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 on the show today, your favorite free software
Chris: projects, they're not taking the summer off.
Chris: We're going to round up the releases that you need to know about,
Chris: including some big changes coming to a kernel near you very soon.
Chris: Then we'll round out the show with some great boos, some picks,
Chris: and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings
Chris: to that virtual lug of ours. Hello, mumble room. Hello, hello. Hello.
Mumble: Hey Chris, hey Wes, and hello Brent.
Chris: Hi guys.
Wes: Hello.
Chris: Hello everybody up there in the quiet listening too. Nice to have you out there.
Chris: Also happy Father's Day to all the dads out there listening.
Chris: You know, happy Father's Day.
Chris: Happy Father's Day to the dad dogs out there too, and the squirrel dads.
Brent: Oh, thank you. Happy Father's Day to you as well.
Chris: And the cat dads. And the cat dads.
Chris: Cat dads, I think, would count, right? Of course. Dads will come in all shapes and sizes.
Chris: Also, good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go to defined.net slash unplug.
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Chris: Your hosts connect directly to each other, and then you can set up your own
Chris: lighthouses. You can use Manage Nebula to discover them. You control that aspect of it.
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Chris: unplugged. Redefine your VPN experience. That is define.net slash unplugged.
Chris: Let's do the news, boys, and let's start with one of the stories I am really
Chris: genuinely excited about because a feature I have been waiting for for a very
Chris: long time has landed in Plasma.
Chris: Plasma 6.7 was released this last week, and they finally baked in per-screen virtual desktop.
Brent: I think they did it just for you as well.
Chris: No, that's not true at all, but I am very grateful.
Wes: I think that took 21 years is what I saw. There was a bug open from 2005.
Chris: And I think I've been complaining about that on there for about 21 years.
Brent: So have you tried it?
Chris: No, because the only machine I have right here in the studio only has one screen right now.
Brent: That's true.
Chris: I know, it's horrible. I will, though, because Aurora just updated so fast,
Chris: so I got it right away. But immediately can notice, I hate to use this phrase, but it is snappier.
Wes: It is. I'm running it as well.
Chris: Oh, you are?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And you agree.
Wes: Shout out to the next packages in K900 for the great work packaging stuff there.
Wes: Oh, I noticed it immediately.
Chris: Yeah. Me too.
Wes: I didn't expect that.
Chris: I didn't either.
Wes: I mean, because it's not like Plasma's sluggish.
Chris: No. I would not have categorized it as sluggish either. But so this release
Chris: is the all Wayland, you know, release. And Nate Graham confirmed that 79% of
Chris: Plasma 6 users were already on Wayland.
Brent: Wow. That's a lot.
Chris: A lot of Wayland improvements in here. A lot of Wayland improvements.
Wes: So like X11's gone for good in 6.8?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Something like early 2027?
Chris: Yeah, it's gone for good in 6.8. But look at this. Weyland only remains planned,
Chris: almost 80% now are on Weyland. Look at that.
Wes: That's pretty wild.
Chris: I mean, it is really a smooth experience now. I mean, I think it is generally pretty good.
Chris: They fixed a bug, too, that was impacting Aurora and Discover,
Chris: which is nice to see. Just one of those little small things that they worked in here.
Chris: The polish overall is something that people often talk about,
Chris: but it does seem like every single release, we just keep seeing an iteration on Breeze.
Chris: It's getting better and better. so what I did was once I had the default or once I had the install,
Chris: I switched everything back to all the default so I could see the new styles
Chris: and everything like that and I love it I love it very happy with this release
Chris: just only been using it for like two days so far but those two days have been really good.
Wes: There's some interesting things in place for like what they're calling the union
Wes: engine they're working on underneath basically they're going to use CSS and
Wes: then a Rust parser from Servo to like parse that and handle it.
Wes: And then it's going to be basically like one style to rule them all eventually.
Wes: It's disabled by default for now. It's a work in progress, but you can see they're
Wes: doing a lot of work under the hood.
Chris: A feature they've added that I think we'll find useful is you can now test your
Chris: microphone volume right there in the little volume pop-up widget.
Wes: Now that is slick.
Chris: It's really nice.
Brent: There's also a nice little touch here. It looks like the oxygen theme is returning
Brent: for KD's 30th anniversary. Can you believe that?
Chris: 30
Brent: And apparently it was quote really really in bad shape uh before the restoration
Brent: which was led by philip phila so if you i don't know they were nostalgic for
Brent: the oxygen theme uh well there's a modern version now.
Chris: Yep improvements to the clipboard manager color lots of performance improvements
Chris: um gpu rendering optimizations too so you don't have to have a big old gpu to do all this stuff,
Chris: here's a couple of other just uh quick hits you can now sync your mouse and
Chris: stylus pointers, an option to set and change preferred to the calendar app,
Chris: an option to assign keyboard shortcuts to toggling the global push to talk microphone
Chris: mute throughout the plasma applications.
Chris: There's now an easy way of selecting mixed skin tones and emojis.
Chris: So you can just have, oh, there's the new emoji thing, the system monitor app
Chris: that respects your preferences regarding storage units for gigabytes versus,
Chris: Another gigabyte display. I mean, it's like a long list of things to go through here.
Chris: And, like, a lot of times we joke that nothing really comes out in the summer.
Chris: But, man, this is one of the major, major releases for Plasma in general.
Chris: And here we are in the summer. It's really great. And it's impressive how fast we're getting it.
Chris: You've gotten it already. I mean, thanks to the maintainers.
Chris: But I'm running it already.
Chris: I just seem to recall it used to be months before I get my hands on it.
Wes: Absolutely. We live in a different world now. At least it depends on your distro.
Wes: But you have the options now if you want something that lets you get it real fast.
Wes: And, I mean, I think it's just also, you know, the project ships quite regular
Wes: releases now. It seems like that cadence is very well polished. So it works well.
Chris: Yeah, shout out to them, too, for that microphone volume test.
Chris: I think that's going to be really useful for our guests.
Chris: Brentley, you tagged a story that Firefox shared with us. I guess they're kind
Chris: of putting out there essentially what is a roadmap for the future features that
Chris: they plan to add to Firefox in the near term.
Brent: Yeah, I thought this was interesting because it's been a while since I've dove
Brent: into what they're trying to do over there.
Brent: And there's been a little bit of controversy recently with some of their AI
Brent: features, you know, and they added an on and off button because of all of the pushback.
Brent: So I was just curious about like, well, what are they thinking the future of Firefox will be?
Brent: And it's kind of interesting. Like there's a lot that they're working on in
Brent: PDFs. So right in the browser, you will be able to split, merge,
Brent: and reorder PDFs, which is an interesting thing.
Brent: It makes me believe more that the browser is actually an OS on top of our OS.
Brent: But for most regular users, I imagine that's really interesting.
Brent: Also, this feature has been asked for for basically ever, customizable built-in hotkeys.
Chris: Yeah. I will note, too, what they've done is this website that you shared with
Chris: us, which we'll have a link in the show notes.
Chris: For the features that you can try now, they just have a button here.
Chris: So they have like this roadmap of features.
Chris: And if that feature is available for testing, they have a try now button. That's a neat approach.
Brent: And they have them by category as well, like productivity. There's privacy controls
Brent: that they're working on. AI done differently, they call it. That's the category name.
Brent: Speed and performance, of course, built-in protection, better web stuff,
Brent: which is an interesting category. So if you're interested in where the browser
Brent: is going, it's worth looking at.
Brent: And I just felt good about this. I think having a map like this feels productive.
Brent: I had totally lost sight of what Firefox was even trying to do.
Brent: And some of this makes me feel a little better about the future of Firefox.
Chris: I guess it answers that question. It's like, what is Mozilla even doing for Firefox?
Brent: Exactly.
Chris: Here you go. This is what they're doing. They made a what's next page.
Chris: The thing that grabbed my attention was new web APIs.
Chris: Wasm.js promise integration, deferred module evaluation, web transport, and more.
Wes: Also some CSS improvements to support more stuff there. So all stuff making
Wes: Firefox better at handling whatever random web page you get.
Chris: HDR video on Linux was listed there.
Brent: This one stood out to me as well. Pasci support for Firefox Sync.
Brent: I don't think you would boiler Sync users, but that's interesting.
Wes: If you are, you probably want Pasci support on this one.
Chris: I'm not using Firefox to manage my passwords, but I do use it to sync everything
Chris: else. Huh. Huh. Okay. Yeah. Good find, Brent. Thank you.
Brent: There's some stuff in there. There's something, you know, it's still doing stuff,
Brent: which makes me feel a little better.
Chris: Wes, you were excited about the SystemD 261 release, and I was looking through
Chris: it. There are a couple of interesting goodies in here.
Wes: Yes, indeed. One you'll notice is the new Instance Metadata Service,
Wes: or IMDS. Of course, you get systemd-imdsd as part of that.
Chris: Gotta have that.
Wes: It's a unified way to access virtual machine metadata.
Wes: In particular, you're going to see this a lot because it interworks with major
Wes: cloud platform and their metadata services, right?
Wes: So if you boot up an AWS EC2 instance, then there's an IP you can query and
Wes: get info about all the stuff, plus all the stuff that's exposed by the virtual
Wes: BIOS and whatever is programmed in at the virtual machine layer.
Wes: And so now all of that kind of stuff, sort of classifying what are you about,
Wes: like where you are, the VM environment, what it knows about the VM is exposed
Wes: in this metadata service.
Wes: And you have one spot to look if you hook it up with the systemd way.
Chris: I suppose, you know, in my current mindset, where that seems useful would be
Chris: being able to query it at like a scale and then build an inventory and things
Chris: like that, right? It sort of almost becomes like an API of information about your system.
Wes: And you maybe don't have to do the handling of what's the difference between
Wes: how Amazon does it or Azure does it or Oracle Cloud does it or Hetzner's in here too or even Volter.
Chris: Okay, that's not what I thought you were going to start with.
Wes: Oh, you, okay, okay, well, it's finally happening.
Chris: Yeah, here we go.
Wes: It's finally happening.
Chris: Ladies and gentlemen.
Wes: Yes, okay, another notable update here is live update orchestrator and kernel
Wes: handover support in System D.
Chris: I thought that's what you'd start with.
Wes: And this has been building, there's been, like, other parts of this.
Wes: This, in particular, includes support for user units and stuff.
Wes: But the idea is, so there's KExec, right?
Wes: Who wants to reboot? it's so slow let's just jump immediately to a new kernel
Wes: without rebooting the system I'm sorry KExec.
Chris: Is too slow?
Wes: No no KExec's great I'm just trying to say like if you haven't heard about KExec
Wes: for a while that's what it does okay yeah right instead of doing a whole reboot.
Chris: You do a live swap.
Wes: Yeah you just load you like load the new kernel into memory and you jump into it.
Chris: So you're really avoiding the whole post process and like you know the bootloader.
Wes: Mhm,
Wes: But what's getting really tricky here is the idea, because you're not blanking
Wes: RAM, right? You're not cycling through things. You can hold stuff in memory, in theory.
Wes: Like, we don't now. When you reboot the kernel, it's as if you rebooted.
Wes: You get a whole fresh thing.
Chris: Right. We'd played with, like,
Chris: persistent RAM disks. We'd tried to kind of solve this with a hacky way.
Wes: Yes, right. You can, like, tell the kernel to mark memory as sort of,
Wes: like, don't touch this. It's supposed to be a fake, sort of,
Wes: as if you had a persistent RAM.
Wes: But at a more fine-grained level, what we now have with the live update orchestration
Wes: and the kernel handover stuff is the idea of you can basically declare memfds,
Wes: which are like memory file descriptors, which is basically just claiming a chunk of memory, right?
Wes: But it's interfaced as a file descriptor.
Wes: And so if an application gets one of those and then serializes whatever state
Wes: it wants, right? So whatever stuff is happening for the application,
Wes: it's running all of its runtime state.
Wes: If it dumps that in this memfd or a few or whatever, it can pass that off to
Wes: systemd and systemd will use the kernel's new orchestration and update features
Wes: to save that across a case.
Chris: Like a handoff thing.
Wes: It's a state handoff so it stores it in memory and then it tells the kernel
Wes: hey when we reboot you need to read like keep the that these bits of memory
Wes: untouched and then reclaim them and restore them,
Wes: and then systemd picks up after that and then as systemd goes it does the same
Wes: and then it's able to hand the memfds back to the service when it boots,
Wes: and then the service is able to if it has support for this load that back in,
Wes: and then just restore itself and it would be like you didn't reboot at all.
Brent: That is so sexy that is neat.
Wes: Now it's not doesn't support everything like you can't preserve like a network
Wes: socket or stuff like that okay but there's a bunch of other caveats so network.
Chris: Traffic would get dropped.
Wes: Yeah for a bit but but the primitives that this is could enable is pretty exciting yeah everything.
Chris: From like emergency infrastructure scaling oh man there's so many things you
Chris: could do that live swapping to a new system.
Chris: And continuing your work? Ho, ho, ho! Okay, do we want to talk at all about
Chris: StorageCTL, a tool that sounds really cool, provides a command line interface
Chris: for, I would imagine, storage resources.
Chris: And this is sort of the SystemD mantra, right, of unifying a bunch of things under a common control?
Wes: Yeah, there's more and more capability built into SystemD to talk about what
Wes: storage is on the machine, expose it to you, have APIs around it,
Wes: and I think, like, format and work with the disk.
Wes: Because it kind of comes also with SystemD sysinstall, which is a simple,
Wes: modern, text-based operating system installer.
Chris: Oh my god, are you serious?
Wes: Yep, it builds on Systemd's existing partitioning, credential management,
Wes: and system management features.
Wes: It can copy an OS from temporary boot media like a USB drive.
Wes: So now Systemd is able to sort of go from, you know, nothing is on your system
Wes: to it's formatted and partitioned things and also installed.
Chris: Again, clearly useful in cloud deployments. Clearly useful in cloud deployments.
Chris: i have to wonder though if you wanted to roll your own distro say like a hypervibe
Chris: kind of thing could you could you use something like this um.
Wes: Yeah i mean more and more there's just systemd primitives you can build on instead
Wes: of having to roll it yourself.
Chris: Wow so systemd sys install,
Chris: A modern text-based operating system installer. I kind of want to play with that.
Wes: Yeah, me too. I think we should.
Chris: So you have to have systemd 261. I mean, this is a big release.
Wes: There's a lot in here. There's also some hardening stuff. Something called restrict file system access.
Wes: It uses a BPF program to restrict execution to binaries stored on signed and
Wes: verified DM Verity protected file systems.
Wes: so if you really want to be super strict that like only the binaries I've explicitly
Wes: signed and told can run on this system another way to make that happen in a secure way with systemd.
Chris: So maybe a way for a really lean system or a container that doesn't need the
Chris: overhead of sc linux or app armor but to still have like just only essentially an allow list.
Wes: And you've seen this right like a lot of the we've seen things like the boot
Wes: c systems more and more are you trying to use systems that do have signed file
Wes: systems do use DM Verity under the hood.
Wes: So you could combine that with some of those technologies and have a very secure
Wes: sort of setup that has fast delivery but can play nicely in a modern enterprise.
Chris: Very impressive. And I suppose also noteworthy boys, right?
Chris: Because we now know that Lenart Pottering, you know, original creator SystemD,
Chris: he was working at Microsoft for a bit. He left in January of this year.
Chris: And he co-founded a Linux security startup and this is the first major system
Chris: D release since he's made that transition and,
Chris: Do you think you see a reflection in some of these releases?
Wes: I mean, I think there might be a bit of a theme.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a pretty solid release for cloud deployments that are just
Chris: trying to spin up Linux systems as secure and fast as possible.
Chris: But I still think there's a lot of primitives that people that are building
Chris: distributions out there could use as well.
Chris: It's always interesting, too, how they have thought of a new thing to take over
Chris: that I have never even considered. I didn't think about building a Linux installer into SystemD.
Chris: It's inspired. I wonder if they, I wonder if the chat GPT come up with that
Chris: idea, like, Hey, chat GPT, I want some new features. And that's like,
Chris: chat GPT is like, this is a great idea.
Chris: We should build a Samba server in too. But you let me know if they ever build a Samba server in.
Wes: I will, I will keep an eye out.
Brent: That gets me thinking about some of the criticisms people have with system D
Brent: is like it just does too much and it's too complex, etc.
Brent: Do you think this is just heading more and more down that path?
Brent: Because it seems soon we're almost going to have just system D be the OS.
Chris: What do you think? What do you think there, Wes?
Wes: Um well it kind of depends on how well you think it uh does these things and how much it's,
Wes: open protocol something you could have other things implement and play with
Wes: um there's a lot of varlink push in this release for instance so whatever you
Wes: think of varlink might play into that,
Wes: you know like is it a kernel feature that systemd is just using that other systems
Wes: could take advantage of or plug into?
Wes: Those would be the questions I'd ask.
Chris: Yeah, I think the other question is if you were to build an operating system
Chris: today, would it have this feature?
Brent: Hmm. Hmm. That's a good way to look at it.
Chris: And if you were, I think, honestly, a lot of these features come because these,
Chris: are getting deployed in these massive cloud infrastructures and the cloud providers
Chris: at talks and through emails and through private connections.
Chris: They just complain about the things that take a long time to do and spin up.
Chris: Like, my mind was blown when we went to Anisha's talk from Anthropic about spending
Chris: up 40,000 containers at once and how, you know, something that takes 35 milliseconds
Chris: ends up adding up big time.
Chris: Like, just these crazy optimizations that they have to do.
Wes: There's also just, you could phrase it, like, how much, oh, there was one thing
Wes: I should mention, too, let's say.
Wes: To speak to that, there's something called condition fraction.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: Which lets you do canary deployments at the service manager level.
Wes: you can roll out to a percentage of machines by hashing machine id.
Chris: Oh this is great for your remember remember forever ago you're asking how to
Chris: do staged rollouts brent at uh your brother's store there you go wow.
Wes: All right.
Chris: Solved it for you.
Wes: But the other thing do you remember the whole xz uh vulnerability.
Chris: Nope forgotten all yeah never.
Wes: Heard right yeah so so that involved instead of having something like plugged
Wes: into the elf metadata saying like oh system d needs uh,
Wes: xz it was done as a DL open which is like a dynamic way to open a shared library right and,
Wes: as a somewhat indirect result of that system D wanted to have a system to be
Wes: able to expose that as metadata so like as part of the build process it would
Wes: tell you in the metadata and it's a way you could read,
Wes: like what do I do dynamically what shared libraries do I depend on with DL open
Wes: that you can't see from the regular elf metadata and that is now shipping as well well,
Wes: So it's a nice little bow on sort of responding to that,
Wes: terrible little supply chain scare.
Chris: Well, we have been waiting to see what the first quote unquote AI features are
Chris: that come to the Ubuntu desktop.
Chris: And we recently got word that it's not going to be quite what you expect.
Chris: It's going to be more of an accessibility thing, and it's going to be text-to-speech.
Chris: And this week, we have a much clearer picture of that. They've launched a new project.
Chris: They say the project will be desktop-focused, local speech-to-text dictation,
Chris: with the first target release being Ubuntu 26.10.
Chris: The initial interface is intentionally simple.
Chris: You press a keyboard shortcut, you speak, and then the text gets inserted into
Chris: the currently focused application with visual feedback while dictation is active.
Chris: The first implementation targets the Ubuntu desktop on Wayland,
Chris: with GNOME as the primary validated environment.
Chris: Voice assistance, voice commands, desktop control, translation,
Chris: and automatic language detection are outside the initial scope.
Chris: So they, I think, are intentionally couching this as limited in scope.
Chris: They have provided diagrams that show the architecture overview about how it works locally.
Chris: um how are we feeling about this first go at it.
Brent: Well my initial response is this is the way you ship an ai feature you'd be
Brent: totally open about what it's doing what's under the hood you know firefox kind of,
Brent: botched that a little while ago with their first features but uh they they do
Brent: describe you know under the hood it uses speech recognition models running locally
Brent: on your machine so i think that
Brent: will make people happy or at least less hesitant maybe of these features,
Brent: So
Brent: communicating lots, I think is great. That's what we're seeing here.
Brent: And also starting slow with some features that are pretty obvious if they work
Brent: or not and are pretty simple. That's a good way to gain some trust.
Brent: So I'm liking this measured approach.
Chris: Right, Wes, this has to be probably the least controversial implementation of
Chris: the technology possible, right?
Wes: Indeed. And I would say so far, it seems like the reaction from what a little
Wes: I've seen anyway, but it seems overall positive, I think.
Wes: I'm taking a look here. Here they have a sort of a test branch where you can
Wes: see a little of the development. Yeah.
Wes: And just to be clear, it is named after the minor bird because it's renowned
Wes: for its ability to listen to, mimic, and reproduce human speech with astonishing clarity.
Wes: Just like its avian counterpart, this application is designed to master voice
Wes: audio listening intently to your spoken words, instantly translating them to accurate, clean text.
Wes: It's a Python app. It uses UV.
Wes: They use hypothesis for generative testing, which is great. Love to see that. It looks very nice.
Wes: Right now they have Whisper with Faster Whisper as one option,
Wes: and then also Nemetron, which can do CUDA.
Wes: So it sounds like they kind of got stuff for CPU and GPU going on here.
Wes: Not a ton of stuff yet, but you've got like a desktop interface,
Wes: it looks like. There's obviously Snap support. They're pulling in Whisper and Nemetron from Snaps.
Wes: There's also a back-end server, standalone Ubu STT server. That's the main thing
Wes: to Snap. This standalone Snap is going to ship, I guess.
Chris: So this will be interesting from a couple of different vectors,
Chris: I think. Number one, from like a user experience, what kind of load does this
Chris: put on your desktop? What kind of memory usage are we looking at?
Chris: And what does it set sort of the minimum requirements to have a decent experience
Chris: here? So that's, I think, one vector to consider this under.
Chris: The other is just, I think, what a hole there is in the accessibility space
Chris: for the Linux desktop right now.
Chris: And how this is table stakes on Android, iOS, I assume Windows,
Chris: I don't actually know, and macOS.
Chris: Table stakes.
Chris: And it's like minimum bar accessibility. And we had this email from listener
Chris: Matthew, and he said, Hey, Linux Unplugged hosts, I'm a blind Arch Linux user,
Chris: and I really enjoy your content.
Chris: I really feel like Linux accessibility is understated.
Chris: Many desktop environments have little to no support for usable screen or usable
Chris: screen reader experience, especially Wayland-based sessions.
Chris: I'm comfortable with Monte, though I believe more people need to know about this.
Chris: It's true that blind people themselves have made their own projects,
Chris: thanks to open source, specifically for these individuals, but it shouldn't
Chris: be like that. Thanks for reading my post.
Chris: And we're thinking about, you followed up with Matthew a bit,
Chris: but we're thinking like, this is probably the best implementation that Canonical
Chris: could do that actually adds value to people in this space that could really
Chris: use accessibility tools like this on Linux.
Chris: And to Matthew's point, we don't really have much in GNOME and Wayland right now.
Chris: And this is the exact area that Canonical is going to go after.
Chris: Now, it's not a screen reader, but it's getting us to part of the way there you know and.
Wes: It's yeah it's it's great to see i'm excited to see what happens uh it seems
Wes: you know they're making some good progress and
Wes: it seems like especially as john mentioned he's been on the show that you know
Wes: they're giving pretty regular updates with the work that they're doing so we'll
Wes: there'll probably be more to come i do also see it's gpl3 so that's pretty cool.
Brent: I have a little bit of a pondering here. And I think, Chris,
Brent: this is in your expertise.
Brent: Why? Like, they built their own thing here. And it sounds like Wes,
Brent: you know, gives it the little approval.
Brent: But why not use something like what Home Assistant has been working on with
Brent: their voice stuff and voice input? Do you think that that's a missed opportunity?
Chris: Whisper is being used by both projects. So some of the primitives are the same.
Chris: Uh, so that's good. I, I think, you know, I could see using the bits that do
Chris: make sense and then building a custom layer for the other parts,
Chris: um, the interface with the desktop.
Chris: I think there is like a lot of people that don't know that you have whisper
Chris: and Piper happening over there at the home assistant community.
Chris: That is really powerful for text to speech and speech to text and all of that.
Chris: But basing it on whisper is going to be, I think they're going to have decent results.
Chris: Fast whisper usually does decent results if you have clean audio,
Chris: but if people are in a noisy work environment, it's going to be pretty hit and
Chris: miss. So it's going to really depend on...
Wes: And I think that open... I haven't dug through the code base,
Wes: but I imagine there's an interface that they have so that they're intending...
Wes: Like, they already support too, so I imagine, like, as other options are available
Wes: or whatever, like, you'll be able to extend with different ASRs.
Chris: Or, I mean, is this some sort of thing that app developers could build on top
Chris: of and maybe create a screen reader using the backend that Canonical is providing here?
Wes: That's a good question.
Chris: I think we'll have to just find out if people experiment and build something
Chris: with it, right? That'll be the question.
Wes: That's the open source way.
Chris: I guess we'll check it out, right? Because we're supposed to get it,
Chris: in the next release, you know? Isn't that what they're targeting?
Brent: Yep.
Chris: I know I wrote it down, but I'm an old man and I can't remember.
Chris: But yeah, the next release. Yeah, 2610. We don't have to wait that long to try it out.
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Brent: As happens to us last week, as we are wrapping up the show, Linus announced a new kernel, Linux 7.1.
Wes: Huzzah.
Chris: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Linus wrote, normally I try to front load the merge
Chris: window and do as much possible the first few days, which we're going to come
Chris: back to the 72. Oh my goodness.
Chris: Oh, this is so funny too, because spoiler alert, uh, it didn't go this way.
Chris: He says this time, I'm not sure it's going to work out with my laptop.
Chris: He didn't think, wow, a couple of long flights without internet,
Chris: but I've made sure that I have fetched the early pull request.
Chris: Thank you. You know who you are.
Chris: So I'll be able to do some of it offline. Well, I guess he worked the entire flight.
Brent: Oh my goodness.
Chris: Anyway, possible slight hiccups in the merge window aside, the news today is 7.1.
Chris: Below is the short log for the last week. Nothing particularly interesting or
Chris: scary stands out, which is as it should be.
Chris: It's mostly various smaller driver updates, GPU networking, sound miscellaneous
Chris: with some networking and trace tooling fixes and random minor changes elsewhere.
Chris: Well, one of those random minor changes is this major rework to the NTFS driver
Chris: implementation, which now has full write support.
Wes: That is correct. And Linus merged it with the commit message NTFS resurrection.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: And that's because it's – so, okay, let's put the – This is a long saga. It is.
Chris: We should try to maybe do a short version.
Wes: Yeah, okay, so there's a lot of different ways to talk NTFS,
Wes: right, which is the sort of Windows file system.
Wes: We've had NTFS 3G, which is like a fuse option, which works well but slow.
Chris: And is in user space.
Wes: Yeah, there has been the traditional NTFS driver in the kernel,
Wes: which has been there a long time, but it's been read-only.
Wes: Then in 2021, we got NTFS 3, which was from Paragon, which was previously out
Wes: of tree, but then they got it merged.
Chris: But then...
Wes: It kind of has just been rotting in the tree, unfortunately.
Chris: Yeah, they kind of left.
Wes: And so now this is like a four-year rewrite from the ex-fat maintainer,
Wes: Namjai Jian, and he took the bones of the original read-only NTFS driver,
Wes: added full write support using modern kernel APIs like IOMAP,
Wes: delayed allocation, folios, and now we're getting it, yeah.
Chris: A real, true, modern NTFS implementation on Linux after this multi-year saga.
Wes: There was a little hiccup. There was a kind of got pulled and then un-pulled
Wes: because there was some Git structure issues with the commits,
Wes: but that all got cleared up and obviously it's here now.
Brent: I'm going to bet that next week Windows comes out with a new file system.
Chris: I don't think so. I don't think so. It's been a while too.
Chris: Also good to see the Apple Silicon MacBooks getting SMC power driver support
Chris: for some of the systems, giving better battery and power metrics.
Chris: Of course, some of that's changing with Mac OS 27 Golden Gate, but it's there.
Chris: Also, did you see this? In 7.1, 7.1, they mainline support for 12 new SOCs and
Chris: hardware platforms across ARM and RISC-V and added real-time kernel build support
Chris: for 32-bit ARM systems out there in the field.
Brent: Fascinating.
Wes: We not only have real-time kernel support these days, but we have it on 32-bit ARM.
Chris: Not 32x86, though.
Wes: No. Well, who wants that? There's this small little lining here about Intel
Wes: FRED being enabled by default for supported systems on Panther Lake,
Wes: Diamond Rapids, and AMD.
Wes: It's interesting...
Wes: So this goes, this is like a 30-year upgrade in a way. I mean,
Wes: this is already, this is text not new, but just sort of making it the default here is.
Wes: So basically any time, since basically the 386, any time a user space program
Wes: needs to talk to the kernel with like a system call or an interrupt or an exception
Wes: or something like that, it goes through what's called the interrupt descriptor table.
Wes: The CPU saves state, switches to ring zero, jumps to the handler.
Wes: When done, it returns back to user space.
Wes: This process involves multiple microcode steps, memory reads and serialization operations.
Wes: It's been the same since like 1985. Wow. But with Fred, we're replacing that
Wes: IDT delivery mechanism with new instructions that do the same sort of ring transitions,
Wes: but they do them atomically. They do them with fewer steps.
Wes: The CPU handles the context switch more directly, so you get fewer memory accesses,
Wes: fewer serialization operations, and lower latency.
Wes: So it's a kind of cool new thing that x86, like it's doing it both on Intel.
Wes: It's called Intel Fred, but AMD's doing it as well. And we're finally starting to get access to it.
Chris: I like the name. Larable and Pharonix notes, quote, great news for Panther Lake
Chris: on Linux and pairs nicely with Panther Lake Intel Idle Driver C-State Editions
Chris: for Linux 7.1 as well as ongoing Z-Kernel Linux driver development improvements.
Chris: I feel like the Panther Lake generation of Intel chips might pull me back to
Chris: the Intel side if I were in the market to get a laptop.
Wes: We should at least get to play with one.
Chris: The good news for Panther Lake on Linux just keeps stacking up.
Chris: It's really impressive.
Chris: Fred's also expected to be used by the upcoming AMD Zen 6 processor and Intel
Chris: Xeon Diamond Rapid Server processor.
Wes: Oh, boy.
Chris: I like those names. I want one of those. Nice to see the Steam Deck OLED audio
Chris: fixes getting now upstream, reducing the need for downstream patches in SteamOS,
Chris: which is good to see. Oh, no.
Chris: Oh, no. You should have warned me about this. PCM ICA support has been removed
Chris: as well as more 486 era x86 support paths.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Well, I still have PCM ICA cards. PCM ICA cards.
Chris: They were the best Wi-Fi. Look, look, when 802.11b came out,
Chris: no laptop had that built in.
Chris: But a guy could get himself a PCM CIA card and he could get himself Wi-Fi.
Chris: And then if you needed to switch over, you could get double-wide ones with an
Chris: Ethernet adapter, you could get ones with storage.
Chris: I feel like it didn't get a chance to live up to its potential,
Chris: and we shouldn't remove it yet.
Wes: Okay, but the upside is, as part of that, we're dumping 140,000 lines of legacy code in the kernel.
Brent: Okay, that sounds like a good thing.
Chris: You can have this, but you can't take anything else for the rest of the episode from the kernel.
Wes: All right, well, we do have some good news from 7.1. It included nearly 13,000
Wes: non-merge change sets, contributions from more than 2,000 developers with hundreds
Wes: of first-time contributions.
Chris: That's cool. That's really cool.
Wes: I think it was like 300 and some.
Chris: Okay, so we opened up with teasing Linus about low-keying what the next merge
Chris: window is going to look like for Linux 7.2, right? Because now 7.1's out the
Chris: door, so work never stops for the kernel team. They immediately open up the
Chris: merge window for the next kernel.
Chris: And Linus is like, I'm going to be on a flight, going to be working on my battery.
Chris: Maybe he has a panther, like, I don't know.
Chris: because he sure did get the work done. So we have now seen the first merge window,
Chris: the first half of it for Linux 7.2, and more than 7,000 non-merge change sets
Chris: have already been pulled into mainline.
Chris: We are seeing some code removal around I-486 again, but let's talk about some
Chris: of the stuff that's landing that looks really interesting,
Chris: including a new feature in Linux 7.2 that adds the ability to limit programs
Chris: to only open, quote, regular files and avoid being tricked or doing, quote, silly things.
Chris: So this is a brilliant feature that basically limits the type of file. Okay, all right.
Chris: So this landing in Linux 7.2 is this open NAT2 underscore regular flag.
Wes: Yeah, so there's already been the existing open, which is a system call for
Wes: opening files. Open NAT2 is this new version of it.
Chris: It doesn't allow silly files?
Brent: I hate those silly files.
Wes: It just gets everywhere. It's a sort of anti-silly system call, if you will.
Chris: Okay, good, good, good.
Wes: Well, okay, so open NAT2 is the modern version, sorry. Now we're getting open
Wes: NAT2 underscore regular.
Chris: Regular, right, regular.
Wes: But it's part of open NAT2. It's basically because OpenI2 supports passing a
Wes: struct of various things that it's this open how parameter. And so now we have
Wes: more ways to tell it, you know, be regular.
Chris: Yeah, the flag indicates the path should be open if it's a regular file.
Chris: It's useful to write secure programs that want to avoid being tricked in opening
Chris: device nodes with special semantics while thinking they operate on regular files.
Wes: Exactly. So like there might be times, right, that you need to open a device
Wes: node or a special file or something under proc or something like that, right?
Wes: or a pipe, but that's usually a specific point in your program and it's not
Wes: from generic user input for uploading a file into the browser or something like that.
Wes: And so this enables you to opt into that behavior of saying,
Wes: hey, I really want a regular file, which sounds funny, but it filters things,
Wes: like a device node, so dev zero or dev random or a FIFO or a pipe or symlink
Wes: substitution attacks here can kind of be detected as well.
Wes: And this will play into container sandbox hardening.
Wes: This is kind of a way to, you know, you could add this in as part of that.
Wes: So it's a nice new, yeah, it's a nice new feature.
Chris: I think it's mostly important as a flex. Like you can walk up to a Mac user and be like...
Chris: My kernel only opens regular files. Does your kernel open up strange,
Chris: silly files? Your kernel might open silly files. You should be concerned about that.
Chris: You know, like that kind of thing. It's a flex now. I like that.
Chris: I also like seeing that BTRFS, our buddy ButterFS, is now enabling large folios.
Chris: Because I think, like, Brent has a ton of those.
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: By default, huge folios are coming with Linux 7.2. Huge folios.
Wes: A folio is a kernel data structure that represents one or more physically contiguous pages.
Chris: And a huge one is two megabytes, apparently.
Wes: Yeah, because the small ones were four kilobytes. So it's kind of huge, apparently.
Brent: It's relative. It's relative.
Chris: Okay, Butterfest also gains a new IOCTL for returning raw checksums to user
Chris: space, a stable UUID for overlay OS-style use cases, and a lot of performance
Chris: work, including reported sequential write and direct I.O. throughput improvements.
Wes: Nice to see.
Chris: And our classic buddy XFS has also seen some work.
Wes: Yeah, it doesn't just stop at Butterfest. Heck no.
Chris: No, no. New zone allocator is now out of experimental status in Linux 7.2.
Chris: Reminder, you're not going to be getting 7.2 for a little bit, but that's good to see.
Wes: Yeah, it's used for zoned storage devices, including those SMR hard drives and ZNS SSDs.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Most of the rest is kind of just fixes and minor changes, but EXT4 got some cool stuff too.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: It reworked fast commit handling to reduce locking contention,
Wes: which is always good, and avoid deadlock scenarios, which is even better.
Wes: Yeah, it's nice to see that. Because you really don't want your file system driver to deadlock.
Chris: I mean, you can't claim that extended four is abandoned. It's nice to see that.
Wes: No, there's like hybrid journaling path that's being used now for recording
Wes: metadata deltas instead of always having to write full metadata every time.
Chris: Should make things a little bit faster there when updating metadata updates.
Chris: Just doing a little boom-boom.
Wes: Yeah, and directory hash computation is optimized by processing input in four-byte
Wes: chunks and removing function pointers, which is like a 2x improvement for at least longer inputs.
Chris: Ugh, that'll finally get Brent to stop complaining.
Wes: Big EXT4 guy.
Chris: Yeah, he's been bitching about that for years.
Wes: Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, how about this? We were talking about you don't want
Wes: to open pipes when you don't think you need to be. I do not.
Wes: But I think many of us run a lot of shell pipelines or use pipes as part of
Wes: operating on a Unix-like operating system.
Chris: Big pipe guy.
Wes: Yeah, right? So Linux 7.2 is improving a non-pipe write, the kernel path used
Wes: for anonymous pipes such as shell pipelines and standard streams.
Wes: So this change avoids allocating pages, reducing contention between concurrent readers and writers.
Wes: So if you're passing a whole bunch of data over that pipeline,
Wes: this could get somewhere between 6% to 28% better throughput,
Wes: and somewhere between 5% and 22% lower average write latency.
Brent: That is significant.
Wes: And it gets better when you're under memory pressure.
Chris: That's the thing right there. That's really cool. Because that's always when I'm piping.
Chris: I'm always piping under memory pressure because that's the secret,
Chris: boys. I'm always under memory pressure.
Chris: We also have some changes in the crypto driver code. I just want to mention
Chris: that they have been deprecating for a period of time bits of this interface,
Chris: that allowed user space applications to call into the crypto API directly in the kernel.
Chris: And not crypto in the currency, but crypto in the sense that it used to mean, as in cryptography.
Wes: Yeah, that's right.
Chris: Remember the good old days? But I guess they've been deprecating this.
Chris: It must be because it's insecure, I would assume.
Wes: Yeah, so you remember copy fail?
Chris: No. No, I've completely forgotten that.
Wes: Yeah, well, that reason, somewhat reason.
Chris: So this is some follow-up from that, huh?
Wes: Uh-huh, vulnerability. Yeah. Yeah, this was used in part of that attack.
Wes: because it has optimizations that kind of let you overwrite memory in a way
Wes: that one area was treating it as read-only, but now suddenly it's getting used
Wes: letters right, and you've been able to change it.
Wes: Essentially, no one is maintaining it, and these optimizations just aren't really
Wes: worth it anymore, and especially now that we're in the era of a whole bunch
Wes: of sustained LLM attacks.
Chris: Yep, exactly. Okay, all right, that makes sense.
Wes: Really, there's kind of a lot of that. Like if you look under the hood,
Wes: a lot of the things being pulled or kind of reconsidered what the value is has stemmed from that.
Chris: Yeah, it's interesting to see the fallout just kind of continue.
Chris: I said you could not take anything else away from the kernel in this episode,
Chris: but that one I'm okay with.
Chris: That one I feel like makes sense. We need to be safe.
Chris: All right, though, let's just see what we have next here on the list here.
Chris: The next feature in Linux 7.2 is they are...
Brent: Sorry. Let me finish that.
Wes: This one was I really didn't want to think about.
Brent: It reads here, removing Apple talk protocol support from the mainline kernel. Sorry, Chris.
Chris: Why? Why do we have to remove? What?
Chris: Why? Why? It doesn't hurt anybody. It's a great little protocol for those of
Chris: us who are enthusiasts that like to have classic machines.
Brent: Why?
Chris: Why? What is this hurting? It's 4,000 lines of code. It's nothing.
Chris: It's nothing in the Linux kernel. I just can't stand for this.
Wes: Do you, are you going to put some effort into building yourself a fork that maintains this?
Chris: No, but what I have thought about doing is, you know, creating a consistent
Chris: complaining campaign about it,
Chris: you know, just consistently getting on a soapbox. you think that's a brand.
Wes: New segment on the show.
Chris: Huh yeah yeah do you think that might help if i just complain a lot i i get
Chris: it but it it is it is sad to see the removal was triggered they say partially by a burst of,
Chris: ai generated fixes that was rarely used code that lacked active reviewers so
Chris: you're telling me it's a victim of slop trimming yep so this is the problem people I.
Wes: Had forgotten about it and the.
Chris: Slop brought it up. The AI can't consider the art and history,
Chris: the full context around Apple talk, right? This isn't IPX.
Chris: Okay. But this isn't like some random Bluetooth 2.0 protocol we don't use anymore
Chris: for like low bit rate headpieces.
Brent: But Chris, the kernel is not a museum. Like we don't need these things in there if nobody's using it.
Chris: First of all, shut your mouth. Second of all, listen, man, I got old Macs somewhere
Chris: around here. i'd love to fire up one day i don't know like if i can't use linux
Chris: and i can't use maples what am i gonna do.
Wes: Oh it does look like they will be maintaining it still in this uh linux net
Wes: dev out mod orphan module really yeah that's what i see here in the patch for removal,
Wes: There's also some AX25 and ham radio that are over there.
Chris: Oh, the ham guys are getting it too?
Wes: Well, they might have already been there. I don't know much about the ham radio driver.
Wes: It does also say that Apple Talk was removed in OSX in 10-6 Snow Leopard in 2009.
Chris: Yeah, I know. It sucked then, doesn't it? And just because they do something wrong.
Wes: You've only gotten over that one.
Chris: Two wrongs don't make a right, Wes. You know that. You know that.
Chris: So we can collectively cope. Before the show, I created Apple Talk Rest in Peace
Chris: sticker, the memorial sticker where we as a community, for those of us that
Chris: remember, can put it on our machines 1985 to 2026.
Chris: It just talked different. Stickers available right now on jupitergarage.com.
Chris: And while you're at it, why not pick up Sorry, I Only Open Regular Files so
Chris: you can flex and celebrate Linux 7.2, the can't-do attitude of saying no to special files.
Chris: Sorry, I only open. Real stickers available now, jupitergarage.com. Go check them out.
Chris: Sorry, I only open regular files and the Apple Talk Memorial sticker.
Chris: I am putting them on my rigs.
Chris: I'll tell you what. It's too soon. It's too soon for both of those things.
Chris: Too soon. I'll tell you what.
Chris: If I could have my way, we would have a little network of Apple Talk going,
Chris: and you would just use it for, like, device discovery and file transfer.
Chris: You don't need TCP IP for that. Like, everybody's doing all these mesh networks
Chris: and overlay networks. Well, if you're just on a LAN, why not use TCP IP for
Chris: everything you use TCP IP for, but then use something like AppleTalk for your local file sharing?
Chris: Guys, you're laughing. There's a real use case here.
Wes: You want to set this up?
Chris: First of all, I know obscurity isn't a thing, but it is a thing with this.
Chris: Okay, this would be a thing. Second of all, it's so easy. Third of all,
Chris: it does name resolution, so you don't have to set up home DNS. Yeah?
Chris: And then if you really want to get classic, you get classic Mac OS,
Chris: then you go into the Apple menu, you go into chooser. Did you ever have to use chooser?
Wes: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: It's a lot of fun. I'm just thinking. I mean, what else are you going to use? IPX, NetBui?
Chris: Why not use AppleTalk? And then you want a private file sharing network that
Chris: nobody's ever going to discover and nobody's going to come looking for?
Chris: It'd be your local little AppleTalk network.
Wes: You want to try it out here at the studio?
Chris: I mean, I kind of do before they take it away from us. I think it makes sense.
Wes: We got one kernel release left.
Brent: I feel like this deserves a moment of silence. Do you think it does?
Chris: I mean, I'm feeling sad, boys.
Brent: We've got a cone for this, and you can just, you know, grieve in the cone if you'd like.
Brent: Okay, we should totally do this. In the studio. In the studio.
Brent: We should totally. Come on. Have the whole studio just be Apple talk. Wouldn't that work?
Chris: All right, you get over here.
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: I'm for it. I'm officially approving it.
Wes: Do you think if we had like a layer two VPN, we could sort of extend it across the network?
Chris: That's what I was wondering is how you would route it. Because obviously you'd
Chris: want to do that. Could you somehow run it over TCP IP?
Brent: Like an Apple talk mesh?
Chris: Encapsulate it, exactly. Could you encapsulate it? And then you would run it
Chris: over your mesh network on top of IP?
Chris: I don't see why. All right, moving on.
Chris: Well, we may have something for you in the future. We'll have links to all the
Chris: new, there's a lot more stuff.
Chris: We just wanted to kind of cover the highlights and we'll put a link to the new
Chris: stickers over in Jupyter Garage too, if you want to commiserate with me or flex
Chris: that your kernel doesn't mess around with silly files.
Chris: I want to take a moment and thank our members for making this episode possible.
Chris: Members, you now get a free web boost to get your message in.
Chris: You can send one free boost per episode. Also, you get access to the bootleg, a lot more content or
Chris: the lean and mean ad-free version that editor drew puts together also available
Chris: to our members the core contributor applies to this show and the jupiter.party
Chris: is all the shows and all the special features,
Chris: and you members you make it possible thank you very very much we appreciate you.
Brent: We've got a special baller boost here this week from hybrid sarcasm the amount is 61,923 satoshis,
Brent: all right hybrid says i boosted this amount to coder radio when my daughter
Brent: was born three years ago since it's father's day today i figured i would do
Brent: that again so happy father's day.
Chris: Ah that's great oh that brings back the memories thank you hybrid thank you.
Brent: Indeed there's a bit of metadata here too it says uh zap right you guys know anything about that.
Chris: Oh but zap right is web boost.
Brent: Yeah so that's our first baller web boost i would say oh Well.
Chris: It might be. It might be. It might be. It might be. It might be not, though, either.
Chris: Saltros comes in with 24,000 sats.
Chris: Hey, guys, no time, long time, no boost. Soltros, we appreciate you.
Chris: Soltros here. I retired Soltros OS, but I learned a lot.
Chris: Right now, I'm working on Cabinet, a file locker, because I really don't like using NextCloud.
Chris: Anyways, I'm very grateful for all you do. You do incredible work with the podcast,
Chris: and thanks for being you.
Chris: File Locker is a solid, or Cabinet, is a file locker.
Chris: He writes, it's a lean, high-performance file locker designed for self-hosting.
Chris: It prioritizes a fast web experience, a mobile-first design,
Chris: and a simple file management without the bloat or complex syncing.
Wes: That does sound maybe like a very useful thing.
Chris: Yeah, that does look nice.
Wes: Have something that runs somewhere.
Chris: You're sitting on top of like a file share or something like that?
Wes: Uh-huh.
Chris: Optimized for mobile screens, he says. It can be added to your home screen as a progressive web app.
Wes: That's a nice touch.
Chris: Well done, Soltros. Well done.
Wes: Daja Boo Sin with 9,494 sats.
Wes: All right, question for you guys and anyone in the community wants to boost
Wes: in. Do you have any preferred methods of dealing with burnout?
Wes: I used to get rejuvenated by doing something weird with my home lab or joining
Wes: in on a JB challenge, going for a hike, or letting my ADHD pick a random new hobby for me.
Wes: But nowadays, everything seems to just make it worse. Love to hear strategies you guys use.
Chris: Such a good question. It feels like you're always having to evolve the strategies.
Wes: It does feel like it.
Brent: Yeah, I had some answers to this one, but then he mentioned them all as not
Brent: working anymore. So I don't know.
Brent: I'd say get a squirrel. That helps.
Chris: Are you sure about the home lab thing? I mean, sometimes stacking a dub in the
Chris: home lab can help. But I think, you know, what I've been trying to do is get
Chris: outside and do a couple of small things outside. Like I'm trying to,
Chris: I'm currently fighting the biggest fight of my life with poison hemlock.
Chris: So every day I try to get out there, do a little trimming and spraying,
Chris: you know, just stack a little dubs. It isn't related to work.
Chris: I still think there's something to that.
Wes: Yeah, I do agree with that.
Chris: I would wonder, though, if there isn't probably some bigger pressures that are
Chris: just making all this other stuff not as enjoyable. And a lot of times for me
Chris: when that happens, it's like bad sleep, maybe, you know, not eating well.
Chris: So like a couple of issues are compounding, usually like three or more.
Chris: And that's usually when I start to just grind down.
Chris: And you're going to have to kind of address those.
Wes: Yeah, it can be difficult, too,
Wes: if it's, you know, there's pressures and maybe standards or, you know.
Wes: It can be useful maybe to try and unpack why the things that no longer give
Wes: you that, what about them has changed.
Chris: Yeah, or if it's not them, it's changed.
Brent: You may also consider getting a van. It's a really busy hobby that gives you
Brent: all sorts of adventures. So that would be my top advice.
Chris: And it won't financially destroy you quite as much as a boat.
Brent: No, no, no.
Chris: Not as much as a boat.
Wes: Okay, well, we got a second Daja boost here. I'm going to some feedback on,
Wes: local models versus cloud models and that kind of thing I'm in a similar boat
Wes: to PJ as a general rule I don't fully integrate anything into my core day-to-day
Wes: production until I can own it and run it on my own hardware or a VPSI control yeah
Wes: probably I've been listening to Chris's to find networking ad reads for too long,
Wes: but that being said one thing that is handy is that the OpenAI API spec is quickly
Wes: turning into S3 of the AI world so in the interim even with the cloud models
Wes: I can run them through a proxy Yeah. Which is, I think, a good tip.
Chris: I think, too, that we're probably not injecting into the conversation very much
Chris: is the potential and possibility of people running their own injector that sits
Chris: in front of these cloud models.
Chris: Which could be your way to make sure certain secrets or certain things you don't
Chris: want shared, a way to route between the free available models. There's a lot.
Chris: I mean, we really could almost do a whole stream just on the,
Chris: we should do a stream on the injector stuff.
Wes: That's a good idea.
Chris: Yeah, because there's a lot there that I think would address some of the concerns
Chris: of our audience. Thank you, Daja. Great boost. Good to hear from you.
Brent: There's a boost here from Not Sure. It's a row of ducks. Web boost changes everything. Great work.
Chris: Great. Glad you like it, Not Sure. Good to hear from you. Gene Bean's here with 7,777 sets.
Chris: I am super excited about the U-clock, Chris. I wanted a nice-looking Home Assistant
Chris: controllable alarm clock for my son.
Chris: I already have him waking up with lighting in Home Assistant.
Chris: Until then, alarms have been an Echo Dot thing. I just ordered the clock,
Chris: and I can't wait to play with it.
Wes: That is great.
Chris: You know what, Gene? That's such a great—it's so much more useful than the Echo
Chris: Dot. It's so much more useful.
Chris: I, again, saved my bacon. This time on the—I think it was the fridge last time.
Chris: It was the freezer this time, or vice versa.
Chris: I saved our bacon and the other thing I added was now a three minute warning
Chris: when the freezer door has been open for more than that's nice yeah just a little
Chris: warning there on the thing.
Wes: I kind of want that.
Chris: It's if you clock is great if you don't know what we're talking about I think
Chris: I buried the lead a lot by putting what is probably one of my favorite gadgets
Chris: of the year so far casually as a pick last week but sometimes the picks hit,
Chris: sometimes those picks hit.
Wes: Yeah Nathan bussin with 2223 sets.
Chris: Love it.
Wes: Looking forward to trying windows mcb anything to spend less time remoting in fixing it's s.
Chris: You get it nathan you get it that's it oh god when you it was in the clip the
Chris: moment i realized oh i'm not gonna
Chris: have to use windows hardly at all ever anymore like it's already rare.
Wes: Now it's even more rare.
Chris: And also like if a family member really needs help i got an option that's really,
Chris: that's the one that gets me it's huge.
Brent: Well aaron boosted in with uh one two three four five sets,
Brent: I know it's only ever played in the bootleg of the show, but my favorite AI
Brent: song you have made is the time-killing song you play sometimes during the pre-show break.
Brent: Can you share that with the audience somehow? I think it would be fun to use
Brent: the college acapella group profile on.
Wes: I like this.
Chris: We do have we have yet to do this.
Chris: Yeah, it's a fun song.
Brent: I've never heard this one before.
Chris: It's because you're always out having a break. We play it when you're away from the song.
Brent: Is that right? What else do you play when I'm gone?
Chris: The song may be all about you for all you know. I don't know.
Chris: One day we'll figure out a way to post those AA rounds. We do need to figure
Chris: that out. Just, there's a lot to do.
Chris: All right, Budai comes in with a row of duck-a-ducks.
Wes: Oh, with a flex.
Chris: Okay, what do we got here? Here we have LS piped into a word count,
Chris: eight, which I treat my download. Oh, talking about he's got eight files in his download folder.
Chris: Finally, I wanted more people to give us this. I want to know.
Chris: I'm not going to reveal mine until we get a few of these.
Chris: I treat my downloads folder like slash temp. It even gets cleared on reboot.
Wes: Oh, that's wild. I love that.
Brent: So eight actually feels pretty high in this case.
Chris: I'm going to definitely admit that I do not clear it out on reboot,
Chris: boys. Let's see if I can just tell you the oldest file in my downloads folder.
Wes: Bad to Hi goes on to say, if there was something on there that I needed and
Wes: got deleted, then I didn't need it that much.
Brent: Good point.
Chris: Okay. All right. That's not as bad as...
Wes: There's a certain zen to it.
Chris: Oh, I cleaned up. It's not as bad as I expected. It's going into last year.
Chris: I'll just leave it at that. If we get more, I might reveal.
Brent: I wonder what the mechanism is here. I'd be curious about that.
Wes: Mechanism for cleaning?
Chris: A little boot script? Yeah, we'd love to know. How are you actually cleaning that?
Brent: Just a little RMRF as a boot script. That's not dangerous at all.
Chris: Tomato comes in with 5,000 SATs.
Chris: It's a boost. The one reason I'm sometimes I have to use Windows is when the
Chris: latest DDRM tools, ah, for the Kindle, stop working with Linux.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: This Windows MCP thing sounds like it might just save my Unix bacon here.
Wes: Nice. I haven't even thought of that. You should let us know how that goes.
Chris: I'd be very curious. That is a great use case, Tomato. Please keep us boosted on that one.
Wes: Distro Stew boosting in with 12,345 sets.
Brent: Okay.
Wes: I came to test out the web.
Chris: Boost Looking good Nice I don't know why you boosted with Windows XP though That's weird.
Wes: And And Here's my Nix router config.
Chris: First web boost with a link First web boost with a link boys That's cool We got.
Wes: A flake here Ooh.
Chris: Router.nix Wonder what's in here Let's go check out that router.nix Oh he's
Chris: using ZFS On his router I love it That's great Couple interfaces here.
Wes: We got DNS mask Yep Oh, uh, Kia for DHCP. Nice.
Chris: I could look at these configs all day. I really could. I also like,
Chris: I'd like to start at the flake and you gotta, you gotta, you gotta go through
Chris: the main config and then get to the, you gotta, you're jumping ahead.
Chris: You're going to the end of the book. I gotta say.
Wes: Well, I wanted to get to the good stuff. We only have so much time.
Chris: Whomever whiz comes in with 9,009 sats.
Chris: I really wanted to clip some audio for you from the Star Trek The Next Generation,
Chris: but I didn't even know what episode it was in. I realized, however,
Chris: the subtitles exist. So instead of just clipping the audio, I made a tool to
Chris: easily clip dialogue from any video in your library. Check it out.
Chris: Wecker. W-E-C-K-E-R.
Chris: Also, you could have just told us the line and we would have told you the episode it's from.
Wes: But I love the idea of this tool.
Chris: I don't think the repository is public yet, but it's a great idea.
Chris: Check out. Oh, Quip Clipper.
Chris: We need this in our lives so bad. we're constantly trying to figure out how
Chris: we could take little sound bits.
Chris: So we'd love to keep this thing fresh all the time.
Chris: And just as an aside, if anybody ever wanted to help us,
Chris: if you have like, say, a backup MKV file of an episode or a movie that's in 5.1 stereo,
Chris: if you were to open that MKV file in an application like Reaper or anything
Chris: that supports multi-track editing, you might be surprised to learn that often
Chris: the dialogue is isolated on its own track and you can extract it from all the
Chris: other background noises to a certain degree.
Chris: Just if you didn't know that. Whomever, Wiz, thank you very much for the boost.
Chris: We really do appreciate you on that.
Brent: Well, I'm going to sneaky pull one up here. Todd from Northern VA with 1,200 sats.
Brent: He says, long time no boost, but this is a test boost after resurrecting my
Brent: node after one plus year of downtime.
Wes: Nicely done. Test boost received.
Brent: Todd, we know exactly how that feels. We have that problem too.
Chris: That's great. Greg the lawyer sent in 50 fiat dollars.
Chris: Using the web boost to say, keep up the great work. Thank you, Greg.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Nice to hear you. What kind of lawyering do you do, Greg? Always love to know
Chris: that kind of stuff. That's awesome. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Wes: Carl N. comes in with $25 via Zapparat Fiat.
Chris: Woo!
Chris: Bah, bah.
Wes: Easy in my guild for writing on the self-hosted membership deal for so long.
Wes: Thanks for clinker therapy. Really enjoyed it.
Chris: I'm glad you liked it. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Brent: Well, Brad sent in 20 fiat dollars.
Brent: I enjoyed the Clanker Therapy recording and all that Hermes info.
Brent: More links and examples would be appreciated. Love the easier to contribute
Brent: web boost option with this fiat.
Chris: Awesome. Thank you. Sire came
Chris: in with $5. Finally, a great way to spend my hard-earned fiat currency.
Chris: Yeah, get rid of that dirty fiat. Throw it at us. That's fine.
Chris: We had a couple of member boosts come in too.
Wes: More than a couple.
Chris: Yeah, it's new.
Wes: It's new.
Chris: It's new. So we should expect that.
Wes: Uh-huh. It's exciting.
Chris: Now, some of you decide to go anonymous. You can put your name in there in the field.
Chris: It is all right. We would still like it. Anonymous boosts in with two boosts here.
Chris: IDK about folder numbers, but I do know my Bitcoin numbers. And with Bitcoin
Chris: under 100K, USD member boosts are a steal.
Chris: But will you increase membership prices when the price goes above 100,000?
Chris: We haven't really ever adjusted. I mean, if you think about it,
Chris: I think at one point it was around 16 or so when we started.
Wes: Yeah, true.
Chris: And we've always just kind of kept it what it is because we don't really denominate
Chris: in dollars. We denominate in sats. So it's just a sats a sat really is kind
Chris: of how we think about it. But I suppose anything's always up for reevaluation
Chris: if you have a better idea.
Chris: Somebody sends us a really great idea. You know, why not?
Wes: Mm hmm.
Wes: Ah, TimeKillerTK comes in with a member boost.
Chris: Ooh, I like that name.
Wes: Long-time listener since the days of TechSnap with Alan.
Chris: Right on.
Wes: Loved Clanker Therapy? Please do more. Zip code boost?
Chris: Oh, great. All right, so we got a zip code boost and a plus one for Clanker Therapy.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, so here's the numbers, Wes. Three, three, three, L-E.
Wes: Oh.
Brent: No, no, you missed a three.
Chris: Oh, did I?
Brent: Yeah.
Wes: How many three? I need to know the right number of threes here.
Chris: Oh, the blurry vision. It looks like three threes to me.
Wes: Brent, how many threes am I working on?
Chris: There's four threes. There are four threes.
Brent: One, two, yeah. It says three, three, three, three, L-E.
Chris: There are four lights. There are four lights. It is true.
Wes: Okay. Well, my man.
Brent: Are you playing on your map? I don't quite.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, I don't hear it, Wes. Oh.
Brent: Oh.
Chris: There it is.
Brent: For a minute there, I thought he had a silent map.
Chris: Yeah, well, he did for a while.
Wes: Okay.
Chris: What you got there, Wes?
Wes: If I've picked the right continent, you never know. It is in the town of Zwingsdrecht,
Wes: in South Holland, Netherlands.
Chris: Sounds probably just like you. Nice.
Wes: I probably butchered that, so tell us, boost back in. Thank you, Time Killer.
Chris: Thank you, Time Killer. Appreciate you.
Wes: That's great.
Chris: All right, Bradley.
Brent: Gong Fuja boosted in a member's boost.
Chris: Hmm.
Brent: Loving the content and extras for members. I actually agree with producer Jeff
Brent: here on the idea of using AI.
Brent: I agree it is helpful and open source will catch up in the end,
Brent: but I don't like short cutting knowledge and not really learning it as a result,
Brent: especially when things go wrong.
Chris: I think we had an interesting follow-up chat today on that. PJ has really been
Chris: diving in deep on the local model stuff.
Chris: We've got a good local model combo in the bootleg today. So I'd like to know what you think, Gong.
Wes: And I think part of, you know, playing with the tools is learning how to set
Wes: them up so that it does work for you, right?
Wes: So you do find the right, like, where do you offload and where do you inspect
Wes: or follow up or gatekeep or, you know, like, where do you set the gates in your
Wes: workflow and which pieces do you focus on?
Wes: And that'll probably be different for a lot of different people.
Chris: What are you really trying to get done? That really is the defining thing which
Chris: you'd expect from a local model right now.
Wes: Well, and like you can have different, you know, some folks might vibe stuff
Wes: up and throw it up and test it.
Wes: it's kind of smoke test it live but you you could you know have a proposing
Wes: architecture and then you walk through every piece with it and then it sets
Wes: it up you know you could do take totally different approaches in terms of like
Wes: how involved you were at each step.
Chris: Sensor smile comes in with a member boost long time listener since 2013,
Chris: first time booster call me a curmudgeon but i'm not going to try crypto in this
Chris: life after hearing all these boosts all these years i can finally send in a Message as a member.
Chris: I'll be sure to send some USD when I can in the future. Thanks and keep them
Chris: coming. Glad to make it happen for you.
Brent: Amazing.
Chris: Sensor smile. Welcome to the Boost Club.
Wes: Uh, whomever wheeves boosts in here, um, maybe it's a follow-up boost from before
Wes: because one cool thing I did with Quip Clipper was batch export all the lines from TNG.
Chris: Resistance is... No way! You could batch line all the Resistance is Feudal lines?
Brent: Oh my goodness.
Wes: It works perfectly with only a few clicks, and I also made it so you can export
Wes: just the center channel.
Chris: That is legit.
Brent: Oh, wow.
Chris: What? I was just saying that!
Wes: You sure were.
Chris: That is so good. Yeah, look at this. He sent us some copies of it,
Chris: too. That is good work. Well done, sir.
Chris: So he's got all the resistances futile now? I'm jelly.
Chris: Aw, Hugh. Aw, that's nice. That one's a good one.
Wes: Yeah, you should. You got to send us an updated link because we got,
Wes: I think, maybe just your GitHub profile, but not, I want to try this.
Chris: Yeah, that is wicked, dude. That's great. Who's next?
Wes: Marcel.
Chris: All right. Marcel comes in with a free member boost.
Chris: You can read higher voltages with it. Oh, good. Yes, with using an ESP resistor
Chris: divider. It basically maps 0 to 12 volts to 0.3 volts. Yes, I do know about
Chris: this. It's not my preferred way to measure this voltage.
Chris: Brent, we've talked about this before. It's not quite ideal.
Brent: Yeah, we did play with this when we were doing that diesel heater reverse engineering
Brent: because we had several strange issues.
Brent: And voltage was one thing that helped with diagnosing a bunch of stuff.
Brent: So we did use a resistor to do exactly this.
Brent: But you kind of end up, I think, in the car with diagnostics and stuff,
Brent: you end up with like, remember, Chris, I had like wires everywhere and like
Brent: little tiny components and resistors and like transistors and stuff.
Brent: Yeah, a dedicated device would be really nice. Something also that,
Brent: you know, if you drop it, it doesn't fall into a million pieces.
Wes: So mostly a packaging issue.
Chris: I also wonder, could there be a slight resolution loss?
Brent: Yeah, that's a good point.
Chris: Because we're looking at really micro measurements here.
Brent: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So that's something to consider. Depends what you're doing.
Chris: But Marcel, I think it's in the category of worth me playing around with because
Chris: I think I have most of the components I need to actually try it. so.
Wes: I like that marcel's clearly paying attention because there's this line there's
Wes: lots of online calculators or i'm sure data could help you.
Chris: With it he was paying attention but i like this last line.
Brent: Uh just be careful because you could easily fry the esp with that 12 volts he got over there.
Chris: Yeah that is true.
Wes: Have done which is another thing to consider perhaps in that you have to just
Wes: navigate that with part of the setup.
Chris: I i think you know my route's probably going to be a meter that has a usb port
Chris: on it that can talk to a linux box
Chris: it's just there's the perfect devices available if you're in europe that are
Chris: just exactly what i'm looking for but with with taxes and shipping to get two of them,
Chris: is almost 300 and they're like 40 to 60 devices if you do the conversion.
Wes: Should you just toss a link in here i'm curious.
Chris: Yeah i need to find them um they're It just, you know, like when you have like
Chris: a dream device, it's funny that it's like a $50 device or something like that.
Chris: And that's, we'd love to have two of those.
Chris: It's just the way the world works right now. Tomatoes here with a member boost.
Chris: I'm trying out the free web boost, but I have to say boo for the cloud flare
Chris: nonsense, boosting two shows in a row. And I had to prove I'm not some bad actor. Heck no.
Chris: So this was we were experimenting with serverless to essentially avoid spinning
Chris: up even more VPS servers with NGINX and stuff that we're running hundreds of.
Chris: So we'll see. You know, I'm always a little skeptical on the Cloudflare side myself.
Wes: Greg, the lawyer member boosts in, boosting in to say, keep up the good work.
Chris: Thank you, Greg. Hello. And again, thank you.
Brent: We also have a leaky canoe member with a members boost.
Brent: Plus one for topical live streams off the main feed. I followed Chris,
Brent: Chris's lead after the clanker therapy stream and set up a multi-agent setup
Brent: and deployed wrappers for the critical functions. I want my agents to accomplish.
Brent: However, I'd like to ask, how do you handle when your agents are, quote, moving too fast?
Chris: It's usually a gap in the skill.
Chris: And so they're just kind of going off on their own and trying to figure it out,
Chris: just using tool calls and whatnot.
Chris: So you might see if maybe there's a little more implicit instructions you can
Chris: give in the skill. Any thoughts on that, Wes?
Wes: Yeah, maybe more some sort of gate or interaction point. or.
Chris: Yeah approval gates are good too if they're having a problem you could always
Chris: say okay stop here and you know put approval gate in that does work pretty well
Chris: and that's sometimes the way you can work through the problem.
Wes: I also like if you you know if you make them work in super small increments
Wes: and maybe you could have checkpoints or have them at regular intervals use various
Wes: you know other agents or sub agents for review as a way to sort of quote unquote slow things down yeah.
Chris: Let us know how it goes, Leaky. Stuart comes in with a member boost,
Chris: saying excited to see a web boost option.
Chris: Getting AlbiHub set up has always been on my backlog. I'm sure I'm going to
Chris: get to it eventually, but this is nice in the meantime.
Chris: I found self-host about six months before it ended, and I decided to come over
Chris: and give LUP a chance. Been a fan since. Well, I'm glad you did, Stuart.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Nice to hear from you.
Brent: Well, this one's from Pavel, who's a friend from Berlin that I met.
Brent: testing this good old member boost functionality.
Chris: It worked.
Brent: Good to see you.
Wes: Bobby member boost in woohoo less friction more inclination to boost thoughts
Wes: to that end i'm beginning to get it ai i mean been playing with some of the
Wes: stuff you talk about burning question though are you running llms.
Chris: Locally isn't that always the burning question if so.
Wes: What is that magic hardware want to self-host where possible.
Chris: Don't we all that's been one of our kind of two week theme conversations in
Chris: the bootleg is like what can you actually do locally and the answer is not a
Chris: lot right now getting to be better.
Wes: But we have a producer actively researching.
Chris: Yeah pj's on the case and uh he's reporting back good question also shout out
Chris: to zippy frog did a test boost and space warlock came in with a member boost his first boost,
Chris: This is great. I haven't found an iOS Matrix client I like, and I'm not usually
Chris: at my desk during the live streams. I've been hoping for this ever since you
Chris: did Texas Linux Fest last year.
Chris: Thanks for getting this figured out. Thank you, Warlock.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Nice to hear from you.
Wes: Hey, props to Chris, who got the whole front end done.
Chris: Oh, please. It wouldn't be anything without the fancy back end and reporting, Westpain.
Wes: Scuffed member boosts in. Free member boosting check-in.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Nice. And then we got Jimmy member boosting in. Okay, this is one I've been looking forward to.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: It's dressed to me, so this is appropriate, at Wes. Do you remember how Chris
Wes: fell in love with another man's van?
Wes: Are we really sure it is another man's van?
Wes: I'm a bit fussy on details, you see, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually another man's van.
Wes: How did it cross the border? Who's it registered to?
Wes: I suspect it's actually Chris's bank bus.
Chris: Well, I mean, it depends on the technicalities. you know jimmy just technicalities
Chris: there technicalities uh,
Chris: it's right now it's the internet's bang bus let's be honest it's the internet,
Chris: it's everyone now if it ever makes it back i have no idea.
Brent: Well you you got to make that tempting you know.
Chris: Put on the sugar uh-huh.
Brent: Well chupacabra came in with a free members boost.
Chris: Hey.
Brent: Clanker therapy was fire.
Chris: Thank you.
Brent: While the stream was loaded with information, I'm experiencing the blank canvas syndrome.
Brent: What would be a good next step on a fresh Nix OS system? I was thinking of unleashing
Brent: clod code over SSH and let it loose with, I want to deploy Hermes agent. Let's cook.
Chris: I mean, why not? But, you know, I've said this before, but what has been supremely
Chris: useful, and whenever people say, I don't know what to do with the agent,
Chris: I think you don't have anything you self-host.
Chris: You don't have anything annoying that you have to, like, move information from one spot to another.
Chris: It's super handy to put it in front of your self-hosted services.
Chris: And I think you might find the family approval factor of using whatever their
Chris: favorite chat app that they've already been using for years to interact with
Chris: whatever you've set up as a smart home thing increases the approval factor by
Chris: a substantial amount that makes it worth it.
Chris: So I would say if you have anything you're already self-hosting,
Chris: you know, get a Hermes thing going, get it cooking, and then stand it up and
Chris: have it start interfacing with the API that that home, that self-hosted service almost no doubt has.
Chris: Such a good way to go. like you got jellyfin or plex or you got things that
Chris: are managing you know media for those instances like why are you going to a
Chris: web ui and searching for a file when you can just tell the bot you know go get
Chris: me this make it easy for them i.
Wes: Also have a lot of fun playing with um having it use like a text-to-speech thing
Wes: so like something like pocket ttsa there's a bunch of options so that could be another thing fun.
Chris: Thing news briefs and stuff like that can be a lot of fun.
Brent: I would also argue that if you have a project that you've been meaning to do
Brent: for like a year, maybe two, maybe five, have at her, right?
Brent: Let Hermes just kind of suggest what to do with it or tackle it completely for
Brent: you and get that thing done.
Chris: Start chewing away at it. Start it. Start it. Let us know how it goes.
Chris: You know what I'm saying? Let's do it.
Chris: All right. Anton comes in with a member boost. All right.
Chris: Long-time listener member since around 2012-13. Hey-o! Nice.
Chris: First-time booster. Hey-o! Not a fan of cryptocurrency, so the web boost is
Chris: awesome. Thanks for all the years of great shows. Hope there are many more to come.
Chris: Any chance the message limit could be longer than 300 characters?
Chris: I don't know about that, man. It makes these segments pretty, pretty long.
Wes: It is a balance.
Chris: It'd be interesting, like, occasional member extra long. Oh,
Chris: yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. Nice to hear from you. Thank you for the long-time support.
Wes: And our final member boost today, which is our last boost, from Hi5Connoisseur.
Chris: Hey, Hi5.
Wes: So excited about the web boost and the member boost, I fell off of AlbiHub due
Wes: to the cost of opening the channel and, well, my addiction to PocketCasts. Great work, as always.
Chris: You know, I used to be a big PocketCast user. I can't go back.
Chris: I thought about it recently. I'm like, no, I'm very happy.
Wes: Yeah, same here, actually. It's not that it's bad.
Chris: No, yeah, it's good. Thank you, everybody, members, boosters,
Chris: and streamers. We had 20 of you stream sats. Collectively, you sat streamer
Chris: stacked 25,922 satoshis. Thank you very much.
Chris: Now, since this is all new, what we think we're going to do,
Chris: just to make it one final line number, is we're just going to convert the Fiat
Chris: Boost to sats for the total at the current price values.
Chris: We don't really know the best way to, since it's two different,
Chris: but this is what we're experimenting with right now. We always appreciate your
Chris: feedback because the goal is transparency.
Chris: The total boosted for this episode is 332,982 Satoshis.
Chris: That includes the member boosts and the fiat boosts.
Chris: Thank you, everybody. And, of course, the Satoshi boosts. That's all in one
Chris: final line item right there.
Wes: Yeah, that combined to make a total of 39 boosts.
Chris: Woo!
Wes: And some streams, of course.
Chris: That's awesome, of course. Yeah, 20 of you. Thank you, everybody,
Chris: who supported the show with a boost or a membership. It's kind of neat to bring
Chris: it all together in this segment. Finally, it's feeling like it's really happening.
Wes: Thank you for trying it out.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, this year of shows since the beginning of the year would not be
Chris: possible without your support. We continue.
Chris: And even if at this point the show were sold out going forward,
Chris: the deficit that we have dug ourselves into, we would still absolutely need
Chris: your support to survive. It is.
Chris: And it only compounds as the year goes on. So thank you so much.
Chris: It really does make a difference. And we enjoy hearing from you.
Chris: It's our favorite segment of the show.
Chris: A couple of picks, a couple of picks. I think maybe, Wes, you found Fluxcast
Chris: this week, which lets you stream your Linux desktop to a smart TV that supports
Chris: Miracast, DLNA, WFD, or Chromecast.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. You know, Miracast especially has been one of those things
Wes: that just has floated around forever, but I've never actually been able to take
Wes: advantage of or try. Obviously, I Chromecast all kinds of stuff.
Wes: I have used DLNA on and off over the years.
Wes: And of course, there's various ways to do that. But I thought like a nice little
Wes: focused app that could just let you stream your desktop would be pretty handy.
Chris: It does look really nice. Pretty straightforward. Supports KDE Organome and Wayland.
Chris: So if you're on the Wayland desktops.
Wes: You can also get it. You can just since it's a Python app, so you can set it
Wes: up that way. Or there's an app image.
Chris: Ah, and it's GPL 3.0 as well. fluxcast streams your linux desktop to a tv they
Chris: have a great video demo of it and,
Chris: it's it's almost anticlimactic it's so straightforward and simple right because
Chris: especially if you're using the chromecast combo it just works the tv detects
Chris: it if you're on the same land and you're just streaming your desktop to the
Chris: tv like no big deal uh and they have a video embed up on.
Wes: There are some issues like some samsung tv cast stuff has issues so it.
Chris: May not be perfect for.
Wes: Your exact devices you have to give it a go but hopefully it's easy to try.
Chris: Something tells me the chromecast probably going to work best,
Chris: followed by DLNA, then Miracast, and then it's going to drop off from there
Chris: pretty quick. But that's pretty
Chris: neat to see, and it's nice that it works great with modern desktops.
Chris: So I doubled down again this week. I'd kind of gotten out of the habit of backing
Chris: up my legal Audible purchases. I've had an Audible membership since Audible was a company. And...
Chris: Just kind of always every month buy a couple of books. I'm a pretty big audiobook
Chris: listener, especially on long drives or in the evening when I'm trying to go
Chris: to bed, things like that.
Chris: And it's pretty easy to just fall into the habit of browsing for audiobooks
Chris: with the app. You're like, yeah,
Chris: I'll get that. I'll get that because you want to use up those credits.
Chris: And then just kind of forgetting about them and letting them just sit on the service.
Chris: And I've talked about various ways to extract them off of Audible before.
Chris: But this time around, when I was revisiting the solution, I decided to implement
Chris: Audible CLI, which is a command line interface to manage multiple Audible accounts,
Chris: which is nice because we have multiple in my family, browse and export your
Chris: library and your wish list.
Chris: It'll download the audiobooks in the AAXE or AAX formats and then help convert
Chris: them to non-DRM formats.
Chris: It supports a faster method of browsing and retrieving the inventory than some
Chris: of the other picks that we've talked about in the past.
Chris: It's available for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
Chris: And it is GPL3 as well. Audible CLI, boys.
Wes: Yeah, this looks nice.
Chris: I like it a lot. It's clean. It's easy to use. And if you're so inclined,
Chris: it's very straightforward to have an agent sit in front of.
Wes: Yeah, it seems like a well-maintained, up-to-date Python app.
Chris: And using UV again.
Wes: And it's already in Nix.
Chris: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Which made it very easy for me to get up and going with it.
Chris: And then you could combine it with something like import to audiobookshelf.
Chris: Our buddy Steve Ovens from the Ask Noah podcast has a utility that takes books
Chris: which you legally purchase from Audible and then moves them over to your audiobookshelf instance.
Chris: We've talked about audiobookshelves in the past. Fantastic app.
Chris: And Steve's made a tool to manage that. There's a couple other things out there.
Chris: For me now, what I have is essentially a systemd timer that once a week sweeps Audible.
Chris: looks for books that I've picked up, and if they're missing from my audiobookshelf
Chris: library, it automatically downloads and imports them for me to my library.
Chris: And I can have it do a sweep for my wife as well.
Wes: Well, I've got a sort of just sneaky final pick here.
Chris: Oh, I love it. Sneaking in.
Wes: Yeah, because whomever whiz popped into the Matrix chat to give us the correct link to Quid Clipper.
Chris: Oh, good.
Wes: So I can actually now see Quid Clipper is MIT licensed, Find and cut lossless
Wes: clips from movies and TV by searching the subtitle dialogue.
Wes: There's a command line tool. But then also, like, it looks like there's a whole
Wes: web interface here or an app interface.
Chris: What?
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Somebody's been busy.
Chris: Boy, talk about the pivot. This looks awesome. I'm looking at the interface pictures right now.
Chris: Library browser, dialogue search, folder dialogue search, scrolling script view,
Chris: stream selector, lossless clipping, bookmarks, clips as first class items.
Wes: Batch export. There's NixOS support down here.
Chris: Oh, this is looking real good.
Wes: As well as Docker. Yeah, it really is. And the CLI part as well.
Wes: I think we'll be giving this a try.
Brent: Chris, you've been asking for this once a week for about a year now, I think.
Chris: I think he was reading our gosh darn minds. All right, we'll put a link to that
Chris: in the show notes as well, and you'll find that over at linuxunplugged.com slash
Chris: 672. What else should we tell people before we go?
Chris: Maybe some extra details around the show, metadata types, structured information about the episode?
Wes: Oh, yeah, well, like, maybe if you want to try to use this tool on something
Wes: like a podcast, like our podcast, I don't know if it will work,
Wes: but we do provide SRT and VTT files right there in our XML RSS feed,
Wes: as well as our Cloud Chapters JSON, of course.
Chris: That's true. Another pro tip.
Wes: Oh, and there's an MP4 file out there lurking, hidden in the feed.
Chris: We should probably tell people that at the beginning of the episode.
Chris: Yeah, we should. Yes, but there is indeed an MP4 file out there.
Chris: And another pro tip, shows live.
Wes: And that's also in the feed.
Chris: Can you believe it? It is. That's right. We do it Sundays, 10 a.m.
Chris: Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. You can get converted to your local time zone over
Chris: at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Chris: We also have the lug going. It's our mumble room. Low latency,
Chris: opus audio. Goes all week long, but popping during the show for sure.
Chris: And then our matrix chats, all of that and more at linuxunplugged.com.
Chris: It's our website with our information on it.
Chris: And then there's a bunch of great shows over at jupyterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Okay, that's it from us. We'd love to know what you think and any feedback.
Chris: Please do boost it in. Don't forget boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: And we'll see you all right back here next week.