LINUX Unplugged - Episode 159: All Wimpy's Vault! | LUP 159

Episode Date: August 24, 2016

We become masters of our own files this week, chat with the ElementaryOS project about inspiring future development & rolling our own file sync solution.Plus a quick look at the new Android N & why now might be the ideal time to switch to a Linux based phone OS.It’s a packed episode!

Did I miss all the media server discussions the last couple of weeks completely? We have had some on and off. It's sort of like a project I have been working on because I want to do a review for the Linux Action Show. And I've been kind of going through OpenMediaVault, RockFiler, of course FreeNAS I'm familiar with. So I kind of just – I'm bringing some of that into it without actually currently – I mean I currently use FreeNAS, but I'm not currently installing it. And OpenFiler, I believe. Did I say OpenFiler? That's the one we agreed you weren't going to look at.

Which has all been whittled down to OpenMediaVault just simply based on looking at either the fact that what their technology stack is or how long they've been since they've been updated or what Wimpy's been poking me about that's gotten me excited. You know, all those things factor in. But actually, legitimately, looking at it all, it seems like Open Media Vault has the best trajectory and long-term sustainability for a project like this, which is exactly what I want for my file server. And I like the folks behind it. And I like the whole stack.

And I like the community. So Open Media Vault is the winner. So now that's the one I'm going to focus on for the review. And I have a basic, basic setup on a NUC right now, an i7 older generation NUC, but it does have USB 3 attached to a three terabyte RAID 1 disk setup over USB 3.0. And that's also connected to a, what are those called? A UPS, which I'm hoping to test like Open Media Vault support for that, which I haven't gotten to yet. I haven't actually hooked it all up. It supports that. That's how I run it.

Yeah, and I want to just test that all. And then I also plan to test how much power it draws and all of that stuff. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 159 for August 23rd, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux podcast that's broadcasting from all over the world, right here, right now. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Angela. Hello.

It's great to have you in studio. Angela will be joining us this week to keep us grounded, to give us the new user's perspective. But fear not, Mr. Payne's reporting in from the field on location. Hello, Wes. Hello, everyone. It's good to be here. Hello, hello. So we have a great show lined up today.

We got some big open source project updates to give you. Of course, LinuxCon's going on. There's a bit of interesting tidbits that have came out of that. A couple of gentlemen from the Elementary OS Project have stopped by to tell us what they've got cooking. Later on in the show I'll tell you about some of my woes. I know I love myself the rolling release, but I think I finally got bit this morning. In the worst way possible. I'll tell finally got bit this morning in the worst way possible. I'll tell you about that coming up in the show. Then later on, LibreVault.

It promises to replace BitTorrent Sync and SyncThing, bring the best of both of them to one GPL3-based project. What is it, and why do we keep talking about it, and is it actually feasible? LibreVault gets a little test today and we'll give you our report. And then later on in the show, the new version of Android's out. Marshmallow? No more. It's all about that nougat now. I've got it loaded.

I'll give you my first thoughts and why I think it's damn near time I switch to Ubuntu Touch. That's right. That's right. I'm actually, you know, the thing is, every now and then, you got to reassess. And that's right. That's right. And actually, you know, the thing is, every now and then, you gotta reassess, and

that's the phase I'm at, so I'll share that with you guys. But first, we gotta bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Oh my gosh! Oh no. Powerful stuff today. Oh, I feel kind of violated almost.

That was... You alright, Ange? That is a room. That is a room. Oh, I feel kind of violated almost. That was, whew. You all right, Ange? That is a room. That is a room. All right, so you guys have all heard the big news today. Microsoft's got you scratching your heads with the announcement of PowerShell coming to Linux. GNU slash Linux is now the home of PowerShell. First it started with.NET, and then, of course, the next domino to fall was the.NET-based PowerShell.

Microsoft obviously reaching out to system administrators that have to manage Windows boxes from Linux boxes and Azure enthusiasts. But I have to tell you, every time Microsoft makes a move like this, I kind of sit here and go, what's next? What is next? It started really with.NET and then Visual Studio Code and now this. really with.NET and then Visual Studio Code and now this. And I thought for a second here and I thought, holy crap.

Did Microsoft just become one of the biggest proprietary companies in the world to figure out how to make money on open source? Oh, that's a thought. Kind of. Right. We always talk about how do you make money on open source? Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along and they figure out how to actually sell software as a service via Azure and then how to use open source as sort of its backup dancers to bring people into its platform and generate revenue. Who would have thought? Microsoft.

It's fascinating to watch them do this. Wes, have you messed at all with PowerShell? Microsoft. It's fascinating to watch them do this. Wes, have you messed at all with PowerShell? I've written some things back in the dark days when I had Windows machines to support. Thankfully, not anymore. It's kind of an interesting environment. You get all the.NET goodness. A lot of people talk about how cool it is to pass objects around in the pipeline.

It's kind of got a neat, you know, you get class-based things. You have all the access to the.NET stuff. And at the same time, you have what you might call function composition where you can pass things to each other. You don't have to parse text. You can just get properties of objects. So that's neat, but personally I'm kind of more interested in Python or other things like that, and I don't see that much of a need.

But for interruptibility and working with Windows tools, definitely it's far better than the Windows command line. Mr. Tunnell there has to... I totally agree with Wes. What's the point? Python exists, Bash exists. As a sysadmin, I don't need a shell. I think Ange could tell you.

So Ange, picture this. Picture it's me. We were just talking on the pre-show back when, the bad old days when I had to use Outlook under Crossover Office. I would do whatever it took to be able to manage the Windows systems I was responsible for from a Linux desktop. Yes. And for me, if I could have had a Linux compatible Windows automation tool where I could have wrote scripts for Windows systems from my Linux box, I totally would have jumped on

that. Yep. And so I think that's who it's for. But I totally would have jumped on that. Yep. And so I think that's who it's for. But I kind of agree. Go ahead. Answerable? Yeah, I know.

Right. And I think that's where I think that's why this move is necessary for them to keep this tool relevant. I great. So it's doing what Microsoft have always done. It's reacting. It's not being this trailblazer that you make them out to be. It's reacting. I don't know if I mean to make them out to be a trailblazer so much as I am sort of in awe of the fact that they keep doing this and I just don't know where it's going to end.

That's the story that fascinates me about it. I think you have to acknowledge that this is without a doubt about revenue for them and they wouldn't be doing it without it, without that motivation. They're not doing it for RMS purposes, right, Mr. Tunnell? Yeah, they're selectively listening to RMS. So like showing that you could give away the software and use the services to make money. Like RMS has said for years. But then, you know, also proprietary and everything else. Yeah.

Also proprietary and everything else. Yeah. So, but you know what? In some weird kind of way, I think it's actually better for a company like Microsoft that it's the bottom line that's forcing them to do this and not some moral rationale. Because leadership, as we've seen at Microsoft, changes. Board members can make things move around. There's corporate restructuring that's happened. There's many layoffs've seen at Microsoft, changes. Board members can make things move around. There's corporate restructuring that's happened. There's many layoffs that happen at Microsoft. CEOs even come and go over time at Microsoft.

And if it's a moral sort of community imperative that's driving them, that could easily change with the next CEO or the next board. You can't argue with the bottom line though exactly very well said yeah it keeps a company like Microsoft in the game because their livelihood depends on it it's also a good example of showing how the open source system like this open source software works in a way that a lot of people say it doesn't because you can't make money off giving away the stuff and like when a lot of people You mean like Microsoft has said? Like Microsoft has said for a long time. Well, I was referencing people who were regurgitating

what Microsoft says, but the fact that Microsoft is changing their tune is maybe a way to show everybody else that there is a reason why open source works. Chris, I kind of think this relates to my prediction that I

made a long ago about Microsoft and Canonical and that, because if you think about it... Are you foreseeing a merger here? A marriage of two companies? Yeah, especially after the release of Ubuntu 17.04, which

will be the last in alphabetical order in that, it'll be Z. And then after that, because Mark's run out of letters, he's going to call good? Yep, pretty much. You know what? Just a double A. Yeah, maybe you're right, Mr. Liu. Maybe you're right.

I've heard crazier theories. There's still A and C, which haven't been filled yet. So there's a couple more releases to go. This week is the 25th birthday of Linux. Happy birthday, Linux. I'd play the jingle, but it would get us pulled down. I know. The Linux Foundation, as they do, likes to note the occasion.

And they've noted a couple of things that are interesting. 13,500 developers from more than 1,300 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git, made detailed tracking possible. Now, that is something else. 5,000 developers from 400 companies have contributed to the kernel. Nearly half these developers contributed for the first time. The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Lenaro, Samsung, SUSE, IBM, Renes, or Renas, I don't know how you say that one,

Google, AMD, Texas Instruments, and, you guessed it, ARM. Oh, didn't hear Microsoft in there. You know, they actually did show up on the radar for one year. Really? Yeah, they did. They were contributing to making the drivers for Hyper-V. The rate of Linux development continues to increase, as does the number of developers and companies involved in the process.

The average number of changes except in the Linux kernel per hour is 7.8, which is up from 7.71 in the last report. What is kind of not really said here, but is fascinating is, and I guess I'd kind of be curious to get the Mumble Room's take on this, predominantly the contribution

to the Linux kernel is corporate sponsors, companies. Does anybody have any qualms about the fact that predominantly all of Linux is developed by commercial companies trying to make money off Linux? Chris, this is kind of not related, but in order to say happy birthday to Linux, I only have one thing to say, and I say it in the chat room a lot whenever he's brought up. All hail King Linus!

And the value of this is negative. So, okay, go ahead, Mr. Bitton. And to celebrate the Sphinx Linux Foundation told on their keynote, on Thursday people are going to have a black tie or a penguin or a Linux related shirt. I wish we could have gone Toronto though kind of made it

unfeasible for us to go but yeah they've been doing the keynotes there is a live stream and you've been watching it. Yeah at least one or two hour I've been busy with work but I watched the first ones at least. And anything jump out at you any kind of impressions you took away? first ones at least. And anything jump out at you? Any kind of impressions you took away? I haven't really thought that much about it. I guess it hasn't struck you, huh? I only had time to watch

an hour. I was too busy and stuff. Yeah, it was just a little expensive for us to go, but I would have liked to have attended. It's always fun to be able to go to those events. I did make it last year when they had it in Seattle. That was good. It wasn't just too long ago. All right. So we are going to chat with the gentleman from Elementary OS here in just a moment. They've got something pretty cool they're working on. And you may have seen it go by if you've been watching the Twitters or the

Reddits. And we're going to talk to him about it. But first, I want to talk to you about my mobile service provider. And that's Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to get a $25 discount off your first device. Or if you bring a device, you'll get $25 in service credit. Now, you could probably scrounge up a device because they support CDMA and GSM. You just go to their BYOD page and find out which ones are supported. They're on a mission to really make mobile simple. It's just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. You just pay for them individually.

What you use is what you pay for. It's $6 for the line, plus Uncle Sam's dirty take, like he always does. He's got his hand in your pocket, that Uncle Sam. And it's really straightforward. Your customer service is amazing. They've got regular human beings that are geeks that you get to talk to. They've got an incredible control panel. And, Ange, did you hear about the big news for Ting?

There's big news afoot, Ange. They've dropped their data prices on Ting. Did you hear about the big news for Ting? There's big news afoot, Ange. They've dropped their data prices on Ting. Did you hear about this? Oh, that's great. Yeah, check it out. It's kind of a big deal. So they've now gotten competitive across the board with just about damn near anybody. Pay for what you use wireless is a great model. No gimmicks, no leather jackets required. Data is now cheaper on Ting. From now on, prices look like this. Need more? It's just $10 per gigabyte beyond the one gigabyte level. Really simple to understand.

Ting's data pricing is obvious. And if you want to know more, they have a great blog post about it. Start by going to linux.ting.com. Check out any of their devices. Feature phones all the way up to real nice Cadillac devices. In fact, if I recall, they're doing a giveaway of, yeah, the Galaxy S7 Edge.

Oh, man. Oh, man. 3,600 milliamp battery, Arduino 430 GPU, four gigabytes of RAM, 5.5 inch quad HD display. And they're giving it away for free. You just got to subscribe. Making me drool, Chris. Making me drool.

Wes, it's like the Cadillac. It's the Cadillac, Wes. You got to subscribe to their Ting account on YouTube. Simple, simple, simple. And then comment on their unboxing video. And do that in the next three days. So think about that. You subscribe to their channel.

You comment on the video. And by the 26th, you could get a free S7. They do this a lot, too. So it's worth doing if you want a free phone because that's not going to be a huge group. And this is going out to a lot of folks that could act on that. So I would jump in. See if you could get that free phone and then let me know. I would, oh, man, I'd be so jelly.

Free S7 on Ting, there's nothing better. You take some of the best phones, you put them on the Ting network, it's a match made in heaven. Pay for what you use. They don't get in the way of the updates. I've got the Nexus 6P and guess what? I'm already running Android N.

Ting doesn't play that game where they get in the way of your updates. They get you basically a dumb pipe. If you want to use it for data, go ahead. You want to use it to make calls, Ting don't care. They're Honey Badger. And that's what I love about it. They just get you connected.

Linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring your Unplugged program. And thanks to all of you guys out there for visiting. That's what keeps us on the air. Linux.ting.com. And then, you know, maybe go get yourself an S7 and then make me totes jelly. I would love that. So Louis and Fabian are joining us today from Elementary OS,

and they're going to talk to us about a little hack fest they're trying to put together in Paris. In fact, they've raised an Indiegogo page to try to get some funding going to make this thing possible. So gentlemen, welcome to the show. And I don't know if you guys want to fight it out between you, maybe to the death, Kirk and Spock style. And tell me which one of you wants to start with why an Indiegogo page for a hack fest? Yeah, I think I'll take that one.

Go ahead. We currently raise funds on our website. And that mainly goes to the elementary employees and those funds are pretty tied up with paying the employees. So we thought

it would be a good idea to raise the money for the Hackfest separately so we don't cut into the money we need for the employees. And Fabian, you're located in Paris, right? No, I'm actually located in Switzerland. Oh, okay.

But because the event is in Paris, we put that in place. I see. And so what's going to take place at a hackfest like this? Is this sort of the kickoff for the next version of elementary OS, sort of get everybody together in one room and brainstorm and begin writing code? Yeah, that's the idea here. We want to brainstorm what we want to do for the next release, but also look at a few things

we already have on our bug tracker maybe, and maybe do a little bit of finishing work on Loki. It depends. We have to see. Do you plan to have any kind of report or summary or anything interesting for people who do support you to see what awesome things come out of this Hackfest? Yeah, we are planning to

do a blog post on it, at least. Not sure what will be in it yet. Well, right. Great. So you're raising funds for this Hackfest, but is attendance free? Or will there be a sign-up page where a fee is paid

actually then i think that's a clear point to make to kind of for people understand it's not necessarily for people to attend it's not like a like a fest or an event is it it's not necessarily something that's closed but it's um something where currently there's just a gist that people are coming commenting on and it's just sort of getting people organized who are going to pop in. But this is a four-day thing, so the people that are staying over are just elementary people who have been pre-organized. Okay. So you're right that it's not totally open as such. It is sort of you need to ask to attend.

Man, I wish we had somebody we could send. You need to ask to attend. Man, I wish we had somebody we could send. So I don't know. Maybe if we want to give Lewis a chance to jump in. You know, I've read some of the comments, guys, and like on some subreddits and things like that. And people just don't seem to grok the value in you guys doing this. Why not do a Google Hangout? I guess, you know, and I'm looking at it right now.

You guys launched it yesterday and you're already doing pretty good. You've got 26 backers, almost $493 US have been raised. And you have a real reasonable goal of 1800. I'm almost surprised to see you haven't popped it yet. And I kind of wanted to give you guys a chance to sort of explain why sort of a in-person meeting is actually important to the process. Lewis, do you want to jump on that one? Sure. Well, historically, we haven't sort of had much of meetings going on in the European community. I think there was some things that have been attended in Germany, but that was a case of people who are actually employees of elementary being

flown over from America so that this will be the first time that that sort of group of people have actually met each other obviously we found that when the sort of American siblings of that community have got together they've done they've got a ridiculous amount of work and some very long-standing stuff sorted out over the course of a few days just because it's so much faster to be talking in person and you can just show someone your screen instead of needing to screenshot it and upload it somewhere and post it yeah and have a discussion about that it's so much quicker to do that in person than it is to do that online as you do normally sure and even when there's only two or three people meeting up uh we've seen just there'll just be a flood of stuff suddenly get

fixed and you can just tell it's all just coming off of them typically and uh there's there's that there's like the actual code that gets created or the documentation or the project outline. But, Wimpy, I kind of want to throw it to you just for a moment because I think you'll agree with me. There's also an energy or an enthusiasm that sort of gets created and then shared amongst the team when you have an in-person meeting that translates to actual productive work. Do you agree? Yeah, I do. to actual productive work. Do you agree? Yeah, I do. So I haven't met Fabian or, um, Lewis, but I did make three of their colleagues at the snappy sprint, um, a few weeks ago. And that was, uh, uh, Daniel Cortan and Cody. And prior to that, I'd got a passing,

a sort of more or less, um, developer acquaintance with cody and i kind of knew of daniel but didn't really know him and through the course of that week although we were focused on um snappy stuff during the day out out of the the sprint you develop some personal relationships and some friendships and some understanding as to who these people are that you're trying to communicate with that outlives that brief period of you being in the same room together and now means that we have a much easier way of communicating with each other over the internet having spent some time in person yeah it makes those text chats um easier to parse because you have a personality model to apply it to yeah and and i absolutely see the

value in elementary crowdfunding a get together like this because actually getting people in in the same place together isn't only productive but it builds those relationships those working relationships and those personal understandings that really bind a project together so i i'm all in favor of of what elementary are doing here and i think that crowdfunding not just these kind of activities but crowdfunding in general is the financing model for independent open source projects for the 21st century why do you think that because it works you don't have to ask for lots of down payment and investment from individuals what you're looking for is small affordable amounts of money from lots of people and and you can do an awful lot with that. And I think that that model works very well.

There's certainly a place for corporate sponsorship and corporate-led projects and governance and things like that. But for the independent projects, I think crowdsourcing is still fairly new and in its infancy. And I think people are still finding their way with the blend and how to do things. and in its infancy, and I think people are still finding their way with the blend and how to do things. But different people need to explore the options and find out where it works, where it's unsuccessful, and then refine that and reproduce it in the future. So, and perhaps Fabian or Lewis, if you guys, I'm noticing something you're doing, and Wimpy just totally touched on it perfectly, But I'm noticing something you're doing and Wimpy just totally touched on it perfectly, that blending of funding for open source projects. So the best model I have is Jupyter Broadcast and we have sponsors like you just heard from and we have Patreon. And we blend the two to sort of balance out not only multiple revenue streams.

So if one dies, we don't die as a company. But two, so we can sort of leverage one to build projects up. Like, for example, we have something coming soon that we're relying on the crowdfunding to actually finance the creation of this thing to make it viable, which is really great because there's no outside influence on creating this new thing. But it's not just one or the other. And I think it was Fabian who said one of the things they're doing here – ooh, a little ambiance there. I like that. One of the things Fabian said they're doing here is we use the traditional funding model we have to pay full-time employees, and because this is something sort of above and beyond what we normally do,

we're going back to our user base and saying, please help us here. Do you guys want to touch on at all why break it out like this? Is it mainly down to things are pretty tight and it's hard to raise funds, so when you want to do something big like this, are you going to the user base hoping that the same people who may already be funding it will go above and beyond, or are you hoping that new folks will come into the fold? Fabian, do you want to take that? Are you hoping that new folks will come into the fold? Fabian, do you want to take that?

Yeah. The reasons for this are probably both. We do want new users to contribute who maybe didn't contribute when they first got elementary hours. Maybe they like it. They've been impressed by now. Yeah. Or also get the users that are using it and liking it to directly impact changes now.

Because getting together like that will certainly help push the next release out faster. So I just want to vote with my own wallet here. By the way, Ange, I backed it today. I threw him just a little bit of money. So they have the Indiegogo campaign, which we will link in the show notes, the Elementary Hackfest in Paris. I threw him some money just because on my own professional experience, I can tell you absolutely that first of all, $1,800 is a ridiculously low amount for what you guys are doing. And the value of what you're doing is easily $10,000 value for the end users of having a tighter-knit team that likes each other more, that has more compassion for each other and understanding of each other will translate to a distribution that is supported by that team for longer, that has a higher level of passion that goes into creating the software, that has better communication understanding amongst the team members, that is likely easier to resolve issues amongst the team members.

It is so super fundamentally valuable for the long-term viability of this distribution that it just, I don't personally run it, but our son runs elementary OS. And for me, it was a no-brainer to back this because he's gotten more than a year of use out of the last version of elementary OS. I can't wait to upgrade him to the next version of elementary OS. And for that alone, it's worth investing in that team to just keep making great stuff. And even if I only use it on one of the many computers in all of the computers that I take care of, it's absolutely valuable.

And if you're an elementary OS user where you kind of grok what they're going, it's maybe worth throwing them a few bucks because they have a flexible goal and they've reached 27%. And I would love to see them get $5,000 because $1,800 is not enough for what they're doing. And it's kind of our way. Some of the people – elementary has got a great desktop experience. That's something Linux, we're really fighting for and the other companies out there that are, you know, making these competing products, uh,

you're, they're absolutely paying for team lunches and outings and going to conferences. So if this is a small way, the open source community can contribute back and get the same kind of experience. I think that's great. So,

uh, guys, anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up and, you know, best of luck to you. We'll have a link in the show notes. People want to lazy web it. Not really, but thanks for your contribution.

Yeah, no problem. I'm glad to back it, and I hope you guys can pull it off. And if anything, I would love to hear an update from you folks down the road because you're always welcome to join us in the Mumba Room and let us know how it's going, because you're always welcome to join us in the Mumba Room and let us know how it's going, especially because one of the things we try to do here on the Unplugged show is give every major viewpoint a good chance and a platform to voice it. And I don't think elementary OS is the distro for everyone, but for the folks that love it, I think they are super happy to have it, and I think it's incredibly important that there is a team out there that is looking with such a critical eye at how to build a great desktop environment for Linux users and how to really make a product that is whole from beginning to end.

And that's something that's desperately needed in the open source community. And so that alone, I think, makes the project valuable, even if I'm not a daily driver of it. And so best of luck to you guys. And I hope people out there, even if they're not a daily driver of it, see some of the value there. So good luck. And hopefully we'll hear a report of how it went in Paris if all goes well. Okay. I got to talk about something.

If you're a patron, you might already know about this. But if you're a Linux user, if you like Linux Unplugged and Linux Action Show, then I may have something that pertains to your interests. Tomorrow, actually as you listen to this, it should be available. Yeah, I was just going to say. We have a new show that's launching on the Jupyter Broadcasting Network. What? I know.

I know. I'm super excited about it. I'm really, really stoked. We're trying out a bunch of new technology on the back end. So it's incredibly fun from that standpoint. It is really something that we have been kind of percolating for, I don't know, two years. And it just sort of has all kind of finally come together in a really, really, really slick. I really enjoyed it. And the response has been super, super good. And by response, he means from the patrons that have subscribed and got to see it and know about it, what, a week ago? Yeah, I released it late last week to the patrons.

And so, yeah, the show is going to be called... Are you ready for this? I'm going to reveal it for the first time. Wait, music, soundboard, something. Oh, something? Okay. No? Wow, no. Oh, something? Okay. No? Wow, no. Not that?

No? Was that the wrong one? Sorry. Okay, how about this? Triumphant. Breaking news on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network. We are about to reveal the new show. Sources familiar with the matter tell us it's going to be called, get ready, user error.

User error. And it is something that is near and dear to my heart. Think of it like this. Everyone makes mistakes. We're just going to make great show content out of them. Insightful. It's going to be a little bit, it's not going to take itself too seriously. So it will be a little irreverent, I guess.

not going to take itself too seriously, so it'll be a little irreverent, I guess, and we'll take sort of the weekly issues from the community as Linux users ourselves, mistakes we've made, and also just things we're doing throughout the week. It is a relaxed, enjoyable talk show. The first

episode is out. It is Noah, myself, and making his network debut, The Beard, Mr. Reikai, as the third host. No way. That's amazing. Yep, yep. It's true.

And it's great. And it starts out good and it stays strong the entire episode. I really enjoyed recording it. We're using a bunch of new technology to do it, not only on the recording aspect of it, but also on the publishing end of it, and it's all Linux-based. And so episode one, you can go check it out at jupyterbroadcasting.com, user error one. We talk about kind of a smattering of things, my experience with Linux on the MacBook and

getting No Man's Sky working, but also we talk quite a bit about tiling window managers and Noah's attempt to get into that whole space and sort of my issues about it. We finally give you a tiling window manager review, which I think turned out really great. New features that are coming to JBot and some of the code that we've been writing to make that possible. And NOAA has recently got into development. And we talk about that. We talk about developing Python and Ruby. So the whole show, it's about an hour long, and it just turned out great.

So you can check it out at jupyterbroadcasting.com. Brand new show for you Linux users. It's called User Air. And I'm really happy with the way it turned out. So on last, are we going to be expecting to see Xmonad? Yeah, right? Actually, I think you'll have to listen to the episode or watch it, but I think he ended up going with awesome. Oh, very nice. Yeah, right. Actually, I think you'll have to listen to the episode or watch it, but I think he ended up going with Awesome.

Oh, very nice. His review was really interesting. Kind of got me my interest piqued. So yeah, there you go. I'm excited. And yeah, the patrons have got it, and we've gotten 100% positive feedback on it so far. What an exciting thing. It's like, you know, once in every few years thing, a new JB show.

Yeah, yeah. And it's super fun for us to do a whole new tech to do it. There was no Mac touch the entire process, which is really fun. And we used some back-end scripts that we're hoping we can work with the folks. They have a really great team over at PodPublish to integrate some of the cool things that we're working on with. We'll see.

So, yeah, it is slick and if you're a commuter or if you consume us via YouTube, it's out right now. There's RSS feeds. You can subscribe to it. All of it's published. It's in iTunes. It's in the Google Play Store.

It's all ready to go. We've got everything ready and loaded to go, although we do need to get Aaron to update the drop-down menu and the show menu thing. Okay. But, yeah. So I'm very excited. I listened to the pilot episode. I mean, I was actually there for it. Yeah, the secret live.

Yeah, the sneaky live stream the secret, yeah, the sneaky live stream. Yeah, thank you. I do have a suggestion. Considering it's more of a loose conversation-based show, why don't you include the mumble room in on it? Maybe one day, maybe one day. I'll tell you what, the audio quality of the show is like nothing else we've ever done i mean it is it is far and beyond anything we've ever recorded before it like i said like i was

saying earlier the new audio the new one of some of the new technology we're using is also a uh um a technology stack that that automates double-ended recording which for if you if you know what that means that's kind of a big deal for us. And that kind of makes it harder to do mumble. But we do appreciate a good technical challenge. So it's not outside the realm of possibility. I don't know if this would work to give you a sample in the show. That might be kind of weird. But I will give you a little sample of what the audio quality is here.

Ideas? If you take a more skeptical approach, then when in a couple months you end up running a tiling window manager, I'll just have more fun saying I was right. So as somebody that's run a tiling window manager in the past, I'm going to say that's not true. That I won't have more fun? No, that Chris is not going to end up liking it. It just doesn't suit the style of desktop that he is used to. Tell me – OK.

Let's start with this. In the same way that I gave you both credit for being able to evaluate an operating system from a completely neutral, no-bias standpoint. Let's try and do that with desktop environments. And for everyone out there that's – that's... I'll stop it there. I'll tell you one of the things that also I really like about this show is, I'll just say now, I don't know if I'll really ever mention it in the show, so you'll only really know if you ever

listen to 159 of Linux Unplugged, probably. But a secret of this show is I'm going to edit it a bit. So most of our shows, they're all live to tape, if you can call it that, live to disc. And what you get is what you get. We don't generally edit these at all, and that's how I've done it for a decade.

Now that's going to change. With user error, from time to time, I will cut it down. I will make it more refined. time to time. I will cut it down. I will make it more refined. I will take the more insightful and intelligent things we say and focus on those and sort of cut out some of the extra. I haven't done it. It's not heavy handed. So the original episode of User Error, episode one, was an hour and 14 minutes long. The raw recording. The published version is like an hour and three minutes. Is that right? Yeah, there you go. So it kind of gives you a sense of I took some stuff.

I just tightened it up. I made it so that way hopefully we keep your attention and everything we say in there has a good intention behind it. And so that's the idea with user error is it's got a little different feel. It's a little more relaxed, a little bit more intentional. And it's definitely one of those shows where we're going to sometimes go down a rabbit hole. We're going to sort of give ourselves license to just let people who are passionate about Linux and technology have the floor from time to time. Linux and technology have the floor from time to time. And I'm really excited about where we're going to go with that because the combination of that freedom, but yet tightening it up and making what the end product is really something

that's solid, I think is going to be incredible. So that's User Error Episode 1. It's out right now. You can subscribe to it. And I'm very excited about it. It's gotten 100% positive feedback so far. You can be the first person to crap in my punch bowl if you like. And a big thank you to Rikai for

finally, after all of these years, I know, it is kind of crazy. At least six or seven. No, more than that. I think eight years. And you know what? He's brilliant. I've been wanting...

From the day we set up the studio, I thought one day I'll get that guy on mic. Eventually I get everybody on mic. Eventually everybody that's in my daily life ends up on microphone or on camera. It just seems to be the way it goes. So that's out now. And thank you to our patrons who funded it to make it possible for us to create a show. And the first question that didn't come to our mind is how do we make it sponsorable? How do I sell this?

The question was what's the audience going to want to listen to? I think that's huge. What is it, Ang? Breaking news here? Yeah, what do we got? Oh, Mr. Wimpy, go ahead. So I just hit play and I noticed that you've got audio spectrum analysis running against a still image. Is that produced using FFmpeg or something else? So yes and yes. And Rikai would probably be the guy to talk to about this.

But what we found was there was a Python GTK application that uses FFmpeg and I think AVConvert or something on the back end. It needed some updates because it was built for like Ubuntu three, four years ago. And it uses like Ubuntu's old – Hello. Hello. Who is that? Who is that? Mr. Mike.

Yeah, thank you. It uses Ubuntu's old FFmpeg libraries and stuff like that. But Rikai made some changes to one of the main Python scripts, and it fired right up. And it gives me a GUI to input the file and the background and the text and then generates the video file. And what we want to do is integrate that eventually into PodPublish, I believe. So, yeah, so there you go, Wimpy.

Rikai just linked you the plug-in. Yep, perfect. And in Python, that's just perfect. Isn't it? That's great. And I guess that's the other thing to kind of touch on here is if everything goes swimmingly, User Air will be hopefully helping make podcasting on Linux easier, even more automated, and a little visually richer. And that's one of our goals, too.

So it's super fun to be working on a project like that that also has some wider community. Yeah, just pioneering it, basically. Yeah. I mean, I was so happy when I found PodPublish. And then the fact that it's a snap, Wimpy, really was sort of the final nail, if you will, because it meant that I could produce the entire thing for my Apollo under Arch. So thank you for snapping that up and continuing that project. Now, did you want to talk about how often it will be released?

So our plan is Wednesday morning over at Jupiter Broadcasting. We'll see if that goes because, again, since it's kind of experimental technology, things could break. But, you know, we kind of have a hole as far as technical content on Wednesdays. Right now on Filter comes out Wednesday

evenings. BSD Now gets recorded during the day, but it doesn't get released. So we kind of have a hole there in the schedule. If you are a Linux user wanting some tech content and not politics, there's nothing really there for you on Wednesdays. And so our plan is to release it Wednesday mornings, if all works, to make it available. So that way, on Sunday, you'll have Linux Action Show. Monday, you have Coder Radio and Tech Talk Today. Tuesday, you have Linux Unplugged. Wednesday, you have User Air. Thursday, you'll have Linux Action Show. Monday, you have Coder Radio and Tech Talk Today. Tuesday, you have Linux Unplugged. Wednesday, you have User Air. Thursday, you'll have Tech Snap.

Okay, and so then for those that like joining live, like the entire Linux Unplugged audience that's listening right now and participating in the Mumble Room, will it be ever recorded live or is it all? I think so. I think so. It's, you know, it's interesting because they're two totally different shows, right?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so I think so. We recorded the first one live. But don't count on it, I guess. If you're thinking, oh, I'm going to catch a live one. I think we'll always do a live. But I'm just, you know, it's just I don't know if we'll always do it at the same time. Because the whole concept behind the show is I really want all of us to be in a chill mood when we record it.

Sure. I just want us to be able to sit back and talk about stuff and not be stressed out. And that might not be possible for three people. And I hope in the future to have Wes join us and talk about stuff and not be stressed out. And that might not be possible for three people. And I hope in the future to have Wes join us. That's exciting. And bring on different JB hosts from time to time. So you'll be able to hear your hosts from other shows sort of get in on this show, which I'm hoping super high-fidelity audio quality.

Everybody will have local recordings using Zencaster for that, which automates. And Wimpy, if you guys, I don't know, Wimpy, what are you using for the Ubuntu podcast for local recordings? There's a utility called Audio Recorder, which is available in a PPA. And then Mumble for the real-time chat? Yeah, so we use Mumble for the real-time chat and then the the sneaky feature of audio recorder is that you can set a time at which the recording starts so because all of our machines are ntp synced we agree we're going to start recording at 20 32 and 0 4 seconds and all of our local recordings start at the same time so i've been i've been talking to

josh and he's he's the gentleman behind zen caster with i think it's missing an e so it's sort of web web 2.0 name yeah and i don't know if you had a chance to look at zen caster it's like a web rtc front end that does all it uh one of the things interesting in user error is noah was slightly delayed from reciner reciner sitting here in the studio talking live. Noah was in Grand Forks, and he had about a half a second delay. So the other thing we do is we start the recording. So audio recorder starts recording. And then traditionally, Mark counts us in with a 3, 2, 1.

And then when it would be zero, all of us say biscuits because of course because and and then when we do when we do the edit you just line up everyone saying biscuits together and that accounts for those you know few hundred milliseconds of of jitter and it's mark that does the editing right uh it's either mark or i i'd say mark does about 60 and i do about 40 percent well it varies week to week depending on who's busiest if you ever get a wild hair doing the lamination though i think that was poppy i think that was poppy yeah poppy is chief laminator yeah wimpy if you ever get the wild hair and you want to try zencaster it will put you out of business because it manages the time sync up and it also does the VoIP aspects.

You don't have to use Mumble if you don't want, but you can just toggle that. And then it will post process and level and gate all the individual tracks and produce one file for you at the end. Oh, it does the gating as well? It does. Yeah, it does. So me being... Because we do all that in post. That's what I do too. And I'm still doing it that way, but I'm

beginning to run two versions, and I ended up for the final published version of User Air, I went with Zencaster's version of the mix. Okay. I still tweaked it a little bit. Bookmarked, and we'll have a production meeting, also known as going out for a curry at the end of the year and we'll discuss a change in production methodology.

It's fun. I'll have the creator on a future show. He's working on a big release right now. And after he's done, I plan to have him on Unplugged or last to talk about what he's doing. So Mr. West, you found that there was an update to a project we have covered in the past, and we just touched on it a little bit. I think it's GNU GUICs. It's a package manager. It's Geeks, I believe. Oh, Geeks.

Okay, thank you. GNU Geeks, a package manager that I think promises reproducible builds with everything. Am I right? Can you remind me about what this is and why it's important? Yeah. GNU Geeks is kind of interesting. They're similar to the Nix package manager slash distribution, and both of them kind of promise a functional programming-like approach to package management.

So today we see a lot of stuff with Chef, Puppet, Ansible. You want systems that are reproducible. You want to have configuration management where you have some sort of declarative style so that you can specify, I want these packages, I want these sys controls changed. I want to be able to rebuild a host on command

or spin up a new host in the cloud if you need one. But they kind of do it from a top-down approach where I can configure whatever on my Ubuntu machine and then have Chef run. And if I don't have Chef know about or specifically managing resources, then those may not get managed and they may Chef run. And if I don't have Chef, you know, know about or specifically managing resources, then those may not get managed. And they may be in a state that I don't know.

It's very easy for kind of unknown things or weird state to creep in that way. So these programs, Geeks in particular, they kind of go from the ground up where you have to specify in basically one config file all of the packages you want, all the settings you want. And they provide it in a way where it's reproducible. Oh, I like that. And it doesn't have a lot of side effects. It doesn't store a lot of state so that you basically, it runs, it processes through this one file,

and you end up with a configuration of a system. And is the advantage to that that it's super easy to replicate that to other systems? Yes. And so you get, you know, they have a lot of dependency management. The way they do it is kind of clever. They use a lot of symlinks. One of the things this enables is you can have multiple versions of what might cause conflicts in other systems. You can have multiple versions of the same package because when it builds it, it has a lot of temporary directories. Not temporary, but they're based on a hash of the file so that they're unique per build.

And if you've changed the dependencies or you've changed the compiler flags, then that will be in a different folder. And so you really have to manually, or not manually, but you really have to specify all your dependencies to get this right. But once you do, it means that you can have multiple versions. It makes it very easy to reproduce. And it lets you know that once you've got it configured, you can move it wherever, nothing will change. It will always be in that state. Huh. You know, so I got bit just this morning. It was rough, Wes. Uh, I sat, I woke up early and I thought I'm going to sneak out. It's, it's, it's, it's the technique you learn when you have young children and you wake up before them rarely. And you're like,

I've got, I've got an hour before they wake up. I used to do this all the time. And so the same thing happened this morning. I woke up an hour earlier than I expected. And I thought, I just got a free hour. So I walked out to the living room, fired up the laptop, went to launch No Man's Sky. Bubkiss didn't start, wouldn't run. And I thought to myself, oh, my, what did I update yesterday that broke my game? And this is where I thought to myself, gosh, you know, I'd really love to be able to just pin the version of Wine and just – or have this version of Wine installed just for this application. And I know there's – There are tools to manage that specifically with Wine, but this is something at a package level I could achieve, right? Yes, and because of the way it works, you can even install it on top of your – a lot of people use it just – you want the latest version of Emacs. And now we have some things like Snap packages, that sort of stuff. But this kind of has a different approach. And you can install this whole, kind of like a package source.

You can install this on top of your existing Linux implementation. I think even just all from Userland without root permissions. And then get all the packages that you might need built just for your user. Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah, and so they've just updated here. Now they're working on getting, you can compile it from source, that's where you get a lot of the power, but they also have binary packages available.

So they've been working now on, one, reproducible builds, which we've talked about before, a lot of projects are working on. And then two, they're working on their own, because of the way it's, because of the unique properties of this distribution, security updates are kind of hard. So they've been working on a technique they call grafting to keep this functional approach, but allow you to have security updates easily applied without having to rebuild all of your programs.

Well, I love that. And just super quick, reproducible builds remind me why that's super important, even though I know I'm asking for the audience. You know, mostly you just want to make sure that the program that you end up running as a binary really was compiled from the sources that you can inspect, right? So if you're running some, eventually, unless you're using something totally interpreted,

you're running a binary at some point, and it's all well and good to have access to the source code. But if you can't actually confirm that that source code would produce a bit-for-bit identical binary, then you really can't be sure that you're getting those advantages. So it's all about verifying that what you built on your system matches what the source code available for that upstream project is or whatever it is you're installing. And that seems almost vitally important. It almost seems like information you have to know in this day and age. And it certainly would be, it's one of the benefits of having access to the source and free

software and all the things that we talk about. So why not leverage it? Because it's an advantage we have built in. Exactly. Even though it's not AppImage, it's not Snaps, but it's still technically extremely interesting. And that's why I think it's fun to talk about it here on the show. And they have a new release. And it's great because Wes has been kind of following it. So thank you, Wes, for bringing it to our attention again. And we have it linked to the LWN post. Go check it out and let us know what you think. And also, like I was just saying, a heads up to those of you that are running on the

development, quote unquote, branch of wine. And you may be running on that branch of wine and not even knowing it because for some distributions, it's just the default branch of wine they install. The new version of wine, 1.9.17, breaks No Man's Sky, which is, in my opinion, and apparently the entire internet disagrees with me, the best game in the universe. But it does work fine on versions 1.9.16 and 1.9.15. I've confirmed myself. So heads up, if you are playing No Man's Sky under Wine, don't update like I did because that ruined my morning. I spent my entire morning fixing that.

The entire morning. That was rough. I thought, you know, and it was, Wes, it's funny because my first thought was, well, maybe it's this MacBook kernel AUR package. Maybe it updated, you know. No, it wasn't that. It wasn't the NVIDIA driver. It was just damn wine.

And it wasn't until I was looking for news for this show that I noticed that there was a new version of WineOut that I went, oh, wait a minute. That's what it was. So it was in preparation for the show that I noticed that there was a new version of WineOut that I went, oh, wait a minute. That's what it was. So it was in preparation for the show I discovered the problem. Just a quick, super quick update on the MacBook Linux thing. I talk about it more in user error. Wes, I've done a couple of kernel updates in the meantime. Flawless, my friend.

That is awesome. I actually clocked it. Three second boot time. Wow. I actually clocked it. Three-second boot time. Wow. Yeah, it's about seven seconds total because X11 and the NVIDIA driver add about another three to four seconds to it depending on the day.

But I don't know. Could you just super quickly – could you talk about how it's not using Grubb. It's not using Lilo. We're not using Refine to boot on this MacBook. We're using the firmware bootloader and frickin' SystemD. Can you talk about that at all? Yeah. You know, we just used to be called Gummy Boot, and then it got eaten up by SystemD.

It's so many things do for better or for worse. We can talk about that later. But it's just a really simple bootloader for EFI systems. And so the Macs, for a long time, were some of the first machines to have EFI-enabled BIOSes, if you want to call them that, or firmwares. And so because they already use that to boot the Mac OS X operating system, if you don't need a fancy menu to pick for them, and if you want Linux to be the default and then have the option to hold the option key to boot into Mac OS X when you need to, say, for firmware updates or the real-time you need to Photoshop, then you can just install it right to the FAT partition that already exists that holds the EFI bootloaders or executables. And then it just writes a simple configuration file that sets it up for you. And then the firmware will just hit that default boot file. It will load the kernel and init ramfs, and away you go.

Just a couple of other notes, because I've always been a huge doubter of Linux on the MacBook, and I've always encouraged the audience not to do it, even though they constantly email in about it. I found two packages in the AUR that were great. One was like fan control D, or I can't remember, Mac fan control D. Anyways, it's a background process. Yes, it's a daemon that runs in the background and actually manages the thermal management on the MacBook. So I'm not cooking the MacBook into hell, which was a problem.

Oh, very nice. Yeah, hugely nice, Wes. Two other packages. One that manages the keyboard backlighting, just uses the ambient light sensor in the MacBook and automatically adjusts the keyboard backlighting just as macOS 10 does. And then the last one that has been also great is the same thing using the ambient light sensor to manage the brightness on the display just like macOS does. That's a lot of usability wins right there. It really is.

And I have to say if you have an old enough MacBook, I don't know about a new model. I couldn't afford to – people are like – people said I cheated because I tried it on a 2013 MacBook instead of a – the subreddit, Ange. Yeah, I saw it. You did? Yeah, I did. They wanted me to buy a new MacBook to try this. I got to tell – Like we're made of money.

Folks, if I was going to buy a new computer today, I would not be buying a MacBook. I would be buying a machine that just runs Linux out of the box. So you're not buying a new MacBook, which is actually a three year old MacBook, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's why, that's actually why I thought it was a valid experiment was I think that MacBook, the one that I have, the 2013 is going to come down to sub, easily sub thousand dollar prices in a month. And I think when that happens, you're going to have a lot more people looking at it for Linux. When you combine the machine that I have, which is honestly a very nice computer. It is – I've been really impressed with the trackpad, with the keyboard backlighting, with the performance. But honestly, what shocks me every time I open up the screen is that 15-inch Retin display with GNOME 3.

Oh, it's beautiful. I've never seen – I've never, ever in my life seen a GUI that looks that good. Even the XPS 13, which is one of my favorite computers, which has a high DPI display, doesn't look as good. It really is amazing. It's too small. Yeah, it's exactly it. Yeah, it looks great on 15-inch.

So there's some reasons to run it, but I would say if I was buying today, I would probably buy a computer from Entraware or System76, where it was preed, designed to run Linux or even the Sputnik edition from Dell, which is also meant to run Linux. But if you are in the position of coming across a pre-owned or you have an existing MacBook and you've been thinking about it, you've been on the fence, Anagross with the Linux MacBook kernel, which is in the AUR, which you have to build every time it updates, and a couple of those packages. Just search for MacBook in the AUR. It really is a great experience. It's totally different.

I'll just add that the AntroGros installer even, it will do the systemd boot stuff for you, so it'll handle it right there. You just need to make sure you have, as we talked about, you need to make sure you have the Wi-Fi drivers or a USB Ethernet adapter. And for more details on that, just listen to episode 158 of your Unplugged program. All right.

Well, enough about that. I want to talk to Wimpy about LibreVault, which promises to bring what I love about SyncThing and what I love about BitTorrent Sync to a GPL3-licensed open source project. And we've talked about it a little bit. Wes has done some kicking of the tires. And like a gentleman, he even did a screencast of it so we could talk about it recently. And I chewed on it. I debated it.

And then Wimpy convinced me I've installed it on my machines and we're going to talk about LibreVault, why it actually matters, why it could fundamentally, I think, change distribution of open source projects and how it could enhance the Jupyter Broadcasting Network, and how it could replace Dropbox or insert name of sync application for you. It's really cool. It's really competitive. And in fact, it worked perfect on a DigitalOcean droplet. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code D-O, unplugged, all one word, lowercase.

You know, I've really boiled the pitch for DigitalOcean down to one thing. If you need a computer that doesn't have a monitor most of the time, DigitalOcean.com. Really. If you want to just accomplish something on a computer that is super fast, has really great disk I.O. because it's all SSD, and it's connected to the best internet connection possible. DigitalOcean.com. They use KVM for the virtualizer running on top of Linux. They got SSD drives for the disk I.O.

and you use our promo code D1Plugged, you get a $10 credit. You can start in less than 55 seconds. And pricing plans, $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. But actually, yeah, they break it down hourly. If you want to just experiment with something, you can spin up.

I like, like Wes for the show notes is like, here's Chris's wiki. Chris's wiki. Chris's wiki. Now, that reminded me of the fact that for just one day, I wanted Chris's wiki. You remember that? And instead of installing all of that crud and pulling down all of those dependencies on my laptop and honestly doing it over on my Vi connection, I just spun up a DigitalOcean droplet and within about two minutes, I decided no good, destroyed the droplet.

I don't even know what I paid for that because they charge an incredible price when you do it hourly. If you've got something you want to host for yourself to be fast that is really not like something you want to share with the world. DigitalOcean has private networking where your DigitalOcean droplets can talk amongst each other that isn't over the internet, which is a really nice feature. They have data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Toronto, Germany, and India.

Their interface though, oh man, back in the day when Angela and I, one of the things for the consulting company that we worked for was they did VMware hosted machines. Remember how we sold hosted solutions? Yes. To manage that, I had to run a virtual machine that ran Windows that then ran the VMware ESX management consoles just so I could manage the Linux machines inside our VMware infrastructure. And it was god-awful. Slow. Yeah, very convoluted.

DigitalOcean changes all of it. I mean, it's not just a good UI for a desktop application. It's a freaking good UI, period, for a web app, for a native app. Don't matter. DigitalOcean's got the best UI I've seen to manage this ever. Then you combine that with a great straightforward API. You can build applications around it, or you can take advantage of cool open source code already committed. Check it out.

It's really straightforward. DigitalOcean.com. Just use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the unplugged program. And by the way, check out their block storage. That's the hotness right now. They've got the ability now to add storage as you need it at the block level up to 16 terabytes, all backed by SSDs. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that nuts? DigitalOcean.com, use the promo code DLUnplugged. It's one word, lowercase. You apply that to your

account, you get a $10 credit over at DigitalOcean.com. Thanks for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So LibreVault is promising to fill a very necessary hole in the open source sync ecosystem. And I kind of wanted to open it up to Wimpy to tell me about his experiments with LibreVault because honestly, you're the one that's really got me looking at this again and again, Wimpy. Okay. Well, it's early days. It is. okay uh well it's early days it is so in fact it's so early days that i think it's only packaged for arch and ubuntu at this point right possibly it's definitely packaged for ubuntu um i've seen it in the aur um i've seen some discussion about the developer making static builds at some point so that um we can run it

wherever yeah if you want to install from the aur you first have to have qt5-tools installed and then it'll build properly but yes it is an aur so leave a comment in the aur for the package maintainer so they can fix that that's uh that's what needs to be done there um and the project the project been cooking for about a year now um but i only became aware of it about two weeks or so ago and like you chris i was really smitten with the bit sync workflow that key exchange mechanism worked really well for what i wanted to do um and i've never really been satisfied with anything else that I've tried to replace BitSync with until this.

So what I've got running at the moment is a very small setup, but on one of my desktop machines, I have LibreVault with the GUI version running, and I have a folder of stuff in a synchronized folder and then i've got two ubuntu servers that are in two different geographic locations and i just have the libre vault daemon installed on those and that comes with a systemd unit which you can run either at the global system level or you can allocate to an individual user or many users so i'm using it on a per user basis oh nice and so and that's a so you start the systemd service as that specific user yes so in this case you just uh sudo systemctl enable uh user at oh

yeah yeah okay yeah and that was the business and then from the command line there's a couple of utilities you can run uh librevolt daemon uh gen config which builds the boilerplate configuration file and pulls some details from your specific system like host name to give it the identifier for that node you can derive the c type key so those read-only keys or the the shareable read write keys rather than just the master key uh using gen key uh and um then it just has a json file for the folder configuration so you can just copy paste your json folders.json from one box to the other and when you then start the um the daemon running it just synchronizes and i've got those three machines running now, and I've just been poking at it and lobbing large files in and making lots of rapid changes to text

files in three locations at the same time to see how it handles conflicts and things like that. And so far, so good. I want to address a couple of things. And maybe somebody in the audience might be listening and thinking, why does something like this matter? So I want to touch on two things. First of all, and I want to come back to this one with Wimpy. I think it could be the next open source CDN. But first of all, when you have something like this working, what you accomplish is almost, it's like a transparent network file system. And once it's all set up and it's in that set it and forget it mode, you have any arbitrary folder that you choose on your system synced across all your devices.

And that's huge. You make a change in one directory and it immediately is available on all your other machines. And to give you this is a very maybe maybe off example but the current example for me is uh no man's sky the configuration folder i just want that configuration folder synced across many machines in the dropbox world to accomplish that i do a sim link and i move the actual folder into my dropbox and then i sim link inlink in the configuration folder that folder. And then I kind of trick No Man's Sky into thinking it's accessing the folder when in reality it's hitting a symlink and going to my Dropbox. But with things like LibreVault, I could choose any arbitrary directory on my file system to sync. And that becomes to be – that gets huge.

And that's just great for just one-to-one users. You don't have to share it with many people. Super handy. And also, one of the other things, before we get to the open source CDN, is one of the advantages it has over something like Dropbox, and I think this will resonate with you, Angela, is there's no centralized storage.

It's just whatever space you have on your hard drive. So you don't have to worry about getting 20 gigs and 30 gigs or buying the one terabyte package like we do with Dropbox. You just – everybody syncs and it's just synced amongst your computers and whatever space you have, that's the space you get. There's no limits. That's extremely compelling especially for something like Unfilter, which is ridiculous. for something like Unfilter, which is ridiculous. But lastly, it kind of – and I don't know about LibreVault. Maybe, Wimpy, you know better.

But it sort of has – it's sort of the BitTorrent sync philosophy brought to a GPL3 application that's not going to get shut down. It's not going to get put behind a paywall. And it allows the distribution of files in a way that is truly, truly unique. Because like a torrent, everybody who participates in the sync also becomes part of the distribution network. And it is therefore its own built-in CDN. And I'm wondering, are you thinking about how to use this in a way that because this is GPL, because that means a lot of Linux users might eventually one day just have it in their damn repo, Because that means a lot of Linux users might eventually one day just have it in their damn repo.

Could this be a way to distribute project images or large files to a user base? What do you think? Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I'm looking at it. So looking out into the future, what I would like to do is list LibreVault in the Ubuntu Mate software boutique. So it's a one-click install. Yes, that's great.

And then provide, so a new feature in the current build of LibreVault is links. So it understands that this URI construct is a link to a LibreVault key. You can click on that. It will embed it in the application and that way you can then or i can then make available images for ubuntu mate for the various architectures available oh yeah people can just click on those and sync them when a new version is available they automatically get the new version and all of the people that are carrying that libre vault key are part of the um collective that are synchronizing and sharing and part of the peer-to-peer network that is making those images available and it is torrent under the hood if you actually go and look at the libre vault

config file you will see um well-known torrent trackers as the trackers that are used to actually broker the connections between your installations very good you and because it's torrent trackers of course you could run your own torrent tracker and just change your config to point your own tracker and you could keep all of your tracking off the public trackers as well you know you could just use your own own torrent tracker so wes you kind of uh been kicking the tires for us you've been our guinea pig uh i've also installed on my machine and Rikai was the guy that had to fall on the sword and even try installing on Windows. Wes, what were your takeaway

from it? You know, I mean, it is definitely early days, but I was also impressed. I do think this, you know, just being able to give it a link of a key and then especially having the built-in, you know, write only, read only, that kind of access control yeah right out of the gate easy right there um i'm excited to play more with it you know i haven't replaced my sync thing needs yet but i'm thinking it's on the list of projects to see it's just so it seems so easy to configure and it seems like a good scale very nicely i'll tell you a story that made me realize how important something like sync thing or libre vault isVault is. And I'll be honest. I'm a little more excited about LibreVault.

Ange and I, you know, we've got three kids. And there's new movies that we discover individually that the kids just absolutely love. And if I wanted to back up one of those movies and share it with her so that way when they're at home, they could watch that same movie. Or I could. Yeah. Right? Don't forget about could. Yeah. Right? Don't forget about me.

Yeah. Up. There was actually recently like when Zootopia came out. That was exactly the situation. And I had it. I had backed it up. I had a copy of it but I had it sitting on a hard drive and when the kids went home, they couldn't watch Zootopia.

And it would be really, really nice if there was a piece of software I could use to just send you that file and didn't go through some corporate server. Because a friend of ours, you and I both know them, you know, there was a file they wanted. And so their friend put it up on a Dropbox account and sent them the link and said, here, go grab it. And Dropbox shut down their whole account, just completely terminated the account, shut it down, you're banned. Wow.

Wow. Wow. Yeah. And it's – that's ridiculous. If I go out and I buy Zootopia for 40 freaking bucks or 30 bucks or 20 bucks from Costco and I use MakeMKV to back it up, and that's my copy and I want my children to be able to watch it. I should have – there should be a way for me to be able to easily share those files with you. And that's what I think. Even if you're just an individual, LibreVault promises that. But in the term for Jupyter Broadcasting, we distribute the unfiltered show notes and all of the clips that we play via BitTorrent Sync right now.

And this is I think absolutely where we're going to migrate to. LibreVault looks like the perfect replacement for BitTorrent Sync for us. And if you're not familiar with BitTorrent Sync, it needs to be replaced. It's kind of – things have gone south. Let's just put it that way. Both Wimpy and I, we're done. We're done. So LibreVault.

Something like – for your issue with Zootopia, would something like Plex or Envy work? Yeah. You know, that's generally what we use. But, of course, on my end, I'm connected to a MiFi. MiFi, yeah. Yeah, so it's not like the kids are going to very easily stream it from my hard drive. So it would really be best for them to have a local copy that just showed up in the kids movie folder. If we just had on both our servers, we had two kids movie directories,

and every time I put a file in there, it showed up on both our servers. It's the perfect solution. So that's my hope eventually. But that all covers – Ionic Badger and I were talking about it before the show. It all pulls into – kind of pulls into like this ultimate multimedia server setup. Ionic, I know you and I are both excited about a media service. Have you solved this moving files between multiple houses problem by chance? He's not in there. Oh, Ionic left? Ironic, yeah. Oh, Ironic. That's why. Probably

because I called him wrong. I called him by the wrong name. That's fine. Yeah, our sync is also how we actually do it now. So it's just manual and it's painful. And LibreSync, I think, eventually will replace Dropbox Pro for us. As a company, we have made the financial decision to buy a Dropbox Pro every year. And go ahead and do that again. No, no. Do that. Do that hand. No, no.

Okay, fine. Turn the camera on. She won't do it. And we're not happy about it. So you've talked about, you know, wanting to sort of fund open source. I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here by the way i don't mind so good man you know look at look at what you're spending on dropbox pro

and turn that into monthly payments and consider contacting the author of libre vault and for a year making donations to the project and marking the issues. Because the issues on his GitHub are kind of a roadmap of improvements and sort of direct him at the things you would most like to see implemented and see if you can encourage the developer to focus his his efforts i think the first first thing would be to not limit it to five users you know at the base oh they don't have the libra vault doesn't have that yeah yeah that's huge that's an automatic yeah that by the way is a dropbox limitation yeah so i think it's 780 a year to pay for dropbox is that right yeah and so and

um from like an expenses standpoint, how would we do that as a business? Could we, instead of paying for a service, so when we pay for a service, is that a type of write-off that's different than buying a physical good? No. So when we pay $800 for an internet service,

that's like buying $800 of something physical? Well, okay. So if it's a physical thing, there's like an amortization breakdown process. But they just raised it to like $1,500. So in the case of $800, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. So could we as a business, could we easily structure paying an open source project? So it would be about $65, $70 a month. It would be exactly 70 bucks a month it'd be exactly 65

dollars yeah i would rather pay monthly than get hit with this 800 because we we we already have so many subscription services uh and it's just much easier to to manage that especially like with cards that expire but um so here's what i did is this is like what three weeks ago we renewed it. And I think we we just we draw a line in the sand and say never again. Let me just let me just point out to that because, yeah, it's Dropbox professional. We have five licenses. I don't have access to my own company's Dropbox. No, it's because we need the producers in there.

I know. So I am keeping all my all the artwork. Like, for example, I need the producers in there to add clips. I know. So I am keeping all the artwork. Like, for example, I made the artwork for User Error. But just all the artwork for all the shows is stored in my Dropbox on my laptop. Right. So all the art assets for the company. And what we need to do is sort of reorganize all of it in some sort of LibreVault folder structure. But the problem really has been in the past is own cloud and sync thing have not been reliable.

We've tried them. Yeah, we did. I still have own cloud. I need to get that off the computer. Well, it's like it's there, but it's only for a couple of things. And the problem is in a media production business, you just end up with this crazy amount of data. I tried. I was going to get an estimate for the show.

But the last time I checked, we have over 600 gigabytes of files just for one show that we sync around. So, you know, like you really got to have a bulletproof product to move all of that stuff around. And the one thing I will give Dropbox is in combination with their selective sync and their web client, it has been very, very, very bulletproof and there are literally times where I make a change and then I walk downstairs and I need to put it on the air within 35 seconds and if it's not there

that doesn't work for me. That's just the reality of live production and Dropbox always meets that deadline. So LibreVault's not going to testing. Yeah, it will need testing. But of course, the advantage of LibreVault is it's based on BitTorrent technology.

So it's syncing blocks, not files. It doesn't care about files. It's just hashes and blocks. And that's important because? Because it handles all of the integrity checking for you. And small changes at the block level could be synced instead of the entire file. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, that is a great point, Wimpy. So, you know, I'm really excited to see LibreVault. Do you feel, Wimpy, it's worth addressing that the primary author is – I almost even don't want to say this, but I know some people listening will be concerned that the primary author is i almost even don't want to say this but i know i know some people listening will be concerned that the primary author is russian do you does that concern you at all that your file syncing solution is okay that doesn't bother me either doesn't bother me doesn't bother me in the slightest no some of the smartest people i've worked with in the past were from russia so yep exactly the same for me. And it's GPL3. And maybe it has a good reason to have an open source, encrypted, supported file sharing.

Great point. Great point. And the LibreVault blog is very instructional. There's a couple of posts there about the detailed makeup of the config file. So the skeleton config files it makes

are really bare bones, don't expose all of the configuration options but there are blog posts to describe all of that in great detail and there are also some blog posts there that talk about the um the crypto libraries that are used and the other alternatives that might exist and you, talking about maybe changing some of the underlying technologies because they're more optimized. So along with the code being open and you can go and look at it and inspect it, there's also some open dialogue through the blog as well. I like that a lot.

And I feel at the end of the day, I feel a little reassured this GPL3, it's not, well, we might one day open source it like BitTorrent Sync kind of insinuated at the beginning. This is just legitimately at the very beginning. GPL3, here it all is. Here's the goal. Yeah. And I think that is also really. And there's about half a dozen other libraries that it's built on top of as well that are all open source.

And they're all linked in the GitHub repository. Wimpy, if it blows up in your face and ruins everything, will you come back and tell us about it? I will. At the moment, I'm not moving anything around that's critical, but what I'm working towards, I've spoken about it before, so I'll be brief. I have this roaming profile that I have synchronized everywhere,

and I'm working to building up confidence in LibreVault so it can take over that. And that is critical to everything I do. So when I build up enough confidence to make that switch, it's passed some sort of credibility testing. And then if it doesn't screw those things up, then as far as I'm concerned, it's good to go. Wow. I'll let you know., it's good to go. Wow.

I'll let you know. I can't wait to hear that goes. That's my dream. That is my dream, that I work on a machine here and I go home and everything's the same. So that's... Yeah. And I have that now and I've had to change the sync solutions along the ways. solutions along the ways the best solution i had was bitsync and this is really a workflow drop-in replacement for bitsync wow yeah exactly that's really oh boy i i you know what

after you've been running um libre of all i say i don't know for how i don't know what the i don't know what the threshold is wimpy but after you feel like it's like, it's me, this is working for me threshold, I would love to hear your full setup on that. Okay. All right. Give me a few weeks or so, because it's going to take a while for me to stress test it a bit

and build up enough confidence that I want to make the switch to something critical. Oh boy, do I understand. I think pretty soon you'll see us experimenting probably with the unfilter show on just because the unfilter audience it's a great it's a great platform because we have a backup copy of all the clips so if there was any huge data corruption we can recover and it's a huge amount of data and it's a bunch of people to sync so it's like this perfect scenario for testing. So I bet you'll hear more about that soon. So my plan is to switch over to handling my profile exclusively,

but then have a job on my main machine, which makes an rsync snapshot of my profile like every hour. So if it totally screws it up i've got a recovery point you know so that's my that's my sort of harness that i've planned for this so i'm not going to just chuck all of my stuff at it and hope it works i do have a a recovery point as well yeah it's in my my plan is also to do a phased approach of more and more critical things, starting with things that I absolutely have multiple copies of. And then over time, I will slowly move to that really precious data, whatever that is. So great.

I'm all in. You can miss me. Yeah, really? I'm going to go through this little process of. Shady revolution. I would love to hear it. Not even a gradual. Let's just all in.

You know what? Joel, let's just all in. You know what? Mr. Tonel, you are bold and I hope you come back and report to us because honestly, I think it's going to be – if we get there and it gets wide enough adoption, it could be a real fantastic way for enthusiasts to get latest versions of ISO images or packages or whatever because it's not only – not only are you the CDN by participating in LibreSync or LibreVault, sorry. But you are also fundamentally part of the RSS feed, part of the distribution swarm, part of the notification network. It's all of that built into one thing and I love it.

So LibreVault, it's super early days. You can hear from all of us here. We're not really quite ready to trust our most important data to it, but it's definitely something we're checking out and we'll be following up on future editions of the show. Now, I got to tell you about my experiences with Android N. I believe it's pronounced Nougat? Nougar? Nougat. Nougat. Android N. And I'll tell you how that's gone and why I think I need to switch to Ubuntu Touch as soon as possible. But first, I'm going to tell you about our friends at Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug.

Take advantage of the Linux Academy shows continuing sponsorship by the Linux Academy. linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Go there to register your vote for one more episode. You want 160 to get here? It's a big number. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug is one way to do it. But also, it's a great opportunity for you to learn more about the Linux Academy platform, the place to go, really, if you have any kind of little rough spots around Linux,

the technology stack that's based around it, or you want to just put yourself in front of current technologies. We were talking, in fact, speaking of user error with Noah about learning Python and Ruby. It's a great example of where Linux Academy can help you bring you up to speed. Anything that might make you more money, get the attention of your employer, make that client a little more inclined to go with you, or just challenge yourself. They have courseware on it, the entire Linux platform, and all of the cool technologies built on top of it.

Self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux topic or really DevOps topic too. Like they've really branched into that. They got Azure, OpenStack, AWS as well. Learning Pass, which are a series of courses and content planned by instructors for specific types of career tasks, which I find to be particularly valuable. The hands-on experience, if you're a little test anxious like I am, I mean, I got to tell you, I've never been a good cert passer because I just get all worked up about these fake scenarios. That's why hands-on experience with the Linux Academy Labs really gives me the experience to move forward. Like, I'm ready. I've done it. I've actually pushed the buttons. That's super nice. They have practice

exams and quizzes. They have availability planners. You can plug in how much time you have. Even if you're super busy, you got three kids and a podcast network, trust me, you can find time at Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug with nuggets. You can go into just deep dives into specific areas. They got search too.

If you want to go in for the search, you're just going all in. You got to get that on your resume. They got great courseware for you. Downloadable comprehensive study guides, instructor help whenever you need it, iOS and Android apps to help you whenever you need that mobile experience, lab servers that spin up on demand and cert training that is above and beyond anything you've ever possibly thought of. I really have to recommend Linux Academy at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check them out. It's a pretty cool platform backed by Linux enthusiasts, developers, and educators that came together to create

something unique in the industry. Linux isn't just a checkbox on their feature list. It's what they're all about. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Go check them out. Go try them. Go log in. Go see what I love about it too. Stuff that in the past seemed like impossible. I could never actually achieve it.

I could never spend the time. I can break it down individually into chunks of time that I can wrap my head around and actually accomplish. And that's what I love about it. Linux Academy. Thanks for sponsoring. All right. So this week is the big week. Android N. Hit our faces. And of course, everybody's

got their write-up. Android Authority, Android Police, Ars Technica, everybody's got their write-up on Android N. It's good. Everybody loves the new Doze features that have been improved. Of course, the multi-window tasking, all that stuff. The notifications, all good. We talked about some of it on Tech Talk today. And I've been running. Of course, the multi-window tasking, all that stuff, the notifications, all good. We talked about some of it on Tech Talk today.

And I've been running on the 6P. I think it's definitely an improvement over Marshmallow. But some of my primary issues that plagued me with Marshmallow continue to plague me with Android N, and that is Doze kills Bluetooth audio. I'm sitting there. I'm driving. is Doze kills Bluetooth audio. Oh. I'm sitting there, I'm driving, I'm 30, well, I'm 20 minutes into my drive, say, all of a sudden I start, get, cut, every podcast.

What's Doze? I hate that. Yeah, Doze is the new Android feature they launched in Marshmallow and then doubled down in Nougat. And that is, depending on if the phone's upside down, face down, or if you're walking,

or if it's midnight, there's all these conditions that Android is taking into account. And if it thinks you're very unlikely to be using your phone at this time, it goes and powers it down or something. Wow. Which has really improved the battery life.

You'd think they would have fine tuned that for podcasting and audio and Pandora. Like if it sucks. Yeah. It sucks. I'm sitting there listening. Actually, you know, it's funny. It's it. You know who you know who it affects the most of everybody I know.

Wimpy. Wimpy's sitting there making a great point on the Ubuntu podcast. And all of a sudden, every other word he says starts getting dropped out. And I'm not – because he speaks at a gentleman's pace. Like I'm not – I don't like – is he like abbreviating his speech? Like at first I'm like – I start losing track of the conversation and then I realize it's dropping every few words from the Ubuntu podcast. This is just as I'm driving in today. And I'm like, what the hell is this?

And this is the same problem I have with marshmallows ever since Doze was introduced. And, you know, marshmallow seems to be good. Nougat seems to be even better. But I think it's just time that Chris gets off of Android. And so is there no way to disable it? Yeah, I don't know. Like, I think I could go in and say, like like whenever this application is running, don't save battery life. But Android has such crappy battery life.

OK, I was just going to say, is it even saving you that much battery life? No, it does. OK. It is effective, yeah. Yeah, it does. I can now go like two days without charging my phone if I push it, which is – that's big. Whoa, unheard of in Android. I know.

But it kills the Bluetooth audio. And so I have been from a distance looking at different options. I won't lie. iOS feels very attractive because I've been there before and I know that I get what I get and I don't complain. You know, you just get what you get. Let me ask. You're saying you're specifically saying Bluetooth. Yeah. If you had headphones plugged in. That's what I get and I don't complain. You know, you just get what you get. Let me ask. You're saying you're specifically saying Bluetooth.

Yeah. If you had headphones plugged in. That's what I do. But then I lose all the controls. Well, no, I don't have that problem with headphone jack. And I that's what I use. I got a little like retractable headphone cable and I use the aux in. But then I lose all of the controls on my steering wheel.

So I don't get like skip ahead or skip back or volume. I like I lose all of the controls on my steering wheel. So I don't get like skip ahead or skip back or volume. Like I lose all of the controls on my steering wheel, which, you know, not a big deal. So I just do the headphone jack. And that's what I've been doing for months and months actually. But it has kind of got me going through my head like, gosh, I think I'm just – I don't like the way it performs. I don't really enjoy some of the interface elements. And I don't really like the fact that they are tracking me. Like it is like a sensor in my pocket.

What about turning on like – isn't there a way to make the screen not turn off? There are a few apps I could use. Like force it to stay away from that? Yeah, I think I could actually like – I think I could exclude pocket casts from all those power management. But then at the same time, while I'm driving, I'll be burning through my battery. Right. I know. Yeah. So it's not like –

Does it happen when you charge in the car as well? Yeah. The dropouts do. Yeah. In fact, Wes, it almost seems like it happens faster, which is odd. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm not going to lie. I've been looking. I've been looking at the MX4. I've been looking at the OnePlus. And there's this guy out there who's been giving me a hard time about it for weeks and weeks. And I won't name names, but Wimpy, you've recently switched to Ubuntu Touch. I think you've been on for a couple of weeks. And I know that podcasts are a big part of your workflow and all of that.

I would really love to hear your thoughts because I know you and I have reflected on how Android doesn't quite fit for us. And Ubuntu Touch is sort of the perfect solution because every now and then we just want something a little extra. We like the flexibility of the platform. We know some of the folks behind it. And it's an alternative to Android that is functional. And you've been actually living in it for a couple of weeks. You've got multiple devices. I'd love to pick your head.

Just go in there sort of like mind-meld style and tell me what's it like to live as wimpy with an Ubuntu Touch device. Okay. as wimpy with an Ubuntu touch device. Okay. It took some weeks of research to figure out what the apps on Ubuntu for devices were that could replace or be alternatives or equivalents to what I was used to on Android. Yeah, I bet.

And by and large, I've been able to find replacements for that and where it gets a little bit icky is things like there are four or five different versions of google plus for example for ubuntu touch and are they all kind of repackaged versions of the web app um sort of kind of there that so what you're starting to see now is people that are starting to use more of the facilities of qml around the web wrapper to introduce more features into what is essentially a web wrapped version but also doing clever things like using different agent strings in that web wrapper to expose modern versions of the google plus ui right so i see what i've what i've been doing is as i've been trying out the several different

versions of google plus for example is rating each of them based on my personal requirements so that the one that i think is best gets the most stars and the others get diminishing star levels with my rationale as to why they're not as good as the other option. So I've gone through that process. And for things like Twitter and Facebook and Gmail and Google+, and all of the stuff you need to do, obviously I don't have a WhatsApp problem because all of my family are on Telegram.

So I don't have that big stopping block that is in front of many people. I have a completely functional experience. I've got a few gaps in what I need. you gaps in what i need and i've i've decided i decided at the at the outset i would find the apps that best met my requirements uh and for example where there where there's an app that isn't quite good enough instead of publishing a duplicate app i would reach out to the developer and work with them to improve the existing app that's in the store rather than create even more versions of the same thing because i don't think that's very helpful right so i've reached out to the author of the pocket casts app and we're going to work together to

make a slightly refined refined version of pocket casts for ubuntu Touch. Now, how much is it actually targeted for Ubuntu Touch versus a modified repackage of the web version? So the current version of Pocket Casts is just a wrapped version of the website. Which is not bad, actually. Which is very good. website which is not bad version actually which is very good and um the only drawback to that is that um it was created about a year ago so it doesn't have the keep the screen on keep the player moving so as the screen blanks the podcast stops so i've contacted the author and said these are the improvements i would like to make and we're going to work on that and produce a refined version that works properly.

And because I'm a Pocket Casts user at the moment, it's easier for me to use that than try and move to Podbird, which is a native podcasting app for Ubuntu for devices. And what I need to do there is send some feedback to the developers of Podbird to say these are the features that I feel need adding refining or improving in order for the native you know Podbird application to be um you know viable because listening to podcasts on my phone is very important to me so full

disclosure right now all of those things i said i can do on my mx4 the one thing i don't do is listen to podcasts i still have an android phone which i keep in the car and when i'm driving to and from work it is that device that is connecting over bluetooth to the car audio system to play the podcasts and that's for two reasons one i've got a podcast player that works and two it's got bluetooth that compare with the phone with the car yeah and i've only got one out of the many ubuntu touch devices i've got there is only one that can pair with the car and what's curious about that is a few months ago they could all pair with the car and now only one of them can so there's been some sort of regression there and i haven't had the opportunity to dig

around and identify what's going on but you know there are rough edges but i don't have android running anymore about my person on a on a day-to-day basis that's very cool and um i'm able to do all of the things that i could do before with a few caveats so i'm i'm going to one of the little projects i want to work on is write an app for buffer because that's something I used to use quite extensively on Android. And I think that that can be neatly created using the Ubuntu framework. It shouldn't be too complicated and it should provide a totally analog experience. Cool. You know, I think this is the perfect moment because Ange is here. And she has, without equivocation, rejected basically everything iCloud.

She still plugs her phone in over a USB cable to sync all the stuff over her photos, her music. And it's a huge part of her workflow. And she doesn't want to auto-update or auto-upload her photos to iCloud. She doesn't want to sync her music through Apple Music. Nope. And you're looking at this and you're like, be honest, do you feel like you're on borrowed time with that platform? I do. Yeah. And when I hear Wimpy talk about it, what I think about for somebody like you is even if everything else doesn't apply about the freedom or the platform or how they design it, the fact that you could maybe find a workflow that you feel comfortable with

when the other platforms are kind of... Forcing. Yeah. It's kind of appealing, right? Yeah. And it's early days still, but I'll let you know when it's ready to switch. Yeah. There's some fixes coming in ota 13 that i think

are really really interesting so there seems to be a lot of focus on refining what's there at the moment and um the last since ota 10 it's really come on a long way so ota 9 i still wasn't convinced i could actually use it as a day-to-day device from OTA 10 I could because in OTA 10 I could copy and paste between applications for example so you know that was three or four months ago not being able to do that prior to them was really a I can't use this day so that was that was what you might call a game changer. Yeah. So, you know, I've got two apps in the Ubuntu Touch Store at the moment, one of which is LastPass Mobile. It's by no means as comprehensive as the LastPass application on Android. But it does mean that when I need to log into things, I can open up LastPass, bring up the password, highlight it, copy it it and then paste it into the thing that i

want to authenticate with right which i couldn't do four months ago so you know the fact that that's possible it is just that that was really that was the moment where i thought right i really need to investigate this more seriously because i could make this work for me now. I've always felt like the place that would be the most successful for me would be on the tablet first and then the phone. So I want to get to that. I also want to mention Minimax. He has a question for you, Wimpy.

All of that. But first, before we go any further, I've got to say thank you to Ange for stopping by. She's got to run to go pick up the kiddos. But Ange, thank you for stopping by. Yeah, thanks for having me. Keeping us grounded. Wonderful to have you. Wow, all the love. I know. And you can hear more from Ange in Tech Talk today. Go listen to this week's

episode. Boy, this week we had a Kickstarter of the week that is going to sit with me for a while. It's going to sit with me. Get it? Get it? Because you remember? Yeah. Wow. Thank you for being here, Ange. All right. So, Wimpy, it's not just the phone. I mean, I know the MX4 is your daily driver, correct?

But you're also trying the tablet experience. Have you noticed? Be honest, Wimpy. Does it work better as a tablet? Does it work better as a tablet? It feels like that interface, that the whole Unity 8 interface, is begging for a tablet UI. A little extra real estate, but still mobile. Seems like the perfect combo.

Maybe something on the BQ. No? I don't know. I have used, when I was using Android, I used the phone and the tablets differently, and I continue to use the phone and the tablet differently. and the tablets differently and i continue to use the phone and the tablet differently so i've got a bqm 10 uh tablet and i also have a nexus 7 that's also running a buntu touch um the bqm 10 i'm mostly experimenting with that as a could this be a laptop replacement yeah exactly and the recent advancements with libertine make that very plausible now because it's now possible if you've got a little bit of

um knowledge about how to you know exercise um come up the command line utilities, you can create containers of your favorite legacy X application and run them on containers on my tablet. Yeah. So, and there's a, there's a nice guide that somebody wrote recently. Um, I'll get a link in a moment that explains, um, how Libertine is used, uh uh to create containers of your app so for example creating a container of mumble is very straightforward or audacity or gimp or whatever it might be that you want to run on your tablet so that you can um have a more desktop like productivity experience. Ooh, like actually create something on, on your tablet. Oh yeah. It will,

it will effectively make the container that runs that app with a launcher. So you can just start gimp or audacity or mumble or whatever with icons, you know, that's, so that's, that's really very interesting. The Nexus seven is kind of my device that I use just for sort of browsing and looking at stuff casually in the evenings. So, you know, when I'm sitting in the front room or cooking, that's the device that I have to hand because it's more convenient to use than a phone and it's easier to, you know, look at.

to use than a phone and it's easier to you know look at um and yeah for for that sort of stuff you know looking at youtube catching up on podcasts um dealing with email and telegrams and all of the rest of it it all works just fine on the tablet and um and phone it certainly works better the mx4 is a slightly bigger screen than the the nexus 4 which i was using before and the bq e5 um and certainly having a bigger screen is favorable it's certainly much easier to use with a larger screen sure huh you know i i know it's just i can't help but think of myself but i i picture a day when I could actually publish something like User Air completely from the tablet. That would be awesome. Right?

Now, Wes, what would it take for you to be able to use something for work, like something that could actually get your day-to-day job done? What do you need from a tablet? And do you have a tablet today? You know, not really. There is an iPad. I think it's like a couple generations old by now that kind of floats around the house purely for consumption, but it really doesn't see very much use. I think for work, that Libertine stuff, that would go a long way.

I think also that last week we were talking about the improvements to the terminal. I think that would also go a long way. If I could have a reasonable experience using some desktop apps and having SSH and just a friendly Linux environment right by my side, I'd be willing to cut it some slack in other areas. Yeah, me too. Me too. Exactly. And I don't think that is, it is, I mean, we can't deny this us, men and women in the hundreds of thousands that need to do that. You think about every small business that has more than 100 employees. They have somebody that could qualify.

Think of every large corporation. I mean that is a massive, massive amount of users that is absolutely worth targeting. And it could just grow from there. I, you know, I tried to buy the BQM10 when it went for sale. I couldn't get it. The page was all kinds of errors. It was just impossible. And today, I sit here with the Android NSIC, or I'm sorry, the 6P. And I think to myself, I would love to be able to take – what I would love to have – maybe this is a 2018 thing.

But what I would love to have happen is sort of like I can download ISOs now for general PC hardware. I would love for Ubuntu Touch for a large range of great Android devices to be available. And I realize that would take a bunch of community commitment and interaction and work. But God dang it, would it be cool if I could just go get the greatest and latest Nexus device and have a good solid bet that within two to three months of the next Nexus 2016 device coming out, I could probably get an Ubuntu Touch image for it. And for the life of that device, I could run it.

Right? And then that's all I really think it would take for me. Or, and Wimpy, I know how you feel about this, if I could get my hands on that MX5 hardware, something that's a real flagship device. How's performance going? That means Chris is stringent standard. Because I am a bit of a performance bigot, Wimpy.

So, and you're on the MX4. I don't really know, but my rough understanding is it's somewhat equivalent to the Nexus 4, and that seems like it would be ancient to me. No, no. So I've got a Nexus 4 and the BQE5. This MX4 is head and shoulders above those in terms of performance when it's running Ubuntu Touch. But, yeah, is that Ubuntu Touch or is that the hardware? Because I might be basing my hardware requirements

on potentially bloated Android requirements. Okay, so definitely, so it's the hardware basically that makes it better. There are definitely improvements that could be made to ubuntu touch to improve the performance and perceived responsiveness of some of the ui um and i think talking to poppy you know there are some well understood things that need to happen and there are some technical challenges as to why they haven't been addressed yet. So I think that will come in due course. But the better the hardware gets, the better the experience gets.

And the MX4 is significantly better than the Nexus 4 and the 5. And my understanding is that this pales in comparison to the Pro 5, which is rarer than hen's teeth now. Uh, and I, I, I re I was wanting to get, um,

went on holiday around the time they were released and thought, I'll get one when I get back. And they were all sold out. Yeah. Yeah. And now you can't find them for less than money. Yeah. Yeah.

And if you want to load Android on the, I mean, if you want to get the one that has Android loaded on it um it looks like that probably works for loading the initial image but there could be over the air update issues potentially so yeah so as best as i've been able to determine reading some of the guides that are available for that you can buy a pro 5 with the international firmware version of android which is required because the Chinese versions, you can't unlock the bootloader, but the international versions you can.

So you have to have one with the international firmware. You can then flash Ubuntu onto that Pro 5, but so far what I've read, and I've researched it very carefully, there seems to be um some difficulty in flashing the ubuntu recovery image onto that device which then means that the over the air updates right uh won't apply automatically you have to go into the recovery and extract those manually that kind of kills the fun So that's why you haven't gone that route? At the moment, unless, because they're quite expensive and I'm not prepared to risk that unless I'm fairly sure of some success. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel too. I just want to

buy it with Ubuntu preloaded. And you were talking about, you know, other devices. There's a website called ubports.com. Yeah. It's one of the community members runs that site and that's crowdfunded. And there's a list of devices there that can run Ubuntu Touch at various stages of completion. completion and if you want to see ubuntu come to one of those devices then you come back the development effort for those devices and that's where he will focus his attention and most of the nexus i think all of the nexus devices are in there and some lg devices and the one plus one plus x one plus two so there's all sorts in Oh, I should talk to that guy because that sounds exactly like what I – I just got to figure out which Nexus device is well-supported.

Like the 5X would make a great, great Ubuntu Touch device, I would think. Yeah, so it's on the list. It hasn't actually started yet, but it's at priority 3. And the Nexus 6P is also in the list as well. It hasn't actually started yet. So, you know, but there's someone there who's, and he's been sponsored by DigitalOcean, I see, as well. There you go. You know, I will mention, too, just as we kind of wrap up here, I guess ZTE made the mistake of asking people what they want.

Oof, never do that. And now they've heard it. And they've even suspected that there was some sort of fraud involved. So I encourage you not to do – Yeah, I encourage you not to fraudulate this. But there is a poll going right now over on ZTE, which if you've ever looked at Newegg, for example, some really nice ZTE devices are out there. And they were asking for input from their community about maybe what kind of next generation projects they should work on, et cetera, et cetera.

And OMG Ubuntu has generated some attention towards this initiative and I think that's why they got so many votes. And they're looking for possible ideas for 2017 that are quote-unquote reasonable. And I just want to give a shout out to this community effort here because holy smoking crap did this write up. Not only is it totally rocking the ZTE voting right now with 88 upvotes, but I2000s who created this post did a true legitimate like um fortune 500 level proposal on why zte should create an ubuntu touch device it's really impressive yeah yeah you saw this i mean he goes quite the breakdown different scenarios different options for them to consider it's um yeah well done i think yeah yeah and uh it i would i would i would buy the shit out of this device if zte did this because i've looked at some of their devices on new egg that are unlocked and been kind of tempted by them because they got front-facing speakers.

They seem to have reasonable packaging for the price. ZTE has consistently caught my eye but not quite crossed that threshold for something I'd actually be willing to spend my money on. But if they shipped an Ubuntu Touch device, I hands down would buy one. And if you want to kind of just vote in that general direction, I'll have a link in the show notes for you to go voice your opinion. I just think this is super important. He says, a brief summary of the idea is ZTE should provide the following options to people to choose when selling a phone model. Pre-installed Ubuntu Touch as the primary OS, pre-installed Ubuntu Touch as a secondary

OS alongside maybe something like Android, or no Ubuntu Touch installed and only something like Android installed. He talks about also including something like a USB Type-C connector and the advantages of convergence and all of it. And it's a brilliant post, and ZTE would be a fantastic manufacturer. And I've heard, I don't know, Wimpy, if you've heard these things, but I've heard some rumors that perhaps BQ might not be doing another Ubuntu Touch device. Have you heard that, Wimpy?

I've seen it on Twitter. I don't know what the authenticity of those claims are. I don't either. And it seems like they've sold as many as they can manufacture of the ubuntu devices so i don't i don't know about that either but maybe we'll see yeah it's a bummer because at the moment you can't buy an ubuntu phone anywhere no in fact unless unless you go to ebay if if if today the mx5 pro were available for purchase i think just for linux unplugged linux Action Show alone,

it'd be worth me picking one up just to try it. But every time I go to their site, they're sold out. Yeah, they had a run, and my understanding was they had an allotted production run, and once they were sold out, they were gone. So it sounds like one of those experiment type things. Minimac, you had a question. Go ahead. Yeah, my question to Wimpy would be, what about multitasking?

Did I face the problems they had before? For example, when I was listening to music on Ubuntu Touch, I tested it on a Nexus 5 and then wanted to open the browser, music stopped. So multitasking at the time I tested is but not really at a good level so that specific example of audio playing there are facilities in the sdk now to continue playing in the background good and um i know pod bird the podcasting client supports that and there's another app called cloud player they both continue to play audio when you switch away from them and go and do other things so

so long as the app has been updated to support those facilities yes it can be done and my second question would be are the ubuntu touch images all based on the same Android base, or does it depend on the different devices they run on? I'm a little bit not sure, but my understanding is each device has got a slightly different Android base origin so this is why some of the devices can support the mirror cast wireless display and some can't for example and why some can do fingerprint authentication and some can't so i believe there is a correlation between the device and the android version that it can support and therefore what the functionality that it can expose is but next time popes i'll ask him that question i know he's um much more up to speed on that than me i've noticed that i can't say

sorry but i can say chris the nexus, and I think you got one of these, the Nexus 5 is normally a good device to test some of these images. I run Sailfish OS, for example, for the Nexus 5, and now it's based on Lollipop, and this was a huge advantage for Sailfish OS. So I guess if they have a Lollipop base now for Ubuntu Touch, it would run rather good. You know, I think this is more poignant than ever. We started this segment with the release of Android N, and it's a pretty solid release. You know, if you like Android, it's just Android even better.

But if you don't like Android, it's everything you don't like even worse. If you don't like Android, it's everything you don't like even worse. But also at the same time, if you're a Nexus 5 user, Wes, then you just got dropped from support where Ubuntu Touch has come along. Yes, I did. They're kind of just picking up momentum. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I can understand it, but it is a little disappointing. I mean there's lots of ROMs to try. I am kind of just holding out on this phone until the next Nexus line drops. We'll see when that is. But yeah, it does make me way more incentivized to try something else. And I played with Ubuntu Touch on here probably like a year ago, and I haven't visited back. So maybe I'll give that a flash here soon and see what it's like so i just posted a link in the chat room which is to the ub ports nexus 5

build uh they've got green ticks in everything except for bluetooth support so the nexus 5 version can support everything except for bluetooth so it is very close wow and when i got my first ubuntu touch device it was about 14 15 months ago and things have improved massively since then yeah you know isn't it um when you come from android wimpy isn't it kind of novel all of a sudden just see constant improvements to your os like on a reoccurring schedule it is and you know that's that's kind of tainted because you you look at ubuntu touch having again i've been using android since 2010 2011 so you know that's a lot you know google have got massive resources they've been able to throw an android and make it this dominant platform so you look at ubuntu and you think

oh you know there is there is these little paper cut type issues but then when you go and look at Ubuntu and you think, oh, you know, there is these little paper cut type issues. But then when you go and look at what the upcoming releases are in the next OTA, you see so many of these paper cuts being addressed now. That's exhilarating in a sense. It is. And, you know, part of me wanting to do this wasn't so much about running Ubuntu Touch, but it was to recap some of that spirit and enthusiasm I had for Linux way, way back when I first discovered Linux in the mid to late 1990s. And that sort of pioneering spirit. And it's not perfect yet, but it could be.

And you can be part of the solution, even if all you do is run it and tell the developers, it could be better if you did this. Right. And well said. That's part of the reason why I'm doing this. Doesn't it? Doesn't it? And I, okay, I want to say two things.

First of all, before we go much further here, it's not like I'm all of a sudden drinking the Kool-Aid, but as I have become more comfortable with Anticross and Ubuntu Mate and Fedora as my go-to desktops, it is freeing me up conceptually to just let go of the Ubuntu default desktop and let them focus on mobile because it doesn't affect me anymore. And I don't have a horse in this race. And so I can now look at the Ubuntu Touch project from a more dispassionate perspective because in the past, I carried my baggage. I carried the baggage of you sons of bitches are working on this mobile project instead of my desktop.

How dare you? And I came with that bias towards Ubuntu Touch. But now – and Wimpy, I'm not just saying this to blow smoke up your proper butthole. It is generally because of projects like Ubuntu Mate and honestly the GNOME desktop that I just don't give a shit what happens to Unity really personally that I have been able to step back and just watch this new effort of theirs from a completely new perspective. And I look at this and it is totally exciting for me. And so that is, number one, I just want to mention that's kind of my perspective on this overall.

But number two, we all have concerns I think to some degree about the privacy of using an Android device or an Apple device. We all have concerns to some degree about how to install applications on our device outside the channels that are pushed by the platform. And we all have concerns about being able to modify our device in a way that suits us. able to modify our device in a way that suits us. And so in that regard, as a technology enthusiast, Ubuntu Touch has always managed to check those boxes for me. And now I sit back and I really think it's, boy, it's a matter of hardware for sure. And I'm still waiting for the perfect hardware. But once that comes along for me, be it the 5X or, you know, I'm looking right now over

at UBports and it appears that if I were to donate Bitcoin in the equivalent of $510, which for me would be less than one Bitcoin right now, it would – all of a sudden the Nexus 6P would become a priority for them. That's less than the next smartphone if I were to buy it unlocked for me. If I could take my Nexus 6P and donate $510 equivalent of Bitcoin to this project and maybe one day have a version for the Nexus 6P, then I could just continue to use my current hardware until that comes out. But aside from all of that, I think the point that you made, is what excites me the most. And that is, it feels like the early 2000s, the late 90s where it's not ready for everybody. But if you're willing to sort of get in and get in the mud a little bit, you can make this a viable platform one day for everybody else by banging on the rough edges, commenting, giving feedback, maybe even making bug fixes. It is sort of what drew me to linux a decade ago and do you find that to be sort of the position you find yourself in now with

ubuntu touch wimpy absolutely and i'm by no means a pioneer here because there are people that have been running these devices as their main phones for 18 months or more now who are far more um advanced in how they're putting apps together and there's some quite sophisticated apps available now so um there's one called rockworks which is available from the open store and i have complete um support for both my pebble watches with ubuntu touch using ah really and the experience on my pebble watch is exactly as i had it on android with no um no shortcomings whatsoever so you know there are there are not many but they're the the ones that exist the native apps are are getting very very good now and are are solving real problems and it it feels like it's really got momentum and there's there's some talented people behind it and but yeah there's still some good work to be done that you can have maybe yeah

some influence in right absolutely i mean like i said even if it's just commenting on the apps in the app store to say this twitter app is better than that twitter app because you know and uprate the ones that are good so that other people don't have this dilemma as to well which of the several twitter apps should i install um but also um i think there are a few proprietary applications for ubuntu touch but most are open source so there are issue trackers that you can go and find and you can actually have dialogue with the developers directly which of course is difficult to do on some of the other platforms. So just by sharing your ideas, you can have some involvement in shaping individual apps and the device as a whole. That is, you know, for those of us who are enthusiasts, that's sort of a delightful

era for a new platform. And it's rare because once the platform becomes established and lots of users, it sort of passes. And, you know, it's your chance to be sort of a hipster before it's famous. But in a way that is empowering for those of us that want to move away from the Google platform. And, you know, privacy concerns and, you know, pioneering spirit aside, obviously, the main reason I've done this is because I want to be an Ubuntu touch hipster. I don't believe you for a second, but the other two reasons I do believe. Yeah. And I really am thankful that you're joining us again and give us an update. And it kind of makes me wimpy.

I'll tell you, if there's a way to make it possible, if the MX5 becomes available again, I think I'm going to jump on it. Or wait for a Nexus 5 image to really kind of get Bluetooth ironed out and then jump on that and at least try it for a bit. Because it really is, for me, the perfect time to jump in. I love this phase of a new platform. As long as it has just enough stuff. Yeah, just enough stuff that I can get by day to day. I'll tell you something. Using Android N and iOS 9, shit ton of problems still.

Tons of problems. Totally unbelievable the shit that doesn't work on these platforms this long into it. I sit there and I think to myself, how could they not have caught this? And if I'm going to feel that way anyways, you know, if I'm going to say Aaron Schickman and go, damn it, Google, why didn't you think of this problem? I might as well be using something where I can submit bugs, I can have some kind of discourse in the evolution of the platform, and I can at least be there when there's a rational explanation why some of these things don't work. And I know that seems like a weird cognitive disconnect from, but it generally, it drives

me crazy to use these more modern platforms or feature-complete platforms or whatever you want to call them, and they still have some of these fundamental usability issues. At the end of the day, I just need certain base functionality, and the rest is all gravy. And so I just am waiting for the perfect hardware device to come along. And maybe I need to reassess my requirements because I'm looking at it from a perspective of an Android user. But I don't know, Wimpy. You tell me do i uh is there a one-to-one performance ratio between ubuntu touch and android or can i get away with maybe a little less hardware using

ubuntu touch because maybe i that are slower than the hardware is capable of so you want the best hardware if you've if you've if your nexus 5 is spare definitely put the current image for the nexus 5 on it it's a community port so it's not as robust as the officially blessed versions yeah but it does give you a flavor of where things are now and you know how your nexus 5 performs with android so you can make that comparison and some of the how do you characterize it it's it's just the way ubuntu works at the moment and i'm i'm sure this is going to get ironed out in the not too distant future but when it does you can so there are some apps that are just c and they bypass some of the framework and those applications when you start them they launch instantly like there's your's not off the screen and they're running.

But a lot of the apps that are using the framework, they have the little spinner that gets them going when they get started up. So you have to sort of go into it knowing you're not going to have this immediate snap, snap, snap type experience. I think on the Pro 5 it's much better because that's a much beefier machine. It's the hardware that's doing that. Have you, just

kind of tangentially related, have you seen the announcement from the Qt project of Qt Lite? I have, only in passing, not really in detail. That might help with some of that because let's be honest. If you're using Qt-based applications, there's a lot there.

And if there's something like Qt Lite that could come along and sort of – they're kind of – they're focusing Qt Lite more of the Internet of Things type devices. But you could also see it working on something like Ubuntu Touch and perhaps – think of Qt Lite as more of a minimal build from base up of Qt functions whereas the traditional Qt environment is huge. It's got everything you need to do everything you could possibly want including touch support which is extremely useful. But it also means that when you load the – when you load – I would think. I'm totally speculating here. But when you load a Qt application for the first time, there's a lot of other things in the background you have to load to support that. Where Qt Lite could sort of tighten that up a bit. I don't know a lot about it, but I was just reading about it today, and it seems like

it could be the perfect thing for Ubuntu Touch. And then you combine that with the fact that Canonical has recently become a backer of KDE EV, which is the commercial entity behind kde yeah yeah and and you know ubuntu has also got support for cordova and react something or other another javas that's the one yeah um javascript you know libraries for making uh native apps so that word needs to get propagated because there are lots of people that have created their apps using those frameworks that could come over directly without any messing about. You know, it's interesting. We've talked about LibreVault and Ubuntu Touch,

and they both have the big, huge, you know, marquee scrolling or HTML flashing tag warning that this is early days on both of these, Ubuntu Touch and LibreVault. At the same time, I think for our audience, they're both getting to the point where if you kind of have a pioneering spirit for this particular thing, be it your file sync or your mobile device, and fully acknowledging that both of these things for some people are critical day-to-day devices that must be completely flawless. But if some of you out there have that pioneering spirit for either one of these types of technologies, it's for both of them getting to be time for that type of person to jump in. And that is super exciting for somebody like me because that's exactly the type of person that I am. And I think of a lot of our audiences to watch this stuff from this part and go, boy, you know, I'm really like for me, Wimpy, I'll be completely honest. I am thrilled that for the last couple of weeks you've been running Ubuntu Touch because

I get updates from you on how it's going and I can kind of project how that would translate for my experience. And you're making – you're giving me bated breath. You're making my mouth water. You're making me want to switch. And I think it's super exciting. And it's funny because I don't know if either one of you or myself would recommend or probably Wes would recommend that people go to play LibreVault or Ubuntu Touch for their daily driver today. But it definitely is ready for a certain class of us or a certain type of user.

And Wimpy, just to kind of wrap it all up, would you kind of give us an idea of the range of devices you're trying it, just so that we can have a full picture of your experience, that way when it does blow up, I mean, if it ever does blow up in your face, we have an idea of what you test on, because I was kind of impressed when you kind of shared it with me okay um i've got a nexus 4 a nexus 7 tablet a bqe 5 hd phone the uh maizu mx4 and the bq m10 damn son whoa yeah that's quite a lot of devices you know if you if if you do have that pioneering spirit and you want to experiment, then consider getting yourself a Nexus 7 2013 or a Nexus 4 off eBay because they go quite cheap now.

And they are officially supported devices for Ubuntu Touch. They come direct from the canonical channels and you can be involved in actually testing these things and trying them out you know that you don't have to make it your daily device you know i didn't for over a year i had a you know one pound sim in my nexus 4 for months and months and months experimenting with it before i determined it was time to make the move. But, you know, you can participate at that level. Yeah. Well, shoot, you're making me want to try it, especially on a tablet. I know, right?

I'm excited. Have you tried on any of your devices? Just the Nexus 5, but it was a while ago. Yeah, yeah, it was. It'll probably be a much better experience. Yeah, maybe when the next Nexus device comes out and you got the 5 sitting around, you could try it out and give us the unplugged take. I think I will. I like it.

Well, there you go. That sort of brings us to the end of this week's discussion. We have lots of links to all the stuff we talked about. Don't forget, if you're like me and you'd love to see Ubuntu Touch on the Nexus 6P, the ubports.com, devices.ubports.com specifically, has a funding page on it. That would be pretty damn cool. And if you're getting finally to the end of this extremely long episode of the Unplugged program and you want more, go check out User Air. Episode one is over at jupiterbroadcasting.com right now as we record this very episode. Wes, thank you for making it despite real-life diversity.

Appreciate it. Hey, thank you. I love being here. Absolutely, absolutely. And you know what? If the folks at home wanted to join us, it turns out we have a diabolical plan. You could join us over at jblive.tv on a Tuesday. Oh, what time, you ask?

Ha-ha, clever of you. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar, where we have robots that automatically adjust it to your time zone in real time before the page even loads. Thank you, robots. Thank you, right? They don't, and I think they probably run Ubuntu Touch, too. I haven't confirmed it yet. I just got them on eBay.

Also, linuxactionshow.reddit.com if you want to give us some feedback for episode 159 or submit a topic. And don't forget you can join us on our virtual lug. Get more information in our chatroom at JBLive.tv. And we'll see you right back here next week. Thank you. All Wimpy's Vault. That's a good title. That is pretty good. That's good, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, boy, look at that. Look at that text highlighting. Yeah, thanks to Ange for stopping by. She had to go because we went so long. But that was great. That was a lot of fun. Sorry about that.

No, no. It was a bit of an epic. No, no. You know I love it. You know I love it. So now we just have to name this thing over. JBTitles.com with the new fancy updated website. Thanks to Rikai and team.

JBot's got some recent refreshes. Actually, and I can actually say this now, we go into quite some detail about the changes to JBot and how we do that and the code and the community members involved in User Air Episode 1. It was really fun. So I implore you, you have multiple disks that you're going to be pulling in and out and mismatched sizes and all that kind of stuff, right?

I don't know. Probably just because of the necessity of budget over time, that'll have to be how it works. But I would like to start with a base set of storage. I think that's overlooked with ZFS. Sorry, British. ZFS. Because there's like a hidden cost to an upgrade. When you think, right, I've run out of storage, you need to add a whole new pool or replace three, four, five drives all at once. And, you know, I don't know about you,

but when I fill up a disk, I just want to buy another three terabyte drive, whack it in there and call it good. And to do that, I use something called MergerFS, which presents all of the drives in my system under a single mount point using a Fuse file system. And I'm running it on

a C2750 ASRock Atom board. Yeah, so a Fuse-based union file system that sort of brings them all in under one mount point, huh? Yeah, and all you do is you modify your mount point in FSTab Sorry, i've talked over uh modify your mount point you modify your mount point um with one line or you just do a mount command and it will uh add the drive that you've just plugged in into the the fuse uh that is just a mount and i've been using it for, I mean, I tried MHDFS or whatever it's called.

I tried another union file system. And then after about 18 months of lots of ghost files and messing about, I settled on MergerFS about a year ago. And since then, Chris, it's been absolutely perfect. No performance penalties, really? Or there must be some, right? Because this is a fused file system. It uses a bit of CPU. Yeah.

It uses a bit of CPU, but I have a Atom cores. And when I'm transcoding a couple of Plex streams around my house, I don't notice any difference whatsoever. Absolutely. And to dovetail with that, there are two plugins for OpenMediaVault that support those technologies so that you can grow your file system without having to employ traditional RAID and you don't have to have matched size disks for growth. I forgot the best bit. MergerFS doesn't stripe file systems across the drives. Yes, exactly. It's drive has its own individually readable file system. So even if you exceed your redundancy

level, you only lose the data on the drives that failed in excess of that level. And you can still read, you plug that drive into any other Linux box and just read the data. You know, that'd be a perfect way to like have some drives for TV shows that I don't really care about on this disc. That's not as redundant too, because I've thought about doing like,

these are my cheaper discs. These are my more, my more important keepsakes. On, on open media vault, the plugins you want to look at are gray hole and snap raid they provide those facilities that plus one is not right but just just um boy this is good stuff guys yeah you need to set up you need to set up a cron job for the sync of the parity to run every night um or something like that otherwise you're effectively running the data that day doesn't have any parity protection um or you can force a

sync if you like but i spent probably the best part of three years getting down to this final docker snap raid and merger fs on top ofbian, which in my case I chose to roll myself. But, you know, it will work on top of Open Media Vault just perfectly with plugins, with a GUI. I don't need any of that because I can just SSH from my phone into my server and it just... And, you know, I remember now that I'm looking at the Greyhole website, I have also looked at Greyhole as potentially doing a segment on Lass about it, and I never even thought about setting it up for storage.

That is slick. So snapitrade or snaprade or snaprade.it if you want to go to the site and grayhole.net for Grayhole, which is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails. Have you had any inclination at all to try out the, I'm not sure how you say it, Nileus N1 email client that has the hosted component and is sort of electron-ish? I did try it when it was first announced. I created a Gash Google account to hook it up to so i could

but basically so i could just see what the ui was like and use it and all the rest of it um and every so often i kind of update it and i haven't i haven't done what wes has done which is host my own middleware for want of a better description you know that piece that does the brokering between the client and your back-end servers i've just used their hosted platform because it was a disposable account um i'll tell you what i what i found what i what always draws me to thunderbird is how how how much i like the enigma gpg plugin And whenever I want to have a good secure email setup, it's such an attractive, easy-to-use, simple, straightforward system that works well with my workflow. And I think it's finally been beat by N1 simply also because it's been easier for the audience to find me on Keybase. And so that tends to be what they sign against.

And N1 has one-check integration with Keybase. And so that tends to be what they sign against. And N1 has one check integration with Keybase. And it has taken that ease of use to the next level. And from what I can tell, appears to be a pretty secure implementation. I mean, all that's being done locally in the Composer. So the advantage of Keybase being easy discoverability of your keys, so you can have seamless email exchanges. And I kind of like their, they have an interesting approach to verifying who you are. Because one of the things that's really kind of the weak spot of GPG in reality is the web of trust works best when you can go to a con or a fest or a live event. And everybody there can do a little key exchange and hi, I'm so-and-so.

It's really me. Here's my key. That works well, but it doesn't work at scale. And what Keybase allows you to do is connect to other online presence that are well-established and trusted and then by building up several of them and also in some cases, I think in mine, I'm using something Bitcoin-related too. Like there's something there that's pretty concrete. It's like three or four for me different.

These are obviously really Chris Lass' account. So it gives the audience some confidence. Now, you have to have certain faith in Keybase.io and assume they're setting it up right. But those implementation details, to me, seem to be interesting concepts. Okay. Yeah, it's just finding the time. I'm interested in Nylas because I think it looks like a nice, um, uh, user in base. Yeah. And I like their ability to tag emails for followup.

So I can, I can technically have read them and process them, but I don't have to take action on it immediately. I can come back to another time and that's also nice. And then it has, it has interesting, and I didn't even realize it was cause I just, I guess it's just turned on by default and some mail client support is it does read receipts by default and what's interesting about that is it's it's also integrated in with the desktop environment notification so I'm off doing something else and I just get a quick gnome notification that so-and-so has read the email I sent them and then it slides away and I you would think that's it's actually kind of neat it makes

email feel a little more 2016. First of all, the fact that I'm getting a gnome notification about it, but also just how seamless that was. I didn't really have to do anything. Yeah, that's a good point, because, yeah, I always I emails that have got read receipts with deep suspicion. Yeah, I know. I agree. I didn't realize it was on by default. They also, by default, put a little promo

for the email client and the signature. And it's a little tricky to get rid of it because when you go to the signatures configuration, it has nothing listed if you've never created one. And the only way to get rid of the default one it puts in there is by creating a signature. Oh, do you make one? Yeah.

Okay. I was like, okay, very nice, guys.