615: 25.05 Reasons to NixOS

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

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brett.

Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to chat with the NixOS release manager and get the inside scoop on what is a unique process to NixOS that I don't think any other distribution does. And then we're going to dig through the 2505 release and really just geek out on our favorite new things like applications and services you can run. Really, anybody's going to love that stuff. And then we're going to round it

I miss them.

I miss them, too. But we're pre-recording because we're going to be flying Sunday morning off to Boston to cover Red Hat Summit, and we'll come back with the signal from the noise. But first, I want to say good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplugged. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are. It is modern networking powered by the WireGuard.

I'm loving. So we've got a issue with discussion happening there. I'm loving some of these comments already. 20 years ago, I was watching Star Trek in the TUI using M player with FBCon support while waiting for my Gentoo system to finish building X and KDE.

Oh my god, he and I may have been building Gen 2 and watching Star Trek at the same exact time in two different places in the world.

Was this you?

Right.

This is Ben, and so Ben's conclusion is MPV is therefore cheating.

Oh, okay.

Strong argument, you know, it's a pretty strong argument.

Yeah, no, I mean, you gotta have X, or Weyland, I think it's cheating. But you have to have X or Weyland to run the terminal these days. Oh man, we really need, this is still a gray area, I think. we need people to get in on that conversation we also want to recommend a little extra listening for you a little extra dose of podcasting a little extra Chris and Brent like.

A deep dive Chris and Brent.

A deep dive yeah Launch 21 really it's the Brent show it was good I really enjoyed it you know editor Drew rarely compliments the shows you know good job guys but he said what did he say on this one This.

Was a really, really great episode.

That's what editor Drew said about, you know, it's good about Bigfoot as a service episode 21. Yes, Bigfoot as a service will make sense once you listen to it. And also, we want to have a call out here to our completionist in the audience. We know some of you are often listening in the past, like we just heard from somebody who just got to episode 600. So, you know, you can be up to like 15 episodes or more behind, and then you kind of catch up over time as a completionist.

This it's a little survey of folks who are back in time.

Yeah exactly that's what we're hoping to hear from i'm.

Definitely a completionist.

Yeah it doesn't surprise me at all no no how come what gave it away uh-huh yeah i could see that so do you do it for podcasts that you listen to even if they're like 600 episodes in yeah.

I guess i don't necessarily listen to the my particular podcast choices for like a current information they're more like story based or something like that uh.

Evergreen.

Or i'm just broken maybe.

Well i actually this is how i do it and again i'd love to just get input from the audience on how you do it but i will subscribe to a podcast and if i like it a lot, when they haven't released an episode for a bit or like it's the off you know whatever i will just go back and like fill in with their previous episodes depending on the show i sometimes will do completionist but generally i just sort of cherry pick i bet everybody has their own style yeah.

I think i'm about the same as you kind of go for the ones that seem interesting or roll through them depends on how many there are and uh how much time i'm trying to fill.

While we are traveling to Red Hat Summit and back, we should see Nix OS 2505 released. And there's a lot.

Update your flakes.

Okay. Or your channels. It's okay. It's okay. Channels are okay, too. And so this week, we wanted to deep dive into this because it's going to be a pretty significant release. And there's a lot of things we're looking forward to that anybody's going to find appealing. But there's a process when it comes to releasing a distribution. And there's probably no one better to speak to about this process than the Nix OS release manager.

Thank you for having me here.

Well, thank you. And before we get into it, I know I read a while back that you were using Asahi Linux with NixOS for over a year on your laptop. I'm wondering, are you still rocking Asahi or have you switched to something else on there?

Oh, I'm using it right now actually to do this podcast.

Amazing. Hey, bonus points for that.

We're getting out-nerded here, boys.

Is it an M1? I don't know the details, but that's what I have, and I know that works pretty well. yeah.

It's an m1 pro with 16 gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage.

So you're you're almost on like uh well you're more you're almost on two years now then aren't you 1.8 years you got to be almost the two-year mark.

Yeah because i got this it was mentioned on my blog somewhere that i got it like, not last year but the prior year so that would have been 2023 in like august from apple's refurbishment site ah.

Nice that's the way to do it yeah making it work yeah i've had pretty good success and look at you doing a call with video and everything we can see your shiny face and everything with it.

I mean that must be mean either you're building a lot or the actual sort of build cache and package availability for that system isn't too bad huh.

So the way i do things is a little bit different where i just have a 120 core ampere ultra max i.

Love it oh okay that helps things huh i see so you build on that and then just install it on the macbook yeah.

Yeah i just all i do is just tell it hey build my config and then i just tell my laptop just pull everything from that and then i reboot and then i use don't have to struggle with 16 gigs of ram versus the 256 in my desktop.

Heck yeah.

Yeah, that is a little superpower there. I mean, Nix makes it so easy, right? As you said, you just point it at your config, it's all the same, and pull the build files later.

That's great. Okay, so I wanted to kind of pick your brain on how the release manager process works. Because I might be wrong, but I don't know if it works like any other distro that I'm familiar with.

Yeah so i believe this kind of came about from an rfc from 2021 2022 somewhere around that time uh where the idea was to like i believe it was to get a more like formal process of release managing releases because it was an informal like way as far as i understood i wasn't in the project during that time quite yet, but the current solution is just you have the previous release manager and the coming up release manager and the previous

That must help right so in a sense like when you came on to do it for the first time that the other person there had at least done it that one other time before so there's some sort of knowledge transfer or training or at least just double checking on things to help.

Yeah that's kind of the general idea it is to kind of essentially be like a mentoring kind of thing where it's like if the, upcoming release manager doesn't like quite understand the previous one can help around and it's just easier with nix as it grows more uh there's a lot of stuff to kind of manage like picking like what packages should be backported or what changes need to be rejected because it could cause some issue with the current release because

I love this i feel like it kind of highlights the unique challenges nix os is such sort of a you know distributed online community without necessarily i mean it's all being worked on as we're as we've seen but without necessarily a lot of structure at first and so you kind of do have to come up with how do we get a good process going that can make all those decisions because there's there's a lot actually that it turns out goes into a nix os release huh yeah.

There's quite a bit i'm not sure how other districts do it because it, from my understanding, it's easier to find information on Nix for the release process. And with just the matrix being out there and just how easy it is to get into the community, it's easy to find like what processes are going on and stuff like that.

Now, help me understand. So you're a release manager and then there's a release editor. What does the editor do?

The editor will go around the documentation and the release notes and kind of just make sure things are clean. Like if there's an issue with the previous releases documentation that people found, then they kind of like fix up the process for the upcoming release and manage just like, oh, this is weird wording. Let's just reword this thing a little bit nicer and stuff like that.

So there's ownership of kind of an important part of the release process at these steps is really what it kind of comes down to. Somebody is making sure that the process is being managed or that the notes are getting edited. That's really great. I mean, I really appreciate that that process probably took some time to form, but it seems this formalized. What made you want to do it? What made you want to get involved in the release process and become a release manager? Why take on the extra work?

I thought it would be interesting and that I could use my Ampere desktop to help around with things.

Right. Yeah, very true, I suppose.

How generous.

Has it been? Would you describe it as interesting or did it meet expectations so far? I know we're not at the finish line yet, but we're really close.

Yeah, I think it's interesting.

Would you do it again?

Maybe in like a few years. Not quite sure.

Ah, yeah, okay. Has it been a considerable time commitment?

It's one of those things where it's not a huge time commitment, But it is There is a certain amount of effort And time that needs to be taken to Put into the releases Right.

I'm curious what you learned about the Nix and NixOS ecosystem by being a release manager versus maybe how you were being involved earlier, maybe just a committer or a user.

So we had different channels of how we push PRs through. We have staging, and then we have unstable, and then we have the master branch, and then we have the stable branches, which are for every release. and so when you're a release manager kind of learn how like you set up those stable branches, so that it is possible for people to so that the release is kind of segmented away from the current unstable set of things and.

Is that where some other processes come in like i know there's the zero hydra failure component often of the release cycle which i think can be a little opaque to folks who are not familiar maybe even what hydra is.

Yeah that kind of comes from there can.

You explain hydra to me because i'm not familiar with what it is.

Hydra is the ci server and build farm for nix it is powered by multiple machines that we have access to that the infrastructure team manages and the general thing is you just push a pr in and then and it just builds whatever, and it puts it into the cache.

Oh. So it's integrated right into the workflow. So you, from GitHub, can essentially have something sent off to this build farm?

GitHub doesn't really trigger anything, because it's on an automated set of when to run the job sets. Typically, from the trunk, we have it where it usually takes about eight hours, because Nick's package is so large. But the general way it works is it's configured to push the, like, things in the pipeline 10 minutes after, like, the current set.

I'm curious how close to what you thought it would be when it started, now that we're close to the end, like how accurate were projections, estimates, plans at the beginning of the release process, and now here we are at the end, like how much has changed, how much didn't work out, was it pretty smooth, just that kind of overall picture?

Yeah, it was pretty smooth. We did have an issue with 2411 that kind of laid it a little bit, But we did add a buffer of time when I was figuring out the schedule to get around that. But as far as I can tell, 2505 is on track.

That is great to hear. We're going to be traveling when it lands. That's why we wanted to get you on a little early. But it doesn't mean we won't be upgrading systems just because we're traveling.

Of course not.

Tristan, thanks for coming on and explaining some of this because it is a pretty unique release process that Nix does. And I just think it helps wrap our heads around it a little bit. So thanks for coming on early. 1password.com slash unplugged. That is the number 1 password slash unplugged, all lowercase. Okay, I have a question. Do you have an idea, and I mean a really clear picture without any exception, where your users are working, what services they use,

All right. Well, now we know how the sausage is made. I think we got to taste the sausage. It's not out yet, but people are hard at work compiling the release notes. So, you know, we took a little sneak peek.

There is some really neat things in here. But let's start with the table stakes, boys. And of course, that is the Cosmic Desktop. The Alpha 7 is going to be officially supported. It's initial, but it's in here in Nix OS 2505.

Yeah, there's been various ways you can run it and try it out and all that. But now it'll be easier than ever.

So that's pretty neat to see.

Has any desktop ever gotten this much traction while still being Alpha? I think it's super impressive.

Yeah, you're right. It is getting everywhere fast.

This is more one of those Gmail-style alphas, you know, where everyone's used it for years.

Where's the invite code?

Yeah, right. The invite code is you've got to install 2505, I guess. Of course, we're getting GNOME 48 in here, which is a fantastic release. We've covered that pretty extensively. And Plasma 6.3.5, which is very fresh, very recent. So you're getting all the good standard table-stake desktops. But, Wes, there's something in 2505 that feels like, you know, We've seen Ubuntu get App 3.0. We've seen Fedora working on DNF5.

Yeah, it's a little bit important if you're going to be running the NixOS system. It's the thing that helps you actually turn your configuration and the updates you made there into an actually updated system.

Pretty essential. And there is a litany of reasons. I suppose the code for Nix OS rebuild right now is written in Bash and not necessarily awful itself. It does mean it's just sort of difficult to refactor. It's kind of difficult to parse and get through. It's a big slog. It's also a bit of a hacky mess, the developer notes. It also doesn't have proper testing. There are some integration tests, but no unit tests and coverage is probably a little less than it should be.

Yeah and that's where we get nix os rebuild ng written in python yeah why python well you know there's a bunch of reasons but a lot of it has to do with it's very flexible dynamic it's a scripting language so you can like easily update or change it and you don't have to do a whole compile cycle it's also well supported in nix right there's lots of pythons available there's also python libraries packaged in nix if you want to use those and it has a pretty good size standard library

Before you go, explain why, between Bash and Python, why it's for maintainability and other developers coming along, why it's superior.

Yeah, so like in Bash, if you're trying to take a bunch of arguments to a function, they're just like the numbered, you know, dollar sign one and two and three. And for small things, that works. But if you're trying to write a robust program where maybe you're having a lot of peer functions, so they just like take in whatever data they need and then transmute it and return you whatever their actual logic is supposed to be.

And it's something that's probably easier to maintain by a group of people, too.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Python is simple enough, like for small enough things, Bash can be easier. Right. But once you've got like logic where you have actual conditionals and like multiple paths and you want to have error handling and that's where it's kind of it's not everyone's forte and not everyone is like that, you know, experience with writing that level of Bash. It's one thing to write a simple script that doesn't fork at all.

Indeed, it does get complex pretty fast. So something else that we saw land in here is NixOS rebuild build image subcommand has been added. Now, I know already that I could produce a container image. In fact, this is kind of nice because I was looking at Nifty or Notify. I talked about that in self-hosted that came out on Friday. And in there, they have pretty clear documentation for the Nix configuration syntax.

Yeah. So now you can do NixOS rebuild and use build image, new subcommand, and it allows you to build a platform-specific disk image from a NixOS configuration.

Hoo-wee boys!

So you could then run that as a container or as a virtual machine or as a whole machine, depending on what you put in the config.

Well, and just think about the potential here for testing. You know, before you deploy it, you could build a VM, power that up inside QMU and run through an entire test process before you actually commit it.

Yeah. And there has already been some tooling around just building a VM to test out. But I think that probably was customized a bit to like be a VM to run on your architecture there for that purpose. So I'm imagining that build image may be a bit more flexible in terms of exposing this. You could already include the right modules and then build the right build output and do it yourself.

I think for onboarding new people to Flakes this is going to be such a great tool yeah.

But they're still not officially supported but yeah you can do this all right all right I'll take it.

Officially unofficial Yeah.

Really. Of course, the user statistics say otherwise, they say rather official. But one of the things that when we talk about a distro release, we don't usually talk about is how much easier it is to do new fun stuff like run services or applications and with an XOS release. you get new modules. And a module is like a full set of configuration. It's isolated for like a particular application. A lot of it's reusable.

Yeah, you can sort of think of it as a function where you put in all these options that you say like, oh, I want it to listen on this port, and I want it to support these features, or, you know, whatever else.

Right, open this port in the firewall.

Yeah, exactly. It generates an updated Nix config for you that sets all those options and creates the right systemd services to run whatever it is that it runs. And then once you rebuild and start, all that happens.

Yeah, like I have Nix Cloud on my system as a module, and, oh, it's great. So we get a whole bunch of new ones that land in 2505.

I counted them for you.

Oh, you did?

Yeah.

Okay.

Uh, 95.

Ah, yeah. So we'll link to the full list, but we're going to go through like our top three, four, five that we think are really awesome and fun. And let's start with yours, Wes, because you have a, you have a really good one.

Yeah, this one I was just scrolling through and it stood out because it seemed fun. It's called Mary TTS, an open source multilingual text to speech synthesis system written in pure Java and it has a web UI.

So to get this working, was it just name enable? Yes.

Yeah, I didn't quite have the module on my system yet. So I was able to just run the main executable from Nix packages. It's already in unstable.

Once you have the module, then you just go into your configuration and you say like service name, enable. And you could probably just get off to the races from there. And sometimes, yeah. All right, so let's try it out. This is the Mary web client. For, uh, is it, it's Mary TTS. Okay. All right. All right.

Hello to the unplugged audience. Please excuse my nervousness. This is my world debut after all. Boost in if you want me to replace Brent.

Oh, whoa. It got, it chose violence. Um, there are some fun effects you can do. Jet pilot is one of them. How does, has anybody tried jet pilot?

I read about it, but it was too scared to.

Hello to the unplugged audience. Please excuse my nervousness. This is my world debut after all.

Yeah, you could put in there like, hello, everybody, and it would kind of sound like a pilot.

Or, you know, you really want to get better at hearing and be able to understand all that pilot chat over the radio, which is impossible to understand.

Apparently, you can also sound like you're in a stadium, so it can generate, and it gives you a...

Hello to the in-plug audience. Please excuse my nervousness.

That's kind of fun, and it gives you different output options, like a WAV file or an AIF file or an AU file. The AU file is kind of neat. And you could also output just words. There's like all kinds of different output options in this one simple website here. And you have different input types as well. Look at this. There's all kinds of different things you can feed into it to have it generate. So it gives you a really kind of silly web page to play around with.

Yeah. And obviously, you know, we're just using the default voice model it comes with. So I'm curious to see. It does sound like, yeah, it does. So I'm curious to see how far you can take this with other voice models.

I saw that you also picked out a handy Postgres tool.

Ah, yes. This one, I'm surprised it didn't exist already because it's been around for a while, but great to have it as easy to run with a module. It's called Postgresed. So you put a little G in there. Because what it takes is Postgres and adds an automatic REST server on top. So you get like a nice swagger open API dock and page for it. And basically all of your tables and views get exposed via an HTTP API.

Oh, that's cool.

So there's tons of stuff where you want to connect and use like an actual SQL connection. But.

Yeah, not always.

Yeah, if you have a lot of views you're using or like stored procedures you want to call. or just as like a quick way to expose data for backups or for automation.

For sure.

Super handy. Okay, and this one I haven't tried but I'm curious about because we've discussed several of these over the years, as have you guys on self-hosted. It's called Omnom.

Okay, I love the name, Omnom.

It's a webpage bookmarking and snapshotting service. Access and share previously visited pages without worrying about modifications or availability, which I thought could be great too for us. It's just ways to like make sure we still have access to sources we're using for a show.

I've been using Kara Keep for a while, and this looks like it could be another one to check out. Om Nom is a great name.

And then this is maybe a bit self-serving, but check this out. It's called YouMurmur, or maybe MicroMurmur. It's a minimalistic Mumble server primarily targeted to run on embedded computers like routers with an open OS like OpenWRT.

Whoa.

So maybe you're running NixOS on like a tiny device. You don't have a ton of resources, but you still want Mumble running. You want to be able to host Mumble.

Or you're like, Brent and I, you've got a couple of low-power machines, and you can throw a mumble. Whoa, that's crazy. It's a mumble server?

Yeah.

That's so neat. That'd be great for a little family or a little LAN party. That's pretty neat. Nice finds. All right, what did you dig out over there, Brent?

I pulled out a few. They're maybe of a different flavor, but there's one here that caught my attention. I think it's Gawk API or GoCappy or any way you want to say it. The reason it caught my attention is that it's a lightweight self-posted Firefox Send alternative without public uploads. Which I thought was interesting. So if you want to share some files, I don't know, with friends, family, that kind of thing, you can throw them up on this thing.

Well, what's neat too is it looks like if you wanted to slap AWS or any S3 compatible storage as the backend, it supports that. So you don't have to host the files, but you could still have a private Firefox-like send with S3 kind of, if you want, to call it unlimited backend storage support, I suppose. I mean, that's kind of a nice feature.

Yeah, and you just maybe add to this, but if not, right, just set up something that goes through and deletes things in there every once in a while. Or some of these services offer that built in.

Be a good feature.

Yeah, that's one of the main features here is things just disappear whenever you decide to.

Oh, perfect.

Oh, okay. GoK API, and as you would probably guess, it's mostly written in Go, which probably makes it pretty easy to get up and going.

Also, most Go things tend to be really easy to build with Nix, which is great.

I know you got one more, though.

Oh, I got two more.

Oh, you do? Okay.

One of them that stood out for me is actual budget.

Uh-huh. Yeah, I saw this one.

I've been looking for something to improve my, let's say, perspectives on my finances, and actual budget kept coming up, and I never had an easy way to deploy it. And as a NixOS module, sounds like I should dive into this one.

You want something that will tell you how much money you're spending on Thai food, basically?

Yeah.

I mean, probably good to at least know.

How much money we spent on mediocre food in California is really what I wanted to know.

No, you don't want to know that.

Oh, you're right. Okay.

And you don't want to see the van category.

No. If you're going to do budgeting and financing, it's nice to have something that's local first and run it on your own machine.

You don't want a third party to have access to all of your banking details?

Well, they already do.

It's a strange concept.

You know. All right. You ready to hear my finds? Oh, no, you had one more.

One last one I thought more I chose for the audience than for myself. It's Cursor, which is a VS Code-based editor that uses AI to help you do coding and stuff. I think some of our audience, at least a subsection, would be interested in that. And as a module, it might be nice and fast to get going.

I agree. Now, get ready for the ones I found because these are going to knock your socks off. The first one has been a bit of a bear to manage via Docker because you've got to build it every time, and then it builds the container, and then it produces a Docker Compose, and then you run that. So every update, it's quite the process.

And it's a great app, but yeah, a bit.

Yep. And I am talking about Pinchflat. I love this application. You know, we were joking about taking your stuff offline. This really is, it's YouTube offline for me. And it is a media manager for YouTube. And it's a self-hosted app that in the background, when your favorite YouTube channels publish new content, it pulls it down gently in the background. It'll also do playlists.

And probably maybe have a better time with the right limiting.

Yes. So pinch flat. And then it has a UI that lets you know this is all the latest downloads. These are how many videos you downloaded. This is how much space it's taken up. And for me, it means that I'm not watching these videos over my LTE or Starlink connection. Because the server is downloading them for me in the background. and then I just go into Jellyfin and I have a YouTube library and this has added all the NFO information that Plex or Jellyfin or Cody needs.

Nerdy detail that really doesn't matter But we don't yet have a soundboard clip for this, but it's written in Elixir, which I just like to see.

Oh, yeah. It's been really nice. Could somebody just do a little work to that? Maybe give it some effects and that could be it. That could be our Elixir. So that's really, really, really happy to see Pinchflat in there. Tracker, which we've talked recently about the Big D Witch and tracking ourselves with that. This is another GPS tracking platform that's self-hosted and lets you use things like own tracks to get location information. And then you can plug it into other front-end applications.

Yeah, send all that tracking stuff right to the crab hole.

Yeah. And then just a couple of quick hits, if you will, because I was just really happy to see this. There are three different Nostre packages landing. Really happy. Nostre RS Relay is a Nostre Relay written in Rust. There's also Haven, which is a high availability vault for events on Nostre to store Nostre events.

Great well i mean especially too there's more things you can do with the nostril wallet connect stuff if you're doing lightning things.

So maybe you.

Want to host your own nostril relay for that.

No kidding and now it's going to make that a little bit easier a lot easier actually and then And last but not least, because I just love the Image Project, which is IMMICH, and it is essentially a self-hosted Google Photos replacement, It has an ecosystem of applications around it now. It's getting very popular. And so there are apps that make it possible to publicly share your images, lots of other things. I have one that's called like Image Kiosk.

Oh, that's great.

Mm-hmm. And again, it's just services.image-public-proxy, you know, enable. And you've got it, assuming you've got the module. And it's going to make a, you know, it kind of rounds out the image hosting, and makes it really straightforward for people that want to get started with a Google Photos alternative, but don't know all of these intricacies. Now they can go read these plain, practically plain text modules and services, figure out what the options are and get up and going.

Just with this release you get a sweet little box you know um get it on nyx put it on tail scale you get next cloud going you put tracker on there you get image going you get a proxy going then you have.

A stir fry for dinner.

Yeah and then right and then you can connect all that stuff from your your mobile device over tail scale and you're off to the races that's basically you build yourself a custom boot disk image with the new build image thing and then deploy it on a server oh.

My gosh it's the golden setup it really is there you go westpain just figured it out, This show is looking for another sponsor. If you want to support independent Linux content that is focused on its audience, drop me a line, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. I'll make a great deal for a listener out there that wants to advertise their product, service, or business on the show. Reach the world's largest best Linux audience. Let's chat, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Gonna just i'm just gonna rely on brent i'm gonna he's gonna.

Yeah did you take notes uh.

I opened my.

Note application i'm gonna have to do it again now i'll.

Listen next week, Well, we got a whole bunch of boosts here and one baller from the Wine Eagle.

It is 26,666 sets. I feel like there might be a message in there. And he says, I hate going to the Nick's option search site for options. So check out Nick's search TV and you won't have to leave the terminal. Okay.

This is just setting us up for when we don't have access to a browser.

Oh, he does have a Tui challenge tip for us. games and GUI work programs should they be allowed? Well, GUI work programs I mean you gotta do your work. So the idea is to do as much of your work in the terminal as possible I think. And then if you look at the challenge rules we have like specific things to accomplish in the terminal. And I think that leaves room for like okay I gotta go do XYZ in this like web app that work requires or something. So what are you gonna do, right?

Yeah, we're not gonna have a Microsoft Teams calls one of our checklist items.

He says, I was having problems boosting from Breeze. I didn't see the JB node in the split. That does happen sometimes. The Lightning network is a peer-to-peer network. And the way Breeze works, which is very awesome, is it's a node in your pocket. And so I think sometimes when it starts up, it needs, you know, a minute, I don't know, 30 seconds to kind of like discover the network possibly. What do you think?

It may also help to send, like just send a low SAT test boost or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We can always skip reading those or, you know, they'll still get counted as your contribution.

Send like a 50 sat boost or 500 sat, something small and make sure it gets to them and then send your, send your boost that you want read on the show. That's probably, I know that's a little wonky and we'll probably have better answers for you very soon. So keep listening, but appreciate that baller boost, Wine Eagle. Thank you very much.

Mr. Nick 86 boosts in with a row of duck. Uh, merch goes to crunch bang bus crunch bang slash bus.

Yeah. We're trying to come up with good names for the bus.

I do like crunch bang bus.

Crunch bang bus isn't bad. Uh, we've had so many. Do any really stick out to you so far, brand of ones that are real winners.

I have a note here. Someone, uh, suggested the into penguin.

Right? Cause it's a road track independent. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Or the USS Brenter prize.

I liked soyager, but yeah, Brenter prize is better.

Soyager was really good.

There's also the Maple Meanderer.

That's pretty fitting. Which ones for you, though, have really stuck out?

Probably Poutine Wagon.

Oh, that's my least favorite.

Oh, okay.

Because it doesn't really rhyme.

We should open up some voting.

Well, we'll have to get there. We have to get some good names.

And remember, it has to look good on a whole van ramp.

And maybe a shirt and a hat. You know, as a car guy, Brett needs a hat.

Well, Tomato boosted in 13,369 sets.

All right.

Actually, in a couple boosts, and one of these is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sets. The headsets sound good to me. And for the TUI challenge, I think sixles should be allowed, since it's something that real deck terminals did. Otherwise, I vote no for external graphics.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Okay. I was really loving the idea of getting a Mac Plus off of eBay that still works and then just getting some sort of terminal app.

Like literally your terminal?

So if I had to go to a GUI, I'd have to only could run on the Mac Plus. Probably not viable. We'll see. So, you know, we've been getting pretty good feedback on the headsets, I think. I am extremely grateful for the audience's support there and then also the feedback.

Need the right table i've run into this several times where the table is incompatible and then what do you do we've had to figure out all sorts of different ways.

So it meant having a range of movement, which is always an issue when we're live.

And I think you have been sort of perfecting your own use of the microphone. You were trying it in studio last week, so you're happy with that. I'm still trying to get used to drinking with the thing, but we'll get there.

I did have a couple of times where I bumped it trying to drink, but I think Drew just cleaned that up. Thank you, Drew. Appreciate you.

They do continue here. Also, what about another bonus challenge to do social media from the two-y. Maybe a toot for Mastodon is a great example.

I was considering social media, but I don't like social media, so I didn't put it on the challenge.

Well, we could try.

That might be a nice bonus, though. Somebody should submit that as a PR.

Send your two-y to it.

Yeah, maybe a suggestion, too. Gene Bean comes in with 4,444 sats. You know what? I'm going to give that some strange odds. I don't know. He also might have been going for a McDuck. He says, I actually really like the sound of the headset you're using in studio. And he has a question for you, Wes. Why not check out TSD proxy? It was mentioned on self-hosted last week. So this could be like an alternative to the tail scale module that you created and announced last week.

Yeah, and it's a great option. There's lots of great little this. There's a few other, I think, competing projects, various methods to proxy things to tail scale with or without their own tail scale host entry. This one does that, right? so you can basically tell it to proxy things it can access and for each thing it proxies, make it show up on Tailscale, which is super great. So I think this would be a good alternative if you don't want to go the full sidecar route.

LandVan does slide right off the tongue land van. I kind of like that.

It'd have some, you know, being a good lineage here. A friend of mine had a minivan we dubbed the land van back in the day, which was often used during our regular land parties. Up until the engine got fired.

Oh, do we want that bad juju? Oh, nobody got hurt.

Nobody got hurt. It would be a story, but let's hope not.

You know, because you could really simplify the logo to just like an Ethernet plug. You know, the land van. Maybe with like a hat or like an ethernet plug with wheels on the road. Right. And like a windy road in Utah. You know what I'm saying?

I feel like maybe you've got a crush on this van. Maybe you're falling in love with this.

I might love another man's van.

I might.

That's a good one. Land van should go on the night. I don't know if it's a winner, especially with that bad juju there at the end, but I think it's worth consideration.

Well, our van hasn't caught on fire yet, but it does smell like waffles.

That's true.

While Oppie 1984 boosted in 4000 sets. Note to self here, don't use the auto-suggestions for names. Sorry, Brent, for calling you Brett last episode.

Hold on. No apology necessary at all, Opi1984. We have been riffing on that idea all week.

Yeah, behind the scenes.

Yeah, I got a whole new podcast lined up for Brett Johnson, so don't worry about it at all. I think you may have inspired my best podcast idea yet.

That's a cute dog, too. As for why truckers have migrated to GMRS, The stated reason is better audio quality, being FM rather than the CB's AM. And antennas are generally pre-tuned and slightly better range.

Oh, so that was going to be my question. I thought maybe the AM would be like on the lower hertz spectrum. Lower. Maybe you would transmit fervor. But sounds like GMRS actually has better range. Well, that settles it right there.

Obby continues here. The unstated reason, though, is since the late 70s, four-wheelers were getting on the CB's and messing things up for drivers. So they switched to get away from them. And, well, those reasons stated above as well. Besides, a license is just $35 and there is no test.

Well, isn't that funny how if you just put a $35 license in front of it, you get all the guys that are just sitting there slack-jawing off.

No more riff-raff.

We use, you know, the consumer radios that you just...

Family radios, they're sometimes called.

Yeah, family radios. Yeah. And the wife and I were on a road trip one time. And for, I don't know, eight minutes, as we were driving along, we heard two buddies. And the first one, where are you at? Oh, yeah, I'm just getting back in range. Sorry about that. I had to stop and use the bathroom. I had. And then he goes on to describe what was a significant BM for this guy over the radio on the channel the wife and I are on.

Quite the movement.

And we don't want to, like, jump in because we're listening. And they don't know we're listening. So, like, we had to wait until we were, like, way out of range. And then we're like, did you hear that? So, yeah, there's people on there just, I don't know, talking about anything, I guess.

I got slow-brained today. So one last piece of follow-up for Gene there.

Oh, yeah, sure.

It does also work with Netbird, and I think it should work with something like Nebula or other services to the module. Yeah, so that'd be another reason if you wanted something that wasn't Tailscale-specific support.

But could, or, you know, it could swap out, too. Outdoor Geek's back with 10,000 SATs. the van name should be good on a t-shirt. I know it should look good on a t-shirt. I agree. Like disco or cosmic. I came up with Vamoose. That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Vamoose looks even slightly better. That's V-A-M-O-O-S with no E at the end. I'm imagining a t-shirt art and van also being moose. Like, oh my God, this is so good. Like the cat bus in my neighborhood, Toronto. The moose is so obviously the branding to lean into for the van. Oh, I love this idea.

If you think about it, even the E they're deleting there, you know. And E is sort of just like antlers.

Yeah, that's true. The E could be antlers.

It could be like a little moose thing, you know, a little moose logo.

The moose has to be on the list. I really like that, Outdoor Geek.

Adding it to the list.

All right. Thank you. That's a good one. That's a good one.

Bologna 9,000 moose in with 6,000 sets. Hey guys, I'm behind a couple months, but here's 6,000 for 600.

Hey!

Keep up the good work.

I love it when we get the... All right. You get some plaid, too. I love it when we get the people in the back catalog catching up and letting us know. We want more of that. Thanks, Belagna.

How long ago does episode 600 feel to you guys?

Two years ago.

Yeah, I would say about the same.

Yeah, it's about two years ago.

Well, Raving Rob sent in 13,345 sets. Y'all are trying to rename the Bang Bus when the only choice in your minds should be the Shebang Bus.

Maybe that would change the perspective people get when they hear the name. I think the problem is when you take the name and you combine it with the look of the vehicle, the two things take you to the wrong direction. You know, Shebang Bus might be better. but Vamoose with Vamoose branding.

Send in your boost to vote for what do you think it should be?

So good. It's so good. Maybe we're missing something but yeah I'd like to know.

Oh there's a PS here. I messed it up already. It says PS. It's pronounced raving grub. I just dropped the extra G so sorry about that.

Alright well thank you everybody who boosted it. We had Shy Fox come in too with some comments on the headset just under the 2000s at cutoff.

You're real crazy, you just make sure you take a new picture every time you make a significant movement and then you let it suck that up.

Yeah then use image as your location thing and yeah i would actually not be a half bad solution for just partial tracking as long as you're really good about taking pictures one.

Thing we didn't mention last week too that came up was that you can import a ton of.

Different services.

Into devar including.

Just gpx files so like a garmin something like that you could actually pull into it and then visualize on there so thank you everybody who sends in feedback and supports the show with a boost it's one of our absolute favorite segments of the show and it brings up conversations we never would have thought to include we had 22 of you stream sats as you listened and collectively you all stacked 43 270 sats by just streaming them to us and we appreciate that a lot and then when you

That sounds pretty convenient, especially if you don't, you know, want to have to remember image magic convert command lines.

Now, what if you need to solve this problem for more than just yourself? Friends, family, significant others. Or maybe, maybe you don't want to have it just on one computer. Well, that's where Muzanook comes in, a self-hosted local image optimizer that runs in your browser. So it is a very easily well-designed, easy-to-use application that is a browser app that will work offline, actually. And it strips out all of the stuff you don't want to share when you're sharing

I'm happy to report Switcheroo is packaged already in Nix. And then I was able to just quickly find here someone is working on a derivation in Flake for Manzanuk.

Can I just have you look at this UI for a second? I know this is an audio podcast, but both of you pull it up there in your browser for just a sec. How clean and simple is that?

Oh, I like it.

Super spousal approval factor here, boys.

Yep. I think anyone could use this.

My wife, for her patients, writes a newsletter, and she's often putting images in there. And I'm like, you know, we could take out all the privacy and all the private info. You could resize it and make it really, really efficient for the email client to load.

It looks like it has a nice mobile, you know, looks good on mobile, too.

You know, I wish these functions were built into just our mobile operating systems from, just natively because well we all need to resize stuff and we all need to keep ourselves more private and that should just be built in I think.

I don't think most people that take pictures are even aware, well I'm sure our listeners are but I don't think most folks know that there's XF data in there that has location, date, camera type, you can tell a lot from that stuff and then you go post that online or share it in like a Telegram or a Discord or a Matrix, you could be giving away information you don't intend to And also, you're probably uploading a file larger than you need to. Or if you're on iOS, you're getting those HEIC files.

No, I just love the way you're pronouncing it. Can you do it one last time?

Mazinuk. How do you say it, Wes?

Mazinuk.

Oh, okay.

I was going to go with Mazinuk.

I was hoping you would.

Oh, yeah, there we go.

I was hoping one of you would because I thought that was a possible pronunciation.

But you prefer...

They are capitalizing it, so I think we have to yell it.

Yeah, that's why I was.

It's... Mazanoke!

Thank you. I am just going with what the developers clearly intended. Yeah.

That's all we ask.

All right, as we wrap up, remember, we're looking for all of you that are on the tail end back catalog completionist trajectory. Tell us where you're at. Say hi to us into the future. Of course, we want your feedback on our TUI challenge. We'll have that linked in the show notes, so you can go over to our GitHub there. We're also soliciting names for Brent's van. And I think we've got to figure that out pretty soon.

You can also just do mpv jblive.fm and periodically check.

Yeah yeah or just pop it in a browser tab jblive.fm are they live oh nope that's an old one if you hear music and farting around it's probably live That's how you know. Links to what we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 615. Matrix info. Membership info. Mumble info. How to contact us. It's all over there. Hyperlinks on a website at linuxunplugged.com. And then we mentioned it earlier. But go. If you're ready, go get some more