LINUX Unplugged - 547: Behind the Shelves

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Data-hoard with purpose and manage your audiobooks and podcasts with one application, plus the lone Linux box that remains on Mars.

What activity or thing are you guys doing when you listen to an audiobook? Well, driving for one, but I don't know, maybe walking the dog. Okay, I pictured you like a cooking guy. Listen to an audiobook while cooking. That's a good one, too. Yeah? That's what the wife does. Brian, what about you?

What are you doing when you listen to an audiobook? Yeah, I mean, I've done a lot of plane sitting, which is a very useful audiobook. Although the problem is I have fallen asleep and then forgotten where I was. And I, you know, rewinding is not that convenient when you're asleep. Oh, I definitely know that one. That's my primary. Oh, God, I'm such an old man. Oh, it's my primary use cases.

Going to bed. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, have you ever wanted to host your own audiobook library? Actually, why?

I don't know. It wasn't obvious to me at first, but now I'm all in. We spent some time with Audiobook Shelf. We'll give you our thoughts, how we get those audiobooks, and our review on using it. Then we'll round it out with some great boosts and picks and a lot more. It is just us this week. No mumble room, no live stream. We're recording a little early because Brent's going to win it big in Vegas. We wanted to get this out of the way before he goes and becomes a big millionaire from his winnings.

If I don't come back, you'll know what happened. Yeah. Well, either way. I'm going to assume you got kidnapped by a hooker, but I mean, I don't really know. Well, isn't that what happens? He wants to stay in Vegas, right? That's what all the YouTube clips I've been watching suggest. Are you preparing for the trip?

You got to prepare. You know, I have never been. So putting that out there. I also, you guys might imagine, don't lean on the crazy party side most days. That's what he says. But now, like, I'm hearing out of the woodwork. Like, all these people are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in Vegas when I was younger. You should go here, here, I'm hearing out of the woodwork, like, all these people are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in Vegas when I was younger.

You should go here, here, and here. I'm like, I never took you as a Vegas person. Like, Chris, you, for instance, you've been several times, you said. Yeah, I've been many times, actually. That's what I'm saying. But mostly, I mean, I'd say most of the visits were actually for tech events. Some of them were for pleasure. But you, you have been with us? I have not, sure. Some of them were for pleasure. But you?

You have been with us? I have not, no. I would love to go with you guys. Maybe there'll be some event in the future. Now that events are back, maybe we'll find one. Everybody, go say good morning to our sponsor, Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. You can try it for free on 100 devices.

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So why would somebody even want an audio book server? I don't know if it's, I mean, to some people it's obvious. I don't know if it was necessarily obvious to me though, because I've been an audible customer since audible first existed and they've just always had my library. That's predominantly where I've always gotten my audio books from.

I have an active audible subscription and I may, I may have like 400 books on there, something like from. I have an active Audible subscription. And I may have like 400 books on there, something like that. So it's a pretty good amount. But over time, I've looked back at my Audible back catalog, and some of them are kind of spicy books now that are a little controversial, that weren't at the time. They were just about a political event or a historical event, but now they're very controversial now they're very controversial and i thought there could be a time where these books are not even available anymore and i would kind of miss out on that because they're they capture a moment

in history in a period of time um and i've also had this overall sort of overriding function to just self-host as much have my own sovereign control over my data as much as possible, and also have as much of the quote-unquote internet work as I can offline in my RV, so that way I can go somewhere like in the woods or wherever that doesn't have internet and still enjoy things like streaming media. And every night that we go to bed, we listen to an audiobook. Right. And you really don't want to have to fuss with something to try to troubleshoot it when

you're like just trying to get into bed and go to sleep. I want it offline. Have you ever considered hosting your own audio book server, Wes? I know it's like a bit much for some reason for some people. Yeah, no, not really. I mean, I'll admit I kind of go back and forth on if I'm like doing audio books or just listening to podcasts. But no, I haven't actually thought to host my own. But if it's easy, I mean, you you know i'm doing it for other types of media

why not what about you brantley well like years and years and years ago i was doing the whole project gutenberg thing if you've ever tried that so going to project gutenberg's website and digging through the giant massive lists of yeah all the audiobooks that they have available and i had never considered self-hosting it because that just wasn't, that wasn't really a trend back then. And I got quite tired of that and tried audible for like a couple months, but just didn't feel right about, I don't know any of it,

to be honest, knowing that there were stories out there even back then of books vanishing on people. And so I just kind of gave up on audiobooks, which actually brought me, since we've been exploring audiobooks again this week, just actually a lot of sadness. Like I missed out on years of just really great experiences.

Yeah, I think if you like podcasts, you'll enjoy audiobooks. I think it's not much of a leap there. There's just a few things you should consider. First of all, these are way smaller than video files. So if you're doing like your own like Jellyfin or Plex media collection, whatever it might be, this is small potatoes compared to any kind of media collection like that. But you do want to organize. You want to have a directory structure. They have great documentation on this.

I just do everything in a flat directory, but you could do subdirectories and whatnot. And then there's also like the how the hell are you going to get these audio books? Like, how the hell do you get these audio books guys? Because it's not as easy as it is for some of these other services. Honestly, that's been one of my detracting things for, you know, whether I'm listening to audio books or podcasts, podcasts are, you know, they're, it's so easy. There's so many ones out there. They're basically all free and there's no walls up to go just hit play on them i think value for value audiobooks are coming and i think it's going to be a firestorm like it has been with what a great idea yeah that's going to happen and they're going to be in your podcast player they're going to be on rss feeds it's going to happen but until then i think something like audio bookshelf is the way to go. And if you combine it with things like, well, there's Libation and OpenAudible, which will essentially help you manage your Audible library collection, download them, remove the DRM, pull down the accompanying PDFs, add all of the metadata information to them, and put them in a DRM-free format for you.

And so I use these tools myself to just back up my Audible subscription from time to time. I maintain an active Audible subscription, and I continually buy things with my Audible credits, but then I back them up to my own home server, and I actually listen to them through Audiobookshelf. So that's, in my opinion, and we'll put some other resources in there, including a Reddit thread that goes through some different resources. There's also the falls off the back of the truck method with something called Readar, R-E-A-D-A-R-R, which is an automatic book manager, which will scan your collection and then fill in the gaps. But your miles are very and how you actually accomplish that. But we'll put resources and links to how you actually get

these audiobooks in the show notes. And then I'd like you to boost in if you're listening with how you get your audio books, because I know I'm just scratching the surface. And I'm curious, Chris, you mentioned like offline was important for you, but doesn't Audible have some of those features? And so what is it about doing this that you can't do in Audible, for instance? I wanted to have them, you know, like a book library that's on the shelves in your home where you have those books. Because as years go by and I look back on my collection, they represent my state of mind, they represent history, and I want them always to be available. And I no longer trust any of these services to keep any licensed content

available indefinitely and so I just trust myself to manage that better and I also am a data nerd for this kind of stuff and I want to collect the analytics of like how many books I'm listening to how many books in a year do I listen to how many minutes per night etc etc and audiobook shelf will collect those metrics for me. Audible will as well. But if I switch phones, if I don't use Audible, like it doesn't, I want it all in one spot. So I've developed a workflow where I buy it on Audible and I sweep it to my audio bookshelf server over time. And then that's how I do it. And as I'm getting done with the book, I just, you know, before I'm, before I'm done with my current book, I, I get another book

queued up and, um, how you get them though.'m done with my current book, I get another book queued up. And how you get them, though, I think your mileage is going to vary. I'd love to know how other people are doing it because I don't necessarily think Audible's the best way. I don't necessarily want to be giving that money to Amazon if there was a different route to go. And I would rather just buy them DRM-free.

Yeah, from the Genco, right? Yes. Support the folks, the author of the book, the people doing the voice work. So, Audio Bookshelf is a slick web app with mobile apps for Android and iOS, although you have to get in test flight on iOS, that helps you manage, organize, and playback audiobooks and podcasts. And I've heard from the audience that several people that have a server-side, self-hosted podcasting listen setup is through Audiobookshelf.

And it supports two kinds of libraries. You can have books that have audiobooks and e-books in them and PDFs, and you can have a podcast library. And it will help manage the metadata, and it can subscribe to RSS feeds and download them for you. It supports multiple users and guest accounts. So my family, my wife, my son, and myself all have our own accounts. And it has a really nice visual interface that you can turn on with wood if you want or you can have really clean. It's visually, it sorts it really well. It supports things like collections and series.

So if you maybe have the Expanse series, it'll put all of the Expanse series together in a series and you can start at the beginning. Or if you want to make it like I made a custom collection of the best books on Bitcoin. So if you go on my server and you look at my profile and you go to my collections, you'll see my recommended Bitcoin books collection. That kind of stuff. Really neat ways for me to organize and share with friends that I think just particularly nails it. I did talk about Audiobookshelf in self-hosted, and I go more into the networking and actual setup there. But functionality-wise, I know you both have been using it for a bit,

and Brent, maybe you actually have the most mileage on us actually because you've been using it since Berlin, haven't you? You know, those folks in Berlin, I got to tell you, you guys got to make it there. They're great. Listener Tom Ash, who I've mentioned before on the show, got to tell you, you guys got to make it there. They're great. Listen, Tom Ash, who I've mentioned before on the show, um, was kind enough to, uh, gift me access to some of his audio book library because, you know, as these audio books do, they come up in conversation over and over again. You know, when you're sharing ideas and just exploring, you know, uh, things you've learned recently.

And so he's like, you know, it's just easier if I just give you access to this. Now he gave me access with just good old WireGuard. And I was surprised that it just worked super easily, super well. And I was skeptical at first because I, you know, we have the best listeners and we've been gifted these kinds of things before. And I wasn't too sure if I would really get into it knowing that I sort of fell off the audio book bandwagon years and years ago, but I learned that it's all about the recommendations. So he made a few key recommendations on book series of various types, like one that's more kind of work focused and no one that's more just kind of sci-fi and art kind of thing. And man, am I ever hooked. Like my journeys in the German train system were changed from that moment on.

And flights are way better now. So I, yeah, since then, which was what, early December or so, have just kind of been hooked. And unfortunately, my podcast listening has gone way down because of it. Traitor. I would say as a first-time user of Audiobookshelf, And unfortunately, my podcast listening has gone way down because of it. Traitor. I would say as a first-time user of Audiobookshelf, it just kind of all makes sense to me. Everything's listed.

The player is really good. It has a sleep function, Chris, that I would imagine you're using religiously every single night. Every night. Brent, are you mostly using the Android app then? Or have you been using it on the laptop? What's the, how are you using it? Yeah, great question. Because I was on the go during that trip.

It was just kind of made sense to use the Android version. And so that has just sort of been my workflow. And I haven't really needed any other reason to use it on the desktop because typically I'm, you know, building fires while I'm listening to audio books or taking a walk or something and, or I'm in an airport or something like that. Right. So being on the desktop actually didn't lend itself to my particular pattern. So being on mobile actually was great. And I have zero complaints about the app. Well, I have, I found one bug, but we'll just ignore that for now. I was going to say, uh, the, in some ways, the app feels a little more polished than the web app.

And they have an Android Auto app for the – Oh. On iOS, it's a little bit harder because it is test flight and there's a limited amount of users. So you kind of have to get in just after a new release. So for my son Dylan, because he came in a little bit later, I just set him up with a web app using Safari on his iPhone, and it works great in the web app. Made a little icon on his launcher for it. He connects up, and I set a little shortcut

so the launcher actually starts tail scale first and then launches the web app. That's great. That's slick. I did just notice, though, that using the web app, it offered to install itself as like a Chrome app, and that popped up into a really nice little dedicated window, you know, plays nicely with the Linux window manager.

I'm impressed. Yeah, so I've used the app mostly myself on Android. And I found that to work pretty well. You can download and cache it, which I really appreciate. So that way, even when I'm in the car, I'm not necessarily burning data. But it still syncs up all of the like, you know, listen information and sync playback position stuff. And that's all been really fantastic.

On the installation side, I installed it as a Docker Compose container. It's a very straightforward container, nothing really too weird about it, like no weird stuff, you know, like multiple containers set up. It's just one straightforward app that runs, and it's just running really solid. I have it running on my Odroid, and it's plenty, plenty of resources there. All in all, I feel like I've found my forever home for audiobooks. Like I know it's weird that I didn't even care about this a month ago and now I'm a month into it. I'm like, oh, this is what I'm going for the rest of my life. Literally the rest of my life. This is how I'm doing audiobooks. I wonder if part of it is like, to me, it felt like it was just kind of had some properties that reminded me of Jellyfin in that it was just so easy to get up and going and like have a very usable system with minimal configuration that. Okay, maybe I wouldn't have thought that I wanted it, but because it's so easy to have and then any benefits you get are just, you know, clearly worth it. What I found too is it organizes and displays things in a way that Audible sure doesn't do for me and that just having these files in a directory doesn't do for me. Because like you said, like Jellyfin, it has like a discover and here's what's recently been added and you get that same discover mechanism that Plex and Jellyfin try to give you. And it's been resurfacing books in my own collection that I just sort of forgotten about.

Even though I've been looking at the directory, I've been looking at the Audible pages, I look at the Audible app. I had been scrolling through the Audible library app for ages, but that stuff didn't stand out. And then you put it in a library like this and you kind of change up the discover new book stuff. And all of a sudden, I'm re-listening to stuff that i bought three four five six seven plus years ago it's kind of a nice way to just explore what you have to i ran it right out of the nick store um because you can just run it as a

single binary and it runs and up and goes and it's got command line flags for anything you need to configure um and i pointed at my downloads folder because i knew i had some stuff that was cached there from uh loading ebooks or whatnot so i tried out the ebook functionality which is not super sophisticated it's not my favorite ebook reading app on the phone i agree um but the the desktop experience is pretty nice and for just added functionality and as an organization system i kind of like it but i was impressed because it was just like it was a nice way to explore the metadata of all the random MP3s and other audio files that I just had laying around on my computer. And like it makes quick work of looking at them and going through them.

It has excellent like built-in ID3 tag and chapter support. Man, if you could boost in their podcast app, it might be one of my go-to podcast players. might be one of my go-to podcast players. What I think was sort of struck me about the way you can just have it just sort of look at everything and add and scan and stuff like that is I also discovered where I was missing books in my series, which I thought, oh, okay. And then the workflow for me is fine. It's I go get that book and then I just SFTP or whatever.

You just get to the file system. You drop the file in the right folder and then audio bookshelf rescans the directory or you can tell it to manually re-scan and boom, there it is. It's much like the Plex Jellyfin workflow. You just add the media file to the underlying file system and then the library re-scans every so often and picks it up, fetches the metadata and shows it in your library. Now, Chris, I know that some of the media players like Plax and Jellyfin are pretty particular about file naming. Did you run into any of those kind of issues with these audiobooks? I had zero problems. And, you know, I probably got in total 300, 400 books in there now because it's not just my books.

It's also Hedia's books and Dylan's books. So there's quite a bit of books in there now. And I've never had a single problem. and Dylan's books. So there's quite a bit of books in there now. And I've never had a single problem. But when I read through their documentation, they do spend a lot of time touching on organizing. So I think it's a problem for some people

based on the emphasis they've given it in the documentation. So we'll link to that so people can sort it out. It's, I don't know, I really give, I want to give Audiobookshelf two thumbs up. We've talked about it in self-hosted too, but I wanted to give it some attention here because it's, I think, a very, very much beloved podcast client and a piece of software that you can run on Linux that the whole family likes. It's not very often we get a win like that where 10 minutes of, you know, filling around with Docker compose and you got a win for the whole family. pose and you got to win for the whole family. Now we have some exciting announcements for our trip to scale. We have some deets. Our first meetup is live and all of that. Of course, it's scale and NixCon all coming up March 14th through the 17th. NixCon runs the first two days and their

schedule is now officially live. And I'm really looking forward to a couple of the talks in here. It has a 11 a.m. talk on the first day about managing your user land with Home Manager. I need to hear that one. Then after the lunch, we're getting to NixOS modules and continuous integration, and then there's going to be lightning talks and karaoke. They're going to go to a karaoke bar. Brent, I want to hear your pipes. All right.

And then on day two, how about this one? And this is one of our community members. He has a talk called Nix is better than Docker image builder for building Docker images. Lessons learned developing system D. Easier NixOS self-hosting with module contracts. That's from Pierre. That's definitely going to be cool. That sounds fun. Yeah. The whole going to be cool. That sounds fun.

Yeah. The whole schedule will be linked in our show notes. So that'll be the first couple of days. And like I mentioned earlier, we also have our first meetup planned, Lunch at Scale, Saturday, March 16th. We put it down. Let's get together at the good old classic yard house.

It's been a solid go-to for a long time. Saturday during Lunch at Scale, we're going to get together. The Unplugged crew will be there at 1.30 p.m. Details at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Now, I've heard you talk a lot about what's across the street from Texas Linux Fest, for instance. Yeah, yeah. But I know nothing of this restaurant and this venue. Can you give us a little hint?

Oh, right. You're totally new. So across from the convention center is a beautiful venue of different restaurants, a movie theater. They used to have a fantastic Brazilian steakhouse, but that's gone now. But they have a very good Japanese restaurant up there and the Yard House, which is a kind of a catch-all. I actually have a link to the menu in the show notes. You can check it out. They got all kinds of everything, but it's also just got a good general vibe for talking to people.

Out of all the restaurants up there, it's been the most conducive to conversation. So that's why we hold it at the art house. It has something for everyone, hopefully, and a lot of room for us to hang out with the folks. Now, our audience made this trip to NixCon and Scale possible, so we are asking you, what do you want to hear? Boost in with what you want to see, any questions you have, or join the Mumba Room next week. We are just mere weeks away. There are seven episodes left until we're on the road, and we'd love to know what you'd like to see. You can also join the Scale Matrix chat, a brand new chat room that we've set up.

It is linked in the show notes as well. Collide.com slash unplug. Look, if you're in IT, you deal with security, especially if you work with Okta, you've got to listen to this. This is going to make life easier. You've probably noticed this reoccurring pattern in recent data breaches where employees one way or another play a role. Maybe their machine got compromised because they had out-of-date software.

Maybe their credentials got phished. Honestly, with bring-your-own-devices, the range is pretty wide right now. There's a lot of nice things about bring-your-own-device, but this is a real issue. And it's not the fault of the users. It's inadequate preventative measures. And this is where Collide comes in. They are the solution to this challenge. For anybody working in IT, anybody who has security background,

you know about this problem. If you work with Okta, Collide ensures that only secure devices can access your cloud app. So say goodbye to compromised credentials, say goodbye to out-of-date systems. That all gets handled and managed before they connect. And Collide works with them using direct messaging that you work with, your procedures, your processes, using direct messaging that you work with, your procedures, your processes, to help the users resolve the problem themselves. That reduces burden, removes IT from the bottleneck that can often derail these zero-trust initiatives that gets employees all riled up. I think that's a huge win.

So go to collide.com slash unplugged, get a demo, see how this all works. Collide is empowering employees. It's saving IT time, and it gives them a dashboard to manage all their diverse systems. It's pretty much the ideal solution. I think it would have kept me in IT another 10 years. Go check it out. Collide.com. K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged.

Collide.com slash unplugged. We have opened the skies of another planet. Ingenuity really opened the door for aerial exploration on Mars. It's just been this plucky little helicopter that just defied everybody's expectations. I'm incredibly proud and grateful for all that Ingenuity has been able to give us. What would you say to Ingenuity directly? You're going to make me cry, you know. What would I say to Ingenuity? It's really hard to say goodbye to you.

I would say thank you. Ingenuity, thank you for bringing us all together. Thank you for leading the charge in our adventure on Mars, and we will never thank you. Ingenuity, thank you for bringing us all together. Thank you for leading the charge in our adventure on Mars, and we will never forget you. Rest well. Thank you, Ingenuity. Thank you, Ingenuity. Thanks, Ingenuity.

Thanks, Ingenuity. Well, yes, on January 18th, Ingenuity, the little Linux copter that could, flew its 72nd and its final flight. It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could, and it kept saying, I think I can, I think I can. Well, it has now taken its last flight on Mars. As it was coming down for landing, at least one of its carbon fiber rotor blades was

damaged. We're investigating the possibility that the blade struck the ground. And we got to actually see this blade in person down at JPL because listeners might remember that Tim down there invited us to give us a tour. And when I heard the news that Ingenuity had its last flight, I reached out and I just said, you know, really, congratulations, 72 flights. What a run. Yeah, absolutely incredible. And Tim wrote back. He says, thanks.

It was a great ride. The helicopter far exceeded our expectations. It's a great victory for Linux. Love to see that. It performed great during the entire mission. He says, a note that the helicopter base station that's on the rover is still healthy and has the same processor and Linux as the helicopter and will be used for some software experiments going forward still.

See, Linux is ready. Even if you break your copter, Linux is there. It continues to operate and be used on the surface of Mars, even though the helicopter is done. That's really neat. That's the silver lining of this story. Thank you, Tim, for telling us that, too, because that really made me smile. And the memories of our trip to JPL are just so fresh.

And as we are about to go back to Pasadena for scale, I wanted to go back in time to the last time we made it to Pasadena, which was for our JPL trip, and take us to the moment we arrived at our very warm Airbnb. We made it to the bottom of the earth. We did it. We're here. We are in Pasadena. We are at our Airbnb. Things sound hot.

It's over 100 degrees outside. Hadiyah did great. Brent, how did you do? I'm not done merging pull requests on the website. Need a little bit further? Yeah, can I just sit here in my office? Even California isn't big enough for Brent. He did get those pull requests merged,

and we got packed up. We headed over to JPL. We got there in the parking lot, and the listeners were already there waiting for us. We've made it to JPL, and, well, there's an equestrian center, so it's already not what I expected. There was horse riding going around, all around us, actually. Like, big, beautiful horses. Like, not what you expect when you go to a space center, right?

No, a little more mundane, earthly endeavor. Something so government about that, though. Like, you go to a government, like, you know earthly endeavor. Something so government about that, though. Like, you go to a government, like, you know, there's something so government about it. But I know it's JPL. It's a little different. But it's just very unique. And honestly, a little distracting. Boys, we did it.

We're actually here. JPL in the background. Some listeners are already here. It's a good day. Yeah. The tour is supposed to be about two, two and a half hours. Lots of walking. So then lots of napping afterwards.

And probably eating. No horseback ride for you then? Never did get that horseback ride but we, one of my, I mean many favorite moments. So many favorite moments but one of the best moments was when they took us upstairs and we came around the corner and there was this large glass display area, windows, and you look in to where they wear the bunny suits and they're building the probes.

Well, this is pretty cool. Look at this. We're getting to watch them as they build the next robot, the Clipper that's going to Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter, which is pretty awesome. This is amazing. This is the area you always see, like, in the TV shows and movies. What kind of headphones do you think he's wearing? Rant. Probably here.

They're screwing around. I know you were captivated, so they've got, like, a live stream of that. And you kept tuning in to watch that little clipper get built. I did. I did. And they got a lot of work done. I did eventually stop checking in, but I should bring it back up again and watch them go. We've got to figure out a way to get an episode unplugged on one of these.

Yeah. Get a load of it. Sort of Golden Record style. We had a good time. And afterwards, we made it back to the Airbnb, and it was the first time we ever tried buying steaks with sats. You remember? With the sat steaks? Unfortunately, we had a grease fire.

Although I think Alex made the best of it. Alex has a grease fire, but like the pro he is, he's working with the fire. Yeah. Use the grease fire. I'll turn off the gas. Yeah, everything's off on the gas here. Now, you can see if you look down in there it's

actually the grease pan catches on fire yeah so we're getting a good bit of char on here good bit char yeah i think we're getting about whoo we're about getting there yeah i think so hey that's all right just work with the grease fire who needs who needs a sear burner when you've got this right yeah you see as podcasters you just learn to tuck and roll you just learn to tuck Just work with the grease fire. Who needs a sear burner when you've got this? Yeah, you see, as podcasters, you just learn to tuck and roll. You just learn to tuck and roll with the grease fire. You get any steak at all, it's a great day. I mean, every episode we're doing, we're basically dealing with the grease fire.

You should see the state of this mixer. My God. I will say, if you want to feel nostalgic and revisit those episodes from that time, Linux Unplugged 478, and we keenly named it the best of both worlds. I also did a brunch with Brent with Tim, which was one of my favorites. So if you want to check that out, those will be linked as well. Absolutely. And just congratulations to the JPL team and anybody down there that's still listening to the pod. We've been following along and so damn impressed with 72 Flights.

Thank you to our unplugged core members as well. You're getting double the content these days. We're putting a lot of work into that members feed. So you get an extra show if you like. Or you get the mean, lean, tight, ad-free version. Still all the great Drew touches, just the essentials. That's also available. Two different feeds as a thank you when you become an Unplugged Core member.

UnpluggedCore.com or there's a link on our main website. And thank you everybody who signed up during our promo run. Appreciate that. We'll have another one sometime in the future, of course. But no immediate planskies, but I do want to do one again in the future soon. It was great. And we really appreciate our members very much these days. And now it is time for Le Boost.

We are at that time of the show where we get to read the messages from the people who supported this here production. And our first boost, our baller boost this week is from KaroMadoZero. Probably not how you say it, but I'm going for it. 329,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster! Thank you, Karo. And, you know, when you come in with a big Ballerboost on Fountain, it pops us right up there to the top of the charts. And then lots of people find us.

So you're doing us a double favor there. I really appreciate that. lots of people find us, so you're doing us a double favor there. I really appreciate that. Kara writes, long-time listener for about 16 years back in the day of the Linux Action Show and Castablasta. Yeah, long-timer indeed. Whoa. Have we had anybody in the boost name drop Castablasta yet? No. Few and far between, if so. Rare, rare. Let's just, we pretend like that doesn't exist. Wow, that is some legit cred, though. He says, I finally got around to sending in some sats. Thanks for all those years.

Looking forward to more. The first two digits are a country code, and the rest forms the postal code. Thank you, Christoph. Uh-oh, Wes, did you bring your, oh, you did. Good, good. Yeah, the international edition. Of course, of course. Yeah, you got it, you got it. Wow.

Thank you for listening for 16 years. That's, I mean, quite literally three years older than my oldest kid. Okay. So country code 32 seems to be Belgium. And that would leave 9,000 for the postal code, which seems to be the city of Ghent. Hello, Ghent. Thank you for boosting in. Appreciate you.

city of Ghent. Hello, Ghent! Thank you for boosting in. Appreciate you. Not the one boosts in with 75,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Also from Fountain. Some sats for Scale 2024.

If you've already reached your target, well then congratulations! Here's some sats for Scale 2025. Mmm, California. Beautiful. No, we absolutely appreciate it still because, you know, it's not necessarily a fixed cost, but also we've literally been putting all of those sats towards Scale. They're in their own separate wallet now, and these sats haven't really been going to support the show production so much it's

good i mean right right scales for the show so i'm happy with the way it's all worked out but now we can actually start putting this back towards the production of the show again which is good it's very good because uh we're getting a little frost bit around the edges from the ad winter mix ep came in with two boosts for a total of 55,000 sats. The first one for 50,000 sats says, Scale Boost! And then right after, 5,000 sats saying, let's just rename that last scale boost to a Birthday Boost!

Eight lines of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Thank you for the Birthday Boost, McZip. I really appreciate it. That's great. Thank you for the birthday boost, McZip. I really appreciate it. That's great. Martin Edebier comes in with 42,000 sats. The answer to the ultimate question.

Hi, Chris Wesson-Brent. Have you seen the announcement of the new OpenSUSE Leap 16 edition? It's going to be based on SUSE's new adaptable Linux platform, ALP, and there will be non-immutable and immutable installation options. There will also be a Leap Micro 6 option. For me, this is quite exciting as I'm a long-time SUSE Leap user. The stats are for scale, by the way. Best regards, Martin DeBilleur from the Netherlands. We were chewing on this in the member stream last week, is it looks like they're going to have something now called Slow Roll, which is kind of going to sit between Tumbleweed and Leap. My only concern is I'm already losing track here because we've got slow roll, Leap, Tumbleweed,

adaptable Linux platform. Non-immutable and immutable. Right. Micro. Yeah. I will say I had that same feeling, but Martin, it's nice to hear from folks that are excited about it, especially the leap side of things. Right.

It's a perspective we need. If you're in that ecosystem, right, then it does make sense to you probably already, right? If you're coming from the outside, like these are a lot of choices. But like from Martin's perspective, he's in that world. It makes sense to him. So it is good to get that. You're our boots on the ground lizard reporter now. Thank you, sir.

Sorry, Brad. Oh, I'm good with it. Hybrid sarcasm boosts in with 42,000 cents. The answer to the ultimate question. Oh, and this is a question, actually. Why do seagulls fly over the ocean? Hmm.

I have no idea why. Because if they flew over the bay, we'd call them bagels. Oh, that's pretty good. I got to tell that one to my kids. I texted my daughter randomly at school. And I should, I don't know. I don't have it. But it was something like, why did the banana cross the street?

And then she says, why? And I said, they don't cross the street. That's silly. Something like that. Just real dad jokes. So I like that one. Why did the seagull fly over the ocean? Because if they flew over the bay,

we'd call them bagels. It's pretty good. Jordan Bravo came in with two boosts. The first one, a Spaceballs boost. Oh. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. Now, this isn't related to NixOS, but I want to recommend Jelly,

a modern Tmux replacement written in Rust. I recently incorporated it into my workflow, and it's a total game changer. You spend a lot of time in the terminal like I do. I highly recommend it. And, of course, it's available in Nix packages. Hmm. A terminal workspace with batteries included, it says. Zelly.

Z-E-L-L-I-J. I'll give this a try after the show. Yeah, you know, that does look really good. Jordan is also holding a workshop around Nix in his neck of the woods in Atlanta. But, unfortunately, by the time this airs, it's going to be all over. But if you are in the Atlanta area, there will be a second one on the 3rd of February. So you can check on the 3rd in your area if you're in Atlanta for Jordan's Knicks meetup. Now, Jordan also sent in a row of McDucks.

Things are looking up for old McDuck. Saying, if I weren't about to have a newborn baby, I would 100% attend NixCon in March. Definitely next year, though. Meanwhile, I'm giving a free two-part Nix workshop, as Chris mentioned, in Atlanta, Georgia. Yay! Good for you. Yeah,

congrats. And, you know, Jordan's also a regular over in our NixNerds Matrix chat room, sharing his neat setups and helping people out, which is wonderful. You do like to see it, don't you? You do. Thank you for the boost, too. Southern Fried Sassafras comes in with a couple of boosts. First one, Spaceballs.

One, two, three, four, five. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Using the index, he writes, a pro for watching live would be the video feed. He'd like to have that. But an audio-only consumption version would miss out on things like Brent's cat scarves. That's true. He goes on, alas, watching live would drive me of the entertainment for multiple commutes.

Yeah, I think that is one reason why sometimes people don't want to catch it. He likes listening Monday. I understand. I understand. Regarding deleted's challenge about building only from source, he says, you know, the title of that episode practically writes itself. It's BYOB. Bring your own binaries. That is pretty good. He also sends me a happy birthday. He says, I almost missed the news about Sunday being a special day. I don't have 42,000

sets just sitting around, but I can provide a factor of that with this boost. He does add, though, he wishes he would have caught us live last week because there was a missed opportunity for the show title, saying that episode 5, 4, 6, Snowflake, the next generation, should have been one of the titles. I do think somebody did bang suggest that. I just don't think it won. I think it was bang suggested, though.

Anonymous boosts in 12,345 sats. We're going to have to go right to Lunacrispy. Comb the desert. That scale. We will. Thank you. Thank you. Bear 454 boosted in with 5,000 sets.

Hey, I'm still Nick suspicious. You keep telling me how stable it is, but then you also tell us about these totally obscure issues that you run into, like your genome network indicator not working, neither Firefox nor Chrome working properly for you either. My gut reaction after years of Linux administration and desktop use is you've over-customized. I still see the value in crafted distributions because of the QA that happens cohesively across the system. You know, it is funny. I've heard that you've over-customized things for so many years, and then whenever something doesn't work, doesn't do the right thing, the answer is always, well, you just need to customize it a little bit. So there's always that sort of balance there. I think with both Firefox and Chrome, the issue simply is that I was on Wayland. And their Wayland implementations were relatively early. Firefox has updated and stopped crashing for me. Chrome still has a problem where my extension menus get cut off.

But now I've discovered that if I – I've never tried this before. But if I just maximize the window or if I just drag it so it's almost maximized, then my extension menus are fine. So it's just with the windows smaller. Yeah, yeah. And I don't actually, I don't think that's so much a next thing again

as I think it's probably more of a toolkit and Wayland issue. And so I'd probably be running into the same thing if I was on the latest version of GNOME with the latest version of Chrome with the latest version of Wayland

and the latest version of Pipewire on Arch or Gen 2, I'd probably be having these same issues. I want to touch on something here because I'm running NixOS on my framework and with pretty much the exact same setup but on Tumbleweed here on my Dev1. And I found myself switching between X and between Wayland. And what I am discovering. And I wonder if you both feel this way is that they both now feel a little bit on edge in terms of bugs.

So it's almost like X isn't seeing some bug fixes and things that it used to. So it's getting a little, I don't know, old in the tooth. But also Wayland's not quite there yet either, so I find myself switching between them because it's like, well, which bug land do I want to choose to live in? And I find that really challenging. It's kind of the awkward middle transition period, yeah, right, where X is stagnant, so there's a lot of new stuff.

If you need any of those new features, then you've got to do Wayland. And the largest desktop environments have kind of declared they're done supporting X, so they don't necessarily even build features. The one that kills me on the laptop is on X I don't have swipe-to-switch workspaces. It's only in Wayland, and so I immediately can tell when I've accidentally logged into X. You don't need X eyes anymore, right? Yeah, right. I just tell if I can swipe or

not. And of course, I suppose if these things bothered you, the solution would be to run XFCE on Nix or to run a desktop environment that perhaps doesn't change as frequently. I don't really put this at the feet of Nix. And I think in a way, Nix lets me walk

it back easier than, say, Tumbleweed might. Tumbleweed, you can still do snapshots, but it's just at such a different level. I do think it back easier than, say, Tumbleweed might. Tumbleweed, you can still do snapshots, but it's just at such a different level. I do think it's fair just to say, though, like, you know, BR has the point that NixOS, in a way, is sort of a build-your-own-distribution framework. And so, yeah, you do kind of, you have to do some of the crafting, and that's reasonably not for everyone. Yeah, I kind of think that's equivalent to how my Homelab stack is.

Like, nobody supports my Homelab stack except for me. It's my custom Homelab. And it used to be how it was for, like, our trucks, right? It's not a totally new concept for us. It's just not as familiar anymore. And I think it's worth saying, too, even if you don't switch to, like, NixOS on your, you know, interface laptop desktop computer, you might still find value in using it for containers or virtual machines or just on the command line as an extra package manager oh thank you bear by the way appreciate

it zach attack comes in with 5 000 stats using the index and says i'm gonna have to try snowflake os in a vm i see how nix can be helpful but for myself i think i'm too deep in archidevian you know what zach that's what distroBox is for, my friend. No, no. You use what works for you. But if you do try Nix and you get a little hung up, DistroBox can be your friend. And, you know, just worth pointing out, too, that these days the graphical installer on the regular Nix OS. So good.

So good. So if Snowflake doesn't work or you run into problems, maybe try that, too. Yeah, the Snowflake installer is new. There's still early days there. The Nix one, I've never had it fail. No, it works great. Otterbrain boosts in with 5,000 cents. I like that name.

Just wondering, what is the Row of Ducks reference? And what is the woman singing when there's a big boost? Oh, Otterbrain must be new. Welcome to the show. Yeah, enjoying the show, currently running Fedora on a System76 laptop, but we'll give Nix a try. Thanks for sharing your passion for tech and for experimenting.

Autobrain, thank you for being willing to ask the questions. I'm sure other people are wondering, too. Taking it from the top, a row of ducks is 2,222 sats. Or, if you want to do McDucks, that's 22,222 sats. Or if you want to do McDucks, that's 22,222 sats. Things are looking up for all McDucks.

And we've got a whole bunch of different sound bites in case people send multiple in. And that was, you know, these are themes and memes that are started by our community. And they get a life of their own. But Chris, why ducks? I guess a two kind of looks like a duck yeah on the calculator if you look at them on a calculator they kind of look like ducks you know that's a lot of it comes from numerology numerology spelled out on a calculator is where a lot of this comes from um and uh the lady singing in the hay rich lobster that's a futurama reference so it you

know depending on your uh age demo and television preference, you may or may not be familiar with Futurama, and that's a clip from there, which I'm actually re-watching with the kids right now. Oh, wonderful. That was also a boost sound recommended by a dear listener, and I think it's one of the best ones we've ever had. I always like it.

It makes me smile every time. Some guy named Wes boosted him with a row of test ducks. Sure did. Thanks, Wes. And then Crypto Phil came in with a Spaceballs boost. The hell was that? Spaceball won. They've gone to plaid.

Crypto Phil with Castomatic writes, First time booster. Love your podcast. Love your podcast. Been listening since late summer. Welcome aboard. Two newbies. That's nice.

Wonderful. Nice to hear. And, of course, the podcast mascot, the Golden Dragon, comes in with those rows of ducks. It's this big opportunity missed to call the Fosdom Room the Fosdudes. Great Nixie show, guys. We're always trying to come up with good names. We should have run them past the Golden Dragon. We just called the scale chat room scale that's maybe that's one of the mascots responsibilities chris and i tried but we came up with exactly nothing yep yep our pal gene bean boosts in with

uh 4896 sets across three boosts eight lines of shimmering cement running from here to pasadena looks like maybe a double boost because we got two both uh leet sets saying i'm looking forward to meeting y'all at nixcon and scale oh the legend gene bean's gonna be there we better prepare ourselves i'm a little nervous and if that wasn't enough gene continues with a row of ducks for the random thing that flat pack is still the best or only option for check out nix dash flat pack it's working well for me do y'all use anything for flat packs what what a declarative flat pack manager for nix oh my god guys i asked about this this is amazing i asked gene b game changed Bean. Game changed. Game changed. Because the flat packs are the last manual thing I have to install now.

That just went away. Well, you can install remotes too. Handy. Okay. Well, I would say pause the show. We've got to all go change our config. Yeah, I feel like I want to go right now. Nix-flatpack.

Of course, we'll put a link to this in the show notes too. Gene, that's a winner. Thank you very much for that. Really appreciate that. Thank you, everybody who boosted. We do have the 2,000 sats cut off. We had 17 boosters. Total of 22 boosts this week.

And we stacked 673,442 sats. Thank you, everyone. We really do appreciate the support of each production and your messages. It gives us a chance to go off script, answer your questions, and it really builds a culture and a community around the show. Really do appreciate everyone who also streams those sats. We see you. Wasn't it Gene Bean as we were setting up that was streaming sats?

Indeed it was. As we were, oh, there's Gene Bean. And we were sitting there talking about him as he's listening because we have on the dashboard, if you set your username, we can see when you're listening with the streaming sats. And it tickles us. It's something real neat about when we're sitting down and set up the show and you see somebody streaming in a few. So thank you, everybody. We appreciate you very much out there. Thank you, everybody,

who takes a moment to support the show, spread the word or boost. The easiest workflow these days is probably Strike and Fountain. Strike's available in 36-ish, maybe 40 countries now, and they have integration with Fountain FM, and Fountain FM has gotten remarkably good. However, I have to say, our audience really seems to like Podverse, too, which is the GPL podcasting 2.0 client. We'll have more on that front.

It might be worth your time to go get a new podcast app if you haven't yet, because there's going to be more things coming from us. Get two, why not? Try them out. I got two. I probably got three. I don't know. I definitely do. I jump around sometimes like I used to distro hop. It's kind of fun. Now, how about a pick that's on theme? The number one thing I heard when people are looking for a local in their control audio book solution that doesn't require a server doesn't require any

docker just something that runs locally on their phone i've not tried this but man did i get when i asked this question was this by far the highest signal the app is called it's for android it's called smart audio book player and it is a comprehensive local app to manage and play audiobooks. And you could just have the whole collection on an SD card or whatever if you still have an Android that does that. But I could see this. You have your whole audiobook collection on your SD card. You pop it in the Android phone.

You point this app at it and it just takes care of the whole thing. It does the metadata thing. It does everything we talked about, but it's all a local solution just on one device, which might be for somebody who's only doing it on that. Yeah, right. That could be it. You just need a folder

with your audiobooks in there. You point this at it. Yeah, I saw other people are doing like services that they sync, like Dropbox and SyncThing and whatnot. They'll sync a folder.

You could probably do it with NextCloud. So you just got to get those audiobooks on the Android device and then you point Smart Audiobook Player at it. 4.8 stars too. So we'll to get those audiobooks on the Android device and then you point smart audiobook player at it 4.8 stars too.

So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. That looks like a really good one. I really like audiobook shelf because I just, the idea of a server just sitting there managing it for me and downloading a few podcasts and archiving them and all of that. I like that. I like when it's just sitting there running for me.

We do have a bonus pick. Who snuck this in? I snuck this one in. What do you got for us? For those keen listeners, you may have noticed that this week is data privacy week in some parts of the world. And I thought that would be a nice throwback to Linux Unplugged 5.2.2, practical privacy, we named it. And it's just action packed, full of our privacy suggestions, different apps and things like that. So I think if you're thinking about privacy this week, you should definitely dive in there. That's a good – look at you keeping an eye on the calendar. This working a day job has got you sharp.

Chief calendar correspondent. But does Canada use the same calendar we do? I never thought that. Well, they don't have the same holidays, so they must not, right? Because their holidays are on different days. Yeah, Thanksgiving. Everything's just kind of like mixed up. Now, we also have a few more bonus like audiobook players like –

Oh, we didn't even mention the Home Assistant integration. I was going to ask. Yeah. We could have talked about that. So we'll have that linked in there. Sonos, if you're a Sonos user, we'll have that in there. And then another native client for iOS that's written in Swift, which

I need to check out. So good links this week. Of course, those will all be at LinuxUnplugged.com slash 547. 547? The good kind of 547. 547. Yeah. And please remember to do Boosted. It does support the show. And we want to know how you collect your audiobooks, or

if you do the audio book thing. Is it a habit you have avoided so far? Let us know. We always appreciate that. And maybe you're listening to this via audio bookshelf on the podcast side. Check it in too. I'd like to hear that. Yeah.

How's that been going? Give us your boots on the ground report if you've been using it as a podcast player for a bit. Because I'm like right now as we record about a month in. So it's not a long term review by me. So if you've got a little bit of longer term experience, I'd love to share that with the audience. So boost in and let us know. We'll be live again next Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m.

Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Of course, you could always join that virtual lug. We have a mumble room that's running during the show when we are live. Get a low latency Opus stream. There's also Jupiter Station, a podcasting 2.0 feed where we're streaming it live. And I also have a few other productions over there like the weekly launch.

A show to kick off your Monday with the news that I thought was interesting. Kind of set you up for the week on the stories that we'll be setting the stage. You can check that out. Brand new content in the Jupiter Station RSS feed. Just search for it in a podcasting tool. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday.

As in Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි Thank you.