Untitled Linux Show 269: Kerfluffel

0:00Hey, folks, we're talking about umachi once again. We maybe get the pronunciation right this time. Surn is migrating to devian. There's a new error project that is trying to be clear Linux for the future. Audacity4.0 is out and we have a butter FS roundup and some new hardware to look at. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. So stay tuned. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, the leading a genic systems platform. OutSystems is helping their customers modernize operations by enabling them to build, modernize and operate enterprise systems starting from any coding tool in a governed, agenteic engineering model. Without systems, you can coordinate and govern your entire agenteic workforce within your enterprise ecosystem and accelerate impact with industry proven agenteic solutions that are pre-built, governed and customizable to your business. It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control,

1:01which is why thousands of enterprises worldwide trust out systems for their mission critical apps. Teams of any size and technical depths can use out systems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agenteic systems platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agenteic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems, build your agenteic future. Learn more at outSystems.com slashtwit. That's outSystems.com slashtwit. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is to it. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 269 recorded September the 5th,

2:01Curve Luffle. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is time to geek out about Linux, the desktop and hardware and software on your host Jonathan Bennett. This is the Untitled Linux show and I have, of course, my compadres, my partners in crime. Today we got Rob and we got Jeff and they are both wearing sort of noisy blue shirts. I have gone for the very conservative, very plain blue and they are doing the more out there blue. Where the funnel ones. Yeah, we've actually had beers together. So, you know, we're, Jonathan's the one that's kind of left out and hey, I'm can, me can got together. We didn't have beer. You guys live next to each other and you got you live next to each other and you got together what what once. We're not exactly next to each other. I mean, we're halfway. He's halfway across the state of Oklahoma, but yeah, it's fair. It's fair. It's like 50 miles. Anyway, we're all talking to you. That's true. Yeah. Tip of the tip of the hat to Doc Soros who has the best observation on the

3:06difference between the US and Europe, particularly UK in this case. And that is in the US, we consider 100 miles, 100 years to be old and in Europe and the UK, they consider 100 miles to be far. All right, Rob, he wasn't here last week, but he configured. We just couldn't get enough of the the O Marchi and Amacom news. I'm going to call it a buckle. It's not a debacle. It's a kerfluffle. I think that's a reasonable word to use for it. Right, Rob, isn't that what you're talking about here? I'm not going to get into the kerfluffle too much, but to begin with, what kerfluffle? Yes, kerfluffle. There you go. You had an extra element. Herfluffle. No! But first I'll correct you. It's pronounced Oomachi. That R is silent, I guess. And that's out of a DHH's mouth and cell. So anyway, I came across an article

4:13that we talked about how one-passward employees are not happy that their company has pledged $300,000 to the DHH Mocchi project. Now, I've seen Mocchi the word around. In some headlines, I guess they talked to us a little bit about it. I don't know how much, but somehow I always scrolled past it. I don't know why they never caught my eye. headlines weren't good enough for me. Well, this one got my interest. So I don't think I didn't watch last weeks, but my understanding is they didn't actually talk about what Oomachi is. So first, first, I'm going to touch on the disgruntled one-passward employees part. The gist of it is that DHH is known for posting some pretty strong political views. And that is about all I'm going to say about that, because I don't want to talk about the technology, or I want to talk about the technology,

5:14and I don't want the creator's personal issues to get in the way of how cool this project actually is. First, I'm not going to do a justice with how awesome Oomachi looks. So I suggest going to the site and viewing the network chuck video on it, because he does a great job showcasing in a 30-minute video. So Oomachi is an open-ended AI-centric Arch Linux distribution built around the Hyperland, tiling window manager, and the QuickShell desktop interface. I did install it on a VM this week to play around with it. So what it does is rather than handing you a blank canvas like Arch does, Oomachi has already made most of the decisions and configured the system for you. And it's a super easy install. It actually, compared to any other

6:17install I've ever done, where they ask you questions, I don't remember if this even asked me any question. I think they don't... No, it did. It asked me a few questions, but it's very minimal, very nothing-confusing. So it is... it's an extremely keyboard-centric operating system. At least today, it sounds like he doesn't even want to use a keyboard in the future, maybe more voice or something. I don't know. I thought that's what they said something on that video I watched, but the shortcut... the way he used it today, at least the way I used it, shortcuts, launch menus, applications, arrange windows, and move you between work spaces, because it is a talent window manager, so it's a lot of keyboard shortcuts and stuff. It's all incredibly fast, but there's definitely going to be a learning curve while you memorize all the key binds. It also has more than 20 themes that you can change the look of the entire

7:22system, and the system makes it easy to quickly make new themes with a simple AI request. What really got my attention is the built-in AI integration. Now, it's a little risky, I guess. The fact that AI can touch and change things on your computer. In the video, a network check launched a portal through Steam, the game crashed, Umachi detected the crash, and offered to send the crash information to his AI agent for diagnosis. I've done a variety of things, such as I said, I told it to move my panel to the bottom. I made a couple of things myself when it was 11. I didn't think it looked that great like when it was 11. For the show here, I just typed in. I said, it's on the screen somewhere, I think, unless it scrolled past, but I told it to, I told it, don't time out and go to the login screen, something like that,

8:26basically, and then it just, okay, and it configured it, so it's not going to time out, because my tip is on Umachi. It's not on Umachi, but it's on this VM that I have later. So I didn't want to time out by the end of the show and have to log back in. Anyway, Umachi also has an easy way to install Windows in a VM by using ESCO to super key, spacebar, select the install menu, and then select Windows, and it sets it all up for you. Just like that, you have a Windows VM. I mean, after a couple minutes of whatever processing, I didn't get a chance to actually try that because I am running in a VM and I don't have nested virtualization enabled, so I would have to either enable that or run a fair metal to get that to work. And, you know, like I said, you can you can ask AI to do anything, change a configuration, install a program. For example, also later on the show, I'm going to be showing a program called Postcard. It set up with with Flatpack, but not

9:30on FlatHub. I typed in the AI box to install a GXAN SHU postcard program and it found the repo, installed Flatpack and installed a postcard flatpack. And I didn't have to do anything else besides type in there, installed that. Umachi stable, it has its own repository that also it's intentionally runs about one month behind Arch. And that gives its developers time to catch breaking changes before the updates reach users. So it's not quite as bleeding edge as Arch. Experience users who want the newest Arch packages can switch to the Edge channel. Umachi, you know, it's not going to be for everyone. It's still Arch underneath and it's, you know, it's not trying to imitate Windows, MacOS, or really even most Linux desktops that you've been used to unless you've used Hyperland

10:36and maybe even things like I3, it might be kind of similar to that. But the majority of Windows desktops, it's not even like that. The experience out of the box looks like something completely new. It's actually what you see behind me right now. Uh, you know, it's a new paradigm in desktops. If you're, if you're feeling adventurous, you gotta go on and try it. Uh, even just to play with and see, see it run for yourself, play around with it. See, see what kind of crazy things you can do. And at the very least, at least, uh, watch some of the network checks videos on it. Uh, you know, he had to make a theme for, uh, one of his advertisers. He also had to make a theme for Windows XP. Um, they look pretty good. Uh, Windows XP theme for who watch that is. Um, you know, I, my VM experience isn't going to do a justice. Um, you know, so I really do want to set up on a spare machine one of these days. And I have a couple. So I, I really think I probably will. And maybe

11:37this will get me to move away from cash, EOS to another arch based distro. Oh, and, and if you want to know more about why one password employees are mad about the pledge, check out the IT Foss article in the show notes. I'm not going to go into that anymore, but, uh, I know Jonathan has a story about DHH coming up and maybe he's going to dig deeper into it. I don't know. He's going to talk about Yeah. So I, I, I found this. Um, I will go ahead and mention my story and they will talk about the two of them together because I unfortunately have not watched the entire video. Um, but I do have a link to a friend of mine and somebody that I have actually interviewed before this Brody. Uh, and he's got a podcast where he does very long form interviews like I was there when you interviewed him. If you, if you thought Flaust Weekly was long, then you need to go check out Brody's. So Brody sat down with DHH for two and a half hours and they just, they talked about

12:38everything. I've gotten only a few minutes into it. It is queued up. I'm, I will make it through all of it because I'm sure it's fascinating conversation. I don't know what all they go into, although I'm sure that they talk some about the controversies. Uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a weird place where we're at right now, especially in technology because such. So there's a group of people that are very, very polarized and, uh, you know, on the left and on the right. I'm talking mainly about in the United States because this is, this is what I know, but very, very polarized. And so you've got, uh, this group of people on the left that, you know, they see someone that's, that's right, we can conservative and they'll meet like all the me know, a fascist or a Nazi. And then you've got the people on the right that see people on the left and they're, oh, they're communists. I was like, well, maybe that's not the most helpful thing to do to throw those terms around. And, uh, so again, I don't, I like Rob. I don't want to dive into the details of this and fight over it because we're here about the technology, not about politics.

13:41Well, now he's bringing a whole another controversy to the table. Those who are all for AI and those who are against it. Hey, that one I'll talk about. That's technology. I am down for talking about that. I think the only problem is that we're all pro AI here. So we're not very fair and balanced. We need to get a day to go back to your old days and think about how you used to be a couple years ago. Why the world was a different place a couple of years ago? I, I, I stand by my early skepticism. I, it's just the world has changed since then. Uh, anyway, pros and cons of data centers. That's always a controversial one too. Oh, see, I'm like most of the people talking about that. I've actually been inside data centers. I think all three of us probably have. And like, they're not burning water. They're not, you know, it's the, the things that people say they're not whatever. I've never seen a data center that was just evaporating water full time. The way this is some of the, some of the older ones that they have the cooling towers that they evaporate water.

14:46That's how they get their cooling. But most of the newer ones are all closed loop. Uh, yeah. Yeah, I put it this way. I've been inside several data centers and I've never seen signs of being evaporated cooling. I think, I think that's a very niche thing that did not happen a whole lot. Rocco's, Rocco's life wants to know what's, what's inside the data center? And, um, it's, yeah, lots of lots of servers. It's, it's really kind of boring. I mean, like, it's, to super nerds like us. It's really, really interesting. But if you're not a super nerd and you don't get excited over racks of servers, then it's, it's pretty boring. Think of it like this. Look at home. If you have a laptop or desktop computer, remove the monitor because there's usually not a whole lot of them. But maybe there's some. Um, look at that. And then change the form factor. So it's laid out and can be mounted in a rack and then put that over and over and over and over and over and put wires in between them. Pretty much. Yeah. There, there's usually about roughly seven

15:47foot tall cabinets. And they have what they call you. So like one U servers to you through you. And that's just the units of height. I don't remember what a U is like two and a half inches or seven inches. Yes. Something like that. And the cabinet is a 48 U something. I think, yeah, I think it's common. Yeah. You can get them a different size. But that's kind of common. And then they just stack them in there. And it's usually based on cooling, you know, because you can put too many in and you can get too high a heat load. It might be just physical space. I mean, it depends on how hard you're running them. Air cooled, water cooled. And most everything comes from the top down. So your network and your power come from the top down. A lot of times that's where you get your redundant power distribution units or PDUs, you get redundant power supplies. So that if and it's all monitored. So like one goes out, you just go, oh, server 1,682 lost power supply. You can walk over and pop one out and pop one in

16:55because the other power supply took the load. And you know, there really is not a lot going on other than you hear a lot of fans and things like that. A good data, data centers designed for airflow. So, uh, comes in hot aisle cold aisle. You have some that are hot out cold out. You have some that have raised flooring. And so the the air goes down underneath the flooring. I've never been in one that's hot out cold aisle. Um, either. Um, but that is that is fairly common. Yeah. Yeah. They'll have they'll have big rows and hot aisle is where they'll have the backs of the servers facing each other with say like three, four feet between them. And that's all a hot air going in. And you have a it's kind of loosely sealed off from the outside cold air so that hot air goes up or down into the ventilation system. The air is cooled and then recirculates back into the into the room. And so if the natural room airflow helps the airflow through the servers.

17:58A lot of servers now are starting to go water cooled. Um, some of the some of the data centers they're looking at immersion for for cooling the chips. I mean, it's it's a wide range of how your data centers are set up based on when they were built the technology. How much of a load do they have? I mean, if you're running your servers hard, you know, you probably have to go you start and look at water cooling the power density of chips now versus older ones that you're not running real hard. Okay, air cooling can take it over. But and they're loud too because the fans and them are not fans like your home PC. They are other times the delta style fans that J's 2 cents has a video where he's like feeding carrots into one and it's just slice them up and it's just, I bought a rack server off eBay wants to play with them like, oh, the power, the, you know, all the all the great things. And I used it for maybe a month like I tried different ways to get

19:00quieter. I bought some some foam stuff and kind of surrounded it to quiet the area off. I tried different tips. I saw online take out every other fan and think was so loud. I couldn't I couldn't take it anymore. Yeah, yeah, and it is hot. A lot of them run it like 85 Fahrenheit, which isn't the best for the servers. But you save so much on cooling that they'd rather have they'd rather go in and go, oh, we we lost a server because of whatever. Okay, go in, rack one out, rack a new one in and away it goes. They're not because because keeping it at a very controlled, you know, say 70, it takes a lot more energy and a lot of times you don't you don't need it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, let's let's actually take a quick break. An interesting dive into cooling and data centers, but not really what we're here to talk about. We we have something

20:02else that's data center adjacent though. If we want to continue talking about that, we're going to do a quick break. And then Jeff will kick us off about what's going on at SIRN. Don't go anywhere. Hey, guys, this episode of the Untitled Linux Show brought to you by BitWord. I love BitWord. The trusted leader and Paskey password and secrets management with more than 15 million users across 180 countries and over 80,000 businesses. BitWord and helps individuals and organizations protect their digital lives. A trusted open source. Yay, security. BitWord believes everyone should have access to strong security. That's why they offer and will always offer a basic free free password manager for individuals as well as paid plans for families, teams and enterprises. I have the families plan and I love BitWord and getting started is easier than ever. They now have new direct import options, which makes it so simple to move your existing passwords from those other guys into BitWord with just a few clicks from there in line auto fill.

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23:12BitWord. I love these guys. Get started today with a free trial of a BitWord in teams or enterprise plan or get started for free forever across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com slash twit. That's bitworden.com slash twit. All right. Back to the untitled Linux show. IGF. Well, you know, after after the server discussion, you know, just a little just a little heads up. I have some hardware later on the show. But right now we're going to go more science and engineering and a little data center ish. CERN is going Debian. Kind of. So let me explain. So CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory operated by the European organization for nuclear research. And part of that that it's also known for is the LHC or the large Hadron hadron collider, which is the world's biggest and

24:13most powerful particle accelerator. It is it accelerates particles close to the speed of light and smashes them together. And as you can imagine, there are a lot of computers and controllers which are needed to make CERN function properly. The organization has been using our HL Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, which was the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And even in the past helped maintain scientific Linux, which was a derivative of R H L. Now, scientific Linux is no more. It went out end of life in 24, but you know, they've been very point being they've been very red hat. Now there was talk about making a change going to CentOS stream, but that was not going to work basically for the same reason Red Hat's not working. There's a problem in their industrial accelerator control computers, which is the

25:16M arch compiler flag where it's set to x86 dash 64 dash V2. And that's the compiler flag that's set as default. And this is from CERN and maybe red hats doing it as well, just saying it's using that flag is considered forced obsolescence for old hardware. Now, Red Hat 9 has a cut off which won't run on CERN's oldest boards. The kind of boards which run chips like an Intel Core 2 Duo. And that's about 47% of their boards to be exact. And Red Hat, you know, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 cuts off another 17% of the boards. So all in all, 64% of their systems would need hardware replacement. Okay, why not do that? Well, CERN calculated that it would take 6.7 US $6.7 million US

26:17or 5.4 million Swiss francs to upgrade the system, not counting the 11 controller boards that would need to be a need a redesign. And there's there's hardware configuration that would need to be changed and rewiring some things. And they calculated that the overall success would be around the 20% level. Yes, they could fix any issues they ran into, but that means more downtime, more money, past the initial investment. Now, this is where Debian comes in, which doesn't mandate the compiler flag. There were three, but now there's only two paths they're looking at for Debian for the long-term support. Plan A develops on bookworm through 2026, deploys Trixi as a long-term support release from 26 to 2030, then moves to Debian 15 Duke. Plan B skips that last jump staying on Trixi until

27:17under extended long-term support ELTS out to 2033 instead. Plan C was running bookworm itself until under extended support the whole way, but that got ruled out. So that's not even in the running anymore. CERN has also started sponsoring Freezean, FREXIN, which is a Debian GNU Linux organization founded in 2005. And they managed funding and coordination for Debian LTS, helping extend standard security support for Debian stable releases to five years by paying developer maintainers and contributors. They also support ELTS, that again, that's the extended LTS, which provides commercial entities, additional security, lifecycle extensions out to seven plus years for select older releases, not all of them, but like, for example, though Debian 910 and 11

28:23for subscriber organizations are going to have very long-term support on those operating systems. It should be noted that the switch to Debian is only for the accelerator itself. So CERN clarified that they're still on Red Hat for their data centers, experimental computing needs, and things like that. So this is only the old hardware that's supporting the Hadron Collider and other items that have the controller boards and things like that. So that's why I said initially in the article or in this in the story that they're switching to Debian sort of, not everywhere. So take a look at the show notes for more details as you know on the implementation, how they're more detailed plans and how they're going to make it happen, more details on the background for the switch, and all the other interesting bits I didn't have time to go over. Yeah, interesting. This is sort of an unexpected problem with the decision

29:29from IBM slash Red Hat to kill the original Sento S because if Sento S still existed, it would have been a lot simpler to just recompile packages without the versioning flag. Most of them I believe would continue to work. It would probably be a pretty easy lift. To do the recompile, but the fact that they were already having to move and going to Sento S stream as part of it, yeah, I understand why they just said, forget this noise, we're going to Debian. Well, I get some of the Ubuntu or Kashi or Fedora running those compiler flags, but like enterprise Linux, you would think that would be like, oh no, no, we're running the base and we're going to keep that old stuff going to end the time kind of thing. If you were going to be conservative on the compiler flag, that would be a distribution that would do it. Yes, but don't make the mistake

30:32of thinking the majority of users of enterprise Linux are running on old hardware. Most of those companies, like the big companies, the ones that use it for a bunch of different servers all at once, they've got the newest stuff that they can possibly get and they want to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of it. If they're at old hardware, they're using an old version, they have support on still, probably. The thing from enterprise Linux going to the new compiler flags, it's all about being the most performance for the most servers and playing to the people that give them the most money. Obviously, they're a business is what they are interested in. I can't fall in for it. Well, you think though at least there'd be an option of like, okay, we have a fork that you can compile under your kernel or whatever. They would support the older hardware on a fork or something because, for example, Kashi, it's got different levels

31:36you can grab based on the hardware you're running. I think this is something that they've looked into as part of Fedora, but it's not landed yet. I think we've talked about this in the past that they've looked at building individual packages with different levels, but it's a complicated thing to do and it's not landed yet. All right, Rob, you want to talk about the ER project? Yes, so I just think what they were going for there, but maybe not the best name. To you, well, I didn't even bother looking at what they might be going for there, but maybe you can expand on that later. So what's going on here is, essentially, Kashi OS may eventually have some clear competition. And I mean that with a capital C. Last year, Intel abruptly ended clear Linux. Distribution famous in Veronica's benchmarks for squeezing extra performance

32:41from X86 hardware and even ANB hardware. Since then, Kashi OS has become one of the names we regularly see near the top of those performance comparisons. Now, I'll cook one of the architects behind clear Linux is starting over with something called the ER project that's that you are. I guess I was kind of thinking a year because I don't know, people often abbreviate year that way in Texas these days, so but maybe it's ER. I don't know. So you are a project. So cook spent more than 17 years at Intel and worked on Moblin, Migo, Tyson, and clear Linux. So he brings plenty of experience building distributions. Before we get too excited, there is nothing to install yet. Cook describes this as a personal hobby project with big ambitions,

33:44but no corporate backing. Like clear Linux had. At the time of the announcement, there were no bootable images or finished distributions to try. The ER project is also more than another desktop distribution. The goal is to create tools that allow people and companies to build their own secure Linux distribution. That could be a desktop and embedded Linux system, a container image, or an operating system with automatic updates. Much of it is being written in rust, so it's going to be good and fast and safe. Plans include a reproducible build, software performance, license tracking, vulnerability, and malware scanning, and secure software updates. It's even planning an MCP based package designer, so AI will apparently help make

34:45creating packages easier. One of the most interesting parts is that cook is openly discussing what clear Linux got wrong. He says it's biggest mistake was making it far too difficult for the community to contribute. Test changes and create packages. With the ER project, he wants people to easily build packages, operate repositories, and securely share and remix those components. So is this really competition for cash? No, not yet. We don't even have an operating system or any benchmarks. There are anything, and it may ultimately be as much a distribution building platform as a distribution itself. So maybe cash will not have one ultimate competitor. It may have a lot of distros to be with in the future, or maybe not. I don't.

35:48But it's being created by someone who helped build one of the fastest Linux distributions we've ever seen. At least before cash, yeah, I don't know if they've ever compared them. The latest version of clear Linux versus cash, that'd be interesting. Who knows what that'd be. But anyway, if you can combine clearly, and secure ideas with a more open community model, cash, you could eventually have some very clear competition. Clear competition. Such a dad joke. Yeah, so ER is the name of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization from like 2100 BC. It is also famously referenced in the Bible, ER of Caldees. That's where Abraham was from. So, like the historic place, and I'm assuming it's a reference to the place and the ancient history.

36:48But they don't actually say I want to look through their website. They're very simple website actually of the ER project. They don't call out what the name is a reference to. So you suspect the name is a reference to that. Do you see a reason that they would compare what they're doing to that? Or, oh, I don't know. Some grandiose ideas about rebuilding civilization, or a new civilization coming out of an old one, or I don't know. I don't want to speculate too much. Does clear was maybe the first performance distribution. Yeah, for those wondering and listening, I see people, several people that are confused about this. It's ER as in you are not ER. Or what? Anyway, yeah, need to see it. It'll be fun to sort of watch and see if this does indeed turn into a worthy successor to the clear Linux legacy and doing some of the things

37:49that clear Linux used to do. I imagine we'll see Michael Larable at Phoronix do some benchmarking of it. I don't know, what would be fun is to have him pull the last clear Linux release and compare the two and see how well it stacks up. I bet he will. I bet so. If not, it's a great idea. I'll let him use it. There you go. We throw the last clear Linux, the first ER release, and he got more cash in there too. Of course. And Fador and Ubuntu and Debian just for flavor. Don't give him too much work. And for the record, back when clear was still running, it was the top top dog performance wise on those faster than cashy. Yes. Was it when they were both. Yeah. It had much more aggressive optimization. And it wasn't as friendly for a daily driver distribution because it was it was set up for a lot of database stuff,

38:56a lot of just pure speed, more enterprise. And so they didn't care about whether it was going to run everything great. Yep. All right. We are going to we're going to get into some new releases. Something actually we've been looking forward to for a long time and that is Audacity. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to talk about Audacity 4.0. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Real value shows up in reliability. You don't have to second guess. Like a set of Firestone all season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and a quiet ride, no matter the road, season after season. Firestone all season tires for durability. You can count on just like people count on you. Firestone always dependable since 1900. I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is

40:05the bear. Restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No. No. We are outgunned and we are outmaned but we have each other. FX is the bear. The final season all episodes now streaming on Disney+. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, register mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Hey everybody. Leo Laporte here and I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club. If you're not already a member I want to encourage you

41:06to support what we do here at Twitch. 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits. Add free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club. Discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet we'd love to have you find out more at twitch.tv slash club. Twitter and thank you so much. So audacity 4.0 is out. It's released and you can go grab it right now actually. I've got to link here to the pharonic article. I'll get a link added to the GitHub release page and they've got quite a few different binaries there. They've got app images. They've got DMGs for putting it on Mac OS. MSI is for downloading it onto Windows and of course your favorite Linux distro I'm sure

42:13will pick this up for too much longer and have a version of it available. I will say there's something fairly interesting that I noticed here that sort of surprised me although I've been seeing quite a bit of this here recently. The app images we get an x86 64 and an a arch 64. So those are now the two big platforms that you can run things on your Raspberry Pi and your Linux desktop or laptop. I found that kind of interesting. Those were the two things two places where it runs where they compile it by default. But I did go ahead and grab this actually and it's it's a pretty so far. It looks like a pretty solid release and it adds back to audacity or it adds to audacity maybe for the first time. Some features that have been in more sophisticated editors like our door. So I mean one of the one of the things that I don't think you could do before that now is extremely easy is just

43:15putting multiple audio tracks and moving them around. You can now do that extremely easily inside of audacity. It's just a matter of clicking on the like the header part of the track and you can scrub it whichever direction you want to. It has more support for non-destructive editing. For those have been around using audacity for a while. Everything used to be you know destructive editing which means essentially that when you applied an effect to a piece of audio it rendered it out and you had the new audio that the effect was on. Whereas now it's doing all of these things live. You have your original audio that just it always lives as it is and then you apply your effects stack real time and they don't you know actually make changes until you're ready to render everything out. That's the idea of the non non-linear non-destructive editor. Yeah it's really it just it strikes me as though it's growing up into a little bit more sophisticated of a tool. I'm sure there are a few

44:18people that are going to be find that unfortunate because we've always described audacity as being like the notepad as opposed to something like our door being the full you know my office suite. And we've gotten just a few office suite features now not literally office suite of course but stay you know understand this in in terms of the the metaphor we're making here we've gotten some office suite features added to the text editor of audacity. But I like it actually I'm going to play with it some more I didn't get very much time to mess with it. I may see the next time I have something audio to edit and mess with I may try it not acidity and see how that goes particularly if you can get all like all of your existing plugins if they now work in audacity that's going to make it really a pretty powerful tool. So I'm impressed I'm looking forward to you know how that works out and what's coming next. Now that we have some office suite features we just need some suite office features. But I'm good. Yeah you roll your eyes at me more than my wife does.

45:21Yes. Probably I'm going to get you in bursts and she has to live with you full time. Her eyes are continuously rolled. Yeah she's just always looking up. Yeah I use audacity I like it just because a lot of the stuff I use for recording is I just need a simple basic you know that notepad reference is perfect because sometimes it's like I just need to write a couple little things and I don't need automatic numbering and headers and footers and you know I just but I've used I've used both you know with with our tour you know you've got the ability to go in and wire things up because it was built on top of Jack originally right so you can you can wire everything up like oh here's the input for this track and the output for that track and it goes into this and it goes into that and you know I mean you can you can do so many extremely fancy things with our door which is great. I mean particularly like if you're an audio engineer or you know I want to be audio engineer like me if you fact if you've worked with real

46:25hardware and plugging things in and out like that it's it's perfect but if you don't want to have to pretend you're an audio engineer then audacity is pretty cool. Yeah because you can get in there with our door sometimes I go oh let me set okay I got to set this to okay what's your input do I versus audacity is kind of more just hit record and then it's it's capturing it all. Yep. Yeah or open a file. Yep do you do that too? Yep do that too. All right it is time now for Jeff to try to convince us that we need to buy some hardware. I'm not going to do it. I'm already not entirely impressed by this it's almost the thing that I want but it's not quite there. It's what you need. John it's it's not what you want it's what you need. Exactly so more hardware corner you know I you know me I love hardware so I saw this and I'm like oh this is cool so let let let you

47:31let go I guess L.E.K. U.O. Southbridge puts an AMD B650 chipset on a PCIe board now you might be thinking what's the point of that the point is for when you need a lot more drives when you look at your motherboard there are probably a few SATA connections and NVMe drive connections and you know you can plug in SATA drives without having any issues with your PCIe interface but your NVMe drives are a different story depending on how the motherboard is set up most have one or more slots that when you plug in a drive and depending where you plug in the drive it can have a effect on the connections for your PCIe slots so by plugging in a drive in a certain location your buy 16 PCIe slot might turn into a buy eight so then the card you have in there is only running at half speed which may or may not depending what you what you have be an issue and the reason is is

48:36how many PCIe lanes there are and how they're split among the actual slots in your motherboard and your actual drive connections your NVMe drives and you don't have enough PCIe lanes to run everything at once so they that's where they kind of split them out now if the other part is if you have a two drive expansion board most of the time the board will bifurcate the PCIe slot meaning that by eight slot will now turn into two by four slots which most times are okay but then you're just limited to your two drives you can't plug in a whole bunch of drives now by putting a chipset on the board then you can have multiple connections and have them communicate over the same PCIe lanes without splitting them up no need to bifurcate the expansion card

49:38chipset handles all the communications switching and routing between the drives and the PCIe lanes now the southbridge max max provides four m.2 NVMe slots four SATA 3.0 ports two 10 gigabit us usb a ports one 10 gigabit usb c and one 20 gigabit usb c port now and the card communicates for a PCIe four interface with four lanes and now that might sound like an issue especially with gen 5 drives out there in real world scenarios it's not really an issue most times meaning you're not really going to slow down your gen 5 drive most times with real world workloads PCIe gen 4 with four lanes still gives a theoretical 16 gigabits a second throughput so it's not like this is a really slow interface so a question some might have is why a b650 chipset and why not a special ASIC to make

50:45it work with higher with a higher rate of speed because the b650 chipset is proven and the drives are well tested if you have a Linux box which we all do or should if you don't install plug it in and it just works no must no fuss and full speed ahead no special drivers no fiddling with anything just plug it in and go for on X you know Michael Aribel over there did some testing and used an AMD Ryzen 7 8700G with Ubuntu 2604 with a 7.0 kernel now when he benchmarked native on the motherboard versus the card you know the card was slower than a native connection but it was only the tiniest bit slower and not where anybody would notice I mean we're talking at worst maybe a 1% difference and a lot of times it was it was equal to the motherboard connection and like I said it running in the real world

51:48it's really about the same speed because unless you're moving huge volumes of data or you're trying to move multiple drives all at once you know huge huge amounts of data across multiple drives at once through that port and you have to have really fast drives you're not you're not that by-four connection is not going to slow you down now I know drive prices are high right now but this could be the card you used to take a bunch of those small drives you have around plug them all in and make a large volume with LVM that's something you could definitely do you know get get the get all those drives laying around back in action again the price the cards around $130 the phronics article says 120 but my brief and not exhaustive look I found it for 130 Michael at phronics you know reiterated a couple times the card just worked out of the box no driver no command line fiddling needed nothing so I should mention though you will need a six pin PCIe

52:55power cable to give the board a little more juice it can't run only on the PCIe slot power but if you take a look at the articles show notes you know you can get more details get all the benchmark results and decide where am I going to buy that new bit of hardware from it's an interesting it's an interesting piece of piece of hardware I don't have enough drives and I haven't already have enough places to put them but I don't know I guess if I was to add another if I wanted to add another NVME drive to the desktop that would just something like that would be the way to go I have some spare drives but I have no need to put anything on them really get that well it's time to start a data hard addiction and that's what my NAS is for actually I need to order another hard drive I've got a a raid six cluster in my desktop and one of the drives has died in it but that doesn't need the new card it just needs the drive the replacement

53:55drive uh yeah well that's a say for this one Jeff um you failed I don't I don't want to buy it I don't have a need for that see I'd get another I don't have any NVME or extra drives laying around all of marine use but maybe on a future show we'll see I'm toying with the idea of picking up another drive and getting rid of my mdadm raid and converting it to a zfs raid six there he goes it's protect against bit rot in addition to to redemix I really like zfs but you know there is another more Linux friendly alternative to z to zfs it's it's it's maybe not that white the same but it's it's getting there which one is that are you thinking butter fs you guys are trying to segue me here Ken's not here for a day and both of these guys feel like they got to

54:57be the ones to segue everything uh well no I I say that because if that's what you're thinking they don't recommend yet better fs for raid five and six really yes interesting I I looked I looked into this and other other levels you know if you're one or two or but zfs is still the kind of the way to go if you want to protect against bit rot in a raid and I say that because mdadm does not go to the yeah there are many other features though that make butter fs better fs the better fs I run it on my systems you know what Jeff this is a segue just I know I just I'm just feeling the pain from the loss you know so I'm just just trying to rub it in a little yeah all right Rob why

55:58don't you go ahead and take it away and tell us all about butter fs it is time for another butter fs corner because it is the better fs anyway at this time we have something for everyone the true Linux fans like Jonathan and the windows fans like Jeff but our fs has always offered powerful features but some have felt like tools intended for the advanced Linux user two recent announcements show those features becoming easier to use and butter fs becoming more useful across platforms operating systems that is first the still in development kde Linux is enabling automatic butter fs snapshots for all user files each home folder becomes its own butter fs sub volume with a snap snapper handling and snapshots automatically

57:07so the real nice part is the new kio snapshot integration with dolphin instead of opening its thermal terminal and learning butter fs commands users can browse previous versions of a file directory from kde's file manager and restore an older copy i kind of like those familiar with lent uh windows shadow copies um or those uh maybe not as familiar with the underlying technology it's usually known as uh previous versions um time i like that but better maybe i like it's better it's Linux so it's got to be better um so anyway it is essentially an undue button for your home directory if you accidentally delete a file or save changes you regret i know jepp does a lot of things here regrets uh an earlier version may be waiting for you kde correctly

58:08points out that this is not a backup uh if the drive fails is lost or is damaged the snapshots disappear with it um so you still need a real backup software uh somewhere else or well but but one thing butter fs does have is a butter fs send so so that's one of the options you can use uh but it's not in the plasma GUI itself yet so you can uh take your snapshots and do a butter fs send which is very similar to uh a feature that zfs or zfs has where they uh can do uh i think it's z sender zfs send that i'm what's called but it does pretty much the same thing um really nice feature for replication uh across drives different locations for now uh the kde plasma snapshot system simply adds another useful layer of protection against everyday mistakes meanwhile

59:10win butter fs 1.10 has arrived after more than two years without a release win butter fs is an open source driver that gives windows you heard that you have windows read and write access to butter fs file system so that might be one place you can uh do a butter fs send to add it um or maybe it doesn't work and that thing uh but uh the new version can write free space bitmaps and compress inline files uh uh features that it could previously only read before it also improves removable drive support and error recovery when a system runs out of memory space there are important fixes uh to including crashes uh when uh moving files between sub volumes or creating many files at once uh which was something steam contributor multiple device

1:00:18disk usage reporting and file pre allocation have also been improved win butter fs is also used by reactOS uh the open source uh windows compatible operating system that uh i think we must have mentioned here once or twice uh it also gives them uh butter fs reading rights port so the same file system be continues to become more useful uh across Linux windows and reactOS uh when to support still requires a third party driver so microsoft isn't suddenly adapting butter fs but you know maybe once they become a fully Linux based OS maybe they will uh but for now it does make accessing butter fs formatted storage that that maybe you have a formatted from a Linux system now you can access it a little bit easier on windows and i also don't think uh it would be practical and maybe not even

1:01:19possible yet to use butter fs as the main file system on windows but i'd love to hear if someone tries and figures out to do that anyway butter fs is quickly becoming my file system of choice for most use cases at least and and now there's even more reason to love it yeah cool stuff need to see kte pull on pull more support for it in there too yeah now it's in kte arts coming to kte Linux but i assume that it's going to be available and any plate but it has kte you you would assume it has to yeah and i will agree with you rob an earlier version of me was a better version of me something that's supposed to work we're supposed to get better as we age but i will say a possible sale because can message me and said that might be something he would want there you go he wants to use butter fs awesome no the hardware board so

1:02:21i'll take a partial win there i gotta take him where i can get him we're down with that story we've moved on man uh yeah i was i was looking at the the the latest this week in kte as well to see if there's anything else in here that we really auto mention um the only one that really pops up is interesting here is that kte's or plasma six dot eight breeze is going to use even less v-ram so i'm making kte even lighter in some instances a couple of other moderately interesting things but nothing huge yet with the cost of memory that is great to hear i mean true that is true i would like to see another uh roundup where they um blow it up kte versus known versus you know all the different desktops where they where they you know what resources do they take yeah when they say oh this is light weight is it really that light weight now compared to

1:03:27the competition to do that comparison you almost need some sort of like standard um i don't know how you would do this across the different desktops but some sort of like standard config like you know these are the icons that exist on the desktop we want you know this sort of theming this i don't know exactly how that would work i think how you do it is that a fault is people are configuring their stuff so much so you have what the vanilla experiences not a customized experience yeah that's that's usually way uh michael larble does is whenever he's doing something like that he's just like this is straight out of the box no not you could customize would be interesting right but i mean you think about it like there are certain things that i want my desktops to be able to do or do by default some certain things i want turned on and it's like well if i go and i try to run a different desktop environment i'm going to come go and turn those things on so i think there's something to be said for trying to make the experience the same and then testing it yeah maybe there's multiple ways because like

1:04:29when i use gnom i'm not using the bit of i'll experience because it's it's not good you have to install some extensions and that obviously does something to it yeah you kind of you kind of want to know how how heavy each of those extensions are uh for sure yeah but it's it but on the on the flip side devil's advocate it's you know some of those have a harder time replicating that look and feel than others so it's you know some would have a little more natural advantage than based on how many different extensions you'd have to load in if you really want to do this i see three three three three tests one that vanilla one that people do one optimize every single desktop the test as much as you can and see how they compare and then another try to make them all look identical yeah there's some today it's an interesting problem to try to figure that out to try it i mean this is a problem with testing in general right like how do you replicate what real

1:05:29people are going to do to be able to get a realistic test challenging all right we're going to take one more quick break not our last break our second our pen ultimate break and uh we will be back and we're going to talk about AI please don't take a drink every time we say AI on this show you'll get out of the whole poisoning but don't go anywhere we'll be right back real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess like a set of firestone all season tires they're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and acquired a ride no matter the road season after season firestone all season tires for durability you can count on just like people count on you firestone always dependable since 1900 i'm not giving up i am selling the building

1:06:31the final season of FX is the bear restaurant is flooded everything's either going to be okay no or not we are outgun and we are outmaned but we have each other FX is the bear the final season all episodes now streaming on Disney Plus still waiting in line again that's time you'll never get back save time and money with stamps.com over four million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now print postage for certified mail register mail and packages in seconds then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift taxes and fees apply so yet another community is having the debates and that is the debate of what do we do with this AI stuff and this one is sort of unexpected this is the llvm

1:07:39community the the group of developers behind the low level virtual machine which is also the thing behind well the llvm shows up and runs a lot of different things but the the the clang or ceiling compiler being one of the big ones and some other things and they are talking about agents dot md and because of dumb reasons you also have to have a claw dot md come on in throughout but get with it let cloud look at agents that md anyway but these are files that you put into a open search repository and the idea is that when someone comes along and wants to use the AI agent to fix a bug or open a bug report or add some new feature the the agent clawed or and you know chat gbt whatever it is that you're using groc whatever will first open up that file and look inside of it and get instructions like oh this is how I'm supposed to do things

1:08:41and if you're really lucky the agent will follow those instructions and not give you terrible poor requests and follow your established way that you're supposed to do bug reports and all of those things sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but we've kind of I think it's sort of settled at least among the people that I've talked to that you need to have some of this tooling some sort of tooling in place you need to have something where you have instructions for the agents and the idea being that clawed and groc and chat gbt and all they're not very smart they're not very smart on their own but they also have no clue how your project works and so this is the one place where you can give them instructions to try to try to fix that ahead of time so there is a poor request now from Nick Nick Dishonet talking of or trying to add the agents.md and claw.md files to

1:09:49lvm and not everyone is on board with that in fact some have said that no no it goes against the current llvm principle that we don't get to shape developers private workflows and that rings a little hollow because I'm sure they have some they have some rules that actually do shape anyway and then of course some people are already using their own agents.md which that can potentially cause problems there it's a draft pull request there is conversation going on around it this does not seem to be quite the same thing it's not it's not a debate over whether they're going to allow AI agents and llvm but more how much input the project should have on the way the individuals use those agents. So something interesting to keep an eye out for and it actually it ties in reasonably well to the floss weekly episode that we had this past week I talked with Benjamin Sanules from

1:10:52Trail of Bits and they've got a they've got a new thing called patch the planet and one of the things that they're doing there is they're looking at projects and trying to give them help like here's the stuff that you need to have in your project to be able to wrangle the AI agents to avoid you know the overwhelming flood of pull requests and bug reports that are you know if you don't manage it they're AI slop but if you have things managed well then it can actually be really useful you can put put your community to work but your community pay for the AI tokens you must spend right that's the ideal there so anyway this is just something that a lot of open source projects are wrestling with and trying to get right others really interesting to see yet another example of it from a really a pretty big project in this case. Yeah I've noticed when I asked Gumaachi to do something for me it looks up various various MD files system. Yeah I did you know I was just say I think

1:11:59I think it's good I mean realistically with the whole AI I think if you're not embracing and guiding early on it's just going to be a mess later on. Yeah that is that is true and ironically one of one of my buddies that was a huge AI skeptic like you thought I was an AI skeptic he sort of hates the things I was talking with him last night and he's like yes I'm using some AI tooling that somebody put or know an application that somebody built with AI because there wasn't any other way to do it and it works he's like I guess it's fine yes yeah we're gonna have to start using it like if he has come along and figured this out then yeah it's it has arrived. I decided I decided I am done pushing it or or trying to correct or turn people around at this point I'm at the point where you know what I'm using it if you don't want to use it don't use it that means there's just going to be more room for me to succeed. That's sadly kind of true.

1:13:07Well I heard someone say you know is AI gonna take my job and the person said no the person who knows how to use AI is gonna take your job. Yeah yeah I said that several times in the show. Jeff's recording me. That's pretty wild. I don't know and I said this on philosophy too I think we're kind of in a golden age right now because like the three of us we did all of this stuff the hard way for so long that we now like we understand how all of the things work under the hood and so now we tell the AI this is the way that should be done now you go take care of the Fiddly Details but the next generation is gonna come up and say I want this outcome but I have no understanding of the Fiddly Details and like that's different what I'm not sure about is in five or ten years when we're all ready to retire if AI is going to be so much better that it doesn't matter that's that's the that's the real question. There's you know there's a legitimate concern that

1:14:10people aren't going to actually learn or understand how to do stuff or anything works and that's I mean in a way that's how technology has always been you know back many years ago people could swap out a tube on their TV and now I'm not you know it's been decades when people are going to touch your TV or like me growing up I started with L computers I grew with the computer age so I understand how it went along the way and then some kids I see is like well I know how to start so I happen to do this like well it's broken I don't know I don't know what to do we are just the peak generation well some of that though too like the fixing the TV is like now we lack the tools I mean unless you can surface mount desotter and re-sotter and you know but I think a lot of the people that are afraid of AI don't realize the limitations of AI you know

1:15:12they're thinking the oh do this great thing and it's like hey I can't is not there yet you know it's it's got to take a little more bite-sized chunks and you used to even writing software you you need to break it into smaller pieces so that AI can help do the sub components before it puts it all together because it's it's not the magic do whatever I say thing when it's complicated there's a limit to its capabilities yeah absolutely you know some ways vibe coding I got an idea do you see my delay anyway vibe coding it's more like you're the manager and the AI is your employee so you have to know how to micr manager employee well and it's an enthusiastic new employee that's really trying to make you happy and sometimes it's like whoa whoa whoa that's not stop you know you're going too far you took the wrong direction you know

1:16:13absolutely yeah I was playing around I wanted to try to have a published directly to GitHub from chat GPT it did it just fine but then every time afterwards is doing it and it was using up tokens pretty quick I'm like let's stop doing that yeah yeah oh so I I did something just earlier earlier today yeah it was today I did this I'm I'm working on a project and like there's two halves to the project you could say and I have one cloud agent looking at one half of it and the other cloud agent looking at the other half of it which was fine and everything was working great and then it's like one found something and I'm like oh that's probably a problem in the other half like so my solution was hey cloud write me a dot md that I can go and drop into the other half of this to get it fixed there as well and then I was like cloud can I just like you talk to the other you that's also running on my computer it's like yes here's the instructions to do that I'm like this is gonna be great I don't have to copy and paste md's around anymore and I did the thing

1:17:16and they started talking to each other and I came back an hour later and they were still talking to each other I'm like this may not be a good thing I may have to turn this off yeah it was pretty slick uh having it published directly to um GitHub because then I also had uh this web in this interface the program would automatically update from GitHub so it was doing everything just automatic but yeah it was uh gonna be too expensive to keep doing that way yeah absolutely well and you gotta be careful I know of a case of uh someone had it had an AI and they said oh make this agents to do these things and those agents spawned agents and those agents spawned agent two million dollars racks up in a really short time when when they're in a runaway mode yeah I don't have that I would just run out of tokens and I don't have auto refill this is the danger of some of those enterprise accounts where like oh we do here's

1:18:19the credit card what all the AI token maxing well that's a lot of tokens potentially all right let's move on and talk Firefox and uh then we'll take our last break and get into command line tips but Jeff first 155 yeah I don't think it's a secret that I use Firefox about 99 percent of the time over Chromium and I only use Chrome and Edge at work and that's just for business compatibility reasons which is you know why am I always happy when there's a new version of Firefox and it so happens this week we have a new release Firefox 155 is out and it's the first release under Mozilla's new twice monthly release schedule that means faster smaller updates instead of waiting a month or more between versions basically it's trying to keep Firefox fresher faster there's a speed change which is something called happy eyeballs version three that should make browsing go a little quicker simply every time Firefox loads a page it has to

1:19:21pick a path to reach a server maybe over IPP4 IPV6 maybe HTTP2 or the newer HTTP3 the older Firefox versions picked one path and waited to see how it worked before trying another if that first goes if that first go was slow or broken the page just sat there Firefox 155 now tries several paths at once and runs with whichever one answers first there's nothing to configure you'll just notice fewer pages hanging while loading worth noting though is it's still in i.e. TF draft and it's not a finished standard and Mozilla says it's only active on some platform so far though they didn't specifically name the platform so I can't say for a hundred percent certain that it's that it's working on Linux but it's definitely coming if it's not another speed upgrade is upgrade is quick QUIC version two support for HTTP3 quick as the connection tech behind a lot of modern webpages

1:20:27loading speeds and the upgrades let's Firefox switch the newer version instantly instead of going back and forth with the server figuring out which version to use which used to cost an extra round trip over the network now setting up a secure connection over HTTP3 takes fewer round trips than the old school TCP and that's why HTTP3 seems faster on bad connections you know where your connections a little weak and not working so good on the privacy side the address bar now shows a live count of how many trackers Firefox is blocked right in the shield icon this is a progressive rollout so you might not see it yet and we we've talked about these progressive rollouts in the past they just not everybody gets everything at once they i don't know how they determine it but the features gets turned on for various people at different times i'm not sure before you know it's been in the because of server loading i don't know why this one would be progressive or you

1:21:33know or something that could break something it's just a counter so i don't know but it's it's coming if you don't have it yet and if the counter bugs you you can turn it off under settings you go under settings privacy and unchecking the tracker count option now if you're still on chrome google just pulled their full version of you block origin from the corn chrome web store following last year's manifest v2 shut down chrome users are stuck with the limited you block origin light uh Firefox so does not have that restriction and if ad blocking matters to you that's a pretty good uh nudge maybe to make the switch so you can continue to run the full featured version of you block origin just saying uh there's also many bug fixes containers got a fix translation support has been expanded uh there's you know ton more changes that i haven't gotten into but take a look at the four articles linked in the show notes for a ton more details on the changes and happy browsing yeah lots of cool stuff going on in Firefox these days um i've not really had

1:22:40problems with you block origin light but it is it is handy that there is still a browser out there that lets you run the the full fat thing never never use the light version i mean it pretty much just works honestly i'm not i'm not seeing problems from it but you know teach each each they're on all right well that uh that covers the news fairly well we've got some command line tips where break really quick and uh then we'll be back and finish her off so don't go anywhere real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess like a set of firestone all season tires they're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and acquire ride no matter the road season after season firestone all season tires for durability you can count on just like people count on you firestone always dependable since 1900

1:23:48i'm not giving up i am showing the building the final season of FX is the bear restaurant is flooded everything's either gonna be okay no or not we are outgun and we are outman but we have each other FX is the bear the final season all episodes now streaming on Disney Plus still waiting in line again that's time you'll never get back save time and money with stamps.com over four million businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now print postage for certified mail register mail and packages in seconds then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift taxes and fees apply all right Rob you are up first and you're talking about post

1:24:50card what what are we doing with post cards i am so post card is a vibe coded email client so to find it it's on github just like for gxanushu or just go to the show notes that's that's really easy just way to do it and you can find it but so post card i'm going to show you on my umachi install where i install this to test it out it alt or not alt i mean super key to i'll go to my other uh uh it's like a virtual desktop virtual desktop very real and here i have post card install with just a little demo email that i am using and it's really just a very basic clean um email client um does that anything in there you know you want to

1:25:59be email and do all the things you can do with an email archive but very simple nice looking uh linux email client if you if you hate how a lot of the others look and you just want something simple post card is a pretty nice option does it have any any killer features that that Thunderbird doesn't now i want to say killer features it's just clean uh simple i would say that's its killer feature and to get it to run in umachi i just told it uh it's a flat pack but not on flat hub so you are installing from this person's uh flat pack repository in umachi i just said install gxanushu uh space post card and it found it and installed flat pack installed

1:27:00found the repository and installed it all and it was uh an interesting experience so a little bonus umachi also yeah does umachi set you up with a uh locally run lllm engine out of the box out of the box i said you could configure it to work with um whatever you want i could figure mine to uh codex which is chat gpt okay um i don't think it had anything with it but uh yeah very cool running running uh doing experimentation with locally running agents is actually something that i i very much want to do i've got a couple of machines here that can probably do a reasonable job with it and i just i have not i'm not taking the time to set it up and play with it but um i i i feel like i read or heard that uh can maybe use a local i'm not quite sure about

1:28:05that i haven't had a lot of time to spend with it yet but uh i was just trying to quickly try yeah i know i know canonical has lemonade which is uh a pretty interesting option maybe i need to maybe i need to try to lemonade out and then bring it as a tip for next week that might be the thing to do because it's got it's got some cool it's got some cool stuff that it can do um some things that i don't think anybody else is doing yet with um with the combination of like an lllm to interpret your text and then um it's got the like the image generation stuff that'll will run both of them at the same time and i'm wondering if that will uh um really fix some of the problems i've had trying to do image generation in the past it's like the the generation engine the uh i forget the term that they use but the the engine that does the generation it's not very good it actually parsing your text and so you're kind of you're kind of guessing and trying to figure out

1:29:07like what you know what prompt do i need to give it it's actually going to match the training data to get the thing that i want out of this um and so i think i think having the two of them running together could be really interesting uh diffusion that's the term i was looking for but anyway uh hey if you want to hear more about umachi check out the videos on their page yeah there you go we're past that story Rob you were moving on moving on yeah well we kept on talking about a i and this was well okay it wasn't a vibe coded act all right jav tell us about sec or seek uh short for sequence hey which is kind of like you think this sequence command or sec q uh stands you know it's used to generate sequences of numbers uh it's particularly useful for scenarios where you need to create a list of numbers you know within loops or you know such as you know your wild four until loops

1:30:08and with sequence you can quickly generate numbers from a starting value to an ending value with optional increments like for example sec q space 10 will generate a list of numbers one through 10 with each number on a new line sec q space three space nine will give you the numbers three through nine same same way one per line sec q three space seven space 30 will give you the numbers three through 30 incrementing by seven which in this case would be three 10 17 and 24 since seven more would be 31 it would be outside the desired range uh you can add text in the sequence the new line can be changed out for spaces or other delimiters padding the output is also an option you know there's many more ways you can generate the sequence of output you want and but if you take a look at the article linked in the show notes you can see examples of many more ways to generate the output

1:31:10yeah it's like a forward loop on bat in bash kind of yeah yeah it's very much reminding me of doing four loops in programming except you don't have to type it all out it's built in mm-hmm is it is it actually a bash built in uh not I mean it's it's probably on your your system not part of bash yeah it appears to be it's it is actually a a standalone binary yeah according to which yeah very cool I'll have to remember that looks like it uh really has some uses for like file names and such because it's got the substitution stuff built into it so very cool all right uh I've got a command line tip for us today and it's system d run we've done a lot of system d stuff but this one we have not ever looked at and it lets you run a transient service um so if you want to do something only once then this uh this is gonna be the way to do it so they've got a a really simple

1:32:15example here which is do a system d run you give it a name so in this case unit my task my task is the name and then you give it a command and so here for this this toy example it's sleep for 300 it'll start it and then you can check the status of it by system ctl status my task and you've got it there so the the idea being that it's kind of like the old run this in the background but with a little bit more modern tooling around it uh you can do some things around it that is interesting though like give it resource limits see puqota uh memory max some other things like that uh you can also run it in a specific slice which that's a system d idea um but can be pretty interesting and then you can do even like a uh a one shot timer like hey iwinch system d run and then the flag for whatever reason not sure why is on active equals five in so in five minutes run this command

1:33:22you can run it as other users you can even if you want to run as an interactive shell um so you can do you can do interesting things there like give me an interactive shell but only allow that shell and its children to use a gig of memory like um that's that's interesting that's something i've never played with before uh i've got a link up to oneuptime.com which is not a website i'm familiar with but they've got the blog post here that's really interesting about this particular command um and uh yeah really has some has some legs to it i think i'm i'm gonna play around with it some particularly that ability to to launch a shell and limit it's like it's memory usage and all that that could be pretty cool interesting yeah so uh system system d run and again i don't think we've ever talked about that one before but looks like a looks like a cool idea of bokehman all right well that is it that is the show i'm gonna let each of the guys plug whatever they want to

1:34:23rob is up first and rob i've got something of yours that is on the way you can talk about that let's see that's supposed to come tomorrow i think uh i i'm so i'm so spoiled and i'm used to things coming in a day but when they have to get manufactured when i hit the button then uh you know hit their print on demand yeah i'm supposed to show up tomorrow rob what am i talking about well what he is talking about is my books i'll start with that go to my website uh there is my book it is a memoir so it has stories of my life uh bearish stories of my life my trajectory from going coming from a poor kid in a trailer park to a technology leader that i am today and there are some fun stories along the way some of the dialogue has been remade because i can't remember uh

1:35:28everything i said as a child but the stories are true um so that there is my book it is available on amazon and an easy way to find it is first by finding me at my website robert pcambell.com if you've been listening for a while i tell you this every single week and it's always at the bottom corner right there and it's robert p as in patrick cambell.com you got that robert pcambell.com and on there uh if you scroll down or hit memoir at the top that'll take you to the book section where you click on the link and go to amazon or you could just search for trailer park to technology leader and it should show up um otherwise uh other things you can do on my site so many fun things so many fun things you do connect with me be a linkedin twitter blue sky mastodon and if you don't

1:36:32want to buy a book you could still contribute to me with a five dollar coffee right here on the coffee go there you go all right very cool Jeff do you have anything nearly that cool to plug no i'll just uh i'll just say that uh i'm gonna give a little poetry to make the world a little better place spinning wheel of death cursor dances time stand still patience where so thin have a great week everybody patience where's thin yes i've had that experience with my computers before all right appreciate you guys being here it's been a lot of fun all right if you want to find more of me one of the places is over at hackenates for floss weekly lives we talk about it from time to time here on the untutled linux show and we did this week as well and this this past week uh the um the show was a really really good one uh it's called the

1:37:36two wolves which is it's it's all about ai and uh it was a lot of fun to talk about so go check that out um other than that we just want to say thank you thank you to everybody that's here whether you watch or listen get a sliver on the download we appreciate you being here and we'll be back next on the untutled linux show i'm not giving up i am selling the building the final season of fx is the bear the restaurant is flooded everything's either gonna be okay or not we are outgun and we are outmaned but we have each other fx is the bear the final season all episodes now streaming on disney plus still waiting in line again that's time you'll never get back save time and money with stamps

1:38:41dot com over four million businesses have skipped the line with stamps dot com join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now print postage for certified mail registered mail and packages in seconds then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time go to stamps dot com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift taxes and fees apply once delicious perfect for nights out nights in and people who like to drink tequila just add ice, lime and your mouth then hold on time 100% agave 0% ego es polo tequila for a real margarita ride the rooster es polo tequila 40% alcohol by volume 80 proof copyright 2026 compare America, New York, New York drink responsibly