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: Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show this week, a simple network monitoring
Chris: tool that does a lot more than just flag unknown devices.
Chris: Then we're going to take things a step further using that data to detect family
Chris: presence at home and trigger automations based on that.
Chris: Then we're going to round it out with some great feedback, some boosts,
Chris: some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: It's a big show. So before we start, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room.
Mumble: Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes. Hello, Brian. Andrea. Happy New Year, by the way.
Chris: Happy New Year.
Wes: That's a strong crowd.
Chris: Got a good group up there and quite listening, too. Hello, everybody.
Chris: Thank you for joining us.
Chris: Happy 2026. Can you believe it? It's our first episode. We're back.
Chris: And I spent the holiday season building out the home lab. And I'm going to share
Chris: just the tip of the iceberg this week.
Chris: So let's start by saying good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go check out ManageNebula at defined.net slash unplug.
Chris: This is a decentralized VPN that's like no other. It's built on the Nebula project,
Chris: which we trust. It's fully open, been around since 2017.
Chris: Something you can really look at, go through, self-host the whole shebang from
Chris: top to bottom. And I think this is something that I like to emphasize at this
Chris: moment because it really makes Nebula stand out.
Chris: Their free tier isn't competing with some other product that's going to eat away at their business.
Chris: They're not trying to just do a sales funnel thing here. In fact,
Chris: you could completely self-host all of the infrastructure.
Chris: What's nice about the managed Nebula from Defy Networking is they take care
Chris: of a lot of the infrastructure for you. But at any point, you can swap back and forth.
Chris: You own the network, the identity, the routing, the control.
Chris: It all stays with you. not a third-party control plane that you don't actually control.
Chris: And Nebula's decentralized design means that there is no single point of failure. And...
Chris: Not everybody accomplishes this, let me tell you from firsthand experience.
Chris: And if you want to self-host the Lighthouse so that way you can do all of the
Chris: node discovery, all of that is under your control. You absolutely can.
Chris: Or hit the easy button and check out Manage Nebula. And you can get 100 hosts
Chris: for free when you go to defined.net slash unplug. No credit card required.
Chris: No lock-in. Just a fantastic open source product turned into a package that's easy for you to use.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplug. Support the show. Go say good morning and check them out.
Chris: And thank you to Define.net for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: Now, just a touch of housekeeping to let you know about, Scale and Planet Nix
Chris: are just around the corner, and Planet Nix's call for proposals closes January 15th. So get them in.
Wes: Yeah, let's see, 11 days from when we record.
Chris: You going to do one? You thinking about one? I mean, you could just kind of,
Chris: there's so many things you tinker with, you could probably come up with a talk pretty quick.
Wes: Well, now you've suggested it. So now I have to consider it.
Chris: I don't know. Yeah, maybe.
Wes: Well, you see, the only trade-off is always there's so much stuff we're always
Wes: trying to do in the short time that we're there there's a lot of nicks to take
Wes: in so you got to balance it.
Chris: That is true yeah the event will have two parallel tracks that take place over
Chris: two days speakers can submit proposals for talks or workshops or both and each
Chris: day they're gonna have a mix of both talks and workshops and these are pretty awesome.
Wes: Because you know sometimes what's happened before is someone from our excellent
Wes: audience is given a talk at the same time my talk is at and that's oh.
Chris: That's rough so we're talking march 5th through the 6th at Pasadena.
Chris: You will want, the way that this works is you're going to want to register for
Chris: scale and that gets you into Planet Nix.
Chris: I'm hoping next week we'll have a promo code for you that'll take a nice little
Chris: chunk of that registration off.
Chris: We don't have it yet just because it's the holidays and, you know,
Chris: they're just getting back to work.
Chris: But it's my expectation that we'll have one for you soon and then you can sign
Chris: up and you get a nice chunk off.
Chris: And if you can make it to Planet Nix or just scale on the weekend,
Chris: we'd love to see you there.
Chris: We actually don't have it locked in that we're going to be there so at this
Chris: moment in time don't base your travel plans on us base it on scale and if we
Chris: can make it work if we can find somebody to help us get there and cover planet
Chris: nix and scale then we are going to go with bells on,
Chris: But that isn't locked in yet.
Wes: A declarative belt.
Chris: But it is an event we strongly recommend, both Planet Nix and Scale itself.
Chris: And what's really great is this combo is at the same venue.
Chris: There's some overlap there. So you can just kind of bang it all out at once
Chris: and dip in from all. It's just great. It's a really nice setup.
Wes: You get like a talk about a bunch of server. You get into Nix talk.
Wes: You go learn more about Postgres. All in the same day.
Chris: Go out to lunch. There's always, if you want to socialize, there's always opportunities.
Chris: If you don't want to socialize, you don't have to. You can just be heads down
Chris: and learn. It works for both the introvert and the extrovert,
Chris: or if the introvert wants to flex their extrovert muscles for a couple of days.
Chris: So check it out. We'll have a link, Planet Nix, 2026, March 5th through the
Chris: 6th in Pasadena Convention Center. Don't miss it.
Chris: Gentlemen, if you'll indulge me, I'd love to tell you about my NetAlert X setup.
Chris: Now, this is a network intruder and presence detector that scans for devices
Chris: that are connected to your network and then alerts you if a new or unknown device is discovered.
Chris: It's kind of handy, especially if you live in a neighborhood where people might
Chris: be scanning Wi-Fi or, you know, you're just a little concerned.
Chris: And it's not like a typical dashboard that you stare at.
Chris: What it is is it's building a memory of your network. This is all local first.
Chris: It's all self-hosted. It's open source.
Chris: There's no account you have to create. There's no SAS brain processing it. There's no telemetry.
Chris: Your network is essentially the way the design of network X is.
Chris: Your network is a fluid moving thing where things change.
Chris: Um, new things update and ports open, hopefully not a lot, but over the course
Chris: of a year, these things happen.
Chris: And the idea is, is that network X, we use multiple different network discovery methods.
Chris: So not just like dumb pings, but all kinds of different methods.
Chris: And there's a lot of plugins to enable different kinds and get an understanding
Chris: of, okay, this device went from this IP to this IP.
Chris: This device has been on your network for this amount of time.
Chris: And you can go in there and you can assign devices to people.
Chris: Well, there's a dashboard to help you do some of that if you want.
Wes: Yeah, I'm interested to see that. You bring up this memory aspect because I
Wes: got it set up. Oh, you did? I did, yeah.
Wes: I was able to just pull it in as a container and have it just run as an OCI
Wes: container on NixOS pretty easily.
Wes: So we can have just a little basic config I'm using for that linked.
Wes: But I've only just started, so I've got the initial setup of the devices that
Wes: I've found, but I haven't used it long enough to see really things evolve yet.
Chris: Right, because initially everything's new. Everything that gets detected is new and whatnot.
Chris: It will also, as it learns more about your network, it'll start to kind of visualize
Chris: what's connected to what node and kind of give you a rough layout of your network.
Wes: Which is fun. That's exciting.
Chris: And it's one of those things where you could put very little into it if you
Chris: just – you want to know when things change.
Chris: Or you can put more into it and you can tell this device is owned by this user
Chris: and it's connected to this device.
Chris: And a lot of times, you know, using MAC address lookup and whatnot,
Chris: it'll identify the device in the manufacturer and it can categorize TV set-top
Chris: boxes, Wi-Fi access points, smart plugs, PCs.
Chris: Tablets it can it can figure a lot of that out on its own and then
Chris: in a very kind of piehole style dashboard at the
Chris: top it gives you how many devices are on your network how many new devices how
Chris: many devices are down it's very it's like i almost wonder if they if the dashboard
Chris: ui isn't actually forked from piehole but it works it's nice and you have that
Chris: to look at and you could never take any further than that you could then if
Chris: you wanted to you could hook it up to say telegram notifications.
Chris: I hooked it up to notify or NTFY. And so when a new device that is unknown on
Chris: my network shows up, I get a notify message sent to my phones to tell me about that.
Chris: And they think when you, when you add the plugins, it really starts to get very,
Chris: very powerful because if you have special devices on your network,
Chris: or say you want to integrate home assistant, or you want to do these other things,
Chris: like I mentioned pie hole, they have plugins for this.
Chris: And so one of the sources of truth for my
Chris: network alert x system is my
Chris: pie hole via the api this is one of the plugins and what's so powerful here
Chris: is now net alert x is in sync with my dhcp dns server so when i issue a new
Chris: client lease or client lease expires or a new dns name shows up the two are in
Chris: patico they know about it that kind of coordination so nice i.
Wes: Just took a look and there's 45 available plugins.
Chris: Yeah yeah yeah yeah any that jump out to you in particular i'm for me i ended
Chris: up using one of the mqtt plugins obviously but yeah there's you know what i
Chris: didn't see was a tectidium no i was taking.
Wes: A look at what it would take to make one.
Chris: Yeah because.
Wes: There's definitely an api so i mean yeah there's a bunch of piehole and piehole
Wes: api there's a specific support for pulling data out of Unify.
Wes: If you have Unify systems on there, I think some Microtech or Microtech stuff as well.
Wes: There's a lot of potential.
Brent: Tiny in the chat room noticed there's a Prometheus endpoint,
Brent: so you can have long-term retention of your data as well and just tie it into
Brent: some of your existing alerting workflow, if that's your thing.
Brent: So it sounds like pretty mature, considering.
Chris: And I feel like it's already appliance level. You just set it up,
Chris: and it does its working. It alerts me.
Chris: And then using MQTT, I'm populating Home Assistant as well.
Chris: So Home Assistant's aware of some of these things. But what I like about it
Chris: is it's event driven. So it alerts, it logs, it feeds automations automatically.
Chris: And you could think of it also as a bit of an event bus. So it has these different
Chris: plugins like Notify and Home Assistant and MQTT and Prometheus and others where
Chris: it's helping them stay current and up to date when they rely on network state information.
Chris: This helps them with that. Like, did that speaker IP address change? Things like that.
Chris: And it assumes that you might have a bit of a messy home lab.
Chris: It's not a perfect network from the start.
Chris: And it assumes there's going to be random ESP devices and things like that that
Chris: it's going to need to figure out. Like, it goes in with that mindset.
Chris: And then you have, once you're done, and it only takes you 20 minutes,
Chris: 10 minutes, depending on your configuration.
Chris: comfortable comfortably with docker compose and your network layout you have
Chris: something that tattles when your friends when your kids have a friend show up
Chris: and they put their device on the wi-fi network you know about it it's that i love.
Wes: I was impressed it was very easy to get started um
Wes: working is i mean it is um containerized so
Wes: that's nice you do need to put it in uh host networking right that helps which
Wes: kind of obviously makes sense and i did do some poking around to look there's
Wes: a lot of python so i gave it a quick stab just to see if i could get it building
Wes: with nix uh there's a little too much going on oh yeah for me to like think
Wes: it was worth it in time for the show but it would definitely be possible.
Chris: Container that's probably.
Wes: So the container i thought was easiest
Wes: um but that said i mean it totally worked and all i really had to do,
Wes: before it was actually like to get to minimum viable useful was just go in the
Wes: settings and make sure it was scanning the right networks i actually cared about
Wes: because by default and all it just wanted to scan was like the local container network.
Chris: Ah yeah sure.
Wes: So i just go say like oh yeah well this one is it could see my local name but
Wes: land just tell it like oh yeah here's what you should go scan that's the one
Wes: you care about yeah but even out of the box it auto detected like what the the
Wes: internet connection was and a few things so.
Brent: Net alert x sounds really amazing from an observation and alerting standpoint
Brent: but i'm curious what happens next like okay you get alerted,
Brent: does it have the means of i don't know tying into some ways of blocking some
Brent: of these hosts or making some decisions or helping you automate some security? Did you get that far?
Chris: That is the key question, right? Is now that you have this data,
Chris: what do you do with it? Besides, I mean, just it is nice getting an alert on
Chris: my phone. Oh, something new is on my network.
Chris: And there is something nice to, I know other commercial products can do that,
Chris: but I'm not using a commercial product.
Chris: Nothing's leaving my private LAN or my mesh net. It's all getting processed locally.
Chris: And the alerting even and the push notifications are all also happening locally.
Wes: Yeah, that's a good point, right? It is something you might get with a fancier
Wes: sort of, oh, I bought this commercial provider that just provides all of my
Wes: network and routing and Wi-Fi all in one thing.
Wes: And it has this fancy, you know, analytics for me. You get a little bit more of that.
Wes: And especially for you, right, you're kind of tying together.
Wes: The DNS side or the DHCP side kind of gives you one picture,
Wes: but it's never really the complete picture.
Wes: There might be devices that aren't doing that, have hard coded things that just
Wes: skip some of that setup and having something that can do active ARP and even
Wes: NMAP scans gives you a lot more capabilities to kind of fill in the blanks.
Chris: But, you know, Brent brings up a great point. It's once you do have this information,
Chris: could you take greater action on it?
Chris: And I actually think that's where it gets really powerful.
Chris: You could stop right here and just have really easy network observability and
Chris: an easy way to alert yourself when something happens.
Chris: But why not take that data and take proactive action based on it.
Chris: And that's, I think, where it really gets powerful.
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Brent: Chris Given, you were playing with this over the holidays, and I imagine that
Brent: means you were in Lady Joops, and JOOPS is pretty much completely run by Home Assistant.
Brent: Is that one of the ways that you're triggering some actions based on this information?
Chris: It is, and I love the power of this.
Chris: So let me give you just a quick diversion, if you will, boys,
Chris: a quick story, and that is I wanted to refine the home and away automations.
Chris: My goal was to trigger automations when the home is empty or if someone arrives home.
Chris: And so, for example, maybe turn off our water pump so we don't have a water
Chris: leak, turn off the lights, turn the heat down, arm and disarm the cameras, big one.
Chris: And some of this I had in different dispersed automations where they came up
Chris: with their own solutions to figure out the state.
Chris: And some of it I didn't have figured out beyond using just like crappy,
Chris: crappy scripts and whatnot.
Chris: And then, of course, I wanted the ability to turn the lights on when we return
Chris: home, turn the cameras off so they're not recording when we return home, when we enter the RV.
Chris: And then also, ideally, start warming it up. So maybe even have like a five-mile radius zone.
Chris: When we haven't been in that five-mile radius zone all day and we enter that, start heating again.
Chris: And the complications in this are a little bit trickier than a standard home.
Chris: Number one, JOOPS moves, so it can't just be based on location. That's going to break.
Wes: You just like to make things difficult.
Chris: And that kind of breakage sucks because it's the exact kind you forget you've
Chris: set up in the first place.
Chris: And then you go out on a trip, and you're like, oh, why isn't, oh, my God.
Wes: It needs to be dynamic to take that into account from the start. Yeah.
Chris: And I have made much, much, much work towards getting Joop's location aware.
Chris: So she auto, so that would just, I can't do that.
Chris: Can't be just Wi-Fi SSD because every now and then our home internet gets crappy.
Chris: So we turn off the Wi-Fi on our phones or something.
Chris: So you can't just be well if they're on the Wi-Fi, which would be,
Chris: which would be another easy one if that works for you.
Chris: And Apple has this technology called iBeacon. Ironically, I can't use it with
Chris: Home Assistant and iPhones. You can with Android.
Chris: So you could do something like Bluetooth presence awareness,
Chris: but I can't because my kids are on iPhones and the wife.
Chris: So I needed a way to do all of this presence awareness.
Chris: And my wife and I are the only ones with the Home Assistant apps.
Chris: The kids don't have the Home Assistant apps on their phones.
Chris: So I needed something that even accounted for, say, we go for a walk around
Chris: the property, but the kids are still home in the morning. I mean,
Chris: I don't want the system to shut off on them. I need to know they're home.
Chris: Well, this is where NetAlertX comes in because NetAlertX supports MQTT and Home
Chris: Assistant integration, and it can supply a collection of stats such as the number
Chris: of devices that are online to Home Assistant.
Chris: And then in Home Assistant, with a little bit of work...
Chris: You can turn on presence awareness and then assign them to persons.
Chris: So I can say, when this device is on the network, consider this person home.
Chris: It's really easy to do in Home Assistant.
Chris: And the beautiful thing about this is their IPs can change, et cetera,
Chris: but it's still associated to them and it knows when they're on the network or not.
Chris: And it's supplying Home Assistant with a home or not kind of status. Very powerful.
Chris: And there is a NetAlertX dashboard to assign, okay, this is my kid's devices.
Chris: my wife's device so you can kind of sort all that out ahead of time and.
Wes: Then that gets auto exposed i think you said via mqtt.
Chris: Yeah and.
Wes: Then that's what sort of sorts it through home assistant.
Chris: I finally broke down yeah i.
Wes: Mean we gotta you kind of burying the lead here.
Chris: Yeah i have avoided this since i've home assistant set up since the very beginning
Chris: so many things want to use mqtt you're.
Wes: A broker bro now.
Chris: But it's the native way that net alert x communicates with home assistant,
Chris: and uh because it's an event-driven system they're just perfect for each other
Chris: and the moment a device is detected it shoots it off over mqtt to home assistant
Chris: home assistant is running the mosquito mqtt broker and immediately is aware
Chris: of a state change it's just instant beautiful it's beautiful yeah.
Wes: So did you is that like a plug-in you just added from.
Chris: Home assistant for this one yeah yeah you could run mqtt uh
Chris: server on anything right it could be i could run mosquito
Chris: on anything but there is just a real easy add-on that integrates it
Chris: all and if you use home assistant's add-on then it uses
Chris: the home assistant authentication because a lot of mqtt brokers now you have
Chris: to authenticate to and you have to go set up user accounts for but if you use
Chris: the home assistant add-on it'll just use your local home assistant user database
Chris: and so yeah that is that is a convenience so you set that up and let net alert
Chris: x auto discover all your devices,
Chris: they all then populate in home assistant as net alert x discovers them you set
Chris: up a you don't even have to create a user account home assistant there's a difference
Chris: between a user account and a,
Chris: Then you add this device that's now being monitored by NetAlertX to their person.
Chris: And then Home Assistant, when that shows them online, considers them home.
Chris: And you can create all kinds of automations based on this because it consolidates
Chris: it all down into your zone.home or whatever it might be called.
Chris: And this just ends up being a counter of X amount of people home.
Chris: So there's a default sensor, essentially, in Home Assistant that aggregates
Chris: down the data of who's home into just a number. one person home five people home.
Wes: Nice and then you can use that for even more downstream stuff.
Chris: Yes oh.
Wes: That's that's so great.
Chris: It is so wonderful and seamless especially if you do a few niceties like in
Chris: your automation maybe you had a five minute delay so when people leave you wait
Chris: five minutes just in case there's like somebody dropping off for a bit and they come back,
Chris: and when you do that it's so seamless to the family they every time they show
Chris: up and right it's dark every time they show up all the lights are on for them
Chris: the heat's been coming on and it's the water tongue like they don't even know
Chris: the water's off while they're gone right nobody even knows it just it's all
Chris: seamless to them ideally they.
Wes: Never have to know.
Chris: They don't have to worry like as soon as they come home the camera shut off
Chris: so they're not getting recorded and i'm not getting a bunch of alerts and because
Chris: home assistant knows people are home or not i can also just based i can say
Chris: um for notifications i can say don't alert me on these things when someone's home oh.
Wes: That is a nice extra detail to set as a flag.
Chris: Right yeah i.
Wes: Do not need to care about these things.
Chris: It's so great.
Wes: We're not in yellow alert mode.
Chris: No. No, we don't need to be in armed mode, essentially. And there is actually, boys...
Chris: An even easier way to do this, if you didn't want NetAlertX at all,
Chris: but you still wanted all this fancy presence awareness I'm talking about,
Chris: step one, set your clients to use a reserved address or set a static address for them.
Chris: Remember iPhones and some Androids, they rotate their Mac address.
Chris: You can go into the Wi-Fi settings for that particular AP.
Chris: You can turn that off or set it to just a fixed Mac address that it generates.
Chris: And once you have your family devices or your own devices, whoever it might
Chris: be, on static IPs, the ones you want to track for awareness,
Chris: there's actually a very simple ping integration that comes built into Home Assistant.
Chris: You don't have to install anything, no MQTT, no additional NetAlertX,
Chris: no crazy community add-ons.
Chris: It's just built into Home Assistant integration called ping.
Chris: And when you add it, it asks for the host IP that you want to ping or the name.
Chris: and when the ping succeeds, Home Assistant considers that device home.
Chris: And when the ping fails, Home Assistant considers that device gone.
Wes: That is pretty simple and easy.
Chris: Yep. And you can go into entities in there and you can, if you filter on disabled
Chris: entities, you can actually turn on the device state tracker setting for the
Chris: ping integration devices and then boom, you add them to your persons.
Chris: And now it's very simple. It's very rudimentary. But if all you need is just
Chris: to be able to ping their device and their IP doesn't change,
Chris: you essentially get presence awareness and you can base all the automations
Chris: around that, which is something that simple.
Wes: And then maybe sub it out later if you need to.
Chris: Yeah, it's so nice, right? Because you could then later go to NetAlertX and
Chris: go a lot more sophisticated and do other kinds of things. But a simple ping
Chris: integration could do it.
Wes: Now, did you consider like an embedded Bluetooth tracker in yourself?
Chris: Well...
Chris: I did actually originally try to go the Bluetooth route.
Chris: That felt just more passive, plus then it wouldn't need the network monitoring
Chris: infrastructure, right?
Wes: Because you could add a whole biohacking angle to this.
Chris: That's true. Just put it in my arm. Or you don't need to. Everybody's walking
Chris: around with phones and, you know, Bluetooth devices.
Chris: And there is an ESP presence firmware project, I think based on ESP Home,
Chris: that you can flash on an ESP.
Chris: And then they're basically little Bluetooth monitoring nodes that you connect
Chris: to Home Assistant. And it can even track the signal strength,
Chris: essentially giving you what room they're in based on monitoring the other way.
Wes: Oh, that is neat.
Chris: That is neat, right? And you don't really have to do anything else other than
Chris: just walk around with something that got Bluetooth.
Chris: So I thought about that. In fact, I kind of wanted to put this out to the audience
Chris: and ask them other ways to do this because I believe there's also hardware sensors,
Chris: like millimeter wave hardware sensors you could do this with.
Chris: You could probably do this with motion sensors.
Chris: I like the network monitoring approach. This is working for us because it solves a couple of edge cases.
Chris: But I wonder if if I supplemented it with another type of presence awareness,
Chris: like a sensor of some kind, if I could make this even better.
Chris: And so I'm putting the question out there to anybody in the audience,
Chris: boost in and let me know if you've solved presence awareness in another way
Chris: with a hardware detection of some kind or motion sensors,
Chris: something I could add to this to kind of really refine and make sure no one
Chris: is in the RV, not even a guest or anybody.
Chris: right because that could be the edge edge edge case is
Chris: a guest of somebody is over that i don't
Chris: know about and for some reason they get left in the rv
Chris: or maybe they're over house i
Chris: don't know i don't know why i mean then they wouldn't have water and lights and
Chris: heat so i gotta figure i gotta figure these edge cases out so boost and let
Chris: me know if you have a way to solve that or go to linuxunplugged.com contact
Chris: and tell me how you're doing it because right now i think that could be the
Chris: gotcha and maybe I'm missing other edge cases too you can tell me about but
Chris: I'm really happy with the results.
Chris: Well, we don't have a sponsor here, but if anybody out there would like to sponsor
Chris: the Unplugged program, we are in the process of finalizing ad deals for Q1.
Chris: Email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Best audience out there. Really great audience. And we can speak from some authority on the topic.
Chris: We can speak from some authority on the topic. So let me know,
Chris: chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I'd love to have somebody from the community sponsor the show.
Chris: Wouldn't that be nice? That'd be really nice.
Wes: That would be wonderful.
Chris: Kind of give it back.
Brent: Well, our dear Olympia Mike writes
Brent: in with, I think, a rather big question here. Guys, I need your help.
Brent: The next project is getting more and more attention and adoption, which is great.
Brent: However, the question of how this project is licensed keeps coming up.
Brent: I'll admit I'm a developer, not a lawyer, so I never paid too much attention
Brent: to licenses and the nuances between them.
Brent: I was just kind of assumed there was some proprietary or open license.
Brent: I have people telling me, go MIT or unlicense, as it helps with adoption.
Brent: But then I have other people telling me, you absolutely should go GPL.
Brent: And others saying, well, use anything except GPL. On top of all of that,
Brent: what can I even license in this project?
Brent: It's mostly just Nix configs with some scripts.
Brent: However, I am working on some Python and GTK apps to pair with it.
Brent: Still, Nixbook relies on other projects to work almost entirely.
Brent: I know you guys always mention how a project is licensed when you do the picks,
Brent: and I guess it's a pretty boring topic, perhaps, but can you all shed some light
Brent: on the differences and what a project like Nick's book should be under?
Brent: Licenses feel like one of those super important topics we should care about,
Brent: and yet, few people really understand them, so help.
Chris: This is a big question, boys. And, you know, Olympia Mike's been working on
Chris: this project for a while. We've watched it grow.
Chris: It's really neat to see the way that these reclaimed, refurbished,
Chris: you know, notebooks can be turned into systems for people that they still get.
Chris: I mean, I'm using one still myself.
Chris: It's a big question that I think really impacts perhaps future adoption the
Chris: most. And how these things get shared is how I look at it.
Chris: So I think that's the big consideration. What do you think, Wes?
Chris: Am I missing something there?
Wes: Well, there's also, like, as the Genesis...
Wes: main chief maintainer one way to
Wes: think about this is you know from mike's perspective
Wes: like what what are you worried about what are you trying to protect
Wes: for yourself and for downstream users
Wes: or people who might want to either use the project directly or use the code
Wes: and so one thing you check out is choose a license.com they've kind of got like
Wes: a nice little it's not like everything that it's not going to answer the question
Wes: for you but it kind of gives you some ways to look at the problem,
Wes: it's a decent starting point.
Wes: If you think about sort of MIT
Wes: versus GPL as representative of the largest difference in terms of like,
Wes: do you go with a copy left license like the GPL or do you go with an open source
Wes: license that is more on the permissive side, like a BSD kind of license or MIT?
Wes: There's more nuances there, but just to start with...
Wes: One way to think about it is like if you're making like a library for a programming
Wes: language, I'm going to make this utility that, you know, does X.
Wes: It computes things. It draws a triangle, whatever.
Wes: And you want that to be widely adopted. You want that just to be used by anyone.
Wes: You want to make it easy to use yourself maybe in contracting work or just like
Wes: to bring it into whatever person you're working for without having to worry about it.
Wes: Then a permissive license makes all of that super easy, simple.
Wes: So I think it does get used a lot for those kinds of things.
Wes: For an end user application, or especially I would argue something that you
Wes: think of maybe as like a commons application,
Wes: like something like LibreOffice, where it's like, this is something you want
Wes: people to have sort of by default as people who, you know, are using computers,
Wes: they should have a way to use this, it should be theirs.
Wes: That's where something like the GPL makes more sense. Now you might think,
Wes: you might worry, one thing to consider then is, do you want people to be able
Wes: to make proprietary things and not share the code?
Wes: Right? They can sell GPL code, they can stuff, but you have to provide the source along with it.
Wes: So are you okay imposing that on people downstream? Are you more concerned about
Wes: the rights to have code for anybody using a Nixbook derivative?
Wes: Or are you more worried about enabling people to build the next Chrome OS competitor or whatever?
Chris: I was, yeah, to kind of double down on what you're saying there.
Chris: It's like, do you want this to be a reference platform?
Chris: Do you want this to be something the community takes over and builds on for
Chris: you? and then you kind of take a supervisor role, do you want it resistant to capture maybe?
Chris: And also, is it worth considering a split licensing, like MIT for the configs
Chris: and GPL3 for apps that are created that are maybe like Python GTK apps and stuff
Chris: like that? Brent, do you have thoughts on this question?
Brent: Well, I think one of the things that becomes obvious here is don't rush into a license.
Brent: Just because people are asking for it doesn't necessarily mean you have to choose
Brent: one today. make an informed decision because you're going to be living with
Brent: it for a while if you choose certain licenses.
Brent: That said, your community has a huge amount of input, right?
Brent: These are the people that are wanting to work with your code or maybe wanting
Brent: to use your project, but they need some kind of license to make sure that it
Brent: fits into their goals as well.
Brent: Maybe one of the best ways to do it is go chat with other open source developers
Brent: of projects that you use and love, or even some that are part of the Nixbook
Brent: project, maybe upstream and see what their advice is.
Brent: They have more experience with this than most of us do, and that would be likely
Brent: a good place to start and start a good discussion.
Chris: Yeah, I think too something maybe worth considering is this isn't really an
Chris: open versus closed because you can make an argument for MIT or GPL.
Chris: I think both camps are right.
Chris: So I think maybe the way to frame this, Mike, and then take your decisions from
Chris: there would be who benefits if this project becomes more successful down the
Chris: road and who would benefit more than I expected.
Chris: And just think about that and think about who you want to contribute.
Chris: And I think that's the essence of what you have to get to to make your decision
Chris: on the license because it's a hard choice to make. And I'd say both groups are technically right.
Chris: And I do like the idea of chatting with some other Nix folks because a lot of
Chris: this is based on Nix, right? So I think that's a great idea too.
Chris: Good question. And there is an active discussion happening on GitHub, right?
Chris: So we'll put a link in the show notes if people out there want to jump in and
Chris: help them think about this. It's a hard choice to make.
Wes: And I will also say, not to take away from that,
Wes: but just also whichever way you go, it won't be the end of the world like it's
Wes: still going to be open source and it almost some of this is academic to the
Wes: folks who uh at least at the start are even just using it and benefiting it at the end of the day it.
Chris: Is academic to the end users.
Wes: I mean it is important i yeah it is very important but just you know like it's
Wes: not even if ultimately you came to inclusion that you wasn't you viewed wasn't
Wes: quite optimal in three years the consequences aren't going to be the end of the.
Chris: Because once people start pestering you about the license, that means you have
Chris: reached a certain level of success in adoption where it matters now.
Chris: So true. Congrats, Mike.
Brent: So true.
Wes: Amen.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Well, boys, I'll start us off with our baller booster this week,
Chris: and it is our podcast. He's back.
Chris: Get ready for this, gentlemen. Brace yourselves.
Chris: 850,000 sats.
Chris: Thank you, Eric. He says, hello, Chris, Wes, and Brent. Here's a little virtual
Chris: stocking stuffer for my favorite Linux podcast.
Chris: This boost is a little way for me to share the immense value LUP and self-hosted
Chris: have provided me in my journey in self-hosting on my home server, powered by NixOS.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: One of these days, I'll get Boosy like going as my next achievement.
Chris: Bonus, my wife's laptop, which is a Dell XPS 137390, is now running NixOS with
Chris: Plasma, and she doesn't hate it.
Wes: Sounds like a win.
Chris: That is a win that is a win i i
Chris: heard a opposite story over the holidays and they tried to uh get the significant
Chris: other on linux desktop and did not go well so oh no not hating it is a definite
Chris: win thank you eric we really really appreciate that it's a great way to start
Chris: the new year and a great way to start our first episode of the new year thank you sir.
Wes: Thumbs comes in with three hundred and thirty three thousand and two hundred cents.
Chris: What are you serious not bad either boys thank you thumbs a.
Wes: Long time no boost still trying my best to get caught up on episodes but there's
Wes: so much amazing content in the members feed that it takes a.
Chris: While yeah even at 2x speed it's a lot yeah I.
Wes: Wanted to bring some holiday cheer to the team Thanks for all that you do every
Wes: week to provide content that's not only educational, but entertaining.
Chris: Also, a special shout out to Thumbs because Thumbs had to go through a bit of
Chris: a process because we had liquidity issues on my node and Brent's node,
Chris: and he worked with me over email.
Chris: And I really appreciate him taking the extra time just to do the one-on-one. So thank you, Thumbs.
Wes: That is some lightning love.
Chris: That is. We really appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Brent: Well, we have a kangaroo paradox here with a massive micboost.
Brent: Two, that, two, two hundred.
Brent: Two, what? That's a lot of twos. A lot of twos, basically. Six twos.
Chris: Two hundred and twenty-two thousand, two hundred and twenty-two SATs!
Chris: Wow. Thank you, Kangaroo.
Brent: Kangaroo says, I love hearing about the JB community setups.
Brent: I hope you guys revisit this content sometime in the future.
Brent: Keep those home labs coming.
Brent: This episode and the Nix configs were some of my favorite episodes as of late.
Brent: Enjoy the holidays and thanks for all that value.
Chris: I'm glad you enjoy it because I really like seeing people's setups and configs
Chris: too. And I thought about it.
Chris: What if, and this would be the only time I think we ever do this, but I have a crazy idea.
Chris: And I know I always say this and we never do it. But what if we did a mid-year
Chris: home lab just so that way we could work the kinks out one more time and that
Chris: way when we go to do it in the winter, we've really got it figured out?
Chris: Because part of the issue is we learn by doing and we do it once a year.
Chris: And so that was our first go at it. And what we learned afterwards is we should
Chris: have had the audience rate some of these and rank some of these because it became
Chris: an emotional chore of unbelievable proportions because we love every single one of them.
Wes: How do you bake the jewels out of a stack of all jewels?
Chris: It was like not the problem we expected to have. And it was very hard.
Chris: We wanted all of them to be winners. And we still felt like,
Chris: can we do more? Because like we want to feature some that didn't make it on
Chris: air because they're just so great.
Chris: And so what we realized is we need to come up with a way for the audience to
Chris: vote on them and be able to review them.
Chris: And I'd like to just work the kinks out one more time. So I don't know.
Chris: Maybe we could talk ourselves into doing an extra.
Chris: But we'll see. Thank you, Kangaroo. I really appreciate the signal on those episodes.
Chris: It's good for us to hear that too. So it gives us a solid direction to go.
Chris: Well, look at this gentleman. The dude abides his back with 252,777 sats. Wow.
Chris: How about that? Thank you, sir. That is amazing. Really appreciate that.
Chris: He writes, it seems the fountain was having some troubles. Yeah,
Chris: we were having troubles over the weekend. So I'm sending the rest via my Albi hub.
Chris: Isn't it nice having your own self-hosted backup route?
Wes: And so that is, in fact, why we should have flipped the last two in terms of
Wes: proper boosts, ball of boost count here. But I kind of had to hand aggregate.
Chris: Coming in with the hand math. It's all right. We appreciate that.
Chris: He says, thanks for featuring my rack. I enjoyed the Homelab episode.
Chris: I didn't think I'd win the Boosties since I'm already a member I'll pass the
Chris: gift to someone else I'm already talking to Hybrid Sarcasm and we'll let you
Chris: know probably next week.
Wes: What?
Chris: Happy 2026 Look at that initiative, appreciate it Amazing.
Chris: And they're gonna gift it to somebody else. That's really cool And can you believe
Chris: the dude won the Boosties and he's also already a member Thank you the dude abides That's.
Wes: A lot of support Uphab comes in with 33,333 cents,
Wes: Here's my prediction. Act one, PC component prices keep hiking.
Chris: Oh, no.
Wes: Personal computers become prohibitively expensive. Act two, the cloud is the
Wes: only way to access decent processing power, and the companies hoarding hardware
Wes: for AI become the obvious providers.
Wes: Act three, the Microsoft 365 Link model takes off.
Wes: AI companies finally become profitable, and personal computing is officially a thing of the past.
Wes: Maybe not for 2026, but who knows? Let's hope never. Happy holidays.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: This is dark. Good holidays to you, too, there, buddy. Thanks, Pat.
Wes: Well, it's a reminder of what we fight for on the show.
Chris: It is.
Wes: Which is not that.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm really feeling like I missed the boat by not building
Chris: my HomeLab server last year.
Mumble: That's super dark.
Chris: It is dark. It is dark. Hello, Neil.
Mumble: Also, hi.
Chris: Hello, Neil. Hello. Hello. I hope that I'm hopeful that somebody comes along
Chris: and says, we're going to get in the RAM game.
Chris: And they, you know, get supply ramped up, at least by the end of 2026.
Mumble: I mean, I wound up panic buying a desktop because of this. i wonder how many others.
Chris: Have yeah because.
Mumble: Like right now.
Chris: Idea it's one of the best ways to get a machine with ram is just to buy a pre-built one.
Mumble: Yeah well i mean the last time i did this was 10 years ago and it was because
Mumble: of the hard drives are flooded and i want like the hard drive manufacturer i
Mumble: remember that right and it took like what three years for them to recover from that,
Mumble: uh and so i wound up buying a pre-built desktop pc last time too so i don't
Mumble: get to win here like Like,
Mumble: I mean, at least this time around, I actually managed to get a,
Mumble: right now, with a lot of the inventory that's still left from pre-insanity,
Mumble: you can get a pretty good deal.
Mumble: I got one where the desktop came with an NVIDIA 5090.
Mumble: It has 64 gigs of RAM and four terabytes of total NVMe storage for five grand with a...
Mumble: With a Ryzen 9 9550X3D or something like that.
Chris: Storage alone is like $1,200 right now.
Mumble: Right, I know, right? I was like, geez, between the RAM and the storage,
Mumble: the computer paid for itself.
Chris: Yeah, crazy.
Mumble: And then the CPU just adds a cherry on top. I mean, the computer's going to
Mumble: come with Windows, of course, because that's what happens with these things.
Mumble: But at least it's a reasonably powerful computer.
Mumble: it's made uh i can the the
Mumble: design of the computer is that the parts internally are not proprietary
Mumble: and they're easily replaceable uh so that means i did not buy a dell and uh
Mumble: it'll be fine right like i also don't really mess around with the desktop once
Mumble: i have it for a long time and it's just it's been time for a while for me to
Mumble: buy a new computer it's just i hate buying computers yeah i really i hate building.
Brent: Them so that's just how it goes.
Wes: All right good good news um Hybrid Sarcasm says, Gene Bean is the one getting the JB Party gift.
Chris: No way, really? That's great. I love to hear that.
Brent: That's great.
Chris: Thank you for the update, Hybrid. All right, take PJ over there, Mr. Westpain.
Wes: Oh, yep. The one, the only producer animated. Jeff comes in with 22,222 sats.
Wes: All you Homelabbers are far more creative than I. Love to hear about it. Thanks.
Chris: That's not true. That's not true.
Wes: Jeff is very creative.
Chris: Jeff was the only one whose Homelab is also attached to his Media Center PC,
Chris: I believe, right? Maybe, as far as I know, is the only one. So that's pretty creative.
Chris: That's a creative reuse of hardware right there, I'd say. All right? I'm impressed.
Brent: Well, Tomato boosted in with a row of McDucks, 22,222 sets.
Brent: Happy New Year, lads. Thank you for a great year of programming on Linux Unplugged.
Brent: Lup is at the top of my queue when an episode comes out, and your quote-unquote
Brent: worst episodes are still among my favorite podcast episodes this year.
Brent: Here's to a 2026 full of independent Linux and open source content.
Chris: Wait a minute. We have bad episodes now? Is that what I'm— Uh-oh.
Chris: I guess nobody ever boosts in and says bad episode, do they?
Chris: Well, actually, they do.
Chris: Yeah. It does happen. Shabby Analyst comes in with 9,811 cents,
Chris: says cheers to the new year and thanks for the great shows thank you thank you
Chris: also to Tomato appreciate that oh look boys look who's back it's been a minute A.A.
Chris: Ron's here with a row of ducks says my new year's resolution is going to be the year of Nixxar nice,
Chris: as a DevOps engineer it's everything I want out of an operating system but I've
Chris: been too afraid to really deep dive into it I'm currently in the middle of installing
Chris: it on my daily driver with a heavy influence from configs from the config confessions episode.
Chris: Me too. I was actually just referring back to that this weekend.
Chris: So, ha-ha, this is Happy New Year as well.
Wes: Yeah, maybe go join the Nixnerd's Matrix chat if you want to.
Brent: Great advice.
Wes: And let us know how it goes.
Chris: Following examples helps a lot, too. It really does. All right,
Chris: you want to take SWAT there, Mr. Payne?
Wes: Oh, yeah, SWAT comes in with $5,874.
Wes: cleaning out my fountain app wallet since i cannot seem to export or import
Wes: or backup and restore the app with wallet and settings.
Chris: But i'm.
Wes: Moving to the new fairphone 6 oh.
Chris: Well i'll tell you what the i guess you don't
Chris: have it yet but the beta ui for the new fountain wallet uh has a secret thing
Chris: in there that i can't tell you about yet but it also has a totally revamped
Chris: import export trans transact really nice but whenever you send us your stats
Chris: we appreciate it thank you for thinking of us and uh good luck with the fairphone
Chris: would love to have a report on that.
Chris: Always curious about Fairphone. Fairphone 6. Not the 5.
Wes: Get it right.
Chris: Yeah, not the 5.
Brent: Well, Marcel boosted in a total of 19,232 SATs across two boosts.
Chris: Hey! Wait a minute there. Thank you, Marcel. It's good to hear from you. Let's hear it.
Brent: Marcel says, I hope you do the holiday home lab thing again,
Brent: and I hope you add a category for a best dumpster rescue like Chris's final prediction.
Brent: My submission was the NAS I found in the street and fixed up.
Brent: I find it extremely satisfying to breathe new life into parts others give up on.
Brent: I know I'm not alone because you mentioned this theme a few times with other
Brent: submissions, but there was no dedicated category for it.
Brent: Did the holiday home lab have something to do with that prediction?
Chris: Hmm you know i i felt the vibe coming actually but the dumpster pc really was
Chris: the definitive machine right we gotta we gotta pull that one up there's a few
Chris: we should pull back out because.
Wes: That really stood out to all of.
Chris: Us yeah i mean talk about the definitive like reviving i make it into a home
Chris: lab machine too it's just so good nice to hear from yourself and thank you for
Chris: your submission and also thank you for the signal on the home lab episode hey gene beans here,
Chris: with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. And he says, happy new year.
Chris: Well, happy new year to you, Gene. Nice to hear from you.
Wes: And happy new membership.
Chris: Yes. Enjoy.
Wes: A scuffed comes in with 4,576 sats.
Chris: All right.
Wes: You teased a Podverse rebuild last week. Can you tell us more?
Chris: Yes, I can. Very exciting news. In fact, Mitch, the lead developer,
Chris: was just on the podcasting 2.0 podcast for the most recent episode as of last
Chris: Friday. So that would be what, Wes? That would be the third?
Chris: No, the second. So Friday the 2nd of January, you can go hear about the new
Chris: Podverse rebuild. It's really exciting.
Chris: They do need some help with the mobile development if anybody is interested.
Chris: But what I love about Podverse is that it's a GPL 3, I believe,
Chris: might be 2, but it's a GPL podcasting app.
Chris: There's not a lot of those out there and even fewer that support all the 2.0
Chris: standards, which are also open source. So it's really a nice combination.
Chris: And Mitch has been working on this for a while. Podverse is also cross-platform,
Chris: which makes it a little extra tricky. But it's pretty exciting to see it coming along.
Chris: alpha.podverse.fm if you want to check it.
Chris: Hey, did we get more from Gene? Is Gene Bean back? Coming in hot?
Wes: Oh, yeah, now there's more Gene Bean.
Chris: Yeah, 10,345 sats. I loved hearing from Kent. Is there a way to easily convert
Chris: other systems to BcacheFS?
Chris: That is something I want to do more of. I think you can convert Extended 4 and
Chris: Butter. I'm not positive about Butter.
Wes: Yeah, I actually have never converted one.
Chris: Yeah, I think we should try it. I think we should try it.
Chris: Gene also says, I noticed recently that my Raspberry Pi Home Assistant,
Chris: it's Pi 4 with 4 gigs of RAM, was out of memory pretty often.
Chris: So I upgraded to the Pi 5 with 8 gigs and was amazed at how good the restore
Chris: from Nebukasa actually worked.
Chris: It was super simple and everything came back as if nothing had changed. It was so slick.
Chris: By the way, this boost amount is the Home Assistant port number, which is 8123.
Wes: Oh, that's nice.
Chris: Good touch, good touch.
Wes: And nice to hear the experience report that went well.
Chris: Yeah, the restore and backup features are kind of what make me want to use their
Chris: whole Home Assistant package because they really do that well.
Wes: Doornail 7887 comes in with a Rodex.
Wes: 100%. Signal is still the go-to cross-platform chat call app out there.
Chris: I saw a couple of plus ones to that. People still really love and trust Signal.
Wes: At least if you want to talk to our audience.
Chris: Yeah, I guess so.
Wes: Which you should want to.
Chris: All right. All right.
Brent: Well, there's a dude trying stuff here with a Rodex.
Brent: Sadly, hardware shipping delays started piling up, and I was not able to make the deadline.
Brent: who knew rack nuts came in multiple sizes rest assured i will link what the
Brent: progress i've made in the new year really love the look uh at the community
Brent: you all are consistently bringing together on the show happy holidays well.
Chris: Thank you that's a nice same to you keep on trying stuff anonymous came in with 4035 sats,
Chris: Altitude boost. If you want to know exactly where I'm at, add the current hour
Chris: in your time zone to 42.42 north and subtract an hour in my time zone from 23.33 east.
Chris: Use the time of the boost to the
Chris: 24-hour format. Extra points if you can pronounce the name of the place.
Chris: Otherwise, Minimech might be able to help out. Hint. All right. Okay.
Brent: So...
Chris: Did you catch all that?
Wes: Well, look, I do zip codes. I never signed up to be the altitude boost guy. Oh, come on.
Chris: You can't figure that out? Come on.
Wes: Well, isn't Brent the altitude? He's always been.
Brent: No, these are coordinates.
Wes: That's why we hired him.
Brent: Wes, Wes, Wes. These are coordinates. So your little calculator on your map,
Brent: that's exactly why you designed it that way.
Wes: Isn't it?
Chris: I mean, why did we go and spend $5,000 on your fancy map if it can't do this?
Chris: What was that money spent on?
Wes: Oh, well, that's because I own a piece of the company that makes them.
Wes: So it's mostly kickbacks to me.
Brent: Do you need a map upgrade?
Chris: So, I mean, Minimac, did you catch this at all?
Chris: did you says okay so it's 4035 sets
Chris: and it's an altitude boost if you want to know exactly where i am at add the
Chris: current hour in your time zone to 42.20 north and subtract the hour in my time
Chris: zone from 23.33 east and use the time of the boost 24 hour format extra points
Chris: if you can pronounce the name of the place you got any idea is is i.
Wes: Think we have to take this as homework maybe.
Chris: I mean try to come back next week do you think the machine could figure it out.
Wes: It's worth a shot.
Chris: Should I ask the machine? I mean, because we'll probably get a wrong answer.
Chris: That feels like a roll of the dice.
Wes: You know, often when you optimize, you have to start with a bad guess and then
Wes: we'll get better guesses.
Wes: We do have the time of the boost. I don't know if it's accurate,
Wes: how accurate it is, but we have the Unix timestamp.
Chris: Right, but that would be the time it hit the node, not necessarily the exact
Chris: time it was sent. But here, I'm going to try the machine.
Chris: Okay, here's what it says. The clues kind of point to, oh boy, Zurich, Switzerland.
Chris: Zurich, which is roughly pronounced Tsu-kerik. Tsu-ri-k. Tsu-ri-k.
Mumble: You mean Zurich?
Chris: Well, it says Tsu-ri-k.
Brent: You're almost like, keep trying.
Chris: Tsu-ri-k is how it says it's pronounced. It's T-S-O-O dash R-I-K-H is how you pronounce it.
Chris: And it's got some information about umlauts, but that's lost on me.
Mumble: Just say Zurich like a normal person.
Chris: Well, it says to Zurich is how you're supposed to say it. Not Zurich,
Chris: but I don't know if that's right or not.
Chris: There you go. That's my guess based on what the machine told me.
Chris: But that's a pretty big roll of the dice.
Wes: We're going to have to tool up so we can handle these more.
Chris: Yeah, clearly.
Wes: I'm thinking like a big 3D globe sort of we have on the desk.
Chris: Yes. Yes. With like things we can project onto it.
Wes: Uh-huh.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Spin it around and zoom in, zoom out.
Chris: There's got to be a movie set somewhere where we can get that from,
Chris: like a war planning movie set.
Brent: When you unfold that, Wes, does it sound differently?
Wes: Oh, yeah. It's more like an EV kind of sound, you know?
Chris: All right, let's round it out with Moon Knight.
Chris: 10,101 sats. My prediction for 2026 of the Linux adoption on the desktop goes
Chris: exponential, thanks to Steam machines and gamers overall getting sick of Windows.
Chris: 6% of Linux users are on Steam now, according to their own metrics.
Chris: I'll say it's double what it is today.
Wes: Well, I hope that happens.
Chris: I hope so. I do feel like there is more.
Chris: I think I discounted the Windows dissatisfaction more than I should have.
Chris: So there is that. I hope you're right, Moon Knight. I hope you're right.
Chris: All right. I'll take this last one just to finish this up here. Are you ready for this?
Chris: Starfleet Computer Scientist boosts in with 17,514 sats.
Chris: And this was also their first boost ever.
Wes: Congratulations. Nice. Welcome to the club.
Chris: Thank you for getting that set up. That is not a small task,
Chris: and we appreciate you doing that.
Chris: They write, long-time listener, first-time booster. I listened back in last,
Chris: and the faux show, and of course, beer is tasty days.
Chris: Rediscovered Linux Unplugged about a year ago. Became a core contributor this
Chris: year, and after decades of using Linux on a secondary machine,
Chris: finally made the switch on my primary one.
Chris: Keep up the great work. I don't know if this is a thing, but please accept this
Chris: as an Enterprise D boost.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: 1704. Aha.
Wes: It's absolutely a thing.
Chris: Nicely done.
Wes: See, I can take those too, that kind of boost where I can easily process.
Chris: Ah, yeah. Well, come in and strong with your first boost.
Chris: Speaking to our Star Trek love. And also, thank you for the long time.
Chris: Listen, I'm glad you're back on board.
Chris: I think, you know, once you're over a year, you're no longer a noob.
Chris: I think, did we decide that? Just over a year, it's no longer a noob.
Chris: This was a banger. We combined some boosts from this week and the week when we were off.
Chris: So that's why there was a lot and a mini boost to get through this week.
Chris: So next week will probably be a little tighter and shorter. So if you would
Chris: like to support us, it would be a great week to step up.
Chris: We had 22 people stream sats as they listened to us.
Chris: Look at these maniacs here. Thank you very much. They just put it on autopilot
Chris: and collectively they stacked 34,665 sats.
Chris: Not too bad at all. Thank you, everyone. When you combine that with our boosters,
Chris: this episode, episode 648, stacked a grand total of 720.
Wes: You got to go farther. Sorry.
Chris: Oh, I got to go down further. You're right because we have the combo from the previous week.
Chris: Right. So we actually stacked more than that. Thank you, Wes. Good catch.
Chris: We stacked a grand total for both episodes of 1,826,819 sats.
Chris: Wow. Thank you, everyone, very much. That's incredible.
Chris: And that matters more than you might know, because those of you paying attention
Chris: might know that it is the beginning of the new year. Our sponsorship contracts
Chris: are under renegotiation.
Chris: We don't have a full boat at all. And so the memberships and the boosts actually
Chris: make all of the difference right now.
Chris: Not just a little bit, not some of the difference, all of it.
Chris: So thank you, everyone, who supported this episode.
Chris: You literally made it possible, either through a membership or a boost.
Chris: And it means a lot to us, because we love doing this, and we want to show up
Chris: every single week and keep making Linux Unplugged for you. We really do appreciate it.
Chris: All right, I got a couple of picks that are going to be kind of obvious why
Chris: I'm including them this week. They are on theme.
Chris: First two I'll get through pretty quickly in case you don't care about.
Chris: They are two different options for figuring out MQTT.
Chris: If you're new to MQTT and you don't know really what it is and what it does,
Chris: these are toolboxes that will let you listen in to a topic from MQTT and see
Chris: it come in either through like a messaging style, and you get a real visceral
Chris: understanding of what the message queue is and what it's sending back and forth.
Chris: And so the two I'm going to talk about is MQTTX, which is kind of like an all-in-one
Chris: app. It's a little bit bigger.
Chris: And then the other one is MQTT5 Explore.
Chris: And this is a little tighter. This one is GPL licensed. The other is Apache
Chris: licensed. They're both available on Flathub and packaged for Linux.
Chris: And they make it really easy to connect to an MQTT server or a client and observe
Chris: the topics it's sending and understand what they are.
Chris: And from that, you could write scripts. You could just learn. It's really nice.
Wes: Now, I haven't tried either of these, but I do notice that MQTT5 Explorer has
Wes: the Arch Linux logo in there, ReadMe.
Wes: So that's a good sign. Yeah, good sign.
Chris: I'd say it's the most, the MQTT5 Explorer is the most native desktop app.
Chris: And MQTTX is a cross-platform Electron app that works on Linux,
Chris: Windows, Web, Mac OS, can run in a Docker container.
Chris: So it sort of depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
Chris: And they just make understanding what the hell this is that you're trying to set up a lot simpler.
Chris: And it's a nice way to demystify something that was a little opaque.
Wes: I noticed you're not calling it MQt?
Chris: Yeah, should have. Now, a couple of others for those of you that don't care about MQTT.
Chris: This is something that you'll see different commercial Electron apps take a
Chris: crack at, so it's nice to see a GPL version of this. It's called Unify.
Chris: It's what you could consider a web app aggregator. Now, this one is built in Qt and Qt 6.
Chris: It uses WebEngine and Karagami to organize different web-based services into
Chris: workspaces and open each in its own web view with desktop-friendly integrations
Chris: like notifications and whatnot.
Chris: So, you know, just relegate all of your web-based style Electron apps to one
Chris: master app that keeps them all organized. We've seen other takes on this,
Chris: commercial ones at that.
Chris: But this one's all based on modern KDE platform technologies,
Chris: and it's GPL3. So that's great.
Chris: Unify, don't confuse it with other things named Unify. And that one is Qt-based.
Chris: Now, if you're more of a GTK person, then there is Web App Hub.
Chris: Web App Manager or whatever, it's labeled both things.
Chris: It's written in Rust and GTK.
Chris: And it's designed in Nidwadia. And it's a Web Hub App Manager,
Chris: just like the Unify application, to do essentially the same thing but do it in a GTK-first world.
Chris: And it gives you easy browser switching.
Chris: It makes it super easy to manage and isolate apps into their own things.
Chris: It can go pull their web icons for you. It can do custom browser profile configs to launch that app.
Chris: It's more than just containing all in one app. It's kind of a little bit more
Chris: than that. It more integrates with the GNOME desktop. So it kind of depends
Chris: what you're looking for.
Chris: But myself, so many dang things are web-based now. I mean, on this machine right
Chris: here, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 pinned web apps.
Chris: I have 11 pinned tabs for different web apps I need to manage the live stream
Chris: and the recording of this episode.
Chris: Those are just 11 different web-based applications.
Chris: And they're all running under the Firefox process.
Chris: I get a little skeeved out by that. I would like to have something else separate
Chris: so that way if my browser crashes, like this morning Brent went to help about
Chris: and his browser crashed.
Chris: Well, then 11 of my apps I used to manage this stream and this show would destroy it. Gone.
Chris: So I like to separate it out into its own process. And there used to be a lot
Chris: of ways. I mean, hell, browsers used to have some of this crap built in for
Chris: a while. God, that was nice.
Chris: And then there was other things like Natifier and other things that came along
Chris: for the Linux desktop, but then they faded.
Chris: So now it's nice to see these two, both for Plasma desktops or GNOME desktops,
Chris: whatever your flavor is.
Wes: Rust, C++, but take your pick.
Chris: Pick your pick. Both open source, both available on the FlatHub or probably
Chris: packaged in a distro near you.
Chris: Enjoy it. And then, of course, the MQTT apps. In fact, everything we talked
Chris: about today will be linked at linuxunplugged.com slash 648.
Chris: And, you know, Wes, it's possible we mentioned something that they'd like to
Chris: catch again. We'd like to look up the name of something. We have a power tip for them, don't we?
Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, we have a website. Is that what you mean? Like a community-powered
Wes: open source? I feel like you go website.
Chris: There's probably, you could do that. There's probably even a way to get,
Chris: like, more rich metadata from the podcast app itself.
Wes: Oh, well, yeah. we do we do have hdmail descriptions.
Chris: In the feed no no i'm not with all the links in it oh and tags we've got a great
Chris: set of tags but no i'm thinking more west like could they get even richer context
Chris: they could even plug into like language models and things like that is there more they oh.
Wes: You're thinking like cloud chapters and um transcripts.
Chris: You got it buddy you're.
Wes: Thinking vtt files.
Chris: Srts maybe even speaker diarization if we could all of it in there uh more and
Chris: more apps Even Apple Podcasts now support all of that.
Chris: And, of course, the podcasting 2.0 apps, which over at podcastapps.com,
Chris: have been supporting it for years. And it's nice to see that standard spread.
Chris: And, of course, one other thing you should know about our gosh darn live stream.
Chris: Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Join us over at jblive.tv, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. Of course, in your local time zone at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: We've got our low latency Opus mumble room going, whatever you want to call it.
Chris: It's a mumble room. it's a live stream but it's a mumble room you can catch
Chris: that you can join our chat room or don't worry about it become a member and
Chris: get the bootleg and we'll deliver it to you all processed and ready to go so
Chris: you don't miss a single thing.
Chris: Last but not least tell a friend it's a great way to support the podcast just
Chris: right there tell somebody about the show it's the number one way people learn
Chris: about new podcasts so we really appreciate that too thanks so much for listening
Chris: to this week's episode of your unplugged program we'll see you right back here next Sunday.