LINUX Unplugged - 515: Ham Sandwich

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

Is Ham Radio a natural hobby for Linux users? An old friend joins us to explain where the two overlap. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

Massive and expensive equipment marks the professional radio station. But in the amateur field, radio parts often include pieces of assorted junk ingeniously assembled by operators who are called hams and who take up broadcasting as a hobby. Cards to prove long-distance contacts are exchanged by the hams and proudly displayed. All amateurs are heroes of the air at heart and dream of a chance to serve humanity or to save lives. It does happen, you know.

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. We have a show that we have been promising for many, many, many years. We've been getting more and more ham curious and wondering where the tie-in with Linux is and trying to figure out if ham radio is a good fit in our lives and maybe the JB community.

out if ham radio is a good fit in our lives and maybe the jb community so our buddy noah is stopping by for a little bit to help us bridge that gap between linux community and ham community then we're going to round all that out with some great boosts some pics and more well at least a boost update because this is a pre-recorded episode before we get there though let's do a little business and say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale who have created one of the best mesh VPNs in the world protected by WireGuard. Head on over to Tailscale.com. It'll change your game and you can use up to 100 devices with Tailscale for free. Just tell them Linux Unplugged sent you if you get a chance. Tailscale.com.

Now, before we get all into it, let's also say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room, sticking it out with us today. Hello, Chris. Hello, Mumble Room, sticking it out with us today. Hello. Hello, Chris. How are you guys doing? Hello. Hello.

It's a smaller crew because this is a pre-recorded episode, but it's still pretty great to have you guys along for the ride. So Noah's joining us again this week. Noah, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, two weeks in a row. I know, long time no hear from. We figured we had to make up for lost time, right? So we might might as well two in a row and this week we're getting into ham and you seem like the guy to go to and i have a little story i want to share with everybody and why noah came to mind stay a while and listen so years ago

i mean years ago noah was coming out to the studio this would be one trip of many where he'd come out and visit the studio and he arrived this one particular trip. Didn't say anything ahead of time, but he was a dog with a bone the moment he walked through the door. He was determined to find a portable ham radio that could be his always here JB radio. And I mean, I watched him hunt on eBay, scour through the Craigslist post Craigslist postings. And, you know, he's not familiar with the local cities and towns, but he made it a go. He went through all the listings listings. And I don't I don't really know how. But at some point he found somebody and set up some sort of clandestine meeting in a park and ride in North Seattle. And of course, I had to go along for the ride because, you know, why not?

And we show up and we have no idea what this guy's driving. It's a little sketch feeling. I don't know what he looks like. I don't know if we knew his name. We don't know if he's a crazy. We don't know. But a few minutes go by. Noah susses out who the who the other seller must be.

Just I don't know, some sort of weird instinct. The guy's just sitting in his car and like then it just goes down almost like some sort of illicit substance exchange like noah goes up to the guy hey how you doing like a couple of moments of words and then like goods exchange hands and noah comes back to the car and he opens up the package and in there is this portable ham radio and on the 45 minute drive back to the studio i'm pondering to myself i'm thinking what's he gonna use this radio for, he clearly went to a lot of effort. He came in the door looking for this thing. We drove all the way down to Seattle. We met some sketchy person in a parking lot. And then we finally got this portable radio. And now, many, many years later, I can tell you it's never been used for anything. And now, many, many years later, I can tell you it's never been used for anything. I think maybe it got turned on.

Maybe. I don't even know. But I think I turned it on. But I realized that Noah, he just wanted, he needed a ham radio here. If he was going to be spending a lot of time at the studio, he just needed to have a ham radio here just in case. So that story is why I thought Noah would be the perfect person to geek out about ham radio and where it kind of maybe cross sex with Linux. So why don't we start there, Noah, as a Linux user yourself, could you share with us where Linux and the ham community kind of cross over the most? Like I'm assuming you were probably a Linux user first, but I'm not sure.

And there must have been some some values or ideas or concepts that appealed that crossed over. Yeah, you're so you're absolutely right. There's the so I've been a ham radio upper and I've been using Linux almost for about the same amount of time. So right in that in that middle school, high school era is when I started to really just explore technology. And it was the first time I had a job, so I could buy stuff like computer parts and radios. And so we value things like self-hosting. We value things like the right to repair and the ability to work on stuff ourselves. We value having administrative rights to a device, right?

The idea that if I want to make this thing do this thing, I can do that and you don't get to tell me I can't because it's mine. And so in many ways, some of the earliest examples we have in technology of that ability of that innate ability to like want to own something and take control of it and do what you want to with it comes from ham radio. So in a way, if you're thinking about whatever environment I'm in, whatever it is I'm doing, if I can get my hands on a 12-volt battery, a radio, and an antenna, I can establish a wireless communication link to anywhere on the globe. And really anywhere in the world, because once we start bringing satellites and the ISS into it, it opens up a whole new realm. And I think a lot of people get this idea when they hear ham radio,

they get this idea of like, you know, a dude sitting in his basement with the dim light of just like a radio tube glowing and sitting down there going, yeah, trying to communicate with somebody. And it's just ridiculous. And that, you know, that absolutely did exist at one time, but these days like it has become very modern. And so Morse code and voice communication, absolutely still a thing. But I think it's Ampernet was

the packet radio network or network 44, which allowed you to put TCP IP over radios. And we were doing that a decade before the public internet was even a thing, right? So, in a lot of ways, ham radio predates a lot of the technologies that we take for today. And if I can, I just go back a little bit. The federal government from the very beginning wanted to set aside a little bit of frequency spectrum because they knew that people who wanted to innovate and people who wanted to experiment and tinker, that there was tremendous value in that, both to innovate and people who wanted to experiment and tinker that there was tremendous value in that both to industry and to society and so even though it costs literally billions of dollars i think in in 2014 t-mobile bought like three million two point three million dollars worth a billion dollars of frequency spectrum from verizon wireless that that radio

spectrum is worth a lot of money. And the federal government sets aside that frequency spectrum to allow ham radio operators to experiment and learn about things. And so today we have things like FT8. And so FT8 is what I describe like ham radio on steroids. It allows you to connect a radio to a computer and it allows you to establish a connection with somebody else very, very quickly. So there is no searching the band and trying to find stuff.

It largely is automated through a computer. And there's a lot of guys, especially some of the older hams out there that will be like, that's not ham radio, that's the computer doing the work for you. I disagree. I'm still hosting the transmitter myself.

I'm still making a communication with another person somewhere else that has a transmitter and a receiver. We still have a point-to-point communication. I'm just making the computer do the work for me. I'm leveraging technology, you know, and that's being on the forefront. So that's where I would say the overlap is, is in that ability to leverage technology, the ability to own and tweak it to your liking, and then the ability to stay on the absolute bleeding edge. A lot of the stuff that comes out that you find in the commercial space or in the consumer space came out after we, as

hams, were experimenting with that years before. And one of the things that you're saying is really self-sovereignty. And that does appeal to me a lot. I like the idea that the years I've spent learning Linux, that's been an investment now that I can use to help self-host my wife and my kids and my family. So all of our data is private. It's not online. And as a family, I feel a little bit better about that,

that all of our photos and all of our notes and all of our documents are living in NextCloud now. And I took the Linux skillset I used to build that years later. And it sounds like it's sort of the similar situation with ham radios, right? If you take the time to learn the radio skillset, then what you get on the other end of that is sovereignty from the existing infrastructure. Because what crossed my mind the other day is I live in a very, very earthquake prone environment here in the Pacific Northwest. And my family spread out. You know, sometimes the kids are with their mom. The wife's maybe up working with a client. I'm

here at the studio. We're all really spread out. And if there was some kind of natural disaster, like an earthquake, the cellular network wouldn't probably function very well. It'd probably be overloaded. And I wouldn't have a way to coordinate and contact them. And, you know, that sort of scares the crap out of me. How are we going to coordinate the shows? I mean, the shows must go on.

The show's got to go on. How do we coordinate that? And so it started making me think, okay, I need something that maybe I could have a rig set up at home i could have a rig set up here at work um but there's all these like technicalities like the wife technically wouldn't be able to use it or the kids wouldn't be able to use it because they're not licensed right and i worry about that's just too much of a commitment to get the family in on it

so then it sort of feels like it gets relegated to just the hobby realm. Yes. And really, if you think about it, the whole idea of setting aside billions of dollars worth of frequency spectrum largely plays into this idea that the federal government wants it to remain a hobby. In fact, like the golden rule is you can't make money off of it. But further and foremost, there are really there are three requirements to become a ham radio operator. The first is electronic theory. And so basically, how do you build and repair electronics from scratch? And the idea behind that is that you're ensuring that people that are going to be doing this, tinkering and playing with stuff, understand the technology that they're working with so that they're not going to harm anybody else or hurt themselves. And that's the second thing is safety, how to not die. If you're dealing with thousands of watts of RF energy, best case scenario, you wind up with a burn on your finger. Worst case scenario, you wind up in the hospital. So it's of paramount concern to make sure that you understand those sorts of things. So the reason behind the licensure is largely to ensure those things. And then the third part is the regulations, because obviously the frequency spectrum is divided up and you have primary users of bands

and you don't want one user of one band to interfere with another user of another band. So just understanding where you're supposed to be and how to stay in your lane, those are important things to be able to responsibly use ham radios. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense for something like that.

You got to have rules of the road. Otherwise, one bad actor could just wreck it for everybody yeah and it and it's a limited spectrum so i i do appreciate that it doesn't really detract me from wanting to try it i guess so my other my other question is before i get to the linux specific stuff is uh is it realistic for somebody to get into that doesn't have a lot of time to devote to it on the regular but maybe more like something i do from time to time when family's out or something like that? Is it how serious of a time investment is for somebody who's busy that has a day job and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. So the I would say to get the license maybe requires a little

bit more of a time investment by way of they give you the questions and the answers and the wrong answers ahead of time. So, you know, if the answer, if you know, they have A, B and C and D and the correct answer is, you know, B in the practice test, it's going to that same answer will be presented to you on the real test. So from that standpoint, it is relatively easy to say, OK, I know what they're going to ask me and I know how I'm supposed to respond the downside is the question pool is like 300 questions and they'll only ask you 25 or 35 questions on the test but you don't know which 35 and so you have to know all of them or at least under you either have to know all of them or you have to understand uh all of the stuff behind all of them to be able to pass the test so So I would say there's maybe an increased time commitment there.

Once you have a license, though, it's good for life. I mean, well, you renew it every 10 years, but you don't ever have to test again. And as far as what you need to do, I mean, there are plenty of hams that jump on once every once in a while and just have a handy talkie like we picked up, and I would gift it to you if you get your license. And you just take it on, you power it on on the way home and call up a friend or talk to somebody once in a great while. And that's just fine. The other thing I would point out to you is it's true. Your wife and your kids aren't going to be able to transmit on the radio, but there's no harm in them receiving. And so while you can't talk directly to them, you can pass traffic to another operator and they'll be able to hear that traffic.

So, for example, if you say, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm stuck at the studio and I, you know, I podcast for a living and I can't get back to home to my wife, you know, at our RV. She can potentially hear that traffic. So you can kind of sidestep some of those things. In my family, what I've done is I've just encouraged my wife to go take the test and become a ham radio operator. I'm encouraging my kids now to kind of follow that path. And so taking them out to field day, which is coming up at the end of June, it's an opportunity for you to go out and see it firsthand and then get some hands-on experience. And usually that kind of lights the bug and gets people to say, I want to do that. Yeah, I could see that. I could see that making

sense after dad gets into it for a bit. What are you doing over there, dad? Well, let me show you. That sometimes works. Linode is now part of Akamai. All the tools that we love, like their beautiful cloud manager, the API that's well-documented with libraries for any language you might want to use, the CLI tool that I use basically every day, all the stuff that you really use to build and deploy on Linode, the stuff that makes it possible to scale in the cloud, all that is still available.

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all the way to the edge. It's linode.com slash unplugged. Support the show and get $100 in 60-day credit. Linode.com slash unplugged. When I started looking into this, because my direction I would like to go is software-defined, if possible, maybe like a raspberry pie or something that i could maybe take with me figures you know a little portable setup and no you know i bet this happens all the time when people look at trying to do something with linux for an area for the first time every guide every youtube video i found literally for like the first probably dozen all of them were telling me go get get like a pre-made Linux distro.

It's got all the tools you need. Yes. Everything's ready to go. Is that the direction I should go for like a dedicated device or should I just install a general distro and put packages on top? Or is this one of those cases where it's like, no, actually you do want the pre-built?

A couple of things there. So I think the first thing I would say is it is absolutely important. I would definitely go go if you're going to do a dedicated computer to run Linux or to run a machine to do ham radio, I would definitely go with the district just by way of they're going to have all of the software that you're not even going to know that you need already there and available to you. And then it just runs. However, I have another thought for you. If your goal is to low, it sounds like your goal is really to lower the friction of operating the radio, not so much. And that's your, that's your push towards SDRs. Then it just runs on the computer

and then you're not hauling around a bunch of equipment. That's fair. Okay. So in that realm, what I might suggest is you look at, um, they make software defined radios that you, they're headless. So essentially it looks almost like a server kind of, and you plug it in at like the studio or some fixed place, and then you're able to access that radio from anywhere. Awesome. So I'm going to recommend something to you that I don't personally agree with myself, but I think in your case, it maybe applies and at least it gets the appetite wet, so to speak. So there is a site called RemoteHamRadio.com. And what RemoteHamRadio.com, what they've done is they've purchased 200-foot towers and put really nice antennas and rotators

on them. And then they've placed them all over the place in the United States and other countries. And then they purchased these software-defined radios that I was telling you about, and they connect them and expose them over a web interface. So for, for, and the reason I don't like it is because it's, yeah, I'm, what I'm telling you about is cloud ham radio, right? And I kind of starts to defeat the purpose, but what it allows you to do is it allows you to operate the radio at a fixed price per minute, as opposed to having to invest in a bunch of equipment and set up and do a bunch of these things and allows you to kind of get your feet wet. Because one of the things I've seen happen over and over and over again, and I think it's really a bad look for ham radio is we take people out to field day, which is a day that happens once a year. It's coming up in June,

where we expose the public to ham radio and allow them to come out and try stuff. And we set up really nice equipment and put it on really nice towers. And then people go off there and they have a great time. The problem is then they get done and we send them home and we're like, here, go spend 200 bucks on a radio and a dipole and tune up your gutter and good luck. And they're like, huh, I was talking to people in Japan at field day and now I can't talk to my neighbor six blocks away. What am I doing wrong? And it leads to a frustrating experience. So, you know, remote AM radio allows you to have a great experience every time as you're learning how, like what you want in a radio, how you want to use it, what things are important to you,

what things are not important to you, what kind of radio you would like, you know, what kind of tower you'd like, what kind of antenna, those kinds of things. It allows you to explore those things. So I might start there. And then, of course, if you want to, if you ever purchased a radio, that's where you start getting into, you can start to use software-defined radio software in Linux to be able to connect to those transceivers to accomplish the same thing. But now you're self-hosting it.

All right. to be able to connect to those transceivers to accomplish the same thing, but now you're self-hosting it. All right. So what I like about the kind of cloud ham radio, the remote ham radio, is it seems like for the home setup in the RV, I could just use that because I'm kind of optimizing the RV for everything over IP anyways. And then, like, for the plane around, could just use a portable radio, possibly. Yes.

And then like for the playing around could just use a portable radio possibly. Yes. And, and then I don't have like this massive pre-requirement of learning a new distro and getting everything set up there. I just kind of come back to that once I've got that other stuff figured out and I can start taking advantage of the benefits of using ham radio and like with the, with the radio hosted stuff, I would still, that would still be beneficial for like learning the culture, the language. Yeah. Right.

Okay. Interesting that this remote ham radio looks like it's free for folks 25 or younger. So, you know, if you do kind of get Dylan interested, I'm going to try it out. I mean, I could see that being a solution that kind of helps grease the wheels and then get you interested in actually having your own rig, because it really would be sovereign right at that point you're not dependent on a internet connection or a remote service but we we've been putting it out there trying to gauge the audience's interest in uh ham because it does seem like there's some overlap and it could be a topic that like we take offline some of the people you know in the community join us and then maybe it common i was thinking like something that linux as we get together and i don't know we test or i don't

know i don't know something yes that's you have the right idea we should definitely do that okay all right well brent we got some feedback along the lines of the ham radio stuff we certainly did and we have been for like six months since we ever first suggested this idea. So thank you to everyone who shared some stuff there. One of them I collected was from Colin. He says, I challenge the three of you guys and the community to get your licenses, which, you know, Noah, I think is a great suggestion. Even if we don't like invest in some equipment right away. It sounds like this is like a perfect tinkering place to go. So he continues. It's a great learning experience that gives you a lot of the basics on how electronics and RF work. I'm not

super active. I just have a small handheld for backpacking and emergencies, but I don't regret taking the course. I had some questions about that. Can you talk a little bit about handheld devices versus, you know, the one you bought for the studio, which I think is a bit of a bigger device and the advantages and disadvantages that come with each of those and might give us a better idea of where to start? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So typically when we think of a handheld radio, we're kind of talking about like the policeman's walkie talkie. And typically the way that that radio is used is used in one of two ways. The first way is known as simplex, which is what you're used to with

the walkie talkie. I key up, it transmits to the other radio. That person hears, they key up, transmits to this radio and they talk together. And that's great if you're trying to talk for like a mile. Okay. Past that, we start to run into the same problems that anybody who's played with walkie talkies has run into. The radio that fits in your pocket just isn't quite powerful enough to be able to extend past that that distance. So what we do is we put a massive we take a tower. We put a tower up and we put what's known as a duplex repeater. A duplex repeater means it listens on one frequency and speaks on another. So when person A keys up there, they're keying up into the input frequency on the repeater.

Then the repeater is taking what they say, which you can hear clearly because it's sitting up to 300, 400 feet, sometimes on a mountain. And it's spitting it out at a very high power so that everybody else in the area can hear it. Now we're able to cover cities or even states. This person keys back up. Now they're keying back up into the input frequency and it's coming out over the output of the repeater and going back to the original person. And now these two people can talk through the magic of this repeater. But wait, there's more. We're able to connect repeaters with something known as a backbone. We take an RF link and we link repeaters together. So now we can

cross states, we can go across the country, and we're able to have communication. And there are absolutely repeaters that are on satellites or like the International Space Station, for example. So you're able to establish communication with these places because they're line of sight. Because when you're up in space, you have essentially a 25,000-foot tower. It can hear really well, and it can speak really well. So that's really great for day-to-day communication. And oftentimes I'll tell my wife, like, hey, I'm on the way home or she'll say, hey, can you pick up this from the grocery store or something like that? Radio works really well for that because it's auditory. I'm driving and

I hear it. I don't have to take my phone out and take my eyes off the road, any of that. She says something, I reach over and say, yep, okay, I can take care of that, and then go do the thing. Where the desktop units come in is when you want to start getting into what's known as HF. And HF radio is where you're trying to communicate over long distances. And the best way I can think to explain that is if I took a tennis ball, and I threw the tennis ball, and I threw it and let it bounce just a few times, the density would be really great. It would hit, you know, a number of different points along a table, but it wouldn't go very far. If instead I took the ball and I threw it and it had big, huge, bouncy, you know, steps, it's going to leave gaps in between. But the ball is going to go much further.

So if I'm trying to talk from here to Japan, I want to use HF. So if I'm trying to talk from here to Japan, I want to use HF. If I want to talk inside of a building, I want to use a VHF or a higher frequency radio. And so HF radios, they make them smaller. In fact, there's an entire sect of ham radio that does QRP rigs, which are essentially very low power HF radios. And what they do is they get very efficient antennas and they're able to broadcast long distances using low power and very small rigs. But typically, that takes a little bit more work and it takes a little bit more skill. Typically, what you'll do is you'll start with a larger radio. You'll have a fairly higher power transmitter and you'll have a fairly higher power transmitter, and you'll have a large antenna. And that makes it fairly easy to establish a communication link anywhere in the world. Of course, the downside is those are difficult to take around with you, right? So that's where you start. So those are the advantages and disadvantages. One is very portable, very easy

to take, but doesn't quite have the same ability to give you the same coverage of distance. The other gives you access to basically anyone in the world, but it's going to be larger and it requires a little bit more to set up and it's not going to be as portable. So earlier you mentioned a little sentence that I want you to dig into. You mentioned tuning up your gutter and I'm assuming that's a home setup. Can you dig into that a little bit? What's going on here? Absolutely. So everything metal can be resonant. It has a frequency at which it's resonant, the frequency it naturally wants to emanate radio energy from, right? And so when we talk about tuning up a gutter, what we're really saying is when we send a certain amount of power forward into a device, an antenna, a certain amount of that radio energy is going to be

emitted. A certain amount of that radio energy is going to be reflected back into the radio. Now, the energy being reflected back into the radio, that's bad because eventually that's going to burn our radio out, right? So we want to make sure that we are tuning whatever it is we're radiating energy for the frequency that we want to speak on. And so what we do is take a little antenna tuner and we plug it into whatever our antenna is and we tune that antenna. And the antenna tuner will actually adjust and make sure that the antenna is radiating as close as it can to the frequency

that we want to speak on. Now, you can tune a gutter up and the radio will be happy as a clam because you have your antenna tuner and it's made sure that you don't have too much power coming back into the radio. It doesn't mean it's going to it doesn't mean it's going to do a great job being able to speak out. But there are absolutely people that they live in an HOA or they live in an apartment and they say, yeah, I want to put a 200 foot tower and an 18 foot Yagi on my and they go, you're cute. No. What does that person do? And they go, you're cute. No. What does that person do? So sometimes you have to work with what you have and having an understanding of electronics and having an understanding of radio energy and knowing that, yeah, I can tune anything up Because it seems like, you know, anyone can buy a ham radio if you have a license, of course. But who pays for the maintenance for these repeaters? Or is it just like a volunteer thing? How does that work? Self-hosted model is people will literally take what's known as a mobile radio. So this is kind of in between the large HF radio I was talking about and the small little handheld. And essentially, if you've ever been in like a police car or if you've ever been on like a shuttle service and the shuttle driver picks up the little microphone and he has a little radio mounted in his vehicle, that is available to ham radio operators.

And so that's kind of in between. So it's a VHF radio. In other words, it has the very high frequency, but it has a little bit, well, about 10 times more power than the little handheld radio has. And if you take two of them, you can have one that's listening and one that is transmitting. And you can place both of these in like a vehicle, for example. And that way, as long as your handheld is within a mile of your vehicle, you're able to talk around the city because you're hosting your own repeater. Some people put them in their house. Some people put them on towers. Typically, what is done is a group of ham radio operators will come together and they'll form a club for the purpose of getting together and hanging out and bettering the hobby and all the rest of it. And as part of that club, the club will oftentimes say, let's have a repeater. And so they'll work with oftentimes their emergency operations center.

They'll work with their local hospital fire department and they'll find towers that already exist and say, hey, in the event that there was an emergency, ham radio operators are often the first people to come and respond and establish an emergency communication system. Would you allow us the privilege of being able to place an antenna on top of your tower? We'll maintain it. We'll take care of it. Can you just give us space to do that? And more often than not, places are happy to accommodate that because they've seen the value that ham radio operators are able to provide to their members, but also the surrounding communities. And so they work out agreements. Sometimes they'll work it out with like radio stations or TV stations say, hey, you have this great little tower on top of a mountain. Can we place a tower, an antenna there? And they'll say, yes. Is there maintenance on a repeater? Sure. But largely, once you have things set up, they mostly run. Every few years you're going to come in. You're going to want to make sure to maintain the antenna elements are really what break down because they're in the elements. the antenna elements are really what break down because they're in the elements.

But you're, yeah, you're, as long as you're able to do some of those maintenance and there's usually people in the club that are happy to do it. I love it. If I get to climb a tower, I think it's a blast. And to be able to go up there and maintain some of those things actually adds to the hobby. And there's usually a pretty good rotation of people that are willing to do it. So no one person absorbs the cost. And then the cost is usually covered by the dues from the ham radio club. But like I say, I started with,

you don't have to do that. You can absolutely just go buy some radio since that's your own up. If you say that's, you know, that sounds too complicated or too much, or I want to own everything top to bottom. Absolutely. That's open to you. Now you mentioned these like small ham repeaters that someone could theoretically place in their car or their truck. But in my experience, I've always learned of CB being in a car or truck. What is the difference between ham and CB? quality radio and was really designed for the idea of one vehicle talking to another. And they work well enough. In fact, it's most hams, a lot of hams will deny this. The ones that are honest will tell you they started with CB and then they realized how much more they could do with ham radio. So then they got into ham radio and that's absolutely what happened to me. Had a friend, he lived a few blocks down. I wanted to talk with them. At that time, there was no such thing as

cell phones and we didn't have constant internet. You had internet and then your parents got a phone call and then you didn't have internet. So I wanted an ability to talk to my buddy. So we each bought a CB radio and we kind of were able to get it to work. But if the conditions weren't right or the antenna wasn't mounted in the right way and it just, it didn't work well at all. And so it didn't take long before it's like, this is not fun. I really want something better. And ham radio, by contrast, offers you pick up even one of those tiny little handhelds is going to give you full quieting, solid FM, you know, full sound. And so it's you're going to be able to more easily establish a communication link with somebody else. So I would say the two big differences are CB is less regulated and it is of less quality. Okay. I think last question from Colin's email here,

Colin signed off his email with seven, three space V E seven C O F. Can you break that down for us? What's going on there? I can. So when hams first got started, they were using Morris code, right? Continuous wave. And so the idea of Morse code is we have dashes and dots that represent the letters of the alphabet. And so for a long time, this is the way that radio communication started in the early 1900s when Marconi sent the first message, it was done with, well, actually not with Spark, but it was done with Morse code. It's great. But when you're trying to send out sentences, it's a lot. It's a lot.

It's a lot of tapping and it's a lot of listening and it's a lot of beeping. So what we've done is we've come up with shorthand ways to shorten up what we're trying to say. And so one of the things that you want to say is you want to say best regards, kind, you know, have a great day, that sort of things. And we shorten that by saying 73. Now, the S is kind of funny, right? Because it's just what we as of things. And we shorten that by saying 73. Now, the S is kind of funny, right? Because it's just what we as humans do. It's the shortcode is 73. So we say 73s as if it's, you know, there's verbiage there, right? And then he gives his call sign. So every amateur radio operator, when they qualify for their license and pass their test, is assigned

a call sign. And that call sign, actually, every radio, every transmitting entity in the world has a call sign associated with it. So oftentimes, you'll hear it on your local radio station, right? You'll hear them say like, KJ 108. What they're doing is that's oftentimes like a mix of the frequency that they're on and their call sign. And they're legally required to place that call sign as close as they can at the top of the hour. In ham radio, we legally required to place that call sign as close as they can at the top of the hour. In ham radio, we are required to do that every 10 minutes during conversation. And the idea there is anybody listening to the radio spectrum can know what station is transmitting on what frequency. And so that's the way that ham radio operators communicate with each other,

but also identify with each other. So funny story, my wife and I were traveling, flew into a city and our ride fell through. So I pull up my two meter radio and i hop on and i say yes it's casey my call sign is casey's rsk so i said casey's rsk anybody available on the repeater some guy comes back he goes hey how's it going i said great you know we just got into town and um i'm stuck at this airport and i'm hoping to get a ride to a hotel is there any chance that you or somebody else would be able to come pick me up oh yeah no problem on the way so my wife has like her face is white and she looks like a ghost she's like who was that like i don't know k7 you know cyb well who is he don't know k7 i know he's a ham yeah he's a ham so so he's just gonna come get we're gonna get in the car with him yeah well how

do you know he won't kill us he doesn't have felony if he has a ham radio license about close i know hey listen he's k7 he's in the club he's good you know and it's all it's it's it's not too far off from like a cult like atmosphere right like we have this shared interest in this technology and in this hobby and so i trust you and you trust me. And people like they really embrace their call sign. So I put it on my jacket. I put it on my license plate, my badge from self. Even they print it on the on the bottom. They'll put the calls. I don't know if that will show up in the camera, but they'll they'll put the call sign at the bottom so that other people walking around will see that and go, oh, he's a ham. And so oftentimes if I go into a gas station or I

run into somebody, I'll see a license plate out there and I'll go in and I'll look because I kind of spot them and say, hey, you're the ham that's out there. And then we'll have a conversation about like what rig do you have and how do you like it and those sorts of things. So it becomes almost kind of like a rite of passage. So the ending of his email, he's saying kind regards and then he's telling me who he is so that I can look him up on QRZ.com and say, oh, that's who that person is. You know what you just described there, Noah, that that interaction you get with the community of hams feels a lot like similar interactions we get at meetups and events with the Linux community. We all kind of have a hobby in common. We have a shared language. This is that guy that you're so-and-so from the chat room.

I recognize your handle. I saw you in this chat room and you're the guy from IRC. And yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. I can tell you, I can tell this is one of those things where you're excited about it. It's making me excited about it. I can tell, I can feel there's something happening here. And it seems like a lot of fun. You've, you've, you've helped me reframe from like this super complicated setup that I think I was going to get into just for the nerdery of it. And you've made me rethink of it in a way that actually feels approachable with the limited amount of time I have,

which is the first time I've ever had that perspective with ham. So thank you. Yeah, that is, that's, I want to hear the audience's feedback. I'd love to just get like, maybe we'll get a little matrix room going of ham,

ham folks or something that are doing this. And then we set a goal by Linux fest Northwest. We take our tests. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. ham folks or something that are doing this, and then we set a goal by LinuxFest Northwest, we take our tests. Yeah. What do you think? Yes, yes, yes. Can we call the Matrix room the ham sandwich?

Oh, that's good. That's good. All right. We'll put a link in the notes. We're going to have to remember to make that after the show, the ham sandwich, because that's pretty awesome. Well, Brent came up with the name. I think he's on it. Oh, yeah.

There you go, Brent. You come up with the name. It's yours now. I'll be your first member. All right. Well, so, no, we'll have some links in the notes. I'm also going to link everybody to episode 200 of the Ask Noah program because you did a ham radio special for your 200th episode. So I think that'd be some good additional listening for folks.

Anywhere else you want to send people? ARRL. So ARRL. This is the organization that has been around like within the first few years. So Marconi sends the first radio message. The federal government says we're going to regulate radio spectrum. The ARRL is born. And from that moment on, they have advocated because as you can imagine, when you're sitting on billions of dollars worth of radio spectrum, all these corporations come time and time again. They're like, yeah, you know what? Let's kick the geeks off the thing.

We've got business to accomplish here. And time and time again, the ARRL has advocated to the federal government and said, no, these people provide some of the best innovation comes out of what ham radio operators do. They assigned us an entire class A subnet. You want to talk about the overlap with Linux and technology. The 44.0 class A subnet was entirely given to ham radio operators. So the ARRL has done a great job over the years of advocating for the innovation that ham radio operators provide. And so when people listen to this and they say, man, I want to learn, that sounds really cool, but I want to learn more. Like, how do I find a testing session? How do I, where is the question pool that he was talking about? Where do I get a book? Where is video resources for me to teach this stuff? How do I practice taking the test? All that stuff is available on the A.R.L. So highly advocate for them and the work that they do. And if you have a subscription to if you're a member of the A.R.L., they'll actually I said that your license expires every 10 years. They'll renew it for you. They take care of all that. So they do a great job of taking care of ham radio operators. That is great to know. Thanks for joining us, Brown Bear. Thanks for having me. Bitwarden.com slash Linux.

Head on over to get started with a free trial for yourself. Or if you're part of a team or a business, it's Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Bitwarden is the easiest way for yourself or a business to store, share, and sync all kinds of sensitive data. Bitwarden vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. Bitwarden doesn't even have anything to sniff at. You can learn all about it on their website when you go to bitwarden.com slash Linux. If you have an existing password manager, I encourage you to check Bitwarden out. I was using another tool for a while and I eventually migrated. One of the things I like a lot about Bitwarden is it's open source. It's trusted by millions in the community. Organizations all over the world are

using it to secure their secrets. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords, our two-factor code, and other sensitive data like recovery keys. And Bitwarden has great apps on mobile, on desktop, in the web, and across all the platforms you might want to use. And Bitwarden has great apps on mobile, on desktop, in the web, and across all the platforms you might want to use. And it syncs so seamlessly in the background, like I'll add a website on my desktop. And then moments later, I'll go over to my mobile device and I can log into their app with those credentials just synced right there in the background. And they make it super easy to switch between accounts. You could have a personal and a business or personal, maybe the project you're working with.

That tooling also just gets turned up to 11 when you use Bitwarden in an enterprise and you snap it in with your existing policy management tools. Bitwarden is really one of the best out there and they're always making it better on a steady cadence as well. So stop waiting, go try it, or maybe you know somebody who should switch. Maybe it's the place you work, maybe it's your school, maybe it's a significant other or a family member.

Just send them all to bitwarden.com slash linux. That's bitwarden.com slash linux. Well, this week we don't have any boosts per se, but we are trying something new. Yeah, because it is a prerecord, we thought, let's solicit some boosts, some feedback, and then we'll do a live cut-in for the next episode, episode 516, which is also going to be prerecorded. It's our last of the batch, and we want to try to cut in fresh boosts, something we've never attempted, but we thought it'd be fun and a nice way to kind of show value for people who take time to boost in. You know, I want to also take a moment since we don't have any boost this week and I want to talk about something.

The support that you guys have been showing for Linux Unplugged, it reaches outside of Linux Unplugged. It reaches into my life. And I have been toying with this concept. There's this kind of golden meme in broadcast. And that is it's for a lot of industries. But in media, the saying goes that when the sun shines, you make hay and of shows and you probably have noticed if you listen to a few podcasts that anybody who's a full-time podcaster has multiple shows they all do there isn't like one of them with very little exception like joe rogan and a couple of others that obviously stand out that only do one show nearly all full-time podcasters have maybe a whole stable of shows and the reason for that is the economics of the podcast industry you can only put so many ads in one podcast but you have advertisers that are coming to you and they want to spend money so the content creators grow horizontally they create create more shows, which creates more ad inventory.

And that can work to a degree, but the problem continues, and a business needs more revenues. They bring in more help to scale to meet the show production. And so the costs go up, and so then you need to bring on more sponsors. In order to do that, you need to have more shows. And you'll notice folks just add more and more shows over time. But I've been doing this for 18 years, and I can tell you that to do a show good, and this is after somebody who's been doing this for a long time,

it still takes two days of prep for every episode if you want to do a good job. It takes at least, and that's at least, that's the minimum, two days of prep for every one episode if you got four or five episodes that math doesn't work very well does it and then the more sponsors you have and the more hosts you have the more side work there is and quite literally for myself 80 percent of easily easily this is this is a low ball number, 80% of my work is off air, doesn't have anything to do with content. Because I have four or five shows that we're running here. And we've had more and we've had less.

And I can tell you that it's no longer sunny. We are entering advertising winter. advertising winter and i could be out there raking the fields and still watering all these shows and not harvesting any crop for a bit or i could take the winter to rest heal and focus and maybe do a little bit less but put more into what i do and the value for value model enables that kind of thinking where i don't have to i don't have to scramble to grow horizontally i can instead perhaps spend a little more time at home on my new little farm or with my kids that are a great age and become a better more well-balanced person and put that back into the shows.

Come to the shows with more of a life and also healthier, which makes it sustainable. Now, how do you get close to that? Well, you don't get close to that with the advertising model. It's not really possible. I think there, and I'm hoping to thread the needle between a hybrid model of advertising where there is genuine interest by legitimate sponsors that I'm willing to work with Linux distribution. I think it could apply to a free software project specifically. Because what I'm kind of suggesting that the world needs to do is less. I'm suggesting that we want more community support

so we can do a little bit less for a while. And I think that sounds crazy. I think some of my friends would never come on air and say, contribute so we can do less. But I think i have a track record that speaks for itself i know it sounds crazy but i really think if we ask for support via the memberships and via the boosts and other methods like time talent things like that community contributions it might enable us to just focus on a core set of things

and do those at our absolute best top of our game which we can really crush while still maintaining a bit of work-life balance which i've never really gotten to especially when it's sunny when it's sunny and the hay's growing like crazy like i mean you got a small business you just got to work so i'm looking at this kind of podcast advertising winter as an opportunity to shift to the primary business client is, which would be the audience while also taking a little bit more time. I don't know if it's going to be possible.

I've got a lot of things at home I want to tend to these days. So I would like to be able to pull back a little bit, but we'll see where it goes. So your support, it, it doesn't just enable like us to say no to some sponsors that we otherwise would have to say yes to, but it may enable eventual shift in a work-life balance.

And that's something that I would like to grow to be large enough that could support all of my friends that are involved with the production of these shows. So we could all do that and focus on this, do this really well. So that way we have something that is a genuinely great product for the community that can serve an open source community, help create consensus based off informed, rational discussion with great sound quality, experts that we can bring on, and of course, are more than a decade plus of experience. And I think we have a unique opportunity here to just keep hitting that harder than ever while whatever's going on in the media

landscape sorts itself out. And so we don't have any boosts this episode, but we'd love to keep that rolling. We'll try to cut in live with them. And I just want to thank everybody who's a member or who does send in support because we're really trying to build something I think is special here. And it's been thought very, very deeply about, and it's trying to create something that is sustainable.

If I'm lucky for 30 years, humbly, I'll take 15. I won't take anything less though that's my that's my mark so i'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on sort of my your perspective on what i just talked about and also we would just love it if you want to step up in some way even if you don't financially support us because that can be trickier than ever right now if you share the show with somebody you think that might hit an episode, like if we have an episode that's topical, like the ham episode or maybe a Knicks episode, share it around. The word of mouth is the number one way to help market a podcast. And then of course, there's other methods like our GitHub, our community, and then of course, financial. Well, leading up to this episode,

I've been hoarding some of your feedback. So thank you for everyone who keeps sending that in. I love reading it and really appreciate how you change my ideas there. There is a piece of ham feedback that I thought we could touch on here. It's from Elmer or unElmer specifically. If you want to get into ham radio and tech, Steve Stroh with call sign N8GNJ is your man and he's in Bellingham. So not very far away from the JB studio. Good to know there. I wonder if he'll be at Linux Fest. That's always where my mind goes now. Yeah. Elmer suggests that Steve shares a bunch of references on his Zero Retries sub stack, which we'll have linked in the show notes. And it might be a really good starting point, especially for folks in the area. And you can also contact him on Mastodon as n8gnj at mastodon.radio. Great. Man, there's a whole world here, boys. Can you feel it? I know. It's a world opening up. It's great. I'm going to suck you in. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. Now, Casper wrote in. Ham, I've been listening since, um, at least since the faux show. It's not a real show. It's a social experience. But probably even longer than that. Too long to

remember, even. I just wanted to say hi and let you know, after episode 509, I finally became a member of the network. I'm willing to go so far to support the network. It's one of my highlights every single week when a new episode of any show airs. If there are any other ancient listeners out there just like me, I would ask them to get a membership if they can afford it. A little challenge for you. Thank you for the years of fantastic podcasting. Well, thank you, Casper. That is a deep breath, the old faux show.

Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. Brent, did you ever catch the faux show? I came in a little later than the faux show, but I do remember digging through some of the archives and having a peek from time to time yeah that uh that was one of our you know first shows that really was just completely inspired by the community i kind of feel like there's a bit of a connection between it and office hours and how so much of the office hours is driven by community participation casper thank you for the membership and also the encouragement of others to step up. I just went on about that a whole bunch, so I don't need to say more, but I really appreciate the people that get it.

I will say we did a recent Office Hours kind of digging into the history of JB. And Chris, you shared a whole bunch of really fun stories there. I believe that was episode 29 of Office Hours. You can go to officehours.air to hear that one. Jared had a question about cryptocurrencies and some filing of taxes. He says, I just had an interesting, quote, exchange with my tax accountant about boosting, i.e. using crypto, and the tax implications of doing so. I was wondering if you could set my mind at ease with any guidance, suggestions, or some wisdom on if I generally need to track my

boosts for capital gains purposes. It seems that the IRS is confused on how to properly handle crypto, especially for small amounts like boosts. I've been filing my US taxes and the following question on the standard 10-0-4-0 form caused a bit of a stir between myself and my tax accountant. The question reads, at any time during 2022, did you A, receive as a reward, award of payment for property or services, or B, sell, exchange, gift, or otherwise dispose of a digital asset or a financial interest in a digital asset? And he says, well, yes, I boosted into the show. Can you give any advice? And this is a tricky one because Wes is an accountant, but Brett and I are not. Indeed, yes.

Yeah. And when you say cryptocurrency for an accountant right they're thinking nfts they're thinking i don't know doge you know they're thinking you got some sort of dog coin and so i think the irs doesn't really raise an eyebrow but accountants definitely do especially well-established accountants and it's pretty why, because so much of it has just been a speculation and bubble. And they've been following as accountants. They've had to follow this thing as this meteor righted up. And then as it's now it's crashed down and they're seeing people make huge gains and losses.

And it's this massive, confusing thing. And how do you track it all? So when let's just talk about boost, this isn't regarding NFTs or anything else. Let's just focus on that. I wrote back to Jared, too, because we were going to put this in office hours, but we had to punt it. I think, first of all, I have to acknowledge this stuff is challenging for accountants because it's new. But there actually is pretty well established IRS policy on it from what I can understand. So I think the first challenge is just communicating properly with your accountant. But the short answer is in this particular case, in Jared's

case, the capital gains tax would be on Jupiter Broadcasting if we were to cash those sats out. Now, of course, you got to double check. I don't know everything, but I'll give you an example where Jared would be responsible would be if he bought a bunch of Bitcoin, sat on it for five or six years, had a 20x gain, and then sold those back for cash or bought an item with that Bitcoin later since he's been holding it. Then Jared would be responsible for capital gains tax so as a business that's one of the calculations we make it'd be like that with any asset right is if you sell an asset there's a capital gains tax that's just how it is for everything this isn't unique to bitcoin uh but say jared buys some sats using the cash app or tops them off in albie directly and he sits on it for a few days or a few weeks or whatever and he sends them in

as gifts which is what a boost is classified to Jupiter Broadcasting that's a transfer and it's not a taxable event it hasn't been sold it's just been moved across the peer-to-peer network but then again when I sell it that will be a taxable event so there is a taxable event in there but it's on me at that point when you're boosting it in that transfer isn't selling it you're transferring it to me then I sell it when i exchange it that's that's when the event happens uh so it's not a taxable event until you exchange it for fiat currency and you make a profit there there's also some ruling there for if you buy the sats and then use the sats and it's kind of like you use them for the essentially the same value because the time the window was so small that's generally not considered a taxable

event either um and then of course to just make this even more complicated for accountants all this is subject to change because there's two bills in the works that one it's two hundred dollars and one that's like a thousand dollars any transaction that's under those amounts in crypto is just not taxed at all that could be great too so uh jared the short answer is if you're if you're buying those sets like you're topping off an Albi and then you're boosting them in, the tax burden is on Jupyter Broadcasting. If you buy those Sats and you save some of them and you hang on to them, that's where you need to start tracking. And these apps often have like the Cash app and the Strike app. They have like a report that you can generate, a little CSV file that you can export from the app if you do decide to speculate and store some of them.

And there's also there's services that can connect to APIs and services that can look at your wallet address and help you figure all that out, too. So you can automate that and export it to an Excel spreadsheet. That's only if you want to go down that route. I wouldn't worry about it too much for the boosting standpoint. It does seem like it also falls under the sort of general like you can give up to 16,000 in the U.S. value in fiat anyway, you know, dollars to someone else. And so as long as you're not giving us more than that in boosts, that should be fine. If you are, you're probably tracking that anyway. Probably a good problem to

have. Yeah, for both of us. But I'm glad we got that question answered just because I'm sure as people did taxes, that kind of comes up. And and you know for for a couple of years while the regulation gets sorted out it's going to be unusual to the accountants part of what we're trying to do here is shift that right this was an issue that still frankly face free software faces but it was way way more pronounced years ago i i always always grouse to the boys off air and often on air that i had competing client i had competing firms that would go out out would they they'd overbid me they'd have a more expensive bid but the way they'd win the contract is by undercutting my choice to use linux and ridiculing me for using linux and arguing that

that wouldn't be a safe choice um and that it was too risky for IP theft and IP lawsuits and all of that stuff. And it was a huge battle I had to fight. And then sometimes I'd win for one round and then they'd replace the CTO and the CTO would have this big bias against Linux. And I would lose all the progress I'd make. And it just took a decade. Thankfully, this is on a much, much, much, much faster trajectory. And out of all of the crap that's going down right now, all the little altcoins that we're going to watch burn over the rest of this year, Bitcoin isn't involved in any of that. It is not a security.

It's a commodity. And I think we're going to see the price decline as the general economy declines. So it's going to be a great summer and fall to boost in cheap sats and we'll still take your sats cheap or not. Max wrote in with a question that I like, Hey, I'm a member of the all shows membership and also each individual show membership, if that makes any sense. I love what you guys are doing and the shows really make my commute to work fly by. So thank you. Now I might be on the younger side and it seems I don't know a single song that you guys tend to play at the beginning and the end of the Linux unplugged streams,

specifically the member live streams that I get. Could you let me know the songs you played at the beginning and the end of both episode 512 and 513? Those songs are bangers and are a real nice intro and outro for members who listen to those feeds. Again, thank you for all the shows you produce. P.S. I understand if some of the shows have to go with how the economy is shaking out these days. But if you guys cancel Coda Radio, Linux Unplugged, LAN, or self-hosted, it will be a true travesty. So I guess office hours.

He's okay with office hours going. That's it. Ouch. So I dug in because we don't really record what songs we play. We just kind of like whatever feels right in the moment or if we feel inspired. And Chris, if you remember, you played Chromio. It was a little taste of their Tiny Desk concert at the beginning of one of our streams. The one you recorded, the one you get your own take. So we'll link to that in the show notes. There was also a couple of songs that I got inspired to throw at Chris to see if he might just play them. And it turns out he did. There was Sam and Dave hold on. I'm coming. And the

clash is the magnificent seven. Those two, uh, are, are really good. And Chris, you also ended a stream with Pink Floyd's. We don't need no education. I mean, I cannot confirm nor deny if copyright materials played on it. We would never. It's just songs that sound a lot like those songs. Yeah. They're,

you know, remakes. AI remakes, I think. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

AI. AI made it, not me. So, in the clear there. Aren't they ruining society? Yes. We try to, we do, we've been going back and playing some of the classics.

Either because folks don't get to hear them often enough, or maybe people never have. I will say, if you like that Pink Floyd song, the entire The Wall album is like a necessary must listen. It's from start to finish, you know, let it be an an experience play it from the beginning all the way to the end it's an entire it's better than a movie actually there is a movie about it you can listen to that too i am still struggling so hard on my offline music setup that i actually i installed spotify and i launched the spotify app the other day chris it was so horrible that I was like, Oh, this is why I quit. All these playlists suck.

All this sucks. All this is no good. I'm just out. But man, is it hurting right now? So the, so it's like, I hate this,

but the way I've been finding music recently is on YouTube. And then we find a great song and then we play it on the stream and for the members. And it's just, I really, really, really wish I had my local media really dialed in and I just had a bunch of great playlists, but that I cannot say is the members. And it's just, I really, really, really wish I had my local media really dialed in and I just had a bunch of great playlists,

but that I cannot say is the case. I feel great shame. We also heard recently from Olympia Mike, who wrote in and said, hey, I've got a pick for all of you that I just discovered and I'm loving. I'm building my own custom Nix with Sway and a Hyperland setup,

and I've been happy to use TUI interfaces instead of GUI where it makes sense. For instance, how often are you connecting to other Wi-Fi networks? It's a bit silly to have an applet always running for that. Just use an M2E. But I've not found anything good for Bluetooth until now. The Bluetooth CTL commands are good, but are very verbose and multi-stepped. But I discovered this program called BlueTooth, which is like NM2E for Bluetooth. It's super lightweight and works perfectly. Yeah, it even has like mouse-driven drop-down menus and stuff with devices. Are you running over there, Wes? Wes Payne running it right now. Oh my god, look at all those Bluetooth devices we have here.

Why does the TV show up on there? Why does the TV have Bluetooth, Wes? What the... That I don't know, but this program's really handy and, you know, it's Olympia mic, so of course this thing's packaged in Nix. You can just run it with as if like... It looks like a really

good app. You know, what do you think of his argument? Why have a dedicated applet for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you only connect occasionally? Now, maybe some people move around a lot, but if you don't... And I think, you know, at least if you're of a certain mindset, a TUI can have a lot of the same discoverability benefits

that a GUI has without having to actually fully leave your terminal environment. And the thing about, like, a nice Nix Sway setup with a couple of dedicated terminal interfaces is that is so robust and solid. Not only do you have the rollbacks and all of that, but there's less to break. And so it's just going to run like a champ forever. Just a few well-chosen pieces that you know you're choosing and including and need to rely on. That's it. Yeah, that's a great idea. And you know you're choosing and including and need to rely on.

That's it. Yeah, that's a great idea. And, you know, if he gets it working really well, perhaps he'll share his next config. Manzer had a note about the framework. He says, Chris, I've heard you say twice now I wish the framework would release some kind of case so you could just use the old motherboard as a computer. Well, fear not. It's coming. They announced a partnership with Cooler master to create the case whoa it's

available for pre-order right now i just haven't been in the mumble rooms the right times to let you know i'm planning on getting one to store the 11th gen motherboard i currently have when i get the new ryzen based one i love that you can even put a ryzen motherboard in an intel chassis that's so cool right especially when you have those modular ports. I guess it's, yeah, it's... A member and a part-time mumbler, he adds. So, look at this thing, guys. This is exactly what I was talking about.

It's definitely bare bones. I almost would describe it more as like a tray than a case. It's like a tray for the motherboard. But that's totally fine. Yeah, that could work. $55. $54. Reasonably priced as well. Oh, and it's got an acrylic clear top. So it would be sealed off from dust. So it is a case. Cottonwood.

Yeah, and cottonwood. That's a winner. That's a winner winner chicken dinner right there because you got yourself your laptop and then maybe every two revs or so you swap in the new motherboard in your laptop. You take out the old motherboard, you put it in this case, and now you got yourself a high end home server. Every couple of years, you just do this and you're upgrading both your laptop and your server at the same time. Human can dream. I like that a lot. I wonder if anybody out there is going to do that.

Let me know. Now, Micah emailed in with exactly one email saying, Hey, I own a company that does video production, graphic design, marketing services. And so I have an extensive background in the creative world and I'm using Linux in it. My company uses Linux exclusively and the people on my team who have never used Linux before say working here has been actually quite comfortable while they grow with it. Next year marks 10 years since I switched to full-time Linux. We use open source everywhere we can. Kubuntu is our main OS of choice. We use the GIMP, Inkscape for graphics, Blender for 3D, only Office for, well, office work, OBS, Handbrake, etc., etc.

And they are all doing an amazing job for us. But most creatives in the field complain of no Adobe Creative Cloud apps on Linux. And the big one is a video editor, especially Premiere Pro. is a video editor, especially Premiere Pro. Now, I feel this is becoming less of an issue as DaVinci Resolve Studio gets a real foothold in the video editor space. But I feel like the Linux community talks about this not enough. This is a great solution that nobody's really talking about. We have alternatives like Kdenlive and Lightworks, but in my opinion, DaVinci Resolve is where it's at. I've been hearing good things about Resolve and of course, Kdenlive and Lightworks.

But yeah, you know, I think, Micah, those of us that are in media production, we think about media production tooling a lot and all of the support infrastructure around that production tooling. But if you're not, you don't really think about it at all. And I think that's maybe the disparity you're seeing there. It does kind of occur. Perhaps it mirrors

a bit on how we feel about Reaper. You know, it's this little hidden gem. Okay, it's not open source, but it supports Linux well. Really well. Without the open source, it has a lot of the properties in terms of, you know, being able to moldable, usable, being able to deploy in a lot of environments, can just work.

Even as an ARM build? Still good software. And we run it. You know what? You got to tell you. If we go help and we go to About Reaper, how many hours does it say we've been running Reaper right there? Well, it says approximately 1,781 days.

Of recording? Of continuous? So 1,000- days of recording of continuous. So a thousand something days of continuous recording. And we've never had a crash in all of that time. Thousand days of continuous recording. Almost 2,000 days. Yeah. I think the only time I've really crashed it is doing something janky with the line plugin.

I don't even want to know how many hours that is. That's a lot of my life. And not every podcast has been recorded in that instance of Reaper. That's just the main instance. So, and it's never had an issue in there. It's really solid. And we want to go to the top of the hills and just scream Reaper. Everybody go throw some money at Reaper, but you know, people don't really need those tools for the most part. I have been really kind of rethinking what i want to use as my photo editor on linux i had a chance to play with pixelmator pro on the mac and it's like if you were to reboot photoshop today and just rebuild the app with what you need in a in a ui that

doesn't really come so much from like actual film, but comes more from a digital era. Yeah, digital first. I'd really like something like that for Linux. I use Photopea on Linux more than I use GIMP. Same here. I mean, I like GIMP. I'm grateful for GIMP, but Photopea is super handy. Photopea is really great. I would just like to have something that's a native application,

something that could fire up really quick when I'm on a bad connection, and still make my funny pictures or whatever it is. So I would love tips for what folks are using for their photo management. I'm thinking like, you know, live stream images or a quick touch up of something. What are you using? That one you made with Brent and the hat. Or that one time I put a beard on Brent and nobody noticed that I added a beard on Brent. Something for that is always a lot of fun.

You can boost in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact to let me know what you're using for that. Now, I know that Noah likes this pick because I was listening to episode 200 of the Ask Noah show and this came up. It's called Trusted QSL. And this is such a fantastic example of why you don't necessarily want to install everything as a native package. This is essentially a Windows application, but it's been flat packed up with all the stuff you need to actually make it work. Little database back in the wine stuff, too, I think. I mean, it looks like a Windows app. It straight up does. But this is a trusted project which provides digitally signed QSO records for amateur radio,

you know, which is the QSO records are how you identify yourself. So, you know, when you're talking to brunch versus pain and you need a place to keep track all that and verify them and re-sign them and check the keys. And this is an app you can run. It's really popular in the Windows world. There's several tools in the windows world there's several tools in the windows world i was looking for something that would do it on linux and it seems like this is the one that the linux nerds like trusted qsl put a link to that in the show notes as well

had to be on theme this week you know good find i like things that uh make me not have to go through the hassle of setting up one myself let me get you eventually i'm gonna get you eventually i'll get you on there you and i'll be you eventually. I'll get you on there. You and I will be trading back call signs. How you doing over there, Wes? Oh, just as good as I

was when we were talking on Slack 15 minutes ago. This is a lot more fun. It's going to be great. It's going to be great. And then when Brent's coming down from Canada,

he'll check in on the radio where he doesn't have cell service. Now you're talking. Okay. I know. I think you just convinced me solving problems here boys i'm solving problems hey i think chris for you the

best part is in ham you just don't have a notification queue everything comes in real time you don't have to like wake up in the morning with 48 notifications in your ham radio honestly there is something kind of pleasant to the idea of having a radio going with a speaker while you're working. And instead of like listening to like YouTube or a podcast, maybe I just turn the radio on and just listen to people talking. You know, in the background, it's just like kind of like a radio show, but it's just hams hamming it up. It reminds me of how the studio lights up every time we get a boost come in. Yeah, a little message came in.

All right, well, we're going to wrap it up and we will not be live for one more episode, but then we'll all be back in studio. After that, I'll be back from this family trip. Brent will be back from his secret moose hunts and Wes from his international travels. We should be refreshed and ready to go. Itching to do a pod, I would think. Of course, we may also be wiped out, exhausted, and have no idea what to do for a show. So that's entirely possible as well. You just have to tune in and find out.

Of course, if you're subscribed, you'll just get the show as a regular release. Yeah, that's like a hack. Big thank you to our members who make the production possible, unpluggedcore.com, if you want to support the show directly or support all the shows over at jupiter.party. As a thank you, you get an option for an ad-free show show or you can have the extended live recording this one would be an interesting one also uh the uh the next live episode would also be and it's a different members version too slightly different you never know sometimes the members get the secret sauce but as for us we'll be watching what's going on and of course continuing to report

over at linuxactionnews.com get a little bit more lin Linux, get a little bit more Wes Payne. If you're in the tech industry, it's a big recommendation because you just get a heads up on what's going on in Linux and open source and you get right back to work. Thank you everybody who emails in at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Links to what we talked about today are at linuxunplugged.com slash 515.

And then there's a whole network of shows over at jupyterbroadcasting.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 month. Thank you.