LINUX Unplugged - 590: Self-Host Before You're Toast

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Two years ago, we took a small step toward digital privacy. Today, we're rethinking everything about our online lives, and we'll give you the tools to do the same.Sponsored By:Black Friday Member Sale: 30% Off for the lifetime of your Membership! Code: blackfriday Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMSyncthing — Open Source Continuous File Synchronization2024 Tuxies.Party — New category based on your feedback, and we've cleared out the hall of fame, all distros and desktops up for a vote!BlueBubblesDavx5Location | Home Assistant Companion DocsGarmin Forerunner 265Obtainium: Get Android app updates straight from the source.OSS-DocumentScanner: Android document document scanning appSimple Mobile ToolsSimple-Calendar2FAS - the Internet's favorite open-source authenticatorFUTO KeyboardReleases · futo-org/android-keyboardstreamyfin: A Jellyfin client build with ExpoTubular: A fork of NewPipe that implements SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike.Fossify - fork of SimpleMobileToolsSoundcore Motion 300 by AnkerLubeLoggerSelf-Hosted 127: Can't Fix What You Don't TrackMealie.io — Self-hosted Recpie ManagmentSelf-Hosted 135: Rebuilding For the Last Timepinchflat: Your next YouTube media managerSelf-Hosted 134: YouTube UnpluggedEmbrace Alby Hub - phasing out Alby’s shared wallet | Alby User Guide — In the beginning of 2024, we shared our vision in "Where Does Alby Fly From Here". Since then we launched Alby Hub, your self-custodial wallet accessible from anywhere to integrate with dozens of apps. We’ve also launched Alby Go - the easiest-to-use mobile app to connect your Alby Hub and use your sats on the go.Wes' half-finished Alby Hub FlakeAlby Go — The easiest mobile app to use bitcoin on the Go and that works great with Alby Hub.Alby Go - Apps on Google PlayBreez App — The Breez mobile app is a favorite of Lightning wizards and rookies alike. With a non-custodial Lightning node running on your mobile device, digital cash register, podcast player, and its own marketplace, the app delivers a standard-setting UX with 100% bitcoin DNA under the hood.Membership Black Friday Sale 30% offAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!turboscribe.aiDiscount Bandit — Self Hosted product tracker for Amazon, Walmart And many moreDiscount-Bandit on GitHubDiscount-Bandit docker-compose.yamlFountain on X — Music discovery isn’t what it used to be. Fountain Radio makes it fun again. Wave goodbye to algorithmic playlists and say hello to a new communal listening experience powered by Bitcoin and Nostr. Fountain Radio is live in version 1.1.8 now. Here's how it works 👇

I'm looking at this list of tools we're going to cover today, and there's some really, really good ones on here. But I can't help notice one thing is missing, and I feel like this show has a blind spot when it comes to SyncThing. I mean, I guess it's my bad. SyncThing is the goat of file synchronization. It's been around for years. I mean, I've literally used it on and off for ages,

but I've used it daily for at least three years straight. And it is just rock solid at this point. I was doing some backups, tearing down some old VPSs I sort of left around cluttered from old projects. And what did I find running on one? Sync thing? Sync thing. Heck yeah.

Yeah. It'd been up for six years. I think back in the day I'd used it to sync photos from my Nexus phone. Oh, wow. Yeah. I like, so on their GitHub, the project has seven goals. But I think the first two just say all you need to know. Number one, protecting the user's data is paramount.

We take every reasonable precaution to avoid corrupting the user's data files. Number two, again, protecting the user's data is paramount. Regardless of our other goals, we must never allow user data to be susceptible to eavesdropping or modification by unauthorized parties. I like that. So shout out to Sync Thing, who's just been quietly moving my data around for three years without a hitch. Bitch! Well, hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Today, we're going to talk about a journey that started two years ago right here on this show, which has led us to basically rethink everything in our online lives. If you're curious what's changed, stay tuned because we're going to get into that and then just a suite of tools that we've ended up using as a result. And then later, we'll talk about a way to do self-hosted boosting. Of course, we have some great picks and those boosts that we'll get to and so much more. So before we go any further, I want to take a moment and give a shout out to our

awesome virtual lug. Hello Mumble Room. Time appropriate greetings. Hello. Nice to see you all in there. In the on-air and in the quiet listening. Thank you very much for joining us. And of course a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged.

Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are. You got a VPS, you got a VM, you got a container, you got a mobile device. I don't care. Put them all on a flat network protected by a Wago. That's right. Tailscale does it for you, and it does it really quick. Go say good morning and try it out for free on 100 devices and three users.

Not a limited time thing. It's the plan I'm on. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Well, it's here. It is that time of year. The unplugged tuxes are out for vote right now.

Do your duty, please. The 2024 tuxes, they need your votes. There's more questions than ever. We collected all of your feedback. We've cleared out the Hall of Fame. So all distros and desktop environments are up for a vote. We have entirely new categories

as suggested by you. And we have only a couple of days to get it all in. So head on over to tuxes.party. Fill out the form and participate

in the community selection of the best, top, and excellent projects, desktops, environments, servers, and more for 2024. Yeah, we only have 26 responses so far, and that's not going to cut it. Wow. What kind of stats can we do with that?

26 before we even made it public, though. It's kind of not bad. Right. Well, we do have a very talented audience. That's pretty great. So, tuxes.party, it is available for voting right now. Then join us live December 22nd for our last two episodes of the year. And yes, one of them, in fact, will be the Tuxes. Between the two live shows, we'll be taking some time to blast some sats to our live streamers to help them get their podcasting 2-0-0 wallet set up. time to blast some sats to our live streamers to help them get their podcasting 2.0 wallet set up. So go grab yourself

Fountain or another app and get ready because we'll send you some sats to help you get started with boosting. And if you're looking at doing it self-hosted with AlbieHub, and we'll have more on that later, we may even be opening a few channels to folks to help with their liquidity and stuff because it's a lot of fun to play around with this from a self-hosted standpoint, and we're all

about being sovereign with that stuff. So we'll have that all coming up on December 22nd. So go get your votes in now, tuxes.party. Also, I just wanted to say, some folks in the Matrix were asking us to confirm the date for episode 600, and so I can say that will be February 2nd, Sunday, February 2nd. So if folks are thinking about having a get-together or whatnot, that's the data planner.

Yep, yep. And I think we'll have more on the get-together stuff soon once we get through the tuxes. Oh, yeah, and a quick shout-out because we had a great website contribution from Teresa24 who added support to our website for showing when an episode has custom splits in it. So right there on the page, you can see who's getting what.

We're a big fan of making all that as transparent as possible. So thank you so much. Also, just a round of applause to the website team. Yeah. It's just a couple of dedicated contributors, a handful of folks, really, that make the Jupiter Broadcasting website hum, add the new episodes, make sure everything looks good,

and add new features. We love those guys. So thank you very much. And then I don't know if this is the right way to phrase this, but as we get to our last couple of episodes of the year, I have a question I would like you to answer via boost. And that is what is the biggest thing happening in Linux right now? I saw a thread on our Linux and it was complaining about how all distros are the same. And there's nothing really that interesting between the different distros once you remove package management. And then I saw somebody else going on about open source AI and what an incredible innovation that is, but it doesn't really feel like a Linux innovation. So boost it and tell me what, in your opinion, is the biggest meta story

happening in Linux in 2024. It'll probably be relevant for our year end episode. So we'd love to hear your opinion on that. So that's everything. The Tuxes.party, the Tuxes on December 22nd. We have the best website team in the world. And we're looking for the biggest meta story in Linux right now. So this episode marks two years with Graphene OS for all of us. And I just thought we'd take a moment to talk about some of the things that actually made transitioning for me from iOS

to Graphene OS possible. Also reflect on just two years of using a non-stock Android OS, and if we miss any of the stock features. And then I can't help but note that this week, the United States Justice Department recommended that Android be split away from Google, along with Chrome and other things. And as a Graphene OS user, I find myself totally unfazed by that news. I've kind of already picked my lane, and it seems unaffected. So I'm curious, and Brent, I'll start with you. If you miss anything about stock OS, Android, perhaps when you're out socializing and you see folks with stock phones

that maybe have features, or some of the stock apps that I know you've given up on for the most part, like Google Maps, two years into this journey-ish for you, is there things that you're thinking, gosh, if I just had stock Android on this thing, XYZ would be a little easier? That's a great question because I've been doing this for so long, I think I don't realize what I'm missing out on. So I'm going to go with, no no i'm pretty darn happy i feel like a graphene oh excuse me a giraffeen os is really just giving me a bunch more over vanilla android that's how i feel pretty much every single day so i don't really feel like i'm missing out what about you mr crusher i've been thinking about this, and I think there are some things where graphene feels like just a little too locked down. Or I would like a few more escape hatches.

I think you've made some decisions in particular with your fancy-dancy watch over there that maybe help with this. But, like, I was pretty used to stock Android has a lot of options around, like, location unlock or, you you know, like various things to make it so you just don't have to constantly unlock your phone. I miss that. And there probably are some more options from you done. But just looking around the settings, I haven't found anything super easy, which I could be missing. I haven't tried super hard. But I'm reflecting on that like that or I've tried some things, but I was never super happy with the Google Assistant. But having a little better default, be able to just yell at my phone to like pause the music or something.

That is nice. That would be nice. I miss that. I have solved for that because I have playback controls on the watch. Right. But I do feel what you're saying there a little bit because I think for me, this would be a lot harder if I couldn't use the cache app. And I know you haven't been able to use the cache app because of like Play Protect APIs.

Yeah. Which I guess they just weren't using when I installed the cache app like a month before you did. Strange. And, you know, my kids use the cache app, so that's how I... Ah, yeah, right. So it would be for me, it would be really, really hard. And I know Android users kind of laugh at this, but I miss Face ID. Face

ID is really nice because you just pick up your phone and look at it and it unlocks. I mean... It's so surprising that they've never bothered to... Is it just a patent issue? I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I suppose. But, I mean, Microsoft has their hello thing, right? So... I thought this year would be the hardest

year to be on Graphene OS because all of the AI stuff that's coming out, like, if there was any... If these companies had managed to launch any killer, killer AI feature, I would have felt left out because that's going to be built into their proprietary apps

and we don't have access to that. But there's not really anything that they've announced that I'm like, oh, I have to have that. And, you know, things like image generation or text prompt summary, I can do that with any LLM. I don't need one built into the OS.

Right. Yeah. You can get pretty far with all the cart stuff. And Graphene makes me appreciate those tools that let you just use it wherever. I think one of the things I also have really appreciated is that Google's applications are at the same level as all other apps on the phone. Google's apps have no – like the Play Store has to ask my permission to install an app. It's so refreshing. It's nice. And that's how it should be.

But there's been, for me, there were things along the way that just as I thought I was going to have to bail and go back to iOS, GrapheneOS sort of perfectly solved, or the ecosystem around it. And I'll admit, Android Auto on GrapheneOS was a big one for me. I really like having

Android Auto. And Blue Bubbles, so I could communicate with family members on iMessage, was a game changer for me. And DAVX5 that lets me sync my card and CalDAV and all that stuff to NextCloud was massive. And then, you know, things like replacing Find My are kind of solved by Home Assistant because Home Assistant has a bunch of location stuff. And then like Wes said, tap-to-pay and playback controls remotely were solved by my getting a Garmin Forerunner 265 smartwatch, which has been great. And that kind of filled out the ecosystem and sort of at each point was like, oh, oh, I've just solved this just in time.

And then, of course, all credit to Brent for really bringing up Obtanium on the show. No kidding. Took you guys months to jump on that train. Yeah, and because I thought F-Droid was sufficient, you know, I was like, because part of this whole catalyst was Apple's stupid behavior around their app store combined with Google being super creepy and narking on a dad who was doing telemedicine.

And you combine those two things. I'm like, I don't want any of this. And Obtanium is truly the tool that lets me have a completely App Store accountless app management system. I just add the release page on GitHub for the apps that I use and Obtainium just watches for updates. That is a great point. I mean, there's lots of other reasons I appreciate it,

but just thinking... No account. No account. Compared to how hard and frustrating it is to use an Apple device if you don't sign in to their account system. Radically different. Yeah. And F-Droid's great, but not everything's there. And sometimes there's like a week long, like a four or five, six, seven day lag before it shows up on F-Droid. But you know where it shows up instantly? The GitHub release page. It's kind of similar in a way to like traditional repos and flatbacks, right?

Like for some apps, you want that direct connection. They update frequently. You want them or they don't work in the market for whatever you're in the app store. And sometimes you're fine letting your distro package maintainer get to it eventually and get it in your repo. There's some apps that just doesn't matter. They don't update that much. Who cares? You got it.

So Obtanium really was sort of like one of those, ah, this is my device. And then I also still use F-Droid, too, of course. But I really, Obtainium is so great. So, Brent was right. Brent was right. For once. I've also been searching for something that will just scan documents and give me a PDF. And there's like ScanBot and all these other things that just do all this other crap.

And they're all trying to inject AI. Watch an ad, then you can save your PDF. So I came across OSS Document Scanner. And it's just a bare bones. It tries to detect the shape of the paper you're taking a picture of. And then it gives you some filter options. And then you can export it as a PDF. It's OSS Document Scanner.

And it's just one of those things. In fact, there's a lot of tools like this. There's a simple mobile tools shop that makes things like Simple Calendar and other apps that are just really basic, no account required, open source apps to do a job. And these things like that, they don't exist on iOS. I have a little tip for you on this one. So I've been using these simple tools for a while, but I think they have been recently replaced by

or forked by a different project who's taking on this role. So look out for Fossify, which is basically the same tools, but just better. New owner or new project. Yeah, new project. Simple Mobile Tools has a new owner. which is basically the same tools, but just better. New owner or new project. Yeah, new project. Simple Mobile Tools has a new owner. But it's been working great.

Like Simple Calendar, what's fantastic about it is I use DavX 5 to sync to NextCloud, and then I use Simple Calendar to manage my calendar, and everything I change in there syncs to NextCloud. Very nice. It's wonderful. I know you boys also are a big fan of the Fudo keyboard, F-U-T-O keyboard. Yeah, although I don't know if it's just me. It feels like lately it's been a little worse.

Really? I don't know. It could just be me. Worse how? Just in its keyboardness. I don't know, in the autocomplete, the text prediction. I think it does train itself on your texting over time. You need to be tapping the correct suggestions in order to train it.

Yeah. I've just, maybe I've just been paying more attention. I thought it was definitely a painful first week switching to it. I thought that I'd gotten pretty used to it, but looking more closely at it, I'm just like, it's frequently changing words that I do not need it to change. And I don't think the Google keyboard does change. I agree. I run into more of that. I am very happy with the

voice dictation. Yes. It's not perfect, but it gets way... And it's on device. So the combination of the keyboard not being that great for me and the on-device dictation being pretty solid is I'm doing that a lot more. I do too. Which, I just have given up. You've probably noticed in some of my messages. I've just, like, I don't know why

I can't spell Linux. And I've have given up. You've probably noticed in some of my messages. I've just, like, I don't know why I can't spell Linux, and I've just given up. It's funny when it gets a very niche technical term perfectly and then messes up another one. Yeah, yeah. But still, to have something that's not constantly reporting back to Google and is pretty good, I like it. So I'm keeping it. Fudo Keyboard, F-U-T-O.

And then also Streamyfin, which is a Jellyfin client that is really nice, and I really like it. And then last but not least, to get away from YouTube but still get access to YouTube, Tubular, which is a fork of Newpipe that implements SponsorBlock and

Return YouTube Dislike. So you can see the dislike button again. Yeah. It does make me reflect, besides the Cash App stuff, none of my other, you know, when I started, I was kind of worried like,

would, you know, some of my apps kind of support come out from under me as I invest in this platform. But that does not happen. By and large, pretty much anything besides the Tap to Pay stuff,

pretty much anything I need to do, the app that I need is there. Tap-to-pay is nice. I am having a weird problem where I can't use my flashlight. Oh, yeah. Really? But besides that. Yeah, I do not have that one.

Brian, do you have any flashlight problems? No, I just used mine late last night around the fire, so all is good here. Camera works otherwise just fine that is strange that is really strange i did restore this from a previous phone that i think was also having that issue so i don't know if it's some like weird app permission thing that i've messed up in somewhere between the system permissions and app permissions um i should probably try a stock you you wouldn't play with that stuff a stock reinstallall. Let's see what I get. So all our experiences are based on the Pixel 7. And the Pixel 7, the non-pro on Swappa.com, is $185 right now.

Oh, wow. Wow. And we're all perfectly happy with this phone. And we're not planning to upgrade anytime soon. So you can get a perfectly serviceable graphing OS phone for $185. And the Pro is $220 on Swappa.

And be sure you're getting unlocked. You know. And something doesn't have the bootloader locked up. But that's amazing. The fact that the Pixel 7 goes for $185 is just bonkers. At that price,

it feels like I should get another one. I know, a backup one. Yeah. My major complaint, I mean, it gets a little hot and a little slow. I mean, I will eventually upgrade one day, probably when the Pixel 10 comes out. But I don't love the sound out of it. I don't think it has the best speakers. In fact, I would argue that the iPhone 13 and 14 and 15 have much, much, much superior speakers than the Pixel 7.

Agreed. So I picked up the Anker Soundcore Motion 300 Bluetooth speaker. It's got pretty good sound. It's got great volume. But why I'm recommending this is because if you install their little app, which you don't have to, recommending this is because if you install their little app, which you don't have to, but if you install their little app and control it over Bluetooth, you can turn off all on and off sounds on the speaker and all lights. And this is a Chris Fisher promise, right?

This thing's not going to just start chirping at me all of a sudden. No, I use this every night. This is what I use to listen to an audio book at night. And it took me a long time to find a Bluetooth speaker that didn't make a chime when it turns on or turns off or doesn't have like an obnoxious blue light, which is the opposite of what I want at night. And so the Soundcore Motion 300 by Anker lets you use their app to turn off that kind of stuff. And so it's a wonderful audio book. And it also is just a great companion with the pixel and the battery lasts forever i mean i probably use it for almost an hour each night or half hour 45 minutes and i've charged

it once and let's see when did i buy it i've had it for probably a couple of months so you know anchor makes i think anchor bought this company but they make good stuff so i bought this speaker on october 18th and i've charged it twice and today is november 24th it's pretty good consider i use it i literally use it every single night. So yeah, I like it a lot and it just solves the sound problem. Yeah, I end up with headphones a lot of time for the same thing. I do think it's fine. Like if I'm just like laying in bed and I want the phone next to me playing like an

audiobook to fall asleep to or something, it's totally serviceable for that. But yeah, you know, anything where you need quality or for like a song that you like, a speaker is definitely helpful. Even vocals, for me, after a while, seem a little harsh on the built-in Pixel speakers. Yeah, if they're not EQ'd nicely, especially in the high end, that can be rough. Yeah, and there are apps that let you re-EQ and stuff, and it does help, but it's still not as good.

Apple is just really good with sound, but I really like the Soundcore. So this has started a trajectory over the last two years that has really accelerated and been quite documented on the Self-Hosted podcast about just really building a self-sovereign stack and reducing the cloud footprint, kind of getting control over data, what people have, what you're using daily, and maybe taking a little bit of craftsmanship along the way. So not only are you sort of taking control back, but you really are kind of proud and enjoy what you've built at the end of it. It's not just something you slap together as a cheap alternative. And Brent, and he just talked about this on the self-hosted podcast, recently put together a NAS. And it's been something he's been planning for a really long time. And it is a big part of the step of taking stuff off of cloud services and bringing it onto his land. So Brent, let's start with your motivation here. Why put the effort into building a NAS after all these years of not having one or maybe not having an official one?

Yeah, I know you boys helped me do this and that question never even really came up because i think we understand it but i did get asked this question after we built it by a friend of ours to like well why are you bothering with all this work like it's so much work why would you even put yourself through that i think it comes down to the reason i got into linux in the first place to be be honest. It's like taking control of all of my information that I find really important. That includes the privacy topic, but also just skill acquisition of things that I find interesting. So just through building this NAS, now I'm playing with Butterfest in ways that I haven't played with it before and about to learn a bunch of new skills around hosting a bunch of different applications on the same box. And all of that

stuff is exactly the reason that I can't keep myself away from Linux is just learning skill acquisition and just curiosity, really. But the biggest one, because you can get some of that through running your own VPS and those kind of things. But the biggest one, I think, is the privacy aspect. You know, VPS, you still have to trust somebody.

And I don't know how I feel about that one. But also, I think there's an investment portion here, both monetary and from a skills point of view. Okay, monetary makes sense, right? Because you don't have to pay for a service that you're renting per month. You're investing in relatively fixed costs that you keep over time.

Okay, but what's the other part? Well, I think the other part is one with skills. Well, I think the other part is one with skills. If I am continuously pushing what this box can do based on all the tools that we keep servicing on these shows here, then I feel like that's a huge investment in my own skill sets. We should be clear maybe though. I don't wonder, cause you touched on this in the self hosted episode that you don't necessarily mean like a lot of folks, I think do some of this home lab stuff for work reasons, you know, like I'm going to build this out and then I can talk about it on my resume and talk about the project and the interview and all that,

which is great, but that's not, you want these skills just to serve you in your personal life, right? Oh, that's a, yeah, that's a good question.

I think that is true. I think the main motivator is my inherent distrust of larger corporations and what they're doing with our information. I think there are, there's more than a couple examples of them just doing whatever they want with our information. I know we can encrypt things these days,

but why not take it further? So that, that was my main motivation i know it comes with a bunch of pain points like for instance the power went out here yesterday all day because of all the snow and so there goes my infrastructure uh turns out my nasa's down because my ups is also broken so you take on all of these like yeah when things down, it's nobody else's fault but mine, right? It's like a different type of risk. You have the counterparty risk of a cloud provider, or you have the risk of just, you know, natural infrastructure issues in a home. It's so true.

They're not a data center. You poured soup on what? Yeah. time and Chris you'll understand this uh one of the main motivations for me in the last couple of years for self-hosting what I can is just unreliable internet I mean I live in the middle of nowhere and that has gotten far better now that I have Starlink but it's still I don't know I guess I've been trained to want to keep everything as local as possible yeah it's a huge motivator for me too yeah and even then because when your internet connection is up, then there's just less traffic on it. So it's, you know, whatever you want to use it for. Unless you're Wes and you got a gigabit. Speaking of you, Wes, I know you've been contemplating setting up a home assistant pretty soon. And I'm just kind of curious why now?

And have you reached some sort of threshold? Is it you're about to start investing in smart stuff? Like, why is 2024, maybe early 2025, the year of home assistant for Westpain? Yeah, it's kind of a confluence of factors. I've had home assistants before. I think I started, we looked at it years and years and years ago on the show. And we did a roundup of a couple of the options at that time. And I had a server that lasted a few years from that, but I happened to move a lot in the last, I don't know, decade of my life. So that's made me very conscious of what infrastructure and stuff I invest in. Cause I just, I got to drag it with me and each place is different. I've also lived in a lot of like studio or loft or like sort of similar situations where it's generally one or two big rooms and not a lot of separate spaces that need individual attention. So it hasn't been hard to like change the temperature in the one room that I'm in. I turn on a couple of lights. Yeah. But I haven't actually moved in the last

couple of years and I'm not, I mean, I will move again for sure, but I'm not planning an immediate move. And I did buy at least some more stuff. And I think the project, you know, I've watched your installation over the years and I've seen it move really fast and change a lot of things. And I've seen you have to migrate off old versions of plugins and redo dashboards. So I've kind of been balancing the amount of things that I needed. I very much like automation, but the amount of stuff I had to have is moving parts to have a functional operation. And I think I'm crossing the point now with enough stability that it makes sense to invest. I feel like we would have a similar conversation

if you came to me and said, Chris, I think I'm ready to become a dad. I'm like, Wes, your life is going to change so much for the better. You're not going to believe how much better your life is going to be once you have a home assistant. It's so great, Wes. Well, now I want one.

Life-changing. Life-changing great. Because it starts small and you're like, oh, that's nice. Like for me, the nice thing was is, you know, I had LIFX. I had Hughes. I had TP-Link. I had like a couple of different vendors. You know, when you get to like three or four apps, that is a pain in the neck. And Home Assistant just brought it all together, and that was for me, that was, oh, this is really nice. Now it literally runs my home and it is so nice

because it adjusts with my home and for the time of year. And it just solves for things that I don't even have to think about anymore. And it's really, really, really great. And then, of course, I have all this remote access. Even when I'm traveling, I can check in on things. And I really love that. So home assistant is one of those, it starts as a baby and it's like, oh yeah, life's a little different now. And then by the time it's in its teenage years, it has completely fundamentally changed your life. And I'm really much in this refinement stage now where I'm just kind of like adding, like, let's see if I can do this thing. And it's, Oh,

it's so rewarding. Really fun. Even if you only have a few smart lights and a couple of smart plugs. I also think, you know, I've just never been a huge fan of running appliance things. So I was always a little sketched out by that. And so now that you can get by with some of the next stuff,

I'm, I'm more interested as well. Totally. So for me, I was like, well, I'd like to have this self-hosted now. I'd like to have this self-hosted and I'd like to have this self-hosted. And it really became a journey, which I will put links where I go into a lot of details in individual self-hosted episodes. I will put links where I go into a lot of details in individual self-hosted episodes. And in no particular order, but an example of this is I think this is all part of a broader mentality of just being more capable in general and not reliant on third parties. And along with this for the last few years, I've been very slowly just learning the basics of car maintenance and work like that. So I could save money, develop a skill set. It seems like maybe there's a diminishing skill set in the marketplace.

So if I could increase my skill set while the marketplace is decreasing its overall skill set, by the time the marketplace is sort of a crap show, maybe I know what I'm doing. And so I have deployed, I've talked about this in self-hosted 127, LubeLogger, and it is a self-maintenance and cost analysis tool that I run for my several vehicles and my RV to just keep track of maintenance and repairs and overall costs of these vehicles. And then you can generate reports if I ever were to go sell one of them.

I could produce a report of all of the maintenance at the miles, the individual costs, and all of that. Really nice little simple app. It's called LubeLogger, lubelogger.com. And it's in this category that I have of something I was considering a cloud service for, and I instead went the direction of self-hosting. Mealy is also in this category. I talked about this in self-hosted 135, mealie.io.

It's a self-hosted recipe management. They just recently introduced multi-home support, and they have a very, very good import system, so you can just give it a URL of a recipe and it'll parse it. It'll break everything out, individual steps and individual ingredients and tags, import imagery if there is any. Multi-user, of course. And again, it's very simple to set up. It's great. This time of year, we're about to do Thanksgiving next week. We make these things once a year. It's nice to be able to go look that stuff up. We could have used a cloud service. I could have used an app that's on one of our phones.

But Melee gives you a progressive web app. I just created a bookmark on my wife's launcher. I think this is one that's added to my household, that's for sure. You're going to love it. You're going to love it. And it's just so clean. And this is an example, oh yeah, I was going to do a cloud service for that. And then I've talked about YouTube. I don't like constantly providing a lot of data to YouTube. I think the YouTube experience is on a downward decline.

It so is. I still use the app sometimes. Now it crashes and loses my history. Oh, the random times it doesn't, like, it seems to always have my history except for the one time I want to go look at my history and find the video. Right. Drives me nuts.

The other problem is, because YouTube is such a hostile platform to creators, there are channels that give me guides, like, on something. Like, I had this channel. It was all about working on my particular model of RV. And the videos were from 2015. And the guy's account either got shut down or he closed his account or whatever. And all of the videos disappeared. Yeah. Nobody else is because it's a 2014 model.

Nobody else is making those videos anymore. It's a poor archive of record if that's what we're trying to treat it as. That's where we've talked about it once before on the show. Pinch Flat comes in. Pinch Flat. So great. It's a YouTube media manager that will save a YouTube channel and their videos

to your local system, and it'll grab all their metadata. So it'll create like an NFO file or whatever you need with the description. It'll grab the thumbnail. And then you can bring that into Jellyfin. And Jellyfin will read that NFO file as a media data source. And in Jellyfin, they look like every other media file,

like a movie or a TV show, with thumbnails and descriptions and all of the metadata information. And you can archive stuff forever that way. So any video that's like, this is how I repair this thing that I own, or this is how I build this thing that I have to build once a year, I put that channel into Pinch Flat.

And every time that YouTuber posts a video, it automatically saves it to my system. And you can also set parameters around length of retention. So maybe you want to put a YouTuber in there who posts often. Maybe your kids love Mr. Beast. And so you want to let them watch Mr. Beast, but you don't want to give them all of YouTube. Well, you could tell Pinch Flat, download every Mr. Beast video, but delete them after 30 days or delete them after 90 days or whatever you want.

It's really, really awesome. And I talk about more detail about how I use it in self-hosted 1.3.4 for that. It's a good app. Yeah, this one's so good that I'm working on making a flake for it. There's so many more that have been great alternatives to cloud services.

I think it's nice, just from the sense, too, that, I mean, you know, some of these cloud services are really nice, but there's so many talented folks in the open source community, and a, you know, some of these cloud services are really nice, but there's so many talented folks in the open source community. And a lot of these apps are kind of just like, you need a relatively simple database schema, you need a UI, maybe you need an app

or a progressive web app or something. And, you know, it just needs to expose that. And there's a lot of people who can do that. And when we can highlight them and kind of, you know, build community around them and prop them up and help them enable them to solve that problem, we're building stuff that we can do that. And when we can highlight them and kind of, you know, build community around them and prop them up and help them, enable them to solve that problem, we're building stuff

that we can all use. I will say, there's one more I'm going to wait to talk about. Oh, you sneaky devil. It's a really great app and it is extremely time appropriate for this very particular time of year.

But I'm going to save it for the pick segment. That's how I do. this very particular time of year. But I'm going to save it for the pick segment. That's how I do. 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number 1password.com slash unplugged.

I have a question for you, and I know how you probably are going to answer, but I have to ask, do all of your end users, and I mean always without exception, only use company-owned devices, applications, cloud services, etc. I don't think so. I mean, in today's world, that's like herding cats. They've got their own devices.

There's every cloud service getting advertised at them. Your employees have their own phones, their own laptops. They probably even have their own voice assistant in their house, which will answer their questions. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all these unmanaged devices using all these unmanaged apps? And this is your job after all. Well, 1Password has the answer to this question. It's extended access management.

1Password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the problems the traditional IAMs and MDMs don't touch. It's security for the reality. It's security for the way we work today. And it's generally available with companies that got Okta or Microsoft Entra. And if you're a Google Workspace customer, it's in beta for you too. This would have fundamentally changed the game for me. I could still possibly be in IT with tools like this. Reduce the friction,

make life easier for end users and IT. Go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That is the number 1password.com slash unplugged. Well, I got an email this week. An email I have to admit I knew was coming, but an email I was not looking forward to nonetheless. No, no. This is, it's a time of transition, Wes. It's a time of transition. Here's the email from Albie.

We're reaching out to inform you that the Albie shared wallet service will be discontinued on January 4th, 2025. To continue enjoying permissionless and inexpensive payments, it's time to transition to your own Albi hub. They've also announced some new limits that are in effect until they shut down the service. But yeah, that's the big news. The Lightning wallet and a lot more that I've been relying on

to receive y'all's generous boosts is going away. And you know, it's not just me using this Brent's using it. And a lot of folks use it to send the boost on the listener side and myself included. And that's a big part of it. Right. So in the lightning world, there's lots of ways to actually participate and a fountain implements their own implementation. A couple of others like TrueFans does as well.

And then many like Podverse and Podcast Attic and Podcast Guru and some of the other podcasting to-do apps, they've been using an Albi backend to manage. And Albi is kind of like a lightning as a service. And they are transitioning away from this lightning as a service to a pretty comprehensive self-hostable solution that they are calling Albie Hub. And they're making this transition in early January.

And I think they put a date in here somewhere. It's like the first week of January. Yeah, January 4th. Ah, 4th. Thank you. And so what they have now introduced is something called Albie Hub. And so what they have now introduced is something called Albie Hub. And Albie Hub is a front end that sits in front of a lightning demon and allows you to participate in a bunch of different lightning apps, including podcasting, 2.0, and things like Stacker News and the Nostrad Network.

It can also be your own lightning node. It doesn't need a third party one. Oh, okay. So that's actually, I think, the default configuration. There's a toolkit out there called the Lightning Development Kit. Written in Rust, I believe. Oh, really? Yeah, they're using, it's mostly a Go app on the back end,

but I think they might be using the C API, I'm not sure, to implement their own node. I think that's what you get out of the gate, but yeah, it does support LND, which is a very popular back-end node, as well as PhoenixD and a few other ones you can find, which makes it even easier because you don't have to deal with actually running the node.

Albi can be a one-stop shop or it can be a bridge from your existing Lightning infrastructure to the Albi world. Yeah, and it's nice because it still works with the existing Albi extension, so it has web support for web Lightning apps. And then they've also released the AlbiGo mobile app, which will connect to your node and let you do mobile payments in a really simple setup. So there's a lot of ways, Wes, to do AlbiHub. And I think the big barrier, though, is you do need a system that is online to run it.

To solve for that, they've introduced AlbiHub Cloud, which is like 10,000 sats a month to run AlbiCloud. Yeah, I think it's like a steep discount for the first three months. And then maybe it's like 20 something ksats a month. After like the first few months. Yeah. If you were doing, I think it's the kind of thing where if you're just doing it for casual boosting, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's a lot for your use case. If you're using it where you're sending a fair amount of stuff, it's

a very reasonable rate. Alright, so with this context, the reason why we want to talk about this is because this is sort of under the umbrella of self-sovereign setups, and a lot of people out there have been using Albi to support the show directly. And you've been looking at ways of hosting AlbiHub in various different means, and

you've even looked at like, or did you create the flake or did you find an AlbieHub flake? Yeah, no, I have a couple of people have made attempts at packaging it for Nix and I'm one of them. So I have a flake that will build both the backend server version and there's a Wales frontend,

which is like a non-Electron thing for Go that provides a similar use case that presents you a desktop UI. So you can even just run it as a desktop app if you want. Yeah, I have not gotten around yet to making a module for it. Ideally, I'd like one that plays nicely with the whole next Bitcoin project. Because then you just, you know, enable it and be done. And that project offers an easy to configure LND server as well. But if you want to try it out, especially if you want to try like the desktop client version out, you can definitely use the Flake.

So I want to talk about a high level about what's happening here, because it's actually pretty neat. A company started with an entirely hosted solution where they managed everything. And they realized, you know, if these stats go up in value, we could end up with a lot of money on our servers. We don't want that. And they took a product that was a fully hosted solution, and they have turned it into a self-hostable solution. And they've kept the browser extension and the API they provide and all of that connected when you make the transition. And they've made it all free software. Yeah, it's an Apache 2 license. And this thing can run with your own existing back-end Lightning. It can be the Lightning

server. If you have Umbral or Start9, it's one click to install it. It's also just a Docker compose away. And you have a completely self-hosted system. It just works so awesome. And again, on December 22nd, we'll be answering questions. If you want to try to play around with Albie Hub or need to get some liquidity, join us for our live stream for that.

Because it's a really cool piece of software. And they're making this journey pivoting from a full cloud service to a full self-hosted. And they're trying to make it possible for people to switch. It's really like nothing I've ever seen before. And the team is really making some great software while they're trying to do it. And then while we're on self-hosted ways that you could boost and support the show, and you don't want to switch podcast apps,

the Breeze app, we've mentioned it a couple of times, but the Breeze app is a lightning node in your pocket. It runs on the app, and you can pull in RSS feeds, and you can boost our shows from Breeze without having to switch away from like whatever

your favorite podcast app is and this thing is a stellar example of taking something that used to require massive server infrastructure 24 7 connectivity and they have distilled it down into something that runs inside the mobile app and it's an entire node in your pocket and it's open source and it's 100 bitcoin it's really neat that's the breeze app and that can you can just use that to casually boost in without having to switch podcast apps yeah i think things like um or use a service that hosts those stats it's all it's all on your node and there's ways of backing it up sorry wes no i mean so i I think one of the difficult parts of this deck can be the liquidity aspect, both in terms of managing it, but also just depending on where you're connecting,

there's just a certain amount of stats you've got to dedicate to be able to open a channel. Yeah, when you're opening up lightning channels. Uh-huh. And so if you are just a casual booster, I do think that's where one of these options is really interesting. Breeze, as you mentioned, Phoenix is another one where they play the role of liquidity provider. They're going to take a fee to pay for that, but that means they handle it and you can be connected to the network in a pretty reasonably robust way.

At least, especially if you're doing mostly like outgoing transactions and not trying to constantly receive for a lot less fuss. And you're holding the keys. Right. And it's still non-custodial. Yeah. And I think now's the time to learn this stuff while you can. It's time to start figuring this stuff out because it's only growing and getting bigger

and getting more and more use and getting more and more feature rich. Yeah. And as much it is kind of a pain to get over the learning curve and get you know figure out the right set of things that you need to like get onboarded after that it's it's really nice and like i think we've all had had these experiences of like you just happen to be randomly paying for something with lightning and it's so much faster and smoother than a lot of traditional methods yeah and the fact that you can have key-based identities that you can connect to these apps and then you can set budgets for all these different various apps that you can connect to. And all of that is really nice. And I feel like Linux users have a bit of a blind spot here because it's not Linux, but it is free software and it is being developed at a feverish pace. But it is free software, and it is being developed at a feverish pace.

It's that kind of special phase where a lot of extremely talented developers are all very much focused on this problem, and they're putting 100% of their effort and energy into this. And you're going from zero to 100 in a quarter. And then within four quarters, this thing's fully feature rich, right? Albie hub started as a project like a year ago. And now it's like a comprehensive piece of software that is a genuine contribution to the free software landscape. And it's only a year old. It's not even that they're moving so fast. And they're just one of many developers like the the Breeze folks. They're doing unbelievable stuff with, like, back-end services, SDKs for developers. It's on fire right now.

And so it is a great time to start looking into it, and we'll have links to get you started in the show notes. Chris, I wondered if we wanted to talk about how we're using it, because I think we're actually doing something kind of novel and interesting here. One of the great things that Albie Hub supports is the Albie Gym mode. And Albie Gym lets you set up sub wallets and accounts. So once you get your node online, you could make an account for your kid, for your spouse, for your friend, for a business partner, and they don't have to manage any of the node stuff. They have their own private stash. I can't access any of it, but they get to take advantage of the liquidity of my node, of the channels that I've established.

And when we say liquidity, what we mean is there's channels open between these peer-to-peer Lightning nodes, and there are sats that are dedicated to those channels to guarantee funds can transfer. And so when we say liquidity, that's what we're talking about. And it's one of the things that people find slightly tricky with Lightning Nodes, depending on your setup. And so with the Albie Jim mode, Brent gets all the advantages of a Lightning Node. It's the same thing we did for PJ to get him up here for the Meshtastic episode, as I set

him up an Albie Jim sub-account on my node. And then he's taking advantage of my liquidity, my online node that's online all the time. He compares his own app to it. He gets his own identity. He can connect to his own applications with his own cryptographic ID. It's really great. I like that because I think, you know,

as Linux folk, we're used to often playing IT roles, and I think in the self-hosting space, right, many times we're offering the services we stand up for ourselves to friends and family, And this can be another way to do that. You could also see maybe a project, like I'm a free software project, and we want to get supported with Boost or Zaps. So the project creates an AlbiHub cloud account. And the project just runs it on AlbiHub cloud, so no one particular computer has to run it. and the project just runs it on Albi Hub Cloud,

so no one particular computer has to run it. And the way that Albi Hub Cloud works is it is encrypted to your security key, so it's an encrypted VM that you have to provide the key to to unlock and start. Albi cannot start and stop it. I think they could probably stop it, but they cannot start and access it

without your master key. You provide the master key, and the VM starts on Albi Hub Cloud. So you could have, say, NeoVim or whatever that sets up this account. And then everybody on the project that is a serious contributor, that's a primary contributor,

gets an AlbieGym sub-account. And they all get splits. And then when you zap NeoVim or when you boost NeoVim, everybody in the project gets supported, including you could have a split in there for the main project itself. Totally. And it would just be one node to manage.

I mean, it's really powerful, and it's all, you know, stuff that nerds are going to love to play around with. I've had a lot of fun, and it's been super impressive to watch it go, and I hope one day we will see a free software project try that kind of thing. On the opposite end of the spectrum, just as a quick final note here, I do want to point

out, Albie Hub is great. People should check it out. If you do already run Lightning infrastructure, you can connect the Albie extension to your node without Hub. Supports LND, there's core Lightning support if you have the right plugins enabled, or if your wallet supports Nostra Wallet Connect, and that'll let you take advantage of sites that support the Albi extension today, regardless of if you want to run extra infra.

The Black Friday sale is here for the Jupyter Broadcasting memberships. Use the promo code BLACKFRIDAY, one word. Any membership, you'll get 30% off. You want to become a member to Linux Unplugged? It's linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Promo code BLACKFRIDAY.com slash membership, promo code Black Friday. You get access to all our special features.

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This is our best deal ever, and it also applies to upgrades. So if you're a single show membership and you want to go to the whole network, you can use the promo code. If you were once a member and you're no longer and you're thinking about renewing, you can use the promo code.

We just really appreciate the support. This is the best way to put your support on autopilot so that the shows you love have the resources and can continue. It's our best deal ever, 30% off any membership, including membership upgrades. Just use the promo code BLACKFRIDAY. It's valid for only two weeks, so you got to move quick. You can go to linuxunplugged.com slash membership to support this here show directly. Welcome to the Boost section. OS, you seem to have pulled things in. Thank you very much. Thanks to everyone who sent in Boost this week as well. Chris, you want to take it off with our

ballers? And now it is time for the boost. Well, look at this, Brantley. Don't we have a lovely batch of boosts? And our first baller boost comes from Turd Ferguson with 100,000 sats. Turd Ferguson! Hey, rich lobster!

Hello, Mr. Ferguson. He writes, Hey, gents, have you seen TurboScribe.ai? I'd love to see more podcasts with transcripts. Transcripts are great. I don't think I have seen TurboScribe. We agree with you on the transcripts. So I think I heard the podfather talking about TurboScribe. Somebody was talking about it.

I guess it's like the name says. It says it's a very, very fast way to transcribe your podcast. I guess like an hour-long podcast, you'll get it in seconds. I do like seconds. And I think they might have an API just looking at their website. You know, it might be something worth looking at. Yeah, that's always the trick with these things. I've seen a lot of nice-looking services with fancy UIs, and then there's nothing for the automation side. I don't want to

upload MP3s by hand. I would love to know what people out there would use the transcripts for if you want to boost an Intellis because it's something worth thinking about. Square triangle boosts in with 41,616 cents. I hoard that which

all kind covet. I laughed so hard after hearing that apparently I'm the third in the most sats streamed leaderboard. Nice. I started using Slackware Linux in 1997 and dual booting into Windows to download software packages and browse internet because AC97 soft modems. Oh man, that was a pain.

Currently, I'm having a bit of an identity crisis while using Windows 10 and 11 for the last five years due to a work requirement. This is a square triangular number boost, not a postcode boost. Oh, neat. Okay. Analysis mode, password 80085.

All right, good to know. The identity crisis while using Windows can be understandable because there's things about Windows that, you know, they're kind of nice. But I ultimately always end up missing Linux quite a bit. But what I would do in your situation is just embrace Windows at work, and then you go home. It's like Linux, it's like a vacation from work, you know. I know a lot of people I've heard from in

the audience like, yeah, I got a Mac at home because I just want to do IT. I do IT during the day. I say flip that script. Linux box at home. Here's a little quiz for you. Okay. Do you know what a square triangular number is? It's a math thing. Well, yeah, it's a number, which is both a triangular number and a square number. As the name implies. That's right. That's good to know. Thank you. Appreciate the boost there, squared triangle. Oh, you see what he did there?

Now, a triangular number counts objects arranged in an equilateral triangle. You know, you got like things, you put them in a triangle shape. How many you're going to get, I guess that's triangle number if it fits into that.

And a squared number is an integer that is the square of an integer. Well, there you go. Apparently, you can get both those things at once, and 41616 is one of them.

I feel like postcodes are easier. We have a boost here from Gene Bean. 2,674 sats across two boosts. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. Regarding a meetup in the Atlanta area, which part of Atlanta going from one side to the other takes a while. If not the west side or near it,

I'd consider also setting up one if there's interest. So that might be two Atlanta meetups. So Gene Beans from the west side? Is that what I'm to take from that? I love it. Okay. Thank you. We're going to have to probably, like after our predictions episode, start getting really serious about the media stuff.

So I think that's the plan. Thank you, though. Everybody keep sending in your, because we'll scrape these when time comes and put a list together. Now, Gene sent a second boost here, just dropping a quick note to confirm streaming sets and boosting to the bootleg feed works via Podcast Guru. Thank you for the check-in. Appreciate that. Tomato comes. Thank you, GB.

Tomato comes in. Oh, we missed a live boost, which is now in the report, but didn't quite make it. Okay, go for it. User 7532 blah, blah, blah sends in GranddaddyDucks 22,222 sats. To say quack quack. Things are looking up for old McDuck. Thank you. Appreciate it. That's nice. I love me a live boost. Now, Tomato comes in with a Jar Jar boost.

That's 5,000 sats. You're so boost. If Chris is interested in a Risk 5 server, check out the Banana Pie F3. It's a decent little machine with EMMC and an M.2 slot for storage expansion, a nice metal enclosure, and Fedora support.

You know what? I've heard of the Banana Pi 3. I just didn't think of it. I don't know if I realized it was risk-based. Well, that is awesome. The Banana Pi 3, if you would like yourself a risky home server, I kind of want it. to see what you did there.

Right? Because that would be a whole theme, wouldn't it? It's my risky server, you know. It's a big risk, you know. That would be the host name, Big Risk. Right? So you're getting one. Is that what you're saying?

That's what I heard. I mean, now I am, I think. I think that's probably what's happening. Thank you, Tomato. The immunologist boosts in with RoaDux. I'm an avid OpenSUSE user, and I would rather reinstall Tumbleweed

than trying to fix any zipper conflicts. Yeah. Tumbleweed with transactional updates mostly solved all those problems for me, though. Hmm. I think listening to Brent fixing zipper would just cause me emotional stress. There's that.

That's a lizard giving us an endorsement for our approach, at least kind of sorta. Yeah, I take that as a complete endorsement. We didn't reinstall for Tumbleweed, but we did reinstall. I agree too. I feel like part of why I just bypass package issues and repo issues is just not in this house. I have done this enough. Get out of here with that. You know?

Same. The whole reason that I wanted to get off of that is because of the emotional stress that it was causing to try to fix zipper. So. Yeah. Great boost. Thank you very much, Mr. Immunologist. Appreciate you.

Well, Watsi boosted it with a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. My longest running system was an eSmith file share server I created in the late 90s for my parents' business. Ran it for about 10 years, never being touched till we sold that business. I think I might be stumped. eSmith file server? Okay, Kuzali SME server, formerly E-Smith server in Gateway,

is a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Maybe it's changed over the years. Oh, Kuzali, huh? Hmm, that does not ring a bell either. Initial release? 25 years ago. Yeah. 1999.

Latest release, December 14th, 2022. Huh. Fresh. Kern fresh kernel type monolithic kazali.org who knew i that's literally the first time i think anybody's ever thank you watsi that's fun e smith file share server reminds me of the network servers i started back in the day on those were quite the trip i mean it is kind of exactly the thing right like even 25 years ago like you you could stand up a Linux server and it does one simple job and it can just keep doing it. It will, too. Yeah. As long as you don't crash it with, like, some sort of weird exploit. CypherSeeker comes in with 5,678 sats.

Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Long-time listener, a first-time booster. Right on. Thank you. I know it can be a bit of a journey sometimes. It looks like you're using Podverse, too. Relevant episode. Relevant episode for you.

Thank you very much, Life Seeker. Reporting in on my first Linux event. Oh, great. Ohio Linux Fest. Despite only making a few talks, I really enjoy the community aspect, and I'm looking forward to attending similar events in the future. Thanks for the great shows. I've been to Ohio LinuxFest once, and I still think about it. I really

enjoyed it out there. Would love to make it back. Yeah, I want to go. Yeah. The LinuxFest season is fast approaching, right? We've got LinuxFest coming up, Northwest, Scales coming up, Planet Nix, probably Texas LinuxFest, I would imagine. Fosdum is on Lep600

Day. We may have more on that later. Yeah, Fosdum. The season is fastly approaching, so take your vitamins, boys. We've got to be in our game shape. I think it's going to be... I'm just going to climb into one of those big bubbles. Yeah, we have those new suits, too. I think they'll look sharp.

Yeah. Cypher Seeker, thank you very much for boosting in. Thank you for listening. I think they'll look sharp. Yeah. Cypher Seeker, thank you very much for boosting in. Thank you for listening. And appreciate you taking that effort. Hybrid Sarcasm comes in with 5,000 cents. You supposed! Would you mind confirming the exact date of LUP 600? I want to start planning the Central Florida Live Listening Party.

Yes! Yeah, that would be February 2nd. As long as we don't miss an episode, which, have we ever? I don't know. I don't know if we've ever missed an episode. You know, because even if we were sick, wouldn't we put together something? Like, even when I was in the hospital, you guys still did an episode. Yeah, right.

True. So probably, most likely on February 2nd. But stay tuned. Check the calendar. Wait, should we miss an episode? That could be interesting. Yeah, just really throw people off. Dude, remember just like a month ago when our hosting platform had an issue and we came out late in the day instead of early in the morning

and we heard from so many people, which we love. It's a good feeling. It's not a bad thing. Mr. Kost-Pelin's back with a Jar Jar Boost, 5,000 sats. You supposed! I think I did not stream sats or something. I went wrong with fountains, so I wish I had a ButterFS snapshot so I could roll back.

So I'm going to boost to catch up, and I have a question. The new real-time kernel options, does this help when we use, say, a VM versus something on the server also shared or used by the VM? Not sure what he means by that, but he has the same question. Would it make a difference to ZFS on a server? Should I avoid VMs on ZFS or on ButterFS? He has that general question, and he has a last statement. His thanks for the show. The general principle is, you know, a lot of these things, the closer to the hardware you get, the more options you have, right?

ZFS and ButterFS love having access to the raw disk. It lets them work the full capacities of their features in Magic. But oftentimes, depending on what you're doing, you may want the subset of features that work sort of, you know, regardless. As far as using a VM for ButterFS and ZFS, copy-on-write can really hurt performance, so you may want to disable copy-on-write on ButterFS. ZFS also has zvols, which are a great option for things like virtual machines.

I don't know about the real-time stuff. I suppose on the, you know, maybe you'd want it on both places for real-time. You know, I guess on the host, you do want it making sure it can attend to all the VMs it's running, but there's a lot of pass-through stuff going on, so probably a situation where

you might just end up having to measure it. And, of course, there's lots of times you just don't have control over whatever the VM host is, and so you can try it or not. Kost, I know you're a spryly guy. I'd like to have you try it and report back. Tell you the truth. Tell you the gosh darn truth. That's what I'd like to have you try it and report back. Tell you the truth. Tell you the gosh darn truth.

That's what I'd like to know. But thank you very much for the boost. Appreciate it. The Golden Dragon boosts in 5,000 sats. The Golden Dragon! Putting forth an idea for the boosties. He actually wrote booties, which I kind of like. Oh!

That's a different show. Boosties, booties, new swag item. Whomever gets the largest boost total for the year gets to be that year's mascot. It's not fair for me to have all the mascot fun. Hope to catch you guys live soon and can't wait for episode 600. Okay, so I support this,

but I think we're going to need a list from the dragon about what he's determined the mascots duties and roles are yeah he takes on a big role in here he takes on a bit he's one of our lead hype men in the matrix room that is true uh it's an important role um i wonder if there wouldn't be another role like uh chief executive producer or something like but more fun um boost master yeah also uh i'll probably have more details i need to sync up with hybrid sarcasm but I think we're going to have a couple of other prizes for top winners as well. The Golden Drain continues.

If anybody has interest in a Wichita chaos, that's Kansas, right? Wichita, Kansas area meetup for episode 600. Get in touch, as I have zero experience in that kind of deal. But it sounds like he's putting an offer out there. We're definitely going to have to go back and scrape all these. We'll make a list

and then get some resources together for people. See, that's just big mascot energy all over it. I love it. Superior Storm. Superposition. Superior Spurious comes in. Spurious comes in. What? Tom. Tom.

Superior Superposition. That's pretty funny. Next caller. Comes in with 8,008 sats. I work for a wholesale distributor in IT, and our ERP software is the backbone of the operations. At all of the conferences I go to, there's rarely anything open source available. I'm curious if any unplugged users have experience with open ERP software. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just go to license and support.

I would love to see some of that go to FOSS. That is a great question. You know, I don't myself, but it strikes me as maybe the kind of question that our friend Noah over on the Ask Noah show would be. I was just going to say that. Have some thoughts on. Yeah, I bet our buddy Noah would. I have a tiny bit of insight here, not a ton. Yeah. But there used to be something called open source ERP, which is exactly what you're looking for, that recently got changed to be called Odoo.

And we do use Odoo at NextCloud. I don't use it personally, but it's something you might look into. Very nice. Chatty Mike boosts in with double rows of ducks. Ah, fuck! Appreciate the thoughtful answer about Nix, and I will try it again when I have some time. I'm currently running Ubuntu Server,

and I'm looking at trying out Nextcloud on Tailscale. How would you run it? What about Snap versus the all-in-one image? Hmm. I mean, I think this is clearly a Brent question. Yeah, I'll let Brent answer the snap versus all-in-one image. I'll answer the tail scale part. You'll run it great.

So my NextCloud is only available on my tail scale, and I love it. And what I've done, not sure I recommend it, but what I've done is I've registered a public DNS address that points at the tail scale address for my next cloud server. So if I'm on a machine that is connected to my tail net, which is all of them, I can just go to blahblahblah.com and it pulls up my next cloud server over my tail net. It's so wonderful. And there are ways to solve this using internal DNS only on your tail net. Like, I mean, you could spin up a pie hole on tail net and make it a DNS server of your tail net

and then resolve all of this stuff that way if you want. You could use magic DNS built into TailScale if you want to. I like having a public DNS for a lot of these things, and I just point it, and that's what my Nextcloud is configured to use as its domain, and I have it set up in front of Nginx that proxies that. And it just works fantastic. Worth saying, depending on how fancy you want to get, you can do both too.

You can have internal DNS and still have the public ones. I do, and it does work. Brantley, what do you think, though, about the all-in-one image versus the Snap? Yeah, I think that becomes a personal preference. I think I will give a little bit of information there and i can speak a little bit to what i have experience with personally so for the all-in-one that is officially you know the install method that next cloud calls official so there's something to that and it includes a whole bunch of niceties like backups using borg backup and a whole bunch of like

pre-configured um add-ons and things that just work out of the box because it's you know fully upstream um that said there are a bunch of projects that are doing similar like bundling but with their own particular opinion about how this should happen next cloud pi project is is one that that strikes me there so you might look into that project as well just to see how they configure everything maybe it's more doing it in a way that you appreciate more so i would compare them side by side uh that said um you asked specifically about snaps versus the all-in-one. And the snap project around Nextcloud has been doing a pretty great job. It's the one I started with many years ago and am still running. And I can definitely say that it's been great between upgrades.

I've never had downtime because of the snap upgrade itself. So that's always good to see. The team there is vetting those updates. So they do lag behind, but there's... But maybe that's what you want if you want to, you know, attempt to install. Especially when you get really serious with your Nextcloud usage, you're okay with a little bit.

It's an appliance that you need online. I am curious, Brent, I guess like the operational side, with the all-in-one, you're going to be doing the Docker stuff, right? But I assume on the Snap, there's ways to run the OCC command and whatever other things you need to do internally

if you have to? Yeah, the Snap documentation for the Nextcloud Snap project is pretty good. So if you need to run OCC commands, I know I certainly did when I was setting things up. It's all documented

actually pretty well. And there's a fairly large community around it. So you will not run into something that someone else hasn't already ran into. Uh, that said again, I haven't really had to troubleshoot it. That's why I've been on it for so many years. A little slow if you're using the web app for the Snap project specifically. I know we've been toying with running Nextcloud on Nix, and that's been way snappier. See what I did there. So that's a consideration as well. I think just run a couple of these, try them out before you make a decision, and see what you like.

And please also report back. We'd love to hear what you choose. Agreed. Great. It's just why not play around and blow them away before you start seriously report back. We'd love to hear what you choose. Agreed. Great. It's just, why not play around and blow them away before you start seriously using it? It's a great tip. Sage advice from the next glad sage. Doug comes in with 15,818 sats. Superior ability breeds superior

ambition. Well, the self-hosted Bitcoin node, the lightning channels, and AlbieHub. Umbral on a Pi 4, all of it doing just fine. Nice! No kidding. Well done on that. That's a nice example of you don't have to have, you're not trying to be some major infrastructure routing node.

You don't need a ton of hardware. And it is a lot of fun stuff to put together. This is down the rabbit hole with liquidity pools and channel rebalancing and streaming sats on Castomatic. Thanks for the ideas, inspiration, and help. Replace the one in the boost with a nine for a zip code. Yes, zip code is a better deal. Now, question here.

There's two ones. Yeah. Oh, boy. I still think maybe you should switch to a digital map because for this particular case, it'd be a lot easier than using the paper map. I know you really like your paper map. I do. You know, I'm old school. Yeah, you are.

Why do you think I have this abacus? Doug, really, just tip of the hat, too. Talk about being right on topic for this episode as well. All right. I'm guessing that Doug is in Land Park area of Sacramento, California. Whoa. Down in Sacramento, California. Whoa. Down in Sacramento. Yeah, or possibly Rumah, Saudi Arabia.

If I do the other nine. So it's probably not that one. It's a bit of a difference, Wes. Okay. Either way, we appreciate the boost. Thank you very much. Okay. Either way, we appreciate the boost. Thank you very much. Sat Stacker 7 boosts in with 2,100 sats.

Just want to report back that I am very happily sending sats from my self-hosted Albie hub. Well done. Look at y'all, way ahead of us. Way ahead of us. The episode didn't even finish yet. That is impressive. Thanks, Sat Stacker. Appreciate the boost. Yeah, more like sad sender to me. Heyo! We have a boost here from the mad lunatic

6382 Satoshis. All systems are functional. Just another long-time listener since 2009 and first-time booster. Hey! Wow, 2009's no joke at all. Thank you for taking the effort and the time

to get your boosting set up. I say thanks for keeping me company over the years during my daily commute. Also, they sent from the podcast index, so they probably got Albie Hub up and going. Right? Wow. Mad Lunatic, well done.

Going the self-hosted route, too, right out of the gate. Very impressive. Thank you for the boost, and thanks for checking in, listening since 2009. I'm really glad to hear from you. MrNick86 comes in with, guess what, boys? It's a row of adorable ducks. Friends, I have a dilemma. I'm going to be building a new server for my home, but I can't decide what OS I want to put on there.

The server will need to be able to run VMs. I do IT consulting, and I need to be able to archive the VM when I'm done. I want to run Home Assistant and some flavor of some local Lama AI instance. I want to put AlbieHub on there, backups for my household Mac, NextCloud, and all of the trimmings, maybe even a Bitcoin node, and still have enough overhead to tinker. So I can't decide. Is this a TrueNAS scale? Maybe Arch and Docker, Fedora and Podman, QMU on Ubuntu? Should I go Proxmox? Dare I say even Nix? I just can't decide. I don't want to

do a lot of work maintaining it either, but I am willing to do it if that's what it comes to. The system will be an Epic Roam-based, mostly with about 50 terabytes of disk storage, plus about 8 terabytes of NVMe. Maybe a great chance to try out BcacheFS2. Any thoughts? Cheers. You know, I think we really going to need a duplicate system at the studio to properly test for you. Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, send it to us. You know, it's tough to to advise here not knowing a little bit more. Two possible approaches. One is, you know, if you don't want a lot of maintenance, what do you already know and are you comfortable with and choose something that's safely in your wheelhouse so you can focus on just the things that you're trying to execute on? Or are there any of these that you've been wanting to learn? Things that, you know, you hear us talk about or other people or like it's been on your list that you just haven't gotten time to? And if so, and you have time, you know, pick one of those and jump down that rabbit hole. The one thing that's jumping out at me on this list is Home Assistant. Because with Home Assistant, as I've explained before, you can do just Home Assistant Core,

which is just the essential core Home Assistant application that you can run as a Docker container. Or you kind of want to run the whole home assistant OS, and they expect to control the entire machine, so you either run it on physical hardware or in a dedicated VM. And you also said you want to be able to run VMs and you want to archive VMs. So it sounds like virtualization is going to be a core use case of this system. So I don't think anybody would get fired for recommending that you put Proxmox on the base of this system, and then you could experiment with Ubuntu, you could experiment with Nix, things like that. If I were building it for myself, I think you know the answer,

I would do Nix at the metal, and then I would use Nix to define the VMs, and that would be an extremely reproducible, reliable, solid way to run a system. But it does mean you have to learn the Nix stuff. The advantage there is then you can just back up that Nix config, you could reproduce it pretty easily. You could also have VMs that are described in your Nix config. And to create a new VM, it would just be a matter of copying that, tweaking a few of the details, rebuilding, and you'd have an entirely new VM that you could get going. So there's some aspects of it that are pretty nice. But if you're doing this as part of an IT consulting business,

I kind of have a hard time thinking of a reason why you shouldn't put Proxmox on the bare metal. And then you take advantage of VMs inside Proxmox in containers, and then you also have snapshots and backups and things like that. Another option could be something like an Ubuntu base or whatever OS.

And then I'll just try to make your life harder by adding one more tool, which is LexD, which can be an excellent platform. You know, it's not quite the whole like appliance level that Proxmox is somewhere in the middle. But if you want somewhere in the middle, then it can be a nice all-in-one sort of thing that'll, you know, run containers and VMs for you. And it can do clusters and all that stuff. you know, run containers and VMs for you, and it can do clusters and all that stuff. And as far as your drive setup, I would definitely think that some of your more performance-oriented VMs

could go on the MVMEs. Depending on when you build this, I might look at Bcache FS if you have proper backups, right? Because really, at the end of the day, any file system is not 100%. And even if you were to put Ext 4 on there, or ZFS, I'd still say you better have backups.

Bcache does have some neat functionality for using the NVMe as cache. I mean, you can do that with lots of file systems, but they specifically have that. Yeah. And it's pretty neat. Whatever you do, Mr. Nick, please boost back if you can and let us know what you chose and how it goes. Thank you, everybody

who participated in the Value for Value system this episode and those of you who did it via a boost. We had 24 of you boost in. Now we have the 2,000-sat cutoff to read on air, but we have all of them, we save all of them, we keep them in our doc and we read them. And we had 41 of you stream sats as you listened to the episode last week. And so collectively, you sat streamers sent us 80,422 SATs.

Not too bad at all. And then when you combine that with all of the folks that sent us a boost directly, well, then together we had 329,729 SATs stacked this week. Thank you, everybody who's been supporting this show either through a membership where they set it on autopilot with the Black Friday deal going on now

or those of you who like to do it at your own time at your own terms at your own price via a boost. All you need to do is grab a podcasting

2.0 app like fountain.fm or set up Albie Hub and then you can start boosting in and we'll read your message on the show. No middleman, no company

taking a fee, nobody that can turn it off. Give Breeze a try, why not? Yeah, Breeze makes it real, real easy. You'll be impressed how simple they've made that. And it's a way to support the show directly. Get your message read on the show. It's one of our absolute favorite segments. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate

it. I think you're really going to like the pick this week. It's called Discount Bandit. Wes, are you familiar with Camel, Camel, Camel? Yeah. The Amazon price tracking website? Right. And there's lots of price track, like Honey is another popular one, right? Yeah. This one, Discount Bandit, is self-hosted. There's a simple Docker composed to get up and go. Ooh, see, that's what a lot of them are not. Exactly. And I don't need them knowing what I'm watching.

You know, I don't need them watching that kind of thing. And, of course, the great thing is that it's more than just Amazon. I know it supports Walmart. I think it supports a bunch of popular online stores. I haven't used it for all of them, but I know Amazon and Walmart are in there. And, like I said, let me take a look. I will link to the Docker Compose in the show nizzles. 37 lines.

Looks like it spins up a little database, a little SQLite database. No big deal. And it also supports Notify, you know, N-T-F-Y. Ah, yes, nice. And you can get deal notifications via Telegram. So it'll send you via Telegram message when something goes on sale. I just, you know, holiday sales are coming up. People got to get stuff for the holidays.

I like that. Grab yourself a little discount bandit. It's just a little tip from me to you. Self-hosting helping you save. I mean, how better to find deals on new hard drives? There's so many great self-hosted apps out there. We're so spoiled. So if that kind of stuff intrigues you, check out the self-hosted podcast, selfhosted.show.

A lot of the stuff is like we're discovering it or implementing it, and the details of how we've implemented it, that's where we cover it. It generally is in that podcast, and you can hear it every other week at jupiterbroadcasting.com. and you can hear it every other week at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Don't forget, we'd love to hear what you think is the biggest meta story happening in Linux in 2024. If you were to zoom out, what is the story of the year? I'd like to hear your opinion. Please boost in.

We'll be collecting those for our end of year episode. And we only have a few more live episodes this year, so you can get those at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. But the cheat code is it's every Sunday, noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. And if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we just mark it pending in there in your time.

And when we go live, it flips live and you can just hit play. Some of those apps, even you can turn on notifications. You know, if that's how you roll. I know there's a lot of bell tapping over on YouTube. I think it's kind of like that, only it's not as obnoxious, and I hardly ever mention it. But you can get a notification when we go live in the podcasting 2.0 apps. Links to everything we talked about today, that's at linuxunplugged.com slash 590.

And at the end of the day, we're extremely grateful for you listening and sharing this podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode. We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you.