LINUX Unplugged - Episode 114: KDE Connect All the Things | LUP 114

Episode Date: October 14, 2015

We take a look at some of the coolest technologies coming out of the Plasma desktop & finally a open source router you and your family can use. Then we share some of our favorite ncurses terminal based applications, you might just be surprised at how modern these terminal apps are!

Speaking of how great Windows is, there is a new subreddit that chronicles the most public blue screens of death ever. And at first I was like, oh, ha ha, that's old joke. But actually, some of these are really good. Really, really good. Like, hey, Wes, take a look at this picture here. I don't even know what this is. Wow. But look how fancy that is.

That's in a mall where they have like a twisted display and the twisted display blue screen. I'd be really curious to see what that looks like when it works. Yeah, right. Every fifth day. Look at this guy sitting there and a massive blue screen right there on that screen. It's almost like art. It is kind of like art. It is kind of beautiful in a way.

Yeah, giant, giant blue screens, giant blue screens. So there is a subreddit now dedicated to the most epic blue screens ever. And if you check it out, I'll have a link in the show notes. Some of these are kind of artistic in their own way. The blue screen of death has, in its own way, gotten its own status in popular culture. So in fairness, do we need to spin up a Linux kernel crash subreddit? Right. Right.

It's not pretty. No, it's not. We don't have the blue. Yeah. Although something went wrong with your computer is the new error message yes there's somebody posted a photo that said it was just a big word that said error you have an error thanks uh this is really uh this is really i love the caption for this ars technica photo so this is the mall one again. We have these wrap displays. And it says, malls, can they get any more Solus? Yes, thanks to the blue screen of death.

Yeah, that's pretty awful. That's pretty gross. You know what I want? An ARM-powered Linux laptop. Linus says it's going to happen, but maybe not in 2016. He's looking for it, though. He said that at LinuxCon in Europe, he said that I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress.

One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year. Maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop. Does the PyTop count? I don't know, actually. That's a good question. I don't think so.

I think when Linus says that, he's talking about something kind of along the lines of the MacBook Air that you just buy. Yeah. And it runs. Consumer, easy peasy. Yeah, I mean, we're starting to see a higher end Chromebooks now. I mean, you know, who's going to try to compete with a $500 Chromebook with an ARM chip instead of an Intel CPU?

You know, I was on. I need a laptop with Android. Yeah, I would rather have it run Linux, really. I mean, much, much rather. I was on Tech Talk today. I was talking about these high-tech nomatics that are living off the grid, quote-unquote. They're staying connected to the Internet, but living off the grid. And one of them is, you guys may know him, is Joey Hess.

He is a Debian software developer. I'm not sure if he's currently with the Debian project, but he did help develop the Debian installer. He created Git Annex. Very nice. Yeah, he's working on a software that uses Dropbox, Git, and a few other things to sync all of your.files between all of your Linux machines. Right? Like, wouldn't that be nice? So Joey, he is an interesting individual because he pines.

He says he pines for an ARM-based Linux laptop because he's using a Dell Mini 9. He's been using it since 2008. He's worn out two keyboards. He's gone through two SSDs. He's upgraded it to two gigabytes of RAM. And he lives totally off the grid. He has solar power. On a good day, he says he gets 50 amp hours.

But on most days, he gets 15 amp hours. And he says when power is low, he often hacks in the evenings by lantern light. That's adorable. And he says he would kill, kill for a powerful arm-based laptop, something that would, you know would use way less power. Oh, I had to put a qualifier on there with powerful. Right, exactly. That was what I was going to say,

is when I say ARM laptop, I want something that's significantly fast. Yeah, where you have your average everyday expectations met easily. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to be a screamer, but here I am a few months into this XPS 13 that I have, and it's got a Core i7, quote unquote, mobile processor, which is actually a dual core processor with hyper-threading that makes it look like four cores. I don't know why that's called an i7, but apparently in laptop jargon, that qualifies as an i7.

That's an i7, yeah. And you know, I notice it. I notice. It's been a while since I've used a dual core as my daily driver, and I don't know, it's still a really nice performing machine, but it's also my newest computer, and it's not my fastest computer. That's a little disappointing. It's a bummer. It's a bummer. That's precisely because Intel's been focusing on power management

for the last couple of years. And I appreciate, I get four or five hours of battery life. I do appreciate that. That makes a difference. But the reality is, uh, if I can, if I'm sitting here with a quote unquote, I seven and an SSD and I'm going not fast enough,

there's no way arms failed there. Yeah. Arms, just arms not going to be fast enough for me for a while. I don't think I, I don't know. You are, you do have higher expectations than a terminal based.

Probably. Oh yeah. Yeah. Being developer. Probably. I mean, I would claim that Intel has maintained a lead because of their manufacturing prowess, and now they've stumbled with the latest process nodes.

So is this the point where ARM catches up? Maybe. And if you go, like Wes is saying, if you're doing terminal development, maybe you have a web browser, an email, and that's just about it. If you can tell me, here's an ARM computer that doesn't need to be charged for 10, 13 hours

that runs Linux, that would be very, very tempting when I'm off-grid. That would be very, very tempting. Yeah. Or your ARM computer is, well, not for off-grid, but your ARM computer is your interface to a droplet in the cloud. Yeah, exactly. So Joey says, I seem to live half the time out of range of broadband and still use dial-up. He uses dial-up.

Two gigs of RAM, dial-up? Yeah. So I'm fully adapted to asynchronous communication. I download my mail with offline IMAP as well as blogs get converted to RSS to email. I use a distributed version control extensively and use my Git annex to maintain large quantities of local data and queue up large files to transfer in rare times when I'm around fast internet. That's really neat. That is really neat. That is really neat.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 114 for October 13th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that is drinking Dawn of the Red, an Indian-style pale ale. That's right. My name is Chris. And my name is Wes. Hey, Wes, you're the good soldier here that brought these Dawn of the Red. I've never even seen this before. I hadn't either. What do you think? Coming out of Eugene, Oregon, a local brewery. And look at that, a 7% alcohol. Ooh, this will be a fun one, guys.

Is this my second or third? I think it's the second one. We better not tell. Yeah, okay. Coming up on this week's episode of Linux Unplugged, there is a KDE elephant in the room. A big plasma monster. We're going to talk about that today. And some accusations being thrown around.

Some new application updates coming out. Compositions being thrown around, some new application updates coming out, and all of that goodness from the Plasma folks as well as what I believe is the one true, the one true ring. No, I'm kidding. The one true form of integration or whatever you want to call it. Canonical calls it convergence. Microsoft calls it, I think, continuity or continuity or something like that.

I actually think there's something here today that we all could install. You don't even have to be a KDE desktop user to take advantage of a really slick integration between your phone and your desktop. You don't need a dock. You don't need any special stuff. I'm excited already. We'll tell you about it, yeah. And then later on in the show, I've been looking at options, something easy to recommend to people that is an open source, a drop-in, set-it-and-forget-it router for the home that

gets updates, stays secure, that uses software we can trust. We're going to talk about that today in the show as well. And then, then we're going to see if we can end curses all of the things. King Looper put us to the challenge and wants us to end curses

all of the things. Every last thing. Every last damn thing, damn it. And we're going to do it. With the help of the Mumble Room. That's right. Well, actually, with sole reliance on the Mumble Room, we have a couple of suggestions, but this is a Mumble Room app pick segment that we'll be getting to, which was requested by the Mumble Room. Well, there you go.

They get what they want. That's right. Now it's coming to you. All right. And speaking of the Mumble Room, let's bring them in. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Howdy, howdy. Hello.

Hello, hello. Zombies don't run Linux. It's good to have them in. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Howdy, howdy. Hello. Hello, hello. Zombies don't run Linux. It's good to have you there. Danica's in there, too. That's good. Hello, guys. So just really quickly, a bit of KDE follow-up. You know, the guys over at the KDE Project are doing things in an interesting way.

You've got the Plasma desktop, and you've got the KDE applications, and all this different stuff. It's a whole set of applications, and the KDE Applications 1508 just got a release today as we are recording. This release contains bug fixes, translation updates, a nice update, a good safe update for everybody if you use ARC or KATE or KDE PIM or Localize, any of that stuff. This is a great update. Plus, this release also includes long-term support versions of the KDE development platform 4.14.13. And I'm going to underscore that. KDE 4.14.13 is still getting updates. The reason I'm going to underscore that is because that brings us to our first bit of

feedback from KNRO in the Linux Action Show subreddit. Does Lass hate KDE? Some strong words. Yeah, so I just listened to episode 386 of Lass, and while they were covering Linux usage at the very large array, Chris noted that it's probably Red Hat with KDE, and then Noah just couldn't help himself but claiming that KDE is a strange desktop for such an environment. I mean, what the hell, Lass?

This is not the first anti-KDE sentiment that I have heard on the show. I mean, I know you're gnome fanboys, What the hell, lass? This is not the first anti-KD sentiment that I've heard on the show. I mean, I know you're Gnome fanboys, but can you just try to stray a little bit towards neutral? It's the Linux Action Show, not the Gnome Action Show. And this is a charge that has been lobbied our way directly. And I just got off of reviewing Netrunner, and Netrunner came with the Netrunner rolling release, came with the Plasma 5 desktop.

And I did have some critical things walking away from there. And I'll just give you a couple of things that happened to me, and these are just my experiences. So I'm trying this on a System76 Bonobo, and traditionally these have been extremely reliable Linux computers without any hardware issues. It's a really safe platform to test a distribution on. They've seen a lot of distributions. Yes.

And I had weird things just in the last couple of days. For example, I would go click on the menu and then shut down. And nothing happens. And then I would click on the menu again and click shut down. And nothing happens. And then I would click on the menu again and click shut down and nothing happens. And then I would click on the menu again and click shut down and it would shut down. Oh, that's almost worse than it never working. Yeah, right? It's just very strange.

Or there was another time where I was thinking about something I wanted to try and I was just sitting here looking at the screen, not even doing anything. And Plasma 5 just crashed. It just crashed. The desktop just crashed. I didn't even touch it. And then I put a thumb drive in, which is actually still in the machine.

I put a thumb drive in and the little notification box comes up and says, hey, you put a thumb drive in. And I click open in file manager. The entire desktop session freezes. The entire desktop freezes. I can still alt tab, control alt tab over to my other virtual consoles. Totally frozen.

All right, so I restart everything. I restart, relaunch, get everything reloaded again. Whatever, I bounce back. It's not a big deal. But it's one after one after one like this. There's a lot of little things that we ran into during the testing that I walked away thinking, this is unpredictably unreliable to me. Like, I can't even fathom what's going to cause it to crash.

Like, I can't even wrap my head around and then just avoid that behavior. Right, you can't avoid it if you wanted to. And this is generally the point where Rotten Corpse would jump in and tell me that KDE 5 has not been declared stable. Do you want to make that point now, Rotten? It's not declared stable.

Yeah, thank you. And so, very much so, it's Do you want to make that point now, Rotten? It's not declared stable. Yeah, thank you. And so very much so, it's something you have to understand, is that there is a long-term support development platform, which I just told you about, the version 4.14 that's out. And if you're actually going to run KDE as a daily driver, I think you might want to consider that. Do you agree with that,

Rotten? Isn't that your daily driver right now? It is my daily driver. And why not Plasma 5? Because it's not stable. Well, but they haven't declared it stable. It is pretty stable in the sense of most people who's been testing it with 5.4. And also it matters what distro you're using it on. Because Netrunner is not a good example of, well, quality, in my opinion.

I mean, you take issue with the manjaro base and things like that right right i take i don't like manjaro in any way whatsoever and um i think that's a terrible base but i also think that a lot of the decisions that netrunner made are nothing to talk to you know right home about like the the fact that they have stuff pre-installed okay so that takes 10 seconds to install something that's not yeah yeah and actually to that point one of the things i like the most uh actually the fact that they had steam uh libraries system libraries and clear all clear all whatever it was uh that's actually from manjaro they inherited that from manjaro

yeah so okay there's there's different weird things that um they did they just decided that wouldn't really work well and they even decided to rip out some of the plasma 5 stuff and go back to some 4 stuff which makes really no sense but um like if you look at kubuntu there are a lot of people who are talking about kubuntu 1510 and using beta um uh wwnsx is one of them uh another another person in the mumble frequently frestle is one of them and they've been using it for the beta for a long time and had no problems at all so it doesn't matter what distro is implementing the plasma 5 so rodan do you think it's a little uh inappropriate and maybe a little premature for certain distributions to be shipping the plasma 5 desktop i think it used to be now it's understandable like 5.4 is very close to being

a solid release and even production ready but you have to have the latest version of 5.4 so the latest good quality version is 5.4.2 netrunrunner has 5.4.1, which is not as polished. Right. Because they make new releases all the time, and if you don't keep up with it – the odd thing is that of all distros, Kubuntu is keeping up with it. Because their beta is currently 5.4.2. And how much they're going to keep up with the PPA or whatever, who knows. But I think 5.4 is good enough.

I think 5.5 is going to be the first solid production-ready everything. This is what I've been hoping about 5.5. And Wes, I'm almost virtually positive you're not a Plasma desktop user. Have you experimented with it since desktop user. I have not been. Have you experimented with it since the 5.0 releases came out? And since then, have you looked at it? Yes. I have installed a preview of it when it was very new.

I have not used it since maybe 5.1, 5.2. I don't quite remember which version it was. And I like a lot of what they're doing. I do not have personal experience that is in production ready. And that's a lot of these things you've learned that line. What is the threshold for you before you would be willing to try it out? Is it just your workflow is good enough now, or is it you've heard enough horror stories that you're not even interested?

I think I fall in the I tolerate crashes and setbacks a little better than a lot of people. I have a little more flow in my workflows than some. So that's not a huge deal to me. So maybe now not a huge deal to me. So maybe now is the perfect time for me to give it a shot. Yeah.

And so my takeaway was that I actually, for a long time, was a KDE user. I actually really, really, there's elements of the Plasma 5 desktop I like a lot. And I have found different iterations of the 5 desktop to be more stable than other. Right. That variability. Yeah. different iterations of the five desktop to be more stable than other. Right. That variability.

Yeah. And so for me, I just, I can't help but take a, when I start having these problems, I can't help but take a step back and go, wow, what if I was an average user and I didn't know to expect this, or I didn't know this was beta, or I didn't know how to solve this problem. This, some of these things I run into would to me be fundamentally unsolvable problems that make them unusable and a lot of times when i get the when i get the feedback about you hate kde it's i think it's misinterpreted as i think there's a lot of use cases where plasma 5 doesn't make sense and there's somewhere plasma 5 does make sense and i just think there's a lot fewer use cases where plasma 5 makes sense than even plasma four so anyways uh i uh it is getting there uh i i'm not but i i hate i hate the idea that if we if

we critique a few things we come across as anti-kde that's not really my intention you're still interested in succeeding and absolutely developing that's why i keep checking it out yeah exactly yeah no actually is an interesting issue because I'm a GNOME fanboy, and I have been for like a decade. And when I used KDE 4, I noticed some problems that were fixed in 5. So Plasma 5 had like 99% of what I hated about 4 was in 5 so I was like I'm excited for 5 and it helped me kind of pull back from

critiquing 4 and saying this is crap and realize that it's going to be better but right now just look at the different pieces of what makes KDE good so it's a weird approach if I had done this test that I did earlier this year if I had transitioned this test that I did earlier this year,

if I had transitioned two years ago, it would have been completely different and I would have hated KDE. But now, since I have the perspective that the stuff that I hate is going to be fixed or is already fixed... You know they're working on it. Right. Here's the biggest problem

that I have with KDE 4. People who like dark themes, which is a lot of people now, I'm one of them. I have a dark theme globally associated to my KDE, and I'm a big fan of that. But if you do a KDE 4 dark theme, it will destroy the look of Firefox. It's awful. That's annoying. It actually makes improvements on some applications. Like if you, for example, just load up

FileZilla, FileZilla is hideous by default. But KDE will fix it and make it look good. Which is weird, but it makes it look good. But it takes Firefox and Thunderbird and makes them just completely crap that you have to stop and fix it or not use it. Well, that's interesting because Firefox and Thunderbird have their own theming things that you would think would override that anyway.

It's because they're based on GTK2. Right. Oh, yep. And that's the fundamental problem of the UI. But if you run Thunderbird and Firefox and Plasma 5, that problem is gone. They fixed it completely. So that problem that I originally go, holy crap, this is awful,

I'm not really pissed off about it because I know it's been fixed and I'm going to get a better version soon. Yeah, it does help when you know they're working on it. That is very true. And actually, Alan, since you're here, I guess I'd kick it over to you. Is KDE a better BSD citizen than GNOME, or has GNOME been pretty good about when they build something that, say, requires log-in D,

they work with other projects to make sure that... So at BSDCAN this year, one of the GNOME developers presented a talk at our conference explaining how they actually have FreeBSD in their continuous integration system. Because the problem before was KDE's developers make a commit that breaks FreeBSD. Six months later, they do a release on that. And then eventually, shortly after, that gets ported to FreeBSD. And eventually, a user gets it and tries it and finds a problem by then the developer that made

the change it's been eight months and he's moved on to something else yeah for sure so uh by integrating freebsd into their continuous configuration system they find these bugs within 24 hours and uh so it's helped them ensure that GNOME runs properly on FreeBSD. That's good. By actually doing that. And we're glad to be able to provide them the help they needed to get that going and to see that they actually have an interest in doing that. Yeah, for sure.

Heaven's Revenge, you think you've got it figured out why people think I'm anti-KDE. Take it, sir. Oh, yes. But one quick thing on the FreeBSD usage. Yeah. Well, considering FreeBSd uses clang as its default compiler it can also use a lot of static analysis and find a bunch of crazy corner case bugs that the linux distribution which used gcc as default might not find so it might help the

stability on the bsd platform versus hmm that's an interesting point. All right. So that helps definitely in the back end, in the background. So is it something I've been saying? Is it the way I talk about it? What is it? It used to suck back in the day. Yeah, yeah. So when we started seeing it improve, we were trying to give it props and have people not be scared to try it. So we're giving a lot of positivity to worm usage. So that might be why people are thinking that you're being negative about KDE. By encouraging the areas that need fixing and things like that. Encouraging, or at least attempting. Yeah, I actually, we did some episodes dedicated to the issues with GNOME 3.

In fact, I remember being, it took years. In fact, it wasn't until January 5th, 2014, season 30, episode 4 of the Linux Action Show. So it has been a while now. Back in the seasons. Yeah. Back to the seasons where we said GNOME's getting good enough now. It wasn't until January 5th, 2014 that we said, now GNOME is turning the corner and

it's worth checking out. And until then, we were not of that opinion. Yep. And it's just there is a threshold like you were saying and i think maybe this is something worth exploring a little bit you're willing to live with a few extra bugs assuming it's something i'm interested in and it makes it worthwhile to check out and rodden it was kind of saying the same thing he's willing to live with a few extra bugs if he knows they're working on it and i think it is interesting that people were very critical of gnome and now

there's a lot of people who, that's all been you know, it's gone now. People base their whole work on it. Now there's nothing to fear of what it used to be. Yeah, the problems that GNOME had is now just more like philosophical differences rather than actual technical differences. Yeah, yeah, true, true.

I think the same thing's going to happen to KDE. So what is it? So I think the real problem was your comment was you know why is this was a scientific project was it wait what no uh the vla the oh oh i that i was surprised that they were using noah's comment i was surprised that they were using kde because it was an old red hat installation which means it was a very old kde installation right but the reason to use kde in that setting is because your scientists are windows users and they're coming over and the buttons are in the same place and it looks the same i think

it's the reason why i use kde boy but if you're a kde advocate that's not the number one reason you want people using kde i wouldn't think it's because it makes switching easier yeah yeah and as far as deploying something for scientists to use, that's the main thing. Yeah, I agree. I think that's why they were using it too. It was just a throwaway comment that didn't leave a lot of room for – I mean, I didn't feel like going into a five-minute explanation about it, but that was essentially it.

I agree. Kitson, you have a comment you want to make about combativeness. Yeah, I've noticed that the KDE devs, for the most part, like on the forums and even in IRC, can tend to be a little bit combative about their decisions and whatnot when they do receive criticisms or suggestions. Just like what you have mentioned time and time again about the sound module and whatnot. And it still hasn't remained changed, and it still is a problem. Yeah, it's kind of funny how much of a problem it is too. If you have a computer that has built-in speakers and a headphone jack,

HDMI out, and say maybe a USB audio device, I understand. This is maybe not a super common setup, but I am describing the setup of anybody that has a laptop and hooks up a USB sound card. It can't be that uncommon, right? Right. Because most laptops have HDMI that does audio. Most laptops have a headphone jack. And if you hook up a USB sound device, it's not that weird.

Now you've got three. And so what we discovered in the latest version that we tested was the way you make sure that sound goes out the right sound card. Because in a lot of applications like Mumble and Skype, they just say, we're going to use whatever the pulse audio default is. You can't specify what the default sound card is. You can just choose default pulse audio device. So you have to mandate in pulse what your default device is system-wide. Okay, I can roll with that.

Not a big deal. So I go in there, and the only way to make sure that the sound is going out the right sound card is by actually turning off all the other sound cards. So instead of selecting your sound card, it is a process of elimination. You go to the HDMI adapter, you turn it off. You go to the built-in headphone

jack, you turn it off. You go to the built-in speakers, you turn it off. And then you go to your USB audio device and you choose from five different options in the the built-in speakers, you turn it off. And then you go to your USB audio device, and you choose from five different options in the dropdown, analog, stereo, duplex. I don't know why it has to have all those different options. I don't know why it has to be a process of elimination. And I actually had to have

Rikai come down here and verify with his own eyes that I was doing the right thing, because the UI is so odd and so weird. Now, is that a big deal? Once you learn it, no. But when you pick it up, it is very, very strange. And I think these are legitimate points that we make. All right. All right. I have one rebuttal for that.

All right. Because of the quality of the hardware you have to use is higher end using different connections. You're going to deal with stuff like that. But if you're like a regular consumer user who has a USB headset, for example, we'll not have a problem with that because the USB headset will show up in Mumble. But you would actually still have to go into the settings. Because I have a USB headset right now in Mumble associated just to Mumble, and I haven't touched it.

Well, that's Pulse. Pulse has set that as your default sound device. You got lucky. I mean, you got lucky there. Maybe. Because my USB audio device didn has set that as your default sound device. You got lucky. I mean, you got lucky there. Maybe. Because my USB audio device didn't get set as the default audio device. No, no, I'm not using default. You can go and mumble.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. You can go and mumble and say, use this device. Anyways, I felt like, I feel like, I guess the core point is I feel like every time we try to say these things need to be improved, we get a lot of criticism for hating something. I don't know why we have to hate just to be able to criticize. Criticism does not equal hate. Criticism equals caring enough about something to say, hey, this could be improved upon. I don't know.

It kind of goes back to the episode from last week of the conversation of if there's a technical problem, it's okay to point it out. And that's pretty much what you were doing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, speaking of technical stuff, first of all, the Plasma desktop is filled with awesome technical stuff. But there is a really cool piece of software that Rod and Corpse actually had a chance

to do a write-up on called KDE Connect. And you can sync your Android device with your Linux computer. And this is really, really nice. In fact, you don't even really have to be a KDE desktop user to take advantage of it. But this is an example of some really cool technology. So before we get into that, I'm going to tell you about our friends over at Ting, my mobile service provider, linux.ting.com, the internet service provider of the JB Rover as well. Ting is pay-for-what-you-use mobile service.

How cool is that? It's a flat $6 for the line, and then you just pay for what you use. I'm not even joking. That's seriously how it's structured. It's $6 for the line. Cell phone, MiFi, Ting don't care. They're honey badger about it. It's just $6 and your usage, your minutes, your messages, your megabytes,

no BS charges, no extra stuff, no early termination charges because there's no contract, nothing like that. In fact, not only is there no contract, but they have an early termination relief program. I love it. They have an aggressively awesome customer service department. I'd love for you to try them out at 1-855-TING-FTW. They have fantastic online communities. And because Ting is so cool and they're kind of changing things up a little bit, there are some uber passionate community members that definitely

want to help you out. It's really, really cool. What I love about Ting is that I'm able to go at it with a little bit of intelligence and a little bit of flexibility. So I know that I have X amount of devices. I want to put them all on one plan. I don't want to have to sit here and nickel and dime myself either. I want to have three or four devices, and I just want to pay a pool of minutes across them for whatever they use. So if I got a couple of phones I don't use very much or a MiFi device that I don't use very much, I only pay for the device that is actually using the service. And here's another thing I love about Ting. GSM service and CDMA service. Bonesies! So that way you got a compatible device almost guaranteed in your house because guess what? Cell phones have been around for a while.

You bring it over to Ting. And when you go to linux.ting.com, you're going to get the discount off a phone. But if you've got a phone that's working on these GSM or CDMA networks, and you probably do, $25 service credit. That paid for more than my first month of Ting. Here's another nice thing about Ting. Excellent, excellent dashboard. Really good. It really solves all of the problems.

dashboard. Really good. It really solves all of the problems. I have been a teen customer for over two years, and I've had to call them for a grand total of twice. And the first time I called them, I was like, eh, might as well just call them and see what it's like. Second time I called them, it was totally legit. And man, they were like a dog with a bone when it came to my problem. They, I honestly, it was 20 minutes into the issue, and I thought for sure the customer service rep was going to start wrapping me up and apologizing and just letting me go. Man, she stuck with the issue. Like, it was super impressive. It felt really good because I could tell that my time was valuable to Ting. I love their dashboard.

I love their customer service, linux.ting.com. I want you to check them out. $6 a month for your phone. And yes, you can go pick up the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P and bring them over to Ting. That's right. You can officially bring the Nexus 5 or Nexus P to Ting. Powerful and well-priced. You can get the Google edition. If you're going to get yourself a Google phone, you can check it out. Ting's going to be doing an unboxing very soon. But's the power user tip just go get a sim card they got gsm and cdma sim cards for nine dollars and when you go to linux.ting.com you get a 25 discount if you have a device that needs to do updating over text

messages check in for stats update any kind of remote information like a i mean for example my buddy chase i thought was brilliant about this. He went and got one of these home security systems that just transmits an image when it detects motion and a condition has been triggered. Very nice. And when that happens, it just sends him an image over the Ting CDMA network. Just sends it to him. Or actually, I think he's using GSM. And he just gets the push notification on his phone, and he can bring it up.

And then if he wants to, he can initiate a real-time stream. Now, when Chase was first looking at building that, he's like, well, I could go get a $30, $40, and $60 a month. These are like my different plan options. Or I can go do Ting, $6 a month, pay for what I use. Noah buys like a batch of these GSM SIM cards, and then as he gets the devices, he pops them in there, and boom, he's got Ting service on it now. That's so easy. It's really cool. It is really, really cool. You can go to linux.ting.com to get our discount, and also

go check out their blog to find out details about the new Nexus devices with that USB-C connector. You know what I like about the 5X and the 6B Nexus devices? Not only are they Google Edition devices, but they have GSM and CDMA antennas in them, and if you combine that, I mean, just think about this for a second.

So you can be on Ting. You pay for what you use. You get in all the devices are unlocked. So it's like you really own the device. And then with like the Nexus line of devices, you can pick between CDMA and GSM, depending on what you need, where you're going, all that stuff. That is awesome. Really slick, really, really slick.

Linux.ting.com to support the show, and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. That is very awesome. All right, Mr. Rottencorps. Now, tell me about KDE Connect, because it promises to sync my Android device with my Linux desktop, and I'm thinking to myself, man, wouldn't this be nice to finally, if I mark something as read somewhere,

it's marked as read on both devices, if I get a notification, or maybe if I just want to check basic connectivity. And so this kind of sounds like it's right up my alley. And from what you were telling me on the pre-show, I don't necessarily even have to be a KDE user, do I? Nope, you don't. There's an app indicator and there's also a shell extension for GNOME to use an app indicator or to use just KDE Connect Daemon. Not all of the features are available to, like, there's actually only one problem if you're not a KDE user,

and that is you can't send the connection from the phone to accept on the computer because the KDE notifications are the only ones that have that functionality built in. It will display, but the functionality doesn't work in the other DEs. So you send the connection from the applet, and it's fine. But the reason why KDE Connect is awesome

is not, like a lot of people look at it as a notification system. And originally that's what it was, but it's beyond that ridiculous now. You sync notifications, yes. That's cool. But it has wireless mounting of your Android device to your file manager. Oh, wow.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It has multi-device clipboard synchronization. Yes. So you copy something on your desktop. It will then copy it to your phone, and then KDE Connect will handle it, sending it to every other device

that is currently connected at that time. And I've tested it through like five different computers, and it all syncs immediately, and there's no lag whatsoever. You just move to the next one, it's there. That's cool. That is really slick. Then it also has remote input controls

which is ridiculously awesome. I never thought I would do it until I tested it on a tablet. It's amazing. You basically turn your tablet into a touchpad. Like a mouse. You have a remote mouse that you can use

and you can also have your Android keyboard can be your keyboard have your keyboard. Your Android keyboard can be your keyboard for your computer. Yeah, I know Chris Moore that I do PC BSD, or BSD Now with, uses his Android cell phone to control his media center. Really? Like, pause and play

and scrub through videos. That is so cool. You can do that with KDE Connect as well, yes. Another cool thing about that is that it doesn't work for every player, but it works for like VLC and Clementine, and a lot of applications work. So the ones I use? Yeah, pretty much. So it works with – the only player I could find that would not work was MPV,

and that's just because they haven't built the functionality yet. But there's another cool thing about the media player is it is not only controlling media from your phone to your computer. It also allows you to use your phone as a reference to when to lower the volume or mute it. So if you get a phone call, it will mute your music on your computer. That is slick. Yeah, and then as soon as you hang up the phone call, it will mute your music on your computer. That is slick! Yeah, and then as soon as you hang up the phone call, the music is back up.

Wow! Okay, that almost sells me on it right there. I mean, the VLC thing. So I have been using, I can't remember, oh shoot, Rika, I might know if he's watching live, but I've been using a Linux and Android app. Oh, where is it? Dang it. Unified Remote. Unified Remote. I've been using Unified Remote for a while

to essentially accomplish a tiny fraction of what you're talking about. Unified Remote has a little daemon that you install on your Linux box that makes your remote touch device act like a keyboard input device or a mouse. And you can control VLC and stuff like that.

But you don't get the pausing and the muting. I mean, that is genuinely slick. The level of integration here seems almost unbelievable. It's more than that, too. You also can make it where it'll display your battery percentage of your phone on your computer. Oh, that's nice. So you can easily switch,

and that's just a little nicety. But there's other things. You can send files back and forth from the phone to the computer. So if you send a file from your phone, it will go to your downloads folder in your computer. And it does – this is not even everything I've mentioned. Everything I've mentioned is not all what it does. What is it using on the back end?

Is it using – like to transfer the files, is it using SSHFS? Is it using – Yes. SSHFS does the file management work. So does the phone and the app on the phone have like a login to your computer? How does that work? Yeah, you essentially, you use SSH to share keys between the devices so that you're, like it will remember your devices and what, like your names and things like that based on the

SSH key. Okay. That is nice. I love that it's doing over SSH. And does that... How possible is it to do some of this stuff outside your LAN? Like, say, if you have a port forwarding setup. Right now, it's not technically...

Well, actually, over your LAN, if you go through the process of port forwarding, you can make it work. You'd probably need a dynamic DNS or something like that, too. Yeah, yeah. But another cool thing is that they're working on currently, like the next release are two features that are coming

that are even more awesome. This is actually one of the, KDE Connect is one of the tools that makes me love KDE Project because of all the amazing stuff they're building for it. And then two things that are coming now is replying to SMS from your computer. Yeah, wow. And Bluetooth support. So instead of Wi-Fi, it's Bluetooth that handles the signals back and forth.

I agree with Heavens. This stuff kind of thing is much better over the LAN. The only thing is when I'm out and about, and I know this is stupid, but they keep putting better and better cameras in mobile phones, and so I can't help but use it for stuff. And then I'm like, okay, now I want to immediately send that back to the studio. Yeah, so that could be really cool. So now, not to jump ahead, but I kind of wanted to have a caveat in here for the Mint users because apparently you ran into some issues there.

Yeah, I did. I like the Mint. Yeah. Mint does – I don't know why they do this. I kind of get it, but it also doesn't make sense because if just based on the hierarchy of where you put the new source, that's all you need to do. But for some reason, the mint team decided to put the priority of their packages on their repos higher than Ubuntu. But the PPAs default lower than the priority that Mint does. So if you put your PPA on top of the list on Ubuntu,

it uses that PPA because they're both 500-level priority. But Mint, for some reason, does a 700 priority. So even if you install that PPA, it's going to completely ignore it. So you have to change the policy of Mint on your computer, or you have to install it with a dev file. So I assume if I install this on my pretty much GNOME pure system, there's going to be quite a bit of dependencies that it's going to pull down? Yeah.

It will bring in some KDE libraries. There was a couple people who asked me questions on the article and in Reddit where they were confused by – because a lot of people consider like the KDE dependency is like a horrible thing. But it brings in packages, and if you're – as long as you're not in 1998, you don't really have to care about the size of the package. That's true, and the honest truth is a lot of times with the Qt stuff, once you pull it in once, pretty much they're going forward. All the other Qt apps you need are going to rely. You just shocked that first time. Yeah, exactly. And I pretty much got over that the first time I sold Quazzle.

Yep, exactly. It's not the disk space so much, though, because with the KDE Connect stuff, it requires the KDE base. Yeah. So you've got a whole heap of KDE that's running in the background. Right. It does add – It's running a few things in the background. Okay. But it's not like it's running – it's not running QT in the background for anything. And it's not running like Plasma or anything like that.

But you're pulling those packages in, right? You're pulling in the KDE-based packages, which is quite a bit of stuff. But, yeah, I agree. It's probably most of the time not all that avoidable. I mean it's not all avoidable because there's a lot of apps that require that. Even on a GNOME system, there's a lot of apps that you end up still pulling that down. Yeah. That's not bad.

It's not a big deal. It used to be a big deal. But now that is kind of like one of those legacy issues that people complained about 10 years ago that was relevant then that isn't now but people still complain about it. I bet you though – I bet Wimpy's – to Wimpy's point, I bet you it's enough that it won't ship by default in any non-KD distros. Right. This is going to be – That's probably true. This is going to be a bit of a leg up.

This is a nice advantage. This KD Connect is really nice. I know. It wants – I hope it works. I'm excited to try it when I go home. Well, and, Wes, I kind of – when I think about convergence, this to me feels a little more like my speed. Like it's, you know, being able to send files back and forth using SHFS, the notifications, things like that. It's a little more like I'm – what I like about this are two things.

Number one is it gets sort of two devices that weren't really communicating before but doing a lot of the same jobs talking. Yep. Love that. Number two is it's essentially Apple's hand job – I mean handoff or whatever they call it. But for Apple, you have to have a really new Mac that has Bluetooth 4.0 LE and you have to have at least an iPhone 5 or something or better for any of this stuff to work. And here Linux comes along. It's like, oh, yeah, you got Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and Android and KDE or KDE dependencies.

You're good to go. No special hardware required. I also like that it lets you kind of separate things. Maybe you like different programs on your phone versus, you know, or different workload styles on your phone versus your full-size computer. So here you can just share the data without sharing the app. So also to point out, another important thing about KDE Connect is it pertains to the

they actually adopt this whole customization thing as well in KDE Connect. Every plug-in that is available to KDE Connect can be turned off on any device that you want it to be. That is great. For some reason, if you don't like the clipboard synchronization,

you can turn it off. You probably will love it. So what's the advantage over something like this versus, say, Pushbullet or AirDroid? Pushbullet only does the – well, AirDroid. I hate AirDroid. There's a lot of people who talk about AirDroid. It's great. But you have to activate the login connection every single time you use it.

Like, ugh, awful. Anyway, well, this one, KDE Connect stores the connections, and they work consistently regardless. I have never had a connection drop at all. Oh, really? Even with Wi-Fi mounting of the file system, I never have a problem. I don't have to worry about

losing access while I'm moving files over or anything. I've never had a problem. I don't have to worry about losing access while I'm moving files over or anything. I've never had a problem. And it allows me to control every aspect to it. And it has features that Pushbullet, for example, only has like notification and file connection. Pushbullet does have SMS response, but that's coming soon in KDE Connect. But another good thing is none of those are open source. Oh, that's a good point.

So I had – it's been – holy crap. Oh, my God. It's been a year almost. It's been a year and about a week. About a year and a week ago, I met the developer of KDE Connect when he first started working on this. And I'm going to get it wrong, but I can't remember what country he moved from. Let's just pretend like it's Germany. But he just moved to –

Country A. Yeah. But what actually matters is he had just moved to Seattle. Hey. Yeah. So he was in Seattle, and I went to a KDE users group because I hate KDE so much. So I go to a KDE users group. Just a rag on everyone there. Yeah yeah right yeah just cause I could tell

you're all wrong you're all making a mistake yeah that's what I do when I go to KD users groups and I went down there and I talked to him and I told him like how awesome it is and talked to him also there was some other designers there and things like that and I was asking him where it was going next and he's like well you know

just gonna keep working on it and so here we are a year later and it is slick yeah it is really slick very nice run and they they need to work on their marketing more because they they don't that's one of the reasons i wanted to write an article about it is because it is when i never used it because i didn't use kde then i used kde and i was like wow this this is this would make me want to use kde but because i don't have to use kde it makes it even better and another thing is it doesn't require android it also works on blackberry and um they're working on ios version as well what what no if that wins that'll no way no way how can that even work ios does ios support networking i don't think ios supports not they probably won't have absolutely everything but it'll still

it'll still give something that the you know at least it doesn't leave them out completely or anything but there is there is one thing that should be mentioned as far as a versioning caveat. You need 0.7.3 or higher to use the remote keyboard feature. That's pretty much it. Everything else works regardless of the version. But the 14.04 and stuff based on that has 0.7.1, so you would need to add a PPA to get the functionality for that. But everything else works great. Yeah, yeah. All right.

So this is something I'm going to play with, I think. After looking at it a while ago, I think I definitely have to check it out again. And you can too. Mr. Rotten Corpse has a write-up at makeuseof.com. We'll have a link to that in the show notes where he goes through all of this, which is very handy. So we'll have a link to that. Thank you, Rottencorbs. My appetite has been whetted, as they say.

Isn't that what they say? I believe so. I think that's the right thing. Next week we'll have tried it and we'll be much better synchronized and more prepared for the show. So just wait for that. You'll be KDE Connect fanboys as well. I think so. Wimpy, I know you're still around.

Don't go anywhere. I've got a question for you about your connectivity and the key point to that connectivity, your router. But before we get to that, I want to thank our next sponsor, and that's the great folks over at DigitalOcean. Check out DigitalOcean.com, a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own cloud server.

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Hashtag just saying. Now, also, their interface. Let's talk about that. Holy moly. If I could legally get married to an interface, that would be the one. I tell you what, I would go into the courthouse, I would say I'm going to marry DigitalOcean's interface

for the rest of my life. I will officiate right now. That's fine. Thank you. Thank you, Wes. I appreciate that. And I would then go home and I would consummate that marriage with DigitalOcean's interface. That part I will not be there for. But here's what I'll do, Wes, because I'm real slick, is I'm going to use their API, because they have a straightforward API. And let me tell you something. If you want to scale up, the API is the way to go. You want

to go deploy on demand, maybe you want to scale your infrastructure, because they got hourly pricing. Did you know they have hourly pricing? It's true. They got hourly pricing. And you plug it into something like Chef or Puppet, just scale up on demand or whatever you want. I'm not going to judge. Tons of code out there you can already take advantage of. DigitalOcean takes these platform features seriously. Here's a few tentpoles of DigitalOcean that I like a lot, all based on Linux. Yeah, that rocks.

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Go over to DigitalOcean.com. Remember that promo code, D-O-N-Plugged, and take a look at the community section. Three ways to securely browse the internet with an open VPN on Debian 8. Now, that is a handy, handy tutorial for DigitalOcean. Imagine turning your DO droplet into an open VPN server. I love that. How to mitigate a denial of service attack against your website with Cloud Flare. Let's go look at that one. That's got to be fairly interesting, I would imagine, because I'm not a huge Cloud Flare fan. But you know what? I've never really had an opportunity to integrate it properly.

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You guys are rocking it. I love seeing that. So I want to talk about something that's more than just an open source router. It's an open source center of your home. A home router, they say, is necessary to connect you to the internet. But that's just sitting there idle most of the time when you're not using the internet. Eating electricity, and boy have I noticed that recently. So why not use your home router to do more things?

More powerful hardware can handle gigabit traffic, maybe could act as a home NAS, a print server, maybe even a virtual server. Now, before I get into how crazy this is, I wanted to bring in Wimpy because I know that, if I recall, Wimpy has some sort of eccentric setup that involves antennae, wave transmissions, and all kinds of stuff.

And Wimpy, if you could remind me about your setup and how do you actually bring that into your house? Like, what is the router you're using and all of that stuff? I'm really curious because I'm looking at different solutions to bring internet connectivity into the rover, and I keep hitting up against once you have, like, an antenna, you have to bring that into something.

And that seems to be where things fall apart. Okay. Well, I'm speaking to you now over the power of shortwave radio broadband. I love it. You sound good, Wendy. You do sound good. You always sound good. Yeah.

So, yeah. My backhaul is about four miles from here over the other side of the trees. So it's Microtech. Noah has spoken about these in the past. So running up the side of the house, there's an aerial with a directional microtech radio, which is the piece that actually does the connection between the house and the back hall.

That's capable of sustaining 100 megabits, but I'm only paying for 12. So I have a 12 megabit connection. 12 down, 4 up. Do you mind roughly giving me an idea of what that costs you? That costs about £45 a month. Okay, that's not bad. I think that's about $60, something like that. Seems pretty reasonable.

I mean, for 12 megabits. And that's unmetered as well. Okay, I'll take it. And I know it's unmetered because one month I kind of got carried away with my radar analysis and I pulled one and a half terabytes across the network in a month. That's an excellent test. Yeah, they contacted me to say have you got a virus but they weren't at all bothered that i'd actually shifted we just want

to make sure that it's not malware they care about you so so the the aerial and the radio that's connected uh via power over ethernet so the cable comes down the side of the house through a you know a small hole in the wall uh runs along the back of the skirting board behind me here and into a little adapter and PoE converter. Okay, nice. And that's plugged into a UPS. So if the power in the house goes down, the internet doesn't. Nice.

And then also plugged into the same ups i did used to have a microtech router doing you know the home lan and wi-fi but i've now got a tp link uh router okay that i flashed um gargoyle router onto which is a uh open wr derivative and, in my opinion, is the best of the open source router projects. Really? And you know what's interesting is the TP-Links seem to be very, very popular for this particular type of activity. Gargoyle, huh? Gargoyle-router.com, does that sound right? That's the one, yeah. And the model that I've got, I flashed myself, but they have a number of models that you can actually buy from them pre-flashed. So if you're at all concerned about being a warranty voider,

they'll do the hard work for you and send you one pre-configured. Interesting. I have not heard of Gargoyle before, maybe because this is... A lot of people that are looking at the TP links are still doing DDWRT and those, but I don't think they're getting updated as much anymore. This is really good. This gets an update. Well, whenever there's a security exploit, this gets an update

and it's under active development. I'm actually a version behind at the moment. There's a new stable release out that I need to update to. Rodden, have you heard of this before? Yeah, I could be wrong, but I think it's a fork of either OpenWRT or DDWRT. It's OpenWRT, yeah. It's OpenWRT with a really nice UI on top. And the reason I found this is because I wanted to put new routers into my family, my extended family's houses after those big Netgear exploits a couple of years ago.

Right. So I bought cheap TP-Link routers for like 20 quid a go. Exactly. Put gargoyle on it and pre-configured them and then sent them all out to everyone's houses. I like this a lot. Because the UI on this is really easy to use. It's not super complicated. Honestly, this seems like a great Christmas gift idea for my family,

to do a few of these for, like, my... You know they'll have a good setup. Yeah. You'll be confident that it'll last. It won't degrade. Right. And what I did is, you know, I set up the second wireless LAN to be common for everybody.

So when we all move between each other's houses, we can all get on each other's guest LAN. Oh, that's looking ahead. That is thinking ahead. So when you go over to visit, you get on their Wi-Fi. Yeah. And everyone does now because I only have to set their phones up once. It doesn't matter where they go. They get on the Wi-Fi and there's none of this.

Oh, Martin, can you just configure, you know, eight phones? Right, yes. You know, what's funny is years and years and years ago, in fact, there's a YouTube video about this, I bought a bunch of Wi-Fi routers for my family because I wanted to get them all digital picture frames to show them pictures of our newborn son. And I thought, here you go.

Kodak has a good deal. I got like four or five digital picture frames. But they all required wireless internet connectivity. Of course, it was long enough ago now. Before that was common. Six years ago, it just wasn't all that common that they had Wi-Fi. And so I bought them the Linksys models that you could replace the firmware on and did that.

And now they all sit there. And some of my – I still come over six years later and like, oh, Christopher, we just want to thank you for that Wi-Fi router. Now that we have our new tablets, it is so nice to get online and check the Facebook to see the pictures of the grandchildren. Your relatives sound charming. Yeah, they are quite charming. And I didn't even think about – like it hasn't even crossed my mind what I'm going to do to replace their particular setup. But, Wimpy, this is brilliant. And do you find the software is powerful enough for you as a Linux power user, quote, unquote?

Yeah. So I originally used this, you know, for my family for a low-tech solution. But actually I found it so nice I used it myself. Wimpy's seal of approval. And so you have your wireless wave, whatever it is, broadband, shortwave, whatever. Magic internet box. Ham radio broadband coming into this, and it just acts like a WAN port, I assume. Yeah, it just looks like an Ethernet WAN port to this router.

And yeah, you just configure a PPOE connection. It seems like to me the biggest challenge with this is you've got to get in the right groove at the right time when it comes to hardware. So you've landed on these TP-Link routers, which work pretty well, and it seemed to be pretty popular amongst people that are equipping their RVs that I've been doing research for different internet options. And the problem I have with that is that's a pretty solid recommendation for a year. But it's not like from a year from now,

like somebody that's listening to episode 114 in a year from now, we could say go get TP-Link model blah, blah, blah, blah, and maybe you know what it is. Do you know what it is off the top of your head, the TP-Link model that you're using? Yeah, mine's still being sold. It's a TLWR10043N. I've had mine for about a good while, over two years. Don't you find, though, that kind of the biggest challenge here is that in a year from now,

that won't necessarily be the right router to recommend to people? Like, this is the issue I have with the custom firmwares is that you can say you can you can give a recommendation today uh but it doesn't necessarily mean that like in six months or even three months from now it's the right one well when when i did this there was two models that i used the model that i've got and a smaller model both of which are still available are still either 20 £30, depending on which model you get. The revision of the board has changed, so there's like a V1, V2, V3, but they're all supported by this,

and they've got, when you download the firmware from this website, it says this is for the V1 boards, this is for the V2 boards, and so on. Okay, so they're still on top of that. And the model I'm using is the model that the company still sells pre-flashed. Also, the TP-Link is not just replacing, like, functionality and stuff. They're creating new versions of the same model,

so, like, the compatibility still exists. Like, the router I have, I went to buy another one of that, but they made a new version of it, and it's still compatible with Gargoyle. That's cool. Even though they're making new versions of their hardware, it's pretty much still compatible anyway. So let me introduce to you the Turris Omnia, which is trying to solve this particular problem. They say it's more than just a router. It's an open source center of your home. I don't know if that's necessarily true or not, but it's open. Or something you want.

Right. It's open hardware running an OS based on OpenWRT. It has a dual-core ARM processor running at 1.6 gigahertz. They say with PC-like performance in here. And it has, so here's 1.6 gigahertz dual-core ARM CPU. Honestly, that does sound fast enough to be a router. Up to a gigabyte of RAM, four gigabytes of flash, five gigabit ports for the LAN, one gigabit port for the WAN. It supports USB 3.0.

It has 2 mini PCI Express, 1 M SATA connector. It has 3 MIMO 802.11ac ports and 2 802.11bgn ports starting at $100 USD for this thing. And I'm showing on the video version here a little schematics of it. It has mSATA, like I mentioned, mini PCI, USB 3, mProcessor, Marvell processor, and a SIM card slot for backup internet connectivity. How cool is this little thing?

I don't know if this is actually practical or not, and I don, and I don't think of this could replace the TP links today, Wimpy, but I look at this and I think maybe a year from now, something like this might be the direction we're pointing people for something like Gargoyle, then a TP link. What do you think? Do you think something like this arm based could be the solution? What is your hardware right now? And when you look at this, does it sound like a reasonable option? Okay, so the box that I've got now, the router I was just describing,

and it's a few years old, that's got five gigabit Ethernet ports, one for the WAN and four for the LAN. And I just take one of those gigabit LAN ports into a switch and then run everything gigabit LAN ports into a switch and then run everything gigabit over the switch.

So then you minimize how much of your local traffic is actually routing up to the router. I would probably do it that way too. Then I've got two HP microservers as my media

servers for the house. One is the server and one is the backup um and i have it oh yeah that's beautiful gotta have that high availability job i like your house is only cool we didn't get it can i do a last cribs episode i'm coming yeah yeah by all means i'll have to clear out the spare room, but you're welcome. And I have experimented with that. So way back before I had shortwave radio broadband, I used to use 3G to get on the internet, and that was with a router with, you know, it had a WAN port and a USB port

where you could plug in your 3G dongle. So I've done that, that you know high availability thing briefly but i've always been nervous about using these more powerful home routers that you can plug usb do a whole bunch of things file servers yeah because wet because they're they're not very robust bits of kit and if they fail then you've lost everything you haven't just lost internet connectivity you've lost your LAN as well so I sort of adopt the same approach to um to my kit that I do with the home cinema you know one device one job that makes sense and and it's definitely been my approach for a really really long time because it just means that troubleshooting is much easier.

Updates are much straightforward, a lot less to break. But I have to admit I have a new perspective now, and that new perspective is how much power does something draw and how much room does something take? And the two things that are real premium for me right now are power draw and the room that it takes up. And I'm talking like, you know, I'm trying to fit stuff like under a chair. Like it is really like under a bench seat. It is really tight. So the routers obviously don't take up much because they're arm powered and they don't take up much space and they don't draw much power. Yeah, true. But I would still separate things, you know on my uh father-in-law's barge uh had a wireless

router with 3g and the file server there was a raspberry pi this is back a couple of years now of course i'd recommend using a raspberry pi 2 right doesn't draw much power. And in fact, if you get one of those routers with the USB port on it, check the specs carefully. But there are some you can storage on the Raspberry Pi, go for a bit less storage, use an SSD connected to the USB port, and then you don't need additional power to drive the SSD attached to the Raspberry Pi. Yeah, I agree. Even with limited space and limited power, I still think it's probably better to break them up.

And Wes got this – I can't remember the brand name of it now, Wes, but you got me this router that – like it allows for different types of 3G connections. Yeah, how did that work? Did you use it at all? No, I haven't yet because I'm waiting to connect it to a machine. But now actually – probably over the next week or so I probably will hook it up because I'm kind of, now that I'm back in part with the rover, I'm kind of like working on the technology land stuff because some of that stuff was like just too much to deal with before

the road trip. You can't drive and upgrade. Yeah, well, and it was like the MiFis kind of act as routers and Wi-Fi access points. So for two weeks, they solved a problem and I could make it work. But the biggest challenge was I was, at minimum, it was either two different Wi-Fis or a cell phone that I was jumping between. And every time on every device, I'd have to go to each device and say, okay, now join this Wi-Fi

network. That gets super old. And that router you got me totally solves that problem. So I think I'm going to try that for a while and see how that shapes out. And I'm going to keep an eye on this project and just kind of see if the – I think it's pronounced Turris, T-U-R-R-I-S, Omnia. If this results in something of substance, I would try this. It's kind of interesting. I was looking down at the bottom about us, and they are responsible for some more enterprise-grade software here. Yes, that's what gives me some hope. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, like if you look here, they're talking about Bird,

which is an internet routing daemon, open source that supports BSDs, Linux. You know, they do BGP, OSPF. So it makes me think that this organization at least knows a little bit about routing. Yes, exactly. That is a good point because that's what gave me hope. It made me, okay, they have some credentials here. But I'm trying to remember.

I don't know if you remember the name of it because I'm drawing a blank right now. But it is. It was recommended by someone in the room. It was, yeah. It is a unit that is essentially trying to accomplish this. And then I agree with Wimpy's approach is whenever it's possible, make your edge of LAN device as single purpose as possible. Yes, very much. Right? Because then it's – for security updates and reliability and troubleshooting and really honestly from your own mistakes, it is much more isolated.

really honestly, from your own mistakes, it is much more isolated. And so the way I work is the further out to the edge of the LAN I get, the less and less stuff I try to have that machine do. And a big trend I have noticed from the TechSnap audience is a lot of them want to virtualize their firewalls. Yeah, that is more and more common these days. Yeah, it is like, you know, can I run my firewall, my PFSense firewall as a VM? You know, I'll give it a dedicated NIC or whatever they say. Or the virtio driver. And it just so goes, yeah, yeah.

It just so goes against my like minimal, like, no, this is a router. That's all it's supposed to do. It kind of sounds like what Wimpy's saying too. minimal like no this is a router that's all it's supposed to do it kind of sounds like what Wimpy's saying too it's like I don't like having it be a file server running Samba running SSH running all this different stuff I don't want that

and so I'm going to try scaling it back a bit but I am definitely kind of relooking at some of the stuff now and going oh but I could save a lot of watts and a lot of space if I had one device doing it all I also wouldn't mind just having a really beefy router. That's fine. Even if it's just as lit on the edge.

Alright, great. It'll last me the next seven years. So I'm not quite sure where I'm going to fall down on yet, but this is pretty neat and it's available for pre-order right now. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go ahead and put myself down as a possibility on the pre-order right now.

I'm just signing up for it as I do this. I'm joining you. Yeah, because I'm curious to see where they go with this, and I like that they're yeah, there we go. I just went in, I added myself to the pre-order list. I'm going to give the Omni a try, but my philosophy is more in line with yours and Wimpy's. I think it's

a little safer to say, this router is dedicated to do this thing. But we'll see. Wimpy, any other thoughts before we wrap up? Yeah. Open Media Vault's available for the Raspberry Pi 2 now. Ooh. Oh.

Yeah, the Raspberry Pi 2 and Open Media Vault could be perfect. That could be perfect. Yeah, that could be good. Can I run MB on it? I'm using MB in the rover. I want to do a little MB follow-up if I could, actually, because people have been asking me about this. I bet that hasn't been

imported to the Raspberry Pi, but who knows? I'm really enjoying MB. I've been using Plex still at the house and the studio, but in the rover I am using MB. Wow, look at me. I've got three different places I'm trying stuff, and MB is really great. Are you using the Android

client at all? No, no, I'm only using the web client at the moment. Why? Have you run into issues with the Android version? Yeah, yeah. It's a bit stuttery and you know... I've noticed some of the similar... The most recent version that... I don't remember when I last

updated, seemed to be doing a lot better. But I have noticed a little occasional slow. Really? Once it gets up and running, it seems to be fine. When you're streaming from your house on your Android device? For me, it's more than like the interface. The actual stream has been fine, but kind of just like the startup and those transitions have been a little slow.

You guys are not encouraging me to keep on with my Ambi exploration. But, I mean, I've been using it as well, and the rest of it has been, I mean, you can push fully 1080p. I mean, my use for MB is I want to build a small network in the rover, and I want a component of that network to be media on demand. I'm not married to MB, though. I will say I've been experimenting with the open and external player feature of MB and I've got it configured

right now it seems to only want to detect VLC but with a little XDG you know like configuring your default apps I've got it one click opening in MPV Are you telling me in the web browser you just click it, it opens MPV and that if you ever had a little slowness when you're changing

places, when you're using MPV of course all of it's gone. MPV is amazing. Yeah and it seems if you ever had a little like a little slowness when you're changing places when you're using mpv of course all of this is amazing yeah and it seems to be streaming the original quality just just beautiful and does it mark it as read or as watched in mb yes that part i haven't updated very recently i think it's been a week or so so they may have fixed it there was like a recent little bug in that but the actual playback is flawless and they have a ui there it just isn't quite fixed to To have, to have, I'm going to talk about that after. Well, tell me right now, how do you make MB use MPV as your default player?

What do you do? Well, it has, it has a, I don't know if it's a plugin or an option somewhere to enable external players. So you do lose, like it doesn't track your progress, but you can enter it where you are. Okay, so you can't resume. Right.

So you lose your resume. But if you're, if you're just watching an hour long program, that's not a big deal. And I can remember, if I remember a jump in a half hour. Right. And MPV makes that. I would totally give that up to use MPV. Right. So you lose your resume, but if you're just watching an hour-long program, that's not a big deal. If I remember a jump in a half hour, I would totally give that up to use MPV. Or you can use Kodi and not give up anything. There you go. Yeah, right.

Exactly. Excellent point. And Kodi with OpenElect will work on the Pi. Yes, with video acceleration. Listen, I'm trying to keep it simple. I've got an MB server, and I just want to go to the webpage in the rover and watch stuff. That's all I want. I don't want to have to do too much more than that. But the

MPV thing, that is... You can send it to Cody as well. Because Cody has an API that I'm actually working on a script to send stuff to Cody. And it will play through Cody and it will connect to the server. Really? And it won't be sending signals.

It'll actually just send the – it'll say, here's what I want to play, and then Kodi will connect to it directly, and you will keep all your syncing and everything. That's awesome. I think you guys are selling me on the Rover setup. I mean, the Rover setup is so early now that if I could have Kodi look at MB and have all – oh! Anyways, if you guys are not

familiar with MB, we did an episode of Linux Action Show about MB versus Plex. These are really, really amazing home theater management solutions. They'll go out, they'll scan your directory, they'll go get all the metadata, they'll build a nice directory, they'll give you watch status, pull an

additional context. It's really cool. You can find it at MB.media, an open-source solution to Plex. And we dedicated an episode of the Linux Action Show to this particular topic because in the Rover, I wanted something that could completely work offline. And not that Plex doesn't. Plex works great offline, but Plex also assumes you have an internet connection all the time. And so MB allowed me to have a little bit of flexibility there and say, you know, I'm going to be offline the majority of the time, and when I am connected, go fetch the metadata.

And those kinds of things, MB allows me to have some flexibility there in the Rover specifically that are really nice. I will say, at least according to a forum post, it does look like there's an Open Media Vault plugin available. The last post on the thread here was from July 2015, so hopefully it's updated and relevant. Oh my gosh. Love to try that. It's more about the architecture support, isn't it?

But MB is supported by Open Media Vault. Yeah. So if you took a NUC with Open Media Vault and MB, this is starting to look pretty nice. Connected over iSCSI or NFS maybe to a storage array.

Oh, I have a few episodes in mind when I think of that. That's really cool. So anyways, if you want to check out this router, it is the Tourist Omnia. And I signed up for a preorder. I'm willing to give it a go. I'm willing to give it a go. I like that they have a built-in LAN switch. That's nice.

I might not use it. You can put fiber right in there. That's interesting. Yes. Oh, yes, by the way. That's that one, right? That little connector right there, which is just at the bottom of the screen, is a little G-Bit connector, which is...

Okay. All right. I'm not saying I would use this as my main switch, but it's definitely tempting. And it might be tempting for you, too, so go check it out. And we'll have a link in the show notes. And if I do manage to get the pre-order, I'll let you know how it goes. So before we move on, I want to thank our friends over at Linux Academy. There's something really cool going on at Linux Academy. And I want to tell

you about it. But first, if you're new to Linux Academy, I want to sort of set up the framework. What I really like about Linux Academy is I see a lot of common ground between them and Jupyter Broadcasting. They care a hell of a lot about content. They care a hell of a lot about Linux and open source, and they really want to deliver that to the people. And so my approach was let's go make podcasts about it. Their approach was let's go make educational content about it. So they paired up with developers and content creators and educators

to make sure this could happen. Linux enthusiasts, they sat around and said, we want to bring this to more people. And that is really, truly unique about Linux Academy. Linux and open source is not a checkbox. They don't have a whole range of tutorials from fixing your sync and After Effects tutorials. What they have is stuff that is hyper-focused on Linux

and all of the technology stack around there. I invite you to go check them out by going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and get our really, really great discount. In fact, I am now very pleased to say our very exclusive discount is the only way to get this pricing structure. It is exclusive to Linux Unplugged show. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check that out. Go tour their features. They have almost 1,900 videos for the self-paced courses,

downloadable comprehensive study guides, and instructor help is available to you when you need it. That is a really big deal and a huge differentiator between the other online learning courses. And on October 15th, oh my gosh, that's really soon actually, they have some major, major, major features they are rolling out. Really big things are coming on October 15th. They say, and this is their words, not mine, they're working on their biggest new tool for the last four months, and they're going to be releasing it on October 15th. It's the result of a dream they had this time a year ago.

It's going to change self-paced and hands-on training as we know it. Also, they just updated their CDN so the content is even faster than before, and the players have a new version of their HTML5 player with speed controls so you can speed up or slow down the videos, which is really cool. And there has been actually some studies as a podcaster. I looked into this. When you listen to podcasts at double speed, you actually retain the data more. Wow.

Didn't know that. But the brain, because it's working a little bit harder to listen at a faster pace, retains the information faster. How cool is that for your training? And now their new HTML5 player supports that. That's really great. But something else has just come out at Linux Academy that I think you need to know about. This is a huge deal. Practice exams.

Practice exams are the secret weapon to actually beating the test. I, for whatever reason, get a little weird about taking tests. I don't know what it is, but I just get a little weird about taking tests. It's just like I'm being put on the spot. Next week on Linux Unplugged, we give Chris a quiz or two. It'll be great fun. Submit your questions online, guys. Actually, that would be really cool.

That would be really good. We should do that as an episode. If anybody has suggestions out there for an online Linux quiz that we could take. Yeah, that sounds great fun. We should do it. We should do it. You can hear me. I'll get totally worked up like, I'm not kidding you guys.

I freak out over our rock, paper, scissors session. Okay? So I'm not kidding you guys. I freak out over a rock, paper, scissors session, okay? So I'm not kidding. So the idea of taking a test, it really overwhelms me. And so Linux Academy recognizes that, and they have a solution. So in the past, and still available today, in fact, better than ever, you have regular mode exams. This is where Linux Academy loads in a preset of number of questions in a preset amount of time. You go through the exam. You know, like, for example, you could take the AWS CSA Associates

in regular mode, and it'll load 60 questions in 80 minutes, and you complete the exam like a real exam. That's cool and gives you a very, very real-world-like experience. However, if that, to you, would stress you out like it would me, check out practice mode. Now you can select your time limit and the number of questions up to a maximum amount of potential questions from the pool and then just take the practice exam. This helps you prepare in a different way than you would normally for the exam and it puts flexibility in the practice exam system based on your current needs. So here's a summary of what you get. You get to display the total number of questions in the exam questions. All practice exams are now timed.

If time runs out, it automatically submits the questions you're currently going for and grades them. Practice mode allows you to define the number of questions and time limits for an exam sessions. And the question order is randomized and answers associated with the question are also randomized. And each new practice exam is started.

This is such a cool way for you to be able to go in and find out the questions that are on the test, try them, learn them, do your studying, see how you did. So that way, when you sit down to actually get your certification, it is a slam dunk. This right here, I'm telling you, is worth the price alone of admission to Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com to get our discount and try that out. A lot of new features. Check out their big presentation October 15th. So much is coming. I love to see this company continue to grow because you know why?

They're promoting Linux at the same time. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right. So, guys, as we wrap up today on the Unplugged show, it was – actually, I think it was Wes's fault. I think this was totally your fault. It's all my fault, guys. Again.

Way to go, Wes. Damn. Jerk. So I think you made an offhanded comment about why don't we just N-Curses everything? Everything should be an N-Curses UI. Well, you know what? King Looper was paying attention when you said that. He said an episode going in depth-depth on Anchors' tool available

on Linux would be a great idea. There are so many Anchors' programs out there. I think an episode on it really could be interesting. Not only is Anchors' programs for everything, in true Linux fashion, there are at least four of them. With programs from CMUS to HTOP, there is a lot of content to cover.

This episode could show off a lot of new useful tools to viewers viewers too. For example, CMUS makes great media player, especially when paired with Dropdown Terminal. Now, this happens to coincide perfectly with the end of Tech Talk today. It was suggested that we have a Mumble App Picks segment in the Linux Unplugged show. So I wanted to turn it over to the Mumble Room. Now, Wes and I have a couple, the go-tos, but I wanted to turn it over to the Mumble Room. Now, Wes and I have a couple, the go-tos,

but I wanted to turn it over to the Mumble Room if anyone in there has any suggestions for really, really great NCurses-based applications. Now, for those of you not familiar, I don't know how this is possible, but think of NCurses as the best interface ever created that never needs to be replaced and never should be superseded.

NCurses applications are console applications that essentially have a UI. You know, I had to look at this, Wes. NCurses actually even has an entry on Wikipedia. Here's a great example of configuring the Linux kernel. I believe the BSD installer is NCurses-based. I believe a lot of things are NCurses-based. Alan, am I right? Is NCurses still a thing believe a lot of things are Ncurses based. Alan, am I right? Is Ncurses still

a thing on BSD as well? Yeah. So, well, the tool is called Dialog and then it uses Ncurses to draw the stuff. Yeah. Now, do you, Alan, while I have you, do you have any Ncurses apps that you've used from time to time? Well, the biggest one is Dialog, which is a way to write, to use Ncurses interfaces from a shell script. Yeah, yes. So the entire installer is written in shell script, but it just asks you the questions and presents you the menus by calling the dialog command, which draws an NCurse's menu for you.

There's a good one. And it is universally like, you know, when it is universally like, if you have a terminal, you've probably at some point in time seen an NCors' application. And Steve Gerbs in the chat room, Steve Gerbs has a recommendation called TIG. And he says in the chat room, it's one of my favorite dev tools.

It's a text mode interface for Git. How cool is that, Wes? How about that? Ooh, I'm excited already. Yeah, that is really neat. So if anybody in the Mumba room wants to chime in with their favorite anchors application, the floor is open to you.

I'm saving mine to see if anybody else guesses them. R-Torrent is also quite nice, especially when you're trying to do stuff server-side. R-Torrent? Yeah, that's a great one. If you're trying to seed from a server, it's just be able to pop it up over SSH. Yeah, R-Torrent is

killer. R-Torrent and I think like version 9, 0.9 is the current version or something like that. I'll put a link to R-Torrent. R-Torrent is great. In fact, R-Torrent, just a little tip, is a great resource to put on your DigitalOcean droplet. You pop that in the BSD license T-MUX and away you go.

Look at you with the T-MUX. R-Torrent, I'm going to put a link there because honestly R-Torrent is one of the BSD-licensed Tmux, and away you go. Look at you with the Tmux. Artorne, I'm going to put a link there because, honestly, Artorne is one of the more common things that I hear people are using on their DigitalOcean droplets. WeChat? WeChat has an anchors-based interface? Is that real? I'm pretty sure, yeah.

Elmon. Elmon coming in from the chat room. How about that? Yersey also does. Yersey. It's the I-R-S-S-I. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, look at this. Look at Elmon. Oh, I'm installing Elmon. Look at those graphs. This might become a last pick. Look at these graphs.

Oh, that's me. Hi, hi. Here it is. Here's the shot. Look at that. Wow. That is really, really nice. And Wimpy, you've got to mention my favorite.

Come on, Wimpy. Give me a plug for Nano. Let's hear it. Yeah, I love Nano. So do I. A great example of an incursus based on full application. Yeah, I like that one a lot. Alright, any other guy? Yeah, there's the new architect installer

for Arch. Architect Linux is an incursus installer for Arch. Architect Linux is an Encurses installer for Arch. Architect Linux. Architect Linux. All right. I'm putting a link to that. If you've ever heard of Evolution Linux, it's a successor to Evolution. Evolution is gone, but it was turned into Architect.

The live installer for Linux brought to you by Carl Duff. And, yeah, there it is, that gorgeous ode to end curses. You know what? I don't know what it is, but I love it. I love the little outline. I love the lines. I love the OK button. I love the title at the top with the line underneath it.

It's so clear. It's so obvious. It's like a nice LaTeX formatted scientific paper. It's got that same kind of look. You know where everything's going to be. It's just right where you expect it. Yes, and my keyboard hotkeys work. I mean, it is... I don't mean to sound like an old man, but

I think it is truly one of the best interfaces ever. It's green before my eyes here, guys. I think if you're interested in using incurses, and you also want good UI design look, OpenSUSE's YAST is now in-curses. Yes. Not now. Not now.

No, no. No, I'm saying it's been for a very long time, which is awesome. Right. But I'm saying now as in everything. Their installer is YAST, so it's all in-curses. Everything they do is now YAST. Everything that they have so much now into YAST, and now YAST is completely in curses. But it also is a good-looking in curses as in design and everything.

So it doesn't even necessarily look like in curses, but it's reliable just like if it was. Yeah, yeah. And I love that about OpenSUSE because when you're installing a machine, a server remotely, that particular feature is extremely, extremely valuable. It's very, very nice to have that because also one of the things that the OpenSUSE installer has supported for a very long time is you can spin up a VNC server over the network and install the system headless using VNC, which is extremely cool. And of course, I got to give a plug.

Corky Betas pointed out in the chat room, you've got to love Midnight Commander, one of the old-school NCurses-based file managers for the command line. A classic. Midnight Commander is very awesome. A network manager, there's a... Hold on, hold on. Network manager has a NCurses interface?

No way. Is that a thing? I'd be really interested. I used to use WICD or Wicked or whatever it was, but I guess that's not maintained anymore. No. So I would love another Curses-based Wi-Fi manager. Yeah, look at this. On December 2013, apparently this is old school news, Network Manager gets a new text interface.

While Network Manager already has a great integration with GNOME and KDE desktops, there's now a command-lane interface. This open-source network management program has the NCURSES-based interface. Look at that. Sweet. That is very cool. And then kernel panic, is that how you say that one, Wes? What do you think? Kernel?

Kernel panic. But it's not spelled with a K. It's kernel. See what I'm saying there? C-O-N-E-L? Yes, but that's the military pronunciation. That's how you pronounce kernel. Okay.

All right. All right. Fine. He goes with it. He's got, I think, a Python debugger here, which is an anchors' interface. Oh, interesting. Look at that. I'm really surprised that nobody has said R2 anchors' picks yet.

You and I have two really good ones, and I'm surprised. This is Colonel Panic. Oh, my God, Chris. But Colonel's Panic is spelled with a K. Noah's already taken that one. All right. Anybody else in the mom room want to throw out their favorite anchors' app before Noah Oh my god, Chris. But Colonel's Panic is spelled with a K. Noah's already taken that one. Alright, anybody else in the mom room want to throw out their favorite end curses before Noah

and I give away the best? I think we have some really good ones. Alright, nobody's chiming in. Wes, you mentioned this one last week. NCDU. Love NCDU. A super fast utility. You go

into a directory. You can say like NCDU and you can give it a directory. You can give it the root and it goes through and scans your disk usage in real time. It is so, so nice. In fact, I should probably just install it right now. It's so nice. I'm going to install it right now. I like as well that you can have it export. So like at

work we've got some scripts that'll run that as well. So when a host has disk space that's above what we've set as warning, it'll have saved already on the back end somewhere. Really? So you can just pop that up. You don't have to rescan it. You can just explore visually. I went to go show it. I went to go show NCDU on the live stream and it worked

so fast that I couldn't actually show you it processing my directories. It's way faster than any graphical tool is. Way faster. And here you can see I'm wasting a ridiculous 51.7 gigabytes on this bonobo to the Dropbox. That is, and you know what's crazy about that? That is a fraction of what is actually in the Dropbox. Let's see here.

Does Dropbox tell you how much space you're using now? Yeah, I'm using, oh my God. Oh my God. Do you have a guess how much space I'm using in Dropbox tell you how much space you're using now? Yeah, I'm using... Oh my god. Oh my god. Do you have a guess how much space I'm using in Dropbox? I don't know if I want to guess. Just take just a rough guess. Just one guess. I'll just take one guess. Let's say... Because here you go. Here you go, Wes. 51 gigs are just on this Bonobo

alone. Just on the Bonobo. On this Bonobo alone. So you can assume this is probably just the files I need. Just them. Just for the show production. I'm going to guess 700 gigabytes. Ooh, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. That's pretty good.

Two terabytes. Ooh. Yeah, Monty, two terabytes up in that Dropbox. You're most enterprise-y up in here. Whoa. It's ridiculous. So NCDU is a really, really, really nice tool that Wes mentioned last week that is a very nice, straightforward way to go through. And so you can see, like, so say I wasn't going to go delete stuff out of my Dropbox folder,

but I wanted to go look at some of my other big offenders here. Downloads, I go into there. You can see, look, 5GB is going to Gunsmoke Old Time Radio, right? It's worth it. Don't get rid of it. I know, I'm not. 1.3GB is going to X-1, another old time radio show. And then another 337 is going to Superman. But I can easily see where a lot of my storage space is going to in my downloads folder,

which is really, really nice. And the other really nice thing about this is it works great through an SSH connection, so when you remote it into that system. You know, Hegemon8 in the IRC, he's got a great point. Also Mixer, something we take for granted, that's Cursus. What is it? Also Mixer, right? Yeah, and there's also aurses. What is it? Also Mixer, right? Yeah, yeah.

And there's also a Pulse audio controller that's also N-Curses based, which is really cool. And then there's another app that I love two things. Now, Telegram isn't N-Curses based, but there is a Telegram command line client, which is really cool for drop-down menus. Oh, I haven't tried that. Yeah, yeah. Tox, T-O-X. Now, you're familiar with Tox. It's kind of like a Skype killer, open

source, in the shadow of Edward Snowden kind of came out, right? And it grows, it blossoms in the shadow of Edward Snowden. And there is Toxic. Toxic is a Tox-based instant messaging client and you guessed it, has an NCurses interface.

So you can use Tox in the command line, like say SSH into a droplet or something like that, using NCurses interface. So you can use talks in the command line, like say SSH into a droplet or something like that, using NCurses. This is my pick. This is, I think, a really... I'm like super remiss for not mentioning PipeCut. Oh, yeah?

Oh, yeah. So PipeCut is this tool to allow you to... When you're dealing with data on Unix, right, you do like some cat file pipe grep for something and then sort and then unique minus C and then sort

numerically by the result of that to get and then pipe tail or something like that, right? To get the top 10 most popular IP addresses in your web server log or something. This allows you to build those interactively and surf back and forth through your pipe and like when you're applying a grep filter it will highlight on the

screen what things you're going to match and what things aren't as you're writing the regular expression really stands out that is so nice yeah i'm looking at their website right now pipe cut at pipecut.org this is really slick presentation we uh we interviewed the author and did a presentation about it at meet psd it is really cool yeah it is holy crap i'm saving this one to go grab after the show it seems like a great tool to help i mean one professionals but two people trying to learn yeah exactly use pipes yes it's like the best teaching tool ever yeah well it really illustrates what you're doing, which is really cool. All right.

So how about this one? This one coming in from Corky. RTV. RTV. No, it's not something for your trailer. It's an NCurses Reddit client. A Reddit terminal viewer right there. RTV is an application that allows you to view and interact with Reddit from your terminal.

Oh, I love it. That is so cool. That makes Reddit so much better. That makes it so, you know, getting something like Reddit out of the web is, I don't know, it's pretty cool. RTV is built on Python using, as you guessed it, the Curses library. Really, really neat. That's a good one. IPtraf is another great one. I agree. LFTP is another good one. IFTOP. That's a good one. IP Traf is another great one.

I agree. LFTP is another good one. Iftop. Iftop, yes. Htop, which was mentioned earlier in the show. I'm going to put a link to as many of these that we're mentioning as possible in the show notes, so that way you guys can check this out. Here's what I love about it.

What's that? A callback to earlier in the show up in WRT has incurses. Nice. That is really – here's the point I want to make. I don't think N-curses interfaces are out of date or old school at all. I think they're still a very practical application for a text-based GUI. Yep. And with VPSs and cloud computing becoming more and more common, I think they have a better place than ever.

Like I think these are really, really good stuff. So LinuxActionShow.reddit.com, please, please tell me about your favorite and cursors-based application for episode 114. Find the feedback thread. I would really like to hear about them. I want to try them out. I'm all in.

I'm like, screw GUIs, right? Speaking of GUIs, though, if you write your shell script thing in dialog, you can substitute dialog for xDialog, and you get Windows version of it. You get the GUI version, too. Yes. Very nice. Very nice.

What were you going to say, Wes? I was just going to say, it's nice that, you know, it's just like a terminal away, right? Yes. You already have your terminal open for someone listening to this show. Yeah, pretty much. It's just a terminal away. And you don't have to learn a new GUI. You're already familiar

with how N-Curses applications work. And Corky Beta says, if you give it a good color scheme, N-Curses can be the most modern UI ever. Very flat.

Yeah, it's very flat. Yes. I was just going to make that joke. All right, Rod and Corp, do you want to take us out with our last N-Curses pick here?

Yeah, CMUS Music Player. Yes. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, CMUS Music Player at, I'm's pretty awesome. Yeah, CMUS Music Player. I'm familiar. There's an Arch Wiki entry on it, but I think they're just on CMUS, C-M-U-S dot GitHub dot I-O. And it's a small, fast, powerful, constant music player for Unix-like operating systems.

So even you Mac users can get a little something out of that one. CMUS. That's a good one, Rotten. Man, I'm really, for some reason all of a sudden, I'm sitting here, I'm getting super verklempt over NCurses-based applications, like anything I could run out of a terminal, I'm all about these days.

So, those are really good ones. Thank you guys. And if you want to submit any others, linuxactionshow.reddit.com Also a good place to go to submit content for this show or the Linux Action Show, to spotlight open source projects, to give something a little bit of attention. You know, it turns out it's also just a popular Linux subreddit. Regardless of our shows, it's also just a popular way for people to talk about cool open source projects, and that helps the show as well.

LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. And also, you can contribute directly by going to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact and sending in some feedback right there. We have a dropdown. You just choose Linux Unplugged and send it in. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention patreon.com slash today. If you'd like to invest in this show, allow us to be flexible with the sponsors that we choose

and make sure that we can continue to pay our production staff and all those goodies. Patreon.com slash today is a great way for you to get involved with the financial end of this show i'd love to get more submissions yeah please do these are great yeah i'm excited to see the final list i know maybe we'll do a follow-up next week like for some reason like these really are hitting like a sweet spot with me i think these are really sweet west sir thank you for being here thanks for bringing the beer anytime thank you to the mumble room jblive.tv if you'd like to join us live, jupiterbroadcasting.com

slash calendar to get those live time zones. Our virtual lug is open. We just got to check your mic and then you get to join us. Alright everybody, thanks so much for tuning this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next week. Thank you. All right. That show moved, huh? Did you feel like that show moved?

Yeah. Woo! Yeah, all right. All right. Very good. Very good. All right. So we go to JB Titles.

We pick our title. And then we all feel like we accomplished something. Doesn't that feel good? Yes, all right. Very good, very good. All right, so we go to JB Titles. We pick our title, and then we all feel like we accomplished something. Doesn't that feel good? Yes, it does. Good stuff. And Curse's apps are fun for me for some reason. I'm an old man today. They're just fun. I like this title suggestion, Katie Connect All the Things.

I look at Microsoft and all of their company resources, all of their employees, all of their money, and then they ship a product that looks like this, right, and makes noises like that. I don't want to make noises like that. Yeah, I don't either. I don't even know why it made that noise. It didn't tell me anything. Why did it make that noise? Why does it do these things?

Why is there so much contrast in the Explorer windows? Why are the fonts so small? Look at this menu. It's like transparent, so you can't hardly read it. You can't even read it. And the thing is small? Look at this menu. It's like transparent, so you can't hardly read it. You can't even read it. And the thing is, nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about it. It's fine.

Now, you know, KDE's got a funky font, or GNOME's got a corner that's not perfectly rounded, or the Mac does something that's not perfect, and it's all we talk about. Big freaking deal. It's a huge deal. Windows is a complete and total presentation crap show with three different types of interfaces built into it. Three different UIs built into it and nobody

gives it a hard time. Everybody gives it a pass. Even we do. This is disgusting. Look at that. You can't even read that. It's gross and yet nobody says anything. I can explain that completely. Let's hear it. Standards. I agree. People have standards that completely. Let's hear it. Standards. I agree.

People have standards that are not using Windows, and everybody knows Windows is complete garbage. I agree. I think we collectively have just been like, oh, well, Windows is the challenge kid in the classroom, and so we don't expect as much from Windows. Oh, look, Windows has a start menu that slides up real nice. Oh, look what a good job Windows has done. You get a ribbon, too. Windows has done such a great job.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Windows gets its trophy. They had a release. They couldn't even get their numbering right. They couldn't even count correctly. They can't count. They can't. I can't stand it as an operating system.

It is so awful. It is so awful. And then, so the thing, the line I have to walk is, how do you not judge people who want to use Windows? People who choose to use Windows. How do you not? Because they have their own valid reasons and they probably spend a lot of time making Windows suck a lot less. They probably don't even realize

how much energy they put into making Windows suck less over like, they set up a Windows box and they probably spend three months getting it not sucking. People do a lot of work. Yeah. It's the worst, dude. Windows is the worst.