¶ Intro
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show, we're back from the future this week. And like Biff with a sports almanac, we've got the cheat codes for every Linux user who ever needs to manage a Windows system without touching Windows. Then we're going to round it out with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. This is one of those that will change the way you look at having to run a Windows box forever. But before we get into that, we've got to say time-appropriate
greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.
Hello, Chris. Hey, Brent. And hello.
Hello.
Hello out there in the quiet listening room. Nice to have you and everybody that's live over at jubilav.tv. Very nice to have you as well. And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking. Go check out Defined.net slash unplugged. One thing that I have learned over and over again is platforms change, business priorities change. And when it comes to something as foundational as how I network everything,
I want to own that stack end to end. And that's why I love Manage Nebula from Define Networking, because it lets you start using Nebula without all of the hard parts. You get the great, fast, simple aspects that's super resilient where you can add your own lighthouses, but they'll take care of the hard part. And when you go to Define.net slash unplugged, you can get started 100 hosts for free, no credit card required.
Or you roll like Wes and I and you do the whole thing, custom yourself, DIY, self-hosted, absolutely can. No big tech login, no middleman, no, like, Google sign-in, no mysterious control pane that has access to all your systems.
No. Instead, it's just sort of standard YAML files and some Go binaries that run just about everywhere, and that's it.
¶ Housekeeping
They've also made a lot of improvements earlier this year and added IPv6 overlay support, multiple Nebula IPs per host now, and a new certificate format that lets you migrate without downtime. plus they've been investing a lot in the mobile apps and you're going to hear a lot more soon about just the unbelievable performance of Nebula. It gives you control, flexibility and a network built for your future. Get started 100 hosts for free.
No credit card required. Define.net slash unplugged. And thank you to Define for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Well, we did a thing.
We did do a thing.
We did a thing. We did. Tell them about the thing we did, Brantley.
Oh, we did a thing. This was last Friday. We did a thing. We hung out with the community and did, what are we calling this thing? Oh, yeah, Clanker Therapy. We did a little live stream and tons of people showed up. I think we had generally a really good time. And we have on YouTube, you could check out the Clanker Therapy highlight segment. It's what, like 40 minutes or something? Quite a lot of highlights.
And then for members, we've got the entire Clanker Therapy recording, the entire live stream, all the mistakes, all the fun stuff. You can get the entire thing. I don't know how long that one is, but it's worth checking out. Even the folks who attended said, I'm going back and re-listening to this whole thing. So very much worth it.
Yeah, and that one has the extended Q&A as well.
Yeah, it was tons of fun. I think it would be just as much fun not live. So check it out.
We have a link to that in the show notes. And ladies and gentlemen, we have a hot tip for you. something brand new, If you've been wanting to get in on that boost action but don't have a podcasting 2.0 app or haven't had time to get into the Sats game, we now have an official web boost. Boost.JupiterBroadcasting.com. You go there. You pick the show, the episode, a message, your name. You can pick USD or Sats. And I believe it's anything Stripe support. So it's denominated in USD or Sats.
And then when you click through, it takes you to a ZapRite checkout process. They handle all the money stuff. and you can choose to boost with Sats. You can choose to boost with Fiat. The great thing is if you want to boost with Sats still, any QR code, lightning, wallet kind of scanning situation works now. It doesn't just have to be a podcasting 2.0 app.
There's no special protocol. You just pay an invoice.
Yep. So Strike, Cash App, Fountain, Phoenix, Breeze, Zeus, Aqua, all of them. It works now. Also, the podcasting 2.0 app, still 100% supported and appreciated. In fact, it's all now integrated into one system. So if you web boost or you boost from a client using either the podcasting 2.0 boosting technology or a web boost with USD or SATs, it all goes to our report. You will get credit in the show. But ladies and gentlemen, there's one thing better.
If you're a Jupiter Party member or an Unplugged Core contributor, you now get one free boost per episode for free. I'm going to say it again. Finally, you've been asking for it, and we have it. You can auth with your Memberful account, and you get a free boost per episode just for being a member. It is a new perk for the members announced right here on the show. As a way to say thank you, you can sign in and get one free boost per episode if you are a member.
and it's pretty easy to author your memberful account as long as you remember what email address you used. Brand new, boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com. How excited are you, Wes? Super excited, yes?
You're very excited. I'm curious to know how it goes for folks, too. So do, I don't know, try it out. Let us know if it doesn't work. It is new, so there could be some rough edges. You know, no better way to see than to have folks see what they think.
It's pretty neat. It still supports all the splits on the back end and all of that kind of stuff as well using some self-hosting technology. We're pretty proud of it. It's pretty great. So try it out, boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com, or just keep on boosting through the podcasting to do app. And, of course, if you are a member who has been waiting, now is your time.
That's what's so exciting, really, right? We know the audience. They're so smart. They have such great feedback. And now, hopefully, this makes it easier for more folks to share those thoughts.
Mm-hmm.
¶ Touching Windows for Fun and Profit
We are back from the future this week. While we were gone over the week, we traveled to the future, and we have stolen the handbook to how to manage Windows without having to use Windows anymore. How every Linux user going forward may want to do this thing. Buckle up, because it's called Windows MCP. It's a Python daemon that runs on a Windows machine, and it exposes a set of controls like mouse clicks, keyboard input, screenshots, Windows management, PowerShell execution, which is huge.
It can read and write to the registry. It can manage processes. It has basically all of the Windows control APIs exposed to it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Wow.
And you can connect to it from a remote machine and manage Windows.
You know, it's sort of like a Windows rootkit, but under your control.
Yeah. So, Wes, the model context protocol, I guess is it fair to call it like a JSON over a communications protocol? Is that too simple? Am I getting that wrong?
Yeah, that's the basic idea, right? So you expose tools over this protocol. And then MCP framework, which uses JSON RCP, which is like remote procedure call under the hood. Basically, the idea is it exposes functions over the network that you can call. So they have names and they take arguments and they return stuff to you. And so as you're talking about, right, there's ways to, say, snapshot the screen. There's ways to make registry notifications. There's ways to inspect or run processes.
and all of those get exposed either over standard IO or in this case, it uses fast MCP under the hood, which is a Python library, but also over HTTP, which is great because then you can use it anywhere over the network.
So perhaps you have an open code session. And you have it connect to this MCP. What's brilliant about this is it means the LLM or the AI doesn't directly touch the Windows machine. It sends structured tool calls to the MCP server. And then the MCP server is actually the thing that's executing them and then returning the results to the agent. So it's not like the agent is just running rampant on the Windows machine. The MCP is this focused context of what they're actually allowed to mess with.
And this does support, as a lot of systems do, you can do it both on the client or on the server side sometimes. You can do tool filtering so that you can allow, if you only want certain capabilities to even be exposed from a system, you can do that, too. All right. And then there is some nice security here, as you mentioned, right?
You can do auth.
Yeah, you can do bear token auth. You can do OAuth 2.0. You can do an IP allow list. And I think even it'll sort of refuse to bind globally unless you set up some kind of auth. So it is trying to, like, do decent, you know, at least make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.
Yeah. And the operating systems that you can control, Windows 7, the Windows 8 series, 10 and 11. So pretty much all the more recent Windows. Very nice.
That is very nice.
And picture this. I'll bring it home. Here's maybe a use case scenario for you. You got family members that just are on Windows and sometimes they need your help. This could run on, say, like a Nebula or a Tailscale mesh network, and you could connect in and manage their Windows updates. We'll show more. I'll have a demonstration in a bit.
But you could manage a lot about their Windows box, check their running processes, disk space, memory available, pull recent event logs, all these types of things, without ever having to remote into their Windows machine, do any kind of remote desktop protocol or anything like that. Or, so that's one scenario I think would be very useful, this Windows MCP on a mesh network with your family. Scenario two, where I could find this to be very, very useful for Linux users, is VMs.
A headless, low-resources Windows VM, either running on a server or running on your machine, that you never have to bring up the GUI. You manage everything you need that VM for. Whatever that one Windows app is you need, you can manage and run all of it through this MCP. So those are a couple scenarios. Not to mention, like, you just got a Windows machine on your network that you need for a few things or something like that, and this could manage that too.
I was impressed. like part of the value here I think is it really hooks into windows in some interesting ways yeah it does, So they have like 17 different tools, which is pretty great, but they have this service traversal. It walks, I guess, like this giant accessibility tree that Windows already has and applications use. And so it can basically produce for each element in those trees and in all of like every application, it can produce an object.
They have bounding boxes, has like snapshot tools hooked into that. It basically gives it like a, it's not just take a snapshot and have OCR that the bot has to work with. It gives the bot like a shared, structured sort of coordinate system for the whole Windows desktop.
And I will add more modern Windows applications read anything in the last probably seven to eight years, really since Windows 10. So however long that's been. They also provide an extensive amount of what I would call metadata to the operating system that says where controls are at, what the Windows size is, like all of like the menu stuff.
There is this rich level of metadata that the Windows applications probably provide for accessibility reasons, that you don't actually need to read the screen to see and operate. And the agents can hook into that and use those controls to operate the application without actually having to drive the mouse and go down a menu and go to the new thing, right? Like they can just call these plug-ins, these API calls, whatever they are, that Windows has built in over the years for applications.
Now, when we get to my demonstration, we'll discover when you're dealing with older Windows applications, that's not necessarily the case.
I was also impressed that, like, I guess they're using, like, an undocumented COM interface for dealing with the virtual desktop stuff. It's just surprising, like, the amount of work that has gone into all of the little features. Like, there's binding to the Win32 side of the API. There's, like, direct access to that. There's all of this UI automation explicit framework.
There's various, it's like, three or four different screenshot backends so that you can always make sure you get a successful screenshot. They have a watchdog service that runs in the background and can monitor system events from Windows like EventLog and respond to that.
Think about that for a moment. That is very useful.
I think one way to think about it, you kind of touched on it, right, is like you could ask, like you can do a lot of stuff over just PowerShell scripts or SSH or existing Windows automation. And I think what this really adds is it's like the bridge so that LLMs are like first class on Windows. And then that means the abstraction of the LLM being the interface for you can actually work.
Yeah, it means Windows is now a tool call away. And the other thing that struck me about this is really how easy it is to get a pretty large Python application running on Windows –, was a basic Windows 11 blank install. It's not like I've had this install around where I've set up a Python environment. UVX was, I think, one command to install, and then once I had UVX, I could just run this.
Yeah, UV and UVX are great. That helps a lot.
It made running Python stuff on Windows as easy as it is to run on Linux. I just wanted to give it credit for that. It was extremely easy to get this running, and you can run it temporarily as just a process that runs in the terminal like I'm doing today. You can install it as a service that starts at boot, but then you're going to need to use some authentication if you do that.
I mean, just that aspect of it for you could, in theory, send an end user a one liner that they would run and it would start the MCP for you. It's not it's you could do it in one liner. It's not that bad. So that to me was pretty neat. So I thought we do maybe a quick little demo. I have what I've done over the weekend is I set up my Hermes agent, a skill and connected to the MCP that's running on a Windows laptop that we have here in the studio.
So the Windows laptops got this Python Windows MCP running and through my agent, which is actually in my RV. It's not even here in the studio. I could do something like, you know, all kinds of things. Change the, I mean, this is just a quick example. Change the wallpaper on Big Dell to anything. Big Dell. Yeah, that's the laptop name is Big Dell. So I tell my agent, change the wallpaper on Big Dell. Now it does take a second because the agent's
got to read the skill. Then it's got to load the MCP. but I don't care. I don't care because I don't have to touch Windows. So if you're watching the video version, which you can switch to in a podcasting 2.0 app, you can actually see we have the MCP server up on the screen. And you can see it's accepting a connection from my agent right now. And so the agent is going to do a smoke test. This is what I've set up to do.
All my things do a smoke test first. And then if the smoke test passes, it'll then rotate the wallpaper. And it's just small stuff. The other thing I did, because this was just a new install, is I used my agent to process and install all the Windows updates?
Yeah, I like that a lot.
Oh, it says it changed the wallpaper, but I actually didn't see the wallpaper change. And I used my agent to install SSH on Windows. So that was really nice. I didn't have to sit there and manage. And it also used the Windows MCP to detect when Windows Update had done enough that it has to reboot before it could continue to install more Windows Updates. So it's like, okay, I've gotten to a point where we can no longer proceed. We need to reboot the host now. Would you like to reboot the host?
That's great.
And then when it came back up, it waited for a bit because then it was rebooting, and then it connected back in to monitor the continuation of the updates.
That's where it feels like it's less sort of like awkward, you know, running commands on top of Windows, and it feels a little more like it really does understand the system, which is nice.
Yeah. And to just sort of have that follow-up. So you imagine, like, you're helping a family member, you can step away for a second, or you're doing it on Telegram when you're out doing something. That is going to be huge when you could, like, do tech support from Telegram while you're, you know.
You could go get like an honest rate of what's happening with the system without having to walk someone else through how to go get all of that data.
So I did a – I'll try to do one more example. We'll see if this works.
Yeah, we need a new background.
Well, I know. That's funny because the background thing has worked every time. I wonder if it's just Windows hasn't rotated it. But, Wes, if you listen over there in a moment, the thing should play some music. So you can actually trigger things to come out of the speakers. Anything you can really do in Windows, you can get this thing to do.
oh is it running hot that's funny a little hot over here it's funny because it's not doing anything it's just a big old machine is what it is it's it's just a big machine, uh alright I don't know maybe it'll work maybe there we go there you go see that's.
You know, it's a Genelia laptop, but they still didn't put any subs in here.
No, it's funny. The speakers are not that great. So that was triggered by the MCP from my agent that's running in my RV, connected over Starlink, using Nebula to manage and communicate the MCP on that Windows box.
So that means, like, if you were doing a remote management, it could be playing a don't touch me and doing a remote management jingle.
Yeah, you could. Or just stand by. We're going to be doing some stuff and rebooting. And I actually do that. I use speakers in the RV now when I'll be like, hey, don't message your machine for a little bit. It's doing some updates in the background. I do that. I don't know. So the other things I've had it do, obviously, is launch applications.
I had it remove some software, clean up a directory. But the real story is I accomplished a project that needed to get done that was a little bit of uncovering proprietary data that's only available via a Windows application. and sucking it into my Linux box. And so that's what we're going to get into next. Webroot.com slash unplugged. Are you sick of dealing with a slow computer?
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¶ Fording the River
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There is this project we've collectively been trying to solve for, it feels like, months now. When I was there for LinuxFest Northwest, we were trying to get your focus working again. It had exploded with coolant going everywhere. And we fixed that part. That part was pretty easy. But then the car just wouldn't start properly. And we troubleshooted and we troubleshooted and we used ODB ports to try to figure things out. And we never could solve it before I left.
but you have been trying to poke at this but you are under a new timeline because there's not much room in the space where we were working so you had to get to doing that.
So here's an overview of the problem we have a shop on the farm an old shop here which is nice to have but it's uh you know busy season and so space in the shop is very tight and the wife's ford has been sitting here for a while, with what seems to be electrical issues in the main wiring harness here. I don't know for sure, so that's what I want to test. So what I have set up, is maybe a little stupid, but I'm going to give it a shot.
I have got a connection to my agent on my Dell laptop, and then on another Dell laptop, I'm running Windows 11, and that has an app called Forescan. Forescan is communicating with the car's computer with a ODB2 to USB adapter, that has an actual physical toggle switch on it. So you can toggle between, I guess, regular industry standard codes and the custom Ford PIDs.
And that's what I'm after. I'm after the custom ford pins, PIDs, P-I-Ds, because in there, I believe, are the voltages that I need to monitor what's going on with this harness. So the laptop is my front end to the agent. The agent is connecting into Windows 11 using Windows MCP. The agent will then drive, this is the part I haven't done yet, the agent will then drive Forescan to diagnose and detect the PIDs. It'll then record the PIDs itself for the ones that we need.
And then the agent should be able to start talking directly to the car using those and reading those PIDs without the need of Forescan.
So essentially, my agent is going to manipulate Windows to operate Forescan, figure out and detect the PIDs that it needs, memorize those and then we can drop four scan altogether and i can do diagnostic testing just with the agent using this usb adapter hooked up to my linux box with just, standard open source python libraries that talk to this and understand odb2, that's the plan so basically just trying to avoid using windows myself let the
agent extract what we need and then go back to linux and do the actual problem solving and then i won't have to use windows 11.
The thing is is like to make this work you got to do all the human work so i'm going around i'm connecting all of the connectors i'm doing the plugs.
It's just sort of a uh you don't do json rpc but you're basically a tool for the lm to do.
Yeah uh so i got the usb to odb2 adapter connected which i don't know if i got the right one so i'm not going to link in the show notes because i've read there's better ones and then i fired up this forescan application i'm going to put a link to this in the show notes, This Forescan application looks like it was last updated just after Windows 3.11 came out. And then their website was updated just after Mosaic retired and Netscape became popular. So, it's old.
Well, you know, when you're the only game in town, I mean, do you need to update?
There's also this whole... Song and dance you have to go through to license it once you actually get it installed. You got to use it in like this trial mode and then go through the song and dance to license it. But what it does is it knows the proprietary Ford OEM PIDs. And in a car built after 1996, at least here in the States, but I think this
is true for a lot of places. After 96, they have the ODB2 diagnostic port with industry standard codes that you can get like a $30, $40, $50 code reader and you can read them. But then these OEMs sometimes have thousands of their own proprietary codes.
I mean, you've got to have your own codes, right?
And four definitely is one of them. And the sensors I really needed are behind these proprietary codes. You can detect them, but you just don't know what they mean. So you just need something that maps the thing I've detected.
You just get some right value, but how do you interpret that? What kind of data type is this? What system is it connected to?
What a great thing for a machine to do.
Yes.
So I did the human bits, and I connected everything. And once I had that working, I kicked the agent off, and I told it to figure out Forescan, and then I wanted it to monitor my PCM system.
Okay, it's trying. However, the Forescan app, pretty, pretty old UI. And the MCP is exporting screenshots, so it's going to have to do some image recognition in order to remotely control Forescan, which I was worried about. I think newer Windows applications actually submit UI details and some sort of metadata that the MCP can process, but an older application like Forescan apparently does not.
So it is trying the screenshot path right now, so it's going to have to take screenshot after screenshot to get through this. I don't know about that. I may have to operate the app.
And you could just do that. Of course. You could have it take a screenshot, actually, and then walk you through what to do, which I consider.
That is handy to have or double-check you're doing the right thing or am I reading this configuration right?
And you can prompt it to do it efficiently, and what it can do is it can actually work with a surprisingly low-res JPEG. And so it can take a low-res JPEG and run that through the model and save you on some processing.
And this is where probably, yeah, depending on the model and how good its image handling recognition is and that kind of stuff might matter.
And you had to go through this somewhat tedious screenshotting process because this app is so old and doesn't implement like the new descriptive metadata you were talking about earlier.
Yeah. And I think perhaps this is this is something people need to know is a real limitation of Windows MCP because maybe a lot of us are are using Windows for legacy applications. It's it is solvable. It was slow. It was awkward, but it did work. And of course, it started working just as I was about to throw the towel and I was going to interrupt and I'll be like, no, no, I'll just do it. Just tell me what to click. It's fine. And just as I was like, screw it, it actually started to get it.
Oh, I spoke too soon. Just as I thought it was giving up, it's opening up the dialogue and it is adding the PIDs right now that we need to monitor. And it figured out a way to add them all at once. It even said, I'm going to add them via some sort of text injection so I don't have to go through and select 100 PIDs. or something like that. It found a way to do it lazy, which I really appreciate. I mean, it got to the spot that I was having trouble finding.
That is the menu right there. It's somewhere in this UI and it found it. And now it's just a matter of figuring out the pits. Oh, I think it's got them. It does. I can't believe this. I never have to use Windows again.
That was the moment it really did click. I'm like, wow, if it can use this crazy esoteric, doesn't follow any kind of Windows convention, even from back in the day. Like somebody who's, you know, supported Windows that was in the game during this era of applications, nothing I've ever seen before. And it managed to figure it out. And then it was able to start mapping the unknown PIDs to the forward OEM PIDs.
That was really where, like, it got powerful because it could do all of that messy stuff for me and start probing for exactly what I needed for the specific task because the agent understood the specific task. So once I had that data coming in and I understood what some of these PIDs meant, well, it was on to phase two.
Phase two of my Galaxy Brain plan is now underway. I'm having the agent document everything we've discovered, the PIDs we now understand, all of that because the goal will be to just remove 4Scan from the picture. Have the agent essentially figure out the proprietary PIDs that we need, take 4Scan out and plug that ODB2 scanner directly into the laptop. And then the agent will talk directly to the car pooter. Then I can begin the real troubleshooting process.
So this was great because with the documents written, the skills created, I could actually do some real work.
And you have some nice artifacts sort of hopefully regardless, right? Like you'll make this attempt, but you have all this stuff forever.
And it's documented, yeah.
I feel like you're slowly replacing me in the diagnostic process of this vehicle. I'm strangely okay with it.
When I got to this phase, I was like, oh, Brent, you would really. When we got to the diagnostic, what I did, which I think you would appreciate, is I went back to zero. And I'm like, okay, now that I have all of this, let's revalidate the hypothesis. And I got the multimeter out and all, and I went around and as it was prompting me and I revalidated the hypothesis. I wasn't sure. Cause like, does it work? Am I complete? Am I completely crazy? Is this thing going to hallucinate?
It's actually working. I now have the ODB two adapter hooked up directly to my laptop and we just did a pedal test.
so it ran monitoring and I feathered the throttle and it observed the voltages it saw that the pedal was being feathered, it captured it it's updating the Python library so it communicates correctly with the adapter because by default it was using the wrong baud rate so once we figured out the baud rate I am now live capturing data from this thing, it's actually working and I no longer need forescan so that was great so Windows
MCP came in really useful because it got the core information we needed out of 4Scan without me having to deal with it. And now we're able to just take Windows completely out of the picture. That laptop is just no longer even being used. And I'm just directly agent to the hardware talking to the car pooter now. And we actually have valid data.
The other thing that I did that was very useful, more so than I thought it would be, I thought it would just be, well, I'll try and see how it goes, is, Ford makes specific comprehensive diagnostic manuals available for ODB2 diagnostics for particular models of cars.
Oh, yeah, okay.
It's just in this crazy site that doesn't, like, sit on a regular Ford domain. Of course.
And you'll find and then traverse and then get the right file or whatever.
Surprisingly, just like Forescan, like, their branding is from, like, a decade ago and stuff like that. But when you do drill down, you find for your particular make and model, all the information you need to know about that ODB2 port and the type information diagnostics.
Nice.
And I was like, all right, agent, read this. See if there's anything helpful. And sure enough, Brent, I mean, they found several things. But the one thing that is going to stick in my mind that I really should have known and we should have known this whole time. And it doesn't really infect us usually. But it turns out when the focus gets to 11 volts, it shuts off all the diagnostic data to the port.
Oh, come on. Really?
Which explains some of the abnormalities I have seen in the past because at one point we had this really, really large draw. And it was pulling the battery down very fast. And we went to 10 volts. And all my data went bonkers. And it was all zeroed out. And I couldn't understand. And so because the agent had read the manual, unlike me, it was like, it flagged it for me. It's like, just so you know, once we hit 11 volts, like, we're not, we don't have good data anymore.
Yeah. And so it knew that data was invalid and incorporated. It just... And then I had it summarized it all to an Obsidian note so that I can recap and resume the session when I need. Then all of this is saved durably as skills. So the agent now, just like I can just say to communicate with Big Dell, it just knows that's Big Dell. And I can say whatever I want it to do on Big Dell. If it's run Forescan or run MS Paint and write Hello World, I can have it do that now.
Right. And then the harness knows how to hook that up. So it can just say, oh, you said Big Dell. Here's my Big Dell skill. Here's all that info I need to know about how to call the MCP tools running on it.
So now like the two times a year when I need something on Windows, I don't even have to touch Windows.
That's so great.
Truly living in the future.
And when you do have to sit through the updates because you only need it once or twice a year, you don't have to sit through the updates.
I don't have to be the one that does it.
I think I have two questions for you. One, what did you discover about the car? I know that might be not totally on topic, but I want to know. This car we've been working on so long.
So the agent noticed a large discrepancy between the voltage level of the battery and the voltage level that the PCM was reporting. Like at one point, the battery was at like 12.8 volts and the PCM was reporting 9.8 volts. PCM is responsible for managing the valve that we are trying to get to operate properly. And by hanging out there and just working and coming and going from the car all the time, I learned that these cars, just a little aside,
they have this neat little trick for it invented. when you open the driver's door after it's been sitting for a while, it actuates the valve that Brent and I have been trying to test.
Oh.
Just by opening the driver's door when it sat there. And you can hear it do it. I've never known what it was.
Yeah.
It turns out it's the very part we've been working on.
That is wild.
And one time, it did not sound very good. Anyways, that's a whole other story.
But it's actually moving?
I mean, I hear it.
Okay. All right.
Okay. I don't think there's any computer control that's watching voltage. But anyways, yeah, it has been getting, yeah, we're getting closer.
Okay.
And then narrowing down on a hypothesis, which is good.
Have you dreamt about what else you can do now that you understand these PIDs? Because I imagine you parking the Focus near Lady Joops, near your RV, and having this ODB port be able to just chat with your network. And then you can just get diagnostics into Home Assistant constantly about the car and how it's doing when your next oil changes, et cetera. Have you considered that?
Absolutely. I've been thinking, too, about just then have the agent automatically feed what is relevant into LubeLogger. And then, you know, also the RV engine is a Ford. So I could use a lot of these same PIDs to figure out what's going on with the RV engine, pull it into Home Assistant again. Because you could imagine a really small little ESP device that's using MQTT to just relay the information it's receiving from the adapter to Home Assistant.
just a little dedicated device that's like 20 20 for entire setup adapter included, so i think that's a serious potential and it with this process it could have been any manufacturer, uh and there are a lot of databases for other cars where these pids are online so um, maybe other manufacturers this process would have been even a little bit easier if i didn't you know if you didn't have to do something like forescan there's
some github repos for different car maker's Toyota and others out there where you can find the community has figured out and reverse engineered these and then posted them up on GitHub and whatnot.
That's great. Yeah.
So there are some ways to make it a little easier that could be a bit of a head start, but pretty happy because I did build something I think I can continue to use and troubleshoot the problem and narrow it down. And then the next thing I want to get, and I would really, really, really appreciate anybody that has suggestions.
is I want to get voltmeters that will work with the voltage range of a car, so it can't really be an ESP, but voltmeters that work with the voltage range that hook up to Linux over USB. And there are some that are from Europe that are like $40 to $60, but after taxes and shipping, they're like $280 to get shipped here.
There's got to be a way to do this, though, because what I want, my goal here is, is to be able to have the agent manage all of the multimeter testing, so that way it can, in real time, measure the voltage with external sensors I would like to have a clamp meter on one of them.
That'd be great.
You build this network of sensors that the agent can sit there and operate to completely build a picture of what's going on with the vehicle. But to get there, I got to have something I can use to do that voltage meter. And I think there's even some multimeters out there that have USB ports that just work with Linux.
That would be great.
Not sure which ones. And that could get expensive. But a boy, a boy can dream. just want to take a moment and thank our members you can become a member at linuxunplugged.com slash membership or support all the shows and get all the bonus features at jupiter.party like the bootleg clocking in an hour 22 worth of content right now,
¶ Shout-Outs
and now you also get that uh free web boost per episode another fantastic perk and a way to say thank you for being a member and keeping us going.
We got a nice piece of feedback from Tom's dad. It says, Tom's dad here, party member and person with no time to get self-hosted AlbiHub set up.
Understandable.
Well, there's the new web interface you could try.
Webboos!
A couple of things worth mentioning. The combination of Forge Joe and Hermes with inbound webhooks is chef's kiss. Larry is my bot. And with his own Forgeo account, I assign issues from my Nix config with at mentions and failing builds also trigger him into action resulting in a PR. You need to whip up a webhook adapter script. Oh, add a Prometheus alert manager webhook to trigger Hermes and you have it all.
Holy crap.
All interactions with Larry and my Nix config now happen through Forgeo. I also have a candidate pick here, ArgueNix. a Nix native CI runner that connects to any Forge.
Yeah, this looks kind of interesting. It's GPL3 declarative Nix native. It watches your repos on GitHub, GitLab, and Forgeo, or Gitia, Codeberg. Evaluates each push and PR as a Nix flake, builds every package, checks, dev shells, all those kinds of things. It's kind of built for indie developers or a small team who wants a single operator, easy to configure, you know, low overhead CI box.
Okay, no kidding. I think maybe for the last two months, we've had a quick version of a conversation after every show of Wes saying something to the effective. You know, I really think there could be something with Hermes Asians tied to 4GO and webhooks. We could really do something around that.
You could see why I thought this feedback was very interesting.
Yeah, Wes, surprise.
Thank you for sharing your setup.
Tom. Tom's dad, can you guess who picked the feedback this week?
Yeah, right.
No, very good. We'll put links to that in the show notes too. That is very cool. Thank you very much. and love to hear that. Sounds like some good adventures over there. And thank you for being a member, too. And we do have some boosts to get to. Musical Coder kicks us off with a row of McDucks, 22,222 sats. And Musical Coder says, thank you for the Clanker Therapy Stream, plus one for doing more of these.
It was so fun.
Thank you for checking it out.
It was great.
Bite Bitten boosts in with 2,000 sats. i'm field testing a password, pw manager pair pass password manager pair pass okay to eliminate the online sync dependency but so far not going entirely smooth on the p2p sync, i appreciate the report you'll have to let us know if you figure that out.
I kind of like to know more about that p2p sync stuff too.
Yeah how does how is it supposed to work even if it isn't working Yeah.
Right, right. That's the thing.
I think that's why sometimes it's nice to just have your own sync, whatever you're using that you've been using forever. That's what I lean on. But Gene Bean here leans on a row of ducks. Weird. Been sending as anonymous for a bit. I fixed that now. Anyway, I just wanted to say Zooz, Z-O-O-Z, is great, and their tech support is also really helpful. When we moved a few years ago, I swapped every light switch in the house to theirs and have been super happy with them.
But even more so since adding the Home Assistant Connect ZWA2. That thing is a game changer.
I am really glad that it's not just me that feels this way, because I felt like I was really fanboying over Zeus and the HA Connect ZWA 2. It's nice to hear you.
A pleased smile on your face right now.
Thank you, Gene. Nice to hear the plus one and all of that. Appreciate the boost. Anonymous is here with a row of duckies. It's 2,222 sets. Just says testing. Was that one of us? No.
A dude trying stuff comes in with a row of ducks. I feel like there's more puns to be made here. configuring chicks os installing negula.
Negula's good.
Either way congratulations on your chicken infrastructure.
I sure do like those chickens i sure do way more than i expected.
All meg boosted in 16 482 sats, Well, you asked for it, so here is my NixOS router config. I am so proud of it. It has been running smoothly for months, and I barely touch it anymore except for updates. It is running on a secondhand x86 netgate SG5100. The whole config is basically one file. I tried to keep the boilerplate to a minimum.
You'll be pleased to see that he's flaking it up, Wes. He's flaking it up for you.
Well, you've got to flake it up. No, that's not true. You don't have to.
Okay, I see how he's doing it here. He's got some interfaces, WireGuard interfaces. A couple of WireGuard interfaces. You WireGuard maniac. He's got some VLAN set up, too.
Wes, how do you pronounce that?
IPv6, systemdnetworkd.
How do you say that, Wes? It's Wire...
What is it?
WireGuard.
Oh, that's what it was. That's what it was. All right, I'm going to keep looking at that.
Oh, BGP. This is fancy.
Well, thank you for sending that in. Appreciate that. Night62 comes in with a row of ducks. web boost test well this is a game changer well done this really shows the barrier to entry for sending a boost sometimes I don't get around to it because it just takes time to send a boost this makes it so much quicker and easier look at night 62 finding the web boost that's awesome we need to get that linked on the main page we really do yes we do well done well done I like that thanks.
For trying it out.
It looks like Zooter the Penguin also gave a try I'll pull this one up oh no this is 5,000 sets oh let's see.
We need to reorder them.
We have new sections now. Uh-huh. Right. We have, this was a fiat boost, a $5 fiat boost from Zooter the Penguin. Already a member, and Bitcoin has been a barrier to boosting, so now I'm happy to sling some additional support your way. Well, thank you. You want to take our very, very, very first free member boost, Wes?
Yes, I do.
So exciting.
From Jimmy. For Friday, I'd be keen to hear why an agent is the answer. Most of the stuff I'd vibe-coded could be run through an agent, or it could be a cron or an A to N job to get the data and push to my obsidian vault, or called from home assistant. Interested in your thoughts. Member Boost!
Yes.
So, Jimmy, thank you for sending that in. That is the question we kicked off the Clanker Therapy stream with. That was what we started with. And I thought we gave it a good answer. So if you'd like to hear our answer for that, go check out the Clanker Therapy link.
Let us know what you think. Thank you for trying out the Member Boost.
Okay, so I've got to figure out a new way to do all of this. Right? I've got to figure out.
Uh-huh. As a spiel, we could move the thanks, maybe.
Wait, does that also mean we have new awards at the end of the year?
Well, I mean.
We certainly could.
We could think about that. Yeah, we could. That could be fun.
A boost to you.
All right. Well, first, I'll say thank you to everybody who streams some sats. 18 of you streamed 21,829 sats into this here episode. When you total it up, we got 79,771 sats. Does that include the fiat, Wes? It does. So that's all. Okay. There you go. So it's just one master number. So 79,771. A little low. A little low. It's okay. Okay. Perhaps this is a sign that we are implementing the web boost at just the right time.
I think that's right.
That's how I'm going to take that right there. So we had one free member boost. We had one Fiat boost. And we had 27 total unique senders altogether. Not too shabby. Thank you, everybody, who supported this here show. We really do support it. This show has really survived because of the community support. You know, we're trying to avoid the Linux magazine thing happening here where you go crazy with the ads and then you go crazy with the whole, like, drop off.
like we're trying to find a middle ground here and the audience support has been what's kept the lights on so thank you very much for everybody who's supported with a membership or a boost it really does mean a lot okay gentlemen,
¶ Picks
I got another IRL pick for you this week. I got to be honest. I could have made a segment out of this. You guys are getting a little extra, right now for the pick segment. This deserves its own dedicated segment.
Wow.
So anybody that's sticking around, you're getting a good one here. This is what I call the U-Clock TC001, the Ulanzi T001 Smart Pixel Clock.
You call it that? Or does everybody call it that?
I don't know. That's what I call it. I call it my U-Clock. That's what I have it set up as. This is not brand new. In fact, because of that, the price is $45.
Oh.
It is a full-color LED screen that supports custom icons, time, weather, in a pixelated LED display. My wife described it as it looks like a light bright, if you're old enough to remember what one of those are.
It's really pretty cute.
It is a great-looking device. Very simple, white, elegant.
I want one.
USB-C power with a five-hour battery, so it can also operate for a while without a power source, if need be, which could be great in a power outage. 256 individual LED beads in there with different colors. It has a bunch of nice built-in features. That's not why I wanted it. The real magic in this sucker is you can use it with ESP Home.
You can custom flash this thing.
Oh, nice.
And there are multiple, quick, easy-to-flash...
I was about to ask, how are you going to control it? How do you interface with it?
So I've plugged it directly into my Home Assistant. So for $48, if you want to buy it from Amazon, $45 if you want to buy it from them directly. You can load something like AWT Rix, Atrix, a custom firmware for this clock. There's other ones as well. And gentlemen, it is, it is so great. If you would allow me, Home Assistant is now driving this thing entirely. It doesn't use any of the original stuff on it. Home Assistant is drawing the time and day, weather from my local station.
The first thing, though, that I wanted to do, and of course I can drive this with Home Assistant as well, is I wanted a day mode and a night mode.
Oh, sure.
You know, day mode's brighter. It has more animations, more information. Night mode is dim. It's dark red.
Gotta be chill, right?
Clean. Doesn't move much unless there's something really important. And that, that's the thing. So not only do I have the time, the date, the weather, of course, the Bitcoin price and block height, but I have set up Home Assistant. So anything it considers critical, which it has to be a certain threshold, like an important external camera battery is at 5%. I'll tell you another thing that came up.
But I have – so I have another page on here because there's like different pages you can set up on this thing that Home Assistant can drive. And one of them is urgent alerts from home assistance.
Oh, that's nice.
And so this weekend, the wife was cleaning out the fridge, doing the full thing, like taking all the shelves out and scrubbing them down. So she figures, I'm going to turn the fridge off while I'm cleaning it so it's not just sitting here running it while I have the door open for a half hour. But as one does, pretty understandable. She forgot to turn it back on. And so I'm sitting there at the table where I can see the clock out of the corner of my eye.
And I've set it up with this idea of just ambient notification. something that's important it's not a five alarm fire but probably something someone in the family should know about not just chris but someone in the family should know about this you know it could be we're about to have a major wind gust we need to go tidy things up, bring the awning in make sure all the animals are okay you know don't do whatever it is make sure the levi's inside whatever it might be we just want to have
some alerts about maybe something and this weekend even though i didn't specifically say this alert it was all home assistant figured it out, it popped up on there that the fridge temperature was like 43 degrees 43 degrees fahrenheit.
Kept warm in there.
And then and the next time i looked at it it said 45 degrees and i was like, whoa it's pretty warm out but it's not that warm what's going on i open up the fridge sure enough it's off, it might have taken me all day before i noticed that for sure and home system was like this is not proper for i didn't even like i didn't even specify like a threshold of what like what What Laura might have. Now that I think about it, Laura probably did.
Yeah, that's the thing. And it was so great. And I was like, look at this. I was pointing to him out, look at this. How great is this? Look what it's doing right now. She's like, why is it so warm? And he forgot to turn it on. And so this little clock, the other thing I'm going to set it up is at the nighttime, there's certain things I would just want to know. like if frigate knows who's at the front door at nighttime put their name on the clock, Dylan's at the front door.
That's great.
If it's somebody that's unknown at the front door, unknown person at the front door.
Super clear.
You know, just simple. Anything like that that you can think of, you can put on this clock. Little messages to family members. It also has a temperature sensor built into it, which will report to Home Assistant as a sensor, whatever you want to use.
Nice.
I think it has a microphone and maybe a speaker as well. I have not used those. But now that I think about it, I do believe that's in there. I don't know what I would use that for. Maybe to yell at the kids. That could be useful. But I really like it for $45, $48. I just think it's an absolute win.
I love this ambient notification. I think that's, you know, just extract more info from your environment.
And I don't need anything buzzing at me.
No.
And if it got to a certain level, I do have a threshold where like a water leak or something, then my phone does buzz.
Please do. Yeah, totally.
Yeah, it's great. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Go check it out. Now, Wes, you found something that I thought only AI could do. You're telling me we don't need an LLM running on our machines to reorganize our files and folders for.
Us no but maybe you want it uh to use it to help set it up yeah check out check out muzy.
Muzy like move it but you're muzing.
Your downloads tamed.
And uh they stress a privacy first a privacy first automatic file organizer that quietly sorts your downloads folder.
Yeah silent elegant lives in your system tray keeps your downloads folder or any other folder automatically tidy runs quietly in the background monitors selected folders moves renames or sorts files based on customizable rules.
UI looks fantastic.
Yeah, Rust, some TypeScript in there, MIT Licensed, And yeah, it's got a clean little UI, kind of runs in the background mostly when you're not interfacing with it or configuring it.
Has a rules engine for like images, documents, archives, installers. You can ignore certain files. Also has an undo history because it uses a little local SQLite database. So if it screws something up, you can undo it.
Nice.
Multilingual support.
That's nice.
100% offline, zero clouds. Dark mode. Uploads, no telemetry, dark mode support. And I guess there's other operating systems out there besides Linux.
Right. You could use Windows MCP to set it up on Windows.
You could.
There's an MSI right there.
And I think there's even a DMG or something. No, maybe there's no DMG. But they have a dev, RPM, and app image available directly from the project.
Yeah, and the rules, like you can do stuff based on extension or a regex pattern, so you can kind of get flexible with it too. And that might be where you could have some, you know, have an LLM if you wanted to have it help you or just do it all by hand.
Would anybody be willing to boost in the number of files in their download directory? Could you do it? Could you do it?
Yeah, are we just doing like top-level LS? Or are we doing like a, yeah.
Oh, oh, subfolders? Uh-huh. Oh.
Or just like things at the top level probably makes the most sense.
I think top level, because if you, if a sub, oh, no, no, no.
No, no, you just hit properties on the folder. It'll tell you every single file.
No, I know, but that just makes it exponentially worse for me.
That's fair. That's only fair.
LSPipeWC-L. How about that?
Okay. I remember once I was having a conversation with our buddy Noah, and he says, one of the ways I can tell if a user is really using the new computer I gave them is after they've had it for a month or two, I check their downloads directory. And if it's empty, I know they're not using the computer. And if it's full of stuff, I know they're using the computer. And that's true for me, too.
I'll give you my number. You got a number?
Are we doing it right now? Yeah, okay.
Oh, well, yeah. Should we wait? No, wait. Let's wait. All right. If people boost in their numbers, we'll reveal our numbers. Because I don't have mine yet. So we'll get all our numbers.
He's going to clean up his folder.
Try out the new web boost. Let us know. I should.
Oh, my God.
Actually, on this machine, it wouldn't be that bad because it's got such a small disk. I clean it all the time. But my machine upstairs, it's like from 2017. Or this soundboard machine that I never do any kind of maintenance on at all that's been around forever. God, it could be horrible. It would be interesting to total it all up. All right. All right, so Wes, that pick there is MIT license.
Yes, it is.
Something worth mentioning. There you have it. That is the show, everybody. So I'd love to know what you think the most Linux user way is to use Windows. I think I've found it. This, I believe, is peak. Imagine a headless VM, a family member on a Mesh VPN, or that Windows machine you have in your house. You could use this just to start Steam on that thing.
It does seem a lot less painful.
Way better. Way makes headless Windows way more feasible, in my opinion, too.
There's something, too, also just, like when I was doing some dabbling for this with Windows, it's not that you need it, but having the LLM sort of translate, because I'm no longer using Windows all of the time. And so having to sort of be able to phrase like the underlying thing that's happening, but in a way that my Linux brain can understand without me having to translate from Microsoft documentation directly is helpful.
It's also stacking on a lot of work Microsoft has done to make almost everything doable via the command line now.
Yes.
You can do so much.
For sure.
So there's really credit to them for making, and that's just sitting on top of that too. So if you want to tell us the most Linux user way to run Windows,
¶ Outro
let us know. You can try out the new Web Boost and tell us your download counts as well. But you know, you can always take it up a notch. Make it a Linux patch Tuesday on a Sunday. Join us Sundays, 10 a.m., 1 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. And we do have the metadatas around the show from time to time, as it were. We've got JSONs. We've got chapters.
Oh, yeah.
We've got SRTs, VTTs.
JSON.
ABCs.
That's right. XMLs, RSS.
Check out the RSS.
MP4s.
There's even an MP4 in there. Wouldn't you know it? Wouldn't you know it? So check it out. And also, don't forget all the links for this week's episode over at linuxunplugged.com slash 671. There's some good stuff in there. You can find the full back catalog at linuxunplugged.com or all the great shows over at jupyterbroadcasting.com, including we have a link to the Clanker Therapy session.
Even if you check out the highlight on YouTube, I think it's worth your time if you're interested at all, because we covered some ways to make these things actually safe to manage your important systems. And I mean my most important systems. I think we have a pretty good solution, so check that stream out. And we answered that question, why agents at all?
If you're a member, we have a transcript you can point your agent in.
Yeah, there you go. All right. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.