Happy Birthday Linux

(drumming)

Welcome back to a very special episode

of Linux Prepper, specifically Happy Birthday.

This is a Happy Birthday bonus, y'all.

Happy Birthday, of course, to Linux, 34 years old.

Linux being the kernel, of course.

It was released to the mailing list today,

announced by Linus himself.

And here we are all these years later in 2025, August 25th.

It's also a joint birthday.

So yay, happy birthday.

I have something in common with Linux apparently.

So that's great.

And I thought for this, I would release

a happy birthday bonus episode.

This comes only a few days after the previous episode called

software failure, meat hardware failure. If you haven't listened to that, it's out there in the

podcast verse. Feel free to give it a listen. It's a full length episode. This will be a shorty.

I just thought it would be fun to do a little happy birthday bonus. In the future, I'm going to do

a donation based premium version of Linux Prepper and any additional stuff I release,

such as this, will go under that umbrella.

I have to get myself to make that happen.

So we're not there yet.

In the meantime, please enjoy this mini episode.

I hope you find it fun.

And thank you so much for listening to Linux Prepper.

Linux Prepper, of course, is a self-hosted show

on using free and open source technology

to DIY everything myself or ourselves

while still enjoying life.

It's inspired by Linux, BSD, open source, and FOSS,

part of James.Network and Living Cartoon Company.

If you're interested and you want to send me your thoughts,

please do, you can email podcast@James.Network,

shows of course subject to change, depending on how it's received, and there's no hard commitments,

just a lot of frustration and fun. That said, let's get into this episode.

Linux Prepper is brought to you by Single Point of Failure. Yes, Single Point of

Failure SPOF is a part of a system that if it fails can cause the entire system to

stop working.

It is important to identify and eliminate single points of failures to ensure reliability

and prevent disruption.

Let's hear from imaginary people on another experience with single point of failure.

Well, I did experience single point of failure.

I kept all of my data on a USB thumb drive because I am a paranoid delusional and I knew

that they were out to get me.

So I put everything I have on this USB thumb drive.

And then I put it in my pants.

Apparently, my pants have a lot of holes in them because somewhere between the public

library where I was right in the USB, the transit and the subway and the walking and my front door I seem to have

lost the USB through a hole in my pants. Of course I could not allow anyone to

have my data so I did not put my name onto the thumb drive which means no one

will be able to return it to me and I do not want anyone to have my data, so I did not make any copies

of this data. It exists only on the thumb drive, which technically is now in someone

else's possession unencrypted. Sounds like a dong dong dong single point of failure.

Let's hear from someone else on their single point of failure. Oh, I set up my own next cloud at home and I set it up on a on a old computer that I dug

out of the dumpster and when I put up that computer with the next cloud, it just stopped

working one day and I didn't know what to do and I thought well at least the data is

in this broken down old computer but then I threw that computer into the trash.

And now that data is gone, never to be seen again.

Dun dun dun sounds like single point of failure.

Thank you single point of failure.

This show is also brought to you by Ameradroyd.com.

Ameradroyd.com of course is a purveyor of all things

out of the country, whether it's from Korea or China, all the single board computers, home assistant hardware, all that good stuff.

We will leave a link to a Maradroyd if you want to order gear from hard kernel, oh,

droid, whoever and get it into say the United States or anywhere else in the world.

A Maradroyd's got your back.

They offer comprehensive shipping solutions, everything you can imagine, at the best price they can offer.

It's a great company with just normal people, Met 'em, like 'em, and I recommend you check

out ameridroid.com.

I'm so thankful they agreed to be sponsored for the show.

Check out ameridroid.com.

Let's do a couple of self-hosted software spotlights.

First up is iSpancerBlock TV. Yes, iSpancerBlock TV is a self-hosted software spotlights. First up is iSpancerBlock TV.

Yes, iSpancerBlock TV is a self-hosted application.

It's very easy to use on your own network.

It connects to your, can't say the name

if I try to go on their streaming service.

So they're sevenletter.com streaming service,

biggest streaming service for video on the planet.

When you connect to that service, this will automatically skip segments like sponsors.

Intros using the sponsor block API can also be used to auto mute those annoying ads and serve as the skip add button.

The moment it becomes available in an advertisement.

Was able to set this up with a friend, only took a few seconds.

We were able to connect it to Apple TV

and also support Samsung, LG, Android Comcast,

Google, Fire, Nintendo Switch, Xbox,

as PlayStations worked great.

You just add it as a TV code into the,

we'll call it PUPU app.

Okay, seven letter rhymes with Pupu

or yeah, whatever you wanna call it.

So, iSpancer Block TV, it works.

We couldn't get the muting function to work on ads

for some reason, but it did do the auto skipping

and some of the sponsor blocking, which is great.

So overall, I think it is a great tool,

super easy to set up. It's Python based.

And I'll drop a link in the show notes for I sponsor block TV. Great tool. Check it out. I sponsor

block TV on GitHub. I know people want to hear about more tools like this as an aside. This is

another reason that I'll have to set up a premium subscription here soon because I can't otherwise

talk about such things

without facing some level of censorship.

It's just the reality, y'all, we're on streaming services,

and those streaming services have terms of service

that I gotta follow or not.

Okay, let me know if you have thoughts on that.

Send them in, otherwise you can join our Matrix chat

where people have talked about all kinds of tools

related to things like, I don't know,

downloading stuff, uploading stuff, we can, I don't know, downloading stuff,

uploading stuff, we can have those conversations there or somewhere else, but it'll have to

be premium content in general.

All right, moving on.

Our next self-hosted spotlight will actually require a small amount of backstory just for

fun.

So I recently added up a post and I've been looking around for ways to connect multiple

multimedia servers together. You're like, what's this guy talking about? Well, if say instead of

using service like Netflix, you want to run your own, as I've discussed in the past, using something

like, let's say, jelly fin, MB or Plex, well, you're going to have to figure out a way to get

one of these services running.

Now, let's fast forward to the future.

In encouraging friends to run these services, it turns out actually have a number of friends

who are.

So not only do I have a Jellyfin multimedia server hosting my own videos that I've made

myself, but I have a number of friends who have jellyfin servers,

Plex servers, etc.

So now I have all these servers that are available to be on all these different VPNs and stuff.

They're all whatever the person set up.

They're all in production.

They're all serving a number of users.

And now my question is, how do I access all of these?

Because what's happened is when I connect

to a service, I basically connect to one service. And maybe this is true a lot of people. It's

almost like the VPN, single point of failure, multimedia server, single point of failure,

in a way where you connect to one service, but then you know, you got to set up the routing

to some other service and it just becomes a pain in the butt. So my question, which I still have, is how do I make it easier for me to connect to a

number of multimedia servers, especially Plex and Jelly Thin, from one interface?

Like it would be great for me to be able to see what movies or things are available on

these different servers at the same time

because I don't know about you,

but I'm literally not gonna take the time

to browse into each individual service

to look for the thing.

I just end up sticking to more or less, you know,

one or maybe two and ignore the rest.

And I wanna say this is an area

where the proprietary Plex has a distinct kind of advantage because

for all of their problems, one thing you get with Plex, right, is the ability to pay whatever

it is now $200 for Plex Pass.

And the reason that that matters is when you set up a Plex server at home as a way to watch

movies, TV shows listen to music online, you can actually

use a Plex Pass subscription instead of having to set up say your own domain and proxy and

all this stuff.

Instead, you just pay an amount of money to Plex and then now you have the ability to

log on on their site and so can all your friends and you can connect on all your friends,

but it turns out a number of different servers as well. So the experience does fall in line with

what people kind of expect with a streaming service. And I will say, when I had, for example,

family members, Triplex coming off of my jelly fin server, they were like, oh, this is a much

better experience. And I was like, what do you mean? But I realized it's because it's more of the kind of experience people expect in terms

of streaming and throwing a bunch of options at you.

So Jelly Fin being a much less bloated option for lack of a better phrase, you know, fewer

choices because there's fewer things that Jelly Fin has a team that's any control over

in terms of how you add your content.

You're just adding content, making it available.

And that's pretty much it.

Whereas Plex has all this other functionality,

which people can find problematic in terms of privacy

and staying power into the future.

But they've been around a long time.

So who knows?

Either way, I was like, you know, I'm a Jelly Fin guy.

A lot of my friends are

Plex people. They've invested a ton of money into it. Who am I to tell them to

stop? If they don't want to, it's up to them. But I would love to be able to

access all this stuff. So I posted about this online asking for more input. And

what I found actually is a very exciting tool and it's called Jelly Swarm. Jelly Swarm, or if you wanna go on the pronunciation,

Jelly Swarm.

Jelly Swarm is,

Jelly Swarm is, I'm gonna call it Jelly Swarm,

is a reverse proxy that lets you combine

multiple Jelly Fenn servers into one place.

If you've got libraries spread across different locations,

different servers, and you just want everything together,

Jellyfin makes it easy to access all of your multimedia

from a singular interface.

What's cool about this is what Jelly Swarm says it will do

is it will present itself as just a regular Jellyfin server.

So all of your clients should work as normal. So when you log in on say

your, you know, TV or whatever to Jelly Fin, it'll show you content, but it'll potentially be showing

you content from a multiples of servers. So instead of just the regular library, say on, you know,

on your local server, you could have content on local server, content on server number two,

and content on server number three, all shown together.

Are there potential security concerns with this?

Sure, let's read off what is currently working.

Currently working, unified library access,

browse media for multiple jellyfin servers in one place,

direct playback, play content straight from the original server

without extra overhead. You can user map link accounts across servers for consistent user experience,

and there is API compatibility with standard jelly fin. In progress, web socket support,

which is needed for real-time features like sync play, which is not reliable yet,

audio streaming, which may not function correctly, it basically needs more testing. Automatic bit rate adjustment, stream based. Quality on network conditions isn't supported yet.

Not planned is the ability to have administrative control over all these different servers

simultaneously. Which makes sense. But anyway, it's a really exciting tool. So,

jelly swarm, could it have major security concerns? Sure. But who says

you're going to make it available on the public internet? Keep it private. I'll

have a link to Jelly Swarm. In the notes, let me know what you think. Also, an

overarching question I have in terms of just access to a bunch of services. I

have an open question to the audience, which is how do

you manage having access, routing access on your mobile device or say your laptop to multiple VPNs?

Because you know, people talk about like, I set up WireGuard and I set up OpenSense and I set up

tail scale and I set up Twingate. Okay, that's four services. Now what do you do when four

friends send you links to four services and let's say each friend has been running these services

longer than you have known about any of this. So they're not going to change for your sake,

they're going to stay with what they have. How do you manage access to whatever they're sharing

with you through these VPNs. Let me know.

One answer I have heard, for example,

is to use a firewall routing device,

like OpenSense or PFSense, which makes sense, possibly.

But then I guess you need to access that device.

What would you do?

Let me know.

Hit me up.

Tell me what you think.

Is there a way that you would manage this over,

for example, a VPS service or doing it at home?

What is the reliable method or in terms of routing

in order to say use whatever VPN service

for whatever web service, be it, you know,

our examples will say are Plex, Jellyfin, and NextCloud.

How do you manage that when somebody's sending you

a multitude of VPN configurations of all different kinds

and you want to do some level of split tunneling

in a sane, manageable way?

Let me know.

Open question to the audience.

All right, related to having open questions to the audience,

I've decided to start a giveaway.

Linux Prepper will be offering its first giveaway.

That is a giveaway of Steam keys.

Why Steam keys, you might ask?

Well, the reality is Steam is the biggest computer gaming platform in existence, and

it just is what it is.

Also, if I give away my DRM free games, that's technically piracy. computer gaming platform in existence, and it just is what it is.

Also, if I give away my DRM free games,

that's technically piracy.

So it's better to just give away these Steam keys

which I have paid for.

I have a bunch of them through various,

I've paid for them over the years,

and I just don't use them,

and I have a lot of them and they're cool.

So I thought, you know what?

I'm gonna give these to people instead of just sitting around on them, I have a lot of them and they're cool. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna give these to people.

Instead of just sitting around on them, I'll gift them out.

What I think I could do in return is I'm asking people

to leave a review for the show.

So if you're listening to this and you're listening

on say Apple TV or on podcasting 2.0 or whatever,

I ask that you write a review.

And to be fair, please don't make the review basically spam.

Don't make the review one word that says here or good

or something, you know, like just take a moment

to write a review.

I think it's a fair trade.

I took the time to pay for these steam keys

out of my own wallet.

I have a ton of them.

And then I will leave a form in the notes for this show over

various types of games that maybe would interest you.

If you want one, just fill out the basic form so that I have your Steam account or, you know,

contact email valid one, obviously, because I'm going to send you a key.

And from there, I'll send you a key once I do a drawing.

We'll say the drawing will happen on November 1st.

Drawing's gonna happen November 1st.

There's a little bit of time,

but there's also a little bit of time for people to submit.

I'll do drawing.

I'll just be drawing keys for a while.

So your chance of winning right now,

if you're the only person who submits is 100%.

I'll say

anyone can enter a maximum of three times. I don't want to do this for followers or something

like that because I just want people to listen to the show because they want to listen to

the show. But if you want to leave me a review on whatever platform, fill out the form, just

basically copy, paste, you know, like what you, where you reviewed.

I don't, the review does not have to be positive.

I don't care about any of that.

You can say the show sucks.

I just asked for a review period.

It just helps me, you know, I think it would help me.

Just give it honest feedback.

So just give some honest feedback.

That's more than one word.

And that's it.

That's all I'm asking.

Thank you so much for considering

and feel free to start at any time. I'll refine this process. Maybe I'll think of other ways

to enter, but let's say no more than three entries. Like if you want to leave a review

on, for example, Spotify and Apple podcasts and somewhere else or something and you say,

"Hey, I left these three reviews. Just let me know where you left them or whatever. Be honest and

I'll put you in the running." And if anyone can think of other ways for me to

offer this game giveaway, let me know. Like I said, I don't want to do it for

followers or something like that because that's just BS. If people want to listen

to the show, they should just listen to it.

But I'm open to having new ways for people to engage in regards to the show that are productive or healthy or whatever. Yeah, feel free to let me know. Feel free to reach out.

And thank you so much. And I hope you enjoy the first ever steam giveaway from Linux Prepper.

Want to give a software spotlight?

This is cross-platform and available to anyone, anywhere.

And it is called Anki, A-N-K-I.

Anki, Anki is the Japanese word for memorization.

And it is a open source flash card program.

It's been out since 2006.

So 18 years ago, its most recent stable release

was in the last 23 days.

Anki supports audio images, videos, scientific markup, and is used to make your own flashcards.

This is an amazingly powerful system. It has over 1600 add-ons available to it that do all

kinds of customization, optimization, gamification, and other ION things through add-ons.

So I've used Anki over the years, never too seriously, but I have to say it's great and

I recommend anyone check it out.

Do you use Anki?

It's used extensively in the medical fields, medical profession for having to practice,

you know, comprehensive, say medical information or really complicated projects.

That's what people use it for.

It's a very powerful, flexible system where you create decks of flashcards.

Those are stored in SQ Lite.

You can recall them at any time.

It says, "Onki claims that you can easily store hundreds of thousands of cards.

No problem whatsoever."

You have this nice open source tooling.

They have their own proprietary sync service,

but they also support a third party onky sync server,

which I will link to, which you can run yourself locally

or whatever.

And there's also an open source community maintain

sync service that you can run as well

that you can share with other people

to make collaborative cards and stuff.

So, very interesting.

Anki, very interesting, very powerful.

One of the funniest plugins I saw, maybe their most popular one, is based on Pokémon,

and you can actually play Pokémon by doing your flashcards, and then use your flashcard Pokémon

to battle other people in the world using

an open source sync service.

How crazy is that?

Anyway, all kinds of ways to gamify and play with Anki and memorize and do useful stuff

and tasks.

I did try it for laying out an episode a little while back and it worked well.

So yeah, check out Anki, A-N-K-I.

And that is our software spotlight for the episode.

Another software spotlight is an old school classic. That is Thunderbird.

Yes, Thunderbird, famously from Mozilla, along from Firefox,

but it is being community maintained more than ever these days.

And donation funded Thunderbird is a project for obviously desktop email but not just email also

calendars and contacts they describe it as freedom from chaos waste less time in a browser tab

it can do things like filtering organizing and managing accounts so obviously having an old

school desktop client for your email does seem bizarre in the world of Gmail,

right?

Because it's just what you're used to using.

And I agree that that's weird.

Why would you want to use Thunderbird?

Why is it useful?

Specifically Thunderbird is super duper duper duper duper useful as well number one offline

access, right?

You can store things and not be on the internet to check it.

But even more important, Thunderbird shines

once you have multiple accounts.

So if you have, for example, your own domain

and you have a bunch of crap there,

and then you have Gmail and you have a bunch of crap there,

suddenly Thunderbird actually starts to make sense.

And it's a great way to combine all these different email

services or locations into one place and manage them locally.

And then also you can move, for example, old emails

into folders to get them out of your online service.

No problem.

So Thunderbird works really well.

I just tried using it for calendars again.

I was very happy to say that that process worked really well. I just tried using it for calendars again. I was very happy to say that that process

worked really well. I got reminders popping up and alarms telling me I had to go to appointments

and it worked. So yeah, Darberd, great tool, especially if you're trying to manage a multitude

of different accounts. Then Thunderbird is a great, great tool. I've had no problem with it, and I found it less confusing than something like,

for example, the KDE Suite,

where you have K-organizer, K-mail, and all this stuff,

but it seems painful to set up

versus Thunderbird was straightforward-er.

For me, if you have different thoughts, send it in,

but I can definitely recommend Thunderbird,

especially if you're managing more

than just some name at gmail.com.

So yeah, yeah, definitely check out Thunderbird.

I see that they are planning to release a Thunderbird Pro

as an optional paid AI enhanced service down the line

to move away from what is currently, you know,

core open source Thunderbird.

We'll see where that goes.

But either way, based Thunderbird is a great option.

It works fine and I can say that I'm happy enough with it.

I did find the way that it displays emails by default,

a little bit confusing and I realized

that's because of what they call threading.

So sometimes replies would just look as like kind of hidden away,

but by disabling threading, all the emails were just in a list and adding a

plugin called also conversations displays at least the head first line of

each email in a stack in the order it was received,

which is what you would expect from modern services like Gmail.

So I can say that between disabling, threading, and adding the conversations plugin, Thunderbird

starts to have a more of a webmail-like experience.

So yeah, check it out, Thunderbird.

I'd like to take this moment to mention that I am actively seeking audience input specifically

to invent a new privacy paranoia

word.

Yes, I need a new word, specifically that describes a person who has been informed of

privacy concerns within the last couple of minutes, and they're now having this sort

of privacy attack vector paranoia full blown meltdown, which we followed by them taking

no action whatsoever and just going on with their life.

Have you ever experienced this?

You know what I'm talking about?

Somebody tells you about big techs hold on you and they're scanning your data with the

AI and you have this kind of total meltdown of the world coming to an end and then you

do nothing and you sort of just forget about it and the world coming to an end, and then you do nothing,

and you sort of just forget about it and move on.

We need a word for that.

If you can think of a word, let me know.

Much appreciated.

I do have a couple running questions

for the audience online.

If you wanna fill out an anonymous form,

a couple of them.

One is if you're using the Matrix chat system

right now in 2025, how's that going for you?

Now there's a form for that as well as

what do you think of TrueNAS?

If you've used the TrueNAS file sharing system,

I wanna hear from you.

Also if you do much offline tooling,

things like Thunderbird,

and you wanna use tooling specifically to not be online,

whether it's on your phone

or when you're abroad or whatever.

How's that going for you?

I want to hear about that as well.

So a few different active little forms you can fill out if you wish and that would be

much appreciated to get your input.

If you liked the show, thank you so much for listening.

Please do share it with other people.

This is a very small podcast.

It's just me making it.

I've had a couple of guests so far,

intended to have a couple more coming up.

But I appreciate hearing from you,

which means you can send in your thoughts to me,

podcast@james.network.

Also, I will link a forum post.

There is a forum at discuss.james.network. Also, I will link a forum post. There is a forum at discuss.James.network

where you can send in your ideas to me, email or form whatever. You can send in your ideas

if you would like to do some kind of guest segment or supplement for me to talk about

on the show. I'm open to it. I had a person previously send in to me asking about Forgeo

person previously send in to me asking about Forgeo or Forch Joe. It's a git system, which I talked about.

So if you have your own ideas, feel free to send those into me.

Best way to support the show, of course, is always to share it with somebody else,

make more people aware of it.

Cause that's the goal here is to connect with other enthusiasts and people who are

excited about using free and open tooling and just enjoying life. You know, because I think also if we talk about too much technology,

it becomes a downer and kind of depressing. So I want to try to ride some sort of edge

of keeping things enjoyable and fun. And I welcome your input. You can also donate to

me directly. There's a PayPal link. That's what you can do currently until I get this premium thing figured out. So either way, enjoy this bonus episode and look forward to more in the

future. You can also listen on podcasting 2.0 if you know what that is, otherwise no worries.

And thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Sorry that there was a lapse

there for a while. Feel free to

listen to the software failure meets hardware failure episode from a couple days ago to learn

a little more about what's been going on there. But either way, I look forward to more regular

release schedule moving forward. Yeah, after enjoying a very happy birthday. So yeah, take

care best to all of you, and have a

great one. Thank you for listening to Linux Prepper. Be well. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]