Self-hosted Tools, Dead Tech, Papercrafting

Welcome back to Linux Prepper. Happy to have you. I'm excited to say that this will be a more technical episode like people are used to from the past. Now that I'm done with the conference and I've gotten some other things out of the way. I do hope you enjoy this episode. If you like the show, please do share it with others. This is a tiny little show that is self-hosted and about the same and using free and open-source tools to just enjoy your life and have the most fun you can.

This episode will be focusing on some self-hosted software picks, some terminal tools, as well as be talking about paper crafting and all things related to it.

So I do hope you enjoy the episode. Feel free to share it around. You can also support me directly. I'll have a PayPal donation link. That's what I've got right now. Otherwise, please do enjoy and you're welcome to join discuss.james.network where I post more detailed notes on the items I'm talking about on the show. We also have a matrix chat. There will be a link you can join and please do enjoy this episode of Linux Prepper.

It was also brought to my attention that if people want to leave reviews or comments on their podcast platforms, that could help the show be seen more by more people since we are so small. So if you want to leave a review on, I guess, whatever it is, whatever platform you're on, feel free to do that. I'd appreciate it., whatever platform you're on, feel free to do that. Appreciate it. And just spread the word.

So all help in sharing this show is appreciated so I can just focus on making content and improving this show. So I hope this works well. I'm in the middle of traveling right now in what they call an air condition nightmare.

If you've listened to the song by Mr. Bungle, link in the show notes. And this is a mic that I purchased just for the occasion. There's so much street noise and it's just craziness being out here. So for the time being, I hope that this sounds good. So totally new way for me to record. Let me know what you think and we'll take it from there.

Speaking of self hosted spotlights, I'd like to take a moment to give a shout out to a fantastic project that is so easy to use by any home admin enthusiast or even a company and consider it a good starting point for open source file sharing file management. SFT PIGO gets a strong recommendation as a very simple platform. It doesn't do a lot, but it might do enough that it's all you need.

Unless you already have a more full featured server like Trunas or Unraid or one of these other things, I think that this could be a nice starting point. And that would be SFTPGo. I know the name's like slightly awkward. It just is SFTPGo is a tool that allows you

to have a fully featured, highly customizable SFTP server with HTTPS, WebUI, and optional FTP and web dev support. So all it really is, is it's a go based tool, you install it, it takes literal seconds, it's up and running, and as soon as you access it, it asks you if you want to set up multi-factor authentication, which I think is amazing. That is the way it should be. It's a very forward thinking modern tool. So it's just fast, responsive, so simple.

And the great thing is that it allows you to create storage and make it accessible in a way that you choose. And what I mean is when you have storage in SFTP Go, you can say whether it is FTP, HTTP, but also S3, Google Cloud, Azure Blob. It's fantastic. So unlike something like next cloud where you're exposing your storage as web dev in SFTP go, you could say I want to expose as NFS. You could do something really unusual by default. And I think that this is an amazing tool.

So when I was looking into this segment, I was actually looking into own cloud infinite scale and open cloud, which are these rewrites of next cloud effectively and own cloud. But honestly, I would skip all of those. And I would say if you are looking for basic file folder management for multiple users, one or more, I would check out SFTP Go.

Because as long as your storage is being exposed in the way that you want, and you have things like multi-factor authentication, that might be all you need, right? That might be all you need as far as tooling is concerned. Making things accessible. People have the ability to upload and share files. So I was pleasantly surprised by SFTP Go and it was usable immediately, which I have not had that experience at all with NextCloud.

It just is what it is because this is such a light piece of software. It's hard not to recommend it at least as a starting point. So if you're looking to get into file sharing file management, I would recommend installing SFTP Go. Give it a shot for five to 10 minutes. If it's not doing what you want, then I would say migrate to something like next cloud or uncloud or whatever it is, open cloud. But those are a more involved setup process. They just are, there's more moving parts.

And if all you need is to make a directory available, the fact that you can make it available, not only, you know, in one method, but all these different common methods, like Google cloud or S3 or whatever, this is probably the better option for you. I would definitely consider it. I want to take a moment to shout out the sponsor of this show, which is Ameradroid.

Ameradroid.com. They are the purveyors of open source hardware, things for home assistant, like the home assistant green, pine 64 hardware, and other related goodies. They are located in Northern California. pine 64 hardware and other related goodies. They are located in Northern California. They have a great little facility that I enjoyed touring, just nice, friendly people. They're very responsive. They have excellent tech support.

But also, if you're in the United States where you're not looking to order from overseas, Ameradroid is a great, great option. And I think they just have been awesome for the last almost 10 years or something like that. I don't know eight years that I've been using them. I can highly recommend to Maradroy.com. You can use Linux Prepper at checkout, or I will include some affiliate links in the show notes for products of theirs that I own and enjoy.

Ameradroyd.com. Another excellent tool that I have been using is chapter tool.

Chapter tool is a tool that allows you to add show notes as well as chapters to audio and video. This is really important if you're trying to release any material online, be it to YouTube, Spotify, whatever platform. Chapter tools got your back. It is a self-hosted tool. You can also use it directly off of their Git site. And it will allow you to upload a file and add in your show notes, chapter tool notes. It works well. I contacted the developer at issue related to show notes.

They were very responsive, which they totally didn't need to be, but they were happy to help me out. And so I found this tool fantastic. It's very easy to make notes and then convert them, say from a specific format to a different one. So if you have a video and you're trying to get on different platforms, this is a great tool for you. It's fully open source and you can get started with it immediately in a web browser.

Chapter tool. Link in the show notes. Also want to give a shout out to a brand new tool I have just discovered online. It is a recent edition on GitHub known as OpenDAW. OpenDAW can be used right now, tested in a web browser at openDA.studio. It is a recording platform for audio, multi-track recording. I am just getting started with it. So if you want to test it, you would be testing it at the same time as me. I would

love to hear people's thoughts on it. But recording in a browser is still new territory as far as audio recording is concerned. And that fact that somebody is working on this is fantastic. The jury's out on how well it works. I literally just discovered it the other day. But if you want to check it out with me, OpenDoc could be an amazing way to record with different people in different locations

through the internet at no cost. So very, very interesting. I'll put a link in the show notes, but the interface is pleasant looking. There's a lot of promise in the world of OpenDAW. Link in the show notes. Let's check it out. See what we think right on. We'll talk about it in a future episode. As a self-hosted spotlight, we'll call it for this episode. I wanted to focus on a tool I've been testing very extensively. And that is CanBoard.

CanBoard is a CanBAN project management tool. And I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison to the other similar tool I've been using for a long time. The open source one being next cloud deck and the proprietary one being Trello. So Trello is a tool that does a lot, right? You have a can band project board cards. You're assigning them to other people. I love the can-ban methodology myself.

If you were at Linux Fest Northwest this last month and you saw Post-it notes, that's related to is a can-ban organization of items and projects, which I like to do physically with a whiteboard. On the computer side, I had the most experience with Trello. And Trello supports things, automations and API support, which is big. So I've been using NextCloud Deck over the years, but NextCloud Deck as a very simple tool does not support those automations, effectively at all.

So enter CanBoard. CanBoard is a tool that does support automations, effectively at all. So enter canboard. Canboard is a tool that does support automations and very exhaustive feature set that you would be expecting from something like Trello. What I mean is public sharing of a board, right? You're creating a board, you're sharing it to non-users to look at, not only look out online, but also do things like leave comments and be able to interact with that board from a public link.

This is something that NextCloud Deck cannot do. So NextCloud Deck is a nice tool. If you'd wanna know what a CanVin is and you already have NextCloud installed. But the similarities end there. This might be a total shot in the dark, but I am hoping for those who are listening to work for NextCloud because some of you do. I really want to encourage

you to consider working with the can board project. It's a project that's been around as long as NextCloud effectively, we're longer, but those guys have been in maintenance mode for a long time because their feature set is feature complete. And most of the features they offer are things that are still in the next cloud deck roadmap. And I file the issue on the next cloud deck. I'll link it in the show notes.

It's a shot in the dark, but next cloud does work with round cube and these other long-term open-source projects. And I feel like the can board team could help you because it allows me to do I feel like the can board team could help you because it allows me to do things like create a can board, you know, for the creation of my show. I can also have personal boards. I have per project controls of can boards. So you can take something

like a can ban for your work. You can add users to it, which I've done. People don't get confused on it. When they log in, they can see a overview of actions based on the most, you know, recent changes. They can follow along. They have assignments. So so far it sounds like deck, right?

You also have control on a per project basis of who gets access to what, what can be publicly accessed by other people, what can be accessed by RSS feed, as well as what can be integrated with other tools through web hooks and send notifications to other services, including Slack, Matrix, Discord. You have GitHub authentication people can log in from their GitHub account, or their GitLab account, or their GitT account, or their ForchJoe account. It's amazing.

So the level of functionality, the thing with that, I would say, as an old-school PHP-style project, is you do have to do some legwork in setting up can board. And I will leave links for this in the show notes. But once you get can board installed, for example, it's not going to include a dark theme. It's not going to include some of this basic stuff that I feel like people want in the modern day. The good news

is it's really easy to fix. I would start by going installing canboard however you want and then you can install first plugin manager and that is maintained by a very cool community member called alja wade I think is the name but I'll have a link in the show notes. plugin manager provides

a improved user-friendly layout for handling plugins in Canboard. Once you have that, there's all kinds of really useful things to be added, such as calendar support, color management, you can customize the exact colors that are used in cards, and then in Canboard you can do automations. Like if I assign you a card, it's going to change the related assignments of that card and update them in a way that I've specified.

For me, this is critical because it does what Trello does by allowing automations and allowing like sort of custom flows on a per user per card per project basis. Another plugin for functionality for a cambour that I love is the ability to print to PDF. So I can take cards and I can turn them into PDFs to physically print them out. And that

is what I am doing for my show notes. So when I am preparing an episode for this show, for example, I can create a PDF, print it out, and then write all my written notes onto that as I'm recording, it's so useful. And once I'm done with it through automation, I can archive that card and everything related to it automatically. You can make associations like this card is dependent on these other cards or is related to or is apparent of.

And through this, you have very fine control over other group members' contributions to cards, but also what they're seeing, which is so awesome. So I have a very fine control over how my projects are being managed, what I'm seeing. And so when I'm looking at my can board, which I've been using the last few years, I'll tell you what I'm seeing. What I'm specifically seeing is items that are works in progress, such as my recording right now. And the total number of items that are

being actively worked on is, see, 123456, about 12 items. That's it. And half of those items are connected within the same release that you're going to get. Once I archive all those six items will go away. And then I'll be looking at my ready to work on Q, which is roughly twice as long, 24 items. And some of those items are linked to this episode as well. So some of those will also be archived. Anyway, it's very exciting. And I think this is a great step beyond task management.

If you've been writing things in a checklist, you know, on a to do, adding them into a sort of calendar system with priority is great. If you want to get started and you run next cloud, you can try deck. But if you're coming from Trello, and you want the ability to have full import, export, support with assignable public access and sharing of boards and automations, then I would recommend CAN board.

Plus it has the ability to allow users to access it from other authentication methods like from their GitHub account stuff they can log in. And it also allows anonymous users to optionally comment and to share your board with whatever chat system you use, you know, discord or whatever. It doesn't matter. So, canboard is certainly not a perfect tool, but I have not seen an open source canvan tool that works better than canboard. Link to that in the

show notes. I strongly recommend trying canboard.com for your canvan needs. Enjoy it. I certainly am and I can feel like there's so much more to learn even after four or five years. It's just this tool has the depth I want and it is an excellent tool. I have a question for the audience and that's what sort of tools do you use offline? Just when you're out and about enjoying your life, what kind of

tools do you use and I would be really curious, what tools help you with that? Just when you're not in the computer and you're doing other things and And I will include a little anonymous form or you're welcome to join our matrix. There will be a link in the show notes or you can email podcast@james.net work.

Let me know what tools do you use when you're just doing your offline regular day-to-day thing? Like what helps you with doing that or not needing to jump on the computer? What do you use as an alternative to that, right, to respect your own time? Let me know what tools do you use for enjoying your offline life and getting things done? Thanks. Touching on a piece of tech news as a product recommendation, Microsoft has once again,

famously or infamously done their extend embrace extinguish strategy by killing off Skype. Skype, of course, being the long time communication tool you can call on a phone or use internationally. And actually, personally, I found a much better alternative to Skype over the last several years, and it is a fully open tool. It happens to be signal. So signal has been around a long time. Now, like at least a solid decade, I believe. And signal is something that just

requires a data plan. You can install it on whatever generic device, it can be a desktop, laptop, or a mobile phone. You can use it to have audio calls, video calls, group calls. It works well. It happens to be end to end encrypted. And that encryption protocol of Signal has served as the basis for all other major platforms. That includes things like Skype's sort of secret conversations or Facebook's.

It's the basis for WhatsApp, as well as the basis for encryption used in matrix and all kinds of other major platforms that you would use. There are all some variation of signal and signal is an excellent tool that you can run on anything. You can communicate internationally with people and unlike Skype, you don't have to buy or pay additional fees to use it. So by switching to signal, personally, it has saved money. The biggest issue with it is just getting other people to use it, right?

That's always the problem. But once somebody's on signal, they'll be able to communicate no matter where they are in the world as long as they can connect to data. So signal is an excellent tool. I also wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that there's been related to signal a couple of the ascos in the US government. So from a purely technical standpoint, I wanted to touch on these two instances that I'm aware of. The first one was a journalist was accidentally invited to a signal group.

And I just wanna say that this is not in any way indicative of like a hack or anything like that. Signalists become something that's popular and used by a lot of people all over the world. So you connect it to your phone contacts usually as a way to invite people to signal. And if someone's on signal, you can add or remove them from groups at will. So that's what would happen. And then in a second instance, a fork of signal was used, which was not maintained and was not secure.

I'm not going to name it because I don't want to encourage people to use it. But in this case, a company had forked signal with the intention of allowing someone to access their messages. This goes against the design of signal because the point of signal is you're using this messaging service which is end-to-end encrypted.

End-to-end encrypted meaning you are encrypting your message on the client device, whatever client device that is, you're then sending it through the network to the other person who is decrypting it on their end when they receive it on that client device. There's some caveats. One being that it's hard to get messages to migrate from the device to device on signal

because it's designed to basically not support that. So if you set up a new phone, you sort of, you can recover your contacts, but recovery and your messages, you have to sort of copy paste them out or something. So this service was a way to effectively man in the middle the service. And this is even though it's provided as a service, you know, it was a bad thing in this case. It would have literally been resolved by the person

not using that service and just sticking with Signal. And this is a caveat of basically all permutations of Signal, whether it's used in WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Skype or whatever in their iterations of like these private conversation type encrypted features from Signal. The intention of a lot of these forks

doesn't mean that everyone's evil or anything, but it's just encryption is inconvenient. And it's also inconvenient to companies who want access to data or anyone who wants access to data if they cannot literally access it. But this doesn't change the fact that Signal itself works as intended on the tin. It's a secure conversation platform that works well and is easy to use by anyone, which is huge. So Signal is a great tool. It's one I can highly recommend.

I'd say the biggest negative of it as an open source project is that it is not distributed and it is not federated. You cannot run your own Signal server for you and your friends. You use signal service. Granted, it's worked well and it's worked well for many years. So that says a lot. But at some point, I think that the biggest negative of signal, of course, is the fact that it's dependent on their service.

So hopefully one day that will change. And of course, there are other forks and things and feel free to recommend them as an alternative to signal in the open sphere, you could of course use matrix. And I've been testing matrix a lot, right? I use a matrix chat for my show, but also I use it to communicate with friends. And I won't lie, the people that use matrix that I know are all technical people. There's a big negative with using matrix for calls.

And that is that the calling functionality be it audio or video is not supported on almost any matrix client besides the default old school element one. And element is, it works, but it's chunky and it's slow. It takes forever to sink and maybe I've just been using it for too long in too many rooms, right? But it just feels so unresponsive and slow and the whole idea of matrix is they have all these clients. But none of these

clients seem to be able to answer a phone call or to call someone else. And it's really awkward when you're using matrix and someone's trying to call you and you can't answer the call. Feel free to contact me if you know the road map of or if there is a road map to support this element calling feature. But as it stands, I personally don't make matrix calls constantly, but occasionally people try to contact me like they did the other day.

I ended up having to reinstall the element client because I had the newer element X client installed, but that couldn't answer the call. This video call, audio call thing, it just wasn't working. So I had to get the old element one and I had like two, three other matrix clients. None of them could accept this call. Super duper awkward, super annoying, whereas of them could accept this call. Super duper awkward, super

annoying, whereas Signal has never had this problem. I like both tools. If your goal is just to have a conversation with your grandparents and they're on the other side of the world, then I think the only tool for that job is Signal. And I recommend checking it out if you're moving off of Skype. And let me know if you think that these sort of responding to the news segments are interesting. I'm happy to do it in this case because I've been using Signal a long time.

But let me know if you think that they're useful or you'd rather hear about other things. All right, cool. Bye bye. Skype. Hello.

Signal. Terminal tools. Coming into the Linux Fest Northwest event last month, I had to submit a logo for the website. So to do that, I was able to generate a logo using a tool called Figlet. It's a long-standing terminal tool you type in text and it turns it into ASCII art. ASCII art being tons of characters, right, put together to make an image in text. And Figlet is a great tool for this. I actually used a fork of it with the absolutely hilarious name, Toilet.

And if you go to the hyphen hyphen options, they're even more embarrassing. So Figlet and Toilet are really good tools for generating ASCII artwork. I'll include a link to the logo that I created, but I'm happy with it. It looks good. And there are a number of very useful guides and cheat sheets. I'll include a link to my forum post about this at discuss.james.network. And it pairs also very nicely to use as a way to generate a message of the day.

If you want to show it in the terminal or whatever, ask you, "It's a great way to do it." It's just fun. So I can definitely recommend Figlet and Toilet. (laughs) Stupid, I know.

I also wanted to generate a meme, and I thought maybe there's a tool that can do that. And I found a tool, if anyone cares, it's called Meme and it's written in go. I found a active branch, as opposed to the original repo, all linked both in the show notes. But the branch had very clear installation instructions, and I was able to generate a silly

meme to share with the forum. So you can check it out online. Meme, something I've been thinking a lot about lately is dead technology. And I think dead technology incorporates things like paper. When you're using paper, a lot of ideal scenarios

are that everything is digital and there's no longer a need to physically write things down. I'm curious if you're listening to this, if you write things down with the pen and paper or with something similar, as opposed to just recording on the phone or with a photograph. I would also be curious if you take photographs of things on the phone, do you actually reference those photos in a meaningful way or not? I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. There could be a combination of things.

But let me know. I'll include a little form in the show notes. I'm just curious how people use or choose to use dead technologies. There's also things like now, I feel like Blu-ray discs are still relevant, but DVDs, cassette tapes, vinyl seems to keep coming back, but it is an old school, more or less dead technology. And I just think there's always this ebb and flow of technologies. And I'm just curious when people choose to embrace the old over the new. So if you're still like

making cassette tapes, let me know. I want to know why, how, I think it's interesting how old things become new again. And I think we can all have those experiences for me personally. Pen and paper is something that I cannot get away from. I have a pen and paper in front of me right now. It's the one thing I carry on a plane or anywhere. It never fails unless

the pen dries out. I can always rely on pen and paper You know, I can play hangman with a person next to me I can be entertained and I'm curious if you the listener find this to be the truth as well or not Let us know do you still use dead tech and with that in mind, I'd like to move on to the main focus of this episode which is paper crafting oh, is paper crafting. Oh, yeah, paper crafting. As part of getting into paper crafting, I realized that I would want a printer. It's

not something I owned. And after looking around for way too long, I decided that the best thing to get is an eco tank style printer. And what that is, is it is an ink printer that uses generic ink that you literally pour in, instead of a normal cartridge that you would buy and plug in, you actually just buy ink and they're in the colors, right? Like a CMYK color value. So why yellow, you're like refilling the tank. This is good for multiple reasons. One, it is the least expensive way to buy ink.

That means the ink costs $50. I think the price now is 55, but it's been like that for many years now. So it's rock bottom price. Because of this, the printers are usually more expensive. They usually range from 200 to over 500 for the printer. And that's your increased print speed and all that good stuff. But because of the way that the ink is designed, you get way, way, way more pages per print, way more, thousands and thousands of pages.

And I've been printing full color as I'll get into printing out all kinds of goofy things. And I've had no problem in terms of printing and having to buy more ink. The other thing, these printers, this is huge and I considered not even sharing this in the show because I kind of hate giving away my advantages sometimes, but whatever it's all good You can get these printers for almost nothing. I

Was able to get a $500 printer for 25 bucks. It turned out to be sealed in box never used Why because people sell them secondhand like any other printer printers people don't want to keep them because the ink is expensive. And this includes the Epson Eco Tank line. So when you look online, if you look up Eco Tank printers on classifieds or the model numbers, you'll see people selling them. And I've seen it over and over again. We're talking 20 bucks, 25 bucks. And

if there's a problem with the ink, it can be cleaned up by hand. So it's an incredibly good printer. And if you find it on the use market for 20 bucks, geez. So yeah, what a deal. Anyway, epsent, inco, take printers, everything worked automatically. Scanner, they have scanner native applications you can install on Linux. Everything works. It has a web UI. It's so easy to use as a scanner, scanner, no problem using that, plugging it into paperless scanning platform.

Not going to go into that right now, but it works. And the epsilent,nico tank has been fantastic. So this is a killer, killer printer. And if you get it on the used market, wow, it is a deal. So your mileage may vary, but can't do a better deal than that. The epsi-nico tank line. Because the ink is generic, people are also DIYing these printers to be used for sublimation printing. Sublimation being transferred prints for t-shirts, mugs, all that kind of stuff.

So this is an incredibly flexible piece of gear. And if you look it up online, sublimation printing, you'll see that this is a common use for these printers and Sublimation printers are incredibly expensive So to be able to buy the ink for cheap on Amazon or whatever and then throw it into one of these printers you have to clean them out swap out the ink but you can You have a sublimation printer that costs next to nothing So that is huge That said once I got this bad boy, what

are things we can print? Well, I think a really fun thing is to print old school print and play game, people print card games and board games. And I want to give you a recommendation for a board game. First, I'll tell you one you can print and then I'll tell you one you can just make on anything. For the print one

I want to recommend kill Dr. Lucky. Kill Dr. Lucky is by cheap ass games. It used to be sold for about 20 bucks maybe. Bought a copy a long time ago for a friend for Christmas present and Kill Dr. Lucky is an inversion of clue. So include you're trying to solve a murder, right? It was so and so in the room with the coat hanger or whatever it was. And in this game, what it is, is you're trying to actually kill doctor lucky.

So you're trying to be the one to commit the murder, you and all of the other players. The entertaining thing about this game though is everyone's trying to do it. So on your turn, you're trying to successfully kill off this person in whatever room of the house with whatever tool is available while everyone else is preventing you from doing it. So they serve as the doctor's

luck, which makes it incredibly hard to kill the person. And it's very humorous that they're in a Mr. Magoo kind of way constantly evading their otherwise certain death. So it's a very entertaining game, very simple, kill doctor lucky. I'll include a link through the wonderful archive.org way back machine to all of the associated files. You can print and play it yourself.

Otherwise they do sell a fancy commercial version. back machine to all of the associated files you can print and play it yourself otherwise they do sell a fancy commercial version. And this isn't unique to Dr. Lucky. There are still games in the modern day that are available as print and play that are top-tier games. The most famous example in the modern is a game called Root. Root is available as print and play for free and that is fantastic.

Otherwise it can be purchased for about 70-80 bucks. And so then I wanted to go to another game that you can make yourself with a felt tip pen and some napkins. And that game is called Skoll. Let's go over the rules of Skoll. For the sake of making it simple, we're gonna to say that they are cards. Okay? So each player starts the game with a hand of four cards.

Three of them are meaningless and one is a skull. Each player takes turns placing one piece in front of them face down in a stack. So you continue playing one at a time until someone chooses to make a bet. Anyone can make a bet. What you're betting is you're betting how many pieces you can turn over before you turn a skull. So let's say you're playing with four people. Four people times four pieces, 16

pieces, four of which are a skull. So if everyone played every single piece at the luckiest you would be able to turn over 12 pieces without turning a skull to 16, right? But you know they're replaced in whatever order. So whenever somebody wants, they start the bet, it's got to start at one. It can be higher. So if you start, let's say you say, I bet I can turn one piece without getting a skull. Well, once someone has made that first bet, the opening bet,

the only response another player can give is a higher number. So they can say, I bet I can turn two pieces without getting a skull. I bet I can turn three pieces without getting a skull. I bet I can turn three pieces without getting a skull. Once the bets begin, there's no more placing. You're just betting. At that point, you turn. If you draw a skull, you lose one of your pieces. And by that, it means you hold up all your pieces. The person doesn't see what the values are.

You just hold them up and they randomly draw one and discard it. So they don't know if they discarded your skull or not. And once you run out of all your pieces, you're out of the game. Super simple game, classic bar game, bluffing game, so fun. Highly recommend skull. You can do it with napkins. You can make it like I did with a laser cutter out of acrylic and collage it. So have skulls and I did like animals on all the other ones, just goofy stuff. But it's a super

fun game. You can also do what they say a classic way is with skulls and roses. But skulls super easy game, super easy game to learn to play and check it out. Skull, you can also buy it commercially for probably about 20 bucks, but I think it's a really fun game to make and give to someone as a present, which is what I did. So yeah, check out Skull. Another super fascinating use of paper is in making paper circuits. You've probably heard of a circuit board or an electrical board, right?

It's usually the thing that you'd find like if you broke apart your computer or your DVD player or whatever, there's going to be a circuit board in there of parts that are connected together with what are called traces. But what if you made one of these yourself and what if you did it on a piece of paper? It actually can be done instead of using a traditional circuit board or a breadboard. You can just stick physical components through paper and you could solder them in place.

Then you could power it. You can get crazy. You could use solar cells, nine volt batteries. Nine volt batteries are actually child friendly. They won't electrocute you like 12 volt. So it's okay if you touch them with your bare hands, you'll be safe. You can also use even smaller, what is it? 2-2-3-2 style batteries like you would use to keep your BIOS running in your computer. Those are available. They'll turn on an LED. I've seen it done.

The positive negative, if you connect it directly on an LED, it will turn on the LED. That's known as a throwy. So if you ever want to make an LED throwy with a simple battery, that can be done. But let's talk paper circuits. So paper circuits, at the base minimum, we're talking basic circuits. They can be made with things like a conductive ink pen or it could be done with copper tape. You can get as creative as you want. You can do it as a sort of art installation.

It could be done with children. You can make tons of circuits, even with a basic battery, no fear of electrocution. So think watch style batteries. You're making little LED lights. You're making things turn on and off. I made a discuss.James.network post, at least breaking down some basic guides. There's also a very detailed guide from Mauser and a STEM guide on making your first paper circuits. And even the most basic chips can be used with paper circuits. And I'm not talking about Arduino's

or Raspberry Pi's or any of that kind of stuff. I'm saying the most basic chips, electric chips that you can get in a, you know, for a few cents. These kinds of chips can be used in paper circuits and for teaching yourself and your children how electronics work. It's

very interesting. And it also has an interesting look to it. If you make a paper circuit and solder it up, let's say you solder it up and you make these electrical connections, even if the paper dissolved over time or whatever, you kind of have this interesting looking metallic installation artwork piece. They're very interesting looking and they're used as the basis for a lot of popular companies, musical instruments and things. And I want to give an example of professional grade paper circuits

for DIY music that's fun, but it's also pretty hardcore. So this is a quote from Peter Blasser of C. Outlaw and Bard. And these instruments are constantly sold, including in the paper circuit variety for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. He says, "Paper circuits have two mirrored sides, printed adjacent, with a fold line in the middle. A piece of card moistened with glue is inserted between the folded sides. The top side indicates where to pierce by needle, and where to then thread

components, resistors, capacitors, and chips. On the underside, lines trace how to weave the component leads together for soldering. It is a quick way to craft a sketch of a circuit, but it also serves as a platform for studying crossed or circuit bent nodes. Component connections form metallic islands, usually kept insulated from one another. The paper leaks some electrons between these islands, which may influence the purity of electronic sounds.

Another unusual design implication of paper circuits arises from the organic nature of paper, which spreads electronic influence among nodes. The "official" circuit can be described in the schematic, but once built, the paper introduces unofficial connections between each of the nodes. And that is a quote from Peter Blasser in his section of the book, Homemade Electronic Music. I'll also include a link you can get paper circuits designed by Peter Blasser directly on his website.

These paper circuits actually serve as a basis for the incredible hand-carved, handmade beautiful instruments of C. Outlaw and Bart is company, which are made out of Germany now. But tons of other companies and products have emerged from this same space over the years. I think paper circuits, another really famous modular synthesis company is 4MS. They have also come out of the paper circuits. There's many more music from outer space by Ray Wilson

rest in peace is another. There's all these different companies that have been connected to this kind of DIY schematic type sharing. Even if it's not a paper circuit, it's, you know, it can become that it's, it's about your imagination. And just think of this idea of running your own paper circuit, right? Like, for example, you draw flowers, you stick LEDs in the center of

those flowers, and you make it so they'll light up. It's like a great project for a kid, but it's also a great project for an adult. And it's just a wealth of information and experience, and ideas and creativity in paper circuits. And I think it's not talked about enough in electronics. So consider making paper circuits. If you're curious about getting started in soldering

and you need a soldering iron, there is an amazing one that is sold by PINE64. And yes, this is free open hardware, but it's also a great soldering iron and it's really inexpensive. It's known as the PINESill. I actually have the version one. I guess I've had it now for at least several years, but I've had no problem with it. The newer version includes like Bluetooth connectivity and it's just the new standard.

Basically, you know, it's the same price. It's just newer. But the parts in it can all be replaced. They're 3D printable, replaceable parts at home. Also, the internals can be replaced. It's actually a risk five chip. So for me, it's my only risk five device. It runs Iron OS. I've updated the firmware. It has a little tiny readout on the side that you can add little graphics to, which is cute. But the best thing about the Pinesol is that it uses generic

Weller style tips. I bought the fine and the thick core style tips. The thing costs about 30 bucks. It's so cheap. What it's replacing costs multiple times more than this. It's just an insanely good deal. I used to have a Weller iron, but the Pinecil, it just looks like a pen.

It has a connection for a DC plug as well as USB-C, and it works wonderfully well. You plug it in, you have temperature control on the side, it only takes a few seconds to heat up, and then you can use the pine sill for soldering, and because you have total control over the temperature, you can get it exactly where you want it on device. You don't need an external controller as normally you would need for one of these for adjusting temperature. It's just so easy and it's cheap and it works.

Peter Blasser, I did a workshop with him some years ago, helped run it for him. And he told me that he only solders with silver-based solder instead of Rosenkor leaded solder, because lead is bad for you to touch. He works a lot with children and he has kids. So he recommended silver solder, which I personally switch to because it can be touched with the fingers without that same toxicity danger. Obviously handling any kind of sauter is probably not great for you.

I would imagine, but I took his point. I didn't personally need leaded sauter. I changed out of it and I've never needed it. If other people need it, I guess let us know. But I figured if he can do it and make some of the nicest instruments in the world, I can probably get by with it fine for my day to day. So I use basic silver sauter. it costs like an extra buck or something. It's not a big deal. But I've had no problem. I never run out of it either. I guess I don't solder that much.

It's worked fine with the Pinesol and I can recommend anyone to order the Pinesol. I'll drop a link, I'll drop a link to a meridroid for them, but you can also find them other

places. Prices will vary probably between like $30 to $40 now or something like that, but it's great. And I'll also include a link to the

generic tip type, which you can replace at your leisure. And it's a great tool. So I hope you guys enjoy the pine sill. If you need a soldering iron, oh, I guess I'll give another recommendation that I use with it, which is the pine 64 travel charger. It has two USB-C and a USB-A connection on the back. I use one all the time doing landscaping masonry, carry it with me, you know, my hands covered in dirt and stuff, like I plug up though and charging connections, right?

With dirt and everything over time. But the Pine 64 travel charger has never had an issue. It's rock solid. I also have the desktop Pine 64 version.

That sits at home. It's got like five plugs on the front and it has auto sensing for the amount of power needed. I use it a lot for doing basic, you know, it's five or nine volt connection to O droids. I run like a three node cluster off of one of these. It also has a port that I've used with higher power draw devices or phone charging. And the top has wireless charging. I've used it, not much.

I've had friends that use it, but it basically just looks like a little tiny box, like a little Apple TV type size, like five inch across thing. I think it's like two, three inches tall. And I've just had it running underneath my desk. If I ever need to look at power draw, I can glance at the front. It'll tell me I can also turn the display off, but the pine 64 desktop charger works great. I think it's around 40 bucks. Mine's been working for like four years.

Like I said, I also really love the travel charger. Keeping in my bag always, but I would recommend all these devices all leave links to them in the show notes. But yeah, the Pinesil, the Pines64 travel charger, which I know I also mentioned in Episode zero, the very first episode of this show, but it's been awesome and the Pines64 desktop charger has also been awesome.

Doesn't really do anything exciting. Just sits under my desk, but it works well And I can recommend all these devices for getting you into soldering and also for just powering basic tools Of course be sure to check your power needs, you know, because new phones new devices all need different amounts of power in the modern day Back to paper crafting paper crafting has a rich history I mean it goes far beyond what I know.

And I think playing with dead trees, as people call it, is just incredibly enjoyable. It's productive. And just think of it as pen and paper, getting things done, having fun, because I have a lot of fun with it. And I really like whiteboards and post-it notes, right? I like using it as a way to reflect and also collaborate. So what I've been thinking is about ways to use paper.

And I was saying, when I was at Linux Fest North West, I used paper to throw together my little trivia challenge with Post-it notes and everything, right? So that was fun. But a big area focused for me with paperwork has been zine Printing. So that was me acquiring the printer secondhand because I wanted to do Zine Printing on my own and print things at home. And as part of that, I needed to figure out how to do some manipulation of documents.

Okay. Because a lot of documents are available in PDF format. So for using PDFs, I found a few different tools. One was just the scanning of paper goods, which is I find best done with paperless N G X. I'm not going to talk about that today, other than to say that it's an excellent tool. You can also serve PDF documents, which I've had a lot of success doing that with tools like Kavita, Comga, Codex, Caliber web. There's like these tools that are designed more for like reading

comic books and ebooks, but they're a nice way to browse through PDF documents. Feel free to share ones if you guys know them. I'm curious about it. But let's talk about the actual manipulation of PDFs related to printing. So the LibreOffice suite is one that I found very useful for manipulating PDF documents, getting access to text, things like that worked well for me. I ended up finding the most useful tool, which I see

paid versions of online all the time, is PDF arranger. PDF arranger is a fork of PDF shuffler. It's a small Python GTK application. It helps you merge and split PDF documents, rotate crop, rearrange pages using interactive and intuitive graphical interface. It's actually a front end for Pike PDF and it can be run on, I think Windows, Mac, flat packs, nap, repos, whatever, but it works really well.

PDF arranger, you can combine multiple PDF documents, move the pages around however you want, change orientations, which is useful for printing. Related to that, I found a useful tool called PDF Book 2. PDF Book 2 is a terminal application. It will convert your PDF document into a principal layout because when you print, your page order is not normal, right, because you're, say, you're stapling something together. Well, then your pages aren't going to be one, two, three, four.

Instead, it's gonna be a page, right? It would be the cover page would also be the last page of the book, right? 'Cause it's folding over itself. I also wanna say that another tool I found very useful in PDF land is called PDF-TK. It's a terminal application. It's for adding a universal password protection to a PDF document. And I actually found myself needing this when I sent a PDF document that had sensitive information over the internet.

And I use PDF TK to add a password that that person would know because I had to email it to them, you know, like you do in life. And I just didn't want to have that information available without some sort of password. But PDF TK worked well for me. For actual zine printing by hand, I found some pretty useful gear. It's a lot to go into and you can look it up. But the basic tools I found that were useful were

a bone folder. It's just literally a thick instrument that you can fold paper on cleanly, as well as thread hooks and binder clips. So those are different ways to just, you know, using thread, you can tie together your book by an interesting way or you can also use a heavy stapler. I found one at the thrift store, 100 pages at a time, costs three bucks, otherwise ordering them online, they can cost you no 30 or more.

Also, you can get various staple size support. For example, binding, say like a half inch worth of paper, things like that. If you're interested in book binding, I also recommend getting heavyweight paper. Regular paper is just too thin. So if you look at cardstock, for example, for covers, because it's really thick, you can then work your way down through thinner poundage of paper and find what works for you. There's different colors, there's different

thicknesses, but I think it's just a more satisfying if you're printing like a little zine book. It's a more satisfying way to print that out. I would also recommend considering getting some paint pens or highlighters, as well as a three hole punch. Three hole punch again, I would get it at a thrift store for like a dollar. But these are all really useful tools. You can also get one of those guillotine like paper cutters. I haven't gotten one of those, but those are pretty fancy.

I'm just using scissors. But these are all useful tools. If you're interested in zine printing and getting started in binding your own books by hand. Another interesting use of printable zines, books and paper crafts that I found is in pen and paper games. And I would say probably the most famous pen and paper game that I can think of off the

top of my head would be Dungeons and Dragons. I personally have never played Dungeons and Dragons. Probably you haven't either. But I found that there is actually tons of independent content in paper games that you don't have to play on the computer and they're actually really

fun. And I want to recommend some and I thought you'd find them in usual places. But the place I found that's the best for supporting independent content creators making paper games, which can also play as a PDF document on the computer, is available through itch.io. itch.io is an independent content creator site where people can choose how much they want to pay back to itch.io for selling there. People can set their own prices. They can also offer things for free.

If you're interested in playing a fun pen and paper game that's 20 pages maximum. It's so clear and it takes about two hours. It's like the length of a movie. I recommend

Ronin Ronin is a game you play with a couple D6 dice just the typical normal dice that you would have on hand and Ronin is a really fun game you're a wandering samurai looking for redemption and you get into these like random encounters walking into a village or people are chasing you down or whatever. And it's just a simple, simple game. And I really enjoyed playing it. I thought Ronan was, was cool. It had almost no needs.

And if you're playing this game and you wanna keep track of your adventure, the way the game manages it, you're playing by yourself to solo game. You can do a process called journaling and it's literally when you roll the dice, you write on a piece of paper, what happened to your character and explain it to yourself. So if someone finds you or you discover something new, you're just writing out what happened and you're kind of like creating the story as you go.

In the game, like I said, last maybe two hours maximum, but it's really fun. Ronin's available for free. You can also pay the creator if you want, but Ronin is an amazing game. It was so fun. And there are multiple iterations improving on Ronin,

which I bought because I just wanted to support the creators, but it's a game called the Notorious, which is about being a space bounty hunter. I think it's inspired mostly by Star Wars, Mandalorian, things like that. But there's also some spin-offs of Notorious, and that can be purchased for about five, 10 bucks. There's also a beautiful printed, I think it's like foil or whatever, like really nice version. Do you wanna buy a physical printed book from the creator?

So, Ronin and Taurus, I would recommend those. And it opened me to like a whole world of independent content available through HIO. And there's all these spin-offs of things like Dungeons and Dragons, if you're curious about it And it's all available on there. There's also kinds of all these cool Independent games that you can get and play not just by installing them

But by playing them in a web browser for example. I'm gonna link one in the show notes this is a web browser game, but it's called snake acid. And it's a play on snake where you're trying to avoid being caught. And apparently the world record for this game is 10 seconds. I could last three. But yeah, if you want to play a game that'll be over in a few seconds, check out snake acid. And it just gives you an idea of how much independent content there is out there.

And I don't just mean the independent content like what you see when you go onto, you know, your typical game store or whatever. There's all these independent creators in the world, making things that are new, that are different, that are fun. And I think it's cool to support that in a real way. that are fun. And I think it's cool to support that in a real way. So with that in mind, I would recommend checking out HIO with an open mind and just looking at what's out there in this kind of

indie scene. And if you have other places that you recommend looking into indie content, let me know. If you find that you do want to get games from HIO and install them the tool

I found that's most useful for doing that is called Lutris L-U-T-R-I-S and Lutris sports things like steam G-O-G Dot-com itch and a ton of other stores But it works well When you install it on the left side menu is where you'll find the option to add HIO support. I always find that slightly confusing, but it's on the left side menu of Lutris. And then you'll be able to install the things that you've purchased from your account.

So yeah, HIO, Lutris, pen and paper games, it calls them physical games. And like I said, you can also look into print and play games. If you wanna just look it up more broadly, so much information online. And there's so many ways to use paper crafting. If you've thought of ways to use paper crafting that I completely missed as part of this, let me know, we can talk about it. There's tons. I'm happy to discuss it more.

And I look forward to continuing this kind of topic in new ways in the future. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed this dive into paper crafting and different sides of paper crafting 'cause there's tons. It's overwhelming. So yeah, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Linux Prepper. If you enjoyed it, please do share it with other people. You can also donate to me directly. If you would like to do that, if you have suggestions, send them into me.

If you have feedback, if you have questions, if you're angry, if you're sad, whatever, send it to me podcast@james.network. You can also join my matrix or you can post to discuss.james.network. As long as you have a positive attitude and treat other people with the same, we'll get along great. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week and take care, everybody. [MUSIC]