613: Packets, Power, and Paulus

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. Well, coming up today, we're going to chat with the founder of Home Assistant and the leader of the Open Home Foundation, Mr. Paulus, and then we'll reveal the big things they have in the works and how we're going to automate Brent's new Linux-powered van. Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, great pick, and a whole lot more. So before we go any further, let me say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes.

And hello, Brian. Hey, guys. Hello.

Hello, hello, hello. And a big good morning to our friends over at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplug. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are, whatever they might be. So go to tailscale.com slash unplugged and try it for free on 100 devices, three users, no credit card required. It's not a limited time trial. Right now, we are doing our entire show production over tailscale.

Oh, I know.

That's right. And so your devices talk directly to each other like they're just physically wired together. But you could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart. And so you can have one flat mesh network across a complex network like multiple VPS providers and your LAN. But on top of that, it's so intuitive to use and it's programmable. So you can have access controls and you can tie it in with your corporate authentication

What do you think? How is it?

I love it. It's surprisingly good in here because it's got padding on the walls. And so it's acoustically actually a lot better than I expected.

I know, right? Better than an Airbnb.

Is it already better than Joupes?

I think it actually acoustically might be. Yeah, because there's a lot more soft, especially because in Joupes I set up at the windshield. Now we're going to kind of mess it up a little bit because we got the back door open, hashtag van lifestyle.

Because there is a back door.

And so we've got, yeah. So if Brent was taking pictures right now and wearing his bikini, you'd swear he was an Instagram model. You know, I mean, it just looks just like that. That's what I want your mental picture to be. So it's quite the story. It involves nasty fuel leaks, getting pulled over and stopped by the cops, and a lot more, including deploying Linux. So we'll get to all of that later on in the show.

Yeah, great to be here.

So I wanted to have you on because I, as you know, longtime huge fan and user of Home Assistant, and I've been watching five years or so. And your state of the open home keynote and live stream was just on April 12th. And I was watching this and I walked away from the impression that things have really leveled up in the last year.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I started Home Assistant like 2013. So that's almost 12 years ago at this point. And, you know, it was just an open source project. I was just hacking on it, right? And it kept growing and growing and growing. And like last year, we were the most active open source project in the world, 21,000 people.

ESP Home, right?

Yeah, ESP Home as well. Yeah. Well, so ESP Home, we already owned it. Well, Nabucasa had acquired it back in the day. So yeah, ESP Home also got donated to the Open Home Foundation. And that made the foundation all of a sudden like, you know, it's a nonprofit, right? The foundation is based in Switzerland. They cannot be acquired. They cannot be invested in. and they are bound to their mission. It's based in Switzerland, which is very strict around its foundations.

I wonder if it's worth clarifying. You know, I don't think this was y'all's heavy-handed pressuring folks. You know, oh, you got to donate your stuff to the foundation, right? This was set up, and people already maintaining community aspects thought it would be a good home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

It really sounds like a structure to prevent incentivification.

Yes, 100%. I think that like when we, what I saw, like, you know, we were, first we were just an open source project, right? And people take you not so seriously in the industry. Then we, you know, we started Nabucasa as a company next to it to support the development. We were taken more seriously, but we were still seen as a company. And then people think that, oh, one day you're going to sell out. And so they treat you differently. And then we went to the foundation and now they're like, okay,

And so can you clarify how things have changed for Nebukasa then? Like where's the dividing line between the two these days?

So Nebukasa is six and a half years old, right? So I know for the people listening, we're throwing around like a lot of names, right? So Home Assistant is the project. Nebukasa is the company I started to fund the development six and a half years ago. And Open Home Foundation is the foundation. Now, Nabucasa has Home Assistant Cloud, which is our subscription service to fund the development of Home Assistant.

So the reason why I wanted to start with the foundation is because when you think of what Home Assistant offers end users, it's offering them an exit from devices that get expired because their cloud service went away or in certification because a vendor wants to get into a storage play. It allows this level of independence, also generally local first, to... The other side of that is the finance side, the development side, and the hardware partnership side.

Yeah, so we started a program called Works with Home Assistant already a couple of years ago, but we now moved it into the foundation. And this program allows manufacturers to certify their devices. And so we actually, you know, if it's a Z-Wave device, right, it needs to be Z-Wave certified, then they can give it to us and we're going to certify it again. Like we test to actually make sure that Z-Wave certification or Zigbee certification,

Yes.

I want you to know that, oh, this one has worked with Home Assistant. This one I can put in my house, and it will work for 10 years or more. That's the kind of guarantee, and it's aligned with our values.

Seems very nice just for me thinking about deploying Home Assistant, not only for myself, where I can maybe figure out if it's going to work or not. I can look up available integrations, but if I tell my friends or my family to do that, they don't want to have to go figure that out or read YAML. And if there's just a little badge right there, that's a big step.

And so it's our, you know, when it's in the program, we want to make sure it's got automatically discovered and all these things have to be perfect. And then we have our, we've set ourselves the goal that we want to, every region in the world, there needs to be for every category of smart home devices, there needs to be a works with home assistant device.

I love that. Because, you know, for years I've just figured it out mostly through community resources, because Home Assistant has a really great community around it. Okay, so I'm curious these days, when you have to do an elevator pitch of what Home Assistant is, what do you tell people?

So it's an open-source smart home platform with a focus on local control and privacy. And then it depends on the audience, right? So if the audience is like technical nerds, I'm focusing on like, we don't believe in silos. It's an actual platform. So your data from all your different devices, but also services like your garbage pickup schedule, whatever flows into a single place.

You know, I kind of had a mind shift around this recently and you've really hit on it. At first, you know, I thought when I was trying to introduce Home Assistant, it was sort of like, look, yeah, you've got all these different smart bulbs from different manufacturers. It can make them all play nice. But you're really pitching it as like, this thing knows about your home. It knows about your life. It is as much a data, you know, a central data hub as it is automation platform or anything else.

Yeah.

Yeah, I recently discovered that my fridge is running more often because I have a smart plug that measures the draw of the fridge and I have also the whole house power. and I can compare the two and I can see, oh, the fridge has been kicking in 15 minutes sooner than it did the last couple of months. And so I know, okay, I probably need to like, you know, pull the fridge out and clean it or something. There's something going on there.

And I think, you know, today, Home Assistant is the perfect toolbox. So we give you like the hammer, the screwdriver to build everything yourself. The thing that we kind of want to work towards to is that we build more solutions. So we already have like an energy dashboard that works out of the box. Our voice now works out of the box. Nice wizard to get you to where you're going.

That is true.

Given the different values and needs of let's say the foundation versus nebucasa versus what the community wants and needs which i'm sure is quite varied how do you balance all of those.

So it's actually all very aligned because there has never been any investors or any external money right so the foundation exists to serve the you know build a smart home around privacy choice and sustainability for the community so we just listen to the users we have like a whole product management team we talk to the users see what they want we have like month of what the heck where everybody can just dump their ideas on us and then we

To touch on this just for a second, because I think it is a good snapshot of how you guys deliver features to end users. So the voice assistant stuff is built in a way that I would describe as modular in the sense that I could opt to run Whisper and Piper, the voice-to-text and the speech-to-text stuff, as Docker containers on my LAN. And I could have all of the voice control, all of the understanding what I'm saying and the execution of that all local.

It is definitely not the easy route, but it is the best route for experimentation. And I think with open source, the way it works is that there will just be, for example, our WakeWords is a great example, right? Like we didn't have WakeWords that could run on an ESP chip. And then I was actually on the self-hosted podcast and I was telling you guys like, well, we couldn't figure it out to run it on the microcontroller.

Oh that's great But yeah.

Right. Instead of reverse engineering your product, there's an interface already available. Please hook into it.

And it also means as a tinkerer, you could build your own different kind of custom hardware into stuff. So you really just need an ESP, a microphone and a Wi-Fi chip. And so you could build that into picture frames. You could build it into R2-D2s. You can build your own that fit your own lifestyle where you need them. And you could buy a five pack for like 15 bucks on Amazon. It's pretty great. You also touched on something that I think our audience would like to know more about.

Yeah, so it's based on BuildRoot, which, by the way, the Open Home Foundation nowadays is also a sponsor of. And with BuildRoot, we really built the tiniest amount of operating system to build Docker, to run Docker containers. And then everything else is running in Docker. So we have a program called Supervisor, which is a manager of the operating system. And then we have some plugins around DNS and audio and these kind of things. And then you have Home Assistant, which is a Docker container.

Yeah, like I said, I've got it on multiple devices now for multiple years. I mean, knock on wood, but I don't think I've ever had a update go bad.

I'm curious. This is a bit of a self-serving question, but as a Pythonista myself, it kind of stands out to me that not only was Python the first implementation thing for Home Assistant, but it's really continued and it seems like there's no stopping the investment in more Python. How's that going?

Oh, yeah. No, yeah, so I mean, we've been Python, I think, so one of the reasons I was just saying that like on a Raspberry Pi, you had to compile your own Python is because we were very early adapters of AsyncIO, right? And we did AsyncIO, and remember, we rewrote the core from executors to AsyncIO, and the first release we're launching, SecFaults. And like, oh. And apparently, it was like a bug in Python. We were able to monkey patch it out.

Amazing.

Destructor. But we've been on AsyncIO from very early on. AOHCP is our web framework of choice, which we also are now donating money to with the foundation, for example, right? And we're slowly, you know, well, not slowly. We've adopted a lot of async.io. A lot of integrations now have been converted to async.io and it's been working really well, but also sometimes for custom integrations, it works less because in Python, you can do either async and not async.

You know, as I've watched it, it really feels like Home Assistant has gone from something that only the geeks would ever consider implementing to, I think, especially with the hardware devices you can buy now, it's kind of at the level where, like, I might give it to mom and dad. And that's amazing, really, if you think about what you're doing. And a lot of it is, like, the easier, faster setup stuff.

I don't know. I should have thought about that before.

Do you have a prediction? All right, so we had one million deploys. We just got to two you were talking about pretty recently. I mean, maybe by the time you're next back on the show, it'll be five. I don't know. Is that too ambitious?

It does seem like it's growing quick.

It is growing quick. Maybe, maybe. I think, you know, one of the big ambitious plans that we announced this year is that we want to build a device database where we want to use our collective intelligence to classify every IoT device in the world. Like, let's start gathering the manuals. Let's start gathering the energy usage so that homelessness can predict how much you're using. Let's get all the infrared codes of your electric candles.

Excellent paulus thank you very much, 1Password.com slash unplugged. That's the number 1Password.com unplugged, all lowercase. Okay, quick question. Do you know that your end users are always, and I mean always without exception, working on company-owned devices, using IT-approved applications and services? Do you know they're always doing that?

Well, as mentioned, we are sat here in the rescued van, the Linux rescued van. And as we've learned recently, these adventures are best described in song.

We are officially on the road and the van is real. It is running multiple Linux systems already because, of course, that was like one of the first things we got to. So this was actually the plan all along. As you may recall, those who've kind of listened to our members-only show or caught the launch, but just a quick recap.

So it's a half hour before we leave, and I think you just almost finished packing? That's not what... You're packing. You're packing? I haven't packed any gear yet. Oh, we still have all the gear to pack. What's that? Good thing we have a half hour. And coveralls.

So not much had been packed by the time we were supposed to be leaving.

You started two days before we left?

Yeah.

I figured I'd start the morning of.

Also, those coveralls proved to be very important and useful.

That is true.

As you'll find out.

Yes, that is very true. We had a great flight. We got down here. PJ picked us up from the airport during peak traffic, so we got to really grind it out in L.A. traffic, you know, get the full experience. And then the next morning, we arrived with all of the most essential tools.

Okay, we have arrived Friday morning at the van. we've got our snake oil and caffeine. The two most important things for this project really are just for my mental well-being and then Brett, you got the home assistant stuff, right? I got bananas. Okay, home assistant's next. Jack. Okay. Yeah, we'll use the jack after we get home assistant running. Yeah, that's the person on the list.

Don't worry. We got home. This isn't running. We're getting to that. But we thought, we knew we had all four new tires needed to go on.

Desperately.

They were in rough shape.

Desperately.

And we figured there may be a few other things that would surprise us. But one of the surprises was one of the more complicated things to solve. And it involves the fuel system.

Oh, Chris, tell us about it. We put a new fuel filter in because the lines were real bad.

We really had no idea was what's in this tank Like, we knew it was bad, but we didn't know how bad.

Well, we knew the engine ran on it. I mean, this engine is classic for running on almost anything, so that's maybe not saying that much. And it did have a particular odor to it.

Yeah. Yeah, and that was one of the reasons we wanted to get some sensors running on Home Assistant, just so we knew how bad we're killing ourselves. So, you really, I mean, you think about it. We showed up Friday night. Saturday is really when the work began. And by the end of Saturday, it was just about ready for the road. It was pretty much after six years of sitting, it took essentially one day of working on it.

Well, I'd say a day and a half because when we were at scale, we did spend that half day making sure the engine started and we did a bunch of work there. So I think that half day set us up for success.

Yeah, that's true. So a day and a half to get it working. And so Brent and Jeff worked late into the night. I went back to the Airbnb to crash early, crashed out. And we showed up for our first day and our first really hitting the road kind of, you know, like we're actually going to take this thing. We don't know what state it's in. It could have all kinds of problems, but we're going to do it.

Okay, it's 8.04, so leaving right at 7 a.m., just like Brent said we would be, and we're packed. It's the calm before the storm. We've got the front loaded. Brent's now done the fifth cleaning of the windshield, which seems to have really done the trick. Cell phone mount provided by Jeff is loaded and ready to go. The dash is actually really cool. It's one of my favorite things of this rig is the dash.

And that is exactly what happened.

Predictions! I didn't even know you said that. That's hilarious.

You didn't know I snuck that in there. You drove for most of the day, but then you had like a snap of driving that was just unrelenting. It must have been nearly 40 mile per hour gusts.

Apparently that's a lot in Freedom Units.

Yeah, it is. It is. and you handled it well because for parts of it we were doing 70 miles per hour in the van. It's really kind of incredible. Our first drive though, we set out, as you just heard there, a little bit later than we expected. So we had the kind of like, we better make up some miles and get going. The one problem is,

It's California.

It's California. It's going to be probably 72 degrees and sunny. You're going to have some smog. Other than that, you don't have to worry about it. You're going to have a great drive. Well, it started to rain on us, and the one thing that we didn't take time to fix because there was no need to was the windshield wipers.

Yeah.

So we had a windshield wiper problem, and then we also very quickly discovered another problem. So it wasn't exactly problem-free.

We're officially off, not just for a test drive, but for a real drive. And Google's helping us. Thanks, guys. Yep, Brent's in the captain's seat. And it feels great, right, Brent? It feels great. I mean, yes, it's great. Yep, nothing to worry about. And we're hitting the road right now. It's super exciting. It is. We got Jeff behind us, so if anything catches on fire, he'll let us know. According to the van, it's 5 p.m. It's actually 8.20 a.m. Yeah, same, same.

How quickly the optimism turns into the drive. I don't even think we made it five minutes.

Okay, well, we're at O'Reilly's, and Brent's under the van.

We never managed to actually fix that problem i.

Put it at the back of my mind did you that felt really nice.

Yeah yeah that that worked That worked pretty well. And so instead of fixing the fuel leak, we went ahead and, well, we fixed the wipers.

Yeah.

Okay, Jeff, let's give the new wiper system a try. Oh, no. Just right. Well, we got a wipe. All right. Good to go? Great. Working wonderfully. I mean, I like it. Oh, for fuck's sake.

It was a little disheartening because the wiper system on this van, it's definitely one of those that the auto industry learned from not to do anymore.

It is real rough.

Rough.

It's like a geometric puzzle.

And you can hear we're there in a loud O'Reilly's parking lot in the rain trying to fix this thing. You boys did get it working after a couple of rounds. We did manage to get the wipers working. So we got back on the road this time for real.

Well, quick update. We're on the road. Brentley's on the freeway. How's she doing on the freeway? Oh, yeah. Yeah. A bit floaty, but... Yeah, quieter than I expected. We got a window cracked at the moment, but quieter than I expected. And we got working windshield wipers. Jeff's behind us, following. And she's doing really great. She doesn't seem to be struggling at all on freeway. She's a cruiser.

Now, you got to appreciate, we're still figuring out the electrical system. So, like, is the gear powered while we're going down the road? Does the gear reset when we hook up to shore power? Like, how does that affect the server equipment? Because there's not like a full battery bank in here yet or anything like that. So we're kind of piecing all of this together, learning how she drives, learning how the electronics work, if our systems are rebooting every time we make a change.

On the mountain passes, doing great. Doing 68 miles per hour on the pass right now. She's a pass machine. Super pretty views, too. Jeff in there. There's Jeff. That's Jeff right there. Well done. The van handles the pass like a champ.

And we were kind of getting carried away. We were excited. And it's easy to forget that this van sat for a long time. And sadly, the previous owner is deceased. And the van is not current on its licensing or its tabs. Yeah. And honestly, you know, we're not really planning to stay in California either. This isn't where the van's going to end up. So it's like, how much do we engage with the California process versus how much do we just engage with the process back up in Washington?

I thought it was the end of the trip right there.

Next thing you know, the lights come on.

Yeah.

And he walks up, comes up to my side of the van because Brent's side was to the freeway. So he comes up to my side and I'm clear he's doing the math. It's clear because like the tabs are from 2019, the tires are brand new, but the van obviously is under repair. And he starts going in about how, you know, this thing isn't street legal and it's supposed to be on a trailer immediately. And we didn't know that because we're not from here.

Great decision.

And Brent is a Canadian. And these two things, they worked well for us because he saw that Brent was from out of town and he saw that I was from out of town. So he believed that we didn't know about the trailer thing. We legitimately didn't know. And then he also saw that producer Jeff had pulled over. And so he knew we had a chase car. And so he's doing the math. Okay, new tires, tabs from 2019. These two are from out of town. They really are here just on a van rescue project. You know,

All right here we go we're back on the road we gave him the story gave him a smile it all worked out he's like we might get pulled over again so you better give him that story again Give them the same story again. Back on the road we go.

I shortly took over driving after that because after that's when we hit the wind.

That wind.

It was crazy. And so we stopped for gas, which we had to do three times in that six-hour drive. And I started to drive. It was great. It's such a treat for me coming from a 40-foot RV to a van. It must be like going from riding a bike uphill to riding an e-bike uphill. That's got to be like the difference in ease of driving. It's just, it goes from like a full on contact sport that's life and death every two seconds to like this leisurely thing.

We've officially arrived at Jeff's house. We're going to do some musical cars so we can get the van back there tonight. How would you rate that, Brent? How do you feel that went? I mean, barring one or two things, I think that was actually excellent. Yeah. Best case scenario, almost? Yeah. I think it was basically best case scenario. Once we got on the road, it was the only times we had to stop was, It did great. Even in the wind, it did really great. I don't know. It did super great.

Now, let's talk about the setup. So we've got a LAN right now that I don't know if it's the permanent solution, but it's currently powered by the Slate that saved us for LinuxFest.

That's true.

So that's kind of neat. that's providing the local area network and the bridging to PJ's network.

And is also running on DC.

Yes. So everything's running on DC, which is we're trying to do as much DC first as we can. Because when you run components with their AC plug in a van or in an RV and you invert that, there's a 30 to 40% efficiency loss there. So you lose a lot of power to the inversion process. So if we can go straight to DC, we avoid that completely. But what I really, really like is the hardware you're using for Home Assistant. It's actually a rescued industrial system that is perfect for this application.

Well, I call this my Jeff Industrial Trash Bin Rescue Special. Because I think actually all of that is true. Jeff, you found this thing somewhere and put it to use in your own network for a while. And very kindly donated it to our crazy projects. And now it finds itself in the van. Yep. I got a couple of those things. They're perfect for home assistant. So this thing is like, I don't know, it's a little metal box.

Yeah. It's like almost the size of like a cigar box.

Okay. I've never had a cigar box, but...

Well, we should get you a cigar box.

Oh, great.

Really, it kind of would make it smell good in here, I think, you know? It's a good smell. Yeah. So it's a small box, but like you say, made out of metal.

Yeah. And you can tell that it's built to last. It's got, what, two networking ports on there. It has an Intel Atom E3-827, which also has QuickSync and supports ECC RAM, we discovered.

That's fun. Now, we don't have ECC RAM in there right now.

But we do have 8 gigs of RAM.

Yeah. I don't really think you need it for home assistant, but it's nice that you have the option with an Atom.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And you've got a couple of storage options, too.

Yeah, this thing supports one serial ATA and also a m-serial ATA drive. You had picked one up for this box specifically. I think some incompatibility happened there and wasn't recognized, but that was fine because we had two hard drive options.

Yeah. And again, this is a dedicated Home Assistant instance, and the 120 gig SSD that's in there is plenty for Home Assistant.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So you tell me.

You got 8 gigs of RAM and you got 120 gigs of storage. Some people are running this off of like Pi 3s and 4s.

Well, that's what I brought to run this on, and then you were like, hey, look what I found.

Yeah, let's use this instead. Well, it was beautiful because Jeff already had it wired up for DC and everything like that.

Thanks, Jeff.

And it only, you know, at idle, I think-ish... Is around 5 watts on DC and around almost 9 watts when you're doing the AC inversion, which is either way pretty minimal. You also forgot to mention it has a serial port.

I did forget to mention that.

Yeah, so you could have a serial port on this thing too.

It has two serial ports.

Yeah, man.

The thing I like about it is that it can be mounted pretty easily.

Yeah.

And also it seems extremely robust. And I was looking at the manual. It has like vibration standards that it matched and stuff. So, like, if you're going to run some equipment in a thing that's jiggling down the road constantly, that's probably a good choice.

Now, one thing that we decided to do differently than we kind of discussed ahead of time, and maybe this changes how Wes does his Home Assistant deployment, is we decided to actually use Home Assistant OS. So it takes over the whole machine, and it does all of the Home Assistant management. Has a lot of pros, but I kind of think one of us should at least also try, like, the roll-your-own Home Assistant, deploy core, maybe manage it with Nix.

Yeah, I've actually already got it going via NixOS, partially because I had a NixOS server stood up, and so it was super easy to just turn it on that way. And all I really needed was, I don't know, like basic control of lights and some smart plugs, at least, you know, starting now. So I think you're right. This means I got to double down on that route, at least for a while.

Yeah, great. Okay, I thought maybe, but I didn't want to release any unconfirmed information there. Now, let's talk a little about what you've got working on here. So when you fire up Home Assistant, it will just sort of auto-discover a lot of things on your network. If you've got an IoT device that's available for remote control or an API that Home Assistant intrinsically knows, when you start a Home Assistant, you'll just have stuff on your dashboard.

Which is sort of amazing and also could be a bit creepy.

Yeah, maybe. It works too well. Look all the stuff that's out there just listening. So for Brent's setup, really why we wanted this is we want some sensors in here because we think there's some exhaust leaks. We know there's a gas leak. We don't know how much we're killing ourselves when we're in this thing for five, six hours at a time. And then also, something that anybody that's staying in a small space should know is, after an hour or two, the CO2 buildup actually gets pretty significant.

Well, I was able to get the sensors working somewhat, which I thought was surprising because I had never really read how to do it or anything.

Right, because you're like tweaking a little YAML file and then you're building and sending these ESP32s that power the sensors.

And the interface to do all that, I think, has come a long way since Home Assistant started. So I'm coming in at a time when most things have been figured out. I think that's really nice for someone starting out. But the other thing is, I have you guys to tell me what to do. So I actually got that quite wrong because I missed the whole component that reads the sensors, which is the whole point. So Jeff sorted that out for me. Thank you, Jeff.

When you think about it, it's such a perfect opportunity because it's a new project. And so everything you're putting into your new project, it's open and it's local and it's maintainable. So you're not putting in something that's tied to a cloud service. You're not you didn't have to create an account with a vendor. Right. That is really big because that stuff's going to last a decade.

That's my favorite Android.

Well, there you go. It is very classic, but it was it's going to make a perfect mounted dashboard in your rig. And I'm a big fan of having a dashboard where you can see what's going on, like your CO2 sensors. And if you have others that are using the space, it makes it much easier for them. And so this thing is a 10-inch tablet. It's got 32 gigs of space, 2 gigs of RAM, and all you need to do is run a web browser or the app.

I think you're trying to tell me I need multiple dashboards.

You might need multiple dashboards. All right, so you can always pull it up on your phone.

I think i have a couple things to reflect on there one is thank you listeners and producer jeff and everyone who left parts at the studio for me to pilfer and uh include in this crazy project uh it's really fun to reuse you know that this and this van is reused the everything in here is being rescued right including the networking and everything so we.

Were joking um on the pre-show with the members that, including the van, all the work we put into it, and all the gear, like all the parts for the automation and the networking and the lighting and the sensors, we're probably still less than a MacBook of total money invested.

It's so true.

It's crazy. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but that's just wild when you think about it.

And the other concept here is, what were you, you were talking about, which is, I guess I look at it as the open source concept of this project, which is that I, this is a crazy new lifestyle idea that we've just randomly come up for, for me. I think I'm going to love it. I have no idea. And I also don't know how I'm going to use the space, right? I've never, the most time I've spent is in Lady Joops.

You spent the night in here last night.

Well, that is true. It felt like that needed to happen.

Yeah, breaking it in. Yeah.

But I love the idea that we can take these components that are modular, try a thing out. Oh, maybe you don't like it there. Or maybe you don't like this light strip in that location. Maybe you don't like this sensor because it's not accurate enough. And you can just replace those components individually. That speaks so much to, I think, the things us and the listeners care about. And that's the part I'm most excited about is this building block approach to this entire project.

We'd love it if you'd support the show with a membership or a boost. The show is free. We put it out there, but that doesn't mean we don't spend hours and hours and many, many, many more working on the show and trying to make it as valuable to you as possible. So you can become a member at linuxonplugged.com slash membership, or you can support each individual production with a boost. And both we appreciate tremendously.

Yes.

Virtuous? What would be the bad version? Vicious. Oh, right. That's what the advertising system is. And I, I, I try to walk this line as best I can, but I have to say, like, if you knew how most of these ad deals went down or how most interviews end up on podcasts, not ours, but if you knew a lot of them out there, uh, you would be so radicalized against the advertising model that, uh, you would be so on board with the direct support model that I think we'd be sitting in a million-dollar van.

Now, I have to say, I'm completely new, A, to this, like, house on wheels lifestyle, B, to this home assistant lifestyle. And so I just want to hear from listeners, what are we doing wrong? What have I not thought about? what is a good suggestion on how to set these things up yeah what do i need to look out for in all of these new yeah like even gear like.

Sensors and accessories with homo system i mean you're starting fresh there you're starting fresh with the van there's like power things you need to learn.

Battery systems and all these tips you don't figure out till you get into it like one tip i should probably give myself is these slates burn out after about a year of using them full time don't use that yeah there's probably something else so yeah.

There we should probably you replace that slate with.

Something. Yeah.

Like something a little more robust.

There's a big list of things we should do to this thing.

We could use some advice.

So please, yes, send in your tips. I would really appreciate that. I don't know what I'm doing.

Well, our first boost comes from the dude abides who gives us a nice baller boost. 53,637 sats, and he says something small to fund Brent's adventures.

That's so sweet.

Isn't that? Thank you very much. That's great.

I did say that you could name the component that you would like to buy with your boost. So maybe, you know, we had someone buy the oil that we put into the engine last time around.

That could be a tank of gas, almost a tank of gas.

Well, if you want to get a tank of gas to rescue this thing.

It's a little bit more in California than 50 bucks.

Oh, gosh, is it ever.

So bad.

Oh, man.

Odyssey Westra boosts in with 5,000 sets. Loving watching y'all live. Just want to put a shout out for your eastern neighbors over in Spokane. Ever since the last meetup, it jump-started interest in our local lug. So if you happen to live in the inland area, come meet us at Denny's on Division. We have users of all walks of life and even have started meetings in those with an interest in home automation.

Odyssey, congratulations. That is really awesome. That's so great to hear. So SpokaneLinux.home.blog. And they're getting into home automation stuff just at the right time, too.

You know, I think this may be the closest lug to my home that I know about, even though it's in a different country. So you might just see me out there at some point. No promises. Well, Otterbrain sent in 10,000 Satoshis. Setting up a fresh system and wondering, do you have any suggestions for clever names for your computers?

Wes, do you have any naming systems that you use for like your home machines?

Oh, I've kind of vacillated with different systems over the years. You know, it was Star Trek things for a while. It was Stargate things for a while. Literary references. So it never actually manages to stay super consistent for that long. So you might as well be just as served by picking a fun list of words. I don't know.

Yeah. I look at that as seasonal or themes. So I remember I'll pull out an old computer like, oh, yeah, this is when I used to name computers after solar system objects.

Exactly.

I like it.

You have eras.

Yeah, eras. Exactly. Do you have a system, Brent, that you use for naming things?

You know, I actually struggled with this very same question for a long time because I thought, like, once you name a thing, then that just sticks, right? So how could you possibly choose the right one in the first go? And I because of that indecision just landed on like shortened nicknames of products like this thing in front of me is Fram.

Because it's.

My framework and that just has balanced between like the logical thing that it's actually called versus the quick fun nickname that.

I give it I sometimes do that too so like if I have a Dell XBS with Ubuntu on it I'll call it XBS2 you know and things like that my ThinkPad.

Is named Pad but the star trek p-a-d-d.

Oh that's the best one west wins that is the yeah that is the winner right there open source account it's a winner and he comes in with 2000 sats says you guys sound a lot different live versus when i'm listening at 2.5.

2.5.

I do that's like doing 85 in a 65 no that's like doing 85 in a 45 right in a in a like yeah that's just that's a you're speeding there buddy I.

Just want to try it. I'm not even sure what that feels like to try to understand, you know?

Brent, do you think he goes straight to two and a half? Or do you think he kind of starts at like 1.5, 1.8, 2?

You've got to warm up.

Yeah, you crank it up over time. Because you can't just go right to 2.5.

Crack those fingers first. I do have a question, though, open source accountant. When you see us in person, is it really disappointing or just high def? Let us know.

Moonenite boosts in with 2,000 sets. I'm on a boat. First ever live boost from a boat?

Yes! I...

That's impressive.

That's right.

I would like to know where.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Follow up. Also, it sounds like you're maybe getting into some more Nix. So maybe boost it and tell us how that goes, too.

Mm-hmm.

Here I thought this week I was doing the crazy thing.

Right. Yeah. He got us. He got us. He's on a boat.

Well, user 137 sent in 5,000 sets. Love the show and linux fest northwest has been awesome.

Oh that's good to hear i it was a really good year i will admit um i think i was a little nervous that we would get the bad weather again and maybe i didn't go as hard on the i don't know i mean we talked about it quite a bit but i it it was so glorious if we ever have another year like this again i think we'd be lucky just weather wise i mean we're talking like you know mid to high 60s all day long sunshine no clouds yeah yeah it was really glorious. Sometimes we get really lucky. We do indeed.

A Monday? I thought it was a Sunday.

On a Tuesday?

Thursday. User 841 boosts in with 5,555 sets. Hey guys, love the show. Really wish I could have made it to Bellingham this weekend, but I'm there in spirit.

Oh, thank you. And thank you for the support. You know what? That's helpful, really. These events are extremely expensive for us, so we really appreciate it, user.

It's also always great to hear from folks listening live. You're special.

Well, TrueGrid sent us in 5,000 sats. This was my very first Linux Fest, and it was so much fun. I'm glad I got to experience it, and definitely planning to go in the future.

Yeah, it was great to meet you, and I am really pleased at the positive feedback we're getting from LinuxFest Northwest. I'll pass it on to the organization team as well. Thank you, True Grits. And speaking of somebody else we got to talk to at LinuxFest Northwest, Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 Satoshis. He writes, if I can't use a Nix OS or a derivative, I would use a variety of distros based on the system type and purpose. Yes, Bazite for gaming, Pop! OS for laptops.

You're in good company.

Yep.

Mr. Pibb boots in with a row of ducks. You know, I hadn't played StarCraft since high school, but now I've been playing all week. Great episode.

Yeah, I think Brent can relate to that one.

Yeah, Mr. Pipp, it's a problem.

We were in the car the other day, and we started talking about StarCraft, and Brent just says, I could beat all of you. I think he's masked in the game.

Round two.

Yeah, I mean, first LAN party in the van? Van LAN?

Ooh, yeah, yeah.

Tail scale.

That'd be fun. Tomato comes in with 5,000 sats. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I use Alpine as my main email client. It's a modern rewrite of Pine. It's under an Apache 2 license. It is an application Oh, it's in application help. It is fantastic and it's still, for me, the high point of command line usability. It's incredibly powerful. It's efficient to use, but something anyone can learn without trouble. Definitely something to try out for the command line challenge.

You know, I came across this one in a hurry and I didn't have time to jump in and I thought the boys are going to love this. So I sent it along.

Okay. This is a project that allows you to essentially turn Excel into a shell and you can run Linux inside the shell inside Excel.

Haven't you always wanted to? Or even needed to? I know I have.

Screw Doom. I want all of Linux. I want all of it. And what what's happened here is the author has created an emulator that's actually doing all the work in a separate DLL. So technically, not Excel doing the work. However, it gets loaded into Excel by the VBA macro.

Yeah, remember how VBA macros can do that? You can just, you know, side load DLLs in there and then have a good time.

They're very safe.

Apparently entire emulators. You can just sideload an entire emulator with a VBA macro call. So it does just that and then it takes the output and writes them into the cells of the spreadsheet.

What? I know i sent in this pic but this is ridiculous linux and excel.

Slash dev slash standard excel.

Yeah right wouldn't that be funny if it just became an output device um i know you and i both looked did did you find a license for this west i did not find a license for this.

No not in that repo uh the underlying uh risk 5 emulator that's really doing all the work here that has an MIT license and of course Linux itself is GPL too but nothing for Linux and Excel just yet I will say I mean the whole thing it's quite impressive but the major limitation is since you're running RISC-V Linux there's just the app compatibility isn't that great.

Yeah we really to take it to the next level you'd almost want like an x86 emulator.

I would love if this is like the inflection point for RISC-V this is what people were like oh finally we have Now we have a reason to write applications.

I'm wondering, though, if anybody, if some crazy person out there could put this into production for something, like, is there some use case for this, other than it just being really awesome?

I mean, I think Jeff nails it. You know, maybe your local enterprise administrator hasn't enabled WSL for you, but, you know, you really help your workflows out. But, of course, Excel might be, you know, you need Excel for your job.

Right. Screw WSL. Everybody's got Excel. that's hilarious good point pj good point would.

We then call it wxl.

I think wxls i don't know what you held i don't know dude don't make the windows excel.

Subsystem for linux right.

Exactly oh no all right we'll have a link to that in the show notes you can go check it out, Oh, those show notes, you ask. Well, of course, you can find those at linuxunplugged.com slash 613. Now, don't forget, we need all of your tips for Brent. And also, we'd love it if you joined us live. You can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We do the show live at 9, no, 10? Yes.