629: Arch Enemies

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. Coming up on the show today, we're going to start with the
attack that's been going on for Arch Linux for over two weeks,
tell you what we know, and some quick workarounds.
Plus, we found some really useful apps that we're adding to our home lab this

(00:32):
week, so we'll share those with you, and then we'll round out the show with
some great feedback boosts and too many picks.
So before I go any further, let me say hello to our virtual lug.
Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room.
Hello. Hey, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.
Hi, everybody. Shout out to all of you up there in quiet listening and everybody
joining us live in the Matrix Room.

(00:55):
And shout out to our friends at Defined Networking.
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(01:16):
It's really, truly a unique product because unlike others, you have the entire
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You can do all those things, and it means there could be a few things you have
to set up. And you found Nebula Manager this week.
Yeah, it builds itself as a unified CLI tool to manage and maintain multiple
Nebula VPN servers with ease.

(01:38):
I don't know if it's fair to call it a TUI, but it sure kind of is a TUI.
It's very TUI adjacent if it's not a TUI.
But yeah, it lets you just manage all of the Nebula things you need,
including some niceties, like managing your local system's inbound and outbound
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So when you get Nebula going, your firewall just works.
And of course, they also support multi-node reachability. They have that latency

(02:01):
table where you can see how your latency is to the different systems,
which is really cool to look at.
Auto-update scheduler in there via cron that's really cool,
Very nice interface, too. It looks very straightforward.
Yeah, and I'm excited to see more tools being built on top because the open
source Nebula stuff really gives you a really good framework to build on,

(02:21):
and it's just kind of been waiting for folks to take advantage of making some
smooth workflows on top to suit whatever the particular use cases are.
And we're seeing more and more of those.
Yeah.
I thought every now and then I'd highlight a couple of them because this one's
really great. We'll put a link in the show notes. Nebula powers thousands of
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(02:43):
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(03:05):
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Okay, I got a little ask out there for the audience, for those of you,
and I know PJ is one of them, that have Frigate systems.

(03:27):
Something I've been thinking about for a long time is the Frigate NVR,
the network video recorder.
Really nice, and if you pair it with something like a Coral USB accelerator,
you can do a lot of fancy image recognition near on the fly.
And one of the things they've added in their 0.16 release, that kind of makes
me want to really go all in now, is they have license plate detection.

(03:50):
Oh, build your own flock, finally.
Right. I want my own way of knowing when somebody new has pulled up at the RV
when I'm not there or when it's somebody we know.
And so I'm on a farm and there are farmhands that have trucks and they drive
around all the time. And that's totally normal expected behavior.
Occasionally, randos show up or people that need help or service or whatever

(04:12):
show up. And I'd like to know when it's the difference between a vehicle I've
seen and and sort of proved and a vehicle that I've never seen before and then get an alert for those.
And there's a lot of cool tooling you can do around the learning in general.
Plus, as you know, everything I kind of look at these days, there's an angle
with Home Assistant here.
I mean, there has to be. Otherwise, you won't even let it on the show. I mean, what?

(04:33):
Yeah, you can actually like. So for this license plate, yeah, right.
It has to be for this license plate automation detection, for example,
you can build alerts and Home Assistant. So you can have home assistant aware of this license plate.
Yeah. Okay. This sounds pretty darn cool. I like where you're going.
I know. Very cool. But of course I have to do it the way that is the least recommended,
the least reliable because of my

(04:54):
situation. And that is I need audience recommendations for wifi cameras.
I know Chris use ethernet, use POE Chris use ethernet. They're going to be more
reliable. Chris, you got to use ethernet. I can't.
My God. If you want to come out and make Ethernet go through places that I didn't
know Ethernet could go through, I would love to have you. I'll host you.

(05:15):
You can stay for as long as you need.
But I need Wi-Fi recommendations. Ideally, even things that are battery-powered is a major bonus.
Like some of the commercial competitors, like the Ring and the Wyze cams,
maybe not Wyze, but like Ring cams and some of the others, they have battery packs in them.
So as long as they're on your Wi-Fi network, you can stick them out in the yard.
You can stick them out on the fence, all over the place.
Super easy deployment, yeah.

(05:36):
Yeah. So battery-powered would
be a major bonus or USB-powered if I can plug it into a battery pack.
And so I'm looking for outdoor and indoor recommendations, both Wi-Fi.
Yes, I know that work well with Frigate.
And so that's probably RTSP and OVFH or whatever it's called.
I'm going to be learning all about that. But right now, before I dive too deep

(05:57):
and spend my precious sats,
I'd like to get the recommendations from the audience out there because I've
looked at a lot of different options and I've just kind of checked out over
and over again because I could see myself spending a bunch of money on cameras
and not really having the results I want.
I know I have to lower my expectations when it comes to Wi-Fi,
but if you have any suggestions,
please boost them in or go to our contact page and let me know because i i have

(06:22):
a feeling if i can find even just a handful of good cameras i think we'll have
a segment on it pretty soon
and i'll do like a little frigate coverage on the show and try to convince you
guys to use it that's i always do.
Well the arch linux project has been getting hammered for just over two weeks
i was hoping by the time we went on the air today, I'd have an update saying it's over.

(06:46):
It is not. The attack is primarily targeted the main website and the AUR and the forums via a DDoS.
Arch's maintainers has confirmed that the incident is ongoing.
It is indeed a DDoS attack, and they're trying to collaborate with service providers
to mitigate it as much as they can.
However, full restoration has been challenging. There's even issues as of the
Sunday morning as we're live on the air.

(07:08):
And this also unfortunately follows kind
of a rough summer for the aur in general there were some browser packages in
july that were replaced that had the chaos rat installed in them we've already
talked the whole you know aur user repository stuff to death so i don't think
we need to dig into that too much but it's worth saying that it's been a rough
summer for the aur to begin with.

(07:29):
I try to use arch by the way.
Yeah oh is this really unfortunate i mean i don't think it even needs to be
said, but this is probably about as low as it gets,
attacking a free software project, non-profit like this, like Arch,
that's not even associated with any particular commercial company and it's just
people working hard trying to

(07:50):
make a distribution that people love and they're trying to run services.
I think it's without any question that we totally, totally, totally are disappointed
to hear this. Very frustrated,
Maybe we could get into what we know about it, but before we get into all of
that, why don't we just take a moment, step back, and talk about workarounds
that users of the show could potentially implement right now while Arch is figuring this out.

(08:13):
And then we'll get into speculation and other stuff.
Yeah, well, unfortunately, things like the mirror list endpoint used by tools
like Reflector, that kind of thing, well, that's hosted on archlinux.org.
So if that's having issues, which it has been, one
thing you can do is look at the mirrors listed in the pacman dash
mirror list package so you should probably already

(08:35):
have that on a normal arch system so go take a peek in there that'll
at least help you get some options and then the iso is also available on a lot
of the mirrors they link to some in their news announcement but if you're going
to do that or download stuff manually do uh make sure you to confirm that it's
actually signed by the arch trusted keys because you're kind of taking that
could be taking that into at your own hands.

(08:58):
I think maybe that's worth underscoring. This is a moment in time where it's
behoovant on you to be a little extra careful because these are times that attackers can exploit.
So be sure things are signed. They look legitimate. Take an extra step.
For the case of the AUR in particular, they maintain a mirror of AUR packages on GitHub.

(09:21):
It's kind of an interesting setup so if you go there it looks empty but they
have a branch per package and their announcement has a little tip about a one-off
git clone command you can do to just check out a particular package that you're interested in.
But that can be a backup way to get your AUR if you need to,
which is nice. That's kind of handy, even just regardless.

(09:42):
I mean, just temporarily, that might be the way to do it. One of the things
that the ARCH wiki, if you use the AUR properly via the whole guide,
they start with having you build your own packages.
It's almost kind of this is the moment where it's like oh that was actually
worth paying attention to yeah.
You know those make package skills they pay off sigh.

(10:06):
I've been watching social media. I've been seeing people talk about this.
There's been some good coverage, LWN and The Register, I think,
in particular, and some others had some good coverage.
Brent, do you have a sense of the impact on the users?
Well, people are reporting, basically, AUR slowness and occasional,
like, complete downtime, basically, which clearly will affect installations and updates.

(10:29):
So, Chris, you can't always update before the show. Sorry.
You know, if this had happened to the CentOS archives, no one would notice.
But Arch users, they're doing Pac-Man, SYU, you know, every two seconds.
Yeah, it's just built into the fingers now. Now, there is, of course,
some users noting that this has also disrupted OMarchie, you know,
that DHH Arch initiative that came out recently.

(10:51):
So the new setups for that have been quite painful. Let's just put it that way.
And some people have also, of course, complained about problems during fresh
installs. And DHH actually addressed this on X recently.
His Omarchi 2.0 release might have to wait a little longer.
The AUR denial of service attack has picked back up.

(11:14):
But the upside is that we're building in all sorts of resilience for the installer
to deal with this style of assault.
And meanwhile, we'll build a complete Omarchi package mirror for all.
Oh, that's a big thing there.
I think this is notable that, first of all, they're releasing it as its own
standalone ISO now, but also that this big moment had to be delayed by this

(11:37):
DDoS attack. That really stings.
It continues here. We're pulling the AUR out of the Omarchi install hotpath.
It's an incredible resource, but we actually only need a handful of packages
for the initial setup, and we can just host those ourselves.
So the AOR really needs a new mirror strategy to avoid this type of predicament.

(11:59):
Interesting. Kind of unfortunate that they have to do that, but probably a pretty
good solution. There has been some spec- Well.
It's at least resources, right, that I guess DHH can offer to a community project,
or at least to offload from, anyway.
Yeah, I mean, Shaw, I have never seen anything in the Linux desktop space see
this kind of continued momentum.

(12:19):
Him we could have a segment on every week of the show of people that you know
dozens of people that are switching it's really impressive so i suppose moving
that off of the aur will probably reduce some of the strain you.
Know steam is based on arch these days and it gets me wondering if they're having
issues if anyone's having issues with their steam decks maybe there's a different

(12:39):
strategy there do you guys have any thoughts on that.
They don't really take advantage of the aur unless the user drops down to desktop
mode and kind of gets that going so i suppose it really only impact them up
at Valve where they're building it, you know, if they're pulling things in from
the AUR, which isn't good. I mean, that's not great either. It's...
It's hard to understand why anyone would do this. I saw some people speculating that it's Oma Archie,

(13:02):
that Oma Archie has put so much traffic with the new users, but the Arch developers
have kind of distilled or dispelled that myth. So, no, we don't think that's what it is.
In the past, we have seen AUR helper tools that have been broken and unintentionally DDoS the AUR.
I suppose that could always be possible. It may be particularly hard to track

(13:24):
down. One of the issues is that multiple aspects of the Arch infrastructure
have been attacked, and the tools that they use to manage the Arch infrastructure are hosted where?
The Arch infrastructure.
You got it, Wes. So they're unable to access some of their own tooling to solve and mitigate this.
Yeah, so far they've only said, we are keeping technical details about the attack,

(13:45):
its origin, and our mitigation tactics internal while the attack is still ongoing.
So maybe when it finally ends, we'll get some more details.
Yeah, as we're recording on August 24th, there has been no specific group that
has come forward and claimed credit.
And there's been nobody that's sort of been trying to tie it to any particular people or motive.

(14:05):
But the fact remains that we're going on now two weeks of either some kind of
intentional attack or misconfiguration.
And I hope it's in a way just a misconfiguration because I'd be really disappointed
to learn that people out there would be attacking Arch.
And Arch has responded by putting up a status.archlinux.org page,

(14:26):
which you can check and see how services are doing.
Some systems are down right now. The website is down right now as we record.
The AUR looks like it's at about an 83% reliability today.
Not great. It was at 78% earlier.
And wiki is doing pretty good though. So yeah.
And the forum is doing better today. The forum was also, it's interesting that

(14:48):
it's different aspects of the infrastructure at different times.
Which kind of suggests targeted attacking to me. Again, these are just things
that are being speculated.
Some people have also speculated that it's somehow because of this malware that
we've talked about on the AUR.
And that people are trying to disable the AUR or something because of it.

(15:09):
But I think actually, isn't there just even a more recent malware incident?
Didn't somebody just slip something in again?
Well, yeah, there was the one, it was like a malicious package named Google Chrome Stable.
Oh yeah, it was Firefox and then Google, right.
Yeah, so the browsers have been a big thing of attack here.
And they're putting in remote access Trojans. And the Google one is the google-chrome-stable.

(15:30):
Yeah, it looks like a legit name, but by a brand new account.
And then Chrome does actually start, but it runs a little Python program first.
And then that turns out to be a remote access Trojan.
It can install other malware, spy on users, tries to connect to its command
and control stuff. It's no good. I mean, the AUR maintainers did remove it pretty quickly.

(15:52):
Yeah.
It did apparently still get a few upvotes, though, so some folks might have installed it.
I mean, Brian, this is what we talk about, right? People do need to be aware
of this, perhaps more so than ever right now as Arch gets more popular.
Good time to have those ButterFS snapshots.
I mean, it's really one of the main criticisms of the AUR forever is that anyone
can just upload a package, and there's not lots of vetting going on.

(16:17):
So even though it's widely used there's
no vetting and the trust is maybe let's
say a little questionable so they specifically
say you know arch devs are not responsible for aur
content 100 community maintained and unsupported by the core arch team so that's
super important to keep in mind that said i mean we've all loved the aur for

(16:40):
years and years and it's super useful chris it kind of saved you recently so
it's popular but you know you're taking some chances.
Maybe now, I think, you know, this is maybe a theory that I'm just roughing,
roughly trying out right now in the air.
Arch has gotten a lot of attention from a few vectors recently.

(17:03):
YouTube, CacheOS, and Omarchi.
And because of these, I would say these three things, it has drawn different
user bases to Arch, and it's giving Arch a lot of attention.
And so there's two thoughts I have with that. One, kind of coincidental,
the timing of this and its peak popularity right now.

(17:24):
Number two, what a damn shame.
You know, like, Arch has been building something incredible for many, many years.
And it's getting the recognition it deserves after so many years of being the butt of a joke.
It's getting the recognition, the attention, and the adoption it rightly deserves.
And then some jackass goes and does something like this.

(17:46):
And knocks them down and shakes people's faith and trust in the platform and
forces folks like DHH to rebuild their products to avoid using core Arch infrastructure.
I don't know. So right now, here's what we do know is we're now into the second week.
They have partial mitigations in place. Some GitHub mirrors are up.
I think Cloudflare has offered to help, but acceptance seems like the group

(18:10):
over at Arch isn't totally down to clown. The Cloudflare's like,
yeah, we'll help you with this.
And DHH has been very much like, you should take their help on this.
And they're very much like, we don't know how we feel about Cloudflare.
So that's where that's at right now.
There are some tools where you could roll your own AUR. So while it's up,
like you could mirror the packages you need.
We were looking at a couple of them. One of them, we'll have both these linked in the show notes.

(18:34):
But AUR Publish is one of them. It seems pretty straightforward.
And you can export things from the AUR and then build them locally and host them.
And Salvador is a similar tool. It's a little older. It's a Bash script that'll
help you maintain your own AUR packages and has some neat features in there.

(18:54):
You can also, it looks like, just self-host maybe even the AUR web,
like the same software running the main one.
Oh, yeah, that would make sense. Yeah, it's on GitHub. So wouldn't that be funny?
And then, like, replace the logo with, like, some sort of crappy,
like, your own logo kind of paint shop together.
You know, if you run a decent amount of Arch machines, maybe it's worth considering

(19:16):
some of these tools anyways.
One of the ways we could help the project out is just by taking some of the load off.
If you got more than a handful of Arch systems, maybe you should just mirror
the packages you use most frequently.
And some of these tools support fetching the latest updates and then,
you know, caching them locally for you. And then you update your systems from that.
I don't know, it seems like it could be a good way to do it.

(19:38):
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(22:13):
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Well, you teased a whole bunch of apps this week, and I've got the feeling one
of these might just be up my alley. But, Chris, what is it?
All right, Brantley, let me see if I can sell you on this one.

(22:34):
I think you're going to like it. I think it would be pretty easy to get going
on your machine in the van.
It's called Task Trove. It's pretty new. It's a self-hostable task management
app that respects your privacy. And I know that's a big one for you.
And you could think of it as offering a lot of the same features as the commercial,
like Todoist style and some of the other bigger to-do apps.

(22:55):
Yeah, it looks a lot like Todoist, really.
Yeah, right. Well, this is what I was looking for, something to kind of replace
Todoist. So obviously you can self-host it, zero data tracking.
They have smart task creation where you can use natural language.
And I actually do like this when I'm on the phone with somebody,
you know, call Brent 2 p.m. on Friday.
And then you can do subtasks with like rich text details

(23:16):
which is i use subtasks all the time you
know figure out linux unplugged and then there's
like 25 subtasks to that right and so it's nice to have all
that you can have reoccurring tasks set linux unplugged pending on saturday
and you can have custom patterns in there and it does automatic scheduling it
also has like a kanban style project organization with colored labels and multiple

(23:38):
different style views really nice clean design with dark and light themes,
mobile friendly, but also works on the desktop, keyboard shortcuts.
Mobile apps are just like a web app that works well for mobile too.
But are you ready for the big one?
Is it Rust?
It's built in Canada.
Whoa. Okay.
In Canada.
You're right. That is in my lane.

(24:00):
Really nice data storage too. It's file-based, which I always like.
Just a simple JSON format that's really easy to back up, transfer, move around, restore.
They are working on a paid hosted version. If you don't want to self-host, not available yet.
But also, it looks like there will be a way to have your totally private,
totally self-hosted version.

(24:21):
But still hook into a couple of the cloud features as well as contribute towards development.
So I like that there is a path to sustainability there, but it doesn't negate
you from using it full-functional self-hosted when they do get there.
They're not there yet, but that's what they're working towards.
And they're very upfront about that, which I like.
Really nice app. What do you think, Wes? Have you looked at the GUI and taken a poke at it?

(24:43):
It does look pretty nice. I will just call out, which is make of it what you
will. It does kind of have an interesting license situation.
Oh, yes. Thank you. Yeah.
Content of branches other than the main branch are not licensed.
Source code files that contain .pro in their file name or their directory name
are not licensed under this license. So there's some exceptions.

(25:04):
And then the whole thing is under a sustainable use license, V1.0.
You can use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes
or for non-commercial or personal use.
So there's some restrictions from your traditional open source license just to be aware of.
Because, you know, they're going to kind of try to find a way to monetize some

(25:24):
of the pro features while still giving you the core functionality.
And the core functionality is kind of there today.
But here's my final kind of pitch to you, Brent. Okay. It's a pretty new project.
And it's under active development.
And you could get in with your bug field today and engage with the developer
who is very clear about how you do that. You engage in, essentially,

(25:48):
the issue process on GitHub and walk through all of that.
And you could make an impact here. And you could end up with,
perhaps, your perfect task management application that's finely tuned for Brentley
and have full control over it.
Self-hostable, respects your privacy, has a sustainable path.
The developer is an independent Canadian developer.

(26:09):
And they're actively looking for input from folks like yourself.
That sounds perfect. I don't see any downsides. where do I sign up?
It's called Task Trove you can check out their, they've got a nice website it's
on GitHub obviously, but you can also go to tasktrove.io and see their fancy
website and it's just a simple Docker Composer way if you like to go that route,

(26:31):
or set it up yourself, there's a couple options there they have instructions
on the GitHub take back control of your productivity is their tagline on their main site, nice site too,
They've put some real thought into this. That's also what's jumped out at me
is there's a lot of care and thought into this.
And it's in a state right now where it's essentially ready to take on something
like Todoist. And they're just getting started.

(26:54):
So that's pretty exciting. And it kind of falls in line with taking these types of things.
These are little signals and bits of data that I used to feed to the cloud and
moving it to my own self-hosted network.
And what I really appreciate is it's one of these applications you can just
run and you don't even really notice it's going.
You can't really see it in the process viewer. It's just really nice and straightforward.

(27:14):
And then in the future, there will have more collaborative features.
I think that'll also be where some of the pro stuff comes in.
The cloud maybe enables that kind of connectivity.
So are you going to run it long-term? Does it have enough that you're able to switch?
The moment I could do collaborative tasks with the wife. Or I'd really love
something where we could use it too.
Sure.
Yeah. I'd even pay a reasonable monthly fee for that.

(27:37):
It does look like it's ready to go with Docker. They've got a Docker Compose
or just plain Docker or some manual setup instructions if you're down with PNPM. So that's nice.
Yeah, you could do it that way. Task Trove, link in the show notes.
And then here's the next one.
This one's really more for future, Chris. This is really, I'm trying to pitch to myself.

(27:57):
Could actually be useful for both of you, though.
This one's called Shuthost, and it's a little helper that manages the standby
states of your Linux boxes and supports Wake on LAN.
And it has a very usable web GUI to manage all of this. And here's where I've needed this.
I never need this until I'm traveling. And then I need it. And I need it every damn time.

(28:21):
Like inevitably something in the studio goes to sleep, usually the soundboard
machine, and I need to wake it up. or my workstation upstairs is asleep because
I haven't been here for two weeks because I'm traveling and now I need something off of it.
Or for some reason, this has happened, like some device at home has gone to
sleep and I need to power it up and use it.
And so this little helper gives you a web front end where you can have these

(28:43):
hosts pop it off and it's just ready to go.
He does disclaim that he did use an LLM to generate. It's not vibe coded,
but he used an LLM in some of this.
But you can manage the standby state
of Unix hosts with Wake on Land or a lightweight agent if you prefer.
There's a web GUI, which you can install as a progressive web app on your phone.
It also provides an API so you could integrate Home Assistant pretty easy with

(29:08):
just like a webhook call or build a quick integration around this,
which that would really take it to the next level.
And they also include some convenient scripts to just make it work for you.
And there's actually a respectable amount of documentation for a project of
this size. It's not a huge project.
It's a pretty straightforward thing to set up, but respectable amount of documentation
and future direction, too.

(29:31):
Seems to have both the Apache and MIT license.
Have you had this problem? You know, where everything works great,
maybe because you're there and you touch things from time to time,
but then when you leave, like, whatever... I know you don't have a lot of systems
running at home, but have you had this problem where, like, it's,
of course, when you're traveling?
Yes. For sure. Yep. You're out of your rhythm. You didn't realize that something

(29:52):
somehow has sleep enabled or something weird happened with your power and things
didn't fully come back online right there can be a lot of situations here's.
My sales hook for Brent are you ready,
I actually think something like this would be useful for you in the van scenario.
Really?
Yeah, yeah. So again, this is called shut host, S-H-U-T host, link in the show notes.

(30:16):
You got to have a minimal power draw in that van.
Like right now, I've been thinking about this. It's parked outside that fancy
hotel, really class in the joint up.
No solar panels connected.
Right. And things are just kind of running, hopefully fine, but you don't really
have visibility on any of this stuff right now.
These are really common scenarios especially for a
guy like yourself and it would

(30:38):
be nice to have things on standby not consuming power
but then with a tool like shut host being
able to fire things up so you have observability you could you
could turn on a camera system or you could turn on the home
assistant box you could enable more things remotely to
like check in on the box and then also use something like this to bring them
back down when you're done and so you could you know kind of like the mars rover

(31:02):
you could you know like the nasa people or the jpl folks that are powering things
up and managing things as they need it then they turn it back down like you
could do the same thing for the van with a tool like this.
So like when the valet goes to like try to start the thing i can boot the cameras
up and then once they give up i can just kind of put them back into a rest state.
I mean you know i do this not with this tool but you know that's what i do right

(31:23):
when i take jupes in to the shop that's true when the folks when the folks enter
the motion sensors detect motion and they activate the cameras and then I can
peep on the technicians.
I'm most excited about the API component of it. I mean, Home Assistant are not
just like for backups, for family backups.
Like I can definitely see my folks having machines that, you know,
they just power off and if I can, you know, wake up when they're in bed and suck up that data.

(31:48):
It also made me wonder, is there like a bit focus workflow for like gear automation?
Bit focus is such a great tool. If you have a stream deck, you can automate
so many things to get like a lab ready or a studio ready.
And so if you could just have a button on here that wakes the studio up,
so then you don't have to have the machines running all the time.
You can have them sleeping, conserving power.
You sit down, you hit one button, as long as the bit focus, Raspberry Pi,

(32:09):
or whatever is going, boop, boop, boop, studio comes online.
Which, you know, if you're doing it off-grid or something like that,
or have a little home lab where you want to try to save as much power as possible,
it's shut down the systems you don't need.
These kinds of things are just really nice. And part of it is having also a
nice little UI to do it, and the other part of it is something that works on
your mobile and then lastly something that doesn't take 10 years to get going.

(32:30):
And the config syntax for this is stupid simple. It's server name, port, the IP.
That's pretty much it. It's two lines.
I don't know if you noticed, but it is written in Rust.
Oh, I did not notice. That did not influence the pick. How about that?

(32:52):
That's true, PJ. You've got a solution for this already that doesn't require any Docker, does it?
Let's go use the ESPN and relay. Still need home assistant running, though.
I'm going to have that. Yeah. Well, you know, to be honest, one of the ways
I do solve this today, because I did not have this tool, is I just plug my PCs
and my monitors into smart plugs.

(33:15):
And the PCs and the BIOS are set to power on when the power is restored, just boot up.
And that's how i solve this and it's great too because the other night dylan
was playing video games too late and i use the intercom and i tell him hey you
got to wrap up and then like you know,
30 minutes go by and he hasn't wrapped up and hey you got five

(33:35):
minutes you need to get off the computer five minutes go by he's not off the computer so
i just bring up homo system boop kill the power he's still
sore about that one this is like a week ago and
he's still bringing it up but it's really nice to have that kind
of control over your individual systems and one of
the other ways i use this and you could absolutely especially like you
said with this api and you could do this without smart plugs

(33:56):
and brent's unfortunately experienced the downside of
some of these automations that always work well but when i
arrive at the studio uh the smart plug activates in my office and turns on the
monitors in my office and if the computer if my workstation isn't on turns it
on because it it takes an obnoxiously long time to post so by the time i get

(34:17):
up there everything's going and it doesn't have to be running 24 7 to accomplish that.
Unfortunately i didn't really build that automation with other people in mind,
which brent brent sometimes experiences when he stays at the studio yes.
I always know when you arrive at the studio though so that's a benefit.
That's true yeah i guess it gives you a warning that I'm here,

(34:39):
right? So you can chase the girls out.
I always know when you leave too because all the lights go out.
Sorry about that. I swear, one of these days, I'm going to fix that.
Unraid.net slash unplugged. Go unleash your hardware, and we are in the final countdown.

(35:01):
It is the final days of the 20 days of Unraid summer. Can you believe it?
Summer has gone by, and 20 years of Unraid has come very, very quickly.
But you're not too late. You can still save 20% off licenses,
upgrades, exclusive new Unraid merch until August 26.
That's your deadline. So there's just enough time to go grab a deal and enter

(35:23):
the Show Your System competition so you can win prizes during their live stream
that's coming up on August 30th.
They're going to have their founder there. They're going to have special guests.
There's going to be hardware giveaways. There's going to be other giveaways as well.
And they're going to celebrate 20 years of Unraid.
So go learn more by going to our URL while you support the show,
unraid.net slash unplugged.
Can you believe it? 20 years of Unraid.

(35:45):
Unraid gives you the ability to take what you have today the different size
drives you have in your closet, take the hardware you have right now and build
something that lets you run the stuff we talk about in every show.
You know, it's like one of these things where if you've got a few hours on a
Saturday, you can actually get up and running.
Unraid really does let you unleash your hardware and they're always running

(36:06):
on top of a modern Linux stack.
It's one of the things I like about Unraid is they have a legitimate monetization
strategy that means they can continue to develop and support your system for the long haul.
I mean, here they are at 20 years And it honestly feels like the energy they
got They're just getting going It's incredible So check it out,
that special deal goes until just August 26 The final 20 days Of summer for Unraid Are almost here.

(36:31):
To celebrate 20 years of Unraid Go to unraid.net slash unplugged Don't miss the big bash on the 30th,
Giveaways, I have a feeling too If you tell them you're from Linux Unplugged
You might get a little special treatment A little special attention You know,
they love you guys Alright, one last time Unraid.net slash unplugged.

(36:51):
Well, we've had another great week and want to say a huge thank you to the new members.
That's Justin N., Caden, Nathan R., Wesley J.P., Jonathan G., and Adam T.
And we have exactly one redemption left for our very special bootleg promo code.
Chris, what's this all about? There's only one?
Only one left. Take 15% off every single month forever. Thank you to our new members.

(37:19):
Thank you for supporting the show, putting that support on autopilot.
And keeping us going. It's a great feeling to see those come in and see that support like that.
Now, we also got some emails into the show, and I got various versions of this all week long.
So I wanted to put this in here because I thought BHH32 had a very articulate
version of this response, and this is in regards to our BcacheFS coverage and

(37:43):
its exclusion so far from the Linux kernel.
We talked about this last week, and I was pretty disappointed.
And I made the point that I felt like the kernel developers were losing touch
with the users on the ground and that it was now becoming feels over features.
Well, BHH writes that, Chris, I don't agree with your sentiment on BcacheFS.
I think it comes down to Kent's inability to adhere to kernel development policies,

(38:05):
his attitude and sneakiness trying to sneak in new features during a feature
freeze when only bug fixes are allowed.
Now he's dogging on other file system developers.
In any industry job, he'd have been fired a while ago. I don't think Linus is
in the wrong, no matter the technical loss.
If he were to remove Bcash from the kernel, well, it's just not fair to the
project and other developers to have to continue to deal with issues from someone

(38:29):
that can't follow the rules after being warned many times already.
And I think this is... There's a lot of things in here I actually kind of agree
with in the sense that, hey, if they don't want to work with somebody,
they don't have to work with somebody.
But one of the sentiments that I saw over and over again this week was.
Hey man, Kent tried to squeeze a new feature in during an RC freeze,

(38:51):
and everybody knows the golden rule, only fixes, no features.
And then when he got caught, he got pissy about it, and it's on him.
He shouldn't have tried to squeeze these features in. He was not following the
release process, or he was being
sneaky, or he doesn't know how the kernel works is also one that I got.
Because I think people don't know Kent's been around longer than BcashFS.

(39:12):
And my position, and I think probably Wes and Brent agree, but I'll let you guys speak to this.
My position is quite simply, there's nuance to this problem.
I did a little research, and over the years, I kind of went back to Linux kernel
3 something, so it was during the development phase all the way forward.
And I, you know, I mean probably over a dozen examples of gray line issues of

(39:38):
feature slash fix, because often a fix is a feature and a feature is a fix.
I saw multiple, I saw three examples for ButterFS, totally fine,
fixes during the RC window.
I saw examples for the sound subsystem. I saw examples for the sound blaster drivers.
I saw examples for the sleep and suspend subsystems. I saw examples for video

(40:01):
things, all kinds of examples of fix slash features getting added during the RC window.
And so I think Kent's position has always been that what I was contributing
was more akin to a fix than a feature.
And I have users in production that need this fix and the RC periods for fixes.
And Linus's position was, I disagree. It is a feature ad. It's not a fix.

(40:26):
And therefore, it's not allowed. And I'm totally fine with that.
That's Linus's call. It's his kernel.
And, you know, how Kent responds to that is his responsibility.
But I actually think there's importance to understand here. It's not like he
was trying to add some new feature to BcacheFS that was just absurd.
In Kent's opinion, he was trying to do a fix.
Fixes are allowed in the Linux kernel during the RC process.

(40:48):
And maybe it's more of people hear the story, but they don't look into the issue.
And this is where I'm going to turn to you, Wes.
In my opinion, what Kent was doing was more akin to fixing log issues than it
was a new feature of BcacheFS.
This time we're just talking about a 70 line patch that just picks overwrites
instead of updates from the journal and sorts them in reverse order is how he

(41:10):
built it at one point in terms of the kind of code for journal replay stuff he was trying to add this.
Was to help people in production that were trying to be cache fs out on their systems,
And so they, in theory, were writing the latest kernels to get these things.
And so is it a new feature or is it a fix?
But where I see a lot of people short-circuit on this issue is,

(41:32):
well, he wasn't following the best practices of kernel development.
He was trying to ram features in during an RC.
I don't agree with that assessment. I think that's kind of a lightweight take.
If you look into it, I think there's nuance here.
But there, Linus can make his call and how Kent responds to that's on Kent.
But do you agree there's nuance this is you could call it a feature but you could also call it a fix.

(41:53):
Yeah and i mean as with all rules right you have
to kind of understand what what they're there what they're trying to prevent is there you
know uh what is the real risk that this
if added can break other parts of
the kernel or other users outside of the bcash fs you know there's all kinds
of things that ultimately get considered into like what actually really gets
stamped into the kernel or not i think it is totally true that kent failed to

(42:16):
gain the trust of the kernel community to be able to have leeway to successfully
get these kinds of things pushed upstream.
We're all dealing with the results of that. But I do think you're right in most
or at least many development communities there are rules and then sometimes
there are exceptions and there's classifications and not all things fall into
clear cut categories and judgment calls get made and that's where the social

(42:39):
dynamics really do become important.
I don't think it's fair though to write Kent off because of that one debate
if it was a feature or not.
And that's where I see a lot of people maybe failing to intellectually follow
this all the way through and just kind of using it as a shortcut to just write
Kent off, who has been a longtime contributor outside of just BcacheFS and knows what he's doing.

(43:03):
But I do agree that if Linus doesn't want it, that's all that really matters.
I think it's a shame and it's a loss.
And it's my opinion that the kernel developers have probably never really been
big file system guys that just don't think it's a thing they really care or
think a lot about. It's not a problem they really have to solve a lot.
And like Wes said, there isn't a social relationship there to kind of allow

(43:26):
for this stuff where some of these developers that have squeezed things in under
the wire, not only have they been long-time contributors to a Linux kernel,
but their employer probably financially contributes to the Linux Foundation too.
So there's a trust there and a relationship there for better or for worse.
But thank you, BHH, and everybody who did push back. I did want to hear from
you and I really appreciate the conversation. And if you disagree, keep it going.

(43:47):
Oh hey we've got next in the old mailbag a note from our pal olympia mike with
a nick's book update oh good.
I've been wanting one of these.
Hey, gents, it's been a long and busy summer here, finally catching up with the back catalog. Nice.
I wanted to give you an update on my next book project and the computer upcycling I've been doing.

(44:09):
I've definitely passed 1,000 computers donated to regular folks out there,
and the feedback is awesome.
People are loving it. That's just, congrats.
Huge. That's huge.
Regular people loving Linux.
Yeah, I love that.
It's been so successful that the local library system hosted me for a talk and
a workshop all about it and interviewed me for their blog.

(44:32):
It's really awesome to see this thing being talked about openly.
Yeah, I'd love to. The seemingly wider and wider interest in the upcycling of
machines are perfectly good.
Mike gave us some Nixbooks, and it's my only laptop, my only x86 laptop. I have a MBP1.
But it's been great. I'm using the hell out of this thing that somebody was going to throw away.

(44:53):
It sounds like we should probably check out what Mike's doing here because Nixbook
itself now has a standalone GUI installer.
Now you can literally grab an ISO, burn it to a USB drive, and convert any computer
into an easy-to-use Nixbook in minutes.
Yeah, maybe we could ape that for Hypervibe.
Uh-huh. Kind of going on the reverse end of the spectrum there, but same deck.
Hypervibe's a bit of a different direction than the Nixbook.

(45:16):
Thank you, Mike. Thank you for that update. It's always really nice to hear that.
Keep up the great work.
Mm-hmm. We'll put a link to his next book project in the show notes.
Well, we have another little piece of mail here. Jesus, this thing's full.
This one from Nemo, who sent this one in via the Matrix chat.
I just wanted to shout out that Crush was a great pick the other day.

(45:38):
I gave it a few small scripts I wrote for work recently and passed it through Quen 3 Coder 30B.
That's the K4KM quantized version running on my own GPU, and it was great.
It then got me thinking about a framework.
Pre-order from one of those desktops that i've got in on batch number 12 though.

(45:59):
It's not.
Going to come for another few months i'm so excited to have up to 112 gigs of
vram i can just fill with an lm or two i was a little surprised though that
i hadn't heard you guys get excited
about it and how they started shipping them over the last week or so.
Yeah well we're just getting the reports of them shipping um that's really always

(46:20):
what i wait with the framework stuff still just i want to i want to hear about
it in people's hands get the report so if anybody out there is getting them
please let me know i am tempted yeah.
Yeah for kind of precisely that reason too i mean it looks like a good a nice cool rig all around.
Yeah for sure it does it does 112 gigs of vram you maniac you maniac you maniac

(46:41):
thank you everybody who uh reached out via the matrix or as a chat We really appreciate it.
And we now transition into the boost.
And this week, we, as we like to do, are going to start with our baller booster,

(47:01):
the person who contributed the most to episode 629, who really stepped up above
the crowd and sent in some real support.
And this week, it is Blackhost, and he comes in with a really astonishing 435,000 SATs.

(47:41):
Black Host writes, boosting for some sats for Texas Linux Fist snacks.
Oh, wow. Thank you, Black Host. And that's actually going to move the needle.
We have not had any, let's say, commercial bites on working with us to get to Texas Linux Fest.
We are still bound and determined like hell to get there. You know,
I've been thinking, too, like these people, they put so much work into these

(48:03):
events and people show up from all around the world, literally,
and vendors show up and community happens and ideas are created.
And it's a damn shame that we don't
get these captured for more people because it's like
a tree falling in the forest and nobody's there to hear
it and it's i'm not trying
to overstate our role here but what

(48:25):
happens at these events is unique and special in
the linux community and i think it's extremely important that a the
show participate in it and b is the
show try to capture it the best we can and convey that to the audience this
is something really unique here and i really want
to get to texas linux fest and i think we're going to do it with sats
because nobody else is stepping up uh to

(48:46):
like work with us and do like a sponsor promo deal and i understand i
understand i understand but of course the offer's still out there chris at
jupiter broadcasting uh dot com but uh thank you blackhost that will move the
needle if we have to self-fund it it's going to be uh with the boost so appreciate
that very much and that is definitely our baller boost for this week thank you

(49:08):
sir appreciate it very much well.
Next up no stromo boosts in with 25 000 cents,
congrats on the new nebula sponsor i was wondering.
Though it doesn't have any.
Coffee in it.
Oh you know it.
I think the coffee is the enterprise-grade encryption, maybe?

(49:31):
No, no. The coffee is what you enjoy when you have a solid networking infrastructure
that just works. That's where the coffee is, you see?
Yes. Thank you, Dostro. It's nice to hear from you.
We have a boost here from Caden. 3,500 sats.
Hey, guys. I'm still loving the show, and I recently got Hyperland working on

(49:53):
Ubuntu, but I borked my gaming desktop.
I did learn apparently my motherboard doesn't like Manjaro for some reason.
Though I am interested in Hypervibe. Would you recommend it for someone with no NixOS experience?
You know, for that I might go to CacheOS first. You wouldn't get Hyperland necessarily.

(50:13):
Maybe you could, but you would get a lot of the optimizations. Not all of them, though.
I will admit I have a really special collection of optimizations.
Not to brag, but you know me, guys. And I've been building these for the last couple of years.
Yeah, you know how I do it. So it's not the same, but they're still,
they got a really great thing going.

(50:35):
Hypervibe is nearly impossible to get going without some NixOS experience at the moment.
We're experimenting with options there. You got pretty far with ISO images this week.
Yeah, I don't know. Did you ever try it?
I did not get a chance to try it. We could try it on my Nix book.
Yeah, we should.
Totally be down. But I also, of course, while Wes is trying to spin up an ISO,
I'm like actively making changes.

(50:56):
Yeah, we'll have to do some catch up there.
Yeah, yeah.
I have made some good changes. I did see Hybrid Sarcasm was forking your stuff
off just to copy the Hyperland setup on top of an Arch install.
Totally.
So something like that's possible too.
The Hyperland configuration, the Waybar configuration, that kind of stuff will
work across distro bases.
So that could be a great place to start is cache OS, install Hyperland,
and then go grab my configs off of my GitHub,

(51:18):
which is chrislast slash hypervibe I think you'll like it thank you for asking
and good luck it sounds like you're going to be enjoying it one thing to know
is just to touch on your hardware issues there it's probably not,
Manjaro specific it's probably more likely kernel specific and it just happens
to be the kernel that Manjaro is using and another distribution may very well

(51:40):
end up using that kernel too,
Manjaro just might be using it before others are just something
to keep in mind it's not likely a manjaro specific issue
uh it could be that is in the realm of possibility but
it is more likely a kernel issue specifically kernel
driver issue because the that all is all the driver stuff is not handled by
the distribution generally except for the nvidia driver like i say generally

(52:03):
but good luck let us know how it goes thank you for the boost oppi 1984 comes in with 4 000 sats,
Mad TV was superior to Saturday Night Live. Lower Expectations is a nice nostalgia
hit. I just wish it didn't mean lower boost amounts.
It's a great, have you seen the lower expectations bit?

(52:24):
Yes, it is so good.
It's worth a YouTube search if you haven't, Mad TV, lowered expectations.
It's one of my favorite bits. Thank you very much for the boost there.
Appreciate it, Opby1984. It's good to hear from you.
Podbun comes in with a row of ducks. Seems very petty to not add it's because
he isn't as nice as they want him to be.

(52:44):
I agree talking about bcashfs here um,
again i know i made this point especially because the people
that are now excluding him for his behavior are sort of famously
called out online for their behavior right or
wrong some of these people involved in
this discussion have been the focus of

(53:04):
toxic behavior and claims of toxic behavior going
on a decade now and now they're using that same
labeling to exclude kent from the kernel for a feature that makes linux more
competitive and linux is less competitive without it so the stakes are higher
than you know i don't know a samba file server built into the kernel but that

(53:27):
makes it and this doesn't thank you pod bun good boost.
Well gene bean sent in a batch of boosts seven in total for 10,057 sats,
This is okay. Episode 626 here. Checking in from the past.

(53:48):
How did I get so far behind? Here's hoping I catch up before Sunday's new episode.
Time machine boost.
He says, FYI, Sonos works super well with music assistant.
I have heard that. So the wife got the Kia speakers that are essentially Sonos
speakers that we're going to set up at her office.

(54:09):
But, you know, in the back of my mind, if I ever get rid of the HomePods,
which will happen one day, maybe I go to Sonos. Maybe. I don't know.
Gene is also pretty stoked about the AirPods integration on Linux recently.
And that's going to be super handy, especially with access to that noise canceling.
For Linux Unplugged 627, this episode has been extra good. And I really enjoyed

(54:31):
hearing the vibe coding adventure.
He says uh chris check out this four button device with switching music at the
clinic it integrates with zha without issue for me.
Uh so i like these quad panel buttons
gene and i have one similar like i mentioned to you in a dm that's kind of like
that but for this use case i'm seeing

(54:53):
if i can find it in my order history there's another type of z
wave button that i like even more and it's
got two big buttons on the top and then two small buttons along the bottom and
it fits really nicely on the wall it's really clean you can magnetically mount
it or you can install it i think zeus makes one that's not the one i've been
buying but i think that's the one i'm going to buy in the future but i'll put

(55:15):
a link to it in the show notes it's a four wave z wave button,
panel but it's tiny and it supports magnetic mounts or you can put it in like
a traditional wall switch mount.
It supports Z-Wave 800 too with that long range support that just came out with
that new Home Assistant antenna. And I've got,
Three, I think, three or so. And they last over a year, I can tell you that.

(55:39):
I have them up front, so I can just with a button while I'm driving,
I can turn off all the lights or turn off the water pump.
I have one in the bathroom. So if you come into the bathroom late at night,
you have a button you can hit that'll turn the lighting on really dim in there.
Or if you step into the bathroom late at night and it's cold,
or whatever it might be, could be in the morning, I have a button you can press,
one button, and it increases the temperature in the bathroom by five degrees.

(56:01):
Also, transversely, if you get in the bathroom and it's too warm,
another button in there decreases the temperature in the bathroom by five degrees and then lastly so.
This is why you're always hanging out in there.
Yeah it's my home office and then lastly i
have a button because i'm an rv that toggles the water
pump and this thing fits within
the size of a traditional light switch socket so that's how small it is it's

(56:23):
really great very big fan and the battery life is fantastic takes a standard
kind of coin type battery and it's worked really well for me so i'll toss a
link to that in the show notes gene always appreciate hearing from you thank
you very much for the boost gene.
Also sent in a little fountain fm clip of me saying a certain something.

(56:43):
Oh i you know i should have pulled this ahead of time because i saw this come
in early and i played it gene did some yeoman's work for us here.
I see there's a collection starting here.
I like it. I like it.
Gene's last boost here. I'm really interested in Bcash FS, but I think it's

(57:07):
perfectly acceptable for the maintainers to kick it if the maintainer is a jerk.
I've worked with really smart jerks, and it just isn't worth it.
To be fair, I also don't agree with how Linus treats people,
but no one has the power to change Linus.
They do have the power to not perpetuate it, though. i hope they work it out.
Yeah i mean i think i generally agree on a no jerks policy and i do think it's

(57:29):
a good opportunity for everyone involved to reflect on how best to communicate,
uh because i think even kent would agree you know he he did cross some some
lines here here and there and there are a lot of ways we could probably be doing
it more effectively on all sides i.
Agree with all that i just have one question when did we close the jerk door
at what point was when did we cut off the jerks from the kernel because we obviously

(57:51):
let a lot of jerks in so when was the jerk door closed, and how come nobody told Kent?
That's all. I mean, what do you think about that?
I think it's not a close and you're done with the door. It's sort of a continual evaluation.
A constantly improving process.
Yes, that's what we're hoping for. Because people are going to make mistakes,
there are going to be flare-ups, but like, if we can try and commit to continue

(58:14):
to do better as a community.
I agree. Although, you know, remember just a week or so before this conversation
happened, Linus told a developer to get bent and his code made the world a worse place.
Yep.
Direct quotes. I mean, I agree with you, but it's like we're sometimes applying
the brakes and sometimes we're applying the gas. Sometimes we're doing it both at the same time.
Like, we're literally telling somebody to get bent while we're yelling at Kent for his toxic behavior.

(58:38):
I don't know. I do hope they work it out. I agree with that.
And I do think you're right.
It should be something that's a constantly improving process.
It's just unfortunate that this has happened.
And, you know, with a little more diplomacy, it probably could have been avoided.
Odyssey Western comes in with 3,333 sats. That's a Chuck E. Cheese boost.
Okay, sending a boost because I didn't realize my wallet had ran out of SATs,

(59:01):
so I guess he wasn't streaming.
With regard to the last episode with Crush, it really resonated with me because
I'm currently using Warp Terminal and Claude to go through my Markdown notes
and clean them up. It is good at Markdown.
Plus, it helped me learn how to research and do some tech for, what's DDGR?
Duck, duck, go, but it's a terminal app.
Right, on the terminal, right, and links, too. Oh, cool, cool.

(59:24):
So, Odyssey's busting up some links action now.
He says i was able to break down information and get summaries took me about
a week to get through the rules to tune it because you know it's like trying to guide a toddler,
it is that's a good yes that's how you got to think of it you really got to be very clear,
anyways i'm warming up to the idea of using some lms as a tool to solve problems

(59:44):
and maybe document work processes that i can reference later anyways love you
guys we love you too always nice to hear from you yeah.
It really was resonating with me this week just because it's like oh i had some
LLM successes and some like I was telling you guys I was been using UDHCP and
I wanted like a little viewer for the lease files like oh surely an LLM can
make me a little 2E really quick that'll just but.

(01:00:05):
It could.
Not hack the binary decoding it
could get the 2E part it just couldn't get the bytes in the NDN is right.
My theory continues to be there's like a line of complexity and when you cross
it there are really no help at all but if you're dealing with like you know
plain text config files simpler stuff you know an nginx config file,

(01:00:28):
they're pretty good at that and it's also really well documented online anyways,
so they have a lot of reference material to train from but then when you get
to more complex obscure niche things or things that are super,
modern relevant just changed kind of stuff bleeding edge it struggles not deeply
indexed yeah yeah exactly.
Ooh okay well outdoor geek is coming in with some stuff I think we're gonna

(01:00:52):
like with 5,000 sets yeah,
Hey, Chris, what's more bleeding edge of the Nix OS Unstable?
The Nix Package's Master Branch.
Oh, I thought I was going to say Nix OS Ice Cold. Oh, yeah, the Master Branch, sure.
Now, I'm using Overlies to access that I'm not just YOLOing my whole OS on Master.
Really, I just added it so I could get the latest Nexus mod app.

(01:01:15):
And then a little link here pointing you maybe to how to do it.
Am I crazy to kind of want to do this? So right now, I pull from Nix OS Unstable,
but i am pulling hyperland for master and so there are days where i'll have
multiple updates to hyperland in one day i.
Think you probably do have to be prepared right you're going to be building stuff.
Yourself yeah so.

(01:01:36):
You will be.
Although it's pretty simple benefit so it's it's it's yeah.
If it's not like a giant browser or whatever.
Exactly i was gonna say it's nothing like building firefox or chromium um you
know i also want to give a shout out because i i figured out thanks to some
help from uh i should have gotten your name i'm so sorry somebody who helped
me with an issue I had on GitHub with Hypervibe,
where every now and then I would sit down at my machine and some of my configs had been reverted.

(01:02:01):
I'd have errors on the screen about some config files missing and my key bindings would be reverted.
And I was trying to track this down because it was initially also reverting
my wallpaper to like stock Hyperlint wallpaper or whatever. I got that solved.
But I kept having this problem where my key bindings would revert and I'd have errors on my screen.
And if I did a new build and either switched or rebooted, everything would be

(01:02:23):
fine and even if I even experimented with I did a build before I went to bed
went to bed left the machine running came back it had been reverted did a build again it was fine.
It was do you have stuff that's getting garbage collected?
It was automatic updates and maybe garbage collection too were not pulling from my flake,
and so it was rebuilding and then Hyperland one of the neat things about it

(01:02:44):
is it hot reloads its config so it was just hot reloading because it was also
doing a switch when it was doing an automatic upgrade,
so uh you know the reason why i didn't catch that is because yourself.
Over a little fun corner.
Yeah you know trying to ride the bleeding
edge and all that and i didn't catch it because i i inherited
that when i burned my system down i left like my

(01:03:06):
stock like out of memory config and my performance tuning and that stuff and
got rid of all the packages and the desktop environment and replaced all that
and so i inherited that from the old system config and didn't even think about
it and so now that is fixed and that was the last outstanding issue it's been
really great great to hear from you outdoor geek thank you for the boost and
i love your style i approve.
Well jasko boosts in 5 000 sets,

(01:03:31):
Regarding Bcash FS, I find it sad that these squabbles in the mailing list impact
support within the kernel.
Riser FS is still in the kernel, and I don't think there's anything more toxic than killing your wife.
Free software has its legacy on the shoulders of abrasive personalities,
whether it be Stallman, Torvalds, or the myriad of other characters.
Why do they get a pass, but Overstreet doesn't? Also, man, I can't wait for

(01:03:55):
all the bugs to be ironed out on Lightning. I can't seem to boost at a higher
value on Fountain or through Albi or even Podverse.
So to the first point, I mostly agree, you know, it's, but like Wes says,
there's two factors here.
It's a process of improving communications,
but two, it comes down to relationships and established trust.
Lightning could be a liquidity issue on one of our nodes. Sometimes some of

(01:04:17):
your boost will get through, but not all of it. Something we could check on.
Generally, it comes down to liquidity problem. Fountain should be fine.
I'm surprised you're having problems. I'm sorry to hear that.
Be happy to troubleshoot with you if you want to ping us on Matrix.
We do also have a boost group on Matrix as well that helps do some troubleshooting.
Definitely want to hear a large boost come in. Thank you, Jasko. Appreciate it.

(01:04:39):
Forty Deuces here with 8,400 sats.
I've been feeling the pain of no boosting your sat streaming from the private
bootleg feed. Yeah, I know.
One idea would be to credit or pod press system for fountain that allows this
podcast creator to give value.
Yeah, if we move over to the fountain system, that could be true.

(01:05:00):
That could be true. Yeah. Or if we generated the RSS feed ourself,
he says, you know, you could ditch it.
It's true. We have thought about it. We have thought about it.
It's just they do a pretty good job except for this one thing, right?
It's really nice in a lot of other ways, like to be able to spin up promo codes and things like that.
But with something also we're considering maybe just building our own workaround

(01:05:20):
that just bypasses all of this, which we may have more on in the future.
And it may just be a lot easier and be app independent. You never know.
He says, it's great to hear you on the Hyperland train. I'll be checking out
your config for sure. I've been going on this route for a while and loving it.
It sounds like you've gone a similar route to the multi-host like Flake approach.

(01:05:40):
Someone mentioned the repeated builds. This takes a little less time with Home
Manager, and there are a couple of ways to approach this.
My tip would be keep it as a standard Hyperland config file outside of Nix and
Home Manager while making heavy changes inside.
This way you benefit from the hot reload and saving of the config file.
Once it's more stable, start writing it to your .config folders with Home Manager's

(01:06:02):
home.file. Then convert to a Nix eventually when it's pretty solid.
That does sound like a nice iteration process.
I have been tapping the brakes on Home Manager.
I know myself, and I know that if I like it, I can really go down a rabbit hole and hyper-optimize it.
And so I often resist these kinds of things.
But as I've talked to people out there, like in the Knicks Nerds chat,

(01:06:25):
and the feedback I've gotten from you folks out there, it does seem like a lot
of people are recommending I just bite the bullet and use Home Manager for this
stuff. I thought you would do it before me, Wes.
Yeah, I think we've both been like, well...
That's going to be a whole Easter egg to get into.
Yeah, a whole can of worms, as they say. Thank you very much.

(01:06:46):
Appreciate that boost. Nice to hear from you. Four to deuce.
SatStagger7 comes in with 9,472 sats.
Nice.
Hey there. Last week's Baller Booster here. Just wanted to apologize for the
many typos in my message last week.
Do not worry about it.
Yeah, it happens to all of us.
That's the least of our concern.

(01:07:07):
These last days i was looking into a pic from a couple episodes ago
oh my mesh sidecar nix os module lets
you make any service available as a node in your tail net uh cool
glad to hear you checked it out um and but
sat stacker goes on but since i'd like
to communicate to my services over tls i started looking into other solutions
and i would like to propose an amazing pic for all the self-hosters out there

(01:07:30):
oh caddy dash tail scale ah it's a plugin for the caddy reverse proxy that connects
to your tail net and can serve each site as a separate tail net node.
Aha.
Caddy can then automatically fetch the tail scale certificate and serve your page via TLS.
And the NixOS package even has a function with plugins to build in the plugin.

(01:07:51):
I can see that being a system that works pretty well.
Yeah, I've been pleased to see that the Caddy support NixOS has been getting better over the years.
Mm-hmm.
Well, Sam H boosted in here two boosts for
a total of 3333 and
one of these is road ducks i love

(01:08:12):
your hyper vibe idea i think
we need more of this for nix os the only system i
have available to try it on is my framework laptop so
i did the right thing and blew away my config to try your flake yes
i noticed a few problems and i had to google how to fix the dpi but it was great
to see it working and after a quick reboot back to my previous config for now

(01:08:37):
cool that's neat i'd like to integrate it into my normal config so i can try
it on a more long-term basis you.
Know you'd like west said earlier you could grab some of the hyperlink config
stuff and just keep that but we are trying to get it more and more portable
too and just recently i got it much more multi-machine so you would be able
to just essentially i have a host folder,

(01:08:57):
and you would just put your own system.nix in there with any of the differences for your system.
And then you could also put your own hyperlink config files and Waybar config
files in there and override the defaults. Takes a little work, but you can do it.
Sam continues here i just got an email saying they charged me for my framework
desktop so hopefully i'll be giving hypervibe a try button that soon i've learned

(01:09:19):
to put it next to my tv for big screen gaming but the main use will be for local ai.
Oh that's gonna be fun i hope you
like it and i would very much love a follow-up on
your takes when you get it and after you've used it for a bit it's on
my radar as maybe a future workstation for me i
was trying to make myself feel better and i i went over to uh

(01:09:40):
like you know some one of these lms and i said here's all
my system specs of my workstation upstairs and i'm
like compared to like a current gen intel or
amd system like this is still a pretty good system
for like day-to-day web browsing and and just you
know standard desktop tasks right i mean maybe i
do a little bit of this and that but it's you know so i ask it to try to make me feel better
and it comes back with no you would

(01:10:03):
see a substantial and noticeable improvement if you upgraded your system like
no holes bar totally trashed my box and i'm like okay it's like your your processor
it's like from 2015 brother like what are you doing what are you doing like
well it's been fine i just closed maybe.
They got better in 10 years i don't know.
Well i hope you get it soon yeah well they might you know maybe they made some

(01:10:26):
improvements wes you just never know i also saw user 46 come and say they were
definitely going to try out hypervibe And, you know, we have the 2,000-sat cutoff,
but we try to read your boosts if they come in.
And so every now and then we'll pull them forward. So user's 46,000-sats.
He says, I'm checking out Hypervibe. Definitely checking it out.
Let me know how it goes. And also, if you want to set your username and your

(01:10:48):
fountain profile and boost back in, let us know who you are.
We appreciate it. Now, we had quite the showing today, boys,
because we had that monster baller boost that talk about setting the tone from the top.
Setting the tone from the top. Blackhost with his 435,000 sat boost,
one of our best baller boosts we've had in ages. So we had a really good showing this week.
So let's talk about our sat streamers. We had 38,872 sats that were streamed by our sat streamers.

(01:11:17):
Individually, it was a total of 1,141 streams.
That is pretty cool. So when you combine that with our boost, yeah, you know.
You know it's a good one because we stacked a grand total of 554,411 sets.

(01:12:02):
Thank you very much, everybody who participated in the boost or is a member.
This is a value for value podcast.
What we really are trying to do here is keep a sustainable program that focuses
on the things you really care about because you're our biggest customer.
And we're serious about what we do. We put a lot of work into it.
An enormous amount of work, attention and effort goes into this.
If you got some value out of it, you can become a member or you can send us a boost with a message.

(01:12:24):
And if it's above 2000 sats, we will read it on the show. Thank you,
everybody who supports this here podcast, making episode 629 of Your Unplugged program possible.
We got a smattering of picks to get out of here. One of them's on theme,
so we really had to include it this week.
We were going to stick with just a couple of picks, but then we're like,
this is too perfect not to include it.

(01:12:45):
And it has a great name.
That's true. It's called Wake My Potato. This is a theme on a project I talked
about earlier, but a little bit different. This is really meant for those of
us who try to make the most out of our old potato computers.
Maybe they don't even have batteries. Some old machines actually wake,
don't have proper wake on LAN support.
Yeah, so you want to use Shuthose, but you can't. But you could use WakeMyPotato,

(01:13:10):
which is a simple and last resort, as they say, systemd Linux service to keep
your old potato laptop alive and running in the event of a power failure.
So it uses RTC wake to schedule wake ups in the near future but it has some
built in safety so like if you have a laptop it's running on AC power power
failure but it has some amount of battery capacity this thing will,

(01:13:32):
tell the clock to keep waking it up in case it does go to sleep but it will
detect if like your laptop's going to run out of power.
And it.
Will safely power it off at that point.
I mean this is awesome if you've got I mean not that I would ever do this but
let's say you had like an old x86 thinkpad that was kind of working as one of
your home lab machines and then you hung a bunch of discs off that plus it has

(01:13:52):
two discs inside there and you want to make sure your file systems are safe
and properly shut down and your battery only lasts for like 10 minutes because
it's old and probably about to blow up,
Well, wake my potato. I can solve that for you. That's one of the things I really appreciate about it.
It's like, oh, you're about to run out of power. Let me safely shut down your
stuff, save your data, unmount your stuff.

(01:14:12):
And then you can also use it to turn it back on, which seems like the really
useful case for me. It is a GPL 3.0.
So nice and easy, breezy, no concerns there.
So that's our on theme pick. But then this is too cool not to share.
Spectacle is a really, really well-equipped screenshot tool for the Plasma desktop.

(01:14:35):
And it's just missing one feature that I hope one day gets baked in.
But Wes, you found a way to add it today. We don't have to wait.
No, you did not. Welcome Spectacle OCR Screenshot, a simple QT application that
integrates KDA Spectacle Screenshot tool with the Tesseract OCR engine to extract
text from screenshots as well as QR codes.

(01:14:57):
Really, really nice. So you can, I love this functionality on iOS.
You take a picture of something, and then you can highlight the text in it.
Oh, it's surprisingly useful. Also, it makes it indexable for search later on.
Yeah, so this one's like a separate cute app. But then there's also Spectacle-OCR,

(01:15:18):
which is just a shell script.
It does expect you to have Tesseract installed as well.
And Spectacle. But it adds it to the existing Spectacle install if you already have it.
Yeah, so it's two takes on the same idea. hopefully one of them works for your situation.
And that one is gpl3 indeed so you
got a couple options there if you're a spectacle user which i've discovered
needs a lot of plasma infrastructure unfortunately because it's my favorite

(01:15:42):
screenshot tool uh but i'm not using it anymore in hyperland in fact like an
animal i'm just using command line apps i sent you guys a screenshot today i just,
I just used a command line tool to take that screenshot. It does a wailing grab
and dumps it to the clipboard.
Vibing yourself backwards over there.
So if anybody has any recommendations for some screenshot tools that are not

(01:16:04):
GNOME or Plasma specific, that are lightweight, my main thing I want is I want
to be able to take a box. I want to be able to draw a box, take a screenshot
of that box, copy to the clipboard.
I don't need a file. I don't need my whole desktop.
Don't you want it to upload to one of a few different proprietary images?
I do not need that generally.
Although every now and then it's kind of handy for Lincoln. I will admit that. I will admit that.

(01:16:26):
Okay, that's it for us this week. You can find links to our picks and our news
and our self-hosted HomeLab apps in the show notes over at linuxunplugged.com slash 629er.
And, of course, we'd love it if you want to make it a live Tuesday on a Sunday.
You can join us Sundays at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.

(01:16:49):
You know i think we got a hot tip in here for him too west there's some extra
functionality in this here podcast they might not know about.
Yes embedded deep within our rss feed it's json chapters and podcasting 2.0.
Transcripts yep transcripts and chapters you can jump around
and re-listen or find what we talked about we love
it when you do that because then you don't have to ask us uh it's mostly true

(01:17:12):
also i want your tips on wi-fi cameras that will work with frigate please help
me out with this one i'd love to do a big old segment on it and thank you so
much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program we'll see
you right back here next tuesday as in sunday.

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