627: The 2 a.m. Rescue

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
So I was woken up this morning at 5 a.m. by birds screaming over what was inside.
A barbecue, which, by the way, once I got in there, they weren't going to be
all that – they weren't going to be that happy.
But we just moved a bunch of gear into this space, and the birds came down and
were fighting over it this morning.
And I could go out there and lift one of them and put them under my arm and
carry them around like a small dog. They're just these huge creatures.

(00:23):
And, man, oh, man, I want one as a pet so bad. Train it. Have it go collect things for me.
Levi's going to get a little jealous, though. You know, watch out.
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

(00:48):
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show, I tried to build a Linux desktop
using nothing but AI text editors.
I never touched a single config file. I just vibed it all the way.
But did it work or did the bots break it? I'll tell you about that.
And then Wes is sharing his tales from DEF CON and Nix Vegas.

(01:10):
Then we're going to round the show out with some great emails,
some boosts, some tremendous picks, and a lot more.
So before I get any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
lug. Hello, Mumble room.
Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.
Hello, hello, hello. Hello. We have a small team in Mumble today.
I think it's maybe this is the live stream summer doldrums, I suppose.

(01:32):
We're grateful for everybody that can make it. We're also grateful for the chat room.
And we're grateful for the friends over at Define Networking.
Go check out Manage Nebula, define.net slash unplugged.
It's a decentralized VPN built on an open source platform that we love. It's called Nebula.
And the entire thing, top to bottom, is open source.

(01:53):
So you can self-host all of it, or you can have the blissful piece of Manage Nebula.
And it is optimized for speed, simplicity, and they're using industry-leading security.
Nebula has a decentralized design that keeps your network resilient.
If you want to manage it for your home lab or for an enterprise of tens of thousands
of systems, Nebula is already doing it.

(02:13):
In fact, Nebula was doing some heavy lifting when you're down there at DEF CON
slash Nix Vegas, Mr. Payne.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, what happens when you're trying to host,
you know, you need to go get Nix packages even when you're doing a proxy or a build cache.
And you're trying to fight, I mean, not only just conference Wi-Fi in general,
but a whole bunch of hackers on said Wi-Fi, well, you bond as much as you can,

(02:36):
and then you use Nebula to tunnel all of that,
dedicated VPS upstream to just protect things and to make sure you have the
best possible routing out of there so you don't get stuck in a big Vegas mess.
That's really cool. And then they could just stand it up like that too.
Nothing else offers Nebula's resilience, its speed, or scalability.

(03:00):
And that stuff, it comes in just the network traffic usage. It comes in the
uptime and the battery usage for mobile devices. It's really fantastic.
It's why we're switching our infrastructure over to it and also the team behind
it are friends of the show so go get started with up to 100 hosts absolutely
free no credit card required just go to defined.net slash unplugged support

(03:22):
the show and visit them at defined.net slash unplugged,
all right so just a few housekeeping items before we dig into this uh the boys are remote this week.
Brent's off in Eastern Canada and taking over a parent's cottage and has a little spot over there.

(03:42):
Are the kitties with you right now, Brent, or did you leave them somewhere else
while you're recording?
I left them somewhere after last week when they had to just sit around while
I was doing the show. They asked to not be a part of it this week for some reason.
I understand. And Wes, you're in your hotel in Vegas right now.
Can you, do you have any kind of view? Do you see anything?
Well, you know, I do, I do have, I can see the strip. I can see the monorail,

(04:03):
except I turned off the AC to do this here show.
So I also closed the blinds to, you know, fight, fight that horrible sky death globe.
Yeah. So I'm just chilling here. No, I'm not going to complain at all then about the weather.
It's a little warm today, but I'm not going to complain at all.
It's nothing like Vegas.
I also wanted to give a shout out to a project that we love here at the show.

(04:26):
It's the Podverse Podcast Catcher.
It's a GPL open source podcasting 2.0 player. You see we also integrated into our website.
And they're undergoing a big rework. And it's going really well.
And they're looking for some help with a web app, perhaps their mobile app as well.
And they let me know that now is the time to engage. Mitch wrote,

(04:48):
I believe the new infrastructure is powerful and will hopefully be the best
podcasting 2.0 compatible software available.
And the backend components are mostly finished and the front-end website is in progress.
So if you know anybody that could help us, please send them our way.
So go find Podverse on GitHub. If you would like to help out what I think is
an absolutely critical project, we need more open-source podcasting apps.

(05:09):
It's not much of a thing. It really should be.
Also, call out for a sponsor that wants to work with us to get us to Texas Linux Fest.
The Linux Unplugged show is looking for someone to help us attend and cover
Texas Linux Festival, which is October 3rd through the 1st.
If you would like to help us get there and do some co-coverage with us or something

(05:31):
like that, email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
And if you want to get there and do a talk or something like that,
sometimes that helps the old boss, grease the wheels, get a talk in.
Their call for papers has been extended.
So you do have a little bit of time still. And it's October,
Austin, Texas Linux Festival.
It's one of the high signal, smaller events in terms of like scale or Linux Fest Northwest.

(05:58):
It's still a good amount. And the signal to noise ratio is really good.
We've always really enjoyed Texas Linux Festival.
Oh yeah, we had a great time last time we went. I'm getting excited already.
And, yeah, you know, I think there's a certain smoky flavor to those Texas-style
Linux hackers that you just don't get anywhere else.

(06:21):
Okay, Wes, so you are there in Vegas right now, and I'm just curious about how
the whole thing went, really. I know you had a talk, I think it was on Saturday,
and I think you had a chance to meet some folks. Tell us, give us a little flavor.
Oh yeah okay so like first time at defcon first time in vegas actually somehow

(06:41):
i've yet to yet to be here um you.
Are kidding me.
No wow.
Did not know that.
Um but you know overall i gotta say very impressed excellent
conference and just like super super friendly
folks i mean i ended up having a neighbor at the hotel in the room with me you
know we were able to just like walk over together we became friends for the
the whole conference and of let me uh tell him way too much info about nix so

(07:05):
first of all just like you know i'm no i'm no pen tester i'm not a reverse engineer
so i wasn't sure i was coming for the nix subconference we'll get more into
that but just overall i would say like if you if you are interested if you have
a budget to come to this kind of thing um much like the vibe at like a at a
linux fest but at a whole different scale like,
it's just super friendly and welcoming and so many people are here either their

(07:27):
first time or their 17th time but uh it doesn't really matter people are looking
to be friendly and welcoming and make new friends.
I was really here, of course, for Nix Vegas, which is, I guess,
the first time they're doing this.
And it's a community sort of sub-conference inside the larger DEF CON.
It's a common thing, right? They've got whole different villages,

(07:48):
they've got sub-treks, and they've got these communities.
And man, I just, like, huge shout-out to the folks behind all this.
Many, many of them, but in particular, Morgan Jones, our buddy Tristan Ross,
who was on the show and was a release manager recently for the most recent NixOS release.
Also Tom Barrick from Phlox and a

(08:08):
shout out to Dan Baker who also really helped organize this
whole thing who sadly got the flu and was not
able to make it to the conference but still so much
hard work you know going there and of course Phlox and
Determinant Systems were sponsoring to help make that possible and because
these Nix folks are just crazy they also
got some hardware support from System76 and Ampere

(08:30):
and Protectly and Next Computing because the amount
of infrastructure they stood up they weren't just like gonna be at
defcon they stood up like whole domains they had
this this impressive nebula infrastructure they
had powerline networking going they ran a pixie server
they basically rebuilt all of nix packages and pulled down all of nix packages

(08:51):
to build a binary cache running on their network that you could get to over
the powerline or the wi-fi that they were broadcasting and all of that is powered
by nix and reproducible And they're pushing as much as they can upstream to
a GitHub repo called NixVegas,
or the GitHub org called NixVegas that we'll definitely have a link to.
So they're doing Nebula over Powerline networking?

(09:13):
Well, I don't know that Powerline was in the path out, but Powerline was a feature that was attacked.
Love it.
Yeah, so they could go elsewhere in the convention center, plug in,
and then Pixie boot, because they were also running a Pixie server, of course.
Oh, my gosh, that's so cool. So I'm guessing pretty good vibes.
When we go to these kind of events, especially these more sub-conferences,

(09:33):
it's a pretty tight crew. Like you say, everybody wants to chat and learn.
Yeah, absolutely. And also just shout out to them because I got a little sneak
peek behind the scenes at the first night as they were getting everything set up.
And I can tell you that, like, they did not have a projector or a screen until,
like, 1030 or 11 the night before things were supposed to get going.

(09:57):
So, they were, like, improvising a backup.
Shout out to Andrew and Anna, who came up with, like, a sheet-based backup and
went and got a backup projector to try to make that work.
People like you know chris and rj there's just this whole crew of folks behind
the scenes making whatever needed to happen happen up to and including at the last minute and then,

(10:19):
morgan sitting there running everything not only sort of like looking at bgp
looking glass to make sure that the peering they have on the vps that's doing
all the nebula streaming has is like optimized but also running an own cast
server and obs and like doing all the stuff we do all at the same Yeah.
Right. Because as we know, although at a smaller scale, it's there,
you have the, you have the networking you have to solve.

(10:39):
You have the production technology you have to solve them. The audio,
I mean, there's so much, and I can so, so picture one of us doing like a backup
run for another solution while we're trying to fix the primary solution. Like,
You can really appreciate the hustle.
Exactly. It definitely had our kind of last minute, just figure it out energy
going on. So I naturally like that.

(11:00):
Also very cool is Morgan and Tristan worked on an incredible badge.
You know, like cool, hacky, embedded, styled badges are a big thing at DEFCON.
And the Knicks team showed up for Knicks Vegas and DEFCON.
Not only were they able to get the official SVG of the Knicks and Knicks OS logo,
though um but like you know they got this sent over

(11:20):
to a lab in um a fab in china
you know they got it all ordered uh it's powered
and built by nix i mean there's like key morgan gave a
great talk uh but like keycads in there they had
to use something called sv svg to shenzhen all
kinds of like hacky scripts and adapters to make this thing as
reproducible as possible so you can actually just go up

(11:41):
to github and like go get this awesome badge it's
running um some expressive like risk 5
chip on there the badges also have
wi-fi they join a wi-fi mesh and sadly
there was like a little bug in some of the routing so the sd card doesn't work
but it was going to be a full nix cache but it can also just be a nix cache

(12:03):
proxy so you can you can be cloning down nix packages and you can point to your
badge as a substituter and have it go over the conference like their,
sub-conference Wi-Fi to get your Nix packages, which is just incredible.
Holy. You had me at reproducible badge, but that's next level.
Yeah. And there's a bunch of Easter eggs on there. I haven't even gotten,

(12:26):
I'm excited to go, I'll bring it up and so you guys can check it out.
We'll have to plug it in and see what we can do with it.
I imagine this thing draws attention.
Yes. So that was what worked out. I was super glad. Next time,
A, I need more JB swag I can be given out, but then also Nick stuff,
because once I had that badge, suddenly I found myself being an impromptu Nick's

(12:48):
ambassador, which it turns out is a role I'm very happy to play.
So whether it was just hanging out while talks were going on at the edge of
the subconf area and talking to people wandering by, asking about it,
or as I'm wandering around at night, at parties, at meetups,
at events, folks are all like, oh, cool badge, so that's one line.
But a lot of folks would just be like, oh, NixOS, or I've been curious about Nix.

(13:09):
Oh, I've really been meaning to learn Nix, especially met a ton of Arch users
in that camp, where it's like, they just needed a little bit more of a push,
a little bit more of like, is it okay?
Is it going to be horrible to try to onboard?
So the badge was a huge win for me, because I just got to have a lot of great
conversations, chatting with random people, trying to spread the good word.
So is this how you ended up getting pulled into a 2 a.m. rescue session?

(13:31):
Yes, absolutely. So I was, you know, trying to pace myself, trying not to stay
up too late, but winding down, working on heading back from the convention center
to the hotel I was staying at.
And I ran to the gentleman I met that first day, Paul, and he was with some
of his friends and they were working on a CTF.
And when I walked over, they'd said something, what really made me stick around

(13:54):
rather than just saying hi was the combination of WebAssembly and DOS.
I was like, what are you doing with WebAssembly and DOS? And it turns out that
this CTF they were doing,
what they gave you to start was just a Z5 file, which is a game data file used
by the Z machine, which is a virtual machine for running interactive fiction

(14:14):
games, like from the DOS era.
Amazing.
So you could just play the game, right? So that was one way to try to go through
the capture the flag event.
But, and of course, probably I'm sure the folks behind this knew,
there's a debugger for these game files called Z tools. And so,
unfortunately, these folks had only brought a Mac with them.

(14:35):
I think their other laptops were back at the hotel at this point because it
was, you know, 2 a.m. And they'd been partying.
So they had a Mac. This thing would not run on a Mac. It would run on Windows.
You know, you could probably get it running. You could compile it for Linux.
So they were going down the path of trying to get WebAssembly and DOS so that
they could upload this debugger and the game file to that, which,
of course, was just going terribly.

(14:57):
So I started, like, I don't know, just trying to help. I was like,
okay, what about FreeDOS? Maybe like we spin up, you know, ultimately UTM,
which is QEMU, trying to run free DOS.
And then, of course, then we had to figure out how to actually get the files in there.
And are you using UTM x86 emulation for this, which is slow as hell on a Mac?
Yeah, I think so. I don't know which era of Mac it was, but yes,

(15:20):
presumably that must be it.
Oh, my God. All right.
Yeah. So they were finally able to get free DOS to download.
You know, you still have to somehow they have a free DOS live CD,
which is almost a thing that doesn't quite compute for me. But it is a thing. It does work.
And then it turns out there is a QEMU flag that you can just pass through like a fat...
Format it'll treat it like a fat device to attach but it has

(15:41):
some weird limitations around like being read only maybe and like
only 512 bytes and how do you then you have to make sure you can pass extra
arbitrary flags through utm so while that was like we were debating that i was
like okay well let me pull out my laptop uh i know i could at least like make
a like a loopback raw device that we could format like fat 16 and mbr and like
try to stuff the files and then maybe mount that as a second drive.

(16:04):
But that's when I finally, because I was kind of getting, you know,
trying to figure out the whole path they had gone down to get where they were
in terms of like actually what the problem up the tree was they were trying to solve.
And then I realized that the whole problem was really just trying to get those,
ZTools debugger working.
And yeah, that was just packaged in Nix packages. So I could just literally clone that down.

(16:26):
It took, you know, two seconds. And then I was able to immediately dump all
of the game data and share that with the team. and then they could start like
grepping through it, trying to find clues.
Of course, if you just grep for the word flag, there's like a,
there's an F you in there from the people behind it. Like, of course we wouldn't
just put this in here like that. What are you doing?
So I don't know how far they eventually got, but I was able to like give them

(16:46):
those text file dumps and at least felt like I was participating and helping
out. And hey, the power of Nix.
I have one question though. Were you out and about at 2 a.m.
With your laptop or did you discover them, come across them,
realize their plight go back to your hotel room get your laptop come back and do this.
No you know so that day not only did I not manage to

(17:09):
actually have dinner but I did not manage to escape the conference at all so
I had my laptop from being there during the day and I just never had a chance
to go back to the hotel so I was bopping around having having a couple of drinks
dancing all with my laptop so oh my gosh that's amazing think that it is uh it is a trooper.
Yeah, really? Wow. Well, also, before the show started, you kind of teased us

(17:31):
that you may have heard about a new feature coming to Nix that you are particularly nerded out about.
Yeah, right. I'm a functional programming guy. I like Clojure and other functional
programming. And Nix is a functional programming language.
And one of the things with functional programming languages is you're doing function calls.
And often you might need to chain some data through a couple of functions,
right? You call one thing to get your initial data.

(17:52):
You call another function on that to maybe modify it a little bit.
And then you finally pass it off to like the final thing that needs that data.
And with Nix, right now, and in a lot of functional programming languages without
these tricks, you kind of have to read it backwards, right?
So it's like it's nested with the last thing, you read it first,
and the first thing is all the way inside the nesting.

(18:14):
That can be confusing. If you do a lot of functional programming language,
you kind of get used to it. But no one really likes it.
Often you then have to kind of leave more comments in the code to try to explain
exactly what's going on with the flow. So I had no idea that this was already
a shipping experimental feature in Nix, and there's an open RFC going for it.
They're introducing a pipe operator, which just lets you do exactly that,

(18:36):
except it flips the order.
So you run, you produce your first data, and then you can just pipe it just
like you're used to in a good old Unix shell to build a pipeline that looks
in the proper readable order right out of the gate.
So it's like a small change on the language, but because this pattern is so
prevalent basically everywhere, it could be one that would be a huge win for

(18:57):
readability and hopefully something that makes it easier for folks not only
coming from other functional programming languages,
but actually the person who's the steward of the RFC was not a functional programmer before Nix at all.
And so they were actually doing this just because it made it so much easier for them.
So I had no idea. Some of the other folks I was chatting with who were definitely
Nix nerds in the audience also had no idea.

(19:18):
So yeah, they were also asking for explicitly support.
Well, I'll link to the RFC in the show notes. And go chime in.
Go try it out. You can enable it now if you have a new enough Nix with an experimental feature.
Then they need users to go test it and break it and figure out if it's going
to work so they can get it across the finish line and shipping and actually ready to go.
By default well Wes I got to know how was the Vegas experience given it was

(19:42):
your first time there but also we've heard some things that Vegas has changed
in a little bit so how was Vegas.
You know, I have not yet had to get to see as much of it as I would like. It's definitely hot.
It definitely doesn't sleep. But I like it, you know? There's entertainment wherever you'd like.

(20:02):
Always something going on. I know that's your style.
Yes, absolutely, right? There's no problem. I was able to go pick up some good
show supplies at like 3 in the morning last night when I was getting back to the hotel.
It is giant, though. So thankfully, the hotel I'm at is attached to their monorail
system on the Strip. So that helps out a lot because otherwise you really don't
want to walk, you know, 30 minutes and 106 degrees.

(20:26):
But I'm excited after the show today. I'm hoping I can, well,
maybe take a nap, but then go get off the strip, go explore some more of,
you know, the rest of Vegas. So hopefully I'll have something fun.
You know, maybe that vitamin D will keep you from getting sick.
Did you get to bump into any listeners or anybody that maybe you've known from other conferences?
Yes, I definitely saw our buddy Rob, who we had on the show,

(20:49):
who helps organize scale. He was here. That was great to see him.
And I ran into a few folks who've seen other conferences kind of all around.
But in particular, shout out to Britton, who gave a great talk about Klan,
which is a cool system we might have to talk more about.
He's also working on a pretty great looking, like based on his talk and based
on looking at his Hyperland setup, a very nice Hyperland setup,

(21:11):
sort of Omarchi style, but on top of Nix, powered by Klan. And I don't know
that any of that's ready or anything, but something I'm looking forward to.
And then also a big shout out to listener Lucas, who heard about Nick's Vegas
on the show and then flew out from Missouri just to come and check it out.
So super great. Had a lovely time talking with Lucas.

(21:32):
And he's actually in between jobs right now. So if you're looking for a sharp
person who can run your infra and knows Nick's, we'll have a link to lucasr.com,
which is his LinkedIn profile.
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Well after the show last week kind of just on a whim um i decided to show you,
a little tool i'd been trying out for vibe
coding i i thought you know mostly it was just look at how nice the interface

(24:29):
is it's really pretty i think chris will like it and hey it's packaged in nix
so we could just give it a try but like we were sitting around you know finishing
out the show notes i didn't think too much of it but it turns out that little
event seems to have totally reshaped your week.
Yeah, I kept playing with it. You know, the first thing when you showed it to
me is like, oh, this would have been cool while we had the TUI challenge. This is a fun toy.

(24:53):
And then I just decided to see how far I could push it. And I kind of created
myself a little mini challenge over the last few days.
Could I could I vibe code a riced up Hyperland desktop from essentially a base headless Nick system?
But before I get into all that, I do want to set the tone for a moment.
Because I realized, you know, we kind of touch on these types of topics once

(25:19):
or twice a year, but we first started talking about this with no hype in like around 2022. And,
I couldn't believe it when I went back and looked at our back catalog when we
started talking about LLMs and this type of stuff.
And I think we've consistently been really good about separating the practical from the hype.
And I think it's one of these things where we have very high expectations and

(25:44):
we kind of miss the trees in the forest, as they say, or whatever.
And I think because part of it is some of the things we ask these LLMs to do,
humans are pretty good at already.
And so we kind of are judging it with a high bar. And so one of the things that's
in the discussion right now around these LLM tools is can they code? Can you vibe code?

(26:06):
Can you build application using these tools? And then, of course,
people build these applications and they're pretty much universally mocked.
But that's a pretty high bar, you know, because even humans aren't very good
at developing software.
And there aren't a ton of great examples online. So if you index the Internet,
the average is pretty low.
But I had this theory, and I thought, well, what if I lowered the bar a little bit?

(26:30):
And maybe instead of trying to build a complex application, what if I just try
to build some configuration files?
You know, what if I try to just generate some YAML, or a Docker Compose file, or Nix, and so on.
And so that's where I started with Crush. It's like, well, I don't need to create
an app. I just, I want like a config template to start with.
And I started building on that idea. And what I realized, and I'm curious what

(26:53):
your thoughts are, Wes, is I have a theory.
And that theory goes that this stuff is a little bit easier.
It's a little bit simpler of a language.
And there's probably more examples of it online that are better on average than,
say, maybe code that these models have been trained on. So it's like it's indexing text.
And this stuff is just a little more straightforward. So maybe these LLMs are

(27:16):
just perhaps a little bit better at generating config files than application code?
Yeah, I mean, I think the limited scope definitely helps, right?
You're not trying to create a sketchy dating app so people will upload all their
ID pictures that you leak out on the internet or whatever. You kind of have some nice bounds.
There is a schema. When you go to try to rebuild or build whatever, it can shout at you.

(27:39):
It can tell you what's wrong. not always with the best error messages,
but often with a good error message or at least good enough,
you can pipe that back in and get some suggestions on what to do next.
Because, yeah, you're not trying to architect a giant distributed system with,
you know, a Rails application and JavaScript and how do you figure out the right
security and protocols and database and caching.
Like, it's a better scoped problem.

(28:02):
Yeah. And so, gentlemen, this was my hypothesize, is that perhaps this would
be something these things would be better at. And I sort of got to this after
playing with this crush tool.
But I wanted to know how good.
And I thought, well, how can I figure out how far somebody could take this?
Somebody who's looking at this as a system administrator or somebody building
a Linux box, not somebody trying to develop an application, not somebody that's

(28:25):
trying to create, you know, some sort of wild out there AI app.
I'm just trying to manage a dozen config files on my box.
And so I took my existing Nix OS system that I have at home.
And I essentially commented out everything but just the really base boot to
a terminal, hardware setup, you know, left the file systems in place,
but essentially just stripped it all the way down.

(28:48):
Which, by the way, is so great to build a load into a previous version when
you screwed something up, fix it, and then try it again and try it again.
Like, I cannot tell you how great that is.
Yeah, it's like, oh, I deleted too much in that build.
Nope, nope, nope. So I stripped it down, got it essentially headless,
and then proceeded to vibe code, at least attempt,

(29:14):
a complete Hyperland desktop with riced out way bar and settings,
custom key binds, theming, and more.
And I quickly discovered I needed to SSH into this thing because I have this
wide, ultra wide screen and Crush was horrible on there because it's on the terminal.
But using it i was able to build a real basic config

(29:35):
through through an ssh session running crush on that
local box i was able to build out a basic
config that i never wrote myself and what it really did is it i told it what
i wanted and it went through and it walked my config and said well okay i'll
re-enable this i'll re i'll re-enable this and i'll add this package and i'll
re-enable this and so it was really intelligent about well if i already had
it in there it would just uncomment it for me oh you already need you you already

(29:58):
have this and it's fun, right?
Because you pointed a directory, it scans that directory, it indexes everything
and it has kind of a cool look to it.
I mean, I thought it looked really neat. Brent, maybe you thought it looked,
I don't know, like it was trying too hard, like an 80s retro computer interface.
I know you had a chance to play with it.
I actually appreciated how it was kind of active.

(30:20):
You know, you were doing something, if you were waiting for it,
it had this sort of, I don't know, animation, but it wasn't over the top or it was super annoying.
It was just like, things are happening so surprisingly i liked it.
And it lets you switch between multiple models it supports open router as well
which is what i was using um so that's kind of nice did you accomplish anything when you tried crush.

(30:42):
I attempted something a different
direction than you i attempted to um pull the irc feature out of our jb website
because it's a thing that i've wanted to do for a while but I haven't sat down
and actually did it it didn't go so well for me but this is the first time I
try to you know vibe vibe so maybe that's on me sometimes.

(31:04):
The vibe isn't.
I do want to call out that the folks behind this, the Charm slash Charm Bracelet
team project, I don't know the full details.
But I mean, not only did they make it super easy to try with all kinds of Nick's
instructions and other distributions on Crush here, but it's all powered by
Bubble T, which is a powerful TUI framework written in Go that they make.

(31:27):
And then it powers other stuff like Gum, which is a tool to,
you can call out to Gum from shell scripts to like make fancy looking interfaces.
They've also got VHS, which is a CLI home video recorder for your terminal.
And they've got Glow, which is a tool I've used all the time because it renders
markdown on the command line that looks really nice.
So like, it's very cool to see them continue to advance and Crush is a very

(31:50):
impressive tool powered by some really good primitives.
And it is slick looking. It really is. And what's neat is, of course,
this is designed to look at a project directory for software,
but it treats the configuration directory like a project. And And then it understands my system.
It understands my sub configuration files, my includes it.
It knows I'm on a flake based system. Like it gets my box. And then so everything

(32:13):
it's doing is with that context and that understanding.
That's powerful. That's really, really powerful. And I'll come back to that later.
I do wonder, just because you mentioned, which you said you were using Open
Router. Were you using a variety of models or did you just stick with one model for this?
I did end up changing it. So I'll mention the model I use later,
the second model. But I started with Claude, which seemed pretty good.

(32:34):
And it's nice because with Open Router, as you probably could explain better
than me, Wes, is I've just put the credits in one place and then it kind of
divvies it out depending on which model I select on the tooling I'm using.
And you've been telling me to do this for months so I finally went and funded
an Open Router account and then yeah I selected Claude through that and I think
it's one of their later ones that's available.

(32:57):
I have a hard time differentiating all the model names to be honest with you
it's kind of ridiculous the branding.
Yeah it's getting confusing but you're totally right Open Router is just a nice
little service that sits in the middle so you pay them instead of having to
pay like six different folks and then they basically proxy to all the various
different LLM providers.
If you spend enough on credits, you get some free stuff. You can choose Claude

(33:19):
or GPT or Gemini or DeepSeq or open source ones.
And then it implements like an open AI style API. So it's super compatible with a lot of stuff.
So I was surprised how simple it was to get a basic desktop without ever writing
or touching a config file.
But it was really basic. It's like, you know, all the little,

(33:41):
because Hyperland is what you make of it. It's very, very simple by default.
And so, you know, you got to rice it up, as they say in that community.
And there's lots of little iterative changes that you want to make,
and you want to make them quickly. Because one of Hyperland's cool features
is that it auto-reloads when you change the config.
And that's, you know, when you're making little tweaks to your bar or this or
that, super great feature.

(34:01):
And you can move quickly if you have the right tooling.
And so this is where I decided to step it up. For the first time ever,
I tried out the Cursor AI Code Editor, which is a fork of VS Code.
I know there's others out there like Void, although I think development is paused for the moment.
Similar to Crush, you know, in VS Code, you point it at a directory.

(34:23):
So I could point it at my Hyperland, my Waybar, my style sheets,
everything that makes up a Hyperland desktop configuration.
And then I could ask questions against that configuration. So I could say,
for example, what key got, did I bind to Firefox?
And it would, it would tell me, but I, I could also ask it, what can I do?
What, what, what, what software is missing in order to accomplish this?

(34:43):
And as I started to use it, I started to
realize that you can kind of build a plan with this thing and then they'll go
and it'll execute through all of them and you can even let them run on their
own on the command line with your user privileges including running the build
tests checking the output when the when the build fails resolving those problems

(35:04):
and then building again until it works.
It's kind of wild right like i mean don't maybe don't give it access to your
production database just yet but like yeah i mean that's where i think the kind
of the agent side of stuff right like you not only does the lm generate the
plan but then like it will actually step through and execute all that and then
collect more data to keep this the feedback cycle going.
And then gives me a summary of what it did formatted a markdown which is great.

(35:29):
Right yes of course right turns out these lms they are good at summarizing so.
And and because all of this is just text files it's really pretty simple but
also the way cursor works is as it's going it's showing me a diff of what it's
adding and removing and I can approve each step or I can deny a step or I can stop it.
Right. That kind of critical human in the loop step, you're still in control,

(35:51):
especially because, you know, despite how much Brent and I try to lecture you,
you know, you don't always put all of your stuff in Git.
So it's kind of nice that you get that extra diffing that you,
you know, so you don't have to go full tool.
You guys were ringing in the back of my head, though. So what I did is I took
all my config from like my Etsy Nix OS and I staged it in a config folder in

(36:11):
my home directory so i had this working against that and then when i was done
and i was satisfied i would just like a monkey on the back end cp all the files over and then build,
so you know it was so i wasn't letting it just run wild on the bear system i
did move them over and then i would kind of like check it and then deploy it
and cursor because the time i was using it which was uh.

(36:33):
August 7th 9th 8th whatever they had
free gpt5 integration and it's funny because i've seen
a lot of people crapping on gpt5 this weekend but i definitely noticed a step
up in the thoroughness because they can research so if you have a model that
can can do a lot of things and that's one of the things gpt5 can do is it can

(36:55):
do research and the other type of stuff whatever so i could tell it,
I want a super riced out Hyperland theme that has my current IP address up in
the Waybar, my CPU, my GPU.
I want my network stats up there. I want the current weather.
I want a clock with a calendar.
Also, I want you to make sure that all of this works with a dark background.
And by the way, I don't have an NVIDIA GPU. I have an AMD GPU.

(37:17):
And keep in mind, I'm also on NixOS. So we have to work within these limitations.
It then kicks off a research job. It cites 16 different sources.
It reviews them against my current configuration. It then proceeds to modify
those configs to enable them.
And then if I need to install a package, it updates my configuration.nix.

(37:37):
It runs a build test for me, make sure that works, and then also gives me an
output of any additional software I need to install.
And I can either have it do it or I can do that. I just had it do it.
I mean, you can really get moving here because I don't know anything about Hyperland.
I don't know the names of these tools, these modules that you can put up,
and there's scripts that you can write. I don't know any of this stuff.

(37:59):
I don't know what launcher people like because there's multiple launchers.
Right. That's really sticking out to me. I mean, just like, right,
you were able to say, like, I want a RICED configuration.
I want something that's going to look nice like the folks over on Unix Porn Share, right?
Like, without having to have a super concrete list.
I linked Unix Porn. I linked some GitHub's in there for it to go check.
But that's, you know, it's one thing to know exactly what you want and then

(38:21):
try to get these tools to do it.
And it's kind of the next level up when you can just be like, I have a high level goal.
I'll know it when I see it. But otherwise, like I need you to suss out what
the even the possible steps are to try and get there.
Well, here's, and tell me if you think this is true. Here's why I think I was
having kind of a success after success for a while. It was going really well

(38:42):
because everything Nix configuration is text-based.
Everything for configuring Hyperland is text-based. And most of the stuff that
makes like the Waybar modules work is just bash scripting.
Yeah.
So this is like, this is its power zone.
It totally is. Yeah, you're able to turn so much of this stuff into,
you know, it's captured, it's declarative, it's right there.

(39:02):
And lots of people are pushing and sharing it on the internet.
So you have a good training base and you have the native medium for these tools.
So they don't have to go that far to be able to affect these changes.
I mean, I'm not kidding. I'm saying like this first initial success I was having,
happened in like the span of maybe two, two and a half hours.
I probably started around 8.30 a.m.
And by 10 a.m., I'm like, I can't believe how well this is going.

(39:27):
And I started, I was actually, I got back to work. I had things humming by 1.30
p.m. I had things humming to the point of where I was getting like that,
oh, no, I think I'm falling in love with this.
I think I'm going to have to change all my systems feeling. You know that how I get, right?
Like, we got to change the studio out. We got to change my workstations out. Like, I got to switch.
I mean, I was really quickly beginning to even develop muscle memory for my hotkeys that I set up.

(39:53):
So it took an LLM to get you finally, after years and years of the audience,
trying to get you to a toiling window manager.
Yeah.
Huh.
That is that is true that was 1 30 by about 2 p.m. it was literally all gone,

(41:46):
This is when it really hit me, like, I didn't know how I had built this, right?
And not only that, but my documentation at best was a couple of the prompts that I had saved.
Right, you had some intent, you had whatever the diffs were,
and how much you could remember of your vibe high.
Yeah, and this is right where it's like, suddenly, do you have the tools to keep going?

(42:06):
Can you get yourself to a state where you're like, well, I've made myself a
mess here, and it's almost there, but I don't know the right levers to push to keep going.
Yeah.
You had this all committed in your Git repo though, right?
Okay, I admit, I should have. That would have helped the situation.
I at least would have, you know, had a sense of like, okay, I could go check
what happened over there and roll back.
But no, and I started thinking like, am I going to, am I going to like try to

(42:30):
figure out the differences?
Am I going to swap the files? Is there some, but then I started thinking,
well, maybe there's something broken.
Do I try to rebuild this prompt by prompt? And then like, will I get a different
result? which, by the way, I did test.
And yes, I do get different results sometimes, like when I'm ricing out the
way bar. It depends on what I emphasize.
If I emphasize large text or certain style things, it's interesting what kind

(42:54):
of differences I can get.
So I wasn't sure what direction I was going to take. So I fired up cursor.
I explained what had happened, that I'd done a NixOS rebuild,
and I came back and I was essentially at a stock Hyperland desktop with like
the Omnicube background.
And I'm sitting there looking at my screen, I've been realizing I have been
working at this since about 8 a.m. It's now two something.

(43:17):
I need to just get up and get some air.

(43:56):
Yeah. So one of the things that we did, the LM and I, is we converted this into a multi-host setup.
And so each individual host of mine has a subfolder with its own config.
I forgot. I forgot we did that.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah so i.

(44:17):
Love this journey.
I know so but what's great is the
machine didn't and it explained to me what's going on and it's like would you
like me to just take care of the deploying and staging and then building and
i could just do that if you would like i'm not kidding you and i'm like yeah
why don't you go ahead and and just handle this for me uh because i'm clearly going to screw.

(44:39):
Up and from that point forward it did all
of it it i let it i let it do
the config changes i let it copy over.
My configs once i you know did a quick review and then
i let it do the the rebuild and i.
Let it determine when it should just do a nix os rebuild switch or when it should
do a nix os rebuild boot depending on the significance of the change and how

(45:01):
fast it wanted to test its considerations yeah it's crazy so this was i i recorded
one more clip sort of later on in the evening just sort of capturing my reflections on the moment.

(46:22):
It was sort of blowing my mind. I even had a hard time sleeping that night because
I was just running through how I just built a full desktop system.
And yeah, it took me a while, but I was playing around, right?
I mean, it actually worked. There was a moment where everything went sideways,
but that was kind of because I was trying new stuff too.

(46:42):
I was shocked that I got this far. Now, there is stuff that's not great.
I went through this morning. I was looking at the config files.
There's some areas where I was trying different things, and it's kind of sloppy
about how it commented a few things out. So it's messy.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. I think you could clean it up pretty quickly.
But I looked at it and I was like, oh, that's not how I would do it.

(47:03):
I am kind of curious in that regard. Like, did you hit, because what I'm picking
up, and I found this when I started kind of trying vibe shelling and stuff,
like, I mean, the vibes are good, the vibes are bad, but it is really like the vibe.
It's not just that you're riding the vibes. Like, it gives you vibes, right? you were
feeling super empowered and a little down at one point i'm
curious though like did you run because we're not just trying to sell

(47:25):
cursor subscriptions of course no i don't uh you know unless they want to reach
out um uh but like did you run into any points where like you just were hitting
your head against the wall or it was hitting its head against the wall because
sometimes you can get down loops where like the ai is confusing it and if you
don't have enough context or your own like escape hatches to tell it like no
you've gone down the wrong path here that isn't going to work.
Ah yeah i'm glad you asked this yeah one time only one time but one time.

(47:50):
It just got in this crazy loop of like, okay, I have to figure this out,
but then I'll figure this out, but then I'll figure this out,
but then I have to figure this out, and then I'll figure this out.
And it was like these three things, and it went, and it went,
and it went, and it went, and it went, and I just eventually had to abort,
and I just kind of restarted.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Again, I'm not trying to sell any particular product, and I would love to know
of free software alternatives.
But one of the things that's handy about Cursor is you can give it particular

(48:11):
config files as context, GitHub repo links as context.
So you can get back up and running pretty quickly after something like that happens.
I'm also curious because i was
running into this where it's like especially with those like when that's happening uh
suddenly i was like becoming more keenly aware that
like right i'm every time it's doing this i'm paying

(48:31):
for that unless i mean either in power and you know the gpus you've bought if
you're doing it self-hosted style or in credits or you know whatever so i'm
curious did you get any kind of rough spend because it's you know if it if it's
three or five or ten dollars that's different than if it takes you know 30 to get.
Yourself a desktop no no it was like eight bucks uh when
i used open router is all i spent when using crush plus i

(48:54):
did a couple on yours so i think i spent like 10 cents on your account right
but uh when i switched over to cursor and this was
kind of a cheat and i'm really glad you brought this up cursor was
giving away gpt5 access for the weekend they might still be doing it oh yeah
so i essentially just went for it i just went for it i mean hours i was like

(49:14):
i'm not going to stop because it's basically unlimited and so yeah that was
i love that you're essentially you're.
You're sucking up that vc money to build uh free and open source desktops keep doing it.
It does make me think how great would it be if you could accomplish this with
a local llm like that imagine if you could have a local llm that could help
you build these setups right because we're we're dealing with you know nix and

(49:35):
yaml and hyperland configurations and css files and bash script that's the entirety
of it it's really approachable i.
Mean and they're getting better and better. I think that's the future.
And I wanted to try this because Oma Archie impressed me a lot,
but I'd like to have my own take on it.
Here's what I ended up with that I like. You know, the cons were I think some

(49:56):
of the configs could be cleaned up a little bit.
But what I liked is, one, I could generate reports against my configs.
So I had to generate me markdown tables of all my custom keybinds so I can do
a little printout of that.
And you can just ask it things about that, which I found to be really fascinating.
And at the end result, I got a rolling flake-enabled NixOS system using the

(50:18):
Zen kernel with all its optimizations, ButterFS-based file systems with auto-scrub enabled.
Nick Store is auto-optimized, and it also does auto-garbage collection.
ZRAM is set up. I have auto-BPF tune enabled, auto-tuning the system on demand.
And it's a collection of what I think are some of the best-in-class Linux desktop

(50:38):
applications, riding on a totally rad Hyperland setup that I am very, very into right now.
I mean, really love this setup so much. I think this is my new setup.
And in hindsight, I wouldn't start with a naked MVP system, especially if you're
doing it on a declarative system and you have a high-res screen.

(51:00):
Just, you don't need to. I was doing it as an experiment and looking back at
it, I should have just started with the desktop I had on there and then just done this.
Ah, you like overly stripped it back thinking like that would make a cleaner,
easier experience probably.
But it turned out to be a little counterproductive. I suppose especially,
maybe that is true in other systems, but with Nix, I guess it's like it matters less.

(51:21):
So if anybody out there is running Hyperland or has done this type of stuff,
I'd love some advice from you. What to do, what not to do, what I should look
into, because I'm a total noob.
But Rofi is such a cool launcher because it's also a file browser,
and it can also give you a dictionary of all your keybinds, but it's also a
very fast application launcher.
And because Hyperland doesn't really choose anything for you,

(51:43):
I'm kind of picking and choosing. So I have Kate and Dolphin from Plasma,
and then some of the apps I'm using are GTK apps from Gnome,
but it's all running so smoothly on Hyperland.
It is what I've always wanted in terms of performance from the Linux desktop.
That smoothness and responsiveness with a hint of modern animation that isn't gaudy,

(52:05):
but a level of customization where I can do things that take extensions in Gnome
that are really straightforward like Waybar modules in Hyperland that aren't
going to break every time I update.
And so it's this it's this combination of
really practical key binds and navigation with really good tiling that's working

(52:26):
for me way better than I ever expected with this curated setup kind of going
out there and asking the internet like what are some of the most popular things
what are in vogue right now in hyperland and bring it into my setup for me and.
I think my biggest takeaway from this is, say what you will about these LLM tools.

(52:46):
I never wrote a single line of any config file of any of this.
I never touched a CSS file. I never touched my Waybar config.
I never touched my Nix config.
I didn't make the changes to make each machine have their own subconfiguration.
I didn't make the changes to have a declarative Hyperlin setup.
At one point during it, I realized I could do that, and it did all the refactoring

(53:07):
for me to make Hyperlin declarative on my Nix system.
That's awesome.
Yeah. And I didn't, I just told the machine to do it.
I mean, there was literally a point where I was just like sitting there sipping,
sipping on a drink and just watching the machine go and doing little checks
on it and approving things and okay, go for it or asking other questions.
That part was really powerful. As far as like these companies go and the resources

(53:29):
they use, those are all things we're going to have to sort out.
But I think we have to not discount their capabilities when you lower the bar
of the task a little bit to something that's a little bit easier for it to handle.
So if you wanted to create the next mobile app, like Wes is saying, that's a big ask.
But if you wanted to generate a riced out Hyperland desktop,
that's actually within its capabilities today.
And because it's all just written in text, I can just go through it and learn what it did.

(53:53):
I read my next config, I read the Hyperland config, the Waybar config,
and I'm done. And I understand what it did.
I think this is kind of the similar scale, like when we were at the Red Hat
Summit this year, right? We saw Lightspeed really being talked about as like
a command line tool you can use.
I think it's that same kind of idea, right? Like maybe it's not architecting
your entire OpenShift cluster, but it can definitely help you troubleshoot,

(54:14):
work with text files, modify them.
And then, you know, you layer on more declarative stuff and it just gets better.
But I think you knew I was going to ask this, but you didn't know the full reason.
While I was playing Nix Ambassador this week, I was actually,
because you had already like, you'd been teasing Brett and I in our private
chat, just sort of about what you were working on, how excited you were.
So I was actually using that as a selling point to Nix. I was like, yeah, well, I'm here.

(54:38):
My buddy back home, he's got himself a vibe-coded, super shiny desktop.
And I know at the end of the week, if he just pushes that up to GitHub,
I'm going to be able to just totally clone and copy it. And that's one of the
reasons I was telling people they should try Nix.
Oh, the pressure's on.
Are you willing to share?
Totally. Yeah, let's do that after the show because I would also like a set of eyes on these.

(55:02):
I mean, who knows? Maybe there's something in here that's awful.
I would like people to review it and boost in some suggestions for improvements
or fixes or additions or things to make Hyperland even more enjoyable.
So, yeah, I'd love to get it up there. I might put it on my GitHub,
I guess, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Perfect.
All right. You talked me into it, Wes Payne.

(55:24):
Unraid.net slash Unplugged. Go unleash your hardware, check out Unraid,
support the show, and celebrate Unraid OS turning 20 years old.
Can you believe it? What a testament to them. And it's also the 20 days of the Unraid summer sale.
It's really just begun, so it runs now through August 26th, and you'll get 20%

(55:44):
off the starter, Unleash licenses, and upgrades.
Also, every item in the brand new merch store, also 20% off.
And they're also doing daily giveaways, free licenses, merch bundles,
and even a link station NAS is up for grabs.
So if you have a unique Unraid setup, you can enter their Show Us Your System
competition. That's Show Us Your System competition.

(56:06):
And you get a chance to win prizes or at least bragging rights.
And I want to know about it, too.
So on August 30th, they're going to have a big bash. Their founder is going
to get together. Some friends are going to get together for Unraid's 20th birthday bash livestream.
And they're going to reveal the Show Us Your System winners at that time.
I think it's going to be pretty neat. They're also going to premiere their first
ever film and much more. Can you believe it?

(56:28):
Unraid.net slash unplugged where you get started. So it is happening right now.
The 20 days of Unraid summer sale where you can get 20% off the starter,
the Unleashed licenses, upgrades, merch.
And of course, they have the show us your unique competition going on right
now where you can send them deets about your setup and maybe get some swag.
I don't know. Maybe you get some bragging rights. I don't know.

(56:51):
You know, maybe there's even a little bit of LinkStation hardware in there up
for grabs. You just never know. You get started at unraid.net slash unplugged.
Well, again, this week we have a few new member shoutouts.
Dan is now a new core contributor and Jacob as well, which means we ran out

(57:11):
of slots for that bootleg promo.
Amazing. Thank you, everybody. We did, and then I got a couple of requests to
add some more slots, And I thought on it and I thought, why not?
If we get a few more people checking out the bootleg, I think they'd stay members forever.
So the 15% off deal, it's a great deal.
People love the deal. Best deal. It's back. And I added a few more slots and

(57:34):
then people jumped on it already.
So now as of this episode, there are seven redemption slots left.
If you use the promo code bootleg, either as a core contributor or for the Jupiter.party membership.
The Jupiter.party gives you all the shows and extra bonus content.
And including what you get with the core contributor, which would be the bootleg
version, the ad-free version, of course, and the direct support of the show.

(57:55):
So all of that is available with a big old 15% discount, which is a number that
hurts a little bit, but I love you guys.
You can get signed up, use the promo code bootleg, and thank you to Dan and
Jacob for signing up. Appreciate you.
Well, Brent, we had a listener, Aaron, write in, and he says,
Brent and I were trying to get a flake going where one config file has multiple

(58:19):
host names in it so we could have one file for all the store computers.
If any of you have any examples of this, we'd appreciate it.
The goal is to have a different hardware config automatically detected to automatically
format the disk, also have different host names for each computer they want set.
We're trying to manage these machines from a distance using SSH over tail scale
for updates, installing printers, and simple troubleshooting when employees have issues.

(58:42):
So you want to essentially have a system that figures out its host name and
all of that and configs itself, right?
Yeah, I thought, what the heck, anything is possible with NixOS.
So this is actually a little ask for my brother here, who has a few stores with
a few simple computers. They're just being hosts for employees who are just trying to use a POS.

(59:02):
And I thought maybe, well, it was over the Christmas holidays when I was feeling
all jazzy, about Nix OS that all these computers can just kind of be the same
and have really the same config.
That's a huge benefit and just be deployed from the comfort of the couch at home.
Yeah, I need to go into the stores to, you know, update these things.

(59:24):
So I was trying to help him get a nice little Nix OS config ready for these.
But I have to say, I hit the edge of my
knowledge in nixos and i'm learning a ton so we use disco to try to get all
the disks identical which worked amazingly we use nixos anywhere with nixos
factor to get things automatically detected and deployed and so we learned a

(59:48):
ton over that christmas break when we deployed all this stuff why.
Are we just hearing about this now what is going anyway go on.
I know right but we hit a bit of a brick wall in trying to make all of these
configs into one that we could just deploy by calling a host name.
So that's where both my brother Aaron and I are saying, hey, dear community,

(01:00:11):
Where do we go now? How do we do this? How do we deploy this in a way that is,
you know, future intelligent and also best practice?
Yeah, I'd be curious, too, because I've got plenty of machines myself.
I'm just wondering if there's a, do you have any code anywhere folks could look at?
Because sometimes that can be helpful to get an idea of exactly like the state
you're at now and then like where you're trying to go.
Boy, this guy, this guy with the put it up on GitHub.

(01:00:34):
Please put all of your things on. That's actually a great idea,
Wes. I have been scared up to this point to deploy any of my configs to GitHub
because I don't trust myself to keep myself private.
But maybe you can have a look at it and we can deploy something up there just
so that folks can have a look, see what kind of mess we've created and try to help us clean it up.

(01:00:55):
Yeah, exactly. You know, we could do some filtering or whatever.
You don't have to share all the private details, but just to give it a rough
idea of like where you're at
so that we don't waste time suggesting stuff that might not be relevant.
Though I am curious, maybe you'll have to try after the show uh i wonder how
our friends the uh so-called thinking machines might do with this one.
That is a great question i had not considered trying that but it's worth a try,

(01:01:20):
so if anybody has any suggestions we'll have a link to that and uh please help
us we're deep deep in it now.
Well it looks like we got another email this week this is cool because apparently
there's someone taking our podcast around the world as they adventure.
There's a little note here hey there just wanted to say thanks

(01:01:41):
for making such an awesome linux podcast i'm
currently cycling around the world right now in china headed
towards mongolia and your show makes the long hours on the road so much more
enjoyable you probably already know this but your podcast is truly global i've
been listening to it across many countries in central asia already keep up the

(01:02:01):
great work and thanks again cheers from javier that.
Is so cool thank.
You so much for writing in um amazing.
Yeah keep us posted and keep spreading the word too that's great thank you everybody
who wrote in linuxunplugged.com contact,

(01:02:23):
And, of course, you can send a message into the show and support this here show.
And we don't have a baller this week.
You know it's going to be a rough week when our top boost is WH-2250,
easy for me to say, with 5,000 sats.
He says, Chris, now that you have Music Assistant connected to Home Assistant,

(01:02:43):
the next step is to trigger albums, playlists, and books with NFC tags.
Oh, I'm going to pause right here, WH.
After the episode, I was thinking the same thing. I've got a bag of them.
And I do that now for certain lights.
So at night I can just like swipe an NFC tag. But this is a great idea for albums specifically.
And I think it's actually pretty spouse approval factor high.

(01:03:06):
I wouldn't say extreme, wouldn't say best, but it's high to medium.
He goes on to say, I printed a one-fourth scale milk crate to hold my LPs and
scan what I want to listen to. Oh, that's so cool.
Brilliant.
You could create a miniature bookshelf of your audio books and set up a physical
digital library. Oh, my gosh.
If I had the space. That's a really neat idea. I have been very successfully

(01:03:29):
enjoying Music Assistant.
Last night, thankfully, there were no kids in the rig.
I hit the book button, and for the first time, and I had been playing music
a couple hours earlier on all the speakers, for the first time,
even though my automation system played specifically on one speaker,
it played on all the speakers in the house.
Ooh.
Which if you know the kids are trying to sleep at that particular time would

(01:03:50):
have been that would have been an automation faux pas it was no big deal for
us because we were the only ones in there but oh man i was embarrassed for a
second so i gotta track that down.
Mjvc boosts in with 4021 sats and um yeah uh across uh four boosts here regard

(01:04:13):
first one regarding manuals and generally tracking of assets,
I highly recommend Homebox.
I use it to track where things are, where they should be. You can also associate
manuals, price, warranty, info, maintenance, all that stuff. Wow.
Yeah, it looks good. All right. Taking a look at that. Thank you.
Re-Homebox continuing here. Also, a system I've developed is to use a random base 36 ID, e.g.

(01:04:41):
X2GS as an example here, to refer to boxes, bins, etc.
This frees me from trying to pre-sort things e.g.
All cables should go into this box when i want to find the cable or random accessory
i just look up which bin it's in so you can stop caring about having perfectly
sorted labels for stuff and just let the computer do it wow that is clever that.

(01:05:02):
Is and also smart because i use my label maker so infrequently that between
times like the batteries are almost dead so it's always like just on the edge yes i go to.
Use it this.
To be a lot better.
They've also sent in for our binary boost, and they did send a binary sub boost here, a 1-0-1-0-sats,

(01:05:23):
I wanted to browse using parts of the binary solo from Flight of the Concords.
So we've got a link there. Maybe we can go check that out after the show.
Thank you. We always love links and ideas for that. And Flight of the Concords are just great.
And then one last boost here. Finally, regarding note-taking.
A few months back, I switched to ForresterNotes.org. It generates static websites that is, to me,

(01:05:48):
kind of like Obsidian if it were to embrace hypermedia and designed by formal
methods and programming language people.
And then, yeah, we've got a link here we'll include in the show notes. Fascinating.
That is interesting because often I would like to just share a really basic
website with the wife or a note if she just needs to review something for working
on something with the RV.

(01:06:09):
That's an interesting idea. Thank you. So that's fosternotes.org.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Well, we have a boost here from Wine Eagle, 6,000 sets.
It's across a couple of boosts first starting i understand that zfs being out
of the kernel is more risky to my boot process but not to my data integrity

(01:06:31):
and that's why zfs replication exists,
that guarantees zfs provides our light years ahead of butterfs butterfest send
is a week compared to the sanoid stack unlike my arch dkms days nixos also provides
some nice guarantees I like Butterfess running on a fresh kernel and getting

(01:06:51):
bit was probably not a great idea.
Combus got me to triple boot my MacBook back in 2007 in seventh grade,
but ZFS got me into self-hosting.
It's home for me now, and I suggest Nix OS users make three separate datasets,
one for slash Nix, slash home, and of course, the root.

(01:07:13):
So backups avoid the Nix store. also shout out to breeze for not even needing
an email super duper no kyc and go podcasting.
Oh i don't have the podfather clip but uh,
I think that recommendation of three separate datasets for Nix,
Home, and Root is clever.

(01:07:35):
So all my home systems are ButterFS for the data and the root.
But here at the studio, we're running Arch with the LTS kernel and ButterFS
on the root and then ZFS for the dataset.
And that's a really great combination too. And then you don't really have to
worry about, you know, some sort of regression hitting the most recent kernels

(01:07:55):
because you're on an LTS kernel.
So you can have both. It can be peanut butter and jelly, and that's just delicious.
Yeah, also, big shout-out to Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, a great way to boost the show
without having to switch podcast apps and no KYC.
I'd also just point out that for folks, Wine Eagle here mentioned Sanoid,
but on the Butterf side, there's also projects like Butterback,

(01:08:16):
which add some of the same functionality.
I'm not going to say they're equivalent or anything, but there are some options
there, some improvements around the sound receive stuff, and just more automation
on top of the tooling that exists for Butterfess natively.
Mentad's back with a row of decks. I think I was also hit by that Butterfest bug.
I had hard powered off my Steam Deck running Bazite, then it wouldn't boot or even mount afterwards.

(01:08:38):
Fortunately, standard Butterfest file system fixes brought it back.
I don't think this will change my use of Butterfest, but it was definitely a shock.
That's a great in-the-field report. Thank you so much for sending that in.
Sorry you had to go through that.
If you feel like sharing, I would be curious to know how you rescued a Steam
Deck. Did you plug it into like an external monitoring keyboard?

(01:09:00):
Did you boot it somehow? Did you have like a dock to share that USB-C port?
That just seems like that's sort of a worst case scenario. Like I was picturing
my desktop or laptop where it's pretty easy to pop in a thumb drive and,
you know, I have a keyboard hooked up.
So Steam Deck is a little more challenging. Good job. Well done on getting that
fixed. Thank you for the boost.
Yeah, how much of the Steam Deck, you know, controls interface work when you're

(01:09:24):
in an emergency rescue in it ramfs i don't know fuzzy mistborn comes in with a row of ducks,
Regarding those Ikea speakers, unfortunately, Ikea and Sonos have now ended
their partnership and the speakers are discontinued.
Given Sonos' good history of device support, I'm sure the speakers will continue
to work for a while, but you'll probably need to buy used ones going forward, just an FYI.

(01:09:47):
Also, for podcasts and music assistant, check out G Potter Sync.
It can even run in Nextcloud.
Yeah, how about that stack? So you get Nextcloud going, then you get G Potter
server going, and you connect that to music assistant.
So regarding those Ikea speakers, which we linked last week, you can still get them.
So yes, Ikea low-key announced in May that they are discontinuing that partnership.

(01:10:12):
And it's sort of a bummer because these speakers are essentially,
the Sonos equivalent is $300.
And these speakers are under $200, but they have the Sonos guts in them.
And the nice thing about that is, is it's all local APIs. So Home Assistant
should still be able to continue to control it unless there's some massive iteration that I don't foresee.

(01:10:32):
But because those speakers don't require the cloud service, they don't even
require the app, probably beyond initial setup. I'm not sure.
So I had my wife buy two of them. So she bought two for her clinic.
And she's liked it so much at home that she's asked for a music assistant setup for her clinic.
And we're going to put a couple of these speakers in. And this is how long she's had a clinic.

(01:10:54):
She's going to finally retire her CD player It's like one of those little portable CD player boomboxes,
And that's how she's done like the lobby kind of like, you know,
the music for a decade plus.
And so we're transitioning her to a music assistant.
I'm going to give her a couple of buttons to press to, you know,
play different types of music.

(01:11:14):
And then I'm also going to experiment with a Zigbee based. I couldn't find a
Z-Wave version. A Zigbee based volume knob.
So a physical knob that she can turn to increase and decrease the volume.
That seems killer.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. My advice, Fuzzy, is if you can find those IKEA speakers,
which we have linked in episode 626, get them while you can.

(01:11:36):
You can find them used on eBay, but they're not much cheaper.
And who knows what people played through them in the past?
Well, Gene Bean boosted in a row of ducks. He's replying to a question we asked
in Linux Unplugged 624, the one we talked about tiny PCs. He says,

(01:11:57):
hey, I don't use the Etsy's directory for my Nix configs at all.
I have my Flate cloned under my home directory and include a shell alias for
updating in my config that references where I checked it out.
Here's the alias I use on NixOS and a little variant for macOS.
Any links to a GitHub blob that you can have a look at?

(01:12:17):
I would like Gene's eyes on mine because I'm doing that now,
too, as of, you know, this weekend. but maybe i'm not doing it right so if you
have a chance gene to look at and let me know i'd appreciate it.
Yeah and gene's using here um you can specify a dash dash flake argument when
you do your rebuild and then you can just tell it you know whatever directory you store your flake in.

(01:12:38):
Thank you gene nice to hear from you brewer seth is here with 4 242 syats,
ice is longtime linux and homelab tinker but a new listener hey welcome aboard
and thank you for boosting you got me into bitcoin and lightning through your
value for value agus advocacy never had a reason to explore crypto bitcoin before

(01:12:59):
this week's project is a self-hosted albihub deployment yes yes,
Uh, next zap will come from my own lightning node. Thanks for inspiring a new
project. Isn't it fun? It is a lot of fun.
That is a great boost to end on. That really cheers me up. Thank you,
Brewer Seth, for updating us on that.

(01:13:19):
It's, it's such an interesting world to explore.
Um, you know, we, uh, just crossed the three and a half years of boosts on the
show, if you can believe it.
And Bitcoin is up 187% since we started doing boosts on the show.
The BlackRock and some of the other ETFs are now the most successful ETFs that
are based on Bitcoin in the history.

(01:13:42):
And that's open source software. In the three and a half years,
the shift is unbelievable.
As of last week, it's now included in 401k plans, if you want.
The level has really shifted and the Lightning Network has grown significantly.
Uh so if if you've been you know kind of on the fence i don't think it's going away also.

(01:14:05):
Albi hub just keeps getting better and better and better and easier to set up
and work with too so it's easier to onboard now too i think.
You know it was really it was it was out there on a ledge three
and a half years ago uh but it's really it's really gone
very mainstream speaking of albi hub this week in
bitcoin we'll have an interview with the co-founder of
albi coming out on monday and it is

(01:14:26):
fascinating what's going on over there there's a lot to talk
about so go check out thisweekinbitcoin.show on
monday for a new episode thank you everybody who did boost we didn't have a
huge episode a huge amount of support for this episode we had 19 of you stream
and we stacked 21,199 sats and when we bring that together with our boosters who we do appreciate,

(01:14:50):
We stacked 50,448 sets Of course that is split between the three of us Editor
Drew and your podcast app of choice,
I think maybe, maybe our worst week ever in three and a half years.

(01:15:14):
Yeah, the total stack wasn't great. The quality was high. We learned a lot.
We got some great tips, some things to follow up on.
And we did get some new members on board. So maybe some folks who transitioned
to membership, which we always really appreciate too.
But the systems are just getting better and better over time.
Fountain FM is getting easier to use. They self-host it for you.
The Fiat on-ramping is getting easier. apps like striker and more countries

(01:15:36):
and you know so bitcoin like i mentioned earlier is up somewhere between 182
187 percent since we started three and a half years ago the most generous,
generous version is the u.s dollar is down 10
percent in that time but it's likely down a lot more and we
could not have afforded a 10 percent loss that would have things

(01:15:56):
things are so expensive for us these days that would have been right
on the razor thin margin so the boosters they're still continuing to support
us so even if even if you're not boosting every episode your boost do continue
to work for us and if you would like to get into this fountain fm is an easy
and straightforward way to do it and it continues to go to work for us and we
really appreciate it i also appreciate those members i.

(01:16:17):
Do want to add uh just shout out to hybrid sarcasm and everyone helping out
in our matrix i mean even just this morning folks were asking about like how
do i get started with boosting and so if you are.
Curious about that kind.
Of thing definitely go hop in the matrix we can link there's an unofficial boost
support room or just chat in any of the rooms and we'll try to help you out
and or other folks will help you out.

(01:16:40):
But sincerely, too, thank you to everybody who is supporting us through our
membership. We hope you enjoy the perks and that Autopilot support. That's our foundation.
Now, we got a couple of picks for you this week. The first one is called FF Share.
It's an Android app that, as you can probably guess, is using FFmpeg on the
back end to compress your images, your videos, or your audio files before you

(01:17:02):
share them, which is kind of nice.
But you can also, I thought this was cool, for compatibility reasons,
just tell it every single video format i throw at you just make it a simple
mp4 that any stupid player can play.
Yes right exactly it doesn't have to matter about optimizations you don't have
to matter how much they know about web m just like just translate it please.
We have that problem in our group chats.

(01:17:23):
Yeah absolutely i mean like.
Pj drops a web m and nobody can play it.
I've been the guy who then downloads it on my laptop re-encodes mp4 re-uploads
it just because it's like ah it's bothering me but i'm just doing it on my phone
i mean come on yeah right i was just gonna say uh right there at the top of
their readme get it on fdroid get it on obtainium who needs the play store that's.

(01:17:44):
Right i'd love to see that.
I will say the fdroid version is quite hefty out
of 54 megs and my very first question was what is
going on here but thankfully they've written a little explainer says the apk
downloaded from fdroid is the app full versions with all the features and abi
compatibility included you can find a choice of smaller apks at the github link

(01:18:06):
which you can download using something like Obtainium.
Ah. Yeah, I would bet, though, they must be bundling FFmpeg, which is no slouch.
Yeah.
So they also have a little, just a little checkbox, remove all of your XF metadata
with, like, you know, your camera and location. You can include that or not.
I wish every OS had that in the share sheet by default, but this adds that.

(01:18:27):
And then for the geekiness factor, you can actually see the CLI output of the
FFmpeg command it's using right there in the Android app.
And then when the job's finished, it just brings up a share sheet.
It's pretty cool. Nice find. FF share link in the show notes for that.
And then we have, I don't know, maybe the second ever listener submitted pick on the show.

(01:18:49):
Alex Gates writes in, the podcasting 2.0 consultant. Hey, fellas,
I got a pick for you this week.
I've been a big fan of envelope style online budgeting made popular by YNAB,
which stands for You Need a Budget.
I recently decided to migrate to an open source, self-hosted alternative,
and I've been really happy.
It's called Actual Budget. It can be used with or without a server if you just

(01:19:14):
want to play around or if you don't need syncing across devices.
And of course, it has a desktop and web apps.
Recently, they added integration with a service for bank syncing called Simplefin.
I think it's worth checking out. And budgeting like this has really changed my life.
And he links us to the Actual Budget documentation, the Simplefin website,
and their bridge where you can connect your bank.

(01:19:35):
He says, with regards, your podcasting to know consultant alex gates oh.
This looks like some good stuff i've not heard of simple fin before but uh stands
for simple financial interchange and makes read-only financial interchange simple
it's like rss for financial information so hey you can see why yes our pod sage was interested huh.
I would very much very much like to get something like this running and i would

(01:20:00):
for me need to be self-hosted it would need to be something i run on my own
infrastructure so i i'm going to take a look at this after the show thank you alex.
I've heard repeatedly good reviews of actual budget this is maybe the fifth
time i hear this so i think i'm going to dive in as well.
I always just thought people are saying you need to actually budget man
you need to actually budget i didn't realize it was a thing um so also i'm going

(01:20:23):
to put myself out there boosting tell me how much you hate me now for playing
around with ai and how i boiled the oceans i'd be willing to hear those arguments
or if you've had any success like this i'd also like to hear those you know
boys i think the real like ultimate place for this to go is,
Is something you would run on your own LAN,
hopefully that doesn't consume a lot of resources that could help you with this

(01:20:46):
kind of stuff that maybe maybe isn't a model that tells me how to deal with
a foot rash or can tell and can tell me what temperature I need to boil eggs at.
But maybe it's a model that can tell me how a hyperland config works.
So it doesn't need to be huge. And it's something maybe I even run on my own
machine or I run on a local network server or on a Nebula network.

(01:21:06):
And I just point these editors at that, right? That to me is where this needs
to go next for probably folks like us to use this kind of stuff long-term.
Like, I don't think this is going to be a habit for me. I think this is sort
of a once and done sort of thing to see if it was possible.
Yeah, explore the edge of technology, see what you can do with it.
But you're right, like, you could, you know, you could have all kinds of different variants.

(01:21:27):
You could have them, you know, trained per operating system or the tools that you want.
You could probably also, like, you know, down the future, you could customize
it. You could retrain it. You could fine-tune it for the stuff that you've actually
been doing over time. There's so many possibilities.
And hearing about your adventure, Chris, I caught little glimpses of what customizing
a desktop might be like in the next, you know, let's call it five years.

(01:21:51):
Felt like there were some strengths here that we can't ignore,
and I want to rice my stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it was pretty wild. I kind of hope somebody over in the sort of
bluefin Aurora type distributions or silver blue, somebody does a really,
really nice opinionated Hyperland,

(01:22:13):
like an Oma Archie, or somebody releases a Nix OS based one that is really,
really opinionated. Maybe people know of some out there also boost that in.
Did I just hear Brent say he hates rising PCs?
I hate rising PCs.
Somebody give me a clip of that I want that,

(01:22:33):
All right. So that's it. That's just, you know, as we're kind of wrapping up,
that's on the back of my mind is this felt more like like an incredible technology
demonstration, but probably not
something I'm going to use every day until it's maybe under my control.
And if it can be limited to my systems or just the things I need to use,
maybe it's approachable. But let me know what you think out there.

(01:22:53):
And of course, we would love it if you joined us live. It just gives it a certain vibe.
We have that mumble room with those low latency open streams right off the mixer.
We do it right here every single Sunday.
Yeah, make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. We start at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
You can get it clack-related in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

(01:23:17):
And if you've got an app that supports it, Wes, what do we have in store for them?
Oh, buddy. Not only do we have chapters, which let you skip right to the content
that you want, But if you want to dive even deeper, we've got transcripts so
you can read along, throw it into an LLM, whatever you like.
So check the feed or a podcasting 2.0 app for that.

(01:23:39):
Yep. Have fun. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday!

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