683: Website Speedrun

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:Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to take a look at a handy tool that Brent's been using to crank out a great-looking static site in really just minutes. How it works, what it does, and why we're starting to like it. Then we're going to round out the show with some great boosts, some really great picks, and a lot more. So before we get to that, and man, you're going to want to stay around just for the picks, let me tell you what. I'm excited.

0:39Chris:Let's say hello to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Time appropes.

0:43Mumble:Hello. Hello, Chris. Hey, Wes. And hello, Brent.

0:46Chris:Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us. Nice to have you here. Mumble Room's always going during the show. We love it if you join us. Details on our website. And good morning to our friends over at Defined Network. Go check out Defined.net slash unplugged and meet Manage Nebula, fast, decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform we love, we use every single day. and history being my teacher, I learned it over and over and over again. When it comes to something as foundational as my network and everything that runs on top of it that I build over the next few years, I want to own that stack end to end.

1:20Chris:Nebula gives you that control with industry-leading encryption, optional self-hosted lighthouse nodes, and a design originally built to connect Slack's global infrastructure of all of their customer data. You know, their goldmine. And that's how strong it is. And now you can use it too. It's resilient enough for the enterprise, simple enough for your home lab. You can connect to 100 hosts for free. You can get them for free, no credit card required, and support the show by going to defined.net slash unplugged. That is defined.net slash unplugged.

1:51Chris:Thank you to Define for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Appreciate you guys. All right, boys, I've been doing the math three ways, checking my list, checking it twice. So that's a lot, math and list. And I just don't see it feasible for the crew to make it down to Texas Linux Fest this year. I hate to say it. I really hate to say it because we love Texas Linux Fest.

2:13Wes:We sure do.

2:14Chris:But the funding is getting tighter, right? Because energy costs are up and housing costs are up. And so even though we could maybe afford a flight, we couldn't afford anything else about it. And that's really just the reality of it. It's very expensive. And there also really isn't any great economic incentive for a sponsor to send us because it's kind of expensive to send us down to cover an event. And there's not a direct return for them. It's not like we're going to spend the entire time talking about them. We would plug them, but we wouldn't spend the entire time.

2:42Chris:And really where it does make economic sense is for the events to send us, but they don't A, have the budget and B, they don't have people that are organizing sponsors to bring us because, you know, we kind of bring publicity for the show, for the events. So there's just not really any way to make it work as far as I can tell. And it doesn't feel like the right time to go to you, the audience, and ask for the money either. I think everybody's feeling tight these days.

3:04Chris:And it just doesn't feel like the right time to say, hey, send us to Texas Linux Fest. And it's really kind of makes me a little sad, not because we can't ask, but because... It's like if a tree falls in the forest, in a sense. Texas Linux Fest is special. It's very special to the Linux community in the sense that very few tech communities have these types of grassroots events still. But nobody really covers them. And once the weekend is over, it can kind of feel like it just never really happened to the rest of the world.

3:31Chris:Which is sort of the hard part about it.

3:33Wes:Yeah. Yeah, it's easy. If you weren't there, you didn't make the connections, you didn't see that one random talk you didn't expect to.

3:39Chris:You don't know that these things are kind of important. Yeah. Yeah, and plus there's always something brewing at Texas Linux Fest that ends up being really good for us to learn about.

3:47Wes:Oh, for sure.

3:48Chris:Great connections, too. But the economics are what they are, and I wanted to say it now because if you're planning to go, I just wanted to let you know that it doesn't seem like we're going to be able to make it. We think it's a great event, and we think you should go. And if we could make it, we absolutely would go. But that's just sort of the state of it right now. And I don't want anybody making plans thinking we're going to be there and then show up, and we're not there.

4:10Chris:so i wanted to let you know that's currently our intention is we'll try to cover as we can.

4:15Wes:But uh also just a quick shout out to listener big cookie.

4:18Chris:Big cook.

4:18Wes:Who sent us uh some delicious cookies.

4:21Chris:Oh yeah i put that in the feedback but i agree that was we should grab them i well we'll grab them for the no no we get it go good go ahead i was gonna say we'll grab it for the feedback yeah we've been snacking on cookies and one of them brent is a maple shortbread cookie oh Ooh.

4:36Brent:Yeah. That one's for me, right?

4:37Chris:Well, it might have been. We still have a lot of the classic Hermit ones because the kids came and they kind of like locusts came in and ate them all. It's a really nicely packaged, made right there in Vermont.

4:51Wes:Yeah, covered bridge cookies.

4:53Chris:Big Cook sent them to us and they're just delicious. Just absolutely delicious. So thank you very much. That was a nice treat. We got them after the show last Sunday and we really enjoyed them. It was a great post-show snack, as it were. You know what? Probably be this week's post-show snack, too. All right. So, Brentley, you sat down to build a website this week, and I can only imagine you must have started it. I mean, you must have started at what you had built in the past and tried to decide if that was the way to go. Take us there, Brentley. Tell us, tell us about it.

5:30Brent:Well, once upon a time, I woke up and built my website, and that was one day in 2012. And for some reason, I never planned this. It's just like, what today?

5:43Chris:Wow.

5:44Brent:Yeah, 2012. And I was super proud of this thing. It was meant to be like my main photography portfolio website, and that it did. So I took, I don't know, a whole day to build this thing and I worked on it for weeks after that and kept updating it and stuff like that. But it was built on WordPress, of course. That was like the modern stuff at the time. And it was kind of cool back then. I had a responsive theme, so it looked good on mobile and everything. And that was the big thing back then, right? And really cool photo galleries that showcased.

6:20Chris:Just plugging away, you know, plugging a photo gallery. You got a photo gallery.

6:23Brent:Yeah and like super high quality too if you wanted it there were ways of getting like you know the high res stuff for anybody who had a decent internet connection or whatever.

6:32Wes:It's really hard for my like this is all true it's just really hard for my brain to get it's been so.

6:38Brent:Long that i spent.

6:39Wes:With wordpress solely as like legacy.

6:42Brent:Yeah but you're right.

6:43Wes:I mean it was it really opened up a lot of and you could sell easy self-hosting yeah it sort of changed the activation potential for even having a website.

6:52Brent:Yeah what was really attractive to me was that um, i guess wordpress allowed you to take control of your own website right it was the thing that felt like everyday users could just build something really cool yeah and being a little bit more technical of course i could host it at like some shared hosting and have it be reasonably fast you know and, enough security in place that it wasn't you know i wasn't getting totally swamped with yep bots and stuff like that.

7:22Chris:And then years later too as it kind of went on like there was like optimization plugins you could.

7:26Brent:Do to.

7:27Chris:Make sure it was like cached and you know all the things you would do to a wordpress site to try to make it faster reprocess your images yeah yeah.

7:33Brent:Yeah right yeah yeah and so like that was pretty cool back then but it turns out i haven't changed that website uh since then, and uh it's not so cool anymore so uh the other thing is i don't really do photography these days and it's been a while gents uh quite a while so for me this website was just getting stale uh, and wasn't serving me really any purpose if anything it was confusing folks that like associated that url with me because they would go there and be like hmm, he never talks about photography anymore this doesn't make any sense, So this week, I woke up, and for some reason, I felt very motivated to make a website.

8:16Brent:So I thought, geez, I'm going to tackle this to-do I've had on my list for the last, what, four years or a long time anyways. And it turns out I did. Made myself a new website. And it was way easier than it was back then. Took way less time.

8:34Chris:When I get those kinds of inspirations, I do try to act on them because if I wait like a week, it'll fade and it won't really be did you have that? So you kind of almost it's like an artificial time box in a way but it's still an important time box.

8:47Wes:And there's something about the spark too right where you're like okay right now this doesn't feel like a project it's not a big task I want to do it I can just do it right now.

8:55Chris:Yeah.

8:55Brent:Whatever I ate that morning just inspired me you know.

8:58Chris:I'm gonna bet that you probably consider going Hugo out of the gate just because you have experience with it from working with the community to build the new JB.com.

9:08Brent:Yeah definitely When we built the new JB website, I had on my list to build myself a new website. And we had a bunch of amazing community members help us build this website with some really cool tech. And static websites seemed like kind of amazing and was new to me. So I went into the project thinking, yeah, okay, I'm going to use Hugo because I had such a good experience with it, building our website with the community. and um it's simple enough that like i don't, i could just edit the markdown whenever i feel like it and that's all i need, right so that's what i went into this project thinking i was going to choose but like vastly simplified from our website because i don't need, you know all the features that we have i don't even need a menu or anything i was picturing just a landing page.

10:02Chris:The other thing if i were building a personal site today and i'm wondering if you thought about this you probably We did. I don't think I'd want to go through the expense or hassle of setting up a VPS with a database and Nginx. So did you think about how to host it too?

10:19Brent:Well, I knew that a lot of people use just static site hosters. Like, I guess GitHub does their pages and Cloudflare has some. And, you know, a bunch of these are popping up all over.

10:32Chris:So you did consider it. You don't have to tell me what you did yet, but I'm curious if you considered it.

10:35Brent:100%. I knew I wanted to do this because I'm spending, I don't know what it is, like $150 a month for mail and hosting of my current website, which doesn't serve me, you know?

10:45Chris:Yeah, okay, that's a bit much.

10:46Brent:This is a complete waste of money. What am I doing?

10:49Chris:We should be doing more with that box is what I'm hearing.

10:50Brent:Well, exactly right. And so I knew I wanted to not do that. And I knew I needed just a really simple website that didn't, you know, I didn't need to host photos and all this media or stuff anymore. So as simple as possible was my goal. And turns out you can go extremely simple these days and it's still really quite effective. You know, back in 2012 that you'd have to write an HTML page or something like that. So I knew I wanted it to be hosted as simply as possible.

11:23Chris:Okay. All right. So you didn't go with Hugo. I'm hearing the but in the sentence. You didn't go with Hugo. So tell us where you did end up. Yeah.

11:32Brent:Well, I started with some explorations. Like, I... Well, okay, I'm going to be honest. I used the robot to help me and I used the heck out of DeepSeq V4 Flash, but to do some explorations. Like literally the opening question was, hey, I think I want to build a website with Hugo. Should I? And what are the alternatives? because like I have an idea maybe it's the wrong idea right if uh if someone definitely knows better than I do so um, it turns out even compared to when we did the website a couple years ago there are new alternatives that are really really cool that are kind of in the same ballpark so the one that kind of caught my eye was Zola, and uh one of the main reasons it caught my eye was that it's written in rust of course.

12:21Chris:Oh it is is.

12:21Brent:It uh-huh all right well.

12:24Chris:If you if you hold on do you would you like it.

12:27Brent:I would i vote very much.

12:29Chris:There you go.

12:29Brent:Ah see it just feels like success.

12:36Chris:So Zola.

12:37Brent:Yeah, Zola, which, you know, is a fast static site generator written in Rust, they say. I was like, that seems really simple and exactly what I need. But the benefit of using a little bit of AI to help here was that I was like, well, compare these for me. And let's write a little snippet because I want the simplest website to maintain as possible and to edit as possible. I was like, give me a markdown file, and that's basically all I want to do. And so I had to make some snippets side by side.

13:13Brent:Let me compare them. And Zola was just simpler. I don't know. It just felt better. And the technology seemed good. And the author wrote a note that I thought was really important. because they said, I wrote Zola and, its Terra engine from an intense dislike of the insane Golang template engine and therefore of Hugo that I was using before for about six plus websites.

13:43Chris:I mean, sometimes you need a muse, a motivation.

13:46Wes:Development by spite goes a long way.

13:49Brent:And that quote alone made me go, hmm, all right, I'm going to try something new then. We'll see how this goes. Turns out it went pretty well.

13:58Chris:All right. So Zola, Z-O-L-A, and you can find it at getzola.org. When I looked at it, a couple of things jumped out at me that seemed like you're obviously going to like. Obviously the markdown stuff. But it looks like the actual... I don't know, size of it is pretty small. You could get down to a single executable to build the entire website if you want. I have to imagine that simplicity also spoke to you.

14:26Brent:Yes, and it was available in Nix packages, which also deeply spoke to me, because it meant I could just try it without really needing to install anything like that. It's such a beautiful... Nix OS is such a beautiful thing.

14:39Chris:It's packaged for several distros, yeah.

14:41Brent:Sure, and I think that's great. But for me, it was like a zero setup trial to just give this a shot. Right.

14:49Chris:Yeah. Well, if it's, if it's one executable, you can really just run it on anything.

14:53Brent:Yeah. And I was building this from my cabin, uh, on the other side of a river in like, you know, Northern Ontario over a cell connection. Oh, so I didn't really have much bandwidth to be downloading like massive binaries or anything like that so it helped that it was teeny tiny and i have to say, it was super fast like insanely fast.

15:21Chris:Tara you mentioned tara is that like an end a rendering engine that zola uses and it's that's the part that's written in rust.

15:27Wes:Well it's all rust.

15:27Chris:That's all rust.

15:28Wes:Okay yeah so tara ends up being a template engine in rust that takes a lot after the style of other popular template engines like Jinja and Django's templates.

15:38Chris:Okay. And so you can do things like, I imagine templates and themes and different kinds of styles and all that kind of stuff.

15:45Wes:Yeah, and the template comes in right because you ultimately want HTML, but you have Markdown or maybe Toml at the front matter of your Markdown. And so you need to somewhere to get that content, into the actual form. And so the template is the thing that sort of binds those and abstracts that together so that you can have one template that knows how to render a blog post or a, you know, resume site or whatever. And then the building engine, Zola or Hugo or whatever, takes all of your source files, feeds them to the right templates, gets HTML out, and then you're done.

16:18Chris:Okay. But Brent, this simplicity that Zola offers, it must come at the cost of some features that Hugo has that Zola doesn't have?

16:26Brent:And I mean, yes, I needed so few features actually that that worked in my favor.

16:33Chris:Sure. That often is the case. Like if you just want a quick dashboard, I was actually thinking like, I just, I could use Zola to get myself just like reports, just render my, you know, cause right now I'm getting them in Markdown. Why not?

16:45Brent:True. Yeah. Make them pretty.

16:47Chris:Yeah.

16:48Brent:So Zola and Hugo are like super similar, which is why I think I felt, comfortable trying something brand new um because it was like well like i already know the concept of these static site generators so both are really fast at compiling static sites, that's great uh hugo's written in go and zola of course is in rust and uh but there's that bigger philosophical difference in the templating so zola's got tara as wes mentioned.

17:17Chris:Menus i'm i think one of the things i remember reading is like hugo has support for menus and zola doesn't have support for menus.

17:23Brent:Yeah, Hugo's much more mature, and it has like a thousand plus themes, and it's well-known, it's battle-tested themes. I guess for the show, we don't use that. We want to use something crazy, right? And that's your fault. So thanks, Chris.

17:41Chris:I don't know. I mean, it's like if you need a corporate website with certain menu navigations and community built things, then Hugo might be the right answer. But if you need a personal resume website or a dashboard or something like or a link list just for our start page, Zola is perfect in its simplicity and it's really its speed.

18:00Wes:I think that shows up too, where it sort of has a little, like you don't need, it has fewer concepts and you don't need as much to get started necessarily, right? Like you might just need one global config file and then like a directory tree and then you can have a website.

18:14Chris:Yeah. Also kind of timely because Zola 0.23 was released in August, September as we record right now. the developers describe it as one of the most big, large, breaking changes of Zola that they'll ever have, they moved to Terra 2 the shortcode system was also removed, and markdown content was promoted to more first class, so like kind of just went through the transitions you needed, Brent to be the tool that you needed last month.

18:46Brent:Like I didn't notice any of this so it's all completely by chance You know, had I been on the other side of that transition, maybe I would have been really angry, but this is somewhere for me.

18:58Wes:It is nice to be on this side. Like, okay, well, clearly they're still investing. This is the new shiny version.

19:03Chris:I'll just learn the new API. Yes, yes, exactly. All right. So with that in mind, I'm curious to hear what you built.

19:18Brent:All right so i woke up that morning feeling very website-ish and i think i should describe how this all went for me uh i described what i wanted and what i found, but the process was just like kind of amazing because like i mentioned i teamed up with deep seek v4 flash which is super fast super cheap and totally understands this stuff uh which is great and I, suggested that it just like, go find public information about me. There's tons, like take the JB website, I don't know, go scrape LinkedIn or something and certainly go take the stuff off my old website.

19:55Brent:and compile it into something that looks nice, right? Like, I could do that, but I want you to do it.

20:04Wes:You just told the bot, hey, do you know who you're working with here?

20:07Chris:Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal. Go look me up on the internet.

20:11Wes:This is an ego-based project that I'm going to need you to get this way.

20:15Brent:Well, isn't that what a website is?

20:17Wes:I mean...

20:18Chris:Also make me look good, no mistakes.

20:20Brent:What was nice, though, is that it just, like, compiled all those things into a few different options that I could put on this one landing page.

20:28Chris:It successfully e-stocked you, is what you've just demonstrated.

20:31Brent:Yeah, yeah, 100%.

20:32Wes:See, I noticed he shared the ultimate thing that he built with us. He didn't share this part of it.

20:37Chris:No, I didn't.

20:38Wes:There's no brent.json that was shared.

20:40Chris:And for all we know, he's doing the same thing on us, and keeping dossiers now, or something with his buddy Deep Freak over there.

20:47Brent:Yeah, your website will be ready tomorrow. That's fine.

20:49Chris:Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay. Interesting, okay.

20:52Brent:Because this is such a fast and efficient, static site generator it like when you make changes to like i was primarily making changes to the content itself so it was just a markdown file, and i would hit save and almost immediately it would get updated in the browser so like the time that's nice at which you could see the result of what you were doing it was instant basically, And that is not the experience that you have with WordPress, if you remember how that goes.

21:26Brent:The whole WordPress experience that I had previous to building this website was like, add a thing, wait a really long time for the page to load, and then, go to the actual website and refresh it, and then wait for that to load.

21:41Chris:Make sure your browser didn't cache it, make sure the performance optimizing extension you use doesn't have cache, and then maybe you need to go back into the admin dashboard and clear that one. Then clear your browser cache, then refresh the page.

21:52Wes:Oh, you probably have a Clash Clearing plugin that you have to go hit if it wasn't wired up right.

21:57Chris:You've got to do this often, so...

21:59Brent:It describes exactly the process I would go through every time I would change my WordPress website, which is why I stopped changing it, because it was such a terrible experience.

22:09Chris:That's why. I love it. I thought it was because you lost it in all your tabs.

22:13Brent:Well, you know, sometimes. So I found that live editing was really nice. And because I was on such a terrible internet connection, building everything locally before I deployed it to the actual website was beautiful because it was like as fast as it possibly could be. Didn't need the internet really at all. And it was instant. Yeah. I don't know. It was even better than I had imagined this process would go, which I'm glad because had it gone worse, maybe we wouldn't be making a show because it wouldn't be done.

22:52Brent:But the process, like Zola worked so well that the hardest part of the process of making the website for me wasn't the new technology I was trying. It was the terrible network I was using.

23:06Chris:So, yeah, sure.

23:08Brent:Like i i thought it was probably a good idea to like archive my old website and that took freaking forever also because oh sure it's wordpress you got to click through stuff images and, well exactly and so that was actually the most frustrating part of the whole thing was like everything that wasn't the new website, right like the downloading of archiving stuff and The technical debt. Yeah, exactly. So I ended up deciding to deploy it with GitHub Pages because, it was super simple. I know it's battle-tested.

23:45Brent:Another option was Cloudflare Pages, and you can host this. It's such a simple website. You can host it any way you want. But that got me up and running almost immediately. And I have to say, when I switched the DNS to it, it was instant as well.

24:00Chris:Oh, nice.

24:00Brent:And yeah, so it was like in a very short amount of time, in quite a time-blocked session, I went from start to finish with a technology that was totally new to me and with a result that I'm pretty happy with.

24:15Chris:And now you don't have to pay for that VPS eventually.

24:18Brent:Yeah, exactly. Someone remind me to cancel that.

24:21Chris:And it produces a really nice, clean kind of like bio page that's just super simple. Yeah. Really nice links, your face.

24:31Brent:Yeah, my face. Yeah, yeah.

24:32Chris:You know, kind of just what you need if you want to like a domain, you know, kind of thing. So with a landing page. I like that. It looks professional, you know?

24:42Brent:Wow. Thank you.

24:44Chris:Was that an existing theme? Did you just kind of browse through some of the community themes and land on one you like? Or was that kind of a mix? Or how did you land on that look?

24:51Brent:I'm going to be honest. Like I asked it to just generate me like a first go so that I could be really critical about the themes. And like we would then look at options and stuff in it. This is the first one that showed up. I was like, hmm, wow, this is exactly what I was picturing. So I didn't even have to do like the browsing through a bunch of themes and stuff. So it was super, super easy. I got to say. And I got lucky. I think there's a lot of luck based here.

25:15Chris:So that's a great example of a nice, clean, simple page. probably really right now, you know, very much Zola's sweet spot. And so they're not really, Hugo and Zola aren't maybe direct competitors, but we decided to do the right thing and try to see if we could make Zola do what Hugo does. And so, Wes, you took a crack at seeing if you could get Zola to render the JupyterBroadcasting.com Hugo website using the Zola stack.

25:43Wes:Yeah, why not?

25:44Chris:Why not?

25:45Wes:Because here it is a tool that's broadly in the same sort of capability set, right? We have a bunch of markdown files and templates and stuff, and it turns it into a website.

25:54Chris:Yep.

25:55Wes:We want the same thing.

25:56Chris:Sure.

25:56Wes:And, you know, as we've talked about, like, it has a bunch of the same stuff, single binary, markdown in, um... Well, let's just see. So if you go to zola.jupiterbroadcasting.com, you should see. It is running on my laptop at the moment.

26:12Chris:Oh, my God, Wes.

26:14Wes:So why not be that fast?

26:16Chris:Oh, my God. People are going to crash your laptop.

26:18Brent:Oh, and loaded almost instantly for me.

26:20Chris:Instantly loaded.

26:21Brent:Instant. Wow.

26:23Chris:It actually kind of looks. Okay, so we don't have the menu. Oh, but we do have a hamburger menu that does give you everything.

26:31Wes:And you should have the normal menu. I think you just don't have quite enough screen.

26:35Chris:Oh you're right if I expand the browser I do have the normal menu it's just because I have it captured for the screen that actually works really well.

26:41Wes:Hey it collapsed was helping me test it.

26:43Chris:And then look if I go into the show I noticed that you're just using the embedded player because the domain.

26:47Wes:Difference yeah so we did make some simplification choices there which we can get into chapters.

26:52Chris:Did we do that or did you do that.

26:53Wes:No no that's so we tried to as part of this I wanted to highlight some of the stuff that was in there that we don't normally show.

27:00Chris:That's a great idea Wes.

27:03Wes:Just because part of a big part of doing it we can get into it but a big part of it was dealing with like the data model that we have especially because we have like a scraper several scrapers generations of scrapers involved hundreds.

27:13Chris:And hundreds and hundreds of posts.

27:15Wes:Yes um but uh in doing the episode page it was like well what data do we already have that we could be put in here that we just haven't yet but i don't know what do you think did it does it work.

27:24Chris:I'm i am shocked i don't know if you looked at that i don't know if you could tell that's not the Hugo site other than maybe it loads faster.

27:33Wes:There are a couple of pages like the live page and there's a few picks and stuff.

27:37Chris:I should do a little side by side. I should. Cause I can see like a little bit of font rendering difference, but I actually prefer the way Zola's doing it. It's a little bigger and bolder. I'm just toggling between the two right now. It's surprisingly consistent. I actually forgot which one was which just for a second.

27:55Wes:Yeah, I did that several times. Well, because I wanted them both up right as I was developing on this one.

28:01Chris:Wow, Wes. It's spot on. Were you impressed by this?

28:07Wes:Yeah. Because at first, I mean, it took a little while to do enough to make it work, I guess. Like, the actual rendering worked really well. But the biggest thing is Hugo's a lot more flexible, right? In some of the templating stuff, which we can talk more about, but then also in, and this is a trade-off, but in like the types of concepts it has and the number of things it can represent and how it understands those and the relationships between them.

28:35Wes:Whereas the data model in Zola is a little more constrained, which can be really nice because you don't need to deal with all of these concepts that you maybe don't need to care about for a simple website.

28:44Chris:Sure.

28:44Wes:But we have grown a website over many years now that also brought over a bunch of past history and sort of, so we're using a lot more of those concepts.

28:53Chris:And so- Do you make your own in Zola?

28:55Wes:Not quite in the same way that you can in Hugo. So what I ended up actually doing is doing a round of Python pre-processing, to sort of take all of the data in the Hugo format and then convert it to a Zola-friendly format.

29:09Chris:That's a little bit of a cheaterade, but I like it.

29:12Wes:Well, there basically was no way around. doing that.

29:14Chris:Right. So if you're willing to pre-process the files, then Zola works.

29:18Wes:And to be clear, there's, Like some amount of this was because Zola doesn't offer things.

29:24Chris:Well, we have a lot of weird stuff.

29:25Wes:And then some amount of this is basically we designed the current data model knowing we were building a Hugo website. They co-evolved together. So it can only tell you so much.

29:35Chris:That's why I'm so impressed. It works as well as it does. Yeah.

29:38Wes:And that's where the Python stuff was. A lot of it was mostly just sort of like normalizing, changing some key names, dealing with things like Brent likes to put emojis everywhere on the website.

29:47Brent:I was hoping those would break something at some point.

29:49Wes:And one of the differences is there's times where Hugo will, by default, sort of just, if it runs into something, it'll just not worry about it and move on. And Zola will very loudly err.

30:01Chris:Which, you know, you could argue either way.

30:02Wes:Yeah. You can make both regimes work.

30:05Chris:When a website's like 10 years old, you're like, oh, just build. When a website's brand new and you want it nice and tight and efficient, you want to know.

30:10Wes:So there was some stuff that, like, probably want it to be handling that it wasn't because it was just skipping over. but the flip side was there was stuff it was just dealing with that Zola immediately choked on that we had to like iterate through to make that work, reasonable things though yeah and so some of that was like well we have tags and it wants to kind of think of those as a taxonomy and then it can automatically build you right like oh here's all the episodes that have tags and that kind of stuff right but, the way Hugo does it and handles emojis ends up being different than the way Zola does it and then you have to come up with a different workaround that involves perhaps pre-processing so that you can separate those out so they can still be displayed as tags but they can't actually live in the full this.

30:52Chris:Is what you get.

30:52Brent:I'm so sorry Wes.

30:54Wes:Yeah so some of this was you know that kind of stuff things we did to ourselves but there was also limitations just in terms of like, So I think the Zola templating language Terra, I mean, A, it's more familiar to other things, you know, like Jinja, that are quite popular out there. And it's nicer for a lot of the common stuff that you're going to do, but it isn't quite as flexible. Now, I have mixed feelings about templates in general, at least in a more general programming language environment, and how much logic you should put into a template.

31:30Wes:But when the alternative is some other logic like living in a pre-process or whatever, sometimes it makes sense to just have it in the template. And so you have a lot more ability to sort of like iterate through and filter, and chain access to your content in the template in a way that Terra doesn't really offer you in the same way.

31:48Chris:That sounds like the kind of thing that you get when you have tens and tens of thousands of users for many, many years.

31:53Wes:Right. So like a big one here, right, is like Zola templates can only loop through lists and things like this, not ask questions in a way that Hugo can ask questions, right? So like we have some scripts in this setup now that have to figure out like for the shows to display on the main page, in Hugo, you can just sort of dynamically get the most recent episodes sorted through your whole collection or your different collections combined into one collection and then filter through that. And you don't really have an easy way to do that.

32:21Chris:Right.

32:21Wes:Zola with Jara.

32:23Chris:So let me flip it around. If we were building JB.com today and we knew we were using Zola. We really wouldn't be hitting these snakes, right? Like these would, would we be missing certain functionality? We'd still have to.

32:36Wes:There would be some, if you wanted it to have exactly the same functionality. So like the pagination is, is, is the result of this, right?

32:42Chris:Okay.

32:43Wes:Where you got, Hugo handles that a little more for you. Pagination is sort of per tree in Zola. Whereas we wanted something that was cross tree in Hugo and Hugo can kind of just do that, but then it does it by generating like each pagination result is a pre generated html, thing okay so for every page you click through yes it's pre-generated uh-huh but you can have hugo do all of that yeah whereas we there wasn't necessarily as clear of a way to do that given the hierarchy of our data as we have it in zola, and so a pre-processing script kind of just goes and figures that out and then can just write out oh here's the most recent 80 episodes we'll just display those or whatever and then so now it uses a bit of javascript to sort of do the pagination versus this like pre-computed step so there's trade-offs there too.

33:29Chris:I mean here's what i'm noticing is a lot of you are talking about the things it doesn't do but then you both seem to really like it is that fair do you like it it seems like you're impressed by it to a degree.

33:38Wes:Yeah i think um like i like rust more than i like go okay right and i also never liked the go templates yeah yeah i would still say the jb site should be using hugo but, i think if you aren't using any of the more complicated features if you don't need the robust sort of template library or like if.

34:01Chris:If you were going to build fullpane.com as like a bio site for yourself would you use zola.

34:07Wes:Yeah i think if i wanted a static site generating tool i think zola would be my default.

34:12Chris:Yeah or Like reports. Yeah.

34:14Brent:That means I made the right decision. Thank you, Wes.

34:16Chris:I mean, I think I'm going to use it. I think I'm going to use it to review reports and just get them in an HTML format.

34:22Wes:Because a lot of the stuff, like, I don't think you'll run into a lot of the limitations. Sure. And this is why I wanted to test on the JB site, was to try to figure out, like, where will it really break?

34:33Chris:Yeah, it's a great test.

34:34Wes:I think Zola rewards when you can kind of adapt your content to it, and Hugo is a little more willing to bend towards your content.

34:41Chris:Yeah, okay. Which is perfect for what Brent's doing. It's because he's starting over again, right?

34:45Wes:Yes, exactly.

34:47Chris:This is a and it's such a simple tool to get started with and markdown is such an approachable language that it and it's so common online now that I think, this is this is one to keep if you're not interested in a site now it's one to keep in your back pocket so it's Zola and you can find it at getzola.org but we'll put a link, to several things like the CLI command usage there's some whole CLI set there that's really good to have they have some search stuff and indexing stuff that you can bolt on which is really nice a bunch of good things in there.

35:17Chris:Nice find there, Brentley. Now you've got to keep it updated somehow. But I suppose all you have to do is, right, you just update the markdown, commit it, push it, and page is updated.

35:29Brent:Exactly.

35:30Wes:And I've got to give props to Brent. He did make sure he got himself a nice little flake there.

35:34Chris:Yeah, I saw that.

35:34Wes:And what's great too is when you do it with Nix, you can have the build just use Zola, and then the output derivation is the static files, and then you just either upload that or you serve that behind engine next you do whatever you need to do.

35:45Chris:Whatever you got to do.

35:46Brent:You know the only reason I made a flake.next was because I knew Wes would require.

35:50Chris:It makes him so happy and it's worth doing it just it's worth it for how happy it makes him, Well, we got some feedback into the show, and Greg the Lawyer writes, Hey, Chris Wesson, Brent, episode 682 was a banger. I love hearing your breakdown of QuickShell and had to chime in with what I have been building over on my side. I put together my own setup called Wintermute OS. I call it that because I'm a big fan of Gibson's Neuromancer. In the book, Wintermute is an existing AI orchestrate that orchestrates its own emergence into a higher state of consciousness.

36:28Chris:It seems to fit given how AI is unlocking new levels of Linux power for us all. Wintermute is Nix OS, Wayland, Hyperland, and Quickshell.

36:36Wes:All right.

36:38Chris:Very, very nicely done. With Quickshell, my bar is exactly what I want, where I want it. I took inspiration from Ama Archie, Home Assistant plugin, and I have configurable panel controls, entities, and I get some sensor readings when I want them.

36:49Wes:Love it.

36:50Chris:I showed off my SingThing panel in the Matrix room in episode 681 as a testament to the power of agents in Quickshell. I created that panel during 681.

36:58Wes:Putting the quick in Quickshell. I love it.

37:00Chris:Two custom panels, different apps. Quickshell pulls all my theming to make the desktop feel unified. One of my favorite quality of life additions is a custom camera settings pop-up. I have a Logi webcam, and without an app running, its settings consistently default to less than ideal. Quickshell to the rescue. Now, right-clicking on the existing screen recording glyph pulls up a panel with a button to instantly apply my defaults to addition to direct controls for exposure, focus, pan, tilt, and color balance on the fly.

37:29Chris:This used to be done with external GUI utilities or terminal commands before I could even do a call or recording.

37:35Brent:We do this exact thing in studio. And Chris, you hate it every single time.

37:40Chris:It is such a pain in the butt. I should think about this. NixOS pulls QuickShell Plus... thinkers, I think, is letting me build a personalized declarative desktop that doesn't really feel janky. The setup bridges Unix philosophy to my desktop. Instead of a pre-built environment that I have to either submit to or alter until it's unrecognizable, I can use these building blocks to craft just what I need. And now I have a premium desktop experience that works just how I want it to, and I can reproduce it across multiple machines.

38:09Chris:Thanks for the great show and keep up the awesome coverage. Cheers, Greg, the lawyer. He's also not criticizing Genome says or any of that love it all I agree and what a great project winter mute OS kind of took what I was thinking about and just ran with it to the next level Greg.

38:22Wes:Yeah it looks really.

38:23Chris:Nice thank you for sharing it's always.

38:25Wes:Fun to see what people build.

38:27Chris:Screenshot of the JB website too gotta love that, thank you Greg appreciate the value, or the email I guess thank you Greg appreciate the form of e-value he usually does boost it he will boost in And he, in fact, is our second booster. So let's get to that. However, producer Jeff sneaking in right now with a baller boost, 66,666 Satoshi's spooky. Jeff's been figuring out another way to boost without bolts. Experimenting, but swap market, swap market.github.io worked well for me to use my liquid stash. Still experimenting. Hope to boost more again soon.

39:09Wes:Oh, well, we appreciate it.

39:10Chris:Yeah. Check out DJ, also the Blockstream app, you know, and if you're on the Lightning Network, moving between lightning wallets is ain't no thing. Ain't no thing. Thank you, PJ.

39:22Wes:I like he's out there experimenting.

39:23Chris:Mm-hmm.

39:25Wes:Oh, well, it's like you saw the future. Greg the lawyer booths in with 30,000 sats.

39:32Chris:Hello, Greg. Good to hear from you again.

39:34Wes:Short and sweet. Live long and prosper.

39:36Chris:You too.

39:39Wes:Live long and quick show.

39:42Brent:We've got an otter brain here with 10,000 sats. As a college educator, I arrived at an AI course policy. I am prohibiting use for quizzes and exams, and students are not allowed to generate responses to homework prompts. I am allowing use for help with finding sources, however, or help with describing a concept introduced in class. For homework and presentations, I ask for a brief citation of model and prompt. I'm curious to see how this is going to work long term. I'm hopeful for the strengths of this tooling is that it can help learners to build confidence and ask good questions.

40:30Chris:I think it's a pretty balanced policy.

40:32Wes:Yeah, I like it.

40:32Chris:Pretty thoughtful. I'm curious if you want to share Otter without maybe revealing too much, how you will know if they used AI, if you have a system to detect that and if it works. I'd just be curious to have any more information you can share. You know, what kind of bakes my noodle about this banning AI in schools thing, and I'll just quickly address this, is I spent the 90s fighting tooth and nail, to get OpenOffice or StarOffice and the Linux desktop on any school system I could get.

41:09Chris:And I came up with every scheme, every way to save money, to repurpose old hardware. You know, I did the math to compare the licensing costs on Microsoft Office. And over and over again, the school board rejected it for one reason. And I listened to this reason for probably five, six years. I mean, it started the year I moved into the school district. And the reason was... When the students leave school, the applications they'll be using in the workforce will be Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel.

41:41Chris:And if we put OpenOffice on their machines, or LibreOffice wasn't around yet, but if we put a StarOffice or OpenOffice on their machines, they'll be learning something that isn't in the workplace and it won't serve them. And so we must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the licensing regime so that way the students are prepared for the workplace. And yet we are just dismissing that logic now i think otter brain has the good balance here i think that's the right way to do it but i'd be curious to know how you actually enforce it thank you otter brain good discussion appreciate you uh keeping us in the loop, hey gene beans here with a row of ducks 2 222 cents, i'm so impressed to hear that omicon foundation is sponsoring devs for multiple years yes in fact i believe they are now at a total of 12 million in funding and they've also launched individual funding and they're already at like $50,000 in individual contributions from end users.

42:34Chris:So it seems to be getting speed, Gene Bean. Nice to hear from you.

42:36Wes:Magnolia Mayhem comes in with $5,289. Well, first we get a boosty, boosty, boost.

42:45Chris:Oh, of course we do. Here you go, buddy.

42:50Wes:And then Mayhem goes on. Some years ago, I promised that my next boost would be from Boost CLI. I guess those days have come and gone, but I hope you'll accept this LBCLI boost in its place.

43:02Chris:That's neat.

43:03Wes:We sure do. Yeah.

43:06Chris:I mean, boosting from the CLI is pretty cool, however you're doing it, right? That's great. Thank you. nice to hear from you mayhem appreciate the value.

43:15Brent:Well thomas english boosted in a row of sticks 11 1111 sets.

43:23Chris:Thanks guys i vibe clanked nixos into every computer to hand out but my phone has eluded me i got my nubal flakes going my hermes and trek project across the sardia skillfully extracting descriptions from restaurants just liked and the pattern matching ones that we should eat at next nom nom nom lm wiki for our holiday habits next.

43:42Wes:There's a lot cooking there. I love it.

43:44Chris:I mean, like he's making his bot an expert on his favorite restaurants, making a wiki out of it, and then going to start planning holiday habits next.

43:52Wes:It's like a restaurant DJ.

43:53Chris:I love it. And also, yeah, turning your phone into like a Trek tricorder would be high on my list. I just, I don't even need it to actually be a tricorder.

44:02Wes:It just needs to be more like it.

44:03Chris:Just look and sound like a tricorder. That's all I'm asking for is. Oh, it's not a big deal.

44:08Wes:Okay. Shouldn't be.

44:09Chris:No, I'm not asking for too much. I don't think.

44:11Wes:Well, how about a ginkgo salad? Because ginkgo salad boosts in with 10,000 sets. Have you seen TryNix.dev? Boot any package Nix packages ever shipped in this tab. There's a good blog post on it as well.

44:27Chris:Have you ever seen these websites and you're like, how do they do this? It's unfortunately under a little bit of load at the moment as we're live. So I don't know if it'll actually load for me. But did you see, I saw this before the show.

44:38Wes:I did not. No, this looks great. Oh, it's made by Farid Zakaria. Of course it's great.

44:43Chris:It's not loading for me, but yeah. So you basically can type in a Nix package. searches it and you're going to boot it up and try it and it's so cool it's really it's really amazing that kind of technology you know run whole computers in a browser.

44:56Brent:Does that mean you could run zola in a browser to make a website for yourself.

45:04Chris:I think that's that's blowing my browser.

45:07Wes:Yeah uh if you haven't checked out uh farid has a lot of great resources about learning nix explaining nix concepts just recently a very cool article about turning sqlite databases into actual executable files on.

45:18Chris:Linux.

45:19Wes:And I think this is also... Yeah, it's great. I'll include a link to that too. And then any Nix package live in your browser is the write-up for this neat little tool. Well, there you go. Thank you, Ginkgo, because I had not seen that.

45:33Chris:Hey, we got some Fiat boost too. And Blackhost is coming in as our Fiat baller with $250. Very nice. Blackhost is just moving the needle. plus one on the AI podcast. Thank you very much, Blackhawks.

45:50Brent:Thank you.

45:50Chris:And strong.

45:51Wes:We sure appreciate it.

45:52Chris:Thank you very much. Mobile Home Labber comes in with $10 in fiat. Hey, first time, a long time. Nice to hear. Freeman was looking at Markdown editors and found Neo, a novel writing tool created by a novelist. Oh, and they are the author of the Silo series. No kidding. App image release. Just thought it was cool. But now I got to go take a look at this. So it's Neo, N-E-O. It's on GitHub. MIT licensed.

46:18Wes:Neo understands from the moment you install it that you're writing books and nothing else. No bloat, no distractions with manuscripts that look like books as you write them.

46:28Chris:Pretty great. Pretty great.

46:30Wes:We're finally getting that novel then, Brent.

46:32Chris:Nice to hear from you. Yeah. Yeah, where is that? Nice to hear from you, Mobile Home Labber. Thank you very much. You know, Brent, you should write a book on how to go to restaurants with gluten and dairy allergies.

46:41Brent:I'll get right on that. I got to wait for a morning where I wake up inspired.

46:46Chris:You want to take our first member boost there, Wes?

46:48Wes:Yeah, we got two anonymous member boosts here. After many months, I finally switched from DMS to Noctalia just a couple of weeks ago, having had regular crashes and quick show whenever the screen locked oh okay looks like those are fixed in zero three one so switching back i'd have missed that update so thanks for the heads up.

47:07Chris:So apparently i jumped on just at the right time like brent's jump on in zola just.

47:10Wes:The right time some good try and stuff luck let's hope that continues yeah yeah, okay and then here we go star trek question i am not a diehard trek fan however i do enjoy the content i've recently He started watching Strange New Worlds and found it enjoyable. For those that are really into Star Trek, how is Strange New Worlds perceived?

47:30Chris:I think, you guys tell me if you think this is wrong. I don't speak for all Star Trek fans. But I feel like a lot of long-timers, we would describe Strange New Worlds as best of the new batch.

47:42Brent:Yeah. Best of the new batch. That's a good way to put it.

47:45Chris:It's not like, you don't build a 60-year franchise on this television show, right? This is the television show you get after a 60-year franchise. And so it's enjoyable, but it isn't representative of what... The original Star Trek was written by sci-fi novelists who wrote fantastic novels with followings and had entire careers writing sci-fi novels. And then Gene came to them and said, hey, will you write for my TV show? And these really good sci-fi writers wrote for television.

48:16Chris:And now what we have is new hires that have never worked in TV before or written. Their first job is working for Bad Robot. And so this is what they're writing. and that's not a judgment it's just a fact and so it just doesn't quite hold up in our opinion but it's still very good we still enjoy it I'm currently watching it I have not watched the most recent episode but I did get through the puppet episode.

48:38Wes:Yeah and of course Gene also himself had done a bunch of previous television stuff and westerns and all kinds of storytelling for the screen.

48:47Chris:It's beautiful too I really think the strange I love the sets.

48:49Wes:It does I think it is the closest that feels that got closest to the feeling of like I'm watching this and it feels like I'm watching.

48:56Chris:Star Trek And it's the one that probably feels the closest to part of the entire universe out of, I think, all the new Trek as well.

49:02Wes:Rather than its own thing.

49:03Chris:Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Not that we like talking about Star Trek.

49:07Wes:No, what? No, never.

49:08Brent:Slightly off topic. Amadeus sends in a member boost.

49:14Chris:Hey.

49:15Brent:Thank you. I'm delighted Quickshell is getting funding. I made a resource widget that turns different colors based on the CPU, memory, and disk thresholds. so now i can play factorio during colmina builds and know when it's time to return to work faithfully reenacting the ancient xkcd my code is.

49:35Wes:Compiling amazing.

49:37Chris:You've basically created your own lunch whistle right when the code goes green again it's time to get back to work the lunch whistles oh.

49:43Wes:Build's done.

49:44Chris:I think that's so good thank you for sharing that that's actually and color coding is such a good way to go you just get it by a glance.

49:50Wes:I was seeing another someone who'd rigged up it started as like a monitoring widget for system d service status but then they kind of just put in more and more things to like a little green right green light red light yellow light sort of setup yeah there's a lot there's a lot to that.

50:04Chris:Unnoticed 92 87 sent in a free member boost. I'm not sure how long I've been listening, but how long does one have to be listening to be called a long timer? Low 400s, maybe the high 300s first time booster relatively new member. Keep up the great work. Well, thank you for becoming a member. Um, here's, I think people usually go by like, well, I joined when system D was the topic or I joined topic eras. Yeah. Well, because new people think, oh my God, all these guys do is talk about Nix or, oh my God, all these guys talk about AI, But long timers know that we're just following where Linux is going and there's eras.

50:39Chris:And there has now been many eras over the show.

50:41Wes:I want to see a map of those eras.

50:43Chris:Right. Because there was a time when like, oh my God, all the show talks about is system D. And oh my God, all we talk about is Pulse Audio.

50:48Wes:Or Arch Linux.

50:49Chris:Or WireGuard or ButterFS or, you know, these things. And then it's just, it's all quantitative to the actual size and impact and scale it is on the Linux community. And so usually what people do unnoticed is they say, I joined during that topic era. Or, you know, or like, I joined when Matt was still hosting or something like that.

51:07Brent:During the Arch Challenge.

51:09Chris:Yeah, the Arch Challenge. Thank you very much for being here, and it's nice to hear from you. Please do keep it up.

51:14Wes:I'll hear this one's for you, Chris.

51:15Chris:Okay.

51:16Wes:Lawson member boosts in to say, Chris, I know you mentioned that you fought with how Bitwarden fills in finding the button and how they keep changing what clicking where it means. As you are moving to a more keyboard-centric workflow with Hyperland, you can use the shortcut Control-Shift-L.

51:31Chris:What? I can use a Hyperland shortcut to do a Bitwarden fill?

51:35Wes:Or is it a...

51:38Chris:That's great.

51:39Brent:Say more. You got to try it out.

51:42Chris:Yeah.

51:42Wes:Let us know how it works.

51:43Chris:Yeah.

51:43Wes:Is it a Bitwarden shortcut that gets registered?

51:45Chris:Either way, I got to look into that. That is great.

51:48Brent:You should write it down on your notebook there, Chris, I think.

51:51Chris:Bring it home with you. You know what? I really have to thank everybody. The show really turned around. When we sat down to do the show, we didn't even crack 100,000 sats for support this week. But things are looking much better. So let's round it all up. I want to say thank you to all of you who streamed sats as you listened. 16 of you did that. And collectively, you 16 stacked 28,789 sats for the show. Thank you. When you bring it all together with the fiat boost converted to our local currency, or local currency, you know what I'm trying to say, current value for sats, bringing the live boost, our bar boost, and all of it, it brings the show to a respectable 491,318.

52:33Wes:Sats. All right.

52:33Chris:Which is way better than we were looking at going into the future.

52:36Wes:Out.

52:36Chris:Yes. Thank you, everybody. boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com support the show and keep us going and thank you to our members who put their support on autopilot we appreciate you.

52:54Brent:Could I pull I think I want to pull a boost forward here.

52:58Chris:Go for it yeah always welcome alright.

53:00Brent:So Harpo sent in a row of sticks basically 1111 sats, and has a great message here in case anyone is interested I've created both knives the Home Assistant add-on that connects an LM of your choice with Assist. It has local memory, so it remembers things between diff conversions, can reason, and can even create automations for you by just speaking. Been using it in my house for months. And two, Knives on Omarchie plug-in, which allows you to speak to Home Assistant from your desktop.

53:36Chris:Oh, my goodness. Here we go, boys. You know, that's a nice little combo right there. Good call. Harpo, thank you for sending that in. We'll link those in the show notes as well. Knives, N-I-V-E-S.

53:49Wes:There is something interesting about the idea of an embedded bot in the home assistant. It's the personality of the home.

53:56Chris:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. My home assistant is named Rosie after the robot in the Jetsons, and I've always wanted to take that a little bit further. I think that'd be a lot of fun. Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a membership or a boost. We have the 2000s at cutoff. We do read them all. And every now and then we do pull one forward as well.

54:15Wes:Now someone's been picking.

54:16Chris:Oh, I am excited. I can't wait to go home tonight and try this on Dylan's Mouse. It's called OpenMouse, and you can go to openmouse.app. And this allows you to configure the DPI, the polling rate, your buttons, if your mouse has RGB. All these things that you normally would require, a proprietary Windows app, can now be done in a web app. It uses the WebHID HID protocol. The downside is it's currently Chromium only. And your mouse has to be on the supported list.

54:51Chris:but there are 117 individual mice with a real focus on gaming mice.

54:56Wes:And something tells me that list will be growing. Yeah.

55:00Chris:Oh, actually it already has. It's 120 now.

55:03Wes:Hey, what are my predictions?

55:06Chris:It worked, Wes. You did it. Oh, the MX Master's on here. Good, good, good. I have one of those.

55:11Brent:It's nice. They have a list here with a ton of requests and also you can vote. So I guess the developers just see like, you know, Get working on the one that has the most votes and keep going. That's a good system.

55:23Chris:It's so cool that you can do this in the browser. Yes, it requires Chromium. But any Chromium browser, I believe, will work. The actual app is control.openmouse.app, and it is GPL3.

55:34Wes:I know. I was impressed when we were doing our, and you can do it for regular old Android too, but our giraffine installs and being able to do that right from the browser installer. So more things that can handle these kind of fussy device interactions without having to install janky software, the better.

55:48Chris:That's why I genuinely wonder if I could build a web app that rips DVDs with like some sort of web-based MakeMKV.

55:55Wes:We'll compile MakeMKV to WebAssembly.

55:59Chris:All right. So this next one. I think initially, at first glance, it looks like a finance tracker. But I think a lot of people have that workflow baked in. Maybe, maybe not. But the thing that still kind of is hard for me to keep track of is not just the subscriptions I've signed up for, but like the ones my kids end up signing up through their phone.

56:20Wes:The whole network of subscriptions that ultimately come back to you.

56:23Chris:And on the Apple devices, I can from my phone see they have subscriptions. I cannot see what they are. So I do not remember. Remember, I have to go to their phone and look it up individually in the settings app on every one of their devices. So enter WallOS, an open source personal subscription tracker, a self-hostable web application designed to empower you for managing your finances with ease.

56:45Wes:WallOS.

56:46Chris:It simplifies the process of tracking expenses and helps you gain a better understanding of your finances. And the big thing here is subscription management. Keep track of your reoccurring subscriptions and payments. Make sure you never miss a due date or lose track of them. it has automatic category, sorting it can go look up the logos for you so that way it looks good it gives you a nice dashboard you pull up you can see you got your Google subscriptions on here your Netflixes and your Spotify and kind of this one dashboard here, and you can dig in give more information, multi-currency support if you happen to be paying in different currencies around the world, data's all yours like I mentioned the logo search is really nice category management I think is really good you do get statistics and graphs you can get perspectives on what you're spending who you're spending it with.

57:28Wes:I see it has some notion of like inactive.

57:30Chris:Subscriptions. Yeah.

57:31Wes:They have a demo instance, which I'm checking out.

57:32Chris:Yes, they do. They do. So you can, you go to the GitHub page on the GitHub page, which we'll link in the notes. They have a demo that you can go to and the login is just like demo, demo. Yeah.

57:43Wes:Oh yeah. Here's the stats page. Okay. Yearly cost fun. Most expensive subscriptions cost. Nice.

57:50Chris:Yeah.

57:50Wes:Some stuff you don't want to know.

57:51Chris:But yeah. Especially when you're spending too much money on tokens. and then you have like your upcoming you get a snapshot of what your monthly budget and spend is oh that's.

58:02Wes:Nice if you're trying to keep track of.

58:03Chris:Things yeah, It's kind of nice. And I like that it's not trying to solve everything.

58:09Wes:That's what I was going to say. You're not necessarily trying to have this be categorized every single transaction that flows through my cats.

58:14Chris:It's not like QuickBooks or whatever you might be using out there these days. It's just because so many things are subscription-based.

58:20Wes:So what's the onboarding like? I mean, how do you get, does it automatically find it? Do you kind of just go plumb it up in the UI?

58:25Chris:Yeah, and then it goes in an API. Gets the logos and things like that. Yes. And also, it will support OIDC with OAuth if you want to do that. And then they have a tie-in, although it's not really a major feature, but they do have an AI tie-in where they'll generate recommendations. It can use ChatGipity over the API, Gemini, or if you've got local llamas going, it can use that as well.

58:46Brent:The fact it even has an API is really brilliant because a lot of these types of tools just don't even...

58:52Chris:And GPL3. I mean, come on. Is that some banger picks or what?

58:59Wes:Mostly PHP. Haven't had one of those for a minute, so that's nice.

59:02Chris:Wow. Well, it's cool again. php is cool again, you know i really think the real unlock though from like a long-term linux user perspective is the open mouse stuff that has been the domain of proprietary windows apps, for so long and now like so that's one of the downsides that my kids have had is all of their friends have fancy gaming nieces with rgb and some of them got fans and high DPI's you can turn ups and stuff like that, and it's all Windows and now I'm going to just say go over there if your mouse is supported.

59:40Wes:It is pretty funny we got to the like actually the games run just great but, we can't really deal with your gaming peripherals.

59:46Chris:Especially weird esoteric Mies made for Windows users, All right, links to all of that will be at linuxunplugged.com slash 683. Find the whole back catalog over there. You can become a long-timer just by listening to the back catalog. Jump in the time machine, go back, automatically become a long-timer. And we also, we haven't mentioned this for a while. Two things before we go. Number one, we do love time travel boost. So if you're in the back catalog, we always like it when you check in. It's just fun for us.

1:00:13Wes:Yeah, that's right. We have zip code boost. That's sort of a spatial domain boost. And then we have a time domain boost.

1:00:19Chris:And then I'm going to make an ask that I don't think we've made for at least five years. And I'm going to say, if you've made it this far in the podcast and you're listening on Apple Podcasts, go give us a nice review if you would. We've had one recently and it was actually really nice because for years now we've been taking it in the pants. We're talking about Knicks or talking about whatever. I think one person dinged it because we talked about immutable distributions and others said, you know, it's like random stuff.

1:00:44Chris:maybe talk about whatever was that's whatever personal pet peeves are, a lot of people go get squeaky on the uh apple podcast ratings we're not apple podcast users so we can't do anything about it but if you're using apple podcast out there and could give us a nice review and rating it helps other people find the show, and i don't think i've asked in like five years so i'm putting it out there we'd really appreciate it anything else they should know before we go wes any hot tips extra information around the show metadata oh metadata yeah.

1:01:12Wes:Okay well how about xml you like xml site i put um i put json inside the xml.

1:01:18Chris:For you now you're talking.

1:01:18Wes:Yep i also put text files vtt srt and uh mpeg not just level three but level four.

1:01:26Chris:It's like the podcast was ready for the agentic era.

1:01:29Wes:It's got all that data sitting there at the item level just packaged up between a lot of you know.

1:01:34Chris:Structured little.

1:01:34Wes:Alligators open and closes.

1:01:36Chris:Yeah a lot of alligators a.

1:01:37Wes:Lot of alligators.

1:01:37Chris:But don't worry they can navigate that now for you the human you should join us live. Make it just a Tuesday on a Sunday experience. Hang out in the mumble room, the chat room, get extra show. And then when you can't do that, become a member and you get the bootleg. Clocking in an hour 43-ish right now. Lots of content in there for them, just for them. Either way, we just really appreciate you listening. Shows clocking in on like 13 years or something like that. You don't get there without a great audience and a great community.

1:02:09Chris:Regardless if they're in the live room or not, we really appreciate you. go get the show notes all that linuxunplugged.com thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday as in Sunday.