LINUX Unplugged - 648: I See Live People

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

We unleash a networking monitoring tool to spot new devices, track changes in real time, and fire alerts straight into Home Assistant, MQTT, and your phone.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMPlanet Nix 2026: Call for Proposals @ Sessionize.comSCaLE 23x | RegistrationNetAlert X — Network intruder and presence detector. Scans for devices connected to your network and alerts you if new and unknown devices are found.NetAlertX DocsNetAlertX GitHubNetAlertX docker-compose.ymlNixOS OCI Config for NetAlertXHome Assistant - NetAlertX Docs — NetAlertX comes with MQTT support, allowing you to show all detected devices as devices in Home Assistant. It also supplies a collection of stats, such as number of online devices.home assistant mqtt documentationntfy.sh — Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POSTMosquitto - An open source MQTT brokerPi-hole – Network-wide Ad BlockingESPresensemkellyxp/nixbook: LICENSE? - Issue #55Choosing a License - Find the Perfect Open Source License for Your ProjectLicense Selector - OpenLicrLicenseHub - Open Source License Tools PlatformOpen Source Licenses Explained: A ComparisonGitHub - ErikMcClure/bad-licenses — A compendium of absurd "open-source" licenses.Podverse AlphaPodcasting 2.0 Episode 246: Crap Trap — Adam & Dave are joined by Mitch and Archie of Podverse famePick: MQTT — Your All-in-one MQTT Client ToolboxMQTTX GitHubMQTT X on FlathubPick: mqtt5-explorer — MQTT5 Explorer is a simple yet feature-rich client to visualize data of any MQTT broker.MQTT5 Explorer on FlathubPick: Unify — Unify is a web app aggregator built with Qt 6, Qt WebEngine, and KirigamiUnify on FlathubPick: web-app-hub — A Web App Manager, written in rust with GTK and beautiful Adwaita.Web App Hub on FlathubPick: Home-manager Webapps — Home-manager configuration file to get webapps in the system menu on a NixOS system

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show this week, a simple network monitoring tool that does a lot more than just flag unknown devices. Then we're going to take things a step further using that day. to detect family presence at home and trigger automations based on that.

Then we're going to round it out with some great feedback, some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. It's a big show. So before we start, let's say time appropriate greetings to our Mumble Room. Hello, Chris, hey, guys. Hello, Andrew, Andrea. Happy New Year. That's a strong crowd. Got a good group up there and quite listening to.

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Happy 2026. Can you believe it? It's our first episode. We're back, and I spent the holiday season building out the home lab. And I'm going to share just the tip of the iceberg this week. So let's start by saying good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.

Go check out Manage Nebula at Defined.net slash unplug. This is a decentralized VPN that's like no other. It's built on the Nebula project, which we trust. It's fully open, been around since 2017. something you can really look at, go through, self-host the whole shebang from top to bottom. And I think this is something that I like to emphasize at this moment because it really makes Nebula stand out. Their free tier isn't competing with some other product that's going to eat away at their business. They're not trying to just do a sales funnel thing here.

In fact, you could completely self-host all of the infrastructure. What's nice about the managed Nebula from Defined Networking is they take care of a lot of the infrastructure for you. But at any point, you can swap back and forth. You own the network, the identity, the routing, the control. It all stays with you. Not a third-party control plane that you don't actually control. And Nebula's decentralized design means that there is no single point of failure. And not everybody accomplishes this.

Let me tell you from firsthand experience. And if you want to self-host the lighthouse, so that way you can do all of the node discovery, all of that is under your control. You absolutely can. Or hit the easy button and check out manage. Nebulae, and you can get 100 hosts for free when you go to Defined.net slash unplug. No credit card required, no lock-in, just a fantastic open-source product turned into a package that's easy for you to use. Defined.net slash unplug. Support the show. Go say good morning

and check them out. And thank you to Define.net for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now, just to touch a housekeeping to let you know about, scale and Planet Nix are just around the corner. and Planet Nix's call for proposals closes January 15th. So get them in. Yeah, let's see 11 days from when we record. You're going to do one? You're thinking about one?

I mean, you could just kind of, there's so many things you tinker with. You could probably come up with a talk pretty quick. Well, now you've suggested it. So now I have to consider it. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Well, you see, the only tradeoff is always,

there's so much stuff we're always trying to do in the short time that we're there. There's a lot of Nix to take in, so you've got to balance it. That is true. Yeah, the event will have two parallel tracks that take place over two days. Speakers can submit proposals for talks or workshops or both. And each day, they're going to have a mix of both talks and workshops.

And these are pretty awesome. Because, you know, sometimes what's happened before is someone from our excellent audience has given a talk at the same time my talk is that. It is true. Oh, that's rough. So we're talking March 5th through the 6th at Pasadena. The way that this works is you're going to want to register for scale. And that gets you into Planet Nix. I'm hoping next week we'll have a promo code for you

that'll take a nice little chunk of that registration off. We don't have it yet just because it's the holidays and they're just getting back to work. But it's my expectation that we'll have one for you soon and then you can sign up, you get a nice chunk off. And if you can make it to Planet Nix or just scale on the weekend, we'd love to see you there. We actually don't have it locked in that we're going to be there.

So at this moment in time, don't base your travel plans on us, base it on scale. And if we can make it work, if we can find somebody to help us get there and cover Planet Nix and Scale, then we are going to go with bells on. But that isn't locked in yet. It's a declarative bell.

But it is an event we strongly recommend both Planet Nix and scale itself. And what's really great is this combo is at the same venue. There's some overlap there. So you can just kind of bang it all out at once and dip in from all, like, it's just great. It's a really nice setup. You get like a talk about a bunch of your server.

You get into Nix talk. You go learn more about Postgres, all in the same day. Go out to, you know, lunch. There's always, if you want to socialize, there's always opportunities. If you don't want to socialize, you don't have to. You can just be heads down and learn. It works for both the introvert and the extrovert.

Or if the introvert wants to flex their extrovert muscles for a couple days. So check it out. We'll have a link, Planet Nix, 2026, March 5th through the 6th in Pasadena Convention Center. Don't miss it. Gentlemen, if you'll indulge me, I'd love to tell you about my Net Alert X setup. Now, this is a network intruder and presence detector. that scans for devices that are connected to your network and then alerts you if a new or unknown device is discovered. It's kind of handy, especially if you live in a neighborhood where people might be scanning Wi-Fi or, you know, you're just a little concerned.

And it's not like a typical dashboard that you stare at. What it is is building a memory of your network. This is all local first. It's all self-hosted. It's open source. There's no account you have to create. There's no SaaS brain processing it. There's no telemetry.

your network is essentially the way the design of network X is your network is a fluid moving thing where things change new things update and ports open hopefully not a lot but over the course of a year these things happen and the idea is is that network X we use multiple different network discovery methods so not just like dumb pings but all kinds of different methods and there's a lot of plugins to enable different kinds and get an understanding of, okay, this device went from this IP to this IP. This device has been on your network for this amount of time. And you can go in there and you can assign devices to people. There's a dashboard to help you do some of that if you want. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested to see that, like you bring up this memory aspect because I got it set up. Oh, you did? I did, yeah. I was able to just get it as a pull it in as a container and have it just run as a OCI container on NixOS pretty easily. So we can have just a little, the basic config I'm using for that linked but I'm only I've only just started so like I've got the initial setup of the devices that

have found but I haven't used it long enough to see really things evolve yet right because initially everything's like new everything to get detected as new and and whatnot I will also as it learns more about your network going to start to kind of visualize what's connected to what node and kind of give you a rough layout of your network which is fine that's exciting and it's one of those things where you could put very little into it if you just you want to know when things change or you can put more into it and you can tell this device is owned by this user and it's connected to this device. And a lot of times, you know, using Mac address look up and whatnot, it'll identify the device in the manufacturer. And it can categorize TV set top boxes, Wi-Fi access

points, smart plugs, PCs, tablets. It can figure a lot of that out on its own. And then in a very kind of Piehole style dashboard, at the top, it gives you how many devices are on your network, how many new devices, how many devices are down. It's like, I almost wonder if the dashboard UI isn't actually forked from Pihull. But it works. It's nice. And you have that to look at, and you could never take it any further than that.

You could then, if you wanted to, you could hook it up to say, telegram notifications. I hooked it up to notify or NTFY. And so when a new device that is unknown on my network shows up, I get a notify message sent to my phones to tell me about that.

And they think when you add the plugins, it really starts to get very, very power. Because if you have special devices on your network, or say you want to integrate home assistant, or you want to do these other things, like I mentioned piehole, they have plugins for this. And so one of the sources of truth for my network alert X system is my pie hole via the API. This is one of the plugins. And what's so powerful here is now Net AlertX is in sync with my DHCP DNS server. So when I issue a new client lease, or client lease expires, or a new DNS name shows up, the two are in Sepatico. They know about it.

That kind of coordination, so nice. I just took a look, and there's 45 available plug-ins. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any that jump out to you in particular? For me, I ended up using one of the MQTT plug-ins, obviously, but, yeah, there's, you know what I didn't see? It was a tectidium plugin. No, I was taking a look at what it would take to make one. Yeah.

Because there's definitely an API. So, I mean, yeah, there's a bunch of piehole and piehole API. There's a specific support for pulling data out of Unify. If you have Unify systems on there, I think some microtech or microtech stuff as well, there's a lot of potential. Tiny in the chat room noticed there's a Prometheus endpoint. So you can have long-term retention of your data as well. And just tied into some of your existing alerting workflow, if that's your thing.

So it sounds like pretty mature, considering. And I feel like it's already appliance level. You just set it up and it does its working. It alerts me. And then using MQTT, I'm populating Home Assistant as well. So Home Assistant's aware of some of these things. But what I like about it is

it's event-driven. So it alerts it logs. It feeds automations automatically. And you could think of it also as a bit of an event bus. So it has these different plugins like Notify and Home Assistant and MQTT and Prometheus and others where it's helping them stay current

and up to date, when they rely on network state information, this helps them with that. Like, did that speaker IP address change, things like that? And it assumes that you might have a bit of a messy home lab. It's not a perfect network from the start. And it assumes there's going to be random ESP devices and things like that that it's going to need to figure out. Like, it goes in with that mindset.

And then you have, once you're done, and it only takes you 20 minutes, 10 minutes, depending on your comfortability with Docker Compose and your network layout, you have something that tattles when your kids have a friend show up and they put their device on the Wi-Fi network. You know about it. It's that I love. I was impressed. It was

very easy to get started working. I mean, it is containerized, so that's nice. You do need to put it in host networking, right? That helps a lot. Which kind of obviously makes sense. And I did do some poking around to look. There's a lot of Python. So I gave it a quick stab, just to see if I could get it building

with Nix. There's a little too much going on for me to like think it was worth it in time for the show. But it would definitely be possible. Container rounds probably. So the container route, I thought, was easiest. But that said, I mean, it totally worked. And all I really had to do before it was actually, like, to get to minimum viable,

useful was just go in the settings and make sure it was scanning the right networks I actually cared about. Because by default, and all it just wanted to scan was, like, the local container network. Ah, yeah, sure. So I just go say, like, oh, yeah, well, this one is, it could see my local name, but land, just tell it like, oh, yeah, here's what you should go scan. That's the one you care about. Yeah.

But even out of the box, it auto-detected, like, what the internet. connection was and a few things. Net Alert X sounds really amazing from an observation and alerting standpoint, but I'm curious what happens next. Like, okay, you get alerted. Does it have the means of, I don't know, tying into some ways of blocking some of these hosts or making some decisions or helping you automate some security? Did you get that far?

That is the key question, right? Is now that you have this data, what do you do with it? Besides, I mean, just it is nice getting an alert. on my phone. Oh, something news on my network. And there is something nice to, I know other commercial products can do that, but I'm not using a commercial product. Nothing's leaving my private land or my meshnet. It's all getting processed locally. And the alerting even and the push notifications are all also happening locally. Yeah, that's a good point, right? It is something you might get with a fancier sort of, oh, I bought this commercial provider that just provides all of my

network and routing and Wi-Fi all in one thing, and it has this fancy, you know, analytics for me. You get a little bit more of that. And especially for you, right, you're kind of tying together. The DNS side or the DHAB side kind of gives you one picture, but it's never really the complete picture. There might be devices that aren't doing that, have hard-coded things that just skip some of that setup. And having something that can do active ARP and even NMAP scans, it gives you a lot more capabilities to kind of fill in the blanks. But, you know, Brent brings up a great point. It's once you do have this information, could you take greater action on it?

And I actually think that's where it gets really powerful. You could stop right here and just have really easy network observability and an easy way to alert yourself when something happens. But why not take that data and take proactive action based on it? And that's, I think, where it really gets powerful. Join crowdhealth.com and use the promo code unplugged. The health insurance process is confusing. It leaves me feeling like I was taking advantage of, and it was extremely hard to navigate

and even make an economically reasonable choice with my wife and I both being self-employed. And every year, the rates keep going up. And the system itself is fundamentally twisted. It's in the states. It's attached to employment, which is just really complicated. And honestly, some of us, like myself, have just opted out. And for over three years, I have been a member. of crowd health. Making informed decisions, especially about your health, isn't easy. And so it took

me a bit of time and research before I came to this decision. But more than three years in, I'm really glad I did. Crowd health isn't regular insurance. It's not like that at all. It's a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. There's no middleman. There's nobody constantly taking more and more profit. There's no networks that you have to be inside. There's just no nonsense at all. It's health care for under $100. That's crowd health, the health insurance alternative. You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescriptions, lab testing tools, and a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors that have been vetted by crowd health.

They've worked with them. It's really smooth. They have a fantastic app to navigate it all, plus great customer service people you can chat with on the phone or via text. And when something major happens, you pay the first $500, and then the crowd steps in and helps fund the rest. It's sort of like the options we used to have before it all got messed up and seemed to get worse every single year. So you'll join the crowd,

a group of members just like me who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. And people are incentivized to take care of each other in the incentive and take care of themselves. The system's betting that you're just going to stay stuck and you're just going to keep paying

the same more and more overpriced, complicated mess. And this year it's getting even worse because a lot of the subsidies are expiring. And so the costs are going to go even more. So far, crowd health members have saved 40 million in health care expenses because they refuse to overpay. I myself have saved somewhere around $3,200. It's really powerful stuff and it's time to take your power back. Join crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com and use our promo code unplug today for your first three months at only $99. That's right. Join

crowdhealth.com promo code unplugged. Crowd health, it's not insurance. It's time to opt out and take your power back. This is how we win. It's join crowdhealth.com and use that promo code unplugged. Chris Given, you were playing with this over the holidays, and I imagine that means you were in Lady Jupes, and Jupes is pretty much completely run by home assistant. Is that one of the ways that you're triggering some actions based on this information? It is, and I love the power of this.

So let me give you just a quick diversion, if you will, boys, is a quick story, and that is, I wanted to refine the home and away automations. I wanted the, my goal was to trigger automations when the home is empty or if someone arrives home. And so, for example, maybe turn off our water pump so we don't have a water leak, turn off the lights, turn the heat down, arm and disarm the cameras, big one. And some of this I had in different dispersed automations where they came up with their own solutions to figure out this state. And some of it I didn't have figured out beyond using just like crappy, crappy scripts and whatnot. And then, of course, I wanted the ability to turn the lights on when we return home,

turn the cameras off so they're not recording when we return home, when we enter the, when we enter the RV. And then also, ideally, start warming it up. So maybe even have like a five mile radius zone. When we enter that, when we haven't been in that five mile radius zone all day and we enter that, start heating again. And the complicated. locations in this are a little bit trickier than a standard home. Number one, Jupes moves, so it can't just be based on the location. That's going to break. You just like to make things difficult.

And that kind of breakage sucks because of the exact kind you forget you set up in the first place. You know, and then you go out on a trip, and you're like, oh, why isn't, oh, my God. It needs to be dynamic to take that into account from the start. Yeah. And I have made much, much, much work towards getting Jupes, location aware. So she auto, so that would just, that can't do that. Can't be just Wi-Fi SSD because every now and then our home internet gets crappy, so we turn off the Wi-Fi on our phones or something. So you can't just be well if they're on the Wi-Fi, which would be another easy one if that works for you.

And Apple has this technology called I Beacon. Ironically, I can't use it with Home Assistant and iPhones. You can with Android. So you could do something like Bluetooth presence awareness, but I can't because my kids are on iPhones and the wife. So I needed a way to do all of this presence awareness. And my wife and I are the only ones with the home assistant apps. The kids don't have the home assistant apps on their phones. So I needed something that even accounted for, say, we go for a walk around the property,

but the kids are still home in the morning. I don't want the system to shut off on them. Totally. I need to know their home. Well, this is where Net Alert X comes in because Net AlertX supports MQTTT and Home Assistant integration. And it can supply a collection of stats such as the number of devices. that are online to home assistant and then in home assistant with a little bit of work you can turn on presence awareness and then assign them to persons so I can say when this device is

on the network consider this person home it's really easy to do in home assistant and the beautiful thing about this is their IPs can change etc but it's still associated to them and it knows when they're on the network or not and it's supplying home assistant with a home or not kind of status very powerful. And there is a Net Alert X dashboard to like assign, okay, this is, you know, my kid's device, this is my wife's device, so you can kind of sort all of that out ahead of time. And then that gets auto-exposed. I think you said via MQTT.

Yeah. And then that's what sort of sorts it through Home Assistant. I finally broke down. Yeah, I mean, we've got to, you kind of bearing the lead here. Yeah. I have avoided this since I, Home Assistant, didn't set up since the very beginning. So many things want to use MQTT. You're a broker bro now.

But it's the native way that Net AlertX communicates with Home Assistant. And because it's an event-driven system, they're just perfect for each other. And the moment a device is detected, it shoots it off over MQTT to Home Assistant. Home Assistant is running the Mosquito, MQTT broker, and immediately is aware of a state change. It's just instant. It's beautiful. Yeah. Is that like a plugin you just added from Home Assistant for this one?

Yeah. You could run MQTT server on anything, right? It could be, I could run mosquito on anything. But there is just a real easy add-on that integrates it all. And if you use Home Assistance add-on, then it uses the Home Assistant authentication. Because a lot of MQTT brokers now you have to authenticate to and you have to go set up user accounts for. But if you use the Home Assistant add-on, it'll just use your local Home Assistant user database. And so, yeah, that is a convenience.

So you set it that up and let Net AlertX auto-discover all your devices. They all then populate in Home Assistant as Net AlertX discovers them. You set up a – you don't even have to create a user account of home. assistant. There's a difference between a user count in a person. You create a person. Then you add this device that's now being monitored by Net AlertX to their person. And then Home Assistant, when that shows them online, considers them home. And you can create all kinds of automations based on this because it consolidates it all down into your zone. dot home or whatever it might be called. And this just ends up being a counter of X amount of

people home. So there's a default sensor, essentially, in Home Assistant that eggs, down the data of who's home into just a number, one person home, five people home. Nice. And then you can use that for even more downstream stuff. Yes. Oh, that's so great. It is so wonderful and seamless, especially if you do a few niceties, like in your automation, maybe you had a five-minute delay. So when people leave, you wait five minutes, just in case there's like somebody dropping off for a bit and they come back. And when you do that, it's so seamless to the family. Every time they show up, and right, it's dark. Every time they show up, all the lights are on for them. the heat's been coming on.

And it's the water, like they don't even know the water's off while they're gone, right? Nobody even knows. It's all seamless to them. Ideally, they never have to know. They don't have to worry.

Like, as soon as they come home, the camera shut off, so they're not getting recorded and I'm not getting a bunch of alerts. And because Home Assistant knows people are home or not, I can also just based, I can say, for notifications,

I can say, don't alert me on these things when someone's home. Oh, that is a nice extra detail to set as a flag, right? I do not need to care about these things. Yeah. It's so great. We're not in yellow alert mode.

No. No, we don't need to be an armed mode, essentially. And there is actually, boys, an even easier way to do this. If you didn't want Net AlertX at all, but you still wanted all of this fancy presence awareness I'm talking about, step one, set your clients to use a reserved address or set a static address for them. Remember, iPhones and some Android, they rotate their Mac address. You can go into the Wi-Fi settings for that particular AP. turn that off or set it to just a fixed Mac address that it generates. And once you have your family devices or your own devices, whoever it might be, on static IPs, the ones you want to track for awareness, there's actually a very simple ping integration that comes built into home assistant.

You don't have to install anything, no MQTT, no additional net alert X, no crazy community add-ons. It's just built into home assistant integration called ping. And when you add it, it asks for the host IP that you want to ping or the name. And when the ping succeeds, home assistant considers that device home. And when the ping fails, home assistant considers that device gone. That is pretty simple and easy. Yep. And you can go into entities in there and you can, if you filter on disabled entities,

you can actually turn on the device state tracker setting for the ping integration devices. And then boom, you add them to your persons. And now it's very simple. It's very rudimentary. But if all you need is just to be able to ping their device and their IP doesn't change, you essentially get presence awareness and you can base all the, automations around that, which is something that simple. And they may be sub it out later if you need to.

Yeah, it's so nice, right? Because you could then later go to Net AlertX and go a lot more sophisticated and do other kinds of things. But a simple ping integration could do it. Now, did you consider like an embedded Bluetooth tracker in yourself? Well, I did actually originally try to go the Bluetooth route. That felt just more passive, plus then it wouldn't need the network monitoring infrastructure, right? Because you could add a whole biohacking angle to this.

That's true. Just put it in my arm. Or you don't need to. Everybody's walking around with phones and, you know, Bluetooth devices. And there is an ESP presence firmware project, I think, based on ESP home, that you can flash on an ESP. And then they're basically little Bluetooth monitoring nodes that you connect to home assistant. And it even is a, it can be, it can even track the signal strength, essentially giving you what room they're in. Right. Based on monitoring the other one.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, that is neat. That is neat, right? And you don't really have to do anything else other than just walk around with something that got Bluetooth. too. So I thought about that. In fact, I kind of wanted to put this out to the audience and ask them other ways to do this because I believe there's also hardware sensors, like a millimeter wave hardware sensors you could do this with. You could probably do this with motion sensors. I like the network monitoring approach. This is working for us because it solves a couple of edge cases. But I wonder if I supplemented it with another type of presence awareness, like a sensor of some kind, if I could make this even better. And so I'm putting the question out there to anybody in the audience, boost in to let me know. If you've solved presence awareness in another way with a hardware detection of some kind or motion sensors, something I could add to this to kind of really refine and make sure no one is in the RV, not even a guest or anybody, right? Because that could be the edge, edge, edge case is a guest of somebody is over that I don't know about, and for some reason they get left in the RV.

Or maybe they're over house. I don't know. I don't know why. Then they wouldn't have water and lights and heat. So I got to figure these edge cases out. So boost and let me know if you have a way to solve that or go to Linuxunplug.com slash contact and tell me how you're doing it.

Because right now, I think that could be the gotcha. And maybe I'm missing other edge cases too, you can tell me about it. But I'm really happy with the results. Well, we don't have a sponsor here. But if anybody out there would like to sponsor the unplug program, we are in the process of finalizing ad deals for Q1, email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. audience out there.

Really great audience. And we can speak from some authority on the topic. We can speak from some authority on the topic. So let me know, Chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I'd love to have somebody from the community sponsor the show. Wouldn't that be nice? That'd be really nice. That would be wonderful.

Kind of give it back. Well, our dear Olympia, Mike writes in with, I think, a rather big question here. Guys, I need your help. The next project is getting more and more. attention and adoption, which is great. However, the question of how this project is license keeps coming up. I'll admit, I'm a developer, not a lawyer, so I never paid too much attention to licenses and the nuances between them. I was just kind of assumed there was some proprietary or open license. I have people telling me, go MIT or unlicense, as it helps with adoption, but then I

have other people telling me you absolutely should go GPO. And others saying, well, use anything except GPU. On top of all of that, what can I even license in this project? It's mostly just Nix configs with some scripts. However, I am working on some Python and GtK apps to pair with it. Still, Nixbook relies on other projects to work almost entirely. I know you guys always mention how a project is licensed when you do the PICS. And I guess it's a pretty boring topic, perhaps, but can you all shed some light on the differences and what a project like Nixbook should be under. Licenses feel like one of those super important topics we should care about, and yet few people really understand them. So help. This is a big question, boys. And, you know, Olympia

Mike's been working on this project for a while. We've watched it grow. It's, it's really neat to see the way that these reclaimed, refurbished, you know, notebooks can be turned into systems for people that they still get, I'm not using one still myself. It's a, it's a big question that I think really impacts perhaps future adoption the most and how these things get shared is how I look at it. So I think that's the big consideration. What do you think, Wes? Am I missing something there? Well, there's also, like, as the Genesis and chief maintainer, one way to think about this is, you know, from Mike's perspective, like, what are you worried about? What are you trying to protect for yourself and for downstream users or people who might want to either use the

project directly or use the code? And so one thing you check out is choose a license.com. They've kind of got like a nice little, it's not like everything that's not going to answer the question for you, but it kind of gives you some ways to look at the problem. It's a decent starting point. If you think about sort of MIT versus GPL as representative of the largest difference in terms of like, do you go with a copy left license like the GPL or do you go with an open source license that is more on the permissive side, like a BSD kind of license or MIT, there's more nuances there. But just to start with, one way to think about it is like if you're making like a library for a programming language. I'm going to make this utility that, you know, does X. It computes things. It draws a triangle, whatever. And you want that to be widely adopted. You want that just to be used by anyone. You want to make it easy to use yourself maybe in contracting work or just like to bring it into whatever person you're working for without having to worry about it. Then a permissive license makes all of that super easy, simple. So I think it does get used a lot for those kinds of things. For an end

user application, or especially I would argue something that you think of maybe as like a Commons application, like something like Libre Office, where it's like, this is something you want people to have sort of by default as people who, you know, are using computers, they should have a way to use this. It should be theirs.

That's where something like the GPL makes more sense. Now you might think, you might worry, one thing to consider then is do you want people to be able to make proprietary things and not share the code? right they can sell gpL code they can stuff but you have to provide the source along with it so are you okay imposing that on people downstream are you more concerned about the rights um to have code for anybody using a next next book derivative or are you more worried about enabling people to build the next chrome OS competitor or whatever i was yeah to kind of double down what you're saying there it's like do you want this to be a reference platform do you want this to be something the community takes over and builds on for you and then you kind of take a super visor role? Do you want it resistant to capture maybe? And there also, is it worth considering

a split licensing, like MIT for the configs and GPL3 for apps that are created that are maybe like Python GTK apps and stuff like that? Brent, do you have thoughts on this question? Well, I think one of the things that becomes obvious here is don't rush into a license, you know, just because people are asking for it doesn't necessarily mean you have to choose one today, make an informed decision because you're going to be living with it for a while if you choose certain licenses. That said, your community has a huge amount of input, right? These are the people that are wanting to work with your code

or maybe wanting to use your project, but they need some kind of license to make sure that it fits into their goals as well. Maybe one of the best ways to do it is go chat with other open source developers of projects that you use and love, or even some that are part of the Nixbook project, maybe upstream and see what their advice is. They have more experience with this than most of us do,

and that would be likely a good place to start and start a good discussion. Yeah, I think, too, something maybe worth considering is this isn't really an open versus closed because you can make an argument for MIT or GPL. I think both camps are right. So I think maybe the way to frame this, Mike, and then take your decisions from there would be who benefits if this project becomes more successful down the road and who would benefit more than I expected. And just think about that and think about who you want to contribute.

And I think that's the essence of what you have to get to to make your decision on the license. Because it's a hard choice to make. And I'd say both groups are technically right. And I do like the idea of chatting with some other Nix folks because a lot of this is based on Nix, right? So I think that's a great idea too. Good question. And there is an active discussion happening on GitHub, right? So we'll put a link in the show notes if people out there want to jump in and help them think about this.

It's a hard choice to make. And I will also say, not to take away from that, but just also, whichever way you go, it won't be the end of the world. Like, it's still going to be open source. And almost some of this is academic to the folks who, at least at the start, are even just using it and benefiting it at the end of the day. It is academic to the end users. I mean, it is important. Yeah. It is very important.

But just, you know, like, it's not, even if ultimately you came to a conclusion that you viewed wasn't quite optimal in three years, the consequences aren't. going to be the end of the world. Also, congratulations, because once people start pestering you about the license, that means you have reached a certain level of success and adoption where it matters now. So true. Congrats, Mike. So true. Amen. Yeah. And now it is time for the boost. Well, boys, I'll start us off with our baller booster this week, and it is our podcast. He's back. Get ready for this gentleman. Brace yourselves. 850,000. Thousand Sats. Hey, Rich Lobster!

You're the best for round. Nothing's going to ever keep you down. You're the best for now. Boost. Thank you, Eric. He says, Hello, Chris West and Brent. Here's a little virtual stocking stuffer

for my favorite Linux podcast. This boost is a little way for me to share the immense value Lupp and self-hosted have provided me in my journey in self-hosting on my home server. Powered by NixOS. Oh, yeah. One of these days,

I'll get Boussela like going is my next achievement. Bonus, my wife's laptop, which is a DellXPS 13, 7390, is now running NixOS with plasma, and she doesn't hate it. Sounds like a win. That is a win. That is a win. I heard an opposite story over the holidays, and they tried to get the significant other on Linux desktop and did not go well. Oh, no.

Not hating it is a definite win. Thank you, Eric. We really, really appreciate this. that it's a great way to start the new year and a great way to start our first episode of the new year. Thank you, sir. Thumbs comes in with three hundred and thirty three thousand and two hundred cents. What? I hoard that which all kind of covered.

Not bad either, boys. Thank you, Thumbs. A long time, no boost. Still trying my best to get caught up on episodes, but there's so much amazing content in the members feed that it takes a while. Yeah, if you fall behind on the bootleg, yeah. Even at 2x speed. It's a lot, yeah.

I wanted to bring some holiday cheer to the team. Thanks for all that you do every week to provide content that's not only educational, but entertaining. Also, a special shout out to Thumbs because Thumbs had to go through a bit of a process because we had liquidity issues on my node and Brent's node, and he worked with me over email, and I really appreciate him taking the extra time just to do the one-on-one. So thank you, Thumbs. That is some lightning loads. That is. We really appreciate that.

Thank you very much. Well, we have a Congaroo paradox here with a massive McA boost to that, 200, two, what, that's a lot of twos, a lot of twos, basically, six twos. There you go, that's all in. 22,000, 22nd and 22, Seth. Wow, thank you, Congru. Congruh says, I love hearing about the JB community setups. I hope you guys revisit this content sometime in the future. Keep those home labs coming.

this episode and the Nix configs were some of my favorite episodes as of late enjoy the holidays and thanks for all that value. I'm glad you enjoy it because I really like seeing people set ups and configs too and I thought about it what if, and this would be the only time I think we ever do this but I have a crazy idea

and I know I always say this and we never do it but what if we did a mid-year home lab just so that way we could work the kinks out one more time and that way when we go to do it in the winter we've really got it figured out because part of the issue is we learned by doing and we do it once a year. And so that was our first go at it.

And what we learned afterwards is, oh, we should have had the audience rate some of these and rank some of these because it became an emotional chore of unbelievable portions because we loved every single one of that. How do you bake the jewels out of a stack of all jewel? It was like not the problem we expected to have. And it was very hard. We wanted all of them to be winners. And we still thought like, can we do more because we want to feature some that didn't make it on air because they're just so great. and so what we realized is we need to come up with a way for the audience to vote on them and be able to review them.

And I'd like to just work the kinks out one more time. So I don't know. Maybe we could talk ourselves into doing an extra, but we'll see. Thank you, Congaroo. I really appreciate the signal on those episodes. It's good for us to hear that, too. Gives us, you know, a solid direction to go. Well, look at this gentleman.

The dude abides us back with 252,777s. Wow. How about that? Thank you, sir. That is amazing. Really appreciate that. He writes, it seems the fountain was having some troubles. Yeah, we were having troubles over the weekend.

So I'm sending the rest via my Albi Hub. Isn't it nice having your own self-hosted backup route? And so that is, in fact, why we should have flipped the last two in terms of proper boosts, ball of boost count here. But I kind of had a hand aggregate. Coming in with the hand math. It's all right, we appreciate that. He says, thanks for featuring my rack. I enjoyed the Homelab episode.

I didn't think I'd win the Boosties since I'm already a member. I'll pass the gift to someone else. I'm already talking to hybrid sarcasm and we'll let you know probably next week. What? Happy 2026. Look at that initiative. Appreciate that. Amazing.

They're going to gift it to somebody else. That's really cool. And can you believe the dude won the Boosties and he's also already a member? Thank you, the dude abides. That's a lot of support. A Pab comes in with 33,333 cents. Here's my prediction. Act 1. PC component prices keep hiking. Oh, no.

Personal computers become prohibitively expensive. Act 2. The cloud is the only way to access decent processing power, and the company's hoarding hardware for AI become the obvious providers. Act 3. The Microsoft 365 link model takes off. AI companies finally become profitable, and personal computing is officially a thing of the past. Maybe not for 2026, but who knows. Let's hope never. Happy holidays. Wow, yeah. Every holidays to you too there, buddy. Thanks, Pat. Well, it's a reminder of what we fight for on the show. It is. Which is not that.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm really, I'm really feeling like I missed the boat by not building my Home Lab server last year. That's super dark. It is dark. It is dark. Hello, Neil. Hello. I hope that, I'm hopeful that somebody comes along and says, we're going to get in the RAM game. And they, you know, get supply ramped up at least by the end of 2026. But, I mean, I wound up panic buying it. desktop because of it. I wonder how many others have. Yeah. Because right now it's one of the best ways to get a machine with RAM is just to buy a pre-built one. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the last time I did this was 10 years ago and it was because of the hard dryers are flooded and I want like the hard drive main fact. I remember that out. Right? And it took like what, three years for them to recover from that. And so I wound up buying a pre-built desktop PC last time too. So I don't get to win here. Like, I mean, on this, at least this time around, I actually managed to get a, right now with a lot of the inventory that's still left from pre-insanity, you can get a pretty good deal.

I got one where the desktop came with an NVIDIA 5090, has 64 gigs of RAM, and four terabytes of total MVME storage for five grand with a, with a, with a, with a Risen 99550x3D or something like that Storage alone's like $1,200 right now that amount of storage. Right, I know, right? I was like, geez, between the ramps, the storage the computer paid for itself.

Yeah, crazy. And then the CPU just adds a cherry on top. Like, it is just, I mean, the computer's going to come with Windows, of course, because like that's what happens with these things. But at least, it's a reasonably powerful computer. It's made, And the design of the computer is that the parts internally are not proprietary, and they're easily replaceable.

So that means I did not buy a Dell. And it'll be fine, right? Like, I also don't really mess around with the desktop once I have it for a long time. And it's just, it's been time for a while for me to buy a new computer. It's just, I hate buying computers. Yeah, I agree. I hate building them. So that's just how it goes.

All right. Good news. Hybrid sarcasm says, Gene Bean is the one getting the J.B. Oh, wait, really? That's great. I'd love to hear that. That's great. Thank you for the update hybrid. All right, take PJ over there, Mr. West Payne. Oh, yep. The one, the only producer animated. Jeff comes in with 22,22 sats. This old duck still got it.

All you home labors are far more creative than I love to hear about it. Thanks. That's not true. That's not true. Jeff is very creative. Jeff was the only one whose home lab is also attached to his media center PC, I believe, right? Maybe, as far as I know. is the only one. So that's pretty creative. That's a creative reuse of hardware right there, I'd say. I'm impressed. Well, tomato boosted in with a row of Mick Ducks, 22,22 sets. Happy New Year, lads. Thank you for a great year of programming on Linux Unplugged. Lep is at the top of my cue when an episode comes out and your quote-unquote worst episodes are still among my favorite podcast episodes this year. Here's to a 2026 full.

of independent Linux and open source content. Wait, wait a minute. We have bad episodes now? Is that what I'm? Uh-oh. I guess nobody ever boosts in and says bad episode, do they? Well, actually, they do. Yeah.

Who does happen? Shabby analyst comes in with 9,811. That's coming in hot with the boost. This is cheers to the new year, and thanks for the great shows. Thank you. I think you also, just a motto. Appreciate that. Oh, look, boys.

Look who's back. It's been a minute. A.A. Ron's here. A. A.A. Ron's here. With a row of ducks. This is my New Year's resolution is going to be the year of Nixor. Nice.

As a DevOps engineer, it's everything I want out of an operating system. But I've been too afraid to really deep dive into it. I'm currently in the middle of installing it on my daily driver with a heavy influence from configs from the config confessions, confessions episode. Me too. I was actually just referring back to that this weekend. So, ha-ha, he's just happy New Year as well. Yeah, maybe go join the Nix Nerds Matrix, Chad, if you want to, if you want.

Great advice. And let us know how it goes. Following examples helps a lot, too. It really does. All right, you want to take SWAT there, Mr. Payne? Oh, yeah. SWAT comes in with $5,874 cents. Oh, my God, this drawer is filled with broolopes.

Cleaning out my fountain app wallet, since I can not seem to export or import or backup and restore the app with wallet and settings. Uh-oh. But I'm moving to the new Fairphone 6. Ooh. Well, I'll tell you what. The, I guess you don't have yet, but the beta UI for the new fountain wallet has a secret thing in there that I can. can't tell you about yet, but it also has a totally revamped import, export, transact

UI. really nice, but whenever you send us your stats, we appreciate it. Thank you for thinking of us, and good luck with the Fairphone. We'd love to have a report on that. Always curious about Fairphone. Fairphone six. Not the five. Get it right.

Yeah, not the five. Well, Marcel boosted in a total of 19,232 sets across two boosts. Hey. Just pump the brakes right there. Wait a minute there. Thank you, Marcel. It's good to hear from you. Let's hear it.

Well, let's hear it, good buddy. Marcel says, I hope you do the holiday home lab thing again. And I hope you add a category for a best dumpster rescue like Chris's final prediction. My submission was the NAS I found in the street and fixed up. I find it extremely satisfying to breathe new life into parts others give up on. I know I'm not alone because you mentioned this theme a few times with other submissions, but there was no dedicated category for it.

Did the holiday home lab have something to do with that prediction? Hmm. You know, I felt the vibe coming, actually. But the dumpster PC really was the definitive machine, right? We got to pull that one up. There's a few we should pull that out. Yes, because that really stood out to all of us. Yeah. I mean, talk about the definitive, like, reviving. I make it into a home lab machine, too, is just so good. Nice to hear from yourself. And thank you for your submission. And also thank you for the signal on the homelab episode. Hey, Gene Beans here with our hour ducks, 2,22s. And he says, happy new year. Happy New Year to you, Gene. Nice to hear from you. And happy new membership. Yes. Enjoy.

A scuffed comes in with 4,576 says. All right. You teased a podverse rebuild last week. Can you tell us more? Yes, I can. Very exciting news. In fact, Mitch, the lead developer, was just on the podcasting 2.0 podcast for the most recent episode as of last Friday. So that would be what, Wes?

That would be the third, no, the second. So Friday the 2nd of January, you can go hear about the new Podverse rebuild. It's really exciting. They do need some help with the mobile development, if anybody is interested. But what I love about Podverse is that it's a GPL 3, I believe it might be 2, but it's a GPL podcasting app. There's not a lot of those out there, and even fewer that support all the 2.0 standards, which are also open source. So it's really a nice combination. And Mitch has been working on this for a while.

Podverse is also cross-platform, which makes it a little extra tricky. but it's pretty exciting to see it coming along. Alpha.podverse.com if you want to check it out. Hey, do we get more from Gene? Is Gene Bean back? Beo, being hot? Yeah, that was more Gene Bean. Yeah, 10,345 sats.

I loved hearing from Kent, is there a way to easily convert other systems to B-Cash-FS? That is something I want to do more of. I think you can convert extended 4 and butter. I'm not positive about butter. Yeah, I actually have never converted one. Yeah. I think we should try it. I think we should try it.

But Gene also says I noticed recently that my Raspberry Pi home assistant, it's Pi 4 with 4 gigs of RAM, was out of memory pretty often. So I upgraded to the Pi 5 with 8 gigs and was amazed at how good the restore from Nebuchasa actually worked. It was super simple and everything came back as if nothing had changed. It was so slick. By the way, this boost amount is the home assistant port number, which is 8, 1, 2, 3. Oh, that's nice.

Good touch, good touch. And nice to hear the experience report that went well. Yeah, the restore and backup features are kind of what makes. make me want to use their whole home assistant package because they really do that. Doornail 7887 comes in with the Rodex. 100%. Signal is still the go-to cross-platform chat call app out there. I saw a couple plus ones to that.

People still really love and trust signal. At least if you want to talk to our audience. Yeah, I guess so. Which you should want to. Hmm, all right, all right. Well, there's dude trying stuff here with a row of ducks. Sadly, hardware shipping delays started. piling up, and I was not able to make

the deadline. Who knew Racknuts came in multiple sizes? Rest assured, I will link what the progress I've made in the new year. Really love the look at the community. You all are consistently bringing together on the show. Happy holidays.

Well, thank you. That's a nice thing to say. Keep on trying stuff. Anonymous came in with 4,035 sats. Altitude boost. If you want to know exactly where I'm at, add the current hour in your time zone to 42.42 north and subtract an hour in my time zone from 23.33 east, use the time of the boost to the 24-hour format.

Extra points if you can pronounce the name of the place. Otherwise, Minimec might be able to help out. Hint. All right. Okay. So, did you catch all that? Well, look, I do zip codes. I never sign up to be the altitude boost guy.

Oh, come on. You can't figure that out? Come on. Isn't Brent the altitude booze? He's always been. No, these are coordinates. That's why we hired. Wes, Wes, Wes, Wes.

These are coordinates, so your little calculator on your map. That's exactly why you designed it that way. I mean, why did we go and spend $5,000 on your fancy map if it can't do this? What was that money spent on? Oh, well, that's because I own a piece of the company that makes them. So it's mostly kickbacks to me. Do you need a map upgrade? So, I mean, Minimac, did you catch this at all?

Did you say, okay, so it's 4,035 sets, and it's an altitude boost. If you want to know exactly where I am at, add the current hour in your time zone to 442.20 north and subtract the hour in my time zone from 23.33 east and use the time of the boost in 24-hour format. Extra points if you can pronounce the name of the place. You got any idea? I think we have to take this as homework maybe

and try to come back next week. Do you think of the machine could figure it out? It's worth the shot. Should I ask the machine? I mean, because we'll probably get a wrong answer. That feels like a roll of the dice. You know, often when you optimize, you have to start with a bad guess, and then we'll get better guesses. We do have the time of the boost.

I don't know if it's accurate, how accurate it is, but we have the Unix timestamp. Right, but that would be the time it hit the node, not necessarily the exact time it was sent. But here, I'm going to try the machine. Okay, here's what it says. The clues kind of point to, oh boy, Zurich, Switzerland. Zurich, which is roughly pronounced Tisukurik, Tussurik. Turisica. You mean Zurich?

Well, it says to Zurich. You're almost like to keep trying. To Zurich is how it says it's pronounced. It's T-S-O-O-O-R-I-K-H is how you pronounce it. And it's got some information here about umlots, but that's lost on me. Just say Zurich like a normal person. Well, it says to Zurich is how you're supposed to say it. Not Zurich, but I don't know if that's right or not.

There you go. That's my guess, based on what the machine told me. but that's a pretty big roll of the dice. We're going to have to, this is impressive, we're going to have to tool up so we can handle these more. Yeah, clearly. All right. I'm thinking like a big 3D globe sort of we have on the desk.

Yes. Yes, with like things we can project onto it. Uh-huh. Yes. Spin it around and zoom in, zoom out. There's got to be a movie set somewhere where we can get that from, like a war planning movie set. When you unfold that, Wes, does it sound differently?

Oh, yeah. It's more like an EV kind of sound, you know? All right, let's round it out with Moonanite. It's over 9,000. 10,101 sats, my prediction for 2026 of the Linux adoption on the desktop goes exponential, thanks to steam machines and gamers overall getting sick of Windows. 6% of Linux users are on Steam now, according to their own metrics. I'll say it's double what it is today.

Well, I hope that happens. I hope so. I do feel like there is more, I think I discounted the Windows dissatisfaction more than I should have. So there is that. I hope you're right, Moonenite. I hope you're right. All right, I'll take this last one just to finish us up here. Are you ready for this?

Starfleet computer scientists boost in with 17,514 sats. Thank you for helping us, help you, help us all. And this was also their first boost ever. Congratulations. Nice. Welcome to the club. Thank you for getting that setup. That is not a small task, and we appreciate you doing that. You're doing very well.

They write long time listener, first time booster. I listened back in Las and the faux show, and of course, beer's tasty days, rediscover Linux Unplugged about a year ago, became a core contributor this year, and after decades of using Linux on a secondary machine, finally made the switch on my primary one. Keep up the great work.

I don't know if this is a thing, but please accept this as an Enterprise D boost. Ah, 1704. Aha. Making so. It's absolutely a thing. Nicely done. See, I can take those, too,

that kind of boost, so I can easily process. Ah, yeah. Well, you come in strong with your first boost. Speaking to our Star Trek love. And also thank you for the long time. Listen, I'm glad you're back on board. I think, you know, once you're over a year, you're no longer a new.

I think, did we decide that? Just over a year, it's no longer a new. This was a banger. We had, we combined some boosts from this week and the week when we were off. So that's why there was a lot and a mini boost to get through this week. So next week will probably be a little tighter and shorter. So if you would like to support us, it would be a great week to step up. We had 22 people stream sats as they listened to us.

Look at these maniacs here. Thank you very much. They just put it on autopilot and collect. effectively, they stacked 34,665 sets. Not too bad at all. Thank you, everyone. When you combine that with our boosters, this episode, episode 648, stacked a grand total of 720.

You've got to go farther. Sorry. Oh, I got to go down further. You're right, because we have the combo from the previous week. Right. So we actually stacked more than that. Thank you, Wes. Good catch.

We stacked a grand total for both episodes of 1,826,8193. that. Wow. Thank you everyone very much. That's incredible. And that matters more than you might know because those of you paying attention might know that it is the beginning of the new year. Our sponsorship contracts are under renegotiation. We don't have a full boat at all. And so the memberships and the boosts actually make all of the difference right now. Not just a little bit, not some of the difference, all of it. So thank you everyone who supported this episode. You literally made it possible, either through a membership or a boost. And it means a lot to us because we love doing this and we want to show up every single week and keep making Linux

unplugged for you. We really do appreciate it. All right, I got a couple of picks that are going to be kind of obvious why I'm including them this week. They are on theme. First two I'll get through pretty quickly in case you don't care about. They are two different options for figuring out MQTT. If you're new to MQTT and you don't know really what it is and what it does, these are toolboxes that will let you listen in to a topic from MQTT and see it come in either through like a messaging style and you get a real visceral understanding of what the message Q is and how it's sent, what it's sending back and forth. And so the two I'm going to talk about is MQTTX, which is kind of like an all in one app. It's a little bit bigger. And then the other one is

MQTT-5 Explore. And this is a little tighter. This one is GPL license. The other is Apache license. They're both available on FlatHub and packages for Linux. And they make it really easy to connect to an MQTT server or a client and observe the topics it's sending and understand what they are. And from that, you could write scripts.

You could just learn. It's really nice. Now, I haven't tried either of these, but I do notice that MQTT-5 Explorer has the Arch Linux logo. In there, read me, see, that's a... Good sign? Yeah, good sign. I'd say it's the most... The MQTT5 Explorer is the most native desktop app.

And MQTTX is a cross-platform electron app that works on Linux, Windows, Web, MacOS, can run in a Docker container. So it sort of depends on what you're trying to accomplish. And they just make understanding what the hell this is that you're trying to set up a lot simpler. And it say it's a nice way to demystify something that was a little opaque. to me. I notice you're not calling it MQD? Yeah, should have. Now, a couple of others, for those of you that I don't care about MQTT. This is something that you'll see

different commercial electron apps take a crack at, so it's nice to see a GPL version of this. It's called Unify. It's what you could consider a web app aggregator. Now, this one is built in QT and QT6. It uses Web Engine and Karagami to organize different web-based services into workspaces and open each in its own web view with desktop-friendly integrations like notifications and whatnot. So, you know, just relegate all of your web-based style electron apps to one master app that

keeps them all organized. We've seen other takes on this, commercial ones at that. But this one's all based on modern KDE platform technologies and it's GPL3. So that's Unify. Don't confuse it with other things named Unify. And that one is cute-based. Now, if you're more of a GTK person, then there is Web App Hub App, Hub. Web app manager or whatever, it's labeledable things. It's written in Rust and GTK.

And it's designed in Edwadia. And it's a web hub app manager just like Unify application to do essentially the same thing, but do it in a GTK-first world. And it gives you easy browser switching. It makes it super easy to manage and isolate apps into their own things. It can go pull their web icons for you. It can do custom browser profile configs to launch that. app. It can, it's more than just containing all in one app. It's, it's kind of a little more than that. It more integrates with the Ghanome desktop. It kind of depends what you're looking for. But myself, so many dang things are web-based now. I mean, on this machine right here, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven-pinned web apps. I have 11 pinned web apps. For different web apps, I need to manage the live stream

and the recording of this episode. Those are just 11 different web-based applications. And They're all running under the Firefox process. I get a little skeved out by that. I would like to have something else separate. So that way if my browser crashes, like this morning Brent went to help about and his browser crashed, well, then 11 of my apps I used to manage this stream and the show would destroy it. Gone.

So I like to separate it out into its own process. And there used to be a lot of ways. I mean, hell, browsers used to have some of this crap built in for a while. God, that was nice. And then there was other things like Natifier and other things that came along for the Linux desktop. But then they faded. So now it's nice to see these two, both for plasma desktops or Gnome desktops, whatever your flavor is. Rust C++, but take your pick.

Take your pick. Both open source, both available on the Flat Hub or probably packaged in a distro near you. So enjoy it. And then, of course, the MQTT apps. In fact, everything we talked about today will be linked at Linuxunplug.com slash 648. And, you know, Wes, it's possible we mentioned something that they'd like to catch again, would like to look up the name of something. We have a power tip for them, don't we?

Oh, yeah. Well, we have a website. Is that what you mean? Like a community-powered, open-source, like, Hugo website? There's probably, you could do that. There's probably even a way to get, like, more rich metadata from the podcast app itself. Oh, well, yeah. We do have HTML descriptions in the feed, yeah. No, I'm not. With all the links in it. Oh, and tags. We've got a great set of tags. But, no, I'm thinking more, Wes. Like, could they get even richer context? They could even plug into, like, language models and things like that. Is there more they could be? Oh, you're thinking, like, cloud chapters and. transcripts. You got it, buddy. You're thinking VTT files.

You got it. Maybe even speaker diarization, if we could. All of it in there. More and more apps. Even Apple Podcasts now support all of that. And of course, the podcasting 2.0 apps, which over at podcast apps.com

have been supporting it for years, and it's nice to see that standard spread. And then, of course, one other thing you should know about our gosh darn live stream. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad Steve. Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday.

Join us over at jbblive. dot TV 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m. Eastern, of course, in your local time zone at Jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We've got our low-latency opus mumble room going, whatever you want to call it. It's a mumble room. It's a live stream, but it's a mumble room. You can catch that. You can join our chat room, or don't worry about it. Become a member and get the bootleg, and we'll deliver it to you all processed and ready to go so you don't miss a single thing. Last but not least, tell a friend. It's a great way to support the podcast just right there. Tell somebody about the show. It's the number.

one way people learn about new podcasts. We really appreciate that. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Your Unplug program. See you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.