620: Brent Loves Building Things

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

My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent.

Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, off the shelf, just didn't cut it. So we built the tool we needed using open hardware and open source. You're going to learn the basics of how to build your own ESP32 project, whether it's for your own rig, an RV, or home automation system, or something like a smart chicken coop.

Hey, Chris. Hey, where's the name? Hello.

It's a smaller, quiet listening crew and a larger on-air crew this week.

Ah, lovely.

Grated.

JupiterBroadcasting.com slash mumble if you want the details. And a big good morning to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com slash unplug. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other, wherever they are, protected by wild gold. And if you go to TailScale.com slash unplugged, you'll get it for free on 100

Is it because we're live right now?

Yeah, there's that. It's a way to be live by just simply putting a couple of lines in an RSS feed.

And then your podcast client, if it has support like Cast-O-Matic now, it'll just show up like a regular podcast in the same place you go to listen to us.

No stinking Twitch, no stinking YouTube needed, no X, no big tech involved at all. Whatever streaming platform you want, whatever mode of streaming, video, audio, you just define it in your RSS feed and these clients read it and incorporate it just like your existing shows like Wes said. No digging around for links, no switching to another platform. You just open your podcast app and you tap play. It's so rad. And the podcasts that take advantage of this are standing out from the pack.

Maybe boost in if you give it a try.

Many years ago, I upgraded my RV, aka Lady Jupiter, aka Jupes, from a stock power system with a couple of golf batteries and a cheap inverter to a full zombie apocalypse off-grid capable machine. And ever since then, I've been trying to plug in different Linux components or different devices to try to pull metrics and organize and manage all of this. And I've built up a pretty mean system with one major problem. All that gear can overheat, especially when you need it the most.

Yeah, that cuts out a lot of options, I would think.

And if I'm putting it literally in my home, like I'm mounting it to the walls or in the walls, I want it to be open source. I don't want it to be a proprietary piece of software that has like a limited lifespan.

And that you don't really understand and can fail for unknown reasons at any time, that your only option is to replace the entire thing.

And if it's a proprietary piece of equipment, it's probably no longer made.

Right.

You know, it's hard to get the exact one-to-one replacement. I want something common enough that if in six years, seven years, it dies, I can order a new one on Amazon and have it in two days. That doesn't exist. That just doesn't exist. So we had to build one. And this is the perfect introduction to ESP devices. They're low-cost, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled microcontrollers produced by, is it Espressif? How do you say their name? I never say it right.

I think you're pretty good. Espressif.

Yeah. Now, they're pretty well-known in the IoT space. And these things are, when I say affordable, I mean $9 gets you a four-pack of these things or something like that off of Amazon. I mean, affordable is ridiculous. Low power consumption, there are three volts, and you can combine them with another open source project called ESPHome, which is now part of Home Assistant, and it gives it a Home Assistant-friendly framework that makes it really easy to integrate and start setting up.

Yeah, right. You kind of have like one part, which is this like microcontrollery ecosystem. You can do stuff like what Arduino or MicroPython or Tasmodo or, you know, all kinds of different options for what you run on there. And then you compare that if you're a home assistant user with ESPHome, which makes this like very user friendly layer on top to like manage it and interface between the two.

So these little ESP32 devices, they're typically running, like Wes said, there's a several different Tasmodo, you know, but they're typically running free RTOS, which is a tiny little real-time operating system. You can even operate these things essentially bare metal, but the nice thing about free RTOS is it kind of does exactly what we need for this job. It handles task scheduling, memory management, and the interrupts, and it also is aware of the GPIO pins and their layout and all of that.

Just enough of a tiny little operating system that you can then run what you need to like get on Wi-Fi appropriately and have an API that Home Assistant can talk to but without having to reinvent the whole world or program it all yourself in C++.

And the main chip for these things, it's not much bigger than a quarter. They're really small and they're in all kinds of different pre-built packages as well. Now, did you know that Amazon bought free RTOS back in 2017?

Vaguely now i they've but i had totally forgotten.

Yeah i.

Guess that means either no one paid attention or they haven't done anything super horrible to it since.

Yeah it's still mit licensed okay great i mean it's even used on the mars rover so it's like from esp32 devices all the way up on mars um so that's pretty nice and then like wes was saying you combine that with esp home which is that open source firmware project and it gives you a simplified way to manage these like my yaml configuration for what we're about to talk about with spacing and you know clean formatting and comments 35 lines and it's with a lot of spacing and whatnot i'll put an

So that's pretty killer, right? So you have to plug it in to get it flashed the first time.

Yes.

But then after that, you can just update it over the air.

Yes.

That's so great. Especially if you have a bunch of these deployed in your walls or whatever.

Yeah, and you can update all of them in one push. It does a build check first. So if the build fails, it won't flip them to production. So there's also a bit of a safety net there.

Quite insane.

And you can do things like, oh, I actually wanted to use this or change the temperature sensor sensitivity from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. You can do all that without having to physically go to the device. You can push the config. It does a build in ESPHome and then sends it all out there and boots the device. It's just really nice. And you're all doing it over your LAN, you know?

I mean, better have a good LAN.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. And some RAM, yeah. But it's all right there in the Home Assistant dashboard these days. You just have to get the add-on going. So for our setup, we used an ESP8266 device and a DC relay and a temperature sensor all hanging off of this ESP8266. And then we used ESPHome working with Home Assistant to configure the temperature sensor, which can trigger the blower fan automatically when the RV power system gets too hot. And then it logs all of it in Home Assistant.

Okay. So the ESP is playing both relay for the temperature sensor back to Home Assistant Central. And then it's also playing endpoint sort of like control to trigger the relay.

Yes, it triggers the relay that turns the fan on. And so these are just the perfect tools for the job. So a little recap, right? DC powered, everything's DC in this system. Offline operation, zero cloud dependency, home assistant integration for monitoring control, data logging and temperature and fan status. And depending on how we build it, which we'll get into, I think we can get a 10 plus year lifespan out of this.

A little buck converter they call them i don't know why they're called that someone will eventually write in and tell me but that converts the 12 volt that is well pretty common in cars but also chris's rv and converts that dc directly to 5 volts which can power this little esp and the temperature sensor as well. So it does a little bit of, I don't know, electron magic for us to make it all work in a nice little package.

And we also added to our little design here, a little fuse in here. So you could, you know, these are things to consider. You're going to need to step down converter. If you're coming from 12 volt or a battery, you may want to fuse. So just those things are something to know about. And yeah, you can then, you know, sort of build to your heart's desire.

I have to confess that originally when I looked at Raspberry Pis, I saw the little, you know, GPIO pins and thought, I'm never, ever, ever going to use those. I know some people will, but like, I'm not going to use that on my Raspberry Pi or any other device. I don't know. Why do I even need that? Everything changed this week.

Yeah. And, you know, PJ points out, and something people should be aware of, some of these pins have special functions. But the ones we used, GPIO 14 and GPIO 5, they are not tied to any special boot functions. So they don't output any expected signals at startup. They're really clean. They're good to use for sensors and relays.

So some of these general purpose input outputs have specific purposes, you're telling me?

And they do things at boot. You need to be aware of it. But generally, GPIO 14 and GPIO 5 are safe for this.

Lucky numbers.

So this, for me, and managing all this, was the really easy part because Home Assistant took care of it for me. But Wes, you took another crack at it.

Yeah, okay. So I've been doing Home Assistant, but on NixOS, knowing that I'm doing it the hard and now unsupported way. And just figuring, well, let's see what it's like. I'm reserving the option to just run it in a VM or a container later if that seems worth it for what I want to do with it.

For for a little bit of context my home assistant system in the rv is using the home assistant yellow hardware which is a cm4 based, system and has about two gigs of RAM, which can be pushing it when you're trying to do a bunch of builds for ESP Home. And one of the things you can do is you can go into the configuration for ESP Home's add-on and you can tell it to limit itself to one thread, which because you're using only one thread instead of like four, it uses less RAM, but it takes longer.

Yeah.

Yeah, I find it interesting because, Chris, you're doing the most supported way, and you might be arguably doing the least supported way, and I like that difference.

So, thankfully, ESPHome is packaged in Nix, and it has an XOS module. So you can just run it yourself, which is handy if you're trying to do troubleshooting and just want to manually flash something, just a little command you can run. But the module's pretty easy, pretty much just, you know, enable equals true.

So ESPHome's not on the wiser. it's on a weird NixOS file system.

Yes, and in particular, the rando binaries it runs to try to compile your build also don't have to deal with that.

Solid solution, really.

As a result, too, the NixOS module does a good job, you could argue, enabling as much of the system dehardening stuff. You know, because if something's downloading some random binaries that's running, maybe you want it to not have to have full write over your full system or whatever.

Yeah, definitely, right.

But that caused me a little bit of an issue. I don't know if there's something that changed or just some details in the module that needs to get worked out.

It was essentially being overly cautious and saying you don't want to execute this.

Yes and so i figured out pretty quick i could just tell platform io to use slash temp for all the stuff and then that worked and then I did a little more work for it and I was able to modify the systemd file we'll see maybe I'll try to submit this or see what other people think but basically have a separate cache directory which is the thing systemd supports for a service so you can say like hey make a slash var slash cache just for this service so use

So you had a lot more initial setup to get it working, but you came away with a lot clearer understanding of how it works under the hood.

This is true.

And now you have that config forever. So you could always reproduce this.

Yeah.

Now, if you really want it easy, you don't need Home Assistant. You don't have to set it up like Wes did. you can actually go to web.esphome.io and do some of the initial setup right there in your web browser. The catch is it has to be Chrome because they take advantage of, like, some serial port API stuff. Right. And you do need to be in the dial-out group and have the permissions to access the USB device and all of that.

That's pretty great. Because then all you need, I mean, if you do want to even still do Home Assistant, you just have to have the integration on that side and you can add the devices.

Turns out even hardware requires a browser.

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So now we get into building the actual thing well in the morning when we first got started chris and i looked at each other and we tried to divvy up the the work and uh chris was going to do the software which as you can hear was nice and simple and then i was going to get started on the hardware well it turns out that's a bit more of a challenge but we've got a good team producer jeff sent us a bunch of consults and diagrams and well years ago even taught us about these devices so we took out

Thought we'd get lunch and then we'd probably switch gears to a separate project around 2 p.m.

Yeah, but then the first part was just figuring out where to get power from, right? You need power for all these devices, so we were going to get a little bit of power.

Well, if we're going to hook up a fan, we need power. So the first thing we're doing before we screw anything into the wall or run any ducts is making sure we have a place we can tap power into, and we need 12 volts because it's a 12-volt fan brand. I think we did that by design, right? Yeah. The only problem is to add the fan, I need to turn the light off, but I'm using the light to see what I'm doing.

I wish the lighting was our biggest challenge.

I'm confused. Why didn't Brent have his headlamp on it?

I know, right?

This was pre-headlamp deployment, and it did encourage me to deploy headlamp.

He always has it on him, of course. But what really slowed us down, I think, is what kind of snags you up on all kinds of new projects where you're not familiar with the little details. All the little parts, all the little idiosyncrasies of the ecosystem.

The stuff that looks good at a high-level plan, and then you're like, oh, wait.

Like, we got an ESP board. We thought we were being so clever because we got an ESP board originally that had the ESP and two relays on it. And so like a couple of hot shots, we figured we just supply five volt voltage to this ESP and everything's going to work. And instead, when we powered it up, it did like this crazy relay dance and click, click, click, click, click. And all the lights started flashing like clearly.

Sometimes things just take longer than you expected. You know, I couldn't tell you. We got ourselves this fancy ESP, and maybe that wasn't the right way to go. So we went and got ourselves one of our classics that we had, and I plugged it in. It wasn't working. I plugged in the next one. It wasn't working. Four ESPs later, none of them were working. I thought, okay, maybe it's something wrong with the groups I'm in. and it turns out I needed to be in dial out.

Now, if you're new to some of this, like we were, I think, Brent, you'd agree having a breadboard where you can prototype some of this is really handy.

Yeah, that was really nice because you end up with this basically, I don't know, small circuit that you could just plug things into, provide power to the entire board, and then just very visually and in an organized way access those GPIO pins that you were mentioning.

Yeah, because the 80s, whatever it is, sits right in the breadboard, just pops right in.

Yeah, the whole ESP development board, you can just kind of work its way into this development or the breadboard, which just does a bunch of electrical connections and then plug a bunch of other things to it. But by the end of it, it was a bit of a spaghetti mess of me trying to just really power this thing so you could see it on the Wi-Fi.

What kind of adds to the spaghetti mess is these all need to be on the same common ground. That's a really important aspect for this functioning properly. So you end up with wires kind of going everywhere.

I learned that the hard way. Yeah, the relay that we're using to try to trigger this fan that's going to cool the battery bay, that needs to share a ground with things like the temperature sensor and also, well, all the power sources that you have and all of that. So everything needs to all be in a nice, cohesive connection.

Sometimes it's quite the jump from what the circuit diagram looks like to the implementation.

Yeah, especially the wiring, original wiring diagram. But it was nice to prototype it and sort of validate it that way. So we kind of had an idea we were moving in the right direction and it was time to make sure that, you know, we could actually make some of these temporary connections a little less temporary and take them off the breadboard and actually plug them in in a way that we can really use for a bit.

Sensor one of them was defective the first one we used.

Just by chance so you one of the i think one of the reasons they they all all this stuff comes in kits like when you buy the temperature sensor you get like five of them it's because like almost always one of them is bad, At least that's been our, that was our experience this day. And some of it had been sitting around for a long time, but it was all still wrapped in the packaging in the, you know, the static bag and all of that.

Well, one bad sensor, one bad wire, and a bad USB cable later, and a bunch of soldering, we have the first test wired up. I mean, like this looks like it should be it. Everything's in place. You got everything hooked up to the 12 volts. So once the ESP boots, I should be able to trigger the fan from Home Assistant. I hope so. Yeah, me too, man. It's been a long day. It's 9 p.m. right now. I've learned a lot today. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, you've become a

It moves a lot of air.

It worked really well, I would say.

Yeah, it's designed for a bilge of a boat. So it moves air. Now, we're doing a couple of things to actually try to make this thing last 10 years. Besides putting a fuse on it to help protect it, we're going to put it in, right now it's not in this box, but that's what we're doing tomorrow, is installing a waterproof junction box for this thing. We're just going to put all the components in there. It's got like a little pegboard on the back so you can peg stuff to it.

Okay, that sounds smart.

And it's clean, and, you know, as long as you get the wiring done and, you know, rents done, what do you call that heat wrapping that you did?

Oh, it's shrink wrap, and we got, thankfully, some really nice stuff that shrinks. I think it's like three times its size and also has adhesive on these. That's the stuff I would totally recommend.

Yeah, it's a kit on Amazon. Maybe we can find it and try to put a link in the notes. It's great. It's great. It's clean. It holds it all together because we're trying to build this to also handle road vibration and, you know, high temperatures and whatnot. But this one ESP device has the relay and the temperature sensor, which also is a humidity sensor. And you could, inside the ESP config, trigger everything using the ESP directly.

Sure, you can have it all local brain.

You totally could. And that would be definitely something to consider. It's the most probably reliable way to run this. So I'm going to do the right thing and I'm not going to do that. And I'm going to use Home Assistant to automate this. And the reason why is because I already have 30 other systems that are automated and managed with Home Assistant. So to keep it consistent with what it sort of has as a standard, I'm going to do it that way.

Welcome to Fan Control Central.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And I'm feeling pretty good. It's going to last. We already have other ESP devices in the walls that have been working great for years.

What do you think the approximate build cost was?

Great question.

Maybe not including, you know, you don't have to include all of the extra soldering equipment or whatever.

So we had to buy the fan and a couple of vents. The fan's like $20. The vents are like $5 each or so.

Something like that.

And then, you know, a pack of ESPs is about $9.

Relay?

Relay's a few bucks, four bucks, five bucks. So it's pretty, pretty cheap. And then con, you know, a little conduit for the fan. You know, it's nothing.

We ended up using the PineSill, which is the really nice open hardware soldering pencil that we've been using for a couple of years. Also recommended by our dear community. And Jeff, thank you for sending this one along.

It's really handy because it's powered off of USB-C.

Oh, so great.

And we had a high wattage portable battery that's small, but high wattage. And so Brent was able to just do that and just, he could take it with him wherever he needed to go.

So that, that was really great. I would also say part of the cost just goes towards having like the accessories. So some wiring that's appropriate, having heat shrink, having, you know, this little breadboard. You don't absolutely need it, but it sure does help.

Do you, do you think he could have built a 10 year device that lasts without soldering? Um, with clip connect? I just don't think so. I mean, if it wasn't maybe in a moving vehicle.

Yeah, I think you'd probably take a bit of a different route. Like there are cables specifically made to slip over the GPIO pins. You could maybe glue those into place, or I know you can use like nail polish to like waterproof certain things, and that might keep things in place. But really, soldering was one of the best ways that we could, for instance, the ESP were powering with a USB cable that I created with this buck converter built into the cable.

It's pretty slick.

And I was able to, because of soldering and like some of these wires are teeny tiny, I was able to make a cable that actually looks really quite clean and small and slick and waterproof and all of this. So in that way, I don't think I could have made that cable with connectors in the same way.

Sort of depends on what your quality threshold is here.

Yeah. As you know, mine tends to be maybe a little high.

Well, and I mean, how proud would you be if this thing last, you know, 12 years or something like that's a pretty big, like we come back to this in a decade and that thing's still in use.

Well, I think especially for you, Chris, like a device that you end up mounting in the guts of your RV, you don't look at it every day. You're not like you don't have an eye on, oh, this thing's starting to come apart or, oh, there's a little bit of corrosion here or something like that.

That is, though, one of the nice things about Home Assistant. You do know if it's online, when it's last been working. So you do get some data. But you're right. Like, I'm not eyes on it. I'm not checking it every day.

Yeah, exactly. I also think, you know, these devices can apply to more than just this 12-volt RV situation.

That's the unlock. And that's the thing, I think, the big takeaway that if you wrap your head around what we've talked about today, anything that's really on a switch, you can automate with an ESP and a relay. And it's a massive unlock. And it's stuff that you can actually take a stab at doing because you're not going to get rugged in three years when the cloud service shuts down.

Yes, commodity hardware and open source software.

And the folks behind ESPHome, well, that's the Home Assistant Foundation. Like there's a foundation model there to make sure that it's vendor neutral and all of that. It's here for the long haul. You can like I literally have it installed in walls and it works. You know, it's as reliable as any smart device I've ever had. It's you just need to have Wi-Fi.

It reminds me of the Raspberry Pi in the sense that it has a massive community of people building all sorts of things around it. I think, really, we're late to the party in this particular one.

Yeah, no, there's huge. And so many devices.

Yeah, so anything you're hoping to do with it has probably been done already, and you can find some assistance, some support, some examples of this happening. People are 3D printing their own cases. They're making their own PCBs around these platforms. So it's a very rich ecosystem. And the beautiful thing about the little tiny device that you and I made, Chris, which is probably the reason we wanted to spend, I don't know, this many hours on pulling our hair out to build the thing.

It's going to be like, yeah, three days of work all said and done. We thought it'd be an afternoon of work or a morning, but yeah.

It reminds me so much, though, of when I first was learning Linux. It's like, oh, there's all these systems that I don't quite understand. You get little snippets of like how it all, and then you put together your first project and it works.

It starts clicking.

Yeah, and now that knowledge carries forward to build on top of. Well, for us, this little ESP plus relay is like, okay, you're using it in your RV with 12-volt power, but I can install this thing in my cabin with 120-volt power. These relays also support up to 240, so in Europe they can use it. So now we've got the knowledge, and hopefully we're a bit faster next time, to build a bunch of these and use them in any context that we find ourselves in, whether it's outdoors or indoors or anywhere.

Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go over there, support the show, and check out Unraid. Unleash your hardware. Unraid's a powerful, easy-to-use NAS operating system built on top of modern Linux with a modern kernel in there that gives you control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your data and your applications. You'll hear us talk about things like Home Assistant or Jellyfin or some of the LLM apps that are a lot of fun.

Well if you're ahead of us on the esp journey maybe uh ride in boost in let us know what crazy or uh super useful things you've built i know we're all excited about uh you know where we can take this and as usual our audience is light years ahead now.

It's just a little reminder that next week well chris is finally coming to canada to pay me a visit we're going to be taking the Van from the JB Studio that we've been working on for, oof, feels like two months now. And also Lady Joops, so it's going to be a bit of a road trip. That means we will not be live next week for Linux Unplugged, but there will be a regular episode coming as usual.

And we start with our baller booster, okay, who comes in as Tui Tickler with 63,300. and 33 sats. I'm just saying your bootleg membership needs a try before you buy option. Like when Costco gives you a bite-sized hot dog and a slice, and then suddenly you're buying 48 packs.

That's so true of Costco.

You guys make a reference. Now let me snack on it.

Delicious.

I am very, very proud of the bootleg. I actually think the bootleg should be heard by more, more listeners. So you're going to get your wish, Tui Tickler. Stay tuned. perhaps sooner than you expect you're going to get to hear some of the bootleg stuff thank you for being our baller it's nice to hear from you and your username is hilarious.

A wine eagle boosin with 22 272 cents, thank you for browse oh yeah I was able to authorize leer to sync gmail with not much plus eric and emacs and neomut support wow, all on my headless nicks them NAS that required going through an OAuth screen on a browser with JS.

Whoa.

That is an impressive setup, Wine Eagle.

So how many points is that?

The things people are willing to do is pretty impressive. That's quite the although fun, I imagine.

Thank you for telling us.

Wow. That's pretty great. Damn. Thank you for the update. That's good to hear. Keep them coming.

Well, Jordan Bravo boosted in a row of ducks. I know the 2AE challenge has ended, but I have a recommendation. systemctl-tui is a tui for systemd as the name suggests it is of course written in rust and available in x packages.

Yeah this.

One this is one also I think that's sticking with me.

From the challenge I want to say I hope the tui challenge continues without us you could be doing it right now and then send us updates it's something we'd love to hear people check in on even though we're done with it you don't have to be just listen to the episodes and follow along you're.

The linux tui am I right.

Yeah that's yeah I think so Magnolia Mayhem's back with 7,777 sats. Man, I wish I could have taken part in the TUI challenge. I've been coordinating with a bunch of activists and need my laptop as usable as possible, such as the nature of being politically active in Mississippi. That said, I hope you'll accept a late submission one day. I really enjoyed the BSD challenge, and I'm still running free BSD on an FX8350 server and on a VPS to this day.

Yeah, I'm down with that.

BSTUI.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, he never got the veggie dog. Brent, will you follow up on that?

Yeah, I can do that.

Thank you.

Fortidoo boosts in with 4,200 sets. Sounds like you guys found some of my faves. I don't know how I ever lived without Helix, Yazzie, and Zelish. I definitely appreciate these for their no-hassle power right out of the box. Ranger and NNN are my runner-ups for file management, though. Mike Rowe is, of course, another great text editor with more standard key bindings. and I'll be checking out Jellyfin Tui right now.

I tried Mock. Yeah, yeah, I liked Mock. Thank you for the value. Really appreciate that. Nice to hear from you. Forty deuce. Deuce. Deuce. Deuce.

Well, Jan Holbo sent in another Forty Deuce set. Here is from the Future Boost.

Ooh, whoa, cool.

I'm trying to catch up on the library and just listen to self-hosted 150. I'm looking forward to getting the occasional self-hosted story in Linux Unplugged. Welcome to this week's content. Question for you. You talked about using Nix OS instead of Docker. Well, does Nix OS support virtual IP addresses for different apps, say Image, Nextcloud, Notify, Smokeping, etc., on the very same host?

What brent.

You're on that hint you're my hint guy.

It's a zip code i don't see it you see it in there i'm i am slow on these what's my problem do you see it with well.

You take maybe the boost i gotta get my divided by two.

I think and you get.

Some crazy number.

Oh there it is let's see here jeez i.

Know it's kind of sharp.

It's huge i.

Don't know why i polish it.

Don't tape all these extra extensions onto it.

Yeah well you know mars the moon they're relevant.

We never we never even go to mexico why do you have mexico on here oh oh i see oh Wes Did you find it?

Um Give me a Give me a Why don't you Unfold the other section I know That's why I need a sec.

This thing has six sides It's crazy.

Yeah well It's a higher dimensional object Is the thing.

Is that a laser?

Yeah, it's weird that he used all this tech for the map. Like, we could have used this for all sorts of stuff.

Here we are soldering, and he's got this, like, eight-dimensional cube map. Well, I'm trying to break down the hint here. So the hint is, here lives an ever-young lady with a tail. And, well, our dear friend AI, in some case, thinks maybe it means a mermaid? That could be a thing.

Yeah, okay, so then my guess is somewhere near DY in New South Wales, Australia, where I guess maybe as Brent is saying, there is a well-known mermaid statue.

Really?

Australia boost, I love it, if so.

I hope that's true, that's pretty neat. Okay, well True Grits, thank you for the boost, and thank you for a zip code math. True Grits is here with 5,000 sets.

I like your energy. Ten Moose comes in with a Robodox. First time booster, long time listener.

Yes!

Loving the Fountain app.

Thank you for going through the setup and getting the SATs. It's been a minute, I think, since we heard from a newbie. Well done, Ten Moose.

Oh, and we get a server report. I'm running Red Hat Home Server on an individual developer license with Cockpit to manage my containers and VMs. yes.

Yes yes all right i'm gonna make that as a vote for the red hat content right there.

Yeah there is another one down in uh if we want to pull up one from the thanks from forward humor voting for open shift coverage so all.

Right thank you forward humor.

Hey did we in the last boost answer the question about nix os and various ips.

Oh no we moved right on because we got you know distracted well that map is flashy yeah it depends exactly what you're wanting to do i don't think there's generally i mean like some if you add more ips to your system and the services support listening on a specific address then you can do it that way but there's no nix os support out of the box for like the docker style networking you can do whatever you want on top in terms of you know systemd services modifying the setup i've made a

You everybody who does boost in of course you can be a member and support the show's production directly you set that on autopilot at linuxunplugged.com membership and you get the bootleg and you get the ad free as a thank you and it really means a lot but then we also have this option to support each individual production. It's your vote on how the show was, how the episode content was, what you thought of it. And it's a way to give back if you got value from this particular episode.

And I remembered, there's also built-in NixOS containers you can do with Systemd N-Spawn for another way to do that. Just in case my answer was turning you off from NixOS too much.

You do need to focus.

I got to be, I got to be thorough.

You got to focus.

There's a flow here.

We're doing the thing now. You both did it. We're doing the thing. All right. We got a thing and we're doing it. All right. But it is good to know. Thank you, everybody.

Wow.

Yeah. Not affiliated with Tidal at all, but it's fantastic. I believe it's GPL3 as well. So it's called Hytide, and it brings Tidal to a native app on Linux. And I love it. Check it out if you're a title user.

It's a Python project. Neat.

Now, I know not all of you are, you know, title users. So I wanted to do something for those of you who are like, Chris, come on. I'm an Apple Music listener. Well, I wanted to remind you, they had a release not too long ago, about an app that is one of my solid daily go-tos on all my systems. And if I don't have this, I never know what's going to happen when I click a link. It's called Junction. And it's a browser chooser. It works, again, great on Plasma or Genome. It's GPL3.

I'm glad to hear you're still using Junction. It's clearly stuck with you over the years.

If I could have one feature change, it would be that it doesn't necessarily open under where your mouse cursor is at. So I'll click a link, and then I'm quick like a ninja. I'll move the cursor to the screen I know the browser is going to be at because I have KWIN rules like a gentleman.

I think i have another feature request just imagining that.

One um.

It would be cool if you could click a link and get this window as you say but then have like short keys for each browser so.

Maybe if you hit.

One uh you get you know the browser in the first.

Place but i'll tell you what else it has it has an abort like an x You click the X, which is just a teeny little thing down in the corner, it doesn't open any browser.

Oh, it's like an oops.

Yeah, I didn't mean to click that. Or I clicked it twice because my finger's dumb or something.

Ooh, it says keyboard navigation.

Yeah, I thought so.

I thought so.

I had a feeling. Yeah, I had a feeling. It's great. Great app. Really appreciate that developer. So go check them out. Links are at linuxunplugged.com slash 0620.

One of us.

I don't know. Whoever I told to mention it.

Delegate A.

Yeah.

Delegate B, actually.

The person I delegated that to said it, so I'm just reminding you. We're a little fried. It's been a couple of days of projects, okay? And, you know, let me tell you, when you know you've got a show and you want to get it working by the show, that is a real motivator.

I'm very impressed with all of your handiwork this week.

It is working.

Yes, it is, which is great because we're going on that summer road trip and things are about to get hot. All right, details about our mumble room, our matrix, all of that, that's over at linuxunplugged.com. You go over there, you get that info, you can figure it out. Of course, you can also join our matrix chat, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash matrix. We got a general chat and a couple of dedicated, detailed, overdone. I don't know. There's too many of them, but there's log chat rooms and there's