Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, I'm going to talk about
Chris: the self-hosted app that turned me into a family time lord and the perfect mobile
Chris: server we found just a little too late.
Chris: Then we're going to round it out with some boosts, some great picks,
Chris: and I mean some great picks and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get to all of that, let's do the right thing and say time-appropriate
Chris: greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.
Brent: Hello, hello.
Wes: Hello, handsome mumble room.
Chris: Yeah, and shout out to that packed, quiet listening, too. Nice to see you all up there.
Chris: Whew! It's going to be a big show. And good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
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Chris: Big thank you to our king chief sponsor of the show over there.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Really, really big thank you.
Wes: Keeping our packets flowing.
Chris: So I want to talk about becoming a Time Lord. So I'll back up a little bit.
Chris: Some people may be able to relate to this problem.
Wes: You hope.
Chris: I have too many calendars. You know, like, first of all, I've got accounts that
Chris: have been around for 200 years that have got calendars on them. And then I've got, like,
Chris: My personal calendar that has
Chris: also shared with some family members and my ex-wife for the kids stuff.
Chris: And then I've got a calendar with my wife and then my wife has her calendar.
Chris: And then I've got the JB calendar and then I've got the show calendars.
Wes: Live streams.
Chris: It's actually, it's something like 12 or something. I don't know. It's a lot of calendars.
Chris: And what inevitably happens is I'm checking one or I've got a couple of configured
Chris: on a device or somebody books on one calendar, but somebody also books on the
Chris: other calendar and the two conflict.
Chris: and then I've got to sort it out if I even notice it, which sometimes I don't.
Wes: Well, that's the other part, right? It's like really most of your time is focused
Wes: either on your family or- The shows.
Wes: The shows, right, yeah. You don't really have a lot of sort of admin office
Wes: time built into this schedule.
Chris: And so over the years, I've tried like having great calendar apps where I like
Chris: pull in all the feeds from the various calendars and then I have one big meta calendar.
Chris: That's sort of how I've solved this for a long time, but it doesn't solve it
Chris: for the people that are trying to book with me.
Wes: Right. It gives you a single pane of glass, but they don't necessarily get the
Wes: like, oh, nope, he's reserved here. Sorry. Yeah.
Chris: So also when you're trying to build like automations or you're trying to just
Chris: look at your calendar in one snapshot, like it's never really easy outside this
Chris: one meta calendar app that I've set up.
Chris: So this is where it's kind of a newer app. They just hit version 2.0. It's called Keeper.sh.
Chris: It's a simple self-hostable open source calendar syncing tool.
Chris: It allows you to pull events from all your different iCal or ICS feeds and then
Chris: push them into one feed with all of the details.
Chris: And the app also has a self-hosted version, or I mean a hosted version,
Chris: if you would rather just use their service.
Chris: I think it's pretty cheap, but they also offer multiple ways to host it, which I'll get into.
Chris: And it's got a very simple UI. The app itself is not a calendar app.
Chris: It's a feed management app, and it creates a source of truth for your calendars.
Chris: So instead of having a calendar app where I have a ton of feeds now,
Chris: I have all my calendar apps with one feed. and it all comes from Keeper.
Chris: And Keeper makes it simple now because when somebody books on one of my different
Chris: calendars, I can now identify the conflicts and catch them quickly.
Chris: And I can also provide my family a synchronized feed so they don't book or mistake
Chris: gaps of time or whatever because of its cross calendars.
Chris: It gives my family one source of truth or you guys, people I work with,
Chris: a single source of truth. And so it's so, so much a game changer when it comes
Chris: to just planning and looking at availability.
Chris: And then the other thing that if you want to push it even further that I really
Chris: appreciate is it also provides a model context protocol server.
Chris: So if you do the claw thing or whatever, it also gives you agentic access to
Chris: your calendar. And that can be really powerful, too.
Wes: Yeah, right. Then you have a chat interface to go make new appointments.
Chris: And so the app itself is surprisingly straightforward. forward
Chris: it keeps track of the different time slots and
Chris: things like that uh it does i'd say there's the
Chris: big limitation is it only supports iCal and ICS for
Chris: ingest it does support a range of
Chris: cloud accounts as well for publishing those so if you have a google calendar
Chris: an outlook calendar or a bunch of other vendors you can have keeper published
Chris: to those calendars which is not import yeah it just uses ICS or iCal for import
Chris: um and they do have a hosting offering and if you read through their GitHub
Chris: readme document. They have a discount code in there. It's already cheap.
Chris: But with the discount code, just read their readme and you'll find it.
Chris: But I wanted to self-host.
Chris: There's seven different options for self-hosting. Did you see this?
Wes: Not only is there like just a lot of containers involved in general,
Wes: but then there's different versions of containers depending.
Wes: It's almost like the next class situation.
Chris: That's a good, that's a good equivalent. What is it about calendaring and all of this that requires?
Chris: It is a hard problem to solve, I guess. I mean, here we are.
Chris: So there are seven images available, but two of them are really sort of the
Chris: all-in-one kind of everything's included in a single stack.
Wes: Keeper standalone, everything you need. or if you want just redis and the database
Wes: outside okay that's that's kind of nice actually so keep the stateful bits yourself
Wes: this will run the rest of the app side okay yeah.
Chris: They're trying to accommodate people's different various hosting setups.
Wes: Or you can run the pieces yourself.
Chris: And then, of course, there's the MCP server in there as well,
Chris: if you want, which is optional.
Chris: So instead of going the Docker route with an environment file,
Chris: I decided to kind of go the one really big Nix config route.
Chris: This was kind of a monster, I'll admit. It ended up being a 234-line Nix config,
Chris: which is one of my biggest ever.
Chris: But it generates system-to-unit files. It sets up a Podman network.
Chris: It sets up the NGINX virtual host, the TLS certification, and it manages all
Chris: of the secrets from one declarative source of truth. So that's really, really nice.
Chris: And so instead of doing it with Docker Compose, I'm doing it with declarative
Chris: Podman containers and then wiring it up through Nginx to do the reverse proxy
Chris: to put it behind a nice pretty URL.
Chris: And it's working really well because then it's a memorable URL.
Chris: And so when I need to put the calendar feed into one of my calendar apps,
Chris: it's really easy to boop, boop, boop, slash ICS, boom.
Chris: That's been fantastic. So I kind of went totally a different direction than
Chris: the project, but used it as kind of a base.
Wes: And I guess since their coordination point was containers, that's all you needed,
Wes: and set the right end vars or whatever else.
Chris: Yeah. And so the other, I'd say, limitation to be aware of this app is the MCP
Chris: server is also read-only.
Wes: Oh. But the API is not just the MCP?
Chris: I haven't tried that because, for my age, and I can just also write to all the
Chris: source calendars. So I've solved it already.
Chris: The agent already has that. I just prefer a single source of truth feed for the actual calendars.
Chris: But man, is this not just one of the small things you can do that's totally
Chris: transparent in a way to the family, but just makes things so much nicer.
Wes: I do see that there are also some modules coming, applications coming through
Wes: maybe, including CLI mobile and SSH.
Brent: Even more ways to use it.
Wes: Don't know what that means, but SSH into your calendar?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I don't know. I love it.
Chris: And also CLI. It's great.
Brent: I do have a usage question.
Chris: Uh-huh, yeah.
Brent: Like you need family approval more than just wife approval this time,
Brent: and maybe you even need approval from the two of us.
Brent: From their perspective, let's say they have right access.
Brent: Let's say Wes has right access to the JB calendar, but you're providing him
Brent: with Chris's everything calendar.
Brent: Now, is he getting duplicate entries because you have the JB calendar on there
Brent: and then he also has write access to it and all of a sudden you have double calendaring?
Chris: That's a good question. So you can generate feeds for folks.
Chris: I'm trying to see if I can. I don't know if I can pull it up here at the studio
Chris: because I don't know if I have. Oh, I do.
Chris: You can generate feeds that exclude certain calendars.
Brent: Ah, that's brilliant.
Chris: But I actually find it really for everyone else. I don't really need to have them make any changes.
Chris: They're just writing to the calendar they've always written to.
Chris: They just have access to that calendar, which is fine.
Chris: They don't, like, you guys don't really need to know when my kid appointments
Chris: are. You just need to know if I'm available.
Brent: Uncle Brandon needs to know sometimes.
Chris: Well, yeah. So it's sort of, you can slice and dice it depending on how you want to use it.
Brent: Very nice.
Chris: Yeah. And they just hit version 2.0. It's been out, I think they're just over,
Chris: like, maybe six, seven months.
Chris: I can't quite recall. But it's very active. The developer, this is a Sunday morning.
Chris: and the developer just committed uh something two hours ago uh it's agpl 3.0
Chris: and uh it's uh mostly written in typescript and then of course there's javascript
Chris: in there and a little bit of shell and stuff but mostly a typescript application.
Wes: It does sound like um the developer was scratching an itch that the same one
Wes: you had which is kind of funny it's had this working on some project three calendars
Wes: across business work and personal and.
Brent: How did you find this, Chris? And why did you solve this problem?
Brent: Because you've had this problem for a very long time. Why this week?
Chris: I was trolling GitHub and Reddit and X for a solution and came across.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Yeah. And then I tracked down the developer's post on our self-hosted for the new 2.0 release.
Chris: I was like, oh, it just came out. What a great time to talk about it now that
Chris: the new 2.0 is out. And he just released 2.914 an hour ago.
Chris: I already got an update, boys.
Brent: Wait another day to get 3.0.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it's not a big update. It's just a calendar off fix, which I didn't run into.
Chris: But really nice. I mean, a guy's clearly dedicated to it as well. So very cool to say.
Brent: Let's not burn them out.
Chris: I'm not sure. It's Rita. I'm not sure. R-I-D-A is the developer's first name or handle.
Chris: But great project. And if you've had this problem, I definitely recommend it.
Chris: And if you solve this another way that you think might be even better,
Chris: please do post that or boost us or emails because totally willing to even solve
Chris: this a better way. It's been good, but perhaps a better solution exists.
Chris: No sponsor right here, so we'll just say thank you for being a member.
Chris: And if you're not a member yet, you can go to linuxonplugged.com slash membership
Chris: and become a core contributor or support the entire network at jupyter.party.
Chris: You get access to the bootlegs, which is a lot more show. We're clocking in
Chris: at 54 minutes, almost 55 minutes right now for the members.
Wes: We have so much more to go.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And there's often really good conversations about making the main
Chris: show, not intentionally it's just because it's a really organic discussion kind of.
Brent: It's a hangout.
Chris: Yeah it's a hangout and so we've gotten in some really good conversations there and
Chris: it's additional content and uh you also uh you also could get an ad-free version
Chris: so when we do get some advertising support if you don't like it there's an ad-free
Chris: version of the feed as well of course the ads aren't in the bootleg either but
Chris: uh either way we appreciate your support it's linuxunplugged.com membership
Chris: or jupiter.party for the whole gosh darn thing.
Wes: Well, you two have been up to a lot of things this week. I've only been getting
Wes: little snapshots here and there.
Wes: So last I heard, y'all have been working on not one, but I think two diesel heaters.
Wes: And clearly, Brent must have the itch for embedded development.
Wes: Because when I got to the studio today, he walks in and hands me a little black box with the radio.
Wes: From CubeSail? What is this?
Chris: Ah, there's quite a story behind that. There is quite a story.
Chris: So how would you describe that, Wes? What would you?
Wes: An industrial-looking sort of like professional metal case.
Wes: It's got what I assume is a Wi-Fi antenna, good connectivity,
Wes: USB-C for power, Ethernet, HDMI.
Chris: Full HDMI.
Wes: On the front, it says PiBox. And it's got that little screen.
Wes: It's also got nice little indicators for disk CPU and power.
Wes: It feels heavy, well-built. Is that a Noctua fan in there?
Chris: Yes. Good eye, Wes.
Brent: So, Wes, now you can just like kind of slide it like a clamshell.
Wes: Oh.
Brent: And it'll reveal itself. So maybe you can try to decipher what's in there.
Chris: I'd say it's as thick as like two, three and a half inch disc stacked, but shorter.
Chris: So it's not, it's not particularly thin. You would notice it in the bag,
Chris: but it's not huge either. And then Wes is now, Wes has taken the, uh, the back off.
Wes: Oh, okay. This looks like a Raspberry Pi.
Chris: Yeah. It's a CM4.
Wes: Oh yeah. The compute module four. And then with, um, a larger carrier board. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Cube sale hat compatible GPIO. Ooh.
Chris: Yeah, that carrier board is very interesting. That's why you get the larger HDMI.
Chris: You get a few additional features in there, including a backplane for SATA disks.
Brent: Yes, it's so great.
Wes: Proper storage?
Brent: Yes. In a tiny little box.
Chris: It has room for two 2.5 SATA SSDs.
Wes: Oh, and there's one in here.
Chris: Yes. So we did scrounge up a precious 480 gig SSD and stuck it in there.
Wes: Okay, CM4. So that's like Pi 4 era, but was the CM4 like slightly better?
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Slightly better. Depending on the model you got at the time,
Chris: it came with up to 8 gigs of RAM and 32 gigabytes of eMMC storage built in.
Chris: So you're not fussing about with an SD card.
Chris: It's got built-in EMCC storage, eMMC.
Chris: It has a gigabit Ethernet port. It has two USB 2.0, like you mentioned, a Type-C.
Chris: It's also got a micro SD card slot on there
Chris: and then on the front of the box We'll put a link if you want to see this it
Chris: has three LEDs and a little LCD screen as well as a GPIO connector on there
Chris: and That lets you see what the system is up to while it's working away and then
Chris: it has these two powered SATA SSD slots and at launch,
Chris: The PiBox CubeSale was $299.
Wes: Whoa.
Chris: Yeah. It was initially a Kickstarter, which I think is maybe how I caught this.
Chris: Unfortunately, they are no longer around. And it's one of these where we were
Chris: both really disappointed when Brent and I discovered this.
Chris: In 2025, they said so long and thanks for all the pods, and they announced they shut down.
Chris: And they did the good guy thing, and they open-sourced their code.
Chris: They open-sourced a lot of stuff.
Wes: Including their OS.
Chris: Oh, that's great.
Wes: I mean, sad, but best case, I guess.
Chris: The cube sale comes from they were using Kubernetes.
Wes: I was going to ask. Was this meant to be like a host to run Kubernetes on the Pi platform?
Chris: Yeah, and then deploy applications and install SSDs and have a tiny low power NAS.
Chris: And looking back at it, they were just early. It's a really good idea.
Chris: They started in 2019 and I think they just couldn't make it work.
Wes: How long do they go?
Chris: 2025.
Wes: Oh, wow. So you just missed them.
Chris: Yeah. So they don't make it anymore, which is such a shame because we love it. It's neat.
Brent: The just hardware quality, I would say, and the thoughtfulness in their design,
Brent: especially even of their PCB.
Brent: They wrote like docs on their PCB about how to use this thing.
Wes: It's very well labeled. Yeah. What is this?
Brent: Oh, it's so nice.
Wes: It also has this, what's this switch on there?
Chris: Yeah. So that's on the carrier board.
Wes: One says normal. The other side says RPI boot.
Chris: There you go.
Brent: Well, this gets us into a fight that Wes had to break up between Chris and I
Brent: about how to deploy to this thing.
Brent: Because we have this big-brained idea of how to use this fancy little box that
Brent: we somehow found in the corner of the studio.
Chris: We should talk about that and then talk about the fight.
Brent: Yeah, okay. Let's talk about the goal. So we've had a problem to solve for years now.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: And just having come back from scale...
Brent: It is obvious we still have this problem, despite my, let's say,
Brent: efforts to solve it with the wrong hardware.
Chris: Yeah, Airbnb TVs suck. They suck so bad. And we're often there for a week,
Chris: and we just want to watch Star Trek.
Wes: I feel like Hisense must be paying them to put these TVs in.
Wes: It's the only reason you do it.
Chris: And Hisense just announced that these TVs are now going to, while they're booting,
Chris: which takes forever, they're going to play advertisements.
Brent: Don't solve the problem of making a boot faster. Just take advantage of the
Brent: slowness to sell you stuff.
Chris: And listeners, you need to understand that priority one, when we arrive at an
Chris: Airbnb, is to get Star Trek going.
Chris: A bench of an Airbnb, a benchmark is how fast can you get Star Trek?
Chris: Because what you're actually, you're benchmarking the quality of the television,
Chris: the quality of the Wi-Fi, the wiring job.
Wes: The instructions from the host.
Chris: Yeah, it's an interesting benchmark immediately. And so really before we've
Chris: unpacked, before we've even picked rooms, we've got Star Trek going.
Chris: and we want to get the window of time down on that and remove the frustration.
Chris: And then additionally, Airbnb Wi-Fi is terrible, always terrible.
Chris: I would say every other time the Wi-Fi is in the other building and we're getting scraps of signal.
Wes: Or this time we had one where the actual speed and signal was great,
Wes: but they did client isolation. So we couldn't actually talk to anything else.
Chris: Yeah. And we've had one where the Wi-Fi went out and it was in the owner's house,
Chris: which was next door, and the owner wasn't there. And so then we just didn't
Chris: have Wi-Fi when we needed to do the show on Sunday at our night at our last
Chris: Airbnb, which is right next to L.A., right next to Pasadena.
Chris: The Wi-Fi was so bad from the area in the Internet that we did the show off of our cell phones.
Chris: So that's a problem we need to solve. So we want this device to be a media server
Chris: as well as an AP that will either extend the Airbnb's Wi-Fi or connect to an LTE network.
Chris: But the goal is, is that all of our client devices always are just attached to the same SSID.
Chris: So when we arrive and the Wi-Fi becomes available, we don't have to play this
Chris: game of, hey, what's the password? What's the password? Hey,
Chris: did you get the password?
Chris: We all already have the Wi-Fi set up on our devices. It connects to this box.
Chris: And then this box handles the actual Internet.
Chris: And it has, on top of that, a jellyfin server with storage on this SSD that's
Chris: built in now or slotted in.
Chris: And maybe it runs a Samba server. Maybe it runs ersatz TV or tunar or something
Chris: like that, which we'll come back to.
Chris: And it becomes essentially a media NAS Wi-Fi repeater that gives us consistency everywhere we go.
Chris: But you want something that isn't as big as even a one liter PC is too big because
Chris: it's going in the bag or the backpack.
Brent: It has to be super travel friendly. I started trying to investigate this problem
Brent: by thinking, well, maybe a cell phone is an interesting way to solve this because
Brent: you can have independent internet if you need it.
Brent: You can throw up a hotspot.
Brent: You can throw it in a bag anywhere. It's so gosh darn portable.
Brent: And modern cell phones maybe can run like Linux containers.
Chris: And they have HDMI out through USB-C.
Brent: Also true. That's also true.
Chris: And you have a Jellyfin app.
Brent: And everybody's got a used cell phone in their closet.
Chris: It was not a bad idea.
Brent: Yeah, the problem is I picked the absolute worst device to showcase it at our
Brent: last Airbnb. Wes will...
Brent: I think, agree with me that we took a listener's device. It was a Bind phone,
Brent: which turns out ancient, even when it was made first.
Brent: But it ran Linux, which is, I thought, going to solve a lot of problems. So I deployed it.
Brent: I worked many, many days and then deployed it at our Airbnb.
Chris: And how'd that go, Brent?
Brent: Well, it was very entertaining.
Chris: Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was.
Brent: It didn't go very well.
Wes: You may have harmed your...
Chris: Friendship with producer json yeah yeah that's true it started when you it took
Chris: you 20 minutes to get it on the wi-fi there was that that was sort of a bad sign yeah.
Brent: I still don't know.
Chris: Why that was but.
Brent: Anyways it was a means of starting this wheel going and then having us solve
Brent: this problem we've had for years and i think having that failed experiment got
Brent: us to a point where i think maybe we got this.
Chris: Yeah so now we had the pie box we discovered it in the studio's archive and
Chris: it was time to give it a little love.
Chris: I probably talked about it years ago when it was brand new, but dusted it off
Chris: and actually had a real use case for it now.
Chris: And it really came down to, well, how do you deploy on this thing?
Chris: I would love to see the Pi get a little easier to deploy on.
Wes: I assume you didn't even try to get the KubeSail software in Kubernetes running?
Chris: No, no, because it's also pretty old now at this point, Debian and whatnot.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And once you have an OS flash to the EMMC, it's a lot harder to just boot off external media.
Chris: Because the way you change the boot order and whatnot is you modify the boot
Chris: order on the installed OS.
Chris: And you change hex codes in the boot order and stuff like that.
Chris: And I just didn't want to play it.
Brent: Just the expression on your face, Chris, when you found out that's what you
Brent: needed to do. So where we came to, where Chris and I were holding up fists and
Brent: Wes had to solve us tearing each other's hair up.
Chris: There may have been some yelling.
Brent: Was how do you deploy to this thing?
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So Chris had a method and I had an experimental method that I wanted to try
Brent: because I read it on the PCB.
Chris: The irony is we probably should have reversed our attempts.
Brent: Really? But I'll get to that.
Chris: I'll get to that. So I advocated for just pulling down existing ARM binary images
Chris: and flashing them to a USB stick and booting the thing with that.
Chris: That was my approach, and I figured that would probably be a 20-minute gerb.
Brent: That's far too reasonable.
Chris: Brent over there wanted to go the route of, like, pulling down all the ARM packages
Chris: on his x86 machine, spinning up an ARM VM, building them in the ARM VM,
Chris: and then deploying a fully ready ARM image.
Chris: as an image to the MMC, using this RPI boot mode that you can flip the carrier board into.
Chris: So you've got to install the RPI boot app, and then it can flash and write.
Chris: So the board, the carrier board for this and the CM4, they come out of the unit.
Chris: You have to unplug them from the SATA backplane, and then you connect them to
Chris: your laptop or whatever over USB-C.
Chris: So now it's getting powered from your laptop, and when it's in RPI boot mode,
Chris: when that toggle switch is flipped, it shows up as a mass storage device of types.
Wes: Oh, interesting.
Chris: Not a regular mass storage device. But A-type. Yes. And then RPiBoot can write to it.
Chris: And so what Brantley is going to do is build all these on his X86 PC in an ARM VM.
Brent: Sounds great.
Chris: And then flash them using RPiBoot.
Wes: To- This isn't his sort of factory assembly line that he turned your RV into?
Chris: You are not kidding. My wife's been out of town for a week. And if she was in town, my goodness, boy.
Brent: I would have never attempted to take over an eighth of the RV.
Chris: Oh, boy. Anyway, so my approach was pull down the images that are already built and flash them.
Chris: But the irony was is that I was on an ARM laptop and Brent's on an x86 laptop
Chris: and I'm doing the prepackaged route and he's doing the package build route.
Brent: Yeah. You should have been building the packages on your ARM laptop.
Chris: Although I did kind of want you to win. I think Wes ultimately sided with me a bit here.
Chris: He didn't really take a side, but he's like, well, the prebuilt packages makes
Chris: the most sense if you're on x86. That was good.
Wes: Well, I remember I tried the cross-compile path way back when I first tried getting NixOS on a Pi.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And just remembered that unless you had a fairly beefy rig, it was kind of painful.
Chris: Yeah, so I wanted to see it work, so Brent gave it a go.
Brent: Well, the reason I thought this might work more than you both seem to have any
Brent: faith in me was that I deployed to a Raspberry Pi previously using this method.
Brent: And then when I saw that nice little switch on the board, I thought,
Brent: okay, this is the way they want this to be done.
Brent: Maybe not the cross-compiling stuff or the cross-building.
Brent: But I really wanted to try plugging this in and just having it be a mass storage
Brent: device that I could write to.
Brent: Because, Chris, you ran into an issue of you had the image.
Chris: Yeah. I'd have to edit the OS to boot from the USB stick.
Brent: Yeah, and so it didn't seem necessarily that much simpler.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So I went down the crazy path and did the cross-building. and it turned out
Brent: with a little bit of, you know, finessing that totally worked.
Chris: It did with one thing I would say people need to watch out for is the config
Chris: that ended up in the image, which was great because Brent was able to set it
Chris: up with user accounts and whatnot. So it just worked.
Chris: But the downside, the first one, like you got to watch yourself because it'll
Chris: do key-based SSH login. And if you don't set that up right, you can't get in.
Wes: You're locked out.
Chris: But the second gotcha is that now when it builds, even locally,
Chris: it's like configured to do a remote build, but it's doing a remote build on itself.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: So it's SSHing into itself and building.
Brent: Be careful which config you deploy to this thing. You can't just take what's
Brent: on your laptop and send it over there.
Chris: Yeah, right. But that aside, we do have a provisioned system with Jellyfin and
Chris: Samba and that 480 gigabyte drive.
Chris: And Wes, get ready for this.
Brent: Hmm.
Chris: I went with XFS.
Wes: You know, I wonder, because I walked in the studio, and I guess this thing was booted up.
Wes: I didn't know it at the time, but I just, I hadn't realized,
Wes: because I guess I haven't watched the kernel boot XFS.
Wes: It still says SGI XFS.
Chris: Yes, it's great, isn't it? Yeah, I don't know.
Chris: It just, we had a moment, and Brent claims that he is a Bcache FS hater now.
Chris: No, I'm kidding. No, I just wanted to try it, I guess. We could always reformat.
Brent: We tried Bcache FS first, and there was, I guess, an error in the current builds in NixOS.
Brent: Yeah. So we just skipped over it. But it'll come.
Wes: I mean, you got NixOS, so you don't strictly need it unless you have plans for
Wes: around what you need to snapshot.
Brent: Wes will fix it.
Chris: So what we're going to do is we're going to seed that thing with all like my
Chris: Blu-ray rips of Star Trek and my DVD copies and put it on the hard drive.
Chris: So we'll always have Star Trek. I think we'll put like season one or two of
Chris: Baywatch on there. We should have put some staples that we always watch at Airbnbs.
Chris: And then Brent found a usb adapter that you can plug an mvme disc into that
Chris: we took from an old busted laptop,
Chris: um and so we're going to use that for like the more current stuff like the updated
Chris: stuff so you want to just you just swap out right you plug it in your machine
Chris: you update it and then when we boot that thing up you plug it in and you've
Chris: got your extra new shows as well jellyfinal index oh.
Wes: I love this classics and currents.
Chris: The thing that's missing that we're working on and i don't know because brent
Chris: was up till 2 a.m working on this i don't know how far he got well.
Wes: We're gonna need to join it to a Nebula network.
Brent: It's so true.
Chris: It is going to be, we're going to have it. We'll have a Nebula network for all
Chris: of this. So it'll be able to route. That thing will become a Nebula router for
Chris: us. That is definitely part of it.
Chris: But you think about the big component that's missing that we haven't talked about yet.
Chris: We'd need this thing to be able to actually plug into a television and display jellyfin.
Wes: Yeah. Can it do that?
Chris: Well, it's got a full-fledged HDMI port, and the docs say it supports up to 4K resolutions.
Chris: So I bet, you know, all the TVs we go to are like 1080p crappers.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: And, you know, worse. So, like, we just have to figure out how to do a super
Chris: low-key, probably Wayland, I would imagine, on that hardware,
Chris: like kiosk almost. So where did you get to on that?
Brent: Yeah, I found a little project. Kind of last minute, so I haven't told you about it yet.
Chris: All right.
Brent: Something called Cage or Cage Kiosk, which is a Wayland-based kiosk,
Brent: which is fairly minimal, so good for these little compute modules.
Brent: And it just gets you a Wayland session with the application that you want to run.
Chris: So we could just have it essentially start up and launch a Firefox? Yeah.
Chris: Oh, and then if we had the Firefox homepage set to the Jellyfin web interface.
Brent: Exactly.
Chris: We could even have it probably launch with a flag for full screen.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Oh, boys. Oh, boys.
Wes: I think it does a single maximized application already. I don't know.
Brent: It's like the exact thing that we need to solve this problem.
Brent: And it still looks like it's in active development.
Brent: And I think we should just go with this plan. unless someone has a much better
Brent: idea because I seem to be. Yeah, I choose a client.
Wes: I think the one thing we don't, I mean, Jellyfin gives you, it has like the
Wes: cast sort of functionality, so we could control it from a phone or a laptop
Wes: pretty easily, but we don't necessarily have like a remote style interface.
Chris: Yeah, we do need to.
Wes: I don't know if we care about that. Maybe we don't. We're all very technical savvy.
Chris: Well, but we think, I think we want a remote, man. We want to make this really
Chris: easy. We want this to be a casual, low friction thing or like if my wife's with
Chris: us, it's easy for her. We have a, you know, we want to make it hard for PJ.
Wes: We could use the get a better version of that um kind of janky presenter remote i have that is.
Brent: Fun that thing was so hard to.
Wes: Use yeah.
Chris: I would actually like listener input on a great remote control device one that we could travel with.
Wes: That's the thing ideally it would still work like on a plane even if we didn't drive so.
Chris: Here's my other question this cage wayland kiosk thing does look really good,
Chris: But is there a kiosk mode for Plasma? Now, hear me out, because Plasma can be
Chris: pretty lean, and there could be, I don't know, situations where maybe we want
Chris: to bust out a full desktop to do something that we didn't think of.
Brent: We are always doing things we never thought of.
Chris: So if we could have, like, a Plasma session that's, like, kiosk mode by default
Chris: single app, but we could, with a, like, if we hooked up a USB keyboard,
Chris: we could break out, that might be also really nice.
Chris: But I don't know if that's a thing or not. Or I don't know. Maybe you can do that with GNOME.
Chris: I have no idea. Maybe that's another thing listeners could tell us.
Brent: I've got the feeling this might be a long-term project because we'll be taking
Brent: it with us and changing it every time we use it, it seems, because we can't help ourselves.
Chris: Yeah, I think the other thing we're going to be spending time figuring out is
Chris: what does this thing do DNS-wise and how do we set that up, especially with
Chris: split networks and all of that.
Brent: It's a great point.
Chris: And then, like, where does it pull the media from if we want,
Chris: say, maybe to connect to another Jellyfin server?
Chris: That probably needs—we need to make sure Nebula's running on the other Jellyfin server.
Chris: So there's a few more things. So I guess the big ask to the audience would be,
Chris: what would you use for kiosk mode would be up there?
Chris: I guess I'd be up to x86 versions of this that are cheap, too,
Chris: but we're kind of down this route now.
Brent: Use the hardware you have, I say.
Chris: Yeah, really. Tis the season, right?
Wes: How did you even – was this just on a shelf somewhere? How did this happen?
Brent: So this has been beside the fish tank in the living room, which we spend quite a lot of time in.
Brent: for about the last four years i've had my eye on it and uh decided to just dig in.
Chris: Mm-hmm i mean it's pretty dang neat it is pretty dang neat so uh and it's i
Chris: i think if we get the kiosk thing solved i think that's going to be a winner
Chris: i think the question is can you do that in plasma that's another you know or
Chris: is there a better route as long as we can get a full desktop that's lean and
Chris: mean but we like to use west.
Brent: Might be a little disappointed because i also tried to upgrade our process because I don't want to,
Brent: We always wanted to deploy to this thing remotely. So deploying to it with NixOS
Brent: Anywhere and using Disco would be nice, especially if we changed to a different device,
Brent: to just have a NixOS config that we can put on any device, really,
Brent: or share with the audience so they can do it.
Brent: But apparently, or at least I ran into this error, KExec does not work on the CM4.
Wes: It has been more hit or miss on ARM. I think there are definitely ARM devices
Wes: that can do it, but I don't know which ones.
Brent: A KExec list device might not pass the OS sniff test.
Wes: I mean, this one's pretty cool, so I'm willing to have a minimal sort of exceptions list.
Wes: There's probably a limit on the number on the size of the list.
Chris: But... Okay, maybe we can sort that out after the show.
Wes: Yeah, I think so.
Chris: All right, so we have one other question.
Wes: Maybe get Brent's lawyer involved.
Chris: While we're bringing up questions for the audience, so we want to talk about
Chris: the technical side of some of the age verification stuff that's moving and i've
Chris: been looking into this a bit we had a really great conversation on the pre-pre-show,
Chris: 25 u.s states now have enacted laws requiring age
Chris: verification usually government id or a third party age assurance
Chris: to get access to adult websites most of
Chris: these have been passed and went into effect in the last 24 months and now
Chris: we have two states that aim to enforce age verification at the
Chris: os level california ab 1043 which
Chris: was signed into law october 25th and goes into effect january 1st
Chris: 2027 and then colorado sb 26051 which is in the works and slated to be on the
Chris: schedule in 2028 the team at systemd has a patch in the works that adds a birth
Chris: date field to the json user records which would be essentially a standardized
Chris: age related logic that distributions could adopt,
Chris: And there is a group that is behind this that seems to be pushing it.
Chris: We had a good conversation that seemed to indicate that this is also underway in New York.
Chris: There is an early version in Washington State that hasn't gotten very far.
Wes: Some efforts in Illinois.
Chris: More and more widespread. And when you zoom outside the states,
Chris: there's countries outside the states like Brazil and others that are also passing
Chris: similar acetation requirements by the operating system.
Chris: So we are very quickly as a community finding ourselves between an awful rock and an awful hard spot.
Chris: And I think we're essentially there now. So System D might have a technical solution here.
Chris: Do you think distributions, and I'm asking you, listener, do you think distributions
Chris: should adopt it or remain out? Should they opt out?
Chris: Now, consider if they opt out, they are likely not going to be valid in certain
Chris: markets, not without fines and legal process.
Chris: and consider who pays for their development where the
Chris: money comes from in free software development it's often from enterprises who
Chris: have contracts with government or companies that have contracts with government
Chris: that have to make certain requirements so is this a line in the sand or should
Chris: we have a technical solution for places that need to implement it is it something
Chris: that all distributions should patch out should we fork system d.
Chris: Or does it make sense to implement? And if it doesn't make sense to implement,
Chris: if you're against it, what real options do you think are out there right now?
Chris: We'd like to have that conversation in next week's boost segment, so please do boost in.
Chris: And we'll have some details about the systemd birthdate field, if you're curious.
Chris: It's essentially a JSON user record that the distribution and the software that's
Chris: on top of that would then read from.
Chris: At this point, no distribution has announced support for that,
Chris: but you would imagine if they were forced to legally, then they would probably adopt that.
Chris: There's some other options as well including the Debian project has looked at
Chris: a potential route to solve this outside of Systemd.
Chris: So it's a conversation that's happening and we want to know where you stand
Chris: on it. We want to take your temperature. So please boost in and let us know.
Chris: I think it'd be a great way to get a conversation going.
Chris: I also want to mention that LinuxFest Northwest 2026 is just around the corner,
Chris: 33 days away as we record April 24th through the 26th at the Bellingham Technical College.
Chris: We'll be doing a live show there. We are on the Sunday schedule,
Chris: so you can join us for an in-person Linux unplugged.
Brent: Usually a riot.
Chris: It is a lot of fun. We don't know all the details yet. And then,
Chris: let's just put it out there.
Chris: You never know. You put something out in the universe, Brent,
Chris: and sometimes the universe answers. and we thought, wouldn't it be interesting?
Chris: Wouldn't it be fun if somebody out there in the audience is sitting with a van
Chris: that needs a little rescue?
Chris: Maybe it's in a rescuable state, needs a little love and get somebody out there
Chris: to get it off your property.
Chris: Well, Brent and I are itching. So let us know.
Chris: Email the show linuxunplugged or unplugged at jupiterbroadcasting.com or send
Chris: us a boost. Maybe we'll put you on the schedule this year and go do a van rescue.
Brent: That would be amazing.
Chris: We do this thing now when we're out driving around. We're always spotting vans.
Chris: It's like, oh, we should stop by and ask them. We should stop.
Chris: I look at that van. It's just sitting there rotting away. We should ask them.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: We could get that running.
Brent: Put it on the road.
Chris: Come on.
Wes: Someone could be using this.
Chris: Yeah. I don't know. I know it's crazy. Let us know. But we'd like to tech one
Chris: out. You know, if we can get it running, it would be such an awesome tech project.
Chris: Home Assistant, sensors all over that thing, leveling sensors,
Chris: mobile internet, all of it.
Wes: You know, maybe we tweak it out. We install a super duper recording studio in
Wes: there and then you just sell it to van influencers. Ready to go.
Chris: Yeah, there you go.
Brent: You know, Wes does need an RV solution. He's the only one of us that doesn't
Brent: currently have sleeping on wheels.
Chris: Oh my God, we could go on a road trip together.
Wes: That would be pretty killer.
Chris: All right, so you see, let us know, okay?
Brent: Help us.
Chris: Well, we got some feedback. Brentley, would you like to read Nix's,
Chris: which is NYX? He wrote into the show.
Brent: Yeah, someone knows our taste. Nix, NYX says, Hey, you'll ask for the most underpowered
Brent: thing in my stack, and I think the award probably goes to my Pentium 2 box.
Chris: Ho-ho-ho!
Brent: I got it for free from my doctor. He had it collecting dust in the office,
Brent: and I brought it home, swapped out the old spinning drive for an SSD.
Chris: Whoa.
Wes: Nice.
Brent: Oh, no, sorry. I read that.
Chris: Oh, SD card.
Brent: Yeah. Swapped it out for an SD card.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. 64 gigabyte SD, still probably better than the spinning rest, though.
Brent: Yeah, and hosting a Luanti or MindTest server over on it.
Brent: It's been hooked up to my tail net, and it can handle about five players with
Brent: limited draw distance pretty well.
Chris: Wow.
Brent: Also use it as an MPD server. It's a bit stuttery if I try to do both at the
Brent: same time. But for a zombie of tech, I'm pretty happy with it.
Chris: That's so great. And he's coming in from Ecuador, too. So hello, Ecuador.
Wes: Oh, yeah. We got a zip code here.
Brent: This is a binary zip code.
Chris: Do you want to go for it, Wes? Because, you know, I always think that zip codes
Chris: are a better option if you want to go for it.
Wes: I do.
Chris: I do. All right. Let's break it up. Let's find where he's at.
Chris: All right, so this is a unique one. It looks like something from the binars here.
Wes: I know, right? Binary, postal code, what is this?
Chris: What's going on, Wes?
Wes: Okay, so I could be wrong. We did obviously get the Ecuador hint, so that's a big helper.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: I couldn't find 010100, but it does look like if you sort of interpret it subnet
Wes: style where that last zero means like the first sort of digits.
Wes: I love where this is going already.
Wes: Then that kind of makes sense with how it seems like Ecuador's postal structure
Wes: is, or postal code is structured. So I think it is in the Asue province and
Wes: then maybe near the capital Cuenca or the province around there.
Wes: That's my guess, which has stuff like, let's see, it's got like a beautiful
Wes: looking park in here, which seems really nice. Yeah.
Chris: Let's go.
Wes: El Cajas National Park, which is in a mountainous region. It's got some,
Wes: the capital looks like it's got some pretty dope architecture going on.
Chris: Sure does. Wow. It's beautiful.
Wes: So I don't know if I found the right place. I'm sure I pronounced the names
Wes: wrong, but either way, I want to visit.
Chris: Yeah, for sure. It's also really impressive that he can actually sustain five
Chris: players. MineTest, for those that don't know, is like a Minecraft-free software implementation.
Chris: And so for five players, that's really great. An MPD server would be a media server.
Wes: Yeah, I like seeing MPD still being used. That's a good solution.
Brent: When's the last time either of you used Appendium 2?
Chris: Really long.
Brent: I know.
Chris: That's what's so great about this is it keeps these things out of the landfill.
Chris: they still have valid uses obviously here they maybe are you pay for it on the
Chris: power but that depends on everybody's individual area so that's really neat
Chris: thank you nix uh i think we i think we're pronouncing it nix let us know if we got that wrong.
Brent: Well we have a couple boosts here starting with a baller free go lay,
Brent: Frigol A sent in 67,011 satoshis.
Chris: Oh, thank you, sir.
Brent: They simply say, great coverage with a thumbs up.
Wes: Aw.
Chris: Thank you very much. And I feel like 67,011 might be a message.
Chris: I feel like it might be, but I'm not sure. Thank you very much,
Chris: Frigol A. I really do appreciate that.
Chris: It is your, you are our baller. Thank you, sir.
Chris: KRHill94 comes in with 10,000 sats.
Chris: Support if my AlbiHub node is working I'm having some troubles It works!
Chris: We got it You got it! Congratulations on self-hosting an AlbiHub.
Wes: It's a big step And we're proud of you Mm-hmm Mm-hmm And our final boost today
Wes: Spooky Satcom comes in with 2,000 sets,
Wes: Brent, your splits is killing my transactions Uh-oh Boost!
Chris: We have to look into that I.
Wes: Think Satcom here has, you know, a good spirit about it.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Wes: And we appreciate that.
Brent: Oopsies.
Chris: Yeah, sorry about that. We'll have to look into that. Okay, so it's a light
Chris: week. It's a light week. I guess, does that mean anything to we?
Brent: That's Signal? Not Signal?
Wes: I don't know. The world's on fire.
Brent: March break, right?
Chris: That's true. That's true. That's true. We're going to, we'll move on.
Chris: But we got, we did get some stream stats as well. We had 90 a stream.
Chris: 4,876. It almost makes me think there's a technical issue. That's so low. That's so low.
Wes: Well, maybe we can blame Brent. his splits causing everyone to give up on boosting I'm fine.
Chris: With that yeah maybe we I'll.
Brent: Yell at my administrator his name's Chris.
Chris: Oh Captain Chris dang it that doesn't that doesn't do me well and when you combine
Chris: it together we had 83,887 sats for this episode thank you everybody who supports us,
Chris: it is a very light advertising season and you can support each individual episode
Chris: and your boosts go directly to me Wes Brent Editor Drew and the podcast app,
Chris: But it really supports all of us and gets your message on the show when you
Chris: boost above 2,000 cents.
Chris: We'll read your message, and it's always a great conversation.
Chris: You can also support us with a membership at linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: We have some really great picks. Let's start with a nerdy one,
Chris: and then we'll get to a listener-contributed one.
Chris: But you found FQ this week, Wes.
Chris: I know about JQ, but that's for JSON.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. And it turns out there's more in the world than JSON.
Wes: So enter FQ. The F is for file. It aims to be JQ, Hexdump, DD,
Wes: and GDB, four files combined into one. It's written in Go.
Wes: It's already in Nix packages, and it's MIT-licensed. And it supports a ton of different formats.
Wes: Apple Bookmarks, ASN1, AAC, MP3, CSV,
Wes: FLAC files, LuaJit, a bunch of stuff for Postgres protocols,
Wes: RTMP, SafeTensors format, which is used, VP9, WASM, WebP, ZipFiles, YAML, JSON, JPEG.
Wes: And so basically it gives you, you know, like with JQ, you can do like dot key
Wes: or like get the third item from a list and then get a key out of that and kind
Wes: of easy syntax for manipulating JSON structures. So the idea is the same thing here.
Wes: So I downloaded our most recent episode, and it has MP3 support.
Chris: Oh, cool.
Wes: And so I can do FQ, and then you do dot frames, and then sort of the bracket
Wes: zero to get the first frame, and then dot tag, and that gives me a bunch of the tag information.
Wes: And I can do, from there, dot encoder, and it tells me it was encoded with flame.
Chris: I can see also you could do that same thing with a PNG or an MP4, whatever, really.
Wes: And of course, there's better dedicated, right? Like if you're just doing MP3s,
Wes: there's tools for that. But the handy here is one tool to explore,
Wes: work with, basically make it PDFs.
Wes: json files exactly make binaries more accessible queryable and sliceable it
Wes: does nested formats and bit oriented decoding it shows it to you in a nice sort
Wes: of hex viewer style along with a more structured data format on the right hand
Wes: side so something to add to your tool belt.
Chris: Very cool nice find wes and it's mit licensed our next pick this week.
Wes: Is one thing oh go ahead uh they have given very the author has given a few
Wes: different presentations about it too including at Fostum 2023,
Wes: so if you are curious, there's a bunch of ways to find out more nerdy teats.
Chris: Our next one is under early development. It's called File Fridge.
Chris: It's Apache 2.0 licensed, and it's created by one of our very own community members.
Chris: Martino writes, Hey guys, I remember a couple of episodes back you were talking
Chris: about storage, price supply issues, and what you were doing to try to use other
Chris: methods to store your media.
Chris: I was, and I still have Blue Vault to back up to Blu-ray.
Chris: I was thinking about this very thing. I worked on a tool that runs in my home
Chris: lab to move media that isn't accessed as often.
Chris: To an external drive, and then drops a sim link to the file.
Chris: I did use AI to code this with two kids I don't have as much time as I used to for projects.
Chris: So check it out when you have time. It is under active development,
Chris: and it's called File Fridge.
Chris: And the idea is, I love this, and I wonder if there's other things out there,
Chris: where you have, obviously, your more precious hot storage that's fast and available,
Chris: but maybe you're archiving things that you haven't accessed for a very long time.
Chris: Instead of buying more expensive fast storage, you kind of, you know,
Chris: you have cloud storage, you have disks around the house, a little more colder storage, right?
Chris: Higher capacity. And that's the idea of FileFridge here.
Chris: And I just think it's brilliant. I'm wondering if there's other projects out
Chris: there like this. You can set up rules and let FileFridge handle the cleanup on a schedule.
Chris: The assembling thing is a really great idea. Then it'll also give you reports
Chris: back on how much space you've saved. You can stay organized by using different
Chris: tags and automated rules to categorize data across storage locations for,
Chris: like, this goes to cloud, this goes to another disk.
Chris: And it has a FileFridge progressive web app, so you can use it on mobile or desktop. FileFridge.
Wes: I love the name.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Put your files in the fridge. Keep them good for later.
Chris: It's a nice project, open source, by a community member of ours who's working
Chris: our way on this. Looks like it's mostly Python.
Brent: I have a sneaky app I'd like to throw in here.
Chris: Ooh, a last-minute sneak? Go ahead.
Brent: It's an app pick I've been using all week to continue the project we talked
Brent: about last week on your diesel heaters.
Chris: Reverse engineering the signal.
Brent: Reverse engineering the protocol that the diesel heater of unknown make and model.
Chris: Which could be any device. It could be a thermostat. I think people are sick
Chris: of us talking about the diesel heaters. That's why I mentioned it.
Chris: It's not specific to a diesel heater. It's any kind of proprietary device that
Chris: has a communications protocol that you want to build a control.
Brent: True.
Chris: Thank you. All right. Just want to inject that.
Brent: So I use the tool that is actually really great because we flash some logic
Brent: analyzers to an ESP to try to break down that protocol.
Brent: And this one is called SIGROC. And I think it's quite well known in those circles.
Brent: But for those of us who are new to it, great tool. You could just flash it to an ESP.
Brent: And it has something called a sub tool here called PulseView.
Brent: And Chris, remember, I was able to show you the visual representation of the
Brent: signal that was coming in on the data line on your diesel heater.
Chris: Well, this is the part where I was like, this should be a pick.
Chris: So you got the ESP doing the analysis and the whatnots, but then it's got a
Chris: GUI for the Linux desktop to actually give you a visual of the signal.
Wes: That's so great.
Chris: So you could actually see like the boop, boop, boop, boop in the actual signal.
Brent: Oh, which we didn't need. Like, we could do it itself, but it was so nice.
Chris: It was really cool.
Brent: And it has, like, the ability to auto-decode specific protocols.
Brent: So then you could see the translated bits and bytes and messages that are being sent. Very cool.
Chris: Pulse view, sometimes abbreviated as PV. And then the GUI part is a cute-based application.
Wes: Logic analyzer, oscilloscope, and MSO GUI for Sigrock.
Chris: That's cool. The GUI is licensed under GPL 2, I believe.
Chris: So I think maybe the other side of it is – I'm not positive on that part.
Chris: Oh, my goodness. So cool to walk up. And I mean, it's a it's a full on technical.
Chris: Well, of course, I'm a noob. What the hell do I know? But you listeners,
Chris: you got to check out the link in the show notes because the visualization it
Chris: gives you is so neat to be able to.
Chris: And then once you've once you've unlocked this, it's no longer proprietary for you.
Chris: Right. It is under your no one else. Right. Well, you can publish it, I suppose.
Brent: But our goal here, because we made quite a lot of progress is now Chris can
Brent: just hit a button in his home assistant. Turn it on, turn it off,
Brent: turn the heat up, turn the heat down.
Brent: And we're working on getting other things like chamber temperatures and stuff like that.
Chris: Which could be good for safety reasons.
Wes: Totally.
Brent: Very true. And for automations. And it's not done quite yet. We're sorry.
Brent: But we will publish this to the JBE GitHub just to share it with the world.
Chris: Yeah, maybe you've got an AC unit that you've wanted to be able to control or
Chris: a garage door that has proprietary.
Chris: Like there's all these things. Now, there's certain levels it won't be able to defeat.
Chris: But there's a lot that it will and can. it really opens up a whole new world
Chris: of like, just open it up and put some open source in it and make it better.
Chris: You know, like they didn't ship it that way, but we can make it that way.
Chris: And this opens it up to a whole new world of hardware, you know,
Chris: pretty much anything that has control buttons and an LCD screen and with some
Chris: power, you, I mean, that's what this thing's working with.
Wes: And that's kind of been the missing link in a lot of ways, right?
Wes: Like I remember in years past you, you know, giving tips of like,
Wes: buy the dumbest thing you can, so you can do the automation with just a power
Wes: or whatever your mechanism.
Wes: So this may be unlocked stuff that you want a better device,
Wes: but it comes with more, doesn't have simple analog controls.
Chris: So much stuff now has like a digital control or soft buttons.
Wes: Maybe remote, but proprietary with their own little thing.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And no more. It is such an unlock when you start thinking about
Chris: it. It's really been exciting.
Chris: And so then to be able to see it work and see it graphically represented,
Chris: it's like, oh, this is something else. And it's all free software.
Chris: Pretty, pretty freaking cool. All right. We have some questions for you.
Chris: So please do boost in on your thoughts around like the system D or technical
Chris: implementations for age gating and verification, or if it's a hard line for
Chris: you and what the alternatives are.
Chris: And we're also looking for your ideas for kiosk mode for this thing and kind
Chris: of anything you got, anything you picked up in that segment that we could make this better.
Chris: Please do boost in. It'd be a great way to maybe make next episode a banger
Chris: since this one was such a sleeper and also help us advance this project.
Wes: And boost in with any good Vans.
Chris: Yeah, let us know.
Brent: Yes, please. That's actually the priority for all the other questions.
Chris: Of course, you can always make it a live Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: Join us Sundays at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: And if you want more show, remember that LUP plug gets together every single
Chris: Sunday while we're streaming. And there is that bootleg version with twice the content.
Chris: And Wes Pano, if they want more metadata information around the show,
Chris: we got that too, don't we?
Wes: Yes, we do. We got JSON chapters hosted in the cloud.
Wes: And for finer grain detail, VTT and SRT files for transcripts.
Chris: How enjoy that getting
Chris: more and more useful every single day also very useful the
Chris: links to everything we talked about those will be posted up at linuxunplugged.com slash
Chris: 659 you also find out how to contact us our mumble and our matrix info and a
Chris: bunch of great shows over there at jupiterbroadcasting.com thanks so much for
Chris: joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program and we'll see you
Chris: back here next tuesday as in sunday.