Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up, we have just one or two self-hosted apps
Chris: that once you unlock will give you free legal TV, the same stuff you're paying
Chris: multiple streaming services for.
Chris: Turns out we were completely wrong about IPTV, and with just a few apps,
Chris: a little bit of Linux, you can finally unlock something that I've been paying
Chris: $100 at least a month for. I'm going to cut all of that out,
Chris: save $100 a month, and tell you how I'm doing it.
Chris: I'm cutting the streaming cord, and there's some great tools to make it. So it's really great.
Chris: Then Carl's going to drop by and give us an update on Cosmic and their big milestone
Chris: that landed this week. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and more.
Chris: So before we get to all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our
Chris: virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Chris: Hello, and hello up there in the quiet listening, too. Thank you for being here.
Chris: Mumble Room's always going on a Sunday when we do the live show.
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Chris: All right. So before we get into the show, I wanted to reflect on a theme of
Chris: the year because we're almost out of episodes and there's no place else for
Chris: us to talk about this except for now, because we are down to the final wire.
Chris: Home Lab holidays just around the corner.
Chris: We're going to have a live stream this Friday coming up. If you'd like to join
Chris: us, it'll be Friday the 19th.
Chris: We'll be doing the Holiday Home Lab live and we'd love to have you there.
Chris: But before we get to our end of year shows I wanted to talk about something
Chris: that I think maybe the show didn't pay as much attention to this year that it
Chris: should have and that has been the end of Windows 10,
Chris: and I think we saw more people coming to Linux than we initially expected because
Chris: we have seen these Windows releases come and go over the years and I don't know
Chris: if Vista and Windows 8 didn't convince people to try Linux I didn't think it would be Windows 11.
Wes: Remember when Windows 10 was Can it be the.
Chris: Last one? The one that went forever?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So Windows 11 does seem to have finally pushed at least some people to try Linux.
Chris: And we saw a handful of distros this year focus on being a Windows alternative,
Chris: trying to make it easy for people to transition.
Chris: And many of them are trying to replace or recreate the Windows experience,
Chris: while others are going their own route.
Chris: And System76, I think, is a company that is positioned to help those Windows
Chris: users transition that are looking for a full package, hardware support,
Chris: and a Linux environment.
Chris: And you might recall during our recent Texas Linux Fest trip in October,
Chris: on our way home, we swung by the System76 factory to see how things were going
Chris: while they were in the final stretch of development for Cosmic.
Chris: Well, this week, Pop!OS 24.04 LTS with Cosmic Desktop 1.0 shipped.
Chris: It's here. It's available right now.
Chris: It's real. And Carl, the CEO of System76, joins us right now to talk about it.
Chris: Carl, welcome back to the show. Last time we came to visit you,
Chris: this time you're coming to visit us, and it's a big day, sir.
Chris: Congratulations on the new release.
Carl: Oh, thank you very much, and thank you for having me on the show.
Carl: It's always a pleasure with you guys.
Chris: Okay, so let's tell everybody what's happened. This week, Pop!
Chris: OS 24.04 LTS shipped with Cosmic Desktop, and is this considered Cosmic 1.0 or Cosmic Stable now?
Carl: It is. We reached 1.0 after about three and a half years of work and a lot of
Carl: design work that came even before that.
Carl: So, yeah, it's a major milestone.
Carl: I can't tell you the endurance it takes to build something over three years
Carl: and then finally get there.
Carl: It's actually a little exhausting, but it's really exciting, too.
Chris: Oh, I bet.
Chris: Would you do it again?
Carl: Absolutely. I love making things. Yeah. You know, it took us longer to build
Carl: Cosmic than it took to build a factory.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Wow.
Chris: Has it been three years, five years, three years? How long has it been?
Carl: Yeah, it was about three and a half years of development time,
Carl: development design time.
Carl: I think the factory was up and running really in about 18 months.
Chris: Oh man.
Carl: Now that was, you know, first shot factory,
Carl: but that's not actually that different than first shot you know
Carl: desktop environment release like there's now you know we didn't have all the
Carl: machinery that we wanted we didn't have all the capabilities we wanted and those
Carl: grew over time but still just to get the point where we're doing the things
Carl: we need to do to ship hardware uh to get all the things we need to do to ship
Carl: cosmic took uh took about twice the time i.
Chris: Bet you probably got more pushback over launching a desktop environment than
Chris: you did trying to manufacture in the States, too.
Carl: You know, not really. No? Yeah, I think... I don't know if we just didn't see
Carl: it, but from my perspective, people were really encouraging.
Chris: I mean, yes, but it also seemed like a crazy endeavor, to be honest.
Chris: I mean, like, who has time to build computers and laptops and support all of
Chris: that and also create a desktop environment? It just seemed...
Carl: Super ambitious it is yeah it's it's ambitious
Carl: but i think like you kind of you run
Carl: up against some kind of limitation and you can either choose just ignore it
Carl: and keep doing what you're doing or you take the dive and do something totally
Carl: new and ambitious and kind of crazy and and that is definitely our mo i mean
Carl: i mean you don't build u.s.
Wes: Factories either i think um the the history with pop i mean from you know cosmic
Wes: sort of starting as customizations on top of GNOME setup and the years now that
Wes: you've spent shipping, you know, a different,
Wes: I would say improved version from this Ubuntu base.
Wes: I think that built credibility that showed like, oh, you guys really can do
Wes: your own thing and it has been worth doing.
Wes: And I think that maybe bought some trust and willingness to wait for Cosmic in the community.
Carl: Yeah, it's a good point. Once you've like bitten off smaller pieces and shown
Carl: what you could do and then you, yeah, you gain that trust over time.
Carl: I'm almost the opposite. I give 100% trust and then it only can get shaved away over time.
Carl: But I understand that, especially when this is something I think we proved what
Carl: we could do in enabling hardware that wasn't there before and that was part
Carl: of what we were doing with Pop!
Carl: OS and then we started.
Carl: We always listen to our customers and what they're doing. So when we came up
Carl: against things that we really wanted to do because we knew they were asking
Carl: for it, we just worked on a new type of user experience inside of Pop!
Carl: OS on top of GNOME with GNOME extensions. That worked really well.
Carl: But our ability to continue to push the envelope, do the things that we were
Carl: hoping to do, and do it in a frictionless way was becoming limited.
Carl: And now the world's always true.
Carl: We could do anything, you know, it was a lot of work getting to the point where
Carl: a customer can go from PopOS 2204 with GNOME that had been around for a very
Carl: long time to a completely brand new desktop.
Carl: And we felt like you could do that without feeling like you lost things and
Carl: you actually feel like you gained things.
Carl: Now, there are some things that are there that, you know, gaps we didn't fill.
Carl: I think our Wacom tablet experience isn't great and that's something we're going to have to do.
Carl: But overall, I think we covered it with a basis that did more for users on the
Carl: whole, for most users that are on PopQuest.
Brent: Carl, remember one of the big questions three years ago when Cosmic was first
Brent: announced that you'd be working on that?
Brent: But also I remember when Pop was first starting out, one of the big questions
Brent: in the community in general was, is this going to dilute the efforts of System76 and their mission?
Brent: I'm just curious how that has showed up for you and the team and how you've
Brent: kind of mitigated that happening, considering that software is quite a bit different than hardware.
Carl: Well, we only ship Linux computers. That's all we do.
Carl: We don't do Windows, we don't do anything else. And so...
Carl: The software that we ship is how we're representing Linux to the world.
Carl: It's not two different things.
Carl: So you can have the greatest hardware in the world and not be doing the things
Carl: that your customers are asking for with the operating system. It doesn't matter.
Carl: You can have a great opportunity to have some terrible hardware and it's not going to work.
Carl: It is kind of shocking that I think we have 60 people at System76.
Carl: And amongst 60 people, we're able to do all this. But I think we have the right
Carl: 60 people that can do it at a very high level.
Chris: So I want to kind of shift gears and talk about what end users should kind of
Chris: expect from release cadence and also availability on distros outside of POP.
Chris: So let's take it one by one. So now that...
Chris: We have 1.0. Is this a every six month release? Is this a one month?
Chris: Is this every three years?
Chris: What kind of cadence should users expect when they're using pop for a release?
Chris: Or is it is it something else? Is it maybe all the time?
Carl: So we're going to adopt the same type of methodology we use building pop OS.
Carl: For everything that we did on top of pop OS, it was a rolling release.
Carl: So popos always has newer kernels newer mesa the extensions evolved,
Carl: throughout during the release there weren't you know big drops after you know
Carl: every six months or something like that so we're going to use the same kind
Carl: of games with cosmic and it'll be interesting because,
Carl: I think it'll be the only desktop environment that's using a rolling release style.
Carl: But some of the foundational architectural ways that it was developed enable
Carl: us to do that in a high-quality way.
Carl: So we don't have to break APIs to continue moving forward with the desktop.
Carl: In GNOME Shell, extensions need to be rebased for the new version of GNOME that
Carl: comes out every six months, and that's not necessary for applets in the Cosmic panel, for instance.
Carl: So just some of those fundamental early architectural decisions means that we
Carl: will be able to move faster and do so without breaking things as we go.
Carl: We still have things to learn. We learned stuff during the beta period that
Carl: sometimes it's like the compositor touches so many things that it's, it's.
Carl: Almost impossible without wider, even with really extensive testing.
Carl: It's almost impossible to catch everything. So we need some time where the community
Carl: is also helping us with running a testing repo, just to help us with some of those corner cases.
Carl: But I'm confident we'll get that nailed down to the point where we can move
Carl: really quickly and deliver features.
Carl: Just as an example, when we finished HDR, why wait four months to get HDR?
Carl: How about we just ship HDR? You take that frosted glass in the compositor and in the UI.
Carl: When we have that ready, if it's been fully QA'd, it's been fully tested,
Carl: why wait up to six months to ship it? We can just ship that to our users.
Carl: So we'll continue with that process and continue refining it and do it in a
Carl: way that you can trust a stable release to operate.
Carl: So we're not going to see regressions.
Carl: I'm sure we'll have a couple little ones here or there. But we will forever
Carl: get better at that process because I think moving fast is really, really important.
Chris: And I kind of know the answer to the second part of the question,
Chris: which was it's already available on other distributions.
Chris: That's just sort of inherent to how the community is built.
Chris: There's people that are for the Fedora distribution and for NixOS that are actively
Chris: packaging it. So that part is actually already done, right?
Chris: I think it's pretty close to when you release something, it can be packaged
Chris: up for the other distributions.
Carl: I don't know why, but I was kind of surprised at the uptake and how broad it
Carl: was. It's really across the whole ecosystem.
Carl: I think I had memories of Unity. I think Unity was difficult for other companies.
Carl: Other distros to package because they were using forked versions of GTK.
Carl: So GNOME and Unity on the same system without these forks wouldn't work.
Carl: So that's something we were careful to do to make it easy to package Cosmic
Carl: and make sure that Cosmic wasn't conflicting with other desktop Linux,
Carl: Linux desktop experiences or environments, so they could be packaged and shipped
Carl: alongside those others.
Chris: So I have one question that's just a weird Chris question, if I could say it right.
Chris: And I was wondering, I thought when you told me in the summer that we'd see
Chris: it ship, I thought maybe you'd be kind of aiming, and maybe you were,
Chris: this is my question, for October to kind of nail that Windows 10 end of life.
Chris: And I'm wondering, second part of this is, is System76 picking up some Windows
Chris: users that are not happy with Windows 11?
Chris: And is the timing of Cosmic 1.0, is it kind of related to this at all?
Chris: Is this part of the goal is trying to pick up some Windows converts?
Carl: We always want to show Windows users how much better it can be on Linux. Sure.
Carl: That's always our objective. But the timing was about the product being completed,
Carl: not about Windows phasing out Windows 10. For Microsoft phasing out Windows 10.
Chris: I thought so. But I thought in a weird way, wouldn't it be great if Cosmic could
Chris: just sort of be there, landing at the right time to pick up some of those expats?
Carl: Well, and that's an ongoing thing. It only started in October.
Carl: Now I think they're looking for a new home and it's going to be some time where,
Carl: especially when you think about the enterprise that has these huge fleets that
Carl: they're thinking about how they're going to migrate and what they're going to do.
Carl: And I don't know how viable Linux is, depending on what their enterprise networks
Carl: are like, but those will take even longer before they start making their decisions
Carl: and moving over different platforms.
Chris: Well, I think if they can look at the specs and the interesting details,
Chris: I think you've got a really compelling story here for them, right?
Chris: Because it's a 24-04 LTS base, but with a modern, updated desktop environment.
Chris: That's kind of an exciting combination because the parts that you want to stay
Chris: kind of fresh stay fresh, and the bits you want to be old and reliable stay
Chris: old and reliable, and that's going to be really appealing to a certain set of
Chris: Windows users. So I hope they find it.
Chris: Back to us Linux users, as just people listening to this show,
Chris: what's kind of the number one way they can help you guys out going forward now
Chris: that the 1.0 is here? What sort of necks that you need from the community?
Carl: The community that's built around it, because we've been doing alpha releases,
Carl: I think it's maybe been 18 months or so.
Carl: Between the alpha releases and the beta releases, we have this fantastic community
Carl: of people that are building apps and applets and testing and filing bug reports.
Carl: The thing about computing is that it is exceptionally broad,
Carl: the amount of hardware out there, the age of hardware, how people use their computers.
Carl: And even with all that time, that really helped us to narrow the gap between
Carl: what we see in the lab. And we have 20 years of hardware to test.
Carl: But what we see in the lab and what people see in the wild, that's helped us a lot.
Carl: And there's always more. So I think if I were to ask for something,
Carl: it would be to communicate with us when there's something.
Carl: If you've installed Pop! OS and some particular thing doesn't work,
Carl: we're here to listen and work on things and improve it.
Carl: And so, so instead of like, this is garbage, I'm going to put something else on.
Carl: We're here to, we're here to listen and, and build and, and make the best experience for you.
Chris: It's pretty exciting to just be here. It's amazing.
Carl: Yeah.
Chris: It's massive congratulations to you and the team and Jeremy and everybody that's
Chris: been working so hard on this.
Chris: Everybody's tested it, the community around it. Just a huge congratulations, Carl.
Chris: It's a, it's a, it's a holiday gift for all of us.
Wes: At the start of the 11th.
Carl: It's a cosmic Christmas.
Chris: Ah, there you go. Very good. Thank you, Carl.
Carl: I've been waiting to use that one for the longest time.
Chris: I can tell.
Carl: Look at the door for me.
Chris: It's a cosmic Christmas, everybody.
Carl: Yes.
Brent: Well, as a little something different for the last couple of weeks,
Brent: I've been like in winter,
Brent: full winter hibernation mode here, hanging out with my parents and they do the
Brent: channel flicking and they watch the news in strange amounts of quantity per day.
Brent: But what I've noticed as a change since I've done this with them years and years
Brent: ago, is they're constantly like, okay, we want to, I don't know,
Brent: watch the, I'm so Canadian, watch the hockey game.
Brent: And then they're They're like, oh yeah, that's on channel 675.
Brent: And then my mother's like, oh, I want to watch my cooking show.
Brent: They're just bouncing constantly from like streaming or, oh no, it's on this app.
Brent: No, no, you actually need to, you know, you can only watch that on the computer
Brent: or your phone or whatever. And they're constantly moving around between all
Brent: these different apps and stuff.
Brent: And it's, I don't even sign up to any streaming services.
Brent: They've got like four or something, plus all these other, like they have cable too.
Brent: And like, but they can't get everything that they want with cable because it
Brent: needs packages. You can't just sign up for like just the channel they want to watch.
Brent: You got to get, it's exhausting. And I'm just like watching from a distance.
Brent: And Chris, you watch a ton of TV.
Brent: You got to have a solution to this, right? Please bring a modern solution to these problems.
Chris: I mean, I do watch a fair amount every night. I watch a little,
Chris: you know, with dinner and then usually a couple hours maybe after that.
Chris: So it's, well, an hour. So it's a big part and you're right.
Wes: You also end up doing some, you know, TV for work.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. And it's for capturing clips and whatnot. There's a lot of that.
Chris: And I think I did a little audit and I think it's six streaming services.
Chris: Some of it's because I have Prime and I pay for the Apple crap for my family
Chris: because they all have the iPhone.
Chris: So you get like the Apple TV with that. So some of it's like you got it anyways.
Chris: But if you count all of them, it's.
Wes: How many logins do you have at the end of the day.
Brent: Right?
Wes: How many apps can you use on your TV?
Chris: It's bad. And then you have the different apps you have to pop between.
Chris: And, you know, the promise was is that we could save money and just have the
Chris: content we wanted. And it is so bad that I can understand why people just want to go to pirating.
Chris: But you don't have to go that route. It turns out you can do it legally for
Chris: free using some really great apps.
Chris: And I've heard of IPTV for years. You've probably heard of it out there or at
Chris: least familiar with the term.
Chris: I mean, you could really just describe it as HLS video over the Internet. That's really IPTV.
Chris: What surprised me is just how rich and deep the content is out there and how
Chris: much money I'm throwing away by not just taking advantage of what's out there for free.
Chris: And I think the missing piece for me was I didn't have a clear way to take all
Chris: of these disparate RTMP HLS streams that are all over the Internet.
Chris: That the industry is using behind the scenes to just send content between each
Chris: other over the open frickin Internet.
Chris: I didn't have a way to like bring all of that together and then just sit there and watch it on my TV.
Chris: You know, that last 20% just made it unapproachable. And so I was doing stupid
Chris: things like paying for YouTube TV so I could watch the local news during the
Chris: winter because we have crazy flooding happening here in the Pacific Northwest.
Chris: So I always end up, YouTube TV is almost $100 a month now. It's outrageous.
Chris: So I came across an app called Dispatcher. Dispatch R. And it is a open source
Chris: powerhouse for managing IPTV streams and all of the program data, the EPG data.
Chris: And it gives you a brilliant interface that then produces a playlist that lots
Chris: of different applications can ingest and make it super simple to have a curated
Chris: playlist of IPTV channels.
Chris: And this dispatcher app will also proxy some of the streaming to make sure you're
Chris: optimizing bandwidth and reduce the overall connections that the client might
Chris: natively make to the RTMP stream.
Chris: And it does so effectively that I can watch four channels simultaneously over my LTE connection.
Chris: Is about 4.5 megabits when I'm doing this. And yet I can watch four streams
Chris: simultaneously with this thing.
Chris: Obviously, it has a lot of different backend, like F of MPEG things going on and whatnot.
Chris: But the other thing that I really like about it is it has a video on demand DVR functionality.
Chris: So kind of turning the page back a bit, sort of like YouTube TV offers.
Chris: So I can record the local news.
Chris: And then it integrates with SponsorBlock after the fact and other tools.
Chris: And it can process the video after the fact. and remove the commercials, which is really nice.
Chris: And it's got a nice, smooth web UI that's very intuitive. I figured it out in
Chris: just a couple of minutes. And then it can output the signal that you ingest
Chris: in HD Home Run format, M3U, XML TV.
Chris: So you can pull like the TV guide and the video feed into Jellyfin or Plex or
Chris: other applications that we'll talk about.
Chris: And this dispatcher is a total unlock for
Chris: this incredible world of content that's available
Chris: in every country in every language and there's
Chris: probably a thousand channels that you would find interesting and like myself
Chris: after you've gone through them you'll probably end up with a hundred that you
Chris: stick with a hundred different channels of free content some of its 2k resolution
Chris: some of its 1080p resolution it's really something impressive but there's just
Chris: a few nuances and a few resources you need to make it all work and that's what we're going to get into.
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Brent: Now, Wes, a couple of weeks ago, when you convinced me to watch baseball with
Brent: you, you were doing something similar to this, just like finding random, I think, IPTV streams.
Brent: So how would this have helped your situation back then? What do you need to,
Brent: you know, instead of doing it manually, how is this bringing it all together?
Wes: I was doing a lot of it manually at that point. I had found a site that if I
Wes: was just like casting a tab, probably would have been the easiest way to do it in a simple setup.
Wes: And if i didn't want to like remix with the my own audio stream in there uh as well but,
Wes: they were really set up for that model i noticed
Wes: after chris kind of tuned me into this dispatcher which
Wes: i've only tried a little bit we'll get into that i've found the local
Wes: hockey game on there i wasn't even looking for that but you know just like
Wes: browsing through and checking out kind of like checking out some of the
Wes: stuff we'll get into so it made me think oh right this is like such a better
Wes: way you know like i don't need to be spinning up i mean obviously i did it in
Wes: i was just having fun but i don't need to be spinning up obs and like inspecting
Wes: the browser console to try to like makeshift uh a proper you know hls m3u m3u8 stream setup or.
Chris: Just like going lazy and like chrome casting some tab to your tv which works
Chris: but like your laptop has to be on your phone and sometimes you lose control.
Wes: It's great in a pinch and it's terrible if you're going to start watching every game.
Chris: Yeah or if you're watching even like a movie really.
Wes: Yes yeah suddenly it falls asleep yeah and then you never get back to where
Wes: it was the seeking somehow you realize doesn't work and yeah um so i set up
Wes: dispatcher uh they've got a docker image uh works totally fine in podman too
Wes: uh so it's really easy to just like start dabbling but.
Wes: And I did find some initial data sources to play with. But I realized there
Wes: were some terms and some structure that I didn't quite understand.
Wes: Because there's the individual streams, which are mostly HLS,
Wes: HTTP streams, shipping little fragments of MP4 files to you,
Wes: essentially, or MPEG-TS files.
Wes: But then those get collected in these M3U files, which also have a bunch of
Wes: metadata in there. Sometimes they have like headers for the connection that you're going to fetch.
Wes: So you can pull that into dispatcher. And then that shows like a whole bunch
Wes: of all the possible channels that are in there.
Wes: But then you have to create from that, like those show up, I guess, as streams.
Wes: And then inside dispatcher, you have to create your own channels.
Wes: And then totally separately, there's this notion of EPG, which is like the electronic program guide.
Wes: And that has its own XML format. And then I guess Dispatcher now has the ability
Wes: to sort of auto match those.
Wes: But in theory, either it auto matches or you're responsible for like connecting
Wes: the stream, the actual like video stream with extra metadata about how the TV guide stuff works.
Wes: So can you give me the lay of the land here? Because I was I got it to work,
Wes: but I don't think I did it right.
Chris: So, yeah, you kind of have it. So you pull in the various streams and in my
Chris: dispatcher, I have 71 pages of streams and there's 50 streams a page.
Chris: So I have everything really that I thought was semi-interesting.
Chris: But I only have 50 channels that I'm actually actively using right now.
Chris: And so what I do is I go through the available streams and I curate them.
Chris: And what's great is you can preview them to make sure they're working in here.
Chris: And then I assign them a channel.
Chris: And this is nice because...
Wes: And is that one stream per channel?
Chris: I think you can do it multiple ways, but I am doing one. So,
Chris: you know, Channel 4 is the Channel 4 news.
Chris: And so that way it sort of maps to what people are familiar with already.
Chris: And so you create from all your available streams, you create the channels you want.
Chris: And then you can find... And so let's talk about this because this is an interesting
Chris: bit. is you can find lists of TV streams from different countries,
Chris: different languages, different topics.
Chris: There's a search engine, which we'll link in the show notes.
Chris: There's a GitHub awesome IPTV that just has lists by region or topic.
Chris: So maybe you're really into gardening.
Chris: You can find all the gardening IPTV streams and then you pull them in.
Chris: Now, I think it is worth noting that some places, you know, do have laws around this kind of thing.
Chris: Like many mech notes that in the Netherlands, if you're caught using a legal
Chris: IPTV provider, an illegal one, you can get your ISP disconnected.
Chris: Now, I don't know what makes it illegal.
Chris: Um, cause they're just open, they're just open HLS streams, but I'm sure some
Chris: of them like are in violation of like a local license or something.
Chris: Um, but you can find these streams either through the awesome list or the search engine.
Chris: And so maybe you're a Star Trek fan. You can literally go to the IPTV link search
Chris: and put in Star Trek and we'll show you all of the streams.
Chris: If you're familiar with Pluto TV, a lot of the Pluto TV content is actually just an open HLS stream.
Wes: Now they still have the ads in there, but I mean, you're going to get that either way.
Chris: Yeah, you're not skipping the ads unless you record it because this does have
Chris: some DVR functionality.
Wes: And we should probably note, too, there's a lot of stuff because of the way
Wes: this is put out there. A lot of it's geoblocked. So you may run into that.
Chris: Yeah, the community tends to label them. You know, there's a community out there
Chris: curating them and does tend to label them. And then I'll also link to streamtest.in.
Chris: And you can throw the URL in there and it will test to make sure it's a valid
Chris: URL, test to see if it's geoblocked, and it'll give you all of the details,
Chris: like what resolution it is, what bit rate it is.
Chris: And so you could pass it through that before you throw it into dispatcher.
Wes: It's also the kind of stuff you know just like reflecting on we
Wes: touched on piracy and just you know open culture and
Wes: media and content like i noticed i was able to pull in
Wes: turner classic movies yeah that was one that i know that my dad occasionally
Wes: liked watching he'd find stuff from his childhood on there that he never got
Wes: to see or whatever and it happened to work out that in the cable package they
Wes: moved that one up to a tier that like he wasn't going to pay for anymore they're
Wes: not you know no one this is not funding active development it's not like it's just all old stuff,
Wes: Why not just have it show up for free on the TV?
Chris: And it's to me, it's the 2025 version of cutting the cord.
Chris: You know, I remember when I lived a little bit further south and I put up an
Chris: over the air antenna for the first time and I started getting HD content for
Chris: free over the air. It felt like I had hacked the system.
Chris: I couldn't believe I could watch all this stuff for free and it was in higher
Chris: bit rate than I was getting over my copper cable.
Chris: This feels much like that. Now I'm cutting the streaming services cord,
Chris: and I'm just going directly to the provider's URLs that they're putting out there already.
Chris: And I'll give you – so here's some of my channels. I have every news channel –.
Chris: That exists and all of their iterations i
Chris: have uh nine versions of
Chris: abc news i have all of my local news
Chris: uh then i have classic tv channels classic
Chris: drama tv land comedy central a lot of pluto tv streams in here a lot of auto
Chris: tv channels because i like some of that stuff i mean just have i have everything
Chris: you could ever want like i even i even have like some some crazy wackadoo streams
Chris: because it's kind of fun just to pull in and watch this stuff um and you can
Chris: have international news you You can have local news.
Chris: I could have just about every local news stream that I want in here.
Chris: If I wanted to see what the news is in Denver today and then I want to check
Chris: Chicago, you could do that if you wanted to.
Chris: And that's why Dispatcher is really nice because there are thousands of these.
Chris: And so with this, you can curate it to just like the 50 or 60 that you're actually going to watch.
Chris: Then it will provide you an output URL that you put into an IPTV player.
Chris: And that's the next bit I think we should talk about, is then you ingest this into an IPTV player.
Chris: And for Android and Apple TV, there's some nice set-top TV box versions that
Chris: just let you watch it on your TV.
Chris: And there's some really nice ones for the mobile app as well.
Chris: I know you looked at a couple.
Wes: Yeah, I was looking at a few. I was curious what you used. I was having,
Wes: it might have been my kind of hasty setup too, because I know like the dispatcher
Wes: can do proxying now. and when you get the URL, you can decide if you want it to do that or not.
Wes: I was having more luck not having it do that, but I might have just like...
Chris: That doesn't surprise me.
Wes: And I might have just like, I don't know if I had everything set,
Wes: so it might have been trying to inject local host.
Chris: Did you have hardware acceleration working too?
Wes: I didn't get that far, so I didn't try.
Chris: That was, it's not bad, right? You just have to pass the DRI device through,
Chris: if you're doing it in a container, however you might be doing it.
Wes: Sure.
Chris: But then proxying for me worked.
Wes: Okay, I'll have to try that.
Chris: On iOS, I'm using a new app that I just got called Chilio. And Chilio is maybe not my most,
Chris: like favorite app ever for this job but on
Chris: the tv on on the apple tv experience they let you do quad boxing or multiple
Chris: boxes and so when we were having historic flooding here over the last few days
Chris: in the pacific northwest i brought up four local news stations and i would just
Chris: switch through which everyone was talking about our area and i could kind of keep an eye on all of them,
Chris: and it was an immediate wife approval factor win because it works better than
Chris: youtube tv I can mix and match any of the channels I want. The quality is better than YouTube TV.
Chris: And so it was an immediate buy-in from the wife.
Chris: But then because it's just, at the end of the day, these are just IPTV apps,
Chris: I can also ingest my ersatz TV feed into this.
Chris: So now in one TV guide, I have a mix of remote streams and local streams.
Chris: So when you want to watch the Simpsons channel, you hit that,
Chris: and that's polling locally.
Chris: But for my family, the end user experience is absolutely the same.
Chris: If they're watching a remote stream or a local stream, it's all now in one TV
Chris: guide, all with the program.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: See, okay, I'm curious. I'll have to copy some of this because I was trying
Wes: TV Mate on my Google TV, which is supposed to be pretty good.
Wes: But it was giving me errors when it was trying to parse the stuff from dispatch.
Wes: So I ended up just going the jellyfin route because I already had that installed and set up on the TV.
Wes: That was working well. I mean, it totally worked. I did kind of have the proxy
Wes: issues I mentioned, but I wasn't really getting the full program data.
Chris: Program guide.
Wes: Yeah. So I'm curious.
Chris: So I got a 70, 75% solution to that. You could go all the way.
Chris: But my 70, 75% solution to that is if you go to the awesome IPTV GitHub page,
Chris: they do have a EPG guide information. And they have two options.
Chris: So it depends on which route you want to go.
Chris: You can take advantage of the community built guide, which essentially you drop
Chris: that in Dispatcher and it matches up a lot of the stream names with EPG data
Chris: and just auto matches them. And that worked for probably 70, 75%.
Wes: Okay, that's pretty good.
Chris: Pretty good. Not bad, right? If you are crazy,
Chris: you could download a little script they have here and then ingest your M3U feed,
Chris: and it will go out and custom match and provide program data for your specific
Chris: batch of shows that you're –.
Wes: That is neat.
Chris: So I'll link to that in the show notes as well.
Wes: Other than that, I was kind of impressed. I mean, Jellyfin hooked it right up,
Wes: and it worked pretty darn well.
Chris: I mean, the EPG guide data, it really takes it across the line because now it's
Chris: a no-compromise solution because you have DVR functionality,
Chris: you can have multiple streams, you have content from all around the world,
Chris: it's high quality, and you have program guide information.
Wes: Here's a question we got live from Magnolia Mayhem. Does closed captioning work with this?
Chris: That's going to depend on the stream, but a lot of them embed that data,
Chris: but that will depend on the stream.
Chris: That is sort of a universal disclaimer here, right? Some of these,
Chris: like the TV Land stream, I think is a 582p stream.
Chris: There's nothing you can do about that. You're going to watch it 582p.
Chris: Now they're playing TV shows from the 60s. So for some stuff.
Wes: It may not matter.
Chris: It's probably fine, right? Whereas like Comedy Central here is a 1080p stream.
Chris: You know, so they're playing more modern stuff.
Wes: Right. So you'll probably need, it'll both need to be embedded in the stream
Wes: you're receiving and your player will need support to see that in.
Chris: And I will be honest with you on Android, IPTV clients are a little more hit
Chris: and miss. It's a little more hit and miss.
Chris: There are some really, really good web versions where you can take your URL
Chris: and throw in a web player and just experiment and test with it.
Chris: And there is also OpenTV for the Linux desktop, and that's pretty good at ingesting
Chris: the M3U and the XML guide.
Chris: And then when you click on a stream in OpenTV on the Linux desktop,
Chris: it just opens the stream in MPV or whatever your default might be.
Wes: Oh, nice.
Chris: That is a really good experience. It's just kind of solid, just everything that,
Chris: you know, focuses on what it does best.
Chris: But there is also a different route you could go. There is one other option.
Chris: You don't have to use Dispatcher at all. First of all, you could just go grab
Chris: some of these IPTV streams that we're going to link in the show notes,
Chris: and you could just throw it in VLC.
Wes: Make a playlist, whatever.
Chris: VLC will read that whole playlist of a thousand different streams,
Chris: and you can just go through and watch the ones you want, and you don't have
Chris: to go any further than that.
Chris: And that can be literally as much effort as you put into this.
Chris: You copy that URL from the GitHub page, and then you go to VLC,
Chris: and VLC will paste it from your clipboard for you. It's that easy.
Wes: And in the past, you even found some stuff to like filter through those files, right?
Chris: I think there's an even easier solution. It's called KPTV Fast.
Chris: This is another self-hosted free software, and it is a headless version of Dispatcher. No UI.
Chris: It just has a pre-built set of high-quality IPTV streams, more than I wanted,
Chris: but the community has gone through, and they've curated, like,
Chris: all the Pluto TV streams are in here,
Chris: Plex, so all the free streaming that Plex has, Samsung TVs, Tubi,
Chris: Distro TV, all of the stuff LG TVs have is in here, STIR.
Wes: Yeah, right. It seems like a lot of this ends up coming from,
Wes: like, the TV providers want to have default stuff to play, and so they've set these up.
Chris: And they want them to be decent quality. And they want some stuff that people want to watch.
Chris: And so what this is, it's a tiny little server that you run that comes with
Chris: all of these already built in.
Chris: And then it just spits out an M3U file for you and you plug it into whatever you want.
Chris: And you've got a curated, high-performance little server that does a lot what Dispatcher does.
Chris: No DVR, no GUI for curation, but it works with your Plex or your Jellyfins and
Chris: does a lot of what Dispatcher does.
Wes: This looks really nice.
Chris: It's nice. And honestly, if you're okay with like a thousand channels,
Chris: it's got a thousand great channels.
Chris: So like it's a pretty good starting point.
Chris: I only wanted a subset. But and it's of course, if you just use Docker,
Chris: it's a it's it's a you could pretty much just use the default compose.
Chris: It's pretty straightforward.
Chris: And so it's really simple. And then you just get this curated list of great TV channels.
Wes: Python app MIT license. Cool.
Chris: So zero fuss. You spin it up. You point your IPTV player at the URL it gives you.
Wes: And what you could probably use Shellyfin's DVR against this thing if you wanted to, right?
Chris: You totally could. Yes, absolutely. And I do that with ersatz already.
Chris: You absolutely could. If you didn't need the DVR or you had the DVR taken care of somewhere else.
Chris: Yeah. And the one criticism I'll give Dispatcher, which I've really been quite
Chris: happy at, it's under quite active development.
Chris: So I'm sure these things will come. But with Dispatcher, it does provide the
Chris: DVR functionality. And that is nice because you have like server side recording
Chris: and all that, which you would with Shellyfin too. But, you know, it's cool. But...
Chris: The next thing would be to have like a channel that it generates for my on-demand content.
Chris: So I don't really have a way to watch what I've recorded in the DVR on the TV, as far as I can tell.
Wes: You'd have to like feed that back into ersatz and then...
Chris: Yes, yeah, exactly. And because it does produce a nice little MKV file for me,
Chris: especially one without commercials, and that's sitting on the server,
Chris: and I could point Jellyfin or something at that or ersatz at that.
Chris: But wouldn't it be really cool if Dispatcher could create a video on-demand channel?
Wes: Absolutely.
Chris: Yeah. I don't know how it would do that, but I would love that.
Chris: Um, and so in your case, if you're using Jellyfin and you didn't necessarily
Chris: want to sit there and spend two hours curating a thousand, you just would say,
Chris: I'll just take them because you could just favorite the ones you like over time.
Chris: Most, most TV clients, IPTV clients have a favorite concept.
Chris: Then KPTV dash fast is a really simple way to go where you could have this up
Chris: and going in 10 minutes if you know how to start a Docker compose.
Chris: And then you could point VLC or Jellyfin at it 30 seconds later and you could
Chris: watch thousands of high quality content from all over the world.
Chris: So it's really amazing, and I think the humble pie that I had to eat here was
Chris: I wrote this category off as –,
Chris: Basically junk streams, local TV, which there is a lot of that, which is kind of great.
Wes: Yeah, right. And you kind of run into like, oh, okay, well, here's like a news
Wes: program for a country I don't live in in a language I don't understand,
Wes: which is great, but it's not super useful to me.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Turns out there's so much more.
Chris: Well, all my local, I didn't realize, and that's where the IPTV search tool
Chris: comes in. I didn't realize all of our local news.
Chris: Because some of these that come with pre-curated lists, maybe they'll have one
Chris: or two local news channels in there for your area.
Chris: But all of them are on there if you know how to find them. And so then I went
Chris: back and just added them manually to Dispatcher and categorized them as local
Chris: news. And I have a local news section.
Chris: And it's fabulous. And if they change it, I'll hunt it down and I'll add it.
Chris: But so far, I don't think it's been a big problem. A lot of these are vetted
Chris: and they stay up for a while because they're communicating with their partners,
Chris: providing, like you said, services to LG or Samsung TVs.
Chris: So it's a real unlock. And at least here in the States, it's a totally legal
Chris: way to watch content where you can have your cake and eat it too.
Chris: And you don't have to pay a bunch of money. I'm going to save like $100 a month doing this.
Chris: So I say goodbye to YouTube TV. You know what I'm saying? And I say hello to Dispatcher.
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Chris: Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go build your dream server. Unraid 7.2 makes it easier than ever.
Chris: Unraid really unleashes your hardware. And now Unraid has a responsive web GUI.
Chris: It works beautifully across all of your devices.
Chris: They have even more file system support than you can shake a stick at.
Chris: But the thing I want to tell you about this week that's really great to see
Chris: take off is they also introduced the Unraid API. It's officially here.
Chris: It's open source. It's fully integrated. And it gives you secure,
Chris: programmable access to system data for building dashboards, automations.
Chris: External apps, integration with Home Assistant, you know, various whatnots.
Chris: And you really are seeing the community build around this.
Chris: And there is an application under development right now called U-Manager.
Chris: Now, it's still early days, but what they've been able to create here is so slick.
Chris: You're just sitting on your phone. You can take a glance at your server.
Chris: You can see what's going on, memory, disk, resources.
Chris: You can see your different VMs. And it's just brilliant what can be done with
Chris: this passionate community.
Chris: And that's one of the real secrets. It's not on any box.
Chris: There's no FAQ that's really going to get to this.
Chris: The community is one of the secret sauces of Unraid because they've been around
Chris: for over 20 years now, and they've been delivering for that 20 years and they continue to deliver.
Chris: So they've built a passionate, loyal following with people that really build on top of this.
Chris: And 7.2 has just seen a massive uptick as well. I think it's one of the most popular releases.
Chris: And it's nice too to see them finally add NTFS support. At first,
Chris: I didn't think that would be something I'd want, but then of course I thought
Chris: about those old disks that are sitting in my closet.
Chris: And honestly, that's one of the brilliant things about Unraid.
Chris: You can start with the hardware you have in your closet right now.
Chris: We talk about some really cool apps today those would run on Unraid that's always
Chris: just an unlock away for you and when you go to unraid.net slash unplugged you
Chris: can try out the baller license for free 30 days.
Chris: It's nice. It supports the show, too, unread.net slash unplugged.
Chris: And then if you like it, it's totally worth the value because you know they're
Chris: going to keep building and supporting it. And this becomes a pretty serious part of your setup.
Chris: And I think you'll appreciate that it's an OS that grows with your skills.
Chris: So maybe today you don't care about an API.
Chris: Maybe in a year you do. Or maybe you just start benefiting from the apps that are being built.
Chris: It's such a great time to jump on, right, because it's a modern Linux base.
Chris: Now with that responsive web GUI, fantastic ZFS support, and so much more still coming for Unraid.
Chris: Check it out. Support the show. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged.
Chris: That gets you a free 30-day trial.
Chris: It's also just a great way to support the show and say, hey,
Chris: I heard about you over here on
Chris: the Unplugged program, and I appreciate you sponsoring the Unplugged show.
Chris: That's unraid.net slash unplugged.
Brent: Well we have a little podcasting 2.0 news for you fountain
Brent: 1.4 is now live they've completely
Brent: redesigned the fountain wallet made ux improvements to
Brent: payments across the app and added some pretty highly requested features uh there's
Brent: nostr wallet connect is now live you can also pay lightning addresses withdraw
Brent: to strike and choose your own payment methods chris do you have extra details
Brent: especially on this Nostra Wallet Connect?
Chris: Yeah, that's a bigger one than it might sound initially. That means now you
Chris: can bring your own self-hosted wallet.
Chris: So one of the great things Foundin has done, obviously, is provided a Lightning infrastructure.
Chris: Now with Nostra Wallet Connect, you can bring your own self-hosted one.
Chris: You can choose. It's an open standard. It's pretty nice to see them embrace that.
Chris: And it's been growing like crazy. They've done a lot of nice refreshments to the UI.
Chris: They're redoing, well, I probably shouldn't say, that they're redoing some of
Chris: the key things you see when you first open the app. I'll just leave it at that.
Chris: I'll just leave it at that. But congratulations to the Fountain team.
Chris: Also, performance improvements.
Chris: And in beta right now is a total rework of how CarPlay operates.
Chris: Totally better, redone.
Chris: App doesn't have to be running anything like that. CarPlay is getting a nice,
Chris: nice workover in the current Fountain betas. That'll be landing too.
Chris: And I believe Android Auto is coming up next.
Wes: And even if you're not using any of this stuff, I mean, I've noticed just the
Wes: recent releases are super snappy, clean. It's a good experience.
Chris: And we do have a few boosts to get to, and The Dude Abides is our baller booster
Chris: this week with 42,000 stats.
Chris: It's nice to hear from you, the dude, and thank you for 42,000 sats. He says, live boost.
Chris: Coming in while we're recording the show and being our baller for the episode as well.
Wes: Double double.
Chris: Double dubs. Thank you, sir.
Wes: Southern fried sasa comes in with a robot ox.
Wes: If LTT can get the Linus on their show, JB has to have a chance, right? Shoot your shot.
Chris: I would rather go to Linus. I'll tell you the truth.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: I think that'd be so great. I don't want to make him travel. He travels enough.
Wes: We should have met him in Japan.
Chris: You know, so Linus did that because he said he was interested in what the YouTube thing is like.
Chris: So now we just got to get him interested in what the podcast thing is like.
Chris: And then that opens the door for us, right?
Wes: Yeah, no makeup required. It's podcasting.
Chris: That's right. No makeup. And also we'll try not to be as awkward.
Chris: We may still be somewhat awkward, but, you know, not as awkward.
Wes: Also, Sassy here notes, still loving the cats. On the video feed, so keep it up, Brent.
Brent: What? We do video?
Wes: We had... Keep it up, Cosmo.
Chris: There's no video. What are you talking about?
Brent: Well, Soham sent in 5,996 sats over to Boosts.
Brent: Uh this one's for you chris hey chris i recently discovered that
Brent: the nebula android and ios clients are
Brent: not open source rather just source available
Brent: with no license in the github repo this is confirmed to be intentional with
Brent: no plans to change i wonder what you all feel about that or if you all could
Brent: ask the uh you know define.net people uh what is the deal absolutely love the
Brent: crap out of nebula and i'd hate to have this be a sticking point later on.
Chris: So that's a great question and uh so i asked the co-founder ryan of nebula just
Chris: this very thing because i saw this boost coming live this week and uh i got
Chris: a i got a proper education on one of the threat vectors that,
Chris: these all vpn providers face is knockoff apps that are actually like you know
Chris: connecting you to a fake network.
Chris: And so the main reason they don't license the mobile app.
Chris: Is essentially be able to enforce the only tool they have, which is a takedown.
Chris: So the only tool they have in that situation is to ask the App Store to take
Chris: it down, and they have to have something like trademark or something they can use there.
Chris: But I asked him, like, you know, where's the flexibility here?
Chris: And he said, well, if someone has a use case in mind or a reason for this,
Chris: we have a process they can contact us, reach out, and then we'll talk to them
Chris: and potentially issue a free license for them.
Chris: So it's more of like, I think they would like to see a community of apps,
Chris: but also you could imagine the risk and brand damage and all of that if a bogus Nebula app goes in.
Chris: And this is particularly challenging when you have a name like Nebula,
Chris: right? It's sort of like trying to enforce the word Jupyter or Linux.
Chris: It's tricky. It's tricky. So that was the answer I got back.
Chris: And I, of course, in more back and forth conversation, I didn't realize what
Chris: an active threat vector that is.
Chris: And not just for them, but other mesh network providers as well. It's a constant thing.
Chris: And then you also have a problem of if somebody creates a really crappy app
Chris: with your name on it, which can be a constant struggle, too.
Chris: But if you are interested in participating, get a hold of me,
Chris: Chris at JupyterBroadcasting.com, and I can put you in touch,
Chris: and you can make some magic happen.
Wes: Also seems like a sort of thing where if you want to use that source for your
Wes: own local thing, you probably could.
Wes: Or, I mean, the whole app and protocol, you know, in terms of Nebula, the core stuff is open.
Chris: You can view the source, I believe, for the mobile app. Yeah,
Chris: and all the Nebula stuff, of course. Yes, but it's just the iOS and Android
Chris: that they're publishing in the app stores.
Chris: Yeah. Not too uncommon, but yeah, it's a good question.
Chris: True Grits came in with 7,777 SATs.
Chris: I really enjoyed the technical talk with Kent. It made me reframe the way I think about Bcash FS.
Chris: I liked his comment towards the end about not caring what Facebook and other
Chris: companies are doing and only caring about writing quality code for individuals.
Chris: In the past, I thought essentially the opposite. It really was only for the
Chris: big players, I thought, and highly technical people.
Chris: The average hobbyist really didn't need to concern themselves.
Chris: Now, now I want to start playing around with it.
Chris: Also, may I introduce a slot machine boost? Sure can. I bet you I could. There you go.
Chris: Seven seven seven seven seven seven seven all seven
Chris: love it all right you guys oh you guys all have to remember the all sevens boost
Chris: is the slot machine boost yeah i i also i mean i was already kind of thinking
Chris: that way but i i thought it was also interesting to hear kent double down on
Chris: the i'm not building this for the for the big hyperscalers i'm building this
Chris: for everybody that's an everyday user it's cool i like that kind of stuff.
Wes: Well moon and night comes in with 2,026 sets. Oh, it's a 2026 boost.
Chris: Aha! I see what he did there. A little early, but I like it.
Wes: Bazite user, checking in.
Chris: Ah.
Wes: I'm running it as a Steam machine for a console experience on my TV in the living room.
Wes: Also have a couple of friends that just installed it on their desktop to escape Windows Gaming.
Chris: Interesting. Nice. So, Moon, I have a follow-up question.
Chris: So you say you're using it as a console experience on your TV,
Chris: are you doing any media watching?
Chris: Or are you using a separate device for that? And if you are doing media watching
Chris: via the Bazite install, what are you using and how did you install it?
Chris: Is it like a flat pack or something?
Chris: I have questions. Because if I could turn my Steam Deck into a Bazite gaming
Chris: system that's maybe also a media center?
Chris: A high performance media center? I mean, now we're starting,
Chris: you know, now we're talking about six barrels, two birds kind of a thing here. I'm all about that.
Chris: So, let me know. Thank you, Moon. I appreciate that. boost.
Brent: Well, our dear Odyssey Westra boosted in 2,291 Satoshis.
Chris: There he is.
Brent: Odyssey says uh love you.
Chris: That's oh well we love him just some love oh i wonder how it's going over there
Chris: let us know how it goes i was gonna get cold soon thank you odyssey stay warm over there,
Chris: chris b's here with 5 000 sets can you guys boost the ally oh a nice catch wes
Chris: i even stopped looking for that very nice boost the ally you get a little bit
Chris: of glaze there for that i like that Can you guys recommend an instant messaging platform that is A,
Chris: open source, B, end-to-end encrypted,
Chris: C, web client, ABCDF, I don't know, iOS app that is 13 plus?
Chris: Oh, supports, I guess, iOS, I don't know.
Wes: I think that is right.
Chris: My family has been using Element, but it is now marked 17 plus.
Chris: Ah, yes, so we have parental controls.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Thanks for all the help and happy holidays. I don't know about the 13 plus thing.
Wes: We'll have to farm this out of the community.
Chris: I was kind of thinking Simplex. I don't know about web but they do have a desktop
Chris: client but I don't know what they're rated in iOS because Apple this is really an Apple thing here,
Chris: Oh, no, Simplex is 13+. Okay. Simple X could be an option.
Chris: Also, Brent, NextCloud Talk, NextCloud Chat, right?
Chris: That could be an option, I suppose, as well. That's 4+.
Brent: Yeah, that's a good one if you're okay with hosting your own infrastructure.
Brent: That wasn't mentioned here, but it's definitely an option.
Chris: Yeah, and that's ages 4 and above.
Wes: I mean, Chris B's hosting Boost CLI, so, you know.
Chris: That's a good point. If you can do Boost CLI, you can probably do Nextcloud.
Brent: Yeah, that's probably... I would also recommend, I think, Signal.
Brent: I'm not sure what they're rated on the Apple's platform there,
Brent: but it's usually a pretty easy one to get going for people who might not be
Brent: as technical as our dear Boost CLI person here. But that could be an option.
Chris: I would like the audience to chime in on that. Is Signal still the recommendation
Chris: in 2025, early 2026? or are we concerned about Signal these days?
Chris: I don't, I've never been a user.
Chris: I have no dog in that particular hunt, but I read and hear things from people
Chris: in the security industry that seem to be scoffing a bit at Signal.
Chris: And I'm just wondering if something's happened. So boost in and tell me.
Brent: I would like to know too.
Chris: I'm just curious. Yeah, right? Chris B., good luck. And that's a good mission,
Chris: really. I wish I would have gotten the family on something like Simplex or something.
Chris: Element would have been good. It's hard to hear about the age rating change.
Chris: Instead, I got them all hooked on Telegram and iMessages. It's gross.
Brent: Why the change in age rating? Anyway, that seems...
Chris: Well, because somebody probably posted a new image and Apple found out about
Chris: it. These are just arbitrary, precocious rules by Apple.
Chris: And because you can send porn in Matrix, they probably marked it up.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: And they just didn't do it for the other chat apps because nobody's flagged it.
Wes: Great. I see.
Chris: Turd Ferguson comes in with 13,333 sats.
Chris: It was good to hear from Kent, and I'm excited about the future of BcashFS.
Chris: Do keep us posted. Value for value, go podcasting. Heck yeah.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: Go podcasting. Thank you, Turd. Appreciate you.
Wes: Hybrid sarcasm comes in, oh, with a live burr boost from Podverse.
Wes: Aw, just some signal to let you know I enjoyed last week's episode.
Chris: Thank you. We didn't get a lot of feedback on that. And I can't tell if that's
Chris: just because people took it in and enjoyed it or if they don't like it when we talk file systems.
Chris: But, you know, it's a shame because, like, that chat with Kent is sort of like
Chris: the thing that the Unplugged program can do that no other program can do because
Chris: we've just been following it closely.
Chris: We've established a channel with Kent. We ourselves run it.
Chris: And so it's like we're kind of – it's kind of in our power zone,
Chris: you know, if you will. Like when you're revving your engine,
Chris: that's kind of in our power zone.
Chris: But this episode –.
Wes: I bet people are too busy setting up their new BcashFS file systems.
Chris: Maybe. This episode didn't get a lot of, that was, we got two boosts about it.
Chris: We didn't get a lot of emails or any, I don't know, about it.
Chris: But I think it's a remarkable thing he's doing. And I was really,
Chris: I really thought it was something special that we could bring to the community.
Chris: And if you liked it, we'd love to see it in the boosts.
Chris: We had 28 folks stream and we stacked 29,955 sats with them.
Chris: And collectively, when you combine that with our boosters, We stacked a pretty
Chris: humble 120,600 sats. I say that just because I'm a little apprehensive.
Chris: 2026, we don't really have many things locked in for funding.
Chris: And so to sort of see this dripping off at the end, especially when we kind
Chris: of did a powerhouse episode, makes me a little concerned. And if you love the
Chris: episode or you love the show in general, there's a couple of ways to support
Chris: it. Keep it going. That would, of course, be a member.
Chris: That's sort of our foundation. And then the signal really for the individual
Chris: episodes would be the boost.
Chris: You can do that with Fountain FM. They're making it easier and better all the
Chris: time. There's even a few more things coming. I mean, they're going to blow your
Chris: mind on how easy it is soon to boost.
Chris: And then there's a bunch of great
Chris: apps like Podverse is in the middle of a fantastic rebuild right now.
Chris: Podcastapps.com. You can boost in the individual episodes and support us that
Chris: way with hard assets. And that's something the show stacks for its long term run.
Chris: And then, of course, the members at linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
Chris: That's our day to day run right there. And that's our foundation.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who does support the show. We do appreciate it.
Chris: Go ahead, Brentley. Yeah.
Brent: Oh, just a small reminder to our community that this is your official last week
Brent: to get your boosts in for the boosties.
Brent: Boosties are happening, what is it, next week, right? Is that what we promised?
Chris: On Friday, really. So if you're listening to this when it comes out. Yeah.
Brent: So if you'd like to get on the leaderboard or try to kick out someone that you
Brent: think you deserve a higher spot, this is your last chance.
Chris: I can't believe we're there already. Can you believe it?
Chris: We're almost at 20. Oh, it's our last episodes. This is wild.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who does support this episode.
Chris: Episode 645 is made possible because of you.
Chris: Of course, check it out at Fountain FM, and we'll have more links at linuxunplugged.com,
Chris: including links to become a member, to join our Matrix community.
Chris: It's a value-for-value podcast, and there's several ways to contribute,
Chris: and that's just a few of them.
Chris: All right, now before we go, we have, well, we really have an embarrassment of picks.
Wes: You can't help yourself.
Chris: I don't know what's going on anymore. We've completely lost it.
Chris: It was supposed to be one pick.
Chris: But it just felt like we should slide this one in with the theme of the episode.
Chris: This one is Jellyfy Music, a cross-platform, open-source music player for Jellyfin.
Chris: And it's a nice-looking app. Showcases your artwork and your library.
Chris: Makes it real easy to just play the music you might have in your Jellyfin library.
Wes: Yeah, React Native.
Chris: It's.
Wes: Available on ios and android lots of ways to install it including published
Wes: releases and apks so i assume that makes it obtainium friendly.
Chris: You got it you got it but yep uh-huh uh-huh and it's really nice if you want
Chris: high quality local flex and things like that so that is in the show notes then
Chris: i want to talk about something that's just kind of handy don't hate on it wes,
Chris: it's docker compose maker now
Chris: you can self-host this yourself or you can just use their live demo but.
Wes: I gotta do i have to use docker compose.
Chris: How am i going to generate i know i know well this is
Chris: for those that use docker compose and so it's
Chris: two things it's a a curated list of like
Chris: compose stacks so say you wanted to get a media stack or a jellyfin stack or
Chris: maybe you wanted to run just one application they have ready to go compose files
Chris: for you but what they do that's kind of neat And why I actually decided to mention
Chris: this is they let you define a lot of the things ahead of time,
Chris: like the config path, the data path,
Chris: the UID and the GID it runs with, the network mode and those types of things.
Chris: So that way, when you actually download the generated compose file.
Chris: Got a better shot of being ready for your environment.
Wes: This looks nice. And I see I can select multiple stuff.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: Let me make sure I add Postgres in here. Definitely going to want that.
Chris: And they have some that are like, okay, I want the self-hosted password stack.
Chris: And it's three or four things combined, right?
Chris: Or the home automation or the dad's media stack, I think, is one of them.
Chris: And then it's several of them combined together.
Chris: And then you go into the settings, you define your variables,
Chris: and then it produces a Docker Compose file that's pretty much ready to go.
Chris: Or at least a good starting point.
Wes: Yeah, it also spits out a .env file for you. Cool. Oh, this looks nice.
Chris: Yeah, it's nice, especially if you're new to this stuff and you hear us talk
Chris: about some of these things but you don't really know Docker Compose.
Chris: This could be a good reference point to get started.
Chris: So that's DCM, and what's neat about it is you can self-host that generator,
Chris: or you can use their demo, which is kind of the same thing. I'll have that linked in the show notes.
Chris: And then, before we get out of here, Bradley found us a AGPL3 productivity management
Chris: tool that has a special niche focus.
Brent: There is a niche focus here's uh here's
Brent: the description lean time it's a goals focused
Brent: project management system for non-project managers hey
Brent: that's me building specifically with people
Brent: who have adhd autism or dyslexia in
Brent: mind i thought that was pretty fascinating i've
Brent: been doing oh let's call it a wee deep dive this week into uh my adhd brain
Brent: stuffs and uh i did not think there would be a productivity application that
Brent: was open source that would be specifically targeted at helping us individuals.
Brent: Sure enough, there is. And it's been around for quite a while.
Brent: It seems pretty actively developed.
Brent: It has 147 contributors, so quite well used and loved, clearly.
Brent: So I'm thinking of giving LeanTime a go.
Brent: But I was curious if If anyone in the community had given this a shot or if,
Brent: you know, you might have an ADHD brain like a few of your hosts here do,
Brent: what are the productivity tricks that have really made a huge,
Brent: massive difference for you?
Brent: Because I'm looking for something that, I don't know, makes my life easier.
Chris: This is gorgeous. I wouldn't think to say that for this type of app,
Chris: but it's a freaking beautiful app.
Chris: That's nice this looks really nice nice deep dive brent i'm.
Wes: Curious what you'll what you'll manage first.
Chris: Yeah yeah we'll see okay so lean time and we have that linked in the show notes
Chris: like i mentioned it's agpl3.o uh looks like it's a mostly a php app with some
Chris: javascript as you would expect and of course a few other things in there uh
Chris: looks like a good project,
Chris: And then also it says a simple Trello, but a, as feature rich as Jira,
Chris: a perfect alternative to ClickUp, Monday, or Asana.
Wes: I mean, just by definition has to be better than Jira.
Chris: There it is. They also have their own website, leantime.io, built with ADHD
Chris: and neurodivergence in mind.
Chris: Huh. I'm just impressed with how damn good it looks. That's,
Chris: to me, that's the unexpected part.
Chris: You know, usually these task management apps like this are not so great.
Wes: So now we've got to get DCM to have a Docker Compose for this.
Chris: Right.
Wes: But we've got to get it going so we can manage that goal with it.
Chris: Oh, yeah, right, because we're never going to get that done until we get lean time going.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Catch 22. And yet, here we sit.
Chris: All right, well, so you're wondering, what do they talk about?
Chris: Where do I find this? You said they have a bunch of IPTV resources and search engines and stuff.
Chris: You've got to go get the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 645,
Chris: or it might just be in your podcast app of choice. Did you even know it?
Chris: If you wanted to catch the name or rehear something we said,
Chris: well, we have a couple of things people should know about West Payne.
Wes: Yes, we do. Including cloud chapters.
Wes: That's right. Up-to-date, accurate chapters to go right to your favorite content.
Wes: And when you want to dive even deeper into the episode, we have full-text transcripts.
Chris: That's right. That's right. How about that? And we make the highest quality
Chris: in the industry. Each individual track is processed for its own individual audio,
Chris: and then we even do attribution, or what is it called?
Wes: Diarization?
Chris: Diarization for the apps that support that, so you don't miss a beat.
Chris: And we are live, so you can catch the whole thing, mistakes and extra bonus content and all.
Chris: That's over at jblive.tv. We start at 10 a.m. Pacific.
Chris: That's 1 p.m. Eastern. You can also catch it at jblive.fm if you're on the go.
Chris: And remember, we have that mumble room that's cooking as we go along.
Chris: They join us. They get that low-latency Opus feed. And it's a lot of fun to hang out in.
Chris: And, of course, you can see Brent's cats. Thank you so much for joining us on
Chris: this week's episode of the Unplugged program.
Chris: And we're going to see you right back here next Tuesday.
Chris: Actually, no, Friday for the Home Lab. Woo-hoo-hoo!
Chris: Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you then.