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 today, it's our take on Ubuntu's plan
Chris: for a leaner, meaner grub that drops some of our favorite features.
Chris: And then one of my favorite open source apps of all time is coming to an end.
Chris: And what I'm going to do, my alternative, and what I'm switching to,
Chris: tell you about that today.
Chris: Then we'll round the show out with some great boosts, some picks,
Chris: and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings
Chris: to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Chris: Hey, Chris. Hey, Russ. And hello, Brent. Hello.
Brent: Hello.
Chris: Hello up there in the quiet listening. Always like having the Mumble Room.
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Chris: A quick mention, if you'd like to catch a very unplugged version of This Week
Chris: in Bitcoin, This Week in Bitcoin episode 97 is an agent-friendly node management for 2026,
Chris: where Brent and Wes both sat down with me for a special episode.
Chris: So that's ThisWeekinBitcoin.show, and it's episode 97.
Wes: I still have more node work to do.
Chris: We do.
Wes: That was a lot of fun, though.
Chris: And then, just a reminder, LinuxFest Northwest, just around the corner,
Chris: and we will have a live show. We'd love to see you there. We don't quite have
Chris: all the details ironed out.
Chris: But plans are already in the works, and I think it's going to be a really great event.
Chris: And I'm really hoping we get the classic late April spring where it's just beautiful.
Chris: Maybe you never know. Maybe if we did, maybe we'd do the episode outside.
Chris: That could be a lot of fun.
Chris: And we may have a hookup on speakers this year, too. I mean,
Chris: not like people that speak, but speakers that we can put in the crowd so people
Chris: can hear the show really well. How about that for getting fancy?
Brent: Speakers for the speakers?
Wes: I like that idea. We just need to prepare ourselves to implement it.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Chris: Big news this week. Canonical has announced big changes.
Chris: Well, maybe you could call them minimal changes to Ubuntu 26.10's grub.
Chris: They're calling it a minimal grub for secure boot.
Chris: Their idea is to reduce the attack surface for grub and remove certain features
Chris: that could be exploited.
Chris: Some of those features are some of our favorite features.
Chris: So, Wes, walk us through kind of the high level of this and then maybe we can
Chris: get into what's getting removed.
Wes: Yeah, well, we can talk about just sort of some of the stuff from the post itself.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Ubuntu Systems supports Secure Boot using Grub. And if you remember from,
Wes: well, really the last, what, 10, 15 years?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Secure Boot is a new standard that came along with sort of our switch to UEFI booting of systems.
Wes: And it provides ways to have the firmware have a set of cryptographic keys that
Wes: it trusts and then verify that it's only going to boot into operating systems
Wes: signed with those things.
Wes: And on its own, as just that, as a primitive, like, that's one thing.
Wes: It can be used for whatever, right? It's like a new tool that your computer can do.
Wes: It can be very useful if you want to operate in a secure way and you want confidence that, like,
Wes: Your machines only ever run code that you signed and no one else can,
Wes: even if they have the hardware, can run stuff on it.
Chris: So it's always made sense, like in the context of an important business laptop
Chris: where you're out and about and you want to make sure your laptop hasn't been, you know, messed with.
Chris: Or obviously in a data center where other people have access, things like that.
Chris: And physical security is really important in these things because if somebody
Chris: gets physical access, then they can essentially get root to the box.
Chris: So you just want to verify that that chain is as secure as possible.
Chris: I get that use case. All right.
Wes: But of course, in the real world, what actually happened is also that Microsoft
Wes: ended up being behind a lot of this and they wanted to push it out to like consumer laptops as well.
Wes: And so you need some kind of key if you're going to do that,
Wes: right? And you're going to want to run Windows and it's not an open source.
Chris: Somebody has to sign it. Only Microsoft does that.
Wes: Right?
Chris: Yeah, Microsoft signs the key.
Wes: And then it just worked out that it's not that you, in most situations,
Wes: not all, in most situations, you can set up and enroll your own keys and sort
Wes: of manage it as you would hope.
Wes: That's not true for every single device, especially like Windows on ARM for
Wes: a while, like all kinds of things.
Wes: but it also means we live in a world where
Wes: like if you want to just be able to have secure boot and boot
Wes: a random iso on a random laptop you probably need it signed
Wes: by that key and we have like a sort
Wes: of complicated setup depending on the distro around like microsoft
Wes: signs a tool called shim which then has its own set of signatures for various
Wes: distros that then it has keys baked into that it trusts when it gets signed
Wes: for like okay i can boot these ubuntu things right and then that's where like
Wes: Ubuntu's system of assigned Grub2 comes in. And so that's where it's important
Wes: to understand sort of the history.
Wes: Like back in 2020, there was a vulnerability called boot hole.
Wes: And this was actually a flaw where Grub had in parsing its own config that led to vulnerability.
Wes: But the important part is like it just...
Wes: It's a lot to deal with when that happens because you now need to go basically
Wes: figure out how to like, you know, there's going to be old shims that trust vulnerable
Wes: versions of Grub, but that are still trusted by the firmware.
Wes: So if you want to do it properly, you have to get a new version of Grub that
Wes: doesn't have the problem.
Wes: Test that, make sure it's going to work everywhere, and then sign that,
Wes: but with updated keys that aren't going to be trusted for the old ones,
Wes: and then roll that up in the shim layer, and then coordinate with Microsoft
Wes: to get the new version of the shim thing signed potentially.
Wes: And then maybe even you need to go like add to the blacklist on the actual hardware
Wes: things to say, you know, so it knows keys that it shouldn't trust anymore.
Chris: And then you've got to get that pushed out to end users.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: And they've got to do a successful update that's updating their bootloader.
Wes: And then if you don't, then it just means sort of means like any old ISOs floating
Wes: around are vulnerable and could have problems.
Wes: And then there's potential attacks. I don't think this is the main concern necessarily,
Wes: but like there are in theory some potential attacks where you could boot a Linux
Wes: setup from like a vulnerable thing that let you then circumvent secure boot
Wes: and use that to attack windows systems on the same laptop,
Wes: so there's just a lot of sort of ecosystem implications that have happened in
Wes: the past that i think they don't specifically mention that but i think there's
Wes: a lot of that sort of history,
Wes: behind this change so basically a bunch of supports grub for secure boot they
Wes: use grub to boot things in 2610 they're proposing to remove the following features
Wes: and if you've ever used grub you know that,
Wes: It's existed long before the modern era of ESPs and UEFI and all that.
Wes: So it supports a ton of different stuff.
Wes: So they want to remove support for file systems for the slash boot drive.
Wes: And actually, maybe it's worth talking about here too.
Wes: Some Linux setups, they just have slash boot as like the ESP, the system partition.
Wes: The EFI standard mandates like this VAT32 partition. And that's what the firmware interacts with.
Wes: Linux often has its own sort of boot setup. And then so you have some setups
Wes: that where you have the EFI system partition often mounted at slash boot EFI,
Wes: but then you also have like a Linux boot partition that could be a different
Wes: file system mounted at slash boot.
Wes: And so you might have just the bare EFI stuff on the EFI partition,
Wes: and then a lot more of the actual Linux boot stuff lives on the Linux side.
Chris: That's how I do it. Is that how you do it? Well, I think boot EFI is its own thing if I'm using Grub.
Chris: I almost use Grub almost on everything, except for like one system.
Wes: See, I think I mostly use systemd boot.
Chris: Brent, do you put it all under slash boot or do you break off boot slash EFI?
Brent: Yes. I have so many systems that have like gone through our phases of,
Brent: so these days it's like mostly systemd boot, but it's a little all over because I got systems all over.
Chris: The reason I ask is because what I do, and I think this is going to impact me,
Chris: is so slash boot EFI is FAT32.
Chris: But Slash Boot, it's usually ButterFS.
Wes: Right. And, you know, there's trade-offs like...
Chris: And they're dropping ButterFS with this change. Like, we haven't gotten to that
Chris: part. So I guess I interrupted you, but I just wanted to ask you that.
Chris: So the changes here is happening at Slash Boot, but some people still have Slash
Chris: Boot EFI, and there's that nuance there.
Wes: Well, yeah, and you have to have the EFI partition.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: The question is, do you, like...
Chris: Make the whole thing FAT32 or...
Wes: Right, and do you want to have stuff that exists on a separate Slash Boot?
Wes: And, you know, there's a variety of different setups, and there's trade-offs,
Wes: and, like, some ESPs are only so big, so you can only have so many generations
Wes: of kernel and RAMFS, and there's a lot of variation here because Linux, right?
Wes: So what they're proposing here in light of this because Grub supports a lot
Wes: of stuff is for slash boot, they want to and basically this means removing it
Wes: from signed Grub builds, and that's important here removing from signed Grub builds Okay.
Chris: So on regular unsigned Grub builds?
Wes: Yeah, you would still have access to these features Oh, okay,
Wes: But remove ButterFS, HFS+, xfs
Wes: and zfs retain ext4
Wes: fat iso 9660 and squash
Wes: fs also remove support for jpeg
Wes: and png retain no support for images at
Wes: all and then remove stuff for like i guess just remove support for apple partition
Wes: tables which okay that seems reasonable i suppose in addition to these simpler
Wes: changes we're also going to remove support for slash boot on complex partition
Wes: setups such as lvm md raid except RAID 1 and Lux encrypted slash boot.
Wes: These abilities were inherited by Debian but never tested in Ubuntu,
Wes: and the Ubuntu installer always set up a bare ext4 partition.
Wes: And then they sort of go into some of their reasoning here. As for encryption
Wes: in particular, encryption of slash boot only provided security by obscurity,
Wes: but not actual security.
Wes: You want to ensure the integrity of those pieces.
Wes: Our TPM FTE solution correctly implements integrity in the early boot stage,
Wes: and we are committed to keep iterating and improve on it.
Wes: Keep in mind these changes only affect slash boot. The file system,
Wes: partition tables, Lux, LVM, RAID solutions continue working in the booted system.
Wes: We are not removing them from the Linux kernel.
Chris: Thank you, Wes. That was a really good breakdown. I think the biggest thing
Chris: that's probably shocking here is the removal of Lux.
Chris: I think most people can kind of understand reducing the file system scope,
Chris: although I am sad to see Butter or Fesco.
Chris: In particular, I think it's probably the least of the concerns here.
Chris: And I think also distributions downstream are going to be really disappointed
Chris: in the lack of image support.
Chris: I've already seen some distributions talking about that.
Wes: I will bring up just a friend of the show, Neil Gampa, was quick to comment
Wes: in here, noting, suggesting, hey, can we please not drop ButterFS?
Wes: It's a read-only file system driver that is actively supported by upstream developers.
Wes: Users who want to leverage boot-to-snapshot setups with ButterFS need this support.
Chris: That's exactly right.
Wes: So there's some nuance here too. And then ZFS users are sort of bringing stuff up.
Wes: Like there's the question of, is the obligation to sort of support this around
Wes: what just the Ubuntu installer did or the wider array of setups people have
Wes: crafted around running even secure boot Ubuntu on different disk configurations in the wild?
Chris: I wouldn't be surprised if they have to walk the Lux decision back.
Chris: I grant that they are saying that encryption of slash boot only provides security
Chris: by obscurity, but not actual security. There's one other thing that Encrypted
Chris: Lux provides that they didn't mention in that paragraph, and that's corporate compliance.
Chris: And there's not a lot of nuance in a corporate policy that requires your entire
Chris: laptop hard drive be encrypted.
Chris: They don't generally allow for, well, your entire laptop should be encrypted
Chris: except for your boot partition.
Chris: That's not generally how the corporate policies are structured.
Chris: And so I wouldn't be too surprised if the feedback from enterprise customers
Chris: is, sorry, chief, but we've got to have luck.
Wes: Even on Windows, you have the ESP can't be encrypted.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: But I would still, I think they would still argue that there's value in having
Chris: like the kernel images and all. I'm not saying.
Wes: Yeah, fair enough.
Chris: I'm not saying.
Wes: There's often compliance drag and yeah, it takes a long time to get stuff updated.
Chris: I think the analysis is technically true that it's security through obscurity,
Chris: especially when you have their TPM backed solution for verifying all the other
Chris: aspects of the boot chain.
Chris: So when you have all other things being true, it is security through obscurity.
Chris: But I don't think corporations are really thinking about it that hard.
Wes: Yeah, that's fair. and it has to be what their auditors are willing to and that
Wes: their standards already exist and support.
Chris: That's the thing. But this is something they're working out now because this
Chris: is going to be after the next LTS.
Chris: So this is something they've got to figure out. They're going to have some time.
Chris: This is an interim release where this would be landing.
Wes: Yeah, it does seem like they've done some thinking too on that,
Wes: like when they wanted this timing in terms of LTS releases and where they sort
Wes: of strand people if there was a problem.
Wes: So, you know, credit there at least. I think they thought it could be contentious
Wes: and are attempting to engage with that thoughtfully, what the reception's like, how it goes, TBD.
Chris: I saw some strong reactions to the lack of ZFS support too, just because people
Chris: kind of went all in on that in some cases.
Chris: That's what I saw on Reddit is people were like, what, what,
Chris: wait, hey, I thought this was the distro I could use ZFS with,
Chris: so I even made my boot ZFS, and I saw that a few times.
Wes: I know, right? People do the bootstrap sort of arch install style to get pretty
Wes: nice Ubuntu setups on ZFS.
Chris: Um brent my one concern to be here and this is not really a big deal but couldn't
Chris: you see like the internet guy hot take on this being that well ubuntu isn't
Chris: the distro if you want to if you want to use encryption or ubuntu you don't
Chris: want to use ubuntu because they don't let you fully encrypt your hard drive
Chris: don't there could be narratives that come out of this kind of thing.
Brent: Yeah at the same time ubuntu makes it arguably one of the easiest to encrypt your stuff so um,
Brent: It's tricky. I would say my initial reactions was like the first one was emotional.
Brent: Like, don't touch my grub, man.
Brent: But I can see how they're coming at this as they describe from like a security posture point of view.
Brent: And someone has to make those tough decisions. And like, we've seen many challenges
Brent: with including images like JPEGs and things like that, that do get compromised quite often.
Brent: so I could see how there
Brent: was probably a lot of difficult conversations about what do we
Brent: include what do we leave in here what do we take out what's a
Brent: realistic expectation for the permutations of the whole boot sequence and how
Brent: much they get used in the wild I don't envy them in making those choices and
Brent: there's going to be backlash for sure but it might change the future of how
Brent: we do things which maybe might be better and.
Chris: To Wes's point I think they're like I am the things I'm the most sour about
Chris: is the image removal butter fast removal and Lux although personally Lux isn't
Chris: a big deal for me but I just think that's gonna be contentious the biggest one
Chris: for me is butter fs obviously because I that's what I use for my boots,
Chris: I think the thing that we have to keep in mind when we're evaluating this decision
Chris: is the point Wes made earlier on is that the mechanisms that we have today to
Chris: update grub in this entire stack when something does go wrong are pretty inadequate and pretty rough.
Chris: And so the cost of fixing something once it's out in production in an LTS is very high.
Chris: And so if you can minimize that attack surface today before it's in production,
Chris: you reduce that future cost.
Wes: And you know there are like you know other thing people are using system d boot
Wes: for a lot of things you're also seeing a lot of systems use uk eyes which is
Wes: where you roll like the kernel and the inner mfs into a single pe efi style
Wes: executable and sign the whole thing yeah right so this is sort of like a transitionary
Wes: step and i think they're to some extent trying to like,
Wes: limit complexity so maintain grub support and for the unsigned stuff full like
Wes: you know all the stuff without having to like swap to hey efi systems we're
Wes: only going to support system d boot going forward or that would probably be.
Chris: Maybe more controversial i'm not sure yeah.
Brent: Well the natural question becomes are there workarounds to this and what should
Brent: we be looking to implement in the future because like some grub installs i feel
Brent: like are they i don't know they just feel deprecated whenever i do them so what's
Brent: the better way what's the way to the future.
Chris: Yeah, I would ask the audience right now, how are you booting?
Chris: I bet the majority of them are using Grub.
Wes: Yeah, probably, huh?
Chris: I think so. And I'm wondering if any of them are even using assigned bootloader or secure boot.
Wes: Yeah, good question. How many are?
Brent: Or how many should be. Now I'm feeling like I could do it better.
Chris: And does this make you want to move to systemd boot if you want Lux and ButterFS
Chris: on your slash boot? Because I think that's the direction I'm going to go if
Chris: I were on Ubuntu system, at least.
Wes: So you don't get that with systemd boot?
Chris: What? I thought I got ButterFS.
Wes: So it's the whole point of the slash boot.
Chris: Yeah. I don't get ButterFS with Systemd boot?
Wes: Well, Systemd just works with the ESP. It's meant as a simpler,
Wes: right? It's whole thing is just to let you...
Chris: Well, I'm always going to have that be FAT32. Because thanks,
Chris: world. That's what I have now, right? But my slash boot...
Chris: You're saying my slash boot with Systemd boot can't be ButterFS?
Wes: Well, Systemd doesn't have any file system support at all.
Chris: I'm at it! Oh, okay.
Wes: Like, it's just meant to be itself an EFI thing that lets you boot other EFI executables.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: So that's where, like, that's where maintaining Grub support.
Wes: you could of course also you know like go through and have a setup where you've
Wes: signed all this stuff yourself from your own role sorry.
Chris: Yeah no totally yeah.
Wes: I just don't know how easy or automated that is right so that's what essentially
Wes: what i'm doing with this laptop on nix os it's just that there was an easy nix
Wes: os setup to do that i don't know what the plumbing is like on a bunch of system
Wes: if you did want to do that yourself i mean it's definitely possible it's just
Wes: a question of like how painful is it and how much nobody's.
Chris: Doing that right i mean not at scale Nobody's doing it. Corporations might be,
Chris: but like nobody, no. Right? Except for you.
Wes: Well, you know, the intersection of very security professionals who use desktop Linux, perhaps.
Chris: Yeah, maybe. All right. Well, boost in and let us know because we've got some
Chris: questions about this one. This seems like a high impact one. Yeah.
Brent: I want to get a West prescription for what the rest of us should be doing.
Wes: I don't know if they're, I mean, you have to have a, what's your goal?
Chris: It's good. Yeah. You know what he's going to say. It depends.
Brent: Yeah, I know.
Wes: You should run Nix OS and then problem solved.
Brent: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
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Brent: Well, Chris, as usual, when I was visiting at the farm and at the studio,
Brent: we watched a heck of a lot of our favorite TV on your favorite project.
Brent: But you kind of teased that that might be going away.
Chris: This is this is sad, guys. You know, you get you get really,
Chris: really happy with a piece of software.
Chris: You get the whole family using it, which is not often a thing that happens.
Wes: It's quite the rollout.
Chris: Yeah. And then the developer burns out and he says it's time to move on.
Chris: And this happened this week with ersatz TV.
Chris: ersatz tv is such a full force multiplier if you have jellyfin or plex because
Chris: it gives you the ability to set up your own live tv's channels and stations and it's so much fun.
Wes: It's essentially like discoverability on top of your collection.
Chris: Yeah it's like having your own private pluto tv and what i have star trek channels
Chris: and bob's burgers and game shows and one of the things we'll do is we'll watch
Chris: a tv show like say cheers and then when we're done we'll put it into a random
Chris: rotation in ersatz tv and you'll just have a cheers channel you can tune into
Chris: and while brend and I were working on the diesel heater.
Chris: We'd have the start, one of the Star Trek channels. We're always going and it just plays.
Chris: And I got, cause TNG is the best. I got one dedicated to TNG and then the other
Chris: Star Trek channel biases DS nine. Cause let's be honest, DS nine is really good.
Chris: So like I got DS nine, but then I got all the other tracks in there too.
Chris: Well, the original tracks.
Brent: You have like a second tier Trek like shows channel as well. I learned a lot.
Chris: Yeah, it's good. It's, it's, it's been, I
Chris: cannot describe to you the delight I have in the most like
Chris: basic because you get a TV guide you get
Chris: you get this live TV experience you can't
Chris: rewind people say can you play that back nope can't play
Chris: that back it's live it's broadcast yeah so great I know it doesn't sound it
Chris: doesn't sound like one of these things that has been a continuous source of
Chris: joy but I don't know what am I a year into this thing and I still just absolutely
Chris: absolutely love it so grateful that the developer made it and he said in his
Chris: wrap up he said it's time to announce the final release of ersatz TV in its current form,
Chris: The existing repositories will be archived following this update.
Chris: The project scope expanded beyond what was personally useful or sustainable
Chris: to maintain in my free time. For now, I plan to step away in the future.
Chris: I hope to reboot the project with significantly reduced and more focused scope.
Chris: And they're also welcoming forks in the meantime.
Wes: Yeah, that was quite devastating when we got the news.
Chris: Yeah, I was legit sad. I was legit sad.
Wes: I mean, it doesn't mean it's useless right away, right? It's still,
Wes: it's open source, so it doesn't go away. You can still run it.
Chris: I am, yeah.
Wes: It's just you don't know what the maintenance will be like and if forks will
Wes: develop and will it slowly decay and not support newer things and yeah.
Chris: One begins to think perhaps it's time to start looking for an alternative.
Chris: And so where the free software world closes a door, it opens a window.
Chris: And we now have Tunar, which has been around for a little bit.
Chris: And it's very similar to ersatz TV with a, I'd say actually a little nicer interface
Chris: if I'm being honest with you. It allows you to create live TV channels from
Chris: Plex, Jellyfin, MB, or just local files on your disk.
Chris: It lets you build a custom TV channel out of your existing media.
Chris: And then you can add the ability to spoof an HD home runner to it with a checkbox.
Chris: And then it shows up automatically to Plex and Jellyfin or MB as a live network
Chris: TV tuner. And then you can just pull in live TV into your Plex or Jellyfin.
Chris: And then it gives you a drag and drop lineup editor. And they have this idea.
Wes: Oh, that's nice.
Chris: Yeah, it's nice. It is a really nice UI. They have this idea of sort of flex
Chris: content or filler content.
Chris: And you can have the thing round an hour out of programming by filling in content.
Chris: So I went on archive.org and I got, I did this a little while ago.
Chris: I got a bunch of 80s and 90s commercials.
Chris: And then it knows the length of the commercials. So it knows which ones it can
Chris: slot in. And then you can set rules on how often it replays the same commercials.
Chris: and so on one of my channels when you tune in it fills out so the shows actually
Chris: start and end on the hour and half hour block it's really cool does.
Wes: It cut in the commercials.
Chris: Or just afterwards after between you could actually have it sort of try to dynamically
Chris: insert them but i just feel like that's going to be a disaster and so it's just
Chris: at the in-between episodes it plays a couple of commercials from like the 80s or 90s.
Wes: It'd be great if you could like index your jellyfin setup to pre-find those
Wes: slots and then like surface them.
Chris: Maybe this is too.
Wes: Much work to insert fake ads but.
Chris: It kind of does in a way when it does that when it does the tv guide it's kind
Chris: of what it's doing you know because.
Brent: As a kid did you ever think you could have your own uh cable network.
Chris: Just no it's a lot of fun it is i it is silly i spent a lot of time trying to
Chris: get um hardware transcoding working which is always a thing and uh i didn't quite like.
Wes: A quick sync system.
Chris: Or NVIDIA.
Wes: Okay.
Chris: Yeah, it's on my H-Droid H3+, which is using QuickSync.
Chris: And both Tuner and EarthSats TV have hardware encoding and decoding support.
Chris: However, Tunar is trying to be a little extra clever.
Chris: And so, of course, I had to hit a very specific bug, probably because Brent
Chris: was over when I was setting this up.
Brent: You're welcome.
Chris: So I've got the H3 Plus, and it's an Intel low-power CPU with its own version of QuickSync.
Chris: And I'm watching my high-resolution 10-bit HVAC custom-ripped Blu-ray TNG,
Chris: like, you know, 14 megabit files.
Wes: That's a good stress test, huh?
Chris: It is. Yeah, it is. And poor computer where ersatz could actually use quick
Chris: sync and decode these files.
Chris: Tuner was unable to, and this is an interesting test because it was same source
Chris: file, same network clients and playback client, all of everything,
Chris: just ersatz versus tuner.
Chris: And what I discovered is that it wasn't a GPU or a driver problem,
Chris: but it was actually the transcode pipeline.
Chris: ersatz was doing a much simpler filter pipeline and didn't have to pass between
Chris: hardware and software renders to do it.
Chris: where TUNAR was trying to be a little fancier and was having to flip between hardware decode,
Chris: hardware scale, and then software to get back to the right point and then do
Chris: some color space normalization in software and then re-encode in hardware.
Chris: And that popping in and out of hardware and software encode back and forth on
Chris: my particular quick sync device with these crazy large TNG files hit the bug.
Chris: And so I can't actually use TUNAR to watch my Star Trek.
Chris: Of all the things. Of all the things, boys.
Wes: Does it work if you didn't hardware offload?
Chris: Yes, but then my little Odroid.
Wes: Right, I'm not saying you want to. I'm just kind of curious.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, it does. But then the Odroid's basically useless because it's just
Chris: doing that. So bottom line, ersatz just has a cleaner, simpler FFmpeg pipeline.
Chris: And so it was handling these 10-bit HVAC files where TUNAR was just trying to be a little more fancy.
Wes: Is this a known issue, I wonder?
Chris: I don't know if it's known actually,
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: Might be worth importing. Maybe you can get yourself, if this is going to be your future.
Chris: It's a lot of edge cases, you know, because it's special high encoded Star Trek.
Chris: Oh, Droid H3 using quick sync. I don't know.
Wes: It'd be interesting to point, maybe a bot at the code base just to see what
Wes: the, like compare the graph building sort of stuff. Maybe there's,
Wes: maybe there's some future improvements.
Brent: I said the same thing.
Chris: So here's what I did.
Wes: See, I like you, Brent.
Chris: Because, you know, I got to have my Star Trek, but I got to start migrating offer sets.
Wes: So this was not enough to say I'm not going to use Tunar. So you're using Tunar.
Wes: But you're also not going to, I see what you mean. You're not going to not have Star Trek.
Chris: What's a guy supposed to do? Do you stay with the Dying Project?
Chris: God bless. Or do you half migrate?
Chris: So, and I don't know, I almost never do this, but I did the half migrate.
Chris: So I moved all the other TV channels to Tunar and I left the Star Trek channels on ersatz,
Chris: Which is starting to get complicated now. Okay, boys.
Wes: System D, Star Trek D.
Chris: So what do you do when you got two competing standards?
Wes: Use both.
Chris: You create a new standard, Wes. That's what you do. So I then brought in Dispatcher,
Chris: a third service. Remember Dispatcher?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, buddy. Dispatcher is an open source powerhouse for managing all IPTV streams.
Chris: Oh, my goodness. Program channel data, on-demand video. And so I have probably
Chris: like 100 IPTV channels in there.
Chris: And so what I decided to do was consolidate all the ersatz and tunar from two
Chris: different sources into Dispatcher.
Chris: So Dispatcher brings them both together and then presents one TV guide to the IPTV client.
Chris: So the client is totally unaware what server is feeding.
Wes: That's pretty great.
Chris: It works. It works. It's a weird stack, but it works really well.
Chris: And Dispatcher is great software.
Chris: And I have all my favorite IPTV channels in there. Plus now I have my own in their own section.
Chris: It really is a lot cleaner than how I was doing it before. And I have groups and categories.
Chris: It's better. I mean, on the back end, it's more, but on the front end, you wouldn't even know.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: That's the, that's the great thing. But, uh, it's, it's this weird transition
Chris: now because I actually think the solution is going to be me replacing my H droid.
Wes: Uh, that would be interesting. Yeah.
Chris: I think that's the solution is to get a higher end quick sync or some other.
Wes: You should try that on another Quicksync box, too, just to see if you can get a source file.
Brent: The only reason you're convincing yourself you need new hardware is because
Brent: your TNG is encoded at ridiculous levels, right? You realize that?
Chris: You mean my TNG is future-proofed and looks beautiful? Is that what you mean?
Wes: You want to respect the film scans they did, Brent.
Chris: You want to respect TNG.
Wes: Well, that, too.
Chris: I mean, like, a guy doesn't want to re-encode it every decade anymore.
Chris: He's kind of done doing that. So I went, I got the Blu-rays,
Chris: and some of the DVDs. I'll tell you what. I mean, just as an aside,
Chris: sometimes, especially with Deep Space Nine, and some of these, the DVDs are actually,
Chris: better quality than the blu-ray so you
Chris: got to pick and choose i mean i picked and choose i'm picky with my star trek uh
Chris: i really though i i want to just relay a couple things before i
Chris: wrap this up i'm going to put links to
Chris: this stuff dispatcher tunar ersatz in the show notes but
Chris: i also want you to go play around with the awesome iptv list in the in the show
Chris: notes i've mentioned this once before on the show and i don't normally do this
Chris: unless it's something i really really think is great and so i'm mentioning it
Chris: again you can play around with this at any level just I just want a web-based
Chris: app to desktop applications to full host services like I'm doing.
Chris: At the end of the day, there's a lot of good legal content out there that you
Chris: can watch absolutely for free.
Chris: And there's a lot of really good open source apps to play it in.
Chris: What I've done is I've stacked a couple of things together.
Chris: So just as a recap, what you have is a simpler version of this is Tunar.
Chris: Tunar could feed directly into Jellyfin.
Chris: You don't need all this other stuff. If you don't have these crazy files like
Chris: I have, T-U-N-A-R-R, get yourself Tunar,
Chris: and point it at your existing Plex or Jellyfin, and then your existing Plex
Chris: or Jellyfin will see it show up as an HD Home Run network box,
Chris: and you'll be able to stream your shows like a classic TV show,
Chris: like a classic cable channel, whatever it might be, with a TV guide where you
Chris: can see what's playing, and I think you'll find it quite delightful.
Chris: It doesn't have to be a very complicated stack. I've gone kind of hardcore here
Chris: because of my setup, but it's really just Tuner, Jellyfin, and Plex,
Chris: and that's the entire stack.
Chris: And then you can add on to that as you like. You could add Dispatcher with lots of IPTV if you wanted to.
Chris: But I really want to encourage you to get started with this because it is a
Chris: great gateway drug into self-hosting.
Chris: And what you'll find is once you get something like this running,
Chris: you're off to the races when it comes to a Sovereign stack. You will find it's
Chris: a very, very fun, and it becomes just the first thing, and then from there it just takes off.
Wes: If you want more info on some of the IPTV-specific stuff, that's in Linux Unplugged 645.
Brent: I also imagine, Wes, you might have gone sneaky spelunking like I may have,
Brent: but Chris, if you look around, you can find under the ersatz.tv GitHub organization
Brent: something simply called Next.
Brent: And it says, ersatz.tv next. This is an experiment and not intended for use by anyone at this point.
Brent: Soon, trademark. And the last commit was 31 minutes ago.
Brent: So keep your eye out. And it's written in 100% Rust.
Chris: So I noticed that like the first commit was two weeks ago. So this has been cooking for a minute.
Chris: MIT licensed cargo. Yeah. It's all right. It's a rust for sure. Huh?
Chris: Yeah. I'm, you know, this is very early. There's nothing here yet other than
Chris: channel.toml and lineup.toml.
Chris: It's something you can see where this is going. And that's pretty exciting.
Chris: Maybe he'll pop on his PayPal and send Jason a few thank you bucks.
Brent: I don't, I don't see a flake.nix yet, but there's still time.
Wes: Maybe we can contribute.
Chris: I think what I realized partway into that segment, and I still haven't done
Chris: it, is every time I've talked about these things, I'm trying to relay the deep
Chris: happiness they bring me every time I use them.
Chris: But I don't feel like I can successfully convey, like, this is a very rewarding thing to get working.
Wes: There's something about, like, we've had experience now with things like Netflix
Wes: and maybe Private Plex and Jellyfin instances.
Chris: And Pluto TV.
Wes: And a lot of folks have experienced, like, cable TV and network TV.
Wes: but the thing that you build while it is shaped and is wearing the clothes of
Wes: that it's not really the same thing because you have so much more control and
Wes: it's stuff you've pre-approved my favorite shows and it's.
Chris: Always my favorite show it's always an episode I generally well even with Star.
Wes: Trek and there's only ads if you add ads in yeah.
Brent: Also you introduced me to a lot of Star Trek canon while we were working on
Brent: projects the last couple weeks.
Wes: Oh that's great.
Chris: So that's the thing. It's like there's a few things you can actually self-host
Chris: and run that just give you this
Chris: constant source of joy and play and new ideas that you can iterate on.
Brent: Well, it's nice to see we have a little update here from Olympia Mike, who writes in.
Brent: He says, hey, guys, I just got word from LinuxFest Northwest that they're giving
Brent: me and my nonprofit, the Computer Upcycle Project, its own booth at the Fest.
Brent: Not only will I have some upcycled Nix books for people to play with,
Brent: but I have a ton of hardware to give out for free.
Brent: Over the years, I've upcycled thousands
Brent: of laptops that have gone into the hands of people who need them.
Brent: However, there are often computers that just aren't good enough to go out to
Brent: everyday users or missing something in particular.
Brent: They still work, but aren't intended for those everyday users.
Brent: I have boxes and boxes of this kind of stuff that I know the Linux community
Brent: can absolutely find a use for.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: So here's a list of what I already know I will have for sure at LinuxFest Northwest.
Brent: Over 100 ARM Chromebooks that can be jailbroken to run post-market OS.
Brent: And we'll include instructions for that.
Brent: Several Intel Chromebooks that have already been jailbroken and running a Debian 13.
Brent: At least 30 small form factor Lenovo ThinkCenters. Oh, those are going to go fast.
Chris: Oh, those are going to go really fast. Yeah.
Brent: Several half-top laptops with missing
Brent: or broken screens, but still work perfectly when plugged into HDMI,
Brent: tons of USB, HDMI cords, a handful of Intel iMacs running Nixbook OS,
Brent: two keyboards and mice, lots of random Apple hardware, tons of DDR3 and DDR4 RAM in various sizes.
Brent: That is right. I said I'm giving away RAM, Wi-Fi cards, and anything else that
Brent: is interesting that I find between now and then.
Brent: I'll also have a donation bin set up too so if you have some of these older
Brent: laptops that are just sitting around,
Brent: collecting dust please consider bringing it to the fest
Brent: and doting it to the organization
Brent: they're all securely wiped upgraded to
Brent: nick's book os and given to someone local in need
Brent: i'll be up there midday saturday and everything will be completely free first
Brent: come first serve and finish off the whole weekend i'm giving a talk on sunday
Brent: afternoon about the story of nick's book os and the computer upcycle project
Brent: i cannot wait to see you guys all there Amazing.
Chris: Go check out Crazy Olympia Mike's Hardware Blowout Saturday at Linux Fest Northwest.
Wes: And bring some hardware. Maybe it's a good time to upcycle some of the stuff
Wes: you're not going to use anymore.
Chris: I can imagine, too, you might need some help. It's going to be a lot of stuff to carry around.
Brent: Yeah, it's true. That's a lot of stuff. I'm going to ask him if you moved to Flakes yet.
Wes: I'm not donating if you don't get Flakes.
Chris: That's good to hear from you.
Brent: Can I get a Nick's book, but with Flakes on it, please? Love you, Mike.
Chris: Spooky Satcom is our baller booster this week, coming in with 133,333 sats.
Chris: Spooky writes, what a great pre-show and discussion last week.
Chris: Glad to be a Jupiter Party member.
Chris: Wes, you were brutal, but well done. Hadn't laughed so hard driving home. So here's some value.
Wes: I suppose that might be about the song about you.
Chris: Yeah, that was right.
Brent: Wes got a little musical last week. Thanks for that. It hurt a bit.
Chris: Yeah, that pre-show discussion was, I feel like, I wish we could have captured that in the show.
Chris: But I'm really glad the members enjoyed it. And we were really discussing the
Chris: age verification issue that's coming to Linux.
Chris: Chris07 comes in. Wes, you want to take that?
Wes: Mm-hmm. 22,222 sets.
Wes: First time booster.
Chris: Hey!
Brent: Nice.
Wes: I've been playing around with Turnstone to manage my home lab with fully local
Wes: models and loving it. Thanks for the show.
Wes: Here's my value for value. And then we are included a link to Turnstone over on GitHub.
Chris: Thank you for taking the time to set up the boost and supporting us.
Chris: It means more than ever right now. An experimental multi-node AI orchestration platform.
Chris: Deploy tool using AI agents across a cluster.
Chris: You know, it's incredible that there are these that I've just never even heard
Chris: of. There's so many of these, and they're just cooking right now.
Chris: Five hours ago was the last. Like, when we check these projects out,
Chris: they're committing while we're doing a live show on a Sunday.
Wes: And it's not huge, but there's, you know, five contributors.
Wes: Okay, one of those is Claude.
Wes: But four contributors and 280 stars already. It just, yeah, stuff's moving.
Chris: Works with any open AI compatible API. Very cool. I had not heard that.
Chris: Appreciate the heads up on that kind of thing. And also, thank you very much
Chris: for taking the time to get boosting.
Wes: We really appreciate it.
Chris: Yeah, we do.
Brent: Well, tomato, or tomato, if you will, boosted in 21,346 sets.
Brent: These are through a couple different messages, and one of them happens to be 12345satoshis.
Brent: This is a minor time travel boost from episode 657.
Brent: Thank you for putting in all of the time and effort for the planet Nix and scale coverage.
Brent: Picking MTR in 2026 is also hilarious, but it's still a great tool.
Wes: Yeah, we call that Pix Classic.
Brent: They continue a good discussion on the members' feed about privacy and age verification last week.
Brent: For my part, I'm drawing a hard line here. Free software has been through civil
Brent: liberties fights in the past, and this is for me clearly another.
Brent: This big corporation and governments are after my and my kids' privacy,
Brent: and I will not compromise on this one.
Brent: If my distro of choice implements an age verification API, collects ID information,
Brent: implements a race or citizenship API, I will leave.
Brent: If I need to run Arch or Gentoo, so be it.
Chris: Leaving the distro. Leaving the distro.
Brent: How do you feel about that?
Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Brent: And there is a last boost here. In the past, we went so far as to have GPG developed
Brent: in Europe when it was illegal in the US.
Brent: We didn't roll over for Clinton and his clipper chip.
Brent: This is non-negotiable. And for me as a parent, it's doubly upsetting.
Brent: I want to protect my children from exactly this sort of privacy invasion.
Chris: Man, I remember the clipper chip.
Wes: Indeed.
Brent: I don't know the Clipper chip.
Chris: Good callback. Like a censorship built into the TV.
Chris: So it could detect swear words or something like that and auto-mute them.
Chris: The idea was that you'd build in a hardware-level thing.
Chris: And there were commercial devices based around that for a little bit.
Chris: Thank you very much. Appreciate the follow-up, Tamato.
Wes: It's nice having real people's opinions on where they actually draw their lines.
Wes: You know, regardless of if you disagree or agree, but just having it spelled
Wes: out in the reasoning is really useful.
Chris: Outdoor Geeks here with 5,000 Sats.
Chris: Would you try a green boost and report back the open-source green boost NVIDIA?
Chris: This is an article at Pharonix. Open-source green boost driver aims to augment
Chris: NVIDIA GPUs, VRAM, with RAM and NVMe to handle larger LLMs.
Chris: The issue is, of course, you have to have a relatively recent RTX card, which is...
Wes: So the second we get one of those.
Brent: Absolutely, we will be trying those.
Chris: I just found a GTX 960 in the drawer. I don't think that's going to quite do
Chris: it though I like that idea though Outdoor, it's on the radar officially Thank
Chris: you for sending that our way Our.
Wes: Buddy Hybrid Sarcasm comes in with 10,000 cents Oh!
Wes: That song begging on Brantley's browser habits Was Jeff's Kiss.
Chris: Brantley just He won't pin his tabs How dare you Brantley won't pin his tabs.
Brent: If it wasn't so catchy, I'd be more angry.
Wes: That's the trick.
Brent: Well, E. Scott boosted in 2,500 sats.
Brent: He has a list here of underpowered hardware, since Chris, you've been asking for it.
Brent: Well, a pihole 0.1.3 running, or a pi 0.1.3 running pihole.
Chris: Two zeros, actually.
Brent: It's two zeros, actually. Yeah, yeah. It's a cluster.
Chris: Here's what he's got running on it, though. All right. next cloud apache
Chris: hdps wikipedia jellyfin java web
Chris: server for work audio bookshelf navidrome fresh r
Chris: says get t hdm hdm it's too much already homebox me tube paperless nginx pinch
Chris: flat rom m sterling pdf sync thing tailscale trillium uptime kuma and hoogle
Chris: as well as open claw that's impressive what on i mean open.
Wes: Claw itself takes a fair bit.
Chris: On four gigs of ram that might win the that might win it right there how do you beat that i.
Brent: Think he scott does it so we don't have to.
Chris: That's nuts well done i am impressed i didn't think i'd be impressed i am impressed,
Chris: Okay. Adversary 17th here with 8,441 slits.
Chris: Wes, what prompt did you use to create?
Chris: Chris, it's okay. We're the recovering ricers. Understand your pain.
Chris: The step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Oh, he wants to.
Chris: Oh, yeah. So context here.
Chris: Wes created a roast song at the end of the membership bootleg last week that
Chris: roasts me for using Hyperland and a tiling window manager.
Chris: And the prompt you used, Wes, do you have it handy? Do you know what the prompt
Chris: was? It wasn't very elaborate.
Wes: I think I have the Brent one. This is a comedy album, party record style.
Wes: It's a song that simulates a podcast as a funny trick.
Wes: So it's a Linux podcast about ButterFS versus CFS. And also,
Wes: it's a frustrated soapbox rant about how, so this is the Brentley one,
Wes: how one of the hosts, Brentley, won't use pin tabs in Firefox for no good reason.
Wes: Musical style is non-musical spoken word, no percussion, no instruments,
Wes: ambient silence podcast audiobook.
Wes: I think I just tweaked it for yours, So it's like, you know,
Wes: some sort of seed of like Chris irrationally uses Tyler window managers.
Wes: He won't use a reasonable desktop environment or something like that.
Chris: What's funny is that really from that, it makes like a chorus and all of that.
Brent: Yeah, unfortunately, that prompt works extremely well. And yeah,
Brent: looking forward to more requests. Thanks. Maybe one about yourself.
Wes: Well, you know, you have the prompt now. So I think you guys,
Wes: that is totally fair game.
Chris: Brantley, you want to take the one from your countryman?
Brent: Oh, this is Rubikman. 3,222 satoshis.
Brent: Oh, I see why you wanted me to take this one. You can't pronounce the name of
Brent: this place. Greetings from Miramichi, New Brunswick in Canada.
Chris: I think it's pronounced Miramachi.
Brent: Is that Miramichi? I'm against the age verification laws, as it is just another
Brent: way to track and catalog us under the guise of clutches, pearls,
Brent: won't someone think of the children?
Brent: It's not my responsibility to make sure that your kids don't look at porn.
Brent: if the distros are forced to implement age verification for some areas it will
Brent: be everywhere because i doubt they will maintain two or more versions and that
Brent: will be the end of privacy because vpns won't protect you with that yeah.
Chris: I do think that's probably true if it if it if it takes off you're they're probably
Chris: just going to be everywhere it'll be just everywhere.
Brent: And a flag in xos right yeah.
Chris: Or something system d something like that trellion comes in with 16 000 sats,
Chris: and just says boost thank you Trillian.
Wes: Tarion Bronzewing comes in with a row of ducks.
Chris: Love the.
Wes: AI hacking open claw and local content keep it coming.
Chris: Thank you.
Brent: Our dear Gene Bean sends in a couple rows of ducks for a total of 5,781 Satoshis,
Brent: Here's a little feedback on Cage kiosk, which I brought up last week.
Brent: Cage is what I use for my two kiosks that show a Home Assistant dashboard.
Brent: Here is one of them. Any links to a NixOS config? Chris, I know you like diving into those.
Chris: I do. I'm looking at it right now.
Brent: By the way, regarding building a NixOS image for the Pi, grab a temporary Ampere
Brent: instance from Hetzner and use it as a remote build host.
Brent: That's how I built mine. Very speedy.
Chris: That's big brain thinking there, Gene. Thank you.
Brent: Last boost here. Funny story. I went looking at my transactions after you mentioned
Brent: it being a light week last week and realized I missed listening to an episode.
Brent: Got to fix that in a little while.
Chris: Thank you, Gene. You are the best.
Brent: Thanks, Gene.
Chris: A dude trying stuff comes in with 5,000 sats. I appreciate your struggles with the calendars.
Chris: I've recently been looking to make my switch from macOS, and one of the last
Chris: remaining applications was a native high quality client from my CalDev server.
Chris: Also, I wanted to submit a pic.
Chris: Planify. It's a very pretty task manager that works natively with CalDev.
Chris: Thanks for the show, boys.
Wes: Nice.
Chris: Thank you, a dude trying stuff. Nice to hear from you.
Wes: See, trying stuff, telling us about it. This is great.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supported the show with a boost. We had 18 of you stream
Chris: sats as you listened and you collectively all stacked 29,701 sats.
Chris: When you combine that with our boosters this week, We got a pretty good showing,
Chris: especially compared to last week.
Chris: We got 264,768 sats for episode 660 of your Unplugged program.
Chris: Thank you, everybody who supports us with a boost. Fountain makes it really easy.
Chris: There's also a self-hosted route with AlbiHub and lots of great apps you can
Chris: integrate with, including Fountain.
Chris: And, of course, thank you to our members who support us every single episode.
Chris: Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it. The show runs on your support
Chris: right now more than ever. In fact, only on your support.
Chris: Now, we got a smattering of picks, boys. A smattering.
Chris: Because a couple of them actually came in from the feedback inbox this week.
Chris: So they're listener picks. But let's start with Boar.
Chris: This one, I believe, I'm going to guess, could be Brent, could be Wes,
Chris: because I talked to both of you about it, so I can't remember which one he is. I'm going to say Wes.
Wes: That's right. Actually, it helped us out behind the scenes a little bit,
Wes: because we were trying to watch Big Buck Bunny with producer Jason.
Chris: Right, remotely. We're all trying to do a group watch of Big Buck Bunny.
Wes: Yeah, and unfortunately, he didn't have the file locally.
Chris: No.
Wes: And it was taking a really long time for him to be able to get it from the upstream.
Chris: Yeah, because it was a real high-res version of the file.
Wes: Yeah. But I had it locally.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So I was able to use Bore, which is a modern, simple TCP tunnel in Rust that
Wes: exposes local ports to a remote server, bypassing standard NAT connection firewalls.
Wes: That's all it does. No more, no less.
Chris: So then he downloaded over like a link? Yeah.
Chris: Like an HTTP link? Or does he use like a command on his end to pull it down? What's the other end?
Wes: Yeah, so the other part was I just ran a Python HTTP server in the folder where
Wes: the bigbuckbunny.mp4 file was.
Chris: Yeah, of course, yeah.
Wes: And then I could just send a link
Wes: to HTTP web server. It just does like a listing of the files, et cetera.
Wes: And then Bohr handles the part of taking that local port and publishing it on
Wes: a public IP address, and then he could connect to it. And then we were able
Wes: to watch it and enjoy it together.
Chris: Yes, we were.
Brent: You know and this took wes like a total of five minutes to deploy and i don't
Brent: think you had used it previously and chris and i were just like i don't know
Brent: talking about nothing and wes just solves this problem in five minutes with
Brent: a brand new tool that he brings to the show so uh oh wait there's even more
Brent: wes you didn't just use it.
Chris: Oh there's more.
Wes: Well so i had um i had used it a little bit before but this is probably the
Wes: best stress test is like i wanted something essentially kind of similar to like a Cloudflare,
Wes: tunnel sort of setup without all the fancy SSL kind of stuff and other layers on top of it.
Wes: But just like an easy way, if I had stuff on one server that maybe even I didn't
Wes: need it on, like to have it already on a mesh network that I needed,
Wes: maybe it's a throwaway host, you know, maybe I'm spinning something up and I
Wes: just want to provide access easily,
Wes: then this seemed like a good solution and it's only, it's like 400 lines of
Wes: safe, it's not even unsafe async Rust code, so it's like super trivial to set
Wes: up. The only thing it was missing, it's already in Nix packages.
Wes: It just didn't have a NixOS module. So I threw one of those together real quick,
Wes: which is really just some options that render out a systemd service to run it
Wes: because it basically just needs some port allocations and network access. And there you go.
Chris: Well done, sir. All right, Bore, link in the show notes and link to the module as well.
Chris: Our next pick is KD Connect SMS TUI and Scott Syntheson.
Chris: He says, you all have expressed interest in both TUIs and KD Connect.
Chris: And because Google is taking away QR code web pairing for messages,
Chris: I worked with Cloud Desktop to develop KD Connect SMS TUI.
Chris: Search conversations and messages, send and receive SMS and MMS,
Chris: inline image display for KD.
Chris: That's cool. I-Term 2 and a few other terminals. you have contact name resolution
Chris: from synced v cards group conversation support in the tui with custom name wow
Chris: multiple device switching with a pop-up selector archive and spam folders for
Chris: hiding conversations 17 built-in themes with this is better than my.
Brent: Sms messenger on my phone.
Chris: And of course rust app,
Chris: Of course, it's a Rust Ham.
Wes: Amazing. Ooh, Ratatouille. And that's a Netflix Flake, too. Great.
Chris: It's pretty slick, right? I mean, Scott's on fire with this one.
Chris: He's got a whole series of hotkeys, so you can whip around this thing like a
Chris: DOS Pro from the 80s and early 90s.
Chris: I mean, treat it like it's your Vim. It's pretty cool. So that's...
Wes: I will definitely be trying this, because I do have KDE Connect.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: It was like, Wes, are you running it already? Well, the Netflix Flake is building.
Chris: Thank you, Scott. And that is MIT licensed. Now, Andrew sent in our next one,
Chris: and it's an alternative to what I talked about last week.
Chris: This one's called BusyBridge, a complex calendar.
Chris: It's a free, busy syncing across organizations.
Chris: It says it's a self-hosted multi-user calendar synchronization service for consulting organizations.
Chris: The service allows users to connect multiple client calendars from,
Chris: say, client organizations to feed their main calendar, keeping availability
Chris: in sync across all the calendars without duplicating event details that don't belong.
Chris: Andrew says, I was listening and having a good laugh because I actually had
Chris: to solve this problem so that way everybody can see what's going on.
Chris: I've been using it for myself, self-hosted, and it's pretty nice.
Chris: It lets you use one main calendar and see all your events color-coded on it.
Chris: And so he sent me along the project that he found here. It's called Busy Bridge.
Wes: This is cool. Python app, self-hosted calendar synchronization service.
Chris: Yeah. Bidirectional sync, personal calendar sync, WebDAV, ICS,
Chris: subscription, reoccurring events, smart busy blocks.
Wes: RSVP propagation. That's some attention to detail.
Chris: I know. I know.
Wes: That's the part I probably wouldn't have bothered to do. You know what I mean?
Wes: But like someone else has done that? That's great.
Chris: Hourly consistency checks. Six-hour orphan scans. Automatic retry of missing busy blocks.
Chris: Circuit breaker or auto-pause sync when all calendars fail. It's pretty smart.
Brent: Auto backups as well?
Chris: Yep.
Brent: Self-healing? Yep.
Chris: This is the real deal. So that's a real nice find.
Chris: I like that a lot so thank you Andrew for sending that along he says I think
Chris: it might do more of what you need
Chris: it might be right it might be right it's often how it goes I you know I uh,
Chris: I talk about something, somebody's like, you know, you could try this.
Chris: That's how I found dispatcher, right? Is I found one thing, you're like,
Chris: you should try dispatcher. I'm like, oh, great.
Chris: All right. So we're going to wrap it up here. Let us know your thoughts on,
Chris: you know, the future of booting your Linux box.
Chris: So I want to know if you're using grubber systemd boot and if you use sign bootloaders.
Chris: Those are the main things I want to know.
Wes: Is secure boot turned on? Do you rely on that? What are your thoughts?
Chris: Yeah. Let us know about that because I just would like to take a survey from
Chris: the audience. You guys are pretty technical groups. So I think it'd be telling what your answer is.
Chris: And yeah, let us know. Send in with Booster, linuxunplugged.com slash contact.
Chris: Now, you can also get even more show by joining us live. You can make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
Chris: Join us at Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: That'll be in your podcasting 2.0 app of choice, like Fountain FM,
Chris: or over at jblive.tv. But Wes Payne, if they want more metadata or information
Chris: around the show, we got that for him, too.
Wes: Yeah, a podcast 2.0 compliant RSS feed, which means it has all kinds of fun goodies in there.
Wes: Like, well, a good, but no, JSON Cloud Chapters.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: And both VTT and SRT files if you want a transcript.
Chris: I heard the developer of Overcast this week say, nobody has transcripts in their
Chris: feeds. We've had it for two years now, buddy.
Wes: Two types.
Chris: That's right.
Wes: And, you know, you don't even have to be like a full 2.0 client to use it.
Wes: Stuff like Intendapod uses them.
Chris: Yeah, there's also Secret, a video version in the feed, too, you could always find.
Wes: That's right. Check that out.
Chris: We're out of here. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.
Brent: Remember if someone has a van that
Brent: needs rescuing we're looking for a half abandoned van we watch our van.