you get stuck.

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technical background. It's a nice, easy read. It's an ebook you can download from Linode. No signup required, no email address required. You can just download the ebook. And it's from 451 Research. And they just give simple analogies to understand the role of containers and Kubernetes in cloud infrastructure. That could be really great for other members of your team or maybe friends that are trying to learn, too. But support the show by starting at linode.com slash unplugged. That gets you the $100. It's a way of supporting the show. And with that $100, you can really kick the tires.

You can go build something. You can go learn something. You can try it for yourself while you're supporting the show and see why we love it so much and why so many in our community keep signing up for Linode. Try it out today and get that $100 at Linode.com slash unplugged. That's Linode.com slash unplugged. dot com slash unplugged. That's linode.com slash unplugged. All right, so I'm going to spin the wheel and find out what my topic is. I have not looked at the results yet, so I'll be doing that shortly. But first, I want to remind everyone that we have a meetup at the end of April, We have a meetup at the end of April, Saturday, April 29th. And there is a perfect location, we think.

The Boston Harbor, downtown Olympia, with covered outdoor area where we can be on the marina, right there on the water, close to snacks, food, drink, and beautiful, beautiful scenery with great parking. beautiful, beautiful scenery with great parking. And that'll be Saturday, April 29th at 1 p.m. meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting for details about that. And I also want to put a shout out or call out or whatever you solicit, ask for, request. If you are in the San Salvador area or in El Salvador area and work with Linux or know a company that uses Linux, please contact me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com or send a boost in. Those are probably your two best ways to get me directly. And or if you were in the area and would be interested in doing a meetup, should we do an El Salvador meetup? I'm going to be there in November, early November, first couple of weeks in November. And I'm going to be there in November, early November, first couple of weeks in November.

And I'm going to figure out if there is interest in doing a Jupyter Broadcasting meetup in San Salvador. So please let me know. Give us a signal somehow so we can decide. I want you to put the word out too, because I'd also like to talk to Linux companies down there, figure out what the job scene is like, and just figure out all that kind of stuff. And I'd love to land a few interviews with Linux companies and put them here in the pod so let me know and then last but not least little psa that i want to get out there is get your talks in get your talks in for linux fest northwest i i don't i'm getting low numbers i don't like the numbers i'm seeing i i'm saying it's like red alert. We need people to start submitting their talks. Now you got a couple of weeks still,

but here's what I want you to do is get your MVP talk in. It doesn't have to be the complete idea. You don't have to have it all finished. Get your proposal in. Cause I want this conference to be just stacked with some of the best content in the world. I'd love to see people there with that want to talk about Knicks, people that want to talk about Ansible, other, other things going on in the world with Linux, people that make, you know, people that

use daily Linux and, you know, have tricks and tips to make that easier. Just anything out there that you have to offer, consider hosting a talk. It's pretty low key. You know, it's, you show up in a room, they make it all ready, easy to go for you. It's not, it's harder than just you have to talk to a group of people, but they're a group of your peers. You know, when I was in Berlin, I was told about a hack and tell that happens at Seabase, the crazy underground bunker thing. Spaceship. Oh, I got it wrong. And I think that would be a great thing for something like Linux Fest Northwest, just like these quick five five-minute lightning talks about something you built that you think is really cool that people might appreciate. So that might be an angle for folks who are attending and maybe traveling from far a JB room like we did a few years ago, a couple of years ago. And then we could leave room in there for audience lightning talks

and we'd have control of the schedule. So that's something to consider. But we also need to get our own talks submitted. I'm trying to think of what I should submit a talk on. Have I done one before? I can think of a few things. We'll have to, we'll do some brainstorming. All right.

I will put a link to the uh call for speakers in the in the show notes you can also just go to linux fest northwest website but please do get it in there um because we're looking at the early results and i'm thinking not so happy a little concerned so if you want to give a talk it is a great venue with a great room because these are the college campus with a low key laid back approach and a group of your peers that are just there to have a good time. And there's a lot of knowledge in our community to be shared. I think if we got just a small percentage of the brain trust in the JB community to do a talk at Linux Fest, it'd be an incredible conference. All right, let's find out what I am talking about today. Never done a show like this before,

so I'm not really sure where this is going to land. Wow, this is not what I expected. So we gave the audience three choices. We try throwing NixOS Unstable on my laptop live on the show and upgrade to Plasma and see where that goes. I share the story of the scariest software update ever. And not my story, but a story of what has got to be one of the scariest, most anxious and anxiety-inducing. Now I want to hear the story.

And the winner. By a few votes, 40% of the votes, did not expect this. By a few votes, 40% of the votes did not expect this. Learn just enough to know why Noster or Noster matters. Noster? No, sir. So we're going to talk about that. Noster, notes, and other things through relays. And I think a lot of people, when they think about this,

they probably roll their eyes and they think it's a Twitter replacement, and that's kind of where, if you're like me me and you have very little interest in more social media, you kind of just opt out. But that would be kind of like saying that HTTP is only for social media. I would think of Nostr as a protocol to run decentralized web applications. It's a lightweight open protocol that, quote, has a chance to work, as per the project docs. And it's probably most famously immediately known for a Twitter replacement. That's what it kind of became known for immediately. And there's probably the most well-developed apps for Noster are like these Twitter clone replacements there's also like some telegram replacements and things like that but I

just wasn't super interested in any of that but I got an insight recently thanks to the Bitcoin dad from the Bitcoin dad pod about where this is going and then it finally clicked for me and I realized this is one of those things that isn't going away and i'll tell you why i think that is in just a moment so this isn't a crypto thing there's no crypto currency but it does use cryptographic signatures kind of like pgp or ssh probably more akin to thinking of it like ssh2 in a way with with identities and whatnot and then it uses relays that's what the notes and other things through relays the protocol specs are all defined by nostre improvement proposals that become collected and you can find them on their github the basics of the protocol is a web socket server that's called the nostre relay

it handles and stores just simple data structures called an event which i think are like basically blocks of json or something mean, it's really basic. Noster clients are apps that can talk to the relays and can subscribe to a set of events and have a subscription filter too. There's no signup or account creation for a client. Clients are identified with their public keys. So your identity is a public key. Every time a client connects to a relay it

submits a subscription filter and then the relay streams back the interested events to the client as they connect and there's relays all over the place some that are pay some that are free some relays can cash client subscriptions but they don't have to and clients basically handle all of the intelligence client side the relays as the project puts it are dumb as a rock and all of the intelligence client side. The relays, as the project puts it, are dumb as a rock. And all of the innovation happens client side. And what they really underscore is dumb server, smart client model. The simplicity of the protocol allows devs, they say, to quickly leverage the open standard and put all the complexity and implementation on the client side.

And it does seem to be working because there are already hundreds of different applications that have been created using Noster. And the app experience is pretty much all defined by the client, which actually so far seems to be pretty impressive. It also means that essentially I can use one type of client, Wes and Brent could use their own different individual clients, and we're all sharing the same information because the protocol is open and the way to relate is all open. So the platform is decentralized at its core, and the clients are compatible with each other via like a simple storage protocol for all of this. And where it all kind of, I think, as Brent likes to say, the rubber meets the road, is when you start to think about the future use cases here. say the rubber meets the road is when you start to think about the future use cases here as a twitter replacement interesting ho-hum but what about as a silk road replacement this is going

to happen there are a couple of different proposals already out there and projects that have begun creating a completely decentralized private unstoppable marketplace that uses lightning and nostre to basically build out a marketplace that has no centralized server has no centralized authority and seems basically as about as unstoppable as bit torrent and bitcoin it is uh an interesting bringing together of the stack, bringing different open protocols together. And this is one of the many ways. Another way that I think is going to be really fascinating and is a lot more positive is the podcasting 2.0 community is looking at this type of stuff for ephemeral chat rooms. chat rooms so imagine live chats powered by noster where when we do a live show a chat room dynamically spins up that is for that episode it exists during the episode when we complete the episode it's available as like a json file that could then be linked to or rendered or played back with in

sequence to the podcast it could be implemented in the podcast client on the mobile device. It could be implemented on the web. And you could also see these other kinds of things where you just spin up an ephemeral chat and then associate it with something where everybody uses their client of choice. It's a lot simpler than something like matrix, a lot less heavier. Another system could be for like backend communication between applications to

do like a negotiation or something like that. But the one that really kind of made it click for me was the silk road replacement because that just seems like when you start thinking about decentralized payments decentralized marketplaces the first thing that's going to happen is services on the fringe that are excluded from society today will leverage anything that gives them an opportunity. So the first things that we'll start using Noster is going to be this kind of stuff that maybe you're not super comfortable with. I mean, some of these marketplaces will probably be completely innocent and others are basically going to be a new Silk Road.

And the technology will get used for good and bad and i think it's going to paint this technology as probably a negative in the tech press for a while while it has this beginning phase now i think there's other positive things that we already see in stack exchange replacements sub stack replacements messaging platform replacements and of course social media platform replacements i will put a link to an awesome Noster list, which is like one of those classic awesomeness. Guys, go through that thing. It'll blow your mind.

Now, do you need to worry about it today? My assessment? No, not really unless one of the applications you look on that list appeals to you. I think it's not really relevant in the Linux community. Are you using it? no um i will probably play with it more and come back with a report sometime if i deem it necessary but at the most

for the most part i think it is a technology that the linux community shouldn't dismiss we should prepare ourselves for the inevitable this tech is bad because it's being used to circumvent authorities and that fud that always gets tossed around because it's a technology it's not an intention it's not an emotion it's a technology but i don't think we really need to distract ourselves with it at this moment it's really in an early build phase if you're a developer and you're kind of looking for the next cool new thing definitely worth taking a look if you enjoy new developing communities and technologies and like to be part of something as it's getting established, definitely worth a look. But, you know, if you just want to sit back and wait for us to tell you when something interesting that's

applicable to the everyday Linux user's life, I think it's still going to be some time. Jupyter Broadcasting Relay when? Yeah, maybe. I might actually set my own up. It does look, you know, I love that kind of stuff, but I just don't get the sense that there's a lot of relevance today if you're not like a heavy social media user or if you're not disenfranchised with some of the existing chat platforms or, you know, if you're particularly interested in decentralized networking, then probably look into it.

But that's my report, gentlemen. What do you think? Are you going to check it out after the show personally? Well, I was already somewhat interested i like the sort of minimal relay you know specification open standard i don't know if i have anything to put in it yet or read from it but i'd like to understand it better at least yeah yeah what about you brett what would it take for it to kind of tickle your okay this is worth my time to dig in? Well, I think that awesome list is where I'm going to start.

I feel like sometimes when a new technology like this shows up, you know, imagining what it can be used for is kind of the hardest part at this stage of its sort of evolution. But there's got to be some super useful stuff in there. So I think I'm just going to start there and cruise through. And I wonder if I can find something that I can convince you both to start using with me. That would be a fun twist. And I'll note that some of the best information I got, like really just like level-headed, removed, detached from the hype. Funny, I think that's even more ironic now that I say this. Came from the Rust community that's interested in Oster. There's a building Rust community over there

that's building a lot of the backend tooling in Rust. Of course. And they have a really good, I'll link to it in the show notes. I think I can find it. They have a really good rundown on why that community thinks it's a sound technology. But it's early days.

It's going to be fascinating to watch. What I'm quite interested in is the combination is the comparison between IPFS and Noster. They seem like maybe they can solve some similar issues. I'm going to really look forward to that in the next year or so. Maybe.

Yeah, maybe. Decentralized persistent storage on a decentralized messaging system. Maybe you want to use some IPFS links in your notes or notes. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Head there right now to get started for free. Try it for yourself as an individual. It's also great for teams and enterprise users.

Bitwarden, simply put, is the easiest way for yourself or a business or an open source team to share and sync sensitive data. And Bitwarden's vaults, they're end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. And of course, the thing that gives all of us some peace of mind, Bitwarden itself is open source. It's trusted by millions out there. It's one of the trusted apps in our local community. It's used by teams all over the world and organizations for secure password and data sharing. Sensitive things like passwords, of course, but maybe billing

information, maybe a recovery phrase you need for certain apps, maybe two-factor codes. It's just all kinds of things that you need to store in a central repository. And you can build up a lot over time as well and bitwarden has a guide to create device specific subsets of your credentials how cool is this idea so if you have like a personal device and a work device you can create device specific subsets of your credentials i love this idea and i was just browsing through the bitwarden docs when i saw this and i thought oh my gosh this is perfect for what i've been experimenting with recently. Migrating to Bitwarden is so simple, too. I did it in about, I mean, under five minutes, probably.

It's just bitwarden.com slash migrate, and I think you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. Do us a favor, though, by starting at bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords. It has so many nice features and they're always improving it as well. And of course, there's lots of eyes on that code, so it gives you some peace of mind. Go check it out today. Get the best password manager and secrets manager in the biz and maybe recommend it to friends or family and help them improve their online hygiene as well. The journey starts for all of us at bitwarden.com slash Linux.

Go try it out today. bitwarden.com slash Linux. And now I think it's time for the boosts. Boostagram. We got some fantastic support. A lot of it for Wes's birthday. Thank you. Frozier comes in with 700,000 sats.

And he was boosting in from last, from episode two weeks ago, from last episode, but two weeks ago, so not last episode. And using Podverse, says some insights into the introductory versus technical questions

that have been floating around on the show. You guys have been the best resource so far in my funny in hindsight goal of becoming a Linux power user. I know what he means, right? Like you think, how hard could it be? Right. Continuing on.

From the start of a complete noob six years ago to now, you have walked the line perfectly. In the beginning, I would have browser open as I listened and I would frantically Google words like SSH, Bash, and Genome, and R-Sync, etc., etc., just to try to keep up. I was a puppy trying to run with the big dogs. Thank you for the education. That's great. Thank you for the value, Frazier.

So sweet. I think I know what he means because that's me with a lot of the financial podcasts and radio shows. I'm like, I have barely any idea what they're talking about, but I'm trying to keep up the best I can. Just like washes over you and, you know, you learn more and more of the words and then the sentences start to fill out and you get more context. Definitely.

I feel like it's that with the car repair channels I watch too. I think I prefer to just go all in and then sort of backwardsly figure out what I need to piece together to get to the objective i have so i definitely jive with that i did a search recently for fuel making happeners but i couldn't really find any information on that it's a weird sometimes yeah you gotta be careful special lingos like genome can throw you sideways that's why that's why we choose to be professionals and we respect the pronunciation. At Deleted came in with 99,999 sets. That's a Wes birthday boost.

What? I hoard that which you're kind covet. Coming in from Fountains is, was there something we're celebrating? I just can't remember. Must not be that important. Just kidding. We love you, Wes. Don't believe all the mean things Chris says about you. Aw, thank you, Deleted. Oh, he's learned that by now. We love you, Wes. Don't believe all the mean things Chris says about you.

Aw, thank you, deleted. Oh, he's learned that by now. We love you, too. Thank you, deleted. Yeah, Wes knows. You know, the Wes will just throw it right back. Wes, he's a cool guy until you start challenging him during Linux Action News prep.

Then he'll throw it down. That's the only time, though, I've really ever seen Wes throw it down. It's during Linux Action. But, you know, you get a good result. Atwin1109 comes in with 84,081 sets. You guys, I love you. Using Fountain to boost it all in. I was talking to a co-worker about all the AI stuff,

you know, what it's doing, what it could do, mostly doom and gloom stuff. But he said, quote, what if instead of the scary stuff ai brought about a kind of star trek utopia allowing us to spend our time coming up with new things and pushing whatever we want or pursuing i should say whatever we want obviously there are some practical hurdles that we would have to overcome but who knows maybe it's ai that solves some of the biggest issues in society today i I'd love to hear what you guys think.

I love that take. Before we even turned all the lights on and started the stream up and anything, Brent and I were talking about how I've noticed the people with the most to lose are panicking the most about AI. And the people with the least to lose are like, let's see what happens. This is going to be neat. with the least to lose are like, let's see what happens. This is going to be neat. There's something to the fact that AI could challenge the establishment a little bit. Not to frame it in this way, but if you think about it from somebody who is what they call a capital allocator or a VC funder, they matter more when you need $400 million from them. They matter a little bit less when you just need $50 million. And if certain tooling, like some of these GPT toolings,

can make your team a team of five people instead of a team of eight people or a team of a dozen people, it's going to make those VCs and those capital allocators less important. It's going to mean smaller businesses can scale up and do things that larger businesses could only do before. And it's going to disrupt things a little bit. And whenever that happens, we start to get a little scared. And I tuned in CNBC the other day and all of their guests were asked the question, what scares you about AI? What's keeping you up at night about AI? And that's where they're starting the conversation right now. So it's going to be a

little bit, and I think there is probably some reason to be somewhat concerned. I don't mean to be laissez-faire or Blair or laissez-brent about it, but my outlook is let's bring the chaos, I guess. Well, it's like everything, right? I mean, it's more technology. It does have a lot of transformational power, and we could use it to lift all of ourselves up. Will we? Yes, it's like sort of the theme with Nostr.

It is a tool. It is a technology. It will be used for good things and bad things. We'll inevitably hear about somebody getting arrested that used one of these GPT tools to create some sort of fraud, right? It's going to happen. That'll be part of the process we go through. Doesn't mean we throw the tooling out, in my opinion.

And I guess part of me figures, kind of unironically, how bad could it be if the robots took over? I mean, think about what a poor job we're doing the meat bags of mostly water are just crap at leadership maybe the robots would do a better job dexbot comes in 69 420 sats what you did there i hoard that which all kind covet boosting from the podcast index directly for last week's episode. Keep your darn secrets. DexBot says, just listen to episode 503 and 504, and I have to say that I really love how y'all covered both the technical and human aspects of the NextCloud project. It's helped move NextCloud up in my home lab to-do list. I think, DexBot, you'll feel like it was a good choice.

I was hesitant, even though we've used it in production successfully for a while. I just didn't really want additional complexity at home. I didn't appreciate how much Nextcloud can be used as a backend for a bunch of different apps that I now use. And now I have a common place for files, pictures, authentication. It's just like an API platform that I can plug into apps that sort of brought everything together for me. It does seem like it's especially useful. I mean, it's useful all the time, but especially useful if you are just starting out because you don't have this big pattern.

You're not already doing all these different Docker Compose services or whatever. You can get by with a lot of things that start in NextCloud and then maybe you migrate to something more specialized when you get there. Or maybe they keep you. You never know. Exactly. Magnolia Mayhem comes in with 39,443

sats. It's a zip code boost. That's a cool zip code. 39443. I'm a little jealous of having 443 in the zip code. That's awesome. Also, to pad things out, I'm leaving some What3Word locations. Oh, great!

Where I have listened to JB shows in the past. I wish What3W words was way more common. This is such a great way to divide the world up into a grid pattern that makes it so easy for meetups. We could just give out three words. Yeah, boom, here, right there. Up to now, we've been failing, clearly. Listeners, if you don't know what I'm talking about, go Google what three words.

There's like, I don't know if that's the open source version. There's also the open source version. That's cool. That must have taken forever to type out mayhem you crazy so do you got the do i got the location over there west did i stall long enough oh yeah i did and then i did i oh your postal code near tucker's crossing mississippi tucker's crossing huh that's nice makes me think of star trek user 406-237-5244-5809-86 boosts in wow with 40,960 sats i'm putting my sats to correct your pronunciation it's not chat gpt it's chat jippity thanks for all your great podcasts i've been listening since somewhere

before episode 400 did I get that right? is this jippity? yeah that tracks right? that does track and 40,000 sats is that low? does that buy us a jippity?

I think it might oh wow wow wow thanks for the sats user Dexbot came in again because Dexbot's a maniac with another huge huge boost, 31,909 sats. Not my current zip code, but it's nearby the same state. It's a zip code where I grew up.

Pick this one special for the extra nines. All the best wishes to Wes for his happy belated birthday. Oh, thank you, Dexbot. This appears to be Columbus, Georgia. Mm. I do want to get down to Georgia one day. If I could get my slides in on my RV, I could maybe make it to a few of these places.

Step one, then step two. I need an RV tech guy. Somebody in the Pacific Northwest that's an RV tech guy, my goodness, reach out to me. You're going to put your kids through college with me as your client. You know, Brent seems like he's got the makings of it. Honestly, if Brent was here or Jeff, if I had some help up there, I probably would be trying

to diagnose it myself. But at a certain point, I just throw my hands up. My kitchen slide broke again, listeners. It's horrible. Sounds like we have a project for the end of the month. Oh, yeah, I could wait.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah, during the April meetup, we'll drive you up there and we'll hook our peepers on it. See if we can't engineer a solution. Gene Bean comes in, 30,180 sats listening to it's a trap from castomatic. They write, I think I've moved since sending what I believe was my first of the zip code boost. So maybe, maybe Gene Bean did kick it off.

Here's another one to agree that Brent's Nextcloud coverage has been awesome. one to agree that Brent's Nextcloud coverage has been awesome. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting a fresh instances hub for running soon and migrating my data from the Snap version I'm using today. All right. So 30180

Westpain. Do we have a location? 30180 Postal code in Georgia near Villa No, let's see. Douglasville.ville near douglasville all right well georgia meetup needs to happen obviously seemingly yeah wow yeah todd comes in with 20 141 sats sent in a zip code boost well thank you todd todd sent that from the podcast index and a little behind the scenes listeners is Wes is creating a system

that automatically grabs these boosts, assigns an ID to each one of them and puts them into the dock here for us. So this is a cool way to kind of over time, begin to build a history of who's boosted in using our own infrastructure, which could be, well, that could be very fruitful one day. So do we have a location for Todd Westpain? Luden County, Virginia. All right, Brent, that could be very fruitful one day. So do we have a location for Todd, Westpain?

Lewton County, Virginia. All right, Brent, write it down. Joe Hill comes in with 40,000 sats using the podcast index from episode 505. This is my favorite podcast of all time. Aw, geez. I've been listening to JB since I think six months before they got acquired by Linux Academy. All right, so coming up almost on what four years maybe three and a half four years five years how long ago was 2018 guys years definitely

i care not to think about god many pounds ago and many years ago i always listen to linux unplugged every week and would continue to listen for many years i use pocketcast because it has all my history if i could import that listening history, I would switch over to a 2.0 app right away. Joe Hill boosting in from zip 15613. Uh, somewhere near Orchard Hills, Pennsylvania. Oh, beautiful. I bet. Danny 42 boosts in with a mega row of ducks. 22,222. This old duck still got it. There you go. You convinced me to switch to NixOS, and now I just wish I tried it before. I absolutely love it.

That was my first reaction, too. It's like, ah, dang it. I waited way too long to try this out. Absolutely. Thank you for the big boost there, guys. And we have a few more to wrap us up that were under the baller amount but we still absolutely appreciate yeah one five thousand sat boost from paulo periera and boosting

in with the podcast index hello long time listener since linux action show about 2005 era can't really remember whoa ex-patreon contributor and current party member and first time booster right on i'm boosting from lisbon portugal just listened a couple of days ago about simplex chat that you mentioned and i'm really liking it it'd be great to bring someone from the project to talk about it and a plus one for more in-depth hands-on shows as an example how to set up a simplex relay you could do it while doing the show explaining and sharing some. Maybe even start something like a wiki or a general steps section on the website that would start in an episode but could be contributed to by the community throughout the show. Keep up the great work. 500 more, please. 500 more, please. Well, thank you very much.

I think we've experimented with some of that. I'm not opposed to it. It would definitely have to be a community initiative because when we ran it in the past, they generally would fall behind. And then you'd have this guide that was no longer really applicable and that became embarrassing for us. It was a thing.

But Wes, you set up that Simplex chat server, the backend server. Oh, yeah. What do you think? Is that still running was that a difficult job was it just like a docker compose and a couple of variables and you're good to go yeah pretty much yeah i wonder how we could do that there might be a way where we could be a little more clear about how we stood it up in the show that would be useful but not boring that is

definitely something i will start noodling around. I think that's worth considering more. Thank you for the suggestion. Snapdragon boosted in with 10,000 sats using Podverse. In Linux Unplugged 505, you mentioned giving Tuxedo OS a review. It would be great if you took it one step further and purchased a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 for the review. The Linux laptop market is so small, getting to hear about the manufacturers other than System 76 would be great content. Much love from Cincinnati. P.S. I'm typing this on a launch keyboard.

How does 99 watt hours sound to you, Chris? Oh, does it have 99 watt hours? That's what this graphic seems to suggest. Yes, please. That has been an issue of mine before um you know so i think the reason why you see more system 76 reviews snapdragon is uh system 76 is more proactive with sending out review units and they have people that are dedicated to doing that i

don't i think i think we've probably been offered a tuxedo review unit maybe once maybe it's been a really long time though if we have and so the reason why that makes a difference is well I I'd have to be making a lot more money to buy every cool Linux laptop that comes out because there's usually a few a year and every now and then I do buy them you know i do i bought my x1 carbon and uh thunderbolt 4 yeah it's got two usb a ports full size sd card reader okay what is it based on what what is the is it based on a magnesium chassis is it based on a clevo that i don't know because i think i mean that's probably similar to some of the max 64 gigs of ram yeah looking at this i think it's kind of similar to some of the other rigs that are out there which

is not bad not necessarily bad those they're getting to a good place and everybody has to make their own choice but for me i i i'm not even exaggerating brent and west can confirm i have a literal stack of clevo laptops in my living room here at the studio. Too many. There's probably at least eight in that stack of laptops. And all of them have died over the years for various small reasons that just sort of leave them inoperable. And I mean, I have ThinkPads and Dell XBSs from a decade ago that are still running. Everybody has a unique individual experience. That just has been my experience.

And so, if that is a Clevo machine, I would have to kind of think about it. It looks like a really great one, and they have really come up high in quality. So, if I was going to spend my own money on it, they'd really... That's a hard call. It's a hard call. I imagine the same hard call a lot of you out there are having. If only there was some sort

of, like, review system. A lot of you out there having, if only there was some sort of like review system, some sort of system. Hmm. How, I don't know. How would that work? I don't, I don't know.

Lucas Burlingham boost in with 9,999 sets. Happy birthday. Thanks again for the wonderful content. Oh, thank you, Lucas. We did get a lot of really great support this week. And personally,

it's been really, it's made me smile to see all the birthday boots coming for Wes. You guys are the best. Aw, thank you, Lucas. We did get a lot of really great support this week, and personally, it's been really, it's made me smile to see all the birthday boos coming for Wes. Me too, you guys are the best. And, you know, there's just something really nice about this model, because we hear from you guys, and it generates this conversation and this feedback, and also forces us to follow up on topics that we completely lose

thread about. It makes us reconsider things. It's more than just the value of the stats, it's just been a really valuable conversation. Well, you know, especially this time, because we prerecorded early. And so it's been a bit, we've got a lot of boost. It was just fun kind of peeking, taking a little peek at the top of the mailbag to be like, oh, look at all these boosts. Yeah, it is. It's it's it makes you it makes you feel like people recognize the hard work and you compound that with there are weeks in a small business that aren't great weeks and so when you see the support coming in from the audience regardless of what sponsors

are saying or partners are saying things like that it's like the people that really matter supports there that feels so good sam h boots in with 5 000 sats i looked at log seek about a year ago when i was looking to switch from OneNote. I got a good impression, it has some great features, but the lack of folders seemed like a problem for me. I'm currently using Obsidian plus SyncThing, and well, still some OneNote, especially for work, but I like the idea of a folder of Markdown files that theoretically is independent of the app, whether that is Obsidian, Zettler, Markor, Nextcloud, etc. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true.

You definitely get the Markdown part with LogSeq, but it relies a lot more on the blocks and the graphs and the connectedness of the layer above than just the folder layout, which works for me, but it's not for everyone, that's for sure. You know, my noodle just takes to the folder layout which works for me but it's not for everyone that's for sure you know my my noodle just takes to the folder layout better so that was definitely a thing that i was having a hard time with um that's where joplin does seem like a little more to my workflow is that i can i can create a bunch of different structures like i have a folder for each car i have a folder for the rv i

have a folder for their servers you know just sorts for the RV, I have a folder for the servers, you know, just sorts it a little bit easier for me to kind of find stuff maybe it's less noise to my eyes when I'm trying to find information Chris, can you give us like a little update? How's it going? It's been a few weeks since you talked about Joplin. You still actively using it? Yeah, I've been using Joplin

combined with a VS Code plugin and that has been really nice because Joplin's UI is just slow for me but using it with VS Code plugin, and that has been really nice because Joplin's UI is just slow for me. But using it with VS Code has been fantastic until this morning. Now my VS Code plugin just quit connecting to my Joplin local instance, and I don't know why. So I don't know. Maybe I'll have a better take later, but I like that.

Opie1984 comes in with 5,999 sats using Fountain and just says, birthday booze. Aw, thanks, Opie. Faraday Fedora also came in with 9,999 sats and said happy birthday to Wes. He says, I hope the boss gives you the day off. He sure did. Yeah, we took Sunday off. It was really nice.

I worked on my broken RV. RGH comes in with 2,671 sats sets coming in from fountain.fm boosting my zip codes aka postcode where i live 2671 west yeah actually yes we should although i'm could be a postcode in new south wales in australia yeah let's see if that's right. I think that's, I mean, when you start throwing around postcode, that's kind of how I know. That's how I know. They also said to keep up the great work. Oh, stop it. Our dear Akenji over in the Matrix points out Joplin has a terminal user interface.

Have you tried that, Chris? Looks pretty neat, actually. All right. All right. They threw a screenshot in the chat, and I'm kind of impressed. I bet the interface is faster. Actually, you know what? If you're just doing Markdown anyways, why the crap not?

That does look actually usable. This is the thing about Joplin. That's what I just love about it. I keep finding this kind of stuff. So great. McLang boosted in 17,955 sets. Ooh, thank you. Hello from the homeland of Alianus himself.

I've been a JB listener since the Lunduk times and have enjoyed every show and every second. This booth is both one quarter of my zip code and my first foray into the value for value land. Thank you to the whole JB crew, and keep up the great work. Well, that's their first boost. That is a very generous first boost. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. And using the podcast index, I think this is a great way to get started.

You don't have to switch podcast apps if you're not ready, and you just get Albie and then go to the podcast index. Well done, McLean. Well done. Now, Wes, did you track down that location there? It seems a little tricky in there. It's a little tricky. The boost is both one quarter of my zip code and my first foray into the V4B land.

Yeah, okay, let's take this. Yeah. Let's multiply it by four. Right. And then. You have the location. And while you do that, Brent, why don't you read the next one? Yeah, Magnolia Mayhem comes in. 3,999 sets. and then you have the location. And while you do that, Brent, why don't you read the next one?

Yeah, Magnolia Mayhem comes in. 3,999 sets. Happy birthday to Wes! This boost was composed in NeoVim over a 3-hop SSH chain before copying to Albi because it's a birthday boost and those should be fun. Magnolia, how did you know that's just what I wanted? That's the perfect gift. The nerdiest boost you could think of.

And then update on McLang's location. It seems to be a postal code in Arkansas. Eileen? How do you boys think you say that one? Eileen? Aileen? There's an A in there. Yeah.

But I'm thinking you just drop the A altogether, you know, because you just throw letters in there. Lean for short? Yeah, lean. Lean, I like it. But there's an E on the end. Is it a lean E? Some people do that kind of thing.

You'll have to let us know. There's only one way to find out. Only one way. We need a local expert. Samir boosts in with a row of ducks. I've been following you since the Lunduk days mainly the windows action show april fools episode first time boosting or messaging just want to wish you all a happy day off amazing you long timers coming out of the wood i know it's it's something else it's special it is really it

is like extra special um and it's always enjoyable how people mark the eras of JV history. And, uh, I think it's great. Lunduk obviously means you've been around for a while, you know, and, uh, I love that. So thank you very much for coming. And, and, and you know how many times people also say I've never reached out before. I've never emailed. I've never talked to you before, but I've been listening for over a decade. ever talked to you before but i've been listening for a over a decade yeah that's me too all the podcasts i listened to i've never written in until boost came along and now i boost into the ones that support it regularly but until then my whole life i've never written into a podcast isn't that funny you know that same thing happens at our meetups like uh ben and berlin who i met he's been listening like since the first show JB ever put out. And he was like, this is the first time I ever reciprocate. Wow.

It was amazing. That could be you next, listener. Hey, speaking of boosts, User 865 boosted in with 10,000 sats. Listener for a few years to several JB shows, first time booster. Mostly because Overcast for iOS is so good. It is a good app.

Thanks for the solid content from 87420, which is in San Juan County, New Mexico. Also thought there might be some interest in this little project I've tinkered on. And then we've got a link to NixOS ButterFS Pi, a repo over on GitHub, and you'll find it in the show notes. Building a ButterFS root NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 3. That is interesting. To me, ButterFS and the Raspberry Pi are just two great things together.

It's a great file system for that use case, especially if you can hang an SSD or two off of it. And then check this out too, which kind of like fits awesome with the Pi. On a new tag in that repo, GitHub Actions builds and uploads an image to the releases on GitHub so that that can be downloaded and then flashed directly to the drive running the Pi.

And then user 865 has been running this on a Pi 3 for a few months now with a scanner connected by USB that's syncing over sync thing works great wow

wow that's a great success story thank you for sending that in and we'll put a link in the show notes and we're going to round it out now

thank you for the fantastic support it's really a wonderful thing to come back to Marcel comes in with 2,099 sats from Fountain says happy birthday

to Wes follows up with another 1,706 for my notes come back to. Marcel comes in with 2,099 sats from Fountain, says happy birthday to Wes, follows up with another 1,706. For my notes, I use a mix of markdown files and the back of envelopes. And yes, it's a big mess. But I keep meaning to try something different. Maybe I'll try log seek. Hey, you should. Don't listen to the folder haters. Yeah. What do they know right and then uh he he has a great question he says can we get some lieutenant commander data boost love and he sends that in with 1705 sats i am programmed in multiple techniques you absolutely can you absolutely can

peg dot came in a couple of times this week 9999 sats wishing a happy birthday to wes and saying my big issue with notes is google keep despite regular searches i've never found a decent replacement i use it for quick notes to do's in my grocery shopping i really am fond of their notes check checkbox list reminders app and the web app most replacements i found either don't have notifications or a web app would be interested that the community knows of a good app for me he followed up saying that he is trying out obsidian though and so he's curious if that's been working for people keep is great and the only way i have avoided uh getting sucked into it is just by not letting myself use it for anything serious like it may be a flight or

something but i just i know i get sucked right into Google Keep. Yeah, I kind of try to keep the reminders and stuff separate. I've just been migrating my groceries and some of those other things into LogSeek just the past couple of weeks, which has been going decently, actually. But that does not answer the case, right? Having a web app, maybe you're on a system that you don't control. You don't have a place to run an app. That's a harder problem to solve. Yeah.

Kos, peel and boost in with $,690 sats about the question to donating to an open source project. I was looking at Linux server IO. If I could send some sats

through a QR code, I would have done that. If I'd seen splits, I would have left it. Too bad,

only old school payments are supported. I know how you feel, Koss. I feel that way these days, too. And I think the Linux Server I.O. guys should get on board because I have noticed the self-hosted community

definitely likes the boost. And if you think about it, it makes sense. You can self-host your entire infrastructure for a financial tool. That's amazing. You can be your own bank. You can have multiple different projects. You can integrate it with different stuff. Could have a Linux Server I.O. custom lightning image ready to go, you know can be your own bank. You can have multiple different projects. You can integrate it with different stuff. Could have a Linux Server I.O. custom lightning image ready to go, you know, host your whole stack.

I hope they wake up to it eventually. I think once the crap coins get done taking their beating from the regulators in the market and we get through macroeconomic conditions, people will start to figure it out. And I bet Linux Server I.O. folks will be some of the first projects just because we have a lot of their users in the self-hosted community and the self-hosted community has really embraced it gene bean boosts in with 6666 sets across the series of boosts coming in hot with the boost wondering how have you replaced apple music yeah so um not great, really. So what I experimented with was creating a bunch of local playlists using Apple Music, and that kind of kept me using Apple Music. I am shocked, shocked, appalled at how bad the playlists are on Apple Music. There is not a single one of their curated playlists that I can just hit play

on and enjoy. And they have thousands of them. They're constantly coming up with new ones. That's really disappointing. I mean, for me, they all suck. And it's in weird ways. It's like songs that don't go together, like, you know, oil and water, just like totally incompatible vibes. And they're putting them back to back. You're like, what's happening here? So I really look forward to getting off of Apple music. The problem is, is I just don't want to curate a collection of high quality music.

I want a collection of beautifully sourced flack files. I don't want to make the collection and I don't want to store it. So I've just been using Apple music cause they got the gosh darn lossless. Right. And I put it locally on the gosh darn Pixel, and it just works. But now I'm listening to like the same 100 songs since I've switched to the Pixel.

I'm not even kidding you. It's starting to drive me crazy. Thankfully, it's a podcast. If you're in Apple Music out there, share some playlists with Chris. He needs it. Yeah. Yeah.

Help me out. Give me some ideas. Hey, I noticed a lot of you are using Podverse Fountain as well. And I got to say, great choices. Podverse has some fantastic updates for Android users. Latest update has brought the crash rates down on Android. Significantly huge gains there. There is still some work around, I guess they're getting like an Android system non-responsive error for some devices. So they're still sorting some of that out. But another big win, the F-Droid build size has been reduced by 66% because they now have platform specific builds for F-Droid, thanks to

some help from the F-Droid team. And so I love on Graphing OS, I'm sorry, Giraffing OS, I gotta get that right. Because you can have a completely free stack, load FDroid on there, and Podverse is in there, the whole thing, 100% GPL, top to bottom. It's fantastic, right? And then Podverse has a membership plan

where you can support the development if you like. It's one of the many new podcast apps. You can find them at podcastapps.com. Of course, if you want to keep your podcast app, just get Albie. Get albie.com, then go over to the podcast index, find the unplugged program on there,

and you can boost right from their webpage, or you can boost from our web player on our website. Thank you, everybody, who did boost in. We had a lot of support this week. It was great to see for Wes's birthday, and just with the extra recording window we had, we appreciate you all. Now, Wes, you've got a pick that I think you've been using on the daily, likely in angeror sometimes.

Indeed. Did you need a new diff tool? You might need a new diff tool if it's written in Rust. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. Third Rust mention in one episode. Okay, no, it's not really a new diff tool.

It's not going to fully replace diff. It's diphtastic, though. That's the name of this handy dandy diff. It's a structuraltastic, though. That's the name of this handy-dandy diff. It's a structural diff that understands syntax. So it's not for preparing patched files or sending patched files. It's for interfacing with humans. If you've got a big complicated diff, you've changed some code, you've just changed a file, you want to understand what those changes are without just being told, oh, that line has some characters that are different. Enter diff-tastic. It supports a

whole bunch of languages, including some obscure ones. So it probably supports the language you use every day. And it works pretty good on just Markdown and plain text files too. I was just using it the other day. I had ChatGippity clean up some text for me, you know, like kind of replace some special characters, maybe swap some words here or there. And I wanted to compare that with a few other engines as well as just make sure that I had a handle on all the stuff that changed from the text I gave it. And this thing would just, you know,

it highlights it in red and green, side by side on the terminal. It's just a much better diff. And for some kind of really nasty cases where Git just doesn't, like regular Git diff doesn't fully understand and kind of shows you a big old messy change that doesn't make it clear, DivTastic does a better job.

And there's some integrations with editors out there, plugins for stuff like VS Code and Emacs. There's also some settings in Git if you want to use it right on the command line. Or it's a Rust app,

so there's just binary releases on the GitHub. You can download it. You don't have to, so it's really easy to try like on a work machine. You just kind of download one little library,

mark it executable, and give it a shot. And of course, maybe you already said this, but it's packaged to Nix. Sure is. Up to date. There you go. That was fun, guys.

I enjoyed your topics very much. Brent, I'm glad we got caught up on some feedback. We have some more that we'll be covering in the future. And Flake definitely looks like something to be checking out. And my take on Noster is don't dismiss it, but don't distract yourself with it just yet unless you want to build something. We'll have links to everything we talked about today

at linuxunplugged.com slash 506. Also, I'd like to personally invite you to join us live. We do the show at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jupiter.tube. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Indeed. Indeed.

The show is archived over there. And of course, we put together a real nice package for our members. We create extra content for them as a thank you. We also have an ad-free version of the show if they like it lean, mean, and ready to go. The bootleg or the lean and mean. It's available for you as a core contributor or sign up as a party member at jupiter.party. There's more news in the world of Linux and open source. Don't miss it at linuxactionnews.com.

We're always just breaking down what you need to know for the week. Wes and I get in, get out, get you informed. linuxactionnews.com. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday! Thank you. you