প্রতিলিপি 🔗
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Welcome to The Bootloader. I'm Paul Cutler.
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And I'm Tod Kurt. The show works like this. In each episode, we bring around six things we're excited to share.
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Chatting about each one for about five minutes. For detailed show notes and transcripts, visit thebootloader.net.
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Paul, what's the first one for us?
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Back in mid-November, Valve Software announced the Steam Machine, a console-like PC running SteamOS,
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which under the covers is really Arch Linux.
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Valve has spent almost 10 years seeding open source developers and projects to get Windows games to run on Linux using emulation,
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and has had the Steam Deck, a handheld PC, for the last couple of years,
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and now they are graduating to the Steam Machine.
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Just over a month ago I did something I rarely do, and I wrote a blog post on building my own Steam Machine.
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If you have an extra PC around, you don't have to wait for Valve to release the Steam Machine,
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you can install a Linux distro called Bazzite right now
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to get the SteamOS experience.
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Bazzite is another flavor of Linux,
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this one based on Fedora and Fedora Silverblue,
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but they call it atomic and immutable.
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According to the Fedora Silverblue homepage,
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which Bazzite is based on,
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being atomic means the system is updated in one go
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and an update won't be applied if anything goes wrong.
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And you don't use DNF to install apps.
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Everything is installed using Flatpak
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and apps are separate from the base system.
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So this isn't the usual Linux you might have used in the past.
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It's been brought up to modern standards.
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And it's not something brand new.
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Bazzite and its bigger sibling, Project Bluefin,
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are going on year five.
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I've linked in the show notes an interview
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with one of the maintainers, Jorge Castro,
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who talks more about the background and how it works.
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But then Bazzite takes it one step further
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and makes it even easier to install Linux.
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The biggest example is it includes
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the proprietary video card drivers for your GPU.
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so you don't have to screw around with that.
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In fact, when you go to download Bazzite,
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it asks you three questions.
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What hardware is it for?
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Is this for a desktop, a home theater PC,
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or a handheld PC with some specific models to choose from?
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I chose home theater PC, and then it asked,
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who's your GPU vendor?
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I picked AMD, 'cause I'm using a 5700 XT,
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and then it asked you to pick a desktop environment.
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And if you know me, of course I chose GNOME over KDE.
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I ran into one upstream Fedora bug
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to install it on a PC with two SSDs, but other than that when I was done, it boots right up into
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Steam using Steam's Big Picture mode. I hooked up a Bluetooth Xbox wireless controller without
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any issues and started installing some games. Out of the 177 Steam games I have accumulated
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over the past 15 or 20 years, 127 worked in Linux on SteamOS, which I thought was super impressive.
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It's been fun kicking back on the couch playing some of the games, and they play surprisingly well,
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both with the controller and on the big screen. Next up, I found a guide to turn it into a real
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console-like experience with waking it up via the Bluetooth controller, which will then use HDMI CEC
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to turn on the receiver and the TV automatically. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, hats off to the Baz Night
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developers for making it so easy and smooth. I've included links to my blog post, to Baz Night
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itself, and to the home theater guide in the show notes. That's great. Yeah, I've got a Steam deck,
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That's the little handheld console.
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Yeah.
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And it's really good.
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It's really well done.
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And it's got some really innovative controls to let you try to do things
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that weren't really meant to be used with a game pad.
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It's got like dual track pads and all that kind of stuff.
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And I'm just amazed that Steam has been hacking on getting Windows
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games to work and not Windows by and by not using any kind of emulation layer.
Load full transcript
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I think the way that like that one we used to all use
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uh, like 20 years ago. Wine? Wine, yeah. It's like it's not using wine, it's doing something else.
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It actually uses wine, it uses Proton, which is built on top of wine. Oh it does! Yeah. Oh it
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does. Okay, for some reason I, I always thought that the wines emulation was like too slow for
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real games, but I've been, I played a couple of like actual sort of fast-paced games and it seemed
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to work really well. And I really want a Steam Machine PC thing. I've been, like for the last
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five or six years I've been wanting to buy a new gaming PC but man trying to get a
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whole gaming PC up and going is like an experience you know. One of the neat
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things if you have a Steam Deck you can take your micro SD card with your games
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and plug it into your Bazzite machine and it just works so you can don't have
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to install some of your game data in both places so I thought that was kind
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of neat to be able to Steam Deck. That's really cool yeah it's it's uh if I had
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some PC parts laying around that were like worthy of this I might try out
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buys that but I'm like well I've already been holding up for five years or so can
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I just hold it a little while longer until Val's steam machine comes out?
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Well when you pick one up you'll have to review one on the show. Oh totally. What's your first one for us this episode?
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So sewing machines. Sewing machines are pretty nerdy actually. They're
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incredible pieces of engineering. If you've never seen how a sewing machine
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works it's amazingly complicated yet all that complication is hidden from you the
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user, the sewing machine operator,
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and they've worked the same way for over 100 years.
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I recently took a sewing machine class,
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actually a couple of them, learned a lot, had a lot of fun.
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If you've seen the things on how sewing machines work,
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like I'll link to a Veritasium video that's pretty good.
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The sewing machine actually has two threads,
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a top and a bottom thread,
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and it locks those threads together across the fabric
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to bind the two pieces of fabric together.
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And it does this via a hidden mechanism
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where it kind of, you know,
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it ties the two threads together
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you seeing any of this, and it does that a hundred times a minute.
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This lock stitch that it creates is really strong, and you can change
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both the horizontal and vertical spacing of the stitching via some knobs
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on the sewing machine to give you different effects of the stitch,
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like maybe make it a stretchy stitch.
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And sewing machines come with a wide variety of adjustment knobs and levers,
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and that can be a little daunting if you look at it.
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It looks almost like a Rube Goldberg machine.
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But after you take a little class, get your good instructions from somebody,
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It's pretty obvious and the intro class I took,
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they walked us through all the,
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how all the different settings change the stitch
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and that most of the time you can just ignore all that
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and just use the machine with standard settings,
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which is pretty cool.
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I thought you'd have to like be manipulating the knobs
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all the time, but you don't.
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If you're interested in learning about sewing machines
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yourself, you can find cheap classes on sewing machines
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from community colleges, makerspaces,
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or even for free from family members who sew.
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Like when I was a little kid, my grandma tried to teach me sewing, and I wish I'd paid more
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attention because all I can remember is that she had me thread up thread on a bobbin.
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So I remember how to do that.
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The classes that I took were from a local craft-oriented maker space, and they had several
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other useful upcoming classes once you've taken these intro ones, like how to make your
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own hoodies and sweatshirts.
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They had a whole stack of fleece material that was ready for people to start cutting
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out the pattern and sew them together to make your own hoodies.
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And I learned for the instructors there that many places like this also let you either borrow a
machine or kind of like stay in the place and use the machine at different times of the day.
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So you don't even have to own a machine.
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You can just like borrow one essentially.
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But if you do want to buy one, sewing machines, like a good starter machine I've learned is only about 250 bucks brand new, which compared to all this other tech gadgets we buy is pretty cheap, you know.
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when our phones cost over $1,000.
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Right.
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So why did I take sewing machine classes?
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Mostly I'm interested in making some little custom bags
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and dust covers for various gadgets,
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like my synthesizers and keyboards and stuff.
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Also maybe sew up some holes that are
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in some favorite pair of jeans.
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There's a couple of shirts that I have that are little boxy,
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and I like to maybe hem them in a bit
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to make it look a little bit more fitted.
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So yeah, everyone I recommend give a sewing machine a try.
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They're really fun pieces of technology.
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You may have one already hiding in your house,
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you know, in the garage, in the basement.
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And there's lots of YouTube videos to help you get started
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if you don't want to take a class.
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I've included a playlist of one example,
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but just type in "How to Use a Sewing Machine" on YouTube
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and you'll find a bunch.
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- See, I'm spoiled.
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My partner is really into sewing.
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She's got a number of sewing machines, a couple of antiques.
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So I've never had to learn it because I just asked her to do it
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You've got an expert in the house exactly and you know going back years and years before the rise of Facebook groups
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She ran a really big online sewing community and put together sewing get-togethers where people would fly in and they would all sew for the weekend
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And that kind of stuff. So oh my gosh. Wow. Yeah, there's really cool communities built all around sewing
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Yeah, it's and it can be amazingly complicated if you want it to be but it can also be like just I want to hem up
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my jeans two inches or something, you know.
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All right, Paul, what's your one for this week?
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- My second pick is a roundup of recent CAD news,
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starting with Hackaday's recent story on brep.io.
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Brep is a brand new from scratch
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boundary representation kernel.
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Brep.io is a new browser-based CAD
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where all computation is done on the client side,
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including the complex operations
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like fillets, lofts, and more.
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They even have a live demo for you
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to give it a try running at brep.io.
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Check out the story at Hackaday, follow the project page,
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or check out the GitHub repository.
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Next up is MicroCAD, which is very young
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in its development and still is an alpha stage.
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Their homepage calls it a new open source
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programming language that can generate 2D sketches
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and 3D objects.
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The easiest comparison that came to mind to me
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is probably something like OpenSCAD.
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They've got some really neat videos
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of how they're using MicroCAD to create models,
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including a logo, Lego bricks, gears, and more.
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And then lastly is CADQuest, a website to help you level up your CAD skills.
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It has a free and a paid tier, but I haven't tried it out personally.
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They claim it works with any CAD software, but it really looks like they prefer SolidWorks.
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So if you're into gamification to level up your CAD skills, it might be worth checking
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out.
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Lots of links in the show notes to all of them.
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Oh, that's really cool.
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I'm a big fan of OpenSCAD, OpenSCAD.
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It's got a really old interface though,
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'cause it's been around for 20 years or something.
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But there's all these CAD, sorry,
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browser-based systems now, like Onshape
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is a professional CAD system
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that you pay thousands of dollars per year for,
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and it's all entirely browser-based.
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Like, why doesn't this exist in a more open-source way?
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And it's really cool to see some of these CAD systems
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that are available just so nicely there.
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I really want to try out this B-Rep.
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Yeah, I'm not quite sure either.
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[LAUGHTER]
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But it does look interesting.
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Totally, yeah.
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What's your next one for us?
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All right, so I do all the synthesizer stuff.
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And someone that I've been following on YouTube for a while
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is this guy named Moritz Klein.
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He's an online instructor.
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I think that's kind of what he described himself as.
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He's also a circuit designer.
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And he does this all on YouTube.
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And it's all for analog synth circuits.
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And the reason why I bring him up
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is because his most recent video that came out
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a couple of weeks ago is how to build a drum
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sequencer using just chips, digital chips, analog chips,
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no coding, no microcontroller.
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And the whole thing is really understandable.
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It's the way that sequencers were made back
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when the original sequencers were made,
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like in the 1970s or whatever.
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But what's really cool is that the sequencer he designs
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has been simplified, has been kind of pared down
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to just what's necessary.
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So it's really understandable, and it
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makes it easier to implement.
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And it's also-- the choices he's made
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has made it very usable in the final form, the final circuit
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he builds.
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And the video he has walks you entirely all the way
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through that and kind of his thought processes
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as to why some of the things he's done he did.
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This drum sequencer video is the latest
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in his series of building a whole set of modules
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to implement a analog drum machine,
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sort of like the venerable TR-808 or TR-606,
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you might've heard the drum sounds from.
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All these videos are very approachable
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and the sounds that come from his circuits
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sound really nice.
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They sound like in some ways,
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exactly what you'd expect from these analog drum sounds,
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but also they're tunable in ways
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that the original circuits weren't.
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So you can make new sounds, which is really neat.
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These drum synths videos do assume you know
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how to read a schematic
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and have a basic understanding of electronics,
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but he has another series for beginners
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that teaches you those skills
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while also helping you build little synthesizer circuits.
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So it's really nice.
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And if you are worried about getting
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the physical stuff hooked up,
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he also works with the fairly famous modular synth company,
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Erika Synths, to make a set of DIY kits
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that are based on his videos.
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And one of his kits is this thing called the EduLabor.
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I think it's a it's a it's a breadboard system that has a bunch of parts already built for you to let you power and
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Monitor like with a little tiny oscilloscope and control like with knobs and buttons and stuff the circuits you build on a breadboard
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And of course you can always just wire up wire up all the circuits that he talks about on your own breadboard
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This is kind of what I do
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but having the labor would make it a lot faster because I'd have to like pull out my little
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Power supply and pull out my knobs that I can plug in the breadboard
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But the labore has all that kind of already set up, you know
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So it'd be much faster and so even though I've been doing electronics for decades
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Watching his videos has improved my analog skills, which I don't use nearly enough
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And it's helped me think about how to implement some of these emulations of analog sense circuits in code, which is where mostly I live
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So so yeah
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I think it's highly recommended two thumbs up if you're interested in how analog sense work or just analog circuits give this video a try
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I'll have links in the show notes
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Yeah, I took a look at the labor and it's it's an investment. It's about $300 or I think 260 euros
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But it looks really neat
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It's got the the breadboard lying around
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In the middle and then laying around it is all those different modular stuff that you can plug in which
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Tended to go for what I think of about 60 to 70 euros as well the plug-in so really neat system
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Yeah, yeah, it does all this stuff all the all the music stuff is always so expensive
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and it's always kind of a bummer.
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And like, it's like, oh, then I'll just save the money
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and do it all myself with a normal breadboard,
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which is totally doable, but, oh man.
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So yeah, I don't have any of the Labore stuff,
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but it's something on my wishlist
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if anyone wealthy wants to buy it for me.
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- Well, our GitHub sponsorship page is open, so.
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- That's right.
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All right, Paul, what's your final one for this time?
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- Way back in episode nine,
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we talked about Radio Free Fedi,
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a streaming radio station made up of artists on the Fetaverse like Mastodon.
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Just over a year ago, Radio Free Fedi shut down on January 1st, 2025. It was a lot of
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work for one person to curate all the music, prep it for listening, and manage all the
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infrastructure behind it, and I'm glad we had it for the time we did. I've linked
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to an article in the show notes that breaks down the timeline of how the station came
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to an end.
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But all is not lost. The Indie Beat Radio was raised out of the ashes to share Fetaverse
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musicians with the world. The Indie Beat Radio federates with Bandwagon FM, which is an alternative
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to Bandcamp, allowing artists to sell their music online using their own Stripe account
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to keep 100% of the revenue, unlike Bandcamp. It's also federated with Mastodon, Loops,
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and more to share their music with their fans, and it's 100% open source. Artists who opt
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in on Bandwagon
can have their songs stream on the Indie Beat Radio, which features over
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thousand different tracks. Where Radio Free Fedi featured just a few channels, the Indie
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Beat Radio has ten channels, streaming everything from Bonkwave to Jazz to an Everything channel
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to Rock and more. Friend of the show Andy Piper even created a GNOME Shell extension
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for listening to the station if you're a GNOME user. And then they took it to another
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level on Sunday, December 28th, and launched the Indie Beat Television. Imagine MTV, but
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by Fetaverse Musicians. The Sunday that it launched, I just happened to be up at 6am
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time for the launch and I'm glad I did. I was blown away by the quality of the videos.
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I knew there were some really good musicians, but there are some great visual artists too.
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Visit the homepage to see the schedule of different shows that are available, including
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one that is just animation videos, which are really cool. And the timing couldn't be better.
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On New Year's Eve, MTV announced it was shutting down its remaining music channels.
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So now you can visit the Indie Beat television when you need a video fix.
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A big shout out to everyone who has donated their time to these projects, including Ben
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Pate of Bandwagon.fm, Kirsten Lambertson of the Indie Beat Radio, friend of the show Axwax,
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Limebar, and I'm sure I'm missing more.
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Go check out the streams for both the Indie Beat Radio and television.
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That's too bad about MTV.
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On the one hand, it's like, yes, we outlived MTV.
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On the other hand, it's like, man, MTV was like, when it first started, it introduced
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me to so much music that was not playing on normal radio.
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Like later, it became like a super popular thing.
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And so it became an echo of what was on popular radio.
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But those original VJs were just playing stuff you would never hear unless it was
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unless you were near a cool college.
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So, hey, now we've got college radio across the Fediverse with with Indie Beat
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Radio and Indie Beat Television.
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This is cool.
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Exactly. It's pretty neat.
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I've
been tuning in just even just in the background at times and some of the
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songs, I'll whip my head around and go, that was really good.
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and I have to look up who the artist is and write it down.
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- Totally.
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- What's your last one for us?
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- All right, so something tonally shift back down
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to the super nerd level of GitHub and get repos and stuff.
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In GitHub, there's this thing called GitHub Actions.
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They're really cool.
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You set up this little YAML config file
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and save it in a special directory in your repo.
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And anytime you do a specific action,
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like say, commit a file, publish a version of your repo,
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create a new tagging repo, GitHub will spin up a server,
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run the code in that config file, and give you the output.
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And so what people often use this for
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is for continuous integration tests
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where it'll recompile all the code in the repo
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and run tests against it to see if the thing you just checked
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in broke the build.
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And then it'll send emails or whatever out to people
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saying, hey, you messed up.
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So it's really great.
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There's a bunch of other cool things.
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If you do CircuitPython development,
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you'll notice that if you have a library,
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if you're doing a library,
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when you create a new version of your library,
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it'll automatically create all the build products
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that the CircuitPython tools need to publish your library
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to Circup and other places.
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So it's just kind of magical.
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The hard part is getting that config file,
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that YAML config file formatted correctly
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to do the things you actually need it to do.
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How do you actually see what changes happen
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is while you make a change to the file,
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you check it in, you commit it,
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just like any other file in your repo,
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and then you wait for the action to run on GitHub,
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and then you see how it breaks, and then you repeat.
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And that can take a little while.
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So there is a cool tool called ACT, just A-C-T,
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that lets you run GitHub actions locally on your computer
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or on your local server.
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You just CD into your local repo and you run ACT.
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And you can give it command line arguments if you want
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for more detailed fine-grained running,
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but that's pretty much all you need to do.
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And ACT works with the power of Docker, of course.
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It's not exactly the virtual environments
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that GitHub uses for its action runners,
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but it's pretty close.
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You can tune the size of the Docker images it uses.
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If you're doing something really standard
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that's just like some simple like Node.js libraries
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or something, you don't need a really big VM,
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a really big Docker image to do that, to do those tests.
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For me, because I'm doing like usually hardware stuff,
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I kind of need like the biggest Ubuntu Docker image
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to sort of fake out the system to know that I had installed
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the various USB level drivers and stuff.
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While ACT is kind of geared towards Linux based actions,
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you can also do Mac OS and Windows GitHub actions
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if you're on those systems.
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By the way, if you didn't know that you could run
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Mac-based and Windows-based GitHub actions, you can,
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and it's cool.
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It's one of the ways I test my programs
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across multiple architectures.
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But you can also run your GitHub actions locally
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if you have a Mac or a Windows box.
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What I've been using it for is to do the sort of
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iterative design of getting the YAML config file.
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Usually I'll have a separate repo that I use
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for testing all the changes,
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00:20:58,840 --> 00:21:00,900
'cause one of the things you'll see is,
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for every time you
wanna make a change to the YAML file
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as another check-in to your GitHub,
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you have this history of this litter in your GitHub history
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of just all the things you've done
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to try to make the config file work.
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And so I've been doing that in a separate repo usually,
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but now I can do it locally instead
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without cluttering up my Git history.
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(laughs)
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So I'm hoping it'll be a little faster for me.
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I just discovered this a couple of days ago.
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So it's early days.
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- That's gotta be faster
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because I don't think everyone realizes too
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that on the free tier of GitHub,
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you've got to check it in.
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And like you said,
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kind of messes up your commit history.
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But then you have to wait for an available runner to start.
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So if you can do it locally,
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you're just saving seconds just there.
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By the time you're doing multiple of these,
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you're saving a lot of time.
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00:21:47,640 --> 00:21:50,080
While the GitHub Linux runners are usually pretty fast,
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the Windows and Mac runners on GitHub
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00:21:54,280 --> 00:21:55,280
are actually pretty slow.
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And so if you've got a spare laptop
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running one of those OSs
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and you need to do Windows or Mac type builds,
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then doing it locally could be so much faster.
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00:22:06,360 --> 00:22:08,060
Like, you know, just waiting after,
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wait five minutes for the Windows runner to become available
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00:22:11,420 --> 00:22:13,020
and then run the Windows runner,
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00:22:13,120 --> 00:22:15,840
which seems to run at like 1/5 the speed of my laptop.
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00:22:17,340 --> 00:22:17,660
(laughing)
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00:22:17,720 --> 00:22:18,780
It's like, come on.
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00:22:19,260 --> 00:22:20,160
- And I'm looking at their homepage,
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00:22:20,240 --> 00:22:21,580
it looks like it's available in Homebrew
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00:22:21,700 --> 00:22:23,000
to run on Mac OS as well.
449
00:22:23,760 --> 00:22:26,260
- Yeah, yeah, just do brew install act and you'll get it.
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00:22:26,740 --> 00:22:28,340
Yeah, I've been mostly playing with this in Linux right now
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because that's kind of where I do a lot
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of my iterative stuff for the actions.
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But yeah, we'll see if I start to move into the Windows thing or the Mac thing.
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I think it'll be pretty cool.
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00:22:38,710 --> 00:22:39,360
That is pretty cool.
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00:22:40,560 --> 00:22:41,200
Well, that's our show.
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00:22:41,580 --> 00:22:46,100
For detailed show notes and transcripts, visit www.thebootloader.net.
458
00:22:46,740 --> 00:22:48,240
You can also order a free sticker.
459
00:22:48,480 --> 00:22:51,980
We've got stickers available and linked to that on the homepage as well.
460
00:22:52,920 --> 00:22:54,580
Until next time, stay positive.
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00:22:54,820 --> 00:22:55,520
(bright music)