0:00

Here we are in episode 105 of

0:02

the self-hosted podcast and it is

0:05

feeling officially like

0:06

the end of summer. My

0:09

two youngest have gone back to school. It's the first

0:11

day of school today. You only say that

0:13

because you live in the frozen north. It was 97 degrees

0:17

down in Raleigh today. Okay. Yeah,

0:19

actually, you know what's funny? Last night on a whim

0:21

I pulled up Raleigh because I have like, I have like everywhere

0:24

the hosts are at stored in Carrot. And

0:26

so I was on Carrot Weather. I'm like, oh, let's check in on everybody.

0:29

Yeah, it's like, oh, Alex.

0:32

Yeah, it's 68 degrees and blue skies

0:34

here.

0:34

I'll take it. But it makes me a little sad when

0:37

summer comes to an end. I always picture summer

0:39

is like, I'm going to get all these projects done. Yeah.

0:43

Do you think that stems from summers

0:45

at school as a kid feeling like they stretch

0:48

in front of you forever,

0:50

except as an adult

0:52

life is in the way. You

0:54

get that. And also for me, it's like,

0:56

well, I'm going to have more daylight. So

0:59

if the sun's going to be up till eight or nine o'clock,

1:02

I should be able to get like twice as much stuff

1:04

done. That should happen. Right.

1:07

So, all right, I'll

1:07

plan like my big thing. And I got close.

1:10

Was I, I really started for

1:12

a moment with Brent's help to wrap my head around

1:15

all the different ways I could improve

1:17

the RV and the studio with ESP

1:19

devices, modules, and just

1:21

little things that I could get like the sonar module

1:24

or relay, you know, controls and temperature

1:27

sensors and moisture sensors and

1:29

all these little things I wanted to do for LEDs,

1:31

where I wanted to add a few more LEDs controlled by an ESP.

1:34

And

1:35

I got a lot of the kits together. I

1:37

got various parts. I got some LED light

1:39

ropes. I got some relays

1:41

and then just sort of lost momentum on all of it.

1:44

And I thought by the end of summer I'd have

1:46

I'd have like these lights installed and I'd have

1:48

some stuff implemented. And nope,

1:51

I didn't get to it. Not at all. So

1:53

I feel a little bad about that. I think the trouble with

1:55

some of those sort of more

1:58

DIY projects, like the. ESP based

2:00

stuff is a lot

2:03

of the times you don't know every single

2:06

little piece of the jigsaw that you

2:08

need

2:08

until you start getting into the project. And

2:11

then inevitably you do the calculus of

2:13

well it's $15 on

2:15

Amazon for this thing or it's $4

2:18

on Ali Express for the exact same thing.

2:20

Do I just wait three months for it to arrive on the

2:23

slow boat or do I pay

2:25

the Amazon tax.

2:26

And that can be the biggest impediment for me

2:29

to finishing some of these more bitty projects

2:31

from the ESP stuff. So

2:33

I took the route I recently ordered something called an ESP

2:36

clicker in my bonus room above my drum

2:38

set I have a skylight with an

2:41

automated VLux blind motorized solar

2:43

power blind in it. And it has a remote

2:45

control and RF remote control I think I've mentioned

2:47

it on the show before which is paired

2:50

with that blind and I don't

2:52

really want to go about hacking the RF protocol

2:54

because the VLux blinds have some kind of encryption

2:57

key rotation nonsense in them which means

3:01

not random strangers can't control

3:03

my blinds which is. Yeah I guess that makes sense. Nice

3:06

but also do we care

3:08

but OK. Not for that particular

3:10

skylight probably not and it. Yeah

3:13

this is interesting because

3:15

this is probably something that everybody

3:17

has in their home with some device like this that has a

3:19

remote or whatnot. Exactly. I'm listening. This

3:21

is your right up my alley right now.

3:23

So this guy I can't tell quite where his accents

3:25

from it sounds Eastern European

3:28

sort of Russian ish I'm not entirely sure

3:30

where this chap's from but he runs a website

3:32

that priceless toolkit which is an IoT

3:35

shop and he sells preassembled

3:37

circuit boards for all sorts of ESP

3:40

related nonsense. And this

3:42

ESP clicker has three microscopic

3:45

relays on it which can simulate up

3:48

to three different button presses

3:50

on different physical devices. So

3:53

the use case he shows in the link to YouTube video on

3:55

the product page which W a link to in the show

3:57

notes by the way is that he

3:59

has.

3:59

his coffee maker, which is not Wi-Fi

4:02

enabled. The only way of interfacing

4:04

with this physical device

4:06

is to stand in front of it with your meat sausage

4:09

and just push the button on the front

4:11

of the machine. Well, except

4:13

of course, all that's doing in reality is

4:16

bridging a contact. So all the relays

4:18

doing inside the ESP clicker is the

4:20

same thing. And obviously because it integrates

4:22

with ESPHome,

4:24

Home Assistant integration is a

4:26

mere click away. And so

4:28

I imagine you kind of have to pick

4:31

and choose the device you're wiring to. Like you'd

4:33

have to be willing to open it up and wire some contacts

4:35

on that side.

4:36

Yes, absolutely. If you're not into soldering

4:38

or into hacking potentially

4:41

very expensive devices to pieces to

4:43

integrate this thing inside of, stay away.

4:45

But for me with my V-Lux

4:48

remote, it has some surface

4:50

mount buttons on it. It's got the four, each

4:52

button has four legs on it.

4:54

So I get my multi-meter out

4:56

and I turn it into continuity mode. And

5:00

the pins of my multi-meter

5:03

are tiny. The probes,

5:05

the tips of the probes are tiny. But the pads

5:08

on these service mount component buttons are

5:10

even tinier. I can't even really

5:13

think of a actual item that

5:15

we would hold in our hands that is that small.

5:18

They are maybe the head of a sewing needle

5:20

small.

5:21

Like I'm used to soldering small stuff with racing

5:24

drones but this is like another

5:26

level down. So I'm gonna have fun soldering it. But

5:29

I did manage to get it work simply by just hot gluing.

5:32

I hot glued just what I was messing about.

5:34

I hot glued the cable from the ESP clicker

5:37

onto the button. So I wouldn't have to physically hold it and

5:40

control the blinds above

5:42

my drums from Home Assistant.

5:45

So it was pretty sweet. That is nice.

5:48

I'm gonna pick one of these up. I have a fan

5:51

I would love to control. Love, love, love

5:53

to be able to remote control with Home Assistant. Cause it's

5:55

built into the roof. It's a great exhaust fan

5:58

but you don't need it running all the time. If it gets.

5:59

it's down below a certain temperature, I could just kill it with

6:02

something like this. I could just

6:03

have that automation that turns it off.

6:06

What's particularly nice about buying this from

6:08

Priceless Toolkit, we have no affiliation with

6:10

this chap or I just found a cool project

6:13

on YouTube,

6:14

is it's a pre-built project. So he

6:16

shows you how to assemble it with all the surface mount components

6:19

on the ESP board, all the relays and stuff.

6:21

But

6:22

honestly, this board is tiny. It's probably

6:24

about the size of your index finger when

6:26

it arrives.

6:28

It's too small for me to be messing around

6:31

with. I'm good at soldering small stuff, but

6:33

this is just,

6:34

it's too much. But the

6:37

fact that you and I can just go on a website

6:39

and buy a pre-made thing as a product that

6:41

arrives with ESP home

6:43

already flashed on it,

6:45

man, that is compelling. You

6:47

wish, I know it's never gonna happen, Alex, but

6:49

don't you just wish these vendors would start

6:52

maybe selling this as an option, like

6:55

an upgrade option. Hey, buy it with the ESP

6:57

home wired in and you can do what you want with

6:59

it. I would pay more for that. Well, I suppose

7:01

effectively, that's what the whole

7:03

two year thing in a roundabout

7:06

kind of way is doing. Cause that's just using an ESP

7:08

chip inside a light bulb

7:11

or whatever it might be. And there was a Digi

7:13

Blur video just this week, which I'll put a link to

7:15

in the show notes as well, where he's talking about

7:17

an update to the liberation

7:20

script we've talked about on the show before, where you

7:22

act as

7:22

the man in the middle between the local

7:24

two year device and their update server and flash

7:27

ESP home onto it that way. There've

7:29

been some more updates to that recently as well.

7:31

So go ahead and check that out down below.

7:33

I've

7:34

been very, very tempted to look

7:37

at ESP solutions around

7:39

buttons

7:40

for home automation.

7:42

There's a lot of options, you know, Hue makes something,

7:45

of course, there's tons of Zigbee buttons, there's tons

7:47

of Z-Wave options. So I've been trying to figure

7:49

out, is that the route I wanna go if I wanna start

7:51

putting in more and more buttons to like turn on and off water

7:54

pumps and water heaters, or

7:56

do I wanna use something pre-made

7:57

that's maybe just on Zigbee or Z-Wave?

7:59

own some of these. So

8:02

I've been experimenting down that route this week and

8:04

I'm curious Alex, have you ever seen anything around

8:07

using an ESP home to just

8:08

essentially have like a button pad that you could

8:11

press just to and then just tie automations

8:13

and home assistant to when you press a button? Not

8:15

an ESP home device

8:18

but you could certainly create

8:20

a macro pad like a numpad

8:23

keyboard and put some kind of a microcontroller

8:25

on that and then use the matrix

8:27

layout of those keys to do

8:30

different things. People build all sorts of

8:33

stuff to go on like their smart desk setups. Obviously

8:35

the downside of those is typically they require

8:38

power all the time where an ESP device

8:41

depending on how clever you are can

8:43

potentially be battery based but the advantage

8:46

of using one of these sort of keypad

8:48

style things is

8:50

it's almost infinitely configurable

8:52

especially if you start delving into the world of

8:54

layers and all that kind of other stuff too.

8:57

So this is this is the problem. So the wife

8:59

she tells me you know I've been getting up early been

9:01

doing the things doing my things getting my coffees

9:04

doing a meditation and I don't feel like

9:06

using the tablet in the morning.

9:09

Okay all right and then I noticed that the

9:11

kids haven't been using the tablet like in the evening

9:13

like they just kind of it sort of slowed

9:15

down and

9:16

so I kind of felt like maybe I'd built a system that the family

9:18

wasn't really using and

9:20

kind of cut them out and I felt bad about them

9:22

I thought well okay I haven't really

9:24

used buttons because we mostly use voice

9:26

control and these tablets that are mounted

9:29

but maybe maybe

9:31

a button to control this specific light or

9:34

to kick off this particular automation or to control

9:36

this group maybe it's time for that.

9:38

So I decided to start doing some

9:41

digging in this area and I'm just not very impressed so

9:43

far. Zigbee buttons in

9:45

my experience kind of suck they

9:48

they work most of the time but

9:50

they failed just often enough

9:52

for you to be like did it work has it worked

9:55

oh yeah there it goes. Yep

9:56

that is it they

9:58

sleep right to save battery

9:59

Yeah. And some buttons do

10:02

support being plugged in, but then those buttons have

10:04

limitations. And then the tooling in Home

10:06

Assistant is pretty rough.

10:09

You can add a device easy enough using

10:11

Zigbee or Z-Wave or whatever you're using, Wi-Fi

10:13

if it's a Shelley potentially, but

10:16

then like, how do you do anything with that button?

10:19

Well, you have to go create an automation. Okay. Well,

10:21

now you have to figure out

10:23

what button the device thinks you're

10:25

pressing. When you press that, find the right option

10:28

in the automation, which sometimes has like 25 entries

10:30

in there, even though it's only got one or two

10:32

buttons. And then you have to create

10:34

an automation for everything you want each iteration of

10:37

those buttons to do. So if you've got like a quad

10:39

button panel, you have to create an automation for each

10:41

button. And then of course, all of these things

10:43

support, like if you double tap, it does something different.

10:45

If you hold it, it does something different. Well, that's a different

10:47

automation

10:48

for that.

10:49

And so if you got a few, a fair amount of lights or things

10:52

that you want to be able to

10:53

control over buttons, like I want to have a button,

10:55

the wife can hit

10:56

and it just raises the temperature five degrees.

10:58

Just

10:59

five degrees warmer for two hours.

11:01

And

11:03

there's just not a really great solution

11:05

and a home assistant for this. I have wanted

11:07

that kind of, uh, for

11:10

me, it would be cool. A house, you know, I'm, I'm

11:12

feeling hot right now and I will know I will

11:14

forget to turn the thermostat back up again. Can

11:17

I just have a, I'm playing the drums and I'm hot

11:19

right now button.

11:21

Yeah. Can that just be a thing? If anybody

11:23

knows how to do that kind of, I think it's probably

11:25

a scene. And then you return to the previous scene.

11:28

If you were in the audience and you have a working example

11:30

of that with code and the buttons, please

11:34

write in and let us know.

11:36

I started playing around with and I haven't gotten it working

11:38

yet, but I want to let the audience know because I think

11:41

this should be built in to home assistant. It's

11:43

called home assistant switch manager.

11:46

You can install it through hacks or do

11:47

whatever you like. And it gives

11:49

you a UI to set up your

11:53

buttons. And when

11:55

you add a device, it gives you, okay, here's

11:57

all the devices we know home assistant natively supports.

11:59

select one from the list. It's also just,

12:02

for God's sakes, nice to have at least some list

12:04

of devices that you know work with Home Assistant.

12:06

So that's another reason why this

12:08

plugin is nice. So you go through the list

12:10

of the buttons that work with Home Assistant, and then

12:13

once you select it, it has this brilliant

12:16

feature called auto detect. So

12:18

you put it in auto detect mode, and you press

12:20

a button on the switch, and it figures

12:23

out what button and switch and everything is, and then

12:25

you just start setting up graphically,

12:27

this button does this, this button does that, if I

12:29

press it twice, and it's all a nice UI,

12:32

and it doesn't require creating automations.

12:35

It is a custom integration, so you have to get that installed,

12:37

and then as a front end component you have to use, but it's

12:39

beautiful.

12:40

It's very minimally designed, it looks like something the Home Assistant

12:42

team might create.

12:44

The only problem with it is, is I can't get it to

12:46

work. It recognizes I press the buttons,

12:48

but then it doesn't execute the thing it's supposed

12:51

to do, like turn device on or off.

12:53

So I've had to bail on using it, but it also supports

12:55

MQTT for devices that use

12:57

that, and it supports Z-Wave and ZigBee devices,

13:00

it Bluetooth, anything that Home Assistant

13:02

can support it will work with.

13:04

I just haven't got it to actually execute the functions. I

13:06

imagine there's probably something wrong on my machine, so I'm back

13:08

to using automations, but I wanted to let you guys know

13:10

because this,

13:12

this is so good, it needs to be built in. They

13:14

need to build this into Home Assistant.

13:16

We know what Steve Jobs would say right now, don't you?

13:18

What? You're holding it wrong. Oh,

13:21

I thought he'd say something about don't have buttons or something.

13:25

I felt like I had discovered a game, you

13:30

know when you're like, you're gonna redo everything, you're gonna delete all

13:32

these automations, you're gonna redo the whole way

13:34

you did manage all this stuff.

13:36

I thought I was gonna do that with Switch Manager, but

13:38

I'm just not there yet. And so I'm just

13:40

stacking more automations.

13:42

I do have a couple of switches that have

13:44

worked for me

13:46

so far, and, but

13:48

like Alex said with the big caveat that

13:51

all of this stuff will like go to

13:53

sleep if it's battery powered.

13:55

You know the other thing that happens with those battery powered

13:57

buttons, if you're as lazy as I

13:59

am.

13:59

anyway is you go to push the button

14:02

one night and you think, ah well maybe it failed I'll

14:04

just get my phone out tonight and then you push it again

14:06

the next night and you're like

14:08

ah well it failed I'll fix it tomorrow

14:10

and then before you know it your buttons been out of battery for six

14:12

months and and your routine is completely

14:15

devoid of physical button presses and

14:17

this thing has been sat on the wall for six months

14:19

doing nothing so

14:22

yeah I just wish there was a way

14:25

an easier way for me to tap

14:27

into the always-on power

14:29

inside a light switch

14:31

to power some of these buttons like I

14:33

know there's that is it the zoos switches

14:36

I think we talked about and there's a wave

14:38

yep

14:39

and they go in the wall and you can wire them I

14:41

really want just some kind of a

14:43

non-offensive

14:45

button pad which looks like

14:48

a light switch and behaves like a light switch for

14:50

normal people and for me in

14:52

the middle of the night to be perfectly honest with you

14:54

but also has the smarts that if I want to

14:57

you know arm the front door

14:59

lock and do a bunch of stuff as I'm heading

15:01

to bed you know I don't have to pull my phone out every

15:03

time that

15:04

would be really nice if you know of anything

15:06

like that again please I see a crowdsourcing

15:09

episode in full today

15:11

but if you if you have any really good examples

15:14

like the zoo switches but Zigbee

15:16

would be my preference if you know any of anything like

15:18

that

15:19

please write in and let us know.

15:22

Linode.com slash SSH

15:24

that's where we host everything that we put

15:26

in the cloud anything that the listeners are going to

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touch anything that we want to have super fast computer

15:30

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15:32

and they've got some exciting news to go

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to Linode.com slash SSH get that $100

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in 60-day credit you can really

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and you can check out the great news.

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Linode's now part of Akamai all the developer

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that's still there it's still Linode but now they're

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combined with the power and glory

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it the object storage is fantastic

16:23

I use it for all kinds of things now that are

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just sort of like back in infrastructure bits and

16:27

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16:30

accessing XML file pulling down a JPEG put

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or Brent's house go try it support the show

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and get that $100 to kick the tires Linode.com

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slash SSH

17:16

Now before we get to an interview with Antonio who

17:18

is the lead developer of the merger FS

17:20

project I came across

17:22

a really interesting article on TechCrunch

17:24

earlier matter

17:27

not the matter you're probably thinking of no

17:29

no not the home automation matter the

17:31

other matter the app which

17:34

lets you read stuff later and transcribes

17:36

and reads it back to you matter have

17:39

added podcast transcription

17:41

support today this

17:43

is getting more and more popular I've been hearing

17:45

from listeners that already just transcribe our

17:47

shows and so another tool you

17:49

know in in that in that cap is nice I don't

17:52

I don't think I'm familiar with matter I actually when

17:55

you put this in the doc I thought you were talking about the

17:57

protocol well I mean it's

17:59

thing is it's not self hosted

18:01

at all. And the reason I mention it today is not

18:04

for our core listener base, of course, it's

18:06

actually from gonna make me get

18:08

off my ass and look at how we can transcribe

18:11

some of the JB show notes automatically

18:14

using some of the whisper tooling that's getting really

18:16

good these days. The tricky

18:18

part, and again, if you know a way around

18:20

this, right in, let me know. That's

18:23

the theme this episode, isn't it? If

18:25

you have a good way of doing the

18:28

diarization. So Alex said

18:30

this sentence and then Chris said that sentence.

18:33

I

18:33

think typically drew our editor does

18:35

a pretty good job of making it so we don't step on

18:37

each other, which isn't always the case with podcasts.

18:39

So the diarization part should be fairly

18:42

straightforward for the most part. If

18:45

you have a good way of doing that with the open

18:47

source whisper tooling that you you're using,

18:50

let us know. We'd love to build it into our release pipeline.

18:52

One thing we could do to make that simpler,

18:55

it would require some help from Drew, but I've

18:57

talked to him about this is supplying

19:00

host tracks. So there's a Chris track and an Alex

19:02

track.

19:03

And so you give that to the trends to whisper

19:05

and whisper knows everything said on this track was from

19:07

Chris. Everything said on this track was from Alex. Oh,

19:10

yeah, of course we have that option is the

19:13

the creators of the content. Yeah,

19:15

we got it. And we have the source we got it multi track.

19:18

So we that's, that's what's cool about

19:20

being able to build it in at the

19:21

at the production levels, we could potentially do that. Yeah,

19:24

I'm really, really excited about

19:26

getting that rolled out because I've been experimenting manually

19:28

generating them manually attaching them to the shows for

19:30

some things every now and then trying different formats.

19:33

So close, like it still messes up on some

19:35

of the tech terms.

19:37

So like this doesn't seem totally feasible,

19:39

but a dream of mine would be

19:41

transcription gets published.

19:43

And then people could do poll requests against

19:45

it and the community could maybe fix the transcription

19:47

if they cared because it's not something we're going to go

19:49

back and clean up. You know, I could see

19:51

us running a better transcription five years down

19:54

the road and just overriding all of the transcription

19:56

files with a better version. I could definitely

19:58

see that at some point.

20:00

Alex, you had a chance to sit down with the lead developer

20:03

of MergerFS and he joined us for

20:05

a chat.

20:05

So welcome back to the show, Antonio. The last time we

20:08

spoke to you technically wasn't in

20:10

self-hosted. It was in one of the Jupiter

20:12

extras shows where we interviewed you with

20:14

Drew and Brent to talk about

20:16

MergerFS. How are you? I'm

20:19

well, how are you doing? Doing good. Thank

20:21

you. How is the new Texas sunshine

20:24

treating you? It's been hot.

20:27

It rained once in two months for like 15

20:29

minutes. We kind of celebrated. So

20:32

it's been a little bit to acculimate

20:34

from New York City,

20:35

but it's been good. Yeah, I tell you,

20:37

we were just talking about this before we

20:40

pressed record. I think if I lived

20:42

in Austin, I would probably have gained another

20:44

hundred pounds since moving

20:46

to America. Just some of the barbecue

20:48

down there is just next level.

20:51

The food in general, right? The Mexican food, of course,

20:53

and everything. They've

20:55

got all these fusion. My

20:58

wife and I, it was our ninth

21:00

anniversary of dating and

21:02

we went to this place. It's like

21:05

brisket, but with Asian flair

21:08

and really good. Came

21:10

home completely stuffedicated, fell

21:12

asleep on the couch afterwards. Delicious.

21:16

The fact that I work from home and I'm in my office

21:19

most days, five

21:21

days a week at least, yeah, I'm

21:24

lucky that I haven't put on that hundred pounds you

21:26

mentioned. That sounds amazing.

21:29

Now for those of you in the audience that don't know Antonio,

21:31

I'll forgive you because it was 2019, the

21:34

last time I think we spoke. Antonio

21:36

is the guy behind MurderFS. I

21:38

think one of the most underrated,

21:40

dare I say, like low

21:42

key, awesome bits of

21:44

Linux technology that's really changed

21:47

the way in which I interact with hard

21:49

drives in media servers in particular.

21:52

So the idea behind it is you have just a bunch

21:54

of drives

21:55

and then you point MurderFS at

21:57

them with an FS tab mount.

22:00

entry or something, and then it kind

22:02

of pulls those drives together into one

22:04

big, what

22:05

would you call it, like gluttonous mount point,

22:08

and then you can kind of traverse all of

22:10

the files and folders on

22:12

those drives as part of that JBOD,

22:14

as if it was just one single massive

22:17

drive.

22:18

With conditions, but yes. I

22:20

mean, if people are familiar with Drivepool

22:22

on Windows or UnionFS

22:25

on Linux or AUFS,

22:27

there's a few different technologies over the years. Union

22:30

file systems have been around for 30 years,

22:33

at least. If you use Docker or containers,

22:35

you might be familiar with overlayFS,

22:38

which is a different kind of Union file

22:40

system. So yeah,

22:41

I'm in that category.

22:43

All right, so let me ask you this. It's been

22:46

two or three years since we spoke, 2019, I

22:48

think, the last time. This is your opportunity

22:51

to tell the good people of the self-hosted podcast

22:53

what's changed. There's been a lot of random

22:55

stuff. I mean, the core features are all there. For

22:59

the average user, I don't think much has

23:01

changed, if anything, at

23:03

least from their perspective. Under

23:05

the covers, I've done a lot of cleanup. I

23:08

years ago embedded libfuse into

23:10

the project to make it easier for me to extend things.

23:13

And I did a lot of kind of retrofitting

23:16

of the code there. I reduced memory

23:18

footprint quite a bit and introduced

23:21

some techniques to just limit

23:23

fragmentation of memory, which was an

23:25

issue for some users. If you had a machine running

23:27

for a long time, there's a lot of churn

23:30

of objects, especially on SPCs,

23:33

smaller RAM systems that would cause issues.

23:35

So I've helped mitigate the amount

23:37

of memory in general used and then kind

23:40

of limited

23:41

that memory leak in the form of fragmentation.

23:44

I've also added, again, under the covers,

23:47

threading pools to certain behaviors.

23:50

This is one of these things as a software developer. You

23:52

have an idea of who's going to use your software in

23:54

a certain way, and then you release it on the world

23:57

and people use and abuse it for all

23:59

kinds of other purposes.

23:59

And I've had

24:02

folks with four socketed

24:05

Xeon systems running

24:07

it against local

24:10

shares, running different file systems,

24:12

connecting to remote file systems

24:14

of all sorts. And in those

24:17

situations,

24:18

the concurrency

24:21

can be both good

24:23

and bad. Good in that you've

24:25

got more things happening in parallel. But

24:27

because of

24:29

how scheduling works, it can

24:31

actually reduce the throughput. And

24:33

so there's features for pinning

24:36

threads on the cores to separate

24:39

receiving messages from the kernel with actually

24:41

processing them, allowing you to

24:43

determine how many readers you want, how many

24:46

processors you want, and then different

24:48

strategies for pinning the cores. And

24:50

that helps increase throughput.

24:52

I haven't released this yet, but soon I'm releasing

24:54

a feature that's been asked for for a while,

24:57

read dir, right? When you actually scan

24:59

directories, a lot of people will have

25:02

network file systems and the latency to connect

25:04

to those is pretty high, or

25:06

they have maybe spinning disks where they're

25:08

asleep.

25:09

And so I'm

25:11

concurrently connecting to or doing

25:14

a read dir on all of those at the same time,

25:16

if optionally, because it increases

25:18

the memory usage a bit. But that way it can

25:20

reduce

25:21

the latency to actually get that

25:23

data. And so when you do an LS,

25:26

it's faster. Yeah, I noticed Wendell

25:28

did a video fairly recently on ZFS

25:31

where he put his metadata onto

25:33

a pair of NVMe drives.

25:36

And even though the data was still stored on spinning

25:38

drives underneath, the lookup times,

25:40

the seat times, for like just listing the

25:43

contents of a specific directory was 10

25:46

or 20 times faster, just simply by

25:48

moving that metadata. Is that the kind of thing you're

25:50

talking about here? No, though, I

25:52

have been working on something similar. Merger

25:55

FS and a lot of union file systems at their core

25:57

is almost like it's just a union.

25:59

in the truest sense. Imagine you have

26:02

A, B, and C, and

26:04

you were to LS in each one of them individually.

26:07

Under the covers, that's all merger FS is doing. And

26:10

so imagine you type LS

26:12

and your drive has to spin up and it takes like 10 seconds.

26:15

Well, if each one is asleep and it takes 10 seconds

26:17

each, it's going to take 30 seconds at least in

26:20

aggregate. Now, what this

26:22

feature does is just issue each of those

26:25

at the same time and then aggregates

26:28

the data as soon as it's available. So you're looking

26:30

at more like 11 seconds rather than 31 seconds.

26:33

That sounds fantastic. And I guess, do you

26:36

have any sense of what the typical

26:39

merger FS deployment size

26:41

is? I mean, there's no telemetry or anything like that in

26:43

your packages are there. So it must be tricky.

26:46

It's one of these things where the

26:48

exceptions probably indicate

26:50

the rule. And what I mean by that

26:53

is the most questions

26:55

I get about merger FS are

26:57

usually from total noobs who don't

26:59

know anything about file systems. And so unfortunately,

27:02

there's only so much I can do to simplify

27:04

what a file system is. That's most

27:06

of us by the way, dude. You know that, right? Well,

27:09

yeah. But I mean, people who have like zero Linux

27:11

experience are coming straight from Windows. They really

27:13

have no

27:15

understanding of how file systems work even

27:18

from just a general purpose

27:20

user perspective. And so I get

27:23

a lot of questions from that.

27:24

But then the other side is

27:26

the people who have these, like I was saying earlier,

27:29

these crazy setups of like

27:31

multi socket Xeon systems with 100

27:34

threads or something.

27:35

I think there's probably a very large silent

27:38

minority or majority there of

27:40

people who just are, you

27:43

know, they've got five drives and

27:45

that that's kind of their setup. And maybe

27:48

they want an SSD in there on occasion. Well,

27:50

speaking of SSDs, I actually had a question for you

27:52

around caching. This is something on

27:54

perfect media server that I actually get quite

27:57

a bit as a question is it's

27:59

pretty common

27:59

in the un-raid world because of how

28:02

they do their parity calculations, you're

28:04

basically halving your write speed of any disk

28:07

because for every single write you make,

28:09

it has to make another write to the parity drive

28:11

as well. So it basically just cuts your write performance in

28:14

half, which is why un-raid many

28:16

years ago adopted that cache drive

28:18

and then mover script type stuff. Now

28:21

I know there's some stuff in your read me about, is it B

28:23

cache I think and a bunch of other stuff.

28:26

What's your take on

28:28

caching? So there's lots of levels

28:30

of caching and this can be

28:32

very confusing for folks. And unfortunately,

28:35

again, it's one of these things where

28:38

the features are there for functionality

28:41

purposes. If there was one great generic

28:43

way to set it up, I would just make that the default.

28:46

Unfortunately, I find that that's not the case,

28:48

especially since a lot of people are using

28:50

it in a way

28:52

where if you did induce caching,

28:55

people want to write things out of that band. They want to be

28:57

able to write to our clone independently

29:00

and still have merger FS work. And you

29:03

can't have caching there because there's no way

29:06

you'll eventually get into a bad state with that.

29:08

So there's certain, there's kind of caching

29:10

in the kernel and merger FS has

29:12

a number of features there

29:14

that are related to fuse directly. Then

29:17

you have

29:18

caching that merger

29:20

FS itself can do. I

29:22

don't do too much of that, though I'm looking

29:24

at doing some more of it just to reduce the

29:27

amount of calls I have to make into the kernel.

29:30

And then there is usually what they call

29:32

tiered caching for the underlying

29:34

devices. And that is where

29:37

you have NVMe or Optane

29:39

in front of spinning disk or Optane in front

29:41

of SSD in front of spinning disk,

29:44

that tier of setup. And

29:46

this is something that I hope to fix in the next year.

29:49

Because merger FS has kind of a simple

29:52

key value pair, config setup,

29:54

it's difficult to articulate to the software

29:58

something like a

30:00

very thorough tiered caching

30:03

system. But there are ways to implement that

30:06

regardless out of band. And that's the kind

30:08

of things I generally show in my documentation,

30:10

which is similar to those mover

30:13

scripts that Drivepool has or

30:15

Unrate has. What you can do is just

30:17

create two pools

30:19

and you can

30:20

set one pool up as your primary

30:22

pool. And that's where you put your SSDs, your fast

30:24

storage and your slow storage. And the idea

30:26

is that you create a policy, that you have a policy

30:29

in mergerfs. Every

30:31

kind of file system function has a policy.

30:34

And that policy is what

30:35

chooses how to behave when

30:37

that function is called. So for instance,

30:39

you want to open a file.

30:41

There's a policy that gets run. And it

30:43

chooses which file is going

30:45

to be opened. Because you could imagine a scenario

30:47

where you have five drives and you have four files across

30:50

five drives, like how do you pick one?

30:52

What you do is you set up a creation policy

30:55

such that your SSDs are prioritized.

30:57

So mergerfs is kind of always picking your

31:00

SSDs. Then you create a secondary

31:02

pool.

31:03

And the reason you want the secondary pools, mostly

31:06

because it's easier than duplicating

31:08

the logic of moving stuff

31:10

from drive to drive. But the idea is you

31:12

just

31:13

then target, like with our sync,

31:16

that SSD. And you just, every

31:18

day or whatever, you just move those files

31:21

over to the secondary pool. And that

31:23

secondary pool has none of the SSDs.

31:25

It only has your slow devices in it.

31:27

And then so far as something like Plex

31:30

or Jellyfern is concerned, the

31:32

files haven't moved. They're

31:35

still in the same place, most likely,

31:37

because of how the mergerfs union

31:40

stuff works. There is some subtlety there,

31:42

but yes. Yes, and it's a neat idea. And

31:44

I think you could very easily combine

31:47

that approach. I mean, that's how I've been adding

31:49

ZFS into my single

31:52

storage mount point for the last few years.

31:55

It's a really interesting concept. And I think once

31:57

you unlock that idea, that you could have more than one.

32:00

one merger FS mount point on a single system

32:02

that's containing different tiers

32:05

of storage, for one of the better phrase, different classes

32:08

of storage, then

32:11

you can ramp up the complexity quite quickly,

32:13

but it also ramps up the flexibility

32:16

massively. Well,

32:17

yeah. And if you think about it, so that

32:19

idea to add SSDs in that

32:22

form came after

32:24

a very popular usage of merger FS, which

32:27

I didn't see it coming when I first

32:29

created it, which is people will have a local

32:32

cache of drives,

32:33

and then they have their

32:34

data hoarder, all

32:36

their ISOs sitting on a

32:38

Google Drive or something, and they tend to use RClone.

32:41

And the author of RClone and I are on

32:44

good terms. He has a union feature

32:46

in RClone that is

32:48

mimicking what merger FS does. And

32:51

so people will combine

32:53

the two and basically use their hard drives

32:56

as a cache to cloud storage. And

32:58

so you just add in SSDs in

33:00

front of all that and you have,

33:03

again, another tier. There's another

33:05

strategy that can be done

33:07

that I don't see a lot of people doing. I created

33:09

a tool years ago to orchestrate all

33:11

this stuff, but I never

33:13

made it

33:14

popular, I never promoted it. And I've

33:16

been looking at maybe doing that again. So if you're

33:19

familiar with

33:20

device mapper in Linux, a DM

33:22

setup, which is used, it's the underpinning

33:25

of technologies like LVM2,

33:28

you can actually take a block device,

33:31

any random block device, whether

33:33

it's a hard drive or SSD, and you can make

33:35

another device a

33:38

block cache for it. There's

33:39

DM cache, which a lot of people

33:42

know. And so you can use LVM to

33:44

create logical volumes and you can create

33:46

a cache partition. But what a lot

33:48

of people don't realize is you can actually take a random

33:50

hard drive you have already formatted with whatever

33:53

file system you have, and use

33:55

an SSD to create a cache on top of

33:57

that.

33:58

It's not that it's some secret issue. just not well,

34:01

it's not

34:02

publicized, I think, because there's no infrastructure

34:04

around it, no software to kind of automate that

34:06

process to say like, okay, I want,

34:09

you know, 100 gigs of this SSD

34:12

to be cached for this drive and 100 for

34:14

that and, and to be able to easily bring

34:16

it all together. And so I've been looking at, at maybe

34:18

releasing a tool that can help with that as well.

34:21

And so that way, people who want that caching

34:23

at a block level, which can help with spin

34:25

up of drives and other issues can

34:28

do that without having to move to ZFS

34:31

or move to B cache or B cache

34:33

FS.

34:34

We'll see that where that goes. Mason

34:36

W

34:40

Most

34:43

of the changes or additions that I've made in the past year or so have

34:45

been quality of life things. So

34:47

I added like O Direct Support, which is

34:49

kind of a niche feature that some programs

34:52

use, but it took a little bit to

34:54

get working. So I added that I added the ability

34:57

that if a drive goes

34:59

into read only mode, it will tag

35:01

it as read only. And so it'll find another

35:03

drive, right? Like you try to create a file and it's a read

35:05

only device because your extension

35:08

for partition got corrupted, it'll

35:10

find it another drive that will

35:12

work if one's available. Read

35:14

ahead, setting read ahead has always been kind

35:16

of a pain. So merger FS will do that

35:19

for you.

35:20

The ability to do lazy unmounting of

35:22

an existing mount point,

35:24

because fuse doesn't have a good way to remount like

35:27

traditional file systems do merger FS

35:29

can take care of that for you. And so as soon

35:31

as the last program stops using the old

35:33

version of merger FS, it'll just get unmounted.

35:36

So there's been a lot of stuff like that.

35:38

Going forward, what I really want to do is

35:40

completely redo the configuration system

35:43

and move to Tomel

35:44

for the config. And what that

35:46

will enable me to do is add

35:49

a lot of features that people have been asking for

35:51

in terms of like built in tiering

35:53

knowledge so people would really like merger

35:55

FS to know

35:57

about the tiers of you know, the

35:59

performance, difference, performance characteristics of different

36:01

drives. So it can more

36:03

intelligently choose which file

36:05

systems choose

36:07

when it's creating a file or reading a file

36:09

or whatnot. And that's kind of a big lift.

36:11

It might not sound like much, but because the

36:13

configuration is

36:16

very simplistic at the moment, and

36:18

it touches a lot of pieces, right? Like there's a runtime,

36:21

config option, and all these things. So that's

36:23

going to take a little bit of work to do, but

36:25

that's going to enable me to

36:27

add probably like a list of instead

36:30

of just having a list of branches, you can

36:32

have like a list of lists

36:35

of branches, right? So you could have a

36:37

collection of SSDs or collection of NVMe's

36:40

that get priority and then that falls back if

36:42

nothing fits there into the slower

36:45

drives. And so that'll allow for

36:47

that tiered caching that we talked about in a

36:49

more fluid and more natural way.

36:52

I also have

36:53

been thinking of

36:56

adding features kind of like what Unraid

36:58

and Drypool do. I

36:59

think the reason that they have

37:01

mover scripts is because they want to have

37:04

a very discrete, simple

37:06

way of laying out the

37:09

files, right? As you create files and

37:11

whatnot. And then they worry about moving

37:13

them on after the fact,

37:15

kind of like the mover script that we talked about earlier.

37:17

A lot of users

37:21

are either because they've used those products,

37:23

I think, or maybe it just seems the

37:25

more natural way of doing it would really like the

37:27

behavior of like rebalancing, right? Like I

37:29

add a new drive and I want it to kind of slowly

37:33

move stuff around in some fashion.

37:35

And merger FS doesn't do that very explicitly.

37:37

It chooses a position where

37:40

it's going to create something, you know, on the fly as it's

37:42

making a decision, and you get to choose that policy.

37:45

And so I think it'd be better to have both, right?

37:47

Like you can choose up front, but then there's kind of a

37:50

background task that'll just sit and move things

37:52

around more subtly. So

37:54

that's a big one that I'm going to look at as well. I

37:57

do wonder sometimes just how

37:59

much of this is started.

37:59

syndrome, a lot of Unraid users

38:02

in particular. No disrespect

38:04

to that project, because it's been around forever. Lots of people

38:06

use it. Lots of people like it. But it does

38:08

do some stuff in a strange way. And

38:10

it has to do things in a certain way to

38:13

make up for decisions made 15 years ago, booting

38:16

from USB being a great example. So

38:19

anyway, I wanted to say thank you very much for coming on today, Antonio.

38:22

I really appreciate it. Where can we send

38:24

folks if they want to support the project, or open

38:26

a feature, or a bug request, or something like that? So

38:29

if you just go to

38:29

your favorite search engine and type MergerFS,

38:32

it will show up. The main page is

38:35

just the GitHub page. So it's github.com

38:37

slash trap exit slash MergerFS.

38:40

And if you're interested in supporting the project,

38:43

instead of MergerFS, go to just support. So there's

38:45

actually a repository that has all the support details

38:47

there. Lovely. Yeah, all the GitHub sponsors,

38:49

Open Collective, Patreon, all that kind

38:51

of good stuff. Thanks so much for coming on,

38:54

and enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for having me.

38:58

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39:30

that small little difference makes a

39:32

big user impact, because you

39:34

can leave Tailscale running all the time. Like I have it on

39:36

my Pixel 7, 24-7, always connected.

39:40

But only the resources I need on my tail net go over my

39:43

Tailscale connection. So I put all of my infrastructure

39:46

on my tail net, all my devices,

39:48

my NextCloud, anything I'm going to sync to, anything

39:50

that I might, like my pictures backup, Home

39:52

Assistant, I put it all on Tailscale.

39:55

So that traffic goes over Tailscale.

39:58

And then there's a lot of nice to have, like Tailscale.

39:59

SSH which lets you log into any machine

40:02

on your tail net using your tail scale credentials

40:04

and ACLs

40:06

And yeah, they got a dashboard to let you manage all that. There's

40:08

things like tail scale send

40:10

Tail drop, you know kind of like airdrop,

40:13

right? But it's

40:14

it lets you send files between your tail scale

40:16

machines They have a plug-in for VS code

40:18

so you can edit the config files on any machine

40:20

in your tail net They have lots of ways to extend

40:22

it

40:23

Alex and I share one machine between each other and

40:25

you can even limit it to the ports That

40:27

you can allow through there. They have a

40:30

client for just about every architecture and OS

40:32

mobile desktop server SBC

40:34

but

40:35

tail scale also supports something called

40:37

subnet routing. So like my solar equipment

40:39

I can access that even though I can't put

40:41

the tail scale client on my solar equipment

40:44

I have a machine on my network

40:46

where I have subnet relay turned on and so using

40:49

that I can get to those systems for My other tail scale

40:51

clients and I love that

40:53

So I always know how the house is doing even

40:55

the electrical equipment

40:56

Go try it out support the show and get it free for up

40:58

to 100 devices when you go to tail

41:00

scale comm slash self

41:02

hosted

41:04

Well,

41:04

you've been asking and I think we

41:07

have an answer for you

41:09

It's always the llamas llama GPT.

41:11

L. L. A. M a GPT a

41:13

self hosted offline

41:15

Chat GPT like chat box powered by

41:18

llama to

41:19

no data leaves your device and

41:21

They just added code llama,

41:23

which is one of the later models that Facebook just put

41:25

out and they just added support for Nvidia

41:28

GPUs

41:29

It's created by the umbral folks

41:31

and they've released this just as a general

41:34

document so you can put it on any system

41:36

Some of this stuff is getting crazy good just

41:38

to go back to the transcription stuff for a second There

41:41

is a version of whisper for Mac called

41:43

Mac whisper which I've been using to transcribe

41:46

all of my YouTube content recently

41:49

and

41:50

I feel like having a local chat GPT

41:52

like bot, you know where I could maybe

41:54

feed that You know that transcription

41:56

of a clip. I've just recorded and say

41:58

could you?

41:59

maybe make that snappier or just, you

42:02

know, some of those little things that you use chat

42:04

GPT for. It's always at the back of my mind

42:06

when I log into OpenAI's website of,

42:09

where is this data going? So

42:11

I love, I love, love, love that this is 100% private

42:13

and local. And

42:16

the UI is beautiful. They really picked like

42:18

the best

42:19

of the front end software that's out there right

42:21

now and combined it with the latest

42:23

and freshest of the open source large language

42:26

models

42:27

all on Docker. And they worked really

42:29

hard

42:30

to make it, although I wouldn't do it, but they made

42:32

it, they made it possible to run it on

42:34

a Raspberry Pi.

42:36

I mean, it's horrible performance.

42:38

Like for example, if you're on an M1

42:41

Mac, MacBook, you're going to get a

42:43

generation speed of 54 tokens a second

42:46

on a Raspberry Pi 4 with eight gigs of RAM,

42:48

you're going to get 0.9 tokens a second.

42:50

Okay. So it's a big difference. Why

42:53

is anybody still running a Raspberry Pi 4 at

42:55

this stage? You know, maybe you're like me and

42:57

you're an old man and you're like, I like it slow

43:00

sometimes. I know that sounds weird, but it's

43:02

nostalgic when the computer's slow. I'm

43:04

being facetious. Of course I am. I understand.

43:06

There's plenty of good reasons.

43:08

It is really nice to have it all local though. I agree with you, Alex

43:11

and to have code llama local too is choice.

43:14

Llama llama duck. This

43:18

speaks to a piece of work I've been doing with, do you remember

43:20

Morgan, the doorbell guy? Yeah. He

43:23

and I have been working on a quick sync benchmarking

43:26

script over the weekend. Finally,

43:29

finally, finally, we wanted to work on this for a long

43:31

time. I think I mentioned it in the show a few episodes

43:33

ago as well. But essentially

43:35

I edited together some of my old drone footage

43:38

into a two minute clip of the

43:40

Ribblehead Viaduct in the UK from a few years

43:42

ago. Uh, not the one that's used

43:44

in Harry Potter. This one's up on Blea Moore

43:47

in the Yorkshire Dales. Beautiful, beautiful

43:49

structure. Anyway, I digress. The

43:52

purpose of this script is to try

43:54

and get a sense for where the sweet spot

43:56

is with quick sync.

43:58

Uh, I had... itchy feet the other

44:00

day and I thought I wish I had

44:02

a server with more PCIe lanes

44:05

so I could put some more NVMe storage in this thing.

44:08

But my trusty i5-8500

44:10

CPU and the motherboard combo

44:13

I have in there which is an ASRock rack motherboard,

44:17

they don't really have much in

44:19

the way of PCIe lanes so I was thinking

44:21

well could I go Ryzen? Is

44:23

that a thing? What about an ARK GPU?

44:26

Could I use that? But then isn't that going to quadruple

44:29

my energy usage? I thought

44:31

to myself I don't know. I don't want to buy these

44:33

things and find out later. So what

44:35

I'd love to do and it might be ready

44:37

by the time we record the next episode

44:40

but keep an eye on the Discord server, there's an active

44:42

thread over there

44:43

on the Perfect Media Server channel called QSV

44:46

testing, quick sync video testing.

44:49

Where we're talking about the various

44:51

different iterations of this script and how we can

44:53

do benchmarking across all

44:56

or as many of the different quick sync

44:58

encoding engines as we can. I've

45:00

got access here to second,

45:03

third, fourth, I think sixth

45:05

maybe and eighth gen Intel

45:07

CPUs and a ninth actually. So

45:10

if you have something else or indeed you

45:12

have one of those and you'd like to run the test as well,

45:15

join the Discord and let me know in that channel

45:17

and we'll share the GitHub repo with you where the script

45:20

is. The idea is to try and figure out where

45:22

the sweet spot is in terms of price

45:24

to performance, in terms of codec

45:27

support, all that kind of stuff. Why hasn't this

45:29

been done already Alex? Why hasn't this

45:31

been done already? I don't know. I mean

45:33

I look at what LTT labs are up to and

45:35

you know gamers Nexus and all that and they're all focused

45:38

on gaming. Like

45:39

that's fine but the terminal

45:41

is my favorite video game. I don't need a 3090

45:44

you know. The hardware can do other things besides

45:47

play video games you guys. Yeah

45:49

sometimes. Yeah

45:50

sometimes. That'll be really

45:52

great to see the results. I'm very curious to see

45:54

how that plays out. The quick sync sweet spot.

45:57

That's gonna be awesome. Yeah

45:58

well when the benchmarks are all right.

45:59

and all the rest of it, I'll make a proper

46:02

blog post, perfect media server page,

46:04

podcast episode, YouTube video, the

46:07

virtuous cycle of content will be strong with

46:09

this one because it's a lot of effort. I am very

46:12

tempted by the ARC GPU. I have

46:14

one in a machine in front of me and

46:16

it sings with Linux, everything

46:19

works so smooth, it's so snappy,

46:21

full Wayland support, it's all

46:23

just flawless.

46:25

However, I constantly

46:27

struggle with tools like stable diffusion

46:29

or Lama GPT or even

46:32

video encoders, they just don't

46:34

even grok what the Intel ARC is.

46:37

Nobody has really built support and then you have to go

46:39

find, as far as this is my understanding, like

46:41

if you want to run something like

46:44

say Lama GPT or stable diffusion using

46:46

the Intel ARC, you basically got to go get patched version

46:49

of the project. Well, you could do what

46:51

Wimpy does and run multiple

46:53

GPUs in the same system and just have a headless

46:55

Nvidia card that has the CUDA

46:58

driver available for those particular apps.

47:00

Not an awful solution if you've got the

47:02

card already, like if you've got the hardware, I don't think

47:05

I'd go out and blow the money on a high-end Nvidia, not

47:08

to use it for anything else, but if I already had

47:10

one.

47:11

Yeah, also not only do you have to have the physical

47:13

hardware, you've got to have the minerals to configure it too,

47:15

it's not a simple task.

47:19

45homelab.com, big,

47:21

strong, fast storage servers with affordable, high-performance,

47:24

high-capacity enterprise storage solutions

47:26

for

47:26

all industries, for

47:28

all data size requirements. I mean, we're talking

47:30

professional-grade solutions that

47:32

are ideal for a business, maybe your

47:34

home lab too. So go check out

47:37

45drives.com to learn more about those folks. You might remember

47:39

them from the show before and

47:41

they have been cooking up 45homelab.com.

47:45

What if you took all the ideas and all the

47:47

skills learned and all of the workmanship

47:49

that went into the enterprise-grade storage,

47:52

but you made something just for the home

47:54

lab? That's their mission. They want to change

47:57

the storage market and they think

47:59

they have a vision.

47:59

for the future Homelab product market.

48:02

They've

48:02

been listening to feedback from our audience, because we had

48:04

them

48:05

back in self-hosted 98,

48:07

and they're cooking up 45homelab.com. I

48:09

think that's going to be up your alley, so go check that out. Again,

48:12

it's 45homelab.com

48:14

for the stuff they're working on for us, Homelabers.

48:17

And I think 45 Drives maintains

48:19

probably one of the best relationships with

48:22

the open source community. They have open designs for

48:24

their hardware.

48:25

I really like their overall ethos

48:28

and where they take this stuff. So I think you might like it too.

48:31

So go learn how 45 Drives does things differently

48:33

at 45drives.com.

48:35

If you get a chance, tell them the self-hosted show sent you if

48:37

you end up buying something.

48:39

And take a minute and go

48:41

visit 45homelab.com. I

48:43

know it's two URLs. It's tricky. One's

48:45

the company, 45drives.com,

48:47

and one is the project they're cooking up for us self-hosters,

48:50

45homelab.com.

48:54

We got a doozy of an email into the show

48:56

this week. I think it's Keone's how you pronounce it.

48:59

And he lost his Homelab

49:01

in a fire. In fact, his whole town

49:03

went

49:03

up in a fire. And he doesn't have

49:05

a lot of budget to work with. He's got some networking

49:08

limitations,

49:09

but he's rebuilding.

49:11

And he's picked up an older HP ProDesk

49:13

for 20 bucks, an i3, fourth gen,

49:15

500 gigs

49:17

of hard drive and four gigabytes of RAM,

49:19

which he can upgrade over time.

49:20

And so now he's trying to wrap his head around how to kind of restore.

49:23

And he says, what would be the best and easiest

49:26

and

49:27

probably the most transferable way to get my old

49:29

systems up and running? I'm staying with family,

49:31

so I don't currently want to mess up with any of their router

49:33

settings or their firewall.

49:35

I'm wondering if TailSky or WireGuard could help here. Well,

49:37

first of all, congratulations on finding that HP ProDesk

49:39

for $20. That's a bit of a steal, isn't it?

49:42

Really? Yeah. Well, I'm very much currently

49:44

in love with those small and cheap one liter PCs.

49:46

You know, the the one liter style that you can

49:48

find refurbs on Dell's website or

49:50

eBay for sort of 100 ish dollars. More

49:54

modern stuff might be better from a power

49:56

draw perspective. So like the eighth gen

49:58

draw seven watts idle.

49:59

whereas the fourth gen draws closer

50:02

to 20. I don't know if that's a consideration

50:04

for you, but I seem to recall

50:06

power on Hawaii isn't the cheapest

50:08

thing in the world. The

50:10

other thing to consider is that you could potentially just

50:12

use something quite turnkey,

50:15

like dare I say, tail scale, to

50:17

connect into these remote devices without having

50:19

to do a whole bunch of firewall punching and configuration

50:22

and stuff.

50:23

Naked Wireguard is great if you

50:25

have access to the firewalls and you're

50:27

familiar with distributing your own

50:30

keys and stuff like that, but I

50:32

don't know what your appetite for that kind of thing is.

50:34

Yeah, I think tail scale is probably the way to go on this one too.

50:37

And then you're not messing with anybody's network.

50:40

If you move it, they'll reconnect to each

50:42

other, reestablish. If you end up on a different network down

50:44

the road, you're not going to have to rebuild your

50:46

VPN setup at that point, which you'll probably become

50:49

pretty familiar with.

50:50

He continues to say, I'd like to have a Nextcloud

50:52

instance using an external USB one terabyte

50:54

drive, piehole for ad blocking,

50:57

maybe for my devices only on tail scale, possible

51:00

sombar NAS drive for file sharing, and

51:02

Plex or Jellyfin.

51:04

I mean, that's kind of the self hosted recommended

51:06

setup there. Piehole is pretty great, Plex or

51:08

Jellyfin, whichever one fits your use cases, I'd

51:10

say start with Jellyfin.

51:12

And then if you have issues, try Plex.

51:15

Also, he says he's considering Proxmox.

51:17

I think that's a good idea. He says I'm okay messing

51:20

with any type of install in a base Ubuntu server Proxmox

51:22

or Docker.

51:23

Now I don't know about it. What do you think Alex? Proxmox

51:25

on an i4 with four gigs of RAM.

51:28

That might

51:29

be tight. I mean, you're going to run up against

51:31

the limits of four gigs of RAM pretty

51:34

quickly, as soon as you spin up one

51:36

virtual machine. But

51:38

if you were to use Proxmox to manage a couple of LXC

51:40

containers, then that gives you a

51:43

lot more runway, of course, and Docker

51:45

containers as well. Of course, Proxmox is just Debian

51:47

Linux under the hood, so you can do that too.

51:49

I get lots of people asking me

51:52

how I run my perfect media server

51:54

setup. I updated the FAQs today

51:56

with the answer to the question of should

51:59

I run perfect media? server on the host directly

52:01

or as a VM? Because for some reason that's

52:03

a really important question to folks, I've never

52:05

really quite understood. No, I don't

52:07

need to shit on people that way. The answer is,

52:10

it's really up to you. If you want to

52:12

run some services in a VM and have that

52:14

level of isolation,

52:15

that's great. You're gonna have to do a couple of things like

52:18

pass through if you wanna have disks available, that kind

52:20

of stuff. Or set up file

52:22

sharing from the Proxmox host into

52:25

the virtual machine using maybe

52:27

some kind of internal bridging or

52:29

something like that. Vert FS or Vert

52:32

9P I think is what it's called for Windows

52:34

hosts.

52:35

A lot of people like to keep the Hypervisor host

52:37

clean, but for me the trade-off of

52:40

running everything directly on the host because of

52:42

access to things like Quicksync is

52:44

kinda worth it. So,

52:46

you know, if you just wanna keep things simple, just

52:49

stick Proxmox on there. You may never

52:52

use any of the Proxmox features, any

52:54

of the virtualization stuff,

52:56

but if you do decide further down the

52:58

road that you wanna do that kind of stuff, you don't have to then

53:00

completely wipe your entire OS and start

53:02

from scratch.

53:04

Yeah, well said.

53:05

Dimitri is struggling to ditch iOS.

53:07

He says, I've been trying to switch from iOS

53:09

device to a Pixel

53:11

running GrapheneOS.

53:13

I've tried it three times, but

53:15

I've been using iOS for so long that it's actually

53:17

a huge pain to switch because of the

53:19

apps. Any chance Chris could share

53:22

how his transition has been going and

53:24

may he share how he set up simple apps such as

53:26

notes, calendar, and reminders. Well, I

53:28

would just refer you to our sister show, Linux Unplugged.

53:30

I think Chris has done a rather excellent

53:33

job over there of documenting his,

53:35

what is it, Graphene? Is that what you

53:38

losers call it over there? My

53:40

Graphene journey? Yes. If

53:42

I recall, it started in November

53:45

because I was at AWS re-invent in Vegas

53:48

back then. Still using it, still got it.

53:50

Yeah. Yeah, it has, you know what,

53:52

it's funny. You're gonna roll your eyes at this hard,

53:55

but you know what, can you guess what app I miss the most

53:57

out of all of Apple's apps?

53:59

Don't tell me it's the blue bubbles.

54:02

No, it's Notes. Really? OK.

54:04

I know. It's silly, but

54:06

in the last couple of iOS releases, Notes

54:09

is really, really competent.

54:11

I mean, you can share Notes. You can do

54:13

collaborative editing. You can take pictures

54:15

and store them in the Note. It supports Markdown

54:18

editing. It can capture text from inside

54:20

the Note. It has searching capabilities,

54:22

and you can search that text. It has tags. It has folders.

54:25

And you can export it all out to Markdown

54:28

using a third-party tool. It's really

54:31

everything I need, because I often just need,

54:33

like, the other day I was working on the car,

54:35

and I just wanted to get the label

54:37

off the battery.

54:38

I don't want that in my photo camera roll. I don't want

54:40

that backed up to the server. I don't want that on my slide

54:42

show system. I don't want that. You

54:44

know, I don't know what. I just want it for 10 minutes.

54:47

Or I want it in a year when I need to look up the battery

54:49

again.

54:50

And I want it in a Note. I want it in a

54:52

damn Note. And that's what Apple notes it. So I haven't

54:54

really solved that, but

54:56

Quillipad gets pretty close.

54:58

Q-U-I-L-I-PAD. It syncs

55:00

with Nextcloud Notes, and it gets

55:03

me really, really close. I like that. And

55:05

then Davix 5, you've got to

55:07

have that to sync with Nextcloud. You basically end up using Nextcloud

55:09

to do a lot of the iCloud stuff.

55:11

And that's how you solve it. What's a guy

55:13

got to do to get you drinking that Obsidian sauce,

55:15

huh? Oh, got it right here. I got it right here.

55:18

Oh, yeah. No, I'm using Obsidian. But Obsidian

55:20

isn't great for image-based stuff, you

55:22

know? Yeah, that's true. That's true. So I use it

55:24

for my actual oil change

55:26

notes and things like that. I put an Obsidian. But

55:29

it was great. It was the other day. Like, I did a bunch of work

55:31

on my car in the summer. And I thought to myself, when

55:33

did I last? Because I've got a track day coming

55:35

up in October. Thinking, when did I

55:37

last change the oil? Which

55:39

event was it before or after? And I couldn't

55:41

remember specifically how many track days

55:44

the oil in the engine has. And

55:46

I went and looked in my Obsidian, and sure

55:48

as you know, a few hundred miles ago. And

55:50

I changed it the day before. So it's done

55:52

one day on track, this current oil change. And I'm like,

55:55

oh, past Alex, I love you. Thank you

55:57

so much.

55:59

wife's the wife's sticker on her windshield that I put

56:02

on there when we changed the oil fell off. I'm

56:04

like, where's your sticker at? What sticker? Oh, yeah. Oil

56:06

change sticker. What are you talking about? The oil change

56:08

sticker I play. Where'd it go? I don't know.

56:10

So open up obsidian. There's the date.

56:12

There's the mileage. Okay, we're good.

56:14

Now just to finish Dimitri's question,

56:17

if you did want to catch up more about Linux unplugged

56:19

and Chris's journey with ditching

56:21

the big G in the sky,

56:24

it started at LUP 486. Goodbye, Google. Click

56:27

in the show notes.

56:28

Now we got some boosts this week and

56:31

our baller boost was spam proof at F

56:33

E A dot S T this week. He came in with 60,000 57 sats

56:36

using pod verse and he has

56:39

a hot tip because we've been getting what do

56:41

you guys use for personal finance management? He

56:43

says GNU cash. It's not great,

56:46

but I've been self hosting for over 10 years

56:48

now and it does a pretty good job of not breaking

56:50

with each new release. That's nice.

56:52

What does that, is that an indictment of the current state

56:55

of software or what? Yeah, really.

56:57

The headline feature is it doesn't break.

56:59

You know, there is also a real practical

57:02

matter of going with something

57:03

like GNU cash. It's not super flashy,

57:06

but it's been around for 226 years.

57:09

It just is steady as it goes and

57:12

it's open source and

57:14

it's established at this point.

57:15

So I got to, I got to give a plus

57:18

one to the GNU cash recommendation. Thanks,

57:20

band proof. And thanks for being our baller.

57:22

Leaky canoe came in with 50,000 sats using

57:24

the index. Hey gents, thanks for the great show.

57:27

I'm just getting started with home assistant.

57:29

What wisdom can you impart on a newcomer to

57:31

into this deep rabbit hole?

57:33

Also, what communication protocols do you choose

57:35

when you build out Z wave Zigbee?

57:37

Also you could add matter, wifi, thread,

57:41

uh, cues.

57:43

What wisdom can we impart on a newcomer?

57:46

Hmm. Start

57:49

small. It's very tempting

57:51

to order 800 devices and try and

57:53

do it all at once. True. You don't need to do

57:55

that. But as we talked about earlier in the show,

57:58

quite often you'll get halfway through doing.

57:59

doing a project, whether

58:02

that's an ESP based build,

58:03

or whether that is some kind of light

58:05

switch swap out and you'll figure out that, oh

58:08

actually the bulbs in the ceiling aren't compatible

58:10

with this type of dimmer switch and there's

58:12

gonna be roadblocks. So I would just take it slow,

58:15

do

58:16

maybe a room at a time or a certain

58:18

type of, do lighting all at

58:20

once or something like that, or

58:22

start off with climate or something really simple,

58:25

low hanging fruit where the stakes are pretty low.

58:28

I think I've talked about this in the past

58:30

where if you're doing something like home security right

58:32

off the bat and you're figuring out all the home

58:34

assistant nuances,

58:37

the stakes are high-ish in that

58:39

if you screw up, could potentially leave your house

58:41

unlocked overnight, which probably

58:43

you don't want to do that. Whereas if the lights

58:45

turn on at 2 a.m., okay, it's a bit annoying, but

58:48

nobody's gonna be actually

58:49

hurt or otherwise. Yeah,

58:53

hopefully. Yeah, I wonder what is

58:55

your thought on

58:56

doing a base of Buntu or

58:59

Sentos or whatever, Dix, and

59:01

running Home Assistant Core in a container

59:04

versus going with the whole Haas operating

59:06

system supervisor setup as for a

59:08

beginner?

59:09

The inbuilt app store is

59:12

super powerful. I don't use Node-RED

59:14

hardly at all anymore. I used to use it a lot when I

59:16

was in the beginning. So Node-RED

59:18

is a more visual-based way of writing

59:21

automations.

59:22

I got into that several years ago before

59:24

Home Assistant made their automation

59:26

UI a lot better. There's

59:28

still a place for Node-RED if you wanna

59:31

do some really complicated stuff because you can drop

59:33

to JavaScript if you're so inclined

59:36

as part of that workflow.

59:38

But I really like the VM

59:40

appliance aspect of it. I feel like

59:43

if I want to move my Proxmox

59:46

host, or I wanna do some maintenance on my main Proxmox

59:48

host, I can just snapshot that VM

59:51

and transfer that Q-COW file to

59:53

a different box and bring it up, no problem.

59:56

Whereas if it's on a physical piece of hardware and

59:58

it goes pop,

59:59

then... And if I'm not

1:00:01

in the house, it's

1:00:03

more tricky for me to recover from

1:00:05

that situation. The other thing I would say

1:00:07

is make sure you've got a proper backup. So I've been using

1:00:10

for the last several years the Google Drive

1:00:12

backup plugin. This takes a snapshot

1:00:15

inside the environment of

1:00:17

the VM

1:00:18

of the entire home assistant configuration, including

1:00:20

add-ons and all the rest of it. And it backs

1:00:23

up to Google Drive. You can configure how many snapshots

1:00:25

it keeps and it rotates

1:00:27

them out every seven days for you or whatever you want to do.

1:00:30

Yep. Also a plus one on that recommendation.

1:00:32

You can also go in there and have it do like, Hey, I'm about to go

1:00:34

do an upgrade. So do a backup for me

1:00:36

and immediately send that off to Google Drive. So

1:00:38

that way if anything goes wrong, I can bail out.

1:00:41

Also you asked about communication protocols,

1:00:43

Z-Wave, Zigbee, et cetera.

1:00:45

You know, man, that

1:00:47

is a hard question to answer. It kind

1:00:49

of depends, bro. Like depends on

1:00:51

your home

1:00:52

because I have both Zigbee and Z-Wave

1:00:54

and there's things I like about both of them. Zigbee

1:00:57

is an open standard. It is going

1:00:59

to also probably, you'll find cheaper devices

1:01:02

so you can save some money because

1:01:04

it doesn't require a certification and Zigbee

1:01:06

is kind of being folded into matters. So it probably has

1:01:09

a really long future. Z-Wave

1:01:11

is a proprietary standard you have to be certified

1:01:13

on, but that means that in order for devices

1:01:16

to get certified, they have to pass a certain

1:01:18

level of QA

1:01:19

and it's 900 megahertz versus 2.4

1:01:22

gigahertz for Zigbee. For me, 900 megahertz

1:01:25

just works better, goes farther, does more,

1:01:27

is more reliable. I tried to switch over

1:01:29

to Zigbee and went back to Z-Wave because

1:01:32

it's just 900 megahertz I think at the end of the day works better

1:01:34

for me.

1:01:34

I would try to put as few devices on Wi-Fi

1:01:37

as possible, absolutely fine to have

1:01:39

Wi-Fi devices. I've got plenty of

1:01:41

them. If you already own some, it's fine.

1:01:43

But ultimately, I like to

1:01:45

have everything on Z-Wave or Zigbee as

1:01:47

much as I can, especially things that are sensors, switches,

1:01:50

and that kind of stuff. And also,

1:01:52

if you can, when you're getting smart plugs, buy ones

1:01:54

that have energy monitoring built in from the beginning because

1:01:56

then you get all kinds of great data you can use later on.

1:01:59

ZP writes

1:02:01

in number one, I

1:02:03

own one domain and

1:02:05

now I just feel inadequate. You

1:02:09

know, it was priced me is how

1:02:11

many people boosted in just saying they own one domain.

1:02:14

Yeah. Yeah. Chris, you are not normal. My

1:02:16

friend. Well, how many domains? I mean, you have

1:02:18

a lot of domains, right? Uh, I

1:02:20

bought a couple this week actually. Yeah.

1:02:23

We actually tried to buy self hosted dot

1:02:25

forum this week.

1:02:26

Uh, but unfortunately that domain has taken

1:02:28

with, with a lemme instance right now and

1:02:31

the admins aren't interested in serving it. So

1:02:33

I would love it if we could do self hosted dot forum,

1:02:35

but alas, that's

1:02:37

why we just got to use, we just got to standardize

1:02:39

on dot lol. Yeah.

1:02:40

I had

1:02:42

to put that in there because first of all, it makes

1:02:44

it a great booster. And second of all,

1:02:46

one domain really dude, somebody

1:02:49

out there must have more than 10 or 15, right? You

1:02:51

got to admit it.

1:02:52

I, I feel, I feel like

1:02:55

a domain lush. I mean, it

1:02:57

might be, it might be 80 domains.

1:02:59

I don't know. I mean, it's not that many. It's

1:03:01

a lot though.

1:03:02

It's, it's enough that they were considered an asset

1:03:05

of the business when I sold the business. I'm

1:03:07

going by the American pie rules here. You

1:03:10

take the number, the girl

1:03:12

says and

1:03:13

times it by three and the boy says

1:03:16

and divide it by three. Lol

1:03:19

Salvatore came in with 10,000 cents. First

1:03:21

time booster, long time lover.

1:03:23

Tail scale question for the wizards. Is there

1:03:25

a way to have an

1:03:26

SSH only connection go over my

1:03:28

tail net?

1:03:29

It has my work machine locked down and sometimes

1:03:32

I want to connect to a guacamole server at home.

1:03:34

You might be looking for something like corkscrew.

1:03:37

This isn't a tail scale specific tip. Although

1:03:39

of course it will work over tail scale. I

1:03:41

don't know if your admins

1:03:43

permit VPN traffic. Some firewalls

1:03:46

are clever enough to detect that kind of stuff and

1:03:48

block it at the firewall level outgoing.

1:03:51

What I used to do when I worked for a bank, what's it

1:03:53

called when, when the thing expires

1:03:55

like Lance Armstrong, like seven years or whatever,

1:03:58

where

1:03:58

you admit to a crime long enough.

1:03:59

after that. Mason- Statue of limitations.

1:04:02

Mason- Yeah, I think that applies here. I think

1:04:04

I've not worked for that company for like six

1:04:06

years, seven years now. Mason- I think it's not statute,

1:04:08

it's statute of limitations. That's what it's statute.

1:04:10

Mason- Statute of limitations. Okay. Well,

1:04:13

when I worked for the bank in London, they had quite

1:04:15

a restrictive firewall policy, which of course being

1:04:17

a bank you would expect. And I was getting

1:04:20

into, you know, Linux in a big way and

1:04:22

SSHing around all over the place back then. So I

1:04:24

started running my SSH servers on port 443. Mason-

1:04:27

Clever boy. Mason- Because a lot of

1:04:29

encrypted

1:04:29

traffic goes over 443, so it becomes

1:04:32

just another encrypted stream. And

1:04:35

so if you use, there's a command,

1:04:37

which you can put in your SSH config file

1:04:39

to tunnel all of your

1:04:42

SSH traffic out over this tool called corkscrew.

1:04:45

And then it will go out over port 443

1:04:48

and look like just normal HTTPS traffic.

1:04:50

And that gets around quite a lot of sneaky

1:04:53

firewalls if you ever need that trick.

1:04:55

Mason-

1:04:55

Yeah, there's so many fun ways to play with SSH.

1:04:58

Let us know how it goes, Lulz Abertur. I think you're

1:05:00

going to have some fun.

1:05:02

VT52 and Faraday Fedora

1:05:04

boosted into say, pork bun.

1:05:07

They like pork bun as a DNS

1:05:09

registrar. They say they're headquartered in Portland, Oregon.

1:05:12

So for Chris, it's almost like buying a domain

1:05:15

from the next door neighbor. Chris- And you have to

1:05:17

have it checked for damp every few years as well, big

1:05:19

Portland, right? Mason- Portland,

1:05:21

potentially vandalism these days, but oh,

1:05:24

I kid.

1:05:25

There's a Seattle Portland rivalry in Seattle's better. Bobby

1:05:27

comes in with 6,000 sats. My

1:05:29

umber node broke. So Oak is down.

1:05:31

That's how he sends his automatic boost.

1:05:33

So I'm sending them by hand. Containers are still a bit of

1:05:35

a challenge for me to troubleshoot. I'm not really sure where

1:05:37

to go next with self hosting and Bitcoin

1:05:40

and Lightning. Do

1:05:41

I do something like Umbral, which is one of those you install

1:05:43

it and it has an app store and you install all the apps from

1:05:45

a container? Or is there maybe another

1:05:47

less black boxy way I should go?

1:05:57

or

1:06:00

some sort of desktop install and

1:06:02

play around with it on the command line and start

1:06:04

there run containers on the command line play around

1:06:06

with Docker compose because that's

1:06:09

what like these things are doing like start 9

1:06:11

and umbral and there's a bunch of others I was looking at

1:06:13

a couple others this week they're giving you really

1:06:15

nice front ends they're doing the app discovery

1:06:18

which is nice but when you click install

1:06:20

they're just kind of pulling down a Docker compose file

1:06:23

and then pulling down containers and firing

1:06:25

them up and when you understand how that works it

1:06:27

makes it pretty easy to troubleshoot any of these or at

1:06:29

least you can go in and look at how they

1:06:31

run and be like oh I'm not comfortable with this this is a mess

1:06:33

and you can bail

1:06:35

yeah I mean I got a bunch of tips over in perfectmedia

1:06:38

server comm which by the way

1:06:40

I should say in the last episode I put a call

1:06:42

out to the audience to say hey send me some

1:06:44

money please to support the website and

1:06:47

boy did you guys respond

1:06:49

I had nearly $400 in donations

1:06:51

come in in the last two that's awesome which was

1:06:53

amazing it's more more donations than I've ever

1:06:55

had for any of any of my projects previously

1:06:58

let's should cover some of the run costs of the server for a

1:07:00

while yeah it's about 15 months it's great I've

1:07:02

run of runway which is the first time perfectmedia

1:07:04

server comm has ever not just been out of my own pocket

1:07:06

so thank you so much to anybody that

1:07:09

donated and

1:07:10

I really really appreciate it so

1:07:13

on perfectmedia server comm there is a containers

1:07:15

section where I sort of walk through Docker and Docker compose

1:07:17

and all that kind of stuff you could also have a look

1:07:19

in my github repo which I'll put a link to in the show

1:07:22

notes for all the various containers that I

1:07:24

run

1:07:24

personally and I run that

1:07:27

through an Ansible configurator to spit out the Docker

1:07:29

compose file that may or may not be

1:07:31

too advanced for you in which case there

1:07:34

are tons of Docker compose examples

1:07:36

for those similar apps on the internet or

1:07:38

just join our discord and ask for some help and we'd be happy

1:07:41

to help.

1:07:41

Our last boost this week that makes it in before

1:07:44

we have to run is from Gene Bean 19,998 sats and he sent

1:07:46

me some pictures

1:07:50

of a traditional American

1:07:53

rotary phone where you put your finger in the thing

1:07:55

and you around

1:07:57

and he has done an integration with

1:07:59

his VoIP system and

1:08:01

he could pick it up and do voice

1:08:04

commands to Home Assistant on an old

1:08:06

classic rotary phone. He

1:08:08

sent me all the pictures in Matrix and it is so

1:08:10

neat and he

1:08:12

he pointed us to the VoIP integration

1:08:14

for Home Assistant

1:08:15

which is how he's kind of making all this happen. He has

1:08:17

a little bridge adapter

1:08:18

with a PoE adapter so the whole thing's

1:08:20

powered and it all just is just so great.

1:08:23

I remember I was probably a teenager

1:08:26

at this point but my

1:08:28

stepmom brought home a

1:08:30

rotary phone from she used to work

1:08:32

in the doctor's office and I think that they

1:08:34

were having a clean out or something and she brought home

1:08:36

this rotary phone and you know

1:08:38

I was a bit of a gadget

1:08:41

head even at age 14 or whatever

1:08:43

it was. And I remember she put this thing down on

1:08:45

the kitchen table and said to me how would you

1:08:47

how would you use this? How would you dial a number on this

1:08:49

phone? And I look at it and I'm poking the

1:08:52

buttons thinking I have

1:08:54

no idea. And I sort of got

1:08:56

the idea that the dial on the front sort

1:08:58

of moved and then I was like wait I

1:09:00

have to drag it all the way around

1:09:03

and then wait for it to go all the way back

1:09:05

and then do the next number the same way. Like

1:09:09

I want to dial 999 that's going to take

1:09:11

me a while. Yeah I

1:09:13

loved them though just playing with it. I

1:09:17

just like that I liked playing around with it. They had such

1:09:19

a wonderful like Land Rover

1:09:21

esque mechanical engineering

1:09:24

like clunk to them didn't they? Yes

1:09:26

they were they were very clunky technology.

1:09:29

Also I'm going to put a link in the show notes. Gene

1:09:31

Bean sent along a link for home cam

1:09:33

for a home kit and if your cameras are home kit

1:09:35

compatible

1:09:37

it gives you like a dashboard

1:09:39

of bringing all your camera feeds into a single

1:09:41

pane.

1:09:42

It looks really cool so I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

1:09:45

That's all the boost for this week because of

1:09:47

time but thank you everybody who boosted and we we

1:09:49

keep all of them in the boost part

1:09:51

and our doc and we share them with the whole team so everybody

1:09:53

sees all of them we had 19 boosters

1:09:55

and we pulled in 230,909 SATs. Thank

1:09:59

you everybody.

1:09:59

who did boost in, we read all of them. And if you'd like

1:10:02

to boost the show, you

1:10:03

can get a new podcast app, podcastapps.com.

1:10:05

Let's see pod friend is on there. Fountain,

1:10:08

Castamatic, podcast

1:10:10

index is on there. Podverse, lots

1:10:12

of different apps out there. Podcastapps.com or

1:10:15

keep your app, getalby.com, top it off

1:10:17

and then go to the podcast index and boost in and we'll read your

1:10:19

message

1:10:20

on a future show. And you're supporting us directly.

1:10:22

And

1:10:23

of course, thank you to our members,

1:10:25

our SREs that are making the show possible

1:10:27

and supporting the ongoing production. You get an ad free

1:10:29

feed with

1:10:30

bonus content, a post show.

1:10:32

That's it. Self-hosted.show slash SRE.

1:10:35

And don't forget about our upcoming meetups.

1:10:37

Linux Fest Northwest is of course happening

1:10:40

any day now. And there'll be

1:10:42

a bunch of last minute shenanigans. I'm sure.

1:10:45

Uh, we're thinking about doing some kind of a live recording

1:10:47

on October the 20th. We're not quite sure of

1:10:50

the details or whether we'll move it

1:10:52

to the Saturday whilst we're at the fest. Who

1:10:54

knows? Who knows? It's all up in

1:10:56

the air. We could do a live show at the fest.

1:10:58

That's not a bad idea, Alex. Yeah. I

1:11:01

don't know. Talk more about that.

1:11:02

We'll see. I mean, I don't know about you, but I kind of like

1:11:04

having an editor. Yeah, that's true. Well, you

1:11:07

can still edit. It's just going to be yikes.

1:11:10

Not, uh, not, it won't be his fault, but

1:11:12

it'll be noisy. Just be a little noisy.

1:11:14

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, if you

1:11:16

want to find out more about that meetup.com

1:11:18

slash Jupyter broadcasting, as well as Linux

1:11:21

Fest Northwest.org, you can

1:11:23

go to self-hosted.show for all different places to

1:11:25

get in touch with us. And I have a

1:11:27

links site at alex.ktz.me. And

1:11:30

you can find me in the matrix. I'm at jupyterbroadcasting.com

1:11:33

slash matrix at Chris LAS. We got a self-hosted

1:11:36

room or two over there. We got a whole bunch of chat rooms. It's

1:11:38

really kind of a pop in place.

1:11:40

Come join us on the Federation. Thanks for

1:11:42

listening. That was self-hosted.show slash 105.