Byebye Raspberry Pi

Welcome back to Linux Prepper.

Alright my first piece of feedback I received on the last episode is use a script.

Thank you for that piece of feedback.

I actually really appreciate it and I am doing that.

So for this episode I am sticking to the script. That said, what I've been up to lately is moving.

The last few months have been a lot of moving around. And because of that, I've been sort

of reevaluating everything, everything in regards to self hosting devices. Where will

they go? Where will I go? I don't know. And I've got tons of devices to spare.

We're talking every iteration of Raspberry Pi from the 1B plus all the way up to the 4.

And I've got all these devices and I'm thinking, what do I do with them? I've got pies, I've got o-droids, I've got all kinds of stuff. And there's other people out there that

could use them more than me. So I'm thinking about who I can give these

devices to in a useful way. Because it doesn't make sense to have these

devices in storage. And I want them to be used for something. So the first thing I

do is I think, hmm, what

would one of my friends want from one of these devices and how can I help them?

Good news is I've been doing the self hosting for a while. So I figured one

thing I'll do is I'll take a device I already have in this case a PI4 with an S-case and some SSD disks and I will give it to a family or friend.

You might be asking yourself what are the considerations when giving someone else

a Linux device that they can run at their own home? Well the first thing I think you'll think of is

cost and in this case I already owned the device.

I'd already paid for it.

So that had already been done upfront.

I've had it for a couple of years.

And the reality is, if it's lost, it's fine.

I might be slightly sad or morose or whatever,

but the truth is I can afford to lose the data.

Anything important is backed up or just irrelevant.

And what's going to happen when this device is placed at someone else's house?

Well, most realistically, it's going to be unplugged.

Even more than it being stolen, is it just simply will not be usable for whatever reason,

and I'm not physically there to do something about it.

usable for whatever reason, and I'm not physically there to do something about it. So physical security is key in this moment, mostly because it'll be sitting there

disconnected if nothing else. Well, how's that gonna happen? First of all, we're

gonna have a hard wire connection. I want a device that is connected over

Ethernet, not Wi-Fi. It's just more reliable, it's faster,

and it's the way I do it. So when I give the device, I'm going to give it with the proper

Ethernet connection. The next consideration is power. Is it going to stay powered? Now,

it might sound ridiculous, but the truth is, is that the more things you

have plugged in cables and connections, the more likely that one of them will be disconnected

for some reason. And you have to take that into consideration upfront. So I'm trying

to make sure when I connect something, I'm really looking at it through the eye of what is the length

of the cables do I need to clean them up or organize them. Maybe I apply some zip ties

or something of that nature to make sure that they're wired up properly and cleanly so that

they pass the basic spousal approval factor. If you can't hide it, make it tidy. And also tell the person

what you're doing. Don't be a sneaky whatever. It just doesn't help anything. The best thing

is to tell the person, "Hey, I'm setting this up. It's going to provide a service that you

can use. In this case, it was Jelly Finn. and you'll be able to watch movies and share media between

ourselves and you can watch it on your TV at home.

So of course then the person's excited and they want to try the thing out at least.

So that's good.

Now we run into another big issue, which is noise.

So in my case I invested in SSD disks because they're not spinning rust, right?

They don't make sound.

And for me, that was important because the device I was giving the person is next to

their dining table.

Because that's where the router is.

And I'm not in a position to dictate anything in regards to this person's home. So when I put in the device, I gave it the cleanest possible ethernet connection and

I gave it the cleanest possible wall connection.

And I did notice that all the electricity they had for the router was connected to an

old search protector and the connection was pretty dang loose in the wall. Like droopy, it's just the wall socket itself was problematic, right? The electrical

socket. And I thought, "Mmm, that could be a problem." Fast forward, and it turns out

that it was a problem. The cables in the wall for the search protector or anything else just fall out of their own volition. So fast forwarding another two months it ended up that the Raspberry

Pi was unplugged from the actual search protector to make space for whatever

and the search protector was falling out of the wall the time. So the way that I adjusted that to make it work

was I ran over to a discount store and I bought a search protector that actually fits in two wall

prongs, one for support and one for the actual electricity. I'll drop a link in the show notes

to a picture. But these adjustable wall mounted search protectors do a great

job of staying in place, which is exactly what happened.

So I did that.

My friend was happy to reimburse me the 10 bucks.

And now their connections in the wall actually stay in place.

And I have a convenient location to plug the Raspberry Pi while leaving the aforementioned

extension cord for whatever

the person was already plugging in.

So it's a cleaner look, everything's plugged in and as of today, this remote device is

accessible to me over WireGuard.

This brings us to our next step of the device, which is how do you manage a device

that is no longer on the premise?

Well, for me, it's an extension of what I'm already doing locally.

And this is interesting.

Normally when you plug something into your network, like this device, I'll make it available

to myself and I'll have a device that I can access on the network.

And what I realized in giving this device to someone else, that I could easily become

confused about the device and its name and its location and all the details related to it. And I

thought, "Ugh, how do I make it easy for me to be able to access and manage this

remote device?" Well, the first thing I did was I changed the hostname. So I

actually went into etc. hostname on the device and I rewrote the hostname.

I made it whatever, doesn't matter.

What I did was I changed the hostname to either the name of the person or some monument related to where they live.

So that at a glance of the hostname, I knew exactly what device I was thinking about. I could look at the hostname

and it actually means something to me. So that's a tip that at least works for me. If

you're going to give a device to Bob, if nothing else changed the hostname of that device to

Bob or Bob's house, and now you know, ah ha, Bob's house. now you know aha Bob's house making this even clear for myself.

If I'm managing a device I'm going to be managing it in the terminal. So for me I wanted to be able

to manage this device in a terminal and know that I'm not looking at my local terminal, but I'm looking at a remote terminal in this person's house. So I am using T-Mucks and I've created my own

T-Mucks config for Bob's house. And every time I log in through SSH. SSH has a hook in bash RC to trigger my SSH Tmux session. Link in the

show notes. I hope this is moving at a pace that you all are following along and feeling

more comfortable. I'm trying to take that feedback and focus on a thing.

So, in order to manage this device, whenever I log in from anywhere, I've made it so every time

I connect over SSH, I am going to see the same T-MUX session, which is themed in the way that I've designed it. And the first thing

that's showing me in the prompt is this hostname, Bob's house. So I am 100%

clear that I am in a terminal for Bob's house. That's really helpful for me

personally. Now, I need to access this device when it's not in my local network.

Normally, it would be in my local network.

But I also don't want to make this device accessible on the public internet.

That's not necessary.

This is between me and Bob.

The way that I'm managing this is WireGuard.

I install WireGuard on the device. I confirm that I can access WireGuard

on this device from anywhere as long as it's properly connected to the internet.

At that point, I know that I am ready to drop this device at any location I'm location am I choosing which of course will be Bob's house. The reality here is

that Bob doesn't know anything about WireGuard or Linux or any of these other

services nor shitty care and I realize that I want Bob to be able to access this

device even if something is wrong on my end with the wire guard.

To keep things relatively sane, I've installed a Vahi and added it with a custom configuration

so that while keeping my previous hostname of Bob's house, I've set a custom Avahi config of acting as though the host is actually just Bob, which

means if Bob goes to Bob.local, they'll be able to access their basic services.

The first service that I want to show to Bob is a static web page. And it's a static web page that includes a basic text index of click on this

link and check out Jellyfin or click on this link and check out another thing. That way I can change

around this little static page of links at my own behest. But as far as Bob knows, they're going to see the same thing every time they

type Bob.local, which is they're going to see this simple webpage.

That way, no matter what changes on the device, I'll be able to make sure that they can at

least find it with the least possible confusion.

They just add Bob.local, they add to the bookmarks on their computer or whatever, and go from there.

Fast forward and it looks like this device is getting some baseline of respect over the last month or two that it's been installed, which is good.

So now that it's running in the way that I would hope, I'm ready to start adding some more things for this household to enjoy. And

that would start with a great application many of you know and love which is called Jelly

Fin. Jelly Fin is a media server that handles not only movies but also ebooks and music. It's very flexible and easy to use and it includes

free-of-cost applications for all major platforms. Turned out that they had a

Roku smart TV in their house so I installed the Roku app for Jellyfin

onto their TV. I logged in to the server on their TV so they wouldn't have to

after generating them their own username and this way whenever they watch media on there,

they'll be able to watch shows pick up where they left off and their user profile will not

impact any other users on the system.

So far that's been a success and I'm happy to say that everyone's very happy with Jelly

Fin, whether it's for watching movies or looking at pictures or listening to some music.

It's on there so far, so good.

So I racked that up to a success.

Now looking at this device

remotely one of the things I realized as I've had it running for a

couple years

successfully is that it's actually run pretty low on disk space.

So running the command df

hyphen h I could see that I was about 97% disk usage, which is a yikes.

And that's a lot of disk usage.

One thing I realized I could purge out of this machine was various old movies and things

from a couple of years ago that nobody's going to watch. So I cleaned those things out and that recovered me

probably 15% of the disk space.

And then I came up with another

surprising way to remove some disk space.

Which is the fact that I'm using a lot of images

because I used personally run Docker

containers for many years.

And as you're pulling new images, they start to add up and

you're left with all these old images that are no longer needed.

So using Docker system prune hyphen a I was able to remove

all of the old hanging, unused, unnecessary images and

data from the machine. It freed me up 50 gigabytes. You'll have to understand. I apologize

upfront because Docker is this whole huge topic. But just the thought, if you're running it

and it's been a few years, probably want to prune through those old images.

Because for me that recovered and easy 50 gigabytes.

Let's take a moment to talk about the ongoing trending topic of Raspberry Pi

and how it relates to this episode of Bye Bye Raspberry Pi.

Obviously I was just talking about the Pi 4, which is notable because it came out back in 2019.

It is not the most current iteration of the Raspberry Pi, which of course is the Pi 5.

You of course might want to buy the latest and greatest, but the truth

is there have been a number of pi versions and I can speak to this because I own

them starting back from the pi b plus the pi 1 and on to the pi 2 and the Pi 3b+ and then the Pi 4.

Not to mention the Pi 0 and 0 2 and Pi pico.

Ugh, it's enough to make your brain explode.

But a big change happened between the Pi 3 and the Pi 4.

Biggest thing being a lot of technical issues were ironed out So we had the adoption of ARM 64

formally in the last couple years, which is excellent. It's an important change which other companies like

O'Droid have been doing for many many years making them vastly better options than the Raspberry Pi has been

Sure, you think of the name Raspberry Pi and that's the biggest boon to it, but take

that away, other devices have been a better option once you know what you're doing.

And the Pi 4 added these technical improvements.

Specifically, USB and Ethernet connectivity were no longer interlinked, which caused huge performance

issues in the Pi 3 and below.

So Pi 4 fixed that.

You've just got this nice gigabit ethernet connection.

You have up to 8 gigabytes of RAM depending on the model.

And you also have USB 3.0, which is huge because it allows you to boot off of SSD disks rather

than a microSD card.

If you're booting off of an SSD disk as I have been, it's very easy to run a number

of say 20+ services simultaneously on the same device over Gigabit LAN and have decent throughput decent speeds.

And as long as your network itself has decent speeds, you're going to be okay for running

the odd service.

It's not going to win any awards, but you know, it's cheap on power.

Functionally it performs well, which is why I have a NAS aluminum case on the thing.

And disk wise, through SSD disks, it is making no noise, all of which are mission critical

for having these things distributed with friends. In my case, I'm actually running two of these

setups, which I've given to different friends.

You might be asking yourself, "Hey, dude, why do you think about this so much?"

Well, that's a good question. That's because I've been involved with the NextCloud

Pi project. NextCloud Pi project is just a project of people who want to run the file sharing open suite

of next cloud on a device at home.

Of course started with the Raspberry Pi, but it's just more generically available to

whoever on whatever device.

So for the last eight years I've been involved with them.

I became a documentation writer and I wanted to help get their project launched as an officially

supported project of NextCloud itself, which did happen. It took a period of years and it was

difficult and I basically didn't know what I was doing, but you know, I'm just trying to help as a normal person.

And it did eventually happen through reaching out to the company, figure things out, ham

and ha, and eventually it did happen. And over the course of this testing, I've been

able to test a number of devices with tools just like next Cloud Pie. And that includes earlier models of the pie,

like the two and the 3B+, and even the four.

But also other devices from companies like O-Droid,

the C1, C1+, C2.

And it's interesting to try all these different devices

because in doing so, spoiler alert,

I realized that I'm not really interested in relying too much on a specific device.

I'm more...

And what I mean by that is this goes back to the despecialized episode of this podcast.

I'm not really interested in having any special device

in terms of a service if I can avoid it.

I'm more generically interested in running services

how I see fit and what that means as part of testing

Nest Cloud Pi on all these different devices

is I found myself reaching more and more to container

technology. So things like Docker, because I'm running tools not for the sake of production

so much as for testing. And I want to be able to start up a test instance and a different

test instance and a different test instance and a different test instance.

So I can do as much testing as possible,

as quickly as possible.

In the modern day, we have all these automations,

which I do not understand because I'm not a developer.

But there's obviously many better ways to do this process.

This is just how I learned.

And over the course of the Pi 4, I found that the performance

of the device reached a point that I'm personally really satisfied with in terms of power consumption

and in terms of throughput and just overall performance. I'm happy with where things are right now.

And I don't think someone needs to continue

iterating on the Pi itself. And that's the other side of this

episode's title, Bye Bye Raspberry Pi. You will not be

surprised if you watch other podcasts or Linux related

news to know that people are moving away from Pi devices

because at what point of

iterations does the Pi simply become

another server another computer and I feel personally that we've already reached that point in terms of power consumption in

terms of cost and

in terms of overall

performance and

physical size of the device.

The intention is to have something small and simple and cheap in my brain.

And there's so many more options now.

The competition is so vast and deep that it's really hard to recommend a specific device anymore of an older generation

or ilk unless you already have that device.

Which is why I would say if you have a device that functionally works for you, keep it.

Don't throw it away. I'm finding, for example, having an older iteration of the Pi,

say the Pi 2, is completely fine if it supports a specific purpose I need,

because it has full-size USB ports, which makes it easy to connect to other devices,

as well as the basic ability to be connected over, you know, ethernet or

Wi-Fi, depending on the capabilities of that specific device.

And as long as it ticks those boxes for you, you might as well use that unless you have

a performance need.

So it's interesting for me in connecting to the show that what I've found personally is

it's not so much that I need newer devices.

It's that the devices I already own are giving me the ability to offset some of my performance

away from my computer because my computer is

honestly a piece of crap. So my computer right now that I have is a laptop that

was going to go in the dumpster. It's a late 2014 MacBook Air and that device

was just going to get thrown away. So I took it, I repurposed it by fixing the battery on it

and now I'm using it to edit this show

after the principal recording.

And the reason that it works is because the services

that I'm editing with and doing using on my day-to-day

are not actually being run on this very poor quality laptop

which has a gigabits soldered RAM.

It's just nothing.

But thankfully I have these distributed pie devices in different locations accessible at

a couple hundred megabytes a second and they are running the editing audio

software and other tools that I need to work on this podcast. So in the end this

sort of distributing is actually helping me greatly and friends get in enjoy

these things but also I get to enjoy them as well. And it's a it's all

around win-win. So moving forward, I have a question for the audience, which is me

wondering what a good modern computer looks like. I've been using repurposed

laptops and desktops for the last 10 years, especially from being

involved with hacker spaces around the Bay Area. And hacker spaces are really, it's

an international conglomeration of loosely connected physical spaces. You

might hear them described as maker spaces.

This sounds very commercial,

but they're just spaces like that go away

from just being co-working and more,

the ones that interest me are ones

that are more experimental and designed

around open technologies, much like the podcast.

And there are places for people to experiment

and places for people to fail.

And in being connected to those spaces,

you end up sometimes getting your hands on things

like free computers.

Example, being me getting my hands

on different single board computer devices over the years,

people giving them to me as thank you for teaching them things, running classes, Linux admin, and also

actually met a employee from Tesla and in the early iterations of their cars

and probably in the current, all of their development was happening on Intel Nook devices, i3 and i5 Nook computers, somewhere USB 2, somewhere

USB 3 with M SATA disks and a number of them were brought to our hacker space

and I ended up with one of them and I still have it to this day and I use it

as my desktop machine. It ain't great, but it works completely fine.

And I find myself oscillating between that

and using a laptop. And because I'm self-hosting my own services,

they're accessible to me from any computer. It doesn't really matter if I'm on Linux or Windows

or Mac because in the end I'm on Linux or Windows or Mac because

in the end I'm able to get my work done. So it's been a real boon to me to have these

services set up and accessible. And I guess what I think of it all as is an extension

of my local network. I'm taking what I would normally just run locally at home,

and I'm expanding it through a WireGuard VPN. And so in this case, what I'm using the VPN

for is not for securely accessing the internet. But rather, I'm just using it to securely access my own resources, which would otherwise

be local only.

And to that end, it's been very successful.

And I highly recommend anyone interested, check it out.

Because especially with the current iteration of hardware, I think you have so many options.

And it's a great time to learn and explore.

So that said, what kind of computer should I get? If I get a new laptop, I mean, what

should I get? I was thinking of framework, but previously, I've used an I think pad X220i, it's a classic from 15 years ago and it has the best keyboard

ever. It also has a nice relative size and I like it. So something in that realm is nice,

even though it has a tiny like 11 inch screen, I think it still works well and mine just literally fell apart.

So I'm interested in finally getting something newer and higher end because I've never really

done that and something I can take with me.

Maybe something I could run local AI models on that I could run a lot of Ramon or something

and do some raw video editing. I think that would be fun.

I'm tired of my laptop being a limitation in regards to making

this show or working on projects. I'm ready to actually invest some money. So tell me what you

think. And I just want to say again, a huge thank you to everyone for listening to this

show. I'm curious about the devices that you host your own local services on, like what

do you use? Are you actually using Pi devices? Like the Pi five? Are you using the Pi five

with an SSD or NVMe disk? And if you are doing that, I also wonder why?

Is it because of the community?

Like at what point does the cost of doing all that

as it exceeds $100, $200, does it make more sense

to just buy a normal computer, thin computer

that's relatively the same exact size

and better designed for the same price.

Do you regret having a Pi 5 current iteration or not?

I would be super curious.

So let me know what you think.

And I think it'll be fine as we move forward to talk more

about uses for older single board computer devices.

It'll be more information for a future episode.

But I think it would be nice.

How did a masonry worker find themselves this deep in tech?

That's super interesting.

Please don't take that the wrong way.

I work in construction, yet here I am.

Well the truth of the construction side of things is I got involved with it just because

I needed consistent work.

And previous to that, I was working in theater and performance, which I still do.

I do masonry, right, full time, and then on the side, I work as a corporate pantomime and clown and I do like mascot stuff and I do

performances mostly for sports teams as well as for hotels. So that pays really

well but it's more or less all seasonal which is a problem. For example coming up

in April there's a conflict with all this Easter related

Benanza stuff and sports and against Linux Fest Northwest, which I was thinking about speaking at,

but I've had so many conflicts that I decided to not put myself in as a speaker. But I will try to

attend Linux Fest Northwest. That's in Bellingham, the Linux conference, if I can make it.

So I would love to be a part of it

if my schedule allows, but I'm still confirming that.

Anyway, working as a mainstream worker,

it's something that I just felt like I could do.

And that's probably not the greatest answer,

but the truth is I just felt like

I don't really care if I get injured.

So I got involved in landscaping from a young age,

and I've kind of come back to it.

And at this point, I've had a lot of

nays and re-experience in dry-stack stonework

and building stone.

And I went out to Vermont and attended

a big stoneworkers conference on behalf of a company

to cherry pick through various people who could come

and work with us on major projects.

So it was, it's good, it's just really hard.

I actually got a RSI related injury to it.

I have been involved in self-hosting primarily since about 20 years ago and

it started in college with me being involved a lot in film studies and finding rare films

and sharing them with other people. And in academia, surprise surprise in film studies, there is a lot of piracy.

This is true.

A lot of piracy in the academic realm.

Not just in the realm of like, I want to watch the new movie in the theaters.

Yeah, there's that realm of piracy, but there's also the realm of piracy where people are more or less attempting to keep alive works of art that you just can't get anymore.

And I was drawn into that actually through my professors on the sly and there are still these groups that are out there for people who are trading rare and

unfindable levels of media. And I already have this feedback, you know, that's like,

like it says under here. The three episodes you have could be split into

multiple episodes if you slow down and thoroughly talk about each topic and

how they relate to your situation. I agree.

The problem is I got so deep in on this situation that now we're 20 years later.

It's crazy.

It's crazy man.

And it's like, I kind of struggle to relate to people on these things.

And that's why I'm more like team up

with the projects directly,

but I want to exist in the world and be someone.

So that's me starting to podcast.

I guess I am a bit of a Renaissance man

that has been said to me over the years,

and yeah, it's apt.

said to me over the years. And yeah, it's apt. I am someone who has spent the last 20 years

using free and open tools really picked up in college. And since that time, I've been running my own tools because I think I just want the control and also I've kind of been on

my own a lot and had to defend for myself in the world. So I think that's

where it comes from and I just also have had to like make ends meet for myself.

So that's where landscaping came from. I have a background in writing, theater performing arts,

and that's what I studied in school.

And it's been great.

I had a great time learning all about creative writing,

play writing in a double major,

and another gentleman Dan, who I went to school with,

he has a hit TV show now that he had created

called "Severns" and that used

to be just a play, you know, and that we watched in college and now it's become this whole

other thing that he owns and props to him to take something that was a 60 minute stage

play and turn it into this massive behemoth TV show on Apple TV Severns.

So I just have this background in the theater

performing arts. I've created a series of shows and toured them around the United

States and I've had a lot of success. I've also performed on TV and that's been

really good and I still actually do theater performance but it's private

more or less. It's for corporate groups and for hotels.

So I do that work but the nature of it is I don't, I can't really talk about it too

much. It's more that it's something that I do and so I don't go sharing a bunch of

photos or anything like that but it's really cool. And so I do corporate work seasonally. And outside of that,

I started working in landscaping

because a coworker of mine or colleague friend

told me about landscaping opportunity,

doing pond work when I was looking for work

and was in the theater as a joke.

And I ended up doing it.

And now it's been seven or eight years

and I've been doing it and now it's been seven or eight years and I've

been continuing to learn skills and especially in dry stack stone masonry

which is a form of masonry that doesn't use any sort of mortars. So I have all

the tools, custom carbide steel tools that I had Smith and they work great and that's something that I've been working

on for a while.

So I work in landscaping and I also work in theater performance and sometimes I get

hired as a technical director for theater shows.

So my experience with things like sound and performance is actually all live like having five people miked up on the stage

with wireless mics things like that I did an internship for some theater companies and

I ended up getting drawn in through my kind of varied interests and performance and lack of

Just resources having to do it myself, I got drawn into hacker spaces,

which has gone on for a long time.

Pretty much the same amount of time as the masonry.

So it's like a decade.

And that's been, it's been good.

Doing that got me connected with next cloud.

It got me connected with Discourse

and these different platforms.

And the whole time, I'm like creating theater shows

and with basically zero tech where I just walk on stage.

And I did the show myself.

I do the lighting design, the sound.

And I just go for it on stage and build my own instruments.

So that's my background, man.

And I love it, you know?

I love it, but I think one of the things that's so tough

when you're making material is like,

you gotta do it for you.

And you can't really do it for anyone else.

I mean, yeah, there's the paycheck aspect of things,

but once you get away from that,

it's like, I have to do art that I want to do. I've got to find my own way. And that's what brings me around to this show. I'm

hoping it's a sort of amalgamation of my interests, which are practical, but also creative,

and just wanting to have fun, you know, wanting to have fun and make a show that's cool. And

like, I would love to be involved with some of these other podcasts and every start to some of them.

Um, and you know, it's like, they didn't want me.

I don't blame them.

It's like, who am I?

So that's sort of where the Linux prepper thing comes from.

Plus I've just been kind of obsessed with projects for 20 years.

So I want to put that into a practical podcast thing.

Um, the most real connection, I guess,

right now between what I've been talking about on the show

in my real life is more or less my involvement

with hacker spaces and NextCloudPy,

which is a project I found 'cause I was running it

for a hacker space.

And I thought, I'm going to learn more about this.

And then similarly with discourse, the forum software,

just set that up for trying to improve it.

Somebody else has set it up, and I was trying to take over

maintenance of it, which I did.

And just like-- see, this is the problem.

This is so much information, and I apologize up front.

It's insane, man.

Because this has just been a through line of my life.

And I'm in this weird space where it's like, I grew up--

I grew up at a time when my parents bought an IBM desktop computer for 3,000 bucks. It had

a 3.5 inch floppy, Q basic, Windows 3.1, and we did everything in DOS. And I basically

never used Windows because it performed so poorly. And I would, it was just when CD

ROMs had come out. And so we didn't have one. So I grew up without CD-ROMs had come out. So we didn't have one.

So I grew up without CD-ROM drive forever.

Until the late '90s.

So I just grew up doing like playing

Q-Basic games that I wrote myself or being outside.

And we didn't own video games.

We didn't have TV.

So I just had to like entertain myself

and then it kind of that, I think using DOS

and using a computer in that way,

kind of ingrained itself in my brain

and I still use the computer in that way to this day.

And it doesn't really matter what I use personally, be it Windows

Mac or Linux. And that's because of the fact that I'm self hosting services. And I have

all my data backed up and stored so that wherever I am, I can access it. It's no big

deal. Like right now, I'm not at my house. But you know what, I have my services on call. If I need them, it's like that, boom.

If you're curious and you want to know a little bit more about me personally,

it's just a snapshot, but in an important moment

from my own life, you can read a book that just came out.

There's a book that came out on January 22 by my friend

Kurt Holtin.

It's called "Apprentice to the Wild."

It was just released.

And...oh, what can I say about it?

It's hard for me to talk about myself sometimes and this is one of those moments.

So yeah, what do you do?

I mean, Kurt wrote a book.

You should read it.

It's well written.

He's an excellent writer and it's just our life.

So if you want to read about Kurt and I, uh, summiting Mount Rainier together, it's the

highest mountain in the United States in the

lower 48. You can read about it in his book, Apprentice to the Wild. It is also a spoiler

alert. It is a sad story changed my life. And if you want to know more about why we summited a mountain together in a time of grief,

you can read his book, Apprentice to the Wild.

I hope you do.

It's very nicely written and excellent book.

To round out the episode, I wanted to give a shout out that is BTM and bottom is you know the top command TOP. Bottom

gives you networking information and basic statistics on your machine. And it's a simple

little application that runs in the background and I found myself using it over the last couple years on my pies and for whatever reason I'm still using it

and instead of writing TOP I write BTM and bam it's there and it gives me the

information I need. It's not fancy but it works and I'm pleased to recommend

bottom if you need a basic application for

checking some system statistics. It's very simple. Give bottom a try. No doubt

there's a lot of jokes to be had there. They're just escaping my mind at the

moment. But yeah I recommend bottom. It's linked in the show notes. And I just want

to say thank you again to everyone

for listening to this show. If you like the show, please do share it with friends and colleagues.

And thank you so much. Please do share it to social media. I'm not interested in doing that

right now. I just I find social media depressing. So if you use it, please do share the show

and send in your feedback podcast at James.network.

You can also look at show notes at discuss.James.network

and we will take it from there in the next episode.

Thank you so much.

(dramatic music)