Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up today, we're going to chat with the founder
Chris: of Home Assistant and the leader of the Open Home Foundation, Mr.
Chris: Paulus, and then we'll reveal the big things they have in the works and how
Chris: we're going to automate Brent's new Linux-powered van.
Chris: Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, great pick,
Chris: and a whole lot more. So before we go any further, let me say time-appropriate
Chris: greetings to our virtual lug.
Chris: Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes.
Wes: And hello, Brian. Hey, guys. Hello.
Chris: Hello, hello, hello. And a big good morning to our friends over at TailScale.
Chris: TailScale.com slash unplug. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices
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Wes: Oh, I know.
Chris: That's right. And so your devices talk directly to each other like they're just
Chris: physically wired together.
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Chris: VPS providers and your LAN.
Chris: But on top of that, it's so intuitive to use and it's programmable.
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Chris: Before we bring Paulus on, I just want to let you know if it sounds a little
Chris: different or you hear some birds or some mowers in the background.
Chris: We are live at producer Jeff's house right now in his backyard.
Chris: The van rescue has officially begun, and Brentley and I are sitting right now
Chris: in the back of his brand new bank bus. It's pretty great, Brent.
Brent: What do you think? How is it?
Chris: I love it. It's surprisingly good in here because it's got padding on the walls.
Chris: And so it's acoustically actually a lot better than I expected.
Brent: I know, right? Better than an Airbnb.
Wes: Is it already better than Joupes?
Chris: I think it actually acoustically might be. Yeah, because there's a lot more
Chris: soft, especially because in Joupes I set up at the windshield.
Chris: Now we're going to kind of mess it up a little bit because we got the back door
Chris: open, hashtag van lifestyle.
Brent: Because there is a back door.
Chris: And so we've got, yeah. So if Brent was taking pictures right now and wearing
Chris: his bikini, you'd swear he was an Instagram model.
Chris: You know, I mean, it just looks just like that. That's what I want your mental
Chris: picture to be. So it's quite the story.
Chris: It involves nasty fuel leaks, getting pulled over and stopped by the cops,
Chris: and a lot more, including deploying Linux.
Chris: So we'll get to all of that later on in the show.
Chris: But I just wanted to mention that with self-hosted coming to an end at episode
Chris: 150, we heard the call and we have launched some swag over at Jupyter Garage.
Chris: Jupitergarage.com there is a fantastic 150 poster over there with all the titles
Chris: and a title cloud that spells 150 the dad hats over there,
Chris: there's t-shirts there's jupitergarage.com things are probably going up right
Chris: now even as we're talking, it's true so check it out,
Chris: buy yourself some self-hosted swag while it lasts to celebrate episode 150 and
Chris: five years of self-hosted at jupitergarage.com.
Chris: Joining us for the first time on the Unplugged program, not the first time to
Chris: Jupyter Broadcasting, but the first time to the Unplugged program,
Chris: it is Paulus, the president of the Open Home Foundation, the founder of Home Assistant,
Chris: and Nebukasa too, I believe, and probably other things I don't know about.
Chris: Paulus, welcome to the show.
Paulus: Yeah, great to be here.
Chris: So I wanted to have you on because I, as you know, longtime huge fan and user
Chris: of Home Assistant, and I've been watching five years or so.
Chris: And your state of the open home keynote and live stream was just on April 12th.
Chris: And I was watching this and I walked away from the impression that things have
Chris: really leveled up in the last year.
Chris: And so before we get into Home Assistant and all that, could we talk a little
Chris: bit about the Open Home Foundation, what it is, where it fits in and some of the goals there.
Paulus: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I started Home Assistant like 2013.
Paulus: So that's almost 12 years ago at this point.
Paulus: And, you know, it was just an open source project. I was just hacking on it,
Paulus: right? And it kept growing and growing and growing.
Paulus: And like last year, we were the most active open source project in the world, 21,000 people.
Paulus: But last year also, we made a big change. We announced the Open Home Foundation
Paulus: because I felt that even though I wasn't planning on selling,
Paulus: we were building something with our whole community together.
Paulus: And having a person owning it, it's just not the right thing.
Paulus: At some point, somewhere, something can happen and then that might jeopardize
Paulus: the project. So we created the Open Home Foundation.
Paulus: I donated Home Assistant to it. Throughout, actually, our ecosystem,
Paulus: other projects got donated, like ZigPy, our ZigBee driver, Piper,
Paulus: our text-to-speech engine, a couple of other things.
Chris: ESP Home, right?
Paulus: Yeah, ESP Home as well. Yeah. Well, so ESP Home, we already owned it.
Paulus: Well, Nabucasa had acquired it back in the day. So yeah, ESP Home also got donated
Paulus: to the Open Home Foundation.
Paulus: And that made the foundation all of a sudden like, you know,
Paulus: it's a nonprofit, right? The foundation is based in Switzerland.
Paulus: They cannot be acquired. They cannot be invested in. and they are bound to their mission.
Paulus: It's based in Switzerland, which is very strict around its foundations.
Paulus: And so, yeah. Now, no one can ever buy Home Assistant again.
Wes: I wonder if it's worth clarifying. You know, I don't think this was y'all's
Wes: heavy-handed pressuring folks.
Wes: You know, oh, you got to donate your stuff to the foundation,
Wes: right? This was set up, and people
Wes: already maintaining community aspects thought it would be a good home.
Paulus: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Chris: It really sounds like a structure to prevent incentivification.
Paulus: Yes, 100%. I think that like when we, what I saw, like, you know,
Paulus: we were, first we were just an open source project, right?
Paulus: And people take you not so seriously in the industry.
Paulus: Then we, you know, we started Nabucasa as a company next to it to support the development.
Paulus: We were taken more seriously, but we were still seen as a company.
Paulus: And then people think that, oh, one day you're going to sell out.
Paulus: And so they treat you differently.
Paulus: And then we went to the foundation and now they're like, okay,
Paulus: you guys are here forever. And like, this is the right path.
Paulus: And yeah, it's been working really well.
Brent: And so can you clarify how things have changed for Nebukasa then?
Brent: Like where's the dividing line between the two these days?
Paulus: So Nebukasa is six and a half years old, right? So I know for the people listening,
Paulus: we're throwing around like a lot of names, right? So Home Assistant is the project.
Paulus: Nebukasa is the company I started to fund the development six and a half years ago.
Paulus: And Open Home Foundation is the foundation. Now, Nabucasa has Home Assistant
Paulus: Cloud, which is our subscription service to fund the development of Home Assistant.
Paulus: It gives you remote access, access to voice assistants, a bunch of other stuff,
Paulus: backup storage off-site.
Paulus: And it also sells Home Assistant hardware, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview
Paulus: Edition, the Home Assistant Green, like official hardware products.
Paulus: And all that funds the development. And it used to do that by just hiring people
Paulus: full-time. and they would work at Nabucasa, but they would be dedicating their
Paulus: full time to working on Home Assistant, ESP Home, Piper, all these other projects.
Paulus: And now with the Open Home Foundation in place, we actually made a big change.
Paulus: And so anyone that was just already dedicating full time on open source is now
Paulus: working for the foundation and the foundation just receives a bag of money from Nabucasa.
Paulus: So this is the ultimate independence move, right?
Paulus: The foundation now has 39 employees full time and there are 17 people at Nabucasa
Paulus: working full-time on the hardware, the subscription service, customer support.
Paulus: And because the foundation is bound to its mission, right, like that bag of
Paulus: money is only going to be made on improving Home Assistant and ESP Home and
Paulus: all these other projects.
Chris: So the reason why I wanted to start with the foundation is because when you
Chris: think of what Home Assistant offers end users,
Chris: it's offering them an exit from devices that get expired because their cloud
Chris: service went away or in certification because a vendor wants to get into a storage play.
Chris: It allows this level of independence, also generally local first, to...
Chris: The other side of that is the finance side, the development side,
Chris: and the hardware partnership side.
Chris: And so it does make sense that a foundation coming in would make it something
Chris: that is sustainable so the software can actually achieve the goals it set out to achieve.
Chris: And it needs that structure of the foundation. And something else that I believe
Chris: is part of that, and then we'll get into Home Assistant itself,
Chris: but is the Works with Home Assistant program, which has had some pretty good
Chris: announcements recently. Can you tell me about that?
Chris: And is that part of the foundation too? And what does it mean when something
Chris: works with Home Assistant?
Paulus: Yeah, so we started a program called Works with Home Assistant already a couple
Paulus: of years ago, but we now moved it into the foundation.
Paulus: And this program allows manufacturers to certify their devices.
Paulus: And so we actually, you know, if it's a Z-Wave device, right,
Paulus: it needs to be Z-Wave certified, then they can give it to us and we're going to certify it again.
Paulus: Like we test to actually make sure that Z-Wave certification or Zigbee certification,
Paulus: they can always like, it might not be perfect, right? So we'll make sure that
Paulus: it works great, that we have firmware updates available.
Paulus: We make sure that everything works with the Home Assistant.
Paulus: But we also make sure that, and for open standards, it's not that important,
Paulus: but for local APIs, it's important.
Paulus: Does it work with the cloud? And if so, it's a no-go.
Paulus: So we want to make sure that if you are, as a user in a store,
Paulus: you see two products. They both are white products in generic brown boxes,
Paulus: because that's how everything looks nowadays.
Wes: Yes.
Paulus: I want you to know that, oh, this one has worked with Home Assistant.
Paulus: This one I can put in my house, and it will work for 10 years or more.
Paulus: That's the kind of guarantee, and it's aligned with our values.
Wes: Seems very nice just for me thinking about deploying Home Assistant,
Wes: not only for myself, where I can maybe figure out if it's going to work or not.
Wes: I can look up available integrations, but if I tell my friends or my family
Wes: to do that, they don't want to have to go figure that out or read YAML.
Wes: And if there's just a little badge right there, that's a big step.
Paulus: And so it's our, you know, when it's in the program, we want to make sure it's
Paulus: got automatically discovered and all these things have to be perfect.
Paulus: And then we have our, we've set ourselves the goal that we want to,
Paulus: every region in the world, there needs to be for every category of smart home
Paulus: devices, there needs to be a works with home assistant device.
Paulus: So whether you're in the UK, Mexico, the US, right, you buy a thermostat,
Paulus: there should be a works with home assistant option, an AC, a light bulb, et cetera, everything.
Chris: I love that. Because, you know, for years I've just figured it out mostly through
Chris: community resources, because Home Assistant has a really great community around it.
Chris: Okay, so I'm curious these days, when you have to do an elevator pitch of what
Chris: Home Assistant is, what do you tell people?
Paulus: So it's an open-source smart home platform with a focus on local control and privacy.
Paulus: And then it depends on the audience, right? So if the audience is like technical
Paulus: nerds, I'm focusing on like, we don't believe in silos. It's an actual platform.
Paulus: So your data from all your different devices, but also services like your garbage
Paulus: pickup schedule, whatever flows into a single place.
Paulus: From there on, you can either, you know, Home Assistant itself has great dashboards,
Paulus: history, automations, voice control, but it's not the endpoint, right?
Paulus: We're not another data silo from there. If you want to use Apple Home,
Paulus: you want to use Google Home or Amazon, whatever, you can send the data through.
Paulus: If you want to use Node-RED for automation, you can use that.
Paulus: If you want to use InfluxDB, Grafana for plotting your data, do your thing.
Paulus: It's your data, right? We believe that any device that you buy,
Paulus: you put it in your house, it starts gathering your data, right? The data is yours.
Paulus: And sometimes we have to go into a cloud and get that data back for you.
Paulus: And then we store it locally and you can do whatever you want with it.
Wes: You know, I kind of had a mind shift around this recently and you've really hit on it.
Wes: At first, you know, I thought when I was trying to introduce Home Assistant,
Wes: it was sort of like, look, yeah, you've got all these different smart bulbs
Wes: from different manufacturers. It can make them all play nice.
Wes: But you're really pitching it as like, this thing knows about your home.
Wes: It knows about your life. It is as much a data, you know, a central data hub
Wes: as it is automation platform or anything else.
Paulus: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I recently discovered that my fridge is running more often because I have
Chris: a smart plug that measures the draw of the fridge and I have also the whole
Chris: house power. and I can compare the two and I can see, oh, the fridge has been
Chris: kicking in 15 minutes sooner than it did the last couple of months.
Chris: And so I know, okay, I probably need to like, you know, pull the fridge out
Chris: and clean it or something. There's something going on there.
Chris: And then I have sensors in the fridge and the freezer that track their overall
Chris: thermal performance too.
Chris: And you can use Home Assistant to actually graph those two things next to each other.
Chris: It's, and I'm not like, you know, Mr. Coder, I'm not vibe coding it up, right?
Chris: I'm just using the tools built in and that kind of data, it can be really insightful
Chris: to learn how things in your home are doing.
Paulus: And I think, you know, today, Home Assistant is the perfect toolbox.
Paulus: So we give you like the hammer, the screwdriver to build everything yourself.
Paulus: The thing that we kind of want to work towards to is that we build more solutions.
Paulus: So we already have like an energy dashboard that works out of the box.
Paulus: Our voice now works out of the box. Nice wizard to get you to where you're going.
Paulus: But for example, if you have a 3D printer, you have to create your own dashboard,
Paulus: find cards, and it's more manual work.
Paulus: This is the kind of stuff where, you know, we're calling it collective intelligence.
Paulus: But we want to make our dashboard system for example in a
Paulus: way that someone in the community can build a 3d
Paulus: printer dashboard and share it to others and we can all like
Paulus: you know now we have a 3d printer dashboard a security dashboard my plants have
Paulus: their own dashboard and just click click click instead of like figuring it out
Paulus: all out and thinking of what you want to build which i think the last part is
Paulus: always the hardest because you know you see home assistant and it's a blank
Paulus: canvas and everything is possible yeah.
Chris: That is true.
Brent: Given the different values and needs of let's say the foundation versus nebucasa
Brent: versus what the community wants and needs which i'm sure is quite varied how
Brent: do you balance all of those.
Paulus: So it's actually all very aligned because
Paulus: there has never been any investors or any external
Paulus: money right so the foundation exists to
Paulus: serve the you know build a smart home around privacy choice
Paulus: and sustainability for the community so we just
Paulus: listen to the users we have like a whole product management team
Paulus: we talk to the users see what they want we have like month of
Paulus: what the heck where everybody can just dump their ideas on us and then we
Paulus: we kind of look prioritize and see okay where do we want to go and build something
Paulus: um we do sometimes piss off people because we think about you know not only
Paulus: the community today but the community at large so for example in the very beginning
Paulus: home assistant was it was just a Python program, right?
Paulus: And people had to even compile Python for Raspberry Pi because I was using features
Paulus: that the old Python didn't have.
Paulus: It was a hassle. Well, that limits your community to a very tiny fraction.
Paulus: And today we use build root. We have our own operating system.
Paulus: It has automatically updates with fallback if the update fails.
Paulus: We have Docker containers. Everything is through the UI, one-click update.
Paulus: And all of a sudden, we've expanded our scope immensely. And so.
Paulus: Whenever we make these kind of changes, there will always be people like,
Paulus: oh, I've already built everything myself. It works perfectly.
Paulus: Why are you adding this feature? I don't need this.
Paulus: Spend your time on something else. It's like, no, we have to think about everything.
Paulus: And then that's the foundation community, Nabucasa. I mean, Nabucasa still exists to fund everything.
Paulus: So for Nabucasa, we have nowadays even, it's part of the contracts between Nabucasa
Paulus: and the Open Home Foundation that everything Nabucasa builds is official products.
Paulus: It has to be open source. so it has to be open
Paulus: source because for example we build a voice assistant we
Paulus: spend like two years on it lots of resources we
Paulus: spend on it but also with the community we build a framework a lot of community
Paulus: people contributing because you know language is hard so we need people from
Paulus: around the world and now instead of having three big tech voice assistants like
Paulus: and the open home foundation there's going to be three big tech voice assistants
Paulus: there's a nabukasa voice assistant an official So Home Assistant 1,
Paulus: and it's open source, and there's already other companies using our technology
Paulus: to start also building voice assistants, right?
Paulus: So we hope that there's going to be like 20 voice assistants and people start
Paulus: building out this technology.
Paulus: So even Nabucasa, sure, they could have had a monopoly on voice assistants for Home Assistant.
Paulus: It's not our core belief, so this is not how we roll.
Chris: To touch on this just for a second, because I think it is a good snapshot of
Chris: how you guys deliver features to end users.
Chris: So the voice assistant stuff is built in a way that I would describe as modular
Chris: in the sense that I could opt to run Whisper and Piper, the voice-to-text and
Chris: the speech-to-text stuff, as Docker containers on my LAN.
Chris: And I could have all of the voice control, all of the understanding what I'm
Chris: saying and the execution of that all local.
Chris: Or I can opt to tie it in, like you mentioned, with the home assistant cloud
Chris: or probably other services. It's sort of a modular approach to something that
Chris: would normally be this monolithic product.
Chris: And that's not always the easy route.
Paulus: It is definitely not the easy route, but it is the best route for experimentation.
Paulus: And I think with open source, the way it works is that there will just be,
Paulus: for example, our WakeWords is a great example, right?
Paulus: Like we didn't have WakeWords that could run on an ESP chip.
Paulus: And then I was actually on the self-hosted podcast and I was telling you guys
Paulus: like, well, we couldn't figure it out to run it on the microcontroller.
Paulus: So we ran it in Home Assistant. somebody heard that
Paulus: and they built uh michael wakeboard to
Paulus: run on the esp chip and because it was
Paulus: modular they were now able to actually test it out and it will and it was working
Paulus: and the whole voice assistant stack and like boom right like if if we had it
Paulus: all locked down you cannot experiment with different text or speech engines
Paulus: or ai engines or whatever and so what this is that person by the way kevin he
Paulus: now works for the open home foundation wow.
Chris: Oh that's great But yeah.
Wes: Right. Instead of reverse engineering your product, there's an interface already
Wes: available. Please hook into it.
Chris: And it also means as a tinkerer, you could build your own different kind of
Chris: custom hardware into stuff.
Chris: So you really just need an ESP, a microphone and a Wi-Fi chip.
Chris: And so you could build that into picture frames. You could build it into R2-D2s.
Chris: You can build your own that fit your own lifestyle where you need them.
Chris: And you could buy a five pack for like 15 bucks on Amazon.
Chris: It's pretty great. You also touched
Chris: on something that I think our audience would like to know more about.
Chris: And I was initially critical, but I actually, having been using it now for a
Chris: couple of years on the yellow and blue, you have your own Home Assistant OS
Chris: that you update and manage. Can you talk a bit about that?
Paulus: Yeah, so it's based on BuildRoot, which, by the way, the Open Home Foundation
Paulus: nowadays is also a sponsor of.
Paulus: And with BuildRoot, we really built the tiniest amount of operating system to
Paulus: build Docker, to run Docker containers.
Paulus: And then everything else is running in Docker. So we have a program called Supervisor,
Paulus: which is a manager of the operating system.
Paulus: And then we have some plugins around DNS and audio and these kind of things.
Paulus: And then you have Home Assistant, which is a Docker container.
Paulus: And then we have this thing called add-ons, which is like applications that
Paulus: are not Home Assistant that might integrate into Home Assistant,
Paulus: but are different applications.
Paulus: So Plex, you can run this as an add-on. I wouldn't recommend it because,
Paulus: you know, if you run on a Raspberry Pi, it depends on how you run Home Assistant, of course.
Paulus: But in MQTT server, Samba server. But also, for example, I mean,
Paulus: you mentioned Whisper and Piper, our speech-to-text, text-to-speech engines,
Paulus: they run as add-ons, right?
Paulus: And they run next to Home Assistant and they have their own update cycle.
Paulus: And what Docker really has enabled us is that people just pull the image and
Paulus: Home Assistant will pull the image and will automatically update and the supervisor
Paulus: will ping Home Assistant after we do an update.
Paulus: If it doesn't come online, we revert to the previous version and it starts up.
Paulus: BuildRoot itself is super stable, but even in BuildRoot, if an update would
Paulus: fail, it has two partitions, right?
Paulus: And so it will boot from the old partition after three failed boots.
Paulus: It's been working really, really well. And it also allows us to easier add,
Paulus: like, you know, it's built in layers, right?
Paulus: So you have a base layer, and then for Raspberry Pi, we pull in a layer,
Paulus: and then for the Odroid, and that's how we can maintain all these different platforms.
Chris: Yeah, like I said, I've got it on multiple devices now for multiple years.
Chris: I mean, knock on wood, but I don't think I've ever had a update go bad.
Wes: I'm curious. This is a bit of a self-serving question, but as a Pythonista myself,
Wes: it kind of stands out to me that not only was Python the first implementation
Wes: thing for Home Assistant, but it's really continued and it seems like there's
Wes: no stopping the investment in more Python. How's that going?
Paulus: Oh, yeah.
Paulus: No, yeah, so I mean, we've been Python, I think, so one of the reasons I was
Paulus: just saying that like on a Raspberry Pi, you had to compile your own Python
Paulus: is because we were very early adapters of AsyncIO, right?
Paulus: And we did AsyncIO, and remember, we rewrote the core from executors to AsyncIO,
Paulus: and the first release we're launching, SecFaults.
Paulus: And like, oh. And apparently, it was like a bug in Python. We were able to monkey patch it out.
Wes: Amazing.
Paulus: Destructor. But we've been on AsyncIO from very early on.
Paulus: AOHCP is our web framework of choice, which we also are now donating money to
Paulus: with the foundation, for example, right?
Paulus: And we're slowly, you know, well, not slowly.
Paulus: We've adopted a lot of async.io. A lot of integrations now have been converted
Paulus: to async.io and it's been working really well, but also sometimes for custom
Paulus: integrations, it works less because in Python, you can do either async and not async.
Paulus: And in an async world, you have to yield, right? Like you're fetching some data
Paulus: from the internet, and then you yield your task so that it can run the next task.
Paulus: If you accidentally call like a sync method, like request.get,
Paulus: the whole home assistant freezes until that data from the internet is fetched.
Paulus: And that is something that we've actually patched a lot of methods to kind of
Paulus: check in the event loop, like, oh, this is happening, and we're able to find a lot of them.
Paulus: But there's sometimes a bit tricky there.
Paulus: Like, you know, JavaScript is only async, right? You cannot really mess this
Paulus: up. But yeah, Python has been great for us.
Chris: You know, as I've watched it, it really feels like Home Assistant has gone from
Chris: something that only the geeks would ever consider implementing to, I think,
Chris: especially with the hardware devices you can buy now, it's kind of at the level
Chris: where, like, I might give it to mom and dad.
Chris: And that's amazing, really, if you think about what you're doing.
Chris: And a lot of it is, like, the easier, faster setup stuff.
Chris: That, when something does work with Home Assistant, you mentioned it really
Chris: quickly, auto-discover.
Chris: When that works, it's better than anything on iOS and Android.
Chris: It is so solid. So it was a great experience.
Chris: And Paul, I've just been watching with essentially awe. And I'm really excited
Chris: to see what the next year holds.
Chris: I'll link to the State of the Open Home 2025 presentation because you do talk
Chris: a little bit about the roadmap in there and the blog post as well.
Chris: Is there anything else you want to mention before we run?
Paulus: I don't know. I should have thought about that before.
Wes: Do you have a prediction? All right, so we had one million deploys.
Wes: We just got to two you were talking about pretty recently.
Wes: I mean, maybe by the time you're next back on the show, it'll be five.
Wes: I don't know. Is that too ambitious?
Chris: It does seem like it's growing quick.
Paulus: It is growing quick. Maybe, maybe.
Paulus: I think, you know, one of the big ambitious plans that we announced this year
Paulus: is that we want to build a device database where we want to use our collective
Paulus: intelligence to classify every IoT device in the world.
Paulus: Like, let's start gathering the manuals. Let's start gathering the energy usage
Paulus: so that homelessness can predict how much you're using.
Paulus: Let's get all the infrared codes of your electric candles.
Paulus: Let's get everything just in a single place, moderated, validated,
Paulus: just to make you make the right decisions, integrate even faster, right?
Paulus: Like that stuff that we cannot out of this cover, but somebody has gathered it.
Paulus: Forum posts always get out of date at some point.
Paulus: Videos get out of date and we believe we can we have the manpower to build this
Paulus: in a way that we can all work together on this piece of data and it will just
Paulus: be the best smart home experience ever.
Chris: Excellent paulus thank you very much,
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Brent: Well, as mentioned, we are sat here in the rescued van, the Linux rescued van.
Brent: And as we've learned recently, these adventures are best described in song.
Chris: We are officially on the road and the van is real.
Chris: It is running multiple Linux systems already because, of course,
Chris: that was like one of the first things we got to.
Chris: So this was actually the plan all along.
Chris: As you may recall, those who've kind of listened to our members-only show or
Chris: caught the launch, but just a quick recap.
Chris: During our trip to Planet Nix, we
Chris: took a little detour and brent ended up finding and
Chris: buying a van and it needed a bit of
Chris: work because it had been sitting since 2019 but we were down for it because
Chris: the bones looked good right they looked it looked like it had solid potential
Chris: it just needed a little tlc so we made a plan that we'd return after linux fest
Chris: northwest and we did just that we came back after linux fest to rescue the van.
Chris: But of course, the fun always begins before we leave.
Chris: And traveling with Brent, you know, it's an experience that helps you embrace going with the flow.
Clips: So it's a half hour before we leave, and I think you just almost finished packing?
Clips: That's not what... You're packing. You're packing?
Clips: I haven't packed any gear yet. Oh, we still have all the gear to pack.
Clips: What's that? Good thing we have a half hour. And coveralls.
Chris: So not much had been packed by the time we were supposed to be leaving.
Brent: You started two days before we left?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: I figured I'd start the morning of.
Wes: Also, those coveralls proved to be very important and useful.
Chris: That is true.
Brent: As you'll find out.
Chris: Yes, that is very true. We had a great flight. We got down here.
Chris: PJ picked us up from the airport during peak traffic, so we got to really grind
Chris: it out in L.A. traffic, you know, get the full experience.
Chris: And then the next morning, we arrived with all of the most essential tools.
Clips: Okay, we have arrived Friday morning at the van. we've got our snake oil and caffeine.
Clips: The two most important things for this project really are just for my mental
Clips: well-being and then Brett, you got the home assistant stuff, right?
Clips: I got bananas. Okay, home assistant's next. Jack. Okay. Yeah,
Clips: we'll use the jack after we get home assistant running. Yeah,
Clips: that's the person on the list.
Chris: Don't worry. We got home. This isn't running. We're getting to that.
Chris: But we thought, we knew we had all four new tires needed to go on.
Brent: Desperately.
Chris: They were in rough shape.
Brent: Desperately.
Chris: And we figured there may be a few other things that would surprise us.
Chris: But one of the surprises was one of the more complicated things to solve.
Chris: And it involves the fuel system.
Clips: Oh, Chris, tell us about it. We put a new fuel filter in because the lines were real bad.
Clips: And jeff like drained the old filter and black stuff
Clips: came out it was oh we put a new like temporary
Clips: filter in so sweet and then we ran it you can see all that beautiful uh yeah
Clips: now we're good to try to roll we're gonna see if she rolls um and the fuel filter
Clips: is replaceable so if it clogs up while we're going down the road it should be
Clips: serviced clear so we can see yeah we can check on it look at that good work boys what.
Chris: We really had no idea was what's in this tank Like, we knew it was bad,
Chris: but we didn't know how bad.
Brent: Well, we knew the engine ran on it. I mean, this engine is classic for running
Brent: on almost anything, so that's maybe not saying that much.
Brent: And it did have a particular odor to it.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, and that was one of the reasons we wanted to get some sensors running
Chris: on Home Assistant, just so we knew how bad we're killing ourselves.
Chris: So, you really, I mean, you think about it. We showed up Friday night.
Chris: Saturday is really when the work began.
Chris: And by the end of Saturday, it was just about ready for the road.
Chris: It was pretty much after six years of sitting, it took essentially one day of working on it.
Brent: Well, I'd say a day and a half because when we were at scale,
Brent: we did spend that half day making sure the engine started and we did a bunch of work there.
Brent: So I think that half day set us up for success.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. So a day and a half to get it working. And so Brent and Jeff
Chris: worked late into the night.
Chris: I went back to the Airbnb to crash early, crashed out. And we showed up for
Chris: our first day and our first really hitting the road kind of,
Chris: you know, like we're actually going to take this thing.
Chris: We don't know what state it's in. It could have all kinds of problems, but we're going to do it.
Clips: Okay, it's 8.04, so leaving right at 7 a.m., just like Brent said we would be, and we're packed.
Clips: It's the calm before the storm. We've got the front loaded.
Clips: Brent's now done the fifth cleaning of the windshield, which seems to have really done the trick.
Clips: Cell phone mount provided by Jeff is loaded and ready to go.
Clips: The dash is actually really cool. It's one of my favorite things of this rig is the dash.
Clips: Got the Red Bull ready to go. I think I'll be riding in the drinker's position. Brent will be captain.
Clips: Because, you know, it's his first ride on the freeway.
Clips: And then eventually, slowly but surely, I'll take the wheel.
Clips: You just watch. Don't tell Brent, though.
Chris: And that is exactly what happened.
Brent: Predictions! I didn't even know you said that. That's hilarious.
Chris: You didn't know I snuck that in there. You drove for most of the day,
Chris: but then you had like a snap of driving that was just unrelenting.
Chris: It must have been nearly 40 mile per hour gusts.
Brent: Apparently that's a lot in Freedom Units.
Chris: Yeah, it is. It is. and you handled it well because for parts of it we were
Chris: doing 70 miles per hour in the van. It's really kind of incredible.
Chris: Our first drive though, we set out, as you just heard there,
Chris: a little bit later than we expected.
Chris: So we had the kind of like, we better make up some miles and get going. The one problem is,
Chris: And we checked the weather apps every single day. I checked them every single
Chris: day for a week leading up to this, and I checked them the night before,
Chris: and I checked them the morning of, and it said it was going to be sunny and clear.
Brent: It's California.
Chris: It's California. It's going to be probably 72 degrees and sunny.
Chris: You're going to have some smog. Other than that, you don't have to worry about
Chris: it. You're going to have a great drive.
Chris: Well, it started to rain on us, and the one thing that we didn't take time to
Chris: fix because there was no need to was the windshield wipers.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: So we had a windshield wiper problem, and then we also very quickly discovered another problem.
Chris: So it wasn't exactly problem-free.
Clips: We're officially off, not just for a test drive, but for a real drive.
Clips: And Google's helping us.
Clips: Thanks, guys. Yep, Brent's in the captain's seat.
Clips: And it feels great, right, Brent? It feels great. I mean, yes, it's great.
Clips: Yep, nothing to worry about. And we're hitting the road right now.
Clips: It's super exciting. It is.
Clips: We got Jeff behind us, so if anything catches on fire, he'll let us know.
Clips: According to the van, it's 5 p.m. It's actually 8.20 a.m. Yeah, same, same.
Clips: And we're off to the freeway. We have about five hours and 59 minutes of driving,
Clips: which you know is going to be a lot longer than that.
Clips: Here we go. There's one problem, Chris. What?
Clips: It's raining. Oh, yeah. Well, I wasn't going to mention the fact that it's raining
Clips: in our way. and windshield wipers don't work, because, you know,
Clips: we'll get some rain acts at some point.
Clips: Also, my weather app says it's not raining, so I wouldn't worry about it. I feel good then.
Chris: How quickly the optimism turns into the drive. I don't even think we made it five minutes.
Clips: Okay, well, we're at O'Reilly's, and Brent's under the van.
Clips: Okay.
Clips: This is uh like a horror movie i can pull you up all right you know we're two
Clips: minutes into the trip how's it going down there brent uh it's really nice down
Clips: here yeah it looks a little tight okay,
Clips: so good news is the terrible fuel
Clips: line that i think is going to explode is hasn't exploded
Clips: it looks good it's connected to the tank yeah bad
Clips: news is the tank is leaking from the
Clips: top of the tank and there's no way we can fix it without dropping the tank so
Clips: we're just gonna go oh it's the top it'd be fine yeah we just gotta bring it
Clips: why is the top of the tank leaking uh like from the fuel pump probably maybe
Clips: i don't know i can't see it.
Chris: We never managed to actually fix that problem i.
Brent: Put it at the back of my mind did you that felt really nice.
Chris: Yeah yeah that that worked That worked pretty well. And so instead of fixing
Chris: the fuel leak, we went ahead and, well, we fixed the wipers.
Brent: Yeah.
Clips: Okay, Jeff, let's give the new wiper system a try.
Clips: Oh, no. Just right. Well, we got a wipe.
Clips: All right. Good to go? Great.
Clips: Working wonderfully. I mean, I like it. Oh, for fuck's sake.
Chris: It was a little disheartening because the wiper system on this van,
Chris: it's definitely one of those that the auto industry learned from not to do anymore.
Brent: It is real rough.
Chris: Rough.
Brent: It's like a geometric puzzle.
Chris: And you can hear we're there in a loud O'Reilly's parking lot in the rain trying to fix this thing.
Chris: You boys did get it working after a couple of rounds. We did manage to get the
Chris: wipers working. So we got back on the road this time for real.
Clips: Well, quick update. We're on the road. Brentley's on the freeway.
Clips: How's she doing on the freeway? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Clips: A bit floaty, but... Yeah, quieter than I expected. We got a window cracked
Clips: at the moment, but quieter than I expected.
Clips: And we got working windshield wipers.
Clips: Jeff's behind us, following. And she's doing really great. She doesn't seem
Clips: to be struggling at all on freeway.
Clips: She's a cruiser.
Chris: Now, you got to appreciate, we're still figuring out the electrical system.
Chris: So, like, is the gear powered while we're going down the road?
Chris: Does the gear reset when we hook up to shore power?
Chris: Like, how does that affect the server equipment? Because there's not like a
Chris: full battery bank in here yet or anything like that.
Chris: So we're kind of piecing all of this together, learning how she drives,
Chris: learning how the electronics work, if our systems are rebooting every time we make a change.
Chris: And part of my concern, especially, you know, for an older van that's big,
Chris: It's like, how do we do with the passes? Are we going to overheat?
Chris: Are we going to be broken down?
Chris: And then we're going to be sitting on the side of the road going,
Chris: maybe we should have worked on the new radiator instead of getting home assistant
Chris: running. You know, like that's what I was working on.
Clips: On the mountain passes, doing great. Doing 68 miles per hour on the pass right now.
Clips: She's a pass machine.
Clips: Super pretty views, too. Jeff in there. There's Jeff. That's Jeff right there.
Clips: Well done. The van handles the pass like a champ.
Chris: And we were kind of getting carried away. We were excited.
Chris: And it's easy to forget that this van sat for a long time. And sadly,
Chris: the previous owner is deceased.
Chris: And the van is not current on its licensing or its tabs.
Chris: Yeah. And honestly, you know, we're not really planning to stay in California either.
Chris: This isn't where the van's going to end up. So it's like, how much do we engage
Chris: with the California process versus how much do we just engage with the process back up in Washington?
Chris: And, you know, we were focused on things like getting Brent's land working and
Chris: his home assistant up and running.
Chris: Not so much like, you know, making it legal to drive on the road.
Chris: And unfortunately, this day, on this particular Saturday, the California cops
Chris: were really on their game.
Chris: And they noticed that Brent's tabs were expired.
Chris: And so not long after that last clip we got flagged down by a cop and we were like all sitting there,
Chris: Just like not even breathing, not even moving as the cops sort of came up alongside
Chris: the van, came, pulled up next to us, and then slid behind us.
Brent: I thought it was the end of the trip right there.
Chris: Next thing you know, the lights come on.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: And he walks up, comes up to my side of the van because Brent's side was to the freeway.
Chris: So he comes up to my side and I'm clear he's doing the math.
Chris: It's clear because like the tabs are from 2019, the tires are brand new,
Chris: but the van obviously is under repair.
Chris: And he starts going in about how, you know, this thing isn't street legal and
Chris: it's supposed to be on a trailer immediately. And we didn't know that because we're not from here.
Chris: So he immediately starts telling us, you know, you're not even supposed to be
Chris: driving this thing. We're like, what?
Chris: Well, how do you, like, my question is like, well, how do we fix it up and get
Chris: it legal if we can't drive it? Because we got to take it to a shop, right?
Chris: He's like, well, it's supposed to be on a trailer. Oh.
Chris: Okay. Well, you see, I think everything lined up because the number one important
Chris: thing was, is I was wearing a camo O'Reilly's hat. So, you know,
Chris: I'm a car guy because I got an O'Reilly's hat on.
Brent: Great decision.
Chris: And Brent is a Canadian. And these two things, they worked well for us because
Chris: he saw that Brent was from out of town and he saw that I was from out of town.
Chris: So he believed that we didn't know about the trailer thing.
Chris: We legitimately didn't know. And then he also saw that producer Jeff had pulled over.
Chris: And so he knew we had a chase car. And so he's doing the math.
Chris: Okay, new tires, tabs from 2019. These two are from out of town.
Chris: They really are here just on a van rescue project. You know,
Chris: it's not like a drug run or something like that. And so...
Chris: He kind of changed his tune about halfway into the conversation,
Chris: and he started like, oh, well, if you're going to try to get this thing up into
Chris: Canada, if I write you a ticket or impound it, it's going to make the process way harder.
Chris: And the impounding fees are more than the van's worth.
Chris: I'm just going to let you guys go. I'll just, you don't need all that hassle.
Chris: And we're just like, oh, thank you so much. because this is the moment we'd
Chris: feared because uh cops kind of have a reputation for not having a lot of leniency
Chris: in this area so the elation we felt when we got back on the freeway was real.
Clips: All right here we go we're back on the road we gave him the story gave him a
Clips: smile it all worked out he's like we might get pulled over again so you better
Clips: give him that story again Give them the same story again.
Clips: Back on the road we go.
Chris: I shortly took over driving after that because after that's when we hit the wind.
Brent: That wind.
Chris: It was crazy. And so we stopped for gas, which we had to do three times in that six-hour drive.
Chris: And I started to drive. It was great. It's such a treat for me coming from a 40-foot RV to a van.
Chris: It must be like going from riding a bike uphill to riding an e-bike uphill.
Chris: That's got to be like the difference in ease of driving.
Chris: It's just, it goes from like a full on contact sport that's life and death every
Chris: two seconds to like this leisurely thing.
Chris: You got to be aware, you got to drive, but like, it's so, I mean, it was so great.
Chris: And so no problem completing the last, you know, 130 miles of the drive.
Chris: And we successfully arrived at producer Jeff's house.
Clips: We've officially arrived at Jeff's house. We're going to do some musical cars
Clips: so we can get the van back there tonight.
Clips: How would you rate that, Brent? How do you feel that went? I mean,
Clips: barring one or two things, I think that was actually excellent. Yeah.
Clips: Best case scenario, almost? Yeah. I think it was basically best case scenario.
Clips: Once we got on the road, it was the only times we had to stop was,
Clips: It did great. Even in the wind, it did really great. I don't know. It did super great.
Clips: Yeah. And it's a lot easier pulling in on these streets than it was on jupes. I'll just say that.
Clips: Pretty pleased. Yeah, I got to drive her in on the way. So I got to do a little comparison.
Clips: And I definitely give this the thumbs up.
Chris: Now, let's talk about the setup. So we've got a LAN right now that I don't know
Chris: if it's the permanent solution, but it's currently powered by the Slate that saved us for LinuxFest.
Brent: That's true.
Chris: So that's kind of neat. that's providing the local area network and the bridging to PJ's network.
Brent: And is also running on DC.
Chris: Yes. So everything's running on DC, which is we're trying to do as much DC first as we can.
Chris: Because when you run components with their AC plug in a van or in an RV and
Chris: you invert that, there's a 30 to 40% efficiency loss there.
Chris: So you lose a lot of power to the inversion process.
Chris: So if we can go straight to DC, we avoid that completely.
Chris: But what I really, really like is the hardware you're using for Home Assistant.
Chris: It's actually a rescued industrial system that is perfect for this application.
Chris: Tell me a little about it.
Brent: Well, I call this my Jeff Industrial Trash Bin Rescue Special.
Brent: Because I think actually all of that is true. Jeff, you found this thing somewhere
Brent: and put it to use in your own network for a while.
Brent: And very kindly donated it to our crazy projects. And now it finds itself in the van.
Brent: Yep. I got a couple of those things. They're perfect for home assistant.
Brent: So this thing is like, I don't know, it's a little metal box.
Brent: You wouldn't even think there was a computer in there, but you take a few screws off.
Chris: Yeah. It's like almost the size of like a cigar box.
Brent: Okay. I've never had a cigar box, but...
Chris: Well, we should get you a cigar box.
Brent: Oh, great.
Chris: Really, it kind of would make it smell good in here, I think,
Chris: you know? It's a good smell. Yeah. So it's a small box, but like you say, made out of metal.
Brent: Yeah. And you can tell that it's built to last. It's got, what,
Brent: two networking ports on there. It has an Intel Atom E3-827, which also has QuickSync
Brent: and supports ECC RAM, we discovered.
Chris: That's fun. Now, we don't have ECC RAM in there right now.
Brent: But we do have 8 gigs of RAM.
Chris: Yeah. I don't really think you need it for home assistant, but it's nice that
Chris: you have the option with an Atom.
Brent: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Yeah. And you've got a couple of storage options, too.
Brent: Yeah, this thing supports one serial ATA and also a m-serial ATA drive.
Brent: You had picked one up for this box specifically.
Brent: I think some incompatibility happened there and wasn't recognized,
Brent: but that was fine because we had two hard drive options.
Chris: Yeah. And again, this is a dedicated Home Assistant instance,
Chris: and the 120 gig SSD that's in there is plenty for Home Assistant.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: So, yeah.
Brent: So you tell me.
Chris: You got 8 gigs of RAM and you got 120 gigs of storage. Some people are running
Chris: this off of like Pi 3s and 4s.
Brent: Well, that's what I brought to run this on, and then you were like, hey, look what I found.
Chris: Yeah, let's use this instead. Well, it was beautiful because Jeff already had
Chris: it wired up for DC and everything like that.
Brent: Thanks, Jeff.
Chris: And it only, you know, at idle, I think-ish...
Chris: Is around 5 watts on DC and around almost 9 watts when you're doing the AC inversion,
Chris: which is either way pretty minimal. You also forgot to mention it has a serial port.
Brent: I did forget to mention that.
Chris: Yeah, so you could have a serial port on this thing too.
Brent: It has two serial ports.
Chris: Yeah, man.
Brent: The thing I like about it is that it can be mounted pretty easily.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And also it seems extremely robust. And I was looking at the manual.
Brent: It has like vibration standards that it matched and stuff. So,
Brent: like, if you're going to run some equipment in a thing that's jiggling down
Brent: the road constantly, that's probably a good choice.
Chris: Now, one thing that we decided to do differently than we kind of discussed ahead
Chris: of time, and maybe this changes how Wes does his Home Assistant deployment,
Chris: is we decided to actually use Home Assistant OS.
Chris: So it takes over the whole machine, and it does all of the Home Assistant management.
Chris: Has a lot of pros, but I kind of think one of us should at least also try,
Chris: like, the roll-your-own Home Assistant, deploy core, maybe manage it with Nix.
Chris: I don't know, Wes, if you want to be that guy, but now that Brent and I went
Chris: the Home Assistant OS route, I feel like one of us should go,
Chris: like, the roll-it-yourself route.
Wes: Yeah, I've actually already got it going via NixOS, partially because I had
Wes: a NixOS server stood up, and so it was super easy to just turn it on that way.
Wes: And all I really needed was, I don't know, like basic control of lights and
Wes: some smart plugs, at least, you know, starting now.
Wes: So I think you're right. This means I got to double down on that route, at least for a while.
Chris: Yeah, great. Okay, I thought maybe, but I didn't want to release any unconfirmed information there.
Chris: Now, let's talk a little about what you've got working on here.
Chris: So when you fire up Home Assistant, it will just sort of auto-discover a lot
Chris: of things on your network.
Chris: If you've got an IoT device that's available for remote control or an API that
Chris: Home Assistant intrinsically knows, when you start a Home Assistant,
Chris: you'll just have stuff on your dashboard.
Brent: Which is sort of amazing and also could be a bit creepy.
Chris: Yeah, maybe. It works too well. Look all the stuff that's out there just listening.
Chris: So for Brent's setup, really why we wanted this is we want some sensors in here
Chris: because we think there's some exhaust leaks.
Chris: We know there's a gas leak. We don't know how much we're killing ourselves when
Chris: we're in this thing for five, six hours at a time.
Chris: And then also, something that anybody that's staying in a small space should
Chris: know is, after an hour or two, the CO2 buildup actually gets pretty significant.
Chris: And having a little sensor that lets you know, hey, you're getting close to
Chris: 2,000 parts per million,
Chris: Probably time to open a window. And so a couple of sensors hanging off this
Chris: thing and then a WLED light strip.
Chris: And WLED is so great. I know you've just started playing with it,
Chris: but what are your initial impressions of the sensors and specifically WLED?
Brent: Well, I was able to get the sensors working somewhat, which I thought was surprising
Brent: because I had never really read how to do it or anything.
Chris: Right, because you're like tweaking a little YAML file and then you're building
Chris: and sending these ESP32s that power the sensors.
Brent: And the interface to do all that, I think, has come a long way since Home Assistant
Brent: started. So I'm coming in at a time when most things have been figured out.
Brent: I think that's really nice for someone starting out. But the other thing is,
Brent: I have you guys to tell me what to do.
Brent: So I actually got that quite wrong because I missed the whole component that
Brent: reads the sensors, which is the whole point.
Brent: So Jeff sorted that out for me. Thank you, Jeff.
Brent: But I found it to be super exciting because we had played with WLED,
Brent: which controls these little light strips that you can build yourself.
Brent: And you know me, I love that, using components that are widely available and
Brent: being able to customize almost infinitely.
Brent: And so just the idea of being able to use my building skills to also build my
Brent: electronics and home automation system is such a nice, beautiful combination
Brent: of the things I care about.
Brent: And so I thought, at least up to this point where I'm super,
Brent: super, super fresh, I'm having tons of fun.
Chris: When you think about it, it's such a perfect opportunity because it's a new project.
Chris: And so everything you're putting
Chris: into your new project, it's open and it's local and it's maintainable.
Chris: So you're not putting in something that's tied to a cloud service.
Chris: You're not you didn't have to create an account with a vendor.
Chris: Right. That is really big because that stuff's going to last a decade.
Chris: I think projects like this are perfect, but you could really break it down to
Chris: go into a room that you spend a lot of time in.
Chris: And are there dark areas of the room that you could paint with a little bit of color and light?
Chris: And that's how I look at it at home is I sit in a space and I go,
Chris: where does the light drop off in this room?
Chris: Where would it look nice to have a little glow or a little color accent?
Chris: And I just kind of sit there and I visualize it. And then I stick in WLED strips in those spots.
Chris: And nine times out of ten, I love it. And so you have both opportunities right now.
Chris: Both, it's a new project where you're putting things in that you can maintain
Chris: and you can support directly.
Chris: That's so rare in technology. But also, it's a blank canvas in that there's
Chris: all these spots you could put light in.
Chris: You can just spend time in the space and slowly build it to your liking and tweak it.
Chris: It doesn't have to be something that you get done in one weekend or something like that.
Chris: You can spend a year doing it if you want and just do it slowly and say, oh, you know what?
Chris: I'd like a little light here or I'd like the dashboard to be right here.
Chris: Because along with this, a listener contributed weeks and maybe a year ago,
Chris: even an Android tablet that has been in the studio.
Chris: It's not a it's not like a barn burner tablet.
Chris: It's, you know, it's like running Android nine, actually.
Brent: That's my favorite Android.
Chris: Well, there you go. It is very classic, but it was it's going to make a perfect
Chris: mounted dashboard in your rig.
Chris: And I'm a big fan of having a dashboard where you can see what's going on, like your CO2 sensors.
Chris: And if you have others that are using the space, it makes it much easier for them.
Chris: And so this thing is a 10-inch tablet.
Chris: It's got 32 gigs of space, 2 gigs of RAM, and all you need to do is run a web browser or the app.
Chris: So I think it's going to be perfect. You mount that on the wall,
Chris: you'll get all your data.
Chris: We should think about it so you can see it while you're going down the road
Chris: too, so you can look at the CO2 sensor while you're going down the road.
Brent: I think you're trying to tell me I need multiple dashboards.
Chris: You might need multiple dashboards. All right, so you can always pull it up on your phone.
Brent: I think i have a couple things to reflect on
Brent: there one is thank you listeners and producer jeff and everyone who left parts
Brent: at the studio for me to pilfer and uh include in this crazy project uh it's
Brent: really fun to reuse you know that this and this van is reused the everything
Brent: in here is being rescued right including the networking and everything so we.
Chris: Were joking um on the pre-show with the members that,
Chris: including the van, all the work we put into it, and all the gear,
Chris: like all the parts for the automation and the networking and the lighting and
Chris: the sensors, we're probably still less than a MacBook of total money invested.
Brent: It's so true.
Chris: It's crazy. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but that's just wild when you think about it.
Brent: And the other concept here is, what were you, you were talking about, which is,
Brent: I guess I look at it as the open source concept of this project,
Brent: which is that I, this is a crazy new lifestyle idea that we've just randomly come up for, for me.
Brent: I think I'm going to love it. I have no idea. And I also don't know how I'm
Brent: going to use the space, right? I've never, the most time I've spent is in Lady Joops.
Chris: You spent the night in here last night.
Brent: Well, that is true. It felt like that needed to happen.
Chris: Yeah, breaking it in. Yeah.
Brent: But I love the idea that we can take these components that are modular, try a thing out.
Brent: Oh, maybe you don't like it there. Or maybe you don't like this light strip in that location.
Brent: Maybe you don't like this sensor because it's not accurate enough.
Brent: And you can just replace those components individually.
Brent: That speaks so much to, I think, the things us and the listeners care about.
Brent: And that's the part I'm most excited about is this building block approach to this entire project.
Chris: We'd love it if you'd support the show with a membership or a boost.
Chris: The show is free. We put it out there, but that doesn't mean we don't spend
Chris: hours and hours and many, many, many more working on the show and trying to
Chris: make it as valuable to you as possible.
Chris: So you can become a member at linuxonplugged.com slash membership,
Chris: or you can support each individual production with a boost.
Chris: And both we appreciate tremendously.
Chris: For our members, we have a bootleg version of the show that's generally a much
Chris: longer extended version of the show with a lot more content.
Chris: We also, because not everybody wants a longer show, we make a slightly shorter
Chris: version of the show for our members. You can pick between them,
Chris: which is completely ad-free.
Chris: It's a little tighter, but it's still got all of Drew's nice touches with the
Chris: good production value and all of that. So we make the bootleg and the ad-free.
Chris: Both are available to our members, and that gives us ongoing, sustained support.
Chris: And each episode can also be boosted to say, hey, I love that,
Chris: or give us a bit of feedback, or get involved in the conversation and support
Chris: that particular production.
Chris: That's where the boosting comes in. And Fountain makes it the easiest because
Chris: everything is self-hosted. They even make it possible to get sats within the app now, I believe.
Chris: I love River for getting my sats. Jupyterbroadcasting.com slash River will take you to our page.
Chris: And that lets you buy from a great company, put them on the Lightning Network,
Chris: and then you can just send them over to Fountain.
Chris: But really, it's not really the focus of this.
Chris: The focus is sending value back to the show and also communicating with us because
Chris: it's a virtuous cycle, not a bad cycle, but a virtuous one. Is that the right,
Chris: am I using that word right, Brent?
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Virtuous? What would be the bad version?
Chris: Vicious. Oh, right. That's what the advertising system is.
Chris: And I, I, I try to walk this line as best I can, but I have to say,
Chris: like, if you knew how most of these ad deals went down or how most interviews
Chris: end up on podcasts, not ours, but if you knew a lot of them out there,
Chris: uh, you would be so radicalized against the advertising model that,
Chris: uh, you would be so on board with the direct support model that I think we'd
Chris: be sitting in a million-dollar van.
Chris: You know what I'm saying? Not a MacBook van. But until we get there one day,
Chris: until humanity sees the light, it's up to the individual listeners.
Chris: And for that, we're so grateful to them and our members. Thank you so much.
Chris: LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership. And if you want to boost and try out a
Chris: podcasting Twitter app, it's got transcripts.
Chris: Yeah, this show's got transcripts. It's got cloud chapters.
Chris: You get releases within 90 seconds. and you get the live stream all in one app.
Chris: Oh, yeah, plus the boosting.
Chris: That's what podcasting 2.0 is about. It's a brand new standard.
Chris: You're going to love it. We'll have links in the show notes.
Brent: Now, I have to say, I'm completely new, A, to this, like, house on wheels lifestyle,
Brent: B, to this home assistant lifestyle.
Brent: And so I just want to hear from listeners, what are we doing wrong?
Brent: What have I not thought about? what is a good suggestion on how to set these
Brent: things up yeah what do i need to look out for in all of these new yeah like even gear like.
Chris: Sensors and accessories with homo system i mean you're starting fresh there
Chris: you're starting fresh with the van there's like power things you need to learn.
Brent: Battery systems and all these tips you don't figure out till you get into it
Brent: like one tip i should probably give myself is these slates burn out after about
Brent: a year of using them full time don't use that yeah there's probably something else so yeah.
Chris: There we should probably you replace that slate with.
Brent: Something. Yeah.
Chris: Like something a little more robust.
Brent: There's a big list of things we should do to this thing.
Chris: We could use some advice.
Brent: So please, yes, send in your tips. I would really appreciate that.
Brent: I don't know what I'm doing.
Chris: Well, our first boost comes from the dude abides who gives us a nice baller boost.
Chris: 53,637 sats, and he says something small to fund Brent's adventures.
Brent: That's so sweet.
Chris: Isn't that? Thank you very much. That's great.
Brent: I did say that you could name the component that you would like to buy with
Brent: your boost. So maybe, you know, we had someone buy the oil that we put into
Brent: the engine last time around.
Chris: That could be a tank of gas, almost a tank of gas.
Brent: Well, if you want to get a tank of gas to rescue this thing.
Chris: It's a little bit more in California than 50 bucks.
Brent: Oh, gosh, is it ever.
Chris: So bad.
Brent: Oh, man.
Wes: Odyssey Westra boosts in with 5,000 sets.
Wes: Loving watching y'all live. Just want to put a shout out for your eastern neighbors over in Spokane.
Wes: Ever since the last meetup, it jump-started interest in our local lug.
Wes: So if you happen to live in the inland area, come meet us at Denny's on Division.
Wes: We have users of all walks of life and even have started meetings in those with
Wes: an interest in home automation.
Wes: So check out spokanelinux.home.blog. And Odyssey says, can't wait till the next
Wes: JB meetup over here, too.
Chris: Odyssey, congratulations. That is really awesome. That's so great to hear.
Chris: So SpokaneLinux.home.blog.
Chris: And they're getting into home automation stuff just at the right time, too.
Brent: You know, I think this may be the closest lug to my home that I know about,
Brent: even though it's in a different country. So you might just see me out there
Brent: at some point. No promises.
Brent: Well, Otterbrain sent in 10,000 Satoshis.
Brent: Setting up a fresh system and wondering, do you have any suggestions for clever
Brent: names for your computers?
Chris: Wes, do you have any naming systems that you use for like your home machines?
Wes: Oh, I've kind of vacillated with different systems over the years.
Wes: You know, it was Star Trek things for a while.
Wes: It was Stargate things for a while. Literary references.
Wes: So it never actually manages to stay super consistent for that long.
Wes: So you might as well be just as served by picking a fun list of words. I don't know.
Chris: Yeah. I look at that as seasonal or themes.
Chris: So I remember I'll pull out an old computer like, oh, yeah, this is when I used
Chris: to name computers after solar system objects.
Wes: Exactly.
Chris: I like it.
Brent: You have eras.
Chris: Yeah, eras. Exactly. Do you have a system, Brent, that you use for naming things?
Brent: You know, I actually struggled with this very same question for a long time
Brent: because I thought, like, once you name a thing, then that just sticks, right?
Brent: So how could you possibly choose the right one in the first go?
Brent: And I because of that indecision just landed on like shortened nicknames of
Brent: products like this thing in front of me is Fram.
Chris: Because it's.
Brent: My framework and that just has balanced between like the logical thing that
Brent: it's actually called versus the quick fun nickname that.
Chris: I give it I sometimes do that too so like if I have a Dell XBS with Ubuntu on
Chris: it I'll call it XBS2 you know and things like that my ThinkPad.
Wes: Is named Pad but the star trek p-a-d-d.
Chris: Oh that's the best one west wins that is the yeah that is the winner right there
Chris: open source account it's a winner and he comes in with 2000 sats says you guys
Chris: sound a lot different live versus when i'm listening at 2.5.
Brent: 2.5.
Chris: I do that's like doing 85 in a 65 no that's like doing 85 in a 45 right in a
Chris: in a like yeah that's just that's a you're speeding there buddy I.
Wes: Just want to try it. I'm not even sure what that feels like to try to understand, you know?
Chris: Brent, do you think he goes straight to two and a half?
Chris: Or do you think he kind of starts at like 1.5, 1.8, 2?
Brent: You've got to warm up.
Chris: Yeah, you crank it up over time. Because you can't just go right to 2.5.
Brent: Crack those fingers first. I do have a question, though, open source accountant.
Brent: When you see us in person, is it really disappointing or just high def? Let us know.
Wes: Moonenite boosts in with 2,000 sets. I'm on a boat. First ever live boost from a boat?
Chris: Yes! I...
Brent: That's impressive.
Chris: That's right.
Brent: I would like to know where.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Oh, yeah. Follow up. Also, it sounds like you're maybe getting into some more
Wes: Nix. So maybe boost it and tell us how that goes, too.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Brent: Here I thought this week I was doing the crazy thing.
Chris: Right. Yeah. He got us. He got us. He's on a boat.
Brent: Well, user 137 sent in 5,000 sets.
Brent: Love the show and linux fest northwest has been awesome.
Chris: Oh that's good to hear i it was a really good year i
Chris: will admit um i think i was a little
Chris: nervous that we would get the bad weather again and maybe i didn't go as hard
Chris: on the i don't know i mean we talked about it quite a bit but i it it was so
Chris: glorious if we ever have another year like this again i think we'd be lucky
Chris: just weather wise i mean we're talking like you know mid to high 60s all day
Chris: long sunshine no clouds yeah yeah it was really glorious. Sometimes we get really lucky. We do indeed.
Chris: A Monday comes in with a Spaceballs boost. That is one, two, three, four, five sets.
Chris: And he says, live luck boost! Thank you. Appreciate it.
Brent: A Monday? I thought it was a Sunday.
Chris: On a Tuesday?
Wes: Thursday.
Wes: User 841 boosts in with 5,555 sets.
Wes: Hey guys, love the show. Really wish I could have made it to Bellingham this
Wes: weekend, but I'm there in spirit.
Chris: Oh, thank you. And thank you for the support. You know what?
Chris: That's helpful, really. These events are extremely expensive for us,
Chris: so we really appreciate it, user.
Wes: It's also always great to hear from folks listening live. You're special.
Brent: Well, TrueGrid sent us in 5,000 sats. This was my very first Linux Fest, and it was so much fun.
Brent: I'm glad I got to experience it, and definitely planning to go in the future.
Chris: Yeah, it was great to meet you, and I am really pleased at the positive feedback
Chris: we're getting from LinuxFest Northwest.
Chris: I'll pass it on to the organization team as well. Thank you, True Grits.
Chris: And speaking of somebody else we got to talk to at LinuxFest Northwest,
Chris: Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 Satoshis.
Chris: He writes, if I can't use a Nix OS or a derivative, I would use a variety of
Chris: distros based on the system type and purpose. Yes, Bazite for gaming, Pop! OS for laptops.
Chris: But I don't even want to think about not using NixOS on my servers.
Brent: You're in good company.
Chris: Yep.
Wes: Mr. Pibb boots in with a row of ducks.
Wes: You know, I hadn't played StarCraft since high school, but now I've been playing
Wes: all week. Great episode.
Chris: Yeah, I think Brent can relate to that one.
Brent: Yeah, Mr. Pipp, it's a problem.
Chris: We were in the car the other day, and we started talking about StarCraft,
Chris: and Brent just says, I could beat all of you.
Chris: I think he's masked in the game.
Brent: Round two.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, first LAN party in the van? Van LAN?
Chris: Ooh, yeah, yeah.
Brent: Tail scale.
Chris: That'd be fun. Tomato comes in with 5,000 sats.
Chris: As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I use Alpine as my main email client.
Chris: It's a modern rewrite of Pine. It's under an Apache 2 license.
Chris: It is an application Oh, it's in application help.
Chris: It is fantastic and it's still, for me, the high point of command line usability.
Chris: It's incredibly powerful. It's efficient to use, but something anyone can learn without trouble.
Chris: Definitely something to try out for the command line challenge.
Chris: And I think Chris would enjoy Pico as an email editor.
Chris: I could get, I could definitely see that.
Chris: I'm very excited about the command line challenge. Obviously we're not doing
Chris: it while we're traveling, but it is coming soon.
Chris: And I am slowly building a list of all of the TUI and command line apps that y'all recommend.
Chris: So if you've got a few more to send us, it
Chris: would be useful because what I'm hoping if nothing else the TUI
Chris: challenge can just be a way
Chris: for people listening to curate a list
Chris: or to get our curated list of awesome command line
Chris: applications so even if you don't do the TUI challenge with us once we announce
Chris: it you'll at least walk away from the episode knowing about a few more command
Chris: line applications that are really really kick butt so if you know any out there
Chris: that we could feature for the audience that you think more people should know
Chris: about please do boost those in because we are collecting them right now and
Chris: we are going to announce the TUI Challenge very soon.
Chris: Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate you and appreciate the support.
Chris: We had 17 folks stream sats as they listened. Just a little humble.
Chris: A little humble, I'm going to admit.
Chris: 29,137 sats streamed. Not sure maybe people didn't turn it on for that episode.
Chris: And you know what? That LinuxFest episode, that was a hell of a lot of work, too.
Chris: So if you love that kind of stuff, let us know. If you hate it,
Chris: you can also let us know, too.
Chris: I guess a boost is at least a little bit of sugar with that medicine.
Chris: You combine the stream sats with our boosters, and we stacked a total of 141,896 sats.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supports the show, and of course, thank you to our members as well.
Chris: It makes, well, it makes quite literally all of the difference.
Chris: So much appreciation to all of you out there, and please consider supporting episode 613. 13.
Chris: All right. Which one of you found the pick this week? Because I certainly did
Chris: not find the pick, but of course I had to include it in the show.
Brent: You know, I came across this one in a hurry and I didn't have time to jump in
Brent: and I thought the boys are going to love this. So I sent it along.
Chris: Okay. This is a project that allows you to essentially turn Excel into a shell
Chris: and you can run Linux inside the shell inside Excel.
Wes: Haven't you always wanted to? Or even needed to? I know I have.
Chris: Screw Doom. I want all of Linux. I want all of it.
Chris: And what what's happened here is the author has created an emulator that's actually
Chris: doing all the work in a separate DLL.
Chris: So technically, not Excel doing the work. However, it gets loaded into Excel by the VBA macro.
Wes: Yeah, remember how VBA macros can do that? You can just, you know,
Wes: side load DLLs in there and then have a good time.
Brent: They're very safe.
Chris: Apparently entire emulators. You can just sideload an entire emulator with a VBA macro call.
Chris: So it does just that and then it takes the output and writes them into the cells of the spreadsheet.
Brent: What?
Brent: I know i sent in this pic but this is ridiculous linux and excel.
Wes: Slash dev slash standard excel.
Chris: Yeah right wouldn't that be funny if it just became an output device um i know
Chris: you and i both looked did did you find a license for this west i did not find a license for this.
Wes: No not in that repo uh the underlying uh
Wes: risk 5 emulator that's really doing all the work here that has an MIT license
Wes: and of course Linux itself is GPL too but nothing for Linux and Excel just yet
Wes: I will say I mean the whole thing it's quite impressive but the major limitation
Wes: is since you're running RISC-V Linux there's just the app compatibility isn't that great.
Chris: Yeah we really to take it to the next level you'd almost want like an x86 emulator.
Brent: I would love if this is like the inflection point for RISC-V this is what people
Brent: were like oh finally we have Now we have a reason to write applications.
Chris: I'm wondering, though, if anybody, if some crazy person out there could put
Chris: this into production for something, like, is there some use case for this,
Chris: other than it just being really awesome?
Wes: I mean, I think Jeff nails it. You know, maybe your local enterprise administrator
Wes: hasn't enabled WSL for you, but, you know, you really help your workflows out.
Wes: But, of course, Excel might be, you know, you need Excel for your job.
Chris: Right. Screw WSL. Everybody's got Excel. that's hilarious good point pj good point would.
Brent: We then call it wxl.
Chris: I think wxls i don't know what you held i don't know dude don't make the windows excel.
Wes: Subsystem for linux right.
Chris: Exactly oh no all right we'll have a link to that in the show notes you can go check it out,
Chris: Oh, those show notes, you ask. Well, of course, you can find those at linuxunplugged.com slash 613.
Chris: Now, don't forget, we need all of your tips for Brent. And also,
Chris: we'd love it if you joined us live.
Chris: You can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We do the show live at 9, no, 10? Yes.
Chris: 10 a.m. Pacific. We do the show live at 10 a.m. Pacific. That's why I put it
Chris: on the calendar, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: And we'd love it if you come hang out with us. Gives it that nice live vibe.
Chris: We'll have the Mumble Room going, which sends out a low-latency Opus stream.
Chris: And, of course, we've got it hot on jblive.tv and jblive.fm on Sunday in your
Chris: podcasting 2.0 app as well.
Chris: So with all of that said, I'll just mention, along with links,
Chris: you'll find how to contact us, our Mumble Room, the Matrix info,
Chris: our membership, and even how to subscribe to the show, all at linuxonplugged.com.
Chris: And then you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and check out episode 20 of The
Chris: Launch, where we go way more into detail about Brent's van adventure.
Chris: And I'm sure we'll have more in future episodes of The Launch as well.
Chris: And then the final couple episodes of Self-Hosted, you'll also find at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: And don't forget swag at jupitergarage.com.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.
Chris: We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.