LINUX Unplugged - 627: The 2 a.m. Rescue

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Wes performs a 2 a.m. rescue at DEFCON, and Chris attempts to build a Linux desktop using nothing but vibes.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 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. Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMPodverse — A FOSS podcast manager for iOS, Android, F-Droid, and web.Podverse - GitHubTexas Linux Festival 2025 - CFP extended to August 18!Nix Pipe Operator by piegamesde [RFC 0148]libexpr: experimental pipe operators by rhendricNix Vegas on GitHubNixVegas/badge — Rebuild the world at DEF CON with the Nix BadgeAND!XOR 5n4ck3yANDnXOR/ANDnXOR_DC33_BadgeNixOS Search - Packages - ztoolChrisLAS/hyprvibe — Chris' vibed-only, riced-up Hyprland desktop running atop NixOS.crush — The glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal 💘Cursor - The AI Code EditorVoid: an open source Cursor alternativegerbrent/storenix — NixOS configs for a store, containing two locations and multiple hosts. Please help me!Listener Javier @hacker.bikepacker - InstagramListener Javier @hacker.bikepacker - YouTubeHomeBox — A simple home inventory management softwaresysadminsmedia/homebox — A continuation of HomeBox the inventory and organization system built for the Home UserForester NotesDesigning tools for scientific thoughtjimsalterjrs/sanoid: — policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools which use OpenZFS for underlying next-gen storage.btrbk — Tool for creating snapshots and remote backups of btrfs subvolumesBreez - Bitcoin in Every AppgPodder - Music AssistantGeneBean's Linux-specific NixOS aliases — GeneBean's MacOS-specific NixOS aliasesGeneBean's MacOS-specific NixOS aliasesAlby Hub — Alby Hub is a self-custodial, open source lightning wallet that connects to appsPick: ffshare — An android app to compress image, video and audio files through ffmpeg before sharing themPick: Actual Budget — Actual Budget is a super fast and privacy-focused app for managing your finances. At its heart is the well proven and much loved Envelope Budgeting methodology.SimpleFINConnect to your bank - SimpleFIN Bridge

So I was woken up this morning at 5 a.m. by bird screaming over what was inside a barbecue, which, by the way, once I got in there, they weren't going to be all that, and they weren't going to be that happy. But we just moved a bunch of gear into this space, and the birds came down, and were fighting over it this morning. And I could go out there and lift one of them and put them under my arm and carrying them around like a small dog. They're just these huge creatures. And man, oh, man, I want one as a pet so bad. Train it.

Have it go collect things for me. Levi's going to get a little jealous, though, so. you know, watch out. 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, I tried to build a Linux desktop using nothing but AI text editors. I never touched a single config file. I just vibed it all the way, but did it work or did the bots break it? I'll tell you about that. And then Wes is sharing his tales from DefCon and Nix Vegas. Then we're going to round the show out with some great emails, some boosts, some tremendous picks, and a lot more. So before I get any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room!

Hey, Chris, hey, Les and hi, hi, Brent. Hello, hello, hello. Hello. We have a small team in Mumble today. I think it's, maybe this is the live stream summer doldrums, I suppose. We're grateful for everybody that can make it. We're also grateful for the chat room. And we're grateful for the friends over at Define Networking.

Go check out Managed Nebula. Define.net slash unplugged. It's a decentralized VPN built on an open source platform that we love. It's called Nebula. And the entire thing, top to bottom, is open source. So you can self-host all of it, or you can have the blissful piece of managed Nebula. and it is optimized for speed, simplicity, and they're using industry-leading security.

And Nebula has a decentralized design that keeps your network resilient. If you want to manage it for your home lab or for an enterprise of tens of thousands of systems, Nebula is already doing it. In fact, Nebula was doing some heavy lifting where you're down there at DefCon slash Nix Vegas, Mr. Payne. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, what happens when you're trying to host a, you know, you need to go get NICS packages even when you're doing a proxy or a build cache, and you're trying to fight, I mean, not only just conference Wi-Fi in general, but a whole bunch of hackers on said Wi-Fi, well, you bond as much as you can, and then you use Nebula to tunnel all of that out to a dedicated VPS upstream to just protect things,

and to make sure you have the best possible routing out of there so you don't get stuck in a big Vegas mess. That's really cool. And then they could just stand it up like that, too. Nothing else offers Nebula's. resilience, its speed, or scalability, and that stuff, it comes at just the network traffic usage. It comes in the uptime and the battery usage for mobile devices. It's really fantastic. It's why we're switching our infrastructure over to it. And also, the team behind

are friends of the show. So go get started with up to 100 hosts absolutely free. No credit card required. Just go to defined.net slash unplugged. Support the show and visit them at defined.net slash unplugged. All right, so just a few housekeeping items before we dig into this. The boys are remote this week. Brent's off in Eastern Canada and taking over a parent's cottage and has a little spot over there. Are the kitties with you right now, Brent, or did you leave them somewhere else while you're recording? I left them somewhere after last week when they had to just sit around while I was doing the show.

They asked to not be a part of it this week for some reason. I understand. And, Wes, you're in your hotel in Vegas right now. Can you, do you have any kind of view? Can you see anything? Well, you know, I do have, I can see the strip. I can see the monorail, except I turned off the AC to do this here show. So I also closed the blinds to, you know, fight, fight that horrible sky death globe.

Yeah, so I'm just chilling here. No, I'm not going to complain at all then about the weather. It's a little warm today, but I'm not going to complain at all. It's nothing like Vegas. I also wanted to give a shout out to a project that we love here at the show. It's the Podverse podcast catcher. It's a GPL open source podcasting 2.0 player. You see we also integrated into our website.

And they're undergoing a big rework, and it's going really well. And they're looking for some help with a web app, perhaps their mobile app as well. And they let me know that now is the time to engage. Mitch wrote, I believe the new infrastructure is powerful and will hopefully be the best podcasting 2.0 compatible software available. And the back-end components are mostly finished, and the front-end website is in progress. So if you know anybody that could help us, please send them our way.

So go find Podverse on GitHub. If you would like to help out what I think is an absolutely critical project, we need more open-source podcasting apps. It's not much of a thing. It really should be. Also, call out for a sponsor that wants to work with us to get us to Texas Linux Fest. The Linux on Plug Show is looking for someone to help us attend and cover Texas Linux Festival, which is October 3rd through the Firf. If you would like to help us get there and do some co-coverage with us or something like that, email me, Chris at Jupyterbroadcasting.com.

And if you want to get there and do a talk or something like that, sometimes that helps the old boss, grease the wheels, get a talk in. Their call for papers has been extended. So you do have a little bit of time still. And it's October, Austin, Texas Linux Festival. It's one of the high signal smaller events in terms of like scale or Texer or Linux Fest Northwest. It's still a good amount. And the signal to noise ratio is really good. We've always really enjoyed Texas Linux Festival.

Oh, yeah. We had a great time last time we went. I'm getting excited already. And yeah, you know, I think there's a certain smoky flavor to those Texas-style Linux hackers that you just don't get anywhere else. Okay, Wes, so you are there in Vegas right now, and I guess I'm just, I'm curious about how the whole thing went, really. I know you had a talk.

I think it was on Saturday, and I think you had a chance to meet some folks. It's like, tell us, give us a little flavor. Oh, yeah. Okay, so like, first time at DefCon, first time in Vegas, actually. Somehow I've yet to be here. You are kidding me. No. Wow.

Did not know that. But, you know, overall, I got to say, very impressed, excellent conference. And just, like, super friendly folks. I mean, I ended up having a neighbor at the hotel in the room with me. You know, we were able to just, like, walk over together. We became friends for the whole conference. And let me tell them way too much info about Nix. So, first of all, just like, you know, I'm no pen tester. I'm not a reverse engineer. So I wasn't sure. I was coming for the NICs subconference. We'll get more into that. But just overall, I would say, like, if you are interested, if you have a budget to come to this kind of thing. Much like the vibe at a Linux fest, but at a whole different scale, like, it's just super friendly and welcoming, and so many people are here either their first time or their 17th time,

but it doesn't really matter. People are looking to be friendly and welcoming and, like, make new friends. But I was really here, of course, for Nix Vegas, which is, I guess, the first time they're doing this, and it's a community sort of sub-conference inside the larger DefCon. And there's a common thing, right?

They've got whole different villages, they've got subtracks, and they've got these communities. And man, I just, like, huge shout out to the folks behind all this. Many, many of them. But in particular, Morgan Jones, our buddy, Tristan Ross, who was on the show and was a release manager recently for the most recent NixOS release. Also, Tom Barrack from flocks.

And a shout out to Dan Baker, who also really helped organize this whole thing, who sadly got the flu and was not able to, to make it to the conference, but still so much hard work, you know, going there. And, of course, flocks and determinate systems were sponsoring to help make that possible. And because these Knicks folks are just crazy, they also got some hardware support from System 76 and Ampure and Protectly and Next Computing because the amount of infrastructure they stood up. They weren't just like going to be at DevCon.

They stood up like whole domains. They had this impressive nebula infrastructure. They had power line networking going. They ran a pixie server. They basically rebuilt all of Nix's packages and pulled down all of Nix packages to build a binary cache running on their network that you could get to over the Powerline

or the Wi-Fi that they were broadcasting. And all of that is powered by Nix and reproducible, and they're pushing as much as they can upstream to a GitHub repo called Nix Vegas, or the GitHub org called Nix Vegas that we'll definitely have a link to. So they're doing NABULA over Powerline networking? Well, I don't know the power line was in that

the path out, but Powerline was a feature that was a tap. Love it. Yeah, so they can go elsewhere in the convention center, plug in, and then Pixie Boot, because they were also running a Pixie server, of course. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Yes. So I'm guessing pretty good vibes. Like when we go to these kind of events, especially these more sub-conferences,

it's a pretty tight crew. Like you say, everybody wants to chat and learn. Yeah, absolutely. And also just like shout out to them because I got like a little sneak peek behind the scenes at the first night. as they were getting everything set up. And I can tell you that, like, they did not have a projector or a screen until, like, 10, 30 or 11 the night before things were supposed to get going.

So they were, like, improvising a backup. Shout to Andrew and Anna, who came up with, like, a sheet-based backup and went and got a backup projector to try to make that work. People like, you know, Chris and RJ. There's just this whole crew of folks behind the scenes making whatever needed to have. happen happen up to and including at the last minute and then Morgan sitting there running everything not only sort of like looking at BGP looking glass to make sure that the peering they have on the VPS that's doing all the nebulous streaming is like optimized but also running an own cast server

and OBS and like doing all the stuff we do all at the same time right because as we know although at a smaller scale it's there you have the you have the networking you have to solve you have the production technology you have to solve then the audio I mean there's so much and I can so so picture one of us doing like a backup run for another solution while we're trying to fix the primary solution like you can really you can really appreciate the hustle exactly it definitely had our kind of last minute just to figure it out energy going on so i i naturally like that also very cool is morgan and tristan worked on an incredible badge you know like cool hacky embedded styled badges are a big thing at defcon and the nix team showed up for nix vegas and

and DefCon. Not only did they, were they able to get the official SVG of the Nix and NixOS logo, but like, you know, they got this sent over to a lab in, a fab in China. You know, they got it all ordered. It's powered and built by Nix. I mean, there's like, K-Morgan gave a great talk, but, like, keycads in there. They had to use something called SVG to Shenzhen, all kinds of, like, hacky scripts and adapters to make this thing as reproducible as possible. So you can actually just go up to GitHub and go get this awesome badge. It's running some expressive, like, Risk 5 chip on there. The badges also have Wi-Fi.

They join a Wi-Fi mesh, and sadly, there was, like, a little bug in some of the routing, so the SD card doesn't work, but it was going to be a full Nix cache, but it can also just be a Nix cache proxy. So you can be cloning down Nix packages, and you can point to your badge as a substitutor and have it go over the conference, like their sub-conference Wi-Fi to get your next packages, which is just incredible.

Holy. You had me at Reproducible Badge, but that's next level. Yeah, and there's a bunch of Easter eggs on there. I haven't even gotten, I'm excited to go, I'll bring it up so you guys can check it out. We'll have to plug it in and see what we can do with it.

I imagine this thing draws attention. Yes, so that was what worked out. I was super glad. Next time, A, I need more. more like J.B. Swag I can be given out. But then also like Nick's stuff, because once I had that badge, suddenly I found myself being an impromptu Nick's ambassador, which it turns out as a role I'm very happy to play. So like whether it was just hanging out while talks were going on sort of at the edge of the subcomf area and talking to people wandering by asking about it, or, you know,

as I'm wandering around at night at parties, at meetups, at events, folks are all like, oh, cool badge. So that's one line. But a lot of folks would just be like, oh, Nick's a West, or I've been curious about Knicks. Oh, I've really been meaning to learn Nix, especially met a ton of arch users in that camp, whereas, like, they just needed a little bit more of a push, a little bit more of like, is it okay? Is it going to be horrible to try to onboard? So the badge was a huge win for me, because I just got to have a lot of great conversations chatting with random people trying to spread the good word. So is this how you ended up getting pulled into a 2 a.m. rescue session? Yes, absolutely. So I was, you know, trying to pace myself, trying not to stay up

too late, but winding down, working on heading back from the convention center to the hotel I was staying at. And I ran to the gentleman I met that first day, Paul, and he was with some of his friends, and they were working on a CTF. And when I walked over, they'd said something, what really made me stick around rather than just saying hi was the combination of WebAssembly and DOS. I was like, What are you doing with WebAssembly and DOS? And it turns out that this CTF they were doing, what they gave you to start was just a Z5 file, which is a game data file used by the Z machine,

which is a virtual machine for running interactive fiction games, like from the DOS era. Amazing. So you could just play the game, right? So that was one way to try to go through the Capture the Flag event. But, and of course probably, I'm sure the folks behind this knew, there's a debugger for these. game files called Z Tools. And so, unfortunately, these folks had only brought a Mac with them.

I think their other laptops were back at the hotel at this point because it was, you know, 2 a.m. And they'd been, they'd been partying. So they had a Mac. This thing would not run on a Mac. It would run on Windows. You know, you could probably get it running. You could compile it for Linux. So they were going down the path of trying to get WebAssembly and DOS so that they could upload this debugger and the game file to that, which of course was just going terribly. So I was started like, I don't know, just trying to help. I was like, okay, what about FreeDOS? Maybe, like, we spin up, you know, ultimately UTM, which is QEMU,

trying to run Free DOS, and then, of course, then we had to figure out how to actually get the files in there. And are you using UTMX-86 emulation for this, which is slow as hell on a Mac? Yeah, I think so. I don't know which era of Mac it was, but yes, presumably that must be it. Oh, my God. All right.

Yeah, so they were finally able to get Free DOS to download, you know, you have to somehow, they have a Free DOS live CD, which is almost a thing that doesn't quite compute for me, but it is a thing, it does work. And then it turns out there is a QAMU flag that you can just pass through like a fat format. It'll treat it like a fat device to attach, but it has some weird limitations around like being read only maybe

and like only 512 bytes, and then you have to make sure you can pass extra arbitrary flags through UTM. So while that was like we were debating that, I was like, okay, well let me pull out my laptop. I know I could at least like make like a loopback raw device that we could format like FAT 16 in an MBR and like try to stuff the files and then maybe mount that as a second drive.

But that's when I finally, because I was kind of getting, you know, trying to figure out the whole path they had gone down to get where they were in terms of like actually what the problem up the tree was they were trying to solve. And then I realized that the whole problem was really just trying to get those Z-Tools

debugger working. And yeah, that was just packaged in Nix packages. So I could just literally clone that down. It took, you know, two seconds. And then I was able to immediately dump all of the game data and share that with the team. And then they could start like grepping through it, trying to find clues. Of course, if you just grep for the word flag, there's like a, there's an FU in there from the people behind it. Like, of course we wouldn't just put this in here like that.

What are you doing? So I don't know how far they eventually got. But I was able to like give them those text file dumps and at least felt like I was I was participating and helping out. And, hey, the power of Nix. I have one question, though. Were you out and about at 2 a.m. with your laptop, or did you discover them, come across them, realize their plight, go back to your hotel room, get your laptop, come back and do this? No, you know, so that day, not only did I not manage to actually have dinner, but I did not manage to escape the conference at all. So I had my laptop from being there during the day, and I just never had a chance to go back to the hotel.

So I was bopping around having a couple of drinks, dancing, all with my laptop. Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. I just think that it is a trooper. Yeah, really. Wow. Well, also, before the show started, you kind of teased us that you may have heard about a new feature coming to Nix that you are particularly nerded out about.

Yeah, right? I'm a functional programming guy. I like closure and other functional programming. And Nix is a functional programming language. And one of the things with functional programming languages is you're doing function calls. And often you might need to chain some data through a couple of functions, right?

You call one thing to get your initial data. You call another function on that. to maybe modify it a little bit, and then you finally pass it off to, like, the final thing that needs that data. And with Nix, right now, and in a lot of functional programming languages without these tricks,

you kind of have to read it backwards, right? So it's like it's nested with the last thing you read it first, and the first thing is all the way inside the nesting. That can be confusing. If you do a lot of functional programming language, you kind of get used to it. But no one really likes it.

Often you then have to kind of leave more comments in the code to try to explain exactly what's going on with the flow. So I had no idea that this was already a shipping experimental feature in Nix and there's an open RFC going for it. They're introducing a pipe operator, which just lets you do exactly that,

except it flips the order. So you run, you produce your first data, and then you can just pipe it just like you're used to in a good old Unix shell to build a pipeline that looks in the proper, readable order right out of the gate. So it's like a small change on the language, but because this pattern is so prevalent basically everywhere,

it could be one that would be a huge win for readability and hopefully something that makes it easier for folks not only coming from other functional programming languages, but actually the person who's the steward of the RFC was not a functional programmer before Nix at all. And so they were actually doing this just because it made it so much easier for them. So I had no idea. Some of the other folks I was chatting with

who were definitely Nix nerds in the audience also had no idea. So yeah, they were also asking for explicitly support go, well, I'll link to the RFC in the show notes and go chime in, go try it out. You can enable it now if you have a new enough Nix with an experimental feature. Then they need users to go test it and break it and figure out if it's going to work so they can get it across the finish line and shipping and actually, you know, ready to go by default. Well, Wes, I got to know, how was the Vegas experience, given it was your first time there, but also we've heard some things that Vegas has changed in a little bit. So how was Vegas? Good. You know, I have not yet had to get to see as much of it as I would like. It's definitely hot. It's definitely doesn't sleep. But I like it, you know? There's entertainment wherever you'd like. Always something going on. I know that's your style. Yes, absolutely, right? There's no problem. I was able to go pick up some good show supplies at like three in the morning last night when I was getting back to the hotel. It is giant, though. So thankfully, the hotel I'm at is attached to their monorail system on the strip.

that helps out a lot, because otherwise you really don't want to walk, you know, 30 minutes and 106 degrees. But I'm excited after the show today. I'm hoping I can, well, maybe take a nap, but then go get off the strip, go explore some more of, you know, the rest of Vegas. So hopefully I'll have something fun. You know, maybe that vitamin D will keep you from getting sick. Did you get to bump into any listeners or anybody that you recognize, that maybe you've

known from other conferences? Yes. I definitely saw, I saw our buddy Rob, who. we had on the show who helps organize scale. He was here. That was great to see him. And I ran into a few folks who've seen other conferences kind of all around, but in particular, shout it to Britain, who gave a great talk about Klan, which is a cool system we might have to talk more about. He's also working on a pretty great looking like, based on his talk and based on looking at his Hyperland setup, a very nice Hyperland setup, sort of Omarchy style, but on top of Knicks, powered by Klan.

I don't know that any of that's ready or anything, but something I'm looking forward to. And then also big shout out to listener Lucas, who heard about Nix Vegas on the show, and then flew out from Missouri just to come and check it out. So, super great, had a lovely time talking with Lucas. And he's actually in between jobs right now. So if you're looking for a sharp person who can run your infra and knows Nix, we'll have a link to LucasR.com, which is his LinkedIn profile. OnePassword.com slash unplug. first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. That's OnePassword, the number one password.com

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show. Just go to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. well after the show last week kind of just on a whim i decided to show you a little tool i'd been trying out for vibe coding i thought you know mostly it was just look at how nice the interface is it's really pretty i think chris'll like it and hey it's packaged in nicks so we could just give it a try but like we were sitting around you know finishing out the show notes i didn't think too much of it but it turns out that little event seems to have totally reshaped your work week. Yeah, I kept playing with it. You know, the first thing when you showed it to me is like, oh, this would have been cool while we had the Tui Challenge. This is a fun toy. And then I just

decided to see how far I could push it. And I kind of created myself a little mini challenge over the last few days. Could I vibe code a riced up Hyperland desktop from essentially a base headless NIC system? But before I get into all that, I do want to set the tone for a moment. because I realized, you know, we we kind of touch on these types of topics once or twice a year, but we first started talking about this with no hype in like around 2022. I couldn't believe it when I went back and looked at our back catalog when we started talking about LMs and this type of stuff.

And I think we've consistently been really good about separating the practical from the hype. And I think it's one of these things where we have very high expectations. and we kind of miss the trees in the forest, as they say, or whatever. And I think because part of it is some of the things we ask these LLMs to do, humans are pretty good at already. And so we kind of are judging it with a high bar. And so one of the things that's in the discussion right now around these LLM tools

is can they code, can you vibe code, can you build application using these tools? And then, of course, people build these applications, and they're pretty much universally mocked. But that's a pretty high bar, you know, because even humans aren't very good at developing software. And there aren't a ton of great examples online. So if you index the Internet, the average is pretty low. But I had this theory, and I thought, well, what if I lowered the bar a little bit? And maybe instead of trying to build a complex application, what if I just try to build some configuration files?

You know, what if I try to just generate some YAML or a Docker Compose file or Nix and so on? And so that's where I started with Crush. It's like, well, I don't need to create an app. I just, I want like a config template to start with. And I started building on that idea. And what I realized, and I'm curious what your thoughts are, Wes, is I have a theory. And that theory goes that this stuff is a little bit easier. It's a little bit simpler of a language.

And there's probably more examples of it online that are better on average than say, maybe code that these models have been trained on. So it's like it's indexing text. And this stuff is just a little more straightforward. So maybe these LLMs are just perhaps a little bit better at generating config files than application code? Yeah. I mean, I think the limited scope definitely helps, right? You're not trying to create a sketchy dating app so people will upload, you know, all their ID pictures that you leak out on the internet or whatever.

You kind of have some nice bounds. There is a schema. When you go to try to rebuild or build whatever, it can shout at you, it can tell you what's wrong. not always with the best error messages, but often with a good error message or at least good enough, you can pipe that back in and get some suggestions on what to do next. Because, yeah, you're not trying to architect a giant distributed system with, you know, a Rails application and JavaScript and how do you figure out the right security and protocols and database and cacheing. Like, it's a better scoped problem.

Yeah. And so, gentlemen, this was my hypothesis, is that perhaps this would be something these things would be better at. And I sort of got to this after playing with this crush tool. But I wanted to know how good. And I thought, well, how can I figure out how far somebody could take this? Somebody who's looking at this as a system administrator or somebody building a Linux box, not somebody trying to develop an application, not somebody that's trying to create, you know, some sort of wild out there AI app. I'm just trying to manage a dozen config files on my box. And so I took my existing NixOS system that I have at home and I essentially commented out everything but just a really base boot to a terminal, hardware setup,

you know, left the file systems in place, but essentially just stripped it all the way down, which, by the way, is so great to be able to load into a previous version when you screwed something up, fix it, and then try it again and try it again. Like, I cannot tell you how great that is. Yeah, it's like, oh, I deleted too much in that build. Yeah, nope, nope, nope. So I stripped it down, got it essentially headless, and then proceeded to vibe code, at least attempt, a complete hyperland desktop with riced out way bar and settings, custom key binds, theming, and more. And I quickly discovered I needed to SSH into this thing because I have this wide, ultra wide screen and Crush was horrible on there because it's on the terminal. but using it I was able to build a real basic config through an SSH session running crush on that local box

I was able to build out a basic config that I never wrote myself and what it really did is it I told it what I wanted and it went through and it walked my config and said well okay I'll reenable this I'll reenable this and I'll add this package and I'll reenable this and so it was really intelligent about well if I already had it in there it would just uncomment it for me oh you already need you already have this and it's fun right because you pointed it directory, it scans that directory, it indexes everything, and it has kind of a cool look to

it. I mean, I thought it looked really neat. Brian, maybe you thought it looked, I don't know, like it was trying too hard, like an 80s retro computer interface. I know you had a chance to play with it. I actually appreciated how it was kind of active, you know. You were doing something if you were waiting for it had this sort of, I don't know, animation, but it wasn't over the top where it was super annoying. It was just like, oh, yeah, things are happening. So, surprisingly, I liked it. And it lets you switch between multiple models. It supports open router as well, which is what I was using.

So that's kind of nice. Did you accomplish anything when you tried Crush? I attempted something a different direction than you. I attempted to pull the IRC feature out of our J.B. website, because it's a thing that I wanted to do for a while, but I haven't sat down and actually did it. It didn't go so well for me. but this is the first time I try to, you know, vibe, vibe. So maybe that's not me. Sometimes the vibe isn't right.

I do want to call out that the folks behind this, the charm slash charm bracelet team project. I don't know the full details. But, I mean, not only did they make it super easy to try with all kinds of NICs instructions and other distributions on Crush here, but it's all powered by Bubble Tea, which is a powerful, two-y framework written in Go that they make.

And then it powers other stuff. like gum, which is a tool to, you can call out to gum from shell scripts to like make fancy look at interfaces. They've also got VHS, which is a CLI home video recorder for your terminal. And they've got glow, which is a tool I've used all the time because it renders markdown on the command line that looks really nice. So like it's very cool to see them continue to advance and Crush is a very impressive tool powered by some really good primitives.

And it is slick looking. It really is. And what's neat is, of course, this is designed to look at, I'm, project directory for software, but it treats the configuration directory like a project. And then it understands my system. It understands my sub-configuration files, my includes it. It knows I'm on a flake-based system. Like, it gets my box.

And then so everything it's doing is with that context and that understanding. And that's powerful. That's really, really powerful. And I'll come back to that later. I do wonder, just because you mentioned, which, you said you were using open router. Were you using a variety of models, or did you just stick with one model for this? I did end up changing it. So I'll mention the model I used later, the second model,

but I started with Claude, which seemed pretty good. And it's nice because with OpenRouter, as you probably could explain better than me, Wes, is I've just put the credits in one place, and then it kind of divvies it out, depending on which model I select on the tooling I'm using. And you've been telling me to do this for months, so I finally went and funded an OpenRouter account.

And then, yeah, I selected Claude through that. And I think it's, you know, one of their later ones that's available. I have a hard time differentiating all the model names, to be honest with you. It's kind of ridiculous, the branding. Yeah, it's getting confusing. But you're totally right. Like, OpenRourder is just a nice little service that sits in the middle, so you pay them instead of having to pay, like, six different folks,

and then they basically proxy to all the various different LLM providers. If you spend enough fun credits, you get some free stuff. You can choose Clod or GPT or Gemini or Deepseek or Open Source ones. And then it implements like an open AI-style API. so it's super compatible with a lot of stuff. So I was surprised how simple it was to get a basic desktop without ever writing or touching a config file. But it was really basic.

It's like, you know, all the little, because Hyperland is, it's what you make of it. It's very, very simple by default. And so, you know, you've got to rice it up, as they say in that community. And there's lots of little iterative changes that you want to make, and you want to make them quickly because one of Hyperland's cool features is that it auto reloads when you change the config. And that's, you know, when you're making little tweaks to your bar or this or that,

super great feature. And you want, so you want, and you can move quickly if you have the right tooling. And so this is where I decided to step it up for the first time ever. I tried out the cursor AI code editor, which is a fork of VS code. I know there's others out there like Void, although I think development is paused for the moment. Similar to Crush, you know, in VS code, you pointed at a directory. So I could point it at my Hyperland, my Waybar, my style sheets, everything that makes up a Hyperland desktop configuration. And then I could ask questions against that configuration.

So I could say, for example, what key got did I bind to Firefox? And it would tell me. But I could also ask it, what can I do, what software is missing in order to accomplish this? And as I started to use it, I started to realize that you can kind of build a plan with this thing. And then they'll go and it'll execute through all of them. and you can even let them run on their own, on the command line with your user privileges, including running the build tests,

checking the output when the build fails, resolving those problems, and then building again until it works. It's kind of wild, right? I mean, maybe don't give it access to your production database just yet, but... Right. Like, yeah, I mean, that's where I think

the kind of the agent side of stuff, right? Like, not only does the LM generate the plan, but then, like, it will actually step through and execute all that, and collect more data to keep the feedback cycle going. And then gives me a summary of what it did, formatted a markdown, which is great. Right. Yes, of course, right?

Turns out these LLMs, they are good to summarize it. And because all of this is just text files, it's really pretty simple, but also the way cursor works is as it's going, it's showing me a diff of what it's adding and removing, and I can approve each step, or I can deny a step, or I can stop it. Right, that kind of critical human in the loop,

step, you're still in control, especially because, you know, despite how much Brent and I try to lecture you, you know, you don't always put all of your stuff in Git. So it's kind of nice that you get that extra diffing that you, you know, so you don't have to go full tool. You guys were ringing in the back of my head, though. So what I did is I took all my config from like my Etsy NixOS and I staged it in a config folder in my home directory. So I had this working against that. And then when I was done and I was satisfied, I would just like a monkey on the back end, CP all the files over and then build.

Yeah. So, you know, it was so, I wasn't letting it just run wild on the bear system. I did move them over and then I would kind of like check it and then deploy it. And cursor, because the time I was using it, which was like August 7th, 9th, 8th, whatever, they had free GPT5 integration. And it's funny because I've seen a lot of people crapping on GPT5 this weekend. But I definitely noticed a step up in the thoroughness because they can research. So if you have a model that can. can do a lot of things, and that's one of the things GPT5 can do, is it can do research and the other type of stuff, whatever. So I could tell it, I want a super riced out Hyperland theme that has my current IP address up in the Waybar, my CPU, my CPU, I want my network stats up there. I want the current weather. I want a clock with a calendar. Also, I want you to make sure that all of this works with a dark background. And by the way, I don't have an Nvidia GPU. I have an AMD GPU.

And keep in mind, I'm also on NixOS, so we have to work within these limitations. It then kicks off a research job. It cites 16 different sources. It reviews them against my current configuration. It then proceeds to modify those configs to enable them. And then if I need to install a package, it updates my configuration.nix. It runs a build test for me. Make sure that works.

And then also gives me an output of any additional software I need to install. And I can either have it do it or I can do that. I just had it do it. I mean, you can really get moving here. because I don't know anything about Hyperland. I don't know the names of these tools, these modules that you can put up, and there's scripts that you can write.

I don't know any of this stuff. I don't know what launcher people like because there's multiple launchers. Right. That's really sticking out to me. I mean, just like, right? You were able to say, like, I want a riced configuration.

I want something that's going to look nice like the folks over on Unix porn share, right? Like, without having to have a super concrete list. I linked to Unix porn and I link some GitHub's in there to afford to go check. Yeah. But it's like, that's, you know, it's one thing to know exactly what you

want and then try to get these tools to do it. And it's kind of the next level up when you can just be like, I have a high level goal. I'll know it when I see it, but otherwise, like, I need you to suss out what the even the possible steps are to try and get there. Well, here's, and tell me if you think this is true, here's what I think I was having kind of a success after success for a while. It was going really well, because everything Nick's configuration is text-based, everything for configuring Hyperland is text-based. And most of the stuff that makes like the Waybar modules work. It's just bash scripting. Yeah. So this is like it's, this is its power zone. It totally is. Yeah, you're able to turn so much of this stuff into, you know, it's captured,

it's declarative, it's right there, and lots of people are pushing and shared it on the internet. So you have a good training base, and you have the native medium for these tools. So they don't have to go that far to be able to affect these changes. I mean, I'm not kidding. I'm saying, like, this first initial success I was having happened in like the span of maybe two, two and a half hours. I probably started around 8.30 a.m. And by 10 a.m., I'm like, I can't believe how well this is going. And I started, I was actually, I got back to work. I had things humming by 1.30 p.m.

I had things humming to the point of where I was getting like that, oh, no, I think I'm falling in love with this. I think I'm going to have to change all my systems feeling. You know that how I get, right? Like, we got to change the studio out. We got to change my workstations out. Like, I got to switch. I mean, I was really quickly beginning to even develop muscle memory. for my hot keys that I set up.

So it took an LLM to get you finally, after years and years of the audience, trying to get you to a toiling window manager. Yeah. That is true. That was 1.30. By about 2 p.m., it was literally all gone. Oh, boys.

The highs are high and the lows are low when you're vibreasing your Hyperland desktop. So I had, I'm not kidding you, the sweetest set up. I had it dialed in. I even had Fahrenheit for the weather, special coloring for special weather conditions to my location. I had a way bar that was so sweet. I had key bindings that were like muscle memory. And then I did a rebuild and I rebooted and it's back to like kind of a half-broken

omna-archy thing. And for some reason, so my setup is I have a repository where I modify my config files, and then when it builds, it's supposed to deploy those config files. And it looks like my Waybar is mostly fine, but for some

reason my Hyperland config didn't get deployed. I'm not sure why that is. So I'm going to look at the files myself manually, and then I'm going to load everything in also into one of these LLM editors and have it kind of compare everything. But man, to come back in

and have my system just be completely, all, like, I've probably been, I have probably been ricing this thing for like the last three hours, at least, maybe longer, all gone. But it's all in my config file and my repo, so if I can figure out how to get that correctly deployed when I build, I think it'll all come back.

This is what it really hit me. Like, I didn't, didn't know how I had built this, right? And not only that, but my documentation at best was a couple of the prompts that I had saved. Right. You had some intent. You had whatever the diffs were and how much you could remember of your vibe high. Yeah. And this is right where it's like, suddenly, do you have the tools to keep going? Can you get yourself to a state where you're like, well, I've made myself a mess here and it's almost there, but I don't know the right levers to push to keep going. Yeah. You had this all committed in your Git repo, though, right? Okay, I admit, I should have. That would have helped the situation. I at least would have had a sense of like, okay, I could go check what happened over there and roll back.

But no, and I started thinking, like, am I going to try to figure out the differences? Am I going to swap the files? But then I started thinking, well, maybe there's something broken. Do I try to rebuild this prompt by prompt? And then, like, will I get a different result? Which, by the way, I did test. And yes, I do get different results sometimes, like when I'm ricing out the way bar. It depends on what I emphasize.

If I emphasize large text or certain style things, it's interesting how what kind of differences I can get. So I wasn't sure what direction I was going to take. So I fired up cursor. I explained what had happened, that I'd done a NixOS rebuild, and I came back and I was essentially at a stock hyperland desktop with like the Omnicube background. And I'm sitting there looking at my screen, realizing I have been working at this since about 8 a.m. It's now to something. I need to just get up and get some air. Okay, I'm taking a walk.

I needed, obviously, a minute. What happened was, see, I was trying to do the right thing and be safe, and I put all my config files in a staging area, and then I would copy them into my Etsy Nix OS when it was actually time to build, but I didn't copy the folder and the sub-config files, so when it rebuilt, it rebuilt with the original blank ones.

See, this is what I get for not just working on my config files directly. If I just want to edit them directly, I never would have had this problem. Yeah, so one of the things that we did, the LM and I, is we converted this into a multi-host setup. And so each individual host of mine has a subfolder with its own config. I forgot. I forgot we did that. Oh, my gosh. I love this journey. I know.

But what's great is the machine didn't, and it explained to me what's going on. And it's like, would you like me to just take care of the deploying and staging and then building? And I could just do that, if you would like. I'm not kidding you. And I'm like, yeah, why don't you go ahead and just handle this for me? Because I'm clearly going to screw it up. And from that point forward, it did all of it. it, I let it, I let it do the config changes.

I let it copy over my configs once I, you know, did a quick review, and then I let it do the rebuild, and I let it determine when it should just do a NixOS rebuild switch or when it should do a NixOS rebuild boot, depending on the significance of the change and how fast it wanted to test its iterations. Yeah, it's crazy. So this was, I recorded one more clip sort of later on in the evening, just sort of capturing my reflections on the moment. So it's 9.15 p.m. I mean, I took some time off, so I haven't been going for hours.

Well, okay, I've kind of been going for hours. Just small little refinements, adding things as I think of them. It's even caught me a couple of times. I wanted to install a screen locker. Hyperland doesn't have one by default. And so I told it to install a package and set it up, and it's like, actually, bro, you already have a similar app that's a little more modern and recommended. How about I just set that up for you? I don't even need to install anything. Like it catches me sometimes. But I think what's really impressed me is it's aware I'm using this in a declarative way

so it knows that I have to update the files in the main config and then build that config and deploy it before Hyperland is actually updated. And I've gone to the point where I'm just letting it do all of those steps. It's running the Nix OS rebuild and then it's checking the output

and if it fails, it's fixing that and I'm just sitting back and you know having a snack I'm just the monkey pushing the button I guess it's it was sort of blowing my mind like I even had a hard time sleeping that night because I was just running through how I just built

a full desktop system and yeah it took me a while but I was playing around right I mean it's it actually it worked there was a moment where everything went sideways but that was kind of because I was trying new stuff too. I was shocked that I got this far. Now, there is stuff that's not great. I went through this morning.

I was looking at the config files. Like, there's some areas where I was trying different things, and it's kind of sloppy about how it commented a few things out. So it's messy. Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. I think you could clean it up pretty quickly. But it's, I looked at it.

I was like, oh, that's not how I would do it. I am kind of curious in that regard. Like, did you hit? Because when I'm picking up, and I found this when I started, trying to try and vibe shelling and stuff, like, I mean, the vibes are good, the vibes are bad, but it is really like the vibe. It's not just that you're riding the vibes, like, it gives you vibes, right? You were feeling super empowered and a little down at one point. I'm curious,

though, like, did you run, because we're not just trying to sell Cursor subscriptions, of course. No, I don't, you know, unless they want to reach out. But, like, did you run into any points where, like, you just were hitting your head against the wall or it was hitting its head against the wall? Because sometimes you can get down loops where, like, the AI is confusing it. And if you don't have enough context or your own, like, escape patches to tell it, like, no, you've gone down the wrong path here. That isn't going to work. Ah, yeah, I'm glad you asked this. Yeah, one time, only one time, but one time, it just got in this crazy loop of like, okay, I have to figure this out, but then I'll figure this out, but then I'll

figure this out, but then I'll figure this out, but then I have to figure this out, and it was like these three things, and it went, and it went, and it went, and it went, and it went, and I just eventually had to abort, and I just kind of restarted. Yeah, that makes sense. Again, I'm not trying to sell any particular product, and I would love to know of free software alternatives. But one of the things that's handy about Cursor is you can give it particular config files is context, GitHub repo links is context. So you can get back up and running pretty quickly after something like that happens. I'm also curious because I was running into this, where it's like, especially with those, like, when that's happening,

suddenly I was like becoming more keenly aware that like, right, I'm, every time it's doing this, I'm paying for that. Unless, I mean, either in power and, you know, the GPUs you've bought, if you're doing it self-hosted style or in credits or, you know, whatever. So I'm curious, did you get any kind of rough spend? Because it's, you know, if it's three or five or $10, that's different than if it takes, you know, $30 to get yourself a desktop. No, no, it was like $8 when I used Open Router is all I spent when using Crush. Plus, I did a couple on yours, so I think I spent like 10 cents on your account. Right.

But when I switched over to Cursor, and this was kind of a cheat, and I'm really glad you brought this up, Cursor was giving away GPT5 access for the weekend. They might still be doing it. Oh. Yeah. So I essentially just went for it. I just went for it.

I mean, hours. I was like, I'm not going to stop because it's basically unlimited. And so, yeah, that was... I love that. You're essentially,

you're sucking up that VC money to build free and open source desktops. Keep doing it. It does make me think how great would it be if you could accomplish this with a local LLM like that.

Imagine if you could have a local LM that can help you build these setups, right? Because we're dealing with, you know, Nix and YAML and Hyperland configurations and CSS files and BAScript. That's the entirety of it. It's really approachable. I mean, they're getting better and better. I think that's the future. And I wanted to try this because Oma Archie impressed me a lot, but I'd like to have my own take on it. And so here's what I ended up with that I like. You know, the cons were I think some of the configs could be cleaned up a little bit. But what I liked is, one, I could generate reports against my

configs. So I had to generate me marked down tables of all my custom key binds so I can do a little printout of that. And you can just ask you things about that, which I found to be really fascinating. And at the end result, I got a rolling, flake-enabled Nix OS system using the Zen kernel with all its optimizations, butterfs-based file systems with auto scrub enabled. Nick Store is auto-optimized, and it also does auto-garbage collection. Z-Ram is set up. I have Auto-B-PF-Tune enabled. auto-tuning the system on-demand, and it's a collection of what I think are some of the best-in-class Linux desktop applications

riding on a totally rad hyperland setup that I am very, very into right now. I mean, really love this setup so much. I think this is my new setup. And in hindsight, I wouldn't start with a naked MVP system, especially if you're doing it on a declarative system and you have a high-res screen.

Just, you don't need to. I was doing it as an experiment and looking back at it. I should have just started with the desktop I had on there and then just done this. Ah, you, like, overly stripped it back thinking, like, that would make a cleaner, easier experience, probably. But it turned out to be a little counterproductive. I suppose especially, maybe that is true in other systems, but with Nix, I guess it's like it matters less. So if anybody out there is running Hyperlander has done this type of stuff, I'd love some advice from you, what to do, what not to do, what I should look into, because I'm a total noob.

but Rofi is such a cool launcher because it's also a file browser and it can also give you a dictionary of all your keybinds but it's also a very fast application launcher and because Hyperland doesn't really choose anything for you I'm kind of picking and choosing so I have Kate and Dolphin from Plasma and then some of the apps I'm using are GTK apps from Gnome but it's all running so smoothly on Hyperland it is what I've always wanted in terms of performance from the Linux

desktop, that smoothness and responsiveness with a hint of modern animation that isn't gaudy, but a level of customization where I can do things that take extensions in Gnome that are really straightforward like Waybar modules in Hyperland that aren't going to break every time I update. And so it's this combination of really practical key binds and navigation with really good tiling that's working for me way better than I ever expected, with this curating. setup kind of going out there and asking the internet like what are some of the most popular things what are in vogue right now in hyperland and bring it into my setup for me and i think my biggest takeaway from this is say what you will about these lm tools i never wrote a single line

of any config file of any of this i never touched a CSS file i never touched my waybar config i never touched my Nix config. I didn't make the changes to make each machine have their own sub-configuration. I didn't make the changes to have a declarative hyperlens setup. At one point during it, I realized I could do that, and it did all the refactoring for me to make hyperlend declarative on my NIC system. That's awesome. Yeah. And I didn't, I just told the machine to do it. I mean, there was literally a point where I was just like sitting there sipping on a drink and just watching the machine go and doing little checks on it and approving things and, okay, go for it or asking other questions. that part was really powerful.

As far as these companies go and the resources they use, those are all things we're going to have to sort out. But I think we have to not discount their capabilities when you lower the bar of the task a little bit to something that's a little bit easier for it to handle. So if you wanted to create the next mobile app, like Wes is saying, that's a big ass. But if you wanted to generate a riced-out Hyperland desktop,

that's actually within its capabilities today. And because it's all just written in text, I can just go through it and learn what it did. I read my Nix config, I read the Hyperline config, the Waybar config, and I'm done. And I understand what it did. I think this is kind of the similar scale, like when we were at the Red Hat Summit this year, right? We saw Lightspeed really being talked about as like a command line tool you can use. I think it's that same kind of idea, right?

Like maybe it's not architecting your entire OpenShift cluster, but it can definitely help you troubleshoot, work with text files, modify them, and then, you know, you layer on more declarative stuff, and it just gets better. But I think you knew I was going to ask this. But you didn't know the full reason. While I was playing Nick's ambassador this week, I was actually, because you had already like, you'd been teasing Brett and I in our private chat

just sort of about what you were working on, how excited you were. So I was actually using that as a selling point to Nix. I was like, yeah, well, I'm here. My buddy back home, he's got himself a vibe-coded, super shiny desktop. And I know at the end of the week, if he just pushes that up to GitHub,

I'm going to be able to just totally clone and copy it. And that's one of the reasons I was telling people they should try Nix. So, oh, the pressure's on. Are you willing to share? Totally. Yeah, let's do that after the show because I would also like a set of eyes on these. I mean, who knows?

Maybe there's something in here that's awful. I would like people to review it and boost in some suggestions for improvements or fixes or additions or things to make Hyperland even more enjoyable. So, yeah, I'd love to get it up there. I put it on my GitHub, I guess, and we'll put a link in the show notes. Perfect. All right. You talked me into it, West Payne. Unraid.net slash unplugged.

Go unleash your hardware. Check out Unraid. Support the show and celebrate Unraid OS turning 20 years old. Can you believe it? What a testament to them. And it's also the 20 days of the Unraid Summer Sale. It's really just begun. So it runs now through August 26th.

And you'll get 20% off the starter, Unleash licenses, and upgrades. Also, every item in the brand new merch store, also 20% off. And they're also doing daily giveaways, free licenses, merch bundles, and even a link station NAS is up for grabs. So if you have a unique Unraid setup, you can enter their Show Us Your System Competition. That's Show Us Your System Competition. And you get a chance to win prizes or at least bragging rates, and I want to know about it too. So on August 30th, they're going to have a big bash. Their founder is going to get together.

Some friends are going to get together for Unraids 20th birthday bash live stream. And they're going to reveal the Show Us Your System winners at that time. I think it's going to be pretty neat. They're also going to premiere their first ever film and much more. Can you believe it? Unraid.net slash unplug's where you get started. So it is happening right now, the 20 days of Unraid Summer Sale, where you can get 20% off the starter,

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You just never know. You get started at unray.net slash unplugged. Well, again, this week, we have a few new member shoutouts. Dan is now a new core contributor and Jacob as well, which means we ran out of slots for that bootleg promo. Amazing. Thank you, everybody. We did.

And then I got a couple of requests to add some. some more slots. And I thought on it and I thought, why not? If we get a few more people checking out the bootleg, I think they'd stay members forever. So the 15% off deal, it's a great deal. People love the deal. Best deal. It's back. And I added a few more slots, and then people jumped on it already. So now, as of this episode, there are seven redemption slots left. If you use the promo code bootleg, either as a core contributor or for the Jupyter.com party membership. The Jupyter dot party gives you all the shows and extra bonus content and including what you get with the core contributor, which would be the bootleg version, the ad free version,

of course, and the direct support of the show. So all of that is available with a big old 15% discount, which is a number that hurts a little bit, but I love you guys. You can get signed up, use the promo code bootleg. And thank you to Dan and Jacob for signing up. Appreciate you. Well, Brent, we had a listener, Aaron, right in, and he says, Brent and I were trying to get a flake going where one config file has multiple host names in it so we could have one file for all the store computers. If any of you have any examples of this, we'd appreciate it.

The goal is to have a different hardware config automatically detected, to automatically format the disk, also have different host names for each computer they want set. We're trying to manage these machines from a distance using SSH, tailscale for updates, installing printers, and simple troubleshooting it when employees have issues. So you want to essentially have a system that figures out its host name and all of that and configs itself, right? Yeah, I thought, what the heck, anything is possible with NixOS. So this is actually a little ask for my brother here, who has a few stores with a few simple computers.

They're just being hosts for employees who are just trying to use a POS. And I thought maybe, well, it was over the, you know, Christmas holidays when I was feeling. and all jazzy about NixOS, that all these computers can just kind of be the same and have really the same config. That's a huge benefit. And just be deployed from the comfort of the couch at home. Yeah. I need to go into the stores to, you know, update these things. So I was trying to help him get a nice little NixOS config ready for these. But I have to say I hit the edge of my knowledge in NixOS. And I'm learning a ton. So we use Disco to try to to get all the discs identical, which worked amazingly.

We use NixOS anywhere with NXOS Factor to get things automatically detected and deployed. And so we learned a ton over that Christmas break when we deployed all this stuff. Why are we just hearing about this? What is going? Anyway, go on. I know, right? But we hit a bit of brick wall in trying to make all of these configs into one that we could just deploy by calling a host name.

So that's where both my brother, Aaron and I, are saying, Hey, dear community, where do we go now? How do we do this? How do we deploy this in a way that is, you know, future intelligent and also best practice? Yeah, I'd be curious, too, because I've got plenty of machines myself. I'm just wondering if there's a, do you have any code anywhere folks could look at? Because sometimes that can be helpful to get an idea of exactly like the state you're at now and then like where you're trying to go.

Boy, this guy, this guy with the put it up on GitHub. And please put all of your things on you. That's actually a great idea, Wes. I have been scared up to this point to deploy any of my configs to GitHub because I don't trust myself to keep myself private. But maybe you can have a look at it and we can deploy something up there just so that folks can have a look, see what kind of mess we've created and try to help us clean it up. Yeah, exactly. You know, we could do some filtering or whatever. You don't have to share all the private details.

But just to give it a rough idea of where you're at so that we know waste time suggesting stuff that might be. not be relevant. Though I am curious, maybe you'll have to try after the show. I wonder how our friends the so-called thinking machines might do with this one. That is a great question. I had not considered trying that, but it's worth a try. So if anybody has any suggestions, we'll have a link to that, and please help us. We're deep, deep in it now. Well, it looks like we got another email this week. This is cool because apparently there's someone taking our podcast around the world as they adventure. There's a little note here. Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for making such an awesome Linux podcast. I'm currently cycling around the world right now in China, headed towards Mongolia,

and your show makes the long hours on the road so much more enjoyable. You probably already know this, but your podcast is truly global. I've been listening to it across many countries in Central Asia, Yeah, already. Keep up the great work. And thanks again. Cheers from Javier. That is so cool. Thank you so much for writing in.

Amazing. Yeah. Keep us posted. And keep spreading the word, too. That's great. Thank you everybody who wrote in. Linuxunplug.com slash contact. And now it is time for the boost.

And, of course, you can send a message into the show and support this here show. And we don't have a baller this week. You know, it's going to be a rough week when our top boost is WH. 20250, easy for me to say, with 5,000 sets. Everything's under control. He's Chris, now that you have music assistant connected to home assistant, the next step is to trigger albums, playlist, and books with NFC tags. Oh, I'm going to pause right here, WH. After the episode, I was thinking the same thing. I've got a bag of them.

And I do that now for certain lights, so at night I can just, like, swipe an NFC tag. but this is a great idea for albums specifically. And I think it's actually pretty spouse approval factor high. I wouldn't say extreme, wouldn't say best, but it's high to medium. He goes on to say, I printed a one-four scale milk crate to hold my LPs and scan what I want to listen to.

Oh, that's so cool. Brilliant. You could create a miniature bookshelf of your audiobooks and set up a physical digital library. Oh, my gosh. If I had the space. That's a really neat idea. I have been very successfully enjoying music assistant last night.

Thankfully, there were no kids in the rig. I hit the book button. And for the first time, and I had been playing music a couple hours earlier on all the speakers. For the first time, even though my automation says played specifically on one speaker, it played on all the speakers in the house. Which if the kids were trying to sleep at that particular time would have been, that would have been an automation faux pa. It was no big deal for us because we were the only ones in there.

But, oh, man, I was embarrassed for a second. So I got to track that down. MJVC boosts in with 4,021 sets. I like you. You're a hot ticket. And, yeah, across four booths here, first one, regarding manuals and generally tracking of assets, I highly recommend HomeBox.

I use it to track where things are, where they should be. You can also associate manuals, price, warranty, info, maintenance, all that stuff. Wow. Yeah, it looks good. All right. Taking a look at that. Thank you. Re-Homebox, continuing here. Also, a system I've developed is to use a random base 36 ID, e.g. X2GS, as an example here, to refer to boxes, bins, et cetera.

This frees me from trying to pre-sort things, e.g., all cables should go into this box. When I want to find the cable or random accessory, I just look up which bin it's in. So you can stop caring about having perfectly sorted labels for stuff and just let the computer do it. Wow, that is clever. That is. And also smart because I use my label maker so infrequently that between times, like the batteries are almost dead. So it's always like just on the edge every time I go to use it. This would be a lot better.

They've also sent in for our binary boost. And they did send a binary sub boost here, a 1010 sets. Live long and prosper. I wanted pros using parts of the binary source. solo from Flight of the Concord. So we've got a link there. Maybe we can go check that out after the show. Thank you.

We always love links and ideas for that. And flat and concords are just great. And then one last boost here. Finally, regarding note-taking. A few months back, I switched to foresternotes.org. It generates static websites. That is, to me, kind of like Obsidian, if it were to embrace hypermedia

and designed by formal methods and programming language, And then, yeah, we've got a link here. We'll include in the show notes. Fascinating. That is interesting because often I would like to just share a really basic website with the wife or a note. If she just needs to, like, review something for working on something with the RV. That's an interesting idea.

Thank you. So that's foster notes.org. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Well, we have a boost here from Wine Eagle, 6,000 sets. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. It's across a couple of boosts. First, starting, I understand that. Z-FS being out of the kernel is more risky to my boot process, but not to my data integrity.

And that's why Z-FS replication exists. That guarantees Z-FS provides our light years ahead of ButterFS. Butterfess Send is a week compared to the Sanoid stack. Unlike my ArchDKMS days, NixOS also provides some nice guarantees. I like Butterfess running on a fresh kernel and getting bit was probably not a great idea. Cobbis got me to triple boot my MacBook back in 2007 in seventh grade, but Z-FS got me into self-hosting. It's home for me now, and I suggest Nix OS users make three separate data sets, one for slash Nix, slash home, and of course, the route. So backups avoid the NIC store.

Also, shout out to Breeze for not even needing an email. Super duper, no K-Y-C, and go podcasting. Oh, I don't have the Podfather clip, but... That's not possible. Nothing can do that. I will now commence. I think that recommendation of three separate data sets for Nick's home and root is clever. So all my home systems are ButterFS for the data and the root. But here at the studio, we're running Arch with the LTS kernel and ButterFS on the root and then ZFS for the data set.

And that's a really great combination, too. and then you don't really have to worry about some sort of regression hitting the most recent kernels because you're on an LTS kernel. So you can have both. It can be peanut butter and jelly and that's just delicious. Yeah, also, big shout out to Breeze,

BREZ, a great way to boost the show without having to switch podcast apps and no KYC. I'd also just point out that for folks, Wine Eagle here mentioned sanoid, but on the Butterf side, there's also projects like Butterback which adds some of the same functionality. I'm not going to say they're equivalent or anything, but

there are some options there, some improvements around the sound to receive stuff and just more automation on top of the tooling that exists for Butterfest natively. Then Dad's back with the road decks. I think I was also hit by that Butterfest bug. I had hard powered off my Steam deck running Bazite

and it wouldn't boot or even mount afterwards. Fortunately, Standard Butterfest file system fixes brought it back. I don't think this will change my use of Butterfess but it was definitely a shock. That's a great in the field report. Thank you so much for sending that in. Sorry you had to go through that. If you feel like sharing, I would be curious to know how

you rescued a Steam Deck. Did you plug it into like an external monitoring keyboard? Did you boot it somehow? Did you have like a dock to share that USBC port? That just seems like that's sort of a worst case scenario. Like I was picturing my desktop or laptop where it's pretty easy to pop in a thumb drive and, you know, I have a keyboard hooked up. So Steam Deck is a little more challenging. Good job. Well done. I'm getting that fixed. Thank you for. for the boost. Yeah, how much of the steam deck, you know, controls interface work when you're in an emergency rescue in at RamfS? I don't know. Fuzzy Missbourne comes in with a row of ducks. Regarding those IKEA speakers, unfortunately, Ikea and Sonos have now ended their partnership and the

speakers are discontinued. Given Sonos's good history of device support, I'm sure the speakers will continue to work for a while, but you'll probably need to buy used ones going forward, just an FYI. Also, for podcasts and music assistant, check out G Potter Sync. It can even run in NextCloud. Yeah, how about that stacks? You get NextCloud going, then you get G Potter server going, and you connect that to Mealing Assistant. So regarding those IKEA speakers, which we linked last week, you can still get them. So yes, IKEA low-key announced in May that they are discontinuing that partnership. And it's sort of a bummer because these speakers are essentially the Sonus equivalent is $300, and these speakers are under $200, but they have the Sonos guts in them.

And the nice thing about that is, is it's all local APIs. So home assistant should still be able to continue to control it unless there's some massive iteration that I don't foresee. But because those speakers don't require the cloud service, they don't even require the app, probably beyond the initial setup, I'm not sure. So I had my wife buy two of them. So she bought two for her clinic. And she asked for a, she's liked it so much at home that she's asked for a music assistant set up for her clinic. And we're going to put a couple of these speakers in and she's, this is how long she's had a clinic. She's going to finally retire her CD player. It's like one of those little portable CD player boomboxes. And that's how she's done like the, like the lobby kind of like,

you know, the music for a decade plus. And so we're transitioning to a music assistant. I'm going to give her a couple of buttons to press to, you know, play different types of music. And then I'm also going to experiment with a Zigby-based, I couldn't find a Z-Wave version, a Zigby-based volume knob. So a physical knob that she can turn to increase and decrease the volume. That seems killer. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, my advice, Fuzzy, is if you can find those IKEA speakers, which we have linked in episode 626, get them while you can. You can find them used on eBay, but they're not much cheaper. And who knows what people played through them in the past? Well, Gene Bean boosted in a row of ducks.

He's replying to a question we asked in Linux Unplug 624, the one we talked about tiny PCs. He says, hey, I don't use the Etsy's directory for my Nix configs at all. I have my flake cloned under my home directory and include a shell alias for updating in my config that references where I checked it out. Here's the alias I use on NixOS and a little variant for Macs. Quess, any links to a GitHub blob that you can have a look at? I would like Gene's eyes on mine, because I'm doing that now, too, as of, you know, this weekend, but maybe I'm not doing it right. So if you have a chance, Gene to look at it and let me know, I'd appreciate it. Yeah, and Gene's using here, you can specify a dash-dash flake argument when you do your rebuild,

and then you can just tell it, you know, whatever directory you store your flake in. Thank you, Gene. Nice to hear from you. Brewer Seth is here with 4,242 sites. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. Ice is longtime Linux and HomeLab Tinker, but a new listener. Hey, welcome aboard. And thank you for boosting.

You gobbied into Bitcoin and Lightning through your value-for-value advocacy. Never had a reason to explore crypto-Bitcoin before. This week's project is self-hosted AlbiHub deployment. Yes, another night. Yes. Next, Zapp will come from my own Lightning Node. Thanks for inspiring a new project. Isn't it fun?

It is a lot of fun. That is a great boost to end on. That really cheers me up. Thank you, Brewer Seth, for updating us on that. It's such an interesting world to explore. You know, we just crossed the three and a half years of boosts on the show, if you can believe it. And Bitcoin is up 187% since we started doing boosts on this show. The BlackRock and some of the other ETFs are now the most successful ETFs that are based on Bitcoin in the history.

And that's open source software. in the three and a half years, the shift is unbelievable. As of last week, it's now included in 401K plans, if you want. The level has really shifted, and the lightning network has grown significantly. So if you've been, you know, kind of on the fence, I don't think it's going away. Also, Albi Hub just keeps getting better and better and better and easier to set up and work with, too. So it's easier to onboard now, too, I think. You know, it was really, it was out there on a ledge three and a half years ago.

But it's really, it's really gone very mainstream. Speaking of Albi Hub, this week in Bitcoin, we'll have an interview with the co-founder of Albi coming out on Monday. And it is fascinating what's going on over there. There's a lot to talk about. So go check out this weekinbitcoin.com show on Monday for a new episode. Thank you, everybody who did boost. We didn't have a huge episode, a huge amount of support for this episode. we had 19 of your stream and we stacked 21,199 sats.

And when we bring that together with our boosters, who we do appreciate, we stacked 50,448 sets. Of course, that is split between the three of us, editor Drew and your podcast app of choice. Lower expectation. I think, maybe, maybe our word. first week ever in three and a half years. Yeah, the total stack wasn't great.

The quality was high. We learned a lot. We got some great tips and things to follow up on. And we did get some new members on board. So maybe some folks who transitioned to membership, which we always really appreciate too. But the systems are just getting better and better over time. Fountain FM is getting easier to use.

They self-host it for you. The Fiat onramping is getting easier. Apps like Stryker and more countries. And, you know, so Bitcoin, like I mentioned earlier, is up somewhere between 182, 187% since we started three and a half years ago. The most generous, generous version is the US dollar is down 10% in that time, but it's likely down a lot more. And we could not have afforded a 10% loss. That would have, things are so expensive for us these days. That would have been right on the razor thin margin. So the boosters, they're still continuing to support us. So even if

you're not boosting every episode, your boosts do continue to work for us. And if you would like to get into this Fountain FM is an easy and straightforward way to do it. And it continues to go to work for us. And we really appreciate it. I also appreciate those members. I do want to add, just shout out to hybrid sarcasm and everyone helping out in our matrix. I mean, even just this morning, folks were asking about like, how do I get started with boosting? And so if you are curious about that kind of thing, definitely go hop in the matrix. We can link there's an unofficial boost support room or just chat in any of the rooms. And we'll try to help you out and or other folks will help you out. He's a good guy. He's a real good.

guy. No, you're a great guy. But sincerely, too, thank you to everybody who is supporting us their membership. We hope you enjoy the perks, and that autopilot support, that's our foundation. Now, we got a couple of picks for you this week. The first one is called FF Share. It's an Android app that, as you can probably guess, is using FFMPEG on the back end to compress your images, your videos, or your audio files before you share them, which is

kind of nice, but you can also, I thought this is cool, for compatibility reasons, reasons. Just tell it every single video format I throw at you. Just make it a simple MP4 that any stupid player can play. Yes, exactly. It doesn't have to matter about optimizations. You don't have to matter how much they know about WebM. Just like, just like, just translate it. We have that problem in our group chats. Yeah, absolutely. I mean... Like PJ drops a WebM and nobody can play it. I've been the guy who then downloads it on my laptop, re-encodes the MP4, re-uploads it just because it's like, ah, it's bothering me. Thanks, West Buy. I'm just to do it on my phone. I mean, come on. Yeah. Right?

I was just going to say, right there at the top of there, read me, get it on FDroid, get it on Obtanium. Who needs the Play Store? That's right. I love to see that. I will see the FDroid version is quite hefty out of 54 megs. And my very first question was, what is going on here? But thankfully, they've written a little explainer. It says the APK download from Eptoid is the app full versions with all the features and ABI compatibility included.

You can find a choice of smaller APKs at the GitHub link, which you can download using something like Obtenium. Ah. Yeah, I would bet, though, they must be bundling FFMPEG, which is no slouch. Yeah. So they also have a little,

just a little checkbox. Remove all of your XF metadata with, like, you know, your camera and location. You can include that or not. I wish every OS had that in the share sheet by default, but this adds that.

And then for the geekiness factor, you can actually see the CLI output of the FFMPEG command it's using right there in the Android app. And then when the job's finished, it just brings up a share sheet. Boom. It's pretty cool.

Nice find. FF Share link in the show notes for that. And then we have, I don't know, maybe the second ever listener submitted pick on the show. Alex Gates writes in the podcasting 2.0 consultant. Hey, fellas, I got a pick for you this week. I've been a big fan of envelope style online budgeting made popular by YNAB, which stands for you need a budget. I recently decided to migrate to an open source self-hosted alternative,

and I've been really happy. It's called actual budget. It can be used with or without a server if you just want to play around or if you don't need syncing across devices. And of course it has a desktop and web apps. Recently, they edit integration with a service for bank syncing called SimpleFin.

I think it's worth checking out. And budgeting like this has really changed my life. And he links us to the actual budget documentation, the SimpleFIN website, and their bridge where you can connect your bank. He says, with regards, your podcasting to-to-note consultant, Alex Gates. Ooh, this looks like some good stuff.

I've not heard of Simple Finn before, but stands for simple financial interchange and makes read-only financial interchange simple. It's like RSS for financial information. So, hey, you can see why our Podsage was interested, huh? I would very much, very much like to get something like this running, and it would, for me, need to be self-hosted. It would need to be something I run on my own infrastructure.

So I'm going to take a look at this after. the show. Thank you, Alex. I've heard repeatedly good reviews of actual budget. This is maybe the fifth time I hear this, so I think I'm going to dive in as well. I always just thought people are saying, you need to actually budget, man. You need to actually budget. I didn't realize it was a thing. So also, I'm going to put myself out there, boost in, tell me how much you hate me now for playing around with AI and how I boiled the oceans. I'd be willing to hear those arguments. Or if you've had any success like this, I'd also like to hear those. You know, boys, I think the real like ultimate place for this to go is something you would run on your own land,

hopefully that doesn't consume a lot of resources that could help you with this kind of stuff that maybe maybe isn't a model that tells me how to deal with a foot rash or can tell me what temperature I need to boil eggs at. But maybe it's a model that can tell me how a hyperland config works. So it doesn't need to be huge. And it's something maybe I even run on my own machine or I run on a local network server. or on a nebula network, and I just point these editors at that, right? That, to me, is where this needs to go next

for probably folks like us to use this kind of stuff long term. Like, I don't think this is going to be a habit for me. I think this is sort of a once-and-done sort of thing to see if it was possible. Yeah, explore the edge of technology, see what you can do with it. But you're right.

Like, you could have all kinds of different variants. You could have them, you know, trained per operating system or the tools that you want. You could probably also, like, you know, down the future, you could customize it. could retrain it. You could fine tune it for the stuff that, like, you've actually been doing over time. There's so many possibilities. And hearing about your adventure, Chris, I caught little glimpses of what customizing a desktop might be like in the next, you know, five, let's call it five years.

It felt like there were some strengths here that we can't ignore, and I want to rice my stuff. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty wild that I was able to put out. I kind of hope somebody over in the sort of bluefin Aurora-type distributions or silver blue. Somebody does a really, really nice opinionated hyperland. Like an OMA Archie. Or somebody releases a

Nix OS-based one that is really, really opinionated. Maybe people know of some out there also boost that in. Did I just hear Brent say he hates rising PCs? I hate rising PCs. Somebody give me a clip of that.

I want that. All right. So that's it. That's just on my, you know, as we're kind of wrapping up, that's on the back of my mind is this felt more like an incredible technology demonstration, but probably not something I'm going to use every day until it's maybe under my control. And if it can be limited to my systems or just the things I need to use, maybe it's approachable. But let me know what you think out there.

And of course, we would love it if you joined us live. It just gives it a certain vibe. We have that mumble room with those low latency open streams right off the mixer. We do it right here. every single Sunday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, make it a Tuesday on a Sunday.

We start at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. You can get it clackulated in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And if you've got an app that supports it, Wes, what do we have in store for them? Oh, buddy. Not only do we have chapters, which lets you skip right to the content that you want, but if you want to dive even deeper, we've got transcripts. So you can read along, throw it into an L. whatever you like.

So check the feed or a podcasting 2.0 app for that. Yep. Have fun. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplug program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you. Thank you.