LINUX Unplugged - 614: Self-Hosted Location Tracking

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

We test-drive a self-hosted alternative to Google Location History. Plus, we cover the week's Linux news highlights, then spill the beans on our upcoming TUI challenge.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.FMLINUX Unplugged TUI Challenge Rules — Help shape the challenge - what did we miss?libcaca – Caca Labs — A graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels, so that it can work on older video cards or text terminals.New GNOME Executive Director Named: Steven Deobald — Steven Deobald has been appointed as the new Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, succeeding interim director Richard Littauer and Holly Million, who stepped down last year after a brief tenure.Creation of the NixOS hardware team — TL;DR: The Steering Committee is launching the new Hardware Team to own the nixos-hardware repo, drive hardware enablement, and expand partnerships.Adopting sudo-rs By Default in Ubuntu 25.10 - Project Discussion - Ubuntu Community Hub — The sudo-rs project is designed to be a drop in replacement for the original tool. For the vast majority of users, the upgrade should be completely transparent to their workflow. That said, sudo-rs is a not a “blind” reimplementation.LINUX Unplugged 607: Ubuntu's Rusty RoadmapBcachefs Patches Aim For Faster Snapshot Deletion But With Another On-Disk Format Update — Bcachefs has introduced patches aimed at significantly improving snapshot deletion performance. However, implementing these improvements necessitates an update to an incompatible on-disk format, which must be explicitly enabled by users.Dawarich — Your Journey, Your Control — Visualize your location history, track your movements, and analyze your travel patterns with complete privacy and control.fabean/ytviewer — YouTube TUI that pulls subscriptions from YouTube APIPick: meshSidecar — meshSidecar provides a flexible way to integrate mesh networking capabilities with NixOS services. It allows services to participate in mesh networks without requiring direct modification of the service itself.Pick: ELEMENT.FM — Unlimited, GPLv3 Licensed, self-hostable podcast hosting

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. Well, coming up on the show today, we'll show you and tell you and test a self-hosted alternative to Google Maps location tracking. It's a hotspot of where you've been and everywhere you go and the three of us have been trying it out. Plus we'll catch up on some news that we've missed while we're on the road and we'll share the details on an upcoming TUI challenge.

Then we'll round it all out with some great booths, some picks and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, everybody. Oh, we got them excited today in there. Nice to have you. If you want details, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.

Get to hang out and get the whole stream. Or of course you can become a member and you get the bootleg. And a big good morning to our friends at Tail Tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go there to get Tailscale for free up to 100 devices and three users because that's the easiest way to connect devices directly to each other. Applications, services, servers, your desktop, a VM, whatever it might be. Maybe it is just an application you're running on your system and you want to put that directly

on your tail net. It's modern networking that builds out a flat mesh network protected by a one-gold. That's right. So you get secure remote access to your systems that is really fast, intuitive, programmable, and also easy to integrate with your company's ACOs and authentication infrastructure. It's easy to deploy. It's easy to config. It's easy to config. It really is no fuss.

If you've got five machines, you can probably get it running in three minutes on all of them. And the personal plan will always be free so you can try it out, get it on 100 devices, build out your home lab. And it's so great. None of my personal data for my phone, my thinking, anything goes over the Internet. I have no inbound ports anymore. And I love it so much that not only am I a personal user, but now JB uses it, and

it's integral to our back-end infrastructure. And thousands of other companies use Tailscale as well. For individuals or businesses, you get started and support the show by going to tailscale.com slash unplugged. That's tailscale.com slash unplugged. Get it for free on 100 Vices. Support the show! Well, we got to start by saying happy Mother's Day to the moms out there. Indeed. Happy Mother's Day. Appreciate all of you and a special appreciation to all the ones in our lives. It's a it's nice that they let us sneak off on this important day and do a podcast.

So we appreciate that too. Also, we have some details about our upcoming Terminal User Interface Challenge. You've been hard at work over there. Yeah. And I have a first public draft and what we're going to do is get this posted up on the Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub, so you can take a look at it. It is on the high level going to be a seven day challenge with different points awarded for what you get completed. There is a bonus round if you want to skip one of the seven day challenges and go past one of them.

There's also some bonus points for creativity. There's details on how you submit your information to the show to let us know how you did. And the idea is we're trying to come up with a way at the end where you can sort of tally up a total score. So you can say, guys, I got an 85 or I got a 62 or I got a 100. Something to compare. Something we can compare at the end. And so all of that is sort of outlined in what I've put together.

But I think it could use a little finessing. So we're all off to Red Hat Summit next week. So we figured we'd put this out there, let people look at it for a couple of weeks, make some suggestions on our GitHub, and then we'll put it together and we'll actually launch the challenge officially after we've gotten some community input to really kind of make this thing nice. Now I'm feeling nervous because I think Brent's going to smoke us somehow and there's going

to be numbers to prove it. I actually feel far more nervous than I think you feel, so we'll see how it goes. See, I'm feeling pretty good because A. You've been doing research. I've been stacking TUI apps. You've been pre-gaming. I've been stacking TUI apps. B. I got that Knicks book from Olympia Mike, and I think I'm going to make that a dedicated to a machine going all in.

So the only thing loads is the terminal. Boom. So I'm in it to win it, boys. I'm in it to win it. We'll see how I do. But I am. So we'll have the link, hopefully, in the show notes when this episode publishes at Linux unplugged dot com slash six. Four team would like you to take a look at link, hopefully in the show notes, when this episode publishes at linuxunplug.com slash 614. We'd like you to take a look at the challenge rules in the outline and make any suggestions for improvements, additions, removals, anything like that,

because it really is just a draft one. And I think it's a good chance for everybody to have some input on there. And while we're in the housekeeping section, I want to follow up on a topic from last week. We're officially back from the van rescue trip. We made it. We made it.

We're here. We're alive. Welcome back, boys. There was definitely some adventures. Couple of detours we didn't expect, but to celebrate the fact that we actually made it, the van survived and we survived. We're cracking open some ciders.

Yes. Cheers, gentlemen. Cheers, gents. To the bus. Van survived and we survived. We're cracking open some ciders. Yes. Cheers, gentlemen. Cheers, gents. To the bus. To the bus. And all those who help her along her way. Which is the engines run like a champ, but we continue to be working out systems.

Electrical is one of the major systems right now. Generator is another major system. The frustrating thing is the systems I thought were cool. Somehow now that we're in Washington are very not cool. And the systems we thought might be a problem. Yeah, totally fine. Probably gonna be fine. Do you think if you were to drive back to California,

did swap back? Oh, I don't know if I want to drive back to California. Sorry, Jeff. But it's good to be back. It was really a hell of an adventure. You said 1,500 miles, but I thought it was roughly 1,800 miles. You know, the maps tend to always want to take the i5, and we tend to not ever want to take the i5.

We took very much the long route. I think my estimates were quite off. Yeah. I think it was 1,800 miles based on the app I used to track us. Yeah. I reset the odometer, but I don't know. It didn't give us the right reading. Yeah, the odometer didn't seem to be reading.

It was on zero? Right, yeah. We did have one cop out of 18 pull us over. We'll have the story about that and more details in the launch. We talked about some of this last week. And then, of course, we had to make the drive since we were in episode 613. That's when we actually had to make the drive all the way

back to Washington here to the studio. So we're gonna cover all the details in the launch 21, which will be out on May 14th, weeklylaunch.rocks. And yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot more projects to continue to. We may have fried the Home Assistant machine already. What? It's not good. It's not good.

We don't know for sure. We gotta do further testing. Like everything, you got to test a few times. I think Jeff has a spare one under his bed. Yeah, PJ, we might need that spare. Thanks. I don't know if he does have it. Yeah, we were testing the electrical system. Although I think, wasn't PJ saying maybe a next book

would be a good fit. We got options. We got, yeah. We have disagreements. Oh, yeah. I see. I'm not a big fan of the Home Assistant. I'm poking my head somewhere here. I'm not a fan of Home Assistant's laptop. I get the built-in battery and all of Oh, I see. I'm not a big fan of the Home Assistant. I'm poking my head somewhere here.

I'm not a fan of Home Assistant's laptop. I get the built-in battery and all of that, but yeah. All right, but anyways, so we may have fried the machine. We'll see how that goes. He claims they're bulletproof, but I don't know. Leave it to me. Yeah, give Brent a week. Actually, it was only a couple days.

This is literally an industrial piece of equipment that's meant to be embedded in a very rough terrain, hard core, hot. Here's what happens. You see the superstructure of the van. It concentrates the bug field. Mmm. Yeah, the metal walls. Yeah, exactly. Oh, it sure feels that way. So it's like a Brentaday cage is what you're saying. That's absolutely right.

Oh, God. I hadn't thought about that. Don't put your sensitive production systems anywhere near that. Like, what what happens to me is there like a cross-contamination? Do I do I get I should probably hang out for a bit. I'll try to do counterbalance. Thank you Yeah, yeah, you better watch out to you. Yeah, you better watch out, but we made it we're back projects We'll continue may have fried the home assistant box We'll have details once we get that tested and of course check out the launch 21 when it comes out on May 14th, weekly launch.rocks. We'll have all of that hopefully figured out. I don't know, but it's been so much fun.

That's the key takeaway. We really enjoyed it. I wish I could do that once a quarter, go rescue something like that. We can find a way. We can crowdsource a bunch of crazy projects for us to go find somewhere in the continent, even off-continent. Anybody else have a semi-functional van they'd rescued? Chris has been looking all the way, yeah. source a bunch of crazy projects for us to go find somewhere in the continent. Even off continent.

Anybody else have a semi-functional van need rescued? Chris has been looking all the way. What's your rate? I have never loved another man's vehicle as much as I love this van. Like, you know, my blood, sweat and tears have gone into this too. And then, you know, you do that driving along the coast. Are you the is there like a godfather sort of concept? I'll take that. Yeah, I'll take that.

I'm not. I can't give that away. That's his to distribute. I mean, I would take it. I can't give that away. That's his to distribute. I mean, I would take it. I would be honored. Well, you asked me a question. What was it? Do you remember? No?

OK. I don't remember either, but I'm sure it was really important. I have a question. One last thing before we get out of housekeeping. How do I sound today? So I'm using the headset in studio just to get more practice with it. I want to know, do you think this could be a forever mic?

Does it sound OK compared to the boys? Boost him, let me know how you think it sounds. Be honest. Give me the harsh feedback or give me the good feedback. Just trying to learn how to use these fancy new headsets that you all helped us get, which we appreciate very much. So the Gnome Foundation, or I guess Gnome. Gnomey for some.

Has a new executive director Steven deal bowled I believe is maybe that maybe not how you say it But he's been appointed as a new executive director of the gnome foundation There was an intern Director who sat in for Holly Millen who stepped down last year Now here's what stood out to me Brent. I thought'd like this, is he's a Canadian free software advocate. Oh. Yeah, he was Canadian.

He's been a Gnome user since 2002. And he does have some experience in the IT industry and also in the fundraising part of the industry as well. That's actually quite a nice mix, I would imagine. It seems like it very well could be. You know, here's some cred from the intro bio over on blogs.gnoom.org. I built a graphical mud before the term MMORPG was coined.

So yeah, right? Hey, that's probably a good sign in terms of general nerdery. I wanna play the Star Trek mud. I've seen it. I think I've never played it though. Yeah, so there's a welcome post that we will link

in the show notes. And what stood out to me is this is somebody who's taking the reins of GNOME, GNOME, do you know me, at a time where they're having some financial troubles. And it feels like it's really a shame that probably the most widely deployed free software desktop, even our most successful free software desktop project, is having troubles raising funds.

And I wish maybe there's a way to leverage that position and maybe this new director has an opportunity to improve that situation because there's a lot of big corporations that are getting a lot of benefit from the GNOME desktop. And I know they contribute developer time and I know there's ways that they contribute now, but it's just such a shame that such a user-forward desktop for Linux is struggling. And I hope that Stephen has an opportunity to improve that situation. Not an easy job. I don't know who would want that position. I'm hopeful. I mean, it does seem like, you know,

he's got a long history with open source and the tools and communities around it. So if anyone can, this seems like a good candidate. So here's hoping for the best. NixOS now has a dedicated hardware team. The steering committee is launching a new hardware team to own the NixOS hardware repo, drive hardware enablement, and expand partnerships.

Ooh. Oh, I would totally be interested in the Nix first laptop. That's fascinating. So they want to streamline device enablement. So it makes it easier to, I guess, say this works with NixOS. I think that's a great idea.

And I mean, it is one of the easiest first ways you can demonstrate the, like, hey, the community already figured this out and documented it as code, and you just need to add two lines somewhere and now you have the approved way to make sure your hardware is optimized. We've seen some self organizing around that, but part of this is to clarify ownership

and also to sort of ensure that those things are done consistently, not as ad hoc, which I'm not slimy and I'm very grateful for, but you know, that's part of what they want to do is make that kind of a consistent experience too. Right. And that's exactly the kind of right next stage of formalities, maybe not the right word process structure, just organization in terms of having a foundation and a sort of longer term outlook on supporting the project for real world use cases.

And that's nice. If it does go to the next stage, I think, but I'm not sure. longer term outlook on supporting the project for real world use cases and that's nice. If it does go to the next stage, I think, but I'm not sure and curious to hear what you boys think. I think I would like to see the NixOS hardware project still be used as the central sort of hardware management. So if we see a bunch of bigger companies committing to that repo, that'd be really nice to see. But I don't know if you think that's best practice. I was picturing, hmm, I was picturing sort of like a maintainer role,

where you'd still have community contributing their fixes, their patches, their configs, but then you would have sort of maintainers that are taking that in and making sure that it is a certain standard format and things like that. But you know, if I was just also thinking if I could be in charge of hardware for a year at NixOS, quote unquote, at the NixOS Corporation, deploying the NixOS software, so this is getting pretty out there. But I do wonder, would it be a big impact to say, work with a ThinkPad or a System 76

and try to focus on the DevOps engineer software developer market that is particularly trying to deploy software? And I'd focus in on a couple of scenarios that I felt like I could really solve. Or maybe, is there room for a company that does this and they work with a company like Phlox to produce an out of the box, really friendly developer experience based on Phlox's technology and NixOS to manage the OS. Ooh, here's your like super streamlined boots to Phlox,

ready to go dev setup. Yeah. Something like that. Chromebook but more powerful, not as restricted. You have a whole list. Meant for the super user, or at least the professional user. Good hardware, good battery life, decent build out, reliability, good keyboard.

I mean, I know this is, but there's a market for this. You know, this is what the Sputnik thing was all about. And I don't know if they've drifted from that as much or not. I think, you know, they're just kind of constrained to what the designs are. And there's so much potential here. And right now, my options are, if I buy a laptop with Fedora or Pop OS,

I know I've got a good chance that's gonna run Nix OS just fine. But I would totally be more inclined to just buy something with Nix OS preloaded, just because I would assume, even when I reload Nix myself, it's going to work great. Yeah, you know the hardware stuff's just gonna detect, or you can import it and it'll have your model ready to go.

While we're on the subject, just a very quick micro-selfish shout out. I did see some folks attempting to organize or seek interest for a Seattle NixOS users meetup group over on the discourse. So if you happen to be in that area and are interested, maybe go chime in. Boy, if something like that got rolling, I think we'd pop it. I think we would, exactly.

Yeah, that'd be pretty great. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] Well, it looks like PseudoRS is in 2510. It's gonna be default. Ubuntu will adopt PseudoRS, a Rust-based memory safe re-implementation of the traditional Pseudo application. I'm surprised to see pushback.

I mean, good code is good code, right? And these tools are tools. And if the functionality is good and it does what they need and they think it's going to make it easier for them to maintain like LTSs and whatnot. I have a hard time finding the bad in this, but it has definitely seen some pushback, more than I expected, especially after we had our chat. Can you give a sense of what the pushback is? Just like people who are traditionalists? Yeah, it's sort of the two-track you get a lot.

It already works, compatibility with older systems, you get that argument. And then you also get the sort of like, well, it's rust. And so there's a pushback because people don't want to just arbitrarily replace everything with rust just because it's rust. There's also a whole social aspect to rust that people want to push back on and say, well, you could do something like go instead. So there's just these different

there's three or four different camps that kind of come together to push back on announcement like this. But I have to I have to side with Canonical on this one. I think some of these things do need to be pushed forward. And when we're talking about maintaining these, what are essentially forks of Linux for a decade plus, which is honestly, in my personal opinion, irresponsible. And these companies should not be doing this and they should be forcing their customers to upgrade which will enforce the vendors to upgrade but since they won't instead they'll just take a check and they'll pay developers to toil away for a decade to port

old patches and fixes to these ancient releases of Linux and anything you can do to make that easier to support to make that more maintainable, to make that more maintainable, and to make that safer and secure, not today, but 10 years from now, seems like a pretty good action to take. And when you consider how long some of these customers will take before they even get this stuff in the next LTS, we're going to still see another five to 10 years before most of the companies that are running these things on these long-term systems even adopt this stuff.

There's also an aspect I think that's easy to not necessarily appreciate, which I did not until we talked with John Seeger, VP, Engineering for Ubuntu, who's had some great blog posts on this effort and was on episode 607, if you want more of the deeper rationale. But you know, they note here in this discourse post that the pseudo RS team is collaborating with Todd Miller, the maintainer of the original pseudo for over 30 years. So it's not, I guess in some considerations, really a fork in the road.

I mean, it is a different project, but you know, it's attempting to keep in line, be pretty much a drop in replacement. They've also contributed changes and enhancements to sudo, right? So they're both still healthy and going onwards. For the most part, if you're just doing the basic stuff that we all do or regular bog standard sudo configuration, it should be a drop in replacement. But it is probably worth noting that it's not a quote

unquote blind re-implementation. The developers are taking a less is more approach, meaning some of the features that if they are only serve quite niche audiences or maybe are just like things you wouldn't do today from a security perspective if you were gonna develop the software now some of those features are gone so if the thing you relied on for your workflow is gone that's reasonable to be concerned but you know if you can drop it in and you don't notice when yeah yeah so be cash FS has had some new patches introduced aimed at significantly improving snapshot deletion performance.

These enhancements are part of an ongoing effort to refine the file system's capabilities, but there is an actual but with this particular patch. The implementation necessitates an update to the incompatible on disk format and then must be explicitly enabled by users to make that happen. Obviously for safety reasons I don't want to surprise you and the new on disk format is not backwards compatible meaning once you enable it yeah you're not gonna be able to revert. Now of course BcacheFS is like ultimate beta should not be using it it's not even released to stable in the kernel,

we're not actually suggesting you should have it in production or on your system, so of course Wes is using it. That's right, on several of my systems actually. So does this impact you at all? No, I mean, I don't have a crazy ton of snapshots to delete, so I don't have any pressure to opt in necessarily in the first place.

As a user of BKSHFS, what is the impact to you when there's an on-disk format change? Well, so there are some that are like, you know, the bigger ones that are slowing down and may be stable are ones that are sort of like, you know, pretty much everyone's doing. So like you upgrade to the new kernel and it's like, or you do some new operation and it needs to upgrade the file system. Then there are incompatible features, right? So there's like the actual on-disk format that new kernel boots up and like you have to make some change to all of the data structures.

And so does it just run through a process at the next boot? Is it just something that's sort of like on the screen for a few minutes while your system boots for the first time? Yeah. Or I mean, there's probably various ways to do it. You can probably trigger it from like a user space tool as well. I don't know all the details.

But that has happened, right, where you've had to do these upgrades. This is not that, right? This does not just automatically happen. This is not necessary to continue using the file system on a new version, except if you opt in, and then you can't go backwards. So this is an incompatible feature.

So if you do opt in, it does change the disk format, but it's not like a feature that is expected of all BKashFS file systems. As Kent was trying to clarify in some of the Pharaonic's comments, this is pretty common that file systems do in terms of like, oh, if you wanna opt into this optimization, we need to make a change

to the structure of your disk. And maybe that'll be something that will be default in future file systems that get created. Or maybe sometimes they remain as sort of niche versions that doesn't make sense for everyone to enable, but does depending on your workload. You boys know I love Butter FS. So this is said with no judgment.

I mean, I got Butter FS everywhere. But it feels like Bcache FS is working this stuff out in this alpha beta stage before it's stable in the kernel, before it's been unleashed to users. The Butter FS kind of was working out in the public once we already had Butter FS on our file systems and we'd already formatted our disk, right? Like it felt like Butter FS was making these iterations years into already being out in production. Again, no shame to that game. I love Butter FS. It's in a great place right now. But this particular type of stuff, this big stuff,

this is the time to do it. Is it before we all have it really seriously deployed in production, unlike Wes? Well, and as we know with Butterfess, like some people got burnt in the early days, and it's really hard to come back to a file system once you've been burnt that hard. Yeah, I think Ken's aware of that too.

Based on our chat with him, I got the sense he is very much aware of trying to avoid that. Yeah, definitely. And as you say, right, I mean, it's useful between being able to learn from the development of ButterFS and ZFS and other modern file systems. And right, there are some users out there with petabyte file systems and who are making a bunch of snapshots. So hopefully, and this is a good reason to run it on systems where you can, you know, Ken's pretty active, there's ways to communicate and share bug reports or test new features. And if we work him out now, hopefully it'll be a reliable

file system for decades to come. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password unplugged all lowercase. Imagine your company's securities like the quad of a college campus. You have your nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices. You could sort of think of it as the stuff IT has approved of

the employee identities that have been managed to things and accounts you know about. And then you have those paths that people actually use. The shortcuts to get worn through the grass. That's the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices. Shadow IT apps and non-employee identities like contractors. Most security tools they only work on the happy brick paths but and I know you know this a lot of security problems take place on those shortcuts. That's where extended access management comes in from one password.

It's the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices apps and identities under your control So you ensure that every user is strong every credential is protected every device is known and healthy and every app is visible That's what one password extended access management solves. It's problems that traditional I am's and MDM's just don't touch that traditional IAMs and MDMs just don't touch. It's security for the way we actually work today, and it's generally available for companies with Okta or Microsoft Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers, too.

Go check it out. You know OnePassword changed the game when it came to password hygiene. Now imagine taking your game all the way to the next level. Every identity, every app, every device. That's what OnePassword does, and they back it up with great supports and regular third-party audits as well. Go secure every app, every device, and every identity,

even the unmanaged ones. Go to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Well, Chris, you threw over the fence for us this mapping application and I have not used too many map tracking applications. This is one of them that got our attention. The name is a little, I'll give it a swing.

Here we go. I think it's Duarich. Yeah, I'm going to go with something like Duarich or something like that. Or maybe we'll just call it the witch. I'm going to go with something like Doar Witch or something like that. Or maybe we'll just call it the Witch. I'm not sure. This is such a neat idea. And Google offers a similar location history service where you can pull up your location history and it'll overlay it on Google Maps with some hotspots.

But of course, you're constantly sending all of your location information to Google. Years ago, I had a similar thing that was tracking everything I did. It was connected to the ODB2 port of my car, and it was called the Automatic. Oh, right. Why the ODB2? That's crazy. Well, the idea was it had a little cellular chip in it. And so, as soon as your car started, it would start tracking your travel.

And what you would get is a map with, and I used this thing for multiple years, like my trip to New York for the Ubuntu Dev Summit and all over. So I just had this massive map of everywhere we had gone. So I got one for the RV. I got one for my car. And then of course they went out of business because they couldn't make money just selling my data, I guess. But the functionality turned out to be really useful because you could go back in time and be like, oh yeah, this was the spot we really love or look how much time we spent here. And it wasn't something I initially found valuable, but like two years later, I found extremely valuable and I've always wanted something like this.

And we've, we've experimented with live trackers for our, our, uh, Linode on the road, Denver trip. Oh yeah. And there's a lot of ways you can solve this, but this is a newer project that is actively maintained that lets you visualize your location history, track your movements, and analyze your travel patterns, and it gives you total privacy and control, and it can be completely self-hosted. It is also GPL3, and the idea is you get an interactive map with timelines and travel

statistics about everywhere you've been, everything you've done, the speeds and timelines and stuff like that. And it works by using multiple different apps or clients that are available for your mobile device. And once your mobile device detects that you're really moving, once the look, it's using the background location services, once the background location services realize you're moving, it can start tracking and reporting to your own server and giving you all of this data. And so if you go on like a family road trip or you go on a work trip or you want to go for a nice long drive and you want to come back and have a map of the route you took and everywhere you stopped, this is perfect for that.

And of course, we've been on a lot of trips recently, so this has been on the front of our mind. And Brent, you probably got the most time with this because you got it set up first. And we went on a nice little scenic route with it. And I'm just, I don't know, I'm wondering if you're seeing the value in something like this and what your thoughts were using it. Well, like I mentioned, I haven't really explored

this space for myself, just primarily because I didn't really have a use or maybe I just didn't have people who cared where I went. But I actually have gotten really fascinated by the whole, because this does like heat maps as well of where you spend the most time and as we'll see later, it can also bring in other data from other sources, which is really interesting. I am surprised I got it working first, just noting that for you guys. And you did, you've not, have you used the Google version or any of the other sort of

proprietary? No, I've been pretty, I have some allergies I'd like to mention and one of them is tracking by these large corporations. I figured, yes. Yeah. I did for years. I think I've turned it off now, but. Same, I did for years but I have turned it off.

But it was, I mean, I did not like the tracking aspect and I don't especially need anyone knowing all of that, but I mean, as a sort of virtual journal wannabe, it's pretty great for remembering past trips, seeing where you were. Well, I was thinking for Brent, he's technically on a trip right now, and a year or two from now, you can look back at this and be like, what did I do when I was in Washington

and where have I not been? Oh, I like your thinking here. What route have I not taken? Uh-huh, okay. That kind of stuff. I think you would find that particularly interesting as somebody who likes to explore and take new routes. You could actually have a map, you know, almost like a video game of everywhere your character has been on the map and you can pick new quests now. I mean just that kind of stuff. Do you think this is something you would keep using? I really

think it is and I didn't think that going into this. So it's changed my perspective of, you know, we unfold maps on the show here from time to time. But it's changed, I don't know, my relationship to wanting to track the history, especially using open formats that you can import and export elsewhere. So this might be here to stay for me, because I've done, I don't know,

how many trips in the last 10 years, like ridiculous, all over the continent, Europe as well, and yeah, actually, I would have liked to know where I've been. Everywhere you've been, even the small places. Yeah. Okay, so you got it running first, so maybe you can tell us how you set it up.

Wes. Well, we asked Wes very nicely to take a look at this while we were working on the van. I met the client. It's a quick message to Wes and poof, magic. Yeah. I'm not that self-savvy. That was amazing though, but with that was your angle.

That was so good. Like nicely done, sir. Savage moment. Yeah, so actually that is a good question though. You and I have it running very differently on our client devices. We do. I decided to try to stay as open as possible

using clients that are well loved by the community. So I decided to use OwnTracks, which has been around for a long time. Chris, you mentioned you were using it in the past for a bunch of tracking. So I knew it had a good history. We liked it, right? That's what we use for Linode on the road track.

Indeed, yeah. And own tracks, I think, is really flexible in that it can support a bunch of backends. And this support is built right into Devour. And so I thought I'm going to go this route, see how that works. It's also, if you're somebody who likes like log output or you want to be able to export your config and import it to another device and you want to get the debug details, OwnTracks

is the client that will actually expose all of that to you. Yeah, I will say it did feel a little heavy on the tech user when I was first setting it up. That's fine for us. Yeah, I mean it starts, it assumes you're going to use MQTT. You've got to put it into HTTP mode Did you have to import an SSL cert or were you just are you just raw dog playing tech sending your location information? Probably the second one. Okay. Okay. Good. Are you are you playing texting you're

using own tracks to our Little self-hosted. Yeah. Yeah our little self-hosted instance. Yeah, yeah, our private self-hosted instance. I did set up Let's Encrypt. You did, but you're not using that on the client, are you? I think I am. Are you?

Because it seems like it just defaults to HTTP. Well, good question, actually, then. That would be a major issue. Wes and I are currently frantically... I mean, if we put this on our own private lands, we would be doing this over tail scale anyways. Yeah, true. It's true, yeah.

Okay, the mode is called HTTP. Okay, yeah. But the URL I'm using, it has a cute little S. It does have the S in it. It's got the Sys. It can also do MQTT, which is interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that would probably be a yes.

So you got the S too? I got it. All right, good. I was just curious, because I did look at that. That's not the way I set it up. Yeah, so I did leave the other server we're running, which will get into the integration. That one's totally unprotected, though.

I will say, I think OwnTrax, if you're willing to go through the configuration, is the more pro route to go with this. Because you do get the config export, you might get a little more granularity. But if you're on iOS, or you want to dedicate an iOS device for this, they actually make a dedicated app that is very simple.

You give it the URL of your server and your API key, and that's it, and it just goes. It's really nice, it's really simple to set up, and as accurate as iOS location can be, I think it's, so I did two setups. I tested two different setups. One of the first routes I took is you can actually install a Home Assistant integration.

And then you can use Home Assistant to get the location from any of the devices that you track in Home Assistant. So I selected a device, fed that into Home Assistant, then Home Assistant gives that to the big D-Witch to track my location. And I don't have to.

Oh, cool. Yeah, I don't run anything else on my phone except for the Home Assistant app. So you can reduce battery usage this way. However, it's gonna be as accurate as your location updates are to Home Assistant. And I found when I was driving using iOS, there were sometimes five minute gaps.

And you would just get like these sharp, and if you guys zoom in on your maps, actually you might see this too, I don't know. But I will have these moments where it's like, I drove through a house on the map. That's impressive. Yeah. I get them less with the dedicated app, I still get them.

So it really comes down to how you fine tune, how often it updates, how often it uploads, and you can tweak all of those settings But if you're looking for like just something that's kind of basic and you want to minimize battery usage and you already have home Assistant that integration will work and it was pretty accurate if you want something better I think own tracks or their dedicated app on iOS is the way to go I do like that own tracks lets you toggle your you know, how much battery do you want versus accuracy? Yeah, I know just the same it would miss some sections of my trip, you know, how much battery do you want versus accuracy? Cause yeah, I noticed the same, it would miss some sections of my trip if it, you know,

I wasn't moving enough or... What I extra liked, I'm not sure if you caught this Wes, is that in the actual notification for own tracks, which is like a persistent notification, you can pause, you can pause, but you can also quickly change the style of reporting. You just tap the button and it allows you to cycle through how aggressive the reporting is. That was a nice feature. I thought you were gonna say you could pause, because one of the nice things with OnTrack

is it makes it a little bit easier to say, stop tracking. I'm going to the adult shop, stop, whatever you do. I don't know what you guys do. Pause, and then it's just right there to resume. That's really nice too, because you can just tap it and then get in the app. There are apps that makes that possible as well, but there's not like that Android persistent notification

aspect that gets you there quicker. You could run this, I think the ultimate setup would be for people that are trying to track a road trip would be maybe it's a container on an existing machine or a little Raspberry Pi that you power up when you're on the road and it just powers up and it starts tracking and reporting immediately. And when you turn the engine off, the Raspberry Pi turns off and it stops tracking. And you could build your own self-hosted, totally private tracker to track everywhere you drive your vehicle

to capture all of the cool spots. And then when you go back into the application, this is still very much under work. And it needs a lot more work. But when you go back to the application, if you have, and Brent, you probably have the best, you can go to My Data and Visits and Places and it will have a list of what it thinks

are significant places that you've visited. And then you can add a note and save them and mark them. So you could go back in a day and review and save some of the significant places you stayed at. Now, you have to collect them for a bit to get there, but that's also really nice for somebody So you could go back in a day and review and save some of the significant places you stayed at. Now, you have to collect them for a bit to get there, but that's also really nice for somebody who found a great campground or for somebody who found a great restaurant or for somebody who found a new route.

And it's just really nice because you can market and save that for later. And they have a UI where they have some suggested places that you could look at. They have the ones you've confirmed or ones you want to save or ones you can decline. Now, it's a little hard to go through right now because it's just kind of a raw list, but I think as they work on that UI, it's gonna get a lot better. It does have a button now at least,

so it'll pull it up on the map. Oh! Yeah. Nice, okay, good. It is kind of a zoomed in map, so you probably have to have some idea of where it's showing you, but there's zoom control. In own tracks, they have something similar

called waypoints. And I've been marking a few waypoints as we've gone through this experiment. But I definitely expected them to show up in the big D-Witch and no go. Not yet. Yeah, I don't think those make it up. Yeah, that's the thing. You got to mark them in the D-Witch if you want to save them. It'd be great to have, if they ever make a data app for Android and on the iOS one,

it would be great to say, oh, save this. So you boys got to play with something that I didn't mess around with even though I'm a big fan of image the self-hosted Google Photos alternative. You Wes and Brent played around a little bit with image integration with the Big D Witch. Yeah I believe it supports both image and photo prism if you're a photo prism user. And you go into your user settings and you just give it the URL string that you need, as well as the API key. And then it can start pulling in,

I think it just sucks through all the various photos in your image and looks for GPS data, and then converts that to point information and feeds that into the trip stuff you were talking about, et cetera. Yeah, in fact, image stores in the database location information separately, so it can probably just pull that right from the database.

So what did you see after this process was done? Well, it does process a little bit, so it's not instant. I mean, Wes and I were a little, we were going to dinner when we were doing this. We were a little impatient. You got a big database, Wes? You know it. A lot of dog photos in there.

But the nice thing is that then in Dvaric on the map. I'm sorry, what? D-Witch, I think we're calling it. You end up with these little photo circles, little sort of. Overlaid on the map. But also the photo preview itself overlaid on the map, which is a nice touch. And you can hover over them and get the photo itself

and a bunch of metadata, which was nice. And it also, Chris, allows you to click and see everything else on that date. Or that location, sorry. Oh, really? In that location, yeah, it's really nice. That was a functionality we were particularly hoping to get out of Google Photos, which it does not.

It's not necessarily, I think, super optimized. A lot of this is pretty new in beta. So, like we were noticing, as we were bootstrapping the image, I just started syncing all of the photos to my phone, but sort of decided that was probably not a tenable idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you can see it sort of, you know,

I'd just taken a trip to visit my folks, or we were doing it at Linux Fest Northwest, and some of those got there. So you can see like the various regions populating. So you have a ton of photos. Right now it seems to load them, not necessarily in one optimized batch, but it was actually quite useful to see

and I think maybe it would be less useful in the neighborhood you're in all the time, but especially for going on trips and just seeing little reminders of like, oh right, there was that waterfall from that hike that we did over in these mountains or that seems great. Yeah, I agree.

So can you tell us a little bit about how you did set it up? I know they have a Docker compose. It looks like it's pretty straightforward, although it's kind of a kitchen sink application. I say that with love, but it's a big Docker compose. Yeah, it's a Ruby app. We haven't had one of those for a minute.

It's also powered by Postgres and PostGIS for that GPS processing geospatial data handling, which is great. There's a Redis container in there too, app container. It is quite built out. They've set up a lot of nice things, I will say, right? There's health checks for a lot of these guys and they've kind of prefigured out a fair amount of spots you can put in like oh, here's how you know, you want to make sure that you're

You maybe you want to respond on localhost But you also wanted to know that it is proxy behind this domain name that you're serving it from So there's already some like nvar set up for that which worked for us because you had nginx in front of this As a reverse proxy, which was fantastic NixOS indeed Uh, yeah, so it was really easy. So NixOS just built up some Nginx to quickly play Let's Encrypt proxy,

and then this thing was just powered by Podman. So it works just fine with Podman, Podman Compose, if you wanna use their standard Docker Compose thing, or Docker, obviously. I just love it because it's like, yeah, there's a Docker Compose available, Wes and Wes is like, great, yeah, I'll take a look at this. Okay, I gotta run it in Podman. I'm like, because like yeah there's a docker compose available Wes and Wes like great yeah I'll take a look at this okay I got a run in pod man

like okay let's go. Chris you did notice that someone's working on a NixOS module for this. Yes although it's been a month but there does seem to be a module in the works which would be really really great because this is definitely something I'm keeping after the show. I'm gonna keep this running I'm gonna put it on my my rig directly and I'm gonna track every road trip I take with this thing I love it and they do also offer a hosted version Which is five euros a month which works out to be about sixty euros a year, which is a early access discount But you know you can run on anything. It's like I said, it's a docker container. You can put it on a Raspberry Pi

You could put it on a VPS. You could fire it up when you need it and export the data when you don't because it does have import and export options there. Right now, was it a little tricky to get multi-user working? I had a sense you had to do some finagling. Oh yes, good point there. It came with a default user, like a demo user. It was not necessarily

clear how to make more. Admittedly, I did not read all of the documentation, surely. But what I ended up doing was just manually inserting some more rows into the user table, which did mean for a little bit, I did not manage to give us each unique API keys, which caused some confusion. You know, if you go into the settings, there's an Add User button. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

Jesus, Wes. Oh my god. Anyways, yeah, so be aware, depending on how you create the user account, you need to do it. Oh, I see. You're right. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Well, then don't do like I do. It worked, though. Yeah, so we actually have... I should have made you the administrator. We have four users on this system. Wes, you have 1,017 points of locations tracked. I have 2,535 and Brent, you have 1,376. I'm surprised I beat you, actually.

I wonder why that is because I moved around a lot more than you did. Yeah, and we're tracking sooner. And I was trying to have it report quite aggressively because I figured, what the heck? Yeah, well, so do I. I maxed it. I wonder why. Maybe it's because for a little bit I fed Home Assistant in. I don't know. But I'll take that as a win. That means I'm the winner of the points of tracking. Is that how we're measuring this? Yay!

points of tracking. Is that how we're measuring this? Yay. There's not many podcasts out there that are trying to go at it full time making a great Linux podcast. And we take it very seriously. But we need your support. Now you can become a sponsor. If you think you want to reach the greatest Linux audience in

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Email me, chris at jupyterbroadcasting.com. Well, we have some feedback this week. Wes, you went to a little meetup. Yes. So, Tailscale hosted a Seattle meetup. I guess the first sort of community meetup they've done, but it sounds like they're hoping to do more. A big shout out to the team, Natasha, and the rest of the Tailscale folks for putting it on. Great meetup, I thought. Well attended, well run, there was snacks, drinks, and folks giving little talks, including myself. And it reminded me a lot of a JB meetup

in the sense that there was just a diverse array of folks from folks who were, you know, doing some serious tailscale at work with like massive network traffic to folks doing neat stuff with IPv6 in their home web. Oh really? Oh yeah. That's fun. Did you run into any listeners?

Yes, definitely some listeners. And then some folks who maybe, hopefully are listening now or thought maybe they might check it out. Well hello to them, thanks for listening. And, um, tailscale zone Brad Fitzpatrick gave a sort of gripe fest of things they wanted to fix. They know our issues in tailscale, so that was fascinating.

Oh, that's great. Brad was there? That's great. And then folks were able to sort of, you know, quiz him on, are you considering this feature? How about that? Could it ever work? So you got a little tailscale nerdery, a lot of folks sharing stories. Some folks from Cumulo told a story of how tailscale saved them during like a big outage

they were having and their tailscale backdoor was the only way they had access to that remote data center so a lot of great nerdin out about fun networking and home lab and all kinds of the crazy stuff you can do with tailscale here's how you know I talked with another presenter there and we're

just sharing tailscale stories and I was like yeah you know it really it's surprising how well it runs in an interim FS Not surprised at all dude was like, yeah. Yeah, it really does. It's great. That's what I love about J You're right. That's what I love about JB meetups and these type of meetups is you can say something like that And he doesn't go right over somebody's head. They know exactly what you're talking about And also it's nice to know people are doing crazier things than we are. Yeah, we're not the only ones doing wild stuff. Well, that's neat.

We were on the road. I'm glad you could make it. So yeah, I don't have any insider details or anything, but do keep an eye out if you're a tailscale fan and maybe they'll do a meetup in an area near you sometime. I really would love to do more meetups in general. So we should keep an eye out for other meetups. We should do more of our local meetups. You know, maybe somebody out there wants to be part of the crew one day,

and the meetup seemed to be a great way to discover new people as well. Isn't that how Wes showed up? That is. And you kind of did too. I mean, Linux Fest essentially was a meetup, right? It's true. Good point. Oh, I definitely met a few folks who had just gone to Linux Fest Northwest. No kidding? Absolutely. That's great. Yeah, boy, Linux Fest. It feels like it was just yesterday.

And I already miss it too. It was a good one. To me, it feels like it was a month ago. Really? Uh huh. It feels like we just like we went to Linux Fest and then we were on our trip. Well that is true. Yeah that is true. That is how it kind of went isn't it? Boosted grade. Well we got a baller booster here. Our dear PJ. Hey rich lobster! Jeff you sent in 68,382 sets. BOOST! Here's your little message. I've used both a laptop and that small PC for Home Assistant.

The power use is about the same, but the laptop is significantly faster, has way more RAM, and can be used for more than just Home Assistant. With the laptop, I was able to actually use the voice stuff and ESB Home builds in less than a minute. I like that you call it a little message. Did you catch that? It's a little message. It's our baller boost, buddy. I also like that he's addressing it to Jeff. As if we read all of the boosts to Jeff. I've spent so much time with Jeff. I mean, we've like, you know,

been under vehicles together in the last couple days. I feel like we've moved to a new level in our friendships. Yeah, he farted in front of us, you know? So there's that. Like I said, new friendship. Now, this is where PJ and I have a disagreement. Technically, he is right.

It is a better machine, it is faster, it can do more things, and it has a built in battery screening keyboard. So it's basically everything you'd want. Right. And when Brent is unwilling to reboot his framework, it could be a backup show machine. No, that's true, too. However, as somebody who has lived for 10 years in a tiny rig,

I can tell you there are certain things that are absolutely just invaluable. And one of them is as small as possible. No monitor, no keyboard, nothing. A laptop, if you can believe it, is too big. It is too big. It is, I know. And so what you do is you, and also I'm a big believer in integrating Home Assistant

into everything. So your water pump, your water heater, everything you do in your RV, your lights, is gonna be run by Home Assistant. Maybe even the ignition one day, the generator start's gonna be Home Assistant. It's gonna be Home Assistant for everything. It's gonna be crazy, Brent, and you're gonna use it for just absolutely everything

we can possibly think of. And so we want this to be its own dedicated machine. Do I start my engine through Home Assistant? I actually would be totally down for figuring that out. If you think about it, it could be really genius. I mean, it probably pre-warms the shower for you. Well, like a lot of losers, when they get remote start, they have like some sort of remote system.

What is that? The proprietary, for sure. You could remote start from anywhere. And there's actually value in that, because maybe your batteries are getting low, and you want a little bit of alternator charge. You know what? You bring up the old Home Assistant app,

you hit the button and ESP connects a relay, boom, your engine started. It's a pretty short list of folks that have remote started over WireGuard. So you could be on that list. I think we could do it. And I'm saying, when I say everything, I mean, you really need to think about it

because it changes your life. And so you want this to be its own dedicated appliance, hard, solid, only does one thing and that's automate your life. So you're not gonna run graphana on this thing, you're not gonna you're not gonna run VS code, well maybe you run VS code, but you're not gonna even do voice stuff on this thing. You're only gonna run your automations and your home assistant and your controls and your dashboard and that's it. Now is there an argument for

you know Olympia Mike just keeps applying him with back For decades. So I'm just actually you know, I'm having some fun. But my point is really I Find it super valuable to have a dedicated machine and I've gotten by on a raspberry CM for with two gigs of RAM for two three years now. Didn't you weren't you just saying this morning? You really want to upgrade I do I think it is more memory. Okay, you have eight gigs. Oh, that's true Yeah, so, you know, yes You really want to upgrade. I do. I think it needs more memory. Oh, OK. But you have eight gigs. Oh, that's true. Yeah. So yes. And then I think the way you do the other stuff, like voice analysis locally, whatever services like Jellyfin,

you might want to run whatever else, that's an Odroid. That's something else that's also very small. Or it's a Raspberry Pi, whatever it is. But it's very small. It's dedicated to just a few things. Also DC power. That's at least my thoughts. So I mean, he's right and I feel like I'm right. It's just your point of view.

And you do have to consider if you want the support contract from Chris Lascaux Industries. Yeah, right. You probably do have to go with his recommendations for what, the document you signed? Yeah, we'll review the contract. Turd Ferguson boosts in with 27,333 sets. Turd Ferguson boosts in with 27,333 sats. Starting off here too boosts,

sending sats and good vibes for the van rescue. I think those vibes helped. Thank you Turd. It did, certainly. I think we could have used those vibes a little sooner, but once we got to Oregon things turned around. Could have used those vibes a little sooner, but once we got to Oregon things turned around could have used those vibes for like Restaurant choosing yeah and some of the gas tank work and some of the electrical and that exhaust leak that we fixed and then unfixed I don't remember that one. We'll get into that. We'll get into that later Yeah, cuz of the exhaust it yeah stuff to the old memory. It does make you very sleepy That's but that's for the launch. Thank you turd. Okay, and then second boost here Did you know in May of 92? Very sleepy. That's, but that's for the launch. Thank you, Turd. Okay, and then second boost here.

Did you know in May of 92, SLS, not Slackware, was the first Linux distro, making installs way easier and sparking the distro boom. SLS in 1992, not Slackware. Do you remember what SLS stands for? I think... Linux Trivia. I think it's soft landing Linux. The idea of making, the idea was making it easy to get started with Linux, if I recall.

Way back in 92. Yeah, isn't that something? I think we can still install it today. I do not. Have you tried? Maybe in Camus, maybe we could do it in Camus. Thank you Turd Maybe in Camus. Maybe we could do it in Camus. Yeah. Thank you, Turd. Appreciate the boost.

Well, Fabian sent in 10,000 sats. Oh, I think it's Fabian. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Trying to prep for the TUI challenge, I've been trying to find a good way to watch YouTube. All those YouTube TUIs seem to be based on NVIDIUS, which gets blocked all the time. So I created my own based on NVIDIUS, which gets blocked all the time. So I created my own, based on the YouTube API, and we'll just show you a list of videos by your subscriptions in the TUI.

It's not real YouTube subs, but then it opens in MPV. This saves so many gigs of RAM. Hmm. You know, I would rather just have a UI that shows me my subscriptions anyways, but it raises, I think, one of our first gray areas that we need the listeners to help us clarify. Does launching MPV from the terminal count,

since that is technically a graphical application? Right. I think one can make the argument that if you're controlling it from the terminal, and it's something that the terminal can't reasonably provide in a realistic sense Maybe but you got to boost into tell us But yeah, cuz I feel like maybe that's the line if the if the terminal can't do it you can't do it

But there must be a terminal out there that does it right? Well, there's libcaca. That's the that's the bar. Sorry version I'm sorry. Well, you look okay. Yeah, mean, look it up. Do you need to lay down? Are you all right? Well, that's a separate matter. Okay. It can't be done. I mean, maybe, so, like, cause couldn't I just launch Chrome from my terminal?

If this is okay? Oh. Oh, yeah, I don't think that would be okay. Right, so where do we draw the line here? Well, you know, Chrome's a full featured thing. This is literally just launching. MPV's not a full featured thing. Compared to a web browser.

Well, okay, I'll give you that. AV is not a full featured thing. Compared to a web browser. Well, okay, I'll give you that. A web browser is practically an operating system. Just needs a good text editor. Okay, well why couldn't I launch Zed or VS Code or G-Edit? Yeah, I mean there's a slippery slope to be pulling out here. I feel like it's too slippery. You see what I'm saying?

So we need the listeners to either boost in or participate in the GitHub and clarify this particular gray area. Because I don't know how to, because I want to watch videos. So I want this, but I recognize it opens up the door to cheating. It really does, boys. Do we have like a pre-approved short list or something?

Hmm, hmm, an approved list. Like MPV and VLC maybe. Or like four specific carve-outs, right? Like you can't do a browser, but you can, if you're just playing videos, that's fine, as long as you launch it from the terminal. But I don't know, I don't have the answers here. I don't know, I don't know. Because you can't watch videos in a terminal.

Unless like Mini-Mek tells us you use enlightenment. Then you could, maybe I'll just use enlightenment, I don't know. No, no, it's a standalone, it's a standalone application. Oh! You need the AFL ribos. You just install terminology and then you're in. It's part of every distribution.

Well, look at that. Little Enlightment technology saving the day. So I feel like if the terminal is natively capable of doing the task. Then you should do it there. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, then that's okay. Maybe that's the line.

We gotta figure this out. I have a prediction. I think we're gonna find several other gray spots that we're gonna have to figure out. Oh, great, thanks Brent. Oh, you're welcome. Oh my God, Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days.

Brett, if you plan on doing any traveling with the van and why have a van if you're not gonna travel, then I suggest a GMRS radio. Most truckers have switched from the old CB to GMRS and while you need a license to transmit, you can listen without a license and I know you like to listen. Also, you have to build a mesh-tastic node because, well, reasons Brent, I mean Brett. Well, I will say I did bring my mesh-tastic note on this trip. I mostly forgot to check it and also I don't think it picked up very much or I'm using it wrong or Jeff saved me. But I do think it's a great idea to put some

radios in there. I'd be curious to hear why the truckers have moved from CB to this new GMRS. Yeah I would actually like to know that too. Because the CB is such a classic. It is. I do know that you know when I did my like my research new GMRS? Yeah, I would actually like to know that too. Because the CB is such a classic thing. It is. I do know that when I did my research in GMRS does seem to be a lot more popular, so I'd plus one that. But I think what you'd want is kind of like a dedicated mesh-tastic node built in.

Maybe even something that has its own power source, put a little solar panel for it. I don't know, I'm just saying. If you just stick to CB, you could be CB Brent and sort of Big fish small pond right I'm the guy on the CB all the time so anyone is listening. They're getting you He's already buying tapes right you went to the thrift store and bought a bunch of tapes I said so he's kind of got a retro vibe dineros pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I

Think maybe coming near you CB radio will feature Linux unplugged Maybe next week the one the only the genius bean, Gene Bean comes in with a row of ducks. Just wanted to say that I'm amazed at how nice the headsets you used at Linux Fest sound. Oh good! On another note, I love hearing what y'all are doing with Home Assistant. I am way, way, way down that rabbit hole and would be happy to help if you want. Oh, that's great. Gene is a great resource.

Pretty far down that hole myself. I wonder Gene, like where are you and I at? Because I'm sure you followed my journey on Self-Hosted. I loved giving folks a tour of Lady Joop's Home Assistant system at Linux Fest. There was like three or four different distinct batches of people I brought through the RV to show them how things work. And it everything. Thank You Gene Bean, it's good

to hear from you. Well son of boom bus comes in 40... 4,444 sats across two booths. I think that's a bunch of ducks. Things are looking up for all the ducks. What's the least useful home assistant integration you have but refuse to delete? Mm, this does become a problem. There's a lot of integrations. I'm seeing as I get more integration set up. I don't have any that fit yet, I don't think,

because I'm still just still getting them configured in my next config, but. There's a lot of community repos too, so you can add even more than the built-in ones. So you can really go crazy. Mine, I think might be a surprise. I think it's the jellyfin integration. And when I had Plex, because I thought I'd really use that and I'd maybe build automations

like we're going to watch a movie and have the lights turn off or I'll have a card that shows what's currently being played and I can hit pause or I can track how much we watch the TV with the statistics and home assistant. Look at me, everybody. But the reality is, never use it. Never use it for Plex, never use it for Jellyfin. What I found much more useful is a remote control and just be able to use the functions of the television

via Home Assistant, you know, and launch any application. Now that you've expressed this to yourself, will you delete it? No, I think I'll keep it. Great, I mean it works. There you go. Thank you, son of a boom bus. I think I'll keep it Great. I mean it works There you go, thank you son of a boom bus boom bus isn't a bad name We need people to boost in names for the for the van van or bus because bang bus isn't sitting well with people Bang bus is not sitting well. They took him in the wrong direction

Plus this way we can make a series of bang bus swag That'll be the legacy swag limited production run. Okay, And then we'll have the new swag for the new name. Because we're still on top of our swag game. But we need new names. It could be a van. It doesn't have to be a bus. It's technically a van. It's a beautiful, big, juicy van, really is what it is.

And so just keep that in mind. Yes, we call it the BangBus, but it's really... Brinks got a BangBus. What's he gonna do? A big, juicy van. A big, juicy van. A big juicy van. Well, Tomato sent in 5,000 sats. You're supposed!

Hearing about the state of the engine ceiling in that van, here's some sats from MQ7 so Brent can get carbon monoxide monitoring going. Ooh, now PJ, you're up to date on the MQ7. You've been having some long-term project plans around building an MQ7 sensor right for carbon monoxide? I got a couple of them sensors already just need to get some MOSFETs to create tiny little heaters on them and then we can use them with ESP devices. Wait did you say a heater? Yep. Oh I feel like I'm going to get in a territory I'm not ready for. Yeah, buddy.

Yeah, buddy. All right. Thank you, Tomado. It's nice to hear from you. Otterbrain came in with a row of ducks. He says, thank you guys. Thanks to you guys, I got three raspberry pies going. One for Home Assistant, one for Nextcloud, and one, of course, for Piehole.

It's been so much fun learning how to set these up. But here's my question. Any suggestions on keeping your headless pies tidy? Do you have a way of tucking them away? Here's what I've done. I have since destroyed this, but what I originally did, and I really, I loved it so much I took pictures, you know,

and I like framed them. Yeah, I loved, what? No, Brent. But I bought a bunch of little sticky pads off of Amazon that have routing for wires in them, like you can you can snap wires into them and they have little 3M backing. And I just routed the wires along the wall and just kind of embrace the wires but did them nice and tidy.

And so like the remote discs and like the I have my Z wave and Zigbee sticks there off on their own little USB extension cords and those were tidy and put there and I thought that made it look really nice and then for some of my systems I also threw a Pi KVM on there so I kind of did the same thing for that and just kind of embraced it and I got that also the double sided 3M Velcro off of the Jungle Store and I just put that on the devices and I stick that to the wall too and then it makes it really easy to pop them off and change something and pop it back on. And you just embrace the wires but you make them look good. And then it looks engineered and not messy.

It would be sweet if there's like a Raspberry Pi back plane you could just kind of plug them into. Wouldn't that be sweet? I mean, folks have that. Do they? Well, versions of it. There's, you know, various enclosures, especially for mounting like a bunch

with built-in switches and then. Yeah, I of it. There's, you know, various enclosures, especially for mounting like a bunch with built-in switches and then... Yeah, I like that. I love that. I should build something like that and just, you know, you would... Oh man, wouldn't it be great if the CM4 platform had gone that way with carrier boards? Oh, that'd be a way. That would be a way.

The dude abides us 15,000 cents. Oh my god, this drawer is filled with Froot Loops! I'm always reminded to boost live on Sundays when that Matrix notification pops up. Aw, thank you dude. Yeah. Nice Home Assistant interview too. More of those please. I really like Paulus. I think Paulus is good people. And I really respect the trajectory they've taken because I've been following them for a little bit over five years now and they've just been taking the right step after the right step to make sure that if you deploy something using Home Assistant, it's not going

to get clouded up, it's not going to get in ****ed, it's going to be supported. And I really appreciate the direction they've taken things. Thank you. We also are very sensitive to not overdoing the interviews. We know not every guest is dynamic and interesting, but we think Paulus is one of those. So we do monitor not overdoing the interviews. We know not every guest is dynamic and interesting, but we think Paulus is one of those. So we do monitor the feedback on the interviews. Those types of things are always signals

that we're looking for from you guys. So thank you very much. We wanna make the show you wanna listen to. Well, Odyssey Westra sent in a live boost. That's actually a live road ducks. Live tracking for me is super important for my job. I use it to keep track of when and where I've been and track my miles for my job.

Oh, that's actually brilliant. Yeah. Plus it helps with billing for multi-day projects. So self-hosting this, he means Devon Rich, will be an important step in de-Googling myself. Love y'all and live meep. Yes! Nice. Odyssey, that's so cool to hear. I hadn't even thought about it for tax accounting. That's brilliant.

That is so brilliant. And you know, it does have the ability to go in there and mark trips. And so you could go in there and say, this was a work trip. You might want the high fidelity mode for that part of it. Oh, Wes, I always have the high fidelity mode on. I always do. I'm going to add a feature request

for fuel station integration. Ooh, that would be amazing. How would you do that? I guess you could look up fuel stations. Yeah, some way. Somebody could figure that out, right? There's a whole ecosystem here, I think. All right, well, GC boosted him with 7,777 sats.

Well, I'll be dipped. He's a good guy. He's a real I'll be dipped. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. He's coming in with a GrafanaCon 2025 report. Oh my god, reading my mind. Some value for value right here. I received the Golden Grot Award for Best Professional

Dashboard and presented my use case on an industrial system monitoring of a wastewater treatment facility. Whoa. I would like to see this. That's amazing. Is there a video of this? Approximately 2,000 metrics at one second resolution. Yeah definitely want to see this. Definitely want to see this. Great networking opportunity for data nerds. I also plugged the show a ton. Oh you. Oh wow. A NixOS sticker on my laptop brought out the NixOS lovers as well. I met someone who uses Proxmox with a NixOS LXC containers on board.

Excellent. Tailscale was a sponsor. Unfortunately, I had to leave before Tailscale community events started where they had some local celebrity named Wes. Oh, sorry not to have you there, but GC, thanks for the report. And are you local? Were you just here for the conference? Yeah.

There's several things we should follow up on. And this is something I extremely appreciate. If you attend a tech event, an industry event, especially if it's adjacent to the show, please do send these reports in. It's so great just to keep in these, not only for our radar, so we kind of know what these events are going on,

but so the other, you know, folks listening, get an idea these events are going on, but so the other folks listening get an idea of what's going on out there too and what's actually worth attending. Man, thank you everybody. I do have a final question here for GC. You mentioned 2000 metrics, one second resolution. Are you running this off a little laptop in a bus? Is that what you're using or some kind of industrial PC?

Smoky if you got him. All right, thank you everybody who supported the show, either our members or by supporting using or some kind of industrial PC. Smoke if you got them. All right. Thank you everybody who supported the show, either our members or by supporting each individual production. Those of you who streamed Sats, we had 28 of you and we stacked 40,555 Sats. Not too bad. Thank you everybody who streamed Sats as you listen. We see you and we appreciate you. When you combine that with those of you who boosted, we had a very humble but yet very appreciated 189,657 sats. Not our biggest episode ever.

Maybe people don't like Home Assistant. I don't know what's going on there. Or maybe people are having problems boosting. Let us know. Now you're just trolling. Maybe, but we do appreciate everyone who supports each production, either through the free Value to Value-value network or through a membership

at LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership. You're the greatest, and we appreciate you. All right, we have two picks this week, and one of them was cooked up by our very own Wes Payne. Yeah, it's sneaky. You know, you're kind of one of the users I have in mind for this, actually. So it's a little gift to you, maybe.

All right. Well, we all know how great the Docker tail scale sidecar pattern is, right? So you're running something in Docker. You want it to be exposed to your whole gosh darn tailnet. So you do the sidecar. So in the same network namespace, you've got your application running. Maybe it's the war itch Maybe it's something else and then a tail scale runs there too

And so to that app it gets access to the tail net with its very own tail net name and IP and IP Which is really handy for like applications like VS code So if I just go to code.whatevermydomain.com is, I'm actually just accessing a Docker container that is just right there on that IP with that just served up directly from the Docker container. I'm not going through Nginx. I'm not going through reverse proxy at all.

And it's nice in the sense that, okay, maybe you still want tail scale on your host for the host to access and other things, but it decouples those. So even if you decide later to move that application stack to a different host, nothing else on your tail nut has to care, because they never knew where it was in the first place.

And when the application starts up, it's the same IP, the same name, all that stuff. Exactly. Even on a different host. Yep. So that's great, but as you probably know from listening to the show, we're all running a bunch of stuff with NixOS now.

And there is no built-in automatic sort of do the same easy sidecar system because one of the advantages of NixOS, depending on what you're doing, is you don't have to isolate everything to run all these things at the same time. So by default, they're not totally off in their own world like you get by default with Docker. So I am working on a NixOS module to just wrap system D services, and NixOS services basically, so that they run in their own network namespace with their own tail scale just like happens with Docker.

So without a container, but you're still taking advantage of network namespaces. It's basically me sort of re-implementing a bunch of the stuff that Docker Compose does with networking. So there's a bridge on the host, and then we use virtual ethernet pairs into namespaces per service, and a tiny little DHCP server, if I'm honest, to tie it all together. And then, yeah, so then they're able to get

a natted firewalled outbound connection, and then tailscale. That is really slick. And to be totally 100% transparent, we don't get paid for any of this. In fact, we're giving the milk away for free right now. The only thing Tailscale pays for is the spot at the top. We just really use it.

And this makes it possible to essentially have every application you wanna run via Nix get its own Tailnet IP and name and all of that. And there's initial support to do it for doing NetBird as well. In theory, you should be able to do this stuff. I haven't tried Nebula or anything, but in theory, other, I call it mesh sidecar because in theory other

services you work just fine. Am I right in that the magic is really the network namespaces? That's a lot of the whole setup and making it work and then getting the right wrapping and modifying of the systemd service to make sure that it like joins the right network namespace and the namespaces get set up and all that kind of bookkeeping stuff and then the actual, yeah the actual message stuff other people are doing much better. Nice work. So also, maybe don't use it just yet. I already want, I made the initial interface really easy. So you just give it a list of services you want to wrap, which works great as long as you're not trying to run like multiples of those where you might

want to have different names. You know what I mean? Like it works great if you're just running one Grafana instance across your tail net, but if you start to have multiple... Or Plax or Jellyfin. Right, because it just right now, it uses the NixOS module interface name as well as the system. Those are all assumed to be identical, so I want to add some configurability so you can change, like, which exact... Maybe the NixOS and the system D name aren't exact matches,

or you want to have the name on your tail net be slightly different. Oh, sure. So I'm going to modify the interface a little bit. So there's already going to be one breaking change. I'll tell you the immediate use case, if it hasn't quite clicked yet, is Jellyfin. You know, that's one area where I think Jellyfin doesn't quite stack up to Plex, and that is sharing.

You know, it is so easy on Plex to share with your buddies and have multiple friends and multiple servers. And Jellyfin doesn't necessarily have that inherently built in. But you can solve that if all of your buddies are on a tail net and you could because this is application specific this one application could be like on a dedicated shared tail net with your friends. Yeah you share just this node or whatever. Yeah and you can all get to your Jellyfin servers.

Yeah it doesn't matter what else you're hosting on that same box. Right. So that's where it gets really cool just to kind of put it practically down. I noticed this is a licensed MIT. Can you say hosting on that same box. Right. So that's where it gets really cool, just to kind of put it practically down. I noticed this is licensed MIT. Can you say anything about that? Why'd you chose MIT specifically? It's kind of my default license, just because it's really short and sweet.

And I mean, they're probably projects I do want to license with more copy left style licenses. But for a lot of stuff on the programming side, library things tend to be of stuff on the programming side, library things tend to be licensed more on the MIT or BSD or Apache or similar spectrum. So I don't mind the MIT and I've built that into my little make a new Git repo script. I have a second pick here. This one is also a little niche, but useful if this is something you've been looking for.

It's called Element FM, and I was just recently made familiar with it, element.fm, and it is a podcasting 2.0 open source hosting platform. It's licensed under the GPL 3. They offer unlimited episodes. They have AI automated generation of certain things you might, like, you know, show notes or whatever you might want to have it generate. They supposedly, I haven't seen these yet have advanced analytics, but the big thing here for me

is the podcasting, two dot o transcriptions, chapters, value for value, all built into the hosting platform and they're launching with an API. So they have a, they have an API that people can use, which we really love. It's also self-hostable if you want to go that route. So if you're looking to produce a modern podcast

that supports things like live tags and the cloud chapters, and of course, transcriptions, which I think are super valuable to have these days and gonna make it much more relevant in a world of LLMs, and then of course, Value for Value too, which supports the ecosystem of the podcast app creators, the hosting platforms, and the creators directly. And it's all just built into element.fm.

So they contacted me over the week and said, how come you've never looked at us? And I took a look and I was very impressed. So if you want something out of the box, it's going to just make you very competitive in the podcast space. Check it out. I think it looks really good. And it's GPL three. So the code is open source, which I feel really nice and solid about when you're looking for

something you want to be able to rely on for years as a podcaster, that gives you kind of that insurance policy and you can self host it if you want to. So check it out. We will have links to all of that in the show notes. Me. Yeah, there we go. So this was a packed episode. We talked about the news items. We talked about the big D, which all of that will be linked in the show notes. You can find those over at Linux unplugged dot com slash six 614. Now we're not going to be live next Sunday. We will be on a trip to Boston because we are attending Red Hat Summit. So we'll probably have a pre recorded episode. We'll have something for our members as well. We're kind of flying by the seat of our pants this week. So we'll get all the details figured out for you really soon. I want to remind you, I'm looking for feedback on my sound.

We're looking for ideas for Brent's bus name, which is technically a van, so you could also, if van makes it more litter, that's fine. And then last but not least, please do check the show notes for the TUI Challenge. We'd love your feedback while we're traveling. It's a great time collectively for the community to work on that, so when we get back, we can hopefully launch the TUI Challenge, at least pretty close to when we're traveling. It's a great time collectively for the community to work on that so when we get back we can hopefully launch the TUI challenge at least pretty close to when we get back. We'll have all of that at linuxonplug.com slash 614. Now we will have more for you. We'll have one more episode before we're actually at Red Hat Summit and then we'll have all of the

details you know. We'll take the best bits, the things that you really care about, the stuff you want to know about, all of the signal from the noise from Red Hat Summit and we'll have it in a future episode for you. So go subscribe, links to everything, our Mumba Room, our Matrix, our RSS feed, it's all at a website. It uses HTML, it's incrediblelinuxunplug.com. You don't even have to type the HTTPS anymore, can you believe it? They took that out, you don't even... Brother, you don't even need the www, can you believe it? I love the www, you don't need it. I'dWW. Can you believe it? I love the WWWW. You don't need it. I'd say put it in there. Why not? I think we set up a redirect, so do it. Thanks so much for joining us.

See you next Tuesday, as in Sunday. So Thanks for watching!