LINUX Unplugged - 604: One Week Left

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

We're pre-gaming two of the biggest Linux events of the year. Engineers, organizers, and surprise guests are dropping by to give us the scoop before it all begins.Sponsored By: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. River: River is the most trusted place in the U.S. for individuals and businesses to buy, sell, send, and receive Bitcoin. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMSCALE 2025 Meetup — El Cholo Cafe Pasadena - Saturday, Mar 8, 2025, 7:00 PMPlanet Nix — March 6th-7th, 2025 @ Pasadena, CA at the Southern California Linux Expo.Flox - Your dev environment, everywhere — Flox help teams focus on building fast by providing reproducible environments that span the entire software lifecycle. With Flox, developers can create environments that contain all of the tools and frameworks they need, binding them with the software they ship into the world.Kelsey Hightower on Xkelseyhightower on GitHubKelsey Hightower on LinkedInRobert Hernandez SCaLE ProfileFireside Chat: An Outsider’s Look at Nix - Ron Efroni, Kelsey HightowerLearn Nix the Fun Way - Farid ZakariaDocker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production -Planet Nix FAQnix.conf - Adding GitHub Access Tokens — Access tokens used to access protected GitHub, GitLab, or other locations requiring token-based authentication.Olympia Mike's nixbookpeterfajdiga/karousel: Scrollable tiling Kwin scriptYaLTeR/niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.paperwm/PaperWM: Tiled scrollable window management for GNOME ShellLibro.fm — Your Independent Bookstore for Digital AudiobooksPick: OpenAudible-To-AudibleBookShelf — This script automates the process of moving audiobook files from OpenAudible or Libation to an organized folder structure and updates AudioBookShelf accordingly. It handles file organization, metadata mapping, and interaction with the AudioBookShelf API.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You know, I've noticed recently there isn't really a maintained way to convert a website into a standalone desktop application. Like on Linux you used to be able to use something like Natifier where you could give it a URL and it would create an electron-based standalone desktop app. There was also AppNatify, which would do the same, but it would create an app image, which is kind of neat. Chrome and Firefox used to have these as just features built into them. Oh yeah, kind of like you could do on Android
Starting point is 00:00:27 or whatever, right? So yeah, make this into a web app, okay. And this is, you know, there's so many web apps these days. I was looking for this and I kind of found something, but I'm wondering if anyone out there has something that works just a lot simpler. I think it's pronounced Turey. What do you think?
Starting point is 00:00:43 Tarey? Tarey, okay, let's go with that. It's probably a lot better. You can use Tari to essentially create a web app out of a website, and then there's some other tools around that you can use. You could even declaratively configure those in your Nix config, it looks like,
Starting point is 00:00:58 but it's a lot of a process versus something like Natifier where I just used to have a command line app, point at a URL, and boom boom I had a local web app This I can't be the only one that wants this this must be a thing on Linux, right? This can't be just a separate browser. Yeah, I don't use a separate browser Doesn't Linux Mint have a version of this? Yes that they have yes in their X apps or whatever. Yes, they do. They do they do But that doesn't work for me and it isn't packaged in the distro I'm using. I think you should go with the Tarii thing because I'm now remembering that Tarii
Starting point is 00:01:30 is the term used for humans in Stargate SG-1. [♪ music starts again with music playing in background. 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.
Starting point is 00:01:53 Coming up on the show today, we're getting ready for two of the biggest Linux events of the year. We've got some folks on the ground, organizers, and surprise guests joining us to give us the scoop before it all begins. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, killer picks, and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that Mumble Room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hi, Chris, I'm Russ, and hello, French.
Starting point is 00:02:17 Hello, Charles. Hello. It's a tight team this week. Did we piss them all off last week? Probably. We did have some hot takes. People were not happy about Russ. They didn't like the Russ talk.
Starting point is 00:02:27 But nice to have you in their mumble room. Thank you very much for being here. And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and get it for free for up to 100 devices, three users, no credit card. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices, your services, your applications, whatever they are,
Starting point is 00:02:47 directly to each other. It's modern networking built on top of, why God? And it's fast, like really, really fast. You'll never even know you're using it. And it's intelligent too. If two nodes are on the same LAN, they talk directly to each other.
Starting point is 00:03:02 But if one of those nodes happens to move off your LAN, they continue to talk like they're right next to each other, just without whatever the speed of your connection is. And it makes it so simple and straightforward to build a flat network of say multiple different online providers. Maybe you have multiple VPSs and you have systems on a land somewhere. You can bring all of those together. And if you work in an organization, there are so many options for how you can control things and program the networks so that the right people
Starting point is 00:03:30 get access to the right resources. It's zero trust that every organization can use, and it's painless. And you can start with our plan for free and support the show for up to 100 devices and three users. No more inbound ports on your firewalls. We love it. Lots of listeners love it and thousands of companies love it. Try it and support the show at tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Starting point is 00:03:55 We have a meetup to announce Saturday, March 8th, 7 p.m. in Pasadena, California. Details at meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting. And we're going to El Cholo. Right? You think that's how you say it? And they have room for around 40 people. So last time we did a dinner, about 55 people showed up. So we do want you to RSVP if you're going to make it. Plan on bringing cash or, you know, maybe paying for meals and drinks on your own. Cash app or Venomo's probably also work, they work there I think from the website. And we generally do this at the yard house, which we were going to. on your own. Cash app or Venomos probably also work there I think from the website.
Starting point is 00:04:25 And we generally do this at the yard house which we were going to, but they wanted to charge us and I understand, but they wanted to charge us a $3200 minimum. So we called up El Cholo and they said we'd love to have you, we can only have room for about 40ish people. Some will cycle though so don't worry, you know, you might pop in, some people will be cycling out. There's a lot going on that evening. And yes, we are using the Meetup page for historical purposes for this one. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Now, if you're listening, you can't make the Meetup,
Starting point is 00:04:54 but maybe you want to help out with the beer budget that night or something like that. You could always boost this episode. We'd appreciate that. And while we are in scale, boys, we have something special. We got nerdy and dug into eBPF. So while we're away at Planet Nix in scale, we have a special eBPF coming out, eBPF episode coming out for you. And this really is a superpower that's just waiting for you to take advantage. It's in your Linux kernel right now. And there are tools that make it possible for anyone to use it. We'll get into some of the more advanced use cases
Starting point is 00:05:25 and some of the like, just grab this executable and run it and you can start messing with eBPF. We won't be live next Sunday, but our members will get a special bootleg episode. And that'll be episode 605, the eBPF special. And you know, it's not necessarily our normal thing, so do let us know what you think about it. Yeah, I'm always a little nervous
Starting point is 00:05:44 about these more technical episodes. We always get feedback from people saying they love it, but then sometimes the metrics don't actually support that. So we do want to hear your feedback on it too, so give us your thoughts. Why are we doing a pre-record? Because next weekend will be Scale and Planet Nick. So this is the Sunday before Planet Nicks.
Starting point is 00:06:07 And we are so thrilled to go to the first planet Nicks because ideally, if possible, we would love to cover every single one of them. I mean, imagine for us how exciting this is. We get we get into Nicks and Nicks OS. A couple of years ago now before these events really existed. And now here we are, you know, on this journey and these events are starting to materialize and this is the first Planet X. That's pretty exciting for us.
Starting point is 00:06:34 And so we're delighted that FLOX is making it possible for us to get down there and cover it and helping with the travel budget and just really coming in clutch. And so we wanted to chat with Ron, he's the CEO at Phlox and he's joining us right now. Well, joining us now to share in the excitement is Ron Afani and he is the co-founder of Phlox and the president of the NixOS Foundation and an all around great guy.
Starting point is 00:07:01 Ron, welcome to the unplugged program. Super excited to be here again. They thought it must have been a year. All around great guy Ron. Welcome to the unplugged program A year I am super excited about Planet Nix and I think I want to start with the fact that this is technically kind of a new thing It's the first planet Nix, isn't it? Now we want to give us what's the background here on is this gonna be like a worldwide thing Is this gonna be a North America thing? Is this to be t TBD? What's the kind of like high level picture of where Planet Nix is and where it's going? I mean I think there's a lot of aspects to it and a lot of things that were
Starting point is 00:07:35 internal in the community around it and out of it but I think bottom line is just we wanted to keep nurturing and growing and bringing Nix to America, making it a little bit closer to this side of the globe. So that was the real first intention for creating a conference on this continent. Well, I am sure grateful. We often feel on the West Coast like we get left out of the fun a little bit. Especially all the way to Europe where there's so much NIC stuff. I have to imagine the first one is going to be also a little bit of let's see how it goes, right? The results will speak for themselves and then you'll kind of decide the future.
Starting point is 00:08:08 Yes, 100%. I think what we're trying to do is definitely see how kind of our ecosystem here responds to it. We have a slight feeling that it's going to be a slightly more Nick's at work feeling, if that makes sense, right? Like folks just seeing it, the talks are coming in from Kelsey Hightower doing the opening to folks from Anthropic and large companies talking about their use of Nick's and how they're bringing it into their workplace. I think it's gonna definitely have a different flavor to it.
Starting point is 00:08:39 And I think that's also why we wanted to make sure it has a new brand, right? There's a kind of like a different vibe to the entire thing. It's interesting too, because I wonder if that sort of is reflective of where NixOS adoption is at right now. Do you think that's, maybe there's a connection there? Oh, 100%.
Starting point is 00:08:55 I mean, we're, I think we're seeing, again, year over year, we're seeing that crazy amount of growth, both on usage and the chatter and the different companies that are coming in to Nix, come into Phlox and talking about the, it's not just about Nix itself and even the programming language behind it, it's kind of also about the principles that Nix brings in
Starting point is 00:09:15 and you're seeing more parts of the marketplace kind of look to adopt it. I wanna also make people aware of Phlox a little bit. Can you tell me kind of the elevator pitch for flocks and maybe why you're connected so closely with Nix? Yeah, definitely. I mean, the elevator pitch is that flocks help subtract away the infrastructure complexity from whatever is doing the coding.
Starting point is 00:09:36 If it's your engineers, if it's the future AI overlords and agents, but that's for the non-Nix initiated. Bottom line flocks started from the fact that we, my co-founder brought NICs in for the first enterprise adoption motion almost eight years ago now. And our whole thing was, okay, how can we bring NICs to more folks? How can we bring it to work? And that's where Flock's generally started. So for us, it's all about environment management up into the build space of what
Starting point is 00:10:04 NICs can do for us, and then into software supply chain security, where I think those are the three rising stars of NICS-based principles, obviously, as a biased person. And I think what drew me to Phlox and why I was excited to work with you guys to do the coverage for this is it's really sort of the evolution of building on top of some amazing open source and free software principles, and it's not maybe fully consumable for the end consumer like an enterprise, but with a little bit of work
Starting point is 00:10:31 and a little bit of innovation from a company like yours, you can take something so powerful and make it accessible to those groups, which is always what happens with this best, great free software we see get built into the Linux kernel, like WireG garden and other things So that's what I really thought was Sort of super super great about flocks and other companies in that space is taking nix and bringing it to that next guy
Starting point is 00:10:53 So I don't have to teach every single one of my team members how to debug all of the new West knows the pain. He knows the pain. Yeah, we've all been there on the on the fly side I think I think for us it's genuinely Yeah, we've all been there on the on the fly side. I think I think for us, it's genuinely Nix is amazing. And I obviously wear two hats and I recommend everyone go check out Nix before they check out flocks. But then flocks comes in and it's just you know, if you want to bring into the workplace where folks don't need to get into the weeds of it, that's kind of what we made it for. And obviously, there's a bunch of of technical kind of IP that's built on top to just enable that enterprise access.
Starting point is 00:11:25 But for us, it's really clear. It's like, if you're coming in, check out Nix. And then when you're looking to bring Nix into the enterprise, come check out Phlox. And it's kind of like a cyclical motion because even Phlox has some Nix escape patches where folks can start diving deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. So it's there's definitely some ideological open source. Yeah, I mean, for sure, it's like people listening to this show could become big Knicks fans.
Starting point is 00:11:48 But it's like, how do you convince everybody else at work to actually implement this? Well, here's something that's actually digestible by them. Yeah. OK, I'm curious. Outside of the keynote with Kelsey, which I think everyone's excited for, what are you personally most excited for for this planet, Nix?
Starting point is 00:12:06 I mean, one, it's honestly just building up our ecosystem on this side. And I know a lot of our awesome European friends and from other places are coming over, which I think is even way more exciting. I think you're seeing, we mentioned that earlier, right? You're seeing that adoption of, it's not even about Nix, it's about the principles, right? It's about like, hey, we care about reproducibility, we care about our software. Software is becoming insanely more complex, right? We are asking software now to write software.
Starting point is 00:12:34 And Nix, at its core, just comes and provides this venue to say, hey, let's de-complexify the stack, right? And we're seeing more folks truly be intrigued about the concepts here and come towards it. So I think just the opportunity to keep growing this front of the globe is number one. The second one is I think there's a few talks I'm pretty excited about. Obviously, I'm excited about all the talks and all the speakers coming in. But my top of mind is that I'm definitely going to be sitting in on are one talk from Fareed, who
Starting point is 00:13:07 is going to jump into a concept of Nix is unapologetically fun. Fareed has a really good way of talking about Nix in a very blunt yet whimsical aspect to it. And then there's actually a talk by a niche from Anthropic that I'm pretty excited about and how they're using some of the next principles to pretty much build the frontier of AI. Yeah, okay. I'm writing both of those down. How did I get more excited? I don't know. Now, okay, kind of along these lines, do you have any tips or anything people need to know
Starting point is 00:13:42 if they're going to show up if they want to get some work done while they're there too, is there, do they need to bring a pencil and paper? Like, what should they know? What should they bring with them? I mean, first of all, the, you know, shout out to Elon and the SoCal Linux Expo team scale. We love them. They help us make this possible.
Starting point is 00:14:01 The venue is incredible. We have, this year we have two giant rooms for one for a workshop so you can get you know down into the details from beginner stuff to advanced things by next experts from the globe. And then we have the talk track but in the middle there's a huge huge huge kind of like open space where we do hacking and birds of a feather and Flocks, Flocks, because Flocks is hosting the entire thing, we've been giving tables to just different projects. So there's gonna be a lot of that.
Starting point is 00:14:35 If you're coming in, you know, come with like your laptops, come with an open mind, come with your biggest problems, everyone and anyone that's gonna be able to help you is probably gonna be out there very happy to. That's exciting. And a GitHub token, grab a, get your GitHub token sorted out before you show up. That'll help too.
Starting point is 00:14:56 Well, Ron, I'm sure you've got a lot of packing to do. I have an incredible amount of gear to pack. We are gonna be hosting a dinner Saturday night. So if you can sneak away for a little bit and you know we'll grab you a beer. 100%. All right Ron thank you for joining us on a Sunday and we'll see in a couple of days. Well after all that I'm getting even more excited for Planet Nix and I've already been taking a sneak peek at some of the talks. And I can see already,
Starting point is 00:15:27 I'm gonna have to make some tough choices about which ones I attend and which ones I can't make because some of them happen at the same time. But there is a keynote I think everyone's excited for and we got ourselves a little bit of a preview. The joining us on the show right now is Kelsey Hightower. And Kelsey, I think people that are listening to this show that are familiar with the whole world of Kubernetes probably know who you are, but could you give us a brief introduction
Starting point is 00:15:52 for folks that are new to you, especially like us Knicks folks? 25 year veteran, retired about a year and a half ago as a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud. A lot of people know me from my work in the container worlds, spent time at CoreOS, a contributor to Kubernetes. Before that, spent time at Puppet Labs, working on things like puppet configuration management. And then the rest of my career,
Starting point is 00:16:16 probably spent time having jobs like the rest of the listeners from storage administration to software developer. Wow, that is fantastic. Down in the trenches. Yep. And now, not that we were like, you know, e-stocking you or anything, but we did notice in December of 2024 on LinkedIn,
Starting point is 00:16:32 you'd posted about dipping the toes into Nix, trying out flocks. And one of the things that sort of appealed to me about your talk with Ron is this outsider's perspective. You have all this experience, but you're coming to Nix now with sort of fresh eyes. And that is intriguing to me because I think it's something we struggle with on the show from time to time
Starting point is 00:16:52 is just kind of getting outside of that Nix bubble a bit. And I'm just sort of curious to know what getting introduced to the Nix community has been like and how that's gone. Yeah, it looks like there's this whole other world of software management that went down a different fork in the road. Yeah. No, 15 years ago, I went down the RPM, Debian packages, one app per VM to create isolation and it seems like configuration management
Starting point is 00:17:26 grew up around that, right? Like this idea that you will have lots of these tiny machines, so now we need frameworks to manage them all. And so if you come from the Linux distribution world, pick your package manager, app git, yum, does it matter? And then we got this second wave of package managers, again, going down this fork in the road of,
Starting point is 00:17:47 we just need a better package manager. So if you're Ruby, you have Ruby gems. If you're Python, you have 7,000 package managers, just figure out what your dependencies need and you'll be all right. And none of that really worked. But then we came up with things like virtual int, which is these isolated ways of having dependencies
Starting point is 00:18:07 match the thing you were working on. I mean, we went full brute force down this path, which ultimately led to things like Docker, right? Docker just says, you know what? If this is the path we're on, and the challenge we have with one app per VM is that it gets super expensive, and if we can just leverage the low level details,
Starting point is 00:18:26 like just create isolated file system, the old school Chirrut. And look, if you want to use RPMs and Ruby gems, hell, you can use all of them together. And what we'll do is just put them all in one big bundle, call it a container image, and then we did something I think that was unique at that time, which was we finally decoupled the application from the machine. And so when I arrived to Nix, you know, that's like a 20-year path. When I get to Nix, Nix is like, hey, wait a minute,
Starting point is 00:18:57 you don't need to do all of that. What you can do instead is just treat all your dependencies as a reusable thing, make them very explicit, lay them out on the file system, and then link them when you need them, and then you can ignore all this other brute force effort. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. That would have been good to know 20 years ago before we went down this road. Yeah. I think we've heard a lot of that, especially with folks who are very comfortable with Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and as you mentioned, things like Ansible or Puppet and Configuration
Starting point is 00:19:31 Management. They've already solved these things at scale, so it's kind of hard to want to unlearn everything. 100%. And I think that's the big challenge now. So anyone that reads the next paper now, I think a lot of people will agree that that is a great way of solving the problem. The one thing that I'm still trying to comprehend is it just feels to me like Nix is still machine focused,
Starting point is 00:19:53 meaning it needs that file system to be first class entity for anything else to work. And then in many ways, you're going to have to modify the binary itself, the startup and linking process. You're going to have to modify the binary itself, the startup and linking process. You're going to have to do a lot of work that assumes that you have access to the whole chain in order for it to work. So I think there's going to be this happy medium between,
Starting point is 00:20:15 can I create reproducible software, but then decide how to distribute it? And I think a lot of people now are using things like Kubernetes, which is a way of managing thousands of machines if you wanted to, but decoupling the app from the server. So you could imagine building a Docker image using Nix as a thing that brings in all the dependencies, creates that kind of chain of trust, if you will, but then allow me to use other tools to distribute. And I think that's the new crossroad that we face, given that NICS is a viable solution to this problem. Yeah, that strikes me.
Starting point is 00:20:48 I think we've got a lot of questions on that, because it is, A, kind of new of NICS being mature enough and the rest of the ecosystem to breed them together, and then also just, unless you understand kind of both container orchestration tech and the NICS side of it, you might see how, at the high level, it's possible to mingle these things productively, but actually how do you go about doing that in a concrete and battle-tested way is maybe an open question.
Starting point is 00:21:11 Yeah, I mean, the answer I've been drawing out, I have my notepad, I'm looking at like, what would be the answers to this problem? And I just keep going back to thinking about things in layers, right? So I think we have the operating system, pick your flavor, you grab your kernel. Those ABI's tend to be pretty stable. But then the next part of this layer, it has to be that programming language and it's runtime. So if you're in a JVM, for decades, you've kind of seen yourself somewhat isolated
Starting point is 00:21:37 from the low level OS, right? You have your class path, the JVM kind of abstracts your app and the bytecode away from the machine in hopefully a portable way. And then you have things like Golang that takes us to the extreme that builds your app with the runtime bundled in and all of its dependencies, even to the point where you're not even relying on libc sometimes. So now you have these languages that are also self-contained, building statically linked binaries.
Starting point is 00:22:06 And so you ask yourself, like, what use does Nix have? And the truth is there's still some use because not every app is gonna be written and going. Not every app is gonna create a statically linked executable. And also there's this trust problem. And this is where I think Nix jumps in. The trust problem is we have all of these dependencies. We're not sure who they're written by.
Starting point is 00:22:26 We're not sure what version they're at. And so on one hand, we're trying to create things like SBOMs if you haven't heard of those. This is this idea that we can produce a software bill of materials when you buy a car or TV. Ideally, someone knows every component and where it came from. So if there's a need for a recall
Starting point is 00:22:44 or to make sure that those things are safe, we can always go back to those hardware building materials. And that's what we're trying to do on this side, but how we use them together, I think a logical first step for a lot of people, if you take Nix as the trust layer, meaning you trust that Nix packages are built by people that are doing the right thing, they're building from source, there's a lot of transparency with that.
Starting point is 00:23:08 If I can take the Nix build process and let's say stick it inside of a Dockerfile. So in this case, Nix would be replacing RPM, Nix will be replacing kind of my ad hoc pulling things from GitHub and putting them in the particular directory. Instead, you would say, all right, let's use Nix, because Nix is going to give me, hopefully, a reproducible way of building my software and having that then sit inside of an image.
Starting point is 00:23:34 So for the Docker people out there, you will still push your Docker image to a Docker registry. You can run it in a serverless platform. You can run it on a VM like you're used to. But when you peer inside of it Now the next ecosystem opens up to you and you have a lot more Transparency on how things are linking to other things and I think that will be a really pragmatic next step for people Coming from the next world or coming from the Docker world and looking for a little bit more
Starting point is 00:24:03 Transparen transparency at the library and dependency layer. Yeah, I think especially, you know, anyone who's had to look backwards and try to piece together, maybe it's a couple different layers of Docker files and one of them is pulling from Alpine and one of them is a custom node or a Go builder and then all of that kind of gets munged together into one final layer. If a lot of that was Nix, yeah, maybe you'd have to learn Nix, but it might be a little easier to introspect.
Starting point is 00:24:24 Yeah, that's the big opportunity. Can these two worlds merge? And I think that's going to be key. User experience tends to dominate the tooling in this space because a lot of people are just not that interested in light building software. Let's just be honest. Most people are interested in capturing their ideas in their IDE, turning that into an artifact that they can ship to their customers and users and being done with it.
Starting point is 00:24:48 And so if we make them focus way too much on this low level detail, my guess is they will skip it. Right, I'm trying to get this feature done. There's a lot of pressure on me. I really don't have time to learn this thing that I don't really care about build systems anyway. They're just a detail. 100%.
Starting point is 00:25:01 I mean, the other, I think equation here is how many people or different entities do we need repackaging the same software, right? Debian does this work for themselves. Red Hat does this work for themselves. The Gentoo community, let's not forget about them. They do this work for themselves. And now you have kind of the Nix maintainers doing all of this work for themselves. And I think the tricky bit here is if I go look at a Nix package, I have to ask myself, who is this person that packaged this upstream software? And typically what I find, it's not the maintainer.
Starting point is 00:25:34 And so now we're adding this additional layer of trust. Like, did this person do something in between what the source code and the maintainer had in mind to what's finally inside of this mixed package. And that's the part that the industry is still trying to work out. Can we have a really reliable software train to trust? And that's where I think things get tricky. And also what happens when packages go unmaintained?
Starting point is 00:25:59 And so you also have the quality question, right? Is this the best place to get this software or should I just go get the sources and build it myself? Right, and you know, even now we've seen somewhat, I think, of a rise of more projects on GitHub having a default.nix or a flake.nix file. But as you say, there's still that question of, okay, well, if I go with them,
Starting point is 00:26:17 maybe it's oriented for like nightly development or exactly how they want it, but then if I go with maybe the Nix packages version or some other downstream, well, that's been maybe massaged a bit to fit more comfortably with the assumptions of the rest of the system and trade-offs abound. 100%. This doesn't sound like somebody who's retired, Kelsey, I have to say.
Starting point is 00:26:35 You said you started by saying you're retired. There's no retirement. What I've learned is you will always do work. It's just how much control over the work do you have. And for me, that means I like to do my own cleaning. I've learned some trade skills, everything from pulling permits to running my own electrical wires
Starting point is 00:26:54 to patching up the drywall and spraying texture on it so it matches the surrounding area. And to me, I think that's the thing that you work for, right? The idea is that you want to work on things that you think make the most impact. So in this capacity, that's going to be a lot of startup advising. I still love the conference speaking.
Starting point is 00:27:13 And look, I still have a knack for learning new technologies and putting my hands on the keyboard. Yeah, and I really appreciate your perspective on this. And it makes me even more excited to see the talk with Ron. Kelsey, is there anything else you wanna touch on before we run? No, I think people always ask me like,
Starting point is 00:27:30 what's the future of this? What's the future of containers? What's the future of NICs? And it's like, oh look, the future is typically determined by the people working on it. And so if you're working on NICs, it's on you to kind of draw that line from where you are right now
Starting point is 00:27:44 and what you want the future to be. And there are people, if you're listening, they're giving you feedback. Here is why I can't use Nix. Here's where I've tried to use Nix and it didn't work for me. If you listen to those things in earnest and you chip away at removing that friction,
Starting point is 00:28:02 and look, you're competing, whether you know it or not. You're competing with all the other solutions out there. And if you take those two things and create a feedback loop and you solve those problems, then you will decide what the future of Nix is. And if it's usable, if it lives up to its promises, you might just find a world where, I don't know, 30%, 50% of Docker images are using Nix at the base layer to provide
Starting point is 00:28:27 the solution to reproducible software. And just make sure you zoom out and understand the big picture. Where does Nix fit in and what people are trying to do every day? And I think those are just the huge takeaways as a technologist. I love the tech. I love it's cool. I know some people have a printed out version of the original Nix white paper and sitting next to them like the tech. I love it's cool. I know some people have a printed out version of the original NYX white paper And sit next to them like the Bible
Starting point is 00:28:48 but you got to remember that's just one component of the whole and Whoever bridges that gap will determine what the future looks like Thank you, sir. Appreciate it very much OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That is the number one password dot com slash unplugged all lowercase. You got to check it out. Imagine your company security like the quad of a college campus or anywhere you've been where there's those nice paths that the designers built, the brick or cement paths between the buildings all thoughtfully designed and laid out. nice paths that the designers built, the brick or cement paths between the buildings, all
Starting point is 00:29:25 thoughtfully designed and laid out. Think of those as like the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the things you actually have your hands around, like managed employee identities. And then everywhere you go, there's also those paths that people actually use, the shortcuts that have worn through the grass and turn out to actually be the straightest line from point A to point B. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps and non-employee identities like contractors. There's just all these incentives in the world for users to inevitably drift this way.
Starting point is 00:29:57 And most security tools today work like that stuff doesn't exist, like we only use the happy brick paths. But we all know the reality is that security problems take place on the shortcuts. That's where one password extended access management comes in. It is the first security solution that brings all of these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected and every device is known and healthy, and every app is visible. One Password Extended Access Management solves the problems that traditional IAMs and MDMs were built back in my day, just don't solve. It's security for the way we actually work today with One Password Extended Access Management, and it's generally available for companies with Okta, Microsoft
Starting point is 00:30:45 Entra, and it is in beta for Google Workspace customers, too. Now, we all know what a game changer, a password manager, has been for the workplace. And One Password's definitely one of those. They're one of the best out there. And you have the confidence that One Password is getting regularly audits with third-party audits
Starting point is 00:31:01 and the industry's largest bug bounty. So that way, when they catch stuff, they catch it fast. Secure every app, secure every device, and every identity, even the unmanaged ones. Go to onepassword.com slash unplugged, all lowercase. You can check it out. They got more information there, and it's a great way to support the show.
Starting point is 00:31:18 That's onepassword.com slash unplugged. Well, Chris, as you mentioned, scale's coming up, it's one of my favorite times of the year, and we've been going for years now, and I think you both would agree. It's just a highlight of the year as well. This time around, we're lucky to have another guest joining us this episode, one of the legends of scale who's been helping there for, oh, a decade now, and giving us a little insight into the tech. (*applause*)
Starting point is 00:31:52 Scale is just days away, and one of the things that makes it one of the best events is it routinely has solid networking, which you can't say for most events, let alone community run events. And I think one of the keys to that success, especially over the last nearly 10 years, has been Scales Tech Chair.
Starting point is 00:32:15 And Rob joins us on the show now. Rob, welcome to the Unplugged program. Hey Chris, Wes, Frank, great to be here. Hello, hello sir. So you're just a few days out. Are you at peak anxiety right now? Are you feeling like everything's kind of going as expected? You know, I'm feeling pretty good.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Things are busy, but not up to my eyeballs and say tech debt or anything. The team works year round. We do a couple of work parties to prepare for the conference. So we've been able to do three to four this year and everything's looking pretty good. And yeah, I'm just packing up the car and I'll be heading to Pasadena this evening. Okay, you mentioned a team there.
Starting point is 00:33:08 What's the, how many folks you got all working to make this happen? So we've got about 30 folks that are contributing in various ways from cabling to the networking to servers, access points, even signage. So that's, yeah, it's really just a group effort. Some folks are working across these multiple sub teams, but we've really got a great group that's, you know, really focused on making sure that the conference is, you know, as good as it could be for our attendees.
Starting point is 00:33:42 And is everyone volunteer rep? Yes, yeah, actually the entire conference is volunteer run. The thing we like to say is that it's the largest community run open source conference in North America. I mean, the organization alone of just getting these work parties organized throughout the year is really commendable. It's hard to manage a team that size even when they like report to you because you're
Starting point is 00:34:06 paying them, let alone their volunteers. Yeah, I mean, as long as it's fun, I think people want to come back. They want to learn new things. You know, a lot of folks, maybe they start out on the cabling team and then make their way to maybe helping out with signage or learning some things about Linux administration. So I think that's really one of the selling points is, you can get your hands dirty with some of the tech
Starting point is 00:34:36 that you might not otherwise have at hand. Does it help for their resume too? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things that, that's why I started to show up nine, 10 years ago was I was thinking, hey, you know, I don't necessarily get to do a lot of these things day to day. You know, a lot of the time my job was on AWS and I was kind of losing some of the,
Starting point is 00:35:03 you know, like the things that you were doing within a physical data center. Hands on stuff. Racking and stacking. Exactly. I follow you. I wanted to get back into that and then also you kind of add in the little bit of the stress factor where you've got to get this thing, you've got this network set up in four days.
Starting point is 00:35:24 We show up on Monday and it's got to be ready to go by Thursday. This almost sounds like a TV show kind of setup. Yeah, like a reality show. Yeah, they should maybe stop doing the America's Talent thing and just film you guys. Not only do you have just a few days to get it working, but it's a serious job for Wi-Fi. Like all the devices people have now, especially this crowd. I'd love to know a little bit about the backend system
Starting point is 00:35:51 that makes it actually work. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that, you know, you mentioned the Wi-Fi, and one of the big things that has happened this year in partnership with OpenWRT and the Software Freedom Conservancy was the partnership that got us 120 OpenWRT ones. So we'll be deploying those across the conference as our access points so that we'll have Wi-Fi
Starting point is 00:36:22 6 and just to make sure that the connectivity is as best as we can make it while still having a open source software stack and hardware stack. Wow that is so you know okay so two things strike me first of all that's so perfect for a conference like this but second of all I thought I recalled last year there was a pretty big back-end switch over to like NixOS. It sounds like every year there's a pretty big infrastructure switch is on the table. Yeah, there's a lot of iteration, right? So we have a year to kind of think about, okay, how did things go last year?
Starting point is 00:36:59 What can we do better next year? And then just start to chip away at that over the course of these work parties and just async or remote communication throughout the year. So is there a process during this if somebody wants to do kind of a wild card like swap out all the Wi-Fi hardware or put everything in crazy VMs or use NixOS? Is there this process where somebody pitches it and then has to like win everybody over? How does that work?
Starting point is 00:37:28 I think it's, there's a little bit of a, yeah, you got to sell the idea, right? You can't just have this crazy idea and, you know, then even if you wanted to implement it, does it really work for the attendees, right? So we've got to make sure that this is good for the folks that are showing up to scale that are going to be able to enjoy the conference. It's got to make sure that this is good for the folks that are showing up to scale that are going to be able to enjoy the conference.
Starting point is 00:37:47 It's got to work. So proof of concepts are always welcome. And then we just kind of iterate on it from there and just try to figure out, does this fit for what we're doing? There's a couple of folks that have been doing this just as long as I have across the various things in the conference, whether that be signage or the servers or the network. And so we just kind of try to figure out, okay, if this can fit,
Starting point is 00:38:17 is this an appropriate next step in the next evolution? And you mentioned, Chris, the switch to NixOS. I've done a little bit of the server side management. Like I've been the one that's managing some of the services. And I just made that switch because we had had some other difficulties with the previous tools that we were deploying.
Starting point is 00:38:46 And it was the, I think the most stable thing we could go to. And that's the other thing is it's, you know, for my perspective, if it's stable and boring, that's fantastic. A lot of these services are, you know, they're core networking services, so they have to work or else really no one's going to be able to present or be able to, you know, just kind of have basic network functions. So, you know, running that stuff on NixOS gets us those guarantees. That was a, you know, from a group or team perspective, that was a, I think, a pretty straightforward next step for us. A lot of the folks are also in the NixOS community, the Nix community, and everybody was pretty on board with that.
Starting point is 00:39:33 You got the Planet Nix crew there, so you got some of the heavy hitters in case something really goes sideways. Yeah, we've got plenty of folks on hand should something really come up that we were stumped on. So I was wondering, and maybe this does happen, I don't know how you'd have the bandwidth for it, but do other conferences like Texas Linux Fest or others, do they reach out to your expertise
Starting point is 00:39:55 and be like, can you help us have a great WiFi and networking and internet setup? You know, we've offered that. No one's taken us up on it. But that would be, I think, a really awesome partnership to have, you know, the the equipment. We don't have a use for it except for the, you know, the four days for scale. So if it can be used elsewhere,
Starting point is 00:40:21 you know, that we would be happy to figure out how to make that work. And that's also why, you know, all of the code, all of the utilities and the scripts and things that we have that go into building the conference and provisioning it and running it are also all open. And that's, you know, kind of the whole intent is someone could take this and then apply it. Maybe, like you said, if that's Texas Lennox Fest or another conference, that's definitely something that we're interested in figuring out how to make work. Rob, I owe you a beer or three.
Starting point is 00:41:01 So if you're around Saturday, 7 p.m, we're doing a meetup and we're going to have a dinner and we'd love to buy you a beer too. Oh, fantastic. I will be there. That sounds awesome. Good, good, good. Well, Rob, thank you so much for sharing all this with us and I look forward to actually seeing you at the event. And we just really appreciate the work you and the whole team does. I gained a much better insight and appreciation for the level of work. You know, especially as a tech folks here,
Starting point is 00:41:25 it's just so nice to have us all work and not have to be involved with it at all. Well, we're happy to do it. We just want to make sure that there's a great experience for all of the attendees and just keep that going forward year after year. So I hope everybody that's going to be enjoys the conference and swing by the NOC if you wanna check out anything about what goes into the network. I'm happy to give a behind the scenes tour.
Starting point is 00:41:54 So just go ahead and find me. We'll be in the conference building. Very good, thank you Rob. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:42:03 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Jupiter broadcasting dot com slash River. That's where I recommend you buy sats. That's where I buy my sats. River makes it easy to get started with Bitcoin in three simple steps. And with River, you get zero fee reoccurring buys. You set it and forget it. You just automatically stack Bitcoin without paying a dime in fees.
Starting point is 00:42:25 And one of my absolute favorite features is their 3.8% interest on cash. Your cash earns yield paid in Bitcoin. No gimmicks, just more sats. And it makes it super easy to smash by on a dip with a target price order. They also have free auto withdrawal to self custody. I am a big believer in self custody. I hope a lot of you are too. With automatic withdrawals, with no extra fees,
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Starting point is 00:43:29 Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river. That's jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river. We received a little digital postcard here from longtime friend of the show, Olympia Mike. Thank you, Mike, for sending a little note. It reads, hey guys it's been far too long since I've been able to hang out with the Lupp family. I'll be attending and speaking at both Planet Nix and Linux Fest Northwest this year and really hope to see as many JB community folks as possible. The talk I'm giving at both events is called
Starting point is 00:44:01 Building a Chromebook Replacement with Nix OS. Love it. I've been working on it for about a year, and it's my attempt at a Nix OS that you can give to your kids or parents who know nothing about Linux or Nix. It's a Chromebook type experience without all the creepy Google stuff. If anyone wants to check it out, the project or the talk,
Starting point is 00:44:23 I'd love all your feedback. But most of all, really, I can't wait to hang out with the JB crew again. Oh, Olympia Mike, I hope you can make it to our Saturday dinner. Check out his project. It's github.com slash Mike Kelly XP slash Nick's book. We'll put a link in the show notes too. Good to hear from you, Olympia Mike, and looking forward to seeing you and looking forward to your talk too. I think it's a great project, and I know you've been iterating for more than a year, you've been iterating on the idea.
Starting point is 00:44:50 One of the things Mike does is he goes out and finds discarded but still quite usable old ThinkPads, and he's been iterating on this idea with those too for a couple of years, so Chromebook idea's a great angle. I love it too, because we've all talked about personal successes with being able to deploy things like NixOS for family and friends. And this is just taking that to the next level where you, you know, you don't even need the curated levels of support that we provide. Yeah, it's pretty great.
Starting point is 00:45:17 And now it is time for the boost. Well, we don't have any baller boosts this week, but we still have some great boosts to read. And Promise QNIX comes comes in with two thousand and one sats. Pew pew pew! From Miss QNICS! I thought you had a read on that. First time boosting, I think, at least live. Keep up the NICS love and watch out for my new NICS YouTube channel coming for newcomers
Starting point is 00:45:40 to NICS. Love you guys. Yeah, this was actually a live boost that just missed our live boost cutoff last episode. Top of the stack. Thank you. Maybe boost us back or send us another way. Uh, why, your channel, when you got it all going, because we'd love to promote that. Yeah. Once you got it launched,
Starting point is 00:45:57 send us a boost and let us know. We'll promote it. Lime Elephant comes in with 5,000 cents. Use a boost! Got a challenge idea. Lime Elephant comes in with 5,000 cents. You supposed! Got a challenge idea? Daily drive a scrollable tiling window manager, like PaperWM, Neary, or Carousel, for at least two weeks. Not as hard as BSD, but it could be fun.
Starting point is 00:46:19 Hmm, this is an interesting one, actually. I like this too, because there's always a background pressure on Chris from the audience to just go tiling already. PaperWM is a GNOME shell extension which provides a scrollable tiling of windows and per monitor workspaces. Hey. It's inspired by paper notebooks and tiling window managers.
Starting point is 00:46:39 Technically an extension, it's a large tent built on top of the GNOME desktop rather than merely extending it Okay. All right. This is a this is weird, but I think worth considering it looking at screenshots. It's a little weird But I think we'll put it up on for discussion when we get back. I like that. That's a good suggestion Thank you for the boost also ham sent in 3000 Satoshi's you make me want to be a better man. A little bit of an opinion here. They read, I'm sorry, but this needs to be done. The Matrix protocol is far too complex and the implementation is just bad.
Starting point is 00:47:15 Firstly, I don't need Merkel-dags happening each time I send a shitpost mean. Then what are the room upgrades? Also if Synapse source code is readable, then I am the king of France. For the longest time they had an environment variable which they themselves didn't know the behavior of. Dendrite replacing Synapse is like IBV6 replacing V4 and we know how that goes. I recently found out they, anyway, don't bridge with the most popular IRC, liberal chat. No wonder they keep running out of money every two years.
Starting point is 00:47:48 That's a solid spicy take. That's a hot take and boy, what do I think? I do kind of agree dendrite replacing was sort of a, I guess, a mislead. I'm glad we didn't go down that route now that it's sort of end of life. Yeah. I mean, I'm impressed in many ways with Synapse, but it is a sprawling app, that is for sure. And I think that, you know,
Starting point is 00:48:14 I don't need a Merkle dag, et cetera comment. I interpret that one way is sort of hitting on that thing I said, right? Like I think maybe the goals, the enterprisey goals of Matrix are not what everyone is looking for necessarily. And to solve that maximum case has meant, you know, a complicated implementation.
Starting point is 00:48:32 I love that boost. That's great. Thank you very much. Magnolia Mayhem's here with 2001 Sat. You're doing a good job. Well, I finally got Bounton fixed, right? Before you guys skip a week. Oh, face bomb.
Starting point is 00:48:43 With that, the case, I'll just hold off on my BSD boost and tell you about my monitor setup. I've always had at least two. My optimal setup was three horizontal screens with a vertical off to the right for monitoring things like maybe documents. Most I've ever had though was eight screens and that was just out of screwing around. We just got married and I remember my wife walking past the room and noticed me surrounded by monitors like a crazy person.
Starting point is 00:49:08 She just shook her head and walked away. Yeah, yeah, I get I think I get that look whenever I use the VR headset, but I don't know for sure because I can't see. But I assume I'm getting that look. It's kind of awkward. I had a landlord I just moved in. This is in a past relationship and she had a lot of monitors too. So we probably had like six or seven monitors between us when we'd set up both of our desks and the landlord was just like,
Starting point is 00:49:31 What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. We're day traders. No. Thank you, Mayhem. Good to hear from you. Outdoor Geek comes in with 10,000 sets. Chris, in response to your AM LAN ping woes, Yeah. I wonder if maybe your router's power is dirty for some reason. Like, is there a new large load nearby? EV chargers?
Starting point is 00:49:56 Although if other devices on your LAN are working OK, then the issue is probably something else. But regardless, I hope the fix is quick and cheap. I can't imagine it would be PJ or Brent's wiring. Can't imagine it be that. Right? No. That's impossible.
Starting point is 00:50:11 So, I do have new neighbors. We do share that wall where the router and switch are plugged in. I love that theory. I don't think it affects my other devices though. Hmm. I thought we'd burn it all down and build it up again. Alright. Alright, I like this. Token ring this time. I thought we'd burn it all down and build it up again. All right. All right, I like this.
Starting point is 00:50:26 Token ring this time. Well Bronzewing sent in three booths for a total of 6,666 Satoshis. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Number one here, RIP Coder Radio. Aw, yeah. We do have a temporary, not a replacement, but some content out there called The Launch, New Show, and we got about three new episodes out right now.
Starting point is 00:50:52 WeeklyLaunch.rocks, if you wanna check it out. The Coder Show continues under Mike's stewardship, but it is not a JB Production anymore. Bronzewing's also switching to Fountain. They did try AlbieHub for a bit, but they've had issues. I think one of the things people run into with AlbiHub is it does sometimes cost money to open channels. So if you're not using it, this is my commentary, if you're not using AlbiHub for anything other
Starting point is 00:51:17 than boosting the shows, something like Fountain or Breeze is a much simpler setup. So that's what they switched to, but now they want CarPlay to work like other apps where you don't have to open it on your phone first. Well, here's a little insider scoop. I don't have all the details I can share with you, but CarPlay and Android Auto are about to get major attention in Fountain. And I think you're going to see much, much better CarPlay implementation and Android Auto implementation probably the next couple of months. And also, yes, Graphene OS does have Android Auto. It's one of the apps you can install. It is sandboxed and it seems to work great.
Starting point is 00:51:51 I've had it crash on me once or twice, maybe ever. So that's pretty good, right? Yeah. That's pretty good. I will say just for the AlbiHub curious out there, one of the nuances here is that AlbiHub is not necessarily optimized out of the box for boosting as your primary use case. Yeah, right, right. If you get what they call a liquidity service One of the nuances here is that Alibihub is not necessarily optimized out of the box for
Starting point is 00:52:05 boosting as your primary use case. So if you get what they call a liquidity service provider, an LSP, that's kind of optimized like if you were a merchant wanting to receive payments from your customers. And so you pay them and they open a channel for you. But most of them say like, well, if you don't use it enough after a month, we're probably going to close it. The alternative is if you have money you're willing to commit because it takes committing some liquidity to a channel you can also open your own channel to one of our nodes or
Starting point is 00:52:31 a big node out there. So there are some options but all of that takes the desire to want to run this infrastructure so Fountain or Breeze are way better if you just want to send an occasional. And sometimes there's you know there's the the Bitcoin questions chat room and the Bitcoin main chat and you can sometimes find people in there That are exchanging nodes to and and actually hybrid started a boost support room I don't I'll get a link to that and that's another spot you can ask for help. Well, there you go turd Ferguson boosts in with 9333 sats
Starting point is 00:53:03 Here's do a great trip boys. Buy a beer on me. Done. Thank you Turd. We'll get Brent a nice gluten free beer on you. If we find gluten free beer that would make me happy. Cider will do. It's gonna, nah it's gonna be in Cal.
Starting point is 00:53:17 Okay, alright. I'll join you in a cider. Well Spectra sent in 5000 sats. You supposed! On the topic of owning your books versus leasing them, I think I learned of it on Linux Unplugged or Self-hosted, but someone boosted in about Libro.fm and gotta say, it's great. DRM free downloads. If anyone is interested, my referral link is linked in the show notes.
Starting point is 00:53:43 Also since I don't stream Sats, any suggestion on how to set up a recurring payment with AlbiHub? I see a Zap Planner, but that doesn't seem to support Splits, so suggestions are welcome. I gotta look into that. Yeah, good question.
Starting point is 00:53:57 There has been other options in the past. Zap Planner, it doesn't seem like it. Maybe in conjunction with something else. Hmm, we will have to investigate. Thank you for the boost the dude abides is here with ten thousand sats He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, you're great guy peace Nix OS injustice No rock and roll Nix OS injustice, right? Is that how you read that? It's emoticons So I I get it. It's a rock Nixon scale. Oh scale, of course. Ah, well done. Well done
Starting point is 00:54:31 Well done. Thank you everybody. Of course We really appreciate everybody who boosted above the 2000 sat cutoff for time And then of course a big tip of the hat and shout out to our sat streamers 37 of you just stream those those SATs as you listened. You did a heavy lift this week. You guys stacked us 90,126 SATs, which is pretty great. We really appreciate it. That's over half, wow.
Starting point is 00:54:52 Not bad, right? And then you combine that with our boosters. It wasn't a particularly strong episode. I think maybe the rest in kernel stuff didn't go over super well. It's kind of my takeaway, but that's totally fine, that's on us. But we really appreciate everybody who did step up.
Starting point is 00:55:07 Collectively, we all stacked 144,427 sats for this episode. Stop it, get some help. We really appreciate you, and don't stop it one bit. If you'd like to boost the show, like I said earlier, the easiest way is probably with Fountain FM. Or if you just don't want to hassle with accounts or anything like that, or even switch podcast apps, Breeze Mobile, B-R-E-E-Z, Breeze Mobile, makes it really easy. Thank you everybody who supports this value for value production.
Starting point is 00:55:42 We distribute this episode for free and our members make it possible. Thank you to our members. You also get a fantastic bootleg special only for you next week. Thank you everybody who supports this production. That is our supporters for episode 604. If you pick music that's good. I know, we just listen to the music. We do have a really fantastic pick.
Starting point is 00:56:09 You should see if we can get this working while we talk about it. So Steve Evans, longtime listener of the show and co-host of the Ask Noah program, has worked on making a dream of mine reality. It's called Open Audible to Audio Bookshelf. Now, you guys know I've talked about how I purchase books on Audible and then I extract them off of Audible and then I manually, like a caveman,
Starting point is 00:56:35 load them over the network onto my Audio Bookshelf server. Well, what Steve has created here is a script that automates the process of moving audiobook files from the open Audible app or libation, your choice, to an organized folder structure and then updates audiobook shelf accordingly. I think it pings the API. Yeah, it says here it handles file organization, metadata mapping, and interaction with the audiobook shelf API. And of course, it is GPL3. Yeah, I saw you tag this for the show
Starting point is 00:57:06 and immediately that just seemed brilliant. This is something that the people have needed. It's a, you need Python. He's got the prerequisites. Just requests and PyYAML for dependencies though. Totally reasonable. I also asked him if he's open to the community contributing ideas or fixes or updates.
Starting point is 00:57:23 And he said he totes is, he would welcome the feedback from the audience out there. This is such a great idea, right? Like you could see yourself just pulling down your books from time to time. This kicks in, moves them up to the to the bookshelf server. Just so ah, you know, because the problem is now is like, I've actually even resisted buying books and like, ah, then I have to go fire up libation copy. And it's not like it's a huge deal, but libations UI is weird. It's just enough friction. So what are you going to do with all your time, Chris?
Starting point is 00:57:52 I'm going to listen to more audio books, clearly, you know, now nothing holds me back. It's pretty cool. So it's open audible to audio bookshelf and we have a link in the show notes. GPL3 made by Mr. Steve, Ovens, fantastic work, sir. You know what, you get an emoy for that. That's so good. Here you go right here, Steve. You're doing a good job. That's some serious value for value right there. Well, I'm not quite there,
Starting point is 00:58:18 but I'm pretty sure a flake can come pretty quick if we want one. You think we could have it before the end of the member stream? I mean, that's a big task. We got other work to do. But I mean, come on, I got to get this going. I need a flake. All right. That's it. Remember, we have the EBPF special for you next week.
Starting point is 00:58:34 We'd like to hear what you think of that. If you'd like to buy a beer at the meetup on Saturday, even if you can't make it, boost the show and just say it's for the beer budget and we'll allocate it as such. Yeah, and then maybe we cheers to the folks that do that at the table. I like that idea. Yeah, we'll pull up the report on the laptop and we'll give you a shout out there at the meetup. Now we won't have the live stream. We do have a bootleg for our members, but we won't have a live stream since we're going to be on location.
Starting point is 00:58:59 We've decided to just sort of focus on getting the content for you and then we're going to bring you back the best stuff when we get back from all of it. So join us in two weeks on Sunday at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Maybe one day AI can generate a version that says see you in two weeks.
Starting point is 00:59:17 You know, cause right now there's nothing I can do. Jeff, get to it. Ha ha ha. Links to everything we talked about and more Linuxunplug.com slash 604. Also, do remember we won't be live next year. But you can find Mumble info, so when you do want to participate, contact page over there, our Matrix info, because the Matrix is always going. We do have a Scale Chat, and so we'll be poking in and out of there during the event. You can always find us in Scale Chat if you want to know where we're at. I think that's it though.
Starting point is 00:59:48 Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So So Okay, real talk. Have any of us actually packed yet? No. I've been thinking about it. Oh, I've been thinking about it. I've got like a semi sorted list in my head.
Starting point is 01:00:41 Yeah, I don't. I haven't packed clothes or gear yet. I mean, I kind of have a, I kind't. I haven't packed clothes or gear yet. I mean, I kind of have a, I kind of know. But I'll tell you the truth, we have not done a live event since Linux Fest Northwest last year. And so, like, everything's in the, we got to pack up the booth in 25 minutes and put it in this huge crate box. And you told me it was safe to store that info on tape and that you'd get the archives ready so we could load it back into our brains, you know, a couple of weeks ago.
Starting point is 01:01:06 But that hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Turns out it wasn't a good plan.

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