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. Coming up on the show this week, how with a bit of hard work
Chris: and a lot of amazing open source, we fully automated and secured a chicken coop,
Chris: an automatic internet failover for the farm, just using Linux.
Chris: And we're going to round out the show with some great booze,
Chris: some awesome pics, and a lot more.
Chris: It's a big show. And before we get there, we've got to say hello to our mumble room. Hello over there.
Chris: Virtual lug. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello. Hi.
Chris: Hello up there in the quiet listening, too. Good looking.
Wes: We see you.
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Chris: Well, gentlemen, we have a bit of an announcement to make on the show.
Chris: If you will have next Friday, that would be June 12th at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. We're doing a very special live stream.
Chris: Teaching my agent to manage Home Assistant. We're going to go hands-on with our agentic workflows.
Chris: I'm going to go over my multi-agent setup, where I kind of split the task between
Chris: the agents, and how I teach them about a new Home Assistant instance without
Chris: letting them run wild and do unsafe stuff.
Chris: Amongst, I think, a bunch of other stuff. I think we could talk about quite
Chris: a few things. The boys will be there with me on the Friday stream,
Chris: and it's going to be an open mumble room, and we'd love to have you in the chat room as well.
Wes: Yeah, come talk agents. Got questions? You want to share your own setup info.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, full disclosure, part of this is like we just want to gauge interest.
Chris: We want to see if people are interested. And to that end, we have created a
Chris: Telegram group and a Matrix room called Agent Op Guild on Telegram and on Matrix.
Chris: We'll have links in the show notes.
Chris: We'll use those chat rooms during the live stream. But I think that could also
Chris: be a place for the community to just kind of get together and talk about their
Chris: agentic setup without overrunning the main chat room, as it were.
Chris: We'll also try to do a Q&A. So if you have any questions about our setups or
Chris: some of the things we're using agents for. I'd be happy to answer that kind of stuff.
Chris: And we'll just do some live setup.
Chris: And the plan is to try to release a useful clip on the tubes and then probably
Chris: the whole darn thing if it's not too big for the members.
Chris: So if you're a member and you can't make it to the live stream,
Chris: we're going to try to make it available for you.
Chris: Where we put a file that big and all that, we're going to work out.
Chris: It kind of depends on how long the recording goes. But that is our plan at the moment.
Chris: So it'll be Friday, June 12th, 2026 At 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m.
Chris: Eastern 2100 UTC At jblive.tv We'd love to have you there Get a sense if you're
Chris: interested And all that kind of stuff And I've already been brainstorming a
Chris: little bit Of some of the things we could get into I had another idea this morning
Chris: I should have written down There's.
Wes: A lot of good options.
Chris: Maybe we might have.
Wes: To do it more than once I don't know.
Chris: You might, maybe, we'll see So join us this next coming Friday,
Chris: June 12th Jblive.tv we would love to see you there,
Chris: Okay, so we had a basic premise.
Chris: Could Linux save the vacation? The core problem is my RV leaves the farm and
Chris: all of the infrastructure, the internet, all of the sensors,
Chris: all of the automations, the time, the weather, everything runs through my RV.
Wes: Or at least you'd like to be able to leave. When was the last time you did leave?
Chris: Well, I can't. I've built a dependency
Chris: around it. I literally would not be able to leave. Cannot leave.
Chris: Stuck. And not only do I want to be able to leave, but I want to be able to leave and nothing dies.
Chris: Initially for a week and then ultimately two weeks is what I figure.
Chris: So that is the core premise is we have that problem to solve during Linux Fest
Chris: as, you know, a power team with producer Jeff and producer Jason and Wes and Brent.
Chris: Could we come together and put all this together?
Wes: It's kind of funny. You get the chickens. You didn't really.
Wes: I mean, you mentioned you didn't necessarily plan to get the chickens anyway.
Brent: He says that.
Wes: That comes with also not planning about a lot of chicken infrastructure.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, a lot.
Wes: And not just...
Wes: Not just the stuff you expect.
Chris: No, in fact, oh, my gosh. And then actually, as we started building this out,
Chris: my kids started moving in.
Chris: So, like, then I had to add infrastructure because they have their own buildings
Chris: they're in on the farm. And so I had to provide infrastructure to that.
Chris: It just started to – the scope creep was real with this one.
Chris: And we had a few things to work with. We had a Odroid H3 Plus sitting around.
Chris: And we had a lot of Wi-Fi devices we could experiment with to try to extend
Chris: the Wi-Fi network or do something like that.
Chris: So we figured, let's take everything we do have and see what we can make work.
Wes: Because right now, like, Joops was just the support, like everything,
Wes: right? Joops cast a Wi-Fi net.
Wes: You have Starlink and some fancy routing over there to have robust access.
Chris: Yeah, we have some cell backup over there. And then everything was just hanging
Chris: off the edge of that. And the further away you move, the worse the signal got. And if you disappear.
Wes: The whole thing comes crumbling down.
Chris: If I leave it, yeah, it's totally gone.
Brent: And JOOPS is a bit of a Faraday cage, too, if you think about it.
Chris: There is that, too. So the first thing we tried is wireless,
Chris: right? We tried, like, wireless extenders and all of that.
Chris: But that just didn't work out too well, did it there, Brentley?
Brent: No, it turns out wireless is not the most dependable when you're trying,
Brent: Well, basically when you're trying to blast it into a whole neighborhood,
Brent: let's say, of different RVs and trailers that all your loved ones are staying in.
Brent: So we used probably way too many napkins to draw out various versions of network diagrams.
Brent: Can we do it this way? Can we do it that way? What if we put these two napkins together?
Brent: And we eventually got to the point where we were ready to pull some hardware.
Brent: And that includes basically cables. We decided, Wi-Fi's gotta go.
Brent: It's not good enough, it's not reliable enough. You know what's great?
Brent: Ethernet. And we somehow, on the farm, found these giant rolls of ethernet cable
Brent: that are ready to go and perfect for what we needed.
Brent: So we wanted to pull all of that. The only problem is,
Brent: It's a little bit of work to do that, but we had a whole team.
Brent: PJ got up nice and early to get the old Odroid set up.
Brent: I probably slept another three hours by the time he had that all nice and going.
Chris: He arrived early on the farm that morning with the Odroid in hand,
Chris: loaded with a base Nix OS install. It was great.
Brent: Deployment day.
Wes: You really can't ask for better service than that.
Brent: But it turns out someone had to do the physical layer.
Brent: so we thought about it and we had this great plan but someone had to actually
Brent: pull the stuff so we wanted to run the ethernet and the problem is it needed
Brent: to run to jupes without being a tripping hazard without vehicles running over
Brent: this ethernet and uh well we had to do some work.
Clips: And he's happy,
Clips: There we go. It was hard for them to nail the old transporter animation.
Clips: That's just technology has just come so far.
Chris: This is a classic work clip of ours. PJ's over there digging a trench and the
Chris: rest of us are watching Star Trek.
Chris: Yeah, we often have a vote and somehow PJ always ends up being the one that has to do the trenching.
Wes: Well, he doesn't like straws, so he gets the shortest one.
Brent: I'm not so sure about his form on that ditch digging, but he got it done.
Brent: I think we might have helped him a little bit. And producer Jason somehow took his shirt off.
Brent: But the trench got dug and the cable got pulled.
Chris: And additionally, on top of all of that, you guys also installed the Connect
Chris: and Internet on the top of the barn with official, you know,
Chris: like high position pointed at the LTE and 5G tower.
Chris: So there was multiple barn climbings that happened in this process, too.
Chris: And then scaling the barn to run the Ethernet cable as well.
Chris: So there was definitely some adventures. And this, I don't know,
Chris: how high up is that barn? 15? Oh, yeah.
Brent: No, it's probably 17 feet, maybe.
Chris: We had to get that super heavy ladder.
Brent: Yeah, that was the hardest part of the whole project, was finding the right
Brent: ladder to get up there so that PJ could dangle from his toenails off the roof
Brent: and put some infrastructure up there.
Brent: But then we had to like, you know, consider putting all this hardware outside
Brent: because when you leave, like there's not a building.
Brent: There is a barn roof that a couple of your infrastructure pieces are under.
Brent: And that's really useful because it doesn't get direct rain,
Brent: but there's bugs, there's like humidity, there's all sorts of stuff you need to consider.
Brent: So we put the Odroid in a box.
Brent: we found this beautiful outdoor enclosure that
Brent: is a picture like an outdoor electrical junction
Brent: box it's water resistant so it has nice enclosures with seals and everything
Brent: and has an internal mounting panel which is like a grid on the inside of this
Brent: thing that you can screw all the components down i think that is the most important
Brent: part of this thing it makes it so easy Yes.
Brent: No hot glue in this particular build.
Chris: It also has vents on the side.
Brent: Which is really nice. Yeah, cooling vents. So, yeah, using just a standard enclosed
Brent: box is not good because, obviously, computer get toasty, right?
Chris: Computer get very toasty, yes.
Brent: And you loved this particular one because it had a hinged cover,
Brent: which meant you could just open it instead of having to take the cover off and
Brent: figure out where to put that.
Brent: the enclosure is about 16 inches by 11 inches and 6 inches tall and it,
Brent: big but once we got everything in there it was like oh no actually this is just
Brent: right it's cozy in there so the thing surprisingly.
Chris: Cozy yeah it.
Brent: Took us a few goes to position everything so that the door could close but we
Brent: did get a bunch of hardware in there so the odroid h3 that we keep mentioning
Brent: definitely took center stage uh but we did also squeeze a few other things in
Brent: there Two Netgear 5-port gigabit dumb switches,
Brent: and specifically one of those is for the Joops LAN.
Brent: So Lady Joops, the RV, and the other one, well, we decided to call the Chicken
Brent: LAN because that's going to handle everything that never moves.
Brent: It stays on the farm. So when Joops leaves, that's the Chicken LAN.
Brent: We also squeezed in a couple other things. Chris, you had the bright idea of
Brent: sticking a Nano KVM in there. So having a little IPKVM when you're away and
Brent: trying to troubleshoot is a fantastic idea.
Brent: It's this little tiny cute thing, so it didn't even take up much room.
Brent: Also, you pulled out this Coral TPU that just plugs in via USB.
Brent: I don't know where you got that thing, but you threw that in there too,
Brent: and we made sure there was a spot for it.
Brent: And for a little foreshadowing, coming soon to the box near you,
Brent: there will be a temperature sensor and maybe even a DC fan.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it does have passive cooling. But every day that I run that with
Chris: the box closed, my MVME is overheating.
Chris: The MVME sits on the bottom of the Odroid. beneath the CPU, and there's definitely
Chris: some heat-soaked pass-through. Plus, the O-Droid's kind of up against a wall.
Brent: Do you think maybe that's our biggest mistake, is we mounted the O-Droid at
Brent: the top of the box and left a little bit of space, but didn't realize it would just cook there?
Brent: So that's on me. That's on me. Or I can blame Jeff, right?
Chris: Yeah, I guess that's probably the biggest design mistake. You know,
Chris: we'll get into some— we had some other problems that we came up as we get into
Chris: this, but that was probably— the heat is the biggest issue, but I have active
Chris: cooling, so that hopefully will work but it is going to require a bit of a redesign,
Chris: because the Ethernet cables and whatnot are all in the way of the cooling but you know,
Chris: Not too surprising. Honestly, these things usually take a V1 or V2.
Wes: And it's been a good kind of a stress test for some of your monitoring and metrics
Wes: so that you can actually track it, right?
Chris: It has shown that works. And, you know, besides the O-Droid,
Chris: there's a lot of gear in there, including them switches.
Wes: Yes, there are. You mentioned that, Brantley. There's two switches in there.
Wes: One of them's on the chicken land side. And I think this is the one that,
Wes: like, was always kind of in the plan.
Wes: because it kind of establishes like a little layer two backbone for all the
Wes: stuff that might go into building out a nice setup on the farm side.
Wes: And underneath the Odroid, it comes with two Nicks right built in, right?
Wes: So that already meant it was pretty easy. We could just kind of set that up.
Wes: And during some of our testing, we actually didn't have necessarily a switch
Wes: on both sides because the side that connects back up to the Joupes and to the
Wes: main gateway out Thank you.
Wes: Ultimately, it just needs to be a bridge there, right? As we built this out,
Wes: we decided it would probably be easier both so we could connect in and troubleshoot
Wes: and just because we had access to the hardware,
Wes: bake it in there, kind of lay things out so it was easy to see and organize
Wes: and reason about, to put a switch coming off both of those interfaces.
Wes: We'll get into more about why that ended up mattering.
Chris: Yeah, but the idea is nice. You know, you have a chicken LAN and a jupes LAN,
Chris: and if you have a laptop or something, you can plug into either LAN for troubleshooting.
Wes: You don't have to unplug anything on the Android itself or do any fussing.
Wes: They're just open ports available.
Chris: And those, like, eight-port Netgear gigabit switches, they're cheap enough that
Chris: it's like, okay, maybe I'll just do two.
Wes: Yeah. And you didn't have to reason about, like, which Ethernet port are you going to plug in?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And the plan was Brent was going to put labels on the switches.
Chris: Right.
Wes: Which I don't know if that happened.
Chris: I don't think that did happen. And that probably is why we'll have the issues
Chris: we got. It we'll get into later. Yeah.
Wes: Sorry, guys. But the Odroid needs all this because it's got a big job.
Chris: You know?
Wes: I mean, it's got a route between the Joops land and the Chicken land where appropriate, provide internet.
Wes: It also needs to be kind of the backbone of the new Chicken land itself, right?
Wes: So, like, you want those modern niceties like DNS and DHCP, some of the basics.
Wes: And then you want it to go beyond just the basics.
Chris: Of course.
Wes: This is some of the real goal here, right, which is you've spent a lot of time
Wes: setting yourself up a robust connection to the Internet as good as you can get
Wes: for your mobile van life lifestyle.
Chris: Got a decent Starlink connection these days.
Wes: Right. But then you also have like your PEPLink device, right,
Wes: that can bridge to cellular.
Chris: Multiple networks, yeah.
Wes: And so if that is available on the farm, you would like things to be able to use that, right? Right.
Wes: But you need a solution so that you can actually leave, and that's where you
Wes: want to fail over to that Connectin up on the roof, and that'll be the main
Wes: gateway while JOOPS is gone.
Chris: That's the plan. So the idea would be JOOPS leaves, the chicken LAN stays online,
Chris: it fails over to the Connectin backup internet connection, which is plugged
Chris: into a third NIC we have on the Odroid, which is a USB NIC.
Chris: So you've got one Nick in the Joops land, one Nick in the chicken land,
Chris: and one Nick right connected to the connected internet.
Chris: And that's just there for when the Joops side of the network goes away.
Wes: It becomes like the backup land port.
Wes: And that's the lay of the land. So you can kind of see the O-Droid sits at the
Wes: intersection of all of that.
Wes: And then we've got stuff like it's using SystemD NetworkD under the hood.
Wes: Kind of learned a lot from building out Hediya's office network, right?
Wes: So then we've got like NF tables doing some of the basic like masquerading and
Wes: routing between things.
Wes: And of course, that means we
Wes: also put a little Home Assistant OS on there running in a virtual machine.
Chris: Yeah, and that is, you know, one of the nice things about having the isolated
Chris: chicken network is I don't have the two home assistant servers kind of conflicting,
Chris: auto-discovering the same things, trying to take over the same remote speakers.
Chris: They don't even really see each other. They're totally isolated.
Wes: Right, and so it works. It's like basically the home assistant that's running
Wes: on the Odroid is just bridged via a bridge that only has the chicken land nick
Wes: in it, which then goes and talks to the chicken land switch.
Wes: And so it just, its network is the chicken land.
Chris: Though the nice little piece of secret sauce that we came up with when we were
Chris: napkinning this out was Nebula.
Chris: Because then you also add the VM to the Nebula interface.
Chris: And then I have a Nebula interface on my other systems. So even though they're
Chris: on separate isolated networks, I still have a Nebula IP to get to the Home Assistant
Chris: dashboard and all of that.
Chris: Or anything I need. The frigate, whatever it might be.
Chris: So the Nebula piece, so it's totally isolated. The Nebula comes on and the two
Chris: systems I need to talk to each other can do it.
Wes: Great yeah and you do kind of have a layered approach here right because um
Wes: just as like another access we did end up because the peplink has this functionality
Wes: we did end up adding a static route so like if you do want automated jobs or
Wes: just to access something not via the nebula mesh you have direct access um or
Wes: if you know it wants to optimize and make sure it takes the fastest route yeah.
Chris: My jupes default gateway has that now.
Wes: Yeah so if you are hanging out in jupes when you want to just be able to ssh
Wes: right ssh right over to the chicken land uh the local infrastructure knows how to handle that.
Wes: But at the same time, if that's not available.
Chris: You're mobile.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. Then you always have the Nebula fallback or primary mesh network
Wes: domain names and all that set up.
Chris: Yeah. All the name resolution still works. It's so nice. Wes did a lot of the
Chris: heavy lift on the router config and the DNS config there.
Chris: And it's one of those where we started early during Linux Fest and we got the
Chris: initial stuff figured out. But then as time went on, the boys went home.
Chris: Everybody went back to their own places.
Chris: And then I'm just sort of there doing all the physical stuff.
Chris: Because I can remote in, but yeah.
Wes: Well, yeah, right. Once Ambulo's there, then I could go kind of get back to
Wes: the system and go poke with things.
Wes: And it's not that crazy, right? Because a lot of it was just,
Wes: like you were saying, kind of have the right appropriate network segregation
Wes: sort of for defaults and what's going to be on the real networks on both sides.
Wes: And then make sure you have the flat mesh view where you need for all the admin and automation stuff.
Chris: Mm-hmm. It did mean, though, like anything networking level that we had to test. I was always like.
Wes: Oh. You were, yeah. Well, there might have been a few times where I was like,
Wes: hey, Chris, can you reboot that?
Chris: Because I can't get back in. Hence the nano KVM.
Wes: Exactly.
Brent: Did you actually test if all of this work works?
Wes: Well, we did an initial test as we were building it out.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. That worked.
Wes: Yeah, it did.
Chris: That initial test, that one definitely worked. But then I thought.
Chris: Well, the right thing to do would be to test it now before the show.
Wes: Right. You need, like, a real test now that, like, because a lot has changed.
Wes: Like, you had to go back in the box several times and mess around with things.
Chris: Got to make sure it works, right? So I replicated Joop's quote-unquote leaving, right?
Chris: I went over and I disconnected the Ethernet cable from Joop's and wanted to see what happened.
Clips: Okay, the job's not finished until we do a failover test.
Clips: so I am on the Henternet, which is the Wi-Fi for the chicken coop,
Clips: and I'm going to disconnect the LadyJoop's Ethernet line, and then the system
Clips: should fall over to the backup Internet.
Clips: Okay, LadyJoop's Internet line disconnected.
Clips: Okay, we do have,
Clips: Nextcloud's asking me to log in. Go away, Nextcloud, not right now.
Clips: Uh-oh, Wes. The pings are not continuing oh no we may have more work to do,
Clips: Of course, it worked in testing.
Chris: It was one of those things, too. I was like, what did we do wrong?
Chris: And it kind of occurred to me afterwards. And you picked up on it.
Chris: You hinted at it. Earlier when we had tested, we were just, all right,
Chris: well, we'll disconnect the Ethernet from the NIC on the back of the O-Droid.
Wes: Because we were kind of thinking through, like, you would have sort of like
Wes: a launch procedure, right? Like, you're a disconnect before you,
Wes: like, sort of take jupes away.
Chris: Yeah, like a checklist. And one of the things, I just unplugged it.
Chris: and then like we mentioned we decided later on introduce the switch so the problem
Chris: is is with the switch now between the odroid and the jupes network the switch
Chris: provides an active link so the kernel isn't detecting link down.
Wes: Yeah and before we can kind of set things up with different routing priorities
Wes: and so it would just prefer uh to go out that link if it was available and if
Wes: we took the cable out the link would go down and the kernel would just handle it.
Chris: Which would still work if i hadn't introduced the fancy switch that would have
Chris: worked and it you know so if you don't need a fancy boy switch then this part
Chris: would have worked we're just relying on link down default routing priorities
Chris: however we had to come up with a bit of a solution.
Wes: Yeah um how about a
Wes: fun new sidecar of course demon yeah
Wes: man so okay so the basic idea right is uh we have two potential routes or at
Wes: least you know in theory at most and so we have the preferred primary out through
Wes: jupes and startlink and so the daemon can sit and ping that way and go check
Wes: to see if connectivity is actually working yeah.
Chris: It's just a basic ping.
Wes: Yeah and then if not under you
Wes: know sort of configurable conditions you can choose how many times does it have
Wes: to fail over what kind of period or whatever if it can't actually get to the
Wes: internet that way it will automatically go bump the priority of the backup wan
Wes: route so that it automatically handles that and goes out the connecting.
Wes: But that's not it because...
Wes: What happens if Jupes shows back up or, you know, the Starlink outage goes away or whatever it is?
Wes: It also does, after four successful primary probes trying to go check back out
Wes: the Starlink route, if it's like, oh, yes, it seems like safely,
Wes: we've got like solid connection back on the primary side, it removes the managed
Wes: backup route that we added,
Wes: and things fall back to the standard steady state.
Chris: That was the hope. So we put it to the test.
Wes: That's the plan, yeah.
Clips: Okay so round two i've got the ping going and i am going to disconnect the jupes
Clips: ethernet line from the switch all right so we've disconnected the ethernet line from the switch,
Clips: and as expected our ping has stopped now what i realized last time is that i
Clips: may actually have to initiate a new ping because I'm not doing like super fancy traffic management.
Clips: I'm just switching default routes and stuff.
Clips: So I think number one is it will interrupt an existing stream,
Clips: but then if you restart, I think it'll work. Oh, look at that. It's working.
Clips: Yes. Yes, it works. Well done. Okay. How about that chicken?
Clips: Yeah? You think so, boss? I agree. It's great, isn't it?
Clips: There you go, chickens. You've got internet even when I leave.
Chris: They're pretty excited. I don't know if you could tell. They're pretty excited.
Chris: I'm pretty excited. And also the kids have internet when I leave now because
Chris: they're old enough now where sometimes they don't want to go.
Wes: I mean, it really kind of turns the whole barn setup into its own first-class entity.
Chris: It does. And it means we can run cameras around the property.
Chris: It also means we can extend this out to the barn because all of this was really
Chris: just to build the infrastructure for the actual project. Yeah.
Chris: I want to take a moment and thank Connected Internet promo code Jupiter35 to take $35 off your order.
Chris: They hooked me up to try out the hardware, so I said, hey, I love it,
Chris: and I'd like to tell the audience about it.
Chris: This will probably be one of the last times I mention it because they're not
Chris: a sponsor, but it's a great thing they have going right now.
Chris: $35 off your entire order when you use promo code Jupiter35.
Chris: They have unlimited priority data. You've got to pay a little bit extra,
Chris: but I'm talking about the stuff that's like the business class that you don't get squashed.
Chris: And they also have cheaper unlimited data if you're willing to live with just
Chris: whatever the carrier wants to give you.
Chris: But the thing that I think is really great about them is you just pay them a
Chris: flat, reasonable rate, and they live on top of the four major carriers in the U.S.
Chris: and Canada and auto-select between them for whatever has the best signal and data in your area.
Chris: The other thing they've recently done is they've introduced a $39 a month plan,
Chris: which is just for backup internet.
Chris: Think about that. You want to do what I'm doing?
Chris: $39 a month, you use it when it's online? Oh, except for they built in all the
Chris: – if you want to use theirs because it's like on OpenWRT. They built in all
Chris: the auto switchover stuff.
Chris: I'm not even kidding. Like I finished this whole setup. We got all done like
Chris: maybe what? Two weeks ago or something?
Chris: And then they released this. And now you can just get it. And it's $39 a month.
Chris: You get the backup internet and it comes with the open WRT device that just
Chris: handles all of the failover, auto checking, health checking,
Chris: all of it. It's pretty great.
Chris: Or you can go with the thing I have, the big seven antenna beast that we have
Chris: up there on the barn roof now.
Chris: So go to connectininternet.com. That's connectininternet.com.
Chris: We'll have a link in the show notes.
Chris: And the promo code is Jupiter35. Shout out to those guys.
Wes: My understanding is the Brent and Jeff installation is not included, though.
Chris: No, but highly recommended. Highly recommended.
Brent: Well, now that it took a couple weeks for us to get the physical layer solved
Brent: with some trenches dug and roofs climbed and everything now failing over properly,
Brent: it's time to get to the real project.
Chris: Oh, oh, boys.
Wes: What's the real project again?
Chris: Getting the coop automated so nothing dies. We don't want anything to die.
Brent: Right, right, right.
Wes: The coop, right, and the chickens. Yeah, okay, right. That was the premise.
Chris: Of course. The right thing to do is just automate everything as much as possible.
Chris: Go shoot for a week, then go for two weeks, see how long I can keep going,
Chris: push it out as far as I can.
Chris: So you got to automate everything, which means you need a foundation,
Chris: boys, a foundation of Home Assistant and also Z-Wave.
Chris: I'm going all in on Z-Wave with the setup using the Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2,
Chris: which is their big old antenna. It's a monster.
Wes: This is the alien sort of communications tech looking one.
Chris: Yeah, I think you could actually have a Z-Wave device in space and it would
Chris: still communicate with this thing. I'm pretty sure that's how that works.
Brent: Did you climb the roof to put that up?
Chris: No, it's just sitting on top of the box with all its power. Super clean home
Chris: assistant integration. So nice.
Wes: USB-C.
Chris: Yeah, and easily flashable. The hen house door is automated.
Chris: It is called the omelet door.
Chris: A smart Wi-Fi door.
Brent: I love that name.
Chris: And you can use it to connect to Home Assistant using a community add-on.
Chris: And I can open and close the henhouse door from Home Assistant. I can set timers.
Wes: And it's like a local, it's able to talk over the LAN?
Chris: Over the Wi-Fi, yeah.
Wes: Cool.
Chris: Yeah, you do have to go get an API key from them. But once you do that,
Chris: you're doing it over the Wi-Fi.
Chris: The other thing that's nice about it is you can just check the status.
Chris: Yes, it closed. You know that they're in there.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: And then, of course, you want to control the environment because chickens that
Chris: live in a comfortable environment with the right lighting produce more eggs.
Chris: So this is where WLED, we've talked about it before, comes in.
Chris: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful setup.
Chris: Love this so much because I found the Meg WLED-1.
Chris: Go buy it right now. Go buy this right now. It's $35 on the Jungle Web, U.S. Greenbacks.
Chris: It is a generic, teensy-tiny WLED controller.
Chris: It comes pre-flash with WLED that you can update over the air,
Chris: USB-C in, and then the WSB connector we all love for WLED.
Wes: Lo-wago!
Chris: It's, you don't have to solder anything. You don't have to clip anything.
Chris: You don't even have to flash anything.
Wes: But it does support easy flashing with custom firmware if you want.
Chris: It does. It does. It's, I love this so much.
Wes: And it does 5-volt and 12-volt.
Chris: So you can have 12-volt lights if you want. That's awesome. I'm going to buy
Chris: a couple more of these before the show goes out because I don't want the audience to snatch them all up.
Chris: I love it. I mean, because it makes, because if you get that and a WS281 2B
Chris: LED light strip, you have a WLED light set up in 30 seconds.
Wes: That's pretty easy.
Chris: And then you just, it puts out an AP, you get on your phone or whatever.
Chris: You get on the AP, you add it to your regular network, and then two seconds
Chris: later, Home Assistant detects it.
Wes: Because really, that's been a lot of the pain in the past, right,
Wes: compared to other proprietary options is you had to sort of assemble it yourself.
Wes: And maybe you had to put some of it together, and then you had to use the right software to control it.
Wes: But that is kind of just one, two, three.
Chris: So I have it going into about 160 LED light strip that runs along the top of the hen house.
Chris: and a little bit before, you know, right at sunrise actually.
Chris: It comes on at really light and it really dim, I should say.
Chris: And it warms up and gets a little brighter during the day. It follows,
Chris: you know, the sunrise and the sunset. Yeah.
Chris: And it just provides them a little bit of extra light, especially in the fall and in the winter.
Wes: Do you have it synced up so like it plays a recording of your voice wishing
Wes: them good morning, good night?
Chris: I just love it because it just ties in with everything I'm doing is extremely
Chris: extensible and hackable.
Chris: It's really an MVP for lighting. I'm going to do, I'll have WLED all over this thing.
Chris: And then for sensors, I think when you think sensors, I think you should plan
Chris: for powered, consistently powered. because they're so much more useful when
Chris: they're consistently powered.
Chris: Now, what I'm going to mention does support battery and I have used them in battery capacity.
Chris: When you do that, they kind of check in every 15 minutes, every hour, then they sleep.
Chris: But when you power them over USB, you can get second to second resolution.
Chris: And the absolute MVP now of home sensors for price, functionality,
Chris: reliability, and compatibility with Home Assistant is Zeus.
Chris: Z-O-O-Z. they are officially a member of the works with home assistant program
Chris: so you take this sensor out of the box you add power you tap a button you put
Chris: your home assistant in z-wave discovery mode,
Chris: a second later they're talking you enter a pin code it's now paired you now
Chris: have motion temperature humidity lux reading wow all in one sensor up in the
Chris: corner that's great over z-wave which then can be used to trigger things like
Chris: smart plugs for heating and whatnot.
Chris: And for that, I have another Zeus device that I want to recommend.
Chris: This is the second Zeus device, and I think these are just absolutely wonderful.
Chris: Now, it's not outdoor, so I have to weather protect it, but Zeus has a long-range Z-Wave power strip.
Chris: Each individual plug shows up as an addressable plug in Home Assistant. That's so good.
Chris: Including two USB ports that show up as addressable buttons.
Chris: And there's physical controls on the power strip itself, as well as lights that
Chris: indicate which port is active.
Brent: This is so cool.
Chris: So each one of those is now a smart switch. And so I can control heating, lighting, fans.
Chris: I can reset the WLED controller, all of it, through this Zeus, Z-O-O-Z.
Wes: That's a nice touch.
Chris: Zen 20, 800LR. Oh, and...
Chris: and it has energy monitoring.
Brent: What?
Chris: And that is really useful because one of the ways you can see,
Chris: like, is the heater running?
Wes: Yeah, how much are you drawing?
Chris: I see 400 watts is being pulled on that port. Yep, the heater is running.
Brent: This is so great.
Chris: That kind of stuff is, yeah. And then the other thing that I recommend,
Chris: although this is the hardest recommendation in terms of price,
Chris: it's just difficult right now because some of the components have gone up in price.
Chris: So this is really kind of buy it if you really need it, but if you really need it, you really need it.
Chris: And it's from Apollo Automation, and it's called the air one and it's an air
Chris: quality sensor that's really great at the base price of 110 dollars if you're
Chris: willing to spend 200 you can get it with the mics 4514 gas sensor,
Chris: that gas sensor is a co2 sensor a nitrogen dioxide sensor an ammonia sensor boys i.
Brent: See where this is going.
Chris: Methane ethanol hydrogen as well but yeah ammonias because you know these chickens
Chris: they poop a lot. So now I have the ability to watch the ammonia levels.
Brent: And so you can get like a clean the hen house alert?
Chris: Yeah, basically hey, you're overdue. The ammonia levels are getting bad.
Chris: It doesn't take much. It doesn't take much. The other thing we'll be able to
Chris: do is we'll be able to look in on them.
Chris: So Frigate is the DVR we'll be using to record camera feeds.
Chris: And I finally deployed my first, after all these years, POE camera.
Wes: Congratulations.
Chris: It feels good!
Brent: Wow.
Chris: No more Wi-Fi for me. I can never go back.
Chris: I have seen the light. And I got a cheap one. I'm happy with it.
Chris: It's manually adjusted. It doesn't, it doesn't like auto pivot and things like that.
Chris: But I bought myself the Armcrest 5 megapixel POE camera.
Chris: $62 on Amazon.
Chris: I got it on sale, and I checked Camel Camel. It's sometimes on sale for $46.
Chris: Five megapixel has great night vision, works out of the box with Frigate DVR,
Chris: and super easy to pull in to go to RTC.
Chris: Then you can share the camera feed with as many apps as you want.
Chris: And you can have an IPTV app on your TV, which I do.
Chris: You can have an IP camera app on your phone, which I do. You can send a feed to Frigate, which I do.
Chris: You can pull it up an MPV on your desktop, which I do, and go to RTC,
Chris: sits in front of all of it and proxies it all out. And the camera works.
Chris: Chef's kiss smooth, right over POE. For $46, it's a slam dunk.
Chris: I think there's better cameras out there for me though. So I'd love recommendations
Chris: for the audience, ones that have spotlights, ones that have actual motorized pivot.
Wes: Right, this one you can pivot yourself, but it doesn't, isn't controllable remotely.
Chris: I think you'd really, I think you'd enjoy this, you know, like especially when
Chris: you're out and about out in charge at home.
Wes: It's true, yeah.
Chris: These are great. Or for you, Brent and the cats.
Wes: Oh yeah. And a very real reasonable price.
Chris: Also, I think this would be a great system if you ever wanted to have a security
Chris: camera system for the van. When you're out boondocking and stuff, it can be nice.
Brent: Hmm.
Chris: I love it. And I think Frigate doesn't get enough love in our community.
Chris: It is a full-fledged camera DVR system that works great.
Wes: And you can accelerate it. Yeah, right, where you put that coral to work.
Chris: Right?
Wes: Doing object face detection, that kind of stuff.
Chris: I don't know. Maybe there's more I can do there too. I don't know.
Brent: Producer Jeff's going to be so proud of you. He's been talking about Frigate
Brent: for years and trying to get us to do something with it.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's been great.
Brent: Jeff Lee knows.
Chris: All these things really come down to, I mean, they sound like,
Chris: you know, oh, they're nerdy and they're geeky, and that's true.
Chris: And it has been a fun project, and I really do appreciate your boys' help.
Chris: But it's actually about, it's about peace of mind.
Chris: It's about the family wanting to check in on the chickens and know everything's okay.
Chris: You know, you hear a bunch of, like this happened just the other night.
Chris: We heard a bunch of coyotes and the wife was like, hey, can you just pull up
Chris: the camera? Can we just see how the chickens are doing?
Wes: Totally.
Chris: And that has been great.
Brent: You're pulling it up on your TV, right? Did you integrate like a channel yet?
Brent: So that you could just flick to the channel and have it.
Chris: All right. Let me tell you what I did here real quick. Okay.
Brent: Right.
Chris: Because everything's on the private chicken land. So my TV can't talk to the chicken land.
Wes: It's nice of you to respect the chicken's privacy.
Chris: I could, but yeah, they're on their own isolated land. So I once again deployed
Chris: my old buddy, my old buddy, Ngrok.
Chris: And I set up some Ngrok tunnels that are for both the RTMP streams from GoToRTC
Chris: and the frigate dashboard.
Chris: And then I set buttons on Home Assistant for the Chicken Coop Home Assistant.
Chris: And I can tap a button and it turns on the Ngrok tunnel with a default of two
Chris: hours. But I have a little slider there.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: So I could, you know, 10 minutes, 24 hours, slide it.
Chris: Right, slide it. I hit the button, I get the tunnel. And then the second the
Chris: tunnel comes up, all of the apps start working.
Chris: And it doesn't matter if you're on the public cellular network,
Chris: wherever you're at. And so what we like to do is I hit that for like an hour.
Chris: And then as we're winding down for the evening, we pull up the camera feeds.
Chris: We watch the chickens kind of settle in because they're so adorable settling in.
Chris: And you like to see where they're sitting because there's a whole pecking order.
Wes: Of course.
Chris: So you like to see where everybody ended up. And then you got to talk about it. Oh, look.
Chris: Mel and Sue are over there, and Boss is sitting next to Blue Tonight instead of Chief.
Chris: Oh, a little development there. You know, it's a big deal.
Chris: And it's fun.
Wes: I like that you have, like, the chicken channel.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I've actually thought about pulling in a dispatcher and then actually
Chris: serving it up to the IPTV app.
Wes: I mean, why not?
Brent: Are you getting audio through that as well?
Chris: We do, yeah. The Armcrest has a ridiculously powerful mic.
Wes: That's a nice touch.
Chris: You could hear people stepping around the coop outside, walking up to it.
Chris: I mean, it's really powerful.
Chris: Maybe too powerful because it clips, too. Yeah, right. Yeah, you get the audio feed.
Chris: It's good, solid video. Even the night camera feed. and pulling all that in
Chris: over the Engrock tunnel is really fun because when we're out and about,
Chris: it's like, oh, let's check in on the chickens and see what they're doing.
Chris: You just get that peace of mind. So then later on, you extend that out.
Chris: When you're on a vacation for a week.
Wes: You can still check in.
Chris: You're really going to appreciate that. And you know, like you can see,
Chris: okay, I see the door closed. I see the watering and the feeding kicked off.
Chris: Okay, yep. I can check on the camera. I can see they're eating the food, right?
Wes: You just- You can see that the ammonia levels are healthy and normal.
Chris: Right, right. And then you extend that out to the garden or the fact that,
Chris: you know, the kids have infrastructure and that their things are working because
Chris: it's monitoring all of that. I'm having all that monitored now.
Chris: It's not just about the chickens. It turned out to be like a farm infrastructure
Chris: project that I didn't see coming.
Chris: And I feel like we'll be redefining how I do my networking probably for a while now.
Chris: Because the idea has always been the infrastructure is built around Joops.
Wes: Yeah, now it's totally switching.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Now you got this permanent infrastructure and Joops is just coming and going.
Chris: And it's all outdoors. It's weird. It's weird.
Brent: You mentioned how you tend to iterate on these things, and we had way too many
Brent: napkins, and I'm glad we finally started implementing, but do you think this
Brent: will evolve, or is this feeling pretty stable now?
Chris: I think there's going to be a few more additions. I think I'd really like to
Chris: dial in more stuff with Frigate, detecting different events with Frigate.
Chris: I still have automation to do for all of the kids' projects.
Chris: They all need lighting, heating, cooling, all their stuff needs automation.
Chris: And then ultimately I have to figure out additional storage for Frigate. I have to get that done.
Chris: And I could see over time, maybe it makes sense that the Starlink is connected to the farm network.
Chris: You know, I can see shifting that kind of stuff. Or does it make,
Chris: maybe I no longer, maybe the NAS is no longer in Joops.
Chris: maybe the nas is at the farm and then
Chris: i could go to spinning rust and i could get a lot more storage since i'm not
Chris: on salt state and maybe what stays in jupes is i go back to the local cash idea
Chris: where it's like i cash a couple of shows because over time i've kind of just
Chris: everything's in jupes now but i could go back to that maybe i don't know there's
Chris: i'm just feeling like because i i haven't had permanent infrastructure suddenly.
Wes: You're gonna have like.
Chris: A year chicken jellyfin yeah oh that could be fun if i could forget highlights
Chris: you know i've been building around the idea of keeping everything compact mobile
Chris: low power and all of a sudden i have a permanent power line and a permanent
Chris: internet connection this.
Wes: Is getting weird.
Chris: And it's like i could actually just have infrastructure i.
Wes: Haven't seen any bricks but i definitely see sticks.
Chris: So it's a big project so yes brent i think the project great great to hear,
Chris: I want to take a moment and thank our members. Normally we would have an ad
Chris: right here, but they don't seem to be too interested in Linux podcasts these days.
Chris: So it went the way of the Linux magazines, but our members keep us going.
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership or jupiter.party. New perks coming soon.
Chris: Plus, I think the bootleg this week might be worth the price of admission.
Chris: We've got some great Linus clips and additional context and tour about the farm,
Chris: additional gear and all of that as well.
Chris: So thank you very much to our members for making this possible.
Chris: We really do appreciate you.
Chris: Again, that's linuxunplugged.com slash membership or drupal.party for all the
Chris: shows and all the special features.
Chris: And of course, thank you to our boosters who make this possible as well.
Chris: We did get some great emails this week, but we were running long.
Chris: So I think we will probably sit on those. We'll see. We'll see.
Chris: But we did get some, we have been reading them and thank you everybody.
Chris: So Brentley, with that said, do you want to kick us off with our first boost?
Brent: Well, we have a baller here of Jackie, who sent in three boosts for a total of 196,000.
Chris: Satoshis.
Chris: Hey, yes, sir. Yes, sir. That is a great one. Thank you.
Brent: Greetings again. Please consider this a three-week combined boost because I
Brent: should have boosted the past two weeks.
Brent: And with this boost, I would like to announce three of my new projects. number one hyper dht.
Chris: Okay it's.
Brent: A p2p protocol re-implementation in c plus plus reverse engineered it's wire
Brent: compatible with javascript.
Chris: Java java java java all right so that's number one and that is brent's more of a.
Wes: Vb script guy so he's not familiar.
Chris: Hyper dht p2p and then there's a number two. Brantley, there's a number two.
Brent: There is a number two. Number two, No Spoon. P2P VPN.
Chris: Yeah, what you have to remember, Brent, is there is No Spoon.
Brent: There is No Spoon.
Chris: You have to remember. We'll put links to those in the show notes.
Chris: Thank you, Jack. It's good to hear from you. Appreciate the boost.
Chris: Doja comes in with 38,394 Satoshis.
Chris: One last AI boost. Sorry. Should I start from the bottom?
Chris: Oh my good question oh there's a couple one sad thing about politicizing all
Chris: this ai is that so many people put themselves in the ai good ai bad camp when
Chris: it's not really both it's not really good it's not really bad it's not a blanket
Chris: one way or the other i really appreciate jb's nuance here uh brandon sanderson
Chris: has a really good keynote called we are the art and i think it hits it,
Chris: All this AI bootlicking reminds me of the yearly Hacktoberfest drama that reached
Chris: to 11, that ratcheted to 11 we've rallied so long on a base level of quality
Chris: being baked by virtue of learning of Evercurve.
Chris: And Vault Worden, for me, over here, I found that it has the wife approval factor.
Wes: All right.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: That is good to know. I also used it to force myself to learn and practice proper
Chris: backups for home assistant.
Chris: Been running six years with zero fire drills and four nine drills.
Wes: Nicely done.
Chris: Bitwarden goes proper south. Bitwarden is a feasible option. And one last boost.
Chris: That's all right. Don't worry about it, Dasha. I found myself treating AI contributions
Chris: as they came from another person is really helpful.
Chris: Because I vibe-coded or AI-assisted something doesn't mean it's exempt from
Chris: my normal review process.
Chris: I give the agent's PR the same scrutiny and feedback I do one of my junior devs.
Chris: And the amount of slop decreases by an order of magnitude. whether it helps
Chris: my juniors write less slop or causes my seniors to produce more slop well that
Chris: says more about them and the person.
Wes: A nice perspective.
Chris: I think that's very insightful um i know west you kind of follow a very same
Chris: kind of thing it's you know you got to review it like it's a contribution that
Chris: just needs review like everything else i think it speaks to a lot of this comes
Chris: down to people think that it's a matter of i speak to the machine and it creates thing,
Chris: but it really is a tool that has nuance, that has practices that are going to
Chris: screw you up or going to serve you better. And it's just something people have to learn.
Wes: And, you know, how much you actually stay engaged can determine whether you
Wes: have a good time or a bad time or just make a big mess.
Chris: Yeah. And if you're willing to keep evolving how you work.
Wes: Right. As Linus was talking about in our pre-show.
Chris: Linus was talking about in our pre-show. It's the more painful aspect of the process.
Wes: Well uh our buddy derivation dingus boosts in with 22 2222 sats,
Wes: I'm still on Bitwarden, and it's been bugging me, but I haven't found a better
Wes: option. I'll probably spin on Vault Warden, at least as a backup.
Wes: My real gripe, though, is with the client UIs. They keep making changes that
Wes: just make it worse, and just reverted one right after I finally adjusted to it.
Chris: You're talking about the autofill thing, aren't you?
Wes: I think so.
Chris: Because that, and then they went back, and I was like, is this the,
Chris: is this like, am I daydreaming that this changed?
Chris: Like, I felt ghost, gaslit a little bit, ghostlit.
Wes: I used to love Bitwarden, but between this stuff and the recent security issues,
Wes: it's slowly eroding my confidence that they can keep shipping a product I want to pay for.
Wes: I'd love to hear more about what others are thinking.
Chris: Yeah. Boy. Well said. I think that's a little bit more than where I'm at,
Chris: but it's pretty close to work. That's where I'm at.
Wes: You do worry, you know, sometimes UI changes like that can be a symptom of sort
Wes: of, you know, check mark based development and or product launching not always you know.
Chris: Can be though.
Wes: Can be though yeah that's what i don't know if this for sure was happening wait and see.
Brent: Jace neville boosted in 2000 sats,
Brent: Long-time listener, but first-time booster.
Chris: Hey, thank you.
Wes: We sure appreciate it.
Brent: I just wanted to chime in and say on the AI-assisted coding that I'm a huge
Brent: proponent of using these tools to yourself.
Brent: I'm someone who has bounced off coding probably 50 times, but now I'm able to
Brent: self-direct different apps and tools for myself using markdown files and carefully
Brent: constructed constraints.
Chris: Oh, he says something that, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt,
Chris: but this is something that I've been thinking about.
Chris: He just put my word, my thoughts into words. Go ahead. Sorry.
Chris: I didn't mean to interrupt. I just got excited.
Brent: Okay, good. He continues. I know how to manage people by trade and I know a
Brent: computer can do anything you tell it to do.
Brent: You just have to know how to communicate it.
Chris: This is the thing, is I think what's melting people's brains that have been
Chris: in development for a long time, like our buddy Wes here, although Wes doesn't,
Chris: you know, he gets a little triggered by my slop sometimes because,
Chris: you know, it's a real skill set that took you a long time to conquer and master a language.
Chris: And then somebody comes along that knows how to manage projects,
Chris: specs, tasks, and people can get a lot further than they could even six months ago.
Chris: and they didn't have to spend years learning how to write zig or whatever, right?
Chris: And I think that's a weird cultural shift we're going through.
Chris: And it's one of the skills you need to do this right is a bit of a management
Chris: skill on task management and how to break it up and how to divvy it out and things like that.
Wes: Although I would say, actually, I don't mind the part about skipping the language
Wes: part. I would say it's the part that I- The practices?
Wes: No, it's more that. I would say managing people and managing a project are not the same.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And so I think some of the weaker parts that people have to learn when they
Wes: come to vibe coding is...
Wes: Like you can discover your way to a lot of architecture that will work,
Wes: but that can also cause problems. And so if you don't learn some amount of understanding
Wes: the trade-offs early enough on, you can still have issues.
Chris: Well, I think that is going to be the big gap. I think that is the big gap.
Chris: But I think that's also just an approach.
Chris: There is a kind of, you know, learning by doing, digging your way through.
Chris: Oh, that screwed up. Now I got to fix this.
Wes: And it's a lot harder.
Chris: And it's a lot messier.
Wes: Well, I mean, you know. Iteration and trying things is the only way to learn.
Chris: It's true.
Wes: But I do think there is a lot to...
Wes: You just have to know how to communicate it. I think one of the more exciting
Wes: things in all of this is, regardless of how the discussion you want to have
Wes: around review and what you declare prod-worthy or not, and all of that side of the conversation,
Wes: the ability to quickly summon forth software to test things and to prototype
Wes: and to understand sort of what is possible, is pretty profound.
Chris: Or when you're learning to review a project and ask it questions about that
Chris: project, like, why does it work like this? How does that work? And just use it as...
Wes: Yeah, and test theories, right? Make a change and see, does it do the thing
Wes: that you thought? Does that jive with your own understanding?
Chris: I think, though, that people that lack proper project management and documentation
Chris: skills and get best practices and things like that, they're going to have a
Chris: harder time as the project gets beyond just a handy script or a quick vibe code.
Chris: And when it gets into something that's a little bit larger, that maybe has a
Chris: front end and a back end, and maybe has to interface with a few services,
Chris: and maybe is going to be user facing, it starts to get a little bit more of
Chris: an actual project that you need to know how to manage. And that's a skill set in itself.
Wes: Especially maybe if you've if it evolves from you know
Wes: it's i think the more it's easy to quickly do output
Wes: testing of it right if it's a tool you use all the time that you can quickly
Wes: tell if it isn't working for you and keep tweaking on that is a really easy
Wes: way to do it if it's like a complicated distributed system keeping track of
Wes: like even use yourself right and that you don't have a full eyes on and it needs
Wes: to keep like certain invariants maybe it's keeping track of money or something
Wes: that way maybe you want a you know there's different ways to set it up to have success.
Wes: And this is all stuff we're all still figuring out.
Chris: Right?
Wes: That's a big part of this.
Chris: And there's going to be parts that don't work. Zach Attacks here with a bunch
Chris: of sticks, a satchel of Richards, 11,100 and 11 cents.
Chris: Thank you for reading my email last week regarding Bitwarden.
Chris: Also, I did appreciate your coverage of Red Hat Summit because I can't make it to those.
Chris: I wanted to ask you and the audience, has anyone spun up their own ELK stack?
Chris: Elasticsearch, Cabana, and Logstash. Not that, but Kilbana, sorry, and Logstash.
Chris: And what is the easiest and quickest way to do that? I'm also really curious
Chris: on how you set up your agentic AI stack, as that's something I need to look at.
Wes: But we have a stream for you.
Chris: Yes, we do. Join us on the Friday stream this next Friday. We're going to have
Chris: a good little conversation on that. Boy, Elasticsearch.
Wes: Yeah, so there's a lot of options there. It kind of depends,
Wes: like, there are, do you need that exact stack? There are also now,
Wes: you know, other versions of it that do kind of the same idea.
Wes: Of course, there's Docker Compose is one easy route. There's also NixOS modules
Wes: for those. So it might depend a bit on what underlying sort of orchestration
Wes: technologies you prefer or are familiar with.
Chris: That's got to be the answer.
Wes: But definitely there's some compose files out there you could use as a starting
Wes: point if you just want to start playing with them and be able to tie them together.
Wes: Because a lot of that is just making sure you can do the full thing, right?
Chris: That seems the easiest way to go. Yeah.
Wes: Yeah, if your main goal is just to learn that stack and be able to work with
Wes: it, then yeah, it's probably going to cheer you all right. Good luck. Let us know how it goes.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Wes: Bunboosin, 2,291 sats. I haven't considered moving from Bitwarden since I moved
Wes: from LastPass years ago.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: The service has been great, and I'm still happy with the price even after the increase.
Chris: Oh, that's good. All right, good to hear. Thank you, Bun. Good feedback.
Wes: Yeah, it hasn't failed me yet in that sense. It's still working reliably. We'll see.
Brent: At what point, what does it take for you to switch?
Wes: That's a good question.
Chris: Probably one more screw-up.
Chris: Hopefully it's not a bad, bad one.
Brent: Right. Backups. Ed Bratton boosted in three, four, five, six Satoshis.
Brent: My preferred password manager is ProtonPass.
Chris: Ah. Sure. Another plug for Proton Pass. You'll like to see it. I get it.
Chris: Your inner child comes in with 2001 Satoshis.
Chris: 2001 Space Odyssey boost. Oh, we need that. The hell boost. I can't do that, Dave, or something.
Chris: Have you guys come across a rotary subwoofer in your journeys? It can hit one hertz.
Chris: Whoa. I know Chris had his ultimate home theater in that one video. I need a part three.
Chris: I can't remember what video he's talking about. Although I do like the home
Chris: theater. it's not the most bangings that I've ever had. That sounds like you would break stuff.
Chris: It reminds me of that scene in Back to the Future when Marty turns the speaker
Chris: all the way up and blows it out. That's what I'm picturing right now.
Wes: Or it's like some sort of deep tissue massage.
Chris: That'd be great. That'd be awesome. Thanks inner child. Appreciate it.
Wes: Bid cryptic boosts in with 4,096 SATs.
Wes: To answer Chris's question on our MDF proposal, I think this was a boost from last week.
Wes: Same URL, agent sends except text slash markdown, gets clean markdown back.
Wes: So this is the like markdown version of the internet.
Wes: No scraping, no HTML parsing.
Wes: Access policy is expressed through price. Free content serves immediately.
Wes: Premium content triggers a lightning invoice via L402.
Wes: One SAT to $100, same mechanism. Reference server is a self-hostable Docker image.
Wes: Price also gives content owners a natural level for lever, excuse me,
Wes: for agent load. Charge a sat instead of getting hammered for free.
Chris: You know, it's not a crazy idea. You can stream sats to podcasts and music and
Chris: you can zap posts on Noster.
Chris: Why can't you zap an API? Zap them five sats.
Chris: I mean, we're not talking like a lot here. We're talking zap them a few sats
Chris: and then you get premium access to the API for however long they determine.
Chris: No membership required, no monthly reoccurring charge.
Wes: I would zap for some articles from time to time for sure.
Chris: There is pay per query, which is sort of an open router that allows you to pay
Chris: for your API access with sats.
Chris: But this just seems like something that could be done if humanity could actually
Chris: implement technology at scale at any time.
Chris: I like the idea. Thanks, BitCryptic.
Brent: Eyes noir boosted in 2 222 sets and you know what that is it's a road decks,
Brent: Regarding the AI vibe coding, it feels to me that the distinction between core
Brent: contributors to a software using AI tools or random people submitting AI written
Brent: PRs is an important distinction.
Brent: The latter is what would annoy people that are trying to maintain a project
Brent: because AI might not know anything about that project.
Brent: Personally, I'm not a programmer, but those tools help me write the code for
Brent: some projects I need. I take care of figuring out the infrastructure and what
Brent: and how the software works.
Brent: AI writes the rest of the code that I don't know how to write.
Chris: So this, I think, is a pretty good point here and something Linus made in our members show as well.
Chris: There's also, when I say this stuff, I want to mention, I feel like there is
Chris: the small open source project that's getting buried that just doesn't have access
Chris: to API credits or some, you know, Google-provided AI service.
Chris: And they're just getting really a lot of the downsides.
Chris: But Linus said something that sort of stuck with me.
Chris: And that is, is that if you just, if you're using an AI vibe coding tool or
Chris: whatever, you know, you're cloud coding and you discover a vulnerability,
Chris: first of all, obviously you should not go just shouting about it.
Chris: But it's probably safe to assume other people have discovered that vulnerability too.
Chris: Maybe a lot of people have discovered that vulnerability. And so it's probably
Chris: a good presumption to assume that vulnerability is already public.
Chris: or it will be relatively soon.
Chris: And then it's worth going to see if the project's getting slammed with issues about it or not.
Wes: And I think that applies too, to some extent, to some of the other things with like random PRs.
Wes: Like if it's an obvious feature or just sort of like low-hanging fruit,
Wes: like there are some things that the problem was just it needed to be implemented.
Wes: But there's a lot of things that it's like no one's quite proposed the way that
Wes: makes sense for the project yet or what feels like the right long-term solution.
Wes: And like a quick vibe code is probably not the thing that's going to hit on
Wes: that, right? Because it wasn't just like implement this API with a clear contract.
Wes: It's sort of debate internally what the right and propose something you think
Wes: should be that contract, which probably takes a fairly deep understanding of like history.
Chris: Yes, exactly. That's probably very common.
Wes: Adversary's 17 boosts in with 4,096 cents.
Chris: Yay!
Wes: Still using Bitwarden. Highest spouse approval factor and my company uses it,
Wes: so I get a free family plan.
Chris: Ah, there's that.
Wes: That's hard to say no to.
Chris: There is that. Both of those are really good. Those are both really good.
Brent: Well, Genonymous boosted in 5,000 cents.
Brent: No message on this one, just a thanks, so I'll take this next one here from
Brent: Magnolia Mayhem with 2,000 sets.
Brent: It simply says, Boosty McBoostface.
Chris: Agreed.
Wes: Agreed. Hard agree.
Brent: Same thing.
Chris: Profound. Profound. Thank you, everybody, who boosted in, including those of
Chris: you who streamed them sats. We do appreciate you.
Chris: 18 of you did that, and collectively you stacked 16,932 satoshis for this here show.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosts, our grand total this episode for episode
Chris: 670 of your Value for Value Linux Unplugged podcast is 322,617 satoshis. I'll get it eventually.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a boost.
Chris: We're pretty fond of it because there's no middleman. Like, we had a web boost
Chris: thing going for a little while that was a prototype thing that we were trying
Chris: and hooked up to my PayPal.
Chris: and now PayPal has shut down my account and they want me to go through a 17
Chris: page long or 17 different document humiliation ritual to get access to the remaining funds in there,
Chris: and I just over the years I've always discovered all these platforms suck and
Chris: so the nice thing about the boost is there's no middleman it's a peer-to-peer
Chris: network and it's an open source system with an open source protocol and an open
Chris: source money and it goes automatically to each one of our wallets including editor Drew and.
Wes: When it's sent it's sent It's.
Chris: Done. And I don't have to go ask PayPal or anything like that.
Chris: And I just, I prefer it that way.
Chris: But we also really appreciate our members who want to use their fiat and just
Chris: put it on autopilot. We totally get that too.
Chris: And that's also very doable. So thank you everybody who supports the show,
Chris: either through value, through time, or through your treasure.
Chris: It makes all the difference. And it does indeed actually keep us going.
Chris: We're not just saying that.
Chris: We've been going since the beginning of the year, super lean on sponsors,
Chris: and it makes all the difference.
Chris: All right, how about – I'm going to pick something that's a little bit of a
Chris: broad category because I think my official pick I already mentioned in the show.
Chris: But this is something I think everybody should know about is the Home Assistant
Chris: Project has a certified works with Home Assistant database.
Chris: So you can go by connectivity type, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, matter,
Chris: Z-Wave, Zigbee, et cetera.
Chris: You do device type, lights, irrigation, camera, battery, sensor,
Chris: air purifier, climate, all the different ones.
Chris: and also some additional secondary subtypes that you can do.
Chris: And then what you'll get is an official, yes, it works with Home Assistant.
Chris: These are the things that are known to work. These are the elements.
Chris: This is the process you may or may not have to go through.
Chris: And there is an extensive 378-page list.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: With 25 entries on each page. They have really done an amazing work over here.
Chris: They say, welcome to the centralized list of works with Home Assistant certified
Chris: devices. Every product listed here has been rigorously tested by our team to
Chris: ensure great experience.
Chris: And I will note, I have seen them kick people out of the program when they slip from the requirements.
Brent: Nice.
Wes: That's what you want to see. It's a real standard.
Chris: They're not scooting.
Wes: I'd like that it has the region search in here, too.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: I know. I know. Also, I'm going to give one more honorable shout out to that
Chris: Zeus Outdoor Smart Plug Game Changer, over-the-air firmware updates, works with Z-Wave.
Chris: So good. So good. So I had to put that in there too.
Wes: IP65.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Chris: I don't know if I would rate, I don't know if I would live on it, but it is IP65 rated.
Chris: I have it inside a crate because it is a power outlet thing.
Chris: You know, I just don't want that out. It doesn't have like caps.
Chris: Oh, this is the different one. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, Wes.
Chris: You're right. You were looking at it.
Wes: I was.
Chris: I didn't mention this in the show. I saved it and I thought I had mentioned it.
Brent: Too many great devices on this project.
Wes: Yeah, because this one does have a cap.
Chris: This one has the cap. This is the one that I feel safe. Thank you.
Chris: This is the one I feel safe about actually putting outside.
Chris: It is also a Zeus product and it has a cap. It's designed to be outdoor.
Chris: And I, this is what I use to do the smart lights in the barn.
Wes: Oh, okay.
Chris: Really nice. That's a button on it too. So if you want to manually activate
Chris: it, you can design for outdoor.
Brent: Wow. It looks actually quite nicely designed for an outdoor,
Brent: like really nice ceiling. And it's got a little whip cable on it and everything. It looks beefy.
Chris: Get Zeus, get Z O O Z.com. They have all their, they just have so many good
Chris: products and they all work really good with home assistant.
Chris: It's just, it's a, it's, it's a real treat. So between the home assistant database
Chris: and Zeus products alone, strong recommend, very much strong recommend.
Chris: Like, you know, you want these things to work like infrastructure as reliable as a light switch.
Chris: That's, that's my benchmark. That's the, if they fail that line,
Chris: that's when I started to get upset.
Chris: And so far they have, they have nailed that every single time.
Brent: Well, Chris, we hinted at some heating issues that you were having in this V1 of your box.
Brent: I'm curious, A, when are you going to solve that? Or do you need to solve it
Brent: right away? And B, any ideas?
Wes: I think he was planning to solve it after dropping the van tank.
Chris: Yeah, right after we get here and get the van working.
Brent: You're going to come install the fans?
Chris: All right, I'm just going to get a boat thing. The fans are showing up during
Chris: the show. They may be out on the porch right now.
Brent: That's exciting.
Chris: I cannot delay on this because even when it's an overcast day,
Chris: the box is overheating. The O-Droid, it's the MVME.
Chris: Everything else is fine, but the MVME.
Wes: Have you considered trying to capture the heat to power a small motor?
Brent: How hot are we talking?
Chris: I think like 80 Celsius.
Brent: Oh, that's like double the recommended temperature for hard drives.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: That's not good. That's almost, you could almost boil water on that thing. See what I'm saying?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. You're right. I should capture that.
Brent: Just put that thing in the chicken coop. Keep those chickens warm.
Chris: I know. Really? Seriously? God. It's bad.
Chris: All right. Also, I would love it if folks boosted in your outdoor frigate friendly cameras.
Chris: Please send that in. And I also think we should do another round of Nick's router configs.
Wes: Yeah, we should.
Chris: Yeah, we should. A little compare and contrast, right? A little compare and
Chris: contrast. See what you guys did versus what I did.
Chris: Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday. Join us 10 a.m. Pacific,
Chris: 1 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv.
Chris: And if you want more show, remember, there's the LUP LUP gets together every single Sunday.
Chris: We got a banging quiet listening right now up there in that mumble room and,
Chris: of course, the chat room.
Chris: It's really easy, and it's going all week long. And then it really starts popping
Chris: Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: Members, you get the full bootleg with twice the content, clocking it in an hour 53 right now.
Chris: And there's not a minute wasted in that hour 53, neither's.
Chris: Tell you what. And, of course, links to our Mumble Room, Matrix,
Chris: everything we talked about today, that's at LinuxUnplugged.com.
Chris: And, Wes, transcript?
Wes: Oh, yeah, we have those. Chapters? Yeah, VTT, SRT, JSON.
Chris: Metadata, boy. Woo, get you some. Thanks for joining us.
Wes: XML in the feed itself, yeah.
Chris: See you next week. Get your feed.