LINUX Unplugged - Episode 115: Open Production | LUP 115

Episode Date: October 21, 2015

OpenStreetMap might just be one of the most important open source projects in the world. We look at some of the amazing tools built around this open & free infrastructure. Then our tips for producing great content & podcasts under Linux, plus a live unboxing & demo of the new Steam Controller.

Hey, Popey, do you have cupcakes ready? Are you celebrating the 10th birthday or the 11th birthday? It's the 11th birthday of Ubuntu over at OMG Ubuntu. They have a picture of Ubuntu cupcakes up. They look pretty good. It's been 11 years and 22 releases of Ubuntu since Mark Schaller sat down and typed the first ever Ubuntu announcement, of course, in there. He says, an extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install. Regular releases every six months, a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default, He says, And I remember very, very much embarrassingly one of the very, very first big pieces of feedback we ever got on the Linux Action Show, one of my first nice public screw-ups, was about Ubuntu. First of all, the name, Ubuntu, Ubuntu. Yep.

But the other one was, and it just was a total brain fart, is we couldn't figure out what the versioning system meant. We're like, 4.10? What is that about? And then, like, we were looking at them. We just couldn't get it. We were too dumb. We had to get a whole bunch of emails. They're like, it's based on the date, October 2010.

We're like, oh, right. And that's really bizarre because the U.S. are the king of making stupid date formats. Yeah, that's like our thing. I know, I know. It totally escaped me. And I was like, I don't get it. Is it based on the Debian version? Like, I just couldn't, I just was not thinking dates for some stupid reason.

Also, there's all that brown. Yeah. Look back on those screenshots. There's a whole hell of a lot of brown. But, you know, when this ship, this is when I started running GNOME as, this is when I switched from, my first time switching from KDE as a KDE user, because when I started running GNOME as this is when I switched from my first time switching from KDE as a KDE user because when I first started using Linux I came with

Mandrake which was a KDE desktop and then I went to SUSE which was a KDE desktop and so when I went to Ubuntu it was also really going to GNOME 2 for the first time and finding and discovering and liking GNOME 2 which then afterwards I went away from but I just thought that was kind of interesting too because it's been a long time since I switched to GNOME and then went back to KDE and now I'm back on GNOME.

I did the same. I was on XFCE on Debian, and then when I discovered Ubuntu, I just switched to GNOME and I stayed on that until Unity came along. I think a big part of it was, what Mark says there, is the selection of apps. Yep. It wasn't that uncommon back then when you installed different... One of the things that was nice about SUSE is it was a good collection, a selection of apps. One of the nice things about Mandrake, again,

a good selection of apps. But there were some distros you'd install them, and they'd have two mail clients and three web browsers and all this stuff. And Ubuntu was like one web browser, one mail client, one editor, one terminal application. Made it very stor to do these. There are a lot of people today, though, that have multiple

apps doing the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You guys should bring back the brown. Yeah, do a retro edition. There's still some, there's a niche for some people who want an ISO image or a DVD image or, you know,

a gigantic USB stick image that has everything installed. There are certainly some people who want an ISO image or a DVD image or a gigantic USB stick image that has everything installed. There are certainly some people who want that. But I think Mark figured out early on that not everyone wanted that. People wanted someone else to make an opinionated decision to say, this is the best browser. This is the best email client. This is the best text editor. Take those and then provide some way of installing other ones if you want something different it's not like it's mandated it's not like chrome os where there

is one browser and that is it there's one browser on the iso but feel free to go and change it to something else this is linux unplugged episode 115 for October 20th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that is broadcasting on Back to the Future Day Eve. Man, that's heavy. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Wes, Back to the Future Eve Day is Man, that's heavy. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Wes, Back to the Future Eve Day is legit, right? Oh, yeah, 100% legit.

Okay, thank you, yeah. Everybody knows that tomorrow's the big day, but we couldn't move the show just for that. A little, you know, it's a solemn day tomorrow, but today we can be a little excited. It's a solemn day. Yeah, no, today on Back to the Future Eve Day, we're really pumped up because we're going to do something

that is a lot of fun on this particular show. We're going to have a little Lug session right here in the show for you. So think about this. If you were going to a Lug like a good Linux user, every now and then they would have talks on how to do something, how to accomplish something under Linux. Well, today our Lug is meeting together to discuss how to do great podcasting with the Kubuntu podcast. They're five episodes into their new podcast. They've showed up here. They're going to get real wisdom advice from Popey and Wimpy, and then Wes and I are going

to throw in a few things here and there. You probably shouldn't listen. Mostly about the way they look. That's mostly what we're going to focus on because that's how we roll. The important stuff. Later in the show today, we're going to give a lot of love to an open source project. OpenStreetMaps is amazing, and some of the data they have is incredible, and some of the projects being built on top of that data are astounding. All of those things are true, and we're going

to tell you why, point you at some tools to use that makes it even cooler, and how you can make the data even more relevant. And I'm going to tell you about the new open source project that is launching today, or actually, I think this week, to really, really challenge Google Maps and Google Maps' routing and directions and that kind of stuff. You know, the really nice stuff that you get from Google. And then, at the end of the show, we got two boxes right here in studio. Ooh, special boxes. Very, very excited to say in studio with us today, we have the Steam Link and the Steam

Controller, both of which I have been keeping in the box, despite my little boy inside me that wants to rip it open and play with it. That is very impressive. We're going to unbox the Steam Controller live on the show and see if we can hook it up to my rig and play Race the Sun with it. Steam Controller,

Steam Link, happening up in this business right now. Very exciting. We'll be doing that. You have to stick around just for that. It's going to be a live demo fail on air, and those are always worth watching. Yeah, 90% chance it just won't work. Totally, because I've got a kernel that doesn't have support for it built in. So we're doing it live. But before we get into that, I want to do a little follow-up from this week's Linux Action Show.

It was a big show. It was over a two-hour show. Ooh. Ridiculous. And it was an oversized show, but we had to talk about replacing LastPass. That LastPass

and getting bought out by LogMeIn basically meant it was time to find something to replace it. So we covered this, all these different solutions. And one story that we covered

just sort of like in the, I think it was in the feedback segment of the show that I wanted to bring a little more attention to in this episode is an open FOSS training Indiegogo campaign. And it's pretty neat. And the guy that's working on it right now has joined us in the Mumble Room.

And one of the reasons I want to bring attention to this is because actually the money's going to a good cause. So Matthew, are you in the Mumble Room right now? Yes, I am, Chris. So tell us a little bit about why you launched an Indiegogo campaign and where the money is going towards and sort of what the end goal is here. Well, it all comes down to I want to try to improve documentation for the new user out there. I remember back in my early days and kind of

running face first into the RTFM brigade and want to make it an easier time for people who are new than what I had when I first came in. The money's going towards building the production system I need to improve the videos I'm producing now. And kind of the big reason I'm doing the Indiegogo is a lot of people who know me through social media and the Linux ecosystem know that I've been fighting cancer for the last year and a half, two years. cancer for the last year and a half, two years. And so it's just my personal funds are really tight to be able to afford to pay for that. So the title is Open FOSS Training, and it's on Indiegogo.

Open-FOSS-Training. And 33 days left, and $1,000 has been raised, 44% funding. And I love the idea of targeting new users for this specifically kind of thing, and the money sounds like it's going to a good spot. So I'll have a link in the show notes if you guys want to check it out. Yeah, definitely check it out. It's a good cause. We could definitely use more high-quality training like this. Yeah, absolutely.

So good luck, sir, and thank you for letting us know about it. And stick around, too, because if you're going to be doing production, today's episode is going to give you some great tips and tricks for doing that production under Linux. We're going to have an interesting discussion around that. And it's something that you guys know we have struggled with over the years. And we've done it in different approaches. We've done production under Linux where we've gone on location and done production under Linux. production under Linux, where we've gone on location and done production under Linux.

We've done it where we'll work offline and do something that's post-edited and put together and produced under Linux. And each time there is lessons we've learned, little tools that we've picked up along the way, and little things that now looking back at it, we realize, oh, we had to at least try it this way to see what worked or didn't work. And so when the guys from the Kubuntu podcast came along and they said, look, we're five episodes in and we want to get your tips and tricks on how to produce it even better using free software, but also, you know, just some other production elements and things like that. And I thought the reason why this might be an interesting topic that's more applicable

to everybody is because there's a certain set of categories of software and functionality that Linux gets a really bad rap for. Yeah, it does. And this is definitely one of them. And the truth of the matter is I actually think the state of things is better than most people think. I think over the last few years, the tools out there, some of which are not free software but work under Linux and some of which that are free software and work under Linux have gotten a lot better.

And I think so much so that if you knew how close they were, you might consider trying to do things differently. I'm seeing a lot of podcasts that are launching right now, especially ones that try to produce under Linux that are using tools that in my estimation are easy to use under Linux. But they do not provide a very good listening experience for the listener. It might work at first, but it's not something you want to invest in for the long haul. Yeah, and I think it's just because people are not aware of how good the state of some of these tools are and what some of the options are. So I want to talk about that a little bit today. And then I'm hoping that those of you who are maybe not interested in actually producing your own podcast

or something like that will walk away from the conversation, walk away from the discussion with a pretty good idea of the state of this for your favorite platform because this is a pretty good measuring stick on how your platform is doing. And I'm hoping that you'll walk away with a bit of an idea of what that's like. So that's sort of my goal today when we're talking with the Ubuntu UK podcast guys and our Ubuntu Kabuntu podcast. Geez, now I'm all getting all mixed up. Wes, that's what happens because there's so many different podcasts these days. But some of them are all making the same mistakes. Some of them aren't. I don't know.

I don't know, Wes. It's not that we're experts on the topic. But people ask. Stay tuned. So we'll share. Chris has opinions, everyone. Turns out. And I just think like if this was a real lug, if we were really like –

We are a real lug. I know. There you go. Thank you. Yeah, real lug. I know. There you go. Thank you. Yeah, come on. I don't need this attitude. Thank you, sir. Because, okay, what I meant to say is if we were meeting in a place like a building and

we were doing it like on a Tuesday night once a month, this would come up. This would be something – also, there's other things like workflow things we could talk about. So I think this is an interesting idea. The more practical side. Bring something into the lug and we'll talk about it. We could do this every now and then. That's an interesting idea. The more practical side. Bring something into the Lug and we'll talk about it. We can do this every now and then. That's a great idea.

Now, we have our Lug sessions on Tuesdays, every single Tuesday, but maybe once a month we could do something like this. Yeah. It's a possibility. It's an idea to play with. I'm just putting it out there. I'm an idea guy. All right, let me tell you about another idea.

Digital Ocean. Go over to digitalocean.com and use our promo code D-O-unplugged to get a $10 credit. Digital Ocean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up an awesome Linux rig. And, Wes, I don't care if they have free BSD. I don't want you looking at it. That's hard to stop. Listen, here's what I did. I went over to DigitalOcean.

I deployed in, like, less than 55 seconds an Ubuntu droplet run and sync thing for me. I've got a run and sync thing and a couple other things that are doing my password management. I'm not telling you about these other things, Wes. I'm going to say it's GPG and stuff like that, but you knock it off. Stop pressing me for information. Chris, what kind of connectivity do you have on that? Oh my gosh, it's so fast. I'm glad you asked. That's just the great kind of question there, Wes, because I'll tell you what, I put it in San Francisco, but they got data centers in New York, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Toronto. Yeah, I got 512 megabytes of RAM. It's a brand new one in Toronto.

20 gigabyte SSD. Pow. One CPU and a terabyte of transfer. A terabyte of transfer. And I tell you what, I tell you what, I have never hit that ceiling. I tried to use it. It's hard to hit. Yeah, and they got a great interface, too.

Makes it really easy to manage all of this. But yet extremely powerful and a straightforward API. Check them out. And when you just need to go roll your own solution for something, testing, hosting, production, use backend infrastructure, digitalocean.com, use the promo code DOUNPLUGGED, and then go deploy yourself a Linux rig up in the cloud. That's crazy fast. I love it. Digitalocean.com, DOUNPLUGGED, support this show and get yourself a $10 credit. Okay. So to reset, here's how it went down. We got an email that came into

the show. It says, hello, I'm one of the hosts of the KaboomTube podcast. Big fan of your shows. Currently, we publish our shows only on YouTube. And he links us to that. We'll check that out in a second. It says, and sometimes audio only using Google Drive. Since we're big fans of Jupyter Broadcasting, we look to you guys as mentors on how

to organize our podcast. However, there are many things we don't know or unsure how to do better. Currently, we use Google Hangouts to record our podcast. However, there are many things we don't know or are unsure how to do better. Currently, we use Google Hangouts to record our podcast, but we're looking into OBS. Could you give us some feedback and tell us how you organize your podcast? Maybe a video call to discuss things in more detail. And so we talked about it, obviously, off air. And we're like, yeah, we could do a video call with these guys. Or we could do this in the show and just sort of share the information with everybody.

And that seemed like maybe a better way to go because there's probably a lot of other people that would be interested in this. And like I said earlier, it's sort of a state of affairs of where Linux is at. So it's the Kubuntu podcast, and I'll pull up just a couple of seconds of episode five. Glad you can join us.

My name is Rick Timmis. I'm Ovidio Florent. Aaron Honeycutt. And Aaron is joining us as well. Aaron Honeycutt. Okay, so I'm just grabbing that cup of coffee there and having a quick look at the show notes. So we've got a few things coming up for you. We've got a special

guest coming up on the show a little bit later, so do stay with us. And they had a guest on, which you said was from the Kubuntu project, correct? Or was I right? Do you remember? I believe it was KDE Dev. Oh, KDE Dev. That's right.

Yes. So it's an interesting idea, and it's obviously an area that could definitely have its own podcast when you're a KDE fan. That's really cool. So we have two gentlemen on from the show. Guys, welcome to Linux Unplugged. It's good to have you here. Thank you.

Absolutely, sir. Absolutely. And what are your names i'm ovidiu but my full first name is ovidiu florin and we have also hey i'm aaron hello aaron greetings so guys uh a couple of a couple of things first of all thanks for emailing in and uh reaching out and it's cool that you guys are starting a new show. So both Wes and I checked you out before you came on today. And I know some of your general questions were around actually organizing the podcast itself. And I wanted to start there, but I also want to start talking about some of the software and tools you guys use. And anybody's welcome to jump in from the mumble room and go along. But I'll jump in. I want to say, you know, congrats for just getting off the ground and doing it. Yeah, definitely.

That's really the hardest step right there. It really is. And the fact that you did it five times in a row is exceptionally harder than you'd think it would be to get several people together at the same time, five times in a row. So congrats on that. You probably got from my intro that I teased earlier, I'm not a huge fan of podcasts that are using Google Hangouts. And some of my favorite podcasters, unfortunately, and they make plenty of money, Tom Merritt, Tom Merritt, use Google Hangouts. I just happen to think it sounds horrible. And so I'm just going to start right there.

Like if – here's where I – actually, here's the bigger picture that I wanted to bring to you guys. So you're thinking about where to organize the podcast. One of the first things that came up when we started talking about your podcast in the pre-show with the guys in the mumble room, where do I find an MP3 for download? And so your show here is an hour and five minutes long. And so I would – the number one question I would ask you is who is the target audience? Is it people on YouTube or is it actually people that maybe would be commuting that more likely to listen to a longer form content? The answer is probably somewhere in between. There's some on YouTube, but there's probably a lot more for a show that's an hour long that are probably more likely to listen. In my estimation,

there is a bit of a mismatch because the people that are likely to consume your type of content are more likely not to be staring at the screen for that long. They're probably working on something else. They need background. For example, Wes wanted to listen on his drive up here today. How did you pull that off? Since you guys have it on YouTube,

I was able to use YouTube DL, download it, and extract the MP3. but that's you know i'm you know in the whatever two percent of people who know how to do that right and yeah exactly and i enjoyed listening to it but and then how did you get it on your phone and then i well i use netcat but that's another story there you go like it was right right but if there's an easy download link then that could go a long way for you know just discoverability so so there's a couple of things that jump out at me. I don't think the Google Hangouts audio quality is very good. I think it's worse than Skype and worse than Mumble.

I think it's also seemingly exceptionally bad with connection problems. Other platforms seem to do a little bit better with spotty connections. Yeah, for sure. So just from that very beginning standpoint, that would be sort of the first thing that jumps out at me. Now, if your audience is YouTube, then I would say stick with it and just keep refining it a bit. And then the other thing is there's other solutions that maybe would have less latency too, depending on your connections.

So that would be sort of my first impressions. And then the second impression walking away from that would be, if possible, and this might take maybe another dozen episodes or so where it's worth the investment. If possible, it would also be really nice if everybody had the same microphone as I smack Wes's microphone, which is identical to my microphone, but I just smacked it. Because one of the things that jumps out at me is there's quite a bit of difference in the different persons presenting. This is the Kubuntu podcast. Glad you can join us. My name is Rick Timmis.

I'm Ovidiu Florent. Aaron Honeycutt. And Aaron is joining us as well. So it's not bad, but there is a noticeable difference between the mics. So that was, so I guess my question to you would be consider that, and you don't have to answer me right now, but it's just something to think about, is if you want people maybe listening on the road more or people on YouTube, and then target towards that. There's also the problem of the environment. For example, right there, I was in Berlin with the KDE Sprint, so my feedback was way off.

Right, right. You could tell that you were in a larger echoey room. Rick has his home studio. I also have some kind of setup at home, but still we need to work on that and improve it. Yeah, that's kind of stuff that you just work out over time. You guys will refine that over time. That's pretty normal when you start out,

figuring out what sounds good and what works good. You get surprised about about what it will throw off a webcam or what it will throw off a mic. But the reason why I brought it up now is because you're early enough in, you could decide to double down on the audio quality or you could decide to double down on the video production, but you kind of have a couple – you're kind of at a split – you're kind of at a fork in the road. So it would be a good time to think about how you consume podcasts and how the target audience, how they might consume podcasts. Why do I keep doing that, Wes? And then deliver it to them that way. I mean, this is one thing to consider is putting it out as an RSS download

so that way it's easy to throw in a podcast catcher. Well, basically we just need the video mostly just for some screen sharing so we can do some presentations. Hey, this is how the app works. This is how it looks or some kind of what's new and all that. But to show ourselves, that's not really very important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tend to agree.

That's usually my approach as well. Just in how I implement it tends to be a little bit different. So, guys, that was sort of my opening impressions and stuff like that. But if you have any specific questions, feel free to throw them out there. I can jump in with some other things, but I'm sure there must be some things that are kicking around in your minds. Microphone choice to begin with? That's always a really hard question. So the microphone thing is really going to depend on how much money you can spend. But what I would say is get something USB.

There are some pretty good ones out there. We did about a month ago a Linux action show where we linked to a bunch of stuff. I like the USB stuff. I don't like coming in over the sound interface. There's better mics than the Rode Podcaster out there,

but the Rode Podcaster is a pretty good one for vocals. One that works on Linux. Yeah, it works on Linux, yes. Yeah, but we also linked some Audio-Technica. I bought that Audio-Technica one that you linked to. So if Linux support is flawless, it just shows up as a new sound device. Yes, and that's absolutely a good one. Or you can go all the way in and get an XLR mic

that comes in through a USB audio interface. The mic question is kind of tough, too, because it kind of depends on your voice a bit. So I would just say my floor would be no headsets, no headphones that are like the mic for your phone. No, what do you call those? Just like, you know, the ones that are built in. Those are terrible. Yeah. Worse than webcam.

Right. And no webcam audio. So no headsets, no webcam audio, and the cell phone things. Yeah, there you go. Rikai links to it. It was Linux Media Production. It was Linux Action Show Episode 355, and we linked to the pre-Sonos hardware. I also linked to the microphone that I do use because I'd like to tell you.

So it's the Audio-Technica, but I'd like to say, you know, get a much nicer microphone. But you just get whatever you can afford to get. Maybe put a link to that show, to that episode in the show notes, to this one. You will find it in the show notes, sir. You will. And there is other

people in there recommending. Now, Popey and Wimpy, you guys jump out. Do you guys have specific microphones that you use on your shows that you're big advocates of or what's where do you fall down there well i know you hate my microphone no i like your mic no i like yours you have the snowball and you're you're the one person oh the snowball nice he's the one person i think sounds all right i don't know must just be just i think it's his lovely voice i think that's what it is no thank you so much so um so i you know when we started the ubuntu podcast eight years ago or so we thought long and hard about what hardware to buy and what to do and we were all sat in the same room so it was very different you know because we

all drove to one location now that we're doing it online and we're using things like mumble or skype and you know recording locally and editing and all that kind of stuff it's quite a burden so you know while i agree with chris that um it would be preferable to use better tools and to create um audio audio that you can put on a stream or on an RSS feed, like a traditional podcast so other people can get it very easily and download it and consume it in the way they want to rather than having to watch a YouTube video, right? That puts a burden on you, and you have to commit to a certain amount of time each week or every other week

or every month or however often your release schedule is to actually record it, edit it, fix the audio and publish it. And that's quite a commitment. It really is. And so you're saying anything you can do to make it easier if it's Google Hangouts is okay. Well,

I'm not necessarily, I, I, I would do whatever you do to make it easier if it's google hangouts is okay well i'm not necessarily uh i i i would do whatever you can to make it easier but don't compromise on the quality i mean you can compromise on the quality to some degree and you can apologize to your listeners because we've done this when you screw up the audio like we do all the time yep uh but but you know it's worth making some effort because you know there are some podcasts that i've watched and listened to where i can't even get more than 60 seconds in and i just think screw this this is terrible i'm not wasting my time with this not because the content is terrible but because the audio is now i sound like a massive jerk or i sound like an audiophile i'm not that guy who has uh a vinyl record player on yeah no it's not that i'm not that guy no but

it's just you know when when you don't take enough care to make it even listenable it's awful for your listeners so the thing i think the thing that you sit in there that's buried, that if I was a new podcaster that I might not have pulled out, is you can get away with so much if you're locally recording everybody's audio. Because then if you had to, the intermediary call could be a phone call. And you could – if they're off in some weird place, as long as they're recording local, rich mic audio, and then some poor schmuck has to edit it all together. I love you, him. It has to edit it all together. I love you, him. It has to edit it all together on the back end. That is – it is nice because then it doesn't matter if Hangouts sounds like a robot.

It doesn't matter if Skype drops you. It doesn't matter if Mumble got weird because you're recording locally and in the end it all comes together sounding very nicely. And that is a very nice way to come across. Now, that is more like you know you're going for your audio listeners. You're going for people that are listening with headphones. They're listening in their car with nice speakers or their computer with nice speakers. And so you know your target audience is a little more refined. I don't know if that is as important when you're targeting video.

But, Wimpy, you, what was it, six months ago, upgraded your microphone, kind of re-looked into your audio setup. Have you kind of walked away with any thoughts after it's been a little while? You've been using this setup for a bit? Yeah, yeah. So around the start of the year, I changed my setup, and I've changed it twice since, actually. So Popey invited me onto the Ubuntu podcast to stand in for a couple of episodes, and I thought I'd better make an effort and put my best foot forward.

So I went and got all my old junk out of the loft and lashed it together with bits of string that's your best part huh yeah well those two things don't align so um so that's what I was using was basically a load of gear that I had uh from when I was a musician years and years ago that I kind of made work but the problem with that was is that each time I recorded I had to keep messing about with the levels and the settings before I went on because it was so old and busted that it was a real faff so about two months ago I got myself a Blue Yeti mic, which, like you were saying, is just a simple USB connection.

All the knobs and the levels are actually on the mic itself, so I don't have to mess about with the mixer on the PC. You just turn up every week, and you know it's going to sound like the week it did before. So that's what I'm using now. you know it's going to sound like the week it did before um so that's what i'm using now and that has an added advantage in that we're all off to og camp at the end of the month and we're actually going to record a couple of shows uh whilst we're away together and i'm going to take the blue yeti with me and you know because it's got multiple recording modes can actually

use it as a right you can traveling mic adjust, I guess, like the recording capsule there. So it can do direct capture or it can go into room mode or it can do like a figure eight or whatever. Oh, wow. That's fancy. Yeah. That does make it nice for group interviews and whatnot. So they're slightly more expensive. But if you, you know, use Camel, Camel, Camel to watch them on Amazon, they drop down to sort of the sort of 80 85 pound mark

every so often so they're kind of a bargain when they get down to that price yeah i think actually though the the the truth of the matter is is you can kind of get it just right but then i mean once you get it set it's pretty much ran for you right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that is um that's the nice thing is you can there's a little bit of troubleshooting up front. And the only other thing I would say is that I only listen to podcasts that I can subscribe to with a podcatcher. So I might watch the odd thing on YouTube, but I don't regularly watch the stuff that I subscribe to on YouTube because it doesn't have that same, like if I'm cooking in the evening, I might have a podcast going and then I pause it whilst I do something else outside or, you know, do something with the family, come back and start it again. And it's that, you know, stop start nature.

And that doesn't work so well, you know, with YouTube. I'm the same way while I drive. I'll listen. And when I get there, I, with my new vehicle too, I finally have, I've reached the new age where it actually uses Bluetooth audio to play. Oh, don't you love that? Oh my gosh, it's so great. Your phone stays in your pocket and you just

hit the button. It really makes, it brings my podcast listening up to an entirely new level because it is just as approachable as the radio. I turn on the vehicle and the podcast resumes. Exactly. And the other nice thing is it doesn't stop playing until I open the door. So I can park the vehicle, turn it off, and I can listen for a few minutes while they complete their thought. And then I open the door and it pauses.

And I just love that. And so for me, it has made – and the other thing I do is I listen at bedtime. I sometimes listen to podcasts at bedtime. So cute. I have podcasts that I listen to that make me sleepy. Yep. They have good information, but they make me sleepy. And I believe Popey listens to one of them too.

It's the talk show, and I'll sometimes listen to it literally just to fall asleep. It's brilliant for that. It's very distracting. You don't worry about all the problems and things you do in the morning. He just kind of drones on in his Gruber kind of way. And I don't really quite care what he's talking about. So it's perfect to fall asleep to. And then I have other shows that keep me awake and amped up and listening while I'm driving. And so for me, I have the same threshold that Wimpy does.

It's got to have an RSS feed because I've got to be able to subscribe to it on my phone. Because this is pretty much how I'm listening to shows now. I will watch the one-off on YouTube from time to time, but I am much more apt to, if I can put it on my phone, even if I'm not listening weekly, I'll download a few of them and then bang through them when I know I'm going to be on the road for a while. As someone who doesn't use RSS feeds very much but does listen to podcasts, I will also say that any time that you can take out of that process is helpful.

It's the worst when I'm sitting in my car and I'm trying to download it and the link isn't obvious and it's like, I just want this to download so I can listen to it on my drive. Even if it's not RSS, if you can just make it simple, that goes a long way. Lord, you wanted to jump in with a mic that you think is pretty great. I'll let you get a plug in for that as we kind of wrap

up the mic question. You still have it? No, he moved on. All right. He left in the chat room for those of you that want to jump back. All right. So, guys, Kubota Podcast, guys, any other questions about the show itself? I could talk a little bit about organizing and planning for the show. I know you guys have some kind of a dedicated machine for recording or something like that.

How does that setup work, for example? I don't know if you have OBS on it and you record. I know you have some weird controller that you just switch screens and all that. Well, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, yeah, this is quite the rabbit hole. If you're going to do it right, you need two machines. That's why I say it's a rabbit hole. So in front of me right now, I've got two systems. One is an OBS system and one is a Wirecast system. The Wirecast system is sort of our legacy system because it has to run on the Mac OS of 10s.

And it is sort of an all-in-one. It does what a $15,000 hardware video mixer does, only it does it for $1,000. So it does the video feed mixing, so it can pull in USB video at 30 frames per second with PC desktop video working at 60 frames per second with HDMI video working at 30 frames per second. And then it can also pull in live screen captures, encode all of that in real time, send it up to Ustream, send it up to Scale Engine, and also write a lossless ProRes file to a RAID 0 drive array at the same time. So it's a nice piece of gear, and it up to Scale Engine, and also write a lossless ProRes file to a RAID 0 drive array at the same time. So it's a nice piece of gear, and it's being very, very, very quickly

replaced by OBS. And so right now on the other machine, on a much, much smaller machine, on a much weaker machine, we're able to accomplish a lot of the same stuff that we do in Wirecast on a frickin' NUC. Because when you move over to OBS and when you move over to Linux, you are gifted in a ton of overhead of performance. And so one of the things that we are moving towards is a setup where a lot of that stuff, going out to the stream endpoints, they're recording to a lossless file,

they're recording to a regular file, will happen under OBS. And eventually, OBS will sit in front of the Wirecast rig. Right now, OBS is behind the Wirecast rig and supplies Wirecast with a certain set of different amounts of feeds, like rerun feeds, station identification feeds, kind of things like for a screen capture feed, things like that that are sent by OBS into Wirecast, and the Wirecast goes out to the web. Now, probably at some point, we'll reverse that and then at some point completely replace Wirecast altogether. It doesn't do everything.

OBS doesn't handle everything like streaming to three or four different endpoints at the same time. It doesn't really do that. If that's not something you're worried about, then that's not really an issue. OBS isn't – we're not quite sure. We haven't totally tested its lossless yet file recording, but it seems to be there for different formats. So there's some stuff you can do with OBS today that even back in January, we couldn't do yet. And so a lot of people have sort of opted to use Google Hangouts, or they've opted to use something else completely different. And I would invite them to check OBS

out again, because the one thing that is true is that since LinuxFest Northwest in April, we have been using OBS in production every single day in some capacity to some degree. And in some cases, we produce entire shows now using OBS. There's been some recent episodes of the Linux Action Show where the entire thing was recorded, the shots were done, all of it was done in OBS, no Wirecast, no Mac needed at all. And so it's getting really, really close. There's just a few areas we keep running into and we keep working on those. So I would say if I was starting out today, I would probably build the entire thing around OBS and just sort of, because I would imagine its limitations would not be outpaced by my noobness. Like my noobness would still be behind what OBS's limitations are. The

problem is, is right now, is we're coming to OBS from this perspective of a ton of functionality and a ton of expectations. And it's just not meeting all of them yet. But if I didn't have all those expectations and all those needs and if my expectations were much simpler, OBS would be doing the job. Does that make sense? Yeah, you could grow with OBS. And I have to say the thing about just watching you guys use OBS, you know, it's already grown a lot. And I think the more people we can bring on board and support it, then it will really become a great community tool

to make these kind of podcasts. Rikai says, if you have trouble finding OBS for Linux on their distro, have a look for Open Broadcaster Multiplatform, as that's actually the name of the rewrite, is multi... Multiplatform. Yeah, Open Broadcaster Multiplatform. We've tried

it, I think, last week or two weeks ago, and we've done some experimenting with streaming directly to YouTube, so we don't have a streaming server. Yeah. And it worked really well, but when I clicked the record button, everything just froze. My whole desktop. Ooh, that's no good.

Yeah, that does happen. Yeah, boy, isn't that a monster. And you know what it is? It's probably some library, something underneath that OBS isn't working right with. And it really is a pain in the ass. But when you dial it in just right and you finally get it working, the nice thing you're going to get by that is you're going to have a local file. And that local file is very easy to strip the audio out of so you can release an MP3 version. It's very easy to post – go directly to an MP4 file and post that up for download somewhere or a WebM file.

I mean, the thing is, is just by mixing locally in OBS versus using Hangouts, you make it accessible to an entire different category of audience. And that's the category of audience that's going to be your passionate long-term subscribers who are going to be your foundation. So it is totally worth the technical trials, even if it's going to mean you try it on a different distro. You try it on Ubuntu LTS versus Ubuntu 15.10 versus Ubuntu Studio versus Arch. You try it on the different distros to see which – because the truth of the matter is one of the mixes, it will work. It just – like what we do here is over there, that is an Arch box running a very fixed set of packages. And it's running the GNOME 3 desktop because that's the desktop I prefer.

It's not the best desktop for production, but it's the one I prefer. It's running Arch, and we just simply don't install updates. It stays. And it just runs. And in six months, we'll replace it with a fully up-to-date box that's been tested. Sounds like we need a perfect Linux broadcast container that can just be distributed. Exactly. Yeah, Docker could very well help with this problem too.

But so truth be told is we found the best combination was Arch and then you don't change it because when you're working on this kind of stuff, a lot of the different software depends on the latest changes to FFmpeg, the latest capabilities of this. Like when we want to be able to stream to multiple destinations we're literally just waiting for final bits of code to be written so to be running on a version of fmpeg that's a year old is just not even an option for us it's unusable so you got to play with that that is the

you know there's a definite downside to production under linux is if if is if this was the Mac unplugged show, I would say, yeah, don't install Capitan, just install Mavericks and go get Wirecast and you're good to go. Oh, yeah, you're going to be out $2,500 for the computer and $1,000 for Wirecast, but you'll be good to go. But the thing is, is that locks you into buying that new Mac every couple of years. It locks you into doing the OS X upgrades, and it locks you into buying the $500 Wirecast upgrades every year. And it is just a cycle that is unneeded because the open source stuff is super close. It's getting there.

So, yeah, I would say stick with OBS. That's why I also asked about the dedicated machine. I saw you have a NUC, and I know stick with OBS. That's why I also asked about the dedicated machine. Should we have – I saw you have a NUC, and I know they're really powerful. So I was thinking maybe we can invest in one and just use that one for the recording. But I don't know how would we stream, for example, from my laptop to the recording machine so that that machine records the video and audio from everybody. Or how would we configure that? Yeah, I definitely do a separate machine because the reason there is it crashes and you lose your episode. And so anything you can do to isolate and make it less likely to crash, the less things that machine is doing,

the less likely you're going to lose your show. And nothing hurts more. I have done the three best Tech Talk Todays of my life. I mean really good episodes with super good mumble conversation. All three of them have been lost. And it hurts because they were really good episodes. And they've all been lost. And so the less that machine does, the less likely you're going to lose that episode.

If you can have a backup recording, that's good. All that kind of stuff. So the NUC, if you're using it for serious production, is probably not powerful enough yet. You might want an i7 with like 16 gigs of RAM or something. I don't know. You might be able to make it work. Too big for us right now. You might be able to make it work then. Just play with it and see.

We'll try different hardware, see what happens. Definitely take some tuning there, I'm sure. Yeah, you just kind of have to dial it into how much uh you know how much how much usage you guys have for it and stuff like all the other thing is ours runs 24 7 what was it i'm okay yeah this is how do you send the video recordings to the separate machine oh that's a good question it depends uh so um sometimes it's over the network using RTSP, and sometimes it is via direct capture on HDMI. Both come in as different camera sources, HDMI and RSTP, RTMP. So, yeah.

All right, guys. Any other questions before we wrap up the segment? How do you play music during the live show? Tricks of the trade. How do you play music or how do you do soundboard clips? And the value of this is negative. Get it out of here. I've never installed GNU slash Linux.

That is, honestly, it's not that tricky. You just have a separate machine that goes into a separate input on the mixer, and I just have it dedicated and ready to go. And sometimes I have soundboard software. Sometimes I use VLC. I have input 7 on my mixer. It's dedicated to a machine that can make silly sounds when I want it. Get it out of here.

What's that? Some audience members prefer that didn't happen. I don't know. Exactly. Very much. But it's here to stay. On the Ubuntu podcast, we have a separate person with their own laptop. And I give them signals and they press the buttons for the sounds to be played in.

But it works the same way. It's like an extra person on the stream. They don't say anything. I just give them the nod. That is hilarious. So it's almost like it like another another host in a way it's commentary in its own way yep i love it so the microphone i've got disabled on that machine but the audio out from it plays out over mumble so we all hear it and it gets recorded locally

so everyone records locally including that person so we have a separate audio file for each speaker plus that um that that device but it means that that we all get to hear it during the recording which is actually quite important because you can all take a breather and you can hear the stings and the bumpers yeah and the bed that goes underneath you can all hear it and so you know when to speak and when not yeah you get to and you get to talk to the beat and stuff like that. Yeah, that's why we do our music live too. Like we'll do all of the music and stuff like that live so that way we kind of, you know,

we can kind of play to the music and stuff like that. And that's another nice thing about knowing you're targeting audio a little more too is that's a lot harder when you're doing video. That's what it turns out. All right, any last questions, guys? Okay, last question yeah how do you organize the sections and keep in time with them because we every time we plan okay we finish on that time and we always get over it yeah yeah yeah how do you well uh also i'll do that backwards how do i how do i so what was the first part is how do I plan the segments?

How do you plan the segments so that you finish each segment on time? Because we always surpass that time. Wes, what do you suppose I do? Well, I would say it helps a lot to not have the time that you're set for. Yeah, that is pretty much it. I just have a pretty innate feeling for how long I have to say about something and how long the mumble room has to say about that thing, how long Wes or Noah or whoever it is has to say about it. And I just kind of suss it up and I just keep plugging content in until I'm like, well, that will take me about 20 minutes to talk about.

And every now and then I blow it. Like last week or on Sunday, I blew it and we had a two-hour Linux action show. I usually try to go for about no more than an hour 45. Which was great, just by the way. We were targeting for one hour, so that's why I was asking. Yeah, we do the same. We have a set of show notes

and at the top we list each of the segment names and the amount of minutes that each segment should be. And I have a web-based clock that if you go to a specific url that i know that all of you even on remote locations can go to this url and it shows you the same clock and when you want to advance to the next segment anyone can tap the screen and it will move the clock on to the next segment. And the clock has the amount of time for this segment

and how far you've clocked up in this segment, so you know when you're going over. And when you get to the end of the segment, someone hits the button and you move over, and everyone's clock moves over. It's really helpful. It's a single HTML file. I'll send you an email with the HTML.

Do you find watching the clock becomes distracting? Well, I personally have a tablet on my desk, which I have always on with the clock on it. I don't mean physically watching the clock. I mean, does it take mental CPU cycles to think about a clock? Yeah. But there's four of us. So it's not like with you, you're often the only presenter or the main presenter, right? With us, there's four of us.

So you have more cycles when one person speaking the other guys are looking at the clock and every so often we're paying a message on chat and be like hey dude shut up now so gosh that is like i definitely do try to follow a clock when i'm doing tech talk i try not to make it longer than 30 minutes but otherwise i think it's wasted effort i'll tell you why i think it's wasted effort. I'll tell you why I think it's wasted effort is I feel like following a specific time limit is following mainstream media's rules. And I'm not doing a podcast because I want to emulate mainstream media. And then one of the nice things about I think the podcast medium is I can say the podcast is exactly as long as the content justifies. And if the content justifies that it's a 45-minute show, then it's a 45-minute show. And if the content justifies it's a two-hour show, it's a two-hour show. And I don't really get that hung up on it because I have my rough goals that I'm aiming for.

But at the same time, I don't want to necessarily take an outdated way of thinking and cram it into a new medium either. So the flip side of that is you're doing this as a job i'm not so i'm doing this during an evening we start recording at half past eight in the evening and finish at half past nine so we do two half hour slots and we've set the expectation with our listeners that each episode is half an hour long yeah yeah if if we suddenly turn up with a two-hour episode they're like whoa dude whoa, dude, what on earth happened there? There's definitely shows too where it's – you can say it's an hour-long show and it's part of the show. Like that – there's space for it too.

I just – I say don't get super hung up on it. But basically – Yeah, and I kind of agree with you. Like a couple of episodes recently, we've rumbled on a bit. And while one person is talking talking the rest of us i can feel it are all looking at the clock oh my god oh my god we're going over come on dude shut up we're running over and i think you know part of me thinks well maybe actually we should just chill out a little bit and every so often put out instead of a 30 minute episode put out a 45

minute episode and actually that's not a big deal but then the flip side is we're doing this in our evenings and you know we've all got families and stuff to do and really we're doing this in our spare time and nobody's paying us for this we're not asking for donations well and honestly honestly uh your existing audience tends to love a longer show but new people will tend to be put off by really long shows so it's a it's a hard line to walk it's kind of how how much does it help you? And I think what is important is to have good sideband communication between hosts so that even if it's not sticking to a distinct timeline, you can at least communicate like, that's enough.

I don't have anything else. You can keep things in sync. And there's a lot of different ways to pull that off. There's inline chat. There's IRC in the background. There's Google Docs chat. There's Slack. There's all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of different ways. Hand signals if you're lucky enough to be in the background. There's Google Docs chat. There's Slack. There's all that kind of stuff.

There's a lot of different ways. Hand signals if you're lucky enough to be in the same room. Wimpy or Popey, you guys have any last wisdom to pass on before we move to the next segment? You've kind of covered it with your fancy equipment and OBS, but make sure you've got a backup. So if you're doing local audio recording, make sure that somewhere there's something recording all of the streams because one day what will happen is somebody won't be recording or they'll have the wrong mic or something, and you'll need that backup.

Yeah. So every person should record their own stream. Yeah, it's super demotivating to lose a really good episode. Yeah. Yes. Or it's also a great way to join a podcast, as I found out earlier in the year. Yeah, that works episode. Yeah. Yes. Or it's also a great way to join a podcast, as I found out earlier in the year. Yeah, that works too. Yeah.

I have a recording of the Ubuntu podcast, a mythical lost episode 30, on a hard drive that's somewhat fried on my desk, and one day I'll get around to getting it back. Oh, man. I have lost some good episodes over the years. And for a long time, I'd never lost any shows. And then, you know, now we have more backups in place.

But that wasn't until after learning the hard way. Sometime last year, you had a bad streak there. And you were like the saddest day. The next day, you'd come on and talk about how you lost. It was just so sad. Yeah. Well, because it's a double whammy because you don't have an episode. So people show up and you got nothing to give them.

And he's like, you did all of the work except for the publishing part. You did all of the work and then lose it. So, yeah, definitely make a backup if you can. And honestly, if you're going to do it live, that's probably – you're right there as your point to do your backup. It all gets mixed down and sent out. Get a backup going right there. And that's – you know, there are a ton of great Linux podcasts out there. Wimpy and Popey just put out an episode of the Ubuntu UK podcast that basically talked about all the podcasts they listen to.

And you can give a shout-out or you can check out there because they have a shout-out to a ton of great shows, including a couple of our shows. So you can find that over there on their podcast. So if you now are interested. That's a great example of one where one of us was talking a lot and the rest of us were looking at the who Wimpy? because Wimpy has a podcast list that is as long as mine

ears are burning it was good fun though it was worth doing yeah that was nice and then you know it's funny because really the truth of the matter is, and I think in a very good way, a few years ago there was a handful of Linux podcasts

and now there's a heck of a lot more. And I think that's a sign that the nuances in the Linux desktop are sort of maturing a little bit and there's different podcasts that can fill each one of those nuances which is awesome! It's really cool. So check it out and we'll have links to some of the stuff we talked about

and of course, you guys can also go look at the Kubuntu podcast if you're a Kubuntu user. Might be of interest to you. They got five episodes up on YouTube. And guys, stick around for the rest of the episode and let us hang out with us and share your insights and then come back from time to time and let us

know how it's going because you're always welcome to join us. Thanks a lot for the info. You bet. Good luck. Alright, so before we get into the next segment, I'm going to take a minute and tell you about my cell phone provider. And they're pretty neat. It's Ting. I want you to go to linux.ting.com

to support the show and get the Linux unplugged discount. Here's what I love about Ting. Mobile that actually makes sense. You can wrap your brain around this because it's pretty straightforward. You just pay for what you use. Boom. So simple.

That is really simple. It can't be simpler. Flat $6 for the line. Pay for what you use. They just take your minutes, your messages, your megabytes, whatever you just use. That's what you pay. Plus, they have really great dashboards to manage it all. They have super passionate customer service. All their devices are unlocked. I think, are you starting to get the picture here? This is pretty nice.

They got a savings calculator. When you go to linux.ting.com, you can try it out. Now, I want to put this out there because if you're clever at all, I mean, like if you just put a little thought into this, you can work this. You can really work this to your benefit. I've got, I mean, Noah is really the ultimate example because he's got, like, an unbelievable amount of lines and he just does not pay very much. But I got three lines. I mean, that's not baller, but I got three lines on Ting. And I'm paying, like, $45 this month. $45.

Because I just think about it a little bit. Like I download my podcast before I leave. I make very few calls. Pretty much the data I use is for audio streaming or maps, like Waze and stuff like that. Otherwise, I'm really savvy about it. And honestly, that's all it takes. It's just that much forethought. And you can save so much money on your mobile.

And the nice thing about Ting is they have two networks to pick from, GSM and CDMA. And again, the thing I like about that, and I think this plays well in our audience, is if you're just a little bit clever, again, you know the difference in your area between a CDMA network and a GSM network, or even if you don't know the difference, you don't mind Googling. Like that's all it takes to figure out, well, I can get better speed or better coverage, or maybe I want to move things around. The thing is, flexibility, control, power, that's your position in the Ting relationship. Ting is built around giving consumers total control over their Ting account, and they have a bunch of great devices and have a bunch of great tools to do this. I want you to go over to the Ting site right now to support the show,

linux.ting.com, and then play around. Take a look at some of these, I was going to go over to the Ting site right now to support the show, linux.ting.com, and then play around. Take a look at some of these, I was going to say computers. Take a look at some of these phones I have. They are computers, Wes. They really are. I mean, the Nexus 6P. Ooh, look at that. Oh, man.

I have to be honest with you. I am definitely tempted. I am too. So, okay, Wes, would you be more of a 6P guy or are you more of a 5X guy or a Moto X guy? Traditionally, I think the 5X is where I'd be looking at and I am looking. But the 6P, I don't know. I haven't had a metal body. Yeah.

The thought of that Nexus line, metal body, I'm very tempted. I agree. So the 5X is like the phone that I should get. Yes, exactly. It seems very reasonable. It looks nice. Unlocked, $379. You can have it at Ting.

I mean it is like, it's the perfect phone because it's the Google experience. It's unlocked and you only pay for what you use. You're in control of the entire account. No contract. No early termination fee. It's amazing. Flat $6. The 5X is like, if I'm reasonable, that's where I should go. But then I look at the 6P.

I look at the 6P and I go, but that's bigger. And it's faster. It's faster. And it's got metal. More faster. And it's got metal. More pixels. Yes. And it's got metal. Yes. And it's a new hardware vendor-ish. I don't have a lot of experience with Hawaii.

Exactly. And I would be kind of curious what a Hawaii phone is. And I really want Marshmallow right now. I'm jelly for Marshmallow. I can't help it. I can't help it. Linux.ting.com. Go check out Ting.

See why I use them. I've been using them for two years and try out their savings calculator. I bring this up because I think my audience is savvy enough to know that if they could take something like Ting and just use a little bit of their skill set to really maximize how much you could save, it is really a great opportunity for people that are willing to maybe do a Google search from time to time. You're not afraid to visit a subreddit every now and then or just call up their passionate customer service. It is an opportunity that is waiting for you. Linux.ting.com.

Go try it. I've saved over $2,000 in the last two years. Go try them out. Linux.ting.com. All right. So I was really kind of pumped about OpenStreetMap, oh, I don't know, about a year ago. And I really haven't looked into it very much. about a year ago, and I really haven't looked into it very much.

But recently, I've been thinking a lot more about maps and navigation and marking areas that I visit. Is that something to do with your recent road trip? It is. I don't understand. It is. You know what I discovered on the road trip is even the best mapping systems often need updates and improvements. And there is a lot of different things that you can get out of OpenStreetMaps. But for those of you that are not familiar, OpenStreetMaps is a really,

really, really neat project. And as the name implies, it is open source maps. It's powered by users, thousands of users, data, web traps, websites, mobile apps, all the stuff that comes in, dedicated hardware devices, local knowledge, community-driven, all open data. And I really, really love this project. But it's one of those boring infrastructure things that you can't really, like, just randomly, randomly talk about from time to time because it's like, yeah, we all know about it. So what's new? Well, this week some stuff is coming out that is brand new, and I'm going to get to that in just a moment.

But I wanted to recap on OpenStreetMaps itself. If you're not familiar with it, it's greatly expanded access to geodata worldwide. When OpenStreetMaps started over 10 years ago, it was created as a response to limited geographic data. Now, primarily in the UK, it's grown much, much larger than that now. It's open and flexible. It's created for the greater good. This author who I'll link to in the show notes talks about one of his favorite things about OpenStreetMaps It's open and flexible. It's created for the greater good. This author who I'll link to in the show notes talks about one of his favorite things about OpenStreetMaps is this large and dedicated community.

One of the best parts of this community is the Hot OSM, whose memberships help coordinate updates to OpenStreetMaps in areas impacted by natural or humanitarian disasters. So that way the maps reflect the current stuff. And it's enabling an entire new emerging industry to grow because the data is available to everybody. There's APIs and software development kits out for mobile devices. Developers, say, the ones that have written into Coda Radio, have told me that their API and their SDK is easier to use and integrate with your apps than Google's own native Maps API on the Android platform. Like, it's a really, really good system. I was looking into it. I mean, at least the Python binding seemed very simple and straightforward, which is really nice.

So think about taking something like Google Maps and making it available to everybody, making it available on all kinds of mobile devices. Well, then you can start to build some really cool stuff. And I want to tell you about some of these apps because I think this is a really amazing initiative. The first And I want to tell you about some of these apps because I think this is a really amazing initiative. The first one I want to tell you about is wheelmap.org. Wheelmap.org is an online map database to search, find, and mark wheelchair-accessible places,

something that maybe Google would never really be motivated by profit to do, but something that a passionate community can do using the accurate, up-to-date, always being modified data from OpenStreetMap. You get so much infrastructure to just build on and tweak and update. So look at this. This is a wheelmap.org for wheelchair users, gives them places like bars, restaurants, cinemas, supermarkets that they can look up and find places that are accessible to them and of course there's apps available for mobile devices as well that's awesome and it's

something that like you know look at this there's a lot of stuff yes isn't this crazy looking at it right now isn't this yeah i know so like here i'll look at the seattle for example and i think this is really kind of and you can go right here to king county and you can also have a get your direct location if you want if you don't want to do like all of the searching stuff. But look at that. Look at this. And also, you'll notice too how fast it is. Doesn't it just feel super fast?

I've been consistently impressed with the UI. Like they've done a lot of work on the front end to make it snappy and competitive with Google, really. Yes, very much so. And there's some, there's cool ones. There's like, there's like OpenStreetMaps that'll even show you where power lines are run. Oh, wow.

Again, Google's never going to put that in there, right? Here's another really cool app. Maps.me. Offline OpenStreetMaps for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, and Windows computers. Offline maps powered by OpenStreetMaps. Maps.me is an open source cross

platform offline maps application built on top of crowdsourced OpenStreetMap data. Isn't this neat? And here's maps.me online right here. In fact, didn't you send this in too? Yes, I believe I did. I just love how much you can do. You know, it's like I was looking at one earlier where it was custom bike routes.

Yes. And so, you know, people can take the data that's available here and then use to determine their own routing algorithms that might be better or more optimized or better for your city. And they pull in the data from a lot of different locations like – Lord, you're in – Lord Drack in the chat – in the mumble room right now is mentioning a lot of the US data came from the Census Bureau. I didn't know that. That's great.

Yeah, that is great. I mean, might as well get it from open locations. And I actually started looking into it because there is when you – now, this is Chris talking about the road trip again. But when you are hauling something, there is an entirely different set of – I am driving like in a parallel dimension. So when I'm pulling the rover, in total, I'm like 45 feet long. That's near semi-length, right? Because you got the truck and then you have a 25-foot long trailer plus you have the connection. And so it's like 40 feet long plus. And so there are certain areas that are just very challenging to go into. So I have been looking to see if there's specific OpenStreetMap

based data that would help with this. What are you looking at there? Well, this was linked here in the chat room to Kresney here. Tell them about state of the map. That looks really fancy. Yeah, it's the biggest OpenStreetMap conference ever. It sounds like there are videos up now. Very cool. So I want to tell you about something that this is why OpenStreetMap got on my radar today. And this is what kind of made me excited about it is since last you know the whole last pass thing i've been

like have can i i this is what i've been trying to square is can i really replace every service that relies on a hosted third-party system is that really realistic in 2015 when everything's in the cloud and everything's online everything's got to be mobile well it has to be mobile it's got to be in the class that's the rule yeah i don't know if you saw that, but I think Obama came out and said, hey, everybody, one of the rules is – Executive order. Yeah. First he came out on the stage and he said – Hello, everybody.

And then he said, look, this is – That's how we roll. Everything's got to be mobile. And so I was trying to get my head around this and I realized, how am I going to get nav routing and maps? You're dependent on the big providers with their big database. Yeah. And it seems like this is an impossible, impossible thing for an open source project to take on.

But, you see, this is where OpenStreet... The data of OpenStreetMaps comes in, and there's a few different projects that are tackling this, and there's a new one out there called Mapsin. M-A-P-Z-E-N. And it is essentially an open platform trying to handle this particular problem. It's a search engine for places that takes the philosophy of open communities and creating data and open code to heart. MAPZEN Search will launch this week.

And in the meantime, they're going to share some background info here with us. And so we're going to go into all of this. Here's what jumped out at me. Okay. Their data collection is already underway. UK postcodes beginning with E. They've got different countries, have different address number schemes. They've figured all that out. They went through US highways. They got all that figured out. East, west, odd routes, all this crazy stuff.

And now they believe they have an open routing system that's going to be available to users to go into and simply get planned routes, maps, all this stuff as available as another data layer sitting on top of OpenStreetMaps, which will then be available to developers. And they got a whole series of cool stuff they're working on. When you go to mapsin.com, including Tansgram, a flexible, hackable mapping engine designed for real-time rendering 2D and 3D of maps. Oh, wow. Yeah.

They got the Maps and Search, the modern geocoding in place search service. They're going to have turn-by-turn directions available through this and vector tile services. Vector tiles are awesome. So, and I don't know. I think this is really like the next level. So you have OpenStreetMaps providing the core infrastructure of the data. And then you got these guys providing cool 3D maps, cool real-time routing with traffic, like all this stuff coming in to MapsIn. To me, this is going to take OpenStreetMaps and sort of make it available

at a whole other level to apps. You could use this stuff on the go, and then you combine it with stuff like OSM Tracker, which is a really nice way for sort of crowd-based Google Street Maps taking photos, real-time corrections of OpenStreetMap data when there's errors. You can mark areas of construction if the map is completely wrong. All that stuff right here from an app while you're driving around. Oh, that makes it so easy. Yeah.

So you can really keep this thing up to date. I thought that was pretty cool. I thought it was pretty cool. Wimpy, you wanted to jump in and talk about an open source alternative to Google Maps. Yeah, so one of the hottest apps on Ubuntu Touch is called UNAV, which

is written by Marcos Costalos. And that's a full turn-by-turn GPS navigator for car, bike, and walking. And that uses OpenStreetMap and Mapzen to do its mapping. And I'm going to use this to hopefully navigate us from the south of England to the northwest of England

when we go to OgCamp at the end of the month. So we're actually going to use it in anger to drive somewhere unfamiliar. Cool. That's the ultimate test, isn't it? You'll have to let us know how it goes. Yeah. Well, it's... Go on.

Well, I notice it does turn-by-turn-by directions, and it avoids toll roads. Do you notice it does offline maps, too? Because that's one of my favorite things about a lot of these OpenStreetMaps apps. I don't think it does yet, but I do think that they're planning that. At the moment, it's an online online only um solution i believe

but the good news is in the uk we have pretty good coverage right no here is a sort of required thing as we discussed a few weeks ago i've got 3g in my car so yeah yes i will add a link to that in the show notes for people that are taking a look taking a look for maybe auntu touch-based stuff. So it's UNAV, GPS Navigation, UNAV App Explorer. Really cool. Yeah, I've been looking for something that is specific for RVers. So if anybody out there in the audience knows of something that is OpenStreetMaps-based, that is geared towards truckers or people that have RVs, large vehicles.

I'd love to know because I was doing some exploring around, which kind of led me to find this topic. And then I realized, kind of much like we talked about LibreOffice a few weeks back, there are some really other cool projects out there that are attached to Linux but not directly that are really neat. And OpenStreetMaps, if you think about it, if you think about how critical that kind of information is and how fundamental it is to a platform, I mean, that's why Apple went off and made their own maps. Yeah, exactly. It's obviously important enough to them. Yeah. Google's

got their own thing, right? And you know, one of the nice ways is there is more and more people using this OpenStreetMaps stuff like DuckDuckGo. If you go to DuckDuckGo's maps application, that is powered also by OpenStreetMap so you can get some Navi type stuff right now using the OpenStreetMaps from DuckDuckGo which is pretty neat. I don't know if you played with it. Yeah, go ahead. One of the other things we're using it for

when Martin's going to be driving us up to Liverpool, I made a little app for Ubuntu Phone which was inspired by your road trip actually Chris. Oh yeah? Yeah, I saw your which was inspired by your road trip actually chris oh yeah uh yeah i saw your um i was following your road trip uh online and watching the position of the live tracker yeah yeah yeah uh and uh so i thought i'd write an app and so i've written an app for ubuntu phone which reports our location to an online that's cool so if you go to ubuntu podcast.org road trip uh then you'll see a map it's currently

blank because we haven't set off yet but when we do uh you'll see a little dot showing you know showing where we are and it's all done on ubuntu phone or using free software now is there what is the what is the back-end server software is it it TrackCar or is it something you just already updated? No, it's all homegrown. That's cool. Wow. It's all free software. So on the phone, it's a little HTML5 app which calls out to the phone to find the GPS location.

It's a battle bus. And once it gets the location, whenever the location changes, it sends a message over WebSockets to our server, and our server then updates the map. That's great. And I've got a little button in the app, just in case I drive somewhere that maybe I don't want people to know about. I can press a button that reverts it back to some other location. If I actually wander into a strip bar i can make it say i'm in church or something i don't know there were a few times where i was on the road trip i was like uh i got lost a couple of times and i'm like damn damn it now they're just

if anybody's watching me right now they're just and i can't remember i i swear to god it was somewhere in montana where we got off the highway to get gas because once we got below a half a tank we're like we better fill up especially in some some of these places in Montana because there's no gas for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles. It's ridiculous. And we pull off the freeway. And, of course, the gas station was closed because it was after 9 o'clock. And what we realized quickly is only the main road right off the highway was paved. Everything else was gravel and like –

Wow. And I ended up going around in circles trying to get out of this place. And I'm thinking if anybody is watching me right now, I am in the middle of nowhere. What the hell is Chris doing? Yeah. I'm driving around on gravel roads. I must look like an idiot. So having that button built in to be able to just be like, never mind.

That's a very – That's exactly what it's I meant the last thing. Yeah. Just don't pay no attention to that. Yeah. I'm really excited about what OpenStreetMaps is doing. So – well, hi there. Hello there.

So now, Popey, did I miss it? So you are using the OpenStreetMap data to power that? Yeah. The map is rendered on top of OpenStreetMap. I mean, from the phone, it's just a case of sending the latitude and longitude. It's nice. And direction and speed as well. So I might have to, depending on how fast Martin goes,

I might have to add a button that... I've got nine points on my license, so I strictly adhere to the speed limit. Right, okay. So now you do. I don't need to worry about that. Now you do. A delay function that's in here.

Yeah, that's the other thing, is if anybody was watching me, they would see that sometimes they'd be looking at me going, you know, he's pulling a trailer. He shouldn't be going that fast because it tells you the exact speed I'm going to. And then it's like, yes, I'm doing 75. It's 80 miles per hour here. Leave me alone. Which, whatever. Well, that's cool. So there you go.

That's a great idea, tracking that. I think it's fun. I think it's fun tracking it. And I think I would love for the next road trip, I would love to use Track Car, T-R-A-C Car. Because right now I'm using like a hardware device, which works fine because what's really nice about it is I just switch it on and all of a sudden it's working. But I would love to be able to use Track Car and just throw it on DigitalOcean Droplet. And I think – We can build that into a hardware device for you. You think?

Like a Raspberry Pi? Yeah. I'm looking right now. I'm betting they must use... I believe they do. I don't see it, but I bet they use OpenStreetMaps. Wes, will you check? I will check. Will you check while you do that?

Tell you what, while you do that, I'll prep us for the next segment which is... I've been really looking forward to it because right here we've got the Steam Link, which is this I'm excited about, but I think the Steam Link is going to need some testing. For those of you who are not familiar with the Steam Link, I'm sure you probably know, but it allows you to stream Windows games to this thing, or probably Linux games too, to this thing that's hooked up to your TV. It's kind of like on live but in your house, and it works.

And then the thing that we're really excited about that's had a lot of different iterations is the Steam Controller. And now we have been told, the beginning with Linux kernel 4.3, not only is Steam Controller support built in, but some significant fixes for, like, the Xbox 360 controller are also built in. Ooh, I've got to love that 360 controller. Yeah, well, if you don't like the Steam Controller, you might like the Xbox 360 controller are also built in. Ooh, I gotta love that 360 controller. Yeah, well, if you don't like the Steam controller,

you might like the 360 controller. It's a decent controller, right? Built into Linux kernel 4.3, support for this built into Linux kernel 4.3. I, however, have Linux kernel 4.2. So we will see how it goes. We're going to unbox this, give you our first impressions of how the actual

final product feels in our hands, take a look at it, hook it up to the arch rig here, and see if we can get it working. And if we can, I'll give you the fix that we tried to figure out ahead of time. We did come up with what we think it's going to take to make it work ahead of time. And if it does work, we'll share that. Well, we're going to share it regardless in the show notes. Did you find it there? Oh, I'm looking for it right now. All right. Well, that's fine. I'm imagining TrackR uses OpenStreetMouse, but I suppose they could use anything. Who knows? Who knows, Wes? I don't know. All right. But you know what I do know? I know that we're brought to you by our friends over at Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged

to get our special discount. They just had a live event, a big one, where they announced a ton of stuff. Not only do they have a brand new CDN powering all of their content, not only do they have a beautiful new HTML5 player, and not only do they have tons of great stuff like, you know, their self-paced courses with instructor help available, their labs that are based on any of the distributions from 7 Plus to choose from that you've chosen, their scenario-based training,

and now their practice labs where you can go in there and actually be graded on how you performed in the lab, not just did you make NGINX start and serve up a webpage, but how well did you actually do it? That's in there now. Think about the technology required to make that work. Seven plus distros. You choose the distro, your courseware automatically adjusts. Your lab server automatically adjusts.

And now they can help you see how you actually performed in there. Also, when you're ready to go take the big exam for whatever cert you're going for, they've got different modes now that really help you learn. If you have a little anxiety around testing, they've got some stuff that really helps with that. I also like, this is a huge component for me, the nuggets. Truth be told, sometimes I don't want to sit down and spend five hours to learn something. I want to spend about two hours. Maybe I want to spend an hour at most. And I just want to deep dive on a topic. They've got those. They also have an availability planner. Now, for somebody

like me, I know that a couple of nights a week, I've got some extra time. Other times during the week, I'm a lot busier, especially when it comes to doing stuff with the kids. So what I can do with the availability seleors, I go, Tuesday nights I've got time, Thursday nights I've got time, Sunday night I've got time. And then Linux Academy will automatically generate courseware that matches my availability with reminders about exams and all of that. And then the best part is they have a community stacked full of your friends, Jupyter Broadcasting community members,

who I've been telling about this for a long time. They're over there now, and they are passing these courses. They can give you a lift if you get down. They can give you tips and tricks. I hear from the folks at Linux Academy all the time about how well this works out. They're rolling out new technologies all the time. I'm going to start telling you about them over the next couple of weeks, but right now I want you to go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. They just upgraded a ton of stuff on their system, a massive rollout. All the technologies around Linux, making Linux even better, and all of the associated stack is all over there. This isn't one of your general learning sites where they're going to tell you how to have

effective leadership communication, how to use Adobe After Effects, and how to set up Apache. Because those sites suck at what they do. They try to do all of the things. They try to tell you how to fix your sync and how to use After Effects and how to use Linux. It doesn't work. You need people who truly know the subject matter, who are passionate about it, who are motivated to bring Linux to as many people as possible, who then decided, how do I achieve that goal? Well, I team up with developers. I team up with educators. And then they created the Linux Academy platform. That's who you want to

learn from because that passion translates to a deep, deep understanding of the root technology and following that technology's latest developments, which means you're getting the best education possible. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Go take care of,

go take advantage of our discount. Go see what I've been talking about. And now, go participate in the stacked community. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys are rocking and that update is huge. And in fact

when you sign up, go into the community section and go read about the updates from Anthony. A lot of stuff there. I'm really, really impressed. As somebody who feels like he's constantly running the rat race to produce the best content available, I am massively impressed because not only are they producing the content, they're also developing the platform to deliver it.

I know. They build that infrastructure at the same time as they update all of their guides. It blows my mind. It's very impressive. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged and a big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring Unplugged program. Okay, Wes. Okay, so this is a big moment, Wes. I pre-ordered this a while ago.

I'm really excited, but I invite you, sir, to unbox the Steam Controller. Wowordered this a while ago. I'm really excited. But I invite you, sir, to unbox the Steam Controller. Wow. It is a big moment. I know. I know. I know. But let's go for it.

Are you ready? I am ready. Okay, Wes. Have at it here. Have at it, sir. And I will work on the link. Now, I'm not as excited about the link. How destructive should I be here?

Well, you can go for it. Just rip it. Let's just rip it. Let's just rip it. Let's just go for it. Just, you know, the top. Let's just rip it. Let's just rip it. Let's just go for it. Let's rip this top one here. That's what the audience wants. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So, I'm getting some new smell off this. They got a nice blue,

dark blue box here. Yeah. Yeah, this is nice. Cute little controller icon on mine. Yeah. Oh, I don't have any cute icons. I have a Steam icon. Here, I'm going to take your keys to get the tape. Please do. It's got a ring of tape on the outside of the box, and I'm going to cut through it now.

Go pass those back when you're done, sir. So you see that? You got that same ring. It's a nice ring, actually. Yeah, very sturdy tape. All right. If that's any sign. Oh, there it is.

Here's the link. I'm pulling it out now. I'd say it's about the size of a Roku 3, maybe it is. Here's the link. I'm pulling it out now. I'd say it's about the size of a Roku 3. Maybe even smaller. Maybe even smaller. It's got... Oh, man, it smells so good. It smells like new stuff.

All right. Oh, I got it open. Oh, here it is. Let me show you. I'll show it to the camera for those of you watching. Here it is. It's a nice little box. Yeah, there it is.

There it is right there. Okay, Wes. Take it out. Tell. Here it is. It's a nice little box. Yeah, there it is. There it is right there. Okay, Wes. Take it out. Tell me how it feels. The Steam Link, it's got two USB on the back, power, Ethernet, and an HDMI out. Oh, this thing, it's light.

It's solid. It's solid, but light. It's light. But it comes with batteries and it comes with a nice little wireless dongle. All right. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Let's get this hooked up. All right, so we comes with batteries, and it comes with a nice little wireless dongle here. All right. Okay. You ready?

Yeah. Let's get this hooked up. All right. So we're going to put batteries in it. Interesting. Interesting. It's got a nice battery snap-off in the back. It's got like a set little switch at the bottom.

Like a bat wing almost. Nicer than your average TV remote. So one battery goes in each side of the controller, it looks like. Right? That'll give a little heft. Yeah. Here, Wes. I'll let you.

You do that. I think that goes in there. I'm going to take... It comes with a USB receiver with the Steam logo on it. I don't think the camera... I don't think that shows up on the camera. That's too bad. It's got the Steam logo on it.

I like that. Alright, Wes. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to plug this in. You know what I should do? Hold on. Before I do it, I'm going to bring ahead and I'm going to plug this in. You know what I should do? Hold on. Before I do it, I'm going to bring up DMSG. Let's watch this live. Then we'll run DMSG afterwards too, okay? So DMSG is up.

And here, I'll bring it up on the screen. So there's DMSG. And there's that. Now that's before I plug in. Now I'm going to plug in. All right, all right, all right. Just plug in the Steam controller. I'm going to run dmessage again.

Oh, we got some new stuff. Okay, USB HID device, Valve software Steam controller. Oh, you see that? It says Valve software Steam controller. I don't know if this is in all the way. You can kind of feel it in the back there. Oh, it doesn't feel like it's in all the way. Oh, no, those are levers.

That's what I thought. Okay. Yeah, those are levers. Yeah, those, no, that's in. All right. So now is, how do we turn it on, though? Oh, it just beeped. Oh, beeped.

Did you hear that? It beeped at us, guys. Did you hear that? Okay. All right. That's cool. All right. So that's cool.

So something just happened with the Steam controller. I'm saying I'm not freaking out, but the Steam logo has lit up in the middle of the controller now. I might be freaking out a little bit right now. It's actually happening. Oh, wow, Wes. The smell is intoxicating. Wes, run your thumb along the Gabe nipple pad

right there. Do you feel that? Oh, yeah. It's got haptic feedback. It's quite haptic. Yeah. Okay. So now let's run Race the Sun. Let's find out. Okay, we're going to launch Race the Sun. I'd say it feels a little heavier than the Xbox. So those of you who have used the Xbox 360 controller, I'd say it feels a little bit heavier than the Xbox 360

controller. The X, Y, A, and B buttons do not light up. The Steam button is blinking. Oh, I was supposed to go into big picture mode, I think, wasn't I? I think I was supposed to go into big picture mode after this. Try to get the firmware. Yeah. Because nothing's happening in the game at the moment.

Alright, alright. So we'll jump out and we'll go into Steam Big Picture Mode. This might not work without it, but, yeah, we'll see. We'll see. This might be as far as we get, Wes. Right here, we may have... The colonel's working hard for us. All right, so we'll go into Big Picture Mode, and...

Ooh. Yeah, so there's Big Picture Mode. All right, so welcome to Steam from your couch. Nothing's happening, though. Nothing's happening. Oh, hold on. Update. Okay, look at that.

We can update the firmware on the Steam controller right now. Do it. I'm going to do it. Live update, everyone. All right. Update Steam controller firmware. The new firmware is being installed on the controller. Well, so then we must be communicating with it.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so that's a good sign. Or it's chosen one of your devices to flash with the Steam firmware, and it's just brick now. It's overriding my S6 over Bluetooth right now. All right, well, cool. So I guess that means then if it's seeing this, then the UDEV rule that we added to my system must be working. Must be working. Your user has permission to update the firmware.

So there was two things we had to do to make this work on a non-4.3 kernel. It'll be different for your distribution, and I have it linked in the show notes. But number one is we created a UDEV rule. Oh, hey, look, it's done. Whoa. Yeah, and it vibrated the controller. Oh, I am now operating this big picture mode with the controller. This is happening right now.

Let's go try Race the Sun. Okay, here we go. We're going to play. Oh, I'm excited. We're going to play Race the Sun okay here. We go. We're gonna play. Oh, I'm excited We're gonna play race the Sun yeah steam controller So anyways you dev rule got added and then my user account my Chris F user had to be added to the steam group which it Already was by default so okay, I

Don't know what I actually hit to to launch the game that would be the good quit that would be the big question So I'm gonna say I'm just gonna use the... Alright, here we go. Here we go. Alright, are you ready, Wes? Let's see if this works. So, uh... Nothing's happening. It does not work. It does not work. Nothing's happening. This game may not support it.

It had a controller icon. No, it did. It did. It did. Alright, so here, I'll jump out. I have no idea what I'm doing, though, because maybe I have to go in somewhere. So here's something that's interesting. I don't know if you noticed this. I'll jump back to the big picture mode here.

You see how it has in-game, it has a controller icon. Yes, it does. Yeah. So I think it does support the Steam controller, but I just have to mess with it a little bit more. The creators of this game have made an interface that requires a keyboard and a mouse. Oh, okay. So I picked the absolute wrong game. But it's such a good game.

A little pop-up showed up a couple seconds after we were on the page that said it doesn't work with Steam Controller. You see how it has a little controller icon? Yeah, I do like that, which almost is accurate. Yeah, so it does still emulate keyboard and mouse if you go to the Manage Game menu, Configure, and pick a template. Yeah, expert tips here. Thank you. Manage Game menu, so where do I go here?

Yeah, open up your game or go to the game tile okay and then oh i have to manage it for each game is what you're saying yep since each game could have different mappings oh i see so i go here to manage game configure controller ah ha ha yes i see yeah i see okay all right all right hmm i think i will play with that after the show. That'd be nice, though, if they just had some, like, controller presets for some of the more popular games. Well, they definitely do, actually. And users can contribute. In fact, I already contributed a controller scheme for Shovel Knight. So I can...

Oh, okay. So here I go. I can browse controller configs, and then I can say this controller configuration is recommended for this game. And so then I think it, I think it just loaded it. I'm not sure. So I'll browse configs, select. Okay.

I'm selecting this config and now I'm going to save this config. All with the controller. Yeah. I'm doing this all with the controller. Now I'm saying i'm done so should i try playing it and see what happens do it all right so now i don't know exactly i didn't i didn't actually study what all the buttons are supposed to be uh yeah kitson you can ask a question go ahead yeah north ranger uh you said that there is uh some per application

controls in steam regarding the steam controller could you said that there is some per-application controls in Steam regarding the Steam Controller. Could you set that up to work with an NES emulator or something of that nature outside of Steam? To be honest, I haven't gotten that far yet. Everyone that I've played with has been through the Steam client because the Steam overlay, or the Steam Big Picture mode is required to emulate uh non-game pad activities so when i go into configure controller let's see yeah for a keyboard mouse only game you probably have to go to the templates when you're browsing configs yeah and choose the keyboard wasd template and is instead of a gamepad okay oh i see community templates templates

and you say keyboard wasda and mouse hmm so let's see yeah yeah all right i can give it a shot i i'll give this a shot this does seem a little it's nice that these are available i guess right that's kind of a nice thing but i feel like uh I don't know. You're wishing it had just worked. Well, I kind of wish by default it would just work, yeah. But that's okay. It doesn't have to, I suppose.

Because, you know, it just takes the Race to the Sun guys one update. Yeah, and they seem to update pretty often. So I'm moving the mouse now. I'm moving the mouse around with the Steam controller. Hey, that's a good start. And it feels really good, actually. So that's actually working for me quite a bit. All right, so I'm going to launch the game, and we'll give it one more try.

We'll see if I can blow up or if I can actually drive. Wow, look at me moving the mouse. That's cool. But still not moving the guy, though. I'm still not moving the guy. So out of the box, it did move the guy. And we're dead. Yeah.

You tried, Chris. Yeah, I did. I can move the mouse now, so out of the box, it didn't move the guy. And we're dead. Yeah. You tried, Chris. Yeah, I did. I can move the mouse now, so that's an improvement at least, but I still have some work to go, I guess. Well, I'll keep playing with it. You know, it feels, Wes, give it another go. I mean, it feels pretty good in the hand, though, don't you think? It does feel pretty good. You know, they've got the, I don't know what to call them, the input pads are at the slight upward angles.

They kind of rest with how your thumbs lay. Oh, the triggers on the back, too they kind of rest with how your thumbs lay. Ooh, the triggers on the back, too, are very... They're nice. Yeah. What do you think about where the battery compartment triggers are? What do you think of that? I'm not sure what I would use that for. Maybe shifting between different

ammo or something like that? It seems like it would work well for a driving game. It kind of is like the paddle shifters on the expensive race cars. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It feels like a pretty high quality controller oh i will say the uh the mouse emulation is really accurate yeah it feels really like it's really glued to your finger it moves fast when you want it to i could use that in place of my control yeah oh yeah yeah you know especially like on a if you have it in big picture mode or even just if you could use it to control your mouse on the native screen i would use use that from the couch, no problem.

Yeah. I don't know if I have a game that would have it supported by default or not. Portal 2 is an excellent example of built-in controls. I wonder what I have. How do I get out of big picture mode? Oh, in big picture mode, you can view just installed games. All right, so I've got Bioshock installed, Distance. Well, of course, I've got Race the Sun.

I don't see Portaled, though. I wonder, what about Trine? I'll have to play around with this and see. And the other thing is I wonder how it works in conjunction with the link as well. That's another area I have a lot of questions about. Oh, I know. That'll be really exciting for people who already have nice gaming rigs and just want to, you know, bring

it to the living room. Yeah. So there you go. That will be our, just for, and we'll be done. I know, because some people, some people, they can't stand all the Steam talk. I know. So there you go. There's our Valve update right there. We talked about it. We unboxed it. The Steam controller is real. It's here.

Did you talk about the community key maps? Using a Steam controller. Look at this. Please run Steam in big picture mode to make full use of your controller. Well, at least it tells us. I was just looking at some of the community key maps, actually. Those are pretty nice. That's an awesome system.

If there's a game that doesn't support it, you can build it and then share it. Yeah, that is really cool. it and then share it. Yeah, that is really cool. And I bet within one week all of the games I play will have tons of different profiles. So is that new with the Steam controller? Yeah.

Okay, wow. I hope that that infrastructure is extended to support other controller layouts. It could be nice with the 360. It feels like, oh, yeah. Right? Because there's some games where it's like, well, I know I could make this config, but why doesn't Steam do it? Well, they wrote the compatibility of the stuff for the 360 anyway, so it makes sense if they had the game. That'd be perfect.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What I was kind of curious about was could the Steam controller become the Linux user's default gamepad? So right now on Linux, when people write into the show or when we're talking about a game controller, we always have to say, well, if you really want the best game controller for Linux … Buy this Microsoft product. Yeah. And doesn't that feel a little weird? A little bit, yeah.

I mean it's a great controller. It's a little weird though. Or buy this Logitech that pretends to be a Microsoft. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I'm hoping that this becomes like the really solid recommendation that is also just a damn good controller too. Not just the fact that it's wireless. Not just the fact that it has built-in kernel support.

Not just the fact that it's valves behind it. Yeah, not just the valve factor. But the fact that it's a really good controller. Plus the box is really pretty that it comes in. I just want to – you should keep the box. I think my initial – Put it up on your – I should.

I actually should. You're right. I should. My initial impressions are pretty good, but I'm going to keep playing with it for the rest of the week, and I'll talk about more in Friday's Linux Action Show. Also, our Ubuntu 15.10 in Friday's Linux... Oh, look at this. The packaging has like a layer-by-layer breakout.

Yeah, they did like a... Probably pretty hard to see on the stream, but you can kind of see how the controller is constructed. Yeah, they did like a schematics breakdown on there. That's really cool. That's neat. It's neat to have the first generation of this too. I like that.

And I was looking at the price. So you were asking on the pre-show how much it was. It looks like it was $49.99. Oh, hey, that's not too bad. No, that's not too bad. $49.99 is not too bad for that. So I'll give it some more testing, and on Friday's Linux Action Show, I'll have more thoughts on the matter.

Mumble Room, any other? Don't mind me. Look at that. Now I have three mice on this bonobo. I've got the trackpad, the actual mouse, and now I've got the Steam controller. Oh, so it is just picking it up as a mouse. Oh, yeah. And on your desktop.

Yeah, you're using my desktop there, yeah. This seems like a great pairing as well if you have like a Steam slash Kodi box. This seems like a great pairing as well if you have like a Steam slash Kodi box or – Yeah, it's what I was just thinking is upstairs in my office, I'll often watch TV shows on my Linux rig and I use Unified Remote to be able to control it from my Android device. But now I could just use it. Yeah, you don't have to unlock it. You don't have to – you just grab it. Yeah, I could just use it as a regular controller. Yep.

That is really cool. I'm really excited and we won't spend all of Linux Action Show this Friday because it's going to be our Ubuntu review, but I'll give you an update on what it's like to actually use it with a few games and with a few profiles and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's an exploded view. Exactly, Lord. That's exactly what it is on the box. And I'd be curious if you've gotten one, what your experiences are, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Heck, linuxactionshow.reddit.com is a great place to go to give us feedback on this particular topic or anything else.

Somebody in the mumble room have something they want to shut in before we wrap up? I heard somebody open up their mic. You're welcome to. No? Okay. We're friendly. We promise. Open FOS train. We'll have the link in the show notes. And that right there will signal the end of this week's episode of Linux Unplugged Show. Thank you very much for joining us, mumble room.

We'd love to have you guys join us. Go over to jblive.tv for the live show or even better, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Find when we're doing Linux Unplugged and join us in our virtual lug. We really do treat it that way. This is the community's lug, man. We love it. And if you can't make it to a local one in your area, at least attend a virtual one. Or even if you can, why not supplement it with our virtual one?

We don't judge. We're friendly. And we only bite when you ask. That's true. And honestly, honestly, we love the conversation. jblive.tv. Join us. You can't judge. We're friendly. And we only bite when you ask. That's true. And honestly, honestly, we love the conversation. JBLive.tv. Join us.

You can hang out in the chat room or if you can't catch us live, LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you back here next week. Thank you, everybody. Great show.

Good stuff. Lots to cover this week. It's all over the place. It was going to be a hard one to title. Boy, this Steam link is really solid. Feel that thing. It feels like a solid piece of... Ooh, yeah.

It's like an external hard drive, but kind of even more dense. Yeah, it's very dense. JBTitles.com, let's pick a title. That thing looks like you could throw it across the room and it'll still work. Yeah, it would put a hole through the wall. HDMI, Ethernet. Reminds me of the Super Nintendo. Does anybody remember that beast?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. I've started using firefox on my android phone because it's better than really on the android a ton better what's better even chrome people love it more really really versus uh versus chrome on the android there so chrome on the android basically does nothing android does everything you need it to do. It has add-ons. It has good tabbing structure.

It's not incredibly limited. It works fine. Perfect. It works fine. Nice. It has an actual quit extension. I want to. What's a quit extension?

You can even install Android or the add-on for LastPass. Great, right? Yay, finally. I can finally. Oh, good, good. A bit late for that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not using Ubuntu browser. I have a theory as to why Chrome is kind of bare bones and Android. They don't want you blocking content. For instance, like Firefox has add-ons for like ad control. Since Google's an ad company, it would make sense that they wouldn't want to build an add-on system because they don't want people creating ad blockers. Yeah, but then would you think they'd really be willing to make one of their most important products less competitive? On mobile, I think they're

willing to do it. I don't think they're willing to do it. I don't think they're willing to do it on desktop because otherwise Chrome wouldn't be able to compete on the desktop. It's got the advantage of being pre-installed on Android. So why would you bother installing another browser in the same way? The only reason why people install other browsers on Windows is because the one that comes with it is crap. On Android, the one that comes with it is pretty decent.

Well, no, it's crap. It's basically Edge. It's a limited – it works. It has support for standards, but pretty much it's limited crap. So on the platform where they are the incumbent browser, they're the least competitive. That isn't that interesting. Isn't that just exactly what Microsoft – Well, their only real competition is Firefox? Isn't that just exactly what Microsoft...

That's exactly what Microsoft did. As soon as Internet Explorer became the incumbent browser, they got nice and lazy, didn't they? Is it sad that I've actually been using Safari pretty regularly now? Safari? Oh, on the iPhone. What else are you going to use on the iPhone?

Chrome. Yeah, I know. Chrome is actually a little bit nicer on the iPhone than on Android, actually. Just a comparison. I mean, you can't really make it your default browser, though. You can use it, and you can copy URLs, and some apps even have supports if they detect you have Chrome installed because they can do the URL handle.

All the Google apps will actually map you to Chrome instead of to Safari. Yeah, exactly. But otherwise, Safari is the default browser. Actually, Safari on iOS 9 doesn't seem to be that bad. No, it's pretty okay. Yeah, it is interesting. State of Chrome.