Skip to main content
LawHub
Sign In
About LawHub Advantage Exploring Law Preparing for the LSAT Applying to Law School Excel in Law School Charting Your Career Podcast - I Am The Law Law School Trends Sign In
Search

The Kernel Always Wins

Feb 8, 2026
Listen to this episode

The news this week highlights shifts in Linux from multiple angles. What's evolving, why it matters, and that moment where the future actually works.

Sponsored By:

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

Transcript

WEBVTT 00:00:11.333 --> 00:00:16.033 Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. 00:00:16.193 --> 00:00:16.833 My name is Wes. 00:00:17.053 --> 00:00:17.953 And my name is Brent. 00:00:18.253 --> 00:00:22.093 Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show, today we're digging into the Linux 00:00:22.093 --> 00:00:26.533 news that's being shaped by delays and some interesting technical shifts that 00:00:26.533 --> 00:00:29.513 might actually matter more than they look at first. I'll tell you about that. 00:00:29.713 --> 00:00:33.073 Then there's a moment where the future actually showed up in Linux and everything 00:00:33.073 --> 00:00:34.533 worked. We'll share that story. 00:00:34.653 --> 00:00:37.453 And then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks, 00:00:37.633 --> 00:00:41.213 and a lot more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings 00:00:41.213 --> 00:00:44.213 to producer Jeff. Hey, PJ. 00:00:45.153 --> 00:00:45.473 Hello. 00:00:46.313 --> 00:00:50.693 It's the big game day, as they say. So we have a few up there in the quiet listening 00:00:50.693 --> 00:00:52.093 up the hello, hello, hello, mumble room. 00:00:52.413 --> 00:00:58.953 And PJ is the sole member brave enough to set the nachos aside long enough to say hello on the show. 00:01:00.113 --> 00:01:02.953 So why don't you make it a Tuesday on a Sunday next week and join us in our 00:01:02.953 --> 00:01:07.113 mumble room. And let's have a nice, vital, big mumble room. You know what I mean? 00:01:07.433 --> 00:01:09.053 I mean, if you do, you get a whole extra show. 00:01:09.313 --> 00:01:14.273 Yeah. Round of applause to people. Dijil just showed up. Round of applause to you guys. 00:01:15.984 --> 00:01:20.064 And of course, a big good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. 00:01:20.184 --> 00:01:25.624 Go to defined.net slash unplugged. This is where you want to go to get 100 machines 00:01:25.624 --> 00:01:29.504 absolutely free, no credit card required on the decentralized managed VPN. 00:01:29.744 --> 00:01:32.624 They manage it for you. It runs Nebula VPN. 00:01:32.944 --> 00:01:36.644 Unlike traditional VPNs, Nebula's decentralized design keeps your network resilient. 00:01:37.024 --> 00:01:41.024 You can manage a home lab with it. I have a Nebula network that's just two nodes. 00:01:41.544 --> 00:01:45.204 And you can have a Nebula network that has thousands of nodes. 00:01:45.204 --> 00:01:50.844 entire global infrastructures across data centers, carrier grade NAT, whatever it might be. 00:01:51.164 --> 00:01:55.264 It's extremely resilient. Saved my butt the other day. I was able to get it 00:01:55.264 --> 00:01:58.124 on the wife's machine and save a problem before she even knew it was going on. 00:01:58.424 --> 00:02:00.264 It's so nice. You could go from 00:02:00.264 --> 00:02:03.724 this teeny tiny lean infrastructure where there's no big tech company. 00:02:03.844 --> 00:02:07.884 You don't need any sign on from Google or whoever to use your mesh net. 00:02:08.184 --> 00:02:13.024 You can do these tiny setups or you can go to these massive slack size scale, right? 00:02:13.124 --> 00:02:16.384 And it's incredible. And if you want to try it out, you can start with Managed 00:02:16.384 --> 00:02:18.184 Nebula. You can use 100 devices for free. 00:02:18.344 --> 00:02:22.264 You can really get a sense of it. It's a great product. It's also a lot leaner on the system. 00:02:23.404 --> 00:02:26.504 Shows up in multiple ways, on the CPU and on the network. 00:02:26.644 --> 00:02:29.784 It's really great for that. And it's got best-in-class encryption, 00:02:29.784 --> 00:02:31.864 and it is fantastic because, 00:02:32.524 --> 00:02:35.704 you control the keys, you control the lighthouse, so the redundancy, 00:02:35.944 --> 00:02:39.724 the discoverability, all of it is under your control, or you let them run it 00:02:39.724 --> 00:02:41.864 over at define.net slash unplugged. 00:02:41.944 --> 00:02:44.784 Then if you wanted to move on, you could. You could self-host it too. 00:02:45.664 --> 00:02:48.584 They're really, really great product because it's the Snebula open sourcing, 00:02:48.684 --> 00:02:50.524 something that we've been following for years. 00:02:51.264 --> 00:02:56.284 Absolutely. I think maybe we started watching in late 2017, early 2018. 00:02:56.584 --> 00:03:00.324 And so we knew there was something there. Now to see it really take off, 00:03:00.424 --> 00:03:01.044 it's really impressive. 00:03:01.564 --> 00:03:05.684 I just noticed on February 6th, we got an updated Android app. 00:03:05.864 --> 00:03:07.784 So, you know, if you are using it, go check that out. 00:03:07.924 --> 00:03:11.284 Check it out. Go over to defined.net slash unplug, support the show, 00:03:11.504 --> 00:03:14.224 and check out Nebula. It is fantastic. 00:03:16.965 --> 00:03:22.365 Just around the corner, 25 days away, Planet Nix and Scale 23X. 00:03:22.685 --> 00:03:26.445 We're working with our buddies over at Phlox, who's focused on making reproducible 00:03:26.445 --> 00:03:28.045 dev environments actually usable. 00:03:28.225 --> 00:03:30.805 They're sending us once again to Planet Nix for the second year. 00:03:30.965 --> 00:03:32.825 They're throwing a hell of an event. 00:03:33.265 --> 00:03:36.465 It's looking good. Year two is looking really, really good. 00:03:36.865 --> 00:03:42.305 And Brent, you have 19 days until you're going to be absolutely slammed to get down the road. 00:03:42.445 --> 00:03:46.665 It's about a 46-hour drive for you, buddy, which is six days of hardcore driving. 00:03:46.665 --> 00:03:47.525 How are you feeling about that? 00:03:48.305 --> 00:03:51.665 I'm glad you've been doing the travel math on this one for me. 00:03:51.825 --> 00:03:54.165 I appreciate it. Yeah. That sounds daunting. 00:03:54.445 --> 00:03:54.785 Sure. 00:03:54.945 --> 00:03:58.645 I think is the main emotion that comes across. And also, holy, 00:03:58.725 --> 00:04:01.505 I probably should leave tomorrow, right? That's what I should do? 00:04:01.665 --> 00:04:04.445 Yeah, well, if you want to have a nice drive. Here's another way to put it in 00:04:04.445 --> 00:04:09.125 perspective. There will be three more unplugs until we are in Pasadena. 00:04:09.385 --> 00:04:12.365 That's frightening. I mean, wonderful. It's coming soon. 00:04:12.865 --> 00:04:15.085 Just keep that one in your head. I think it's easier to work with. 00:04:15.085 --> 00:04:18.385 Mm-hmm. Yep. Three more lumps. So there you go. 00:04:18.505 --> 00:04:23.125 Check out planetnix.com for the details and then go get registered at scale. 00:04:23.305 --> 00:04:24.425 That gets you to both events. 00:04:25.065 --> 00:04:28.905 We have a link in the show notes for scale at socialinuxexpo.org. 00:04:29.005 --> 00:04:34.705 And you can use our promo code unpludge, U-N-P-L-G, to get 40% off your registration. It's no joke. 00:04:35.025 --> 00:04:37.845 And I've updated the meetup page a little bit as well. We, I think, 00:04:37.905 --> 00:04:42.125 are locking in the yard house because the other two locations are no longer in business. 00:04:42.665 --> 00:04:49.225 I was informed by a local listener which I really appreciated it is but it's 00:04:49.225 --> 00:04:51.985 great we already have a good showing and if you are planning to be there at 00:04:51.985 --> 00:04:54.305 our meetup please go sign up so we can let the venue know oh. 00:04:54.305 --> 00:04:57.125 Great already 25 potential attendees join the crowd. 00:04:58.765 --> 00:05:03.005 Meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting for that and we'd love it if you could 00:05:03.005 --> 00:05:06.985 be there even if you're not going to one of the events show up and say hi we 00:05:06.985 --> 00:05:11.505 like that so there you go that's all the housekeeping I have for you, 00:05:14.749 --> 00:05:17.789 So we wanted to get everybody on the same page with a couple of stories that 00:05:17.789 --> 00:05:20.249 have gone down, and the first one you may have already heard about, 00:05:21.443 --> 00:05:25.203 It's not too surprising. We just wanted you to be aware. Valve has updated their 00:05:25.203 --> 00:05:29.143 plans for their recently announced upcoming hardware lineup. 00:05:29.523 --> 00:05:33.263 All three products announced last November are now expected to ship in the first 00:05:33.263 --> 00:05:37.023 half of the year instead of in early 2026. So it's a bit of a delay here. 00:05:37.263 --> 00:05:40.983 In a Steam community post, Valve explained the lack of firm release dates. 00:05:41.403 --> 00:05:46.243 Basically, ongoing RAM and SSD shortages combined with the rising prices, 00:05:46.523 --> 00:05:50.743 making it hard to lock in final pricing and also launch timelines. 00:05:51.283 --> 00:05:52.603 That's not too surprising, is it? 00:05:52.803 --> 00:05:56.483 No. Okay, but what are we talking about concretely? Well, it's the Steam machine, 00:05:56.743 --> 00:06:01.543 the Steam Frame VR headset, and that new Steam controller. 00:06:02.183 --> 00:06:05.163 In their statement, they did say this in a very Valve way, I thought. 00:06:05.163 --> 00:06:10.503 They have more, quote, work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates. 00:06:10.723 --> 00:06:11.723 It's like they don't even know. 00:06:11.823 --> 00:06:14.903 No, and are still kind of figuring that out internally. I mean, 00:06:14.983 --> 00:06:18.283 but they did then secondly emphasize, especially given how quickly hardware 00:06:18.283 --> 00:06:19.823 market conditions are changing right now. 00:06:19.823 --> 00:06:25.463 I think some of us maybe were lingering on to this hope that they had maybe bought a pre-stock. 00:06:26.083 --> 00:06:29.983 Which things were already rolling and done and you were just going to ship them. Yeah. 00:06:30.203 --> 00:06:34.283 And then we recently saw these rumors floated that there was a possible bare 00:06:34.283 --> 00:06:37.363 bones steam machine with no RAM or storage that they might ship. 00:06:38.543 --> 00:06:43.443 And they didn't seem to really give much life to that rumor in this press release 00:06:43.443 --> 00:06:46.543 and in the questions that they took. Do you think that would be a product? 00:06:46.883 --> 00:06:50.883 I mean, it might be for our crowd. I don't know. It doesn't seem like it competes 00:06:50.883 --> 00:06:52.603 as much in the console market. 00:06:52.763 --> 00:06:52.943 For sure. 00:06:53.103 --> 00:06:53.463 Yeah. 00:06:54.343 --> 00:06:59.083 I think in normal market conditions, a bare-bones steam machine would be the one I would want. 00:07:00.263 --> 00:07:03.283 But I can't buy RAM or storage any cheaper than Valve can. 00:07:03.923 --> 00:07:04.283 Exactly. 00:07:04.603 --> 00:07:07.703 So yeah, it's like if I have it, yeah, then I would like a bare-bones machine. 00:07:07.943 --> 00:07:10.803 I'm curious that if you're listening to this and you could boost and let me 00:07:10.803 --> 00:07:13.063 know if you would buy a bare-bones steam machine if they offered it. 00:07:13.743 --> 00:07:16.403 And they might be able to ship that sooner would be the advantage. 00:07:16.403 --> 00:07:20.443 So if you had the money to spend and you could buy your own storage and your own RAM, 00:07:21.528 --> 00:07:23.708 And you could get your hands on this a couple of months before others. 00:07:23.928 --> 00:07:28.688 One of the questions I have is like, how long can they wait for prices to stabilize 00:07:28.688 --> 00:07:34.688 or to secure hardware before the product just gets older and older and less worth releasing? 00:07:35.248 --> 00:07:38.068 Why is it two grand for a three-year-old product? 00:07:38.188 --> 00:07:41.008 You're right. Yeah, that's tricky. Maybe they know something we don't know. 00:07:41.268 --> 00:07:45.048 Maybe they know some other vendors about to come online and start manufacturing RAM. 00:07:46.261 --> 00:07:49.481 I don't know. But that's a good point. If they wait too long, 00:07:49.861 --> 00:07:52.041 they're not going to be super competitive machines. 00:07:52.461 --> 00:07:52.821 Yeah. 00:07:53.281 --> 00:07:57.381 Huh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure. I guess what we do know is that it's going to 00:07:57.381 --> 00:07:59.121 be later than they originally suggested. 00:07:59.661 --> 00:08:04.501 But they're still, for now, promising first half. So what, by June, July? 00:08:05.101 --> 00:08:06.321 That's what I would take it to mean. 00:08:07.241 --> 00:08:08.701 Assuming they don't change that again. 00:08:09.041 --> 00:08:11.561 Right. Do we think it even ships in this year? 00:08:12.561 --> 00:08:14.781 Jeff, how are you feeling about this? Were you going to buy one of these? 00:08:15.741 --> 00:08:18.961 Yeah i'm a little sad i really really really want a frame. 00:08:18.961 --> 00:08:25.161 Yes yes me too that's the thing for me is the frame i'm surprised the controller's 00:08:25.161 --> 00:08:28.361 delayed that's interesting maybe maybe there's memory on the controller it's. 00:08:28.361 --> 00:08:29.301 All that ram in the controller. 00:08:29.301 --> 00:08:34.301 You feel for valve because when they announced this it was maybe the writing 00:08:34.301 --> 00:08:37.821 was on the wall at that point but it wasn't obvious where this was all going 00:08:37.821 --> 00:08:39.101 price-wise certainly wasn't. 00:08:39.101 --> 00:08:39.801 Where we are now. 00:08:39.801 --> 00:08:43.181 And now here we are and it's like you feel for don't you i. 00:08:43.181 --> 00:08:47.961 Think if they can get through the covid stuff with the steam deck i'm pretty 00:08:47.961 --> 00:08:51.241 sure they're going to get through this too they'll find some way it won't be 00:08:51.241 --> 00:08:56.481 as much as we hope you know i don't think they're going to do any better than 00:08:56.481 --> 00:08:57.381 they did with the steam deck. 00:08:57.381 --> 00:09:00.301 That's true though that was challenging got it out yeah and they. 00:09:00.301 --> 00:09:03.561 Are very smart you know they have a lot of smart people working there that's. 00:09:03.561 --> 00:09:06.941 A good point all right pj you're making me feel better i like that all right 00:09:06.941 --> 00:09:10.561 here's another story that may suggest an interesting shift virtual 00:09:10.561 --> 00:09:13.481 box is finally learning to ride on 00:09:13.481 --> 00:09:16.281 top of kvm some code changes are landing 00:09:16.281 --> 00:09:19.661 in virtual box that could have big implications long 00:09:19.661 --> 00:09:24.761 term for how people use it it's just being tested now they're beginning to support 00:09:24.761 --> 00:09:30.481 native kvm virtualization backend for the virtual box application that's crazy 00:09:30.481 --> 00:09:33.981 i know it's a long-standing ask from the linux users out there who just want 00:09:33.981 --> 00:09:36.841 no i don't want a little kernel module. I totally get that. 00:09:37.261 --> 00:09:40.061 Very early, very opt-in, hard to get. We'll get more into that. 00:09:40.903 --> 00:09:46.863 But this does seem to be a trend that we just keep seeing is that hypervisors 00:09:46.863 --> 00:09:51.043 over time are just adopting Linux's native virtualization stack and just saying, 00:09:51.243 --> 00:09:53.543 ah, fuck, you can just screw it. You can just use that. 00:09:53.923 --> 00:09:57.423 I mean, VMware did a similar thing. I just think that's fascinating. 00:09:57.703 --> 00:10:00.503 I mean, this is one of the main reasons I moved away from VirtualBox. 00:10:00.643 --> 00:10:06.463 It was the first virtualization software that I used way back when I was stuck 00:10:06.463 --> 00:10:08.823 on, let's just say, other operating systems. 00:10:09.463 --> 00:10:12.363 um but then once i discovered like why there's 00:10:12.363 --> 00:10:15.183 all these kernel modules and stuff that was the reason 00:10:15.183 --> 00:10:18.363 for me to move away from it so i would assume for other linux 00:10:18.363 --> 00:10:21.503 users this is about reducing kernel friction so less 00:10:21.503 --> 00:10:24.663 reliance on those proprietary kernel drivers 00:10:24.663 --> 00:10:27.923 that you have to load and sometimes break better compatibility 00:10:27.923 --> 00:10:31.063 with hardened kernels secure boot and distro 00:10:31.063 --> 00:10:35.923 updates right right that is a good point would be a great point and i think 00:10:35.923 --> 00:10:40.543 from a privacy and freedom angle basically kvm is part of the kernel so it's 00:10:40.543 --> 00:10:45.343 audited it's upstream transparent and running virtual box on kvm shifts that 00:10:45.343 --> 00:10:50.283 trust towards the kernel rather than vendor specific modules what. 00:10:50.283 --> 00:10:51.603 Brent you don't trust oracle. 00:10:51.603 --> 00:10:57.483 Well let's just say i have less reasons to trust oracle than i do the kernel fair. 00:10:57.483 --> 00:10:58.303 Yeah good point. 00:10:59.435 --> 00:11:03.555 So they're pretty much Oracle's positioning this as a fallback, 00:11:03.575 --> 00:11:06.455 so not the preferred path for VirtualBox. 00:11:06.715 --> 00:11:10.415 So the messaging still centers Oracle's hypervisor as the, quote, 00:11:11.035 --> 00:11:13.715 better choice, especially for legacy workloads. 00:11:14.035 --> 00:11:16.835 Yeah, isn't that interesting? Like, I mean, I guess I get it. 00:11:16.915 --> 00:11:19.515 They're very proud of what they've done, and they've specialized it over the 00:11:19.515 --> 00:11:20.835 years to address their users. 00:11:21.015 --> 00:11:23.915 They're not just chucking the old one on the ground, throwing it behind the bag. 00:11:23.915 --> 00:11:28.335 But it's not often where somebody submits an upstream patch so that way their 00:11:28.335 --> 00:11:31.395 software can take advantage of something in the kernel and then includes like 00:11:31.395 --> 00:11:34.495 a five bullet point. But this is why ours is better, right? 00:11:34.875 --> 00:11:38.215 Did anything in there stand out to you that was reasonable? I mean, there must be some. 00:11:38.435 --> 00:11:41.855 Yeah, a lot of it is like legacy and exotic guests, right? 00:11:41.855 --> 00:11:46.595 So if you think about KVM, when it came of age, which was after VirtualBox, 00:11:46.735 --> 00:11:50.835 and it's been very Linux native, and it's been used a lot by hyperscalers to 00:11:50.835 --> 00:11:54.635 run cloud businesses, running a lot of Linux guests, 00:11:55.135 --> 00:11:57.715 whereas VirtualBox can run a whole bunch of stuff. 00:11:57.855 --> 00:12:01.515 It's got accurate A20 gate emulation, which is important for some DOS stuff. 00:12:01.635 --> 00:12:05.315 It's got advanced instruction emulation, ring zero device emulation tricks, 00:12:05.515 --> 00:12:07.815 aggressive VM exit optimizations. 00:12:08.455 --> 00:12:12.135 For modern guests, you really don't notice a ton of difference for most situations. 00:12:12.135 --> 00:12:17.495 But if you do have some particular legacy workloads, you might find some areas 00:12:17.495 --> 00:12:19.275 where the old driver would be better. 00:12:20.055 --> 00:12:23.855 I still think even partial KVM support is, you know, a win for us. 00:12:23.955 --> 00:12:25.655 It is, as you said, hard to get. 00:12:25.775 --> 00:12:29.215 It's in the latest VirtualBox Git and Test Builds, Linux only for now. 00:12:29.335 --> 00:12:30.195 So you can't, you know, obviously. 00:12:30.495 --> 00:12:33.175 So you have to go build it yourself. 00:12:33.355 --> 00:12:34.335 Okay. All right. 00:12:34.335 --> 00:12:38.135 Or I'd be comfortable with getting one of those test builds from somewhere else. 00:12:38.475 --> 00:12:42.015 You can opt into it explicitly if you want, or as Brent was saying, 00:12:42.275 --> 00:12:46.835 I think probably what is probably an upgrade for folks and end users who maybe 00:12:46.835 --> 00:12:50.235 don't know what a kernel module is, is this could be a easy fallback, 00:12:50.315 --> 00:12:52.455 right? So it could try to run with the virtual box stuff. 00:12:53.385 --> 00:12:57.805 Sees KVM's already loaded, kernel conflict, just go use KVM. 00:12:57.905 --> 00:13:01.085 Maybe you won't have all the features. Maybe it won't be quite the same, but it'll work. 00:13:01.125 --> 00:13:02.725 That's going to be the main use case initially for this. 00:13:02.725 --> 00:13:04.785 Probably would. I think it's going to convince them to do it, right? 00:13:04.805 --> 00:13:10.385 Yeah, yeah. I wonder if long-term, if there isn't some potential for VirtualBox 00:13:10.385 --> 00:13:15.785 to essentially become one of the recommended user space VM managers for KVM. 00:13:16.345 --> 00:13:19.945 That was my first thought is, oh, it would be a nice way to manage a bunch of 00:13:19.945 --> 00:13:23.345 KVM systems, especially if I could remote connect from my desktop, 00:13:23.505 --> 00:13:28.645 if I could have the VirtualBox VM management UI on my desktop and then I connect 00:13:28.645 --> 00:13:33.925 to my KVM server and I could manage all my virtual machines at KVM with the VirtualBox UI, I mean, 00:13:34.105 --> 00:13:36.405 I think I would at least give that a try. 00:13:36.625 --> 00:13:40.345 It has been, right? Like it is in some of the best ways of open source, 00:13:40.445 --> 00:13:42.845 even with its own licensing complications in Oracle and all the rest, 00:13:42.985 --> 00:13:44.545 like it's been around for a long time. 00:13:44.725 --> 00:13:48.425 It was early at having a good, consistent cross-platform experience. 00:13:48.585 --> 00:13:52.025 It's just this like very available if you need virtualization software. 00:13:52.225 --> 00:13:54.785 And that has a lot of utility, especially now if it can kind of adapt. 00:13:55.225 --> 00:13:59.945 I do also think you kind of hit on the Linux side trend of folks using more 00:13:59.945 --> 00:14:02.005 of this existing in-kernel infrastructure. 00:14:02.225 --> 00:14:05.285 And I think that's a trend that is beyond Linux, right? 00:14:05.365 --> 00:14:10.225 Like you've seen Apple offer a lot more robust virtualization primitives in their system. 00:14:10.405 --> 00:14:13.265 Right, they provide the plumbing and then you write to the API, essentially. 00:14:13.425 --> 00:14:16.325 And same on the Microsoft stack, right? You got Hyper-V side, 00:14:16.425 --> 00:14:17.525 you've got the WSL stuff. 00:14:17.685 --> 00:14:20.365 There's just a lot more primitives that you can do. There are still products, 00:14:20.505 --> 00:14:23.245 especially Microsoft, but like there are still products built on it, 00:14:23.305 --> 00:14:26.045 but you get a lot more of that base infrastructure that you can plumb yourself. 00:14:26.485 --> 00:14:28.865 And it makes sense, right? They're in control of the kernel and all of that. 00:14:29.873 --> 00:14:33.673 We've made and heard some wild theories in the past of Microsoft, 00:14:34.033 --> 00:14:37.393 maybe Windows is just going to take this approach and become Linux under the 00:14:37.393 --> 00:14:38.873 hood with a nice, fancy interface. 00:14:39.173 --> 00:14:43.093 So my big question becomes, do all roads lead to Linux? 00:14:43.753 --> 00:14:45.053 Yeah, it seems like it. 00:14:46.333 --> 00:14:47.693 That's what it seems like here. 00:14:47.833 --> 00:14:51.673 Here we are, right? I've been talking about Linux for 20 years. 00:14:51.833 --> 00:14:56.693 And can you believe it's still relevant after 20 years? And it's more relevant than ever? 00:14:56.713 --> 00:14:57.253 It's more relevant. 00:14:57.333 --> 00:15:00.353 Yeah. There's not a lot of technology like that. 00:15:00.613 --> 00:15:05.373 And it is this trend of all things just kind of moving to the kernel. 00:15:05.673 --> 00:15:07.933 And they stop their own way of doing things. 00:15:08.373 --> 00:15:11.193 Now, VirtualBox is going to keep going for a while with their own modules, to be clear. 00:15:11.333 --> 00:15:15.573 Did you see this week's unrelated, but that someone proposed like a machine 00:15:15.573 --> 00:15:19.453 learning framework offload for the kernel? So it really is everything in the kernel. 00:15:19.533 --> 00:15:24.813 Whatever you want. Right? Use eBPF. I don't care. Well, speaking of things in 00:15:24.813 --> 00:15:29.753 the kernel and sometimes outside the kernel, let's talk about BcacheFS, 00:15:30.073 --> 00:15:33.833 big update in just the last couple of days over there. 00:15:33.973 --> 00:15:38.193 And I have one particular feature that I am very excited about. 00:15:39.536 --> 00:15:43.916 I'll hold that because I'm going to let you take the stage for a moment on this Bcache update. 00:15:44.216 --> 00:15:48.716 Yeah, so this is on the heels. We had 1.36 back in the end of January. 00:15:48.796 --> 00:15:50.536 That had a lot of internal stuff. 00:15:50.956 --> 00:15:56.396 This time we get a little bit of user-facing stuff with the new BcacheFSFS timestats 00:15:56.396 --> 00:16:00.376 command. It's an interactive TUI for monitoring various file system internals, 00:16:00.516 --> 00:16:04.756 slow paths, and device performance, duration, frequency tracking for various events. 00:16:04.876 --> 00:16:05.296 Wow. 00:16:05.496 --> 00:16:07.536 Helpful for diagnosing performance issues. 00:16:07.536 --> 00:16:11.896 Brent, did you catch the part in there that I'm excited about? Did you catch that? 00:16:11.896 --> 00:16:15.896 Uh-huh. I think the light bulb turned on for me, too. A little TUI to do this stuff. 00:16:15.896 --> 00:16:16.716 This is great. 00:16:16.916 --> 00:16:18.596 It's good for the people like you and I. 00:16:18.676 --> 00:16:22.996 A file system repair tool with a TUI? Are you kidding me? To look at some of 00:16:22.996 --> 00:16:25.456 the internals and device performance and what's going on? 00:16:25.956 --> 00:16:27.996 That is so up my alley. 00:16:28.376 --> 00:16:33.496 There's also some other improvements around in the output, like improved BKeshFS 00:16:33.496 --> 00:16:35.036 reconcile status output. 00:16:35.036 --> 00:16:40.856 I saw on Reddit just some users in Kent chatting about, in general, 00:16:40.936 --> 00:16:44.176 some of the interface and the outputs, because there's kind of an array of, 00:16:44.216 --> 00:16:46.716 there's some up-to-date stuff, there's some older stuff, so there may be one 00:16:46.716 --> 00:16:48.476 area of porcelain that gets some more attention. 00:16:48.896 --> 00:16:53.156 But something we know is getting more attention is that in the release announcement, 00:16:53.356 --> 00:16:57.236 Kent said 136.1 is out, which we were just talking about. 00:16:57.676 --> 00:17:00.056 The next release will be Erasure Coding. 00:17:00.396 --> 00:17:01.396 Yeah, so tell me about this. 00:17:01.516 --> 00:17:04.836 So that would be the Parity Raid kind of style stuff, right? 00:17:04.836 --> 00:17:11.016 We made 5.6 in the Bcash of S world coming for Bcash of S, or in the Butterfest 00:17:11.016 --> 00:17:12.056 world coming for Bcash of S. 00:17:12.941 --> 00:17:13.861 That's massive. 00:17:14.061 --> 00:17:14.161 Yeah. 00:17:14.661 --> 00:17:19.001 And a lot of the base stuff has been there, but all the user side stuff, 00:17:19.161 --> 00:17:23.181 and especially like you can make these file systems if you do experimental things 00:17:23.181 --> 00:17:26.541 or enable flags, but there hasn't been a lot of tooling support for actually 00:17:26.541 --> 00:17:27.961 doing anything if a disk dies. 00:17:28.301 --> 00:17:31.661 So you could test it and use it, but you don't want to run a prod system on it. 00:17:32.761 --> 00:17:37.341 And the last little BcacheFS bit for today is, it's not all good things. 00:17:37.401 --> 00:17:39.501 It is still an experimental developing file system. 00:17:39.621 --> 00:17:40.641 A little bit of a PSA here. 00:17:40.781 --> 00:17:44.281 Indeed. 19 hours ago on rbcachefs early 00:17:44.281 --> 00:17:47.461 reconcile had a serious bug in the data update path 00:17:47.461 --> 00:17:51.921 if an extent lives on devices that are all being evacuated while being evacuated 00:17:51.921 --> 00:17:55.341 they're considered to have durability zero and the old code for reconciling 00:17:55.341 --> 00:18:00.081 the existing extent with what the data update path wrote would drop those replicas 00:18:00.081 --> 00:18:04.861 too soon okay so if you're on 1.33 through 1.35. 00:18:04.861 --> 00:18:06.241 You need to upgrade you. 00:18:06.241 --> 00:18:06.761 Need to upgrade, 00:18:09.252 --> 00:18:12.452 Good news is the new code is much more rigorous with how it decides when to 00:18:12.452 --> 00:18:16.952 drop replicas. And so far, only like a handful of people have been hit by it. 00:18:17.152 --> 00:18:20.232 As usual, I have seen Kent doing a lot of on-the-ground support, 00:18:20.232 --> 00:18:22.012 both in the IRC and on the subreddit. 00:18:22.132 --> 00:18:26.872 So if you do have file system issues for your sake and for everyone else's sake 00:18:26.872 --> 00:18:29.452 as this thing gets developed, don't be afraid to reach out. 00:18:29.632 --> 00:18:34.512 Yeah, he's very engaged. I just realized, I told the story to the members recently, 00:18:34.672 --> 00:18:40.332 but I'm just around the two-year mark of BcacheFS on one of my absolute most 00:18:40.332 --> 00:18:42.732 important production systems, runs 24-7, 00:18:42.932 --> 00:18:46.412 and it's been using BcacheFS for its critical data drive. 00:18:46.752 --> 00:18:52.292 And I do that not necessarily saying that you should and not necessarily recommending 00:18:52.292 --> 00:18:55.892 it, but so that way I can be kind of on the front line and report to you how it's going. 00:18:55.892 --> 00:18:59.492 And so if we're five years down the road and I'm talking about Bcash FS, 00:18:59.772 --> 00:19:02.072 you know, I've been using it for five, six years at that point. 00:19:02.192 --> 00:19:06.612 Right. So I think there's some credibility in actually deploying it and testing 00:19:06.612 --> 00:19:09.152 it with data that is literally putting my money where my mouth is. 00:19:09.252 --> 00:19:12.252 But I don't know if everybody should do that yet, but I'm very impressed because 00:19:12.252 --> 00:19:14.692 two years ago it was in a much different state than it is now. 00:19:14.812 --> 00:19:16.172 And now it doesn't feel risky at all. 00:19:16.172 --> 00:19:18.592 Yeah, definitely. And a lot of improvements, right? And we're still getting 00:19:18.592 --> 00:19:22.592 some really nice, like, being able to do more upgrades in the background or 00:19:22.592 --> 00:19:25.672 without, you know, not having to have the drive offline to do them. 00:19:26.472 --> 00:19:29.152 It's now a very robust file system in a lot of ways, which is great. 00:19:29.352 --> 00:19:32.812 I mean, I, again, don't do as I do, but I'm at the point where if I can, 00:19:33.032 --> 00:19:36.792 I'm going to make it my default file system on every root install for workstations 00:19:36.792 --> 00:19:39.552 and laptops going forward. You already have been doing that. 00:19:40.072 --> 00:19:42.152 You've been running it for a long time on that laptop. 00:19:42.152 --> 00:19:45.392 Yeah, I think it's summer 2024. 00:19:46.632 --> 00:19:50.692 Wow. And you've just been going through the kernel upgrades kind of regularly and just... 00:19:51.382 --> 00:19:55.822 And then I've also got it running on my home router box at the moment. 00:19:56.062 --> 00:19:57.182 I don't have any RAID systems. 00:19:57.582 --> 00:20:00.942 So I do want to set that. I mean, I've dabbled with some, but no permanent ones. 00:20:01.082 --> 00:20:03.402 I don't know. The router one tickles me the most, right, Brent? 00:20:03.602 --> 00:20:04.362 It's like, that's the one. 00:20:04.362 --> 00:20:05.162 Because, like, why? 00:20:05.302 --> 00:20:07.622 Yeah. You can do extended four on a router. 00:20:07.842 --> 00:20:09.182 You can do anything on a router. 00:20:11.702 --> 00:20:14.362 That was actually one of the first ones I built, I think. I think I was just... 00:20:14.362 --> 00:20:14.962 Oh, yeah, why not? 00:20:14.962 --> 00:20:16.502 I was, like, redoing the system. 00:20:16.662 --> 00:20:16.802 Yeah. 00:20:16.942 --> 00:20:21.242 It was there. And there was... That did buy me one time, I will admit. 00:20:21.382 --> 00:20:25.802 with what wasn't a byte. It was just, it had been an old enough file system 00:20:25.802 --> 00:20:28.382 that I had to go through some of those on-disk upgrades. 00:20:28.862 --> 00:20:33.262 So I did have to do one update where my network was offline for like 20 minutes while it did that. 00:20:33.442 --> 00:20:37.942 I want to ask right now, if you're listening, what is your router file system of choice? 00:20:37.962 --> 00:20:40.902 If you're building a router or a system like that, boost in or send us an email. 00:20:41.042 --> 00:20:43.102 What is your router file system of choice? Let us know. 00:20:43.602 --> 00:20:47.282 Yeah, I have ridden the file system way for a long time. So I think that's kind 00:20:47.282 --> 00:20:49.982 of one of the reasons why I'm a little bit more comfortable using BcacheFS. 00:20:50.682 --> 00:20:54.482 I switched to SUSE back in the day because they supported Riser FS. 00:20:55.182 --> 00:20:59.122 And I needed extended attributes for Samba shares. And I needed support for 00:20:59.122 --> 00:21:02.262 a lot of little files because I was doing images of checks, JPEGs. 00:21:02.722 --> 00:21:05.402 And so I went with Riser FS way back in the day. 00:21:05.682 --> 00:21:11.162 And then when ButterFS came around, I adopted it and got so burned early on. 00:21:11.302 --> 00:21:15.202 Some of the early Linux unplugs are me ranting about losing my machine to ButterFS. 00:21:15.562 --> 00:21:16.062 Yep. 00:21:16.702 --> 00:21:20.722 And now I have it everywhere. And I'm starting to do that again with BcashFS. 00:21:21.262 --> 00:21:25.022 And then I have a lot of my scary raids around, which you guys remember my scary raid, right? 00:21:25.762 --> 00:21:27.042 Oh, yeah. How could you forget? 00:21:27.282 --> 00:21:29.742 Which is my, it's a raid zero of just a bunch of spinning rust. 00:21:29.902 --> 00:21:31.362 Well, you forget everything if it disfails. 00:21:31.802 --> 00:21:36.702 That's true. And I have a scary raid here in the studio on the studio machine. 00:21:36.702 --> 00:21:38.782 And I have a scary raid on my workstation upstairs. 00:21:39.302 --> 00:21:44.262 And I name it slash scary raid. So I always remind myself this could blow up at any time. 00:21:44.762 --> 00:21:48.902 Anything you put here is ephemeral. And so that's my little mental trick is scary raid. 00:21:49.322 --> 00:21:55.802 And that right now on all my systems, all my scary raids are XFS. 00:21:57.002 --> 00:21:57.502 Wow. 00:21:57.782 --> 00:22:02.122 Yeah. All my Scary Raids are XFS. And I don't know, I just, it's legacy because 00:22:02.122 --> 00:22:06.702 they've been around for years because I reload the boxes and then I just remount the Scary Raid. 00:22:07.062 --> 00:22:09.362 You know, because I've always got the Scary Raid. It's just sitting right there. 00:22:10.002 --> 00:22:13.362 So are you going to upgrade that to a BcacheFS Scary Raid? 00:22:13.422 --> 00:22:16.562 Well, this is what I'm thinking, is the next generation. 00:22:16.662 --> 00:22:21.702 The next generation of a Scary Raid would be like a bunch of used SSDs that 00:22:21.702 --> 00:22:25.542 I just slam into one big volume and use BcacheFS for that. 00:22:25.542 --> 00:22:28.342 I should say that was the other factor on the router box is it's pretty much 00:22:28.342 --> 00:22:31.542 just a NixOS config in Git, so there wasn't a lot of data on there. 00:22:31.842 --> 00:22:34.322 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if I were to, you know, 00:22:34.402 --> 00:22:36.642 because all my scary raids are identical disks. 00:22:36.782 --> 00:22:41.042 And if I were to do a mix of drive size and just sort of mush all that together, 00:22:41.282 --> 00:22:45.342 I think I would call that messy raid. That would be a messy raid. 00:22:48.746 --> 00:22:51.446 Well, I just want to take a moment and thank our members. We don't have an advertiser 00:22:51.446 --> 00:22:55.706 for this spot yet, although we do have the world's best Linux audience, 00:22:55.866 --> 00:22:57.186 the world's largest Linux audience. 00:22:57.346 --> 00:23:00.866 We've been around for over 12 years doing this show. I've been doing podcasting for 20 years. 00:23:01.006 --> 00:23:04.426 So if you would like to reach one of the best audiences with somebody that knows 00:23:04.426 --> 00:23:07.686 how to do podcast ads, send me an email at chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com. 00:23:07.926 --> 00:23:12.526 In the meantime, thank you, members, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash membership. 00:23:12.906 --> 00:23:15.886 I don't know. I know you can get the Linux unplugged. Jupiter.party for the whole network. 00:23:16.926 --> 00:23:20.046 I don't need to go through the whole thing. You guys know it, 00:23:20.246 --> 00:23:21.526 so I'll just say thank you very much. 00:23:21.666 --> 00:23:27.526 There's not a lot of big commercial demand for a Linux podcast that is talking 00:23:27.526 --> 00:23:29.486 about file system nuances like this. 00:23:29.626 --> 00:23:34.386 I don't know if that surprises you, but it turns out people that are selling 00:23:34.386 --> 00:23:38.646 ads on podcasts and YouTube, they don't find file system discussion particularly 00:23:38.646 --> 00:23:42.366 interesting and doesn't really reach their radar. are. 00:23:42.486 --> 00:23:47.866 So we do have to lean more on listener support than a typical podcast that you might listen to. 00:23:48.106 --> 00:23:52.286 Because what we do is we use that listener support to give us the runway to 00:23:52.286 --> 00:23:56.346 actually nerd out on these topics and go for the stuff that is never going to 00:23:56.346 --> 00:23:57.346 get us any play on YouTube. 00:23:57.506 --> 00:24:00.646 We're never going to get a clip on TikTok. We're never going to show up in some 00:24:00.646 --> 00:24:05.046 sort of advertiser's keyword search dashboard thing, right? It's never going to happen for us. 00:24:06.112 --> 00:24:08.532 And that's okay. We're fine with that because we have listener support. 00:24:08.752 --> 00:24:10.292 So there's a couple of ways you can do it. 00:24:11.012 --> 00:24:15.832 We have the show membership. Those are our core contributors at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. 00:24:16.132 --> 00:24:19.652 We have the jupyter.party membership that gives you access to all the shows 00:24:19.652 --> 00:24:22.232 and their special features. Every show has special features. 00:24:22.532 --> 00:24:27.052 And then you can boost us. And that is not only a signal, but it also supports 00:24:27.052 --> 00:24:32.492 that particular production and gives us an idea of like that topic worked or didn't work. 00:24:32.632 --> 00:24:36.232 And so there's several ways where you can participate. and we really do appreciate 00:24:36.232 --> 00:24:39.932 it because we couldn't make this kind of content where we talk about these nerdy 00:24:39.932 --> 00:24:41.852 esoteric things that actually do matter. 00:24:42.472 --> 00:24:45.712 It's not our fault that the advertisers don't realize this stuff matters. 00:24:45.892 --> 00:24:46.912 Right? It's not our fault. 00:24:47.152 --> 00:24:50.892 This stuff does matter and it matters to you just like it matters to us. 00:24:51.032 --> 00:24:55.872 So thank you very much for the support and you can find membership links in the show notes as well. 00:25:00.200 --> 00:25:04.300 A little while ago, we took a moment on the show to plant our flag and say all 00:25:04.300 --> 00:25:08.060 this assisted AI stuff was coming for Linux administration. 00:25:08.680 --> 00:25:13.660 And the last few weeks, with all the OpenClaw excitement, might be proving that out. 00:25:13.900 --> 00:25:17.820 But there's also been a lot of pushback to all these big tech commercial models. 00:25:18.020 --> 00:25:22.640 And for some of us, it's made us more excited about local open source models. 00:25:23.740 --> 00:25:29.040 Over on ItsFoss, Bhwan Mishra wrote about ditching Clawed code and using the 00:25:29.040 --> 00:25:32.340 open-source Quen model for real sysadmin work. 00:25:32.460 --> 00:25:34.280 I liked hearing about this, guys. 00:25:34.640 --> 00:25:35.200 Yeah, me too. 00:25:35.480 --> 00:25:39.660 Yeah, so the author dropped Cloud Code, went with local Quen code because it 00:25:39.660 --> 00:25:41.640 behaves more like a proper Linux tool. 00:25:41.780 --> 00:25:45.680 He says he could install it locally. It was open-source, and it shows every 00:25:45.680 --> 00:25:48.260 command it's going to execute before it actually runs it. 00:25:48.540 --> 00:25:51.800 And you can describe a task in plain English, and the Quen model, 00:25:51.960 --> 00:25:56.240 which is a free model that you can run on your own machine, will just turn that 00:25:56.240 --> 00:26:01.360 into reviewable shell commands that you can then authorize, and then it'll execute them. 00:26:01.880 --> 00:26:07.000 Yeah, it's pretty neat. So Quen comes from Alibaba, so it is a Chinese model, 00:26:07.080 --> 00:26:08.260 but it is also open-weight. 00:26:08.460 --> 00:26:11.760 Some folks have found some kinds of censorship or other sort of things you might 00:26:11.760 --> 00:26:13.480 expect from some of these Chinese models. 00:26:13.880 --> 00:26:19.640 But it has also been optimized for agent stuff, so has Quen code. 00:26:20.640 --> 00:26:25.360 They have various specific models, especially like the code-focused models itself 00:26:25.360 --> 00:26:28.340 sort of aimed at exactly these tasks. 00:26:28.600 --> 00:26:32.620 And in fact, even the app itself is a fork of Gemini CLI. So it's under the 00:26:32.620 --> 00:26:35.260 Apache 2 license. They look pretty much exactly the same. 00:26:35.520 --> 00:26:35.980 Oh, interesting. Okay. 00:26:36.040 --> 00:26:40.420 But the Quen folks wanted to add in, like Gemini CLI does a lot of stuff because 00:26:40.420 --> 00:26:44.760 it's attached to this very broad Gemini product and stuff, and you can only use it with that. 00:26:44.920 --> 00:26:48.960 But they added support for using local stuff. They also optimized it more for 00:26:48.960 --> 00:26:50.720 doing these coding and agent tasks. 00:26:50.780 --> 00:26:51.660 Very nice. Okay. 00:26:52.732 --> 00:26:56.332 That's, I didn't realize that you could, I guess I never looked at Gemini CLI. 00:26:56.432 --> 00:26:57.712 I didn't realize they had made that open source. 00:26:58.132 --> 00:27:02.732 Yeah, isn't that nice? I mean, the back end isn't, but at least the front end is. 00:27:02.872 --> 00:27:03.052 Yeah, yeah. 00:27:03.352 --> 00:27:07.832 And, you know, it is like, maybe you don't do everything with one of these particular 00:27:07.832 --> 00:27:12.672 local models, depending on what kind of system and GPU and what you can actually run. 00:27:14.192 --> 00:27:17.952 But as these things get better and better, like writing shell scripts, 00:27:18.172 --> 00:27:20.332 or especially like, you know, especially even silly stuff like, 00:27:20.332 --> 00:27:23.832 Like, oh, dang, I downloaded a bunch of files with spaces in there, 00:27:23.932 --> 00:27:25.772 and they got weird names, and I just want it cleaned up. 00:27:26.072 --> 00:27:27.032 That happens to me all the time. 00:27:27.092 --> 00:27:30.852 Even stuff you can run locally can definitely handle a spitting out of Bash script to do that. 00:27:31.192 --> 00:27:34.592 Yeah, it is really exciting to see where these local models are going. 00:27:34.592 --> 00:27:39.892 I feel like I'm in this tortured position where I recognize the utility now 00:27:39.892 --> 00:27:43.652 in a way that I kind of missed the boat on when hardware was reasonably priced. 00:27:45.732 --> 00:27:47.172 Where's that open source time machine? 00:27:47.172 --> 00:27:51.952 Now I'm so GPU starved, and I've been looking at Venice AI, which is a pretty 00:27:51.952 --> 00:27:56.152 good privacy-focused model system that you can use with agents and whatnot. 00:27:56.312 --> 00:27:58.792 But the tokens are more expensive because of the privacy layer. 00:27:59.192 --> 00:28:03.432 And this gets really expensive very fast when you want to do more extensive things. 00:28:03.532 --> 00:28:08.472 So it is with a particular eye we're watching these local models and seeing where they go. 00:28:09.432 --> 00:28:13.012 Just a little background on something we tried last week. This was a very interesting 00:28:13.012 --> 00:28:16.592 experiment, and we wanted to share it with you. We have wanted to stand up a 00:28:16.592 --> 00:28:18.672 production Mattermost server for years. 00:28:19.152 --> 00:28:23.572 We've spun up a few. We've toyed with them kind of as just experiments. 00:28:23.872 --> 00:28:29.172 We've even ran a few project-specific Mattermost when we're working on something with people outside. 00:28:29.272 --> 00:28:33.212 JB will spin up a Mattermost real quick, but they really just throw away Mattermost, 00:28:33.232 --> 00:28:34.812 and we don't really spend a lot of time with them. 00:28:36.166 --> 00:28:41.266 We wanted something we could use long-term. So last week before the show, 00:28:41.486 --> 00:28:46.706 I had been working with one of these open claw agents, just going over best 00:28:46.706 --> 00:28:50.366 system practices, focus on this, consider this, security. 00:28:50.946 --> 00:28:53.666 And the stuff we normally want or don't want to see in a system. 00:28:53.866 --> 00:28:59.486 Yeah, exactly. And so also I've been working to delegate some subtasks to agents and stuff like that. 00:29:00.066 --> 00:29:05.746 So naturally, I thought, let's do something really stupid and give this thing 00:29:05.746 --> 00:29:07.526 API access to Cloudflare. 00:29:09.306 --> 00:29:13.586 I figured, why not? I had an old domain that I'd sat around for years. 00:29:13.586 --> 00:29:16.786 I don't use. I could set up a limited scope API credentials. 00:29:16.986 --> 00:29:21.586 I was about to say that we've already gotten to the point of maturity in that 00:29:21.586 --> 00:29:24.226 side of the industry is really useful if you're trying to use agents. 00:29:24.366 --> 00:29:25.366 Like, don't give it everything. 00:29:25.546 --> 00:29:30.206 No. So I gave it this old domain I had sitting around that I bought on a lark. 00:29:30.366 --> 00:29:32.706 Probably had too many beers and decided, I'm going to buy this domain. 00:29:33.466 --> 00:29:39.646 And so before the show last week, I told the agent, go SSH into this VPS because 00:29:39.646 --> 00:29:41.526 the host that it's running on has an SSH key. 00:29:42.146 --> 00:29:45.086 SSH into this VPS. Go look around. 00:29:45.506 --> 00:29:49.706 Learn the system. The Docker Compose files are over here. And then commit to 00:29:49.706 --> 00:29:53.326 your memory what you've learned. That was before the show, just Sunday morning last week. 00:29:53.426 --> 00:29:55.226 A little scouting mission. Reconnaissance. 00:29:55.706 --> 00:29:59.386 After the show, when we were all done with our post-show duties, I... 00:29:59.386 --> 00:30:01.346 I didn't even know you did that, by the way. You're sneaky. 00:30:01.546 --> 00:30:06.746 Yeah. After the show, I said to Wes, how fast do you think an agent could deploy 00:30:06.746 --> 00:30:08.106 a secure Mattermost server? 00:30:08.786 --> 00:30:15.286 And so I brought up Telegram and I sent my agent the API key for its Cloudflare stuff. 00:30:15.786 --> 00:30:19.746 And I gave it a clear goal. I said, go deploy a Mattermost server on the VPS 00:30:19.746 --> 00:30:21.586 I told you about earlier. That's all I said. 00:30:22.666 --> 00:30:27.166 and follow best security practices and use Cloudflare to handle things like 00:30:27.166 --> 00:30:29.726 DNS caching and other security best practices. 00:30:30.186 --> 00:30:34.106 And that was the entire Telegram message. Five minutes later, 00:30:36.077 --> 00:30:39.957 The agent had deployed Mattermost via Docker Compose, integrated a Cloudflare 00:30:39.957 --> 00:30:45.377 tunnel sidecar, set up DNS with optimal caching based on upstream Cloudflare 00:30:45.377 --> 00:30:48.617 docs for best security practices when deploying a Mattermost server, 00:30:50.157 --> 00:30:53.457 which is really neat because it set up the sidecar. 00:30:53.577 --> 00:30:57.577 Wes, talk about the sidecar tunnel. We talked about these sidecars before. You're a sidecar guy. 00:30:57.657 --> 00:31:01.557 Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a handy pattern, right? It's just because you're using 00:31:01.557 --> 00:31:05.657 network namespaces with the containers, You can put two containers in the same 00:31:05.657 --> 00:31:07.837 network namespace. And so they share a network. 00:31:07.997 --> 00:31:13.877 And then you can have, say, Tailscale, Netbird, Nebula, any of these mesh VPNs. 00:31:14.017 --> 00:31:14.477 Cloudflare Tunnel. 00:31:14.617 --> 00:31:18.277 Or you can have a Cloudflare Tunnel. And so Cloudflare Tunnel's agent handles 00:31:18.277 --> 00:31:21.117 binding a VPN, a tunneling connection to them. 00:31:21.237 --> 00:31:24.417 And then because they're also controlling all of the front side, 00:31:24.537 --> 00:31:28.297 right, the load balancing, the DNS, the caching, then they can automatically 00:31:28.297 --> 00:31:30.377 just route it through that tunnel back to you. 00:31:30.377 --> 00:31:35.617 And so the Docker and namespace layer make sure that you don't have to mess 00:31:35.617 --> 00:31:36.557 with any of the host stuff. 00:31:36.997 --> 00:31:40.897 But as long as the actual Cloudflare tunnel agent itself can get outside via 00:31:40.897 --> 00:31:43.517 the Internet, then everyone else can connect. 00:31:43.637 --> 00:31:46.497 And you don't have to have an open port. You don't have to worry about that kind of thing. 00:31:46.677 --> 00:31:48.977 That's the key thing. It doesn't even talk to the host network. 00:31:48.997 --> 00:31:54.477 It's not even talking to the VPS network at all. It's just talking over this tunnel. 00:31:55.217 --> 00:31:58.157 So then what I did, after it had stood up this entire thing, 00:31:58.237 --> 00:32:00.597 as I reviewed the Docker Compose, it was clean. It was lean. 00:32:00.837 --> 00:32:03.777 I looked at the Mattermost config. It was pretty basic. So I said to the bot, 00:32:03.877 --> 00:32:05.077 I said, I'm going to go create you an account. 00:32:05.837 --> 00:32:10.397 I'll go create you a bot token for the agent. Then what I want you to do is go finish the work. 00:32:11.037 --> 00:32:14.917 Go set up the rooms, set up the permissions, dial in a full configuration, 00:32:15.117 --> 00:32:18.937 give the rooms the descriptions, set descriptions for all the individual accounts, everything. 00:32:20.641 --> 00:32:23.961 And then two minutes later, it was back, and we had everything there. 00:32:24.241 --> 00:32:29.601 A complete lounge, rooms for the bots to talk, room for the people to talk, permission structure. 00:32:30.281 --> 00:32:33.001 The entire process was probably eight to ten minutes. 00:32:33.601 --> 00:32:38.181 Also, having the bots fiddle with the actual admin settings, 00:32:38.181 --> 00:32:39.861 so much nicer than doing it yourself. 00:32:39.981 --> 00:32:42.421 Especially for, like, I'm not a Mattermost UI expert, right? 00:32:42.481 --> 00:32:45.461 But, like, we needed to rename some accounts, or, like, I wanted to make sure 00:32:45.461 --> 00:32:48.001 that when Brent got in, he was going to be an admin on the instance. 00:32:49.101 --> 00:32:50.561 And bots handled that just fine. 00:32:50.641 --> 00:32:56.201 Yeah. And so the point that I'm trying to make here is this is not going away 00:32:56.201 --> 00:32:57.421 for Linux system administration. 00:32:57.521 --> 00:33:01.581 And it didn't deploy some vibe coded piece of crap insecure setup either. 00:33:02.261 --> 00:33:06.721 It actually did a fantastic expert job. We went through and reviewed it. 00:33:06.841 --> 00:33:09.161 It's good. It's solid. It's a it's a good setup. 00:33:09.581 --> 00:33:13.281 And you have to kind of let that soak in for a moment because we have heard 00:33:13.281 --> 00:33:17.901 these big tech CEOs promise all this ridiculous crap for the last three years. 00:33:18.461 --> 00:33:19.721 But this is really working. 00:33:20.421 --> 00:33:24.681 I did three things. In the morning, I told the bot to go check out the VPS. 00:33:25.241 --> 00:33:29.381 In the afternoon, I gave it an API key, and I told it to go deploy Mattermost. 00:33:30.001 --> 00:33:32.981 And then after that, I said, go set up all the rooms, the permissions, 00:33:33.321 --> 00:33:35.681 the descriptions, give them emojis, all that crap. 00:33:36.770 --> 00:33:41.430 And it did all of that. And it's all because these things all have API endpoints. 00:33:42.390 --> 00:33:46.110 The documentation on how to set them up is extremely well documented and clear. 00:33:46.410 --> 00:33:53.130 Yep. And in the case of open source stuff, you can also go have your bot spelunk 00:33:53.130 --> 00:33:54.950 the source code and figure out exactly what it needs. 00:33:55.150 --> 00:33:59.850 Yeah. And the API to then realize how to connect to it so then it can participate in the chat. 00:34:00.230 --> 00:34:03.390 And Brent, we pulled you into some of that shenanigans. And you could see the 00:34:03.390 --> 00:34:07.010 bots are actually coordinating with each other back and forth in our Mattermost chat. 00:34:07.210 --> 00:34:10.530 Can I just say how much I wasn't expecting to be pulled into that kind of environment? 00:34:13.410 --> 00:34:17.490 But it was impressive. Like, I don't know, this is a topic we've been talking 00:34:17.490 --> 00:34:22.070 about for years to replace our sort of legacy internal communications tool. 00:34:22.270 --> 00:34:26.890 And you guys just kind of pulled that out while you were doing the post-show 00:34:26.890 --> 00:34:29.290 work? I kind of couldn't believe it. 00:34:29.290 --> 00:34:32.430 But we were actually just playing with agents and not doing the post-show work, 00:34:32.450 --> 00:34:35.270 but we were doing other stuff and not supervising this bot. 00:34:35.930 --> 00:34:41.370 Like what a force multiplier if you look at it that way. And to stand up something 00:34:41.370 --> 00:34:44.050 we've been wanting for quite a long time and having, 00:34:44.270 --> 00:34:48.970 like you said, some confidence that it's been done with best practices better 00:34:48.970 --> 00:34:50.990 than we could have in our little busy schedule. 00:34:50.990 --> 00:34:55.510 Because this would have taken us longer to do it in a way that we were satisfied 00:34:55.510 --> 00:34:59.170 that it was good enough to be a long-term tool for us. 00:34:59.290 --> 00:35:01.750 and secure, and safe enough, and resilient. 00:35:02.590 --> 00:35:03.850 That's just awesome. 00:35:04.390 --> 00:35:06.650 Yeah, I agree. But I think there's another part I was thinking about, 00:35:06.750 --> 00:35:10.390 which is like, this varies per person and group and all that, 00:35:10.470 --> 00:35:14.370 but we weren't going to learn that much from standing up a Mattermouth server. 00:35:14.590 --> 00:35:19.070 Like, it's sidecar patterns, we've done it before, and there's this whole mass, 00:35:19.170 --> 00:35:21.970 at least for me personally, of work where I want to do it, 00:35:23.100 --> 00:35:26.340 It's either not quite important enough, it's not going to rise to the top 10, 00:35:26.360 --> 00:35:29.740 and I'm not especially motivated to do it, especially because I know it's kind 00:35:29.740 --> 00:35:31.260 of just grinding it out. It's not a new thing. 00:35:31.380 --> 00:35:34.300 I'm not learning some new application or some new way to do things. 00:35:35.420 --> 00:35:39.060 And I'm totally happy to delegate that. Another thing I was doing just this 00:35:39.060 --> 00:35:42.160 week was I had an old code base. 00:35:42.380 --> 00:35:46.160 I ran a linter across it to get a bunch of lint errors. I know how to fix that 00:35:46.160 --> 00:35:47.480 stuff. I don't need to do that again. 00:35:47.620 --> 00:35:51.140 But a bot can fix it, and then I can just review the diff. And if it didn't 00:35:51.140 --> 00:35:53.940 break anything, the tests all passed, like, totally fine. 00:35:54.100 --> 00:35:57.000 Yeah. Yeah, and for me, I feel like it's in the experimental, 00:35:57.260 --> 00:36:00.480 okay, I'm learning about a stage, but it goes into the this is something that 00:36:00.480 --> 00:36:03.720 I will use for year stage when I can run a model that's competent locally, 00:36:04.160 --> 00:36:05.220 you know, and privately. 00:36:05.520 --> 00:36:08.780 Yeah, where you don't have to pay out the arm and leg for the credits, 00:36:08.880 --> 00:36:12.020 where you don't have to worry that every little detail of your life is being sucked up. 00:36:12.180 --> 00:36:15.460 Yep, yep. But there is something here. It is not going away. 00:36:15.460 --> 00:36:18.100 even if like open AI were to crash. 00:36:18.320 --> 00:36:22.440 Like this is not going away. And what we're going to see, and we're already 00:36:22.440 --> 00:36:30.800 seeing it, is services are going to have to develop and deliver agent-specific endpoints. 00:36:31.920 --> 00:36:35.120 You hit on the importance of APIs, and I think that is... 00:36:36.087 --> 00:36:39.627 going to be helpful for us open source people because 00:36:39.627 --> 00:36:42.507 if you have an open api system that's documented that's easy to 00:36:42.507 --> 00:36:46.007 learn these agents can figure it out like when we 00:36:46.007 --> 00:36:48.847 were playing around last week i had my agent figure out how to use this web 00:36:48.847 --> 00:36:52.927 socket irc thing but then even just after we got the mattermost stuff i wanted 00:36:52.927 --> 00:36:58.007 my agent as a test to send your agent a direct message but the security on the 00:36:58.007 --> 00:37:02.627 open cloud would not let that happen my agent figured out how to use the Mattermost API directly. 00:37:02.807 --> 00:37:08.807 Now, in that case, a little concerning, but in general, like in the old world, right? 00:37:08.927 --> 00:37:12.287 Like the proprietary provider would provide the bindings. 00:37:12.347 --> 00:37:15.127 So you had to rely on whatever set of bindings were going to be there, 00:37:15.147 --> 00:37:17.627 but you don't have to rely on the default set. 00:37:17.767 --> 00:37:22.327 If you can dynamically add the capability of new bindings yourself. 00:37:22.907 --> 00:37:23.267 Yeah. 00:37:23.367 --> 00:37:27.507 So here's, so it doesn't matter if they only support Slack, we can add Mattermost if we need that. 00:37:27.507 --> 00:37:32.287 Yes. This is the head shift that people need to get around and it's going to 00:37:32.287 --> 00:37:35.147 impact open source projects and they're not going to take it gracefully. 00:37:35.327 --> 00:37:37.287 We're already seeing it happen. I'll give you an example. 00:37:38.226 --> 00:37:42.586 These agents are going to become an extension of whatever somebody can do online, 00:37:42.586 --> 00:37:44.286 this agent will be tasked to do. 00:37:45.046 --> 00:37:48.886 And that is from everything from hiring people to mow lawns, 00:37:48.966 --> 00:37:54.326 to topping off its own API credits, to going through GitHub and looking for issues. 00:37:54.426 --> 00:37:58.626 And we are going to see a lot of transitions between crap code and all that. 00:37:58.806 --> 00:38:02.006 But focus on something that the open source projects need to think about. 00:38:02.006 --> 00:38:05.346 And this is something that Debian's struggling with right now, 00:38:05.506 --> 00:38:10.326 is Debian's had a problem with their CI system getting overloaded with what 00:38:10.326 --> 00:38:11.926 they say are LLM scrapers, 00:38:12.106 --> 00:38:17.526 essentially going through their infrastructure via a web browser and kind of 00:38:17.526 --> 00:38:23.366 just going through page by page and generating so much load by doing this that 00:38:23.366 --> 00:38:26.386 it's making the service unavailable for their existing developers. 00:38:26.386 --> 00:38:30.906 Yeah, it's not just hitting, say, like the actual output text file from the build run. 00:38:31.226 --> 00:38:34.446 They're like walking through the whole interface to go browse through it. 00:38:34.526 --> 00:38:37.466 And then as a result, I guess there's not that much caching and just, 00:38:37.606 --> 00:38:40.326 you know, it's a volunteer project. It's open source infrastructure. It's Debian. 00:38:40.646 --> 00:38:44.806 So then it's going and pulling a bunch of results for like years ago build systems. 00:38:44.946 --> 00:38:47.726 So now the system's turning on that instead of focusing on, you know, 00:38:47.806 --> 00:38:48.946 the actual builds for the next release. 00:38:49.086 --> 00:38:52.006 And one of the things that's challenging about this is it's difficult to distinguish 00:38:52.006 --> 00:38:55.966 an LLM scraper, which might be training, questionable. 00:38:56.806 --> 00:39:01.966 a bot that is just scraping this stuff or an agent that somebody has tasked 00:39:01.966 --> 00:39:04.966 on their behalf to help them with their development in Debian. 00:39:05.126 --> 00:39:08.086 You might want to go pull in those logs, say, so that you have your own personal 00:39:08.086 --> 00:39:10.206 dashboard of the upstream builds to keep track of issues. 00:39:10.326 --> 00:39:12.546 Exactly. And so maybe you've tasked your agent to go do that. 00:39:12.966 --> 00:39:16.946 And what's going to have to happen here, what Debian has done for now is they've 00:39:16.946 --> 00:39:19.046 just essentially taken this out of the public. 00:39:19.226 --> 00:39:22.726 And you have to have special access and special whitelists and all of that to 00:39:22.726 --> 00:39:25.266 be able to get access to their CI system now. 00:39:26.119 --> 00:39:30.279 But the solution is not going to be to block these agents that are operating 00:39:30.279 --> 00:39:31.919 on behalf of other developers. 00:39:31.919 --> 00:39:37.779 The solution is going to be to develop API and data pipelines and then for these 00:39:37.779 --> 00:39:42.419 bots, agents, and LLMs to respect those and use those data pipelines and APIs 00:39:42.419 --> 00:39:44.459 instead of just crawling the website. 00:39:44.659 --> 00:39:47.779 Yeah, and there's certainly some operator responsibility here, 00:39:47.819 --> 00:39:51.439 right, to respect those things, to respect stuff like robots.txt and other. 00:39:51.439 --> 00:39:55.539 Like, you know, there is an element of you put it on the web and there is some, 00:39:55.999 --> 00:39:59.319 you know, depending on your law and jurisdiction, but there's some right to 00:39:59.319 --> 00:40:01.119 just go do a curl request and get the results. 00:40:01.219 --> 00:40:05.219 But you also need to respect that that costs people money and can interfere 00:40:05.219 --> 00:40:07.939 with other people's right to do the same access. 00:40:08.119 --> 00:40:11.199 I don't know if people remember, maybe I'm old enough, but there was a time 00:40:11.199 --> 00:40:15.019 when web search engines first came out and they were crawling the web. 00:40:15.859 --> 00:40:19.039 And even though they weren't permanently caching before, like, 00:40:19.179 --> 00:40:23.139 Archive and the Google Archive stuff, even though they weren't permanently caching, 00:40:23.279 --> 00:40:28.259 there were lawsuits over the fact that the web indexers had a copy of the information 00:40:28.259 --> 00:40:30.859 in RAM temporarily while they indexed the website. 00:40:30.919 --> 00:40:33.119 Often copyrighted things. Yeah. 00:40:33.319 --> 00:40:36.439 Yeah. So it takes a little bit to figure this out. 00:40:37.019 --> 00:40:40.559 And I don't think projects like Debian are going to want to completely sit this 00:40:40.559 --> 00:40:45.079 out because there is use case for these agents. and if they can be more intelligent 00:40:45.079 --> 00:40:50.139 about how to manage a Debian system, that's good for Debian as a project and 00:40:50.139 --> 00:40:51.979 it's good for Debian as adoption in the enterprise. 00:40:52.159 --> 00:40:58.599 I do think or suppose we might see a rise in more structured outputs and outputs 00:40:58.599 --> 00:41:02.419 designed specifically for LLMs as an aside to the human-centric interface. 00:41:02.619 --> 00:41:05.679 Just give them their own thing to ingest that is low resource. 00:41:05.739 --> 00:41:07.659 Don't have them muck up with the human side, yeah. 00:41:07.799 --> 00:41:08.539 Pretend like, and. 00:41:08.539 --> 00:41:10.599 Honestly- It's less efficient for both sides. 00:41:10.719 --> 00:41:13.699 Right, because they're spending a bunch of tokens to run that web browser to 00:41:13.699 --> 00:41:14.899 browse the website like a human. 00:41:14.999 --> 00:41:17.539 To parse out the HTML to go figure out where the links are. 00:41:17.739 --> 00:41:20.159 And then they're probably just producing a JSON file on the back end anyway. 00:41:20.199 --> 00:41:20.659 That's all they wanted. 00:41:22.079 --> 00:41:26.219 So everybody wins, but we're not there yet. So what the Debian projects had 00:41:26.219 --> 00:41:27.839 to do is they've had to go kind of private. 00:41:28.686 --> 00:41:32.686 But I don't think that solves the problem long-term. But we really had a moment 00:41:32.686 --> 00:41:34.066 with our Mattermost server. 00:41:34.386 --> 00:41:36.946 We had a, you know, let's call it 10 minutes. 00:41:37.386 --> 00:41:42.366 In 10 minutes, we had a fully working Mattermost server, like an expert had 00:41:42.366 --> 00:41:45.506 deployed it, with clean configs, tight security, great performance, 00:41:45.526 --> 00:41:47.446 because I sort of glossed over this. 00:41:47.606 --> 00:41:51.506 But like you mentioned, it set up all of the caching and best practices with Cloudflare. 00:41:51.626 --> 00:41:56.926 So this thing is running on a super old low-end VPS that is already doing other 00:41:56.926 --> 00:41:59.766 stuff. And it is a faster chat experience than, say, Slack. 00:42:00.286 --> 00:42:05.066 It was a really nice, responsive, performance system. And using this Cloudflare 00:42:05.066 --> 00:42:08.786 tunnel made it really easy for security purposes. I didn't have to worry about 00:42:08.786 --> 00:42:10.906 having a VPS address and all that kind of stuff. 00:42:11.066 --> 00:42:13.726 Also makes it portable. You can move it around. It doesn't matter where it lives. 00:42:13.826 --> 00:42:17.526 Especially the way this tunnel works. It's portable per machine, too. 00:42:17.546 --> 00:42:20.506 So you could actually lift the entire Docker Compose, drop it on another machine, 00:42:20.566 --> 00:42:22.026 and start it. And the tunnel would reconnect. 00:42:22.826 --> 00:42:26.806 That kind of stuff is really impressive. and on a low end vps it's even better 00:42:26.806 --> 00:42:28.006 because you're getting more bang for your buck. 00:42:28.006 --> 00:42:31.006 And you you wouldn't you know you don't have to use cloud for you can tunnel 00:42:31.006 --> 00:42:32.026 it over your existing mesh. 00:42:32.026 --> 00:42:33.206 Network you can do an nginx. 00:42:33.206 --> 00:42:34.486 Proxy and the bots can help. 00:42:34.486 --> 00:42:37.566 Oh yeah for sure this is just because i was experimenting with using the api 00:42:37.566 --> 00:42:40.586 to just do a complete totally end-to-end solution there's a lot of ways you 00:42:40.586 --> 00:42:43.706 could solve it with networking and uh you know maybe it was two dollars and 00:42:43.706 --> 00:42:47.466 50 cents in tokens for the entire thing in 10 minutes and now we have a server 00:42:47.466 --> 00:42:48.966 that we could use in production for years, 00:42:49.664 --> 00:42:53.484 So there is something there. And when you get that kind of utility and that 00:42:53.484 --> 00:42:56.824 kind of optimization, you know enterprises are going to be drawn to that. 00:42:56.964 --> 00:43:00.344 And you know that's the kind of thing that Red Hat and SUSE are going to be, 00:43:00.504 --> 00:43:04.544 and Canonical, are going to be leaning into. It isn't going away. 00:43:04.744 --> 00:43:09.544 And it's important, I think, that the open source side stay engaged and pushing 00:43:09.544 --> 00:43:12.584 on the values that we bring to technology generally. 00:43:12.784 --> 00:43:15.864 And I think that's the most interesting and exciting thing about the last three 00:43:15.864 --> 00:43:18.864 weeks is that it has been driven by open source. 00:43:19.304 --> 00:43:22.584 We've been talking about AI, well, we haven't, but people have been talking 00:43:22.584 --> 00:43:26.184 about AI for years now, sort of to ad nauseum. 00:43:26.444 --> 00:43:29.264 It's just, ugh. And this is the first time where we've actually been interested 00:43:29.264 --> 00:43:31.504 because open source is really biting in and making a difference. 00:43:31.664 --> 00:43:34.564 And you can see it, like, just if you go look on Hacker News or other spots, 00:43:34.724 --> 00:43:37.024 like, OpenClaw came out, and now there's a bunch of different versions. 00:43:37.184 --> 00:43:39.044 There's smaller versions, there's Rust versions. 00:43:39.224 --> 00:43:42.444 And especially because the implementations are open source, you don't have to 00:43:42.444 --> 00:43:43.784 figure out how to give the bot memory. 00:43:43.964 --> 00:43:46.244 I mean, you might need to customize it or tweak it or change it, 00:43:46.244 --> 00:43:49.124 But you can go follow the patterns that are emerging in the upstream open source. 00:43:49.304 --> 00:43:53.004 So what Wes is saying there is one of the things that's different this time 00:43:53.004 --> 00:43:58.344 around with these new agents is the memory and the soul and the tools and all 00:43:58.344 --> 00:44:00.264 the things that it memorizes. 00:44:00.444 --> 00:44:04.044 So, for example, last night I messaged my bot. I didn't say anything else other 00:44:04.044 --> 00:44:06.964 than, can you go get the weather report from Home Assistant? 00:44:07.444 --> 00:44:12.584 That's all I said. And it knows, well, OK, Home Assistant lives on this host. This is the API. 00:44:12.844 --> 00:44:16.824 This is my API key. the weather is this and it goes and gets all of that and 00:44:16.824 --> 00:44:19.484 it just comes back with a rather weather report from home assistant. 00:44:19.484 --> 00:44:24.004 That's another one of the big changes here is the agent is the interface. 00:44:24.004 --> 00:44:28.424 Right and that memory and all of that is yours it's on your file system and 00:44:28.424 --> 00:44:31.724 these other bots that are being built these other agent frameworks like you 00:44:31.724 --> 00:44:37.304 mentioned can use this so it is portable because it's just text and other agents 00:44:37.304 --> 00:44:39.884 can ingest this and learn from it so when you are building this, 00:44:40.424 --> 00:44:44.144 you're taking something that is vendor agnostic, model agnostic, 00:44:44.324 --> 00:44:46.664 and gateway implementation agnostic. 00:44:46.804 --> 00:44:48.544 And you can change it. They can change it. 00:44:50.323 --> 00:44:54.203 So that's a big difference. It's a big shift. And we're done talking about it, 00:44:54.263 --> 00:44:56.963 but we wanted you to understand it because, man, does it matter. 00:44:59.763 --> 00:45:02.743 Well, no spot, no ad right here. But thank you, members, and thank you, 00:45:02.823 --> 00:45:05.583 boosters. We really do appreciate you for making this show possible. 00:45:06.703 --> 00:45:08.743 You're doing the heavy lifting, that's for sure. 00:45:12.343 --> 00:45:17.763 We got a few little fantastic pieces of feedback this week. Joe sent in this 00:45:17.763 --> 00:45:19.803 awesome case for your ThinkCenter. 00:45:20.023 --> 00:45:28.043 It's a ThinkBox V2 custom 4-bay serial ATA or SAS hard drive NAS that you can print yourself. 00:45:28.603 --> 00:45:32.403 Yes, you heard me. It's a case for your system with a case. 00:45:33.103 --> 00:45:40.723 It's basically, it's a custom 4-bay NAS that the ThinkCenter small form factor PCs just slide into. 00:45:41.023 --> 00:45:44.203 So using an LSI HBA card 00:45:44.203 --> 00:45:47.223 and the powerful brains of are much loved by 00:45:47.223 --> 00:45:51.383 our community m720q or m920q by 00:45:51.383 --> 00:45:54.603 lenovo it leverages many improvements over alternative 00:45:54.603 --> 00:45:58.163 custom nas builds by basically providing 00:45:58.163 --> 00:46:03.343 a stable direct disc pass through with proper air handling reliable drive identification 00:46:03.343 --> 00:46:09.683 the drive bays to the think box also support both serial ata and sas drives 00:46:09.683 --> 00:46:15.683 on a 12 gigabit per second backplane and everything just slides right into this 00:46:15.683 --> 00:46:17.703 thing. This specifically. 00:46:18.804 --> 00:46:22.144 Is exactly what I've been thinking about for the last two weeks. 00:46:22.144 --> 00:46:28.284 And I have to say, Joe, how did you get into my brain? Because I've been deeply 00:46:28.284 --> 00:46:33.844 investigating the M720Qs and all of the possibilities that these little machines 00:46:33.844 --> 00:46:35.644 can do for us, including a NAS. 00:46:36.164 --> 00:46:39.564 And I was like, ah, geez, I really would just want to throw one of these into 00:46:39.564 --> 00:46:44.404 a case. I can support a couple hard drives and here you come along with a version two of this project. 00:46:44.404 --> 00:46:48.584 Doesn't it? It looks OEM, right? It looks mint. 00:46:50.104 --> 00:46:55.504 This is such a great find. Thank you, Joe. He says that he found this and thought 00:46:55.504 --> 00:46:56.824 we would be interested, and boy, was he right. 00:46:57.924 --> 00:47:00.084 Upgrade your pizza box to a cube. 00:47:00.224 --> 00:47:02.544 We will link this in the show notes. I know what I want for Christmas. 00:47:02.944 --> 00:47:08.404 The creator says, Lenovo's use of the coffee-like generation of CPU in the M720Q 00:47:08.404 --> 00:47:13.484 and M920Q line gives access to native hardware transcoding through Intel QuickSync. 00:47:13.944 --> 00:47:18.564 yeah it just it makes for such a nice home media server but it is a little bit 00:47:18.564 --> 00:47:23.464 tight on the storage so that is a great find thanks for sending that in, 00:47:24.537 --> 00:47:29.317 Our buddy Michael Dominick from the Coda Radio podcast has a great giveaway 00:47:29.317 --> 00:47:32.437 going on right now for students. He's calling all students. 00:47:32.637 --> 00:47:35.957 He has an Earth Day open source challenge. If you build something that helps 00:47:35.957 --> 00:47:38.477 the planet, you could win a big prize. 00:47:39.257 --> 00:47:40.937 Some System 76 hardware. 00:47:41.157 --> 00:47:43.057 Oh, hey, we know that. We know that stuff. 00:47:43.177 --> 00:47:46.137 Yeah, so if you've got a kid that's K-12 or even college students that are listening 00:47:46.137 --> 00:47:48.337 to the podcast, the deadline is Earth Day. 00:47:48.797 --> 00:47:51.957 I'll put a link to Mr. Dominick's post about it. 00:47:52.557 --> 00:47:56.117 He's done this. His company, MadBotter Inc., has done this for a while now, 00:47:56.157 --> 00:48:01.397 and they often give away some really nice System76 hardware for this. 00:48:01.497 --> 00:48:03.157 So check that out. We'll have a link in the show notes. 00:48:03.497 --> 00:48:07.837 Code for Climate 2026, the MadBotter Earth Day Open Source Challenge. 00:48:08.417 --> 00:48:09.957 And the deadline is Earth Day. 00:48:10.517 --> 00:48:14.077 You've got to code something up that helps the Earth. Go check it out. 00:48:14.537 --> 00:48:17.757 Ooh, looks like we got a little feedback from our buddy, Only Mike. 00:48:17.877 --> 00:48:18.917 Hey, Olympia Mike! 00:48:20.217 --> 00:48:25.017 Guys, wow. I just wanted to say thanks for sharing my mini computer giveaway. 00:48:25.437 --> 00:48:29.777 I received hundreds of emails from this amazing community with positive messages 00:48:29.777 --> 00:48:31.877 and excitement for some free hardware. 00:48:32.497 --> 00:48:38.317 I had all 35 units claimed in a couple of days and have mailed them all out as fast as I could. 00:48:38.557 --> 00:48:41.837 I'm now on a first name basis with the post office employees. 00:48:42.157 --> 00:48:42.777 I bet. 00:48:43.037 --> 00:48:43.717 I bet. 00:48:43.717 --> 00:48:47.877 I also wanted to say thanks to the many recipients that donated above the shipping 00:48:47.877 --> 00:48:52.057 cost, allowing the Computer Upcycle project to have some extra funds for SSDs 00:48:52.057 --> 00:48:55.077 and power cords to fix more computers. 00:48:55.317 --> 00:48:56.497 Best audience ever. 00:48:56.797 --> 00:49:00.137 This community is literally the best, and I'll be sure to do this again if, 00:49:00.257 --> 00:49:02.297 when, I have more good home server hardware. 00:49:02.557 --> 00:49:05.897 Thanks again, love community. I love you all and cannot wait to see you all 00:49:05.897 --> 00:49:07.057 at LinuxFest Northwest. 00:49:07.357 --> 00:49:08.337 Oh man, Mike, that's great. 00:49:08.437 --> 00:49:08.637 Amen. 00:49:09.177 --> 00:49:12.897 Thank you, Mike. Thank you for the update. Really, I love that. 00:49:12.897 --> 00:49:14.117 I just love the growth of that too. 00:49:14.917 --> 00:49:18.397 It's so great to see and appreciate the updates. You know what I mean? It's very good. 00:49:23.259 --> 00:49:27.399 Well, the dude is definitely abiding this week, and he is coming in with our 00:49:27.399 --> 00:49:31.959 baller boost, 77,777 sats. 00:49:38.919 --> 00:49:42.299 He says, thanks for the wake-up call. I deployed Prometheus and Grafana, 00:49:42.439 --> 00:49:46.579 and now I'm hooking up everything. My TrueNAS, ProxMax, my Unify. 00:49:47.179 --> 00:49:51.459 That's right. And Home Assistant. I have no idea what I'll use all that data for. 00:49:51.639 --> 00:49:54.859 The next step is to set up alerts, I guess. great episode as always and happy 00:49:54.859 --> 00:50:00.099 belated birthday oh thank you the dude yeah uh i have been finding it very useful 00:50:00.099 --> 00:50:03.779 just to monitor disk space and the cpu load on my home assistant those are like 00:50:03.779 --> 00:50:05.779 the main things i have i have basic sort. 00:50:05.779 --> 00:50:07.099 Of metrics and monitoring stuff. 00:50:07.099 --> 00:50:10.479 Stuff that i'm like is this box struggling is it or is it okay. 00:50:10.479 --> 00:50:19.399 Well anonymous comes in with 2021 sets but no sets just the value So also we 00:50:19.399 --> 00:50:22.439 get a boost from Outdoor Geek. 5,000 sets. 00:50:24.619 --> 00:50:26.219 Ooh, Scott, he's hot to trot. 00:50:26.839 --> 00:50:31.919 Open WRT as access point tip. By default, if you connect another router to a 00:50:31.919 --> 00:50:37.979 LAN port of an Open WRT Wi-Fi device, the Open WRT Wi-Fi device will operate as an AP. 00:50:38.399 --> 00:50:42.319 However, if someone fiddles with it and forgets or doesn't know to use LAN port 00:50:42.319 --> 00:50:46.099 versus the LAN, better to configure as AP for permanent installs. 00:50:46.099 --> 00:50:49.279 Good to know. Outdoor geek coming in. Good tip. 00:50:49.379 --> 00:50:52.159 Sounds like maybe you've seen that happen one or two times, huh? 00:50:52.259 --> 00:50:54.099 Brent, did you do this? Are you okay? 00:50:54.339 --> 00:50:57.639 I didn't even know this was possible. I like this little default behavior. 00:50:57.819 --> 00:51:01.219 Although, you know, sometimes these kind of behind-the-scenes behaviors that 00:51:01.219 --> 00:51:04.979 are trying to be helpful can be unhelpful if you don't know they're happening. 00:51:05.539 --> 00:51:09.239 This didn't happen to me because I didn't know this was such a useful feature. 00:51:09.259 --> 00:51:11.059 So maybe I'll try that next time. 00:51:11.119 --> 00:51:11.699 Now you know. 00:51:12.459 --> 00:51:16.279 Well, Zach Attack came in with 4,500 Satoshis. 00:51:19.264 --> 00:51:25.244 It's been a long time. I never stopped listening, but just haven't found funds to send over. 00:51:25.444 --> 00:51:31.304 I'm curious as to how your AI adventures go. So I look forward to the continued reporting on that. 00:51:31.424 --> 00:51:35.604 I've been back on the distro hopping train with one laptop running Nick's book. 00:51:35.904 --> 00:51:41.304 Ooh. And the other running Linux Mint, my main machine staying with Bluefin for now. 00:51:41.424 --> 00:51:45.224 That's interesting fleet you have there. I like that. Good, good testing around, 00:51:45.224 --> 00:51:49.924 You know, so talking about the Asian stuff just a bit more, just briefly, it ain't all great. 00:51:50.715 --> 00:51:51.715 Because, you know. 00:51:52.055 --> 00:51:54.755 Why does your wallet look so thin? 00:51:54.975 --> 00:51:59.355 There's that. I'm basically an alpha tester, right? Because I installed it when it was called Clodbot. 00:51:59.695 --> 00:52:04.235 Then it became Maltbot. Then it became OpenClaw. And then they've had three releases of OpenClaw. 00:52:04.615 --> 00:52:09.115 And the first two releases of OpenClaw completely blew out my sub agents, 00:52:09.135 --> 00:52:13.035 blew out my Mattermost config on the second install. 00:52:13.715 --> 00:52:16.655 I mean, just like and then the stereotypical thing where you're talking to the 00:52:16.655 --> 00:52:19.475 agents like, I've got it figured out now. and then it kills its own gateway 00:52:19.475 --> 00:52:22.995 and then i'm in there repairing the gateway not not. 00:52:22.995 --> 00:52:23.815 Just once on that one. 00:52:23.815 --> 00:52:28.475 No i was getting pretty spicy about it so it hasn't all been great, 00:52:29.075 --> 00:52:32.695 i've definitely learned what i do and don't like about the open claw uh infrastructure 00:52:32.695 --> 00:52:36.315 but uh ultimately the uh 00:52:36.315 --> 00:52:39.375 you know the reality is just that when you are learning 00:52:39.375 --> 00:52:42.195 something when it's really new you learn a bunch you 00:52:42.195 --> 00:52:44.895 have to throw it out you get burned you learn a bunch and then you throw 00:52:44.895 --> 00:52:47.595 it out and you learn again and you learn again and you learn 00:52:47.595 --> 00:52:50.375 again and being an early adopter has a bit of work to 00:52:50.375 --> 00:52:53.615 it but you then at least know the language 00:52:53.615 --> 00:52:57.415 you know the technology you understand the direction you know what's hype versus 00:52:57.415 --> 00:53:03.275 what's actually just practically good and it it actually is valuable to experiment 00:53:03.275 --> 00:53:07.795 with this stuff early on even if it is somewhat personally expensive in time 00:53:07.795 --> 00:53:12.495 and money but i kind of consider it like this is this is my ongoing education, 00:53:13.235 --> 00:53:17.915 And I don't go to college anymore, but I do invest in my ongoing education in 00:53:17.915 --> 00:53:20.515 some of these ways within reasonable means, right? 00:53:20.535 --> 00:53:23.215 I can't go crazy with it, and I sometimes just cut myself off. 00:53:23.375 --> 00:53:26.175 And another reason, we need more local solutions. 00:53:26.355 --> 00:53:30.615 We do. We do. And maybe somebody will even create a better agent framework one 00:53:30.615 --> 00:53:31.695 day. Thank you, Zach Attack. 00:53:32.255 --> 00:53:34.635 Gene Bean's back with 2020 Sats. 00:53:37.016 --> 00:53:40.476 This is happy birthday to JB. Thank you, Gene. Always good to hear from you. 00:53:40.556 --> 00:53:43.676 Hope you're doing good out there. Wonderful to see, Gene, in March. 00:53:43.796 --> 00:53:44.396 I hope so. 00:53:44.476 --> 00:53:45.656 I hope so. I hope so. 00:53:47.016 --> 00:53:50.236 Well, Red 5D comes in with a row of ducks. 00:53:51.596 --> 00:53:55.496 You mentioned the idea of having an agent read the show RSS feed for summaries 00:53:55.496 --> 00:53:59.096 and stuff, but with the size of the RSS data, especially ours, 00:53:59.376 --> 00:54:01.796 that would be a lot of tokens to process. 00:54:01.996 --> 00:54:06.656 So I'd actually recommend using MCP tools to process and search the data first. 00:54:06.656 --> 00:54:11.316 Here's an MCP server that I wrote to handle retrieving episode and transcript 00:54:11.316 --> 00:54:14.916 data from podcasting 2.0 compatible RSS feeds. 00:54:15.136 --> 00:54:17.756 I've really only tested it with JB feeds so far, though. 00:54:17.996 --> 00:54:21.956 Well, that's a big one. The Linux Unplugged one's a little ridiculous, I will admit. 00:54:21.976 --> 00:54:26.696 This is awesome. It's MIT licensed. It's written in Python over on GitHub. 00:54:26.696 --> 00:54:28.196 We will definitely have this in the show notes. 00:54:28.276 --> 00:54:32.676 Yeah, it lets your agent list shows, search episodes, get episodes, and get the transcript. 00:54:33.656 --> 00:54:37.796 So my agent provides me a morning report and it surfaces certain boosts and 00:54:37.796 --> 00:54:41.896 it put red 5Ds right to the top, right to the top. 00:54:41.956 --> 00:54:44.336 And it said it had a specific call out. 00:54:44.696 --> 00:54:48.836 Hey, he created this and this looks really useful. It saved tokens. 00:54:49.316 --> 00:54:50.556 You should let me have it. 00:54:50.616 --> 00:54:54.436 Yeah, that's exactly what Laura said. He's like, I think this would be really 00:54:54.436 --> 00:54:55.616 useful. Let's set this up. 00:54:55.716 --> 00:54:58.856 So it's funny because I have it monitoring the boost just so I can see what people are saying. 00:54:58.856 --> 00:55:02.336 and you know it's good for signal and stuff like that and and and really good 00:55:02.336 --> 00:55:06.976 sense of direction so and but this is the first time where you started surfacing 00:55:06.976 --> 00:55:11.176 interesting bits like this and reds came right to the top so appreciate that 00:55:11.176 --> 00:55:12.576 very very much thank you sir. 00:55:12.576 --> 00:55:17.676 Well turd ferguson boosts in 13,333 sets, 00:55:21.050 --> 00:55:25.810 So let's say you guys were right about agents managing Linux systems in the future. 00:55:26.410 --> 00:55:32.090 Makes you wonder how the big cloud providers would take advantage of a technology like that. 00:55:32.690 --> 00:55:36.750 Yeah, you do wonder, you know, what changes about fleet management and just 00:55:36.750 --> 00:55:41.770 wrangling APIs. And there's already so much YAML to manage in like declarative systems. 00:55:42.050 --> 00:55:47.790 Do they sit on top of like an Ansible and Kubernetes and then go out and deploy things? 00:55:47.790 --> 00:55:52.590 Or do we develop other new agent first things or like whole systems to sort 00:55:52.590 --> 00:55:58.530 of enforce more security layers or more review layers or adversarial layers 00:55:58.530 --> 00:56:02.650 on top of that to make sure like that your change sets are really heavily scrutinized? 00:56:02.810 --> 00:56:08.270 Do you think we would see cloud providers that lean into no AI agentic, 00:56:08.370 --> 00:56:10.530 no agent stuff? Do you think that could be a market? 00:56:14.236 --> 00:56:18.156 I doubt it. They want to take advantage of all of this. 00:56:18.156 --> 00:56:21.776 They do, because it just sells more of their stuff. So they're going to lean in, you're right. 00:56:21.956 --> 00:56:24.636 Well, I opt out of that. That's a good point. 00:56:24.796 --> 00:56:27.376 Okay, all right. Well, there goes that dream. All right. Well, 00:56:27.576 --> 00:56:29.456 that's an interesting question, Turd. Thank you. 00:56:30.096 --> 00:56:34.356 Tomato comes in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. 00:56:35.656 --> 00:56:38.576 I love the discussion on the bots and especially the talk with Abe. 00:56:38.736 --> 00:56:41.576 Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Abe's been updating us, too, in the Matrix. 00:56:41.576 --> 00:56:44.936 There's more going on over there in Abeverse. 00:56:45.176 --> 00:56:45.916 Planet of the Abe. 00:56:46.076 --> 00:56:49.276 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I don't want to spoil it, but I'm on, I think, 00:56:49.356 --> 00:56:51.036 the fifth book of Bobverse or fourth book. 00:56:51.116 --> 00:56:51.656 Oh, fun. 00:56:51.876 --> 00:56:57.476 And just a really, like a real, oh, crap moment just went down with AI. 00:56:58.576 --> 00:57:01.836 Fascinating timing on that. Thank you, everybody who boosted the show. 00:57:02.016 --> 00:57:04.456 Those of you who streamed them sats, we had 28 of you stream them, 00:57:04.596 --> 00:57:09.196 and you stacked collectively 38,385 sats amongst y'all. 00:57:09.276 --> 00:57:12.736 Very good job. It's a nice little showing right there. We really do appreciate that. 00:57:13.036 --> 00:57:16.396 When you combine that with our boosters who sent a message, including even those 00:57:16.396 --> 00:57:20.316 that were beloved below, we beloved them, below the 2,000-sat cutoff, 00:57:20.436 --> 00:57:22.956 which we do it for timing. But we read them all. We love them all. 00:57:23.516 --> 00:57:30.316 So our grand total, when you combine it all together, for this episode was 149,531 sats. 00:57:35.618 --> 00:57:39.438 Now, I will say we have some big stuff coming up. We have our trip to scale 00:57:39.438 --> 00:57:41.658 and Planet Nix. We have LinuxFest Northwest. 00:57:41.878 --> 00:57:43.938 There's always a ton of expenses around that. 00:57:44.398 --> 00:57:48.338 And we're always doing it on a really super lean budget. So if you want to boost 00:57:48.338 --> 00:57:51.318 the dip while the sats are cheap and support our upcoming events, 00:57:51.318 --> 00:57:53.978 this could be a great time to get a message on the show. 00:57:54.078 --> 00:57:56.218 Even if you don't have anything that profound to say, if you just want to send 00:57:56.218 --> 00:57:59.178 the value, we'll stack that and use that towards our upcoming trips. 00:57:59.238 --> 00:58:00.738 And we really do appreciate it very much. 00:58:01.258 --> 00:58:05.238 Fountain FM makes it really easy to get started. But there are a bunch of ways, 00:58:05.298 --> 00:58:09.838 including self-hosted ways, they use things like Albi and Podverse and whatnot. 00:58:09.838 --> 00:58:13.878 That's all open source, top to bottom, from the software to the payment infrastructure. 00:58:14.178 --> 00:58:17.038 Thank everybody who supports us, including our members. 00:58:19.358 --> 00:58:24.218 All right. So let's go through these picks because I found one and Brent found 00:58:24.218 --> 00:58:28.878 one. And I think Brent's is going to be really handy for anybody that isn't using a stock ROM. 00:58:29.118 --> 00:58:33.238 I sent this app immediately to Jeff because it fits his personality perfectly. 00:58:33.838 --> 00:58:39.538 This app is called Plexus, and I just found it browsing the FDroid repository, 00:58:39.538 --> 00:58:41.118 as you should do from time to time. 00:58:41.338 --> 00:58:41.538 I do. 00:58:42.698 --> 00:58:43.498 I like that. 00:58:43.818 --> 00:58:47.598 It's calming and fun, which is also why I have like 400 apps on my phone. 00:58:48.118 --> 00:58:51.898 Yeah. You need to also, I think you need a rule. One in, one out, Chris. 00:58:52.078 --> 00:58:53.278 That's a good idea. That's a good idea. 00:58:54.978 --> 00:58:57.458 Plexus provides insights into 00:58:57.458 --> 00:59:03.658 app compatibility using the Google Play services. so it's a crowdsourced, 00:59:05.231 --> 00:59:10.211 I guess, definition of which apps work really well without Google Play services, 00:59:10.751 --> 00:59:17.851 also with the Micro G service, and which apps may or may not encounter issues 00:59:17.851 --> 00:59:19.991 if you have these installed or not. 00:59:20.171 --> 00:59:25.871 So if you're using a custom ROM like Lineage OS or maybe something like Calix 00:59:25.871 --> 00:59:33.211 OS, you can see how compatible your current apps are if you are migrating from one system to another. 00:59:33.431 --> 00:59:34.331 Can I ask you something? 00:59:35.231 --> 00:59:35.751 Oh, yeah, sure. 00:59:36.051 --> 00:59:38.011 Did you give it a go on your Paizo? 00:59:39.031 --> 00:59:40.791 Well, I was really hoping Jeff would do that for me. 00:59:41.071 --> 00:59:42.051 You didn't give it a go. 00:59:42.771 --> 00:59:43.831 No, I didn't give it a go. 00:59:43.831 --> 00:59:47.511 You're a paranoid guy when it comes to this kind of stuff. Not to use the word, 00:59:47.731 --> 00:59:49.051 but you were kind of paranoid. 00:59:49.231 --> 00:59:57.291 I have to report that using Giraffe in OS has considerably changed my level 00:59:57.291 --> 00:59:59.451 of anxiety about this particular problem. 01:00:01.011 --> 01:00:05.711 because Graphene has a sandbox Google Play, and that has softened me. 01:00:05.871 --> 01:00:07.551 And I don't know if that's good. 01:00:07.651 --> 01:00:07.791 Right. 01:00:07.891 --> 01:00:10.631 But I'm going to blame you, Chris, because you brought me on this bandwagon, 01:00:10.631 --> 01:00:15.051 and it's made me way more willing to install apps I would have never done before. 01:00:17.311 --> 01:00:21.171 So maybe the community could tell me whether that was a good idea or if I should 01:00:21.171 --> 01:00:23.411 go back to being a little bit more paranoid. 01:00:23.571 --> 01:00:26.651 I have felt pretty safe about the Giraffe, you know, a sandbox Google stuff 01:00:26.651 --> 01:00:30.711 as well, which is probably why I have 300 apps on my phone. why is. 01:00:30.711 --> 01:00:32.591 It going down how many of them would work without it. 01:00:32.591 --> 01:00:33.751 You said 400 last time. 01:00:33.751 --> 01:00:39.831 I was exaggerating it is i think it's closer to five it is no it is closer to 300 you're. 01:00:39.831 --> 01:00:40.911 Updating let's be terrible. 01:00:40.911 --> 01:00:44.431 Oh no it's the optimizing that's terrible the updating's not so bad because 01:00:44.431 --> 01:00:49.431 that just happens in the background okay so you guys know me i love markdown 01:00:49.431 --> 01:00:54.031 if i could think in markdown i would and i often will write myself a little 01:00:54.031 --> 01:00:57.731 to do for the day just in a text document and i'll just format it in Markdown. 01:00:58.211 --> 01:01:01.911 And I came across an app. I think it's German developers. Anybody have a guess 01:01:01.911 --> 01:01:04.031 on how to pronounce this one? Maybe Brenton, you have a. 01:01:05.088 --> 01:01:08.148 I'm going to go with Reinshrift. Reinshrift to do. 01:01:08.248 --> 01:01:14.508 Reinshrift to do. And it is a Rust, Eduardia app. That's right. That's right. 01:01:15.448 --> 01:01:20.908 That is a front end to very, very simple markdown to do management. 01:01:21.168 --> 01:01:25.868 So if you like to manage your to do's with the markdown, this is a front end 01:01:25.868 --> 01:01:30.448 to it that is designed to connect to a web dev instance, particularly Nextcloud. 01:01:30.448 --> 01:01:33.368 So you could have ongoing sync 01:01:33.368 --> 01:01:37.068 to-do notes formatted in Markdown that just save to any web dev share. 01:01:37.268 --> 01:01:38.328 Oh, that's nice. 01:01:38.528 --> 01:01:43.088 Yeah. Obviously, the idea is to lean into NextCloud, but any web dev share would 01:01:43.088 --> 01:01:45.428 work. You can make it versionable via Git. 01:01:45.848 --> 01:01:50.948 And if you're so inclined, there's an optional download to download a local 01:01:50.948 --> 01:01:56.568 Whisper open source audio model so you can dictate your tasks to the application. 01:01:56.768 --> 01:01:58.248 And it will write them in Markdown for you. 01:01:58.428 --> 01:01:58.828 Nice. 01:01:59.828 --> 01:02:05.148 And it's lean it's mean it could fit on your machine no problem at all and because 01:02:05.148 --> 01:02:08.568 the back end is all text should you decide to stop using it, 01:02:09.896 --> 01:02:11.536 Bob's your uncle. You got your files right there. 01:02:11.536 --> 01:02:15.816 Looks like it's a CC by SA 4.0 license, Rust, Python, JavaScript, 01:02:16.096 --> 01:02:18.256 HTML, all in there. There is a Docker file. 01:02:18.876 --> 01:02:21.336 And no NICs yet, but it's cargo, so that should be easy. 01:02:21.536 --> 01:02:24.756 It is a little bit of all of the above. And you don't often see an app these 01:02:24.756 --> 01:02:28.096 days with the Creative Commons license, but it works. 01:02:28.836 --> 01:02:32.016 So we'll check it in the show notes. We'll chuck it in the show notes for you. 01:02:32.116 --> 01:02:33.896 It's like Plexus is GPL3. 01:02:34.596 --> 01:02:37.156 Yes. Plexus is a good one. Nice find, Brent. 01:02:37.616 --> 01:02:41.196 Okay, I have to say I felt bad about not trying Plexus. So in the time that 01:02:41.196 --> 01:02:45.096 you gave us a second pick, I tried it. And it's pretty fabulous, I've got to say. 01:02:45.416 --> 01:02:50.876 You can just see the entire database of the apps that have been tracked or looked at. 01:02:51.136 --> 01:02:54.136 Or you can just filter by installed apps. So Chris, you can look at your 300 01:02:54.136 --> 01:02:57.716 apps and have a little homework when you're trying to fall asleep. 01:02:58.056 --> 01:03:03.196 It is fabulous. And they rate, kind of like rating video games with how they work on wine. 01:03:03.216 --> 01:03:06.516 It has like silver ratings, gold ratings, that kind of thing for various apps. 01:03:06.516 --> 01:03:10.216 depending on if you're using Micro G or without Google Play services. 01:03:10.496 --> 01:03:12.236 Oh, look, Audiobookshelf is gold. That's nice. 01:03:12.856 --> 01:03:13.396 Mm-hmm. 01:03:14.409 --> 01:03:14.809 Okay. 01:03:15.149 --> 01:03:16.189 I'll be go. Not so great. 01:03:16.589 --> 01:03:21.169 Yeah, well, that's fine by me. In a way, it's a badge of honor, I say. 01:03:22.069 --> 01:03:25.509 The least compatible I am with Google Play, the better. It's a badge of honor. 01:03:25.769 --> 01:03:28.689 So if you'd like to get links to our picks or anything else we've talked about, 01:03:29.249 --> 01:03:33.309 linuxunplugged.com slash 653 is where you go for that. 01:03:33.389 --> 01:03:37.129 In fact, we have a whole bunch of episodes over there. You could say a whole back catalog, perhaps. 01:03:37.789 --> 01:03:41.769 In fact, maybe there's even hidden metadata that they can't see on the website, 01:03:41.769 --> 01:03:43.709 but it lurks in the RSS feed. 01:03:43.709 --> 01:03:48.869 Well, how else would that dope MCP server work if we didn't have fancy podcasting 01:03:48.869 --> 01:03:51.709 2.0 namespace tags for chapters and transcripts? 01:03:51.749 --> 01:03:57.209 That's right. So the chapters are available as high-resolution data. Let's call it that. 01:03:57.269 --> 01:03:57.789 And the JSON. 01:03:58.109 --> 01:04:02.849 Yep, as well as the transcript, also available for you, all in the RSS feed. 01:04:03.029 --> 01:04:08.549 And often a video version of the show is tucked in that RSS feed as well if you go through there. 01:04:08.609 --> 01:04:11.969 And if you've got a podcasting 2.0 app, it just exposes all of that for you. 01:04:11.969 --> 01:04:14.649 Just whisper alternate enclosure to yourself at night. 01:04:15.029 --> 01:04:16.729 And of course, we also stream live. 01:04:20.009 --> 01:04:23.209 Yeah, join us on a Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. 01:04:23.449 --> 01:04:26.469 Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Hang out with our Mumble crew, 01:04:26.669 --> 01:04:30.969 our Matrix room. Give it that live vibe. 01:04:31.609 --> 01:04:36.049 jblive.tv, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your local time. 01:04:36.349 --> 01:04:40.069 And remember, if you want more show, that's how you do it. You feel like you 01:04:40.069 --> 01:04:44.849 need more, there's a bootleg, which is clocking in at a whole lot of extra show right now. 01:04:45.149 --> 01:04:47.189 Oh, my gosh. That's a lot of show. 01:04:47.529 --> 01:04:49.389 All right. Links to everything we talked about. Links to Unplugged.com, 01:04:49.469 --> 01:04:52.449 Matrix Room, all of that details are there. It's a website. 01:04:52.809 --> 01:04:56.149 Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program. 01:04:56.369 --> 01:04:58.369 And we'll see you back here next Tuesday. 01:04:59.129 --> 01:05:00.309 As in Sunday.
Previous episode Next episode

Search

Search

Listen on

Apple Podcasts Spotify RSS feed