LINUX Unplugged - 613: Packets, Power, and Paulus

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

We chat with the founder of Home Assistant and then fire up Brent's Linux-powered rig.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. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMSelf-Hosted 150 Merch at the Jupiter GarageAnnouncing State of the Open Home 2025Open Home FoundationWorks with Home AssistantReolink joins Works with Home AssistantEve Joins Works With Home Assistant - Home Assistant3…2…1… Backup - Home AssistantHome AssistantThe Launch 🚀 20: Linux Goat North VanThis 1987 Dodge Camper Van Is an Amazing 1980s RV Relic - YouTubeRoadtrek Brochure - 1989-1990 Chassis Model Years.pdfAxiomtek ICO300-TES5 Industrial PC (PDF)Intel Atom® E3827Mieze K106 Octa-Core Tablet 10 InchSpokane Linux User's Group – casual meet-up to talk tech — Cant wait till the next JB meetup over here too!Alpine Email ProgramPick: LinuxInExcel — The emulator is built as a seperate dll which is loaded by the VBA macro. The VBA macro calls the emulator in the dll and gets the output and writes it into the cells in the spreadsheet.cnlohr/mini-rv32ima — A tiny C header-only risc-v emulator.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Les. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up today, we're going to chat with the founder of Home Assistant and the leader of the Open Home Foundation, Mr. Paulus. And then we'll reveal the big things they have in the works

and how we're going to automate Brent's new Linux powered van. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, great pick, and a whole lot more. So before we go any further, let me say time appropriate greetings to our virtual log. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hi, Bryson. Hello, everyone. There you go. Hello. Hello, hello, hello. And a big good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are,

whatever they might be. So go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged and try it for free on 100 devices, three users, no credit card required. It's not a limited time trial. Right now we are doing our entire show production over tail scale. We're in PJ's backyard and I'm controlling everything over tail scale. And it's so nice because no matter where you go, all your devices talk to each other because they're talking over their tail net, which is a flat mesh network protected by a loud.

That's right. And so your devices talk directly to each other like they're just physically wired together, but you could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart. And so you can have one flat mesh network across a complex network, like multiple VPS providers and your LAN. But on top of that, it's so intuitive to use

and it's programmable. So you can have access controls and you can tie it in with your corporate authentication because it also works great for corporations. The personal plan's always gonna be free and you can try Tailscale out right now and support the show 100 devices, three users when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.

Thousands of companies use it. We use it. Instacart uses it. Hugging Face uses it and so many of our audience love it too. Support the show. Get it for free on 100 devices at tailscale.com slash unplugged. Before we bring Paulus on, I just want to let you know if it sounds a little different or you hear some birds or some mowers

in the background. We are live at producer Jeff's house right now in his backyard. The van rescue has officially begun. And Brentley and I are sitting right now in the back of his brand new bank bus It's pretty great Brent. What do you think? How is it? I love it It's surprisingly good in here because it's got padding on the walls true And so it's acoustically actually a lot better than I expected. I know right better than an Airbnb Is it already better than jupes? Um, I think it actually acoustically might be yeah Because there's a lot more soft especially because because in Joops I set up at the

windshield. Now we're going we're gonna kind of mess it up a little bit because we got the back door open hashtag van lifestyle. Because there is a back door. And so we've got yeah so if if you were to you if Brent was taking pictures right now and wearing his bikini you'd swear he was an Instagram model you know I mean it just looks just like that like that. That's what I want your mental picture to be. So it's quite the story. It involves nasty fuel leaks, getting pulled over and stopped by the cops, and a lot more,

including deploying Linux. So we'll get to all of that later on in the show. But I just wanted to mention that with Self-Hosted coming to an end at episode 150, we heard the call and we have launched some swag over at Jupiter Garage. JupiterGarage.com. There is a fantastic 150 poster over there with all the titles and a title cloud that spells 150. The dad hats over there. There's t-shirts. There's JupiterGarage.com. Things are probably going up right now even as we're talking. It's true. So check it out.

Buy yourself some Self-Hosted swag while it lasts to celebrate episode 150 and five years of Self-Hosted at jupitergarage.com. Joining us for the first time on the Unplugged program, not the first time to Jupiter Broadcasting, but the first time to the Unplugged program, it is Paulus, the president of the Open Home Foundation, the founder of Home Assistant, and Nebuchadnezzar too, I believe, and probably other things I don't know about. Paulus, welcome to the show. Yeah, great to be here. So I wanted to have you on because I, as you know,

long time huge fan and user of Home Assistant and I've been watching you guys for the last five years or so and your state of the open home keynote and live stream was just on April 12th and I was watching this and I walked away from the impression that things have really leveled up in the last year. And so before we get into Home Assistant and all that,

could we talk a little bit about the Open Home Foundation, what it is, where it fits in and some of the goals there? Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I started Home Assistant like 2013, so that's almost 12 years ago at this point. And it was just an open source project. I was just hacking on it, right? And it keeps growing and growing and growing. And like last year, we were the most active open source project in the world, 21,000 people.

But last year also, we made a big change. We announced the Open Home Foundation because I felt that even though I wasn't planning on selling, we were building something with our whole community together. Having a person owning it, it's just not the right thing. At some point, somewhere, something can happen and then that might jeopardize the project. We created the Open Home Foundation. I donated Home Assistant to it throughout actually our ecosystem, other projects got donated like ZigPi

or Zigbee driver, Piper, our Text-to-Speech engine, couple of other things. ESPHome, right? ESP, well, yeah, ESPHome as well. Yeah, well, so ESPHome, we already owned it. Well, Nabucasa had acquired it back in the day. So yeah, ESPHome also got donated to the Open Home Foundation. And that made the foundation all of a sudden like, you know, it's a nonprofit, right?

A foundation is based in Switzerland. They cannot be acquired. They cannot be invested in. They are bound to their mission. It's based in Switzerland, which is very strict around its foundations. And so, yeah, now no one can ever buy Home Assistant again. I wonder if it's worth clarifying you know I don't I don't think this was y'all's heavy-handed pressuring folks you know all you got to donate your stuff to the foundation right this was set up and people already maintaining community aspects thought it would be a good home. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. It really sounds like

a structure to prevent in-. Yes, 100 percent. I think that like when we what I saw, like, you know, we were first, we were just an open source project, right. And people take you not so seriously in the industry. Then we, you know, we started Nabucas as a company next to it to support the development. We were taken more seriously, but we were still seen as a company. And then people think that one day you're going to sell out,

and so they treat you differently. And then we went to the foundation, and now they're like, OK, you guys are here forever, and this is the right path. And yeah, we've been working really well. And so can you clarify how things have changed for Nebuchadnezzar, then? Where's the dividing line between the two these days? So Nebuchadnezzar is six and a half years old. So I know for the people listening,

we're throwing around a lot of names. So Home Assistant is the project. Nabucasa is the company I started to fund the development six and a half years ago. And Open Home Foundation is the foundation. Now, Nabucasa has Home Assistant Cloud, which is our subscription service to fund the development of Home Assistant.

It gives you remote access, access to voice assistance, a bunch of other stuff, backup storage offsite. It also sells Home Assistant hardware, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, the Home Assistant Green, like official hardware products. All that funds the development. It used to do that by just hiring people full-time. They would work at home at Nabucasa, but they would be dedicating their full-time to working on Home Assistant, ESP Home, Piper, all these other projects. And now with the Open Home Foundation in place, we actually made a big change. And so anyone that was just already dedicating full-time on open source is now working for the foundation and the foundation just receives a bag of money from Nabucasa. So this is the ultimate independence move, right? The foundation now has 39 employees

full-time and there are 17 people at Nabucasa working full-time on the hardware, the subscription service, customer support. And because the foundation is bound to its mission, right? Like that bag of money is only going to be made on improving Home Assistant and ESPHome and all these other projects. So the reason why I wanted to start with the foundation is because when you think of what Home Assistant offers end users, it's offering them an exit from devices that get expired

because their cloud service went away or in certification because a vendor wants to get into a storage play. It allows this level of independence, also generally local first. But the other side of that is the finance side, the development side and the hardware partnership side. And so it does make sense that a foundation coming in would make it something that is sustainable.

So the software can actually achieve the goals it's set out to achieve. And it needs that structure of the foundation. And something else that I believe is part of that, then we'll get into Home Assistant itself, but is the Works with Home Assistant program, which has had some pretty good announcements recently, can you tell me about that? Is that part of the foundation too? And what does it mean when something works with Home Assistant?

Yes, so we started a program called Works with Home Assistant already a couple of years ago, but we now moved it into the foundation. And this program allows manufacturers to certify their devices. And so we actually, you know, if it's a Z-Wave device, right? It needs to be Z-Wave certified, then they can give it to us and we're gonna certify it again. Like we test to actually make sure that

Z-Wave certification or Zigbee certification, they can always like, it might not be perfect, right? So we'll make sure that CWay certification or ZigBee certification, they can always like, it might not be perfect, right? So we'll make sure that it works great, that we have firmware updates available. We make sure that everything works with Home Assistant, but we also make sure that, and for open standards it's not that important,

but for local APIs it's important, does it work with the cloud? And if so, it's a no-go, right? So we want to make sure that if you are as a user in a store, you see two products, they both are white products in like generic brown boxes because that's how everything looks nowadays. Yes.

I want you to know that, oh, this one is works with Home Assistant, this one I can put in my house and it will work for 10 years or more, right? That's the kind of guarantee and it's aligned with our values. It seems very nice just for me thinking about deploying Home Assistant,

not only for myself, where I can maybe figure out if it's gonna work or not. I can look up available integrations, but if I tell my friends or my family to do that, they don't wanna have to go figure that out or read YAML, and if there's just a little badge right there,

that's a big step. And so when it's in the program, we want to make sure it's got automatically discovered and all these things have to be perfect. And then we have our, we've set ourselves the goal that we want to, every region in the world, there needs to be for every category of smart home devices, there needs to be a WorkSuit Home Assistant device.

So whether in the UK, Mexico, the US, right, you buy a thermostat, it should be a WorkSuit Home Assistant option, an AC, a light bulb, et cetera, right, you buy a thermostat, it should be a works with Home Assistant option, an AC, a light bulb, et cetera, everything. I love that. Because you know, for years I've just figured it out mostly through community resources because Home Assistant has a really great community around it.

Okay, so I'm curious these days, when you have to do an elevator pitch of what Home Assistant is, what do you tell people? So it's a open source smart home platform with a focus on local control and privacy. Then it depends on the audience. So if the audience is like technical nerds and focusing on like, we don't believe in silos, it's an actual platform. So your data from all your different devices, but also services like your garbage pickup

schedule, whatever flows into a single place. From there on, you can either, you know, Homosys in itself has great dashboards, history, automations, voice control, but it's not the end point, right? We're not a another data silo from there. If you want to use Apple Home, you only use Google Home or Amazon, whatever, you can send the data through. If you want to use Node-RED for automation, you can use that. If you want to use InfluxDB, Grafana for plotting your data, do your thing. It's your data.

We believe that any device that you buy, you put it in your house, it starts gathering your data. That data is yours. And sometimes we have to go into a cloud and get that data back for you. And then we store it locally. And you can do whatever you want with it. I kind of had a mind shift around this recently and you've really hit on it.

At first, you know, I thought when I was trying to introduce Home Assistant, it was sort of like, look, yeah, you've got all these different smart bulbs from different manufacturers. It can make them all play nice, but you're really pitching it as like, this thing knows about your home, it knows about your life. It is as much a data, you know, a central data hub

as it is automation platform or anything else. Yeah. Yeah, I recently discovered that my fridge is running more often because I have a smart plug that measures the draw of the fridge and I have also the whole house power. And I can compare the two and I can see, oh, the fridge has been kicking in 15 minutes sooner

than it did the last couple of months. And so I know, okay, I probably need to like, you know, pull the fridge out and clean it or something. There's something going on there. 15 minutes sooner than it did the last couple of months. And so I know, okay, I probably need to like, you know, pull the fridge out and clean it or something. There's something going on there. And then I have sensors in the fridge and the freezer that track their overall thermal performance too. And you can use Home Assistant to actually graph

those two things next to each other. And I'm not like, you know, Mr. Coder, I'm not vibe coding it up, right? I'm just using the tools built in. And that kind of data can be really insightful to learn how things in your home are doing. Yeah. I think, you know, today, Home Assistant

is the perfect toolbox. So we give you like the hammer, the screwdriver to build everything yourself. The thing that we kind of want to work towards too is that we build more solutions. So we already have like an energy dashboard that works out of the box. Our voice now works out of the box.

Nice wizard to get you to where you're going. But for example, if you have a 3D printer, you have to create your own dashboard, find cards and it's more manual work. This is the kind of stuff where we're calling it collective intelligence, but we want to make our dashboard system, for example, in a way that someone in the community can build a 3D printer dashboard and share it to others. And we can all like, you know, now we have a 3D printer dashboard, a security dashboard, my plants have their own dashboard and just click, click, click instead of like figuring

it out all out and thinking of what you want to build, which I think the last part is always the hardest because you know, you see Home Assistant and it's a blank canvas and everything is possible. Yeah, that is true. Given the different values and needs of, let's say, the foundation versus Nebu Costa versus what the community wants and needs, which I'm sure is quite varied,

how do you balance all of those? So it's actually all very aligned because there has never been any investors or any external money, right? So the foundation exists to serve the, you know, build a smart home around privacy, choice, and sustainability for the community. So we just listen to the users.

We have like a whole product management team. We talk to the users, see what they want. We have like month of what the heck, where everybody can just dump their ideas on us. And then we kind of look, prioritize and see, okay, where do we want to go and build something? We do sometimes piss off people because we think about, you know, not only the community today,

but the community at large. So for example, in the very beginning, Home Assistant was, it was just a Python program, right? And people had to even like compile Python for Raspberry Pi because I was using features that the old Python didn't have. It was a hassle. Well, that limits your community to a very tiny fraction. And today, we use Buildroot. We have our own operating system. It has automatically updates with fallback. If the update fails, we have Docker containers. Everything is through the UI, one-click update. And all of a sudden, we've expanded our scope immensely. And so whenever we make these kinds of changes, there will always be people like,

like, oh, I've already built everything myself. It works perfectly. Why are you adding this feature? I don't need this. Spend your time on something else. And it's like, no, we have to think about everything. And then that's the foundation community, Nabucasa. I mean, Nabucasa still exists to fund everything.

So for Nabucasa, we have nowadays, even it's part of the contracts between Nabucasa and the Open Home Foundation that everything Nabucasa builds as official products, it has to be open source. So it has to be open source because, for example, we built a voice assistant, we spent like two years on it, lots of resources we spend on it,

but also with the community, we built a framework, a lot of community people contributing because language is hard. So we need people from around the world. And now instead of having three big tech voice assistants, like and the Open Home Foundation, there's going to be three big tech voice assistants. There's a Nabucasa voice assistant, an official Home Assistant one, and it's open source. And there's already other companies using our technology to start also building voice assistants. So we hope that there's gonna be like 20 voice assistants

and people start building out this technology. So even Nabucasa, sure they could have like had a monopoly on voice assistants for home assistant. It's not our core belief, so this is not how we roll. To touch on this just for a second, because I think it is a good snapshot of how you guys deliver features to end users. So the voice assistant stuff is built in a way that's,

I would describe as modular, in the sense that I could opt to run Whisper and Piper, the voice to text and the speech to text stuff, as Docker containers on my LAN, and I could have all of the voice control, all of the understanding what I'm saying, and the execution of that all local, or I can opt to tie it in, like you mentioned with the Home Assistant Cloud,

and, or probably other services. It's sort of a modular approach to something that would normally be this monolithic product, and that's not always the easy route. It is definitely not the easy route, but it is the best route for experimentation. And I think with open source, the way it works is that there will just be,

for example, our wake words is a great example, right? Like we didn't have wake words that could run on an ESP chip. And then I was actually on the self hosted podcast and I was telling you guys like, well, we couldn't figure it out to run it on the microcontroller. So we ran it in Home Assistant. Somebody heard that and they built a microwave word to run on the ESP chip.

And because it was modular, they were now able to actually test it out and it will, and it was working and the whole voice assistant stack and like, boom, right, like if, if we had it all locked down, you cannot experiment with different text-to-speech engines or AI engines or whatever. And so that person, by the way, Kevin, he now works for the Open Home Foundation. Wow.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. But yeah, right, instead of reverse engineering your product, there's an interface already available. Please hook into it. And it also means, as a tinkerer, you could build your own different kind of custom hardware into stuff.

So you really just need an ESP, a microphone, and a Wi-Fi chip. And so you could build that into picture frames. You could build it into R2-D2s. You can build your own that fit your own lifestyle where you need them. And you could buy a five pack for like $15 on Amazon. It's pretty great. You also touched on something that I think

our audience would like to know more about. And I was initially critical, but I actually, having been using it now for a couple of years on the yellow and blue, you have your own Home Assistant OS that you update and manage. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, so it's based on Buildroot,

which by the way, the Open Home Foundation nowadays is also a sponsor of. And with Buildroot, which by the way, the Open Home Foundation nowadays is also a sponsor of. And with Buildroot, we really build the tiniest amount of operating system to build Docker, to run Docker containers. And then everything else is running in Docker. So we have a program called Supervisor, which is a manager of the operating system.

And then we have some plugins around DNS and audio and these kinds of things. And then you have Home Assistant, which is a Docker container. And then we have these plugins around DNS and audio and these kind of things. And then you have Home Assistant, which is a Docker container. And then we have these things called add-ons, which is like applications that are not Home Assistant that might integrate into Home Assistant, but are different applications. So Plex, you can run this in add-on. I wouldn't recommend it because if you run on a Raspberry Pi, it depends on how you run Home Assistant, of course. But in MQTT server,

Samba server, but also for example, I mean, you mentioned Whisper and Piper, speech attacks, text-to-speech engines, they run as add-ons, right? And they run next to Home Assistant and they have their own update cycle. And what Docker really has enabled us is that people just pull the image and or Home Assistant will pull the image and will automatically update and it will, the supervisor will ping home assistant after we do an update. If it doesn't come online, we revert to the previous version and it starts up. Build route itself is super stable, but even in build route, if an update would fail, it has two partitions, right?

And so it will boot from the old partition after three failed boots. It's been working really, really well. And it also allows us to easier add, like, you know, it's built in layers, right? So you have a base layer and then for Raspberry Pi, we pull in a layer and then for the old droid. And that's how we can maintain all these different platforms. Yeah, like I said, I've got it on multiple devices now for multiple years. I mean, knock on wood, but I don't think I've ever had a update go bad.

I'm curious, this is a bit of a self-serving question, but as a Python-ista myself, it kind of stands out to me that not only was Python the first implementation thing for Home Assistant, but it's really continued and it seems like there's no stopping the investment in more Python. How's that going? Oh yeah.

No, yeah, so I mean, we've been Python. I think, so one of the reasons I was just saying that like on the Raspberry Pi, you had to compile your own Python is because we were very early adapters of async IO, right? And we did async IO and I remember we rewrote the core from executors to async IO and the first release we're launching, SegFaults. And like, oh.

And apparently it was like a bug in Python. We were able to monkey patch it out from destructor. But we've been on AsyncIO from very early on. AOHCP is our web framework of choice, which we also are now donating money to with the foundation, for example. And we're slowly, we've adopted a lot of AsyncO, a lot of integrations now have been converted to async IO and it's been working really well. But also sometimes for custom integrations, it works less because in Python you can do

either async and not async. And in an async world, you have to yield, right? You're fetching some data from the internet and then you yield your tasks so that it can run the next task. If you accidentally call a sync method, like request.get, the whole Home Assistant freezes until that data from the internet is fetched. And that is something that we've actually patched a lot of methods to kind of check in the event loop,

like, oh, this is happening. And we're able to find a lot of them. But there is sometimes a bit tricky there. like JavaScript is only async, right? You cannot really mess this up. But yeah, Python has been great for us. And, you know, as I've watched it, it really feels like Home Assistant has gone from something that only the geeks would ever consider implementing to, I think, especially with the hardware devices you can buy now,

it's kind of at the level where I might give it to mom and dad. And that's amazing, really, if you think about what you're, yeah. And a lot of it is the easier, faster setup stuff. That, when something does work with Home Assistant, you mentioned it really quickly, AutoDiscover. When that works, it's better than anything

on iOS and Android. It is so solid. So it was a great experience. Paul, I've just been watching with essentially awe. And I'm really excited to see what the next year holds. I'll link to the State of the Open Home 2025 presentation, because you do talk a little bit about the roadmap in there and the blog post as well.

Is there anything else you want to mention before we run? I don't know. I should have thought of that before. Yeah. Do you have a prediction on, all right, so we had one million deploys. We just got to two. You were talking about pretty recently.

Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe by the time you're next back on the show, it'll be five. I don't know. Is that too ambitious? It does seem like it's growing quick. It is growing quick. Maybe, maybe.

I think one of the big ambitious plans that we announced this year is that we want to build a device database where we want to use our collective intelligence to classify every IoT device in the world. Like, let's start gathering the manuals. Let's start gathering the energy usage so that Homosystem can predict how much you're using.

Let's get all the infrared codes of your electric candles. Let's get everything just in a single place, moderated, validated, just to get, you know, make you make the right decisions, integrate even faster, right? Like that stuff that we cannot auto discover, but somebody has gathered it. Forum posts always get out of date at some point,

videos get out of date, and we believe we can, we have the manpower to build this in a way that we can all work together on this piece of data, and it will just be the best smart home experience ever. Excellent, Paulus, thank you very much. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password.com unplugged all lowercase. Okay. Quick question.

Do you know that your end users are always, and I mean always without exception, working on company owned devices, using IT approved applications and services? Do you know they're always doing that? I don't think so. How could you really? So then the next question obviously is,

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Because it solves problems, traditional IAMs and MDMs were never built to touch. We know what a difference just good password hygiene and having a password manager has made. Well, One Password is bringing that expertise and that beloved solution to the next level with Extended Access Management. It's really the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps,

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Even the unmanaged apps and identities can be tamed with One Password Extended Access Management. Try it out today. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Well, as mentioned, we are sat here in the rescued van, the Linux rescued van. And as we've learned recently, these adventures are best described in song.

["Saved by the Sea"] Set out on a half-baked plan, rescue branch is long lost fan. First thing wired, home assistant, sensors blinking, vibe consistent Breathing fumes and playing it cool, still not sure if the fridge even cools Pulled by the cops, thought the ride was done It pounded this heap, yeah, that wasn't fun Told them a story with charm and flair They let us go with a stern little glare We are officially on the road and the van is real It is running multiple Linux systems already Because of course that was like one of the first things we got to.

So this was actually the plan all along. As you may recall, those who've kind of listened to our members only show or caught the launch, but just a quick recap. During our trip to Planet Nix, we took a little detour and Brent ended up finding and buying a van and it needed a bit of work because it had been sitting since 2019. But we were down for it because the bones looked good, right? They looked it looked like it had solid potential. It just needed a little TLC. So we made a plan

that we'd return after Linux Fest Northwest. And we did just that. We came back after Linux Fest to rescue the van but of course the fun always begins before we leave and traveling with Brent you know it's an experience that helps you embrace going with the flow. So it's half hour before we leave and I think you just almost finished packing? That's not what. You're packing you're packing? I haven't packed any gear yet. Oh we still have all the gear to pack. How's that? Good thing we have a half hour.

And coveralls. So not much had been packed by the time we were supposed to be leaving. You started two days before we left? Yeah, yeah. I figured I'd start the morning off. Also, those coveralls proved to be very important and useful. That is true, as you'll find out. Yes, that is very true.

We had a great flight. We got down here. PJ picked us up from the airport during peak traffic. So we got to really grind it out in LA traffic. Get the full experience. And then the next morning, we arrived with all of the most essential tools. OK, we've arrived Friday morning at the van.

We've got our snake oil and caffeine. The two most important things for this project, really, are just for my mental well-being. And then Brett, you got the Home Assistant stuff, right? I got bananas. Okay, Home Assistant's next. Okay, yeah, we'll use the jack after we get Home Assistant running.

Yeah, yeah, that's the person on the left. Don't worry, we got Home Assistant running. We're getting to that. But we thought, we knew we had all four new tires needed to go on. Desperately. They were in rough shape. Desperately. And we figured there may be a few other things that would surprise us. But one of the surprises was one of the more complicated things to solve and it involves the fuel system. Oh Chris, tell us about it.

We put a new fuel filter in because the lines were real bad. Real bad. And Jeff like drained the old filter and black stuff came out, it was gross. We put a new like temporary filter in. So sweet and then we ran it and you can see all that beautiful... Yeah. Now we're good to try to roll? We're gonna see if she rolls. And the fuel filter is replaceable so if it clogs up while we're going to try to roll. We're going to see if she rolls.

And the fuel filter is replaceable. So if it clogs up while we're going down the road, it should be serviced. Yes, we can check on it. Look at that. Good work, boys. What we really had no idea was what's in this tank. We knew it was bad, but we didn't know how bad. Well, we knew the engine ran on it. I mean this engine is classic for running on almost anything so that's maybe not saying that much and it did have a particular odor to it. Yeah yeah and that was one of the reasons we wanted to get some sensors running on Home Assistant just so we knew how bad we're killing ourselves. So you really I mean you think about it we showed up Friday night Saturday is really when the work began. And by the end of Saturday, it was just about ready for the road.

It was pretty much after six years of sitting, it took essentially one day of working on it. Well, I'd say a day and a half because when we were at scale, we did spend that half day making sure the engine started and we did a bunch of work there. So I think that half day set us up for success. Yeah, that's true.

So a day and a half to get it working. And so Brent and Jeff worked late into the night. I went back to the Airbnb to crash early, crashed out and we showed up for our first day and our first really hitting the road kind of you know like we're actually going to take this thing we don't know what state it's in it could have all kinds of problems but we're gonna do it. Okay it's 8 so we're leaving right at 7 a.m., just like Brent said we would be, and we're packed. It's the calm before the storm. We've got the front loaded.

Brent's now done the fifth cleaning of the windshield, which seems to have really done the trick. Cell phone mount provided by Jeff is loaded and ready to go. The dash is actually really cool. It's one of my favorite things of this rig is the dash. Got the Red and ready to go. The dash is actually really cool. It's one of my favorite things of this rig is the dash. Got the Red Bull ready to go. I think I'll be riding in the drinker's position.

Brent will be captain because, you know, it's his first ride on the freeway. And then eventually, slowly but surely, I'll take the wheel. You just watch. Don't tell Brent though. And that is exactly what happened. Predictions, I didn't even know you said that. That that's hilarious you didn't know I snuck that in there but you know you drove for most

of the day but then you had like a snap of driving that was just unrelenting it must have been nearly 40 mile per hour gusts apparently that's a lot in freedom units yeah it is it is and you handled it well because for parts of we were doing 70 miles per hour in the van. It's really kind of incredible. Our first drive though, we set out, as you just heard there, a little bit later than we expected.

So we had the kind of like, we better make up some miles and get going. The one problem is, and we checked the weather apps every single day. I checked them every single day for a week leading up to this and I checked them the night before and I checked them the morning of and it said it was gonna be sunny and clear. It's California. It's California. It's gonna be probably 72 degrees and sunny. You're gonna have some smog. Other than that you don't have to worry about it. You're gonna have a great drive. Well it started to rain on us and the one thing that we didn't take time to fix because there was no need to was the windshield wipers.

So we had a windshield wiper problem and then we also very quickly discovered another problem. So it wasn't exactly problem free. We're officially off, not just for a test drive, but for a real drive and And Google's helping us. Thanks, Google. Yep, Brent's in the captain's seat. And it feels great, right Brent?

It feels great. I mean, yes, it's great. Yep, nothing to worry about. And we're hitting the road right now. It's super exciting. It is. We've got Jeff behind us. So if anything catches on fire, he'll let us know. According to the van, it's super exciting. It is. Yeah. We got Jeff behind us, so if anything catches on fire, he'll let us know.

According to the van, it's 5 PM. It's actually 8 20 AM. Yeah, same, same. And we're off to the freeway. We have about five hours and 59 minutes of driving, which you know is going to be a lot longer than that. Here we go. There's one problem, Chris.

What? It's raining. Oh, yeah. Well, I wasn't going to mention the fact that it's raining and and windshield wipers don't work. Because, you know, we'll get some rain acts at some point. Also, my weather app says it's not raining, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Oh, I feel good then. How quickly the optimism turns into the drive. I don't even think we made it five minutes. Okay, well, we're at O'Reilly's. And Brent's under the van. This is a... It's like a horror movie. I can pull you up.

Alright, you know, we're two minutes into the trip. How's it going down there Brent? It's really nice down here. Yeah, it looks a little tight. Smells nice. Yeah, it looks a little tight. Okay. So good news is the terrible fuel line that I think is gonna explode hasn't exploded. It looks good. The one that's connected to the tank. Bad news is The tank is leaking from the top of the tank and there's no way we can fix it without dropping the tank

So we're just gonna burn. Oh, it's the top. It'll be fine. Yeah, we just gotta bring it. Why is the top of the tank? leaking like from the fuel pump Oh, it's the top, it'll be fine. Yeah, we just gotta bring it out. Why is the top of the tank leaking? Uh... Like from the fuel pump? Probably. Maybe. I don't know, I can't see it. We never managed to actually fix that problem. I put it at the back of my mind, did you?

That felt really nice. Yeah, yeah, that worked. That worked pretty well. And so, instead of fixing the fuel leak, we went ahead and, well, we fixed the wipers. Okay, Jeff, let's give the new wiper system a try. Oh no! Just right. Well to go. Great. I mean, I like it. It was a little disheartening because the wiper system on this van, it's definitely one of those that the auto industry learned from not to do anymore. It is real rough.

Rough. It's like a geometric puzzle. And you can hear we're there in a loud O'Reilly's parking lot in the rain trying to fix this thing. You boys did get it working after a couple of rounds. We did manage to get the wipers working so we got back on the road this time for real. Well, quick update, we're on the road. Bradley's on the freeway. How's she doing on the freeway? Yeah, quieter than I expected we got a window cracked at the moment but quieter than I expected And we got working windshield wipers

Jeff's behind us Still really great. I don't seem to be struggling at all freeway Now you got to appreciate we're still figuring out the electrical system. So like is the gear powered while we're going down the road? Does the gear reset when we hook up to shore power? Like how does that affect the server equipment? Because there's not not like a full like battery bank in here yet or anything like that. So we're kind of piecing all of this together, learning how she drives, learning how the electronics work. If our systems are rebooting every time we make a change and part of of my concern, especially for an older van that's big, is how do we do with

the passes? Are we going to overheat? Are we going to be broken down? And then we're going to be sitting on the side of the road going, maybe we should have worked on the new radiator instead of getting home assistant running. That's what I was working on. On the mountain passes, doing great. Doing 68 miles per hour on the pass right now.

She's a pass machine. Super pretty views too. Jeff in there. There's Jeff. That's Jeff right there. Hey Jeff. Well done. The van handles the pass like a champ.

We were kind of getting carried away. We were excited. And it's easy to forget that this van sat for a long time. And sadly, the previous owner is deceased. And the van is not current on its licensing or its tabs. Really? Yeah. And honestly, you know, we're not really planning to stay in California either. This isn't where the vans gonna end up So it's like how much do we engage with the California process? versus how much do we just engage with the process back up in Washington and

You know we were focused on things like getting Brent's land working and his home assistant up and running not so much like you know Making it legal to drive on the road and unfortunately This, on this particular Saturday, the California cops were really on their game. And they noticed that Brent's tabs were expired. And so not long after that last clip, we got flagged down by a cop. And we were we were like all sitting there, just like not even breathing, not even moving

as the cop sort of came up alongside the van, came, pulled up next to us and then slid behind us. I thought it was the end of the trip right there. Next thing you know, the lights come on. And he walks up, comes up to my side of the van because Brent's side was to the freeway. So he comes up to my side of the van because Brent's side was to the freeway. So it comes up to my side and I'm clear he's doing the math. It's clear because like the tabs are from 2019, the tires are brand new, but the van obviously is

under repair and he starts going in about how you know this thing isn't street legal and it's supposed to be on a trailer immediately. We didn't know that because we're not from here. So he immediately starts telling us, you're not even supposed to be driving this thing. We're like, what? Well, how do you like my question is like, well, how do we fix it up and get it legal if we can't drive it because we got to take it to a shop, right? He's like, well, it's supposed to be on a trailer. Oh, okay. Well, you see, I think everything lined up because the number one important thing was is I was wearing a camo O'Reilly's hat.

So you know I'm a car guy because I got an O'Reilly's hat on. Great decision. And Brent is a Canadian. And these two things, they worked well for us because he saw that Brent was from out of town and he saw that I was from out of town. So he believed that we didn't know about the trailer thing.

We legitimately didn't know. And then he also saw that producer Jeff had pulled over. And so he knew we had a chase car. And so he's doing the math, okay, new tires, tabs from 2019. These two are from out of town. They really are here just on a van rescue project. You know, it's not like a drug run or something like that. And so he

kind of changed his tune about halfway into the conversation and he started like, oh well, if you're gonna try to get this thing up into Canada, if I write you a ticket or impound it, it's gonna make the process way harder and the impounding fees are more than the van's worth and he's, I'm just gonna let you guys go, I'll just, ah, you don't need all that hassle. And we're just like, oh, thank you so much. Because this is the moment we'd feared. Because cops kind of have a reputation for not having a lot of leniency in this area. So the elation we felt when we got back on the freeway was real.

All right, here we go. We're back on the road. We gave him the story. Gave him a smile. And it all worked out. Canadian charm. He's like, we might get pulled over again. So you better give him that story again. Give him the same story again.

Back on the road we go! I shortly took over driving after that because after that's when we hit the wind. That wind. It was crazy. And so we stopped for gas, which we had to do three times in that six hour drive. And I started to drive. It was great. It's such a treat for me coming from a 40 foot RV to a van.

It's like it must be like going from like riding a bike uphill to riding an e-bike uphill. That's got to be like the difference in ease of driving. It's just it goes from like a full on contact sport that's life and death every two seconds to like this leisurely thing. You got to be aware. You got to drive. But like it's so I mean, it was so great. And so no problem completing the last, you know, 130 miles of the drive. And we successfully arrived at producer Jeff's house. We've officially arrived at Jeff's house We're gonna do some musical cars So we can get the van back there tonight How would you rate that Brent? How do you feel that went? I mean barring one or two things

I think that was actually excellent. Yeah, best-case scenario. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was basically best-case scenario once we got on the road It was the only times we had to stop with the fuel. And it did great. It did great. Even in the wind, it did really great. Yeah. Yeah, and it's a lot easier pulling in on these streets

than it was on jubes. I'll just say that. Pretty pleased. Yeah, I got to drive her in on the way. So I got to do a little comparison. And I definitely give this the thumbs up. Now let's talk about the setup. So we've got a LAN right now that I don't know if it's the permanent solution,

but it's currently powered by the slate that saved us for Linux Fest. That's true. So that's kind of neat. That's providing the local area network and the bridging to PJ's network. And is also running on DC. Yes. So everything's running on DC. Which is we're trying to do as much DC first as we can Because when you run components with their AC plug in a van or in an RV and you invert that there's a 30 to 40 percent

Efficiency loss there so you lose a lot of power to the inversion process So if we can go straight to DC we avoid that completely But I what I really really like is the hardware you're using for Home Assistant. It's actually a rescued industrial system that is perfect for this application. Tell me a little about it. Well, I call this my Jeff Industrial Trash Bin Rescue Special because I think actually all of that is true. Jeff, you found this thing somewhere and put it to use in your own network for a while and very kindly donated it to our crazy projects and now it to use in your own network for a while and very kindly donated it to our crazy

projects and now it finds itself in the van. Yep, I got a couple of those things. They're perfect for home assistant. So this thing is like, I don't know, it's a little metal box. You wouldn't even think there was a computer in there where you take a few screws off. Yeah, it's like almost the size of like a cigar box.

Okay, I've never had a cigar box but. Well, we should get you a cigar box. Oh, great. It really, it kind of would make it smell good in here, I think, you know, it like a cigar box. Okay, I've never had a cigar box, but. Well, we should get you a cigar box. Oh, great. It really, it kind of would make it smell good in here, I think, you know? It's a good smell. Yeah, so it's a small box, but like you say, made out of metal.

Yeah, and you can tell that it's built to last. It's got, what, two networking ports on there. It has an Intel Atom E3827, which also has Quick Sync and supports ECC RAM we discovered. That's fun. Now we don't have ECC RAM in there right now. But we do have eight gigs of RAM.

Yeah, I don't really think you need it for home assistance, but it's nice that you have the option with an Atom. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and you've got a couple of storage options too. Yeah, this thing supports one serial ATA and also a M serial ATA drive. You had picked one up for this box specifically. I think some incompatibility happened there

and wasn't recognized, but that was fine because we had two hard drive options. Yeah, and again, this is a dedicated Home Assistant instance and the 120 gig SSD that's in there is plenty for Home Assistant. Yeah, so you tell me. You got eight gigs of RAM and you got 120 gigs of storage. Some people are running this off of like Pi 3s and 4s.

Well, that's what I brought to run this on and then you were like, hey, look what I found. Yeah, let's use this instead. Well, it was beautiful because Jeff already had it wired up for DC and everything like that. Thanks, Jeff. And it only, at idle, I think, is around five watts on DC

and around almost nine watts when you're doing the AC inversion, At idle, I think, ish, is around five watts on DC, around almost nine watts when you're doing the AC inversion. Which is, either way, pretty minimal. You also forgot to mention it has a serial port. I did forget to mention that. Yeah, so you could have a serial port on this thing too. It has two serial ports. Yeah, man.

The thing I like about it is that it can be mounted pretty easily. Yeah. And also it seems extremely robust. And there's, I was looking at the manual, it has like vibration standards that it matched and stuff. So like if you're going to run some equipment in a thing that's jiggling down the road constantly, that's probably a good choice.

Now one thing that we decided to do differently than we kind of discussed ahead of time, and maybe this changes how Wes does his Home Assistant deployment, is we decided to actually use Home Assistant OS. So it takes over the whole machine, and it does all of the Home Assistant management. Has a lot of pros, but I kind of think one of us should at least also try the

roll your own Home Assistant, deploy Core, maybe manage it with Nix. I don't know, Wes, if you want to be that guy, but now that Brent and I went the Home Assistant OS route, I feel like one of us should go like the Roll It Yourself route. Yeah, I've actually already got it going via Nix OS, partially because I had a Nix OS server stood up

and so it was super easy to just turn it on that way. And all I really needed was, I don't know, like basic control of lights and some smart plugs, at least, you know, starting out. So I think you're right. This means I got to double down on that route, at least for a while. Yeah, great. Okay.

I thought maybe, but I didn't want to like, didn't want to release any unconfirmed information there. Now, let's talk a little about what you've got working on your. So when you fire up Home Assistant, it will just sort of auto discover a lot of things on your network. If you've got an IoT device that's available for remote control or an API that Home Assistant intrinsically knows, when you start up Home Assistant, you'll just have stuff on your dashboard.

It'll just do, there you go. It's just sort of amazing and also could be like a bit creepy. Yeah, maybe. I mean, it's like, it works too well. Oh, look at all the stuff that's out there. Just listen. Yeah.

So for Brent's setup, really why we wanted this is we want some sensors in here because we think there's some exhaust leaks, we know there's a gas leak, we don't know how much we're killing ourselves when we're in this thing for five, six hours at a time. And then also something that anybody that's staying in a small space should know is after an hour or two,

the CO2 buildup actually gets pretty significant. And having a little sensor that lets you know, is after an hour or two, the CO2 buildup actually gets pretty significant. And having a little sensor that lets you know, hey, you're getting close to 2,000 parts per million, probably time to open a window. And so a couple of sensors hanging off this thing and then a WLED light strip. And WLED is so great. I know you've just started playing with it, but what are your initial impressions of the sensors and specifically WLED?

Well, I was able to get the sensors working somewhat, which I thought was surprising because I had never really read how to do it. Right, because you're tweaking a little YAML file and then you're building and sending to these ESP32s that power the sensors. And the interface to do all that, I think has come a long way since Home Assistant started. So I'm coming in at a time when most things have been figured out.

I think that's really nice for someone starting out. But the other thing is, I have you guys to tell me what to do. So I actually got that quite wrong because I missed the whole component that reads the sensors, which is the whole point. So Jeff sorted that out for me. Thank you, Jeff. But I found it to be super exciting because we had played with WLED, which controls these little light strips that you can build yourself. And you know me, I love that.

Using components that are widely available and being able to customize almost infinitely. And so just the idea of being able to use my like building skills to also build my electronics and home automation system is such a nice, beautiful combination of the things I care about. And so I thought, at least up to this point where I'm super, super, super fresh, I'm having tons of fun. Well, and you think about it, it's such a perfect opportunity because it's a new project.

And so everything you're putting into your new project, it's open and it's local and it's maintainable so you're not putting in something that's tied to a cloud service you're not you didn't have to create an account with a vendor right that is really big because that stuff's gonna last a decade but I think projects like this are perfect but you could really break it down to go into a room that you spend a lot of time in and are there dark areas of the room that you could paint with a little bit of color and light. And that's how I look at it at home is I sit in a space and I go, where does the light drop off in this room?

Where would it look nice to have a little glow or a little color accent? And I just kind of sit there and I visualize it and then I stick in WLED strips in those spots and nine times out of ten I love it and so you have both opportunities right now both it's a new project where you're putting things in that you can maintain and you can support directly that's so rare in technology but also it's a blank canvas in that there's all these spots you could put lighting you can just spend time in the space and slowly build it to your liking and tweak it. It doesn't have to be something that you get done in one weekend or something like that. You can spend a year doing it if you want and just do it slowly and say,

oh, you know what, I'd like a little light here or I'd like the dashboard to be right here. Because along with this, a listener contributed weeks and maybe a year ago even an Android tablet that has been in the studio. It's not like a barn burner tablet. It's like running Android 9, actually. That's my favorite Android. Well, there you go. It is very classic, but it's going to make a perfect mounted dashboard in your rig. And I'm a big fan of having a dashboard where you can see what's going on, like your CO2 sensors, and if you have others that are using the space, it makes it much easier for them. And so this thing is a 10 inch tablet,

it's got 32 gigs of space, two gigs of RAM, and all you need to do is run a web browser, or the app. So I think it's gonna be perfect. You mount that on the wall, you'll get all your data. We should think about where, so you could see it when you're going down the road too so you could look at the co2 sensor while you're going down the road I think you're trying

to tell me I need multiple dashboard you might need multiple dashboards all right suppose you guys pull it up on your phone I think I have a couple things to reflect on there one is thank you listeners and producer Jeff and everyone who left parts at the studio for me to pilfer and include in this crazy project. It's really fun to reuse, you know, this van is reused. Everything in here is being rescued, right? Including the networking and everything, so. We were joking on the pre-show with the members

that including the van, all the work we put into it, and all the gear, like all the parts for the automation and the networking and the lighting all the work we put into it and all the gear like all the parts for the Automation and the networking and the lighting and the sensors. We're probably still less than a MacBook of total money invested. It's so true It's crazy. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt but that's just wild when you think about it and the other concept here is What were you you were talking about? Which is I guess I look at it as the open source concept of this project, which is that, this is a crazy new lifestyle idea

that we've just randomly come up for for me. I think I'm gonna love it, I have no idea. And I also don't know how I'm gonna use the space, right? I've never, the most time I've spent is in Lady Joops. So I have a- You spent the night in here last night. Well, that is true. It felt like that needed to happen.

Yeah, breaking it in, yeah. But I love the idea that we can take these components that are modular, try a thing out. Oh, maybe you don't like it there, or maybe you don't like this light strip in that location. Maybe you don't like this sensor because it's not accurate enough, and you can just replace those components individually.

That speaks so much to, I think, the things us and the listeners care about. And that's the part I'm most excited about, is this building block approach to this entire project. We'd love it if you'd support the show with a membership or a boost. The show is free, we put it out there, but that doesn't mean we don't spend hours and

hours and many, many, many more working on the show and trying to make it as valuable to you as possible. So you can become a member at linuxonplug.com slash membership, or you can support each individual production with a boost. And both we appreciate tremendously. For our members, we have a bootleg version of the show that's generally a much longer extended version of the show with a lot more content. We also because not everybody wants a longer show, we make a slightly shorter version of the show for our members, you can pick between them, which is completely ad free. It's a

little tighter, but it's still got all of Drew's nice touches with a good production value, and all of that. So we make the bootleg and the ad-free, both are available to our members, and that gives us ongoing sustained support. Each episode can also be boosted to say, hey, I love that or give us a bit of feedback or get involved in the conversation and support that particular production.

That's where the boosting comes in and Fountain makes it the easiest because everything is self-hosted. They even make it possible to get sats within the app now, I believe. I love River for getting my Sats. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash River will take you to our page. And that lets you buy from a great company, put them on the Lightning Network, and then you can just send them over to Fountain. But really, it's not really the focus of this. The focus is sending value back to the show and also communicating with us

because it's a virtuous cycle, not a bad cycle, but a virtuous one. Is that the right, Mike, you're using that word right, Brett? Yes. Virtuous. Mm-hmm. What would be the bad version? Vicious.

Oh, nicely done. That's what the advertising system is. And I try to walk this line as best I can, but I have to say, like, if you knew how most of these ad deals went down or how most interviews end up on podcasts, not ours, but if you knew a lot of them out there, you would be so radicalized against the advertising model

that you would be so on board with the direct support model that I think we'd be sitting in a million dollar van. You know what I'm saying? Not a MacBook fan. But until we get there one day, until humanity sees the light, it's up to the individual listeners. And for that, we're so grateful to them and our members. Thank you so much. Linuxunplug.com.com membership.

And if you want to boost and try out a podcasting 2.0 app, it's got transcripts. Yeah, this show's got transcripts. It's got cloud chapters. You get releases within 90 seconds and you get the live stream all in one app. Oh yeah, plus the boosting. That's what podcasting 2.0 is about.

It's a brand new standard. You're gonna love it. We'll have links in the show notes. Now I have to say I'm completely new A to this house on wheels lifestyle, B to this home assistant lifestyle. And so I just want to hear from listeners what are we doing wrong? What have I not thought about?

What is a good suggestion on how to set these things up? What do I need to look out for in all of these new? Yeah, even gear like sensors and accessories with HomoSys. I mean you're starting fresh there. You're starting fresh with the van. There's like power things you need to learn, battery systems. And all these tips you don't figure out until you get into it. Like one tip I should probably give myself is these slates burn out after about a year

of using them full time. Don't use that. Yeah, there's probably something... Although we are using it, so... Yeah, we should probably replace that slate with something. Yeah. Like something a little more robust. There's a big list of things we should probably replace that slate with something. Yeah, like something a little more robust There's a big list of things we should do to this thing. We could use some we could use some advice So please yes send in your tips. I would really appreciate that. I don't know what I'm doing

And now it is time for the boost Well, our first boost comes from the dude abides who gives us a nice baller boost comes from the dude abides who gives us a nice baller boost. Hey, rich luster. 53,637 sats, and he says, something small to fund Brent's adventures. Aw. That's so sweet. Isn't that?

Thank you very much. That's great. I did say that you could name the component that you would like to buy with your boost. So maybe, you know, we had someone buy the oil that you would like to buy with your boost. So maybe, you know, we had someone buy the oil that we put into the engine last time around. That could be a tank of gas, almost a tank of gas.

Well, if you want to get a tank of gas to rescue this thing, you let us know. It's a little bit more in California than 50 bucks, but. Gosh, is it ever. So bad. Oh man. Odyssey Westra boosts in with 5,000 sets. Use a boost! Loving watching y'all live, just want to put a shout out for your Eastern

neighbors over in Spokane. Ever since the last meetup, it jump-started interest in our local lug. So if you happen to live in the inland area, come meet us at Denison Division. We have users of all walks of life and even have started meetings in those with an interest in home automation. So check out spokanelinux.home.blog and Odyssey says can't wait till the next JB meetup over here too. Honestly, congratulations. That is really awesome. That's so great to hear. So spokanelinux.home.blog and they're getting into automation stuff just at the right time too. You know I think this may be the closest lug to my home that I know about even though it's

in a different country so you might just see me out there at some point no promises. Well Otterbrain sent in 10,000 Satoshis. Setting up a fresh system and wondering do you have any suggestions for clever names for your computers? Hmm, Wes, do you have any naming systems that you use for like your home machines? Oh, I've kind of vacillated with different systems over the years, you know, it was Star Trek things for a while, it was Stargate things for a while, literary references. So it never actually manages to stay super consistent for that long.

So you might as well be just as served by picking a fun list of words, I don't know. Yeah, I look at that as seasonal or themes. So I remember I'll pull out an old computer like, oh yeah, this is when I used to name computers after solar system objects. Exactly. I like it.

You have eras. Yeah, eras, exactly. Do you have a system, Brent, that you use for naming things? I actually struggled with this very same question for a long time, because I thought, once you name a thing, then that just sticks, right? So how could you possibly choose the right one in the first go? And because of that indecision, just

landed on shortened nicknames of products, like this thing in front of me is Fram, because it's my framework. Yeah. And that just has balanced between like the logical thing that it's actually called versus the quick fun nickname that I give it. Yeah.

I sometimes do that too. So like if I have a Dell XPS with Ubuntu on it, I'll call it XPS 2. Oh. You know, and things like that. That works. Oh yeah, my ThinkPad is named Pad, but the Star Trek P-A-D-D. Oh, yeah, my my think pad is named pad, but the Star Trek padd

Oh, that's the best one West winds that is the yep. That is the winner right there open source account It's a winner and he comes in with 2,000 sats Says you guys sound a lot different live versus when I'm listening at 2.5 2.5 They do that's like doing 85 in a 65. No, that's like doing 85 in a 45, right? You know, like yeah, that's just that's what you're speeding there, buddy I just want to try it. I'm just I can not even sure what that feels like to try to understand, you know Brent do you think he goes? straight to two and a half or do you think like he kind of starts at like

1.5, 1.8, two? You gotta warm up. Yeah, you crank it up over time? Because you can't just go right to 2.5. Crack those fingers first. Woo, I do have a question though, open source accountant. When you see us in person, is it really disappointing or just high def? Let us know.

Mooninite boosts in with 2000 cents. Fun will now commence. I'm on a boat. First ever live boost from a boat? Yes. I. That's impressive. That's right.

I would like to know where. Yeah. Oh yeah, follow up. Also, it sounds like you're maybe getting into some more NICs, so maybe boost it and tell us how that goes too. Mm-hmm. Here I thought this week I was doing the crazy thing. Right, yeah, he got us, he got us, he's on a boat.

Well user 137 sent in 5,000 cents. Everything's under control. Love the show and Linux Fest Northwest has been awesome. Oh, that's good to hear. It was a really good year. I will admit, I think I was a little nervous that we would get the bad weather again and maybe I didn't go as hard on the,

I don't know, I mean we talked about it quite a bit, but it was so glorious. If we ever have another year like this again, I think we'd be lucky just weather wise I mean we're talking like, you know mid to high 60s all day long sunshine. No clouds. Yeah. Yeah, it was really glorious So sometimes we get really lucky you do indeed a Monday comes in with a space balls boost that is one two three four five sets So the combination is one, two, three, four, five sets. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. And he says, Live Log Boost. Boost!

Thank you. Appreciate it. A Monday, I thought it was a Sunday. On a Tuesday? Thursday. User 841 boosts in with 5,555 sets. Make it so. Hey, guys. love the show. Really wish I could have made it to Bellingham this weekend,

but I'm there in spirit. Aw, thank you. And thank you for the support. You know what? That's helpful, really. These events are extremely expensive for us, so we really appreciate it, user. It's also always great to hear from folks listening live.

You're special. Well, Trugrid sent us in 5,000 sacks. You're so boost. This True Grits sent us in 5000 sacks. You're so boost! This was my very first Linux Fest and it was so much fun. I'm glad I got to experience it and definitely planning to go in the future. Yeah, it was great to meet you and I am really pleased at the positive feedback we're getting from Linux Fest Northwest. I'll pass it on to the organization team as well. Thank you, True Grits.

And speaking of somebody else we got to talk to at Linux Fest Northwest, OutdoorGeek is here with 5000 Satoshis. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. He writes, if I can't use a NixOS or a derivative, I would use a variety of distros based on the system type and purpose. Bazite for gaming, PopOS for laptops. But I don't even want to think about not using NixOS on my servers.

You're in good company. Mr. Pib boosts in with a row of ducks. You know, I hadn't played StarCraft since high school, but now I've been playing all week. Great episode. Yeah, yeah. I think Brent can relate to that one. Yeah, Mr. Pippa, it's a problem. Well, we were in the car the other day,

and we were starting talking about StarCraft, and Brent just says, I could beat all of you. I think he's mastered the game. Round two. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, first LAN party in the in the van van Lynn ooh yeah yeah tail skill mm-hmm that'd be fun tomato comes in with

five thousand sats as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I use Alpine as my main email client it's a modern rewrite of pine it's under an Apache 2 license it is an application oh It's in application help, is fantastic and it's still for me, the high point of command line usability. It's incredibly powerful, it's efficient to use, but something anyone can learn without trouble.

Definitely something to try out for the command line challenge, and I think Chris would enjoy Pico as an email editor. I could get, I could definitely see that. Very excited about the command line challenge. Obviously we're not doing it while we're traveling, but it is coming soon. And I am slowly building a list of all of the TUI and command line apps that y'all recommend.

So if you've got a few more to send us, it would be useful. Because what I'm hoping, if nothing else, the TUI challenge can just be a way for people listening to curate a list or get our curated list of awesome command line applications. So even if you don't do the TUI challenge with us once we announce it, you'll at least walk away from the episode

knowing about a few more command line applications that are really, really kick butt. So if you know any out there that we could feature for the audience that you think more people should know about, please do boost those in because we are collecting them right now and we are going to announce the TUI challenge very soon.

Thank you everybody. We really appreciate you and appreciate the support. Smoke if you got them. We had 17 folks stream sats as they listened. This is a little humble. A little humble, I'm going to admit 29,137 sat stream. Not sure maybe people didn't turn it on for that episode. And you know what? That Linux Fest episode,

that was a hell of a lot of work, too. So if you love if you love that kind of stuff, let us know. If you hate it, you could also let us know, too. I guess a boost is at least a little bit of sugar with that medicine. You combine the stream sats with our boosters and we stacked a total of 141,896 sats. Thank you everybody who supports the show and of course thank you to our members as well. It makes, well, it makes quite literally all of the difference. So much appreciation to all of you out there, and please consider supporting episode 613.

All right, which one of you found the pick this week? Because I certainly did not find the pick, but of course I had to include it in the show. You know, I came across this one in a hurry and I didn't have time to jump in and I thought the boys are gonna love this, so I sent it along. Okay. This is a project that allows you to essentially turn Excel into a shell. And you can run Linux inside the shell inside Excel.

Haven't you always wanted to or even needed to? I know I have. Screw Doom. I want all of Linux. I want all of it. And what's happened here is the author has created an emulator that's actually doing all the work in a separate DLL. So technically, not Excel doing the work. However, it gets loaded into Excel by the VBA macro. Yeah, remember how macro VBA macros can do that?

You can just, you know, side load DLLs in there and then have a good time. They're very safe. Apparently entire emulators. You can load, you can just sideload entire emulator with a VBA macro call. So it does just that. And then it takes the output and writes them into the cells of the spreadsheet. What? Yeah. I know I send in this pic, but this is ridiculous. Linux and Excel. Slash dev slash standard Excel.

Yeah, right. Wouldn't that be funny if it just became an output device? I know you and I both looked. Did you find a license for this, Wes? I did not find a license for this. No, not in that repo. The underlying RISC-V emulator that's really doing all of the work here, that has an MIT license.

And of course, Linux itself is GPL too, but nothing for Linux and Excel just yet. I will say, I mean, the whole thing, it's quite impressive, but the major limitation is since you're running RISC-V Linux, it's just the app compatibility isn't that great. Yeah, we really, to take it to the next level, you'd almost want like an x86 emulator. I would love if this is like the inflection point for S5. This is what people were like, oh, finally we have the target. Now we have a reason to write applications. Yeah.

I'm wondering though, if anybody, if some crazy person out there could put this in a production for something, like is there some use case for this other than it just being really awesome? I mean, I think Jeff nails it, you know, maybe your Local enterprise administrator hasn't enabled WSL for you, but you know, you really they really help your workflows out But of course Excel might be you need Excel for your job, right? Screw WSL everybody's got Excel. That's hilarious. Good point PJ. Good point. Would we then call it WXL? I think W XLS? I don't know.

I don't know, dude. Don't make me go down that path. Yeah, the Windows Excel subsystem for Linux, right? Exactly. Jesus, oh no. All right, we'll have a link to that in the show notes. You can go check it out. Oh, those show notes, you ask. Well, of course, you can find those at

linuxunplug.com slash 613. Now, don't forget, we need all of your tips for Brent. And also, we'd love it if you join us live. You can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We do the show live at 9. No, 10. Yes. 10 a.m. Pacific. We do the show live at 10 a.m. Pacific. This is why I put it on the calendar, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And we'd love it if you come hang out with us. Gives it that nice live vibe.

We'll have the Mumble Room going, which sends out a low latency opus stream. And of course we've got it hot on jblive.tv and jblive.fm on Sunday in your podcasting 2.0 app as well. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. So with all of that said, I'll just mention, along with links, you'll find how to contact us, our Mumble Room, the Matrix info, our membership, and even how to subscribe to the show, all at LinuxOnPlugged.com.

And then you can go to JupiterBroadcasting.com and check out episode 20 of the launch, where we go way more into detail about Brent's van adventure. And I'm sure we'll have more in future episodes of the launch as well. And then the final couple episodes of Self-Hostage you'll also find at jupiterbroadcasting.com and don't forget swag at jupitergarage.com. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday as in Sunday. I'm going to go to bed. you