650: This Old Network

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 finally doing something
we've wanted to do for years.
In episode 650, we're going on-site, and we're fixing a network and rebuilding
it with Linux at the core.

(00:31):
Then, of course, we've got some great feedback, some great picks,
and some fantastic boosts.
All that is coming up later on in the show. But before we get to that,
let's say hello to our virtual lug who's live with us right now.
Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumble Room.
Hello, Brent.
Oh, hello, gang.
Hello, guys.
Thanks for joining us.

(00:52):
Everyone up there in the quiet listening, too. The Mumble Room's always a-rockin'
on a Sunday, which is a Tuesday but on a Sunday.
And you can get details at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble.
And a big good morning to our friends at Defined Networking.
Go to defined.net slash unplugged and meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking.
It's a decentralized VPN that is built from an open source project.

(01:14):
The entire thing is open source.
And as I was building out a network using this recently, what really,
really is nice is you don't need anyone else's permission to provision a system.
It's not somebody else's control plane.
Everything is under your control. And if you want something turnkey,
they have managed Nebula.
It's such a nice mix between the two. And if you go to define.net slash unplugged,

(01:38):
you can sign up for 100 devices for free, no credit card required,
and try it out. This would be a great way for like your home lab,
you know, experiment with this.
And then when it comes time to the enterprise, you can own it from the ground
up and you can watch where the project's going just by paying attention to their GitHub.
And there are some fantastic features nobody else is doing coming down the pipe.
Very excited about the future. And I think it's a great time to try it out.

(02:00):
So this is what I'm building on now because I want to own the entire stack, everything.
And I don't want to have any big tech between me and my network.
And I can trust that Defined is focused on building these things out.
But, you know, it's been around since 2007, Nebula has.
It was built for Slack, had to be good from day one, and now it's just everywhere.
It's in places you would never expect, like vehicles going down the road right now.

(02:23):
It's top, high-end, production-ready, on-the-road stuff, and you can use it.
Defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Nebula.
It is that good. That's what we're using. And a big thank you to Defined for
sponsoring the Unplugged program.
Defined.net slash unplugged.
48 days remain until Planet Nix and Scale 23.

(02:47):
Oh, boy.
That's not enough days. I don't like this.
I'm excited. Yeah, Brent, you're behind.
I got to get the van in shape.
Yes, you do. We have a promo code, Unpludge, U-N-P-L-G. You'll get 40% off your Scale tickets.
And that's what you got to do, right? Go sign up for Scale. And then you can
just attend Planet Nix. I mean, go sign up, too.
Yeah. I think we're probably going to have a meetup on Friday or Saturday.

(03:10):
We haven't locked that in yet, but I think it's going to happen.
And this is one of the big events in North America around free software.
And one of the things they do is they have these tracks, like Planet Nix, and there are others.
We are partial to Planet Nix, but there's some benefit to focused tracks as
well, which you might want to look into. There are other ones.
The dates to remember are March 5th through the 6th in Pasadena, California.

(03:33):
And then shortly— They always also have great Postgres talks, okay?
They do. They have a great Postgres community there. We also have LinuxFest
Northwest coming up just around the corner as well. That's in April.
But before we get that far, we would really like to have swag this year.
And none of us are really great at this, but we would love to have something
by scale, but definitely for LinuxFest Northwest. So we're putting a call out

(03:55):
for ideas to the audience for a shirt, maybe something to do with Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
You know, anything you could think of from the show that might make a great
shirt. Send them to unplugged at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Or maybe tag one of us in Matrix.
Yeah, you can tag me in the Matrix.
Thank you, Wes. He's taking one for the team there.
And let us know. And we'll work with you. Like, we'll kick a little back to

(04:18):
you or something. I don't know what, you know, because we'll see how they sell.
But we'll work with you and thank you for it.
And we'd love to have something great pretty quick.
So unplugged at jupiterbroadcasting.com where you can tag Mr. Wes.
And come up with a fun idea for the show, something that makes you think about
the show. Because why we love these is not only could it be a way to help cover
some of the costs of the show during the event, but it really makes it easy to find each other.

(04:42):
And that makes the conversation real smooth.
You've got an opener right there. Hey, you listen to the show.
And it makes the networking aspect of that for those of us that are not particularly
great at the conversation starting that much smoother.
And also means for the boys, we can see in the audience who's there from the show.
And it makes it easier for us to find people. And we don't have to have that

(05:04):
awkward conversation of, have you listened to my podcast before?
Well, and we feel more, you know, secure because we know we have reinforcements right there.
Call the army. So we'd love a great swag idea. Shoot them over to us,
unpluggedjupiterbroadcasting.com.
You never know. We might just use it.

(05:24):
Well, something we fancy ourselves doing is going out to listeners' businesses,
their friend's place, or I don't know, their family's businesses, maybe even home labs.
Maybe Airbnbs we stay at.
Nope, that's a great idea, actually. We should fix up people's,
oh my God, we should fix up people's Airbnbs.
Yes.
They're probably pretty bad.
We have practice. So basically helping people with their home network setups,

(05:48):
business network setups, Airbnb network setups, everything from Wi-Fi to storage,
find those pain points and solve them all.
With, of course, you know, as we do, as much Linux as possible.
And to get our sea legs, we started local, quite local.
Yeah, in fact, not long ago, my wife moved to clinics, and her tech setup has been rough ever since.

(06:10):
And I have been like the shoemaker here where my wife's tech setup is abysmal.
Embarrassing.
And I've been meaning to get to it, meaning to get to it. And I thought,
this is our chance right here.
Let's dip our toes and figure out what's going on.
And I knew immediately there was a couple of items we had to bang off.
Like, she's using a MiFi from AT&T for some of this, and it's an LTE 4G thing. Not even 5G.

(06:35):
Yeah, and not just as the upstream, like as the entire network.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, it's bad. And then she has no local storage. So let's just say the backup situation is bad.
And the Wi-Fi situation is bad.
Thankfully, though, you know, we didn't have to start from total scratch because
she did have some hardware, obviously that Wi-Fi, but also a potential server,

(06:59):
a Geekom IT13 Mini PC 2026.
from their mini Air series line.
That thing's cool.
Yeah, 13th gen Intel i5, 13600H, 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM, 1 terabyte SSD.
I guess it came with a Windows 11 Pro. Is that right?

(07:19):
Did you see that? I never even booted it, dude.
Okay, good. It was already rebooted into the Nix OS installer by the time I arrived.
Did not buy it.
It's got two USB 4.0s up to 40 gigabit per second, 8K quad display support,
Wi-Fi 6E, an SD card slot, up to two disk possible.
You can have a 2.5 SATA SSD, and there's also an M.2 slot in there. Total price was $600.

(07:44):
Yeah, so not the cheapest, but also when you think not...
What it can do, not that bad. You know, you get a more modern gen,
cheap, low power, cool Intel processor.
And I think the big thing for us was Wi-Fi 6E in there, two storage slots.
And this also has been blessed by folks in the Home Assistant community as a

(08:04):
good Home Assistant server. And we'll get to that.
Great size too. I mean, just lovely form factored, felt pretty premium, good product.
It's really a successor to the NUC. It really, truly is a successor to the NUC.
and it's a good little box and just right out of the box, great compatibility
with Linux and that's what we needed.
So then on the Wi-Fi side, we're going to move her from, I had this set up for

(08:26):
originally, but then she moved clinics and I'm going to put it back into action for her.
And so it's the OpenWRT1. We already had this and in fact, it was partially already set up.
And so this was just an obvious go-to to move her Wi-Fi clients over to this
instead of a Wi-Fi. So this is the hardware we brought.
We had this NUC killer, essentially.

(08:46):
We had the OpenWRT1 little blue box, the little physical hardware box,
and a few other items that you might find to be a little surprising.
Did you catch on the parts list here what else I brought?
I'm looking here. So, well, I see a Zigbee radio.

(09:08):
I thought you were a Z-Wave guy.
I am a pretty big Z-Wave stan.
What's going on here then?
Traitor.
You keep recommending things to me and then changing your mind?
Is this back to the don't do as I do thing?
It is. Yeah, it is. Yeah, call the launch. Well, so this, Zigbee's the right
tool for the job on this one.
This she already owned as well. It's a Sonoff Zigbee USB dongle.

(09:32):
And it's a nice little dongle, really good reputation. If she was purchasing
it today, I would have had her get the Home Assistant Connect ZBT2,
which is their nice new Zigbee dongle.
But her clinic isn't particularly large, and I think the coverage is going to be good.
And the Sonoff dongle has an antenna that sticks out and goes up a bit,

(09:54):
so you get away from the machine piece.
Yeah, all you had to do, we just had to plug it into the back,
and it showed right up on Linux. It was ready to go.
Yeah. And the nice thing this will enable is she'll have control surfaces around
the clinic for different lighting and music.
Yeah, and like cleaning mode, just turn everything up bright and stuff like
that. And so those will be Zigbee buttons because they're low power and they're low cost.

(10:16):
And then the other thing that we brought is the rather infamous speakers from
Ikea that have Sonos guts in them.
The Symphonisk.
Yeah. And these are killer. And I had her pick a couple of these up while they were still for sale.
You can still find them in some places because you essentially get a $300,
$400 speaker or more in a $150, $180 speaker package.

(10:42):
And it integrates perfectly with Home Assistant using the Sonos integration,
and you can control everything over the LAN.
Which, I mean, just seems ideal.
I'm hoping no Sonos app required. And so that'll be how she does some of the,
you know, like the wait music or the whatever music she wants to play.
I don't know, but she'll do it through these speakers throughout the office.
Sadly, as we're about to get into, that was sort of, you know,

(11:03):
one of the end goals. Sort of the nice, I'll go get to play with the fun new
speakers and set those up.
We didn't quite get there.
No.
No, no, we did not. No, we did not.
Well, Friday morning you guys were planning to roll up to the clinic and I would
imagine your first priority was to ask Adia what her top issues were?
It's a network makeover day, so I thought I should get from you,

(11:24):
what are your top three or so pain points that you're having right now?
Well, mostly that I just have to slow down because my internet's inconsistent.
I just don't have access to, well, it feels like I'm on dial-up,
which is no good. And then sometimes your printer drops off the network?
Yeah, and then I've got to go search for wherever it is.
I suppose it doesn't change where it is. But because my iPad will just switch

(11:49):
from whatever network it can get on, I go to print from it, and it's not on
the same network, and then I...
Yeah, and the fact that your network is switching on the iPad suggests that
the iPad's determined that there's no Internet available on your main Wi-Fi.
And it's like, oh, I have this one saved, so I'll just switch to that.
So that's definitely something we'll take a look at to see if we can't get that
more consistent. We brought some hardware that I think could solve that.

(12:12):
And I think that's job one. And then job two is I know you have lights and speakers
that we need to get working.
It would probably be good to move out of the 90s because I've been using a physical
CD player. So I think we'll do home assistant for that job.
All right. You're familiar with that. I'm familiar with that.
So that should be fine. Office assistant.
Yeah, we'll call it office. That's a good name for it. Clinic assistant.

(12:32):
Office assistant. That's what I'll name it. Okay.
Little did we know the Wi-Fi would be, and the networking in general,
would be such a challenge. So that's where we had to start, and that's where
we spent a good amount of time.
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(12:53):
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(13:18):
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(13:40):
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(14:03):
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(14:24):
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(14:51):
Well, you heard the client. We got right to work on that Wi-Fi situation,
especially because, I mean, we wanted to set some servers up,
Home Assistant, and we're going to be pulling down a bunch of packages.
We wanted a connection that was going to be rock solid, not get an R-Way,
and actually work for Hadea long term.
So it'd been a little while, but we got to work setting up and re-familiarizing

(15:12):
ourselves with the OpenWRT1, which I think ultimately was pretty quick to set
up, even if it took longer than we would have liked to get everything right.
Okay, so the thing I was kind of the most worried about was networking,
and I think we have that working.
Though every eight or ten pings, I'm getting a dupe error message from the ping command.

(15:35):
So you get the ping that comes back with the milliseconds and all the normal
stuff, but then it's got this dupe error next to it. Yeah, I don't know if I've seen that either.
I don't know if this is some sort of double NAT thing that we're hitting,
because we are attached.
Her OpenWRT1 is attached to a LTE network. So maybe it's a carrier-grade NAT
thing. I don't know. But it seems to be working.

(15:57):
And the server's up. It's a basic config.
But the server's up. So what's next for the server will be NextCloud and a KVM
and then Home Assistant once we get all that going.
Once the basics are done getting configured. You feeling good?
Oh, yeah. We got NixOS running. How could I not feel good?
Of course. Of course. Now, so not only were we getting these dupe pings every

(16:19):
couple of pings and honestly the response time wasn't ideal,
You're thinking maybe we were having some sort of Wi-Fi weirdness in here as well.
So I wanted to know what the audience would use at this point.
If you think maybe there's maybe a channel congestion or honestly,
we thought perhaps one AP was just spazzing out because the one has a channel

(16:41):
analysis tool in it, which we used, and we could see that everything was just
stacked on top of each other.
And there's this massive gap in the middle of the spectrum that just wasn't
being used. So that's where we went.
Well, we ran into so many ridiculous collisions this time.
I mean, not only in like, oh, these are already on the same channel.
We should move one of those.
But then also in just like they were all using the most common IP address schemes in the 192.168.

(17:07):
So multiple times it was like, oh, we should have just moved this from the start.
Yeah, it was. And then we realized, too, like one of the things we could be
dealing with is, you know, carrier grade NAT. And there is a shop next to us
that has nice Wi-Fi hooked up to Fiber, and they have a guest network.
So maybe we just take the LTE out of the picture.
Okay, so we're still having some networking problems, and we've bounced around

(17:31):
a couple of things. So here's what we've tried.
To try to figure out why we're seeing these dupes in our pings.
And honestly, we're getting 8 megabits when we should be getting 80.
Yeah, we kind of expected, like, okay, maybe up to, like, 50% loss just from
all the extra Wi-Fi and the double hops and all that, but not a factor of 10.
So we also, as a troubleshooting thing, decided to swap over to the neighbor's

(17:53):
Wi-Fi, which they have a guest public Wi-Fi that's open.
And they're on Zip.ly fiber, so it's a good, solid connection.
Yeah, we're getting, like, 80 plus minus over there. And then when we connect
to the network directly, we can get 80 megabits, but when we do the bridge from the...
OpenWRT1 to their public network, again, we're getting like 8 megabits,

(18:13):
10 megabits, and also do pings.
So it's got to be the configuration of the OpenWRT, but it's pretty simple,
and I'm not really, nothing's jumping out at me.
We've tried messing around with Wi-Fi radio channels.
Yeah, we did move to another channel, and that helped a little bit, but no major change.
There are two radios, and so...

(18:34):
Yeah, it's possible maybe we're not using the best radio for this job.
And it may be falling down to sort of the lowest common denominator of what
it can actually talk to our attempted upstream.
But we, of course, in this case, we don't actually know what the device we're
talking to on the other side is.
That's the problem with this particular troubleshooting technique.
So, I mean, it's workable.
I mean, 8 megabits you could live on, but it's not the 80 or 90 she should be getting.

(18:58):
So I think this is an item that we're going to have to try to figure out.
I mean, it's workable for today, but we need to figure it out.
And it turned out we needed to pivot our strategy a little bit.
And we also needed there are there are two different Wi-Fi antennae in this
thing. And one is better at the 2.4 gigahertz stuff.
And we needed that for the printer. We decided to split the labor up.

(19:21):
And Wes worked on a very unplugged solution for something coming up.
And we'll get to that in a moment.
Yeah.
And he was, you know, banging on a plan B for our Internet problems.
And I decided to go back to my roots and get into some network printing and
network printing troubleshooting, which, trust me, guys, I just love.

(19:44):
OK, I've been trying to connect. There we go. Oh, my God.
So I just got a report from the printer here. It took five minutes to print
to tell me what it told me on the screen is that the connection failed.
Wow, that's what it was taking so long to print? It's this black and white page
with, like, monospace font on it.

(20:04):
Is it just because I didn't intercap the AP name?
Oh, maybe. Like, you can't figure that out?
It's got to be exact. Well, at least I have to tap it all out on this tiny screen
again. It's the world's tiniest screen. What is that, the size of a quarter?
I mean, oh, my gosh. That's stupid.
Well, maybe, do you think we're
going to get another fun print after we successfully connect? I hope so.

(20:24):
Don't you land? Well, we know that if I don't successfully connect,
we'll get another fun one.
I don't even know what's happening here right now, Wes. This is so bad.
So, I mean, I'm a big fan of brother printers, but the Wi-Fi stack on this relatively
new printer, I think it was bought late last year, so bad.
Thankfully, the WRT1 is flexible, and I could take that antennae that was good

(20:48):
at the 2.4, and I could just really make that a crappy security 2.4 gigahertz
dedicated IoT network, which the printer could then join.
But it's just got this tiny little UI where you've got to scroll through the
numbers and tap out your WPA password and all of that. Absolute murder.
I've recommended that series of printers to so many friends and family and then

(21:09):
had to be the person to connect it to the Wi-Fi network.
In that moment, you're like, why did I do this? They are rock solid once you
get it on the network, but that's like the biggest pain point.
The big question, though, Chris, is did you get that thing working?
Credit to Wes. It really was. Wes was the one that figured out that I needed
to ratchet down. Definitely, that was like the WPA security.

(21:31):
Yeah, we specifically had to do WPA2, PSK, and then there was a couple other
things, BGN compatibility.
I don't know, like there was three or four specific tweaks. Like you really
had to have a specific mode and a specific cipher that would really play best with.
I think one of the LLMs grabbed some of those details. Like,
yeah, this is kind of the profile you want to do. And once we got that specific configuration...

(21:52):
Popped on just fine.
Yeah, what surprised me is when it would do that ridiculous printout,
which would take forever, it would identify the network security that it was using in the type.
So it had the ability to recognize, like, WPA3 AES.
It just couldn't join it. Which I thought, like, what is that?
And it didn't say that that was the reason.
No, it didn't.
That was just a stat on the page.

(22:14):
Yeah.
As helpful as you can be without being any help at all, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, but, you know, with that, thankfully, we're able to get that dedicated
what I'm going to call the IoT network.
So there'll probably be other IoT devices in the future that have similar problem.
That's fine. They're safe.
And really, the thing that I think was our greatest moment was part of all of this in the background.
Wes was pivoting to building a Linux router, and we made a few tweaks to this,

(22:38):
including one of the things that we decided about building this Linux router
is we're going to get this MiFi into shape and we're just going to disable Wi-Fi on the MiFi.
and plug it in over USB directly into a Nix router that we'll have do all the heavy lifting.
Okay, a little pre-lunch pivot. Might regret, but we were just looking at this
networking situation, and it's just insufficient.

(23:00):
And we're not experts in the OpenWRT1.
I mean, it's a great little device with great options, but we're fiddling around with the UI.
I mean, honestly, it feels like the last 45 minutes to an hour have just been
like us exploring a UI to find options. I think we could get to the UCI stuff
underneath and, you know, put even more. Yeah, yeah, true.

(23:21):
I don't know if that's what we want necessarily because we don't also know that very well.
Yeah, so we're going to do the right thing, and we're going to set up the server
that's our NextCloud and Home Assistant box to also be our router DNS and DHCP box.
And, like, primary connection to the Wi-Fi that we're using as the upstream.
So it will connect to the upstream Wi-Fi, and then using the Ethernet port,

(23:44):
we will connect to the WRT1.
which will then share that connection out via Wi-Fi. And we'll just have the
NIC server doing the routing and the DNS and the HTTP because that's an interface we understand.
And then, honestly, it might make it easier for me to make changes from remote,
too, the more I think about it.
Now I don't have to try to open up, like, a web UI in a remote browser kind of thing.

(24:06):
Or it's going to be a huge pain in our butt and waste an hour of our time. We'll find out.
I want to ask the audience in particular what tools you would have used to figure
out what's going on with these Wi-Fi problems we had.
And our solution was just remove as much Wi-Fi from the picture altogether.
But this was extremely crowded. I'd say on the low side, there was probably
30 APs that we could pick up.

(24:26):
Easy, yeah.
And some of them were pretty strong. And some of them seemed like businesses, AP1, AP2, AP3, AP4.
And then others were obviously residential because it's a mix of business and residential.
It's business on the first floor, residential on the second floor.
Right. And like the open, you know, the one isn't like crazy underpowered or anything.
I don't know if it's like blasting anything out, but fine.

(24:48):
And we could see things that were at least as strong as it right there.
And it was sitting next to us.
Yes, right there at the desk. So I would like to know what you would use to
troubleshoot and analyze Wi-Fi in this situation.
Is there a particular tool that's beyond just Wi-Fi analyzer,
or am I discounting Wi-Fi analyzer on Android?
If you could boost in and tell us what you would use, because I think if we

(25:11):
did this again, that would be a tool I would like to have in our toolbox to
troubleshoot, because I could see that being an issue when we go to places like this.
And we were kind of left just blind with what was really going on,
with only what we could tell just by,
what was in the one and with the tools in the one and what we had on our phones or our laptops.
So that was, you know, a challenge. But I think once we moved over to USB and

(25:33):
Wes got a nice little basic config going with DNS, mask and DHCP and all of
that, we had started making some real progress finally on the networking.
Well, progress has been made. We have the networking all set up on the Nix host.
It's doing DHCP and DNS and it's routing out quite nicely. and we're using now
the OpenWRT1 as an AP that's connected to the NixOS box.

(25:58):
And I could not tell you why, but our throughput has gone from,
at best, 8 megabits to now 60 megabits.
We're not at the 80 we should be, but we're a lot closer.
Do you have any thoughts on why? Blame Nix, in a good way.
Or the magic of a full Linux kernel on x86?

(26:18):
I don't know. But we're going to take the W where we can take it,
and we're going to get Home Assistant spun up.
So we're working right now on getting a bridge interface, so that way Home Assistant
OS can run in KVM, but essentially get link-level access to the LAN so it can
find all the stuff it needs to find.
And we're setting up a little Home Assistant config, and then,
well, I mean, a VM, and then we'll get a booting. I'm looking right now because

(26:40):
Wes is doing the rebuild right now.
Doing a boot command, getting ready to reboot, maybe with a new fancy bridge
actually working. We'll see.
Yeah, we can sometimes get it up and sometimes it just gets shut down by the system.
But I think this reboot's going to do it, and then we'll have Home Assistant
up and running. Because it's just the image.
Once the VM starts, now we get Home Assistant configured. So we're really close.

(27:01):
Boy, you know, I think we were losing it a little bit there.
Clearly, we were getting hungry.
We'd kind of been going in circles for a while. I didn't mention it before,
but I think it's worth saying that part of the benefit of moving things over
to NixOS was making sure you didn't have to spend any more time in the OpenWrt1
web interface, which I think maybe might have cost you some sanity.

(27:25):
I've realized this about myself in the past, too.
I seem to have a threshold of fiddling with GUIs, as I put it.
And I've hit it before with TrueNaz. I've hit it with PFSense.
I've hit it with Proxmox.
We would get to a state where you were trying to set a particular value that
you'd know you'd seen where to set it, but then we're not that familiar with
this UI. We used it for one day recently, right?

(27:46):
And then so you're trying to hunt through the entire UI to go find it on which
page and which button to get to that setting screen.
I've already spent more than an hour on this, and I thought this would be a
10-minute thing, right? And it's like, I just want to look at it all on one screen.
I just want it in a config all on one screen, and then I don't have to hunt like this.
So we thought Nick's would be the opposite experience. And for the most part, it was. Except.

(28:09):
tang bridge yeah we would reboot the bridge would appear and um just for background
right so what we're trying to do is run home assistant in kvm libvert virtual
machine but obviously home assistant wants to talk to all the stuff on your network so big.
Part of it.
We were going to make a virtual switch a bridge on the
linux host and then put the ethernet address
that we're using to talk to the wi-fi as the backbone of the network in as a

(28:34):
slave to the bridge and then that would be able to make sure that the VMs that
get added and are also added to the ports of the bridge can talk automatically
to the network and it'll just use all the same sort of DHCP setup and just get
a regular IP on the network.
Being Home Assistant to everything on the network just looks like another device
directly on the network which is that link layer you really need for Home Assistant to do all its magic.

(28:57):
But it would pop up, we would see it coming online successfully DNS Mask was happy about it.
Hey, there's our BR0, we've got a bridge, great!
And then it would disappear.
Okay, this is genuinely perplexing. It's got to be vert manager or something's
messing with us. But we reboot the system.
The bridge interface comes up. You can even list interfaces,

(29:20):
and for a few seconds, you'll see it.
We have the right IP address. I mean, I bet the SMS was happy for a moment.
And then, I don't know, 20 seconds after the system's loaded,
the interface shuts down.
And we don't have a network manager running on this system. Nope.
So that is weird. That's a little problem. We thought we just had fixed with

(29:40):
that last build. And yet it persists.
This is exactly how network troubleshooting or, you know, quote-unquote upgrading
always goes when I try it.
This is why I hate networking. So did you boys just, like, keep at it and try
to figure this out and an hour later make progress? Or how did this go?
Well, we came up with a viable solution.

(30:02):
You know, sometimes you just got to let the machine take a look.
So we kind of threw our hands up and we threw the machine at it and said,
hey, LLM, review all the logs and figure out why our bridge keeps disappearing.
And sure enough, it found a correlation. I think it would have taken us a little while.
And it appears to be related to our USB connection to the MiFi,
that is our primary Internet connection.

(30:24):
When it goes down and then comes back up, the bridge is getting shut down and
then isn't starting again.
And we need to make that independent of the rest of it. So it has it lined up.
It says we can rebuild. So I'd say rebuild and reboot, and let's see if it works.
Oh, also, look here. It has a line suggesting that we add USB power management to help.

(30:45):
I think it just disconnected because we rebooted. That's why it disconnected.
And I think it takes a bit before the interface appears. Right.
And it might be just enough. It might be waiting until the host even starts
to negotiate before it even creates an interface, because that thing also, port works for storage.
So it can do a USB storage, or it can be a tethering interface.
So it may have to do some sort of negotiation.
I don't know how that works, but I do like that it found it.

(31:07):
Do we have a bridge? Oh, this is looking better. We have a bridge.
The bridge has disappeared before, so we don't know if we have a persistent bridge. Oh, okay, good.
It's still there. Yes, and we just got an IP on our MiFi upstream,
which is, I think, when it was failing before. Yes, that would make sense.
Yeah, of course, right. I think we would have found that, but we don't have
a full graphical environment here, so it's not the best for reading through

(31:30):
files of system delay. It's just on a console. LM is perfect for that.
Yeah, reading through and finding that correlation, I think that solved it.
Nice. So now we have a bridge.
Yeah, to really underscore that, what worked super well is Wes was physically at the console.
You can imagine what that's like, a little headless server that we have a monitor attached to.
And then I'm on my little laptop, and I'm SSH'd in. And I have to give a shout out to OpenCode.

(31:54):
This is a killer LLM2E that really made this quick work, because it just was
able to review the logs super quickly, find the correlation,
and be like, well, here you go, dummy, this is your problem.
And it was something that, yeah, like Wes said, maybe we would have found that.
it found it very quickly. And the great thing about OpenCode is you can connect
it to local models, you can connect it to remote cloud models,

(32:17):
it has a lot of different options in there.
OpenRouter easily.
OpenRouter super easy.
Any of the big cloud providers. And they also give you some free usage on their
models without even logging in.
Yeah, they have like these Zen models that they've kind of vetted and they host
and let you use for a little bit.
But the big thing is that it's MIT licensed, it's vendor neutral,
and it's perfect for these kind of quick, I need to get something running and

(32:39):
diagnose and read through some logs.
And I think it made it go a lot faster for us. We probably would have had to
burn, you know, another 10, 20 minutes trying to find that correlation.
And it's nice to see this when every other provider has their own version, right?
And now you're seeing like folks locking it down more where only some plans
can be used with their particular version of these kinds of tools.
So it's nice to have an open source thing for a very useful tool.

(32:59):
Yeah, if you're playing around with something like Cloud Code,
you could easily use something like this. Then you're not tied to a particular
vendor. You could keep using the Cloud stuff if you want.
But OpenCode is vendor neutral. Like I said, it's MIT licensed. And it's beautiful.
It's really snappy.
It's beautiful. It's fast. And it's got a lot of smart features.
And it was just like it was taking a laser at this and just boom, found it right away.

(33:19):
Oh, here's your problem. And then it was so obvious. Oh, of course. Right. Duh.
Okay, so we've got the bridge. It was actually staying around doing its job.
So that means the Home Assistant virtual machine could actually start and get
on the network and actually start getting configured. It had a bunch of stuff
to pull down, some Docker containers, because we're using the whole Home Assistant
OS setup here. But we had a little more work to do.

(33:42):
And the final piece falls into place. We had one last thing to do, and that was?
Establish a Nebula network. That's right. By directional SSH,
because otherwise we can't actually do what we need to do. Yeah.
I mean, not only does it mean that we get to wrap up and finish anything that
needs to be finished remotely, but that's also what I'll use for off-site backups
as well. So it's really good to have that.

(34:04):
And that'll be something I can work on from my leisure at home.
And now you can print your lady love notes wherever you are.
Yeah, I signed you up for that. So you better make good on it.
This is awesome. I didn't know you guys were going to do the Nebula part of it.
How did that go? And, well, basically, Chris, I'm assuming doing all your work

(34:24):
from home is going to be much better than having to deal with the office internet?
Yes, very much so. Just being able to chill and do it from the comfort of home
is nice. Or support her when she needs it.
You know, because part of this also is which didn't work in the clips just for timing.
But we have a little basic NextCloud setup on there. And I'm going to offsite
backup that for her. But long story short, the nice thing I really clicked in

(34:46):
with Nebula is we didn't have to ask permission from any service or log in any service provider.
We just issued ourself the keys and set up a quick lighthouse,
which I almost had completely finished anyways. It just takes no time at all.
And then it was we had a private mesh VPN with no other person,
company, entity involved at all.

(35:06):
And it's perfect for a clinic, you know, trying to do offsite backups privately.
Yeah, and it was pretty easy to get it kind of connected to the rest of what
you needed so that you had a link from your existing setup in there when you do need remote access.
And then Nebby has a lot of nice firewall rules, too, so you can kind of make
sure that only the stuff and the directions that you want are allowed.
We started the show talking about what Hadiyah wanted out of all of this,

(35:30):
and you boys spent all of your time seemingly trying to troubleshoot the network.
Did you get there? Like, was she happy with the end result?
Okay, so it took a little longer. It's 6 p.m. I thought we'd be done at 3 p.m. Yeah.
But here's what we got for you. So that over there is your new server.
I'm pointing at the little tiny box. Great. We need it doctor.

(35:50):
Yeah, that's doctor server, server doctor. And it's going to run your home assistant,
which you can see we have up and running over there on that screen.
I see it. And that blue box is the WRT1. And that's going to be doing your Wi-Fi now.
Your internet connection is now connected over USB to your server.
And so we're just going to need to find a place for all this.
But I've tested your printing. The Wi-Fi network is way solid,

(36:12):
so the devices shouldn't drop off anymore. Good.
And your Internet is much better than it was. We were having some sort of weird,
like, IP conflict. I don't know what was going on.
How did you solve it without knowing what it was? We swapped out the hardware
and just YOLO'd into using the server to act as a router.
And then we switched from using Wi-Fi or Ethernet to connect to the Wi-Fi to using USB.

(36:35):
Oh, that's what I would have done. I should have mentioned that to begin with.
Yeah. Yeah, that would have saved us some time. We should have waited for you to get back.
I didn't want to step on you or woman's plane, you know? All right.
Well, we'll check back in and see how it's working in a few days.
I mean, the core thing she wanted was solid Wi-Fi, and I think we delivered that.
The NextCloud stuff, she and I need to work on more because we need to develop

(36:57):
a workflow for how she actually exports her backup data to the NextCloud.
Yeah.
We haven't worked that workflow out yet. So that remains to be done.
And the Home Assistant instance is basic.
And so there's some refinement needs to be there. But some of that she'll do
on her own. She doesn't mind toying with that.
But I think, you know, there's probably room for improvement,
but we got the job done. And I actually would like to punt that over to the audience.

(37:19):
And, you know, a great way to boost in and support the show is how do we do?
Give us your grade, you know, A to F, what we can improve if we did this out
in production for a listener in the future or somebody's Airbnb or small business
or home lab and some Wi-Fi tools.
I think would be good. And also just general, like, what we could have done better.

(37:40):
What pro tips, setups you like?
I am very happy with how solid we got the internet ultimately.
And then the Wi-Fi LAN seems to be very solid too, so she's not going to have the drop-off.
Yeah, that's, I mean, at least even if there are sort of upstream issues or,
you know, service provider, etc., at least having a stable LAN means you don't go insane.
And ultimately, the reason why I wanted to use NixOS for doing the DNS and DHCP

(38:03):
is because it's just there in the declarative configuration.
And so I just need to back that up. And if I ever have to restore her server,
I just restore that configuration and all of her core network settings get restored.
That was also handy as we were like onboarding the VM and onboarding the printer.
And like it just was super easy to add reservations and check on things. And yeah.
That's a great point, Wes. As we started to build that stuff up,

(38:23):
it was just sort of obvious that this was a better route for us to go for the
kind of integration we wanted.
So I am happy with the results, but there is still a little bit of work left to be done.
I think if we hadn't spent so much time troubleshooting the different network stuff.
We did kind of spend half the day getting to the point where we even ended up
on the path that was the good path.
So that limited our results. Because we knew the WRT1 was good and we could

(38:45):
probably get it working, but just ultimately.
There really are limited know-how of how to properly utilize it.
It's probably part of it.
At the end, though, we switched to our strength and it worked pretty well.
Well, thank you very much to our members. The early year sales are lean,
and this is an area where we lean very much on the members to keep things going.

(39:09):
There's no understatement there. The members are making these episodes possible,
and I really do appreciate it.
You can get a membership right now at a great discount. I think we still have
some bootleg promo codes to claim for the annual or for the month-to-month membership.
You can apply them for the linuxunplugged.com membership. We'll get you a core
membership and that gets you the unedited bootleg version now in video in that

(39:33):
feed as well, a video version of the show.
Wave, boys. Hi. We see we're waving right now to the video version of the show.
And then – but notice how we haven't effed up the audio version because we love you.
And then also there is an ad-free version of the audio version that's still
got all of Drew's great touches that's available for you.
And then at jupiter.party, that's a whole network membership because we have
a bootleg thing going for launch and other shows that will eventually also be

(39:55):
on there. So that's jupyter.party for the whole network membership and then
bootleg for the promo code.
The bootleg really is where it's at. I got to say, there's some good stuff in
there. We had a good bootleg.
Some sneaky extras, you might say.
Thank you very much to our members for making it possible. And of course,
everyone who boosts each episode. These are the things that keep us going and sustain the podcast.

(40:18):
This week we were lucky enough to receive a little update from Olympia Mike, dear friend of the show.
He says, hey Lupp family, I got a great follow-up to the Holiday Home Lab episode.
My little Nixbook side project has all grown up.
The Computer Upcycle Project is now an official non-profit taking donated hardware, fixing it up,

(40:38):
and getting it into the hands of people who need it
recently we received a donation of 35
hp pro desk 600 g5 minis
they're 8th and 9th gen i5s 8
to 16 gigs of ram they generally have a
serial ata ssds in them they're small quiet fast
and easy to upgrade now there is one catch though

(41:00):
they don't have built-in wi-fi which makes them less than ideal for everyday
home desktops but these things make fantastic little home servers so here's
the deal i want to offer them completely free to the linux unplugged community,
you cover the shipping from olympia washington i send you a box no strings attached

(41:24):
and you use it for whatever you want home lab server experiments chaos it's up to you.
That is pretty great, Mike. So how do they reach out to Mike if they're interested
in covering the shipping and grabbing one of these HP Homelab boxes?
Yeah, if you're interested, just, well, shout out to Mike.
So it's Mike at ComputerUpcycleProject.org, and you can organize how all that

(41:48):
shipping is going to work and where to send these little monsters.
That is so kind and great. And congrats on the nonprofit and just this continuing.
I mean, also, I saw, we previously mentioned the license discussion that Mike
was having with his community.
Right.
Well, they kept going after we talked about it and had some great discussions
and reasonings shared from the project side and have ended up going through

(42:12):
the steps to get all the approval from all the contributors and are now officially licensed as MIT.
Hey, that's good to hear.
Hopefully.
Glad they got that sorted.
Yeah, right? So it's the next stage of the project in many ways, which is wonderful.
I want to give a huge thank you to listener Alex and also to producer Jeff.
They each sent in a Coral USB accelerator for the show, and I grabbed one right away as it came in.

(42:37):
And one just came in too. Wes has one now. I, of course, hooked mine up to Frigate.
I have now Frigate with accelerated detection.
And I'm really liking it. So if people are interested in an episode on Frigate,
the open source DVR, where you can take a bunch of different kind of camera
feeds and put them into one DVR and keep it all local.
And with this accelerator, I'm doing, you know, millisecond face detection now

(42:58):
and stuff like that and object detection and motion detection.
And so we have the second one here because listener Alex and PJ were both very generous.
And so while I think while we have it around, we should play audio tagging.
Wes, you were looking at ways to maybe do a little tagging with audio and whatnot
with the choral chatted about that. So I think that could be a fun project.
It does seem like there's got to be some wacky, fun things we can do with this thing.

(43:18):
And Brent rumor has it there may be a third one if you make it over here sooner or later.
Oh, I'm on my way.
I don't know. We don't know. Maybe it ends up, you know, sneaking out in the
hands of somebody else. But.
Thank you, Alex, and thank you, PJ. Really appreciate that.
And would love, love to hear what you can do with the West and be happy to do
a report on Frigate if people are interested. Just let us know.

(43:39):
Indeed.
Well, we received a baller boost. Wait, there's several baller boosts here,
but the top one, 100,000 sats from CJ McAdemy.
Macademy.
Yes, CJ Macademy.

(44:00):
Or CJ Macademy.
Thank you for the boost. Well,
CJ Macademy says, Hey, I've been a weekly listener for about two years now.
I am a macOS system admin with a little prior Linux experience,

(44:20):
and the show was recommended to me by one of our company's Linux devs as a place to dive into Linux.
Well, long story short, I run Nix packages and NixOS on everything possible
now. So here's some value for value.
See you all at scale and plan Nix.
Oh, great. Looking forward to that. Wonderful. Thanks for saying hi.

(44:41):
Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for listening. I'm glad to hear that.
Interesting, too, because I think that's a really neat demonstration of the
demographic that listens to the show as well.
And I'm glad to hear that these tools are useful on all the platforms out there. Thank you, CJ.
Appreciate you being our baller booster. Mr. Hybrid Sarcasms back with a nice 25,000 sets.

(45:05):
Well, wouldn't you know it? He's on to actual budget. When I saw the actual
budget supports multiple users via OIDC.
Is that the Excel connection?
No, that's OpenID.
Okay. Oh, right. I'm thinking of whatever it used to be where you could connect Excel to SQL Server.
I love that idea.
I'm like, what is he doing? I'm thinking budgets, right? I'm thinking spreadsheets.
I implemented PocketID.

(45:26):
Oh, there you go. I should have just read the next sentence in my home network.
It's game-changing to log into an app using a pass you stored in BitWarn.
Now I'm O-dicking all the things.
Wow.
I have been very tempted by this, too. In fact, this is what makes me a little
pro passkey, is a setup very much like this.
And also, I think using Bitwarden or a 1Password password manager makes it a lot smoother.

(45:49):
For sure, yeah.
But then you've got to kind of commit for a while. So consider that.
That's why I like hybrid setup here. That's something I could commit to.
Yeah, very nice work, hybrid.
I could OIDick all over the place.
Curious how you like actual budget, too. That's been curious about that.
Yeah, good call.
The DudaBinds abides in with McDuck's 22,222 sets.

(46:10):
You brought back some memories with the disc burner.
Oh, good.
I remembered I used to use Nero on Windows and K3B and Bracero on Linux.
Uh-huh, you used all those, yep.
I don't know why, but I specifically remember the Tayo Yudin DVDs,
buying them by the hundreds back in the day.
I bought an LG Blu-ray writer in 2023, actually.

(46:31):
Same.
The flashable version, WH-16NS40.
That was the one.
But I hardly ever used it. If when I ever get it out of storage,
I might give this cold storage idea a go.
Do it.
Thanks for the content, as always.
And I was reminded via email this morning, when it comes to optical media,

(46:51):
why not burn two? Because one is none, after all. And you never know when it
comes to optical storage.
So, thank you very much. Appreciate it, dude. It's good to hear from you.
Well, Johnny Castaway boosted in a Spaceballs boost. One, two,
three, four, five Satoshis.

(47:12):
I'm just passing this along for your perusal. It's a little Reddit thread.
It's only an open source one petabyte NAS.
No big deal. Seems doable, right?
Might try building this one myself after Fosdom this month.
That's a lot of spinning rust. Wow, man.
You seem like you're sweating a little bit.
I just get a little nervous about babysitting that much spinning rust,

(47:34):
but that would be cool. It's usually one of these open enclosures. I do love that idea.
the closure and closure is printed and then it has the back planes in there
and wiring channeling for it and i mean it looks really slick it can hold up
to 45 discs so uh yeah that's how you get to a petabyte right 45 24 terabyte
that's absolutely we could.

(47:55):
Just build one of these for the jv colony to use you know let's put it in space
or something and we can all access it and have some off-site backups.
It will even contribute to the ipfs network you never know.
A networking dream.
Wow thanks Johnny appreciate it hey there's Gene Bean he's here with 4,813 sats

(48:16):
I think he wants some mac and cheese,
He says, I'm using Backblaze B2 for my backups. It's the way to go,
in my opinion. And he says, Chris, you made me nostalgic with your Blue Vault project.
And he links me to the old Svelte CD DVD case that many of us have.
Yes, look at this.
With the plastic bindings where you slide 96-disc capacity. Yeah.

(48:39):
I think I still have one of those, actually. It's got a couple of Ubuntu discs in there.
It works for car, home, office, or travel.
Honestly.
You need backups everywhere.
It's actually a good idea. That is actually a really good idea.
Because what am I going to do? Have a stack of jewel cases like an animal where
I could have one pack and it's only $10.
Did any of you have one of these in your car so that you could just like?
Oh, yeah.
For sure.

(49:00):
Oh, yeah.
All right.
I also had the one that clipped onto the visor.
Yeah, the quick switch.
Yep.
You pro.
And he shouts out to Unify for a great Wi-Fi hardware and stuff.
So thank you, Gene. Appreciate you, sir. Always great to hear from you.
Well, PCNORF boosts in with 5,000 cents.
Oh. Thank you.

(49:25):
Don't forget to do a dedicated burn for Jar Jar.
You always want to have an extra burn for Jar Jar, right? Because one is none,
and Jar Jar needs at least one.
Doornail 7887 boosted in a row of ducks. Damn it, Chris, your timing is quite suspicious.

(49:47):
I just wrote a very similar app, which is, granted it's a Python-based app,
for backing up my ever-growing data to a suite of old, small,
offline hard drives I keep in a safe.
I pull them out regularly and was manually managing which data went on which
drive, but that was getting quite a bit out of hand, and I needed some automation.

(50:09):
Maybe you should consider more than just optical destinations?
Hmm.
Huh?
Blue fault. If I could find a nice stasher of spinning rust,
that's probably the way I would go.
I had. Maybe if I dug through all the systems here in the studio,
I could probably come up with a few terabytes. You know what I mean?
Just pull them out of those old laptop stacks.

(50:30):
Why don't I think that every raid you make is a scary raid?
No kidding, right?
Except for my raid one. I had to
do a raid one over the week to save my Butterfest install. That one is...
Fair, fair.
All right. Thank you very much, Dornell. Appreciate that. Lymilus?
Imilus? What do you think there, Wes? What would you give that one?
Elmilus. Milus comes in.
Milius?
Yeah. It's good, though. I like it. It's good. It's good. They come in with 4,000 sats.

(50:57):
Wow, check this out, party member and listener since 2020.
Nice.
On the Self-Husted Show and then added love. Well, thank you very much.
Thank you for being here. So I ran out of episodes to listen to.
This is my first boost. Hey!
Welcome. Thank you for figuring it out.
He said, oh, good. I use Friggin on an Intel system, and you could try out OpenVINO. It's a detector.

(51:18):
Rather than getting a Coral TPU, it utilizes the iGPU on 6th Gen and later Intel
CPUs. inference time on my 6th gen has been reliable in the sub-20 millisecond
timing, you know, compared to the 9 to 10 you get on the Coral.
Not bad.
Run it for about six months. This is a great field report because we were talking
about OpenVino behind the scenes and maybe doing an episode on it,

(51:39):
and I want to know if you could tell me, and this is something I should look
into, but I have an Intel Arc, one of the first generation Intel Arcs,
in the machine here in the studio, and could I use OpenVino,
to start doing inference on that Intel Arc? Oh, that'd be great.
And then we could have it maybe it could watch Brent and we could tell when
he sneaks away or if there's a cat in the frame or not.
Definitely and whenever there's a cat in the frame we just switch to him.

(52:02):
Exactly for the clicks and the.
Views thank you everybody.
Maybe we should pull up advantage I think.
We should yeah let's do it.
So adversaries comes in here with the 1701 sets which maybe we should have an
exception in the script for that one I don't know I officially volunteer to
help with blue faults sounds like something I've been wanting to do for a while

(52:23):
and Rust is my preferred language.
Oh, really?
Send me a message on Matrix or Signal if you want to discuss.
Very nice. Well, I think we should. Signal, huh? Let's hook up on Signal.
Whoa. Are you feeling okay?
It'll be my... I know. It'll be my second person on Signal ever.
You haven't added me yet. I feel so...
Dude, you haven't added... You are the Signal ambassador in the friend group here.

(52:44):
I didn't know you were on it. You were so against it for years. You were like.
I ain't a gain it. I just didn't need it. I ain't a gain it. I ain't a gain it.
All right. We'll talk later.
I just didn't need it. Thank you.
So thank you. I did get a couple of PRs.
Nice.
And I got an issue or two, and I resolved a couple of them. I think the hot
dog colors are still outstanding.
Yeah, what's the deal with that?

(53:05):
I'll be getting around to that, I'm sure. I'm sure, yeah. What does GitHub do
with issues or PRs that sit around for a while?
Is there like a stale bot that comes around and.
Cleans them up?
I mean, you can set those things up. Or I could push some updates.
Oh! You want to just ride it yourself? You feel like doing a little rusty-roo?
I knew it would come to this.

(53:25):
I could get some help.
All right. Thank you, everybody, who boosted this episode to support us directly.
We had 24 of you stream them, Sats, as you listened to the show.
And you all collectively stacked 35,406 Sats. This is one of those nice boosts in this episode.
And when you combine that with our boosters, who also sent us a message,

(53:46):
this episode stacked 212,809 Sats.
Not bad at all. Fountain FM is going from win to win, making it easier and easier
to boost. There's also some self-hosted options.
Just look into AlbiHub, and you can find a bunch of great apps at newpodcastapps.com.
Thank you, everybody, who supported this episode.

(54:17):
Okay, this week we have two picks, and I'm pretty tickled with both of them.
And Wes, you've been playing around with Pocket TTS.
Yes, 100 million parameter model, text-to-speech, voice cloning abilities,
small enough to run in real time easily on your laptop's CPU.

(54:38):
On the CPU. So this is voice cloning anyone can play with.
That's right.
So probably should set expectations because you said it's kind of a smaller...
Yes, that's right. It's not like a giant thing, 100 million parameter model.
It's pretty small by modern standards.
But that's what lets it run on your laptop CPU.
Yeah.
And it's just a PIP or UV install away.
So here's a little comparison just to set the expectations. We're going to play a clip of Editor Drew.

(55:03):
First will be the original Drew. And second will be the Pocket TTS version of Drew.
I get so mad.
All right. That's real Drew. And here is Pocket Drew.
I get so mad.
Right. And Wes, why don't you say it?
I get so mad.
I get so mad.
I get so mad.

(55:24):
Brent, why don't you give it a go?
I get so mad.
I get so mad.
Brent says, I think, the furthest off.
I get so mad.
I get so mad.
Okay, here's Chris. I get so mad.
I get so mad. I get so mad.
I like that one.
That's actually kind of fun. I like the little extra it added in there.

(55:46):
So you can play around with it and get different results. And you probably weren't
giving it like the most amazing sample.
No. So this was literally, I just took, Editor Drew is kind enough to clip and
save our predictions so that we have them to review for next year.
Yeah.
I took the smallest or shortest samples of those, one for each of us.
So it's like 30 seconds or less of audio. And that's all it got is a sample.
Literally a one sentence thing.

(56:07):
Yeah. But pretty neat. and all
on your laptop cpu right so that's pretty cool too just a little python.
Yeah it has a ui you can do and then um it has an interface you just upload
your sample wave you do probably want to um you know a few things like make
it 16-bit depth and there's a few other things that are nice for these kinds
of generative generative audio in particular but real easy upload in the ui

(56:28):
has a text box to type in what you want then you hit generate and it'll stream it right back to you.
Yeah you could yeah you could put anything right now and do it live and they
can render it in the browser. That's a pretty good demo right there.
It's small enough to fit in your pocket.
There you go. Just played that live in the web page.
Yeah, and it's got, of course, built-in ones that you can use.
If you do want to do the voice cloning on your own, then you do need to have a Hugging Face account.

(56:51):
They are open models, but you have to sign in and do a little agreement that
says you're not going to abuse them or use it for whatever variety of nefarious things.
Okay.
But it's only like 250 meg download, and you're ready to do voice cloning.
So good. So this next pick is for- Also.
I just want to say, this opens the absurd possibility of having Chris or recording

(57:13):
your own voice and then having it read your own audio books or reading audio books back for you.
Chris would like his audio books read as Shatner.
Okay.
From now on.
I thought, whoa, there you go. I would. But I thought of a scenario like,
maybe if when my kids were young and I was traveling and I wanted to have some
books for them that I was reading to them.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, is that weird? Maybe I might actually consider it if it was close.

(57:34):
that could be kind of sweet we'll see or maybe it'd freak me out I'm not sure,
All right, this next pick is for those of us that like to slap an Android tablet
on the wall and make a Home Assistant dashboard or maybe a Frigate dashboard or whatever, Grafana.
I don't know what you do. You got dashboards, dashboards for days.
But the key of it is you just want this dedicated tablet that does nothing but show your dashboard.

(57:58):
Maybe it has some settings for when the lights go out, it goes to sleep.
It refreshes if the Wi-Fi goes out. And ideally, maybe you could even centrally
manage some of the settings from like Home Assistant or an automation platform.
And Fully Kiosk has served this role for many years.
It's a great app. In fact, it's still a little better what I'm about to talk
about, but it's commercial and it's not cheap. And when you start having five

(58:18):
or six tablets over the years and you're paying like 30 bucks a tablet,
you're like, is there a way to do this for free?
Well, friends, let me tell you about WebView Kiosk. You can turn any Android
device into a lockdown, full-page, full-screen kiosk.
And yes, of course, it is open source. It's AGPL 3.0.
So it's WebView kiosk, and you can get it directly from GitHub or FDroid or Google Play.

(58:44):
And it works essentially like I just described.
The way you do the remote management features is through MQTT,
which I'm an MQTT pro now, so no problem for me.
But once you hook up MQTT to this thing, you don't have to. But once you do,
you can monitor events, you can update settings remotely, you can execute commands
on the tablet, and of course you can build automations.

(59:06):
So you do need a mosquito broker, like a mosquito or something like that. And it's really great.
And it has all kinds of permissions, so you can access the camera feed if you
want. You can make sure it's the foreground application.
You could even have the, you could access the speakers and play audio on it.
It's very feature complete. It's not, I would say it's not fully,
it's not a fully kiosk killer.

(59:28):
WebView-Kiosk, we'll have a link in the show notes, is a free way to get a lot of the functionality.
And for me, I like to watch for Black Friday, and I try to snipe the cheapest,
best 11-inch or so Android tablet I can get.
And for a couple of years in a row, I've picked up like an $85 tablet that lasts
me two, three years running a piece of software, formerly fully Kiosk,

(59:48):
but probably this going forward.
And this is how I am then in each different areas.
I have dashboards for that area of the home. and this is how most of my interactions
and my family's interactions with Home Assistant are.
Yeah, and I mean, it seems I haven't tried it yet, but when I saw this floating
around, I thought you might like it.
Yeah, good for that.
It's 100% Kotlin, so it's, I think, probably pretty snappy and new.

(01:00:09):
And probably would work even on some of these slower, like Android Fire.
Yeah, and it's AGPL 3.0. Pocket TTS is MIT, by the way.
Yes. So we'll have links to that in the show notes.
Now, what'd you say, show notes, Chris? Yes. In fact, things are copiously linked,
including the hardware we talked about and all of that at linuxunplugged.com slash 650.

(01:00:31):
Halfway to the big 700, so we'd love it if you found time to join us live and
make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday.
That's right, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern over jblive.tv.
And now for our members, we have a video version of the show in their feed.
It is just part of the podcasting tutorial spec.

(01:00:52):
So it is the same RSS feed. You don't have to resubscribe or change anything.
If you have a podcasting tutorial app like Fountain or Podverse that supports
video, you now have a video version of the show.
And we're not going to mess up the audio version one little bit.
It's still our top priority.
It's just an option that's available for our members. Or you can catch it over at jblive.tv.
You know, there's other things in that feed too, like extra data,

(01:01:13):
say transcripts or whatnot.
Wes. Oh, yeah, we got transcripts, diarizations, you know, who's saying what
silly thing. We've also got cloud chapters, so you can go right to your favorite segment.
Yeah, that's nice, too. All right, you know, you don't want to hear about the
pick? That's fine. Actually, the picks are great. Those are bangers.
Yeah, that's on you, but maybe jump right to the picks.
Yeah.
Who cares about our printer problems? Get to the picks.

(01:01:35):
All right, thank you so much for tuning in this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
This is a fun one to get out in the field and fix somebody's problems for the
real, real like you know real world stuff even if it was the wife it was a good
dip in the toe in the water yeah.
She has high standards.
And happy wife happy life that keeps the show going too like i said links over
at linuxunplugged.com and then we got a bunch of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com

(01:01:56):
check out the launch with angela and myself and sometimes brent too the.
Best way to check it out is to call.
Yeah that's true weeklylaunch.rocks for that thank you so much for joining us
on this week's program, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday,
which is really a Sunday.

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