641: Something New, Something Old

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:11):
Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
My name is Wes.
And my name is Brent.
Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming
up on the show today, we have something new and something old for you.
Valve made some big Linux hardware news this week, so we're going to give you
our take and the big things I think everyone's kind of overlooking.
Then we have a souped up, refurbished one liter PC that might just work for

(00:35):
my home lab. We're going to put the ThinkCenter M920Q through the tests,
and then we'll round out the show with some great boos, some picks, and a lot more.
So before I go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual
log. Hello, Mumble Room!
Hey, Chris, hey, Wes, and hello, Branch.
You're doing good. You're representing. It's a small on-air crew.
We've got some up in the quiet listening.
Everybody's out. Otherwise, I think having a nice Sunday. Of course,

(00:58):
our Mumble Room is live during the show. Details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
Also, be sure to check out defined.net slash unplugged and go meet our friends at Defined Networking.
They have Manage Nebula, which sits on top of the open source Nebula decentralized
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If you have a home lab, which is a couple of machines or a global enterprise
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(01:42):
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Go to defined.net slash unplugged.

(02:23):
You deserve a better VPN experience. So go redefine it at defined.net slash unplugged.
We have a spot of housekeeping before we start the show. Ohio Linux Fest is
back December 6th, 2025.
Brent, are you going to just pop down? You know, just pop on down for a little...
It's only like 10 hours from where I am now, so maybe, maybe.

(02:48):
We've got over 10 days, so plenty of time for you.
Oh, thanks.
Yeah, now we know you can do it. It'll be in downtown Columbus at the Sonesta
Hotel. We'll have a link in the show notes. You do need to register.
Listener Jonathan will be there giving a talk. He's a sysadmin at Red Hat,
and he manages a fleet of laptops. That's neat.
Yeah, this talk should explain what to consider when managing Linux workstations

(03:11):
for remote or traveling employees, discuss some of the technology used,
and how things have changed.
Yeah, that's a non-trivial problem, and you'll love to see it being talked about
because I'm someone who wants to work for employers that provide Linux laptops.
So, you know, realistically, that comes with, like, compliance and other things
that needs to happen to make it work in the org. So, you know, spread that knowledge.

(03:33):
I did do the travel math. If I was willing to drive 11 hours a day,
it'd be 3.7 days of driving.
3.7 days total of driving to get one way.
You could totally do it. We've done worse.
It's a bit of a trek.
I know this is one we've been wanting to make for years now.
Yeah. But it has eluded us.
Tell you what, fly in somewhere, I'll pick you up, and then that'll shorten your drive.

(03:57):
I like this idea.
And we still sort of get like an artificial road trip. out of it.
You get to ride in the van.
Perhaps in our absence uh
some of you could go and either boost us a little report emails report or even
better show up in the mumble room and tell us how ohio linux fest went again
it's on december 6th we'll have links to the web page and you do need to register

(04:19):
so all that information will be in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 641,
Well, Valve made some big news this week. They announced a whole lineup of hardware.
We have a new Steam frame, an updated Steam controller, and the Steam machine
is back in a new and revamped way.

(04:41):
And they're all running Steam OS.
The implications feel pretty big here.
The fact that they're all running Steam OS, I think, is the thing that jumps
out at me first. This is what we were hoping for in our, was it our predictions?
Did someone predict this? but that feels like quite a good thing for the linux ecosystem.
Kind of a doubling down from them right like um we

(05:03):
had this first go around if this if this was the
usual like uh random government agency switches to linux then like they would
have already cycled back a few times uh by now but like instead we're getting
steam machine take two but they've spent like the last decade building out a
whole bunch of cool technology underneath to to make it work out hopefully a

(05:23):
lot better this time yeah.
If it was a movie trailer or something the subtitle would be it would be steam
machine 2 and the subtitle would be lessons learned right because that's that's the sense i got and i.
Or i.
Tried to devour all the interviews and that was the sense i got is they incorporated
everything they've learned from proton and linux development and steam deck
and they realized oh we would do the steam machine way differently now,

(05:46):
So Gabe quotes, Gabe said, quote, we've been super happy with the success of
the Steam Deck and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play
all the great titles of their Steam libraries.
I will admit I have wanted them to do more with VR. So here's just to go over it.
The 2026 lineup, which they say early 2026, is a updated Steam controller.

(06:07):
Quite a nice update to it, actually, with magnetic sticks and new trackpads
and all that. And they're including, which you're going to hear more about this,
a low-latency wireless dongle, which is also built in to the Steam machine.
Yeah, doesn't it seem nice? I don't know. I mean, I've only seen a couple of
clips, but just the UX around it, the fit and finish, it seemed like a great idea.

(06:30):
Brent, I get a sense you're the most excited about the new Steam machine,
which is a six-inch cube aimed for the living room. It's got a Zen 4 processor in it.
I guess that's six times, they say, more powerful than the Steam Deck.
Wow.
So it's a little box, a little Steam machine.
Considering what some listeners have done with the Steam Deck and their portability

(06:50):
and traveling, I think, yes, this is the kind of machine you and I love,
Chris. A little tiny thing you could just plunk anywhere that gets all the work
done. And, oh, wait, I said work.
This is a gaming machine. Wait a second.
Well, you know, I mean, it probably does make a nice little desktop machine, too.
I mean, you do love seeing them. Even Steam, you know, saying that as part of their adverts.

(07:13):
Yes.
I will note, just as, you know, it's getting called the GameCube,
and as a GameCube fan, the only thing I'm really missing from it is,
where's the nice little handle?
That does need a handle. You're right.
Maybe there'll be 3D, you know, 3D printed aftermarket stuff you can get.
People will build them for sure. For sure. And this, again, made for the living room.

(07:34):
So probably people that were Steam Deck or are Steam Deck customers and always
leave it hooked up to the TV, which I guess is 20%. I think that was the number they quoted.
Yeah, I'm wondering about that because it does it does feel like console targeted.
I wonder how you feel about the value to money. You mentioned like a 6x factor
or something. But I've seen some people a little unhappy, feeling like maybe
we don't really know the full price details or anything, but just feeling like

(07:56):
maybe this isn't going to be long term competitive.
Yeah, that's a good question. That is a good question. I'm a little. Yeah, I agree.
I'm a little underwhelmed. I feel like I could build a more powerful system,
but we don't know what the price. Yeah.
Maybe if to your point, they're targeting more casual folks that you just want
something that'll work well enough. You're not necessarily nitpicking over triple A frame rates.

(08:17):
What I understand is their goal was you could play the majority of the Steam
library at a 4K resolution on a TV with not everything turned up,
but like decent settings.
Yeah, okay.
And then they're going to release essentially an API that game developers can use.
So when it loads on one of these Steam devices, they know which type of Steam
device they're on and they can preset the game video settings to be optimized for that machine.

(08:42):
Oh, okay.
Yeah. So that's one of the ways they're going to eek a little extra out of what
might otherwise be slightly underwhelming specs.
But the thing I think that I'm the most excited about, I'm curious to hear how you guys feel.
And this is the part I think I might have predicted, as I think I predicted
before we saw the next Steam Deck, we'd see them do something in VR.
And now we have. It's called the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone streaming

(09:05):
VR headset powered by a Snapdragon 8 ARM processor.
It has eye tracking and something that Valve has called foveated streaming.
So this thing is really designed to be able to stream games to it.
You can also play games locally, but it's designed around the intention of streaming
any game from Steam on your desktop.

(09:26):
And the foveated streaming is something that happens after the game has been
rendered on the remote PC.
So the remote PC's GPU works hard. So you can have a nice fancy sucker in there.
And it renders the game frames.
And then just before the software sends it off to the frame that you have on
your face, it spends all the time in the video and all that rendering only the

(09:47):
part that you're looking at because the frame is tracking your eyes.
And so if you were to somehow be able to zoom out and look at the entire picture
only the exact spot you're looking at has all of the resources and everything
else is lower res lower rendered and so it's only doing its most,
computational workload exactly where you are focused you can't tell because

(10:09):
you're not looking anywhere else so.
Does that mean it's streaming your eye tracking data back to the um the host rendering platform.
That's what i have to reckon yeah it must
be that kind of data going back and
forth very cool and very
impressive the other thing about the frame is that
it is really going to be quite customizable the entire machine is just in the

(10:32):
front piece like the little tiny visor piece that pops off and there is just
going to be a world of accessories to make this thing comfortable and i think
the part that people have have mentioned but have maybe glossed over is this is a full,
it is ARM, but it is a full Steam machine.
So that means you can sideload software on this thing.

(10:56):
And it also means that you can run Linux desktop mode on the Steam frame, on the VR headset.
This is exactly what you've been asking for.
Yeah, right? How much time have you spent recreating this? Strap a computer to my face.
He says.
Wouldn't it be sort of ironic if Valve was the one to bring this to the mainstream?

(11:17):
Because, you know, there's devices out there that do this. And so I haven't
heard a lot of people talk about this, but it did come up in an engineering chat.
And I will link to the full video in the show notes, but here's the bit relevant
to the Linux desktop on the frame.
For the microSD card, it's not just for SteamOS games, but any type of media
content also works on that?
Are you thinking of it works as extra storage? Media content,

(11:39):
it's certainly your computer.
So you as a computer owner can do anything you want with that data storage.
We tend to think about this as a gaming device first and foremost.
So while we don't restrict or limit any media options, that is very much not
our focus out of the gate.
We'll see what people do with it. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that a microSD
card formatted for SteamOS to read it, if you go to desktop mode,

(12:00):
you'd be able to open files in there and look at it from the file browser. Yeah.
Does a headset render in a standard resolution? Is that configurable?
Well, the headset is locked to 2160 by 2160. SteamOS, I guess.
SteamVR. Yeah, SteamVR and SteamOS, it's all dynamic. All dynamic, okay.
Yeah, so even when you launch desktop mode, it's less of a mode and more you

(12:21):
hit a button and you have a desktop window and it could be a big one or a smaller one. Right, okay.
That could be really neat. It could suck.
But if you could bring a little high-powered armed face computer and get a Linux
desktop, a stable plasma Linux desktop, that's pretty exciting.

(12:44):
That can also game, can also stream stuff from your other computers.
That, to me, PJ, are you feeling what I'm putting down? Doesn't that feel like
a compelling product from Valve?
And you know how Valve leaves these things open. So, like emulators,
you could sideload on an SD card.
This sounds like your device.
The things I'm feeling are indescribable. Like, this thing has me so fired up.

(13:07):
Oh, man. The work they've done, and I kind of called this out a while back when
we started seeing the rumors.
Oh, Valve is working on ARM stuff and x86 translation.
And i'm like oh this is headset this is definitely headset
they're not going to do x86 for a headset and sure enough
we got a headset and that and that right
there the fact that it's running steam ls it's running linux it's not

(13:29):
just this isn't great for gaming they are making the
apple walled garden for gaming using open source and
that is so exciting nobody else is doing this
nobody else is making a full range of
hardware and software that works together for a
use case in this case gaming that all
works together really really well and and being powered by linux and open source

(13:52):
is incredible and having that compatibility layer having it on arm able to run
x86 software we'll see i don't have very high hopes for that because you never
know but i do have high hopes that,
the system's going to work well for what it's intended to do and i think it's going to.

(14:13):
Over achieve the way the steam deck like the
steam deck isn't the steam deck isn't the most powerful hardware
obviously we know that but it still punches way above
its its weight class in terms of raw performance and raw power and i i think
we're going to get the same thing here that foveated streaming it comes with
a dedicated dongle as well as something people need to understand everyone's

(14:34):
wi-fi sucks everybody's wi-fi sucks they solve that by giving you a little router
i've given you a dongle yep.
Yeah that is a good that was a great move.
And putting everything on six gigahertz that matters having three different
radios all doing different things on the on the frame itself as well man this
is exciting i i i've been wanting to get into,

(14:56):
into vr for a while i've got a computer for it now
you know uh even the index has been on my site but they never never went on
sale right so for me it's exciting i'm worried about the wireless factor but
i think they've got that covered with the dedicated streaming hardware the standalone
stuff 8 16 gigs of ram like it's a powerful computer on your face,

(15:16):
rumors to sideload apks for android it's it's armed so you know way droid stuff
like that a lot of the vr games or apks are on android meta quest style but
open source i'm you're gonna be able to fired up.
Yeah i i also feel pretty excited about it of course i'm reserving some judgment based on the price.
We know we're going to have two versions. It'll be a 256 gigabyte and a one

(15:39):
terabyte versions of the frame.
The dev program is starting very soon.
Kits will start going out mid-November. So probably in the next couple of weeks,
you're going to start seeing these kits go out.
They claim the price will be
lower than the index. So if it's under a grand, man, I'm sold. I'm sold.
Like it's still, the quest is still way cheaper, but you know,

(16:01):
pay for what you get, I guess.
This is one of the big questions. But Valve...
I don't know about the price, but I want to go back to something you said earlier,
and that was how the deck seems to punch above its weight.
We are watching Valve now having figured out the game, right?
Just like we saw with the deck with Proton, we're watching them invest in the

(16:23):
technology stack way out ahead of time.
Getting the infrastructure ready at the open source level way ahead of time.
And then when it's ready, bring it into their product and making something seemingly
impossible possible before it was good Windows gaming on Linux and now it's ARM.

(16:45):
On or x86 games on arm and this is where fex comes in f-e-x and we've talked
about it very briefly on the show it's a translation layer of sorts right west
it's kind of like an api translation layer.
Yep fex allows you to run x86 applications on arm 64 linux devices similar to
what you might do with like qemu user or box 64 um and then not only can you

(17:09):
do it just in general but it's also meant to be used alongside things like Wine and Proton.
So you can have a chance to play x86 Windows games on ARM Linux.
And then it even has tricks to make that work, like it supports forwarding API
calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulkan.
So instead of doing sort of like the dumbest layer of just emulate everything,

(17:31):
you can sort of figure out like, oh, I could just directly translate this call
without having to go through the layers of emulation.
That you can make this work at all, let alone be performant enough to play games enjoyably incredible.
Yes yeah really um it's
something i've been meaning to try around on my uh my macbook
pro i played around with it for like 10 minutes the part

(17:53):
you just touched on there at the end that it understands if a
game is making an open gl or a vulcan call it
doesn't need to emulate that it can just pass that
through natively or if it's if it's a direct
x call that it can translate to a vulcan call it can do
that too but if the game if it's a windows game that's already using open gl
or vulcan it can pass it right through to the native subsystem which is which

(18:18):
is a similar trick apple uses with rosetta 2 on the arm macbooks you do have
to have arm 8 hardware but this is where valve has.
This long-term thinking, building out these open-source projects,
Now they have total control over the OS, the software environment that makes

(18:39):
it possible, and the hardware.
Like Jeff was kind of saying, it's almost the Apple ecosystem of gaming hardware
in the sense that they can optimize everything in that entire stack.
And even after it ships, they can continue to optimize it like we've seen with
the deck. The deck got better after it came out. It got faster after it came out.
Games ran better. More games after it came out.

(19:01):
And that was just them issuing software updates. since they have that whole
stack and they have fex to emulate
x86 programs on arm in a way that isn't
miserable and of
course we'll see but this to me is one of the absolute missing pieces because
when i run linux arm which i do pretty frequently everything's a web app for

(19:23):
me so few things are x86 and if this could be expanded to run other programs
down the future sort of like you can with Wine and Proton.
Oh boy. Because you can use it alongside with Wine and Proton,
of course. You have to be able to. It's just very exciting.
And to see them kind of put all this in there together, I think the ultimate
result down the road will be,

(19:46):
it may become too prohibitive for these game vendors to use this horrible anti-cheat software.
Because if 20% of your player base is on Steam hardware at some point in the
future, then you're going to have to do something that lets them play your game
on their hardware because that's a big customer base at that point.

(20:08):
And this is sort of happening in a broader context of the gaming ecosystem where
Xbox is kind of pulling back.
The consoles are sort of tired. This is a really nice value proposition.
And if on top of this, we can build out more and more users running these games
on Linux, on Steam hardware, these game manufacturers, they're going to have
to respond, right? They're going to have to.

(20:30):
Because anti-cheat to me seems like the biggest problem still for these devices, right?
I just totally agree that developers need to get on board.
There's a lot of news like, oh, Steam. Valve is a monopoly and Steam's a monopoly
in the gaming sphere. It's like, well, there's no competition,
you know, step it up, step up your game and, and, and actually compete in that
aspect. And the anti-cheat stuff is a big part of it.

(20:52):
You know, Valve kind of lets the developers do what they want to do in a lot of ways.
And they just lay it out. It's like, Hey, do you want to be on our platform?
Do you want to play your games on this great selling hardware?
Then it's got to run on Linux. You got to get rid of that anti-cheat.
And I'm really, really hoping that game developers step it up and,
and go that way as well. Especially now that we have even more hardware to, to play those games on.

(21:14):
I'm trying to think of, I'm trying to think of who the ideal customer is for this, Brent.
Who do you think the ideal customer is for the, for the steam machine?
Not so much for the frame, but for the steam machine, that kind of console thing.
Well i think it's me and you to be honest like i maybe i hesitate to buy consoles because,
i'm not that much of a gamer i used to be there's

(21:36):
a nostalgia there but i just i don't know every time
i've tried to you know set up a system it's uh hoops
to jump through but having a little mini pc that i could use in place of the
mini pc i bought last year for instance but also have it just like be work all
the time 100 of the time for some gaming when i do want to jump in that could

(22:00):
totally convert my sort of,
the way that I've been a gamer, but I'm no longer a gamer.
So this may convert a lot of people into gaming, which for Valve,
I would imagine is a good thing.
You know, they're, they're reaching out on the edges of their current customer
base and potentially converting new people to gaming, especially gaming on their platforms.

(22:24):
Uh, it I'm tempted for the first time in decades, I have to say.
It's, it's ideal for people like you and me that either live on laptops or B links.
So it's nice to have a but also i was thinking of
we hear more and more people that are leaving windows with windows
11 frustrations and the end of windows 10 support and
this just seems like another license to leave windows now you can

(22:46):
go get your framework you can go get your macbook or
whatever it is if that's the way you're going and you can still get access to your
library of pc games and now you can just let valve
handle it um or somebody else right nothing nothing prohibits somebody else
from coming along but to me that feels pretty powerful and i think just as the
steam deck has moved the needle a little bit more for linux gaming i think so

(23:08):
will the frame and the steam machine and hopefully the long-term result is these anti-cheats go away.
I do have a question for you chris.
Okay uh.
If on day of release you know let's say you decided to buy something but you
had to choose between the frame and the steam machine which one would you go for.
Oh, 100% the frame.
Uh-huh. I was hoping you'd say that.

(23:30):
Oh, 100%.
Say more, please.
Well, you know, I've always dreamed of a decent VR headset that would let me
get work done in the RV with essentially either a ginormous screen.
And so what, of course, I've just ended up doing is I tried the Quest for a
while. But the issue there is you have to run this client software and all that. And it can break.

(23:51):
And so I just got an ultra-wide screen. But it's a ridiculously oversized monitor for the space.
So what would be great is to have my laptop at home or something.
And then when I need the big space, I put the frame on.
And if the frame is a computer itself, that's pretty awesome.
That's pretty powerful. I don't really want to stream my desktop. I mean, I might.
Maybe I will like that. But I love the idea of a persistent workspace in the frame.

(24:16):
My local user data is there. And I can just pull it up in a window in a space,
maybe have multiple windows even one day.
That to me would be probably more useful than a gaming computer.
But I know I'm a weird one. That's just odd.
I'd like to actually punt that to the audience.
And I'd like to ask you out there, what's your reaction to the Valve news?

(24:37):
And are you in the market for one of these in 2026?
And what do you think the pricing is going to be for the frame and the Steam machine?
Boost in and let us know your reaction, if you're going to get one,
and what you think the pricing will be.
Or what your price level is.
Maybe. Where do you need it to be if you're going to pick one up?
My, yeah, my question is, how comfortable would you, and be realistic,

(25:01):
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1password.com slash unplugged.
Now, with all that talk of hardware, of course, we're constantly working on
our own hardware in our home lab setups.
I know for a good part of the summer and even into this fall,
we were setting up the home assistant in my van. And that has turned out wonderfully.

(28:03):
Jeff, thanks for the hardware again. I don't know why you gave it away.
It's great. That said, Chris, we haven't really done any upgrades to your setup,
but you in the last few episodes have kind of hinted that you need a new box.
And it so turns out we have amazing listeners and listener Alex sent a previously
loved Lenovo ThinkCenter M920Q, which is a little tiny one liter PC.

(28:26):
We have to try it out and put it to the task. And well, wasn't there a note in that box too?
Ah, there was. Alex included a note in the box. I always really appreciate that.
Wait, that sounds like you have the map. I think that's the wrong.
Similar. It's not quite as big, doesn't have all the dynamic tiles that Wes has added.
But Alex writes, hey, Chris, Wes, and Brent, glad I could help out the show.

(28:50):
Inside the box, you're going to find a Lenovo ThinkCenter M920Q.
It's running 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 terabyte NVMe, a 250 gig SSD that might still
have Windows hanging around on it, and the power brick's in there, too.
I decided to add some fun extras for my tinkering. There's a PCIe riser card
that exposes the PCIe 3.08X slot.

(29:12):
So you can drop proper PCIe cards in. I used it with a gigabit Ethernet card
when I was experimenting with the system as a PFSense box.
And then later tried a secondary NVMe drive. Both worked well.
I even tested the NVMe adapter in place of the Wi-Fi card. It was functional-ish.
He says, while digging through the parts bin, I found an unopened SkyConnect

(29:36):
Zigbee adapter from when it was first launched.
Chris, I remember your Zigbee adventures. Maybe this one plays nice.
I've since moved to PoE gear, so it's all yours.
And because I can't stand shipping a box with empty space, I tossed in a few
Cafu smart plugs that work great with the HP home.
I've gone mostly in-wall for my setup, so these need a better home.
Oh, and these tiny skeletons I've included, those are left over from our annual

(29:58):
Halloween gifts that I 3D printed.
They just felt like they belonged in there. You probably don't see my name pop
up in the booth, but I've been a monthly member for a long time.
Always in the background, tuning in every week.
Monday mornings start with Linux Unplugged for me.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the hardware or at least some laughs out of the gear.
And hey, the ATL is absolutely ripe for a live show.

(30:19):
Hey, the ATL is absolutely ripe for a live show. I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks, Alex.
Thank you, Alex.
This is awesome.
These smart plugs are great that he included. I'm going to set a couple aside
for you, Wes, so you can play with these two.
And they, I think, I don't know if they came preloaded with,
yeah, yeah, they come preloaded with ESP Home.
And it's an ESP8266 in here. And because of that, it has full energy monitoring, which I love.

(30:45):
That is awesome.
The workflow is,
Dead simple with these. I'll put a link to them in the show notes.
You plug them in. They create a little AP.
You join that. The first thing that comes up is it has a CAPTCHA,
but the CAPTCHA is just select your Wi-Fi, your real Wi-Fi network.
And so you do that, and then it reboots, and it's on your Wi-Fi.
And then about two seconds later, Home Assistant auto detects it.

(31:08):
Excellent.
Pulls it in, and I'm off to the races with energy monitoring,
all the stuff. It's just so great. So K-A-U-F.
Oh, wow. Yeah, okay. That sounds awesome.
Yeah, and they're Wi-Fi based, but they're not like a proprietary, right? It's ESP home.
I like that somehow, you know, I think Listener Alex is like the secondhand stuff.

(31:28):
It's better than plenty of firsthand stuff.
Yeah, that's very true.
I need a parts bin like that.
Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Very, very appreciative. And, you know,
even knowing how small these boxes are, I was still surprised when I took it out of the box.
And it you know it's slightly larger than my hand is really the size of the

(31:49):
thing it's it's remarkable it's.
One liter chris it's in the name.
I know i know i know but still actually holding it uh was shocked plenty of
ports on here it's got your display ports your hdmi's it's got some usb uh and
of course it's got an ethernet jack a little wi-fi antenna sticking out the back,
And then it has a real DC power plug, which I'm very excited about for the future.

(32:15):
And yeah, there's a little rattle. So I wasn't sure if it maybe got a little damaged in shipping.
And once I held it in my little hands, I was like, oh, this is very exciting.
This is actually a great idea. Thank you, everybody who sent these ideas in.
So I hooked it up as fast as I could. And I just booted like the latest Ubuntu
ISO on here using Ventoy.
Wait, wait, wait. You didn't check out the rattling first?

(32:36):
Well, that's how I checked it out.
Well done, sir. Well done.
It works. Okay, then the rattle's not a problem.
And no vent toy issues that worked as expected? Okay, great.
Thankfully, Ventoy works great on there. And it has, on the front, very handy.
Not only does it have a USB-A, but it has a USB-C as well.

(32:58):
And so when you, you know, on that Ventoy dongle I have, it's like a little
SSD in there. So it's very fast over USB-C.
You could just use the system that way. So I booted up in Ubuntu and went through
just the, you know, the live session.
And everything got detected. The Ethernet picked up an IP address just fine.
The disks were in there. And all of that.

(33:20):
I was able to browse the web. So I went ahead and just repartitioned it since
Gparted comes on the live session. And I love Gparted.
Went through and cleared out the main MVME.
Didn't bother with the windows. I figured I'd just mess with that disk later.
And cleared it all out. And then,
you know, rebooted and started the installation process for a server.
And what we ended up with is pretty nice, of course.

(33:44):
This little think center is a decent little box in here. It's got a i5-8500T
and it's got six threads and like the note mentioned,
32 gigs of RAM in this, which is going to be great because ultimately I'm trying
to consolidate a Home Assistant Yellow and maybe a couple of Pis or one Pi and an Odroid.

(34:07):
Down into one machine. So it's going to be a lot on this machine.
And I think I'm going to be running Home Assistant potentially,
although I'm not 100% locked in, inside a VM.
So I set up a Nix OS base on this thing and got KVM installed and had Wes start poking around.
We thought about a couple of different ways to virtualize Home Assistant OS.

(34:29):
Kind of ultimately went KVM libvert. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of options, right? You're almost spoiled for options.
I've been keen to try SystemD VM spawn more, although that's very new,
and it didn't seem like the USB pass-through stuff was really as sophisticated
as we might want, specifically for trying to virtualize something like Home Assistant.

(34:50):
LexD or the ForkNow Incis is another good option. That does have robust pass-through options.
But you'd kind of gotten a base config going. Out of the box,
in NixOS, it's really quite easy to get, well, KVM going.
We could just use QMU, But if you want a little more affordances,
a little more options for like tools to work with stuff that isn't just your

(35:11):
own custom QEMU script, well, Libvert's a pretty standard option.
It does mean, you know, you kind of got to go and interact with its world,
right? Like it has XML files that it wants to make.
And you got to like make your VM storage pools and tell it about how you want the networking to work.
But the plus side is it's, I mean, it's got all kinds of affordances to do that
in a whole bunch of like enterprise complicated ways that are way more than we actually need.

(35:35):
And so it meant really, like we were able to use Nix OS to create the basic
bridge setup we wanted, which in particular, you wanted to have Home Assistant
VM appear as if it was just like another box on your local network,
so it could really easily talk to all of your devices, right?
Yeah, because auto-discovery is a huge part of the Home Assistant setup.

(35:55):
A lot of the new Home Assistant devices that they make, just auto-broadcast.
So that was something that was definitely needed. And we had some reports of
people that had tried virtualizing it on, I think, Proxmox, and they had some
issues with the USB pass-through not always working.
Thankfully, Alex included that SkyConnect dongle, so we had something to test
right there. I'll also note, it seems like the Home Assistant blessed path is KVM LibVirt.

(36:21):
If you're going to virtualize Home Assistant OS, all their documentation kind
of pushes you down that path.
It did feel well supported. It would maybe be another way to put it,
right? Like, yeah, the docs make it super simple.
They have like QKO images ready to go, which is pretty great.
So in that sense, it was a very smooth process really to get it going and then
be able to connect to it and see it.

(36:43):
And we're able to use the NixOS side for, I mean, later you might like bake
this stuff in with add-ons or whatnot, but, you know, we were able to bootstrap
tail scale access and set up some basic sort of port forwarding and stuff.
So we could get in and talk to the VM either by the LAN or via tail scale.
It all pretty much worked. I mean, I don't think we, it hasn't really been tried

(37:03):
in anger yet. It's really a demo setup, but I don't know. What do you think?
Do you have enough confidence to like try it in production?
I was pleased to see that I could do a firmware update of the Sky Connect through
the virtualized Home Assistant instance. That seemed like a good sign there.
So that's definitely, that's got me feeling more confident. I want to hook up

(37:25):
a few more USB devices and like you say, actually try it with a few things.
Um to me i think i also have to like somehow simulate gpu load and i need to
simulate my load without maybe spending hours moving all of my applications
over because i really want to see this thing under kind of sustained baseload

(37:46):
what its power draw is especially if you're going to load up the host.
Too and you've got your vm going is that going to maintain responsiveness to
all the home automation you're doing and then yeah.
Right you.
Haven't even i think dabbled yet fully with exactly what even the baseline power dry is.
And that would be my concern is that the home automation stuff or the responsiveness
suffers when maybe like you know we're we're doing a big jellyfin job or something

(38:08):
uh before we move too far off of home assistant os you guys know i love home
assistant and i really respect the work they do over there but my god if you
want an experience and frustration,
I challenge you listening to this episode, go download the home assistant image for KVM Libvert.
Go through, go to their webpage. Don't, don't Google it, but go to their home

(38:32):
assistant webpage like a regular user would and try to download the image.
And boost in your results. Tell me if you actually, if you got it.
I'll zap you back if you actually manage to find it through their website.
That's rough. So that to me was
like, I'm not even sure if I'm getting the right thing and all of that.
I actually downloaded the wrong image the first time and then went back and

(38:56):
like, oh, nope, this is where I get the QCAV file.
Okay, they have something already set up. I need to grab that.
It was a lot. It was a lot of reading to still even end up with the wrong file.
And that's a little disappointing because the experience, if you just buy their
hardware where it comes loaded with Home Assistant is the exact opposite.
It's just so smooth. It's so easy. I was surprised by that.
But so ultimately, I need to figure out a way to test Jellyfin and ersatz and the whole RAR stack.

(39:18):
Of course, things like NextCloud need to be able to run on there.
Audiobookshelf, Music Assistant. I mean, I just have a litany.
I mean, you can go over the back catalog of the show. I have probably something
like 30 applications running on this.
But you just have your Nix config you can move over, right?
They're all mostly Docker, you know, because this is from years ago,

(39:38):
which feels a little, when you have like 30 Docker applications,
that feels kind of just like sprawl.
I know where most of the application data is, but probably not about 20% of it would be my guess.
Right, probably a few of them have it just in a folder right there.
A few of them are using Docker volume. Some of them are using bind mounts to
a regular spot on your file system.
Yes, exactly.

(39:58):
And then a couple other random stuff, who knows?
And then to really make it all work, I'd have to move the storage over, and I'm not
ready to commit yet because i'm not sure if all this under actual load
works so i'm trying to think of a way to simulate gpu load simulate disk
activity and moderate cpu load that
i would feel confident that that's a decent estimation maybe some download you
know what i mean like i need to think of that and then check the power drop

(40:20):
and then determine if it's a same or less than all my other hardware combined
that's where i'm kind of at with it now but i'm very impressed with these one
liter pcs if you weren't concerned about the power at all it's so obvious i'm,
Let's just say I was, I never felt like it was slow. I never,
I never had, you know, I do sometimes feel like that with the O-Droid and definitely with the yellow.

(40:41):
Yeah. You and I were both like simultaneously kind of banging away,
working on stuff, doing NixOS builds without even telling each other.
And yeah, it was doing just fine.
I would imagine this thing has a fan in it, which your other computers don't.
So I'm curious about audible levels.
Cause you're going to have this tucked away in the, in the RV somewhere.
Are you worried about that in any way?
You know, I never heard it spin up. It would be in the booth,

(41:04):
so I don't think it would be too big of a problem.
If it did spin up, I don't think it would be too bad. So I'm ultimately dedicating
right now the 256 gigabyte SSD that came in there, the separate disk that came in there.
I'm dedicating that to the KVM VM storage pool, and I've decided to format it in BcacheFS.

(41:27):
And if I put this thing in production, I intend to keep it as BcacheFS.
And i feel good about it i went through i reviewed
like some ideal mount options for a bcash
fs file system nothing too surprising in there uh i did turn compress on because
you know these are vm images some of them are have you know large sparse sections

(41:47):
i turned on no access time and things like that to just try to improve overall
performance but uh i didn't tell you ahead of time that i was going to do that west no.
You did not um i actually first noticed because there was kind of a weird i
think you'd run into some problems as you were trying mount options so there was.
Like an.
Artifact from some of your um vibe coding that left.

(42:07):
Like a.
System d script that was doing the mount so one of the first things.
I did was.
Clean that up and i made it like a regular file system yeah.
Well here's i want what i wanted was i was researching the mount options and
this is just a great thing because you can go out and do it for me um but the one i decided to yolo,
Because it was like, this is something you could try, and I decided to try to

(42:30):
brute force it, is Bcache FS not only does it have compress,
which is dope, and everybody should use for their NASs and SSDs and stuff,
but it has background compress,
which I think is obvious what that does, right?
It's when the system isn't as busy, when there's some spare cycles,
then it attends to the compressing.
Well, that sounds exactly like

(42:52):
what I want, right? Who wants this crazy compress at write and read? No.
Do it in the background. So I went ahead and said, yeah, let's throw that in
there, which then I rebooted the system and got the emergency console.
It almost came all the way up. And then I got the emergency console. Oh, OK.

(43:14):
OK. All right. So I go in, and the solution that the machine came up with,
because I wanted to keep the background compressed, because that's a dope option,
is I had the machine try to mount the file system at a different point so it
wouldn't take the system out if it doesn't work. And I used SystemD to do that.
Yeah, okay.
But it was still kicking errors when it tried to mount the file system,

(43:37):
so ultimately I wasn't getting a reliable mount. It just wasn't taking the system out.
So I had to capitulate, and I took the background compressed out for now.
But it still has compression on it.
Well, I'm just excited because now you're kind of like keyed in.
You'll be following the Bcache updates that I keep sending you.
Ray.
And you can try more of the features as they keep landing.

(43:58):
Although, so...
We're working on this thing, Wes and I. And, you know, I got it pretty far,
but I had to step away for like three or four hours on Saturday for kids stuff.
And I come back and Wes is like, by the way, I switched it over to the Zen kernel.
I'm like, oh, good, good.

(44:19):
I figured you'd want that.
It crossed my mind. It had crossed my mind. But then I'm like,
no, that's too crazy for a server.
I'm not going to do that for my server. I want. We're like, this thing's going
to be a VM host. I need to be an adult.
Maybe I should even use the LTS kernel. I'm thinking to myself,
especially if I got BcacheFS.
And then I come back and Wes is like, yeah, I zenned it up. Totally latest version.

(44:42):
Click right on the edge. I'm like, all right, we're going with it. Let's do it.
Yeah, that's right. 617 7-zen1.
Why not? It might help with the overall Jellyfin performance.
We do have NF tables on there for a few things like Wes was talking about.
ButterFS on the root, so my root file system for the host is not Bcache. That's just for the VMs.

(45:06):
The root is still Butter, but I do have automatic scrubbing and weekly trims
for the SSD and MVME, both on BcacheFS and ButterFS.
Like Wes said, we went with KVM and LibVert, and we bridged the VM to the local
network, and just sort of were able to declare all of that in the NixOS config.
I would love feedback from the audience on this.

(45:29):
Bear in mind, I'm coming from a Home Assistant Yellow. It has like two gigs
of RAM and, you know, like a Raspberry Pi 4 processor. But I'm thinking...
Four gigs of ram is probably enough but that's a bit i'd like feedback on and two virtual cpus.
Yeah i think those values came from the uh their install guide they had some

(45:50):
like default sort of like oh run this um vert install command to kind of get
started and so we've started there but yeah i wonder like it sounds like jeff
might be using this maybe other audience members have tried it out and if they i may.
Have now i'm thinking about i think i actually upped it to eight gigs in the
actual config i might have upped it to eight gigs.
Excellent i.
Think i went eight gigabytes of two CPUs dedicated.

(46:11):
And I'd like feedback from the audience if that seems to be sufficient for Home
Assistant OS where I'm going to have a handful of, well, you know,
a dozen add-ons probably and stuff like that and probably 300 devices talking to it.
You might be able to flash ESPs now. Congratulations.
That's what I'm hoping is I'll have enough memory for ESP Home.
Oh, we got to test that.

(46:31):
I know. It's a tight line to walk here because Home Assistant's just one of
the many, many things this box would end up doing.
And so if this was only doing Home Assistant, I just let it eat up a lot of the RAM.
But I do need to actually, so I don't know if I'm throwing things away with
eight gigs or four gigs like Home Assistant recommends is the sweet spot.
The problem is at one point they recommended two and here I am,

(46:53):
I'm bumping up against that all the time.
A little bird in our chat says maybe this machine can actually take 64 gigs
despite being advertised as 32.
So that might solve your issue here.
Great, Scott. And then I am going to use the SkyConnect, I believe, for my Zigbee.
And I think I'm going to use the ZWA 2, whatever that fancy Home Assistant Z-Wave

(47:15):
adapter is for the Z-Wave stuff.
Although that makes a lot more work. It's a lot easier if I just move the existing adapters.
I may just have to bite that bullet. I'm not sure.
Yeah, so far it seemed like the USB pass-through worked just fine.
We definitely saw it inside Home Assistant, saw it and all that.
We haven't tried it in terms of actually talking over the radio or anything, but hey.

(47:36):
Nope. For more flash, though. For more flash.
Oh, yeah, right. So that's a good sign.
That was good. I haven't got a good sense of the power readings.
That's what I'm going to be spending my time on between now and the next episode,
just kind of getting a sense of what the power usage is.
The thing that i have to really just underscore for me that's such a big deal
is that it does natively have a dc plug on the back so down the road i could

(47:59):
just take the ac adapter out of the picture entirely and for me that's a pretty
big deal it could be a nice little savings because,
inverting that the way the inverter works is the actual the less amount that
it's inverting the worse the efficiency is so when something like that's only
drawing 20 30 watts uh i lose like 40% in the inversion.

(48:19):
It's actually really rough. Whereas if I just go straight to DC,
I don't, it's all, there's no efficiency loss there.
So that's something I'll be thinking about, but I'm very, very impressed with
the one liter PC, especially this little Lenovo and just took Linux like a champ.
Absolutely no problem getting Linux on there. Total compatibility,
all the devices work and the performance seems to be really good.

(48:39):
So this is, I'd say, best case scenario for me. And I'm extremely grateful for
Alex for sending this in.
We're going to keep building on it And probably not next week,
but in the future, a little bit down the road, I'll have an update once I've
really tried it and put it through its paces.
Stay tuned for Chris, Chris's One Leader Power Pulse.

(49:01):
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(49:23):
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(49:46):
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(50:08):
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(52:43):
Welcome to the Boost segment. We first have Marcel here, Buller Booster, with 22,444 sets.
Marcel boosted our episode 640, The deuce configolo desktop gigolo.

(53:04):
Thank you for that. He says, I
tried to boost a config confessions related message, but it was too long.
I sent it in via the contact page instead, but I still wanted to send in some value.
Thank you, Marcel. I have that tag for the post show because it's kind of in depth.
So I don't know if we're going to get into it in the show, but I have it saved
for us. I went and grabbed his email. Thank you, Marcel.

(53:25):
Didrell's here with 3,661 sats.
Well i messed up something fountain so sorry about my username uh but after
a six five on my config i wanted to say thank you also this is a zip code boost
but it has to be multiplied,
by 15 whoa oh boy yeah get your calculator out and then grab the map does the map even have.

(53:46):
A calculator module i don't know.
If i kept that i think the map has python so.
You could just use that.
You're right yeah it definitely has a python interpreter well how could it three
six six one three six six one times fifteen.
Does the post office, can I leave the equation on there and they'll figure out

(54:06):
what zip code I'm talking about? No.
Do they have an LLM that'll do that for you?
Yeah, as they're scanning, you know, and doing the fingerprint, you know.
Okay, we get 54915. And that is a zip code assigned to Appleton, Wisconsin.
Hey, hello, Wisconsin.
Yeah, it covers areas in a few different counties, including Winnebago.

(54:29):
Although apples are our thing, so get out of our thing. Appleton.
Don't make us fight about apples.
Don't, yeah, you don't want Washington fighting about apples.
Woo! Thank you, Didrell. Nice to hear from you, and thank you for that boost.
BTC is my 401k boost in with 4,590 sets.

(54:51):
Elevation boost, boosting from my mountain home in Southern California. Oh, fun.
Do you get snow up there at 4,509 to fight? in California?
I'm genuinely curious. In Southern California, do you get snow at that elevation?
I don't know how the earth works.

(55:12):
That's beautiful. That's beautiful.
Hello up there. Thank you for the boost.
What is it about the idea of living up in elevation sounds so appealing to me?
I don't know what that is.
Because it's been a while since you've moved a couch.
I've lived at sea level for too long.
Jeff, guy on the floor Do you know if they get snow up there?

(55:36):
Yeah, they do Depends on where he's at But yeah, you got Big Bear You got all
those mountainous areas over there I got snow at about 3,700 feet In Asperia,
California, back in the day.
And that's Jeff with the weather.
PJ with the weather, thank you PJ Well.
Badu High Sent in a boost 2001 sets.

(56:02):
Hey, I was user 75 from last episode, and yes, you guys got that postal code
right, and yes, the weather was pretty nice that day.
Yeah.
Nice. I like it. We got it right. Also, a little clarification there.
Yeah. He says, uh, to Brent's question there on the postal codes,
Brazilian postal codes do have this long but simple format with a dash that

(56:25):
can identify an address right down to the street.
That is why I didn't send my actual postal code. It's way too precise.
Good thinking.
And he finishes up here. Looks like I missed my chance for the addition of config
confessions, but it was my fault. I did submit it pretty late.
I guess I'll wait for next year's config confessions.

(56:46):
Missed it by that much. Sorry about that. Thank you for the boost,
though. Anonymous comes in with a row of decks.
2,222 sats. It was awesome seeing y'all at Texas Linux Fest.
I wanted to join in the config confessions. this is my first ever git repo and
i just recently moved to using flakes about two months ago things are a bit
messy i'm also currently working on adding my other hosts and i'll add the host

(57:09):
readme to change it when i do all right we'll tag that for the post show as well for the members,
thank you anonymous or perhaps tie fighter and good job getting your first git
repo going as brent will tell you that's important yeah.
And working with flakes.
That's true yeah well done well effing done jasko.
Comes in with five thousand sets,

(57:32):
with all the fun around the config confessions i think it would be cool if love
hosted a sort of hackathon maybe announce a theme or a couple categories a few
weeks before the show and have you guys roast our projects maybe in place of
the tuxies it certainly has that same community engagement aspect anyway.
Hey, now you know, this is an interesting idea.

(57:55):
Especially if we did like a home lab thing where like if people had a home lab
project they've been wanting to get done, we could do like a two week sprint.
And then at the end they send us their setups and we give them a review and
tell them how they did. You know, so it's their excuse to finally buckle down
and just get something done. I want to, because I do that.
Artificial deadline, a thing to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, push for. Yeah.
If that's something people would like, you know, I don't know,

(58:17):
we need a name for it. We need a good name.
And if we get a good name, if somebody sends a good name, that's a sign we should do it, I think.
Thank you, Jasko. It's a pretty good idea. I like that. I like that.
Well, our dear Gene Bean is here with a row of ducks. Hey, y'all.
PinchFlight is awesome. I know you mentioned it many times, but it's so much

(58:39):
nicer than I even realized.
As a bonus, integrated the containerized version of Jellyfin that comes from
Nick's packages. And that was pretty straightforward.
And he links to, Gene B links to his GitHub repo.
Well done, Gene B, and glad you got a chance to try it out.
It's pretty great. Gene's links right to the actual pull request and diff that

(59:01):
kind of shows, like, updating the secrets for it and adding a NixOS file that
sets up OCI containerization to declaratively run the container.
Nice.
I think where it really clicks with Pinch Flat is when you pull it up in Jellyfin
or Plex, and it looks equivalent to all your other media, but it's the stuff on YouTube.
And now you don't have to go down the YouTube rabbit hole and get sucked into a whole bunch of stuff.

(59:25):
You just go in there, you're playing it locally through your media center where
you watch all your other content and it just integrates with the rest of the
stuff you watch. I think it's great. Thank you, Gene.
Good to hear from you. Woodland Geeks is here with 4,321 sats.
Hey, finally got to boost. Hey-oh, good for you. The Utah app at the end of last show was on point.

(59:50):
I have been looking for something like this. I got it working yesterday,
and I had a couple of setup glitches, but the creator was Johnny on the spot
with the game issues. Oh, that's always so great.
That's rad.
And an area where free software can sometimes really shine.
You don't want to put expectations on the developer, but you're just never going
to get that from, you know, Microsoft or something.
That's great. Love to hear that. Thank you, Woodland.

(01:00:10):
Hodor comes in with 18,500 sats.
Hi there, long-time listener, first-time caller.
All right!
I wanted to highlight a Linux conference close to my heart, Ohio Linux Fest,
happening Saturday, December 6th.
I've attended for over a decade, but attendance has dropped the last few years.

(01:00:34):
I'm hoping to boost awareness here in the colony.
It's affordable, fun, and I've certainly made new connections there.
And maybe with some support, it'll return to the two- or three-day event it
once was. check it out at holfconference.org.
And you know what it was because of your boost Hodor when I saw this or Hodor
when this came in earlier I was like putting that in the housekeeping,

(01:00:57):
so it's something we always like to do but sometimes it's just not on our radar,
and I appreciate you giving it the awareness we're going to give it a plug here
and we'll have a link in the show notes for people in the area to go check it out and.
Maybe you know for folks that do report back let us know how it went because we wish we could be there.
Well we got a row of ducks from southern fried sassafras,

(01:01:18):
i loved config trek into the desktop
i mean deuce configulo desktop gigolo well i
know i didn't include it in the boost just to make one of you say it again i'd
never do something like that in all seriousness plus one for a part three of
the config confession series at some point now to jump back to the past and

(01:01:38):
catch up on that backlog i wonder who will end up winning the race to texas.
Don't spoil it don't spoil it you'll never believe what happened next the.
Tracker did have a bug in it just saying.
Oh oh this is new this is a very late reported.
Bug let me just say.
Now the bug field kicks in wh 2020 50 comes in with 4 444 sats that's a big old mcduck,

(01:02:08):
Quick PSA for Unraid users, remember to back up your flash drive,
not just your data pools. I just upgraded to 7.2, and on reboot, my flash drive died.
Oh, man. After way too long refusing to admit it was dead, I finally grabbed
a new one, only to find my backup was a year old.
Fortunately, Unraid is awesome, and all my VMs and containers still loaded up and ran.
However, any container I set up after the backup didn't have a template,

(01:02:30):
so it would not have to run.
Luckily, all I had to do was remove the template and reinstall it from the community
app, and then it picked right back up with all my data still intact.
This is also a time traveler boost. I'm going through the back catalog.
So greetings from episode 25.
That's a typo, right?
It's fun to listen to all the old stuff with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, it is.

(01:02:52):
Oh, boy, man. Yeah. I love that on Unraid, all that stuff is separate from your
data. So you can just allocate all your disks.
Those flash disks, those flash drives, I just don't trust them.
Not long term. but they're thankfully very easy to duplicate make an image of
etc right so there's that thank you for the report appreciate it very much WH

(01:03:14):
good to hear from you and hope to hear from you in the future.
Oh and this last one was me we could probably just skip that I should have I.
Should have trim that oh I was wondering who that was yeah.
Sorry about that.
Okay all right all right yeah all right okay then that brings us to And that
is all of the 2,000 and above boosts for this episode.

(01:03:37):
And a shout out to our SAT streamers. 19 of you streamed and you collectively
stacked 25,467 SATs to support this here show.
When you combine that with all our boosters, we almost, almost broke 100K SATs.
99,094 SATs. And when you do the math, that gets split equally between myself, Wes Brent.

(01:03:59):
A bit goes to Editor Drew. That goes to the podcast app in the index.
That's a pretty low haul.
Although, slightly picked up by a live boost by PJ.
Although it didn't fire the sound like I wanted. I was hoping for a live boost sound.

(01:04:21):
But credit goes to PJ with one, two, three, four, five sats.
Oh, no, it's True Grits. PJ was just saying he wanted to hear the pew sound with 14,000 sats.
True Grits had the Spaceballs boost. Surprise, surprise. I'm still making my
way up to current episodes. Lesson for everybody. Do not ever get behind. There you go.

(01:04:44):
Great advice.
And Jeff just says, I want to hear the pew sound. So here you go.
There you go, Jeff. Thank you, everybody. Not a fantastic episode,
but you know what? We really do appreciate the direct support. This is a wild system.
It's using a free software stack. It's using a peer-to-peer monetary system.
But the booths are on sale right now. So if you've been thinking about it,
now it could be a great time to dip in. Best price of the year right now to boost us.

(01:05:07):
And you also have that membership. If you just want to set it and forget it,
linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Thank you to everybody who does support the show.
This is something that's been going on now for 12 years.
It's a bit of an odd phenomenon, if you think about it in the media space and
to have something going for 12 years that's totally aligned to its audience.
I think it's something special and it's something we should keep going and we
appreciate everybody who does make it sustainable and does make it possible.

(01:05:30):
Here's your taco. We appreciate you very much.
One little bit before we run is one pick this week. One pick, but it's a good one.
We've mentioned this a long time on the show. It's called Easy Effects.
It's had other names, but it's a limiter, compressor, equalizer,
helps with volume in general for your desktop applications or maybe a video

(01:05:54):
or a podcast you're listening to that doesn't have very good levels or the host
levels are all over the place.
You can turn Easy Effects on, and it's like having a sound technician for your desktop audio.
And just recently, and the reason why we're giving it a mention is not only
is just a great application that you should have, but with the recent release,
the whole application was ported from GTK4 to a combination of Qt,

(01:06:17):
QML, and the Kirigami frameworks.
So it's got a brand new fresh release. It's on Flathub as well.
And it's one of our favorites.
It's so good. It's just, it's so good. It's only gotten better.
It's easier to use now. It's more automatic. Like, this is a huge update,
so clearly they're, like, able to keep shipping and iterating.
And, yeah, like, the ThinkPad I use for show stuff, it has abysmal speakers.

(01:06:42):
EasyFX is basically the only way that I can really manage to use them at all.
I will say, no shame, but a lot of the free software events that I watch that
are streamed, they always have, like, really low audio.
Or a buzz and you can just
you got firefox up or whatever you're watching the video stream you
open up easy effects you turn it on and you can start moving dials and

(01:07:03):
you can take something that's barely audible right up to something you can
actually manage it's just fantastic it works with pipe wire it's got lots of
little knobs honestly it's the kind of app that mac users brag about all the
time and it's something we have right here for linux it should get more attention
it's got a nice little visualizer too so you get the uh just spectrum easy effects
8.0 you can get it from GitHub or you can get it from Flathub. It's a great project.

(01:07:27):
And I had no idea they were porting it to Qt, but...
No, me either. But, you know, as a Plasma user, I'm here for it.
Suits us just fine. Suits us just fine. Links to that and everything else are
over at linuxunplugged.com slash 641.
Now, if you missed something or you want to jump around, Wes,
you've got a power tip for people. Something they can really take advantage of.

(01:07:47):
The magic of cloud chapters! Yeah, let's write a JSON file They'll magically
deliver it from us to you that tells your podcast player where to go in the file.
And if you need even more specificity, we've got transcripts in SRT and VTT
format. So pick your favorite.
Yeah, depending on your player, you may even get the speaker names.

(01:08:10):
And for those of you that are on podcasting 1.0 apps, we will bake the chapters
in for the applications that support it.
And some of them, like Apple Podcasts, now are adding transcript support as
well. So some of the 1.0 apps are starting to, and I have to say,
those are from the podcasting 2.0 standard, which is really great to see.
So the stuff that we've been producing for years now on all of our shows is

(01:08:31):
just immediately available to all Apple podcast users because Apple is implementing
the podcasting 2.0 standard.
I don't love that app, but it's really cool to see that happen.
Power of open source and open standards.
Yeah, it's neat to see it happen in the podcast space. And if you get one of
those 2.0 apps that have all the stuff, you can get them over at newpodcastapps.com.
Then you can tune in live and you can listen to us on Tuesday on a Sunday.

(01:08:54):
See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station.
Yeah, that's right. You can also join our lug. That's another way to listen
and get in on the conversation. We get together every single Sunday at 10 a.m.
Pacific. you can find it in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.
Thank you to our members. You get the bootleg with everything and more.

(01:09:14):
And of course, thank you for joining us. We wouldn't do this show if you weren't
listening, so we appreciate you too.
And let us know your adventures with the one-liter PCs and your thoughts on
the Valve hardware announcements. We'd love to read those next week.
Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday.

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