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 on the show today, it does seem to be the storage apocalypse.
Chris: It's here. It's real. And an old friend's going to drop by to talk survival
Chris: strategies as prices explode.
Chris: And then we've got an unapologetically 90s approach to stretching your current storage.
Chris: Sometimes the old way of doing things still makes sense. They're going to round
Chris: it out with some booths, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble Room!
Mumble: Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.
Chris: And let's say hello to that old friend from Tux Digital and this week in Linux,
Chris: Michael Tunnellsbeck. Hello, Michael.
Michael: Hello, everybody.
Chris: It's good to see you.
Michael: Yeah, it's been a while.
Chris: Yeah, we didn't get a chance to see you for our predictions episode because
Chris: you were under the weather. But you're back?
Michael: Not speak so that was that was a bummer because uh i enjoy being the referee you.
Chris: Know yeah well maybe we'll pick it back up next
Chris: year but it's good to see and i think we should maybe we could chat in just
Chris: a moment on a couple of those predictions i mean we might have them here so
Chris: if we wanted to look at them in a moment we could before we get there i want
Chris: to say good morning to our friends over at defined networking go check out manage
Chris: nebula at define.net slash unplugged Now,
Chris: you want a beautiful mesh VPN network these days.
Chris: Everybody knows that because the benefits are incredible. I mean,
Chris: you can connect data centers across multiple different providers and regions,
Chris: your mobile devices, your workstations, your development machines,
Chris: your production machines, and you can create all kinds of privacy with this
Chris: that is just absolutely unbeatable. I mean, I think people understand that.
Chris: But which one is actually the right one to choose? And I say you have to check
Chris: out Define a .NET slash Unplugged.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula project.
Chris: It's all open source. Top to bottom, if you want to self-host every single component,
Chris: it will always be that way because that's how they build it.
Chris: You want to know what feature's coming down the road?
Chris: Go watch the development right there out in the open on GitHub.
Chris: And then later on, if you decide, I want to completely take this over myself,
Chris: you absolutely can, including some of the essential services.
Chris: But what I think is great is they offer the managed Nebula product so you can get started.
Chris: They host the tough stuff. They do all of that. Later on, if you want to own
Chris: the authentication and you want to own the discovery and all of that, you absolutely can.
Chris: Nebula's decentralized design means there's no single point of failure.
Chris: There's nothing that can happen like on their back end because you can host everything.
Chris: And when you're building something that you want to last five years,
Chris: 10 years, you got to think about that.
Chris: It was also from the get-go designed to manage Slack's global infrastructure.
Chris: So you know it's tight, it's powerful, it's super advanced.
Chris: I could tell you all about it, but I think you should go check it out.
Chris: You can get 100 hosts for free, no credit card required, no lock-in,
Chris: define.net slash unplugged. You start with that, then later on you want to go
Chris: set up your own lighthouses? You absolutely can.
Chris: There's no problem. There's no conflict there where you're like part of a big sales funnel.
Chris: Like it's such a great thing because we have heard from so many people out there
Chris: that have deployed it, and they absolutely have been thrilled.
Chris: And probably going to have a little bit more from my end next week. So check it out.
Chris: Go get started. support the show at defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: And a big thank you to defined.net for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: Gentlemen, we are on like Donkey Kong for Planet Nix. Get ready. We're going.
Chris: Phlox is helping make it possible again this year. You know Phlox.
Chris: They're focused on making reproducible dev environments actually usable.
Chris: And they're facilitating our trip and Planet Nix. We will have a meetup.
Chris: I think year two is going to be fantastic.
Chris: The call for papers for Planet Nix ends very soon.
Chris: January 15th. So if you're listening to it when this comes out,
Chris: you got a few days. Jan 15th.
Chris: We'll put a link in the show notes. To attend Planet Nix, you need to register for Scale.
Chris: So we'll put a link in there, too. We have a promo code. The promo code is UNPLUG,
Chris: U-N-P-L-G, UNPLUG, and you'll get 40% off your ticket.
Wes: And the remaining value goes to support one of the best open source conferences out there.
Chris: Yeah, and you get access to both Planet Nix and Scale.
Wes: And the expo hall and all the other talks. There's a lot.
Chris: UNPLUG, U-N-P-L-G. We'll have a link to that. We want to see you there.
Chris: This, you know, I think year one of Planet Nix.
Chris: Is this a thing? Is this possible? Can they pull this off?
Chris: Establish it? Yes. Did people like it? We loved it.
Chris: All right, we're doing it again. Now, this year, I think it's going to be a
Chris: lot about building things, talking to people, like people who don't normally
Chris: sit in the same room together, but also still use the same stuff they create. A lot of that.
Chris: And I think it's also going to just pull them or just lead right in to a great scale.
Chris: So why not make it to both? And then just shortly after that,
Chris: LinuxFest Northwest, April 24th to the 26th, back at the Bellingham Technical
Chris: College in the original large expo room.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: Back in the nice area. It's all fixed up. And the LinuxFest Northwest call for
Chris: papers ends tomorrow. Tomorrow.
Chris: at midnight, Monday, January 12th, at midnight. So get it in.
Chris: No promo code for LinuxFest Northwest because it's free.
Chris: Although you can give them a little donation if you want to help support a great event.
Chris: We'll have links to the LinuxFest Northwest call for papers as well. So there you go.
Chris: Planet Nix and Scale. That's happening in March, March 5th through the 6th in
Chris: Pasadena, California. We'd love to see you there.
Chris: And then a little bit after that, LinuxFest Northwest, April 24th through the
Chris: 26th. things are shaping up to be a beautiful spring a warm beautiful spring
Chris: in the pacific northwest and then they're saying a hot summer you know have you seen this no.
Wes: I have not.
Chris: Yeah we got a nino transition it's fading out uh you know of dominance as they
Chris: say uh-huh which means it should be a beautiful linux fest northwest so we'd
Chris: love to see you plenty of time to plan.
Wes: Right come on we're telling you now.
Chris: Yep and all the lazy links are in the show notes,
Chris: Well, I just wanted to say a big welcome back to Michael. It's nice to see you,
Chris: sir. Thank you again for making it.
Michael: Thanks for having me.
Chris: Would you love to go back in time and see how you did? I mean,
Chris: would you just love it? Would you just be thrilled? I would love it.
Michael: Actually, I don't remember most of what I said. I remember one of them,
Michael: and I think I was right. And the other ones, I don't remember at all.
Chris: I mean, I did. I don't remember them specifically. But when we were prepping
Chris: for the episode, I reviewed them. And I think you did OK.
Wes: Yeah, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by yourself.
Chris: So, here was Michael's first prediction for 2025.
Clips: I predict that the Cosmic desktop from System76 will make at least a release
Clips: candidate version available in 2025.
Chris: I mean, they made that.
Michael: I was very right.
Chris: Nice. Not bad.
Michael: I forgot about that one entirely.
Wes: You're too busy playing with Cosmic.
Chris: That only really came later in the year.
Michael: Yeah, it was like three weeks before the end of the year. and then like nice yeah.
Chris: All right here was prediction number two for 2025 i.
Clips: Predict that the linux desktop market share will become five percent some point this year.
Chris: I think that one was right too right like everything we can.
Michael: Measure with.
Chris: Seems like that seems like it hit which is.
Michael: Yeah i was i was super shocked uh because that's the one i remembered i was
Michael: like uh because i remember saying like because it was expected to go to four
Michael: and i was like you know i'll just do five anyway and then that actually happened
Michael: it's like wow how was i right okay awesome well.
Chris: You know what i want to know is do you have a prediction for 2026.
Michael: I should but in terms of market share i think it's going to go up to i'm going
Michael: to go ahead and say an extra two percent and say seven all.
Chris: Right all right i like that that was bold all right are you ready for your third and last prediction.
Michael: Yes here.
Clips: We go i predict that in 2025 kde will release a specific desktop operating system
Clips: of their own, regardless of what it's named,
Clips: KDE Linux or not, and it will be at least at a beta release level.
Chris: Now, I don't know. I don't know if they've actually hit beta, have they?
Michael: No, I think I was wrong on that one. I think they hit alpha, not beta.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Michael: That's a bummer. I almost got perfect.
Chris: Okay, here's just a bonus prediction. Do you think they'll hit a 1.0 in 2026?
Michael: I think towards the end of the year, maybe. Yeah. I don't think it's going to
Michael: be anytime soon, but I think they've made a lot of progress.
Michael: I think they've made a lot of progress, enough where they could get to the the
Michael: like I don't know November December era yeah.
Chris: I hope so.
Wes: Although didn't I see they're like doing some debates about sort of the underpinnings
Wes: and should they stick with their like arch sort of inspired thing or adopt other.
Michael: Yeah I think that there's actually potential where they could you know do a
Michael: combination of things like,
Michael: a lot of the effort in the Universal Blue project is super
Michael: interesting because there's there's some effort to make it
Michael: distro-less and that by that meaning um
Michael: it doesn't matter what it's sitting on top of like the
Michael: you could switch out the underneath you know
Michael: fairly easily like just how you can like image mode you can
Michael: switch the desktops pretty quickly it would be uh possible to switch arch to
Michael: fedora or back and forth rebase the base yeah but also the user could do it
Michael: like not even like it's great all you have to do is set up the image mode to
Michael: have that compatibility and it'd be theoretically possible to do that.
Chris: Swap that layer out, huh?
Michael: Yeah, that could also solve that problem. Who knows?
Chris: Wouldn't that be interesting? I'm just thinking about the way OEMs could use that.
Chris: I think the last 10% of KDE Linux is going to be the toughest. So that...
Chris: It might push a 1.0 out to Q1 of 2027. And I don't think that'd be a shame.
Michael: Honestly, I feel like it might be a 1.0 that's not a 1.0.
Chris: Oh, it could be, yeah.
Michael: Yeah. So, like, for example, Cosmix. Cosmix 1.0 was not really ready.
Michael: Like, it's cool. There's a lot of good stuff.
Michael: But there's still some pretty noticeable bugs that would not really count as a 1.0 in that sense.
Chris: And in our space, there is some value to getting it out there in front of users
Chris: and starting to get that feedback.
Michael: Yeah. I also just feel like the idea of the 1.0 is, you know,
Michael: like the version number mattering is like antiquated and no longer matters.
Michael: Like it's like when people talk about like the next version of Linux,
Michael: you know, like Linux 7 is going to come out sometime soon.
Michael: And they're like, well, why is it going to 7? Well, arbitrary number count.
Michael: Like who cares? like it doesn't it's not like they actually choose it for any
Michael: particular reason it's just because they're tired of being six so like now it's seven they.
Brent: Choose it because west predicted it that's usually how it goes.
Michael: Well that that also helps too yeah.
Chris: You know back in my day a point release was like a sign of perhaps a compatibility
Chris: break or a major new feature set.
Michael: Yeah it's.
Chris: Just sort of lost its meaning in that sense.
Michael: Yeah and the major minor bug thing is gone too like it some people use it but
Michael: it also doesn't matter anymore yeah so like uh ubuntu helped create that to go away with the dates.
Michael: So now we have like the major minor, but it's really just like,
Michael: it's an update. Who cares?
Chris: Yeah, I wonder, one day we'll have Linux 2810. Linux, you know,
Chris: whatever. Whatever we'll have.
Chris: All right, well, we are gathered here today because we, as a world,
Chris: of technology enthusiasts, are faced with the plight of incredibly high storage prices.
Chris: I really missed the boat on this one. I don't know how many of you were feeling
Chris: this way, but I, of course, was, if you guys remember, we were talking about
Chris: low power home labs towards the end of last year, started around October, November.
Chris: Boy, should I have bought then. So I did a little digging before the show,
Chris: guys, and it's real bad out there. So...
Chris: The worst price increases seem to be in like the kind of nicer SSDs and MVMEs
Chris: in the two terabyte and up range.
Chris: I don't see a lot of punishment in the one terabyte. But for example,
Chris: the Western Digital Black SN850X two terabyte drive is up 80 percent since October. Since October.
Brent: Since October.
Wes: That's not 10 percent. That's not 20 percent. No. Over 50 percent.
Chris: And because I'm in a moving vehicle, I was looking for solid state.
Chris: So I at first had my eye on an 8-terabyte NVMe, which would be just enough.
Chris: And that thing went from it.
Wes: I mean, that sounds expensive already.
Chris: Yeah. But I think it was like $700, $800. And now it's between $14 and $1,600
Chris: depending on the vendor.
Michael: Wow.
Chris: And the other thing is.
Wes: Do I want a laptop or a hard drive?
Chris: The number of vendors even supplying to the consumer market is less.
Chris: I did a little comparison shopping on Camel, Camel, Camel of SSD vendors selling
Chris: two terabyte drives back in October, and there were probably 30 of them. And now there's two.
Chris: So it's brutal out there.
Chris: And it's just gone from something that was kind of cheap to just this precious
Chris: commodity, obviously because enterprise data centers, those types of AI jobs,
Chris: they're all eating up storage.
Chris: They're buying inventory before they've even been produced. Some of these vendors
Chris: are making exclusivity deals with these larger data centers to provide them
Chris: with, you know, their storage chips.
Chris: So I think each one of us have probably been thinking about this problem a little bit.
Chris: I don't know if anybody – you know, we always are – our storage needs are always growing.
Chris: So I thought we'd go around the horn and kind of talk about if we had any ideas
Chris: for sort of stretching out or getting cheap storage for 2026, maybe even into 2027.
Chris: Some of the things I was looking at here suggest we already have back orders
Chris: now on the books up to 24 months from the AI data centers.
Chris: And so they are going to be filling the data center inventory for 24 months
Chris: at least, and that's the existing back.
Chris: Now, some of that might get canceled if things decline or whatever,
Chris: but the projection is at least until 2027, we're going to have a massive crunch in storage prices.
Chris: So, Michael, do you have any thoughts on ways to stretch your existing storage
Chris: or cheap storage acquisition strategies?
Chris: Are you going to be shucking USB disks?
Wes: Do you have any hard drives we can have?
Michael: So actually as you were talking about it i was thinking about it
Michael: and uh you got that
Michael: sweet storage i i was actually thinking about
Michael: it as you were mentioning you were describing this problem and i was thinking
Michael: like you know at this point ssds are probably around the same or if not more
Michael: value than gold so so i was thinking like maybe i should sell some of my ssds
Michael: you know and get some like like some like five-year-old ssds are now worth double
Michael: what they were or whatever,
Michael: and uh and but it's actually
Michael: kind of funny because i was you know debating whether or
Michael: not i should upgrade my hard drives for my
Michael: nas because i got i recently got a bigger nas
Michael: so like i had a four bay and now i have an eight bay and then
Michael: i was thinking like okay i need to you know
Michael: figure out a time where i need to get some more drives and
Michael: then i looked at the prices like you know what i can
Michael: wait a little bit i'll come back into it like a couple months and
Michael: then the storage price hit same and yeah it's completely destroyed all plans
Michael: so like i'm now not only am i not i'm not even using that new bay anymore i'm
Michael: using the still using old four bay uh just because it's not worth even bothering
Michael: to move the stuff and now i'm just in the process of like.
Michael: Figuring out like it used to be uh you know storage is
Michael: cheap i'll just get whatever i need and then i'll just keep everything
Michael: now i'm just deciding whether i want to keep the stuff or not
Michael: like some of the stuff i've had for 20 years
Michael: yeah and i've not never looked at it ever because
Michael: i have a i had a rule i don't need more i've already i've already established
Michael: this and i've gone i've i've pulled the trigger on this situation to save my
Michael: storage and uh i used to have a philosophy of everything I create as a creative
Michael: person and graphic design and everything, I keep everything.
Wes: Yeah, totally get that, right? You don't want to have it later,
Wes: you're like, I had that, I made that, I burned hours of my life investing in
Wes: creating that to throw it away when I could have just had that one more FLAC file? Come on.
Michael: Exactly. And also, it goes back to when I was doing graphic design.
Michael: So I have all the PSD files and I have everything. So I have the completed project
Michael: and the source project and everything.
Michael: And I've gotten to the point where now, So some of that stuff I still keep,
Michael: even if it's super old, just because of like, I just want it.
Michael: But when it comes to video, and doing like video on YouTube,
Michael: and you know, the podcasting and stuff, and there's been, there's just so much data that takes up.
Michael: And I was thinking, like, do I have I ever gone back and done a montage of like
Michael: previous episodes or anything? Have I ever used that stuff?
Michael: And no, I have not. So I just basically deleted half of the storage.
Michael: And now I actually have the NAS available to use again.
Michael: Yeah, because I was I was super close to having nothing on the on no storage
Michael: on the NAS. And now I have like half of it back.
Michael: So I'm actually kind of happy I did that because I would have just bought new storage.
Michael: I don't I'm not saying that it's good that this happened
Michael: that forced me to do this but I am happy that uh I'm I've kind of gotten past
Michael: this threshold of like not holding on to everything because I I'm a very minimal
Michael: person in reality but in terms of digital hoarder yep that would I'm very much
Michael: a digital hoarder so I think that's a fair point there is.
Chris: It is really easy to slip into digital hoarding um and and just you save everything
Chris: and and you constantly are adding to it more and more, which is kind of fun,
Chris: but gets very expensive right now.
Chris: Yeah. So I'm kind of not with like project files, but I'm on the other end of
Chris: I spent probably the last five years being I'll just delete it guy.
Chris: And then a couple of months ago, a few months ago, I was starting to plan for
Chris: my daughter's birthday and I wanted to get her that I wanted to show her this
Chris: movie that I had deleted, but I figured what's the big deal?
Chris: I'll just download it again. could not actually find a working way to get it again.
Chris: And so I went and bought the DVD and ripped it and started thinking,
Chris: you know, there's a few things I started going through my library and thinking
Chris: there's a few things that I ripped by hand that I either think are better quality
Chris: or like I can't necessarily find an easy way to find them again online.
Chris: And I started thinking maybe there is some stuff I do want to keep forever.
Chris: And then if that's the case, I got a real problem here because I'm already almost
Chris: out of storage. There is some stuff I absolutely will delete.
Chris: There are some things I want to keep.
Wes: Yeah, no, I'm kind of in the same place. Like I have been trying to keep,
Wes: I haven't, not for the last few years, but before that I was moving around a
Wes: lot and it was just like, didn't make sense to have a giant NAS keeping everything.
Wes: So I've kind of been pruning, but you're right.
Wes: We're entering now a digital landscape where I've been thinking about it for,
Wes: like with the, I don't know if you've seen some of the numbers people are passing
Wes: around for like the death of stack overflow.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: But there's just a lot of stuff on there. Not that it isn't elsewhere,
Wes: but especially even for some things like, like there's like the math overflow part.
Wes: There's some nice write-ups or ways that people express things or taught things,
Wes: just things that I've kind of always relied on existing out there in the internet,
Wes: whether it be on the media side or just on the information side,
Wes: that we're getting to a new era.
Wes: And it seems like a lot of that stuff, some of it will be kept,
Wes: some of it will hit the internet archive, but a lot of it just won't.
Wes: And if I don't take action and have some dedicated storage for it,
Wes: it might just vanish. Yeah.
Chris: And then I've also digitized more things with paperless and whatnot,
Chris: which also brings in backups to this, Brent.
Chris: And I don't know if you've thought much about this, but with storage going up,
Chris: it makes strategies like, oh, I'll just buy another hard drive.
Chris: I'll buy this hard drive, copy everything over, then send it off-site.
Chris: Well, maybe not with the expense now.
Brent: Yeah. I mean, that was my strategy up till now. And now I'm thinking,
Brent: holy, I got to get my act in gear because if I all of a sudden decide I have
Brent: to move to used drives, for instance.
Brent: I don't know. You tell me if I'm right or not. But that feels like the risk
Brent: is higher. So maybe I do need extra bays in my NAS.
Brent: And maybe I do need to have a better RAID system. And maybe I do need,
Brent: you know, more offside backups and stuff because hard drives are going to fail.
Chris: Used drives are getting more expensive, too. I did a little eBay slinking trying to find a cheap.
Chris: And you can, I mean, you'll save money. But like you said, you don't know the quality.
Chris: And yeah, like they're still not as cheap as they used to be.
Wes: And here I thought 2026 was naively going to be the year I finally got a proper
Wes: backup system for my folks going.
Chris: I know. So, yeah, Brian, it's like not even used storage.
Brent: Well, I do have a bunch in my basement
Brent: that I forgot about that I could probably get back out of the ice.
Chris: Slam it all into a scary raid, you know?
Michael: I think the worst part is that now this whole thing has happened.
Michael: And I have just a few sitting over here for like, you know, drives that I've
Michael: done for testing of like distros and stuff that even they're 256 gig or 512
Michael: gig. And they're now looking super appealing.
Michael: Like, oh, wow, I actually have stuff I can use, even though it's super tiny, too.
Chris: I know, I was looking at, like, SATA controllers with, like, eight ports on them.
Chris: I'm like, I could slam one of these in and just attach a bunch of random drives
Chris: and then just smash it all together. And then one of them will eventually pop, but...
Wes: All right, you get a bunch of Raspberry Pis, and then you plug in a bunch of sort of USB expanders.
Wes: And then you put in a bunch of flash drives, and then you put that all into
Wes: a CEPH cluster. And then you just store everything there.
Chris: Well, why not cut out the middleman and get a USB hub and just attach a whole
Chris: bunch of SD card readers all to the USB hub?
Wes: Oh, good point, yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Those are so thin, right?
Chris: It like it'll stack well yeah it's essentially solid.
Brent: I would assume this is all you know hard drives and memory and ssd is all being
Brent: consumed by like the you know ai push right the.
Chris: Big machine yeah.
Brent: But i was thinking about this a little bit more this morning and,
Brent: You know, they're going to be pushing their hard drives out of the pipeline at some point, right?
Brent: They're not just going to hoard every single hard drive that they're using.
Michael: I feel like they're going to destroy them, though. Like, they're going to use
Michael: them to a degree. Like, you know, like the crypto miners made the GPUs worthless.
Michael: I feel like they're going to make their drives worthless.
Chris: Yeah. Although, like, some vendors may have an age-out strategy.
Chris: Hmm. You could still see. Like, I could still see, even if not all of them.
Chris: If only like, say, 30% of them made it on the market, in the used market,
Chris: there are outlets that specialize.
Chris: And that's one of the ones I looked into, by the way, is there are outlets that
Chris: specialize in they go buy them from the data centers and guarantee like they
Chris: wipe everything and they have like a whole contract. And then they resell them
Chris: in bundles, like massive bundles.
Chris: So that could be a thing.
Wes: The nice thing, too, with some of this, right, like, unlike GPUs,
Wes: I mean, if it was cheaper, you could also, if it was cheaper but sketchy,
Wes: you could up the redundancy, right?
Chris: Oh, true.
Wes: I'm going to build two arrays. I'm going to have double copies because I don't
Wes: really trust either of them, and I don't want to do a giant.
Chris: So that could be a future thing where use storage comes down,
Chris: but as of right now, it's still pretty expensive, and you're rolling the dice.
Chris: So it's sort of a double whammy.
Brent: There's also something to be said for not every
Brent: single ai company that's buying all this stuff up right
Brent: now because they somehow have free money uh is
Brent: going to survive so we might see like these big splashes of hardware just hitting
Brent: the used market all of a sudden so if you're looking you might be able to find
Brent: that stuff i don't imagine it'll be a constant you know stream of what we want
Brent: to be consuming in terms of hardware but it might happen.
Chris: Yeah, they may not all be consumer end products, but if you're okay dealing
Chris: with SaaS or whatever, it might work.
Chris: But I do think there is something we can do about it because there is an area
Chris: of the market that these data centers are just not gobbling up.
Chris: They have no interest in.
Chris: It still provides a good means of storage.
Wes: You're talking about magnetic tape.
Chris: I looked at that. I did. If anybody knows a place to find a tape drive that's
Chris: reliable for under $500, let me know. but all the ones I saw.
Michael: Floppy disks.
Chris: Floppy disks. Yes. Now here's what I'm thinking.
Chris: The solution comes from the nineties and that's optical media.
Chris: We channel our inner nineties kids and I think we look back at optical media.
Chris: I think it, I think it holds the solution.
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Chris: of health bill negotiators, low-cost prescriptions, lab testing tools,
Chris: and a database of low-cost, high-quality doctors that have been vetted by CrowdHealth.
Chris: They've worked with them.
Chris: It's really smooth. They have a fantastic app to navigate it all,
Chris: plus great customer service, people you can chat with on the phone or via text.
Chris: And when something major happens, you pay the first $500 and then the crowd
Chris: steps in and helps fund the rest.
Chris: It's sort of like the options we used to have before it all got messed up and
Chris: seemed to get worse every single year.
Chris: So you'll join the crowd, a group of members just like me, who want to help
Chris: pay for each other's unexpected medical events.
Chris: And people are incentivized to take care of each other in this incentive and
Chris: take care of themselves.
Chris: The system's betting that you're just going to stay stuck, and you're just going
Chris: to keep paying the same more and more overpriced, complicated mess.
Chris: And this year, it's getting even worse because a lot of the subsidies are expiring,
Chris: and so the costs are going to go up even more.
Chris: So far, CrowdHealth members have saved $40 million in health care expenses because
Chris: they refuse to overpay. I, myself, have saved somewhere around $3,200.
Chris: It's really powerful stuff, and it's time to take your power back.
Chris: Join CrowdHealth at joincrowdhealth.com and use our promo code unplugged today
Chris: for your first three months at only $99.
Chris: That's right. Joincrowdhealth.com promo code unplugged. CrowdHealth, it's not insurance.
Chris: It's time to opt out and take your power back. This is how we win.
Chris: It's joincrowdhealth.com and use that promo code unplugged.
Brent: Chris, I'll admit when I first heard you talking about this idea,
Brent: I thought it was pretty crazy because I thought we had left those little spinning
Brent: things of plastic behind.
Brent: Like, I have a drawer full somewhere, though, if you need some.
Brent: But now I, after doing a little research, I kind of see where you're going with this.
Brent: It's, you know, I'm feeling a little nostalgic from their 90s times.
Chris: It is fun. It does have some nostalgia. Physical media, it's back.
Chris: It's still a thing and it's cheap.
Chris: So the seed oil of this idea was after last week's Linux Unplugged,
Chris: Wes and I were checking out the DVD drive that I bought to restore or re-rip
Chris: stuff from the original DVD since I deleted it and then wanted it back.
Chris: And we were checking it out and I needed something to test it with and I wanted
Chris: to see if it worked with Linux and see if the USB bus could power it enough and all this.
Chris: So I'm searching the whole freaking studio and I cannot find any physical media. I'm like, wow.
Chris: In my mind, I can picture where I used to store DVDs. But of course, that was a decade ago.
Chris: So I find an old CDR in a box of old studio stuff and something I burnt a long
Chris: time ago. And it's like data backup on there.
Chris: And I vaguely recall doing this.
Chris: So I bring it in, pop it in the new drive and it mounts and I see it.
Chris: And I start looking at the contents on there. And it's a backup of the Office 2000 installer.
Wes: That's right. Oh, that was so good.
Chris: I burned this CD-R in early 2000, 26 years ago.
Wes: And it was just there, sitting, waiting this whole time.
Chris: Just worked perfectly.
Brent: No way.
Chris: And it struck me as, well, that's about as best case scenario as I can expect. Right?
Wes: Now, admittedly, we didn't try installing Windows.
Chris: No. We didn't check Summit. That's true. We didn't try installing Office 2000.
Chris: But it just got me thinking, like, wow, that really held up.
Chris: And then throughout the week, I realized, well, this DVD drive can burn Blu-rays.
Chris: And then I started thinking, well, let's go take a look at this.
Chris: I'm running out of storage.
Chris: Well, you can buy a 50 gigabyte Blu-ray disc.
Chris: In fact, you can buy a pack of 10 50 gig Blu-ray discs for 18 US dollars.
Chris: You can buy 100 discs at Newegg for under $160. So on the low end.
Brent: They still manufacture them? I don't believe this.
Chris: Wow. So say you get that Newegg deal, right? you're essentially
Chris: buying usable storage about 4.6 terabytes
Chris: of usable storage and so that works out to be about three
Chris: cents a gigabyte you could
Chris: of course get an ssd at a pretty but you know those are pretty expensive so
Chris: you can buy these bundles of blu-ray discs at 50 gigs a pop i mean it's going
Chris: to take a while but this is like an area that the data centers don't don't care
Chris: about they're they're not driving these prices up and then you have something
Chris: that could potentially sit on a shelf for 26 years and if you ever needed it back.
Wes: I mean so I guess you gotta go through the effort of doing the burning.
Chris: Yep and.
Wes: Maybe the restoring or the.
Chris: Validating don't lose it and don't forget what files on what and probably.
Wes: Ideally you wanna make sure you've got it in some sort of storage where it's
Wes: not gonna get scratched and you know whatever,
Wes: But, I mean, I remember the eras, like I remember copying stuff for friends, et cetera.
Wes: Like, I have gone through the motions of burning a fair amount of disks,
Wes: right? So, like, it is doable, and you probably use them in the computer anyway,
Wes: so, like, you kind of just do it while you're doing other things.
Chris: And if you do it right, you know, like in the case of this CDR I backed up in
Chris: the year 2000, if it's just files on a file system, and you don't require some
Chris: specific app to, like, decrypt and restore it,
Chris: then future you can just drag and drop the files when you want to restore it
Chris: when you want them maybe you only want one file or something like that.
Wes: But that does bring up keeping track of like there is that because if you're
Wes: gonna have it like the units are smaller right so you'll have more units and
Wes: so yeah if you don't do a good job labeling or whatever then you're like well
Wes: where's wait i need for the photos from which year.
Brent: We also have much better compression algorithms these days than we used to.
Brent: So I feel like you could fit even more info on those disks than you're comparing.
Chris: That's very true. So I set out to find a tool to help me achieve this job.
Chris: How hard could this be, right? I looked at Borg Backup.
Chris: I looked at Bacula, too, considering maybe I would actually just accomplish
Chris: this with a traditional backup tool.
Chris: Because you bring up a good point, Wes, is like the key thing is,
Chris: say my kids come to me two years from now, and they say, Dad, we want to watch X.
Chris: And, well, how the hell do I know out of these 15 Blu-rays where that one file is?
Chris: And if you're backing up a TV series, it could be larger than 50 gigabytes or something like that.
Wes: It's even worse if it's a bunch of small files. They're like,
Wes: oh, I need the, which, okay, where did I put the taxes for this year?
Chris: Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, because paperless is also another thing in here and all of that.
Chris: So, ladies and gentlemen, I could not find a tool, so I have made a tool,
Chris: and it is called Blue Vault.
Chris: That's right. It's a Rust-based app, a TUI, with sort of an 80s theme for managing Blu-ray archives.
Chris: And the basic idea is you attach a USB Blu-ray burner, which are like $50 these
Chris: days, US dollars. You bring up this TUI.
Chris: And it walks you through archiving individual folders to a Blu-ray disk.
Chris: And it supports 25 gig, 50 gig, and 100 gigabyte disks.
Chris: I just this morning added multi-disk architecture. So that's very new.
Chris: So there's two different releases. Release one is single-disk architecture.
Chris: Release two is multi-disk architecture. It generates a table of contents and
Chris: a SQL database where all of the files are.
Chris: It does a SHA-256 sum and a CRC-325 sum of all of the files.
Chris: So you can verify them later. It offers two different burn methods,
Chris: burns directly to Blu-ray or just create an ISO image.
Chris: And it has an optional QR code generator. So if you wanted to label the disk
Chris: or the jewel case with a QR code, you could.
Chris: It has a verify mode, which is very nice.
Chris: It also will do a dry run if you just want to go through a dry run.
Chris: It's using like R-Sync on the back end and a bunch of standard Linux burning tools.
Chris: So really, I just created the TUI to set on top of this. And the Tui has a phosphorus
Chris: green, high contrast, black on green.
Chris: But it's easy to read. Like the stuff you're supposed to look at is obvious and highlighted.
Chris: Monospace type. It's really nice. Subtle animations. And one of the things I
Chris: worked on, although it's not perfect, is I really tried to constantly give you as much feedback.
Chris: Because there's some processes that are just like when you're generating a shot,
Chris: like it can take a little bit in the background.
Chris: Right. Or if you're if you're moving an MKV file to a Blu-ray,
Chris: it can take a little bit. So I've tried to give the UI as much responsiveness
Chris: and updates as to what it's doing as possible.
Chris: And then the thing I just added this morning, well, technically late last night.
Chris: Is the multi-disc archive. Because obviously you're going to have issues where
Chris: you want to back up something that's larger than 50 gigabytes or something like that.
Chris: And so what I'm trying to do here is preserve the folder integrity.
Chris: So it's not doing like a par split or something like that where it's lumping
Chris: them all up and splitting them.
Chris: It will err on the side of potentially wasting a little space on a Blu-ray in
Chris: order to keep all the files just accessible on the file system.
Chris: And then does sequential folder naming so you know where everything's at.
Chris: And this is disc two, this is disc one. And then, like I said,
Chris: it also has a SQLite database that tracks the multi-disc sets for you,
Chris: which you can then search against later on.
Wes: Wait, okay. So it's not splitting files or anything?
Chris: No, it's just kind of looking at the map and being like, okay,
Chris: I can fit this season on this disk, but a few episodes are going to have to go on this other disk.
Chris: And I'll properly label that in the file system, but you know,
Chris: you're going to probably waste a few gigs on this disk.
Chris: But the idea being that in the future, you could just put that in,
Chris: mount it, and just drag and drop the files. You don't need any particular app to restore it.
Wes: And then is it like thought of differently in the app?
Wes: Is that like the multi-disk thought of as a single unit when you're like listing all of your disks or?
Wes: So then it knows that they're at least connected in the database.
Chris: Yes, exactly. And there's two paths in the app right now. There's the single
Chris: disk route, which is really simple.
Chris: Then there's the multi-disk route. And then if you do the multi-disk route,
Chris: then the database knows, okay, this was a multi-disk entry and just stores it that way.
Chris: It's a Rust app, too, which is fun, and it's the first Rust app I've ever created.
Chris: I've tried to be considerate about
Chris: storage space, too, so when the job is successful, it'll clean itself up.
Chris: And there's also just a menu option in the TUI to just do a cleanup because
Chris: from time to time, it's going to generate temporary files to stage them for
Chris: the Blu-ray because I've experimented with a couple of different ways.
Chris: So I bought myself a 10-pack of Blu-rays thinking I was going to use that 10-pack to back up my data.
Chris: No, no. I used that 10-pack to do test after test after test with this app.
Chris: I blew through an entire 10-pack of Blu-rays.
Chris: So I haven't completely tested the multi-dysfunctionality.
Brent: But it does dry runs, you said.
Chris: Yeah, so we'll do dry runs. But, of course, to fully test, I need to burn.
Chris: Yeah, and it will do some testing to make sure everything's working.
Chris: And if it looks like it won't work, it'll try to warn you.
Chris: And if you have any missing dependencies because of a couple apps you have to
Chris: install, it'll attempt to warn you.
Chris: But, yeah, it was an interesting endeavor. And I think my end goal has been
Chris: accomplished in that I could either plug the drive into my NAS,
Chris: my, you know, my Odroid, or I could plug it into my workstation and I can run this in either space.
Chris: And you just sort of set it and forget it. And when you go to the multi-disc
Chris: mode, it'll just go through the work, and it'll pop the disc out when it's ready
Chris: for the next one, tell you what to label it, you pop the next disc in,
Chris: and it'll start continuing the archive. And I just write it across the disc.
Wes: I got a preview of the single-disc mode, so I've been playing with that one.
Wes: I have not yet tried multi-disc, because you only just put it in last night.
Chris: I have no idea if it would even build on your machine. Yeah,
Chris: because not only that, but there's a lot of UI updates I did too, So it's like, we'll see.
Chris: But I would love some help with it because I think, you know,
Chris: there's a couple of little nagly bugs, but the basic functionality is there. It's GPL2.
Chris: It's really easy to pick up everything, super documented, the architecture,
Chris: the commit, the development, the directory structure.
Chris: Everything is there. So you could just sort of pick up and keep running with it if you would like.
Chris: I saw you submitted a pull request.
Wes: I did, yeah. So it turns out that you mentioned kind of what it looks like,
Wes: but you have added a theming system.
Wes: So I thought I'd add a new theme for you.
Chris: You told me to wait for the show. A hot dog theme.
Michael: Hot dog theme.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Classic Windows 3.1 hot dog stand.
Chris: I do like the, you know, I kind of like it. I do like it.
Chris: Yeah, well, because I kind of decided to lean into the 80s retro theme,
Chris: but then I thought some people might find that really obnoxious.
Chris: So you can actually override it at runtime, or there's a little config file,
Chris: too, where you can set the theme. That's way more obnoxious than mine.
Wes: And I love it. So, well, it's serious business when you're doing your backups,
Wes: right? So, like, you want it to be bright with warning and emergencies.
Chris: I just got a, last night I got a warning from us. Like, hey,
Chris: I made a PR, but don't look at it or merge it until the show.
Michael: And also, if there is about the 80s, maybe they're, like, really big into Hulkamania. That's perfect.
Chris: Oh, yeah, it does. It is the Hulk colors. You're right. I never really connected those two things.
Chris: Yeah, so Blu-ray is in the 90s, right? But the optical storage is very much a retro thing.
Chris: And I will full-on admit I got a little tinge of delightful nostalgia the first
Chris: time I took the wrapper off the spindle, opened up the spindle,
Chris: pulled the Blu-ray off, and put it in the drive.
Chris: And I held it there in my hand, and I'm like, this is actually fun.
Wes: You just had spindles around all the time.
Chris: Yeah.
Michael: It's ours it's it's kind of like the the idea of like
Michael: you know the the style of these optical
Michael: drives you know it's it seems antiquated but
Michael: at the same time there are still massive uses
Michael: for it like really good uses and if you get like the the mdisc
Michael: type of stuff where they claim to have like a thousand
Michael: years of longevity uh the like it is a legitimate solution for storage of data
Michael: and uh Especially if it's data that you're storing for the sake of like I might
Michael: – like movies or TV shows or that kind of media where you don't need access to it at all times.
Michael: The solution through these kinds of disks is actually like probably even better
Michael: because you're not wasting really quick access stuff.
Michael: And so now I've actually thought about this like a couple years ago,
Michael: and now you've convinced me that I want to actually implement this.
Chris: And you know like a jewel case a little blu-ray jewel case doesn't take up a lot of room i.
Wes: Was gonna ask are you gonna do that are you gonna like.
Chris: Or do like a like a like you could get covers or do they.
Wes: Still make those discs where you could like draw images on the top.
Chris: These ones do that like with the inkjet like template thing which is so cool
Chris: oh man yeah um so blue vault is available at github.com slash chris lass slash
Chris: blue dash vault it is vibe coded warning i.
Wes: Did I don't think you can type R in.
Chris: Yes, I fixed that.
Wes: Oh, great.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. R or, there was like Q. I don't think it was R or Q,
Chris: because they were grabbed by the UI for other.
Wes: I figured it must have.
Chris: Yeah. I was like, oh yeah, right, of course. You know, that's,
Chris: so this has been an interesting experience for me is,
Chris: What I really, and I totally if I'm wrong, Wes, but what I really got away from this,
Chris: what I took away from this experience is I got the core functionality working
Chris: in about 45 minutes and the UI and the edge cases and all the little things
Chris: like you can't type R here is what took me six to seven hours.
Wes: Yep. Which totally checks out. You get the happy path done, right?
Wes: You're like, oh, okay, yes, this was, I connected the core pieces of what I
Wes: needed together, got it to do it.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And then you realize that there's a whole bunch of ways that you have to,
Wes: like, micro-adjust to make sure that that actually is smooth and usable by a human.
Michael: I mean, six hours is still pretty fast in considering what this is, you know?
Chris: Yeah, well, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting's been just tools underneath
Chris: that have been around on Linux forever. So I got lucky that way,
Chris: right? I'm just using it.
Wes: You don't have to build something to burn the disk. You just have to make sure you assemble the files.
Chris: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Brent: I have some real-world questions.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: How long does it take you to burn a 50-gig disk? And how long does it take you to retrieve said disk?
Chris: So it's slower than I remember, I'll be honest with you. I expected it to be slow.
Chris: I mean, and this isn't like the fastest drive either. It's a $50 external tiny
Chris: thin USB drive, so they probably have faster ones.
Chris: About 30 minutes, 35 minutes to burn a full disk, but I don't really often burn a full disk.
Chris: So if you're doing about a half a disk, it's about 15 minutes.
Chris: And then restoring, you restore at anywhere between 2 megabytes a second to
Chris: 30 megabytes a second, depending on where it is on the disk,
Chris: how long the disk has been reading.
Chris: It's one of those things where it's, I don't know if you guys remember this,
Chris: but it starts faster and then it kind of slows down over time a little bit.
Chris: And that's true, you'll notice with the burn, because I do try to show as best
Chris: as I can your transfer rate in the UI.
Chris: And so you'll see it'll start pretty solid. And then it sort of trickles down.
Chris: I guess maybe as it goes wider and wider out on the disk, perhaps is what it is.
Brent: It's physics, yeah.
Chris: Yeah. But going through this has been an interesting, like reconnecting with
Chris: physical media, thinking about documents and media that maybe I don't even need this year.
Chris: And if I can buy from Newegg.
Chris: You know, at three cents a gigabyte, that's probably better than any storage I can get.
Chris: And then I could take some stuff off my existing network storage and maybe squeak through the year.
Chris: What are you know.
Brent: What are your request?
Chris: OK, yeah. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: Have you tried it yet? Have you tried it?
Brent: I'm not yet.
Wes: I got to get this in your hand so you can break it.
Brent: But I have past experience that makes me imagine that feature request.
Brent: and are you taking audio feature requests at this time?
Chris: Audio? Oh, I mean, you're submitting it via audio instead of a P. Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Brent: I just wondered, since, you know, you just admitted that burning disks takes
Brent: a little longer than transferring to hard drives, but that's okay,
Brent: that's okay. This is long-term media.
Brent: So does Blue Vault have the ability to manage multiple burn devices to do the burning?
Chris: Oh, that's a great idea.
Brent: You could stack up five of these or something and just let them go.
Chris: Maybe like once a month you pick one up for the first three months of the year or something.
Wes: Multiplex it.
Michael: And then after the multi-disc, you have like five of these machines doing the
Michael: burning to the multi-disc.
Michael: So it's technically only to take the whole process of one.
Chris: That is a fascinating idea.
Brent: You're welcome.
Chris: You need some serious USB bus power. Because these things, one of the things
Chris: I've noticed is if you don't have a dedicated powered USB hub,
Chris: your built-in port might not be enough.
Chris: And so the burn will fail in Blue Vault, not because of Blue Vault,
Chris: but because the disk doesn't have enough juice.
Chris: So I had to plug it into an externally powered hub in order to get enough juice.
Brent: So it was a laser.
Wes: Three, four disks when you figured that one out?
Chris: It was two disks. yeah i i ended up like getting real learning real quick some
Chris: of the syntax to like just read if there's a file system at all on the disc
Chris: because if there's a file system at all you can't burn to it in for bdrs at least so.
Michael: So does it burn to the like the data as is or does it have like a way for let's
Michael: say you're burning some kind of movie or tv show if it's like playable in a blu-ray player.
Chris: No no it's only it's only meant for like being able to the the guiding principle
Chris: was you could put it like on another Linux box in 10 years and just drag the files off.
Michael: Gotcha.
Chris: Cause I don't actually, I don't really have anything anymore.
Wes: I, if you wanted to play the movie, you would be doing that and then dragging
Wes: it into jellyfin anyway.
Chris: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. I feel like, I feel like if you're just trying to see how,
Michael: how far you're going down the optical media path, you know?
Chris: Well, I started thinking of, I'm like, this is, you know, how bad would it be
Chris: to just have one of these on the TV and just put, that's not that bad.
Chris: You know, I started thinking about that.
Chris: I think the other thing that'd be kind of a neat feature for this would be to
Chris: just have it also manage archives to disk.
Chris: Like if you had a bunch of like, you know, old disks sitting around,
Chris: although I don't know if I would trust those as much for long-term storage,
Chris: but maybe to get you through the year, because it's still nice to have it organize
Chris: the file system and track in the database what disk it's on and all of that.
Chris: So that's another thing I was thinking about is like a larger storage or,
Chris: you know, you could go to a network mount or something like that.
Chris: So the multi-disc is new.
Wes: What would be interesting is if it had a way of, like, suppose it would,
Wes: would it win multi-disc mode?
Wes: Could you do recursively for, like, a whole folder path?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So you could, like, sort of have it, say, back up a system onto a couple of discs if you needed to.
Chris: You could, yeah. I mean, it just...
Wes: And then just, like, have it run and piecemeal it all back together.
Chris: So when you start it, you know, you tell what mode you want to go in and you
Chris: give yourself some notes.
Chris: And then one of the second to final screens is there is,
Chris: you can manually enter a path or there's
Chris: a file browser you can tab down to and you can browse and whatever
Chris: top level you capture it'll back up everything underneath that
Chris: top level okay so you can do your home directory too or whatever yeah and
Chris: i actually was thinking that is what i'm going to do is i'm going to do one
Chris: for my paperless you know and all that and just put it on a shelf maybe once
Chris: a quarter once a year something like that and if something goes wrong i'll at
Chris: least have that hard copy that i can refer to um and you know if it's in a standard
Chris: file system format then it'd be possible that if I want to recover that,
Chris: say I want some document for some reason, God forbid,
Chris: I don't need to restore all of it into paperless. Maybe I just go get that one file.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: That's why I like having it, even though you will sometimes have a Blu-ray where
Chris: you didn't use all the space, maybe as efficiently, I think it's worth it.
Michael: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting idea, and I also think it's kind
Michael: of hilarious that it's vibe-coded because that means AI caused the problem and solved the problem.
Chris: That's a great point.
Wes: Oh, man.
Chris: There is no sponsor for this segment, but we do have our great members and,
Chris: of course, our boosters.
Chris: So I just want to take a moment and thank them because at the beginning of the
Chris: year, you know, we're sorting out the deals. It can take a little while,
Chris: and there are periods that if we didn't have the support of our members, we wouldn't have a show.
Chris: And so I'm very grateful. And if you haven't signed up yet, I do still have
Chris: the bootleg promo code. That's a fantastic deal.
Chris: It's so good I don't say the price on air. But it gets you access to Linux Unplugged's
Chris: bootleg feed and the no-ads feed you get to pick, as well as the launch bootleg
Chris: feed, which much like this has extra content that just doesn't make it in the main show.
Chris: And there's always a little additional context in there, too.
Chris: So thank you, everybody, who supports us with a boost or with membership,
Chris: because right now you make the show possible.
Chris: We really do appreciate it. Thank you very much. And on with the show, gentlemen.
Brent: I'll see a little bag of boosts here and we're gonna start off with our baller the dude abides,
Brent: Now the Dutabide sent in a row of McDucks here. 22,222 sets.
Brent: Stop suggesting awesome projects. I'm running out of resources.
Brent: Metalurk X seems promising. I have seen it mentioned a couple times out in the
Brent: wild, but didn't bother deploying it.
Brent: And now because of Linux Unplugged, I have to try it.
Chris: All right, the dude. You know, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised.
Chris: you could set it up and let it just run for a week and then come back to it
Chris: and when you got time to tinker with it because let it run and discover.
Chris: I was over the last couple of days realizing that, so I've got these stupid
Chris: mesh APs. It's great, whatever.
Chris: But IoT devices in particular are so dumb and they will really lock into one particular AP.
Chris: The decision in a mesh AP network happens on the client side And if the client
Chris: side isn't willing to move nodes, it won't.
Chris: And so if the stupid IoT device that's way far away from the AP decides to connect
Chris: to that AP, you basically have to take the mesh nodes offline and make things
Chris: forcibly readjust mess.
Chris: So I was dealing with that. And it was really interesting to watch NetAlertX kind of catch up.
Chris: Oh, this has moved over here. Oh, this device has changed over here. Oh, yeah, right.
Chris: Good job, NetAlertX. You nailed it. So it's worth it. And you can just let it
Chris: run for a bit. and then come back around to it.
Chris: Well, Adversary 17 comes in with a Spaceballs boost. That, of course, is 12,345 sats.
Chris: Adversary says, I have a lot of similar ability for monitoring within my Unify
Chris: dream machine, but I still might set this up. Good find, Mr. Fisher.
Wes: Hey, I think what you just said also works for this.
Chris: You know, yeah. I would love to hear more feedback on the Unify stuff if our
Chris: audience likes the Unify stuff.
Wes: I don't know how much it can pull in, but it did seem like they had a plug-in
Wes: that could also, like if you ended up wanting the Unify data in NetAlert.
Chris: Peanut butter and jelly, West Payne.
Wes: Mm-hmm. Ooh, our buddy, our pal Gene Bean comes in with the RoboDucks.
Wes: In response to Olympia Mike and the Nixbook project and the licensing question,
Wes: Gene makes a great point, which we should have mentioned.
Wes: Keep in mind that if you have contributors and don't also use a CLA or contributor
Wes: license agreement from day one, you can't change the license of the existing
Wes: code later without sign-off from all prior contributors.
Chris: Gene Bean saying go for the CLA? Something to think about. He's right.
Wes: And it's also just worthwhile, you know, thinking about the licensing kind of
Wes: early on and up front is worthwhile.
Chris: Yeah, I agree. It is definitely a good point. Thank you, Gene.
Michael: Yeah, and not having a license. And some people don't, like,
Michael: create a project and don't put a license at all. And that just causes massive craziness.
Chris: That's, I think, kind of where he's at. He's getting popular enough now where
Chris: it's like people are asking rather consistently, what's the license here?
Chris: So they know how to proceed.
Chris: So, Mike, let us know what you end up doing.
Brent: Well, Odyssey, Westra boosted in a couple boosts here for a total of 6,000. 206 Satoshis.
Brent: It turns out they all say Happy New Year.
Chris: Happy New Year!
Wes: Happy New Year!
Chris: Happy New Year!
Wes: The year of the Linux desktop.
Chris: Thank you, Odyssey. Nice to hear from you. Pegdots here with 6,666 sats.
Chris: Well, I'm guessing that Brent doesn't work for Nextcloud anymore.
Chris: So what's he doing now? Is he a traveling salesman in his bang bus?
Chris: As a JB member, I'd be interested to know how much financial value added is
Chris: compared to the boost in streaming. Oh, these are – okay. So we've got two questions here, three questions.
Chris: I know that the functions like Bitcoin value fluctuate.
Chris: Difficult to put in numbers but interested in a rough idea. So think of it –
Chris: okay. So I'll answer that one first.
Chris: So this week where we have – And I think what.
Wes: The question was, how does boosting and streaming compare to memberships in
Wes: terms of supporting the show or something like that?
Chris: Yeah, I think on average, there's still we still probably get significantly
Chris: more support through the membership mechanism on average.
Chris: And so the way we can that and the thing about that is that's we look at as,
Chris: OK, that's the revenue we can plan on.
Wes: Kind of a consistent baseline.
Chris: And then the boost is like, OK, that's like when, you know, you get a bonus,
Chris: you did a lot, you did good, you did. And that's like the extra stuff that goes
Chris: directly to all of us because the show through the memberships is,
Chris: you know, it's barely paying the bills.
Chris: And so it's not really equivalent.
Chris: One sort of serves one function and one serves. And we're very,
Chris: very lucky it worked out that way because really since COVID,
Chris: the ad market has just been destroyed.
Chris: But really in the last few years, it's perhaps turning around,
Chris: but it's still very slow.
Chris: And one thing that I think is very true is as the podcast market has grown,
Chris: the sponsors are looking at different types of shows and different demographics
Chris: than they were a few years ago when we were sort of in our heyday of,
Chris: you know, every spot was sold out.
Chris: And it's just how it goes is, you know, a podcast today is just a much different beast.
Chris: Usually has a celebrity name attached to it if it's very successful.
Wes: Yeah. The ecosystem around it has changed. The ecosystem within has changed.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Who people and what they're marketing towards has changed.
Chris: Yeah. And so for us, it's like the two things are very symbiotic and used differently.
Chris: We really do appreciate both the support. And I know it's, you know,
Chris: it's the thing is, it's like, it's like I've kind of made the equivalent seat with Linux magazines.
Chris: It's like, it's a very niche thing. There's a core audience that loves it.
Chris: The fundamental economic model might not actually be viable with the direct
Chris: commercial market because the
Chris: scale of advertising on the internet now requires essentially millions.
Chris: And so it's where these kinds of direct audience supported things really make
Chris: a difference because it's then made possible by the very niche that's interested in it.
Chris: And I don't think like the Linux magazines could have survived without something.
Chris: They didn't have anything like that.
Chris: And so, you know, they went the way of the dinosaur for the most part.
Chris: Good question. Oh, and then, Brentley, do you have any comment on the NextCloud stuff?
Chris: Besides being a full-time JBer, I'm sure you do other things as well.
Brent: Yeah, I would say good guess on the NextCloud part. I haven't been a NextClouder
Brent: since about, I don't know, May of last year and have been basically,
Brent: what would you call it, Chris, vagabonding
Brent: since then, doing a bunch of JB projects there for a long time.
Brent: We rescued, I don't know if you heard about it, rescued this crazy van that's
Brent: still giving me projects on a daily basis, it seems.
Wes: Yeah, you're kind of restoring that.
Chris: You know something else we don't talk about with you, Brent,
Chris: too, is you are a very handy guy, Brent.
Chris: Like, if Brent needs to work for a couple of days, you know,
Chris: there's friends and family that have projects where they need somebody who can
Chris: go on site and do a lot of really good work with their hands,
Chris: like good, intricate work.
Chris: masonry type work i don't know is that what it's called what is it called that kind of work.
Brent: Uh like i don't know general construction work i'm kind of a generalist i would
Brent: say but you're a fancy experience and i have high standards that most people
Brent: don't have i guess right yeah i.
Chris: Think that's the word i was looking for.
Brent: Basically just yesterday i was doing that like uh i had an uncle near here who
Brent: was like hey i need some electrical work done but i don't know what i'm doing
Brent: and last time i did it i really screwed it up so can you come over and fix all
Brent: my mistakes that i've done for the last decade, and so we did that.
Brent: And it worked out really well.
Chris: And then that was when you come over to my place.
Wes: The other thing you have to know is Brent has a hard time saying no to those kind of requests.
Chris: That's true, too. Yeah.
Wes: Because he's a kind and generous person.
Brent: Basically, I've been chasing, like, hanging out with people I love and chasing
Brent: happiness instead of financial stuff.
Brent: That leaves, you know, my bank account sad, but my soul quite happy.
Wes: He's saying hanging out with people he loves, but he's on the opposite coast. I don't understand.
Brent: Sharing my time with people I love.
Chris: Message received on that one. All right. All right. Wes, you want to take Mr. Facial Hair?
Wes: Yes. The facial hair comes in with 6,000 sats.
Wes: I wanted to shine some light on an area where open source and Linux are doing
Wes: quite well. And it's tabletop gaming.
Chris: Really?
Wes: For example, the D&D game I run uses Nextcloud for content hosting,
Wes: Foundry VTT for our virtual table, and self-hosted Jitsi for player comms.
Wes: Just wanted to get your thoughts on this and see if you all had any fun D&D stories.
Chris: Facial hair, why do you suppose this is? What has attributed this phenomenon?
Chris: And how can we replicate it?
Wes: Thank you for the report.
Chris: That's great.
Wes: I mean, there's a lot of great tools, and you need to accomplish a certain set
Wes: of things to have a good game going. Why not solve them with open source?
Chris: You ever play any D&D?
Wes: Yeah, I like D&D. It's been a while, but I've played many.
Wes: I mean, never super consistent, but I've had many fun D&D experiences over the years.
Chris: Michael, you ever do any D&D?
Michael: I've never played D&D. No.
Chris: Brent, what about you?
Brent: I have never participated. However, I have watched a lot of famous people play
Brent: in the last couple months. and have been invited several times,
Brent: but I feel unprepared, let's say. Daunted.
Michael: Well, I mean, I hope they're not inviting you to be the DM.
Brent: No, no, no, by far not. However, I still feel a way out of my league.
Michael: I feel like this is an opportunity that we could do a collab of like doing like,
Michael: you know, first timers doing D&D.
Chris: Like pair up first timer with a pro or something. I want to learn enough where
Chris: I could just do like commentary on the streams like, oh, he moves over here
Chris: and does this. You know, I don't know.
Chris: I don't know if it's more golf or if it's more wrestling for D&D, but.
Michael: I think it's more. I think it's more golf, maybe.
Chris: Yeah, I think so.
Michael: They have their own dialogue, so you don't want to interact too much.
Michael: but there's actually a few like i haven't done like play dnd but i've seen like
Michael: random videos of people playing dnd because there's a couple uh shows that are
Michael: on youtube where it's just like a bunch of comedians playing dnd and that's
Michael: that's entertaining stuff yeah for sure.
Wes: What's fun too right is they have like all kinds of different types of
Wes: games at this point so one of the first ones i did was actually a star wars themed
Wes: one that a roommate ran and uh it's kind of a new roommate
Wes: and i i came home and another uh roommate was working at a donut shop and so
Wes: they had all these like you know like end of the day donuts like they'd pushed
Wes: um some of the like taking a table out of a room and pushed it in with the main
Wes: kitchen table and the center was filled with donuts and i was like coming home
Wes: and i was like what is happening.
Michael: That sounds like an awesome.
Wes: Introduction it was a great introduction not bad.
Brent: At all i i would say if we want to do a jb dnd at some point maybe a fun stream
Brent: on the holidays or when we're all feeling like we don't have too much work,
Brent: probably our buddy Jason would host that for us.
Wes: That would be great.
Brent: He is a professional D&D-er, so he would organize that for us if we wanted.
Chris: Why am I not surprised?
Brent: And he's listening right now, so hey, Jason.
Chris: Hello, Jason! Alright, thank you everybody who supported the show,
Chris: the members and the boosters.
Chris: When you look at our SAT streamers, 22 of you stream SATs as you listen,
Chris: you collectively stacked 25,340 SATs.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters, it's a humble but appreciated 85,267 sats.
Chris: This can be a thing from time to time because the last two episodes, the sun was shining.
Wes: Crazy. We got sunburned.
Chris: Yeah. We still have our skin peeling.
Chris: You guys really blew us away. What does tend to happen is we kind of go into
Chris: famine. We sort of feast and then we have famine for a bit.
Wes: Like a rain shadow.
Chris: Yeah. So if you've been waiting to support the show, now it could be a good
Chris: time during the famine. We really do appreciate it.
Chris: It's really easy to boost to something like Fountain FM. In fact,
Chris: they're making it easier and
Chris: easier, guys. It's getting crazy what they're doing with the new features.
Chris: There's a whole self-hosted platform out there with things like AlbiHub and
Chris: lots of good apps at podcastapps.com.
Chris: Then you get additional features like transcripts. You get the cloud chapters.
Chris: You get notifications within 90 seconds when a new episode is out.
Chris: Additionally, there's all kinds of new things coming all the time like live
Chris: stream support and more. So check it out at podcastapps.com.
Chris: All right, now, the first pick this week, I think, Brenly, you spotted this
Chris: one, and for a good reason, right?
Chris: This was Copia, I think is maybe how you say it, a cross-platform backup tool
Chris: for the various operating systems out there with some really nice features.
Brent: Yeah, I've been diving into Copia. It was mentioned a couple times by some of
Brent: our listeners as a response to our, you know, several scattered backup episodes
Brent: that we've done in the past.
Chris: And you could consider this one of them.
Brent: Yeah. Here's your mini segment for, you know, give us some feedback on what we're doing wrong.
Brent: But I had a friend who ran into a situation where their laptop was stolen out
Brent: of their apartment while they were there sleeping just overnight.
Brent: And it turns out that person also had a thesis that was due in a week.
Brent: And that was their only copy of pretty much all of the stuff they've created
Brent: in the last couple years.
Brent: So somehow as a crazy story, I won't tell here, they got it back like a random
Brent: stranger came and gave the laptop back.
Brent: I don't know really the whole story there. But anyway, so that situation got much better.
Brent: But it got me thinking, well, I think my duty in this world is to help my friends with their backups.
Brent: And I've been trying to do that for more than a decade.
Brent: But it sounds like there's something to do here.
Brent: So I wanted to set up a backup system for her that just kind of ran in the background.
Brent: she never ever ever had to think about and if
Brent: this kind of situation happened i can just kind of step in and
Brent: help out and copia's sort of fit
Brent: the bill on this one because usually i would reach for a linux only tool
Brent: because i only do support for friends who run linux
Brent: but she was because her laptop
Brent: was stolen given a laptop by her parents which is a windows
Brent: laptop and she was like i might just use it as is so i
Brent: figured okay i need something that's you know cross-platform and
Brent: copia seemed to fit the bill there because the interface is just
Brent: the same on a bunch of different platforms the you
Brent: know three ones we care about and it
Brent: also is serverless which means you know it could just kind of
Brent: run on its own on a laptop which is all that this friend in particular and many
Brent: other friends i can think of and family members have so i kind of started diving
Brent: into copia as maybe the next way i can help a bunch of people and if i can just
Brent: suggest one tool for all of them, that would make my life easier.
Brent: So the things I loved about Copia is cross-platform, as I mentioned.
Brent: It seems really quite modern. It's written in Go, which is nice and fast.
Brent: But also there's a lot of people who've been contributing to it.
Brent: I think I saw 170 contributors, which is something I always care about.
Brent: But there's some cool stuff here. So it can back up to, you know,
Brent: Amazon S3 and Backblaze and those kind of things by default. Yeah.
Brent: one thing i thought our little crew here would really love is
Brent: it can also if you have r clone installed it
Brent: can also control our clone as sort
Brent: of an interface to our clone and support a
Brent: lot of what our clone can do as a back end so the options for back ends is plenty
Brent: and i think you'd be hard pressed to find a back end that doesn't work for you
Brent: and it just runs really well the other The thing I liked is the interface is
Brent: super configurable if you want it to be,
Brent: but it can also be fairly straightforward.
Brent: So it's a nice blend for someone who's not that tech savvy who has it running,
Brent: but then I can just pop in and make some adjustments whenever I need to.
Wes: That sounds like a low-key compliment, but this is the QA guy over here, right?
Wes: So that means the interface wasn't riddled with a bunch of obvious bugs or defects or silly things.
Brent: Well, I found one or two, but they weren't critical.
Chris: So we'll get it. Of course. Of course.
Brent: But I would say give it a try. I've been using Borg for myself for the last
Brent: couple of years, and this actually is getting me to start thinking if I should
Brent: switch to it permanently for my own stuff, too.
Chris: So not only does it have support for a lot of the cloud storage providers we've
Chris: all heard of, but then, as you might expect, it also has support for any WebDAV
Chris: or SFTP or like Brent said, our clone support, too, which really opens it up.
Chris: So that's pretty nice because, you know, you could have one person you're helping
Chris: that uses their Dropbox and another person you're helping uses their Google Cloud storage.
Chris: But it's the same interface and options sitting on top of that.
Wes: You don't have to keep learning new tools.
Chris: Yeah. It's Apache 2 is the license on that. And, yes, it does save everything
Chris: encrypted locally. Yeah.
Chris: before it sends them up to the cloud provider. Nice one, Brent.
Chris: Good find. Sorry to hear about that story with the laptop. That's awful.
Brent: Yeah, and it's really a thanks to the audience for suggesting this one.
Brent: I had it noted for future reference, and the future is now.
Chris: Ah, isn't it funny? Later becomes now. Well, since I was talking,
Chris: you know, Blu-rays and whatnot, you could also just go a little simpler with
Chris: something called Power ISO.
Chris: It's not a free software app, but it is available for Linux,
Chris: and you can probably guess what this does. It's an application for burning your
Chris: disks and making your file systems and all of that, creating virtual drives
Chris: or bootable disks or whatever you want.
Chris: I think people even use it somehow to make Windows USB boot disks.
Chris: I couldn't speak to that.
Chris: But it's an application that very much invokes a 90s design.
Chris: In fact, the screenshot is from a Vista era, a Windows desktop.
Chris: So that's how you know it's good, right? Because if you're dealing with something
Chris: that burns disks, you want to have a retro look. That's why I went with an 80s
Chris: Tui, and they have a very 90s or maybe early aughts Vista theme.
Chris: But they just released a new version on October 24th, 2025, so the project is
Chris: still very active and is free.
Chris: and works tried it out so this is you know more akin to like the typical uh
Chris: things you might have back in the day to burn your disk and stuff.
Brent: Well i think i have a pick from the chat room they suggested a project chris
Brent: when you were talking about your blue vault yeah that is this teleco project
Brent: oh teleco yeah it looks like it does a bunch of like well i don't quite know
Brent: does anybody else know it better than i do because i'm just gonna wing it.
Michael: Teleco is a kde project yeah and it's
Michael: uh it's basically like it's more of an inventory system it's
Michael: not really like a day it's not really a database tracking thing
Michael: but and let's it's like a manual inserting of like keeping track
Michael: of basically anything you want some information about uh so you could you know
Michael: use it to track your documents but also in a sense of like labeling everything
Michael: or you know your music could be associated your books could be associated like
Michael: all sorts of stuff it's more of a just a overall,
Michael: collections of anything so like if you have a you know digital comic books or
Michael: something you could use it as a keeping track of that sort of stuff but it's
Michael: more of a manual setup yeah.
Chris: I did seriously consider it i have it like installed on all my machines and
Chris: i was playing really yeah yeah nice.
Brent: So thanks to swami for that one.
Michael: But i i got kind of,
Michael: burned out on the manual part of it so.
Chris: Yeah it's worth checking out though people are interested so i'll toss a link
Chris: to that in the show notes too but wes that wasn't what you had up your sleeve was it.
Wes: It was not no so um okay well you were getting getting the coding done or the
Wes: vibing done whichever it was yeah um i was trying to test it right and so i
Wes: was getting it to build checking it did build on my machine i wanted to try
Wes: it there was a few things we had to fix in particular some tests i'm.
Chris: Betting you probably didn't have a stash of blu-rays.
Wes: No. And I was using this laptop, and it doesn't even have an optical drive.
Chris: No.
Wes: So I go, I finally get it built, and I go and run it, and the first thing it
Wes: does is say, hey, buddy, you don't have an optical drive. I'm not doing anything.
Chris: Yeah. After you had a problem with that, by the way, it inspired me to add drive detection now.
Chris: So it accommodates all kinds of different systems with different drive setups.
Wes: Oh, nice.
Chris: So you did inspire a new feature.
Wes: Okay, good. And so I was like, okay, well, I could always spin up a virtual
Wes: machine. That'd be pretty easy. But I was just curious, like,
Wes: well, how hard is it to just emulate one of these, right?
Chris: Yeah, I should have thought of this.
Wes: And so I found CDEMU. CDEMU.
Chris: Well, and it looks like as recent as of July 8th, 2018, version 3.2 is out.
Wes: Yeah, it has a website that's appropriately old looking, though,
Wes: right? I think you'll see.
Chris: It definitely fits the 90s vibe.
Wes: So it's retro, yeah.
Michael: What is with all these different tools having such a retro thing?
Chris: I don't know. I leaned into it, too. I like it.
Wes: And I mean, it's like a super simple little UI. They have a GUI for it.
Wes: So you run a daemon that does the emulation.
Chris: Right? Is it a TUI?
Wes: No.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: Oh, there is a CLI app that's a client for it.
Michael: The disappointment in your voice.
Wes: But they have, like, a nice little, like...
Chris: Oh, an actual GUI?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Like a real GUI?
Wes: Like a real GUI.
Chris: Oh. Wow. That's fancy. That is really fancy. It actually looks GTK, perhaps?
Wes: Yeah. I would suspect so.
Chris: Yeah, okay.
Wes: But what's cool is it's open source.
Chris: Yeah, that is cool.
Wes: Of course.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: No, but you can...
Chris: And it still works, even though it hasn't had an update in a while,
Chris: right? Obviously. Oh, no, actually, some of this stuff on GitHub has been updated
Chris: a little more recently, at least.
Wes: GPL 2. So it does both sides. So not only can you load in ISOs and it looks
Wes: like you have a CD in there, right?
Chris: Yeah, it's nice.
Wes: And like even it'll just present an empty one, but you can create blanks and it shows up as writable.
Wes: So I was able to test your program end to end without having to drive at all.
Chris: Meanwhile, I'm over here buying 10 packs.
Wes: And then it leaves an ISO file on the file system that I could then mount and
Wes: check that it got all the files.
Chris: You could have told a guy this, I don't know, the other day before I bought
Chris: another pack of Blu-rays for more testing.
Wes: So you should see if you can get the LLM to make us some NixOS integration tests.
Chris: Right?
Wes: Run the full thing and try to burn...
Wes: Because there's a Nix OS service for it.
Michael: You do need to have the full testing for the disks. Yeah.
Michael: So it's like, I mean, it is sort of save a little bit of time,
Michael: but you still need to burn and waste anyway.
Chris: What hurts the most is like when it starts to burn and fails almost immediately,
Chris: and I get like one stripe, and then you can never use the disk again.
Chris: And I've used like 400 kilobytes of 50 gigs, and I'm like, you've got to be kidding.
Michael: Have you looked at the price in terms of like gigabytes to, you know,
Michael: like the disks, or like rewritable Blu-rays?
Chris: Yeah, that's a good idea. I was thinking much like, you know,
Chris: cold storage, but rewritable would be handy, too.
Chris: Well, this is pretty neat. C-D-E-M-U. And it is at cdemu.org,
Chris: or we'll put a link in the show notes. I'm going to look at this, Wes, after the show.
Chris: I wish you would have told me about it earlier, but I'm glad to know about it now.
Chris: I can't believe that. It's so stupid, too. I guess, you know, learn.
Chris: It's what it really comes down to, of course, is there's just a lot of little
Chris: parameters you've got to pass the burn command.
Wes: And as you said, right, it kind of attunes you more to doing,
Wes: like, test-driven development.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one of the things I was telling Wes is as I started
Chris: doing this, I'm like, well, I better just figure out a way to test this because
Chris: I can't every time I need to run through this thing burn a disk.
Chris: So I had to create a bunch of little unit tests for individual functionality
Chris: so that I could test everything I could before I actually had to burn.
Brent: I feel like this also um perfectly describes your different approaches to solving
Brent: a problem this would always be the west approach and yeah well chris physical media right.
Chris: Well, if anybody wants to take a look at it, you should be able to just pick
Chris: right up and get working with it.
Chris: I'd love somebody to help me with some of the basic features and run through it.
Chris: Or if anybody wants to triage PRs or issues as they come in,
Chris: I'd appreciate any of that. And we'll have it linked in the show notes.
Chris: You know it's going to happen.
Brent: Do you need disc donations?
Chris: Maybe, eventually. Well, I bought another pack, so that'll be good for a little while.
Chris: I haven't actually backed anything up yet. I mean, I haven't testing backed
Chris: things up, but, you know. And every time I wanted to use like unique stuff so
Chris: I could test that the database search was working.
Chris: So it's like a lot of me copying files off the NAS to my local system and waiting
Chris: for all that to copy and then waiting for it to burn. Oh, my goodness.
Chris: Software development is ridiculous. I don't know how anybody does this crap.
Chris: I'll tell you what. All right. Well, that's it for us. We'd love to hear from
Chris: you. Of course, you can send us a boost or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: You could also make it a Tuesday on a Sunday and join us live.
Chris: The mumble room is kicking right now. We have our live chat.
Chris: Of course, we do this on Sundays at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: Wes, you got like a hot power tip for them if they want any extra metadata or
Chris: context around what we talked about things? Do you have any hot tips, Wes?
Wes: Oh, yeah. How about like a magical JSON file that lets you skip around via the
Wes: use of chapters, cloud chapters too, right?
Wes: So it's last decade's hype word built into the chapters.
Chris: What it really means is if we screw up, we can fix it and you get the fix. That's right.
Wes: Yeah, you don't have to download a new MP3. You just get the new fix.
Chris: Which is great for us.
Wes: Yeah. But better than that, we've got transcripts. So you can scrub through the whole thing.
Wes: If you can't hear us and you just want to get a sense of what we said in the
Wes: episode, you want to index it, you want to search it.
Chris: You know what we've never made a call out for? And if anybody's looking for
Chris: a 2026 software project, it'd be really neat to make those searchable.
Chris: Have a front end that sits on top of them. Every transcript is linked in the
Chris: RSS feed sitting out at an endpoint that you could pull in.
Chris: And if anybody wants to make a searchable database out of that so people can
Chris: find keywords what we talked about, that'd be a really helpful tool.
Chris: We'd really appreciate that.
Chris: Links to everything we talked about today. Yep, those are on our website. You know that.
Chris: LinuxUnplugged.com slash 649er. That'll get you the links for what we talked about today.
Chris: Lots of great episodes over there. In fact, you might even say an entire back
Chris: catalog of a whole 648 episodes, if you can believe it. I couldn't believe it.
Chris: Lots of great shows over at, well, at least a few good shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: We always appreciate if you check those out, too. Thanks so much for joining
Chris: us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program. And you're going to see
Chris: us right back here next week.