LINUX Unplugged - 685: Pool Party

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

We're turning our spare, scattered storage into one giant network drive. Good idea? Maybe.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 SWAGSorry, 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 - YouTubeTexas Linux Festival 2026Valve's Steam Frame Now Available At $1059+ USDMy Last Quest - Launch 84RustFS — RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.Announcing RustFS 1.0.0 GA - RustFS Blogrustfs - GitHub — RustFS is an open-source, S3-compatible high-performance object storage system supporting migration and coexistence with other S3-compatible platforms such as MinIO and Ceph.Amazon.com: Xiaomi TV Box S 3rd Gen - 4K UHD, Google TV, 32GB Memory, Dolby Vision & Atmos, WiFi 6, HDMI 2.1, Fast Streaming, Compact and Powerful : ElectronicsMacintosh SE/30 - WikipediaLove Down BabylonArmada — The Open Source, Encrypted Discord Alternativeabsorb — A cross platform Audiobookshelf client for Android and iOSLissen: Audiobookshelf ClientGrakovNe/lissen-android — Minimalistic Android client app for Audiobookshelfwizarr - GitHub — Wizarr is an advanced user invitation and management system for Jellyfin, Plex, Emby etc.vikunja — The task manager you actually own.zj-radar — A Zellij sidebar that shows Claude Code, Codex, and other AI-agent status across every tab.Pi - GitHubPi — AI agent toolkit: unified LLM API, agent loop, TUI, coding agent CLIZoboomafoo - WikipediaPick: flakelet — Run systemd services from Nix flakes and update them independently of the host systemPick: ffdash — A TUI for batch AV1 & VP9 video encoding with hardware acceleration, real-time progress monitoring, and full control over quality settings. Made to work as a viable encoding dashboard over SSH. · GitHubPick: Chompass — Private calorie tracking for Android and the browser. Bring your own AI key, or run Gemma 4 on-device.

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how we are pooling the storage around our land into one giant, useful network drive. We have finally cracked it. Plus, our thoughts on the new steam frame. Then we're going to round it out with some great boost picks and a lot more. So before we get to that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, friends. Strong room today. Nice.

Nice having you guys here. Thank you. And, of course, you can always join our Mumble Room. We've got details on our website. Hello, everybody watching live to making it a Tuesday on a Sunday. And good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go meet Manage, nebula. Defined.net slash unplugged.

Nebula is my network hero. When it just comes to something as foundational as a mesh network, something I'm going to build on top of for a long time, I want to own the whole stack. I really like Managed Nebula because it's a great way for you to get started. 100 hosts absolutely free, and now they are throwing in a lighthouse as well. Plus you can run your own lighthouse. So talk about something super robust under your control, no big tech login.

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You're really going to like it. For anything from a simple host to host, host to a large global mesh network. You're going to be impressed. Defined.net slash unplug. And thank you to Define for sponsoring the Unplug program. Well, as you may have heard last week, we're officially going to Texas for Texas Linux Festival 2026.

We hope you are or will consider doing it too. Yes, November 6th through the 7th. We'd love to see you there because we'd love to have a little meetup and we are asking if anybody out there wants to throw some sats or feel out our way via the boost page, we are asking because the budget's tight. We're grateful for what we have, but a little bit more, and we could maybe do a little meetup, but I think that'd be really great. Boost.juproodcasting.com.

And if you can be there, reach out, let us know. We do have that Texas Linux Fest matrix chat room. I think that's going to start warming up again. And there may even be an old telegram group out there rattling around as well. Perhaps we should dig for that. But we'd love to see you there. And then we're going to try to put together some coverage. So if you can't make it, you get a taste of what we think.

is one of the really special fests out there. So that's also, you know, probably why we're mentioning it. So look forward to that coverage in the future in a way that only we do. Before we get into the storage situation that I'm very excited about, I think we should just mention for posterity that we now have the official details

on Valve's steam frame, and it is available for it pre-order starting at 10,000, or 10,000. It's a deal for that. I wish that was a deal. I wish I was that rich. No, a thousand fifty-nine, which is probably actually slightly cheaper than I was expecting. Of course, if you want to bump that storage up to terabyte, it's more like $1,300.

Yeah, what the base is $256? But I was prepping myself for $1,300 being the starting price, just with the supply chain, what it is. Right. That's just it. It's both more than you'd like and realistically maybe a little better than you hoped. Bren, have you ordered yours? Not quite yet. Not quite yet.

I think Jeff's picking me up one though, right Jeff? Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, I wish. You'd have pre-ordered one though, right? Which one? I did get in the reservation queue. I have not gotten email to actually purchase that device yet.

Oh, you're in the line to get in line? No, I'm in the line to purchase, not the line to get in line to purchase. Oh, there's another line. It's a several queue system. So supplies are limited. There's a reservation queue, which means that you will get the chance to purchase once it's ready to be purchased. whenever that may be. And then there is the wait list queue, which means that you're in the next batch, essentially. So I'm in the reservation. I'm just waiting for that email to say,

give me your money and I will give them my $1,300 for the one terabyte kit. Oh, that's exactly. Okay. Okay. I think the rest of us are in the NVQ at this point. Yeah, there is another cue. And you're right. The funny thing is, Jeff, is, I mean, I assume you're going to use it to game, right? That's why you're getting it. Yeah, mainly gaming. I mean, it's Linux on your face, so I'm going to have as much fun as I can with this thing. I'm so excited for that. See, for me, the Linux on the face thing is the really big thing, is a persistent work space and workstation with your apps, your environment, and you just put it in your backpack, and then you just slip it on your face.

If you're on an airplane, you're in a car, you're sitting at home on the couch. To me, it just seems really powerful, and you combine it with something like a backpack. Bluetooth keyboard, and you could really get some work done. I've been experimenting, just as this came out, I decided I'll fire up the old MetaQuest again, and I've been experimenting, and there's a lot of Android apps that are pretty good now. There's pretty good terminal apps, there's a lot of the work apps you need, and there's decent browsers, and you combine that with something like Sunshine and Moolight, and it's a really compelling work environment.

It's not quite there yet, and it's not as open as I would like, and of course it's attached to meta. So that's why I'm very excited from a productivity standpoint about the frame. Right. Having some other option out there that is even more just like exactly what you want. But I think if you're skeptical of what I'm saying, I invite you to check out Launch 84. We'll put a link in the show notes. My last quest, I decided to kind of do like an exit interview with the Oculus and where they're at with their Horizon OS and all of that.

And I really do think there is something there, especially if you spend a lot of your day in a terminal and a web browser and a couple of chat. apps. You get a lot of work done that way. It's nuts what these things are capable of. I mean, it's because it's the applications, it's the environment, it's your state in this headset. They just slip on and every, you just write back to the world. It's not a whole desk.

It's not a particular machine. Yeah. But it's going to be a while, I think, but people will get these and they'll start building. That'll be something. And Jeff, I hope you'll take a look at the desktop experience and give us a report. When you do finally get it. Absolutely. We'll do so.

Don't think it'll quite meet the needs for you. Yeah, not yet. everything. I've heard you talk, yeah. But it could be built. Exactly. It's Linux on your face. And we already have some decent implementations with, like, plasma doing virtual desktops in terms of sending it to a different device. So with Wayland and everything like that, I don't see it being too long before we have a,

you know, a bunch of desktops around your head and having something similar than what you get with the quest. I'm very excited. I cannot wait to get my hands on it. Have you, you know quite a bit about the frame. Does it, since it's just running SteamOS, can you boot straight to the desktop? It doesn't do the back and forth like the deck does. It boost you into a virtual environment and you can have the desktop floating next to your main environment. So there's no rebooting it or logging out. It's just it's all in one.

It's pretty nice. So it'd be running like GameScope on one side, using the resources for the environment that you'd play games in, and then the desktop could be rendered next to it. Yep, just a floating window. your entire desktop, whatever size you want, right next to your game, or whatever other thing you got going on in the main environment.

Do you know for the desktop environment, it would also do the foveal rendering, the render what I'm looking at in high resolution and the other stuff in lesser resolution? Don't think it will do the foveated rendering. I don't think it needs to. No, it won't need to. And the reason I say that,

because it's not rendering 3D graphics necessarily like it would for a game. And foveated rendering versus foveated streaming are different. Now, I suspect that if you're streaming your desktop specifically with steam streaming from your main computer, it will be doing foviated streaming in that case. So one thing that I do want to try is streaming a very, very high resolution desktop, quote unquote, like a 4K desktop from my desktop and then zooming in, having one giant monitor with tiling, and then the foviated streaming should handle the performance on that.

But even then, I don't think the performance is going to be a big deal with their dongle, the streaming dongle they've got going on. So it's cool. It's exciting. I really, really can't wait to get my hands on. And the flexibility, being able to stream a large desktop or run the desktop directly on the device is going to be powerful.

And then when people work on dedicated work environments for it, you know, I'm sure eventually they'll replace the entire big picture experience that it'll be, you know, some custom thing that, I mean, there's just going to be so much that happens with this, I imagine. It'll just take a little while, and we have to get in our hands for it. The seeds are here, just waiting for things to bloom. And, I mean, what do you think of the price, Jeff?

Was it just about where you expected? Was it a little bit more than you wanted to swallow? Yeah, I mean, I called $1,300. I wasn't sure if that was it going to be for the 256 of the 1 terabyte. I'm glad it's for the 1 terabyte. MicroSDs are, unfortunately, $200 for the 1 terabyte cards. So, yeah, I splurged for that. It's obviously soldered on.

So unlike the deck, you can't replay. it. You know, it's, it's where I expected. It performance wise, we'll see, you know, everybody compares it to the, to the meta quest three because it basically is a meta quest three in terms of hardware, in terms of battery life, in terms of displays. A lot of people have complained about the LCDs and this and that, but. Yeah, I don't know. You know, right now, I can work two to four hours a week in it. Yeah, okay. And given that you can just put a battery pack in your pocket, I don't think it's a big deal if you're gaming. My headset, my headset has a replaceable battery,

and so I can swap it out while I'm live. I can just, and then I just plug it into USBC and it charges. It's very comfortable. And Valve claims will be getting that for the frame later on as well, a whole new kind of head strap with a removable battery and a more steam in-deck-like headset. That's kind of why I was brought back to the quest and wanted to try this out recently,

because it's sort of, it's a lot in a lot of ways, what I can expect from the frame, but some of the workflows are a little more mature around it has an MCP and a CLI and all of that. So I think the frame will get there, and I just think it's like for travel, for work, for people that have small spaces they need to be in. It's going to be so great.

And then it's going to game, too, by the way. It's going to game. Yeah, then you also have a really great gaming experience right around the corner. Well, congrats, Jeff. I hope the queue doesn't last too long. Maybe, you know, maybe you'll know something by Christmas. It's probably going to be around next year.

I know, don't say that. I know I hate it. I hope not. It'd be amazing if they arrived in time for the holidays. That'd be really great. You'll prove us wrong. I'm really hoping it'll be like within this month. They've claimed they'll be shipping before summer.

So, you know, if you're in the reservation, hopefully we'll get it soon. Very good. Thank you, Jeff. All right. So, Brettly, I have talked about it. I want to see if you can recall, but I have talked about the ability to take spare storage on the various computers around the land and try to pool

it into one large disk? Like a virtual... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Especially with storage getting as expensive as it is, right? It's getting expensive to go out there and buy hard drives, and if you've got machines sitting around with a terabyte... So this machine has like 200 gigs free here, this

machine has two terabytes free over here. Right? You know what I mean? You have a lot of stranded, spare capacity, but, you know, being able to design and build from scratch the right sort of NAS or cluster is prohibitively expensive. And I have a feeling you know exactly How that feels, Brian. To me, this feels like your long-term plan to just sip away some of Wes and I's storage for your own works.

I hadn't thought of that, but that is a great idea. You boys want to join the pool? What do we get? What do we get? One giant jellyfin chair. One giant distributed jellyfin share. So this week, RustFS went one. It's an open source S3.

compatible high performance object storage system. And you can think it's all like Min I.O. Ceph. There's some other. There's a lot of... Yeah, there's some solutions out there. This one's nice because it's an open license. It just hit 1.0.

They've put about two years of work into building something. More than that, almost three years of work building to something really impressive. Yeah, it's MIT, fresh implementation, Rust, of course. It supports more than just S3. It can also support WebDAV, FTPS, Other things that... Yeah, some of those, I think, like, SFTP is maybe compiled time. Some of you have to, like, turn it on.

They're not there by default, but that kind of stuff is growing. 1.0 also added some features that are just nice to have, like, erasure coding, self-healing nodes, rebalancing of the pool, bucket replication, just stuff that's just quality of life you want to see before you really commit to something like this, and it landed in the 1-0. So that kind of caught our attention at that point. Yeah, it really seems like they're trying to signal, you know,

okay, this can actually maybe be used now. If they didn't, you know, it wasn't rushed out after three months. They've spent, you know, more than two years sort of working and iterating, which makes sense because you really, you're going to build everything else on top of this. So it needs to work. So why object storage? Because I think when we say S3, people think Amazon. I mean, a lot of people probably think Amazon.

So why would a person want to run object storage in their home lab or on their corporate land or something like that? What would be your pitch? Well, it turns out that you. you don't always need a file system. A file system comes with a lot of things, right? They kind of grew out of trying to be able to put stuff on disk and use it in a non-sort of tape storage-based way. We have random access.

What can we build? You know, fat in the file allocation table. And obviously, there's a lot of great stuff about having a file system. We love file systems here on the show. But these days, especially as we tried to, you know, distribute, we have distributed computers, distributed systems, the rise of the cloud. it turned out that we still need to store files, blobs, backups, media, artifacts, all kinds of stuff, but we didn't actually need all of the traditional properties of a file system.

And so if you take off some of those, those end up being like fewer constraints that you need and you can then optimize the core parts that you're doing, which is like, you know, being able to put and get something by like an object ID and maybe have it distributed, maybe have it replicated, all that kind of layer. You'll also find a lot of the apps that you can self-host these days, they have an S3 storage option. It's becoming very, very common for an S3 storage backend. Yeah, and it's been that way for a while, right? Like, S3 has been here for a long time now. We're even already running our production NextCloud that way.

Yep, we have been for a long time. Which is great because you don't really have to allocate space in the traditional way. It's great at storing blobs. You know, it's particularly good at that, too. So there's some advantages if you have, like, images and media files and things like. that which we have a lot of. So it's been, and it's been fairly robust. Any problems we really have had have been more in the application implementation layer.

Never really an issue with the S3 storage itself. And it can turn a pile of otherwise separate storage into one programmable storage service, which is what I was interested in. So I wanted to build a little test environment to see how viable this was. So I set up four headless VMs, each with their own 50 gigs of disk to store. and then I set up a fifth VM that acts as kind of like a client that runs jellyfin and a front end to those headless NIC servers, the little VMs. Because what I was picturing is four or five systems around my land, 100 gigs over here,

50 gigs over here, a terabyte over there, that kind of set up. So I'm sort, so I was just creating a couple of VMs, few VMs, and a master client server that sat in front of that. And that VM, that master server that ran Jellyfin, used R-Clone to connect a RustFS over S3 and mount and expose what was a collection of my storage system. So that was the test set up,

and the goal was, with this distributed object storage across multiple machines, would they behave well enough for something like a 4K Jellyfin file to stream? And this is an example right where Jellyfin isn't necessarily designed around object storage. So you're using ARClon

to bridge the gap and make, the S3 object storage dial back in show up as if it were part of the file system. Yeah, and one large disk, too, not a bunch of... I don't want to mess with that. Right. And I wanted to support one of them, at least, going offline, because on a homeland, that's very likely that one of these nodes is going to turn off, and you don't want the whole thing to blow up.

Right. If you sort of turn this into a big distributed system and you don't add redundancy, then you've built yourself a super brittle waiting to fail state. Which is going to be so frustrating when you go hit that play button. So that's what the goal was. I'll tell you how it went on the other side. Well, I don't mean to be this guy, but it was very easy to do this via Nix

because RustFS ships and Upstream Flake. There's even one in Nix packages too, I believe. That's so great. But if you want a more, a fancy cluster like we were testing out, then the upstream flake is the good path. It was really nice for just deploying a bunch of VMs and testing this to see what was viable because you didn't have to have a custom installer,

though they do offer one. Or I didn't even have to set up a container. It was really nice. So yeah, I set up just some Nix-based systems using their flake, enabled the service, and I pointed it at the VM's persistent storage. And then something I've been doing more is using something to manage the credentials, too, which I really like. Instead of like baking them into the NIC store or somewhere on your file system, I've been using like Sops Nix. So that's been nice because there is some credential management you have to do. Yeah, it can use System D credentials, which I also really like as a way.

so it system D handles making sure that everything's provided securely. You don't have the fault, the downsides of using NVars and that kind of thing. So it's nice to see that support because it means it plays nicely with ship secrets your own sidecar way, use SOPS nix or age nix. It all just plays right in with all of this. It does. And so that part was quite easy. The whole, that whole setup was surprisingly smooth. Where it went wrong was in my own assumptions.

I did not properly read the documentation, I will admit. I skipped right. You know, like, because they always have like the splash page for like the documentation splash page. And then like all the stuff you want is usually like in a subsection because I just want to know the one thing, right? So I jumped down. And then later on when I went back and read like the front page and I scrolled down,

they had this big warning there that you want to use at least a minimum of four storage nodes, not the three that I had initially set up. Yeah, I was looking at it. It can technically go all the way down to two. But four is like what they bless for production, and it's what a bunch of their test infrastructure actually tests is sort of what they provide guidance on upgrade paths for. So it's really the like blessed setup.

Or more, but in my opinion, if that is a deal breaker for you, that's probably something to flag. It's not the end of the world, but you're probably not using a blessed setup. Now for me, that was just one more VM. And I also, I do have plenty of systems on my land to do that. I probably have more than five. And I believe part of the reason is like you don't get necessarily more node,

like it doesn't protect you from more node failures in three, but it does mean that as you're rebuilding things after one, that you're in a more resilient setup. Yeah, it's really about redundancy. Yeah, operations. Yeah. So, and let's actually talk about that for a moment. So I took, in total, I had about 200 gigabytes of raw storage to work with.

But when you consider the redundancy, what I got usable out of that 200 gigs was 91.7 gigs. gigabytes. Yeah, and you did like erasure cooing sort of parody raid style setup. Yeah, and so I definitely ate it in the redundancy department, so that is very true.

But the resiliency worked. I pulled the plug on a node and the system kept working. And then when you plug the node back in, it rebuilt and it caught up. And so yes, it does mean you lose a lot of space, but if you have

the space around your land and you have the nodes and you want to be able to survive have a machine going out, it could be worth it? Yeah, and that's part of the neat stuff, right? It's because it can sort of distribute, you know, it can parody it up, it can make the various chunks, distribute those chunks across the cluster, and then you only need the right, depending on the level,

that number of chunks again to be able to read from across the cluster to be able to get the file back. The thing I was happy about is the idea, so I wasn't sure how this would work exactly on the implementation side, because since jellyfin doesn't have native S3 support, I had to trick Jellyfin into using the S3 storage. So RustFs presented one distribution, be it an S3 pool, and then the R-clone mount exposed all of that as one single mount point.

Like I had like a slash mount Rust Media. And then in JellyFet, I presume, you can just then do the normal media library configuration path. It just looks at it like it's a file system path. Nice. So that made it surprisingly easy. And I could get sequential read speeds around 360 megabytes to 340 megabytes. So I'm sorry, 360 megabytes to 430 megabytes.

430 megabytes per second across that pool, which is I'm pretty happy with. There was definitely, though, a hidden cost in how I had R clone set up. And this is, I think, the second gotcha. First gotcha is you got to have four nodes to really be stable. The second gotcha is you're going to need to be careful how you configure R clone. Because R clone is going to need to do a lot of caching. And depending on how you configure that, you can eat up a lot of disk. You can spend a lot of time cashing.

There is a sweet spot that I played with where I could kind of set to get that right and I could store the cache in a specific place, which is also very useful. But that was an area where, you know, it took a one-gigabyte client disk filled up a two-gigabyte upload, right? So it's just like it's, the caching doubles it.

It is a problem. You need to plan for the caching if you're going to go with this setup. Obviously, the idea would be that jellyfin just had native S3 support. But there's a lot of applications that don't. Yes. And so I do think you can make it work.

Yeah, this is kind of a test for that side of things, right? There's plenty of applications that do, but for the things that don't, can it still work for those? Or are you sort of blocking yourself from using those apps? And there could be a better way to mount an S3 file system. Yeah, Arkland was just sort of the thing at hand here for some quick tests, and we used it a bunch of places already. But I feel like, you know, what I was able to kind of validate in the testing is spare disks spread across multiple machines were turned into a usable media namespace that had redundancy when one of the machines. machines went down that I could bring up jellyfin and I could play a 4K movie across that. And that was really the goal and it works.

And it speeds the seem, I mean, you have to try it again off, you know, not virtual links and like the real network links and stuff. But seemingly, it speeds them might be totally workable. Yes. And I think if you use any kind of infrastructure management tool like Ansible or Nix or whatever, it's really easy to just deploy this across a few of your machines. Yeah, I think that stuck with me with when trying it was like it is, it was really easy to get going. Sometimes these distributed system tools

need a lot of like bootstrapping and setup and like it takes a while to get the whole system online and that was not the case here. Yeah. Also, very friendly for agent deployments. If you did want to tie it into an open claw or a Hermes agent really

straightforward between just the way you set it up and it also includes a comprehensive command line client. There's a lot there plus these agents already understand S3 and all these things like you could have the agents manage the file system, manage health checks. It's really pretty extensive what you could do if you wanted to.

It just sort of plugs right into an agentic workflow if you wanted to have the manager storage. If you're crazy enough to do that. I thought that was interesting that if something's coming out today, where does it sit in that? Looking forward in that way. And they're looking forward. They're looking forward. So RustFS hits version 1.0. And with the right set of tooling, there's a lot of ways to crack this.

But with the right set of tooling, you can truly do storage pooling. that supports failover on one of your devices. And that I was very pleased to see. It is worth noting. It does not have the complete AWS S3 API. It doesn't have some of the same sort of strong consistency things around, like, write and then read ordering. In particular, there is no, like, consensus mechanism or raft or that kind of thing. Instead, they lean more to, like, eventual consistency.

And so it works really well for blob workflows, in particular, where you're doing, like, a right once. you're not having multiple different actors all trying to write to the same key or use that for consensus or something. Instead, you want something where you're just like, one process is going to jump it on there and then lots of stuff is going to be able to read. Because if you do have some sort of like network partition or a node goes offline, you can have, basically it has to get a lock, a quorum lock on the cluster and then it can write. But if that lock expires, there's no code right now. There's a feature plan, but there's no code right now. to like stop. So you can have two different writers

both get success and then the later version wins. So one of them just silently has its rights not work anymore. So there are some things like that, but for most traditional I think S3 style workflows that should work just great.

I got a couple of questions that I can throw out you boys. Can we do a little thought experiment? I'm curious if you know, I've been setting up redundant raids on various hard drives in remote locations recently.

And I'm just wondering, could this tool kind of supersede that? You don't need RAID, but you can use something like this for the redundancy. It has some cool modern redundancy in it, and maybe you don't need to necessarily have both. Yeah, I mean, it basically copies, not copies, but has a very similar implementation of its Reed-Solomon sort of erasure coding stuff to ZFS or, you know, other modern file systems like that. So you do get, you know, per block hashes, and it checks that before it reads it out and serves it over the API and that kind of thing. So I think it is designed to store your files durably well. What kind of defense in depth and, like, you know, what file systems that you want have under for the servers you're running anyway, I think is probably more the operational question. Okay, next question.

When can we expect this in the kernel? Yeah, I don't think so. No, okay. All right. And then last question. Did you mention what this is written in? I didn't really hear any mic or anything. Oh, did you get to catch the?

It's MIT licensed rest. Oh, very fancy. I think also, like, if you're still listening and you're kind of still asking yourself, why would I want object storage? Again, well, guys, why do I have an object storage? This could be the project to play with to figure out why you might want object storage. This is what's really nice about this is this is very accessible to any of us to deploy this. And it's clean, it's simple.

and it's pretty easy to get running on just about any distro you're likely to try it on. And it seems like they are trying to hit to this kind of case. Like there's other projects that kind of aim for like geo-distributed versions of this, or there's, you know, things like Ceph for like more file system semantics that are distributed. And this seems to be really targeting kind of exactly what you were hoping, which is be able to use sort of diverse array of storage on something like a local or enterprise network and turn it into a single pool. Yeah.

Now, there's probably a lot of ways you could solve. that and I would like to hear how you have solved it, boost.jubterbroadcasting.com. I'm not married to this approach, but I am kind of thinking about it. I was going to ask, are you keeping it? Yeah, I think, I mean, not this particular setup, but I think definitely at home and possibly for a new self-hosted jellyfin server I want to build in the future. That would be an interesting production use case. Yeah, especially if you had

some internet links in there. Which maybe there's also a better tool for that, but I'm not sure. Boost.jubterbroadcasting.com if you got any feedback on that, But I do think this is what I'll be using for that moving forward. And so I'll eventually get some, like, serious, not just testing in the lab, but like serious hands on with it. You know, probably in the pretty near future. I imagine with your new fancy state-of-the-art file system, you're going to be throwing some media files around of various machines. Is that your hope, Chris? You got new plans for this?

You know, I am trying out a new box. and I would love some feedback on this from the audience. It's the Yami TV Box S third gen 4K UHD. It's Google TV. It's got 32 gigs of storage, Wi-Fi 6, HDMI 2.0, 92 U.S. dollars on Amazon.

That's not bad. It also takes SD card slots. Like the Google TV is expensive. The Apple TV is expensive. They're all, you know, the Google TV is almost $200. This is under $100. and it's pretty powerful. Of course, it's the Google TV interface.

And so the ask I wanted to put out there, if anybody else has this, and have they been able to reflash this or clean up the slop that's on this thing? Because it's loaded with the Google experience. Let me tell you, it's an experience. But for $92, I'm pretty impressed with the performance. It's not.

And it has all the apps that you might need or want, right? It doesn't feel any worse or any better than my shield, which has been kind of my benchmark for a long time. It feels probably. about as fast. Because as we know, if you under spec Android boxes,

they can be a little slow. Did you consider any other boxes to solve this problem? Like maybe an old cell phone running Linux, maybe? Yeah, yep.

I did. But it's for, it's for my daughters and, you know, they just, you know, I don't want to, if it was a TV for me,

I would probably actually just get like a Roku or, yeah, like use an Android, use my Paisel, potentially. But for them, I wanted something

that was a little more appliance. And I felt like that was a pretty good price at $92 because when I look at the market, the only thing that gets close to that would be a Roku or a fire stick. And I would, in that situation, I would just prefer to have the Android applications because then you get good jellyfin app, you get the good Plex app, that kind of stuff.

There's stuff like, you know, Mesh VPN apps. That's the other big one is it has to be on the Mesh network. That was also a big deal. So I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes if you're curious. I don't have any affiliation. I don't even, it's not even an affiliate link, I don't make a dime. But it is working for me. And if you out there have one like this and you've been able to make the experience better without all the Google crap on there, give me your tips.

Help us hack, Chris's TV. Let me make it, just make it better. That's all I want. I just want it to not be so basically a constant commercial. Because that's what it feels like. But think of the advertisers and think about Google. Yeah, I need to know about their new experiences. Yeah.

And now it is time for the boost. Speaking of experiences, we got some support this week, and we're going to start with Anonymous, who comes in as our baller booster at 75,000 sets. Hey, rich, love star, ain't too chabby. All right, so Anonymous writes, recently got a Mac SE 30. I'll try to figure out how to boost over Apple Talk.

Now this is such a classic machine. I use the crap out of it. I don't know who Anonymous is, but I do know they're my new best friend. I do know that. That is going to be such a fun project. Also, tell me if you're not tempted to get TCIP working on that thing somehow.

Come on, right? Come on. And then how great would it be if you could get some sort of SSH client? That probably not going to happen. It's just your thin client. That's what you're able to use to work on. I don't think the cryptography is going to happen

on that old thing. You know, we're complaining about computer prices these days. Back then, it was sold for 4,369 U.S. dollars, which in today's dollars, $11,350. Yep. So not a bad deal? Yeah, that is the funny thing is, if you

look at 80s prices and value them by today's dollar, yeah, we were paying out the nose back then. That was one of the big controversies, really. So, yeah, wow, that is a great boost. Thank you very much, Anonymous. Hope you have fun. Josh comes in with 24,690

cents. All right. I hoard that which all kind covered. Oh, it's a double batch of one, two, three, four, five. Oh, you know. So we might need to... You might be going a little too fast. He needs to simmer down over there

because it's going to get ludicrous. You're going to have to go right to ludicrous speed. But mostly value. We just got a rocket ship and a thanks. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to put that towards the Texas budget. Greg the lawyer came in again this week

with a row of megaducks, 22,222 cents. Mega ducks. Affie! He's out looking up for all the duck. Um, Greg, also just, sent the value. No message on that one. So thanks, Greg. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate you. Get off my TTI.

42 also came in with a row of Mick Ducks. This old duck still got it. Okay. In the pre-show, you celebrated more Home Assistant config removing from YAML. I can't reconcile that with the promotion of declarative systems, cough Nix. It seems like H.A. moving to ClickOps. Did we celebrate that? Hmm. I don't know if that's what you were trying to say.

Yeah. I am a little torn on this particular issue myself. Because this has recently just been changed with Modbus, which before had to be all done with YAML, which was a massive pain of the butt in the before time. And now, it's funny that they're getting rid of YAML when it's easier than ever to generate YAML.

That is, there is some irony there. Home Assistant EA continues. Home Assistant YAML is easier to grasp than Nix, and it's easy for an agent to write. What am I missing? I don't think you're missing anything. I suppose agents are at least very good with the API, so that's not. that I don't know, I don't, I don't think, and I really respect the home assistant team. I don't think they've wrapped their head around the fact that a lot of people are just going

to use that as an agent API now. And they're not going to build dashboards. Like they're doing all this work around making dashboards really pretty and easy now. I have a home assistant instance. I've never even loaded the dashboard. I've never even logged into it. I just have the agent manage all of it. And if I want to know what the temperature is, I ask the agent. And if I want to know if the lights on or off, I ask the agent. Because it's a chicken coop. You know? It's like, I don't think they've wrapped their head around where this is going for them yet. And I, perhaps what you're witnessing here, get off my TTI is sort of a result of that.

Because I kind of agree with you, although I do, like, at the same time, like to see it easier for people to get mod bus working. I'm a complicated guy. Love Down Babylon comes in with 21,337 sets. It's lurks. Hey, hey Chris, Sir Lurks a lot here. You, Adam Curry, and Dave Jones and others inspired me to launch my own Value for Value podcast, Love Down Babylon. First episode, out now.

A multifaceted adventure through personal healing technology, platforms, big ideas, world problems, and hope for our future. Here is Elite Satoshi Boost as thanks for letting me sat-svertise my show. Fun will now commence. Oh, congrats, Lurks. Go check it out. I think Love Down Babylon. Search for it on the index.

Well, Gene Bean is here with a row of ducks. Oh, look at all those ducks. Gene Bean says, Bravo TechDev, looking forward to hearing the Texas Linux Fest coverage. Yes. Thank you again to TechDev for becoming the elite sponsor of our trip to Texas Linux Fest. That was amazing. This is the way.

Geez, Gene is here with another row of ducks. You make me want to be a best. You mentioned Discord, and it reminded me I'd like to get your take on Armada. The headline of their website is encrypted open source Discord alternative. What do you think? This is one I don't think I've seen before, actually. I don't think I have. They have a web client.

I like that. Zapp Store. Google Play. Okay. Lots of pink. Lots of pink. Animated Jeff support. You know, it's a little frustrating that the UI already looks better than element.

Like they've already surpassed. element in the U-I-I. One of their top features here that they're promoting is unbannable communities. Well, that is important. Self-hostable at every level. You don't want, because pretty soon those Canadians are going to get banned from communities, so you don't want that to happen. Self-hostable at every level, you say, huh?

Interesting. Okay, should we put that on our list to check out? Oh, and it is interoperable with other Noster apps? I feel like the only thing is, Jean, is we really seem to be at, like, a platform fatigue. Could you imagine us ask you, the audience, I like this called Soapucks. Could you imagine us asking the audience to sign up for another chat platform? Some of you would do it.

It's a lot. And at the same time, I'd have to be asking myself, why don't we just go back to IRC? That would be that now it's competitor in my mind, because IRC was so simple. So easy. Right, there's a risk now that if we make any move, it will just go back to IRC.

I miss you, IRC. But thank you, Gene. I think that is worth looking at. Well, Gene sent a couple more messages really enjoyed the great jellyfin information and FYI stock jellyfin is finally in the default Samsung Tizzen store He says he's looking forward to the tutorial on arm that we promised Did we promise something like that?

Uh-oh. He says I tried it a while but unsuccessful, so hopefully it shows what I missed. I feel like, hold on a second. I feel like these last couple of boosts, like you guys are like, I don't remember saying anything about the home assistant yamble thing.

I don't remember saying anything about arm stuff. possible we've also forgotten a lot because that's usually true that could be the B team so you just need to give us more context so we can remember what we've promised yeah it must have been Jeff's project okay continue and provide proof to next time thanks yeah well uh Jeff Jean's last row of ducks here here's a pick for you absorb is a new to me audio bookshelf client that works on both iOS and Android that seems to implement the entire API even the admin bit thank you Jean thank you absorb the dev has a buy me a coffee link and I encourage anyone as impressed as I am to consider using that button. 91% dart? 3% Kotlin. This looks really good. I like the stats page too.

I am a huge audiobook shelf user. Use it every night. And use it on long drives. Love a new client. I'll give you a new client that I've been using this week. A little client called Listen. At least on Android.

I don't know if it's available in other platforms. But I've been using that this week because same as you, Chris. It's your fault. Listen audiobooks every night. And just a nicer interface. A little simpler. I like it. All right.

Listen. Ironically, Google's original podcast app was called Listen. And then this is L-I-S-E-N. No T's around here. All right. Thank you, Gene. Appreciate you. That's some good boost on right there.

Dajah's here with 4,747 Situciers. Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with fruit loo. Plus one for Wizard. It also works with Audio Bookshelf. Oh. Did we promise that, too? No, no, but that's something I'm going to look into.

Brent actually already used mine to create an account on my audiobook server when I I sure did. ADHD is awesome. Super handy for when you want to invite people to all your platforms at once with a single invite code. It also does ROM. Yes, I have ROM. That's impressive. I love ROM.

R-O-M-M. I want to talk about it on the show all the time, but I've done an episode on it and we try not to overdo the gaming stuff, so I haven't mentioned it again. but that's my excuse. R-O-M-M. Love it. It's unbelievable what you can do in a web browser.

That is great. Thank you, Dajah. Derivation ding is Boo-Sin with the double row of ducks. I like you. You're a hot ticket. Plus one for Vakunya. I just set this up a few weeks ago,

including an MCP server, and hooked up my personal assistant agent to it. It can display the same data as to-do lists, con bond, Gant, charts, etc. Okay. I really like it. If you guys try it,

I'd love to hear how you end up using it. I might now that I got the plus one on that. Mm-hmm. That's some good signal there. Is that a promise you're given out there? We got a... You should be careful. I want to try it as well, so... I do too. I do too.

All right, Brian, get on it. And I think we got a little more signal here. Oh, okay. I thought Herder was pretty nice, but I love Zellage and really miss some of its features when using Herder. Yeah. But then I found ZJ-Radar. It's extremely similar to Herder, but it's just a Zellage plug-in.

I set up the alias Zerder, which launches Zellage straight into the radar profile. I honestly haven't. launched harder since since I got it installed. I really recommend. There are people listening that have no idea what any of those words mean, but I am very grateful. I've been wondering about this because I have seen the Zelji plugin going around. It sets up a little sidebar, and then you have, like,

it's aware of what your AI agent, you know, whatever you're using, your open codes, your, your, your clods, whatever, and it's kind of a context aware of when they need your help and stuff like that. But it gives that type of capability to Zellage. Yeah, to the terminal multiplexer, maybe you already, using love. Yeah. Interesting. Because I agree. There's things about Herder I like, but there's things about Herder that feel

like it's not designed for a guy like me. Interesting to see, too, because I have used a lot of Zellage, but I have not yet tried to Zellage plug-ins. So I'm kind of curious on that experience. Ah, ha, ha. Fascinating. Thank you, Dengus. Appreciate you. Well, we got a digital farmer here

with a rope ducks. Just test boosting from my new LND node running Nix OS. We got it. That's exciting. Nice work. Well done. Keep on farming.

Thank you, sir. Mram comes in with one, nope. Well, I guess one, one, one, one sets. There you go. That's sort of what I was trying to. Find ten goldblums out of a possible ten goldblums. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, there you go. Because I'm the win. Mram writes, Hi, I listen episode 331. Whoa, that is a time travel and boost. You are all so exalted over your arch server. I enjoyed it big time. Wow, we've had the archer going since that one.

Oh, my goodness. No way. Crazy. You can't use Arch as a server. No, I can't work. I like the AI stuff too. Wish I understood it better, though. Keep up the good work.

Well, keep on listening to M. Ram, you just might. Thank you for the boost. Wow. I love time travel boost. I had no. Dang. That is a typo, though, right? That little server through every summer, every winter, out in that garage.

Cottonwood disaster. Cottonwood, cats. Rats, probably. I don't know. Geez. That, I am. I just feel, I'm so proud of that little server, guys. I'm so proud of it.

I do trying stuff boost in. 11,670 cents. I don't understand what the heck is going on here. Woo! See you at Texas Linux Fest. Had to work the dates into this boost. Clever. Give me a holler when this goes south.

November 6th and 7th. Yep. Awesome. A dude. Looking forward to it. Well, Pixie's here with a $5 Fiat boost. That's not possible. Nothing can do that.

Putting some money up to get a chance to read Chris's Knicks or SOPS config for the media stack. Plus, Jellar experience would be appreciated. I was just looking at that project. I completely blinked on that.

I will try to get an other promise you made. That's a good, I think so. Oh my gosh. This is why we're keeping us honest, keeping us transparent and honest.

We intend to be. We're just, you know, really fallible. Well, I got really excited with storage this week. I will be honest, once I was, once I saw that one dot on, I'm like, can I build it?

Can I build it? I got a little carried away. Thank you, Pixie, though. I will, I need to export all that anyway. So as I sort of just decommissioned that test box, I'll try to capture that. And then I'll put a link in the show notes when we got it. Sam H comes in with a free member boost,

a time travel boost from 682. I also use Pi with my framework desktop. A simple Pi extension written by Pi helps select models from Lama swap and get the right reasoning level options. Prompt processing is slow on this GPU, so the smaller the system prompt of Pi helps things get started faster.

Very nice. That makes a lot of sense. Another case where a little bit of a harness can be really helpful for that kind of stuff. Anonymous comes in with a free member boost just to say, great job, guys. I learned something new on every episode. And this one was for 684. I hope that's true.

We definitely try, so I hope that is true. That is one of our goals for sure. Going for the value. Thank you everybody who supported the show. Members, those of you who boosted below the 2000-Sat cutoff, Mayhem came in at 1,99s with a Zubamoof. Okay. When you bring it all together, we had 16 of your streamed Sats, and collectively,

you all stacked 29,371 Satoshi's. Thank you very much, Sat Streamers. When you bring it together with our Fiat boost and our regular boosts and average it all at the current sat market value, our total this week was 254,069 Satoshes. Not too bad for an average week. but we are trying to get that up a little bit on the average to put that budget towards our Texas trip. Anything there would help.

Boost.comodd Broadcasting for that, but we are grateful. And, of course, thank you to our members who do put their support on autopilot. All right, yeah, so thank you, everybody. We really do appreciate it. Of course, if you're a member, too, not only do you support the show automatically,

but you do get a free member boost, so you can always send in that and we like it, boost.orgatubterbroadcasting.com for that. Thank you. And we appreciate everybody who supports the show. We are still sort of struggling in the sponsorship department, still relying on the dynamic ads and all of that. And so it does make a big difference.

And yeah, you know what I'm realizing? I didn't put my picks in the dock. I was wondering. What? Hmm. I wonder if I could retro fix that. I wonder if I could retro fix that. I really liked those picks.

I was going to say I got two backup picks. You do? Yeah. Gosh, mine were really good. And I never, you know, it's because I don't actually write in the web browser. I write. Yeah, you have a working document. Mm-hmm.

That's what I do. All right. Well, what are your backup picks? And then I'll save my. for next week. Well, I was just trying to, I wasn't sure if we had picked, so I was just trying to see what had been, you know, putting our pick.

Yeah, yeah, there's a few options. I could probably find it in there. This is my bad. I didn't put it in there. Okay, well, someone linked in our chat room, one of our chat rooms earlier today, flakelit, run system D services from Nix Flakes and update them independently of the host system.

That is such a West pick. Mm-hmm. That's a strong West pick. Normally a Nix-O-S host has to be rebuilt to update one of its services. Flakelet takes the same approach as how the virtualization OCI container stuff does, but with flakes instead of container images. The host only declares which flake to run and which settings to pass. The machine itself resolves the flake, evaluates, and builds it,

and switches the system to units. There's no images, and there's no registry. The units run straight out of the host's Nick Store. Well, that's not too bad. Now what we need is a pick that checks our show notes to find out if we didn't put our picks in there. You got a sneaky pick you want to throw in, Brent? Well, I'm going to throw an opportunity here at Jeff Lee seems to have a pick. Oh, PJ Pick.

All right. Yeah, a sneaky little pick. It's more for the Android side of things, but it involves the good old AI stuff. There's an Android app called Chompis. It is a calorie counting slash health and food counting application. And it can use your local AI. It can use whatever AI you point at it. You can use a dangney or anything.

And it has a nice big registry built in for various foods as well. So you can do things like take a photo of the plate that's in front of your face with some kind of idea like a hand or a coin and describe what you're going to eat. And it does a pretty dang good job at calling your AI and saying, okay, you're consuming this many calories. You're consuming this much fat, this much protein, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Knock it off. I would have I would have mine yell at me about it. You know better. Stop it.

There is a coach thing as well, so you can kind of chat with your AI and do that as well. And I don't do, I don't try it. I don't use it, but I have tried like, hey, what did the last week look like? And it did pull in that data and give me information about the last week of food. But I've been using it a lot with my local hosted AI stuff. I think I'm using Gemma for specifically. And it's been working pretty good. All right.

We put a link to that in the notes. and then I'll toss in one last little extra bony pick here. It's called FF Dash. It's a Rust app, and it's a terminal UI for batch, AV1, and VP9 video encoding. I am becoming a big fan of AV1, and so it'll use Hardware Acceleration if you got it. The Tui gives you nice real-time progress monitoring, full control over the settings, and it's made to work as a visible encoding dashboard over SSH. Yeah, this looks really nice.

I haven't tried it yet, but it's in the queue to try for sure. I love the look of it. And for me, this was a hard requirement that it supported Quixink, and it does. It supports Quixink, and it'll also support the NVIDA stuff if you got it, or the AMD. Nice. Yep. Doesn't discriminate on platform. You got your VA API and your NVEX as well as the QSVs, Wes, which is what you want to see in there.

So, again, it's called FF-F-Dash, and it is MIT license. and it is written in rust. So there you go. Not the picks I intended, but they were bangers and they were saving. So I'll save them for you. And instead, you got a bunch of nice surprise picks. We didn't even know.

Yeah, so stay tuned next week for our real picks. When's the last time we've even left something out like that in the talk? It doesn't happen often. No, it does not. I'm going to blame Brent. He's a QC guy. Brent's QC guy. That's right.

Now, I will blame you out there for not visiting us on a Sunday and making it a Tuesday because you're missing out. It's a life experience. well okay maybe I'm overselling you a little bit but it is a fun experience you can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday over at jb live.tv 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. I mean, we got all kinds of ways to experience it too. We got audio. We got video. We got the whole mumble experience. You can just be in the chat room if you want. We're on the like proprietary platforms. If that's more your speed. That's true. Got them over on the tubes. And then we have a handcrafted. RSS feed, beautifully designed, full of extra stuff like... JSON Cloud Chapters.

Boom. SvT, S-R-T-V-T-T. I made up a fake file format there for a second. Transcripts, though. That's right. Transcripts. That's good. You like those. M-Peg layer four and layer three. If we got... You know what? Sometimes we might be showing a visual of what we're talking about, and you don't even know it because we're so good at the audio show.

But it might be in there if you watch the video. A little extra. Yeah. And it's all, of course, linked over at LinuxUMPLugged.com. And this was episode 685, so you could just go to Linuxunplug.com slash 685. Then when you're all done, head on over to Jupiter Broadcasting. Check out the launch for my last quest, this week in Bitcoin and others coming soon over there, jupiterbroadcasting.com. But that's it for us. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program.

And I hope to see you next Tuesday, which is what we call Sunday. It's a Tuesday on a Sunday. The Linux!