LINUX Unplugged - Episode 79: Ubuntu Calling | LUP 79

Episode Date: February 11, 2015

The first Ubuntu phone goes on sale tomorrow & we ask all the interesting questions you might have been wondering. The details on the launch of the phone, some of the great apps & what’s still missing.Plus the new Raspberry Pi hates being flashed & we read a quick batch of great emails.

Hey, before we get started, I gotta give props to Mr. Popey who pointed me out to this pretty sweet deal over by Googs. You can get 2GB of additional Google Drive storage if you just do a security audit checkup on your Google account. Really? Which seems like kind of a good idea anyways, right? Well, yeah. They're paying me to do something I should be doing anyhow. Yeah. You know you're not supposed to call it the Googs anymore, right? Right. We got in trouble for that, didn't we? Yeah, we did.

What was the problem with that? Hold on. I got to hear the story. There's just people are complaining, as usual. People don't like it, I guess. Oh, well, yeah. People complain about system D, but we like that. So whatever.

No, I guess Googs is actually like a slam term in some areas. Oh, it's a cultural thing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know that. See, I got Googs from Google. Yeah, I didn't know that either.

Google. Googs is actually kind of an endearment term. And meanwhile, Noah's sitting there saying, Googs, he's the guy that. See, I got Googs from Google. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Google. Googs is actually kind of an endearing term. And meanwhile, Noah's sitting there saying, Googs, he's the guy that walks around wearing Google Glass. Yeah. A good comparison is if you walk into a house in the 70s in the U.S. and you say, wow, look at that shag. You're talking about carpet. You do that in the U.K. I'm pretty sure you're talking about two people doing the Funky Monkey.

So, you know, I mean, it's cultural. It's cultural. You could call it Goggle. Goggle? Oh, Goggle. so you know i mean it's it's cultural it's cultural you could call it google it's like it's like if google and i uh were like lovers it'd be like oh googs like that would be my love nickname for google there's really here's the thing chris because i always have to start stories with here's the thing the thing is that I don't ever call anything by its actual name. I don't call Walmart Walmart. I call it Wally World. I don't call Google Google.

I call it Googs. I mean, I have abbreviated names for everything. It's an opportunity for fun. Right. They might be confusing it with that word. I do the same thing. I call Mate, Mate, and Teragross, Antagross. It's two distinct syllables.

It's supposed to be Ma-tay. Yeah, right. Right. Ma-tay. Pay attention to feedback, Chris. Yeah,'t know. It's two distinct syllables. It's supposed to be ma-tay. Yeah, right. Right. Ma-tay. Pay attention to feedback, Chris. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I run it and I still can't get it right.

Once again, I can't help but point out that all of you will say something wrong at some point. And so long as you get the message across, it doesn't really matter how you say it. Oh, that's way too rational. That was so beautiful. I know. That actually made's a week of rational. That was so beautiful. I know. That actually made me feel better about myself. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's definitely stuck in the Pacific Northwest rain. My name is Chris.

And my name is Soggy. Or Matt, as they also know me. No kidding, right? It was really nice. My wife and kids stopped by a few minutes before the show started. And, you know, that's a nice treat when they show up in the middle of the day. One of the benefits of working for yourself, I suppose. But you know what wasn't so nice?

What's that? You know, I'd go out there to be, you know, to say goodbye and, you know, get everybody else situated, buckle in the kids. And I wore my jacket. And in that time, time i got rain it's a pretty heavy jacket i got rain through my jacket and the shirt underneath i'm wearing got totally soaked so i'm standing here wearing wet clothes man you know they they that's funny they have these things on sticks that apparently project the rain around you i think they're called umbrellas. And living in Washington, I'm just putting that out there. You think I should have stock? Well, it's manly in this day and age to have an umbrella.

It's no longer like a sissy thing. We can do that now? Okay, good. Yeah, it's totally okay. Black umbrella, you're fine. Well, Matt, we have a great show today. Umbrella notwithstanding, later on in today's show, after we get through the feedback,

we're going to talk about Ubuntu phone. It's here. It's real. Starting next week, you'll be able to preorder yourself a BQ phone on Ubuntu Touch. We'll give you more details about that, what the pricing is going to be, what the software situation looks like right now. We're going to pick up Popey's ear on the launch event. They had an insider's event. I don't know what the heck that means, but I know people got their hands on special units. That also sounds very interesting. We'll talk about that in the show. And then

we're going to really do a deep dive on this because normally we would cover a lot of this in the Linux Action Show on Sunday. But Linux Action Show this week was pre-recorded, so we didn't get a chance to fit this in. So there's so much to talk about. So we're going to go in deep on that this week. But first, we've got to talk a little about OwnCloud. 8.0 just came out. And I wanted to kind of noodle around with the Mumble Room, see who's in the Mumble Room using OwnCloud. So let's bring them in. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.

Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. Hey, guys. Hey-ho. So we got a great note in the subreddit from Seal20. And he's talking about kids from Arose. I was wondering how many people use OwnCloud in the last community and for what.

With the release of 8, I thought it would be nice to ask the community. I'll start by describing my use case. He's got it on a CentOS 6 VPS, OwnCloud 7, soon to be version 8. He uses, obviously, the core OwnCloud components, the contacts, the gallery, the documents, the tasks, news, music, chat, calendar, all that stuff. He's got six users on it. He's using mobile apps, using CalDev and CardDev and OwnCloud Sync. He's using it as a complete replacement for Dropbox, almost a complete replacement for Google. He shares photos with it, shares files that are too big for email.

He isn't currently using encryption. He has about 300 gigs in OwnCloud. Anybody in the Mumble room currently experimenting with own cloud maybe done the upgrade to own cloud 8 by chance i have fun cloud now which you know is it seven i use it yeah i'm still using seven and what are you using on cloud for no i uh well i started unbeknownst to me uh you're not supposed to put all of your data into own cloud it's not uh it's not quite there yet oh so somebody forgot to tell me that. And so I put every last bit of it. I tried it for a couple of weeks first on my laptop, and everything worked out great.

So I moved all of my data that I carry in my laptop on a daily basis to own cloud. And for the first couple of months, I thought things were dandy. Every time I'd restore my laptop, which is once every three weeks, or switch laptops, I'd just sign into own cloud, and all my files would show up. And then one day, I went to look for a file and it wasn't there. And so I started doing comparisons of the backups I'd made of my laptops and realized that over time, I had just been slowly losing files. And then I brought it up to everyone,

thinking that everyone would have a solution, and everyone's answer was, yeah, you didn't know that? That happens with Uncloud sometimes. No. I blame PHP. Wow. Well, so I'm kind of out on Uncloud for the time being.

Well, yeah. Yeah. I've noticed a lot of people online say, I use Uncloud, but I don't use the sync feature. Huh. And I think that's kind of how I use it. I do use Uncloud sync, but I only use Uncloud sync for a director that holds maybe 200 text files.

And that's about all I sync. And a few pictures, things like that that I'm using for in-production stuff. And then when it gets to heavy lifting for syncing, that's when I go BitTorrent sync. And I use a dedicated sync system to handle a lot of file syncing. I have, too, had issues with own cloud more in like I get all in and then I start hitting performance issues. Haven't had that as much with the later versions. So I've been bit a little bit by own cloud too. So I am a little trepidatious.

What I use own cloud for today is card dev and cal dev syncing. I use it for minimal file stuff. Like for example we have art assets for our shows. Women's Tech Radio or How to Linux or Linux Unplugged. There's, you know, you have PNGs of the logos and you have whatever the designers sent you the file and all this stuff that we need to share amongst people.

OwnCloud's great for that. Outside of that, I have ran into a few issues that have made me go kind of slow. And another one that we got in, this kind of along the same thing, is 19kster in the subreddit. In big bold letters says, read the documentation before you upgrade to owncloud 8, because if you just do a pseudo app get test upgrade, it could break your own cloud install.

So there he gave some links for what you need to read, so if you are upgrading to owncloud 8 soon, check that out. Anyone else in the mumble room want to share their owncloud story? Yeah, I've really never had a problem with own cloud. I'm running own cloud seven on open BSD. And it's a manual install of own cloud, not a distro install or anything like that. And honestly, I use it for syncing my files.

And I've never had a problem in this. Quite a few of us that use it that sync across OwnCloud, different files, different folders, all that sort of stuff. And I haven't noticed any file drops or anything like that. And performance-wise, it's been spot on. So no problems here. Noah, do you remember what version of OwnCloud it was where you had data loss? And I'm wondering if it was like...

Seven. Oh, I was going to say, if it was like version 6 or 5, I think that's when they initially introduced FileSync. My question is, to the gentleman that was just speaking, do you have any files that are over like 6 or 7 gigs? And have you noticed any problems with those? Those are big. No, I don't try to push that size file.

In Australia, our uplinks are absolutely pathetic, so we sort of don't push big files. I've got a couple of 100 meg files, and the checksums are still spot on on those. They're ISOs. From my point of view, I don't move gigs, but that could be a PHP limitation where you've got a configuration issue of post. Yeah, that is something people that are running on cloud installs often run into

is like settings in their PHP config that prevent file size or timeout issues and things like that is a common issue. And the guides do talk about that. They do address that. Yeah, I'm running it on Nginx with PHP FPM, so that's the only difference. I bet that's a pretty good setup, though. Yeah, from a performance point of view, it's stable. It doesn't use too much system resources.

It's actually only running on a VPS of 512 megabram and 20 or 30 gig hard disk. Something only you use, or do you have multiple users? No, multiple users. Hmm. Very nice. Well, I'm glad to get this. So we got a little mixed input. Mine has been somewhere in between what Noah's experienced, but I have had some issues.

So just take it easy and start. What I do is whenever it comes to data like this, I start slow, you know. And I'm sure Matt would tell you to have a backup. Always backups for your backups yeah and are you still are you still primarily using bit torrent sync matt are you kind of now are you been able to get off the dropbox sauce because i'm having a problem getting fully off the dropbox sauce still i tend to use dropbox for more of a i won't say backup because that would be entirely accurate but for more long-term sending things back and forth as far as like

over the web but as far as like over the web. But as far as like just on the LAN, BitTorrent Sync is definitely what I do. It just makes sense because it's easy. If something breaks, it's stupid easy to fix. I just haven't had any problems with it. And I'm going to give an obligatory plug for SyncThing because we always get in trouble when we don't mention SyncThing. I need to look into that. I happen to like BitTorrent Sync a lot because I publicly share keys with folks and we sync over the Internet.

But if you don't have that requirement and you're doing LAN syncing or syncing even not over LAN but just a few machines, SyncThing is a very viable option. Yeah, I like BitTorrent Sync, especially when it comes to large files. It doesn't give me grief. I don't have to worry about it. It just works and I can walk away and go have coffee. It doesn't matter. It's easy. Hey, you know, one way you can make all of this work is with a DigitalOcean droplet, whether it's

own cloud or BitTorrent sync or even sync thing. DigitalOcean would be a great place to host that. Head over to DigitalOcean.com right now. In fact, right after this, one of our next emails is somebody's hosting something really, really, really cool on DigitalOcean. And again, it gave me a great idea of something I might try, but I'll show that to you in a second. DigitalOcean, though, it's

a perfect opportunity for you to play with something like this or put it into full production like we do here at Jupyter Broadcasting. That's the great thing about DigitalOcean. Because of the value that they have, you can easily justify going over there and setting up a machine purely for educational reasons, right? But because these are all SSD power, because they have Tier 1 bandwidth, because it's Linux and KVM, you could also put into full scale production like we do. And like my co-host on Coda Radio does for his clients.

He puts their client back in app stuff on DigitalOcean. And you can transfer those images around. It's great. Because DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to get started. Go over there. In less than a minute, you'll have your own cloud server spun up. And pricing plans start only $5 per month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of fricking transfer. That's amazing. And they have data center locations

in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. So you can get that deal, that geo-diversify, go out there and set up your own CDN or quite honestly, one of the things I use that for. And it's a small thing, but it, to me, it's like, it's a nice thing I can do for the unfilter audience without much cost. Cause it's just $5 is I have a droplet in New York and I have a droplet in San Francisco and I have a droplet in Washington or I mean, I'm sorry, I have a server in Washington and all three of them act as like a three-way CDN. So if you are in on the East Coast,

you can pull from my East Coast server much faster than you're going to pull from my West Coast server. And if you're across the pond, you can pull from all three locations at the same time and all of them come from different routes. So it's a really cool way that I did like a cheap, really kind of overnight BitTorrent sync CDN. And it's, is it perfect? Probably not. But man, does it do the job. For $5 a month. Plus, I've got other stuff running on that rig. And I'm always setting up new droplets because it's so quick to get started.

That interface, it's like it's no barrier at all. I can just sit down and get working because the control panel is so crazy intuitive. And you can replicate the control panel on a larger scale with their API. So that way, if you end up getting a lot of droplets, you can scale the management of those droplets using that API, taking advantage of tools already created by

the community or ones you create yourself if you've got the skills. Plus, they've got great tutorials to help you get anything set up you need. This is really a great combination. They're taking Linux, they're taking SSDs, they're taking all this tier one bandwidth in these connections that they've managed to get in these great data centers, and they've brought all of it together with incredible customer

service, an expanding community that means great apps, great tutorials, incredible value, backed by Linux. It's awesome. DigitalOcean.com. But here's the thing. We got a promo code for you. And you can use the promo code D-O, unplugged. DigitalOcean, unplugged.

D-O, unplugged. Lowercase. All one word. D-O, unplugged. Get a $10 credit. Try out the $5 rig. Two months for free, and see all the things you can do with it. Go deploy something amazing that's all yours. It's extremely gratifying.

DigitalOcean.com, D-O-unplugged, and you get that $10 credit. Try out the $5 rig, two months for free, or go all in on Big Boy. Absolutely. You know, something here I did recently as I was working with a client, and they were looking at setting up something with Moodle. And I was like, oh, well, you know, I can set Moodle up. And when I was Googling around, sure enough, they had a DigitalOcean

tutorial written for it. Very, very awesome. And it was cool because I could go through with this client and actually show them how it was being set up and what all these things meant and all that sort of stuff. It was very awesome. Yeah, you know, and that is a nice peace of mind for them too is, I'm going to set this up on a DigitalOcean droplet. If you and I ever part ways, you're not high and dry dry they've got all of this information for you and you can

yeah that is slick and you know more and more when i'm searching for stuff i'm seeing the digital ocean tutorial show up in the search results because they're just they're just great uh so david my favorite oh yeah oh yeah no i was gonna say my favorite part was where they're like oh hey that's great but you have control over it because it's on your droplet and like ah but i don't and i clicked a few buttons and sure enough... And it's yours. Yeah. It's your droplet. You got it. Yep. So David set up something kind of cool on one of his droplets.

He says, I'm a longtime fan of Lass, and I want to tell you about a project I have been working on. It's a website called DistroPlaza running at www.distroplaza.com. You guys can go check it out while I talk about it if you want. And it lets anyone upload a torrent of any distribution for free. Every distro uploaded gets a download page,

a forum, a blog, and a place for users to review the distro. Distributions also get user groups where they can use, where users can stay informed about what's going on with their favorite distro. Distro Plaza launched in January on DigitalOcean thanks to the awesome promo code JB provides. I would love to hear some feedback on Distro Plaza and if you think any other features

that would be good for Distro Plaza, I'd love to know. You can check it out at distroplaza.com. And so we're looking at it right here. And so the idea is you have a distro you love a lot. You upload the torrent. So now they're seeding the torrent here, or part of that. They give you the forms. Here's the official Ubuntu forms.

Here's their forms for it. Here's blogs that would be specifically around Ubuntu. It's empty. I mean, it needs content. And the other thing is I think it needs content from outside sources. I don't think you can depend on self-generated content. That would be my feedback to DistroPlaza. But it's kind of neat. It's a neat idea.

It is a neat idea. Yeah, I could definitely see a direction where this could be really, really powerful. Like a one-stop place to get information, get the downloads. The thing is, this has been tried before, so you've got to really figure out a way to do something different here, I think. Right, right. I would caution against – so I would go one direction or the other. I would definitely caution against the community aspect of it unless you're vetting specific people that you trust or at least know aren't going to just spam your stuff.

You could try that approach. But I think really the idea of showing folks that you're this type of person. You should be looking at these distros. You're that type of person. You should be looking at these distros. You're that type of person. You should be looking at that distros. And look at the other attempts that have been made and try and fine-tune that, dial it in a little better. I don't know. Maybe some previous things failed.

Yeah, because there's some that have tried that aren't really that great. This actually is very clean. I like the layout. So it's very promising. Mumbler Room, any thoughts? Any advice for our friend David who wants to set up Distro Plaza, a place to feature distros and talk about them and download them?

No. Going once. Okay. Well, there you go, David. You got Matt and I's advice. The Mumble Room, we'll check it out after the show, perhaps. And you can too, listener. DistroPlaza.com. One last topic and then we're out of the feedback. I know, I know. But I want to give everybody a chance to chime in. I love the

community interaction. In fact, it was one of the reasons why we started this show. It's actually the reason. Yeah. So, Will writes in, it sounded to me like Chris was pronouncing U-Block as U-Block. But I think it's pronounced Moo-Block. He's not even shitting. You know the one that's spelled U-Block? It's actually pronounced

Well, obviously it's Moo. Like a cow. Because, see, it's actually a Greek U, so it's pronounced M-U, like a micro, since it's a lightweight... But anyways, back to AdBlock Plus. I started using AdBlock Plus shortly after it started, even back when there was no option to allow Google text ads. He thinks that people care too much about the acceptable ads program that we talked about last week.

It's easy to change subscriptions in AdBlock Plus so that one doesn't have a whitelist ads if you don't want them. But I think AdBlock Plus is playing with fire a little bit. It reminds me a bit of the net neutrality issue. AdBlock Plus wants to provide some privilege to some ads over others resources or money, in other words, and are necessary to review ads

and decide what is acceptable and when it isn't. They have chosen to let companies pay to be reviewed faster, which effectively means companies can get in ahead of other people. They will say that the prioritization does not impact their criteria for what is acceptable ad, but their money incentives for the program really don't line up with what is best for the user. And this is something I didn't realize.

I didn't realize that I knew you could pay AdBlock Plus not to be on their block list. I didn't know that you could pay AdBlock Plus to grease the wheels a little bit. Sort of like when you're getting a passport and you want to rush it. Yeah. I did. And here's why I don't care. Because I care in a sense, but I think it's important to really take this away. Until it's

being bundled into browsers or forced onto people, it'll take care of itself. I think it'll snuff itself out. I think he's going to pay a heavy price for it because I think it's a bad idea. But if it was pre-installed, yeah, that would be very scary. That'd be frightening because then it isn't that neutrality issue at that point.

You're right. It's the user's opnion. That's a good point. I agree that it's a very shady, sleazy, not very long-term, healthy kind of approach. Yeah. I still remain... I think one of the reasons I wanted to read this email is I'm still pretty undecided on the whole ad blocking thing. I mean obviously this show is an ad-supported show, and so I wouldn't want people to block ads on this show.

I'm sure a lot of people will skip them. I would hope they don't, and we try to change them up a little bit so that way you won't, and it would hurt us. So if there was such a thing as ad block for podcasts and 90% of the people listened, we would go out of business. Well, so when it comes to advertising, and this includes AdSense or audio ads, the thing you have to remember is, is that advertisement,

does it have any slim potential of offering a true benefit to the user? Our ads do. We like them. We feel that they're awesome things that we're excited about. We want to share them. Even AdSense, to a limited limited degree especially when it first came out did potentially offer some advantage

to a user they go to a uh maybe a decor website they're going to have decor ads that might help them enhance enhance what they're wanting to do now that being said when you have flashing banners and pop-unders that's not a value-added situation that needs to die in a fire so you know so. So my philosophy on that is people are going to use these apps. They want to do that. That's fine. So in tech circles, yes, ad blocking is going to happen. Outside of tech circles, it's a mood issue. I think we're in a good position because our stuff is audio-based and video-based,

where it's really not as big of an issue in that regard, except for, obviously, AdSense and things like that. Yeah, and I think you made a good point, like it's the wash it's on it and this is and then we'll get off this because it's not strictly related but i guess this is why i've kind of kept opting back to turning off ad blockers is because if the publisher wants to publish a full screen takeover ad uh then i want to be able to judge them for that and so like one of like you said one of the things is we make sure like the ads we pick there's not a single sponsor we have that

we don't actually use that's a big deal we actually like these songs it's not like we're just picking random people out of a hat and so yeah that's where I think so they cross the line they sort of take the audience for granted in that regard and they shove too much in their face

and it can't work when you do that much as it's noise, and that's why people, I think, resort to using ad block. I think it's a symptom. Most importantly, does it inhibit the user experience? That's when an ad block is acceptable at any case and any scenario. If it's literally legitimately inhibiting an experience. Now, a quick commercial before a YouTube video is not inhibiting your experience. A few seconds in, it gives you the option to skip it and get over yourself. It's not that big a deal.

Yeah, I agree. But if you're on a mobile phone and you've got that big ad that just covers up the entire screen and it's playing video and you can't find the X, that's inhibiting my experience. That needs to stop. Yeah. That's it. And now I'd like to take a moment to tell you about vitamins. No, I'm kidding. Oh, no. And power I'd like to take a moment to tell you about vitamins. No, I'm kidding. Oh, no.

And power shakes. Always power shakes. Oh, yeah, protein shakes. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. The Mumbaroon has been pretty quiet on the issue. Anybody have any final thoughts before we close the book on this topic? Mumbaroon, this is your chance.

Well, you know, it's – Adverts on TV and podcasts and, you know, radio or whatever. They're all a lot more difficult to get away from than adverts on the web. I mean, adverts on TV, I used to have a PVR that actually had an advert skip button. And all it was was a one-minute forward skip. And I knew that I could go bam, bam, bam, bam, and forward skip through the TV adverts. And I had no moral compunction doing that whatsoever.

Yet, and there's a big TV company, and I'm paying for the delivery of that service to my house anyway. Whereas an independent content creator on the web, it's a different story. There's like sometimes one guy who's creating that website and maintaining it, keeping it running, running the server, and creating the content as their full-time job. And so I generally don't run Adblock at all unless the site looks like a bag of crap like Pharonix, in which case I will block it. Waiting for that to come out. Because so far, that's totally larval. You you're explaining he's one guy he runs the whole

thing he manages all of that uh but yeah right it's a tough line to walk uh and it's particularly hard i mean not to not to take this in a weird direction uh but it is particularly hard to monetize probably more hard than normal in the free and open source software community because oh god yeah yeah you know what i mean so like i mean not necessarily i mean obviously people to monetize probably more hard than normal in the free and open source software community because... Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, you know what I mean? So, like, I mean, not necessarily. I mean, obviously people are willing to pay.

I mean, look at the Humble Bundle and our Patreon. People are willing to pay when they feel there's value there. But I think some people are a little afraid of that and I can understand that. And people also pay when they're guilt-tripped into it. I mean, look last week what happened to the GnuPG developer guy. Yeah, right. A new story comes out, and suddenly his donation goes from like €20,000 up to €120,000 in a day.

And when people feel guilty about it, then, yeah, they will throw a few coins in to help maintain it. But often they won't do anything. People will pay the minimum for for humble bundle no matter what anyone says about the fact that linux users pay more many people pay the absolute yeah they they need to so you know and everyone's in the same boat nobody has like buckets of money throw this right yeah uh a lot of things also try to get under google's example when it comes to things so they don't really know of many other alternative ways to fund their project. They just do it the Google way, ad-wise.

Yeah. But I think having or asking or saying that you need something, and if it's a really good project like GNU PG or AdBlock, if you ask your users and you have a good product that's worth paying for, hell, I'd pay for it. That's exactly how I feel, too. I'll make two points. I think that it really behooves the content creators to do their due diligence and looking into who's advertising and how they're advertising, such as you guys do.

And the other thing is, you know, sometimes you'll get caught up in people using Adblock because of all the sites that don't do that due diligence. And we have to be reminded to go turn it off for your pages. Well, and Reddit has a nice approach. If you use Adblock on Reddit, it says, hey, you're using Adblock, and that's cool. But if you don't use it, they actually have a little banner that appears that says, hey, thank you for not using Adblock on our site. That's the way to do it. I find Reddit ads are pretty acceptable. They're tame.

Yeah, I don't really mind them at all. Me neither. And I do like being thanked for turning off Adblock. I know that's a stupid thing, but I do kind of like it. It helps. It's psychological. You can't argue with it. Like, you know what?

You're welcome. That's a really good point because that exact little thing is what's reminded me in some instances, oh, I have Adblock on or Ublocklock on and then you go turn it off. Yeah. And I just whitelist them now. I mean, it's like I'm okay with that. Yeah. Yeah, good point.

All right. Well, you know what? Chad wants to talk about it. Maybe in just a second. Before we get into it, we'll just real briefly and then we'll get into the Ubuntu phone stuff. Chad really wants to talk about this Raspberry Pi 2 problem. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Okay, we'll do that. We'll do that. I think we'll have a quick one on that. Why don't we, you know, we'll mention one of our great sponsors, one of the ones that we use, one that I've used for over two years now.

I've been a Ting customer for over two years. I think Matt's clocking up on that, too. It's got to be really close, if not. I mean, really, yeah, it's got to be close. Two years. And so I can say now confidently that I am truly a Ting user and I do recommend them. Start by going to linux.ting.com.

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What? You only pay for what you use. I know. I know. It's crazy. Here's what you're saying. You're saying, Chris, crazy ting's too crazy. They can't afford to do that.

You know what? You're wrong. You're wrong. Kyra's here to tell you why. Ting keeps rates simple. We don't make you pick a plan. Instead, you just use your phone as you normally would. How much you use determines how much you pay each month.

You can have as many devices as you want on one account. That's good, because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data. Your usage, plus $6 per active device on your account, plus taxes, is your monthly bill. Simple. That's what we mean when we say mobile. That makes sense. Yeah, go over to linux.ting.com. Just get that savings.

By the way, remember how I said that $25 matters? From time to time, Ting gets some great deals in on MiFi hotspots. And they just got back in the Novotel MiFi 5580. Once you go to linux.ting.com, that's a $96 tri-band LTE hotspot. $96. You own that thing. It's not locked either. You own it.

It's yours. And it's $6 for the line. You can even turn that off when you don't need it. And then you just pay for the data usage. Why wouldn't you just have that in your pocket? Now, they don't have this device all the time, so I mention it right now. Again, it's the Novotel MiFi 5580, $96 tri-band LTE hotspot with a LCD screen on the front So I mention it right now. Start by going to linux.ting.com, and if you have any questions, you can call them at 1-855-TING-FTW. Also, on their blog right now, and I know from some of the emails I've gotten, net neutrality and Title II are on your mind.

Ting has been very upfront about their position and what they think is important in this debate and discussion, and they have another blog post up on their – it's ting.com slash blog, but start by going to linux.ting.com to read that. And they also, up on the blog, have a tip for how you can download Google Maps for offline use. If you're going to go somewhere where you don't have Signal or you want to save some data, it turns out there's actually a really great way to save the maps in Google Maps offline so you can get them without even a connection. They have that up on their blog as well. Linux.ting.com.

And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. And thank you, all of you, for going out there and trying them. I can say I really do recommend them. And by the end of February, things are really going to get crazy for Ting when they're rocking GSM and CDMA at the same time. Oh, it's going to be huge. Huge. Who else is doing that? Nobody.

Exactly. Nobody else is doing that. Linux.Ting.com. Okay. So real quick, I guess it turns out this new Raspberry Pi 2 that we were talking about last week, if you expose it to a bright flash, like a Xeon flash, like on a camera flash, not just like a room, like you don't just turn on the light, but like you really expose it to a bright light, it kills power to the device and causes it to reboot.

So you can reboot a Raspberry Pi 2 by flashing a light at it so what you're telling me is no raspberry pies can be used in porn studios photography situations i mean like so that's you know that just i mean you know well i got one in my basement you know i mean so you just totally killed my killed my dream here right i mean it's like oh my god that just that totally just see i can't that just totally changes everything now i gotta go and get knUX or something I think people just find this to be funny and I guess there's even like an epoxy paint people are already using to cover up the chip and make it so it's not like that

but it's just hilarious oh Inagogo you have something to comment about lasers in the Raspberry Pi this sounds good but someone I was reading on Reddit someone also said the laser also affects the Raspberry Pi and does the same effect lasers but someone i was reading on reddit someone also said the laser also affects the raspberry pie and does the same effect lasers freaking lasers raspberry pies with lasers on their head

yeah i didn't i don't know what to make of this uh but i thought people that adore them i thought that was funny uh so yeah is it me or does it strike me as jerry springer in a way like you could actually have a raspberry pie sitting on a on a chair and you know the other person with lasers and flashlights attached to them having this conversation. I don't know. The whole thing just seems silly. I was picturing elite government agents who take over

a Middle Eastern compound using Raspberry Pis by going and flashing lights at the Raspberry Pis, causing the security grid to crash and then they infiltrate and drop troops in and it's a big American, it's the next big American movie and it all happened because they flashed lights at Raspberry Pi's. Well, that's pretty in-depth.

That's true, right? That's where I was going with that. Any other thoughts? They'll just put that in Black Hatch or something, I'm sure. Exactly. You could. You could set up lighting in your server room where you have a bunch of Raspberry Pis,

and you could flash the lights when you need all your servers to reboot. There you go. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about what we're all really here gathered today to talk about, and that's this new BQ phone that goes on sale next week. It's like around $170. I think, what is it?

Probably like $100. I don't know. About $175. I don't know what it's going for exactly, US. And there's even a little video. Now, I don't think there's a lot of words in this video, so I'll just put it up on the stream so we can look at it. I mean, it's definitely a very fancy video.

After all of the waiting, I mean, I know it's only been a couple of years, but it feels, I mean, that's a long time. In the scheme of developing something like this, that's not actually a long time, but for people sitting on the outside, it feels like a long time. In the scheme of developing something like this, that's not actually a long time. But for people sitting on the outside, it feels like a long time. And so this video is extremely well done. Popey, I don't know if you know any of the background on this video.

No, the first time I saw it was last Friday. It was shown off at an event in London, and I'd never seen it before. And actually, the bits where you see outside the guy on top of a building is actually on top of our office building. I can recognize certain parts of London in the video. Oh, that's funny.

We'll have the video linked in the show notes. I think one of the things the video does really well for me is essentially, without being too obvious about it, showing me how Ubuntu Touch would fit in with the ideal daily lifestyle that, of course, nobody truly lives. But if you live that, I get contextual information becomes available to me just by watching that commercial. It's surprisingly effective. Life at your fingertips is the slogan.

That's pretty good. This is really well done. I think so. I think they did a nice job with it. I think it's going to be interesting to see where it goes to. So the Aquarius E4 5, 4.5. It's a 4.5-inch screen, huh? Well, so there you go.

So the BQ phone, it's not a screamer of a phone. It's not going to blow you away with its stats. It's got a 4.5-inch screen. It runs at 540x960 resolution, 1.3 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 MediaTek CPU, a Mali-400 GPU at 500 MHz, again MediaTek,

8 GB EMC storage, 1 GB of RAM, 2150 mAh battery, dual micro-SIM, and an 8-megapixel rear shooter. As far as first goes, it's not bad, especially if you consider that, you know, for a certain sector of the market, that's plenty phone. Oh, yeah.

I don't know if it would be for me. I think anyone coming into the smartphone space for the first time is going to be pleasantly surprised, and I think that's really where they're going to hit their sweet spot. That's where I would target. I think that seems like that's what they're doing. Now, it's not launching in the U.S. yet. Yeah.

But it is available. it'll be available i wonder i wonder if i'll still be able to buy it i don't know the uh the event that happened last uh friday there were 30 people invited from this is the insiders around the world yeah it was called the yeah the insiders event the ubuntu insiders they were actually invited uh a couple of months ago we built a couple of months ago. We built a list of people that we thought might be interesting to come along and see it. And there was a couple of journalists, a couple of video bloggers, and some bloggers, like written bloggers, and members of our community, developers, and what you might call outsiders from the community, just come along and we give them a phone and they get to be the first people with one of these devices.

We also gave them a few little tidbits of information over the month leading up to it. And then we flew them out to London on Friday and they came and saw that video and a couple of talks by, it was a guy from BQ there, there was a couple of people from Canonical giving talks. It was really good fun.

And they got to leave with a phone, right? Yeah, we gave them all a phone and it was in a special origami presentation box. There was a phone and a pair of nice headphones. Yeah. It even warranted the Ubuntu phone's first official unboxing video, which OMG Ubuntu picked up and ran. That Ubuntu phone box is slick.

I've got to say, that's a nice-looking box. It was funny. We were asking them, look, do you mind if we video you some opening? Because we know what it's like. People want to see the thing unboxed. And so the video that you're showing now, that's Jordan Keyes unboxing his, he actually ran back to his hotel room or ran back to another room in order to do that. And then we went out for beer in the evening while his video was rendering out. And then he uploaded it to YouTube when he got back after a few beers. Good sport. Good sport. It was, it was a good,

it was a good day. Um, I noticed too, I noticed that they come with a, uh, the, uh, the insiders edition came with a very nice set of just headphones,

like an extra perk there. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. We wanted to give them a little bit of something extra to say, thank you for taking part. And, uh,

and you know, uh, coming all the way to the UK. I mean, some of them flew over. Some of them didn't have fast come. But it was nice of them to come over and just take part and give us feedback as well. You know, we've been capturing feedback from them. You know, I was walking around on a Friday with a notebook, old style paper notebook. And people were saying, hey, Popey, what about this? And how does that work?

And why is this like this and i was making lists and you know i've been giving feedback to developers and filing bugs like you know doing all the due diligence because these are the first people that have seen them outside canonical we've all seen it evolve you know i've had one of those phones since august last year and i use it every day but there are things you just don't notice and then when someone walks up to you and goes oh why why is it doing allowing me to do this and you think oh wow yeah you're right yeah yeah it's just something because you use it every day you just don't think that's weird very much you shouldn't do that yeah very much so that is very true so so actually they they go on sale as a flash sale starting tomorrow which is is Wednesday, the 11th of February,

at 8 o'clock UTC. So it's 9 central European time. Flash sale means it's only going to be available for a limited time. Are suckers like me, are we going to be able to buy it? Or is it only going to be, is it region-locked? It's all day. So it's 9 central European time until 6 central.

So 8 till 5 UTC. So yeah, it's a fairly lengthy amount of time throughout the day it's not like you know a 10 minute flash so it's not like the whole world has to ddos so i might actually website for the day you could try i have a shot yeah yeah yeah i'm certainly going to bed early so i could get up it's like christmas for me tomorrow because i'm going to be ordering one obviously yeah um you know we're all going to be ordering them are you pretty excited yeah it's it's you know the fact that you know i started working at canonical three years ago knowing that this was going to happen and it's taken a long time for us to get here and we've you know we've had a lot of flack along the way and the method by which we've developed this and the software choices that we've made and the hardware specification of the first device.

You know, remember, this is the first Ubuntu phone. Right. Hopefully one of many devices. You know, if we come back on unplugged episode 600, there'll be, you know, a plethora of these phones out there who knows are you already looking at the next device a little bit because i know they yeah we've already said the next one is the meizu yeah that one's going to be a little more uh like a larger screen right one thing and uh yeah it's uh yeah it's quite a bigger screen and more it's uh more cores more ram you know yeah more and bigger of everything but um yeah the moment you gotta

start somewhere focused on the BQ1. How important was it? You mentioned that you've had one iteration of this, another since August. Is that part of why you got to start and you kind of have to lock in the specs at some place and then start developing for that? And so this BQ phone, it's sort of been locked in for a while, I take it. Right. And so we initially were you know we've had

loads of different hardware over the the time that we've developed this we started off with a tablet edition on an asus transformer tf-101 and we've moved through very and nokia n9 and various samsung galaxies and nexus devices and you know then we got a partner in bq so we we grabbed a bunch of those devices and we started doing the hardware enablement and making sure all the apps work. Because if we've been focusing on the Nexus 4, then we discover that, oh, actually, certain dialogues don't fit on the screen because this thing's slightly different.

So we have to make sure all our apps and the dash is responsive and scales down to devices of this size. And it's actually made us more disciplined. Having a device that has more constrained hardware resources is probably better for us. If we'd have had the MX4 first and had Octocore with 2GB of RAM, we could have gone nuts and made some decisions that actually we'd regret later because we'd have to try and scale it back.

Whereas from what I'm told, even unoptimized on the MX4, decisions that actually we'd regret later because we'd have to try and scale it back whereas from what i'm told um even unoptimized on the mx4 it flies along i haven't actually got one myself but i'm told it flies along um and it's you know it's pretty good on this bq device and we've still got some more optimization to do um so yeah there's still work and we're still ongoing and and the good thing is that we continue to deliver updates to that device. So even when we moved on to the MX4 and the next device and the next device, all the previous devices continue to get those updates. The MX4 looks so sweet. Wow.

This looks like a – yeah. Yeah. I mean I want the BQ just to have the experience, but I think the one I'm going to land on would be the MX4. This is an incredible phone. I want the mole. Yeah, well, sure, of course. That's like trading cards, yeah? Yeah, exactly.

I'd like it. So how much energy do you suspect Canonical will put into sort of like, I don't want to know if a generic image is the right one, but an image that's essentially with some modifications that will work on most smartphones. Is that something Canonical will ever do? You can't really do that because the ARM architecture doesn't let you. So there's a couple of things. ARM doesn't really have the concept that the PC world has in terms of ACPI and device discovery. That's very mature on the PC, and you can have one cobase stick a usb stick in it and it will

boot auto discover everything and figure out what drivers to load at runtime um and the second problem is most um socs most of the chips that are in phones have uh binary blobs and you know that's that's sad and disappointing and but that's just the world we we live in right now there are no free soft fully free software phones, none, none whatsoever. So whenever anyone complains to us that we're not a fully free software phone, well, good luck finding one. Well, yeah, if you want a phone that makes phone calls. Right, yeah, or is usable in any way, shape, or form.

So we have to build an image that is usable on a specific device. But that's actually where we've been quite cunning with this, is that we have multiple layers to the image that goes on the phone. There's the very base layer, which is the device-specific part. And there'll be a device-specific bit for BQ, a device-specific bit for the MX4, and then ongoing other devices. And practically, what is that is that is that a specific kernel what what is that layer composed of yeah so that's the that's effectively the kernel and the drivers for things like the gpu the radios and all that the sensors you know so so for example if a device comes along that has a fingerprint sensor just for the sake of argument

you know we might want to support that and there'll be a device specific thing driver that we need to go in but on top of that is the second layer which is the user space bit which has got all of our ubuntu stuff in and the dash and then on top of that is your apps but also the the oem or the carrier um can put their own additional bit on top. So we control a bit in the middle that's the API and all the stuff people write. Yeah, and the dash and the common bit that you would see across all the devices. The bit at the bottom is the device enablement. And so that means that when a new device comes out, all we need to do is do the device enablement, and then it's the same user space that runs on those.

And so when we want to update an old device, we just update the middle section, and the device enablement bit stays the same. That's a really good approach. It means we don't have that fragmentation that Android has. We can have lots of different devices on the market, and they're all effectively running the same code. Well, and it seems like it's approachable by just a fairly well-organized community could come together and say, all right, well, we'll take on supporting the Nexus 4 for another couple of years, or we'll make a Nexus 5 port. And me, as a more sophisticated user, could say, you know what? I know this community. I'll go use their image because if I'm following you, the only thing they would really have to modify would be that first layer, that lower-level bits, right?

Right. And so someone has already created the Nexus 5 port, as you know. And it has issues. It's not perfect hardware-wise. We're going to continue to maintain the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10. And then whatever other devices come along that we have to support for contractual agreement for things like BQ and Meizu and so on. So we'll continue to maintain a whole bunch of devices going forward. All right.

I got a couple more questions, and then we'll open up the moment because I know they have a couple of questions. I'm exceptionally excited about this because I know we've all just been watching this. And so this is a really exciting first step. And I know the BQ phone isn't perfect. Maybe we'll talk about that too and kind of get Popey's idea on sort of what expectations we should have, maybe performance-wise and battery life and things like that. But first, I'll tell you about Linux Academy.

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I can figure out five hours. Once you put it in that terms,, I can wrap my brain around that. That's a concept I get. And they'll let me set up a learning plan, so I just say how much time I have, and then they'll work with me. And they can do the same for you. It doesn't matter if you have a little time or a lot of time. Linux Academy is where you want to go.

Check them out, linuxacademy.com. Go over there, get our special discount. I think you're going to be really impressed. I think, yeah, I know I've been talking about Linux Academy, I've been talking about learning Ruby, and I'll tell you, I think that realization for me has just sort of re-cemented for me why I think this is such a great resource and why it can be such a great resource for you.

And I want you to try it. I want you to have that moment. It's extremely empowering. It gives you a level of control over your future that I think if you don't have that, it's worth going over there and trying it for a little while. I don't have a better way to put it. It was extremely gratifying to know that I could set a goal for myself and that this was a tool that would help me accomplish that goal. And it's not a bullshit goal either. It's actually making myself better, educating myself, and learning something new.

I would like all of you to experience that. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Get our special discount. Thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. I think you guys will be really impressed. Alright. So, Mr. Popey, Iy i gotta ask you now we've

we've talked a lot of good stuff is there any disclaimers you want to make about like expectations like if i buy one of these is there maybe gonna be performance issues you think it's gonna work okay so the first thing i'd say is don't expect every single app you've got on you know wherever phone you currently use to be there we we you you know, we're realistic about this. You know, we're new to the market and we don't have the app ecosystem that the other platforms have. We just don't yet have the Skype and the WhatsApp.

You know, they're not there yet. So you do have Telegram. You have Telegram, which is really cool. Yeah. That's a neat mobile app. It's a really nice app as well. Yeah. It's open source.

It's the codes on Launchpad. You can, you know contribute if you want to if you want to add features that that you've seen in other telegram apps then knock yourself out and it even does badge like little numbers for unread messages and the that's really cool yeah and you get notifications and all that kind of stuff all right so that's a good disclaimer you're not going to have all your apps probably pretty expected uh you can probably fill in some of the gaps with web apps but it's's just probably not quite there. It's not going to be there for a while. But that's pretty expected, I think.

Right. And part of this is, you know, I think some of the – we do have conversations with software vendors all the time. You know, we have a team of people who are constantly discussing, you know, you should bring your app to Ubuntu or you should bring your framework to Ubuntu or whatever it is. And so we're constantly having those conversations. And we know that those companies are keeping an eye on Ubuntu, shall we say. Yeah, kind of seeing where things go. And I have noticed, what the hell is it about you guys where you managed to get just managed to get attention like no other company in the linux space does like i i mentioned to you today on the pre-show i was just digging around for stories for tech talk and i just kept coming up with all these various outlets they're not even really attached to the linux or the open source community necessarily talking about it like for

example the one that stood out with me this morning was i was going over some bitcoin headlines and one of the top bitcoin headlines one of the top stories in Bitcoin today was the launch of the Ubuntu Touch phone and if there was a Bitcoin wallet available for it. Like, isn't that interesting to just see how it permeates? It seems to reach out to a level of consumers. It's not like Apple or Microsoft level of reach, but it seems like a wider reach

than pretty much anybody else in the Linux space gets. And I've seen a lot more people talking about Ubuntu Touch than I would have expected. I think partly the fact that it's that real Linux device. You know, I know Android is Linux at heart, really, but it is a real Linux device in that, you know, you can SSH into it and do all the kinds of stupid stuff that you would do on a normal Linux machine.

And that actually enables quite a lot of creativity in terms of what you want to run on the device. And you're talking about the Bitcoin wallet. There is a Bitcoin wallet in the store, and it's been in the store for a long, long time, about 18 months it's been there. Is there a central place I can go to find all the apps available for my ubuntu phone there is uh we we haven't made a web front end yet but someone in the community uh looked at our store api and built one for us so there is one and you can go to it and i'll give you the link and you can put it in the show notes and you can browse the apps that are in the store and you can

see the ratings and all the kinds of stuff that you would see on iTunes on the web. Q5, you had a question, right? Yeah, now I'm going to frame this, Popey, in that let's say this Ubuntu phone is incredibly successful. We're five years down the road. There's multiple devices out there. My question has to do with that because one thing I've noticed with Android devices

is you buy a device, you load it up with apps, everything runs great. A couple years go by, even though your hardware is the same, the apps run like poo because of the automatic updates. The programmers, the developers of the applications are now building them for the newer hardware, which then doesn't run on what you have. And I'm wondering if, as Ubuntu has older software updates for older repos, if there's going to be something similar on the phone side of things so that if you get a phone, you don't have to worry about a semi-planned obsolescence

because applications are being updated and basically update to the point where your hardware can't run them anymore. So it's a great question, and I've been bitten by that myself. I have an iPad first generation, and there's half a dozen apps on there that I just cannot run anymore because when I first run them, they say, you need to update me.

And when you try and update them, it says, oh, you need iOS 7 or you need iOS 8 or something. And so, yeah, I can appreciate that problem. One of the issues there, there's a few issues. One is, you know, we can't necessarily control

what app developers do. If they see a new uh device that comes on the market that has a 4k screen and 128 gig of storage and a 16 core cpu and they want to do something amazing with that whatever it might be let's say they make the most amazing touch screen video editor on linux on a phone that's got that kind of specs then yeah i would expect that to run like a pig on the bq device because this is a 960 by 440 display with a few cores and one gig of ramp so that you're going to have a bad time and and i don't think that's our you know department to start telling app developers no no no no you need to write your your apps as if you're running motif

on you know on a pentium 200 in order to you into our app store. I don't think that's what we should be doing. We should foster innovation and the advancement of more complex and fun and interactive and useful applications on the device. I don't think we should rein them in. the platform we are trying to keep our platform as lean as possible and as i said before having this as our first device helps us to get to that goal because we've committed to continuing to maintain this device it's not like i'm not trying to throw stones but with the firefox os first phone that i bought the zte open there's no updates for it whereas the firefox flame i can move to firefox os 2.0, but I have no way of doing that that I'm aware of on the ZTE Open, and we don't want to be in that situation where we leave devices behind. No, my question wasn't are you going to force developers to maintain,

like you can't do anything newer on your programs because of older devices. What I'm specifically asking is will there be a way, unlike, for instance, the Google Play Store, where once an application is updated, you do not have the option to reuse the older version if your phone auto-updated unless you can somewhere find the APK online to be able to sideload it? Like, will, when an application is updated, will the original older version still be available for those who don't have the money to go out and buy that new 4k phone yeah that's a good question actually and we're we're working on the best way

to do that you know whether we whether we need to support having multiple different versions of the same app in the store to support different versions of the framework of different versions of the devices that we've got out in in you know consumer land uh we haven't got a solution for that at the moment my workaround is that i personally mirror all of the clicks in the store every single day so i have a copy of every version of every app that's in the store on my home server you know that's my personal way of doing it uh but uh yeah you you but depending on your geek level you might be able to manually back up those click packages uh yeah like if i wanted the old version of telegram for

some reason i could maybe somehow keep that yeah i mean it's you could we've got the tools you can you can get a click package and you can sideload it over a usb cable and just type a command and it installs it you know i i have done that today installed loads of because i wanted to test the upgrade process i installed a load of old apps on the phone and then went through the upgrade process so yeah you can do that kind of thing we do make it possible for you to sideload old versions of stuff is that something that canonical will try well would they have a problem if someone in the community took up that role of hosting all the older versions or would they be okay with that well we got to remember is that the packages in the store are uh licensed under certain terms and they're not necessarily all gpl the developers you know some of them yeah it's up to them whether

their apps are you know distributable redistributable or not you know that now it's something you would have to check you know there's actually some some decent apps that i use like uh readability and insta there's an instapaper web app in here there's a rotten tomatoes i mean some of these are web apps to be sure but hey you know a web app's fine as long as it takes me right to it for the most part i don't need things to be native for like rotten tomatoes right and there's a few games you know we need i i would love for there to be more games on there because you know i same as anyone. I sit there and when I'm bored, I pick up my phone and start playing stupid games. There's a couple of really good ones. There's one called Machines vs. Machines, which is a really nice desktop tower defense game, which is infuriating. And I'm almost 100% certain Canonical have lost a lot of productivity over the last month or so having that game in there I like this a lot, this is really neat, I'll have a link to this

app store website, I mean you're pulling in the reviews here this is really, tiny tiny RSS app very nice, oh very cool yeah, and the nice thing, that store nobody asked him to do that, he just noticed that we had a well documented API for the store, and so he created his own web front end

and put it on GitHub, so anyone can do that. I've noticed a couple of other questions in the IRC. Yeah, please do. So Ana Gogo says, is there tethering? The answer is yes and no. There isn't a GUI for it at the moment, but I think it is possible with a couple of commands you can tether to the device.

And we do plan to have it so that you can press buttons in order to tether in the same way as you would expect to do that on other devices. And the other question is, is there a mobile terminal? Yes, yes, of course there is. So it seems like for a lot of us the selection of apps won't be a big deal but for the average consumer like an Audible app is kind of important, maybe Waze or something like that. That's going to be the big fight. But I guess that only gets solved after some hardware has been on the market for a little while, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And once you've got a couple of those out there and you can go to places like MWC or GDC or, you know, any of the conferences over the next six months and start

waving the device around and say, look, we've got this open platform with hardware in the market and here's our SDK and here are people who've developed apps and here's a selection of code that you could look at to show you how to develop your own apps. Maybe we can get people ported. I mean, I

thought I understood the difference. I thought I understood what a scope was, but I've got to tell you, some of these apps in here that are called scopes look like apps i don't know it's like this gmail scope looks like an app to me but this is just a scope right what does that mean yeah so so the scopes uh are a way you know when you showed that video earlier yeah the uh the people in the video were just looking at scopes they were just uh take the phone out of the pocket and swipe to one side right you just swipe across check what the weather's like it's all about specific like information at your fingertips right kind of like right and things i've heard explained is google now without the creepy and the rituals you do

every day like you know you check what the weather's going to be like before you get before you get up you you know you might uh see what appointments you have that day to see whether you need to wear a suit or you can dress down so you check your calendar and you know all these kind of little things that ordinarily might be siloed away in lots of different applications like i have to open the weather app or i have to open my calendar app or i have to go and check my email app and and rather than you have to open each of these apps one after the other that information is pushed to the front screen so it's just a case of swipe swipe swipe and swipe. And you see that information right there. I think that's the key goal.

And that's where the whole, you know, your information at your fingertips is just a quick swipe away rather than having to dig deep in apps. Isn't that canonical saying in a way, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but isn't that canonical in a way saying, you know what, guys,

some stuff doesn't need to be an app. Your stuff is a feature. It's not a dedicated app. Just write a scope. It kind of feels a little bit like saying to developers, sorry, your app, I know you want to brand it, and you want to have a Yahoo weather app, and you want to give everybody the Yahoo weather experience,

but really people just want to know if it's going to rain. That should just be in a scope. Is that kind of the message there? Yeah, partly. Especially as you can aggregate data from multiple scopes so you know i could say well i i i like the um the weather reports i get from yahoo and i like the weather reports i get from the weather channel but i also like knowing how windy it's going to be so there's this where this website where i go to find out

what the wind's going to be like so when i go surfing, you know, I have a better idea, and Yahoo don't show me that kind of data. So it's nice to be able to aggregate all of that kind of information so you can get multiple perspectives on the same piece of data, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, I do like that. You can get alternative opinions. And, of course, one thing, the first app you'd want to get

for your Ubuntu Touch device is the Jupyter Broadcasting app. Well, of course. Obviously, which is is pretty cool and it actually resizes pretty well too uh i think this is and this app this app is really well done uh the authors put uh uh you know the host information right there and it's just a really well done app it's really cool it's it's one of it's i think one of our best mobile apps out there of course i love all our mobile apps but i think it's one of our best on and it's on ubuntu touch right now so the author of that simon was actually one of the insiders uh we invited him along so he's one of the people who got invited last friday to come along and get a a phone and the headphones and and all that awesome everyone so yeah a little

kind of thank you for yeah i'm glad because i know working with him on that app, he was super excited about the platform. Or he is super excited about the platform. Yeah. And the other nice thing is what we've said to all these people who came along last Friday, it's important to know that they're not all yes men. They're not all people who we've said you must say positive things about Ubuntu. We've given them the phone. They can say whatever they like. You know, we've had people posting YouTube videos telling us that the boot performance is bad or telling us that the scrolling performance is bad.

That's exactly what we want. We want them to tell us their experience, not tell us only the positive things. Tell us what's wrong with it as well. You've got to fix that stuff too, yeah. Exactly. That's good. That's a good outlook to have about it, I think. I wonder if – i even think a podcast

app could be a scope thing i mean that's a fascinating thing that i think i want to play with more as i get the device and i wonder if i well yeah there there is a there is a generic podcast app um that's written by mike sheldon who's one of the one of our employees is that the on-screen keyboard is that yes yeah and and I think he's looking at developing a scope as well. So you could just scroll across, like first thing in the morning on your commute, you just scroll across to your podcast scope and it lists all the upcoming episodes or what's new in the podcast. And you could just hit the button and hit play rather than having to go squirreling

around within your podcast app. Yeah. So the other thing I think of is, and then all my questions are done and we can, then I'll let people, then we'll wrap up. But anyways, the last thing. I'm sure people are sick of hearing about it. Yeah. One of the things like I know whenever we're writing apps for platforms is what kind of features is the platform just going to give me for free? Can it just do video playback?

Like if I just say put a video element here, will it just do video playback? Or do I have to write the player, figure out how I'm going to pull down the mp4 file figure out how i'm going to break that up and play to the user especially when i'm moving on connections is there like you know like on ios there's like a core video on a core is there anything like that on ubuntu touch yet or is that in development yeah there is so we have a bunch of core services that uh the platform provides so for example uh there's location services so that if you develop a map app, you just request the location and the user gets prompted to say, do you want this app to know your location? And you accept or deny and then you're done and the app can then find out your location. And that location detection is provided by our location service.

Similarly, if you're writing a podcast app and you want to be able to download video podcasts that take a very long time to download, you can use the download service. So when the developer chooses to download a long video podcast, it downloads in the background. And then when it finishes, it signals to the app that it's done. What was the other one? Oh, media playback. So, yeah, we have a media hub, which which does audio playback we have video playback as well and we also have a media scanner service so if you put your music on the device it will scan all your music figure out what the id3 tags are go and get the artwork all that kind of stuff as well oh that's really cool and then last but not least how much do you

want one of these cases that has the cutout for the notification thing? That is really cool. I had no idea that thing existed. It turns out the BQ guy who was at the thing last Friday had one, and I just didn't notice it. The Ubuntu Touch phone gets its own exclusive phone case with a custom cutout for that little notification ring. That's pretty cool. How sweet is that? That's really cool. That's awesome.

That is neat. All right. Anybody in the Mumbroom have any questions for Pope before we wrap up on the – I do. Okay. Go ahead. Pope, you can answer or not answer. It's totally up to you.

Okay. My questions are if we import this to the U.S., if like one of us decides to, would I be able to like put it on Ting or some other mobile network? able to like put it on ting or some other mobile network and how good is like the wi-fi on this if let's say i just don't want to use a mobile network and um just use it on wi-fi just to contact people online so you could you could get it shipped to the u.s and in fact we have some of our employees who are in the u.s who use it um the downside is because uh the u.s uses different frequencies for 3g you'd only get um gsm 2g um it does have wi-fi so yes it'll do uh 2.4 i think and 5 gig i i'd have to check that but um yeah, it does Wi-Fi perfectly. Mine is mostly on my Wi-Fi, actually.

I think it's only 2.4. Yeah, it doesn't do 5G. It's 2.4. Okay. So yeah, that's not too uncommon when you're bringing a phone over. It kind of depends on what bands are in it. And then lastly... Yeah, it's a bit of a bummer.

Unfortunately, it's a bit out of our control, that one. Okay, I had one last question. Do you have any insights to share about the integrated traffic data service that's going to be shipping with the phones in the UK? And is that something we're going to see more of where maybe Canonical has a bit of a hole in something the phone does that maybe some of the shipping ones already do? And so instead, you just partner with somebody who does that, like ironix here with the traffic data can you know anything about this you know i i learned about that from omg ubuntu so joey runs omg ubuntu came last friday as well and you know he writes a blog post or uh tweets about something i think oh that's cool i didn't know we did that yeah so yeah these insiders are not just you know i don't know maybe there was an

announcement that i missed because we've all been heads down for the phone. Yeah, they say it's a partnership with INRX to do – or INRX or whatever to do the traffic. And I think that when I saw that, I was like, that seems like, hey, you know what? We have a gap here and we can plug it with a partnership. It makes sense to me. Right. And that's exactly what we did for the location services. So you know how Android have – Google have their own location services and Apple have their own location services. So you know how Google have their own location services

and Apple have their own location services. We partnered with Nokia here for our location services. So they provided some software to us that allows us to do the fast fix location detection so that it does a GPS when you're out and about and your Wi-Fi access points, it can find you pretty quickly. Without that, it would take a long time to get a GPS when you're out and about and your Wi-Fi access points, it can find you pretty quickly. Without that, it would take a long time to get a GPS lock. It's painfully long. So we partnered with them.

So yeah, there is a precedent for us partnering with other companies to provide services for the phone. Okay. Any last questions for Mr. Pope before we wrap this thing up? I think he just sold me on it. Oh, it sounds awesome. Yay awesome yay oh and we have a torch app so you know that base is good as well yes gotta gotta be able to make sure i can find my way in the dark uh yeah so uh very cool and exciting to see an actual ship date so tomorrow's

the day yep uh oh feb oh my gosh oh oh really so then there'll be another so there's gonna be another one later? Maybe, yeah. Want. I've got to figure out what those times are. Pacific time. And I'm going to set an alarm. And I want to try to get one.

I mean, it seems like we've all been waiting for so long, right? And it's under $200. So it's a pretty good deal. Yeah, it's pretty cheap, really. You know, 126 pounds. What is it? 169 euros. I don't know what that is in funny money you have over there. But, yeah, it's not ridiculously expensive.

No. It's pretty cool to see it actually come to fruition. All right. Well, I think we'll wrap it up right there. And if I get one eventually, I'll give you a review, however it is. And I'll watch it as it goes. The other reason I kind of want to beat Q is so I can get updates and kind of track the progress as the platform matures. Because there's going to be things that will be pushed out as they find stuff.

And it would be good to keep track of that. Very true. I'll give you a report next week if I manage to grab one. It's already tomorrow here, says Juba in the chat room. Well, that's true. That's a little confusing. And the people could be listening at any time. We're talking to people in the future.

I mean, how cool is that, right? We're time travelers. That's right. We're time travelers. Thank you for letting us mean, how cool is that, right? We're time travelers. That's right. We're time travelers. Thank you for letting us pick your brain and all that stuff, Poppy. It was a good download of information. Thank you. Cheers, guys.

Yeah, congratulations to you and everybody over there to come on the team for working your asses off to get this far. I think if nothing else, that's a hell of an accomplishment just right there. All right, well, then we'll wrap it up here on the Linux Unplugged show. We'd love to have you visit us. Why don't you join us? You know, you could do this with us. Yeah, you could. Come over to the website Tuesdays.

We start at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that in your local time zone and join us in that there IRC chat room. Share your opinions as we go. Or even better, join us in the Mubble room. Maybe we can hear you and what you actually think about these things. Because I think we have a pretty smart audience. You probably can hear you and what you actually think about these things. Because I think we have a pretty smart audience. You probably have a pretty educated opinion on a lot of this stuff.

Why not contribute? We're just going to check your mic. You can also go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com and submit content that way. Matt, have a great week. I'll talk to you next week. Sounds good. See you then. Alright, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Okay, I've got a $10,000 Ethernet cable to sell you. Are you ready for this, for a $10,000 Ethernet cable to sell you.

Are you ready for this, for a $10,000 Ethernet cable? Yeah. Let me get my checkbook. Now, here's the good thing, Matt. If you're willing to pay $10,000 for this Ethernet cable, not only am I going to include data in this Ethernet cable, but for no additional charge on top of the $10,000, I'm also going to give you high-fidelity audio.

Nice. This better be a unidirectional one, because I don't going to give you high-fidelity audio. Nice. This better be a unidirectional one, because I don't want any of your cheap bidirectional Ethernet cables. They're rubbish. Now that I've got you interested, I should probably disclaim it's actually $10,500 for this cable. It's got an RJ45 connector made from silver

with tabs that are virtually unbreakable. The plug comes with the added strain relief and a firm lock to keep it in place. That way, no critical data is lost. Silver, huh? I'm going to wager this is put out by Monster. I'll just call that a hunch. You know, with their gold cables and all this crap.

Oh, my gosh. It makes it sound better. Wow, it does look amazing, though. This does look like the... It's got a really cool braided cable, too. This is the coolest-looking Ethernet cable I've ever seen. I'd probably wear it like Mr. T. I'll be honest with you.

Audio Quest. Diamond. Yeah, you could. It could be a piece of jewelry. All right, jbtitles.com. I have a feeling it's going to be something to do with the Ubuntu phone. I don't know. Could be.

Yeah. So you know how I talk about Chrome and how I like Chrome? Oh, you're a Chrome maniac. Yeah. So over the weekend, my Chrome profile just got corrupted for some reason. And now every time I launch Chrome, it thinks it's launched

for the first time ever, which is not like unusable because it syncs so well and so fast that all of my stuff syncs back. But the one thing I really end up missing is my URL auto-completion. and the reason why that's handy is turns out like i need to type while i'm doing a podcast often and it's really nice if i

could just type in jbt and then jb titles is automatically and i just hit enter because that way i don't otherwise i'm over here going like hey welcome to uh hold on i gotta uh hold on i'm typing all right welcome to the show not did you not restore your Chrome profile from your backup? My what? Yeah, I thought so. Well, it's a fun trick that I've used. I've never done this on Chrome, and I used to do it on Firefox a lot, and I keep multiple...

I create what I call the generic profile, and then I got all my autocompletes done, and then I move them away. And that way, when it goes to crap, and it will, there you go. Because I'm paranoid, and I wear a tinfoil hat. Ubuntu is calling is not bad. Ubuntu phone's arrival is also pretty good. I like both of those.

I like Ubuntu calling. It's cool. Ubuntu is calling. It's very Avon. It's kind of working for me. The Ubuntu blob phone. Oh my gosh. It's already starting. It's already starting. It's negative in the freedom dimension. Yep, yep.

Ahoy, Ubuntu. All right, jbtitles.com. Suck my googs. No, I'm not going to go suck my googs. Oh, boy. Yeah. And I just got that out of my brain, too. Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Geez. You guys. Hey, you know what? We started with it. We might as well end with it, right? Yeah, well.

It's the circle of life. Circle of Googs.