613: Packets, Power, and Paulus

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up today, we're going to chat with the founder
of Home Assistant and the leader of the Open Home Foundation, Mr.
Paulus, and then we'll reveal the big things they have in the works and how
we're going to automate Brent's new Linux-powered van.

(00:33):
Then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, great pick,
and a whole lot more. So before we go any further, let me say time-appropriate
greetings to our virtual lug.
Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes.
And hello, Brian. Hey, guys. Hello.
Hello, hello, hello. And a big good morning to our friends over at TailScale.

(00:56):
TailScale.com slash unplug. TailScale is the easiest way to connect your devices
and services to each other wherever they are, whatever they might be.
So go to tailscale.com slash unplugged and try it for free on 100 devices,
three users, no credit card required. It's not a limited time trial.
Right now, we are doing our entire show production over tailscale.

(01:17):
We're in PJ's backyard, and I'm controlling everything over tailscale.
And it's so nice because no matter where you go, all your devices talk to each
other because they're talking over their tail net, which is a flat mesh network protected by.
Oh, I know.
That's right. And so your devices talk directly to each other like they're just
physically wired together.

(01:38):
But you could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart.
And so you can have one flat mesh network across a complex network like multiple
VPS providers and your LAN.
But on top of that, it's so intuitive to use and it's programmable.
So you can have access controls and you can tie it in with your corporate authentication
because it also works great for corporations. The personal plan's always going

(02:01):
to be free, and you can try Tailscale out right now and support the show.
100 devices, three users, when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged.
Thousands of companies use it. We use it. Instacart uses it.
Hugging Face uses it. And so many in our audience love it, too.
Support the show. Get it for free on 100 devices at tailscale.com slash unplugged.

(02:26):
Before we bring Paulus on, I just want to let you know if it sounds a little
different or you hear some birds or some mowers in the background.
We are live at producer Jeff's house right now in his backyard.
The van rescue has officially begun, and Brentley and I are sitting right now
in the back of his brand new bank bus. It's pretty great, Brent.

(02:48):
What do you think? How is it?
I love it. It's surprisingly good in here because it's got padding on the walls.
And so it's acoustically actually a lot better than I expected.
I know, right? Better than an Airbnb.
Is it already better than Joupes?
I think it actually acoustically might be. Yeah, because there's a lot more
soft, especially because in Joupes I set up at the windshield.
Now we're going to kind of mess it up a little bit because we got the back door

(03:10):
open, hashtag van lifestyle.
Because there is a back door.
And so we've got, yeah. So if Brent was taking pictures right now and wearing
his bikini, you'd swear he was an Instagram model.
You know, I mean, it just looks just like that. That's what I want your mental
picture to be. So it's quite the story.
It involves nasty fuel leaks, getting pulled over and stopped by the cops,

(03:33):
and a lot more, including deploying Linux.
So we'll get to all of that later on in the show.
But I just wanted to mention that with self-hosted coming to an end at episode
150, we heard the call and we have launched some swag over at Jupyter Garage.
Jupitergarage.com there is a fantastic 150 poster over there with all the titles

(03:56):
and a title cloud that spells 150 the dad hats over there,
there's t-shirts there's jupitergarage.com things are probably going up right
now even as we're talking, it's true so check it out,
buy yourself some self-hosted swag while it lasts to celebrate episode 150 and
five years of self-hosted at jupitergarage.com.

(04:25):
Joining us for the first time on the Unplugged program, not the first time to
Jupyter Broadcasting, but the first time to the Unplugged program,
it is Paulus, the president of the Open Home Foundation, the founder of Home Assistant,
and Nebukasa too, I believe, and probably other things I don't know about.
Paulus, welcome to the show.
Yeah, great to be here.

(04:46):
So I wanted to have you on because I, as you know, longtime huge fan and user
of Home Assistant, and I've been watching five years or so.
And your state of the open home keynote and live stream was just on April 12th.
And I was watching this and I walked away from the impression that things have

(05:09):
really leveled up in the last year.
And so before we get into Home Assistant and all that, could we talk a little
bit about the Open Home Foundation, what it is, where it fits in and some of the goals there.
Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I started Home Assistant like 2013.
So that's almost 12 years ago at this point.
And, you know, it was just an open source project. I was just hacking on it,

(05:30):
right? And it kept growing and growing and growing.
And like last year, we were the most active open source project in the world, 21,000 people.
But last year also, we made a big change. We announced the Open Home Foundation
because I felt that even though I wasn't planning on selling,
we were building something with our whole community together.

(05:52):
And having a person owning it, it's just not the right thing.
At some point, somewhere, something can happen and then that might jeopardize
the project. So we created the Open Home Foundation.
I donated Home Assistant to it. Throughout, actually, our ecosystem,
other projects got donated, like ZigPy, our ZigBee driver, Piper,

(06:13):
our text-to-speech engine, a couple of other things.
ESP Home, right?
Yeah, ESP Home as well. Yeah. Well, so ESP Home, we already owned it.
Well, Nabucasa had acquired it back in the day. So yeah, ESP Home also got donated
to the Open Home Foundation.
And that made the foundation all of a sudden like, you know,
it's a nonprofit, right? The foundation is based in Switzerland.
They cannot be acquired. They cannot be invested in. and they are bound to their mission.

(06:37):
It's based in Switzerland, which is very strict around its foundations.
And so, yeah. Now, no one can ever buy Home Assistant again.
I wonder if it's worth clarifying. You know, I don't think this was y'all's
heavy-handed pressuring folks.
You know, oh, you got to donate your stuff to the foundation,
right? This was set up, and people
already maintaining community aspects thought it would be a good home.

(06:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It really sounds like a structure to prevent incentivification.
Yes, 100%. I think that like when we, what I saw, like, you know,
we were, first we were just an open source project, right?
And people take you not so seriously in the industry.
Then we, you know, we started Nabucasa as a company next to it to support the development.

(07:18):
We were taken more seriously, but we were still seen as a company.
And then people think that, oh, one day you're going to sell out.
And so they treat you differently.
And then we went to the foundation and now they're like, okay,
you guys are here forever. And like, this is the right path.
And yeah, it's been working really well.
And so can you clarify how things have changed for Nebukasa then?

(07:40):
Like where's the dividing line between the two these days?
So Nebukasa is six and a half years old, right? So I know for the people listening,
we're throwing around like a lot of names, right? So Home Assistant is the project.
Nebukasa is the company I started to fund the development six and a half years ago.
And Open Home Foundation is the foundation. Now, Nabucasa has Home Assistant

(08:00):
Cloud, which is our subscription service to fund the development of Home Assistant.
It gives you remote access, access to voice assistants, a bunch of other stuff,
backup storage off-site.
And it also sells Home Assistant hardware, like the Home Assistant Voice Preview
Edition, the Home Assistant Green, like official hardware products.
And all that funds the development. And it used to do that by just hiring people

(08:21):
full-time. and they would work at Nabucasa, but they would be dedicating their
full time to working on Home Assistant, ESP Home, Piper, all these other projects.
And now with the Open Home Foundation in place, we actually made a big change.
And so anyone that was just already dedicating full time on open source is now
working for the foundation and the foundation just receives a bag of money from Nabucasa.

(08:44):
So this is the ultimate independence move, right?
The foundation now has 39 employees full time and there are 17 people at Nabucasa
working full-time on the hardware, the subscription service, customer support.
And because the foundation is bound to its mission, right, like that bag of
money is only going to be made on improving Home Assistant and ESP Home and

(09:06):
all these other projects.
So the reason why I wanted to start with the foundation is because when you
think of what Home Assistant offers end users,
it's offering them an exit from devices that get expired because their cloud
service went away or in certification because a vendor wants to get into a storage play.
It allows this level of independence, also generally local first, to...

(09:29):
The other side of that is the finance side, the development side,
and the hardware partnership side.
And so it does make sense that a foundation coming in would make it something
that is sustainable so the software can actually achieve the goals it set out to achieve.
And it needs that structure of the foundation. And something else that I believe
is part of that, and then we'll get into Home Assistant itself,

(09:50):
but is the Works with Home Assistant program, which has had some pretty good
announcements recently. Can you tell me about that?
And is that part of the foundation too? And what does it mean when something
works with Home Assistant?
Yeah, so we started a program called Works with Home Assistant already a couple
of years ago, but we now moved it into the foundation.
And this program allows manufacturers to certify their devices.

(10:12):
And so we actually, you know, if it's a Z-Wave device, right,
it needs to be Z-Wave certified, then they can give it to us and we're going to certify it again.
Like we test to actually make sure that Z-Wave certification or Zigbee certification,
they can always like, it might not be perfect, right? So we'll make sure that
it works great, that we have firmware updates available.
We make sure that everything works with the Home Assistant.

(10:33):
But we also make sure that, and for open standards, it's not that important,
but for local APIs, it's important.
Does it work with the cloud? And if so, it's a no-go.
So we want to make sure that if you are, as a user in a store,
you see two products. They both are white products in generic brown boxes,
because that's how everything looks nowadays.

(10:54):
Yes.
I want you to know that, oh, this one has worked with Home Assistant.
This one I can put in my house, and it will work for 10 years or more.
That's the kind of guarantee, and it's aligned with our values.
Seems very nice just for me thinking about deploying Home Assistant,
not only for myself, where I can maybe figure out if it's going to work or not.
I can look up available integrations, but if I tell my friends or my family

(11:16):
to do that, they don't want to have to go figure that out or read YAML.
And if there's just a little badge right there, that's a big step.
And so it's our, you know, when it's in the program, we want to make sure it's
got automatically discovered and all these things have to be perfect.
And then we have our, we've set ourselves the goal that we want to,
every region in the world, there needs to be for every category of smart home

(11:36):
devices, there needs to be a works with home assistant device.
So whether you're in the UK, Mexico, the US, right, you buy a thermostat,
there should be a works with home assistant option, an AC, a light bulb, et cetera, everything.
I love that. Because, you know, for years I've just figured it out mostly through
community resources, because Home Assistant has a really great community around it.
Okay, so I'm curious these days, when you have to do an elevator pitch of what

(12:00):
Home Assistant is, what do you tell people?
So it's an open-source smart home platform with a focus on local control and privacy.
And then it depends on the audience, right? So if the audience is like technical
nerds, I'm focusing on like, we don't believe in silos. It's an actual platform.
So your data from all your different devices, but also services like your garbage

(12:22):
pickup schedule, whatever flows into a single place.
From there on, you can either, you know, Home Assistant itself has great dashboards,
history, automations, voice control, but it's not the endpoint, right?
We're not another data silo from there. If you want to use Apple Home,
you want to use Google Home or Amazon, whatever, you can send the data through.
If you want to use Node-RED for automation, you can use that.

(12:45):
If you want to use InfluxDB, Grafana for plotting your data, do your thing.
It's your data, right? We believe that any device that you buy,
you put it in your house, it starts gathering your data, right? The data is yours.
And sometimes we have to go into a cloud and get that data back for you.
And then we store it locally and you can do whatever you want with it.
You know, I kind of had a mind shift around this recently and you've really hit on it.

(13:08):
At first, you know, I thought when I was trying to introduce Home Assistant,
it was sort of like, look, yeah, you've got all these different smart bulbs
from different manufacturers. It can make them all play nice.
But you're really pitching it as like, this thing knows about your home.
It knows about your life. It is as much a data, you know, a central data hub
as it is automation platform or anything else.
Yeah.
Yeah, I recently discovered that my fridge is running more often because I have

(13:32):
a smart plug that measures the draw of the fridge and I have also the whole
house power. and I can compare the two and I can see, oh, the fridge has been
kicking in 15 minutes sooner than it did the last couple of months.
And so I know, okay, I probably need to like, you know, pull the fridge out
and clean it or something. There's something going on there.
And then I have sensors in the fridge and the freezer that track their overall

(13:52):
thermal performance too.
And you can use Home Assistant to actually graph those two things next to each other.
It's, and I'm not like, you know, Mr. Coder, I'm not vibe coding it up, right?
I'm just using the tools built in and that kind of data, it can be really insightful
to learn how things in your home are doing.
And I think, you know, today, Home Assistant is the perfect toolbox.

(14:12):
So we give you like the hammer, the screwdriver to build everything yourself.
The thing that we kind of want to work towards to is that we build more solutions.
So we already have like an energy dashboard that works out of the box.
Our voice now works out of the box. Nice wizard to get you to where you're going.
But for example, if you have a 3D printer, you have to create your own dashboard,
find cards, and it's more manual work.

(14:33):
This is the kind of stuff where, you know, we're calling it collective intelligence.
But we want to make our dashboard system for example in a
way that someone in the community can build a 3d
printer dashboard and share it to others and we can all like
you know now we have a 3d printer dashboard a security dashboard my plants have
their own dashboard and just click click click instead of like figuring it out

(14:53):
all out and thinking of what you want to build which i think the last part is
always the hardest because you know you see home assistant and it's a blank
canvas and everything is possible yeah.
That is true.
Given the different values and needs of let's say the foundation versus nebucasa
versus what the community wants and needs which i'm sure is quite varied how

(15:15):
do you balance all of those.
So it's actually all very aligned because
there has never been any investors or any external
money right so the foundation exists to
serve the you know build a smart home around privacy choice
and sustainability for the community so we just
listen to the users we have like a whole product management team

(15:36):
we talk to the users see what they want we have like month of
what the heck where everybody can just dump their ideas on us and then we
we kind of look prioritize and see okay where do we want to go and build something
um we do sometimes piss off people because we think about you know not only
the community today but the community at large so for example in the very beginning
home assistant was it was just a Python program, right?

(15:59):
And people had to even compile Python for Raspberry Pi because I was using features
that the old Python didn't have.
It was a hassle. Well, that limits your community to a very tiny fraction.
And today we use build root. We have our own operating system.
It has automatically updates with fallback if the update fails.
We have Docker containers. Everything is through the UI, one-click update.

(16:20):
And all of a sudden, we've expanded our scope immensely. And so.
Whenever we make these kind of changes, there will always be people like,
oh, I've already built everything myself. It works perfectly.
Why are you adding this feature? I don't need this.
Spend your time on something else. It's like, no, we have to think about everything.
And then that's the foundation community, Nabucasa. I mean, Nabucasa still exists to fund everything.

(16:43):
So for Nabucasa, we have nowadays even, it's part of the contracts between Nabucasa
and the Open Home Foundation that everything Nabucasa builds is official products.
It has to be open source. so it has to be open
source because for example we build a voice assistant we
spend like two years on it lots of resources we
spend on it but also with the community we build a framework a lot of community

(17:04):
people contributing because you know language is hard so we need people from
around the world and now instead of having three big tech voice assistants like
and the open home foundation there's going to be three big tech voice assistants
there's a nabukasa voice assistant an official So Home Assistant 1,
and it's open source, and there's already other companies using our technology
to start also building voice assistants, right?

(17:26):
So we hope that there's going to be like 20 voice assistants and people start
building out this technology.
So even Nabucasa, sure, they could have had a monopoly on voice assistants for Home Assistant.
It's not our core belief, so this is not how we roll.
To touch on this just for a second, because I think it is a good snapshot of
how you guys deliver features to end users.

(17:47):
So the voice assistant stuff is built in a way that I would describe as modular
in the sense that I could opt to run Whisper and Piper, the voice-to-text and
the speech-to-text stuff, as Docker containers on my LAN.
And I could have all of the voice control, all of the understanding what I'm
saying and the execution of that all local.

(18:09):
Or I can opt to tie it in, like you mentioned, with the home assistant cloud
or probably other services. It's sort of a modular approach to something that
would normally be this monolithic product.
And that's not always the easy route.
It is definitely not the easy route, but it is the best route for experimentation.

(18:29):
And I think with open source, the way it works is that there will just be,
for example, our WakeWords is a great example, right?
Like we didn't have WakeWords that could run on an ESP chip.
And then I was actually on the self-hosted podcast and I was telling you guys
like, well, we couldn't figure it out to run it on the microcontroller.
So we ran it in Home Assistant. somebody heard that
and they built uh michael wakeboard to

(18:52):
run on the esp chip and because it was
modular they were now able to actually test it out and it will and it was working
and the whole voice assistant stack and like boom right like if if we had it
all locked down you cannot experiment with different text or speech engines
or ai engines or whatever and so what this is that person by the way kevin he
now works for the open home foundation wow.

(19:14):
Oh that's great But yeah.
Right. Instead of reverse engineering your product, there's an interface already
available. Please hook into it.
And it also means as a tinkerer, you could build your own different kind of
custom hardware into stuff.
So you really just need an ESP, a microphone and a Wi-Fi chip.
And so you could build that into picture frames. You could build it into R2-D2s.

(19:35):
You can build your own that fit your own lifestyle where you need them.
And you could buy a five pack for like 15 bucks on Amazon.
It's pretty great. You also touched
on something that I think our audience would like to know more about.
And I was initially critical, but I actually, having been using it now for a
couple of years on the yellow and blue, you have your own Home Assistant OS

(19:55):
that you update and manage. Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, so it's based on BuildRoot, which, by the way, the Open Home Foundation
nowadays is also a sponsor of.
And with BuildRoot, we really built the tiniest amount of operating system to
build Docker, to run Docker containers.
And then everything else is running in Docker. So we have a program called Supervisor,

(20:17):
which is a manager of the operating system.
And then we have some plugins around DNS and audio and these kind of things.
And then you have Home Assistant, which is a Docker container.
And then we have this thing called add-ons, which is like applications that
are not Home Assistant that might integrate into Home Assistant,
but are different applications.
So Plex, you can run this as an add-on. I wouldn't recommend it because,

(20:38):
you know, if you run on a Raspberry Pi, it depends on how you run Home Assistant, of course.
But in MQTT server, Samba server. But also, for example, I mean,
you mentioned Whisper and Piper, our speech-to-text, text-to-speech engines,
they run as add-ons, right?
And they run next to Home Assistant and they have their own update cycle.
And what Docker really has enabled us is that people just pull the image and

(21:00):
Home Assistant will pull the image and will automatically update and the supervisor
will ping Home Assistant after we do an update.
If it doesn't come online, we revert to the previous version and it starts up.
BuildRoot itself is super stable, but even in BuildRoot, if an update would
fail, it has two partitions, right?
And so it will boot from the old partition after three failed boots.

(21:23):
It's been working really, really well. And it also allows us to easier add,
like, you know, it's built in layers, right?
So you have a base layer, and then for Raspberry Pi, we pull in a layer,
and then for the Odroid, and that's how we can maintain all these different platforms.
Yeah, like I said, I've got it on multiple devices now for multiple years.
I mean, knock on wood, but I don't think I've ever had a update go bad.

(21:47):
I'm curious. This is a bit of a self-serving question, but as a Pythonista myself,
it kind of stands out to me that not only was Python the first implementation
thing for Home Assistant, but it's really continued and it seems like there's
no stopping the investment in more Python. How's that going?
Oh, yeah.
No, yeah, so I mean, we've been Python, I think, so one of the reasons I was
just saying that like on a Raspberry Pi, you had to compile your own Python

(22:09):
is because we were very early adapters of AsyncIO, right?
And we did AsyncIO, and remember, we rewrote the core from executors to AsyncIO,
and the first release we're launching, SecFaults.
And like, oh. And apparently, it was like a bug in Python. We were able to monkey patch it out.
Amazing.
Destructor. But we've been on AsyncIO from very early on.

(22:32):
AOHCP is our web framework of choice, which we also are now donating money to
with the foundation, for example, right?
And we're slowly, you know, well, not slowly.
We've adopted a lot of async.io. A lot of integrations now have been converted
to async.io and it's been working really well, but also sometimes for custom
integrations, it works less because in Python, you can do either async and not async.

(22:57):
And in an async world, you have to yield, right? Like you're fetching some data
from the internet, and then you yield your task so that it can run the next task.
If you accidentally call like a sync method, like request.get,
the whole home assistant freezes until that data from the internet is fetched.
And that is something that we've actually patched a lot of methods to kind of

(23:18):
check in the event loop, like, oh, this is happening, and we're able to find a lot of them.
But there's sometimes a bit tricky there.
Like, you know, JavaScript is only async, right? You cannot really mess this
up. But yeah, Python has been great for us.
You know, as I've watched it, it really feels like Home Assistant has gone from
something that only the geeks would ever consider implementing to, I think,

(23:42):
especially with the hardware devices you can buy now, it's kind of at the level
where, like, I might give it to mom and dad.
And that's amazing, really, if you think about what you're doing.
And a lot of it is, like, the easier, faster setup stuff.
That, when something does work with Home Assistant, you mentioned it really
quickly, auto-discover.

(24:02):
When that works, it's better than anything on iOS and Android.
It is so solid. So it was a great experience.
And Paul, I've just been watching with essentially awe. And I'm really excited
to see what the next year holds.
I'll link to the State of the Open Home 2025 presentation because you do talk
a little bit about the roadmap in there and the blog post as well.

(24:23):
Is there anything else you want to mention before we run?
I don't know. I should have thought about that before.
Do you have a prediction? All right, so we had one million deploys.
We just got to two you were talking about pretty recently.
I mean, maybe by the time you're next back on the show, it'll be five.
I don't know. Is that too ambitious?
It does seem like it's growing quick.
It is growing quick. Maybe, maybe.

(24:44):
I think, you know, one of the big ambitious plans that we announced this year
is that we want to build a device database where we want to use our collective
intelligence to classify every IoT device in the world.
Like, let's start gathering the manuals. Let's start gathering the energy usage
so that homelessness can predict how much you're using.
Let's get all the infrared codes of your electric candles.
Let's get everything just in a single place, moderated, validated,

(25:10):
just to make you make the right decisions, integrate even faster, right?
Like that stuff that we cannot out of this cover, but somebody has gathered it.
Forum posts always get out of date at some point.
Videos get out of date and we believe we can we have the manpower to build this
in a way that we can all work together on this piece of data and it will just

(25:34):
be the best smart home experience ever.
Excellent paulus thank you very much,
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(25:55):
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(27:28):
Well, as mentioned, we are sat here in the rescued van, the Linux rescued van.
And as we've learned recently, these adventures are best described in song.

(28:36):
We are officially on the road and the van is real.
It is running multiple Linux systems already because, of course,
that was like one of the first things we got to.
So this was actually the plan all along.
As you may recall, those who've kind of listened to our members-only show or
caught the launch, but just a quick recap.

(28:58):
During our trip to Planet Nix, we
took a little detour and brent ended up finding and
buying a van and it needed a bit of
work because it had been sitting since 2019 but we were down for it because
the bones looked good right they looked it looked like it had solid potential
it just needed a little tlc so we made a plan that we'd return after linux fest

(29:21):
northwest and we did just that we came back after linux fest to rescue the van.
But of course, the fun always begins before we leave.
And traveling with Brent, you know, it's an experience that helps you embrace going with the flow.
So it's a half hour before we leave, and I think you just almost finished packing?
That's not what... You're packing. You're packing?

(29:42):
I haven't packed any gear yet. Oh, we still have all the gear to pack.
What's that? Good thing we have a half hour. And coveralls.
So not much had been packed by the time we were supposed to be leaving.
You started two days before we left?
Yeah.
I figured I'd start the morning of.
Also, those coveralls proved to be very important and useful.
That is true.

(30:03):
As you'll find out.
Yes, that is very true. We had a great flight. We got down here.
PJ picked us up from the airport during peak traffic, so we got to really grind
it out in L.A. traffic, you know, get the full experience.
And then the next morning, we arrived with all of the most essential tools.
Okay, we have arrived Friday morning at the van. we've got our snake oil and caffeine.

(30:24):
The two most important things for this project really are just for my mental
well-being and then Brett, you got the home assistant stuff, right?
I got bananas. Okay, home assistant's next. Jack. Okay. Yeah,
we'll use the jack after we get home assistant running. Yeah,
that's the person on the list.
Don't worry. We got home. This isn't running. We're getting to that.
But we thought, we knew we had all four new tires needed to go on.

(30:48):
Desperately.
They were in rough shape.
Desperately.
And we figured there may be a few other things that would surprise us.
But one of the surprises was one of the more complicated things to solve.
And it involves the fuel system.
Oh, Chris, tell us about it. We put a new fuel filter in because the lines were real bad.

(31:10):
And jeff like drained the old filter and black stuff
came out it was oh we put a new like temporary
filter in so sweet and then we ran it you can see all that beautiful uh yeah
now we're good to try to roll we're gonna see if she rolls um and the fuel filter
is replaceable so if it clogs up while we're going down the road it should be
serviced clear so we can see yeah we can check on it look at that good work boys what.

(31:36):
We really had no idea was what's in this tank Like, we knew it was bad,
but we didn't know how bad.
Well, we knew the engine ran on it. I mean, this engine is classic for running
on almost anything, so that's maybe not saying that much.
And it did have a particular odor to it.
Yeah. Yeah, and that was one of the reasons we wanted to get some sensors running
on Home Assistant, just so we knew how bad we're killing ourselves.

(31:57):
So, you really, I mean, you think about it. We showed up Friday night.
Saturday is really when the work began.
And by the end of Saturday, it was just about ready for the road.
It was pretty much after six years of sitting, it took essentially one day of working on it.
Well, I'd say a day and a half because when we were at scale,
we did spend that half day making sure the engine started and we did a bunch of work there.

(32:19):
So I think that half day set us up for success.
Yeah, that's true. So a day and a half to get it working. And so Brent and Jeff
worked late into the night.
I went back to the Airbnb to crash early, crashed out. And we showed up for
our first day and our first really hitting the road kind of,
you know, like we're actually going to take this thing.
We don't know what state it's in. It could have all kinds of problems, but we're going to do it.

(32:43):
Okay, it's 8.04, so leaving right at 7 a.m., just like Brent said we would be, and we're packed.
It's the calm before the storm. We've got the front loaded.
Brent's now done the fifth cleaning of the windshield, which seems to have really done the trick.
Cell phone mount provided by Jeff is loaded and ready to go.
The dash is actually really cool. It's one of my favorite things of this rig is the dash.

(33:06):
Got the Red Bull ready to go. I think I'll be riding in the drinker's position. Brent will be captain.
Because, you know, it's his first ride on the freeway.
And then eventually, slowly but surely, I'll take the wheel.
You just watch. Don't tell Brent, though.
And that is exactly what happened.
Predictions! I didn't even know you said that. That's hilarious.

(33:26):
You didn't know I snuck that in there. You drove for most of the day,
but then you had like a snap of driving that was just unrelenting.
It must have been nearly 40 mile per hour gusts.
Apparently that's a lot in Freedom Units.
Yeah, it is. It is. and you handled it well because for parts of it we were
doing 70 miles per hour in the van. It's really kind of incredible.

(33:47):
Our first drive though, we set out, as you just heard there,
a little bit later than we expected.
So we had the kind of like, we better make up some miles and get going. The one problem is,
And we checked the weather apps every single day. I checked them every single
day for a week leading up to this, and I checked them the night before,
and I checked them the morning of, and it said it was going to be sunny and clear.

(34:09):
It's California.
It's California. It's going to be probably 72 degrees and sunny.
You're going to have some smog. Other than that, you don't have to worry about
it. You're going to have a great drive.
Well, it started to rain on us, and the one thing that we didn't take time to
fix because there was no need to was the windshield wipers.
Yeah.
So we had a windshield wiper problem, and then we also very quickly discovered another problem.

(34:35):
So it wasn't exactly problem-free.
We're officially off, not just for a test drive, but for a real drive.
And Google's helping us.
Thanks, guys. Yep, Brent's in the captain's seat.
And it feels great, right, Brent? It feels great. I mean, yes, it's great.

(34:56):
Yep, nothing to worry about. And we're hitting the road right now.
It's super exciting. It is.
We got Jeff behind us, so if anything catches on fire, he'll let us know.
According to the van, it's 5 p.m. It's actually 8.20 a.m. Yeah, same, same.
And we're off to the freeway. We have about five hours and 59 minutes of driving,

(35:16):
which you know is going to be a lot longer than that.
Here we go. There's one problem, Chris. What?
It's raining. Oh, yeah. Well, I wasn't going to mention the fact that it's raining
in our way. and windshield wipers don't work, because, you know,
we'll get some rain acts at some point.
Also, my weather app says it's not raining, so I wouldn't worry about it. I feel good then.
How quickly the optimism turns into the drive. I don't even think we made it five minutes.

(35:39):
Okay, well, we're at O'Reilly's, and Brent's under the van.
Okay.
This is uh like a horror movie i can pull you up all right you know we're two
minutes into the trip how's it going down there brent uh it's really nice down

(35:59):
here yeah it looks a little tight okay,
so good news is the terrible fuel
line that i think is going to explode is hasn't exploded
it looks good it's connected to the tank yeah bad
news is the tank is leaking from the
top of the tank and there's no way we can fix it without dropping the tank so
we're just gonna go oh it's the top it'd be fine yeah we just gotta bring it

(36:23):
why is the top of the tank leaking uh like from the fuel pump probably maybe
i don't know i can't see it.
We never managed to actually fix that problem i.
Put it at the back of my mind did you that felt really nice.
Yeah yeah that that worked That worked pretty well. And so instead of fixing

(36:45):
the fuel leak, we went ahead and, well, we fixed the wipers.
Yeah.
Okay, Jeff, let's give the new wiper system a try.
Oh, no. Just right. Well, we got a wipe.
All right. Good to go? Great.

(37:06):
Working wonderfully. I mean, I like it. Oh, for fuck's sake.
It was a little disheartening because the wiper system on this van,
it's definitely one of those that the auto industry learned from not to do anymore.
It is real rough.
Rough.
It's like a geometric puzzle.
And you can hear we're there in a loud O'Reilly's parking lot in the rain trying to fix this thing.

(37:29):
You boys did get it working after a couple of rounds. We did manage to get the
wipers working. So we got back on the road this time for real.
Well, quick update. We're on the road. Brentley's on the freeway.
How's she doing on the freeway? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
A bit floaty, but... Yeah, quieter than I expected. We got a window cracked
at the moment, but quieter than I expected.

(37:50):
And we got working windshield wipers.
Jeff's behind us, following. And she's doing really great. She doesn't seem
to be struggling at all on freeway.
She's a cruiser.
Now, you got to appreciate, we're still figuring out the electrical system.
So, like, is the gear powered while we're going down the road?
Does the gear reset when we hook up to shore power?

(38:11):
Like, how does that affect the server equipment? Because there's not like a
full battery bank in here yet or anything like that.
So we're kind of piecing all of this together, learning how she drives,
learning how the electronics work, if our systems are rebooting every time we make a change.
And part of my concern, especially, you know, for an older van that's big,
It's like, how do we do with the passes? Are we going to overheat?

(38:32):
Are we going to be broken down?
And then we're going to be sitting on the side of the road going,
maybe we should have worked on the new radiator instead of getting home assistant
running. You know, like that's what I was working on.
On the mountain passes, doing great. Doing 68 miles per hour on the pass right now.
She's a pass machine.

(38:52):
Super pretty views, too. Jeff in there. There's Jeff. That's Jeff right there.
Well done. The van handles the pass like a champ.
And we were kind of getting carried away. We were excited.
And it's easy to forget that this van sat for a long time. And sadly,

(39:13):
the previous owner is deceased.
And the van is not current on its licensing or its tabs.
Yeah. And honestly, you know, we're not really planning to stay in California either.
This isn't where the van's going to end up. So it's like, how much do we engage
with the California process versus how much do we just engage with the process back up in Washington?

(39:33):
And, you know, we were focused on things like getting Brent's land working and
his home assistant up and running.
Not so much like, you know, making it legal to drive on the road.
And unfortunately, this day, on this particular Saturday, the California cops
were really on their game.
And they noticed that Brent's tabs were expired.

(39:57):
And so not long after that last clip we got flagged down by a cop and we were like all sitting there,
Just like not even breathing, not even moving as the cops sort of came up alongside
the van, came, pulled up next to us, and then slid behind us.
I thought it was the end of the trip right there.
Next thing you know, the lights come on.
Yeah.

(40:19):
And he walks up, comes up to my side of the van because Brent's side was to the freeway.
So he comes up to my side and I'm clear he's doing the math.
It's clear because like the tabs are from 2019, the tires are brand new,
but the van obviously is under repair.

(40:39):
And he starts going in about how, you know, this thing isn't street legal and
it's supposed to be on a trailer immediately. And we didn't know that because we're not from here.
So he immediately starts telling us, you know, you're not even supposed to be
driving this thing. We're like, what?
Well, how do you, like, my question is like, well, how do we fix it up and get
it legal if we can't drive it? Because we got to take it to a shop, right?
He's like, well, it's supposed to be on a trailer. Oh.

(41:02):
Okay. Well, you see, I think everything lined up because the number one important
thing was, is I was wearing a camo O'Reilly's hat. So, you know,
I'm a car guy because I got an O'Reilly's hat on.
Great decision.
And Brent is a Canadian. And these two things, they worked well for us because
he saw that Brent was from out of town and he saw that I was from out of town.

(41:24):
So he believed that we didn't know about the trailer thing.
We legitimately didn't know. And then he also saw that producer Jeff had pulled over.
And so he knew we had a chase car. And so he's doing the math.
Okay, new tires, tabs from 2019. These two are from out of town.
They really are here just on a van rescue project. You know,
it's not like a drug run or something like that. And so...

(41:45):
He kind of changed his tune about halfway into the conversation,
and he started like, oh, well, if you're going to try to get this thing up into
Canada, if I write you a ticket or impound it, it's going to make the process way harder.
And the impounding fees are more than the van's worth.
I'm just going to let you guys go. I'll just, you don't need all that hassle.

(42:06):
And we're just like, oh, thank you so much. because this is the moment we'd
feared because uh cops kind of have a reputation for not having a lot of leniency
in this area so the elation we felt when we got back on the freeway was real.
All right here we go we're back on the road we gave him the story gave him a

(42:28):
smile it all worked out he's like we might get pulled over again so you better
give him that story again Give them the same story again.
Back on the road we go.
I shortly took over driving after that because after that's when we hit the wind.
That wind.
It was crazy. And so we stopped for gas, which we had to do three times in that six-hour drive.

(42:50):
And I started to drive. It was great. It's such a treat for me coming from a 40-foot RV to a van.
It must be like going from riding a bike uphill to riding an e-bike uphill.
That's got to be like the difference in ease of driving.
It's just, it goes from like a full on contact sport that's life and death every
two seconds to like this leisurely thing.

(43:12):
You got to be aware, you got to drive, but like, it's so, I mean, it was so great.
And so no problem completing the last, you know, 130 miles of the drive.
And we successfully arrived at producer Jeff's house.
We've officially arrived at Jeff's house. We're going to do some musical cars
so we can get the van back there tonight.

(43:32):
How would you rate that, Brent? How do you feel that went? I mean,
barring one or two things, I think that was actually excellent. Yeah.
Best case scenario, almost? Yeah. I think it was basically best case scenario.
Once we got on the road, it was the only times we had to stop was,
It did great. Even in the wind, it did really great. I don't know. It did super great.
Yeah. And it's a lot easier pulling in on these streets than it was on jupes. I'll just say that.

(43:55):
Pretty pleased. Yeah, I got to drive her in on the way. So I got to do a little comparison.
And I definitely give this the thumbs up.
Now, let's talk about the setup. So we've got a LAN right now that I don't know
if it's the permanent solution, but it's currently powered by the Slate that saved us for LinuxFest.
That's true.
So that's kind of neat. that's providing the local area network and the bridging to PJ's network.

(44:18):
And is also running on DC.
Yes. So everything's running on DC, which is we're trying to do as much DC first as we can.
Because when you run components with their AC plug in a van or in an RV and
you invert that, there's a 30 to 40% efficiency loss there.
So you lose a lot of power to the inversion process.
So if we can go straight to DC, we avoid that completely.

(44:40):
But what I really, really like is the hardware you're using for Home Assistant.
It's actually a rescued industrial system that is perfect for this application.
Tell me a little about it.
Well, I call this my Jeff Industrial Trash Bin Rescue Special.
Because I think actually all of that is true. Jeff, you found this thing somewhere

(45:00):
and put it to use in your own network for a while.
And very kindly donated it to our crazy projects. And now it finds itself in the van.
Yep. I got a couple of those things. They're perfect for home assistant.
So this thing is like, I don't know, it's a little metal box.
You wouldn't even think there was a computer in there, but you take a few screws off.
Yeah. It's like almost the size of like a cigar box.

(45:21):
Okay. I've never had a cigar box, but...
Well, we should get you a cigar box.
Oh, great.
Really, it kind of would make it smell good in here, I think,
you know? It's a good smell. Yeah. So it's a small box, but like you say, made out of metal.
Yeah. And you can tell that it's built to last. It's got, what,
two networking ports on there. It has an Intel Atom E3-827, which also has QuickSync

(45:45):
and supports ECC RAM, we discovered.
That's fun. Now, we don't have ECC RAM in there right now.
But we do have 8 gigs of RAM.
Yeah. I don't really think you need it for home assistant, but it's nice that
you have the option with an Atom.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And you've got a couple of storage options, too.
Yeah, this thing supports one serial ATA and also a m-serial ATA drive.
You had picked one up for this box specifically.

(46:07):
I think some incompatibility happened there and wasn't recognized,
but that was fine because we had two hard drive options.
Yeah. And again, this is a dedicated Home Assistant instance,
and the 120 gig SSD that's in there is plenty for Home Assistant.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So you tell me.
You got 8 gigs of RAM and you got 120 gigs of storage. Some people are running
this off of like Pi 3s and 4s.

(46:28):
Well, that's what I brought to run this on, and then you were like, hey, look what I found.
Yeah, let's use this instead. Well, it was beautiful because Jeff already had
it wired up for DC and everything like that.
Thanks, Jeff.
And it only, you know, at idle, I think-ish...
Is around 5 watts on DC and around almost 9 watts when you're doing the AC inversion,

(46:49):
which is either way pretty minimal. You also forgot to mention it has a serial port.
I did forget to mention that.
Yeah, so you could have a serial port on this thing too.
It has two serial ports.
Yeah, man.
The thing I like about it is that it can be mounted pretty easily.
Yeah.
And also it seems extremely robust. And I was looking at the manual.
It has like vibration standards that it matched and stuff. So,

(47:11):
like, if you're going to run some equipment in a thing that's jiggling down
the road constantly, that's probably a good choice.
Now, one thing that we decided to do differently than we kind of discussed ahead
of time, and maybe this changes how Wes does his Home Assistant deployment,
is we decided to actually use Home Assistant OS.
So it takes over the whole machine, and it does all of the Home Assistant management.

(47:34):
Has a lot of pros, but I kind of think one of us should at least also try,
like, the roll-your-own Home Assistant, deploy core, maybe manage it with Nix.
I don't know, Wes, if you want to be that guy, but now that Brent and I went
the Home Assistant OS route, I feel like one of us should go,
like, the roll-it-yourself route.
Yeah, I've actually already got it going via NixOS, partially because I had
a NixOS server stood up, and so it was super easy to just turn it on that way.

(47:57):
And all I really needed was, I don't know, like basic control of lights and
some smart plugs, at least, you know, starting now.
So I think you're right. This means I got to double down on that route, at least for a while.
Yeah, great. Okay, I thought maybe, but I didn't want to release any unconfirmed information there.
Now, let's talk a little about what you've got working on here.

(48:19):
So when you fire up Home Assistant, it will just sort of auto-discover a lot
of things on your network.
If you've got an IoT device that's available for remote control or an API that
Home Assistant intrinsically knows, when you start a Home Assistant,
you'll just have stuff on your dashboard.
Which is sort of amazing and also could be a bit creepy.
Yeah, maybe. It works too well. Look all the stuff that's out there just listening.

(48:42):
So for Brent's setup, really why we wanted this is we want some sensors in here
because we think there's some exhaust leaks.
We know there's a gas leak. We don't know how much we're killing ourselves when
we're in this thing for five, six hours at a time.
And then also, something that anybody that's staying in a small space should
know is, after an hour or two, the CO2 buildup actually gets pretty significant.

(49:04):
And having a little sensor that lets you know, hey, you're getting close to
2,000 parts per million,
Probably time to open a window. And so a couple of sensors hanging off this
thing and then a WLED light strip.
And WLED is so great. I know you've just started playing with it,
but what are your initial impressions of the sensors and specifically WLED?

(49:26):
Well, I was able to get the sensors working somewhat, which I thought was surprising
because I had never really read how to do it or anything.
Right, because you're like tweaking a little YAML file and then you're building
and sending these ESP32s that power the sensors.
And the interface to do all that, I think, has come a long way since Home Assistant
started. So I'm coming in at a time when most things have been figured out.

(49:48):
I think that's really nice for someone starting out. But the other thing is,
I have you guys to tell me what to do.
So I actually got that quite wrong because I missed the whole component that
reads the sensors, which is the whole point.
So Jeff sorted that out for me. Thank you, Jeff.
But I found it to be super exciting because we had played with WLED,
which controls these little light strips that you can build yourself.

(50:11):
And you know me, I love that, using components that are widely available and
being able to customize almost infinitely.
And so just the idea of being able to use my building skills to also build my
electronics and home automation system is such a nice, beautiful combination
of the things I care about.

(50:32):
And so I thought, at least up to this point where I'm super,
super, super fresh, I'm having tons of fun.
When you think about it, it's such a perfect opportunity because it's a new project.
And so everything you're putting
into your new project, it's open and it's local and it's maintainable.
So you're not putting in something that's tied to a cloud service.
You're not you didn't have to create an account with a vendor.

(50:53):
Right. That is really big because that stuff's going to last a decade.
I think projects like this are perfect, but you could really break it down to
go into a room that you spend a lot of time in.
And are there dark areas of the room that you could paint with a little bit of color and light?
And that's how I look at it at home is I sit in a space and I go,

(51:14):
where does the light drop off in this room?
Where would it look nice to have a little glow or a little color accent?
And I just kind of sit there and I visualize it. And then I stick in WLED strips in those spots.
And nine times out of ten, I love it. And so you have both opportunities right now.
Both, it's a new project where you're putting things in that you can maintain
and you can support directly.

(51:37):
That's so rare in technology. But also, it's a blank canvas in that there's
all these spots you could put light in.
You can just spend time in the space and slowly build it to your liking and tweak it.
It doesn't have to be something that you get done in one weekend or something like that.
You can spend a year doing it if you want and just do it slowly and say, oh, you know what?
I'd like a little light here or I'd like the dashboard to be right here.
Because along with this, a listener contributed weeks and maybe a year ago,

(52:01):
even an Android tablet that has been in the studio.
It's not a it's not like a barn burner tablet.
It's, you know, it's like running Android nine, actually.
That's my favorite Android.
Well, there you go. It is very classic, but it was it's going to make a perfect
mounted dashboard in your rig.
And I'm a big fan of having a dashboard where you can see what's going on, like your CO2 sensors.

(52:23):
And if you have others that are using the space, it makes it much easier for them.
And so this thing is a 10-inch tablet.
It's got 32 gigs of space, 2 gigs of RAM, and all you need to do is run a web browser or the app.
So I think it's going to be perfect. You mount that on the wall,
you'll get all your data.
We should think about it so you can see it while you're going down the road

(52:45):
too, so you can look at the CO2 sensor while you're going down the road.
I think you're trying to tell me I need multiple dashboards.
You might need multiple dashboards. All right, so you can always pull it up on your phone.
I think i have a couple things to reflect on
there one is thank you listeners and producer jeff and everyone who left parts
at the studio for me to pilfer and uh include in this crazy project uh it's

(53:06):
really fun to reuse you know that this and this van is reused the everything
in here is being rescued right including the networking and everything so we.
Were joking um on the pre-show with the members that,
including the van, all the work we put into it, and all the gear,
like all the parts for the automation and the networking and the lighting and

(53:28):
the sensors, we're probably still less than a MacBook of total money invested.
It's so true.
It's crazy. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but that's just wild when you think about it.
And the other concept here is, what were you, you were talking about, which is,
I guess I look at it as the open source concept of this project,
which is that I, this is a crazy new lifestyle idea that we've just randomly come up for, for me.

(53:53):
I think I'm going to love it. I have no idea. And I also don't know how I'm
going to use the space, right? I've never, the most time I've spent is in Lady Joops.
You spent the night in here last night.
Well, that is true. It felt like that needed to happen.
Yeah, breaking it in. Yeah.
But I love the idea that we can take these components that are modular, try a thing out.

(54:14):
Oh, maybe you don't like it there. Or maybe you don't like this light strip in that location.
Maybe you don't like this sensor because it's not accurate enough.
And you can just replace those components individually.
That speaks so much to, I think, the things us and the listeners care about.
And that's the part I'm most excited about is this building block approach to this entire project.

(54:37):
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(54:58):
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(55:21):
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and then you can just send them over to Fountain.
But really, it's not really the focus of this.
The focus is sending value back to the show and also communicating with us because

(56:06):
it's a virtuous cycle, not a bad cycle, but a virtuous one. Is that the right,
am I using that word right, Brent?
Yes.
Virtuous? What would be the bad version?
Vicious. Oh, right. That's what the advertising system is.
And I, I, I try to walk this line as best I can, but I have to say,
like, if you knew how most of these ad deals went down or how most interviews

(56:28):
end up on podcasts, not ours, but if you knew a lot of them out there,
uh, you would be so radicalized against the advertising model that,
uh, you would be so on board with the direct support model that I think we'd
be sitting in a million-dollar van.
You know what I'm saying? Not a MacBook van. But until we get there one day,
until humanity sees the light, it's up to the individual listeners.

(56:53):
And for that, we're so grateful to them and our members. Thank you so much.
LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership. And if you want to boost and try out a
podcasting Twitter app, it's got transcripts.
Yeah, this show's got transcripts. It's got cloud chapters.
You get releases within 90 seconds. and you get the live stream all in one app.
Oh, yeah, plus the boosting.
That's what podcasting 2.0 is about. It's a brand new standard.

(57:14):
You're going to love it. We'll have links in the show notes.
Now, I have to say, I'm completely new, A, to this, like, house on wheels lifestyle,
B, to this home assistant lifestyle.
And so I just want to hear from listeners, what are we doing wrong?
What have I not thought about? what is a good suggestion on how to set these

(57:38):
things up yeah what do i need to look out for in all of these new yeah like even gear like.
Sensors and accessories with homo system i mean you're starting fresh there
you're starting fresh with the van there's like power things you need to learn.
Battery systems and all these tips you don't figure out till you get into it
like one tip i should probably give myself is these slates burn out after about
a year of using them full time don't use that yeah there's probably something else so yeah.

(58:02):
There we should probably you replace that slate with.
Something. Yeah.
Like something a little more robust.
There's a big list of things we should do to this thing.
We could use some advice.
So please, yes, send in your tips. I would really appreciate that.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Well, our first boost comes from the dude abides who gives us a nice baller boost.

(58:29):
53,637 sats, and he says something small to fund Brent's adventures.
That's so sweet.
Isn't that? Thank you very much. That's great.
I did say that you could name the component that you would like to buy with
your boost. So maybe, you know, we had someone buy the oil that we put into
the engine last time around.

(58:49):
That could be a tank of gas, almost a tank of gas.
Well, if you want to get a tank of gas to rescue this thing.
It's a little bit more in California than 50 bucks.
Oh, gosh, is it ever.
So bad.
Oh, man.
Odyssey Westra boosts in with 5,000 sets.
Loving watching y'all live. Just want to put a shout out for your eastern neighbors over in Spokane.

(59:12):
Ever since the last meetup, it jump-started interest in our local lug.
So if you happen to live in the inland area, come meet us at Denny's on Division.
We have users of all walks of life and even have started meetings in those with
an interest in home automation.
So check out spokanelinux.home.blog. And Odyssey says, can't wait till the next

(59:33):
JB meetup over here, too.
Odyssey, congratulations. That is really awesome. That's so great to hear.
So SpokaneLinux.home.blog.
And they're getting into home automation stuff just at the right time, too.
You know, I think this may be the closest lug to my home that I know about,
even though it's in a different country. So you might just see me out there

(59:54):
at some point. No promises.
Well, Otterbrain sent in 10,000 Satoshis.
Setting up a fresh system and wondering, do you have any suggestions for clever
names for your computers?
Wes, do you have any naming systems that you use for like your home machines?
Oh, I've kind of vacillated with different systems over the years.

(01:00:15):
You know, it was Star Trek things for a while.
It was Stargate things for a while. Literary references.
So it never actually manages to stay super consistent for that long.
So you might as well be just as served by picking a fun list of words. I don't know.
Yeah. I look at that as seasonal or themes.
So I remember I'll pull out an old computer like, oh, yeah, this is when I used

(01:00:36):
to name computers after solar system objects.
Exactly.
I like it.
You have eras.
Yeah, eras. Exactly. Do you have a system, Brent, that you use for naming things?
You know, I actually struggled with this very same question for a long time
because I thought, like, once you name a thing, then that just sticks, right?
So how could you possibly choose the right one in the first go?
And I because of that indecision just landed on like shortened nicknames of

(01:01:01):
products like this thing in front of me is Fram.
Because it's.
My framework and that just has balanced between like the logical thing that
it's actually called versus the quick fun nickname that.
I give it I sometimes do that too so like if I have a Dell XBS with Ubuntu on
it I'll call it XBS2 you know and things like that my ThinkPad.

(01:01:22):
Is named Pad but the star trek p-a-d-d.
Oh that's the best one west wins that is the yeah that is the winner right there
open source account it's a winner and he comes in with 2000 sats says you guys
sound a lot different live versus when i'm listening at 2.5.
2.5.
I do that's like doing 85 in a 65 no that's like doing 85 in a 45 right in a

(01:01:49):
in a like yeah that's just that's a you're speeding there buddy I.
Just want to try it. I'm not even sure what that feels like to try to understand, you know?
Brent, do you think he goes straight to two and a half?
Or do you think he kind of starts at like 1.5, 1.8, 2?
You've got to warm up.

(01:02:09):
Yeah, you crank it up over time. Because you can't just go right to 2.5.
Crack those fingers first. I do have a question, though, open source accountant.
When you see us in person, is it really disappointing or just high def? Let us know.
Moonenite boosts in with 2,000 sets. I'm on a boat. First ever live boost from a boat?

(01:02:35):
Yes! I...
That's impressive.
That's right.
I would like to know where.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Follow up. Also, it sounds like you're maybe getting into some more
Nix. So maybe boost it and tell us how that goes, too.
Mm-hmm.
Here I thought this week I was doing the crazy thing.

(01:02:57):
Right. Yeah. He got us. He got us. He's on a boat.
Well, user 137 sent in 5,000 sets.
Love the show and linux fest northwest has been awesome.
Oh that's good to hear i it was a really good year i
will admit um i think i was a little
nervous that we would get the bad weather again and maybe i didn't go as hard

(01:03:21):
on the i don't know i mean we talked about it quite a bit but i it it was so
glorious if we ever have another year like this again i think we'd be lucky
just weather wise i mean we're talking like you know mid to high 60s all day
long sunshine no clouds yeah yeah it was really glorious. Sometimes we get really lucky. We do indeed.
A Monday comes in with a Spaceballs boost. That is one, two, three, four, five sets.

(01:03:48):
And he says, live luck boost! Thank you. Appreciate it.
A Monday? I thought it was a Sunday.
On a Tuesday?
Thursday.
User 841 boosts in with 5,555 sets.
Hey guys, love the show. Really wish I could have made it to Bellingham this
weekend, but I'm there in spirit.

(01:04:11):
Oh, thank you. And thank you for the support. You know what?
That's helpful, really. These events are extremely expensive for us,
so we really appreciate it, user.
It's also always great to hear from folks listening live. You're special.
Well, TrueGrid sent us in 5,000 sats. This was my very first Linux Fest, and it was so much fun.
I'm glad I got to experience it, and definitely planning to go in the future.

(01:04:33):
Yeah, it was great to meet you, and I am really pleased at the positive feedback
we're getting from LinuxFest Northwest.
I'll pass it on to the organization team as well. Thank you, True Grits.
And speaking of somebody else we got to talk to at LinuxFest Northwest,
Outdoor Geek is here with 5,000 Satoshis.

(01:04:53):
He writes, if I can't use a Nix OS or a derivative, I would use a variety of
distros based on the system type and purpose. Yes, Bazite for gaming, Pop! OS for laptops.
But I don't even want to think about not using NixOS on my servers.
You're in good company.
Yep.
Mr. Pibb boots in with a row of ducks.

(01:05:16):
You know, I hadn't played StarCraft since high school, but now I've been playing
all week. Great episode.
Yeah, I think Brent can relate to that one.
Yeah, Mr. Pipp, it's a problem.
We were in the car the other day, and we started talking about StarCraft,
and Brent just says, I could beat all of you.

(01:05:38):
I think he's masked in the game.
Round two.
Yeah, I mean, first LAN party in the van? Van LAN?
Ooh, yeah, yeah.
Tail scale.
That'd be fun. Tomato comes in with 5,000 sats.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I use Alpine as my main email client.
It's a modern rewrite of Pine. It's under an Apache 2 license.

(01:06:01):
It is an application Oh, it's in application help.
It is fantastic and it's still, for me, the high point of command line usability.
It's incredibly powerful. It's efficient to use, but something anyone can learn without trouble.
Definitely something to try out for the command line challenge.
And I think Chris would enjoy Pico as an email editor.

(01:06:25):
I could get, I could definitely see that.
I'm very excited about the command line challenge. Obviously we're not doing
it while we're traveling, but it is coming soon.
And I am slowly building a list of all of the TUI and command line apps that y'all recommend.
So if you've got a few more to send us, it
would be useful because what I'm hoping if nothing else the TUI

(01:06:47):
challenge can just be a way
for people listening to curate a list
or to get our curated list of awesome command line
applications so even if you don't do the TUI challenge with us once we announce
it you'll at least walk away from the episode knowing about a few more command
line applications that are really really kick butt so if you know any out there
that we could feature for the audience that you think more people should know

(01:07:08):
about please do boost those in because we are collecting them right now and
we are going to announce the TUI Challenge very soon.
Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate you and appreciate the support.
We had 17 folks stream sats as they listened. Just a little humble.
A little humble, I'm going to admit.
29,137 sats streamed. Not sure maybe people didn't turn it on for that episode.

(01:07:30):
And you know what? That LinuxFest episode, that was a hell of a lot of work, too.
So if you love that kind of stuff, let us know. If you hate it,
you can also let us know, too.
I guess a boost is at least a little bit of sugar with that medicine.
You combine the stream sats with our boosters, and we stacked a total of 141,896 sats.

(01:07:52):
Thank you, everybody who supports the show, and of course, thank you to our members as well.
It makes, well, it makes quite literally all of the difference.
So much appreciation to all of you out there, and please consider supporting episode 613. 13.
All right. Which one of you found the pick this week? Because I certainly did

(01:08:13):
not find the pick, but of course I had to include it in the show.
You know, I came across this one in a hurry and I didn't have time to jump in
and I thought the boys are going to love this. So I sent it along.
Okay. This is a project that allows you to essentially turn Excel into a shell

(01:08:33):
and you can run Linux inside the shell inside Excel.
Haven't you always wanted to? Or even needed to? I know I have.
Screw Doom. I want all of Linux. I want all of it.
And what what's happened here is the author has created an emulator that's actually
doing all the work in a separate DLL.
So technically, not Excel doing the work. However, it gets loaded into Excel by the VBA macro.

(01:09:00):
Yeah, remember how VBA macros can do that? You can just, you know,
side load DLLs in there and then have a good time.
They're very safe.
Apparently entire emulators. You can just sideload an entire emulator with a VBA macro call.
So it does just that and then it takes the output and writes them into the cells of the spreadsheet.
What?
I know i sent in this pic but this is ridiculous linux and excel.

(01:09:23):
Slash dev slash standard excel.
Yeah right wouldn't that be funny if it just became an output device um i know
you and i both looked did did you find a license for this west i did not find a license for this.
No not in that repo uh the underlying uh
risk 5 emulator that's really doing all the work here that has an MIT license

(01:09:45):
and of course Linux itself is GPL too but nothing for Linux and Excel just yet
I will say I mean the whole thing it's quite impressive but the major limitation
is since you're running RISC-V Linux there's just the app compatibility isn't that great.
Yeah we really to take it to the next level you'd almost want like an x86 emulator.
I would love if this is like the inflection point for RISC-V this is what people

(01:10:08):
were like oh finally we have Now we have a reason to write applications.
I'm wondering, though, if anybody, if some crazy person out there could put
this into production for something, like, is there some use case for this,
other than it just being really awesome?
I mean, I think Jeff nails it. You know, maybe your local enterprise administrator
hasn't enabled WSL for you, but, you know, you really help your workflows out.

(01:10:31):
But, of course, Excel might be, you know, you need Excel for your job.
Right. Screw WSL. Everybody's got Excel. that's hilarious good point pj good point would.
We then call it wxl.
I think wxls i don't know what you held i don't know dude don't make the windows excel.
Subsystem for linux right.
Exactly oh no all right we'll have a link to that in the show notes you can go check it out,

(01:10:59):
Oh, those show notes, you ask. Well, of course, you can find those at linuxunplugged.com slash 613.
Now, don't forget, we need all of your tips for Brent. And also,
we'd love it if you joined us live.
You can make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We do the show live at 9, no, 10? Yes.

(01:11:19):
10 a.m. Pacific. We do the show live at 10 a.m. Pacific. That's why I put it
on the calendar, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
And we'd love it if you come hang out with us. Gives it that nice live vibe.
We'll have the Mumble Room going, which sends out a low-latency Opus stream.
And, of course, we've got it hot on jblive.tv and jblive.fm on Sunday in your
podcasting 2.0 app as well.

(01:11:43):
So with all of that said, I'll just mention, along with links,
you'll find how to contact us, our Mumble Room, the Matrix info,
our membership, and even how to subscribe to the show, all at linuxonplugged.com.
And then you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com and check out episode 20 of The
Launch, where we go way more into detail about Brent's van adventure.

(01:12:05):
And I'm sure we'll have more in future episodes of The Launch as well.
And then the final couple episodes of Self-Hosted, you'll also find at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
And don't forget swag at jupitergarage.com.
Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program.
We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday.

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