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, after a family member's Windows install ate itself this
Chris: week, we're donning our capes and swooping in to save the day.
Chris: And naturally, we're going to overcomplicate everything. Coming up,
Chris: our plan to switch Wes's brother over to Linux.
Chris: And then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts,
Chris: picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings
Chris: to our virtual lug. Hello, mobile room.
Mumble: Hello. Hey. Good morning.
Brent: Oh, hey there.
Chris: That is a great crowd. Hello up there in the quiet listening to.
Chris: And if you'd like to join our mumble room, we've got the details on our website.
Chris: Low latency live Opus audio stream. It is fantastic.
Chris: Also, good morning to our friends over at Define Networking.
Chris: Go to define.net slash unplugged and check out Manage Nebula.
Chris: The easiest way to build a fast, resilient private network on the open source
Chris: Nebula platform. We love, we use.
Chris: I got more Nebula networks than ever now. It's fantastic. Big ones, small ones.
Chris: And now every new network includes a free managed lighthouse.
Chris: So you can connect your first machines instantly.
Chris: They provide the infrastructure. You bring your host. But if you prefer full
Chris: control like we do, you can self-host your own lighthouse.
Chris: Or I might consider this run both.
Chris: Greater resiliency. You have that flexibility. I just love how powerful that is.
Chris: So go get started. 100 hosts for free. no credit card required defined.net slash,
Chris: unplug that is defined.net slash unplugged go redefine your vpn experience today
Chris: and a big thank you to defined,
Chris: for sponsoring this here podcast defined.net slash unplugged,
Chris: Well, we just have a quick housekeeping, but we wanted to give a shout out to
Chris: our buddy, Noah, who is about to reach 500 episodes.
Wes: Impressive.
Chris: The Ask Noah program going strong. And they're celebrating.
Chris: And I just wanted to help spread the word. If you are in the St.
Chris: Paul area in Minneapolis, on Tuesday, August 4th, 2026, they're going to have a episode 500 party.
Chris: So keep an ear out or an eye out on the Ask Noah show notes for more deets when they have them.
Wes: Gosh, I wish we could make it.
Chris: I know.
Wes: But if anyone out there can, do give a hello from us.
Chris: And tell us how it went. So this is why I'm giving them a shout,
Chris: because deep down I would love to go.
Chris: But, you know, I looked it up. It'd be about $500 in a two-way flight or three
Chris: days driving each way for 10 hours, which I'm considering. But the problem is.
Wes: You probably need to organize some more around that.
Chris: We're also going to be like getting back just like the week before from our trip to Brent's.
Brent: Well, if you drive to my place, that's the first day done. You just keep going.
Chris: I had that thought, but I have the wife and I'll have a Wes.
Chris: So I got to, you know, I can't just bail on him.
Chris: But I thought like I could leave from Brent's, come down in through Montana, right?
Chris: And then just head on over. I really did think about it. I really would like
Chris: to go because 500 episodes is a huge deal. It's very rare in podcasting.
Chris: So if you can make it, go give him a shout, maybe buy him a beer.
Chris: Don't let him buy you the beer. He'll try.
Wes: Convince him to do, you know, some more so we can make it for the next time.
Chris: There you go. Maybe we'll make it for the 600 or something like that.
Chris: All right, so this is one of those situations where every now and then a window
Chris: of opportunity opens up.
Chris: One person's misfortune is the podcast's opportunity.
Wes: That is right, yeah. And we are here to take full advantage.
Chris: So tell us what happened, Wes, what happened?
Wes: Yeah, okay, so my brother, Alan, he has a Linux laptop, but his primary computer
Wes: is a Windows desktop. He uses it for a lot of things. Some of that's gaming.
Wes: We can talk more about that.
Wes: But, you know, as you do, you're watching a video with VLC, beloved media player
Wes: that works just fine on Windows.
Chris: Frequent use case, yeah.
Wes: Yeah. Full screen.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: It crashed.
Chris: VLC locked up or?
Wes: Yeah. And so then he hits Alt F4.
Chris: Sure.
Wes: You know, like VLC stops responding.
Chris: Gotta get out of it.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: And then the entire machine froze. And so, okay, force a hard reset,
Wes: get it rebooted, start looking into it.
Wes: shows up login screen seems everything's okay boot seems normal but after login,
Wes: a blank screen with just the mouse cursor no desktop, no start menu,
Wes: no taskbar no explorer.exe does he have a terminal.
Brent: Though that's all.
Wes: You need so this is where it was kind of weird because like when you open up
Wes: the task manager and check things out, that worked that became his main way
Wes: to control the system because.
Chris: You can run from the task.
Wes: Manager and so he ended up doing that Wow. Resorting his launcher.
Wes: Yes. It even claimed that Explorer was running.
Wes: And so basically he had to go just use it as his launcher. As he said,
Wes: he basically had 90% of a computer because he could play videos still. He could launch stuff.
Wes: He just had to do it to the task manager and there was no other way.
Wes: I think he was doing a little bit of terminal.
Chris: It sounds like something happened, maybe like a GPU driver glitch or something.
Chris: And Windows really, really messed up and ate itself. kind of.
Wes: Yeah, and this is where you're like, okay, this seems recoverable, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Big props to my brother. Like, he definitely entered the, like,
Wes: okay, I'll fix this. I can troubleshoot, right?
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And Windows kind of tore that down piece by piece. So, of course,
Wes: he, like, restarted Explorer, ran some system scans, even rebooted into safe
Wes: mode. That did show the desktop.
Chris: Okay. Oh.
Wes: So, like, the GPU was kind of working. He did get some advice to,
Wes: like, maybe uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver.
Chris: I was wondering, because it's starting to sound more and more like graphics.
Wes: So, he did that. Even tried creating a new admin account.
Wes: That was another thing of, like, go make yourself a separate account because
Wes: it could be like a user profile sort of thing totally yeah well trying to make
Wes: the new admin account just led to a permanent getting ready screen no didn't
Wes: solve anything didn't finish,
Wes: uh so then that was just sort of another broken profile so something's going.
Chris: On with user creation.
Wes: Yeah even in safe mode yes even in safe mode so,
Wes: at that point we kept trying a few other things like we you know i had him go,
Wes: get like a terminal in the PE support environment and we did like an SFC scan
Wes: and check the disk and you know did a few of the things that we could find,
Wes: any guide or you know ask the LM sort of like what are the best strategies here
Wes: I'm guessing at this point.
Brent: You're helping remotely is this where you're okay that's.
Wes: A special kind of challenge.
Chris: Too especially as not a daily Windows driver.
Wes: No mostly only whenever I need
Wes: it very rarely for my own task when we do something on the show honestly.
Brent: Did you Windows MCP is that what happened here there you.
Wes: Go actually I was going to say that could be one thing that if we were going
Wes: to really have to get into it but uh that was going to have to be set up from
Wes: the sort of weirdly compromised environment.
Chris: Yeah hilariously though the solution there right you set up windows mcp and
Chris: then give him a telegram chat and he just launches all of his programs from.
Wes: Telegram right it might still be the best way to use windows so yeah that's
Wes: true so like we kept trying things nothing nothing really solving it um and,
Wes: figured okay well these modern windows systems they have a reset option yeah
Wes: right like it won't wipe your data but you do have to reinstall programs kind
Wes: of rolls windows back to a fresher windows install that's.
Chris: The move i think.
Wes: Yeah and so being safe and all that kind of like got things ready uh he had
Wes: a usb drive and did some backups onto that some of the critical stuff just to
Wes: make sure like if something went wrong nothing was going to be lost right wise go try to do a reset,
Wes: unable to download cloud install.
Brent: What network problem.
Wes: Nope network was working great because he was actually he transferred some files over the network.
Chris: Oh right okay wow.
Wes: Actually he had to because of course he goes to get a new usb drive right and,
Wes: as it as it comes it's installed with fat 32.
Brent: Brand new usb.
Wes: Drive or maybe windows formatted it that way.
Chris: In this year.
Wes: It was a new drive oh wow yeah so of course then he had some video files to
Wes: back up which were bigger than four gigabytes oh no so it's being the whole
Wes: thing that's so we knew that it was working because he had to use the network
Wes: to transfer those files yeah.
Chris: Wow i bet it's for mac compatibility or something.
Wes: Yeah right i mean what compatibility is kind of weird huh geez.
Chris: So he's like okay so he's having to figure out how to transfer files over the
Chris: network without actually having the windows desktop so he's having to launch
Chris: these individual elements through task.
Wes: Manager and he got that done actually without much of my help wow.
Chris: I mean that is dedication some people would just nope out at this point i'm
Chris: impressed okay all right so okay i have not done this process for a very long
Chris: time but when you're trying to do the restore do you have to like log into a
Chris: microsoft account i imagine.
Wes: Oh that's a good question,
Wes: No, I'm not sure, actually.
Chris: Is it restoring from a local partition?
Wes: I think some setups have that capability.
Chris: Yeah, okay. But it says, what now? It can't restore it? It couldn't do the restore process?
Wes: Correct.
Chris: How can it not do the restore process? Wipe the drive, just re-image it.
Chris: I don't know, there's a way, right?
Wes: And I think we tried a few things because it did have the ability to talk to it.
Wes: Maybe there was a login that he missed or something, but you're doing it from
Wes: a pretty basic sort of environment, right?
Wes: like this is yeah this is windows after all and again you know,
Wes: not a windows expert and also was remote and we didn't even do like a high bandwidth
Wes: like most of this was just done over some sessions we were both on the on telegram,
Wes: so we weren't even on a call or anything so i probably could have provided better
Wes: support i will be the first but.
Chris: I was doing i was doing obs tech support over chat it's sort of a similar thing
Chris: back and forth oh yeah try this yeah okay.
Wes: So probably like if we maybe on the other computer download like a windows iso
Wes: and then you know we could have reinstalled obviously that was going to be one
Wes: plan or don't try to do a reset that way uh but all of the default guidance
Wes: paths were basically failing one after another.
Chris: And your brother alan must be
Chris: losing faith in windows one moment after another as he goes through this.
Wes: Process yeah and he never really loved it it was just you know he knew how to
Wes: use it he doesn't game a lot yeah gaming,
Wes: yeah um but he's been linux curious obviously like you know he's listened to
Wes: some of the show he uh i talk about linux with him all the time obviously and
Wes: he does have a laptop that It does have Linux on it. So he's a big split.
Chris: Do you remember what distro is on the laptop right now?
Wes: Oh, good question. Mint?
Chris: I was going to say Mint is what my recollection was.
Wes: Yeah, or maybe just Ubuntu.
Chris: Okay. All right. So he's not totally new to it, open to the idea,
Chris: assuming the workflow for gaming is the big one.
Wes: And some dev. Yeah, he's been experimenting with doing some Python development,
Wes: so having something that doesn't make that overly crazy is not a bad idea.
Wes: and then another bit of compatibility is he does use some of the office suite oh yeah,
Wes: primarily and this is actually the kind of the toughest part is um powerpoint,
Wes: but he doesn't use it he's not in the he's not in the position of like i got
Wes: to make this deck that i exchange for this work reason or whatever he actually
Wes: uses it more as a creative process for like storyboarding and kind of like outlining a.
Chris: Tool he's familiar with.
Wes: Yes and so that's actually another area that it turns out he might be open to
Wes: using something else so it was an area to look at i guess there's some like
Wes: there's lin office which is sort of a streamlined setup to run office in a Windows
Wes: VM and like try to make it as smooth as possible.
Chris: There's a lot of great web presentation apps now too.
Wes: There are, yeah. So I think somewhere between, he may just like lean into using
Wes: something like Caden Live or a video editing app and doing things in there.
Wes: Because a lot of it, I guess, was doing some animations and stuff.
Wes: Or as you say, like there are now a lot of other alternative presentation apps.
Wes: And actually I found a specific one. I couldn't tell if it was open source or
Wes: not, but it was like a new storyboarding app that had a Linux environment.
Brent: Cool.
Wes: And Lookprint is specifically for storyboarding. So it was interesting to see.
Wes: And of course, there are, even if
Wes: you do want Office, even besides just LibreOffice, there are multiple WPS.
Wes: There's like a, I don't know, I don't need that, so I'm not an expert.
Wes: But just looking and checking, there still are quite a number of different Office
Wes: suites, some with more or less compatibility or the ribbon and all of that.
Chris: They're going to have users for a long time.
Wes: Yeah. So what I was discovering is...
Wes: Maybe, you know, any taste from Microsoft is now being slowly beaten out of
Wes: him as part of this procedure. But for whatever the reason, or,
Wes: you know, he's already using a lot of open source software. So that's,
Wes: as we like to say, kind of the first little seedling step that you can try and
Wes: plant when you're doing a conversion like this.
Wes: He even joked with me, and this is where it started, was like,
Wes: well, maybe it's time I just InstaBipe and install Linux.
Chris: Yeah, there we go.
Brent: There's the window.
Chris: That's the window.
Brent: Yes.
Wes: I didn't, I wasn't trying to push. I mean, I've suggested it in the past, of course.
Wes: I always mention that Proton's getting really good, but that was a change.
Chris: You know, I can understand it because you just, if you're following the tech
Chris: news a little bit, you do keep hearing about advances with Linux gaming.
Chris: I think that's in the general tech news.
Chris: And then talking to you, I'm sure he's gotten some pretty good insights into that.
Brent: On the Steam machine too, right? That's a huge boon for Linux gaming.
Wes: And you know he does he does like he does play a lot of games but he's not playing
Wes: like the crazy anti-cheat triple a ones we did some light random checking might
Wes: do another pass of going to proton gb and checking things out and for the most
Wes: part they all seem like on lock.
Chris: Is he open to a different distribution than the one that's on his laptop.
Wes: Yeah so i think that and actually this was pretty fun because he went and did
Wes: his own little survey of asking a few of the different element i think he asked
Wes: gemini and claude maybe another um to sort of see interesting well what should i be running yeah.
Chris: Yeah what was the general consensus.
Wes: Uh i we got pop os okay uh we got nobara which is based on fedora and kind of
Wes: aimed at gaming and content creation uh and then we got linux mint and then
Wes: i think those were from gemini and i think claude brought in bazite.
Chris: Okay fair enough what i don't hear in there is standard fedora i didn't even
Chris: hear a standard Ubuntu, and I didn't hear a Nix OS.
Wes: No. No.
Wes: And then, so, of course, I suggest XOS. And then he goes and asks the bot about it.
Chris: And what's it say?
Wes: It's actually pretty negative on the idea.
Chris: Oh, really?
Wes: Well, it's like, you know, it violates the file system hierarchy,
Wes: and that could break stuff, and it might make it harder to run the wine stuff.
Wes: He does also use fruity loops and make music and stuff. So he doesn't use any
Wes: crazy VSTs, I don't think, but that's another factor of potential.
Chris: I mean, that is kind of fair. That is fair criticism.
Wes: Yeah, and then he mentioned, you know, you have to edit you can't just apt install
Wes: or dnf install i think is the example it is well i think that's a feature well
Wes: yes but you know you have to go edit this text file in a obscured really.
Brent: Hard sounds super yeah.
Wes: Um so he was getting some mixed messaging let's just say that's.
Chris: Fair i could see it i could definitely from that perspective too right yeah yeah.
Wes: And And here's the key part, I think, some extra context. There's NixOS.
Wes: And then there's what we've been doing lately, which is Nix OS plus an LLM.
Chris: Yeah. Sort of LLM generated Nix OS.
Wes: Right.
Chris: LLM guided Nix OS.
Wes: And that is, I think, so like, I think that take he got was basically assuming.
Chris: This is a whole new pitch.
Wes: Yes. Because the take he got was totally calibrated for like the old days.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Where you had, like, if he was going to do that, and it didn't necessarily know
Wes: that like I'm willing to be a support and help him and onboard and all that
Wes: kind of stuff, which I am.
Wes: but in the old days you're going to have to go figure out the NixOS wiki and
Wes: go look at a bunch of examples like you want a new user to figure out a NixOS
Wes: config of course no I'm like well no,
Wes: let's get a NixOS config crafted for him and then he can interface with that
Wes: and have a bot maintain it teach him how to use it update it engage as much
Wes: or as little as he wants ask about it this is beautiful,
Wes: and then so that I realized was like ah because it's if he was just making like
Wes: a living room pc or is primarily gaming and there wasn't a bunch else then like
Wes: bazite could be great or something like that there's a lot of good options.
Chris: If he was just doing steam.
Wes: Yes but it felt like he also kind of expressed right he'd just been burned by
Wes: the computer he wanted something that just worked right that like he had a computer
Wes: he could use because at this point it's been like over a week where he's kind
Wes: of been in this like semi-workable computer state,
Wes: i don't think he's been playing any games it's just like it's.
Chris: Not uh he's using an nvidia card yes and you know my personal experience is
Chris: nothing has been as rock solid as nyx would stick into the gpu driver and making sure everything works.
Wes: So it just felt like to answer the brief like if you allow the combo of llm
Wes: plus nyx right get something because nyx is kind of like an operating system
Wes: toolkit and if you have something that can help a new person orchestrate that yeah,
Wes: put the pieces they want together with the toolkit without having to be an expert
Wes: in how to compose the toolkit yourself,
Wes: then maybe that unlocks something that is otherwise maybe not quite out there.
Chris: So you could almost envision a world where you set up somebody like your brother
Chris: with a system, a base Nix config, and then an icon in the toolbar that just
Chris: like you click this and it just opens open code, right?
Wes: I like that idea.
Chris: And then anything he wants to do, he just goes to that and he changes he wants to.
Wes: And maybe, you know, pre-configure it to you so it knows how to like read some
Wes: initialization stuff so it has the context, like here's where the config is,
Wes: here's how the system's managed.
Chris: You know, agents MD that says, this is what you are, this is where your config lives.
Brent: Yeah, I've been playing with recently like an expert Nix OS agent,
Brent: basically. It's like, here's all the stuff I normally run.
Brent: And oh yeah, by the way, there's this official like MCP over here.
Brent: So you can learn all about Nix if you want. And don't make mistakes.
Chris: Basically. Good. You got to include that.
Brent: Yeah, that's an important one.
Chris: I mean, this is, I mean, I know, I think a lot of people would be listening
Chris: going from Windows to Nix. It's kind of a crazy jump.
Wes: Yeah, this is a new Linux user. What are you doing?
Chris: You guys are a bunch of Nix heads over complicating this. But I would actually
Chris: like to to make the pitch that I think it's quite reasonable because my son
Chris: Dylan has been using it for years.
Chris: well over a year now. And we've tried, we tried Fedora, we tried Arch,
Chris: I think initially Pop! OS, even before that.
Chris: And what has really been fantastic about Nix OS is it really just,
Chris: like it locks that driver in.
Chris: And it creates this situation where I can load 32-bit libraries and all of the
Chris: Steam stuff he needs for like the two months he's playing that game.
Chris: And then when he's done with that game, we just go in and clean those 32-bit
Chris: lines out and he rebuilds and his system is pristine again and for a gaming
Chris: system keeping it pristine like that and keeping it lean and mean it does matter,
Chris: and it's it just really excels at that then additionally you have a
Chris: massive package repo to pull from so like all the launchers that might be out
Chris: there for minecraft or you know all the other games they're in there and if
Chris: they're not in there it's so easy to get flat packs working or app images,
Chris: and you can even declaratively install those so they're just always there when they need them that.
Wes: Did come because i was just thinking like okay like let's say he did use Novara
Wes: or this other thing like okay I'm gonna have to A get a little more familiar
Wes: with that system which is totally fine I mean I like learning about Linux systems
Wes: but and then just have to deal with like,
Wes: what is their package support like? And then, okay, you might have a higher
Wes: hit rate of download some binary or install some deb or whatever,
Wes: but if that doesn't work, then what does it look like to get that software there?
Wes: And the combination of how much with the picks and just stuff we run into that
Wes: either has a flake or is already in Nix packages, and then,
Wes: that I know that it's very possible to build Nix packages from just about anything,
Wes: and there's a lot of templates for whatever the thing happens to be,
Wes: and gotten a lot more familiar with making random binaries work, It just felt like,
Wes: to get stuff running, Nix might actually be the best way.
Chris: For the stuff that's not in the repo or the stuff you want that's newer than
Chris: what's in the repo. Yeah.
Brent: Another thing I've been thinking is a huge lesson recently that we often overlook
Brent: when we're trying to switch people like this is just rollbacks.
Brent: Like the entire situation that he ran into with Windows, if he could do a simple
Brent: rollback to like a week ago when everything was working, that would have made
Brent: his situation so much simpler, right?
Brent: And NixOS makes that really beautiful because rolling back is like,
Brent: you hit down when you're rebooting, you hit enter and you're done.
Brent: It's like super, super user friendly.
Brent: So I think like a hard requirement for me now with bringing these kind of people
Brent: to Linux is like, you have to have rollbacks because it's just cheap insurance. Why not?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: However you get them, having a rollback is super worthwhile in that situation,
Wes: especially in remote support where it's like, okay, roll to something that's
Wes: useful. then I can come look at why it won't upgrade or we can pick a time to do support.
Chris: Well, let's actually just spend a moment with that because the remote situation
Chris: with a Nix OS is going to be different than any other distro that you would provide him, right?
Chris: Because the beauty here is the situation you just had where you're not on a
Chris: phone, you're not on a video call, you're not in person, you're doing it over Telegram.
Chris: You could pull up his Nix config in a GitHub repo and check it out on your system,
Chris: find the problem or add the thing he needs, check it back in.
Chris: And then with a couple of commands on his side, he could pull that new config
Chris: in that you fixed remotely without ever SSHing into his machine.
Chris: And boom, Robert's his uncle. He now has a working system or he has that thing installed.
Chris: And Wes did the work for him without ever having to even connect to his system.
Chris: It's like, and you could do it asynchronously. So like, hey,
Chris: Wes, could you do this for me? And then like a couple hours later when you're
Chris: back at the machine, you do it for him. And then tomorrow he does the update and he gets it.
Chris: And you just, there are ways you could do that with distros.
Chris: You could do that with just about every distro, but this is built in.
Wes: It's like the default operating mode. And the whole config is like super easy
Wes: to read. I can tell exactly what it was he was trying to do or what that wasn't working.
Chris: And he clearly has the technical capabilities to be able to tell the differences
Chris: so he could see, oh, what did Wes do and learn from that.
Wes: Right.
Chris: That's just really cool because he can review it.
Wes: And if I did need to do remote support over a mesh network or whatever,
Wes: it's, you know, It's not a big, complicated graphics environment or something.
Wes: It's the same thing, right?
Wes: Making an edit to a file and doing a system rebuild.
Chris: It's huge.
Wes: To his credit, he was definitely concerned about, like, yeah,
Wes: how do I make this reliable? How do I know it'll work? How do I know I'm in
Wes: control and can operate in it? So, like, when I first pitched...
Wes: the idea of like having the LLM as a helper or guide, I think his experience
Wes: was shaped mostly by using something in a browser tab.
Chris: Of course.
Wes: And like, that can be, it's still a great way to ask about NixOS and Nix and all that.
Wes: But I think it'll be an interesting shift if we try this to see the experience
Wes: of like, oh, this thing can just manage the system.
Chris: It can use tools and it can call these things.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: It reads the config.
Wes: And then he also was worried like, well, what if like, what if it's offline
Wes: or, you know, like I don't want to pay for this or, you know,
Wes: like something like that.
Wes: and i think he didn't quite appreciate yet and this will be another piece that
Wes: i'm curious to see land is the,
Wes: because it's you know the nix really makes everything like you only need it
Wes: when you want to make changes
Wes: and you can learn to make a lot of changes yes exactly and you can learn to
Wes: make a lot of changes yourself right like okay maybe maybe if you're a newbie
Wes: and trying to make a massive restructuring of your setup that's going to be
Wes: difficult by yourself but that's mostly not what you're doing if you have a
Wes: working setup it's like enabling one more service or adding another,
Wes: yeah or adding another like the
Wes: most common one is just adding another package to the list of packages.
Chris: Which is super simple.
Wes: Which is typing the name of the package for the most part.
Brent: I think I would also argue that those changes are really inexpensive in the
Brent: sense that a lot of the lower end models can handle NixOS very, very easily.
Brent: And so you don't need the biggest and greatest model to handle a little NixOS
Brent: config. So even some of the free low limit open code go stuff that they let you use is totally good.
Brent: he'll never hit the limit on that just changing his NixOS config so I think
Brent: that's actually a really nice pairing.
Chris: Yeah you can model shop you can use less powerful models for this and like Wes
Chris: said you can read it and look it up,
Chris: yourself manually too.
Wes: Yeah or ask one in the tab or you know a lot of options once it's all set up
Wes: and working and of course nix provides a lot of stuff too so even if them you
Wes: know makes a mistake a few times like you do a next flight check you do a test build,
Wes: and it won't update if it won't build right so you you not only have still a
Wes: rollback but like you won't even get to the new system a lot of the time.
Chris: And you know you can have these things make tools um there are wrappers whatnot
Chris: so i have one it's just uh nomad update and i have a couple options and nomad
Chris: update all just make sure that everything's checked in and current on main and
Chris: make sure all my flake inputs are updated.
Chris: It rebuilds my main system. It goes through everything. And then at the end,
Chris: it has a health check that it does to make sure everything is properly running
Chris: and all the services restarted that need to restart, et cetera, et cetera.
Chris: Those are all just like three or four individual commands that are wrapped into one command.
Chris: And it's just really simple to have something to have it build that for you.
Chris: And then you can have the LLM use that itself. And it's another way to check
Chris: to make sure everything's being done correctly.
Wes: Yeah. Whatever you need, You know, you want it done that way and follow the procedure every time.
Chris: So you're open to this idea of, like, LM as interface?
Wes: I think so, yeah.
Chris: Really? That's pretty fun.
Wes: Yeah, so once I was trying to clarify, like, you know, it's only needed if you're
Wes: trying to have it help you make changes. Nothing breaks without it.
Wes: Everything, you can always roll back or, you know, undo.
Wes: He made some, like, say, I started building him, like, a little initial NixOS config to make it easy.
Wes: You know, we plan a little time to get it going, and I can walk him through
Wes: applying the first build and getting the system working and stuff.
Wes: And so I wrote a little summary of like, here's what's in the stuff.
Wes: Here's how the system works. Just a little brief paragraph.
Wes: He liked it. And he's like, it feels like I'm using like a Star Wars computer.
Wes: So I think that was an endorsement.
Chris: It does feel like that, doesn't it?
Chris: Okay. Well, so I kind of want to know how it goes after a while.
Chris: Like we should do like a little check-in.
Wes: Yeah, follow up. I think we can do that.
Chris: So what we could do is we could kind of talk about my experience.
Chris: and kind of look at something that's been in production for just about 110 days.
Wes: Yeah, because I think maybe one of the objections would be,
Wes: Okay, it's one thing to have someone like us who, like, understands Nix pretty
Wes: well and can, in a theory, in a pinch, could guide, could intervene, could look.
Wes: If this user can't do that, like, what do you, what might this turn into?
Chris: And I think, too, the second argument would be, okay, well, it'll set up the
Chris: initial config, but then over time it's going to turn into absolute slop.
Chris: Because I think one of the biggest arguments is, well, it can produce the initial
Chris: application, it can produce the initial configuration, but it is not good at
Chris: long-term maintenance. It is not good at sustaining a project,
Chris: which would be true for a desktop over time as well.
Chris: So I think, you know, I got 110 days we can look at, and it's been a hell of
Chris: 110 days. This is going to be way beyond the average 110 days,
Chris: but it'll give us an idea how a machine does. So that's next.
Brent: Chris, you mentioned 110 days. That's like, you know, a third of a year or something like that.
Brent: And I know you've been dabbling with all sorts of things.
Brent: We talked about Hermes on our AI clanker stream. So I would imagine that plays
Brent: in here a little bit. You've been, what, deep diving on an open code?
Brent: You got Laura over there doing stuff for you.
Brent: Explain the situation. What's going on here?
Chris: You know, for the show. I do it for the show, guys.
Brent: I do it for the show. Thanks.
Chris: When Claude Crab or whatever it was called, what was it called initially?
Wes: Claude Bot?
Chris: Claude Bot came out.
Brent: Claude Crab.
Chris: I installed that, and then it became Molt Bot, so I updated to that.
Chris: And then it became OpenClaw, so I updated to that. And then I had to build a
Chris: whole infrastructure to make it run, including a way to update it where I didn't
Chris: have to pull in a bunch of Windows and Mac NPM packages. I mean,
Chris: I built an infrastructure for OpenClaw.
Wes: Several versions of one, I would argue.
Chris: Then I had to migrate to a new machine because my disk started to fail rapidly.
Brent: Yeah, right.
Chris: So I had like two hours to migrate to a new host and I got it on ThinkCenter.
Brent: No, that was, I was there. That was not two hours. That was like a half day.
Chris: You're right. Well, the initial transfer was a half day, but then I did the
Chris: right thing and I set stuff up properly and that took forever.
Chris: But the initial data transfer was pretty quick.
Brent: All right.
Chris: And then I transitioned from OpenClaw to Hermes, the Hermes agent system.
Chris: And so there's just, it's a lot, but only, not only this, this agent,
Chris: this multi-agent system, it's six agents. It manages things,
Chris: aspects of podcast production, news curation. It does a whole bunch of home
Chris: automation stuff for me.
Chris: It's doing security monitoring, camera monitoring. There's a lot the system is constantly doing.
Chris: And so I had a really, really quick setup.
Chris: I'll just point that out. But what we have is, yeah, 110 days old,
Chris: 837 commits, roughly 7.7 commits per day to my infrastructure.
Brent: Oh, really?
Chris: For one Nix OS host, 11 custom built packages, 7 GitHub workflows,
Chris: 5 primary agent workflows, roughly a 6 megabyte repo size.
Wes: Good little repo.
Chris: It's a big boy.
Chris: And, you know, I had the different LLMs run a little audit of it to kind of give me a roast.
Chris: And it was fairly nice on a lot of things.
Chris: But, you know, what I wanted to find out was, has it become slop?
Chris: You know, because it started with a pretty straightforward MVP Nix OS headless
Chris: system that it was completely deployed by the agents.
Chris: And now it's become, you know, with 7.7 commits per day, it's become this massive
Chris: thing that runs back-end infrastructure for all kinds of agent services and podcast production.
Chris: So, I looked at this, and there's a few things I definitely think are great.
Chris: I'm very impressed with a few things.
Chris: Documentation, things like that. I mean, you should probably saw.
Chris: There's a couple things before I get to the bad. You probably saw that we're good.
Wes: Yeah, I got some good takes.
Chris: Because I didn't save any of the good takes.
Wes: This is a remarkably well-documented, thoughtfully secured home lab built by
Wes: someone who actually cares.
Wes: The runbooks and agents.md are better than most startups. I mean,
Wes: this is going to be some LLM glaze, obviously.
Chris: Yeah, it's glazing.
Wes: I asked it for that. 86% of services ship with real system dehardening.
Wes: The tested podcast pipeline is genuinely production-grade.
Wes: And the one giant file is a cohesive single-host design, not a sin in Nix,
Wes: whose only real flaw is shell living in the wrong layer.
Wes: With a focused cleanup pass, delete the dead tree, lift the shell into packages,
Wes: de-dupe the secret loader, it becomes exactly the clean, maintainable system
Wes: its documentation already claims it is.
Wes: I do have a hotter take when we're ready.
Chris: You know, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I think the key area,
Chris: I want to be fair. I think it's pretty good. But the key area of concern that
Chris: I have is there's a 14,000 line Nix config.
Wes: I think that one file is more than the rest of the other Nix files combined.
Chris: Yeah. And I think a lot of it is basically inline shell script stuff, right?
Brent: Activation scripts, Chris?
Chris: Is this where your more harder take comes from, Wes? Is this,
Chris: have I gotten to the root of the issue?
Wes: Yeah, let's see here.
Chris: Because it is very embarrassing when I learned about that.
Wes: This repo is a 14,000-line shell script wearing a NixOS costume,
Wes: propped up next to a 67,000-line corpse it refuses to bury.
Wes: The author clearly knows how to build real software. The tested Python package
Wes: and the one elegant combinator prove it.
Wes: So the duplication, the hand-rolled activation, and the zombie CI aren't ignorance,
Wes: they're accumulated laziness.
Wes: And the longer that retired open-clog graveyard and the copy-pasted 12-time
Wes: secret loader stay in the tree, The more every future change-based attacks the
Wes: author already knows is stupid.
Chris: Yeah. I do need to get rid of it. I kept the open claw config so I could roll
Chris: back. Like, that's never going to happen at this point. So it is time to purge
Chris: that. Because what was that? That was 16,000 lines of it right there.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, man.
Wes: I do have some more here.
Chris: It is not good. I'll admit 14,000 lines is too many lines. And a shell script
Chris: in there, I'm personally comfortable with, but I recognize it's not...
Chris: The recommended way to do it.
Wes: Okay, here we go.
Chris: You got more?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, okay, good.
Wes: That Hermes.nix, roughly 61% of its 14,352 lines live inside string literals
Wes: as 109 write-shell script slash write-shell script bin wrappers.
Chris: Thank you, thank you.
Wes: The largest being Hermes Todoist, that's 700 lines.
Chris: Yeah, it's funny too, right? Because it's like, that's something I do use a
Chris: lot. It's integration with Todoist, but didn't intend for it to live there.
Brent: Breaking all the time?
Wes: Smoke test.
Chris: No, no, it doesn't break ever. Home Assistant stuff's in there.
Wes: Home Assistant capability smoke test. That's 500 lines.
Chris: Well, that's important.
Wes: 600 maybe.
Chris: You got a smoke test.
Wes: And this is the part that it doesn't like. And this is, you definitely could be, these are great.
Wes: And none of them get shell check,
Wes: runtime inputs, or any test because Nix can't see inside the strings.
Wes: Binaries are at least resolved as a package's reference, so that part's good
Wes: rather than something more difficult. But the duplication is even worse than the monolith.
Wes: A security sensitive read secret M function is copy pasted 12 times.
Wes: near identical plus three times as a sibling loader 150 lines of copy paste and secret.
Chris: Load see i don't think that's a fair criticism because it's just saying read this environment.
Wes: Yeah this probably reason.
Chris: It's really and when you consider the size of the config the fact that that's
Chris: in there 10 times or whatever is not that.
Wes: And then it really wants to point out that basically everything in var lib hermes
Wes: uh all the state there is in is in seven hand rolled system activation scripts
Wes: yeah doing flat install with zero systemd temp file rules zero environment dot etsy.
Chris: No no of course not.
Wes: And all those activation steps
Wes: are glued together with hard-coded lib dot string after dependency names,
Wes: so ordering inside so ordering silently breaks on any rename or typo the net
Wes: effect a boot critical file system setup and the agent's most sensitive code
Wes: path live is untested unlinted duplicated shell that nix treats as opaque text,
Wes: Well, exactly the same temp files and packages built right shell application,
Wes: which could be a really easy swap that would give you a little more safety.
Wes: That's what they exist for.
Chris: Well, here, let me let me say, first of all.
Chris: You know, I'm just having some fun here, boys. So what the activation script situation is.
Brent: Just to make a clear justification.
Chris: Is the Hermes config is declaratively configured through Nix,
Chris: and there's a lot of runtime stuff that gets set up because ideally I'm making
Chris: all the changes in the repo and then deploying it to the machine.
Chris: So when the system sets up, it imports a lot of the runtime stuff from the Nix config.
Chris: This is what's going on. Is there ways to do that better?
Wes: No, no, I get you. But yeah, basically you have stuff, so it's all built in
Wes: Nix and then you need it in the places that Hermes expects it at runtime.
Chris: Yeah. So Hermes is like, and what always trips these things up and what it gets
Chris: a little stuck on there with like the Etsy and the VAR stuff is,
Chris: and they don't expect this, is I want these suckers to have full control.
Chris: Everything, right? You can do everything on the system.
Wes: This is your box.
Chris: Right. There's no limits. And so they're always constantly like,
Chris: you should really prevent this thing from writing Etsy. Give it a virtual Etsy.
Chris: So it thinks it has Etsy. I'm like, no.
Chris: No, the idea is this thing owns the box. It's a dedicated box.
Chris: It's an experiment to see what happens.
Wes: It's especially funny because, like, NixOS is primed up to have all of that,
Wes: like, security hardening for, like, the Hermes service or all kinds of stuff
Wes: that you really do have to explicitly walk back, which is good, but is kind of fussy.
Chris: Also, some of that, right, and I do think what I need to do is,
Chris: like, I need to spend a couple days doing a cleanup pass because some of it
Chris: is done this way because that's how it was done for OpenClaw.
Chris: And to just get things working, if that worked for open claw i just kept it
Chris: working for hermes when i moved.
Wes: Yes and like in all in all fairness uh i did a similar swap and i have some
Wes: similar yeah some similar cruft that could use a glade.
Chris: Up yeah so uh it did give me it gave me a grading score do you have that because
Chris: uh i want to pull that up because i thought that was interesting it wasn't you
Chris: know we're touching on the bad stuff because it is sort of embarrassing,
Chris: and some of it honestly is from me just the direction i wanted to take things
Chris: but um i got a grading score when i ran it through like a little,
Chris: you know like a review and i thought it was pretty fair um so here's kind of
Chris: how it overall it graded me uh i got a uh overall grade for reproducibility of a b plus,
Chris: pretty good not too bad not too bad uh operational documentation i got an a,
Chris: deployment safety a b plus testing discipline a b ci independence a c plus and
Chris: that's because i have that old open claw,
Chris: job that just doesn't work anymore. Secrets Recovery is a C+.
Chris: Modularity, a C, which is kind of funny because this thing's been modulared
Chris: and then demodulared a lot. Supply chain hygiene is a C.
Chris: Maintainability at a current growth rate is a C. But guys, got an A-plus for
Chris: ambition. I got an A-plus.
Chris: Final verdict. This is better than the stereotype AI-generated infrastructure.
Chris: It is not a pile of hallucinated nicks.
Chris: it reflects real production feedback repeated debugging and increasing mature
Chris: operational policy it's also becoming an agent built city with no zoning board.
Wes: Yeah that's a good line.
Chris: The recommendation I agree is split things out clean things up get rid of the old open cloth stuff.
Wes: I think there is a lot of docs and policy I got an A- for that for you over here.
Chris: If you'd like strong.
Wes: Slightly ahead of code so if anything the docs and the policy and the rules
Wes: and stuff is probably the strong which makes sense because you're kind of building
Wes: it from that way in right like you are,
Wes: obviously very involved in crafting exactly what's going on and testing the
Wes: workflows and all of that and so a lot of that is like you need to have all
Wes: of the skills and the agents or whatever else to define the workflows for things to get done
Wes: uh so that's good and also like the packaging obviously there's some shell script
Wes: improvements we could be doing but outside of that there is like you're doing
Wes: a lot of packaging for stuff that you're running clean idiomatic uh,
Wes: some really nice python in there,
Wes: CI Health got C-.
Chris: Yeah, well, just because I have that one thing.
Wes: Oh, you need some other builds.
Chris: Yeah, there you go.
Wes: Secrets Hardening, C+, Dead Code Hygiene, D-. So, there's some good in the bed.
Brent: Chris, what do you think, if you were to self-grade, what do you think is the
Brent: most brittle part of this whole system?
Chris: Probably that big old Nix, right? That big old Nix file is ridiculous.
Chris: I got to get that bash stuff out of there. And that to me is like at the point
Chris: of it's not breaking, but it's going to get more and more unmaintainable as time goes on.
Chris: And I feel like that's 50% their fault, 50% my fault. I haven't really asked
Chris: them to ever flag anything like this. I haven't asked them.
Chris: To be clear, I've never even opened up any of these files. Everything's been generated.
Wes: I think that's what makes it such a fun experiment.
Chris: So, yeah, I mean, we're 110 days into it and this thing is rock solid.
Chris: I mean, it builds every time. I mean, it really has been good.
Wes: It's sort of a test of the philosophy of like, how much can this get right or
Wes: serviceable with just testing on the outside, right?
Wes: Does it do the things you need without ever looking under the hood?
Wes: And obviously we know for a long time now that it can, but then that's just
Wes: the question is like, how much mess is there?
Wes: And what, and how bad is it to clean up? Because if it's, I mean,
Wes: all code bases get some mess and then you do some cleanup passes.
Wes: And so like how, how wacky or close to something that approximates reasonable
Wes: software development is that?
Chris: And something I've also noticed is happening is around the time the code base
Chris: is getting to the point where it's like, oh, I really need to kind of do some maintenance on this.
Chris: Newer iterations of the models are out and they're better at that thing.
Chris: And so you can go back with better intelligence and clean it up.
Chris: And this really struck me because this config, this nomad config,
Chris: part of it started on my workstation RVB, which was failing,
Chris: and then moved and became an open clock config. and then was sort of reinvented
Chris: again to become a Hermes config.
Chris: The downside is there's been some bloat, but the agents have been responsible
Chris: for every time they've had to slice and dice and extract it from one system
Chris: and can create a new system.
Chris: They have done all of that work. Now, this is three trans.
Chris: Well, there's actually been multiple transitions because there was the different
Chris: versions of OpenClaw initially, too, that were very, very, very,
Chris: very active development.
Wes: So not only is it a new methodology and workflow that you're trying,
Wes: but also everything that you are actually maintaining with this is very fast. Yeah.
Chris: And so I think when you grade on that, it's actually pretty great.
Wes: I think you have to give a pretty big positive score for it seems to work really well.
Chris: Now I just need to go back with a little bit better model and say,
Chris: let's split some of this out. Let's do a little bit better job of this.
Wes: And the great part, right, is like there's a lot of tooling to help and built
Wes: into NixOS in terms of like the right shell application that automatically runs shell check.
Wes: and Nix OS provides a bunch of formatters and linters. And I mean,
Wes: if you want to set up explicit checks for the flake or the builds,
Wes: you can do load of VM and test it in there.
Chris: That's great.
Wes: And that's even just built on all the stuff of having your config in a text
Wes: file in Git gives you in terms of like branching and rollback and all of that kind of safety.
Chris: That's true. There's a lot of layers.
Wes: So there's basically like...
Wes: You can go hog wild with the refactoring and you always have the system you
Wes: have right now to fall back to you.
Chris: Well, it's like Git rollback and Nix rollback.
Wes: Yeah.
Brent: It's a beautiful thing. As a thought experiment, could you imagine doing this
Brent: with like, I don't know, vanilla Ubuntu install?
Chris: I don't think you could. I don't think you could. Right? I think the agents would run amok.
Chris: I really think on a Debian or a Red Hat or an Ubuntu host, I really think they would run amok.
Wes: I mean, yeah. I mean, maybe if it was- I've seen it. If it was a dedicated,
Wes: if it was maintained by someone who knew what they were doing and had been set
Wes: up as a dedicated, like, sysadmin bot that didn't really stray too far and the box didn't do very much.
Chris: Yeah. And you could also put other layers of safety, like file system snapshots or VM snapshots.
Wes: But I think just, like, the biggest risk is, I mean, there's a lot,
Wes: but just, you know, it's not going to have good context or grounding necessarily
Wes: for, like, what's happened.
Wes: And because it is this imperative state that you kind of have to recheck on
Wes: and go see what the runtime's like and, oh, why was that PPA added?
Wes: and then that's what's breaking it now and then you remove it to fix this problem
Wes: but did you have documentation that made it really clear why that was needed
Wes: for this other important job on the box in a way that Nix just doesn't do?
Chris: Besides logs, which there are logs for apt and whatnot, there's not a clear
Chris: history for the agent to figure out what's been recently done and then narrow
Chris: down the problem. So they have to start with a much wider scope and they have
Chris: to narrow it down from a much wider data set.
Chris: And so what I think what you're saying is because the way the system has to
Chris: build, because Nix has like this boundary that you have to cross with a valid
Chris: configuration, it adds a layer where...
Chris: The agent can try, and they can get the config wrong, but Nix won't allow it.
Chris: It won't allow it to build.
Chris: So then the agent gets the error message. They see, oh, okay,
Chris: I made a mistake on line 112.
Chris: I go back. I fix line 112. I try a build again. Okay, it passes.
Chris: That gate, that barrier, that build process doesn't exist on Ubuntu or Debian or Fedora.
Chris: And so there's not that check that has to happen. So the agent can just go write
Chris: a config for whatever service you're modifying, and maybe it wrote it wrong.
Chris: Maybe it has a syntax error.
Chris: Now when you reload the service, it doesn't start for some reason, right?
Chris: Like that doesn't happen as frequently or as much or nearly at all with the
Chris: Nix system setup. So it's like this additional harness that the agent has to
Chris: interoperate with that prevents it making mistakes that it might otherwise make.
Chris: And so if I were running an Ubuntu server, I might use it to help troubleshoot issues.
Chris: I am actually using it on an Ubuntu server right now upstairs.
Chris: My agent data is troubleshooting a problem with one of our Ubuntu hosts at the moment.
Chris: But when I do that, to Wes's point, it's a very narrow scope.
Chris: Everything requires implicit approval gates by me, all this stuff.
Chris: Where on the NIC system, they YOLO. And I let them go.
Chris: And that, you know, after 110 days is working.
Brent: You know, I really wish when I was learning Linux,
Brent: and well, I still am, but just experimenting with like running your own VPS,
Brent: your own servers, even building your own desktop and like playing,
Brent: you know, that stage where you play with Linux to understand how it works and how it's all crafted.
Brent: That's one of the beautiful stages, but I've broken way too many systems,
Brent: just like putting the wrong PPA in or something like that.
Brent: Right. And like, I've broken Debian, I've broken Archa a great many times and
Brent: Ubuntu systems and Mint system, like I've broken everything.
Brent: And I think that gating for someone who's exploring a new OS for them is,
Brent: is a beautiful thing because you can try stuff,
Brent: and like, you've got this insurance package just sitting right there taking
Brent: care of you to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot.
Brent: And okay, I learned a lot by the consequences of the things I ruined.
Brent: But at the same time, that really slowed me down and made me hesitate to really
Brent: push the envelope and to learn more.
Brent: So if there's some way we can have that kind of checks and balances for,
Brent: you know, quote unquote, classic Linux, that would be amazing.
Brent: That would be amazing for everybody.
Brent: But in the meantime, just right next to us.
Chris: I want to take a moment and mention my friends over at ConnectedInternet and
Chris: use the promo code JUPITER35 to get $35 off your order.
Chris: They're not a sponsor, but they sent me some gear a while ago and I just ended
Chris: up using it over the weekend.
Chris: And I'm like, this is so good. It's one box and it combines all of the high-speed
Chris: data networks in the US and Canada.
Chris: And it has technology in there. It's based on, I think, an open WRTOS and it
Chris: kind of picks between the best for your signal and data and all of that,
Chris: and they have truly unlimited plans as well, including plans with priority internet
Chris: access, which means you get higher priority on the LTE network or the 5G network,
Chris: and they have plans with no data caps.
Chris: It's really rare out there.
Chris: I mean, I have been doing this since the days of buying bootleg SIMs off of
Chris: eBay, and to have something like this now is just remarkable.
Chris: And to have it across the different popular networks too is really great.
Chris: And not too long ago, they introduced their backup plan, $39 a month that comes
Chris: with a router and the antenna and everything you need.
Chris: And it just auto-fails over when your internet goes out and auto-fails back,
Chris: if that's a term, auto-restores when your internet returns. It's just great.
Chris: And they also have things for more permanent installs, like their Fortress Router,
Chris: which I have up at the farm.
Chris: Seven and ten a beast. Also run an open WRT. It's impressive.
Chris: Connectininternet.com is where you go. Connectininternet.com.
Chris: and if you use our promo code jupyter35 you can take,
Chris: $35 off your entire order they hooked me up when they sent some gear and I'm
Chris: giving them a shout because I'm still using to this day and I think it's great,
Chris: and since we don't have an official sponsor for this spot I say go check out
Chris: Connected Internet I really liked it and if you're mobile or you need a backup
Chris: internet connection it's a no brainer promo code,
Chris: jupyter35.
Brent: We have some fresh feedback here. This one shared by Patrick about last week's Apple Talk discussion.
Brent: Hi, it's great you were talking about Apple Talk.
Brent: Back in 1990, 1991, through at least the 99 or so, we used Apple Talk to connect a blend of Macs
Brent: from the old Plus to a souped-up SE, Quadra 609, LC3, Performa 475,
Brent: and eventually the Power Computing and Radius clones. Thank you.
Brent: We ran PhoneLine up in the attic and had nice wire mold for desktop connections.
Brent: We used it to share files, etc.
Brent: And we also ran NetStickies to send instant messages to others in the office.
Chris: Oh my god, yes! I forgot about NetStickies!
Brent: It was great, but it was slow at big file transfers. We replaced it all with
Brent: Cat5 Ethernet around 1998-99 and had to get adapters for the Macs to plug in.
Brent: As a side note, my old office was in the country, and it took quite a few years
Brent: to get broadband internet.
Brent: So we used Starband satellites for internet for a while until Tom Warner put
Brent: a microwave link from the closest road to our office.
Brent: They finally put in a hard link once the company that sold those links went
Brent: out of business, and they just couldn't get them anymore.
Brent: The 90s were a fun time for computing and networking.
Brent: Signed, Patrick, web developer and ham radio operator, KC2BQZ.
Chris: Patrick, that brings me back so much. In my high school years and in my elementary
Chris: school years, I lived in rural areas that did not have any broadband.
Chris: We had dial-up, and we often didn't even have the V.2 support for 56K.
Chris: So we didn't even get true 56K. You know, we maybe got 48.8 if we were lucky,
Chris: but often got 36.6 kilobytes per second for our internet connection.
Chris: And I was so desperate for high-speed internet that me and a buddy started a
Chris: business and began the process...
Chris: of talking to the neighborhood to deploy our own WISP, to just create our own WISP.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: I can see why, though, the exact speeds were burned into your head.
Chris: You were desperate.
Wes: You were going to do whatever it took.
Chris: Yep. Yeah, we never got there. We never got there because a couple of the key
Chris: houses, while we were getting it set up, got that Time Warner satellite internet,
Chris: and they're like, ah, we don't need it anymore.
Chris: Thanks, kid. And I'm like, ah, but I needed your trees.
Chris: So it never worked out. And then, you know, now it's just a problem of the past, I suppose.
Chris: But that's fun, Patrick. Yeah, the file transfer rate on AppleTalk,
Chris: I want to say, was pretty bad. I seem to recall it was pretty bad,
Chris: but you didn't have huge files back then.
Chris: All right, Brent, we got another one from Brett.
Brent: We do. Brett sent one in here. He talks about an AI-built spud router.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: Brett says, I've been— What's that.
Wes: You ask?
Brent: Exactly. I've been listening to the show for a while and wanted to reach out
Brent: and share a project I've been working on.
Brent: I built a router out of a le potato single board computer using AI agents.
Brent: It was supposed to be a simple router configured via a basic Ansible role.
Brent: And well, there is no Ansible and I took it way too far.
Brent: Now it's got a web UI, a TUI, some VLANs, firewall, tail scale,
Brent: wire guard, nebulas on there, DNS over HTTPS and OTA updates with auto rollback.
Chris: Guys, look at this.
Brent: That's a sweet setup.
Chris: Look at this. So he created a web UI. Nice. Right. Created a TUI. Oh, yeah. And an MCP.
Chris: Modern day awesome right here.
Wes: That is sophisticated.
Brent: You guys a little jealous?
Chris: I actually am a little jelly.
Wes: AGPL3, Python, some JavaScript. Nice.
Chris: This looks great. I don't know. Something about having all three.
Wes: However you want to use it.
Chris: So perfect. It's so perfect. I love also the ginormous disclaimer.
Chris: Let's be real. This entire project was coded by AI. So put that out there too.
Chris: I think in this day and age, people want to know that.
Wes: Mm-hmm.
Chris: They want to know that. And, you know, he's sitting on top of a bunch of really
Chris: solid Linux technologies, right? He's sitting on top of Nebula and WireGuard
Chris: and, of course, the IP stack and Linux and all that.
Wes: I see there's this Flake.Nix in here.
Chris: Oh, man.
Brent: Oh, sexy.
Chris: If this isn't our speed, I don't know what is. That is great.
Brent: I feel like listeners are really just making software for us now. It's really nice.
Chris: Spud Router. It's a great name, too. I love it, Brett.
Brent: Brett does have a couple more things here. Gary says, I love the AI content
Brent: on the show and genuinely enjoy
Brent: hearing about the agents and the crazy things you're doing with them.
Brent: I had a bunch of agents coding, fixing bugs, doing all that from Cloud Code and OpenCode.
Brent: I also got a lot of work done with my OpenCode Go subscription,
Brent: which I learned about from the show. So thank you.
Brent: Oh, good, nice. For AI, I would have never had the time to do any of this.
Chris: Isn't that the thing?
Brent: Is it perfect? No. but I'm at the point where I'm comfortable taking it to our
Brent: RV, which sits on a site over an hour away connected via Starlink.
Brent: If the potato survives that, I'll call it a win.
Chris: That is great.
Chris: That is a great example of, like, yeah, there's a lot of stories.
Chris: The Financial Times just ran an outdated piece about the curl developer complaining
Chris: about too many slop bug reports.
Chris: And the slop bug reports and the load it puts on projects is a real issue,
Chris: and I hope it's one that we solve and we create tooling and culture around.
Chris: Like, that is a downside, right?
Wes: And there is a way to responsibly use these tools and a way to not responsibly use them.
Chris: For sure. Also, the curl developer did an update a couple months ago,
Chris: so it's not really a problem anymore. But the upshot is there's so much more
Chris: free software being created.
Chris: And people that have never had the ability to do it are creating software that
Chris: is genuinely useful for them, which was always one of the core goals of free software.
Wes: And I mean, just think about, if we think back to sort of, you know,
Wes: Computer Chronicles sort of era. How long has this idea of like a normal user
Wes: can sort of customize and tweak software and build something with some widgets or whatever?
Wes: it didn't end up being this like you know whizzy wig gooey thing that.
Chris: It wasn't hyper card.
Wes: No it wasn't hyper card but we're kind of getting there.
Chris: Yeah we are and now it's just plain english.
Wes: Have you seen this late potato before.
Chris: No what is late potato.
Wes: Well that's what he built on it's a hardware so it's yeah.
Chris: It's kind of rings a bell actually.
Wes: Late potato aml s905 xcc which i guess um some Google and Amazon use it for
Wes: some things, supposedly.
Wes: A long-term supported SoC family. Support for the latest, well,
Wes: I don't know when, but it had some support for Android, TV, Linux, Uboot, Kodi.
Chris: Looks a lot like a Pi.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: It's got the GPIO headers, four USB ports, Ethernet port, SD micro. It's got HDMI.
Chris: It's about the footprint of, oh, it's got an EMMC connector.
Brent: VP9.
Chris: I like that.
Wes: Oh up to two gigs ddr3 so not a.
Chris: Lot of ram for a router though yeah it's got an oh what's this got ir2.
Wes: Kind of fun little device. Never heard of it. Neat.
Chris: Okay, I want one. Do we know what the cost is? Purchase. I'm just curious what
Chris: it cost is compared to. Oh, it's on Amazon.
Chris: I'm curious what the cost is compared to. $65.
Brent: Oh, wow. That's not bad.
Wes: $60 on Amazon US, I think.
Chris: You know, I was just, I wonder, I was just talking about, I want to set up a
Chris: VDO thing. And I wonder if this, hmm. Interesting. All right.
Brent: Is there a buy it now button there, Chris?
Chris: Brett, you're tempting me I'm going to hold off, I'm going to look into it more
Chris: after the show But that is really great Oh man, great emails,
Chris: thank you guys very much And we do have some great boosts too, let's do those,
Chris: And as we do, we'll start with a baller boost. And Greg, the lawyer,
Chris: is back with 100,000 Satoshis.
Chris: All right, Greg. I love the land before time. The title is A Chef's Kiss,
Chris: and it took me back to a student magazine in college where the final layout
Chris: involved making an ad hoc land at someone's apartment with our Macs.
Chris: A borrowed laser writer and a mess of Apple Top.
Chris: I bet there was no network experts, but it all worked. Good times.
Wes: There's some exciting too. It's kind of the same. We were just talking about
Wes: like you, you could build this system just with being a computer user.
Chris: Connect them up.
Brent: You know, you know, we should also mention that a Jupiter garage,
Brent: we have a special Apple talk kind of retrospective.
Chris: Right.
Brent: Well, I guess it's a memorial sticker.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And I think get it now. I still can not sure how long it'll be up there.
Chris: But maybe we should pull it once Linux seven two releases.
Chris: that's reasonable because that's when it's officially gone from our lives and
Chris: never gone from our hearts yeah
Chris: Jupiter Garage good plug thank you Brantley we need to do more of that.
Wes: Turd Ferguson boosts in with 50,675 sats,
Wes: The thing about Apple Talk is after about 32 nodes, it started to get pretty dicey.
Wes: Now, do IPX? It was the corporate king in the 80s and 90s, and for a reason.
Wes: Turds and IPX, Dan, who knew? I love what you find out with the boost.
Chris: Yes, I mean, God, I hated IPX. I hated it. The thing, too, was I discovered IPX.
Chris: So I grew up in an Apple talk world and then Microsoft, there's a long story,
Chris: but Microsoft came in and kind of rushed the high school I was at and just flooded
Chris: it with Microsoft technology.
Chris: And so over summer, we transitioned to a bunch of NetBui and all this kind of stuff.
Wes: That happened all over too.
Chris: And there was, yeah. And they're in the background where these really obnoxious
Chris: network servers I constantly had to deal with. So my perspective was like these
Chris: nagging, aging network servers that use this fricking IPX protocol.
Chris: and i know the perspective was wrong because i i don't know if i don't know
Chris: if it's true the number was 32 but i do remember that when you started to get
Chris: like a classroom full of these apple talk things it just started to fall apart
Chris: because all the broadcast and it was such low bandwidth and,
Chris: like i think like 300 kilobits was the file transfer for local talk speed,
Chris: and ipx didn't have these limitations,
Chris: so i really hated it back in the day so i don't think we'll even an episode on it but unless we.
Wes: Use it to do another place more starcraft i.
Chris: Guess you know you know i never realized i felt so strong about network protocols
Chris: until we did last week's episode you.
Wes: Always had it out for tcpip and i never knew why.
Chris: Yeah well it's a scam i should have never won apple talk you know it was routable.
Brent: Well anonymous comes in with a row of mcducks,
Brent: Ooh, just testing this new Web Boost functionality. What a great idea to help,
Brent: to let us help with the show.
Chris: Thank you, Anonymous. Yes, the Web Boost, we did have a problem because,
Chris: like, I think we, like, reached a new echelon of our ZapRite subscription.
Wes: Is that right?
Brent: Good problem to have.
Chris: But it's great because they let you renew with sets. So it's a virtuous circle.
Chris: So I was able to top it off.
Wes: So there was a brief little outage there. Sorry about that.
Chris: Yeah, but we're learning. It's new. And it's just, that's just the,
Chris: it's been a success and it's working well. And I really appreciate boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Yes, you, yes, you can boost in from the web.
Wes: Shout out to BJ for helping us troubleshoot.
Chris: Magnolia Mayhem comes in with a row of duckroos. That's 2,222 Satoshis.
Chris: Here's my request to have a massive community run classic protocol network full
Chris: of Apple Talks, Telnet, Gopher, et cetera. Maybe we could use Nebula as a backbone.
Chris: If people get scared about scalability and security, who's with me?
Chris: Here's my question. Could we work a BBS into this? We really should do a BBS.
Wes: How are we going to coordinate if we don't have one?
Brent: Have done, will do.
Chris: I would love to do like a retro Linux BBS and then we do an episode on it and
Chris: then afterwards the audience can go check it out.
Wes: I was for a while playing with this idea of like, could you fuse AppleTalk and
Wes: then, but like make Nebula the transport.
Chris: Right?
Wes: And then especially because like the lighthouses have the DNS where they kind
Wes: of know some of the names so you could skip some broadcasts and use that as like a source.
Wes: They would be terribly hacky, of course.
Chris: I think mayhem, it's a good idea. I think we should focus on the achievable.
Chris: Gopher is probably pretty achievable, so you can do that over IP.
Chris: Telnet would be achievable, and I think a BBS. The AppleTalk stuff would be
Chris: a lot harder and wouldn't really produce great results, but we could do it.
Chris: I think we should, if we got a BBS running a Linux-like classic one,
Chris: I'd do an episode on that. You bet.
Wes: The facial hair boosts in with 6,000 sets.
Wes: With what seems to be the return of single-use devices, such as the rise of
Wes: modded iPods and handheld gaming devices, and even some going back to pocket
Wes: cameras, I was wondering what y'all's take on this was.
Chris: You know, it's funny you bring this up, the facial hair, because I just pulled
Chris: out an old Kodak pocket cam that we used to use before. There's a more popular
Chris: brand, I'm blanking on the name, but we used to use these before we had camera phones.
Chris: and they were just little 1080p pocket cameras and they could save to an SD
Chris: card and they have like a fold-out USB port you can plug in as well.
Chris: The optics are horrible, but the dedicated functionality is actually pretty cool.
Chris: And it makes me wonder if I would enjoy carrying a dedicated camera again.
Chris: I can see dedicated camera would be good. A dedicated music player though,
Chris: for me, those days are long gone.
Wes: Yeah, I don't know if I need that one.
Brent: In the days of like when digital was first coming out, when I was entering the photography world.
Brent: There was this nostalgia to using film and everyone agreed that using a film
Brent: camera without all these like digital buttons and numbers and things,
Brent: using a film camera made you take photos in a very different way.
Brent: And almost everybody appreciated that you kind of took better photos because
Brent: you only had a limited number of them. The technology sort of vanished.
Brent: Of course, digital one, because it's better in innumerable other ways.
Brent: but there's something about having a single use device that I think gets us
Brent: back to that because if, well, I've struggled with this this week is like each
Brent: device I use, I, they're my beloved devices like this framework in front of me.
Brent: Right. And, and my pixel that runs graphene and I freaking love those things,
Brent: except I can do anything on them.
Brent: And so when I sit down to try to do a thing, there's a hundred other things
Brent: that kind of are just right there. And so a dedicated device I think is a really
Brent: nice way to get away from that, At least for a short time.
Wes: It brings its own intentionality. If you feel your camera's hanging on there,
Wes: you're like, well, I should probably be using this.
Chris: I would like a dedicated messaging device and take messaging off my phone.
Chris: That would be incredible. But you know where it's not really in the scope of the question?
Chris: But this is what came to my mind. Television. I just want my TV to be a dumb
Chris: display with like four or five HDMI inputs and scale it well,
Chris: have a good picture. I don't even want a speaker built in.
Wes: Yeah, but how am I going to show you ads?
Chris: It drives me crazy when I get like a new terms of service. And when you select
Chris: all, it's like, I'm going to turn your microphone on and I'm going to monitor
Chris: everything you're doing.
Wes: How else can they know what you're watching?
Chris: Yeah. Brownlee, are you up? Is that you?
Brent: Faraday Futura comes in with another row of ducks. Sorry, between the character
Brent: limit and, well, my dyslexia, I wrote the wrong thing.
Brent: You don't need the mesh. Think of Laura like writing a letter,
Brent: and the mesh network is USPS.
Brent: You can write a letter to your wife, but you don't need USPS to get it to her.
Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking more about your last boost and thinking about,
Chris: I have a lot of coyotes on the farm. and they're out during the day now a lot.
Chris: And I'm trying to figure out a way where I could have motion sensors all over
Chris: the farm, which is a massive territory to cover.
Chris: So it can't be Wi-Fi and LTE would be too expensive for the amount of sensors I need.
Chris: So I need something that could wake up and ping me when it detects motion in
Chris: an area and then maybe in some places activate a camera, depending.
Chris: And I'm wondering, I think that's where Alora kind of low frequency radio network
Chris: could be perfect, a mesh network throughout the farm.
Chris: I gotta research that more. Thank you very much, Faraday.
Brent: I think you just put little mesh-tastic collars on them all and then once they
Brent: get within range, you'll know.
Chris: Take them with a drone, call it good.
Wes: Gotta maintain your fleet.
Chris: Dodge is here with 5,747 Satoshis.
Chris: Keep the Tesla check. This must be a, were we talking about Tesla in the show?
Chris: It must be on the bootleg. Pre-show, I think? Yeah.
Chris: Keep it coming. Always fun to see what's going on on that side of the fence.
Chris: To totally hear you on chargers, I've gotten to the point where I assume the
Chris: charger won't work if it's not an EVgo, EA, or Tesla.
Chris: Or it has a perfect score on PlugShare. Oh, I should check PlugShare.
Chris: EVgo is currently my favorite. They support plug and run by non-Tesla and Tesla.
Chris: Super clean experience.
Chris: And they're rolling out next. That's good. So I just did a car camping trip.
Chris: That's what Dajja was referring to. is I just took a car camping trip in an
Chris: EV, which had a lot of pros to it.
Chris: But two of the charging, they were run, both of them, I think,
Chris: were run by the local city.
Chris: And one just had, one was out of order. I suppose that happens.
Chris: The other one, somebody was camping at, like, not actually camping,
Chris: but like they plugged their car into a fast charger when they have a slow charging
Chris: car and they just left for a few hours.
Chris: So I wasn't able to use that charger. So then I stopped at another one.
Chris: And this one had two chargers right next to each other. And in the middle,
Chris: it had a tap to pay box. So you could just plug in and use tap to pay like, you know, a gas pump.
Wes: It was ideal.
Chris: Seems like the way to do it. Right. Um,
Chris: So I do the tap to pay. That one was out of order too. So, but there's another
Chris: handle. So I grabbed that handle and my transaction still valid. So I go to charge.
Chris: Oh no, no. This handle is actually on this other post over here,
Chris: which has a QR code system. You have to scan and create an account for and then
Chris: prepay $45, even though I only need $5 of charging.
Chris: And then I can charge, even though like the payment, there's a one payment terminal,
Chris: but there's two different payment systems depending on which plug I use.
Chris: It's just all over the place. Like some of them, like the tap to pay thing is
Chris: perfect. It should just be like a gas pump. I walk up.
Wes: You have my credit card now. Tell me from what I charge.
Chris: And they're getting more and more to that. But some of them,
Chris: like, they want you to, like, they envision you charging frequently at this
Chris: one spot, so they want to sell you on a membership program and all of this stuff.
Chris: It's early days. He says, if you're able to plan your route beforehand,
Chris: you can install and register all the apps for chargers along your route before
Chris: you leave. It makes things way easier, especially for the plug-and-runs.
Chris: And you've got it. All you have to do is tap and enter the stall ID.
Chris: You know, I've been also using a better route planner, ABR.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Really good for that, too. Thank you, Daja. Appreciate that.
Chris: And thanks for being a member.
Wes: Poppy comes in with $69.69. It's a time travel boost.
Chris: Ooh.
Chris: Tasty time travel.
Wes: Loved the holiday home lab, hearing about community setups. Hope you revisit
Wes: this in the future so I can get mine in there when I'm not six months behind on listening.
Brent: Well, Pabby.
Wes: What an idea.
Brent: When the holidays come around, I think maybe we might repeat that. Yes?
Chris: Yeah, I'm wondering if we should, should we put a call out for the home lab stuff early?
Wes: We should think about what the right process is at the very least.
Wes: Yeah. Definitely earlier is better.
Chris: I think we'd have to revisit our submission form and make sure there's no changes
Chris: we need to make. But I guess nothing would prevent us from...
Wes: We should probably give a listen to the episode.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. I think this would be a good idea, though, because we're pretty
Chris: bad about getting it out.
Wes: We're at a best... You know, we have six months, basically.
Chris: Yeah, this would be the time. That should be enough time. Let's try to remember
Chris: to look into that. I think that is a good idea.
Brent: Someone set it around.
Chris: Thank you, and thanks for the time travel boost.
Brent: Ensign X sent in 8,472 Satoshis.
Brent: Well, I've tried Tailscale and Nebula recently, but I've landed on NetBird.
Brent: It's the perfect compromise between the two, open source, self-hosted, and damn fast.
Brent: I'm also really looking forward to the reverse proxy feature that they have in beta.
Brent: By the way, this is a Star Trek boost. Can you guess which episode?
Chris: Oh, yes, I can. Very easily, actually. That's not hard at all.
Chris: Uh, that would be, uh, probably the end of season three, the beginning of season
Chris: four of Star Trek Voyager, uh, and it is a nod to Species 8472,
Chris: the only actual threat to the Borg.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Right? I'm guessing, right? It's gotta be Species 8472.
Wes: Absolutely. Which episode? There's a couple of good ones.
Chris: Well, I mean, they're introduced, I think, at the end of season three,
Chris: the beginning of season four, when they're phasing out Kes and bringing in Seven of Nine.
Chris: Yeah, Scorpion. Yeah, Scorpion. Yeah, yeah. Scorpion is something, right?
Wes: But then later, there's that one with the whole...
Chris: Where they do the fake Starfleet?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: That's where it gets a little silly and they're no longer such a big threat.
Chris: Voyager had the worst tendency of like setting up the biggest enemy ever and,
Chris: then a season later, they're just like buddies.
Chris: Like they're allies. You know, same with the Herosian.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: What was the ones with the parts? The parts? The phage. Oh, yeah.
Wes: Blankin. Yeah, the phage.
Chris: They're suffering from the phage.
Wes: Vidians.
Chris: The Vidians. Super creepy. And then by the end, like not so threatening.
Wes: They're like, oh, I guess we have sympathy for them now.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. So, but yes, I think we got it. I hope. Let us know how we did.
Chris: Netbug 105 comes in with 4,300 and no, 4,531 Satoshis. I got it.
Chris: I did my first members boost a few weeks ago and decided to get Albie set up
Chris: and give some extra support. Oh, that's great. Thank you.
Chris: How do most people boost the show? Fountain? Long live Apple talk.
Chris: I would say Fountain is probably the most popular. The web boost is picking up Steam.
Chris: and then there's a lot of people using AlbiHub with the podcast index or Castamatic
Chris: or just the various apps of choice so there's a long AlbiHub tale too but yeah, Fountain,
Chris: AlbiHub in some sense and then I'd say the web boost at this point thank you
Chris: for the support and being a member.
Wes: Tom Motto boosts in with 2000 sats,
Wes: Love the Apple Talk episode. And remember, if you want to play with it again
Wes: in five to ten years, it'll still be supported in NetBSD.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Good point.
Chris: That's true. Okay, good.
Wes: That could be a good excuse to use NetBSD.
Chris: That could be, right?
Wes: Because it sounds like we're going to be needing to have Apple Talk around if,
Wes: you know, ma'am takes off.
Chris: That's true.
Brent: Well, the Zor Alchemist is here with $10 of fiat boosts.
Brent: This one's for you, Chris. Chris, if you're looking for a, quote,
Brent: modern web browser for macOS Classic, check out MacSurf.
Brent: It supports HTTPS, CSS, and JavaScript on macOS 9.
Brent: While it won't work for every single site, it'll be far more functional than
Brent: a 1990s release of Nexscape. Also, thanks for the episode.
Chris: I was hoping somebody would send something like that in. Thank you,
Chris: Zor. I had not heard of that. That's incredible. That is great.
Chris: Love it. Greg the lawyer sends in a members boost.
Chris: Using my free member boost to encourage others to become a member.
Chris: Greg, you're just so great. Recurring revenue keeps the lights on.
Chris: Money talks. Tell the world you want more Linux unplugged.
Wes: Can't argue with that.
Chris: Don't let the fate of the Linux magazines happen to Linux podcasts.
Chris: Thank you, Greg. I appreciate that.
Wes: Adversary 17 comes in with a member boost.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: To say boosty, boosty, boosty, boost.
Chris: There you go. Thank you, adversaries.
Brent: Well, Anonymous is here, too, with a members boost.
Brent: You guys have a good solution for AI-assisted research? For example,
Brent: what is the best insert product category here? Or teach me more about insert topic here.
Brent: Ideally, it would be something interactive that would prompt me and let me refine
Brent: and dive deeper into specific aspects.
Chris: Okay, I will say that I have enjoyed using the Hermes LLM wiki skill that is
Chris: very easy to get working with the Hermes agent. I know that's a big lift to get to this point.
Chris: But Brent poised a question to me. He said, Chris, you've got family in Canada
Chris: and Canada has national health care and you haven't had health care for almost
Chris: 15 years or whatever the hell it's been. I don't know. A hundred.
Chris: What if you had dual citizenship? Could you get access to Canadian health care?
Chris: So I says to the agent, I says, hey, agent, I want you to research dual citizenship
Chris: in the context of access to Canadian health care in the process.
Chris: And what LMWiki does is not just a storage structure, but in the case of Hermes,
Chris: it's also sort of a research protocol.
Chris: And so it launches about four subagents. It can do more or less.
Chris: And they go off on particular tasks, and they look up individual things,
Chris: and it compiles a very, very, very comprehensive data set.
Chris: And then it gives me kind of a human-readable overview and then saves the entire
Chris: output into an obsidian vault for me for retrieval later.
Chris: And I found it to be extremely, extremely useful. I've also had to do research
Chris: on different car oil types and I thought it was very comprehensive because it's,
Chris: It is essentially a research methodology that it's following and then a way
Chris: to store and collect that information that is retrievable and you can build on top of it.
Chris: So this might be something and look into two things, LMWiki,
Chris: and then you can look into the Hermes Agent LMWiki stuff.
Wes: I think even just beyond that, it's not that the inner tabs aren't useful,
Wes: but really having a harness where it can have real file access.
Wes: It can build iteratively on some artifacts and stuff.
Chris: You can ask it questions and follow-ups.
Wes: Yeah. And then it has robust support, I think, especially for sub-agents where
Wes: you can do stuff like have editors or a council or like fact check each other.
Wes: Like a lot of those patterns can go a long way beyond just you got one,
Wes: you know, it did a couple searches and wrote a few markdown files.
Chris: Yeah, you know, just to cap that off, because that's such a great point,
Chris: Wes, is one of the other things that Hermes has recently introduced is this,
Chris: aggregation model, where when it's trying to figure out research or make decisions,
Chris: it can aggregate it through three or four models and then have an ultimate decision.
Chris: And it's actually a fascinating way to use it for research as well.
Chris: So there could be something there. Yeah.
Chris: Ryan from Boise is here with a free
Chris: member boost. Open source software and camping, my two favorite things.
Chris: As you talked about in the pre-show, finding spots to camp can be really difficult.
Chris: Here's a pick I found this week.
Chris: It's called Campy. It's up on GitHub. You also mentioned last week you didn't
Chris: take your CPAP. Get a DC plug from Amazon. I really should do that.
Chris: First, I got to get my hose replaced.
Chris: Tried to do that. Amazon screwed that up. Campy, the campsite finder,
Chris: a tool to help you book campsites online. Finding reservations sold out at campgrounds can be tough.
Chris: This is where Campy comes in. It searches thousands of campgrounds across the
Chris: world via APIs. I was just thinking about building this.
Chris: I was just going to build this. I was thinking to myself, why am I doing this?
Chris: I could have the bot do it. It already can be. That's awesome.
Wes: It's MIT licensed.
Chris: 99% Python. Continuously checks for cancellations and availabilities.
Chris: Oh, my God. This is so perf. Thank you, Brian. Definitely going to use that.
Brent: As a slight correction here, Chris, you know how you call me Brentley?
Brent: Well, this is actually called Camply.
Chris: Okay, what did I say? Campy?
Brent: Well, it's not that campy, but it's campy.
Chris: All right, thanks. I'll take the next one, too. Mountain Man comes in with a member boost.
Chris: Someone else already mentioned Voron, but I also had to mention Hevort printers.
Chris: You could probably have AI create a home assistant dashboard using the Moonraker
Chris: API from Clipper and also had to share the Ellis Tuning Guide.
Chris: I don't know if I knew what any of that means.
Wes: It's a bunch of 3D printer stuff.
Chris: Remember you were asking for tips and setups I am such a 3D printer noob the
Chris: wife and I though were watching 3D printing videos last night like ASMR,
Chris: you never know it could be in our future Papa John's here with the I definitely
Chris: want to hear about Chris's Nextcloud bacon all your pictures are stored directly
Chris: in Nextcloud I do backups but I don't have to use them I would rather not love the show guys,
Chris: We should have talked about my NextCloud woes in the pre-show today while we
Chris: were talking about yours.
Brent: There's still time.
Chris: Next week. Somebody remind me,
Chris: I have no hard feelings towards the NextCloud project. I still think it's a great project.
Chris: Personally, I've decided I will never be using it again after the most severe
Chris: data loss that I've ever experienced.
Brent: Oh, no.
Chris: So, for me, it just, like, it crossed a line, and I just can no longer use it.
Chris: But I will try to remember to tell that story in next week's member feed if somebody reminds me.
Wes: I think we might have skipped Sam H's here.
Chris: Oh, grab it for me then. Sorry about that.
Wes: Yeah, just getting started with Hermes. Love the clinker therapy recording.
Wes: I wondered, though, why Codex CLA instead of ChatGPD OAuth, the provider in Hermes?
Chris: So I do that as well. But so there's a matter of perspective that influences
Chris: the way the agents interact and audit the system.
Chris: And so Codex is coming from a view outside the Hermes harness,
Chris: outside the system, without all of the soul and the agent and all of the stuff
Chris: that the skills, everything that agent's loading.
Chris: And what you will find is you can have the exact same model and...
Chris: the one that's loaded up with all your agent harness stuff may produce code,
Chris: slightly differently than the exact same model without all that stuff.
Chris: And depending on how you prompt the model with all that stuff,
Chris: it will take more of a supervisory, auditorial, critical role,
Chris: and it has a different perspective, and it actually will find stuff that the
Chris: same exact model created that is a little off and needs to be corrected.
Chris: It's the state of the technology right now. And so by using the two together,
Chris: you kind of have that coverage, right?
Chris: Because the Hermes agent and that harness, it knows my systems,
Chris: it knows my host, machines it knows where the credentials are it knows all that
Chris: stuff and knows how to build and iterate really quickly and it has a task management
Chris: system and a progress tracking system and all of that and it can do it iteratively,
Chris: then i can hit it with codex or you know whatever open code using whatever model
Chris: you want on the side and it's taking more of a third party meta role and it
Chris: tends to find stuff that the original harness may be missed.
Wes: Yeah you can also do something where like you can have specific like dynamic
Wes: sub agents where you've crafted a prompt in a similar way so you don't inject,
Wes: as little context as you can with just a prompt or something.
Wes: But having a separate harness can be nice too for auditing, for checking,
Wes: for like verifying. And if something gets messed up and you need it to,
Wes: you want someone to help you repair it, super handy for that too.
Chris: Also, depending on how you have Hermes configured, it may commit things to memory.
Chris: So if you're working through iteratively trying to fix stuff every now and then,
Chris: it will commit the wrong thing and it'll update the skill to the wrong thing,
Chris: as you're going through the iteration process.
Chris: You avoid that if you're sort of hitting it from the side with a codex or something like that.
Chris: And then you can do a handoff prompt at the end of your session with Codex or
Chris: OpenCode to say, all right, give me a handoff prompt that tells my agent to
Chris: store what's changed and been updated durably since the last time we communicated.
Chris: And, of course, those side tools can read those chat sessions so it actually
Chris: knows the last thing you said to the agent so it can craft a specific response.
Chris: You then give to the original Hermes or OpenClaw agent, and it can update its
Chris: skills and its memory and all of that.
Wes: A blessed little artifact. And then you can have, like, I mean,
Wes: can be throwaway or semi-permanent separate context that you used to craft that.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Feels like we need another clanker string. Well, guys, we have King Arthur as
Brent: a member here with a members boost.
Chris: We need a King Arthur sound.
Chris: Once we verify he's a certified king, we've got to get a good.
Brent: Like, King Arthur says, what is the story of removing the 5,000 Jar Jar boost clip?
Chris: Oh, I just don't have it on the button. Where is it?
Wes: Back by popular demand.
Chris: Hold on. I do have it somewhere.
Chris: Nope, that's it. I don't think that's it. I have it. I have it. I do have it.
Chris: i just don't have it on the active because i kind of rotate through you know
Chris: because otherwise i'd play the
Chris: same ones all the time but it is here somewhere it is i think this is a.
Brent: Vote to bring it a little further in the.
Chris: Front all right i'll try to find it oh that one yeah we have several in the
Chris: 5 000 category we kind of rotate through.
Brent: Is it over 5 000.
Chris: Oh i see send us a boost sound effect,
Chris: Yeah, nice.
Brent: Except there's Boost Mobile and also Nestle's Boost Drinks that we can pull from.
Chris: We choose to Boost.
Wes: Good idea.
Chris: And Eric the Magician wraps us up with a member Boost. I tried out Hyperland
Chris: by copying Hypervibe's Nix configs to my system. Looking great!
Chris: Not where I expected that to go. It's been a good starting point for me. I'm glad to hear that.
Wes: Eric. Awesome.
Chris: I thought that was going to go the other direction, and I am pleased to hear
Chris: that's working well for you.
Chris: Shout out to everybody who streamed us sats as you listened to the show.
Chris: 17 of you streamed us 24,671 Satoshis.
Chris: When you combine that with our member boost, the Fiat boost,
Chris: and you convert it all to Satoshis, it brings us to a grand total of 254,045 Satoshis this episode.
Chris: Not too bad at all. Thank you very much. We had nine member boosts,
Chris: one Fiat boost, and 38 unique SatSenders.
Chris: You are the small crew that made the show possible along with our members this week.
Chris: Tens of thousands and tens of thousands of Linux users will enjoy this episode.
Chris: And this is the career that made
Chris: it possible. It is a value for value podcast. We are in the ad winter.
Chris: We don't have the ad deals we used to have. I think they're gone,
Chris: but the support continues.
Chris: We really do appreciate it. You can boost at boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com or
Chris: become a member and set your support on autopilot at linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: I got a couple of pics for you boys. Kind of went along a theme this week.
Wes: I see that.
Chris: It is a YouTube theme. One way to privately watch YouTube and one way to watch YouTube with others.
Chris: So let's start with Open Together, where you can enjoy YouTube as well as other
Chris: video streaming services. Real-time synchronized playback with an optional voting system.
Chris: No sign-up required. It's all open source. It's got text chat.
Chris: You can play videos from YouTube, Vimeo, any MP4 served over HTTP,
Chris: any HLS or Dashstream, as well as some other ones.
Wes: Oh, that is handy.
Chris: Yeah, and the vote system's neat, too, if you're, like, you know,
Chris: hanging out with a crew online and you're watching some videos.
Wes: Oh, DJ mode.
Chris: And they also let you provide your own custom JSON file with an MP4 if you want
Chris: to enable, like, all the extra features, like, multiple different bit rates and text chat and.
Wes: Stuff like that.
Brent: Fancy. Oh, I miss JSON.
Chris: On uh.
Wes: Yeah hope he's doing well.
Brent: So we gonna watch some academy together then.
Chris: Well yeah i guess you could yeah you could watch an mp4 with this you could
Chris: you could watch academy we should probably try it yeah so that's enjoy together
Chris: and uh open together dot tube or open together tube.com i'll put a link to it
Chris: in the show notes it's also on github it is open source,
Chris: as you would imagine It is AGPL3.0.
Chris: This next one doesn't sound like a YouTube tool, but it is.
Chris: It's called TypeType, a privacy-respecting platform to watch YouTube.
Chris: And it plays from a couple of other platforms I've never heard from either.
Chris: But it stores history. It has subscriptions, playlists, favorites, watch later.
Chris: You can resume videos that you are watching just like you can with actual YouTube.
Chris: And I have to say the YouTube style UI from like maybe a year or two ago before
Chris: some, like they really crammed it full of shorts.
Chris: It looks like that. It looks like it's a self-help.
Wes: It does look like classic sort of, yeah.
Chris: Classic YouTube. And you get all the classic features of YouTube without YouTube.
Chris: I mean, you can pull in the videos.
Brent: I think I'm getting this.
Chris: It's doing the watch history. It's doing the recommendations.
Chris: It's doing the playlist.
Brent: It's got subscriptions. Oh my gosh.
Chris: You can import as well.
Brent: This is what I've been looking for for years.
Chris: I think it has a lot of potential. I think it has a lot of potential.
Chris: Yeah, you can import from YouTube your playlist.
Wes: That's, wow.
Chris: Yeah. So this is, I think, you know, there's a lot of options these days,
Chris: but I think, it's just a weird name, but I think it has a lot of potential.
Chris: It's called TypeType, and it's MIT licensed, and it's available on GitHub.
Wes: You did some great searching this week.
Chris: I like these ones. It also has an API.
Wes: Perfect.
Chris: And it can download, I love this, it can download the videos in the background
Chris: with a separate download thread so when you click play they're playing locally,
Chris: they can also do the streaming if it needs to but it can.
Wes: Now what's the mobile story here does it behave okay as a web app.
Chris: You know I actually don't know like in the mobile because I on the mobile app,
Chris: if I'm on Android I'm not happy with the YouTube app anymore it's gotten real it.
Wes: Has been it has for.
Chris: Sure so I would actually like to try it on mobile Well, on iOS,
Chris: the app isn't as bad, but the font's all screwed up. It's the weirdest thing.
Chris: So I haven't tried it on mobile. I don't know. But in the GitHub project,
Chris: they have screenshots that make it look like the YouTube. I mean,
Chris: it almost looks like YouTube.com and in the mobile version of it, too.
Brent: That's very nice.
Chris: So the screenshots of the mobile one look really good. So if I'm to go by that,
Chris: I'd say it's pretty tight.
Chris: I'm very impressed with both. These will put links to those in the show notes.
Chris: And then, Brentley, you have a sneaky third pick that's on the same theme.
Brent: I have two sneaky picks. One is on the same theme. Yeah, yeah,
Brent: yeah. I kept one from you.
Brent: So, it's funny that you linked to these this week because I stayed up far too late last night.
Brent: installing me tube on my little nas over here and it's to solve a very specific
Brent: problem for me basically this thing is a,
Brent: little container that you can self-host and it's just a very simple web ui for
Brent: youtube dlp and it just makes downloading,
Brent: like individual youtube videos much much much easier than you know reaching
Brent: for your terminal especially when you want to save the file on a,
Brent: different computer than the one you're on, et cetera.
Brent: So that's the problem I was trying
Brent: to save. And it turns out MeTube was exactly what I was looking for.
Brent: A little self-hosted thing I can throw on the NAS. And then I have a plugin on my Firefox or Chrome.
Brent: And you click the plugin and it either pulls the page you're on because you're
Brent: on YouTube, or you could just paste a URL and it just sends,
Brent: offloads that download off to that little tool. And it throws it in a folder.
Brent: if you want, and it scrapes all the metadata and stuff to make it nice and friendly
Brent: for Jellyfin if you want. I love that.
Brent: So I looked at doing it a few other ways. I was like, maybe I could do a skill
Brent: for my robot. And that seems wrong.
Brent: And then I looked at Pinch Flat too, and I was like, well, actually,
Brent: this is not what I want. I just want to send like very specific videos.
Brent: But it turns out MeTube can also download videos from, you know,
Brent: playlists and channels in real time as well. So it's a nice, simple.
Chris: Little tool that is nice again me tube m-e-t-u-b-e honorable mention however
Chris: to pinch flat because it is kind of in this category and i just want to follow up still using it,
Chris: it downloads my youtube videos saves them to a jellyfin youtube library folder
Chris: and i watch them offline so that way i'm,
Chris: what's this about a sneaky third pick yeah yeah.
Brent: What's going on yeah is this embargoed.
Chris: Smuggled in this is too many picks we can't.
Brent: Put this in the show okay i'll tell you uh tell us about it.
Chris: We'll cut all this from the show but you can tell us.
Brent: Okay okay okay yeah yeah well i forgot to tell you that uh yeah i'm a bit embarrassed
Brent: about this but it's also a success like uh i installed me tube using podmas
Brent: first podman like success that i had it was so easy,
Brent: it was so easy easy.
Chris: What's the secret pick? Come on.
Brent: I have a secret pick. Um, it's, it's, it's actually on topic and I am embarrassed
Brent: that we didn't talk about it, but it's called MCP dash NixOS.
Brent: Oh, I use this in, you know, I use open code.
Brent: I use this in my open code. And the reason I came to want it is that it just
Brent: makes looking up NixOS things much, much, much easier.
Brent: So it says it's a real up to the second information about NixOS,
Brent: including packages, options, home manager configurations nix darwin flakes,
Brent: and all of that stuff and you get it super fast just right punched into your
Brent: uh lm or the robot your of your choice and i found,
Brent: for manipulating nix os configs it made it far more accurate far faster really
Brent: and just smooth oh yeah very much so and it solved the problem i was having
Brent: which was sometimes it just gives the wrong answer.
Wes: Okay well i feel bad now because i've been using this for a while i assumed
Wes: you guys were already well brad.
Brent: Is using which is great all.
Chris: Right all right okay all right we gotta wrap up the show oh.
Brent: Wait.
Chris: Nothing. All right. So that's all the picks. We'll have links to those in the
Chris: show notes. There's totally not a secret pick in the show notes.
Brent: No, I didn't hear anything.
Chris: No, I didn't hear anything about that. So don't go to linuxunplugged.com slash 657 for that at all.
Chris: You know, also, we always love a pick. If there's an app or especially a self-hosted
Chris: tool that we could share with the audience that you've been using that we haven't
Chris: mentioned on the show, let us know.
Chris: Send us an email, linuxunplugged.com slash contact or boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Wes: We have an unhealthy obsession with finding good picks.
Chris: Too many apps. Too many apps.
Brent: Producer Jeff wants to correct us here. He figured out why it's called TypeType.
Brent: It's because it uses PipePipe, the extractor, on the back end.
Chris: Ah, it's cute. Thank you, PJ. Look at him putting it all together.
Chris: See? That's great. Like a good producer do.
Chris: All right, well, that's it for us. We're going to wrap it up here.
Chris: But, of course, we want to let you know that we do have a few extra bennies
Chris: in the feed you might like to know about. We've got an MP4 version of the show,
Chris: as well as some metadata you could always throw a bot at.
Wes: Yeah. Speaking of JSON, we've got JSON right there in the RSS feed.
Chris: How about that?
Wes: So it's always with us.
Chris: How about that?
Wes: Yeah. Chapter info, find out where the good stuff is, jump right to the pics
Wes: if you want. I don't know why, but you could.
Chris: That's what I do.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I just skip to the pics.
Wes: Or if you want to find all the details, download the transcript.
Chris: Mm, that's pretty cool. And of course, we are live as well. You can make it
Chris: a Tuesday on a Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: And if you want more show, remember we have the Luplug. It gets together every
Chris: Sunday before we get started, and it keeps on going after the show.
Chris: And our members get the bootleg, which is clocking it at two hours and 33 minutes
Chris: right now. It's a lot of show. There's a lot of content in there.
Chris: And a shout-out to everyone who contributes in some way or another,
Chris: even if it's just listening and sharing it. We really do appreciate that.
Chris: We don't mention it enough, but we really do appreciate it.
Chris: Word of mouth is the number one way podcasts get shared. All right,
Chris: that's it from us. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: We'll see you back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.