649: Burned by AI

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, it does seem to be the storage apocalypse. It's here. It's real. And an old friend's going to drop by to talk survival strategies as prices explode. And then we've got an unapologetically 90s approach to stretching your current storage. Sometimes the old way of doing things still makes sense. They're going to round it out with some booths, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual

Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Brent.

And let's say hello to that old friend from Tux Digital and this week in Linux, Michael Tunnellsbeck. Hello, Michael.

Hello, everybody.

It's good to see you.

Yeah, it's been a while.

Yeah, we didn't get a chance to see you for our predictions episode because you were under the weather. But you're back?

Not speak so that was that was a bummer because uh i enjoy being the referee you.

Know yeah well maybe we'll pick it back up next year but it's good to see and i think we should maybe we could chat in just a moment on a couple of those predictions i mean we might have them here so if we wanted to look at them in a moment we could before we get there i want to say good morning to our friends over at defined networking go check out manage nebula at define.net slash unplugged Now, you want a beautiful mesh VPN network these days.

And the remaining value goes to support one of the best open source conferences out there.

Yeah, and you get access to both Planet Nix and Scale.

And the expo hall and all the other talks. There's a lot.

UNPLUG, U-N-P-L-G. We'll have a link to that. We want to see you there. This, you know, I think year one of Planet Nix. Is this a thing? Is this possible? Can they pull this off? Establish it? Yes. Did people like it? We loved it. All right, we're doing it again. Now, this year, I think it's going to be a lot about building things, talking to people, like people who don't normally sit in the same room together, but also still use the same stuff they create. A lot of that.

Oh.

Back in the nice area. It's all fixed up. And the LinuxFest Northwest call for papers ends tomorrow. Tomorrow. at midnight, Monday, January 12th, at midnight. So get it in. No promo code for LinuxFest Northwest because it's free. Although you can give them a little donation if you want to help support a great event. We'll have links to the LinuxFest Northwest call for papers as well. So there you go. Planet Nix and Scale. That's happening in March, March 5th through the 6th in

I have not.

Yeah we got a nino transition it's fading out uh you know of dominance as they say uh-huh which means it should be a beautiful linux fest northwest so we'd love to see you plenty of time to plan.

Right come on we're telling you now.

Yep and all the lazy links are in the show notes,

Thanks for having me.

Would you love to go back in time and see how you did? I mean, would you just love it? Would you just be thrilled? I would love it.

Actually, I don't remember most of what I said. I remember one of them, and I think I was right. And the other ones, I don't remember at all.

I mean, I did. I don't remember them specifically. But when we were prepping for the episode, I reviewed them. And I think you did OK.

Yeah, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by yourself.

So, here was Michael's first prediction for 2025.

I predict that the Cosmic desktop from System76 will make at least a release candidate version available in 2025.

I mean, they made that.

I was very right.

Nice. Not bad.

I forgot about that one entirely.

You're too busy playing with Cosmic.

That only really came later in the year.

Yeah, it was like three weeks before the end of the year. and then like nice yeah.

All right here was prediction number two for 2025 i.

Predict that the linux desktop market share will become five percent some point this year.

I think that one was right too right like everything we can.

Measure with.

Seems like that seems like it hit which is.

Yeah i was i was super shocked uh because that's the one i remembered i was like uh because i remember saying like because it was expected to go to four and i was like you know i'll just do five anyway and then that actually happened it's like wow how was i right okay awesome well.

You know what i want to know is do you have a prediction for 2026.

I should but in terms of market share i think it's going to go up to i'm going to go ahead and say an extra two percent and say seven all.

Right all right i like that that was bold all right are you ready for your third and last prediction.

Yes here.

We go i predict that in 2025 kde will release a specific desktop operating system of their own, regardless of what it's named, KDE Linux or not, and it will be at least at a beta release level.

Now, I don't know. I don't know if they've actually hit beta, have they?

No, I think I was wrong on that one. I think they hit alpha, not beta.

Yeah, right.

That's a bummer. I almost got perfect.

Okay, here's just a bonus prediction. Do you think they'll hit a 1.0 in 2026?

I think towards the end of the year, maybe. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be anytime soon, but I think they've made a lot of progress. I think they've made a lot of progress, enough where they could get to the the like I don't know November December era yeah.

I hope so.

Although didn't I see they're like doing some debates about sort of the underpinnings and should they stick with their like arch sort of inspired thing or adopt other.

Yeah I think that there's actually potential where they could you know do a combination of things like, a lot of the effort in the Universal Blue project is super interesting because there's there's some effort to make it distro-less and that by that meaning um it doesn't matter what it's sitting on top of like the you could switch out the underneath you know fairly easily like just how you can like image mode you can switch the desktops pretty quickly it would be uh possible to switch arch to

Swap that layer out, huh?

Yeah, that could also solve that problem. Who knows?

Wouldn't that be interesting? I'm just thinking about the way OEMs could use that. I think the last 10% of KDE Linux is going to be the toughest. So that... It might push a 1.0 out to Q1 of 2027. And I don't think that'd be a shame.

Honestly, I feel like it might be a 1.0 that's not a 1.0.

Oh, it could be, yeah.

Yeah. So, like, for example, Cosmix. Cosmix 1.0 was not really ready. Like, it's cool. There's a lot of good stuff. But there's still some pretty noticeable bugs that would not really count as a 1.0 in that sense.

And in our space, there is some value to getting it out there in front of users and starting to get that feedback.

Yeah. I also just feel like the idea of the 1.0 is, you know, like the version number mattering is like antiquated and no longer matters. Like it's like when people talk about like the next version of Linux, you know, like Linux 7 is going to come out sometime soon. And they're like, well, why is it going to 7? Well, arbitrary number count.

Choose it because west predicted it that's usually how it goes.

Well that that also helps too yeah.

You know back in my day a point release was like a sign of perhaps a compatibility break or a major new feature set.

Yeah it's.

Just sort of lost its meaning in that sense.

Yeah and the major minor bug thing is gone too like it some people use it but it also doesn't matter anymore yeah so like uh ubuntu helped create that to go away with the dates. So now we have like the major minor, but it's really just like, it's an update. Who cares?

Yeah, I wonder, one day we'll have Linux 2810. Linux, you know, whatever. Whatever we'll have.

Since October.

That's not 10 percent. That's not 20 percent. No. Over 50 percent.

And because I'm in a moving vehicle, I was looking for solid state. So I at first had my eye on an 8-terabyte NVMe, which would be just enough. And that thing went from it.

I mean, that sounds expensive already.

Yeah. But I think it was like $700, $800. And now it's between $14 and $1,600 depending on the vendor.

Wow.

And the other thing is.

Do I want a laptop or a hard drive?

The number of vendors even supplying to the consumer market is less. I did a little comparison shopping on Camel, Camel, Camel of SSD vendors selling two terabyte drives back in October, and there were probably 30 of them. And now there's two. So it's brutal out there. And it's just gone from something that was kind of cheap to just this precious commodity, obviously because enterprise data centers, those types of AI jobs, they're all eating up storage.

Do you have any hard drives we can have?

So actually as you were talking about it i was thinking about it and uh you got that sweet storage i i was actually thinking about it as you were mentioning you were describing this problem and i was thinking like you know at this point ssds are probably around the same or if not more value than gold so so i was thinking like maybe i should sell some of my ssds you know and get some like like some like five-year-old ssds are now worth double what they were or whatever,

Yeah, totally get that, right? You don't want to have it later, you're like, I had that, I made that, I burned hours of my life investing in creating that to throw it away when I could have just had that one more FLAC file? Come on.

Exactly. And also, it goes back to when I was doing graphic design. So I have all the PSD files and I have everything. So I have the completed project and the source project and everything. And I've gotten to the point where now, So some of that stuff I still keep, even if it's super old, just because of like, I just want it. But when it comes to video, and doing like video on YouTube, and you know, the podcasting and stuff, and there's been, there's just so much data that takes up.

It is really easy to slip into digital hoarding um and and just you save everything and and you constantly are adding to it more and more, which is kind of fun, but gets very expensive right now. Yeah. So I'm kind of not with like project files, but I'm on the other end of I spent probably the last five years being I'll just delete it guy.

Yeah, no, I'm kind of in the same place. Like I have been trying to keep, I haven't, not for the last few years, but before that I was moving around a lot and it was just like, didn't make sense to have a giant NAS keeping everything. So I've kind of been pruning, but you're right. We're entering now a digital landscape where I've been thinking about it for, like with the, I don't know if you've seen some of the numbers people are passing around for like the death of stack overflow.

Yeah.

But there's just a lot of stuff on there. Not that it isn't elsewhere, but especially even for some things like, like there's like the math overflow part. There's some nice write-ups or ways that people express things or taught things, just things that I've kind of always relied on existing out there in the internet, whether it be on the media side or just on the information side, that we're getting to a new era.

And then I've also digitized more things with paperless and whatnot, which also brings in backups to this, Brent. And I don't know if you've thought much about this, but with storage going up, it makes strategies like, oh, I'll just buy another hard drive. I'll buy this hard drive, copy everything over, then send it off-site. Well, maybe not with the expense now.

Yeah. I mean, that was my strategy up till now. And now I'm thinking, holy, I got to get my act in gear because if I all of a sudden decide I have to move to used drives, for instance. I don't know. You tell me if I'm right or not. But that feels like the risk is higher. So maybe I do need extra bays in my NAS. And maybe I do need to have a better RAID system. And maybe I do need, you know, more offside backups and stuff because hard drives are going to fail.

Used drives are getting more expensive, too. I did a little eBay slinking trying to find a cheap. And you can, I mean, you'll save money. But like you said, you don't know the quality. And yeah, like they're still not as cheap as they used to be.

And here I thought 2026 was naively going to be the year I finally got a proper backup system for my folks going.

I know. So, yeah, Brian, it's like not even used storage.

Well, I do have a bunch in my basement that I forgot about that I could probably get back out of the ice.

Slam it all into a scary raid, you know?

I think the worst part is that now this whole thing has happened. And I have just a few sitting over here for like, you know, drives that I've done for testing of like distros and stuff that even they're 256 gig or 512 gig. And they're now looking super appealing. Like, oh, wow, I actually have stuff I can use, even though it's super tiny, too.

I know, I was looking at, like, SATA controllers with, like, eight ports on them. I'm like, I could slam one of these in and just attach a bunch of random drives and then just smash it all together. And then one of them will eventually pop, but...

All right, you get a bunch of Raspberry Pis, and then you plug in a bunch of sort of USB expanders. And then you put in a bunch of flash drives, and then you put that all into a CEPH cluster. And then you just store everything there.

Well, why not cut out the middleman and get a USB hub and just attach a whole bunch of SD card readers all to the USB hub?

Oh, good point, yeah.

Yeah.

Those are so thin, right?

It like it'll stack well yeah it's essentially solid.

I would assume this is all you know hard drives and memory and ssd is all being consumed by like the you know ai push right the.

Big machine yeah.

But i was thinking about this a little bit more this morning and, You know, they're going to be pushing their hard drives out of the pipeline at some point, right? They're not just going to hoard every single hard drive that they're using.

I feel like they're going to destroy them, though. Like, they're going to use them to a degree. Like, you know, like the crypto miners made the GPUs worthless. I feel like they're going to make their drives worthless.

Yeah. Although, like, some vendors may have an age-out strategy. Hmm. You could still see. Like, I could still see, even if not all of them. If only like, say, 30% of them made it on the market, in the used market, there are outlets that specialize. And that's one of the ones I looked into, by the way, is there are outlets that specialize in they go buy them from the data centers and guarantee like they

The nice thing, too, with some of this, right, like, unlike GPUs, I mean, if it was cheaper, you could also, if it was cheaper but sketchy, you could up the redundancy, right?

Oh, true.

I'm going to build two arrays. I'm going to have double copies because I don't really trust either of them, and I don't want to do a giant.

So that could be a future thing where use storage comes down, but as of right now, it's still pretty expensive, and you're rolling the dice. So it's sort of a double whammy.

There's also something to be said for not every single ai company that's buying all this stuff up right now because they somehow have free money uh is going to survive so we might see like these big splashes of hardware just hitting the used market all of a sudden so if you're looking you might be able to find that stuff i don't imagine it'll be a constant you know stream of what we want to be consuming in terms of hardware but it might happen.

Yeah, they may not all be consumer end products, but if you're okay dealing with SaaS or whatever, it might work. But I do think there is something we can do about it because there is an area of the market that these data centers are just not gobbling up. They have no interest in. It still provides a good means of storage.

You're talking about magnetic tape.

I looked at that. I did. If anybody knows a place to find a tape drive that's reliable for under $500, let me know. but all the ones I saw.

Floppy disks.

Floppy disks. Yes. Now here's what I'm thinking. The solution comes from the nineties and that's optical media. We channel our inner nineties kids and I think we look back at optical media. I think it, I think it holds the solution. And so gentlemen, I have been inspired and I have an idea. Join crowdhealth.com and use the promo code unplugged.

Chris, I'll admit when I first heard you talking about this idea, I thought it was pretty crazy because I thought we had left those little spinning things of plastic behind. Like, I have a drawer full somewhere, though, if you need some. But now I, after doing a little research, I kind of see where you're going with this. It's, you know, I'm feeling a little nostalgic from their 90s times.

It is fun. It does have some nostalgia. Physical media, it's back. It's still a thing and it's cheap. So the seed oil of this idea was after last week's Linux Unplugged, Wes and I were checking out the DVD drive that I bought to restore or re-rip stuff from the original DVD since I deleted it and then wanted it back. And we were checking it out and I needed something to test it with and I wanted to see if it worked with Linux and see if the USB bus could power it enough and all this.

That's right. Oh, that was so good.

I burned this CD-R in early 2000, 26 years ago.

And it was just there, sitting, waiting this whole time.

Just worked perfectly.

No way.

And it struck me as, well, that's about as best case scenario as I can expect. Right?

Now, admittedly, we didn't try installing Windows.

No. We didn't check Summit. That's true. We didn't try installing Office 2000. But it just got me thinking, like, wow, that really held up. And then throughout the week, I realized, well, this DVD drive can burn Blu-rays. And then I started thinking, well, let's go take a look at this. I'm running out of storage. Well, you can buy a 50 gigabyte Blu-ray disc. In fact, you can buy a pack of 10 50 gig Blu-ray discs for 18 US dollars.

They still manufacture them? I don't believe this.

Wow. So say you get that Newegg deal, right? you're essentially buying usable storage about 4.6 terabytes of usable storage and so that works out to be about three cents a gigabyte you could of course get an ssd at a pretty but you know those are pretty expensive so you can buy these bundles of blu-ray discs at 50 gigs a pop i mean it's going to take a while but this is like an area that the data centers don't don't care

I mean so I guess you gotta go through the effort of doing the burning.

Yep and.

Maybe the restoring or the.

Validating don't lose it and don't forget what files on what and probably.

Ideally you wanna make sure you've got it in some sort of storage where it's not gonna get scratched and you know whatever, But, I mean, I remember the eras, like I remember copying stuff for friends, et cetera. Like, I have gone through the motions of burning a fair amount of disks, right? So, like, it is doable, and you probably use them in the computer anyway, so, like, you kind of just do it while you're doing other things.

And if you do it right, you know, like in the case of this CDR I backed up in the year 2000, if it's just files on a file system, and you don't require some specific app to, like, decrypt and restore it, then future you can just drag and drop the files when you want to restore it when you want them maybe you only want one file or something like that.

But that does bring up keeping track of like there is that because if you're gonna have it like the units are smaller right so you'll have more units and so yeah if you don't do a good job labeling or whatever then you're like well where's wait i need for the photos from which year.

We also have much better compression algorithms these days than we used to. So I feel like you could fit even more info on those disks than you're comparing.

That's very true. So I set out to find a tool to help me achieve this job. How hard could this be, right? I looked at Borg Backup. I looked at Bacula, too, considering maybe I would actually just accomplish this with a traditional backup tool. Because you bring up a good point, Wes, is like the key thing is, say my kids come to me two years from now, and they say, Dad, we want to watch X. And, well, how the hell do I know out of these 15 Blu-rays where that one file is?

It's even worse if it's a bunch of small files. They're like, oh, I need the, which, okay, where did I put the taxes for this year?

Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, because paperless is also another thing in here and all of that. So, ladies and gentlemen, I could not find a tool, so I have made a tool, and it is called Blue Vault. That's right. It's a Rust-based app, a TUI, with sort of an 80s theme for managing Blu-ray archives. And the basic idea is you attach a USB Blu-ray burner, which are like $50 these days, US dollars. You bring up this TUI. And it walks you through archiving individual folders to a Blu-ray disk.

Wait, okay. So it's not splitting files or anything?

No, it's just kind of looking at the map and being like, okay, I can fit this season on this disk, but a few episodes are going to have to go on this other disk. And I'll properly label that in the file system, but you know, you're going to probably waste a few gigs on this disk. But the idea being that in the future, you could just put that in, mount it, and just drag and drop the files. You don't need any particular app to restore it.

And then is it like thought of differently in the app? Is that like the multi-disk thought of as a single unit when you're like listing all of your disks or? So then it knows that they're at least connected in the database.

Yes, exactly. And there's two paths in the app right now. There's the single disk route, which is really simple. Then there's the multi-disk route. And then if you do the multi-disk route, then the database knows, okay, this was a multi-disk entry and just stores it that way. It's a Rust app, too, which is fun, and it's the first Rust app I've ever created. I've tried to be considerate about storage space, too, so when the job is successful, it'll clean itself up.

But it does dry runs, you said.

Yeah, so we'll do dry runs. But, of course, to fully test, I need to burn. Yeah, and it will do some testing to make sure everything's working. And if it looks like it won't work, it'll try to warn you. And if you have any missing dependencies because of a couple apps you have to install, it'll attempt to warn you.

I got a preview of the single-disc mode, so I've been playing with that one. I have not yet tried multi-disc, because you only just put it in last night.

I have no idea if it would even build on your machine. Yeah, because not only that, but there's a lot of UI updates I did too, So it's like, we'll see. But I would love some help with it because I think, you know, there's a couple of little nagly bugs, but the basic functionality is there. It's GPL2. It's really easy to pick up everything, super documented, the architecture, the commit, the development, the directory structure.

I did, yeah. So it turns out that you mentioned kind of what it looks like, but you have added a theming system. So I thought I'd add a new theme for you.

You told me to wait for the show. A hot dog theme.

Hot dog theme.

Yes.

Classic Windows 3.1 hot dog stand.

I do like the, you know, I kind of like it. I do like it. Yeah, well, because I kind of decided to lean into the 80s retro theme, but then I thought some people might find that really obnoxious. So you can actually override it at runtime, or there's a little config file, too, where you can set the theme. That's way more obnoxious than mine.

And I love it. So, well, it's serious business when you're doing your backups, right? So, like, you want it to be bright with warning and emergencies.

I just got a, last night I got a warning from us. Like, hey, I made a PR, but don't look at it or merge it until the show.

And also, if there is about the 80s, maybe they're, like, really big into Hulkamania. That's perfect.

Oh, yeah, it does. It is the Hulk colors. You're right. I never really connected those two things. Yeah, so Blu-ray is in the 90s, right? But the optical storage is very much a retro thing. And I will full-on admit I got a little tinge of delightful nostalgia the first time I took the wrapper off the spindle, opened up the spindle, pulled the Blu-ray off, and put it in the drive. And I held it there in my hand, and I'm like, this is actually fun.

You just had spindles around all the time.

Yeah.

It's ours it's it's kind of like the the idea of like you know the the style of these optical drives you know it's it seems antiquated but at the same time there are still massive uses for it like really good uses and if you get like the the mdisc type of stuff where they claim to have like a thousand years of longevity uh the like it is a legitimate solution for storage of data and uh Especially if it's data that you're storing for the sake of like I might

And you know like a jewel case a little blu-ray jewel case doesn't take up a lot of room i.

Was gonna ask are you gonna do that are you gonna like.

Or do like a like a like you could get covers or do they.

Still make those discs where you could like draw images on the top.

These ones do that like with the inkjet like template thing which is so cool oh man yeah um so blue vault is available at github.com slash chris lass slash blue dash vault it is vibe coded warning i.

Did I don't think you can type R in.

Yes, I fixed that.

Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah. R or, there was like Q. I don't think it was R or Q, because they were grabbed by the UI for other.

I figured it must have.

Yeah. I was like, oh yeah, right, of course. You know, that's, so this has been an interesting experience for me is, What I really, and I totally if I'm wrong, Wes, but what I really got away from this, what I took away from this experience is I got the core functionality working in about 45 minutes and the UI and the edge cases and all the little things like you can't type R here is what took me six to seven hours.

Yep. Which totally checks out. You get the happy path done, right? You're like, oh, okay, yes, this was, I connected the core pieces of what I needed together, got it to do it.

Yeah.

And then you realize that there's a whole bunch of ways that you have to, like, micro-adjust to make sure that that actually is smooth and usable by a human.

I mean, six hours is still pretty fast in considering what this is, you know?

Yeah, well, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting's been just tools underneath that have been around on Linux forever. So I got lucky that way, right? I'm just using it.

You don't have to build something to burn the disk. You just have to make sure you assemble the files.

Right. Yeah, yeah.

I have some real-world questions.

Okay.

How long does it take you to burn a 50-gig disk? And how long does it take you to retrieve said disk?

So it's slower than I remember, I'll be honest with you. I expected it to be slow. I mean, and this isn't like the fastest drive either. It's a $50 external tiny thin USB drive, so they probably have faster ones. About 30 minutes, 35 minutes to burn a full disk, but I don't really often burn a full disk. So if you're doing about a half a disk, it's about 15 minutes.

It's physics, yeah.

Yeah. But going through this has been an interesting, like reconnecting with physical media, thinking about documents and media that maybe I don't even need this year. And if I can buy from Newegg. You know, at three cents a gigabyte, that's probably better than any storage I can get. And then I could take some stuff off my existing network storage and maybe squeak through the year. What are you know.

What are your request?

OK, yeah. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

Yeah.

Have you tried it yet? Have you tried it?

I'm not yet.

I got to get this in your hand so you can break it.

But I have past experience that makes me imagine that feature request. and are you taking audio feature requests at this time?

Audio? Oh, I mean, you're submitting it via audio instead of a P. Okay, yeah, go ahead.

I just wondered, since, you know, you just admitted that burning disks takes a little longer than transferring to hard drives, but that's okay, that's okay. This is long-term media. So does Blue Vault have the ability to manage multiple burn devices to do the burning?

Oh, that's a great idea.

You could stack up five of these or something and just let them go.

Maybe like once a month you pick one up for the first three months of the year or something.

Multiplex it.

And then after the multi-disc, you have like five of these machines doing the burning to the multi-disc. So it's technically only to take the whole process of one.

That is a fascinating idea.

You're welcome.

You need some serious USB bus power. Because these things, one of the things I've noticed is if you don't have a dedicated powered USB hub, your built-in port might not be enough. And so the burn will fail in Blue Vault, not because of Blue Vault, but because the disk doesn't have enough juice. So I had to plug it into an externally powered hub in order to get enough juice.

So it was a laser.

Three, four disks when you figured that one out?

It was two disks. yeah i i ended up like getting real learning real quick some of the syntax to like just read if there's a file system at all on the disc because if there's a file system at all you can't burn to it in for bdrs at least so.

So does it burn to the like the data as is or does it have like a way for let's say you're burning some kind of movie or tv show if it's like playable in a blu-ray player.

No no it's only it's only meant for like being able to the the guiding principle was you could put it like on another Linux box in 10 years and just drag the files off.

Gotcha.

Cause I don't actually, I don't really have anything anymore.

I, if you wanted to play the movie, you would be doing that and then dragging it into jellyfin anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like, I feel like if you're just trying to see how, how far you're going down the optical media path, you know?

Well, I started thinking of, I'm like, this is, you know, how bad would it be to just have one of these on the TV and just put, that's not that bad. You know, I started thinking about that. I think the other thing that'd be kind of a neat feature for this would be to just have it also manage archives to disk.

What would be interesting is if it had a way of, like, suppose it would, would it win multi-disc mode? Could you do recursively for, like, a whole folder path?

Yeah.

So you could, like, sort of have it, say, back up a system onto a couple of discs if you needed to.

You could, yeah. I mean, it just...

And then just, like, have it run and piecemeal it all back together.

So when you start it, you know, you tell what mode you want to go in and you give yourself some notes.

Sure.

That's why I like having it, even though you will sometimes have a Blu-ray where you didn't use all the space, maybe as efficiently, I think it's worth it.

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting idea, and I also think it's kind of hilarious that it's vibe-coded because that means AI caused the problem and solved the problem.

That's a great point.

Oh, man.

There is no sponsor for this segment, but we do have our great members and, of course, our boosters. So I just want to take a moment and thank them because at the beginning of the year, you know, we're sorting out the deals. It can take a little while, and there are periods that if we didn't have the support of our members, we wouldn't have a show. And so I'm very grateful. And if you haven't signed up yet, I do still have the bootleg promo code. That's a fantastic deal.

I'll see a little bag of boosts here and we're gonna start off with our baller the dude abides, Now the Dutabide sent in a row of McDucks here. 22,222 sets. Stop suggesting awesome projects. I'm running out of resources. Metalurk X seems promising. I have seen it mentioned a couple times out in the wild, but didn't bother deploying it. And now because of Linux Unplugged, I have to try it.

All right, the dude. You know, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised. you could set it up and let it just run for a week and then come back to it and when you got time to tinker with it because let it run and discover. I was over the last couple of days realizing that, so I've got these stupid mesh APs. It's great, whatever. But IoT devices in particular are so dumb and they will really lock into one particular AP.

Hey, I think what you just said also works for this.

You know, yeah. I would love to hear more feedback on the Unify stuff if our audience likes the Unify stuff.

I don't know how much it can pull in, but it did seem like they had a plug-in that could also, like if you ended up wanting the Unify data in NetAlert.

Peanut butter and jelly, West Payne.

Mm-hmm. Ooh, our buddy, our pal Gene Bean comes in with the RoboDucks. In response to Olympia Mike and the Nixbook project and the licensing question, Gene makes a great point, which we should have mentioned. Keep in mind that if you have contributors and don't also use a CLA or contributor license agreement from day one, you can't change the license of the existing code later without sign-off from all prior contributors.

Gene Bean saying go for the CLA? Something to think about. He's right.

And it's also just worthwhile, you know, thinking about the licensing kind of early on and up front is worthwhile.

Yeah, I agree. It is definitely a good point. Thank you, Gene.

Yeah, and not having a license. And some people don't, like, create a project and don't put a license at all. And that just causes massive craziness.

That's, I think, kind of where he's at. He's getting popular enough now where it's like people are asking rather consistently, what's the license here? So they know how to proceed. So, Mike, let us know what you end up doing.

Well, Odyssey, Westra boosted in a couple boosts here for a total of 6,000. 206 Satoshis. It turns out they all say Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

The year of the Linux desktop.

Thank you, Odyssey. Nice to hear from you. Pegdots here with 6,666 sats. Well, I'm guessing that Brent doesn't work for Nextcloud anymore. So what's he doing now? Is he a traveling salesman in his bang bus? As a JB member, I'd be interested to know how much financial value added is compared to the boost in streaming. Oh, these are – okay. So we've got two questions here, three questions. I know that the functions like Bitcoin value fluctuate.

The question was, how does boosting and streaming compare to memberships in terms of supporting the show or something like that?

Yeah, I think on average, there's still we still probably get significantly more support through the membership mechanism on average. And so the way we can that and the thing about that is that's we look at as, OK, that's the revenue we can plan on.

Kind of a consistent baseline.

And then the boost is like, OK, that's like when, you know, you get a bonus, you did a lot, you did good, you did. And that's like the extra stuff that goes directly to all of us because the show through the memberships is, you know, it's barely paying the bills. And so it's not really equivalent. One sort of serves one function and one serves. And we're very, very lucky it worked out that way because really since COVID, the ad market has just been destroyed.

Yeah. The ecosystem around it has changed. The ecosystem within has changed.

Yeah.

Who people and what they're marketing towards has changed.

Yeah. And so for us, it's like the two things are very symbiotic and used differently. We really do appreciate both the support. And I know it's, you know, it's the thing is, it's like, it's like I've kind of made the equivalent seat with Linux magazines. It's like, it's a very niche thing. There's a core audience that loves it.

Yeah, I would say good guess on the NextCloud part. I haven't been a NextClouder since about, I don't know, May of last year and have been basically, what would you call it, Chris, vagabonding since then, doing a bunch of JB projects there for a long time. We rescued, I don't know if you heard about it, rescued this crazy van that's still giving me projects on a daily basis, it seems.

Yeah, you're kind of restoring that.

You know something else we don't talk about with you, Brent, too, is you are a very handy guy, Brent. Like, if Brent needs to work for a couple of days, you know, there's friends and family that have projects where they need somebody who can go on site and do a lot of really good work with their hands, like good, intricate work. masonry type work i don't know is that what it's called what is it called that kind of work.

Uh like i don't know general construction work i'm kind of a generalist i would say but you're a fancy experience and i have high standards that most people don't have i guess right yeah i.

Think that's the word i was looking for.

Basically just yesterday i was doing that like uh i had an uncle near here who was like hey i need some electrical work done but i don't know what i'm doing and last time i did it i really screwed it up so can you come over and fix all my mistakes that i've done for the last decade, and so we did that. And it worked out really well.

And then that was when you come over to my place.

The other thing you have to know is Brent has a hard time saying no to those kind of requests.

That's true, too. Yeah.

Because he's a kind and generous person.

Basically, I've been chasing, like, hanging out with people I love and chasing happiness instead of financial stuff. That leaves, you know, my bank account sad, but my soul quite happy.

He's saying hanging out with people he loves, but he's on the opposite coast. I don't understand.

Sharing my time with people I love.

Message received on that one. All right. All right. Wes, you want to take Mr. Facial Hair?

Yes. The facial hair comes in with 6,000 sats. I wanted to shine some light on an area where open source and Linux are doing quite well. And it's tabletop gaming.

Really?

For example, the D&D game I run uses Nextcloud for content hosting, Foundry VTT for our virtual table, and self-hosted Jitsi for player comms. Just wanted to get your thoughts on this and see if you all had any fun D&D stories.

Facial hair, why do you suppose this is? What has attributed this phenomenon? And how can we replicate it?

Thank you for the report.

That's great.

I mean, there's a lot of great tools, and you need to accomplish a certain set of things to have a good game going. Why not solve them with open source?

You ever play any D&D?

Yeah, I like D&D. It's been a while, but I've played many. I mean, never super consistent, but I've had many fun D&D experiences over the years.

Michael, you ever do any D&D?

I've never played D&D. No.

Brent, what about you?

I have never participated. However, I have watched a lot of famous people play in the last couple months. and have been invited several times, but I feel unprepared, let's say. Daunted.

Well, I mean, I hope they're not inviting you to be the DM.

No, no, no, by far not. However, I still feel a way out of my league.

I feel like this is an opportunity that we could do a collab of like doing like, you know, first timers doing D&D.

Like pair up first timer with a pro or something. I want to learn enough where I could just do like commentary on the streams like, oh, he moves over here and does this. You know, I don't know. I don't know if it's more golf or if it's more wrestling for D&D, but.

I think it's more. I think it's more golf, maybe.

Yeah, I think so.

They have their own dialogue, so you don't want to interact too much. but there's actually a few like i haven't done like play dnd but i've seen like random videos of people playing dnd because there's a couple uh shows that are on youtube where it's just like a bunch of comedians playing dnd and that's that's entertaining stuff yeah for sure.

What's fun too right is they have like all kinds of different types of games at this point so one of the first ones i did was actually a star wars themed one that a roommate ran and uh it's kind of a new roommate and i i came home and another uh roommate was working at a donut shop and so they had all these like you know like end of the day donuts like they'd pushed um some of the like taking a table out of a room and pushed it in with the main

That sounds like an awesome.

Introduction it was a great introduction not bad.

At all i i would say if we want to do a jb dnd at some point maybe a fun stream on the holidays or when we're all feeling like we don't have too much work, probably our buddy Jason would host that for us.

That would be great.

He is a professional D&D-er, so he would organize that for us if we wanted.

Why am I not surprised?

And he's listening right now, so hey, Jason.

Hello, Jason! Alright, thank you everybody who supported the show, the members and the boosters. When you look at our SAT streamers, 22 of you stream SATs as you listen, you collectively stacked 25,340 SATs. When you combine that with our boosters, it's a humble but appreciated 85,267 sats. This can be a thing from time to time because the last two episodes, the sun was shining.

Crazy. We got sunburned.

Yeah. We still have our skin peeling. You guys really blew us away. What does tend to happen is we kind of go into famine. We sort of feast and then we have famine for a bit.

Like a rain shadow.

Yeah. So if you've been waiting to support the show, now it could be a good time during the famine. We really do appreciate it. It's really easy to boost to something like Fountain FM. In fact, they're making it easier and easier, guys. It's getting crazy what they're doing with the new features. There's a whole self-hosted platform out there with things like AlbiHub and lots of good apps at podcastapps.com. Then you get additional features like transcripts. You get the cloud chapters.

Yeah, I've been diving into Copia. It was mentioned a couple times by some of our listeners as a response to our, you know, several scattered backup episodes that we've done in the past.

And you could consider this one of them.

Yeah. Here's your mini segment for, you know, give us some feedback on what we're doing wrong. But I had a friend who ran into a situation where their laptop was stolen out of their apartment while they were there sleeping just overnight. And it turns out that person also had a thesis that was due in a week. And that was their only copy of pretty much all of the stuff they've created in the last couple years.

That sounds like a low-key compliment, but this is the QA guy over here, right? So that means the interface wasn't riddled with a bunch of obvious bugs or defects or silly things.

Well, I found one or two, but they weren't critical.

So we'll get it. Of course. Of course.

But I would say give it a try. I've been using Borg for myself for the last couple of years, and this actually is getting me to start thinking if I should switch to it permanently for my own stuff, too.

So not only does it have support for a lot of the cloud storage providers we've all heard of, but then, as you might expect, it also has support for any WebDAV or SFTP or like Brent said, our clone support, too, which really opens it up. So that's pretty nice because, you know, you could have one person you're helping that uses their Dropbox and another person you're helping uses their Google Cloud storage. But it's the same interface and options sitting on top of that.

You don't have to keep learning new tools.

Yeah. It's Apache 2 is the license on that. And, yes, it does save everything encrypted locally. Yeah. before it sends them up to the cloud provider. Nice one, Brent. Good find. Sorry to hear about that story with the laptop. That's awful.

Yeah, and it's really a thanks to the audience for suggesting this one. I had it noted for future reference, and the future is now.

Ah, isn't it funny? Later becomes now. Well, since I was talking, you know, Blu-rays and whatnot, you could also just go a little simpler with something called Power ISO. It's not a free software app, but it is available for Linux, and you can probably guess what this does. It's an application for burning your disks and making your file systems and all of that, creating virtual drives or bootable disks or whatever you want. I think people even use it somehow to make Windows USB boot disks.

Well i think i have a pick from the chat room they suggested a project chris when you were talking about your blue vault yeah that is this teleco project oh teleco yeah it looks like it does a bunch of like well i don't quite know does anybody else know it better than i do because i'm just gonna wing it.

Teleco is a kde project yeah and it's uh it's basically like it's more of an inventory system it's not really like a day it's not really a database tracking thing but and let's it's like a manual inserting of like keeping track of basically anything you want some information about uh so you could you know use it to track your documents but also in a sense of like labeling everything or you know your music could be associated your books could be associated like

I did seriously consider it i have it like installed on all my machines and i was playing really yeah yeah nice.

So thanks to swami for that one.

But i i got kind of, burned out on the manual part of it so.

Yeah it's worth checking out though people are interested so i'll toss a link to that in the show notes too but wes that wasn't what you had up your sleeve was it.

It was not no so um okay well you were getting getting the coding done or the vibing done whichever it was yeah um i was trying to test it right and so i was getting it to build checking it did build on my machine i wanted to try it there was a few things we had to fix in particular some tests i'm.

Betting you probably didn't have a stash of blu-rays.

No. And I was using this laptop, and it doesn't even have an optical drive.

No.

So I go, I finally get it built, and I go and run it, and the first thing it does is say, hey, buddy, you don't have an optical drive. I'm not doing anything.

Yeah. After you had a problem with that, by the way, it inspired me to add drive detection now. So it accommodates all kinds of different systems with different drive setups.

Oh, nice.

So you did inspire a new feature.

Okay, good. And so I was like, okay, well, I could always spin up a virtual machine. That'd be pretty easy. But I was just curious, like, well, how hard is it to just emulate one of these, right?

Yeah, I should have thought of this.

And so I found CDEMU. CDEMU.

Well, and it looks like as recent as of July 8th, 2018, version 3.2 is out.

Yeah, it has a website that's appropriately old looking, though, right? I think you'll see.

It definitely fits the 90s vibe.

So it's retro, yeah.

What is with all these different tools having such a retro thing?

I don't know. I leaned into it, too. I like it.

And I mean, it's like a super simple little UI. They have a GUI for it. So you run a daemon that does the emulation.

Right? Is it a TUI?

No.

Oh.

Oh, there is a CLI app that's a client for it.

The disappointment in your voice.

But they have, like, a nice little, like...

Oh, an actual GUI?

Yeah.

Like a real GUI?

Like a real GUI.

Oh. Wow. That's fancy. That is really fancy. It actually looks GTK, perhaps?

Yeah. I would suspect so.

Yeah, okay.

But what's cool is it's open source.

Yeah, that is cool.

Of course.

Yeah.

No, but you can...

And it still works, even though it hasn't had an update in a while, right? Obviously. Oh, no, actually, some of this stuff on GitHub has been updated a little more recently, at least.

GPL 2. So it does both sides. So not only can you load in ISOs and it looks like you have a CD in there, right?

Yeah, it's nice.

And like even it'll just present an empty one, but you can create blanks and it shows up as writable. So I was able to test your program end to end without having to drive at all.

Meanwhile, I'm over here buying 10 packs.

And then it leaves an ISO file on the file system that I could then mount and check that it got all the files.

You could have told a guy this, I don't know, the other day before I bought another pack of Blu-rays for more testing.

So you should see if you can get the LLM to make us some NixOS integration tests.

Right?

Run the full thing and try to burn... Because there's a Nix OS service for it.

You do need to have the full testing for the disks. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, it is sort of save a little bit of time, but you still need to burn and waste anyway.

What hurts the most is like when it starts to burn and fails almost immediately, and I get like one stripe, and then you can never use the disk again. And I've used like 400 kilobytes of 50 gigs, and I'm like, you've got to be kidding.

Have you looked at the price in terms of like gigabytes to, you know, like the disks, or like rewritable Blu-rays?

Yeah, that's a good idea. I was thinking much like, you know, cold storage, but rewritable would be handy, too. Well, this is pretty neat. C-D-E-M-U. And it is at cdemu.org, or we'll put a link in the show notes. I'm going to look at this, Wes, after the show. I wish you would have told me about it earlier, but I'm glad to know about it now. I can't believe that. It's so stupid, too. I guess, you know, learn.

And as you said, right, it kind of attunes you more to doing, like, test-driven development.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one of the things I was telling Wes is as I started doing this, I'm like, well, I better just figure out a way to test this because I can't every time I need to run through this thing burn a disk. So I had to create a bunch of little unit tests for individual functionality so that I could test everything I could before I actually had to burn.

I feel like this also um perfectly describes your different approaches to solving a problem this would always be the west approach and yeah well chris physical media right.

Well, if anybody wants to take a look at it, you should be able to just pick right up and get working with it. I'd love somebody to help me with some of the basic features and run through it. Or if anybody wants to triage PRs or issues as they come in, I'd appreciate any of that. And we'll have it linked in the show notes. You know it's going to happen.

Do you need disc donations?

Maybe, eventually. Well, I bought another pack, so that'll be good for a little while. I haven't actually backed anything up yet. I mean, I haven't testing backed things up, but, you know. And every time I wanted to use like unique stuff so I could test that the database search was working. So it's like a lot of me copying files off the NAS to my local system and waiting for all that to copy and then waiting for it to burn. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, yeah. How about like a magical JSON file that lets you skip around via the use of chapters, cloud chapters too, right? So it's last decade's hype word built into the chapters.

What it really means is if we screw up, we can fix it and you get the fix. That's right.

Yeah, you don't have to download a new MP3. You just get the new fix.

Which is great for us.

Yeah. But better than that, we've got transcripts. So you can scrub through the whole thing. If you can't hear us and you just want to get a sense of what we said in the episode, you want to index it, you want to search it.

You know what we've never made a call out for? And if anybody's looking for a 2026 software project, it'd be really neat to make those searchable. Have a front end that sits on top of them. Every transcript is linked in the RSS feed sitting out at an endpoint that you could pull in. And if anybody wants to make a searchable database out of that so people can find keywords what we talked about, that'd be a really helpful tool. We'd really appreciate that.