LINUX Unplugged - Episode 111: Completely Unplugged | LUP 111

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

A special edition of the Unplugged show, Chris joins the Virtual LUG from the road & Noah and Wes host the show. They compare and contrast Fedora and Arch & the nice new features of Fedora 23.Then everyone has their own perspective on home automation, from security to convenience. We have a great discussion about the broader ramifications of home automation.Then we wrap it all up with some closing thoughts on using Linux & open source to live offline, like you're online.

We have something kind of unusual for the Unplugged show. We have a real lug member, I guess, not a virtual lug member. Anthony is right here in the trailer with me. Hey, Anthony. Hey, how are you all doing? I love your... So let me paint the picture for you guys. Anthony is rocking a last jacket, and it's a little warm, too.

You're rocking a last jacket, and then underneath it, LinuxFest Northwest 2015. How'd you get that jacket or that shirt? Picked it up back in the spring. When you were at? LinuxFest Northwest 2015. There you go. That's what I was fishing for. So did you make the drive?

Did you drive all the way from here? Because I could now tell you officially, that's a long-ass drive. Oh, yeah. To me, I don't know. I go to Seattle a lot. So to me, it's like a 600 miles. Nine hours, right? It's nine hours.

Not too bad. Nine, ten hours. Yeah, nine, ten hours. Not too bad. Nine, ten hours. Yeah, nine, ten hours. Not too bad. All right, do you do it all in one drive? Yeah. Okay. So you're crazy then.

Do you do it in your car? Yeah. All right. You podcast the whole way? Yeah. Now you do some vlogging, right? I'm a vlogger, yeah. I'm a YouTube vlogger.

So tell me about that. I've vlogged my life and my experiences with Linux and computers. Oh, really? Linux is in there? Mm-hmm. Are you going to vlog this? You know what? I'm going to have to.

Yeah. Why? You got a camera over there, huh? Yep, yep, yep. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Okay, you guys. I don't know if I...

Okay. Now, he's pulling out the camera right now. I'm painting the picture for you. Uh-oh. Now, it's on me. Now, how did this happen? This is supposed to be an audio show. Turn the tables on Chris Lass. I love it. And now he's on video. Yeah,

now I'm on video right there. Hello, everybody. Hey, it's a 4K camera. Here, here's the JB Rover in 4K, everybody. Is that 4K? Yeah. Wow. I guess if you're doing YouTube right, you should do 4K. Yeah, I just recently got into 4K. Yeah, how much was that? That's nice. It was about 600 bucks. Not too bad. Alright, alright. I want another toy now. Yeah, I bet. You know, there are a few things that come out. A lot of times I think it's just marketing, like when it comes to

4G or something like that, that I'm like, ah, it's just a new way of marketing the same old thing. But when it comes to 4K, there are very clear, defined advantages that nobody can deny that make it really really really compelling to spend some money on something like a 4k camera right it it's it's beautiful when you actually even on a 1080 display it still looks very very good right and you use it for do you do

you like the super zoom effect you but you're releasing 4k so you're probably not doing i see i'm getting ready to release in 4k i just recently upgraded to this oh um because the new uh lightworks beta is now supporting uh are you editing 4k yes i do everything on linux yeah he's doing he's doing everything under linux how about that awesome brother you got a brother over there now he's doing 4k no you better step it up i know i know well here's here's the thing if i if if give me this all right give me this the user interface like the layout of lightworks is like it's horrible right like the workflow is pretty bad uh i don't know i actually it kind of grows on you because i've spent a lot of time in the program when i first first few months yeah it was the worst thing in

the planet to learn and now that i'm kind of learning it's in and out where everything's kind of hidden um i feel I feel like it's, it's just on the power level of like premiere. What do you use for encoding? What do you, what do you, you code out from light works or using an FFM peg? Once you get it out of light works or I go straight from my camera,

load it up into the light works. Yeah. And then just export it out of light and just export it out. And light works handles all the encoding and all that news and throw it right up on YouTube. Yep. Nice. That's not bad. All right.

All right. I got to give that a shot. The, uh, the, the uh the thing about like so you've used premiere so then you'll know what i'm talking about i feel like every other audio product or video production suite like i can even if i've never used it before if you just screw around with it a little bit you can figure it out man i banged my head against the desk for weeks trying to figure out Lightworks. And I never did figure it out. And what I ended up doing was they have a fantastic set of tutorials on YouTube and you can go through and they teach you how to do all this stuff. And like you said, once you kind of get into their mindset and I almost and tell me if you agree with this, I almost treat Lightworks like an operating system. It feels very immersive because it just kind of takes over the entire machine and then you do all of the stuff inside of light works itself so you don't

ever really leave the program and if you use it it like turns your editing machine into like an appliance right and if you do monitors for it because dual monitors are a must you need especially if you need research on the other side other monitor or doing other things like checking twitters and whatnot you know yeah Yeah. Yeah. I bet. The one thing that I think that Lightworks has a leg up on pretty much every other video editor I've ever used is the fact that when you do that, when you treat it like an operating system, like it takes over all your monitors, the like the preview screen, you can make it as big or small as you want. You can place it anywhere on the quote unquote workspace that you want.

And mind you, I haven't used some of the latter versions of premiere, some of the latter versions of final cut. So perhaps these features do exist now. But when I was previously, when I was using them, it seemed like there was like kind of a stock layout, how they wanted you to, to kind of do things and where the toolbars were located.

And that was kind of static. There was no real way to change that. And with light works, everything is dynamic. Everything can be moved to wherever you best think it should be oh yeah and did you know that shark actually eats some of the windows i actually hate that i didn't it was funny like i i actually wrote into the form and i'm like is there a way to get rid of that shark and they go that's part of the sex appeal of lightworks is we leave the shark there and i'm like right but it literally destroys the

corner of my screen and i can't get rid of it and then it's like over over all my windows. And they're like, yeah, that's kind of the fun. But you can drag it up and then it like sinks back down. I'm like, right. Well, yeah. You can actually go over windows and the shark will eat it. Wow. And then when you left click the shark, all your eaten windows will pop back up. So you've got a lot of things going on on the screen.

So there is almost some functionality there. Yeah, there is a function in there. It's called shark. Okay. All right. i'll give them that then yeah i i don't know i just don't wish there was a way to turn it off i can't say i'm a fan i i uh i the there are there are i just saw actually actually for anyone that's interested they're actually running a sale today i just got i just got an email from the university, um, 50% off Lightworks pro, um, for, uh, for the, for the editor. So you can get access to all of the, uh, codecs and the way that Lightworks structures or licensing is actually pretty cool. You can pay a one-time fee, a large

fee like you would for Adobe premiere or final cut. And then you buy that version of Lightworks and it's yours forever. And so you download it and then you install it and then you buy that version of Lightworks and it's yours forever. And so you download it and then you install it and then you're stuck on that version. Now, the way that I do it is I pay something like 89 bucks a year and I get the latest version as soon as it comes out for, you know, indefinitely. But the tradeoff is I'm paying a recurring fee. And at first I was a little against that. Actually, I thought to myself, I don't like, I feel like I'm just renting software. I don't feel like I actually own the software and it kind of bothers me. And then a buddy of mine said, let me ask you something. How much did you pay for at the time? Uh, I think it was, it was a final cut that I was using. And

I said, it was a couple, you know, high hundreds of dollars if I remember right. At least back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. Seven, I think was the last one I bought. I want to say, Chris, does this sound right? Seven or 800 bucks hundred bucks well if you bought it at its peak final cut seven might have even been you got the full final cut suite it could have been twelve hundred dollars yeah yeah it was it was it was uh it was final cut and then it was motion and then that's the twelve hundred dollar one yeah yeah i i think i got a bit of a discount because i remember i think it was under a grand but i remember being a significant amount of money and when i and then then i was talking to him about it and he goes how long did you use it and i said oh you know three four years and he goes great so it'd be half the cost man to just pay the 89 bucks a year and

if you're never going to keep the software for 10 years and i thought about it i'm like yeah he's right when would i use one version of software for 10 years i would that would never happen that's true yeah and you know so for some reason though that same logic doesn't come for me about adobe creative cloud because we have jb has a subscription to creative cloud for a couple of machines none of the machines that i use uh well not frequently but um the it that burns me that for some reason paying for creative cloud burns me i don't know why if maybe maybe it's because it's probably mainly actually i actually probably would have zero issue paying for it if they made creative cloud work on linux then yeah yeah then i could do it and

maybe if it was a little less irritating with constantly reminding you yeah thank you yes that too i think as free software people i think as open source people i think as linux people i think that i think what it is is i think we have it ingrained in our head that subscription leans leads to us getting burned because I have been burned so many times by a company who existed and then the company goes away. And so I can't renew my subscription or reactivate the software. And let's take, for example, Lightworks. Let's just say here's here's what is a very realistic prospect. Seven years from now, maybe edit share goes out of business and then my subscription thing goes down the tubes because I never bought it outright. And so I no longer have access to Lightworks.

All I can do is start it up and I get to a login screen. I have all of my projects for the past 10 years that right now I can open them back up and make any edits I want, change anything I want, re-export them. If if tomorrow a different Kodak comes out and everyone wants it in a different format and now Lightworks supports it, I could open that project file up with my raw video and export back out into this new format. I could do all of that until I no longer have access to the software. And then all of that, all those options go away.

And essentially, I have been archiving all those project files for years for nothing. And I think that as people that have been burned by that in the past, I think that people like you and I, Chris, I think we're – and Wes – I think that we are aware of that. make sense on paper, paying $1,200 as a one-time fee versus $89 a year. I think it just makes, in our ethos and deep inside of us, I think we know that there is an inherent danger and there's inherent risk associated with that. And so we shy away from it. I think anytime you've been around, even for a few years, you realize that a lot of times commercial companies are more dictated by the whims of the market than they will try to present. Even companies like Adobe and other really big companies, they are very much driven by the next new shiny, the next new thing that's going to generate profit.

And they're not, you know, that doesn't, and I'm not making a comment if that's bad or good, because in some ways that's what pushes things forward. But in another way, it also means abandoning previous ways of doing things. And one of the things, this is just me being, you know, maybe I've been looking at the hills of Montana for too long, but I really kind of look back at some of the stuff that we create in these proprietary formats, these proprietary containers. And I think this is stuff that is going to be generationally lost. It's a generational problem. It is an entire generation of people that are going to lose access to the content that they have created,

be it videos or photos or music. I mean, anything that's stored in a GarageBand file, anything that's stored in a Logic file, that's probably not going to open in 100 years. And maybe your crappy music doesn't need to open up in 100 years, but wouldn't it be neat if 100 years from now, a family member or a historian or somebody could access a perfect, digital, pristine copy of what you created 100 years ago and be able to listen to it or watch it?

And the only thing preventing them from being able to do that is some proprietary codec or some proprietary format or some lockdown application. And when you think about it in that context, it's a real shame. It's a real shame. Actually, if you think about it in that context, it's a real shame. It's a real shame. Actually, if you think about it, too, like you look at like when my when my when my grandfather passed away, him and I were very close. And so I was I was really interested in learning about his life before before me, before I knew him as grandpa. I wanted to know,

what the rest of his life was like. And we found pictures and documents and all this stuff that he had from back when he was in the military, when he was 18, 19 years old. And I found that I found that two days before he graduated high school was what I found his enlistment application. And it was dated two days before he graduated high school. And it was just interesting to look and say that was, you know, that was him as he was an Air Force guy. I'm like, wow, I can't imagine like before I even get out of high school saying this is what I'm going to commit the next, you know, for sure, at least eight years of my life, but then 30 years. And the only reason I was able to go back and have that connection with him was because

I found these documents and I found the pictures and stuff like that. And like you're talking about in 50, my grandkids, I don't have I haven't taken pictures of my kids that we print out. They're on Facebook and they're on Twitter. I have tons of them on a hard drive as I do video. But who knows, is JPEG going to open in 100 years? I don't know. I mean, I hope so.

I think so. So, yeah, I think that there's a real concern of that, and I think we have to be careful. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 111 for September 22nd, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly tech talk show that's being brought to you from, well, it kind of depends upon the hour and the current geographical location of J.B. Rover. My name is Noah, and joining me is Wes. Hey, it's Wes, guys. Wes is joining me in Seattle in the studio, and then I'm actually in Grand Forks hosting the show, and then Chris, the Hairmaster Chris, is actually in J.B. Rover right now in the middle of Montana.

Hello, guys. Hi. How is Montana? Well, I found a spot that has connectivity, and it's actually quite pleasant here. And there's time differences and all these kinds of things. It's a lot of fun. I get to struggle with time math. I get to find cellular connectivity.

And I get to be part of the virtual lug. I'm pretty excited. That sounds amazing. And I heard that you found a straggler. That's right. Actually, to be totally correct, he found me. Hey, Anthony. Hey, what's going on?

Not much. So Anthony was tracking us over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover, and he saw us parked here. We're in a gravel lot. We were driving around, literally, Noah. We were driving around trying to find the best signal possible. We found, like, stop the vehicle, stop the vehicle. We pulled over right here. Anthony was watching us in real time on the rover because he knew we were getting the best chicken in town. Oh, yeah. And then when we got parked, I started setting up. He came knocking on knocking on the door no i swear i started to almost panic because i thought it was the cops telling me to get the heck out of here well and you had you had that particular spot you would stopped because of a very specific technical reason right it wasn't just like you were like

well this seems like a good place to park that's true well i had to get good signal i had to have good connection i had to hello music hi there go had to have good connection. I had to... Hello, music. Hi there. Go, music. Hello. Go. Go. Go.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure that we were able to get a good spot, solid spot, so that way we could get the show prep necessary done. And there was different sections of the city that would have no cellular coverage at all. That's a thing around here, I guess. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just part of the fun. Yeah.

The way life is up here. You go one block, you have no signal. We found this spot here we set up. The only downside is we don't have any shore power here, so everything we're doing right now is completely running off of DC battery. Hopefully, we'll last. We got the MiFi plugged in

to the DC outlet. We're running both laptops off of battery power, and the mixer itself is, as you know, Noah, is able to run off of 9-volt batteries. So we're running the mixer off of batteries right now, too. Oh, good. You had to change them, though, I heard. Just when we were about to start the show,

literally, everything's all dialed in, Noah, and it's like all these different challenges, because I didn't quite plan to have two people in the rover, but Anthony, who's totally prepared, brought his own microphone. It's a was totally prepared brought his own microphone it's a gold mic too yeah yeah it's a gold mic that's awesome but we didn't so we got everything wired and i'm like look at us we managed to get two people set up right on and then all of a sudden no audio and we're like what what's going on what is but it was it was enough power to still show power light on the mixer but not enough power to

send phantom power to the microphones. So the mics themselves were dead, but the mixer had enough power. So thankfully, you included a nice box of 9-volt batteries, so I just plugged another three in, and we're good to go. Oh, good. You know, what's funny is when I bought that mixer, the guy specifically told me, he's like, it will run forever without a battery change. And being as you've been on the road for going on 72 hours and you've done attempted one show and this is the first one we're going all the way through i'm gonna guess that's not the case unless you left it on the whole time no i did not leave it

on i didn't think so you have to think though it's if you think about it so there are three nine volt batteries that are in there right so yes three nine volts so math tells us that's 9 18 uh 24 is that right right yes okay so 48 volts is what's required for the phantom power and so i guess that would kind of make sense that they would essentially what they're doing is they're getting half of the voltage and then probably doubling it to power the phantom power but that's a that's twice the amount of voltage draw on each of those batteries. So it would make sense, I guess, that 27, yeah. And now we're also powering two microphones now. Yeah.

Well, do you have dynamic mics or condenser mics? What is your mic? I have the RE-20. What's yours? It's a condenser microphone? Yeah, it is a condenser. You know what? I don't know.

It was a cheap one on Amazon. I needed it for gaming. I use Phantom for the RE20 because it powers, the amp is powered by Phantom. Huh. So anyways, you know, the thing that's actually a little more interesting about the Rover is I'm actually, I'm finding some challenges with DC power that I didn't expect. So I'm not, I'm hitting some speed bumps there, but other than that, we're all good. And you have, uh, you have your, you brought the, the XPS 13 with you, right?

Yes, sir. Now is that running Antragos? Yes, sir. All right. So I saw, uh, that we are talking about Antragos today and that we are going to talk about supporting Antragos. Now here's the thing. The first time I ever did Arch, when you got when back when you and Matt actually did the Linux Action Show and talked about how we should switch to Arch, I was game. I thought

I'll give it a shot. I don't really think I'm going to stick with it, but we'll see what it's like. Now, I'm too lazy to read the wiki, which is what everyone which is what a good Arch user should do. And in fact, oh, yeah, exactly. You can see where this is going, right? So what I did was I did what I call the way of the future, which is when your dishwasher breaks, you don't break out the manual anymore. When your refrigerator breaks, you don't break out the manual. What do you do? You go to YouTube and type in the problem and see if somebody walks you through. So that's what I did.

By the way, that's also what you do when you can't remember if you put the sway bars on your hitch when it's up a little bit or down all the way up. If I remember right. Yeah, it works much better. You can get you can get a few more links in the chain. So I went to YouTube and I looked how to install Arch. And there was this guy. He pronounced a bunch of words wrong despite making claims that he was pronouncing them correct.

And then and then went through it and went through the installation of Arch. And after I got done, I was like, I could do that. It'll take me about an hour, but I could do that. So I grab a spare computer and I installed Arch. And when I got done, I was happy. I was most I was 90 percent happy with the experience and I was 90 percent happy with the result. But my problem was I was afraid to go back and change anything.

I was afraid to blow it away and do it all over again because there was no way I was going to be able to reload my laptop, you know, in the 20 minutes that I've become accustomed to. And so anytime I would travel, I would never take my laptop with me because I thought if anything ever happens, I have to have an Internet connection and I have to have like an hour of time. And not to mention my guide, which I was keeping on an Evernote. So I'd have it on my on my phone. So I'd have all the steps written down because I remember them. So it was just kind of problematic. And I thought, so it's a great operating system and I really like Arch, but I don't think I could ever seriously commit

to it because of some of those problems. And Antregos completely solved that for me. And it did that in that I could now treat the Linux installation, the, the Arch Linux installation, I could have an Arch Linux installation, but I could treat it just like every other distro in that I had a USB installer and I stuck it in and I just clicked next and I waited for the bar to go from left to right, made a couple of choices along the way,

and I had a working Linux distro. Yeah, it's not even, I mean, you could stop right there. I mean, it's not even the fact that it's Arch, right? It's the fact that it's just a nice setup usable distro with a good looking theme by default. And you know, one of the things they're doing now to make Arch more approachable is they are giving you options at installation to do things

like enable the long-term support kernel instead of the kernel that gets updated all the time, use the LTS kernel. Do you want to have Samba work out of the box? Check a box. You want an Arch user repository tool? Check a box. You want Samba printer support? Check a box. You want Lib of the box? Check a box. You want an Arch user repository tool? Check a box. You want Samba printer support? Check a box.

You want LibreOffice? Check a box. And all, yeah, or a simple firewall? Check a box, right? And these things all are just one check now, and they make for a very good distro. It doesn't matter if it's Arch, Fedora, or Ubuntu. You'd want that on anything. And the fact that Antigros is making this as part of their installation, in my opinion, it takes Arch not just approachable,

but when you start talking LTS kernels and things like that, I think it opens up to a whole other realm of use cases. And the fact that they're just building that right in there is smart, smart, smart. So I'm going to get your take, and I definitely want to get Wes' take on this too. But a lot of times I feel like when I'm trying a Linux distro out, essentially what I'm really doing is evaluating the desktop. Having used Fedora for so long, and so having used GNOME 3 for so long, it's not uncommon for me to sit down at my Arch box and type yum. And because of that, and that's just because I'm so used to when I see GNOME, I just

have Fedora pictured that's running in the background. And the reality is the differences between Arch and Fedora, at least from a usability standpoint, once it's set up, is not much, right? I'm primarily interacting with GNOME. Now, where Antrigo sets itself apart and why I think it's a really solid, good operating system, in fact, in some ways a lot better than Fedora, is well, really, it begins and ends with the AUR, right? When I want to try software, if I want to try a new piece of software, especially if we're testing something for the show, I don't grab the Ubuntu box. I certainly don't sit down in my Fedora box. I grab my Arch laptop or my Antragos laptop. And that's because with a single command, I can go out and grab however the package

is packaged, whether it's available with source code or whether it's available in a dev or available in RPM. Somebody has taken that and putting that into the Arch AUR and then I can pull that down onto my laptop. And to me, that is such a huge time saver. That feature alone almost trumps everything else, every other advantage that every other distro could offer. It is nice.

It's nice to be able to just install software on the fly while I'm on air. A lot of times when you and I are talking about an app on the show, if you convince me to try it, I'll just install it right there on the show and try it. So I know, Wes, I'm going to jump to you for a second, but Anthony, what are you using for Linux? What's your main distro? My main distro is Arch. Oh, really? And Wes, your main distro is Arch too, right? Sure is. Has been for three years or so.

Listen to us. Oh my gosh. Well, it's funny. It's later in the show today. I might confess my love for Fedora. I don't know. You know, there's a couple of things I note where I'm offline and having to update a rolling distro over a cellular connection is getting old super fast. So, I don't know. I don't want to say we're all a bunch a cellular connection is getting old super fast.

So I don't know. I don't want to say we're all a bunch of Arch bigots. But it is now. To be fair, though, Noah, it's not your daily driver, right? Well, I'm not exactly sure how to answer that. Because for the purpose of not getting made fun of by all of my Jupiter Broadcasting supportive teammates who constantly make fun of my Fedora laptop, I installed on my ThinkPad, I have Arch. And so everything I do for Jupiter Broadcasting, all of the show prep, all of that stuff is being done on my ThinkPad.

And then somewhere along halfway through the year, I decided it was too inconvenient to do all the speed stuff on my Dell and Jupiter Broadcasting stuff on my ThinkPad. But at that point, all of my stuff and all of my programs and everything was kind of set up on my ThinkPad. But at that point, all of my stuff and all of my programs and everything was kind of set up on my ThinkPad. So I just kind of unintentionally, I guess, switched to it full time. And so my main laptop is running Arch, and that is the laptop that sits in front of my face 80% of the day. I have an Ubuntu box that's downstairs at home, and I don't have any particular native love for Ubuntu. If it was my choice, I'd probably be using Fedora. But because Ubuntu is such a

successful operating system, it's the one that I point other people to, and therefore it becomes extremely important for me to know how to solve the problems on Ubuntu, so I force myself to use it. So if I'm at home and I'm sitting at my desk, I'm using Ubuntu. And I kind of feel like I forced myself to do that. It's not so much of a choice. I'm interested though, what got you started on Arch West?

You know, I was an Ubuntu user for a long time before that. And I kind of just wanted to dig in more, get into, I ran into a couple configuration problems after the initial Unity switch. Obviously, things are a lot more polished now. But that had me digging around in configuration files and some forums. I heard some people using Arch, and they talked it up a lot.

And I was like, well, is this really that cool? And so far, I've been really happy with it. I think what you touched on with the AUR speaks kind of the way Arch is built in general with the Arch build system. You know, you can download the package build for any of the repo files if you want. You can modify them. It makes it really easy to add your own files as well if you just want to make, you know, turn something that you can only get in a tar.gz. You can make that into a regular install. Yeah.

Speaking of software or solutions that you can get on the fly, over at reddit.com slash r slash Linux Action Show, people submit projects that they think we'd be interested in or software they think we might be interested in. And Chris has been talking about how he's trying to move his life from being connected online to being connected to seeming like he's connected online while simultaneously being offline. like he's connected online while simultaneously being offline. And one of the ways that he is going to do that, or one of the things that he needs to accomplish that, is he needs to minimize the amount of traffic that he's sending. And so French AP41 was kind enough to submit WAN proxy to the subreddit. And essentially, what WAN proxy is, is a free portable TCP proxy, which makes TCP connections send less data, which improves TCP performance and the throughput over lossy links. Now, if you're sitting on a mobile hotspot and I don't care who is providing the mobile hotspot, connection can be up and down, particularly if you don't know within 500 miles where exactly you're going to be.

Then things really get interesting. And so the ability to limit the amount of traffic that you're sending back and forth becomes really, really important. I'm interested, Chris, have you set this up and have you tried it? And if so, how is it working? You know, the other thing, you know, I haven't set it up yet. I just saw this today because he submitted it six hours ago. But the other thing that I thought about, no, is you nailed it right on over the over the Wi-Fi connection. Anything you can do to reduce traffic is killer uh but the thing that that struck me is it might also work really well when driving down the road just because it might help smooth out that spottiness that you have as you're just driving down the road and there's different uh

you know different you're moving between towers and things like that uh and i he he likes he warns us too he says don't be fooled or repelled by its Spartan webpage. WAN proxy helps by compressing and duplicating data. So it makes things magically faster when you have slow links, he says. That seems like that'd be super important if you're sitting in a trailer. I can't think of, I was trying to think as I was reading over the show notes, if there was a place that I could implement this. Honestly, you know, Grand Forks back in 1997, we had a really bad flood, like a super bad

flood. And in fact, when you come here, Chris, I will show you there's a landmark. It actually looks kind of like a giant penis. But around the shaft of the statue is a ring. And that shows how high the water was back in 1997. And it was, i mean people's houses were literally underwater when we got back into grand forks there were like cars on the roof of garages and stuff like that wow good yeah it was crazy but here's the good thing that came out

of it when they went through to redo the streets and essentially rebuild the city somebody somewhere had the brilliant idea of let's bury fiber everywhere in Grand Forks. I'm moving there. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So we have fiber right up, almost right up to our doorstep. There is a multiplexer that's out in the, that is at the box out in the yard that, and then they run copper into the house, which I think is silly.

But the, I have, there is no place in the city or any of the customers that I support where it would ever be beneficial to me to limit my TCP traffic. So I can't say that this is something that I'm going to try simply because I wouldn't know how to really evaluate it. I wouldn't know if it was doing a good job or a bad job, but I think it would be super important if you were in a rover. The other thing that I think that is really helpful to minimize traffic is if you can get your certain parts

of data that you want to send over the internet not coming from your hotspot. And my understanding is that the Rover Live Tracker, that isn't using your cell phone or hotspot or anything like that. It's actually updating jupyterbroadcasting.com slash rover that it's updating that live on its own, right? Yeah that it's updating that live on its own, right? Yeah, it's using Silver Cloud and Silver Cloud has some a fee associated with it. But in all practical purposes, it's just using GPRS, which is like, you know, old, slow, lots of coverage, but not at all in Montana, right? Yeah, not at all in Montana. In fact,

where was the dead spot you were noticing? Just when I was watching you come across the border. You disappeared until St. Regis. See, that's a bummer. But yeah, the nice thing about it is it's a self-contained unit. It has GPS in there. It gets our elevation in there. It does all of that on its own, and it uses its own cellular connectivity, so I don't have to worry about any data usage. have to worry about any data usage. Now, the cool thing about that is if, if you were better at math than I am, you could actually figure out based on how far you're going from one place to the other,

what your speed is, and then you could do some more math and you could figure out even if the, even if the device isn't updating you, if it drops off the map for a little bit, you could figure out about where you are, but people can follow you all the way from Seattle, all the way to Grand Forks. And when you get to Grand Forks, we're going to have a meetup and we're going to have, there's going to be a big party in Grand Forks. That's what's going to happen. Yeah. We're going to have a meetup. We are. And the thing is some people might be thinking, you know, I've gotten all sorts. You would not believe the questions I've gotten, Chris, people are asking me things like, you guys have electricity up there. Do you guys,

it's amazing. you have internet there. How do you have running? I mean, like people, there's a guy asked me about an outhouse. Like, really? No, we have plumbing. Come on. I mean, it's not a third world country. We live in the United States.

I mean, it's a city. It's just like Arlington. It's just, you know, a little colder and a little further away. And there's not much around. There's some cows and it's really flat. But it's a city. away and there's not much around. There's some cows and it's really flat, but it's a city. And so you're going to find out exactly what a party is when when Chris gets here to Grand Forks.

I think tentatively it's scheduled for Sunday, the Sunday that Chris is going to be here, which this this coming Sunday at seven o'clock p.m. Now, that time is a little bit flexible. Obviously, I didn't talk to Chris about it. Albert just asked me if if this would work. And I'm like, yeah, sure. And we can change it. So if there are some people, because I imagine it's going to be a slightly smaller group than in some of the other larger cities, if there's anyone out there that wants to come to the meetup and Sunday is a bad day or Sunday at 7 is a bad time, just get a hold of us. Go over to Jitterbucket. There's a forum thread there, too. So you can use the contact page, but there's also the forum thread at Meetup, which Albert's monitoring. That time should work for us,

and I think we're planning to do last Friday still, so that should give us plenty of time. But yeah, the other thing, too, by the way, I'll just mention is if there's other people along our route that want to meet up, you can use that forum there. Albert's watching that. In fact, why don't we, can we pull Odyssey down here? I don't know if we can or not.

Yeah, there we go. Hello, Mr. Westress. So, did you want to mention anything about the meetup page? I was just going to say, the meetup forum, you're monitoring that if people along the way want to meet up or if people need to make modifications. That's a good way to get a hold of you, right? In fact, meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting, he just opened up the

Grand Forks meetup page right now. So, if anybody is going to be in that area and would like to meet up with us, go to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. He just opened up the Grand Forks Meetup page right now. So if anybody is going to be in that area and would like to meet up with us, go to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. We have two RSVPs right now. Not enough. Not enough mana. And that link will be in the show notes too. So if somehow that's not, if meetup.com slash Jupiter

Broadcasting isn't easy enough to remember, then you can go look in the show notes. So one of the things is Chris and I have been working back and forth on getting a mobile studio and getting this, you know, the tracking thing set up. And there's all these different moving parts

that make it possible for him to do shows from the road. But I think one of the biggest things that he was worried about, definitely the biggest thing I was worried about is mobile connectivity. And if you're looking for good mobile connectivity you want to look at something like ting if you go over to last dot ting or i'm sorry uh is we're at linux.ting.com right that's the that's the link for this show

we get linux.ting.com which if you think about it is way better than last.ting.com from a branding standpoint it's like the coolest url ever but linux.ting.com from a branding standpoint. It's like the coolest URL ever. But linux.ting.com, you go over there and you can pick from a variety of devices. Now, I have had Ting actually the first week that Chris ever announced that Ting was a supporter of the show. I was in bed. It was like 3 in the morning, and I was watching Linux Action Show on my laptop, and he started talking about Ting. watching a Linux action show on my laptop and he started talking about ting. And as soon as I heard the ad read, I'm like, Oh wow, that, that sounds like something I should be interested in. So I, I get up and I go over to my desktop where I had all of my, I have all my bills and I'm doing the little calculator. And my wife looks up and she goes, what on God's green earth are you doing at

three in the morning? And I'm like, I'm signing up for a new cell phone service. This is amazing. And so I signed up and I, and I, I and i i get their cheap little phone which is only like i think it was 40 40 50 bucks at the time and they still have cheaper phones like that and uh a couple weeks later i had gone to uh a linux convention linux fest northwest and we were in uh we were in uh uh bellingham and my cell my regular cell phone died. And so all I was left with was my Ting phone. And so Ting kind of saved the day that day. And ever since then, I, I, then, then I switched to an actual smartphone and then I started buying more and more phones to add them onto the Ting network. So I have my dad, I have my mother, I've got my sister, I've got my wife. I've even got a good friend of mine.

That's that's all. My aunt is all in my ting account. And the reason is because it's so cost effective. It's going to be my bill ranges from like eighteen dollars to I'd say thirty five forty at the absolute at the at the absolute most. Of course, I haven't looked as I've added, as I keep adding people on that, that, that number sure to climb a little bit, but the nice thing is you only pay for what you use. So if you're the kind of person that doesn't make any phone calls, like my sister doesn't, she texts and she uses the internet, but she never actually makes any calls. She's not going

to pay for minutes. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person that is really, really, really good at making, at finding alternative ways to make calls. So for example, I use my phone on Wi-Fi all the time. So all of my calls are going over data because I'm using SIP, except that's actually being transmitted over Wi-Fi. So I'm not using minutes and I'm not using data. And all of my text messages

are being sent over Google Hangouts. So that's not using any data. And Ting is completely cool with that. So go over to linux.ting.com and pick something out. You're going to be really happy that you did. Chris has, I think you have what, you have three Ting devices in your RV? Two maybe? He's got a hotspot and he's got a phone, at least, and probably a couple more.

So the first story we want to talk about and i'm really interested to see what the mumble room thinks of this we have uh as as some of you know chris is coming here to look at my automated house i have automated my house and in fact my automated house actually just went on the market today uh but there was a story about a gentleman who pioneered a smart home and then his smart home actually ended up with a denial of service. Oh, I love this story. Yeah. Have you seen this?

The challenge of the futurist pioneer is being patent zero for a future day headaches. In 2009, Paul Rouse, a computer science professor from the Free University of Berlin, built Germany's first smart home. Everything in the home was connected to the internet so that the lights, television, heating, and cooling could all be turned on and off from afar. Even the stove, oven, and microwave could be turned off in Roja's computer, which prevented some potential panic attacks

about leaving the appliances on after he exited the house. This sounds like you, Noah. This sounds like you. Yeah, very much so. In fact, I have such a, you know me. I have such an absent minded memory that things like this become huge to me. The ability to walk into my house and go, did I remember to turn that on or did I remember to turn that off? And then you add to that my incessant laziness of doing repetitive tasks that I think are a waste of time. So, for example, when I walk into a room, I think the

light should just come on because we have these things called motion sensors and it should know that I'm in the room. And if I'm in the room, I want light. And I just, I find the concept that I should have to walk over to a specific area of the room and hit the wall randomly numerous times until I find some sort of tactile device

that I can then flip up to make the room illuminate. And then the room illuminates at 100% brightness, which I think is total overkill. It just seems antiquated and ridiculous to me. yes this is very me but one of the last things that were connected to his house were the locks now i do have my locks automated automated locks rojas bought in 2009 were still sitting in a drawer waiting to be installed i was afraid of not being able to open the doors rojas said in a phone interview now about two years ago rojas rojas house froze up and stopped responding to

his commands nothing worked i couldn't turn the lights on or off it got stuck he says it was like a beach ball of death begins spinning on my computer except it was my entire home now this is my wife's worst nightmare right now so she's listening i'm gonna get killed when i get home because this is what she's worried about um It wasn't quite as bad as the nightmare on the connected home street dreamt up by Wired last year, but it was a fictional smart home's obsolete technology gets loaded with viruses and malware and starts misbehaving and uploading naked photos

of its owner. Rojas, a professor who specializes in artificial intelligence, knows his way around the network well enough to cure his own home. And when he investigated, it turned out that the culprit was a single connected light bulb. I connected my laptop around the network well enough to cure his own home and when he investigated it turned out that the culprit was a single connected light bulb i connected my laptop to the to the network

and looked at the traffic and saw that one unit was sending packets continuously said roas he realized that the light fixture had been burnt out and was trying to tell the hub that it needed its attention to do so it started sending continuous requests that had overloaded the network and caused it to freeze it was a continual denial of service attack, he says. The light was performing a DDoS attack on my smart home to say, change me. Ro has changed the light bulb and the problem was fixed. So a couple of things come to mind. First of all, I think that when people automate their houses, you have to be, first of all, aware that you are taking technology and you are putting fundamental aspects of your life on the television to watch things.

All of that becomes reliant on your computer system. And if there's anything we know about computer systems, working on computer systems is that... Can we just stop right here? Because this is exactly my big hesitation. Even as a fan of technology and as somebody who wants to implement some of these things, I start to think to myself, you know, like, for example, I mean, I hate to be this guy right now, but here in the JB Rover, you know what I like? I like that every single light has its own individual power switch.

I like that my water in my shower has a manual cutoff switch that I can hit. I like that every single thing has its own individual control point and they're all manually operated. You know what else I like for some reason? I can't tell you why, but for some reason I like the ability to turn my water heater on and off with the flip of a switch in my kitchen or my water pump. Like I like knowing that my fridge can be turned on and off like with these switches here. Like I like having manual control over all of this and then here's the other thing noah is i like to be able to visually look at the position of that

physical switch and i like to know by physically confirming the way it looks what the state of that object is and all of that's also taken away from you when all of this stuff is automated so i i'm not actually i'm not able to quantify what the advantage of the totally automated home is other than I can do crap to it remotely. But that seems like a total, total, you know, niche, niche use case. So I'm hoping to change your mind on that. And I think I'll be, I think I'm on relatively solid ground to do that. Very, very few things in my house are connected to the internet.

At the very most, they're connected to the LAN and some of them aren't even connected to that a lot of the systems i'd say the majority of the systems are tied together with uh something known as normally closed normally open and basically the idea is you have a series of contacts a series of of of screws and and either a set of contacts are closed meaning there is a piece of metal that is going between them and electricity can flow or the contacts are open meaning there is a piece of metal that is going between them and electricity can flow or the contacts are open, meaning there is no piece of electricity and electricity cannot flow. I'll give you an example. Your garage door opener is a normally open circuit. Normally, the wires are separated. When you push that little button to open your garage door, what you're doing

is shorting those two contacts together and that tells the motor, start the motor up, open the garage door. Right. Now, most of the systems in my house, the door control system, the security system, even, yeah, even the light system, most of those are powered by this idea of context. And so it's a very rudimentary way for one system to talk to the other. And it's very, very reliable. It's very, very, I think I can say it's efficient as long as it's all in one room obviously if you're gonna put control uh points all over the house that would you know that would limit its efficiency but right now there's just wires that go from one system to another and the

whole system works yet it really can't be compromised unless you have physical access to it and i have made a i have made a a strong point not to connect my stuff to the internet and that's why i've shied away from things like the Nest thermostat. A lot of people have asked, why don't you have a Nest thermostat? Well, the reason is I don't like the fact that it relies on a service. I don't like the fact that it talks out to the Internet. I don't like the fact that Google is going to start recording what temperature I like my house at. I don't want any of that.

I just want the ability for the thermostat to change the temperature depending on if we're in or out of the house and there are certain things like the lights like the lights and stuff which is nice to be able to control from a smartphone but really i don't need to control that from outside the house i am a little worried about leaving an appliance on or something like that but the security implications and the fact that it opens it up to basically the security implementations. I guess that's where – Here's how you sell me on this, and I am willing to admit that I would have to be the biggest idiot in the world to be sitting here in Montana on the way to your house to see your automated house. I would have to be the biggest moron in the world to say I'm not willing to change my mind on this

because I'm driving halfway across the United States of America to see this. However, what I will tell you is where I sit now is the only way this seems feasible to me is if I could have like a 1U rack mount style Linux powered rig that everything was wired in over Ethernet or something into this thing

and this was a central hub and I had to have a connection to that and then that orchestrated everything for me. I mean, if it was like, if it was like as, as appliance level, as installing an alarm system in your home or installing like a sprinkler system or an air conditioner, that's the level of appliance the home automation has to be for me to buy off. How about when you're walking into your house and you want to give your nanny a key to the house and so you give her a key to the house?

And so you give her a key to the house, but she could take that down to Walmart and she could duplicate it, right? And the other thing is your nanny really only needs to be there between the hours of 8 and 6 p.m. Because that's when mom and dad are gone at work and that's when the kids need to be watched. There's no reason for her to come into your house at 2 in the morning, right? And so my access control system allows me to authorize a key fob and I hand it to somebody. And if they, I can tell them that they can come in one time, uh, any hour they're choosing, I can tell them that they will come in between these hours on these specific days, or I can tell them they have free access to the house until I decide that they don't. And so if at some point I have no problem giving you a key to my

house, Chris, and if at some point we part ways and you think I'm going to I'm going to drive all the way back to Grand Forks, North Dakota, I'm going to sabotage Noah's house. Guess what? By the time you get here, your key, I just I log in and I shut it back off and now you can't get back into the house. Additionally, because it's a proximity system, I have a lanyard that hangs around my neck when I have my hands full of groceries or full of boxes. All I do is just swing the lanyard. It hits the side of the house and the door opens. Those are the kind of automation things that I think that there are very little detractions from. I don't really see a downside to it and I see a ton of advantages. So I'm leveraging the advantages of technology to make my life easier. Same thing with the lights coming on.

When you walk into my house or when you disarm the security system or when the little transponder in my car detects that my car is pulled up in the driveway, the entry lights come on. And that is – to me, there is no disadvantage to that happening. It just saves me the hassle of having to walk into my house. Well, I'll tell you – I'll give you a scenario that does kind of – that has crossed my mind is JB1. that has crossed my mind is JB1. It would be nice to be able to have, to somehow grant access for Wes to be able to say, here, Wes, here's a token. You can use Bluetooth on your smartphone

and now the door will just automatically unlock for you when I'm not there. That sounds great. Yeah, that's the kind of thing. That would be kind of nice. I don't know, Wes, have you thought at all about, I know you kind of got a new place and when you're moving in,

have you thought at all about home automation and like Hughes lights and any of this kind of stuff when you're moving in have you thought at all about home automation and like hues lights and any of this kind of stuff when you're moving in you're looking at setting things up definitely you know a big one is uh i work kind of weird hours as does my wife and we have two dogs so we've we've been looking at a system where the dogs could be let out and let back in and then maybe once they've come back in not let out again so we're definitely interested in that kind of automation that's yeah yeah that for pet owners and you're working that makes a lack that's a that's a use case that makes a lot of sense to me wes have you seen these pet doors that have a

little it's uh you know a lot of people will put um pet doors in their uh in their garage and so the the animal can get in and out by itself but the problem is that creates a potential security hole pun intended uh for unauthorized people to crawl through the doggy door. Have you seen these little things? The dog wears a little RFID collar, and then as the dog approaches the door, it unlocks the doggy flap. The dog can go out. The dog can get in. But other people can't.

Those are exactly the kind of things we're looking at. We'd like to maybe experiment with making one, you know, open source and easily hackable. But we haven't gotten that far yet. Yeah, yeah. but we haven't gotten that far yet. Yeah, yeah. The animals seem like anything that, my line is, I have a couple of hard lines in the sand.

One is I won't use something that requires a service or a company to stay in business to continue using it. Totally agreed. And the other thing is I try and stay away from is things that require the internet to work. If you turn the internet off in my house, all of my stuff would still work. My doors would unlock, my lights would come on. Everything would work just fine with or without the internet to work. If you turn the internet off in my house, all of my stuff would still work. My doors would unlock, my lights would come on, everything would work just fine with or without the internet. Noah, have you had any total failure problems, like with this light bulb scenario?

The closest I had to a total failure was we lost power for a couple days in a row, and during that time, so there are electromagnetic locks that lock the doors. And so if they're a fail, what we would say a fail safe system as opposed to a fail secure system. In other words, if it loses power altogether, the door defaults to unlock, not locked. Right. And that's a safety concern, because if I can't I want to be able to get out of my house. Right. Yeah, definitely. So what I have done is there is a battery backup that will that will automatically kick in should the uh power die and it'll power the house up to 24 to 40 some

hours it'll power those electromagnetic yeah so because the electromagnetic locks draw very very little power and so um but once i exhausted uh more than a day or so, the battery started to die. And so what I ended up doing was I used a junction box into the electrical panel so I could switch from the shore power of the city over to essentially what amounts to an extension cord that hangs off the side of my house, which was plugged into a generator. Awesome. awesome yeah so i started the generator up and i just flipped those switches and then i was able to set the i was able to switch over and run off of my off of my own uh off of my own power do you have any old style keys at all or is it all completely digital uh uh no there is the we left the traditional locks simply for uh appearance sake oh yeah really yeah well when it's kind of weird if you come up to the house and there's there's just a plate over the deadbolt and you need a handle to you know to open and shut the door so you'll see locks

they're just they're keyed on both sides so there's no way for somebody to lock me out of my house that makes sense i'm really excited to see this noah yeah no i i think you'll be impressed um but uh before i move on is there anyone in the mumble room that has uh that has thoughts or feedback about the uh about about the automated house actually you um earlier you were talking about how the negatives about it and uh i was already excited then you start talking about the negatives and you convince me i didn't want it. And then you convince me again that I do want it. Oh, good. So mostly the stuff that you were talking about, like the doors unlocking automatically.

I've seen some stuff like the – I think it's called the YubiKey. Not the YubiKey. It's like the U as in not the UbiKey, but it's U-B-I. And it's basically like a deadbolt that you tap your phone to it and it works but it requires the internet so if you actually had something that already does that without any internet that sounds awesome yeah yeah anyone else have any thoughts uh either positive or negative yay or nay for home automation hey no how many um how much research did you put into this because it sounds like you looked into every little nut and bolt on this.

You know, I really did. And so what it comes down to is I do research in a very strange way and probably not very well supported by a lot of other people. Oh, I love it already. You know what I'm going to say, Chris. You know what I'm going to say. I do research. No, no, no. I buy it.

I see if it works. Oh, Chris, you know what I'm going to say? I do research. No, no, no, no. I buy it. I see if it works. Oh, yeah, you buy it. And here's actually what you do, Noah, is you buy it. You do some search. Maybe you do an initial obsessive phase that involves YouTube and lots of Googling, forum readings, Reddit. And then you get a very modest, very average, reasonable, a very, very good starter edition, and then you realize, okay, this is either something bad or this is something good.

And if it's something good, then you have to buy the next better version because you can't have the crappy version. You've got to have the good version of it. Right. And we're going to go into the details of exactly what the system is and exactly how it works. I don't want to give too much of that away. But, yeah, basically I bought a bunch of different systems. I tried a bunch of different things. I saw what works to give too much of that away. But yeah, basically, I bought a bunch of different systems.

I tried a bunch of different things. I saw what works. I saw what didn't work. And the one thing I walked away with is mesh technology is garbage. This idea that one thing is going to repeat a signal to another thing is going to repeat a signal to another thing is just a totally inefficient use of

radio bandwidth, and it's just a disaster and does not work reliably. Anyone who's used X10 knows exactly what I'm talking about. And bandwidth and it's just a disaster and does not work reliably anyone who's used x10 knows exactly what i'm talking about and not that it's mesh but it feels like a bad science project it does not feel like oh yeah it does not feel like like like an automated home anyone else have any thoughts yeah anthony's got something now what do you do in the case of say like rodents getting into the wires or chewing them up? You know, what happens then? Just out of curiosity. Yeah, what do you do, Noah?

Because if something, or yeah, or any kind of like degradation or something like that. That would be horrible because, like I said, everything is interconnected via wire. So if wires get broken or cut or chewed or anything else, bad things would happen. He's the pest control guy on Speed Down. Yeah. All of the wires are in the ceiling so i guess there's a couple that are in the walls that go down to the various panels and stuff but the most critical wiring is in the ceiling and then the things that go uh from the security system and

stuff like that i won't go into too much detail but they're not exposed so it's not well you can't just cut them you know noah it's not all the wiring can be replaced what you really got to do if you're smart is you need to have that backed up and maybe you have it backed up off site on your own droplet. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no kidding that. So I don't use I said all of my home automation stuff isn't connected to the Internet, but you better believe that my my home server and my file server and everything else that

runs on my network is connected to the Internet. And a big thing that i've been playing with lately is mb and you know how i'm running mb is on a digital ocean droplet no kidding yeah yeah that's that's how i set it up and that's how i'm running and of course i'm running it on a sensible distro which is centos um if you if you head over to digitalocean.com and use the and use the promo code do unplugged all lowercase all one word you'll get ten dollars credit and you can fire up your own digital ocean droplet now ten dollars to some people might not seem like a lot of money but when it comes to digital ocean that's two

whole droplets you can have two servers for a month on that with with that ten dollar promo code i actually once i got hooked on digital, I actually had to request that they expand my, uh, my droplet limit because they limit you to 25 droplets and I have exceeded 25 droplets. Now you were actually, you were in the Seattle area when you had to do that. It was hilarious. Yeah, I think so. Well, here's the thing. DigitalOcean has one, they have made me a ton of money. I mean, they have revolutionized my business because they essentially, usually what happens in business is you hire somebody that heads up a project

and then they take that project and then deliver a profit and loss statement and figure out how they're gonna make money and all that stuff. DigitalOcean essentially did that for my business. What they do is they allow me to set up inside of their beautiful dashboard the me to set up inside of their beautiful dashboard, the ability to spin up servers on the fly. And I have clients all the

time that call and say, hey, this isn't working. That isn't working. Just last week, I had a client call me up. She said, our EMR system, our electronic medical records, the thing that we use for our patients is not working. We need you to come fix this for us. I go over there and their server is totally shot. Now, a couple of years ago, I would have had to tell her that we would have to order a server from Dell. It would take five, three to five business days unless they wanted to pay for expedited shipping and expedited processing, in which case I could get it there in maybe a day or two, but it would cost them an arm and a leg. And then she tells me they're actually looking at switching software to something else. So I said, hey, I got an idea. I got a great deal for you.

We'll rent you a server for 20 bucks a month. And of course it's only costing me five. So the, my, my profit margin is built in there. Yeah. And you know what, honestly too, like, uh, uh, there was a, there was a time and a day where I worked for a company that did this and they would do it, uh, for like $300 a month, the same thing. And so really it's, it's, you know, the other thing that's really awesome about that, Noah, and I know you know this, but of course you could then just once, if like they ever wanted to move on or if they wanted to manage it themselves, you could just transfer it to them.

And we've done that. And DigitalOcean is really, really good about helping you move one server with no downtime, no loss of uptime. They'll move it from one, as they call it, profile to another profile. And so if they want to take control of that server, they're more than welcome to do it. And actually, for the first time, we went the other way, where we had a client that we had set them up with their own account and their own server, the whole nine yards. And eventually they came back and said, hey, we would actually really appreciate it if you could manage

this because it's getting to be a lot for us to do and so they just moved it over to our account and we just kind of took over and uh we've been managing it ever since and it has worked awesome so head over to digital ocean.com and use the promo code uh do unplugged all lowercase to get ten dollars and spin up your own linux rig i love it uh thank you digital ocean anthony do you use digital ocean oh yes i love digital ocean i use it a lot yeah i usually mostly use it for vpn work and uh tunneling around the internet oh that's very good use for digital ocean awesome very nice so one of my all-time favorite distros in fact i'd say it still stays as my favorite distro is fedora and fedora released Fedora 23 beta edition. And I have not had a chance to play with it myself,

but reading through, uh, reading through this release from Fedora magazine.org seems like, uh, they've got some pretty cool stuff that that's coming out. Now, one of the things I've noticed of the last couple of releases of Fedora is it seems like they are not making,

they're not like plowing through, uh, making headway and sweeping changes. It seems like they are not making, they're not like plowing through, making headway and sweeping changes. It seems like they're kind of trying to stabilize and try to polish things up. That's not so much the case with, of course, their new installer, package manager. So there's a couple of things that have been new in the last couple of releases,

but it seems like 23 is shaping up to be a really, really polished Linux distro. And the other thing I like, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, I like the direction they're going with this workstation idea, this idea that you can actually use Fedora in production. And I think that there's a big misconception about using Fedora in production. I've obviously used it on my laptop and on my desktop, but I guess in the past I would have been hesitant to hand it to a client or somebody that wasn't overly familiar

with Linux to use. Yeah, you know, is it just me, or does it seem like the Fedora project also is changing in the way they message about asking for help with the betas? It seems to be that they're encouraging users to use beta more, but they're also at the same time they're saying, use our betas, but use it to help us find problems. So, you know, it's like be very aware of what you're using it for. In a much more, they did it last release, but I really feel like they're doing it a lot in this release.

And now from a selfish standpoint, Noah, because I'm sitting right here in front of my XPS 13, I gotta say, the improvements that they say with Wayland, and we've talked about this before on Unplugged, is the mixed high DPI support. So those of you who don't have high DPI at the moment, if you have a Linux rig that has a high DPI display and you want to hook up a secondary display, that secondary display also runs in a pixel-doubled mode. So you get essentially half or worse resolution. So

the only way I've actually made this usable on my XPS 13 is I have a used Apple Cinema 30 inch display that I use as a second display. And then I get a semi like usable like the Telegram app takes up half the screen. It's awful. Wow. It's super weak. Yeah, it's not

usable. So having mixed high dpi support is a huge deal now you're gonna have to use wayland to get that now let's let's be let's be fair about this this is a short-lived problem because eventually i my personal belief is my personal prediction is within we'll say three years everything is going to be high dpi so i think that i think that this is a short-lived problem i think that in a couple of years we're every monitor that you buy will support this natively and we we won't even need to it'll be it will seem like it will seem like complaining about not having a vga port on a computer and i know there's going to be somebody out there that

says i have to have my vga port um but but until that time until we reach that point, I guess if you had a high DPI display on your laptop and you didn't have a high D and you don't have mixed high DPI support, that would be a real problem. Yeah. But you're right. That's like a limited time issue. I see what you're saying. Yeah. It's not going to be a big deal. Okay. Here's speaking of something that feels like something maybe more down the road, and I'm sure it's not going to work for a lot of hardware. I don't have a lot of high expectations for this particular bullet point in the feature list, but this is what they say. The software application is smarter, and it now has the ability to update system firmware.

We've talked about this before, but system firmware updates through GNOME software, to me, seem like a big deal. That, to me, is like, that's like MacBook level, like, you know, Apple sending you a UEFI firmware for your MacBook update, and you update through the software center. Now, with GNOME software, I'm sure the initial support's going to be limited, but you're going to be able to update system firmware through GNOME software under Fedora. That feels like a super integrated 2015 consumer experience to me. And hopefully now someone will they're like taking the lead here, so if people do want to better support

firmware updates with Linux, they have a project they can go to and get it integrated right away. Good point. What took them so long is what Anthony says. What took them so long? How about the mobile room? What do you guys think? The system firmware stuff, what exactly is it offering to update?

Is it UEFI stuff? I'm not exactly sure. When they say on the bullet point here, they just say system firmware. Now, we covered it before in the past. I looked into it, and it was essentially like any hardware that can distribute

a free open source firmware could potentially, if they package it up correctly, get updated through this. I don't think it has to be anything in particular. The key there, though, right, is if it has proprietary blobs, if it's something that is proprietary, it's not going to work through the system. And if it's something where they don't – I don't know exactly, but if they don't take the prep work, it won't work either. So I would imagine it's fairly limited but then again if you want to be known as the best linux wi-fi card or the best linux um video capture device or something like that then maybe you're the vendor that goes above and beyond and starts to support the system before somebody else

does yeah uh so you know it'll be interesting uh do we i didn't pull it up here when is the when they usually do here we go here's a release schedule do we know when the actual uh when the 123 will actually be out they just say october and they say october in the list you know and i i the reason why i hate to say more specific than that is because it doesn't when's the last time a fedora release didn't get bumped a little bit? Never, it always does. But you know what? I support that. I support that decision because I would rather them take an extra month,

an extra two months, and fix the stuff that they're holding the release rather than just put it out there and say, oh, we'll patch it or we'll update it. No, just if it takes an extra month or two, that's fine. In fact, the way I do Fedora releases, and this is not a hit on Fedora. I think this is just good practice.

I have a machine that I use daily and then I have another machine that I use, you know, kind of at, at night just to kind of, you know, check my email and do stuff like that. I will usually install the latest version of Fedora on that machine and then run it for a month or two and make sure that all the kinks and all the bugs and, and all my software works and all that stuff on it first before I actually move my daily driver over to it. And I think that's a good way to do it. You know, what strikes me about the Fedora project really is, and I mean, maybe he just successfully has his, he batted his eyes at me and he impressed me, but I talked with Matthew Miller at LinuxCon. And, you know, I really liked sort of – and actually, I forget, Noah, who the other gentleman we were talking to from Red Hat.

But he was talking about some of the things that Fedora Project and maybe even more so Red Hat have worked on that they are unable to really advertise because it would actually expose them to greater risk. So I don't even want to go into too much detail here because this was a private conversation. But what they told me was essentially there has been major accomplishments they have made that they don't really advertise. And I bet this is true for a lot of companies. I bet this is probably not a Red Hat specific thing. This is probably true for Intel and Canonical and a lot of different companies that they make these legal battles or they resolve these issues.

But the reason you can't talk about it is because if you say, let's just say it's the ability to burn a CD under Linux. Let's just say it's like there was some code that had to be licensed to do that. And if you if you announce that you licensed it, then you're essentially exposing yourself open to potential lawsuits down the road. So you don't say anything, even though it was a major benefit to the desktop. And that is one of the things that when I look at Fedora, I like a lot about it, is I like the people behind Fedora. I like the people leading Fedora, and I like the company supporting Fedora. That's one of the reasons I was an Ubuntu user for a really long time, too.

So Fedora 23 coming out in October, that's sort of like reasons i was at ubuntu user for a really long time too so uh fedora 23 coming out in october that's sort of like interesting the major topic the takeaway for me is man fedora is looking really compelling and and you got to have some perspective when i say this because you you do a snapshot of i don't know five six years ago and i might have been one of the biggest fedora haters around i mean i even a year ago I didn't really think it was that practical of a distro until until 21 started coming out. Then I started changing my tune. And I guess for me, what it's willful ignorance, I guess, is what it was, because I had started with Red Hat and then I had moved in to Fedora and I'd been using it since Fedora Core one. So I had just I had just learned to deal with some of the shortcomings of fedora and i just

i was like it for me it wasn't oh fedora doesn't do these things and those other distros do for me it was just my computer doesn't do those things and and that's it's a good thing and it's a bad thing on what it's it's a bad thing because i think i was i think i was unaware of how powerful linux really was but I think it's a good thing because it allowed, it allowed me to have an appreciation for, for, uh, to appreciate Fedora for what it was. And as you, as you, as you pointed out, the company behind Fedora is so great. I have a large respect for Red Hat even more now after having visited with them. I mean, let me tell you the people at Red Hat, they are some really authentic Linux loving folks.

And I'm I'm trying to think it was it was it at the was it at the after party at LinuxCon that you were talking to? Yep. Yep. OK. And so I think I know who that was. But yeah, but but yeah, you can tell from talking to him, right? He's a very authentic guy. He's he's he's he it's it's not just a show and it's not a tagline. Those are core beliefs to people like that. And also, I wouldn't just say that. I would also say some serious like perspective on the community and on the landscape and and not just like a lot of times when you talk to people, they have a very, very strong corporate bias. A lot of times when you talk to people, they have a very, very strong corporate bias. You know, they see the world through a corporate lens. I'm sure that's the case for Red Hat employees too.

But when we were having, you know, a 20-minute casual conversation, it was really – I got the sensation that he had a broader perspective. And what was nice about that is two other Red Hat employees walked up and they also gave me that same impression. They have the corporate perspective and then they have the broader open source perspective. And that I found very refreshing. Yeah. And they're the first people, you know, I walked in there and I was talking about how how much I appreciated their training program. And they talked about and I asked them, I said, tell me what advantages Red Hat offers over its competitors. And none of them could answer the question. All of them them looked at me and they went you mean like the other people in the community we all kind of work together i mean i mean there's some things that canonical does that we use and we do a lot of stuff that canonical uses but i don't i guess we don't really have a competitive thing as we we just make what we need and we do the work and we support the projects and then everyone benefits it does help

when you are standing on stacks of billions of dollars. It does. But my point is they don't, they don't say, they don't say we're standing at where we have the financial resources to make this project succeed. And so that's what we leverage over these other companies. They don't view it that way. They just view it as a contribution that everyone can benefit from. And the thing is, I mean, to some degree, I appreciate

where they're coming from. To some degree, I sometimes I think they're short selling themselves because I when I went through the Red Hat training program, I was absolutely blown away. The fact that I was being tested on real hardware with real problems, save the Internet, because I know we disagree on that point. But the way that they the way that the training was conducted, the fact that the instructor was using a Red Hat machine the entire time, all the notes were available to us in OpenOffice. It's the little things like that that just made it, if you were a Linux user and you wanted to be immersed in Linux, you could do the Linux training. Now, these days, owning a full-time business, there's something that nobody ever tells you

about owning a small business, and that is when you go into business for yourself, you have the ability to, you might be a really good electrical person that electrician, and you can run electrical wires, but if you're going to go into business for yourself, you actually have to know the business side of it too. And the thing they don't tell you about that is that business side of it takes a ton of time. And so now I just, I don't have the time to go for a week off to a Red Hat training course to get certified in the latest Red Hat certification. But what I do have time for is late at night in two in the morning in my Skippy sitting down with my laptop and going to Linux Academy. Now, Linux Academy, if you use the if you use the URL Linux Academy.com slash unplugged, you'll get 33% off. And let me tell you, I actually paid full price, I think, the first time I signed up because I didn't know about the promo code.

And I thought that was a good deal. So 33% off, that's a huge deal. Now, they are actually working to help find you a job, help get you into the career space. And you can find me at linuxacademy.com, and they'll be willing to help you with that. I actually am just getting ready to take my Red Hat 7 certification, and in the past, the past couple versions of Red Hat, what I've had to do is drive, the nearest training center is Minneapolis, so that's a four-hour drive for me, actually closer to five, probably, and when I get to Minneapolis, I have to rent a hotel, that's money,

I'm not working, so that's money, I'm paying to eat out every day that's money plus i'm paying for the course and let me tell you while the courses are absolutely top notch and i absolutely love them they're expensive and so that's money and then i have to actually pay to take the test and then of course the gas to go back and forth um with linux academy i'm doing it for literally a fraction of that price, and I can get certified in the next version of Red Hat. I can't actually take the test, but I can do all of the prep work and learn all of the material right on their website. Now, the other thing I really like about Linux Academy is the concept of the snippets. When I first got into, when RHEL 7 first came out, the first thing I had to do was learn how to support it for clients. I didn't care about certification.

I didn't care about what was going to be on the test. What I wanted to know was the practical advice. How can I actually make this work? And Linux Academy worked with me on that and said, these are the five or six things I need to know. And so they said, I told them, these are the five or six things I need to know. And they said, here's how much time you need to allocate. And here are the things that modules that you need to go through and learn this stuff. That helped me that when I when I saw like when I was trying to decide if I'm going to take on Ruby or Python and being able to put both of them into a four hours or five hours or six hour perspective.

I know I've mentioned this before, Noah, but to me, that is like goes from this big, really weird like concept that I'm going to learn a programming language to I'm going to spend five hours doing a thing. And that made it much more approachable. Now, think about that. If I had told you Ruby is a really cool language and your your troll up in the upstairs, your living troll says that you should learn Ruby. Would you have taken time out of your week and paid money to go to a course to learn programming? Or would you have simply said, hey, you know what? I'm not a programmer. I don't have time for this. I'm running a podcast network. I have three kids. I'm trying to launch a new show. I have all these things going on. I don't have time for that. But then if you say, well, here's what I want you to do. Open your laptop, and instead of watching TV, click around through this stuff, and you'll learn how to program.

But jeez, anyone can get on board with that. And you know, if you're somebody like me where sometimes your version of playing gaming on your computer is actually like tinkering with your distro or messing around with your computer, Linux Academy also scratches that same itch. Yeah. So yeah, linuxacademy.com.

Slash unplugged, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged because then you'll get the automatic discount. Yeah, 33%. That's a heck of a discount. I know. You know, that number isn't accidentally picked, I don't think. I think it had special meaning. Hmm.

Okay, so we were going to talk this week about the automatic block backup system. Wimpy was trying that out. However, I don't see him in the room. You know, he's on wireless connection, too. So I have to be gentle with him. I can't give him in the room. You know, he's on wireless connection too. So I have to be gentle with him. I can't give him a hard time if he can't make it. That seems legit.

So I thought I would talk a little bit just for a moment then about the last couple of weeks, there's been a pretty important topic to me, and that's taking things offline and pretending like I'm online, just sort of like that could be a lot of things, like anything from search to media content or things like that. And I kind of have a couple of different ideas in mind. But since I'm on the road, I thought maybe specifically I'd talk about ideas I had for the rover. And Noah, bad news, some of it involves project time when I get to your place. What are you talking about? That's great news, dude. I know, I know.

I'm excited. Listen, any time somebody's willing to let me drill holes news, dude. I know, I know. I'm excited. Listen, anytime somebody's willing to let me drill holes and take parts off, no, I'm just kidding, but I'm all over doing projects. I think it'll be fun. Chris is never going to make it back. No, I think it'll be fun. And you know what the great thing is? Here's what Chris's answer. Every time I'm

like, oh, you know what we have? We have this problem where we have this. Here's his answer. It's become kind of a joke. It's all show content. That's right. That's true. So you're all going to get to see it that is very true it does even even when my side of the road it still ends up being uh show content so uh wes have you continued to work with mb i mean you still set it up what are your thoughts couple day or i guess maybe a week and a half since we first talked about two weeks three weeks since we first talked about it and a week since we first talked about it, two weeks, three weeks since we first talked about it, and a week since we first recorded our segment. Any follow-up thoughts?

You know, I'm still fairly impressed. I've been adding more content. Filebot's been working great. The directory structure hasn't been too onerous, at least for my personal collection. And honestly, I've been pretty impressed. A lot of that credit goes to FFmpeg, but I built it on a rather, let's say it's not generously specced.

It'll be upgraded at some point, but, you know, I'm loading it down pretty good, transcoding 1080p streams and hardly a hiccup. I will say sometimes when you need to jump around in the video, that can be a little laggy, but once it picks up, it seems to be continuous. So I'm having a great time. I think I'll be donating pretty soon. That was kind of, that's where I'm at too, is I'm thinking about doing the donation once I get back from the road trip if I have the funds. But I was telling Anthony before we went on the air, right where he's sitting right now, or perhaps where I'm sitting, I'm not sure.

So one of the cool things about the current Rover setup is the mobile studio all collapses down and it goes underneath the seat that's at the dinner table. So I'm able to completely just get rid of all of this when we're driving and it's all safe and it all fits under the seat. But there's another seat where we have that same storage area. Now, it's a very nice storage area. It's mostly filled with toilet paper at the moment. Truth be told. The essentials.

Essentials, exactly. But I was thinking there is a storage compartment in the side of the RV that is sort of lined up with where that seat is at. And if I were to fill that storage compartment with a bank of batteries, I could then put an inverter underneath that seat. I could then put a NUC and a NAS under that seat and a router. And then when I wanted to charge that bank of batteries, because it would be in that storage compartment, I would simply open up that storage compartment and then run the solar chargers to it, charge over solar or whatever the source power would be in that storage compartment, I would simply open up that storage compartment and then run the solar chargers to it, charge over solar or whatever the source power would be, and then

have it come back into the inverter right here underneath your butt, basically. Does that seem solid to you? That seems very solid. Now, what do you think, Noah? Is this an impossible task? No, I don't think it's an impossible task. The only thing I want to add to that, and I'll be completely honest, you kind of lost me in the middle of that when you're describing it, but the only thing I would add is I would want somehow your battery bank inside the camper to be connected to the battery bank on the front of the camper. And the reason I say that is because the front bank of the camper is what's tied into the charging inverter of the camper, as well as the charging connector that goes into your truck. So anytime you're plugged into shore power or anytime you're plugged into your truck,

I would think you'd want all the batteries available to charge as much as they can, right? That is true. Yeah, that is a good point. I was actually thinking about running as... So I had two ideas. So I was thinking I could tie it into the main trailer power system, and then I would have the advantages of shore power charging that battery bank. I would have the advantage of lighting up all of the AC outlets power system, and then I would have the advantages of shore power charging that battery bank. I would have the advantage of lighting up all of the AC outlets in here, and I would

have the advantage of trickle charging while I'm driving. However, I could also use that as a separate isolated power system that just powers all of the computer gear, essentially all of the studio gear, all of the Linux server stuff, and all of that, that has its own separate source of power that is completely off of the RV system. So, I mean, there's two ways to go. Both have their downs and ups. Well, it sounds like you're developing quite the list. I know that when I did my RV, it took me a good two years to flesh out all of the things I wanted to do. And then I would do some of them and then I would go back and redo them. I'm curious, have you come up with that? Have you, have you done anything that you said that

you've now after living in it, you've said, well, actually, if I had that to do that over again, I would do it this way instead. Yeah. I mean, this, this, this battery bank that I'm talking about is probably the biggest thing actually is now that we're here doing shows and I'm sitting here watching my, both my, both my laptops I'm sitting in front of me are down to 40 percent battery and uh I just kind of you know this is hang on right I kind of sit here and I think okay this this power thing here's what we're doing to save money to be honest with you is we're boondocking a lot more is uh we're kind of just uh we're finding places that have good cellular coverage and we're staying there and they don't necessarily have power hookups which means we're running off of battery a lot more do you uh uh you don't you have that thousand trails membership that gets you free camping at places if there's one along

uh us 90 but there's not really anything along there's nothing along us this is montana there's not much out there trust me yeah it's really something. Well, boondocking is kind of fun. And if you think about it, really, boondocking is the best way to test your true offline ability because you're literally reliant on nothing. Yeah, just for those of you who are not familiar with the term, because before I knew anything about trailers and RVs, I didn't know what the hell boondocking was. It's basically a fancy term of dry camping. It's a trailer or an RV where you live off the grid. You still have power because you have your furnace. You have your water tanks.

You have your sewage tanks and you have propane. So you can completely be self-contained and you can go anywhere and just basically live off the grid. And you call that boondocking. A lot of times it's urban camping is another term people call it. It's urban camping is another term people call it. And some places like Walmarts and yes, Cracker Barrels and a lot of other places, they actually like it because they want you to be their customer. And so it's an interesting culture there. And we've been meeting different people and they've all been really cool.

And every single one has a different technology implementation. And we walk around sometimes some of the different parks and we're checking out like the different antennas that they have hooked up. And some people have like flat ones in their window. Some people have big ones they have out in their yard that are wired into their rigs. And all of these people are coming with different technology solutions. It's not like these are technology dead spots. There's a lot of different ingenuity going on here and a lot of maker stuff I'm seeing that's really cool. That's awesome.

The concept of – see, and the thing is my next goal is to get you involved with Ham Radio because it ties in so nicely with the concept of – well, with the concept of open source, with the concept of maker, with the concept of doing everything yourself. The one thing that you are somewhat reliant on right now is connectivity to other places. Now it's not ham radio isn't necessarily going to help you with the broadcasting side, but it would definitely help you if you ever wanted to get a message from one person to the other and you didn't have cell phone service, you wouldn't need it. I don't know what, what kind of luck I'm going to have to be honest, but I'm willing to try. And I think that as you continue to move towards this idea of wanting control over your own, like you were talking about, controlling every individual light, controlling when the water heater is on and when the water heater is off, that kind of intense control, intense flexibility, and intense self-reliance just dovetails perfectly with ham radio.

And intense self-reliance just goes, like, just dovetails perfectly with ham radio. The only thing I'm, you know, when I do all of this is my default right now would be, like, use Arch for all these different little machines to run these different things. And the only thing is, is I'm just not sure that's going to work in an offline scenario. So that's one thing I'm revisiting. And there's some stuff that I have to kind of reevaluate when I think about some of this. It's like, how would I really do this if I have to actually be offline? Could I take an Arch box offline? And if I go offline, is it only offline for two, three weeks at a time is maybe a week at most, but then can, if I go, can I go somewhere? I can get a lot of updates. There's little things like that when using Linux that

are different than using some of the other commercial operating systems. But then the flip side is, uh, I have the main thing that I need, and that is the ability to live offline on my own, no subscription necessary. And like we were talking about at the beginning, I'm not going to also be victims of marketing whims of these different companies. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a big one, right? Well, I guess that goes back to my thing of just anything that requires a company or a service. Yeah, I know. I know you always make that point. Wes, are you, so Wes, where do you fall on this? So Noah's kind of coming down the lines, like he won't even get a Roku for his house

because he doesn't want to be tied to the Roku service. And this is one of the reasons he's a big Linux fan too. Where do you fall on like, Wes, stuff that's like dependent on a third party service to continue to function long-term? You know, I'm definitely skeptical as well. I do use some of them. You know, my some of my family members have smart TVs, and I've set up some streaming to those and that kind of thing.

But you do, you know, you have to be very aware that you're kind of just risking the time thing. As soon as that platform decides to stop supporting the service you happen to use, you're you're out. And it'll be an anachronism before. I want to get your take on this too, because I have a whole nother complaint when it comes to smart TVs. Smart TVs are are these devices that even if lg stays in business which i think they will and even if they continue to support their platform which i think they will the fact that those apps constantly get updated but the hardware is stuck and instead of replacing with the roku we're talking about a 30 40 50 60 70 box right when it comes to the tv right now we're talking about, I mean, I've paid a couple hundred dollars for any decent TV. And if you buy a real big one in your basement and you're looking at

$1,200, $1,300, you know how mad I'd be if in three years I go to take that out and, or I go to update it and I realize I can no longer open Netflix on my smart TV because the ARM processor in it is not capable of running the newest version of Netflix because they've literally quadrupled in speed in four years. That is definitely the stage that technology is at. Yeah. So, uh, so I mean that, and that's, that's not specific. The Roku, where you gain some solid ground, Chris, and where I don't really have a leg to stand on is principally, I think I'm on safe safe ground but the problem becomes that the roku is such a cost-effective device that it literally becomes almost disposable you know when you're talking

about you know you you've said this and i think you're right when you're looking at 50 or 60 bucks anything under 100 really if it gets you a couple of years it served its purpose you want i mean you got your use out of it um and then you can go go get some of them i think that's why the chromecast is so successful because it is you know it's so cheap even if you can't do everything with it it does enough for such a boy no kidding the other thing about that but again so and the chromecast i come i become conflicted on i had we had a meeting room for a client and what they wanted to do was they wanted to uh obviously project from their laptop up on onto the screen.

So we had run an HDMI cable in the wall while the room was being built and all that stuff. Do you know what turned out to be a way easier solution was putting a Chromecast in there. And now every guest that sits down, even if there's like six of them in a room, they can take turns who is sharing their screen up on up on the Chromecast. And that was I mean, it was 30 freaking dollars. It required no actual wiring. We didn't have to do anything in the wallscast. And that was, I mean, it was $30 freaking dollars. It required no actual wiring. We didn't have to do anything in the walls or anything like that. It was brain dead simple to set up.

And it's actually worked super well. On the flip side of the coin, if Google ever decides not to support the Chromecast, which could be next week for all we know, not only are they out their they're, you know, 40 bucks for the Chromecast, but now they're out of solution. Now the thing that they were relying on

to be able to get stuff up on this meeting room TV is host. And I guess that's what kind of bothers me. Yeah, I have a personal example. We were looking to use, Groupon has some software where you can have like kind of point of sale displays

where you can set up links for various Chromecasts and have a web interface where you can manage what each Chromecast is displaying. So you can kind of easily change them. And we were looking to use that at work for looking at graphs and that kind of stuff. But what you get with the convenience, you lose in the custom ability. So we were looking to use the new Ethernet adapters that they have.

But a lot of the security implications, we just couldn't, you know, we have to use Raspberry Pis because you can't lock down a Chromecast. You know, you just don't have the option if you if they lose power they instantly come back as a wireless access point yeah so what have what what you've you've you've done that with a raspberry pi uh we're implementing something that will be essentially the same but we don't get to take advantage of groupon's awesome open source project unfortunately all right well that's cool there was uh i don't know if you caught the in in linux action show this week there was a guy that was talking about the fruit party and how everyone names their mini little computer after some form of a fruit.

That's awesome. That's awesome to you. I remember that. So Chris, any other final thoughts of using Linux offline? No, I think I'm going to reflect on some more because we are about to go through, unless I'm wrong, Anthony, pretty much most of the rest of the stretch in Montana is going to be offline, right? I don't know. Once you get past Billings, it's going to be pretty rough. Yeah, and Billings is our next destination, I think. So we'll see.

So I'll probably have some more thoughts after that. And I'll say also this, if you want to follow the destination, as long as we have have some level of connectivity you should be able to over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover and I don't know if I'll be able to post updates as often since we'll have limited connectivity but you can also find a link to the playlist over on the rover webpage and we just posted one last night we now have seven

seven of the rover logs go check those out and you patrons also some exclusive stuff over at patreon.com slash today some really cool personal touch just for you alright well that'll bring us to the end of this week's episode join us at jupiterbroadcasting.com

or jblive.tv every week and we'll see you again next week. Well, for flying by the seat of our pants, that wasn't too bad. No, I think that went pretty good. Good job, sir. Good job. Noah, you're awesome. Yeah, well, here's the thing.

I'm going to take a picture when I get done of what this room looks like. It has been fun. Like, I was literally walking. Why is it? Every 15 seconds, I'd look around, and I'm like, oh, I have to do this, or I have to get that done. Yeah. You were quick on the telegram, though.

That worked pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have one computer that's dedicated on the telegram, though. That works pretty well. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have I have one computer that's dedicated to telecast him. You've lost me. You've lost me. No, you haven't lost me. I'm here. Sorry.

Sorry about that. I yeah, I have I have one computer that's just dedicated to to telegram. So that computer that had one laptop that was set up and I'm like, this is just the computer I'm going to use to communicate with people. So I hear that there was a Skype yesterday and that has thrown a serious wrench into your plans of doing a mobile studio on Skype. Yeah, man, that was awful.

We were all wired in. It sounded actually really good and I had good connection and then I was able to log into the studio. Thankfully, after a little while I was able to get connected to the studio and talk to the live stream. But for a while, I thought it was like I thought it was an issue with the connectivity. I thought it was I didn't know what was going on because I figured it was on my end because I'm in the mobile studio. So it must be my fault that I can't get logged into Skype. Yeah, but you and so and so somewhere along the lines, you were like, this just isn't going to work.

Well, about 50 minutes after the show was supposed to start, we decided to bail. Yeah. So basically, we kept trying to push it, kept trying to push it. And I just you know, and I had to vamp for 15 minutes on the live stream while I'm waiting for Mike to try to get connected. You know, I have to be honest with you. I have a new I started my newfound appreciation for what you do for a living back when we were at the back when we were at self. And it's like, uh, I don't think I, I, I really don't think people get it. Like, I think as, as a viewer, I think I had like a general idea of kind of what, of kind of what you did, but you don't really get it until you're like, you're going to sit here and talk for six hours and come up with something,

something to say. And it actually has to be something pseudo interesting to keep people listening. And then while you're doing all that, you also have to handle the chat room and do all the auto stuff and then deal with people complaining and people that need you for different things. And yeah. Yeah. It's fun. It's good times. Yeah.

It's good times. All right. Do we have a title? Everybody got to go to jbtitles.com. Jbtitles.com. Yeah. So what do you, what, what do you do? Skype goes out.

Well, you switch to mumble. So this whole show was powered by Mumble. It was, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Nothing is Skyped anywhere. Everything is Mumble. Yeah, yeah. So the chat was complaining about audio a lot, and hopefully it's better in the post edition.

But hey, at least we used open source Mumble for the whole thing.