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, there might be more than
Chris: just a couple of things wrong with our home labs, but we do have a plan to fix them up.
Chris: Today, we'll talk about what needs a fixin' and then what hardware might just do the job.
Chris: Plus, we have two great self-hosted apps we've come across recently you didn't even know you needed.
Chris: and then we're going to round the show out with some great shout outs and boosts
Chris: and picks and more so before we go any further let's say time appropriate greetings
Chris: to our virtual lug hello mumble room hey chris hey wes and hello brent hello
Chris: mumble room thank you for joining us,
Chris: boys i gotta break format for a second.
Wes: Get out of here brent come on squeeze it.
Brent: Oh it's what's with the.
Chris: I'm a little i'm a little nervous is that all right is it okay yeah it is it's
Chris: kind of a big deal uh we have something exciting and I don't know I don't want
Chris: to blow it I don't want to blow it you know because this is something we've
Chris: been thinking about for a while we have an opportunity to bring on a new sponsor,
Chris: and this project was co-created by a listener of the show it's something we followed for years,
Chris: and it's it's tremendously good and the company is great too they're building
Chris: the company the right way you know they're not like hooked on that VC crack
Chris: right they're doing in a smart sensible way and so i'm i don't know i'm just i don't want to mess it up.
Wes: You got this.
Chris: You think so uh-huh.
Wes: Just be yourself.
Chris: All right i'll give it a go so let me tell you go ahead what is it don't.
Wes: Forget about the reverse code i believe.
Chris: You got a tip for me i think what oh that's it that's your that's your motivation you've.
Brent: Not royally messed it up previously i know this might be a big deal but i believe
Brent: in you i think you got this.
Chris: I feel like it's a big deal too because we're like the only podcast in the world
Chris: yeah we're at wow you know i know that's a big deal actually.
Brent: Okay now i'm feeling.
Chris: Nervous i know they're reaching a new stage and it's just it's super exciting all right okay thanks.
Brent: Guys you got that.
Chris: Check out defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Nebula, and they have managed
Chris: Nebula from Defined Networking.
Chris: It's a decentralized VPN built the right way on the open source Nebula platform that we love.
Chris: And it is optimized for speed and efficiency where the nodes use less network
Chris: activity, less battery life, and it's using industry-leading encryption.
Chris: It's built on top of the noise protocol, which is super cool.
Chris: So that's what they're using to exchange keys, do the symmetric encryption.
Chris: And all of that's open source, independently audited.
Chris: And unlike traditional VPNs, you can host what are called the lighthouses,
Chris: if you like, or you can use their managed products. So you are in complete control.
Chris: They built this for Slack back in the day.
Chris: And it had to be great from the start because Slack has a global infrastructure, as you can imagine.
Chris: they're across so many different data
Chris: centers around the world and they need all of
Chris: that stuff to be able to communicate and they're dealing with corporate
Chris: private information so the requirements to get it right are astronomical could
Chris: break the company if they get it wrong kind of stuff so nebula has been engineered
Chris: for scale and performance from day one each host connects directly to each other
Chris: and then it queries lighthouse nodes for routing information.
Chris: Which you can host that yourself. That's a big deal.
Chris: And these lightweight queries, they hit all available lighthouses simultaneously,
Chris: so you have uninterrupted operation.
Chris: Even if one of your nodes is down, if you have five other nodes online or two
Chris: other nodes online, everything continues to hum right along.
Chris: So if you go over to define.net slash unplugged, you can check out Nebula and
Chris: manage Nebula for 100 hosts, absolutely free, no credit card required.
Chris: Nothing matches Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability.
Chris: I am super thrilled that they're joining the Unplugged program because this
Chris: is a project we've been watching since like almost the day it was announced.
Chris: We very quickly brought the co-creator on to talk about it and have been tracking
Chris: their progress ever since.
Chris: I think you're going to love it. It redefines the VPN experience.
Chris: Check it out at defined.net slash unplugged. Support the show.
Chris: And it's great too because it's from the community. It's really something special.
Chris: Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Do we have any last-minute housekeeping? I know you're going to be at the Knicks
Chris: event attached to DEFCON.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. Knicks Vegas. So if you go to DEFCON, reach out and see you there.
Chris: That's coming up real soon, West Payne.
Wes: That's right. Next month.
Chris: Wow. Are you flying?
Wes: Uh-huh.
Chris: You got a hotel?
Wes: I do.
Chris: You're already done then.
Wes: I know. Surprisingly organized.
Chris: Now you just need to get the presentation done.
Wes: That's right.
Chris: Okay. All right. That's it, right? That's all we have for the housekeeping, I think? All right.
Chris: All right. Let's do a home lab check-in. There's a lot that's been going on behind the scenes.
Chris: Brent got his home assistant up and running again in the van.
Chris: And he's actually been using some of the sensors to test different systems on the van. So I don't know.
Chris: Walk us through. You got the system going again. And how are you using it, Brent?
Brent: Yeah, we together got the system going. Oh, that feels like...
Brent: months ago now. And the idea is to have a permanent home assistant set up in
Brent: this crazy van that I somehow have in my possession that I'm putting lots of love into.
Brent: And I wanted to do some testing on the fridge that is from the nineties and is still in this thing.
Brent: And it's like this bizarre absorption fridge.
Brent: I don't have any experience with those kinds of things. that can run propane
Brent: and 12 volts and 120 volts. I just had so many mysteries.
Brent: And I thought, what a perfect use case to use Home Assistant to track how good this thing is.
Brent: Like, what does it do with temperatures? Can it get down to the right temperatures?
Brent: Can it keep it there, et cetera, et cetera?
Chris: It's worth noting that when you bring sensor data into Home Assistant,
Chris: like a temperature sensor, it automatically graphs, charts, and logs that for
Chris: you. So not only do you get real-time information, but you get historical data automatically.
Wes: So great.
Brent: And I'm, you know, compared to some who are listening very relatively new to
Brent: Home Assistant, I feel slightly ashamed about that. But I have a project and it's getting me there.
Brent: And I didn't realize this graphing was just built in.
Brent: So such a win for me because I could just plug a couple sensors in and just
Brent: get exactly what I needed right away.
Brent: I did randomly meet a stranger with almost an identical van who offered to purchase this fridge off me.
Brent: So I had extra incentive to be like, hey, this thing works really well.
Brent: But I wanted to make sure that I was tracking this stuff in a way that,
Brent: I don't know, I could provide a cool little graph of ambient temperature versus
Brent: this fridge temperature.
Brent: So having a little project like this is a perfect way to dive into Learning
Brent: Home Assistant. You know, there's, I'm probably using 2% of what it can do,
Brent: maybe less, but it's been super fun to get it up and running again.
Brent: I feel like the power system in the van can maybe handle it a bit more.
Brent: I was really quite nervous about that previously.
Brent: But I think I can say I now have a home assistant setup that is going to be
Brent: on full time 24 hours a day unless all my batteries die. So I think that's a big step for me.
Wes: Yes. Yes, welcome to the club.
Brent: Thank you. That's great. I feel like I have lots to learn.
Wes: I'm not a long-time member, but I'm just, you know.
Chris: Yeah, I'm so proud of you both recently getting Home Assistant going.
Chris: So that's the good news in the Home Lab.
Chris: Now, the bad news is you've got this project that's stalled out,
Chris: in part because we ran out of time while I was visiting.
Chris: And the idea is you want to create an off-site backup server that does essentially
Chris: server-to-server replication.
Chris: And I kind of want to hear more about that because I think it's still kind of
Chris: up in the air exactly how to solve that problem.
Chris: So tell us what you're trying to accomplish and then maybe we can kick around a few ideas.
Brent: Yeah, I have talked about this on the network before, on Self-Hosted.
Brent: I really just want to provide backups for my family and myself included that have an offsite option.
Brent: So my parents have a super stable home environment, super stable internet,
Brent: and we visit there a couple times a year.
Brent: So that's a perfect location, but it's like thousands and thousands of kilometers
Brent: away or miles, if you will.
Brent: And so it's a perfect spot for a little like
Brent: offsite backup at least for me and if
Brent: that's a service i can provide you know throw up a
Brent: machine that isn't uh an old laptop for their
Brent: own backups that would give me peace of mind being their main support
Brent: people and so i've had this dream if you'll put it because uh i haven't quite
Brent: got there of having two near identical systems at least identical from a software
Brent: perspective the hardware i thought oh having identical would be good too but
Brent: i'm just at this point using old parts that i have for the computer on my end,
Brent: and I bought what I'm hoping is a very stable platform to put on their end.
Brent: So that includes an H4, Odroid, H4 Plus, and a couple new hard drives,
Brent: 20 terabytes that'll be mirrored.
Brent: And the idea is to just be able for my family to back up to the local computers
Brent: and those to just mirror to each other on a regular basis.
Brent: It seems simple on the surface. Okay.
Chris: So you want to mirror your data to that machine, but you also want to backup
Chris: data from how many computers of your parents?
Brent: Oh, they've got, you know, two, you know, one cell phone each and one laptop
Brent: each. And I think that's about it.
Chris: Cell phones.
Brent: Well, why not? Why should you not backup cell phone data? Like photos is mostly
Brent: the thing they care about, photos and videos.
Chris: Well, what I'm mapping in my head now is three different backup systems.
Chris: Because you have one to do the server-to-server replication,
Chris: you have one to back up the computers, and then a separate one to back up the
Chris: phones, right? I'm seeing this is three different systems you'd be managing.
Brent: Yeah, the dream seems simple until you start implementing, and then all of a
Brent: sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. This is multifaceted, isn't it?
Chris: I feel like the server-to-server is probably the easiest because that you could
Chris: just do like a ButterFS send-receive.
Brent: True.
Chris: And for the parents' backup, you do have some experience with,
Chris: which backup software was it that you were using? Was it Borg?
Brent: Yeah, I've got them set up currently with Borg, and I'm using Vorda as the main GUI interface.
Brent: And they have, well, my father especially, have been pretty cozy with that.
Brent: And it's been working well, and I don't think about it until I get on their
Brent: systems every couple months, and it just seems to be working, which is great.
Chris: So could that be just you set up borg backup on this new server and then reconfigure
Chris: their clients to use that to back up to this that.
Brent: Is at least for me at this point well tested well uh received on their part
Brent: and like the super stable simple part of this backup system.
Chris: Okay so desktops are solved what is your what is your thought on backing up
Chris: i assume they have two android devices yeah.
Brent: They have identical android devices and previously
Brent: backups have been done manually by my father who's a bit tech savvy and he's
Brent: using kd connect to uh just manually drag files he cares about he likes to sort
Brent: all his photos like sit down one sunday morning with a coffee and move photos
Brent: from both phones onto his laptop and then he just you know in vortigot just goes go and then.
Chris: That backs.
Brent: Up uh the android photos that are now on his laptop to the server so it's you know he's he's doing.
Chris: That manually but it's happening oh let's pause let's pause let's zoom in as
Chris: they say and double click what is it on the Android device they need backed up is it just photos I.
Brent: Mean I think we in modern times should have the ability to back up all of our
Brent: apps on Android but that is strangely difficult so if.
Chris: You had a minimal set.
Brent: Then I would.
Chris: Say just.
Brent: Photos and videos but.
Chris: Why not if you've got like notes and contact information in
Chris: Nextcloud already then it's just
Chris: a matter of the photos and there yes
Chris: you could use nextcloud obviously but it could be
Chris: a great opportunity for image it's pretty
Chris: straightforward to set up it does require some updates but it's pretty straightforward
Chris: to set up um the experience is really great for the end user because the app
Chris: is also a photo viewer that's really good great and fast uh but then there's
Chris: also fun things you can do like you could set up an image kiosk and a few other
Chris: ancillary containers or apps,
Chris: that let you view different albums in image on different devices.
Chris: So it could just be like on the computer, but it can also be on tablets. It can be on displays.
Chris: There's fun things you can do with the pictures once you get them in image.
Chris: Plus it also supports all the location information. It's private.
Chris: Yeah. So it's, and it just works in the background, right? They take a photo
Chris: and image uploads it when they're on wifi.
Brent: Image could totally work. I had sync thing recommended to me about a hundred
Brent: times to solve this problem.
Chris: It does seem like it's a popular one in the audience, but it seems to me kind
Chris: of like a blunt tool for the job, especially if you have everything else getting synced.
Chris: I think the easier workflow is you get the new phone. Unfortunately,
Chris: you set it up, you sign in or whatever the crap you got to do.
Chris: And then you just sync your stuff, right? I mean, it's just what,
Chris: I don't know, just seems to be.
Chris: I'd be interested in tips from the audience on utilities that would let you
Chris: do like an image backup or some kind of full backup to a Samba share or some kind of local NAS.
Chris: If the audience knows, boost in or email us and let us know.
Brent: I find it wild that this is not a standard thing. Wild. Once you get used to
Brent: Linux computers, like, come on, we don't have this?
Chris: This i mean it seems if you can get the hardware running
Chris: it seems like a pretty easy thing to at least get
Chris: the server to server backup going on your lan maybe
Chris: using like some sort of you know like a nebula vpn
Chris: or something to make that work so they're
Chris: talking to each other over that vpn on your lan and
Chris: then get that syncing while you're you know node to node right there so you
Chris: do the bulk of the syncing first then ship it off but i don't know about the
Chris: borg stuff like we'd have to talk more about that but I think that seems pretty
Chris: achievable if they've already got a workflow then later on it would just be
Chris: moving them over to image you could even do that later,
Chris: as a phase two staged rollout mm-hmm,
Chris: That might be it.
Brent: Yeah, I like the image idea. I hadn't even considered that. I think that is a wonderful idea.
Brent: The hardware is an upgrade to what they're currently using, which is an ancient
Brent: T61 laptop that my father used to use way back.
Brent: And yeah, that fan has been replaced several times. But it's still kicking.
Chris: Are you doing any jellyfin on this thing?
Brent: Not yet. Mostly because the hardware hasn't been up to the task.
Brent: And that's where I feel like.
Chris: This H4 is no problem.
Brent: That's where image wasn't really an option previously. either
Brent: but because of the hardware upgrade i feel
Brent: like it opens up a whole bunch of new options
Brent: so yeah why not have a jellyfin server they've got
Brent: a they have a dvd room it's like a secret room behind their tv from the previous
Brent: person who built this house who was a nerd so they literally like you take what
Brent: looks like a speaker off the wall and then they have a room back there and they
Brent: have just shelves of dvds that they bought in the past so maybe digitizing those
Brent: would be a great thing for them.
Chris: Yeah man yeah yeah.
Brent: So there's lots of possibility for sure.
Chris: Yeah that could be a great project honestly it's something you could just you
Chris: know you could set up a workflow and it sounds like your old man could sit there
Chris: and kind of do the actual ripping yeah 100 and.
Brent: Then i could benefit.
Chris: Okay so let me tell you what's going on in my
Chris: home lab i i have been very happy
Chris: with my home assistant yellow for years until
Chris: i started hanging around jeff and brent sorry no
Chris: you know i actually it's just over the years it does more
Chris: right it pulls in camera feeds it pulls in lots
Chris: of power metrics from my victron system it's you
Chris: know managing probably 300 devices and pulling
Chris: all of their metrics and their numbers and stuff like that it's connected
Chris: to probably half a dozen cloud services it
Chris: does a lot plus i have a bunch of sidecar applications i've
Chris: installed and this thing is built around
Chris: the pi 4 compute module it's got two
Chris: gigs of ram one terabyte of storage two usb
Chris: a ports and one usb c port and then they also build
Chris: in the silicon labs chip that has a zigbee 3o thread open thread and matter
Chris: support in there oh that is and it's a nice little machine it's nice yeah for
Chris: its job it's worked great and it comes in a nice translucent injected molded
Chris: case that has their logo on it it's cool because you can see some of the led shining through i.
Brent: Would imagine for you this thing just sips power too right that's important.
Chris: He dude like that's what's
Chris: really made me stick with this is if it's
Chris: just sitting there doing nothing it's like two watts it's
Chris: hard to even measure that oh wow you know and then maybe up to
Chris: six watts almost under load right so just a monster yeah about as much as a
Chris: light would pull an led light or something a big one so it's been really nice
Chris: but the two gigs of ram i'm generally running around 1.5 1.6 gigs of RAM usage
Chris: and so I like ESP home builds fail,
Chris: but what's really getting me,
Chris: Is as I've built more complicated dashboards, I noticed that the load times.
Wes: Just pulling them up?
Chris: Yeah. In the mobile app and on the tablets.
Wes: It's going to scrape a whole bunch of different data sources and has to get all the points.
Chris: And sometimes I need to get in quick and turn something off or check,
Chris: are we undervolting the entire rig right now because we just ran all this stuff?
Chris: And I'm just sitting there waiting for the page to load. So that's the killer for me.
Chris: And I just think I need to get on more robust hardware.
Brent: I didn't realize this was an issue because the hardware you gave me that was
Brent: just sitting around waiting for it to be your upgrade that's now in the van
Brent: is actually super performant and probably the perfect device for you to deploy for yourself.
Chris: Ironically, yes.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Yeah. And it's nice, too, because that's DC straight. But I've been kind of
Chris: looking around and I found three options.
Chris: I don't know what their power draw is. So it'd be like three options that I
Chris: would buy and test before I deployed.
Chris: But then, of course, I'm very interested to see what other folks are doing.
Chris: I do think I want something x86, although I'm not totally opposed to ARM for
Chris: Home Assistant OS. I will be using Home Assistant OS. Here's three options.
Chris: If I use my Home Assistant for more stuff, like also media hosting,
Chris: Ugreen has this device called the NAS Sync, and it is a tiny two-desktop-bay,
Chris: all-in-one Intel N100 quad-core system.
Brent: Whoa.
Chris: It's like the size of a book. It takes 2, 2.5. I think they're 2.5.
Chris: So you can get up to 76 terabytes of storage in this thing.
Chris: And it's the size of a USB disk enclosure, but it's an entire PC.
Chris: It's everything you need in there.
Chris: Up to 76 gigs of RAM, which is nice. It's 12th gen Intel N100.
Chris: It's a PC with the stuff. I mean, if you wanted something that was like a media
Chris: server, that was a really small, low-powered device.
Wes: I noticed it says user-friendly UGOS Pro. I assume you'd be keeping whatever that is on there.
Chris: I mean, if it's user-friendly, Wes, if it's user-friendly, why not?
Brent: I also noticed that it can hold hard drives, so it means you won't have hard
Brent: drives strapped to the side of your RV dinette cupboard.
Chris: Right. Thank you. So what I do now for storage is I have an O-Droid that does
Chris: have, I think it's just SATA ports, but yeah, there's nowhere to put them.
Chris: So they are, everything's kind of mounted to the inside of a dinette's booth, mounted to the wall.
Chris: And it would be nice to actually have them in enclosures. That could be nice
Chris: because they're just raw drives mounted to the wall.
Wes: I think this thing claims six watts for TDP. Yeah.
Chris: I want to test on that. But the N100 is a very efficient chip.
Chris: And around the 12th and 13th gen, they started getting really legit.
Chris: So that's why I kind of looked in that range.
Chris: Now, this next one wouldn't fit any drives, but it would have about the same
Chris: footprint as my current home assistant. Could be mounted on the sidewall.
Chris: Is a 12th gen Alder Lake N100 up to 3.4 gigahertz.
Chris: And it's called a mini PC stick. We've seen some of these before, and it's back.
Wes: This looks more like a USB adapter than it does a PC.
Chris: Right? Yeah, it looks like a dongle.
Wes: That's crazy.
Chris: I know.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: It really is something. It's eight gigs of RAM in this thing.
Chris: It's got one USB-C output, two USB-As. It has an Ethernet port.
Chris: It goes up to 65 watts USB-C PD, although I don't think that's its draw.
Chris: It looks like its draw is, you know, around the same as the other device.
Chris: It can drive a high-res 4K screen if you need to.
Wes: Yeah, dual screen support.
Chris: So what I thought, and this thing's $160. dollars so what
Chris: i i thought like if you wanted a linux media pc you could you could just attach
Chris: this to the back of your television and run it off of usb power it has an hdmi
Chris: out this is the kind of thing now where these are so small you could velcro
Chris: it to something and make a display does.
Brent: It feel like we're in the golden age of hardware when these kind of things are
Brent: available Because it's super performant, teeny tiny, and it hardly uses any
Brent: power. So like, what else do you really need?
Chris: Well, and what's great is we're getting in the price range of the Odroids, right?
Chris: And when you look at these Intel systems, they're really competitive with the ARM boxes now.
Brent: And the Raspberry Pis.
Chris: That's what I mean. But they have a lot of really nice features.
Wes: And compatibility.
Chris: And compatibility, and they're a little faster. But the one that really kind
Chris: of won me over for what I think I would use, Home Assistant,
Chris: if I want to build a box that lasts another six years, another five years,
Chris: whatever it's been, four years.
Chris: The GeekOM Air 12 mini PC.
Chris: It's a 13th-gen Intel N150, so it's even a little better on the power usage.
Chris: 16 gigs of ddr5 5 12 gigabyte
Chris: mvme ssd so 16 gigs of ram 5 12 gig storage
Chris: also has an sd card slot which actually can be really handy and has a visa mount
Chris: built in so i you could use anything that supports visa mounts again attaching
Chris: to something 200 usd 200 usd and 150 huh yeah and with a max of 3.6 gigahertz and 16 gigs of RAM.
Chris: So I would go from 2 gigs of RAM to 16 gigs of RAM.
Wes: That's not bad.
Chris: Yeah. And I'd go from like a quad core 1.4 gigahertz to up to 3.6 of boost,
Chris: obviously. And it's 200 USD.
Brent: I kind of feel like you just buy all three, you'll figure out a way to use them all, right?
Wes: Beowulf HA cluster.
Chris: There is a real revolution happening with these mini PCs.
Chris: And B-Link was really early to it, but B-Link is getting fancier and fancier.
Chris: These manufacturing places in China have built up all this tooling to build
Chris: these small compact PCs and now they're just going wild.
Chris: It is incredible what you can find for under $200 if you don't need a crazy GPU.
Chris: That's essentially the dividing line now. And this thing here,
Chris: I don't know if Geeko makes good stuff or not, I can't vouch for it.
Chris: At $200 I could put Home Assistant OS on this and run it till this thing dies.
Chris: I just, maybe there's probably even better ideas out there. So I'd be really
Chris: open to other suggestions.
Chris: This thing's got, you know, it's got Ethernet, it's got Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2.
Chris: So that's all really handy to have in a Home Assistant box as well.
Chris: And then to have the N150 processor in there, which is, you know,
Chris: on a good day, about 10% faster than the N100 in multi-core performance.
Chris: I'll take that. That could be a really nice box, but I'd be curious to know
Chris: if others have a better suggestion because I'd love something a little cheaper
Chris: than 200 USD, but for something as important as Home Assistant,
Chris: I'd probably be willing to do it.
Chris: So that's sort of my conundrum is I've got to figure out which hardware to use.
Chris: Then I've got to migrate my Home Assistant installation, which would probably
Chris: be a backup and a restore.
Chris: And what I'm really worried about and wondering how this has worked for others
Chris: that have tried this is the last time I did this, I had to completely reset
Chris: up my Z-Wave and Zigbee networks, I think.
Wes: That sounds rough.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, at this point, that's a non-starter. So I would love to know.
Chris: I mean, at that point, it's like I'm redoing everything, basically.
Chris: So there's probably a way to manage that. I'd love to hear people's experiences
Chris: because I know I've read a couple of different guides but last time it didn't
Chris: work for me I'd love to know what people have done that's worked,
Chris: so even once I get the hardware I think I'm going to do the backup and restore
Chris: I'll install Home Assistant OS clean on the new hardware and then immediately
Chris: restore my installation Have.
Wes: You considered just a crazy raw image copy and see what happens?
Brent: I do note here that you said that your Home Assistant Yellow has a special,
Brent: you know, Silicon Labs module with ZigBee and thread and open thread and matter
Brent: built in, is this mean that anything you buy off the shelf is going to be downgraded in that sense?
Brent: You're going to have to figure out how to solve that problem.
Chris: I think I have okay radios there, external ones, but see what a lot of people
Chris: have said is we'll just move your controller to the new unit.
Chris: But the problem is with the yellow, my controller is built in.
Chris: I can't just move the controller.
Brent: Right, right.
Chris: I don't know.
Chris: So that's my conundrum, but I'll figure it out and report back.
Chris: Wes, you've been taking a little nibble at Nebula, speaking of Nebula.
Wes: Yeah, that's true. Actually, independent of the sponsor change,
Wes: I've been playing with this for the talk, the Mesh Networking NixOS module.
Wes: And I wanted to see about, you know, because we love Nebula,
Wes: haven't used it in a little bit.
Wes: I wanted to check in and see if I can get it working with the module and play
Wes: nice. And for that, I kind of had to re-familiarize myself. So a little Nebula
Wes: nibble check-in, perhaps.
Chris: I like it. Man, now I want to be at the talk. Are you going to get it recorded? Do you know?
Wes: I don't know, but let's hope so.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Or I'll give you a private version.
Chris: What are you learning, Westpain, on location?
Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, so we now live in a world with 1,001 different Mesh VPNs
Wes: out there, which is pretty great for an end user.
Wes: But Nebula is especially fun because you kind of get to see how it all works
Wes: because you run it all yourself.
Wes: So you start off by making a signing authority, a CA cert and key that establishes
Wes: your root of trust for what you're doing. So it's all self-hosted in that sense, right?
Wes: And there is, again, the managed product, but I'm just talking about the open
Wes: source one for the most part here.
Wes: And from that, you can start signing for individual hosts.
Wes: And this is how you add new stuff to your network. So you have to do it yourself.
Wes: It's not dynamic. It's not managed by an API in this configuration.
Wes: So you have to have some signing set up. Obviously, you don't want to put the
Wes: secret key out everywhere.
Wes: That just lives on wherever you're doing and managing the signing.
Wes: And then go stamp out the stuff that you need for all the hosts that you have
Wes: now or you know about. And then if you want to automate this more,
Wes: totally can, but kind of on you.
Wes: There are some projects I've linked. There are various people who have Ansible
Wes: setups or Helm charts or like Python scripts on top of it. So there's a lot
Wes: of options there as well.
Wes: but the nice part is like you're in total control of what
Wes: things get added and when and you kind of have to know about
Wes: it and then it's a very simple little you know you specify
Wes: the ip what's cool is you get to pick the cider and
Wes: so it's really like your own internal network totally up
Wes: to however you want to manage it all under your control
Wes: you can fit it nicely in with whatever other networks you're
Wes: commonly on and then you can also define
Wes: various groups and then when you make the you know
Wes: establish and sign for the host you configure the groups for it as well and
Wes: this lets you do very nice and simple and easy filtering where you can just
Wes: say like oh right well only the stuff that is in the database group gets to
Wes: talk to the database server oh boy right like oh the admin group can talk to
Wes: all of these but the user group can talk to these could.
Chris: We use that so like i could have one nebula connection and we'd have like the
Chris: jb stuff where you guys can talk to that and i could have my own stuff.
Wes: I even saw someone wrote a Python script. I'm not recommending this,
Wes: but they, and I don't know if it's still running, but they were running a public
Wes: lighthouse where you could then use the Python script to upload the host you
Wes: wanted so it would all get set up correctly.
Wes: And then you would just make sure in your configs you had your own private group
Wes: so only your group from all the public stuff could get into it.
Wes: So it's pretty flexible.
Chris: Could we run a JB lighthouse just for the community? Is that like a thing that would be helpful?
Wes: If you use this sort of wrapper script, then yeah, in theory,
Wes: we can run our own copy of it.
Chris: That's not something people wanted. I wouldn't be.
Wes: I think they'd be fun.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Wes: But then after that, you know, it's like a Go app, so it's easy to build or
Wes: run pretty much anywhere, and then you just need to point it at a config and
Wes: have all of the key stuff.
Wes: So usually you make like a little bundle of a tarball or whatever for each host
Wes: that has all the stuff it needs, which is like the base cert from the certificate
Wes: authority, and then its individual stuff, and then like keys for the other hosts
Wes: that you want it to trust.
Chris: And so in your talk, you're kind of expanding on this idea of a NIC setup that
Chris: just automatically installs an application into the mesh network.
Chris: And so it's just, boom, it's when you launch it and get it running,
Chris: it's on the network immediately.
Wes: Yeah, it lives in its own network namespace and it talks through the mesh network.
Wes: And so this would just allow, you know, I'm working on a version that would
Wes: allow Nebula to play the same role that already works for Tailscale or Netbird.
Wes: And then so this would pop up and then as long as you had all the key infrastructure
Wes: there, it would pop onto your network and that's what it would know.
Chris: Well, that's so cool.
Wes: But it's fun. So that's like how it works and has worked for a long time.
Wes: and then you have lighthouses, right, which are the main thing that sits there
Wes: and lets people swap information about network addresses so you can do,
Wes: you know, bust through NATs and actually establish connections and all that.
Chris: Right.
Wes: They've now also added dedicated relays. So, in the Tailscale world,
Wes: you're probably familiar, they have, like, the derp relays, which is a fallback.
Wes: So, like, if you can't establish a proper peer-to-peer connection,
Wes: it'll automatically fall back to that.
Wes: Lighthouses can be relays for you already, but,
Wes: That's not really their job. So in like once you get a production network going,
Wes: there's now dedicated relays you can have. And you have, again,
Wes: this is an area where you get complete control.
Wes: So like you can put them where your pain points are in your network.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: Because it's there to be the, it will tunnel network traffic because it has a public address.
Chris: So you know where the tough spots are.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Ah.
Wes: Or if you do at least, then you can make sure there's one like geographically
Wes: at that point of presence or in this VPC or whatever you need.
Chris: I got you.
Wes: Okay.
Chris: So you can, you can place it. Yeah. Yeah, and also then you don't really have
Chris: to worry about somebody else running it and potentially watching what you're
Chris: doing or, you know, potentially getting legal requests to block certain types
Chris: of traffic or anything like that because you're running it yourself.
Wes: It's all going through things you control.
Chris: That's a nice nibble, Wes.
Wes: They've also got, let's see, you can SSH into it and get like a debugging console,
Wes: which is pretty neat. I've only really played with this a little bit.
Wes: They've also added a very basic but good enough support, I think, for Lighthouse DNS.
Wes: So now the host that the Lighthouse knows about, it can answer DNS requests for.
Wes: So if you pair that with a DNS server that can delegate a subdomain or something,
Wes: then you can have sort of automatic host discovery for the stuff on your Nebula.
Chris: I want that. I want that.
Wes: There's also, I don't know if it's shipped yet, but there's some docs pointing
Wes: out that they're working on
Wes: IPv6 support for having directly on your overlay. So that's pretty neat.
Wes: and then also there's now a nix os module.
Chris: So yes um.
Wes: If you want to run it there it looks like a pretty clean little setup too.
Chris: Speaking of that do you mind if i do an update please do after the show last
Chris: week wes set me aside and said here's what you need to do and showed me how
Chris: to clone the repo of the um they have essentially a image builder script you
Chris: can clone and make it's called.
Wes: Image dash template under the ublue os repo.
Chris: I'll link to to my version uh because it's pretty simple that i put up on my
Chris: github and so i pulled that down and there's a build.sh file in there that i
Chris: can modify like you were talking about last week and in there i put nebula and
Chris: i put nix well actually not nix did i i put the creation of slash nix yes.
Wes: And then runtime you uh use the determinate installer i believe.
Chris: And determinate installer is se linux aware and os tree aware so it goes real
Chris: smooth as long as you have a slash nix it just can't make.
Wes: That slash nix on its own.
Chris: Right. So I now have essentially my own tiny, tiny fork of Aurora that has Nebula and slash Nix created.
Chris: And now I have the Nix tooling and I have AUR and I have Ubuntu and I have Brew and I have Flatpak.
Chris: It's like, I'm feeling like the king of the world over here.
Chris: And with that, when I modify that build SH...
Chris: Anything that's in DNF or in copper, I can just install really quickly at build time.
Chris: And then, you know, you save it, you build the image, and then it's interesting.
Chris: It's, you build an image with this script using Ubuild, and then you essentially
Chris: deploy it with Podman and Boots, and then use Bootsy to...
Wes: Bootsy hooks up all the right boot bits for you.
Chris: And it gives you, like, options to say, yeah, activate this one,
Chris: and here's your next few images and here's which one's pending and it's it's
Chris: it's a decent clean easy to use command bootsees nice i like it and then i just
Chris: say yeah bless this one to be my active image and i reboot and boom i'm in my
Chris: own custom image and i installed determinate nix and i'm off to the races baby yeah.
Wes: So hopefully hopefully that means like you've got more packages available uh
Wes: and i don't know it's kind of fun to have your own sort of custom image.
Chris: Onepassword.com slash unplugged take the
Chris: first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and
Chris: protecting every application even unmanaged shadow
Chris: it go learn more at onepassword.com slash unplugged
Chris: that's the number one password.com slash unplugged
Chris: all lowercase okay if you're a security
Chris: it professional you know this problem already you have more and more assets
Chris: to protect as time goes on more devices more identities and more applications
Chris: and it becomes a mountain of security risks over time but fortunately you can
Chris: conquer that mountain of security risks with one password extended access management.
Chris: The reality is that when surveyed, over half of IT pros say securing their SaaS
Chris: apps is actually their biggest challenge now.
Chris: And I kind of get it. You know, you've got SaaS sprawl essentially happening,
Chris: and it creates this shadow IT where users sign up to things and use things because,
Chris: quote unquote, it makes their job easier or better.
Chris: So it's kind of understandable, but it's a hard problem to fix.
Chris: Thankfully, Trelica by 1Password can discover and secure access to all your
Chris: apps, managed or not. See, Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company.
Chris: Then, pre-populated app profiles assess SaaS risk, letting you manage access,
Chris: optimize spend, and enforce security best practices across every app your employees use.
Chris: Yes, even the shadow IT stuff. You can securely onboard and off-board employees
Chris: and meet compliance goals.
Chris: See, Trellica by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance.
Chris: And it's just one of the ways extended access management helps teams strengthen
Chris: compliance and security.
Chris: You know 1Password and their award-winning password manager.
Chris: Now go check out extended access management and Trelica.
Chris: You can take the first steps to better security for your team by securing credentials
Chris: and protecting every application, even the unmanaged ones.
Chris: Go find out more and support the show. You go to 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Chris: That is the number 1Password.com slash unplugged.
Brent: While this self-hosted energy has me remembering that you teased you had a couple
Brent: app picks that were really interesting.
Chris: I've been looking for a great way for
Chris: us to save all the stories that we're all looking
Chris: at all three of us and then be able to collaboratively like
Chris: mark them up and take notes we've used a
Chris: couple of different systems over the years but we've kind of gone our
Chris: own separate ways as time has gone on we each have built our own
Chris: like workflow for this but in this quest
Chris: in this journey i have
Chris: come across link warden a self-hosted collaborative
Chris: bookmark manager to collect read annotate and fully
Chris: preserve what matters all in one
Chris: place so think pocket meets dego whatever it is we used to use meets notes with
Chris: highlights so it's obviously a self-hosted open source bookmark manager that's
Chris: the basics of it but it also it does snapshots of the site,
Chris: so it'll take a PDF, an image, it'll do an HTML archive,
Chris: so it can also archive things, so that way you don't have to suffer from link rot when you go back.
Chris: So it saves a copy of all of that in various different formats,
Chris: which you can then download separately,
Chris: which is really nice because it really only takes a couple of years and pretty
Chris: much our links start to expire, and I think that might sometimes punish us in
Chris: the Google results because we have so many show notes, and then three or four
Chris: years after a show's been out, an episode's been released.
Chris: several of the links 404 and that you know just yeah it also doesn't work for
Chris: us when we want to go back and recover old information no.
Wes: It's nice to be able to have a snapshot archive stuff and if it does highlights too that's.
Chris: Shared highlights so yeah so highlighting and annotating moving.
Brent: To this for the next show right.
Chris: I know right it also as you would expect has a reader view,
Chris: and they've begun integrating local ai tagging so you can run a local ai and
Chris: have it go through and This sounds silly, but I use this with,
Chris: I forget the name of it. It's not Hoarder anymore.
Chris: But I use that with that application, and it works fantastic for just tagging
Chris: it and sussing out automatic tags.
Chris: It can collaborate on link gathering. You can share collections of lists with various people.
Chris: It has a dashboard where you can pin your favorite stories.
Chris: It supports full text search and filtering.
Chris: The design is really nice and responsive. Of course, it has dark and light mode.
Chris: It has browser extensions so you can bookmark and preserve the page you're looking at.
Chris: It also supports importing from Pocket and several others, including just some basic export formats.
Brent: I feel like this is an application I didn't realize that I needed.
Brent: And just now I'm thinking, hmm, this might rise to the top of the to-do list.
Brent: It also looks like it is AGPL.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, it's free. AGPL 3.0.
Chris: It has a couple other nice things I think you'd like too, Brent.
Chris: It has really good sorting, including supporting custom icons for different
Chris: categories, which just visually helps lay it out.
Chris: But you can put select RSS feeds into this if you want, and it can auto bookmark
Chris: and preserve those. Because remember, it's not just saving it.
Chris: It's also doing the JPEG snapshot, the PDF snapshot, the full HTML archiving.
Brent: I hear you saying this might help me with my open tabs problem.
Chris: Maybe, maybe. And if you're on, I don't think they have this for Android yet.
Chris: but if you're on ios there is a shortcut to just save the link you're currently
Chris: looking at right to link warden as well and uh there's a couple community projects
Chris: i think it's called link droid maybe that's the ones for android oh yeah okay
Chris: and then yeah there's a few browser extensions as well this.
Wes: Seems neat i'd used um buku in the past.
Chris: Right right but.
Wes: This kind of has some more of the stuff that's targeted like at the you know
Wes: buku's been pretty decent for like personal just sort of you know,
Wes: keeping, not forgetting things.
Wes: for the kind of work we're doing or other kinds of research,
Wes: maybe generating stuff that you're going to go feed into LLMs to ask about. This seems great.
Chris: Tracking stories for work, that kind of stuff.
Wes: Yeah, professional development.
Chris: The other thing, too, is the project has some momentum. I mean,
Chris: they had a release just 15 hours ago.
Chris: They have a live demo you can check out. They also, I think,
Chris: have a cloud product eventually if you don't want to deploy it yourself.
Brent: Also, 68 contributors. That's often something I look at for projects just to
Brent: see the health of it and how popular it is. Those are important things.
Brent: And like 68 is respectable.
Chris: Yeah, and they're doing funding on Open Collective, so they have all that information
Chris: up there, which is a great way for projects to go. So I'm very impressed with Link Warden.
Chris: You know, I've probably used it for a total of 12 hours so far,
Chris: but it was like one of these, oh, I got to tell the world about this.
Chris: This is better than any of the other ones I've used, specifically if you have
Chris: people you want to collaborate with, like a little small group of people or a team.
Chris: Just killer. So that's Linkward, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. That was my find.
Chris: Wes, you came across something that, to me, sounded really useful,
Chris: but I'm not sure why I would use it. But I feel like one day I will call upon this.
Wes: Yeah, and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first because it's a lot of things, or could be.
Wes: It's called Neko, a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker and uses WebRTC and,
Wes: So it's like a browser in browser that you stream, that you stream so you can interact with it.
Wes: But like the interface is streamed back to you via WebRTC.
Chris: Yeah, I guess the end result is it's actually pretty responsive.
Wes: Yeah, it's kind of surprisingly usable. I mean, you need a system that's hosting
Wes: it that like can keep up, you know, especially but WebRTC is,
Wes: you know, built to do a lot of this and they put in a lot of work, I think, to make it fast.
Wes: So in a lot of ways, like, okay, you can do it for a browser,
Wes: but it can also be, well, it can run anything that the Linux desktop can run, it turns out.
Wes: So this can also be sort of like a guacamole alternative, perhaps.
Chris: But, you know, it also could just be so much simpler because you can stream to multiple endpoints.
Wes: Yes. So you can also do RTMP out of this thing. So you can stream to YouTube or Twitch if you want.
Chris: Ah.
Wes: And multiple people can connect to it, right? So you can do stuff like a watch
Wes: party, or we could interactively all edit our docs for the show.
Chris: Yeah, so you could be the technical person in the friend group.
Chris: You could have them all watch a URL, and you go get a video stream going,
Chris: and now you're all watching.
Chris: I mean, that sounds awesome. You're all watching it together.
Chris: Interactive presentation, sure.
Wes: It can also be just one way, too. If you want a browser that isn't attached
Wes: to your remote system, spin it up in an IP space.
Chris: Or you want a full desktop browser on a mobile device for some reason.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: Or you want to embed a browser into an application i mean that's interesting
Chris: there's a lot when you think about it there's a lot of things there must be.
Brent: Some security uh ways of using this that would you know it's kind of like ultimate
Brent: sandboxing if you think of it that way.
Chris: Right well because you can have a remote persistent browser that's in some secure
Chris: system or some secure data center and then client machines and all the client
Chris: machines are doing is sending and receiving video data yeah.
Wes: I haven't tried this part yet but um,
Wes: apparently there's built-in audio support too so that's pretty great i mean
Wes: you need it for the watch party right but like just you could do a lot of stuff with that.
Chris: Well there you go who needs uh x11
Chris: remote applications anymore when you've got neko i'm kidding huh it's interesting
Chris: so neko itself has built-in live streaming support yeah that's neat i mean i
Chris: don't know what i would use that for but it could be like a well session broadcasting.
Wes: Broadcast room content using.
Chris: Rtmp Yeah.
Wes: You can also record it. You can use stuff like Nginx RTMP on top of it to be
Wes: able to just save that to a file.
Chris: So because you're streaming video, video playback is really nice and smooth.
Wes: Yeah, it's not just, as they say, sending images over WebSocket.
Chris: Right.
Wes: It's actually encoding video and then streaming that to you,
Wes: which is also stuff we've seen for things like, what, Moonlight?
Wes: That was another thing that...
Chris: Yeah, right. Right. But this makes it a little bit easier when it's just WebRTC,
Chris: because that's a web browser. There's so many ways you can ingest an RTMP stream.
Wes: Built on Go, which has good support for a lot of this stuff.
Wes: So yeah, you get like the power of web technology, modern browsers,
Wes: good support for this kind of stuff, and real video codecs too.
Chris: I mean, even tutorials, like live tutorials, this could be great for it.
Chris: Even inside just a company, right?
Chris: Screw Twitch and YouTube, just you got a group of people you're trying to do
Chris: a training session with.
Wes: It does have a very prominently cat butt based logo.
Chris: That is so you know watch out for that that is true that maybe makes.
Wes: Mileage may vary but it's a cute.
Chris: Cat i think brent yeah but there there is straight up cat butt right there you could argue.
Wes: It's an asterisk maybe.
Chris: It's a bold logo it's a bold logo you.
Brent: Don't forget it that's memorable is important.
Chris: The docker compose is 14 lines,
Chris: I mean, this is really simple stuff. Like everything, it wants port 880.
Chris: 8080, I mean. They always want 8080, of course. Nothing else is using that.
Chris: And then there's some UDP ports that opens up for WebRTC as well. Oh, interesting.
Chris: You set the resolution of the remote host in the Docker Compose file.
Wes: Yeah, right now I think it configures like an X desktop. They say,
Wes: in theory, anything where they could take image snapshots that they then encode
Wes: into the video stream could be supported, but for now, that's all future potential.
Brent: It looks like there's also Nico Rooms, which is a room management software for this.
Brent: So that's pretty advanced.
Wes: Yeah, I have not tried that, but you could build a lot on top of this.
Chris: And the whole thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. I mean, it's pretty neat.
Chris: That's really a fun kind of idea. I don't, like you said, other than watch parties, I'm not sure.
Chris: maybe a live stream i mean i could have it could be i could be sending brent
Chris: a live capture of the dock that i'm looking at right now he could be seeing
Chris: my screen you know i mean i.
Brent: Am looking at the dock.
Chris: A guy like you brent you need a persistent web browser so one ultimate machine
Chris: you get him like go get a vps with like 64 gigs of ram you know because you're
Chris: gonna need a lot with all your tabs um maybe even more but then you could just
Chris: use this to pull that down to all the different machines right oh.
Brent: That would actually be sweet.
Chris: All right one ultimate tab browser to rule them all it.
Wes: Does make you think you could also maybe tie it in with things like uh video
Wes: ninja or other sort of obs technologies probably.
Chris: Oh for sure with obs yes you could totally pull it into obs and do screen capture
Chris: that way oh that's a good idea i like that westpain,
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go unleash your hardware.
Chris: You know we're big home labbers and self-hosters, and Unraid is a powerful,
Chris: easy-to-use NAS operating system for those of you that want control,
Chris: flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data, because Unraid allows
Chris: you to mix and match drives of any size so you can build which system you want
Chris: with the hardware you have right now with no restrictions.
Chris: It also now includes built-in support for TailScale, so you can check a box
Chris: and get on the TailScale network.
Chris: You can get secure remote access to your systems using multiple different methods
Chris: like Cloudflare Tunnels and, of course, Nebula as well.
Chris: And there are thousands of applications you can stack on top of Unraid.
Chris: And there's an active community that's out there supporting it.
Chris: But I think you might appreciate some of the more advanced features that Unraid
Chris: gives you access to without a whole bunch of hassle and time to set it up.
Chris: and things have really been taken to the next level in the latest OS releases from Unraid.
Chris: The big stuff, of course, is Unraid's always been famous for making it pretty
Chris: easy to pass through your graphics cards through to a virtual machine.
Chris: But now with QXL virtual GPU support, Linux VMs can now get a big graphics boost,
Chris: which is actually usable for gaming now, video editing, and of course,
Chris: just smooth, buttery desktop performance.
Chris: And Unraid 7.1 makes things even easier than ever to get started with virtual
Chris: machines and templates.
Chris: And now 7.1 also includes built-in wireless networking, which is great for folks
Chris: like me who just can't wire up their place.
Chris: Whether you're a tinker or a power user, or maybe you just want a simpler way
Chris: to run apps and VMs, check out Unraid.
Chris: Unraid 7.1 really gives you the next level too with ZFS support.
Chris: So if you want to import an existing system, like maybe you built an Ubuntu
Chris: box or a FreeNAS system or a Proxmox and you just want to migrate that over to Unraid, easy now.
Chris: Learn more, get started, and support the show by going to unraid.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Go play with the stuff we talk about nearly almost, I mean, unless we're really,
Chris: really early to something, almost everything we talk about gets published in
Chris: the Unraid App Store because that community is just killing it. Go check it out.
Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged.
Brent: We had a big week this week at the JB community, and we wanted to do a few shout
Brent: outs, specifically new members.
Chris: Yeah, we ran that bootleg promo recently, and we had Ryan Davis sign up,
Chris: Marcus L and Batty Morris become new core contributors to the program.
Chris: So we wanted to give them a shout out.
Chris: Something we're going to try to do more on the show.
Chris: And it does look like there are still 17 slots left as of this episode for that
Chris: bootleg promo code, which takes 15% off the core contributor or the Jupyter.PartyNetwork membership.
Wes: And that just keeps going, right? As long as you keep it correct.
Chris: That is a nice thing about it. And you can get either the ad-free version of
Chris: the show or the special bootleg version of the show.
Wes: Do you want less show or more show?
Chris: You pick. And it's just our way of saying thank you. And yeah,
Chris: so as we record right now, 17 slots left. If you go to linuxunplugged.com slash
Chris: membership, use the promo code bootleg, it'll take 15% off for the life of your membership.
Chris: We also wanted to give a shout out to some folks that are positive contributors
Chris: in our various community spots.
Chris: This is tricky because we could name a lot of people.
Chris: I mean, you know, I mean, there's the folks that show up in the mumble room
Chris: like Minimac and Byte and producer
Chris: Jeff and Otterbrain and Hybrid and Hawkins and others that show up,
Chris: Swami and others that show up on the regular and without even just showing up matters a lot to us.
Chris: And then there's folks that have been in our chat rooms for years or people
Chris: have been helping moderate.
Chris: But I just want to give shout outs this week specifically to Bite Bitten,
Chris: Hybrid Sarcasm and Magnolia Mayhem because throughout the week,
Chris: I saw them being helpful in different rooms across the communities in different
Chris: places, just answering quick questions, providing interesting content,
Chris: helping people with questions.
Wes: Caretaker in the room.
Chris: Yeah, it was really nice. And so I just wanted to give you guys a shout out.
Chris: Thank you very much. It does not go unnoticed.
Chris: And listener Soltros reached out to me this week and our talk about,
Chris: you know, customizing our distros inspired him, I think, to create Soltros OS,
Chris: which is his personal RPM OS3 based OS, a gaming optimized immutable Linux distribution
Chris: based on Fedora's Bootsy base image featuring MacBook hardware support, gaming enhancements,
Chris: Cache OS kernel performance, and the KDE Plasma desktop environment and developer friendly tools.
Wes: This is impressive.
Chris: Right? And it looks good, too. He sent me a screenshot, and I love it,
Chris: man. It's looking really good.
Chris: So he's got a picture of it up on the GitHub, too, if you want to check out
Chris: the link in the show notes.
Chris: Inspired by VenOS, bringing together the best of gaming and productivity.
Chris: It's a weird mix, but it's my mix.
Chris: It's like primarily productivity machine. And then on the weekends, a little bit of gaming.
Wes: Well, and, you know, much like in the NixOS world, you could rebase over to
Wes: Sultris OS and try it out if you wanted to. and the rebase back.
Chris: You know what? I might do that on the Dell laptop because the kid's been playing
Chris: Geometry Dash like a madman on there.
Chris: And it could use a little help. A little performance in the kernel could be a nice thing.
Chris: So check out Sultros OS. Looks like a fun project. And we have it linked.
Chris: We also got a tip on a feed issue that was impacting some of our members from
Chris: Power 46, it was, in the Matrix.
Wes: Yeah, they reached out Matrix then via email. And I guess they were using Miniflux,
Wes: which is a cool RSS feed reader. It's got like a UI you can use because I think
Wes: they like to consume on the desktop as well.
Wes: Okay, so with the ad, ad free and the bootleg have different back-end providers
Wes: at the moment, and so it works out that there's what's known as a link element
Wes: in the feed, and that just, like, provides you a link you can go to for a specific episode.
Wes: One provider has it, and the other doesn't. So for the ad free version,
Wes: in the feed reader, it would let you open up that link, which would have a little
Wes: webpage and a player that you could play.
Chris: I see.
Wes: But the bootleg feed does not have that.
Chris: A separate provider doesn't generate that item in the feed.
Wes: Exactly. And so Miniflux was falling back to just including the whole feed URL
Wes: as the external link for every episode, which wasn't really working.
Wes: So I kind of explained some of that. And then, unfortunately,
Wes: there wasn't a lot we could do.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: But that didn't stop Power46 because they submitted an issue upstream to Miniflux.
Wes: And the project has actually already merged a fix.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: So now we'll use the first enclosure link as a fallback if there isn't a link,
Wes: if that enclosure link exists, before finally doing what it was already doing. So that's great.
Wes: Thank you for doing that, Power46, and for reaching out.
Chris: Yeah. It's a great combination of a great community and open source,
Chris: and now it's fixed for everybody.
Wes: Yeah, maybe go try Miniflux.
Chris: Yeah. Could be worth it. Maybe if you want something on the desktop.
Chris: and it is also time to shout out our boosters and our baller booster this week is mr turd ferguson,
Chris: And he boosts 65,600 sats.
Chris: Do you gentlemen know of any open source health tracking software,
Chris: ideally something that would work with non-stock Android?
Wes: Open source.
Brent: Wow. I'm surprised we haven't thought about this yet.
Chris: I've kind of been kicking this around. I've come across a project that I've
Chris: bookmarked to check out.
Chris: But turd, I will include a link if you want to look into it. It's called Endurion.
Chris: I think it's a self-hosted fitness tracking service designed to give users full
Chris: control over their data.
Chris: And one of the neat things about it is, first of all, you can just import a
Chris: GPX file if you want to track a hike.
Chris: And we've covered an app recently that just runs in the background on Android
Chris: and just logs to a GPX file.
Chris: But it also looks like it works with Garmin Connect and a couple of other services
Chris: and it can import from like a Garmin fitness watch.
Wes: That's pretty handy.
Chris: Yeah, I haven't tried it.
Brent: You got my ears up.
Chris: It's got a nice UI that gives you like, so if you go on a hike,
Chris: it gives you a map overview.
Chris: A lot of what these fitness tracking things give you, but just locally designed
Chris: to give you full control over your data.
Chris: So it's available as a Docker image. It looks pretty comprehensive.
Chris: And if you want to give it a shot and report back, or if anybody wants to try
Chris: it in Darien, I think that's how you say it.
Chris: Let us know. Because it is something I've kicked around. Good question.
Chris: Yeah. And if it supports the Garmin stuff, well, we've already got that.
Chris: it'd be really nice too if it supported the apple watch and the wife could use
Chris: it thank you turd appreciate the baller boost good to hear from you again.
Wes: The do to buy it boosts in with 42 000 sats,
Wes: hello gentlemen i'm a few episodes behind but
Wes: i saw the matrix notification and i just had to boost oh thank you we appreciate
Wes: it we do i'm currently on vacation so greetings from somewhere at 37.04 blah
Wes: blah blah comma 25.08 yeah we got some gps coordinates okay.
Brent: West does your map have this feature.
Wes: Uh there's actually a plug-in module you can add as an overlay to the map.
Chris: Look at this thing. I'm impressed. Okay, I'm zooming out. I'm zooming out.
Brent: That's a lot of digits of precision, too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Chris: How do you suppose we say this place?
Wes: I'm going to say Antiparos?
Chris: Paradise, perhaps? It looks like paradise to me. It's a tiny island just off of a set of tiny islands.
Chris: Oh, my gosh. Look at all those little islands. Incredible.
Chris: so it's really kind of south east of uh greece yeah.
Wes: This looks beautiful.
Chris: That is really amazing holy crap that must be paradise i.
Wes: Think the dude is really abiding right now.
Chris: Oh my gosh the dude way to live it up thanks for thinking.
Wes: Of us even on your.
Chris: Vacation yeah man we really appreciate have a great time well.
Brent: We have the immunologist here with 5555 cents,
Brent: I use Aeon, which is relatively easy to modify by creating a changed Butterfest
Brent: image and then booting into it.
Brent: However, it is specifically a laptop OS. I do enjoy the whole DistroBox flat
Brent: pack transitional upgrade system quite a lot.
Brent: I also feel the pain of those .docx editing with reference software.
Brent: I use Zotero, specifically in scientific manuscripts. I strongly believe in
Brent: publicly funded science, people should actually use publicly funded software.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Wish LibreOffice would be fully compatible with the whole Word review system.
Chris: Man, wouldn't that be a change? That would be amazing. That's a solid boost. Thank you, Immune.
Brent: I've heard a couple people use Zotero and really love it.
Chris: I want to just touch on something really quick here. He says he's modifying
Chris: his AEM install by changing a Butterfest image. And then I presume,
Chris: yeah, he says he's booting into that.
Chris: That's a whole other way to approach that.
Wes: Maybe we should go try AM.
Brent: It doesn't sound very cloud native to me.
Chris: No, but maybe that's what makes it fun.
Wes: Maybe it's copy on write native.
Chris: It's...
Wes: Cow native, you know?
Chris: Oh my God, that's good.
Brent: Wes. That's the title. Someone remember that.
Chris: I'm going to go with period logical. I'm sure I'm getting that wrong,
Chris: but they came in with 2000 sats.
Chris: For the listener having an issue with Fountain or others, I had a lot of problems
Chris: trying to set up Fountain using a Gmail address. but then no issues using a different domain.
Chris: I never saw anything identifying this as a fix but thought it was worth sharing.
Chris: I have also heard that. Thank you. Plus one to that.
Chris: For folks that were trying to sign up with Fountain, something is going on with
Chris: Gmail and I don't know what it is because I use Gmail with my Fountain login
Chris: and it works fine but that is something I've heard reports of. So good looking out.
Chris: Thank you very much, period and appreciate that boost.
Wes: Thor comes in with 3,000 sats. I definitely need to give one of those Atomic Desktops a try now.
Wes: This is a boost for 623.50 Days of Blitz.
Wes: For the next episode, will there be a segment on how to build your own Nix-based installation image?
Wes: So it seems like part joke, but then also Thor goes on, sounds like it's trivial
Wes: for minor changes to atomic desktops like Bluefin, but how easy is it to build of Nix OS?
Wes: Not just configure, but say, make an image to deploy to your family or org.
Chris: Hmm, okay, so that's an interesting line right there.
Chris: If you're looking for something you want to deploy to other people,
Chris: it's an interesting question. I would actually argue that minor changes are
Chris: easier with Nix OS, right?
Chris: Because now I've essentially have a fork of Aurora that I need to go and make
Chris: sure I update from time to time from upstream or whatever.
Chris: And so now there's like an extra step in my upgrade process.
Chris: I don't just do like you just update. I have to go through a whole process now.
Chris: And if that was just so I could add Nebula and create slash Nix,
Chris: right? I mean, we're talking pretty significant shift in how I maintain my system
Chris: just for those two things.
Chris: But when you're talking about creating something that you would build and then
Chris: deploy as an image to multiple people, it would work pretty well for that, I think.
Wes: Yeah, I mean, you definitely have options, right? You can just do like a stock
Wes: install and then immediately apply a flake to that system if you want to.
Wes: Or you can totally bake in, you know, you can make your own install.
Chris: I think a flake would be the way to go. I think that's really the way to do
Chris: it, right, is take the flake approach.
Chris: Then also, you know, you can break things out a little bit, manage system and
Chris: application separately or
Chris: update individual applications and not have to update the entire system.
Chris: There's some other benefits to it, too, which, you know, give you flexibility
Chris: that maybe the other systems don't.
Wes: It doesn't change what gets applied but if you just want to build the iso there is a module,
Wes: uh in nix packages that lets you build like the installation iso so you can
Wes: also like totally customize that and presumably set it up to make it really
Wes: easy to just apply your flake at first installation if you wanted to yeah.
Chris: The output could be a vhd file the output could be an image file you know oci
Chris: container file it's a good question let us know if you go down the path.
Brent: Odyssey Westra boosted in a row of ducks.
Brent: Hey, wouldn't it be possible for you guys to shout out the sat streamers who
Brent: streamed over 2000 sats?
Brent: I don't know how feasible that is, but that would be pretty cool.
Brent: My opinion is that sat streaming will probably be more important for live streaming
Brent: and podcasts, especially music podcasts.
Brent: I don't like picking one specific artist to boost. I like them all sometimes.
Chris: That's a great point. And it's also sad to forget it, which is nice.
Chris: You just know if you're listening, you're sending back the value.
Wes: So remembering to boost or coming up with a topic, it just happened.
Chris: You know, Odyssey, you send this question at a good time because we have just
Chris: started kicking around like what kind of metrics do we want to pull to make
Chris: sure things are working correctly?
Chris: And to do that, you know, we have to move things into a database and then we
Chris: have to write scripts against that and pull that data and massage that data.
Chris: And one of the things we might be able to do is that type of thing.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: We'd have to talk about like how to build something like that.
Chris: But we have kind of like the early scripts that we pull for the boosties at
Chris: the end of the year. So we could probably modify something like that.
Wes: Yeah, we have a lot of the plumbing. actually, but we don't have it rigged to
Wes: answer this question just yet, but we'll try to take a look.
Chris: I think it's a great idea.
Wes: Absolutely.
Chris: We really appreciate all you SAD streamers out there, too. Gene Bean's back with 8,455 SADs.
Wes: Across five boosts.
Chris: Excellent boosting. He sends us a reference manager that he likes at techment.com
Chris: slash reference dash management dash software.
Chris: as also for the Word stuff. He says you could try only Office and maybe consider
Chris: the web version of MS Word.
Chris: I was wondering, I assumed that for some reason they weren't using the web version of MS Word.
Chris: I wondered if like the online Office 365 stuff would work. Web Word, Web Word, I like that.
Chris: Gene says, I keep my ESP home devices up to date so that my configs are uniform
Chris: and so that everything plays nice with the latest Home Assistant stuff.
Chris: I've learned the hard way, like other tools, if you lag behind too long,
Chris: it can be extra hard to get a current again.
Chris: Additionally, I have a voice PE and a couple of those cheap Atom voice things
Chris: integrated with Home Assistant, and those need updating quite frequently.
Chris: That's true, I do update my voice PE.
Chris: For the ESPs, you're right in the syntax sense, but one of the nice things is
Chris: much like an Atomic Linux build, it's a transactional update.
Chris: So if the build fails, it won't update the ESP device. And then you can go back
Chris: and correct what needs fixed and then build it again.
Chris: In theory, Gene, you could pretty safely leap fairly far ahead,
Chris: but you're right. I probably don't want to fall too far behind.
Chris: It's one of the reasons I want to update my Home Assistant to better hardware.
Wes: It is a good principle, that's for sure.
Brent: Are people version controlling their ESP?
Brent: I have all sorts of questions about Home Assistant, I realize,
Brent: because that would be a handy thing.
Chris: I suppose you could. He says, I want someone to integrate BitChat,
Chris: Bridget, we talked about BitChat last week, into the MeshTastic firmware.
Chris: So you could optionally have people on both chatting away, say at a camp out or at a conference.
Chris: Each participating in a MeshTastic radio would then be able to support nearby
Chris: people in this theoretical world.
Wes: Oh, great idea.
Chris: I do feel like there's a crossover between BitChat and MeshTastic where you
Chris: have something that can use LoRa and something that can use Bluetooth and you're
Chris: taking advantage of both. Maybe one day.
Wes: MaxiMesh.
Chris: He says, for my laptop, I've loved 95% of Nix, but I'm bouncing to Ubuntu for
Chris: now for compatibility of select applications.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Still love Nix OS. I'm still using it in many places. I'm going to try a normal
Chris: distribution plus Nix for my laptop for a bit.
Wes: Also a great option. Let us know how it goes. See what you think.
Chris: Might try Bluefin, too, he says, and do a little dual boot.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Solid, Gene. Keep us updated. We want to know how it goes.
Wes: Thanks for writing back. Marcel boosts in with 5,000 sats.
Wes: You asked to boost in on whether we're using immutable OSes.
Wes: Well, I finally upgraded my 10-year-old Arch laptop to a Framework 16 running NixOS.
Chris: Nice upgrade.
Wes: I have a NixOS question for you.
Chris: All right.
Wes: How do you version control your Etsy NixOS slash configuration.nix?
Brent: Chris.
Wes: I have my home manager config in Git, of course, but I've seen different schools
Wes: of thought on forums for the root config.
Wes: Some sim link it to their home folder while others run Git as root in slash Etsy.
Chris: Well, what you do is you do old.configuration.nix, really old.configuration.
Brent: Do you append the dates just to keep yourself organized?
Chris: No, I just trust the file system for that. All right, what's the right way to do it?
Chris: What's the right way? Does everything have to be in git these days, boys?
Brent: Just git.
Wes: If you want a history of it, and you want to be able to roll back.
Chris: Oh, all right.
Brent: Well, I can tell you what I'm doing. I'm a reasonable man.
Wes: You want a time-traveling database?
Chris: All right, what are you doing, Brent?
Brent: Well, you know, when I was learning Nix, I had the little, you know,
Brent: a good Wes on one of my shoulders and a bad Chris on the other shoulder.
Brent: And it seemed like Wes won out.
Brent: So I've been linking to the home directory and doing a sim link there and then
Brent: doing version control there.
Brent: So that main, the main reason when I was first starting was so I could just
Brent: use Kate without needing elevated privileges.
Chris: Oh, that, yeah.
Brent: That has worked great. Great. I have to tell you, I've rarely used the Git portion
Brent: of it, but that's the whole point of Git is you hardly ever need it.
Brent: But when you do, you really do.
Brent: So, Chris, I feel like maybe you can get on board here at some point.
Chris: I think the solution is just simply you do different versions,
Chris: old, dot, old, dot, dot, back,
Chris: and then you throw sync thing at the entire thing across all your machines and
Chris: then just put certain includes that you want and you're good to go. What's the problem?
Wes: I mean, especially if you use Flakes. Git and Flakes are just,
Wes: you know, they pair so nice. And I'm with Brent.
Wes: You know, if you, under Etsy, NixOS, you can just put Flake.nix.
Wes: sim link that wherever you want i i just
Wes: say i might put it like under where i have the rest of my source code uh and
Wes: then you can have regular get regular user permissions and then especially with
Wes: flakes anytime you update you can see it just as a diff you can immediately
Wes: roll back if you want to and then you have a nice little change log from your
Wes: commit history of all the stuff that you've done and.
Chris: It sounds very traceable and like you can figure out where things need to be
Chris: fixed and take action it's wonderful.
Brent: You know what i've actually done because i didn't want
Brent: to post any of my git configs
Brent: to anything public because i figured i
Brent: would totally screw that up and make myself vulnerable i actually
Brent: have sim linked into a next cloud
Brent: directory so i actually have a nix os directory on
Brent: next cloud that just has a bunch of machines listed i know
Brent: there are better ways of doing this but i basically have
Brent: a folder for each of my machines and then configs within there
Brent: and i've sim linked the folder that is on that particular machine so it's like
Brent: i do it once and then but that way i can access the configs of all my machines
Brent: from any machine and i can remotely deploy if needed for a server or two i do
Brent: that which is really handy that.
Chris: Sounds like a solution that would work for me.
Brent: Yeah it's not too too bad um you know add get in there but chris i figured if
Brent: you want to stick with your trusted solution you could just append like a hash to your phone.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: That'd be a better way to do it.
Brent: Well, we have a boost here from our dear PJ. 12,140 sets.
Brent: oh it's for me brent almost had it one two one four zero that's 12 years one
Brent: month four days prior to the release of linux unplugged six two one.
Chris: 12 years all right based on the youtube publish date of linux arch show the
Chris: arch way published on june 2nd 2013 well there you go wow,
Chris: That was a little bit before PewDiePie Thank you, PJ Nice to hear from you Appreciate the boost,
Chris: Doornail comes in with Doornail, I should say 7887, sorry Comes in with 2,800 and 34 sats,
Chris: Zip code multiplied by 16 This one shouldn't require too many paper cuts Also,
Chris: another OpenShift ping for you as well.
Chris: Oh, right. Thank you. Thank you for the reminder.
Chris: We get so caught up in everything we're doing, I think.
Wes: Yeah, how's that cluster set up going, Chris?
Chris: Right. We got to get back to that. Oh, right. Jeez.
Wes: What was the amount again?
Chris: 2, 8, 3, 4, multiply by 16.
Wes: Okay, so that's 4, 5, 3, 4, 4.
Chris: Okay, so now we just need to translate that in our book here.
Wes: We got to go find it in the map, bro.
Chris: Yeah, so we have a book that tells us zip codes to map coordinates.
Brent: The decoder, we call it.
Chris: Put that right there.
Wes: It's very old. It's got like a, I don't know. I don't know what kind of leather binding this is.
Chris: I think it's pleather.
Brent: Did someone spill coffee on it?
Chris: Oh, yeah. That was a while ago.
Brent: Was it?
Chris: That was.
Wes: Let's go with lucky city new Carlisle, Ohio.
Chris: Hello, Ohio.
Chris: Thank you for the boost.
Brent: You know I've never been to Ohio.
Wes: Me either.
Brent: Gotta put that on the list.
Chris: I've been, I believe, at least once, because I went to OhioFest way back in the day.
Wes: I've seen a lot of ads for Ohio.
Chris: My kids say the word Ohio ironically a lot. I don't know what that's about.
Brent: Like Ohio?
Chris: Ohio, they say. Yeah. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Amorph Sausage comes in with 5,000 sats.
Chris: Well, he says, unfortunately, my experience with Universal Blue, a.k.a.
Chris: Bazite, was not good.
Brent: Oh, no.
Chris: Yeah, he says on initial setup, it was fine. But over the first month,
Chris: boot time increased with every boot to eventually get to about 10 minutes.
Wes: That's not ideal.
Chris: When I checked what takes so long to start, I saw an OS Tree or Ublue service,
Chris: I can't remember the name, taking eight plus minutes.
Chris: So I switched to CacheOS, and I'm very happy. I got my parents on Cachy 2.
Chris: It kind of went to a disaster. Now they're on Mint.
Chris: The OSes seem to not suit every PC tower. That OS seems not to suit every PC
Chris: tower, and I don't know why.
Chris: But I'd love to give Bazzite another try, but I'm scared about ruining my setup.
Chris: But I do love the immutable idea.
Chris: That is a particularly weird problem that I've never heard anybody else report.
Chris: And I'm wondering if something just went sideways.
Chris: And how long ago was that? It might be worth another shot. You know,
Chris: the projects in the last four years, it's come a long way.
Chris: I think maybe you give it another try there, Amorph, and let us know.
Chris: Tell us how the sausage was made, okay? And thank you for the boost.
Wes: Not a zip code boost in with 8,888 sats.
Wes: Coming in from Podverse, boosting from the only country that has one zip code per building?
Chris: Oh, I've heard of this.
Brent: Can I guess? Can I guess?
Wes: Is it on the Mighty Map? Love the recent Red Hat episodes and the Tui Challenge. Well, thank you.
Wes: A couple of weeks back, I fell into the Shaz... How do you say this?
Brent: Shamoah.
Wes: There we go. Thank you. Rabbit Hole, a past show mention. It's a blast once
Wes: you get it tiled in. Does anyone on the JB crew still use it?
Wes: I'm also now feeling like Bluefin might be the next logical step towards the
Wes: cloud-native desktop. Thanks for the great show.
Chris: Okay, okay, okay.
Wes: Yeah, you guys got to help me out on this one.
Chris: Now, the UK actually is known for having zip codes with a high level of granularity,
Chris: but I don't think he's talking. I'm just saying, I'm just saying before they write in, I know that.
Chris: I know Singapore and Hong Kong both use six-digit codes that uniquely identify
Chris: sectors or buildings. So it could be Singapore or Hong Kong.
Chris: seems like a long shot what do you think brent.
Brent: Well i mean i think the japanese get this one right i think they're super sophisticated
Brent: and we're just like you know 100 years in the past in the past.
Chris: Really okay i didn't know the japanese do this that's my guess okay i know that
Chris: the netherlands has a pretty granular postal code system too so this could be a few but per building oh.
Wes: One of My old maps seems to maybe say hungry.
Chris: Hungry, but there's a few options here. That's a rare one, though.
Chris: That's pretty neat. Think about the handiness there.
Wes: I don't know how to.
Chris: You know what I mean?
Wes: In Zala County, maybe?
Chris: Just the zip code tells you write the building to go to. That's so handy.
Wes: But in theory, they should be showing me a specific building then.
Chris: Wow. Let us know not a zip code.
Wes: Please do. Thanks for boosting in.
Chris: Now I got to know. I'm stumped.
Wes: I got to get an upgrade on this map kit.
Chris: Adversary 17 came in below the 2000s at cutoff, but we got to give him a shout
Chris: out. He says, sorry, I haven't boosted recently. I have been streaming those sats.
Chris: I'm getting married next week. So life is hectic.
Wes: I bet.
Chris: Congratulations. Nice to just hear I have a check in during the middle of all of that.
Chris: Wow, that's so neat that we get to hear that kind of stuff. I really appreciate
Chris: that. It's really cool knowing that. Thanks, adversaries. And congratulations.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supported episode 624 of the Unplugged program.
Chris: We really appreciate it. You know, the thing is, is we work hard,
Chris: and this segment right here is sort of the reinforcement factor of that.
Chris: It motivates us. We give good signal from you. The conversations are great.
Chris: It reminds us of things that we've committed to, like the OpenShift stuff.
Chris: Got to get back on that. So it means a lot to us. And if you like to send a
Chris: boost, of course, you can use the Fountain app, or you can go down the self-hosting
Chris: route with something like AlbiHub and Podverse.
Chris: A shout out to everybody who streamed those sats. 22 of you streamed them as
Chris: you listen and collectively you stacked 44,891 sats for the show this week.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters, the show stacked a grand total of 210,139 sats.
Chris: Join the fun, grab Fountain FM. They've been making a lot of improvements over
Chris: there and getting closer and closer to making boosting easier than ever.
Chris: And also a big thank you to our members who put that support on autopilot and
Chris: make each episode possible. We really appreciate you.
Chris: And we do this for you.
Chris: Check out the links in the show notes for easy ways to boost.
Chris: We have them all right over there. Okay, boys.
Chris: This is an app that was sent in to us by listener Nick.
Chris: And in the members pre-stream, the bootleg, we were talking about some of the
Chris: problems that Bottles is facing.
Chris: And Bottles is an application that makes it really easy to set up individual
Chris: wine environments to run Windows applications, and they include some installer
Chris: scripts for common popular applications.
Chris: So Nick sent in WinApps.
Chris: WinApps. And what is neat about it, and it works best with their key-supported
Chris: applications. But like what you were talking about back in the day last week, it pops them out.
Wes: Oh, I'm going to have to try this.
Chris: And it includes integration with things like Nautilus.
Wes: WinApp's unified software experience for Linux.
Chris: Yes, it uses Docker or Podman or LibVert, and then it can pop these individual
Chris: Windows applications out and make them feel on Plasma or Gnome like they're as native as possible.
Chris: so if you need to be in windows a lot this could
Chris: be a you know a word or something this could be
Chris: a great way to do it now you want to make sure your applications on there
Chris: like gonna work for sure list it doesn't have to be on here for it to work or
Chris: not but you know you're gonna have a good time but look at this list after effects
Chris: adobe audition i mean illustrator right all the adobe stuff wow internet explorer
Chris: the microsoft office suite from one note to word and outlook and Publisher and
Chris: Vizio and Visual Studio.
Chris: You could also just do a full Windows RDP session as well, and it could just
Chris: be a hyper-efficient way to run Windows applications.
Wes: I like that MIRC is on here.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: But also PowerShell and Command Pro.
Chris: So this system, it queries Windows for all the installed applications,
Chris: and then it creates shortcuts for those Windows applications on the GNU Linux
Chris: OS, and then it uses FreeRDP on the back end to render the Windows applications
Chris: alongside your GNU Linux applications.
Chris: How neat is this?
Chris: It's so great. And there's an official taskbar widget that enables seamless
Chris: administration of the Windows subsystem and to launch Windows applications.
Chris: So if you want to add that, you can, which is just so slick.
Chris: The whole thing is just so neat. I didn't even know about it until Nick sent it in.
Chris: And it's using the GNU Afero general public license, which is a free copyleft
Chris: software license for all kinds of work specifically designed to ensure cooperation
Chris: with the community in the case of network or server software.
Brent: I'm still regularly blown away that we don't hear about some of these applications.
Brent: Like we do a lot of just sleuthing around to find the craziest applications
Brent: to solve the craziest problems.
Brent: And this seems like such an obvious one that should have been on our radar sooner.
Brent: It's a really good one, Nick.
Chris: Yes, it's fun. It takes me back too, to the old days of trying to run these
Chris: apps and using the different technologies.
Wes: Suddenly I'm like excited to go try to run a Windows application. What's going on here?
Chris: Could I run the Creative Cloud suite? If I could, would I? I don't know.
Brent: I feel, Chris, like this might solve your Bluefin software availability challenge.
Brent: You could just use the Windows Store.
Chris: Oh, that's so funny.
Wes: Well, you could probably run WSL, right?
Chris: Oh, man. You know what? That would be like some serious distroception right
Chris: there, Wes Payne. That's a good one.
Chris: That just about brings us to the end. If you have any tips for my Home Assistant
Chris: hardware setup, Brent's backup ideas for both the server-to-server,
Chris: the desktops, and really, I think the Android.
Chris: Like, what's really ideal on the Android? Say we did want to do a full Android backup.
Chris: Please boost in or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact for that.
Chris: Also, if you want to make the power user move, join us live.
Chris: The program is live on Sundays.
Chris: You can get it converted to your local time at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash
Chris: calendar, or if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we'll publish it ahead of time
Chris: and it'll just be right in your playlist.
Chris: And what do we got to tell people every week, Wes? What do we got to let them know?
Chris: Chapters and transcripts.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. Podcasting 2.0 certified over here.
Wes: We've got transcripts so you can follow along or go search for something if you want.
Wes: And easy chapter markers to go to your favorite segment.
Chris: Right back. Play it, listen again, or skip it. Thanks so much for listening
Chris: to this week's episode of the unplugged program and we'll see you right back here next sunday.