Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show, we're back from the future this week.
Chris: And like Biff with a sports almanac, we've got the cheat codes for every Linux
Chris: user who ever needs to manage a Windows system without touching Windows.
Chris: Then we're going to round it out with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: This is one of those that will change the way you look at having to run a Windows
Chris: box forever. But before we get into that, we've got to say time-appropriate
Chris: greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Mumble: Hello, Chris. Hey, Brent. And hello.
Wes: Hello.
Chris: Hello out there in the quiet listening room. Nice to have you and everybody
Chris: that's live over at jubilav.tv. Very nice to have you as well.
Chris: And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
Chris: Go check out Defined.net slash unplugged.
Chris: One thing that I have learned over and over again is platforms change,
Chris: business priorities change.
Chris: And when it comes to something as foundational as how I network everything,
Chris: I want to own that stack end to end. And that's why I love Manage Nebula from
Chris: Define Networking, because it lets you start using Nebula without all of the hard parts.
Chris: You get the great, fast, simple aspects that's super resilient where you can
Chris: add your own lighthouses, but they'll take care of the hard part.
Chris: And when you go to Define.net slash unplugged, you can get started 100 hosts
Chris: for free, no credit card required.
Chris: Or you roll like Wes and I and you do the whole thing, custom yourself,
Chris: DIY, self-hosted, absolutely can.
Chris: No big tech login, no middleman, no, like, Google sign-in, no mysterious control
Chris: pane that has access to all your systems.
Wes: No. Instead, it's just sort of standard YAML files and some Go binaries that
Wes: run just about everywhere, and that's it.
Chris: They've also made a lot of improvements earlier this year and added IPv6 overlay
Chris: support, multiple Nebula IPs per host now, and a new certificate format that
Chris: lets you migrate without downtime.
Chris: plus they've been investing a lot in the mobile apps and you're going to hear
Chris: a lot more soon about just the unbelievable performance of Nebula.
Chris: It gives you control, flexibility and a network built for your future.
Chris: Get started 100 hosts for free.
Chris: No credit card required. Define.net slash unplugged. And thank you to Define
Chris: for sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Chris: Well, we did a thing.
Brent: We did do a thing.
Chris: We did a thing. We did. Tell them about the thing we did, Brantley.
Brent: Oh, we did a thing. This was last Friday. We did a thing. We hung out with the
Brent: community and did, what are we calling this thing? Oh, yeah,
Brent: Clanker Therapy. We did a little live stream and tons of people showed up.
Brent: I think we had generally a really good time.
Brent: And we have on YouTube, you could check out the Clanker Therapy highlight segment.
Brent: It's what, like 40 minutes or something? Quite a lot of highlights.
Brent: And then for members, we've got the entire Clanker Therapy recording,
Brent: the entire live stream, all the mistakes, all the fun stuff.
Brent: You can get the entire thing. I don't know how long that one is,
Brent: but it's worth checking out. Even the folks who attended said,
Brent: I'm going back and re-listening to this whole thing. So very much worth it.
Chris: Yeah, and that one has the extended Q&A as well.
Brent: Yeah, it was tons of fun. I think it would be just as much fun not live. So check it out.
Chris: We have a link to that in the show notes. And ladies and gentlemen,
Chris: we have a hot tip for you. something brand new,
Chris: If you've been wanting to get in on that boost action but don't have a podcasting
Chris: 2.0 app or haven't had time to get into the Sats game, we now have an official web boost.
Chris: Boost.JupiterBroadcasting.com. You go there. You pick the show,
Chris: the episode, a message, your name.
Chris: You can pick USD or Sats.
Chris: And I believe it's anything Stripe support. So it's denominated in USD or Sats.
Chris: And then when you click through, it takes you to a ZapRite checkout process.
Chris: They handle all the money stuff.
Chris: and you can choose to boost with Sats. You can choose to boost with Fiat.
Chris: The great thing is if you want to boost with Sats still, any QR code,
Chris: lightning, wallet kind of scanning situation works now. It doesn't just have
Chris: to be a podcasting 2.0 app.
Wes: There's no special protocol. You just pay an invoice.
Chris: Yep. So Strike, Cash App, Fountain, Phoenix, Breeze, Zeus, Aqua, all of them.
Chris: It works now. Also, the podcasting 2.0 app, still 100% supported and appreciated.
Chris: In fact, it's all now integrated into one system. So if you web boost or you
Chris: boost from a client using either the podcasting 2.0 boosting technology or a
Chris: web boost with USD or SATs, it all goes to our report. You will get credit in the show.
Chris: But ladies and gentlemen, there's one thing better.
Chris: If you're a Jupiter Party member or an Unplugged Core contributor,
Chris: you now get one free boost per episode for free. I'm going to say it again.
Chris: Finally, you've been asking for it, and we have it.
Chris: You can auth with your Memberful account, and you get a free boost per episode just for being a member.
Chris: It is a new perk for the members announced right here on the show.
Chris: As a way to say thank you, you can sign in and get one free boost per episode if you are a member.
Chris: and it's pretty easy to author your memberful account as long as you remember
Chris: what email address you used.
Chris: Brand new, boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com. How excited are you,
Chris: Wes? Super excited, yes?
Wes: You're very excited. I'm curious to know how it goes for folks,
Wes: too. So do, I don't know, try it out.
Wes: Let us know if it doesn't work. It is new, so there could be some rough edges.
Wes: You know, no better way to see than to have folks see what they think.
Chris: It's pretty neat. It still supports all the splits on the back end and all of
Chris: that kind of stuff as well using some self-hosting technology.
Chris: We're pretty proud of it. It's pretty great. So try it out, boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com,
Chris: or just keep on boosting through the podcasting to do app. And,
Chris: of course, if you are a member who has been waiting, now is your time.
Wes: That's what's so exciting, really, right? We know the audience.
Wes: They're so smart. They have such great feedback. And now, hopefully,
Wes: this makes it easier for more folks to share those thoughts.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Chris: We are back from the future this week. While we were gone over the week,
Chris: we traveled to the future, and we have stolen the handbook to how to manage
Chris: Windows without having to use Windows anymore.
Chris: How every Linux user going forward may want to do this thing.
Chris: Buckle up, because it's called Windows MCP. It's a Python daemon that runs on
Chris: a Windows machine, and it exposes a set of controls like mouse clicks,
Chris: keyboard input, screenshots, Windows management, PowerShell execution, which is huge.
Chris: It can read and write to the registry. It can manage processes.
Chris: It has basically all of the Windows control APIs exposed to it,
Chris: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: And you can connect to it from a remote machine and manage Windows.
Wes: You know, it's sort of like a Windows rootkit, but under your control.
Chris: Yeah. So, Wes, the model context protocol, I guess is it fair to call it like
Chris: a JSON over a communications protocol? Is that too simple? Am I getting that wrong?
Wes: Yeah, that's the basic idea, right? So you expose tools over this protocol.
Wes: And then MCP framework, which uses JSON RCP, which is like remote procedure call under the hood.
Wes: Basically, the idea is it exposes functions over the network that you can call.
Wes: So they have names and they take arguments and they return stuff to you.
Wes: And so as you're talking about, right, there's ways to, say,
Wes: snapshot the screen. There's ways to make registry notifications.
Wes: There's ways to inspect or run processes.
Wes: and all of those get exposed either over standard IO or in this case,
Wes: it uses fast MCP under the hood, which is a Python library, but also over HTTP,
Wes: which is great because then you can use it anywhere over the network.
Chris: So perhaps you have an open code session.
Chris: And you have it connect to this MCP. What's brilliant about this is it means
Chris: the LLM or the AI doesn't directly touch the Windows machine.
Chris: It sends structured tool calls to the MCP server. And then the MCP server is
Chris: actually the thing that's executing them and then returning the results to the
Chris: agent. So it's not like the agent is just running rampant on the Windows machine.
Chris: The MCP is this focused context of what they're actually allowed to mess with.
Wes: And this does support, as a lot of systems do, you can do it both on the client
Wes: or on the server side sometimes.
Wes: You can do tool filtering so that you can allow, if you only want certain capabilities
Wes: to even be exposed from a system, you can do that, too. All right.
Wes: And then there is some nice security here, as you mentioned, right?
Chris: You can do auth.
Wes: Yeah, you can do bear token auth. You can do OAuth 2.0. You can do an IP allow
Wes: list. And I think even it'll sort of refuse to bind globally unless you set
Wes: up some kind of auth. So it is trying to, like, do decent, you know,
Wes: at least make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.
Chris: Yeah. And the operating systems that you can control, Windows 7,
Chris: the Windows 8 series, 10 and 11. So pretty much all the more recent Windows. Very nice.
Wes: That is very nice.
Chris: And picture this. I'll bring it home. Here's maybe a use case scenario for you.
Chris: You got family members that just are on Windows and sometimes they need your help.
Chris: This could run on, say, like a Nebula or a Tailscale mesh network,
Chris: and you could connect in and manage their Windows updates.
Chris: We'll show more. I'll have a demonstration in a bit.
Chris: But you could manage a lot about their Windows box, check their running processes,
Chris: disk space, memory available, pull recent event logs, all these types of things,
Chris: without ever having to remote into their Windows machine, do any kind of remote
Chris: desktop protocol or anything like that.
Chris: Or, so that's one scenario I think would be very useful, this Windows MCP on
Chris: a mesh network with your family.
Chris: Scenario two, where I could find this to be very, very useful for Linux users, is VMs.
Chris: A headless, low-resources Windows VM, either running on a server or running
Chris: on your machine, that you never have to bring up the GUI.
Chris: You manage everything you need that VM for. Whatever that one Windows app is
Chris: you need, you can manage and run all of it through this MCP.
Chris: So those are a couple scenarios. Not to mention, like, you just got a Windows
Chris: machine on your network that you need for a few things or something like that,
Chris: and this could manage that too.
Wes: I was impressed. like part of the value here I think is it really hooks into
Wes: windows in some interesting ways yeah it does,
Wes: So they have like 17 different tools, which is pretty great,
Wes: but they have this service traversal. It walks, I guess, like this giant accessibility
Wes: tree that Windows already has and applications use.
Wes: And so it can basically produce for each element in those trees and in all of
Wes: like every application, it can produce an object.
Wes: They have bounding boxes, has like snapshot tools hooked into that.
Wes: It basically gives it like a,
Wes: it's not just take a snapshot and have OCR that the bot has to work with.
Wes: It gives the bot like a shared, structured sort of coordinate system for the whole Windows desktop.
Chris: And I will add more modern Windows applications read anything in the last probably
Chris: seven to eight years, really since Windows 10. So however long that's been.
Chris: They also provide an extensive amount of what I would call metadata to the operating
Chris: system that says where controls are at, what the Windows size is,
Chris: like all of like the menu stuff.
Chris: There is this rich level of metadata that the Windows applications probably
Chris: provide for accessibility reasons,
Chris: that you don't actually need to read the screen to see and operate.
Chris: And the agents can hook into that and use those controls to operate the application
Chris: without actually having to drive the mouse and go down a menu and go to the new thing, right?
Chris: Like they can just call these plug-ins, these API calls, whatever they are,
Chris: that Windows has built in over the years for applications.
Chris: Now, when we get to my demonstration, we'll discover when you're dealing with
Chris: older Windows applications, that's not necessarily the case.
Wes: I was also impressed that, like, I guess they're using, like,
Wes: an undocumented COM interface for dealing with the virtual desktop stuff.
Wes: It's just surprising, like, the amount of work that has gone into all of the
Wes: little features. Like, there's binding to the Win32 side of the API.
Wes: There's, like, direct access to that. There's all of this UI automation explicit framework.
Wes: There's various, it's like, three or four different screenshot backends so that
Wes: you can always make sure you get a successful screenshot.
Wes: They have a watchdog service that runs in the background and can monitor system
Wes: events from Windows like EventLog and respond to that.
Chris: Think about that for a moment. That is very useful.
Wes: I think one way to think about it, you kind of touched on it,
Wes: right, is like you could ask, like you can do a lot of stuff over just PowerShell
Wes: scripts or SSH or existing Windows automation.
Wes: And I think what this really adds is it's like the bridge so that LLMs are like
Wes: first class on Windows. And then that means the abstraction of the LLM being
Wes: the interface for you can actually work.
Chris: Yeah, it means Windows is now a tool call away. And the other thing that struck
Chris: me about this is really how easy it is to get a pretty large Python application running on Windows –,
Chris: was a basic Windows 11 blank install. It's not like I've had this install around
Chris: where I've set up a Python environment.
Chris: UVX was, I think, one command to install, and then once I had UVX, I could just run this.
Wes: Yeah, UV and UVX are great. That helps a lot.
Chris: It made running Python stuff on Windows as easy as it is to run on Linux.
Chris: I just wanted to give it credit for that. It was extremely easy to get this
Chris: running, and you can run it temporarily
Chris: as just a process that runs in the terminal like I'm doing today.
Chris: You can install it as a service that starts at boot, but then you're going to
Chris: need to use some authentication if you do that.
Chris: I mean, just that aspect of it for you could, in theory, send an end user a
Chris: one liner that they would run and it would start the MCP for you.
Chris: It's not it's you could do it in one liner. It's not that bad.
Chris: So that to me was pretty neat. So I thought we do maybe a quick little demo.
Chris: I have what I've done over the weekend is I set up my Hermes agent,
Chris: a skill and connected to the MCP that's running on a Windows laptop that we have here in the studio.
Chris: So the Windows laptops got this Python Windows MCP running and through my agent,
Chris: which is actually in my RV. It's not even here in the studio.
Chris: I could do something like, you know, all kinds of things. Change the,
Chris: I mean, this is just a quick example. Change the wallpaper on Big Dell to anything. Big Dell.
Chris: Yeah, that's the laptop name is Big Dell. So I tell my agent,
Chris: change the wallpaper on Big Dell. Now it does take a second because the agent's
Chris: got to read the skill. Then it's got to load the MCP. but I don't care.
Chris: I don't care because I don't have to touch Windows. So if you're watching the
Chris: video version, which you can switch to in a podcasting 2.0 app,
Chris: you can actually see we have the MCP server up on the screen.
Chris: And you can see it's accepting a connection from my agent right now.
Chris: And so the agent is going to do a smoke test. This is what I've set up to do.
Chris: All my things do a smoke test first. And then if the smoke test passes,
Chris: it'll then rotate the wallpaper.
Chris: And it's just small stuff. The other thing I did, because this was just a new
Chris: install, is I used my agent to process and install all the Windows updates?
Wes: Yeah, I like that a lot.
Chris: Oh, it says it changed the wallpaper, but I actually didn't see the wallpaper
Chris: change. And I used my agent to install SSH on Windows.
Chris: So that was really nice. I didn't have to sit there and manage.
Chris: And it also used the Windows MCP to detect when Windows Update had done enough
Chris: that it has to reboot before it could continue to install more Windows Updates.
Chris: So it's like, okay, I've gotten to a point where we can no longer proceed.
Chris: We need to reboot the host now. Would you like to reboot the host?
Wes: That's great.
Chris: And then when it came back up, it waited for a bit because then it was rebooting,
Chris: and then it connected back in to monitor the continuation of the updates.
Wes: That's where it feels like it's less sort of like awkward, you know,
Wes: running commands on top of Windows, and it feels a little more like it really
Wes: does understand the system, which is nice.
Chris: Yeah. And to just sort of have that follow-up. So you imagine,
Chris: like, you're helping a family member, you can step away for a second,
Chris: or you're doing it on Telegram when you're out doing something.
Chris: That is going to be huge when you could, like, do tech support from Telegram while you're, you know.
Wes: You could go get like an honest rate of what's happening with the system without
Wes: having to walk someone else through how to go get all of that data.
Chris: So I did a – I'll try to do one more example. We'll see if this works.
Wes: Yeah, we need a new background.
Chris: Well, I know. That's funny because the background thing has worked every time.
Chris: I wonder if it's just Windows hasn't rotated it. But, Wes, if you listen over
Chris: there in a moment, the thing should play some music. So you can actually trigger
Chris: things to come out of the speakers.
Chris: Anything you can really do in Windows, you can get this thing to do.
Chris: oh is it running hot that's funny a little hot over here it's funny because
Chris: it's not doing anything it's just a big old machine is what it is it's it's just a big machine,
Chris: uh alright I don't know maybe it'll work maybe there we go there you go see that's.
Wes: You know, it's a Genelia laptop, but they still didn't put any subs in here.
Chris: No, it's funny. The speakers are not that great. So that was triggered by the
Chris: MCP from my agent that's running in my RV, connected over Starlink,
Chris: using Nebula to manage and communicate the MCP on that Windows box.
Wes: So that means, like, if you were doing a remote management, it could be playing
Wes: a don't touch me and doing a remote management jingle.
Chris: Yeah, you could. Or just stand by.
Chris: We're going to be doing some stuff and rebooting. And I actually do that.
Chris: I use speakers in the RV now when I'll be like, hey, don't message your machine
Chris: for a little bit. It's doing some updates in the background.
Chris: I do that. I don't know. So the other things I've had it do,
Chris: obviously, is launch applications.
Chris: I had it remove some software, clean up a directory. But the real story is I
Chris: accomplished a project that needed to get done that was a little bit of uncovering
Chris: proprietary data that's only available via a Windows application.
Chris: and sucking it into my Linux box. And so that's what we're going to get into next.
Chris: Webroot.com slash unplugged. Are you sick of dealing with a slow computer?
Chris: Most people, they blame their device, but the real slowdown often comes from
Chris: heavy traditional antivirus programs that hog up storage and just drag everything down.
Chris: Webroot is a cloud-based antivirus engineered to stay out of your way.
Chris: It takes up to 33 times less space than bulky competitors, and it scans six times faster.
Chris: So instead of waiting around, you're getting instant powerful protection without leg.
Chris: And because the intelligence lives in the cloud, Webroot keeps your computer
Chris: running light, fast and smooth, while defending you in real time against malware,
Chris: phishing, ransomware, and other threats.
Chris: So if you're working, you're browsing, or you're streaming, Webroot is the antivirus
Chris: that works for you, not against you.
Chris: Make the switch and feel the difference of truly fast modern antivirus protection.
Chris: And unlike traditional security programs, Webroot is built to counter modern
Chris: AI-driven attacks, including phishing attempts that just look shockingly real.
Chris: That is a little peace of mind when you think about your friends and your family.
Chris: And the thing I love is it just runs quietly in the background without slowing things down.
Chris: It uses five times less RAM than something like Norton, and that really matters.
Chris: So for a limited time, you can save 60% on Webroot when you go to webroot.com slash unplugged.
Chris: That's 60% off today, but only when you go to webroot.com slash unplugged.
Brent: There is this project we've collectively been trying to solve for,
Brent: it feels like, months now. When I was there for LinuxFest Northwest,
Brent: we were trying to get your focus working again.
Brent: It had exploded with coolant going everywhere.
Brent: And we fixed that part. That part was pretty easy. But then the car just wouldn't start properly.
Brent: And we troubleshooted and we troubleshooted and we used ODB ports to try to
Brent: figure things out. And we never could solve it before I left.
Brent: but you have been trying to poke at this but you are under a new timeline because
Brent: there's not much room in the space where we were working so you had to get to doing that.
Clips: So here's an overview of the problem we have a shop on the farm an old shop
Clips: here which is nice to have but it's uh you know busy season and so space in
Clips: the shop is very tight and the wife's ford has been sitting here for a while,
Clips: with what seems to be electrical issues in the main wiring harness here.
Clips: I don't know for sure, so that's what I want to test. So what I have set up,
Clips: is maybe a little stupid, but I'm going to give it a shot.
Clips: I have got a connection to my agent on my Dell laptop, and then on another Dell
Clips: laptop, I'm running Windows 11, and that has an app called Forescan.
Clips: Forescan is communicating with the car's computer with a ODB2 to USB adapter,
Clips: that has an actual physical toggle switch on it.
Clips: So you can toggle between, I guess, regular industry standard codes and the custom Ford PIDs.
Clips: And that's what I'm after. I'm after the custom ford pins, PIDs,
Clips: P-I-Ds, because in there, I believe, are the voltages that I need to monitor
Clips: what's going on with this harness.
Clips: So the laptop is my front end to the agent.
Clips: The agent is connecting into Windows 11 using Windows MCP.
Clips: The agent will then drive, this is the part I haven't done yet,
Clips: the agent will then drive Forescan to diagnose and detect the PIDs.
Clips: It'll then record the PIDs itself for the ones that we need.
Clips: And then the agent should be able to start talking directly to the car using
Clips: those and reading those PIDs without the need of Forescan.
Clips: So essentially, my agent is going to manipulate Windows to operate Forescan,
Clips: figure out and detect the PIDs that it needs,
Clips: memorize those and then we can drop four scan altogether and i can do diagnostic
Clips: testing just with the agent using this usb adapter hooked up to my linux box with just,
Clips: standard open source python libraries that talk to this and understand odb2,
Clips: that's the plan so basically just trying to avoid using windows myself let the
Clips: agent extract what we need and then go back to linux and do the actual problem
Clips: solving and then i won't have to use windows 11.
Chris: The thing is is like to make this work you got to do all the human work so i'm
Chris: going around i'm connecting all of the connectors i'm doing the plugs.
Wes: It's just sort of a uh you don't do json rpc but you're basically a tool for the lm to do.
Chris: Yeah uh so i got the usb to odb2 adapter connected which i don't know if i got
Chris: the right one so i'm not going to link in the show notes because i've read there's
Chris: better ones and then i fired up this forescan application i'm going to put a
Chris: link to this in the show notes,
Chris: This Forescan application looks like it was last updated just after Windows 3.11 came out.
Chris: And then their website was updated just after Mosaic retired and Netscape became popular.
Chris: So, it's old.
Wes: Well, you know, when you're the only game in town, I mean, do you need to update?
Chris: There's also this whole...
Chris: Song and dance you have to go through to license it once you actually get it
Chris: installed. You got to use it in like this trial mode and then go through the
Chris: song and dance to license it.
Chris: But what it does is it knows the proprietary Ford OEM PIDs.
Chris: And in a car built after 1996, at least here in the States, but I think this
Chris: is true for a lot of places. After 96, they have the ODB2 diagnostic port with
Chris: industry standard codes that you can get like a $30, $40, $50 code reader and you can read them.
Chris: But then these OEMs sometimes have thousands of their own proprietary codes.
Wes: I mean, you've got to have your own codes, right?
Chris: And four definitely is one of them. And the sensors I really needed are behind
Chris: these proprietary codes.
Chris: You can detect them, but you just don't know what they mean.
Chris: So you just need something that maps the thing I've detected.
Wes: You just get some right value, but how do you interpret that?
Wes: What kind of data type is this? What system is it connected to?
Chris: What a great thing for a machine to do.
Brent: Yes.
Chris: So I did the human bits, and I connected everything. And once I had that working,
Chris: I kicked the agent off, and I told it to figure out Forescan,
Chris: and then I wanted it to monitor my PCM system.
Clips: Okay, it's trying. However, the Forescan app, pretty, pretty old UI.
Clips: And the MCP is exporting screenshots, so it's going to have to do some image
Clips: recognition in order to remotely control Forescan, which I was worried about.
Clips: I think newer Windows applications actually submit UI details and some sort
Clips: of metadata that the MCP can process, but an older application like Forescan apparently does not.
Clips: So it is trying the screenshot path right now, so it's going to have to take
Clips: screenshot after screenshot to get through this.
Clips: I don't know about that. I may have to operate the app.
Chris: And you could just do that. Of course. You could have it take a screenshot,
Chris: actually, and then walk you through what to do, which I consider.
Wes: That is handy to have or double-check you're doing the right thing or am I reading
Wes: this configuration right?
Chris: And you can prompt it to do it efficiently, and what it can do is it can actually
Chris: work with a surprisingly low-res JPEG.
Chris: And so it can take a low-res JPEG and run that through the model and save you on some processing.
Wes: And this is where probably, yeah, depending on the model and how good its image
Wes: handling recognition is and that kind of stuff might matter.
Brent: And you had to go through this somewhat tedious screenshotting process because
Brent: this app is so old and doesn't implement like the new descriptive metadata you
Brent: were talking about earlier.
Chris: Yeah. And I think perhaps this is this is something people need to know is a
Chris: real limitation of Windows MCP because maybe a lot of us are are using Windows
Chris: for legacy applications.
Chris: It's it is solvable. It was slow. It was awkward, but it did work.
Chris: And of course, it started working just as I was about to throw the towel and
Chris: I was going to interrupt and I'll be like, no, no, I'll just do it.
Chris: Just tell me what to click. It's fine.
Chris: And just as I was like, screw it, it actually started to get it.
Clips: Oh, I spoke too soon. Just as I thought it was giving up, it's opening up the
Clips: dialogue and it is adding the PIDs right now that we need to monitor.
Clips: And it figured out a way to add them all at once. It even said,
Clips: I'm going to add them via some sort of text injection so I don't have to go
Clips: through and select 100 PIDs. or something like that.
Clips: It found a way to do it lazy, which I really appreciate.
Clips: I mean, it got to the spot that I was having trouble finding.
Clips: That is the menu right there. It's somewhere in this UI and it found it.
Clips: And now it's just a matter of figuring out the pits. Oh, I think it's got them. It does.
Clips: I can't believe this. I never have to use Windows again.
Chris: That was the moment it really did click. I'm like, wow, if it can use this crazy
Chris: esoteric, doesn't follow any kind of Windows convention, even from back in the day.
Chris: Like somebody who's, you know, supported Windows that was in the game during
Chris: this era of applications, nothing I've ever seen before.
Chris: And it managed to figure it out. And then it was able to start mapping the unknown
Chris: PIDs to the forward OEM PIDs.
Chris: That was really where, like, it got powerful because it could do all of that
Chris: messy stuff for me and start probing for exactly what I needed for the specific
Chris: task because the agent understood the specific task.
Chris: So once I had that data coming in and I understood what some of these PIDs meant,
Chris: well, it was on to phase two.
Clips: Phase two of my Galaxy Brain plan is now underway.
Clips: I'm having the agent document everything we've discovered, the PIDs we now understand,
Clips: all of that because the goal will be to just remove 4Scan from the picture.
Clips: Have the agent essentially figure out the proprietary PIDs that we need,
Clips: take 4Scan out and plug that ODB2 scanner directly into the laptop.
Clips: And then the agent will talk directly to the car pooter.
Clips: Then I can begin the real troubleshooting process.
Chris: So this was great because with the documents written, the skills created,
Chris: I could actually do some real work.
Wes: And you have some nice artifacts sort of hopefully regardless,
Wes: right? Like you'll make this attempt, but you have all this stuff forever.
Chris: And it's documented, yeah.
Brent: I feel like you're slowly replacing me in the diagnostic process of this vehicle.
Brent: I'm strangely okay with it.
Chris: When I got to this phase, I was like, oh, Brent, you would really.
Chris: When we got to the diagnostic, what I did, which I think you would appreciate, is I went back to zero.
Chris: And I'm like, okay, now that I have all of this, let's revalidate the hypothesis.
Chris: And I got the multimeter out and all, and I went around and as it was prompting
Chris: me and I revalidated the hypothesis.
Chris: I wasn't sure. Cause like, does it work? Am I complete? Am I completely crazy?
Chris: Is this thing going to hallucinate?
Clips: It's actually working. I now have the ODB two adapter hooked up directly to
Clips: my laptop and we just did a pedal test.
Clips: so it ran monitoring and I feathered the throttle and it observed the voltages
Clips: it saw that the pedal was being feathered,
Clips: it captured it it's updating the Python library so it communicates correctly
Clips: with the adapter because by default it was using the wrong baud rate so once
Clips: we figured out the baud rate I am now live capturing data from this thing,
Clips: it's actually working and I no longer need forescan so that was great so Windows
Clips: MCP came in really useful because it got the core information we needed out
Clips: of 4Scan without me having to deal with it.
Clips: And now we're able to just take Windows completely out of the picture.
Clips: That laptop is just no longer even being used.
Clips: And I'm just directly agent to the hardware talking to the car pooter now.
Clips: And we actually have valid data.
Chris: The other thing that I did that was very useful, more so than I thought it would
Chris: be, I thought it would just be, well, I'll try and see how it goes, is,
Chris: Ford makes specific comprehensive diagnostic manuals available for ODB2 diagnostics
Chris: for particular models of cars.
Wes: Oh, yeah, okay.
Chris: It's just in this crazy site that doesn't, like, sit on a regular Ford domain. Of course.
Wes: And you'll find and then traverse and then get the right file or whatever.
Chris: Surprisingly, just like Forescan, like, their branding is from,
Chris: like, a decade ago and stuff like that. But when you do drill down,
Chris: you find for your particular make and model, all the information you need to
Chris: know about that ODB2 port and the type information diagnostics.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: And I was like, all right, agent, read this. See if there's anything helpful.
Chris: And sure enough, Brent, I mean, they found several things. But the one thing
Chris: that is going to stick in my mind that I really should have known and we should
Chris: have known this whole time.
Chris: And it doesn't really infect us usually. But it turns out when the focus gets
Chris: to 11 volts, it shuts off all the diagnostic data to the port.
Brent: Oh, come on. Really?
Chris: Which explains some of the abnormalities I have seen in the past because at
Chris: one point we had this really, really large draw.
Chris: And it was pulling the battery down very fast. And we went to 10 volts.
Chris: And all my data went bonkers. And it was all zeroed out.
Chris: And I couldn't understand. And so because the agent had read the manual,
Chris: unlike me, it was like, it flagged it for me. It's like, just so you know,
Chris: once we hit 11 volts, like, we're not, we don't have good data anymore.
Chris: Yeah. And so it knew that data was invalid and incorporated. It just...
Chris: And then I had it summarized it all to an Obsidian note so that I can recap
Chris: and resume the session when I need. Then all of this is saved durably as skills.
Chris: So the agent now, just like I can just say to communicate with Big Dell,
Chris: it just knows that's Big Dell.
Chris: And I can say whatever I want it to do on Big Dell. If it's run Forescan or
Chris: run MS Paint and write Hello World, I can have it do that now.
Wes: Right. And then the harness knows how to hook that up. So it can just say,
Wes: oh, you said Big Dell. Here's my Big Dell skill. Here's all that info I need
Wes: to know about how to call the MCP tools running on it.
Chris: So now like the two times a year when I need something on Windows,
Chris: I don't even have to touch Windows.
Wes: That's so great.
Chris: Truly living in the future.
Wes: And when you do have to sit through the updates because you only need it once
Wes: or twice a year, you don't have to sit through the updates.
Chris: I don't have to be the one that does it.
Brent: I think I have two questions for you. One, what did you discover about the car?
Brent: I know that might be not totally on topic, but I want to know.
Brent: This car we've been working on so long.
Chris: So the agent noticed a large discrepancy between the voltage level of the battery
Chris: and the voltage level that the PCM was reporting. Like at one point,
Chris: the battery was at like 12.8 volts and the PCM was reporting 9.8 volts.
Chris: PCM is responsible for managing the valve that we are trying to get to operate properly.
Chris: And by hanging out there and just working and coming and going from the car
Chris: all the time, I learned that these cars, just a little aside,
Chris: they have this neat little trick for it invented. when you open the driver's
Chris: door after it's been sitting for a while, it actuates the valve that Brent and
Chris: I have been trying to test.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: Just by opening the driver's door when it sat there. And you can hear it do
Chris: it. I've never known what it was.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: It turns out it's the very part we've been working on.
Wes: That is wild.
Chris: And one time, it did not sound very good. Anyways, that's a whole other story.
Brent: But it's actually moving?
Chris: I mean, I hear it.
Brent: Okay. All right.
Chris: Okay. I don't think there's any computer control that's watching voltage.
Chris: But anyways, yeah, it has been getting, yeah, we're getting closer.
Brent: Okay.
Chris: And then narrowing down on a hypothesis, which is good.
Brent: Have you dreamt about what else you can do now that you understand these PIDs?
Brent: Because I imagine you parking the Focus near Lady Joops, near your RV,
Brent: and having this ODB port be able to just chat with your network.
Brent: And then you can just get diagnostics into Home Assistant constantly about the
Brent: car and how it's doing when your next oil changes, et cetera.
Brent: Have you considered that?
Chris: Absolutely. I've been thinking, too, about just then have the agent automatically
Chris: feed what is relevant into LubeLogger.
Chris: And then, you know, also the RV engine is a Ford. So I could use a lot of these
Chris: same PIDs to figure out what's going on with the RV engine, pull it into Home Assistant again.
Chris: Because you could imagine a really small little ESP device that's using MQTT
Chris: to just relay the information it's receiving from the adapter to Home Assistant.
Chris: just a little dedicated device that's like 20 20 for entire setup adapter included,
Chris: so i think that's a serious potential and it with this process it could have been any manufacturer,
Chris: uh and there are a lot of databases for other cars where these pids are online so um,
Chris: maybe other manufacturers this process would have been even a little bit easier
Chris: if i didn't you know if you didn't have to do something like forescan there's
Chris: some github repos for different car maker's Toyota and others out there where
Chris: you can find the community has figured out and reverse engineered these and
Chris: then posted them up on GitHub and whatnot.
Wes: That's great. Yeah.
Chris: So there are some ways to make it a little easier that could be a bit of a head
Chris: start, but pretty happy because I did build something I think I can continue
Chris: to use and troubleshoot the problem and narrow it down.
Chris: And then the next thing I want to get, and I would really, really,
Chris: really appreciate anybody that has suggestions.
Chris: is I want to get voltmeters that will work with the voltage range of a car,
Chris: so it can't really be an ESP, but voltmeters that work with the voltage range
Chris: that hook up to Linux over USB.
Chris: And there are some that are from Europe that are like $40 to $60,
Chris: but after taxes and shipping, they're like $280 to get shipped here.
Chris: There's got to be a way to do this, though, because what I want,
Chris: my goal here is, is to be able to have the agent manage all of the multimeter
Chris: testing, so that way it can, in real time, measure the voltage with external
Chris: sensors I would like to have a clamp meter on one of them.
Wes: That'd be great.
Chris: You build this network of sensors that the agent can sit there and operate to
Chris: completely build a picture of what's going on with the vehicle.
Chris: But to get there, I got to have something I can use to do that voltage meter.
Chris: And I think there's even some multimeters out there that have USB ports that just work with Linux.
Wes: That would be great.
Chris: Not sure which ones. And that could get expensive. But a boy, a boy can dream.
Chris: just want to take a moment and thank our members you can become a member at
Chris: linuxunplugged.com slash membership or support all the shows and get all the
Chris: bonus features at jupiter.party like the bootleg clocking in an hour 22 worth of content right now,
Chris: and now you also get that uh free web boost per episode another fantastic perk
Chris: and a way to say thank you for being a member and keeping us going.
Brent: We got a nice piece of feedback from Tom's dad. It says, Tom's dad here,
Brent: party member and person with no time to get self-hosted AlbiHub set up.
Wes: Understandable.
Brent: Well, there's the new web interface you could try.
Chris: Webboos!
Brent: A couple of things worth mentioning. The combination of Forge Joe and Hermes
Brent: with inbound webhooks is chef's kiss.
Brent: Larry is my bot. And with his own Forgeo account, I assign issues from my Nix
Brent: config with at mentions and failing builds also trigger him into action resulting in a PR.
Brent: You need to whip up a webhook adapter script. Oh, add a Prometheus alert manager
Brent: webhook to trigger Hermes and you have it all.
Chris: Holy crap.
Brent: All interactions with Larry and my Nix config now happen through Forgeo.
Brent: I also have a candidate pick here, ArgueNix.
Brent: a Nix native CI runner that connects to any Forge.
Wes: Yeah, this looks kind of interesting. It's GPL3 declarative Nix native.
Wes: It watches your repos on GitHub, GitLab, and Forgeo, or Gitia, Codeberg.
Wes: Evaluates each push and PR as a Nix flake, builds every package,
Wes: checks, dev shells, all those kinds of things.
Wes: It's kind of built for indie developers or a small team who wants a single operator,
Wes: easy to configure, you know, low overhead CI box.
Chris: Okay, no kidding.
Chris: I think maybe for the last two months, we've had a quick version of a conversation
Chris: after every show of Wes saying something to the effective. You know,
Chris: I really think there could be something with Hermes Asians tied to 4GO and webhooks.
Chris: We could really do something around that.
Wes: You could see why I thought this feedback was very interesting.
Chris: Yeah, Wes, surprise.
Wes: Thank you for sharing your setup.
Chris: Tom. Tom's dad, can you guess who picked the feedback this week?
Brent: Yeah, right.
Chris: No, very good. We'll put links to that in the show notes too.
Chris: That is very cool. Thank you very much. and love to hear that.
Chris: Sounds like some good adventures over there. And thank you for being a member, too.
Chris: And we do have some boosts to get to. Musical Coder kicks us off with a row
Chris: of McDucks, 22,222 sats.
Chris: And Musical Coder says, thank you for the Clanker Therapy Stream,
Chris: plus one for doing more of these.
Brent: It was so fun.
Wes: Thank you for checking it out.
Chris: It was great.
Wes: Bite Bitten boosts in with 2,000 sats. i'm field testing a password,
Wes: pw manager pair pass password manager pair pass okay to eliminate the online
Wes: sync dependency but so far not going entirely smooth on the p2p sync,
Wes: i appreciate the report you'll have to let us know if you figure that out.
Chris: I kind of like to know more about that p2p sync stuff too.
Wes: Yeah how does how is it supposed to work even if it isn't working Yeah.
Chris: Right, right. That's the thing.
Brent: I think that's why sometimes it's nice to just have your own sync,
Brent: whatever you're using that you've been using forever.
Brent: That's what I lean on. But Gene Bean here leans on a row of ducks.
Brent: Weird. Been sending as anonymous for a bit. I fixed that now.
Brent: Anyway, I just wanted to say Zooz, Z-O-O-Z, is great, and their tech support is also really helpful.
Brent: When we moved a few years ago, I swapped every light switch in the house to
Brent: theirs and have been super happy with them.
Brent: But even more so since adding the Home Assistant Connect ZWA2.
Brent: That thing is a game changer.
Chris: I am really glad that it's not just me that feels this way, because I felt like
Chris: I was really fanboying over Zeus and the HA Connect ZWA 2. It's nice to hear you.
Wes: A pleased smile on your face right now.
Chris: Thank you, Gene. Nice to hear the plus one and all of that. Appreciate the boost.
Chris: Anonymous is here with a row of duckies. It's 2,222 sets. Just says testing. Was that one of us? No.
Wes: A dude trying stuff comes in with a row of ducks. I feel like there's more puns
Wes: to be made here. configuring chicks os installing negula.
Chris: Negula's good.
Wes: Either way congratulations on your chicken infrastructure.
Chris: I sure do like those chickens i sure do way more than i expected.
Brent: All meg boosted in 16 482 sats,
Brent: Well, you asked for it, so here is my NixOS router config.
Brent: I am so proud of it. It has been running smoothly for months,
Brent: and I barely touch it anymore except for updates.
Brent: It is running on a secondhand x86 netgate SG5100.
Brent: The whole config is basically one file. I tried to keep the boilerplate to a minimum.
Chris: You'll be pleased to see that he's flaking it up, Wes. He's flaking it up for you.
Wes: Well, you've got to flake it up. No, that's not true. You don't have to.
Chris: Okay, I see how he's doing it here. He's got some interfaces,
Chris: WireGuard interfaces. A couple of WireGuard interfaces.
Chris: You WireGuard maniac. He's got some VLAN set up, too.
Brent: Wes, how do you pronounce that?
Wes: IPv6, systemdnetworkd.
Chris: How do you say that, Wes? It's Wire...
Brent: What is it?
Wes: WireGuard.
Chris: Oh, that's what it was. That's what it was. All right, I'm going to keep looking at that.
Wes: Oh, BGP. This is fancy.
Chris: Well, thank you for sending that in. Appreciate that. Night62 comes in with a row of ducks.
Chris: web boost test well this is a game changer well done this really shows the barrier
Chris: to entry for sending a boost sometimes I don't get around to it because it just
Chris: takes time to send a boost this makes it so much quicker and easier look at
Chris: night 62 finding the web boost that's awesome
Chris: we need to get that linked on the main page we really do yes we do well done
Chris: well done I like that thanks.
Wes: For trying it out.
Chris: It looks like Zooter the Penguin also gave a try I'll pull this one up oh no
Chris: this is 5,000 sets oh let's see.
Wes: We need to reorder them.
Chris: We have new sections now. Uh-huh. Right. We have, this was a fiat boost,
Chris: a $5 fiat boost from Zooter the Penguin.
Chris: Already a member, and Bitcoin has been a barrier to boosting,
Chris: so now I'm happy to sling some additional support your way. Well, thank you.
Chris: You want to take our very, very, very first free member boost, Wes?
Wes: Yes, I do.
Chris: So exciting.
Wes: From Jimmy. For Friday, I'd be keen to hear why an agent is the answer.
Wes: Most of the stuff I'd vibe-coded could be run through an agent,
Wes: or it could be a cron or an A to N job to get the data and push to my obsidian
Wes: vault, or called from home assistant.
Wes: Interested in your thoughts. Member Boost!
Brent: Yes.
Chris: So, Jimmy, thank you for sending that in. That is the question we kicked off
Chris: the Clanker Therapy stream with.
Chris: That was what we started with. And I thought we gave it a good answer.
Chris: So if you'd like to hear our answer for that, go check out the Clanker Therapy link.
Wes: Let us know what you think. Thank you for trying out the Member Boost.
Chris: Okay, so I've got to figure out a new way to do all of this.
Chris: Right? I've got to figure out.
Wes: Uh-huh. As a spiel, we could move the thanks, maybe.
Brent: Wait, does that also mean we have new awards at the end of the year?
Chris: Well, I mean.
Wes: We certainly could.
Chris: We could think about that. Yeah, we could. That could be fun.
Brent: A boost to you.
Chris: All right. Well, first, I'll say thank you to everybody who streams some sats.
Chris: 18 of you streamed 21,829 sats into this here episode.
Chris: When you total it up, we got 79,771 sats. Does that include the fiat,
Chris: Wes? It does. So that's all. Okay. There you go. So it's just one master number. So 79,771.
Chris: A little low. A little low. It's okay. Okay.
Chris: Perhaps this is a sign that we are implementing the web boost at just the right time.
Wes: I think that's right.
Chris: That's how I'm going to take that right there. So we had one free member boost. We had one Fiat boost.
Chris: And we had 27 total unique senders altogether. Not too shabby.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who supported this here show.
Chris: We really do support it. This show has really survived because of the community support.
Chris: You know, we're trying to avoid the Linux magazine thing happening here where
Chris: you go crazy with the ads and then you go crazy with the whole, like, drop off.
Chris: like we're trying to find a middle ground here and the audience support has
Chris: been what's kept the lights on so thank you very much for everybody who's supported
Chris: with a membership or a boost it really does mean a lot okay gentlemen,
Chris: I got another IRL pick for you this week. I got to be honest.
Chris: I could have made a segment out of this. You guys are getting a little extra,
Chris: right now for the pick segment. This deserves its own dedicated segment.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: So anybody that's sticking around, you're getting a good one here.
Chris: This is what I call the U-Clock TC001, the Ulanzi T001 Smart Pixel Clock.
Wes: You call it that? Or does everybody call it that?
Chris: I don't know. That's what I call it. I call it my U-Clock. That's what I have
Chris: it set up as. This is not brand new. In fact, because of that, the price is $45.
Wes: Oh.
Chris: It is a full-color LED screen that supports custom icons, time,
Chris: weather, in a pixelated LED display.
Chris: My wife described it as it looks like a light bright, if you're old enough to
Chris: remember what one of those are.
Wes: It's really pretty cute.
Chris: It is a great-looking device. Very simple, white, elegant.
Wes: I want one.
Chris: USB-C power with a five-hour battery, so it can also operate for a while without
Chris: a power source, if need be, which could be great in a power outage.
Chris: 256 individual LED beads in there with different colors. It has a bunch of nice built-in features.
Chris: That's not why I wanted it. The real magic in this sucker is you can use it with ESP Home.
Brent: You can custom flash this thing.
Wes: Oh, nice.
Chris: And there are multiple, quick, easy-to-flash...
Wes: I was about to ask, how are you going to control it? How do you interface with it?
Chris: So I've plugged it directly into my Home Assistant. So for $48,
Chris: if you want to buy it from Amazon, $45 if you want to buy it from them directly.
Chris: You can load something like AWT Rix, Atrix, a custom firmware for this clock.
Chris: There's other ones as well.
Chris: And gentlemen, it is, it is so great. If you would allow me,
Chris: Home Assistant is now driving this thing entirely. It doesn't use any of the original stuff on it.
Chris: Home Assistant is drawing the time and day, weather from my local station.
Chris: The first thing, though, that I wanted to do, and of course I can drive this
Chris: with Home Assistant as well, is I wanted a day mode and a night mode.
Wes: Oh, sure.
Chris: You know, day mode's brighter. It has more animations, more information.
Chris: Night mode is dim. It's dark red.
Wes: Gotta be chill, right?
Chris: Clean. Doesn't move much unless there's something really important.
Chris: And that, that's the thing.
Chris: So not only do I have the time, the date, the weather, of course,
Chris: the Bitcoin price and block height, but I have set up Home Assistant.
Chris: So anything it considers critical, which it has to be a certain threshold,
Chris: like an important external camera battery is at 5%. I'll tell you another thing that came up.
Chris: But I have – so I have another page on here because there's like different pages
Chris: you can set up on this thing that Home Assistant can drive.
Chris: And one of them is urgent alerts from home assistance.
Wes: Oh, that's nice.
Chris: And so this weekend, the wife was cleaning out the fridge, doing the full thing,
Chris: like taking all the shelves out and scrubbing them down. So she figures,
Chris: I'm going to turn the fridge off while I'm cleaning it so it's not just sitting
Chris: here running it while I have the door open for a half hour.
Chris: But as one does, pretty understandable. She forgot to turn it back on.
Chris: And so I'm sitting there at the table where I can see the clock out of the corner of my eye.
Chris: And I've set it up with this idea of just ambient notification.
Chris: something that's important it's not a five alarm fire but probably something
Chris: someone in the family should know about not just chris but someone in the family
Chris: should know about this you know it could be we're about to have a major wind
Chris: gust we need to go tidy things up,
Chris: bring the awning in make sure all the animals are okay you know don't do whatever
Chris: it is make sure the levi's inside whatever it might be we just want to have
Chris: some alerts about maybe something and this weekend even though i didn't specifically
Chris: say this alert it was all home assistant figured it out,
Chris: it popped up on there that the fridge temperature was like 43 degrees 43 degrees fahrenheit.
Wes: Kept warm in there.
Chris: And then and the next time i looked at it it said 45 degrees and i was like,
Chris: whoa it's pretty warm out but it's not that warm what's going on i open up the
Chris: fridge sure enough it's off,
Chris: it might have taken me all day before i noticed that for sure and home system
Chris: was like this is not proper for i didn't even like i didn't even specify like
Chris: a threshold of what like what What Laura might have. Now that I think about it, Laura probably did.
Chris: Yeah, that's the thing. And it was so great. And I was like, look at this.
Chris: I was pointing to him out, look at this. How great is this? Look what it's doing
Chris: right now. She's like, why is it so warm? And he forgot to turn it on.
Chris: And so this little clock, the other thing I'm going to set it up is at the nighttime,
Chris: there's certain things I would just want to know.
Chris: like if frigate knows who's at the front door at nighttime put their name on the clock,
Chris: Dylan's at the front door.
Wes: That's great.
Chris: If it's somebody that's unknown at the front door, unknown person at the front door.
Wes: Super clear.
Chris: You know, just simple. Anything like that that you can think of,
Chris: you can put on this clock. Little messages to family members.
Chris: It also has a temperature sensor built into it, which will report to Home Assistant
Chris: as a sensor, whatever you want to use.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: I think it has a microphone and maybe a speaker as well. I have not used those.
Chris: But now that I think about it, I do believe that's in there.
Chris: I don't know what I would use that for. Maybe to yell at the kids. That could be useful.
Chris: But I really like it for $45, $48. I just think it's an absolute win.
Wes: I love this ambient notification. I think that's, you know, just extract more
Wes: info from your environment.
Chris: And I don't need anything buzzing at me.
Wes: No.
Chris: And if it got to a certain level, I do have a threshold where like a water leak
Chris: or something, then my phone does buzz.
Wes: Please do. Yeah, totally.
Chris: Yeah, it's great. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes.
Chris: Go check it out. Now, Wes, you found something that I thought only AI could do.
Chris: You're telling me we don't need an LLM running on our machines to reorganize
Chris: our files and folders for.
Wes: Us no but maybe you want it uh to use it to help set it up yeah check out check out muzy.
Chris: Muzy like move it but you're muzing.
Wes: Your downloads tamed.
Chris: And uh they stress a privacy first a privacy first automatic file organizer
Chris: that quietly sorts your downloads folder.
Wes: Yeah silent elegant lives in your system tray keeps your downloads folder or
Wes: any other folder automatically tidy runs quietly in the background monitors
Wes: selected folders moves renames or sorts files based on customizable rules.
Chris: UI looks fantastic.
Wes: Yeah, Rust, some TypeScript in there, MIT Licensed,
Wes: And yeah, it's got a clean little UI, kind of runs in the background mostly
Wes: when you're not interfacing with it or configuring it.
Chris: Has a rules engine for like images, documents, archives, installers.
Chris: You can ignore certain files.
Chris: Also has an undo history because it uses a little local SQLite database.
Chris: So if it screws something up, you can undo it.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Multilingual support.
Wes: That's nice.
Chris: 100% offline, zero clouds. Dark mode. Uploads, no telemetry, dark mode support.
Chris: And I guess there's other operating systems out there besides Linux.
Wes: Right. You could use Windows MCP to set it up on Windows.
Chris: You could.
Wes: There's an MSI right there.
Chris: And I think there's even a DMG or something. No, maybe there's no DMG.
Chris: But they have a dev, RPM, and app image available directly from the project.
Wes: Yeah, and the rules, like you can do stuff based on extension or a regex pattern,
Wes: so you can kind of get flexible with it too.
Wes: And that might be where you could have some, you know, have an LLM if you wanted
Wes: to have it help you or just do it all by hand.
Chris: Would anybody be willing to boost in the number of files in their download directory?
Chris: Could you do it? Could you do it?
Wes: Yeah, are we just doing like top-level LS? Or are we doing like a, yeah.
Chris: Oh, oh, subfolders? Uh-huh. Oh.
Wes: Or just like things at the top level probably makes the most sense.
Chris: I think top level, because if you, if a sub, oh, no, no, no.
Brent: No, no, you just hit properties on the folder. It'll tell you every single file.
Chris: No, I know, but that just makes it exponentially worse for me.
Brent: That's fair. That's only fair.
Wes: LSPipeWC-L. How about that?
Chris: Okay. I remember once I was having a conversation with our buddy Noah,
Chris: and he says, one of the ways I can tell if a user is really using the new computer
Chris: I gave them is after they've had it for a month or two, I check their downloads directory.
Chris: And if it's empty, I know they're not using the computer.
Chris: And if it's full of stuff, I know they're using the computer.
Chris: And that's true for me, too.
Brent: I'll give you my number. You got a number?
Wes: Are we doing it right now? Yeah, okay.
Chris: Oh, well, yeah. Should we wait? No, wait. Let's wait. All right.
Chris: If people boost in their numbers, we'll reveal our numbers. Because I don't
Chris: have mine yet. So we'll get all our numbers.
Brent: He's going to clean up his folder.
Chris: Try out the new web boost. Let us know. I should.
Wes: Oh, my God.
Chris: Actually, on this machine, it wouldn't be that bad because it's got such a small
Chris: disk. I clean it all the time. But my machine upstairs, it's like from 2017.
Chris: Or this soundboard machine that I never do any kind of maintenance on at all
Chris: that's been around forever. God, it could be horrible.
Chris: It would be interesting to total it all up.
Chris: All right. All right, so Wes, that pick there is MIT license.
Wes: Yes, it is.
Chris: Something worth mentioning. There you have it. That is the show,
Chris: everybody. So I'd love to know what you think the most Linux user way is to
Chris: use Windows. I think I've found it.
Chris: This, I believe, is peak. Imagine a headless VM, a family member on a Mesh VPN,
Chris: or that Windows machine you have in your house.
Chris: You could use this just to start Steam on that thing.
Wes: It does seem a lot less painful.
Chris: Way better. Way makes headless Windows way more feasible, in my opinion, too.
Wes: There's something, too, also just, like when I was doing some dabbling for this
Wes: with Windows, it's not that you need it, but having the LLM sort of translate,
Wes: because I'm no longer using Windows all of the time.
Wes: And so having to sort of be able to phrase like the underlying thing that's
Wes: happening, but in a way that my Linux brain can understand without me having
Wes: to translate from Microsoft documentation directly is helpful.
Chris: It's also stacking on a lot of work Microsoft has done to make almost everything
Chris: doable via the command line now.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: You can do so much.
Wes: For sure.
Chris: So there's really credit to them for making, and that's just sitting on top of that too.
Chris: So if you want to tell us the most Linux user way to run Windows,
Chris: let us know. You can try out the new Web Boost and tell us your download counts
Chris: as well. But you know, you can always take it up a notch.
Chris: Make it a Linux patch Tuesday on a Sunday. Join us Sundays, 10 a.m.,
Chris: 1 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv.
Chris: And we do have the metadatas around the show from time to time,
Chris: as it were. We've got JSONs. We've got chapters.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: We've got SRTs, VTTs.
Wes: JSON.
Chris: ABCs.
Wes: That's right. XMLs, RSS.
Chris: Check out the RSS.
Wes: MP4s.
Chris: There's even an MP4 in there. Wouldn't you know it? Wouldn't you know it?
Chris: So check it out. And also, don't forget all the links for this week's episode
Chris: over at linuxunplugged.com slash 671.
Chris: There's some good stuff in there. You can find the full back catalog at linuxunplugged.com
Chris: or all the great shows over at jupyterbroadcasting.com, including we have a
Chris: link to the Clanker Therapy session.
Chris: Even if you check out the highlight on YouTube, I think it's worth your time
Chris: if you're interested at all, because we covered some ways to make these things
Chris: actually safe to manage your important systems.
Chris: And I mean my most important systems.
Chris: I think we have a pretty good solution, so check that stream out.
Chris: And we answered that question, why agents at all?
Wes: If you're a member, we have a transcript you can point your agent in.
Chris: Yeah, there you go.
Chris: All right. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you right
Chris: back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.