Techno Tim Time

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of
the Uncarshed Now.
Today we've got an amazingguest for you.
It's none other than Techno Tim.
If you're like me and many ofour viewers, you've probably
been following Tim for years.
As a leading YouTuber in theself-hosting community, tim's
channel has become the go-toresource for anyone looking to
optimize their home labs and ITinfrastructure.

(00:43):
His expertise in home labsself-hosting is unparalleled, so
we're super excited to have theopportunity to deep dive into
Tim's journey, gain his insightsand experience and see the
future of home labbing throughhis lens.
So, whether you're juststarting out in home labbing or
you've been doing it for manyyears, I'm sure you're going to
really enjoy this conversation.

(01:04):
So, tim, let's start.
So thank you very much fortaking the time to come on to
the show.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, my pleasure.
I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
So, you know, let's sort of kick things off by
learning a little bit about yourbackground.
You know how did you actuallystart your journey in tech in
the first place?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, great question.
So I mean, my curiosity startedwhen I was, when I was a lot
younger.
You know I can remember wayback.
This might date me, but Iremember, like we had a VCR and,
like you know, the tape gettingcaught in the VCR and everyone
in the family thinking, oh, it'sbroken, we need to buy another

(01:45):
one.
And uh, you know, I just founda Phillips screwdriver, opened
it up and kind of saw how itworks and fixed it and like,
from there on, I can remember Iwas always always interested in,
like, electronics and tech.
Um, you know, shortly afterthat, a little bit later, we got
our first computer.
And well, while most people hadPCs, our first computer was

(02:07):
like a Commodore 64 that we gotat a garage sale and so, like
you know, even though we wereprobably five generations behind
, it was something that I couldplay with and tinker with.
And, you know, ever since thenI've been just like hooked on
technology Went to school, wentto college, min to college, uh,
minored in, uh, uh, computerapplications, majored in

(02:29):
Japanese, and that's, that'sprobably a story for a different
day.
Oh, wow, yeah.
And then, uh, I, I've justalways been interested in tech.
Uh, when I, when I got out ofcollege, I I had an opportunity
to start, as you, a tech supportat a local health care system
hospital and uh, I, I, I, youknow, did tech support.

(02:49):
I fixed printers, I networkstuff, I imaged pcs, you name it
.
I was doing it replacing harddrives, and so that really gave
me like a lot of breadth anddepth, uh, into it in general,
how to, how to support it, howit works, how it works in the
enterprise, and uh, it alsotaught me a lot of stuff about
customer service too.
And so it was.
It was like into IT in general,how to support it, how it works

(03:11):
, how it works in the enterprise, and it also taught me a lot of
stuff about customer servicetoo.
And so it was like a great.
I look back on my tech supportdays fondly and I love them.
Some days I wish I could goback, but it's more nostalgia.
But I look back at those daysand think, man, I learned so
many valuable skills and itreally opened the doors for
anything I wanted to do afterthat.
I think you know a lot of my, alot of my opportunities after

(03:32):
that came from, like, mymotivation, what I was
interested in, and a lot of themcame from just being in the
right place at the right timetoo, but I think a lot of it has
to do with you know what you'repassionate about.
Think a lot of it has to do withyou.
You know what you're passionateabout and if you know, if good
leaders see that people have apassion that can be harnessed,
you may as well harness and letthem do that.
Uh, you know as much as theycan.

(03:54):
So I don't know.
And then I yeah, it goes on andon and on.
I mean I got into systemadministration, I got into
networking, I got really uh deepinto infrastructure and then,
uh, then I decided to become asoftware engineer and I built
apps, built websites, builtcorporate apps, worked for very
large retailers, built theirapps, and then they went the
opposite way and worked forstartups and did cloud.

(04:16):
So lots of stuff.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
So, so what inspired you, then, to actually start the
YouTube channel and share yourknowledge to everyone else?

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, it's.
That's also interesting too.
I mean, originally I startedout on Twitch and I was
streaming video games and I loveplaying video games.
I don't play them enoughanymore because now my my hobby
is YouTube, kind of sort of.
But I started streaming onTwitch and I had a lot of fun
there.
But I noticed, you know, Iwasn't getting a ton of

(04:44):
interaction.
Twitch and I had a lot of funthere, but I noticed, you know,
I wasn't getting a ton ofinteraction and at the same time
I'd always flip-flop betweengaming and home labbing.
Like that was just my cycle,like I'd play games.
I played the new Legend ofZelda game, I'd geek out on it
for four months and I get tiredof the game.
And then I go back into homelabbing and build out, you know,
upgrade all of my machines,network all of my machines, do

(05:09):
whatever, build something new,and then, once that was in a
good place, I get bored of itand go back to gaming.
So there was always this goingback and forth.
Well, once I started doingTwitch, I realized like, well,
now I'm putting all that timeinto gaming, I have zero time
for home labbing, and, you know,building and tinkering.
And so one day I just decidedyou know what, building and

(05:30):
tinkering.
And so one day I just decidedyou know what I, I'm doing this
stuff on the weekend, I'm, I'm,I'm learning about all these
things.
I'm just going to record it.
I'm just going to record what Ido every weekend and what my
project is the prior week and,uh, that's exactly what I do to
this day.
I mean, you know, I I don'tknow if I was right place, right
time, you know, but thispre-pandemic and and you know, I
just started recording what Iwas doing and I realized that

(05:50):
there are a lot of people outthere who, who know what I'm
talking about and do the samething.
That was, that was a big eyeopener for me, because prior to
this, like no one no, no one Iknow does what I do, you know,
and and very few people in reallife, like, um, understand even
what I'm talking about.
So it was a big unexpectedsurprise to find such a large

(06:13):
community that's the great thingabout the internet, tim, isn't
it?

Speaker 1 (06:15):
you kind of find so many like-minded people like um,
where I live, like it's allvery old people and all they
care about is how tall the grassis.
You know, if I talk to them tothem about anything that plugs
in that isn't an electriclawnmower, they don't want to
know.
That's the great thing aboutthe internet is we do get to
have our little nerdy niches andgroups.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's super fun?
Yeah, it is.
I almost thought it was tooniche for YouTube, but I learned
later, the more niche you arethe better because you, you, you
know you're not lost in the seaof other things.
So, and that category has grownlike that, like home labbing
has grown since I startedtenfold.

(06:58):
There are so many channels thatare popping up that are so
awesome.
I keep adding, I keep seeingnew people and new projects
every day popping up on my, onmy home YouTube homepage and my
watch later is just full of newpeople and I love it.
I love to see it.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah, why do you think there's more and more
people getting into it?
You know, why do you think it'sso different now?
Is it just that it's easier,better products or just a better
knowledge that people have thatit?
You know that they don't trustkind of big tech and they want
to self-host.
You know what do you think thereason is?
People are, you know, kind offlooding into the self-hosting
scene yes, all of it, I think.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Uh, yeah, all of it.
I, I think it's.
I think people see other peoplewell, one, I, I think there's
just a large amount of peopledoing this, even though, like I
thought, hey, I'm on an island,I'm doing this by myself.
I think, um, having, you know,a handful of youtubers doing the
same thing, kind of open thedoors for other people to say,

(07:53):
hey, I can do that too, but Ihave my own perspective on that
and here's how I do it.
I think it's a combination ofthat uh, seeing more of it.
Uh, people getting motivated orinspired by other people doing
it and saying, hey, I, I want todo that too.
Uh, I think the pandemic had alot to do with it too.
Like it, now everybody knowshow to, you know, do a web

(08:14):
conference properly besides megetting started today, um, and
and recording and audio.
Like a lot of people you know,double down on.
Uh, you know, in in in.
Like investments in av, and uh,people had a lot of time on
their hands.
Down on on.
Uh, you know, in in in.
Like investments in av, and uh,people had a lot of time on
their hands.
And then, on top of that, yeah,we have a lot of great products
that are getting a lot of greattraction, uh, whether open
source or not, uh, but getting,uh, you know there's a also this

(08:39):
shift, um, for some people,away from the, for some people
it's to the cloud, but eitherway, like there's a lot of
people you know making decisionson, you know what what they
want to share with companies orwhat they don't want to share
with companies, and then there'sa lot of great hardware coming
out.
If you think about you, justthis massive shift from big and

(09:02):
powerful to small and mighty,like it's accessible to anyone
now and I got a lot of advicesback there too.
It's, you know, I could have awhole home lab on a tiny $200
mini PC and it's going toperform just like, just like,
almost like you know, afive-year-old enterprise server.
I mean, you know you got totemper your expectations a

(09:25):
little bit, uh, but for whatmost people are going to do on
those large enterprise servers,they could also do on these very
small mini pcs too.
So it's like compute has gottena lot better over time and a
lot more efficient, and it's uh,it's just incredible what you
can do on on such affordabledevices now too.
So I, I think it's acombination of all that and you

(09:45):
know, you know, I I feel likethis is uh, I don't want to see
a new hobby, but just it.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
I I think this hobby as a category is growing too
right yeah, like I think youknow, um, you know our fathers
were into tinkering with cars,like our generation we're.
You know, unless we're realgood mechanics, we can't because
it's too difficult.
So we tinker with our homeservers.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
So maybe it's our generation, that's a good point.
Yeah, yeah, auto mechanic yeah,that's that that is a good
point.
Yeah, instead of, like you know, tinkering in the garage and
and turning bolts, you know, onan engine, on an old car and
fixing it up, you know, we,we're fixing up the old servers,
you know, in our basement.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
As someone who's you know, you've contributed so much
to the community, you knowwhat's been the most rewarding
aspect.
Do you think of sharing yourknowledge?
Is it, you know, just otherpeople getting into it as a
hobby?
Or you know other YouTubersstarting up and seeing the?
You know what you're talkingabout before.
What do you find most rewardingand what keeps you going?

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, I think it's a combination of all of that.
I think the very first thingthat was rewarding to me was
just realizing that there was acommunity of people out there.
Like my whole life, I've alwaysbeen different.
Like my whole life, like youknow, I rarely find anyone who
likes the things I like, whowants to talk about the things I

(11:08):
want to talk about, who evenknows what I'm talking about or
even interested in those things.
So in most social situations Ijust I don't have a lot to say
to contribute to mostconversations, not because I'm
antisocial, it's just because,you know, my brain works a
little different.
So I think the biggest thing wasrealizing there's a ton of
people out there that like to dothis stuff too.

(11:29):
They're super passionate about,you know, the products they
choose, the hardware they choose.
Why they choose a specifichardware or brand and it's funny
, it's like it's almost liketech brands are our sports teams
at least.
For you know, that's kind ofhow I see it too.
You know you're going to rootfor team, you know red or team
blue or team green or whoeveryour team is.

(11:50):
And I feel like you know I I'mnot, I'm not huge on sports, but
you know, I, I kind of feellike that.
There's that rivalry andthere's that, you know, kind of.
You know the, the, the brandsthat you like and support, um,
but yeah, it's it, you know.
So, first of all is realizingthat there's a huge community
out there.
Second, it's something thatprobably people in the youtube

(12:12):
community say not to do, andit's read the comments and I
can't help it.
Like I, I read comments, youknow, and, and the good and the
bad, like I, I read them all, um, because, um, you know, I, I,
someone told me a long time agothat that feedback is a gift and
, and and I look at it that waytoo Um, doing a lot of product
development stuff with, withsoftware, feedback is a gift.

(12:34):
It's hard to get from people,and so, you know, while some
comments might be trawling andsome comments just might be, you
know, whatever a lot of themare, are I, for me, kind of kind
of heartfelt, like people willsay, like, oh, I, you know, I'm
so excited I finally got thisworking.
Thank you so much.
Or this is the first tutorial Iunderstood, you know.

(12:55):
Or or, uh, I feel, I feel, forme, uh, reading the comments
where someone, um can finallyunderstand a piece of technology
or how something works, or theygot something going and they
want to share that excitementand they're so excited that they
type a comment that's.
That's the kind of thing that II really enjoy.
I really enjoy just seeingpeople learning and get getting

(13:16):
really excited about technology,like so excited that they're
going to tell me their wholeentire home lab, you know know
stack, in one comment, like Ilove those because I cause I
feel for that person, cause I,I'm like I think you know, when
I was on the other side of that,what you know, I, I felt that
way too.
I wanted to tell someone whoknew what I was talking about my

(13:36):
whole stack, cause at leasttelling that person they, they
would understand what I'mtalking about.
So it's, it's a lot of honestly.
Honestly, it's a lot of littlethings that that, um, that that
I don't know give me, you know,motivation and and, uh, the
reward you know I'm looking backto when you first started.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
You know what challenges did you face when
creating content.
You know um did you face anychallenges and, if so, how did
you actually overcome them?

Speaker 2 (14:00):
yeah, I, I faced a lot of challenges and I think
these are things like peoplelearn over time, after doing it,
cause there isn't a like thereisn't.
There isn't a great guide onhere's how to build a YouTube
channel.
I know Don't get me wrongthere's a thousand million
probably people on YouTubetelling you how to grow and how
to do this, uh and, and how toedit and which camera to use and

(14:21):
um.
So there I.
I had a lot of challenges.
I still have those challengestoday.
A lot of I mean just basic AVstuff.
Like I'm a tech person, myhobby has never been AV.
I've never done anything in AVand all of a sudden I wanted to
do AV.
That was that was a challengefor me.
I realized, hey, when you're ina room that's plaster and wood,

(14:43):
like that's not great for audioI.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
I never had any idea that my first videos.
I just used the microphone onthe um on yeah book and, oh, my
sound was so bad.
Looking back, I almost feellike I should delete our first
videos because I'm there withyou.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
I'm there with you and on top of that then I, you
know, I, I had my face and I'mlike stiff as a board and you
know, I and I, I didn't know howto act Like a lot of people
will say, not that I'm acting,but like like my real voice
wasn't coming out, like like itkind of is now.
I mean, it's a little bit lowernow, cause it still happens.

(15:23):
Now it takes me a long time tolike get my personality out and
uh, kind of be comfortable withwith everything, with all my
isms, you know, with with alittle bit of stuttering, with a
little bit of talking reallyfast followed up by pausing.
Like you know, I, I, uh,there's a lot of things.
Like you, you start to becomereally self-aware when you do

(15:43):
this stuff and that's still hardto overcome.
And part of the reason why I doa Twitch stream on Saturday is
because that's kind of like thereal me.
That's, you know, like this isright now, like live
interactions are kind of thereal me, and when I do scripted
stuff I try so hard to be me,but it's, you know, it's kind of
hard when you're, you know,looking at a teleprompter and

(16:04):
notes and and talking aboutstuff, but I, I think most of it
, um, most of the challenges areare, for me, were like soft
skills, like you know, how do I,you know, how do I act like a
normal human being, like likeI've been trying to do my whole
life, so which which is, uh, youknow it's, it's, it's debatable
whether I'm accomplishing thator not.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
So you're doing a great job, you know.
I do love your channel, youknow oh, thank you.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
I, I appreciate it, like I really do.
I I appreciate it.
Um, yeah, and you know, then itwas, there was editing.
Like I don't know how to edit,like do I do?
You know j cuts, l cuts.
Like you, you start to learnabout all these editing
techniques and how to soundnatural and you know how do I
splice in these clips.
So I'm not, like you know,cutting every, you know two

(16:54):
seconds or 10 seconds afterevery sentence.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
So do you do all your own editing tim?

Speaker 2 (16:59):
yeah, I do, I, I do my own everything.
Uh love some help at some point, but at the same time, I enjoy
every piece of the processsomewhat.
There are some parts where it'seasy to procrastinate and then
there are some parts where I'msuper excited to finish up and

(17:20):
so, yeah, I do it all.
That's another thing I don'tthink a lot of people realize.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work, you know,it's a lot of work, especially
in tech.
I'm sure it's like thiseverywhere, but at least for a
lot of my content, it's like I'meither teaching something or I
have to test something, and so Ihave to do all that pre-work
ahead of time, before I evenlike think about, like, writing

(17:41):
an outline for a script.
That's what I have to do.
So test this, build this I meanvery similar to what's going on
back there build this wholething, test it, make sure it
works.
Uh, kind of write documentation.
While I'm doing it, then youknow, uh, come up with a way to
kind of explain it to anaudience and hopefully get it
within, you know, 15, 20 minutes.

(18:03):
I've, uh I've been known torelease our videos and then you
know, and and I, I guess theykind of do okay too.
But, um, you know there'sthere's just so much you learn
about youtube, uh, and thealgorithm is always changing and
so it's just like you kind of.
It's.
It's really hard to to, yeah,to to bundle all of that up and

(18:24):
still stay relevant.
It's tough.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
You, you um cover.
You know really wide, widerange of topics.
How'd you actually um decidewhat to focus on for your next
video?

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, good question.
So my, like I mentioned earlierthat that that my channel is
always what I worked on lastweek or the week before and it's
still that way.
Um, you know, it was a littlemore organic in the beginning
because I had a lot, I feel likeI had a lot of like
infrastructure and like pipes tolay down, like really

(18:58):
foundational stuff so that I canthen teach stuff from my home
lab.
So in the beginning it was, youknow, really nuts and bolts,
like here's I'm building mynetwork, here I'm building my
server rack, getting new servers, you know, laying down this
foundation.
So then I can do the rest of mycontent.
And now I'm at a point where,like, my home lab is super solid
.
Well, for the most part, I, youknow, I I have, uh, I migrated

(19:22):
some of my servers to aco-location in downtown
Minneapolis here, uh, still ahundred percent self-hosted,
just someone else's, you know,supplying power and network.
And then you know, I'm kind ofstandardizing some of my home
production, and so things arereally, you know, getting pretty
solid.
And so now it's it's fun,because then I get to think,

(19:43):
okay, what do I want to do next?
Right, not, not, what do I haveto do, and even the have to
do's are super fun.
But now it's like, okay, likewhat's something that's that's
really cool, that like I wouldlike to learn about next week or
play with next week, and so alot of it's like that.
It's a, it's a combination of,you know, what I want to do,

(20:06):
what I'm interested in.
I have a backlog of videos,always that you know.
Any one of those could be, youknow, come to the top.
They could be surfaced to thetop.
What are people interested in?
What's popular right now?
You know it's.
What are other YouTuberstalking about, you know?
And so it's kind of like all ofthat together and then trying

(20:31):
to figure out you know what,what my angle or what the story
is or what it is that I want toteach or tell, and so you know
it's.
It's been organic, like youknow.
And then, and then there's thewhole like brand side of it,
which all new to me, you knowthere's.
You know, once, once you startdoing stuff, you know brands see
what you're doing and they,they, they, they want to help
out or they want to hop on forthe ride.
It's a lot of that, and so youkind of have to balance, like,

(20:55):
hey, if I want to do this for aliving, you have to make money.
If this is going to be your job, otherwise it's a hobby.
If this is going to be your job, otherwise it's a hobby.
And so at some point you know,either, if you you're not, if
you're not big enough to live upad revenue, um then you have to
, like you know, partner up withbrands and do cool things.
Uh, and most of the time it'sit's more than you could do by

(21:17):
yourself.
Anyway, so it's, it's, it's.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
I think it's a win-win, uh, if it's done right
you know, talking about how youkind of focus on what video is
going to do.
Just a question to see ifyou're kind of similar to me
really is do you have like awhole bunch of videos that are
half finished and you kind oflike you start doing one video?
Then you have like you think,oh, this is such a good idea,
and you think I've got to startvideoing this, and then you kind
of forget some other videosthat you've done.

(21:40):
Six months later you kind oflook in some folder and you
think, oh yeah, I forgot aboutthat.
I don't know.
Oh, or is that just me?

Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know um, honestly, no, I, I, I wish I was
like that, because that, that,that to me, that feels like how
you have this moment ofinspiration where you want to do
this thing and you startfilming it and then you know
something else you know gets.
Take this place, like I wish Idid that more, like that's to me
sounds, sounds, sounds awesome.

(22:08):
I don't, unfortunately.
I I have kind of ideas, so Ihave notes and I have lots of
ideas and I'll add notes orideas throughout the day as I
think of them, like, and I'vegotten better at this, and and
this is something that I that Ilearned I have to do is like,
whenever an idea pops into myhead, I have to write it down,

(22:29):
cause, like it's not so muchjust the idea, it's it's how I
see that idea uh, come tofruition, or what I want to say
about that idea.
And I think, yeah, I'llremember it.
No, I, I never remember.
I remember the idea, but notwhat I was thinking like, like
how this will relate to theperson, and so I'd gotten a lot
better at having a lot of noteson different videos, and then I

(22:51):
keep adding to them.
I keep just, you know, sprinklethem on and then.
So then, when it's finally timeto film, I am like, okay, like
let's, uh, let's let's pull thisall together, but I wish I was
uh.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
I wish I was uh.
I wish it was more like that.
More you know, you don't tim,you really don't.
I wish I was more organized.
So do you?
Do you carry an actual notebook, pen and paper around with you,
or is it all kind of digitalnotes?

Speaker 2 (23:16):
yeah, it's digital.
I I mean I, I like the idea ofthat and I I've loved the idea
of that forever.
I mean, you know, that's that's.
And I think a lot of peoplelove the idea of that.
That's why, even like, a lot oftech companies still give out
these moleskin notebooks,because I think people like the
idea of like, hey, I'm anote-taker, I'm gonna do this on
pencil and paper.
Pen and paper, I mean a lot ofpeople still do for me I can't.

(23:39):
I can't because it's it's notwith me at the grocery store,
it's not with me, you know, whenI'm walking down the street or
walking my dogs or anywhere.
And so, it being digital nowit's just so easy because I pull
it up, I can find the doc and Ican really quickly like get
something out of my brain.
While it's still in my brainand I have that thought, you

(24:00):
know, and it's weird, that'skind of how my brain works
Something will pop in my head.
I'll be like that's how Iexplain it.
That's going to be my intro.
Hurry up and write this downand, you know, write kind of
what what I'm thinking.
Um, it's mostly how I canexplain something to someone, to
where they can understandsomething and, um, those things
are kind of hard to think of inthe moment and what?

Speaker 1 (24:22):
what do you use for your note taking?
Is it open source thing orunfortunately.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
No, um, I, I, you know, I've used a combination of
stuff like I used to do it allin markdown and it used to be
just like my local stuff.
It used to be a markdown and,uh, I, you know, I've tried
everything from from notion toapple notes, to google docs, to
google keep, to one note, to uhevernote.

(24:49):
I mean, I've done a lot of notetaking stuff and we're talking
like going back 10 years, youknow, and so like things that
over time I've used.
The things that stuck were onenote from microsoft, um, that I
used that for a while.
I switched to uh Apple notesfor a while and then I, um, it
kind of I don't know, I'm not afan of like when any note taking

(25:12):
app copy and paste your yourstyling too, so, anyways, these
are nitpicks.
And then, uh, then I use Googlekey for a long time and I was
like, yeah, this is, this isgreat, except for it's a little
too basic.
So, so lately I've just been, Ifeel like I feel like I need a
better system, uh, but I've I'vebeen using Google docs yeah, I

(25:33):
use Google docs for it and Ifound that, like, if I just
create a doc per idea.
Then it's a lot easier for me tolike put those ideas in there.
I mean, it's the same idea.
If I was going to use OneNote Iwould have a new page for this
thing.
But yeah, it's notsophisticated at all.
It used to be.
I used Notion for a littlewhile too.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Tim, one thing I'm not sure if you ever tried.
Have you tried Noteslm,google's Noteslm?
Have you tried that at all?

Speaker 2 (26:01):
I haven't.
Is this like one of their betaproducts?

Speaker 1 (26:03):
Yeah, so you can kind of like log into it just um,
with your normal google account,but what it allows you to do is
you can add various differentsources so you can write your
own notes.
You can like copy and pastetext, you can put pdfs in, you
can put web links in, and thenyou can like question it and the
ai analyzes that data set ofnotes, and so you can kind of
put notes in about things you'rekind of thinking about and

(26:25):
working on and then you can askthe AI to analyze all of those
kind of sources in your notes.
It's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
Yeah, I'll have to check it out and this is a
Google product, then right.
Did you?
Ah, yeah, I'll have to check itout.
I mean, I just I just got forGoogle.
I thought you know what they'reoffering a free trial Like.
So I've done a little bit of AIstuff, a lot of self-hosted AI
stuff.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah, I was watching your videos recently about the
self-hosted AI.
Yeah, that's something I wantto definitely do.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, and we could touch on it then or later.
But you know, I recentlystarted.
Since I'm using GoogleWorkspaces, I was like, you know
, they're offering me a freetrial of Gemini.
I may as well be informed on it.
It's kind of two for one I getinformed and I get some value
out of it.
I'm on the two-week free trial.
This is kind of like where I seeAI going, where AI isn't its

(27:16):
own product, ai is integratedinto the products you already
use or into a product you'regoing to use, and it's uh, it's
pretty nice in Gemini to be ableto every email you pull up,
there's a summary on the rightfrom Gemini, gemini, even if the
thread is, like you know,months long, like some of my
email threads tend to be, uh, inthis space, you know Gemini,

(27:37):
summarizing stuff you could askit.
Stuff.
You could ask it all kinds ofstuff about documents, contracts
.
I mean not that I, you know,not that I don't read contracts,
but when I'm like, did they saythis in this contract?
You know it's very easy to askGemini, like you know.
Hey, did they, you know, didthey mention exclusivity?
You know, I'm not going tosearch for the word, I want the

(27:59):
idea.
Did they mention you know anykind of exclusivity in this
contract, and gemini figures itall out, so I think that's
coming along too.
So, anyways, I'm on the freetrial.
I don't know if I'm going tostick on it, but I need to try
out this.
Notes llm too um, just um.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Last question I got about your youtube channel is
where did the name techno timcome from?

Speaker 2 (28:17):
oh yeah, a lot of people ask this uh, oh man, it's
um, oh man.
So when I was in college,electronic music was pretty
popular.
Everybody, even now, stillcalls a lot of electronic music
just techno.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
I must admit, adam Tim, when I've been searching
for your channel, sometimes I'vetyped in techno Tim, and the
autocorrect has changed it totime and so I'm doing a search.
I thought, oh for God's search.
I thought, no, I didn't wanttechno time, I wanted techno.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
Tim, yeah, yeah, autocorrect, I noticed does that
on on mobile?
Um, these are all all things Ihad to figure out and overcome,
um, but so, so, like going wayback when I was in college, uh,
uh, I liked electronic music.
I liked more of, like I don'tknow, trance and kind of EDM and
like all this atmospheric kindof electronic music, cause it

(29:11):
was new to me, like I'd neverheard anything like it, and it
was new to me and it was a newgenre.
I've always been into hip hop,I still am, uh, but you know, in
college I that because Ithought, wow, this is a new way
of listening to music that'selectronic, as hip hop for a
long time was, I mean, you know,especially nineties and two
thousands.
So, anyway that I would play itand I lived in the dorms and,

(29:34):
uh, you know, my, my, my dormroom was right by the bathroom
so everybody could hear it.
Like, if someone has to go tothe bathroom, my door's open,
I'm playing the music.
And so, you know, people wouldalways tease me about it and my
RA would always make a point tosay, tim, turn your techno music
down.
You know, it became a joke.
Even though it wasn't that loudEveryone could hear it as they
walked by to the bathroom.

(29:55):
And so I know a hockey playerlived next door to me and he
just started calling me technoTim and it stuck and like all
through college like peoplewouldn't even call me Tim
anymore, they just called meTechno.
Like for a long time my namewas just Techno, you know, and
it was just.
I just knew that that's whothey were talking about.

(30:16):
So, anyways, that became my,you know, like my gamer tag for
a lot of stuff and I justthought like hey, I'm just going
to, I'm just going to use this.
And I thought it kind of fitbecause, you know, is it for
technology or is it for music,and so because I was before I
asked you.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
I was wondering, I was thinking I wonder if it's
got anything to do with technomusic or is it just techno and
technology.
So yeah, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, yeah and yeah.
And just touching on a pointearlier, for a long time the SEO
was pretty bad for me becauseI'm like you know, when people
would search for me, they'd findall stuff about techno music, a
DJ called Techno Tim and all ofthis stuff, and I was like man,
I'm, you know, I'm like 10th,I'm on like page two of Google

(30:59):
when people search, and so I hadto do you know, you know, I I
mean me, not me personally hadto do a lot of work, but as my
content grew and people searchedfor me more, now I'm higher on
that list on seo.
But yeah, that those are thingsyou don't think about, like
when you pick a name is like youdon't you kind of want to pick
something kind of unique,because then your seo is is easy

(31:20):
, you know, for people to find.

Speaker 1 (31:22):
So I'm going to to move on to a different kind of
section of the podcast I like todo I call it rapid fire
questions where I'm going to askyou just some pretty random
questions, tim, and you just gotto kind of answer them just
simply.
So I know the answer to thisone already, but I'm going to
ask it anyway.
Dark mode or light mode?

Speaker 2 (31:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, dark mode I.
I mean, I got love for lightmode too.
I'll have more love for lightmode too.
I'm probably hearing a littlebit, uh, but dark mode it's got
to be.
My eyes are sensitive to light,so and your preferred web
browser oh, the one I use, orthe one I have to use.
Uh, no, it's, it's chrome.

(32:03):
Uh, only because it'sconvenient.
I've been using it forever.
Um, yeah, you know I lovefirefox.
Uh, you know, safari even hasits you know perks, but chrome
is the one I click and yourfavorite tech gadget that you
own wow, that that is tough.
I I could say super generic it'smy phone, because, man, I

(32:24):
couldn't imagine being out withmy phone and that has like the
biggest impact on you know, oneverything.
But if I had to pick somethingthat wasn't obvious, that's
tough.
That is tough.
If I had to pick something thatwasn't obvious, yeah, that's
tough.
I would say my phone, but if Icould have, I guess, something

(32:49):
else.
I mean, I think it's really cool, but I have this HDMI capture
card that does 4K, quad 4Kinputs and it was one of my
biggest purchases way back inthe day when I was making zero
dollars on youtube and uh, I'mstill using it today.
And back then, you know, a 400purchase for something that was

(33:10):
a hobby was a lot of money, butI, I love it.
It's this 4k capture card, uhby uh by um black magic, and uh,
still use it today.
It's, it's pretty awesome.
So, anyways, that's my favorite, uh favorite gadget that I've
gotten a lot of use of over timeokay, so your next um favorite
question is what's your favoriteretro game or retro console?

(33:35):
oh yeah, this is tough.
Um, my my favorite retro gamelike what, what will I?
Will I pick up, um, and so youknow the console's tough too.
Uh, yeah, this is tough.
Like I, I love the Legend ofZelda series.
I can play them all.
Two Links Awakening is so hard.

(33:55):
It's one of the few I've neverbeaten yet.
Uh, on NES, uh, but I think like, while I have these fond
memories of playing NES reallyyoung, I think like I really
love, I like N64 a lot, nintendo64.
Ocarina of Time is like a gamethat, like you know, still I
still remember like the music Iwas listening to, what grade I

(34:19):
was in and what food I waseating when I was playing that
game.
So a lot of nostalgia aroundocarina of time.
Um, you know, I don't know, Ilove the whole series.
Uh, I'm gonna have to go withnintendo 64 because it was so
unique, the controller was sounique, uh, and the z targeting
and everything was was so unique.
And then ocarina of time, ontop of that, was like like the

(34:40):
game of my life when I wasyounger.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
So I'm gonna go with those two right, um, next
favorite thing your favoriteyoutube channel other than your
own?
And, of course, like it's goingto be space invader one.
But you're not allowed to saythat anyway so favorite favorite
youtube channel.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Thanks for qualifying okay.
Uh, um, this this one's toughtoo.
You know, I someone I've alwayslooked up to and respect.
I mean both Jeff from CraftComputing and Jeff Geerling,
both of those two, you know,I've always, I've always looked
at them as showmen, as goodstorytellers, as you know, good

(35:19):
technologists overall.
And so you know, now I got topick betweenff and other jeff.
That's a long running joke Ihave with those two as well.
Um, I picked jeff.
Yeah, sounds good to me.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Um, you've already answered this question, so I'm
going to slightly change it alittle bit.
Um, the question was the firstcomputer you ever owned, so I'm
going to change it to the secondcomputer you ever owned,
because your first one was thec64.
So what was your secondcomputer you ever owned then?

Speaker 2 (35:51):
the second computer I ever owned was a hp pavilion
and it had a AMD K6-2 processorand I think it was 500 megahertz
and that thing was awesome andit was so awesome and I owned it

(36:11):
in a time where I didn't fullyunderstand computers and I
didn't fully understand PCs.
They were still magic to me.
And you know, real quick funnything is like when I, when I,
when I went to college and usethis PC like I didn't even know,
like I didn't even want to openit up, like my RA had to come
and physically put the networkadapter card into that PC

(36:35):
because I didn't know how andafter I saw him do that it was
all over.
That's when I was like it wasthat easy to put in a PCI card.
Okay, I got this, this, youknow voodoo express video card.
After that, like you name it.
So that was, that was a littlebit of catalyst for me to get
into.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
Like pc building and pc tearing apart was seeing how
easy it inaccessible I thinkit's got easier nowadays, like a
lot of um of the kind ofyounger guys.
Nowadays, like you know, theyput a hard drive in the computer
.
It's just you plug it into thesata cable.
But do you remember when we hadto put the little jumper on the
ide if it was the kind?

Speaker 2 (37:05):
of like primary or secondary drive you know, oh
yeah, slave or master you like.
You had no idea.
Like how many can I chain in arow?
And is that still slave ormaster?
And is this ide, oh?

Speaker 1 (37:17):
one.
It was nice when the kind ofauto select bit came along,
wasn't it where you could put it?
Put it on the jumper.
Supposedly it was meant to workthat out itself.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but sometimes you had to override
it or something, because Iremember having, like I think,
four, four, you know, on one ID,you know having four hard
drives in one and on the otherone, having, like my CD burner,
my DVD burner and two otherspaces for drives, like it was
out of control so I'm moving onlike I'm software, now your

(37:48):
favorite open source project.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
What would that be, tim?

Speaker 2 (37:53):
wow.
Um, onto software um, thisone's tough because, like I use
a lot of open uh source softwaretools when I develop um, you
know I'm a huge fan like I.
I like to do a lot of open uhsource software tools when I
develop.
Um, you know I'm a huge fanlike I.
I like to do a lot of front end.
I do front end, back end, cloud, whatever you name it for
software.
Like me writing software myself.
Like in that space, I I lovereact.

(38:14):
I'm a huge fan of react.
React, I think has changed likethe game for everyone as far as
front end is concerned.
But when it comes to likeself-hosting stuff, like I don't
think there's a bigger projectthan Home Assistant, like I'm
still so amazed I think it's oneof the biggest projects on
GitHub ever still.

(38:35):
And when I heard that stat Iwas like, is that true?
And then I started thinkingabout it.
I'm like this has like hundreds, if not thousands, of people
contributing to this thing.
Um, that's, that's trying tohelp people do something really
awesome.
So I would have to say homeassistant uh, you know part of
it.
Uh, because, like you couldhonestly make a career out of
home assistant right now if youwanted, like you could, you

(38:56):
could, you could spend so muchtime Like if you started
configuring today, you can makea career out of it, and you
would still wouldn't be done.
You know in, you know in 20years.
And that's not me beingfacetious, it's just like
talking about like how much, howmany integration points they
have and how many modalitiesthey're like surfacing in this
really awesome UI, so I wouldhave to go home.

(39:17):
Assistant.
It's a.
It's one that I battle with alot of times, you know on config
, or why is this working thisway?
But it's one that I battle witha lot of times, you know on
config, or why is this workingthis way?
But at the end of the day, itis really powerful and it's
massive.
Like it is as far as likeMindshare and how much code and
how many contributors are.
It is massive.
There's nothing else out thereleft.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
That's a great choice .
I'm glad I'm not being askedthese questions.
I'm glad I'm the host and Idon't have to choose.
Moving on to the next question,a bit more easy maybe, um star
wars or star trek oh, yeah, Igot.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
I was asked this one.
Uh, just a couple weeks ago Ihave to go star wars only
because, like it's what I know,you know it's, uh, it's, it's
what I gravitated towards, uh,when I was younger and uh, you
know, when I was younger I feltlike there was more action in it
, so I was kind of drawn to thatand so, you know, I I think
either people introduce you toboth when you're younger, or one

(40:13):
or the other, and so I wasnever introduced really to star
trek other than on tv when I wasyounger.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
So, you know, star wars I was, and so I I've always
gravitated towards that, and soum, and my final question um,
probably my favorite question Iask people is if you could go
either forward in time or backin time, which would you pick?

Speaker 2 (40:33):
Oh, this one's so tough, this one is so tough.
Um, honestly, I think I wouldgo back, uh and um, like I'm,
I'm excited for the future, I,but I but I also want it to be a
surprise, uh, and be able tohelp change the you know, I
guess, how it's uh, how it playsout, and so I feel like going

(40:56):
backwards in time could helpthat.
And so, for me, I, you know, II pulled the Marty McFly, you
know I go back in time but Itell myself, all of these things
you don't need to worry about.
And then I, you know, try tohelp, I don't know, fix
something, all while not makingmy family and friends disappear
or me disappear from the picture.

(41:16):
So, you know, I don't know,I've always enjoyed like Back to
the Future is one of my, one ofmy most favorite.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
I think they call it the perfect movie in film school
apparently.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Oh, that's good, I think it's a fitting name for it
.
It's my number one and and italso proves that, hey, sequels
can be almost as good as theoriginal, just like Star Wars do
.
But you know it's, it's sofantastic, like I love that.
So I, you know it's, uh, it'sso fantastic, like I love that.
So I, I've always enjoyed, like, this idea of time travel and
going back and, like you know,trying to fix things but not
interrupt things, and so I, Iwould go back because I, I I

(41:50):
loved marty mcfly in uh, in, uh,and back to the future, and oh,
man, two was even so good, likeat the end of two, when he's
going back in time to seehimself back in time and he's
above, you know himself playingthe guitar, where he going back
in time to see himself back intime and he's above, you know
himself playing the guitar.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
It's like when I first watched that?

Speaker 2 (42:08):
oh yeah, it was so good, it's amazing yeah, yeah,
yeah, just the.
That really blew my mind whenhe, like in part two, went back
in time to see himself in the50s, back in time, playing the
guitar, I was like this, thiscould go on forever, this, you
know.
And then he could go back intime to see himself, you know.
I was like, oh, this is sogreat so I need to watch the

(42:30):
series or again.
I love it.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
So I would say back in time.
So, um, we can move on and justtalk about your home lab a
little bit, tim, if that's allright.
Um, so you've been buildingsome new servers and stuff you
know fairly recently.
Can you talk through theservers that you have in your
home lab?
What kind of hardware do youhave in your lab currently, sort
of computer and server-wise?

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, it's been changing a lot.
So I used to have three one-useservers that I built and that
was kind of my Proxmox clusterall in one and that ran all of
my Proxmox cluster all in one,um, and that ran all of my
workloads.
Uh, just recently I'd saywithin the last three months I
had an opportunity to host someof those in a co-location
downtown, so I moved those thereand so I have a Proxmox cluster

(43:14):
downtown that I'm self-hostingand managing from here, um, so
now in my home lab I've kind ofhad to figure out OK, what does
my compute look like?
You know a kind of moderncompute look like.
And so I have three.
Just if I'm going from the topdown like a lot of networking,

(43:36):
I'll kind of skip over that,excuse me.
And then I have three IntelNUCs.
So I have three 11th gen IntelNUCs in a cluster for Proxmox.
Because I realized as part of mytesting to see if I could
really really move some of mystuff to the colo, I decided to
shut down and migrate all ofthose workloads to my Intel NUCs
.
And these are Intel NUCs.
I was just playing around withputting Proxmox on running

(43:58):
Kubernetes just to kind of testit all out.
But then I migrated thoseworkloads there and I shut down
my one use and then I neverturned them back on.
I'm like this is awesome.
Like these, you know, thesethree nox can like do all of
this.
I was pretty impressed.
Of course it didn't have theram, the amount of ram, the ecc,
like you know, hard drives, uh,uh, any kind of redundancy, but

(44:21):
but it did work.
So, um.
So after that I decided, okay,move my stuff, some stuff, to
colo so I could play with likeremote networking and
site-to-site vpn, um, and thenmy three intel nuts are running
proxmox, uh, then on top of thatit's running two kubernetes
clusters and then a lot ofdifferent software in there that

(44:42):
I run and test and whatnot.
Also in that rack I have astoreinator that 45 Drives gave
me, and that's been awesome tokind of play with and tinker
with you recently customized andyou put the SSDs in and you
moved um 3.5 bays out that'sright.

(45:04):
Did you havea 3d print?

Speaker 1 (45:06):
um the bracket no good question.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
No, I haven't yet.
And so that my those drives arejust freestanding.
It's kind of it's.
It's not ideal, uh, but it'sworking.
I, I, I need to get a 3dprinter because I it's just a
skill I think I need to learn atsome point.
The longer I wait, the betterthey get.
And I'm kind of waiting forthis point where it's like I

(45:30):
have enough things to print to,where it justifies the cost of
paying and also it's a good timeto buy because the technology
isn't evolving as fast as it is.
Someone saying like the nextgeneration ones are going to be
even better.
But you know, that's, that'swhat every everyone says.
It's fixed in the next version.
So so I, you know I'm at thispoint.

(45:52):
Where do do I?
Do I buy one?

Speaker 1 (45:54):
now I've got a bamboo lab, some X, one carbon, and
it's great.
It's really, it's great, it'sreally.
It's an amazing 3d printer.
But I can't do CAD, so I'mrelying on kind of other
people's, um other people's workto print things out.
But a friend of mine, um isvery kindly, said that every
Sunday he's going to set asideum a few hours and teach me to

(46:15):
use I think it's called Rhino.
Um, um, hopefully he's very,very going to be very, very
patient because, yeah, I'm notthe most um artistic kind of
person to be able to designthings I, I hear you, I, I'm
there too, I I'm a little more.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
I mean, I'm I'm kind of okay with design stuff, but
when it gets into likeengineering, you know, when it,
when it comes down tomillimeters, I'm not good at
that kind of stuff, you know I'mkind of like, you know I'm a
measure once cut, three timeskind of person, um, uh and so.
So, uh, while I can like sketchsome stuff out and, you know,
kind of make it work, when itcomes down to you know where I

(46:57):
have to get out calipers andmeasure stuff.
That's where I'm, you know I, Iknow I'm in over my head, so
but I would love to.
I, I, you know I have this ideastill, I, I still love to do it
where in in in that store, evenhl 15 because they're basically
the same model is havebasically um drive cages, that

(47:18):
um, you could choose whether ornot you want 3.5 or 2.5, and
they'll just be stackable.
That's kind of my idea andthat's all spawned from.
I put my NVIDIA 3090 that was inmy Windows PC into that server
so I could do some AI tests, andso that's too big and gets in
the way, and so I thought, well,if I take out one row of fans,

(47:40):
the SSDs will fit all the wayacross.
I don.
Well, if I take out you know,one row of fans, you know the
SSDs will fit all the way across.
I don't even know if I'm goingto need 15 SSDs, who knows.
But I decided for that AI box.
So that's that's next to.
You know, it's a storeinator.
I've done a ton of stuff withit.
But now recently I've decidedthis is my like application
server it's probably a betterway to call it application

(48:08):
server that's going to run apps.
It's going to be a hundredpercent flash, it's going to
have a lot of ram, decentcompute, but it's going to have
a 3090 or some kind of videocard in there, uh, to run ai and
ml workloads, if I need to, andtranscoding for plex.
So basically, you know, gputasks are going to go there, cpu
tasks are going to go in thexeon, that's in there, and then
it's just all flash, because whynot?
I don't want to have to worryabout spinning drives in that.
In that I've seen in um yourvideos.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Why you've got like um.
Is it like a slinger slingercase I'm not sure that's how
it's pronounced the cx um 4170a.
Have you used that for anything?
I I thought that case looksreally nice it is so that, yeah,
it's I think it's pronouncedsliger I could be wrong I.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
I could be wrong, um, but I you know I, so I haven't
used the case yet.
I like it looks so nice.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
I love the white stuff it looks beautiful.

Speaker 2 (48:50):
Oh yeah, I, I agree, I agree.
I I asked him like, can I havewhite?
And they're like, absolutely,uh, but no, sliger, a great
company here in the us, uh, theymake uh a lot of like beautiful
, uh, pc conversion cases, or Ishould just say server, you know
cases.
The reason why I like this oneso much is because it's one of

(49:11):
the few that can fit a radiatorfor AIO coolers, for liquid
cooling, and so I always thoughtin my head like I would love to
build, you know, a rack mountserver that had, you know, an
AIO cooler, liquid cooling.
One because I can say my serverhas liquid cooling, and two
because, I don't know, it justsounds really nice.
And so, yeah, they sent me it along time ago and they're like,

(49:33):
yeah, use it for anything youwant.
If you find a use for it, yeah,absolutely use it.
And so I just have this awesomecase I'm just waiting to use,
and so it's not in my serverrack.
I actually have a mini serverrack here in the office and that
case is going to house my newWindows build that's coming soon
, as soon as Intel releasestheir 15th gen, and hopefully it

(49:54):
doesn't have all these problemsand hopefully it's okay.
But that's a special case thatI've been waiting for.
Honestly, if I don't end upputting the Windows build in
that case my current Stornatorcase I'm just going to shift
stuff around and put everythingin the Sliger case because then
I don't have to worry about thewhole 13-inch video card problem

(50:16):
, because it has way more depththan the Stornator.
But yeah, that case is awesome.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Yeah, I've got a couple of for you, um for you,
servers that have got the frontmounted radiator in the front as
well, but they just don't lookas pretty as your case.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
You know, I was like yeah, so I can make awesome
stuff.
They make awesome stuff andpretty affordable too.
If, like, if you look in thisspace like pc conversions or
build your own server, likeyou're paying a server tax,
you're basically paying a homelab tax.
I think over time you know thisas this category kind of grows,
uh, manufacturers and companiesare realizing like, hey, you

(50:55):
know, we can slap on an extra 20just because.
Just because it's going to goin someone's home lab, I feel
like, um, and whereas some ofthese cases were, you know, a
third of the price that they aretoday and I don't know if that
has to do with other things, butI've been realizing a lot of
this stuff, like even evensecondhand parts, are getting
more expensive because I thinkfor a long time people were just

(51:18):
giving it away.
You know, quote unquote givingit away Like just get it out of
here, I'll take whatever.
You know, I just don't want itanymore.
Now they realize like there's ahuge secondhand market for all
of this old enterprise stuff, soI'm not just going to give it
away anymore.
So, yeah, prices have definitelyincreased in this category,

(51:39):
which is totally fine, like Ilove that there's a second or
third or fourth life for thisstuff, which is totally fine.
Like I, I, I love that there's.
There's a.
There's a second or third orfourth life for this stuff,
which is awesome.
Which is awesome.
And at the end of the day, ifit gets more use for another
five, ten years, hey, that'sless time in the landfill and uh
, and at the same time, theperson who had it, you know,
made some money, and the personwho got it got it a little
cheaper.

(51:59):
So I still run.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
I've got to my left here.
I've got three gen 8 microservers.
Um yeah, I upgraded the cpus toxeons because they all came
with seller on, but I'veactually got a little three node
proxmox cluster there.
I thought I need to dosomething.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
You know, I couldn't throw them away yeah, yeah cool
I hear you, like you find allkinds of uses for this stuff.
You know, like I, I find allkinds of uses.
I I've been this way forever.
Like, yeah, well, now that I Iupgraded this, well, now this
old server is going to becomethis server, and well, I don't
have a rack.
So let's go build this littlerack or hack this ikea thing and

(52:41):
put it over here, and this willbe the server that's over here
versus the server that's overhere.
So I've done it so much to thepoint where now I'm like, okay,
in my studio I'm going to have amini server rack and all of my
you know, my windows, my Mac andmy Linux box and my audio gears
all going to be in this miniserver rack.
And so now I'm like building upthis whole mini server rack in
my office, which which has a lotof use for me actually, by the

(53:03):
way, and it's super nice.
A lot of people say you know,like, why do you use a server
rack?
Can't you just put it on shelf?
Sure, like, absolutely Like,you use what you have.
But I found like, for me,spending the money and buying
like a rack that fits and doesexactly what I want is is worth
it for me because it also forcesme to think about cable
management and it gives meplaces to put cables too.

(53:25):
You know, I've done the, I'vedone the wire rack server rack
for a long time, or the ikearack server rack for a long time
, and, um, it's just tough, totough to manage cables when,
when, when you're, when you'reusing something that doesn't
have, you know, any cablemanagement in mind yeah, I, you
know where I put my servers.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
I kind of built wooden shelves.
To be honest, I really wantedrails, but, um, I wanted to
build my servers inside anarcade cabinet so, but I
couldn't fit rails?
It would, it was just too wide,so I kind of have to slide it
on the wood.
And then I've got different sizepieces of wood that I have kind
of vertically to slide it onthe wood.
And then I've got differentsize pieces of wood that I have
kind of vertically that will fitunderneath the different

(54:07):
heights of the servers when Ipull them out so they don't
topple over then yeah, thatsounds awesome.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
Inside of an arcade cabinet.
Uh, yeah, that sounds awesome.
A buddy of mine, you know hedid a video game in jukebox
repair when I was younger and he, his whole garage was filled
with like old cabinets and gamesand it was so awesome, a lot of
fun times playing there.
And actually he now he owns acompany, a mobile company, where
he drives them to people'sparties and people play it.

(54:35):
So I don't know, I, I love, uh,I love the old arcade games
like nothing, nothing likehaving an arcade cabinet and uh,
you know, just like a goodsturdy one, like something you
could play mortal kombat orstreet fighter on, where you
know you can be rough with itand and smash the buttons.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
I, I don't know, I love I've got um in the arcade
cabinet.
I've got um, a vm runningbataseria with a um.
It's only a quadro p2000 passthrough to it but it plays all
of the games and um.
So it kind of actually thecabinet actually works um
through a vm.
Um, yeah, off my kind of mainunraised server that's awesome I

(55:11):
thought it was pretty yeah,that is awesome.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
That is awesome.
That's uh, that's a dream oneday to have.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
Yeah, yeah, basically , uh, yeah, uh, that is sarah,
yeah it's um a linux distrothat's just based, it's just for
retro gaming.
Um, you kind of put your romsin and stuff.
It will get.
It will scrape all the artworkand um and that kind of thing um
like like a plex.
I'll have to check it outgaming kind of thing, yeah okay,

(55:37):
yeah, I'll have to check it out.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
I I think I remember the name.
Yeah, I've used retro pi andemulation station for a long
time.
I actually have it running onone of those, but maybe I can
shift gears real quick beforethis next video and start
running it.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
So you know you're saying you're thinking of
getting 15th gen Intel.
Did you consider the new Ryzenat all for your Windows build?
Or you're not an AMD fan?

Speaker 2 (56:06):
You know it's hard.
Like I've had AMD before, Likedon't get me wrong.
Like I said, my first processorI guess you know x86 processor
was AMD.
Then I used AMD XPs, mds,athlons, dual MPs and for a
while, like that was great.
And I feel, like you know, amdand Intel always tick-tock back

(56:27):
and forth.
Now it's swung way, way to theAMD side and maybe a little bit
back towards Intel with the lastcouple of releases.
That being said, like I have,but I'm so familiar with Intel,
like I'm, you know, when itcomes to like I totally
understand why a lot of peoplepick AMD.

(56:50):
Some of my reasoning, though,for picking Intel is, you know,
more than just like raw power,you know, or cores, you know,
some of it has to do, you know,with things like QuickSync or
AV1, you know, to decoding,encoding.
Similarly to like why I pickNVIDIA a lot too.
And people you know ask, likewhy do you always go with NVIDIA

(57:11):
?
And similarly, like, ok, I getNVENC, encoding, decoding, I get
pretty good graphics, you know3D rendering, performance, and
then I get like world class AI,ai stuff, you know.
So it's like, you know it'skind of it's the whole package
thing, and that's where, atleast for me, for intel, like I
know, I'm gonna get, you know,super compatible hardware and

(57:32):
software, even on themotherboard, that if I want to
run linux I don't have to worryabout anything.
And that's probably a thing inthe past too.
But I could always guarantee,like, if I buy a board that has
an Intel NIC, intel Wi-Fi and Iuse an Intel chip, if I install
Linux on it I will have zeroproblems.
And maybe that's all changedwith AMD and Ryzen series.
But you know, I'm just going tosay it's more what I'm familiar

(57:55):
with.
You know I've been using Intelstuff for a long time and I do
have AMD stuff here for a longtime.
And, uh, I, I do have amd stuffhere.
Uh, but when I but when Ichoose my personal builds, I
usually choose intel and I'm notagainst, like I, I've thought
about thread ripper I, I I'vehad a thread ripper type machine
in my cart so many times.
But then I end up saying, well,I'm gonna wait a little bit.

(58:17):
I think it's what a lot ofpeople do like build this dream
system on amazon or whatever.
That's a thread ripper.
And then you're kind of like,yeah, that's a lot of people do
like build this dream system onAmazon or whatever.
That's a thread ripper.
And then you're kind of like,yeah, that's a lot of money.
I think I'll hold off for alittle bit.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
I've done exactly the same.
I've had thread ripper in mycart and I'm thinking that's a
lot of money.
And then also electricity is soexpensive in the UK, I'm
thinking that's going to be alot of money if you turned on

(58:48):
servers that are, like you knowum consumer grade hardware.
But I used to use amd um.
I swapped to intel fairlyrecently for the igpu, really um
, you know, for the quick sync.
It's just so good.
It just really frustrates methat nowadays we get so few pcie
lanes in consumer motherboards.
It's, you know, we kind ofdon't have that kind of like
enthusiast motherboard like weused to have years ago.
It's kind of you either have,like you know um, the consumer
grade one that's designed for acouple of nvmes and a graphics

(59:10):
card, and you know, if you'renot doing gaming then you need
to go and get like a full kindof full-blown, you know
enterprise style hardware, andthen you don't get.
Then you don't get the um theigpu.
Yeah, it's not fair.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
Yeah I'm there with you, 100 I.
I'm there with you and you know, I, I always question, like,
like, how did this happen?
Like you know, how did how didthis happen?
Like we, we, we had workstationboards.
Then they're getting to takeaway, then we have enthusiast
board and who knows what's goingon now.
But if you get a xeon, you don'tget an igpu, so you don't get

(59:45):
quick sync.
And if you go the desktop way,you do get an igpu, where you
get quick sync, but you only get, you know, 24 lanes, which is a
video car, or 20 lanes, whichis a video card, and nvme drive.
So it's like what is going on?
Like, like, give me, like I, I,like, I, I don't support this,
but I, I, I understand whycompanies do this, at least at

(01:00:08):
least on the um, uh, on theprocessor side, um, like core
counts and stuff like that, butlike lanes I, I guess I can kind
of understand.
I don't know if that's anartificial limitation, you know,
or it's a technical limitation,and same with QuickSync, intel

(01:00:28):
QuickSync, I don't know.
I just feel like, okay, ifyou're going enterprise, like
you should still have all thosethings.
I know this is going to driveup costs.
That's probably what they'regoing to say.
It's going to be more expensive.
If we put an IGPU, it's goingto use some, some of your lanes,
but I don't know they're,they're, you know they're.
There's not a good choice.
Uh, for, yeah, for anenthusiast really is is hey, I,

(01:00:49):
I want a desktop class processor.
Uh, because of power, because,whatever, I don't need 32 cores,
it is fine.
And uh, you know, I don't wantto spend all that power.
Give me a few more lanes, notasking for like 50, but maybe 30
.
I don't want to spend all thatpower.
Give me a few more lanes.
I'm not asking for like 50, butmaybe 30.
I don't know.
And then, yeah, give me my HPU.
It's tough.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Do you think it's because you know people aren't
using kind of multiple graphicscards all together for their
gaming nowadays?
Do you think that's why wedon't have that?

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Yeah, yeah, that is a big one, yeah, and big one,
yeah, and I that's a good point,I think that's how we got there
.
Yeah, because no one's doing,you know, the, the, the, the
dual cards anymore, so they'rejust like I.
I think that, yeah, I, I thinkthat gaming has shaped a lot of
the way that, like that, pcs aremanufacturers, even cases are
manufactured.
Now it's like, hey, why do youbuild a pc?

(01:01:38):
You build it to game, you know.
I'm just thinking like, whatmarketers or what people are
thinking, hey, everyone'sgrabbing, gravitating towards
building a gaming pc.
Well, what do you need again?
And a gaming pc?
Really, you only need one videocard and nvme the rest is all
you really need a gaming pc.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Tim is rgb lights.
You don't need anything elsethat's right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Yeah, yeah, that is right.
Save some room for rgb, that isexactly right.
But you know, I think I thinkthat's just shaped, I, I feel
like that skewed like everythingtowards, like, well, you know,
a gaming pc also, you know,fulfills like a lot of these
enthusiasts needs.
And I don't think it does atall because, you know, I I have

(01:02:17):
a hard time saying, like I'mgoing to spend two to $3,000 on
building my next windows machine, um, but I only get to put a
video card and an NVMe drive init, like, hey, what about the
gadget I was just talking aboutearlier, like my, you know, my
HDMI input that has four HDMIinputs, that's PCI express.
You know eight, like now,that's going to share lanes with

(01:02:40):
other things and and I don'twant a xeon running in here, you
know, for for many reasons, um,so it's, it's just tough.
And then, on top of that, like,even if I could get the you
know, the workstation version ofthe xeons, if those are even
still sticking around, I, Ihaven't followed the news on
that um, those are prettyexpensive.

(01:03:01):
And then you're getting intomotherboards, uh, that $600,
$700, $800.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Some of the motherboards are crazy prices,
aren't they?

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Yeah, yeah, in general, especially for the
workstation ones I think Asushas them I get it Like limited,
run, limited, totally niche.
But man motherboards overall,like remember when you could pay
$30 or $40 for a motherboard, Ifeel like I'm getting old.
But this is not too far in ourpast.
I mean, I'm talking about maybe, I don't know, six, seven,

(01:03:31):
eight years ago.
You know, paying, like you know, $100 for a really good
motherboard.
You know, not too far away.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
I feel like yeah, it's a shame, you know.
Um, hopefully, as home labbinggets a bit more popular, maybe
maybe vendors will kind of seethere is a market there for some
middle ground stuff.
You never know yeah yeah, Ihope so yeah, I hope so.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
I mean, I think, yeah , I think this, like I keep
saying this category is growing.
I think it is, is, and now yousee, you know, you see like 45
drives they're, they're building, you know they're building
systems for home labbers andhome lab is actually in the name
, like.
So I still feel like we'rewe're pretty early on.
You know there's, there's othercompanies that are doing

(01:04:18):
awesome things too, that arethat are targeting specifically
home lab enthusiasts, where youknow if, if you still sometimes,
when you search for this on theinternet, bad seo, uh, they
think you're growing, uh, uh,some kind of garden in your
house or doing some kind ofchemical experiment, you know a
laboratory, uh.
So the fact that now, when Isearch for a home lab on Google,

(01:04:41):
where it's starting to showcomputers, I think that that's a
good sign that like, hey, likethe category is growing and I'm
no longer getting like homemassage kits or laboratories or
like grow kits for my house, youknow.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
So, moving on from hardware, I'd like to talk about
software and I'd like to kindof talk a little bit about
Unraid.
I know you've kind of used itfor the first time this year.
You know, how did you actuallydiscover it?
Was it kind of people on yourchannel said you know, check it
out, or is it something you'vekind of had on the back burner
to check out for a while?

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both.
Like I've heard of hunray foryears, I've heard of unread for
years, linus I'm sure that'swhere, like 99% of people heard
of it for the first time Um, andso I, you know, I, it's always
been in the back of my head.
I've been building like alldifferent kinds of systems and I
thought, yeah, that would,that'd be cool to check out one
day.
Um, and then, like there wasthis sense of urgency when

(01:05:41):
licensing was changing and so,like you know, I, I, I thought
like, oh, okay, well, if I'mever gonna try, let's just buy
it now.
So, you know, if I try in acouple years, whatever, it's
still around for me to try, notthat, you know, not that I
wouldn't mind supporting peoplein software.
Uh, anyways, because I alwayssay to people like, hey, support
thing, the things you like,because if you don't, they're

(01:06:02):
not going to be around in thefuture and I'm more than happy
to pay for something that I getvalue out of.
But I thought like, hey, thisis a good time to like, buy it,
put it on the back burner and,uh, and try it at a later time.
Well, as I was, like you know,kind of just ripping apart some
of my systems, that, yeah, I Igave it a spin and uh, but yeah,
I, I it was.

(01:06:22):
Uh, and a lot of people haverecommended it too.
It's it's.
It's funny how you don't knowwhat people use until you talk
about it, and I, I think Unraidis one of those things.
I think Unraid is one of thosethings and, uh, I wish more
people in Homelab would, would,would talk about it.
Um, cause, as soon as Imentioned it, like people you

(01:06:44):
know in my discord server thatI've talked to for years, it's
like, yeah, got one runningright here.
I'm like dude, where have youbeen?
Like you've never talked aboutit.
Like I don't, I don't know whatit is, but, uh, I wish more
people would talk about itbecause it is awesome um.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
Have you um tried the unraid 7 beta yet, tim?
Have you um spun that up yet?
Or is that something you?

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
I haven't.
So I I still have the latestsix on my usb drive and you know
it's, it's uh, I could boot upmy other system with it at any
time.
It's kind of nice that it's onusb, because then you know I can
just boot it up anytime, justreboot my machine and there we
go.
But I have no, I haven't tried.
Seven I heard it's coming, Isaw your video on it and uh,
yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm superexcited.

Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
Maybe I can show you some things about it today.
And um, um, like um.
For those who don't know um,tim um has made two videos about
unraid um, his first one whereyou know he first installed it
and a second one where hecompared it to his current nas
system, which was um, um trueNAS scale, I believe, tim and um

(01:07:46):
.
You know.
What I want to say to everyoneis you know, um, both systems
are really awesome and um it's.
It's very funny when people getvery kind of territorial about
kind of um.
You know, like it reminds me ofum, when, when you're telling
me about kind of Commodore 64earlier, tim actually is um.
You know, like it reminds me ofwhen you're telling me about
kind of Commodore 64 earlier Timactually is.
You know, I remember at schoolit was kind of like we had a

(01:08:07):
computer over here called the ZXSpectrum.
I don't know if you've everheard of it in the States, but
it was a kind of it was.
It was a terrible computer andCommodore 64 was just much
better.
And all the people that saidSpectrum wasn't they were all
wrong.
But but yeah, but you know, um.
You know one thing I've kind ofkind of like you know I run vms
all the time.
I for everything I do, umpretty much, and I just kind of

(01:08:32):
think of an operating system asreally just a tool and um, you
know it's the same with anythingthere's pros and cons of
everything, you know I I thoughtit was very interesting to hear
your thoughts on the productand you know I know lime
technology, are very interestedto hear feedback and your
feedback was very interesting tohear your point of view from
someone who's never set up onraid before and, you know, is

(01:08:54):
coming as a first-time userseeing what's there.
I might kind of go through someof the kind of points you made
in your video, tim, if that'sall right.
Like the first thing that manypeople kind of think about is
probably, I guess is like youknow you mentioned as your first
point is the fact that you canget TrueNAS for free and Unraid
you do have to buy a license forit.

(01:09:15):
You know everyone kind of likesfree, but you know the kind of
difference between TrueNAS andUnraid is TrueNAS gets a lot of
income from the enterpriseclients so and that kind of
feeds down to the communityversion, which is really awesome
.
But obviously Unraid doesn'thave the enterprise users and so

(01:09:35):
don't have the same kind ofrevenue stream.
And what I say to people kindof like you know, I hear a lot
of people say I don't want tokind of pay for Unraid.
I'm not saying this to you atall, tim, I'm just saying this
to friends who have said this tome.
They get the Xbox game, that'sthe Dulux pack.
That's like £90 for one gameand they're quite happy for that

(01:09:56):
.
Yeah, so that's what I thinkabout with the free versus paid.
But it is something that a lotof people, you know they do have
to, you know, think about forsure.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
Yeah, just if I could chime in.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I'm not against paying foranything.
Like I pay for stuff.
I support people on Patreon, Isupport stuff on, you know,
people on YouTube, like Itotally get it.
And I always say to people likething, support the things you
like.
Like, if you like something,support it because you know if
it goes away like you won't havethat thing anymore.

(01:10:29):
And I totally get it.
Like you know, lime tech is abusiness.
They have good employees.
Uh, they have people to pay.
Uh, you know they provide jobsfor people and so the small fee
on getting an operating systemthat you get so much value out
of helps support the companythat helps support the people
that help support theircommunity.
Like I totally get 100.

(01:10:51):
Like I, you know I've worked ina couple small startups and I
get it like I, you know, I, I'vebeen there, I've been, I've
been in positions before whereI'm like am I getting paid next
week?
You know.
So I, I, I, you know, I totallyget how it works and I totally
understand.

Speaker 1 (01:11:04):
I totally get it Like people who maybe they can't
afford to kind of like spend,you know, $50 on an iOS.
Maybe they're kind of likethey're at school, they don't
have much money and they want toget into.
They want to get into this kindof space Like you know.
You know the point of peopleyou know saying that it's an

(01:11:25):
advantage to be free.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
for sure yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I totally understand
and I will say, like, justgoing into the value piece, you
know, um, you do get a ton ofvalue for what you get, like,
like, for what you pay, like youspend.
Yeah, like you could, you couldbuild all the parts and pieces
if you wanted individually andspend weeks and weeks and months

(01:11:46):
kind of getting it to work, butit wouldn't be fully integrated
all in one package and justwork out of the box.
So it's like where do you wantto spend your time?
Do you want to spend your timetinkering to the point to where
you're spending most of yourtime building something like it?
Or do you just want to buy itand focus really on why you
bought it?
You didn't buy it to just wantan ass.

(01:12:08):
You bought it to provideservices for your network.
You bought it to, you know,provide uh applications for your
network and so, yeah, that,that uh it.
I think about this a lot too,even with servers.
It's like I don't build aserver just to build a server.
It's like that server is goingto provide some kind of value

(01:12:29):
for me, and so that value isn'trealized until I do that thing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
And so I feel like with Unraid you realize that
value a lot sooner than you doif you try to build it yourself.
I think a lot of people whobuild Unraid they build an
Unraid server because they'vegot a lot of different size hard
drives and they start offthinking I just want to build my
own NAS, I don't want to buy awhole load of new hard drives,
I've got all these differentsize hard drives.
And they find out that they canput an Unraid array together
and build it.
And then they build it and thenit's after that they go oh I

(01:13:09):
can run docker, oh I can run vms, and I think, right, okay, now
I'm going to buy some whole newhardware and build a new server.
Because they find out they canrun applications and um and vls
and stuff.
But you know, one kind of likeum sticking point I think it is
for a lot of people is um thefact that it does run off a USB
flash drive.
So it boots off a USB flashdrive and then the system runs
in RAM.
And I know that a lot of peopleyou know can worry about that

(01:13:30):
in case the drive fails.
And you know what are yourthoughts on that, tim, from
someone who's not used Unraidbefore, and coming to seeing
kind of Unraid running on aflash drive, you know how does
that kind of make you feelpersonally, does it make you
feel, you know, a bit worriedthat if the flash drive fails,
you know that's a bit of aproblem.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Yeah, you know, I kind of go back and forth on
this because, you know, I Iremember in the VMware days,
like running it at home, I waslike so impressed that it could
run off this USB drive and it'sall in Ram and that's not taking
up an extra sata, you knowdrive or it's not, you know,
using something I need forstorage.
So I was like blown away by itand then doing more stuff like I

(01:14:11):
do now.
It's kind of like, yeah, itwould be nice if it's, if it's
on its own drive, because then Ijust don't have to worry in
general about you know,something happened to it, me
bumping it, or you know whatever, whatever the this, you know
the slow boot up or you know, oranything like that.
So I I uh, you know I'm kind ofon the fence about it.
I I do wish there was not, Iwish it was an option.

(01:14:32):
I'll say that I I do wish itwas an option where you could
choose.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
I I agree with you.
I think it would be very goodto be able to choose either or
personally, um, but you know, Ican see the.
I can see the advantage of aflash drive is you don't have to
use a drive, and I like it youknow I can just unplug my usb
flash drive, take out all thehard drives out of my server,
just chuck it into some otheryou know another box and plug it

(01:14:56):
in and it just is the same andit works.

Speaker 2 (01:14:58):
That's nice yeah, yeah, like I was saying, it's
still plugged into my, stillplugged into my store, nator, so
I can boot off it right now andlike there's no, there's no
change yeah, yeah, I, I getthere's pros and cons to both
and I, I, I uh.
Yeah, I was just curious likeit's it.
Uh, I mean, I feel like I feellike the pieces are in place, at

(01:15:20):
least for the authorization andstuff like that for key
management.
I just always wondered, likeyou know, I don't know, I'm just
curious about the choice andI'm sure it's like a lot of
technical stuff and it's likeyou know it's because it's been
that way since day one.
But I mean, people I talk to ingeneral would be like, yeah,
it'd be a nice option, and againI get it Small company to in

(01:15:42):
general would be like, yeah,it'd be a nice option and again
I get it small company likewhere do you spend your time,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:15:45):
So you know.
I was just wondering if I couldactually show you one of my
servers, tim um I'd love to, I'dlove to see it and you know
you're not allowed to laugh atit if it's only got a little bit
of storage compared to yours,or and it's not kind of
enterprise hardware yeah, sopromise not to laugh and I will
show it hey no, no, no, no hey Ilike my first home lab computer

(01:16:07):
was like this compact 300megahertz computer from like it
was like antiquated 10 yearsbefore I got it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
So um so no, I, I never, I never questioned
anyone's home lab.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
So anyway tim hit.
This.
Here is my kind of main Unraidserver.
I've got my kind of Unraidarray at the top here which is
made out of 16 terabyte harddrives with an Unraid array with
a 16 terabyte parity and therest is data drives.
I've got a small Zpool herewhich is a pretty kind of risky

(01:16:38):
Zpool because it's just a stripe.
I wanted to have the extra base.
I only had um two, two terabytenvmes here and I run vms off
this, on um, on this zpool.
But what I do do is um.
One thing that unraid can dothat's very interesting with zfs
, in my opinion, is you canactually put a zfs drive in an

(01:17:01):
unraid array and it kind ofmakes it like a hybrid zfs.
So obviously you know onedriver.
Zfs normally has no redundancy,um yeah, and you're not gaining
any kind of speed from havingit.
You know drives workingtogether, but what I like to do
is put one zfs drive in myunraid array.

(01:17:21):
So I know this drive fails, Ican rebuild it from the parity
because you can mix file systemsin Unraid.
I could have like ButterFS, xfs, zfs.
So what I do with this, you see, is I actually use ZFS
replication.
I snapshot the VMs and Ireplicate them to this
16-terabyte drive here.
So that kind of gives me alittle bit of backup.

(01:17:42):
It only replicates once a day,but it's enough for my kind of
home lab like I.
This is the machine I run atassyria from.
You'll notice here as well withthe um nvmes.
Now there's a little bit moremetrics here.
We can see the temperatures andhow much power is being drawn
yeah if we look at this here,called zfs master, um, a plugin
I definitely recommend youinstalling.

(01:18:04):
If you do install Unraid andput ZFS there, it gives you kind
of control over the data sets.
You can see all the variousdifferent data sets I've got
here which you don't kind of getin stock Unraid, and from here
you can kind of, like you knowyou can, take snapshots of the
data sets, can kind of, like youknow you can, can take

(01:18:24):
snapshots of the data sets, um.
But I just want to take you tothe dashboard rather than just
show you my main unraid array.
Here is we've had some reallynice improvements on the
dashboard here.
Um, we can see obviously thiswas in six.
You know you could see all ofthe running containers and vms
um and the v VM running here,actually this PopOS one, if you
can see behind me I've got likea VM running that's got the kind

(01:18:48):
of matrix thing for mybackground.
So that's running from this VMhere.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
That is awesome.
To be honest, I thought youwere in front of a green screen.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
It looks so good.
So you know, we've gotobviously the normal kind of
things like um, you know the cpustuff and you can kind of
minimize it here.
But I remember you you said youdon't know how you can kind of
get rid of things.
There's a little green padlockat the top here it goes red,
like I don't really like seeingthe motherboard thing personally

(01:19:17):
, because I know, what mymotherboard is I don't need on
the dashboard so you can justkind of get rid of the ones that
you don't really want.
And this here has been reallynicely improved.
The RAM usage we can now seehow much RAM services are using.
You see 13 gigs here.
My VM usage is 16.
And my CFS art cache is at 21gigs at the moment.

(01:19:44):
So it's massively improved, Ithink here, um, for being able
to see you know what's runningon the server itself.
We've also got kind of morethings in to do with vms here,
like this is the only vm runningon the system at the moment, um
, and you can also see this fromthe vm page as well.
But we can see the guest isusing, you know, 12 of its cpu

(01:20:07):
working hard doing the matrixstuff in the background, um, and
the whole host cpu is only um,you know, using five percent and
you know other metrics, sothat's something that's pretty
nice um yeah, so you can tellwho the noisy neighbor is now if
something's gone awry.

(01:20:30):
And here this just says where mydisks are in my server.
These NVMEs are saying it's hotbecause I haven't actually set
them.
And here I know you'veinstalled the GPU plug-in
yourself and it puts the metricshere up.
Um, this here I quite likebecause I have a tas motor plug
that goes into my whole kind oflike server rack, inverted
commas, so that this is how muchwhole of the um servers are

(01:20:54):
using at the moment, or there'sthree running there and it's
using about 500 watts.
So yeah, that's awesome, that isawesome so it's nice you can
put things in.
There's, you know, tail scale.
When you install that, thatcomes in there's a whole bunch
of different things and there'sa smart error on there.
It's just a CRC error on one ofmy hard drives that I'm not too
worried about.
But yeah, so the dashboard hasbeen really improved, but you

(01:21:17):
know, you're right, it's notresponsive.
It would be really nice if itwas.
I totally agree.
And um, I I totally hate umusing a phone to operate the
unraid um dashboard yeah, likebeing a front-end developer I, I
being a front-end developer too.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
Like I noticed that right away and uh, I was like,
oh, this is, this is tough, butI, I get it priorities, but you
know, I'm sure it's somethingthat the team will be working on
in the future.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
But you know, like I say, we were trying to get
Unraid 7 out the door.
I'm going to switch across toanother server here.
This one's actually not startedup.
This is another Zpool I've gotwith.
I don't know about six SSDsthere.
What's been added into 7 thatwasn't in 6?
In 6, we couldn't add like a L2arc, we couldn't add a slog and

(01:22:11):
that kind of thing.
That's now been put into theGUI so you can just kind of add
all of that kind of thing in.
It's not something I kind ofwant in mine here.
This VM I just use mainly Sorry, this server I use mainly for
vms, to be honest.
But you can see here as well,there's no unread array, so you
get the choice now of having anunread array or not.

(01:22:35):
So basically you just havebunches of pools got you know
when you were talking about thecache drive to accelerate the
reads and writes, that's 100,correct what?
you were saying it's like youknow, you can have the unread
array and you can have it rightto a cache first, but you can
actually have it right to anypool you want, I see, and you
can actually move it from poolto pool.
So these two z pools here, Ican have it right to here first,

(01:22:55):
or have it right to my fasterpool first here, which is nvmes,
and then later move to that ifI wanted to.
Or I can just keep it how it isso that's you know something
that's um pretty good, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:23:08):
Just coming on to docker, I know that you um had a
problem with adding gpu to acontainer yeah, so yeah, it's uh
kind of a I I'm sure I mean Iknow a lot of people figured it
out, but, um, yeah, the problemis getting like a GPU added to
Plex.
I have the drivers installed,installed the container toolkit.

(01:23:29):
I've even looked at the Plexcontainer and saw that you need
to add I forget some extra flagsto say hey, it's NVIDIA and how
many cards to pass through.
But yeah, then transcoding forsome reason is still not working
.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
I can probably tell you why that is.
You know, what you'll find iswhether it's got the part to add
the GPU or not.
Depends on the person who madethe template.
Really, one thing you noticedis you'll look for Plex and
there's, like you know, sixdifferent Plexes and I can
totally understand that.
That's kind of um quiteconfusing for a lot of people.

(01:24:06):
Like you know which one?
I often have people ask me.
They say, ed, I've just set upunraid, how do I know which plex
to install?
And that's a really good point.
But if I take this stablediffusion container here and I
just click on to edit here, yousee this container actually had
already the nvid this part herefor nvidia devices.

(01:24:28):
But you have to put the actualid of the gpu.
I'm not sure my true nas isactually running as a vm, to be
honest, so I don't run any kindof services on it.
I've sort of seen like I'mcorrect me if I'm wrong.
You get the option you canchoose kind of like GPU one, gpu
two.
Is that correct?

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
Yeah, yeah, Docker, yeah, that's how it is.
It's like zero or one and thenall you could use all.
Sometimes Docker has beenchanging how it actually works.
Is that for?

Speaker 1 (01:24:54):
every single container Like oh, does the
container have to support theGPU, or can you just like is it
that up to the user to kind offigure out whether it supports
it?
Do you know?

Speaker 2 (01:25:05):
Well, like Docker proper, like you can add it to
any container, whether or notthe container supports it now
Like with Compose right, there'sthis new way of doing it which
says the GPU is available to youif you want to use it, and yeah
.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
You know, that's how we'd add the GPU and you could
just add it yourself by clickingthat.
But the one thing that peopleforget is you do need this Under
extra parameters.
You need the runtime.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
Yeah, the runtime.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
And it should work.
I'm not sure why yours isn't.
Obviously, you need to enableit in Plex as well, but I don't
need to tell you that yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
Yeah, I'll probably revisit it soon, when 7 comes
out.
I'm absolutely going to upgrade.

Speaker 1 (01:25:53):
But another reason I think people have to be careful
in Unraid with passing throughkind of GPUs as well is you can
pass them through to VMs, and ifyou pass it through to a VM
whilst transcoding is happening,it will crash the whole system
because it just basically ripsit out from out of the host and
I don't know what would happen,like in um in scale, if that's
even possible to do, but um touse the same gpu for a vm and

(01:26:17):
and then start the vm up, and Idon't know how it's dealt with
there.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
But no, no, I think, I think would you do hardware
pass through to a vm.
It's exclusive, I mean therethere are ways to like divide up
a gpu, uh, on the host and thengive pieces to each vm not on
scale, just like in general withkvm, but nothing, scale doesn't
support that you know, we cankind of like combine to vfio

(01:26:43):
devices so the host never hasthem.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
But I don't like doing I don't personally do that
.
The reason I don't do that isum is because some of my servers
have only got one GPU and Iwant to use it with containers
sometimes and VMs other, andalso I find that if.
I, um, if I bind it to VF, io,um, and it's not being used by

(01:27:07):
the VM, it's got no powermanagement.
So the GPU, I've got a 3080.
If I bind it to VFIO and it'snot passed to a VM, I'm using
about 80 watts idle, which isjust too much for me.

Speaker 2 (01:27:20):
Gotcha, yeah, yeah, because, yeah, I see, because
it's abstracting it from thehost.
So it's like, yeah, the hosthas no idea about power control
anymore, so kind of that's.

Speaker 1 (01:27:30):
That's kind of one reason why.
But we've had huge, huge, hugeimprovements in the vms.
Um, I'm very obsessed with vms,it's kind of one of my favorite
things in life.

Speaker 2 (01:27:43):
No no, a lot of people choose between VMs and
containers.

Speaker 1 (01:27:48):
If I had to lose one and I was never allowed to use
you know one or the other again,I'd say, okay, I'll never use
Docker again or any containers.
Just give me VMs.

Speaker 2 (01:28:00):
Yeah, no, I get it.
They're, they're super flexible.
I totally get it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
So you know here.
You know this is like my kindof VM page.
There's a few here, but if Iwas to add a new VM now, for
instance, and let's say Windows10, there's kind of a lot more
here, you'll probably see, thanthere was kind of on your 6.10.
So obviously we've got the same, adding all of the um, all of

(01:28:30):
the cores, and I thought yourcomment about being able to just
choose how many cores you wantwithout pinning couldn't agree
with you more.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
I think yeah, because like you don't always need to
pin, it's great to be able topin, yeah, yeah, like like it
guarantees that core to thatmachine so you don't ever have
to wait on CPU cycles.
Like totally get the use case,especially like if you're going
to, you know, pass throughgaming or something, then you
don't always need that kind ofyou don't need, you don't always
have that situation.

Speaker 1 (01:28:55):
Sometimes you just want the Linux scheduler to deal
with it, what cores to use ititself.
You know if it's a differenttype of VM for sure.
Also, we can turn off themigratable here, which gives it
a little bit better performancewhat?

Speaker 2 (01:29:09):
yeah sorry, what does the migratable do?
Is that uh?

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
it turns off um the flag for the cpu to be
migratable between one host andanother, so it kind of stops it,
always checking for that state,most people running on raid.
Obviously they're not going tobe like live migrating.
So, um, people say it gives itbetter performance for the vm if
you turn off.
So that's just an option toactually turn that flag off and

(01:29:35):
just sort of scroll down here.
I won't bother kind of settingeverything up, but with the
graphics card here I can chooseum.
With the graphics card here Ican choose um, choose the
graphics cards in here.
So you know, if I was to choosemy 2080 ti here.
Another thing you can do is youcan actually in the gui you can

(01:29:55):
set it to multi-function now,which you didn't used to be able
to do and put the soundcounterpart on.
I'll probably put the wrong oneon, but so so that'll just make
it appear, as you know, likeit's on the same bus, etc.
But before you had to go in andedit the XML, which was a real
pain because you would come out.
You know, because what wouldhappen in Unraid when you edited

(01:30:16):
the XML is you would save it,but if you came and made another
change here it would strip itout again.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
Yeah, yeah, because of the template.
Yeah, yeah, out again.
Yeah, yeah, because thetemplate.
Yeah, yeah, I could see howthat could work.

Speaker 1 (01:30:26):
And, as before, you can add um a v bios um, which is
essential.
Obviously if it's your primarygpu you have to have the v bios
um.
As you know usb devices, youknow there's two check boxes.
If you kind of check both ofthem it will pass it through.
If it's there if you don't callme in, you do one.
Then if it isn't there, we'llkind of go, hey, I can't find

(01:30:50):
that device and not start.
Then here we've got someadvanced tuning here.
You can put in QMU command linearts there.
So I use those personally forMac VMs, windows 98, of all
things.
Because I passed through a cbios um, a c bios card, yeah,
actually a um, a voodoo, voodoo3 2000.

(01:31:13):
I passed through with a pcieadapter and you get a black
screen.
Let's put some um bits and bobsin there.
So that's nice that we can kindof put anything in there.
And another thing we can do isevdev pass through um straight
from the gui.
So you can see here this hereis actually my arcade controls
um, that j, um jpack thingy.

(01:31:35):
And evdev is like kind ofactually faster than passing
through a whole.
It's very, very low latency.
So, um, you can like passthrough keyboards and mice that
way with evdev um, which isreally good as well for things
that don't have usb support.
For us is that don't have usbsupport, such as windows 95 and
things like that you can stillactually pass through keyboards

(01:31:57):
and mice.
So that's some of the kind ofyou know.
I think personally that we'vegot some of the best and easiest
kind of ways to set up VMs.
You can literally kind of setit up very, very quickly and
once you've got something set up, you can actually create your
own template.
So say you kind of think, yeah,I always use my 2080 TI, do

(01:32:21):
this, that and the other, andyou've got certain you know
tweaks that you're doing.
You know you can.
You can change all the kind oflike um clock off certain things
here for different vms yeah youcan actually make um, you can
actually make your own templatehere, cool and then yeah, yeah,
that's super helpful and, youknow, save the template.

(01:32:41):
So that's pretty cool, yeah, sokind of.
My favorite section is VMs, forsure, and going back to kind of
like Docker.
I know one thing you mentionedis backing up app data.
That is super, super importantfor sure.
We do have a plugin calledAppData Backup for people who

(01:33:05):
are.
I've got to go back to the VMsbit actually, just to show you
something.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
Yeah, I was going to ask about snapshots and backups
and restores.

Speaker 1 (01:33:17):
You can create snapshots, yeah.
All right, nice but what youcan do as well.
What's really cool you can do amemory dump at the same time if
you're backing up a running one.
So that's, pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like, yeah, it'll
snapshot it in memory.
So, yeah, you probably use thatfrom live migration too, I
assume.
But I mean similar type of deal, you know you can choose as
well.

Speaker 1 (01:33:39):
Whether you use like a QMU snapshot or if you've kind
of got ZFS as the underlyingstorage, it will use that to do
that.
So that's something I thinkyou'll definitely appreciate in
7, tim that you can snapshotyour.
Vms.

Speaker 2 (01:33:54):
Yeah, so how do you restore that then?
Out of curiosity, was there arestore?

Speaker 1 (01:33:57):
option.
Obviously you have to take thesnapshot first and then you can
just restore to the snapshot.
Cool, and you can kind of cloneas well.
But, you know as well for theDockers, docker containers you
can.
You know what I personally dofor snapshotting is I use just

(01:34:19):
the FS snapshots Again, all ofmy containers are here.
Where are they?
So, yeah, I'll just take asnapshot of um, like a snapshot

(01:34:41):
of the mb data there.
Yeah, it's super fast too.
Yeah, and like, obviously,because it's like zfs, you know
you can, you can do it whileit's running.
Obviously, you shouldn't reallydo it as a database.
I did make a script thatautomatically backs up all of
the app data and that kind ofthing.

Speaker 2 (01:34:54):
Yeah, that is super nice.
Super nice to be able to dothat.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):
So, yeah, so there's been a lot of improvement.
We're hoping to really kind ofbuild out the zfs implementation
going forward, as I know kindof like you know, true, nas has
a sort of best in class zfsimplementation.
You know you can do kind oflike replication, snap snapshots
very easily and um backupbacking up very easily, so that

(01:35:18):
that's something that will kindof be built out and kind of
getting better and better as astime goes on.
Basically so, um, yeah, I thinkI pretty think I've shown you
kind of be built out and kind ofgetting better and better as as
time goes on.
Basically so, um, yeah, I thinkI pretty think I've shown you
kind of everything um, yeah, Ithink yeah, so I awesome, so
this is awesome, uh, and this isone of my favorite servers here

(01:35:38):
tim n1 n100 like I know.
I know you like your oh yeah,yeah.
It's just incredible what itcan actually do, oh yeah this,
this here, yeah, um, you won'tbelieve what it, what it's, what
it's doing.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
It runs my home assistant and my pf sense all
right yeah, wow, and it runsjellyfish.

Speaker 1 (01:35:59):
There's a kind of well mb runs on my kind of main
server but this is alwaysrunning jellyfin in case I shut
the main server down so thefamily don't kind of have a riot
on my kind of main server, butthis is always running jellyfin
in case I shut the main serverdown so the family don't kind of
have a riot and start kind ofgoing crazy.
They can't watch it.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
I know what you mean.
Is this a?
Is this a b-link device?
Is this a b-link or is this oneof those?

Speaker 1 (01:36:16):
it's a little tiny one I got from aliexpress.
That's got four 2.5 gig umthings on the back.

Speaker 2 (01:36:22):
Yeah, it's really awesome very.
Yeah, it's really awesome Verytiny, yeah, pretty awesome, yeah
, yeah, yeah.
N100, I love it.
I actually have an N200 backhere too that I've been testing
too.
Oh wow, but N100, I love it, Ijust can't believe how efficient
it is, like 10 to 20% it'susing?
Yeah, it's just sipping powertoo%.

(01:36:42):
It's like using yeah, it's justsipping power too, like it's
probably using like 15 Watts orsomething, 20 maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
It's just crazy, isn't it?
Like I almost kind of don'ttrust it, cause I think it can't
be that good.

Speaker 2 (01:36:58):
Yeah, I mean you know this is.
This is kind of Intel's answerto you know a lot of the ARM
stuff, and I think it's only thebeginning.
Intel's trying to say, hey, wecould do low power too, but at
the same time you can still usex86.
So I think we're going to seemore and more of this.
You ever tried.

Speaker 1 (01:37:19):
SATS TV oh.

Speaker 2 (01:37:22):
I haven't you must do .

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
You got to Tim.
It's super cool.
What it is is.
You can basically make your ownkind of tv station, okay oh,
I've heard of that.
Maybe I heard about it on yourchannel but you know you may
have heard it on um self-hostedpodcast that's where I first
heard about it.
Um so yeah basically you kind oflike can put your favorite kind

(01:37:43):
of shows and stuff into it andit just ran, it will randomly
play them, or or you can makelike your own tv schedule and
what people are doing is they'rekind of downloading um from
what's that place called uminternet archive 1980s adverts,
and so they put ad breaks in.
They've got things like the18th thing and they've got the

(01:38:05):
80s it's just something I'vejust literally started playing
with.
I haven't really kind offinished it yet, but it just
seems really awesome, becausesometimes you don't know what to
watch, do you?
And so if you're kind ofworking in your kind of home lab
and you know and you want towatch something in the
background.
You don't have to choose, youknow it can just be, playing
random episodes of stargate orsomething, so I think that's

(01:38:26):
pretty pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
I like it.
Yeah, I like that idea because,like you know, like, like,
sometimes you know, you haveanalysis, paralysis, like we
have so many choices on what towatch that we just can't even
choose.
And now, now a lot of peoplewant to go back to the old days
where, like, no, you, you, you,you know, you, uh, you, you
schedule something for me, I'lljust watch it.
You know, same with radio.

(01:38:48):
Now too, I see a lot of peoplejust like, yeah, just play
something.

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
You know I don't care .
You know yeah, so yeah, um.
Well, you know, that's the kindof end of um, of showing you
kind of unraid on raid, I think.
I think I pretty much umshowing you everything really Um
yeah, it looks, it looks.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
I think it looks awesome, like I'm I'm super
excited for it.
Like, when it gets released,I'm definitely going to install
it on my USB drive, like I, Istill have it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:19):
And also like for the record, like um, the beta is
there.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
Can I upgrade the beta to the final then?

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
just upgrade to the beta, give it a try and get used
to it, and then, when thestable comes out, you just
upgrade to the stable withoutany issue at all that is awesome
.

Speaker 2 (01:39:43):
I'll have to check it out.
I know, yeah, that is, that isawesome.
Yeah, yeah, I'll have to checkit out.
And, uh, you know I, I, I know,uh, you know I after, so just
uh, kind of clear the air.
I'm I'm a huge fan of unraid.
I have no, no hard feelings.
I, I know that.
Uh, you know I, I, I learned alot about youtube 10 minutes, I
think I learned more aboutyoutube, uh and the the 10
minutes after I posted thatvideo.

(01:40:04):
Then I have like the last yearand a half, and so you know, I
don't.

Speaker 1 (01:40:08):
I don't think you said anything wrong in that
video at all, tim um like it'syour opinion, like you know,
it's like I called someone,everyone's allowed to have their
opinion.
You know people shouldn't likeit is it is, it is I guess it
was.

Speaker 2 (01:40:21):
It was the first time , um, I feel like that I created
something that, for me, uh,created some controversy and uh,
I don't like to do that, likeI'm not there to create drama.
And uh, um, you know, and uh, inthe future I know how to frame
stuff up like that.
Like 100% unraid has a hundredpercent of a lot of great use

(01:40:43):
cases and uh, uh, you know, I, Ishould have highlighted those
more Um, and I and I totally getand some I didn't even know,
like a lot of people were like,hey, what about this low power
use case where, you know, I usemy cash drives during the day
but then, you know, it'll sinkonce a night?
I was like, never thought aboutthat, you know.
And so, like there are so manyuse cases that that that you
know.
And so, like there are so manyuse cases that that that you

(01:41:05):
don't know, that you don't thinkabout unless you're part of the
community.
And, uh, you know, honestly, Ihaven't been running it for a
long time and I haven't, youknow, been perusing the forums
for a long time you know, howcould you have known?

Speaker 1 (01:41:15):
I mean, like some, there's lots of little nuances
and, like I say, I think youknow.
I'm pretty sure you said inyour video that you know people
don't always know what pluginsto install.

Speaker 2 (01:41:27):
So you know when you kind of install it a vanilla
install.

Speaker 1 (01:41:30):
You know, you don't always know.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
You know what's out there, yeah yeah, and even all
the tweaks it would.
And I know like hey, likesubscribe to Space Invader.
1.
You're going to learn all thetweaks.
You know You're going to learnall the tweaks.
You know you're going to learnall the tweaks and all the
things to do.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
Just I'm switching gears a bit.
I just wondered like, um, ifyou've got any kind of like
things you're running in yourhome lab that you find super
useful, like what, what would beto all of the kind of
self-hosting community?
What would you say is somesuper cool things that you run,
I some super cool things thatyou run.
I know you run plex.
Um, you run home assistant.

(01:42:08):
Is there any kind of like maybekind of lesser known
self-hosted projects that youthink are pretty cool?

Speaker 2 (01:42:12):
um, well, I mean, there's a couple like um,
there's a couple like I.
I mean this one is is onlybecause it's fresh in mind, but
like the olama uh, running olamawith your own LLM and being
able to run open web UI.
So basically, giving you aself-hosted, private version of

(01:42:35):
ChatGPT that you can run in yourown home that is all local is
pretty incredible.
It's pretty awesome to playwith and to tinker with.
And you can get started withmostly modest hardware, like, if
you just want to explore it,you can do it on your CPU.
But if you have something likea 20 series RTX or a 30 series
RTX basically anything witheight to 12 gigs of Ram a lot of

(01:42:58):
people have it for gamingmachines Uh, you could, you
could use that to to play withsome AI stuff and that and
that's super fun, cause I, youcould use that to play with some
AI stuff, and that's super funbecause you know there's a lot
of people who want to know, like, what's the big deal with
ChatGPT?
But they don't want to useChatGPT, and so I think this is
a great way to say, hey, here'swhat LLMs are, here's how these

(01:43:21):
type of chatbots can help, butyou don't have to use one of the
big companies.

Speaker 1 (01:43:26):
You can test it out as a developer.
Tim, can any of theseself-hosted AIs help you with
coding at all?

Speaker 2 (01:43:34):
Yeah, so that's a good point.
So, once you get so, alama isreally the kind of the engine
and thei and uh kind of loadsand hosts your models.
Once you get that into place,there are plugins then, um, not
even plugins.
Yeah, there are ways to hookinto olama, into like vs code or

(01:43:59):
whatever notepad editor you use, so you can get some some help
while coding.
And so, yeah, my last video I Italked through that and how I
wired up vs code, uh, to myexisting ulama instance and you
basically get like a freeco-pilot, like experience.
So microsoft github has thisco-pilot program that you pay

(01:44:21):
for and it'll suggest code asyou type or it will explain code
or write tests for you or youname it.
It can do it.
And so you can do things likethat too.
And I've hooked it up and it'sactually really cool.
Like I, you know, I thought like, nah, I don't know, I don't
know if this is going to work,and, sure enough, like it was
able to analyze, like my YAMLfiles.

(01:44:41):
Like I thought, yeah, like code, I get it.
Yeah, it's going to know how towrite JavaScript.
Sure, but then even in my YAMLfiles, it was suggesting
properties that I didn't defineyet, with a suggested name, and
I'm like, yeah, that's, that'sexactly what I was going to type
.
So I just hit tab and so tabcompletion right there, is
really cool, um, and you know,obviously can write programs for

(01:45:02):
you.
Uh, I don't use it in that way.
I use it more for, like youknow, tab completion and
sometimes explaining code, likesometimes, you know, I write a
lot of software.
Um, the next developer who hasto look at my software heaven
forbid, they have to do that.
Uh, they might not know what myintentions were or what I'm
trying to do, and I'm prettygood at writing comments.

(01:45:29):
Uh, but every now and then youmight need some help saying,
like, what is this code actuallydoing?
And, and I think that's great, Ithink that's great to be able
to have that kind of help, youknow, in context, while you're
working on things and and so,like, you can actually do that
with your self hosted AI stacktoo, and so I've been playing
through some of these things.
You know, I even wired it intoHome Assistant and got the voice
chat assistant in HomeAssistant.
Now, that very simple, verysimple to wire up, and you, now,

(01:45:54):
it's like we don't have adevice named home, you know, and
so like, empowering and givingeven your home assistant a
little bit intelligence isreally cool, because then it's,

(01:46:15):
you know, however you want tosay it, it's an LLM, it's
natural language, it'll figureit out.
You can say how many lights areon right now, you know.
You don't have to worry aboutkeywords or anything like that.
It's smart enough to know that,uh, hey, it's, uh, it can
figure out your intentions.
So, yeah, that's cool.
And then another one it's, it'snot known at all, it's, it's
very small.
Maybe you know it, but it'sthis thing called change

(01:46:36):
detection, and so I think thisis pretty cool.
This, it's this container forwebsites I'm sorry yeah, yeah, I
think I saw it on your?

Speaker 1 (01:46:45):
did?
I see it on your channel, maybe, yeah yeah, yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:46:50):
Yeah, yeah it's, it's a little lesser known, but I
think it's fun because it's uh,you know, for me it was a way to
monitor things online.
Um, not so much for, like,monitoring a website itself
whether it's up or down you useUptime Kuma for that, or
something else.
This is more about checkingwebsites for specific content.

(01:47:10):
So think if, like, hey, youwanted to monitor the stock not
stock prices, but the inventoryof a certain product you know
and it's out of stock and youwant to know, hey, when's it
back in stock?
Like, this is a great littleprogram for it.
And then, once I released thevideo, I realized that people
are doing this for all kinds ofstuff.
They're like scripting theautomation of their login.

(01:47:34):
You know.
They're scripting the login totheir financial site to see you
know how much money they have.
You know in that, whatever thesite is, just to keep an eye on
it, just in case somethingchanges.
So I'm like, wow, like peopleare using this for really,
really awesome and obscurethings.

Speaker 1 (01:47:50):
That's an interesting use case.

Speaker 2 (01:47:53):
Yeah, it is pretty, it's fun too.
Yeah, I'm like man, I have waysto monitor that outside of
logging in like that, but it'spretty cool.
So just think of anything youwant to do on the web like that,
but it's it's pretty cool.
So just think of anything youwant to do on the web if you
want to automate it and recordthose steps and then do that
over and over and over to checksomething.
Yeah, change detection is ispretty fun for that.
So I don't know, that's whatI've been having a lot of fun

(01:48:14):
with.
I mean that and ai stuff, butuh, that's one that's, I think,
lesser known, that uh, it's funto play.

Speaker 1 (01:48:19):
you could like put it on like a website if you're
waiting for, kind of like, anupdate for some software.
Yeah, exactly, pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (01:48:27):
Exactly that's what I use it for Firmware updates and
software updates.
And the cool thing is because,like, a lot of those web pages
don't contain deep links, youknow, to their software.
You have to go here, click here, click on this version.
You can script that then andand change detection.
You can record all those stepsand then you can monitor.

(01:48:51):
You know the result and thenyou never have to do that again,
like you don't have to.
Like you know, pick this model,pick this version, pick this
piece of hardware and click bios.
Like change detection, you canautomate that and it'll do it
for you.
So it's pretty cool, it's funto play with.
For sure, like, is it supercritical?
No, but it's nice to know whenyou know I have new firmware

(01:49:11):
updates for something that youknow I used to check on manually
.

Speaker 1 (01:49:15):
Yeah, it's fun.
I think.
I'll definitely be installingthat one when we finish the
podcast, I think.
And also one that I really wantto install um, I know you've
done a video on it is um, it'snot called netboot xyz something
very similar to that, like thekind of pixie boots netboot xyz
yeah you got it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:35):
Netboot xyz.
Yeah, yeah, netboot.
Yeah, yeah, that's super, yeah,it's uh, it is, it is, it's uh
maybe we should explain to theaudience what it is so yeah,
yeah, sure so quick, so twominute rundown for everyone yeah
, it's a.
it's an open source project thatallows you to um host like a

(01:49:56):
pixie boot server, so a networkboot server where you can boot
your devices to the network andhook into that and then install
your operating system from there.
So if you think, hey, I havethis this.
This PC doesn't have anoperating system on it.
I don't want to get a CD, Idon't want to get a USB and I
want to choose an operatingsystem later, you know you would

(01:50:17):
boot up the machine, hit F12 orF7, whatever it is to boot to
network.
It would communicate with thenet boot XYyz server and then
you could pick your operatingsystem, you could pick any
version of linux you want, youcould pick tools, and so having
something like this on yournetwork is super valuable,
especially just for the tooling.
Just for the tooling, you know,for having g party, you know,
if you kind of buy, like, say, abroken computer off ebay or a

(01:50:43):
laptop there's.

Speaker 1 (01:50:44):
You can just plug it in, boot it up and you know you
don't have.
You know, even if it doesn'thave a hard drive in, it can't
be.

Speaker 2 (01:50:50):
So it's super cool that's right, yeah, good point,
good point.
Or, or you could you know, host, uh, dban on it, dan's boot and
nuke.
So if you just want to, hey,I'm done with this machine.
I want to wipe the drive.
You just boot to network,select it and walk away.
So nothing to install, nothingto do, and so this container
helps you do that.
And uh, you know, in my techsupport days, like I thought I

(01:51:12):
thought pixie boot was so much,I thought it was magic, I
thought it was so great, and Ialways thought like to myself,
like if I ever get pixie boot athome, that's how I know I made
it.
Well, I finally got pixie bootat home, haven't made it yet,
but, uh, I got a pretty coolnetwork boot system yeah, it's,
it's really, really awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:51:29):
I just I'm not sure if it's possible.
If you found out a way how todo it is um, um, because you've
got, it downloads the um images,kind of like live from the,
from the internet, and you canalso host your own images, can't
you?
Can you do a hybrid of the two?
So if you don't have your own,it then does it, or is it kind

(01:51:49):
of either or?

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):
I think it's, um, I, so I think you can customize
that menu all together.
So I mean it, it's, it's.
You know it's going to bepretty complicated, but I think
you can customize that menu likeyou could say you know local
ubuntu or web ubuntu and thenyou know, pick your where it's
going to be pulling thosesources from.
So, yeah, that is one thing.
It does pull them from fromgithub.

(01:52:13):
A lot of those images arehosted there, um, you know, and,
and that's you know, a lot ofpeople will balk at that because
of security, and I totallyagree.
And so you have to make thatchoice.
Do you want to pull theseimages down?
They're hosted on GitHub andthey're hosted on places where

(01:52:35):
anyone can inspect the code andsee what it's doing.
It's all open source, butyou're right, so you can host it
internally too.
I haven't done it, but I knowyou can customize that whole
entire menu.
I should probably do afollow-up to that, please do, on
how to customize it.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
Yeah, and anyone who wants to install it, watch Tim's
video about how to do that.
I think it's pretty cool, yeah,yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53:00):
And if you comment like, how do you use this
locally, then you know I might,uh, I might, then uh decide to
do that video on how to do itlocally, but that that that
video was, um, surprisinglypopular.
Surprisingly popular.
I thought it was just like hey,here's me, you know, tinkering
around again.
I need a network boot for acouple of things.
I'm so tired of booting fromusb, like you know, and and

(01:53:23):
don't get me wrong like, uh,what's it called?
Uh, the, the boot drive vent,ventoy yeah, thank you.
Yes, yeah, ventoy.
Like I was just using ventoyyesterday, like I totally get it
, ventoy is there and that's athing, but there are times when
I just don't even want to.
You know, plug a usb drive intoa device.

Speaker 1 (01:53:43):
The amount of times I lose either a usb flash drive
or the receiver for a keyboard.
I tell you, I actually threwaway a keyboard last week and
then I found out the receiverwas in the back of my mr fpga,
when I really and I kept thatmicrosoft keyboard for six
months looking for that and Ithought I'm just gonna throw it

(01:54:04):
in the bin.

Speaker 2 (01:54:05):
Oh yeah, fair enough, yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:54:08):
It's harder to lose your network connections, isn't
it?

Speaker 2 (01:54:12):
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, I agree and it's.
Yeah, I think it's awesome,it's fun to play with.
It was a surprise that it wasthat popular.

Speaker 1 (01:54:25):
And so, yeah, with it was a surprise that it was that
popular and so, yeah, I, maybeI should follow up on that.
Hey, this is the part two.
Here's I, yeah, I'm definitelygoing to be um, putting putting
on together very soon yeah, it'ssuper, super fun.

Speaker 2 (01:54:33):
It's super easy to go , it's super easy to get started
too.

Speaker 1 (01:54:36):
It's uh, it's, it's literally a docker container
that you just have to open a fewports and you're done um, I
don't want to keep you sort oftoo long all of your day, but if
I can just ask you a couplemore questions if you've got
time, just keep you a little bitlonger.
I just wondered, like you knowfor kind of new home lab
enthusiasts, any common pitfallsor mistakes that they should
avoid.

(01:54:57):
Can you give them any advice?

Speaker 2 (01:54:59):
Yeah, yes, I would say this one's tough because it
kind of depends, and so here'show I think people approaching
it should wrap their head aroundit Don't overbuy.
I guess I should say don'toverbuy.

(01:55:19):
That's a common thing.
Even I did when I first gotinto it.
I'm like, yeah, I needenterprise grade.
I'm buying an enterprise usedenterprise server, I'm going to
get a server rack and I'm goingto build all this stuff and
while I love doing that stuffand I am not against it Um, you
could.
You could dip your toes in thewater with something like we
were just talking about a littlebit earlier and 100 and 200,.

(01:55:42):
You could dip your toes in thewater for $200, $300 for 10
watts of power.
You could dip your toes in thewater with a Raspberry Pi too.
But if you're going to bespending that kind of money, you
get way more out of an N100than you do a Raspberry Pi.
Not trying to start any drama,but you get a lot for your money

(01:56:02):
nowadays with with like, likelow power intel stuff, not to
mention quick sync, all thatstuff we were talking about
earlier with you know, mb, uh,netflix sorry, plex, pretty much
netflix yeah, like you know myn100, it will transcode.

Speaker 1 (01:56:16):
Yeah, mb stuff, you know, it's just it's just yeah,
it's just unreal yeah it reallyis.

Speaker 2 (01:56:21):
Yeah, and so I, that's, that's.
I think my one tip is, uh, oneyou know.
You know, don't be intimidated.
Like, don't be intimidated.
Uh, ask lots of questions there.
What I've realized in home labcommunity too people love to
share, people love to give theiropinion, people will love to
help.
So, if, if, if, if you, if youfeel like, hey, I don't fully

(01:56:43):
understand this or I don't knowhow to do this, there is always
someone there that's willing tohelp, because they went through
the same thing, and I think alot of home labbers, like, want
to share their experience orwant to share what they figured
out, and so that's anopportunity for them to share
what they've learned.
And then you know, for me it'sdon't overbuy.
And maybe that's, maybe itcould be, you know, framed up as

(01:57:08):
start simple.
You know, keep it simple, startsimple, grow as you need to.
You know, grow as you need toand you might find that you
might get by with.
You know, maybe it's an N100.
Maybe it's not that, maybe it's, you know, still a mini PC, but
it's an AMD Ryzen in there, orit's an Intel, you know i7, and
that's enough.
So you know, rather than go allout and then work your way back

(01:57:32):
.
You might be better offstarting small and working your
way up, because somewhere inthere you're going to find what
works for you, and then at thesame time, if that N100 doesn't
work for you, you could eithersell that, pass it on or start
to build your empire of home labmachines.

Speaker 1 (01:57:46):
I think that's excellent advice, tim.
I couldn't agree more to behonest um any um upcoming
projects or content you'reworking on that.
You can kind of give us alittle sneak idea that you might
be doing yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
So, uh, I, I have a uh, I don't want it to.
Well, maybe I'll let it comeout of focus.
This is going to be out reallysoon, so you probably can't see
that, but it's this mini rack,so something that I've kind of
been playing with.
Jeff Geerling did a video on amini rack for pies and that
company also sent one to me.
Even though I said, hey, likeyou know, jeff Geerling did a

(01:58:22):
great job, like you know, jeffKearling did a great job Like,
uh, you know I don't have muchto add they said, hey, we're,
we're, we're a community of, youknow, we're a company of
tinkerners.
To, you know, take it.
If you find a project that fitsyou know, great.
If you don't, that's fine too,but we'd love your feedback.
And so I'm building like almosta full data center in this tiny
mini, you know, 10 inch rack,and it's actually been pretty

(01:58:45):
fun.
Uh, and on top of that, radowbrett, uh, another home lab
youtuber, he, uh, he, he justchallenged me and so, he, he
created this one that is like soover the top, like I don't know
how I'm gonna beat it, and thenon top of that, he kind of
challenged me to beat it.
So, uh, a little littlefriendly competition and at the
same time, I I get to get to putmy hands on some hardware.

(01:59:06):
So, yeah, mini rack stuff.
There's always going to be moreColo, like remote networking
stuff.
There's always going to bethings in my home lab that need
to be upgraded or fixed, andthere's always going to be
software that I'm using that Ilove to share with people.
My channel is always acombination of hardware and
software, and so I like to kindof keep those close together as

(01:59:27):
possible.
Sometimes I just do all thehardware, sometimes it's all
software, but I like thecombination of the two, because
that's when people can say, oh,I, you know, I, I, I get it,
that's how I can use it, and Iwant to do that too.
So, yeah, but awesome, I don'tknow more.
More stuff, it's, it's all inmy head.
I don't know More stuff, it'sall in my head.
I need to get it out andprobably use more than Google
Docs, as I figured out throughthis conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:59:49):
I can't wait to see the mini rack video.
That's exciting.

Speaker 2 (02:00:00):
Yeah, it's going to be awesome.
There's building a mini rackand then there's beating Ray Dal
and I kind of want to beawesome.
There's building a mini rackand then there's beating Ray Dal
and I kind of want to do both.

Speaker 1 (02:00:09):
Well, good luck, I'm not that competitive.
I want to see you beat him, man.

Speaker 2 (02:00:14):
Thank you.
Yeah, not that competitive, butwhen someone calls you out
specifically, that's where youkind of I don't know.
I feel like I've got to rise tothe occasion.

Speaker 1 (02:00:24):
And if I can ask um for people watching um, where
can they get hold of you?
Um, obviously, youtube, um, allthe links are going to be in
the description, but you knowwhere can they find your work
tim yeah, so I I host uh most ofmy stuff on techno timlive.

Speaker 2 (02:00:40):
That's an easy way to to find everything uh you need
to get to, so from documentation, to my videos, to my new shop,
to uh, yeah, other social media,that's probably the best place
to go.
If you google techno tem now,now you will actually find me
instead of a dj, so I I fixedthe seo piece over the last
couple years.

Speaker 1 (02:00:59):
So we're not gonna have like a video of you d djing
on to technic um technics.
What have 32 tens or whateverthey're called?

Speaker 2 (02:01:06):
no, technically yeah yeah I wish I could, I wish, I
could, I wish it were that coolum, well, it's been absolutely
awesome speaking to you, tim.

Speaker 1 (02:01:16):
You know it's been so enjoyable.
Um, I probably want to speak toyou for another two or three
hours if I had my way.
So for any of you guys watching, please subscribe to Tim's
YouTube channel and head over tohis website.
Again, thank you very, verymuch for your time, tim.
Thank you for taking the timeout to come and speak to us here

(02:01:36):
.
We've really enjoyed speakingto you and you sharing your
expertise with us, and best ofluck with the challenge against
Radar and best of luck for yourfuture YouTubing.

Speaker 2 (02:01:50):
Thank you so much.
Yeah, honored to be here.
I've watched a lot of yourvideos.
It's nice to finally put a facewith the name and a name with
the channel.
So, yeah, I could talk to youall day too.
Like I said, it's rare for meto find someone to talk about
this stuff, so I always lookforward to it and I look forward
to talking to you especially.

Speaker 1 (02:02:10):
Thank you very much, Tim.

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