Upcoming Events
Linuxfest Northwest
- April 25th - 27th in Bellingham, WA. I'll be tabling, so please do say hello.
Audience Suggestion
Forgejo, their project repo
Terminal Tool Recommendation
Television - fuzzy finder terminal tool that integrates with the shell to easily find files, docker images, git repositories and whatever else you need based on simple configuration files and syntax highlighting.
- Friendly interface that supports clean themes.
- Keyboard will automatically exit out at any time, making it very useful as a pseudo-file manager.
- Full Featured Terminal File Manager alternatives that work well are Ranger and Midnight Commander.
Self-hosted Tools I Recommend
Uptime Kuma - Monitoring Tool that sends notifications to basically any tool imaginable. Super easy to setup.
- Came in super useful this morning when I had an issue with the podcast! It told me I needed to fix the thing, so awesome.
- Hosting on my DHCP server, because if that is offline my local network is already in trouble.
- Live Demo to play with.
- Live Status Page for disroot.org
Dockje, Docker compose based management webui. Same developer as Uptime Kuma!
- Point at your compose directory and success.
- Includes the links to your services, which I find more useful than a dedicated Dashboard application.
- Alternative to Portainer, which I've never found useful as a compose user. Many people love this tool though. Nothing stops you from running both.
Homebox Inventory Management to track your devices, warranty information, add QR codes and keep track of where things are. Their Github repo
- Spreadsheets could do this as well.
- Super simple, looks nice, completely obvious how to use.
- Keeping track of the devices I'm lending to friends.
LINUXPREPPER at checkout or referral links below.
More Self-hosted & Terminal Tools I Recommend.
AI Experimentation is underway... let's talk about it.
Whisper Speech to Text dictation. The reason you have all the subtitles now on Youtube.
Themio StereoTool software based audio processor as VST, GUI / terminal app for x86 and arm.
- Running remotely on a Pi 4
scp - ssh based copying to and from remote locations.
Learning Linux TV Bash Scripting course
ffmpeg -i VIDEO.mp4 -bits_per_raw_sample 24 -ar 44100 OUTPUT.wav
- For extracting audio out of a video file.
Leaving Linux and getting a new computer.
Lenovo Ideapad 5i Pro
Testing out this new laptop with Windows 11 before seeing how it works across various distributions.
- AntiX live boot distribution
- Failed to see my monitor resolution.
- WiFi didn't work... that is a no go.
- KDE Neon for testing the latest release of KDE Tooling.
- Majority of all hardware just worked! Good to know all is well on latest Plasma
- Simple, functional demo to confirm Plasma is well supported on your machine.
- My introduction to KDE Plasma 6, since I'm still on 5!
- NixOS immutable distribution tested for a week.
- Hyper active community support. Very good.
- Feels similar to editing XML files powering Openbox back around 2010.
- Struggled to add RTX4050 video support and about 7 pieces of hardware not recognized, including my monitor...
- Despite days of customizing, my bash history was only a few entries! All you need are basic config files to restore.
- Many, many more options to explore. No hiding this is an advanced distribution.
- Basic functionality is all there, but documentation is lacking for the average person. It is a tool for someone who already knows exactly what they want. Rides the line between enthusiast and programmer.
- If you have an older, turn key computer it should work just fine for you. Especially for a desktop or server. I can resume this journey at any moment thanks to the configuration files.
- Kubuntu with Plasma 6.1 on latest 24.10
- Automatically saw my monitor correctly and added all major drivers in one command.
- Configured the entire system by hand (normally I'd run ansible) to see how long it would take.
- Base installation took 20 minutes, customizations took 6:10 minutes, Plasma and manual tweaks 10 minutes. At 36 minutes I was running Whisper and working on the show.
- The time to undo what I don't like in Ubuntu was very brief, though I do see myself migrating back to Nix in the future.
Thoughts on recent news
Ubuntu to replace GNU coreutils with Rust-based uutils
State of the Podcast
Audience listeners have exploded in the last episode! Don't forget to send me your feedback.
In the Next Episode(s)
- Touring a makerspace.
- Learning more about Linuxfest Northwest.
- Longer format interviews are coming.
- AI Experimentation, both locally on the laptop and on arm64 devices.
- Subscription model for the podcast to be announced.
- Introduction to Docker Containers.
- Paper crafting: Zine printing, Print and Play games, indie developer stores.