614: Self-Hosted Location Tracking

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 on the show today, we'll show you and tell you and test a self-hosted alternative to Google Maps location tracking. It's a hotspot of where you've been and everywhere you go, and the three of us have been trying it out. Plus, we'll catch up on some news that we've missed while we're on the road, and we'll share the details on an upcoming TUI challenge. And then we'll round it all out with some great booths, some picks, and a lot more.

Hello. Hey, Chris. Hello, Bunt.

Hello, everybody.

We got him excited today in there.

Nice to have you. If you want details, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. You get to hang out and get the whole stream. Or, of course, you can become a member. And you get the bootleg.

Indeed, Happy Mother's Day.

Appreciate all of you and a special appreciation to all the ones in our lives. It's nice that they let us sneak off on this important day and do a podcast. So we appreciate that too. Also, we have some details about our upcoming Terminal User Interface Challenge.

You've been hard at work over there.

Yeah, and I have a first public draft. And what we're going to do is get this posted up on the Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub so you can take a look at it. It is, on the high level, going to be a seven-day challenge with different points awarded for what you get completed. There is a bonus round if you want to skip one of the seven-day challenges and go past one of them. There's also some bonus points for creativity.

Something to compare.

Something we can compare at the end. And so all of that is sort of outlined in what I've put together, but I think it could use a little finessing. So we're all off to Red Hat Summit next week. So we figured we'd put this out there, let people look at it for a couple of weeks, make some suggestions on our GitHub, and then we'll put it together and we'll actually launch the challenge officially after we've gotten some community input to really kind of make this thing nice.

Now I'm feeling nervous because I think Brent's going to smoke us somehow and there's going to be numbers to prove it.

I actually feel far more nervous than I think you feel, so we'll see how it goes.

See, I'm feeling pretty good because A.

You've been doing research.

I've been stacking 2E apps.

You've been pre-gaming.

I've been stacking 2E apps. B, I got that Knicks book from Olympia Mike, and I think I'm going to make that a dedicated 2E machine. Going all in. So the only thing that loads is the terminal. Boom. So I'm in it to win it, boys. I'm in it to win it. We'll see how I do, but I am. So we'll have the link, hopefully in the show notes, when this episode publishes at linuxunplugged.com slash 614.

We made it.

We made it. We're here. We're alive.

Welcome back, boys.

There was definitely some adventures, a couple of detours we didn't expect, but to celebrate the fact that we actually made it, the van survived and we survived, we're cracking open some ciders. Yes. Cheers, gentlemen.

Cheers, gents.

To the bus.

To the bus.

And all those who help her along her way.

Which is, the engines run like a champ, but we continue to be working out systems. Electrical is one of the major systems right now. Generator is another major system.

The frustrating thing is the systems I thought were cool. Somehow, now that we're in Washington, are very not cool.

And the systems we thought might be a problem.

Yeah, totally fine.

Probably going to be fine.

Do you think if you were to drive back to California, you'd swap back?

Oh, I don't know if I want to drive back to California. Sorry, Jeff.

But it's good to be back. It was really a hell of an adventure. You know, roughly, you said 1,500 miles, but I thought it was roughly 1,800 miles.

You know um the maps tend to always want to take the i5 and we tend to not ever want to take the.

I5 we took very much the long route i.

Think my estimates were quite off.

I think it was 1800 miles based on the app i used to track us yeah.

I i reset the odometer but i don't know it didn't give us the right reading.

Uh yeah the odometer didn't seem to be reading it was on zero right yeah um we did have one cop out of 18 pull us over we'll have this story about that um, and more details in the launch we covered we talked about some of this last week and then And of course, we had to make the drive since we were in episode 613. That's when we actually had to make the drive all the way back to Washington

It's not good. It's not good.

We don't know for sure. We got to do further testing. Like everything, you got to test a few times.

I think Jeff has a spare one under his bed.

Yeah, PJ, we might need that spare.

Thanks.

I don't know if he does have it. Yeah, we were testing the electrical system.

Although I think, wasn't PJ saying maybe a Knicks book would be a good fit?

We got options.

We got, yeah. We have disagreements.

I see.

I'm not a big fan of the home assistant.

I'm poking my head somewhere here.

I'm not a fan of home assistant's laptop. I get the built-in battery and all of that, but yeah. All right, but anyways. Yeah, so we may have fried the machine. We'll see how. We'll see how that goes.

He claims they're bulletproof, but I don't know. Leave it to me.

Yeah, give Brent a week.

Actually, it was only a couple days.

This is literally an industrial piece of equipment that's meant to be embedded in a very rough terrain, hard, core, hot.

Here's what happens. You see the superstructure of the van. It concentrates the bug field.

Yeah, the metal walls.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, it sure feels that way.

So it's like a Brent-a-day cage is what you're saying.

That's absolutely right.

Oh, God. I hadn't thought about that.

Yeah, don't put your sensitive production systems anywhere near there.

Like, what happens to me? Is there, like, a cross-contamination? Do I get affected?

Yeah, we should probably hang out for a bit. I'll try to decontaminate it.

Counterbalance, thank you, Wes. Yeah. Yeah, you better watch out, too. Yeah, you better watch out. But we made it. We're back. Projects will continue. We may have fried the Home Assistant box. We'll have details once we get that tested. And, of course, check out the Launch 21 when it comes out on May 14th. Weekly launch.rocks. We'll have all of that, hopefully, figured out. I don't know. But it's been so much fun. That's the key takeaway. We really enjoyed it. I wish I could do that once a

We could find a way. You know, we can crowdsource a bunch of crazy projects for us to go find somewhere in the continent. Even off continent.

Anybody else have a semi-functional van need rescued?

Chris has been looking along the way.

What's your rate?

I have never loved another man's vehicle as much as I love this van. Like, you know, my blood, sweat, and tears have gone into this too. And then, you know, you do that driving along the coast.

Are you the, is there like a godfather sort of concept?

I'll take that.

Yeah, I'll take that. I'm not, I can't give that away. That's his to distribute.

I mean, I would take it. I would be honest. You asked me a question. What was it? Do you remember? No? Okay. I don't remember either, but I'm sure it was really important. I have a question. One last thing before we get out of housekeeping. How do I sound today? So I'm using the headset in studio just to get more practice with it. I want to know, do you think this could be a forever mic? Does it sound okay compared to the boys? Boost him, let me know how you think it sounds. Be honest.

Gnome for some.

Has a new executive director. Steven Diobald, I believe is maybe not how you say it, but he's been appointed as a new executive director of the Gnome Foundation. There was an intern director who sat in for Holly Millen, who stepped down last year. Now, here's what stood out to me, Brent. I thought you'd like this, is he's a Canadian free software advocate.

Oh.

Yeah, he's Canadian. He's been a Gnome user since 2002. and he does have some experience in the IT industry and also in the fundraising part of the industry.

It's actually quite a nice mix, I would imagine.

It seems like it very well could be.

You know, here's some cred from the intro bio over on blogs.gnome.org. I built a graphical mud before the term MMORPG was coined. So, yeah, right? Hey. That's probably a good sign in terms of general nerdery.

I want to play the Star Trek mud. I've seen it. I think I've never played it, though. Yeah, so there's a welcome post that we will link in the show notes. And what stood out to me is this is somebody who's taking the reins of GNOME at GNOME, GNOME, at a time where they're having some financial troubles. And... It feels like it's really a shame that probably the most widely deployed free software desktop, even our most successful free software desktop project, is having troubles raising funds.

I'm hopeful. I mean, it does seem like, you know, he's got a long history with open source and the tools and communities around it. So if anyone can, this seems like a good candidate. So here's hoping for the best.

NixOS now has a dedicated hardware team. The steering committee is launching a new hardware team to own the NixOS hardware repo, drive hardware enablement, and expand partnerships.

Ooh.

Oh, I would totally be interested in the Nix First laptop.

That's fascinating.

So they want to streamline device enablement. So it makes it easier to, I guess, say this works with NixOS.

I think that's a great idea. And I mean, it is one of the easiest first ways you can demonstrate that like, hey, the community already figured this out and documented it as code and you just need to add two lines somewhere and now you have the approved way to make sure your hardware is optimized.

We've seen some self-organizing around that, but part of this is to clarify ownership and also to sort of ensure that those things are done consistently and not as ad hoc, which I'm not slamming. I'm very grateful for, but, you know, that's part of what they want to do is make that kind of a consistent experience too.

Right. And that's exactly the kind of next stage of formalities, maybe not the right word, process, structure, just organization in terms of having a foundation and a sort of longer term outlook on supporting the project for real world use cases. And that's nice.

If it does go to the next stage, I think, but I'm not sure. I'm curious to hear what you boys think. I think I would like to see the NixOS hardware project still be used as the central sort of hardware management. So if we see a bunch of bigger companies committing to that repo, that'd be really nice to see. But I don't know if you think that's best practice.

Hmm i was picturing i was picturing uh sort of like a maintainer role where you'd still have community contributing their fixes their patches their configs but then you would have sort of, maintainers that are taking that in and making sure that it is a certain standard format and things like that but you know if i was just also thinking if i could be in charge of hardware for you know, a year at NixOS, quote unquote, at the NixOS Corporation, deploying the NixOS software.

Um...

But I do wonder, would it be a big impact to say, work with a ThinkPad or a System76 and try to focus on the DevOps engineer software developer market that is particularly trying to deploy software? I'd focus in on a couple of scenarios that I felt like I could really solve.

Ooh, here's your, like, super streamlined, boots-to-Phlox, ready-to-go dev setup.

Yeah.

Something like that. Hmm.

Chromebook, but more powerful, not as restricted.

Meant for the super user, or at least the professional user.

Good hardware, good battery life, decent build-out, reliability, good keyboard. I mean, I know this is, but there's a market for this. You know, this is what the Sputnik thing was all about. And I don't know if they've drifted from that as much or not. I think, you know, they're just kind of constrained to what the designs are. And there's so much potential here. And right now, my options are, if I buy a laptop with Fedora or Pop!

Yeah, you know the hardware stuff's just going to detect or you can import it and it'll have your model ready to go. While we're on the subject, just a very quick micro selfish shout out. I did see some folks attempting to organize or seek interest for a Seattle NixOS users meetup group over on the Discord. course so if you happen to be in that area and are interested maybe go chime in.

Oh something like that got rolling i think we'd pop i think we would exactly yeah that'd be pretty great, well it looks like sudo rs is in 2510 it's going to be default ubuntu will adopt sudo rs a rust-based memory safe re-implementation of the traditional sudo application This, you know, I'm surprised to see pushback. I mean, good code is good code, right? And these tools are tools.

Can you give a sense of what the pushback is? Just like people who are traditionalists?

Yeah, it's sort of the two-track. You get a lot. It already works. compatibility with older systems, you get that argument. And then you also get the sort of like, well, it's Rust, and so there's a pushback because people don't want to just arbitrarily replace everything with Rust just because it's Rust. There's also a whole social aspect to Rust that people want to push back on and say, well, you could use something like Go instead.

There's also an aspect I think that's easy to not necessarily appreciate, which I did not until we talked with John Seeger, VP Engineering for Ubuntu, who's had some great blog posts on this effort and was on episode 607, if you want more of the deeper rationale.

So, BcacheFS has had some new patches introduced aimed at significantly improving snapshot deletion performance. These enhancements are part of an ongoing effort to refine the file system's capabilities, but there is an actual but with this particular patch. The implementation necessitates an update to the incompatible on-disk format, and then must be explicitly enabled by users to make that happen. Obviously, for safety reasons, I don't want to surprise you.

That's right, on several of my systems, actually.

So does this impact you at all?

No i mean i'm don't have a crazy ton of snapshots to delete so i don't have any pressure to opt in necessarily for the in the first place um what.

As a user of bcfs what um is the impact to you when there's an on disk format change.

Uh well so there are some that are like you know the bigger ones uh that are slowing down and maybe stable um are ones that is sort of like you know pretty much everyone's doing so like you upgrade to the new kernel and it's like or you do some new operation and it needs to upgrade the file system then there are incompatible features right so there's like the actual on just format that new kernel puts up and like you have to make some change to all of the data structures and.

So does it just run through a process at the next boot is it just something that's sort of like on the screen for a few minutes while your system boots for the first time.

Yeah or i mean there's probably various ways to do you can probably trigger it from like a user space tool as well i don't know all the details but that has happened right where You've had to do these upgrades. This is not that, right? This is not just like automatically happen. This is not necessary to continue using the file system on a new version, except if you opt in and then you can't go backwards. So this is an incompatible features.

You always know I love ButterFS. So this is said with no judgment I mean I got ButterFS everywhere, But it feels like BcacheFS is working this stuff out in this alpha-beta stage before it's stable in the kernel, before it's been unleashed to users. The ButterFS kind of was working out in the public once we already had ButterFS on our file systems. And we'd already formatted our disk, right? It felt like ButterFS was making these iterations years into already being out in production.

And as we know with butterfs like some people got burnt in the early days and it's really hard to come back to a file system once you've been burnt that hard.

Yeah i think ken's aware of that too based on our chat with him i got the sense he is very much aware of trying to avoid that.

Yeah definitely and as you say right i mean it's useful between being able to learn from the development of butterfs and zfs and other modern file systems. And, right, there are some users out there with petabyte file systems and who are making a bunch of snapshots. So, hopefully, and this is a good reason to run it on systems where you can. You know, Kent's pretty active. There's ways to communicate and share bug reports or test new features.

Onepassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password, unplugged, all lowercase. Imagine your company's securities like the quad of a college campus. You have your nice brick pass between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices you could sort of think of as the stuff IT is approved of, the employee identities that have been managed, the things and accounts you know about. And then you have those pass that people actually use.

Well, Chris, you threw over the fence for us this mapping application, and I have not used too many map tracking applications. This is one of them that got our attention. The name is a little, I'll give it a swing. Here we go. I think it's Dwarwich.

Yeah, I'm going to go with something like Dwarwich or something like that, or maybe we'll just call it the witch. I'm not sure. This is such a neat idea. And Google offers a similar location history service where you can pull up your location history and it'll overlay it on Google Maps with some hotspots. But of course, You're constantly sending all of your location information to Google. Years ago, I had a similar thing that was tracking everything I did.

Oh, right.

Why the ODB2? That's crazy.

Well, the idea was it had a little cellular chip in it. And so as soon as your car started, it would start tracking your travel. And what you would get is a map with, and I use this thing for multiple years, like my trip to New York for the Ubuntu Dev Summit and all over. So I just had this massive map of everywhere we had gone. So I got one for the RV. I got one for my car. And then, of course, they went out of business because they couldn't make money just selling my data, I guess.

Oh, yeah.

And there's a lot of ways you can solve this. But this is a newer project that is actively maintained that lets you visualize your location history, track your movements, and analyze your travel patterns. and it gives you total privacy and control and it can be completely self-hosted. It is also GPL3. And the idea is you get an interactive map with timelines and travel statistics about everywhere you've been, everything you've done, the speeds and timelines and stuff like that.

Well, like I mentioned, I haven't really explored this space for myself just primarily because I didn't really have a use or maybe I just didn't have people who cared where I went, but I actually have gotten really fascinated by the whole, cause this does like heat maps as well of where you spend the most time. And as we'll see later, it can also bring in other data from other sources, which is really interesting. I am surprised I got it working first, just, you know, noting that for you guys.

And you did, you've not, have you used the Google version or any of the other sort of proprietary?

No, I've been pretty, I have some allergies I'd like to mention. And one of them is tracking by these large corporations.

Yeah.

I did for years. I think I've turned it off now.

Same. I did for years.

But I have turned it off. I mean, I did not like the tracking aspect and I don't especially need anyone knowing all of that. I mean, as a sort of virtual journal wannabe, it's pretty great for, you know, remembering past trips, seeing where you were.

Well, I was thinking for Brent. He's technically on a trip right now. And a year or two from now, you can look back at this and be like, what did I do when I was in Washington? Where have I not been?

Oh, I like your thinking.

What route have I not taken yet?

Okay.

That kind of stuff. I think you would find that particularly interesting as somebody who likes to explore and take new routes. you could actually have a map, almost like a video game, of everywhere your character has been on the map, and you can pick new quests now. I mean, just that kind of stuff. Do you think this is something you would keep using?

I really think it is. And I didn't think that going into this. So it's changed my perspective of, we unfold maps on the show here from time to time, but it's changed, I don't know, my relationship to wanting to track the history, especially using open formats that you can import and export elsewhere. So this might be here to stay for me because I've done, I don't know, how many trips in the last 10 years? Like ridiculous all over the continent, Europe as well.

Everywhere you've been, even the small places.

Yeah.

Okay. So you got it running first. So maybe you can tell us how you set it up.

Wes. Well, we asked Wes very nicely to take a look at this while we were working on the van.

I meant the client.

It's a quick message to Wes and poof, magic.

I'm not that self-serving.

That was amazing, though. If that was your angle, that was so good. I was like, nicely done, sir. Savage moment. Yeah, so actually, that is a good question, though. You and I have it running very differently on our client devices.

We do. I decided to try to stay as open as possible using clients that are well-loved by the community. So I decided to use OwnTracks, which has been around for a long time. Now, Chris, you mentioned you were using it in the past for a bunch of tracking. So I knew it had a good history.

We liked it, right? That's what we use for Linode on the road tracking. Indeed, yeah.

And OwnTracks, I think, is really flexible in that it can support a bunch of backends. And this support is built right into Vavarach. And so I thought I'm going to go this route, see how that works.

It's also, if you're somebody who likes log output, or you want to be able to export your config and import it to another device, and you want to get the debug details, OwnTrax is the client that will actually expose all of that to you.

Yeah, I will say it did feel a little heavy on the tech user when I was first setting it up. That's fine for us.

Yeah. I mean, it starts, it assumes you're going to use MQTT. You've got to put it into HTTP mode. Did you have to import an SSL cert or were you just, are you just raw dog plain text sending your location information?

Probably the second one.

Okay, good. Are you plain texting? You're using own tracks?

No, to our little self-hosted instance?

Yeah, our private self-hosted instance.

I did set up Let's Encrypt.

You did, but you're not using that on the client, are you?

I think I am.

Are you? Because it seems like it just defaults to HTTP.

Well, good question, actually, then. That would be a major issue.

Wes and I are currently frantically...

I mean, if we put this on our own private lands, we would be doing this over tail scale anyways.

It's true, yeah. Okay, the mode is called HTTP.

Okay, yeah.

But the URL I'm using, it has a cute little S.

It does have the S in it.

It can also do MDT, which is interesting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that would probably be a yes. So you got the S too?

I got it.

All right, good. I was just curious because I did look at that. That's not the way I set it up. Yeah, so I...

I did leave the other server we're running, which we'll get into the integration. That one's totally unprotected though.

I will say, I think own tracks, if you're willing to go through the configuration is the more pro route to go with this because you do get the config export. You might get a little more granularity, but if you're on iOS or you want to dedicate an iOS device for this, they, they actually make a dedicated app that is very simple. You give it the URL of your server and your API key and that's it. And it just goes. is really nice. It's really simple to set up and, as accurate as iOS location can be.

That's impressive. Yeah.

I get them less with the dedicated app. I still get them. So it really comes down to how you fine-tune, how often it updates, how often it uploads, and you can tweak all of those settings. But if you're looking for just something that's kind of basic and you want to minimize battery usage and you already have Home Assistant, that integration will work, and it was pretty accurate. If you want something better, I think OwnTracks or their dedicated app on iOS is the way to go.

I do like that OwnTracks lets you toggle your, you know, how much battery do you want versus accuracy. Because, yeah, I noticed the same. It would miss some sections of my trip if it wasn't moving enough.

What I extra liked, I'm not sure if you caught this, Wes, is that in the actual notification for OwnTracks, which is like a persistent notification.

You can pause.

You can pause, but you can also quickly change the style of reporting. You just tap the button and it allows you to cycle through how aggressive the reporting is.

I thought you were going to say you can pause because one of the nice things with OwnTracks is it makes it a little bit easier to say, stop tracking. I'm going to the adult shop. Stop, whatever you do. I don't know what you guys do. Pause. And then it's just right there to resume. That's really nice too, because you can just tap it and then get in the app. Their app makes that possible as well, but there's not like that Android persistent notification aspect that gets you there quicker.

It does have a button now, at least. So it'll pull it up on the map.

Oh, yeah. Nice. Okay, good.

It is kind of a zoomed-in map, so you probably have to have some idea of where it's showing you, but there's zoom control.

In OwnTracks, they have something similar called waypoints, and I've been marking a few waypoints as we've gone through this experiment. But I definitely expected them to show up in the big D-Witch, and no go. Not yet, anyway.

Yeah, I don't think those make it up. Yeah, that's the thing. You've got to mark them in the D-Witch if you want to save them. It'd be great to have, if they ever make a data app for Android and on the iOS one, it would be great to say, oh, save this. So you boys got to play with something that I didn't mess around with, even though I'm a big fan of Image, the self-hosted Google Photos alternative. You, Wes, and Brent played around a little bit with Image integration with the Big D Witch.

Yeah, I believe it supports both Image and Photo Prism, if you're a Photo Prism user. And you go into your user settings, and you just give it the URL string that you need, as well as the API key, and then it can start pulling in, I think it just sucks through all the various photos in your image and looks for GPS data and then converts that to point information and feeds that into the trip stuff you were talking about, etc.

Yeah, in fact, image stores in the database location information separately, so it can probably just pull that right from the database. So what did you see after this process was done?

Well, it does process a little bit, so it's not instant. I mean, Wes and I were a little... We were going to dinner when we were doing this.

And we were a little impatient. You got a big database, Wes?

You know it.

A lot of dog photos in there.

But the nice thing is that then in Devarich on the map.

I'm sorry, what?

DeWitch, I think we're calling it. You end up with these little photo circles, little sort of.

Overlaid on the map.

But also the photo preview itself overlaid on the map, which is a nice touch. And you can hover over them and get like the photo itself and a bunch of metadata, which was nice. And it also, Chris, allows you to click and see everything else on that date. Or that location, sorry.

Oh, really?

In that location, yeah.

That was a functionality we were particularly hoping to get out of Google Photos, which it does not.

It's not necessarily, I think, super optimized. A lot of this is pretty new in beta. So, like, we were noticing, as we were bootstrapping the image, I just started syncing all of the photos to my phone. But so I decided that was probably not a tenable idea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you can see it sort of, you know, I'd just taken a trip to visit my folks. Or we were doing it at LinuxFest Northwest, and some of those got there. So you can see like the various regions populating. So you have a ton of photos right now. It seems to like load them, not necessarily in like one optimized batch, but it was actually quite useful to see.

Yeah, I agree. So can you tell us a little bit about how you did set it up? I know they have a Docker Compose. It looks like it's pretty straightforward, although it's kind of a kitchen sink application. I say that with love, but it's a big Docker Compose.

Yeah, it's a Ruby app. We haven't had one of those for a minute. It's also powered by Postgres and PostGIS for that GPS processing geospatial data handling, which is great. There's a Redis container in there too, app container.

Which worked for us because you had Nginx in front of this as a reverse proxy, which was fantastic.

NixOS, indeed. Yeah, so it was really easy. So NixOS just built up some Nginx to quickly play Let's Encrypt Proxy. And then this thing was just powered by Podman. So it works just fine with Podman, Podman Compose, if you want to use their standard Docker Compose thing. or Docker, obviously.

I just love it because it's like, yeah, there's a Docker Compose available, Wes. And Wes is like, great. Yeah, I'll take a look at this. Okay, I got it running in Podman. Like, okay, let's go.

Chris, you did notice that someone's working on a NixOS module for this.

Yes, although it's been a month, but there does seem to be a module in the works, which would be really, really great because this is definitely something I'm keeping after the show. I'm going to keep this running. I'm going to put it on my rig directly and I'm going to track every road trip I take with this thing. I love it. And they do also offer a hosted version, which is €5 a month, which works out to be about €60 a year, which is an early access discount.

Oh, yes. a good point there. It didn't, it came with the default user, like a demo user. It was not necessarily clear how to make more. Admittedly, I did not read all of the documentation, surely. But what I ended up doing was just manually inserting some more rows into the user table, which did mean for a little bit I did not manage to give us each unique API keys, which caused some confusion.

You know, if you go into the settings, there's an add user button.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. Jesus, Wes. Oh, my God. Anyways, yeah, so be aware. Depending on how you create the user account, you need to generate new API keys.

Oh, I see. Yeah, you're right. Well, then don't do like I do.

It worked, though. Yeah, so we actually have...

I should have made you the administrator.

We have four users on this system. Wes, you have 1,017 points of locations tracked. I have 2,535 and Brent, you have 1,376. I'm surprised I beat you actually.

I wonder why that is because I moved around a lot more than you did.

And we're tracking sooner.

And I was trying to have it report quite aggressively because I figured.

Well, so do I. I maxed it. I wonder why. Maybe it's because for a little bit I fed home assistant in. I don't know. But I'll take that as a win. That means I'm the winner of the points of tracking.

Is that how we're measuring this?

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Well we have some feedback this week Wes you went to a little meetup.

Yes so Tailscale hosted a Seattle meetup I guess the first sort of community meetup they've done but it sounds like they're hoping to do more big shout out to the team Natasha and the rest of the Tailscale folks for putting it on great meetup I thought well attended well run there was snacks drinks, and folks giving little talks, including myself.

Oh, really?

Oh, yeah.

That's fun. Did you run into any listeners?

Yes, definitely some listeners. And then some folks who maybe, hopefully, are listening now or thought Maybe they might check it out.

Well, hello to them. Thanks for listening.

And Tailscale's own Brad Fitzpatrick gave a sort of gripe fest of things they wanted to fix. They know our issues in Tailscale. So that was fascinating.

Oh, that's great. Brad was there. That's great.

And then folks were able to sort of, you know, quiz him on, are you considering this feature? How about that? Could it ever work? So you got a little Tailscale nerdery. A lot of folks sharing stories. Some folks from Cumulo told a story of how Tailscale saved them during like a big outage they were having. and their tailscale backdoor was the only way they had access to that remote data center. So a lot of great nerding out about fun networking and home lab and all kinds

That's what I love about JB meetups and these type of meetups, is you can say something like that. And it doesn't go right over somebody's head. They know exactly what you're talking about.

And also, it's nice to know people are doing crazier things than we are.

Yeah, we're not the only ones doing wild stuff. Well, that's neat. We were on the road. I'm glad you could make it.

So, yeah, I don't have any insider details or anything, but do keep an eye out if you're a Tailscale fan. And maybe they'll do a meetup in an area near you sometime.

I really would love to do more meetups in general. So we should keep an eye out for other meetups. We should do more of our local meetups. You know, maybe somebody out there wants to be part of the crew one day, and the meetups seem to be a great way to discover new people as well.

Isn't that how Wes showed up?

That is. And you kind of did too. I mean, LinuxFest essentially was a meetup.

Right?

That's true.

Good point.

Oh, I definitely met a few folks who had just gone to LinuxFest Northwest there too.

No kidding?

Absolutely.

That's great. Yeah. Boy, LinuxFest. It feels like it was just yesterday. And I already miss it too. It was a good one.

To me, it feels like it was a month ago.

Really? It feels like we just went to Linux Fest and then we were on our trip.

Well, that is true.

Yeah, that is true. That is how it kind of went, isn't it?

Well, we got a baller booster here, our dear PJ. Jeff, you sent in 68,382 sets. Here's your little message. I've used both a laptop and that small PC for home assistant. The power use is about the same, but the laptop is significantly faster, has way more RAM, and can be used for more than just Home Assistant. With the laptop, I was able to actually use the voice stuff and ESB Home builds in less than a minute.

I like that you call it a little message. Did you catch that? It's a little message. It's our baller boost, buddy.

I also like that he's addressing it to Jeff. As if we read all of the boosts to Jeff.

I've spent so much time with Jeff. I mean, we've been under vehicles together in the last couple days. I feel like we've moved to a new level in our friendships.

Yeah, he farted in front of us. So there's that.

Like I said, new friendship.

Now, this is where PJ and I have a disagreement. Technically, he is right. It is a better machine, it is faster, it can do more things, and it has a built-in battery screen and keyboard. So it's basically everything you'd want, right?

And when Brent is unwilling to reboot his framework, it could be a backup show machine.

Oh, that's true too. However, as somebody who has lived for 10 years in a tiny rig, I can tell you there are certain things that are absolutely just invaluable. And one of them is as small as possible. No monitor, no keyboard, nothing. A laptop, if you can believe it, is too big. It is too big. I know. And so what you do is you, and also I'm a big believer in integrating home assistant into everything.

Do I start my engine through Home Assistant?

I actually would be totally down for figuring that out. If you think about it, it could be really genius.

I mean, it probably pre-warms the shower for you.

Well, like a lot of losers, when they get remote start, they have like some sort of remote system. You know, what is that?

Proprietary for sure.

You could remote start from anywhere. And there's actually valuable. There's actually value in that because maybe your batteries are getting low. You want a little bit of alternator charge. You know what? You bring up the old Home Assistant app, you hit the button, and ESP connects a relay. Boom, your engine started.

It's a pretty short list of folks that have remote started over WireGuard. So you could be on that list.

I think we could do it. And I'm saying, when I say everything, I mean, you really need to think about it because it changes your life. And so you want this to be its own dedicated appliance. Hard, solid, only does one thing, and that's automate your life. So you're not going to run Graphana on this thing. You're not going to run VS Code. Well, maybe you'll run VS Code, but you're not going to even do voice stuff

Is there an argument for, you know, Olympia Mike who just keeps supplying them with backup Xbox for decades?

So I'm just actually, you know, I'm having some fun. But my point is really, I find it super valuable to have a dedicated machine. And I've gotten by on a Raspberry CM4 with two gigs of RAM for two, three years now.

Weren't you just saying this morning you really want to upgrade?

I do. I think it needs more memory.

Oh, okay.

But you have eight gigs.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah. So, you know, yes. and then i think the way you do the other stuff like uh voice analysis locally um you know whatever services like jellyfin you might want to run whatever else that's an odroid that's something else that's also very small or it's a raspberry pi whatever it is but it's very small it's dedicated to just a few things also dc power um that's at least my thoughts so i mean he's right and i feel like i'm right it's just a it's just your point of view and.

You do have to consider if you want the support contract from Chris Lasko.

Industries. Yeah, right.

You probably do have to go with his recommendations for the document you signed.

Yeah, let's we'll review the contract.

Turd Ferguson boots in with 27,333 sats. Starting off here too, Boos, sending sats and good vibes for the van rescue.

Mmm, I think those vibes helped.

Thank you, Turd. It did, certainly.

I think we could have used those vibes a little sooner, but once we got to Oregon things turned around.

Could he use those vibes for like restaurant choosing?

Yeah, and some of the gas tank work, and some of the electrical, and that exhaust leak that we fixed and then unfixed.

I don't remember that one.

We'll get into that. We'll get into that later.

Yeah, that's because of the exhaust. It does stuff to the old memory.

It does make you very sleepy. But that's for the launch. Thank you, Turd.

Okay, and then second boost here. Did you know, in May of 92, SLS not Slackware was the first Linux distro, making installs way easier and sparking the distro boom.

SLS in 1992, not Slackware. Do you remember what SLS stands for? I think.

Linux trivia.

I think it's soft landing Linux. The idea was making it easy to get started with Linux, if I recall.

Way back in 92.

Yeah, isn't that something?

I think we can still install it today.

I do not. have you tried maybe in camu maybe we could do it in camu thank you turd appreciate the boost.

Well fabian sent in 10 000 sats oh i think it's fabine, Trying to prep for the TUI challenge, I've been trying to find a good way to watch YouTube. All those YouTube TUIs seem to be based on NVIDIAs, which gets blocked all the time. So I created my own based on the YouTube API, and we'll just show you a list of videos by your subscriptions in the TUI. It's not real YouTube subs, but then it opens an MPV. This saves so many gigs of RAM.

You know, I would rather just have a UI that shows me my subscriptions anyways. but raises I think one of our first gray areas that we need the listeners to help us clarify does launching MPV from the terminal count since that is technically a graphical application right.

I think one can make the argument that if you're controlling it from the terminal and it's something that the terminal can't reasonably provide in a realistic sense maybe but you gotta.

Boost in to tell us or contribute Yeah, because I feel like maybe that's the line. If the terminal can't do it, you can't do it.

There must be a terminal out there that does it, right?

Well, there's LibCaca. That's the bargain basement version.

I'm sorry?

Are you okay? Yeah, I mean, look it up.

Do you need to lay down? Are you all right?

Well, that's a separate matter.

Okay. It can't be done. I mean, maybe, because couldn't I just launch Chrome from my terminal if this is okay?

Oh, yeah, I don't think that would be okay.

Right, so where do we draw the line here? well.

You know Chrome's a full featured thing this is literally.

Just launching not a full featured thing compared.

To a web browser.

Well okay I'll give you that web browser's practically an operating system.

Just needs a good text.

Out of it okay well why couldn't I launch you know Zed or VS Code or Gedit.

Yeah, I mean, there's a slippery slope to be pointed out here.

I feel like it's too slippery. You see what I'm saying?

So we need...

We need the listeners to either boost in or participate in the GitHub and clarify this particular gray area. Because I don't know how to... Because I want to watch videos. So I want this. But I recognize it opens up the door to cheating. It really does, boys.

Do we have like a pre-approved shortlist or something?

Hmm. Hmm. An approved list. Like MPV and VLC, maybe?

Or like for specific carve-outs, right? You can't do a browser, but you can. If you're just playing videos, that's fine as long as you launch it from the terminal. But I don't know.

I don't have the answers here. I don't know. I don't know. Because you can't watch videos in a terminal. Unless, like Minimek tells us, you use Enlightenment. Then you could. Maybe I'll just use Enlightenment. I don't know.

No, no. It's a standalone. It's a standalone application. You need the AFL libraries. You just install terminology, and then you're in. It's part of every distribution.

Well, look at that. A little Enlightenment technology saving the day. So I feel like if the terminal is natively capable of doing the task.

Then you should do it there. Yeah, agreed.

Yeah, then that's okay. Ooh, maybe that's the line. We got to figure this out.

I have a prediction. Okay. I think we're going to find several other gray spots that we're going to have to figure out.

Oh, great. Thanks, Brent.

Oh, you're welcome.

Oh, my God. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Brett, if you plan on doing any traveling with the van and why have a van if you're not going to travel, then I suggest a GMRS radio. Most truckers have switched from the old CB to GMRS, and while you need a license to transmit, you can listen without a license, and I know you like to listen. Also, you have to build a meshtastic node because, well, reasons, Brent. I mean, Brett.

Well, I will say I did bring my meshtastic node on this trip.

Uh-huh.

I mostly forgot to check it, and also I don't think it picked up very much, or I'm using it wrong, or Jeff saved me. But I do think it's a great idea to put some radios in there. I'd be curious to hear why the truckers have moved from CB to this new GMRS.

Yeah, I would actually like to know that too. Because the CB is such a classic thing. It is. I do know that when I did my research in GMRS does seem to be a lot more popular, so I'd plus one that. But I think what you'd want is kind of like a dedicated MeshTastic node built in. Maybe even something that has its own power source. Put a little solar panel for it. I don't know. I'm just saying.

You know, if you just stick to CB, you could be CB Brent and, you know, sort of big fish, small pond, right? You're the guy on the CB all the time. So anyone who's listening, they're getting you.

He's already buying tapes. Right. You went to the thrift store and bought a bunch of tapes.

I did.

So he's kind of got a retro vibe going.

Diana Ross. Pretty good.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think maybe coming near you, CB Radio will feature Linux Unplugged maybe next week.

The one, the only, the genius bean himself, Gene Bean, comes in with a row of ducks. Just wanted to say that I'm amazed at how nice the headsets you used at LinuxFest sound.

Oh, good.

On another note, I love hearing what y'all are doing with Home Assistant. I am way, way, way down that rabbit hole and would be happy to help if you want.

Oh, that's great. Gene is a great resource. I'm pretty far down that hole myself. I wonder, Gene, like, where are you and I at? Because I'm sure you followed my journey on Self-Hosted. I loved giving folks a tour of Lady Joops' Home Assistant system at LinuxFest. There was like three or four different distinct batches of people I brought through the RV to show them how things worked. And it controls everything. Thank you, Gene Bean. It's good to hear from you.

Well, son of BoomBus comes in. 4,444 sats across two booths. I think that's a bunch of ducks. What's the least useful Home Assistant integration you have but refuse to delete?

This does become a problem.

There's a lot of integrations. I'm seeing as I get more integration set up. I don't have any that fit yet, I don't think, because I'm still just still getting them configured to my next config, but.

There's a lot of community repos too, so you can add even more than the built-in ones. So you can really go crazy. Mine, I think, might be a surprise. I think it's the Jellyfin integration. And when I had Plex, because I thought I'd really use that and I'd maybe build automations, like we're going to watch a movie and we'll have the lights turn off, or I'll have a card that shows what's currently being played and I can hit pause,

Now that you've expressed this to yourself, will you delete it?

No, I think I'll keep it. Great. I mean, it works. There you go. Thank you, son of a boom bus. Boom bus isn't a bad name. We need people to boost in names for the van. Van or bus. Because bang bus isn't sitting well with people. Bang bus is not sitting well. They took it in the wrong direction.

Plus, this way we can make a series of bang bus swag. That'll be the legacy swag, limited production run.

Okay.

And then we'll have the new swag for the new name.

Because we're still on top of our swag game. But we need new names. It could be a van. It doesn't have to be a bus. It's technically a van. It's a beautiful, big, juicy van, really, is what it is. And so just keep that in mind. Yes, we call it the bang bus. but it's really, a big juicy van.

Well, Tomato sent in 5,000 SATs. Hearing about the state of the engine ceiling in that van, here's some SATs from MQ7 so Brent can get carbon monoxide monitoring going.

Ooh, now, PJ, you're up to date on the MQ7. You've been having some long-term project plans around building an MQ7 sensor, right? For carbon monoxide?

I got a couple of them sensors already. You just need to get some MOSFETs to create tiny little heaters on them, and then we can use them with ESP devices.

Wait, did you say a heater?

Yep.

Oh, I feel like I'm going to get in a territory I'm not ready for.

Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy. All right. Thank you, Tomato. It's nice to hear from you. Otter Brain came in with a row of ducks. He says, thank you, guys. Thanks to you guys, I got three Raspberry Pis going. One for Home Assistant, one for NextCloud, and one, of course, for PiHole.

It would be sweet if there was, like, a Raspberry Pi backplane you could just kind of plug them into. Wouldn't that be sweet?

I mean, folks have that.

Do they?

Well, versions of it. There's, you know, various enclosures, especially for mounting, like, a bunch with built-in switches and then.

Yeah, I like that. I love that. I should build something like that and just you know, you would, oh man wouldn't it be great if the CM4 platform had gone that way with carrier boards? Oh, that'd be a way. That would be a way.

The dude abides us 15,000 cents. I'm always reminded to boost live on Sundays when that Matrix notification pops up.

Aw, thank you, dude.

Yeah.

Nice Home Assistant interview, too. More of those, please.

I really like Polis. I think Polis is good people. And I really respect the trajectory they've taken, because I've been following them for a little bit over five years now, and they've just been taking the right step after the right step to make sure that if you deploy something using Home Assistant, it's not going to get clouded up, it's not going to get identified, it's going to be supported. And I really appreciate the direction they've taken things. Thank you.

We want to make the show you want to listen to.

Well, Odyssey Westra sent in a live boost. That's actually a live road ducks. Live tracking for me is super important for my job. I use it to keep track of when and where I've been and track my miles for my job. Oh, that's actually brilliant. Plus, it helps with billing for multi-day projects. So self-hosting this, he means Devarich, will be an important step in de-googling myself. Love y'all and live meep.

Yes. Nice. Honestly, that's so cool to hear. I hadn't even thought about it for tax accounting.

That's brilliant.

That is so brilliant. and you know it does have the ability to go in there and mark trips and so you could go in and say this was a work trip you.

Might want the high fidelity mode for that part.

Oh Wes I always have the high fidelity mode on I always do I'm.

Gonna add a feature request for fuel station integration.

Oh that would be amazing how would you do that I guess you could look up fuel stations yeah some way somebody could somebody could figure that out right there's.

A whole ecosystem here I think.

All right. Well, GC boosted him with 7,777 sats. He's coming in with a Grafonicon 2025 report. Oh, my God. Reading my mind. Some value for value right here. I received the Golden Grot Award for Best Professional Dashboard and presented my use case on an industrial system monitoring of a wastewater treatment facility. I would like to see this.

That's amazing.

Is there a video of this? Approximately 2,000 metrics at one second resolution.

Yeah, definitely want to see this.

Definitely want to see this. Great networking opportunity for data nerds. I also plugged the show a ton.

Oh, you.

Oh, wow. A NixOS sticker on my laptop brought out the NixOS lovers as well. I met someone who uses Proxmox with a NixOS LXC containers on board. Talescale was a sponsor. Unfortunately, I had to leave before Talescale community events started where they had some local celebrity named Wes.

Oh, sorry not to have you there. But GC, thanks for the report. And are you local? Were you just here for the conference?

Yeah.

There's several things we should follow up on.

And this is something I extremely appreciate. If you attend a tech event, an industry event, especially if it's adjacent to the show, please do send these reports in. It's so great just to keep in these, not only for our radar, so we kind of know what these events are going on, but so the other folks listening get an idea of what's going on out there too and what's actually worth attending. Man, thank you, everybody.

I do have a final question here for GC. You mentioned 2,000 metrics, one second resolution. Are you running this off a little laptop in a bus? Is that what you're using or some kind of industrial PC?

All right, thank you everybody who supported the show, either our members or by supporting each individual production. Those of you who stream sats, we had 28 of you, and we stacked 40,555 sats. Not too bad. Thank you everybody who stream sats as you listen. We see you, and we appreciate you. When you combine that with those of you who boosted, we had a very humble but yet very appreciated 189,657 sats. It's not our biggest episode ever. Maybe people don't like Home Assistant.

Now you're just trolling.

Maybe. But we do appreciate everyone who supports each production, either through the free Value to Value Network or through a membership at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. You're the greatest, and we appreciate you. All right, we have two picks this week, and one of them was cooked up by our very own Wes Payne.

Yeah, it's sneaky. You know, you're kind of one of the users I have in mind for this, actually. So it's a little gift to you, maybe.

All right.

Well, we all know how great the Docker tail scale sidecar pattern is, right? So you're running something in Docker. You want it to be exposed to your whole gosh darn tail net. So you do the sidecar. So in the same network namespace, you've got your application running. maybe it's Dwarich, maybe it's something else. And then a tail scale runs there too. And so to that app, it gets access to the tail net with its very own tail net name.

And IP.

And IP.

Which is really handy for applications like VS Code. So if I just go to code.whatevermydomain.com is, I'm actually just accessing a Docker container that is just right there on that IP with that just served up directly from the Docker container. I'm not going through Nginx. I'm not going through reverse proxy at all.

And it's nice in the sense that okay maybe you still want tail scale on your host for the host to access and other things but it decouples those so even if you decide later to move, that application stack to a different host nothing else on your tail that has to care because they never knew where it was in the first place.

And when the application starts up it's the same IP the same name all that stuff.

Even on.

A different host.

Yep so that's great but as you probably know from listening to the show we're all running a bunch of stuff with Nix OS now, and there is no built in automatic sort of do the same easy sidecar system because one of the advantages of NixOS depending on what you're doing is you don't have to isolate everything to run all these things at the same time so by default they're not totally off in their own world like you get by default with Docker so I am working on a NixOS module

So without a container but you're still taking advantage of network namespaces.

It's basically me sort of uh re-implementing a bunch of the stuff that docker compose does with networking so there's a bridge on the host and then we use virtual ethernet pairs into namespaces per service and a tiny little dhcp server if i'm honest to tie it all together and then yeah so then they're able to get a natted firewalled outbound connection and then tailscale that.

Is really slick and to be totally 100 transparent, We don't get paid for any of this. In fact, we're giving the milk away for free right now. The only thing Tailscale pays for is the spot at the top. We just really use it. And this makes it possible to essentially have every application you want to run via Nix get its own Tailnet IP and name and all of that.

And there's initial support for doing Netbird as well. In theory, you should be able to do this stuff. I haven't tried Nebula or anything, but in theory, other... I called it Mesh sidecar because in theory, other services should work just fine.

Am I right? The magic is really the network namespaces.

That's a lot of the whole setup and making it work and then getting the right wrapping and modifying of the systemd service to make sure that it like joins the right network namespace and the namespaces get set up and all that kind of bookkeeping stuff. And then the actual, yeah, the actual mess stuff, other people are doing much better.

Nice work.

So also, maybe don't use it just yet. I already want, I made the initial interface really easy. So you just give it a list of services you want to wrap, which works great as long as you're not trying to run like multiples of those where you might want to have different names. You know what I mean? Like it works great if you're just running one grafana instance across your tail net but if you start to have multiple or.

Plex or jellyfin.

Right um because it just right now it uses the nix os module interface name as well as the system those are all assumed to be identical so i want to add some configurability so you can change like which exact maybe the nix os and the system d name aren't exact matches or you want to have the name on your tail net be slightly different oh sure so i'm going to modify the interface a little bit so there's already going to be one breaking change.

I'll tell you the immediate use case if it hasn't quite clicked yet is jellyfin you know that's one area where i think jellyfin doesn't quite stack up to plex and that is sharing you know it is so easy on plex to share with your buddies and have multiple friends and multiple servers and jellyfin doesn't necessarily have that inherently built in but you can solve that if all of your buddies are on a tail net and

Yeah, you shared just this node or whatever.

Yeah, and you can all get to your Jellyfin servers.

Yeah, it doesn't matter what else you're hosting on that same box.

So that's where it gets really cool, just to kind of put it practically down.

I noticed this is licensed MIT. Can you say anything about that? Why did you chose MIT specifically?

It's kind of my default license, just because it's really short and sweet. And I mean, there are probably projects I do want to license with more copy left style licenses. But for a lot of stuff on the programming side, library things tend to be licensed more on the MIT or BSD or Apache or similar spectrum. So I don't mind the MIT, and I've built that into my little make-a-new-get repo script.

I have a second pick here. This one is also a little niche but useful if this is something you've been looking for. It's called Element.fm, and I was just recently made familiar with it.

Neat.

Yeah. There we go. So this was a packed episode. We talked about the news items. We talked about the Big D Witch. All of that will be linked in the show notes. You can find those over at linuxunplugged.com slash 614. Now, we're not going to be live next Sunday. We will be on a trip to Boston because we are attending Red Hat Summit. So we'll probably have a prerecorded episode. We'll have something for our members as well.