LINUX Unplugged - 675: Sloppy Agent Roasting

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Wes' brother's PC is toast, making this the perfect moment to switch him to Linux. If our ambitious plan doesn’t scare him away first.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:Web Boost — Send us a boost via sats or USD💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMJupiter Garage SWAGAppleTalk 1985-2026 Memorial StickerSorry, I only open regular files StickerClanker Therapy Session 1 - Member's Stream — We’re taking the hype out of agents and showing the workflows that actually help. Join us for a hands-on walk-through of our Hermes multi-agent setup, how we let agents manage systems safely, and how we introduce them to a new Home Assistant instance without letting them run wild.Clanker Therapy Session 1 Highlights - YouTubeStoryboarder — Storyboarder makes it easy to visualize a story as fast you can draw stick figures. Quickly draw to test if a story idea works. Create and show animatics to others. Express your story idea without making a movie.MCP-NixOS — Model Context Protocol for NixOSSpud Router — An open-source router-on-a-stick that you can manage from a browser, a terminal CLI, or directly from your AI agentsLe Potato AML-S905X-CCMacSurf — A modern web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 PowerPC. Real CSS3, ES5 JavaScript, native HTTPS — built with CodeWarrior on the Carbon API.Karpathy's llm-wikiHermes llm-wiki SKILL.mdcamply - the campsite finder ⛺️ — a tool to find campsites at sold out campgrounds through sites like recreation.govPick: OpenTogetherTube — Enjoy YouTube together. Real-time synchronized playback. Optional voting system. Dark theme. No sign up required. All Open Source. It's never been easier to watch videos together.opentogethertube on GitHubPick: TypeType — Privacy-respecting video platform to watch Youtube.TypeType on GitHubPick: metube — Self-hosted web UI for yt-dlp, for downloading media from YouTube and dozens of other sites.

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Save up to 52% with the code podcast at grooens.co. That's code podcast at g-r-un-s.com. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, after a family member's Windows install ate itself this week, we're donning our capes and swooping in to save the day.

And naturally, we're going to overcomplicate everything. Coming up, our plan to switch Wes's brother over to Linux. And then we're going to round out the show with some great boost, picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hey. Oh, hey, hello. That is a great crowd.

Hello, up there in the quiet, listening to. And if you'd like to join our Mumble Room, we've got the details on our website. Low latency live, OPEIS audio stream. It is fantastic. Also, good morning to our friends over at Define Networking. Go to Define.net slash unplugged and check out Managed Nebula. The easiest way to build a fast, resilient, private network on the open source Nebula platform, We love, we use.

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That is defined. Dot net slash unplugged. Go redefine your VPN experience today. And a big thank you to Defined for sponsoring this year podcast. Define.net slash unplugged. Well, we just have a quick housekeeping, but we wanted to give a shout out to our buddy Noah, who is about to reach 500 episodes.

Impressive. Yes, Noah program going strong. And there's a lot of them. celebrating and I just wanted to help spread the word if you are in the St. Paul area in Minneapolis on Tuesday, August 4th, 2026, they're going to have a episode 500 party. So keep an ear out or an eye out on the Asanoa show notes for more deets when they have them. Gosh, I wish we could make it. I know. But if anyone out there can do give a hello from us. And tell us how it went. So this is why I'm giving a shout because deep down I would love to go. But, you know, I looked it up. It'd be about

$500 in a two-way flight or three days driving each way for 10 hours, which I'm considering, but the problem is you probably need to organize some more around that. We're also going to be like getting back just like the week before from our trip to Brent's. Well, if you drive to my place, that's the first day, done. You just keep going. I had that thought, but I have the wife and I'll have a Wes. So I got to, you know, I can't just bail on them. But I thought, like, I could leave from Brent's, come down in through Montana, right and then just head on over.

I really did think about it. I really would like to go because 500 episodes is a huge deal. It's very rare in podcasting. So if you can make it, go give him a shout. Maybe buy him a beer. Don't let him buy you the beer. He'll try. Convince them to do, you know, some more so we can make it for the next day.

Yeah, there you go. Maybe we'll make it for 600 or something like that. All right. So this is one of those situations where every now and then a window of opportunity opens up. one person's misfortune is the podcast opportunity. That is right, yeah. And we are here to take full advantage. So tell us what happened, Wes, what happened?

Yeah, okay, so my brother, Alan, he has a Linux laptop, but his primary computer is a Windows desktop. He uses it for a lot of things. Some of that's gaming. We can talk more about that. But, you know, as you do, you're watching a video with VLC, beloved media player that works just fine on Windows. Frequent use case, yeah.

Yeah. Full screen. Yeah. It crashed. VLC locked up or? Yeah. Oh. And so then he hits Alt F4.

Sure. You know, like VLC stops responding. Got to get out of it. Wow. And then the entire machine froze. And so, okay. Force a hard reset, get it rebooted, start looking into it. Shows up login screen.

Seems everything's okay. Boot seems normal. Okay. But after login, a blank screen with just the mouse cursor. Oh. No desktop. No start menu, no taskbar. No Explorer.exc?

Yes. Does he have a terminal though? That's all you need? No, seemingly. So this is where it was kind of weird because like when you open up the task manager and check things out, that worked. Okay. And that became his main way to control the system. So because you can run from the task manager.

Yes. And so he ended up doing that. Wow. So it's like his launcher. Yes. It even claimed that Explorer was running. But and so basically he had to go just use it as his launcher. As he said, he basically had 90% of a computer because he could like play video still.

He could launch stuff. He just had to do it to the task manager, and there wasn't one of way. I think he's doing some good, it's a little bit of terminal. It sounds like, it sounds like something happened, maybe like a GPU driver glitch or something. And Windows really, really messed up and ate itself, kind of. Yeah, and this is where you're like, okay, this seems recoverable, right? Yeah. Big props to my brother.

Like, he definitely entered the like, okay, I can, I'll fix this. I can troubleshoot, right? Okay. And Windows kind of tore that down piece by piece. So, of course, he, like, restarted Explorer, ran some system scans, even rebooted into safe mode. That did show the desktop. Okay.

Oh. So, like, the GPU was kind of working. He did get some advice to, like, maybe uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver. I was wondering, because it's starting to sound more and more like graphics. So he did that. Even tried creating a new admin account. That was another thing of, like, go make yourself a separate account

because it could be like a user profile sort of thing. Totally, yeah. Well, trying to make the new admin account just led to a permanent getting ready screen. Oh. Didn't solve anything, didn't finish. Oh. So then that was just sort of another broken profile. So something's going on with user creation.

Yeah. Even in safe mode. Yes, even in safe mode. So at that point, we kept trying a few other things. Like we, you know, I had him go get like a terminal in the PE support environment. And we did like an SFC scan and check the disc. And, you know, did a few of the things that we could find any guide or, you know, ask the LM sort of like, what are the best strategies here. I'm guessing at this point you're helping remotely.

Is this where you're? Okay. That's a special kind of challenge too. Yeah. Especially it's not a daily Windows driver. No. Mostly only whenever I need it very rarely for my own task. We do something on the show, honestly.

Did you Windows MCP? Is that what happened here? There you go. No, actually, I was going to say that that could be one thing that if we were going to really have to get into it. But that was going to have to be set up from the sort of weirdly compromised environment. Yeah, hilariously, though, the solution there, right? You set up Windows MCP.

He can give him a telegram chat and he just launches all of his programs from telegram. Right? It might still be the best way to use Windows. Yeah, that's true. So we kept trying things, nothing really solving it and figured, okay, well, these modern Windows systems, they have a reset option.

Yeah. Right? Like it won't wipe your data, but you do have to reinstall programs kind of rolls Windows back to a fresher Windows install. That's the move, I think. Yeah. And so being safe and all that kind of like got things ready. He had a USB drive.

and did some backups onto that and some of the critical stuff just to make sure if something went wrong, nothing was going to be lost. Right. Wise. Go try to do a reset.

Unable to download cloud install. What? Network problem? Nope. Network was working great because he was actually, he transferred some files over the network. Oh, right, okay.

Wow. Actually, he had to because, of course, he goes to get a new USB drive, right? And as it comes, it's installed a fat 32. Ran new USB drive? Or maybe Windows formated it that way. In this year?

It was a new drive. Oh, wow. Yeah, so of course, then he had some video files to backup, which were bigger than 4 gigableness. Oh, no. So it was being in the whole thing. That's so we knew the network was working because he had to use the network to transfer those files on. Wow. I bet it's for Mac compatibility or something.

Yeah, right? I mean, compatibility is kind of weird. Huh, geez. So he's like, okay, so he's having to figure out how to transfer files over the network without actually having the Windows desktop. So he's having to launch these individual elements through task manager. And he got that done actually without much of my help, which I was surprised with it. Wow. I mean, that is dedication.

Some people would just nope out at this point. I'm impressed. Okay. All right. So, okay, I have not done this process for a very long time, but when you're trying to do the restore, do you have to, like, log into a Microsoft account, I imagine? Oh, that's a good question. No, I'm not sure, actually.

I think we maybe could have also. Is it restoring from, like, a local partition? I know, I think some setups have that capability. Yeah, okay. So, but it, it says, what now? It can't restore it? It couldn't do the restore process? Correct.

How can it not do the restore process? Wipe the drive, at least. Just reimage it. I don't know. Like, there's a way, right? And I think we tried a few things because, like, in theory, it did have the ability to talk to it. Maybe there was a login that, like, he missed or something.

But, I mean, you're doing it from a pretty basic sort of environment, right? Like, this is Windows after all. And again, you know, not a Windows expert and also was remote. And we didn't even do, like, a high bandwidth. Like, most of this was just done over some sessions. We were both on the, on telegram. So we weren't even on a call or anything. So I probably could have provided better support.

I will be the first. I was doing OBS tech support over chat. It's sort of a similar thing back and forth. Oh, yeah, try this. Yeah, okay. So probably like if we maybe on the other computer, download a Windows ISO and then, you know, we could have reinstalled.

Obviously, that was going to be one plan or try to do a reset that way. But all of the default guidance paths were basically failing one after another. And your brother, Alan, must be losing faith in Windows one moment after another as he goes through this process. Yeah.

And he never really loved it. It was just, you know, he knew how to use it. He does game a lot. Yeah. Gaming. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But he's been Linux curious.

Obviously, like, you know, he's listened to some of the show. He, I talk about Linux with him all the time, obviously. And he does have a laptop that does have Linux on it. So he's been a big book. You know what? Do you remember what distro is on the laptop right now? Oh, good question. Min?

I was going to say Mint is what my recollection was. Yeah. Or maybe just a bunch of you. Okay. All right. So he's not totally new to it. Open to the idea, assuming the workflow, for gaming. gaming is the big one and

some dev. Yeah, and there's another, yeah, he's been experimenting with doing some Python development, so having something that doesn't make that overly crazy is not a bad idea. Yeah. And then another bit of compatibility is he does use some of the office suite. Oh.

Primarily, and this is actually the kind of the toughest Bart is PowerPoint. But he doesn't use it, he's not in the position of like, I got to make this deck that I exchange for this work reason or whatever. He actually uses it more. as a creative process for like storyboarding and kind of like outlining. A tool he's familiar with.

Yes. And so that's actually another area that it turns out he might be open to using something else. So it was an area to look at. I guess there's some like there's Lynn Office, which is sort of a streamlined setup to run office in a Windows VM and like try to make it as smooth as possible. There's a lot of great web presentation apps now too. There are, yeah.

So I think somewhere between he may just like lean into using something like Kaden Live for a video editing app and doing things in there. Because a lot of it I guess was some doing some animation. and stuff. Or, as you say, like, there are now a lot of

other alternative presentation apps. And actually I found a specific one. I couldn't tell if it was open source or not,

but it was like a new storyboarding app that had a Linux environment. Cool. It's like specifically for storyboarding. So it was interesting

to see. And, of course, there are even if you do want office, like, even besides just Librey offers, there are multiple

WPS. There's like, I don't know, I don't need that, so I'm not an expert. But just looking and checking still are quite a number.

of different office suites. Some with more or less like compatibility or the ribbon and all of that. They're going to have users for a long time. Yeah. So what I was discovering is maybe any taste from Microsoft is now being slowly beaten out of him as part of this procedure. But for whatever the reason or he's already using a lot of open source software.

So that's as we like to say kind of the first little seedling step that you can try and plant when you're doing a conversion like this. He even joked with me and this is where it started. It was like, well maybe it's maybe it's try my I just pipe it and install it. Yeah, there we go.

There's the window. That's the window. Yes. I didn't, I wasn't trying to push. I mean, I've suggested it in the past, of course. I've, I always mentioned that protons getting really good. But that was a change. You know, I can understand it because you just, if you're following the tech news a little bit,

you do keep hearing about advances with Linux gaming. I think that's in the general tech news. And then talking to you, I'm sure he's gotten some pretty good insights into that. Well, in the steam machine, too, right? That's a huge boon for Linux gaming. And, you know, he does play a lot of games, but he's not playing like the crazy anti-sheet, AAA ones. We did some light-round checking.

You might do another pass of going to ProtonDB and checking things out. And for the most part, they all seem like on lock. Is he open to a different distribution than the one that's on his laptop? Yeah, so I think that. And actually, this was pretty fun because he went and did his own little survey of asking a few of the different L-LM,

but he asked Gemini and Cloth. maybe another, to sort of see, well, what should I be running? Yeah, yeah. What was the general consensus? We got Pop OS. Okay.

We got Nobara, which is based on Fedora and kind of aimed at gaming and content creation. And then we got Linux Mint. And then I think those were from Gemini, and I think Claude brought in Bazite. Okay.

Fair enough. What I don't hear in there is standard Fedora. I didn't even hear a standard Ubuntu and I didn't hear a Nix OS. No, no. and then so, of course, I suggest NixOS, and then he goes and asks the bot about it.

And what's it say? It's actually pretty negative on the idea. Oh, really? Well, it's like, you know, it violates the file system hierarchy and that could break stuff, and it might make it harder to run the wine stuff. He does also use fruity loops and make music and stuff, so there's a, you know, he doesn't use any crazy VSTs, I don't think,

but that's another factor of potential. I mean, that is kind of fair. That is fair criticism. Yeah, and then he mentioned, you know, You have to edit. You can't just app to install or DNF install. I think is the example of you. Well,

I think that's an answer to myself. Well, yes, but you know, you have to go edit this text file in an obscure configuration. Again, it sounds really hard.

Sounds super hard. Yeah. So he was getting some mixed messaging, let's just say. That's fair. I could see it. I could definitely, from that perspective too, right?

Yeah. And here's the key part, I think, some extra context. There's Nix-O-S. and then there's what we've been doing lately, which is NixOS plus an LLM. Yeah,

sort of LLM generated NixOS. Right. LLM guided Nix OS. And that is, I think, so, like, I think that take he got was basically assuming, this is a whole new pitch.

Yes, because the take he got was totally calibrated for like the old days, where you had, like, if he was going to do it, and it didn't necessarily know that I'm willing to be a support

and help him and onboard and all that kind of stuff, which I am. But in the only, old days, like, you're going to have to go figure out the NixOS Wiki and go look at a bunch of examples.

Yeah, like, you want a new user to figure out a NXOS config? Of course, no. I'm like, well, no, let's have, let's get a NixOS config crafted for him. And then he can interface with that and have a bot maintain it. Teach him how to use it, update it, engage as much or as little as he wants. Ask about it.

Beautiful. And then so that I realized was like, ah, because it's, if he was just making like a living room PC or it was primarily, gaming and there wasn't a bunch else, then like Bazite could be great or something like that. There's a lot of good options. If he was just doing Steam. Yes.

But it felt like he also kind of expressed, right, he'd just been burned by the computer. He wanted something that just worked, right, that like he had a computer he could use. Because at this point it's been like over a week where he's kind of been in this like semi-workable computer state. I don't think he's been playing any games. It's just like it's not. It used to be using a Nvidia card. Yes.

And, you know, my personal experience is nothing has been as rock solid as Nix. would stick into the GPU driver and making sure everything works. So it just felt like to answer the brief, like if you allow the combo of LLM plus Nix, you get something, because Nix is kind of like

an operating system toolkit. And if you have something that can help a new person orchestrate that. Yeah. Put the pieces they want together with the toolkit without having to be an expert

in how to compose the toolkit yourself. And maybe that unlocks something that is otherwise maybe not quite out there. So you could almost envision a world where you set up somebody like your brother with a system base Nix config. And then an icon in the toolbar that just like you click this and it just opens open code. I like that idea. And then anything he wants to do, he just goes to that and it changes he wants to make. And maybe you know, pre-configure it to you so it knows how to like read some initialization stuff.

So it has the context. Like here's where the config is. Here's how the system's managed. You know, agents MD that says this is what you are. It's where you config lives. Yeah, I've been playing with recently, like, an expert NixOS agent, basically. It's like, here's all the stuff I normally run. And, oh, yeah, by the way, there's this official like MCP over here,

so you can learn all about NICS if you want. And don't make mistakes, basically. Good. You got to include that. Yeah, yeah, that's an important one. I mean, this is, I mean, I know, I think a lot of people would be listening going from Windows to Nix. It's kind of a crazy jump. Yeah, this is a new Linux user. What do you do?

You guys are a bunch of Nix heads over complicating this. But I would actually like to make the pitch that I think it's quite reasonable because my son Dylan has been using it for well over a year now. And we've tried we tried Fedora, we tried Arch, I think initially pop OS even before that. And what has really been fantastic about NixOS is it really just, like it locks that driver in. And it creates the situation where I can load 32-bit libraries and all of the steam stuff he needs for like the two months he's playing that game. and then when he's done with that game, we just go in and clean those 32-bit lines out, and he rebuilds,

and his system is pristine again. And for a gaming system, keeping it pristine like that and keeping it lean and mean, it does matter. And it just really excels at that. Then additionally, you have a massive package repo to pull from.

So, like, all the launchers that might be out there for Minecraft or all the other games, they're in there, and if they're not in there, it's so easy to get flat packs working or app images, and you can even to click

They're relatively install those, so they're just always there when they need them. That did come, because I was just thinking, like, okay, let's say he did use no bar or this other thing. Like, okay, I'm going to have to, A, get a little more familiar with that system, which is totally fine. I mean, I'm like learning about Linux systems. And then just have to deal with, like, what is their package support like? And then, okay, you might have a higher hit rate of download some binary or install some deb or whatever. Yeah. But if that doesn't work, then what does it look like to get that software there?

and the combination of like how much with the picks and just stuff we run into that either has a flake or is already in Nix packages and then that I know that it's very possible to build Nix packages from just about anything and there's like a lot of templates

for whatever the thing happens to be and got a lot more familiar with making random binaries work it just felt like to get stuff running Nix might actually be the best way for the stuff that's not in the repo or the stuff you want that's newer than what's in the repo.

Yeah. Another thing I've been thinking is a huge lesson recently that we often overlook when we're trying to switch people like this is just rollbacks. Like the entire situation that he ran into with Windows, if you could do a simple rollback to like a week ago when everything was working, that would have made his situation so much simpler, right? And NixOS makes that really beautiful because rolling back is like you hit down when you're rebooting, you hit enter and you're done.

It's like super, super user-friendly. So I think like a hard requirement for me now with bringing these kind of people to Linux is like you have to have rollbacks because it's just cheap insurance. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. However you get them, having a rollback is super worthwhile in that situation, especially in remote support where it's like, okay, roll the something that's useful, then I can come look at why it won't upgrade or we can pick a time to do support. Well, let's actually just spend a moment with that because the remote situation with a Nix OS is going to be different than any other distro that you would provide him. Because the beauty here is the situation you just had where you're not on a phone, you're not on a video call, you're not in person, you're doing it over telegram. You could pull up his Nix config in a GitHub repo and check it out on your system, find the problem, or add the thing he needs, check it back in.

And then with a couple of commands on his side, he could pull that new config in that you fixed remotely without ever SSH into his machine. And boom, Roberts's his uncle. He now has a working system or he has that thing installed. And West did the work for him without ever having to even come. connect to a system. It's like, and you could do it asynchronously? So like, hey, Wes, could you do this for me? And then like a couple hours later, when you're back at the machine, you do it for him, and then tomorrow he does the update and he gets it. Totally. And you just, there are ways you could do that with distros. You could do that with just about every distro, but this is built in.

It's like the default operating mode. And the whole config is like super easy to read. I can tell exactly what it was he was trying to do or what that wasn't working. And he clearly has the technical capabilities to be able to tell the differences so he could see, oh, what did Wes do and learn from that? Right. That sounds really cool. And if I can review it. And if I did need to do remote support over a mesh network or whatever, it's, you know, it's not a big complicated graphics environment or something. It's the same thing, right?

Making an edit to a file and doing a system rebuild. It's huge. To his credit, he was definitely concerned about, like, yeah, how do I make this reliable? How do I know it will work? How do I know I'm in control and can operate in it? So, like, when I first pitched the idea of, like, having the LLM as a helper or guide, I think his experience was shaped mostly by using something in a browser tab. Of course.

And, like, that can be, that's still. a great way to ask about NixOS and Nix and all that. But I think it'll be an interesting shift if we try this to see the experience of like, oh, this thing can just manage the system. It can use tools and it can call these things. Yeah. It reads the config. And then he also was worried like, well, what if like, what if it's offline or, you know,

like I don't want to pay for this or, you know, like something like that. And I think he didn't quite appreciate yet. And this will be another piece that I'm curious to see land is the, because it's, you know, the Nix really makes everything, like you only need it when you want to make changes and you can learn to make a lot of changes. Yes, exactly. And you can learn to make a lot of changes yourself, right? Like, okay, maybe if you're a newbie and you're trying to make a massive restructuring of your setup, that's going to be difficult by yourself. But that's mostly not what you're doing if you have a working setup. It's like enabling one more service or adding another,

yeah, or adding another, like the most common one is just adding another package to the list of packages, which is super simple, which is typing the name of the package. Right. I think I would also argue that those changes are really inexpensive in the sense that like a lot of the lower end models can handle NixOS very, very easily. Yes. Yes. And so you don't need the biggest and greatest model to handle a little NixOS config. So even some of the, you know, free, low limit open code go stuff that they let you use is totally, totally good. He'll never hit the limit on that, just changing the NixOS config. So I think that's actually a really nice pairing.

Yeah, you can model shop. You can use less powerful models for this. And like West said, you can read it and look it up. yourself manually too. Yeah. Or ask one in the tab. You know, you have a lot of options once it's all set up and working. And, of course, Nix provides a lot of stuff too. So even if them, you know, makes a mistake a few times, like you do a Nixflake check, you do a test build and it won't update if it won't build, right?

So you not only have still a rollback, but like you won't even get to the new system a lot of the time. And, you know, you can have these things make tools or wrappers, what out. So I have one. It's just Nomad Update. And I have a couple options. A Nomad Update all just make sure that everything. things checked in and current on main and make sure all my flake inputs are updated. It rebuilds my main system. It goes through everything and then at the end it has a health check that it does to make sure everything is properly running and all the services restarted that

need to restart, et cetera, et cetera. Those are all just like three or four individual commands that are wrapped into one command. Nice. And it's just really simple to have something to have to build that for you. And then you can have the LLM use that itself and it's another way to check to make sure everything's being done correctly. Yeah. Whatever you need, you know, you want it done that way and follow the procedure every time. So he's open to this idea of like LM as interface? I think so. Really? That's pretty fun.

Yeah. So once I was trying to clarify like, you know, it's only needed if you're trying to have it help you make changes. Nothing breaks without it. Everything you can always roll back or, you know, undo. He made some, he made some like, I started building him like a little initial NixOS config to make it easy.

You know, we plan a little time to get it going and I can walk him through applying the first build and getting the system working and stuff. And so I wrote a little summary of like, Here's what's in the stuff. Here's how the system works. Just a little brief paragraph. He liked it.

And he's like, it feels like I'm using like a Star Wars computer. So I think that was an endorsement. It does feel like that, doesn't it? Okay. Well, so I kind of want to know how it goes after a while. Like, we should do like a little check. Yeah, follow up. I think we can do that.

So what we could do is we could kind of talk about my experience and kind of look at something that's been in production. for just about 110 days. Yeah, because I think maybe one of the objections would be, okay, it's one thing to have someone like us who understands Nix pretty well and in a theory, in a pinch, could guide, could intervene, could look.

If this user can't do that, what might this turn into? And I think to the second argument would be, okay, well, it'll set up the initial config, but then over time it's going to turn into absolute slop. Because I think one of the biggest arguments is, well, it can produce the initial. application. It can produce the initial

configuration, but it is not good at long-term maintenance. It is not good at sustaining a project, which would be true for a desktop over time as well. So I think, you know, I got 110 days we can look at, and it's been a hell of 110 days. This is going to be way

beyond the average 110 days. But it'll give us an idea how a machine does. So that's next. Chris, you mentioned 110 days. That's like, you know, a third of a year, or something like that. And I know you've been dabbling with all sorts of things.

We talked about Hermes on our AI clinker stream. So I would imagine that plays in here a little bit. You've been, what, deep diving on an open code? You got lore over there doing stuff. Explain the situation. What's going on here? You know, for the show. I do it for the show, guys.

I do it for the show. Thanks. When Claude Crab or whatever was called, what was it called initially? Claudebot? Claudebot came out. CloudCraft. I installed that and then it became MoltBot, so I updated to that. And then it became OpenClaught, so I updated to that.

And then I had to build a whole infrastructure to make it run, including a way to update it, where I didn't have to pull in a bunch of Windows and Mac MPM packages. I mean, I built an infrastructure for OpenClaw. Several versions of one. I would argue. Then I had to migrate to a new machine because my disk started to fail around. Oh, yeah, right. So I had like two hours to migrate to a new host.

And I got it on a think center. No, I was there. That was not two hours. That was like a half day. You're right. Well, the initial transfer was a half day, but then I did the right thing and I set stuff up properly and that took forever. But the initial data transfer was pretty quick. And then I transitioned from OpenCla to Hermes, the Hermes agent system. And so there's just, it's a lot. But not only this, this agent, this multi-agent cysts, it's six agents. It manages things, aspects of podcast production, news curation. It does a whole bunch of home automation stuff for me. It's doing security monitoring, camera monitoring. There's a lot the system is constantly doing. And so I had a really, really quick setup. I'll just point that out. But what we have is, yeah, 110 days old, 837 commits, roughly 7.7 commits per day to my infrastructure.

Oh, really? For one NixOS host, 11 custom-built packages, seven GitHub workflows, five primary agent workflows, a roughly a six megabyte repo size. Good little repo. It's a big boy. And, you know, I had the different LMs run a little audit of it to kind of give me a roast. And it was, it was fairly nice on a lot of things. But, you know, what I wanted to find out was has it become slop?

You know, because it started with a pretty straightforward MVP NixOS headless system that it was completely deployed by the agents. And now it's become, you know, with 7.7 commits per day, it's become this massive thing that runs. Back-end infrastructure for all kinds of agent services and podcast production. So I looked at this, and there's a few things I definitely think are great. I'm very impressed with a few things. Documentation, things like that. I mean, you should probably saw. There's a couple of things before I get to the bad.

You probably saw that we're good. I got some good takes. Because I didn't save any of the good things. Yeah. This is a remarkably well-documented, thoughtfully secured home lab built by someone who actually cares. The runbooks and agents.md. Are better than most startups. I mean, this is going to be some L.M. Glaze, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, it's glazing. I asked it for that. 86% of services ship with real system dehardening. The tested podcast pipeline is genuinely production grade. And the one giant file is a cohesive single host design, not a sin in Nix, whose only real flaw is shell living in the wrong layer. With a focused cleanup pass, delete the dead tree, lift the shell into packages, de-dupe the secret loader.

It becomes exactly the clean, maintainable system its documentation already claims it is. I do have a hotter take when we're ready, by us. So, you know, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I think the key area, I want to be fair, I think it's pretty good. But the key area of concern that I have is there's a 14,000 line Nix config. I think that one file is more than the rest of the other Nix files combined. Yeah.

And I think a lot of it is basically inline shell script stuff, right? Activation scripts, Chris? Is this where your more harder take comes from, Wes? Is this, have I gotten to the root of the issue? Yeah, let's see here. Because it is very embarrassing when I learned about that. This repo is a 14,000-line shell script wearing a NixOS costume. Propped up next to a 67,000-line corpse it refuses to bury.

The author clearly knows how to build real software, the tested Python package, and the one elegant combinator prove it. So the duplication, the hand-rolled activation, and the zombie CI aren't ignorance, their accumulated laziness, and the longer that retired open-clog graveyard and the copy-pasted 12-time secret loader stay in the tree, the more every future change-based attacks the author already knows is stupid.

Yeah, I do need to get rid. I kept the open-claw config so I could roll back. Like, that's never going to happen at this point, so it is time to purge that. Because what was that? That was 16,000 lines of it right there. Oh, man. I do have some more here. It is not good. I'll admit, 14,000 lines is too many lines.

And a shell script in there, I'm personally comfortable with, but I recognize it's not the recommended way to do. Okay, here we go. You got more? Yeah. Oh, okay, good.

That Hermes.niz. Dot nix, roughly 61% of its 14,352 lines live inside string literals as 109 right shell script slash right shell script bin rappers. Thank you.

Thank you. The largest being Hermes to-doist, that's 700 lines. Yeah, it's funny too, right? Because it's like, that's something I do use a lot. It's integration with to-doist, but this is stuff for a lot. to live there.

Like breaking all the time? Smoke test. No, no, it doesn't break ever. Home assistant stuff's in there. Home assistant capability smoke test. That's 500 lines. Well, that's important. You got a smoke test.

And this is the part that it doesn't like. And this is, you definitely could be, these are great. And none of them get shell check, runtime inputs, or any test, because Nix can't see inside the strings. Bineries are at least resolved as a package's reference,

so that part's good rather than something more difficult. But the duplication is even worse than the monolith. A security sensitive read secret M function is copy-pasted 12 times, near identical, plus three times as a sibling loader, 150 lines of copy-pasted secret load.

See, I don't think that's a fair criticism because it's just saying read this environment. Yeah, it's probably a reason. It's really. And when you consider the size of the config, the fact that that's in there 10 times or whatever is not that. And then it really wants to point out

that basically everything in Varlib Hermes, all the state there is in seven-hand-rolled system.comactivation scripts. Yeah. Doing flat install with zero system-dempt file rules, zero environment. Etsy. No, no, of course not. And all those activation steps are glued together

with hard-coded lib.String after dependency names. So ordering silently breaks on any rename or typo. The net effect, a boot critical file system setup and the agent's most sensitive code path, live is untested, unlinked, duplicated shell that Nick's treats as opaque text. Well, dear listener.

Temp files and packages built right shell application, which could be a really easy slop that would, swap, that would, swap that would give you a little more safety. That's what they exist for. Well, here, let me say. First of all, so happy hacking.

You know, I'm just having some fun here, boys. So what the activation script situation is. Uh-huh. Here's the justification. Is the Hermes config is declaratively configured through Nix, and there's a lot of runtime stuff that gets set up because, ideally, I'm making all the changes in the repo and then deploying it to the machine. and so when the system sets up,

it imports a lot of the runtime stuff from the Nix config. Is what's going? Is there ways to do that better? No, no, I get you. Yeah. Basically, you have stuff, so it's all built in Nix

and then you need it in the places that Hermes expects it at runtime. Yeah, so Hermes is like, and what always trips these things up and what it gets a little stuck on there with like the Etsy and the VAR stuff is, and they don't expect this, is I want these suckers to have full control,

everything, right? You can do everything on the system. This is your box. Right. There's no limits. And so they're always constantly like, you should really prevent this thing from writing Etsy. Give it a virtual Etsy so it thinks it has Etsy. I'm like, no.

No, the idea is this thing owns the box. It's a dedicated box as an experiment to see what happens. It's especially funny because like NixOS is primed up to have all of that like security hardening for like the Hermie service or all kinds of stuff that you really do. Have to explicitly walk back, which is good, but is kind of fussy. Also, some of that, right. And I do think what I need to do is like I need to spend a couple days doing a cleanup pass because. some of it is done this way because that's how it was done for open claw. And to just get things working, if that worked for OpenClaw,

I just kept it working for Hermes when I moved. Yes. And like in all fairness, I did a similar spot and I have some similar, yeah, some similar craft that could use a clayed up pass. Yeah. So it did give me, it gave me a grading score. Do you have that? Because I want to pull that up because I thought that was interesting. It wasn't, you know, we're touching on the bad stuff because it is sort of embarrassing.

And some of it, honestly, is from me. just the direction I wanted to take things. But I got a grading score when I ran it through like a little, you know, like a review. And I thought it was pretty fair. So here's kind of how it overall, it graded me. I got a overall grade for reproducibility of a B plus. Pretty good? Not too bad.

Not too bad. Operational documentation. I got an A. Deployment safety, a B plus. Testing discipline, a B. C-plus. and that's because I have that old open claw job that just doesn't work anymore. Secrets recovery is a C plus, modularity, a C, which is kind of funny because this thing has been modulared and then demodulared a lot.

Supply chain hygiene is a C. Maintainability and a current growth rate is a C. But guys, got an A plus for ambition. I got an A plus. Final verdict. This is better than the stereotype AI-generated infrastructure. It is not a pile of hallucinated nix. it reflects real production feedback,

a repeated debugging, and increasing mature operational policy. It's also becoming an agent-built city with no zoning board. Yeah, that's a good line. The recommendation, and I agree, is split things out, clean things up,

get rid of the old open-cloth stuff. It did, you know, I think there is a lot of docs and policy. I got an A-minus for that for you over here. You did. Yeah, that's not bad. Strong, slightly ahead of code. So, if anything, the docs and the policy

and the rules and stuff is probably the strong. because you're kind of building it from that way in, right? Like, you are obviously very involved in crafting exactly what's going on and testing the workflows and all of that. And so a lot of that is, like, you need to have all of the skills and the agents or whatever else to define the workflows for things to get done. So that's good. And also like the packaging. Obviously, there's some shell script improvements we could be doing. But outside of that, there is, like, you're doing a lot of packaging for stuff that you're running, clean, idiomatic.

Some really nice Python in there. CI Health got C-minus. Yeah, well, just because I have that one thing. Or you need some more, some other build. Yeah, there you go. Secrets hardening C plus, dead code hygiene D-minus. So there's some good in the bed. Chris, what do you think if you were to, you know, self-grade,

what do you think is the most brittle part of this whole system? Probably that big old Nix, right? That big old Nix file is ridiculous. I got to get those, that bash stuff out of there. that to me is like at the point of it's not breaking, but it's going to get more and more unmantainable as time goes on. And I feel like that's 50% their fault, 50% my fault. I haven't really asked them to ever flag anything like this.

I haven't asked them, to be clear, I've never even opened up any of these files. Everything's been generated. I think that's what makes it such a fun experiment. So, yeah, I mean, we're 110 days into it, and this thing is rock solid. I mean, it builds every time. I mean, it really has been good. It's sort of a test of the philosophy of like, how much can this get right or serviceable with just testing on the outside, right?

Does it do the things you need without ever looking under the hood? And obviously we know for a long time now that it can, but then that's just the question is like, how much mess is there? And what, and how bad is it to clean up? Because if it's, I mean, all code bases get some mess and then you do some cleanup passes. And so, like, how wacky or close to something that approximates reasonable software development is that? And something I've also noticed is happening is around the time the code base is getting to the point where it's like, oh, I really need to kind of do some maintenance on this.

Newer iterations of the models are out, and they're better at that thing. And so you can go back with better intelligence and clean it up. And this really struck me because this config, this nomad config, part of it started on my workstation RVB, which was failing, and then moved and became an open clock config. and then was sort of reinvented again to become a Hermes config. And the downside is there's been some bloat, but the agents have been responsible for every time they've had to slice and dice and extract it from one system and can create a new system. They have done all of that work.

Now, this is three trans... Well, there's actually been multiple transitions because there was the different versions of OpenClaught initially, too, that were very, very, very active development. So not only is it a new methodology and workflow that you're trying, but also everything that you are actually maintaining with this is moving very fast. Yeah.

And so I think when you grade on that, it's actually pretty great. I mean... Yeah, I think you have to give a pretty big positive score for it. It seems to work really well. Now I just need to go back with a little bit better model and say, let's split some of this out. Let's do a little bit better job of this. And the great part, right, is like there's a lot of tooling to help

and built into NixOS in terms of like the right shell application that automatically runs shell check. And NixOS provides a bunch of formatters and linters. and, I mean, if you want to set up explicit checks for the flake or the builds, you can do load of VM and test it in there. That's great. And that's even just built on all the stuff of having your config in a text file in Git gives you in terms of branching and rollback and all of that kind of safety.

That's true. There's a lot of layers. So there's basically like you can go hog wild with the refactoring and you always have the system you have right now. Both I've got Git rollback and Nick's rollback. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. As a thought experiment, could you imagine doing this with like,

I don't know, vanilla Ubuntu install? I don't think you could. I don't think you could. Right? I think the agents would run amok. I really think on a Debian or a Red Hat or an Ubuntu host, I really think they would run a muck. I mean, yeah.

I mean, maybe if it was a dedicated, if it was maintained by someone who knew what they were doing and had been set up as a dedicated like cis-admin bot that didn't really straight too far. And the box didn't do very much. Yeah. And you could also put other layers of safety like file system snapshots or VM snapshots.

But I think just like the biggest risk is, I mean there's a lot, but just, you know, it's not going to have good context or grounding necessarily for like what's happened. And because it is this imperative state that you kind of have to recheck on and go see what the run time's like and oh, why was that PPA added? And then that's what's breaking it now. And then you remove it to fix this problem. But did you have documentation that made it really clear why that was needed for this other important job on the box in a way that Nix just doesn't do?

Besides logs, which there are logs for app and whatnot. not a clear history for the agent to figure out what's been recently done and then narrow down the problem. So they have to start with a much wider scope and they have to narrow it down from a much wider data set. And so what I think what you're saying is because the way the system has to build, because Nix has like this boundary that you have to cross with a valid configuration, it adds a layer where the agent can try and they can get the config wrong, but Nix won't allow it. It won't allow it to build. So then the agent gets the error message.

They see, oh, okay, I made a mistake on line 112. I go back. I fix line 112. I try a build again. Okay, it passes. Right? That gate, that barrier, that build process doesn't exist on Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora. And so there's not that check that has to happen.

So the agent can just go write a config for whatever service you're modifying, and maybe it wrote it wrong. Maybe it has a syntax error. Now when you reload the service, it doesn't start for some reason. Right? Like that doesn't happen as frequently or as much or nearly at all with the Nix system setup. So it's like this additional harness that the agent has to interoperate with that prevents it making mistakes that it might otherwise make. And so if I were running an Ubuntu server, I might use it to help troubleshoot issues. I am actually using it on an Ubuntu server right now upstairs.

My agent data is troubleshooting a problem with one of our Ubuntu host at the moment. But when I do that, to Wes's point, it's a very narrow scope. Everything requires implicit approval gates by me, all this stuff. Where on the Nixist and the YOLO, and I let them go. And that, you know, after 110 days is working. You know, I really wish when I was learning Linux and, well, I still am, but just experimenting with like running your own VPS, your own servers, even building your own desktop and like playing, you know, that stage where you play with Linux to understand. and how it works and how it's all crafted. That's one of the beautiful stages,

but I've broken way too many systems, just like putting the wrong PPA in or something like that, right? And like, I've broken Debian, I've broken Archa great many times and Ubuntu systems and Mint system. Like, I've broken everything. And I think that gating for someone who's exploring a new OS for them is a beautiful thing because you can try stuff. And, like, you've got this insurance package sitting right there,

taking care of you to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot. And okay, I learned a lot by the consequences of the things I ruined. But at the same time, that really slowed me down and maybe hesitate to really push the envelope and to learn more. So if there's some way we can have that kind of checks and balances for, you know, quote unquote, classic Linux, that would be amazing. That would be amazing for everybody. But in the meantime, just run next of us.

I want to take a moment and mention my friends over at Connected Internet and use the promo code Jupiter 35 to get $35 off your order. They're not a sponsor, but they sent me some gear a while ago, and I just ended up using it over the weekend. And I'm like, this is so good. It's one box, and it combines all of the high-speed data networks in the U.S. and Canada. And it has technology in there. It's based on, I think, an OpenWRTOS,

and it kind of picks between the best for your signal and data and all of that. and they have truly unlimited plans as well, including plans with priority internet access, which means you get higher priority on the LTE network or the 5G network, and they have plans with no data caps. It's really rare out there. I mean, I have been doing this since the days of buying bootleg sims off of eBay, and to have something like this now is just remarkable. And to have it across the different popular networks, too, is really great.

And not too long ago, they introduced their backup plan, $39 a month that comes with a router, and the antennae and everything you need. And it just auto fails over when your internet goes out and auto fails back, if that's a term. Auto restores when your internet returns. It's just great. And they also have things for more permanent installs. Like their fortress router, which I have up at the farm.

Seven and ten a beast. Also run an open WRT. It's impressive. Connectinininternet.com is where you go. Connect10 internet.com. And if you use our promo code, Jupiter 35, you can take $35 off your, entire order. They hooked me up when they send

some gear and I'm giving them a shout because I'm still using to this day and I think it's great. Since we don't have an official sponsor for this spot, I say go check out Connected Internet. I really liked it. And if you're mobile or you need a backup internet connection, it's a no-brainer. Provo code Jupiter 35.

We have some fresh feedback here. This one shared by Patrick about last week's Apple Talk discussion. Hi. It's great. You were talking about Apple Talk. Back in 1990, 1991, through at least 99 or so, we used Apple Talk to connect a blend of Macs from the old plus to a souped-up SE, Quadra 609, LC3, Performa 475, and eventually the power computing and radius clones. We ran phone line up in the attic and had

nice wire mold for desktop connections. We used it to share files, et cetera, and we also ran net stickies to send instant messages to others in the office. Oh my God, yes! I forgot about net stickies. It was great, but it was slow at big file transfers. We replaced it all with Cat 5 Ethernet around 1998-99 and had to get adapters for the Macs to plug in. As a side note, my old office was in the country and it took quite a few years to get broadband internet. So we used star band satellites for internet for a while until Time Warner put a microwave link from the closest road to our office. They finally put in a hard link once the company that sold those links

went out of business and they just couldn't get them anymore. The 90s were a fun time for computing and networking. Signed Patrick, web developer and ham radio operator KC2BQZ. Patrick, that brings me back so much. In my high school, years and in my elementary school years, I lived in rural areas that did not have any broadband. We had dial-up, and we often didn't even have the V.D2 support for 56K. So we didn't even get true 56K. You know, we maybe got 488, if we were lucky, but often got 366 kilobytes per second for our internet connection. And I was so desperate for high-speed internet that me and a buddy started a business and began the process of talking to the neighborhood to deploy our own wisp.

to just create our own whiz. I can see why though the exact speeds were burned into your head. You were desperate. You were going to do whatever it took. Yep. Yeah, we never got there. We never got there because a couple of the key houses, while we were getting it set up,

got that Time Warner satellite internet, and they're like, ah, we don't need it anymore. Thanks, kid. And I'm like, oh, but I needed your trees. So it never worked out. And then, you know, now it's just a problem of the past, I suppose. But that's fun, Patrick. Yeah, the file transfer rate on Apple Talk, I want to say it was pretty bad.

I seem to recall it was pretty bad. But you didn't have huge files back then. All right, Brent. We got another one from Brett. We do. Brett sent one in here. He talks about an AI built spud router. Okay.

Brett says, I've been... What's that, you ask? Exactly. I've been listening to the show for a while and wanted to reach out and share a project I've been working on. I built a router out of a le potato. single board computer using AI agents. It was supposed to be a simple router configured via a basic Ansible role, and well, there is no Ansible, and I took it

way too far. Now it's got a web UI, a 2E, some VLands, firewall, tailscale, wire guard, nebula's on there, DNS over HTTPS, and OTA updates with auto rollback. Guys, that's a sweet setup. Look at this. So he created a WebUI, nice, right? created a 2E. Oh, yeah.

And an MCP. That? Modern day, awesome right here. That is sophisticated. Jeez. You guys are little jealous? Budrouter. I actually am a little jelly.

AGPL3? Yeah. Python and some JavaScript. Nice. This looks great. I don't know. Something about having all three. However you want to use it.

So perfect. It's so perfect. I love also the ginormous disclaimer. Let's be real. This entire project was coded by AI. So put that out there too. I think in this day and age, people want to know that. They want to know that. And

you know, he's sitting on top of a bunch of really solid Linux technologies, right? He's sitting on top of nebula and wire guard and of course the IP stack and Linux and all that. And I see there's this flake dot Nixon here. Oh, man. Oh, sexy. If this isn't our speed, I don't know what is.

That is great. I feel like listeners are really just making software for us now. It's really nice. Spudrouter. It's a great name too. I love it, Brett. Brett does have a couple more things here. He says, I love the AI content on the show and genuinely enjoy hearing about the agents and the crazy things you're doing with them. I had a bunch of agents coding, fixing bugs, doing all that from cloud code and open code. I also got a lot of work done with my OpenCode Go subscription, which I learned about from the show.

So thank you. But wasn't for AI, I would have never had the time to do any of this. Isn't that the thing? Is it perfect? No. But I'm at the point where I'm comfortable taking it to our RV, which sits on a site over an hour away connected via Starlink. If the potato survives that, I'll call it a win. That is great. That is a great example of like, yeah, there's a lot of stories.

The Financial Times just ran an outdated piece about the Curl developer complaining about too many slop bug reports. And the slop bug reports and the load it puts on projects is a real issue. hope it's one that we solve and we create tooling and culture around. Like, that is a downside, right? And there is a way to responsibly use these tools and a way to not responsibly use them, for sure. Also, the curl developer did an update a couple months ago. I said it's not really a problem anymore. But the upshot is there's so much more free software being created. And people that have never had the ability to do it are creating software that is genuinely useful for them, which was always one of the core goals of free software. Yeah. And I mean, just think about, you

If we think back to sort of, you know, computer chronicles sort of error. How long has this idea of, like, a normal user can sort of customize and tweak software and build something with some widgets or whatever? It didn't end up being this, like, you know, wizzy-wig, gooey thing that... It wasn't hypercard. No, it wasn't hypercard, but we're kind of getting there. Yeah, we are, and now it's just plain English. Have you seen this lay potato before?

No, what is lay potato, is it? Well, that's what he built on. It's a hardware platform. It's the hardware. Yeah, so it's... Oh, this kind of rings a bit of... actually. Le Potato, AML S905XCC, which I guess some other, like Google and Amazon use it for some things, supposedly, long-term supported SOC family, support for the latest, well, I don't know,

but had some support for Android, TV, U-Linix, Ubu, Cody. Looks a lot like a pie. Yeah. It's got the GPIO headers, four USB ports, Ethernet port, SD Micro, it's got HTMLI. It's got H.D. It's about the footprint of... Oh, it's got an EMMC connector. VP9. I like that.

Oh, up to 2 gigs DDR3, so not a lot of RAM. For a router, though. Yeah. It's got an... What's this? It's got an IR2. Kind of fun little device. Never heard of it. Neat.

Okay, I want one. Do we know what the cost is? Purchase. I just curious what it cost is compared to... Oh, it's on Amazon. I'm curious what the cost is compared to. $65. Oh, wow.

That's a 60 on Amazon US, I think. You know, I was just, I wonder, I was just talking about, I want to set up a VDO thing. And I wonder if this, hmm, interesting. All right. Is there a bite now button there, Chris? Brett, you're tempting me. I'm going to hold off. I'm going to look into it more after the show.

But that is really great. Oh, man. Great emails. Thank you guys very much. And we do have some great boost, too. Let's do those. And now, as the French say, it is time for the boost. And as we do, we'll start with a baller boost.

And Greg, the lawyer, is back with 100,000 Satoshi. All right, Greg. I love the land before time. The title is a chef's kiss, and it took me back to a student magazine in college with a final layout involved making an ad hoc land at someone's apartment with our max, a borrowed laser writer and a mess of apple top.

Apple Talks. I bet. There was no network experts, but it all worked. Good times. There's some exciting, too. It's kind of the same we're just talking about. Like, you could build this system just with being a computer user. Connect them up. You know, we should also mention that Jupiter Garage, we have a special Apple Talk kind of retrospective. Right. I guess it's a memorial sticker. And I think, get it now, I still can. Not sure how long it'll be up there. Maybe we should pull it once Linux 7-2 releases. That's reasonable. Because that's when it's officially gone, from our lives and never gone from our hearts.

Yeah, Jupiter Garage. Good plug. Thank you, Brantley. We need to do more of that. Turd Ferguson boost in with 50,675 sets. I hoard that which your kind covered. Tert Ferguson. The thing about Apple Talk is after about 32 nodes,

it started to get pretty dicey. Now, do IPX? It was the corporate king in the 80s. and 90s, and for a reason. Tertz and IPX, Dan. Who knew? I love what you find out with the boost. Yes. I mean, God, I hated IPX.

I hated it. The thing, too, was, is I discovered IPX. So I grew up in an Apple Talk world, and then Microsoft, there's a long story, but Microsoft came in and kind of rushed the high school I was at and just flooded it with Microsoft

technology. And so over summer, we transitioned to a bunch of NetBooey, and all this kind of stuff. That happened all over too. And there was, yeah, and they're in the background where these really obnoxious network servers I constantly had to deal with. So my perspective was like these nagging, aging network servers that use this freaking IPX protocol.

And I know the perspective was wrong because I don't know if it's true. The number was 32. But I do remember that when you started to get like a classroom full of these Apple Talk things, it just started to fall apart because all the broadcasts and it was such low bandwidth. And like I think like 300 kilobits was. the file transfer for local talk speed. And IPX didn't have these limitations.

So I really hated it back in the day. So I don't think we'll be doing an episode on it. Unless we use it to play some more StarCraft, I guess. You know, I never realized I felt so strong about network protocols until we did last week's episode. You've always had it out for TCPIP and I never knew why. Yeah, well, it's a scam. I should have never won.

Apple Talk. You know, it was routable. Well, Anonymous comes in. with a row of McDucks. Things are looking up for all McDuck. Ooh, just testing this new web boost functionality. What a great idea to let us help with the show. Thank you, Anonymous.

Yes, the web boost, we did have a problem because, like, I think we, like, reached a new echelon of our Zaprite subscription. Good problem to have. But it's great because they let you renew with sets. So it's a virtuous circle, so I was able to top it off. So there was a brief little out there.

Sorry about that. Yeah, but we're learning. It's new, and it's just, it's been a success, and it's working well, and I really appreciate. Boost.gubterbroadcasting.com, yes, you,

yes, you can boost in from the web. Shout out to BJ for helping us troubleshoot. Magnolia Mayhem comes in with a row of duck rooes. That's 2,22 Satoches. Here's my request to have a massive community run classic protocol network full of Apple Talk, Telnet, Gofer, et cetera. Maybe we could use Nebula as a backbone.

Oh. If people get scared. about scalability and security, who's with me? Here's my question. Could we work a BBS into this? We really should do it. We need to. How are we going to coordinate if we don't know?

Have done? We'll do. I would love to do like a retro Linux, BBS, and then we do an episode on it. And then afterwards, the audience can go check it out. I was for a while playing with this idea of like, could you fuse Apple Talk and then, but like make Nebulaa the transport? Right. And then especially because like the lighthouses have the DNS where they kind of know some of the name. So you could skip some broadcast and use that as like an, a.

source. I think it would be terribly hacky, of course. I think mayhem. It's a good idea. I think we should focus on the achievable. Gofer is probably pretty achievable, so you can do that over IP. Tellen that would be achievable. And I think a BBS.

The Apple Talk stuff would be a lot harder and wouldn't really produce great results, but we could do it. I think we should, if we got a BBS running a Linux, like, classic one, I'd do an episode on that. You bet. The facial hair boosts in with 6,000 sweats. With what seems to be the return of single-use devices, such as the rise of modded iPods and had handheld gaming devices,

and even some going back to pocket cameras, I was wondering what y'all's take on this was. You know, it's funny this, you bring this up the facial hair, because I just pulled out an old Kodak pocket cam that we used to use before, there's a more popular brand I'm blanking on the name, but we used to use these before we had camera phones. and they were just little 1080p

pocket cameras and they could save to an SD card and they have like a fold-out USB port you can plug in as well

the optics are horrible but the dedicated functionality is actually pretty cool and it makes me wonder if I would enjoy carrying a dedicated camera

again I can see dedicated camera would be good I dedicated music player though for me those days are long gone yeah I don't know

if I need that one in the days of like when digital was first coming out when I was entering the photography world. There was this nostalgia to using film, and everyone agreed that using a film camera,

without all these digital buttons and numbers and things, using a film camera made you take photos in a very different way, and almost everybody appreciated that you kind of took better photos because you only had a limited number of them. The technology sort of vanished. Of course, digital one, because it's better in innumerable other ways. but there's something about having a single use device that I think gets us back to that. Because if, well, I've struggled with this this week is like each device I use, they're my beloved devices,

like this framework in front of me, right? And my pixel that runs graphene and I freaking love those things, except I can do anything on them. And so when I sit down to try to do a thing, there's a hundred other things that kind of are just right there. And so a dedicated device, I think, is a really nice way to get away from that, at least for a brings its own intentionality. If you feel your camera's hanging on there, and you're like, well, I should probably be used on this.

I would like a dedicated messaging device and take messaging off my phone. That would be incredible. But you know where it's not really in the scope with the question, but this is what came to my mind, television. I just want my TV to be a dumb display

with like four or five HDMI inputs and scale it well, have a good picture. I don't even want a speaker. Yeah, but how am I going to show you ads? It drives me crazy when I get like a new terms of service. And when you select all,

It's like, I'm going to turn your microphone on, and I'm going to monitor everything you're doing. How else can they know what you're watching? Brindley, are you up? Is that you? Fairday Fitora comes in with another row of ducks. Sorry between the character limit and, well, my dyslexia, I wrote the wrong thing. You don't need the mesh. Think of Laura like writing a letter, and the mesh network is USBS. You can write a letter to your wife, but you don't need USBS to get it to her.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking more about your last boost and thinking about I have a lot of coyotes on the farm. And they're out during the day now a lot. And I'm trying to figure out a way where I could have motion sensors all over the farm, which is a massive territory to cover. So it can't be Wi-Fi. And LTE would be too expensive for the amount of sensors I need. So I need something that could wake up.

up and ping me when it detects motion in an area and then maybe in some places activated camera depending and I'm wondering I think that's where a laura kind of low low frequency radio network could be perfect a mesh network throughout the farm I gotta research that more thank you very much Faraday I think you just put little like mesh-tastic collars on them all and then once once they get within range you'll know take them with a drone call it good gotta maintain your fleet yeah right Dodge is here with five thousand 74747, Satoshi's.

Oh my God, this drawer is filled with broolopes. Keep the Tesla check. This must be a... Were we talking about Tesla in the show? Must be on the pre-show, I think. Keep it coming. Always fun to see what's going on that side of the fence. To totally hear you on chargers, I've gotten to the point where I assume the charger won't work if it's not an EVEGO, EA, or Tesla. Or it has

a perfect score on PlugShare. Oh, I should check PlugShare. Evie Go is currently my favorite. They support plug and run by non-Tesla and Tesla, super clean experience. And they're rolling out next. That's good. So I just did a just did a car camping trip. That's what Dajal was referring to is I just took a car camping trip in an EV,

which had a lot of pros to it. But to the charging, they were run, both of them, I think were run by the local city. And one just had, one was out of order. I suppose that happens. The other one, somebody was camping at, like, not actually camping, but like they plugged their car into a fast charger when they have a slow charging car and they just left for a few hours. So I wasn't able to use that charger.

So then I stopped at another one. And this one had two chargers right next. to each other, and in the middle it had a tap-to-pay box. So you could just plug in and use tap-to-pay, like, you know, a gas pump. Which seems ideal. Seems like the way to do it, right? So I do the tap-to-pay. That one was out of order, too. But there's

another handle. So I grabbed that handle, and my transaction's still valid, so I go to charge. Oh, no, no. This handle is actually on this other post over here, which has a QR code system. You have to scan and create an account for, and then prepay $45, even though I only need $5 of charging, and then I can charge.

Even though, like, the payment, there's a one payment terminal, but there's two different payment systems, depending on which plug I use. It's just all over the place. Like, some of them, like the tap to pay thing is perfect. It should just be like a gas pump. I walk up. You have my credit card now. Tell me from what I charge. And they're getting more and more to that. But some of them, like, they want you to, like, they envision you charging frequently at this one spot.

So they want to sell you on a membership program and all of this stuff. It's early days. He says, if you're able to plan your route beforehand, you can install and register all the apps for charges along your route before you leave. makes things way easier, especially for the plug-and-runs. And you've got it, all you have to do is tap and enter the stall ID. You know, I've been also using a better route planner, ABR. Oh, yeah. Really good for that, too.

Thank you, Daja. Appreciate that. And thanks for being a member. Poppy comes in with 69-69. It's a time travel boost. Ooh. This is a tasty burger. Tasty time travel.

Love the holiday home lab, hearing about community setups. Hope you revisit this in the future so I can get mine in there when I'm not six months behind on listening. Well, Pabby, what an idea. When the holidays come around, I think maybe we might repeat that, yes? Yeah, I'm wondering if we should, should we put a call out for the Home Lab stuff early? We should think about what the right process is at the very least, yeah. Yeah.

Definitely earlier is better. I think we'd have to revisit our submission form and make sure there's, like, no changes we need to make. But I guess nothing would prevent us from. We should probably give a listen to the episode. Yeah, yeah. I think this would be a good idea, though, because we're pretty, bad about Gage. And we're at a best,

you know, we have six months, basically. Yeah, this should be the time. Let's try to remember to look into that. I think that is a good idea. Someone said a reminder. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks for the time travel boost. And Sin X sent in

8,472 Satoches. Well, that's here. Good, buddy. Well, I've tried tail scale and nebula recently, but I've landed on Netbird. It's the perfect compromise between the two, open source, self-hosted and damn fast. I'm also really looking for

to the reverse proxy feature that they have in beta. By the way, this is a Star Trek boost. Can you guess which episode? Oh, yes, I can. Very easily, actually. That's not hard at all. There's coffee in that nebula. That would be probably the end of season three,

the beginning of season four of Star Trek Voyager, and it is a nod to species 8472, the only actual threat to the board. Wow. Right? I'm guessing, right? It's got to be a species 8472. Absolutely. Which episode?

There's a couple of good ones. Well, I mean, they're introduced, I think, at the end of season three, the beginning of season four, when they're phasing out Kess and bringing in seven of nine. Yeah, Scorpion. Yeah, Scorpion. Yeah. Scorpion is something, right? But then later there's that one with the whole... Where they do the fake Starfleet?

Yeah. That's where it gets a little silly and they're no longer such a big threat. Voyager had the worst tendency of, like, setting up the biggest enemy ever. And then a season later, they're just like buddies. Like, they're allies. You know, same with the erosion. Yeah. What was the ones with the parts?

The parts? The phage. Oh, yeah. Blankin. Yeah, the phage. They're suffering from the phage? Vedeans. The Videans.

Super creepy. And then by the end, like, not so threatening. Like, they're like, oh, I guess we have sympathy for them now. Yeah, yeah. So, but yes, I think we got it. I hope. Let us know how we did. Netbug 105 comes in with 4,300 and, no, 4,500, 31, Satoshi's.

Coming in a house with the boost. I did my first member's boost a few weeks ago and decided to get Albi set up and give some extra support. Oh, that's great. Thank you. How do most people boost the show? Fountain? Long live Apple Talk. I would say Fountain is probably the most popular.

The web boost is picking up steam. And then there's a lot of people using AlbiHub with the podcast index or Castamatic or just the various apps of choice. So there's a long AlbiHub tale, too. But, yeah, Fountain, AlbiHub in some sense. And then I'd say the web boost at this point. Thank you for the support and being a member. Tom Motto boost in with 2,000 sats. Love the Apple Talk episode.

And remember, if you want to play with it again in 5 to 10 years, it'll still be supported in NetBSD. Okay. Yes, hi. That's true. Okay, good. That could be a good excuse to use NetBSD. That could be, right? Because it sounds like we're going to be needing to have Apple Talk around if, you know, ma'am takes off.

That's true. Well, the Zor Alchemist is here with $10 of Fiat boosts. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. This one's for you, Chris. Chris, if you're looking for a, quote, modern web browser for MacOS Classic, check out MacSurf. It supports HTPS,

CSS, and JavaScript on MacOS 9. Well, it won't work for every single site. It'll be far more functional than a 1990s release of Nixcape. So, thanks for the episode. Yeah, so I was hoping somebody would send something like that in. Thank you, Zor. I had not heard that.

That's incredible. That is great. Love it. Greg, the lawyer, sends in a member boost. Using my free member boost to encourage others to become a member. Craig, you're just a, you're so great. That's so great. We're recurring revenue keeps the lights on, money talks.

Tell the world you want more Linux on plug. Woo, run it. Can't argue with that. Don't let the fate of the Linux magazines happen to Linux podcast. Thank you, Greg. I appreciate that. Adversaries 17 comes in with a member boost. Oh.

To say boosty, boasty, boasty, boosty, boosty, boosty, boost. Boasty, boosty, boosty, there you go. Thank you for series. Well, Anonymous is here too with a member's boost. This is a tasty burger. You guys have a good solution for AI-assisted research. For example, what is the best insert product category here? Or teach me more about insert topic here.

Ideally, it would be something interactive that would prompt me and let me refine and dive deeper into specific aspects. Okay, I will say, that I have enjoyed using the Hermes L.LM. Wiki skill that is very easy to get working with the Hermes agent. I know that's a big lift to get to this point. But Brent poised a question to me. So, Chris, you've got family in Canada and Canada has national health care and you haven't had health care for almost 15 years or wherever the hell. It's been, I don't know, at 100. What if you had dual citizenship? Could you get access to Canadian health care? So I says to the agent, I says, hey, agent, I want you to research dual citizenship in the context of access to Canadian health care. care in the process. And what LMWiki does is not just a storage structure, but in the case of Hermes, it's also sort of a research protocol. And so it launches about four subagents. It can do more or less. And they go off in particular tasks and they look up individual things. And it compiles a very, very, very, very comprehensive data set. And then it gives me kind of a human readable overview and then saves the entire output into an obsidian vault for me for retrieval later. And I found it a

be extremely, extremely useful. I've also had to do research on different car oil types, and I thought it was very comprehensive because it's, you know, it is, it is essentially a research methodology that it's following, and then a way to store and collect that information that is retrievable and then you can build on top of it. So this might be something, and looking, to two things, LMWiki, and then you can look into the Hermes agent LMWiki stuff. I think even just beyond that, it's like where, it's not that the in a tabs aren't useful, but really have in a harness where you, like, it can have real file access. It can build iteratively on some artifacts and stuff.

You can ask it questions and follow-ups. Yeah. And then it has robust support, I think, especially for sub-agents where you can do stuff, like have editors or a council or, like, fact-check each other. Like, a lot of those patterns can go a long way beyond just, you got one, you know, it did a couple searches and wrote a few markdown files. Yeah, you know, just to cap that off because that's such a great point, Wes. It was one of the other things that Hermes has recently introduced is this aggregation model,

where when it's trying to figure out research or make decisions, it can aggregate it through three or four models and then have an ultimate decision. And it's actually a fascinating way to use it for research as well. So there could be something there. Just pump the brakes right there. Ryan from Boise is here with a free member boost. Open source software and camping.

My two favorite things. As you talked about in the pre-show, finding spots to camp can be really difficult. Here's a pick I found this week. It's called Campi. It's up on GitHub. You also mentioned last week you didn't take your CPAP. Get a DC plug from Amazon.

I really should do that. First, I got to get my hose replaced. Tried to do that. And Amazon screwed that up. Campi, the campsite finder, a tool to help you book campsites online. Finding reservation sold out, campgrounds can be tough.

This is where Campi comes in. It searches thousands of campgrounds across the world via API. I was just thinking about building this. I was just going to build this. I was thinking to myself, why am I doing this? I could have the bot do.

It already campy. That's awesome. It's MIT licensed. 99% Python. continuously checks for cancellations and availabilities. Oh my God, this is so perf. Thank you, Brian. Definitely going to use that.

As a slight correction here, Chris, you know how you call me Brentley? Well, this is actually called camply. Okay, what did I say? Campy? Well, it's not that campy, but it's camping. All right, thanks. You make me want to be a better man. I'll take the next one, too.

Mountain Man comes in with a member boos. Someone else already mentioned Voron, but I also had to dimension have orc printers. You could probably have AI create a home assistant dashboard using the Moonraker API from Clipper and also had to share the Ellis Tuning Guide. I don't know if I knew what any of that means. It's a bunch of 3D printer stuff. Remember you were asking for tips and setups?

I am such a 3D printer noob. The wife and I, though, were watching 3D printing videos last night. Oh, getting used to like ASMR. You never know. You never know. It could be in our future, okay. Papa John's here with the Bremen boast. Yes, hi.

I definitely want to hear about. Chris's NextCloud bacon. All your pictures are stored directly in NextCloud. I do backups, but I don't have to use them. I would rather not. Love the show, guys. We should have talked about my Next Cloud woes in the pre-show today while we were talking about yours. There's still time.

Next week. Somebody remind me, I have no hard feelings towards the Next Cloud project. I still think it's a great project. Personally, I've decided I will never be using it again after the most severe data loss that I've ever experienced. Oh, no. So for me, it just, like, it crossed a line, and I just can no longer use it. But I will try to remember to tell that story in next week's member feed if somebody reminds me. I think we might have skipped Sam H's here.

Oh, grab it for me then. Sorry about that. Yeah, just getting started with Hermes. Love the clinkered therapy recording. I wondered, though, why Codex-C-Li instead of Chad GPD-Oath, the provider in Hermes? He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, you're a great guy.

So I do that as well. But so there's a matter of personality. perspective that influences the way the agents interact and audit the system. And so Codex is coming from a view outside the Hermes harness, outside the system, without all of the soul and the agent and all of the stuff that the skills, everything, that agent's loading. And what you will find is you can have the exact same model and the one that's loaded up with all your agent harness stuff may produce code slightly differently than the exact same model without all that stuff. and depending on how you prompt the model with all that stuff, it will take more of a supervisory,

auditorial, critical role, and it has a different perspective, and it actually will find stuff that the same exact model created that is a little off and needs to be corrected. It's the state of the technology right now. And so by using the two together,

you kind of have that coverage, right? Because the Hermes age into that harness, it knows my systems, it knows my host machines, it knows where the credentials are, it knows all that stuff, and knows how to build and iterate really quickly, and it has a task management system

and a progress tracking system and all of that, and it can do it iteratively. Then I can hit it with codex or whatever, open code using whatever model you want on the side, and it's taking more of a third-party meta-roll, and it tends to find stuff that the original harness may be missed. Yeah, you can also do something where you can have specific, like, dynamic subagents

where you've crafted a prompt in a similar way, so you don't inject as little context as you can with just a prompt or something. But having a separate harness can be nice to, for auditing, for checking, for, for like, verifying, and if something gets messed up and you need it to, you want someone to help you repair it, super handy for that too. Also, depending on how you have Hermes configured,

it may commit things to memory. So if you're working through iteratively trying to fix stuff every now and then it will commit the wrong thing and it'll update the skill to the wrong thing as you're going through the iteration process, you avoid that if you're sort of hitting it from the side with a codex or something like that,

and then you can do a handoff prompt at the end of your session with codex or open code to say, all right, give me a handoff prompt that tells my agent to store what's changed and been updated durably since the last time we communicated. And of course, those side tools can read those chat sessions so it actually knows the last thing you said to the agent

so it can craft a specific response you then give to the original Hermes or OpenClaught agent and it can update its skills and its memory and all of that. A blessed little artifact. And then you can have like, I mean, can be thrown away or semi-permanent, separate context that you used to craft that. Yeah.

Feels like we need another clanker stream. Well, guys, we have King Arthur as a member here with a member's boost. We need a King Arthur sound. Did you buy that from a certified vendor? Once we verify, he's a certified king. We got to get a good, like, King Arthur. King Arthur says,

What is the story of removing the 5,000 Jar Jar Boost clip? Oh, I just don't have it on the button. Where is it? Back by popular demand. Hold on. I do have it somewhere. Missa Bustin with Happy Seen's a year. I don't think that's it.

I have it. I have it. I do have it. I just don't have it on the active, because I kind of rotate through, you know, because otherwise I play the same ones. You're doing a good job. But it is here somewhere. I think this is a vote to bring it a little further in the phone. All right.

I'll try to find it. You're supposed. Yeah? We have several in the 5,000 category. We kind of rotate through them. Is it over 5,000? Oh, I see. Send us a boost sound effect.

Do. And choose now. Boost. Yeah. Nice. There's Boost mobile and also Nestle. these boost drinks that we can pull from. We choose to boost.

Good idea. And Eric, the magician, wraps us up with a member boost. I tried out Hyperland by copying Hyper vibes Nixon fixed my system. Looking great. Nice. Not where I expected that to go. It's been a good starting point for me. I'm glad to hear that, Eric.

I thought that was going to go the other direction, and I am pleased to hear that's working well for you. Shout out to everybody who streamed us Sats as you listened to the show. 17 of you streamed us 24, 6171 Satoshies. Live long and prosper. When you combine that with our member boost, the Fiat boosts, and you convert it all to Satoshi's, it brings us to a grand total of 254,000 and 455 Satoshes this episode. Not too bad at all. Thank you very much. We had nine member boos, one Fiat Boos, and 38 unique sat senders.

You are the small crew that made the show possible along with our members this week. Tens of thousands and tens of thousands of Linux users will enjoy this episode, and this is the crew. that made it possible. It is a value for value podcast. We are in the ad winter. We don't have the ad deals we used to. I think they're gone, but the support continues. We really do appreciate it.

You can boost at boost.com or become a member and set your support on autopilot at Linuxonplug.com slash membership. I got a couple of picks for you, boys. Kind of went along a theme this week, so I hope you like that. It is a YouTube theme, one way to privately watch YouTube and one way to watch YouTube with others. So let's start with Open Together. where you can enjoy YouTube as well as other video streaming services, real-time synchronized playback with an optional voting system,

no sign-up required, it's all open source. It's got text chat. You can play videos from YouTube, Vimeo, any MP4 served over HTTP, any HLS or dash stream as well as some other ones. That is handy. Yeah, and the vote system's neat too if you're like, you know, hanging out with a crew online and you're watching some videos. Oh, DJ mode.

And they also let you provide your own custom JSON file with an MP4, if you want to enable all the extra features, like multiple different bit rates and text chat and stuff like that. Oh, I miss JSON. Yeah, hope he's doing well. So we're going to watch some Academy together then? Well, I guess you could. Yeah, you could watch an MP4 with this.

You could. You could watch Academy with this. We should probably try. Yeah, so that's enjoy together. And opentogether. Or opentogethertube.com. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's also on GitHub.

It is open source. I'll see what I imagine. It is AGPL3.0. This next one doesn't sound like a YouTube tool, but it is. It's called TypeType, a privacy respecting platform to watch YouTube. And it plays from a couple of other platforms I've never heard from either. But it stores history. It has subscriptions, playlist, favorites, watch later.

You can resume videos that you are watching just like you can with actual YouTube. And I have to say the YouTube style UI from like maybe a year or two ago, for some, like, they really crammed it full of shorts. It looks like that. It looks like it's a self-hostic. It does look like classic sort of, yeah. Classic YouTube. And you get all the classic features of YouTube without YouTube.

I mean, you can pull in the videos. I think I'm getting this. It's doing the watch history. It's doing the recommendations. It's doing the playlist. It's got subscriptions. Oh, my gosh. You can import as well.

This is what I've been looking for for years. I think it has a lot of potential. I think it has a lot of potential. Yeah, you can import from YouTube your playlist. That's... Wow. Yeah.

So this is, I think, you know, there's a lot of options these days, but I think... It's just a weird name, but I think it has a lot of potential. It's called TypeType, and it's M.it licensed, and it's available on GitHub.

You did some great searching this week. I like these ones. It also has an API. Perfect. Mm-hmm. And it can download... I love this. It can download the videos

in the background with a separate download thread. So when you click play, they're playing locally. They can also do the streaming if it needs to, but it can... Now, what's the mobile story here? Does it behave okay as a web app? You know, I actually don't know.

Like in the mobile? Because on the mobile app, if I'm on Android, I'm not happy with the YouTube app anymore. It's gotten real... It has been. It has, for sure. And so I would actually like to try it on mobile. On iOS, the app isn't as bad,

but the fonts all screwed up. It's the weirdest thing. So I haven't tried it on mobile. I don't know. But in the GitHub project, they have screenshots that make it look like the YouTube. I mean, it almost looks like YouTube.com and in the mobile version of it, too. That's very nice. So the screenshots of the mobile one look really good. So if I'm to go by that, I'd say it's pretty tight.

I'm very impressed with both. These will put links to those in the show notes. And then Brentley, you have a sneaky third pick that's on the same theme. I have two sneaky picks. One is on the same theme. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I kept one from you. So it's funny that you linked to these this week because I stayed up far too late last night

installing MeTube on my little NAS over here. And it's to solve a very specific problem for me. Basically, this thing is a little container that you can self-host, and it's just a very simple web UI for YouTube DLP. And it just makes downloading, like, individual YouTube videos much, much, much, much easier than, you know, reaching for your terminal, especially when you want to save the file on a different computer than the one you're on, et cetera. So that's the problem I was trying to save. And it turns out, MeTube was exactly what I was looking for. A little

self-hosted thing I can throw on the NAS. And then I have a plugin on my Firefox or Chrome. Oh, it just, you click the plugin and it either pulls the page you're on, because you're on YouTube. or you could just paste a URL and it just sends, you know, offloads that download off to that little tool and it throws it in,

you know, a folder if you want and it scrapes all the metadata and stuff to make it nice and friendly for jellyfin if you want. So, I looked at doing it a few other ways. I was like,

maybe I could do a skill for my robot and that seems wrong. And then I looked at pinch flat too and I was like, well, actually, this is not what I want. I just want to send like very specific videos. Yep.

But it turns out MeTube can also download videos from, you know, playlists and channels in real time as well. So it's an nice simple little tool. That is nice. Again, MeTube, M-E-T-U-B-E. Honorable mention, however, to pinch flat because it is kind of in this category. And I just want to follow up. Still using it.

It downloads my YouTube videos, saves them to a jellyfin YouTube library folder. And I watch them offline. That way I'm not using up bandwidth. But, um... The cone of science. What's this about a sneaky third pick? Yeah, what's going on? It's actually a fourth pick.

This is a bargo? Smuggled in. This is too many picks. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh. Okay. Tell us about it. We'll cut all this from the show, but you can tell us.

Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, I forgot to tell you that, uh, I'm a bit embarrassed about this, but it's also a success. Like, uh, I installed Me-tube using Podmas, it's first Podman and, like, success. Oh, Palm, congratulations. It was so easy. It's so easy. All right, what's the secret pick?

Come on. I have a secret pick. It's actually on topic, and I'm embarrassed. We didn't talk about it, but it's called MCP-NXOS. Oh. I use this in, you know, I use open code. I use this in my open code. And the reason I came to want it is that it just makes looking up NixOS things much, much, much easier.

So it says it's a real up-to-the-second information about NixOS, including packages, options, home manager configurations, Nix, Darwin, Flakes, and all of that stuff, and you get it super fast, just right punched into your LLM or the robot of your choice. And I found,

for manipulating NixOS configs, it made it far more accurate, far faster. You know some improvement. Smooth. Oh, yeah, very much so. And it solved a problem I was having, which was sometimes it just gives the wrong answer.

Okay, well, I feel bad now because I've been using this for a while. I assumed you guys were arguing. Well, Brad, What is that? All right. All right. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So, uh, we got to wrap up the show. We're going to... Oh, wait.

All right. So, uh, that's all the picks. We'll have links to those in the show notes. There's totally not a secret pick in the show notes. No, I didn't hear anything. No, I didn't hear anything about that. So don't, don't go to Linux unplug.com slash 657 for that at all. You know, also we always love a pick. If there's an app or especially a self-hosted tool that we could share with the audience that you've been using that we haven't mentioned on the show. let us know. Send us an email, Linuxunplug.com, slash contact,

or boost.combebricasting.com. We have an unhealthy obsession with finding good picks. Too many apps. Producer Jeff wants to correct us here. He figured out why it's called TypeType. It's because it uses pipe-bite, the extractor on the back end.

Ah, it's cute. Thank you, PJ. Look at him putting it all together. See? That's great. Like a good producer do. All right, well, that's it for us. We're going to wrap it up here.

But, of course, we want to let you know that we do have a few extra bennies in the feed you might like to know about. We've got an MP4 version of the show, as well as some metadata you could always throw a bot at. Yeah, speaking of JSON, we've got JSON right there in the RSS feed. How about that? So it's always with us. How about that? Yeah, chapter info, find out where the good stuff is.

Jump right to the picks if you want. I don't know why, but you could. That's what I do. Yeah. I just skip to the picks. Or if you want to find all the details, download the transcript. That's pretty cool. And, of course, we are live as well.

You can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. And if you want more show, remember we have the lup lug. It gets together every Sunday before we get started, and it keeps on going after the show. And our members get the bootleg,

which is clock in it at two hours and 33 minutes right now. It's a lot of show. There's a lot of content in there. And a shout out to everyone who contributes in some way or another, even if it's just listening and sharing it. We really do appreciate that. We don't mention it enough, but we really do appreciate it. Word of mouth is the number one way podcast. It's sharing.

All right, that's it from us. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplug program. We'll see you back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.