674: LAN Before Time

0:11Chris:Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

0:16Wes:My name is Wes.

0:17Brent:And my name is Brent.

0:18Chris:Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, Linux is saying goodbye to AppleTalk. So naturally, we're bringing it back. We're going to build a tiny retro LAN with Mac OS 8, Linux, Netatalk, no TCP IP. And we'll tell you about a surprisingly hard part that we ran into. Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, guys.

0:45Mumble:Hey, Chris. Hey, my son. Hello, Brent.

0:47Chris:Hi. Good crew in there today. Hi. And the hell up there in the quiet listening, too. Hello, everybody, live over at jblive.tv. Nice to have you on board. And good morning to our friends over at Defined Networking. Go to defined.net slash unplugged. You know, this week, we're remembering a time when networking felt local and understandable. And that's why I like Manage Nebula from Define Networking. It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that was originally developed to connect all of Slack's global infrastructure securely and safely.

1:19Chris:What's also great about Nebula is you can run your own lightweight lighthouse, your own nodes. You control the visibility and connectivity. You have that under your power. It's fast. It's encrypted. It's resilient. And it's great for connectivity for a home lab all the way up to global enterprises. So start with 100 hosts for free. No credit card required. Defined.net slash unplugged. Go over there. Check it out. Support the show at defined.net slash unplugged.

1:50Chris:A quick spot of housekeeping. Wes, you wanted to remind us about NixVegas coming up around the corner.

1:55Wes:Yeah, that's right. NixVegas, a great conference I had the privilege of speaking at last year. If you don't remember, it's a sub-conference at DEF CON. So it's a ton of fun, lots of security, hackers, and with the efforts of the SoCal NixOS user group and Distractions, Inc., there's now a bunch of Nix nerds there, too. So the CFP is still open for a week and three days until the 16th, or I think it ends maybe the midnight on the 15th. And they're doing something kind of interesting this year that not only can you do like a call for papers style submission to do a talk, but they're also doing something where they want you to submit.

2:33Wes:Like if you don't want to do a whole public speaking thing, they're going to have a space for people to show off projects instead of giving presentations. So if you have a cool Nix-related thing you want to demo at a con, they'll have space, maybe infrastructure, and so you can kind of have more casual conversations, demo that without having to go through the rigmarole of doing a public talk. So I just think that's great, and it's super good time, very clever nerds doing the intersection of security.

3:01Wes:And as we know, Nix makes a great foundation for that. And if you're curious, they do have a little sneak peek of some of the talks they've already accepted, and we'll have that linked in the show notes.

3:10Chris:All right so time is running out though if you want to get in on that goodness you got like a limited window of time you can still register.

3:16Wes:And go but if you do submit a cfp and get accepted they do cover the defcon badge which is great.

3:23Chris:Sweet sweet links in the show notes for that as we do, So we wanted to say goodbye to Apple Talk properly. You know, it was released in 1985 as the primary protocol used by Apple devices, all the way up pretty solidly into the 90s. And it was dropped officially in Snow Leopard when they just sort of switched all in on TCP IP. Now, we recently covered that it's going to be removed from the Linux kernel in Linux 7.2, the next major release.

3:50Wes:I think you're underselling this. You know, you're just coming in here matter-of-factly, you know, just doing our serious news business. We talked about how it was going to be removed from the kernel as if it hasn't been something of a small existential crisis for you since we talked about that.

4:04Chris:It's true. That's fair. It's true. I was trying to keep the emotion out of it because, you know, I'm upset about this.

4:09Brent:You made swag just to, like, put your tears all over them.

4:14Chris:I know. Well, here's the irony of it, too. And this is why it hurts. Right. Is and I hope today we will make the case why Apple talk was perhaps one of the greatest protocols of all time. I'm going to try to make the case today. We'll see. But what hurts about it is I know it was ironically removed from the kernel, because it started getting more attention. Okay? That's just a little bit of salt in the wound, boys.

4:40Wes:It turns out the LLMs, they really like it. They were checking it out. And now we're following it.

4:45Chris:So on June 16th, I went into the Linux kernel mailing list, and you can find this email here. I'll have it linked. AppleTalk has been removed from Mac OS 10.6 since Snow Leopard in 2009. We just recently got a burst of AI-generated fixes for the protocol, which nobody's reviewing. Let AppleTalk follow the AX25 and ham radio out of the Linux tree. We'll maintain code at, and they link it to an orphan.

5:11Wes:That is cool. I didn't know that existed until this happened. There is this Linux NetDev mod orphan repo you can get for this stuff, but.

5:18Chris:That's legit cool. That's legit cool. I want to take us back in time, though, because you guys, I mean, I think everybody's just rolling their eyes at this, but there could have been a world where AppleTalk took off. See, it arrived early on when there was not a standard. People were not using TCP IP. That wasn't the obvious choice. Everybody, every major vendor had their own local LAN network standard. Microsoft had NetBui, NetWare had IPX, and Apple had AppleTalk, and there were others as well.

5:51Chris:And, you know, in the fringes, the weirdos were using something called TCP, but we'll get to that.

5:56Wes:I mean, you hadn't even standardized on like what you were doing at the physical layer yet, right? I mean, Ethernet, token ring, other options.

6:04Chris:Which was one of the great things about AppleTalk is it had real flexibility. It could do local talk, Ethernet, token ring, whatever the sort of the flavor du jour of networking was. AppleTalk probably worked with it, even down to just computers connected directly to each other. It was beyond what most people could do. But what you have to appreciate is AppleTalk had dynamic addressing, DHCP essentially, and had name discovery, DNS essentially, built in on day one.

6:36Chris:Name resolution, auto discovery. So you could go out and get yourself a tiny little beige Mac. You could drop it down on the network, plug it in, and it would start seeing the other Mac. And then you plug in the next one and it sees the other Mac.

6:47Brent:That's a strange concept. Right?

6:49Chris:Right. Now, I mean, Wes, I know we're kind of jumping around here, but you were looking at some of the protocol stuff here. I mean, it's genuinely impressive, right?

6:57Wes:Yeah, it is pretty great. So you mentioned local talk, which was basically they hadn't really planned when they were doing like the first Macintosh for networking to necessarily be a part. And they were already kind of overdone on how many chips they could fit on the board and the expense and all of that. And so they had a serial bus and they're like, well, we're just going to turn that into, you know, a physical layer for networking and implement packet collision in user space, essentially.

7:20Wes:in the software that we run it on and just make it work. And then later that had to get ported over to things like EtherTalk or TokenTalk so that you could have flexible physical layers, which, yeah, that already is huge, right? Which kind of helped us that we did bridge into Ethernet winning the world. But then above that, yeah, so they've got, well, they've got a lot of interesting stuff, but the main one you're talking about is NBP, which is the name-binding protocol, which is the big one.

7:47Chris:For the 80s, 85, 87, 88, like this was huge.

7:52Wes:Yep. Distributed, no central authority. It provides a way basically to have a nice name, a human readable name. And what they were early on is this idea that we've slowly gotten to and the TCP IP did not come with, which is like, don't use the address, right? The address is like a temporary thing, right? You're sending the letter to me. Okay, you might need the address of the house I'm renting right now, but that's going to change. And the same idea is here.

8:18Wes:So like you want to talk to the same printer on, you know, the third, the third floor office printer. But if we go redo the underlying networking, that shouldn't have to be a big deal.

8:28Chris:Yeah.

8:28Wes:And then already they also had this hilarious protocol called AARP. Oh, yeah. It's not the, you know, American Association of Retired Persons or whatever the correct abbreviation is. It's the Apple Talk Address Resolution Protocol. And this is because like they did. So you have DDP, which is kind of sort of, you can imagine, it's like the, it's sort of the IP equivalent in this. So you have whatever you're doing at the physical layer. And then on top of that rides DDP, which is sort of the thing that actually has the address.

9:02Wes:which is like three little components one of that's a socket one of that's a local address and once they got routing which they didn't have originally they added like a global thing that's sort of like the router number so you can have separate sub networks, but you need a way if you have this apple layer address how do you get the like ethernet address or whatever on the physical media that's where aarp comes in so like already and they had this concept where you could go from a human-friendly name of your printer and then you distribute it without a centralized server you ask the network hey what's the you know the apple address of this so you get that back then and of course you this all gets cash too, and then from that you go hey how do i find that on this like ethernet network that i'm actually on and you get that back and then you can open a ddp, um which is datagram delivery protocol which is kind of like you can imagine at udp on ip but you don't even need a separate thing because it was just built into how it worked and then you can send basic unreliable networking and then on top of that,

10:01Wes:they kind of they kind of went a fascinating path because instead of starting with like TCP has these full like you know the SYNXN stuff and the bidirectional setup and all the things that come with TCP. They started with just little transactions. So they have ATP, which is AppleTalk Transaction Protocol, which is just request and response. It's almost like an RPC thing. So it wasn't meant to be this open-ended, long-living connection. It limits, like it only allows up to eight request packets, which is kind of fascinating.

10:33Wes:And then only later, after it was sort of proven out, because this was really early, right? Networking was still becoming like a thing consumers even did or had access to. later on they added the apple talk data stream protocol which is basically the tcp equivalent it's reliable ordered bi-directional byte stream but it kind of has some of their own twists it has symmetric teardown it has a notion of an out of band attention message so if you need to send some urgent message but you don't want it to be stuck in the queue behind whatever you've already sent it has an idea for that.

11:05Chris:Yeah you could do that for like server shutdown alerts.

11:07Wes:Exactly and they have a way to say like oh i you know just i need to shut this down early so reject everything that's going to come after this. Kind of fascinating. It's like a whole parallel stack of things. And that's before you even get to the application layer where you might build something like an AppleTalk filing server with the AFP, the AppleTalk filing protocol.

11:27Chris:Where they would take advantage of some of the built-in protocol stuff like, we're shutting down the server for 10 minutes. So back in the day, you would alert the network before the services went unavailable because that was just built into AppleTalk. And then they built in a way to display the message into macOS.

11:41Wes:They also had an interesting concept, which we don't really need to get into for today too much, but of zones which kind of went along with these names and zones are fascinating because instead of like usually when we do something like vlans or we think about network segments it's at least somewhat related to the physical layer or however it's like you know worked out and the actual the cabling of it or where the switch is involved, but zones were meant to be social like zones are not connected, in the first version they were but in the second version they like sort of totally decoupled from the actual networking side of it and so they're really more meant for the human layers of how you want to associate these names and then all of the infrastructure on the apple talk side figured out how to map the zones across different routers and all of that under the hood so they were really ahead in multiple ways i.

12:25Chris:Think it was like more complex than say like even work groups were in windows.

12:29Brent:Yeah i think i have a question at this point in the show um why did we get rid of this.

12:35Chris:It sounds freaking great how cool is the decentralized like name discovery stuff. I know. I know.

12:42Brent:Now I understand your existential crisis.

12:45Chris:It was it was so simple. And imagine the type of customers out there like schools and offices where they they they're not really even intending to build a network because like Wes said. The consumer didn't even know what a network was, but they knew that they wanted to share a printer, right? That was sort of their level. And so offices and schools, governments, like they were buying these computers and they still weren't understanding the benefits of networking.

13:12Chris:So they would have them and they wouldn't even necessarily connect them. And so companies like Apple and others had to put together essentially presentations and sales pitches to try to convince corporate America why they wanted computer networking.

13:39Clips:So what does it look like what's what look like the network well you can't see it's not a thing it's a system okay so when did we get the system put in you mean when did we get the computers put in, what do you mean well that's when the system began and we've been adding to it ever since.

13:59Chris:You just put a computer in and it'll add to it um and like we said most systems back then not using TCP IP, each vendor had their own networking solution. And even people that were considered computer experts at the time, they needed their heads to kind of wrap, they needed to wrap their heads around it. This is a clip. I think it's from 1987 from the Computer Chronicles.

14:23Clips:To make it as similar to using local resources as you can. Chris, excuse me, describe the configuration we have here before you get going. What we have is a Macintosh 2 workstation, the color monitor here. This is connected to the file server over the network. The next is a Macintosh 2 that is actually functioning as the file server. It's running the Apple Share software, and you can see on its screen that it has a server status display. The next is the LaserWriter Plus printer, and then in front of Andrew is a Macintosh SE workstation, which is also connected to the file server. Okay, now show us how it all works. Okay.

14:57Clips:The local hard disk is represented by this icon. And when we open that up, we can see folders or the equivalent of subdirectories that are stored locally on this Macintosh 2. Each one of those little cards is a subdirectory. That's right. And if we open that up, we can see whether... Well, that one's empty. Okay. We can see the programs or documents that are stored inside. And those are files. Those are icons for files. And we could have additional folders stored within that.

15:24Clips:Now, when we open up the file server volume, you'll notice that the remote information, the representation of that, is nearly identical to the local information. And in fact, we work with it in just the same way. Now, Chris, one of those folders is gray. That's right. Some folder, in the Macintosh, there's a metaphor for resources that you don't have access to are grayed out. For example, if we go up into this menu, you'll see that some of the selections are grayed because we can't use those at this time. There's nothing in the trash, so we can't empty that.

15:53Clips:The same way, a folder that we can't have access to is grayed, and when we try to open it, indeed, we get a message that says we don't have access. And you don't have access to that because? Because the owner, who has control over giving access to other users, has kept that private. In fact, this is a special kind of folder. This is what we call a drop folder. I can make changes to that folder, but I can't see what's inside. This is sort of like analogous to the mailbox that's on the corner.

16:17Clips:You can go and put things in, but you can't see what's inside there. And it might be useful for if you were doing status reports or performance reviews, you can submit those and no one but the manager has access to them.

16:29Chris:Oh, I see. Oh, interesting, he says. And those are folders? Oh, OK. So this is very early. Immediately when Linux came on the scene, it was such a unique beast in this paradigm because Linux had no vendor affiliation. If you built support for Linux, it would work. So you started to see different protocols start to be built for Linux and it could speak all of one server could talk to the NetWare box. The Windows systems with Samba and the Apple systems with Netatalk and Appletalk.

17:03Chris:One system could do all of it. And it was such a powerful thing early in the early days with Linux. But we didn't start there. Initially, before Linux just came around and did this, entire companies existed just to solve the cross-networking protocol issue that Linux would just come in and do natively. There were entire businesses, multiple of them, that were selling hardware and software trying to solve this multi-protocol world.

17:30Clips:When the accounting firm of Arthur Young & Company decided to install an integrated network, it was faced with some special problems. At the San Jose, California branch, incompatible hardware is divided into different parallel networks on three floors of offices. On the eighth floor, Macintoshes are everywhere. But on the lower floors, IBM compatibles have the upper hand. Today, the company is testing a new gateway that allows any user to communicate with any part of the network.

18:01Clips:What we're really addressing here is the ability to take an existing network, that was designed exclusively for a single environment, DOS in this case, and gatewaying that to the Macintosh world. What we're able to do is we have to dedicate a machine that is a gateway. it's a DOS box it has an ARCNET card in it it has an AppleTalk card in it talks to both networks and the bottom line is it is, for all intents and purposes, seamless, because any file that's published over NetBIOS is available to whoever has access to it, is also available to anybody on the Macintosh side through that gateway machine.

18:49Clips:3Com file servers presently link different machines and different networks over the telephone lines. While the so-called interbridge talks to all the networks, the decision to keep different machines led to frustrations and delays. I guess the biggest problem was just coming to terms with the true capabilities of the network, not pushing the network beyond what it was expected to do. The problem used to be things like corrupted data and file allocation tables that go out of whack and things like that.

19:22Clips:But, you know, the problems we face now are just spending a lot of time trying something that was never intended to work. And you get to the end, and the bottom line is it doesn't work, and you've just spent a lot of time trying it. So I think it's to the point now where it's not causing the users problems. It's causing the people who are trying to push the technology problems. The Mac to IBM gateway is not yet perfected. It took several tries to transfer a file for this demonstration.

19:53Clips:But its appeal is undeniable. Through the Interbridge, a user can retrieve a formatted document, send a memo, or electronic mail literally to anywhere on the network. At Arthur Young, Macintoshes outnumber IBMs, still an unusual sight in the business world. It's common to see accountants lugging Macs back into their offices from field trips to clients' offices. And in spite of some persistent bugs in the Mac to IBM network, the company plans to expand its system to provide network access from remote locations and a wide area network to link offices around the world.

20:35Chris:All right. So that just really brings me back. At the end there, there's a gal. She's carrying a giant bag with a Mac in there, all the wires.

20:43Wes:I think that really, I mean, it kind of hits on what they were designing for, right? Like people were doing that. Some businesses were just adopting, you know, computers of this size and scale. So some people needed to bring it with them, maybe to the job site or plug into an existing network and have it just work.

21:00Chris:There was no Wi-Fi.

21:01Wes:Right. And there might not really be a dedicated IT person there. So that's where a lot of the Apple talk design comes in is where they needed it to be sort of decentralized so that it could be self-discoverable. Now, the downside is, of course, there's not really any security built in. And it comes like they sort of assume smaller networks. So a lot of this is broadcast based over that local network.

21:21Chris:But and you didn't have a lot of network performance back then. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. But there were some upsides. although what i find to be fascinating about the story um and really linux was the great unifier so it didn't matter we're going to get more into our experiments here, on the little land that we built and all of that but if you dig around in the late 80s there was some writing on the wall, there would be slowly and then suddenly this new open standard that only weirdos were using at the time, something called TCPIP.

21:59Clips:...in Palo Alto, where Wendy Woods reports. Stanford University has one of the largest campus computer networks in the country. Some 1,300 computers, ranging from Macintoshes, sophisticated workstations, and PCs, to Vaxes, Microvaxes, and IBM mainframes, all talk to each other via the Ethernet network. In various closets across the campus, you can see the gateways and repeaters, in lay terms, the traffic hops that make the system work across the vast distances required.

22:33Clips:This impressive network even spreads into the dormitories, where students have access to bulletin boards, job banks, even the full bibliographic holdings of the Stanford University library system. They can do assigned courses in programming, even send mail to their instructors or anyone else on campus. Networking director Bill Yunt says tying all these diverse systems together with Macintoshes came with a few tradeoffs. The way we've chosen to do that is by writing software that runs in a compatible fashion with the other machines on the network that share the protocol family called TCPIP.

23:10Clips:And allow a Macintosh to sit on an AppleTalk network and be connected through the AppleTalk network to our Ethernets so that they look to the rest of the network as though they're physically connected. connected to the Ethernet. Macintoshes are slow and have only single-tasking operating systems, but students love them. They're easy to operate and good teaching machines. The most common way Macs are used is in classrooms. In small, local area networks such as this interactive classroom, the Macintoshes share software programs stored in a designated file server.

23:45Clips:What's on the instructor's machine can be viewed on all the students' Macintoshes, or his Macintosh can be used to view what's running on individual students' computers. So far, French history and computer literacy have been taught this way. Linking all computers on campuses is an increasing phenomenon throughout the nation's top universities. MIT and Carnegie Mellon are two other outstanding examples, but the people here say they're ahead of the rest because they've found a way to make their network useful, with top researchers and freshman students alike.

24:19Clips:At Stanford University, for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods.

24:41Brent:Well, I think you boys have been playing with Apple Talk. I mean, you can't just talk about it for half an episode and then not have some kind of crazy experiment going on. So what the heck did you build this week?

24:55Chris:Well, you know, it all came from we got to send this thing off properly, but nothing on Linux uses Apple Talk anymore. I mean, there's Netatalk. There's Netatalk, right? That is legitimately a use. It's an open source, essentially, file server. that acts as an Apple file server to other Apple Macs. And you can talk to a Linux box over that. It's been around since the 90s.

25:18Wes:GPL too.

25:19Chris:It's great. I have it installed on my machine right now just for today's episode, and it's probably been a decade since I set it up.

25:26Wes:You can tell when it's from because it's 91.9% C and 3.6% Perl.

25:32Chris:Yep. And it comes with two daemons. The ATOC-D handles the user-level AppleTalk networking management on the server, so that does routing stuff, node assignment, zone backup. You need something on the network kind of doing this for what we wanted to do. That's the piece that helps Mac clients when they go into, like, Chooser or something. That helps them, like, discover everything. And this server can kind of do that for us. So I got that all running and set up. But I'll tell you why in a minute.

25:59Chris:And I also worked on a couple of projects. I know, Wes, you swore up to, like, way too late, not just enjoying fireworks, but also building projects to try to put together a little, you know, demonstration of using AppleTalk on Linux. And then for fun, why not work on maybe a classic Mac as well, right? Just to kind of make it all come together.

26:21Wes:Yeah, we might have gotten distracted on the classic Mac side.

26:25Chris:Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. So I built a little app called Chooser, which is up on my GitHub. And it is a TUI client for Linux that browses Apple file shares. And it talks Apple talk. And so I got my Linux box and a Mac OS 8.1 VM talking, running under Baskill 2. Yeah. Yeah, it was great, dude.

26:49Brent:What?

26:50Chris:I was emulating a Quadra-class 68K Mac, 608040, 32 megabytes of RAM, because why not?

26:57Brent:This is so ridiculous.

26:59Chris:I got it working with my Ethernet, so it had bridge-style LAN access. So I actually had an old Mac with Ethernet. It's crazy how fast it is, right? I've never used this operating system on a machine like this. I mean, this is not a very fast machine, but compared to old Macs, it boots in like three seconds. Oh, wow.

27:20Wes:It's like XFCE, it's like that, but squared.

27:24Chris:Crazy, crazy. So I got the Linux host using Netatalk, which then I shared out a directory, an AFP file share. And then from Mac OS 8.1, I used chooser to talk to that. And I could also use my chooser on the Linux side, little TUI. And once I had a volume on Linux that I could connect to from the classic Mac, I realized the main thing holding Mac OS 8.1 is it comes with like Netscape 3, Netscape Navigator 3. And I was like, well, I can't use that to download stuff. But I could on my Linux desktop. So I went and downloaded a bunch of classic games.

28:04Chris:And I put them in the share. And I thought, all right, now I've got a nice, easy way to move my games between my Linux box and my Mac. But time has moved on, my friends. And what we forget is that classic Macs, they didn't use file extensions. They had, every file had a delta fork and a resource fork and a finder metadata type.

28:25Wes:Because I ran into this too. Boy.

28:28Chris:Creator codes and all. Oh! So you can't just like move files because the Mac doesn't know what the file is. It doesn't do anything with a .bin or a .zip or a .sit.

28:39Wes:Oh, .sits.

28:41Chris:Oh. So, like, you can't just copy and move them. So I went through all this trouble of getting file sharing working for Bubkis because the real move was to download image versions of them and mount them into my VM and install them that way. And then later on, I got an app called Disk Copy, which supposedly can mount these directly inside macOS.

29:05Wes:You know what I was having work was, because I was using, I think I did use Nettock a bit, but I also, your chooser was built on TailTalk, which is a modern async user-spaced AppleTalk stack in Rust that we were playing with. Yeah, so you can build a bunch of stuff on there. And it also comes with like a little demo AFP server. So I was getting that going too. And I was noticing... It seemed to work better. I was able to, I couldn't copy, but I could run.

29:38Wes:And so like once I had gone through the dance of getting the correct version, most modern version of stuff at Expander going, right? Like I was then able to install stuff that way.

29:49Chris:Yes. Yeah, I had to start with like version three and then go to version five for some reason. There was a bit of a journey. But everything installs so flipping fast, it doesn't matter. It just, it's bonkers how fast everything is. And once you have this unlock, there is a absolute massive library out there on Internet Archive. We'll link to one in the show notes and others of Mac apps, classic retro Mac app games. So we'll talk more about that, I suppose, later.

30:19Chris:But at one point I had the Knicks station, the Knicks book and fake Mac all talking to each other. all there's also apple talk had this concept of ping back in the day go figure and they could all ping each other and all discover each other all use their actual names they were all using real names, i mean the hardest bit is what's available on linux today pretty much only works in kind of a limited capacity you kind of have everything has to be on the same network segment, ideally like not even across different switches and things like that but if you meet these little requirements, you can essentially, with what we have today, with the, with like the chooser TUI app I created, or just what's available with the work in progress demo app that comes with that project Wes was talking about, you can create a local LAN that doesn't use TCP IP and start immediately chatting amongst yourselves and moving files between them.

31:12Chris:Now, it's not really very good because it's not designed to move large files around. But it's incredible how it's still available today. Something from 1985.

31:21Wes:And it still works.

31:22Chris:Still available today. And it still works.

31:23Wes:I think there's something so, like, we just live in a world where, like, it's so obvious, so much of the stack, right? Like, HTTPS, and there's so many layers down from that that's all decided essentially for us just by what everyone else is doing. And so the idea that you can have this whole, like, it's the same wires, but there's a whole parallel thing going on of what's inside them. and at the same time from linux like there's libraries now right that you can you can play with that you can read it tcp dump i had that going as i was debugging a bunch of this and like it just shows you exactly it's nice simple packets the protocol is easy to see what's happening, um so it's kind of a great little play box to learn more about networking because it is kind of relatively it's both different enough to to make you think and simple enough to be able to wrap your head around.

32:10Chris:So you and I both built a couple of, like, MVP demo kind of apps. Mine is Chooser, you know, to browse the AppleTalk network and stuff like that. A little TUI. It works surprisingly well. It has to be a little hacky with some packet capture, to get everything. So you do have to have, like, sudo access to run that.

32:28Wes:And that's true for a lot of this stuff. Or you can, if you set, like, raw packet as a capability on the binary, you can do it that way, too.

32:36Chris:Okay. Yeah, so that's good, too. You can do that. It's not a beautiful app, but the TUI works and it gets the job done. But I'd love to hear what you were up late building with.

32:45Wes:Well, I went down a rabbit hole and I didn't really finish everything. My first example was, so a big motivation for a lot of this stuff from the Apple side was for printers, right? And so that's where you actually wanted, they wanted a way to be able to connect printers, share printer. And so as part of Apple Talk, there's the printer access protocol, which is PAP. And of course, under the hood, it uses a bunch of the other Apple Talk stuff to actually send the data to the printer and that kind of stuff.

33:11Wes:But it participates in the name binding protocol and all of that. So if you have a printer on your network, it's kind of like we're used to these days, but it worked very well back then. You do a query via broadcast to say, show me all the printers that look like this on the network, or you could filter by zone or whatever. And then they send you your info back and you can configure them and connect. So I made a little demo that you could run on the Linux side with GoScript and stuff.

33:37Wes:It wasn't perfect, but at least the data capture worked, is you could go get something like KidPix going, do some art in your old Apple Mac, and then hit print to your AppleTalk printer, and then have this Rust app actually take that and then save that as a file on Linux. Obviously, you could copy it out, but I thought it would be kind of fun if you could just print it right out of the VM.

34:00Chris:That's actually a great use because Kid Picks is fun to play around with.

34:06Wes:And there's a lot of fun stuff you can do, like art tools, right? Like a lot of these Macs were kind of some of the early areas where a lot of digital arts were being explored. So there's a ton of software for it, even old video stuff. But yeah, so that worked. Some nuances in getting exactly the right protocol stuff working, which is where I got TCP dump involved. Because the printing would work, but exactly making it so that the printer, app and the queue and stuff, which, gosh, do you think of how far ahead they were from windows already in this stuff even in this world it's just wild yeah to make it kind of happy with like that it successfully printed and didn't think i it needed to be canceled took a lot longer than i thought, but where i really got off the rails is i discovered that there is something called retro 68 a gcc based cross compiler for classic 68k and power pc macintoshes, and in their readme i noticed uh using retro 68 with nix so you can just do nix develop and point it at their github and after you know a few minutes tens of minutes compiling you get, a build environment that you can build stuff that runs in the old bank.

35:23Chris:No

35:24Brent:It is insane.

35:25Chris:You are kidding me.

35:27Wes:Nope so then you could you could build that you get a dot bin out i put that on my afp share booted up the, you know basilisk going and then you run the dot bin and that extracts and then it's kind of hacky you had to like go out in the file explorer app and like go one layer back and open the folder again and then i would see the actual sort of executable resource there listed but then, i could run that and i got as far as like you would actually open up an app that didn't crash or, freeze the whole operating system.

35:57Wes:It would show text. It had a little, some debug information. My hope was, and it would be fun to finish, my hope was I could build like a two-part thing over AppleTalk that would let you have an MCP system on your host that could then like take screenshots or control stuff inside the Mac.

36:17Brent:Dude, you're time traveling.

36:19Chris:Well done.

36:21Wes:The hardest part was, and this is where I got more into the AppleTalk side, is it ended up that I was running an 8.1 system.

36:28Chris:Yeah.

36:29Wes:And it started having OpenTransport, which is where they were merging TCP. It's like one system that could do both TCP IP and all the AppleTalk stuff.

36:39Chris:But I believe if you install OpenTransport, AppleTalk is disabled.

36:42Wes:You can have it do both. I think that might be the default. So there's just some nuances, and maybe I have an easier time on 7. I might try that. Just because I was having the bot try to help me, and it was essentially trying to figure out, like, what is the right old Mac assembly traps? Like, oh, do I use the legacy API for doing the Apple Talk? So we were trying a little bit on serial. That might also work. But I wanted it. We got it as far as registering a name. But it wasn't quite as far as having it successfully receive a command over Apple Talk. But that'd be the next step.

37:13Chris:Wow. That's fun. We really should give a shout out to, how did you say it? Is it Basilisk? How do you say it?

37:20Wes:Yeah, Basilisk.

37:22Chris:Basilisk 2. Probably people are aware of it. But it's still out there. It's a great project to emulate old Mac OS 8 and 7 era Macintoshes. And the reality is there is so much good software and the firmware and the ROM files, they're all online. You can get access to everything you need to set up a really fun retro computing environment. Sometimes the sound's a little off. You might have to experiment with different ROMs. And you can absolutely share files between your Linux box and this thing just using Netatalk and Chooser. Or you can also just mount things directly in there.

37:59Chris:There's other options, too.

38:00Wes:For getting things in there. I did found for more things to explore. There's something called Global Talk. And this person has the best domain name ever. It's markintosh.com slash globaltalk.html. Global Talk is the nickname we've given to the practice of using an ancient Apple internet router software package. to bridge your local Apple Talk network to the global network of the internet and other people's vintage computers and printers. While nothing is stopping you from doing this all year, usage primarily spikes in March for Marchintosh. Ah, that's what it is. It's Marchintosh.

38:34Chris:That makes more sense.

38:35Wes:Amazing. This lets you and other Global Talk participants share files over Apple Share and print to each other's Apple Talk-enabled printers.

38:44Chris:Wow.

38:45Wes:Yeah.

38:46Chris:Is it 100% safe and secure? Actually, no.

38:48Wes:Probably not the only way to participate in this is to share your ip address on a spreadsheet and open a port for your router to allow these, so as part of that i found there's a couple pieces of software but one of one of them is what's called j router which is a homegrown alternative implementation of apple internet router 3.0 and so in the first local talk era era, apple talk was only local but then they added these internet routers and so they changed like they added another segment onto like the three segment protocol address that was like a global number so you could then have routing between these different networks and so you needed some sort of router software to do that and so in theory and we didn't quite get this far in theory i think we could have this j router going maybe on a mesh network or something and then.

39:34Chris:I was thinking yep.

39:34Wes:Be able to bridge our local apple talk environments and that's apparently what people are doing in.

39:42Brent:Wow.

39:43Wes:Yeah.

39:43Chris:Brent set a reminder.

39:44Brent:So, yeah. March is the time to do that, really.

39:49Chris:Yeah, you're going to be cold inside.

39:50Brent:Yeah, but I get the feeling we're going to be doing this next episode with your energy around all this.

39:56Chris:It was a lot of fun. I did not expect the nostalgia hit as hard when you fire up some of those old games.

40:04Brent:The real question, though, Chris, is are you feeling better about Apple Talk being pulled out of the kernel?

40:10Chris:Not really, no. I mean, I get it. I absolutely, rationally, I get it. But I don't know if I could properly put you in the headspace of late 90s, early aughts. We've kind of come to this collision point where we have a lot of TCP IP. The internet is a thing. But we still have this legacy of the Macintoshes are on this network. The Windows boxes are on this network. And we had this division that was still persistent. the mainframes and whatever the older hardware was, was on a separate network.

40:44Chris:And see, I'm old enough to remember too, like we were still transitioning away from Token Ring. And to have something like Linux that came in and could be Samba and Netatalk at the same time, it was like having a superpower. Like it made my career for a little while. Like it was such a big deal. So like that part of me is really sad to see it go because it means it's one less thing Linux does, but it's just not a thing people need anymore and I get it and we have so much new stuff to build and put in there.

41:13Brent:Maybe they can add it into the kernel in March and then just take it out.

41:17Chris:In May well the good news is there's a lot of people out there won't be running 7.2 for a long time so they still got it.

41:22Wes:Long live 6.18.

41:24Chris:That's right.

41:32Brent:Look at this. We got a little piece of news this week, a little piece of feedback, actually. And we'll see if it's on topic. I'm not sure we'll get into it here. OK, here we go. Good Lord, man. Apple Talks sucked back in the day and still sucks. In any event, just use an older kernel. They are not purging it out of the existing kernels that support it. classic Mac is awesome till the lack of protected memory trashes your app or triggers a beach ball of death.

42:04Chris:Yeah, that is true. Or back then it was an hour glass of death.

42:09Wes:It is nice having it in an emulator that you can just restart pretty easily.

42:12Chris:Yes.

42:13Wes:Especially as I was getting seg faults and trying to call fake memory addresses in assembly.

42:19Chris:Now in defense, Ian, you sent this email before we did this episode. I'd like to know if we changed your mind at all. I think if you think of it at the time, you know, the late 80s, it was actually quite impressive. By the time we were using it, you know, in schools and stuff, if you're around my age, it was getting to the point where it was frustrating. There was already IP was coming along and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, at the time, I think, I don't know, I'd like to know if we changed your mind at least.

42:43Wes:And I mean, we do have the modern legacy, which we didn't mention. But, you know, we got things like MDNS and Bonjour out of basically these ideas or at least the best surviving remnants of it.

42:55Chris:I'm glad you mentioned that. I meant to bring that up, right? Like those were trying to reimplement things that just came native to Apple Talk.

43:00Wes:The whole zero-conf idea, really.

43:02Chris:And for better or worse, right? Like sometimes when you do a packet capture, it's gross to see all those broadcasts on the network. You're like, oh, come on, Apple. Don't look at those. Come on, just look it up. But yeah, it makes it easy for the end user, and it works pretty well for a homeland. So that's why I like it. All right. Let's do some boost, boys, and we're going to start with a baller booster, and it is a baller indeed. Lutris Oppie? You think I got that right?

43:30Wes:No, but that's- Lucitropy.

43:33Chris:Oh, that's way better. That's way better than what I came up with. All right. So, Lucup, Lucup.

43:40Wes:I don't know if you got it once.

43:41Brent:Yeah.

43:43Chris:Lucy comes in with a baller boost of 345,678,000.

43:50Brent:Satoshis. What?

43:53Chris:Yep. Yep. That's right. Ah! Oh! Ha ha! Long-time listener, first-time booster came across Bramble on Hacker News, local password manager with cross-device sync. It is Rust with a cryptographic core. You can find it on GitHub. We'll put a link in the show notes. I'd like to see what you think. Bramble, huh, boys? Sounds like we have a contender for the list here.

44:22Brent:Gpl3 it says bramble a password manager that keeps your secrets on your own devices i like that no account no server holding your vault no company to get breached and leak everything for you you hold the vault you hold the password and that is all.

44:37Wes:What's kind of impressive here is they already seem to have browser extensions i guess the firefox one's pending approval but in progress you can get it uh an ios app and an android app which is kind of some of the harder holes to fill when you make yourself a new password platform.

44:52Chris:Screenshots look good, too.

44:53Brent:Yeah.

44:54Chris:Oh, it looks good.

44:54Brent:Gotta say, yeah. KeyPass looks a little old compared to this. This looks good.

44:59Chris:Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, the flip side is Bitward and keeps moving where the fill button is on me just as I finally learn it. So, you know.

45:07Brent:That's a security bug.

45:09Wes:Would it work better on Hyperland?

45:11Chris:I can confirm it does not.

45:14Wes:Oh, well, our buddy, our pal producer, Jeff Boosin, with a big old row of McDuck's. I think the Steam machine is not, quote-unquote, overpriced. It's too expensive. The closest pre-built computers that come close to its performance and size would need the AMD AI Max APU. Those start around $1,500, and they fall short in GPU spec. Give them some time, and their custom hardware will shine. Or do it yourself.

45:46Chris:I think PJ is saying let them cook.

45:48Wes:Yeah, I think he is.

45:49Chris:Let them cook. Yeah. All right. I say good on you, PJ. Thank you for boosting in. And I think you're right. It's not that it's overpriced. And unfortunately, we may discover that it just becomes the new norm. And we'll just adjust to it like we do gas prices, I suppose.

46:08Brent:There's a boost here. A row of ducks from Brent's Tabs.

46:20Chris:Oh, it gets me every time.

46:21Brent:This came from our Web Boost page. Thank you very much. It says, would Brent consider exporting his tab count as a Prometheus metric the audience could graph into?

46:32Chris:That's a fun idea. That's a fun idea.

46:35Brent:I would highly consider this. I might be ashamed at some point, but that would be fun to graph. It's like a shame graph, basically.

46:43Chris:Don't worry because if we get that going for you I may just reveal how many files and the age of the files in my downloads folder I think people may be shocked, we'll see AR buddy adversary 17 is here with 8143 satoshers, adversaries writes Chris send me a link to your stream deck holder you want I'll print it for you oh really Oh my gosh, that'd be great. He says, yeah, regarding 3D printing, nice printers can cost a bit, but they produce quality parts. The parts in my printer are ironically printed by my printer.

47:22Chris:Persia uses their own printers to print the parts they make their printers out of. The Core 1 printer parts are printed on Core 1s. Yeah, Alex tells me about that.

47:29Brent:But how do you get the first printer, then? How do you get the first?

47:32Chris:Well, you get a little kit, right? But then the cool thing is you can literally print some of the upgrades down the road and stuff.

47:36Brent:So great.

47:37Wes:It was handed to us from the old Wandsprint.

47:40Chris:Adversaries, right, so I also just want to say I love the web boost option. I've been repeatedly punting the Albie extension to set up on my self-hosted LND node every time I try to figure it out. I run into a problem, and I say, I'll get back to it later. So I just haven't been able to boost outside of using Fountain. Well, I'm glad you like it.

47:55Brent:We built it for you.

47:57Chris:We love it.

47:59Wes:Gene Bean, a boost in with 8,888 sats. Chris, have you seen the Y-Can Pro for OBD2 to Home Assistant? Looks to be about $89.

48:16Chris:You know, we've been kind of talking about this off-air a little bit. And it's, yeah, a little meat pie, and it sits there and just runs all the time. I think that is in my future.

48:25Wes:Maybe in all of our futures. And then we also got from our buddy Gene a little Gentoo defense here. You know, Gene writes, you can make that stripped down kernel for your no GUI system pretty easily in Gen 2. Just saying. Gene's not wrong. Gene's rarely wrong, I would say.

48:48Chris:Yeah, I'd say he's got a pretty good batting average.

48:50Brent:Is this his way to get me to try Gen 2 finally?

48:53Chris:I mean, you might love it. That's the funny thing. I had to.

48:55Wes:I think you need to.

48:57Chris:I think you might actually love it.

48:59Brent:Really?

49:00Chris:I do. I do.

49:02Brent:I think you're on Gene's team on this one.

49:04Wes:You know, it's probably a great Hyperland experience.

49:06Chris:Let me ask you something, Brent. If you could, would you love to live in like your own bespoke hand-built cabin or log cabin or something like that that you had all the time and resources in the world to build?

49:16Wes:Oh, yeah.

49:17Brent:Oh, definitely.

49:18Chris:Right? Isn't that kind of what Gentoo is? You build it just the way you live.

49:20Brent:Oh, I see what you're saying.

49:22Chris:A realistic time frame. You know, I'm just saying. Just putting that in there.

49:25Brent:What kind of time frame are we talking about? Because I might consider this.

49:28Wes:You know how.

49:28Chris:You like.

49:29Wes:Distracting projects from your other projects.

49:31Chris:Yeah you know how you love time holes that just totally distract you i call it.

49:35Brent:Productive productivity thank you productive procrastination thank you very much.

49:40Chris:With with that kind of spin you could be a politician.

49:44Brent:Well faraday fedora is not a politician but they did send in a row of ducks, Oh, hell no. MeshTastic is not dead in the Pacific Northwest. Most of us just moved off long fast. Vancouver Island had a closer to 300 node mesh with medium slow. But both mesh core and meshtastic are not a good use case for a sensor on your property. Laura is still a good option, but you do need the whole mesh.

50:14Chris:I would love you to expand on that, Faraday. Because I think I jive what you're saying. It's like those are more for messaging, but the idea of low, like 900 megahertz or whatever it is.

50:25Wes:Yeah, you could have a LoRa mesh of your own.

50:27Chris:Yeah.

50:28Wes:You just need enough to make sure you maintain the coverage, I guess.

50:30Chris:It could use AppleTalk. How do you get it to work with Home Assistant? You probably could. You probably could. Wouldn't that be awesome?

50:36Brent:Well, that's next week's project. There you go.

50:40Wes:You know, NQTT might work great over ATP, you know. I'm just saying.

50:45Brent:Good.

50:46Chris:Dude, they're all very, very, very, very old. So they just might all work great together.

50:52Wes:Chris P. boosts in with $12,345. First time Web Booster, long time listener. Discover JB with the RMS last 200th episode in 2012.

51:08Brent:Wow.

51:09Chris:Oh my goodness.

51:11Brent:Classic.

51:12Chris:Yeah. Yeah. That was a long time ago. That episode, I think, is not only like one of the standard episodes, but for me, I believe, I think, I found out about it either the night before or the morning of it. It was pretty close. It was like we just managed to, Brian just managed to barely schedule RMS. And then I think, too, we had to kind of come up with a way to do the phone. We might have used Skype or something.

51:35Wes:Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.

51:37Chris:He wouldn't use any proprietary technology.

51:38Wes:He has limits on what he would use. Yeah.

51:40Chris:But he was fine with the phone system?

51:41Brent:Hmm.

51:43Wes:I do like this summary. Chris B. saying to himself, well, they have opinions and they know they're Linux. I'll give them a chance. And still listening.

51:55Chris:Hey, I love it.

51:56Wes:Thank you. By the way, no time to try NixOS, but being French, I should find some, as it could be our future with the Sovereign OS stuff. Not sure it'll make it to production, but unlike the Munich failed migration in France, we have the Gendarmerie Nationale. There we go. And the success, successfully migrated to their version of Ubuntu. So that is a pretty good, that's pretty good grounds for success. I like that.

52:18Chris:And they've all, he's also mentioned, they've already done the Open Office and Thunderbird and stuff like that. So that seems like positive vibes.

52:25Wes:Yeah, if you hear more, if it does, be our correspondent if you would. Please do boost back in. Thank you for boosting and for the longtime support.

52:33Chris:And well done perfectly sequencing your individual boost to get to a Spaceballs boost. Very impressive. All right. I'll take whomever whiz. Also coming in with 2,222 stats. That's a row of duckaroos. I'm building new skills for my agent, but I could use more examples for inspiration. Would you consider sharing some MD files or wrapper scripts? I'd love to see community repo or wiki for this kind of thing. I also love to see the writing to manage multiple agents on the same.

53:02Wes:A wiring, I think.

53:04Chris:Oh, okay. Thank you. Okay, I think we need more streams, boys.

53:09Wes:I think we might have a stream.

53:10Brent:We need a quicker stream. That's very true.

53:13Chris:Maybe one of the outputs of the stream could be some stuff published on a repo or something. Think about it. Thank you, whomever.

53:20Brent:I think I can give an example of a skill that I made this week as just a little example. There was a function I was repeating because I guess my NextCloud notes sync kept failing for I don't know what reason. And so I kept getting like versions of files and stuff. And so all I did was I kept like three times in one day. I wanted to compare different versions of the identical file. So I used, I don't know, the NextCloud API or something to like go fetch those versions, just compare them and then merge all the stuff that didn't sing properly.

53:55Brent:And I was like, well, I'm going to be doing this a couple of times or like maybe in the future it'll fail again. And just make a skill out of it because we just, I don't know, I spent 20 minutes figuring out exactly how to do it. Just remember that and then I'll just call it whenever I need it. So little things like that is a good way to write skills.

54:10Wes:So skills to unbreak your Nextcloud server.

54:13Brent:Yeah, that's a good place to start.

54:14Chris:I don't think I've told my Nextcloud story where it almost ate some of my most precious data in the world.

54:19Brent:Delicious.

54:20Chris:Total bug in Nextcloud. If people are interested, boost it. Otherwise, I hate to talk bad about the project because I love it so much. but man oh man it basically disqualified itself from me ever using it in production oh no, it was it was worst case absolutely worst case so it's there's that but i'm yeah all right well we'll come we'll follow back with you whomever maybe with a clanker stream well all right who takes mg.

54:44Brent:There's another clanker boost here from mg 5 000 sats, Hey, what models are you using for the various Hermes functions and for coding? I think Chris talked about Minimax for the primary model, but what about Wes? And what about Vision or Summary or Titles?

55:02Chris:Yeah, Wes.

55:04Wes:Yeah, Titles.

55:04Chris:Yeah. Yeah. What do you use? Because I use Minimax M3 primarily with a little small codec subscription on the side to sort of supplement things here and there that need to build out for them. So that's, mine's very basic, very boring, but Wes, you're always experimenting. I know sometimes you're even renting GPUs directly and.

55:23Wes:Yeah, I kind of tend to bounce around because I'll, I'll use stuff that is new on OpenRounder just to try it out or, you know, use stuff that's free or limited time offer, not necessarily for like production or like consistent backend stuff, but definitely for, you know, trying out for coding or random agentics tasks that I'm right there so I can kind of evaluate them. So I do tend to use a fair amount of DeepSeq. That's been a good one. Mimo's pretty good. I was trying one called Orenth recently, which is one that I had to self-host, which is kind of neat.

55:56Wes:So it kind of depends on whatever is that. Quinn also, both API and self-host, has been very good too. Kind of depends on, are you aiming for more tool calling stuff or are you doing more like active dev work? you might pick, you know, different flavors.

56:14Chris:Or image generation is a different thing too.

56:15Wes:Totally, yeah. Or, yeah, do you want, like, I like Memo because it does have multimodal support. There's some interesting ones from Gemma these days with that too. So if you do want stuff that's optimized for, like, operating a browser or, you know, being able to quickly paste an image and have it do something with that, it kind of changes the mix too.

56:35Chris:MG, if you're not already, get in one of our clanker chat rooms, Matrix or Telegram. It's a great question for that room in there, I think. I'll take this next one. Donnie comes in with another baller boost for the show, gentlemen, $200 in Fiat Bun coupons.

56:51Brent:That's like fashionable fiat.

56:56Chris:That is fantastic. Hi, all. I wanted to boost episode 644, the People's File System, for a while, but I never got around to setting up a wallet. I found myself maintaining a project that he calls HD Idol almost by accident. That interview inspired me to test code that manipulates hardware. Thank you.

57:13Brent:Nice.

57:13Chris:Well, Donnie, thank you for that great boost. That's really awesome. So HD Idol, huh? I feel like I already can kind of tell what it does.

57:21Wes:Gpl3 yeah.

57:23Chris:Hard disk idle spin down utility boys.

57:25Wes:It's a re-implementation of christian moeller's hd idle yeah utility for spinning down external disks after a period of idle time since most external ide disk closures don't support setting the ide idle timer a program like this could be required to spin down disks automatically.

57:39Chris:Freaking great if you've got like external usb spinning rust and stuff.

57:43Wes:Wow that's great i could have used this maybe.

57:46Brent:Like 10 years ago.

57:48Wes:I bet.

57:48Chris:I could use it today.

57:49Wes:I love the idea that a nerdy interview about bcashfs with kent and some of his yeah brain smarts on file system then inspired someone who then started maintaining something that is useful to everyone and, and also just as my own personal love of testing strategies and stuff which, hardware testing is especially hard so great, thank you for thank you for this thank you for sharing all this good stuff.

58:12Chris:Yeah i appreciate you sending some of that value back donnie and we'll put a link to it in the show notes so other folks can check it out.

58:18Wes:Leaky canoe comes in with $10 of fiat. Even though I'm a member, here's some V4V.

58:26Chris:Aw, thank you.

58:29Wes:After listening to the Forescan Adventures, I bought an OBD2 USB adapter.

58:33Brent:Nice.

58:34Wes:Wow, what an excellent new tool for my toolbox when paired with some local AI.

58:38Brent:Yes.

58:39Chris:Isn't it amazing? It's a new age of home repairs, buddy. It's a new age. That's great. Thank you, Leaky.

58:45Brent:And also, the adventure's not over. More to come on that, I'm sure.

58:49Chris:Mm-hmm.

58:49Brent:We do have some free members boosts here. First one from Anonymous.

58:54Chris:Oh, yeah.

58:59Brent:A massive appreciation to Brent for his mention of Ngram in the member's bootleg last week. I've spent the better part of two days trying to implement other memory tools for my coding agents across providers in OpenCode and Codex. Ngram is in Nix and syncs secrets across hosts in my Nebula Mesh. Massive love.

59:21Chris:That's so great.

59:22Brent:That's great to hear.

59:24Chris:It sounds like Ngram is a hit. Yeah, we were looking at it afterwards. It looks pretty good, too. He also mentions Distributed Llama, which I think we've been poking at a little bit behind the scenes. That's pretty cool. We should probably link to that. And he says, did you guys completely ignore 44? I've been using it for a few months after it came out, and since swapping away from Nix and setting up Determinant Nix, I've had a great time. The KD Plasma Edition is really nice, and it worked great for development.

59:49Chris:Yes, but there's a reason. We were at Linux Fest, and then by the time we were done with everything we had lined up on the schedule it just didn't seem like it made sense anymore but it hurt it hurt it hurt and then i wasn't sure like, you know can we pick it up two months later, you know so i think i feel like we just got to do a really good job with 45 it was that it was no mention or commentary or anything it was just the scheduling worked out where, we had a window for fedora content wise the release didn't make that window and then we were up against like hard stuff we had fest.

1:00:25Wes:And then we had i I think we had an interview for the Ubuntu side with John, if I recall. Yeah, there was just too much going on.

1:00:31Chris:We had to get back and get to that interview. And then, yeah, there was some Summit stuff in there as well. It was crazy. So that was really a miss.

1:00:39Wes:I do really like, though, Anonymous here points out. They link to museumofmodernart.org, which every once in a while, a computer can be a museum or at least a museum piece. And do you know what it happens to be?

1:01:00Chris:A Mac?

1:01:00Wes:A Macintosh classic desktop.

1:01:02Brent:That's cool. It is beautiful, you know, I have to say, in an old kind of yellowing way.

1:01:11Wes:Gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation. I just love that idea.

1:01:15Chris:Thank you very much. Appreciate that, Anonymous. Marcel sent in a free member boost for 3D printing. I got two Vorons. It's not a company. It's a self-assembled, and it's from an open source community that designs in the open. They can 100% their stuff for the car. Just don't use PLA plastic. I made a custom phone mount. I printed an ASA. Still fine a year later.

1:01:34Wes:Ooh.

1:01:35Chris:Yeah, that's great. Okay, Marcel. I like that. And I can use it in the RV too. Eric, the magician comes in with a free member boost. Following up on Nebula and DNS, it was the wife who didn't want it on all the time. I tried Nebula in December, and I tried it again this week. I was asking, like, why are you turning off your wife network? But it is actually working better now. I got... Blaming the wife. I got caught with Nebula V2 Scheme, and the mobile didn't support it at the time.

1:02:02Chris:But the mobile client supports DNS now. Yes, the mobile client's got a nice refresh in early 2026. It's very true. Good. I really appreciate the follow-up, Eric. Thank you very much. We tease, but we do appreciate it.

1:02:15Wes:King Arthur member, Boo Sin, I think you were asking about other podcasts who do live things. And so Vance Crow does live podcasts occasionally, as does the board game company Stonemaier, who makes wingspan oh wingspan's a fun game and other games yeah cool, thank you king arthur great to see other live folks doing stuff especially in the podcast space specifically.

1:02:37Brent:Peg dot came in with a members boost says uh here are my download sat stats for my downloads folder the the home folder itself started as arch linux around spring 2019 and got migrated to kashi a few months ago, download folder the number of items 2,871, And here's a du-h command to figure out the size. 102 gigs.

1:03:05Wes:Oh! Those, that's the 2,000 files are pulling their weight.

1:03:11Chris:I wonder how much of that old stuff you need. You know? Like how much of that from, you know?

1:03:17Brent:If you're archival in your disposition, then all of it.

1:03:22Chris:Should I reveal my details or should we wait one more week? I kind of, I feel like I've been teasing it out too much.

1:03:27Wes:You have been.

1:03:28Chris:So I'm going to tell you. I'm looking at it right now. So the size is not that impressive. 54 gigs. I think that's pretty reasonable for a downloads folder. It's pretty reasonable.

1:03:40Brent:No, it's not.

1:03:41Chris:What? Really? 54 gigs?

1:03:43Brent:Mine was like 10 megs or something.

1:03:45Wes:Really?

1:03:47Brent:Uh-huh.

1:03:49Chris:That's so weird with your tab hygiene and all of that.

1:03:52Brent:Yeah.

1:03:52Wes:You don't have any ISO files.

1:03:53Brent:I'm perfect, just not in all ways.

1:03:54Wes:You don't have a VM disk image. Mr.

1:03:57Chris:Videos Unless I run out of storage I mostly don't manage my downloads folder until the machine dies and this machine just won't die It's 62.9.

1:04:07Brent:Megs and it's got 49 files in it.

1:04:10Wes:Not even 100 megs?

1:04:15Chris:I feel like the amount of files is one thing, and I do have a lot of those, but I don't need a break about that.

1:04:18Wes:You're saying you're storing more data in your tabs? That's why I need all the RAM. In your tabs than you have in your downloads?

1:04:25Brent:Oh, definitely.

1:04:27Chris:Rent. Here's what I'm proud of, boys. My oldest file is from, in my downloads folder, November 6th, 1996.

1:04:43Brent:Yeah, that wasn't true last week.

1:04:45Chris:My next December 24th, 1996, and then I have a couple files from 2000, 2004, and then mostly it gets pretty busy around 2016, and then it's just a lot of files from there. But it's only 54 gigs. So I got files going back to 1996 in the old download drive.

1:05:04Wes:I wonder if we have similar files because I have two 1996 files as well.

1:05:09Chris:I know what files they might be.

1:05:10Brent:You guys have been around for a bit.

1:05:13Chris:Hey, you can call us seasoned, okay?

1:05:15Brent:They're text files, right? They're just, you can use them on anything.

1:05:19Chris:Right. Let's wrap it up. Thank you, everybody who supported the show. Thank you, too, to the SAT streamers. 18 of you streamed SATs as you just listened to the episode, and collectively, you stacked a real handsome 63,014 SATs. That ain't too bad at all. I think that's pretty darn good. So thank you for streaming those SATs. When you bring it together with our Fiat Fund coupons converted to sats at the current market value, we had a really great episode this week.

1:05:43Chris:And it means so much. The show, I can't believe we're still going. I mean, we're going into July. And we don't have, the only primary sponsor we have is Nebula. The other sponsors are temporary. You know, it's just different. It's different. I don't need to go into details. But we just wouldn't be here without the support. I cannot tell you how much it matters. Thank you, everybody who supported the show. We stacked a grand total of 809,307 Satoshis. Absolutely incredible.

1:06:10Wes:Amazing.

1:06:23Chris:It's across 30 people. Tens of thousands of people will listen to this episode. 30 people and our members are making it possible. LinuxUnplugged.com membership to put your support on Autopilot or boost the show at boost.jupyterbroadcasting.com or use something like the Fountain app. Makes it real easy. Cast-O-Matic is great on iOS as well and connects with your Albi Hub. Thank you everybody who supported the show this week and kept us going. We really appreciate it. And for you and everybody else as a little treat, we got some picks.

1:06:55Chris:If you will allow, we are going to start with a couple of retro Mac picks. If you want to go get a VM set up, we got some suggestions for you. And we've been having some fun. There's a lot we could have picked. I'm going to tell you that.

1:07:07Wes:A lot.

1:07:08Chris:We tried to narrow it down for you all. A couple of must-haves. Wes, why don't you start with one of your favorites?

1:07:14Wes:Yeah. I mean, as a kid, this just was blowing my mind. It's Morph. um griffin morph no less which was one of the first commercial quote-unquote morphing programs available for this era of computers um you essentially, You're given a UI where you can kind of put dots on two images, and then you move the dots so they sort of match up so they both are on a nose, say. And then it generates a transition effect from one image to the other, and then you can export that as a movie. Quick time, no less.

1:07:47Chris:That's pretty good. It's impressive.

1:07:49Wes:Yeah, so that was one of the demos it came with, where it's morphing like a bear into a lion, and vice versa.

1:07:56Chris:Yeah, yeah.

1:07:57Wes:That's pretty fun. It did also give me a chance to really deal with resource forks, because, boy, howdy, did the early QuickTime videos really use that stuff. So, like, it's part of the data, like, the move atom is in one side and then the mdata stuff is in the other part of the file. And then what you can do is if you get QuickTime for that era, you can open up the export from Morph and then you can save it as a consolidated file that can open on non-Macs and then that saves it as the correct version that none of it's in the resource fuck and then you can just copy it to your AFP share.

1:08:31Chris:All right. There you go.

1:08:33Wes:So Morph is there. That's legitimate software from the old days. I cheated a little bit here because this was one of my ideas. And then I realized someone had already done it way, way better. It's called Legacy AI. Legacy AI allows older Apple computers to interact with AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Legacy AI works across 15 different Mac systems from System 7 to 1011 El Capitan.

1:08:59Chris:What? Somebody wrote classic Mac apps to talk to LLMs?

1:09:03Wes:Yep.

1:09:05Chris:How is this a thing?

1:09:06Wes:Yep. Now, I didn't get the networking going because I think it needs TCP.

1:09:12Chris:Yeah, well, I got that going. I could try this.

1:09:15Wes:Yeah. Get to it. And the Manticore folks, they also have a few old Mac apps, including one that's just like a nice-looking weather thing, weather bot. But, yeah, so you can run your own proxy. Essentially, you run a proxy to do the HTTPS stuff. They provide one as well, I think. And then it has image generation with Dolly in there. And you get a little LM.

1:09:38Chris:You know, if somebody could write a modern web browser for Mac OS, we could almost do a challenge. It'd be stupid, but we could almost do a challenge. That's crazy. Wow.

1:09:48Wes:Okay.

1:09:50Chris:I did not expect that. I did not expect that.

1:09:52Brent:I'm like speechless on this one.

1:09:53Chris:I am too. I did not expect that.

1:09:55Wes:And it looks so nice. They really leaned into the look of that era app and the toolkit.

1:10:01Chris:All right. Well, I want to tell you about a little nostalgia that I got going, and I'll link to this in the show notes. You don't even have to set up a VM to try it because the Internet Archive will run a VM in the web browser. It's an app called Dark Castle, a 1986 computer game for the Mac published by Silicon Beach Software, and then it was ported to other platforms later on. It's a platformer, a side-by-scrolling platformer, where a hero named Duncan, tries to make his way through an evil castle where there's a black knight and objects and bats he has to dodge and mice and rats and occasional puzzles.

1:10:37Chris:And as a young lad, I spent an enormous amount of time playing this game. It's very simple by today's standards, but it's actually, in my opinion, still holds up, still makes for a bit of a challenge, especially using the controls under a VM.

1:10:51Wes:So Dark Castle.

1:10:53Chris:Yeah, 1986. And you can play it right on archive.org or you can download the image file and then mount it as a CD-ROM and install it on your VM.

1:11:03Brent:Wow.

1:11:04Chris:I loved it, and it was really great to revisit that. Another game that I was surprised was so much fun to revisit is a 1987 hit called Crystal Quest, a mouse-driven game where the player controls a little circular spaceship and you got to shoot around the screen, collect crystals, blow up UFOs, and then, you know, go through tiny little obstacles. And it's funny how hard it is actually to control this game. I spent a lot of time dying, but you can play Crystal Quest again on archive.org or on the Mac VM.

1:11:41Chris:And relive the classic sounds.

1:11:46Clips:Oh!

1:11:48Wes:That stupid gate on the bottom, their portal or whatever.

1:11:50Chris:I know.

1:11:51Wes:The sharp edges, you gotta be right in the middle.

1:11:55Chris:And those weird noises that it makes. I mean, the games, they're definitely of an era.

1:11:59Wes:Crystal Quest is such a classic.

1:12:01Chris:There's so many on archive.org and other places, but Crystal Quest and Dark Castle were some of my favorites, so we'll link to those in the show notes. But we do have some gosh darn Linux picks, don't we?

1:12:11Wes:At least one. Yeah, just one. And this is actually a sneaky piece of feedback. So listener Alex wrote in, I'm the author of GoToTV, which Wes gave a nice shout out in episode 516. And a couple of months ago, I created MCP Beam. I've been listening to the podcast for a while, and you often talk about your media setup, so I thought you might like it. It lets you control Chromecast and DLNA receivers through an MCP-compatible agent. For example, you can tell your agent, play a random video from my library on the living room TV.

1:12:43Wes:Nice. Seek to 50%. Pause playback. It supports video, audio, and images. It takes me about an hour to get to work, and Linux Unplugged fits perfectly into that commute. Thanks for keeping me company along the way.

1:12:54Brent:Aw.

1:12:54Chris:That is so cool. MCPBeam, mostly written in 99.6% Go. And what a cool idea. And then you just get this set up in OpenCode. You open up OpenCode and just tell it to play the file.

1:13:07Wes:I will definitely give this a try. I've been using the CAT, C-A-T-T tool a fair amount to control my Chromecast. But this would just kind of skip one step, which sounds great.

1:13:18Chris:Now, eventually I'll get all of you boys deeply indoctrinated into the school of Home Assistant. But until then, it's all very useful. It's all very useful, but Home Assistant can control it all. Also, another shout-out to GoToTV, which is a fantastic app. A little cast media files to your smart TVs or Chromecast devices. A little for Linux. So we'll link to that, too, because that was very solid. That was good. Well, there you have it. It was nice to say goodbye to Apple Talk and go down memory lane one time for a little while.

1:13:51Chris:And at least remember, in a way, how awful networking used to be and how good it is now and how transparent TCPIP is now and how transparent it is to just talk between machines and systems and route out to the internet.

1:14:05Wes:And that we live in a world where you don't need an interbridge to have two totally different proprietary things, be able to talk to each other with another proprietary middleman in the middle. Well, you do in some worlds, but you don't in the topics we cover on this show.

1:14:18Chris:Wouldn't mind getting my hands on a 3Com InterBridge and setting up a little 3Com InterBridge network or something. That'd be stupid. My kind of thing. You know, my kind of thing.

1:14:28Wes:Yeah, I mean, maybe once we're sponsored by Novell Network.

1:14:31Chris:Yeah, that'll come along any time now. We're big IPX guys. So, Wes, before we get out of here, you know, there's additional data, you might say. You could say rich details around the show in multiple different ways. Could you tell people about it?

1:14:42Wes:Yeah, well, if you open up an AppleTalk bidirectional connection to our RSS server and you set up your Mac to be able to handle JSON files correctly, you will be able to have access to our cloud chapters, yeah, which are timestamps into our podcasts that tell you when we talk about stuff at the segment level. But if you need more granularity and your system has enough RAM, you can even get an SRT or VTT file for subtitles.

1:15:09Chris:Oh, and don't forget that macOS 8.1 installation media comes with a free trial of AOL. You can get online and it's keyword LUP-LUG to join our mumble room, which gets together every Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific. JBLive.tv is where to watch it, Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your local time. Yeah, we got show notes. Yeah, we got links. Whichever you want, what's we talked about and all of that over at linuxunplugged.com slash 674.

1:15:43Chris:There's also some great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Go check those out. And why not check out the back catalog while you're over there? And then join us on a Sunday. Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Get yourself in the right headspace. That way, Monday feels like a Wednesday.

1:15:59Wes:And then go check our calendar again, because you never know when there might be a sneaky clanker stream coming up.

1:16:05Chris:Clanker. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.

1:17:08Wes:Thank you. Bye, Drew.