We're kicking off episode 147 of the self-hosted podcast with a bit of production news. It's good news, it's bad news, it's mixed news. I don't know, Alex. It's definitely news. It's news. It's news. Well, without getting too navel-gazy, I think we'll just get straight to the point. Episode 150, which will air at the end of May, will be the last episode of Self-Hosted. Indeed.
Sad to hear, but it has been a good run. You know, we were thinking, if this had been a weekly show, it'd be like the five-year mark right about now. Yeah. Well, I mean, we passed five years. Last September, we'd be at episode 300, roughly, about now. If my maths of 150 times 2 is correct. I think that's right. That's where I was going. And it's like, wow, that's 300 episodes would be really something.
I think one of the things that we rightly decided is let's do this every other week and give ourselves some time in between to actually play around and use this stuff. And then we come to the episode. with some experience and I think that's been one of the nice unique things about the show and that's something I hope we're going to keep doing from time to time in Linux Unplugged. Alex is going to join us.
And we're going to cover some more self-hosted stuff in the Unplugged podcast, and we'll have more information about that. We also think we have an opportunity to do something special with our final episode, episode 150, which will be at the end of May. I think we're going to try to make that live. We'll probably have a way for you to contribute too. We'll have more information soon as we kind of work that stuff.
But we wanted to give you some heads up. It's something that has been in discussion for a bit, like when is the right time? And Alex and I are both fans of nice round numbers. Yeah, I want to just make sure that the audience are absolutely clear that there's no drama, there's no beef, there's nothing going on in the background that you and I are both like, right, screw this, we're throwing in the towel or anything. It just...
just kind of feels like the right time. You know, there's been five and a half years worth of of show documented here of of life documented you know if i look back at um we'll probably get more into the the naval gazey stuff uh later on i guess but like i wasn't a dad when we started the show i am now You know, we weren't homeowners in America. We are now like just a whole ton of stuff has changed. And the self-hosting landscape has changed.
I don't think it's changed beyond recognition in the last five or six years, but it's certainly become, I think, a lot more of a mainstream talking point, sort of. Stuff like n***ification has become a lot more of a... It's been given a name by Cory Doctorow for a start. You know, we kind of understand as a collective tech community now the importance of self-hosting a lot more than we did, I think, than when we started the show.
There's been just a huge amount of water under the bridge in that period. Yeah, I completely agree. It's really been pretty amazing. We picked an incredible few years to... Watch this industry closely and... The things that we have come to, like both in the way we think about our home labs and services, like that stuff's not going away. That stuff's now baked into the DNA of Jupyter Broadcasting.
Alex isn't going away. He'll still be around as not only a friend, but his presence will be felt on the back end and, of course, time to time on Linux Unplugged. I will be setting up a Jupiter Party discount for our SREs because the membership support from the self-hosted podcast has been really tremendous.
If you want to continue to support the network, I'm going to do a crazy discount, $10 off the Jupiter Party membership if you go to jupiter.party and use the promo code SRE. We have some good content over there, bootleg versions of our shows, ad-free versions of the shows, and more stuff coming.
And our future projects, the jupyter.party membership is a great way to do that. Absolutely. Please do help Chris and Jupyter Broadcasting continue long into the night after self-hosting is yet a distant memory. I'll also be over on YouTube, KTZ Systems. I'll still be doing my thing over there. Of course, the Tailscale stuff too. That's not going anywhere. And honestly, that's a large part of the thought process behind what's going on here, for me at least personally, is...
The Series C announcement last week with Talescale, you know. things are getting more serious by the day over there for me and you know just trying to strike that balance between home life work life try not to burn out try not to push things too hard and Making sure I can spend enough quality time with Akira while she's young and all that kind of stuff. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Bittersweet, very bittersweet and not an easy decision to make at all. So thank you very much to everybody that's listened.
whether it's one episode or 100 and at this point 147 episodes we appreciate every single one of you Absolutely. And we're going to try to have a good time with the remaining few episodes we do have. Yeah. You know, do some of the things we've always wanted. And of course, cover some of the classics. And this week. You're going to follow up on something you kind of teased me about last time, and that's this.
Recall, it's a streaming game service, and it's called Apollo. Not to be confused with the hardware manufacturer, right? This is a different Apollo. Yes, right. So this is a little bit of a complicated situation as it pertains to. Streaming games. Alright, so... I have built a Windows gaming desktop running Windows 11 with a 9950X 3D, and it's got, I think, a 3080 in there at the minute. That's not impressive, right? It's just a gaming rig, and I use it to play computer games.
What I wanted to do, though, and have wanted to do for basically since the beginning of time is have a graphics card somewhere in my life. and then use that graphics card to stream the pixels across the network to whatever device I've got in my hand or on the desk in front of me, regardless of the resolution, regardless of the architecture, regardless of the operating system even. And Apollo lets me do just that. So it's like GPU is a service on your LAN. Pretty much. Pretty much.
So the origin story here of Moonlight is that it's an open source implementation of NVIDIA's proprietary GameStream protocol that was reversed engineered in approximately 2013 or 14 or so, according to my research. And GameStream was designed originally to only work on Nvidia Shield devices. So the set-top box, like the TV box, as well as, if you remember, they did like a handheld tablet gaming Nvidia Shield.
Still got it. Still works. Yeah. And well, originally it was supposed to be like a USP. Like one of the reasons you would buy a shield device was because you could stream your games from your PC. to your handheld device, which was limited to Nvidia hardware specifically. But Moonlight came along and broke down that barrier by allowing streaming to pretty much any device with a screen and an internet connection, which kind of democratised access to remote PC gaming.
So a lot of water went under the bridge, and Moonlight actually was, I don't want to say embraced by NVIDIA, but it wasn't squished either, which is about as close as you can get from a conglomerate. And essentially the two operated in kind of a symbiosis for the better part of a decade. And I've definitely taken advantage of... Some of the open source implementations of this, you know, maybe just from like a Linux desktop to another Linux desktop. I've also, I also have used...
some of the open source implementations to stream PC games into a Quest headset. So I'm familiar with some of this, but I guess I don't understand where Apollo differs. Right. So what makes Apollo technically so impressive is that rather than streaming to... the resolution or streaming the resolution of your host system it creates a virtual display with the resolution that matches that of the target system. Oh, boy. Okay. Okay.
So Steam Deck, perfect example, right? I have a 5K, 2K, 21 by 9 ultra-wide monitor on my desk downstairs. Why would I possibly need to stream that many pixels across the network to my Steam Deck? I'm using up extra bandwidth. I'm probably introducing extra latency that's not required. My graphics card is having to work five times harder than it would to render a Steam Deck's worth of pixels.
So by doing this, Apollo means that every step of the equation is being taxed less hard. Now, you were able to do this with Moonlight originally.
But you had to kind of bring the batteries yourself. Like this was not a batteries included solution. You had to... figure out a bunch of scripts to change the resolution once you started streaming and then change it back once you'd finished and then you know you could also have a script which would disable the monitor on the host system so you weren't showing the game on the screen on your desk whilst you were playing it on your Steam Deck on the bus.
All that kind of stuff. And Apollo came along, I think, out of frustration. So the developer for Apollo is a chap called Classic Old Song. There'll be a link to his GitHub repo in the show notes. And like many open source folks, his work began as a set of modifications to address specific issues that he'd had with the original Moonlight software. He's also written a modified Moonlight client called Artemis, which is also apparently known as Moonlight Noir.
And this now has created a parallel ecosystem to the mainstream Moonlight Sunshine client-server combination. So if you're going to adopt Apollo, you want to have Apollo on your PC and Artemis on the client, whereas before you had Moonlight on the client. and Sunshine on the PC. And then Apollo also offers like a web UI management system as well.
Yeah, well, really, that's just the same thing that Moonlight does, except it offers a few more bells and whistles underneath. So you configure it. It basically runs as a Windows service, and then you configure it by going to local host port. I think it's 47.990 by default. And then it brings up a web display and you can configure things like the NVENC encoding parameters. It actually also now supports AMD, I believe, although I haven't tried that.
There's a bunch of stuff in there about HDR support, although some people report it's a little problematic. You can tweak things like bit rates and all sorts of stuff, right? It's a very fully featured solution. For me, the acid test is, can I play a racing game? Can I play an F1 game or a rally game or something on my Steam Deck streaming? Yeah. I mean, I haven't really noticed any significant latency spikes. It's genuinely a really impressive technical feat. Hmm.
And you're pretty familiar with the game, so you'd be pretty sensitive to kind of input latency delays and things like that. Are you doing this over Ethernet? Are you playing this over Wi-Fi? Like, what's the network conditions? Well, the PC is connected in with 10 gig fiber. Sure. Okay. But the Steam Deck's just bog standard Steam Deck Wi-Fi. Okay. Yeah. Wi-Fi.
That's great, Alex. It's amazing. Yeah. And so you think about all the stuff that you've got to handle when you're changing the device like that. presenting itself to steam as an xbox controller or a gamepad controller so you see all the correct buttons on the screen as well so you're not seeing like press a to continue press b whatever you're seeing like press x y or press right button or trigger or whatever it is and
There's just so many small things that Apollo's getting right. And I kind of don't really know where the line of Moonlight and Apollo, I don't know where that line is struck, but I do know that the virtual display stuff... is really stellar and absolutely worth your time to have a look at. tailscale.com slash self-hosted go there and get it for free on 100 devices and up to three users tailscale is the easiest way
to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are. Modern networking built on top of WireGuard that builds out a mesh network of all of your nodes. It is fast, too. It's easy to deploy, and it's also just literally very fast. They have the ability to determine if the system's remote or if it's on the same LAN, it takes the best route.
I have systems that are behind double carrier grade net. I have systems that are in multiple different VPS providers in different regions around the world. They're all represented on one flat mesh network. If you got five minutes, you can get tail scale deployed in like. Probably two or three machines in five minutes. It's really simple to get going. You can replace your legacy VPN infrastructure in just minutes.
and you'll never go back. Connect multiple cloud providers together as if it was just one flat network, and you can use TailScale's ACL policies to securely control access to devices and services with their next-gen access control. Save time. Use some networking technology that just works. The internet should be better. Some of these things that Tailscale makes capable impossible. Honestly, we should have had these things.
But we never got there. Tailscale brings it all together and really makes it simple. There's a lot of nice tooling too. You can send files securely to any node on your tail net using something like tail drop, which is kind of like airdrop for all your devices on your tail net, including cross-platform devices.
I personally access things like my VS Code instance and all sorts of remote services over my tail net, never having to expose any of that stuff to the public internet. And once I realized it was totally redoing the way I did my personal networking, I brought it to work. And now the JB infrastructure is behind Tailscale. It's great for the enterprise, and it's great for your home. Just get started and support the show by going to tailscale.com slash self-hosted. You go over there.
You get the 100 free systems, the three user accounts, and you support the show. You kick the tires, you like it, you keep it that way forever, or one day you bring it to work and you tell them to go to tailscale.com. Great for home, great for every organization. Just fantastic software going from strength to strength. Talescale.com slash self-hosted.
Okay, I think you just put this next project in the show notes so that one of us has to say it out loud. Yeah, what do you think? Domica? You went first. Domica? Because of domicile, maybe? Yeah, yeah. This is an interesting project, and I've been waiting for these to come along. It's an unofficial Home Assistant app. Now stick with me here for a second, because I think this is perhaps a bigger deal than it looks at first.
Now what this is, it's an app specifically designed not to cover every feature of Home Assistant. So you can't set up new devices. You're not going to create new automations. You're not going to add any new integrations when you're using this app. It focuses on just core functionality, the kind of stuff you're doing day-to-day with Home Assistant, tapping lights, adjusting ACs, closing the garage door, whatever it might be.
It's available for Android and iOS, and they have focused on a couple of areas that I think the Home Assistant app should learn from and other apps as well. But one of them is first-class widget support. so you can get real good controls through your widgets, lock screen controls, and critical push notifications all get wired up.
Yeah, that's nice. So again, we were talking about batteries being included or not in the last segment. This kind of looks like they're just trying to close that last few percent gap to save you having to spend your entire weekend building out the perfect. mobile dashboard for your phone. I actually think there's a market for this kind of thing. You know, and also the home assistant team could look at some of this stuff.
you know, integrate some ideas. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I tried it out on my iPhone and, um, you know, it's typical. It asks you to give it the URL for your home assistant instance, or if you're on the land, it can try to auto discover it, which it will do. And then once you log in, authenticate, the app guides you through downloading the integration for the app using your Hacks install, if you already have Hacks.
So it'll just download the integration for you. It'll then reboot your home assistant. This is all just like on a setup screen in the app. You're not doing any of this. It's doing it for you. Once Home Assistant reboots, it installs the integration. and connects and then it gives you a blank dashboard where you start adding and designing and i i will say it produces something that's a little bit nicer than home kit but a similar look to home kit
perhaps a little cleaner and with more control. You have more control before you lay out the widgets. It asks you about size and different options that you want to have. It's also very fast. I see this really as a Home Assistant app on easy mode. Which could be fantastic for family members. Rather than having to create specific accounts and specific dashboards for guests or maybe long visiting family members or whatever the case may be.
You'll be like, right, just download Domica and then you've only got a few things exposed to you. Through it. Yeah. Now, I did also notice that towards the bottom of the page, there is a subscription fee. Yeah. So I'm in the free trial period right now. I'm not opposed to this idea because, again, I do think.
I think there is a market to take these really powerful free software projects that do need that 10% gap closed and, you know, solve it for the normies. On iOS, I don't know if I see the value as much because I have HomeKit integration, but on Android...
Where you don't have the HomeKit UI for some people to use. And it's a nice, clean interface. I'd pay for it just probably to have it up on a tablet, potentially. Because it does have a tablet UI version, too. So on Android, I think there's more of a use case. than on iOS quite as much. And as we all know, the thorny issue of monetizing
Anything related to open source really can be the death of projects. So it's kind of good to see them just being upfront and saying, yeah, if you want us to keep working on this thing, it's going to be a couple of bones a month. Also, if it meant better family adoption.
I'd pay the two bucks a month, you know, or whatever it is. Yeah. Now I wonder, and I have no data to back this up, but I wonder, given that they're building their software around a free and open source project, whether some of that $2...
goes back upstream or whether it all goes to Domeka. I don't know what the split is there. But one thing I might like to see would be some kind of... acknowledgement or some kind of contribution back upstream whether they mainline some of their the work they're doing for this app back to the home assistant companion apps or like i don't know what that would look like whether it's money or whether it's time and effort
Jerry's out, but. Yeah, I like that. I think that's a good idea too. So something else I've been playing with this week. Kara Keep, which is a rebrand of an app we talked about and we both quite liked, Hoarder. I use the crap out of Hoarder. I use it every day for something. The fact that it does the AI tagging and you can search for things like...
My memory is just not what it used to be. And if I'm researching a video or a podcast segment or just doing anything related to researching anything, I'll just throw it in order because I know later on. my brain will surface a keyword or two and I'll find it that way. Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally the same for me too. You know, I don't know the details, but I did catch some of it online and they got a trademark dispute.
It looks like they played rough. A spurious trademark dispute. It was a complete load of horse manure, if you ask me. Because there was somebody, like a patent troll, that registered a name that was one letter different or something. Again, I don't have the details in front of me. I'm going off memory here. Essentially, the poor guy behind Hoarder is renaming because he just wants to get on with building an app. He doesn't want to become a trademark attorney.
It's just a load of nonsense, really. You feel for the guy, though, because he talks about how he spent months trying to think of a good name, and a good name is so hard. It's so hard, so. Really, yeah. And you figure, like, if you buy the domain name, you figure you've pretty much got it nailed, right? Like, nobody can come after, or apparently they can.
Yeah, apparently. It's not fair. Yeah, I feel really sorry for the guy. It's still the same great app, right? It's still the same great app. It's called KaraKeep now. If you are using the Docker Compose version like I was, there is a very small little migration you need to do. just because kind of due to GitHub limitations. I think they were able to push an update to the old image namespace, but it is a new image name now with Kara Keep, and I'll have a link in the show notes. Yeah, yeah.
And so if you want to continue to get updates, you will have to just swap that image line out in your Docker compose. It's a 10 second fix. It's really not that bad. And ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised. I did the update. Everything went really smooth. I did an update before I swapped out the image name. Then I went into the Docker Compose file, swapped out the image name to the new one, saved that, did another Docker Compose poll.
Brought it up. Everything's working. I got the new name. I think if you dig around, you might find old stuff. I didn't when I checked, but I saw a few people saying online there's a couple things. And I'm sure they're working through it. Yeah, Control-F, you know, through the code base.
But like you said, Alex, it's such a handy application. I don't really care what it's called. I do have to go update my... my nginx config and my domain name that i registered for it now oh woe is you i know it's rough dude it's rough like i wonder if there's a harry potter themed name in there of like remember all or pensive or something yes
I generally do try to keep it, you know, application like agnostic as much as I can. Like instead of going to image dot whatever dot whatever, it's photos. Right. So I for the most part, I try. But Hoarder was just such a great name. It just stuck in my brain, and so I used it as the subdomain. Well, why do you need to change the domain name then? Just keep it the same. I could keep it. What, are they going to come after me? Because you're like Smaug, right? You're hoarding your treasure.
This problem, though, of going after open source projects for trademark with these crappy tactics, it's a plague on the free software community. And so if you haven't checked out, which is what is now called Kara Keep. Both Alex and I heavily recommend it. Also, I recommend getting the iOS or Android app because then you can share from the apps when you're reading something.
Chef's kiss to that. I find that so, so useful. And then also having it go through, sort out, pull out the tags. The only change I would love to see if I could have one feature request. is to have some sort of screenshot feature when I bookmark either X-links or other...
Other sites that require login to view the content because the preview image it pulls down is just disgusting. It's just like a big X or something like that. Oh, yeah. I'd love to be able to swap that out with a screenshot or something. Yeah, I ran into an issue where when it was trying to take that full page archive, it wasn't that the browser extension wasn't doing the correct thing.
But I mean, yeah, a screenshot for something as small as like a tweet or something would be all that you need, really. I guess the trick is that whatever is pulling that information isn't authenticated. Right. So it can't even get a screenshot because. some sites like well yeah but that's where you would use like a browser framework to like capture the screen you're physically looking at right now. Right.
Or even some kind of like a Raycast plugin. It's very Mac specific, of course, but like some kind of like a Raycast plugin that literally captures what you see and does OCR on it instead of making it a browser extension if that's too limiting.
Yeah, I guess, yeah. It does sound kind of tricky now that we talk about it, but I would love to see it. There's a reason you and I aren't developers, Chris. Yeah, there are certain folks I follow that are worth saving their tweets sometimes or like a Washington Post article. But yeah, otherwise, fantastic. Yeah, these days, Christ, yeah. And they are planning to add soon the ability to download content for offline reading in the mobile app so you could queue things up.
And then when you're on a flight or something like that, go through and read your cue. Yeah, that'd be great for like on the tube or something in the morning. Perfect. Unraid.net slash self-hosted. Unraid is a powerful, easy-to-use operating system for us self-hosters and home labbers where you can make the most out of your hardware no matter what drives you have on hand.
And Unraid has been working on their 7.1 release. Just a few days ago, as I record, 7.10RC1 came out. And I'm mentioning this because I'm just so dang impressed with how quick Unraid has been pushing forward. Just complete ZFS feature rollout. And one of the things that's landing in 7.1... This RC that I think is really great is Unraid now supports importing ZFS pools from TrueNAS, Proxmox, Ubuntu, and QNAP.
That last one to me is implicitly great. Like imagine having an old QNAP box where you've kind of just reached the end of its viability. Maybe it's old. Maybe it doesn't do what you want. You could now just take that and import that. into an Unraid system that's going to be way more capable. Same with Ubuntu and Proxmox and TrueNAS, of course, but...
I just love the idea of being able to free yourself from these little restricted devices and going to something that's a true powerful platform like Unraid. They also have smarter pool management in there. You can import the largest partition on a disk. automatically, instead of just the first partition, you can think about how great that could be.
Oh, man. When I see them roll out these features to Unrate, I just think this is getting better and better, right? Like, I know they've recently added wireless networking support, too, which for me at home is fantastic since I can't do Ethernet in my home. And I know some of you want something you can bring on the go, too. built-in Unraid Wi-Fi support. supporting WPA2 and WPA3. Yes, please. User VM templates is also another nice thing I saw land recently. And of course,
They always put in an updated Linux kernel that includes support for Intel's next-gen battle image GPUs. They're always working on that kind of stuff. Unraid lets you unleash your hardware. and they're going from strength to strength. If you want to run Linux VMs, if you want to run containers or some of the applications you hear us talk about on the show,
Unraid's a great way to go. Also, they offer multi-screen support. So think about some of the things you could do with that box, some of the multi-purpose uses you could do with an Unraid system. It's pretty powerful. And with that new GPU support, you've got even more options.
It's just really great to see. Go check out Unraid. They're really, really great. And of course, the 7.1 RC is just cooking with gas. Support the show and go learn more. Unraid's something that needs to be on your radar. Check it out. Unraid.net slash self-host. One more time, go there to support the show. It's unread.net slash self-hosted. Time for some of that feedback and boostage, I think.
We got a good batch this week, and we had a great conversation earlier today in the Matrix chat room, too. about self-hosted LLMs. Adversary17 kicks us off with 25,000 sats and says, Chris, how is that Tempest weather station working out for you? I've been considering getting one, but the prices kept me hesitant. There's a few in my area. I actually wanted to touch on this again, or just follow up on the Tempest, so I'm really glad you gave me the chance here.
Now tried and confirmed that I can leave the location of the Tempest weather station so that the base stations in my RV and of course the Tempest weather stations out in the field. And I can leave, be gone for a while and come back and they do auto reconnect and resume syncing data. In Home Assistant, now there's a big gap in my charts and whatnot.
So I can't really solve for that. And there isn't really a way to backfill that information. But it is nice to know that even if they're separated for a week plus, when they come back together, they just resume talking again. So it seems to be a pretty robust system. I liked it so much when we talked about it on the show last night, I ended up buying one myself. So I've been running mine, I guess, for what, a couple of months now?
It's great. It's basically carrot weather, but self-hosted and local. Yeah, I personally pay attention to wind speed quite a bit. And so it's so great to have right there on my dashboard on the tablet in the kitchen. I have the current wind speed.
So I've created just a small little microcluster on one of my main dashboards, like a tiny little weather station, a microcluster of weather station widgets of just the things I care about, rain, wind, and temperature. And it's just right there along with our other information.
What it's done for me is it's underscored just how schizophrenic the weather in North Carolina can be sometimes. So I'm afraid this is in Celsius because that's how my brain has worked and always will work. Fahrenheit is just... I still have to remember that 20 is 70 and then go from there every single time. That's how I do it. The low, so this is just in the last week, the low that it registered was 5.7 Celsius.
And the high was 31.4 in the space of a week. Whoa, yeah. You have the swings in spring down here. Because some weeks we get the, Brent's very kind and shares his Arctic lobes with us sometimes. And then other times we get tropical waves coming up from the Gulf instead. And, you know, I think the last week we've had a bit of both. Yeah, it's either Hawaiian lobes or we're getting Canada lobes here. Tell you what, but... It's turned me into an armchair meteorologist, and I love that about it.
Yeah, it's just fun to have that data. And also the other one I love, surprise, surprise, in the Pacific Northwest is the rain accumulation data. How does it work? Because Lord knows you've tested it. Oh, I'll tell you how it works. It gives me a great excuse to pull out my phone and gripe about the weather. I can point at spikes on the chart and say, you see this spike right here? We got more rain in these two hours than we did the three days prior. That's me now.
Thank you, adversaries. Lingus Chex Mix comes in with 5,000 sets. Here's a different way of doing media, but if you're like me and my family, we watch a lot of live TV, so we use Channels DVR. It's focused on being a great DVR first. You can have your own media in there too. I think it was Casey Liss who recommended I take a look at this a while back. I'm afraid, Casey, if you're listening, I didn't in the end.
But I hear some really good things about channels. I took a brief look at it after he mentioned it and very impressed. And I kind of thought it's like this parallel universe to play. where I could have gone if I was coming at it from a television content first perspective. Right. It looks really good, I have to say. And, you know, if it... Honestly, if it has a clear way to pay for it up front and it's been working for a few years, maybe it's something worth looking at, folks.
Yeah, the spiel on the App Store page is cut the cord without missing your shows. You don't have to lose your DVR just because you cancelled your cable subscription. Which kind of feels like a sales pitch of like cutting the cord from like 10 years ago. Yeah, I wonder, you know, if you're in an area where you can get over the air.
Could be nice. Over the air for certain folks is a pretty great option. But it does get fantastic ratings, 4.7 with nearly 500 ratings. So everybody that uses it seems to love it. I just don't have a huge need for live TV, but if I did, I think this would be the way to go. Leaky Canoe comes in with 10,000 sats. How do you guys handle Firefox configuration? I'm a NixOS user, and a home manager might be the way to replace Firefox Sync for me. Thanks.
I don't use Firefox. Oh. Actually, that's true. That's not true. I use it to log into Facebook whenever I want to put anything on Facebook Marketplace. With the Facebook containers that they have. That is handy, isn't it? I have an almost equally as bad answer. I use Firefox, but... I'm just letting them sync it. Yeah. I was a Chrome expat and I'd already given into Google sync. And so I felt like switching to Firefox and using Mozilla's Firefox sync was probably at least better.
This is an area I'd be willing to revisit. My services are up 24-7 on my tail net, so at this point... What would be a big, what would be one more thing like syncing my browser? Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's, that's an interesting thing. Looking back at the, the arc of this show is when we started like mesh VPNs were just a mess. And.
Yes, I know I work for them and I am a corporate shill. You didn't when the show started, which is another interesting... The reason I worked there is because I liked it so damn much that I was like, I've got to get a job there. I've got to be part of that thing. But like some of the assumptions that we made at the beginning of the show about the way in which the world of infrastructure worked are just not valid anymore. Like Talesca is a perfect example.
Firefox also, and its position in the browser universe, has also changed significantly in that time. But perhaps this, more than anything, speaks to the reason why both of us are shysters and shouldn't host a podcast called Self-Hosted is because... We don't eat our own dog food quite enough sometimes. Yeah, I think my two areas of shame...
Would be right now, probably my browser sync and my push notifications. I've wanted to do push notifications for so long. Might be one of the things to try to get in before 150. You know, that would make a really good segment for next episode. What are our actual state of the apps? What are we actually using? What do we wish we were using?
What hosted things have we, there might be hosted things we've, oh yeah, I got one that I've fallen back on. I'm sure, I'm sure. Yeah, we should do that. Maybe not, maybe not 148, 149, something like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I like it. Also, if you have questions to go along with that, boost those in and ask us. Yeah, write in and tell us what you're doing too.
Tebby Dog comes in with a Spaceballs Boost 12,345 sats. I might be a bit late, but I want to let you know about another possible Wyze camera replacement. The TP-Link C200 cameras. They're extremely cheap. I paid $15 each. They have 2K variants that you can get for around $20. You set the camera up in the TP-Link app once.
but you can turn on direct RTSP stream and you can set credentials. Then you're good. I'm pretty happy with them so far. I ordered some of those 2K ones for outdoor. They are outdoor rated as well with PTZ. They're a little bit more expensive with all that at $55. Seems like a pretty good value even at $55. Yeah, it really does. I wonder, can you hook these up to Ethernet or are they Wi-Fi only or do you know?
I was looking at the I was just looking at the product page, too, and I should have checked that because I personally these are Wi-Fi. So I personally need Wi-Fi. But if they have Ethernet variants, I'd like to know because I'm sure there's plenty of you out there that very reasonably want to put your cameras on Ethernet. God, I wish I could put my cameras on Ethernet, Alex.
But you know what? Maybe dedicated Wi-Fi will help. Thanks, Debbie Dog. Appreciate that tip. All right, last couple ones. Withers comes in with 9,001 sets. Here is an app pick for you guys. Daarich, D-A-W-A-R-I-C-H, location tracking service. It was one of the last pieces of the puzzle for replacing Google for me. Your journey, your control. Visualize your location history, track your movements, and analyze your travel patterns.
with complete privacy and control. You know, now I think about it, that's another area that I'm a phony. I use Find My all the time. Yeah. Well, how can you not if you got an iPhone? I mean, they're tracking anyways. Yeah, you know, I mean.
I, on Android, I use Home Assistant and location and Home Assistant, but it is not as up-to-date as Find My. I think anything you can do to move sideways from the big tech kind of surveillance that's been going on for increasingly uh with something like what is with this name Doorwatch? I don't know, man. I don't know. It markets itself as a self-hostable alternative to Google location history, Google Maps timeline.
I actually really love this. I've talked about this on the show before. Before this podcast started, I had this really creepy tracking device called the Automatic. that went into the ODB2 port of your car. But what I really loved about it is for the first two or three years of a lot of road tripping that I did, I had one of these suckers. And so I had a two or three year map of everywhere I'd been, which was.
all over the united states and it was so neat to actually have that that i've always looked for something like this which is i'm sure why withers boosted this in so i'm definitely going to take a look at this because something else i want to do is from time to time when we're going on road trips for the show and we're doing meetups along the way, I want to have a live RV tracker so people know if we're in their city and they can come to a meetup.
You've been doing that with OwnTracks for a while since, right? Yeah, and it's an okay solution, but maybe this would be something better. It looks like it's OwnTracks application compatible as well. This will let you import your data from Google Maps. So you can take the big tech surveillance net you've already got and import that into this thing. Nice. OwnTrax, Strava.
Image. I noticed there was a line here about image and photoprism saying, if you provide credentials for image and or photoprism, Dara Rich will automatically import the geodata from your photos and allow you to visualize your photos on the map. That's rad. That's cool. I love that. That's a cool tip.
Thank you. I'm going to definitely look into that. Appreciate it, Withers. It's a fairly new project, too. It looks like it's only been around for approaching a year as well. So, yeah, definitely one to watch. Nice to have on our radar. So User55 wants to know how you feel about the reliability of Thunderbolt. They're thinking about doing a NAS, but it's one of these tiny NASs, but it does have Thunderbolt.
I think it's CSIS 4 on there. Would you trust it for like an external gigabit Ethernet or a storage array? My initial reaction is probably no, but that is potentially based on... outdated prejudice i i don't know like usb as a protocol is noisy enough and crappy enough that it Thunderbolt's a PCIe-based protocol, and it's a very different proposition.
Some of the same risks still apply. So you've still got an external dongle hanging off your thing that's very easy to knock or get pulled out just a millimeter here, just a millimeter there. Or could even fail. Or it could fail, but then internal stuff fails all the time too. I don't know. What is interesting about Thunderbolt in particular, let's say you've got like a cluster of mini PCs or something.
and they've all got Thunderbolt, you could very easily spin up like a Proxmox cluster and then as a ring network between the three devices, set up a Thunderbolt network at 40 gigs or whatever. on mini PCs and you're laughing. Yeah, I definitely feel more comfortable with Thunderbolt than I do USB. I have one system. It is a trashcan Mac Pro. and it has about 22 terabytes hanging off of it over Thunderbolt 3. And so far, that's been going.
For maybe about a year without a hitch. Wow. And it's, you know, do I love it? No, because like Alex, I think it introduces additional risk. The enclosure could fail. The power supply for the enclosure could fail. The Thunderbolt cable could get unplugged. I mean, it's a low risk, but it could happen. However, in a pinch, I'm doing it, and so far it has been really solid. That's also, though, with Linux. If you're using Windows or macOS, I don't know if I'd feel as confident about it.
I did enjoy the fact that that was a rush boost as well. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. 5595. Had to get that in. And then hybrid sarcasm rounds us out with one right before the show. He says, I'm self hosting. If self-hosting LLM is fine, if I want a fancy search engine for public data, but how do I feed my data, my docs, my notes, my links into it so it can help me search my own data, a curated search?
I think the answer, and I haven't done this yet myself, but it's very much on my to-do list to do soon, TM. is the MCP stuff. So the machine context protocol, or is it model context protocol? that lets you give a model, whether that's a hosted one with Claude or whether that's a local one through Olama or whatever, you can think of an MCP almost like an API to a set of data.
So rather than each LLM having to understand the specifics of how to interface with Obsidian and how to interface with a database, et cetera, et cetera, it interfaces with the MCP and then the MCP does the translation. And I suspect if you are using, I mentioned Obsidian for a reason, because there seems to be a lot of momentum around MCPs and Obsidian at the moment. If you're using that, then I suspect you'll have a good time hybrid.
Yeah, that's probably going to, yeah, that has to be the ultimate solution. If anybody does have tips for local like llama based applications that let you add documents and then, you know, it trains on that sort of like a custom GPT. Let me know. Yeah. The trouble is, like, if you're trying to throw a huge amount of data at this thing.
the number of tokens it would take for each request to then have the context without you actually doing rag on the model and like bring it up, like actually genuinely training it on your data. Yeah. But that's incredibly time consuming and expensive to do. What's better is to have some way of interfacing directly with your content that's presumably fairly dynamic, I don't know, but... My notes certainly change a lot every day. So, you know, it's one of those things that...
It's on the list. We'll get to it. I don't know if we'll get to it before 1.50, but we'll get to it at some point. Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a boost. We had 35 of you stream SAP. Why you listened and you stacked 67,604 sats for episode 147 combined with our boosters. Not all of them made into the show, but we tried to put a little extra in here.
We do have the boost bar in the show notes for those that didn't make it. But when you combine it all together, we stacked 149,839 SATs for this episode. That's all using open source software, a peer-to-peer network, no middleman that we have to go. ask for our money from that then takes 5%. It goes directly to the network and directly to the host and to Editor Drew. Thank you, everybody. It's easy to boost with fountain.fm.
And there's lots of other options. We have some links in the show notes. And a huge thank you to our SREs who have been integral in keeping the show going for this long. We're grateful that we're not ending it because the show's financially collapsing. We're ending it because we want to try to find a good spot where the show's still going strong. We're trying to do kind of like the Seinfeld exit.
That we think will deliver the best product for our members. And we really appreciate your support. And again, we do have that SRE discount code if you want to sign up for Jupyter.Party and get the full network membership for a ridiculous discount for the price of your SRE. Thank you very much. Yes, huge, huge thank you. We'll get to all the soppy stuff in 150, I'm sure, but... It's not quite the silly season this spring that it was last spring for conferences, but...
Still silly-ish. Linux Fest Northwest is coming up soon, right? Alex is like next weekend. It's like next weekend, Alex. See, I'm not going, so I don't know exactly when it is this time. Well, yeah, by the time people hear this. It is the 25th and 26th of April, and it is in the beautiful Bellingham, Washington, and we are shaping up to have one of the nice Aprils as well.
Very beautiful and things are blooming like crazy right now. You ordered the nice weather this time, did you? I put the order and we'll see if it gets delivered. It's at the Bellingham Technical College. This is the 25th year and it's going to be a banger of a show. We will also have a live Linux Unplugged Sunday. That'll be on the calendar at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. But if you're at LinuxFest...
Come say hi. And then Wes Payne is doing a talk right around the show, too, so you can come for LUP and stay for Wes. That Wes Payne, he's always a treat, isn't he? And he's always up to something. Always. The man... The man is an AI mastermind. You would not believe the things he's gotten these different AIs to produce, especially the ones that generate voices and whatnot from Google. It's quite hilarious. We have a library of them now.
He's torturing them, Alex. He's torturing the machines. Spoiler alert. That's why we're ending the show is because we're about to be replaced by a Wes bot. Wait, why did we say anything? We could have just had Wes bring us up some AI voices. Yeah. Dang it, Alex. What are we going to learn? All right, so by now, I think most of you know how to find us, but you can go to selfhosted.show slash contact to send us an email, selfhosted at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Please write in with your self-hosted stories. I would love to do over the next few weeks some more chronicling, I suppose, of what you as an audience have been through on the journey with us.
over the last five or six years of where your self-hosting setup was when you started listening even if that was only a few months ago and where it is now and sort of bring us along for the ride i can't promise we'll read them all out But I'd love to read them at least and sort of get an overall sense of where you as a community have been on this journey with us. Yeah, really, for me, it's... I'm going to get all Clarkson emotional in a minute. So let's...
Let's move on, shall we? Well, on that note, I will say you can find me over at ChrisLAS.com. And the show does have a Twitter page, although I don't know what the point of mentioning that is at this point. But we do have great show notes. We do have great show notes. Where do they find those, Alex? Well, typically they find them on a website called self-hosted.show slash 147.