Chris: So I was woken up this morning at 5 a.m. by birds screaming over what was inside.
Chris: A barbecue, which, by the way, once I got in there, they weren't going to be
Chris: all that – they weren't going to be that happy.
Chris: But we just moved a bunch of gear into this space, and the birds came down and
Chris: were fighting over it this morning.
Chris: And I could go out there and lift one of them and put them under my arm and
Chris: carry them around like a small dog. They're just these huge creatures.
Chris: And, man, oh, man, I want one as a pet so bad. Train it. Have it go collect things for me.
Wes: Levi's going to get a little jealous, though. You know, watch out.
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, I tried to build a Linux desktop
Chris: using nothing but AI text editors.
Chris: I never touched a single config file. I just vibed it all the way.
Chris: But did it work or did the bots break it? I'll tell you about that.
Chris: And then Wes is sharing his tales from DEF CON and Nix Vegas.
Chris: Then we're going to round the show out with some great emails,
Chris: some boosts, some tremendous picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before I get any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
Chris: lug. Hello, Mumble room.
Chris: Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.
Chris: Hello, hello, hello. Hello. We have a small team in Mumble today.
Chris: I think it's maybe this is the live stream summer doldrums, I suppose.
Chris: We're grateful for everybody that can make it. We're also grateful for the chat room.
Chris: And we're grateful for the friends over at Define Networking.
Chris: Go check out Manage Nebula, define.net slash unplugged.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built on an open source platform that we love. It's called Nebula.
Chris: And the entire thing, top to bottom, is open source.
Chris: So you can self-host all of it, or you can have the blissful piece of Manage Nebula.
Chris: And it is optimized for speed, simplicity, and they're using industry-leading security.
Chris: Nebula has a decentralized design that keeps your network resilient.
Chris: If you want to manage it for your home lab or for an enterprise of tens of thousands
Chris: of systems, Nebula is already doing it.
Chris: In fact, Nebula was doing some heavy lifting when you're down there at DEF CON
Chris: slash Nix Vegas, Mr. Payne.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. I mean, what happens when you're trying to host,
Wes: you know, you need to go get Nix packages even when you're doing a proxy or a build cache.
Wes: And you're trying to fight, I mean, not only just conference Wi-Fi in general,
Wes: but a whole bunch of hackers on said Wi-Fi, well, you bond as much as you can,
Wes: and then you use Nebula to tunnel all of that,
Wes: dedicated VPS upstream to just protect things and to make sure you have the
Wes: best possible routing out of there so you don't get stuck in a big Vegas mess.
Chris: That's really cool. And then they could just stand it up like that too.
Chris: Nothing else offers Nebula's resilience, its speed, or scalability.
Chris: And that stuff, it comes in just the network traffic usage. It comes in the
Chris: uptime and the battery usage for mobile devices. It's really fantastic.
Chris: It's why we're switching our infrastructure over to it and also the team behind
Chris: it are friends of the show so go get started with up to 100 hosts absolutely
Chris: free no credit card required just go to defined.net slash unplugged support
Chris: the show and visit them at defined.net slash unplugged,
Chris: all right so just a few housekeeping items before we dig into this uh the boys are remote this week.
Chris: Brent's off in Eastern Canada and taking over a parent's cottage and has a little spot over there.
Chris: Are the kitties with you right now, Brent, or did you leave them somewhere else
Chris: while you're recording?
Brent: I left them somewhere after last week when they had to just sit around while
Brent: I was doing the show. They asked to not be a part of it this week for some reason.
Chris: I understand. And Wes, you're in your hotel in Vegas right now.
Chris: Can you, do you have any kind of view? Do you see anything?
Wes: Well, you know, I do, I do have, I can see the strip. I can see the monorail,
Wes: except I turned off the AC to do this here show.
Wes: So I also closed the blinds to, you know, fight, fight that horrible sky death globe.
Chris: Yeah. So I'm just chilling here. No, I'm not going to complain at all then about the weather.
Chris: It's a little warm today, but I'm not going to complain at all.
Chris: It's nothing like Vegas.
Chris: I also wanted to give a shout out to a project that we love here at the show.
Chris: It's the Podverse Podcast Catcher.
Chris: It's a GPL open source podcasting 2.0 player. You see we also integrated into our website.
Chris: And they're undergoing a big rework. And it's going really well.
Chris: And they're looking for some help with a web app, perhaps their mobile app as well.
Chris: And they let me know that now is the time to engage. Mitch wrote,
Chris: I believe the new infrastructure is powerful and will hopefully be the best
Chris: podcasting 2.0 compatible software available.
Chris: And the backend components are mostly finished and the front-end website is in progress.
Chris: So if you know anybody that could help us, please send them our way.
Chris: So go find Podverse on GitHub. If you would like to help out what I think is
Chris: an absolutely critical project, we need more open-source podcasting apps.
Chris: It's not much of a thing. It really should be.
Chris: Also, call out for a sponsor that wants to work with us to get us to Texas Linux Fest.
Chris: The Linux Unplugged show is looking for someone to help us attend and cover
Chris: Texas Linux Festival, which is October 3rd through the 1st.
Chris: If you would like to help us get there and do some co-coverage with us or something
Chris: like that, email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: And if you want to get there and do a talk or something like that,
Chris: sometimes that helps the old boss, grease the wheels, get a talk in.
Chris: Their call for papers has been extended.
Chris: So you do have a little bit of time still. And it's October,
Chris: Austin, Texas Linux Festival.
Chris: It's one of the high signal, smaller events in terms of like scale or Linux Fest Northwest.
Chris: It's still a good amount. And the signal to noise ratio is really good.
Chris: We've always really enjoyed Texas Linux Festival.
Wes: Oh yeah, we had a great time last time we went. I'm getting excited already.
Wes: And, yeah, you know, I think there's a certain smoky flavor to those Texas-style
Wes: Linux hackers that you just don't get anywhere else.
Chris: Okay, Wes, so you are there in Vegas right now, and I'm just curious about how
Chris: the whole thing went, really. I know you had a talk, I think it was on Saturday,
Chris: and I think you had a chance to meet some folks. Tell us, give us a little flavor.
Wes: Oh yeah okay so like first time at defcon first time in vegas actually somehow
Wes: i've yet to yet to be here um you.
Chris: Are kidding me.
Wes: No wow.
Chris: Did not know that.
Wes: Um but you know overall i gotta say very impressed excellent
Wes: conference and just like super super friendly
Wes: folks i mean i ended up having a neighbor at the hotel in the room with me you
Wes: know we were able to just like walk over together we became friends for the
Wes: the whole conference and of let me uh tell him way too much info about nix so
Wes: first of all just like you know i'm no i'm no pen tester i'm not a reverse engineer
Wes: so i wasn't sure i was coming for the nix subconference we'll get more into
Wes: that but just overall i would say like if you if you are interested if you have
Wes: a budget to come to this kind of thing um much like the vibe at like a at a
Wes: linux fest but at a whole different scale like,
Wes: it's just super friendly and welcoming and so many people are here either their
Wes: first time or their 17th time but uh it doesn't really matter people are looking
Wes: to be friendly and welcoming and make new friends.
Wes: I was really here, of course, for Nix Vegas, which is, I guess,
Wes: the first time they're doing this.
Wes: And it's a community sort of sub-conference inside the larger DEF CON.
Wes: It's a common thing, right? They've got whole different villages,
Wes: they've got sub-treks, and they've got these communities.
Wes: And man, I just, like, huge shout-out to the folks behind all this.
Wes: Many, many of them, but in particular, Morgan Jones, our buddy Tristan Ross,
Wes: who was on the show and was a release manager recently for the most recent NixOS release.
Wes: Also Tom Barrick from Phlox and a
Wes: shout out to Dan Baker who also really helped organize this
Wes: whole thing who sadly got the flu and was not
Wes: able to make it to the conference but still so much
Wes: hard work you know going there and of course Phlox and
Wes: Determinant Systems were sponsoring to help make that possible and because
Wes: these Nix folks are just crazy they also
Wes: got some hardware support from System76 and Ampere
Wes: and Protectly and Next Computing because the amount
Wes: of infrastructure they stood up they weren't just like gonna be at
Wes: defcon they stood up like whole domains they had
Wes: this this impressive nebula infrastructure they
Wes: had powerline networking going they ran a pixie server
Wes: they basically rebuilt all of nix packages and pulled down all of nix packages
Wes: to build a binary cache running on their network that you could get to over
Wes: the powerline or the wi-fi that they were broadcasting and all of that is powered
Wes: by nix and reproducible And they're pushing as much as they can upstream to
Wes: a GitHub repo called NixVegas,
Wes: or the GitHub org called NixVegas that we'll definitely have a link to.
Chris: So they're doing Nebula over Powerline networking?
Wes: Well, I don't know that Powerline was in the path out, but Powerline was a feature that was attacked.
Chris: Love it.
Wes: Yeah, so they could go elsewhere in the convention center, plug in,
Wes: and then Pixie boot, because they were also running a Pixie server, of course.
Chris: Oh, my gosh, that's so cool. So I'm guessing pretty good vibes.
Chris: When we go to these kind of events, especially these more sub-conferences,
Chris: it's a pretty tight crew. Like you say, everybody wants to chat and learn.
Wes: Yeah, absolutely. And also just shout out to them because I got a little sneak
Wes: peek behind the scenes at the first night as they were getting everything set up.
Wes: And I can tell you that, like, they did not have a projector or a screen until,
Wes: like, 1030 or 11 the night before things were supposed to get going.
Wes: So, they were, like, improvising a backup.
Wes: Shout out to Andrew and Anna, who came up with, like, a sheet-based backup and
Wes: went and got a backup projector to try to make that work.
Wes: People like you know chris and rj there's just this whole crew of folks behind
Wes: the scenes making whatever needed to happen happen up to and including at the last minute and then,
Wes: morgan sitting there running everything not only sort of like looking at bgp
Wes: looking glass to make sure that the peering they have on the vps that's doing
Wes: all the nebula streaming has is like optimized but also running an own cast
Wes: server and obs and like doing all the stuff we do all at the same Yeah.
Chris: Right. Because as we know, although at a smaller scale, it's there,
Chris: you have the, you have the networking you have to solve.
Chris: You have the production technology you have to solve them. The audio,
Chris: I mean, there's so much, and I can so, so picture one of us doing like a backup
Chris: run for another solution while we're trying to fix the primary solution. Like,
Chris: You can really appreciate the hustle.
Wes: Exactly. It definitely had our kind of last minute, just figure it out energy
Wes: going on. So I naturally like that.
Wes: Also very cool is Morgan and Tristan worked on an incredible badge.
Wes: You know, like cool, hacky, embedded, styled badges are a big thing at DEFCON.
Wes: And the Knicks team showed up for Knicks Vegas and DEFCON.
Wes: Not only were they able to get the official SVG of the Knicks and Knicks OS logo,
Wes: though um but like you know they got this sent over
Wes: to a lab in um a fab in china
Wes: you know they got it all ordered uh it's powered
Wes: and built by nix i mean there's like key morgan gave a
Wes: great talk uh but like keycads in there they had
Wes: to use something called sv svg to shenzhen all
Wes: kinds of like hacky scripts and adapters to make this thing as
Wes: reproducible as possible so you can actually just go up
Wes: to github and like go get this awesome badge it's
Wes: running um some expressive like risk 5
Wes: chip on there the badges also have
Wes: wi-fi they join a wi-fi mesh and sadly
Wes: there was like a little bug in some of the routing so the sd card doesn't work
Wes: but it was going to be a full nix cache but it can also just be a nix cache
Wes: proxy so you can you can be cloning down nix packages and you can point to your
Wes: badge as a substituter and have it go over the conference like their,
Wes: sub-conference Wi-Fi to get your Nix packages, which is just incredible.
Chris: Holy. You had me at reproducible badge, but that's next level.
Wes: Yeah. And there's a bunch of Easter eggs on there. I haven't even gotten,
Wes: I'm excited to go, I'll bring it up and so you guys can check it out.
Wes: We'll have to plug it in and see what we can do with it.
Chris: I imagine this thing draws attention.
Wes: Yes. So that was what worked out. I was super glad. Next time,
Wes: A, I need more JB swag I can be given out, but then also Nick stuff,
Wes: because once I had that badge, suddenly I found myself being an impromptu Nick's
Wes: ambassador, which it turns out is a role I'm very happy to play.
Wes: So whether it was just hanging out while talks were going on at the edge of
Wes: the subconf area and talking to people wandering by, asking about it,
Wes: or as I'm wandering around at night, at parties, at meetups,
Wes: at events, folks are all like, oh, cool badge, so that's one line.
Wes: But a lot of folks would just be like, oh, NixOS, or I've been curious about Nix.
Wes: Oh, I've really been meaning to learn Nix, especially met a ton of Arch users
Wes: in that camp, where it's like, they just needed a little bit more of a push,
Wes: a little bit more of like, is it okay?
Wes: Is it going to be horrible to try to onboard?
Wes: So the badge was a huge win for me, because I just got to have a lot of great
Wes: conversations, chatting with random people, trying to spread the good word.
Chris: So is this how you ended up getting pulled into a 2 a.m. rescue session?
Wes: Yes, absolutely. So I was, you know, trying to pace myself, trying not to stay
Wes: up too late, but winding down, working on heading back from the convention center
Wes: to the hotel I was staying at.
Wes: And I ran to the gentleman I met that first day, Paul, and he was with some
Wes: of his friends and they were working on a CTF.
Wes: And when I walked over, they'd said something, what really made me stick around
Wes: rather than just saying hi was the combination of WebAssembly and DOS.
Wes: I was like, what are you doing with WebAssembly and DOS? And it turns out that
Wes: this CTF they were doing,
Wes: what they gave you to start was just a Z5 file, which is a game data file used
Wes: by the Z machine, which is a virtual machine for running interactive fiction
Wes: games, like from the DOS era.
Chris: Amazing.
Wes: So you could just play the game, right? So that was one way to try to go through
Wes: the capture the flag event.
Wes: But, and of course, probably I'm sure the folks behind this knew,
Wes: there's a debugger for these game files called Z tools. And so,
Wes: unfortunately, these folks had only brought a Mac with them.
Wes: I think their other laptops were back at the hotel at this point because it
Wes: was, you know, 2 a.m. And they'd been partying.
Wes: So they had a Mac. This thing would not run on a Mac. It would run on Windows.
Wes: You know, you could probably get it running. You could compile it for Linux.
Wes: So they were going down the path of trying to get WebAssembly and DOS so that
Wes: they could upload this debugger and the game file to that, which,
Wes: of course, was just going terribly.
Wes: So I started, like, I don't know, just trying to help. I was like,
Wes: okay, what about FreeDOS? Maybe like we spin up, you know, ultimately UTM,
Wes: which is QEMU, trying to run free DOS.
Wes: And then, of course, then we had to figure out how to actually get the files in there.
Chris: And are you using UTM x86 emulation for this, which is slow as hell on a Mac?
Wes: Yeah, I think so. I don't know which era of Mac it was, but yes,
Wes: presumably that must be it.
Chris: Oh, my God. All right.
Wes: Yeah. So they were finally able to get free DOS to download.
Wes: You know, you still have to somehow they have a free DOS live CD,
Wes: which is almost a thing that doesn't quite compute for me. But it is a thing. It does work.
Wes: And then it turns out there is a QEMU flag that you can just pass through like a fat...
Wes: Format it'll treat it like a fat device to attach but it has
Wes: some weird limitations around like being read only maybe and like
Wes: only 512 bytes and how do you then you have to make sure you can pass extra
Wes: arbitrary flags through utm so while that was like we were debating that i was
Wes: like okay well let me pull out my laptop uh i know i could at least like make
Wes: a like a loopback raw device that we could format like fat 16 and mbr and like
Wes: try to stuff the files and then maybe mount that as a second drive.
Wes: But that's when I finally, because I was kind of getting, you know,
Wes: trying to figure out the whole path they had gone down to get where they were
Wes: in terms of like actually what the problem up the tree was they were trying to solve.
Wes: And then I realized that the whole problem was really just trying to get those,
Wes: ZTools debugger working.
Wes: And yeah, that was just packaged in Nix packages. So I could just literally clone that down.
Wes: It took, you know, two seconds. And then I was able to immediately dump all
Wes: of the game data and share that with the team. and then they could start like
Wes: grepping through it, trying to find clues.
Wes: Of course, if you just grep for the word flag, there's like a,
Wes: there's an F you in there from the people behind it. Like, of course we wouldn't
Wes: just put this in here like that. What are you doing?
Wes: So I don't know how far they eventually got, but I was able to like give them
Wes: those text file dumps and at least felt like I was participating and helping
Wes: out. And hey, the power of Nix.
Chris: I have one question though. Were you out and about at 2 a.m.
Chris: With your laptop or did you discover them, come across them,
Chris: realize their plight go back to your hotel room get your laptop come back and do this.
Wes: No you know so that day not only did I not manage to
Wes: actually have dinner but I did not manage to escape the conference at all so
Wes: I had my laptop from being there during the day and I just never had a chance
Wes: to go back to the hotel so I was bopping around having having a couple of drinks
Wes: dancing all with my laptop so oh my gosh that's amazing think that it is uh it is a trooper.
Chris: Yeah, really? Wow. Well, also, before the show started, you kind of teased us
Chris: that you may have heard about a new feature coming to Nix that you are particularly nerded out about.
Wes: Yeah, right. I'm a functional programming guy. I like Clojure and other functional
Wes: programming. And Nix is a functional programming language.
Wes: And one of the things with functional programming languages is you're doing function calls.
Wes: And often you might need to chain some data through a couple of functions,
Wes: right? You call one thing to get your initial data.
Wes: You call another function on that to maybe modify it a little bit.
Wes: And then you finally pass it off to like the final thing that needs that data.
Wes: And with Nix, right now, and in a lot of functional programming languages without
Wes: these tricks, you kind of have to read it backwards, right?
Wes: So it's like it's nested with the last thing, you read it first,
Wes: and the first thing is all the way inside the nesting.
Wes: That can be confusing. If you do a lot of functional programming language,
Wes: you kind of get used to it. But no one really likes it.
Wes: Often you then have to kind of leave more comments in the code to try to explain
Wes: exactly what's going on with the flow. So I had no idea that this was already
Wes: a shipping experimental feature in Nix, and there's an open RFC going for it.
Wes: They're introducing a pipe operator, which just lets you do exactly that,
Wes: except it flips the order.
Wes: So you run, you produce your first data, and then you can just pipe it just
Wes: like you're used to in a good old Unix shell to build a pipeline that looks
Wes: in the proper readable order right out of the gate.
Wes: So it's like a small change on the language, but because this pattern is so
Wes: prevalent basically everywhere, it could be one that would be a huge win for
Wes: readability and hopefully something that makes it easier for folks not only
Wes: coming from other functional programming languages,
Wes: but actually the person who's the steward of the RFC was not a functional programmer before Nix at all.
Wes: And so they were actually doing this just because it made it so much easier for them.
Wes: So I had no idea. Some of the other folks I was chatting with who were definitely
Wes: Nix nerds in the audience also had no idea.
Wes: So yeah, they were also asking for explicitly support.
Wes: Well, I'll link to the RFC in the show notes. And go chime in.
Wes: Go try it out. You can enable it now if you have a new enough Nix with an experimental feature.
Wes: Then they need users to go test it and break it and figure out if it's going
Wes: to work so they can get it across the finish line and shipping and actually ready to go.
Brent: By default well Wes I got to know how was the Vegas experience given it was
Brent: your first time there but also we've heard some things that Vegas has changed
Brent: in a little bit so how was Vegas.
Wes: You know, I have not yet had to get to see as much of it as I would like. It's definitely hot.
Wes: It definitely doesn't sleep. But I like it, you know? There's entertainment wherever you'd like.
Chris: Always something going on. I know that's your style.
Wes: Yes, absolutely, right? There's no problem. I was able to go pick up some good
Wes: show supplies at like 3 in the morning last night when I was getting back to the hotel.
Wes: It is giant, though. So thankfully, the hotel I'm at is attached to their monorail
Wes: system on the Strip. So that helps out a lot because otherwise you really don't
Wes: want to walk, you know, 30 minutes and 106 degrees.
Wes: But I'm excited after the show today. I'm hoping I can, well,
Wes: maybe take a nap, but then go get off the strip, go explore some more of,
Wes: you know, the rest of Vegas. So hopefully I'll have something fun.
Chris: You know, maybe that vitamin D will keep you from getting sick.
Chris: Did you get to bump into any listeners or anybody that maybe you've known from other conferences?
Wes: Yes, I definitely saw our buddy Rob, who we had on the show,
Wes: who helps organize scale. He was here. That was great to see him.
Wes: And I ran into a few folks who've seen other conferences kind of all around.
Wes: But in particular, shout out to Britton, who gave a great talk about Klan,
Wes: which is a cool system we might have to talk more about.
Wes: He's also working on a pretty great looking, like based on his talk and based
Wes: on looking at his Hyperland setup, a very nice Hyperland setup,
Wes: sort of Omarchi style, but on top of Nix, powered by Klan. And I don't know
Wes: that any of that's ready or anything, but something I'm looking forward to.
Wes: And then also a big shout out to listener Lucas, who heard about Nick's Vegas
Wes: on the show and then flew out from Missouri just to come and check it out.
Wes: So super great. Had a lovely time talking with Lucas.
Wes: And he's actually in between jobs right now. So if you're looking for a sharp
Wes: person who can run your infra and knows Nick's, we'll have a link to lucasr.com,
Wes: which is his LinkedIn profile.
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Wes: Well after the show last week kind of just on a whim um i decided to show you,
Wes: a little tool i'd been trying out for vibe
Wes: coding i i thought you know mostly it was just look at how nice the interface
Wes: is it's really pretty i think chris will like it and hey it's packaged in nix
Wes: so we could just give it a try but like we were sitting around you know finishing
Wes: out the show notes i didn't think too much of it but it turns out that little
Wes: event seems to have totally reshaped your week.
Chris: Yeah, I kept playing with it. You know, the first thing when you showed it to
Chris: me is like, oh, this would have been cool while we had the TUI challenge. This is a fun toy.
Chris: And then I just decided to see how far I could push it. And I kind of created
Chris: myself a little mini challenge over the last few days.
Chris: Could I could I vibe code a riced up Hyperland desktop from essentially a base headless Nick system?
Chris: But before I get into all that, I do want to set the tone for a moment.
Chris: Because I realized, you know, we kind of touch on these types of topics once
Chris: or twice a year, but we first started talking about this with no hype in like around 2022. And,
Chris: I couldn't believe it when I went back and looked at our back catalog when we
Chris: started talking about LLMs and this type of stuff.
Chris: And I think we've consistently been really good about separating the practical from the hype.
Chris: And I think it's one of these things where we have very high expectations and
Chris: we kind of miss the trees in the forest, as they say, or whatever.
Chris: And I think because part of it is some of the things we ask these LLMs to do,
Chris: humans are pretty good at already.
Chris: And so we kind of are judging it with a high bar. And so one of the things that's
Chris: in the discussion right now around these LLM tools is can they code? Can you vibe code?
Chris: Can you build application using these tools? And then, of course,
Chris: people build these applications and they're pretty much universally mocked.
Chris: But that's a pretty high bar, you know, because even humans aren't very good
Chris: at developing software.
Chris: And there aren't a ton of great examples online. So if you index the Internet,
Chris: the average is pretty low.
Chris: But I had this theory, and I thought, well, what if I lowered the bar a little bit?
Chris: And maybe instead of trying to build a complex application, what if I just try
Chris: to build some configuration files?
Chris: You know, what if I try to just generate some YAML, or a Docker Compose file, or Nix, and so on.
Chris: And so that's where I started with Crush. It's like, well, I don't need to create
Chris: an app. I just, I want like a config template to start with.
Chris: And I started building on that idea. And what I realized, and I'm curious what
Chris: your thoughts are, Wes, is I have a theory.
Chris: And that theory goes that this stuff is a little bit easier.
Chris: It's a little bit simpler of a language.
Chris: And there's probably more examples of it online that are better on average than,
Chris: say, maybe code that these models have been trained on. So it's like it's indexing text.
Chris: And this stuff is just a little more straightforward. So maybe these LLMs are
Chris: just perhaps a little bit better at generating config files than application code?
Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the limited scope definitely helps, right?
Wes: You're not trying to create a sketchy dating app so people will upload all their
Wes: ID pictures that you leak out on the internet or whatever. You kind of have some nice bounds.
Wes: There is a schema. When you go to try to rebuild or build whatever, it can shout at you.
Wes: It can tell you what's wrong. not always with the best error messages,
Wes: but often with a good error message or at least good enough,
Wes: you can pipe that back in and get some suggestions on what to do next.
Wes: Because, yeah, you're not trying to architect a giant distributed system with,
Wes: you know, a Rails application and JavaScript and how do you figure out the right
Wes: security and protocols and database and caching.
Wes: Like, it's a better scoped problem.
Chris: Yeah. And so, gentlemen, this was my hypothesize, is that perhaps this would
Chris: be something these things would be better at. And I sort of got to this after
Chris: playing with this crush tool.
Chris: But I wanted to know how good.
Chris: And I thought, well, how can I figure out how far somebody could take this?
Chris: Somebody who's looking at this as a system administrator or somebody building
Chris: a Linux box, not somebody trying to develop an application, not somebody that's
Chris: trying to create, you know, some sort of wild out there AI app.
Chris: I'm just trying to manage a dozen config files on my box.
Chris: And so I took my existing Nix OS system that I have at home.
Chris: And I essentially commented out everything but just the really base boot to
Chris: a terminal, hardware setup, you know, left the file systems in place,
Chris: but essentially just stripped it all the way down.
Chris: Which, by the way, is so great to build a load into a previous version when
Chris: you screwed something up, fix it, and then try it again and try it again.
Chris: Like, I cannot tell you how great that is.
Wes: Yeah, it's like, oh, I deleted too much in that build.
Chris: Nope, nope, nope. So I stripped it down, got it essentially headless,
Chris: and then proceeded to vibe code, at least attempt,
Chris: a complete Hyperland desktop with riced out way bar and settings,
Chris: custom key binds, theming, and more.
Chris: And I quickly discovered I needed to SSH into this thing because I have this
Chris: wide, ultra wide screen and Crush was horrible on there because it's on the terminal.
Chris: But using it i was able to build a real basic config
Chris: through through an ssh session running crush on that
Chris: local box i was able to build out a basic
Chris: config that i never wrote myself and what it really did is it i told it what
Chris: i wanted and it went through and it walked my config and said well okay i'll
Chris: re-enable this i'll re i'll re-enable this and i'll add this package and i'll
Chris: re-enable this and so it was really intelligent about well if i already had
Chris: it in there it would just uncomment it for me oh you already need you you already
Chris: have this and it's fun, right?
Chris: Because you pointed a directory, it scans that directory, it indexes everything
Chris: and it has kind of a cool look to it.
Chris: I mean, I thought it looked really neat. Brent, maybe you thought it looked,
Chris: I don't know, like it was trying too hard, like an 80s retro computer interface.
Chris: I know you had a chance to play with it.
Brent: I actually appreciated how it was kind of active.
Brent: You know, you were doing something, if you were waiting for it,
Brent: it had this sort of, I don't know, animation, but it wasn't over the top or it was super annoying.
Brent: It was just like, things are happening so surprisingly i liked it.
Chris: And it lets you switch between multiple models it supports open router as well
Chris: which is what i was using um so that's kind of nice did you accomplish anything when you tried crush.
Brent: I attempted something a different
Brent: direction than you i attempted to um pull the irc feature out of our jb website
Brent: because it's a thing that i've wanted to do for a while but I haven't sat down
Brent: and actually did it it didn't go so well for me but this is the first time I
Brent: try to you know vibe vibe so maybe that's on me sometimes.
Chris: The vibe isn't.
Wes: I do want to call out that the folks behind this, the Charm slash Charm Bracelet
Wes: team project, I don't know the full details.
Wes: But I mean, not only did they make it super easy to try with all kinds of Nick's
Wes: instructions and other distributions on Crush here, but it's all powered by
Wes: Bubble T, which is a powerful TUI framework written in Go that they make.
Wes: And then it powers other stuff like Gum, which is a tool to,
Wes: you can call out to Gum from shell scripts to like make fancy looking interfaces.
Wes: They've also got VHS, which is a CLI home video recorder for your terminal.
Wes: And they've got Glow, which is a tool I've used all the time because it renders
Wes: markdown on the command line that looks really nice.
Wes: So like, it's very cool to see them continue to advance and Crush is a very
Wes: impressive tool powered by some really good primitives.
Chris: And it is slick looking. It really is. And what's neat is, of course,
Chris: this is designed to look at a project directory for software,
Chris: but it treats the configuration directory like a project. And And then it understands my system.
Chris: It understands my sub configuration files, my includes it.
Chris: It knows I'm on a flake based system. Like it gets my box. And then so everything
Chris: it's doing is with that context and that understanding.
Chris: That's powerful. That's really, really powerful. And I'll come back to that later.
Wes: I do wonder, just because you mentioned, which you said you were using Open
Wes: Router. Were you using a variety of models or did you just stick with one model for this?
Chris: I did end up changing it. So I'll mention the model I use later,
Chris: the second model. But I started with Claude, which seemed pretty good.
Chris: And it's nice because with Open Router, as you probably could explain better
Chris: than me, Wes, is I've just put the credits in one place and then it kind of
Chris: divvies it out depending on which model I select on the tooling I'm using.
Chris: And you've been telling me to do this for months so I finally went and funded
Chris: an Open Router account and then yeah I selected Claude through that and I think
Chris: it's one of their later ones that's available.
Chris: I have a hard time differentiating all the model names to be honest with you
Chris: it's kind of ridiculous the branding.
Wes: Yeah it's getting confusing but you're totally right Open Router is just a nice
Wes: little service that sits in the middle so you pay them instead of having to
Wes: pay like six different folks and then they basically proxy to all the various
Wes: different LLM providers.
Wes: If you spend enough on credits, you get some free stuff. You can choose Claude
Wes: or GPT or Gemini or DeepSeq or open source ones.
Wes: And then it implements like an open AI style API. So it's super compatible with a lot of stuff.
Chris: So I was surprised how simple it was to get a basic desktop without ever writing
Chris: or touching a config file.
Chris: But it was really basic. It's like, you know, all the little,
Chris: because Hyperland is what you make of it. It's very, very simple by default.
Chris: And so, you know, you got to rice it up, as they say in that community.
Chris: And there's lots of little iterative changes that you want to make,
Chris: and you want to make them quickly. Because one of Hyperland's cool features
Chris: is that it auto-reloads when you change the config.
Chris: And that's, you know, when you're making little tweaks to your bar or this or
Chris: that, super great feature.
Chris: And you can move quickly if you have the right tooling.
Chris: And so this is where I decided to step it up. For the first time ever,
Chris: I tried out the Cursor AI Code Editor, which is a fork of VS Code.
Chris: I know there's others out there like Void, although I think development is paused for the moment.
Chris: Similar to Crush, you know, in VS Code, you point it at a directory.
Chris: So I could point it at my Hyperland, my Waybar, my style sheets,
Chris: everything that makes up a Hyperland desktop configuration.
Chris: And then I could ask questions against that configuration. So I could say,
Chris: for example, what key got, did I bind to Firefox?
Chris: And it would, it would tell me, but I, I could also ask it, what can I do?
Chris: What, what, what, what software is missing in order to accomplish this?
Chris: And as I started to use it, I started to
Chris: realize that you can kind of build a plan with this thing and then they'll go
Chris: and it'll execute through all of them and you can even let them run on their
Chris: own on the command line with your user privileges including running the build
Chris: tests checking the output when the when the build fails resolving those problems
Chris: and then building again until it works.
Wes: It's kind of wild right like i mean don't maybe don't give it access to your
Wes: production database just yet but like yeah i mean that's where i think the kind
Wes: of the agent side of stuff right like you not only does the lm generate the
Wes: plan but then like it will actually step through and execute all that and then
Wes: collect more data to keep this the feedback cycle going.
Chris: And then gives me a summary of what it did formatted a markdown which is great.
Wes: Right yes of course right turns out these lms they are good at summarizing so.
Chris: And and because all of this is just text files it's really pretty simple but
Chris: also the way cursor works is as it's going it's showing me a diff of what it's
Chris: adding and removing and I can approve each step or I can deny a step or I can stop it.
Wes: Right. That kind of critical human in the loop step, you're still in control,
Wes: especially because, you know, despite how much Brent and I try to lecture you,
Wes: you know, you don't always put all of your stuff in Git.
Wes: So it's kind of nice that you get that extra diffing that you,
Wes: you know, so you don't have to go full tool.
Chris: You guys were ringing in the back of my head, though. So what I did is I took
Chris: all my config from like my Etsy Nix OS and I staged it in a config folder in
Chris: my home directory so i had this working against that and then when i was done
Chris: and i was satisfied i would just like a monkey on the back end cp all the files over and then build,
Chris: so you know it was so i wasn't letting it just run wild on the bear system i
Chris: did move them over and then i would kind of like check it and then deploy it
Chris: and cursor because the time i was using it which was uh.
Chris: August 7th 9th 8th whatever they had
Chris: free gpt5 integration and it's funny because i've seen
Chris: a lot of people crapping on gpt5 this weekend but i definitely noticed a step
Chris: up in the thoroughness because they can research so if you have a model that
Chris: can can do a lot of things and that's one of the things gpt5 can do is it can
Chris: do research and the other type of stuff whatever so i could tell it,
Chris: I want a super riced out Hyperland theme that has my current IP address up in
Chris: the Waybar, my CPU, my GPU.
Chris: I want my network stats up there. I want the current weather.
Chris: I want a clock with a calendar.
Chris: Also, I want you to make sure that all of this works with a dark background.
Chris: And by the way, I don't have an NVIDIA GPU. I have an AMD GPU.
Chris: And keep in mind, I'm also on NixOS. So we have to work within these limitations.
Chris: It then kicks off a research job. It cites 16 different sources.
Chris: It reviews them against my current configuration. It then proceeds to modify
Chris: those configs to enable them.
Chris: And then if I need to install a package, it updates my configuration.nix.
Chris: It runs a build test for me, make sure that works, and then also gives me an
Chris: output of any additional software I need to install.
Chris: And I can either have it do it or I can do that. I just had it do it.
Chris: I mean, you can really get moving here because I don't know anything about Hyperland.
Chris: I don't know the names of these tools, these modules that you can put up,
Chris: and there's scripts that you can write. I don't know any of this stuff.
Chris: I don't know what launcher people like because there's multiple launchers.
Wes: Right. That's really sticking out to me. I mean, just like, right,
Wes: you were able to say, like, I want a RICED configuration.
Wes: I want something that's going to look nice like the folks over on Unix Porn Share, right?
Wes: Like, without having to have a super concrete list.
Chris: I linked Unix Porn. I linked some GitHub's in there for it to go check.
Wes: But that's, you know, it's one thing to know exactly what you want and then
Wes: try to get these tools to do it.
Wes: And it's kind of the next level up when you can just be like, I have a high level goal.
Wes: I'll know it when I see it. But otherwise, like I need you to suss out what
Wes: the even the possible steps are to try and get there.
Chris: Well, here's, and tell me if you think this is true. Here's why I think I was
Chris: having kind of a success after success for a while. It was going really well
Chris: because everything Nix configuration is text-based.
Chris: Everything for configuring Hyperland is text-based. And most of the stuff that
Chris: makes like the Waybar modules work is just bash scripting.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So this is like, this is its power zone.
Wes: It totally is. Yeah, you're able to turn so much of this stuff into,
Wes: you know, it's captured, it's declarative, it's right there.
Wes: And lots of people are pushing and sharing it on the internet.
Wes: So you have a good training base and you have the native medium for these tools.
Wes: So they don't have to go that far to be able to affect these changes.
Chris: I mean, I'm not kidding. I'm saying like this first initial success I was having,
Chris: happened in like the span of maybe two, two and a half hours.
Chris: I probably started around 8.30 a.m.
Chris: And by 10 a.m., I'm like, I can't believe how well this is going.
Chris: And I started, I was actually, I got back to work. I had things humming by 1.30
Chris: p.m. I had things humming to the point of where I was getting like that,
Chris: oh, no, I think I'm falling in love with this.
Chris: I think I'm going to have to change all my systems feeling. You know that how I get, right?
Chris: Like, we got to change the studio out. We got to change my workstations out. Like, I got to switch.
Chris: I mean, I was really quickly beginning to even develop muscle memory for my hotkeys that I set up.
Wes: So it took an LLM to get you finally, after years and years of the audience,
Wes: trying to get you to a toiling window manager.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Huh.
Chris: That is that is true that was 1 30 by about 2 p.m. it was literally all gone,
Chris: This is when it really hit me, like, I didn't know how I had built this, right?
Chris: And not only that, but my documentation at best was a couple of the prompts that I had saved.
Wes: Right, you had some intent, you had whatever the diffs were,
Wes: and how much you could remember of your vibe high.
Wes: Yeah, and this is right where it's like, suddenly, do you have the tools to keep going?
Wes: Can you get yourself to a state where you're like, well, I've made myself a
Wes: mess here, and it's almost there, but I don't know the right levers to push to keep going.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: You had this all committed in your Git repo though, right?
Chris: Okay, I admit, I should have. That would have helped the situation.
Chris: I at least would have, you know, had a sense of like, okay, I could go check
Chris: what happened over there and roll back.
Chris: But no, and I started thinking like, am I going to, am I going to like try to
Chris: figure out the differences?
Chris: Am I going to swap the files? Is there some, but then I started thinking,
Chris: well, maybe there's something broken.
Chris: Do I try to rebuild this prompt by prompt? And then like, will I get a different
Chris: result? which, by the way, I did test.
Chris: And yes, I do get different results sometimes, like when I'm ricing out the
Chris: way bar. It depends on what I emphasize.
Chris: If I emphasize large text or certain style things, it's interesting what kind
Chris: of differences I can get.
Chris: So I wasn't sure what direction I was going to take. So I fired up cursor.
Chris: I explained what had happened, that I'd done a NixOS rebuild,
Chris: and I came back and I was essentially at a stock Hyperland desktop with like
Chris: the Omnicube background.
Chris: And I'm sitting there looking at my screen, I've been realizing I have been
Chris: working at this since about 8 a.m. It's now two something.
Chris: I need to just get up and get some air.
Chris: Yeah. So one of the things that we did, the LM and I, is we converted this into a multi-host setup.
Chris: And so each individual host of mine has a subfolder with its own config.
Chris: I forgot. I forgot we did that.
Wes: Oh my gosh.
Chris: Yeah so i.
Brent: Love this journey.
Chris: I know so but what's great is the
Chris: machine didn't and it explained to me what's going on and it's like would you
Chris: like me to just take care of the deploying and staging and then building and
Chris: i could just do that if you would like i'm not kidding you and i'm like yeah
Chris: why don't you go ahead and and just handle this for me uh because i'm clearly going to screw.
Chris: Up and from that point forward it did all
Chris: of it it i let it i let it do
Chris: the config changes i let it copy over.
Chris: My configs once i you know did a quick review and then
Chris: i let it do the the rebuild and i.
Chris: Let it determine when it should just do a nix os rebuild switch or when it should
Chris: do a nix os rebuild boot depending on the significance of the change and how
Chris: fast it wanted to test its considerations yeah it's crazy so this was i i recorded
Chris: one more clip sort of later on in the evening just sort of capturing my reflections on the moment.
Chris: It was sort of blowing my mind. I even had a hard time sleeping that night because
Chris: I was just running through how I just built a full desktop system.
Chris: And yeah, it took me a while, but I was playing around, right?
Chris: I mean, it actually worked. There was a moment where everything went sideways,
Chris: but that was kind of because I was trying new stuff too.
Chris: I was shocked that I got this far. Now, there is stuff that's not great.
Chris: I went through this morning. I was looking at the config files.
Chris: There's some areas where I was trying different things, and it's kind of sloppy
Chris: about how it commented a few things out. So it's messy.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. I think you could clean it up pretty quickly.
Chris: But I looked at it and I was like, oh, that's not how I would do it.
Wes: I am kind of curious in that regard. Like, did you hit, because what I'm picking
Wes: up, and I found this when I started kind of trying vibe shelling and stuff,
Wes: like, I mean, the vibes are good, the vibes are bad, but it is really like the vibe.
Wes: It's not just that you're riding the vibes. Like, it gives you vibes, right? you were
Wes: feeling super empowered and a little down at one point i'm
Wes: curious though like did you run because we're not just trying to sell
Wes: cursor subscriptions of course no i don't uh you know unless they want to reach
Wes: out um uh but like did you run into any points where like you just were hitting
Wes: your head against the wall or it was hitting its head against the wall because
Wes: sometimes you can get down loops where like the ai is confusing it and if you
Wes: don't have enough context or your own like escape hatches to tell it like no
Wes: you've gone down the wrong path here that isn't going to work.
Chris: Ah yeah i'm glad you asked this yeah one time only one time but one time.
Chris: It just got in this crazy loop of like, okay, I have to figure this out,
Chris: but then I'll figure this out, but then I'll figure this out,
Chris: but then I have to figure this out, and then I'll figure this out.
Chris: And it was like these three things, and it went, and it went,
Chris: and it went, and it went, and it went, and I just eventually had to abort,
Chris: and I just kind of restarted.
Wes: Yeah, that makes sense.
Chris: Again, I'm not trying to sell any particular product, and I would love to know
Chris: of free software alternatives.
Chris: But one of the things that's handy about Cursor is you can give it particular
Chris: config files as context, GitHub repo links as context.
Chris: So you can get back up and running pretty quickly after something like that happens.
Wes: I'm also curious because i was
Wes: running into this where it's like especially with those like when that's happening uh
Wes: suddenly i was like becoming more keenly aware that
Wes: like right i'm every time it's doing this i'm paying
Wes: for that unless i mean either in power and you know the gpus you've bought if
Wes: you're doing it self-hosted style or in credits or you know whatever so i'm
Wes: curious did you get any kind of rough spend because it's you know if it if it's
Wes: three or five or ten dollars that's different than if it takes you know 30 to get.
Chris: Yourself a desktop no no it was like eight bucks uh when
Chris: i used open router is all i spent when using crush plus i
Chris: did a couple on yours so i think i spent like 10 cents on your account right
Chris: but uh when i switched over to cursor and this was
Chris: kind of a cheat and i'm really glad you brought this up cursor was
Chris: giving away gpt5 access for the weekend they might still be doing it oh yeah
Chris: so i essentially just went for it i just went for it i mean hours i was like
Chris: i'm not going to stop because it's basically unlimited and so yeah that was
Chris: i love that you're essentially you're.
Wes: You're sucking up that vc money to build uh free and open source desktops keep doing it.
Chris: It does make me think how great would it be if you could accomplish this with
Chris: a local llm like that imagine if you could have a local llm that could help
Chris: you build these setups right because we're we're dealing with you know nix and
Chris: yaml and hyperland configurations and css files and bash script that's the entirety
Chris: of it it's really approachable i.
Wes: Mean and they're getting better and better. I think that's the future.
Chris: And I wanted to try this because Oma Archie impressed me a lot,
Chris: but I'd like to have my own take on it.
Chris: Here's what I ended up with that I like. You know, the cons were I think some
Chris: of the configs could be cleaned up a little bit.
Chris: But what I liked is, one, I could generate reports against my configs.
Chris: So I had to generate me markdown tables of all my custom keybinds so I can do
Chris: a little printout of that.
Chris: And you can just ask it things about that, which I found to be really fascinating.
Chris: And at the end result, I got a rolling flake-enabled NixOS system using the
Chris: Zen kernel with all its optimizations, ButterFS-based file systems with auto-scrub enabled.
Chris: Nick Store is auto-optimized, and it also does auto-garbage collection.
Chris: ZRAM is set up. I have auto-BPF tune enabled, auto-tuning the system on demand.
Chris: And it's a collection of what I think are some of the best-in-class Linux desktop
Chris: applications, riding on a totally rad Hyperland setup that I am very, very into right now.
Chris: I mean, really love this setup so much. I think this is my new setup.
Chris: And in hindsight, I wouldn't start with a naked MVP system, especially if you're
Chris: doing it on a declarative system and you have a high-res screen.
Chris: Just, you don't need to. I was doing it as an experiment and looking back at
Chris: it, I should have just started with the desktop I had on there and then just done this.
Wes: Ah, you like overly stripped it back thinking like that would make a cleaner,
Wes: easier experience probably.
Wes: But it turned out to be a little counterproductive. I suppose especially,
Wes: maybe that is true in other systems, but with Nix, I guess it's like it matters less.
Chris: So if anybody out there is running Hyperland or has done this type of stuff,
Chris: I'd love some advice from you. What to do, what not to do, what I should look
Chris: into, because I'm a total noob.
Chris: But Rofi is such a cool launcher because it's also a file browser,
Chris: and it can also give you a dictionary of all your keybinds, but it's also a
Chris: very fast application launcher.
Chris: And because Hyperland doesn't really choose anything for you,
Chris: I'm kind of picking and choosing. So I have Kate and Dolphin from Plasma,
Chris: and then some of the apps I'm using are GTK apps from Gnome,
Chris: but it's all running so smoothly on Hyperland.
Chris: It is what I've always wanted in terms of performance from the Linux desktop.
Chris: That smoothness and responsiveness with a hint of modern animation that isn't gaudy,
Chris: but a level of customization where I can do things that take extensions in Gnome
Chris: that are really straightforward like Waybar modules in Hyperland that aren't
Chris: going to break every time I update.
Chris: And so it's this it's this combination of
Chris: really practical key binds and navigation with really good tiling that's working
Chris: for me way better than I ever expected with this curated setup kind of going
Chris: out there and asking the internet like what are some of the most popular things
Chris: what are in vogue right now in hyperland and bring it into my setup for me and.
Chris: I think my biggest takeaway from this is, say what you will about these LLM tools.
Chris: I never wrote a single line of any config file of any of this.
Chris: I never touched a CSS file. I never touched my Waybar config.
Chris: I never touched my Nix config.
Chris: I didn't make the changes to make each machine have their own subconfiguration.
Chris: I didn't make the changes to have a declarative Hyperlin setup.
Chris: At one point during it, I realized I could do that, and it did all the refactoring
Chris: for me to make Hyperlin declarative on my Nix system.
Wes: That's awesome.
Chris: Yeah. And I didn't, I just told the machine to do it.
Chris: I mean, there was literally a point where I was just like sitting there sipping,
Chris: sipping on a drink and just watching the machine go and doing little checks
Chris: on it and approving things and okay, go for it or asking other questions.
Chris: That part was really powerful. As far as like these companies go and the resources
Chris: they use, those are all things we're going to have to sort out.
Chris: But I think we have to not discount their capabilities when you lower the bar
Chris: of the task a little bit to something that's a little bit easier for it to handle.
Chris: So if you wanted to create the next mobile app, like Wes is saying, that's a big ask.
Chris: But if you wanted to generate a riced out Hyperland desktop,
Chris: that's actually within its capabilities today.
Chris: And because it's all just written in text, I can just go through it and learn what it did.
Chris: I read my next config, I read the Hyperland config, the Waybar config,
Chris: and I'm done. And I understand what it did.
Wes: I think this is kind of the similar scale, like when we were at the Red Hat
Wes: Summit this year, right? We saw Lightspeed really being talked about as like
Wes: a command line tool you can use.
Wes: I think it's that same kind of idea, right? Like maybe it's not architecting
Wes: your entire OpenShift cluster, but it can definitely help you troubleshoot,
Wes: work with text files, modify them.
Wes: And then, you know, you layer on more declarative stuff and it just gets better.
Wes: But I think you knew I was going to ask this, but you didn't know the full reason.
Wes: While I was playing Nix Ambassador this week, I was actually,
Wes: because you had already like, you'd been teasing Brett and I in our private
Wes: chat, just sort of about what you were working on, how excited you were.
Wes: So I was actually using that as a selling point to Nix. I was like, yeah, well, I'm here.
Wes: My buddy back home, he's got himself a vibe-coded, super shiny desktop.
Wes: And I know at the end of the week, if he just pushes that up to GitHub,
Wes: I'm going to be able to just totally clone and copy it. And that's one of the
Wes: reasons I was telling people they should try Nix.
Chris: Oh, the pressure's on.
Wes: Are you willing to share?
Chris: Totally. Yeah, let's do that after the show because I would also like a set of eyes on these.
Chris: I mean, who knows? Maybe there's something in here that's awful.
Chris: I would like people to review it and boost in some suggestions for improvements
Chris: or fixes or additions or things to make Hyperland even more enjoyable.
Chris: So, yeah, I'd love to get it up there. I might put it on my GitHub,
Chris: I guess, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Wes: Perfect.
Chris: All right. You talked me into it, Wes Payne.
Chris: Unraid.net slash Unplugged. Go unleash your hardware, check out Unraid,
Chris: support the show, and celebrate Unraid OS turning 20 years old.
Chris: Can you believe it? What a testament to them. And it's also the 20 days of the Unraid summer sale.
Chris: It's really just begun, so it runs now through August 26th, and you'll get 20%
Chris: off the starter, Unleash licenses, and upgrades.
Chris: Also, every item in the brand new merch store, also 20% off.
Chris: And they're also doing daily giveaways, free licenses, merch bundles,
Chris: and even a link station NAS is up for grabs.
Chris: So if you have a unique Unraid setup, you can enter their Show Us Your System
Chris: competition. That's Show Us Your System competition.
Chris: And you get a chance to win prizes or at least bragging rights.
Chris: And I want to know about it, too.
Chris: So on August 30th, they're going to have a big bash. Their founder is going
Chris: to get together. Some friends are going to get together for Unraid's 20th birthday bash livestream.
Chris: And they're going to reveal the Show Us Your System winners at that time.
Chris: I think it's going to be pretty neat. They're also going to premiere their first
Chris: ever film and much more. Can you believe it?
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged where you get started. So it is happening right now.
Chris: The 20 days of Unraid summer sale where you can get 20% off the starter,
Chris: the Unleashed licenses, upgrades, merch.
Chris: And of course, they have the show us your unique competition going on right
Chris: now where you can send them deets about your setup and maybe get some swag.
Chris: I don't know. Maybe you get some bragging rights. I don't know.
Chris: You know, maybe there's even a little bit of LinkStation hardware in there up
Chris: for grabs. You just never know. You get started at unraid.net slash unplugged.
Brent: Well, again, this week we have a few new member shoutouts.
Brent: Dan is now a new core contributor and Jacob as well, which means we ran out
Brent: of slots for that bootleg promo.
Chris: Amazing. Thank you, everybody. We did, and then I got a couple of requests to
Chris: add some more slots, And I thought on it and I thought, why not?
Chris: If we get a few more people checking out the bootleg, I think they'd stay members forever.
Chris: So the 15% off deal, it's a great deal.
Chris: People love the deal. Best deal. It's back. And I added a few more slots and
Chris: then people jumped on it already.
Chris: So now as of this episode, there are seven redemption slots left.
Chris: If you use the promo code bootleg, either as a core contributor or for the Jupiter.party membership.
Chris: The Jupiter.party gives you all the shows and extra bonus content.
Chris: And including what you get with the core contributor, which would be the bootleg
Chris: version, the ad-free version, of course, and the direct support of the show.
Chris: So all of that is available with a big old 15% discount, which is a number that
Chris: hurts a little bit, but I love you guys.
Chris: You can get signed up, use the promo code bootleg, and thank you to Dan and
Chris: Jacob for signing up. Appreciate you.
Chris: Well, Brent, we had a listener, Aaron, write in, and he says,
Chris: Brent and I were trying to get a flake going where one config file has multiple
Chris: host names in it so we could have one file for all the store computers.
Chris: If any of you have any examples of this, we'd appreciate it.
Chris: The goal is to have a different hardware config automatically detected to automatically
Chris: format the disk, also have different host names for each computer they want set.
Chris: We're trying to manage these machines from a distance using SSH over tail scale
Chris: for updates, installing printers, and simple troubleshooting when employees have issues.
Chris: So you want to essentially have a system that figures out its host name and
Chris: all of that and configs itself, right?
Brent: Yeah, I thought, what the heck, anything is possible with NixOS.
Brent: So this is actually a little ask for my brother here, who has a few stores with
Brent: a few simple computers. They're just being hosts for employees who are just trying to use a POS.
Brent: And I thought maybe, well, it was over the Christmas holidays when I was feeling
Brent: all jazzy, about Nix OS that all these computers can just kind of be the same
Brent: and have really the same config.
Brent: That's a huge benefit and just be deployed from the comfort of the couch at home.
Brent: Yeah, I need to go into the stores to, you know, update these things.
Brent: So I was trying to help him get a nice little Nix OS config ready for these.
Brent: But I have to say, I hit the edge of my
Brent: knowledge in nixos and i'm learning a ton so we use disco to try to get all
Brent: the disks identical which worked amazingly we use nixos anywhere with nixos
Brent: factor to get things automatically detected and deployed and so we learned a
Brent: ton over that christmas break when we deployed all this stuff why.
Wes: Are we just hearing about this now what is going anyway go on.
Brent: I know right but we hit a bit of a brick wall in trying to make all of these
Brent: configs into one that we could just deploy by calling a host name.
Brent: So that's where both my brother Aaron and I are saying, hey, dear community,
Brent: Where do we go now? How do we do this? How do we deploy this in a way that is,
Brent: you know, future intelligent and also best practice?
Chris: Yeah, I'd be curious, too, because I've got plenty of machines myself.
Wes: I'm just wondering if there's a, do you have any code anywhere folks could look at?
Wes: Because sometimes that can be helpful to get an idea of exactly like the state
Wes: you're at now and then like where you're trying to go.
Chris: Boy, this guy, this guy with the put it up on GitHub.
Brent: Please put all of your things on. That's actually a great idea,
Brent: Wes. I have been scared up to this point to deploy any of my configs to GitHub
Brent: because I don't trust myself to keep myself private.
Brent: But maybe you can have a look at it and we can deploy something up there just
Brent: so that folks can have a look, see what kind of mess we've created and try to help us clean it up.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. You know, we could do some filtering or whatever.
Wes: You don't have to share all the private details, but just to give it a rough
Wes: idea of like where you're at
Wes: so that we don't waste time suggesting stuff that might not be relevant.
Wes: Though I am curious, maybe you'll have to try after the show uh i wonder how
Wes: our friends the uh so-called thinking machines might do with this one.
Brent: That is a great question i had not considered trying that but it's worth a try,
Brent: so if anybody has any suggestions we'll have a link to that and uh please help
Brent: us we're deep deep in it now.
Wes: Well it looks like we got another email this week this is cool because apparently
Wes: there's someone taking our podcast around the world as they adventure.
Brent: There's a little note here hey there just wanted to say thanks
Brent: for making such an awesome linux podcast i'm
Brent: currently cycling around the world right now in china headed
Brent: towards mongolia and your show makes the long hours on the road so much more
Brent: enjoyable you probably already know this but your podcast is truly global i've
Brent: been listening to it across many countries in central asia already keep up the
Brent: great work and thanks again cheers from javier that.
Chris: Is so cool thank.
Wes: You so much for writing in um amazing.
Chris: Yeah keep us posted and keep spreading the word too that's great thank you everybody
Chris: who wrote in linuxunplugged.com contact,
Chris: And, of course, you can send a message into the show and support this here show.
Chris: And we don't have a baller this week.
Chris: You know it's going to be a rough week when our top boost is WH-2250,
Chris: easy for me to say, with 5,000 sats.
Chris: He says, Chris, now that you have Music Assistant connected to Home Assistant,
Chris: the next step is to trigger albums, playlists, and books with NFC tags.
Chris: Oh, I'm going to pause right here, WH.
Chris: After the episode, I was thinking the same thing. I've got a bag of them.
Chris: And I do that now for certain lights.
Chris: So at night I can just like swipe an NFC tag. But this is a great idea for albums specifically.
Chris: And I think it's actually pretty spouse approval factor high.
Chris: I wouldn't say extreme, wouldn't say best, but it's high to medium.
Chris: He goes on to say, I printed a one-fourth scale milk crate to hold my LPs and
Chris: scan what I want to listen to. Oh, that's so cool.
Wes: Brilliant.
Chris: You could create a miniature bookshelf of your audio books and set up a physical
Chris: digital library. Oh, my gosh.
Chris: If I had the space. That's a really neat idea. I have been very successfully
Chris: enjoying Music Assistant.
Chris: Last night, thankfully, there were no kids in the rig.
Chris: I hit the book button, and for the first time, and I had been playing music
Chris: a couple hours earlier on all the speakers, for the first time,
Chris: even though my automation system played specifically on one speaker,
Chris: it played on all the speakers in the house.
Wes: Ooh.
Chris: Which if you know the kids are trying to sleep at that particular time would
Chris: have been that would have been an automation faux pas it was no big deal for
Chris: us because we were the only ones in there but oh man i was embarrassed for a
Chris: second so i gotta track that down.
Wes: Mjvc boosts in with 4021 sats and um yeah uh across uh four boosts here regard
Wes: first one regarding manuals and generally tracking of assets,
Wes: I highly recommend Homebox.
Wes: I use it to track where things are, where they should be. You can also associate
Wes: manuals, price, warranty, info, maintenance, all that stuff. Wow.
Chris: Yeah, it looks good. All right. Taking a look at that. Thank you.
Wes: Re-Homebox continuing here. Also, a system I've developed is to use a random base 36 ID, e.g.
Wes: X2GS as an example here, to refer to boxes, bins, etc.
Wes: This frees me from trying to pre-sort things e.g.
Wes: All cables should go into this box when i want to find the cable or random accessory
Wes: i just look up which bin it's in so you can stop caring about having perfectly
Wes: sorted labels for stuff and just let the computer do it wow that is clever that.
Chris: Is and also smart because i use my label maker so infrequently that between
Chris: times like the batteries are almost dead so it's always like just on the edge yes i go to.
Wes: Use it this.
Chris: To be a lot better.
Wes: They've also sent in for our binary boost, and they did send a binary sub boost here, a 1-0-1-0-sats,
Wes: I wanted to browse using parts of the binary solo from Flight of the Concords.
Wes: So we've got a link there. Maybe we can go check that out after the show.
Wes: Thank you. We always love links and ideas for that. And Flight of the Concords are just great.
Wes: And then one last boost here. Finally, regarding note-taking.
Wes: A few months back, I switched to ForresterNotes.org. It generates static websites that is, to me,
Wes: kind of like Obsidian if it were to embrace hypermedia and designed by formal
Wes: methods and programming language people.
Wes: And then, yeah, we've got a link here we'll include in the show notes. Fascinating.
Chris: That is interesting because often I would like to just share a really basic
Chris: website with the wife or a note if she just needs to review something for working
Chris: on something with the RV.
Chris: That's an interesting idea. Thank you. So that's fosternotes.org.
Chris: We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Brent: Well, we have a boost here from Wine Eagle, 6,000 sets.
Brent: It's across a couple of boosts first starting i understand that zfs being out
Brent: of the kernel is more risky to my boot process but not to my data integrity
Brent: and that's why zfs replication exists,
Brent: that guarantees zfs provides our light years ahead of butterfs butterfest send
Brent: is a week compared to the sanoid stack unlike my arch dkms days nixos also provides
Brent: some nice guarantees I like Butterfess running on a fresh kernel and getting
Brent: bit was probably not a great idea.
Brent: Combus got me to triple boot my MacBook back in 2007 in seventh grade,
Brent: but ZFS got me into self-hosting.
Brent: It's home for me now, and I suggest Nix OS users make three separate datasets,
Brent: one for slash Nix, slash home, and of course, the root.
Brent: So backups avoid the Nix store. also shout out to breeze for not even needing
Brent: an email super duper no kyc and go podcasting.
Chris: Oh i don't have the podfather clip but uh,
Chris: I think that recommendation of three separate datasets for Nix,
Chris: Home, and Root is clever.
Chris: So all my home systems are ButterFS for the data and the root.
Chris: But here at the studio, we're running Arch with the LTS kernel and ButterFS
Chris: on the root and then ZFS for the dataset.
Chris: And that's a really great combination too. And then you don't really have to
Chris: worry about, you know, some sort of regression hitting the most recent kernels
Chris: because you're on an LTS kernel.
Chris: So you can have both. It can be peanut butter and jelly, and that's just delicious.
Chris: Yeah, also, big shout-out to Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, a great way to boost the show
Chris: without having to switch podcast apps and no KYC.
Wes: I'd also just point out that for folks, Wine Eagle here mentioned Sanoid,
Wes: but on the Butterf side, there's also projects like Butterback,
Wes: which add some of the same functionality.
Wes: I'm not going to say they're equivalent or anything, but there are some options
Wes: there, some improvements around the sound receive stuff, and just more automation
Wes: on top of the tooling that exists for Butterfess natively.
Chris: Mentad's back with a row of decks. I think I was also hit by that Butterfest bug.
Chris: I had hard powered off my Steam Deck running Bazite, then it wouldn't boot or even mount afterwards.
Chris: Fortunately, standard Butterfest file system fixes brought it back.
Chris: I don't think this will change my use of Butterfest, but it was definitely a shock.
Chris: That's a great in-the-field report. Thank you so much for sending that in.
Chris: Sorry you had to go through that.
Chris: If you feel like sharing, I would be curious to know how you rescued a Steam
Chris: Deck. Did you plug it into like an external monitoring keyboard?
Chris: Did you boot it somehow? Did you have like a dock to share that USB-C port?
Chris: That just seems like that's sort of a worst case scenario. Like I was picturing
Chris: my desktop or laptop where it's pretty easy to pop in a thumb drive and,
Chris: you know, I have a keyboard hooked up.
Chris: So Steam Deck is a little more challenging. Good job. Well done on getting that
Chris: fixed. Thank you for the boost.
Wes: Yeah, how much of the Steam Deck, you know, controls interface work when you're
Wes: in an emergency rescue in it ramfs i don't know fuzzy mistborn comes in with a row of ducks,
Wes: Regarding those Ikea speakers, unfortunately, Ikea and Sonos have now ended
Wes: their partnership and the speakers are discontinued.
Wes: Given Sonos' good history of device support, I'm sure the speakers will continue
Wes: to work for a while, but you'll probably need to buy used ones going forward, just an FYI.
Wes: Also, for podcasts and music assistant, check out G Potter Sync.
Wes: It can even run in Nextcloud.
Chris: Yeah, how about that stack? So you get Nextcloud going, then you get G Potter
Chris: server going, and you connect that to music assistant.
Chris: So regarding those Ikea speakers, which we linked last week, you can still get them.
Chris: So yes, Ikea low-key announced in May that they are discontinuing that partnership.
Chris: And it's sort of a bummer because these speakers are essentially,
Chris: the Sonos equivalent is $300.
Chris: And these speakers are under $200, but they have the Sonos guts in them.
Chris: And the nice thing about that is, is it's all local APIs. So Home Assistant
Chris: should still be able to continue to control it unless there's some massive iteration that I don't foresee.
Chris: But because those speakers don't require the cloud service, they don't even
Chris: require the app, probably beyond initial setup. I'm not sure.
Chris: So I had my wife buy two of them. So she bought two for her clinic.
Chris: And she's liked it so much at home that she's asked for a music assistant setup for her clinic.
Chris: And we're going to put a couple of these speakers in. And this is how long she's had a clinic.
Chris: She's going to finally retire her CD player It's like one of those little portable CD player boomboxes,
Chris: And that's how she's done like the lobby kind of like, you know,
Chris: the music for a decade plus.
Chris: And so we're transitioning her to a music assistant.
Chris: I'm going to give her a couple of buttons to press to, you know,
Chris: play different types of music.
Chris: And then I'm also going to experiment with a Zigbee based. I couldn't find a
Chris: Z-Wave version. A Zigbee based volume knob.
Chris: So a physical knob that she can turn to increase and decrease the volume.
Wes: That seems killer.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. My advice, Fuzzy, is if you can find those IKEA speakers,
Chris: which we have linked in episode 626, get them while you can.
Chris: You can find them used on eBay, but they're not much cheaper.
Wes: And who knows what people played through them in the past?
Brent: Well, Gene Bean boosted in a row of ducks. He's replying to a question we asked
Brent: in Linux Unplugged 624, the one we talked about tiny PCs. He says,
Brent: hey, I don't use the Etsy's directory for my Nix configs at all.
Brent: I have my Flate cloned under my home directory and include a shell alias for
Brent: updating in my config that references where I checked it out.
Brent: Here's the alias I use on NixOS and a little variant for macOS.
Brent: Any links to a GitHub blob that you can have a look at?
Chris: I would like Gene's eyes on mine because I'm doing that now,
Chris: too, as of, you know, this weekend. but maybe i'm not doing it right so if you
Chris: have a chance gene to look at and let me know i'd appreciate it.
Wes: Yeah and gene's using here um you can specify a dash dash flake argument when
Wes: you do your rebuild and then you can just tell it you know whatever directory you store your flake in.
Chris: Thank you gene nice to hear from you brewer seth is here with 4 242 syats,
Chris: ice is longtime linux and homelab tinker but a new listener hey welcome aboard
Chris: and thank you for boosting you got me into bitcoin and lightning through your
Chris: value for value agus advocacy never had a reason to explore crypto bitcoin before
Chris: this week's project is a self-hosted albihub deployment yes yes,
Chris: Uh, next zap will come from my own lightning node. Thanks for inspiring a new
Chris: project. Isn't it fun? It is a lot of fun.
Chris: That is a great boost to end on. That really cheers me up. Thank you,
Chris: Brewer Seth, for updating us on that.
Chris: It's, it's such an interesting world to explore.
Chris: Um, you know, we, uh, just crossed the three and a half years of boosts on the
Chris: show, if you can believe it.
Chris: And Bitcoin is up 187% since we started doing boosts on the show.
Chris: The BlackRock and some of the other ETFs are now the most successful ETFs that
Chris: are based on Bitcoin in the history.
Chris: And that's open source software. In the three and a half years,
Chris: the shift is unbelievable.
Chris: As of last week, it's now included in 401k plans, if you want.
Chris: The level has really shifted and the Lightning Network has grown significantly.
Chris: Uh so if if you've been you know kind of on the fence i don't think it's going away also.
Wes: Albi hub just keeps getting better and better and better and easier to set up
Wes: and work with too so it's easier to onboard now too i think.
Chris: You know it was really it was it was out there on a ledge three
Chris: and a half years ago uh but it's really it's really gone
Chris: very mainstream speaking of albi hub this week in
Chris: bitcoin we'll have an interview with the co-founder of
Chris: albi coming out on monday and it is
Chris: fascinating what's going on over there there's a lot to talk
Chris: about so go check out thisweekinbitcoin.show on
Chris: monday for a new episode thank you everybody who did boost we didn't have a
Chris: huge episode a huge amount of support for this episode we had 19 of you stream
Chris: and we stacked 21,199 sats and when we bring that together with our boosters who we do appreciate,
Chris: We stacked 50,448 sets Of course that is split between the three of us Editor
Chris: Drew and your podcast app of choice,
Chris: I think maybe, maybe our worst week ever in three and a half years.
Wes: Yeah, the total stack wasn't great. The quality was high. We learned a lot.
Wes: We got some great tips, some things to follow up on.
Chris: And we did get some new members on board. So maybe some folks who transitioned
Chris: to membership, which we always really appreciate too.
Chris: But the systems are just getting better and better over time.
Chris: Fountain FM is getting easier to use. They self-host it for you.
Chris: The Fiat on-ramping is getting easier. apps like striker and more countries
Chris: and you know so bitcoin like i mentioned earlier is up somewhere between 182
Chris: 187 percent since we started three and a half years ago the most generous,
Chris: generous version is the u.s dollar is down 10
Chris: percent in that time but it's likely down a lot more and we
Chris: could not have afforded a 10 percent loss that would have things
Chris: things are so expensive for us these days that would have been right
Chris: on the razor thin margin so the boosters they're still continuing to support
Chris: us so even if even if you're not boosting every episode your boost do continue
Chris: to work for us and if you would like to get into this fountain fm is an easy
Chris: and straightforward way to do it and it continues to go to work for us and we
Chris: really appreciate it i also appreciate those members i.
Wes: Do want to add uh just shout out to hybrid sarcasm and everyone helping out
Wes: in our matrix i mean even just this morning folks were asking about like how
Wes: do i get started with boosting and so if you are.
Chris: Curious about that kind.
Wes: Of thing definitely go hop in the matrix we can link there's an unofficial boost
Wes: support room or just chat in any of the rooms and we'll try to help you out
Wes: and or other folks will help you out.
Chris: But sincerely, too, thank you to everybody who is supporting us through our
Chris: membership. We hope you enjoy the perks and that Autopilot support. That's our foundation.
Chris: Now, we got a couple of picks for you this week. The first one is called FF Share.
Chris: It's an Android app that, as you can probably guess, is using FFmpeg on the
Chris: back end to compress your images, your videos, or your audio files before you
Chris: share them, which is kind of nice.
Chris: But you can also, I thought this was cool, for compatibility reasons,
Chris: just tell it every single video format i throw at you just make it a simple
Chris: mp4 that any stupid player can play.
Wes: Yes right exactly it doesn't have to matter about optimizations you don't have
Wes: to matter how much they know about web m just like just translate it please.
Chris: We have that problem in our group chats.
Wes: Yeah absolutely i mean like.
Chris: Pj drops a web m and nobody can play it.
Wes: I've been the guy who then downloads it on my laptop re-encodes mp4 re-uploads
Wes: it just because it's like ah it's bothering me but i'm just doing it on my phone
Wes: i mean come on yeah right i was just gonna say uh right there at the top of
Wes: their readme get it on fdroid get it on obtainium who needs the play store that's.
Chris: Right i'd love to see that.
Brent: I will say the fdroid version is quite hefty out
Brent: of 54 megs and my very first question was what is
Brent: going on here but thankfully they've written a little explainer says the apk
Brent: downloaded from fdroid is the app full versions with all the features and abi
Brent: compatibility included you can find a choice of smaller apks at the github link
Brent: which you can download using something like Obtainium.
Chris: Ah. Yeah, I would bet, though, they must be bundling FFmpeg, which is no slouch.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So they also have a little, just a little checkbox, remove all of your XF metadata
Chris: with, like, you know, your camera and location. You can include that or not.
Chris: I wish every OS had that in the share sheet by default, but this adds that.
Chris: And then for the geekiness factor, you can actually see the CLI output of the
Chris: FFmpeg command it's using right there in the Android app.
Chris: And then when the job's finished, it just brings up a share sheet.
Chris: It's pretty cool. Nice find. FF share link in the show notes for that.
Chris: And then we have, I don't know, maybe the second ever listener submitted pick on the show.
Chris: Alex Gates writes in, the podcasting 2.0 consultant. Hey, fellas,
Chris: I got a pick for you this week.
Chris: I've been a big fan of envelope style online budgeting made popular by YNAB,
Chris: which stands for You Need a Budget.
Chris: I recently decided to migrate to an open source, self-hosted alternative,
Chris: and I've been really happy.
Chris: It's called Actual Budget. It can be used with or without a server if you just
Chris: want to play around or if you don't need syncing across devices.
Chris: And of course, it has a desktop and web apps.
Chris: Recently, they added integration with a service for bank syncing called Simplefin.
Chris: I think it's worth checking out. And budgeting like this has really changed my life.
Chris: And he links us to the Actual Budget documentation, the Simplefin website,
Chris: and their bridge where you can connect your bank.
Chris: He says, with regards, your podcasting to know consultant alex gates oh.
Wes: This looks like some good stuff i've not heard of simple fin before but uh stands
Wes: for simple financial interchange and makes read-only financial interchange simple
Wes: it's like rss for financial information so hey you can see why yes our pod sage was interested huh.
Chris: I would very much very much like to get something like this running and i would
Chris: for me need to be self-hosted it would need to be something i run on my own
Chris: infrastructure so i i'm going to take a look at this after the show thank you alex.
Brent: I've heard repeatedly good reviews of actual budget this is maybe the fifth
Brent: time i hear this so i think i'm going to dive in as well.
Chris: I always just thought people are saying you need to actually budget man
Chris: you need to actually budget i didn't realize it was a thing um so also i'm going
Chris: to put myself out there boosting tell me how much you hate me now for playing
Chris: around with ai and how i boiled the oceans i'd be willing to hear those arguments
Chris: or if you've had any success like this i'd also like to hear those you know
Chris: boys i think the real like ultimate place for this to go is,
Chris: Is something you would run on your own LAN,
Chris: hopefully that doesn't consume a lot of resources that could help you with this
Chris: kind of stuff that maybe maybe isn't a model that tells me how to deal with
Chris: a foot rash or can tell and can tell me what temperature I need to boil eggs at.
Chris: But maybe it's a model that can tell me how a hyperland config works.
Chris: So it doesn't need to be huge. And it's something maybe I even run on my own
Chris: machine or I run on a local network server or on a Nebula network.
Chris: And I just point these editors at that, right? That to me is where this needs
Chris: to go next for probably folks like us to use this kind of stuff long-term.
Chris: Like, I don't think this is going to be a habit for me. I think this is sort
Chris: of a once and done sort of thing to see if it was possible.
Wes: Yeah, explore the edge of technology, see what you can do with it.
Wes: But you're right, like, you could, you know, you could have all kinds of different variants.
Wes: You could have them, you know, trained per operating system or the tools that you want.
Wes: You could probably also, like, you know, down the future, you could customize
Wes: it. You could retrain it. You could fine-tune it for the stuff that you've actually
Wes: been doing over time. There's so many possibilities.
Brent: And hearing about your adventure, Chris, I caught little glimpses of what customizing
Brent: a desktop might be like in the next, you know, let's call it five years.
Brent: Felt like there were some strengths here that we can't ignore,
Brent: and I want to rice my stuff.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it was pretty wild. I kind of hope somebody over in the sort of
Chris: bluefin Aurora type distributions or silver blue, somebody does a really,
Chris: really nice opinionated Hyperland,
Chris: like an Oma Archie, or somebody releases a Nix OS based one that is really,
Chris: really opinionated. Maybe people know of some out there also boost that in.
Wes: Did I just hear Brent say he hates rising PCs?
Brent: I hate rising PCs.
Chris: Somebody give me a clip of that I want that,
Chris: All right. So that's it. That's just, you know, as we're kind of wrapping up,
Chris: that's on the back of my mind is this felt more like like an incredible technology
Chris: demonstration, but probably not
Chris: something I'm going to use every day until it's maybe under my control.
Chris: And if it can be limited to my systems or just the things I need to use,
Chris: maybe it's approachable. But let me know what you think out there.
Chris: And of course, we would love it if you joined us live. It just gives it a certain vibe.
Chris: We have that mumble room with those low latency open streams right off the mixer.
Chris: We do it right here every single Sunday.
Chris: Yeah, make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We start at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: You can get it clack-related in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: And if you've got an app that supports it, Wes, what do we have in store for them?
Wes: Oh, buddy. Not only do we have chapters, which let you skip right to the content
Wes: that you want, But if you want to dive even deeper, we've got transcripts so
Wes: you can read along, throw it into an LLM, whatever you like.
Wes: So check the feed or a podcasting 2.0 app for that.
Chris: Yep. Have fun. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday!