LINUX Unplugged - 511: Accepting the Future

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

How we found peace with the Linux community’s perpetual debates; and our tricks for finding the signal from the noise.

As of just a couple of days ago, people have started reporting that the Spotify app just stopped working on Linux. For users, premium users and free users that have been using it for years, they just open the app. And the Spotify app says, quote, this app is restricted to premium users only, error code 409. Even if you're a premium user, you still seem to be getting this error message. And I'm looking through the form here. And it's even as of just a few hours ago, people are having this issue. What are you doing, Spotify? It's an Electron app. It's like a really fancy web view. Time to switch to local media? I think they should rewrite it in Rust.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, for years, for years, the endless debates of Linux drove us crazy. Wayland, should we adopt it? Should we not? Systemd, is it the death of Linux or is it not? Which distro is the best? Which desktop environment? Package manager, snaps, flat pack, so on. But more recently, we've actually managed to find a little bit of peace with it all.

We'll chat about this inclination for our community to debate endlessly, perhaps why maybe it isn't actually such a bad thing, and our tricks for finding the signal in the noise of all of it. And then we'll round it out with some picks, some boosts, and a lot more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Go over to Tailscale.com. It's a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Say hey.

WireGuard. Good morning. You can now get it for free up to 100 devices and unlimited subnet routing too. It is such a game changer. I have no inbound ports on any of my firewalls anymore. I sync all of my data over Tailscale to my mobile device. So even when I'm out and about, I have WireGuard protection. Tailscale.com.

If you get a chance, tell them the sent you tailscale.com and let's say time appropriate greetings to our mumble room hello virtual lug welcome in hello guys hello hello hello hello guys hey y'all what we've got today nice to see you in there looking sharp and hello to you folks up in the quiet listening as well nice to have you all on board just tag me in the chat room as we go along if What a call we've got today. just wanted to give a quick update on our drafting slash graphing os usage because i haven't told you guys of some recent developments i've been saving it for the show uh so you know we've covered my journey to drafting os on my paizel 7 i see you have it here with you today that's not an iphone how long has it been now chris i think like eight months it's been since last november i think yeah right around thanksgiving yeah it's a since last november i think yeah right around

thanksgiving yeah it's a couple of nights ago wife and i were out for a little evening walk and i was mentioning how i still don't really trust mobile devices and mobile phones and i don't trust them really from a full security standpoint and i don't really trust them from a hardware standpoint because it's all integrated So one component failure could take out the entire device. And so anything of real value, like a Bitcoin or master password list, or all of my notes or all of my wife's notes being just on the phone, I'm uncomfortable with. And I was just, we were just having this conversation and kind of talking about it. And I kind of realized, oh, you know, when I think about it, I sort of feel that way about all my devices right now. They no longer use a custom built desktop everything's sort of integrated

one component fails potentially I'm looking at warranty repair maybe reloading the OS restoring from backups like it's such a bigger deal than back when I had a custom PC and I could just replace the power supply or the graphics card and it's not necessarily an entire new machine. Yeah, now that might just be a whole laptop down and you have to buy a whole replacement and get going again. And so I was telling you, this has been a really tricky thing for me because I don't really know which machine is my most trusted computer anymore. And the part of the conversation was, am I just getting old? Is the obvious answer my mobile device because I've got this great

drafting OS the pixel 7 is really good it's secure I trust that this is probably one of the more secure devices I own now I don't have it tied to any Google stuff see it's feeling pretty good but I just can't fully bring myself to trust phones as the place to be my most secure thing for, or even like the stuff that my wife needs for her business. That's really private and confidential for her clients. And so this is just something we've been talking about. And then the next morning, this is like Thursday night, we had this conversation Friday morning. I wake up, my iPhone's totally dead. And I, at first I don't think much about it. I think, well, And at first I don't think much about it.

I think, well, you know, this, uh, this wireless puck that the Apple has now that you use for charging that's magnetic. It's great. This makes the make safe power puck adapter, but because it's Apple, like every now and then, for whatever reason, the puck has to be rebooted. And I've paid extra money for the privilege of rebooting my power brick from time to time so that way it charged so i don't think anything about it i grab my iphone put in my pocket whatever i got my i got my pixel with me i'll go to work i get down to the studio and i plug it into like my high power adapter you know like my high power apple adapter give

it the juice i give it the full onion hold down the buttons. The iPhone doesn't turn on. So I look up. What are my tricks for getting an iPhone to hard reset, boot, et cetera, like all the troubleshooting things. So I just plug it into a Mac. So, you know, I get a freaking lightning cable and I get a freaking Mac out and I get it all set up and I plug it in. Nothing happens. And I go through all of this and I cannot get the iPhone 13 to boot. It is totally dead. Ironically, the

morning after we just had the conversation where I said, gosh, I'm not so sure if I trust these mobile devices because one component fails and the whole thing's gone. Then the next freaking morning, my iPhone 13 was dead. And I tried every trick in the book Friday to get it to boot up. But ultimately I was like, screw it. I got the pixel. It's fine. And I go home with my pixel and my graphene and it's my whole, it's my whole, uh, setup for the whole weekend this last weekend. And it was fine. It was a really good reminder that these integrated devices shouldn't be fully trusted. Even, even if you get them secure, there's still that issue. I come in this morning, Sunday morning to do the show. And I still had it plugged into the machine. the machine booted up when i sat down and the iphone turned on yeah of course right like i guess maybe it drained itself all the

way to zero at that point and then it turned on maybe it was it was just on holidays yeah everyone needs a break chris but it's just like come on this is a this is supposed to be a premium product it's embarrassing yeah and well especially is a this is supposed to be a premium product it's embarrassing yeah and well especially with you know these mobile devices they get they're so used for communication and little little bits of you know checking in on your daily life when they suddenly drop away or yeah you feel them missing i was like man am i glad that i've been doing this graphing os stuff because you have a i had another phone ready to go so it wasn't really a big deal but i'll test it the weekend without my phone would have been hard with the kids and stuff

like it's just it's tricky you know graphing os continues to just be a great great product they've just released a new version uh which has a bunch of nice little quality of life improvements and they're testing out this thing called contact scopes which provides a way of granting contacts permissions for apps so you could so you could just make sure an app can only see like a couple of your contacts or something like that i can't suck in all of your contacts once you give it access to that they've also been working on their google play compatibility layer which they call gms compat config a new version of that was released and that just seems to be working really well for me if i need to emulate the play stuff for a bit and keep it kind of boxed off i can just really

really grateful that i had drafting os and that i had this pixel when the iphone died on me like that but it does bring me back to that core concern of what device do i really trust because the same thing could happen to a laptop you know even the companies with the best manufacturing standards these things can happen these components can fail and i i think the thing that would really really really be awesome is if i could get drafting os on an android device that had a removable battery because the next obvious step with that iphone would have been if i could pop open the back and pop in a new battery and it very well may have resolved it if that thing draining to zero was finally would let me power

it back on once I once it was plugged in it just seems for like sustainability and safety and reliability and all these things a little bit more bulk to have a removable battery ultimately as these become more important in our lives I I think it matters more than ever. But if we're just so not going in that direction. So I guess, you know, backup your devices is the moral of the story. Yeah, I mean, we're kind of forced to do that. It's almost a parallel version of some of the, you know, the cloud stuff. You got to assume like, well, this could fail at any time.

I need to make sure I've got stuff synced. I've got a plan for how to get it all back going quickly when I do need to swap over. Obviously, on the desktop side, you know, we've got tools like Ansible and Nix that can help a lot with that. But it can be a bit trickier in the mobile world. You know, Chris, I've been thinking about this topic for too long in the same way as you. But with all of my traveling, as you used to give me a hard time for, I used to travel with two phones. And one of them was simply a backup and wasn't an active second phone like yours. But I've been thinking about this quite a lot.

And I think, you know, Wes, you just mentioned doing backups. But I find even doing backups from a phone. Now, I have mostly just Android experience. But that process, if you don't want to be a part of the Google ecosystem is a rather difficult one and it's not straightforward. And it means that I'm, you know, for myself running a device that actually feels a little precarious, even though I'm doing the most that I can to like, you know, auto sync things like photos and stuff like that. But there's so much in a phone that is required for you to just get going.

You know, if, if one of my phones gets run over by a dump truck, well, it's not actually that straightforward to move over to a new one where I feel like if that was the case with my laptop, with such more advanced backup strategies and just more open, uh, it would actually be quite quick to get back up and running. So I feel like we need to make better progress in that area just to make it easier, switch from one to the other. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go check out the new exciting news from Linode, now part of Akamai.

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And I'm talking like the tippity edge, like Brent's house up there in Canada. Linode.com slash unplugged. Please, please stop using X.Org with Asahi Linux. Those were the words from Hector Martin recently over on Mastodon. He went on to say, It's all but unmaintained, broken in fundamental ways that cannot be fixed, unsuited to modern display hardware like these machines, and we absolutely do not have the bandwidth to spend time on it.

We strive for a quality desktop on Apple Silicon, but we have to pick and choose our battles very carefully because we can't single-handedly fix all the problems in the entire Linux desktop ecosystem. Yes, some X.Org things might work better on other platforms. That doesn't mean X.Org isn't broken. It means those other platforms have spent years working around X.Org's failings. We don't have time for that. Distributions and major desktop environments are already dropping

X.Org support, and it's pointless to try to support it well today on a brand new platform. Yeah, this debate has once again really come up. The whole, is Wayland worth it? It seems like every few months, at least, if not more often, this debate kind of just comes percolating around. We've even seen some companies like RustDesk, which I previously liked a lot,

just completely write off Wayland and say, no, we're not even going to bother. We're just not even on our radar. And you see arguments too, like for streamers that want to get 60 frame per second video capture in OBS, they have issues with Wayland, right? It's not 100% for every desktop environment.

Things like RetroArch don't have window decorations. Genome is probably the furthest along. Plasma with a pretty close second. But then it kind of gets worse from there for the traditional desktop environments, with really the only desktop environments that really shine are the ones that were built Wayland first in the last few years. And so it does feel like there's legitimate arguments to be made on the, why are we even bothering with Wayland? It's taking so damn long. Why even bother? Let's make X11 work instead. And I can appreciate that it might

feel like getting trolled a bit to some users of the community where you keep getting told, stop using this. Move on. We've got a thing for you. It's Wayland now. This is the future. This is where you should be going. And then you try it and you realize, yeah, okay, well this can't work for all my use cases or doesn't now.

Or has anyone else run into this? Why doesn't that work? Hector actually, he quite literally said at one point, quote, deal with it. You know, like not every random app or feature you want on Xorg will have a whaling equivalent, quote, deal with it. The major players in the desktop links have decided to move on from Xorg. And if you want to go against the tide, you're on your own. And I think people hear that, like you're saying, they hear just deal with it. And they're like, okay, well, I guess I'll go check it out. It must be functional now. They're telling

me I just have to deal with it. And then your favorite thing, some edge case, it doesn't work. So they're kind of right. You know, the people that are pushing back, they're kind of right. But I feel like it might be one of those chicken and egg problems. You know, if the features aren't there, if we had more people there, then maybe there would be more attention paid to implementing some of those features or alternatives to them. You know, for myself, that was one of the tricks to moving to Wayland full time was, well, things like VNC, you know, a year ago were kind of super rough or not available at all and screencasting and all of that. So, but the more we move over to these new technologies, especially considering everyone else, you know,

it's starting to have consensus in that direction, then the more people are there, the more attention it gets, the quicker development happens and the better it becomes for everyone in long term. It makes me think, do we need some, some better docs or better ways of, you know, like is Wayland ready yet for your use case? It feels like it can be kind of tricky, like Brent's saying, like, unless you're, you know, you're keeping up, you're following a particular guide for a particular disco, maybe Fedora, right, is a place where that kind of shepherds users a little better here than other places. But if you're not tuned in, you don't know that, okay, yes, here's how VNC, here's how you're supposed to do remote desktop.

Here's how it's gotten better in the last little bit. And you're just left wondering, like, does it work? I've heard some people got it working on some forums or over on Reddit, but I don't know how to reliably do it myself versus X11. You know, you Google how to set up VNC for Linux and there's a thousand tutorials out there.

And nothing's really clear that says like, hey man, maybe this doesn't work for your setup anymore. You know, so you might be on Wayland and you're looking up some article on how to do VNC and they just naturally assume you're on X11 because that's how it's been forever. And there's nothing that even says it doesn't work on Wayland. Then you go to try it and it doesn't function.

I wonder if we shouldn't just kind of like pop up the metastack one level and just kind of admit that desktop Linux occasionally has crap sandwiches that it serves up. And one of those crap sandwiches is regressions. And the truth of using free software is sometimes we go backwards before we go forwards, but it's to retrench and build it in a way that is more sustainable. It's also sort of a sister to, you know, we sometimes have issues or end up talking about things that we might not in the commercial space because, you know, open source development happens out in the open. We get to see the fights, we get to see the discussions. Oh yeah, that's definitely a thing.

And here, you know, you get to try the software, you get to use the software, all the different integrators and distributions kind of pick and choose when things happen. People like us on shows are talking about the latest stuff, maybe pressuring you to use it, and it's there. So you can try it and you can get burned in a way that, you know, in the commercial world, the only way you're going to get access to stuff that's maybe not quite ready is in some beta that you have to acknowledge could be broken. And, you know, if that's what ships to you eventually, it's on the proprietor, not necessarily on you.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, too, it is definitely a bit of the sausage factory is just like out there for everybody to see and so we do see that i think also it is possible in free software for anyone who's properly motivated and educated and it's even more available for a really popular piece of software for anybody to fork and if it's something that's really really you know used by a large community and they get a lot of value out of it that large community will even self-organize to maintain it we don't have that even as an option with commercial software and i think in the short term especially as desktop Linux users, we can find some of this behavior aggravating and frustrating and feeling like it's slowing down progress.

Like, why can't everybody just get on Wayland and Pipewire and we're all on ButterFS? But the reality is that it's a much more organic process where somebody or a group of people who really believe in something can continue to use that, and that makes their workflow continue to operate. And it's kind of the ultimate software insurance policy that they just don't even have available to them with commercial software. And so if we were to take that kind of choice and that flexibility and that freedom away for the sake of focus and the speed of development to be competitive, we would be removing one of the fundamental counter benefits

to the way commercial software is developed. Right. You're not stuck in a world where you don't have to just say like, oh, I don't like the new version of Windows. I'm just not going to install it because those are my two options. Take what's new or stick on what's old, right? Here, the whole reason Hector's making a post like this is because people, you can still choose X11 if that's what's still working best for your particular use case. Yeah. And I think in the case of the M1 systems, it makes the most sense just to focus on going forward and not trying to make the old system work better. And, you know, upstream has moved on. So there is this reality just in the regards of the Wayland discussion.

There's this reality that Red Hat isn't really paying anybody to write code for X11 anymore. So therefore, no one is really paying anybody to write code for x11 anymore so therefore no one is really right paying anybody anymore to work on x11 every now and then wes and i talked about it on lan a while ago every now and then an old timer this is legitimately how it works now an old timer i say that with all respect becoming an old timer myself over time comes out of the woodwork and does like some sort of like save the day patch set for X11, just kind of drops it and says, here, have it. And then walks away again for the other five, 10 years.

And like, that's how X11 development is getting done right now. And what they are focused on is X Wayland. And they're focused on making X Wayland a full X11 replacement that could run on top of Wayland. That's what Red Hat's resources are going into. So that's essentially what Up Hat's resources are going into. So that's essentially what Upstream's resources are going into. So the reality on the ground is Wayland is the only thing

getting resources going forward, including ex-Wayland. And so there is a transition that needs to happen, but that crap sandwich exists. You know, if you want your 60 frame per second capture for your OBS vidya games on the Twitch.tv, yeah, it might not be there yet we're doing a wayland setup here for our obs streaming it's not it's not perfect perfect but

it's pretty much exactly what we need for the basic streaming that we do we're live streaming on nixos plasma and wayland using pipewire the whole brand new stack on this obs machine and it can absolutely be done it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but I don't know, I guess you just sort of live within your means on that kind of stuff. And it, it ends up working in the end. Right. Chris, you shared a software analogy that I really appreciated along with a moving train. And I thought, could you dig into that? Cause I thought that was such a nice way to see. Oh, I thought so. How open source software.

Okay, well, I thought it was a slightly tortured metaphor. Sorry, everyone. No, it's okay. It's one of the, it does kind of convey the idea. And Wayland gets criticized for taking, you know, 15 years or whatever to get done. It's only been 14. Okay. But in free software, when you build it right, that thing can last forever.

We may end up using Wayland for 40 years or more. And so if it took 14 years before it became the default, when you're at the end of that 40, 45 year time span and you look back, does it really seem that ridiculous that it took that 14 years? Because it wasn't like it just, the code got thrown over the fence and it just sat there and then we slowly adopted it. It has been improving during that 14 years. years because it wasn't like it just the code got thrown over the fence and it just sat there and then we slowly adopted it it has been improving during that 14 years and the the tortured analogy was essentially it's a basic freight train that carried a basic set of cargo in the beginning

but that train has been in motion for 14 years and during that 14 years they're building the train with more and more features and capabilities essentially more apis and more things that it supports and it can carry different types of cargo. And now we're 14 years into that train running nonstop, and it can carry just about all types of cargo that we care about with just a few minor exceptions. And when you look back 40, 45 years from now, and you look at a general purpose display server platform,

it's not going to seem that ridiculous that it took 15, 16 years to reach all the edge cases, especially when the desktop Linux user is like one of the least important focuses for most of these developers to begin with. And that's just the hard reality we have to live with. And that's why we get the crap sandwiches sometimes. But at the same time, it's a very nourishing crap sandwich because we get a great general platform that we can use for free that provides so it's just the process and it's kind of how i've come to a peace with it i'm wondering brett i'd actually like to ask you do you find it still frustrating sometimes is this a

piece you have found did you come to it sooner than i did yeah so i find i have the benefit of you know playing in this linux space single day. And not all users of the desktop Linux have that benefit. And so I find if I'm getting frustrated by some of these technologies, you know, and their implementation taking a little while, well, for those who don't even know the intricacies of why this is important or why it's taking so long, I would imagine I'm not the only one who's frustrated by this. So I don't know if it's like a bigger communication problem or like everyone needs to come together and say, Hey, let's go in that direction. So in a way, this post by Asahi

recently is kind of like, Oh yeah, right. Everyone should be headed in that direction and we shouldn't just be kind of stagnating yeah i think my my zen comes from the fact that i can zoom out and i can see these things go in the right direction over time have you come to peace with this wes do you get frustrated when we talk about these things that take forever like i think uh i think one that maybe would you maybe consider frustrating like I do is Butterfest. You know, early on. It wasn't great. I criticized it. I lost data to it.

But that also generated years of FUD of articles and blog posts and opinion makers that now generate so much hate today. And these opinions have just become entrenched but the objective reality is the source code for butter fs has seen enormous improvements over the last few years and if you don't like reassess and listen to people you trust you won't find the signal like you you can you can you can get really kind of lost in the noise and i i gotta imagine you find that frustrating yeah especially i think over a long you know a long life cycle of a project which we especially kind of lost in the noise. I got to imagine you find that frustrating. Yeah, especially I think over a long life cycle of a project, which we especially

see in free and open source software. And maybe Butterfest hasn't become exactly the sort of ZFS killer that was overly promised on Reddit way back when. And honestly, neither do we need it to be. That's just it. And if that's the only view you stick with, you kind of lose sight of okay, well well but maybe i don't use it for that but there's a

whole bunch of other things i can use it for that will be useful to me especially since it's it just pretty much comes ready to go for you in the kernel you're already running so i think i find it useful to not think of it as like a cold turkey switch you know because these are free and open source because we have some control over our systems, you can try things out and switch over or have multiple setups. I'm thinking about, you know, as Pipeware, which admittedly has been one of the better transitions

for, you know, in the Linux desktop space, I think. But there was, you know, plenty of time where it was really early and I would have it on systems, but I would use Pulse for just, you know, whatever, browsing YouTube and using my laptop normally. And then when I wanted to play around with Pipewire, I just turned Pulse off, turned Pipewire on, and, you know, I learned how to roll back. And, you know, same thing with X11. You can use X11 when it's what works best for your case, and you can have a whole, you know,

just another login session or a whole dual boot your laptop or a separate machine for, you know, when you want to play with Wayland. And then just make sure you do keep checking in because this stuff changes a lot and it can be hard to get an accurate summary it's so practical it almost feels like it shouldn't need to be said but then obviously somebody out there needs to hear this and it feels to me like the uh the just obvious way to kind of tack this would be I would look at the signal here and the signal is upstream isn't really focused on this anymore. Carl, you had a comment in the chat room that I wanted to bring forward. Yeah, of course. I pointed out that the X11 and Wayland are both from the Xorg project. The Wayland devs were X11 devs, and they're basically done with it. They

don't want to work on it anymore. They're focused on Wayland. So in some ways, you know, I kind of think if would it have been a better transition or easier for people to think about as a transition, as a natural evolution, if they had just named it X12. Yeah. And that's just it's that's the signal right there. Think about it like that. The devs have kind of moved on. They're not really working on this anymore. If you just change the words in your mind from Wayland to X12, does it become something you actively want to push against, or does it just become a natural inevitability that you wait for the moment where it's right for you? Another kind of funny thing that came up, I noticed on Mastodon that, oh sorry, the Fediverse,

that the Xorg account, they posted, per the bylaws, does the board need to vote on a rename to be more accurate? Should we become the Freedestop.org, Mesa, Wayland, and Linux in a Trenchcoat Shilling for Xorg Foundation? I'd love to see the logo for that. Somebody get on that. That'd be pretty good. So just think, for me, the long-term thing is kind of looking at some of the fundamentals like what the developers are saying what they're recommending where they see things going what trusted voices are saying in the community and then kind of from that deriving what seems to

be the likely long long-term kind of outcome and you can kind of just from that figure out where things are going and it just seems inevitable if you think about like whaling you think about the butter fs and those types of things why fight it just accept it and use it where it makes sense i feel like another tip we should probably give and remind ourselves is we need to challenge our own opinions you know an opinion you gathered uh maybe five years ago about whaling is going to be very different than the opinion you probably should have these days. It's changed so much. And I feel like in some areas, you know, we talk about R slash Linux quite a bit, but sometimes I read opinions and they feel so outdated. And so it's important for us, I think, as a reminder to keep looking into these projects and saying,

okay, where are they now? It's been a year. I should update the opinion I have about this thing that I wasn't so sure about. You know, Butterfests is a great example of that. Years and years ago, I was like, well, maybe I should just be cautious about it. But these days, especially with all the updates that we've been getting these last six months, it's like, actually, this is looking really good. So just try not to get stuck in those opinions and challenge yourself a little bit. Yeah, I would refine that tip just a little bit and be i would be a little more on the point and say if your opinion is older than a year old it's time to update it because one or two releases of these

desktop environments they can fundamentally improve their wayland support or one or two years of butter fs support has made tremendous progress from where it was five years ago. So if your opinion's getting to be about a year old or so on something, I think that the tip to take away here is check back in on it. And since it's free, it just takes time. And if you don't have the time to check back in on it, then maybe just stick out of the conversation in general. Just sit back and let things go, right? And because we get all these opinions mixed in with an open source kind of community thing and it can create kind of drag on the entire process.

So if you don't have the time to update yourself, maybe don't be involved in the discourse, which is something we try to apply to ourselves too. So I do like your focus on sort of looking at the developers because, you know, we're a community and you can keep using the old tools. But if you're if you have new problems to solve

and you need support, you kind of have to engage with the, you know, where where things are going, even if it's just to, you know, keep apprising and learn. That's where the future's headed.

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That's what Bitwarden does. And they make it really easy to snap into an enterprise, fully customizable with different features using just your enterprise policies to adapt it to your need. As an end user, you're going to love the fact that it's open source and trusted by millions in the community. And if you're on something else and you're looking to change, bitwarden.com slash migrate. They make it silly easy you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner i did it a few years ago west before me uh i feel

silly for not having done it sooner and i love that they keep adding great features that make it easy for me to have my personal my work and the open source projects totally separate that's chef's kiss brilliant right there they just keep iterating and making it better and better. So go try it out and support the show. Just go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Get it for free for yourself or for a business at bitwarden.com slash Linux. Chris, when I left the studio earlier this week, I noticed the morning I left, there was quite a nice box that was sitting there waiting for it. But I didn't tear it open, you know. I respect your privacy, but it seemed like it might be something exciting.

What did it end up being? Is it something special? Oh, this is so delightful. We really have the best audience, and we've gotten some great hardware sent into the studio recently. One hot tip, though. If you send it in, put a little note in there, even if it's just with your name or your matrix ID or something, so we can make sure we tie it to what comes in. But Rotten Mood sent in an Odroid H3+. And you guys know what a big fan I am of these Odroid H3s.

He bought one for himself for a project that didn't quite work out, so he wanted to send it in so we could put it into pretty good use, as we will. 64 gigs of RAM on this sucker. He sent in three cases with it, one type one case, one type three case. And then I guess one off Etsy, which looks really nice. And he also included a 19 volt brick, which is very handy. And a 15 volt power brick as well,

as well as some casing for some SSDs, and it looks like a 128-gig eMMC as well. I actually, I opened it up this morning, but I haven't tore into all of it because I hadn't been here previously, but it came in two boxes, and the smaller box in there has the Etsy case, and, I mean, it just looks really nice.

The way you packaged everything, too, is really great. So now we have to brainstorm what to do with this odroid i have an idea i i don't know i mean there's a lot i mean there's a lot i could do right i was gonna say i don't think we'll have a problem with that we just have to compete with them uh what's the best idea what i kind of like the idea of putting it in the studio because it's silent and it's fairly powerful and it's x86 compatible. And I feel like we are an afternoon and a half away from a headless Linux powered soundboard that uses a stream deck as the UI. I like it. And then if we could and the way we could do it is we could obviously have it hooked up to the UI. I like it. And then if we could, and the way we could do it is we could obviously have it hooked up to the

board. We could, you know, take the spot that the soundboard uses now, maybe we do over the network, but I could see us using as a, as a headless soundboard. That's just,

they're running all the time. And then we could eliminate one of the machines from the studio. And presumably we could all have access to it. Yeah. You know, even when remote. And then when we're remote the sounds would play from the studio which would be fantastic because they would be a lot

higher quality and they would be in sync with the stream live time so and you know if i get like if i have if i have some sort of packet disruption and i want to play a clip if it's playing from the studio then that clip plays clean without packet loss. So there's a lot of advantages. Plus, it's just so cool. It would be really great. So that's one thing that's on my mind. I've also thought about building a new dedicated Reaper machine.

Right. It'd be a fun platform to have just in the sense you were talking about earlier in the show of, you know, stuff can fail. And at least here with an Odroid, you could be feasible to have a backup one ready to go that we just, you know, slap the image on or run the next config and go. Still very, very happy with my Odroid too.

Really, really glad I got that Odroid. And so it's really nice to have another one in here. We'll put it to good use. Now we have something really kind of special coming up. We have another birthday coming up on the pod. It was just Wes's birthday, not too long ago, but coming up pretty soon. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast.

It's going to be Mr. Brent's birthday. Brent's big birthday next episode on our live day. It's true. I don't think that's ever happened, so I'm quite excited about it. Live birthday. Mm-hmm. And for no particular reason, if you boost in with 28,000 sats on the nose, we will auto-mark those as birthday boosts for Brent to be read in the show.

And that'll be the denomination, for no particular reason, 28,000 sats. I'm looking forward to that. I think depending what comes in, we should do something special with those and, I don't know, get crazy. Some sort of gluten-free cake for Brent, perhaps. Is there any gluten-free cake that's... Isn't that like cake

mostly gluten? What do you call it when you take out the gluten? It's not cake. I don't know. I like pie more than cake anyways. Alright, there we go. I can get down on a good pie. Alright, well let's get into the boost this week. So we've recently been talking on the show about how as we round into next quarter and into the second half of 2023, the ad market has pretty much collapsed with the exception of like the really crappy dynamic ads and like your real basic kind of pre-manufactured ads and so what we're going to do here at jb is instead of going with just kind of some of the crappier ads because that's just not personally something i'm interested in it's not what our brand is about we're going to reduce our show load we're probably going to have to cut one or two

shows at least and uh we're going to focus on the shows that we think we can get the most community support around. And LUP is obviously one of those. I hope to be doing Linux Unplugged until I can see these guys in their 50s and 60s. I think they're going to be adorable old men. I will be a crank and probably on life support. But I'll stick in just to get to see you two as adorable old men. What about like a Futurama style head in a vat? I'm totally down with a VR headset on.

I'm actually with the way things are going these days, thinking it's more likely I'm going to be an AI presence that just is here antagonizing you guys constantly. Who gave Chris bought access to production? And so we've been asking the community to help support us as much as they can, because as we kind of go into this, we're trying to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. And we committed to reading the total boost amounts on the show. And when we get a million sats an episode, then the audience gets to pick a topic, the top booster of that.

So we'll get to the total amount here in a bit. But let's start with our first baller boost this week from Eric Walker at 1,031,427 sats. Putting us at the million sat mark with the first boost this week. Absolutely unbelievable. It was across four boosts, of course, but they write, Chris and JB crew, I started listening to JB about four years ago, and I haven't missed an episode of linux unplugged land self-hosted office hours jupiter extras tech snap linux headlines or work life and rv sense wow it's so funny to me when work life and rv gets the plug you know like i did like a handful of those like three years ago and i'm still hearing about it which is just amazing uh kind of makes me think i missed something there uh anyway he says i love to listen to a good episode number

of unfiltered episodes and a wide range of podcasts daily but i get behind due to travel or other commitments i find the jb shows are the first ones i want to catch up on because they're the ones i enjoy the most wow thank you we do strive for that we want to be your first tap i also says i feel that they're the ones i'm the most invested in. I've never reached out to any podcast before, but hearing your upcoming financial issues prompted me to consider the value I get out of all your hard work. So here's my first boost ever. What?

To show you my appreciation for all you've done over the last four years. I also joined Jupiter.party to support you all going into the future. Wow. Thank you. Here's to hoping you don going into the future. Wow. Thank you. Here's to hoping you don't have to pause any shows. Well, wow. I mean, that is an incredible amount of support, Eric. That is, I mean, it really, when people reach out and it's the first time they've ever boosted,

it's the first time they've ever contacted us or it's the first time they've ever contacted a podcast in general. That really hits me hard and it's amazing because i also have never ever reached out to a podcast until the boost came along and then i started boosting podcasts and you know sending in notes and stuff and i just think it's an incredible connection so thank you so much uh he said he did try to boost in for several days to the podcast index but had some errors but did get it through with Podverse. Yeah, I was juggling like a madman this week. So the Lightning Network is you have to have the capacity ready.

And so what I do is when we get a bunch of boosts, I take those stats and I reinvest them into additional channel capacity. So as they were coming in, I was opening more channels. But frickin' Brent over there with his uptime on Linode has beat my node out as a as a higher ranked node mine's a self-hosted node and his is on linode and so his is rated better and so the boost started getting routed through his load his low node his like you know low mid node meanwhile i got my big dog node up here that's totally getting bypassed so i had to like go around and like fix a bunch of stuff, but it was a good educational experience, you know, a little chaotic.

Yeah. So we're getting it all sorted out. It's actually getting in a pretty good spot and I'm figuring things out. It's been a good educational process. And thanks for, uh, you know, not only figuring out all this stuff you got to get here,

but also persevering through all of our ups and downs. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Cause you know, there's times too, when I'm working on this and, my god just really quick aside so i spent you know probably about four or five hours across two days here and there getting the node in really great

shape and then the next morning comcast took our internet down on and off all day so we couldn't get any boost in because again self-hosted downsides to self-hosting these things right the upside was is i could read the boost directly off the server and i could still show prep for the bitcoin dad pod so i could still do my work so that was the upside you know just sounds like another nudge towards a second internet source for that note oh yeah well you know what we need to do is get starlink down here so what you could do is when you're visiting, you could park your van outside, right? And then we could hook up your Starlink that you're going to inevitably have as our second internet source here at the studio. Just route it through Brent.

You better get on that, Brent. Better get on that. Danny 42 comes in with some McDucks. This old duck still got it. 222,222 sats. So someone thought they could come in outdo meoming the last episode and boost more than I did. Well, game on.

Here's some McDucks now in all seriousness, wouldn't it be a cool idea if we could link JB memberships to a lightning network address? That way, people who are boosting, say around 60 sats, 60,000 sats or so could enjoy an ad free experience. I think we'll get there one day. There will be tooling around that.

This suggestion is driven by my personal detest for subscription services. Yep. That's definitely one of the things we have the boost oriented at, right? Like the memberships are fantastic because during the boom times, they let us say no to like all these people that want to throw money at us to have people on the shows or run their stupid ads. We got the members and we can say, no, we're good. And then in the down times, like the members actually sustain us and keep us going.

So the memberships are super important, but the boosts allow for per episode support. And for people who don't want to do subscriptions anymore, it's also another great avenue. So I totally get that. He has a topic suggestion for a rust only challenge for an entire week we can only use apps that are written in rust of course with the kernel and the desktop excluded uh but everything from like the terminal to your core utilities should be written in rust so like goodbye ls hello exa hmm can we find a rust-based browser? I'm going to write it down. That's an interesting idea. A week in Rust.

And how far could you get? And are the tools there yet? That would be my question. We will determine if you are the winner. Hybrid sarcasm comes in with 100,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Here's a boost for the 1 million sat challenge. I think it would be neat to have a crossover episode

with the Bitcoin dad, perhaps an exploration of how dad uses Linux to manage his workflows, including Bitcoin. If dad doesn't use Linux, then this episode would be an opportunity for a FOSS conversation. What do you think? Oh, that could be fun.

Yeah, that could be, because he right now, he does use Linux, and right now is debating switching from Pulse Audio to Pipewire as a way to get, like, multi-track recording support and route audio and things like that. And, of course, one of the conversations, like, which distro is the right one to use for this? Yeah, so we'll see.

All right. Sarcasm, I'm writing that down. I'm writing that down. I love the idea that somehow the bitcoin dad's using exclusively a windows tech yeah that would be funny considering uh his job and all wink meow comes in with 78 660 sats it says this is my zip code boost i may be biased but i have to give a plus one to the aust barbecue. Thanks for all the great content. Well, Wes, I have a hint right there as to where that zip code is, but what's the official?

Yeah, that's right. 78660 is a postal code in Travis County, Texas, which includes Austin. I mean, I'm not trying to be insinuary when I say this, but I think there is great barbecue out there. when I say this, but I think there is great barbecue out there. And then there is some of the barbecue in Austin, Texas, which is survival of the fittest elite versus elite, which has produced a market for the best barbecue in the country.

And I just think it's the reality of the market dynamics down there. And I think the meat speaks for itself. And if you haven't been, I don't think you can argue. How about this? What if, what if we get some barbecue boosts, you know,

just boost it and let us know, you know, lobby for the barbecue. We clearly at some point, maybe for episode, I don't know, 600, we got to solve this. And there's only one way to truly solve this is I need to put my mouth. We got to figure out everybody. Tell us the best barbecue. We'll make a list. We'll pick out a top three that everybody sends in. We'll do a tour.

And then we go put our mouths on it. Wean just have to go meat hungry for a couple of days we'll put our mouths on it and we'll come back with the definitive opinion i mean i believe it's going to be austin texas but i am willing to be proven wrong the problem you're going to have is a lot of people in other states outside of texas you're going to say the best barbecue and they're just going to write in about their best barbecue sauce because that's what barbecue is to them. Oh, savage, savage. Saul Penguin Man boosts in with fifty five thousand five hundred and fifty five cents. I hoard that which your kind covet.

Long time listener, first time booster. I recently got an Odroid H3 plus and decided to design the Linux unplugged case. And it included Git repo, which includes STL files if you want to make one of these really neat looking cases for yourself. How awesome is this? So it is a legit, straight up, professional looking case for the Odroid H3. And it's got a glorious orange Linux unplugged logo on the top that's kind of embossed into the case. To quote from the repo, I wanted it to have roughly the same layout as a Mac mini, which left me with quite some unused space to practice some CAD and add ventilation. I designed a fan system with two Noctua fans and a couple of ducts.

So it looks, it's pretty fancy. You know, I'm really glad he boosted in so this was on our radar because the amount of work that went into this, we need to see this. We also got a greetings from Gothenburg, Sweden. That's so awesome. I want this so bad. And it looks really good. I like that power button too.

You know, this is a pretty decent little, like if you had it in a case like that, you take the Odroid and you put in a case like that, all of a sudden it doesn't seem so silly to use it in the studio, does it? It sure does not. I mean, it's branded. Perfect.

Right. I was picturing mounting it to the bottom of the table, but that's just too beautiful. Thank you, Saul. That was fantastic. Root is God boosts in with 50,000 sets. Thanks for introducing me to Tailscale. It's so darn useful to make self-hosted and cloud-based systems appear on the same virtual

LAN. Truly, no more firewall rules. Amazing. I mean, what else is there to say? Amen. It's good stuff. It really is. The Mesh VPN is so the way to go. And Tailscale and Nebula and Headscale and those types of things, they make it so much better than it was even just a few years ago.

It's fantastic, too, to put in VMs. Like, I'll have a VM running here for something we're testing for the show. And I can just leave the VM here. I used to, like, put it on a laptop or try to upload it to my home server. Now I just leave the VM going, and I just remote into it over Tailscale. Yeah, VMs, containers, sidecars, use it for CI stuff. It's handy everywhere. Wolfman 2G1 comes in with 50,000 sats.

Just another nudge for that ham episode. I'll sweeten the deal with this. I currently run an aprs the digipeter digipeter that uses linux to send aprs packets to aprs.fi ham operators in the area use it for things like position reporting and weather reporting technically you don't need a license if the only thing you're doing is receiving and relaying APRS.FI. Okay. All right.

But if I retransmit, but I also retransmit, which does require license, if you retransmit that will. You don't need to get a lot to get started. I just began with a Raspberry Pi and a $20 5-watt radio. This is a segment I really, again, feel like we need. We've been getting this suggestion for like four hundred and ninety two episodes. So I really kind of feel like we should do it. But we I would really like to have a ham person here in studio that kind of walks us through it.

We need a guide. Yeah. So. Yeah. The fact that. OK, what I really do appreciate, though, about Wolfman's boost is he kind of told me how I could do it without having to get a license. Because that's what I need for me is I need to start playing with it and get motivated enough to then get my butt out there to get the test. Something needs to get you hooked, right? So you're willing to invest, you're willing to study, you're willing to learn. Yeah, and that's why I love stuff over IP. Because there's just, there's no gatekeeper and I can just start learning and experimenting right away. But, you know, like I was saying the other day when they had the internet out here at the studio and my iPhone was dead.

So I had my pie cell, but do I like want to tether the entire network off of my pie cell that I pay per megabyte for? No, not really. And I started thinking, God, I wish I had some sort of backup method. The ham radio guys were like, yeah, we're out here. We guys were like yeah we're out here we're out here we're out here i feel like this digipeter that uses linux a has a great name b is the linux angle we've been looking for that's really what we've been looking for is that tie-in so this might be the one yep delireman comes in with 46 000000 SATs, and that is their postcode, which doesn't look like a postcode I recognize. I think you have to add a zero in there somewhere, Wes.

So were you able to compute their location? Computing. Appears to be a postal code in Altenburg, Germany. Oh, fantastic. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for boosting in all the way across the board. I thought that looked a little, like, probably. Thank you. Thanks for boosting in all the way across the board. I thought that looked a little like probably outside the States. Syce Admin comes in with 38,000 sats. Here's another high from also Norway.

Reliant on Nix is probably excessive, but how can you return from doing a Git pull and a Nix update to have the latest packages with personal settings and colors no matter the distro? It replaces apt at home, DNF at work, but most impressively, it even works as a drop in replacement for brew on Mac for terminal tools. Yeah, that's huge, right? It sure is.

Yeah, Wes has been able to build some really awesome scripts that basically leverage Nix and make it a lot more cross-platform. It's so handy to know you just need that one thing. And then if it's in Nix, I mean, you can set up a little, you know, a little shell environment really quick. You don't have to worry about it. If someone else already has Nix, they don't have to fuss with whatever particular thing or deal with Python packages, which is really never fun for people that don't do a lot of

Python. So Nix is a lot to learn. But once you learn the Nix language, you can manage a nixos machine elegantly but you can lift the nix language itself to any distro and mac os 2 and probably windows if you're a maniac and you can you can then use that that same knowledge set and that same language and expressions and those same config files on those platforms and it's not you know at point, it's not such a huge commitment to learn. It's actually kind of reasonable when you consider the scope of what it lets you do. It's especially nice, I think, on the Mac,

because it just makes me feel a little more at home on a somewhat foreign and hostile system. Todd from Northern VA boosted in with 22,222 sets. And I think you know what that is, Chris. Thank you very much. And here's something for your trouble. I'm going to call the Daffy Duck boost. Thank you, Todd. He says he's boosting in to get us over that million in boost hump.

Aw, thank you. Our good friend, listener Jeff, Torched Escape, boosted in 20,001 satoshis, saying, I love the million sat sat challenge but i think we can do better than that i'm boring and don't have good topic ideas but i'm super tempted to game the system just to troll small boost for today but maybe this ruffles some feathers and we see some proper large boosts coming in and trolling i also am loving this bounty boost idea. Maybe there can be a web page showing the current bounties and their progress. A dedicated lightning address for

each bounty would be cool for detailed stats and sort of an audience poll to see what gets funded first, but also might be a pain to manage. So maybe just a bounty bucket? This could be a great way to crowdfund hardware upgrades, studio equipment, meet up road trips, Brent's gallivanting, etc. Maybe something simple like a new ball mouse for Chris is a good start. You know what? That's a clever idea. You could facilitate that with the splits, right? The bounty bucket split and whatever goes in there is like a little bit of a budget we use for something for the show or for like gas for getting Brent down here or something like that. That's an interesting idea. The bounty bucket. Hmm.

And we just, you know, you could just set up an Albie account that we three have to log into. Yeah, just a wallet that holds just for that purpose. That feels like a really novel use of splits as well that I don't think I've heard discussed elsewhere. Like a project-specific one versus connected to a person or organization. The only downside is that, you know, one more split is it can be a fee,

depending on the app, and it means one more prompt on the podcast index. And one more possibility to fail. Yeah, yeah, but I do really like the idea. So i'm writing that down because i have been thinking in the future like how do we do little events and things like that when things are really tight like i can't even personally afford to pay for the gas like how do we actually do these events and a bounty bucket could be a good way or it could be a way to like yeah get a piece of hardware funded something i'm gonna give more thought to thanks jeff mouse down mic boosted funded. Something I'm going to give more thought to. Thanks, Jeff.

Mouse down, Mike. Boosted in with 20,000 stats. How about adding more tiers to the Jupiter.party membership options? I imagine there are probably listeners that could and would contribute more than a $16 a month donation. Yeah, I mean, you could tell because a lot of them boost in. And so that's really, really generous. I need to also add an annual plan. And there's a lot lot i need to do there i'm kind of restricted by the platform we use because what they require for each variation is essentially a new plan a whole new plan and

then that requires a lot of q a on our side to make sure when we publish something all the plans are getting it we're not putting the wrong stuff so i've just gone really slow but it is something i would seriously like to consider because obviously one of the upshots to the membership programs is it gives us some income predictability so we can make kind of plans and budgets and stuff like that which is pretty nice for a business it's one of those things it's it's okay to have that it's okay it's okay some guy named noble pain came in with uh some cheap boosts 4444 cents after all those i'm not interested in supporting the show really no no you were helping me test right although i think you put some sort of secret message in here that i don't i know we were curious we We were noticing we got some boosts with some funny titles.

And it turns out if you boost from like some clients let you boost from the general show page and not a single episode page. And that gets untitled episode. But depending on the locale of the specific booster and their language, we're getting the phrase untitled episode pre-translated into other languages so i was trying to see if i could recreate that effect to make sure that's what was really going on i put my giraffe you know us in japanese uh and thankfully managed to get it out of that mode after parts which i didn't consider before wow i have done that too and it was like crap i didn't think about that sadly all that trouble and we still got untitled episode in English. I don't know quite what's going on, but

it's been a lot of fun. It's pretty nice to be able to pragmatically poke and prod at this and kind of get the results out and then generate these reports for us and help us track all this. So, I appreciate you testing. Soltros came in with 8,888 sats

saying, I've been using Google Bard to generate Docker compose files. It's life changing. Huh. Have you used Bard to produce any kind of like config or any kind of output like that? Oh, yeah. It's handy for that. All the little tools are nice for especially easy templated stuff or just quick, you know,

transformations. Doubly so for things that you understand and you kind of get and so it's it's easy it saves you time to generate and then it's easy for you to check the results and make sure that you understand or if it needs a few yeah changes that's my thing is like i'll look at it as a template but i'm probably gonna have to replace everything put in there with a few exceptions of maybe like the name and whatnot but yeah he put a zip code in there for us have you tracked that zip code down? Do a little zip code hunt. 4-8-6-4-2 is the postal code in Michigan,

including Midland, Larkin, Charter Township, and Williams, Charter Township. That's an interesting name. I bet there's a little bit of history there, right?

Must be. The Golden Dragon comes in with some stepped up support this week. 12,222 sats across two boosts. Doing a little pre-listen boost-a-reeny to continue to show the support, he says. And he goes on to say it was a great episode. I don't drink, but the Kentucky Bourbon and KC BBQ. I know I can't boost a lot, but what other ways can a guy like me contribute? It'd be a really great sweet segment if you guys did.

He's down for the barbecue segment. I know the time, talent, and treasure model, what kind of things would jb need in those categories you know time wise or or talent there is a lot of physical hardware projects here at the studio a a like an intern type person that could help us for a few weeks like everything from go through a literal stack of laptops figure out what's working that we can get linux and build the best Frankenstein laptop from that or desktops that are in that similar category or servers that need some Proxmox work. And just like the list,

the studio has a thousand little jobs in here. The list goes on and on. So there's lots of time things there. And then of course, for talent, there's a lot of web development projects we have on our GitHub over at github.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. One of the things we should probably do

is spruce up our membership pages and stuff like that to make it more appealing to people and if i'm going to add more tiers and levels we'll have to come up with ways to show that in a way that reads well and all that kind of stuff is very useful and then ultimately outside of that like just as listening and spreading the word about a show if you know somebody who's inclined to like this type of content recommend the show to them because that's the only kind of marketing for podcasts that works. There's such a time commitment that you're only going to listen if somebody that you know recommends you listen. And so if there's somebody you could suggest the show to and help us grow during this time, that also would be a great outcome because my intention

is to just come on the outside of this with a with a business that is more focused on the audience than ever leaner and meaner and then we just grow into whatever makes sense maybe we bring things back that kind of stuff and so if we can grow the audience base during that time even if the revenue base isn't growing then we'll just be positioned for more success when things do turn around so recommending the shows and that kind of stuff is a great help as well. Yeah, just drive around with the shows playing really loud. Real loud.

Real loud. Yeah, and just crank the bass up because we do cut that down for listening. So what you're going to want to do is just really crank it. Really crank it. Yeah, it makes Brent sound great. Yeah. Gene Bean boosts in with 4,270 sats. Hey, Gene!

Great show this week, as always. Plus, just sending a test boost from Podcast Guru. Yes, Podcast Guru seems to be the new hot player in the podcasting 2.0 space. Oh, it's Android too, huh? Yep. Android, iOS, and web. Light and powerful.

I like the UI screenshots on here. I appreciate the finishing up on the web. I gotta check it out. I got to check it out. I have not tried it yet, but it looks like it supports boost podcast guru.io. If you're looking for a new fresh podcast app. Well, darn it. Now I got something to try after this. I know.

I know. Gene beans on the cutting edge, man. It's great. Thanks, Bean. Lawd impacts comes in with 4,000 sats. Tell you what. You were right with the postcode. Wow, we got one right.

We mess these up so often. It's really nice to hear. My home country is Malaysia, but I've moved to Germany to pursue my studies. Well, thanks for listening. And thanks for letting us know. Good luck with your studies. We have really, really enjoyed the zip code boost. It's great to know where you are all at and i'm consistently

surprised every time i am surprised by the locations that come in it's been really enjoyable thank you everybody who did boost into the show uh not all of them make it out of the air but we appreciate everybody who takes the time and your boost does get documented in our show notes so we will be enshrined in this week's document forever and of course those, those of you who stream those sats, we are greatly appreciative as well. Thank you very much for the folks that turned that on. And if you'd like to boost into the show, you have two paths ahead of you, my friend. You can grab a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. They support the podcasting Twitter standard like Boost.

Or you can keep your podcast app. I know some of you, you get kind of get like in a long-term relationship with that podcast app i feel you i used to be like that too but now i kind of are you playing the field over there i catch around let's just say that i catch around so if you want to keep your podcast app if you're in a monogamous relationship with your this is you get what i'm saying get albie.com yes get albie.com go get albie and uh then you just load it up with some stats, either directly in the app or using something like the cash app or the

strike app, which is now like all over the world. They just went into like 65 more countries in the last week. And then you can just top it off with a few stats and send them in using Albie and the podcast index podcast index.org. We got, we got the links in the show notes. You'd really don't have to worry about any of this.

You just click the links and you can send in your message and you can support us. And of course, thank you to our members who continue to invest. Unpluggedcore.com or jupiter.party. So that way we kind of know where we're going and keep us on the straight and narrow in the boom times and keep us sustained in the lean times. So thank you, everybody. This is a value for value podcast that is in it for the long haul. That's why we dedicate this much of the show value for value podcast that is in it for the long haul.

That's why we dedicate this much of the show to our audience is because we do it for them. And we hope to be doing it for a very long time. Again, I want to see these guys as adorable old men. Brent, you found our pick this week and it looks like a doozy. Yeah, it was a last minute find just this morning. And we've been sort of wanting this for quite a long time this might be a thing that solves a few little issues whenever we're looking into our back catalog was my thought youtube-fts it's youtube full text search and the idea is you can search all of a youtube's channels subtitles for a particular text string using the command line.

That's slick. Wes, I think you gave this a try, didn't you? Yeah, I sure did. Now, you are going to have to download, but what I love about YT-FTS is it's building on the shoulders of giants, right? Under the hood, it's using YT-DLP to actually go find all the videos in the particular channel you list, right? And then for each video in there,

it goes and downloads the YouTube subtitles that YouTube's already pre-computed for them. Then it sticks that into a local SQLite database. And then that's how you can implement, you basically first do a download, which goes and sucks in all the subtitle files. It indexes them, sticks them in SQLite, and then you can do a search

and it'll pop up with a neat little summary of all the places it found the string you're searching for. And it does all of that in seconds, right? I mean, it's pretty quick overall. Does it have to pull down anything more than the transcript file? It doesn't pull down the whole video? Well, besides some JSON and metadata to, you know, find all the episodes and iterate through them. But yeah, it's pretty quick.

I did it, I was trying to do it on JB, but we've got something like 4,000 videos. Yeah, almost 5,000 public videos, yeah. Yeah, and you might have to futz around a little bit with channels that are sort of linked, depending on the back end. I put it at what I thought was JB's, but it actually downloaded all of your personal vlog videos. Old videos that haven't been touched in years. That was actually kind of a perfect test, though, because there's only 66 of them, and that meant it went pretty darn quick. kind of a perfect test though because there's only 66 of them and that meant it went pretty darn quick you know uh this is really handy because one of the things that was like pulling me towards bard which i hate to even say but you know google's ai thing is bard can search the

contents of youtube channels so you can say hey bard what does this youtube channel say about xyz and it can go through the transcripts for that YouTube channel and tell you their take on some topic. Assuming it's right, it's very handy. Wait, have you tried that with yourself yet? No, actually. That would be the best way to find out if it's accurate or not. But I like this better, to be fully honest with you,

because A, you can do it on your own machine, and B, you're just looking for certain text strings and stuff. It doesn't need to have the whole AI interpretation, which could be wrong. Yeah, and plus you can do an export, too. So if you're trying to do something en masse, you're doing research, you want to follow up or feed it into another script, there's an export option, which will do the search and then dump the results into a CSV file for later processing. Could be a great way to keep track of all the ludicrous things Brent says on air. Oh, they are many.

Just build a little note file. We've got him this time. All right. Well, we'll have a link to all that stuff, like UT-FTS, LinuxUnplugged.com slash 511 for today's links. We'll have a few supporting links for our X 11 Whalen discussion and all the other good things that we talked about in the show. Linux unplugged.com slash five 11 plus links to everything else like our

contact page, the RSS feed and a great deal more. And then you can find us live over JBLive.tv at noon Pacific 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Indeed. And it's arch See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Indeed.

And it's archived over at jupiter.tube and we make a complete recording that has been produced for our members available as a thank you for those of you

who support the show as a member. More of us, more antics, a whole lot less scripting. Yeah. A lot less unplugged. Even more unplugged.

I don't know what that'd be called, but it's more unplugged. Anyways, if you want a little bit more Wes and I, go get Linux Action News. Lean, mean, and just what you need to know in the world of Linux and open source every single week, linuxactionnews.com. As for us, well, thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next sunday so Brent when it's your birthday do you do you do like a special twins birthday when you were growing up like it's not just your day it's your birthday, do you do like a special twins birthday when you're growing up?

Like, it's not just your day. It's your brother's day, too. Maybe they rotate, you know? Oh, that's not a bad strategy. It has evolved. You know, I remember being young as a kid with my parents. We would, you know, my parents were great because they tried to make us feel as individuals. But inevitably, you just can't.

So what would end up happening is we'd each have like our favorite cake. Uh, and I think he would always choose a cheesecake and I forget what I would choose, but anyways, everybody wins. I mean, there's so many great things. It's like having two birthdays basically. And as that has evolved, you know, we used to live in different cities. So what, you know, sometimes we would get in the same city and celebrate a birthday, which was always fun. But these days we're living on the same piece of land. So,

uh, it makes it pretty easy. So I don't know what we're going to do this time around, but I'll report back. I'm sure it's going to be a special one. Hot tub birthday cake. Yeah. You're talking.

All right. So before we go, we got a little bit, a little bit of house business to take care of. I don't know. I don't know if we want to air our dirty laundry on air. So maybe. The cone of silence.

Yeah. Come on in. Come on in. So I believe Danny 42 is our topic winner. He came in with that row of extreme McDucks there, the 222,222 sats. And he's the one that suggested the week in Rust. Now, I think we could probably do this, but we probably want to come up with some parameters. And do we want to all be using the same Rust tools, or do we want to each go out on our own and find our own Rust tools? Right, maybe we've got some, like, yeah, as you say, parameters, some categories, some stuff that we're trying to replace.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What do you think, Brentley? I love the idea of finding our own. It feels like one of those, you know, bring your own topic episodes that we do on occasion. I bet you we're going to find some, a variety, like a grab bag of great tools. Next week then is going to be our rusty birthday batch. So if you're still listening, you got to send us in your rust tool suggestions and your birthday wishes for Brent, because it's going to be, I think we're going to have a

lot of fun.