624: Tiny PC, Huge Problems

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, there might be more than just a couple of things wrong with our home labs, but we do have a plan to fix them up. Today, we'll talk about what needs a fixin' and then what hardware might just do the job. Plus, we have two great self-hosted apps we've come across recently you didn't even know you needed.

Get out of here brent come on squeeze it.

Oh it's what's with the.

I'm a little i'm a little nervous is that all right is it okay yeah it is it's kind of a big deal uh we have something exciting and I don't know I don't want to blow it I don't want to blow it you know because this is something we've been thinking about for a while we have an opportunity to bring on a new sponsor, and this project was co-created by a listener of the show it's something we followed for years, and it's it's tremendously good and the company is great too they're building

You got this.

You think so uh-huh.

Just be yourself.

All right i'll give it a go so let me tell you go ahead what is it don't.

Forget about the reverse code i believe.

You got a tip for me i think what oh that's it that's your that's your motivation you've.

Not royally messed it up previously i know this might be a big deal but i believe in you i think you got this.

I feel like it's a big deal too because we're like the only podcast in the world yeah we're at wow you know i know that's a big deal actually.

Okay now i'm feeling.

Nervous i know they're reaching a new stage and it's just it's super exciting all right okay thanks.

Guys you got that.

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Yeah, that's right. Knicks Vegas. So if you go to DEFCON, reach out and see you there.

That's coming up real soon, West Payne.

That's right. Next month.

Wow. Are you flying?

Uh-huh.

You got a hotel?

I do.

You're already done then.

I know. Surprisingly organized.

Now you just need to get the presentation done.

That's right.

Okay. All right. That's it, right? That's all we have for the housekeeping, I think? All right. All right. Let's do a home lab check-in. There's a lot that's been going on behind the scenes. Brent got his home assistant up and running again in the van. And he's actually been using some of the sensors to test different systems on the van. So I don't know. Walk us through. You got the system going again. And how are you using it, Brent?

Yeah, we together got the system going. Oh, that feels like... months ago now. And the idea is to have a permanent home assistant set up in this crazy van that I somehow have in my possession that I'm putting lots of love into. And I wanted to do some testing on the fridge that is from the nineties and is still in this thing. And it's like this bizarre absorption fridge. I don't have any experience with those kinds of things. that can run propane

It's worth noting that when you bring sensor data into Home Assistant, like a temperature sensor, it automatically graphs, charts, and logs that for you. So not only do you get real-time information, but you get historical data automatically.

So great.

And I'm, you know, compared to some who are listening very relatively new to Home Assistant, I feel slightly ashamed about that. But I have a project and it's getting me there. And I didn't realize this graphing was just built in. So such a win for me because I could just plug a couple sensors in and just get exactly what I needed right away. I did randomly meet a stranger with almost an identical van who offered to purchase this fridge off me.

Yes. Yes, welcome to the club.

Thank you. That's great. I feel like I have lots to learn.

I'm not a long-time member, but I'm just, you know.

Yeah, I'm so proud of you both recently getting Home Assistant going. So that's the good news in the Home Lab. Now, the bad news is you've got this project that's stalled out, in part because we ran out of time while I was visiting. And the idea is you want to create an off-site backup server that does essentially server-to-server replication. And I kind of want to hear more about that because I think it's still kind of up in the air exactly how to solve that problem.

Yeah, I have talked about this on the network before, on Self-Hosted. I really just want to provide backups for my family and myself included that have an offsite option. So my parents have a super stable home environment, super stable internet, and we visit there a couple times a year. So that's a perfect location, but it's like thousands and thousands of kilometers away or miles, if you will.

So you want to mirror your data to that machine, but you also want to backup data from how many computers of your parents?

Oh, they've got, you know, two, you know, one cell phone each and one laptop each. And I think that's about it.

Cell phones.

Well, why not? Why should you not backup cell phone data? Like photos is mostly the thing they care about, photos and videos.

Well, what I'm mapping in my head now is three different backup systems. Because you have one to do the server-to-server replication, you have one to back up the computers, and then a separate one to back up the phones, right? I'm seeing this is three different systems you'd be managing.

Yeah, the dream seems simple until you start implementing, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. This is multifaceted, isn't it?

I feel like the server-to-server is probably the easiest because that you could just do like a ButterFS send-receive.

True.

And for the parents' backup, you do have some experience with, which backup software was it that you were using? Was it Borg?

Yeah, I've got them set up currently with Borg, and I'm using Vorda as the main GUI interface. And they have, well, my father especially, have been pretty cozy with that. And it's been working well, and I don't think about it until I get on their systems every couple months, and it just seems to be working, which is great.

So could that be just you set up borg backup on this new server and then reconfigure their clients to use that to back up to this that.

Is at least for me at this point well tested well uh received on their part and like the super stable simple part of this backup system.

Okay so desktops are solved what is your what is your thought on backing up i assume they have two android devices yeah.

They have identical android devices and previously backups have been done manually by my father who's a bit tech savvy and he's using kd connect to uh just manually drag files he cares about he likes to sort all his photos like sit down one sunday morning with a coffee and move photos from both phones onto his laptop and then he just you know in vortigot just goes go and then.

That backs.

Up uh the android photos that are now on his laptop to the server so it's you know he's he's doing.

That manually but it's happening oh let's pause let's pause let's zoom in as they say and double click what is it on the Android device they need backed up is it just photos I.

Mean I think we in modern times should have the ability to back up all of our apps on Android but that is strangely difficult so if.

You had a minimal set.

Then I would.

Say just.

Photos and videos but.

Why not if you've got like notes and contact information in Nextcloud already then it's just a matter of the photos and there yes you could use nextcloud obviously but it could be a great opportunity for image it's pretty straightforward to set up it does require some updates but it's pretty straightforward to set up um the experience is really great for the end user because the app is also a photo viewer that's really good great and fast uh but then there's

Image could totally work. I had sync thing recommended to me about a hundred times to solve this problem.

It does seem like it's a popular one in the audience, but it seems to me kind of like a blunt tool for the job, especially if you have everything else getting synced. I think the easier workflow is you get the new phone. Unfortunately, you set it up, you sign in or whatever the crap you got to do. And then you just sync your stuff, right? I mean, it's just what, I don't know, just seems to be.

I find it wild that this is not a standard thing. Wild. Once you get used to Linux computers, like, come on, we don't have this?

This i mean it seems if you can get the hardware running it seems like a pretty easy thing to at least get the server to server backup going on your lan maybe using like some sort of you know like a nebula vpn or something to make that work so they're talking to each other over that vpn on your lan and then get that syncing while you're you know node to node right there so you do the bulk of the syncing first then ship it off but i don't know about the

Yeah, I like the image idea. I hadn't even considered that. I think that is a wonderful idea. The hardware is an upgrade to what they're currently using, which is an ancient T61 laptop that my father used to use way back. And yeah, that fan has been replaced several times. But it's still kicking.

Are you doing any jellyfin on this thing?

Not yet. Mostly because the hardware hasn't been up to the task. And that's where I feel like.

This H4 is no problem.

That's where image wasn't really an option previously. either but because of the hardware upgrade i feel like it opens up a whole bunch of new options so yeah why not have a jellyfin server they've got a they have a dvd room it's like a secret room behind their tv from the previous person who built this house who was a nerd so they literally like you take what looks like a speaker off the wall and then they have a room back there and they

Yeah man yeah yeah.

So there's lots of possibility for sure.

Yeah that could be a great project honestly it's something you could just you know you could set up a workflow and it sounds like your old man could sit there and kind of do the actual ripping yeah 100 and.

Then i could benefit.

Okay so let me tell you what's going on in my home lab i i have been very happy with my home assistant yellow for years until i started hanging around jeff and brent sorry no you know i actually it's just over the years it does more right it pulls in camera feeds it pulls in lots of power metrics from my victron system it's you know managing probably 300 devices and pulling all of their metrics and their numbers and stuff like that it's connected to probably half a dozen cloud services it

Would imagine for you this thing just sips power too right that's important.

He dude like that's what's really made me stick with this is if it's just sitting there doing nothing it's like two watts it's hard to even measure that oh wow you know and then maybe up to six watts almost under load right so just a monster yeah about as much as a light would pull an led light or something a big one so it's been really nice but the two gigs of ram i'm generally running around 1.5 1.6 gigs of RAM usage and so I like ESP home builds fail, but what's really getting me,

Just pulling them up?

Yeah. In the mobile app and on the tablets.

It's going to scrape a whole bunch of different data sources and has to get all the points.

And sometimes I need to get in quick and turn something off or check, are we undervolting the entire rig right now because we just ran all this stuff? And I'm just sitting there waiting for the page to load. So that's the killer for me. And I just think I need to get on more robust hardware.

I didn't realize this was an issue because the hardware you gave me that was just sitting around waiting for it to be your upgrade that's now in the van is actually super performant and probably the perfect device for you to deploy for yourself.

Ironically, yes.

Thank you.

Yeah. And it's nice, too, because that's DC straight. But I've been kind of looking around and I found three options. I don't know what their power draw is. So it'd be like three options that I would buy and test before I deployed. But then, of course, I'm very interested to see what other folks are doing. I do think I want something x86, although I'm not totally opposed to ARM for Home Assistant OS. I will be using Home Assistant OS. Here's three options.

Whoa.

It's like the size of a book. It takes 2, 2.5. I think they're 2.5. So you can get up to 76 terabytes of storage in this thing. And it's the size of a USB disk enclosure, but it's an entire PC. It's everything you need in there. Up to 76 gigs of RAM, which is nice. It's 12th gen Intel N100. It's a PC with the stuff. I mean, if you wanted something that was like a media server, that was a really small, low-powered device.

I noticed it says user-friendly UGOS Pro. I assume you'd be keeping whatever that is on there.

I mean, if it's user-friendly, Wes, if it's user-friendly, why not?

I also noticed that it can hold hard drives, so it means you won't have hard drives strapped to the side of your RV dinette cupboard.

Right. Thank you. So what I do now for storage is I have an O-Droid that does have, I think it's just SATA ports, but yeah, there's nowhere to put them. So they are, everything's kind of mounted to the inside of a dinette's booth, mounted to the wall. And it would be nice to actually have them in enclosures. That could be nice because they're just raw drives mounted to the wall.

I think this thing claims six watts for TDP. Yeah.

I want to test on that. But the N100 is a very efficient chip. And around the 12th and 13th gen, they started getting really legit. So that's why I kind of looked in that range. Now, this next one wouldn't fit any drives, but it would have about the same footprint as my current home assistant. Could be mounted on the sidewall. Is a 12th gen Alder Lake N100 up to 3.4 gigahertz. And it's called a mini PC stick. We've seen some of these before, and it's back.

This looks more like a USB adapter than it does a PC.

Right? Yeah, it looks like a dongle.

That's crazy.

I know.

Wow.

It really is something. It's eight gigs of RAM in this thing. It's got one USB-C output, two USB-As. It has an Ethernet port. It goes up to 65 watts USB-C PD, although I don't think that's its draw. It looks like its draw is, you know, around the same as the other device. It can drive a high-res 4K screen if you need to.

Yeah, dual screen support.

So what I thought, and this thing's $160. dollars so what i i thought like if you wanted a linux media pc you could you could just attach this to the back of your television and run it off of usb power it has an hdmi out this is the kind of thing now where these are so small you could velcro it to something and make a display does.

It feel like we're in the golden age of hardware when these kind of things are available Because it's super performant, teeny tiny, and it hardly uses any power. So like, what else do you really need?

Well, and what's great is we're getting in the price range of the Odroids, right? And when you look at these Intel systems, they're really competitive with the ARM boxes now.

And the Raspberry Pis.

That's what I mean. But they have a lot of really nice features.

And compatibility.

And compatibility, and they're a little faster. But the one that really kind of won me over for what I think I would use, Home Assistant, if I want to build a box that lasts another six years, another five years, whatever it's been, four years. The GeekOM Air 12 mini PC. It's a 13th-gen Intel N150, so it's even a little better on the power usage.

That's not bad.

Yeah. And I'd go from like a quad core 1.4 gigahertz to up to 3.6 of boost, obviously. And it's 200 USD.

I kind of feel like you just buy all three, you'll figure out a way to use them all, right?

Beowulf HA cluster.

There is a real revolution happening with these mini PCs. And B-Link was really early to it, but B-Link is getting fancier and fancier. These manufacturing places in China have built up all this tooling to build these small compact PCs and now they're just going wild. It is incredible what you can find for under $200 if you don't need a crazy GPU. That's essentially the dividing line now. And this thing here, I don't know if Geeko makes good stuff or not, I can't vouch for it.

That sounds rough.

Yeah.

Yeah, at this point, that's a non-starter. So I would love to know. I mean, at that point, it's like I'm redoing everything, basically.

You considered just a crazy raw image copy and see what happens?

I do note here that you said that your Home Assistant Yellow has a special, you know, Silicon Labs module with ZigBee and thread and open thread and matter built in, is this mean that anything you buy off the shelf is going to be downgraded in that sense? You're going to have to figure out how to solve that problem.

I think I have okay radios there, external ones, but see what a lot of people have said is we'll just move your controller to the new unit. But the problem is with the yellow, my controller is built in. I can't just move the controller.

Right, right.

I don't know. So that's my conundrum, but I'll figure it out and report back. Wes, you've been taking a little nibble at Nebula, speaking of Nebula.

Yeah, that's true. Actually, independent of the sponsor change, I've been playing with this for the talk, the Mesh Networking NixOS module. And I wanted to see about, you know, because we love Nebula, haven't used it in a little bit. I wanted to check in and see if I can get it working with the module and play nice. And for that, I kind of had to re-familiarize myself. So a little Nebula nibble check-in, perhaps.

I like it. Man, now I want to be at the talk. Are you going to get it recorded? Do you know?

I don't know, but let's hope so.

Okay.

Or I'll give you a private version.

What are you learning, Westpain, on location?

Yeah, well, I mean, so we now live in a world with 1,001 different Mesh VPNs out there, which is pretty great for an end user. But Nebula is especially fun because you kind of get to see how it all works because you run it all yourself. So you start off by making a signing authority, a CA cert and key that establishes your root of trust for what you're doing. So it's all self-hosted in that sense, right?

We use that so like i could have one nebula connection and we'd have like the jb stuff where you guys can talk to that and i could have my own stuff.

I even saw someone wrote a Python script. I'm not recommending this, but they, and I don't know if it's still running, but they were running a public lighthouse where you could then use the Python script to upload the host you wanted so it would all get set up correctly. And then you would just make sure in your configs you had your own private group so only your group from all the public stuff could get into it. So it's pretty flexible.

Could we run a JB lighthouse just for the community? Is that like a thing that would be helpful?

If you use this sort of wrapper script, then yeah, in theory, we can run our own copy of it.

That's not something people wanted. I wouldn't be.

I think they'd be fun.

Yeah, exactly.

But then after that, you know, it's like a Go app, so it's easy to build or run pretty much anywhere, and then you just need to point it at a config and have all of the key stuff. So usually you make like a little bundle of a tarball or whatever for each host that has all the stuff it needs, which is like the base cert from the certificate authority, and then its individual stuff, and then like keys for the other hosts that you want it to trust.

And so in your talk, you're kind of expanding on this idea of a NIC setup that just automatically installs an application into the mesh network. And so it's just, boom, it's when you launch it and get it running, it's on the network immediately.

Yeah, it lives in its own network namespace and it talks through the mesh network. And so this would just allow, you know, I'm working on a version that would allow Nebula to play the same role that already works for Tailscale or Netbird. And then so this would pop up and then as long as you had all the key infrastructure there, it would pop onto your network and that's what it would know.

Well, that's so cool.

But it's fun. So that's like how it works and has worked for a long time. and then you have lighthouses, right, which are the main thing that sits there and lets people swap information about network addresses so you can do, you know, bust through NATs and actually establish connections and all that.

Right.

They've now also added dedicated relays. So, in the Tailscale world, you're probably familiar, they have, like, the derp relays, which is a fallback. So, like, if you can't establish a proper peer-to-peer connection, it'll automatically fall back to that. Lighthouses can be relays for you already, but, That's not really their job. So in like once you get a production network going, there's now dedicated relays you can have. And you have, again, this is an area where you get complete control.

Oh.

Because it's there to be the, it will tunnel network traffic because it has a public address.

So you know where the tough spots are.

Yeah.

Ah.

Or if you do at least, then you can make sure there's one like geographically at that point of presence or in this VPC or whatever you need.

I got you.

Okay.

So you can, you can place it. Yeah. Yeah, and also then you don't really have to worry about somebody else running it and potentially watching what you're doing or, you know, potentially getting legal requests to block certain types of traffic or anything like that because you're running it yourself.

It's all going through things you control.

That's a nice nibble, Wes.

They've also got, let's see, you can SSH into it and get like a debugging console, which is pretty neat. I've only really played with this a little bit. They've also added a very basic but good enough support, I think, for Lighthouse DNS. So now the host that the Lighthouse knows about, it can answer DNS requests for. So if you pair that with a DNS server that can delegate a subdomain or something, then you can have sort of automatic host discovery for the stuff on your Nebula.

I want that. I want that.

There's also, I don't know if it's shipped yet, but there's some docs pointing out that they're working on IPv6 support for having directly on your overlay. So that's pretty neat. and then also there's now a nix os module.

So yes um.

If you want to run it there it looks like a pretty clean little setup too.

Speaking of that do you mind if i do an update please do after the show last week wes set me aside and said here's what you need to do and showed me how to clone the repo of the um they have essentially a image builder script you can clone and make it's called.

Image dash template under the ublue os repo.

I'll link to to my version uh because it's pretty simple that i put up on my github and so i pulled that down and there's a build.sh file in there that i can modify like you were talking about last week and in there i put nebula and i put nix well actually not nix did i i put the creation of slash nix yes.

And then runtime you uh use the determinate installer i believe.

And determinate installer is se linux aware and os tree aware so it goes real smooth as long as you have a slash nix it just can't make.

That slash nix on its own.

Right. So I now have essentially my own tiny, tiny fork of Aurora that has Nebula and slash Nix created. And now I have the Nix tooling and I have AUR and I have Ubuntu and I have Brew and I have Flatpak. It's like, I'm feeling like the king of the world over here. And with that, when I modify that build SH... Anything that's in DNF or in copper, I can just install really quickly at build time. And then, you know, you save it, you build the image, and then it's interesting.

Bootsy hooks up all the right boot bits for you.

And it gives you, like, options to say, yeah, activate this one, and here's your next few images and here's which one's pending and it's it's it's a decent clean easy to use command bootsees nice i like it and then i just say yeah bless this one to be my active image and i reboot and boom i'm in my own custom image and i installed determinate nix and i'm off to the races baby yeah.

So hopefully hopefully that means like you've got more packages available uh and i don't know it's kind of fun to have your own sort of custom image.

Onepassword.com slash unplugged take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application even unmanaged shadow it go learn more at onepassword.com slash unplugged that's the number one password.com slash unplugged all lowercase okay if you're a security it professional you know this problem already you have more and more assets to protect as time goes on more devices more identities and more applications

While this self-hosted energy has me remembering that you teased you had a couple app picks that were really interesting.

I've been looking for a great way for us to save all the stories that we're all looking at all three of us and then be able to collaboratively like mark them up and take notes we've used a couple of different systems over the years but we've kind of gone our own separate ways as time has gone on we each have built our own like workflow for this but in this quest in this journey i have come across link warden a self-hosted collaborative bookmark manager to collect read annotate and fully

It's nice to be able to have a snapshot archive stuff and if it does highlights too that's.

Shared highlights so yeah so highlighting and annotating moving.

To this for the next show right.

I know right it also as you would expect has a reader view, and they've begun integrating local ai tagging so you can run a local ai and have it go through and This sounds silly, but I use this with, I forget the name of it. It's not Hoarder anymore. But I use that with that application, and it works fantastic for just tagging it and sussing out automatic tags. It can collaborate on link gathering. You can share collections of lists with various people.

I feel like this is an application I didn't realize that I needed. And just now I'm thinking, hmm, this might rise to the top of the to-do list. It also looks like it is AGPL.

Yeah. Yeah, it's free. AGPL 3.0. It has a couple other nice things I think you'd like too, Brent. It has really good sorting, including supporting custom icons for different categories, which just visually helps lay it out. But you can put select RSS feeds into this if you want, and it can auto bookmark and preserve those. Because remember, it's not just saving it. It's also doing the JPEG snapshot, the PDF snapshot, the full HTML archiving.

I hear you saying this might help me with my open tabs problem.

Maybe, maybe. And if you're on, I don't think they have this for Android yet. but if you're on ios there is a shortcut to just save the link you're currently looking at right to link warden as well and uh there's a couple community projects i think it's called link droid maybe that's the ones for android oh yeah okay and then yeah there's a few browser extensions as well this.

Seems neat i'd used um buku in the past.

Right right but.

This kind of has some more of the stuff that's targeted like at the you know buku's been pretty decent for like personal just sort of you know, keeping, not forgetting things. for the kind of work we're doing or other kinds of research, maybe generating stuff that you're going to go feed into LLMs to ask about. This seems great.

Tracking stories for work, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, professional development.

The other thing, too, is the project has some momentum. I mean, they had a release just 15 hours ago. They have a live demo you can check out. They also, I think, have a cloud product eventually if you don't want to deploy it yourself.

Also, 68 contributors. That's often something I look at for projects just to see the health of it and how popular it is. Those are important things. And like 68 is respectable.

Yeah, and they're doing funding on Open Collective, so they have all that information up there, which is a great way for projects to go. So I'm very impressed with Link Warden. You know, I've probably used it for a total of 12 hours so far, but it was like one of these, oh, I got to tell the world about this. This is better than any of the other ones I've used, specifically if you have people you want to collaborate with, like a little small group of people or a team.

Yeah, and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first because it's a lot of things, or could be. It's called Neko, a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker and uses WebRTC and, So it's like a browser in browser that you stream, that you stream so you can interact with it. But like the interface is streamed back to you via WebRTC.

Yeah, I guess the end result is it's actually pretty responsive.

Yeah, it's kind of surprisingly usable. I mean, you need a system that's hosting it that like can keep up, you know, especially but WebRTC is, you know, built to do a lot of this and they put in a lot of work, I think, to make it fast. So in a lot of ways, like, okay, you can do it for a browser, but it can also be, well, it can run anything that the Linux desktop can run, it turns out. So this can also be sort of like a guacamole alternative, perhaps.

But, you know, it also could just be so much simpler because you can stream to multiple endpoints.

Yes. So you can also do RTMP out of this thing. So you can stream to YouTube or Twitch if you want.

Ah.

And multiple people can connect to it, right? So you can do stuff like a watch party, or we could interactively all edit our docs for the show.

Yeah, so you could be the technical person in the friend group. You could have them all watch a URL, and you go get a video stream going, and now you're all watching. I mean, that sounds awesome. You're all watching it together. Interactive presentation, sure.

It can also be just one way, too. If you want a browser that isn't attached to your remote system, spin it up in an IP space.

Or you want a full desktop browser on a mobile device for some reason.

Sure.

Or you want to embed a browser into an application i mean that's interesting there's a lot when you think about it there's a lot of things there must be.

Some security uh ways of using this that would you know it's kind of like ultimate sandboxing if you think of it that way.

Right well because you can have a remote persistent browser that's in some secure system or some secure data center and then client machines and all the client machines are doing is sending and receiving video data yeah.

I haven't tried this part yet but um, apparently there's built-in audio support too so that's pretty great i mean you need it for the watch party right but like just you could do a lot of stuff with that.

Well there you go who needs uh x11 remote applications anymore when you've got neko i'm kidding huh it's interesting so neko itself has built-in live streaming support yeah that's neat i mean i don't know what i would use that for but it could be like a well session broadcasting.

Broadcast room content using.

Rtmp Yeah.

You can also record it. You can use stuff like Nginx RTMP on top of it to be able to just save that to a file.

So because you're streaming video, video playback is really nice and smooth.

Yeah, it's not just, as they say, sending images over WebSocket.

Right.

It's actually encoding video and then streaming that to you, which is also stuff we've seen for things like, what, Moonlight? That was another thing that...

Yeah, right. Right. But this makes it a little bit easier when it's just WebRTC, because that's a web browser. There's so many ways you can ingest an RTMP stream.

Built on Go, which has good support for a lot of this stuff. So yeah, you get like the power of web technology, modern browsers, good support for this kind of stuff, and real video codecs too.

I mean, even tutorials, like live tutorials, this could be great for it. Even inside just a company, right? Screw Twitch and YouTube, just you got a group of people you're trying to do a training session with.

It does have a very prominently cat butt based logo.

That is so you know watch out for that that is true that maybe makes.

Mileage may vary but it's a cute.

Cat i think brent yeah but there there is straight up cat butt right there you could argue.

It's an asterisk maybe.

It's a bold logo it's a bold logo you.

Don't forget it that's memorable is important.

The docker compose is 14 lines, I mean, this is really simple stuff. Like everything, it wants port 880. 8080, I mean. They always want 8080, of course. Nothing else is using that. And then there's some UDP ports that opens up for WebRTC as well. Oh, interesting. You set the resolution of the remote host in the Docker Compose file.

Yeah, right now I think it configures like an X desktop. They say, in theory, anything where they could take image snapshots that they then encode into the video stream could be supported, but for now, that's all future potential.

It looks like there's also Nico Rooms, which is a room management software for this. So that's pretty advanced.

Yeah, I have not tried that, but you could build a lot on top of this.

And the whole thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. I mean, it's pretty neat. That's really a fun kind of idea. I don't, like you said, other than watch parties, I'm not sure. maybe a live stream i mean i could have it could be i could be sending brent a live capture of the dock that i'm looking at right now he could be seeing my screen you know i mean i.

Am looking at the dock.

A guy like you brent you need a persistent web browser so one ultimate machine you get him like go get a vps with like 64 gigs of ram you know because you're gonna need a lot with all your tabs um maybe even more but then you could just use this to pull that down to all the different machines right oh.

That would actually be sweet.

All right one ultimate tab browser to rule them all it.

Does make you think you could also maybe tie it in with things like uh video ninja or other sort of obs technologies probably.

Oh for sure with obs yes you could totally pull it into obs and do screen capture that way oh that's a good idea i like that westpain, Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go unleash your hardware.

We had a big week this week at the JB community, and we wanted to do a few shout outs, specifically new members.

Yeah, we ran that bootleg promo recently, and we had Ryan Davis sign up, Marcus L and Batty Morris become new core contributors to the program. So we wanted to give them a shout out. Something we're going to try to do more on the show. And it does look like there are still 17 slots left as of this episode for that bootleg promo code, which takes 15% off the core contributor or the Jupyter.PartyNetwork membership.

And that just keeps going, right? As long as you keep it correct.

That is a nice thing about it. And you can get either the ad-free version of the show or the special bootleg version of the show.

Do you want less show or more show?

You pick. And it's just our way of saying thank you. And yeah, so as we record right now, 17 slots left. If you go to linuxunplugged.com slash membership, use the promo code bootleg, it'll take 15% off for the life of your membership. We also wanted to give a shout out to some folks that are positive contributors in our various community spots. This is tricky because we could name a lot of people.

Caretaker in the room.

Yeah, it was really nice. And so I just wanted to give you guys a shout out. Thank you very much. It does not go unnoticed.

This is impressive.

Right? And it looks good, too. He sent me a screenshot, and I love it, man. It's looking really good. So he's got a picture of it up on the GitHub, too, if you want to check out the link in the show notes. Inspired by VenOS, bringing together the best of gaming and productivity. It's a weird mix, but it's my mix. It's like primarily productivity machine. And then on the weekends, a little bit of gaming.

Well, and, you know, much like in the NixOS world, you could rebase over to Sultris OS and try it out if you wanted to. and the rebase back.

You know what? I might do that on the Dell laptop because the kid's been playing Geometry Dash like a madman on there. And it could use a little help. A little performance in the kernel could be a nice thing. So check out Sultros OS. Looks like a fun project. And we have it linked. We also got a tip on a feed issue that was impacting some of our members from Power 46, it was, in the Matrix.

Yeah, they reached out Matrix then via email. And I guess they were using Miniflux, which is a cool RSS feed reader. It's got like a UI you can use because I think they like to consume on the desktop as well. Okay, so with the ad, ad free and the bootleg have different back-end providers at the moment, and so it works out that there's what's known as a link element in the feed, and that just, like, provides you a link you can go to for a specific episode.

I see.

But the bootleg feed does not have that.

A separate provider doesn't generate that item in the feed.

Exactly. And so Miniflux was falling back to just including the whole feed URL as the external link for every episode, which wasn't really working. So I kind of explained some of that. And then, unfortunately, there wasn't a lot we could do.

Yeah.

But that didn't stop Power46 because they submitted an issue upstream to Miniflux. And the project has actually already merged a fix.

Yes.

So now we'll use the first enclosure link as a fallback if there isn't a link, if that enclosure link exists, before finally doing what it was already doing. So that's great. Thank you for doing that, Power46, and for reaching out.

Yeah. It's a great combination of a great community and open source, and now it's fixed for everybody.

Yeah, maybe go try Miniflux.

Yeah. Could be worth it. Maybe if you want something on the desktop. and it is also time to shout out our boosters and our baller booster this week is mr turd ferguson, And he boosts 65,600 sats. Do you gentlemen know of any open source health tracking software, ideally something that would work with non-stock Android?

Open source.

Wow. I'm surprised we haven't thought about this yet.

I've kind of been kicking this around. I've come across a project that I've bookmarked to check out. But turd, I will include a link if you want to look into it. It's called Endurion. I think it's a self-hosted fitness tracking service designed to give users full control over their data. And one of the neat things about it is, first of all, you can just import a GPX file if you want to track a hike.

That's pretty handy.

Yeah, I haven't tried it.

You got my ears up.

It's got a nice UI that gives you like, so if you go on a hike, it gives you a map overview. A lot of what these fitness tracking things give you, but just locally designed to give you full control over your data. So it's available as a Docker image. It looks pretty comprehensive. And if you want to give it a shot and report back, or if anybody wants to try it in Darien, I think that's how you say it. Let us know. Because it is something I've kicked around. Good question.

The do to buy it boosts in with 42 000 sats, hello gentlemen i'm a few episodes behind but i saw the matrix notification and i just had to boost oh thank you we appreciate it we do i'm currently on vacation so greetings from somewhere at 37.04 blah blah blah comma 25.08 yeah we got some gps coordinates okay.

West does your map have this feature.

Uh there's actually a plug-in module you can add as an overlay to the map.

Look at this thing. I'm impressed. Okay, I'm zooming out. I'm zooming out.

That's a lot of digits of precision, too. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

How do you suppose we say this place?

I'm going to say Antiparos?

Paradise, perhaps? It looks like paradise to me. It's a tiny island just off of a set of tiny islands. Oh, my gosh. Look at all those little islands. Incredible. so it's really kind of south east of uh greece yeah.

This looks beautiful.

That is really amazing holy crap that must be paradise i.

Think the dude is really abiding right now.

Oh my gosh the dude way to live it up thanks for thinking.

Of us even on your.

Vacation yeah man we really appreciate have a great time well.

We have the immunologist here with 5555 cents, I use Aeon, which is relatively easy to modify by creating a changed Butterfest image and then booting into it. However, it is specifically a laptop OS. I do enjoy the whole DistroBox flat pack transitional upgrade system quite a lot. I also feel the pain of those .docx editing with reference software.

Yeah.

Wish LibreOffice would be fully compatible with the whole Word review system.

Man, wouldn't that be a change? That would be amazing. That's a solid boost. Thank you, Immune.

I've heard a couple people use Zotero and really love it.

I want to just touch on something really quick here. He says he's modifying his AEM install by changing a Butterfest image. And then I presume, yeah, he says he's booting into that. That's a whole other way to approach that.

Maybe we should go try AM.

It doesn't sound very cloud native to me.

No, but maybe that's what makes it fun.

Maybe it's copy on write native.

It's...

Cow native, you know?

Oh my God, that's good.

Wes. That's the title. Someone remember that.

I'm going to go with period logical. I'm sure I'm getting that wrong, but they came in with 2000 sats. For the listener having an issue with Fountain or others, I had a lot of problems trying to set up Fountain using a Gmail address. but then no issues using a different domain. I never saw anything identifying this as a fix but thought it was worth sharing. I have also heard that. Thank you. Plus one to that.

Thor comes in with 3,000 sats. I definitely need to give one of those Atomic Desktops a try now. This is a boost for 623.50 Days of Blitz. For the next episode, will there be a segment on how to build your own Nix-based installation image? So it seems like part joke, but then also Thor goes on, sounds like it's trivial for minor changes to atomic desktops like Bluefin, but how easy is it to build of Nix OS? Not just configure, but say, make an image to deploy to your family or org.

Hmm, okay, so that's an interesting line right there. If you're looking for something you want to deploy to other people, it's an interesting question. I would actually argue that minor changes are easier with Nix OS, right? Because now I've essentially have a fork of Aurora that I need to go and make sure I update from time to time from upstream or whatever. And so now there's like an extra step in my upgrade process.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely have options, right? You can just do like a stock install and then immediately apply a flake to that system if you want to. Or you can totally bake in, you know, you can make your own install.

I think a flake would be the way to go. I think that's really the way to do it, right, is take the flake approach. Then also, you know, you can break things out a little bit, manage system and application separately or update individual applications and not have to update the entire system. There's some other benefits to it, too, which, you know, give you flexibility that maybe the other systems don't.

It doesn't change what gets applied but if you just want to build the iso there is a module, uh in nix packages that lets you build like the installation iso so you can also like totally customize that and presumably set it up to make it really easy to just apply your flake at first installation if you wanted to yeah.

The output could be a vhd file the output could be an image file you know oci container file it's a good question let us know if you go down the path.

Odyssey Westra boosted in a row of ducks. Hey, wouldn't it be possible for you guys to shout out the sat streamers who streamed over 2000 sats? I don't know how feasible that is, but that would be pretty cool. My opinion is that sat streaming will probably be more important for live streaming and podcasts, especially music podcasts. I don't like picking one specific artist to boost. I like them all sometimes.

That's a great point. And it's also sad to forget it, which is nice. You just know if you're listening, you're sending back the value.

So remembering to boost or coming up with a topic, it just happened.

You know, Odyssey, you send this question at a good time because we have just started kicking around like what kind of metrics do we want to pull to make sure things are working correctly? And to do that, you know, we have to move things into a database and then we have to write scripts against that and pull that data and massage that data. And one of the things we might be able to do is that type of thing.

Yeah.

We'd have to talk about like how to build something like that. But we have kind of like the early scripts that we pull for the boosties at the end of the year. So we could probably modify something like that.

Yeah, we have a lot of the plumbing. actually, but we don't have it rigged to answer this question just yet, but we'll try to take a look.

I think it's a great idea.

Absolutely.

We really appreciate all you SAD streamers out there, too. Gene Bean's back with 8,455 SADs.

Across five boosts.

Excellent boosting. He sends us a reference manager that he likes at techment.com slash reference dash management dash software. as also for the Word stuff. He says you could try only Office and maybe consider the web version of MS Word. I was wondering, I assumed that for some reason they weren't using the web version of MS Word. I wondered if like the online Office 365 stuff would work. Web Word, Web Word, I like that.

It is a good principle, that's for sure.

Are people version controlling their ESP? I have all sorts of questions about Home Assistant, I realize, because that would be a handy thing.

I suppose you could. He says, I want someone to integrate BitChat, Bridget, we talked about BitChat last week, into the MeshTastic firmware. So you could optionally have people on both chatting away, say at a camp out or at a conference. Each participating in a MeshTastic radio would then be able to support nearby people in this theoretical world.

Oh, great idea.

I do feel like there's a crossover between BitChat and MeshTastic where you have something that can use LoRa and something that can use Bluetooth and you're taking advantage of both. Maybe one day.

MaxiMesh.

He says, for my laptop, I've loved 95% of Nix, but I'm bouncing to Ubuntu for now for compatibility of select applications.

Wow.

Still love Nix OS. I'm still using it in many places. I'm going to try a normal distribution plus Nix for my laptop for a bit.

Also a great option. Let us know how it goes. See what you think.

Might try Bluefin, too, he says, and do a little dual boot.

Oh, yeah.

Solid, Gene. Keep us updated. We want to know how it goes.

Thanks for writing back. Marcel boosts in with 5,000 sats. You asked to boost in on whether we're using immutable OSes. Well, I finally upgraded my 10-year-old Arch laptop to a Framework 16 running NixOS.

Nice upgrade.

I have a NixOS question for you.

All right.

How do you version control your Etsy NixOS slash configuration.nix?

Chris.

I have my home manager config in Git, of course, but I've seen different schools of thought on forums for the root config. Some sim link it to their home folder while others run Git as root in slash Etsy.

Well, what you do is you do old.configuration.nix, really old.configuration.

Do you append the dates just to keep yourself organized?

No, I just trust the file system for that. All right, what's the right way to do it? What's the right way? Does everything have to be in git these days, boys?

Just git.

If you want a history of it, and you want to be able to roll back.

Oh, all right.

Well, I can tell you what I'm doing. I'm a reasonable man.

You want a time-traveling database?

All right, what are you doing, Brent?

Well, you know, when I was learning Nix, I had the little, you know, a good Wes on one of my shoulders and a bad Chris on the other shoulder. And it seemed like Wes won out. So I've been linking to the home directory and doing a sim link there and then doing version control there. So that main, the main reason when I was first starting was so I could just use Kate without needing elevated privileges.

Oh, that, yeah.

That has worked great. Great. I have to tell you, I've rarely used the Git portion of it, but that's the whole point of Git is you hardly ever need it. But when you do, you really do. So, Chris, I feel like maybe you can get on board here at some point.

I think the solution is just simply you do different versions, old, dot, old, dot, dot, back, and then you throw sync thing at the entire thing across all your machines and then just put certain includes that you want and you're good to go. What's the problem?

I mean, especially if you use Flakes. Git and Flakes are just, you know, they pair so nice. And I'm with Brent. You know, if you, under Etsy, NixOS, you can just put Flake.nix.

It sounds very traceable and like you can figure out where things need to be fixed and take action it's wonderful.

You know what i've actually done because i didn't want to post any of my git configs to anything public because i figured i would totally screw that up and make myself vulnerable i actually have sim linked into a next cloud directory so i actually have a nix os directory on next cloud that just has a bunch of machines listed i know there are better ways of doing this but i basically have a folder for each of my machines and then configs within there

Sounds like a solution that would work for me.

Yeah it's not too too bad um you know add get in there but chris i figured if you want to stick with your trusted solution you could just append like a hash to your phone.

Yeah. That'd be a better way to do it.

Well, we have a boost here from our dear PJ. 12,140 sets. oh it's for me brent almost had it one two one four zero that's 12 years one month four days prior to the release of linux unplugged six two one.

12 years all right based on the youtube publish date of linux arch show the arch way published on june 2nd 2013 well there you go wow, That was a little bit before PewDiePie Thank you, PJ Nice to hear from you Appreciate the boost, Doornail comes in with Doornail, I should say 7887, sorry Comes in with 2,800 and 34 sats, Zip code multiplied by 16 This one shouldn't require too many paper cuts Also, another OpenShift ping for you as well. Oh, right. Thank you. Thank you for the reminder.

Yeah, how's that cluster set up going, Chris?

Right. We got to get back to that. Oh, right. Jeez.

What was the amount again?

2, 8, 3, 4, multiply by 16.

Okay, so that's 4, 5, 3, 4, 4.

Okay, so now we just need to translate that in our book here.

We got to go find it in the map, bro.

Yeah, so we have a book that tells us zip codes to map coordinates.

The decoder, we call it.

Put that right there.

It's very old. It's got like a, I don't know. I don't know what kind of leather binding this is.

I think it's pleather.

Did someone spill coffee on it?

Oh, yeah. That was a while ago.

Was it?

That was.

Let's go with lucky city new Carlisle, Ohio.

Hello, Ohio. Thank you for the boost.

You know I've never been to Ohio.

Me either.

Gotta put that on the list.

I've been, I believe, at least once, because I went to OhioFest way back in the day.

I've seen a lot of ads for Ohio.

My kids say the word Ohio ironically a lot. I don't know what that's about.

Like Ohio?

Ohio, they say. Yeah. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Amorph Sausage comes in with 5,000 sats. Well, he says, unfortunately, my experience with Universal Blue, a.k.a. Bazite, was not good.

Oh, no.

Yeah, he says on initial setup, it was fine. But over the first month, boot time increased with every boot to eventually get to about 10 minutes.

That's not ideal.

When I checked what takes so long to start, I saw an OS Tree or Ublue service, I can't remember the name, taking eight plus minutes. So I switched to CacheOS, and I'm very happy. I got my parents on Cachy 2. It kind of went to a disaster. Now they're on Mint. The OSes seem to not suit every PC tower. That OS seems not to suit every PC tower, and I don't know why. But I'd love to give Bazzite another try, but I'm scared about ruining my setup. But I do love the immutable idea.

Not a zip code boost in with 8,888 sats. Coming in from Podverse, boosting from the only country that has one zip code per building?

Oh, I've heard of this.

Can I guess? Can I guess?

Is it on the Mighty Map? Love the recent Red Hat episodes and the Tui Challenge. Well, thank you. A couple of weeks back, I fell into the Shaz... How do you say this?

Shamoah.

There we go. Thank you. Rabbit Hole, a past show mention. It's a blast once you get it tiled in. Does anyone on the JB crew still use it? I'm also now feeling like Bluefin might be the next logical step towards the cloud-native desktop. Thanks for the great show.

Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, you guys got to help me out on this one.

Now, the UK actually is known for having zip codes with a high level of granularity, but I don't think he's talking. I'm just saying, I'm just saying before they write in, I know that. I know Singapore and Hong Kong both use six-digit codes that uniquely identify sectors or buildings. So it could be Singapore or Hong Kong. seems like a long shot what do you think brent.

Well i mean i think the japanese get this one right i think they're super sophisticated and we're just like you know 100 years in the past in the past.

Really okay i didn't know the japanese do this that's my guess okay i know that the netherlands has a pretty granular postal code system too so this could be a few but per building oh.

One of My old maps seems to maybe say hungry.

Hungry, but there's a few options here. That's a rare one, though. That's pretty neat. Think about the handiness there.

I don't know how to.

You know what I mean?

In Zala County, maybe?

Just the zip code tells you write the building to go to. That's so handy.

But in theory, they should be showing me a specific building then.

Wow. Let us know not a zip code.

Please do. Thanks for boosting in.

Now I got to know. I'm stumped.

I got to get an upgrade on this map kit.

Adversary 17 came in below the 2000s at cutoff, but we got to give him a shout out. He says, sorry, I haven't boosted recently. I have been streaming those sats. I'm getting married next week. So life is hectic.

I bet.

Congratulations. Nice to just hear I have a check in during the middle of all of that. Wow, that's so neat that we get to hear that kind of stuff. I really appreciate that. It's really cool knowing that. Thanks, adversaries. And congratulations. Thank you, everybody who supported episode 624 of the Unplugged program. We really appreciate it. You know, the thing is, is we work hard, and this segment right here is sort of the reinforcement factor of that.

Oh, I'm going to have to try this.

And it includes integration with things like Nautilus.

WinApp's unified software experience for Linux.

Yes, it uses Docker or Podman or LibVert, and then it can pop these individual Windows applications out and make them feel on Plasma or Gnome like they're as native as possible.

I like that MIRC is on here.

Yeah.

But also PowerShell and Command Pro.

So this system, it queries Windows for all the installed applications, and then it creates shortcuts for those Windows applications on the GNU Linux OS, and then it uses FreeRDP on the back end to render the Windows applications alongside your GNU Linux applications. How neat is this? It's so great. And there's an official taskbar widget that enables seamless administration of the Windows subsystem and to launch Windows applications. So if you want to add that, you can, which is just so slick.

I'm still regularly blown away that we don't hear about some of these applications. Like we do a lot of just sleuthing around to find the craziest applications to solve the craziest problems. And this seems like such an obvious one that should have been on our radar sooner. It's a really good one, Nick.

Yes, it's fun. It takes me back too, to the old days of trying to run these apps and using the different technologies.

Suddenly I'm like excited to go try to run a Windows application. What's going on here?

Could I run the Creative Cloud suite? If I could, would I? I don't know.

I feel, Chris, like this might solve your Bluefin software availability challenge. You could just use the Windows Store.

Oh, that's so funny.

Well, you could probably run WSL, right?

Oh, man. You know what? That would be like some serious distroception right there, Wes Payne. That's a good one.

Yeah, that's right. Podcasting 2.0 certified over here. We've got transcripts so you can follow along or go search for something if you want. And easy chapter markers to go to your favorite segment.

Right back. Play it, listen again, or skip it. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of the unplugged program and we'll see you right back here next sunday.