LINUX Unplugged - 553: Portably Predictable Productivity

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

We each bring surprise topics, a mix of hardware and software, as we prepare to hit the road for NixCon and SCaLE.

About once a year or so, I feel like I break out the old Nvidia Shield Portable. And it still is one of the best portable gaming devices I think ever made. It is in the shape of a game controller, like a fat Xbox controller. And inside there, they have a full Android PC with one of their first Tegra processors. And they have a – where it gets its Shield name from is a flip up almost like a star trek communicator style flip up screen where it runs android and over the years it's you know i'm not really getting updated anymore but i can still run my rom emulators on this thing and it still works i bought this thing in 2014 wow yeah i was gonna say released july 2013 android

lollipop 5.1 yeah and it's they issued like several updates since then so in may of 2014 i picked this thing up and it's still really never been surpassed by like just something that you could put in your bag has a battery life that lasts you all day you can maybe take on a flight easy to use plays classic games and um i thought you know it would never i thought for sure that but i would just use this until it died and i'd never be able to replace it like the battery would eventually go and maybe i could open it up maybe not because it's a pretty tight little piece of gear there's a lot of little seams and stuff you have to crack open so i thought okay i'm just going to drive this thing into the ground it is what it is until. Until this week. I have found a replacement

for my Nvidia Shield portable that I think is better and has a better screen. It's a step up. It's cheaper. And I think it's going to be officially time

to retire my beloved Nvidia Shield portable. Does that mean Brent gets the old one. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Nice to have you all in studio this week. Such a treat. It is our Scale Eve episode, and we have three wild and crazy topics. Each one of us has brought our own topic this week, and we're going to surprise each other with them and find out in real time what they are with you. Then we're going to hit the road shortly after the episode and have all kinds of stuff for you. So you know what we got to do is we got to get you our picks and our

boosts and our feedback before we get out of here. We got all the standard stuff because it is, of course, a banger of an episode. So before we get into there, let's say good morning to our virtual lug. Time appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello and good morning to our friends at Tailscale, Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Hello and good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Go try it for free on 100 devices and see how you can have programmable networking that is so fast, so easy, and very private.

All built on top of? WireGuard. That's right. Using the noise protocol, it is really easy. Zero config mesh networking for yourself as an individual or for an enterprise. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. So here we are. We don't really know what we're going to talk about.

I know I've hinted at what mine is. Boy, this thing's such a cool device. I just remembered that the faceplate slides off of the NVIDIA Shield Portable, and you could have these alternative, like, stylized faceplates that you could put on there. They thought that was going to be such a big thing. Style it your own. Yeah. I'm surprised I just haven't lost it, you know, especially all the places I've taken this thing.

Well, Brandon, it's so dang nice to have you here. Well, thank you. I realize it's just so much fun doing this when we're all in the same room. It makes it so much easier. I mean, we need more mattresses along the walls, I think, for like the trip season. But this feels great. Yeah. It's nice.

I also realize we don't do this enough because there was a spider web on my microphone. And I had to wipe it off. You had to dust it off? Yeah, this morning. You don't remember? That was our guest last week. Yeah, we were pre-recording for Halloween. A spider OS.

I feel like the Knicks con buzz in the last couple of weeks has really gone to the next level. I think they're expecting somewhere around 300 people. Wow. Which is a lot for the first conference. Yeah. And I think NixCon EU was, or Europe, whatever it was, was something like 200, 150, 200 people. That's nice to see people showing up. I mean, and just in general, I think this, you know,

this scale is going to be pretty banging. I know there's a lot of fellow content creators that we're looking forward to seeing, and then just a whole bunch of wonderful community members too. I think it's going to be a little bit of a who's who at NixCon for the Nix community. That's going to be neat. Good buzz.

I think there's going to be some stuff for us to really kind of observe from a Nix community standpoint. We're going to feel like real Nix novices. It's going to be great. You know, Jens, I feel like I've had that treat already from my time in Berlin. There's some cool people who show up at some of the hacker spaces there that I've been to. So I'm excited for you both to share in that experience because from what I can tell, the folks who are kind of hacking away on

Nix-related stuff are just our kind of folk. I think so. Except for this part. This part, there's this – it's me, right? It's me. Maybe it's a little bit of Wes and a little bit of Bryant. We're going to – there's something about us that just is broken and – Therefore, we break other things.

Yes. Oh, I break a lot. is broken and uh therefore we break other things yes oh i break a lot so we are planning to make some pretty serious upgrades to the linux unplugged rss feed as we go out the door this week so we may potentially wreck your rss feed or your podcast client's ability to download future episodes please don't unsub just so you know this is coming up we're flipping the linux unplugged feed to a podcasting 2.0 feed. And we're going to try to do a swap in place so you don't have to change URLs or anything like that. What could possibly go wrong?

We'll find out. Why are we doing this? Why do this? Are we crazy? Well, we plan to have four live only Linux Unplugs on the next trip. We're not going to be publishing those anywhere. And we want to be able to deliver that in your podcasting 2.0 apps you're already using.

So you'll just see it in there. It's either pending or when it's live, and you can just tap in and catch us as we're live on the 12th, the 14th, the 15th, the 17th. So I mean, everything works with the feed and the live streams. We're going to put those live streams to good use to help inform our coverage, which will inevitably be in the Linux Unplugged on the 17th. And we're going to have those live streams to good use to help inform our coverage which will inevitably be in the linux unplugged on the 17th and we're going to have a new streaming

front end on the web with a new test chat experience i don't know if it'll be well it should be already but it's all kind of coming together at the same time so there's a lot of moving pieces and we're going to test this new chat experience to see if we just draw in more folks and if it becomes something that's popular well then we'll probably work on getting bots and all that kind of stuff in there. We'll see. The backend is going to be all podcasting 2.0 RSS feeds and lit. So it'll be audio and video all in the RSS feed.

So you got to get a new podcasting app and you'll, you know, then you're set. Help us test it. Yeah. Yeah, really. Because this is something new for us.

It's using some really, really slick stuff that Wes has built behind the scenes. Wes gets a round of applause. He's a legend this week. I think we should save the applause until, you know, after it works. That's true, all right. That's a very good point.

But it's pretty exciting. It's a pretty big change. If everything goes right, you just, all of a sudden, we'll start getting new features in your podcast app one by one as we turn them on, starting with live support,

which would be great. You know, Chance in the chat room here asked a good question. Are we going to test our website ahead of time to make sure it works? And I never even thought of that. There shouldn't be any changes on the website. All that will still be getting fed the way it always gets fed. Because they're all going to just be using the same backend URLs and everything. So all that should still work.

JBLive.tv should still work. Trigger a scrape after we're done swapping things over if we think it's working. Yeah. Long-term, if this setup works, we'll also use it for Texas LinuxFest and maybe LinuxFest Northwest. So this could be a model that we can reproduce. So please do help us test it. Go get yourself Fountain or Podverse or Castomatic. I think Castomatic does

lit. And join us and help us test it throughout the week. Especially, you know, maybe you haven't had a chance to try the live features in the apps yet because we are live other places on Sunday, but not this time. Not this time. And of course, if you're going to be at scale, we'll be throwing a lunch Saturday the 16th

at 1.30 p.m. at the Yardhouse. We'd love to have you there, and we also have that scale matrix chat room. And we have some more fast stuff later in the show but let's get into our first topic this week so each one of us is bringing a topic and brentley we're gonna see what you have for the class this week yeah i uh hesitated a little bit on this one because i feel like it's maybe more of a ask the class what's going on. I need some suggestions here, but I got, I've been revamping my productivity systems recently. Uh, and it's mostly cause I realized that being a freelancer for so long, I just kind of like get to work whenever I feel inspired and

whenever, you know, usually it's late at night as Wes knows very deeply. You had a lot of inbuilt flexibility cause you didn't have to really collaborate with anyone or meet any deadline beyond the deadlines you set for yourself, right? Yeah. So, I mean, that worked really well for me, especially as a creative person. But these days, you know, doing the Nextcloud thing, it turns out I need to be predictably productive, which is a thing I never had to do before. So I've been looking for some tools to help me do that. And one I came across actually for some tools to help me do that.

And one I came across actually feels quite inspiring to me. It's called Super Productivity, which is hopefully aptly named. And it's been changing my world a little bit. And for some of you who have been using productivity tools for a long time now, you might feel like, oh yeah, this is pretty basic and I'm not sure what this would do for me. But man, for me, it's like been a wonderful structure and a way to track my time. And so that's kind of what I was looking for. And I didn't think I would find any apps that I was happy with that weren't like hosted applications. Cause a ton of suggestions I've gotten were like, oh, we're used to do use Todoist or use like, so I've gotten so many suggestions of those kind of products. But I came across Super Productivity, which is open source. And at first I was like, no, no,

no. And like, this isn't going to have enough traction to really, you know, be a stable application that's useful. Right. But there's something like 150 contributors to this particular project. So you found something with a community. Yeah, that got me kind of my ears up thinking, okay, wait a second, there might actually be something here. And so this application also does some cool stuff like integrates GitHub and Jira and CalDAV open project and get T issues into your task list. So you can have all these other systems that maybe your team works with or whatever, but you can bring those into your own productivity system and overlay them on top of, you know, your own personal tasks and things like that. And so some of the ideas in this project are really making a big difference

in my own personal life. But also I just thought, there's like these communities of these super niches and they're crazy active. And so I found it really interesting. The next best thing is that it is packaged up in Nix,

which I was like, oh, I'm never going to be able to try this because I'm on Nix and I don't, you know, whatever. I don't have Snap packages installed. Yeah, I was just, so that blew me away and made me realize, oh yeah, Nix packages does indeed have a lot of stuff.

Like, way more than I expected. So there's no flat pack of this yet. There's a Snap and a Deb and, you know, a Nix package. And if you don't want to go that route, they also have like a web way of using it. Yeah, a web app. A web app. That's nice.

And also Android clients and iOS clients. So it's just like really... It says F-Droid right here on the GitHub page. That's nice. Crazy mature. And so I've been using it for about a week now, and it's made a big difference for me at least in learning how to be more stable in my productivity, which is the whole point. But the question for me then becomes, what do you guys use? Like, Wes, you've got a whole ton of daily jobby job things you've got to track. Do you have any productivity system? job things you got to track. Do you have any productivity system? I would imagine maybe for those of you who've been, you know, having to solve

this kind of problem for a couple decades, maybe you're using things like, I don't know, a note system that you have tweaked for just exactly what you need. So I feel like I'm on the start of this journey. I'm looking for advice on what's working for you guys. You know, Brent, there's things I do like about this.

It doesn't require an account. That's nice. You know, a lot of these things that do this kind this. It doesn't require an account. That's nice. You know, a lot of these things that do this kind of level of stuff, they require an account. The integration with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, and GitT, it's all really nice. That makes me curious, yeah. Yeah, so that means if you, you know,

close something out on GitHub, it could be accounted for in here. Also, the way they do timeboxing seems particularly useful for somebody like you and the way you work. It also syncs with NextCloud on the back end, which is a nice thing. It can do syncing in a few different ways in different places.

Do you have a task manager, Wes? I might just have to install this to see if it's one less time I actually have to open JIRA up. So I have zero experience with things like JIRA. But yeah, if it can help you, that'd be interesting. Try to keep it that way, buddy. Yeah. You know, I kind of have a few different methods. There's always the, you know, there's a markdown file that I have open in Vim.

I called it. That's a lot of it. I have been playing with LogSeeks. It has some time tracking functionality built in and some plugins if you want to kind of take it beyond that. So I use that for some things, though I find the actual note-taking part more useful for me. And then for personal projects, I've had Todoist subscription for a while, which I don't use a ton of, but can be nice, especially just for the mobile interface, so I can, you know,

mostly, honestly, to track down some groceries I want to buy, or you know, keep track of like, oh, make sure you renew the car tabs. But... What I like, so Brent, what you kind of have here with Super Productivity is it's a, it's more than just a to-do app. It is,

it's a time slicing app, where you can slice your time up to specific things that you can focus on and then track your progress there and break those tasks up into a time slicing fashion, which seems like a very handy way to approach a to-do app. It seems especially useful maybe if you were in like a contracting situation where you had stuff like billable hours, you really did need to account for like what happened in that day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see too there's like break reminders and anti-procrastination feature yeah also i do like the pomodoro method it's got one of those built in yeah i've been kind of seeing it as not just a to-do list but as a structure that i can just throw myself into and it's like already all these best practices are sort of integrated into the software instead of me, you know, having to pull these or have the discipline to integrate these into my own little strategies every single day.

It's like there's just this structure that I can be thrown into and I have no choice but to just adhere to them. And actually, it was super helpful for someone like me who was just trying to figure this stuff out for seemingly the first time. It's the old, I'll start making blog posts just as soon as I finish developing my personal blogging. Right, yes. And actually, it was super helpful for someone like me who was just trying to figure this stuff out for seemingly the first time. It's the old, I'll start making blog posts just as soon as I finish developing my personal blogging. Right. Yes. Yes.

I like that it has, you know, app for every platform. It's got a Snap as well if you want to install it via Snap. It's in the AUR. Like you said, it's Nixed. It looks like there's a Docker container available too. There you go. So this is, I think, a really nice – it's MIT licensed. so i think this is a really solid contribution i like this a lot kind of like a next level productivity app i'll just for what i use is just i think it's called task task.org

oh and i use the next cloud as my a back-end feature and it works pretty much like 90 of the time i i'll use that and then every now and then I'll use like a bespoke to-do app like Todoist or something for like a project. And I just use the app for that project. Sometimes it is nice to have like I know I just pull over here, there's no other clutter to distract me, I could go right to that. But maybe super productivity

fixes that in the way it can timebox things. Is it designed around like a single user or like if say JB had an instance, could we all be using it? That's a really good question. From what I can tell, it is single user. But, yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, collaborative tasks are always sort of a more advanced feature, but very.

But you can pull in, like, CalDAV systems and stuff like that. So if we're using that as a… I guess we had a GitHub, if we did some sort of GitHub-based flow. So I think if you rely on some of these backends, that might be totally an option. That's pretty slick and free. How do they make it? Do you know how they're making money as a company? I don't.

Do they have a hosted version? That's a great question. I didn't even look for that because – I don't see anything but the web app, but I don't see how you pay for that. And, you know, they have that hosted web app, but I don't know. This is an area, too, where I would love to solicit some feedback from the audience on if they have a task manager that's just enough for them. Because I'm looking for something that is totally inclusive like this, but also my go-to has always been a lean, mean task manager for a particular project. I do see they are enabled with GitHub sponsors.

So if you do find it useful, maybe take a look at that. Nice. And again, it's super productivity. We will put a link to that in the show notes so that way you can find it nice and peasy. Determinate.systems slash unplugged. Yeah, determinate.systems slash unplugged is a sponsor of your Unplugged program, and they are the builders of the best Nix installer, including MDM support and Skiff mode

with more than 20,000 installs a day. They have also that advanced binary caching with sophisticated access controls that make using Nix at the enterprise possible and team collaboration tools that you're just going to love because they fit into your existing DevOps workflow. And they've also created a plethora of open source tools and documentation for the Nix

community. They really are a great resource. And above all, they've created flakehub.com, the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. You can bring Nix to work the way you've always wanted with flakehub.com. If you go to determinant.systems slash unplug, you can register for the private beta, get secure, compliance-friendly NICs, and all the support you need.

So you got to go to determinant.systems slash unplugged. We'll have a link in the show notes. Determinant Systems is prioritizing flake stability. That means you get a reliable foundation for your development. Plus, with Determinant Systems, you're always ahead of the curve with their development. You can gain access to new NICs features Thank you. Flake Hub empowers you to secure your Nix environment while still enjoying the full potential and utility inside your team. And the great thing is you're not going to have to learn a whole bunch of new tooling.

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Now, Chris, since I've been here at the studio, I feel like I had a little bit of a hint of what your topic would be. I think I know what Wes's is in the area of. It feels like you two have been secret working on a project for maybe the last week or two, but I don't know what that is. It might just be one that's going to benefit you, too. Yeah, buddy. Well, tell us about that's going to benefit you, too. Yeah. Well, tell us about it. Yeah.

And it is true. For about the last three Sundays after Linux Unplugged, Wes and I have stayed very late. Negligently so. Oh, no. Working on a project. You know, because we have some infrastructure bits and pieces and we want to move them. And one of the things that we're starting with is one of the more challenging ones is you remember January of 2022

when we first started doing Boost, we deployed our own local Umbral Bitcoin node. Which is kind of this, right, all-in-one application, Docker composed under the hood, but you get a slick dashboard and a bunch of web apps and stuff to install. And then everything that you install via their quote-unquote app store

is really a Docker container. We've all seen these systems out there. With a whole bunch of web apps and stuff to install. And then everything that you install via their quote-unquote app store is really a Docker container. We've all seen these systems out there. With a whole bunch of scripts that you occasionally have to troubleshoot under the hood. And the more you use systems like this, you go, gosh, I'd just rather be just running the core applications myself. And this seemed like a perfect thing to Nix. Could we Nix this system? And just get a very specific box that is an mvp that just runs really reliable but then take that as a model that we could then deploy for brent and myself and wes or any of the listeners could go grab and deploy their own system and you could

swap in the bitcoin demon for anything else you know, Samba, whatever it is, Plex. It's really about prescribing a system that gets built the way you want and creating your own custom, in our case, Bitcoin node. But it could be really anything. And, you know, Umbral had been pretty great. I think it allowed you to, like, play and explore the ecosystem and kind of mix and match, like, oh, I just want to try this app for a bit without committing to it.

But, you know. Now we know. Yeah, exactly. And it's been a while. We're pretty invested in the boost. We're seemingly only going to be more so. And one of the things is, right, you can run it locally. We all want to.

I wasn't super thrilled about setting up Umbral in my house. We all want to self-host our own nodes because you can. But we don't need that solution anymore. We want something really a little more almost appliance-like. Enter Nix Bitcoin, which I think you first directed us at from the Fort Nix project on GitHub. It's a collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security. And I've heard about this on and off, but where I realized there was something serious here is when I was visiting El Salvador,

there is a school of college kids, or a class of college kids, about 40 kids, and they were all working on creating self-hosted point-of-sales terminals for small businesses in El Salvador. And the first thing they tried, the first district they tried was Debian, but they had issues every time it came to support and reproducibility of the problems.

Like they would try to troubleshoot back at the home office or the classroom, whatever. They'd have problems reproducing that. So then they moved to Ubuntu and then they moved to Arch and they continued to have the same problem. And so then the professor said, all right, you guys just go figure out what's going to work best. And whatever you figure out works best, we're going to just put that on a piece of hardware. And that's what we're going to send out to everybody. So they tried silver, but when they tried all these different things,

and then the last thing they tried was Knicks and they used the Knicks Bitcoin project. And then it started solving all of their problems. They're having all these little educations and configuration things they needed. And then they could also start reproducing problems back in the classroom, make a fix, ship it to the customer,

and get the point-of-sales device working in a couple of hours. And so they came to their professor and they said, we think we should go with Nix Bitcoin. And he said, what the hell is Nix? You want to go with what weird niche distro that we have to support now? And so they gave him a little presentation

and they sold him on it. And now there is this piece of hardware, they call it the MyBonk, that is in El Salvador. You can get it other places too. It's all Nix Bitcoin and it's all prescribed for this point of sales setup.

Yeah. And so we thought that seems like a pretty reasonable approach for us. It also kind of felt like a nice version of, I mean, it's not quite a Will It Nix segment, but I think it's in that spirit. But it was interesting because you know our last time around we were doing our nix cloud setup well that had a module that was just

right in nix packages and i think we so far most of us have experience using you know pretty straight nix os and there's so much stuff in nix packages that pretty much everything we need has been there but nix bitcoin it's its own repo it's its own flake it's a whole other i mean it all leverages nix os technology of course but you know it's its own thing, and we have to figure out how to apply that. Yeah, it's sort of outside the standard module system, so we have to figure out how to bring it in and then figure out which bits of it we wanted. Yeah, how to get everything to play nicely together. It's been pretty nice. I mean, you got to go get the flake or however you choose to do it. They've got instructions in the readme. Bring that in. But then you just make, you know, in your NixOS configuration, suddenly you've got a bunch more modules and services available that Nix Bitcoin exports.

So, you know, you do services.bitcoind.enable equals true. And boom, you've got a Bitcoin daemon running. Now, you still got to wait to go sync the blockchain, but you have a nice reproducible setup. They've got a lot of apps already, you know, stuff like the mempool. They've got ride the lightning. They've got, you know, liquid support, lightning loop. We found a lot of the stuff that we wanted from Umbral, but not everything.

And the goal here is to have something that we can, again, say, okay, Brent, here's your file. Use this file, and now you have a working system. You can imagine this with an IMAP server, right? Here's your file, use this file, and now you have a working system. You can imagine this with an IMAP server, right? Here's your file, you run this, and now you have a working system. We don't just spend an afternoon with you, like, trying to get it all out. Oh, yeah, first I installed this package over here, and then I'll make sure you change that config setting. Right.

None of that. None of that. It's just ready to go. And then the other thing is you're safe on upgrades. You know, you're really pretty much set. Unless there's a bug or a regression introduced upstream by the software maker, it's going to be such a more solid upgrade process

than one of these pre-built systems that's managing all these containers that has to, like, do a self-update and then do a Docker-composed pull and, you know, do all these things under the hood that can sometimes go wrong and sideways, and it just hangs. You don't have to deal with any of that.

Instead, you've got, like, a flake with pins in it right you just you can roll back if anything goes wrong it's all in git so what happens wes when not everything is packaged up as a module which we did run into yeah okay so um for the booth specifically there's this great app from the podcasting 2.0 folks called helipad and uh chris you turn on this turned us on to this as well and um it's super helpful especially during live streams because it just pops up and makes that fun pew sound and it's like a real-time dashboard yeah it shows us live boosts coming in but it wasn't packaged in next bitcoin so we thought okay well we're gonna need helipad and actually just uh

just a couple days ago they finally merged a merged a longstanding issue and pull request to add a fancy settings page and webhooks. Webhooks. Which is pretty killer, I think, for a lot of folks. Because you can get Helipad running, talking to your lightning demon, and then export that anywhere else. Have it send you messages in Slack or Element or whatever. So this was an application we wanted to have on our systems for all of us, each one of us. But it wasn't available by the Nix Bitcoin project. So we had to come up with a way where we could package it ourselves that, again, would be reproducible for everybody that uses this afterwards.

Yeah. You know, we had a lot of options because it's designed to run on Umbral. It's already packaged as a Docker container. So that's definitely one option. Yeah, just use a Docker container. It's also a Rust app, so it's pretty minimal. We could probably just download the binary and run it on NixOS, and it would probably work just fine. You basically just need the little web root folder

with all the static assets and a working binary for your system, and it should work. But neither of those sounded as much fun as... No. Trying to make it first class. Like, what if we wanted to fit into this lovely little Nix Bitcoin ecosystem? And we want to be able to configure some of the parameters.

And again, we want the co-host to be able to run this without having to go, like, set up a Docker container separately. And that turned out to be a lot simpler than I think either of us really hoped for. I mean, just to get started, much like Go and a few other languages, Nix has great support for Rust. You do need to have, like like a cargo.lock file available, but they have a build Rust package function. So you kind of just go in there.

Oh, Nix does. Yeah, totally. Rust platform, build Rust package. Oh, sweet. So here, you know, basically you tell it like, okay, the name is helipad. Here's the version I want, which usually corresponds to like a tag in Git

that you're going to go download. You point it to literally fetch from GitHub, right? Go grab it from the podcast index, grab the helipad repo, and that's about it. We did have to figure out, you know, you got to figure out like what kind of build inputs and native build inputs. I even, I don't know why, but I put in a little work to see that it would work on Darwin as well. Old Mac OS, so that's possible. That's great. It's random. But you know, now essentially the GitHub repo is our package repo, right?

So when they update and they release there, we'll get the new version. Yeah, we will have to do a couple updates because you got to go, you know, there's hashes in here

to make everything reproducible. So you got to go through and when they do a new release, we'll decide, are we ready to update? And then we can update that package to pull in the latest one.

So that worked pretty well and we got ourselves a little binary that was built and runnable. But that's only half the battle, really. Probably not even half the battle, because that just kind of gets us in the next door a helipad executable that we could run. And we tested that, and that was working. But then you're going to also have to go download the web route and statefully stick that somewhere. And that just didn't sound that fun. And you need to get it to start.

Yes. And this was one area where personally I'd had like a little more experience with nix because i've tried packaging a couple things uh myself just for personal projects and so i'd seen like okay you can build the package you got it available for a lot of stuff that's enough yeah yeah what about having a whole gosh darn nix os module right why not because that's how everything's done with nix bitcoin and i think ultimately we'd love i don't know if it upstreams or not but it would be nice for it to take advantage of the NixBitcoin

infrastructure and sort of seamlessly slot in a mix to that. Because we really liked a lot of the patterns that that gave us. So I thought if we could have the exact same thing

for Helipad. And this is something that a lot of other folks who are on their own note are going to want eventually. Yeah. Yeah.

Especially folks interested in value for value and boosts and stuff. So following their convention, so it sort of just slots right in if people are already using NixBitcoin. Yeah. And that was so great because

there are a lot of NixOS modules out there, but a bunch of them are kind of integrated in with Nix packages, and it's just a lot to sort through. I found it super helpful that NixBitcoin is totally open source. I could just go read some of the modules for the apps we were already using and then kind of copy that pattern and be like,

oh, right, that's how they do that. So for instance, right, we've got a, you know, a big array attached to the thing that we're running that's going to store the blockchain and stuff. We wanted to make sure that all the state wasn't going to be on the main OS disk. It was going to be over there. All the other services come with like a data dir option. So you can make sure it goes and points in it. You know, hey, all the app data live over here. Just to emphasize that point, this is what makes it so nice, is in that config that we're setting up, we're setting the data directory in there. So when these applications get set up,

they just are configured out of the box for our data to live where we want. And this stuff is so nice. And when we give it to Brent, he just changes that path to wherever his data directory is. And all of the, you don't have to go configure each application individually right or you could mount your thing to the same full you have a lot of flexibility but anyways i didn't mean to interrupt but i just i want to underscore how freaking nice that is well and it was um it was neat to see how it was done too so a bunch of these they use systemd temp files under the hood which is a sort of facility

for systemd to create temporary files but turns out they actually don't need to be that temporary. So you can create directories. You can also create symlinks. So there was stuff in there that we could set up. So helipad works the same way. It automatically sets up its own storage location wherever you tell it. I got it configured so you can, you know, in Next, you can tell it all the options you want for helipad. And then that spits out your configuration file into the Nextdoor. And and then it symlinked that into the route where this thing's running i mean this is all very mvp we basically got it to the stage of like hey look it looks like it works and you know in our actual node config we could just say like services.helipad.enable equals true surely lots of stuff to improve but it was really fun and i thought it was a nice way to go about learning this stuff in kind of a safe

environment and a slightly simpler environment. Well, and the opposite of a, like, and I don't mean to, like, hate on, like, the free NAS type stuff or the platforms that let you deploy, you know, a bunch of apps from an app store. But what we get with this is we're building it up instead of building it down. And so we're adding individual things that we need as we need them and nothing more. And to me, for something that you want to run reliably, securely for a long time, that's always, always a better way to go. If it's more minimal and you just bolt on as you need stuff,

using a standard way that is totally scalable, it's just going to, I think, going to make for a much, I mean, these basically are set up once and done. It's neat too, because the NixBitcoin stuff, obviously security is fairly important on your node, right? You really don't want folks getting on there or stealing your bag. So there's a bunch of options

in NixBitcoin and stuff that they just use. So like when you're setting up the SystemD service for Helipad or for whatever, there's some neat options in there like read-write paths or read-only paths. And basically you can tell systemd when this service, I'd like it to have this working directory, and then it can only read from these paths and it can only read and write these other paths.

So you can tell it like, okay, you can read from Etsy, you can write to this wonder, and elsewise, you don't get to c-squat. Yeah, that's nice. The one last part about this that was really nice is, you know, we were doing this at the studio on a particular machine here, but I didn't really want to do all the testing and dev on that machine.

You know, there's tail scale, there's access, it's all fine, but I just wanted to play with it a bit on my laptop as I was trying to get the module to work. And I wasn't even using NixOS. I was using KDE Neon at the time because we were getting ready to check out the new Plasma. I installed Nix on there. And then you're able to not only build the whole NixOS module,

but then in the flake, I just added a NixOS configuration that was pulling in the module I was developing. And then from that, it'll just build you a virtual machine image, which it uses the Nix version of QEMU to run right on my Nix. I didn't install any VM stuff. It was just like... Doing this all on top of an Ubuntu base. And then suddenly, I'm in a Nix OS VM,

and I can see, like, oh, did my system disservice render out like I wanted it to? Yeah. So neat. That is so neat. And then once you get it working, you go put it on the box. And then it worked.

It just worked. That's so cool. Yeah, that's the other thing, is you move to a totally different system from that temporary VM system, drop another box, reload, and it worked. It just worked. That's so cool. Yeah, that's the other thing is you move to a totally different system from that temporary VM system. Drop another box, reload, and it works. And you don't even have to bring anything. I basically just pushed it to GitHub and then went on the box in the studio and said, hey, pull in the flake from this GitHub repo and rebuild your system.

Can we just soak in that for a second? Just put it up on GitHub and it reproduces it and it works. Just put it up on Gitapult and it reproduces it and it works. And this is where it just seems inevitable that if you have a mission-critical production app, you're going to want to be able to have this kind of flexibility and prescribed deployment. And as with everything, there's a ton of ways to do this. Obviously, a bunch of this stuff you can do. Sure, there always is. Yeah.

But I think there's something about the power of combining all these things in one system and some of the ergonomics of Nix, like that just built-in virtual machine setup and that you can do it on any system without really installing much besides nix uh really kind of lowered the barrier to entry and i think up the reward a bit now we just have to figure out how to do a full migration but the thing that i've liked about it is we've essentially each week solve something and as we do, we kind of unlock that knowledge and then we can build on top of that. So week one, we weren't installing custom apps. No, we were just getting the darn thing. Is the lightning demon working? Is the thing synced? We don't know. But it's like you solve a problem and you're always moving forward. You can always build on top of what you've done.

Not that that isn't how it typically works, but it really feels concrete. It's like, okay, we've solved this. Now we build on top of that because that's a finished problem, and we can now do this next thing. And then the next week, we solve the next problem. Yeah, and I think it's nice just to understand that, yes, the barrier to entry is high, and maybe you don't need to build your own custom apps, but Alex has been off contributing stuff to Nix packages. Once you get over a couple of those humps, you can really start bringing whatever you want right along with you just like you can with Nix packages, once you get over a couple of those humps, you can really start bringing whatever you

want right along with you just like you can with Nix. Okay, first of all, this is amazing. We've been dreaming about this for like, what, a year or two? So kudos to you guys for doing that and hearing the details of it is awesome. I do have a question about Nix Bitcoin having its own repo. I'm curious about why that is, why the project feels like they have to have their own repo versus just using the standard Nix repo. Is there a particular reason? You know, I'm not really sure, but I think part of it is probably you can just, you know, uncouple the development. Nix packages development seems to go pretty fast and there's, all kinds of reviews and awesome systems, but I think the stuff might be just different enough and they might also have some different sort of defaults

with eyes to security and tour integration and stuff. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, there's some defaults that they change. And I think you're going to see more of this. I think Nix Bitcoin and Nixified AI are kind of the beginning of this, but instead of distros, you know, where we'd see spins of distros in the past that were like a studio distro or whatever, you're going to just see these communities

that build up around Nix and create like the Nix Bitcoin project. And you're going to have Nix, probably maybe already be a Nix studio project. We should look into that. But you know, I think this is going to become like the next wave. Instead of seeing, I hope, maybe this is me projecting,

I hope of mine, but instead of seeing new distros pop up all the time which does feel like it's slowing down you're going to see takes on nix that are kind of like a you know a community that comes together with a very specific goal and they create this and then you just i mean it starts as just a basic nix install and then it became a nix bitcoin install right we just really just added another input to our flake and then turned on some more services. Yeah. And I think that too helps, you know, obviously before you could do all the same stuff, but the Flake integration really takes the costs of having it as its own repo down a lot, I think. So you get the benefits of having it sort of uncoupled, play with it, especially as early development, you know, you don't want to have to, you're making lots of rapid changes and then it's still easy for folks to get it.

I mean, I'd love to see Nick's email. It's this for an email server, right? Nick's image or whatever. Just easy, all these things where the community comes together and they just build this because there's so many ways to solve these problems. And the nice thing about it, these modules being on GitHub, is you can just look at what they're doing and you can adopt some of it or all of it. You could bring it in with the Flink or you could just copy the file right and then have your own module locally until you're ready to do something else but we're all starting from a much better place and you know it's you can see I've been going so much faster but this is kind of what docker is trying to do right but it feels like

maybe this is the new way to solve those problems well here you're going all the way into the application too so not only are you deploying on the actual host but you're going into configuring all the way into the application and it's kind of are you deploying on the actual host, but you're going into configuring all the way into the application. And it's kind of all integrated too. So it's like, you know, one of these services might configure the MySQL, that service that exists in NixOS already. But if you want to then further tweak that,

that's all right in the same area. So you can access that with directly without having to go to some other file. It's all integrated into one holistic config. Collide.com slash unplug. Now, I bet you have heard me talk about Collide before. I think it's kind of a secret weapon. Would have kept me in IT probably for even longer.

But did you hear the good news? Collide's been acquired by 1Password. That's actually pretty big news since these two companies really have a very similar focus in the security industry, solutions that put users first. Now, for over a year, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known secure devices can access their data. They do this with some really cool tooling and a single-pane dashboard for all your machines. And now they're doing it even more with 1Password.

So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now is a great time. Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks too. But of course, you can write your own custom checks as well for just about anything you can think of, including your Linux fleet, all without the requirement of an MDM, the dreaded MDM.

What does a Linux fleet do? Well, you don't need to worry anymore with Collide. Also, you know, really handy, I know, for contractor devices where you can't necessarily just install software on somebody else's computer. And really, every BYOD device, every phone or laptop that happens to roll into your company now, Collide solves that, and now they're doing it with one password.

So go check them out. They're only getting better. Go to collide.com slash unplugged to learn and to watch that demo. It's a great way to support the show too. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Collide.com slash unplugged. Okay. Now I think we come to Chris.

I have some hints at what you've been doing, but actually now I'm starting to question myself. I don't know. So what do you got for us? Yeah, I used you as a tester this morning to just like check, like, do you think this is as cool as I do? Because I think this is really cool. I got to give a shout out to our buddy Alex

who turned me on to this. And it is a portable game console called the RS36S. And it's focused on retro games. You can find it for somewhere between $30, $60, or if you get the full kit, about $85. It is really focused on emulators, so you've got a whole list, you know, everything you could really think of that is of any kind of retro era, and that's great for me. Nintendo, PSP, all those Game Boys, all that is of any kind of retro era um and that's great for me nintendo psp all those game boys all that kind of stuff where it really stands out is its size it's shaped like kind of like a little bit fatter of a game boy and its screen the screen is small but it is a ips oca brilliant

screen it is i'll turn i did not expect that it Somehow, it looks like a Game Boy, so I thought it would just be like a black and white screen. A crappy screen. I know, right? It really seems like it would just be a crappy screen. But it is not. It's only 640x40, but again, when you're playing these ROMs, that's all you really need. It has an ARM 64-bit CPU in here, 1.5 GHz,

so it's, you know, plenty fast for playing these. It has joysticks on it as well, which is really neat. A gigabyte of RAM. And check this out. Dual, this one has dual TF card slots. So I've got two SD cards in here. One is the OS, so you could reflash that.

And one is the ROMs. There's about a thousand ROMs this thing comes with. ROMs that I've never even been able to find online. There's no way this thing's going to be for sale for very long. It's loaded with ROMs. So what's the OS like? The OS is great. So it's called Arc OS, which is based on Ubuntu 19.10. Oh.

Of course it's Linux powered. But I wasn't sure if it was some embedded thing. No, it's Linux. It's Linux, buddy. It's got two USB-C ports on the bottom, one for charging and one for actually getting computer access too, so you can actually get to it. The battery life's fantastic. This morning was the first time I've recharged this thing in like two days.

So it's your Linux device with the best battery at this point. Yeah. Well, I got it so that way you boys wouldn't be fighting in the backseat so I could keep you distracted on our way down the scale. You only got one of them? Well, it's one of them you have to, you know, just look out the window, I guess. You can share it. It's great. It's got a little speaker in there, a little 8-watt capacity, a little 8-watt speaker, so it's not going to do anything. It's not going to blow you away, just look out the window, I guess. You can share it. It's great. It's got a little speaker in there, a little 8-watt

capacity, a little 8-watt speaker, so it's not going to blow you away. But again, for these 8-bit and 32-bit and 16-bit games, it's really not bad. And the Arc OS UI is really fantastic. I was just looking, you can actually, oh, yeah, I'm going to do this live,

but you can actually open up the back and you can take out the battery, it looks like. And you can actually look at that. You could actually. Yep. You could swap the battery. Oh, that's got a removable little lithium battery pack. Looks like eleven point one watt hour battery pack.

That looks pretty standard. Like you could buy something, too. Yeah. Yeah. It's a real standard little three thousand. I didn't save my game. Oh, sorry, Brent. Sorry.

I have read by the community. I don't know if any of the audience out there has had experience, but I've read that the SD cards it comes with are very cheap, and they don't last as long. So you might, if you get this. Maybe get a premium one. Yeah. And you can run it off one SD card if you partition it,

or you can do the dual SD card thing. So did you have to install the OS? Comes with the games and the OS ready to go, and it's got a UI specifically done for arcade. Boots right up, plays the games. It's got great controls. They feel really good. What did you think of the physical controls?

I was really impressed. Like, I picked it up, and I haven't played many of these Game Boy-style consoles, but it just came super naturally for a person who's played, like, Super Nintendo or those kind of controllers. And what stood out for me was the quality of the uh joysticks yeah yeah they're pretty good aren't they yeah i'm gonna put it back together so west can try it and also um what

surprised me was the triggers in the back yeah once you find out that there are triggers back there they were brilliant yeah it's a nice touch and so for the size, like, okay, it's tempting to compare it to a Steam Deck. But for the size of this little thing that you could just shove in your front pocket. You could put it in your front pocket, yeah. It's like brilliant. I was really, really impressed. But it's the screen that stood out the most. It's great if you just want some kill some time travel gaming or something like that.

Oh, the battery might be dead. I just turned it on, but then it turned off. But I don't know if it'll boot. We, the battery, we were playing it this morning and then we didn't charge it much. Uh, so for like a sense of performance and scale, like what, you know, what kind of modern, what's the like emulated system limit that this thing can do? That's a good question. I haven't really pushed it far cause I'm so much of the classics, but it does have a PC game emulator on there, too. It feels faster than the, I hate to say it, my beloved Shield Portable. Because, you know, it's Linux.

It's less than it has to do. It's not Android with, you know, the Play Services and all that kind of stuff. It's USB-C charging, and my Shield is micro. So, you know, that's nice, too, to actually have a USB-C device. I got this one for 80 bucks off amazon but then i went and looked and i found it on alibaba or not aliexpress for i i want to say 60 us greenback oh 48 that's not bad with the games with the games 48 bucks with the games in there and you got yourself seems wrong there's just no way this thing lasts, right?

No way. And I love that it's Linux. So Alex showed it to me. I was like, oh, yeah, it's brilliant, Alex. I'm getting myself one of those. Okay, so it is old man tested, clearly, but has it been kid tested? Yeah, the kids like it. You know, that's the thing is some of those old games hold up. Some of the good ones hold up, like the Mario stuff and all that really does hold up.

Mario Kart's on there, you know. I played Star Fox, Chris, and you picked it up and you're like, oh, wait a second. This looks really good on here. Yeah. Again, the screen quality is so top notch that it gives life to your old games. They're just vibrant. Yeah. My brother has a Wii that has been sort of hacked to have a bunch of these simulators on it.

Yeah. And that's what we rely on every christmas when we spend far too many hours you know playing uh games for 30 hours straight but i have to say the experience on this device was better you think so oh yeah it was felt smoother more reliable like i know on his system uh the inner because you're trying to fight it into like a wii interface is really clumsy but also the emulators like they don't have all the right memory or whatever to allocate it. And so it's it was a clumsy experience compared to

this thing, which the menu to go through the games was just really nice. Yeah, it gives, it's got, it plays a little theme song for like the most popular game from that console and it's completely branded. It's got the Super Famicom in there. It's got the Super Nintendo. So it's even got like the the some of the variations of the consoles that maybe didn't ship in your country

and stuff like that and you can try like a different country's version of the rom they'll have multiple editions of the roms on there and things so they have stuff that as a kid i knew was out there but could never get my hands on too which is kind of a neat thing now but then playing it for like i don't know how long i was playing it because I lost myself, but probably 15, 20 minutes at least, right Chris? I took a long shower. That's what I'll say on air. I just found it super responsive

too. Like I quickly, really quickly, even though I'm not used to this style of gaming console, just kind of got lost in the game. And a game that's actually quite old. And success, I would say. old and uh you know what success i would say well i'm curious to what your thoughts are i was really surprised the amount of controls you know you got your standard d-pad on there you got your snes you know a b y whatever buttons on

there and x or whatever it is and then you've got the the dual 3d joysticks plus the buttons on the back yeah it's all kind of at least in my my opinion, with my hand size, it was all very reachable, all usable. Yeah, I thought that was going to be, when you handed it to me, its biggest downside was ergonomics. That's what I looked at. That's what I thought too. And like, especially I thought, oh, geez, these buttons on the back, the triggers on the back.

You're going to hit them all the time or whatever. It just seems like they're just sort of plunked on there and there's not much thought put to this. Like they're even right angle. Like this isn't going to work. But then I started using it. Once it's in the hand. And I was like,

oh, wait a second. I actually really like this. What do you think, Wes? I want a version of this that has the old cell phone style

flip out keyboard or like slide out keyboard. Yeah, yeah. Because this screen, you can get some like serious remote sysadmin work done on this thing. It's only 640 by 480

but it looks great. Yeah, I mean, there you go. I don't know if anybody's shopping for a device like that, but something you can throw in your front pocket or your laptop bag or something like that, real easy to travel with like we're going to be doing. It just seems like a no-brainer. So again, it's kind of hard to find because it's just called the RS36S Retro Handheld Gaming Console. And yeah, that's it.

Different places I've noticed come with different ROMs potentially too, so look for that. Make sure you get the one I came with. The one I got off Amazon was a little bit more expensive, but it came with kind of a whole kit. So you're saying the one you chose is better? I don't know. Actually, I don't know for sure

because I think you could probably find the one I got for cheaper. I just happen to know mine came with all you know, all the ROMs and stuff. And you're going to want that. There you go. Yeah, put it up to your mic there. Yeah, so that's the system menu. And then if you hit the down arrow, Wes, it'll switch between different emulators. Oh, I was wondering about that.

Okay. Yeah, and then each one plays like a little tune and gives you a little themed menu or whatever. Yeah, it's nice. Oh, Nintendo 64? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I, Nintendo 64? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I know what I'm doing after the show.

Goldeneye? Oh, man. This is brilliant. I think, you know, I haven't bought... I think Bass Hunter 64 is more Brent speed. Hey, no.

No, I just go outside my front door. That's right. I haven't bought a gaming console in like decades. Right. And I am extremely a gaming console in like decades. Right. And I am extremely tempted by this thing, actually.

Now, did you, I assume, but can you add your own, you know, if you have a ROM file? Oh, 100%. Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, I think, what I really like about the dual ROM setup is you can just pop the game ROM out, leave the OS ROM going, and then just pop it back in. So, Texas Linux Fest is, I'll put links, by the way, in the show notes for that. Texas Linux Fest is approaching quickly after scale. Startingly quick.

We had a community member reach out to us and offer to help bring us down to scale. And I'm really excited by this. You mean bring us down to Texas Linux Fest? Oh, Texas Linux Fest. Yeah, sorry. I got everything running together right now. They're Sinaeri Cybersecurity, and they're based out of Texas, and they reached out. Donald is a longtime listener. He's been listening since Linux Action Show with Matt. What?

Wow. Yeah, and he said, we'd love to get you guys down here. So they're going to help get Linux Unplugged down to Texas for the Texas Linux Festival, as they put it. And I think we're going to have a chance to go out to dinner with the Scenery guys and learn what they do and meet them too, so that should be really good. They're also contributing to Texas Linux Fest itself as one of the contributors and sponsors of Texas Linux Fest. Oh, great.

So they're really – you know how these stories go. They say they listen. We help them. I think they give us too much credit, but they wanted to, you know, return the value and send us down there. So you can check them out if you're looking for a cybersecurity company. It's S-C-I-N-A-R-Y.com, Sinary.com. And they're helping us get to Texas Linux Fest. Go say hi to Donald. Really looking forward to that.

We're still working through, like, do we have somewhere for Jupes down there that's near or in Austin? I've gotten a very generous offer outside of Austin, but it's about, I think it's 20 miles. Not sure if that's a great idea for going to a conference every day. So we are looking for a place where we can park

a big old RV for a little bit, if you're listening and have something. And we'd love to get down there early for the eclipse, too. And, you know, it's getting expensive, so if you're listening and have something. And we'd love to get down there early for the eclipse too. And you know, it's getting expensive. So if you haven't booked your travel yet, listeners, do it because the eclipse is raising the rates. Or book after the eclipse.

But it's, yeah. It's not going to be cheap. It's not going to be cheap. And I would imagine you've got to look at that schedule closely because I was looking at flying in a couple of days for the eclipse and the rates just skyrocket. But just think about the barbecue. Think about the barbecue.

And now, as the French say, it is time for Le Bousse. Sure is. And VT52 is coming in once again. And he is our baller at 62,222 sats. our baller at 62,222 sats. And we all, I think, giggled when we saw this first link that he sent in. He says, NixOS on FreeBSD, and he sends us a link. It is a thing.

NixBSD. NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD based on NixOS. You know what? What took him so long? In theory, a lot of this work could be, you and declarable BSD based on NixOS. You know what? What took them so long? In theory, a lot of this work could be, you know, any BSD. So far, it's a FreeBSD focus. They've got a fork of upstream Nix that allows building packages for FreeBSD. There's a fork of Nix packages.

And then there's NixBSD, which is basically the equivalent of NixOS. Seems like a, I mean, a nicely laid out project here. They've got a great readme that kind of talks about, talks about what is this thing and how likely is any of this to ever make it back upstream, which some of it seems like it could. Maybe there's hope. And then he sends 60,000 sass to say if Rust has its own cool

soundbite, then is it perhaps time for Nix and NixOS to have its own? Maybe some ideas like a harmonica riff maybe some chanting monk monks or uh just yelling one of us one of us if you're unfamiliar you can look for that on youtube maybe something else he's looking for suggestions but he says we need a nicks os sound bite something declarative what's a declarative sound bite oh i have a question how'd you come up with the rust one uh well wes hired a intern to run the soundboard

and he brought it in and it was extremely inappropriate but we paid the license so we're keeping it you know so there's always that yeah we fired the soundboard guy and kept all the clips yeah i mean we paid for the clips but we never paid the soundboard guy hybrid sarcasm comes in with 42 000 sets the answer to the ultimate question. From the podcast index, but I'm not seeing a message here. Well, we appreciate that value and support, Hybrid. It's always nice when I see Hybrid check in. At least, you know, we know

he's out there still. You know, if we don't hear from him, we start to worry a little bit. Ensign Nix boosted in a total of 21,222 sats over two boosts. B-O-O-S-T. Using Fountain. Greetings from England.

I'm a long-time listener, first-time booster. Hello. Thank you. Nix unplugged. Oops, Linux unplugged. Okay, we deserve that. It's my favorite technical podcast. So it's about time I support with some sats.

Hey-o. Thank you. Regarding Fountain, I really want to use it with Android Auto, but the experience is not great for me. The tabs along the top show no items for every category. On the rare occasion, as well, my content shows up, but it struggles to play even if the episode has been downloaded. Also, need more characters per boost. Also, need more characters per boost. I can't remember if you've done this before,

but I'd love an episode on how the JB audio infrastructure is set up, specifically how you got such good audio quality from remote participants. And is Reaper doing all that heavy lifting? By the way, I use Borg with Borgmatic for backups and Paperless NGX with Genius Scan on my phone. Chris, you were asking. I'm going to write Genius Scan. That's a new one to me. Yeah, I got to try that.

I'm going to write that down. At NixCon. All right. We have a couple things going on here. So number one, Fountain. Yeah. Android Auto. Not sure about the new items.

That's a new one for me. So I'll report that. I mean, Nick's already seen these. But yes, that's new to me. That's not your experience. No. I was going to say we used it this morning but I actually couldn't

get my USB cable plugged in so I didn't use it this morning just I gave up USB-A is such a bastard but we'll follow up

on that now your question about audio quality and remote hosts I mean honestly we have to give a lot of the credit to Drew

yeah a lot of it goes to Drew we've hired a professional editor who's the best in the biz so you know he's got tooling and techniques that he's developed over the years I swear every time we ask him about it he's found some new better tooling than he's applied to

so the stuff just gets better and we don't have to do any work yeah we've basically we set we try to get good local quality audio and we try to do the best we can but then Drew really comes in and saves the day usually. I joke with him that I call it running it through the wash. When we send it to Drew, we run it through the wash because he just cleans it right up. Really appreciate you following up too on your backup strategies.

If you do have the characters when you boost in to include how you're doing backups these days, we're keeping track of this. And the paperless NGINX and Genius Scan, that could be really, really good. I like that idea a lot. Thank you, Craig. Appreciate the support. Thanks for taking the time to get it all set up, too. I know the initial setup is the tricky spot, but now that you've got it, love to hear from you. I also realized here that this is sort of a postcode boost.

There's a little location included here. Wes, you want to take this one? Oh, I could not pronounce any of that except for the Weston part. Weston Rang. Os Westry. Shropshire. Shropshire. Shropshire.

Shropshire. Shrop. Shropshire. Extra shrop. Shropshire. Yeah, I hope we got that right, Craig. Probably not. Is it even Craig? Is that the pronunciation? Who knows? You know,

I look at these names and I go, gosh, these are so hard to pronounce, but then go take a look at a few names on the Washington state map and try to pronounce those. They're just as wild, you know? You just get used to them. You grow up with them, and they just seem normal to you. Listener Jeff comes in with 2,500 sats. A little bit of a hot

booze right there. Coming in hot with the booze! He says, okay, I'm finally testing out Fountain. Hey-oh,500 sats. A little bit of a hot booze right there. He says, okay, I'm finally testing out Fountain. Hey-oh, there you go. Good job. Now, I know some of you have had issues when importing OPML, because the reason I know this is I was talking to the Fountain team, and I'm like, you know, what are the top issues?

And seriously, one of the top, top problems that people have is OPML because the different podcast apps, they follow the OPML standard, but they implement a little bit differently. So you just have all of these edge cases. I know, I know. But I,

Jeff, let us know how it works when you're, when we're doing the lit stream. You could be our on the boots ground tester. Okay. You're a lit guy. Sounds good to me. Jeff's going to be lit.

Thank you, Jeff. Jordan Bravo comes in with 11,101 sats and says, Ah, this is for you, Brent. I tend to use my keyboard as much as possible when I'm using the computer. I've tried a lot of fancy ergonomic keyboards, but in my opinion, the absolute king,

the king, the king, is the Glove 80, the Morgo. Is it expensive? Absolutely. But nothing else comes close in terms of comfort quality and features. Wireless split ergonomic keyboard. You know...

Ooh, this thing looks cool. Glove is a great name for a keyboard. How have I not, like, thought of that? Whoa. Chris, this would be such an upgrade for you. I know. You were saying just this morning your keyboard's starting to repeat characters and such.

Maybe you need an upgrade. It's like a multi-layer keyboard. I also like this because it probably scares away, you know, anyone else from even trying to use your machine. Yeah, nobody's going to, you don't have to lock your screen anymore. Nobody else is going to try. IT approved.

So what's fascinating about this keyboard to me, the Glove 80, is that it's like, I always forget, but it's concave, or it's like, it looks like a skate park. That is the opposite of what I thought would be an ergonomic setup. I figured, sure enough, you'd go the other way, like a dome over the deck. So I'm loving this exploration of weird and wacky and wonderful keyboards. Are you down for spending $399 US greenbacks?

I mean, what is that even in Canadian? It's too much. Like $500 in Canadian? Yeah, probably. Woo, that's starting to be an expensive keyboard well if you break it down by hour of use oh yeah over time i think you're doing pretty good i mean price per keystroke when's the last time you threw out a keyboard i still never i think it's okay i think it's going to be just fine to spend a little bit you'll use it for for a while. Deleted boost in with 12,345 sets. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. I suspect the reason that the AI episodes don't hit that hard is that the Linux community is filled with people who are extremely independent. That makes them prone to being suspicious of cloud and, yes, AI. Even when done locally, I don't think AI would survive the digital doomsday or a government internet shutdown. I won't speak for everyone, but I'm close to buying an RV and just living off-grid. Hey, is that a shot at me? Is that a shot at me? Or a compliment, I don't know.

But wouldn't you want an all-answering, all-knowing local LLM in that RV to help answer your questions when you're off-grid? Like imagine you hurt yourself or you got some sort of medical problem. Well, they have these LLMs that are specifically trained around medical issues. And I find this to be fascinating. Sure, it might hallucinate a disease that doesn't exist, but you don't know anymore. Or you have to argue that you're not actually seeking medical advice with it for five minutes before it gives you a straight answer. But I actually think there's something to the local. So one of the things I've been using a local, I just been seeing how useful they are. And I tried out using an LLM to help me plan for scale. And I said,

and what I did is I said, we're going to be doing several live shows. There's going to be three of us. We're going to need a mixer. We're going to need microphones. Give me a parts list of everything I need to pack that includes all of the cables and accessories that make all these things work. Quartermaster IT. And it just gave me an itemized list. Okay, you're going to need the XLR cables. You're going to need this cable.

You're going to need the power cable. This thing's a USB-C device. You're going to need a USB-C charger. You might want to bring a battery bank. And, yeah, it's helpful, right? Because I was having a hard time getting my head wrapped around that problem. I didn't need to, you know, did it. Could I have done it without it? Absolutely. But it's a little boost. And when it's local, when it's not sending your data somewhere, the cost to using it suddenly are a lot less. So I think if you are skeptical, I think the point we were trying to make a couple episodes ago is there's utility here that we think is worth your time to learn more about.

Don't stay ignorant to it, but you can do it without having to go live off the teat of a cloud service. And let's maybe show that there are people who are interested in this stuff. So there's motivation out there to keep this developing before it all just turns to SaaS only. Well, user 42138438 with 10,051 Sats kind of says the same thing. I definitely enjoy the episode about local AI, so please keep it coming. Oh, is that quite the same

thing? I think it's slightly different. I don't think the previous booster really enjoyed the episode, but I'm glad to know he did. That is good to get feedback on that. You know, Brent, they also mentioned in this boost that they've been running BcacheFS. Whoa! A little BcacheFS check-in.

Although they say they have to do, like, a manual mount at boot due to some previous limitations, I think, with the VM they're using. I think there's also, I know, you know, BcacheFS does some weird fancy new stuff and not all of the tools support the, like, if you have multiple disks and the way you have to specify that on the command line. But thank you for trying it and reporting back. They have a question for us.

They're looking for a new single board computer that could do maybe even local AI, run some VMs like Windows and Android, perhaps. Could do containers for some of that. And they'd like good Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with USB ports. They've looked at the Orange Pi 5. Powerful but expensive. Might struggle with battery life, Orange Pi 03, Raspberry Pi 02, the GPT Win 4,

powerful but expensive there. They want something that is sort of between a small board computer and an Orange Pi 5 Plus or 03, and you know, something that's made powerful to run a few local services like AI, like local AI workloads. That's an interesting question. I don't know if there's anything besides,

I mean, honestly, local accelerated AI on a small box? Yeah, it sounds like quite a challenge. I think you want a Mac Mini. Maybe I'm wrong. That doesn't always meet the budget requirement. Yeah. Could you do something like an Odroid with a NVIDIA card or something in there

that maybe it's not running at the full slot speed, but you don't need it since you're just doing offloaded compute, I don't know. Maybe somebody could help us in the right direction. I wouldn't mind building something like that myself. One thing you could do is offload your tasks, the AI task service provider that you trust.

Yeah. That just gives you GPU compute or something like that. That way, at least you don't need to have all of that on your single-board computer. That just like gives you GPU compute or something like that. That way at least you don't need to have all of that on your single board computer. That's an option. The idiot you yell at comes in with a row of ducks. Oh, from Breeze. Neat.

Okay, we're being linked to the OSS document scanner, which has been my go-to document scanner since using Graphene OS. Okay. Alright, so hearing from a Drapfine Graphene OS user, very good. It's on Izzy Droid, Google Play, and on GitHub. Updated four days ago. It kind of just looks lean and mean.

This kind of seems like maybe the obvious place to start. Not that Paperless and Genius Scanner wouldn't be really good, but this is just an open-source, on-device document scanning app, which I've been looking for something to take pictures of receipts and whatnot when we're on our scale trip and our Texas Linux Fest trip and we're trying to replace ScanBot. So if you have any recommendations, but this looks really good. OSS-DocumentScanner. Writing that down.

And we'll have a link in the show notes. Yes. Thank you very much for the boost, idiot. And for that link. Appreciate it. Well, Lego feet boosted in 2000 sats. Pew, pew, pew. More fountain feedback.

You seem to be reading boosts I can't see when viewing podcasts. Am I missing something? I'd like to see them all so I can refer to some of them later. Not all the boosts are in the comments thread yet in Fountain, but they will be soon. They are for some of the other shows.

Just a little back-end thing we have to update to get them into Fountain. Then you'll be able to see all of them. Southern Fried Sassafras comes in with 4,444 sats because it is a bunch of ducks. And, you know, we have – look at all these people are reporting. He says he wants a feature added to Fountain podcast season, so I'll write that down. I will – oh, he says, never mind. I figured out a way to solve that.

Okay. Well, there you go. That was easy. He says he did, he says, never mind. I figured out a way to solve that. Okay, well, there you go. That was easy. He says he did enjoy the LLM topic. He says it's pertinent to a future project that he's working on, and he's training a local LLM on the internal knowledge base and documentation. I bet we're going to see a lot more of that. That seems useful,

right? Imagine, and for new employees and stuff coming on board. It makes me think, too, it's kind of applying the same benefits we get from open source software, where you can just use it without having to ask for permission. I mean, you know, ask permission where it makes sense or it's required or all that, but, like, I can imagine you want that functionality. Like, okay, well, now we've got to go get some SaaS, and I've got to get my boss to approve it,

and then the head of IT approves it, and then accounting approves it, and it finally gets authorized, and then two months later, we've got it. Or if you had, you know, the gumption, the know-how, the access to the tools, you could just start doing it and test it out and see if it's even worth doing it. Build it yourself. Awesome. Red5 comes in with a row of ducks. For a document scanner on Android, I use OpenScan.

Okay. All right. I then use Paperless Share to send the scanned document over to Paperless NGX for OCR and safekeeping reference. Paperless Share to kind of bridge them together. I haven't heard of that one. Yeah. Written that down too, you guys.

Thank you very much. We're going to be set. We could each try one of these on our- That's a great idea. Yeah. Chris, would you send me your notes after the episode? Yeah. Okay.

Scan them up. My scribble? Yeah. Well, whatever. Scan them up. We can OCR. Well, Vamax sent us 10,000 Satoshis through Fountain. Thank you.

That's great. Coming in hot with the boost. Here's another one for the Fountain team. I mainly listen to podcasts in the car over Bluetooth. On the Pixel 7, it is maddening when one to two times in about a 30-minute trip, Fountain will simply crash. That is a memory issue on your device, I believe. I think that might be what that is. I was looking at another issue similar to that,

and it could be that your system's running out of RAM. You might have something in the background that's eating it up, because, you know, I have a Pixel 7, and I run it all the time. But running through this process has been very interesting, because you start to see some similar issues in there,

and I think that is a low memory condition. I could be wrong. Would there be benefit to whatever the, you know, going in and saying, like, don't optimize this app for Fountain, perhaps? Oh, yes. That's probably a great idea. I may have done that a long time ago. I could be wrong. Would there be benefit to whatever the, you know, going in and saying like don't optimize this app for Fountain perhaps? Oh, yes. That's probably a great idea. I may have done that a long time ago. I don't know. I am very, very excited

about the future of podcast apps. And I think the Fountain team, you know, they're a small team, but they move quick. No kidding. And they're, you know, they have been in there answering all of these if they can. That's impressive. Directly in Fountain. So that's really great.

So yes, but double check and then follow up and let me know there. Vamax could be some memory management issues there. This is something you definitely run into if you're using Android Auto as well. And then if you use Bluetooth to do the audio portion, all of that consumes a surprising amount of resources. BeardedZero.bin comes in with a lucky 6,666 sets. So that's a bunch of ducks. Quacka quacka, it's a treasure. Yippee!

And he gave us some great feedback on dynamic playlists. He talks about how cool is this? He sets up playlists for like JB specifically, I'm honored. News, family, and exercise. And remember we had another listener who had like the dad pods? Folks are doing stuff I hadn't even thought to do. I just have like a dumb old list of podcasts. I'm like such a basic.

That is such a great, cool, cool way to do it. He says, because it's great. It's like you can listen to the latest NPR and then it'll just play the next BBC episode. Just keep on listening. Because you're in that newsy zone. Right, you're in the news zone. Seems nice, especially if you're doing dishes or chores and you don't want to have to go pull your phone back out

to go switch to whatever's next. Yeah. Well, that kind of plays to what I was saying last episode where I often reach to my podcast when I'm in a particular mood and it's so nice to have these pre-filters. I'm going to give thought to this. You know, also you could have like a road trip playlist. I'll bring it.

Hmm. Just thinking about this. He also said on the topic of local AI, Upscale, that's U-P-S-C-A-Y-L, uses local AI to upscale your images. It does a decent job and it works with AMD and NVIDIA cards. So it looks like this is an app for GNU slash Linux and maybe the Mac. I'm not sure. If we can get the barrier to entry for these lower, that definitely seems like one that

a lot of just regular old computer users could totally use. This would, I don't know if I've installed any AI app via Flatpak yet. This could be the first one. It's on FlatHub. Okay. Upscale. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. I see our booster here asked a little bit about boosts for the members feed, too, which we did a little research into, but it's not solved yet.

We are working on it. It is in the work queue. Yes. Upscale. Upscale looks really – I like that. I've been thinking, guys, just one thing before I move off the Upscale thing. I think we're pretty soon going to see these apps are going to be really really good at upscaling lower res video and stuff like that

and i wonder if we're not going to be able to take some of our maybe some of our really old og cell phone video and run it through a system like this and bring it up to the next level so it looks good on modern displays finally unblur bigfoot maybe maybe actually it's funny you say that there is unblurred AI footage of Bigfoot going around, and it just really kills it. It's such a dude in a suit, it's so awful when you clear it up. That whole

blurriness really adds to the effect. And the shaky. Yeah. Presley Wee, PhD, comes in with $2,669. Hello, and thank you. The most frustrating thing about the call to regulate AI is that they did not care when it was major companies using

exploited data that everyday people were tricked into handing over to train the models. But as soon as the everyday person has the ability to speak truth with satire using those same tools, the hammers begin to come down, proving that our elected representatives don't represent us, the people. Hmm. Yeah down, proving that our elected representatives don't represent

us, the people. Yeah, you might be onto something there. Yeah, because there was lots of, you know, discussion about building these AI tools for a long time, and we never heard anybody screaming about regulation then. But then ChatGPT comes along. Yeah, I think it made it real for a lot of the folks. You know, previously, you're like, well, what is this thing?

We'll see. Yeah, that might be it. It's just it became a real tangible thing. Well, the galactic starfish boosted in 8,996 Satoshis. B-O-O-S-T! Here's three Rosa ducks plus a few ugly ducklings for some sat splits. Regarding fancy fountain features, granular playback speed and silent skipping. I use both on AntennaPod, and it cuts down my listening time to an amount manageable in my life as an avid podcast listener without changing the listening experience drastically. What is granular playback speed?

Is that like 1.23? Yeah. Maybe like a smooth slider instead of just like 1.5 or 1.25 or whatever. Interesting. So you could custom set it to the pod. Right. I mean, different speakers probably are, you know, clearer or less clear at different ratios.

Well, they give an example here. It feels unnatural to me to hear my podcast hosts at 1.25 speed over my usual 1.1 times speed. Yeah. 1.1 times. Is that even worth doing? I guess it is. I guess.

A little bit maybe on aggregate, and then, you know, you cut out the silences. But I have Is that even worth doing? I guess it is. I guess. A little bit. Maybe on aggregate. And then, you know, you cut out the silences. But I have tried that, the silence cutting. And to me, I feel like I get stressed out. I start listening because everybody seems like they're talking really fast. Right. There's no breaks. Calm down. Well, I find, at least for some of the podcasts that I listen to, which are pretty information dense,

I like the time to let my sort of neurons catch up with the information that's coming in. But if that's what it takes for the starfish to listen, I appreciate it. Thank you, Galactic Starfish. I do want to say I was playing around and trying something out on AntennaPod the other day, and I don't know when it happened, but gosh, does AntennaPod look great?

I mean, it feels like a much fancier app than I ever remember it feeling like, and that we have that as a sort of base podcast app on Android is great. Yeah, it is. Yep. And maybe one day they'll get a few more features. I'd love, you know, lid support would be great.

Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks. Well, on the will it nicks, did you guys decide to try out own tracks? You suggested that before. Totally understand if not. I just wanted to follow along on the trip. We have tried own tracks. We did not try to nix it this time. Maybe we'd have time for the Texas Linux trip.

Yeah, there's been too many things in the cooker for this one. Yeah, we've been working on some big stuff. Not only have we been doing the migration setup that we told you about, but Wes has been working, like I said earlier in the show, on, you know, re-plumbing the RSS feed stuff. And so it's just kind of been on the back burner. But maybe. I do think, too, like, you know,

the own track setups we've had in the past, we're also kind of slapdash, and we didn't actually keep them around necessarily. So, like, if we were going to Nix something, having own tracks solidly in Nix would be pretty nice. Yeah. Then we could just deploy it when we need it. Rolled gold comes in with a row of ducks.

After bouncing off the ducks a few times, I decided to just pull the darn trigger and install NixOS. It turns out that reading the comments in the default configuration.nix was the perfect amount of docks and context for me to have that aha moment. I still don't understand

most of the jargon. I mean, yeah, I think we're on that boat too. But I've been swapping desktop environments all afternoon just because I can. It is fun. It's very cool. It's like it was never there. It's like never there. Clean. Just gone. Fresh system. Well, thanks for telling us about your experiences

there, Gold, and good luck. Chime in again sometime in the future when you've played even more. Yeah. Let us know how it goes. Yeah, yeah. I do want updates. Thank you everybody who boosted. It is below the 2,000 satsat cutoff as well. We got all your boosts, and we have read them, and we appreciate it. The total boosts this week, 21 boosters, and we stacked 206,683 sats.

Thank you, everybody, for the support of this production. We love your messages. It's a nice improv moment for us, and your sats are sending us on this road trip to scale. We didn't think it was possible. Pretty incredible. In the past, we would have had a sponsor. We would have had big old agreements. And now we're just doing it with the sats from our audience directly.

And we hope to return you the value. Thank you, everybody. Go grab a new podcast app and try out Fountain or Podverse or something like Castomatic. And now would be a great time because we are going to be rolling out new features for those apps. More things coming, but we're starting with live stream support. And I think that's a big one. And thank you also to all our sat streamers.

You don't always get a direct shout out, but we're monitoring. We watch it on the daily dashboard as it comes in and it's a big part. It actually brings that total up even higher. And so you guys out there, we see you and we really appreciate you. Thank you everybody.

And we also appreciate our members. It's a whole lot of appreciation going along. It's one of my favorite parts of the show. It's really rewarding. Thank you, everybody. Now, the pick this week was almost my topic, but I just started using it and I felt like I needed more time with it to cook.

It's called AnyType and it is going directly after Notion. Are you familiar with Notion at all? Yeah. This is an open source, free alternative that you can use to keep track of your tasks, your ideas, documents, workflow. It's all local. It's end-to-end encrypted, and it uses P2P syncing. So you sync between the applications directly. So no sync service required in theory. Right. And future versions will have collaboration. They don't have that now.

And they use an interesting concept for backup. The entire notebook is generated from a 12-word seed phrase, kind of like a Bitcoin wallet. So when you restore, you restore that seed phrase, and it somehow restores your notes. Like I said got, like I said, I've just started using AnyType, but it's really for anybody that's been tempted by Notion, but doesn't want to, you know, subscribe to Notion or doesn't need what Notion offers. You can find it at anytype.io. And of course they got a client for all the various OSs, obviously, or else I wouldn't tell you about it. And I've really kind of just started to scratch the surface, but I can see the utility in it. I think it could be useful.

I was experimenting with, again, taking notes for the trip, trying to figure out if this would be a way to store that stuff. This looks surprisingly polished already. I mean, I assume it's early days, but, I mean, they've got apps for the mobile platforms, a bunch of stuff on GitHub, a really nice website. I think they pivoted. So I think they were maybe, and again, I'm really new to all this, but I think maybe they were solving another problem, so they had this tech built, and they pivoted to a Notion alternative. So they

kind of had a lot of the lower-level foundation built. And now we have this. Anytype.io if you want to check it out. I've been enjoying it. Again, only been using it for a few days, but I've liked it a lot. That's it for us, though. If you'd like to support the show directly, you can become a member.

We have it linked at linuxunplugged.com slash membership, or you'll find the link up there. You get an ad-free version of the show, or you get the bootleg, which is clocking in right now at three hours and 24-ish minutes. That's a big show, lots of content there.

We all get together and try to put something special for our members. Who needs a playlist when you've got one giant show? Yeah. You only need one show a week. It's the bootleg version. You just hang out with us for even longer, right? Hey, if we're going to see you at scale, come up and say hi. Don't be shy and don't forget about our lunch.

We'd love to see you there. It's just all coming up. I'm going to bring the RS 36S or whatever it is with us. We'll bring the Tuxedo machine. We'll try the Tuxedo on the road too. Get some on the road testing. We'll come back with a review for that. A lot coming up still. So much to do. And of course

our coverage of NixCon. The first. Very excited about that. Very excited about that. So we will be live. We'll be live either from the I don't know, the scale floor or from our Airbnb. I don't know where we're going to be live, but we'll be live next Sunday. And, of course, throughout the week, we have all the times at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station.

And, of course, links to what we talked about today, that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 553. And a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, including that fantastic self-hosted podcast, the Coder Radio podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. If we don't see you at scale, don't worry, friends. We'll be here next week in the RSS feed. Next week will be Tuesday, as in Sunday. Yeah, some sort of animal time, right? 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.