0:00

I let my Gmail inbox just go

0:02

this weekend. I wanted to see

0:05

just how much junk accumulated

0:07

in just three days. Do you want to guess how

0:10

many emails? Justin Perdue

0:11

Interesting experiment. I really, I

0:13

couldn't, I don't know if I could guess because it's going to be

0:15

so individualized, but

0:17

I mean, it must be at least a dozen or 20, something

0:20

in that range. Aidan McCullen No, no, no, come on. Aidan

0:22

McCullen Much, much, much higher. Justin Perdue Oh, oh, really?

0:25

Justin Perdue It was over 100 in just one weekend? Aidan

0:27

McCullen Well over 100. I got about 210

0:30

emails in three days. Justin

0:32

Perdue Ah, that explains so much because my inbox

0:34

is a disaster and it just feels like it's overwhelming

0:37

every time, even with the different tabs in Gmail. Aidan

0:39

McCullen

0:39

I don't actually have those enabled. I just, I

0:42

just raw dog it and just let

0:44

everything come in at the top and deal with it there. Justin Perdue

0:46

Get the chronological list. Aidan McCullen Yeah.

0:48

So I let it go for a few days. I had an unbelievable

0:51

amount of email and what I noticed was there

0:53

was, because I could see it all in

0:55

front of me, there were five or six

0:58

repeat offenders that sent me at least

1:00

one, if not two emails per day. So

1:03

I just went through and did a few manual click,

1:06

click, click, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. And then

1:08

I started looking for a service that would do it.

1:10

Like, uh, was it unroll.me,

1:12

I think is what it's called? Justin Perdue There must be a

1:14

better way. Aidan McCullen Yeah.

1:16

Well, I mean, the idea behind unroll.me

1:19

is it gives you a cleaner inbox and,

1:21

you know, they

1:23

filter your email for you. There are other services

1:25

that do a similar thing,

1:28

but the problem with that obviously

1:30

is you have to give them full access to

1:32

your inbox, which I don't know about you.

1:35

I'm already uncomfortable with Google having

1:37

that let alone random

1:39

company. What is scanning my inbox

1:42

in it? So I came across a project

1:45

on GitHub called just

1:47

Jake Gmail unsubscribe.

1:50

We'll put it a link in the show notes. I

1:53

have mixed success with this thing. It kind

1:55

of worked. It kind of didn't. It got

1:57

me about half the way there. The issue.

2:00

you with it is that email

2:02

marketers have become sneaky

2:06

mother effers at the moment.

2:08

They call it dark patterns. They have dark UI

2:11

patterns that make it intentionally hard

2:13

or not impossible to unsubscribe.

2:16

It's even got a term now in the industry. Yeah,

2:19

unsubscribables. What's

2:22

frustrating is that a lot of these unsubscribe buttons,

2:25

there's a fairly standard pattern in most emails

2:27

from marketing. You scroll to the bottom. There's a tiny,

2:30

tiny, tiny little word that says unsubscribe

2:32

or manage preferences. Then you go

2:34

to another page and you either have to type your email

2:37

in or you have to unclick a bunch of

2:39

boxes and then realize the one at the bottom says

2:41

unsubscribe from all. Check that box and

2:44

then press submit.

2:45

Basically, the problem is when

2:47

it requires anything other than just

2:50

a click of a single interaction, that's

2:52

where the problem comes. I just

2:54

thought I'd make you aware of this unsubscribe

2:57

project. It's pretty cool. I found it useful. I thought

3:00

you might too.

3:01

Yeah, I mean, even if it only cuts down on half,

3:04

at least it's a private script.

3:06

Yes, exactly. It's all

3:08

private. It's all local. Is

3:11

this a good time to announce our new mailing list or no?

3:13

Just kidding. Sign

3:16

up to our newsletter, please. Yeah,

3:18

right.

3:19

It does feel like it, but no, I actually

3:22

watched the home assistant release so

3:25

that way you don't have to. They're

3:26

long. They try to make them

3:28

about two hours or so, but

3:31

it is getting really, really, really

3:33

exciting

3:34

what's happening with their voice

3:37

efforts. I wanted to check in because they've now reached

3:39

what they call chapter three and they're just beginning chapter

3:41

four. With chapter

3:43

three of

3:45

the year of the voice,

3:47

they've done something that I think is going to

3:49

be a massive enabler for me and

3:51

actually using their local voice

3:53

assistant

3:54

system. They have on

3:56

the Android versions of the home

3:58

assistant app enabled.

3:59

the ability to set assist

4:02

from Home Assistant as your default digital assistant

4:04

on Android.

4:06

So you know most Android phones have

4:08

a way to activate

4:10

their Google Assistant or whatever the

4:12

Samsung one is or whatever, squeeze

4:14

the phone to a swipe, whatever. What do you mean you don't

4:16

like Bixby? Yeah, Bixby, that's right. He'll

4:18

hurt his feelings. That's

4:21

what it is. I was thinking it was Gigsby

4:23

or something. It's so silly right? Bixby.

4:25

In Android you can choose

4:27

the assistant and if you choose the Home Assistant,

4:30

now when you trigger it, however you do trigger

4:33

it, you can just talk directly to your Home Assistant.

4:35

And if you have Whisper and Piper set up, all

4:37

of the processing can be done entirely,

4:40

locally, for

4:41

voice commands. If you're a Nebuchasa

4:44

subscriber, you can also use the Nebuchasa

4:46

cloud, which is insanely fast,

4:48

because they take it as you speak,

4:51

so they're transcribing as you speak the words,

4:53

and then wait for you to stop now. They also can

4:56

detect when you stop and then finish

4:58

that transcription and then execute the command because

5:00

sending the text back is really quick.

5:02

So even if you use Nebuchasa cloud, it's really fast.

5:05

And the built-in assistant

5:07

lets you choose multiple

5:10

Home Assistant instances. So

5:12

I can say if I want to control the studio, if I want to

5:14

control Lady Choops,

5:16

and it lets you do multiple voice

5:18

backend, so you could have one that's on the cloud,

5:21

you could have one that's local only, which maybe that'd be a little

5:23

slower if you got a Raspberry Pi,

5:24

or you could do one that's different language. Like I'm gonna have one

5:27

set up that's local and is in Spanish

5:29

for the wife and kids because they're learning Spanish

5:32

and why not have all of the

5:35

voice commands in Spanish available for them. It's

5:37

a really good idea. It's like Duolingo, but

5:39

it actually has real-world consequences.

5:41

And

5:42

if you have an Android watch,

5:45

like where,

5:46

they've added the ability to invoke voice

5:48

assistant commands on the watch. You can just press

5:51

down the crown, say your command,

5:53

and Home Assistant will execute it, which is

5:55

really nice.

5:56

That's pretty cool, especially given that you daily

5:59

drive an Android Android phone and

6:01

yet you still wear an Apple watch, right?

6:03

Yeah, mostly because I hold

6:05

down the button and I give it voice commands

6:07

and it executes it on home assistant. That

6:10

my message, but for me, because

6:13

I am on graphene OS, I don't really use Google

6:15

assistant.

6:16

So I was kind of assistant lists.

6:18

You can actually install Google assistant if you're

6:20

a maniac, but I just decided not to,

6:22

um, but now I have something that fills that spot.

6:25

And I love it. It's perfect

6:27

for me. It's the 99%

6:29

of the time I use those assistants just for

6:32

controlling homo system, um,

6:34

and with Piper and whisper Piper

6:37

is the text to speech system created by Nebuchad.

6:39

So they, they brought a developer on. You

6:41

could in theory run on raspberry PI, but

6:44

if you put it on an X 86 system and the faster,

6:46

the X 86 system, the faster it can

6:48

process the voice commands. But

6:50

they have, they have that in a whisper and they can auto

6:52

detect each other with this protocol that they've come up

6:55

with.

6:55

And so you could run the backends

6:58

on a different box. Like I can have the processing

7:01

on an X 86 box, but homo assistance

7:03

on an arm system.

7:04

And, um, they've added the

7:07

ability now for Piper to make announcements.

7:09

So in automations, you can have the text to speech

7:11

system, make announcements and whisper

7:13

can take speech in

7:15

and convert it to text. And the

7:17

whole thing is just really coming along nicely

7:19

combined with this little $13

7:22

Adam echo, which is an ESP home device.

7:24

It's the size of a quarter

7:26

and it's got a little microphone and a little button and you press

7:28

it and it becomes

7:31

a voice command box to home assistant. And at $13,

7:35

you could put these all over the house

7:37

and I've ordered two, because

7:40

I'm going to start playing with it. Why not at that price?

7:43

Yeah.

7:44

They're also looking at in chapter four

7:47

wake word detection. So you could say computer

7:49

activate or whatever they're going to say, have it be Jarvis,

7:52

obviously. Sure. Here's a be Jarvis mind of your computer.

7:55

And it's coming along so nicely that

7:57

I think with the August release of Home

8:00

Assistant,

8:01

I'm going to transition to using

8:04

Assistant

8:05

for all of my voice commands,

8:08

all of that stuff that I'm doing, at least on the phone. Well,

8:11

I did say it was the year of the voice and

8:13

they're making good on those promises. They really

8:15

are delivering.

8:16

I think that it's funny because with the parts

8:18

that I'm actually the most excited about are

8:20

Piper and Whisper

8:22

because having open source community

8:24

contributed

8:25

text to speech and speech to text systems

8:28

that are getting models and training from the Home Assistant

8:30

community

8:31

is going to be so beneficial

8:33

to the open source community. Eventually,

8:36

some Linux desktop developer is going

8:38

to realize that this is just sitting out there.

8:41

They could bang it out in a container in 15 minutes and

8:43

they could get a voice assistant built into the Linux desktop.

8:45

Yeah. In a day. Just

8:47

like I have that little Siri orb up in the corner

8:50

of my

8:51

MacBook. Yeah. Why not have

8:53

a Bixby orb? No, it's not Bixby, is it? It's

8:56

a tuxy.

8:57

It's a tuxy. It's a little

8:59

tux assistant, right? He comes up and you

9:01

ask him to do things on your system. I don't know

9:03

what you'd use it for, but it's there. It's low hanging

9:06

fruit and it's something that's available to the open source community.

9:09

And I'm really thrilled about it. And it's just

9:11

so nice to actually see the Mexican on it. I was a little

9:13

concerned when they announced this massive initiative

9:15

that how

9:16

would they pull this off? We've watched the Mycroft people

9:18

fail.

9:19

I mean, honestly, the Google Home

9:22

and the Alexa devices are subpar devices,

9:24

but

9:25

they've really attacked this in a really

9:27

practical way.

9:28

And half a year in,

9:30

we've really got some serious results that are usable now.

9:33

I did a bit of tinkering with Home Assistant myself

9:35

this week. For the longest time, I've been,

9:38

when I drive up the hill by my house, which is

9:40

a dead end, so there's almost never any

9:42

traffic.

9:44

There is a little routine I do.

9:46

I pick up my phone, I unlock my phone,

9:48

and then I press the

9:51

tail scale app to make sure that my

9:53

phone, you know, cause it's just roamed off wifi

9:55

or whatever. Right. And iOS is a turd

9:57

about that. Yeah, is on the tail net.

9:59

Then I opened the Home Assistant app and scroll

10:02

up about two thirds of the way down my primary home

10:04

screen and press the garage door

10:06

button. Yeah, okay. This sounds like

10:08

something I've been doing for a while too.

10:10

And it occurred to me the other day that I've been doing

10:12

this for over a year. Why

10:15

don't I automate it?

10:16

What is wrong with me? Right. So

10:19

then I started going down the rabbit hole of trying to automate

10:21

just a simple button press on iOS. What

10:24

I wanted was just an app on my home screen,

10:26

one button that was always there, no extra

10:28

swipes, no weirdness, just, I

10:31

mean, perfect thing would be for it to show up in CarPlay.

10:34

I haven't quite gotten there yet, but what

10:36

I have done is I've been able to create an iOS

10:38

home screen air quotes app

10:41

using iOS shortcuts.

10:44

So this shortcut triggers a

10:47

Home Assistant script on the backend.

10:49

So you just create a very simple script in the Home Assistant

10:51

UI,

10:52

make a note of the name because we'll use

10:54

that later. So the iOS shortcut

10:57

that I've written is really straightforward.

10:59

There's three steps. The first one

11:01

is connect to your tail scale network. So the

11:04

shortcut does that by default,

11:05

just in the background. It takes about five seconds.

11:08

If it's not connected, it takes about half a second

11:10

if it is. Do you see the tail scale

11:12

UI launch as it's doing that? Nope,

11:14

just all in the background. What you do see, and there

11:16

is no way to,

11:18

there was an iOS 16, but I'm

11:20

running the iOS 17 beta.

11:23

There is no way to hide the notification

11:27

of the shortcut running. You can hide notifications

11:30

for automations.

11:33

This is a shortcut, which is a different thing

11:35

for some reason. I don't know why, but it

11:37

is. And you can't hide the notifications

11:40

for those. So that's kind of annoying.

11:42

But once I've been, you know,

11:44

so that's step one. Once it's connected to the tail

11:47

scale, I then create a

11:49

dictionary object and into that dictionary

11:51

object I put a single

11:54

entity ID. So entity

11:56

underscore ID. And then

11:58

in the, that's the key. And then the value.

11:59

you is script.toggle garage

12:02

door, whatever you call it. Whatever you name the script.

12:04

Okay. Exactly. So step

12:07

two doesn't actually do anything. It just essentially

12:09

creates a variable, a dictionary with

12:12

in this case, one item in

12:14

it. So this is like the shortcuts term for how

12:16

you make it a variable item that you can pass to

12:18

something else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you

12:20

could in theory call that

12:22

array and then reference items within that

12:24

dictionary. You know, that's the kind of

12:27

stuff that's going on here. And then the third

12:29

step is the really simple bit. It's just

12:31

call a home assistant service of script.toggle

12:34

garage door with data.

12:37

And that's it. Uh, it just works. And

12:39

then as a button you can press under the share

12:42

sheet, which is add to home

12:44

screen. And then it creates a little app

12:46

icon that just sits on your, on your home screen.

12:49

You push the button and it does the thing.

12:51

I have done something similar using

12:53

the home assistant widget on iOS

12:55

now. And it's one of the buttons in the widget

12:58

is that's, that's nice that you, it's so it's,

13:00

so how do you set the icon or can you set

13:02

the icon? Is it just a system? Yeah. You can.

13:06

So under, let me just have a quick look

13:08

there at the top, there's a little, um,

13:11

UI menu where you can rename it. And

13:13

then another option is choose the icon. So

13:15

you can change the color. You can choose, you

13:17

know, any pretty much any emoji.

13:20

Uh, it's not like a full color emoji.

13:22

It's like a,

13:24

almost like an MDI icon. Emoji

13:27

options and there's things like air pods in there, stairs,

13:30

you know, cows, you know,

13:32

fish. They have garage door. They

13:35

have a car, which is good enough for me. Uh,

13:38

so that's, that's what I picked. Yeah.

13:41

That I need to do the same every morning

13:43

when I'm coming to the studio,

13:45

I turn on the smart plug. I, I, well,

13:48

I do, I

13:49

open up home assistant,

13:50

which is persistently connected. Thanks to Android. I

13:52

open up home assistant.

13:54

I scroll to my office. I turn

13:56

on my workstation smart plug.

13:58

I make sure the temperature.

13:59

correctly and then I close Home Assistant

14:02

and I don't know why I don't just make that a script and

14:04

a button. That's so obvious. I think what I'd like

14:06

to do is in the automation section

14:09

of iOS,

14:10

try and trigger this based on a

14:12

geo zone and make it

14:14

like my neighborhood or something. I mean, the

14:17

issue with that though, and well, I'll

14:19

trigger the automation with a do you want

14:21

to, yes or no option.

14:24

Yeah. Or what about like,

14:26

what about if no motion was detected after a certain amount

14:28

of time it closes the door. Yeah, maybe that

14:31

could be it.

14:31

Cause I mean, sometimes, I mean, I've got an air conditioner in my

14:34

garage cause that's my, where I do all my woodworking. So

14:37

quite often in the summer months I am

14:39

air conditioning that space because it's unbearable

14:41

if I don't. So I, I want the door open

14:44

for minimal amount of time possible.

14:46

Right.

14:48

So, I mean, there's still some, there's

14:50

still some improvements to be made and I

14:52

don't know how reliable the coming home geo

14:55

location of iOS is. It's probably pretty

14:57

good, but yeah,

15:00

it's been very useful for me.

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slash SSH.

16:13

So in one of my intentional visits to Reddit,

16:16

I still don't have a mobile client on my phone.

16:19

I just go to the

16:21

old reddit.com maybe

16:23

once a day now at most for just a

16:25

couple of minutes. I saw a really

16:27

interesting link for

16:29

an app called LinkWarden. The

16:32

idea behind this thing is it's a fully self-hostable

16:34

open-source collaborative bookmark manager.

16:37

The

16:38

really nice thing about it that sort of piqued

16:40

my interest was that you

16:42

can use it to collect and organize,

16:45

but most importantly, archive web

16:47

pages. And you kick the tires on that,

16:49

Chris. Yeah,

16:50

I wouldn't say it's totally accessible

16:52

to everybody that wants to self-host. You have

16:54

two routes.

16:55

You can kind of build it yourself,

16:58

which is probably the safest, most

17:00

secure way to go. It does take some time

17:02

to build.

17:03

There's also a community member

17:05

out there that has made a Docker Compose. Now the

17:07

project themself, LinkWarden, does plan to make a Docker

17:12

image available, and I would imagine a

17:14

Docker Compose along with that.

17:16

But they don't have it yet. So depending

17:19

on which route you take, there's a couple of

17:21

different paths to get it self-hosted.

17:23

It's not too bad overall,

17:25

and a couple of things struck me that I

17:27

like about it a lot. When

17:30

you feed it a link, you have the option

17:32

to kind of just give it the URL and

17:35

tell it to go ahead and do its thing. Or

17:37

you can provide optional information like

17:39

tags and categories and collection

17:42

and a description and your own custom title

17:44

if you want, and then it'll pull it in with all that extra

17:46

information.

17:47

Obviously it's a good idea if you provide that extra information

17:49

to organize it. Once it's

17:51

pulled that link in,

17:52

what

17:55

I expected, which I would like

17:57

to see, is I click it and

17:59

I get

17:59

a reader view of the contents of

18:02

the website or some sort of cached

18:04

almost like archive.org wayback machine style.

18:07

That's not what you get. There is no viewing

18:10

your saved web pages in Link Warden

18:12

but what you can do

18:14

is view a screenshot that it took at the time you

18:16

saved it.

18:17

You can view it in the app or download it

18:20

or you can get a PDF version

18:22

of the web page.

18:23

And from an archival

18:26

versioning standpoint, I

18:27

really like that because there

18:30

are news stories and there is one that has

18:32

stuck in my craw now for two years

18:34

where a big

18:37

Linux vendor changed their website

18:39

after they found out we were going to report on a story.

18:41

And by the time we went public with the story, they had totally

18:44

updated their website and I kick myself

18:46

to this day

18:47

for not having an archival version

18:50

of the original site that I could link people to.

18:53

Unfortunately, Link

18:54

Warden as of right now doesn't

18:56

really have a way to share

19:00

your saved result outside of just downloading

19:02

the PDF and like I could share the PDF with Alex.

19:05

But in my example I just gave, I would love if I have a public

19:08

instance like I put this up on a Linode,

19:10

I'd love to be able to just give Alex a link to that entry

19:13

and he could have like an archived version that

19:15

he could read in the thing or he could download

19:17

the PDF if he wanted to. And

19:19

then additionally when you're looking at ways to like archive

19:21

stuff that you're working on, this is one of my number one primary

19:24

use cases for something like Vault Warden or Wallbag

19:26

or any of those is I'm processing

19:28

information, I want to save this perhaps for later,

19:31

I want a bookmarklet or I want

19:33

a browser extension that'll just take what I'm reading,

19:35

what I'm doing right now,

19:37

suck it all into something and save the complete

19:39

version. There's

19:40

no Link Warden browser extension

19:42

or bookmarklet yet.

19:44

So there's

19:45

only manually adding URLs

19:47

by hand by loading up the Link Warden UI, logging

19:49

in,

19:51

and then hitting the add URL thing. Which

19:53

is not very quick for like massively

19:56

slamming stuff in there.

19:58

It'd be nice to have those options. I think

19:59

a browser extensions also

20:02

on their to-do list. I imagine it's probably not.

20:05

Super easy. But if you want to collect certain,

20:07

like if you want a bunch of

20:09

car repair collections and you have

20:11

recipe collections and you could put all

20:14

these in here and it does present them in a very

20:16

nice UI,

20:17

if not minimum

20:18

UI at this point. It's a really interesting

20:21

idea, isn't it? Particularly with Twitter

20:24

going away or becoming X

20:27

or whatever. The

20:30

internet archive is an incredibly valuable

20:32

resource, but we can't

20:34

rely on it to be there forever, not necessarily.

20:36

Your

20:37

example of having a

20:40

news story or a company's

20:43

website that changed based on your reporting

20:45

or

20:46

prospective reporting, which

20:48

is pretty shady.

20:52

We don't really have a very good way other than just

20:54

save as print and save as PDF

20:56

right now to archive a website, which

20:59

in this day and age feels

21:01

a little out of touch.

21:04

I had to look for a couple of other options

21:06

in this space as well whilst you were

21:08

busy trying out Linkwarden. Now,

21:10

there's another one called Linkding.

21:13

I tried to search for this. It kept trying to send me to LinkedIn.

21:15

This actually is Link, like

21:19

the bell. There we go. This

21:22

is yet another bookmark manager. It has

21:24

a whole bunch of standard bookmark manager features,

21:26

which I won't bore you with. You can probably figure out and guess

21:29

what they are. But the one for me that really

21:31

stood out was this one has the ability to automatically

21:34

create snapshots of bookmark

21:36

websites on the internet archive way

21:38

back machine. Now that's

21:40

useful. Obviously, it's in terms of

21:43

a data sovereignty and having a locally

21:45

cached copy. You know, it doesn't solve

21:47

that particular problem, but your

21:50

collaborative problem of putting something

21:52

in the show notes and not having link rot

21:54

happen to it over the next decade or two. This

21:57

could be a great solution.

21:59

Yes. And then,

22:00

you know, the nice thing about having something that integrates

22:02

with archive.org is then you make that snapshot

22:04

available to everybody else too. It's not just your private

22:07

little stash somewhere.

22:09

Which for my use case might be fine, but

22:11

if you think about it in a broader context, it'd be nice if everybody

22:13

had a copy. And I did check the archive, and

22:16

it wasn't there. Yeah.

22:19

Okay, so LinkedIn, I

22:22

like that. I think I'm gonna be taking a look at that. And of course,

22:24

they have a very simple Docker composed to get it going.

22:27

I mean, you could, of course, use something like Firefox

22:29

Sync and self-host that and sync your bookmarks

22:31

around that way if you want to. But

22:34

I think my kind of desire here is

22:36

to have that kind of archival aspect

22:39

of, you know, let's say I find a solution in a Reddit

22:41

thread.

22:42

I want to archive that Reddit thread today.

22:44

And then know that I can link to it, say,

22:47

from my Obsidian vault to

22:49

a file path somewhere else and just have

22:51

it forever. Yeah. Now, I found another

22:53

one which looked pretty interesting. It doesn't have

22:55

any archival aspects, which

22:58

is a bit of a ding against it for now, but who

23:01

knows where they'll take the project in future. This

23:03

one's called Flockus. F-L-O-C-C-U-S.

23:08

I swear developers just make names to troll

23:10

people like you and me that have to say them out loud. I

23:12

know. They should all be forced to pronounce them out loud

23:15

and put the recording up on their website if they're

23:17

going to choose a crazy name. It's

23:19

like Flockus, like kind of a

23:21

bit like meet the Fockers, you know? This

23:25

is nice because you can use Nextcloud bookmarks,

23:27

Google Drive or any web dev compatible

23:30

service to sync your bookmarks around between Firefox,

23:33

Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave,

23:35

Vivaldi and Safari is coming soon

23:37

because it uses web extensions

23:39

to do that. So it has Android apps as well. There's

23:42

a bunch of other stuff that looks

23:44

pretty neat in there.

23:45

That's pretty handy if you already have Nextcloud

23:48

or it says here Google Drive would work or any web

23:50

dev compatible service. It'll sync. Basically,

23:53

it syncs your bookmarks between your browsers

23:56

and any browser that supports

23:58

the standard. web extensions.

24:01

So if you've, I mean, this is me, man. I've got Firefox,

24:04

I've got Chrome, I've got frickin Edge,

24:06

and I got an xCloud Bookmarks app installed.

24:09

So you're nailing it today. Well, we are

24:11

recording this episode a week early because

24:13

next week

24:14

as we record, I'll be in Chicago for

24:16

DevOps days. So I

24:19

hope that we all had a lovely meetup on

24:21

the Thursday night. Yeah, I hope I heard

24:23

a bunch of great stories, Alex, right? I

24:26

bet I did. It was probably a lot of fun. And I

24:28

bet I really wished I was there. Exactly.

24:32

Time travel, hey, time

24:34

maths. I would make a very

24:36

poor Doctor Who. Let's put it that way.

24:40

tailscale.com slash self

24:42

hosted, go check it out right now and get a free personal

24:44

account for up to 100 devices. And it's a

24:46

great way to support the show. So it's tailscale.com

24:49

slash self hosted. Now tailscale is a

24:51

solution for a team of any size an individual

24:54

or a large enterprise that just doesn't want

24:56

to have to deal with the annoying old style

24:58

VPN systems that are costly

25:01

and complicated to maintain.

25:03

What tailscale does is it uses WireGuard

25:06

to create a mesh network between your resources.

25:09

It lets you easily build out in

25:11

minutes per device a network that's flat

25:13

and talks directly to each other using WireGuard's

25:16

noise protocol. It's perfect for those of

25:18

us that like to self host, you can put your services

25:20

all on your tail net. And you don't need to bother

25:23

with port forwarding on your firewall if your

25:25

ISP doesn't allow a certain inbound port, because

25:27

it's all private traffic now.

25:29

And each device like your phone

25:31

or your tablet or a VPS or your desktop

25:34

computer, but doesn't matter what the OS is because they support

25:36

arm and Intel and just the whole range out there.

25:39

And they give you great tooling to like tailscale

25:41

send, which is sort of like airdrop

25:44

I guess but for all of your devices

25:46

on your tail net doesn't matter their OS or tailscale

25:49

SSH which lets you log in to all of your

25:51

tailscale devices. There's a lot more to Alex

25:54

and I use it to share resources between our

25:56

network. So when we're trying something out for the show, we

25:58

share it over tailscale. And then I just put his

26:01

DNS domain name in, put his port in, boop, goes

26:03

over Tailscale, all protected by WireGuard.

26:06

It's so elegant and so easy. It's

26:08

gonna change your networking game. So support

26:10

the show and try it for 100 devices for

26:12

free on a personal account. Just go to tailscale.com

26:15

slash self-hosted. That's it. And

26:17

you get started for 100 devices right there. Tailscale.com

26:20

slash self-hosted.

26:24

Meanwhile, I thought it might

26:26

be a good idea to give you all an app pick to kind of

26:29

bring you back down to earth after that. I

26:31

found an app that lets you browse IMDB

26:34

in the terminal.

26:35

Now, why would you want to,

26:37

well, actually IMDB doesn't have the best website

26:39

anymore.

26:40

This is kind of brilliant. It just turns everything into a big

26:43

N-curses directory.

26:45

Well, that's just it. I mean, some people live in

26:47

the terminal, Chris. Like,

26:49

some people use I3, some people use XFCE.

26:52

You know, some people do some things

26:54

that I don't understand. You exposed that to

26:57

me. I didn't even call you out, but you exposed it to me

26:59

when you showed me your Nix config and I saw XFCE

27:01

in there. I was aghast, but then I thought about it. I

27:04

understand, I understand. I just wanted a lightweight

27:06

desktop for the server.

27:07

Yeah, that's what I figured. I'm not actually going to use

27:09

it. Right.

27:11

But this thing, IMDB for the terminal

27:13

is pretty cool. It's written in Ruby. And

27:15

so I thought, right, I'm on my MacBook. Why

27:17

don't I try this out? Oh, hold on a minute. I've

27:20

got Nix Shell, because I'm now a Nix guy.

27:22

I don't know if I mentioned that

27:24

recently. By the way. Yeah.

27:28

So I went down the rabbit hole of trying to get this app running

27:30

with Nix Shell. So it's very

27:33

easy to do. You just type the command, Nix Shell,

27:36

and then pick your package repo. So in my case,

27:38

unstable, put a hashtag in

27:40

there and then Ruby so that I end up

27:43

dumped into

27:44

almost like a chroot, but not. It's

27:46

like a virtual environment if you're

27:48

a Python guy. It's a bit like

27:51

that. You get dumped into this virtual

27:53

environment, which is a Nix Shell

27:56

with

27:57

whatever packages you requested installed. In

27:59

my case, it was Ruby. Then I

28:01

did gem install IMDB

28:03

terminal.

28:04

It pulled down everything without

28:06

having Ruby installed on my host system, I'll

28:08

just remind you. And then I was able to follow

28:10

the instructions in the application itself. Now

28:12

it does ask you to sign up for a

28:15

API scraping service. So unfortunately

28:18

I

28:18

wasn't able to actually test this out. So I'm

28:20

just relying on the screenshots for this episode.

28:23

Cause the scraping API is 19 bucks a month

28:26

in the cheapest option, which I love

28:28

you all, but that's a lot just to test something out for fun.

28:31

This whole Nick's shell thing, when

28:34

I realized that that app wasn't gonna be the

28:36

one for me, I just pressed control C, control

28:38

D to come out of the environment.

28:41

And then I tried to type Ruby just to see what

28:43

would happen.

28:44

It was as if it never happened. It was amazing.

28:47

We did get lots of feedback on

28:50

my inability to understand

28:52

flakes and some people empathizing with

28:54

me to say, yes, they are really difficult. And

28:57

thank you for saying out loud. Cause I felt like I

28:59

was the stupid one. No, we're

29:01

stupid together. Don't worry. It's all fine. I

29:04

had a few people send me their configs, examples

29:06

and stuff over the weekend. And some

29:09

of those were really helpful actually. Some people on the discord

29:11

helped me out a bunch. And I think I

29:13

just about understand flakes now. I've just

29:16

about got there. It was

29:17

really, really painful to get there.

29:20

Could you explain it like I'm five?

29:22

No. Okay. So that's still

29:24

that step. My

29:26

now vague understanding of them and

29:28

it is very vague

29:30

because I think Nick's probably

29:33

has one of the steepest learning curves in

29:35

all of computer science, genuinely. Maybe

29:38

becoming a software developer in the beginning, learning

29:40

your first programming language is harder.

29:43

But it's- Some of those early BSDs I imagine

29:45

were pretty rough, but modern day computing

29:48

systems, I think it's definitely one of the most complex. Yeah.

29:50

What's been really interesting is I just

29:53

started my new job

29:54

yesterday as we record. And

29:57

I mentioned to my new boss that I'd just taken

29:59

my brand new Mac. out of the box 30 minutes

30:01

before our intro call. Like I

30:04

had nothing installed on it. I had to do all the iCloud

30:06

set up, all that kind of nonsense. I

30:08

ran my Nix install

30:11

command. So I ran the determinant systems

30:13

Nix installer, then downloaded

30:16

the zip file from GitHub

30:18

of my macOS GitHub repo.

30:21

Then I had to run Nix build

30:24

Darwin config, whatever

30:29

it was, about 10 or 15

30:31

minutes later, I came back because it was downloading

30:33

all of my Mac app store apps. It was

30:35

downloading all of my brew apps. How

30:38

does it get the authorization to iCloud to log

30:40

in and get those? It can pull them down without having

30:42

to open up the app store UI. Oh

30:45

goodness, that's so wonderful. There's a binary

30:47

called MAS,

30:48

which lets you interact with the Mac app

30:51

store through the command line. Yes,

30:53

I've seen that going crazy in the background while it's

30:55

updating apps before. Interesting.

30:58

As though, you know, the promise of Nix is

31:00

real. I went from a box fresh

31:03

laptop to all of my apps installed,

31:06

including iStat Menus configuration

31:08

files in place, iTerm configuration

31:10

files in place. All of my

31:12

shell stuff was there. The only things I've

31:15

had to do really was log into a whole bunch

31:17

of stuff, which you can't really automate

31:19

that, I don't think. The promise is real.

31:22

It is amazing when you get there.

31:24

So Nix on macOS sounds like it adds some real

31:27

serious utility to macOS because honestly,

31:29

a

31:30

new Mac can take at least

31:32

a day to get your core stuff set up because

31:34

you got to download, you got to log in to everything.

31:37

It's true. Go through all the settings. Yeah, man,

31:39

that's a mess.

31:40

So how much, I mean, all with the downloads

31:42

and all that, what do you think the total time was? Well,

31:44

I went from box fresh and I joined at 9.05 or

31:48

something when I sat at my desk. And I joined

31:50

the call with my boss at 9.32, just

31:52

two minutes late, who I was panicking a little. So

31:56

what's that? 27 minutes,

31:59

end to end. That makes that makes me

32:01

really really think I

32:02

should try that on the link side too So what I

32:05

do right now is I use nix to just get the base

32:07

system up But

32:08

I like to experiment every build

32:10

so I haven't really wanted to come up with

32:12

like a prescribed installation on Linux

32:15

But

32:15

on the Mac it's such a utility for

32:17

me if I'm using a Mac It's like four

32:20

or five apps tops and

32:21

I could totally see it working there Well, I mean this can

32:23

do stuff like rewrite system default

32:26

preferences So things like moving my

32:28

dock to the left Disabling

32:31

the app icon bouncing in the dock minimize

32:33

into app icon it changes

32:35

screensaver time preferences It changes

32:38

all these little things tap to click it

32:40

enables tap to click all these little things that

32:42

I remember to do over the next Six

32:44

weeks as I settle into this Mac and make

32:47

it my own I've now got in a configuration

32:49

file and I'll never have to remember them ever again

32:52

I just run I

32:53

run my just file I literally all I have to type

32:55

is just when I'm in the git repo and

32:58

it does everything for me just do

33:00

it And I tell you my

33:02

absolute favorite feature besides the you know

33:04

the whole overall holistic solution Fuzzy

33:08

finder integration on control

33:10

R for reverse search. Where has that

33:13

been all my life? Oh my goodness

33:16

Yeah, oh,

33:17

I'm really happy and of course You're

33:20

not just using it on Mac OS to make you clear to the listener

33:23

We've been chatting off air about redoing

33:26

some of the JB infrastructure with Nix

33:28

including Jupiter broadcasting calm eventually

33:30

and

33:31

you know Really kind of using it everywhere And you could you

33:33

could absolutely start using the Nix package manager

33:36

on you know fedora or sentos or whatever

33:38

you're on a buntu today

33:39

But the nice thing I really like about using Nix

33:42

OS as my server platform is it's

33:44

it's a real MVP

33:46

Just a minimum viable platform like

33:48

my ode droid at home. I have

33:50

00 concerns

33:54

about just doing the system updates because

33:56

it's like the

33:57

basic stuff you need to get it It could almost

33:59

just be a container

33:59

itself. It's the basic run times you need

34:02

for a Linux system to manage it

34:04

and containers.

34:05

And the containers are isolated from the system. And

34:08

since the Nix OS updates are transactional,

34:11

and I can roll back,

34:12

I just keep that base minimum rolling

34:15

Linux environment that's always up to date. I

34:18

like to go some of the more newer kernels since I'm on an ODRide.

34:20

And I

34:22

just roll that all the time. And I

34:25

haven't done it yet, but I've considered just sending it

34:27

to automatic.

34:28

And the separation of the two with a secure up to

34:30

date

34:31

declarative base

34:33

that is reproducible instantly.

34:36

And my containerized applications has

34:38

been the ultimate home

34:40

self hosted solution I've ever had. And

34:42

I like it so much. I also am very interested

34:44

in applying to the JB infrastructure.

34:46

Took me a while to get there, huh? I'm

34:49

still not quite at Wes's ninja level of,

34:51

you know, GitHub actions of tearing down

34:53

entire environments quite yet. But I think I'll

34:55

get there. It's funny with Wes because some stuff

34:57

bounces off him, you know, we talk about a lot of things, but

35:00

this one, it's like every week, I can tell

35:02

he's gone further down the rabbit hole. And you've

35:04

probably noticed

35:05

Nix folks come out of the woodwork. They're all out

35:07

there. They do. Yes. First day at

35:09

New Job, I mentioned to my boss that

35:11

I just run Nix and he's like, Oh,

35:14

take a look at my Nix repo.

35:17

And I do a whole bunch of calls. Like he is

35:19

next level from me, which isn't

35:21

difficult, honestly, but he's extremely

35:23

far down the rabbit hole of, of Nix.

35:26

We were talking about how to add nodes programmatically

35:29

with Nix config to your tail

35:31

net for tail scale. Obviously we

35:33

can't do it yet. Well, I can't promise

35:35

anything at all, but we want it to happen at

35:37

some point in the future. You'd be able to just add an auth

35:40

key into your Nix config and that

35:42

will automatically add that node

35:44

to your tail net. Yeah. I could see that being useful

35:46

one day for headless systems

35:49

like Raspberry Pis and, or my old droid,

35:51

which I, it would totally have no one

35:53

at all. GitHub actions. Imagine running a GitHub

35:55

action and then pushing to a remote

35:58

server over your tail net.

37:59

crapped out.

38:01

This is happening to me relatively often.

38:03

Some files just don't seem to seek properly on

38:05

Jellyfin, AVI files for example,

38:08

so I have two backup options.

38:09

Number one, you can copy

38:11

the stream URL from the menu and then open

38:13

in VLC. You have to seek manually to where

38:16

you're at, but that'll work.

38:18

Number two, if all else fails, you could just download the file and

38:20

play it locally. It's a slightly bigger pause

38:23

in the movie, but it's not super bad and

38:25

at least guarantees the movie either plays

38:27

or the file itself is actually broken.

38:29

He says, I don't usually get too much sass from the

38:31

family, but it's rough to be in that spot.

38:34

Do

38:34

you do that thing where when a file

38:36

doesn't play in, let's say Jellyfin

38:39

in this case, you go to Plex and it doesn't

38:41

play there and you're like, right,

38:43

I'm going to try Cody. And if it doesn't play in

38:45

Cody, yeah, God damn it, it's

38:48

broken. It's bad. Yeah, Cody, yeah, Cody,

38:50

you know, is like the go to can play

38:52

everything. Also, like if

38:54

it doesn't play in the web browser, I'll sometimes,

38:57

you know, that'll be a red flag. That's usually where I'll

38:59

pull it down at that point and

39:00

just try a local playback. But you know, in this case,

39:03

I was playing it on the Apple TV

39:05

and there's not a lot of great options.

39:08

There is actually VLC for the Apple TV, but

39:10

I'm not, I don't know how I'd actually get the file in there.

39:12

I thought about this a lot and I decided to turn

39:14

Plex back on. I still have Jellyfin, but

39:17

I decided to also turn Plex on because we're starting

39:19

a new show, 12 Monkeys.

39:21

We also just watch other shows and I still haven't

39:23

gotten adequate intro skipping. And

39:26

I know this sounds silly, but

39:29

we're watching Who's the Boss, for example, just

39:31

like at dinner. It's got a minute

39:33

five intro

39:35

and it's got, you know, you're watching that every time you're,

39:37

it's just, you want to skip that. And Plex has also added

39:40

credit skipping,

39:41

but then the real final kind of nail

39:43

in the coffin for me was

39:46

just about every day or two

39:48

the Swift Fin app, God bless new

39:51

app

39:51

since early days,

39:53

it loses my server entry information

39:55

and all of my login information. And I have

39:57

to go through and re type in my server.

39:59

server address and relog

40:02

in with my account, uh,

40:04

almost every other day or two. That

40:06

kind of stuff is a real paper cut and just

40:09

adds up. Adds up. So

40:12

the TVOS experience is still not quite

40:14

what I want. And then the thing that really put me over

40:16

back for Plex for now, I

40:19

don't know when, but at some point when

40:21

I was on Jellyfun or something, Plex added cross

40:24

Plex server watch

40:26

syncing. My God, Alex, like

40:29

yes, because I have

40:31

a huge cache on one server of

40:33

everything. And I have a subset

40:36

in the RV

40:37

and every now and then I'm down at the studio and

40:39

I want to watch that same show.

40:41

And I have to remember to go between all of them and mark everything

40:43

red. And if I'm watching on Plex and Jellyfun, I'm now

40:46

like doing it in three different places and it's absolutely

40:48

bonkers.

40:49

So the fact that they added watch

40:51

status syncing between Plex instances solves

40:54

a huge problem for me. And I, maybe

40:57

there's a way I could do that manually or with a plug-in on

40:59

Jellyfun, but it's just a checkbox on

41:01

Plex.

41:03

And that's just really nice.

41:04

Convenience is worth something.

41:07

You know, your time is worth something. And,

41:09

uh,

41:10

I think I've, you know, I'm, I still remain

41:13

impressed with, with Jellyfun from

41:15

what we, we tried from earlier in the year, especially

41:18

I think if you're just using the web version,

41:21

no

41:22

complaints really,

41:23

but I'm going to have a bunch more travel coming up, uh,

41:26

soon. And I still didn't figure out a good remote

41:28

access solution other than tail scale,

41:31

which is probably fine. I haven't actually tried to

41:33

stream over tail net video.

41:36

I have on my phone, even over cellular from

41:38

Jellyfun and it worked well.

41:40

It's been really good in a lot of ways. That's why I'm going to

41:42

leave it running. And I'm going to keep using it

41:44

myself to keep tabs on it. And then

41:46

when we're doing it with the family, they're just going to use Plex for

41:48

now.

41:49

Yeah. I mean, Plex, that

41:52

credit skips thing is cool. But

41:54

it's also really annoying the way it kind of just

41:56

minimizes the content in the corner.

41:59

Uh, the way I don't know, Netflix

42:02

style, you know, streaming sites do that. No,

42:04

I would prefer just a little skip credits

42:07

button to pop up. Not the whole UI takeover.

42:09

It does, but yeah, I agree.

42:13

It's neat that it can do it. You know, and it's funny

42:15

cause when you fire a Plex

42:16

and it's been a while since I had Plex running.

42:19

It has to go through everything

42:22

and extract chapter images and detect

42:24

intros and detect credits. Like they,

42:27

they are doing a lot of grunt work there and I

42:29

can understand why jelly fin has been trying to

42:31

come up with the right approach because. You'll bake

42:33

a box

42:34

while Plex goes through and does all that. Well, it's

42:36

not quite as bad as when you, um, batch

42:38

upload a bunch of files to image though. That

42:41

will bake a box.

42:46

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43:55

Question for you from Anon Bob. He asks, is there a way to get chapter markers

43:57

in podverts? I

44:00

keep trying to switch from Pocket Casts

44:03

and every time I do the other apps just don't

44:05

quite measure up

44:07

Yeah, Pocket Casts is you know, it's been around for a long

44:09

time. It's a good app. What's your

44:11

Alex? What's your podcast app of choice? Yeah, Pocket

44:13

Casts. Yeah. Yeah, it's

44:15

classic. So there is

44:18

two ways to do

44:20

chapters in podcasts right now

44:23

one is kind of a hack that

44:25

the Germans came up with God bless that

44:27

sort of crams it into the ID3

44:29

tag and that works and that's what we've been

44:31

using for years.

44:32

Another is called cloud chapters

44:34

which is a standardized

44:36

sort of JSON file that you put up on an HTTP endpoint

44:40

that allows you to put metadata in there like links

44:42

so a chapter can also be a link you could

44:45

have images for that chapter

44:47

So like when we're talking about home

44:49

assistant We could have the home assistant blog

44:51

post screenshot up there or something like that two

44:53

different standards pod verse follows the ladder Which

44:56

is the more modern standard

44:57

if they had time or a contributor

45:00

They would probably accept a patch that would

45:02

allow pod verse to read

45:05

The old ID3 standard because it just it

45:07

just needs to be scrubbed and parsed properly

45:09

The issue is there is that because there's no standard

45:12

on how that chapter data is actually

45:14

kind of crammed into the ID3 tag space

45:16

It sometimes is formatted in wonky ways that'll

45:18

break the player So you have to do a lot of kind of

45:20

catching there which pocket cast has just had

45:22

years to do But

45:23

pod verse would need somebody to kind of write that code

45:26

and submit it in

45:27

Or we need to get off our butts and

45:30

make podcasting 2.0 chapters That could be

45:32

done overnight if our hosting platform fireside

45:34

just did it properly

45:36

Or it could be done if we started producing

45:38

our own RSS feeds Which inevitably

45:40

will happen if our platform providers don't keep

45:42

up.

45:43

That's a long answer, right? But it's more complicated than you'd think

45:45

I suppose Often is infrastructure

45:47

often is yeah, it is. We got some great

45:49

boost even though we're early into the cycle We

45:52

got a lot of great boosts and JJ style is

45:54

our baller this week with 40,000 sats

45:57

And he was coming in from the podcast index website.

45:59

He says

45:59

Congratulations and good luck Alex with the new

46:02

job.

46:03

We got a lot of that this week.

46:05

Yeah, thank you. He also wanted to send us a

46:07

plus one on fresh RSS. Says

46:09

I've looked at wall bag, but settled for LinkedIn

46:12

in the end. Deployment was simple with Docker,

46:14

it exposes an RSS feed. Oh, that is nice.

46:17

And my favorite thing, it has a browser extension that injects

46:19

and matches alongside the search results on DuckDuck

46:22

or Googz.

46:23

If the search keywords match any of the tags,

46:26

you give an article which is super helpful, or find

46:28

an old blog post stack overflows, and

46:30

you can't remember them or the exact order of words that you

46:32

entered a year ago. Yeah, you still get

46:34

the perfect search results. That's nice. That

46:36

is amazing.

46:37

That is incredible. Have you ever

46:39

run over one of your old forum

46:42

posts when you've been Googling for an issue?

46:44

Yes, it's so funny. And you're like,

46:46

I solved this problem four years ago.

46:49

Why am I solving it again today? So

46:53

this is funny. It's funny but yes. This is protecting

46:55

future Alex from himself. Thank you very much

46:57

for the suggestion.

46:58

Oh, JJ's not gonna be able to make it to Chicago. He's

47:01

gonna be there in October.

47:03

So... Well, you mean he

47:05

was there last night as this airs, next week

47:07

as we record, but last night as it airs. We

47:10

should have thought of a Chicago chat room.

47:12

Didn't even occur to me. Oh,

47:15

also agrees with you on the F1 TV

47:17

DRM. It's no good.

47:20

Okay, next time we do a meetup for something

47:22

like that, we should totally make a chat room.

47:24

This is too late at this point, but lesson

47:26

learned on that one. That is... Well,

47:29

I think we will. I think we have done. We

47:31

have created it, right? Wink, wink. And

47:33

then we're gonna talk about it in

47:35

the lot that aired last week. Oh, this

47:38

time maths is so confusing. Yeah, that can still

47:40

work out. Yeah, okay.

47:41

Yes, you are correct. See,

47:44

you are good at time math. You see,

47:47

maybe you would make a good doctor. Uh,

47:49

maybe. Would I be the Rick and Morty scrotum

47:52

guy, the time cop though? Well,

47:56

maybe better than Rick. Let's think about he's pretty miserable.

47:58

Yep. Hopefully cranky.

47:59

Danny is that he comes in with 20,000 sats

48:02

using fountain dear Chris and Alex

48:04

in the episode last recent in one or

48:06

two, you seem not to be able to find a downside

48:08

for using Nick's OS, but I want to present you with

48:10

a dilemma that I unfortunately can't solve

48:13

in the time of exploits and vulnerabilities

48:15

is the trade-off of not having se

48:17

Linux or app armor really worth it. Same

48:20

dilemma with the less revolutionary immutable

48:22

next-gen systems

48:23

like blend. Thanks for your insights. I'll probably

48:26

boost the symbol up as well. That's

48:27

a good question.

48:29

I would have felt duty bound as a Red

48:31

Hat employee last month to say, yes,

48:33

I see Linux is fantastic and you should

48:35

use it on all the things. But

48:37

the reality is I haven't run out on any of my personal

48:40

systems. Ever.

48:43

I've had to use it at work and, you know, in

48:46

cloud environments,

48:47

it's probably not a bad idea

48:50

and certainly government sort of

48:52

systems typically mandate those

48:54

kinds of access controls to secure

48:57

areas of the kernel and, you know, bit to the

48:59

of the system that

49:00

you maybe should or should not have

49:03

access to the reality is

49:05

though,

49:06

the world of computing

49:08

has moved on in my opinion, significantly

49:10

from when se Linux was created, not

49:12

to say it's not still useful in certain scenarios

49:15

because it absolutely is.

49:17

But these immutable OS is that you talk about

49:19

are the solution. They have read only file

49:21

systems for the most part.

49:23

So, yes, you can still access that

49:25

data. You know, let's let's suppose

49:27

you found some exploit to get onto the shell

49:30

of this box. For example,

49:32

you can still read the file system and still probably

49:34

do a bunch of stuff that se Linux might stop you

49:36

from doing. But the minute that server

49:38

gets rebooted,

49:40

you've lost all of that stuff. And one

49:42

of the solutions I've seen batted

49:45

around from security folks of

49:47

how to sort of work around this is

49:50

just have a policy that rebuilds

49:52

these boxes every seven days, you

49:54

know, have a rolling rebuild policy in

49:56

Kubernetes clusters and just have these nodes

49:58

be genuinely I know some people in the audience

50:00

are gonna be triggered, cattle versus pets,

50:03

all that stuff. Just take the

50:05

VM out the back and shoot it in the head. You know,

50:08

that's the solution here. That is the ultimate

50:11

solution.

50:12

Also, I know it's absolutely

50:14

possible, but I would love, and

50:16

this is something I'd totally be down for doing if somebody

50:18

had some insights on how to pull this off correctly.

50:21

I'd love to expose an Xbox

50:24

to the internet

50:25

and see what people could do to it malware-wise.

50:28

Because if you download a binary,

50:30

a Linux binary, on an Xbox,

50:33

it won't run. You can't execute

50:35

it,

50:35

right? It doesn't know anything about its environment.

50:38

So you'd have to have

50:40

malware or an Infiltrator that was

50:42

familiar

50:43

with Nix OS and how to

50:45

sort that out.

50:46

And I wonder if that complexity in itself

50:48

wouldn't eliminate a good chunk of malware

50:50

that might land on that box.

50:52

I mean, a sufficiently motivated actor, for

50:54

sure. Let's say, you know, it's a financial

50:57

banking system and there are

50:59

stock trades at play. And,

51:01

you know, it's quite popular in

51:03

the FinTech sector, Nix

51:05

OS. You know, if

51:07

you're sufficiently motivated, you could figure out

51:09

how to create your own Nix environment and Nix shell

51:12

and do all that stuff. But

51:13

most of the time, these vulnerabilities

51:16

are targeting the lowest hanging fruit,

51:19

the boxes that have port 3389 left open. Or

51:23

they're replacing a standard binary

51:25

that you might execute, and

51:28

they're adding a root executable bit to it.

51:30

And then you're running that and it's secretly getting

51:32

root privileges and it's actually been a compromised

51:34

version of grep or something like that.

51:37

But again, that wouldn't work in Nix. So

51:39

I would love to just test it.

51:41

So largely my answer is, SELinux

51:43

is still relevant. It's a yes,

51:46

no, but answer.

51:49

You know, it really does depend. And

51:52

for all the reasons we just talked about, it

51:54

does still have a place in the world, but

51:56

I do think its role

51:58

is diminishing.

53:59

of the heart rate because a lot of the PJ

54:02

patterns make the compression algorithm breakdown

54:04

and that lets you know they're okay. You're just

54:06

the movement and detection stuff, yeah.

54:10

I don't know if that's a great solution

54:13

for like the mom. Well,

54:14

I tell you, if you are a podcaster

54:17

or tangentially related to one, you

54:20

could take your nice expensive, sensitive, dynamic

54:22

microphone, put it underneath the

54:24

crib and turn the gain way up and

54:26

listen to that because we've definitely done that on nights

54:28

before. There you go. Yeah, microphone

54:31

is not a bad way to go at all really.

54:33

Yeah. Just get a very long XLR came. Yeah.

54:36

PS Schmidt comes in with 6,969 cents. Listening

54:40

to 102, you mentioned the renaming

54:42

entities in Home Assistant.

54:44

Yes.

54:45

Oh, I'm looking forward to this. He said, it could be made easier.

54:48

It reminded me that I wrote a script a while back

54:50

that renames entities in bulk. It

54:52

supports custom naming formats and filtering

54:54

by manufacturer and integration.

54:57

It's on GitHub under PS Schmidt,

54:59

and he has a link that we

55:01

will include in the show notes. He also says,

55:03

congratulations to you, Alex, for the new trip.

55:05

Thank you very much.

55:07

Thank you very, very much for that. That

55:09

is probably exactly what I'm looking for Schmidt. I appreciate

55:11

that. Smart growth comes in again. 5,000 stats using

55:13

Fountain.

55:16

I think he wants to use tail scale. He seems like it's, he

55:18

says it seems like an incredible solution.

55:21

He's happy to be inside the free tier zone and

55:23

maybe even pay, but he

55:25

is concerned about the single sign

55:27

on options only being major enterprises.

55:30

He doesn't want to have to have a big enterprise account to

55:32

log into tail scale. He wants to meet in the middle

55:35

and use a different solution.

55:38

Then you're looking for the custom OIDC

55:41

providers. This lets you use a custom domain name

55:44

so that tail scale can integrate with providers

55:46

that support OpenID Connect. There

55:48

you go. And they have some documentation on their website about

55:51

that as well. And we'll put a link to a

55:53

blog post in the show notes. How was

55:55

right? Actually schooled me on how

55:57

to link to my noster ID. He did find.

55:59

me so I will be able to put that in the

56:02

show notes.

56:03

And he had a little flakes wisdom he says I've been using flakes

56:05

with nix but

56:06

it did take me a while to feel comfortable with it

56:08

and I've even developed software in the past I just think that flakes

56:11

can be used for the main nix OS with just a

56:13

few files.

56:14

Maybe take a look at how the open ZFS

56:16

nix OS guy does the flake setup. The

56:19

nix OS flake repo isn't as complicated as

56:21

others and he links us to that

56:24

and it's kind of an example I get oh yeah

56:27

oh that's like six seven lines

56:29

of code that's really simple.

56:31

Minimal nix OS root

56:33

on ZFS config that's slick.

56:36

And you know what now that you get that oh

56:38

god that's great.

56:40

Thank you Hal appreciate that.

56:42

It is it is nice but I think you've just got to

56:44

stare at this problem for a while it's one of those you

56:46

know you've got to understand how the data

56:49

gets passed around between the modules

56:51

and you know it's not an

56:53

object

56:54

orientated

56:56

language so yeah things

56:58

just work differently it just takes a while to load

57:00

that into my system memory you know

57:02

yeah and format it properly. You know erok

57:06

boosted in to say that we missed a great title

57:09

nix and match. Oh

57:13

that is a good one.

57:15

And Gene Bean has a boost in 4444 sats

57:17

to say that they use the

57:19

AngelCare movement monitor

57:22

that also track temperature there's no camera

57:24

and

57:25

then later on he added a unified G3

57:28

instant camera

57:29

for his baby monitoring.

57:32

There you go

57:33

that's pretty great thank you everybody those are and he'll

57:35

he also included a link to the AngelCare

57:38

baby monitoring product that he uses that monitors for

57:40

breathing

57:41

with a wireless sensor pad so

57:42

I'll put a link to that in the show notes too

57:45

for you new dads out there.

57:46

We had 14 total boosters 18

57:49

boosts all across though some

57:51

people send in multiple boosts for a total of one hundred

57:53

and thirty seven thousand nine hundred and thirty five sats

57:55

thank you everybody if you didn't hear your

57:57

boost read it was a big one you think why didn't they read it

57:59

It could be because we're recording early, although not every

58:02

single boost makes it onto the show, but we do appreciate

58:04

all of them and we save them.

58:06

All of them in our show notes and in

58:08

our group chat. Thank you everybody. If you want to boost in and get

58:10

a new podcast app and get those new chapter titles

58:12

and stuff like that, new podcast apps.com or

58:15

keep your app. Maybe you want to use pocket cast

58:17

and just get, I'll be get Albie.com, top it off with

58:19

the cash app or directly. And

58:21

then head over to the podcast index website and find us

58:23

over there. And you can just use the web.

58:24

It's pretty easy and

58:26

we appreciate the support.

58:28

And we do get people asking us, can they support

58:30

us with the old school fiat currencies

58:32

as well? If you want to do that, you can go to self-hosted.show

58:35

slash SRE and join up to our membership.

58:38

We do an ad free feed over there with a

58:40

post show as well.

58:42

Yeah, we really love our members.

58:43

You are a rock. Thank you everybody.

58:45

And don't forget about meetups when they're coming up

58:47

and when we're doing pre-records and all that, you can always

58:50

just kind of keep in the loop by joining our meetup page,

58:52

meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting.

58:55

And the

58:56

word is I'm going to be

58:58

responsible for a lot of cooking at

59:00

Linux Fest Northwest. So I may have to recruit

59:03

your skills to Alex, cause it's going to be, we're

59:05

going to be the lunch providers

59:07

for potentially thousands of people. Is cheese

59:10

bacon going to be there? I hope so. We got

59:12

to reach out. Yeah. We got to get them booked. We

59:14

need someone to cook those brats at the front of the line. We got to

59:16

get to the front of the line.

59:19

And you can get at self-hosted.show slash contact.

59:22

If you'd like to get in touch with us that way. And

59:24

you can find all of my online places

59:26

at alex.ktz.me.

59:29

You can always chat in our discord. We have that linked

59:31

on our website, or you can hang out on our self-hosted

59:34

matrix.

59:35

That's also linked on the website or with Jupiter broadcasting.com

59:38

slash matrix. You can come and say hi to me in there.

59:41

Thanks for listening everyone. That was self-hosted.show

59:43

slash 103.