609: We Used to Be Friends

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we challenge each other to get one of the best games in history working on Linux, and then pit us all against each other to fight to the death. Then we'll tell you a bit about my new retro handheld gaming device that just came out. And if you should get one, it's pretty cool. And if we have time, we'll get into some of the technical reasons why games still never going to quite work on Linux. There's just going to be some games you're never going

Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.

Hello.

Hi. Thanks for being there. And hello. Wow. Hello, everybody up there in the quiet listening, too. And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged. TailScale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other. Wherever they are, protected by WireGuard. Yeah, it's modern networking. It sets up a flat mesh network protected by WireGuard, and it is really fast. It's secure, and it's privacy for everyone in every organization.

Why do you keep saying that?

That seems so scary.

Yep. And if you're listening to this on Monday, 18. And if you're listening to it, it's sooner. We'll have a link to the schedule. And we have a poll. And I would love it if everybody would just take a moment, go to the show notes, linuxunplugged.com slash 609 or in your podcast app. And please go vote in our poll. Would you tune in to a live Saturday LinuxFest live stream?

Course i mean and we don't want to do things in the wrong order right.

No i mean wait what us we would never we would never do things in the wrong order.

Saturday before the show, four men assemble to conquer the galaxy. It's StarCraft time. Before we can play, though, we've got to get it working on Brent's system. What? Hey, why is it always me? We were going to ask you that. Well, to be fair, you were traveling. Oh, right. He has an excuse this week. Yeah, we'll let him have it. Oh, I have a script here of several excuses if you need them. You've got Lutris, right? Yes, that was great advice. Thank you.

I mean, that's at least some effort. So one of the things about StarCraft is there's a lot of different ways you can actually get it installed on Linux. It is a classic real-time strategy game from Blizzard. It launched in 1998, and it's still beloved to this day. It's a huge hit, and it's been free to play since 2017, but you do have to have a Battle.net account.

Which involves uh maybe the worst captcha system ever devised.

Yeah yeah by far.

The worst one i've ever experienced which i think it's worth even if you don't want an account here just go try that captcha it is life-changing.

Yeah and.

If you don't want an account it's better because you can quit when you're bored.

And it also just be great to point to as the worst implementation ever so we're stacking a few things here so we have lutris which is this incredibly useful game launcher that is helping us manage the wine stuff and pull down the files we need to install battle.net which then installs starcraft that's we all but there's a lot of different ways you could go at it that's.

The way we went at it when you say it like that uh it almost sounds like it shouldn't work and yet this was like a super ultimately reliable method to have it work yeah.

I was wondering halfway through going through this, but you guys were pressuring me so much. I just kept going. But why in the world do we not just use Steam?

So you can do it with Steam, but it's a little bit more of a rigmarole. So you have to add the game, run it, and then you can use Proton to launch it. But you kind of have to do like the manually add stuff. Because one of the things that really sucks about gaming since StarCraft came out is everybody has their own platform. Everybody has their own launcher. Everybody has their own login. And we're going to talk about a retro handheld gaming console in a little bit.

So here we go. All right. Starting in five seconds. I'm getting nervous. Okay, so on the menu there, go to... Oh, no, sorry, the bottom left. Diplomacy, where the little handshake is. Click allies on all of us and vision on all of us and allied victory and then accept, Nice so Brent the first thing we're gonna do is click that one building you have and the one thing it can create that's gonna be the guys that can like mine for you and build for you and.

Not only did we have to get Brent with the game installed, we had to teach Brent how to play.

Mostly, me too. I probably hadn't played since like 2003, 2005. It had been a really long time.

Yeah, I confess I had never played it, which is, I don't know, a little bit of a crime for our kind of people. But I had played a lot of Red Alert. I also have an extra confession, which is I tried to get my brother to play for me instead because he's played StarCraft in the past. And I was going to try to just slot him in without you guys noticing.

But oh my god he.

Got busy yeah so maybe next time.

I will say i hope i hope this was um, satisfying for producer jeff uh because he has been trying to get us to play some starcraft for like way too long so it's on us for taking so long and i think he rightfully pointed out at one point that you know brian if you'd listened to him earlier you would you would have been upskilled on starcraft.

I should listen to jeff more often that's probably the truth.

Jeff was our teacher during this too um he you know he had probably the most experience followed by wes i guess uh or maybe i'm not sure we'll get to that but um i sat down in the studio so we could record the audio of all of us and the studio is set up for recording not for gaming and one of the things i have in the studio which i don't have on any other computer is one of these giant kingston track balls because i can move my mouse silently while recording it.

Is actually pretty legit a great little hack for live presentations.

So i sat down i said chris you're gonna be a man you're not gonna complain about the fact that you're playing starcraft on this horrible horrible trackball you're just gonna suck it up and never even mention it to the boys i.

Gotta clean my trackball real quick it's getting bad uh-oh what do you got in there i don't know dude but it's it's causing accuracy issues oh sure hey excuses begin yep i just spilled tea all over my mouse Oh, you guys. Oh, no. Talk about excuses. It's hot tea, too, that works.

Pretty quickly, it goes from excuses to just straight-up dying.

Uh-oh, I'm under attack. I'm under attack, boys. I'm under attack. They're getting me, boys. Oh, I was doing so good, boys. There's a lot over there, too. I don't even have that many yet. No, I'm dead. I had such a good... Where are you? I'm in the bottom left. Right. I'm in the bottom right. Oh, no, boys! It was such a beautiful paradise! I got to kill you, guys. We were a little too slow. I can try to send to you. I don't have a ton. It was so beautiful.

So maybe starting as a couple of rookies with computer opponents wasn't a great idea.

On a fastest map.

Yeah, yeah. So we all kind of pretty quickly died and started game two.

Are you guys ready? It's kind of great. I'm distracted because if I move my mouse all the way from one screen to the other The StarCraft cursor shows up on the non-StarCraft screen That's fun It's just trapped at the edge though, What do you mean it's not working, Chris? No Are you just trolling? I'll hit and go, So typical Round two.

What I realized as we started playing is that I just love setting everything up. Clicking stuff.

Yeah, you were really keyed in on building the society, which was kind of fun.

Yeah.

And there's a lot to build.

I just, I was really vibing on just making a thriving science-based society and clicking on stuff. I was really enjoying that part.

I just like building a cool base. I just, that's all I want to do is build a thriving society. We could play Siv That works on Linux If.

Anybody that knows Starcraft probably knows How that ended up for me but we'll get there First there was some trolling Hello Wes.

Goodbye Wes, Oh, what happened? Hey, that's mean I'm just saying hi.

A little strategy of coming around and just pecking at us From time to time, you know, just Decimating a few of our troops Just making sure we weren't getting too far rolling it back a little bit, wasting some of our resources.

Yeah, I kind of manage things all day. Why am I doing it now for gaming? What's going on here? How did I talk myself into this? Resource management's exhausting.

There was always probably the likelihood that some kind of plan would have to formulate because now it was the three of us. We're on an open world map. Eventually, we're going to bump into each other as we grow, right? And so we have to kind of start sorting things out.

I have like a very, very, very rough idea of kind of what I want to do, but not really. And then I'm constantly just failing to execute on that as I switch between managing way too many tasks that I'm managing very poorly. Yeah. I think you guys are doing great. Thanks. He's like, I know exactly where everyone is, and I have a plan. No plan. I'm just doing my thing. That's all.

And then, you know, I noticed, at first I thought it was PJ. But then I realized, once I realized this who was who, Wes was doing a little poking around early on.

Hey, I was just scouting around. Oh, scouting around with a bunch of really powerful guys. Okay. What they died they had real quick they weren't powerful, you know the Protoss shuttle really it's just not a powerful but the high Templars you know they're they're not powerful either.

Brent and I were playing the Terrans I think it's kind of an easier one to start with, and Brent you were really good you manufactured pretty quick I also noticed you had a sneaky strategy one that I used to employ back in the day which once things started to get a little more aggressive you started stashing your workers all over the map in like hidden little spots that.

Deeply saved me in the future.

Yeah Brent's.

A survivor because I didn't trust myself to keep myself alive so I figured I would just trust obscurity to keep me alive and that paid off.

A little piece of advice Brent those tanks are called siege tanks for a reason Let's see. Oh... Oh, jeez, that's cool. All right, thank you. That siege mode gives them much, much better range and much better attack.

Brent started to get the hang of it. Started manufacturing.

Pretty sure Jeff regretted telling me that little trick because I used it against him quite a lot, let's say. And I realized at that point I would sneaky use some LLMs off screen. I didn't tell you guys this, but I would get a little stressed. Because I was like, I've never played this before. I don't even know what I can do with these people. As soon as Jeff said, hey, you're missing one of the key elements these players can do, I was like, I need some help.

Oh, you clever boy. I should have done that because while I had a thriving, beautiful, peaceful society, it started to become painfully obvious. We're running out of room and I was going to need to retool.

Well, my once beautiful society has had to refactor around war, thanks to Jeff. Hey, I haven't attacked anybody except for Wes.

Or Wes.

I mean, that's a loose definition.

However, with my limited resources, a path began to emerge. The boys started talking about something. I had gone kind of quiet at this point. And I was focused on one thing and one thing only. And I don't know if Wes had kind of maybe thought about it, but I was already down a path.

I would also like to point out that I believe you guys have access to nukes. What? Where? Yes, they do. Yeah, Terrans can build nukes. Yeah, so... It can be hard to pull off, but... The command center has a couple expansions that can be added, that can add to it, so you might want to have a couple command centers. One of them is a SATCOM, which can see invisible things anywhere on the map.

As you guys are talking about this, I'm like actively churning out ghosts, doing the research. I was like down that path, and I'm like, yep, yep, yep.

Uh-oh. Nothing. Uh-huh. Nothing in my ass. I heard it. I just don't know where it's going to go. I don't know what you're talking about. I wouldn't make stuff up. Oh, Brantley.

That's my CG.

Oh, it felt good. That felt good. That felt so good. You know, once I had nuclear capabilities, I kind of had to, you know, see what I could do.

Someone keeps doing nukes. Yeah, but they're just at my door. You know, it's basically my own neighborhood. You know, like. Just a little backdoor nuke. Yeah. A little backdoor nuke. They're basically my Nevada. You guys are just in the space.

Now, listening back to this, it kind of sounds like I provoked this war.

It does, yeah.

I was just defending my territory.

Damn. All right. All right, I see that. It's all good. Just because they're there at the door Again You wouldn't even know how to do if you weren't at the door, So I think So why don't you try getting a nuke Have you considered nuking something a little closer to home That's all I'm saying Or like a little closer to Jeff's home Oh well the problem is the ghosts get detected, He's got ghost detectors Sure but if you work on that Is there another thing I can do This.

Is a turning point because this is really like, I am going to solely focus my society on producing weapons of mass destruction. And I think maybe Jeff realized that was going to be a problem.

Now, don't come, now, come on, come on, come on, come on, don't come over here. Don't come over, come on. I got a good thing going over here. I got a good thing going over here. I've rebuilt a new, oh, come on! Bro! Bro! I don't even have any defensive systems. It was a peaceful society! Bro! That was the best! There is no peace in this universe. We were a society of science.

I will admit, I took it rough. I did manage to get a few of my guys to escape.

You should be destroying Jeff's base while he's distracted, murdering me ruthlessly. You both should get on it. This is your window of opportunity. Oh, God. Oh, God. I just built that. I just built that. If you want to send a guy down to me, I can let that happen. Oh, it's too late, Wes. It's too late. I didn't have any defensive systems. I didn't even build nuclear capabilities this time. It was a peaceful society.

It wasn't a peaceful society, and I already had men on their way to Wes's base. 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number 1password.com slash unplugged, all lowercase. Now, imagine your company security, sort of like the quad of a college campus. You've got your nice brick paths between all of the buildings. Those are the ones the company built, right? The company owned devices in our analogy, if you will. Your IT approved apps, your managed employee identities.

You know, since I was just learning the game, I took a lot of cues from the vocals. And Chris, as soon as you said, hey, I'm going to head to Wes's base, I thought, huh, that's a brilliant idea. I can hide some guys over there. Wes seems like he knows what he's doing.

Party at my base.

And Wes comes in for the save. Can he save Brent's one last guy? Probably not, but you know. Brent, bring him over to my base. What? No, you're going to... No, not that way. Or maybe go to Wes's base, actually. It's probably safer there. You should go to my base, yeah. I don't know which one's which. Wes is down in the right corner. Yeah, go bottom right.

So we, all three of us, cram into Wes's territory. It was tight. My guys, I had to go super far to get the resources and weave through all of Wes's guys, because Wes really packed them in there.

Well, yeah, I mean, I had filled most of my land with photon cannons, so there wasn't a lot of room to begin with. You were welcome, of course, as allies, but...

I was actually lucky to survive at this point because, Jeff, I used to love you, but you came to my base and just decimated everything just because I was sieging a little bit. And it turned out I had lost track of one of my builder guys, the SVGs or whatever they're called. And he was actually trapped behind some of my last buildings. So I couldn't actually move this character the entire game because I had trapped it there.

Rebuild quickly. You did. I focused on nukes. Brent began building a new force. Jeff started getting worried.

Nuclear launch detected. I think Wes is going to have me. He's just got way too much defense. I might just have to give it up. There's no way I can get through those cannons. Look, there's just a few. Just a few.

This is really when the siege set in. I mean, Jeff put up a heck of a fight, and Wes brought a ton of carriers.

Holy cow, that's a lot of carriers. Now you're playing how I like to play. Send a hundred carriers, let's go. Come on guys, come on, do I have an air defense? Nope, they got nuked. Alright guys, come on, get him!

This is probably the moment that was always destined to happen, where all three of us begun working together on the attack.

Pay attention to what these guys are firing at. Oh no, siege tanks. No! Brent! Brent! Brent! Yes! Brent! Yes! Yes! I gotta return the favor, you know? Oh no!

Brent comes in with the siege tanks. I drop the nukes.

Oh, you guys are awesome, man. Yeah, the nuke at the same time as you come in, I'm just, there's no way I can find it. There's no way. I won't have enough time. Done. Nice! That was so good! I like hearing that. That was so good. I like hearing that a lot. Holy cow! Get out of here, Arbiter.

Over three hours into it, like, really, a hell of a fight. I think the end was in sight around the three hour, 15, maybe 10 minute mark.

It just took some time because, you know, Jeff had really built himself a nice base.

You're building on my base. You guys are getting in. Look at this. This is insane. I've never seen nothing like this. Holy cow. Oh, the shuttles. Oh, Templars. No. Look at this chaos. Oh, I'm so done for.

Send it all in. And then I started focusing on resources because, you know, I didn't want Jeff's economy to hold up.

Oh. No. No! No, she detected. Where are you? There you are. Oh, you got him. Okay. Not fast enough. Dang, you must have an upgrade on your nukes. Those things are coming quick now. Jeff, you forced me to be a society from peace that focuses on weapons of war. How does it make you feel? Oh, that's a lot of Archons. Oh, that's a lot of Archons. Affirmative.

Now, I really saw, you know, the sort of twisted side of Brent come out during the end of this battle.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Oh, no.

I don't really. I kind of blacked out.

Oh, he's wrecking Brent's upper base. He's wrecking Brent's upper base. Brent, you got guys there that aren't doing anything up there. It's because all my rally points were in Jeff's base. Do you set your base rally points straight to the base? Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, to your base. Oh, I love it. I love it.

Brett's just cranking out guys and just sending them right to Jeff's base the entire time.

Very pragmatic.

My annihilation was swift and complete.

Yeah, really, the best part, though, was when the economy collapsed. That felt good.

Focus your attacks. Focus your attacks. Oh, there's more. Oh. No, and that's it. That's it. There's no way, I'm just gonna start talking Brent just because, His base has gotten way too big over there, You guys you guys put up a damn fight here So do you see one-on-one Whatever that would have been fine, but this this is treachery. I Was peaceful dude, Same same I don't think that's the name of the game As much as you want to tell yourself. Oh nuclear launch where's that coming from?

Now, it wasn't quite it. There was a couple of floaters, and you can understand, as a society that was now built around creating weapons of mass destruction, I had quite the pipeline, and well, I had more birds to fly, and my society has the view you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and sometimes it's worth finishing them off.

Nuclear launch detected what are you blowing up buddy, Oh, man. Actually. Oh, yeah, he did. Oh, no, he blew up. Either himself or Brent. Hey, sometimes you got to crack a few eggs. There it is. Good job. Oh, I see. Are the tides turning? Good job.

Yeah, this is where Chris decided.

I was just trying to get rid of one guy left.

It was worth nuking Jeff's last guy. You know, if you had to take out some of my cannons and a bunch of my units, it was no problem.

A couple of Brent's soldiers, too, I think.

Yeah.

But, you know, it was a dramatic way to end it. We captured our immediate thoughts after the game.

Well done, gentlemen. Jeff, you only lasted four hours. Oh, my God. So, looking at the units, Wes had... You did the best of it. Holy cow. Uh, no, well, not according to mine. I did so poorly. Oh, total. My total score is higher, but that's because my structure is higher. At the end, I just entirely focused on nuclear capability. I just, that's all I did. Yeah. Which was great. What does units mean? Like, how are you building that many things? Just constantly building.

All right. All right. Well, so Brent, I want to hear your thoughts on it. How do you think the game held up, how it worked on Linux, getting it going, all of that?

Yeah, I was running this thing on my dev one because I figured, you know, why not? And it ran great. I would say the most painful part was the setup only because I was unfamiliar with like all these launchers and things like that. That's what friends are for, right? To guide me through that path.

Were on nix os uh you were on nix os as well.

Indeed yeah it was kind of great Because I just did Nix run Nix packages hash Lutris dash free to get started. I didn't even have to install anything really.

So I tested a few different install scenarios with Lutris on Nix OS. And my experience was is the flat pack didn't work as well. I got errors during the installation of things. But if I use the Lutris dash free package in Nix packages, that worked just fine. So on Nix OS, my advice would be to use the built-in Nix package.

I was on uh arch windows.

Yeah i.

Was on arch.

Arch okay there you go so it's it's wonderful because really wine's doing the bulk of the heavy lifting there, and so as long as you can get a good wine environment and you've got you can play games i was i was even doing on an intel arc system on here in the studio you.

Know i believe i was watching some of the command line stuff go by and i believe uh even lutris was using proton on the back end to do this stuff.

Yeah i.

I'm not that familiar with how all that stuff works out but i think, this is we're so lucky can i just say that like 10 years ago this was just a dream to get gaming especially more modern games working but this is uh i feel like the golden age for linux we're just getting better and better okay.

Just one final follow-up question here brent did you have a good enough time did we convince you to try the single player campaign.

I will say immediately after we hung up like our four-hour phone call i was like i should go play campaign so i know what i'm doing and next time i could like you know resist the jeff let's say.

I'll tell you one thing that would be useful is if you go through some of the initial tutorials they start very very basic very straightforward goals and one of the things they do through story is they introduce you to some of the key characters that have special abilities that you can then deploy in game later on and you kind of understand more about what they can do.

Chris also offers a paid online class if you want to base your society around nukes.

Yeah, definitely. ConfigCat.com slash unplugged. We have a new sponsor on the show. I am thrilled and excited to welcome ConfigCat, the feature flag service that helps you release features faster and with less risk. They have unlimited seats, awesome support, and a very reasonable price tag. ConfigCat makes it super easy to manage feature flags in your code. And they have open-source SDKs for 19-plus platforms, including JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, and, yes, even Rust.

Now, with all this gaming talk the last couple of weeks, I think you got a new little something in your hands, right? Chris, you've been teasing this thing, but you haven't really given details.

We talked about the older version of this a while ago on the show. These little portable gaming handheld retro consoles, the R36S is what we talked about on the show forever ago. You can get them on Amazon or other places for around 60 bucks, and they come with, you know, thousands of ROMs. Well, in March of 2025, the R36 Max came out, a brand new updated version of it. And it's a little more expensive at the moment because it is brand new.

Ooh, it's crisp though.

It is. So it's a 720 by 720, four inch screen. Yeah, Wes is playing a little Metroid there. It's slightly skewed perspective. Can you see that?

Yes, I do. Yeah, the aspect ratios has been stretched slightly, but it's not realistically interfering with the gameplay.

I haven't found it to be a problem. However, Purus might, and you can pop it into native resolutions.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, you can pop it down, and then you just have sort of a black bar.

Okay, so how many different platforms? Am I on Super Nintendo here?

You are on Game Boy Advance right now.

Game Boy Advance, okay, I see.

So I know it supports NES, SNES, Sega, the PSP, the Nintendo 64, the PS1, MAME machines, PCRK, and a lot of others. It's a lot of platforms. This particular one claims to come with 18,000 ROMs preloaded. Other numbers say 16,000. So it's, you know, it's suffice to say so many games that you have to come up with tricks to navigate all of them. And they have some folders of popular ones and you can mark favorites. But the biggest problem this thing has is that there's so many games.

Because you just have to scroll through the giant list of games which you want to play some subset of.

But that's also the upside. You get this thing out of the box. Mine was charged actually and everything's loaded and good to go. There's no account to create. There's no Wi-Fi. It does actually have Wi-Fi built in. I don't know what you would use it for. There's no Wi-Fi you need to sign on to. Nothing. You turn it on, you select your game and you play.

That is pretty compelling and just like, Oh, I ordered fun game time from the internet, and then it just showed up and I can use it.

Yeah, and this beautiful IPS screen makes these games look the best you've ever seen them. And you're not stretching them up to 1080p. It's 720 by 720, so they actually, they still look pretty good. The fact that you can also pop in storage and add more ROMs is really nice if you have, like, some custom hacked ROMs. It's USB-C. It's got two USB-C ports on it, actually. It's got a power port, and then it labels the other one as the OTG port. It's got a headphone jack on it.

Right. This is not what Uncle Jeff would want to use for competitive gameplay.

Right. It took me five or ten minutes the first time I played this for games where you really got to move fast and you really have to be accurate. It took me five or ten minutes to get my thumb in the groove. But then I got there.

Okay. Okay, I see it's also got, what, like four trigger-y type buttons on the back there? How are those?

I don't use them much except for like some of the games that support, but you can use them for different things and triggering. They can hold them down with other combinations to trigger system events. They're good. I don't find that I mispress them. The new one has more ergonomic grip. So I've got the old one here in the studio, Wes, and you can see the old one's kind of got a flat back.

Yeah, it's just like a rectangular construction primarily.

Right, where this new one kind of has...

Ergonomics may be a hand to shape, I suppose, depending a bit on your particular hands, but still.

And the new one is definitely taller, too, because of that wider screen. So the new ones, I actually think, having played them both quite a bit, the older one, you know, for $30, if you could pick it up, is still kind of the way to go. The keys might be a little nicer on the older one. And it still has a lot of games. If you really want the best screen, though, you've got to get the R36X. It really is something. So the D-pad's okay, they're not great.

It does seem perfect for just taking it on the plane, carrying it in your bag for a little downtime here and there while you're waiting for whatever.

I keep it on the couch. And, you know, if I'm waiting for the wife or something before we watch, I just pull it and start playing for five minutes. And I hit the pause button and it goes back to sleep. I've been playing this one level of Metroid for like three days. It's nice. It's fun.

Chris, I'm wondering how the old one held up. You've had it, what, for a year now? And have been playing it pretty consistently from what I can tell when I visit. How did it hold up from a hardware perspective?

Well, about three months ago, I let it go really dead, apparently, and I cannot get it to hold a charge anymore. And it won't work if you take out the battery and plug it in directly. So I found a replacement battery on Amazon for like $6, and it's going to be here today. So my hope is I can plug a new lithium battery into that thing, and then it fires up, and then I've got both of them.

Well thank you everyone for sending boosts in this week it's a kind of strange here i think he was trying to pay us off our baller booster this week is producer jeff, Now, there's many boosts here. The first one I see is 100 sats for a test. You sent in a couple boosts, but the second one is the baller. It says, to the headset fund.

Hey!

Let's go to gaming.

Yeah, all right. So we have Zonotic here, Urban Terror, Tux Cart, Velorin. I don't know about that one. It's got the Starcrafts in there, of course, for the proprietary. Left 4 Dead is a great one. Payday.

Oh, Castle Crashers. Yeah, that's fun.

Broforce is fun.

Broforce. Yeah, Jeff and I played Broforce when I was there last. Very, very good.

Thanks for the sats for the headset fund, PJ. Appreciate it. Frigolet comes in with 50,000 sats. And just says headphones. We know what to do with that. Thank you very much.

The Muso comes in with 50,000 sats. Unplugged headset fund is go.

All right. Thank you, Muso. Nice to hear from you, too.

We have another boost here from, not sure, not sure who that is, 30,000 Satoshis. And this is another headset boost, says new headset boost. Who doesn't love new gear?

Yeah, hopefully we love them. One arrived, that one that I ordered, and I'm waiting for the cable, which all these things take a lot of time. So I'm thinking this is the week, Monday or Tuesday, I have to finish all the ordering. The cable requires signature. and while we were recording yesterday the StarCraft stuff, they knocked on the door here at the studio and I didn't hear it. So, I'll have to catch it next time but appreciate that. WH-2050 comes in with 20,250 SATs.

The like human sort of cultural problem beyond the technical problem in that sense i would argue on the windows side but here we are.

And then often when there's cheating at scale that's done on linux so a lot of these developers are lazy when it comes to the stuff and they just say well we won't allow linux because then we don't have to worry about this problem which is a real crap cheap kind of way to go but it's just the way it is now there are some workarounds being created. EAC, for example, offers Linux builds, but developers have to enable them in their game.

Tr selby boosts in with 8 000 cents, Where the rubber meets the road. Use towards getting the Brent Bus new rubber boots so you can roll on home.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, that old rusty can does need some love, which we will be giving it next month. And thank you. Really super appreciate the support.

Yeah, that's definitely going to need new boots. Hey, look at this. A Mr. West Payne boosted in.

Oh, me?

3,222 sats. Saying hi to PJ. I love it. Good. Good. KyloDog came in with 2,001 sats. I had thought while listening the other day, it would be funny to have a sound effect to boost values right at or just above the 2,000-sat cutoff, like doing the bare minimum or something like that. We kind of have like a basic pew-pew that we use from time to time for like the 2,000-sat, but I don't use it that often. I just like playing around.

Soli86 boosts in with 2,000 sats. regarding the sleep mode with framework laptops i found that my framework doesn't sleep when an application is stopping hibernate in plasma sure my other issue may be closing the lid while plugged into a dock and then pulling the usbc cable ah oh confused with a hardware disappearing and what state to be in i.

Could see myself doing that closing the lid and then pulling the cable as i walk away brent do you think it could be that an application you have is telling plasma don't sleep.

Considering the number of applications you guys know i always have open i would say probably yes but uh the real trick is figuring out which one i don't know where to start there so happy to happy to look into it if you have any tips and tricks dear.

Listeners i think we uh you know we write a little script it kills processes at random and then it just records that so then you can you know yeah trace it back from there that.

Seems completely reasonable.

Make sure to.

Vistro's stew boosted in 5,555 sets. In regards to signing PDFs, I've had success with Journal++ for many years. Just keeping around an image of your signature. But these days I use Firefox because its built-in PDF reader now supports forms and images.

I did not know that. You got me with that. Yeah.

I did use Journal for a long time, but this is an awesome hack. Thank you.

Yeah, it is. thank you for the tip Coffee Bacon Linux is here with 5,000 sats, new gear day enjoy loving the show keep up the great work he says he also meant to send a second sat boost because he wanted to send a little more for the headsets.

Little top up boost.

Thank you.

True Grits boosts in with 17,000 and 10 sats, Oh, it's a little announcement. True Grits is officially coming to LinuxFest Northwest. Ah, but Grits does have a question mainly for you, Brent.

Uh-oh.

I think I'm going to do some car camping if possible. Do I need permission from the college to do so? Any tips?

Are you asking because I've specifically done this exact thing at my first LinuxFest Northwest and did not ask for permission because I was actually in a car, was SUV at the time, although Chris did catch me brushing my teeth, so I didn't go completely undiscovered. But I think it's pretty okay. I would say if you're riding a rig like Lady Joops, like we do, maybe you need permission because it takes up like, how many, 10 parking spaces, something like that.

Yeah, that would be my approach, is if it's small and discreet, you're better off just probably not bringing it up and don't ask but if it's a if it's a large you probably shouldn't do it or you need to get permission that's probably the yeah that's probably the way to go forward humor come thank you great boost can't wait to see you there it's gonna be awesome forward humor comes in with a row of ducks libra office draw has great pdf editor built in just open your pdf

Hey that could be a pretty easy one.

I started doing this recently and i agree it's great um i realized when we asked the signing pdf question there's a whole bunch of different meanings to that one is which we're seeing here is just having a photo of your signature they just plop on a bunch of documents which i think is the simplest one but digitally signing is a whole other ball game so uh which i haven't figured out yet so i would love some tips on how to do it you know the right way.

Sat stacker seven moose in with 10 000 sats, plus one here for the idea of making all those great ai songs available for streaming.

There's some.

Real gems in there and i would love to browse through.

Yeah the members usually we kick off the member stream with a custom song some of them are hits some of them not so much but we'll have more on that soon i think.

And just a general thanks for the great work.

Well thank you nice to hear from you sat stacker.

Next high five connoisseur sent in a total of 10,864 sats across two booths first one here here's some treasure for the headsets for your lovely gents.

Thank you another.

Shout out to the bootleg version of the show it is the best way to listen for sure join that jupiter party.

I do think we could probably plug the bootleg a little more there is a lot of show in there it's clocking at an hour 42 right now yeah someone.

Has a habit of overproducing the.

Bootleg yeah anonymous sent us some stats to test out their setup thank you and tomato came in with 13 337 stats, Some sats towards a pair of lead headsets for Wes and Brent.

And our last boost from Bronze Wing with a row of ducks. Headphones and gaming.

Yes! Great.

We're well in progress on both there.

Yeah. I would love to know how the gaming episode was received, too. If you're looking for a reason to boost us, 600 episodes, we've done two, three of them ever. And we really don't know. But we'd love to hear your feedback on that. It's just something maybe we would do in another 100 episodes if you liked it. I don't know. In the back of my mind, I thought, if we can get StarCraft working for us,

Careful what you suggest because you're going to start something here.

I know. I know. Well, maybe that's my intention.

Get your ghosts ready.

Thank you, everybody who boosted below the 2000sat cutoff too. We just read above 2000sats for time, but we have all of your boosts and keep them in the dock. And also a big shout out to all of you who stream those sats as you listened, which you can do with those podcasting 2.0 apps, 33 of you did so, and you collectively stacked 46,271 sats. When you combine that with our boosters, this episode, 609, stacked 358,561 sats. If you want to get on the fun, maybe support the Headset Fund.

I was going to say Kua, but I like yours a little smoother.

I kind of like yours. So what'd you find?

I found this little app just like minutes after the show last week, and I've been looking for, I've got to say, probably like a year and a half, for a very simple screen recording app. I used to use Peak quite a bit to, as you guys know, record a bunch of bugs. I find when doing bug reports and issues on GitHub, it's really helpful to even just have a screen cap of sometimes the behavior that you're seeing. It's a really great way to communicate to the developers what's going on.

You answered my question, I was going to say. You got to give Spectacle at least, you know, a little dimension.

Yeah, Spectacle has added this feature recently. and I've been trying to use it, but it seems I just trip over the feature sets. Like it, I don't know, it doesn't work for my brain. It's not doing it for me. Although I use Spectacle constantly every single day. But KUHA has been really doing it for me. It's nice and simple and elegant and just works. So I would say if you like that kind of thing, it's great. It is also licensed GPL v3. And I think it's 96% written in Rust.

Yeah, we'll have a link to it, K-O-O-H-A, and that'll be in the show notes. Yeah, nice find. And then, Wes, you found a doozy, too, so we had to do two picks this week. You came across VTT Summarizer, which summarizes VTT files, which, if you don't know, and I'm sure most of you probably wouldn't be unless you're a podcaster, those are transcript files.

Yeah, like SRTs or subtitle files, basically.

Yeah, it could be a subtitle for a movie, too, right? and we use them to all of our episodes since 600 have had transcription and you found a tool this vtt summarizer that uses open source llms to essentially go through this and summarize it could also do with meeting notes tell me about this thing.

Uh yeah i haven't actually had a chance to try it yet.

It also looks kind of new like i don't even see a license right on there yet.

It's just basically like a python file that hooks into um all the you know apis we have around open source LLM. So here's how it reads. This script extracts structured information from VTT files, such as Zoom meeting transcripts or closed captions, and converts it into JSON and Markdown formats. This includes an overview, participants, main topics, key points, decisions, and action items.

Very nice. Link to that in the show notes. Also, shout out to Llama4, which came out today. That's exciting. We'll be digging into that at some point in the future. There's a lot going on. And remember, LinuxFest is just around the corner, 1918 days. And I'd love it if you participated in that poll. And just let us know if you'd be likely to tune in for a bit during a Saturday stream. And if you would, boost it and tell me, what would you want to hear from that stream?