LINUX Unplugged - 533: LinuxFest North Jeff

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

We try and pull off one too many projects, but you can't argue with the results. We report on our week of rebuilds and rescues and having a blast at LinuxFest Northwest. Special Guest: Frank Karlitschek.

Now, I know you just got done working a week straight, but if we were to start planning for the next visit. Can we not? Now, hear me out. It's brilliant. It's great. Just pretend you're assigning this work to someone else. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sure.

I'll do it. I'm just thinking like a little box, right? I got a box, and at the top of the box is a button but inside the box is an esp right and it's running like a script that mutes different channels and wes could take one and brent takes one and it uses netbird we'll take care of the vpn part but we netbird back or tail scale or i don't know something and we come back into the studio and they have mute buttons that go with them anywhere that are actually wired back to the mixer right here in the studio. I'll also take one for his channel.

That's a great idea. I was going to say, I could see us mixing up iGrabWesses by accident. That's what would happen is Jeff would build a mute button for me. Just mute all, actually. You know, didn't Alex mention there's Tailscale on ESB Home now? WireGuard. Oh, WireGuard directly. WireGuard's Tailscale on ESB Home now? WireGuard. Oh, WireGuard directly. WireGuard directly.

Directly on ESB Home. Oh, that's great. That's all it would take. That's just great. I mean, shoot, it's beyond my scope in terms of software, but maybe we can find some kind of project. Yeah, we can do that part. Yeah. As long as we just get portable mute buttons and then we can start muting each other, I think that's going to work out great.

Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, everybody can mute. Well, hello friends and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. And my name is Jeff. Hello, and welcome back, everybody. It's so good to all be here in person. It's so exciting. Nothing like it. Don't break that lamp.

I'm going to break a lamp. I'm going to break a lot more than that because coming up on the show today, we've been kicking absolute butt and putting all of the Linux in all of the places with all of the gadgets, even in places they shouldn't go. We'll talk about that. And then we'll share how the mini Linux Fest this weekend went. And we'll round it out with some great guests that'll stop by and hang out with us, some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. Job one, though, is we got to say

shout out to Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. They have been essential this week, and you can try it for free for up to 100 devices. It'll change your networking game. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. And now, our second order of duty, time-appropriate greetings, virtual love. Hello, guys. Jeff is waving. Again, I just really wanted to say hello again. I feel bad because, quite literally, most of the the mumble rooms out in the living room right now,

we have a living room full of folks that came to LinuxFest Northwest, and I sent Brent around to secretly invite people, and I tried to get to everybody who was basically staying around. However, some are still en route. We'll see. But it's pretty neat. We have pizza out there, we got sandwiches out there, and we got people watching and listening to the show. An amazing group of people outside. And in the feedback segment, we'll bring a few friends in from a few projects that you probably heard about, and we'll chat with them. But before we get to that, let's cover some very important housekeeping.

The taxis are coming up. Whoa. Whoa. Oh, yeah. Why do you have to remind me? I don't mean to derail the show at the very beginning, but we got to talk about the tuxes. I want feedback. Don't go.

Don't vote. My if you vote, I'm going to be. Don't do not vote. No voting allowed. Wes, if they vote, I'm going to be so upset. Yeah. We're tracking it, so don't. Don't vote.

I'll know who votes. But I would like you to review the tuxes and give us edits and recommendations and maybe removals. Yeah, basically, like, look at what we did last year, which is what's still up right now. How do you want—what do you want to see fixed, improved, made better for this year? Included. Excluded. Tuxes.party. That's tuxes.party. What do you want to see fixed, improved, made better for this year? Included. Excluded. Tuxes.party.

That's Tuxes.party. Please, right now, go to Tuxes.party. Don't take the review. Don't take it. Don't. Don't. Don't fill out the survey, but please do review it and then boost in with your suggestions for edits, additions, and removals because you have one week and then we're rolling them out.

I remember last year we had an item we really thought we missed the mark on and that we should have added. Did we write down what that was? I completely forget what that was. Dear Audie. There's show notes, right? Yeah, let's go listen. But go look at tuxes.party.

Tell us what's wrong. Tell us what needs to be updated. Tell us what needs to be edited. And then we'll make it and boost it in or join the tuxes matrix room we will put a link in the show notes those will be the two avenues and of which i can a practically manage and be practically actually watch the feedback so please boost it in or go to the tuxes matrix room and then I will edit the form before next episode, and then the votes are open. It's pretty exciting.

So we have been gathered together for about, well, it depends on who made it, but a few days. Jeff made it here for about a week and hit the ground running. I had what I thought would be a list of ambitious Jeff jobs. I'd say so. I made a bunch of tasks on NextCloud and pretty happy with where we're at right now, Jeff. But let's talk about the automation upgrades

that we did in Jupes. I know we covered some of this in self-hosted, but we decided to put ESP32s connected to relays in the wall. You think I'm going to be calling you in a week? I really hope not. It's a long drive to come fix it. Luckily, Hadiyah knows how to bypass them. She can wire.

She can bypass. By the time we were done, I was like, I don't care. I don't care. But we've really done some, I don't know, like, not bucket list isn't the right word, but it's near bucket list levels types of automation now in the RV we've got the water heater and electric and gas sides fully automated okay so what does automation mean in that context well Jeff explain how we hook these relays up so on your electrical panel I guess your control panel for tubes that does your slides your water heater and your water

heater is both gas and electric so you have two different switches for those. Fancy. And there's also the water pump. It has its own button as well, its own switch, rather. So, of course, he wanted to be able to remotely control said switches. Ah, right. So in the before times, the terrible, terrible, no good before times,

you had to manually walk over to the wall to go, like, toggle the switches. Horrible. Yeah, like a whopping three feet. Ugh. Oh, it was the worst. Yeah. So now there are some relays in there and they are connected to an ESP board and that is tied into home system. Yeah. So you can essentially take a dumb thing that just needs electrical signal and make it a

smart thing that connects into home assistant. And this is all consistent, right? So like you could do it on the wall and it reflects the home assistant. Yeah. And you can override it. So one of the things we wanted, So you could do it on the wall and it reflects the home assistant? Yes, mostly. And you can override it. So one of the things we wanted, because you have multiple options how you can wire it.

Right. You could make it like the switch is part of the process or you could make it where the switch is like a manual override and cut the power, which is what we want. You can do different options.

But I actually felt what was really kind of beneficial was learning and watching Jeff. And what I learned is that you can work in the dark. You can work in the rain. It doesn't matter. What I've learned from Jeff is that it's no big deal to do your electrical work in the rain. Or dark.

Or the dark. Yeah. So, and on a positive life system that's hot. So, we're in the rain. It's hot. It's dark. You get to a point where you've been working on stuff all day long. And you've been planning to do something.

And you don't get to it because, like, the other projects took longer. So then you're like, okay, tomorrow we're going to get in there. We're going to finish this. And Jeff built this beautiful breakout box that has a bunch of DC plugs. What are the type of connectors, Jeff? XT60. And then switches. And then at the last minute, I got him to also cram an ESP in there as well with a relay.

So one of those plugs is on a relay. But, you know, you only got so much time. Sometimes you got to do the job in the rain. Get it done. Get it done. Get it done. Even if we were soaked afterwards. We were so soaked. You're dry now.

Of course, it didn't stop there. There's more to do inside. Got that done in the rain and then went inside and got more done inside. So it went. Yeah. We built some WLED displays. Really love that. I'm sure we'll talk about that on Self Hosted.

You know, when I finally arrived, last time we did this, what was that, six months ago? January? I don't know. Jeff and I kind of raced here on the same day. And I got here, what, half an hour before you or something like that. And then so it was like project week commence. This time around, I think, I mean, it worked out for me. I showed up

and most of the work was done. So I arrived at Lady Joop's in the RV and there were tools and parts and just components everywhere. It was quite the sight. I had, of course, the server booth completely like splayed open because I decided to deploy the PiKVM that we picked up at the RV because we were going to run it here on the OBS machine with Wayland and Plasma and it would be great. We had such dreams. But obviously the Pi KVM has a 1080p resolution limit and this is an ultra-wide display. And I thought, well, where do we have it?

Oh, my home server. So the great thing about the Pi KVM is you can actually connect it to the ATX pins on the motherboard. So you can have the Pi KVM trigger power-offs and resets. Oh, it's so much better than the IPMI stuff that the vendors put in there. It's so much better. So I'm really happy with that. That turned out fantastic. But I think the thing that the audience is probably going to be the happiest to hear is that with Jeff's help, we accomplished the impossible.

We built the Notes PC, and it's fantastic. Okay, so this is an exciting moment because we've talked a lot about the Notes PC, and now we're about to do the big reveal. Jeff's very proud. I see that. And so we'd just like your observations. See what you think. Go ahead. Go ahead.

We're going to go out into the garage. It's a some kind of tour here. Yep. We're stepping out into the server room, also known as the garage. Server room A. Oh. What?

This printer is gorgeous. Isn't that dot matrix in great shape? Very, very cool. Yeah, but it, in a weird way, feels modern. Yeah, it's very modern looking because it's not beige. It's black and gray. And just the form factor. It's in fantastic shape.

We got lucky. I realize I'm looking at the printer and not the notes piece. Yeah. You can move it out the way you want or you can leave it there. It's up to you. It's fully working, though. Just wiggle the mouse wake up the pc so you see here we've got olympia mike's b-link acting as the notes pc now tell us what desktop environment you think we've chosen what do you think we've chosen here for the desktop environment i don't recognize this so I don't actually know. What is it?

Do a little digging. Find out. All right. See how long it'll take me? Yeah. Okay, that doesn't work. He's trying his typical plasma stuff, seeing if it's a plasma skin. There's a button that just says run everything.

It's the best button, actually. Oh! It's enlightenment. button, actually. Oh! It's enlightenment. Yeah, you got it! I left the about open for you. Yeah, that's the hint over we have an about just hidden right there that actually gives it away. But it runs great on this little B-link, and it's fun to have an actual machine dedicated to playing around with it. It's snappy. Isn't it slick?

It's kind of great. Perfect for a notes machine. You want to hear that and see that dot matrix print? Oh yeah, let's take a look. You got something you can cat? Yeah, I got something I can cat. Now, I do need a piece of paper of some sort. Oh, we should have picked up some...

We should have picked up some... These things deserve proper paper. Oh, it worked. We're just shoving a sheet of modern printer paper in there, like animals. Yeah, well... We're going to need to put that somewhere where we can have a stack of dot matrix printer ready to go. Do you think they sell that at the office supply store? Oh, yeah.

They do still? There's a business in Canada that's quite popular everywhere. Of course, of course. It still uses dot matrix printers for their, like, when's a business in Canada. That's quite popular Of course, that still uses dot matrix printers for their like when you go to the cache And you get a carbon copy, you know, cuz you can do that. Yeah. No, they're impact printers They're the best Alright, alright Jeff, it's on it's plugged in technically I should just be able to cap this file here and Technically, I should just be able to cat this file here, and that's it. It's just one line.

Should I do a little more? Sure. I do a lot. Yeah, I do a lot. Cat dot bash underscore history. That could be interesting and embarrassing. Just pick a system file. Well, yeah, I'm going to be dumb. just pick a system file or you can cat the

etsy nixos configuration.nix well I'm not running nix I can't get this thing to work with nix because nix doesn't need it there you go there we go beautiful I can do it at an angle There we go. Beautiful.

I can do it at an angle. Now, at the risk of sounding like a noob, and I want to make a disclaimer here, I have maintained and deployed dot matrix printers for many, many years, but I'd kind of forgotten about the simplicity of them it's pretty interesting because i've never maintained or deployed a dot matrix printer even no shoot ink chants and modern printers i've barely used sure uh yeah so just looking to see like do i need a driver for this am i going to need cups any of that stuff and i installed cups just out of instinct because i don't have it don't need it and i like the idea of installing cups out of instinct yeah i do it too

and you know i just wanted to see that and i couldn't find any way i added a driver in plasma's thing just let's see you know well raw driver let's see what happens and it actually sent something to the printer and it printed out all this random data when it was just one line in Kate. A bunch of characters and stuff. Yeah, kind of a bunch of, not so much insanity, but more of a bunch of... Like a description for a driver. Right, right, exactly. And then I found somewhere a note in some other forum post that said,

oh, you just cat a file to the device, and oh, okay, it's a USB to parallel adapter, and found that and catted a file to the device and oh okay it's a usb to parallel adapter and found that and added a file to it and sure enough it gave me the output if i put ahead and kate yeah it took me like a moment to wrap my head around the simplicity of that it's just an output wow you could net cat to it if you wanted to i know we have not yet got it working in nixOS. I think it's probably a UDEV thing. I literally have not even tried. I tried. Oh, you did?

I failed. Okay. I like this Netcat idea that we expose it on the mesh network, and then anyone can print to it. Well, here's what I'd love to do, Wes, is I'd love to get it working on the Nix Notes machine, and then I want to share it via CUPS to the whole Tailscale network. So from anywhere on my Tailscale network, I can print to that dot matrix printer. How great

is that? There is one problem, and it's unfortunately a rather large problem, and it's the paper for the dot matrix printer. There's a lot of boxes of paper here. Wow, that one's $50. How much do you think a box of dot matrix printer is? Paper. Just the paper.

Given from your expressions, either really high or really low, I'm going to go with low. 1,000 sheets. 1,000 sheets of dot matrix printer. 1,000 sheets, $12. Okay. What do you think, Jeff, for 1,000 sheets? I'm cheating a little bit. Yeah, I'm going to go $85.

$85? I'd say it's a little bit higher than this. Okay. So what was yours again? $12. $12, $85. And survey? It's a little bit higher than this. Okay. So what was yours again? $12. $12. $85. And survey says $211. $211 for a box of Top Matrix printer.

I don't think it's so popular anymore, is it? To be fair, that box would probably last you the rest of your life. Yeah, that's true. That is true. I just cannot believe it. I think we probably only need like rest of your life. Yeah, that's true. That is true. I just cannot believe it. I think we probably only need like 12 sheets or something. Carl is stopping by the studio and dropping off some beef jerky, and I want to take a moment.

Now this smells good. Oh, Carl, is this yours? No. Oh, man, this smells so good. Hey, Levi. Levi is here too. I got a moment, Carl. I got to show you something while you're here in studio.

I know this isn't great for the audio audience, but we were hanging out at Linux Fest, and we looked over at Carl. And Carl was so freaking on brand, I had to take a picture of it. By the way, I also got some pictures of you doing the event. But here's a picture of Carl hanging out at the event eating a piece of jerky, watching. And we're all starving, and Carl brings his own lunch with him, and he's eating jerky while we watch the conference. I should expect nothing less. Yeah, I did expect nothing less, and I was very impressed. Thank you for bringing the little in.

Yeah, thank you. That's the protein we needed to get the show done. You're the best. Boy, it smells delicious out there. I can smell my wife's making some good food out there. I'm not eating it, but I can smell it's delicious. You've got work to do, mister. I know. So I also want to give a shout out to

Bear, because if you'll remember, he boosted in with a recommendation for the dot matrix printer, and on the eBay listing, it said parts only. Cannot verify condition. That sounds bad.

And Jeff is such a dude. He's like, well, here's what I know I need to take care of before we get there. So he pre-orders some lithium grease, thinking, you know, he's taking this thing apart and re-greasing this whole thing. But you didn't have to do any of that, did you? It's very clean. The rails for the head are greased up. There's a little little bit of uh you know dirt in there very very very little super clean the heads the delrun gears that i could see were lubed and moved very very nicely didn't even bother taking it apart the whole

thing is just way too clean no no need it looks brand new perfect condition so now we just need some dot matrix printer paper and we need to get it working on NixOS. The box even had the manual in it and the previous owner wrote the exact ribbon and where he got it. It's like, oh, this ribbon part number at Radio Shack. Yeah, he was playing stuff from Radio Shack back in the day. You know, my favorite thing

of the whole Notes PC and the printer is the name of the printer. You notice that? It's just Gorilla Banana. Yeah. Come on. Chris, Chris, Chris, wait wait wait oh right right right no you're right you're right there's yeah you know you're absolutely you can't hold on i'll eat my jerky you go ahead so first of all i want to tell all the listeners that enlightenment is on the toxic list for next year's vote for this year's vote but it was last year it was last year so i guess you will put it this year are you on the payroll over there i mean no no the thing is you know i i think i

started using enlightenment in like 2004 or something like that so i've i think i use enlightenment for almost 20 years and i started with some configuration and i added some mouse shortcuts tools and stuff like that and i think i run this configuration for more than 10 years like like that and it does not change i i can trust enlightenment that with the next version my configuration will probably work again. That's nice. For a desktop computer with multiple screens, give it a shot. Give it a shot.

I always started with running Enlightenment just as a window manager, you know? And then I added the GNOME settings demons and a GNOME panel. So I did, in fact, what, if we go back to Linux history, Enlightenment was the window manager of GNOME 1. Huh, really? And then they switched to

MetaCity. Then they switched to MetaCity and then afterwards we have the GNOME 3 as we have right now. So give Enlightenment a shot. When it comes to multi-screen setups or for a low-spec system, you can't beat it. No, definitely not.

You can't beat it. It's a single screen, and it's a notes PC. But even then, like you said, you set up the configuration, and everybody calls Plasma configurable, and that's a joke compared to Enlightenment. It really is. But it's kind of hard to configure and somebody who's never done it trying to find those little bits and pieces and yeah every little

thing that you can you can configure and you're dead on though a couple a couple good configurations and you can just scream through it like anything else i mean configure it however you want and it's so slick super fast super clean um the animations are extremely smooth. It's just all the little things that really checks those boxes. I'm curious, is there such a rich sharing community of configs for Enlightenment? It's a good

question. You know, easiest thing is you go to IRC, good old IRC, and you will find an Enlightenment. On Finoad you will find an Enlightenment, on Freenode you will find an Enlightenment or Libra chat now. You'll find an Enlightenment chat, and they give you some

links. I personally don't need this knowledge base, because I'm working with that for so much time, I don't have any questions, otherwise I figure it out. I know the learnings. Well, that's nice for you mini mac being on the payroll he has access to a bunch of sounds like you can ping him whenever you need

help so you're saying you're mini mac you're saying you're going to fly out here and help me set up the node species it's a niche product it's a niche product so you don't have a large community uh as gnome has or KDE Plasma or whatever. But give it a try and try to go to this configuration where the definition of the menu items is sometimes pretty strange. And all of a sudden you realize that, wow, you achieved something that you did not want, but it looks nice. So it is that learning curve. And you do another click and then it's gone yep and and

and the thing is all that stuff is binary so that thing is not saved in a configuration thing it's saved directly on the fly on in the enlightenment configuration files which are binary in fact because you have the enlightenment running the the settings are applied in fact. Because you have the Enlightenment running, the settings are applied, in fact, in the edgy file. It's really, it's fast. That's why it's so fast. Yeah, it is. That's my first impression.

It's so smooth. I'm excited to try this. Yeah, after the show, we're going out there. You've got to try it. Plus, Wes, you've got to help us get the dot matrix printer working on NixOS. Wait, wait, wait. What is the deal with that run everything button? I mean, I didn't push it. Oh, yeah, you've got to help us get the.matrix printer working on NixOS. Wait, wait, wait. What is the deal with that run everything button? I mean, I didn't push it.

Oh, yeah. What is it? Minimac. What is it? That's a launcher. That's a launcher. And it includes also file search and everything. You can go to the configuration and you will find, I think, even in menu item, everything launcher,

where you can, in fact uh configure what he's looking for for me it's just an app launcher but you can also search for files and probably even do some web search if you have the module for it i'm not sure if that is possible so they have various modules that kind of extend it yeah yeah that's nice it's very nice well i uh i finally have my enlightenment system jeff did it as a troll and i love it do you next i'm keeping it we'll see the only yeah so thanks for that cool the only problem is is i was kind of i was sort of planning for a mouse free environment just to reduce space but jeff has a better idea instead of putting it on so in the garage i have the automotive table and only automotive related things are supposed to go on

that table but now we have this pc and jeff had a great idea of maybe setting up like a mount on the wall where i actually work on the engines of the machine and we'll put it over there i don't know if there's room for a mouse, though. But I would like to be a mouse-free environment. So is that possible? Can you get a keyboard that has like a... Can I do it all with keyboard? It's configurable, for sure, to do that. It might take you a while to get to that point,

but it is absolutely configurable to do that. And I mean, if you're using a little launch mini and, you know, have room for a ball mouse, I think that'd be fine. What'd you say? If you have room... A ball what? A what? Yeah, all right. All mouse, I think that'd be fine. What'd you say? If you have a ball, what? A what?

Yeah. All right. All right. I'm going to stick with enlightenment. We're going to make it work. We're going to make it work. I think it's going to be fantastic. And the gorilla banana was a fantastic recommendation by bear.

It is a solid little printer. We just got to get our hands on some paper. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head on over there to get $100 in 60-day credit. It's a great way to support the show. It's where we run all of our cloud services. We get the control, the power, the flexibility, and the performance that we frankly require to run all of our infrastructure to have it perform well for our audience. And things have just been getting better because Linode is now part of Akamai.

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That's like a vote of confidence. You can really try something out. You've been wondering about Matrix or Mattermost or running your own Jitsi server, maybe a Minecraft server. Maybe you want to run git lab or next cloud they have so many ready to go instances and they deploy in a sane manageable way and as part of akamai's global network of offerings they're going to give you even more resources as time goes on so you'll know there'll be more data centers to choose from that's been a really nice aspect for us we can deploy resources in areas that our listeners are

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applications from the cloud all the way out to Grand Forks, North Dakota and beyond. Maybe even Mars one day. Linode.com slash unplugged. Now, the talks happened on Saturday, but it seems like the mini-fest really kicked off on Friday night with a little social get-together. And I knew I was going to be missing out.

Unfortunately, I had a conflict and couldn't make it. But I don't think I fully appreciated just how much I was going to be missing out. Unfortunately, I had a conflict and couldn't make it. But I don't think I fully appreciated just how much I was going to be missing out because it sounds like there was also some gaming going on. Yes. You know, the first venue, so it was two venues Friday night, which is kind of fancy. Yeah. The first venue, Stones Throw Brewery. Family-friendly, pet-friendly, and bike-friendly, but they did a kind of a neat

thing. So they started with an old-school Bellingham house for the brewery, and then they built like this complex arrangement of containers and canvases around it. And then in the middle, they created like this pit fire and a place to sit and like a little area to hang out. It was really pretty great. I don't mean to sound like an idiot, but it took me about an hour before I realized that I was surrounded by a bunch of like complex container arrangements. And they had made like they extended this one single house out of like 20 or 30 containers. It was massively more impressive than I expected. Well, and I noticed you grabbed, Chrisris the very last chair around the fire you spotted that yeah went straight for it and i think you

were there all night right well i i had that i had a strategy i i figured sit down and just let people come to me you know well best for you in the house too it was pretty great it was pretty great you know what's you know what was really neat is I felt like Friday night I had a chance to meet with fellow podcasters. Yeah, the pseudo show, like 70, maybe 80% of the pseudo show is there. Some people that are about to launch a new podcast

about Linux and open source and education were there and they were asking me for some tips and that was pretty cool to kind of like share some ideas with them. That is kind of special. I mean, you know, obviously we're you bring in the audio on podcast, it's like a double feature. Yeah, and you're literally sitting around a fire. Dang it, I'm jealous.

There's something tribal about that. And then we, after that, we kind of wrapped up. And we moved to one of the most legitimate gaming venues I've been to ever. I was a little skeptical because I see these kind of things all the time. But the 1UP Lounge, they really had it nailed. They had the classic pinball games. They had the classic console games with the CRT screens and all that kind of stuff. Ooh, CRT screens.

Yeah. So you're playing it the right way, right? Like massive CRT screens. Yeah. The Trinitron. The flat Trinitron. You know, the good stuff. The good stuff. It was really fun. It was really fun. And Noah had a chance to show

my kids a few hot tips on Goldeneye. Well, I showed Noah a few hot tips about the Star Trek pinball that was right at the door. Did you? It was very much worth playing. Did you miss that? I didn't play the Star Trek pinball game. Oh, Chris. I thought that was the whole reason we got that venue i left my debit card there unfortunately excuse to go back

well they had a they had a really nice card shop attached and you could go over there and play some card games i i don't know but i i i just kind of was meandering through the different venues and checking it out and then i kind of left and said my goodbyes and just totally walked out and didn't grab my debit card on the tab and you didn't think to grab it the next day either? No, Hadeed got it for me. Oh, that's kind. It was good. It was really Saturday where things kind of clicked in and I felt like we got down to actual business. And I gave the opening, hello, everybody, welcome to Linux Fest mini. And then Brent, you had to give the first talk. Yeah, it's a bit, well, I will admit that's the first talk yeah it's a bit um well I will admit that's

the first talk I give at any conference which was a you know a little bit of uh jitters if you know really like nerves not counting like next con not counting like next cloud events you're saying this is the first fair enough not yeah I think because you just like two weekends ago we're doing live events like yeah I guess I consider those slightly different one is like hosting an event the other is giving a talk i don't know is there a difference maybe not how did i do did i do okay you did great oh well thank you we're like what do we need to do to upgrade our next cloud like we are missing out on we're not taking advantage of all these things yeah the great thing about uh that venue which ended up being a room filled with what like 90 people or so was that it just also felt really casual and cozy.

And I thought it was just like hanging out with a bunch of friends, which is a great feeling as someone giving a talk, because literally it's just like hanging out with a bunch of friends that you really enjoy. So at least from my point of view, it was pretty amazing and really, really fun. And, you know, I get to talk about NextCloud, which is also super fun. So I think those presentations, Chris, are going to be, I think, released in a couple weeks. Is that right? That's the plan.

I don't know how the audio will be, but the plan is on the LinuxFest Northwest channel in the next week or two. Some of the talk should be there. Do you think there was sort of a special atmosphere, you know, just given, you know, all the complications so far, the questions, would we even be here? I think there was an especially sort of supportive spirit and group going on. You know, sometimes you go to a conference and it's a big thing, especially maybe like a corporate event and you're kind of like, what can I get out of this for me? I didn't really get that. It was much more like everyone in the room, even if you, you know, maybe that talk wasn't the reason that you were going to come or you were the most excited about.

It's not like people were getting up and leaving or moving. Sure, you could. It'd be fine. But it felt like everyone was just there to see what would happen and wishing everyone the best. Noah, one of the things you pointed out during the conference was it was kind of nice just to sit there in one spot and have the great talks come to you. Yeah, I think that it provided an opportunity for people to go see talks they wouldn't ordinarily participate in. You know, a lot of times at the conference, you'll take the conference bulletin and you'll read through it and you'll say to yourself, which of these things are most directly relevant to what I'm doing? And the problem with that is it doesn't always let you wander into exposure to things that you don't know are beneficial to you.

Like, for example, the fact that CloneZilla has Pixie booting built into it. I use CloneZilla all the time, but I'm still running around and like, okay, we got 50 machines, so what do I need? I need 51 flash drives, one for the source machine, and one for all the cloning machines. And so the idea of being able to just, hey, let me just hit F12 and tell the people, you know, boot Pixie. You don't know that option is there unless the guy from CloneZilla is presenting those things.

You're paying attention to what's coming new. That's maybe not a thing I would have gone to. I would have said, CloneZilla, the ISO that I download and image on my machines, I use that all the time. Sitting through that presentation, though, you learn things and you get exposure to things you wouldn't ordinarily do. And so, yeah, you learn things, and you get exposure to things you wouldn't ordinarily do. And so, yeah, I thought that was great. I thought it was kind of special that the folks from Clonezilla showed up. You know, they weren't, they're not always the loudest or the

most announcing of their presence at LinuxFest Northwest, but they've been there for a long time, and I think it says something about the special nature of LinuxFest Northwest that they keep showing up. Well, it also reminded me that I'm just not using CloneZilla to its fullest. No, you are not.

Did you get that impression when you watched it? Like, I'm not using that to its best. 100%. The only thing I would say to that is just kind of referencing our previous NixOS conversation, like the ability to, or the benefit of being able to replicate

a setup machine kind of goes out the window if you can just set it up from scratch every time. Yeah. It was pretty neat also seeing it from their perspective, you know, like just hearing them talk about it and hearing their passion and all of that. Like, I really was pretty grateful they made it.

Everybody, obviously, who makes it. Guys like Carl who make it, and of course all the others. But thank you, Carl. Thank you for making Carl's heading out right now. But when I watched that presentation, my takeaway was there's a lot more I could do with Clonezilla. There's a lot more. But, no, you nailed it. When you said, I just sat here and all of the talk, all the presentations, all of the best speakers that came to me, there's something here with a little bit smaller format, actually, I think.

Don't you think? Like a little bit smaller format. I don't need 20 talks to pick from. No, and it causes you to pick from the highest of the high because you have a smaller bandwidth. I also think it was interesting because we all sat in on the same talks. Again, later on throughout the night and throughout that evening there were topics of conversation that you knew sitting down at a table that you could have with other people because you knew they sat through the same talks you did yeah and which is not something you would ordinarily have you would say hey did you catch that no i didn't see that okay well maybe on the rerun that kind of thing right did you have a favorite talk noah was it clonzel or something

else you know i'll be honest with you and i'm not just blowing smoke i would say brent's next cloud talk one of the things that he said that was super impactful to me was when he described next cloud Was it Clonzilla or something else? You know, I'll be honest with you, and I'm not just blowing smoke. I would say Brent's NextCloud talk. One of the things that he said that was super impactful to me was when he described NextCloud as the hub of apps. I've always thought of NextCloud as like an Office 365 replacement or my cloud system. I've never really thought of it as like one app to rule them all. And so in the same way that I've bamboozled my wife into believing that Home Assistant is just the one app that she needs on her phone to control everything and I'll just funnel it all into the one place, I kind of feel like that's what NextCloud Hub is, well, NextCloud is for the rest of life. And when he showed that screenshot of here's all the other things, like you gentlemen were saying, am i doing why am i not doing this that sounds fantastic uh that's i think that's that's what stuck stuck out to me the most followed maybe closely second by carl's explanation of apple nine just from the standpoint that i'd never heard it explained in a linear fashion like

here's the the regardless of what you think your ideology or how you view Red Hat or all the rest of it, this is how things did work before. Here's how things work now. See how much more logical this is. And just kind of hearing it, you know, I'm like any idiot should be able to listen to that and be like, nope, that makes sense. Yeah.

There was definitely a sense of like, oh, that's what you're trying to do. And I literally, not even kidding, I heard a couple of folks go, oh, during the presentation. Light bulb. Yeah, light bulb went off for sure. And we also, of course, have a last minute update. We have the call for papers for Texas Linux Fest, which we're going to be at.

We're going to all try to make it. April 12th and 13th, 2024. That's right. You know, there's lots of suggestions over there. We have it all at 2024.TexasLinuxFest.org. We'll put a link in the show notes. Their call for papers is open right now. We're going to be there.

It's going to be a great fest. And it's across from Terry Black's. So, you know, it's going to be good. I feel like I finally got to attend more talks than I probably have in the last couple of years combined. That's a good point, actually. I completely missed the last fest, but showed up when it was over. But I think you're right. The hallway

track has typically been where we spend most of our time. But this time, just being smaller and stuff, it felt like a shared experience was had by all, and I think that was really cool. Well, and credit to the LinuxFest team,

which I really had no role in, picking the best talks, you know, and they had to pick from those who were still going to make it and the talks that were really viable. Yeah, not necessarily an easy task. Yeah, yeah, really. And I totally enjoyed the format. I heard some whispers that maybe this format might come around every half year,

like have a big fest in the spring and maybe another fest like this in the fall? Do you think that's a good idea? It sounds like there's some interest. I would be down. Yeah, me too. More excuses to go to Bellingham? Check. Yep. So we wrapped up the evening, Saturday, with a dinner. And it was the JB dinner

and it was at the Brandywine Kitchen, which is both a place to get like great food and great drinks in one spot. And they have an upstairs venue and they have a downstairs venue. They've been around since 2008 and they've really kind of honed the experience because it's a local favorite. It's one of those where we packed it so much and I was standing outside for a few minutes and I would see locals walk up and they go, oh, screw this. And they'd walk away because there's just too many people.

Their favorite had been wrecked. But we came in and we wrecked it real good. And we had just a great crowd. We literally filled the entire venue. I mean we could not have fit a single – any more people at all. We didn't have enough chairs. No. No, it was completely, completely just slammed in there.

And to the point where they're even having a hard time getting the drinks up to everybody and whatnot. But, you know, the longer we do this, the more it feels like just getting together with old friends. Just feels like we're hanging out with old friends that I haven't seen for a while. And, you know, about once, kind of like family. Once every couple of times a year, I get together with these folks and I hang out and we update each other on what we're working on and what they're working on. It's so fun, right? Like, you know, they're not in your day-to-day life necessarily, or maybe you only see them

sometimes in the Matrix room or in Mumble or something like that. But then you show up in person and you pick up where you left off. And I think it's such a nice little just mixing event because you have, you know, tables of people that have seen each other over the past six years of events. And then you got folks there, this is their first time and they're just right there together. Yeah.

We got folks from Switzerland. We had Frank came in from Berlin. Yeah. Frank came in from Berlin. He attended all things Berlin. He attended... All Things Open. He attended All Things Open in Raleigh and then made his way out here to the Pacific Northwest

to attend LinuxFest, which is really great. But yeah, Florian from Switzerland came. That was my... At least that's the person I found who came the furthest, and I don't know if you can top that one. But that was super impressive. And I guess Florian spent a month here just taking in the Pacific Northwest.

And his brother came for two weeks and they had an experience together. That's the way to do it. Really sweet, really. I was impressed too. Just in the States, a lot of folks from the East Coast, across the country, all over. So many people are totally on the cutting edge of stuff.

You know what I mean? Like Nick's and just totally pushing it to the edge. Like we had a conversation with Christopher who's looking at converting their entire operation to open source and they're doing like, you know, just underwater archaeological surveil, like types of, I don't know, depth mapping, you know, just like regular things,

just using Linux, just all kinds of great stories. It feels more like friends getting together over the years than it does like a tech event it feels like good friends that just known each other for a long time getting together and i can't help but look forward to meeting these internet strangers over and over again um but i think as we do this over and over again the undeniable thing is the crew time. It's just so great. I feel like, really, Wes and I hardly spent any time together.

Every time I saw him, I was like, Hi, Wes. We dodged past each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I feel like it's still so essential to be in the same room. We've said that during the pandemic, of course, and before then, but it's still true now

that you get this revitalization, this energy from listeners, from new friends that we made, but also from the crew just being in the same room. Currently, as I'm saying this, Chris is locking eyes with me. It's like this beautiful moment. My heart's starting to flutter a little.

How you doing? Hey there. Yeah, the winking's a bit much. Yeah, he doesn't need to do the winking, does he? You're next, Wes. No, no no no if we had an hr department if we had an hr department uh for me uh i feel like these sprints have come to a point now where they sustain jupiter broadcasting just full stop

like uh the things we get done behind the scenes between these get-togethers are literally the things that make it possible for us to survive until the next get-together. Like, I'm not even exaggerating a little bit. It's a nice little focus point, reprioritization, you know, sort of like what really needs to happen to keep things going and

all the right people in the right place at the right time. We're focused on that. Shout out to Jeff. Oh yeah, I would say a huge shout out to Jeff. I feel like when we get together in person, it's this culmination of a bunch of ideas that come together and get implemented. And skill sets. Yeah, skill sets, absolutely.

But then the implementation happens, like the Notes PC we talked about. It's really nice to see it in person and physically working, which is really exciting. But long-time project, we saw the servers up and running as well. Noah and Jeff, I was just watching because I couldn't help, and I was

getting frustrated by how long servers take to reboot. But they got that thing running. It took a couple days. And it's at a place now where we can actually do some irresponsible things to it. Yeah, it's too bad I hate it. What do you mean, Chris? How are you feeling over there? What's going on? irresponsible things to it. Yeah, it's too bad I hate it. It's too bad.

What do you mean, Chris? How are you feeling over there? What's going on? You guys spent legitimately three days getting this thing. I mean, reflashing BIOSes, reflashing controller firmware. Wow. Mix and match and hardware. Let me tell you something about this Dell.

It has no primary storage. What it does have is a massive disk array and then an SD card. It's got an SD card. No, no, no. It has two primary storage. What it does have is a massive disk array and then an SD card. It's got an SD card. No, no, no. It has two SD cards. Well, it's got an SD card. And then it copies slowly, manually, at boot time to the second SD card. It's not a RAID.

Just as like an offline backup in case you need it. Yeah, you want a backup of this? Would you like to back this up? Do you think maybe you should back this up? Go ahead and hit enter, and we'll go ahead and sit here at the boot process for 25, 30, 40 minutes. 0%. Yeah, and we'll just, maybe two hours, and we'll just go ahead and copy this SD card to the other. So it's a PCI riser card.

It's got two SD card slots on it. One SD card is the primary SD card, and I'm talking like your digital camera Kingston SD card. And the other one is the primary sd card and i'm talking like your digital camera kingston sd card and the other one is the backup sd card and the backup sd card gets a manual copy at boot if you're cool with six hours of downtime it'll replicate the sd card and then you can have yourself a machine with 96 cores almost 400 gigs of ram super fast sas storage, and you're still Raspberry Pi-ing this thing as you install the OS. It's so slow. So that was pretty painful, but we kind of eventually, through flashing the disk controller, through flashing the BIOS, got it to boot off a local disk.

Yeah, we tried what was it, an NVMe drive on a PCI bus, And that, of course, wasn't supported by this particular server. No, why would you want that? No. So we got there. I mean, I say we. I did literally nothing. I carried the server once out of the rack. I imagine there was some important moral support going on.

Yeah. I would every half hour come out and say, hey, guys, you're doing great. And then go away again. Yeah. And I would check in on the IPMI. It's not working. So that was helpful. That was good.

It was like literally though three days of one blow after another. Like it can't do this or this is a problem or that was a problem or we got to flash this. Okay. And then we get Proxmox on there.

It did eventually work, yes. We did. And I tried it. Oh. for about four hours and i hate it i do not like proxmox i'm sorry i tried i tried to like proxmox i tried because so many of the listeners like proxmox i tried to like proxmox i wanted to like proxmox wes and you've been talking about you've been excited to give it a go a year but i just want nicks on there i just want a plain simple nick system i don't want proxmox on there. I just want a plain, simple Nix system. I don't want Proxmox on there.

It's too much hassle. It's too much everything. Just so you don't feel alone, Chris, that was the exact feeling I got when we were talking on Self Hosted that I got, you know, Alex dropped off that one liter PC for me. And I was all excited. I was like, oh, I finally have a place to put Proxmox. Everybody's always talking about it.

And I got all excited. I was like, oh, I finally have a place to put Proxmox. Everybody's always talking about it. And I got it on there. And then I immediately just felt deflated by the experience. And I thought, I don't like this at all. This is not for me. Here's where it went south for me. Literally, the first thing I had to do was edit the grub defaults and add like Intel iMMOU support to the book parameters. And I'm sitting there like editing the grub file. I'm updating grub defaults and add like intel immou support to the book parameters and i'm sitting there like editing the grub file i'm updating grub i'm changing the bootloader i'm like i'm already

literally my first job the first thing i do is i'm already editing the linux system yeah exactly what you don't want to be doing so like why am i not just running linux and then i don't have like all of this problem to deal with? Because here's what would happen. I know this would happen every single time. I would build a whole bunch of servers. I would create a workflow with like PCI pass-through and storage pass-through and cool backups. And then it would break and I would try to fix it. And the entire time I wish I just could get to the – I just wish this was Linux.

I wish this was just plain config files. I wish I could just get to the – I just wish this was Linux. I wish this was just plain config files. I wish I could just get to the basic stuff and fix this. And it will run fine for a year or two. I know it would. It would run fine for a year or two. And then it would break and I would wish I could just get to the basic system. And if I already have to get to the basic system to just make it work in the first freaking place, well, that's probably my red flag right there. You know, and just to give it some credit,

you know, it breaking might even be we break it. Well, likely, actually. Which makes it all the more important that we understand it enough that we can put it back together again or at least make sure we've salvaged our data. You know what's special about these LinuxFests, though, is we get projects done.

We get things done that we just don't have time to do, or I don't have the bandwidth to do, or it just needs multiple people. And, you know, Jeff coming out a week early before Linux Fest and banging these things out was a game changer for us. And JB will be in a better position for a year. What a hero. I know. It is really, it is the fundamental game changer for us, is getting some of these things done that – we're so focused on making the individual shows and there's multiple shows every single week that need to get made and that's really our primary focus. But there is infrastructure that needs addressing to make it all possible and that's where Jeff really came in and sleeping on the couch every night, staying up, making it get done. It's just really impressive. Luckily, we did do a little trade. We introduced him to Indian food.

That's true. I want an update. How did that go? I mean, he ate the entire plate. Yeah. I only ate half, and you know that's saying something. He had tiki masala. He wouldn't even try my butter chicken, which I think was a bit of a new bear.

But I think the saving grace was about 50%, 60% of the meal, I did a full stop. Everybody, stop. Put your effing forks down. Jeff hasn't even tried the naan yet. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we got that taken care of,

and I think that took it up to a whole other level for him. So we got the naan in there, and then he was really good to go. You know, treat it like it's a fork, you know, scoop stuff up. It's delicious. I think we're super lucky to have Jeff joining us for these projects and just being around the JB community generally. I mean, I've learned so much from him personally. He's taught me all the ESP stuff I know and all the ESP stuff you know, Chris, and just a collection of other things. So thanks to Jeff, really.

I just love getting to play with this stuff and not having the skill set to necessarily wire it all up. Knowing it's out there, knowing these individual devices can do these things, but not literally being able to make it all connect, that's the part that Jeff comes in and just kills it. So awesome! Literally being able to make it all connect, that's the part that Jeff comes in and just kills it.

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And welcome back to the Pacific Northwest. It's been a few minutes. Yeah, yeah. I think there was a pandemic or something. Something. But really, really good to be back. I felt like it was the LinuxFest Northwest events where I'd check in with you and see what's going on. Well, since everything's been going on, I don't know, I feel like Nextcloud turned it up to 11.

Things have really been progressing this year, Frank, like at a very aggressive clip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And not only this year. I mean, it depends how you look at it, right? Of course, everything is developing very nicely. We have this integration with AI features, which is really interesting at the moment.

And all the components, Nextcloud Torque developed a lot and the groupware part, and it's really going nicely. But of course, I'm the type of person which is never really satisfied. It's always more. I mean our mission is to

be an alternative to Google and Microsoft and yeah we still have some work to do there. And they don't stop either right? So you gotta kind of keep it up. You have a pretty I think you've locked in on the value proposition that is clearly distinct from what Google and Microsoft are offering. And that is, not only is it local AI, but I get to kind of pick the AI services I want to pick and choose.

But you're doing something that feels like yeoman's work. And you're looking at the different AI services and you're giving them color ratings. Can you talk about that? Yeah, exactly. So this is quite interesting. So the last 12 months was really crazy for all of us, I think, because like 12 months ago, no one really thought something like ChatGPT is even possible. This was science fiction, right?

This is not crazy. And then like in the end of November, I think, last year, ChatGPT came out and everybody was like, oh, wow, that's really powerful. But unfortunately, that's something only big tech can do. This is obviously needs like, I don't know, crazy server clusters from Microsoft or Amazon or whatever. Yeah, lots of GPU or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And I was really depressed at the time.

I thought, okay. Open source is being left out here. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we developed this nice software suite with Nextcloud now, but the new stuff, AI, we cannot do it. But then just a few months later, I mean, beginning of the year, it became clear that's not true,

that the open source community did so much awesome work, and it was actually interesting that we realized, okay, we can actually develop AI features. And then we, yeah, we formed a dedicated team for that and started to work on that. Was it immediately obvious how this stuff would be beneficial to Nextcloud? Because I'll be honest, as an outsider, it was not immediately obvious to me. And so many companies are just, like like adding AI without it being really useful. They're throwing it in, right.

Yeah. I mean, for me, it always was obvious, I have to say. Because, I mean, AI is bullshit in a lot of use cases. Yeah. But for a productivity suite like Nextcloud, I think it's pretty obvious. It can help to write your emails. It can help to summarize your emails. It can help you, like you reformulate a document or generate

a contract in Nextcloud Office. Summarize a thread of emails. I think this is pretty obvious why this is useful and I'm really happy that we can do this now. Doesn't it feel sort of perfect? Nextcloud, there was a clear value proposition, local data,

and having sovereignty over your own information, but the AI stuff comes along. And the way you've identified it, it's a perfect integration. It's almost your moment here. Do you feel that? It is strategically very interesting because, I mean, I'm running around for like 10, 15 years and I'm saying like, hey, keep your data under control. It would be great if we have it it local. Maybe you want to pick

a service provider, blah, blah, blah. And that's very important. And yeah, some people listen to this message and some just ignore it. But now with AI, I think it becomes clear that this is important. I mean, there are companies like Apple and Samsung and like Goldman Sachs

and they're all blocking chat GBT. And why is that? Because they're all blocking chat GBT. And why is that? Because they're afraid that their data is used for training purposes by these AI systems. Yeah, their private information. Yeah, exactly. And then the competitor is asking chat GBT for, hey, how can the next generation plane can be constructed

and you can suddenly get the construction plans from your competitors. And like everybody's afraid of that. And to have something open source and local in Nextcloud makes a lot of sense. It's kind of a change. You mentioned spinning up a new team, but did you have to retool or re-architect things to fit AI into the productivity application?

Yeah, exactly. Because the challenge is that Nextcloud is mostly written in PHP and most of the machine learning stuff is in Python. Right. But just coincidentally, we in parallel started an initiative to build a new API with microservice architecture that can plug in applications to Nextcloud that are written in completely different languages and different

machines and with different APIs and so on. So that's actually matched perfectly. So does the AI stuff then leverage the new API? Partly. I mean, there's some things that we can actually do in PHP, and that's nice because you can just activate it with one click. But the more advanced things, like

our large language models, these are Python components that are running in parallel. Neat. And so there is some new efforts being put in place by the Nextcloud team to enable kind of any language you want to use. Yeah, exactly. So it was since the very beginning where I developed this app system because the idea is that it should be a platform. beginning where I developed this app system so because

the idea is that it should be a platform you can build applications on top of not only like and nowadays

if you just do like a default next-door installation it's already like I don't know 30 or 40 apps are enabled by default so it's

modular but they're all PHP and that's cool for some things but as I said for machine learning other things

you want to have other technologies. So we developed this new API, REST-based API, where you can do with Microsoft is plug in other components. And this just opens up a lot of new opportunities. Yeah. I mean, I think we're excited about it just internally. Yeah. It is really, to me, Frank,

I feel like the next time we're doing this in a year or so, you're going to be too fancy to talk to me because this is – you are – I'm not sure. You are really – You're the famous person here. No, no, no, no. You have really aligned the project to really take advantage of this in a way where I can not only from like a technical standpoint feel comfortable with it but from a moral standpoint. Thanks for saying that. That's – I mean moral is a big word. But at with it, but from a moral standpoint. Thanks for saying that. I mean, moral is a big word, but at the end of the day...

Ethical. Ethical, yeah. I mean, there are some reasons why the Nextcloud community is developing Nextcloud like that. And sometimes I'm, I don't know, not disappointed, but if you go to open source conferences, and I just came from All Things Open in Raleigh, a lot of people do open source. Every company makes open source conferences and I just came from All Things Open in Raleigh. Right.

It is, a lot of people do open source. Every company makes open source. Yeah, to a degree. Exactly. And some of them or most of them

do it in a way that doesn't really give any freedom to the users. Yes. It's just part of the stack, which is nice, but you still have

the vendor login. And we at Nextcloud trying to do it basically have the full stack open source. It's a big battle though. You're essentially taking on Office 365 and Google Workspace.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when I started this like 13 years ago, it was, I mean, for me, the main message is always that I don't want to live in a world where like only five companies have all data of all humans. Oh, boy, does that resonate?

Thank you. It was really, I mean, it was moving this direction, right? I mean, everybody was doing SAST, everybody's using Gmail and Dropbox and so on, and it was like, okay, that's great, but I don't know. I mean, open source is all about putting you in

control of your digital IT destiny. And yeah, that's what we want to help with with Nextcloud. I just really applaud what you're doing because there's a lot of companies that are jumping in on the AI hype. And they're just going all in without the thoughtfulness. without the thoughtfulness. And what I think is pretty great is, as a Nextcloud user, I can just select the stuff that runs locally on system.

If I want to use the remote API, I can. And I don't feel like there's a lot of companies that are thinking through that. Totally. Nextcloud is really, because of this too, developing into a productivity suite, like a complete productivity suite. Do you have any thoughts on where this goes in the next couple of years? Just to add something to what you said earlier,

there are so many companies who are trying to do AI now. Just slapping it in. Yeah, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense. And often it's just like, hey, we're sending something to JetGBT. Isn't it great? like, hey, we're sending something to JetGBT. Isn't it great? Yeah. I mean, I saw like a few months ago

that an open source groupware solution, I don't want to say the name, they're also like, we do everything local and open source. Isn't it great? And then they announced AI integration to summarize email threads and they just send it to JetGBT.

Yeah. Great. So you have your local mail server, but every single mail is first sent to open ai i mean that's not a good idea no and then i just like i posted it on mustard on like a few days ago i saw like a kickstarter project where someone developed like a box that you can put on your desk it has a microphone and a speaker and it just records everything that's said in the room and sends it to chat gbt and then you can press a button and ask for a summary later,

which is, like, I mean, great. Powerful and neat. Neat, but also scary. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to have a microphone. It's basically live broadcasting to Microsoft, everything that happens. I mean, come on.

Right, I'd like that to be local. Yeah, exactly. I don't mind that functionality, but I want to have it local. I feel like there's power in having both through the same interface, too. You know, like you get these competing sort of SaaS or like AI as a service companies, but each one wants to sort of lock you into their thing. You're logging into their interface using their APIs, but that I could say use for the things that it made sense that I was concerned about

or that it worked well, use the local model. And then in the same way, without really switching anything, take advantage of ChatGPT where it made sense. Yeah. It's important to have the choice, right? And we have this ethical AI system where you can say, okay, this AI's

subsystem is like, either local or this is not, or here you can that the bias is checked or not, and here's the CO2 footprint under control or not and you can really choose what you want for what purpose and I mean in Nextcloud Assistant it's not only like one LLM it's just I think it's

20 different models there's something for translation there's something for face recognition and so on and you can really choose which system you want to use in what way Well Frank I've really been grateful as a Nextcloud user because these are things we use and so on. And you can really choose which system you want to use in what way. Well, Frank, I've really been grateful as an xCloud user because these are things we use.

You know, these are features we're taking advantage of. But ultimately, I know that I think as DexCloud grows, I have to imagine your future customer is probably 10 times larger

than somebody like Jupyter Broadcasting. Do you feel like these issues that we've touched on here today, do you feel like they resonate with the scale of companies or government organizations? Are they concerned about these types of issues? As Nextcloud grows, what have you been discovering? This is actually very interesting because, again, looking back,

many years ago, I thought that our main users, our main customers would be enterprises, like big companies. People looking maybe to replace Dropbox. Yeah, like, I don't know, big organizations, like, I don't know, being afraid of industry espionage or something like that. But it's actually not the case. I mean, there's typically big enterprises. They're most of them are ignoring the privacy and security aspects. Our main

users and customers are governments, universities, schools. Are they ahead of the privacy concern there? I think so, yeah. And they're under a lot of a lot more like public pressure

to not screw it up somehow. So they really care about being compliant and being like, I don't know, secure and so on. And companies, they're often like, yeah, I don't know if Microsoft is compliant with our requirements, but everybody's doing it, so we're doing it too. Yeah. So they're essentially assuming it's safe.

Do you see those as potential customers in the future? I think so. I think so. I mean, especially with the AI stuff we just mentioned. It's like, I mean, big companies, they're blocking ChatGPT for a reason. And they will also block,

like, Copilot for Microsoft and other things because it's not really clear where the data is going to. Right. But as they get more concerned and they think

a little bit deeper about that. I think so. And I expect that there will be some security leaks the next few months, probably. I mean,

it has to be. And then if, I don't know, there will be some security leaks the next few months, probably. I mean, there has to be. And then if, I don't know, there will be a story where like, hey, have you tried, I don't know, putting like next Samsung phone into chat GPT and then you maybe get something back. Yeah. Yeah, there will be scandals. So you're kind of building it before they're ready to come. You're kind of building it and when they figure it out, they're going to arrive.

I think so, yeah. As far as I know, we are the only productivity suite with locally running AI integration in the world. And I think there will be a— Kind of a recognition as people start to understand the technical pinnings and how it all works. They're going to kind of look for something that probably respects their privacy a little bit more. And there's a bit of a corporate competition and protection aspect there, too. So I could see corporations really figuring it out quick. I think so, yeah.

And via Nextcloud, we're also growing nicely. I don't know how many people we hired this year, but a lot. Well, Brent's one of them. Yeah, Brent, of course, exactly. I was paying attention and I was the new employee for about five and a half days. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That gives you some scale, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's going well, yeah. It's pretty neat to see because it's a free software project that's getting the recognition and it deserves and the governments and the companies are finally understanding why it's important.

And I'm really grateful that you're still there. You understand that, right? Because if you – it's like that leadership matters, Frank. It's a really important role in the open source community. It seems all too easy to have NextCloud just turn into yet another sort of offering. But you clearly have these ideas and morals embedded in you. You get. You can't go anywhere, right? Yeah, but I mean, thanks for the credits.

But it's really the full team. It's really the full team. I mean, we have such an awesome team. And we all share our values and our goals, what we want to achieve. And this is why it's all working. I mean, it would not work if I would be the only one who is believing in that. Everybody does it.

And we have our open source community, right? I mean, Nextcloud is a company still small, like, I don't know, 95 people or something, but our community is thousands of volunteers. And they're only there, they're only helping because we have this shared idea, this shared mission, these shared goals. I mean, this is what's holding open source

projects together. Well said. Thank you, Frank, for joining us. Thanks a lot. And now join us in the hot seat. Mr. S-U-C-D. Community member, booster, and IPFS podcaster contributor.

Oh, don't forget Podverse. Oh, yes. Podverse, the GPL podcasting 2.0 app. Too many things. Why don't we start there? There is some big news in the Podverse realm, isn't there? Oh, yeah. They just started getting Android Auto, but apparently it just broke F-Droid.

Go figure. So they're trying to revert that. I just talked to Mitch this morning. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a process. But Android Auto is like that checkbox that I have been waiting for for so, so, so long. Podverse, of course, being the GPL podcasting 2.0 app that is available on Android, iOS, and the web very much. What drew you into Podverse?

I was just trying to find some place to take my skills to the next level and learn and grow and help Podcasting 2.0 and going asking around. Met Cameron the same way from IPS Podcasting. Then found Mitch the same way with Podverse and been going back and forth and helping. Let's all raise one to Mitch who just went full time working on Podverse for a few months. That's wonderful. That's amazing. The balls on that guy, right? Because he doesn't have a soft landing necessarily pre-planned.

Nope. Living in Chicago, no. You're just kind of grinding it away. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to renew my Podverse subscription. I know that. And IPFS podcasting. We have actually been IPFS skeptics on this show

because we weren't huge fans of Filecoin. Yep. Turns out, even though we take boost weren't huge fans of Filecoin. Yep. Turns out, even though we take boosts, we don't like crypto. Yep. And even despite that, I have decided for office hours we are distributing it on IPFS podcasting. Because the idea is you can have an origin, you know, CDN object storage or maybe some random. That one liter PC in Brett's place. Yeah.

It really could be anything. It just needs to be accessible over HTTP. And then you see that to IPFS podcasting and it essentially acts as your CDN. Yep. So I'm currently running three nodes. One of them is on a one liter PC running. I'm currently running from my house, one of the gateways that is feeding IPFS podcasting. So we get only about 90 gigs of

traffic a day or so, but it's still just trying to decentralize from using the main IPFS gateway and trying to spread it out because IPFS gateway is having some issues with some other podcasts and they weren't liking the idea of having one single point of failure. That's great. Yeah, we've been curious, like, hey, how could we run one of those? Yeah. Engine X in a Docker container can get you far. It's getting close.

So if we were to put this podcast on IPFS podcasting, we'd be looking at about 60 terabytes a month. Could we do that? Depends on how much your gateways can handle. So how much money are you willing to spend to get this working? Good question. I don't know. I don't know what 60

terabytes a month would cost me. But I do know that I got the call from my current CDN providers like, hey, you're costing us too much money. It's not hard to set up your own gateway. Honestly, what they need is more nodes than gateways. What's the difference? So the node holds the data

and runs IPFS. The gateway takes the intermediary between IPFS to HTTPS. It's like the redirector. So it translates to HTTP. And so the node on the backend will store it wherever it is and IPFS podcasting will distribute it to anything that you

gold star or i'm sorry gold heart is what uh cameron has done or pink heart to say i want to put this on my node you pin it essentially yeah you pin it but at the same time people turn off their computers and they go on and off and on and off and there was one of the podcasts i just recently pinned and gold hearted because it goes off every night and people still want it. Well, A, nice of you. Yeah. B, they should be getting their damn infrastructure online 24-7 if they're serious about this. When you run everything from your desktop, why would you?

You turn them off at night. I can't even with that. I can't even with that. I can't even with that. But what I, just to abstract it for the audience, what I appreciate about IPFS podcasting is with some object storage or some sort of HTTP endpoint, you can have an RSS feed and you can put an MP3 file up and you don't need any kind of hosting provider. You don't need a CDN. You don't need to have kind of Libsyn or you don't need Fireside. You don't necessarily need any potential provider. You need an XML file on HTTP endpoint and you need an MP3 file on an endpoint.

And that's all you really need. And you can distribute with IPFS podcasting. Lower the barrier to entry. You don't have to start all this upfront cash, try to set up all these complicated things just to see if you even want to do the podcast. I'm paying over what some people make every single month just in bandwidth, right? And I believe IPFS podcasting has the potential to remove that. It definitely has the potential to remove some of those barriers to entry to allow people to get more world-class infrastructure easier to get. It's infrastructure that anybody gets access to.

You can have the same infrastructure that the ballers have and the beginners have. But, yeah, go ahead. And you can do it from a leader PC. You can do it from Raspberry Pi. Yes. Anything that can talk to the system. Right. And then with Cameron's latest introduction of V4V splits,

it makes it worthwhile for some people to actually do it. Yeah, it gets rid of Filecoin. It gets rid of Filecoin, gives you sats. I never paid attention to Filecoin. I just started playing with IPFS. No, it's crypto crap. I don't want it, but I want sats. And so the fact of the matter is,

you can put IPFS podcasting in one of the splits. That's nice because then the node operators that are pinning your files and spending disk storage can actually get a little bit of sats for the trouble. Yeah, right. And it's, you know, those are the folks who like your show, who are excited about you and are trying to help you out by re-hosting things. And yeah, why not make it super simple? You don't have to go try to like send them a PayPal invoice every month or something crazy. You just let the sats flow. Now, personal stuff here.

You have something that I think every geek listening to this show should do. You have a plain text business card that you link people to. And it is essentially an ASCII business card, right? Yep. Tell me about this. Oh, the curl card. It looks better in curl, of course.

Yes. And there's a little http redirect that handles it so if you don't go to the wrong place it won't do it anyway uh this was another idea from a jb member in element no he was sharing it and like i gotta do that i don't remember who he was so i'm sorry about that but i had to just like make a very simple replication of it uh curl gives you a little little bit more bash fun because you get proper corners, but the website does too, and just a little bit of

HTTP sniffing on the user agent for Nginx. But just simple, neat, clean. You can hand it out on a QR code or just type it out pretty quick. It's nice. It's great for like the hey, are you the person that I'm talking to in person kind of interaction? And I get a message from him.

I'm like, oh, yeah, that's Archie. That's great. Well, thank you. Seriously, thank you for everything you work on, but also thank you for the IPFS podcasting. If you have a chance to chat with Cameron, just please relay our thank you. I will pass it on. It is absolutely quintessential to us accomplishing truly distributed podcasting. We're excited to get to do more with it too.

Thank you. Okay, one more note. Podverse is working on the Android audio issue in F-Droid as we speak. So it should be fixed soon. That's it. All hail Podverse. That's right. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. Now, finally, for the first time, joining us in studio, it is the one, the only show mascot, Mr. Golden Dragon. Hello, sir. What's up? Well, you know what? I'm just sitting here thinking, this is the guy that started the row of ducks yeah i know right legendary and and uh to kind of like own it we had to honor him by becoming the show mascot and you delivered you delivered as the show mascot week out we have not only a fantastic history of boosts but we now have official Golden Dragon sticker pack out there.

That's true. And you weren't messing around. You had to learn. You had to become an AI art director. Right, right. That's a big deal, an AI art director. And you also figured out how to make stickers. Tell us a little bit about this process because we have a very exclusive set of stickers in here for the fans that are hanging out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, on top of the learning the AI directing portion of it, you know, you've got to figure out the prompts. You mean you're an art director now? Yeah, absolutely. So, unfortunately, it's mostly proprietary software on the back end. So I use the Cricut software if you're familiar with the Cricut cutting machines. We have an older one. And so you go into the software, you import your art, and then do some finagling.

Tweak it. Yeah, tweak it. Get it right. Print basically a bunch of crap. Yeah. You print like – Stuff that doesn't work. Right.

And you're like, whoa, why isn't this working? And then finally you get to a point where maybe you got to do some upscaling. A lot of the stuff you got to do credits. So it's like you're having to log in every day to get these extra credits so that you're like, hey, I'm not paying for the AI, so I've got to log in. You have to have credits to generate the images. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you're hustling just to be able to make the thing to get onto the stage.

How do you generate the credits? Well, easily enough, you can just log in every day. And so they send me an email that says, hey, log in for your free credits. And you join their community. I got to give Brent a back rub every single day to get my credits. That doesn't seem fair. It's working pretty well, I think. Yeah, absolutely.

And so once you get like your art right, it's as simple as like you kind of generate like a square, I guess, in the Cricut software for lack of a better term. It's a size that the paper will accept. Right, because you have limitations based on what the printer is capable of. Correct. Well, not only that, but you have a limitation based on the die cutter. So, you know, not only is it eight and a half by 11 sheet you're down to roughly six and a half by nine oh and so you have to generate you know say for the does your podcast have a mascot sticker you can only generate like 10 to 12 uh clean cuts and that's with your offsets. Yeah, it's fantastic. And some stickers you can get more, some you get less, and it really just depends on your sizing and whatnot.

So that's kind of the back end. That's really the best part of it, really. Yeah, that's really about it on the sticker shelf. The ducks, though. The ducks. The ducks, dude. You put some time in to generate a row of duck stickers. I hadn't even thought of that as swag.

It's such a brilliant idea. That was my third idea. So, of course, the first thing after the mascot thing was like, you know, as a joke, I was like, hey, maybe I can be the mascot, right? And like, does your podcast have a mascot? No? What are you doing? What are you doing with your life? I want to keep a batch of the stickers.

Can we keep a batch? I'm giving you guys the whole thing. We're going to have to send them out because they're the best freaking stickers. From AI art director perhaps to swag director, huh? Oh, the dragon steps up a pinch. Well, okay. I don't know. Maybe the Tuxies?

We've got to figure out a reason to give out we got to figure out a reason to give out these stickers because they're so good they're so good we'll consult with you as the sticker master sure yeah absolutely yeah if you want to like forbid somebody from receiving stickers too just you know like somebody wrongs you in the matrix chat room yeah yeah i feel like that's your final right as the creator like you can just say no that person doesn't receive stickers. Right. Yeah.

You know, they can go wherever really. Yeah. You know, we'll figure something out. Yeah. I mean, it's not quite as dictatorial as I was going for, but we'll make it work. I'll definitely, I'll put the hammer down as it were. Right. That's right.

Thank you, Dragon. Yeah, for sure. It's a lot of fun seeing you. Oh, it's been great. You're the dragon in person. Oh, yeah. Now, there's one thing I want to talk about before you go, Dragon. You've built yourself a little something, and you started explaining to me, I know it's ESP powered, and so I was immediately in, and I said, stop, shut up, save it for the show. I get too excited sometimes, and it's just, I have to just, in the moment. Yeah, so tell me about this device you've created.

So this is I wish I would have created it more. But what it is is a nerd miner, which all it really is is just it mines Bitcoin. But really what I find it as is like your security, right? It's another node that's mining Bitcoin because it's an ESP32, right? Yeah, it's not mining much. You're never going to get above 61. What is is it, trillion as a difficulty or something right now. It's something ridiculous. Crazy.

But, you know, like I've got one screen at home and you just like put it on your wall, put a little, you know, it's got a USB micro. Can I see it? Oh, for sure. Pass it over to him. Check this thing out. It comes in a plastic case. Oh, I 3D printed the case. It comes with a cable.

And so 3D printed the case. Oh, man, this is slick. And so, like, I did. It's got an LCD screen. How big is this LCD screen on this sucker? 320 by 240. Oh, that's bigger than I thought. Yeah.

And it's just, you know, a small device. And so what you do is your initial setup, you plug it in, and it says, hey, go to this website. Sometimes your system will just pick it up as an access point. So it has an AP on it? Yes. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. But the AP only works for your setup, right?

Okay. Because you set it up with, it shows on the screen, the password and the access point name. It shows on the screen the password and the access point name. So you log in, put in a Bitcoin address and the required information, right, for your wireless points or whatever. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it starts showing you, hey, I'm mining Bitcoin. It actually mines Bitcoin, though? Yeah, right.

It's just running the process? Yes. I suppose you could add it to a pool. Oh, Yeah, right. It's just running the process? Yes. I suppose you could add it to a pool. Oh yeah, absolutely. So the pool that it runs in is a stratum pool. Okay. Stratum? Yeah.

So it's really low power. You know, of course, being a low power device, but it's really odd. I was like, what can I do with an ESP32? Because I was just like, what can I,

you know, just kind of figuring out the ecosystem, seeing cool things I could do. I was like, this seems really interesting. And low power, this kind of is a cool you know, talking piece in my house. So it's just like,

hey, what are you doing? Realistically, I'm trying to add some security to the network. Yeah, you're distributing the hash. Right. Okay, so I'm a little bit more interested in that security aspect. Can you give us a sense of what it even does? Like, it's a tiny little device. How could it possibly provide you with more security?

So, if I understand how this works, Chris can, you know, definitely tell you infinitely, infinitely more. The more, if I understand this correctly, so the more nodes you have distributing the hash, the more votes if something changes. Yep. And so if somebody says, I'm going to hard fork Bitcoin to, I don't know. BlackRock coin. BlackRock coin. I want to add another 21 million. You can say no.

Yeah. Or yes. It helps the plebs participate in the consensus. So with your little, tiny, 3D-printed, built-at-home, super inexpensive little device. Using five watts of power. Right? Yeah. You get the same vote as someone running a super fancy A6 or something. Exactly.

Wow. Yeah. You could also run it to just be a node. That is so neat. And the fact that it's built in with the screen. That's slick. It's not a bad-looking screen. I mean, we got color on here.

It's an easy-to-scan QR code. You plugged it in? Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. I wanted to check it out. He just plugs in random devices to his computer all the time. I trust the show mascot. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, there might be a little something that, you know, sniffs some packets. That's fine. Yeah, yeah. And it sends it back to him over tail scale. That's fine. That's how it works. Yeah, yeah. It just grabs some of your sats from your wallet and sends them to the golden dragon.

Not a big deal. I was going to do it anyway. Great. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, thank you, dragon. Absolutely. That's a great pleasure. Four score and seven boosts to go.

It is indeed time for the boost and our first baller boost comes in from boa or perhaps pronounced as boy and it is our baller boost with 200 000 sets i saw this number coming out of my dashboard this morning. By dashboard, I mean my email. And I couldn't believe it. That is such a generous boost, so thank you, boy. So here we go. I'll read it for you. I've been coming to LinuxFest Northwest since 2012. Had such a great time at the mini-conference this year

and wanted to express my gratitude. I have, like, one friend who is sort of into Linux, and yet he moved away. It is nice to spend time with people who value community, privacy, open source, and doing things locally. Loved Neil and David's talk on bringing Fedora to Apple Silicon. And Sam's talk as well on gaming with robots. Super inspiring.

Hanging out afterwards was the best part, although I enjoyed talking with Sergio, Fabian, open source accountant, David, and the galactic starfish. I also finally set up Albi just so I can boost this exact message. And wanted to tell Brent

je me souviens. Hey! Boost! That is a great boost. Thank you so much for taking the effort to set that all up and send us a message. And I completely agree. Some of the conversations

you had there are fantastic. Open Source Accountant was in the Momber Room earlier. Yeah, wonderful to meet you. Glad you made it home safe. Yeah, absolutely. John A. comes in with 197,902 sats, like a power player.

He says, okay, because I accidentally forgot to boost last week, and I'm doubling up this week, divide by two for my zip. Wes, that's some tricky math there. You sure you're going to handle this one. Coming at you last minute, Wes. All right, all right. I've got to remember my high school upbringing. Yeah.

That seems to be 98951, which is a postal code in Yakima County, Washington. Whoa. Hello, Yakima. Hello, Yakima. I'm checking. Yeah, that looks right, Wes. That looks right. John, we know you've been out here before once, but we missed you.

Perhaps you can make it for the spring. Thank you, sir, though, for the boost. It really helps kind of complete the entire thing. Zelifcam boosts in with 100,000 cents. Hey, that, Wes, that ain't bad. That ain't bad at all. I hoard that which your kind covet. Thank you for the years of content. Bonus if Zellifcam,

I don't know if I'm saying that right, Z-E-L-I-F-C-A-M is familiar to anyone. It's the old Mac file Z go to Zellifcam chat room from the AOL 2.7 and 3.0 days. Oh. It was my introduction to bots and scripting and

inspired me to learn more about coding. If I'm not wrong, that was a software project that was made of fire and water. It was a project that a Californian and a Texas came together to create. Salt

and vinegar. Oil and water. Coming together to create open source salt. Powerful stuff. I guess I'll have to find a CD. Legit Salvage came in with 60,000 sets over two boosts. I've been doing the Windows challenge going on 20 years now. That's not a challenge! Traitor!

That's just living with Windows. That's just living with Windows. Well, he sent a few paragraphs describing that exact challenge, and I'll give you a little taste of it. Every single challenge you mentioned is something that has burned me in my career over the years, and I've spent hours finding consistent workarounds. My current employer is a Microsoft partner, and I consult on most things infrastructure and security, and also happen to maintain my office machines fleet. All Microsoft services, 30 at the moment, that is. So unfortunately, my Linux adventures have remained mostly in the hobby realm, though I'd love to make the jump at some point. And in a second boost of 10,000 Satoshis, he mentions, almost forgot my app pick for Windows 10 and 11. Power Toys for Microsoft is a must-have.

It provides a bunch of power user settings and utilities that I think really should have been baked into the operating system to begin with. Yeah, yeah. I've felt that way since Windows Plus. I feel like Microsoft was just baking in like upgrade pricing. I feel dumb for not having installed it

when we were doing the challenge actually because yeah, I've used it in the past. I just didn't think about it. I have a question. Yeah. What's Windows Plus?

Oh, well, so you get yourself the Windows operating system but it would turn out it wasn't enough. You needed the Plus pack. Like they gave you

three quarters of an operating system? Yeah. Well, you know how you used to need RPM Fusion? Yeah, exactly. You want themes, you want sound effects, you want games? Well, let's sell you Windows Plus.

Early on, even in the early days of Windows, I'm talking 95, 98, they figured out they could differentiate by just selling you sound themes and crap like that. And I'm a sucker. I bought it. And you got all the sound themes and crap like that and i'm a sucker i bought it and you got all the like you got like special themes and special color packs and all

that kind of stuff as a result and it was early differentiation i hated it so yet i bought it with your friends was it like hey do you got plus no i don't got plus i'm left out is that that kind of comparison going on you don't have friends if you're on windows man yeah yeah the friends are all linux users we all hate each other uh shoyer came in with uh 50,498 sats like a freaking gentleman i am programmed in multiple techniques that's a gentleman right he's not pushing yeah uh he writes uh for uh october 2030 writes i've been experimenting with tail scale and using free ipa i must say this works a lot better than i probably would have imagined central authentication even when i'm not in my local land has been amazing you guys should check it out anyway i, I wish I could meet you guys. Thanks for congregating this community.

Don't forget us folks in the Midwest over at 66227. Which is a postal code in Johnson County, Kansas, a home of cities like Shawnee. Hello, Kansas. Thank you for boosting in. Damn good boost, too. That sounds like a lot of fun to set up. Can I share an embarrassment with you guys? Sure.

I feel like I missed free IPA. Like, I was coming along and I was implementing LDAP authentication and using it for all kinds of stuff. And I just sailed like this, like this, just like this. I sailed right past free IPA. How? Just like this. Yeah, just right past it. I sailed right past free IPA. How? Just like this. Yeah, just right past it. I sailed right past it.

You know, when I see free IPA, I just think this might just be Wes's next favorite brew. Yeah, delicious. It is a great LDAP authentication system. And it is something that is on my shame list. Thank you for the boost, though, because I appreciate the little encouragement to dig into it. Davrolin comes in with 31,337 saps. Oh! Using Castomatic.

And you know what else, Wes? They're coming in hot with the boost. Coming in hot with the boost! Since the show mascot of all people jumped on my suggestion, I need to correct something. Uh-oh. I didn't really suggest a no corporate tax November. It was in direct response to no Knicks November. And, you know, a month is a long time.

However, as a theme, the highlight isn't really the no corporate tax part, but rather the community part. My day job, I work at a big corporation. So when I come home, I prefer everything to not be like my day job, which, you know, helps with the work-life balance. So for me, once I tried Debian, I never really looked back. And all the other distros comes with the, you know, kind of janky and unpredictable corporate tax, which I prefer getting paid to deal with. NixOS has been the first other distro I have wanted to actually try, I think, for the last decade. Part of that is because I know it's backed by a community,

and there's no corporation that's going to pull the rug out or do something drastic that I have to react to. My personal time, my rules. What I take away from this is that people are paying more attention to the machinations behind the scenes than I gave credit. And they're paying attention to who controls what and who's in power when they're picking their Homelab software. You know, we also got some proposed ideas for things to do with Debian as part of this boost. So try installing old, old stable. Although, please don't use recent hardware.

That's not fair. Maybe try building the Jupyter Broadcasting website in a container, but using Debian's version of Docker. Upgrade to old stable. Then upgrade to stable. Remove Docker. Switch to Podman. Oh, gosh.

And get the container running again. He's like literally describing the reasons why I use NixOS now. Bonus points. Try doing the same thing with Ubuntu. Say 1804, 2004, 2204. again he's he's like literally describing the reasons why i use an xls now bonus points try doing the same thing with ubuntu say 1804 2004 2204 or red hat 789 oh oh i'd rather not it's just awful um but i i want to i want to circle back and i want to get on this uh no no strategy tax november that's been coming in and etc uh you guys and I want to get on this no strategy tax November that's been coming in, et cetera. You guys got 10 days to get your shit together. And if you want us to do a November thing, you got 10 days to get your shit together.

And if you don't figure it out, we're not going to do it. But I'm down for some of this. The one reoccurring theme that I'm sensing and smelling here is Debian. Again. But, Chris, I got reminded while reading this that you tried a particular flavor of Debian just like a day ago. A day or two ago? How'd that go? Are we talking about Proxmox?

Oh. I said a flavor. I don't think I'm going to like Proxmox at all. It took us three days to get Proxmox installed on the Stellhard. We had to reflash the frickin' firmware controller for the hardware drives. We had to frickin' flash the BIOS. We had to sacrifice 2.3 ghosts. And that took a whole seance session to even get them to manifest in the first place,

which took us an entire day. So, like, don't want to do that again. And I think I'm going to go with Nyx. I just, I tried Proxmox. Guys, guys, I tried Proxmox, but I think you're all a bunch of lunatics who like to hurt yourself and probably cut. You're probably cutters.

And so I'm not a cutter, so I'm going to use Nyx. If I were a cutter, I'd probably use Proxmox. I do see the second boost here is it might just be a postal code boost. It sure is, and check this out. It's the postal code 1337. What? Which is somewhere in Norway.

Sandvik Billionstad Sleppenden? You did great. The elite postal code? That's not fair. How are you ever going to beat that? That's like having bacon as your postal code? That's not fair. How are you ever going to beat that? That's like having bacon as your postal code. That's so cool you kind of have to use Debian to offset it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Leaky Canoe comes in with 25,000 sats.

You guys knock it out of the park every single freaking week. Not this week. I'm a party member, and I still want to boost because your team is producing some of the best content. Keep it up, fellas. Wish you all the best. Thank you. Leaky Canoe, we'll apply this to, like, next week's episode. We just take that and apply it next week, yeah.

Caricia? How do you even say that one? Kusuria. I don't know. Kusuria comes in with 22,666 sets. I'll believe it, Wes. That's so funny. 666 sets. I'll believe it, Wes. So long. Back in 532,

you were talking about the use cases for TPM unlocking. Mine is actually kind of fun. So the tools support, to some degree, TPM passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols. So I have a Diceware password on my TPM and drive encryption. The TPM is seven words, easy enough to to remember the disk is like the bitcoin recovery phrase 22 words burn it out laminated

and in a safe just in case hey seed phrase baby yeah that's nice that seems like a clever solution you kind of got both going on um mix and match might have to play with that yeah i agree i like that a lot taco Taco Strange comes in with A, the best username, and B, a row of McDucks. Things are looking up for old McDuck. Have you heard of BP for SQFMI? It's a Pi Zero W

with a display and a Blackberry keyboard. It would work as a perfect notes device on the go if you could get your hands on one. So we have a notes PC, but one of the very, very, very first things that came up was how do you do notes on the go? So I will take a look at Beepy because we do have ourselves a tiny, full-corded keyboard Linux PC with a thermal printer on the back that could make itself quite the little portable notes PC. We shall see.

Complete Noobs came in with 18,888 sets. I like it! Suggestion. Drop wallet for Felton. Objective. Enable users to rate and fund podcasts using a dedicated drop wallet reflecting their support.

Drop wallet. A digital wallet for users to set aside podcast donations load based on budget. Rating system, rate shows on donation desire, not content quality. Ratings depend on podcast donation compatibility, something like non-participating podcasts

are rated zero. Partial benefits, like no knighthoods, might be a two to three out of five, but fully integrated shows, five out of five but fully integrated shows five out of five interesting idea so it's like it's like taking all of the individual contribution points and averaging them together to get a score i like that idea a lot um i don't know if anyone gonna do it there but i think it's a pretty good idea mr noobs Noobs. You know, Wes is keeping score. He's always keeping score.

It does add up. Open source accountant comes in with 2,500 sats. And he says, you know what I want? I want Fountain to stop rearranging my queue on iOS. And we asked for people to send in some support ideas or features for 1.0, and I've never

had my queue rearranged at all. So, but you know what? He wants that. I don't want that either. Tier boosts in with a row of ducks. Oh! How about this? Debian December.

Take a month and reflect on all the work the Debian derivatives do. Each of the hosts run different Debian derivatives for a week, and basic Debian for another week, with the goal of trying to get Debian close to the same state as the derivatives in either UI or a select particular functionality. And, uh, P.S.,

when hearing the Windows XP sounds, it really reminded me of the Windows Waltz. Hey, Chris. Chris. Yeah? What? Are you done talking about Debian?

Yeah. Oh, okay. All right. Did you know it's a Deb and Ian? What a great revelation. Nobody's ever told me that. I'm not saying Debian. Nobody's ever told me that. At least you're not saying deviant. Nobody's ever told me that.

That's my thing. Magnolia Mayhem came in with 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Satoshis. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. Perfect for your luggage though Oh yeah I know this isn't Coda Radio

But Mise Back I wish I could have boosted in before But I was driving five hours a day To do the UPS To do the USPS RCA Rural Carrier Academy

Hey Doing the people's work Either way I got some loose sats now And I'm looking forward Somewhere to throw these things. Not sure if anyone even saw it, but I'm happy enough to have been in Matrix

shouting about the Spaceballs luggage combination when it came up, so here. Have one, two, three, four, five Satoshis. We do appreciate it, and we do notice. Yeah, Coder Radio, um, I can't, I cannot with all of the energy I can summon summon i cannot stop that man from channeling

jar jar binks i just cannot stop it i cannot stop it yeah it's a it's a powerful force i think your efforts are better spent elsewhere right i that's what i've learned through through a process west i had to go through a a process of steps uh but I have learned that. Ghost Mullet comes in with 2,000 stats using Podverse. Obala bala for all you vala, perhaps? And any Windows episodes, that was appreciated.

Soon, here at work, I'll be forced to use Windows, and now I know that that laptop is in. I feel like we gave him peace. That's good. Thank you for the boost. I hope so, and good luck. Marshall Miller boosts in with a row of ducks. Seeing Alma Linux give a talk at All Things Open

about how they build without using RHEL was really reassuring regarding the future of the project. I hope that's true. I would love to see that show up on YouTube. I know the Linux Fest video should be up in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps the All Things Open videos will be too. I see a boost here. Row of ducks from GeneBee.

The main thing keeping me off from Fountain is the lack of playlists. When I say playlists, I mean like Overcast and CastomaticCast. Ah, they do have queues. So I use, in Fountain.fm they do have queues. So I use, in Fountain FM, I use queues and I'll queue up two or three podcasts for a drive. We ask folks to boost in what they'd like to see for Fountain 1.0 and

that is a pretty good feature. You know what's kind of fun is I've been just monitoring for live boosts in the background and I've seen some streaming sats happening from Gene Bean. So, hey Gene Bean, thanks for listening. Hey there Gene Bean. So, hey, Gene Bean. Thanks for listening. Hey there, Gene Bean. Solteress comes in with 5,000 sats. From the podcast index,

I must have jinxed myself, he writes, because after I boosted in talking about my setup, three of my discs died. Oh, my goodness. Bro, I am so sorry to hear that. He said, I did end up rebuilding my Ubuntu server into a Proxbox machine with SSDs, and all my stuff is fine now, but I do blame

Brent. Amen. I mean, everyone else is doing it, so it's fine. Linux Teamster comes in with 10,000 sats across two boosts. It's been a minute because I keep forgetting to boost in. I listen on AntennaPod and usually while I'm doing something,

I keep thinking that I'll open up Podverse, but, you know, the ADHD kicks in and I'm on to something else before I can actually get that accomplished. Word, word. I am looking forward to using Podverse more, though, but since they don't handle private RSS feeds very well right now, it makes it harder to listen to my Jupyter member feed and others that I love so much. Once they can have all of my episodes auto-download and automatically add to my queue and make that the first page I see when I open the app,

then I'll definitely be moving. Just a little bit of earth needs to be moved there, but I agree with you, sir. I think that is necessary. And you know what I have to say, Mr. Teamster, is that Mitch, the main developer over at Podverse, very excited to say he has gone full-time for the next three months, and that is a huge deal to have a GPL podcasting app with a full-time developer.

That's awesome. Also, I will mention, Mr. Teamster, that Fountain does support private RSS feeds, so there are a few like Stratechery and a few others that I subscribe to that are password protected RSS feeds, and they do work with Fountain does support private RSS feeds. So there are a few like Stratechery and a few others that I subscribe to that are password protected RSS feeds. And they do work with Fountain. I'm curious. You mentioned Mitch would be doing this for about three months.

What can we do to make sure that it happens for more than three months? That's a good question. Besides just using Podverse, the only GPL podcasting tune-up I know of, it would be their membership program, right? Because that's the predictable kind of revenue thing. They do have a membership program you can sign up, and that would really help. Zach Attack came in with the dreaded 666

sets. Do you guys feel that chill? Yeah, the window's open. Coming in hot with the boost! I never understood the hate on snaps. If NixOS had snaps, I would probably consider using it as a daily driver. I do look forward to the immutable Ubuntu that is all snaps.

Yeah, it should be fun to try anyway. You really don't get the hate on snaps, really? Like, I gotta write that memo for you here? Right here on the show? Hey, hey, hey, we like snaps now. Oh, yeah, right. Oh, right. But could you give us a summary of the past? Well, they're slow the fonts often tend to be crap the display settings don't match my theme and uh there's a

lot of mount points and it's slower to start and they update without my permission i don't like any of that now uh canonical has diligently managed to make some of that a lot more appeasable especially if you're using ubuntu itself, especially the latest Ubuntu. But, I don't like how many mount points there are. I don't like the performance overhead. And I'm sorry that I'm a f***ing a**hole who doesn't like that s***, but it is true.

I don't like that s***. And I'm never going to like it. It doesn't matter what changes. However... What about the slick proprietary web store, though? Yeah, I mean, there are ways to make it more approachable. And I think that's what they're being more successful about. And they're making additional efforts to make things like the Firefox Snap actually perform and things like that. And little by little as we try each milestone desktop Linux application, they'll have an opportunity to dial it in.

And when we're there in five to ten years, I'm sure I'm going to freaking love it. And in the meantime, I'm going to complain about the transition. It is getting a lot better, though. And I do feel like 2310 was probably the best implementation we've seen yet. Do you guys agree? Yeah, definitely. Completely. It gets closer to that state of forgetting about snaps.

Yes. It was actually really close to that. I really, I really just didn't really think forgetting about snaps. Yes, it was actually really close to that. I really, I really just didn't really think much about it. And, of course, we have a boost from the show mascot. The Golden Dragon comes in with one, two, three, four sats. So the combination is one, two, three, two three four five that's the stupidest combination i ever heard in my life he says maybe we should try out void it's been a long time since i gave void a try i've been avoiding void i've been yeah i feel like void and a couple other things are

kind of in that category of maybe one day in the future. I think next week for us, that's what I feel like we're going to be testing, is the new... But I'll put Void on... I'll put it on the consider list. I absolutely will. Thank you for the boost, Mr. Dragon. We also had a boost from VT52 with 6,667 sets.

Fortunately, they had to split before really getting a chance to meet us, but had a lot of fun at the mini-fest. And sounds like they can't wait until the spring-fest, which means they're coming back. P.S. Bellingham is pretty cool. It is. It sure is. It's like mini-Seattle.

You know, I locked eyes with someone who was at the JB meetup last night who was like, you know, trying to squeeze their way into a conversation. And I was in a spot where I couldn't really invite them in, but I was like, noted. In a moment, when I get the chance, I will kind of bring them in and at least introduce myself. But they left. And I felt like heartbroken. I was like, no, I missed someone. I had some of that, too. As a past listener who wanted to meet some hosts to the podcast, it's hard.

And I want to make that easy for everyone. And I failed. And I apologize I apologize VT if that was you I'm so sorry please come back you're on our regret list you gotta do it again so that we can do a make good because we do not want to like our biggest fear I think I speak for all of us

our biggest concern is that somebody takes all of the time and hassle to get their ass here and then we don't say hi to them that sucks we don't say hi to them yeah that sucks we don't want that to happen so if that happened you got to come back in the in the spring so we can do it make good right yeah we owe it to you thank you everybody who did boost in we got a whole bunch of boost this week we actually had nearly 30 boosters come in which is so great and you know a lot of people that went to the meetup they didn't get a chance to say goodbye

their first instinct was to say goodbye via boost we really do appreciate that too that is that is very very kind thank you everybody who boosted in we got 29 boosters and we managed to stack 786,883 sets it really whips the llama's ass. That does feel really great. Thank you, everybody, for helping to keep this an independent production. That's financing that goes directly to us. I was just telling Brent earlier today. I know, I know, I know. But, you know, like when the boosts come in and we see the totals,

Wes drops them in the dock, it's done. It's not 30 days until you guys get those sats. You have them right now, right? We don't have to wait for accounts receiving to process the invoices and then determine what the percentage is and then invoice properly and then make sure we get all that and then send it to you and then you guys do the tax stuff. Like as it comes in, as the support comes in live, you guys immediately get it and it's all documented in the RSS feed for our audience to see. Yeah, as much as we like the open

source accountant, we just don't need him. Not anymore. Not anymore. We do have a pick and I want to leave you with Moonlight version 5.00 for the PC. So this is like a QT front end to Moonlight

which is an open source PC client for the NVIDIA GameStream and Sunshine servers. And man, they are just a fantastic piece of free software if you're not using them. And the new version is out-packed, full of features that are really good to see, including you can now specify your own custom frame rate, horizontal frickin' scrolling. Oh, you're going to need that.

I got them widescreens, Wes. I got them widescreens. Native frickin' multi-touch support, of course, is in there. Controller type information is now passed on to Sunshine servers. So if you got like a—you get it. I don't got to explain it. And then, of course, packages for all the distros you'd want to Sunshine servers. So if you got like a... I don't know. You get it. I don't got to explain it. And then, of course, packages for all the distros you'd want to actually use. Don't forget, you can stream with AV1 now.

Woo! Yes. Good to see AV1 landing in there, right? Yeah. You know, at the conference, Linux Fest, you know, I was sitting there listening to a really interesting talk, and Jeff was sat beside me. And, you know, everybody's got their laptops out taking notes and stuff, and I peek over at Jeff's laptop, which I know you're not supposed to do. But he's always doing something interesting.

I look over. And you're always peeking. Always peeking. Wes? Yep. You've got to get at one of those screen protector things. Yeah. He's always peeking.

Screen privacy guard if it prints around. Just approach him. Sneaky peek. And he's playing with the Sierra Moonlight. And he's trying to get it all set up. So, you know, that Jeff. he's always playing with the new technology. Well, maybe that's what we end up using on our Nix headless VM server that I think we're going to get set up after the show. If we can get enough of Wes' time, we're going to go up there and wipe Proxmox off that thing.

We're going to put Nix on there. We're going to pass through that GTX, and we're going to start doing some AI stuff here on the land. Yeah, baby. But we'll see. We'll see how it turns out. I just want to say thank you to everybody who did make it out, but also everybody who just sticks with us and listens to our shenanigans as we share how great the experience is. Because, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. And one of the things that we want to avoid is just coming on and telling you how great it is to talk to everybody and how great it is to catch up with everybody but the truth is it really

is it's so true it really is it is it is what sustains us and uh behind the scenes with the efforts of guys like jeff and noah and brent and wes we get things done uh in this type of kind of tight time period that sustains the network until the next get-together. And we ride on those technologies. From the very machines we're using on right now that Noah put in in 2016 to the machines that Jeff completely refurbished this year so we didn't have to go out and buy new PCs.

It is the stuff that keeps JB going. I feel like, unfortunately, we've been too productive so we we don't have these little meet and greets more often. We need to screw up. Yeah? Yeah. I can help with that. Yeah. Thank you.

I appreciate that, Brent. One for the team. He finds the bugs and he introduces the bugs. A real QA chief. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad state. All right, we've got to wrap it up here because we've been going on for way too long, but we'd love to have you join us in the Mumble Room or join us over at jblive.tv because we do the show every frickin' Sunday over at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, jblive.tv.

That Mumble Room's always going. You can get your opinion in. Of course, that feedback forum's open at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And last but not least, we love your boosts. Hey, wait, one more thing, though. Go look at the tuxes. Give us feedback. Yeah. It's coming up. We've got to get that in. Don't vote. Last moments. Yeah, don't vote. Yeah, don't vote, but give us your feedback because next week it's going live. Thank you to our members, thank you to our boosters, and thank you

to all our listeners. We appreciate you. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you. Well, what do you think? I think I just found our title. Oh, really? Yeah.