The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Homelab nerds, unite! (Friends)

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Ok Homelabbers, it's time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that's what homelab is about. Let's do this.

Yes, we are back. This is ChangeLogging Friends, a weekly talk show about all things Homelab. Today I'm joined by my new friend, Techno Tim. Thank you to Fastly, Fly, and also TypeSense for helping us ship awesome pods pretty much daily. Okay, let's talk. So we're here with Techno Tim. Do people call you Tim or they call you Techno? Is Techno your first name and Tim is your last name? What's the deal here? Oh, wow. Wow. Tough questions first. So people call me Tim or they call you Techno? Is Techno your first name and Tim is your last name? What's the deal here? Oh, wow. Wow. Tough questions first. So people call me Tim. I think sometimes

people call me Techno Tim. Actually, in college, people called me just Techno. And it's kind of a long story, but- Is that right? Yeah, yeah. In college, everyone just called me Techno. That was my name uh because in college i used to play electronic music really loud in my dorm okay and uh everyone said hey you know that guy plays techno music and uh my ra always had a bullet point uh in our weekly meeting to say tim turn your techno music down and then so my neighbor gary hockey player was just started calling me Techno Tim. And ever since then, that's what I went with. And that was my handle for gaming and everything. So when I started a YouTube channel, I thought, hey, why not? I'm a listener and watcher, I suppose, of your YouTube channel. And I just,

for the first time today, I was like, let me go back as far as I can in this channel to be like, when did this guy begin? Because I've been paying attention for a while. I'd say at least about two years, maybe a year and a half to your content. And I went back and I'm like, this dude's a gamer. Cause like your earliest stuff is like gaming stuff for five years, for like three,

you've been doing YouTube for like five years, but like three of it has been just straight up, just like gaming. I don't even know if you talk on there or what you've done, but I caught a couple just to kind of see what you were doing but now it makes sense why you're called techno tim because that's been your handle and you are a techno music player which i like techno too you know it's good stuff edm yeah yeah all that good stuff i've always liked electronics so uh and you know back in the day i should say but everyone called everything electronic techno so you know that's what stuck but it was more just you know edm just kind of chill out music too trance break beats house yeah yes uh

i don't know how old you are but those go that goes back to like my day you know i was uh i was born in 79 lived in orlando for a little bit so i got to be steeped in you know some of the local folks there digweed came to town yeah i haven't heard that name in a long time yeah sasha digweed deep dish that's like my era i'm they're still around yeah but they're just not like it's cool then it became like ts doing stuff like that so there you go so home lab let's get into the innards of Homelab. So I mean, I think I have an idea of what Homelab means to me. Now you obviously have a YouTube channel that's primarily focused on Homelab-y things. I think mostly Homelab things. So how do you define Homelab? Like what exactly is Homelab to you, Tim? Yeah, it means so many different things to so many different people. But for me, I try to bundle it all up into having an environment, whether that be virtual, physical, but just having an environment where you can tinker and play around with technology without the fear of breaking things or taking down a production environment.

A lot of people that get into Homelab are in IT, right? And so they inherit this environment from their enterprise and they inherit this architecture from their enterprise and they don't get to tinker much outside of that. You know, you're playing in someone else's playpen, so to speak. Yeah. And so with Homelab, you can build up this environment and this architecture and explore things in your own environment without asking for permission or bringing anything at work. So I've always bundled it up into this environment where you can play with stuff.

And then it's multifaceted. Some people consider virtual machines on their desktop, their Homelab, totally fine. I totally agree. A virtual environment on your desktop? Sure. Why not? Some people think it's a server rack full of stuff. Absolutely could be, like the one behind me. Or just a couple of Raspberry Pis or even one Raspberry Pi. Absolutely could be. But really just an environment. And it has many tentacles from there. It could be networking, it could be focused on hardware, it could be focused on storage. There's just so many ways to go. Yeah. So I try to think about this ahead of time. I was like, okay, what do I think? Because I agree with everything you just said too. And I try to play it from my perspective. So software developer, product manager, now podcaster around software. I've been doing it for 14 years just on this

channel alone, but really I've been podcasting for almost 20 years. So I've talked to almost everyone in tech over the years, not literally everyone, but we've talked a lot of different angles around how software has developed since 2009, you know, so we've really eat it all out. And over that journey, I primarily focused on software. I've always had my own dev environment. And that was always a version of not so much home lab stuff, but like it was my single machine, single node environment that I had to mess with. li stuff that's setting up ruby back in the day then it's javascript then it's node.js then it's npm then it's web environments then it's elixir because our our stack for changelog.com is elixir based it's a phoenix application you know obviously github all those things have been like not home labby stuff but like the software developer things but then i was like i really didn't get into home networking until around i think I got my unify set up that was really got me what got me further

into like just typical network gear was never easy to use I was never a network person but for me it began how can I set up a better home network my wife is upset because wi-fi sucks in the bedroom okay that was you know I got into web development because my mom was like Adam you're really good at it you should just keep doing this stuff I'm like mom like, mom, I just, this is a hobby. She's like, no, you should just keep doing it. You're really good at it. And so now my wife is like, Hey, wifi sucks. Can you make it better? I'm like, well, I guess I can try. I don't know how to do it. I make software for a living and I build software for a living. I'd run software podcasts, but I don't know how it really works. And so I studied it and I learned. And so for me, it was like a better network. How can I make wifi suck less in our house? Now I have multiple machines. I've got to move data around the house. So now I've got to like understand true ethernet based networking. I understand put a cable into the wall, you get internet from a modem. But then I started to get really, really curious. And that's really kind of where the fun began for me as someone who was steeped in software,

but then sort of like had to eke into the network world to some degree. And then it was like multiple machines and services and like, oh my gosh. So yeah, as you said, the tentacles. Yeah, yeah. Funny. My story is the opposite. So I am a software engineer by trade. That's kind of my day job.

Things have changed a little bit. So I started out in infrastructure. I mean, the first time I ever learned about networking was trying to get my brother's PC connected to my PC so we could play NBA Live 98 or something over the network. And I remember like, oh my gosh, like static IPs. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just, you know, typing in whatever Yahoo told me to type in at the time. And I remember seeing on our hub, the network lights flashing and we could play two players at the same time, you know, even though our bedrooms are right across from each other. And I remember just like almost welling up in tears because it was like, oh my gosh, I did it. But anyway, so I

started out in infrastructure. Like I kind of have a background in infrastructure, but started out tech support, did server administration, did some networking stuff. And so I built up that way. And then I became a software engineer within the last eight, nine years. So I kind of had that background. And then I got into software development. And I think that was a good play for me because it taught me a lot about networking infrastructure, like some of these core tenants of just running services, and then later on to build software. So I built apps,

I built websites, I've worked for large companies, startups, and that taught me a lot about infrastructure. And so after I became a software engineer, I started like missing, like, hey, I used to tinker with this stuff all the time at home. and I realized I wasn't doing that as much anymore. That's really how I got back into Homeland because I, you know, I wanted to network stuff. I mean, I've had a server in my closet, quote unquote, for a long time. Whether it's running a small website or a media server, I've done it for a long time. Anyways, getting back into running services and software at home, like at home now, I have a full Kubernetes stack. I write my own code.

I deploy it. I build it in containers. I ship it to my own Kubernetes stack. And it's all self-hosted here at home in my home lab. You know, you're kind of abusing the term home lab as soon as you get into self-hosting production at home. But a lot of people do it and still call it home lab. I still call it home. If it's in the house, it's a home lab, Tim. Right. Yeah, I agree. I'm there. I'm there with you.

But it's this more layers of sophistication, in my opinion, like you can start small, like I did, like I was trying to share my journey to some degree, because it's about curiosity. Yeah. You may not even really be like you were in infrastructure or even like I was more in software. And then, you know, I think for anybody, it's usually the dad or the guy in the home. It's like, Hey, wifi sucks. Or at least that's my, you know, stereotypical opinion. It may not be super accurate, but it's like, well, there's somebody that's curious about home automation. There's

somebody who cares about like, okay, for example, in my home, I can say, you know, living room on and the Apple TV will arc, wake up my TV and turn on the living room TV. Or if the kids are upstairs in the family room and I'm like, hey kids, it's time for lunch or dinner or whatever. If it's the weekend or if it's dinnertime and they're not listening, I'm like, okay, family room off. And the TV turns off, right? My watch probably is going to like start yelling at me here in a second so it light up yeah so it's like that was like cool you know and then you kind of have certain things you want to do in your home or even like nfc stuff where you want the temperature change because you're close to the thermostat or there's all sorts of like little things that i think are home labby you know like there's home automation and smartness

that i think is a blend of home lab may not be exactly that. And then you've got things like Plex. For me, Plex was a big deal to get into home lab. I was working with 45 Drives a couple of years ago, got an AV15 that helped me learn a lot more about Linux, a lot more about what everything about ZFS and then what it would actually take to like basically tear that machine down and rebuild it in a way that was more Plex friendly. Cause it had a Xeon processor that did not have quick sync. And okay. I was like, why in the world, every time I transcode, I've got this beefy Xeon processor. Why does transcoding not work? I'm like, I didn't understand it. And then I learned, okay, it really relies on quick sync.

And so you learn these things, each failure or a learning point along the way, but Plex was a big deal. Learning ZFS was a big deal. And then when I kind of got past that intimidation factor, I was like, okay, I don't know anything really about Linux. I mean, I've played with Linux. I've deployed Linux servers. I've got WordPress on Linux in DigitalOcean droplets. And that's fun, but I followed a tutorial. I didn't learn truly what it meant to be zero to Linux, running Linux, managing Linux, keeping it updated, keeping it secure, firewall, all those fun things. And so over time, I've learned little by little more and more through curiosity. And so we kind of all come into this, in quotes,

home lab world from different areas. Do I need a rack full of gear? No, not necessarily. But if you have one, it's still a home lab. If you've built your own Kubernetes high availability cluster and you deploy your own software to it, that's still a home lab too, Tim. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, like I said, it means so many different things to so many different people i i think i think diy in general like encapsulates a lot of home lab it doesn't mean diy like i built a shelf from wood and i hacked an ikea rack and now i'm putting servers i got you know from a secondhand market it could be as simple as like you know hey i may have a unify switch totally fine but you know what this is my diy pc that i like, you know, hey, I may have a unified switch, totally fine. But you know what, this is my DIY PC that I converted to, you know, a server. And now I'm, you know, installing and learning things about it. I think that I think anything, you know, kind of DIY, I'll do it myself or assemble it myself or even configure it myself is really what encapsulate a lot of Homelab,

the spirit of Homelab. I think you find a lot of people who like to save money, like to configure things, like to adapt things, like to bend things to their will. And I just love it about it. Anytime I talk to someone who's using something, I learn either a way that they're doing it that I haven't thought of before, or they're doing something with it that I didn't think was possible, which both are awesome. Yeah, precisely. And it's, you don't have to have a full rack of gear. I even like repurposing. I'm not, not trying to save money necessarily, but you know, I want, I tend to be the person who upgrades myself to him. So if I go to buy a car, they don't have to talk me into the nicest thing.

I've already pre-selected. I'm actually coming to the lot to buy, not to look in most cases. So I'm that kind of person just generally. But I like the idea even of repurposing that old PC to some degree and just finding out how to truly, like you said, bend it to your will and be able to do something with it. Let's dig into the stack, I suppose. What's your chosen home lab stack? Like I mentioned, Unify was my gateway drug to some degree. I literally bought some Unify gear and it sat there for months, like at least two or three months because I was just intimidated. I'm like,

I don't even know where to begin. I think I was watching Crosstalk Solutions and I'm like, thank God that guy told me how to set it up the first time because this was like four or five years ago. Maybe, I don't know, four years ago or so. And I don't even know what to do with it. I got the boxes and Unify is notoriously not really good with documenting how to do anything. It's like, here's the stuff. It's great. Just go figure out how to do it. And I'm like, I don't know what to do. I've got this cloud key. I don't even know what PoE really means.

I've got the USG. I've got the cloud key and I've got a switch. Okay, that's what I need. I didn't even know I needed an access point. I'm like an idiot really getting into this. So I mentioned Unify was my gateway drug. What is your home lab stack? Like, where do you begin with your stack? Is it Unify all the way up?

I mean, how do you choose what your stack is? Yeah, it's changed over time. You know, at first it was a lot of DIY solutions like PFSense. I was like, oh, I got an old PC. I was really big of upgrading myself and handing those things down to my Homelab. So that was a big part of my early days of Homelab. I'm going to upgrade my home lab. So that was a big part of my early days of home lab. I'm going to upgrade my current PC and then my old PC is going to become a new home lab PC. So I would basically hand me down

this hardware to myself. And so I did that for a long time. So I really got into PFSense for a long time. I tried a lot of software firewalls, you know, open source software firewalls for a really long time. And then just recently I've been getting into Unify stuff and don't feel bad about Unify. I did the same things. Yeah. I looked at crosstalk solutions. Paramount, right? Yeah. This guy on YouTube, it's my natural color taught me how to do VLANs. And so it's totally fine. And so, yeah, I do like my network core now is Unify and it is a gateway and it is a black hole because once you start realizing like, oh, like, you know, right behind me here, I have an old switch that was downstairs in my big rack.

And so I was like, you know, I upgraded that switch, put this switch up here and then realized there's a bunch of these PoE switches. You know, why would I want a PoE switch? You know, I thought I'd never need that. And then I was like, oh, I want VLANs for the devices in my living room. So I'll plug in a little mini PoE switch that powers from my big switch, and then I get three additional switches to plug my Xbox, to plug my TV, and plug everything else in so they can be on different VLANs or cameras or what have you. And so my network core almost 100% Unify.

Access points, everything, switches, all the way down unify just because I like a single pane of glass to manage both the network, the firmware, and then the other pieces of the ecosystem. And so having one pane of glass for me is huge. And don't get me wrong, I still run a version of PFSense in my home lab virtualized for testing. me wrong. Like I still run a version of PFSense in my home lab virtualized for testing, but having an easy way to update my camera's firmware. Awesome. To update, you know, any of my devices firmware. Totally awesome. Yeah. You don't want to waste your time, right? Keep it simple. That's

right. And push out VLANs and one can add a VLAN somewhere. It pushes that out to every device. I don't even need to think about it. And so, you know, that's become valuable to me. Huge time saver. And not to mention, like, their apps are so good. Like, their apps on iPhone, Android, everything. Tablets are so, so good. And even their web-based ones. And so, anyways, it's not a Unify commercial, but I'm a huge fan of them.

It is Unify commercial, Tim. I'll concur because I'm Unify all the way down to from the cameras to the switches to I mean I just for the same reason I watched your VLAN video and I'm like oh I should do VLANs because long story short I was building a new home and so I just recently moved into it and I'm like well I've got like three or four months until this thing is done so I've got my gear right here doing nothing because I'm not in the home now I should like set up my future network it should just be like when I get there just plug it in it works because what will often happen is you'll get to the home or you know move somewhere if that's the case you're doing and then you'll be like now i should do all the setup i'm like i can do all this preparatory and then i saw your video on vlans and i'm like so intimidated by vlans i don't even know how to do them or and i'm still stuck honestly i had to flatten it out

because like i had one device that couldn't talk to the other. I've got Sonos in my house and I'm like, I wanted the Sonos to be on the IoT VLAN. And then my app on my iPhone could not talk to it. I was on my main, you know, trusted network and it couldn't talk. So I've sort of abandoned the VLANs temporarily until I figured out my firewall issues. I've got some pass-through concerns. I know there's two settings. I know what they are. And there's two settings. MDNS is one. Yeah. And that'll probably solve all your DNS. Okay. MDNS it's called. Yeah. Okay. So I hit that brick wall, but I'm like, I wanted to do VLANs and have all this stuff. I know I should do these things. I mean, should and shouldn't it's about, you know, security and concerns. I think I'm okay for now, but long-term I want to be better.

But yeah, same thing with the VLANs. If my access points, which I currently only have two installed, but I'll eventually have four, no, I have three and I'll eventually have five access points throughout the house. One on the back patio, one kind of in the garage area. I happen to have like a workshop garage that just is in the driveway area that just needs more wi-fi out there because i did a whole mapping and stuff like that i have one in my office and kind of two that serve the home and if you vlan like you said it just pushes those out to the access points and the access points serve up all the wireless networks you decide to to create i'm like that to me is easy that's why i like unify because if I didn't use Unify,

I'm sure it would be more manual and have to like copy the config and SSH into the actual device or something like that. It would be not quite as software driven where Unify really has nailed that. So I don't mind being commercial because I love Unify. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wish they would pay us, but maybe they pay you. They don't pay me.

But yeah, so, and then, you know, just to touch more on Unify too, because I used to do a lot of home security stuff myself. I ran Blue Iris. I've run Frigate. I've run like lots of different solutions. And, you know, at the end of the day, I was using a lot of these no-name cameras with weird firmware, with weird accounts I couldn't delete from who knows where. And so that's why I really decided to get into UniFi security too for a long time. UniFi Protect for cameras is because now I have these devices that are updated and managed by UniFi by a company I trust and I don't need to go and search for firmware and have all these weird

local accounts and stuff like that. So yeah, huge fan of basically all of their product lines. Haven't tried them all yet. Still want to try out their secure access stuff, but do you have a doorbell yet or do you have something different? I do have a doorbell and I realized they released the POE one now. And I'm like, guess what I just got. I have a new home.

So I just got the POE switch or the POE doorbell. It's not installed yet though. So don't feel good or bad for me. Yeah. It's on next Wednesday, my network people, I'm going to have somebody else install it because I have Stucco in the front and it needs to be kind of dug out. And I'm like, it's a new home. I want them to do it.

I'll manage the connection to the PoE and I'll adopt it, but they can do the install of the actual hardware itself. So my home stays safe. Yeah, huge fan of PoE. I feel like they've re-new life into a technology that's been around for, I don't know, 20, 30 years, probably more. Is that right? PoE's been around for a really long time. I mean, even Cat5e was, I think, supporting PoE.

And yeah, I mean, people have powered things over Ethernet for a really long time. And I feel like it was just this untapped market that, you know, Unify is now like, hey, we're going to power LED lights, cameras, like everything, phones. And other companies have done it too. You know, they've powered phones and stuff like that. But I feel like they're expanding their line of things they support with PoE. And it's just so cool to see because, you know, I have a 48 port PoE switch in my basement. I went 48 port all PoE because I want to power more things over PoE. And then on top of that, that's on battery backup. So if my power goes out in my home, I can still run my

PoE switch for two hours and that will still power access points. You know, I don't have phones. Well, I got a test phone back there, but cameras, like all of the things that I plug into that Unify switch will still be powered. Switches, everything. So having battery backup, you know, and not having the battery backup individual things and worry about my security cameras. It's so nice. Such a relief to know that, hey, my switch is powering all these things in my home. So if something happens, they're still going to be online. Okay. So we love UniFi.

Let's put that down. They know that. UniFi, call either of us. We'll gladly find ways to work with you. And we'll potentially even bend over backwards and do it. So big, big fan. I've given them lots of money, probably too much, but it's good gear and I like it. if you can choose it cat 5e unless you have an older home that's you know you just couldn't choose the wiring cat 6 will let you do 10 gigabit which most people don't really need but it's future-proofing so if you can why not right that's right and cat 5e will too over short runs but yeah right it's less reliable right it's still possible but just not reliable because of interference that's right yeah and then the long run. The long run is really what diminishes the speed. I run 10 gigabit on Cat6 easily in almost all cases.

The switches, I always choose SFP+, because I want the interconnectivity between an aggregation switch or the actual switch. I happen to have the rack mount 10XG, I believe. It's the 16 port with all the spfs or sfps and then like the four rj45s i have that because i had a lot of a lot more tinkering a bit transferring and now i'm like you know what i guess way a little longer i don't even it's more about transfer than it is i need the actual speed because like i'm really the only

power user in our home everyone else is convenience they don't even like because like I'm really the only power user in our home. Everyone else is convenience. They don't even like know what I'm probably the same for you. They don't even know what you've really built for them. Right. They just my kids are like that. This is amazing. I love it. And they never say that. Right. They just watch the TV. That's right. Watch whatever. They just have their iPad and do whatever. They really have no clue that no matter where they go in the home, there is amazing Wi-Fi. Right. They just enjoy it. No news is good news when it comes to networking because, you know, if you don't hear anything, that means everything's working. You hear when things don't work. Right. And so from there, I think you got to establish some small machine. Like for me,

PiHole is an absolute in my network stack. Like I've got unifies the network, protect, obviously with cameras. Those are sort of a given. So assuming you've got your network settled, VLANs, no VLANs, it doesn't matter. You've got an established network that's strong with ethernet or Wi-Fi, and then you've got to establish some machines. So you've got an actual Raspberry Pi or potentially some other smaller form factor machine that can run some sort of Linux. I like Docker in most cases. I haven't ventured into the Kubernetes world yet. I think maybe I'm waiting for you to release a zero to Kubernetes video, and maybe then I'll actually go into that world because I'm quite intimidated by it.

Proxmox, if you like virtualization, obviously, I like to virtualize. And really, thanks to you for explaining Proxmox because you really preached this hypervisor and i never really thought about i mean i understood docker i can do containers and stuff like that i never really considered virtualizing from one good solid machine and having my entire stack kind of live mostly on that machine so for me that's you know in a lot of cases thanks to you for like treading those waters for me and like saying hey it's safe over here come on over here to the proxmox world and virtualize your abootu servers and you know do this or do that and so i haven't mimicked literally everything

you've done but you've sort of given me a map you know it's like almost like a gamer right it's like imagine the map is dark and until somebody ventures into that room and now it's lit up for the map it's your tim has done that for me. So I appreciate that. Yeah, no problem. Yeah. Fog of war. I like it. So for me, that's a pie hole, virtualized, Docker.

That's my stack. I think I'm mirroring your stack, but what about you? No, I like it. Yeah, that's my stack too. So first I start with a machine, a hypervisor. And so if you're not familiar with hypervisor, most people are. But if you're not, you know, it's just really a machine that you can run virtual machines inside of. There are different types of hypervisors, but for all intents and purposes, run machines inside of machines.

My choice has been Proxmox. It's been for a long time. You know, I used to run Hyper-V, which was a Microsoft product. I've run ESXi at home, which is a Microsoft product. I run ESXi at home, which is a VMware product. None of those gave me the flexibility that I needed at home without buying expensive licenses. And so Proxmox was there. It was open source and early in its development, and it hit all of those things that I wanted,

a web-based hypervisor that was performant, that's Linux-based, that's open source, and has some enterprise features if I want them. And so it's Proxmox. From there, I usually virtualize everything. So everything's virtualized. I try to virtualize everything just because it makes management and backups a lot easier. PyHole is definitely one. PyHole is, I have gone a little overboard. I have three PyHole servers. Two of them are load balanced behind a load balancer with, yeah, with a software load balancer, not important. But then I run containers. I'll say I run containers. I used to do a ton of Docker. So I run Portainer, which is a web UI

for Docker, which makes Docker very approachable for someone who doesn't know Docker, gives you a nice web UI. And so I've run a lot of containers, a lot of containers in there, you know, you name it, Plex, Pyhole, you name it, Heimdall, like a lot of dashboard stuff. And then since I did a lot of Kubernetes at work, I decided to do Kubernetes at home. I will say that it takes a lot. It takes a lot to grok Kubernetes, to understand Kubernetes and then to run it at home and maintain it. So I don't recommend it for the average home user. It's definitely not approachable. There are some things that make it a little more approachable, like Rancher and even Portainer, but for the most part, not approachable, you know, because it's, you know, it's made to be,

you know, this huge state machine for running high availability applications. And so you need lots of machines, lots of hardware and lots of resources. You could minimize all of that, but at the end of the day, it's going to take, you know, mostly three machines, which is like out of the question for most people. So yeah, I containerize everything. I always try to containerize everything mainly because, you know, I want to run multiple containers on one machine, so Docker containers on one machine. I don't want to have to worry about global dependencies or all of that stuff that you worry about if you have a virtual machine. You think about it like back in the day, I used to install WordPress on a machine, and then I would install, you name it, some other

software on a machine because I wanted one machine to do everything. Well, you know, at the end of the day, when you start doing that, you might say for WordPress need PHP eight and my SQL seven, and then you install something else on that machine, which requires my SQL eight. And now you have these broken dependencies. And so that's where Docker comes in and it, you know, kind of keeps all of those in little containers and silos so that you can run multiple things without them affecting each other. But, but yeah, you know, kind of keeps all of those in little containers and silos so that you can run multiple things without them affecting each other. But, but yeah, it's, uh, yeah, everything's containerized. I run a ton of stuff. I run a ton of stuff at home, uptime Kuma, I monitor and log all of my services. I have a lot of custom code that I wrote a lot of websites that

I write. I mean, I do a ton of node JS. I do a ton of Docker, do a ton of TypeScript. So I build and deploy. I have CI running in my home lab. I write code. I push it to my CI. It runs my test to build containers, and then it puts them in Kubernetes. It used to put them in Docker, but yeah, now it puts them in Kubernetes. And that's all at home. And I learned how to do all of that kind of in my home lab. But yeah, it's a lot of services. Probably too many. Some of them are for testing, but some of them have stood the test of time, like PyHole. I absolutely love it. Yeah, PyHole's a given for me. And then really, it just helped me learn more about how to use Docker Compose, how to really look at network ports, things like that, obviously, which container to use, because there's a couple of different flavors of

PyHall I think you can use. You can use, I think, Linux server's version of it, potentially, and then PyHall's direct version of it that they manage and deploy. Do you think that you would be as deep or as many services as you run at home if you didn't have your YouTube channel? Do you feel like it's cyclical where you obviously have a persona and you have a channel that you like to share what you learn, but you also learn so that you can create content? I don't know really what your content creator journey has been or what really makes you do it. Does the channel feed the beast, basically? Are you having to do these things or feeling like you have to do these things because you

have this channel? Yeah, it is. It is cyclical in the fact that I'll create content that will go out into the world. People might recommend something else or an alternative. And I feel like, oh, maybe I should look at this. Or why didn't I consider this? Then I'll look into that and maybe create some content from that. But it definitely is.

I never feel like it's work. I mean, you know, I'm not going to say that it's all roses. You know, sometimes editing, you know, takes a lot of time and writing, being creative on demand is something different. And so that takes a lot of time and energy, not used to that being a software engineer. So that's tough.

But the content itself is definitely fun. I definitely learned. I get a lot of my best ideas from people's comments too. Because people recommend alternatives or say what they did for a particular case or say how they solved a problem or some software that they use. And so a lot of times I find out about things in the comments on some of the videos I release, but it is, it is cyclical. There are times when I have to chase topics and there are other times where I'm putting something out because it's something I've been interested in. I try to treat my YouTube channel almost like a, almost agile or like a software project.

You know, I have things I, in the backlog, I prioritize them as things become either more popular in the world or it's time has come, you know, I'll prioritize that story or that, you know, video and work on it. For a while, I was going after a lot of different like services you can self-host, which was totally fun. I learned so much in the first like two years about self-hosting in general, about Docker, about Docker Compose, you know, even about Kubernetes. I learned so much by teaching this to other people. You know, sometimes I miss those days, just going out there and figuring out what's the latest from linuxserver.io because they have all the cool containers and, you know, a standard way of writing your compose and standard properties,

environment variables. But I used to window shop Linux server.io all the time and say, you know, oh, could I run this at home? Do I need this? You know, and how would I use this? Right. And for a long time, and I guess still is even the case, most of the things that you ever see on my channel are things I'm doing or that I believe in or that I'm using. I mean, that's how I started my channel. My channel was always, what projects am I working on right now? I still ask that same question on my Twitch channel. It's been that way for years. You know, we all talk about what we're working on this weekend or things we're excited about in tech

or projects we're working on. And so my channel has always been like what I did last week. And it's still to this day, what I did last week. It's really focusing on, you know, home and home tech and home lab projects, really focusing on projects I've really done and really do. And most of the time, it's not something that I'm exploring. It's things that I've already done and I think they're awesome and I want to share them with people. And so I don't know if that makes me different than anyone else, but that's something that I've always taken kind of seriously. Like all the things that are put out are things I either

run in my home or services that I run to this day. Yeah, the reason I ask that is because you said you've got a CI in your home lab, which is an anomaly. Not everybody's going to do that. That is not, I mean, that's home lab because it's in your home, Tim, but it's not common for somebody's home lab. And then to have that build and test, which is what CI does, and deploy it somewhere. And you could deploy it to the cloud, right? But you choose to deploy it to your own locally host, high availability, three node Kubernetes cluster, which is totally cool, but that's not normal.

And so the reason why you do that is because you probably have this channel and you're also a software developer and you're also curious. So you kind of have to eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne, whichever flavor of that phrase you like to use, because that's why you do it.

Now that you've said why and how you use Kubernetes, I'm probably never going to go and use Kubernetes. I'll probably just stick to Proxmox, virtualized servers, and Docker and call it a day because there's an end to my means. The reason why I do home lab stuff isn't necessarily so I can tinker. I do enjoy the tinker process and the curiosity, but I have other priorities. You know, I've got a family, I've got kids, you know, my time with them to me

is way more important than upgrading firmware. I know you like to upgrade firmware. Oh yeah. Everybody likes to upgrade firmware when it makes sense, but like, I don't want to live and die by this upgrade or whatever. So I'd rather prioritize other things around me. So really my joy in Homelab is making

it so that I don't have to interact with as much, you know, do some of the upfront work and maybe dig for two weeks on a project. And then for the most part be off, you know, like my Plex server took me a while to learn. I literally took the AV-15, which I'm pretty sure you're familiar with because you have one from 45 drives. I took that and I removed the super micro board replaced it with a Asus Z70 because I wanted to have ECC RAM I wanted to run the Intel 13900k CPU like I wanted to max it out and just have a beefy server and I wanted to have as much storage that 15 drives could give me in that machine and so i'd never built a machine ever in my life ever like i'd never like i took everything out and put everything in and obviously i had a test board for a bit it wasn't in the machine the whole time

and it took me a while to i tried to proxmox this thing i could not get virtualization to work i couldn't i couldn't pass through the hba to and I just hit brick wall after brick wall. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to install Ubuntu. I just went to straight. This machine is not virtualized in any way. It's just Ubuntu with Docker machines on it, essentially. But I did all that upfront work and I learned everything I needed to, to get to that point.

And now it's just simply change directory into the Plex directory, spin down that thing and spin it, you know, do a new pull, spin it back up and, you know, prune the images and keep my disk clean or whatever. That's the extent of like my Plex server. Now that board and RAM and well, the RAM probably isn't because ZFS isn't RAM hungry. It uses RAM very well.

I wanted to have a lot of RAM. I wanted to have a lot of disk space. I wanted to have, I just wanted to build a beefy machine. So it's underutilized right now. So I do have a lot of RAM. I wanted to have a lot of disk space. I wanted to have, I just wanted to build a beefy machine. So it's underutilized right now. So I do have more plans for it. I have no idea how I would use it more. I mean,

if I put a home assistant on there, it's not going to really ping the CPU. The most I ping the CPU really is during data transfers or so because it's a, it's a ZFS server for the most part, pretty much I'm just storing things there. I might do some 7V stuff. So we actually have 7Z is what I meant to say. So we have these podcasts.

When they're done, they may be like 4, 5, 7 gigs of data in a directory. I'll take that. And rather than store that 4, 5, 6, or 7 gigs of data, I'm 7Zing that directory down. It's usually about 40% to 50% compressed. And so I'll keep that as a single file, which is so much easier to transfer than 50 or 60 files in a directory. So that's the extent. The CPU gets pinged quite heavily during that algorithmic compression, but that's about it. But I learned a lot.

So I did all this upfront work to build this machine, to learn how it should work. And now it's in my stack and I never really have to touch it. Aside from like keeping Linux updated, which is I've got security patches automatically implied. I mean, that's pretty much it. It's pretty much hands-free.

Yeah, that's a good thing. You know, I tell a lot of people a lot of times, like a lot of people want to go, you know, huge and enterprise and make things as complicated as possible. I'm guilty of that. Totally guilty. I rely on automation to help me out with some of the complexity and logging and all of that. But a lot of people want to go all out and make everything complex and that's totally fine. And then you have people who basically, you know, want to set it and forget it or not worry about it, or, you know, it's a means to an end. I appreciate all of that. You know, I tell people all the time, like, do what you want to do. Um, because at the end of the day,

you're the one that's going to be supporting it. And do you want to support it a lot? Do you want to support it a little? And, you know, I always lean towards keeping things as simple as possible, little different from me. Cause yeah, I'm, you yeah, I have a channel and stuff and I have to do all of this crazy stuff all the time to try to keep abreast on the professional side for DevOps. But I totally appreciate keeping things simple. I mean, that's a large reason why I simplified my network, simplified a lot of things, is because that's not where I want to spend my time. And like you said, you want to spend time with family, kids, and hobbies and work. Do I want to spend my time, you know, on a particular problem that I created for myself?

Not a lot of times. Not a lot of times. Well, there is Netflix, there is Apple TV, and there's other things you can stream from. I choose Plex because I just prefer, well, I mean, if for some reason culture doesn't care for this movie anymore, Netflix can stop serving it.

And now I no longer have access to it. Or just not having to, like, leverage the cloud so much. Like, just not having to, like, put that kind of pressure on the backbone of humanity. Really, at some point, it's going to be a bigger deal. Yeah. You know, if I own these discs or if I don't mind owning these discs, it also blocks out commercials for my kids. There's all sorts of reasons why people choose to use Plex. I also happen to be a home theater geek.

So in my home, I have 120-inch screen, a laser projector, THX speakers in the wall because I'm just crazy like that. Because I really appreciate movies. And so for me, it's like I don't want to change discs anymore. I don't want to have to keep a rack of Blu-rays, 4K Blu-rays, whatever, pick your flavor and have to go swap them out. I'd rather just give me a lossless version of it that's on my network that gets served wherever I want, whether it's a restaurant for my children, because they want to do something while we're sitting there waiting for food or whatever, or we're on a trip or something like that. we also have a travel trailer RV. So like we will stream Plex from our home in our RV.

You know, like we don't have to take all those discs with us. You know, there's so much, so many reasons why people choose it. And that's what's important to me and my family. Not everybody really cares about movies and access to their media library. I do.

And I built this BV service so I can make sure I can do it anywhere. Yeah, that's fantastic. I'm a huge fan of Plex too. I do a lot of over the air TV recording too. That's, I love this free resource, you know, called OTA TV. And it's, it's great. You know, I have a network tuner and I figured out the whole antenna thing and filtering out noise. And it's so great to be able to record, you know, over there TV and use the commercial skip on it, you know, all from Plex. It's, it's so great to be able to record you know over there tv and use the commercial skip on it you know all from plex it's it's so awesome and my only concern really for the future is like

what if plex isn't around anymore what if plex stops being plex like what if their business model changes to the fact that they no longer really prioritize the local media like it is changing already like they have streaming in plex now and I can see some of their priorities shifting. I just hope they always keep these legacy features in the forefront of their long-term vision. Cause like if Plex, I'm sure you have jellyfish and maybe you'll have others,

maybe something will come out instead of Plex and alternative, but Plex is just really good. Like their application, their iOS app is amazing for me. I'm an iOS user. Their Apple TV app is just phenomenal. It's on most smart TVs. It's pretty much wherever you want to watch TV.

And so my only concern really is, one, I don't really do much over the air, so that's less concern for me. But I'm concerned for you now, so I'll add you to my list of concerns. What happens when there's no more discs to rip? What happens when media is no more discs to rip? What happens when media it's only streamed, right? You can't literally buy the physical copy to watch whenever you choose to watch it in your DRM player.

Of course, you know, like that's still a thing. What happens when that changes? I guess at that point, Plex would become on the road to obsolete for me. Cause I mostly care about my local media. But then if that does happen, then obviously Plex will change their priorities because, well, physical discs are just not a thing anymore.

Yeah, it's scary to think about. Definitely, for sure. Especially when streaming companies, you know, I've heard stories of them, you know, removing media that people have already purchased on that streaming platform. Yeah. No media is safe unless you have a physical copy. It's like, I don't know if you're into Bitcoin at all, but not your keys, not your wallet kind of situation. Like, hey, not your media, not your...

Just because you own the disks too, you still have a license to use the disk. You don't actually own it, but you can. You have way more freedom than streamed, you know, because you can find a way to change where it's, you know, stored at. I don't think ripping is against the law. Sharing, I'm not sharing my content with you. You know, I'm not torrenting my media library. That's not at all why I do any of that stuff. It's really for convenience for me and my family. The experience of swapping out discs is like caveman, right? It's like trying to create fire with sticks. Why would you do that, right? If you have

home lab sophistication or curiosities, why would you not find a way to run Plex? Why would you not find a way to have a small NAS and run ZFS? Of course, not BTRFS or anything else because nothing else exists besides OpenZFS. I don't know about you, Tim. That's how I feel. Okay. I'm just kidding. I'm not a hater. I do prefer, but I'm not a hater. I know. I know. I hear it a lot. You know, there are pros and cons to both. Once ZFS implements, you know, the resizing of pools, I think it might be a less argument for or against, you know, BTRF or ButterFS, you know, because that's, I don't want to say the one, but that's a huge feature that BTRFS is going for, ButterFS, is that, you know, you can JBOD disks. You can add storage just by adding another disk, you know, or resize the pool and reshuffle everything around.

Whereas ZFS, you can't. You got to grow your pool, you know, in a certain way, either double disks or depending on how you divide it up. It's tough. It's tough. I've been there. You know, I had to move my old ZFS pool was a certain size. And when I got my, I watched you swap out disks. I couldn't believe how you grew that pool. I was like, this guy's ballsy, man. He's swapping disks. He's growing his, I mean, like I was watching out just like sweating with you. I'm just like, gosh is his data gonna be there when he's done yeah so it's tough so then that's one of the challenges with zfs and so i'm uh you know i'm all for just having some flexibility too because zfs is pretty awesome i love a software raid i love you know all the integrity checks

that it does i love how quickly you can snapshot and back it up at the same time it's pretty rigid for home you know i want to be able to go buy a a disc one disc or maybe two and add it to my pool and expand my pool so that's that's not there yet and some versions of zfs yeah i talked to matt aaron's about that and i think that was a coming feature when we talked about i can't recall if it was like landed in certain versions or it was coming and even then like it wouldn't really re-silver the whole entire pool but sort of like it would still be unbalanced to some degree but in the realm of zfs like your data would all be in the same you know vdev or whatever it might be but it was still not going to like rebalance the whole disk array that's right you know, just may be a technical challenge that it will never overcome. But the reason why I like ZFS is it's so easy to use. It is pretty secure in terms of copy on write and all sorts of the reasons that it's just a good file system. Backing up, like I

have a backup system. I had chat GPT write me some scripts that I run. They're bash scripts. They help me do some cool stuff that I'm just like, just back up. And it's just like, we'll back it up to it. I can learn those things and I can write those commands every single time and I can up arrow to my nth degree and rerun the command. But who wants to do that, right? I'm not going to do that. So I had ChatGP write me some stuff, my pair programmer. Okay, let's get back to the stack. Let's, uh, so ZFS is in my home lab stack. You've chosen Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu, pick your way to say it. I think it's Ubuntu actually. I've chosen Ubuntu. I'm curious why you chose Ubuntu. Where do I go? So I've used Ubuntu since I want to say 4.10,

which would mean April of 2010. That's so long ago. Yeah. Tell me about it. And I think that's the first time I like heard about it. And I think that's the first time I like heard about it. Like, yeah, you know, it was Windows. I still am a Windows fan. I'm nothing against Windows. I use Windows, Mac, Linux. I use them all for different things. And back then it was all Windows. I was all Windows and I just didn't have a lot of experience with Linux and I heard about it. And so I, you know, that was the first approachable Linux for me was Ubuntu. It had a desktop. It kind of felt like Windows.

So that was my first foray into Linux, really. And then from there, you know, they had the server version. So I could, as I used Ubuntu desktop, I could open up a terminal and kind of, you know, tinker and play around with Linux and copy and paste these commands into there and, you know, do things that people were doing on Linux server. So eventually I got to the point where I was like, well, I'll use Linux headless now, and basically the server version to where I don't need the UI. And so I got really familiar with Ubuntu in general or Debian, I guess I should say, but more so Ubuntu. And, you know, I learned their package manager. I learned all of the stuff about it. And so I just kept using it. And then being

in infrastructure and then being a software developer, a lot of people supported Ubuntu LTS for a lot of their stuff, whether it was MySQL, MongoDB or anything. You could always guarantee that any software package or service was going to run on the latest LTS of Ubuntu. So since the tech community considered it so stable, I just stuck with it. And I still do. And I've tinkered with all different versions. So I'm a huge fan.

I've been using it for a long time. And then with Microsoft now having WSL and running Linux on Windows and having Ubuntu kind of running on Windows too, it's super nice to be able to use. For me, approachable and accessible stable and supported that's what it boils down to okay and i think everyone has their flavor of linux that they like or yeah you got distro hoppers or you got some sort of hating you know

like why do you like this so did you explore all the distros ever or did you sort of like just land at ubuntu and just stay there no i distro hop. I think once you get kind of bitten by the Linux bug, I think then you're like, okay, well, what else is out there? You know, is this the best one? Am I on the best one? What's everyone else using? So I used to go out to distro watch all the time, all the time and say, hey, what's Mate?

You know, Ubuntu Mate or what's Fedora all about or, you know, Red Hat or you name it and hop around and try things, Arch, you know. And then I did that too for my Linux firewall. So I ran a Linux firewall for a long time. I ran Smoothwall, IPCOP, Untangle, PFSense. And so that was part of my routine too was I'm going to distro hop with my Linux firewall. So I'd go out to distro watch, see what the top, you know, network distribution was and hop that way too. At work, I used Mac or Windows and at home I use Linux. So I found, you know, every time I went to switch to another Linux, I felt like I'm paying some debt to keep learning something else and to keep trying something else. And at

the end of the day, you know, running Linux at home for me was kind of a means to an end for some things. And so I started to be a little more pragmatic and say, I just need this to work. I need it to run. Because at the end of the day, you know, I need to get Docker containers running on here. I need to get Kubernetes on here. And so, you know, if it works, it's stable, it's supported. I had to put my, you know, pragmatic hat on and say, I just need this to work. Yeah. Yeah, to answer your question, though, I have distraught a lot. A lot less lately.

Okay. Okay. So you've stabilized to Ubuntu. That's right. And since version 4, essentially 4.10. So I think I was 12.10 was the first version I installed. And I think that was around 2015, 2016, maybe. Something like that.

And the first place I installed Linux myself was on a DigitalOcean droplet. And it was to run a WordPress server. All right. Did the firewall, all that good stuff. And that thing was stable and ran without being rebooted for years. I mean, like it was either DigitalOcean's good job or my good job or the tutorial's good job. I don't know. Or Linux itself.

So I was a fan of Ubuntu for a while. And so when it came to, you know, about a year or so ago, when I kind of got back into Linux, I never really got out of it, but I never really tinkered with it day to day. But then I kind of got more into my Homelab stuff and was more concerned with which flavor of Linux I was running. And I wanted to try them all.

I wanted to try Debian. I wanted to try Red Hat. I wanted to try Rocky. I want to try all the different ones. But what made me come back to Ubuntu was one, the reasons you say, which is support and stability. But then I just recognized that it was always better resource efficient, always better CPU efficient and phenomenally better on RAM in comparison to most distros

I always kind of gauged it on if I install basic Ubuntu get Docker running on it and spin up PyHole, what are the resource utilization on that? Well basically nothing on the CPU of course because it's not really a CPU intensive application anyways, but the RAM was like 300 megs maybe

while I had 4 gigs or so on a small machine in most cases for that it was just super ram efficient and you could just add more and more i believe that was even inside of proxmox now that i'm thinking about it so it was like proxmox then abun2 as the obviously having a machine to run it on and then docker and then the actual container itself it was sitting inside that container at 300 megs but you know i would run htop on on proxmox itself it was sitting inside that container at 300 megs but you know i would run htop on on proximal itself it was the resource utilization was just like basically nothing you know so if you add more and more to that pf sense or plex or something else like you just

have a lot and in the home lab the things you really care about and i think you've helped me understand this more because you always talk about like kilowatt usage and how much watts something uses. I'm like, why does that even matter? And I'm like, oh yeah, the power bill. So that's important. But then like when you're tinkering, you're just curious, you're just learning. So you're like, I don't care how many watts

this thing takes, does this work? And does it serve my use? And then you're like, oh, how can I now make it more efficient? CPU, RAM, watts, et cetera. And the point I'm trying to make, I suppose, is just like that, you start to care about heat, you care about noise, and you care about wattage in Homelab.

And you care about reuse. So can I reuse something? And does it sound X? Does it power X? Okay, no. Let me spend some money. You were recently doing a video on uh your mobile home lab forbidden travel router plus plus ultimate home lab thingy i didn't see it like you did i thought it was hilarious

the times you said on that on that episode but i'm like i need that for my travel trailer rv i need a version of that and i thought about like building a unified network but that thing you built was just way better because it's everything in one single device and it's quiet and it's low powered so like you know you start to think about you know as we sort of you know go up and down this home lab stack what matters i think is you know power obviously and noise and you know does it create a lot of heat because if you're in a small environment or even a closet in most cases are you generating a lot of heat that if you're in a small environment or even a closet in most cases, are you generating a lot of heat that you got to somehow exhaust? You know, these are things you got to worry about. So talk about the Protectly. Talk about, you know, this mobile home lab

forbidden travel router plus plus ultimate home lab thingy that you've built. You nailed it. Yeah. So I've had this idea for a while. Like every time I travel, I bring devices with me. I think a lot of people in tech do. I almost never. I would just bring a hotspot. I'm the opposite. I would want to bring a lot of stuff. I just didn't have anything to bring.

So I just bring my hotspot and hope for the best. Yeah, that's true. But I guess I was bringing a lot of things that needed to connect to another network. And, you know, off the top of my head, everything, you know, a laptop. But no, it was a laptop, a phone, you know, a tablet, maybe a gaming device, maybe whatever. And so those things grew. And then if my wife traveled with me,

it was that times two. And so, you know, I always felt weird about like, hey, we just got an Airbnb. We're just going to connect all our devices to their Airbnb. Like, yeah, we'll a hundred percent trust this thing. Trust them. Yeah. Let's just trust them. You know? And I always felt weird about it. And I was like, there's gotta be something better. Like I don't trust this.

And so for a while I would bring like a little raspberry pie and I would plug it in and broadcast the network. It didn't do the greatest, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was like this travel version of a network firewall that only our devices got connected to. If I wanted, it could VPN back home and then get all the protection I wanted. Or if I wanted, I'd run Pi hole on it. And so the Pi did kind of okay at that. It did okay at that for a lot of different reasons. Then I started looking at, okay, well, I need something a little bit more powerful than a Pi. I won't get too technical, but I need something that does AES encryption, AES and I.

It doesn't exist on ARM CPUs or at least the Pi, and it does on x86 processors. So that's when I started looking for small, low power, quiet devices that I could bring with me, you know, small. I'm talking about the size of, you know, a phone, a large phone. And that's when I came across these Protectly devices. And then I started thinking, okay, what are the things that I want to, you know, take with me? And it was that same thing. It was like, hey, let's build a firewall

so that I can connect only my devices to it. Let's add an access point to this so that I don't have to connect to their access point. I'll connect to this device's access point and I can uplink to their router. And then, you know, let's add Pi hold to it because I want the same protection I have at home. You know, why have everyone track me as soon as I walk out the door, you know? That's right. And then I realized, hey, like Proxmox is a great fit for this. Like these little devices, I mean, there are a lot of them, but this Protectly device,

at the end of the day, it's an Intel CPU that supports virtualization. So I was like, well, why not just put Proxmox on this and do exactly what I do at home, except for add an access point to it. And so that's kind of what I did. And it works great. It's super complicated. It is fun. But yeah, it's great for like, if you're going to travel somewhere, I'd say for a week or more or like your RV, perfect for that. Because it's something you could set up, you could have everyone connect to and you can be sure that everyone's connected and safe. Also, you know, I can run Plex on it and because it has quick sync on that intel cpu

because it has an intel desktop class processor with an intel iris it can do transcoding their local too so i mean obviously most people are going to connect back home for plex but think of like you're on the actual road trip like road tripping you know and all your kids want to connect to a device and you don't want to use data, you could easily serve that out locally through that machine too. So there's just so many possibilities. And, you know, every time I traveled, I thought there's got to be a better way. And then, you know, network Chuck did something similar and I was like, awesome. This kind of ties together one piece that I was missing. You know, I was just like, yeah, noodling on this idea for a while

and eventually it kind of came together. But I think Proxmox made it so much easier than it was without Proxmox. Now there are tiny little travel routers too that, you know, I'm going to look into at some point, but it's super nice to be able to bring some things with you, you know, and to be able to tinker and to spin up stuff,

local services, whatever I want, you know. What I like about it is that it can run Plex and I don't always want to phone home for Plex because the network isn't always there really, you know? And so if I can actually have one, like the reasons why I like it is for all the reasons you've said, it can be the router for all the devices that I trust. I can connect to LTE or a hard line to the local network if there is one available, if it's an Airbnb or this RV place happens to support that.

Sometimes they'll give you a router that connects to their network, which you can then run an Ethernet port out of to something else. So you can still be their device, but then protect yourself from there. But the fact that I can run Plex and just run a mobile version of my Plex, so it doesn't have to be my main version of it. I can just pull over the kids directory, for example, which is they have their own directory. All the stuff that the kids can watch is in the kids directory.

I can just clone that to this device. Now, obviously, if it's too big and it's 10 terabytes or whatever the number might be, maybe I'm then choosy or it's a selection process, but I can always take a mobile version of my Plex essentially. You know, I wanted it for all the reasons. It's low power, Intel CPU,

virtualization, can run Proxmox. So thank you for doing all the hard work, Tim. And then the relationship, I'm sure, because finding hardware manufacturers that support open source the way that it particularly seems to based upon what you've shared about them, you know, it's kind of hard.

If it weren't for folks like you and I think just YouTube in general or like content creators either being approached by these brands or being curious and having these needs and be like, you know, there's got to be a better way. If it weren't for folks like you

going and doing all that digging, then people like me would not be able to just piggyback off all your work and just you know because i'm going to go and figure out how to do that for myself because my idea was okay i'm going to get the that small square usg a poe thing with a poe access point like i was going to do a small version of a unified network and like that thing basically is all that in one plus it can run plaques yeah and also have i think it supports uh sata ssds i can you know maybe doing an eight gig or maybe i can plug in i think there's some usb ports or something like that too

maybe i can have an external device that's just for the storage i don't know i haven't thought that far because i've only recently just watched your video but that to me is like that's the better way to do it. Yeah, it's tough because I thought the same thing. Is there a mini Unify thing I can bring with me that auto connects me back home? And I don't think that exists yet or who knows. Well, they're listening. They'll make it after this call. They'll be like, okay, listen, they've really promoted Unify at the beginning.

And now they're not doing it anymore. They're building protectly stuff. We've got to find a way. They're going to listen. Thank you for calling that out about me doing research and making relationships with companies. Because that's kind of what it is. And that's another tough part about content creation. A lot of people think like, oh, they're just saying this because, you know, you're getting paid.

And it's like, no, I believe in this product. And either they approach me or I approach them. But at the end of the day, like, you know, I believe in this product and I want it to succeed. And yes, Protectly definitely has leaned into open source a ton. If you look at their documentation, they have everything you can possibly install on that device between OpenWRT, Proxmox, you name it. They've done a ton of documentation on it and pretty cool device too. I didn't even know that existed, the OpenWRT. I didn't know it existed. I didn't know. I mean, you're helping me discover these new things that are already out there and open source

is just so big. We've been covering open source on the change log for, I mean, basically after the one year after GitHub's birth, it was like maybe six months or so, you know, we just saw the trend of open source, you know, moving faster. And the name of the show became really because I was watching open source change so often. I'm like, well, there's nobody talking about what happened between this version and this version. Like nobody's reading the change log. Right. And so then the show became called the change log because we were chronicling, you know,

open source changing via our blog. We had a blog back in the day that became our newsletter and newsfeed. And then now just our news show. We have a new show on Mondays. It's a newsletter and a podcast in one. It's about eight or nine minutes. It's a must listen basically

if you want the top stories for that week. And then the newsletter obviously gives you more details. We have an email called Change All Nightly that literally comes out daily or technically nightly and shows the trends on GitHub repository wise. Sadly, there's so much GitHub spam now that it's made that newsletter kind of suck a little bit. And it's so hard to sort of prune it. And it leverages Google's BigQuery and some of it's out of our control. So all we can really do is filter. We can't really change the query as much,

but yeah, I mean, the power of open source system is amazing, but I had no idea about open WRT and how you can leverage it. So like, you know, really thank you for like being what I call in the trenches. Like you're in the, you're a content creator, but I think you're this person who's curious and you probably have these challenges and you're like, what devices out there work? Okay. Either they called you or you called them, but there's some sort of like discovery process. And then there's a software discovery process. And then there's like, well, actually this thing makes sense to run Proxmox.

So like, will it actually virtualize well? Cause sometimes you'll support, I, you know, IO, iommu and maybe you can virtualize something it's like i think you had an issue with a via drive or something like that with windows like there's always something finicky even though it's supported there's always something and so it requires that you know sometimes that person to go ahead of everybody else and sort of like recon okay the path is safe come on you know way. Totally. A canary sometimes I feel like in a coal mine, but it's tough. And I'm glad you recognize that. Yeah. Because, you know, you know, it starts with an idea sometimes, but there's so much I realized for tech YouTube too, at least for my, what I'm doing for tech YouTube,

it's, there's a lot that goes into it. Not only, you know, the writing, the thumbnails, the things you guys see, but just, yeah, a lot of these are projects that I have to test ahead of time. And usually I test them two or three times because I don't want surprises as I'm recording. So it's, yeah, a lot of work goes into it, but it's fun. I learned a ton and it's fun to share that stuff too. Can we, since we're kind of on the subject and we're probably getting close to time, can we kind of talk about the business of being a YouTuber to some degree? Do you mind? Yeah, no, sure.

Is that an open subject for you? Yeah. So I noticed recently, and because you mentioned Protectly and this relationship, I've noticed, and I don't know if I noticed it before, but I've noticed this phrase in the top left corner

of some of your videos, not all of them, includes paid promotion. And I think you have to do something when you publish a video because there is some relationship and you have to be forthcoming with YouTube, the platform about the dealings of business behind the scenes. How does that work for you? Do you have dedicated sponsors? What is the business side of your, your channel like, how does it work for you?

Good question. I feel like this was the question I was hoping for. Okay. Well, I mean, a lot of people are always trying to figure out, like, is this person being genuine or is this person being paid to say this? You've always seemed genuine to me. Well, thank you. It's either the way you talk, which I think you have a unique way of delivering. You have a pace with your voice. Either it's on purpose or it's just natural. But you've always seemed, without having to say so, like you've gone on a journey and you're telling us the tale of the journey and why it made sense for you to go on it. So you've always seemed very trustworthy to me in

terms of like, you know, being truthful and, you know, honest with your dealings. It's never felt like you had to over-explain it. It just seemed the way you approach the topic and the subject matter just seemed naturally trustworthy to me, personally. Thank you. Well, I really appreciate that. Sometimes I get bogged down by the comments. You know, it's one comment that's like, he's just getting paid to say this. And I shouldn't read the comments, but I do. I can't. Don't read those comments. Yeah, man. I know. I can't help it, though. Well, every time you see that comment, just imagine me going, not true. All right. Tim, I believe in you. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it.

So let me explain this the best way I can without, I'm not a lawyer or anything like that, but YouTube has this checkbox. So when I create content, YouTube has this checkbox and this checkbox says, check this checkbox. I'm paraphrasing. If you received anything of value to create this video or receive money. So they kind of lumped them both into one. And me, I'm like, I'm a rule follower.

I'm a rule follower. And so I read into it deeply and I think, well, you know, on my latest video, Rackstuds sent me a free pack of Rackstuds. They didn't pay me, didn't say anything. They just said, I want you to have them. Use them in any of your videos. And so to me, I'm like, okay, I'm posting this video. I received one thing for free in this video. I should probably check the checkbox. So anyways, long story short, that's up for almost every single one of my videos because one thing in

my video was usually sent to me for free that I used. So full disclosure. I tried to disclose that too in the video too. But there are times when, you know, I paid sponsors who want to sponsor the video or a segment in the video. And I'm pretty clear about that too. And I usually have a segment in my videos that says like, hey, this video was sponsored by so-and-so. And, you know, I'm very picky on who I work with. I've been fortunate enough to do that, but I, you know, work with some really awesome brands. And so I'm sticking with them. But the business of YouTube, it's tough. It's tough. You know, it's trying to balance this. Well, one, it's being able to get paid for what you're doing. That is tough. You have to have an audience that trusts you, you know, and then YouTube has a rev share with ads, which isn't much. And then

there are brand deals and sponsorships where brands can sponsor your videos for however much you charge for a segment on your video. It's done okay. I'm a software engineer. So in general, I earn a pretty good wage. Recently, that's changed. I've been doing half and half, kind of, sort of. I've been fortunate enough to dial back some of my software engineering stuff and contracts and do more of YouTube to try to give this a shot to see if this is something I want to do for the next six months. But I will say it's a huge pay cut. But at the same time, I'm doing three of five days, I'm doing exactly what I want to do. Just trying to make a business out of YouTube and figuring out what that means. Don't have a lot of

mentorship. I actually have zero. I don't have anyone to talk to. Bummer. It doesn't seem like that from the outside. Oh, thanks. But honestly, it's, don't get me wrong. I've talked to other YouTubers, but it never gets into like, what's your business model? How do you charge? Like, what do you, you know, how do you make money outside of YouTube? It's been all this, like trying to figure it out for myself, which is totally fine. But at the end of the day, like I have to figure out if this works between the lines and also having gone down, I'm not on the YouTube path. We've been on podcasting primarily. I feel like audio is the best type of content. Like video does. I mean, I suppose I couldn't imagine you audibly talking about the things you talk about because you need a visual to it.

So there's some things that just don't fit the podcast method, so to speak. But we've chosen podcasts first, audio podcast first, and then video being a second class citizen in all of our production. But I can empathize because you're towing that line of like, I want my listeners and the people I'm trying to cultivate as an audience, the people I genuinely care about because I am one of them. So in a lot of ways of what I produce is a mirror of what they desire in life or what they're curious about and they don't know about it yet. And I'm on this discovery path that we've talked about with you. And you want to stay genuine to that.

But in order to do that, you know, you do have to make money. So, I mean, there is a relationship that comes there. So it's like, well, how do I capitalize from a business and revenue perspective without, you know, squandering or just basically removing that trust that they've given me because you want to toe that line. And the only way I've been able to find out how to do that is just choose the brands that, like you had said, that you trust, that you believe in, that you would yourself use if you had that problem. In our case, it's a little bit different because we don't always have the problem every brand approaches us with.

Tailscale is a good example. I use Tailscale. They're one of our sponsors. I chose Tailscale because I like them. I use them. I'm like, hey, I would love it if you all sponsored our podcast. If you have any budget, I'd love to talk about how these things work for us. And those for us are super clear.

You can tell where there's an ad spot. I just mentioned Tailscale. They didn't pay me to do that. That's because I use them. You know, that's genuine. And so you do have that blend. And it's unfortunate for you because like you, yeah, it's kind of crazy. They lump both of those into one.

But you have that struggle of like, I want my audience to trust me. I want them to know that when I mentioned Protectly or Raxus, I believe, or what was the other, the rack you just talked about today? Yeah, SysRax. SysRax. I had it backwards. Did you buy that? Do you own that? Would you buy that if you had to buy it? Did they give it to you? Like all these questions come into play. Like I personally had that question when I watched that because I'm like, well, Tim, you have a big version of that. Why in the world do you need a second small version of that, Tim? Like what story are you not sharing here? You know? And it's not that I'm thinking you're dishonest. It's just more like, I know you're a, you have to create a business around this, but then you're like, well,

did they give him this one? And now he just cares that much. And this is a small version of the big version. You know, what's the story here. And it's so challenging to be forthcoming with every detail without giving too much TMI. And then also just bloating your content with all the explanatory of explaining why people should trust you. So for us, I always feel like every time I get a chance in a podcast naturally to mention how we deal with sponsors, just say like we choose to work with them. We don't just take money from anybody. And it's because we truly trust and think that business is worth promoting because you should know about this. You should know about their brand story.

You should know more about the details. And that's how we choose them. So I don't always preface every single ad with, here's how we're getting paid. Here's the business dealings. And by the way, here's the details about the business itself. It's a challenge. So I empathize to the nth degree with the challenge.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. You know, a lot of people wonder, every video I release, you know, and maybe it's just me like reading into stuff, but it the head, you know, a lot of people wonder, yeah, every video I release, you know, and maybe it's just me like reading into stuff, but it's, it's tough. You know, it's like, do I want to spend like 45 seconds in the beginning disclosing exactly how this product came to my house, you know? And I'm sure some people would be interested in that, but other people may not be. Plus like the algorithm. I mean, I have to deal with the algorithm on YouTube too. So it's like, that's tough too. You know, YouTube analyzes everything

you say and all the engagement with your stuff. Is that right? They're analyzing your words too? Oh yeah. Everything, everything plays into it. Like you, you could put a video out on YouTube with no title whatsoever. And YouTube already knows who your audience is and who's going to click on it. I mean, they'll analyze the thumbnail too, but how much time do I want to spend talking about how I got this item? Well, if I do that in the first 30 seconds, people are going to click away. So that's going to drop off. So it's like, okay, you know, the first 30 seconds of your video is to captivate the audience, not to talk about all your prerequisites and stuff like that. So it's, it's tough. It's tough. So I,

you know, if you see that checkbox, it's most of the time, it means that I received at least one thing for free in this video to make the video, because that's the FTC saying they have to do it too. That's Google basically saying, Hey, we have to do this for the FTC. And so, so I have to check that checkbox if I received one thing for free. And like, like I've heard a lot of people say like, Oh, well they didn't give it to me for free. My money costs time. And so I'm, this technically isn't for free and I don't want to play the game. I'm just going to check the checkbox almost every time. If something in my video was free, then I'm going to check the checkbox because I never want the FTC or Google coming after me for not doing it. Have you considered

doing a video that explains the phrase they put up there, includes pay promotion? Like almost just do a whole standalone video that just says, the title is includes pay promotion. This is how it works for me. I like it. Because you're going to see this on almost every video. And here's why. And this is the path that things come to me.

Sometimes I reach out to them. Sometimes they reach out to me. Sometimes they just send things to me and I don't even know it's coming. You know, whatever the methodology is. And this is is you know, when you see that thing up there because I can't avoid it I'm forthcoming. I'm a genuine person. I play by the rules all the reasons you just basically stated when you see that this is how My business here on youtube kind of works so that when you see that this is how you can trust What I care about and why things end up on my video. The rack studs, I bought mine.

They didn't send me any. And I heard about them from Tom Lawrence. And I like them. I think they're pretty awesome. I didn't see the 1U ones you just mentioned before. I think those are brand new. Kind of cool. They don't hold a ton of weight.

So you can't, I mean, I think you put your UPS on it and it was a lighter version, minus 75 pounds. So it would not hold mine. And if it did, it would stress test it and maybe break it. But those racks, those are pretty cool. I like them. They are cool. They are super cool. And I'm not going to lie. I was a little skeptical about them. Like, you know, I thought, well, cage nuts aren't that hard to use, you know? And they're plethora. They're everywhere. There's no shortage. Yeah. I like the stainless. I had stainless steel ones and I was like, yeah, they're pretty cool and shiny and never

have using them. Seeing on the channels, I thought, well, I think cage nuts are fine, you know? And then as I'm, this is exactly how I happen. I'm working on this video for this new rack. The, I think it's the owner for Rackstuds. Reach out, said, hey, I've watched a ton of your videos. Give me your address. I want to send you some, you know, Rackstuds. I said, sure, why not? And then I decided to use them for this and I'm a believer in them now. It's super nice to be able to just, I don't know, the 1U ones are

awesome because you just clip them in and then you can put your device there and screw them in. But I also had to use the other ones too too and i was surprised at how much weight they could hold i'm surprised at how much weight and how steady they are i will say like if you ever put a screwdriver to them put it to it gently yeah i've only done it to get them off because like i would hand tighten them too tight and i've only had to use a screwdriver to get them off it's never been to like i would just only hand tighten because it's plastic. I mean, it's nylon of some sort, I'm sure,

but it's not metal, you know? Yeah, yeah. They are pretty amazing at what they do. So the 22 pound UPS is as far as I've taken it. And this is a tiny little rack that I have behind me. It's basically gonna, it's gonna house a couple of things that I have coming up. Basically studio stuff that's gonna be rack mounted.

Right. So you have like, I don't know the map of your house, but I think you have a basement It's going to house a couple of things that I have coming up. Basically, studio stuff that's going to be rack-mounted. Right. So you have, like, I don't know the map of your house, but I think you have a basement. Yeah. And I think your main rack is in your basement because that's what you've said. That's right. Very colorful rack, you know, but you have a large, I think, a 32U rack, which is, that's a lot of stuff. I mean, that's a, I think the 45 drives is probably for you, you know?

So you've got, what, 28 to go from there? Maybe you've got a few switches. So maybe you've got down to 26. I mean, you're not filling the whole thing, are you? The whole 32U rack? You got a little bit of space left, but maybe like four or five use, something like that. Yeah, I do. And I have a disk shelf in there that I'm selling now.

And so, yeah, things have evolved over time. And I have some 1U servers in there. I even have an Intel NUC cluster in there. So yeah, things have definitely evolved. What are you using that for? My Intel NUC cluster. Yeah. Is that your Kubernetes cluster then that you're deploying to or is that something else? It was. So for a while it was for testing my Kubernetes. So I built this thing in Ansible that's open source that helps you deploy a high availability Kubernetes

cluster. And that was my test bed for a long time. Funny you mentioned power and heat and all this stuff we were just talking about. Well, we're in a heat wave here in Minnesota. I mean, it's really hot. I mean, we're talking it was like 95 yesterday, 94 today. And I've been running these one-use servers in my basement, in my server rack for a while, and they get hot, they're loud, and they use a lot of power. And I'll say, you know, I'll preface it with they're pretty efficient. I mean, they're pulling 140 watts each, which is pretty efficient compared to if you look at other things, they're 200, 300 watts apiece. So they're already pretty efficient. But I thought, you know what?

I wonder if I can run Proxmox on this Intel NUC cluster and replace one-to-one, replace one 1U server running six to nine virtual machines and move and migrate all of those virtual machines to one Intel NUC. And so I did it. And I did this, I want to say, I don't know, a couple of days ago, I was posting it on Twitter, basically my almost live tweets. And what I found was I was able to migrate all of those virtual machines to an Intel NUC and run them all there and shut down my one use server. And I went from 140 watts to only 26 watts and running the same exact workload. And then, so I was like, okay, that worked out pretty well. Like it was like a non-event. So then I was like, oh, let's migrate

the other one. I migrated the other one, nine virtual machines to another Intel NUC and it's running same thing, you know, saved, I don't know, around a hundred Watts there. And so then I was like, okay, well, I'm going to shut down my 1U servers and I'll just maybe on Monday I'll need them again. So I'll keep them on standby. Well, it is now Wednesday and I haven't needed to turn my 1Us back on. So I think. Very cool.

Yeah, so I'm running Proxmox on two Intel NUCs. You know, it has a one terabyte NVMe and a 500 gig SSD for the OS. All my virtual machines are running in there, 64 gigs of RAM. You know, I was able to save a ton of power. And on top of that, things I didn't realize, I'm also not using my AC or fans as much too, because now the temperature in my server room dropped by almost 10 degrees. So then my fans are on less. So then my AC is on less. That's insane. So two, one use servers was generating 10 degrees. What? So then my fans are on less. So then my AC is on less. That's insane. So two, one use servers was drain rating 10 degrees. That's, that's a lot.

Wow. Yeah. Have you done the math on what that equates to? Like kilowatts per month? Like, I mean, you pay your power bill and I'm like, man,

like my power bill goes up and we've had, the AC is the main user of that. And there's even ways you can cool down your, your coils and stuff like that. Cause I live in Texas. Okay. So it's always like, it's common to be, well, it's the same temperature as you, Tim. 95 degrees outside.

So there you go. Different parts of the world, but same temperature. Yeah. But yeah. Have you calculated what that 100 watts or 120 watts equates to for the full month when you run that? Like how much you'll save or what the difference is kilowatts per hour? No, I haven't.

So it's a total of 200 watts that I save total running 24-7. I haven't calculated it out. I should probably will. Does that be kind of cool? Oh, yeah, for sure. Like I said before, I never really thought about, I mean, obviously I pay my power, but I think about power consumption,

but I never really considered, okay, as I'm being curious with Homelab things and as I choose this device, the Protectly stuff is low power, fanless even, you know, and so it's got that grate or whatever you call it on top to sort of dissipate the heat and whatnot. You don't think about the consumption and then really how that, you know, affects, like, what if all the YouTubers in Minnesota did what you did, Tim? You know, I'm just kidding. There's probably not many of you up there, but what if everybody considered how can I shave off, you know, 200 watts of consumption 24-7?

That might reduce the stress on the power grid. I mean, these are all, you know, utilities. You flip a switch, the lights waves or, you know, peak times and winters or summers whenever it's too cold or too hot? You know, what if we all like consider a little bit that power consumption in particular, like 200 watts is a lot and 10 degrees in one room change by turning off two devices is significant. It is. And so, yeah, it had this compounding effect of less power, which, you know, those servers then

generated less heat. And so I have an enclosed server, you know, that enclosed server rack and it has a temperature control unit. So as the heat would, you know, get past, I think,

87 degrees, it would kick on those fans. And so now that whole thing is no longer happening. It's all being passively cooled. Well, passively from the rest of my house. But, yeah, it's crazy to think about. It's all being passively cooled. Well, passively from the rest of my house. But yeah, it's crazy to think about.

I think about it more and more. When I first got into Homelab, I thought I needed this huge, gigantic server. And it turns out very few things need a lot of compute. And like you mentioned earlier, it's going to be compressing or compiling or transcoding. Other than that, most things run pretty okay on low wattage processors. So. Yes. Yes. Well, I think we're getting close to the length of, we're beyond what I thought we'd actually go in terms of timing. The only question I had left for you, and I think you may want to answer this because you said that you wanted to talk about

the other topic, which was the business of YouTube. What are your plans for the future? I mean, you do a great job with your content. I appreciate the journeys you take to create the content you do because in a lot of ways, you're the recon. You're the recon team. I'm the follow-up team. I'm just watching what you do. And some things I just learned from, like the PyKVM,

I don't really leverage that really much. I don't have a lot of headless things where I got to deal with that. I SSH into most things I need to, so I don't need a visual for almost anything really, unless I have to. And maybe then I'll go back and watch it and maybe implement a Pi KVM or something like that. Proxmox, you've helped me get into that, obviously considering low power consumption, but things like that. So what are the features for you in terms of like the business of YouTube? Do you plan to grow a team? Do you have an editor? Will you build an empire?

Will you be the next Linus? What's going to happen? What do you want to do? What would be ideal for you? That is a great question. I feel like I'm at those crossroads right now. So the last couple of weeks, I decided to focus more on YouTube. I've had a full-time job outside of YouTube as a software engineer at

a small startup for a long time. And since then, I've put less time in software engineering and more time in YouTube. And so I'm honestly trying to still find my way. I would love to find an editor at some point, only because editing takes a lot of time. I would love help with script writing sometime. Everything I talk about are my own words, which I always want my YouTube to be my own words, but it could use a little finesse sometimes, or it could use a little bit of help sometime with some of my ideas. I'm okay with it being a one-person show right now. It's taught me a lot about how to write, how to produce, how to edit, how to do audio, all of these things I didn't know about before. how to teach um i don't want to say i've taught but i've you know i've mentored people and at work and uh outside of work and

teaching people through video through instructional material is a lot different you know zero feedback you know the feedback is after the fact and so it's taught me a lot how to teach and so i i think this next six months are really just going to be focusing on, like you mentioned, the business of YouTube. I don't necessarily want to grow an empire. I mean, I would love to have some help at some point, but I want to keep it authentic to me and just be able to make this a sustainable business for myself to be able to support, you know, my family doing this and support, you know, doing what I love. And that's, you know, combining tech and learning and teaching too, and exposing people to new things. So yeah, if there's a, if there's an audience out there for that, I would just like to capture more of that.

Yeah. Well, in terms of feedback, since I am a, a watcher slash listener, I don't know what the heck to call it. A person who watches somebody's YouTube videos, a consumer or whatever, subscriber, maybe subscriber. Well, for a while, I think I didn't even subscribe. The algorithm just would feed me your stuff or other people's stuff even. So you would be a watcher of somebody's and not really recognize that you're not a subscriber, which does impact how the algorithm treats your content

and there's all sorts of things that play into that. But in terms of some direct feedback on your writing, I think you do a great job. I think the way you open up your videos, you ask a question. I don't know if it's intentional fully or how much you go back and re-examine the words you've written to script write your processes. I think your approach to it is really good. Your pace is good. Your writing is good.

So whenever you consider bringing somebody on for that, I would still do what you can to be the kind of primary writer and not leverage too much from somebody else because I think your style is good already. Thank you. I do understand the burden that puts on you because now you've got to be cognitively available for every piece of the process

of building the thing. Like you'd mentioned before in the pre-call that you released a video today and half the battle is doing the thing and half the battle is releasing the thing and being there for the distribution process and the questions that come from there

and the attention that comes from that. And I totally get that. We have a saying around here, three things actually. So kind of three pillars that kind of guide us. Keep the main thing, the main thing, slow and steady wins. And if you feel like you're going too fast, slow down and check yourself. So whatever pace you feel is your pace. Just because you say slow and steady, that doesn't really mean slow. It just means at a pace which you can go steady. So you can be going really fast, but still be going slow

and steady because you're at a steady pace. So pick your momentum. But if you feel like you're not able to keep up and the things that matter most to you, the main thing, keep the main thing, the main thing, if that's, if you're losing your grip on that, slow down and check yourself. You know, that's the rudders and the levers we tend to pull having done this for 14 plus years and making a living doing it. This year has been the most unique year of all years, but that's our guiding principle, so to speak, you know? And then I think the last one is listeners first in our case, because we're audio. So listener first, everything we do is based on the listener. If I don't think they're a brand, if it's a promotional thing that they should hear, I'm not going to work with them, you know,

in any sort of business way. If it's a piece of content or a topic that we don't feel the listener is going to engage in, or if how we speak, like I mentioned before, we remove the explicit tag off of our shows for that reason. We want people to be in the car with their moms, their grandfathers, their kids, their dogs, whoever may get offended by offensive speech. You may not offend us, but you may offend somebody else. And we're going to do our best to curb that so that we can hit the widest possible audience. We always even say to the hacker generation doesn't begin at 20 and they may begin at nine or five or whatever. Like my kids are really into that.

I got a seven-year-old, you know, when I want my show playing. Yeah. He listens to my show when I'm QAing it. Like he didn't always listen to it, but I'm happy to play my content as a QA process when I'm driving my truck or car or whatever, because I know that it's safe. I know what the content is and I want our listeners to have that same feeling. So listener first, slow and steady, slow down and check yourself. Keep the main thing, the main thing. I like it. Yeah. This is exactly what I needed. So I appreciate your advice. Hey, yeah, I'm happy to be, you know, not just come on our show.

I'm happy to be a friend. You know, that feedback process is insanely challenging even with our stuff. Like only until a couple of years ago did we start doing certain things that sort of solicited to some degree or invited that feedback process. I think sometimes when you do such a good job, like I think you do, you do a great job. You seem, not that you're not approachable, that maybe you're too cool, that you won't say yes to coming on a rando homelab podcast.

Like I didn't think you would respond, honestly. I was like, Tim's not gonna respond. And you responded so graciously, pretty quickly. And the email has that auto reply. So that may turn some people off. And I have no idea why you do that. You may have your reasons, but you know, if you want feedback, you have to provide feedback mechanisms.

I watch a lot of your stuff, but I'm on zero of Twitch. So your live streams almost don't exist to me. Maybe I'm missing out. I just don't live stream with folks ever really. And I don't know who, maybe it's a thing with my age demographic or whatever, but I've just never done it with really anybody. And so I would just find ways if you want that feedback or that friendship or that loop, so to speak of not just you in the echo chamber, but you with like in the YouTube comments, find ways to recreate that somewhere

else. But again, that's even half the battle too, because now you've got maybe a Slack or a Discord you've got to manage. Now you got one more, you know, self-hosted thing. You've got a CI and test and Kubernetes and all this good stuff. So at every layer, Tim,

there's just a new battle to consider how to win. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Yeah. All great advice. Cool.

What's left? Anything left unsaid? Is there anything I didn't ask you that you want to include here right as we're closing out this edition, this long edition of Change Logging Friends on Homelabs? I, you there anything I didn't ask you that you want to include here right as we're closing out this edition, this long edition of Change Logging Friends on Homelabs? You know, I don't think so. I'm just super appreciative of the time and sharing me with your community

and feeling, you know, hey, like Tim is someone I want to share with your community because it means a lot. It means a lot to me. And I'm the same way. I don't curse. So you don't even have to say it to me. I wouldn't even have cursed anyway.

So I like to keep a safe and welcoming chat or dialogue with anyone so that anyone can play me anywhere and not second guess, do I need to turn it down or change the channel? Yes. Will he say something wrong? Like super quick,

I watched this YouTuber, Sam the Cooking Guy. I don't know if you cooked him, but like my side hobby is backyard barbecue. I don't love if you cooked him, but my side hobby is backyard barbecue. I don't love to cook, but I love to cook certain things. I watch Sam the Cooking Guy. I love to eat. Yeah, I love to eat. I love to eat good food.

Nobody's making me good food. My wife makes me amazing food, but I don't have a chef. I don't have anything like that. I've got to be my own chef. Sam the Cooking Guy is amazing, but he is notorious for cussing it's a cooking show it's like uh emerald but you know way worse not on cable tv but amazing food amazing guy i love his attitude and i almost wouldn't take sam without the cursing but i

can't watch sam with my kids around so i have to like confirm when i can when it's safe for me to watch sam the cooking guy and if i do want them to watch some of the stuff he can, when it's safe for me to watch Sam the Cooking Guy. And if I do want them to watch some of the stuff he's doing, cause it's entertaining while I have to be like pre watching it. So yeah, anyways, but yeah, Tim, I appreciate the content you produce. Keep fighting the good fight, you know, keep being curious like you are, find a way to make it, you know, a sustainable business. And if you want a friend to help you along the way, I'd be happy to be that friend for you. But thank you so much for coming on here

and just sharing your time and sharing your Home Lab journey and some of the opinions you have. Thank you. Thank you so much, Adam. Appreciate it. Okay, so now you're done with the show. And the next thing to do is to,

I guess, begin your Home Lab if you haven't already. And I guess a second thing you could do is subscribe to Tim on YouTube. You can find him on YouTube by searching for Techno Tim or check the show notes. So I want to hear about your journey with your home lab. And the best way to do that is to hang with us in Slack. If you're not there already, go to changelog.com slash community. That gets you in.

And once you're there, search for the Homelab channel or just ask in Maine where it's at. I hope to see you there. If you dig this show, hey, do me a favor and tell a friend. We Homelabbers must unite. That's it. The show's done. Come back again and we'll talk. Game on.