LINUX Unplugged - 682: Oops! All Shells!

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Quickshell is rising, and bringing with it a new wave of customizable Linux desktops, community-built plugins, and serious funding.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 SWAGQuickshell — Quickshell is a toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lockscreens, and other desktop components using QtQuick. It can be used alongside your wayland compositor or window manager to build a complete desktop environment.Caelestia — A fluid, morphing shell for your Linux desktop.end-4’s configurationWaybar — Highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway and Wlroots based compositors.Omacom Foundation to be premier Quickshell sponsorOmarchy — — Beautiful, Fun & Opinionated Linux by DHHomacom/omarchy - GithubThe first plugin competition winners — Omarchy NewsOmacom Foundation to be exclusive Hyprland sponsor — Omarchy NewsHyprland — An independent, highly customizable, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks.hyprwm/Hyprland - GitHubomarchy-radio-atlas — Explore live radio on a rotatable globe from the Omarchy bar.Home Assistant for Omarchy — Home Assistant Quickshell plugin for Omarchy 4syncshell — See sync health, open folders, control the service, and install or update Syncthing from the Omarchy bar.syncshell-dms: — Read-only Syncthing monitoring plugin for DankMaterialShellDank Linux — A Modern Desktop for Wayland.Dank Linux DocsTREK — A self-hosted travel/trip planner with real-time collaboration, interactive maps, PWA support, SSO, budgets, packing lists, and more.Dawarich — Your favorite self-hostable alternative to Google Timeline (Google Location History).Immich — High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution.How to get a TomTom API key - TomTom DocsFileBrowser Quantum - GitHubFileBrowser Quantum — The best free self-hosted web-based file manager with source configuration, modern authentication, office support, and lightning-fast search.Open Book Touch — A pocketable, front-lit, open source e-reader — for every book, in every language.Pick: dankcalendar — Calendar from the Dank Linux Suite. Local, Google, Microsoft, CalDAV, and iCloud calendars in one standalone app.DankCalendar on FlathubPick: Homelable — Visual Homelab Mapper & MonitorHomelable — Self-hosted homelab infrastructure visualizer, interactive network diagram with live status monitoring.homelable-hacs — Home Assistant integration for Homelable

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. Coming up on the show this week, some of us build dashboards. Others turn their desktop into a dashboard. QuickShell is changing the Linux landscape in a massive way, and it kicked off this summer.

We'll dig into what it is, how you can start having some fun with it and what we've built. Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, great. Hello, happy birthday. PJ and everybody up there, thank you for joining us. Also, look at that quiet listening, too. Hi, up there.

On a Sunday, on a Tuesday, no less. Getting that low latency, opus. Also, a big good morning to our friends at Define Networking. Define.net slash unplug. Go meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. when there's something as foundational as my network, I want to know I own the stack end to end, especially over the long term.

If I build this thing and I build stuff on top of it, it's not a two-year thing. It's a 10-year thing. This is what I love about Nebula. It's open source, and it was originally built to secure Slack's massive global infrastructure. I mean, just think about that one for a second. And today it's trusted from everybody from Rivian to Home Labs.

I mean, I use it in multiple different ways for small systems, direct direct to larger mesh networks. And manage Nebula, which is Define.net.net slash unplugged, manage Nebula gives you the open foundation and peer-to-peer resilience while they handle the certificate management and some of the operational headaches. You can also spin up your own lighthouses in that scenario. You get full control without the busy work, without the big tech login barrier. Go get started 100 hosts for free. No credit card required. Defined.com.combed.

Go check it out. Redefined your VPN experience. Define. Slend. Slash unplugged. All right. So I will admit it, I wanted to talk about QuickShell this week because I think something really special is happening here. Quickshell is a toolkit for building status bars, widgets, lock screens, other various desktop components.

And it's using QQQQQML and it can be used alongside your Wayland compositor or window manager. Or you can build a complete desktop environment with it. And it's sort of the ultimate end result, I think, of Wayland. and it's fascinating because it means you don't actually need a desktop environment anymore. Now, it's not to take away from the hard work that they do to make a usable desktop environment. Yeah, if you want that, we have better options than ever and it's excellent. But it does mean that you could mix and match or you can now completely create your own environment in a way that's actually achievable to anyone listening to this podcast. And that is remarkable because you don't need to be attached to any particular desktop vendors.

any particular toolkit. It's really fascinating. So it means, you know, if you want your own desktop widgets, your own launcher, your own lock screen, or if you want to take advantage of the many that are out there to have been built, you can. It gives you the building blocks to create or replace just about all the pieces of the desktop environment you care about, but still using a standard toolkit, a standard API, and sort of the best of cute and modern cute.

You think that's fair? Yeah. I mean, maybe it's worth thinking about where this all sits. So we talked about Wayland, right? So Wayland ends up being the protocol that sits at the bottom of things. So you need your actual Wayland compositor, which could be something like Hyperland or Neri or K-WIN. There's a bunch of options. Sway uses like the WL Root stuff, which a bunch of them use under the hood.

Yeah. And then that lets you like draw stuff to the screen, right? But you actually, you're going to need to do more. And a lot of these provide some basic window management and that kind of thing. But basically after that, nothing else, right? So if you want status indicators, you want things you can click to, like, move windows around or switch which workspace you're on or any of that. Or if you want to build a widget that has a common interface to talk to network manager. There you go.

Maybe you want to be able to select your Wi-Fi network. None of that comes out of the box. So that's where you need this whole shell layer on top. And QuickShell is an interesting use where they took, I mean, like what I'm used to thinking about cute, I think, object-oriented C++. You know what I mean? It's low-level. you can do lots of great stuff it's a whole toolkit for

interfacing with Wayland drawing things creating and managing Windows but it involves compiling C++ and building C++ and kind of it sounds like something maybe you do if you were building your own plasma but doesn't really sound like something you want to do for quick you know

I'm just working on trying to build out a cool new widget and that's where QML comes in and QML which is the cute markup language it's a declarative interface a super simple little programming language essentially that lets you describe the widgets and the interface that you want to build

and then it can either be ahead of time compiled into C++ or, and this is the part that makes it super useful to work on, it can just be reloaded at runtime and drawn on the screen. And so QuickShelt, under the hood you have cute and then you have Cute Quick, which is a pre-bundled set of common stuff you can use like basic drawing blocks and the API you want to be able to put rectangles and circles

and all that kind of stuff on the screen. and Quickshell takes that. It sits and runs the cute event loop. It's kind of going to be the thing that actually talks to the whaling compositor and draws things. And it looks on your file system, wherever you tell it,

and it loads QML from there. And then it can, in a loop, re-evaluate the QML, redraw stuff on the screen, and it's done a lot of the hard work to build QML services, which are basically extra APIs available to you when you're writing a QML on top of QuickShel

that bind to, like, pipewire. and there's a plugin that handles NERI, or they have a first-party plugin for Hyperland, so now you can get access to all of the Hyperland state right in the QML. And then the biggest part that is wild, because this has been in since like Q5,

how far ahead it is in some ways, is QML is designed to be reactive. Yes. So think of it kind of like a spreadsheet, right, where you have linked formulas. And cells. Yeah. And so you make a change in one cell

and everything else automatically recomputes and updates. And so you can describe declarative widgets and bars and panels and docks. And they'll rescale to the appropriate display. Well, not only that, but like, if you update whatever data at the root, everything downstream, but you don't have to handle, like, manually updating each part of the widget, right? It's much closer to something like React, where you describe what you want the final state to look like,

and as long as you're binding in properties from QML, it all just auto updates. It's like a differential data flow UI engine that you get for free just by use. using QML. That you can declaratively define. Exactly. It sounds like a completely new way

to look at how to build desktops. Am I getting that wrong? No, you're getting it right. And what's new, what's changed is in May, version 0.30 came out,

which added a bunch of stuff like Paul Kit, pipe wire, Wayland idle timers, just more control over managing the windows. A lot of multi-monitor fixes went in.

And then it was followed by a 0.3.3 release in late August, which fixed a few crashes involving multi-monitors and Wi-Fi and things like that. So it sort of got recognition after these more recent releases. You can use it alongside plasma pretty easily. You can also use it on Gnome, although for full integration, you would need a corresponding extension. But it's really blowing up on Hyperland and other tiling window managers

because there are projects that are now giving you more of a, I wouldn't call it a complete desktop because Wes will give me a hard time, but I would say it gives you like a status bar, application timers, a control center for like which Wi-Fi network, audio device, notifications and D&D, calendar integration, Bluetooth controls, you know, settings drop down, things like that that are kind of nice to have on any desktop that don't come inherently with nearly any of these timing window managers.

Sort of the day-to-day stuff that you'd expect to run an operator machine just from the GUI without having to know a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or stuff like that. And it's beautiful. It's also, I don't know if we've touched on this, but it's gorgeous. It looks like some of the most modern desktop Linux out there. And HyperLIN really is a nice fit because it's a very smooth desktop, but it doesn't bring anything. And so this kind of gives you something to work with. The other reason it's getting some traction is Amma Archie is using it, Omarchi,

they have a Quattro release in the works, and they've kind of built a whole hyperland shell around QuickShel. And the desktop is a QuickShill process called Amarchi Shell, and it has a top bar, drop-down control panels, notifications, volume, brightness stuff, application menu, clipboard, emoji overlays, lock screen. Yeah, these are in the whole lock screen. You know, pseudopromps, background services. And because everything is sort of like Ghanomshell where it's sort of one big,

large process. They can re-change and refresh stuff while it's running, but they also have a plug-in system, which sits on top of QuickShel. They've already had over a thousand different contributions of plugins in their quote-unquote store. They also ran a little bit of a competition, and they awarded some of the competitions and stuff like that. But, yeah, this is where it kind of gets interesting that it's using QML, because at first it kind of just, you know, you could almost if you look at like sort of something like Nix, it's declarative. You set a lot of properties, right? like I need to set the width of this piece of the UI or something, you know, the background color, all those kinds of normal things.

But the properties can also be expressions, which are just JavaScript. And once you put that there, you can basically do anything. It becomes essentially a full programming language. And so that means you can have really self-contained little plugins because QuickShel and QML offers stuff like, you know, talking to Rest APIs, reading files on the file system, doing like debus and Unix sockets. You get all kinds of different ways to pull data. in. So if you want, however you want

to surface that, an API that runs on your box, a file from the file system, something else, if you can use those hooks to bring data into QML, then the rest of the stuff all just applies, right? So it's the second you've got it in there, you can build the UI with it. I did, and I'll talk about that in a little bit.

I built a couple things. And so the Omachi setup is you can have this top level, it's all just like a, you can just have essentially a big folder of QML, and then because the plugins are mostly self-contained, them, it could rely on like hyperline specific stuff or whatever. You know, there's some more specificity in some of them.

But in general, you just drop that folder in the tree, and Quickshell is already set up to reload that anyway, and then the second you reference it anywhere else, or it can tie up all the strings for you, and then you're done. And one of the nice things about that is it keeps a real consistent look. So all of their plugins for their desktop, for their Quatro desktop, they all have a consistent theme. And when you change the shell theme,

they all immediately adapt and are consistent. It's really quite nice. Yeah. And so internally, they can expose sort of properties inside QML. And then so when you're building a downstream plugin, if you just reference that, you automatically get that consistency. So historically throughout Linux and all the various distributions that are out there, we had these boutique distributions where a couple of Rockstar developers would, or one Rockstar

developer or whatever it might be, would get together. And they would create their version of a desktop environment. We still have versions of these at different scales. But what I think we're going to see with QuickShall and AI-assisted development and with bases like Arch and NixOS is you're going to see hundreds and thousands of little teeny tiny microdistros that are their own composite, like mine. Like HyperVive is now, it's a base of NixOS, the window manager is Wayland, Hyperland, and then the entire shell now from the lock screen, the lock,

login screen everything is all quick shell i've built it all i've built my entire my desk over the last three days well okay it's a little more but and i've deployed it to all my systems with multiple different different every system has a different video card a different monitor layout and uh it's my desktop shell now and it really wasn't it's not like i sat down and like learned how to do cplice it's quick shell is so straightforward and it's so easy for agents to manage as well or for a person to just do, you know, by hand, all 100% human grade created. It's approachable that way, too. So it's really going to create, I believe,

because we already have so many great distros, especially like when you think about the U-Blus you could easily rebase on and silver blue, like there's so many great base distros out there that then just build your own layer on top of. And you'll just see people that'll just be hundreds, if not thousands of GitHub repos and GitLab repos out there of people just run in their own distro now. And I bet, I bet if people boosted in their email, I bet you a lot of people, people in our audience are already doing this.

And this is what QuickShall is unlocking now is this last layer. This last layer of the desktop can now be completely yours, or there's so many cool community spins out there you can take in. I just think that's really neat. Yeah, there's like a critical mass factor. I like your comparison with Nix, right? Because there's a long time where Nix was like, okay, really cool technology. But if NICS packages didn't really have enough,

you're not going to take all the time to re-bootstrap your whole environment every time. right. And I think that's where we're getting now. What's like, QuickShell has, QML has been around for a while, right? We've had a lot of these primitives. Quick Shell's now got a rich enough API and we've got so much stuff that's building on top of it and sort of

figuring out some of the quirks of the system and how to wire it up robustly and it's open source. So now we just have all of these pieces that even if it, even if you can't just exactly pull the thing, most of it's going to be declared to view why. And maybe you need to fuss a little with like where the data comes in and out

or whatever. But that's it. And you have a bunch of examples of how to do it that you can take whole cloth or reinvent yourself. This is what I wanted plasma widgets to be. I remember when QML was, I remember when QML was first introduced. And I thought there's real potential here for all of this.

The other thing I think that's moving the needle a little bit is the Amicom Foundation announced that it has become a premier sponsor of QuickShel and its lead developer, who's known publicly as outfoxed. And the sponsorship is initially set to run for three years. years. They're also sponsoring Vaxury from Hyperland for, I believe, three years perhaps with the option to even extend that. So both the Hyperland component and the Quickshell component now have at least three years of full-time funding for development. So they're probably not slowing down, because that just happened. Yeah, that means you can actually, you know, you can take some stuff

off the backlog. You can plan out some months at a time to figure out what things you're going to be building. Yeah. That's an enviable position. So I feel like you're going to hear more about QuickShell, and one of the ways you're going to experience it is you'll probably see at least plasma-based distros start shipping different QuickShill applications, not to spoil the picks, but that's another thing that's happening is people are able to also publish standalone applications using QuickShel, which is very fascinating. I played with some of those two. But I think we should talk about some of the stuff we built.

So with all that fun, we built a thing. We extended it, and, well, of course, we have some notes. But before we get there, let's talk a bit more about these community plugins. I thought this was an interesting way to kind of kick things off. You know, Omar Archie held this community plugin contest and awarded some cash prizes to some of the number one plugins for their platform. And can and have been pretty straightforward to just port these to my own setup. Really, it's not hard. These are not like inherently locked into Omaha Archie.

they might be designed around Omaha and Chi, but they're not inherently locked in. Which is a great point, because from the outside, especially if you are coming from like Canome or Plasma, it could be kind of hard to understand, like, is this compatible? What parts of this can I use or not use? And you're not using that.

You're using a different shell, which you can talk more about. So I think it's a great test case because it does show. Like, unless it's trying, it helps probably that you're on the same compositor, but like, unless you're, unless it really needs some sort of hyper-specific OMachi information.

Or design elements. Right. I mean, they have a very unique, style I like it. I mean, it is a good look. I just, it's not the shell I'm using. But one of the number one plugins is really cool. It's called Radio Atlas. And it is a plugin that allows you to rotate a globe and then little dots on the map throughout and around the world. And when you click the dot, it plays the radio station from that area around the world. It's basically got all the radio stations. And it's just a really neat thing to have like if you, like me,

I really enjoy trying, especially around the states, different local radio, local TV. and it's just really well done. And it's like an example of what actually is a very powerful and very nice user interface, very high-end user interface, that is done with this kind of simple quick shell setup. It gets it much closer to, like, if you were comfortable building out like a simple React,

what UI, you can now do a similar thing, except it's a part of the desktop. Or, you know, ClaudeCode can. The other one that I thought was, you land your helpers. The other one that I thought was just a great idea that I'll probably be borrowing is the home assistant quick shell integration to just be able to control different parts of your home assistant right there in the bar. Very, very beautifully done. Again, not necessarily locked to one particular project, which is really great.

So they have some really wonderful plugins, and you can just browse them and get an idea of what people are building. And I did that. And I found one called Sink Shell. Oh, okay. Sink Shell is a health and my... monitoring widget for sync thing. And you can control and install or control service pause syncing things like that. And as we know, we've recently recommitted to our dear, our dear sync thing.

That's right. So this one was built. Sink shell is built for Oma Archie, although the project does stay, you know, we totally open to expanding in the future. So I may link them what I did because I have built my shell around Dank Linux, the DMS shell. Dank shell is beautiful. So I took a lot of.

my design from Dankshell, which is, you know, it's like a, it's a community-made desktop for sway, really any Wayland, any Wayland desktop. And it's beautiful. It's so gorgeous. It's so nice. And so I just sort of like aped all of this and then wanted to create a Sinkthing widget that matches that design. And I'm going to publish this. So if you end up playing around with this listener and you also use Sinkthing and you would like a Sinkthing widget for your DankTestop, I will publish this in the show notes. I have made Synch shell. And it is kind of my, you know, quick copy.

This is a read-only version. It tells you the current status of things where they're synced, how much space is transferred, what's left. You can see, I have 73 gigabytes indexed across 11 folders. And I'm currently updating this week in Bitcoin. And it's QML, JavaScript, and a little Nix language, so I can get easily going on my host. Nice.

See, and this is great, too, because you've already tried. experimenting with like can I have this one thing I'm excited about here is the composability right so you can just sort of publish this it's just some bits you don't really need to compile anything or do any complicated build and so you can have a simple next package that just puts the bits on disk and then pull them in the right spot and it's really good at handling

various monitor layouts and panel size differences which has been really really nice because I have really weird esoteric vertical monitors and different every monitor is a different resolution in some systems. It's really crazy. So it's been nice to build something because I have one Nix config for all these hosts. So it's really nice to build a build something that does work across multiple hosts but it's still adaptive. You can have customizations, but it's not like a crazy thing where you're constantly duplicating everything and having to do a bunch of jank.

I really like that. It feels like mine too in a way that I didn't, it wasn't really missing some of this stuff. But now that I have it, I don't think I can go back. It is still sort of feels early. It is kind of easy every now than to like, slip into an accidental CPU loop where it's like eating a lot of CPU because something in the bar didn't

render correctly and it takes me a minute to catch that. But that's my own footgun, not inherent to QuickShill. Did you have anything you built or play around with? I did. Yeah. So, okay, one thing I find fascinating here is like because there's this connection with, you know, drawing UIs, the flip

side of that, which has become quite the study in the web world, is like you need state management, right? It's like you have the U.I, but the U.I is displaying state, which could be, you know, the external state of your sync thing, or it could be, like, where the windows are and which windows exist and how many workshops you have. But what's the source of truth kind of thing? Yes. Okay. And different desktops have taken different paths on some of this, right? Yeah, yeah. So, like, the stuff that this latest

omachi is doing is really, like, QML QuickShell native, where it's all there. It's just one tree. The state lives mostly in that system besides, like, some config files on disk. But Dank Materials Shell kind of took a different path. They have a separate Go demon that sort of does a lot of the stuff under the hood. Yeah. And then QML talks to it over two different sockets. One's like a request response. And then the other one,

and it sort of subscribes for updates. And so the Go Demon can kind of own a bunch of the state. And then QML ends up being used sort of as the presentation layer. That's one of the things that actually drew me to dank. I mean, because you need something that's doing that management and that dispatch. I thought that was a good way to do it. Yeah, absolutely.

And what's fun is you get various sort of like there's different, it fits into sort of theoretical computer science because there's There's various ways of managing state and various ways of handling and updating UIs. and so you get, QMU handles a certain amount of it, and then everything else, you get to see this sort of plethora of different open source takes, right? So there's, like, Celestia,

they compile a C++ plugin that they load, and that's where the config lives. There's a bunch of different use cases. Some folks even, like Nactalia used to use Quickshell, but now they're just going C++ native entirely. Yeah. So I decided I'd build my own shell, kind of inspired by what Dank is doing.

Oh, this is exciting. Brent, what do you think? Okay, Brent, Brent, what is Wes's desktop shell? What are, like, the key things that Wes has to have on his desktop shell? What do you think? App launcher, probably, maybe? No, I think he's going to hide that. I think he's going to get to an app launcher with the keyboard shortcuts.

Right, but, I mean, and I guess you could use another one, too, you don't have to build one. He wants a bunch of visibility into, like, multitasking, I think. so similar to like pinning your tabs in your browser. Some people do this, I hear. I bet you he has like a sidebar where you can see the progress of everything that's going on at a glance and then, you know, keyboard shortcuts to quickly move to them.

You should call it the pain bench. I like what you guys are crafting for me. Can you write some of this data? You're recording, right? Well, I'm thinking like, it depends on how far you want to go, right? Because, oh, man, you could build one that has like a Wi-Fi network manager interface. You got to have that.

Why not have a button that executes K-Exec. Oh, I don't have that. Kexec on the fly. Okay, so tell us what is your desktop. What is it? Well, so it's right now it's super minimal. I went with Neri as the scrollable Wayland compositor under the hood. Nice.

And then on top of that, well, naturally because it's me, I have a closure Babashka program, and it's serving the role of that Go program. So it's sort of the state management. and the brain, and then it subscribes. Neri has an event socket. And so you talk to that. The first thing is it pushes the current state of everything it knows.

And then after that, it will send events whenever you do stuff, right? You click or you move windows or you do whatever. This guy. And then so the brain just gets those and sort of... So Neri's doing that inherently, and you're just riding on top of that? Yeah, so it subscribes.

Oh, that's great. So anytime you know, like, if I like click a button that takes me to workshop two, or Workspace 2, that sends an event that says that, right? And then so the closure program does what's known as like a reduce or a fold. So every time it gets an event, it just updates state, right? It says like, oh, I know that what changed, let me keep track of it. And then anytime you have an update, you render out now what the state looks like, right?

And so that gets pushed. You can do it over a socket or I'm just doing a file right now because I don't have that much in there. So it has opportunity there to update the state. It controls that. and it can fire off events or whatever and actions that are needed when you see like, oh, this thing changed, what do I need to do?

And then QML is set up to be the rendering side. So it reads the state. JSON file. And then that has everything it needs to display everything. Of course. And then... Source of truth.

Just like a lot of these are doing, QuickShell has an IPC that you can talk to, right? So essentially, it then triggers things in QuickShell. So like, when you click... One of the things they had to built was like a little workspace switcher. Yeah. There's also basic stuff

for just being able to click and see what Windows are open and click on those. Okay. So you got a window switcher. Yep. And so that took all of that loop to be able to work, right? And so I was trying to figure out like what exactly all do you need.

So that gave me like a very basic. I've got my clock. I've got my very basic window controls, right? Everything working there. And then of course I had to add basic system monitoring, right? So like live CPU and disk and networking. Nice. Oh, I didn't think you'd do monitoring.

That's cool. I love that. I figured, you know, because in case Brantley wanted to use any of this, I did add a little monitor that tells me the Firefox windows I have opened and that way tabs. I called it, called it. Good call. Good call. And then I did also build a cute little power profile switcher. Oh, yeah.

So you can kind of just click that and toggle it. And you know it works. And then the fanciest thing I've built so far, because a lot of this was just trying to get the underlying architecture to work at all and be like an actual desktop I could use without having a switchback. is a little open code session viewer. I was thinking about building one of those. So it tells me I have 11 sessions over the last 24 hours, 32 million token, you know, and then it tells me like how much I've spent.

And then you click it, and this took a little bit, you know, to make work. And it's not very, it's not fancy yet, but you click it and it drops down and shows you like the most recent ones. Oh, I love it. Yeah. And their title. Yeah.

That's great. So to sort of double down on that point, we're talking about a lot like building your desktop and creating a shell and replacing plasma or whatever. with Gnome, but you could just build that widget. Yeah. And you could just use it on whatever desktop you like today. You do not need to replace the entire shell.

So if you just want a widget for a thing that's unique to you, like I was kind of joking in the intro, you could turn your dashboard, you could turn your desktop into a dashboard because you could just build, like, I built a sync thing, you built an open code thing. They don't require that you build your whole shell. No. You could actually just make them plasma widgets or you could make them a little application on Ghanom or whatever you want to use. And though, like, you could, like in my version, I'm having the closure program go and fetch the data and then write it into the state.

But the rest of that, like the downstream UI part, you could just take, right? Because none of that needs to change. You just have to fill in the gap with how you want to provide the information. The info, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like with our modern tools, we're starting to see a shift towards, like, deep customization. Like, if you look at a tool, like open code, for instance, you can modify it as much as you want to be your own very personalized. esoteric, like, workspace. And I, this quick shell stuff and this entire conversation and Wes's beginnings of

his to customizations just reminds me that like, we all get to have our own distinct computing environments now. And it's, this is what we've always wanted and everybody's always wanted. It's been too hard to attain. But I don't know. This year just feels like everybody gets a desktop. You get a desktop and you get a desktop. You just get whatever you want.

It's great. It's also really easy to port the widgets I had built from. my Waybar over to QuickShall. It took seconds. I wanted to ask you about that because you had been using Waybar before and one version of what you can think of QuickShel is as sort of as a Waybar replacement. On steroids.

I also really like the launcher that Dank chose and builds. It's really good. And one of the plugins is Nix run. So if I type Nix and the name of a package, it searches NICS packages, gives me a list, and then I just hit it and it just runs it from the repository immediately and launches the application. It's really next level.

So I love it. I love it. And yeah, look at the... Oh, you just... Oh, Wes just posted a picture. Actually, Wes, it looks really good. I like... See, I kind of went for more, like,

bubbly kind of pill widgets on mine, but you went for like a clean text bar, which I think also looks really good. Oh, yeah, that's nice looking, Wes. Clean, minimal? Yeah, and I want to play more with doing more theme stuff. I just kind of got it across to like, what's the minimum thing I could actually

use day without hating it, right? Yeah. I think that looks very... good. Brent, right? You impressed? Yeah, I'm trying to wonder, like, Wes, when are you going to publish this for us to all play with? Because I feel like there's some real gems here. It's fun.

It's also getting to play with this stuff and just, like you were saying, in a deeper way and building this whole thing. There's a lot. Like, I've played with Tiling Window managers over the years. I've never gone this team. And it was a great excuse to understand more of, like, what are some of the options? Because it, like, opens our software, right? Like, you dive in, and there's, like all the good things,

there's so much you didn't know you didn't know. Well, as my kids would say, I'm so cooked now, because between QuickShell and Hyperland, it really is the perfect sweet spot for me now. I just can't ever, I mean, I love all the desktop environments, but for like my production systems

where I'm working and sitting there doing show prep, I have built such a workflow around the key, key binds, and now with the QuickShell stuff, it's so good. It really is, it is a unique kind of lock-in. I have created my own lock-in. And I love it. I couldn't be happier.

And so even if you just use it to create a simple widget or you use it to try out a lot of the really neat desktop shells or build your own, I think you're going to be hearing a lot more about QuickShel for many, many reasons. And so it really blew up over the summer, and we just kind of wanted to give you a heads up and give you a little information about what's going on. And if you built something or have built or build something with it, you got to let us know, boost.jupidobroadcasting.com. Once again this week, we have some red hot feedback. This one from definitely not a Mac user. I don't know what they like, but they definitely don't like a Mac, I guess. Hey, J.B. Team, too long for just a boost.

Saw I'm yapping here on the email. My dad and I just finished up a road trip across the country from Columbus, Ohio, to L.A. for college. Oh, that sounds fun. And as you do, we realized we needed to plan this trip. I found a tool called Trek, and it so happens. You featured this on episode 680. seeing as it has an MCP naturally, my dad, and I each hooked up our own clankers to it,

and oh boy, is that the way to do trips? As if we needed to complicate it further, we hooked up Devarich, remember, the big D, and image to make a timeline for our trip on track to keep the memories after we get there. That's so smart. String it all together. We use GBT and Claude models

to make the rough skeleton before we left on the trip. This put in places we wanted to stop and the routes to get there. But once we left, we used Hermes agents only. Shout out to Quinn 2.7 plus. My dad would book a hotel, give his agent the booking confirmation number, and my agent would send me the Google Map link and suggest a good dinner spot nearby. Hermes also managed our time so we could visit the Gateway Arch and Arch's National Park.

Yes, yes, we like Arches, while also making tracks across the country. to make sure we get to the check-in on time. This whole trip was made so much easier by combining all of those tools. Imagine how many people contributed to this trip from the open source community. Wow. All the time we saved in planning,

let my dad start to catch up on Linux unplug episodes, as well as time to argue about the relative merits of supporting legacy and outdated protocols in the kernel, such as Apple Talk. Yeah, buddy. So definitely not a Mac user. I have a couple of hot tips for you because you can probably guess

I have done something very similar. And I would very much recommend it's free to do to sign up for the TomTom Developer API because this gives your bot super routing powers. It knows about outages, it knows about closures, it knows about weather, it knows about traffic.

It also can do route distance and planning and they have an endpoint if you have an EV. So it can do range calculation as well. Then if you really want, want to go nuts, most states or like up in Canada provinces and areas will have developer APIs for their local traffic information. So for me, I'm very often in the Washington, Idaho, Oregon, or BC area. So I signed up for APIs for each one of those and I can check their particular closures when routing. Then on top of that, if you really want to go crazy, you can also

tie into things like free campsites.net and other services like recreation.gov. And it can actually do availability planning and checking. So you can bring it all together and you can have it produce quite the comprehensive plan. I just went on a trip to Idaho over the weekend. The entire thing was generated by my agent. And then for consumption by the wife, I had to produce a PDF, which she loved. And it just broke everything down day by day where we're going to stop.

Where if you wanted to, if you don't want to stop there, you could stop here. You'll have this much battery charge when you arrive. These are the food places nearby. These are the campgrounds that allow you to stay one night. You can book late. They let you park and sleep in a car, like all the stuff. It just does all the stuff. Oh, and it'll even tell me, because this is a problem here, it'll tell me like how close I'm going to get to wildfires along my route because I'm checking all the wildfire information as well.

And it just produces such an awesome comprehensive. This is coming from somebody who's a road trip enthusiast, right? I mean, I've been doing this for a long time and this is all stuff I had to do. You can even have a check in on cellular coverage. I mean, in other words, keep going because it just keeps getting. and better and better. It's really pretty great. Can we just have an API for everything?

Finally, maybe I would book my trips in advance. Yeah, but then you also have to do what the agent tells you, and that's still, that's the human factor. All right, well, we do have some boosts too, so let's get to those, gentlemen. And now it is time for

the boost. And Greg, the lawyer comes in with 40,000 sats. Greg, you're back again. Look at you. Wow. Hey, Rich Lobster! And Greg comes in with one message.

Boost! He comes in with boost. Love it, Greg. Thank you very much. Greg, you're often on the top of the list there, and it doesn't go unnoticed. We appreciate it very, very much. Make it so. You, sir, are the baller booster of the show.

Appreciate you. Hey, speaking of PJ and his B-Day. Oh, we got a birthday booster. Except this was actually a boost from last week's live. Oh, really? coming in live so early but late. All right. Do we have a sound for 8,888s?

Fun will now commence. How about that? Yeah, PJ says, does this thing work? And yes, it does. I guess I'm on a delay this time, because we were not watching live. But thank you. It's fun to get live boost.

Thank you, PJ. Thank you. Well, cholerafa boosts in a row of ducks. Polifhora? No. Chlorifera? Calafra. That ain't right.

Color. No message, just value. We take that. Thank you very, very much. Appreciate that. All right, next boost comes in from Nyquist, which almost sounds like the drive I used to use. Is that?

Are you Nyquist? Are you referring to the old Nyquist drive? Because that would be awesome. Also, no message, though, just the value. That's not possible. Nothing to do that. Sir, Omlet comes in with a row of ducks. Hey!

When I hear Sinkthing, I just have to boost in. All right. Such a game changer. Isn't it? Some projects out there just don't get enough love. And that's where we're like, no, we've got to talk about this. I know people know about sync thing, but it just doesn't get enough talk. At Chris, I enjoyed the irony of recommending it because there's no cloud and then pointing

a free cloud host to LLM at it. But I do agree. The API is great. On the topic of web and thin clients, maybe check out a file browser fork. And then Bearded Tech independently also recommended, I think, there's like a maintained fork called Quantum File Browser or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, because the question was, is like, how do we stack like a file manager or something on top of this? So that way, when you're on a mobile device, you could get to these files. Or maybe you're on a computer that doesn't have a thing installed, but you're on your METN. You just want to quickly download or maybe even upload something. So this is File Browser Quantum. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Mostly Go.

And it is Apache 2.0 licensed. Yeah, another option would be something like copy party, which is also in that space. So there's a few different things that maybe we should be tried. I need to try something. I do, because that is going to be, that's going to be one of those things if I don't set it up. When I do need it, I'm really going to be kicking. Well, speaking of omelets, Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 sets.

Oh, my God, this drawer is filled with broilopes. Here's a PSA. Avoid the HP 840 G9 12th gen Intel for Linux. I couldn't get any sort of low power state working on this thing. Oh. Sleep battery drain is more than. 10% per hour on Linux. On Windows, however, it's less

than 1%. Oh, that's annoying. I tried NixOS, PopOS, and Fedora. I put maybe eight hours of troubleshooting into this thing about two months ago, but nothing made this thing better. Oh, well, you definitely tried. You got to give credit for that.

HP 840 G9, 12th gen, Intel, he says. Well, if anyone knows any tricks. I just haven't been able to pull the trigger on a used laptop. It's just such a bad time to buy a computer right now. This is a bit on theme for me this week because I, as most of you might remember, I just moved recently. And so somehow the Dev 1 came out of a box this week. And I plugged it in. I was like, wait a second, this thing's charging 100% all the time. I need to just set this thing

maybe to something lower because I mostly use it on desktop. Nope. Yeah. Can't do that. Did a ton of research. Nope. None of the, you know, the kernel for this thing just can't handle it. There is a PR to allow it to happen. I don't know how long it's going to take. Yeah, I was very surprised. Very, very surprised. Even TLP can't do it on this thing. You're like, nope, not going to happen for this one.

Hmm. Okay, I got a suggestion. You set up Home Assistant. Uh-huh. You get a little sensor on there that monitors the battery charge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then you put your charger on a smart switch, right? The smart switch gets toggled by Home Assistant.

When you reach 80%, Home Assistant turns off the smart switch. And then when you reach 60%, home assistant turns it back on. That sounds like a product. The digital world fails you? Cut of the analog. That's right. via the digital control. M-RAM comes in with a row of ducks.

2,222 sets. First-time booster. Thank you for the work. Wow, that's awesome. Thank you for boosting. I like RAM. Appreciate the value. Too many accounts comes in with 11,337 sets.

Picking up the Firefox thread here, I'd love your take on how to handle multiple Firefox profiles elegantly. Firefox now ships two profiles. managers, but both like the ease of Chrome profiles for a GUI file like me. I love, hate, my Foxy friend.

So I just randomly did see that old. There's like two versions and one of them look real old, like the original one from early days of Firefox. I was surprised that that UI popped up. I don't do the profiles thing anymore.

I have messed around a bit with containers. Yeah, I have done that too. And I do find that to be be kind of useful and tab groups. Right. Yeah, I've used containers, especially for things like, you know, you have like a day job or a particular account associated for something like that. That, I think, works better than individual profiles personally. But we may not be addressing what you use profiles for. I'm kind of curious what you need them to do.

And have you tried, have you tried that? Because I don't know, it's like, you've probably seen it once before. Maybe you took it off your menu bar kind of like when you, when they first added it, they kept popping up every few updates. And first I was like, I'll get this out of here. I don't want, I don't care about this. But then I actually stopped and used it, and I actually found it pretty effective. I haven't quite used the Chrome Profile Switcher, so I'm not sure which features you love about it. But I do remember using profiles in the past, and I found the easiest way to use it was to have a distinct, like, shortcut icon for them.

That would just, like, launch that one or launch either one. And that seemed to be the easiest way to manage it, just outside of the browser itself. Usually it's just a pending, you know, a profile kind of stands at the end of the, at the end of the executable. It's not really that hard. And you can usually just play around with it. I at the command line see what works and then make that the launcher. But that would probably be one way to do it.

I guess that we need more information to properly answer this and ask why you. And we're also asking, to be honest with you if you're holding it wrong, a little bit. But just a little bit. Like you might not be. We might just need more context. Bronzo Wing comes in with 11,233 Satoshies. Well, I'll be dipped. One vote for a clanker podcast.

Have you guys tried this? the pie coding agent. I'm writing it with Lama CPP with unsloth Quinn 3.8 Q4KXL with MTP and NoVision M. M.M. ProJ. For extra speed. Okay, I don't know what that last one is. Love it. I lost me on the last one.

Feels almost frontier-like. Oh. I ditched Hermes and open code as they felt too bloated for local models. Oh, that is an interesting observation. I could see that. So I can see maybe why pie coding would be a little more appealing. Yeah, if you don't. And, you know, if you are targeting it in a specific thing, you don't need a fold.

sort of general assistant type agent, skip the bloat. Have you tried, I know you've looked at it, Wes. I know you're familiar with. Yeah, I haven't done anything extensive with pie. I have, yeah, poked out it a little bit because it's kind of, you know, some of the fundamentals here early, too, and it's just continued on. Maybe we owe up some time. Thanks for the, thanks for the idea there, bronze wing, and the report.

They're always useful. I agree. G. Anonymous comes in, 4,500 and 13 sats. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. No message found, so I'll take distro stew too because distro stew sent in 12,345 sets. You know, it's been a minute since we've had ourselves a space ball. So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five. Yikes, 300 character limit.

Oh, yikes, you say, blessing, we say. I recently created a hub and spoke module for my sync thing setup. Ah. Two Nix servers, everything else is a spoke, phones, laptops, etc. Yeah. When I was mesh-syncing, every hope, host to every ephemeral host, it led to an unnecessary amount of conflicts over time. And then we get a little link from Stu here.

Which doesn't seem to be done. Oh, no, it didn't seem to work. Maybe it got cut off by the 300 characters. Maybe, maybe. But love it. Thank you for the architecture. Yeah, the old hub and spoke model. I did it when I, for a long time, like sort of my main sync thing server was actually a VPS with

some attached storage. And then I would attach everything to that and then have a, But everything obviously because of its high speed would sink there first just naturally, and then it was sort of distributed to everything else. And that worked quite well. They worked quite well. Well, Gene Bean boosted in a couple rows of ducks for a total of 6,66 sets. Things that are looking up for old but duck.

First one here, the hold music from data in Lupp 680 is quite great. As for making up for missed streaming sats, well, it emptied while driving. On a road trip, Beijing, do you all have any suggestions for interacting with Syncthing from iOS? Probably using whatever file manager that ends up being agreeable, I think. Really, I think it's probably putting

a web file manager on a Mesh VPN network is probably going to be my solution for that. I don't think Sync Thing as a service is very viable, unless somebody knows differently. If anybody has a solution for that, please let us know, because that is something I'd like to solve.

Mr. Mayhem came in with a smoking hot boost right as we got going here, 2001 Satoshi's. Coming in hot with the boost. Your pre-show song reminded me to boost. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Mayhem. Appreciate that. Time for some Fiat boost. Here we go, boys. Well, Dan comes in with $100.

Hey! Hey, rich lifestyle. Month two, Fossad boost. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. This is for a cool little project I found called. the open book touch, which is everything I've thought an e-reader should be and nothing more.

I've already ordered one and thought I'd spread the word. Okay, look at this. This is looking good. So it looks like pricing will be between 150 and 250, and 250 depending on options. A pocketable front-lit open-source e-reader for every book in every language. Looks like a cleaner version of the Kindle about the size of a large field notes notebook, which is a great visual. and yeah, it's an e-pop reader. No physical buttons.

Devices a single perfectly symmetrical 4.26 inch front-lit e-paper touchscreen, one centimeter thin in its enclosure. It looks great. Open book touch slips into a pocket and disappears until you unlock it to read. All right. Nice, fine, Dan. Thank you very much. I really would love to know how you like it when you get it. Yeah, please do you report because, boy, that looks tempting. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Well, definitely not. A Mac user comes in again with 20 total Fiat. Yes, hi. My dad and I just finished across a country like Glandker trip powered by open source. Oh, this is his boost to refer. You know, that's a nice way to do it.

If you're going to do a long email, that's really thoughtful. Thank you, definitely. There's some extra details in here. Track Devarich, which we mentioned, image, we mentioned Hermes, of course, but there's Nebula in here as well. Oh, yeah, nice, dude.

He says, see my email for more fun info. We did, and that was great. Boosting in to say, thanks for being the entertainment on this trip, providing all the picks to make it happen. Keep it up. Well done, putting it all to practical use, definitely. That's really awesome.

Monty comes in with a free member boosts. I support the used think pad plan. There's never a shortage of good options in that 300 range. I look for a listing that have several of the same model as a sign that there are off-lease business units. Yeah. Yeah, one listing that has like 10 or more available. They usually come looking like new.

Then I resell the previous and I get close to half back. Nice. Yeah, I guess around $300, if you only use them for a year or two, they probably don't lose too much more value. Halfback is not bad. That's kind of, what I really want is a think pad, around 14-inch screen, 32 gigs of RAM, and 10th Jan or newer processor. And I don't, 300, I think 300 is a little, probably not quite enough at this point. But that's what I was looking on eBay, and I just haven't really pulled the trigger yet. Well, we have another member boost here from Paul.

Paul writes, continuing my member boost streak, do you try local tier models like the 30B variants of Muse Glimmer, Quinn, or Gemma? I guess you don't have the resources to run them on your own hardware in a meaningful way, but would you be interested in trying to use small models exclusively for a week as a test? Ooh, fun idea. I'm always trying them to see what I can eke out of an old computer, and that's not much. Wes has done the rent-a-gupoo model. Yeah. And has played with some of the more powerful versions of these self-hosted models on a rented GPU. Yeah, I have played a little bit with the Muse Glimmer model.

That was fun. I was just playing with the Quinn-38-27B model. Yeah. And a tiny bit with camera. I'd like to do a little bit more with camera. But yeah, I haven't done like a whole week long. It's more like, you know, when new models come out, I usually try to find some time to go at least,

put them through some basic paces. It doesn't always happen, but I'd like to do more. Yeah. Oh, boy. Are we ready? One day, in the distant future, hardware prices, at some point will come back to Earth, and these models will be optimized for on local hardware, and maybe the two will meet. Maybe.

A guy from Vienna sent a member boost. Use a rubber duck, save the planet. I had this thought yesterday when debugging a network issue. The solution was quite obvious, but asking the LM first got me into a cul-de-sac. The rubber duck uses the energy and doesn't talk back. Nice feature sometimes. Yeah, it can be right.

You know, the rubber duck approach just to kick things around is definitely a valid use. Rubber duck it, Wes, and plug your laptop in. Wes's desktop environment is using too much power. You want to take Lutris copy? Got to optimize that, Wes. Lucidropi came in with a free member boost. Lucidropi. I went to the future and got wine 99.0, so I don't need to dual boot windows anymore.

I think we're reaching a point where you can clank any unsupported application into wine. I was able to get my clanker to iterate and debug loading a small proprietary work app with wine. And now, I don't need Windows. Hmm, it does seem like wine compatibility is a softer target than porting an entire Windows application. And we have seen a couple of success stories of previously very complicated Windows applications getting wine support. So we may be, you might be honest on me here. I mean, you can imagine, right, especially if it's just a couple of spots, like it's not missing a whole giant compatibility thing,

but it's just a few things you need to fix or implement some stub or something. Yeah. The real trick would be if anybody ever got Mac apps working, but now that they're on the M platform, I don't think that's ever going to happen. Thank you everybody who boosted the shows. We have those of you who streamed them stats, 15 of you, collectively stacked 26,303 Satoshis. Welcome to Texas.

I guess that's the Texas amount. There you go. 26303. That's not too bad. Thank you, Sat Streamers. When you combine that with our Fiat boosters and our sap boosters, and we'll just kind of convert it all to SATs, the show this week stacked 292, 102 Satochis.

Not too bad at all. And of course, thank you to all of our members who put your support on autopilot. Don't forget you get that free member boost as a reward at boost. Jupyter Broadcasting.com. And you can support each individual episode as well, but you're going to boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com or in your podcast app.

The memberships are pretty neat, though. Jupiter. Party gives you access to the entire network special features, like bootleg editions of the show, which right now, the bootleg edition of Linux Unplugged is almost an hour and 54, 55 minutes long at this point. Lots of content, really good discussions in those bootlegs, sometimes develop into full segments,

but sometimes it only ever lives in the bootleg. So if you want more content, there's a whole other show. and jupiter.signal, or you can support just this humble show at Linuxunplug.com slash membership. I'm kind of excited about these picks, boys. Let's start with Dank Calendar, because it's the one I told you about the kind of proves that these quick shell applications don't have to be tied to an individual desktop environment or individual shell. They can actually be spun out into their own applications, and I present you Dank Calendar, which is also available on FlatHub. So you can just install it on any distro of choice.

Yeah, look at this. Now, it's a simple, clean, local calendar that can connect to Google, Microsoft, Cal Dev, and ICloud calendars, and pulled into one app. And I use it in coordination with my Keeper application, which is already syncing all of my calendars to one ICAL feed. So then I can just plug that into Dank calendar. And, well, Richard is your mother's brother. I now have not only a great desktop calendar app, but a great calendar widget as well. Yeah, and you can tell how it's made. I mean, one, it's got a flake done next.

love to see it. It's 49% go and 45% UML. Hmm. The other one, you know, Wes, you were talking about sources of truth. Indeed. And I think when you're thinking about agenetic network management or you're just thinking about human network management, having a visual home lab map diagram that is live and represents your actual living network.

Oh, not like the way it was six months ago when I last thought to update it? Yeah, it's pretty useful. And I've always kind of loved experimenting with these, and I think I have found the apex predator in the space. It's called Home Lab. It's a visual home lab manager map or kind of a Delio. It's self-hostable, and it visualizes an interactive diagram of your network with live monitoring. It provides a network integration for like your IP network, your Zigby devices, and your Z wave devices. So you can also bring your smart devices into this diagram, which is really, really powerful.

It also supports importing proxmocks. So if you use a proxmock server, you can connect to it, and it understands the architecture of your proxmux VM and pulls that into the diagram for you as well, including the networking setup and all of that. It's great. It produces a canvas layout that you can export as Markdown or you can export as a PNG or you can make available to agents over at MCP. And then they can use this as a source of truth for how your network is actually physically laid out. and what services run on which device. So this goes back to what Wes was saying about having a source of truth.

This could be a source of truth in that scenario. So again, it's called Home Label. And one of the things I love about is, even if you never had any plans to use the MCP or whatever, it produces this great visual diagram system of your network that you can use as a human being. And they've just recently announced a hacks plug-in so it'll integrate with your home assistant

if you use the Home Assistant stack and pull in that information. Every device, one canvas, your switches, your routers, your cameras, your VMs, your NAS device, your any electric smart devices that are reading electricity usage, your ISP information,

Wi-Fi stuff, like I said, Zigbee and Z wave, all of it into this, and then it diagrams it all up for you, and then gives you nice little status lights about what services are active. You could literally diagram your network rack

if you want with this thing. and down to the individual port level if you so care. And the ability to pull in the Zigby and the Z wave networks, so you can map your IOT network along with the rest of, so you now get the full picture of the network, not just your IP network, and not just the ZGB network, and not just the ZWave network off on their own islands,

but the whole thing and all of it monitored by the system available as an API, a web interface, or an MCP. Homelabel.net. It's fan. Fantastic. I set it up this weekend. I've been loving it. This is so crazy.

It was very impressive. Wow. Mm-hmm. It's great. I'm really, really happy with it. I had it scan both my hen network and my main network and the proxmocks. How to do? What did you learn?

It's all diagram nice. It's MIT licensed. So have at it. You can run it via Docker or whatever you like. I'm doing Docker Compose for this setup. And easy, Peezy. really, it was, it was nothing. And the results are great.

The scan is great, too. It has, by default, you have to review the results and then approve them, which is my preferred route, because otherwise sometimes these things just get crazy. And then you can just get to diagramming. You could likely even just have the agent generated diagram, I suppose, if you don't want to do it yourself. But it's really neat. It's neat to also see all my cameras in their own group and stuff like that, that other

tools just haven't really properly visualized. Yeah, it seems like maybe part of the value is that it has a wide array of possible options and things that it has understanding of and that you can therefore have them all in one cohesive picture? Your IP network, your ProxMox, your ZGB, and your Z wave is really great. I've never seen that before. And you don't have to bring your own understanding and layers and stuff. It understands that already.

Yeah, you can, so if you don't use the hacks integration, then you have to just connect to like your MQTT server or something. There's a little bit more work there. But if you use the hacks integration, it just ties all in. And then to be able to export it all is really nice. So you can like, you know, go flex your network diagram when you get it all pretty as a PNG. That's pretty cool. And if you do want to hook it up to the MCP, you can just, as you can ask your agent or your clod code or your open code, whatever it is, what nodes are currently offline.

It gets a list back. You could say add a new LXE container named Pyehole at 192-168.1.5 running on this host connected to this virtual VLAN. And the agent can query this and understand what all of that means and have a live updated map and understanding of it. So you're going to reduce not only exploration times, you're going to reduce your token cost, but you're going to reduce mistakes too. And then that means you can use models that perhaps aren't, you know,

fable or something. You know, they don't have to be front to your level. I noticed it also has a read-only stats API you can get. So that's kind of nice. You can see how many notes you got, stuff that's offline, unknown devices, and when you last did a scan. I mean, I just...

That smells like a little quick-shell widget to me. You're right, dude. You're right, actually. Well said. I hadn't thought of that yet, but I mean, I have it all set up. I'm all in on this. I really like it.

And it's really, it's complimentary to some of the other network monitoring already used too. It's fantastic. Can you hear the plane out there, Brentley? Did you hear the plane?

It makes me want to fly. We had a banner going by for Home Label as we did the episode. I don't know, I know it's not a... Yeah, yeah, yeah, too, yeah, yeah, of course. But that was actually the smoke one. Oh. Yeah.

So MIT license, link to that in the show notes. And if you forget the show notes, well, those are at Linux unplugged.com. And this one is slash 6-8-2. It's best not to think about it and just read the numbers without internalizing. Also, I want to remind you the show is live. We make it a Tuesday on a Sunday over at jbivolive.tv. See you next week.

Same bad time. Same bad station. Yeah, you can get it converted at jupiter broadcasting.com slash calendar. The mumble room's always going throughout the week, but really pops during the show. And then if you want to read more, look at something we said or point your clanker at more information, West, hook him up with the info. Well, do you prefer an SRT file? Or the even more robust

VTT file? I think I'm going VTT. You're a VTT kind of person. Okay, yeah, Web VTT, good standard there. I'm liking that. But that's not all. No? No, there's an upgraded now in two dimensions

instead of just one video feed. Yeah, an MP4. That seems like a lot of work. Huh, that's just in the feed? Yeah. Just the regular access feed? Right next to where we keep our JSON file with our cloud chapters.

Like, so, like, structure data? that you could just analyze and go right to this section in the show? It's a little out of vogue. It is XML based, right? Oh. But technically XML is parsible, yes. Oh, okay. Could we just do it in Markdown then?

Someday. We probably will. I don't know about that. So we'd love it if you joined us. Take advantage of all those extra features and all that over at Linuxonplug.com slash RSS for the RSS feed. And of course, of course, that mumble room. Details of Jupyterbroadcasting.com.

Check out some of the other great shows over there as well. The launch comes out on Tuesday. Actually, it's live Tuesday. It comes out on Wednesday. Check it out. I think there's an RSS feed for that. There might be. There might be several RSS feed for that.

Websites are great. I tell you what. All right, thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your Unplug program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.