LINUX Unplugged - 516: The Fixer-Upper

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Chris tears into two old PCs, and builds a surprisingly powerful multi-monitor Wayland workstation. Plus, Wes has a new device, and Brent wants answers.

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, we've got three topics brought by each one of us. I don't even really know what they are. We'll surprise each other. And then later in the show, we're going to attempt something

we've never done in like 500 episodes, never done it, trying something brand new. And then we're going to round it out with the classics. So let's say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. We love it. It'll really change your networking game. I went from having inbound ports for syncing and plex and stuff like that to no inbound ports, everything on my tail net. Go say good morning,

try it for free up to 100 devices. We got a brand new URL to actually get recognition for you. Go in there, tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. That's right. You can put the whole proud name in there. You finally get to give the show

the credit it deserves at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. That's right. You can put the whole proud name in there. You finally get to give the show the credit it deserves at tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. The one downside is I'm pretty sure your IP table skills have atrophied a bit. It's true. Thankfully, actually. So this is an episode at a time. We're all on the road this week. Some of us out in the woods, some of us on the coast, and some of us out in the woods some of us on the coast and some of us totally out of the country very very fun and we're all at our various destinations we wanted to have an episode for you so that way when we get back in the studio you haven't had to miss anything it's like we were never gone and of course i'm in the mad dash because as i record this i'm just about to leave as it airs i'm just about to get back right now, I'm just running around just like mad,

trying to get everything ready to go. And so I figured what a perfect time to replace my primary workstation. Wait, what? Yeah. Well, it's a go-figure thing. You know, so months ago now, Wes, I don't know if you remember how long ago, we decommissioned the old and tired OBS system,

and we put a, it was an old Ubuntu old ubuntu like 1804 system a custom build box and we put a brand new system thaleo in system 76 thaleo with a 13th gen intel in there was that four or five months ago yeah within the last six months i think think time flies and you know it works we just wanted to make sure it works so we we set that OBS machine aside. It was on its last legs in several ways. And at that same time, I set my workstation machine in my office aside. Because they're both identical machines. When I ordered the OBS machine, at the same time, I ordered a duplicate machine for my workstation with the foresight of thinking the OBS machine is pretty critical. If anything ever goes wrong, I want to be able to just hot swap apart from my workstation and that actually happened a couple of times power

supply i think and video card i think we had to replace once it's nice it's nice to be able to do that in a pinch and i figured well what i could do now is essentially take the best from both and take the parts that are working on the obs machine take the parts that are working on my workstation machine build one really kind of fully built well running workstation let's be honest you're sacrificing one of your children yeah to harvest their organs to build one mutant stronger child it does feel like that because then you end up with one rig that's like pecked at it's just like a bone of just the bones are just sitting there and you're looking at the meat you're like should i try should bones are just sitting there. And you're looking at the meat and you're like, should I try? Should I bother?

Should I try taking all the RAM? You know, doing all the math. And of course, it's just been bits and pieces that I've been working at. And the timing just sort of came together where it's this week. The machine's ready to go. And, you know, so I figured, why not?

And it's a bit of an interesting machine. This would also be my first NixOS on desktop hardware instead of just a laptop or a server. This is my first NixOS desktop machine. That was kind of exciting. And all the parts are pretty good, but they're not very new. So I thought I would, I'll tell you about,

I'm going to review my old rig here for a second. It's got an Asus X99A motherboard that I ordered back in Aprilil of 2016 seven years ago it was a high-end motherboard it was 233 us greenbacks at the time but going on ebay it's still going for like 180 to 210 to this day this one component this Asus X99A, has held up value-wise more so than anything else. Because like, here's a real stinker. The CPU is an Intel i7-5820K, which has six physical cores, clocked at 3.3 gigahertz. This is a fourth gen Haswell. This is an old CPU. And I have it overclocked from 3.3 gigahertz to 3.9 gigahertz.

When I bought this CPU, and remember, I bought two of them at the time. It's $388.99. Now, on eBay, $20, $60. Wow. Yeah. But I mean, like, if you're going to rebuild the same system, on eBay, $20, $60. Wow. Yeah. But I mean, if you're going to rebuild the same system, $20 to $60 isn't bad for a CPU. And I have an upgraded Cooler Master EVO CPU cooler on there, so it's got one of those big tower coolers. This was slightly upgraded after the purchase.

In 2019, in June of 2019, I put a Ron rx 570 into this thing it's 368 dollars at the time back in 2019 when i bought it now worth 77 today 77 pretty big drop in value and not a great video card anymore 64 gigs of ram in the system in total now after like, because each system had, you know, different RAM, but I had that same RAM, but had it split up. So I just consolidated the working RAM in one machine. I also consolidated the hard drive. So it's got a 256 gig NVMe plus a 240 gig SSD, then a 480 gigabyte SSD and then a whole slew for one terabyte Western Digital 10K RPM spinning rust that are all in a RAID 0 on a mount point that I call slash scary to remind myself that all of that data is is very precarious. But this mount point of these four, one terabyte, 10,000 RPM spinning rust. This is a, this is a logical volume that I created with LLVM when I first built this rig back in 2017, formatted it with XFS.

And then that one single volume has moved arch Fedora, Ubuntu back to arch now to nix os and every time i just unmount it when i go to reload the system i don't i don't mount it during installation then after the system's installed i just go they they all the linux distros always see this logical volume from lvm and from from there i just mount it like a disk and all four disks show up in a RAID 0. And I put my Steam library on there, put my Dropbox library on there, and I put my NextCloud's libraries on there. And that type of stuff that is resyncable, but nice not to have to download. It's really just your local cache sort of. Yeah.

For big old files. And that can just move between installs. And that's it. It's really just your local cache, sort of. Yeah. For big old files. And that can just move between installs, and that's it. It's nice to be able to use that. I find it impressive that your slash scary has so much staying power since 2017 and migrating it so many times. You didn't even make any mistakes

and wipe it out accidentally. That's impressive. Nope. You got to think eventually one of those disks is going to pop. He does not have a lot of faith in you. You hear that? It's a ridiculous setup.

It's just stupid. It's a dumb way to do it. No doubt about it. I think the wildest thing that I do with this system that that poor little AMD 570 has to deal with is I have four displays now hooked up to this workstation. And I got to say, so far, GNOME with Way, Gnome 43 with Wayland's doing a pretty good job. I hate, I hate this though, because... I knew there was a button here somewhere. Okay, so I got four screens. One of the screens is vertical. Then one of them's up top. One of them's like right in front of me and one of them's off to the side. Which screen do you suspect the system and thus Wayland and GNOME, which screen do you think they use as the default screen? The primary screen.

I'm going to say the vertical. You want me to say top left? Yeah, it's the fricking vertical. It's the fricking vertical screen. So like the BIOS boots sideways on a vertical screen and like, you know, what do you do?

Right. Cause this, this, this video cards got three display ports and an HDMI port. So I thought, well, the HDMI ports and an hdmi port so i thought well the hdmi port's probably the primary display port so i'll hook up the center middle screen to hdmi and then i'll put the other screens on display port nope nope it's like one of the display port ports is the primary port and that's the one the vertical display is plugged into so

when you first get a system booted up that's the primary monitor where the login screen is sideways and when you're looking at the bios information that's sideways and when you're watching the first initial boot sequence that's on the sideways screen and it's it's just so frustrating that you can't change that kind of stuff and it feels like it's different for every video card i use but as far as like once i set it in genome it's working really well it's sticking and every time i wake the system up the monitors are restoring so pretty happy with that better than i had before i'm rocking uh i think it's like 44.1 or something so i'm running 44.1 on wayland it's working pretty good and i'm using i I know this sounds weird, but I'm using an old used Apple Magic trackpad. So I have all the swipe gestures in Genome.

It's a nice little tip if you're on, even Plasma. You can get them, you can pick them up for like 80 bucks. Now, Chris, did you run into any like really odd hardware issues? Because you were kind of Frankensteining two of these systems who've really had many hours on them. Did you run into any weird stuff? I had, for the life of me, I couldn't get the installer to sort the bootloader out with all the disks attached. And I gave it a go, and I gave it a go,

and I inevitably just had to unplug all the disks except for the NVMe. Oh, really? And then the installer could do the partitioning and do the... But then I had to go after the fact now. I have to go after the fact and repartition this thing. And Nix does partitioning differently, or does the mount points differently, right? Like a noob, I opened up fstab at first,

thinking I would set up my new mount points. No, no, no. What a dope I am. So you got to go, of course, you got to go into the hardwareconfig.nix and set it up all in there. And it makes sense, but it's just different. It's just different.

I played around a little bit too with GenomeRDPp it turned out i'm a bit curious to check back in yeah it's i've my results have been hit and miss i think it might depend maybe you need the right rdp client but now instead of having to do the rigmarole that you and i had to do you just go into your sharing settings in gnome settings and one of the sharing options, like along with media and remote login, is remote desktop. And it just spins up the RDP server, and it's using Pipewire, so you can have Wayland, and you can get your console,

your GNOME desktop, in the RDP session. My experiences were pretty crappy, even on the LAN, though. So I think I have the wrong RDP client. Maybe people know a better one. Still, though, I mean, if you're gonna be need to do support and you need wayland or want wayland for some reason i guess genome's the way to genome is the way to go for now huh

so i got it i got it so i got a couple of questions i want the colony hive mind to give me suggestions for a good budget gpu to replace that am 570. You're not going with an arc? Well, I'd like to, but A, it might be a little bit out of my price range, and B, I want something that'll work with stable diffusion, and I don't know if the arc is quite there yet. So I'm looking for a video card that would support stable diffusion. It doesn't have to be crazy fast, because I want it to support it on a budget. And then the other thing, because it's on Knicks now is I can not get easy, stable diffusion to work, you know,

cause the way Knicks is, you can do a steam run and it'll boot up and start the, start the whole process. But then it airs out. So I have to work that. There's a few things I still have to sort out, but so far I'm very impressed you guys with how smooth and fluid current gnome and Wayland and everything feels on a workstation. It's a nice

workstation, but it's essentially parts from 2016 and 2019 cobbled together. And man, like pretty happy with it overall. I have to say it. Firefox feels super, super responsive pages feel like they're loading faster than ever. And this is the same system where years passed. I was having to do, it was an iteration of the system, at least where I was having to do all these things to like load my bro, my browser profile into RAM. You guys remember that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I didn't have to do any of that this time.

And I'm very happy with the performance so far. So very, very nice machine for something that is essentially put together with Frankenstein techniques and parts from years ago. I'm excited that you're going down the Nixos route with it, too. Yeah, it's been nice. Hey, Wes, how long do you think this setup will stick for him? Do you give him, like, a two-month prediction? Wow. I'm hopeful that at least since, you know,

even if he needs to, like, move it or replace stuff, you've got it all in Nix now, maybe it means some form of the system can maintain. Well, I'll tell you what. At least spiritually. What makes it so doable is I just lifted the config off of my laptop, which I'd recently

switched over to Genome, dropped it on this new system after I had Nix installed, rebuilt the system, changed like a dozen lines in the config, like host name, changed the boot stuff a little bit, changed some of the mount points, rebuild, restart, and I had the whole system, essentially everything ready to go, except for the stuff I put on via flat pack. I just do that manually still. That's pretty awesome. You know,

because it went from like, hey, I think I'll do this to like, I was done within an afternoon. And so that's going to be my next question is how fussy was getting this all besides the monitor stuff? I mean, it's way quicker than it used to be way quicker this way so it's pretty great and it you know it feels really really solid because you always have that rollback capability and the downside is there are things like this easy stable diffusion that i can't get to run under nixos yet it's because it like it can't find it the error messages is error no binary for g, unable to find object for all current devices. That seems serious. It's there, right?

But it's just somewhere in Nix that it can't find because Nix is weird. And so I'll have to just run it in a different way, no doubt. But I'll have to figure that out. Now, those are the kinds of things you like. If you were to drop easy stable diffusion on an Ubuntu desktop or a fedora desktop or hell even mac os or whatever it would just run and you wouldn't have that problem but because you know your environments and your paths are all different in nix os some things need a little extra hand holding i tried using steam run but just didn't take but either way like you know i'll figure it out it's not the

end of the world right i've got other systems in the meantime so if i can't generate an image on one computer it's not the end of the world but man you guys it is so great having a desktop again hallelujah oh i am freed freed from the context and constraints of a laptop because a laptop you always have to remember in the back of your mind this thing might be unlimited connectivity i might need battery life yeah it can't stay here forever it can can't run 24-7 if you want. Like, would you have on a laptop Dropbox and two different NextCloud clients syncing simultaneously all the time 24-7 on a laptop? That'd be silly, right? Because if I'm on a mobile connection, I'm going to use up my entire LTE connection just syncing all that stuff all the time.

Not to mention it's a ton of IO for one disk in a laptop. And not to mention it eats up a bunch of battery life. So it's just dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. But on a desktop with multiple dedicated disks and a big-ass power supply and an actual full CPU with cooling and, like, lots it's glorious it is like it it's i hate to be so cliche but it's like it's like having a it's like having a full power system again even though it's old it still feels great oh very excited to be back on a desktop uh remind me to revisit my syncing setup here on my laptop i feel like maybe I could use some advice. Wait, you've got more than three syncing clients?

Yeah, at least two. Let's just put it that way. There you go. I say go for four. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account and check out the exciting news. Linode's now part of Akamai. Yeah, the Akamai. But all the developer-friendly tools like the

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Well, gentlemen, I thought I'd bring a slightly unusual topic because I just can't get this one out of my head this week. I wanted to explore privacy from kind of a U.S. lens. You guys will feel right at home. But for me, that's like slightly across the border, you know. But I think it really applies to anybody, anywhere, any of our listeners. There was an article just this week as we record that was reported by all of the media, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, you know, and then all the tech ones that on June 9th, the office of the media, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, you know, and then all the tech ones, that on June 9th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. declassified

and released a report that was dated January 2022. And it was following a request by Senator Wyden to disclose how the U.S. intelligence community uses commercially available data. And this data is generated from internet connected devices. We've all got them and made available by data brokers for purchase. Now, some of us might not be surprised by any of this, but I thought actually this was pretty interesting because it just showed us that things that we thought were happening are actually just happening out in the open without any real thoughts or rules around it. And so this data is coming from, you know, anything you can imagine, like your smartphone and your car and web browsing, fitness trackers and your toothbrush and those kind of things. trackers and your toothbrush and those kind of things the web browsing part to me is the disturbing one because it sort of implies perhaps that these data brokers are in contract with the isps and i don't i don't know but you know yeah so this is a this is an industry that i find

absolutely abhorrent but it is a growing industry in the u.s of companies that make these relationships with banks visa mastercard um and all these other outlets and isps and then hoard your data some of them even have web portals where you can go for under a hundred dollars and you can buy someone's real time location anybody can do this something because that's how there's so many of them that's gotten so loose that's you that's how you knew i was gonna be late today i'm always tracking you always tracking us cost me thousands of dollars but it's worth um and so this obviously makes it available to the u.s government for purchase as well and any other government right the russian government the chinese government could be buying this information as well maybe through proxies maybe not

and i find it just so disgusting as a linux user too it feels like i just want to shake the world and be like don't you see there's a better way but it's like they just don't care right i mean we've i think a lot of people listening to be like yeah i already knew this i heard about this from snowden and this is like a whole other level right because this is about a privatized spying industry yeah and and And, and, you know, you, I would suggest you go and read this report because it's, it's actually a surprisingly good read and written in English. Like it's not just all spy code or something. There is some blacked out stuff to make you feel like you're in a movie. Um, but I, I pulled a few quotes

cause I thought you guys would appreciate this. And they're just kind of like talking about it. Like it's an everyday thing. And to me, I was kind of surprised that they're so laissez faire about this stuff. So here's a quote, the government would never have permitted to compel billions of people to carry a location tracking devices on their persons at all time to log and track most of their social interactions or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, and the internet of things and other innovations have had this effect without government participation. And there's these other quotes that I find fascinating. I will say there's a difference here discussed about the difference between commercially available information, which is basically for sale, versus what we used to refer to as publicly available information. So things that you might find in the white pages or yellow pages, you know, for those who even remember what that is, but also just things that are reported in the newspaper. So here's another quote from the report.

As noted above, we think it's insufficient as a matter of policy to treat all CAI, that's the commercially available information, as PAI, public available information, without more, because modern CAI is so different from traditional PAI. Today's CAI is more revealing, available on more people in bulk, less possible to avoid, and less well understood than traditional PAI. It's only a little oversimplified to say that when Executive Order 12333 was adopted in the past. U.S. persons generally understood that the white pages in the New York Times were public, but also understood that it was possible to choose an unpublished telephone number, and usually to keep oneself out of the newspaper.

Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand and even fewer of them can avoid, that far fewer Americans seem to understand and even fewer of them can avoid. CAI includes information on nearly everyone that is of a type and level of sensitivity that historically could have never been obtained, if at all, only through targeted and predicated collection. As a matter of policy, therefore, asserting that modern CAI is materially indistinguishable from traditional PAI is like saying a ride on a horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. So essentially they're saying that people have come to kind of this understanding that they have some right to privacy, but modern publicly available information is so rich with information it's like too tempting they say here too that the intelligence community cannot willingly

blind itself to this information i think that's just it's like it's we're all voluntarily putting this out there we all know this though as tech people like this is something we we know right like yeah of course we know this but i think there is a real cost that is worth mentioning. And if you, if you've had a hard time reaching other people and making them appreciate why this is a problem, as we record today on June 16th, two huge stories broke. data was exposed in a hack that that has impacted meant multiple world governments apparently um and businesses and apparently it seems to be like just some piece of crap ransomware attack too which is always the most frustrating thing but then specifically in louisiana and oregon which is where i'm headed uh users had their information compromised and with it what is called a sprawling cyber attack same sprawling cyber attack that also hit the u.s federal government and it has affected 3.5 million organians with driver licenses or state id cards or anyone with documentation that same documentation in louisiana their information

has all been exposed because the government was storing that information and because their systems were vulnerable to basic ransomware attacks, that information got leaked. Also today became public that several U.S. federal government agencies have been hit by a global cyber attack by Russian cyber criminals, it's believed, that exploit a vulnerability in widely used software, according to the U.S. government. Since last month, hackers have been exploiting a flaw in software known as MoveIt. Companies and agencies use this to transfer data around. Progress Software, the firm behind it, told CNN on Thursday that the new vulnerability in the software had been discovered. It could be exploited by a, quote, bad actor. So even when they, you know, when they collect this information for the right reasons, which I don't know,

I don't think they're buying all this information from these private brokers for the right reasons. But even when they do collect this information, like your driver's license information and stuff, uh, it gets leaked. If you give it to the government, inevitably their tech stack, their tech debt,

like it's just not robust enough. It doesn't keep up with the times. Bad practices happen. People get ransomware and look where we're at. anywhere not just the government right right right right but the government's in this case i'm giving them a hard time because they're the ones seemingly buying this information but these data brokers could get breached you know they i mean you might maybe on on the whole you might assume they have better security practices but who knows it's so frustrating what i find fascinating is watching you kind of have these two markets

right you have this let's say legal information market that's done somewhat out in the open but you also have these bad actors who have you know underground sort of dark markets that are kind of selling the same information really and. And there's probably easily some information being passed from one of those markets to the other regularly. And so it's just like, we're at the mercy of these two massive, massive movements, if you want to call them. And the big question I have is what the hell can you even do about it? Yeah, it's pretty creepy, right? It's creepy to think your web browsing habits. So if you're looking at porn, potentially that's getting tracked. Your Visa and MasterCard transactions. So if you've got a debit card with a MasterCard or Visa logo on it, or you got a credit card, that's getting tracked. about self-hosting,

methods to use private credit cards and private email addresses. Mostly, not because I have anything that I'm trying to hide, but if I ever did have anything I wanted to hide, I wouldn't want to all of a sudden just start using these tools and then stick out a red light. I prefer to try to normalize it as much as possible

so that way, when I need it, I've already practiced it, I've already normalized it. Well, it's like so many things, right? Like, I might be okay. There's lots of stuff where I'd be okay with someone hosting it for me. If I'm offered the right controls, which include sort of privacy, freedom, etc. And in so many of these areas, we're just not. And I can't trust that if I put some stuff, even if you don't intend to leak it, I can't trust that if I put some data into your system, I have no idea what will happen to it. Yeah, I thought we could offer a few resources, Chris. Whenever I sit in your office, there's always a book just sitting there staring at me that I've kind of wanted to leaf through. And I thought we could recommend that one. I know you've kind of read about it as well. I'm interested to hear about your thoughts. It's extreme privacy what it takes to disappear by michael bazell uh what was your initial takes on that one

there's a lot that i think our audience will know in that book but it is a great resource of recapping all the fundamentals kind of in one spot there just to kind of help think about the different things that you leak and um ways of thinking about privacy. So I do still recommend it, but I think probably some of it will be stuff people have already seen and read, but you know, centralized resource is nice in a way. I would imagine just by the nature of being a book, as soon as you publish it, it's a little bit outdated too, but maybe the concepts still apply. I think maybe it's a useful tool too, because sharing this stuff, you know, we're talking about how as tech interested folks, maybe we have a little more purview into just how deep this goes.

And if we're ever going to force change at a systemic level, we're going to need more people to care. And maybe they won't, but the first step to that is at least knowing that it's happening. A book like that would be great for people that are just curious, but maybe just a little bit less knowledgeable about this stuff. Yes, that's a great point. If you don't understand cookies and IP addresses and all these other things. Yeah, and some basics around file encryption and privacy. Yes, yeah, for that audience, it'd be fantastic. There's another website that I've known about for quite a while now, but I think it's worth revisiting. Have I Been Pwned? You guys, have you tried this before?

Oh, yeah. It's a website by Troy Hunt Hunt who kind of collects a bunch of data breaches and then you can go and look up at least your email address, see which ones you're part of and which of your information is out there. It's really illuminating. Or depressing depending on the results. Yeah. Although I think his former tech snap host we owe Troy Hunt, you know, I mean, he sure generates a lot of content. Yeah, I mean, we've been following that since the very beginning of that tool. That is pretty great to see it. So now it like integrated into stuff and all kinds of

things. Yeah, that's a great one too. Yeah, I've been also listening to a podcast lately that has perfect for road trips, Darknet Diaries. I don't know if you've each dug into it, but he has a section of his website called Stalkerware Resources. And some of that applies to this information, but some also applies to people who have some far more serious issues,

too. There's a bunch of great stuff in there. I would recommend at least browsing that one and just listening to Darknet Diaries generally. There's some bunch of great stuff in there. I would recommend at least browsing that one and just listening to Darknet Diaries generally. There's some fascinating stories about what happens sort of on the underground or the web that applies on this. And of course, the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, has a privacy section. They have a great surveillance self-defense tool that describes a bunch of this stuff. That's always the first place I go and send people when they show a sign of being interested. So a good reminder there. Yeah. And I think for us, when I internalize, what am I actually going to do about this? I do feel good about the fact that

I have set all of my data for my phone. Everything that syncs goes over tailscale directly to my next cloud. Nothing goes over the public internet and using graphing OS. I'm sorry, drafting. I do feel like I am opting out a little bit more, but man, there's still so much. It's, it is a constant,

constant thing. And I could feel myself drifting more and more towards like radical privacy advocate. Like I'm starting to feel like the wording that we've all heard before but it's actually starting to resonate with me for some reason after years of never really landing is privacy is a fundamental human right and i just that actually for some reason after hearing it for years it finally really does feel like well yeah yeah it is it is a fundamental right and i don't know so i you know just gonna get a radical about it i suppose but

thinks really the practical way to do it is self-hosting which you can reducing cloud usage where you can and just being mindful about the metadata you generate and there's not a lot you can do about the payment rails today that's just that's a highly surveilled system right now you know you keep hoping theorizing musing on getting some sort of less phone different phone you know and just as part of me having to get a new phone we'll talk about that a bit more shortly uh i've been going on more drives and other activities without any lte or cell signal and it's just a little little throwback to it interesting and it's actually not are you printing maps out like what are you doing

you going on map quest well i got the local area loaded and i know you know none of these are like yeah like spots i've never been yeah so you got offline okay yeah that's a good idea i know i know you've probably done this a thousand times but it's a totally different driving experience just to turn off the map right uh there's something about it because then you rely on your internal navigation chris you and i've talked about this when we go on our drives and man, not relying on something to give you that information just makes you a smarter human. So Wes,

good on you. I support this, this route, but it, I also find it very cute because welcome to my everyday life, basically. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go there right now to get started with a free trial for yourself

or if you're part of a team, maybe an enterprise, and you want to really up your game, it's Bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's the easiest, most straightforward way for an individual or a business to store, share, and sync your sensitive data. Bitwarden vaults are end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption, and Bitwarden is open source. It's trusted by millions in the community and thousands of organizations worldwide to secure their passwords and just to generally store that sensitive data. It's what Wes and I have been using for like almost three years now. Put your two-factor

codes in there. Put your recovery keys in there. You can put some payment information in there. Bitwarden has no idea what's in there. It's end-to-end encrypted. And that gets audited. That gets verified. And Bitwarden's always improving the experience too, making the application better. And it is so simple to migrate. I was blown away. It took minutes, just minutes, under 10 minutes,

including downloading it, getting it, installing it, and doing the migration. Check it out at bitwarden.com slash migrate. But go to bitwarden.com slash Linux first. That way you can support the show. You can check it all out and try a free trial for a team or an enterprise at bitwarden.com slash Linux. So you teased us a little bit.

I am so excited that I just started updating my pixel seven to the latest Drafting OS while you're talking about this. So I know you had your phone die on you just kind of like out of nowhere. And we were taken aback because it was just like two weeks after my iPhone 14 had bit in the dirt. Right. Your Pixel 7. It's like, OK, so neither one of these really feel all that reliable. But since it was so new, you were able to get a replacement.

That's right. replacement it's here and so i've just been going back through the process of getting it all set up avoiding stock and uh well i did i did actually get the part of trying to restore my old semi-broken phone back to the stock image i figured you know why not before i ship it back to them that way it's not now drafting on there oh so so now you have reversed the drafting process. Uh-huh. Which also is surprisingly easy to do. Anything in particular? Well, they give you some steps to sort of unenroll the custom keys that you

put in when you go through the setup process. Right, okay. And then you go Google has their own fancy web flashing tool. And so you go over there and then they've got it so you can just sort of flash back to the latest stock image. And it'll relock your bootloader and all that. And so you go over there and then they've got it. So you can just sort of flash back to the latest stock image and it'll relock your bootloader and all that. Man,

you know, we go iPhone pixel versus stuff all the time, but Apple just can't even touch that. I would say, I mean, you get a little more detail in the Google version, but I've, it made me even more impressed with the drafting side,

just how smooth and slick it is. And you just kind of click through a couple of buttons and walk through the steps and it's, it's, you know, a few phone reboots of course but then you're done totally okay that's good to hear but okay i'm kind of taking this as an opportunity to go a little bit the next couple of steps because i you know i switched here but i wasn't going to switch everything all at once it just wasn't practical so i've still got some google things here there and i hadn't really addressed the permanency of what was getting because in the past i've kind of relied on either either the plug-in phone migration of apps

that'll happen, or cloud syncing of things. And sure, I still have a lot, anything that I'm syncing with SyncThing or NextCloud or whatever, that'll all work, or anything that has a cloud backend service, or any hosted service if it's self-hosted. But I'd never quite gotten around to dealing with backups, or like, you know, what if this happens again? Can I do something with drafting so I can have something that doesn't mean I need to manually reinstall every app?

Right, maybe you get base drafting reloaded and then just do a restore or something. And it doesn't need to be perfect. You know, like I'm okay with the process. I kind of actually enjoy it as an opportunity to, you know, not get everything that I have, but just sort of start with what I know I need and then I can custom just instantly that app install. Do you see my screen right now? Do you see

what it's doing? Yeah. Optimizing app 203 out of 331. That's yeah. I mean, that's why I have to start over. Cause I got 331 fricking apps on this stupid phone right now. And I just never stop. I just keep adding and adding. And so I eventually got it to start over. All right. So I see that Giraffian has, it looks like it's got backups sort of built in. Go poking around at that, and it seems to be using something called Seed Vault, which is a backup system designed

for the Android open source project. Yeah, or perhaps like their fork of it, potentially. Yeah, that's where things get a little unclear. So just as I'm getting excited, like, cool, there's something built in for this. It looks like it can talk to a WebDAV system or even NextCloud. There's a lot of possibilities here. You point out

to me some tweets from the Drafting Project Twitter account, suggesting that A, Seed Vault is not very reliable, maybe B, controlled by folks that have mixed views of the project or there's some at odds here, and then C, that longer-term drafting

is planning to either use a fork or rewrite it or switch to something entirely different. So now I'm feeling a little bit like, oh, what am I getting myself involved with here? Yeah, am I using something that's being swapped out? That's what I was wondering.

I did see they kind of polished things up. They pulled all the latest bug fixes for the Android 13 sort of releases. So it's about as good as it's going to get anytime soon, I see. But having started to play with it, I do see... I do notice some of the issues that they were mentioning on

Twitter, unfortunately. Oh, really? In particular? Well, I tried to get just WebDAV set up. Try that. I also got NextCloud installed to try that method. So the idea is it backups to NextCloud over WebDAV, and you can just have a nightly OS-level backup to NextCloud using the Seed Vault system. Right.

Unfortunately, it did talk both ways. You could either use the actual next cloud client app it'll it'll even fancily prompt you to install it from either f droid or the play store so that part was kind of impressive it's like actual yeah integration at the same time it said not recommended for next cloud so we got the uh that what is it dav x5 x5 yep uh which i that's another app i've been meaning to try but just hadn't gotten on that first version. DevX5 is what we're using to make NextCloud the backend for all my CalDev, CardDev, all the calendar, contact syncing, all that stuff that normally would sync to a Google account. Yep. Is using, what is it called again?

I just already forgot. DevX5. Yeah, DevX5. Thank you. And that lets it use NextCloud. DevX5 does that translation to NextCloud in the backend and makes it all work just pretty with Android's default stuff. So just, you know, your contacts on NextCloud show up in your phone app, etc.

Yeah, it looks super useful. That's one of the things I'd like to migrate because I've still got my contacts over on Google, shamefully. Yeah, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. I know Brent has been a longtime user as well. Yeah, been working great for me, actually. So I'm happy to hear you're moving in that direction. So that had an option to be the web

dev thing, or I can use the Nextcloud. I've now tried both of them. They do set up a backup location, and it moves some data up there, but every single one got a backup failed. And I tried to go in and then restore to see if I could just do the restore even if the whole backup didn't work, and

it didn't work enough for it to have prompted me with like an entry to restore from so that uh that's not good that's not great yeah that's not the you generally want the restore part of a backup yes i'm glad you checked it um now i do see that they have a backup option to the local phone hard drive uh-huh okay which maybe doesn't work if you're trying to back up like everything on your phone hard drive yeah but if you excluded that directory and then like sync thing did off or something that so now that's what i'm thinking because i've so i've just i've just tried that um it did appear to work it well it still said backup failed it got all the way it said 100 hung at 100 for a while then said backup failed. But if I go to restore backup...

Does it actually still restore? Yeah. Maybe it's like one thing failed, right? You know, like one file or something was locked or whatever. Yeah, it has a backup status. And I see local contacts still say waiting to back up. You don't need those, do you? But it did get text messages, call history, device settings.

It got F-Droid, Play Store, Messages app, you know, a bunch of other apps I had installed. So I wonder, like, do I keep, is it worth going down this route? Like, I guess this way I would have to come in here manually, I'd go, you know, run the backup, and then grab the backup folder

and sync that with NextCloud. I love it, right? Because you're depending on multiple things so if sync thing stops working for some reason then your backups aren't getting off the phone but thinking about it i wonder like when when do i need this and what what all problems am i really trying to solve because i think for anything crucial that's going to be something that is more like sync real time think in real time and i i'm imagining this would be more i could get away with an older version.

So let's say I hadn't done one for a month. My phone breaks, I get a new phone. Okay, but if I'm mostly just missing, if I'm mostly using this as a convenient way to capture the state of the phone from a system view in terms of settings and installed apps and not necessarily relying on it to capture crucial data, is that workable?

Could I at least then get back to sort of a baseline, I need to re-sign into a bunch of stuff and sit stuff down that's kind of my approach um with one a big exception recently but until recently my approach has been anything critical is getting synced real time so like notes that syncs contacts calendar that's all set somewhere else on my next cloud that syncs but you know then i thought well i'd put a couple of bitcoin wallets on there and i'd like to have those backed up you know i don't put anything in there i wouldn't i wouldn't like be upset about losing on a mobile device but when i'm traveling to el salvador here i'll probably put a couple hundred bucks which is the most i've ever had on a mobile phone and And I really like to have that backed up.

I also noticed there's some apps that don't allow themselves to be backed up by this process. So I wonder, it'd be interesting to try because maybe it would back up reliably and restore and it'd be fine. It would be worth trying, but it might be an app that's like,

nope, sorry, I don't want to be backed up. I am trying to restore right now and it's successfully going through. It's just reinstalled Slack and Element and NextCloud. So I guess I'm trying it. I'm not hopeful. I'm curious if Brent or the audience have any, you know, are there other tools I'm missing?

Are there apps, like, if I just kind of want to get the system state, installed apps, and maybe, like, the call data, call and message, just the base stuff, what are the best routes? It also would be kind of nice to have the application data, you know, if you could. But yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. I'd like some recommendations. Yeah, I unfortunately am in the same boat as both of you. I've tried a variety of tools.

I know if you have root access on your device, there's a couple extra tools that can help you. And I've not tried them. I know listener Jeff was telling me just this week that he tried one and didn't go so well for him, unfortunately. So I feel like this has been a major issue specifically with Android phones for a long, long time. You know, if you don't want to rely on the Google backup stuff, then your options feel sort of incomplete to me. And I've struggled with making backups

of my phone regularly, you know, with so much traveling and stuff. You never know when a dump truck comes by and smashes my phone. So, but I've not found a very good solution. So I would love again for sort of the JB Hive mind to give us some better solutions.

A call to the Hive mind! Please come save us. Yes. I need GPU recommendations for budgets to do the stables of the fusions. And then we need

really solid but yet flexible Android backup solutions that won't kill our battery life, too. Photos is another thing. You know, like, I sync those off now with Image image yep yep and that's been working pretty well for me so we'll put a link to to dav x5 in the notes because that's a that's a must recommend by all

of all three of us now and then i'll just give one more plug to graphene os and to the image project two different projects now that i rely on greatly and I'm very appreciative of. Image I-M-M-I-C-H replaces Google Photos. Both, they have the app locally, so you can browse your photos locally fast, and it's syncing. And they're working on the machine learning type stuff, so you can search

based on objects and faces. Exciting. And now, it is time for Le Boost. So we're doing something we've never done on the show before we're going to cut in live from current day to read the boost on the show as a thank you to everybody who's been supporting us live and we'll start with some ballers adam c 1999 the pot father comes in with 77 777 sets a lin Linux user and a ham operator for almost 10 years here. I love the digital modes. I'll be on the air for field day. 73's D-E-K-5-A-C-C. That's

amazing. Thank you, Podfather. And I think we've been getting some really good feedback on the ham stuff. A lot of the boosts are going to be about the ham stuff this week, so prepare yourself. You know, I was actually kind of hoping we would get somebody who would say, no, don't do the ham stuff, you know, just to kind of spice it up a little bit. But it didn't seem to go that way. And it turns out we're learning something about people we never knew before. I didn't know he was a ham. Yeah. Oh, I think I knew Adam was a ham, but I think I'd forgotten.

So that's a pretty good reminder. And it kind of makes me wonder for these types of setups if one day we could just do this over ham radio. I mean, not for commercial purposes, of course. Sure seems like everyone else but us is hams at this point. Gene Bean boosts in with 60,023 sats. This one's for Chris. Chris, for your kids, check out Jamboree on the Air. It's an event put on worldwide by scouts and the ARRL the third weekend in October.

Well, I do like a jamboree. Thank you. He also sent in a Unix booth to support the idea of doing one thing and doing it well, meaning podcasting itself. And by the way, 8649 is Unix spelled on a phone's dial pad. Hmm, I like the way you're thinking, Gene. Another 4,096 sets? Hey, JB Crew, just wanted you to know I've added the new pod role tag to the volunteer technologist feed,

and two of the three entries in it are JB shows. Whoop, and self-hosted. And on a related note, if anyone in the JB audience volunteers their tech skills outside of their primary job and wants to share their story, I'm looking for guests. They can reach me via volunteertechnologist.com contact.

We got a nice boost from Anonymous, 56,988 sats. Been a listener since Linux Action Show episode number two. I missed a few episodes while on paternity leave, no commute, and was surprised to come back to a ham radio episode. As another ham listener, I decided it was time to try this boost thing. I run a Hackett Radio BBS on an RPI, which is some Linux and ham fun. I also run Linux right on my Jigu. Did I say that right, boys? X6100QRP, low power

radio. On handhelds, there are open source firmware projects as well. That is a great boost. Thank you, Anonymous. And thank you for listening for so dang long and being willing to go through the rigmarole of setting up the boost. I have a question. I hear this term a lot, and I know I'm going to learn it soon, but I hear this term low power radio. Does that mean the radio takes low?

I know this is so stupid, but does that mean does radio takes low i know this is so stupid but does that mean does the radio take less power or does that mean it's transmitting with less watts so therefore it doesn't go as far i'm guessing that second one just based on how fussy things are but i think we need a clarification boost yeah i'm thinking the low power one's the one that won't cook your brain when you're beside it yeah yeah um this is for this real-time cut-in. We're all remote. Wes is in South Africa. I'm on the coast of Oregon, and Brent is in the woods in a hunting shack. And so we're like, how do we connect exactly for this? And it's working, you know? Getting a signal in these far-off places is easier and easier these days. But, you know, getting a signal in these far off places is easier and easier these days.

But, you know, I feel like something like ham radio or some kind of radio system would just be nice to be able to fall back on, even just to sync with you guys when we're off grid. Wise Papa John comes in with 50,000 sats. Howdy, guys. I'm currently working through catching up about six months worth of episodes. I've really been enjoying some nonstop JB action. I've been looking to switch to NextCloud for syncing and backing up my contacts and calendars. I have a test set up that I'm happy with.

But the only thing holding me back is the shared Google Calendar with my fiancée. I only recently got her using Google Calendar, and I'd like to make a transition to another calendar as seamless as possible. Thanks. Wise Papa John. You know, this is a problem I tried to solve a couple of years ago of having shared calendars on NextCloud. And I gotta say, I failed back then. But that was, I think, two or three years ago.

So I'd be curious to hear if someone's got a NextCloud calendar syncing between multiple people. That sounds really useful to me. Magnolia Mayhem comes in with 45,030 sets across four boosts. Ugh, missed the birthday boost and just got back to where I can boost again. So please accept this as my belated birthday boost. Are you willing to accept, Brent? Is this for mine or for yours, Wes?

You know, I'm actually not sure, but let's give it to you this time. Aw, I accept. Also from Mayhem, plus one for Fractal. I found it while I was trying to make the Pine phone work for me. Element was giving me problems, and so it really was a lifesaver, considering the fact that my family are all in on Facebook Messenger. Gross! And this was decently easy to get them to use, at least

for a while. Right. Fractal is that Matrix client that we talked about that's kind of lean and mean, but maybe perfect for new users. Oh, and look at this. We've got a zip code boost in the batch. 20,032 sets. Doing a second zip boost for fun and profit.

This is where I was when I first found JP. And it looks like that is Washington, D.C. Awesome. That's really great. Is that our first D.C. boost? That might be our first D. first DC boost, I actually think. I think so, but boost in and let us know if we're wrong, folks. Not the real Washington.

Right, well. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They also sent us some music suggestions, which is much appreciated. I love it. We're going to have to go through after we get back and pull out all these music suggestions because I think there's going to be some good member stream songs in there. Sir Alex Gates comes in with 2,345 sets. JMP chat is great. Nothing like getting calls and SMS right in your XMPP client. Yeah, Alex Gates, the podcasting

consultant is a big fan of XMPP and I get it. He and I have talked about this a couple of times. XMPP was a beautiful thing ahead of its time, and it solved many, many problems that we are attempting to invent new technologies to solve today, and it is lighter weight and uses less resources than networking, CPU, all that. Just all of it. It was fantastic. Unfortunately, it seems the rest of all of it. It was fantastic. Unfortunately,

it seems the rest of all of us have moved on. I know you see XMPP privately implemented for folks. I've considered implementing it for my family, just running it here maybe on my Odroid in the RV all over tail scale.

But ultimately, just Matrix is the way I've gone, And it just seems to be the momentum that most of the open source community is going in as well. You mean we have to bridge XMPP to Matrix now too? Yeah, there's always that. True Grits came in with two boosts, 6,701 Satoshis in total. This is a pre-show boost. As soon as I saw the episode title of the last Linux Unplugged, I knew Noah would be on. Also, Noah described exactly what I thought about the Apple Vision Pro, kind of like seeing an image from Ready Player One. Also, I loved having Noah back and the hammy breakdown. Yeah, it was nice. It was nice catching up with Noah and the Appley breakdown. Yeah, it was nice catching up with Noah. And the Apple Vision Pro,

I'm trying not to have that typical knee-jerk, like all new technology is bad, it's going to doom society, and we're all going to fall apart because new device. At the same time, I do worry about it sort of being the master move for the ecosystem lock-in. Like, if you end up spending $3,500 of your hard-earned money on this Apple Goggles thing, you're kind of all in, right? Like, you're going to probably want to use their photo system so you can sync photos over. You're probably going to want to use their note system so that way you can capture notes you're probably going to want to use safari so that way the tabs sync between

your devices and you can use the best browser available on the platform which apple makes only safari the best browser so there's no choice but safari so probably going to want to switch over to safari on the desktop so that way all your bookmarks sync and all your settings sync and you know at that point you're kind of all in on icloud so you might as well start using icloud storage too like you just see how like this, it just, to me, that's where I feel like the Apple vision pro, I'm not really so worried about society hiding behind these screens because

they're already hiding behind screens that they just hold in their phone. And I've been hiding behind a computer screen my whole life. So that, that the people before me were hiding behind newspapers and books. So it's just sort of been human nature for a long time. So yeah, it's going to happen, but I don't think it's going to destroy society. But what I think is going to do is it's going to create probably Apple's most compelling ecosystem lock-in. And so, so, you know, you got, you got that kind of contend with, because we don't really have a great solution on the free software side.

There's Simula VR. I've reached out to them and I invited them on the show, but I haven't heard back. But man, I got to say, I went over to Simula VR's website after watching the Apple demo and it was a lot rougher than what Apple showed. It looks like maybe something Apple had kind of put together five years ago through this development process. No disrespect to them because one of the things the Simula VR guys are doing is a full X86 box on your face, and I think it's an XOS base. That's pretty cool, and they're doing it all on Wayland, which is pretty dope. But, man, does it look rough compared to what Apple's got cooked up. I think this means we're going to need to clone Hector Martin a couple times.

But, Chris, I think I want to challenge your argument because aren't those the same incentives as people have on Apple platforms currently? What makes it different if it's just a computer on your face? information bias psychology that plays. When you buy a $3,500 gadget, you're going to kind of keep looking for ways to confirm to yourself that that was a decent decision. And you're going to probably have to get in deep with some of the integrations to really take advantage of that. So I think it's one of those things where like if you buy a $1,000 phone, it's pretty hard not to get sucked into the AirPods and maybe the watch and maybe some iCloud. But at the end of the day, you could really use any Bluetooth headset, right? You could really use kind of anything with the iPhone. But with the Apple Vision Pro, it's going to be a lot more limited

in terms of what accessories and devices it works best with, and of course it's going to be programmed for things like spatial audio, which really only works on Apple's headphones. There's just a lot of little more paper cuts from transitioning away, especially at a $3,500 price point, where you're kind of looking to confirm it was worth your money in the first place. To me, it just seems like, I don't know. I mean, like, I guess what I'm complaining about is they're going to make a good product.

I guess the risk is that they make a good product. And then the best chance is that they don't make a great product. And somebody that makes something that's more open comes along because as I'm recording right now, I'm sitting in the bedroom of my RV in the back of the RV, and I've got one screen. And if I could have a fancy headset that I could put on, and I could see the show notes, and I could see you boys, and I could see my levels, and I could see my recording, and I could see the boost, that'd be pretty great, man. I could pretty easily convince myself that's worth the money spending, that kind of money, because I could never even have a monitor set up in here.

But, you know, that productivity comes at the cost of greater ecosystem lock-in. I just know you would recreate the studio in your goggles so that you can have all your monitors exactly where they usually are. We're already prepped for the virtual bell. Yep, good to go. Mr. Pip boosts in with a row of ducks. My work has a big antenna on top of the building, but none of us staff have anything to do with it. Some volunteers from the local ham radio group visit sporadically and keep a log of their test transmissions. I've never gone near the equipment myself, but I do work alone some weekends and wonder how an old ThinkPad could get involved.

Oh yeah, I would too. I'd be like, how can I hook this thing up? Can I do like some Wi-Fi scanning with this? Feral Hippie comes in with 2,520 sats across a few boosts. It says, I really enjoyed the Dark Side of the Moon cover by Easy Starts called Dub Side of the the moon i actually listened to this more than the original all right so dub side of the moon everybody go check it out i says here's an idea for raising some value from listeners i like what jack spirko has done with the survival podcast he has discounts for members from companies that he aligns with that have values for the show you could ask if anyone listening would be willing to give a give a discount code which you could then hook up your members for a membership program as it grows would then give you more customers for those discount programs with jack's program i make money via discounts

on things i would have bought anyways yeah that's that's an interesting idea i feel like i would need to really wrap my head around that but yeah like certain vendors that we like a lot, it's tricky for us because there's a lot of those we cover too. Like, so say, you know, we got a discount program with system 76 and then they come out with a brand new laptop. What happens if I don't like the new laptop? That's awkward potentially.

I don't want to mess up my program for my members at that point, right? So I'd just have to give that a lot of thought, because I wouldn't want to implement it in a way that would be tricky to kind of balance the incentives on. I would want to make sure that it was always incentivized towards the members. Yeah, I suppose it might depend on exactly what sort of company and what sort of deal. But if there are interested parties, I'm sure we'd be curious to at least talk it out. I could see there being good fits.

You know, there are certain services or, you know, hardware things. I could see it working. I just would need, I think it'd probably be like the right company, the right idea. And then see what the members think. Loud Impacts came in with 2,000 sats. I'm studying and working part-time, so I unfortunately cannot contribute as much as I want to for now, but here's almost all of my sats in my fountain wallet right now. I just wanted to show my support for better work-life balance for you guys as a thank you for

all the great work you've done all these years. Well, thank you, Lod, and keep up the hard work on your end and keep on listening. We appreciate the boost. And, thank you, Lod, and keep up the hard work on your end and keep on listening. We appreciate the boost. And make sure you take some time to get that work-life balance for yourself, too. Soham boosts in with 10,000 sats. Finally got around to refreshing my LND setup. Currently running in Kubernetes in the cloud, boosting from Podverse. I do have some spare sats lying around. I'm dreading the time after refill and have every app reject my ID as a non-US citizen. Thanks for all you do. JB has had a sizable impact on my life, and there's just not enough sats out there to match that.

Aw. Aw. Thank you, Soham. You know, if you're outside the US, you might check out Hodl, Hodl, Hodl, which is a no-KYC peer-to-peer trade platform that just isn't, it is restricted in the U.S. But if you're outside the U.S., that's an option. And also RoboSats, also another great option if you're just looking for some KYC free sats, which is know your customer. some KYC free sats, which is know your customer. In the West, you basically have a whole book of laws about anti-money laundering and terrorism. And so if you're trying to connect an account, like you might to say, buy some sats in the West, then they want to know who you are. It's the law. That's KYC, know your customer. And so there are platforms out there, but some of them are restricted in the States. But if you're outside the States, they're pretty much fully available to you. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. I mean,

it matters so much that all three of us, when we're out and about, got together randomly at a certain time. I sent the family out so we could sit here and read these boosts and thank you. This is a value for value podcast. And if you got some value out of an episode, we appreciate that back in a boost, some time or some talent, whichever you would like to contribute. We absolutely appreciate. And we also want to say thank you to editor Drew, who took a little extra time to cut this in live.

So that way the most recent episode, even though it was prerecorded, could have some live content from us on location. And if you'd like to send a boost into the show, well, it's pretty easy. Get Albie, getalbie.com. Top that off either in-app or you could just send some sats using the Cash app or Strike because it's the Lightning Network, baby. It's all open. You can use competitors' apps to send sats between each other like it should be.

So a really easy way is like get the Cash app because that's an amazing app anyways if you're in the States and have Albie and then just boopop boop or get albie.com, top it off directly, and then head on over to the podcast index, podcastindex.org. Linux unplugged up on there. You can boost them from the web or get a brand new shiny podcasting 2.0 app with all the new features, newpodcastapps.com. And with that, we'll send it back to us, I guess, back in the studio, back in time. All right. Well, I snuck in a little pic for today's episode. I've been having tech troubles, I guess, because not only did I, you know, break my phone,

but then I went on a little beach trip with the family and left my Chromecast behind. Oh, okay. How many people have done this? Because I've done this with a Amazon Fire Stick. I left it. You do this where you left it connected to the hotel TV or whatever? Yeah. It's behind the thing. You don't see it.

Yeah, it was so snug in there. It actually was really easy to set up. There was a spare USB port. It just was perfect, but alas, a little too perfect. Yeah. So, okay, I got another one. Fine. I'm all set up again.

But in the interim, I didn't want to have to, like, connect the laptop to my TV or drag out some old... You know, I had considered a few different paths. But then I remembered... You're a gentleman. You're not just going to do, like,

HDMI from your laptop and do VLC. Who would do that? I mean, it would work pretty well, I'm sure. We've all done it. We've all done it. And then I'm reminded how bad Linux can be sometimes at, you know, rendering video.

Yeah, you don't want that tearing? You got to have Wayland, man. It's true, it's true. I remember that my ancient Samsung Smart TV, which I normally don't connect to the network or anything. Naturally. Has DLNA built in. Uh-huh. And, of course, there's lots of stuff, right?

Plex and Jellyfin and lots of tools that have dlna support but some of those are a little heavier than i needed because this would kind of just fill in a gap while i waited for my chromecast to arrive which only got there in a day or two so it was fine if you're in a similar position or you got you know you're you already using dlna or you're at a hotel that has it or some you know whatever or like so many like game consoles yeah so many things have dlna support it's It's ridiculous. Check out GoToTV. Media casting made easy. Oh, little desktop app. Yeah, it's written in Go, so you can just, you know,

it's really easy to install. I think it's in Nix packages as well. And just download it. Give it a run. That's what I was looking for. I didn't want to set up. I wasn't trying to maintain some server for the future. I just wanted a little file that let me grab files off my local file system. It can do URLs as well.

And you can control the playback here. That's cool. The thing about it, too, is those kinds of features on this type of application are often really janky, right? Where you do it, and then eventually it gets there, and then maybe it's messed up somehow. This was really fast. Nice. You just click, and it would update, jump immediately. I was impressed.

Yeah, I like the UI. I mean, it looks like a really slimmed down, really simplified version of Handbrake, if you've ever used that before. And you have your target devices because it detects the DLNA devices on your LAN. You select the target device. You select your file. It also has a couple of other nice things in here, like you could actually pull it in from a URL. That seems really handy. And you can loop. And you can autoplay a file.

And you can retranscode on the fly if you need to for the MTV, whatever. Yeah, it's got subtitle support as well, which my Samsung didn't seem to love entirely. But I could vary per device. But I like that the tool has it. Yeah. Whatever it's using for the UI definitely does not feel native, but probably means it feels consistent and worked just fine. So yeah, if you're in a pinch, you want to take advantage of DLNA without a whole lot

of setup. That's a winner. That's a winner, winner, chicken dinner. And it has a CLI mode, so you know we're into it. That's right. So GoToTV, you can Google that or we'll, of course, have a link in the notes where you can find it and just get to it real easy. Those will be at Linux unplugged dot com slash 516. It's pretty easy, right?

You get it, don't you? And with this episode, you know what? We are officially back at our regular scheduled live production time. We will be back on Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same production time. We will be back on Sunday at noon Pacific, 3pm Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. At Linux Action News, getting close to episode 300. Go check it

out at linuxactionnews.com. Go get more Wes Payne. Of course, there's a whole network of podcasts over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. We encourage you to check them out. Self-hosted, just about to hit episode 100. There's so much going on. We got some special things happening over in office hours land as well.

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