674: LAN Before Time

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Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
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My name is Wes.
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And my name is Brent.
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Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, Linux is saying goodbye to AppleTalk.
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So naturally, we're bringing it back. We're going to build a tiny retro LAN
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with Mac OS 8, Linux, Netatalk, no TCP IP.
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And we'll tell you about a surprisingly hard part that we ran into.
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Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts,
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some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate
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greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, guys.
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Hey, Chris. Hey, my son. Hello, Brent.
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Hi. Good crew in there today. Hi. And the hell up there in the quiet listening,
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too. Hello, everybody, live over at jblive.tv.
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Nice to have you on board. And good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking.
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Go to defined.net slash unplugged. You know, this week, we're remembering a
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time when networking felt local and understandable.
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And that's why I like Manage Nebula from Define Networking. It's a decentralized
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VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that was originally developed to
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connect all of Slack's global infrastructure securely and safely.
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What's also great about Nebula is you can run your own lightweight lighthouse,
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your own nodes. You control the visibility and connectivity.
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You have that under your power. It's fast. It's encrypted. It's resilient.
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And it's great for connectivity for a home lab all the way up to global enterprises.
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So start with 100 hosts for free. No credit card required.
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Defined.net slash unplugged. Go over there.
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Check it out. Support the show at defined.net slash unplugged.
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A quick spot of housekeeping. Wes, you wanted to remind us about NixVegas coming up around the corner.
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Yeah, that's right. NixVegas, a great conference I had the privilege of speaking at last year.
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If you don't remember, it's a sub-conference at DEF CON.
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So it's a ton of fun, lots of security, hackers, and with the efforts of the
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SoCal NixOS user group and Distractions, Inc., there's now a bunch of Nix nerds there, too.
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So the CFP is still open for a week and three days until the 16th,
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or I think it ends maybe the midnight on the 15th.
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And they're doing something kind of interesting this year that not only can
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you do like a call for papers style submission to do a talk,
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but they're also doing something where they want you to submit.
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Like if you don't want to do a whole public speaking thing, they're going to
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have a space for people to show off projects instead of giving presentations.
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So if you have a cool Nix-related thing you want to demo at a con,
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they'll have space, maybe infrastructure, and so you can kind of have more casual
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conversations, demo that without having to go through the rigmarole of doing a public talk.
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So I just think that's great, and it's super good time, very clever nerds doing
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the intersection of security.
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And as we know, Nix makes a great foundation for that.
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And if you're curious, they do have a little sneak peek of some of the talks
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they've already accepted, and we'll have that linked in the show notes.
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All right so time is running out though if you want to get in on that goodness
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you got like a limited window of time you can still register.
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And go but if you do submit a cfp and get accepted they do cover the defcon badge which is great.
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Sweet sweet links in the show notes for that as we do,
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So we wanted to say goodbye to Apple Talk properly. You know,
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it was released in 1985 as the primary protocol used by Apple devices,
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all the way up pretty solidly into the 90s.
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And it was dropped officially in Snow Leopard when they just sort of switched all in on TCP IP.
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Now, we recently covered that it's going to be removed from the Linux kernel
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in Linux 7.2, the next major release.
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I think you're underselling this. You know, you're just coming in here matter-of-factly,
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you know, just doing our serious news business. We talked about how it was going
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to be removed from the kernel as if it hasn't been something of a small existential
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crisis for you since we talked about that.
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It's true. That's fair. It's true. I was trying to keep the emotion out of it
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because, you know, I'm upset about this.
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You made swag just to, like, put your tears all over them.
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I know. Well, here's the irony of it, too. And this is why it hurts.
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Right. Is and I hope today we will make the case why Apple talk was perhaps
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one of the greatest protocols of all time. I'm going to try to make the case today. We'll see.
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But what hurts about it is I know it was ironically removed from the kernel,
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because it started getting more attention.
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Okay? That's just a little bit of salt in the wound, boys.
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It turns out the LLMs, they really like it. They were checking it out.
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And now we're following it.
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So on June 16th, I went into the Linux kernel mailing list, and you can find
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this email here. I'll have it linked.
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AppleTalk has been removed from Mac OS 10.6 since Snow Leopard in 2009.
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We just recently got a burst of AI-generated fixes for the protocol,
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which nobody's reviewing.
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Let AppleTalk follow the AX25 and ham radio out of the Linux tree.
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We'll maintain code at, and they link it to an orphan.
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That is cool. I didn't know that existed until this happened.
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There is this Linux NetDev mod orphan repo you can get for this stuff, but.
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That's legit cool. That's legit cool. I want to take us back in time,
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though, because you guys, I mean, I think everybody's just rolling their eyes
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at this, but there could have been a world where AppleTalk took off.
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See, it arrived early on when there was not a standard. People were not using
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TCP IP. That wasn't the obvious choice.
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Everybody, every major vendor had their own local LAN network standard.
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Microsoft had NetBui, NetWare had IPX, and Apple had AppleTalk,
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and there were others as well.
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And, you know, in the fringes, the weirdos were using something called TCP, but we'll get to that.
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I mean, you hadn't even standardized on like what you were doing at the physical
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layer yet, right? I mean, Ethernet, token ring, other options.
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Which was one of the great things about AppleTalk is it had real flexibility.
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It could do local talk, Ethernet, token ring, whatever the sort of the flavor
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du jour of networking was.
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AppleTalk probably worked with it, even down to just computers connected directly to each other.
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It was beyond what most people could do. But what you have to appreciate is
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AppleTalk had dynamic addressing, DHCP essentially,
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and had name discovery, DNS essentially, built in on day one.
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Name resolution, auto discovery. So you could go out and get yourself a tiny little beige Mac.
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You could drop it down on the network, plug it in, and it would start seeing
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the other Mac. And then you plug in the next one and it sees the other Mac.
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That's a strange concept. Right?
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Right.
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Now, I mean, Wes, I know we're kind of jumping around here, but you were looking
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at some of the protocol stuff here. I mean, it's genuinely impressive, right?
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Yeah, it is pretty great. So you mentioned local talk, which was basically they
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hadn't really planned when they were doing like the first Macintosh for networking
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to necessarily be a part. And they were already kind of overdone on how many
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chips they could fit on the board and the expense and all of that.
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And so they had a serial bus and they're like, well, we're just going to turn
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that into, you know, a physical layer for networking and implement packet collision
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in user space, essentially.
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in the software that we run it on and just make it work.
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And then later that had to get ported over to things like EtherTalk or TokenTalk
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so that you could have flexible physical layers, which, yeah,
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that already is huge, right? Which kind of helped us that we did bridge into
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Ethernet winning the world.
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But then above that, yeah, so they've got, well, they've got a lot of interesting
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stuff, but the main one you're talking about is NBP, which is the name-binding
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protocol, which is the big one.
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For the 80s, 85, 87, 88, like this was huge.
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Yep. Distributed, no central authority. It provides a way basically to have
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a nice name, a human readable name.
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And what they were early on is this idea that we've slowly gotten to and the
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TCP IP did not come with, which is like, don't use the address,
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right? The address is like a temporary thing, right? You're sending the letter to me.
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Okay, you might need the address of the house I'm renting right now,
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but that's going to change. And the same idea is here.
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So like you want to talk to the same printer on, you know, the third,
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the third floor office printer. But if we go redo the underlying networking,
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that shouldn't have to be a big deal.
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Yeah.
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And then already they also had this hilarious protocol called AARP.
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Oh, yeah. It's not the, you know, American Association of Retired Persons or
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whatever the correct abbreviation is.
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It's the Apple Talk Address Resolution Protocol.
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And this is because like they did. So you have DDP, which is kind of sort of,
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you can imagine, it's like the, it's sort of the IP equivalent in this.
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So you have whatever you're doing at the physical layer.
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And then on top of that rides DDP, which is sort of the thing that actually has the address.
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which is like three little components one of that's a socket one of that's a
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local address and once they got routing which they didn't have originally they
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added like a global thing that's
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sort of like the router number so you can have separate sub networks,
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but you need a way if you have this apple layer address how do you get the like
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ethernet address or whatever on the physical media that's where aarp comes in
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so like already and they had this concept where you could go from a human-friendly
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name of your printer and then you distribute it without a centralized server
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you ask the network hey what's the you know the apple address of this so you
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get that back then and of course you this all gets cash too,
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and then from that you go hey how do i find that on this like ethernet network
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that i'm actually on and you get that back and then you can open a ddp,
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um which is datagram delivery protocol which is kind of like you can imagine
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at udp on ip but you don't even need a separate thing because it was just built
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into how it worked and then you can send basic unreliable networking and then on top of that,
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they kind of they kind of went a fascinating path because instead of starting
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with like TCP has these full like you know the SYNXN stuff and the bidirectional
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setup and all the things that come with TCP.
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They started with just little transactions. So they have ATP,
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which is AppleTalk Transaction Protocol, which is just request and response.
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It's almost like an RPC thing. So it wasn't meant to be this open-ended,
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long-living connection.
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It limits, like it only allows up to eight request packets, which is kind of fascinating.
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And then only later, after it was sort of proven out, because this was really
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early, right? Networking was still becoming like a thing consumers even did or had access to.
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later on they added the apple talk data stream protocol which is basically the tcp equivalent
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it's reliable ordered bi-directional byte stream but it kind of has some of
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their own twists it has symmetric teardown it has a notion of an out of band
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attention message so if you need to send some urgent
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message but you don't want it to be stuck in the queue behind whatever you've
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already sent it has an idea for that.
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Yeah you could do that for like server shutdown alerts.
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Exactly and they have a way to say like oh i you know just i need to shut this
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down early so reject everything that's going to come after this.
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Kind of fascinating. It's like a whole parallel stack of things.
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And that's before you even get to the application layer where you might build
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something like an AppleTalk filing server with the AFP, the AppleTalk filing protocol.
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Where they would take advantage of some of the built-in protocol stuff like,
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we're shutting down the server for 10 minutes. So back in the day,
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you would alert the network before the services went unavailable because that
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was just built into AppleTalk. And then they built in a way to display the message into macOS.
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They also had an interesting concept, which we don't really need to get into
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for today too much, but of zones which kind of went along with these names and
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zones are fascinating because instead of like usually when we do something like
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vlans or we think about network segments
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it's at least somewhat related to the physical layer or however it's like you
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know worked out and the actual the cabling of it or where the switch is involved,
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but zones were meant to be social like zones are not connected,
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in the first version they were but in the second version they like sort of totally
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decoupled from the actual networking side of it and so they're really more meant
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for the human layers of how you want to associate these names
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and then all of the infrastructure on the apple talk side figured out how to
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map the zones across different routers and all of that under the hood
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so they were really ahead in multiple ways i.
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Think it was like more complex than say like even work groups were in windows.
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Yeah i think i have a question at this point in the show um why did we get rid of this.
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It sounds freaking great how cool is the decentralized like name discovery stuff. I know. I know.
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Now I understand your existential crisis.
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It was it was so simple. And imagine the type of customers out there like schools
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and offices where they they they're
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not really even intending to build a network because like Wes said.
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The consumer didn't even know what a network was, but they knew that they wanted
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to share a printer, right? That was sort of their level.
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And so offices and schools, governments, like they were buying these computers
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and they still weren't understanding the benefits of networking.
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So they would have them and they wouldn't even necessarily connect them.
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And so companies like Apple and others had to put together essentially presentations
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and sales pitches to try to convince corporate America why they wanted computer networking.
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So what does it look like what's what look like the network well you can't see
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it's not a thing it's a system okay so when did we get the system put in you
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mean when did we get the computers put in,
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what do you mean well that's when the system began and we've been adding to it ever since.
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You just put a computer in and it'll add to it um and like we said most systems
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back then not using TCP IP, each vendor had their own networking solution.
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And even people that were considered computer experts at the time,
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they needed their heads to kind of wrap, they needed to wrap their heads around it. This is a clip.
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I think it's from 1987 from the Computer Chronicles.
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To make it as similar to using local resources as you can. Chris,
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excuse me, describe the configuration we have here before you get going.
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What we have is a Macintosh 2 workstation, the color monitor here.
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This is connected to the file server over the network.
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The next is a Macintosh 2 that is actually functioning as the file server.
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It's running the Apple Share software, and you can see on its screen that it
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has a server status display.
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The next is the LaserWriter Plus printer, and then in front of Andrew is a Macintosh
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SE workstation, which is also connected to the file server. Okay,
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now show us how it all works. Okay.
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The local hard disk is represented by this icon.
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And when we open that up, we can see folders or the equivalent of subdirectories
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that are stored locally on this Macintosh 2. Each one of those little cards
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is a subdirectory. That's right.
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And if we open that up, we can see whether... Well, that one's empty.
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Okay. We can see the programs or documents that are stored inside. And those are files.
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Those are icons for files. And we could have additional folders stored within that.
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Now, when we open up the file server volume, you'll notice that the remote information,
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the representation of that, is nearly identical to the local information.
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And in fact, we work with it in just the same way. Now, Chris,
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one of those folders is gray.
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That's right. Some folder, in the Macintosh, there's a metaphor for resources
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that you don't have access to are grayed out. For example, if we go up into
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this menu, you'll see that some of the selections are grayed because we can't
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use those at this time. There's nothing in the trash, so we can't empty that.
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The same way, a folder that we can't have access to is grayed,
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and when we try to open it, indeed, we get a message that says we don't have access.
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And you don't have access to that because? Because the owner,
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who has control over giving access to other users, has kept that private.
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In fact, this is a special kind of folder.
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This is what we call a drop folder. I can make changes to that folder,
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but I can't see what's inside. This is sort of like analogous to the mailbox that's on the corner.
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You can go and put things in, but you can't see what's inside there.
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And it might be useful for if you were doing status reports or performance reviews,
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you can submit those and no one but the manager has access to them.
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Oh, I see. Oh, interesting, he says. And those are folders? Oh,
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OK. So this is very early.
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Immediately when Linux came on the scene, it was such a unique beast in this
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paradigm because Linux had no vendor affiliation.
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If you built support for Linux, it would work. So you started to see different
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protocols start to be built for
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Linux and it could speak all of one server could talk to the NetWare box.
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The Windows systems with Samba and the Apple systems with Netatalk and Appletalk.
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One system could do all of it. And it was such a powerful thing early in the early days with Linux.
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But we didn't start there. Initially, before Linux just came around and did
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this, entire companies existed just to solve the cross-networking protocol issue
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that Linux would just come in and do natively.
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There were entire businesses, multiple of them, that were selling hardware and
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software trying to solve this multi-protocol world.
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When the accounting firm of Arthur Young & Company decided to install an integrated
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network, it was faced with some special problems.
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At the San Jose, California branch, incompatible hardware is divided into different
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parallel networks on three floors of offices.
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On the eighth floor, Macintoshes are everywhere. But on the lower floors,
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IBM compatibles have the upper hand.
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Today, the company is testing a new gateway that allows any user to communicate
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with any part of the network.
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What we're really addressing here is the ability to take an existing network,
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that was designed exclusively for a single environment, DOS in this case,
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and gatewaying that to the Macintosh world.
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What we're able to do is we have to dedicate a machine that is a gateway.
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it's a DOS box it has an ARCNET card in it it has an AppleTalk card in it talks
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to both networks and the bottom line is it is,
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for all intents and purposes, seamless, because any file that's published over
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NetBIOS is available to whoever has access to it,
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is also available to anybody on the Macintosh side through that gateway machine.
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3Com file servers presently link different machines and different networks over the telephone lines.
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While the so-called interbridge talks to all the networks, the decision to keep
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different machines led to frustrations and delays.
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I guess the biggest problem was just coming to terms with the true capabilities
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of the network, not pushing the network beyond what it was expected to do.
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The problem used to be things like corrupted data and file allocation tables
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that go out of whack and things like that.
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But, you know, the problems we face now are just spending a lot of time trying
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something that was never intended to work.
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And you get to the end, and the bottom line is it doesn't work,
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and you've just spent a lot of time trying it.
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So I think it's to the point now where it's not causing the users problems.
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It's causing the people who are trying to push the technology problems.
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The Mac to IBM gateway is not yet perfected. It took several tries to transfer
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a file for this demonstration.
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But its appeal is undeniable. Through the Interbridge, a user can retrieve a
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formatted document, send a memo, or electronic mail literally to anywhere on the network.
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At Arthur Young, Macintoshes outnumber IBMs, still an unusual sight in the business world.
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It's common to see accountants lugging Macs back into their offices from field
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trips to clients' offices.
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And in spite of some persistent bugs in the Mac to IBM network,
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the company plans to expand its system to provide network access from remote
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locations and a wide area network to link offices around the world.
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All right. So that just really brings me back. At the end there,
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there's a gal. She's carrying a giant bag with a Mac in there, all the wires.
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I think that really, I mean, it kind of hits on what they were designing for, right?
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Like people were doing that. Some businesses were just adopting,
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you know, computers of this size and scale. So some people needed to bring it
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with them, maybe to the job site or plug into an existing network and have it just work.
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There was no Wi-Fi.
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Right. And there might not really be a dedicated IT person there.
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So that's where a lot of the Apple talk design comes in is where they needed
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it to be sort of decentralized so that it could be self-discoverable.
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Now, the downside is, of course, there's not really any security built in.
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And it comes like they sort of assume smaller networks. So a lot of this is
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broadcast based over that local network.
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But and you didn't have a lot of network performance back then.
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So, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there were some upsides.
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although what i find to be fascinating about the story um and really linux was
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the great unifier so it didn't matter we're going to get more into our experiments here,
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on the little land that we built and all of that but if you dig around in the
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late 80s there was some writing on the wall,
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there would be slowly and then suddenly this new open standard that only weirdos
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were using at the time, something called TCPIP.
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...in Palo Alto, where Wendy Woods reports.
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Stanford University has one of the largest campus computer networks in the country.
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Some 1,300 computers, ranging from Macintoshes, sophisticated workstations,
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and PCs, to Vaxes, Microvaxes, and IBM mainframes, all talk to each other via the Ethernet network.
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In various closets across the campus, you can see the gateways and repeaters,
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in lay terms, the traffic hops that make the system work across the vast distances required.
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This impressive network even spreads into the dormitories, where students have
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access to bulletin boards, job banks, even the full bibliographic holdings of
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the Stanford University library system.
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They can do assigned courses in programming, even send mail to their instructors
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or anyone else on campus.
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Networking director Bill Yunt says tying all these diverse systems together
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with Macintoshes came with a few tradeoffs.
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The way we've chosen to do that is by writing software that runs in a compatible
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fashion with the other machines on the network that share the protocol family called TCPIP.
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And allow a Macintosh to sit on an AppleTalk network and be connected through
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the AppleTalk network to our Ethernets so that they look to the rest of the
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network as though they're physically connected.
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connected to the Ethernet. Macintoshes are slow and have only single-tasking
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operating systems, but students love them.
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They're easy to operate and good teaching machines.
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The most common way Macs are used is in classrooms. In small,
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local area networks such as this interactive classroom, the Macintoshes share
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software programs stored in a designated file server.
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What's on the instructor's machine can be viewed on all the students' Macintoshes,
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or his Macintosh can be used to view what's running on individual students' computers.
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So far, French history and computer literacy have been taught this way.
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Linking all computers on campuses is an increasing phenomenon throughout the
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nation's top universities.
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MIT and Carnegie Mellon are two other outstanding examples, but the people here
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say they're ahead of the rest because they've found a way to make their network
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useful, with top researchers and freshman students alike.
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At Stanford University, for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods.
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Well, I think you boys have been playing with Apple Talk. I mean,
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you can't just talk about it for half an episode and then not have some kind
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of crazy experiment going on. So what the heck did you build this week?
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Well, you know, it all came from we got to send this thing off properly,
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but nothing on Linux uses Apple Talk anymore. I mean, there's Netatalk.
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There's Netatalk, right? That is legitimately a use.
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It's an open source, essentially, file server. that acts as an Apple file server
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to other Apple Macs. And you can talk to a Linux box over that.
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It's been around since the 90s.
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GPL too.
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It's great.
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I have it installed on my machine right now just for today's episode,
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and it's probably been a decade since I set it up.
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You can tell when it's from because it's 91.9% C and 3.6% Perl.
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Yep. And it comes with two daemons. The ATOC-D handles the user-level AppleTalk
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networking management on the server, so that does routing stuff,
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node assignment, zone backup. You need something on the network kind of doing
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this for what we wanted to do.
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That's the piece that helps Mac clients when they go into, like,
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Chooser or something. That helps them, like, discover everything.
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And this server can kind of do that for us. So I got that all running and set
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up. But I'll tell you why in a minute.
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And I also worked on a couple of projects.
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I know, Wes, you swore up to, like, way too late, not just enjoying fireworks,
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but also building projects to try to put together a little, you know,
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demonstration of using AppleTalk on Linux.
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And then for fun, why not work on maybe a classic Mac as well,
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right? Just to kind of make it all come together.
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Yeah, we might have gotten distracted on the classic Mac side.
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Yeah, let's talk about that for a
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minute. So I built a little app called Chooser, which is up on my GitHub.
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And it is a TUI client for Linux that browses Apple file shares. And it talks Apple talk.
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And so I got my Linux box and a Mac OS 8.1 VM talking, running under Baskill 2. Yeah.
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Yeah, it was great, dude.
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What?
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I was emulating a Quadra-class 68K Mac, 608040, 32 megabytes of RAM, because why not?
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This is so ridiculous.
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I got it working with my Ethernet, so it had bridge-style LAN access.
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So I actually had an old Mac with Ethernet.
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It's crazy how fast it is, right? I've never used this operating system on a machine like this.
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I mean, this is not a very fast machine, but compared to old Macs,
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it boots in like three seconds.
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Oh, wow.
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It's like XFCE, it's like that, but squared.
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Crazy, crazy. So I got the Linux host using Netatalk, which then I shared out
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a directory, an AFP file share.
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And then from Mac OS 8.1, I used chooser to talk to that. And I could also use
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my chooser on the Linux side, little TUI.
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And once I had a volume on Linux that I could connect to from the classic Mac,
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I realized the main thing holding Mac OS 8.1 is it comes with like Netscape
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3, Netscape Navigator 3.
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And I was like, well, I can't use that to download stuff. But I could on my
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Linux desktop. So I went and downloaded a bunch of classic games.
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And I put them in the share. And I thought, all right, now I've got a nice,
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easy way to move my games between my Linux box and my Mac.
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But time has moved on, my friends. And what we forget is that classic Macs,
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they didn't use file extensions.
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They had, every file had a delta fork and a resource fork and a finder metadata type.
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Because I ran into this too. Boy.
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Creator codes and all. Oh! So you can't just like move files because the Mac
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doesn't know what the file is.
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It doesn't do anything with a .bin or a .zip or a .sit.
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Oh, .sits.
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Oh. So, like, you can't just copy and move them.
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So I went through all this trouble of getting file sharing working for Bubkis
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because the real move was to download image versions of them and mount them
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into my VM and install them that way.
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And then later on, I got an app called Disk Copy, which supposedly can mount
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these directly inside macOS.
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You know what I was having work was, because I was using, I think I did use
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Nettock a bit, but I also,
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your chooser was built on TailTalk, which is a modern async user-spaced AppleTalk
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stack in Rust that we were playing with. Yeah, so you can build a bunch of stuff on there.
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And it also comes with like a little demo AFP server. So I was getting that
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going too. And I was noticing...
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It seemed to work better. I was able to, I couldn't copy, but I could run.
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And so like once I had gone through the dance of getting the correct version,
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most modern version of stuff at Expander going, right? Like I was then able
439
00:29:47,573 --> 00:29:48,728
to install stuff that way.
440
00:29:49,367 --> 00:29:53,237
Yes. Yeah, I had to start with like version three and then go to version five
441
00:29:53,237 --> 00:29:55,247
for some reason. There was a bit of a journey.
442
00:29:56,607 --> 00:29:59,694
But everything installs so flipping fast, it doesn't matter.
443
00:30:00,228 --> 00:30:05,724
It just, it's bonkers how fast everything is. And once you have this unlock,
444
00:30:06,037 --> 00:30:11,197
there is a absolute massive library out there on Internet Archive.
445
00:30:11,197 --> 00:30:16,897
We'll link to one in the show notes and others of Mac apps, classic retro Mac
446
00:30:16,897 --> 00:30:19,453
app games. So we'll talk more about that, I suppose, later.
447
00:30:19,934 --> 00:30:28,572
But at one point I had the Knicks station, the Knicks book and fake Mac all talking to each other.
448
00:30:29,925 --> 00:30:33,327
all there's also apple talk had this concept of ping back in the day go figure
449
00:30:33,594 --> 00:30:36,447
and they could all ping each other and all discover each other all use their
450
00:30:36,447 --> 00:30:39,087
actual names they were all using real names,
451
00:30:40,502 --> 00:30:46,057
i mean the hardest bit is what's available on linux today pretty much only works
452
00:30:46,057 --> 00:30:49,650
in kind of a limited capacity you kind of have everything has to be on the same network segment,
453
00:30:51,038 --> 00:30:54,737
ideally like not even across different switches and things like that but if
454
00:30:54,737 --> 00:30:59,072
you meet these little requirements, you can essentially, with what we have today, with the,
455
00:30:59,844 --> 00:31:03,577
with like the chooser TUI app I created, or just what's available with the work
456
00:31:03,577 --> 00:31:06,611
in progress demo app that comes with that project Wes was talking about,
457
00:31:07,139 --> 00:31:10,967
you can create a local LAN that doesn't use TCP IP and start immediately chatting
458
00:31:10,967 --> 00:31:12,597
amongst yourselves and moving files between them.
459
00:31:12,597 --> 00:31:16,114
Now, it's not really very good because it's not designed to move large files around.
460
00:31:17,918 --> 00:31:21,419
But it's incredible how it's still available today. Something from 1985.
461
00:31:21,529 --> 00:31:22,158
And it still works.
462
00:31:22,158 --> 00:31:23,568
Still available today. And it still works.
463
00:31:23,568 --> 00:31:26,708
I think there's something so, like, we just live in a world where,
464
00:31:26,708 --> 00:31:29,898
like, it's so obvious, so much of the stack, right? Like, HTTPS,
465
00:31:29,898 --> 00:31:33,298
and there's so many layers down from that that's all decided essentially for
466
00:31:33,298 --> 00:31:35,542
us just by what everyone else is doing.
467
00:31:36,076 --> 00:31:39,598
And so the idea that you can have this whole, like, it's the same wires,
468
00:31:39,598 --> 00:31:43,623
but there's a whole parallel thing going on of what's inside them.
469
00:31:44,023 --> 00:31:48,058
and at the same time from linux like there's libraries now right that you can
470
00:31:48,058 --> 00:31:52,328
you can play with that you can read it tcp dump i had that going as i was debugging
471
00:31:52,328 --> 00:31:55,418
a bunch of this and like it just shows you exactly it's nice simple packets
472
00:31:55,418 --> 00:31:57,410
the protocol is easy to see what's happening,
473
00:31:57,897 --> 00:32:02,978
um so it's kind of a great little play box to learn more about networking because
474
00:32:02,978 --> 00:32:07,298
it is kind of relatively it's both different enough to to make you think and
475
00:32:07,298 --> 00:32:09,042
simple enough to be able to wrap your head around.
476
00:32:10,157 --> 00:32:14,315
So you and I both built a couple of, like, MVP demo kind of apps.
477
00:32:14,315 --> 00:32:18,627
Mine is Chooser, you know, to browse the AppleTalk network and stuff like that. A little TUI.
478
00:32:19,393 --> 00:32:23,230
It works surprisingly well. It has to be a little hacky with some packet capture,
479
00:32:23,932 --> 00:32:28,095
to get everything. So you do have to have, like, sudo access to run that.
480
00:32:28,095 --> 00:32:30,725
And that's true for a lot of this stuff. Or you can, if you set,
481
00:32:30,725 --> 00:32:35,653
like, raw packet as a capability on the binary, you can do it that way, too.
482
00:32:36,483 --> 00:32:39,931
Okay. Yeah, so that's good, too. You can do that. It's not a beautiful app,
483
00:32:40,076 --> 00:32:41,945
but the TUI works and it gets the job done.
484
00:32:42,245 --> 00:32:44,585
But I'd love to hear what you were up late building with.
485
00:32:44,993 --> 00:32:48,308
Well, I went down a rabbit hole and I didn't really finish everything.
486
00:32:48,517 --> 00:32:53,145
My first example was, so a big motivation for a lot of this stuff from the Apple
487
00:32:53,145 --> 00:32:58,775
side was for printers, right? And so that's where you actually wanted,
488
00:32:58,775 --> 00:33:01,373
they wanted a way to be able to connect printers, share printer.
489
00:33:01,646 --> 00:33:05,505
And so as part of Apple Talk, there's the printer access protocol, which is PAP.
490
00:33:06,197 --> 00:33:09,175
And of course, under the hood, it uses a bunch of the other Apple Talk stuff
491
00:33:09,175 --> 00:33:11,635
to actually send the data to the printer and that kind of stuff.
492
00:33:11,635 --> 00:33:14,495
But it participates in the name binding protocol and all of that.
493
00:33:14,495 --> 00:33:18,095
So if you have a printer on your network, it's kind of like we're used to these
494
00:33:18,095 --> 00:33:20,256
days, but it worked very well back then.
495
00:33:22,445 --> 00:33:25,855
You do a query via broadcast to say, show me all the printers that look like
496
00:33:25,855 --> 00:33:28,157
this on the network, or you could filter by zone or whatever.
497
00:33:28,656 --> 00:33:32,156
And then they send you your info back and you can configure them and connect.
498
00:33:32,743 --> 00:33:37,190
So I made a little demo that you could run on the Linux side with GoScript and stuff.
499
00:33:37,927 --> 00:33:42,107
It wasn't perfect, but at least the data capture worked, is you could go get
500
00:33:42,357 --> 00:33:47,005
something like KidPix going, do some art in your old Apple Mac,
501
00:33:47,406 --> 00:33:50,645
and then hit print to your AppleTalk printer,
502
00:33:51,145 --> 00:33:55,385
and then have this Rust app actually take that and then save that as a file on Linux.
503
00:33:55,385 --> 00:33:57,815
Obviously, you could copy it out, but I thought it would be kind of fun if you
504
00:33:57,815 --> 00:33:59,825
could just print it right out of the VM.
505
00:34:00,605 --> 00:34:04,878
That's actually a great use because Kid Picks is fun to play around with.
506
00:34:06,068 --> 00:34:08,784
And there's a lot of fun stuff you can do, like art tools, right?
507
00:34:08,784 --> 00:34:12,244
Like a lot of these Macs were kind of some of the early areas where a lot of
508
00:34:12,244 --> 00:34:15,222
digital arts were being explored. So there's a ton of software for it,
509
00:34:15,913 --> 00:34:18,494
even old video stuff. But yeah, so that worked.
510
00:34:19,112 --> 00:34:22,954
Some nuances in getting exactly the right protocol stuff working,
511
00:34:22,954 --> 00:34:25,131
which is where I got TCP dump involved.
512
00:34:25,596 --> 00:34:29,706
Because the printing would work, but exactly making it so that the printer,
513
00:34:30,472 --> 00:34:33,794
app and the queue and stuff, which, gosh, do you think of how far ahead they
514
00:34:33,794 --> 00:34:37,728
were from windows already in this stuff even in this world it's just wild yeah
515
00:34:37,728 --> 00:34:41,294
to make it kind of happy with like that it successfully printed and didn't think
516
00:34:41,294 --> 00:34:44,108
i it needed to be canceled took a lot longer than i thought,
517
00:34:44,990 --> 00:34:49,604
but where i really got off the rails is i discovered that there is something
518
00:34:49,604 --> 00:34:59,314
called retro 68 a gcc based cross compiler for classic 68k and power pc macintoshes,
519
00:35:02,654 --> 00:35:09,804
and in their readme i noticed uh using retro 68 with nix so you can just do
520
00:35:09,804 --> 00:35:15,804
nix develop and point it at their github and after you know a few minutes tens
521
00:35:15,804 --> 00:35:17,634
of minutes compiling you get,
522
00:35:18,554 --> 00:35:23,186
a build environment that you can build stuff that runs in the old bank.
523
00:35:23,801 --> 00:35:24,054
No
524
00:35:24,614 --> 00:35:25,914
It is insane.
525
00:35:25,914 --> 00:35:27,414
You are kidding me.
526
00:35:27,414 --> 00:35:32,674
Nope so then you could you could build that you get a dot bin out i put that
527
00:35:32,674 --> 00:35:34,474
on my afp share booted up the,
528
00:35:34,954 --> 00:35:38,454
you know basilisk going and then you run the dot bin and that extracts and then
529
00:35:38,454 --> 00:35:42,964
it's kind of hacky you had to like go out in the file explorer app and like
530
00:35:42,964 --> 00:35:45,854
go one layer back and open the folder again and then i would see the actual
531
00:35:45,854 --> 00:35:49,262
sort of executable resource there listed but then,
532
00:35:49,854 --> 00:35:55,214
i could run that and i got as far as like you would actually open up an app that didn't crash or,
533
00:35:56,294 --> 00:35:57,804
freeze the whole operating system.
534
00:35:57,804 --> 00:36:00,754
It would show text. It had a little, some debug information.
535
00:36:01,927 --> 00:36:06,385
My hope was, and it would be fun to finish, my hope was I could build
536
00:36:06,757 --> 00:36:12,145
like a two-part thing over AppleTalk that would let you have an MCP system on
537
00:36:12,145 --> 00:36:17,258
your host that could then like take screenshots or control stuff inside the Mac.
538
00:36:17,542 --> 00:36:19,174
Dude, you're time traveling.
539
00:36:19,510 --> 00:36:20,201
Well done.
540
00:36:21,461 --> 00:36:24,915
The hardest part was, and this is where I got more into the AppleTalk side,
541
00:36:24,915 --> 00:36:28,119
is it ended up that I was running an 8.1 system.
542
00:36:28,647 --> 00:36:28,909
Yeah.
543
00:36:29,205 --> 00:36:34,465
And it started having OpenTransport, which is where they were merging TCP.
544
00:36:34,465 --> 00:36:38,800
It's like one system that could do both TCP IP and all the AppleTalk stuff.
545
00:36:39,038 --> 00:36:42,272
But I believe if you install OpenTransport, AppleTalk is disabled.
546
00:36:42,585 --> 00:36:46,625
You can have it do both. I think that might be the default. So there's just
547
00:36:46,625 --> 00:36:50,108
some nuances, and maybe I have an easier time on 7. I might try that.
548
00:36:51,055 --> 00:36:55,495
Just because I was having the bot try to help me, and it was essentially trying
549
00:36:55,495 --> 00:36:58,715
to figure out, like, what is the right old Mac assembly traps?
550
00:36:58,715 --> 00:37:03,105
Like, oh, do I use the legacy API for doing the Apple Talk? So we were trying
551
00:37:03,105 --> 00:37:05,136
a little bit on serial. That might also work. But I wanted it.
552
00:37:05,281 --> 00:37:08,825
We got it as far as registering a name. But it wasn't quite as far as having
553
00:37:08,825 --> 00:37:12,903
it successfully receive a command over Apple Talk. But that'd be the next step.
554
00:37:13,809 --> 00:37:19,085
Wow. That's fun. We really should give a shout out to, how did you say it?
555
00:37:19,085 --> 00:37:20,595
Is it Basilisk? How do you say it?
556
00:37:20,675 --> 00:37:21,773
Yeah, Basilisk.
557
00:37:22,354 --> 00:37:26,615
Basilisk 2. Probably people are aware of it. But it's still out there.
558
00:37:26,615 --> 00:37:32,426
It's a great project to emulate old Mac OS 8 and 7 era Macintoshes.
559
00:37:32,861 --> 00:37:37,175
And the reality is there is so much good software and the firmware and the ROM
560
00:37:37,175 --> 00:37:41,945
files, they're all online. You can get access to everything you need to set
561
00:37:41,945 --> 00:37:45,785
up a really fun retro computing environment. Sometimes the sound's a little
562
00:37:45,785 --> 00:37:47,809
off. You might have to experiment with different ROMs.
563
00:37:49,121 --> 00:37:53,865
And you can absolutely share files between your Linux box and this thing just
564
00:37:53,865 --> 00:37:59,395
using Netatalk and Chooser. Or you can also just mount things directly in there.
565
00:37:59,395 --> 00:38:00,585
There's other options, too.
566
00:38:00,585 --> 00:38:03,997
For getting things in there. I did found for more things to explore.
567
00:38:05,117 --> 00:38:09,115
There's something called Global Talk. And this person has the best domain name
568
00:38:09,115 --> 00:38:13,436
ever. It's markintosh.com slash globaltalk.html.
569
00:38:13,859 --> 00:38:17,035
Global Talk is the nickname we've given to the practice of using an ancient
570
00:38:17,035 --> 00:38:21,835
Apple internet router software package. to bridge your local Apple Talk network
571
00:38:22,102 --> 00:38:25,736
to the global network of the internet and other people's vintage computers and printers.
572
00:38:26,325 --> 00:38:30,065
While nothing is stopping you from doing this all year, usage primarily spikes
573
00:38:30,065 --> 00:38:34,155
in March for Marchintosh. Ah, that's what it is. It's Marchintosh.
574
00:38:34,155 --> 00:38:34,925
That makes more sense.
575
00:38:35,565 --> 00:38:40,555
Amazing. This lets you and other Global Talk participants share files over Apple
576
00:38:40,555 --> 00:38:43,291
Share and print to each other's Apple Talk-enabled printers.
577
00:38:44,057 --> 00:38:44,625
Wow.
578
00:38:45,659 --> 00:38:46,065
Yeah.
579
00:38:46,065 --> 00:38:48,725
Is it 100% safe and secure? Actually, no.
580
00:38:48,725 --> 00:38:53,025
Probably not the only way to participate in this is to share your ip address
581
00:38:53,025 --> 00:38:55,905
on a spreadsheet and open a port for your router to allow these,
582
00:38:57,205 --> 00:39:00,695
so as part of that i found there's a couple pieces of software but one of one
583
00:39:00,695 --> 00:39:05,015
of them is what's called j router which is a homegrown alternative implementation
584
00:39:05,015 --> 00:39:10,387
of apple internet router 3.0 and so in the first local talk era era,
585
00:39:10,851 --> 00:39:14,455
apple talk was only local but then they added these internet routers and so
586
00:39:14,455 --> 00:39:18,270
they changed like they added another segment onto like the three segment
587
00:39:18,636 --> 00:39:22,485
protocol address that was like a global number so you could then have routing
588
00:39:22,485 --> 00:39:26,641
between these different networks and so you needed some sort of router software to do that
589
00:39:26,955 --> 00:39:29,995
and so in theory and we didn't quite get this far in theory i think we could
590
00:39:29,995 --> 00:39:33,985
have this j router going maybe on a mesh network or something and then.
591
00:39:33,985 --> 00:39:34,855
I was thinking yep.
592
00:39:34,855 --> 00:39:39,965
Be able to bridge our local apple talk environments and that's apparently what people are doing in.
593
00:39:42,261 --> 00:39:42,790
Wow.
594
00:39:43,440 --> 00:39:43,689
Yeah.
595
00:39:43,689 --> 00:39:44,579
Brent set a reminder.
596
00:39:44,579 --> 00:39:48,222
So, yeah. March is the time to do that, really.
597
00:39:49,261 --> 00:39:50,677
Yeah, you're going to be cold inside.
598
00:39:50,851 --> 00:39:51,869
Yeah, but I get the feeling we're
599
00:39:51,869 --> 00:39:55,709
going to be doing this next episode with your energy around all this.
600
00:39:56,349 --> 00:40:01,649
It was a lot of fun. I did not expect the nostalgia hit as hard when you fire
601
00:40:01,649 --> 00:40:02,569
up some of those old games.
602
00:40:04,441 --> 00:40:08,979
The real question, though, Chris, is are you feeling better about Apple Talk
603
00:40:08,979 --> 00:40:10,019
being pulled out of the kernel?
604
00:40:10,763 --> 00:40:15,784
Not really, no. I mean, I get it. I absolutely, rationally, I get it.
605
00:40:16,417 --> 00:40:24,636
But I don't know if I could properly put you in the headspace of late 90s, early aughts.
606
00:40:25,165 --> 00:40:29,008
We've kind of come to this collision point where we have a lot of TCP IP.
607
00:40:29,536 --> 00:40:34,807
The internet is a thing. But we still have this legacy of the Macintoshes are on this network.
608
00:40:35,207 --> 00:40:39,499
The Windows boxes are on this network. And we had this division that was still
609
00:40:39,499 --> 00:40:42,189
persistent. the mainframes and whatever the older hardware was,
610
00:40:42,189 --> 00:40:43,218
was on a separate network.
611
00:40:44,873 --> 00:40:48,157
And see, I'm old enough to remember too, like we were still transitioning away from Token Ring.
612
00:40:48,273 --> 00:40:53,579
And to have something like Linux that came in and could be Samba and Netatalk
613
00:40:53,579 --> 00:40:59,581
at the same time, it was like having a superpower. Like it made my career for a little while.
614
00:40:59,993 --> 00:41:01,990
Like it was such a big deal.
615
00:41:02,681 --> 00:41:07,319
So like that part of me is really sad to see it go because it means it's one
616
00:41:07,319 --> 00:41:10,649
less thing Linux does, but it's just not a thing people need anymore and I get
617
00:41:10,649 --> 00:41:13,199
it and we have so much new stuff to build and put in there.
618
00:41:13,199 --> 00:41:15,749
Maybe they can add it into the kernel in March and then just take it out.
619
00:41:17,049 --> 00:41:20,239
In May well the good news is there's a lot of people out there won't be running
620
00:41:20,239 --> 00:41:22,609
7.2 for a long time so they still got it.
621
00:41:22,809 --> 00:41:23,817
Long live 6.18.
622
00:41:24,200 --> 00:41:24,717
That's right.
623
00:41:32,601 --> 00:41:36,705
Look at this. We got a little piece of news this week, a little piece of feedback, actually.
624
00:41:37,175 --> 00:41:41,837
And we'll see if it's on topic. I'm not sure we'll get into it here. OK, here we go.
625
00:41:42,661 --> 00:41:47,275
Good Lord, man. Apple Talks sucked back in the day and still sucks.
626
00:41:47,728 --> 00:41:51,269
In any event, just use an older kernel.
627
00:41:52,029 --> 00:41:56,040
They are not purging it out of the existing kernels that support it.
628
00:41:56,690 --> 00:42:01,488
classic Mac is awesome till the lack of protected memory trashes your app or
629
00:42:01,488 --> 00:42:03,968
triggers a beach ball of death.
630
00:42:04,765 --> 00:42:08,341
Yeah, that is true. Or back then it was an hour glass of death.
631
00:42:09,095 --> 00:42:12,698
It is nice having it in an emulator that you can just restart pretty easily.
632
00:42:12,698 --> 00:42:13,228
Yes.
633
00:42:13,828 --> 00:42:18,529
Especially as I was getting seg faults and trying to call fake memory addresses in assembly.
634
00:42:19,342 --> 00:42:23,838
Now in defense, Ian, you sent this email before we did this episode.
635
00:42:23,838 --> 00:42:25,454
I'd like to know if we changed your mind at all.
636
00:42:26,122 --> 00:42:29,198
I think if you think of it at the time, you know, the late 80s,
637
00:42:29,198 --> 00:42:30,480
it was actually quite impressive.
638
00:42:30,870 --> 00:42:33,758
By the time we were using it, you know, in schools and stuff,
639
00:42:33,758 --> 00:42:37,018
if you're around my age, it was getting to the point where it was frustrating.
640
00:42:37,018 --> 00:42:39,408
There was already IP was coming along and all that kind of stuff.
641
00:42:39,408 --> 00:42:43,788
But, you know, at the time, I think, I don't know, I'd like to know if we changed your mind at least.
642
00:42:43,788 --> 00:42:46,268
And I mean, we do have the modern legacy, which we didn't mention.
643
00:42:46,268 --> 00:42:52,118
But, you know, we got things like MDNS and Bonjour out of basically these ideas
644
00:42:52,118 --> 00:42:54,680
or at least the best surviving remnants of it.
645
00:42:55,057 --> 00:42:57,468
I'm glad you mentioned that. I meant to bring that up, right?
646
00:42:57,468 --> 00:43:00,418
Like those were trying to reimplement things that just came native to Apple Talk.
647
00:43:00,418 --> 00:43:01,948
The whole zero-conf idea, really.
648
00:43:02,888 --> 00:43:05,888
And for better or worse, right? Like sometimes when you do a packet capture,
649
00:43:05,888 --> 00:43:08,378
it's gross to see all those broadcasts on the network. You're like,
650
00:43:08,378 --> 00:43:09,508
oh, come on, Apple. Don't look at those.
651
00:43:10,208 --> 00:43:13,638
Come on, just look it up. But yeah, it makes it easy for the end user,
652
00:43:13,638 --> 00:43:17,354
and it works pretty well for a homeland. So that's why I like it. All right.
653
00:43:22,340 --> 00:43:26,045
Let's do some boost, boys, and we're going to start with a baller booster,
654
00:43:26,385 --> 00:43:27,733
and it is a baller indeed.
655
00:43:28,226 --> 00:43:30,785
Lutris Oppie? You think I got that right?
656
00:43:30,785 --> 00:43:32,771
No, but that's- Lucitropy.
657
00:43:33,369 --> 00:43:37,445
Oh, that's way better. That's way better than what I came up with.
658
00:43:37,445 --> 00:43:39,545
All right. So, Lucup, Lucup.
659
00:43:39,965 --> 00:43:40,565
I don't know if you got it once.
660
00:43:41,125 --> 00:43:41,125
Yeah.
661
00:43:43,325 --> 00:43:49,367
Lucy comes in with a baller boost of 345,678,000.
662
00:43:50,754 --> 00:43:50,845
Satoshis. What?
663
00:43:53,169 --> 00:44:00,019
Yep. Yep. That's right. Ah! Oh! Ha ha!
664
00:44:02,515 --> 00:44:06,055
Long-time listener, first-time booster came across Bramble on Hacker News,
665
00:44:06,055 --> 00:44:08,085
local password manager with cross-device sync.
666
00:44:08,665 --> 00:44:12,365
It is Rust with a cryptographic core. You can find it on GitHub.
667
00:44:12,365 --> 00:44:14,154
We'll put a link in the show notes.
668
00:44:14,514 --> 00:44:17,202
I'd like to see what you think. Bramble, huh, boys?
669
00:44:17,660 --> 00:44:20,209
Sounds like we have a contender for the list here.
670
00:44:22,740 --> 00:44:26,385
Gpl3 it says bramble a password manager that keeps your secrets on your own
671
00:44:26,385 --> 00:44:30,865
devices i like that no account no server holding your vault no company to get
672
00:44:30,865 --> 00:44:37,101
breached and leak everything for you you hold the vault you hold the password and that is all.
673
00:44:37,484 --> 00:44:40,875
What's kind of impressive here is they already seem to have browser extensions
674
00:44:40,875 --> 00:44:44,535
i guess the firefox one's pending approval but in progress you can get it uh
675
00:44:44,535 --> 00:44:48,955
an ios app and an android app which is kind of some of the harder holes to fill
676
00:44:48,955 --> 00:44:51,078
when you make yourself a new password platform.
677
00:44:52,222 --> 00:44:53,313
Screenshots look good, too.
678
00:44:53,598 --> 00:44:54,055
Yeah.
679
00:44:54,055 --> 00:44:54,765
Oh, it looks good.
680
00:44:54,765 --> 00:44:59,002
Gotta say, yeah. KeyPass looks a little old compared to this. This looks good.
681
00:44:59,896 --> 00:45:04,065
Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, the flip side is Bitward and keeps moving where the
682
00:45:04,065 --> 00:45:07,750
fill button is on me just as I finally learn it. So, you know.
683
00:45:07,930 --> 00:45:09,025
That's a security bug.
684
00:45:09,125 --> 00:45:10,405
Would it work better on Hyperland?
685
00:45:11,552 --> 00:45:13,062
I can confirm it does not.
686
00:45:14,693 --> 00:45:21,241
Oh, well, our buddy, our pal producer, Jeff Boosin, with a big old row of McDuck's.
687
00:45:23,557 --> 00:45:29,571
I think the Steam machine is not, quote-unquote, overpriced. It's too expensive.
688
00:45:29,890 --> 00:45:33,026
The closest pre-built computers that come close to its performance and size
689
00:45:33,026 --> 00:45:35,527
would need the AMD AI Max APU.
690
00:45:35,899 --> 00:45:39,961
Those start around $1,500, and they fall short in GPU spec.
691
00:45:40,390 --> 00:45:45,400
Give them some time, and their custom hardware will shine. Or do it yourself.
692
00:45:46,625 --> 00:45:47,856
I think PJ is saying let them cook.
693
00:45:48,076 --> 00:45:49,249
Yeah, I think he is.
694
00:45:49,876 --> 00:45:55,546
Let them cook. Yeah. All right. I say good on you, PJ. Thank you for boosting
695
00:45:55,546 --> 00:45:57,246
in. And I think you're right.
696
00:45:58,212 --> 00:46:04,176
It's not that it's overpriced. And unfortunately, we may discover that it just
697
00:46:04,176 --> 00:46:07,912
becomes the new norm. And we'll just adjust to it like we do gas prices, I suppose.
698
00:46:08,359 --> 00:46:12,376
There's a boost here. A row of ducks from Brent's Tabs.
699
00:46:20,666 --> 00:46:21,595
Oh, it gets me every time.
700
00:46:21,746 --> 00:46:25,311
This came from our Web Boost page. Thank you very much. It says,
701
00:46:25,311 --> 00:46:32,011
would Brent consider exporting his tab count as a Prometheus metric the audience could graph into?
702
00:46:32,011 --> 00:46:35,084
That's a fun idea. That's a fun idea.
703
00:46:35,264 --> 00:46:39,241
I would highly consider this. I might be ashamed at some point,
704
00:46:39,241 --> 00:46:42,376
but that would be fun to graph. It's like a shame graph, basically.
705
00:46:43,551 --> 00:46:48,371
Don't worry because if we get that going for you I may just reveal how many
706
00:46:48,371 --> 00:46:52,571
files and the age of the files in my downloads folder I think people may be shocked,
707
00:46:55,111 --> 00:47:02,020
we'll see AR buddy adversary 17 is here with 8143 satoshers,
708
00:47:05,107 --> 00:47:08,573
adversaries writes Chris send me a link to your stream deck holder you want
709
00:47:08,857 --> 00:47:13,286
I'll print it for you oh really Oh my gosh, that'd be great.
710
00:47:13,588 --> 00:47:16,551
He says, yeah, regarding 3D printing, nice printers can cost a bit,
711
00:47:16,551 --> 00:47:21,531
but they produce quality parts. The parts in my printer are ironically printed by my printer.
712
00:47:22,041 --> 00:47:25,281
Persia uses their own printers to print the parts they make their printers out
713
00:47:25,281 --> 00:47:29,501
of. The Core 1 printer parts are printed on Core 1s. Yeah, Alex tells me about that.
714
00:47:29,501 --> 00:47:32,351
But how do you get the first printer, then? How do you get the first?
715
00:47:32,591 --> 00:47:34,771
Well, you get a little kit, right? But then the cool thing is you can literally
716
00:47:34,771 --> 00:47:36,581
print some of the upgrades down the road and stuff.
717
00:47:36,581 --> 00:47:37,271
So great.
718
00:47:37,585 --> 00:47:39,483
It was handed to us from the old Wandsprint.
719
00:47:40,783 --> 00:47:43,837
Adversaries, right, so I also just want to say I love the web boost option.
720
00:47:44,174 --> 00:47:47,901
I've been repeatedly punting the Albie extension to set up on my self-hosted
721
00:47:47,901 --> 00:47:50,501
LND node every time I try to figure it out. I run into a problem,
722
00:47:50,501 --> 00:47:52,039
and I say, I'll get back to it later.
723
00:47:52,457 --> 00:47:54,698
So I just haven't been able to boost outside of using Fountain.
724
00:47:54,843 --> 00:47:55,911
Well, I'm glad you like it.
725
00:47:55,911 --> 00:47:57,351
We built it for you.
726
00:47:57,862 --> 00:47:58,361
We love it.
727
00:47:59,934 --> 00:48:04,027
Gene Bean, a boost in with 8,888 sats.
728
00:48:07,758 --> 00:48:15,508
Chris, have you seen the Y-Can Pro for OBD2 to Home Assistant? Looks to be about $89.
729
00:48:16,361 --> 00:48:20,184
You know, we've been kind of talking about this off-air a little bit.
730
00:48:20,184 --> 00:48:23,644
And it's, yeah, a little meat pie, and it sits there and just runs all the time.
731
00:48:23,644 --> 00:48:24,819
I think that is in my future.
732
00:48:25,944 --> 00:48:32,454
Maybe in all of our futures. And then we also got from our buddy Gene a little Gentoo defense here.
733
00:48:32,454 --> 00:48:38,654
You know, Gene writes, you can make that stripped down kernel for your no GUI
734
00:48:38,654 --> 00:48:41,728
system pretty easily in Gen 2. Just saying.
735
00:48:44,084 --> 00:48:47,730
Gene's not wrong. Gene's rarely wrong, I would say.
736
00:48:48,340 --> 00:48:50,744
Yeah, I'd say he's got a pretty good batting average.
737
00:48:50,744 --> 00:48:53,152
Is this his way to get me to try Gen 2 finally?
738
00:48:53,286 --> 00:48:55,784
I mean, you might love it. That's the funny thing. I had to.
739
00:48:55,784 --> 00:48:56,583
I think you need to.
740
00:48:57,111 --> 00:48:58,736
I think you might actually love it.
741
00:48:59,090 --> 00:48:59,625
Really?
742
00:49:00,106 --> 00:49:01,285
I do. I do.
743
00:49:02,404 --> 00:49:04,374
I think you're on Gene's team on this one.
744
00:49:04,374 --> 00:49:06,405
You know, it's probably a great Hyperland experience.
745
00:49:06,875 --> 00:49:10,814
Let me ask you something, Brent. If you could, would you love to live in like
746
00:49:10,814 --> 00:49:14,534
your own bespoke hand-built cabin or log cabin or something like that that you
747
00:49:14,534 --> 00:49:16,834
had all the time and resources in the world to build?
748
00:49:16,834 --> 00:49:17,754
Oh, yeah.
749
00:49:17,754 --> 00:49:18,589
Oh, definitely.
750
00:49:18,845 --> 00:49:20,684
Right? Isn't that kind of what Gentoo is? You build it just the way you live.
751
00:49:20,684 --> 00:49:21,954
Oh, I see what you're saying.
752
00:49:21,954 --> 00:49:25,304
A realistic time frame. You know, I'm just saying. Just putting that in there.
753
00:49:25,304 --> 00:49:28,074
What kind of time frame are we talking about? Because I might consider this.
754
00:49:28,074 --> 00:49:28,424
You know how.
755
00:49:28,424 --> 00:49:28,684
You like.
756
00:49:29,084 --> 00:49:31,417
Distracting projects from your other projects.
757
00:49:31,632 --> 00:49:35,289
Yeah you know how you love time holes that just totally distract you i call it.
758
00:49:35,556 --> 00:49:40,794
Productive productivity thank you productive procrastination thank you very much.
759
00:49:40,794 --> 00:49:43,084
With with that kind of spin you could be a politician.
760
00:49:44,119 --> 00:49:48,147
Well faraday fedora is not a politician but they did send in a row of ducks,
761
00:49:50,023 --> 00:49:54,661
Oh, hell no. MeshTastic is not dead in the Pacific Northwest.
762
00:49:55,045 --> 00:50:02,637
Most of us just moved off long fast. Vancouver Island had a closer to 300 node mesh with medium slow.
763
00:50:03,613 --> 00:50:09,093
But both mesh core and meshtastic are not a good use case for a sensor on your property.
764
00:50:09,377 --> 00:50:14,253
Laura is still a good option, but you do need the whole mesh.
765
00:50:14,758 --> 00:50:18,687
I would love you to expand on that, Faraday. Because I think I jive what you're
766
00:50:18,687 --> 00:50:23,757
saying. It's like those are more for messaging, but the idea of low,
767
00:50:23,757 --> 00:50:25,287
like 900 megahertz or whatever it is.
768
00:50:25,307 --> 00:50:27,296
Yeah, you could have a LoRa mesh of your own.
769
00:50:27,679 --> 00:50:28,127
Yeah.
770
00:50:28,127 --> 00:50:30,787
You just need enough to make sure you maintain the coverage, I guess.
771
00:50:30,787 --> 00:50:33,517
It could use AppleTalk. How do you get it to work with Home Assistant?
772
00:50:33,517 --> 00:50:36,323
You probably could. You probably could. Wouldn't that be awesome?
773
00:50:36,590 --> 00:50:38,747
Well, that's next week's project. There you go.
774
00:50:40,450 --> 00:50:44,978
You know, NQTT might work great over ATP, you know. I'm just saying.
775
00:50:45,570 --> 00:50:46,005
Good.
776
00:50:46,690 --> 00:50:50,974
Dude, they're all very, very, very, very old. So they just might all work great together.
777
00:50:52,118 --> 00:50:55,525
Chris P. boosts in with $12,345.
778
00:51:01,852 --> 00:51:08,644
First time Web Booster, long time listener. Discover JB with the RMS last 200th episode in 2012.
779
00:51:08,859 --> 00:51:09,359
Wow.
780
00:51:09,359 --> 00:51:10,039
Oh my goodness.
781
00:51:11,506 --> 00:51:12,016
Classic.
782
00:51:12,556 --> 00:51:17,779
Yeah. Yeah. That was a long time ago. That episode, I think,
783
00:51:17,779 --> 00:51:21,850
is not only like one of the standard episodes, but for me, I believe,
784
00:51:22,239 --> 00:51:27,020
I think, I found out about it either the night before or the morning of it. It was pretty close.
785
00:51:27,189 --> 00:51:31,002
It was like we just managed to, Brian just managed to barely schedule RMS.
786
00:51:32,019 --> 00:51:34,709
And then I think, too, we had to kind of come up with a way to do the phone.
787
00:51:34,709 --> 00:51:35,719
We might have used Skype or something.
788
00:51:35,779 --> 00:51:36,539
Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.
789
00:51:37,059 --> 00:51:38,399
He wouldn't use any proprietary technology.
790
00:51:38,539 --> 00:51:40,019
He has limits on what he would use. Yeah.
791
00:51:40,019 --> 00:51:41,277
But he was fine with the phone system?
792
00:51:41,875 --> 00:51:42,479
Hmm.
793
00:51:43,679 --> 00:51:44,479
I do like this summary.
794
00:51:46,949 --> 00:51:52,196
Chris B. saying to himself, well, they have opinions and they know they're Linux.
795
00:51:52,405 --> 00:51:54,727
I'll give them a chance. And still listening.
796
00:51:55,419 --> 00:51:55,912
Hey, I love it.
797
00:51:56,168 --> 00:51:59,339
Thank you. By the way, no time to try NixOS, but being French,
798
00:51:59,339 --> 00:52:03,046
I should find some, as it could be our future with the Sovereign OS stuff.
799
00:52:03,394 --> 00:52:06,039
Not sure it'll make it to production, but unlike the Munich failed migration
800
00:52:06,039 --> 00:52:10,439
in France, we have the Gendarmerie Nationale.
801
00:52:10,739 --> 00:52:14,557
There we go. And the success, successfully migrated to their version of Ubuntu.
802
00:52:15,097 --> 00:52:18,199
So that is a pretty good, that's pretty good grounds for success. I like that.
803
00:52:18,199 --> 00:52:21,439
And they've all, he's also mentioned, they've already done the Open Office and
804
00:52:21,439 --> 00:52:25,849
Thunderbird and stuff like that. So that seems like positive vibes.
805
00:52:25,849 --> 00:52:29,259
Yeah, if you hear more, if it does, be our correspondent if you would.
806
00:52:29,259 --> 00:52:32,430
Please do boost back in. Thank you for boosting and for the longtime support.
807
00:52:32,987 --> 00:52:37,159
And well done perfectly sequencing your individual boost to get to a Spaceballs
808
00:52:37,159 --> 00:52:39,099
boost. Very impressive.
809
00:52:40,679 --> 00:52:44,399
All right. I'll take whomever whiz. Also coming in with 2,222 stats.
810
00:52:44,399 --> 00:52:45,502
That's a row of duckaroos.
811
00:52:46,582 --> 00:52:49,979
I'm building new skills for my agent, but I could use more examples for inspiration.
812
00:52:49,979 --> 00:52:53,989
Would you consider sharing some MD files or wrapper scripts?
813
00:52:54,291 --> 00:52:57,299
I'd love to see community repo or wiki for this kind of thing.
814
00:52:59,379 --> 00:53:02,799
I also love to see the writing to manage multiple agents on the same.
815
00:53:02,799 --> 00:53:03,875
A wiring, I think.
816
00:53:04,450 --> 00:53:05,054
Oh, okay. Thank you.
817
00:53:07,087 --> 00:53:08,987
Okay, I think we need more streams, boys.
818
00:53:08,987 --> 00:53:10,207
I think we might have a stream.
819
00:53:10,527 --> 00:53:13,067
We need a quicker stream. That's very true.
820
00:53:13,407 --> 00:53:17,187
Maybe one of the outputs of the stream could be some stuff published on a repo
821
00:53:17,187 --> 00:53:19,758
or something. Think about it. Thank you, whomever.
822
00:53:19,961 --> 00:53:27,164
I think I can give an example of a skill that I made this week as just a little example.
823
00:53:27,343 --> 00:53:32,327
There was a function I was repeating because I guess my NextCloud notes sync
824
00:53:32,327 --> 00:53:37,450
kept failing for I don't know what reason. And so I kept getting like versions of files and stuff.
825
00:53:37,990 --> 00:53:43,632
And so all I did was I kept like three times in one day. I wanted to compare
826
00:53:44,027 --> 00:53:46,512
different versions of the identical file.
827
00:53:46,773 --> 00:53:50,937
So I used, I don't know, the NextCloud API or something to like go fetch those
828
00:53:50,937 --> 00:53:54,464
versions, just compare them and then merge all the stuff that didn't sing properly.
829
00:53:54,975 --> 00:53:58,327
And I was like, well, I'm going to be doing this a couple of times or like maybe
830
00:53:58,327 --> 00:53:59,167
in the future it'll fail again.
831
00:53:59,167 --> 00:54:01,557
And just make a skill out of it because we just, I don't know,
832
00:54:01,557 --> 00:54:05,627
I spent 20 minutes figuring out exactly how to do it. Just remember that and
833
00:54:05,627 --> 00:54:10,637
then I'll just call it whenever I need it. So little things like that is a good way to write skills.
834
00:54:10,637 --> 00:54:12,527
So skills to unbreak your Nextcloud server.
835
00:54:13,147 --> 00:54:14,287
Yeah, that's a good place to start.
836
00:54:14,647 --> 00:54:17,607
I don't think I've told my Nextcloud story where it almost ate some of my most
837
00:54:17,607 --> 00:54:18,607
precious data in the world.
838
00:54:19,548 --> 00:54:20,007
Delicious.
839
00:54:20,007 --> 00:54:23,107
Total bug in Nextcloud. If people are interested, boost it. Otherwise,
840
00:54:23,647 --> 00:54:25,398
I hate to talk bad about the project because I love it so much.
841
00:54:26,095 --> 00:54:32,294
but man oh man it basically disqualified itself from me ever using it in production oh no,
842
00:54:32,863 --> 00:54:37,377
it was it was worst case absolutely worst case so it's there's that but i'm
843
00:54:37,377 --> 00:54:40,977
yeah all right well we'll come we'll follow back with you whomever maybe with
844
00:54:40,977 --> 00:54:43,827
a clanker stream well all right who takes mg.
845
00:54:44,187 --> 00:54:47,767
There's another clanker boost here from mg 5 000 sats,
846
00:54:50,400 --> 00:54:54,005
Hey, what models are you using for the various Hermes functions and for coding?
847
00:54:54,289 --> 00:54:57,708
I think Chris talked about Minimax for the primary model, but what about Wes?
848
00:54:58,088 --> 00:55:01,290
And what about Vision or Summary or Titles?
849
00:55:02,387 --> 00:55:03,113
Yeah, Wes.
850
00:55:04,378 --> 00:55:04,948
Yeah, Titles.
851
00:55:04,948 --> 00:55:11,708
Yeah. Yeah. What do you use? Because I use Minimax M3 primarily with a little
852
00:55:11,708 --> 00:55:14,988
small codec subscription on the side to sort of supplement things here and there
853
00:55:14,988 --> 00:55:16,319
that need to build out for them.
854
00:55:16,673 --> 00:55:20,548
So that's, mine's very basic, very boring, but Wes, you're always experimenting.
855
00:55:20,548 --> 00:55:22,946
I know sometimes you're even renting GPUs directly and.
856
00:55:23,179 --> 00:55:27,338
Yeah, I kind of tend to bounce around because I'll, I'll use stuff that is new
857
00:55:27,338 --> 00:55:31,708
on OpenRounder just to try it out or, you know, use stuff that's free or
858
00:55:32,148 --> 00:55:35,648
limited time offer, not necessarily for like production or like consistent backend
859
00:55:35,648 --> 00:55:38,196
stuff, but definitely for, you know,
860
00:55:38,782 --> 00:55:42,838
trying out for coding or random agentics tasks that I'm right there so I can
861
00:55:42,838 --> 00:55:45,808
kind of evaluate them. So I do tend to use a fair amount of DeepSeq.
862
00:55:46,468 --> 00:55:51,678
That's been a good one. Mimo's pretty good. I was trying one called Orenth recently,
863
00:55:51,678 --> 00:55:54,248
which is one that I had to self-host, which is kind of neat.
864
00:55:55,959 --> 00:56:03,094
So it kind of depends on whatever is that. Quinn also, both API and self-host, has been very good too.
865
00:56:03,239 --> 00:56:09,938
Kind of depends on, are you aiming for more tool calling stuff or are you doing
866
00:56:09,938 --> 00:56:14,042
more like active dev work? you might pick, you know, different flavors.
867
00:56:14,560 --> 00:56:15,918
Or image generation is a different thing too.
868
00:56:15,918 --> 00:56:20,931
Totally, yeah. Or, yeah, do you want, like, I like Memo because it does have multimodal support.
869
00:56:21,268 --> 00:56:25,728
There's some interesting ones from Gemma these days with that too.
870
00:56:25,728 --> 00:56:29,698
So if you do want stuff that's optimized for, like, operating a browser or,
871
00:56:29,698 --> 00:56:32,738
you know, being able to quickly paste an image and have it do something with
872
00:56:32,738 --> 00:56:34,387
that, it kind of changes the mix too.
873
00:56:34,979 --> 00:56:37,598
MG, if you're not already, get in one of our clanker chat rooms,
874
00:56:37,598 --> 00:56:40,546
Matrix or Telegram. It's a great question for that room in there, I think.
875
00:56:40,744 --> 00:56:44,718
I'll take this next one. Donnie comes in with another baller boost for the show,
876
00:56:44,718 --> 00:56:47,367
gentlemen, $200 in Fiat Bun coupons.
877
00:56:51,583 --> 00:56:53,829
That's like fashionable fiat.
878
00:56:56,052 --> 00:57:00,427
That is fantastic. Hi, all. I wanted to boost episode 644, the People's File
879
00:57:00,427 --> 00:57:03,645
System, for a while, but I never got around to setting up a wallet.
880
00:57:04,510 --> 00:57:09,218
I found myself maintaining a project that he calls HD Idol almost by accident.
881
00:57:09,468 --> 00:57:12,987
That interview inspired me to test code that manipulates hardware. Thank you.
882
00:57:12,987 --> 00:57:13,507
Nice.
883
00:57:13,507 --> 00:57:17,257
Well, Donnie, thank you for that great boost. That's really awesome.
884
00:57:17,257 --> 00:57:21,167
So HD Idol, huh? I feel like I already can kind of tell what it does.
885
00:57:21,787 --> 00:57:23,177
Gpl3 yeah.
886
00:57:23,177 --> 00:57:25,247
Hard disk idle spin down utility boys.
887
00:57:25,247 --> 00:57:28,957
It's a re-implementation of christian moeller's hd idle yeah utility for spinning
888
00:57:28,957 --> 00:57:32,217
down external disks after a period of idle time since most external ide disk
889
00:57:32,217 --> 00:57:36,727
closures don't support setting the ide idle timer a program like this could
890
00:57:36,727 --> 00:57:38,805
be required to spin down disks automatically.
891
00:57:39,269 --> 00:57:42,427
Freaking great if you've got like external usb spinning rust and stuff.
892
00:57:43,524 --> 00:57:46,137
Wow that's great i could have used this maybe.
893
00:57:46,137 --> 00:57:47,356
Like 10 years ago.
894
00:57:48,273 --> 00:57:48,807
I bet.
895
00:57:48,807 --> 00:57:49,620
I could use it today.
896
00:57:49,933 --> 00:57:54,897
I love the idea that a nerdy interview about bcashfs with kent and some of his
897
00:57:54,897 --> 00:57:59,477
yeah brain smarts on file system then inspired someone who then started maintaining
898
00:57:59,477 --> 00:58:01,967
something that is useful to everyone and,
899
00:58:02,427 --> 00:58:06,127
and also just as my own personal love of testing strategies and stuff which,
900
00:58:06,767 --> 00:58:09,067
hardware testing is especially hard so great,
901
00:58:09,967 --> 00:58:12,236
thank you for thank you for this thank you for sharing all this good stuff.
902
00:58:12,752 --> 00:58:15,597
Yeah i appreciate you sending some of that value back donnie and we'll put a
903
00:58:15,597 --> 00:58:17,476
link to it in the show notes so other folks can check it out.
904
00:58:18,231 --> 00:58:20,959
Leaky canoe comes in with $10 of fiat.
905
00:58:23,751 --> 00:58:26,572
Even though I'm a member, here's some V4V.
906
00:58:26,862 --> 00:58:28,354
Aw, thank you.
907
00:58:29,097 --> 00:58:33,799
After listening to the Forescan Adventures, I bought an OBD2 USB adapter.
908
00:58:33,909 --> 00:58:34,430
Nice.
909
00:58:34,430 --> 00:58:38,466
Wow, what an excellent new tool for my toolbox when paired with some local AI.
910
00:58:38,693 --> 00:58:39,100
Yes.
911
00:58:39,100 --> 00:58:43,380
Isn't it amazing? It's a new age of home repairs, buddy. It's a new age.
912
00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:44,962
That's great. Thank you, Leaky.
913
00:58:45,084 --> 00:58:48,683
And also, the adventure's not over. More to come on that, I'm sure.
914
00:58:49,130 --> 00:58:49,716
Mm-hmm.
915
00:58:49,867 --> 00:58:54,267
We do have some free members boosts here. First one from Anonymous.
916
00:58:54,482 --> 00:58:55,156
Oh, yeah.
917
00:58:59,556 --> 00:59:04,562
A massive appreciation to Brent for his mention of Ngram in the member's bootleg
918
00:59:04,562 --> 00:59:08,142
last week. I've spent the better part of two days trying to implement other
919
00:59:08,142 --> 00:59:12,406
memory tools for my coding agents across providers in OpenCode and Codex.
920
00:59:13,248 --> 00:59:19,599
Ngram is in Nix and syncs secrets across hosts in my Nebula Mesh. Massive love.
921
00:59:20,963 --> 00:59:22,293
That's so great.
922
00:59:22,722 --> 00:59:23,922
That's great to hear.
923
00:59:24,222 --> 00:59:26,832
It sounds like Ngram is a hit. Yeah, we were looking at it afterwards.
924
00:59:26,832 --> 00:59:27,830
It looks pretty good, too.
925
00:59:28,312 --> 00:59:33,482
He also mentions Distributed Llama, which I think we've been poking at a little
926
00:59:33,482 --> 00:59:35,142
bit behind the scenes. That's pretty cool.
927
00:59:35,962 --> 00:59:38,612
We should probably link to that. And he says, did you guys completely ignore
928
00:59:38,612 --> 00:59:42,562
44? I've been using it for a few months after it came out, and since swapping
929
00:59:42,562 --> 00:59:45,786
away from Nix and setting up Determinant Nix, I've had a great time.
930
00:59:46,144 --> 00:59:48,787
The KD Plasma Edition is really nice, and it worked great for development.
931
00:59:49,268 --> 00:59:51,347
Yes, but there's a reason.
932
00:59:53,642 --> 00:59:57,072
We were at Linux Fest, and then by the time we were done with everything we
933
00:59:57,072 --> 01:00:00,142
had lined up on the schedule it just didn't seem like it made sense anymore
934
01:00:00,142 --> 01:00:04,274
but it hurt it hurt it hurt and then i wasn't sure like,
935
01:00:05,322 --> 01:00:08,142
you know can we pick it up two months later,
936
01:00:08,744 --> 01:00:11,982
you know so i think i feel like we just got to do a really good job with 45
937
01:00:11,982 --> 01:00:16,776
it was that it was no mention or commentary or anything it was just the scheduling worked out where,
938
01:00:17,310 --> 01:00:22,462
we had a window for fedora content wise the release didn't make that window
939
01:00:22,462 --> 01:00:25,512
and then we were up against like hard stuff we had fest.
940
01:00:25,512 --> 01:00:28,712
And then we had i I think we had an interview for the Ubuntu side with John,
941
01:00:28,712 --> 01:00:31,212
if I recall. Yeah, there was just too much going on.
942
01:00:31,212 --> 01:00:34,242
We had to get back and get to that interview. And then, yeah,
943
01:00:34,242 --> 01:00:39,282
there was some Summit stuff in there as well. It was crazy. So that was really a miss.
944
01:00:39,944 --> 01:00:43,253
I do really like, though, Anonymous here points out.
945
01:00:45,093 --> 01:00:51,442
They link to museumofmodernart.org, which every once in a while,
946
01:00:51,442 --> 01:00:57,713
a computer can be a museum or at least a museum piece. And do you know what it happens to be?
947
01:01:00,110 --> 01:01:00,476
A Mac?
948
01:01:00,476 --> 01:01:02,056
A Macintosh classic desktop.
949
01:01:02,056 --> 01:01:03,083
That's cool.
950
01:01:05,770 --> 01:01:11,156
It is beautiful, you know, I have to say, in an old kind of yellowing way.
951
01:01:11,667 --> 01:01:14,796
Gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation. I just love that idea.
952
01:01:15,521 --> 01:01:18,416
Thank you very much. Appreciate that, Anonymous. Marcel sent in a free member
953
01:01:18,416 --> 01:01:20,380
boost for 3D printing. I got two Vorons.
954
01:01:20,984 --> 01:01:24,806
It's not a company. It's a self-assembled, and it's from an open source community
955
01:01:24,806 --> 01:01:26,475
that designs in the open.
956
01:01:26,905 --> 01:01:30,466
They can 100% their stuff for the car. Just don't use PLA plastic.
957
01:01:30,466 --> 01:01:34,103
I made a custom phone mount. I printed an ASA. Still fine a year later.
958
01:01:34,399 --> 01:01:34,676
Ooh.
959
01:01:35,682 --> 01:01:40,314
Yeah, that's great. Okay, Marcel. I like that. And I can use it in the RV too.
960
01:01:40,552 --> 01:01:43,446
Eric, the magician comes in with a free member boost. Following up on Nebula
961
01:01:43,446 --> 01:01:46,549
and DNS, it was the wife who didn't want it on all the time.
962
01:01:46,752 --> 01:01:49,596
I tried Nebula in December, and I tried it again this week. I was asking,
963
01:01:49,596 --> 01:01:51,776
like, why are you turning off your wife network?
964
01:01:52,116 --> 01:01:54,096
But it is actually working better now. I got...
965
01:01:57,156 --> 01:02:02,043
Blaming the wife. I got caught with Nebula V2 Scheme, and the mobile didn't support it at the time.
966
01:02:02,327 --> 01:02:07,364
But the mobile client supports DNS now. Yes, the mobile client's got a nice refresh in early 2026.
967
01:02:08,253 --> 01:02:10,986
It's very true. Good. I really appreciate the follow-up, Eric.
968
01:02:10,986 --> 01:02:14,145
Thank you very much. We tease, but we do appreciate it.
969
01:02:15,114 --> 01:02:20,036
King Arthur member, Boo Sin, I think you were asking about other podcasts who do live things.
970
01:02:20,036 --> 01:02:25,246
And so Vance Crow does live podcasts occasionally, as does the board game company
971
01:02:25,246 --> 01:02:30,805
Stonemaier, who makes wingspan oh wingspan's a fun game and other games yeah cool,
972
01:02:31,595 --> 01:02:35,156
thank you king arthur great to see other live folks doing stuff especially in
973
01:02:35,156 --> 01:02:36,633
the podcast space specifically.
974
01:02:37,028 --> 01:02:43,096
Peg dot came in with a members boost says uh here are my download sat stats
975
01:02:43,096 --> 01:02:48,936
for my downloads folder the the home folder itself started as arch linux around
976
01:02:48,936 --> 01:02:51,987
spring 2019 and got migrated to kashi a few months ago,
977
01:02:52,678 --> 01:02:57,688
download folder the number of items 2,871,
978
01:02:58,803 --> 01:03:05,513
And here's a du-h command to figure out the size. 102 gigs.
979
01:03:05,513 --> 01:03:06,153
Oh!
980
01:03:06,673 --> 01:03:07,173
Oh!
981
01:03:07,713 --> 01:03:10,202
Those, that's the 2,000 files are pulling their weight.
982
01:03:10,992 --> 01:03:16,493
I wonder how much of that old stuff you need. You know? Like how much of that from, you know?
983
01:03:17,226 --> 01:03:21,168
If you're archival in your disposition, then all of it.
984
01:03:22,404 --> 01:03:25,663
Should I reveal my details or should we wait one more week? I kind of,
985
01:03:25,663 --> 01:03:27,293
I feel like I've been teasing it out too much.
986
01:03:27,293 --> 01:03:27,791
You have been.
987
01:03:28,407 --> 01:03:34,258
So I'm going to tell you. I'm looking at it right now. So the size is not that impressive.
988
01:03:34,972 --> 01:03:38,033
54 gigs. I think that's pretty reasonable for a downloads folder.
989
01:03:38,033 --> 01:03:39,355
It's pretty reasonable.
990
01:03:40,144 --> 01:03:41,027
No, it's not.
991
01:03:41,677 --> 01:03:42,919
What? Really? 54 gigs?
992
01:03:43,070 --> 01:03:45,386
Mine was like 10 megs or something.
993
01:03:45,944 --> 01:03:46,501
Really?
994
01:03:47,238 --> 01:03:47,761
Uh-huh.
995
01:03:49,032 --> 01:03:51,293
That's so weird with your tab hygiene and all of that.
996
01:03:51,993 --> 01:03:52,153
Yeah.
997
01:03:52,153 --> 01:03:52,793
You don't have any ISO files.
998
01:03:53,293 --> 01:03:54,173
I'm perfect, just not in all ways.
999
01:03:54,173 --> 01:03:57,703
You don't have a VM disk image. Mr.
1000
01:03:57,703 --> 01:04:03,173
Videos Unless I run out of storage I mostly don't manage my downloads folder
1001
01:04:03,173 --> 01:04:07,743
until the machine dies and this machine just won't die It's 62.9.
1002
01:04:07,743 --> 01:04:10,413
Megs and it's got 49 files in it.
1003
01:04:10,413 --> 01:04:12,139
Not even 100 megs?
1004
01:04:15,136 --> 01:04:18,030
I feel like the amount of files is one thing, and I do have a lot of those,
1005
01:04:18,030 --> 01:04:18,780
but I don't need a break about that.
1006
01:04:18,780 --> 01:04:23,380
You're saying you're storing more data in your tabs? That's why I need all the
1007
01:04:23,380 --> 01:04:25,010
RAM. In your tabs than you have in your downloads?
1008
01:04:25,010 --> 01:04:26,867
Oh, definitely.
1009
01:04:27,843 --> 01:04:28,387
Rent.
1010
01:04:31,163 --> 01:04:39,820
Here's what I'm proud of, boys. My oldest file is from, in my downloads folder, November 6th, 1996.
1011
01:04:43,238 --> 01:04:44,961
Yeah, that wasn't true last week.
1012
01:04:45,362 --> 01:04:50,490
My next December 24th, 1996, and then I have a couple files from 2000,
1013
01:04:50,490 --> 01:04:56,440
2004, and then mostly it gets pretty busy around 2016, and then it's just a
1014
01:04:56,440 --> 01:04:59,886
lot of files from there. But it's only 54 gigs.
1015
01:05:00,842 --> 01:05:04,740
So I got files going back to 1996 in the old download drive.
1016
01:05:04,740 --> 01:05:08,446
I wonder if we have similar files because I have two 1996 files as well.
1017
01:05:09,180 --> 01:05:10,420
I know what files they might be.
1018
01:05:10,420 --> 01:05:11,940
You guys have been around for a bit.
1019
01:05:13,921 --> 01:05:15,737
Hey, you can call us seasoned, okay?
1020
01:05:15,912 --> 01:05:18,762
They're text files, right? They're just, you can use them on anything.
1021
01:05:19,575 --> 01:05:22,560
Right. Let's wrap it up. Thank you, everybody who supported the show.
1022
01:05:22,560 --> 01:05:23,998
Thank you, too, to the SAT streamers.
1023
01:05:24,410 --> 01:05:26,820
18 of you streamed SATs as you just listened to the episode,
1024
01:05:26,820 --> 01:05:33,170
and collectively, you stacked a real handsome 63,014 SATs. That ain't too bad at all.
1025
01:05:33,960 --> 01:05:37,030
I think that's pretty darn good. So thank you for streaming those SATs.
1026
01:05:37,030 --> 01:05:40,750
When you bring it together with our Fiat Fund coupons converted to sats at the
1027
01:05:40,750 --> 01:05:43,630
current market value, we had a really great episode this week.
1028
01:05:43,630 --> 01:05:47,508
And it means so much. The show, I can't believe we're still going.
1029
01:05:47,961 --> 01:05:52,530
I mean, we're going into July. And we don't have, the only primary sponsor we have is Nebula.
1030
01:05:53,011 --> 01:05:55,500
The other sponsors are temporary. You know, it's just different.
1031
01:05:55,500 --> 01:05:58,580
It's different. I don't need to go into details. But we just wouldn't be here
1032
01:05:58,580 --> 01:06:01,250
without the support. I cannot tell you how much it matters. Thank you,
1033
01:06:01,250 --> 01:06:02,420
everybody who supported the show.
1034
01:06:02,832 --> 01:06:10,740
We stacked a grand total of 809,307 Satoshis. Absolutely incredible.
1035
01:06:10,740 --> 01:06:11,420
Amazing.
1036
01:06:23,708 --> 01:06:28,207
It's across 30 people. Tens of thousands of people will listen to this episode.
1037
01:06:28,207 --> 01:06:32,377
30 people and our members are making it possible. LinuxUnplugged.com membership
1038
01:06:32,377 --> 01:06:36,617
to put your support on Autopilot or boost the show at boost.jupyterbroadcasting.com
1039
01:06:36,617 --> 01:06:39,167
or use something like the Fountain app. Makes it real easy.
1040
01:06:39,468 --> 01:06:43,857
Cast-O-Matic is great on iOS as well and connects with your Albi Hub.
1041
01:06:43,857 --> 01:06:47,526
Thank you everybody who supported the show this week and kept us going.
1042
01:06:47,960 --> 01:06:52,628
We really appreciate it. And for you and everybody else as a little treat, we got some picks.
1043
01:06:55,217 --> 01:06:58,937
If you will allow, we are going to start with a couple of retro Mac picks.
1044
01:06:58,937 --> 01:07:02,280
If you want to go get a VM set up, we got some suggestions for you.
1045
01:07:03,677 --> 01:07:06,907
And we've been having some fun. There's a lot we could have picked.
1046
01:07:06,907 --> 01:07:07,687
I'm going to tell you that.
1047
01:07:07,687 --> 01:07:08,202
A lot.
1048
01:07:08,719 --> 01:07:12,037
We tried to narrow it down for you all. A couple of must-haves.
1049
01:07:12,037 --> 01:07:13,997
Wes, why don't you start with one of your favorites?
1050
01:07:13,997 --> 01:07:18,976
Yeah. I mean, as a kid, this just was blowing my mind. It's Morph.
1051
01:07:19,516 --> 01:07:25,527
um griffin morph no less which was one of the first commercial quote-unquote
1052
01:07:25,527 --> 01:07:30,615
morphing programs available for this era of computers um you essentially,
1053
01:07:31,579 --> 01:07:35,083
You're given a UI where you can kind of put dots on two images,
1054
01:07:35,083 --> 01:07:39,131
and then you move the dots so they sort of match up so they both are on a nose, say.
1055
01:07:39,409 --> 01:07:43,903
And then it generates a transition effect from one image to the other,
1056
01:07:43,903 --> 01:07:47,783
and then you can export that as a movie. Quick time, no less.
1057
01:07:47,903 --> 01:07:49,463
That's pretty good. It's impressive.
1058
01:07:49,763 --> 01:07:53,193
Yeah, so that was one of the demos it came with, where it's morphing like a
1059
01:07:53,193 --> 01:07:55,841
bear into a lion, and vice versa.
1060
01:07:56,388 --> 01:07:57,103
Yeah, yeah.
1061
01:07:57,523 --> 01:08:00,633
That's pretty fun. It did also give me a chance to really deal with resource
1062
01:08:00,633 --> 01:08:05,827
forks, because, boy, howdy, did the early QuickTime videos really use that stuff.
1063
01:08:06,210 --> 01:08:11,563
So, like, it's part of the data, like, the move atom is in one side and then
1064
01:08:11,563 --> 01:08:14,256
the mdata stuff is in the other part of the file.
1065
01:08:14,983 --> 01:08:18,429
And then what you can do is if you get QuickTime for that era,
1066
01:08:18,707 --> 01:08:23,473
you can open up the export from Morph and then you can save it as a consolidated
1067
01:08:23,473 --> 01:08:27,346
file that can open on non-Macs and then that saves it as the correct version
1068
01:08:27,542 --> 01:08:30,928
that none of it's in the resource fuck and then you can just copy it to your AFP share.
1069
01:08:31,559 --> 01:08:32,553
All right. There you go.
1070
01:08:33,249 --> 01:08:36,111
So Morph is there. That's legitimate software from the old days.
1071
01:08:36,349 --> 01:08:39,345
I cheated a little bit here because this was one of my ideas.
1072
01:08:39,635 --> 01:08:44,144
And then I realized someone had already done it way, way better.
1073
01:08:44,680 --> 01:08:50,363
It's called Legacy AI. Legacy AI allows older Apple computers to interact with
1074
01:08:50,363 --> 01:08:53,038
AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
1075
01:08:53,669 --> 01:08:59,463
Legacy AI works across 15 different Mac systems from System 7 to 1011 El Capitan.
1076
01:08:59,939 --> 01:09:03,693
What? Somebody wrote classic Mac apps to talk to LLMs?
1077
01:09:03,703 --> 01:09:04,089
Yep.
1078
01:09:05,905 --> 01:09:06,893
How is this a thing?
1079
01:09:06,893 --> 01:09:11,688
Yep. Now, I didn't get the networking going because I think it needs TCP.
1080
01:09:12,373 --> 01:09:15,367
Yeah, well, I got that going. I could try this.
1081
01:09:15,530 --> 01:09:21,803
Yeah. Get to it. And the Manticore folks, they also have a few old Mac apps,
1082
01:09:21,803 --> 01:09:24,858
including one that's just like a nice-looking weather thing,
1083
01:09:25,433 --> 01:09:27,849
weather bot. But, yeah, so you can run your own proxy.
1084
01:09:28,017 --> 01:09:30,334
Essentially, you run a proxy to do the HTTPS stuff.
1085
01:09:31,113 --> 01:09:35,223
They provide one as well, I think. And then it has image generation with Dolly
1086
01:09:35,223 --> 01:09:37,474
in there. And you get a little LM.
1087
01:09:38,060 --> 01:09:41,473
You know, if somebody could write a modern web browser for Mac OS,
1088
01:09:41,473 --> 01:09:42,819
we could almost do a challenge.
1089
01:09:44,050 --> 01:09:48,373
It'd be stupid, but we could almost do a challenge. That's crazy. Wow.
1090
01:09:48,373 --> 01:09:49,588
Okay.
1091
01:09:50,296 --> 01:09:52,433
I did not expect that. I did not expect that.
1092
01:09:52,433 --> 01:09:53,893
I'm like speechless on this one.
1093
01:09:53,893 --> 01:09:55,703
I am too. I did not expect that.
1094
01:09:55,703 --> 01:09:59,873
And it looks so nice. They really leaned into the look of that era app and the toolkit.
1095
01:10:01,238 --> 01:10:05,345
All right. Well, I want to tell you about a little nostalgia that I got going,
1096
01:10:05,825 --> 01:10:09,145
and I'll link to this in the show notes. You don't even have to set up a VM
1097
01:10:09,145 --> 01:10:12,848
to try it because the Internet Archive will run a VM in the web browser.
1098
01:10:13,191 --> 01:10:19,265
It's an app called Dark Castle, a 1986 computer game for the Mac published by
1099
01:10:19,265 --> 01:10:22,318
Silicon Beach Software, and then it was ported to other platforms later on.
1100
01:10:22,531 --> 01:10:27,125
It's a platformer, a side-by-scrolling platformer, where a hero named Duncan,
1101
01:10:27,805 --> 01:10:31,815
tries to make his way through an evil castle where there's a black knight and
1102
01:10:31,815 --> 01:10:36,480
objects and bats he has to dodge and mice and rats and occasional puzzles.
1103
01:10:37,026 --> 01:10:41,513
And as a young lad, I spent an enormous amount of time playing this game.
1104
01:10:42,545 --> 01:10:46,115
It's very simple by today's standards, but it's actually, in my opinion,
1105
01:10:46,115 --> 01:10:50,939
still holds up, still makes for a bit of a challenge, especially using the controls under a VM.
1106
01:10:51,328 --> 01:10:52,895
So Dark Castle.
1107
01:10:53,598 --> 01:10:58,905
Yeah, 1986. And you can play it right on archive.org or you can download the
1108
01:10:58,905 --> 01:11:03,425
image file and then mount it as a CD-ROM and install it on your VM.
1109
01:11:03,885 --> 01:11:04,215
Wow.
1110
01:11:04,918 --> 01:11:08,605
I loved it, and it was really great to revisit that. Another game that I was
1111
01:11:08,605 --> 01:11:13,590
surprised was so much fun to revisit is a 1987 hit called Crystal Quest,
1112
01:11:14,078 --> 01:11:18,675
a mouse-driven game where the player controls a little circular spaceship and
1113
01:11:18,675 --> 01:11:23,331
you got to shoot around the screen, collect crystals, blow up UFOs,
1114
01:11:24,080 --> 01:11:26,454
and then, you know, go through tiny little obstacles.
1115
01:11:26,756 --> 01:11:31,625
And it's funny how hard it is actually to control this game.
1116
01:11:32,245 --> 01:11:38,203
I spent a lot of time dying, but you can play Crystal Quest again on archive.org or on the Mac VM.
1117
01:11:41,059 --> 01:11:42,923
And relive the classic sounds.
1118
01:11:46,510 --> 01:11:47,228
Oh!
1119
01:11:48,268 --> 01:11:50,778
That stupid gate on the bottom, their portal or whatever.
1120
01:11:50,908 --> 01:11:51,048
I know.
1121
01:11:51,108 --> 01:11:54,804
The sharp edges, you gotta be right in the middle.
1122
01:11:55,396 --> 01:11:59,718
And those weird noises that it makes. I mean, the games, they're definitely of an era.
1123
01:11:59,718 --> 01:12:01,137
Crystal Quest is such a classic.
1124
01:12:01,833 --> 01:12:05,148
There's so many on archive.org and other places, but Crystal Quest and Dark
1125
01:12:05,148 --> 01:12:09,178
Castle were some of my favorites, so we'll link to those in the show notes.
1126
01:12:09,178 --> 01:12:11,458
But we do have some gosh darn Linux picks, don't we?
1127
01:12:11,592 --> 01:12:15,648
At least one. Yeah, just one. And this is actually a sneaky piece of feedback.
1128
01:12:15,648 --> 01:12:22,924
So listener Alex wrote in, I'm the author of GoToTV, which Wes gave a nice shout out in episode 516.
1129
01:12:23,242 --> 01:12:29,098
And a couple of months ago, I created MCP Beam. I've been listening to the podcast
1130
01:12:29,098 --> 01:12:32,391
for a while, and you often talk about your media setup, so I thought you might like it.
1131
01:12:32,595 --> 01:12:38,470
It lets you control Chromecast and DLNA receivers through an MCP-compatible agent.
1132
01:12:38,777 --> 01:12:42,808
For example, you can tell your agent, play a random video from my library on the living room TV.
1133
01:12:43,288 --> 01:12:47,762
Nice. Seek to 50%. Pause playback. It supports video, audio, and images.
1134
01:12:48,423 --> 01:12:51,208
It takes me about an hour to get to work, and Linux Unplugged fits perfectly
1135
01:12:51,208 --> 01:12:54,356
into that commute. Thanks for keeping me company along the way.
1136
01:12:54,518 --> 01:12:54,928
Aw.
1137
01:12:54,928 --> 01:13:00,155
That is so cool. MCPBeam, mostly written in 99.6% Go.
1138
01:13:01,083 --> 01:13:05,520
And what a cool idea. And then you just get this set up in OpenCode.
1139
01:13:05,520 --> 01:13:07,540
You open up OpenCode and just tell it to play the file.
1140
01:13:07,540 --> 01:13:12,720
I will definitely give this a try. I've been using the CAT, C-A-T-T tool a fair
1141
01:13:12,720 --> 01:13:18,400
amount to control my Chromecast. But this would just kind of skip one step, which sounds great.
1142
01:13:18,400 --> 01:13:24,099
Now, eventually I'll get all of you boys deeply indoctrinated into the school of Home Assistant.
1143
01:13:24,594 --> 01:13:27,241
But until then, it's all very useful.
1144
01:13:27,878 --> 01:13:29,933
It's all very useful, but Home Assistant can control it all.
1145
01:13:30,160 --> 01:13:34,760
Also, another shout-out to GoToTV, which is a fantastic app.
1146
01:13:34,760 --> 01:13:37,909
A little cast media files to your smart TVs or Chromecast devices.
1147
01:13:38,728 --> 01:13:42,687
A little for Linux. So we'll link to that, too, because that was very solid.
1148
01:13:43,303 --> 01:13:45,090
That was good. Well, there you have it.
1149
01:13:46,604 --> 01:13:51,610
It was nice to say goodbye to Apple Talk and go down memory lane one time for a little while.
1150
01:13:51,610 --> 01:13:57,020
And at least remember, in a way, how awful networking used to be and how good
1151
01:13:57,020 --> 01:14:02,608
it is now and how transparent TCPIP is now and how transparent it is to just
1152
01:14:02,858 --> 01:14:05,520
talk between machines and systems and route out to the internet.
1153
01:14:05,520 --> 01:14:09,410
And that we live in a world where you don't need an interbridge to have two
1154
01:14:09,410 --> 01:14:12,710
totally different proprietary things, be able to talk to each other with another
1155
01:14:12,710 --> 01:14:14,230
proprietary middleman in the middle.
1156
01:14:14,729 --> 01:14:18,253
Well, you do in some worlds, but you don't in the topics we cover on this show.
1157
01:14:18,891 --> 01:14:22,520
Wouldn't mind getting my hands on a 3Com InterBridge and setting up a little
1158
01:14:22,520 --> 01:14:24,499
3Com InterBridge network or something.
1159
01:14:24,911 --> 01:14:28,220
That'd be stupid. My kind of thing. You know, my kind of thing.
1160
01:14:28,220 --> 01:14:30,379
Yeah, I mean, maybe once we're sponsored by Novell Network.
1161
01:14:31,390 --> 01:14:34,754
Yeah, that'll come along any time now. We're big IPX guys. So,
1162
01:14:34,754 --> 01:14:37,294
Wes, before we get out of here, you know, there's additional data,
1163
01:14:37,294 --> 01:14:40,684
you might say. You could say rich details around the show in multiple different
1164
01:14:40,684 --> 01:14:42,268
ways. Could you tell people about it?
1165
01:14:42,865 --> 01:14:48,014
Yeah, well, if you open up an AppleTalk bidirectional connection to our RSS
1166
01:14:48,014 --> 01:14:53,254
server and you set up your Mac to be able to handle JSON files correctly,
1167
01:14:53,674 --> 01:14:56,628
you will be able to have access to our cloud chapters, yeah,
1168
01:14:57,139 --> 01:15:01,764
which are timestamps into our podcasts that tell you when we talk about stuff at the segment level.
1169
01:15:01,764 --> 01:15:05,214
But if you need more granularity and your system has enough RAM,
1170
01:15:05,493 --> 01:15:09,452
you can even get an SRT or VTT file for subtitles.
1171
01:15:09,835 --> 01:15:15,245
Oh, and don't forget that macOS 8.1 installation media comes with a free trial of AOL.
1172
01:15:15,570 --> 01:15:19,504
You can get online and it's keyword LUP-LUG to join our mumble room,
1173
01:15:19,504 --> 01:15:21,909
which gets together every Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific.
1174
01:15:22,466 --> 01:15:26,034
JBLive.tv is where to watch it, Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
1175
01:15:26,034 --> 01:15:29,461
Eastern, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your local time.
1176
01:15:33,397 --> 01:15:36,607
Yeah, we got show notes. Yeah, we got links.
1177
01:15:36,932 --> 01:15:42,533
Whichever you want, what's we talked about and all of that over at linuxunplugged.com slash 674.
1178
01:15:42,992 --> 01:15:46,858
There's also some great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Go check those out.
1179
01:15:47,415 --> 01:15:49,766
And why not check out the back catalog while you're over there?
1180
01:15:50,056 --> 01:15:52,285
And then join us on a Sunday.
1181
01:15:52,843 --> 01:15:55,914
Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Get yourself in the right headspace.
1182
01:15:56,169 --> 01:15:58,526
That way, Monday feels like a Wednesday.
1183
01:15:59,257 --> 01:16:03,464
And then go check our calendar again, because you never know when there might
1184
01:16:03,464 --> 01:16:05,004
be a sneaky clanker stream coming up.
1185
01:16:05,004 --> 01:16:08,374
Clanker. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's
1186
01:16:08,374 --> 01:16:10,142
episode of Your Unplugged Program.
1187
01:16:10,374 --> 01:16:14,063
And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.
1188
01:17:08,237 --> 01:17:09,054
Thank you. Bye, Drew.