LINUX Unplugged - 649: Burned by AI

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

The storage apocalypse has arrived. An old friend drops by to talk survival strategies as prices explode, and we pitch our own unapologetically 90s approach to stretching storage.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 $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMPlanetNix 2026 — Where Nix Builders Come TogetherPlanet Nix 2026: Call for ProposalsSCaLE 23x | RegistrationLinuxFest Northwest 2026: Call for SpeakersMichael Tunnell - YouTubeDestination Linux - YouTubeTuxDigitalLINUX Unplugged 596: Perilously Pontificated PredictionsPhison CEO: SSD "Pricing Apocalypse" to Continue Through 2027HDD Prices Spike as AI Infrastructure and China’s PC Push Collide2025 Cloud Pricing Trends: Big Three Shake Up Storage CostsStorage Apocalypse: Why SSDs and HDDs Are Becoming Impossibly ExpensiveJensen Huang Flagged Data Storage as the Next AI BottleneckManufacturer Recertified Drives - ServerPartDeals.comHard Disk Prices (US)Storage Price TrackerRackRat - eBay Rackmount Server Deal Finderr/HomelabSales$£€ - RedditSmart Buy 10 Pack Bd-r Dl 50gb 6X Blu-ray Double Layer Recordable DiscBlueVault — A top-quality TUI app to manage Blu-ray cold storage archives on Linux.Pick: Kopia — Cross-platform backup tool for Windows, macOS & Linux with fast, incremental backups, client-side end-to-end encryption, compression and data deduplication. CLI and GUI included.Kopia Repository ServerPick: PowerISO — Create, Burn, Mount, Edit, Compress, Encrypt, Split, Extract ISO file, ISO/BIN converter, Virtual DrivePowerISO on FlathubPick: CDEmu — CDemu is a software suite designed to emulate an optical drive and disc on the Linux operating system.Tellico — Collection management software, free and simple.

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. We'll coming up on the show today, it does seem to be the storage apocalypse. It's here. It's real.

And an old friend's going to drop by to talk survival strategies as prices explode. And then we've got an unapologetically 90s approach to stretching your current storage. Sometimes the old way of doing things still makes sense. They're going to round it out with some boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room! Hey, Chris, Hey, Gus, and Hello, Branch. And let's say hello to that old friend from Tux Digital and this week in Linux, Michael Tonell's back.

Hello, Michael. Hello, everybody. It's good to see you. I know that... Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, we didn't get a chance to see you for our predictions episode because you were under the weather. But you're bad? I got sick and could not speak.

So that was a bummer. Because I enjoy being the referee, you know. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll pick it back up next year. But it's good to see you. And I think we should maybe. We could chat in just a moment on a couple of those predictions. I mean, we might have them here.

So if we wanted to look at them in a moment, we could. Before we get there, I want to say good morning to our friends over at Defined Network. And go check out Managednebula at Define.net slash unplugged. Now, you want a beautiful mesh VPN network these days. Everybody knows that because the benefits are incredible. I mean, you can connect data centers across multiple different providers and regions, your mobile devices, your workstations, your development machines, your production machines, and you can create all kinds of privacy with this that is just absolutely unbeatable.

I mean, I think people understand that. But which one is actually the right one to choose? And I say you have to check out to find a dot net slash unplugged. It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source nebula project. It's all open source. top to bottom view on a self-host every single component. It will always be that way because that's how they build it. You want to know what features coming down the road?

Go watch the development right there out in the open on GitHub. And then later on, if you decide, I want to completely take this over myself, you absolutely can, including some of the essential services. But what I think is great is they offer the managed Nebula product. So you can get started. They host the tough stuff. They do all of that. Later on, if you want to own the authentication and you want to own the discovery and all of that,

you absolutely can. Nebula's decentralized design means there's no single point of failure. There's nothing that can happen on their back end because you can host everything. And when you're building something that you want to last five years, 10 years, you've got to think about that. It was also from the get-go designed to manage Slack's global infrastructure. So you know it's tight, it's powerful. It's super advanced. I can tell you all about it, but I think you should go check it out.

You can get 100 hosts for free. No credit card required, no lock-in to find.net slash unplugged. You start with that. Then later on, you want to go set up your own lighthouses. absolutely can't. There's no problem. There's no conflict there where you're like part of a big sales funnel. Like it's such a great thing because we have heard from so many people out there to deploy it and they absolutely have been thrilled. And probably going to have a little bit more from my end next week. So check it out. Go get started. Support the show at Defined.com.

And a big thank you to Define.net for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Gentlemen, we are on like Donkey Kong for Planet Nix. Get ready. We're going. Flax is helping make it possible again this year. You know, Flax, they're focused on making reproducible dev environments actually usable, and they're facilitating our trip and Planet Nix. We will have a meetup.

I think year two is going to be fantastic. The call for papers for Planet Nix ends very soon. January 15th. So if you're listening to it when this comes out, you've got a few days. Jan 15th. we'll put a link in the show notes. To attend Planet Nix, you need to register for scale. So we'll put a link in there too.

We have a promo code. The promo code is Unpludge, U-N-P-L-G, Unpludge, and you'll get 40% off your ticket. And the remaining value goes to support one of the best open-source conferences out there. Yeah, and you get access to both Planet Nix and scale. And the Expo Hall and all the other talks. There's a lot.

Unpludge. UN-P-L-G. We'll have a link to that. want to see you there. This, you know, I think year one of Planet Nix. Is this a thing? Is this possible? Can they pull this off? Establish it. Yes. Did people like it? We loved it. All right, we're doing it again. Now, this year, I think it's going to be a lot about building things, talking to people, like people who don't normally sit in the same room together, but also still use the same stuff they create. A lot of that. And I think it's also going to just pull them or just lead right in to a great scale. So why not make it to both?

And then just shortly after that, Linux Fest Northwest, April 24th to the 26th back at the Bellyamp Technical College in the original large expo room. Oh. Back in the nice area, it's all fixed up. And the Linux Fest Northwest call for papers ends tomorrow at midnight. Monday, January 12th at midnight. So get it in.

No promo code for Linux Fest Northwest because it's free. Although you can give them a little donation if you want to help. support a great event. We'll have links to the Linux Fest Northwest call for papers as well. So there you go. Planet Nix and scale. That's happening in March, March 5th through the 6th in Pasadena, California. We'd love to see you there. And then a little bit after that, Linux Fest Northwest, April 24th through the 26th, things are shaping up to be a beautiful spring, a warm, beautiful spring in the Pacific Northwest. And then they're saying a hot summer. You know, have you seen this? No, I have not. Yeah. We got a Niño transition. It's fading out.

you know, of dominance, as they say. Uh-huh. Which means it should be a beautiful Linux Fest Northwest. So we'd love to see you. Plenty of time to plan, right? Come on. We're telling you now. Mm-hmm.

Yep. And all the lazy links are in the show notes. Well, I just wanted to say a big welcome back to Michael. It's nice to see you, sir. Thank you again for making it. Thanks for having me. Would you love to go back in time and see how you did it? I mean, would you just love it?

Would you just be thrilled? I would love it. Actually, I don't remember most of what I said. said. I remember one of them and I think I was right and the other ones I don't remember at all. I mean, I did. I don't remember them specifically, but when we were prepping for the episode, I reviewed them and I think you did okay. Yeah, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised myself. All right. So, here was Michael's first prediction for 2025. I predict that the cosmic desktop from System 76 will make at least a release candidate version available in 2025.

I mean, they made that. I was, that was very right. Nice. Not bad. I forgot about that one entirely. And, you know, that only really came later in the year. Came later in a year. Yeah, it was like three weeks before the end of the year. And then like, nice.

Yeah. All right. Here was prediction number two for 2025. I predict that the Linux desktop market share will become 5% some point this year. I think that one was right too, right? Like everything we can measure it with seems like that was. Seems like it hit, which is great. I was, I was super shocked.

because that's the one I remembered. I was like, because I remember saying like, because it was expected to go to four. And I was like, you know what? I'll just do five anyway. And then that actually happened. It's like, wow, how was that right? Okay, awesome.

Well, you know what I want to know is do you have a prediction for 2026? I should. But in terms of market share, I think it's going to go up to, I'm going to go ahead and say an extra 2% and say 7. All right. All right. I like that. That was bold.

All right. Are you ready for your third and last prediction? Yes. Here we go. I predict that in 2020, KDE will release a specific desktop operating system of their own, regardless of what it's named, KDE Linux or not, and it will be at least at a beta release level. Now, I don't know. I don't know if they've actually hit beta, have they?

No, I think I was wrong on that one. I think they hit alpha, not beta. Yeah, right. That's a bummer. I almost got perfect. Okay, here's just a bonus prediction. Do you think they'll hit a 1.0 in 2026? I think towards the end of the year, maybe.

Yeah. I don't think it's going to be anytime soon, but I think it's, they've made a lot of progress. I think they've made a lot of progress enough where they could get to the, like, I don't know, November, December era. Yeah. I hope so. Although, didn't I see they're, like, doing some debates about sort of the underpinnings and should they stick with their, like, arch sort of inspired thing or adopt other? Oh. Yeah.

I think that there's actually potential where they could. could, you know, do a combination of things. So, like, a lot of the effort in the Universal Blue Project is super interesting because there's, there's some effort to make it distroless. And that, by that, meaning, it doesn't matter what it's sitting on top of. Like, you could switch out the underneath, you know, fairly easily. Like, just how you can, like, image mode, you can switch the desktops really quickly. It would be possible to switch arch to Fedora or back and forth.

Rebase the base. Yeah. But also the user could do it. Rebusbiz. Like not even, like, all you have to do is set up the image mode to have that compatibility,

and it would be theoretically possible to do that. Swap that layer out, huh? Yeah, that could also solve that problem. Who knows? Wouldn't that be interesting? I'm just thinking about the way OEMs could use that. I think the last 10% of KDE Linux is going to be the toughest.

So that, it might push 1.0 out to Q1 of 2027. And I don't, I don't think that'd be a shame. Honestly, I feel like it might be a 1.0 that's not a 1.0. Oh, it could be, yeah. Yeah. So, like, it's, for example, Cosmix.

Cosmix 1.0 was not really ready. Like, it's, uh, it's cool. There's a lot of good stuff, but it's, there's still some pretty noticeable bugs that would not really count as a 1.0 in that sense. And in our space, there is some value to get it out there in front of users and starting to get that feedback. Yeah. I also just feel like the idea of the 1.0 is, uh, you know like the version number mattering is like antiquated and no longer matters like it's it's like

when people talk about like uh the next version of linux you know like linux seven is going to come out sometime soon and it's just like well why is it why is it going to seven well arbitrary number count like who cares like it doesn't it's not like they actually choose it for any particular reason it's just because they're tired of being six so like now it's seven they choose it because west predicted that's usually how it goes well that that also helps to you back in my day a point release was like a sign of perhaps a compatibility break or a major new feature set it's just sort of lost its meaning in that sense yeah and the major minor bug thing is gone too like it some people use it but it also doesn't matter anymore yeah so like uh a bontu helped create that

to go away with the not with the dates so now we have like the major minor but it's really just like it's an update who cares yeah i wonder one day we'll have uh linux 28 10 20 Linux you know whatever whatever we'll have. All right, well, we are gathered here today because we, as a world of technology enthusiasts, are faced with the plight of incredibly high storage prices. I really missed a boat on this one. I don't know how many of you are feeling this way, but I, of course, was, if you guys remember, we were talking about low power home labs toward the end of last year,

started around October, November. Boy, should I have bought then. So I did a little digging before the show guys, and it's real bad out there. So the worst price increases seem to be in like the kind of nicer SSDs and MVMEs in the 2 terabyte and uprange. I don't see a lot of punishment in the 1 terabyte. But for example, the Western Digital Black, SN 850X 2 terabyte drive, is up 80% since October. since October That's not 10%

That's not 20% No Over 50%. And because I'm in a moving vehicle I was looking for solid state So I at first had my eye on an 8 terabyte MVME which would be just enough And that thing went from

I mean that sounds expensive already Yeah But I think it was like $700, $800 And now it's between $14 and $600 depending on the vendor That's good Wow And the other thing is

Is the... Do I want a laptop or a hard drive? The number of vendors even supply to the consumer market is less. I did a little comparison shopping on Camel, Camel, Camel, of SSD vendors selling a two-tabide drives back in October, and there were probably 30 of them. And now there's two.

So it's brutal out there. And it's just gone from something that was kind of cheap to just this precious commodity, obviously because enterprise data centers, all these types of AI jobs, they're all eating up storage, or buying inventory before they've even, you know, have been produced.

Some of these vendors are making exclusivity deals with these larger data centers to provide them with, you know, their storage chips. So I think each one of us have probably been thinking about this problem a little bit. I don't know if anybody, you know, we always are growing. Our storage needs are always growing. So I thought we'd go around the horn and kind of talk about if we had any ideas for sort of stretching out or getting cheap storage for 2026, maybe even into 2027, Some of the things I was looking at here suggest we already have back orders now on the books up to 24 months from the AI data centers.

And so they are going to be filling the data center inventory for 24 months at least. And that's the existing back. Now, some of that might get canceled if things decline or whatever. But the projection is at least until 2027. We're going to have a massive crunch in storage prices. And so Michael, do you have any thoughts on like ways to stretch your existing storage or cheap storage acquisition strategies? Are you going to be shucking USB disks? Like, do you have any hard drives we can have?

So actually, as you were talking about it, I was thinking about it. You got that sweet storage. I was actually thinking about it as you were mentioning you were describing this problem. And I was thinking like, you know, at this point, SSDs are probably around the same. or if not more value than gold. So I was thinking like, maybe I should sell some of my SSDs, you know, and get some like, like some like five-year-old SSDs are now worth double what they were or whatever. And, and, but it's actually kind of funny because I was, you know, debating whether or not I should upgrade my hard drives for my NAS.

Because I got, I recently got a bigger NAS so like I had a four bay and now I have an eight bay. And then I was thinking like, okay, I need to, you know, figure out a time where I need to get some more drives. And then I looked at the price and was like, you know what? I can wait a little bit. I'll come back into it like a couple months. And then the storage price hit. Same. And yeah, it's completely destroyed all plans.

So like I'm now, not only am I not, I'm not even using that new bay anymore. I'm using the still using old four bay just because it's not worth even bothering to move the stuff. And now I'm just in the process of like figuring out like it used to be a, you know, storage is cheap. I'll just get whatever I need and then I'll just keep everything. Now I'm just deciding whether I don't want to keep the stuff or not. Like some of the stuff I've had for 20 years. Yeah. And I've never looked at it ever because I have a, I had a rule.

I don't need more. I've already established this. I've gone. I've pulled the trigger on this situation to save my storage. and I used to have a philosophy of like everything I create as a creative person and graphic design and everything. I keep everything. Yeah, totally get that, right? You don't want to have it like later.

You're like, I had that. I made that. I burned hours of my life investing in creating that to throw it away when I could have just had that one more flag file. Come on. Exactly. And also it's like it goes back to when I was doing graphic design. So I have like all the PSD files and I have everything. So I have the completed project and the source project and everything.

And I've gotten to the point where now, some of that stuff I still keep, even if it's super old, just because of like, I just want it. But when it comes to video and doing like video on YouTube and, you know, the podcasting and stuff and there's been,

there's just so much data that takes up. And I was thinking, like, do I have I ever gone back and done a montage of like previous episodes or anything? Have I ever used that stuff? No, I have not.

So I just basically delete, deleted half of the storage and now I actually have the NAS available to use again. Yeah. Because I was I was super close to having nothing on the, on no storage on the NAS. And now I have like half of it back. So I'm actually kind of happy I did that because I would have just bought new storage. I don't,

I'm not saying that it's good that this happened that forced me to do this. But I am happy that I'm, I've kind of gotten past this threshold of like not holding on to everything. Because I'm a very minimal person in reality, but in terms of digital hoarder, I'm very much a digital hoarder. I think that's a fair point is it is really easy to slip into digital hoarding. And just you save everything and you constantly are adding to it more and more, which is kind of fun, but gets very expensive right now. Yeah. So I'm kind of not with like project files, but I'm on the other end of I spent probably the last five years being a I'll just delete it guy.

And then a couple of months ago, a few months ago, I was starting to plan for my daughter's birthday, and I wanted to show her this movie that I had deleted, but I figured what's the big deal? I'll just download it again. Could not actually find a working way to get it again. And so I went and bought the DVD and ripped it and started thinking, you know, there's a few things I started going through my library and thinking,

there's a few things that I ripped by hand that I either think are better quality or like I can't necessarily find an easy way to find them again online. And I started thinking maybe there is some stuff I do want to keep forever. And then if that's the case, I got a real problem here because I'm already almost out of storage. There is some stuff I absolutely will delete. But there are some things I want to keep. Yeah, no, I'm kind of in the same place. Like I have been trying to keep, like not for the last few years, but before that I was moving around a lot.

And it was just like didn't make sense to have a giant. as keeping everything, so I've kind of been pruning, but you're right. We're entering now a digital landscape where I've been thinking about it for, like, with the, I don't know if you've seen some of the numbers people are passing around for, like, the death of stack overflow. Yeah. But there's just a lot of stuff on there, not that it isn't elsewhere, but especially even for some things like, like there's like the math overflow part.

There's some nice write-ups or ways that people express things or taught things, just things that I've kind of always relied on existing out there in the internet, whether it be on the media side or just on the information side that... We're getting to a new era, and it seems like a lot of that stuff, some of it will be kept. Some of it will hit the Internet Archive, but a lot of it just won't. And if I don't take action and have some dedicated storage for it, it might just vanish. Yeah. And then I've also digitized more things with paperless and whatnot, which also brings in backups to this brand.

And I don't know if you've thought much about this, but with storage going up, it makes strategies like, oh, I'll just buy another hard drive. I'll buy this hard drive, copy everything over and then send it off site. Well, maybe not with the expense now. Yeah, I mean, that was my strategy up till now. And now I'm thinking, holy, I got to get my act in gear. Because, you know, if I all of a sudden decide I have to move to, like, use drives, for instance, I don't know. You tell me if I'm right or not, but that feels like the risk is higher. So maybe I do need extra bays in my NAS.

And maybe I do need to have a better raid system. And maybe I do need, you know, more offside backups and stuff because hard drives are going to fail. Use drives are getting more expensive, too. I did a little eBay. of course. Trying to find a cheap. And, I mean, you'll save money, but like you said, you don't know the quality. And, yeah, they're still not as cheap as they used to be.

And here I thought 2026 was naively going to be the year. I finally got a proper backup system for my folks going. I know. I know. So, yeah, it's like not even use storage. Well, I do have a bunch in my basement that I forgot about that I could probably, you know, get back out of the ice. Slime it all into a scary raid, you know? I think the worst part is that now this whole thing has happened.

And I have just a few sitting over here for like, you know, drives that I've done for testing of like distros and stuff that even their 256 gig or 512 gig. And they're now looking super appealing. Yeah. Like, oh, wow. I actually have stuff I can use even though it's super tiny to you. I know I was looking at like SATa controllers with like eight ports on them. I'm like, I could slam one of these and it just attach a bunch of random drives and then just smash it all together.

One of them will eventually pop, but... All right, you get a bunch of Raspberry pies, and then you plug in a bunch of USB expanders, and then you put in a bunch of flash drives, and then you put that all into a Ceph cluster, and then you just store everything there. Well, why not cut out the middleman and get a USB hub and just attach a whole bunch of SD card readers

all to the USB hub? Oh, good point, yeah. Those are so thin, right? Like, it'll stack well. Yeah, it's essentially solid. I would assume this is all, you know, hard drives and memory and SSD. is all being consumed by like the, you know, AI push, right?

The big machine, yeah. But I was thinking about this a little bit more this morning, and aren't, you know, they're going to be pushing their hard drives out of the pipeline at some point, right? They're not just going to hoard every single hard drive that they're using. So I feel like they're going to destroy them, though. Like they're going to use them to a degree. Like, you know, like the crypto miners made the GPUs worthless. I feel like they're going to make their drives worthless.

Yeah. Although, like, some vendors may have an. age out strategy. Hmm. You could still see, like, I could still see, even if not all of them, if only, like, say, 30% of them made it on the market in the used market. There are outlets that specialize, and that's one of the ones I looked into, by the way, is there are outlets that specialize in they go buy them from the data centers and guarantee,

like, they wipe everything and they have, like, a whole contract, and then they resell them in bundles, like massive bundles. So that could be a thing. The nice thing too with some of this, right, like unlike GPUs, I mean, if it was cheaper, you could also, if it was cheaper but sketch you, you could up the redundancy, right? Oh, true. I'm going to build two arrays. I'm going to have double copies because I don't really trust either of them and I don't want to do a giant. So that could be a future thing where use storage comes down, but as of right now, it's still pretty expensive and you're rolling the dice.

So it's sort of a double whammy. There's also something to be said for not every single AI company that's buying all this stuff up right now because they, I somehow have free money, is going to survive. So we might see like these big splashes of hardware just hitting the used market all of a sudden. So if you're looking, you might be able to find that stuff. I don't imagine it'll be a constant, you know, stream of what we want to be consuming in terms of hardware. But it might happen. Yeah.

Yeah, they might not all be consumer end products. But if you're okay dealing with SaaS or whatever, it might work. But I do think there is something we can do about it. because there is an area of the market that these data centers are just not gobbling up. They have no interest in. It still provides a good means of storage. You're talking about magnetic tape. I looked at that.

I did. If anybody knows a place to find a tape drive that's reliable for under $500, let me know. But all the ones are outside. Flobby disks. Yes. Now, here's what I'm thinking. The solution comes from the 90s, and that's optical media. We channel our inner 90s kids, and I think we look back at optical media.

I think it holds the solution, and so, gentlemen, I have been inspired, and I have an idea. 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 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 seems 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 up 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. Joincrowdealth.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, I'll admit when I first heard you talking about this idea, I thought it was pretty crazy because I thought we had left those little spinning things of plastic. stick behind. I have drawerful somewhere, though, if you need some. But now, after doing a little research, I kind of see where you're going with this. It's, you know, I'm feeling a little nostalgic from their 90s times. It is fun. It does

have some nostalgia. Physical media, it's back. It's still a thing, and it's cheap. So the seed oil of this idea was, after last week's Linux Unplugged, Wes and I were checking out the DVD drive that I bought to

restore or re-ripped stuff from the original DVD since I deleted and then wanted it back. And we were checking it out and I needed something to test it with. And I wanted to see if it worked with Linux and see if the, you know, the USB bus could power it enough and all this. So I'm searching the whole freaking studio and I cannot find any physical media. I'm like, wow. In my mind, I can picture where I used to store DVDs, but of course that was a decade ago. So I find an old CDR in a box of old studio stuff. And it's something I burnt a long time ago and it's like data backup on there. And I vaguely recall doing this.

So I bring it in, pop it in the new drive, and it mounts, and I see it, and I start looking at the contents on there. And it's a backup of the Office 2000 installer. That's right. Oh, that was so good. I burned this CDR in early 2000, 26 years ago. And it was just there sitting, waiting this whole time. Just worked perfectly.

No way. And it struck me as, well, that's about his best case scenario as I can expect, right? Now, admittedly, we didn't try installing Windows. No, we didn't check some of it. That's true. We didn't try installing Office 2000. But it just got me thinking like, wow, that really held up. And then throughout the week, I realized, well, this DVD drive couldn't burn Blu-Rays.

And then I started thinking, well, let's go take a look at this. I'm running out of storage. Well, you can buy a 50 gigabyte Blu-ray disc. In fact, you can buy a pack of 10, 50-gig Blu-ray discs for $18 U.S. dollars. You can buy 100 disks at New Egg for under $160. So on the low end, that's... They don't manufacture them? I don't believe this.

Wow. So say you get that New Egg deal, right? you're essentially buying usable storage about 4.6 terabytes of usable storage and so that works out to be about 3 cents a gigabyte you could of course get an SSD but you know those are pretty expensive so you can buy these bundles of Blu-ray disks at 50 gigs a pop I mean it's going to take a while

but this is like an area that the data centers don't care about they're not driving these prices up and then you have something that could potentially sit on a shelf for 26 years and if you ever needed it back. I mean, so I guess you got to go through the effort of doing the burning. Yep. And maybe the restoring or the validating. And don't lose it.

Yeah. And don't forget what files on what disk. And probably ideally you want to make sure you've got it in some sort of storage where it's not going to get scratched and, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, I remember the eras. Like, I remember copying stuff for friends, et cetera.

Like, I have gone through the motions of burning a fair amount of disks, right? Yeah. So, like, it is doable. And you probably use them in the computer anyway. So, like, you kind of just do it while you're doing other things. And if you do it right, you know, like in the case of this, CDR, I backed up in the year 2000, if it's just files on a file system and you don't require some specific app to, like, decrypt and restore it, then future you can just drag and drop the files when you want to restore it when you want them.

Maybe you only want one file or something like that. But that does bring up keeping track of, like... There is that. Because if you're going to have it, like, the units are smaller, right? So you'll have more units. And so... Yeah. If you don't do a good job labeling or whatever,

then you're like, well, where's, wait, I need the photos from which year? Yeah. We also have much better compression algorithms these days than we used to. So I feel like you could fit even more info on those discs than you're comparing, yeah. That's very true. So I set out to find a tool to help me achieve this job. How hard could this be, right? I looked at Borg backup.

I looked at Bacula 2, considering maybe I would actually just accomplish this with a traditional backup tool, because you bring up a good point, Wes, is like the key thing is, say my kids come to me two years from now and they say, Dad, we want to watch X. And, well, how the hell do I know out of these 15 Blu-rays where that one file is? And if you're backing up a TV series, it could be larger than 50 gigabytes or something like that. It's even worse if it's a bunch of small files. You're like, oh, I need the, which, okay, where did I put the taxes for this year? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, because paperless is also another thing in here and all of that.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I could not find a tool, so I have made a tool. And it is called Blue Vault. That's right. It's a Rust-based app, a toee with sort of an 80s theme for managing Blu-ray archives. And the basic idea is, is you attach a USB Blu-ray burner, which are like $50 these days, U.S. dollars. You bring up this towi, and it walks you through archiving individual folders to a Blu-ray disk. and it supports 25 gig, 50 gig, and 100 gigabyte disks. I just this morning added multi-disc architecture,

so that's very new. So there's two different releases. Release one is single-disc architecture. Release two is multi-disc architecture. It generates a table of contents and a SQL database where all of the files are. It does a Shaw-256 sum and a CRC-325 sum of all of the files, so you can verify them later.

It offers two different burn methods, burns directly to Blu-ray, or just create an ISO. image. And it has an optional QR code generator. So if you wanted to label the disk or the jewel case with a QR code, you could. It has a verify mode, which is very nice. It also will do a dry run if you just want to go through a dry run. It's using like R sync on the back end and a bunch of standard Linux burning tools. So really, I just created the toui to set on top of this. And the towey has a phosphorus green, high contrast, black on green, but it's easy to read.

Like the stuff you're supposed to look at is obvious and highlighted monospace type type. It's really nice. S subtle animations. And one of the things I worked on, although it's not perfect, is I really tried to constantly give you as much feedback because there's some processes that are just, like, when you're generating a shot,

like it can take a little bit in the background, right? Or if you're moving an MKV file to a Blu-ray, it can take a little bit. So I've tried to give the UI as much responsiveness and updates as to what it's doing as possible. And then the thing I just added this morning, well, technically late last night, is the multi-disc archive

because obviously you're going to have issues where you want to back up something that's larger than 50 gigabytes or something like that. And so what I'm trying to do here is preserve the folder integrity. So it's not doing like a par split or something like that where it's lumping them all up and splitting them.

It will err on the side of potentially wasting a little space on a Blu-ray in order to keep all the files just accessible on the file system. And it does sequential folder naming so you know where everything's at and this is disc two, this is disc one. And then, like I said, it also has a SQLite database

that tracks the multi-disc sets for you, which you can then search against later on. Wait, okay. So it's not splitting files or anything. No, it's just kind of looking at the math and being like, okay, I can fit this season on this disc, but a few episodes are going to have to go on this other disc, and I'll properly label that in the file system,

but you're going to probably waste a few gigs on this disc. But the idea being that in the future, you could just put that in, mount it, and just drag and drop the files. You don't need any particular app to restore it. And then is it like thought of differently in the app? Is it like the multi-disk thought of as a single unit when you're like listing all of your disks? So then it knows that they're at least connected in the database.

Yes, exactly. And there's two paths in the app right now. There's the single disk route, which is really simple. Then there's a multi-disc route. And then there, if you do the multi-disc route, then the database knows, okay, this was a multi-disc entry. And just stores it that way. It's a Rust app too, which is fun. And it's the first Rust app I've ever created.

I've tried to be considerate about storage space too, so when the job is successful, it'll clean itself up. And there's also just a menu option in the TUI to just do a cleanup. Because from time to time, it's going to generate temporary files to stage them for the Blu-ray because I've experimented with a couple of different ways. So I bought myself a 10-pack of Blu-Rays thinking I was going to use that 10-pack to back up my data.

No, no. I use that 10-pack to do test after test after test with this app. I blew through an entire 10 pack of Blu-ray. So I haven't completely tested the multi-disfunctionality. But it does dry runs, you said. Yeah. So we'll do dry runs, but of course to fully test, I didn't actually burn. Yeah, and it does, it will do some testing to make sure everything's working.

And if it looks like it won't work, it'll try to warn you. And if you have any missing dependencies, because of a couple apps you have to install, it'll attempt to warn you. But, yeah, it was an interesting endeavor. And I think my end goal has been accomplished in that. I could either plug the drive into my NAS, my O-Droid, or I could plug it into my workstation, and I can run this on either space, and you just sort of set it and forget it.

And when you go to the multi-disc mode, it'll just go through the work, and it'll pop the disc out when it's ready for the next one, tell you what to label, you pop the next disc in, and it'll start continuing the archive. And I just ride across the desk. I got a preview of the single disc mode,

so I've been playing with that one. I've not yet tried multi-disc, Because you only just, I mean, you just put it in last night. I have no idea if it would even build on your machine. Yeah. Because not only that, but there's like a lot of UI updates I did too. So it's like, we'll see. But I would love some help with it because I think, you know,

there's a couple of little nagli bugs, but the basic functionality is there. It's GPL2. It's really easy to pick up everything super documented, the architecture, the commitment, the directory structure, the commitment, the directory structure. Everything is there. So you could just sort of pick up and keep running with it, if you would like. I saw you submitted a poll request. I did, yeah. So it turns out that you mentioned kind of what it looks like,

but you have added a theming system. Yeah, yeah. So I thought I'd add a new theme for you. You told me to wait for the show. A hot dog theme. Hot dog theme. Yes, very mustard. Windows 3-1 Hot Dog stand.

I do like the, you know, I kind of like it. I do like it. Yeah, well, because I kind of decided to lean into the 80s retro theme, but then I thought some people might find that really obnoxious. So you can actually override it at runtime, or there's a little config file too where you can set the theme. That's way more obnoxious than mine and I love. Well, it's serious business when you're doing your backups, right? So you want it to be bright with warning an emergency sign. I just got it, last night I got a warning from us like,

hey, I made a PR, but don't look at it emerge at, don't look at it or merge it until the show. And also, if there is about the 80s, maybe they're like really big into Hulkomania. It's perfect. Oh, yeah. It is the Hulk colors. You're right. I never really connected those two things. Yeah, so Blu-ray is in the 90s, right?

But the optical storage is very much a retro thing. And I will full on admit I got a little tinge of delightful nostalgia the first time I took the wrapper off the spindle, open up the spindle, pulled the Blu-ray off and put it in the drive. And I held it in my hand. I'm like, this is actually fun. You just had spindles around all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of like the idea of like, you know, the style of these optical drives, you know, it seems antiquated, but at the same time, there are still massive uses for it, like really good uses. And if you get like the M-Disc type of stuff where they claim to have like a thousand years of longevity, like it is a legitimate solution for storage of data. and like especially if it's data that you're you're storing for the sake of like I might like movies or TV shows or that kind of media where you don't need access to it at all times. The solution through these kinds of disks is actually like probably even better because you're not wasting, you know, really quick access stuff. Yeah. And so now I've actually thought about this like a couple years ago and now you've convinced me that I want to actually implement this. And you know, like a jewel case, a little Blu-ray jewel case doesn't take up a lot of room. I was going to ask, are you going to do that?

Are you going to like... Or do you like a box? You could get covers or do they still make those discs where you could like draw images on the top? These ones do that, like with the inkjet like template thing. Which is so cool. Oh, man. Yeah. So Blue Vault is available at GitHub.com slash Chris Las slash Blue dash Vault.

It is vibe coded warning. I did notice. I don't think you can type R in. Yes, I fixed that. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. R or, there was like, um, Q. I don't think it was R or Q because they were grabbed by the UI for other.

I figured it must have, yeah. I was like, oh, yeah, right, of course. You know, that's, so this has been an interesting experience for me is what I really, and I, I totally if I'm wrong, Wes, but what I really got away from this, what I took away from this experience is I got the core functionality working in about 45 minutes and the UI and the edge cases and all the little things like you can't type R here is what took me six to seven hours. Yep, which is totally checking. You get the happy path done, right?

You're like, oh, okay, yes, this was, I connected the core pieces of what I needed together, got the, got it to do it. Yeah. And then you realize that there's a whole bunch of ways that you have to, like, micro adjust to make sure that that actually is smooth and usable by human. I mean, six hours is still pretty fast in considering what this is, you know? Yeah, well, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting's been just tools underneath that have been around on Linux forever. So I got lucky that way, right? I'm just using... You didn't have to build something to burn the disk.

You just have to make sure you assemble the files and... Right. Yeah, yeah. I have some real world questions. Okay. How long does it take you to burn a 50 gig disk? Yeah, how long does it take you to retrieve said disc? So it's slower than I remember.

I'll be honest with you. I expected it to be slow. I mean, and this isn't like the fastest drive either. It's a $50 external tiny thin USB drive, so they probably have faster ones. About 30 minutes, 35 minutes to burn. a full disk, but I don't really often burn a full disc. So if you're doing about a half a disk, it's about 15 minutes. And then restoring, you restore at anywhere between two megabytes a second to 30 megabytes a second,

depending on where it is on the disc, how long the disc has been reading. Sure. It's one of those things where it's, I don't know if you guys remember this, but it starts faster and then it kind of slows down over time a little bit. And it, yeah. That's true. You'll notice with the burn, because I do try to show as best as I can your transfer rate in the UI. and so you'll see it'll start pretty solid.

And then it sort of trickles down. I guess maybe as it goes wider and wider out on the disc, perhaps is what it is. It's physics, yeah. Yeah. But going through this has been an interesting, like reconnecting with physical media, thinking about documents and media that maybe I don't even need this year. And if I can buy from New Egg, you know, at three cents a gigabyte, that's probably better than any storage I can get. And then I could take some stuff off my existing network storage. and maybe squeak through the year?

I have a feature request, I think. Okay, yeah. Oh, God, I, oh, God. Oh, God. Yeah, have you tried it, yeah? Have you tried it, Brent? I've got to get you this in your hand so you can break it. But I have past experience that makes me imagine a feature request. Okay.

Are you taking audio feature requests at this time? Audio? Oh, I mean, you're submitting it via audio instead of a piece. Okay, yeah. Go ahead. I just wondered, since, you know, you just admitted that burning disks takes a little longer than transferring to hard drives, but that's okay. That's okay. There's long-term media.

So does Blue Vault have the ability to manage multiple burn devices to do the burning? Oh, that's a great idea. You can stack up five of these or something and just let them go. Maybe like once a month you pick one up for the first three months of the year or something. Multi-Plex it. I mean, after the multi-disc, you have like five of these machines doing the burning to the multi-disc. So it's technically only the whole process of one. That is a fascinating idea.

You're welcome. You need some serious USB bus power. Because these things, one of the things I've noticed is if you don't have a dedicated, powered USB hub, your built-in port might not be a. And so the burn will fail in Blue Vault, not because of Blue Vault, but because the disc doesn't have enough juice. So I had to plug it into an externally powered hub in order to get enough juice. So there's a laser. Three, four, discs when you figured that one.

It was two discs. Yeah, I ended up, like, getting real, learning real quick some of the syntax to, like, just read if there's a file system at all on the disc. Because if there's a file system at all, you can't burn to it for BDRs at least. So does it burn to the, like, the data as is? or does it have like a way for, let's say you're burning some kind of movie or TV show if it's like playable in a Blu-ray player? No, no, it's only meant for like being able to,

the guiding principle was you could put it like on another Linux box in 10 years and just drag the files off. Gotcha. Because I don't actually, I don't really have anything anymore. If you wanted to play the movie, you would be doing that

and then dragging it into jellyfin anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like if you're just trying to see how far you're going down the optical media like path, you know? Well, I started thinking of, I'm like, you know, how bad would it be to just have one of these on the TV and just put that's not that bad? You know, I started thinking about that.

I think the other thing that would be kind of a neat feature for this would be to just have it also manage archives to disk. Like if you had a bunch of like, you know, old disc sitting around, although I don't know if I would trust those as much for long-term storage, but maybe to get you through the year because it's still nice to have it organized the file system and track in the database what disk it's on and all of that. So that's another thing I was thinking about is like a larger storage

or you could have go to a network mount or something like that. So the multi-disc is new. Well, it would be interesting is if it had a way of like supposed to, would it win multi-disc mode? Could you do recursively

for like a whole folder path? Yeah. So you could like sort of have it say backup a system onto a couple of desks if you needed to. You could, yeah. And then just like have it run and piecemeal it all back together.

So they, when you start, start it, you know, you tell what mode you want to go in and you give yourself some notes. And then one of the second to final screens is there is, you can manually enter a path, or there's a file browser you can tab down to and you can browse. And whatever top level you capture, it'll back up everything underneath that top level. Okay. So you could do your home directory, too, or whatever. Yeah. And I actually was thinking that is what I'm going to do is I'm going to do one for my paper list, you know, and all that and just put it on a shelf, maybe once a quarter, once a year, something like that.

and if something goes wrong, I'll at least have that hard copy that I can refer to. And, you know, if it's in a standard file system format, then it'd be possible that if I want to recover that, say I want some document for some, you know, reason, God forbid. I don't need to restore all of it into paperless. Maybe I just go get that one file. Sure. So that's cute. That's why I like having it, even though you will sometimes have a Blu-ray where you didn't use all the space, maybe as efficiently, I think it's worth it. Yeah, I think this is a really interesting idea. And I also think it's kind of hilarious that it's vibe-coded. because that means AI caused the problem and solved the problem. That's a great point.

There is no sponsor for this segment, but we do have our great members and, of course, our boosters. So I just want to take a moment and thank them because at the beginning of the year, you know, we're sorting out the deals. It can take a little while. And there are periods that if we didn't have the support of our members, we wouldn't have a show.

And so I'm very grateful. and if you haven't signed up yet, I do still have the bootleg promo code that's a fantastic deal. It's so good, I don't say the price on air. But it gets you access to Linux Unplugs, bootleg feed, and the no ads feed you get to pick, as well as the launch bootleg feed,

which much like this has extra content that just doesn't make it in the main show. And there's always a little additional context in there too. So thank you everybody who supports us with a boost or with membership, because right now you make the show possible. We really do appreciate it. Thank you very much.

And on with the show, gentlemen. I'll see a little bag of boosts here, and we're going to start off with our baller, the Duda Bides. Now the Duda Bide sent in Rov Mick Ducks here, 22,22 sets. This old duck still got it. Stop suggesting awesome projects. I'm running out of resources. Metal Rekx seems promising. I have seen it mentioned a couple times out in the wild, but didn't bother.

deploying it. And now because of Linux unplugged, I have to try it. All right, the dude. You know, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised you could set it up and let it just run for a week and then come back to it. And when you got time to tinker with it, because let it run and discover.

I was over the last couple of days, realizing that, so I've got, you know, these stupid mesh APs. It's great, whatever. But IoT devices in particular are so dumb. And they will really lock into one particular AP.

The decision in a mesh AP network happens on the client side. And if the client side isn't willing to move nodes, it won't. And so if the stupid IoT device that's way far away from the AP decides to connect to that AP, you basically have to take the mesh nodes offline and make things forcibly readjust mess. So I was dealing with that. And it was really interesting to watch Net Alert X kind of catch up. Oh, this has moved over here.

Oh, this device has changed over here. Oh, yeah, right. Good job, Net AlertX. You nailed it. So it's worth it, and you can just let it run for a bit. And then come back around to it. Well, adversary 17 comes in with a spaceballs boost. That, of course, is 12,345 sets.

So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Adversary says, I have a lot of similar ability for monitoring within my Unified Dream Machine, but I still might set this up. Good fine, Mr. Fisher. Hey, I think what you just said also works for this. You know, yeah. I would love to hear more feedback on the Unify stuff.

If our audience likes the Unify stuff. I don't know how much it can pull in, but it did seem like that a plug-in that could also, like if you ended up wanting the Unified data in NetAler. Unit butter and jelly, Westpane. Mm-hmm. Ooh, our buddy, our pal Gene Bean comes in with the Rowadugs. In response to Olympia Mike and the Nixbook project and the licensing question,

Gene makes a great point, which we should have mentioned. Keep in mind that if you have contributors and don't also use a CLA or contributor license agreement from day one, you can't change the license of the existing code later without sign off from all prior contributors. Gene being saying go for the CLA, something to think about. He's right. And it's also just worthwhile, you know, thinking about the licensing kind of early on and up front is worthwhile. Yeah, I agree. It is definitely a good point.

Thank you, Gene. Yeah, and not having a license, and some people don't, like create a project, don't put a license at all and that just causes massive craziness. That's, I think, kind of where he's at, he's getting popular enough now where it's like people are asking rather consistently, what's the license here? So they know how to proceed.

Mike, let us know what you end up doing. Well, Odyssey, Wester boosted in a couple boosted here for a total of 6,2006 Satoshi's. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes. It turns out they all say, happy new year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Year of the Linux sesta.

Thank you, Odyssey. Nice to hear from you. Peg Dots here with 6,66s. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. Well, I'm guessing that Brent doesn't work for Next Cloud anymore. So what's he doing now? Is he a traveling salesman in his bang bus? As a J.B member, I'd be interested to know how much financial value added is compared to the boost in streaming. Oh, these are okay. So we've got two questions here, three questions. I know that the functions, the Bitcoin value fluctuate. Difficult to put in numbers, but interested in a rough idea. So think of it. Okay, so I'll answer that one first.

So, like, so this week where we have... I think what the question was, how does boosting and streaming compare to memberships in terms of supporting the show or something like that? Yeah, I think on average, there's still, we still probably get significantly more support through the membership mechanism on average. And so the way we can, and the thing about that is that's we look at as, okay, that's the revenue we can plan on. It's kind of a consistent base line. Yeah. And then the boost is like, okay, that's like when, you know, you get a bonus, you did a good, you did it. And that's like the extra stuff that goes directly to all of us because the show through the memberships is, you know, it's barely paying the bills.

And so it's not really equivalent. One sort of serves one function and one serves. And we're very, very lucky it worked out that way because really since COVID, the ad market has just been destroyed. But really in the last few years, it's perhaps turning around, but it's still very slow. And one thing that I think is very true is as the podcast market has grown, the sponsors are looking at different types of shows. and different demographics than they were a few years ago when we were sort of in our heyday of, you know, every spot was sold out.

And it's just how it goes is, you know, a podcast today is a much different beast. Usually has a celebrity name attached to it if it's very successful. Yeah, the ecosystem around it has changed. The ecosystem within has changed. Yeah. Blue people and what their marketing towards has changed. Yeah.

And so for us, it's like the two things are very symbiotic and used differently. We really do appreciate both the support. And I know it's, you know, it's the thing is, is like, it's like I've kind of made the equivalency with Linux magazines. It's like it's a very niche thing. There's a core audience that loves it. The fundamental economic model might not actually be viable with the direct commercial market

because the scale of advertising on the internet now requires essentially millions. And so it's where these kinds of direct audience supported things really make a difference because it's then made possible by the very niche that's interested in it. And I don't think like the Linux magazines could have survived without something. They didn't have anything like that. And so, you know, they went the way of the dinosaur for the most part. Good question. Oh, and then Brentley, do you have any comment on the next cloud stuff?

Are you, you know, besides being a full-time J-Ber, I'm sure you do other things as well. I don't know. Yeah, I was a good guess on the next cloud part. I haven't been an X clouder since about, I don't know, May of last year and have been basically, what would you call it, Chris, vagabonding since then, doing a bunch of J.B. Projects there for a long time. We rescued, I don't know if you heard about it, rescued this crazy van that's still giving me projects on the daily basis, it seems. You're kind of restoring that.

You know, something else we don't talk about with you, Brent, too, is you are a very handy guy. Brent, like, if Brent needs to work for a couple of days, you know, there's friends and family that have projects where they need somebody who can go on site and do a lot of really good work with their hands, like good, intricate masonry type work. I don't know. Is that what is called? What is it called, Brent, that kind of work?

Like, I don't know, general construction work. I'm kind of a generalist, I would say. Yeah, but you're a fancy boy one. You know. I have decades of experience, and I have high standards that most people don't have. I guess, right? Yeah, craftsman. I think that's the word I was looking for.

Basically, just yesterday I was doing that. I had an uncle near here who was like, hey, I need some electrical work done, but I don't know what I'm doing. And last time I did it, I'm really screwed it up. So can you come over and fix all my mistakes that I've done for the last decade? And so we did that. And it worked out really well. And that's like when you come over to my place.

The other thing you have to know is Brent has a hard time saying no to those kind of requests. That's true, too. Yeah. Because he's a kind and generous person. Basically, I've been chasing, like, hanging out with people I love and chasing happiness instead of financial stuff. That leaves, you know, my back account sad, but my soul quite happy. He's saying hanging out with people he loves, but he's on the opposite coast. I don't understand.

Sharing my time with people I love. Message received on that one. Okay. All right. All right. Wes, you want to take Mr. Facial hair? Yes, the facial hair comes in with 6,000 sats. Make it so.

I wanted to shine some light on an area where open source and Linux are doing quite well. And it's tabletop gaming. Really? For example, the D&D game I run uses NextCloud for content hosting, Foundry VTT for our virtual table, and a self-hosted Jitzy for playercoms. Just wanted to get your thoughts on this and see if you all had any fun D&D stories. Facial hair, why do you suppose this is? What has attributed to this phenomenon? And how can we replicate it?

Thank you for the report. That's great. I mean, there's a lot of great tools, and you need to accomplish a certain set of things to have a good game going. Why not solve them with open source? You ever play any D&D? Yeah, I like D&D.

It's been a while, but I've played many, not, I mean, not like, never like, super consistent, but I've had many fun D&D experiences over the years. Michael, you ever do any D&D? I've never played D&D. No. Brent, what about you? I have never participated.

However, I've watched a lot of famous people play in the last couple months. Oh, right. And have been invited several times. but I feel unprepared, let's say, daunted. Well, I mean, I hope they don't invite you to be the DM. No, no, no, no, by far not.

However, I still feel a way out of my league. I feel like this is an opportunity that we could do a collab with like Jewish doing, like, you know, first timers doing B&D. Like pair up first timer with a pro or something. I want to learn enough where I could just do like commentary on the streams. Like, oh, he moves over here and knows this. You know, I don't know if it's more.

golf or if it's more wrestling for D&D, but. I think it's more, I think it's more golf maybe. Yeah, yeah. They have to, they have their own dialogue, so you don't want to interact too much. But there's actually a few, like, I haven't done, like, play D&D, but I've seen, like, random videos of people playing D&D because there's a couple shows that are on YouTube where it's just, like, a bunch of comedians playing D&D. And that's, that's entertaining stuff.

Yeah, for sure. What's fun, too, right, is they have, like, all kinds of different types of games at this point. One of the first ones I did was actually a Star Wars theme one that a roommate ran. And it's kind of a new roommate. And I came home and another roommate was working at a donut shop. And so they had all these like, you know, like end of the day donuts. So they'd pushed some of the, like taking a table out of a room and pushed it in with the main kitchen table. And the center was filled with donuts.

And I was like, coming home and I was like, what is that? That sounds like an awesome introduction. Yeah, it was a great introduction. Not bad at all. I would say if we want to do a JBD&D at some point, maybe a fun stream on the holidays or when we're all feeling like we don't have too much work, probably our buddy Jason would host that for us. Oh, that'd be wonderful.

Oh, that would be great. He is a professional D&Der, so he would organize that for us if we wanted. I might not surprise. And he's listening right now, so hey, Jason. Hello, Jason. All right, thank you everybody who supported the show, the members and the boosters. Thank you for helping us, help you, help us all. When you look at our SAT streamers, 22 of you streamed sats as you listen,

you collectively stacked 25,340 sets. When you combine that with our boosters, it's a humble but appreciated 85,267 sats. This can be a thing from time to time because the last two episodes, it was, the sun was shining. Crazy. We got sunburn. Just, yeah, we got, we still have, we still have our skin peeling. You guys really blew us away. What does tend to happen is we kind of go into famine.

We sort of feast and then we have famine for a bit. Yeah. So if you've been waiting to support the show, now it could be a good time during the famine, we really do appreciate it. It's really easy to boost to something like Fountain FM. In fact, they're making it easier and easier, guys. It's getting crazy what they're doing with the new features. There's a whole self-hosted platform out there with things like AlbiHub

and lots of good apps at podcast apps.com. Then you get additional features like transcripts. You get the cloud chapters. You get notifications within 90 seconds when a new episode is. out. Additionally, there's all kinds of new things coming all the time like live stream support and more. So check it out at podcast apps.com. All right. Now, the first pick this week, I think, Bradley, you spotted this one and for a good reason, right? This is Copia, I think is maybe how you say it, a cross-platform backup tool

for the various operating systems out there with some really nice features. Yeah, I've been diving into Copia. It was mentioned a couple times by some of our listeners as a response to our, you know, several scattered backup episodes that we've done in the past. And you could consider this one of them. Yeah, here's your mini segment for, you know, give us some feedback on what we're doing wrong. But I had a friend who ran into a situation where their laptop was stolen out of their apartment

while they were there sleeping just overnight. And it turns out that person also had a thesis that was due in a week and that was their only copy of pretty much all of the stuff they've created in the last couple years. Somehow is a crazy tour I won't tell here. They got it back like a random stranger came and gave the laptop back. I don't know really the whole story there. But anyway, so that situation got much better. But it got me thinking, well, I think my duty in this world is to help my friends with

their backups. And I've been trying to do that for more than a decade. But it sounds like there's something to do here. So I wanted to set up a backup system for her that just kind of ran in the background. She never, ever, ever had to think about. And if this kind of situation happened, I can just kind of step in and help out. And copia sort of fit the bill on this one because usually I would reach for a Linux-only tool because I only do support for friends who run Linux.

But she was because her laptop was stolen, given a laptop by her parents, which is a Windows laptop. And she was like, yeah, I might just use it as is. So I figured, okay, I need something that's cross-platform. And Copia seemed to fit the bill there because the interface is just the same on a bunch of different platforms, the three ones we care about. And it also is serverless, which means it could just kind of run on its own on a laptop, which is all that this friend in particular and many other friends I can think of and family members have. So I kind of started diving into Copia as maybe the next way I can. can help a bunch of people. And if I can just suggest one tool for all of them, that would make my life easier. So the things I loved about Copia is cross-platform, as I mentioned. It seems really

quite modern. It's written in Go, which is nice and fast. But also, there's a lot of people who've been contributing to it. I think I saw 170 contributors, which is something I always care about. But there's some cool stuff here. So it can back up to, you know, Amazon S3 and backblaze and those kind of things by default. But one thing I thought our little crew here would really love is it can also, if you have R clone installed, it can also control R clone as sort of an interface to R clone and support a lot of what R clone can do as a back end. So the options for backends is plenty, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a back end

that doesn't work for you. And it just runs really well. The other thing I liked is the interface is super configurable if you want it to be, but it can also be fairly straightforward. So it's a nice blend for someone who's not that tech savvy who has it running, but then I can just pop in and make some adjustments whenever I need to. That sounds like a low-key compliment, but this is the QA guy over here, right? So that means what the interface wasn't riddled with a bunch of obvious bugs or defects or silly things.

Well, I found one or two, but they weren't critical. Of course. Of course. But I would say give it a try. I've been using Borg for myself for the last couple of years, and this actually is getting me to start thinking if I should switch to it permanently for my own stuff, too. So not only does it have support for a lot of the cloud storage providers, we've all heard of, but then, as you might expect, it also has support for any web DAV or SFTP,

or like Brent said, Arklone support too, which really opens it up. So that's pretty nice because, you know, you could have one person you're helping that uses their Dropbox, and another person you're helping uses their Google Cloud Storage, but it's the same interface and option sitting on top of that. You don't have to keep learning new tools. Yeah, it's Apache 2. It is the license on that. And yes, it does save everything encrypted locally

before it sends them up to the cloud provider. Nice one, Brent. Good, good find. Sorry to hear about that story with the laptop. That's awful. Yeah, and it's really a thanks to the audience for suggesting this one. I had it noted for Future Reference and the Future is Now. Aha, isn't it funny? Later becomes now.

Well, since I'm a nice, I was talking, you know, blue rays and whatnot, you could also just go a little simpler with something called Power ISO. It's not a free software app, but it is available for Linux, and you can probably guess what this does. It's a application for burning your disks and making your file systems and all of that, creating virtual drives or bootable disks or whatever you want. I think people even use it somehow to make Windows via USB boot disks. I couldn't speak to that. But it's an application that very much invokes a 90s design. And in fact, the screenshot is from a Vista era, Windows desktop.

So that's how you know it's good, right? Because if you're dealing with something that burns this, you want to have a retro look. That's why I went with an 80s 2y, and they have a very 90s or maybe early Otts, Vista theme. But they just released a new version on October 24th, 2025, so the project is still very active and is free. And works. Try it up. So this is, you know, more akin to like the typical thing. you might have back in the day to burn your diss and stuff.

Well, I think I have a pick from the chat room. They suggested a project, Chris, when you were talking about your blue vault, that is this Teleco project. Oh, Teleco! Yeah. It looks like it does a bunch of, like, well, I don't quite know. Does anybody else know it better than I do? Because I'm just going to wing it.

Teleco is a KDE project. Yeah. And it's basically like, it's more of an inventory system. It's not really like a database tracking thing. but it's like a manual inserting of like keeping track of basically anything you want some information about so you could you know use it to track your documents but also in a sense of like labeling everything or you know your music could be associated or your books could be associated like all sorts of stuff it's more of a just a overall collections of anything so like if you have

you know digital comic books or something you could use it as a keeping track of that sort of stuff but it's more of a manual setup. Yeah, I did seriously consider it. I have it like installed on all my machines and I was playing right. Really? Yeah. Nice. So thanks to Swami for that one.

But I got kind of burned out on the manual part of it. Yeah. It's worth checking out though if people are interested. So I'll toss a link to that in the show notes too. But Wes, that wasn't what you had up your sleeve, was it? It was not. No. So, okay, well, you were getting the coding done or the vibing done, whichever it was.

I was trying to test it, right? And so I was getting it to build, checking it did build on my machine. I wanted to try it. There was a few things we had to fix, in particular, some tests. I'm betting you probably didn't have a stash of Blu-rays. No. And I was using this laptop, and it doesn't even have an optical drive. No.

So I go, I finally get it built, and I go and run it. And the first thing it does is say, hey, buddy, you don't have an optical drive. I'm not doing anything. Yeah. After you had a problem with that, by the way, that inspired me to add drive detection now. So it accommodates all kinds of different systems with different drive setups. Oh, nice.

So you did inspire new feature. Okay, good. And so I was like, okay, well, I could always spin up a virtual machine. That'd be pretty easy. But I was just curious, like, well, how hard is it to just emulate one of these, right? And so I found CDEMU, CDEMU. Well, and it looks like as recent as of July 8th, 2018, version 3.2 is that. Yeah, it has a website that's appropriately old-looking, though, right?

I think you'll see. It definitely fits to 90s. What is with all these different tools having such a retro thing? I don't know. I leaned into it too. I like it. And I mean, it's like a super simple little UI. They have a GUI for it.

So you run a Damon that does the emulation. Is it a towee? No. Oh. Oh, there's a, well, there's a CLI app that's a client for it. The disappointment in your place. But they have like a nice little like classic. Oh, an actual GUI.

Yeah. Like a real GUI. Like a real GUI. Oh. Wow. That's fancy. That is really fancy. It actually looks GTK.

perhaps? Yeah. I would suspect so. Yeah. Okay. But what's cool is it's open source. Yeah. That is cool.

Of course. Yeah. No, but you can... And it still works, even though it hasn't had an update in a while, right? Obviously. Oh, no, actually, some of this stuff on GitHub has been updated a little more recently, at least...

GPL2. So it does both sides. So not only can you load in ISOs and it looks like you have a CD in there, right? Yeah, that's nice. And, like, even it'll just present an empty one, but you can create blanks. and it shows up as writable. Oh. So I was able to test your program end to end

without having to drive at all. Meanwhile, I'm over here buying 10 packs. And then it leaves an ISO file on the file system that I could then mount and check that it got all the files. You could have told a guy this, I don't know, the other day before I bought another pack of Blu-Rays for more testing. So you should see if you can get the LM to make us some NixOS integration test, right?

With that run the full thing and try to burn because there's a NixOS service for, for it. You do need to have the full testing for the discs. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, it is sort of saved a little bit of time, but you still need to burn and waste anyway. What hurts the most is like when it starts

a burn and fails almost immediately, and I get like one stripe. And then you can never use the disc again. And I've used like 400 kilobytes of 50 gigs, and I'm like, you got to be kidding. What about, uh, have you looked at the price in terms of like gigabytes to, you know, like the discs, um, or like

rewritable Blu-rays? Yeah, that's a idea. I was thinking much like cold storage, but re-a-d-a-d-a-old would be handy, too. This is pretty neat. C-D-E-M-U. And it is at c-d-E-M-U.org, we'll put a link in the show notes. I'm going to look at this Wes after the show. I wish you would have told me about earlier, but

I'm glad to know about it now. I can't believe that. It's so stupid, too. I guess, you know, learn and it's what it really comes down to, of course, is there's just a lot of little parameters. You've got to pass the burn command. And as you said, right, it kind of attuned you more to doing like test-driven development. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was one of the things I was telling Wes is, as I started doing this, I'm like, well, I better just figure out a way to test this because I can't, I can't every time I need to run through this thing burn a disk. So I had to create a bunch of little unit tests for individual functionality so it could test everything I could before I actually had to burn. I feel like this also perfectly describes your different approaches to solving a problem. This would always be the West approach. And yeah, well, Chris, physical media, right? Yeah. Well, if anybody wants to take a look at it, you should be able to just pick right up and get

working with it. I'd love somebody to help me some of the basic features and run through it. Or if anybody wants to triage PRs or issues as they come in, I'd appreciate any of that, and we'll have it linked in the show notes. You know, it's going to happen. Do you need disc donations? Maybe, eventually. Well, I bought another pack, so it'll be good for a little while. I haven't actually backed anything up yet. I mean, I haven't testing backed things up, but, you know. And every time I wanted to use, like, unique stuff so I could test that the database search was working. So it's like a lot of me copying files off the NAS to my local system and waiting for all that to copy and then waiting for it to burn.

Oh, my goodness. Software development is ridiculous. I don't know how anybody does this crap. I'll tell you what. All right, well, that's it for us. We'd love to hear from you. Of course, you can send us a boost or go to Linuxunplug.com slash contact. You could also make it a Tuesday on a Sunday and join us live.

The mumble room is kicking right now. We have our live chat. Of course, we do this on Sundays at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. Wes, you got like a hot power tip for him if they want any extra metadata or context around. We talked about things.

You got any hot tips, Wes? Oh, yeah. How about like a magical JSON file that lets you skip around via the use of chapters? Cloud chapters, too, right? So it's last decade's hype word built into the chapters. What it really means is if we screw up, we can fix it and you get the fix. That's right. Yeah, you don't have to download a new MP3.

You just get the new fix. Which is great for us. Yeah. But better than that, we've got transcripts. That is. So you can scrub through the whole thing. If you can't hear us and you just want to get a sense of what we said in the episode, you want to index it, you want to search it. You know, we've never made a call out for.

And if anybody's looking for a 2026 software project, it'd be really neat to make those searchable. Have a front end that sits on top of them. Every transcript is linked in the RSS feed sitting out at an endpoint that you could pull in. And if anybody wants to make a searchable database out of that so people can find keywords, what we talked about. That'd be really helpful tool. We'd really appreciate that. Links to everything we talked about today. Yep, those are on our website.

You know that. Linuxonplug.com slash 649er. That'll get you the links for what we talked about today. Lots of great episodes over there. In fact, you might even say an entire back catalog of a whole 648 episodes, if you can believe it. I couldn't believe it. Lots of great shows over at, well, at least a few good shows over at jupiter Broadcasting.com.

We always appreciate to check those out, too. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program, and you're going to see us right back here next week.