Self-hosted media server goodness

Welcome to changelog and friends a weekly talk show about all things self -hosted big shout out to our friends and partners at fly .io the home of changelog .com launch your apps launch your databases launch your AI near your users learn more at fly .io okay let's talk what's up friends i'm here with sama alam naylor senior developer advocate at sentry so we've been working with sentry for many years now and i love sentry we use sentry it's so helpful for us but we don't write many bugs here at changelog we're just that good but i do say often how many teams use sentry and that number has grown over the years it was 40 000 then it's 70 000 then it's 90 000 and now 100 000 plus teams use sentry numbers don't lie check the nasdaq can you believe that sama what are your thoughts on sentry's impact to software teams do

you know what i'm not surprised it's a quality product and i'm not just talking about that because i work for sentry but because i've used sentry and i think its success is also due to the fact that it supports over 100 sdks and frameworks like any programming language you want to use unless it's obscure sentry's got an stk for that whether it's an official maintained stk or whether it's a community stk there's a way that you can implement sentry in your projects with a few lines of code you don't need to really do much to get its benefit and i think that's really powerful also in in showing that people want to make sentry work for their frameworks or their languages of choice because it works and the fact that you can self -host sentry as well it shows how valuable it is and shows how valuable sentry knows it is to people the fact that it's open and out there and you can use it and configure it to your specifications at the code level if you want and if you want to not bother about that and pay for it then you can do that too i'm not surprised and i'm not surprised that it's growing i sound biased obviously but it's the best error monitoring solution i have used in my dev career of many years and as a front -end dev it feels intuitive i think a lot of these error monitoring solutions are very back -end focused they're very stack tracey and not really geared up with a good developer experience like here are some logs here are some things to spit out you can read them if you care but with sentry it seems to appeal to more developers because of the way it's been engineered the amount of sdks that are available makes it appeal to more developers and you can get started in sentry in so many different frameworks in less than a minute and all the instructions are in the app and they point you to documentation if you need it it's you know a joy to use and so i'm not surprised that that many people use it

i'm glad you're not surprised because i'm not surprised either it's an amazing tool we love it we use it go to sentry .io use the code changelog that will get you 100 off the team plan it's basically three and a half months free or almost four months but code changelog will get you 100 bucks off the team plan use it love it sentry we love it sentry .io that's s -e -n -t -r -y .io sentry .io finally here finally sitting down we've met face to face briefly in raleigh funnily enough i think yeah right in your backyard basically for all things open we're going we're going to go back there again this year are you going to go back again this year what do you think yeah my my talk was just accepted i got the email yesterday so uh you try and stop me it's 20 minutes down the road so really i've got no excuse that's right so born and raised in the uk now you live in the the tech triangle they call what they call that tech triangle is that what it is just the triangle i think that triangle okay people not from raleigh call it rdu uh other people call it the triangle yeah and what is rd i know raleigh durham what's the is it what's the u raleigh durham as in du durham okay that's like the airport code gotcha that makes sense then okay i mean i've flown in there many a times i think i've been to north carolina to raleigh specifically on three occasions all four all things open and uh jared and i don't always get to go together i've been there three times he's been there i think three times as well but one of those times was not together but we always go to sullivans downtown to eat steak when we're there i don't know if you've been do you do you go out and around into downtown well there's angus barn if you want a proper steak okay well i'll take a recommendation i've been going to sullivans that's pretty they're solid sullivans are solid solvans is okay but i mean it's no it's no uh like you're from austin right where you get proper beef right you know what i mean yeah yeah i was just there for um well twice actually texas linux fest and devops days austin just happened i wish i'd have known you're coming back because i'd have taken you out for some proper beef yeah we went to terry blacks and that was that was pretty nice proper wow i mean yeah they're kind of like i don't know i feel like they're they're not they're obviously great folks and i'm not knocking anybody for making great beef but there are some up -and -comers that need more attention than terry blacks yeah you know i'm saying yeah terry's was good because it was like touristy and we went we wanted to eat on a monday

and

most of the places are shut on a monday oh yeah mondays are like shut down for any barbecue spot right like it's not gonna happen i mean they're not open they're literally not open they're like we've worked and now we're done so that's how it works well good to have you back here in austin i know that uh i actually was gonna go to linux was it linux texas linux fest that what it was the one down by the i think it was at palm or event sense down by the water yeah and i happen to have my dear cousin and she's basically a sister you know how some family is like their label is x but really they're a lot more like y and so she's my cousin but she's a lot more like a sister than simply just a cousin and so when she's in town i i throw everything out the window and it's it's dedicated to like spending time with her and so she came into town and i couldn't go to texas linux fest and i wanted to so

that

goes sometimes yeah it is how it goes sometimes but uh you've been in and around the linux world for a while you run a podcast you write a blog you wrote are the original author of perfect media server which i have used and did not know that you were the maintainer and original author of until literally this morning when i was like what the heck else does alex do let me see and i'm like oh yeah i've i've used this guide in some cases to sort of get more information on what a perfect media server might be like and this is i was actually on a journey towards the end of 2022 going into 2023 having spent many years building out a media server never doing it properly and when i say properly i mean having linux as the the operating system right something built on linux like my media server was plex always but for a long time i ran it as the the pms server on mac and that was fine but there were some limitations obviously max do run it very well i don't know if they have quick i know intel based cpu max the new max are pretty good because they have their uh what's it called video toolkit or something like hardware encoding so not only do the new max sit power idle when they're sat there on your desk but also

the

hardware encoding is pretty good we were just talking to casey lis on self -hosted about uh he came on to talk about the vision pro the podcast and we ended up digressing a little bit and talk about plex because it's the gateway drug for everybody into self -hosting it sure is yeah you think right well i've got this plex server running on this for me i this is sort of going back 10 years now i bought a synology box and i was like right i've got this thing in my house that's always on surely it could be doing something else for me oh what's this plex thing and then it snowballed and now as many services as i can self -host in my life i do so like self -hosted google photos clone with an app called image for example next cloud to replace dropbox and the list goes on and on and on but as part of that journey there was a lot of mistakes made and a lot of technology had to kind of catch up so again going back sort of 10 years moving out of the synology sort of training wheels mode where you have an app store and you have a gooey and all this kind of stuff eventually you start finding where the edges are you know like when you go bowling and they've got the little bumper rails up oh yeah you feel like that's the synology experience really and so i moved then i moved on to unraid and the cycle repeated after a year or so i was like oh well unraid's more flexible it's it's real linux underneath it's got you know xfs file systems and ext4 and i've got parity checks and i've got all the apps i could ever want and stuff like that this was before unraid had docker support so way back in in the beginning i used to vms for unraid which i used to maintain like an arch linux package repository for unraid that people could install a lot of their media collection apps onto vms on top of unraid and then docker came along and it just seemed like a natural progression to kind of turn that into a container maintaining team so that's where linux server .io came from it was sort of born out of my personal blog of messing around on my journey of discovering linux and you know thinking well nobody else is making these containers nobody else is writing good documentation why don't we do try and do that and it's one of those things like the youthful arrogance of being in your mid 20s of not knowing what you don't know like there's no way i'd start a project like that today because i i know how much i don't know and in my mid 20s i was like sure what how hard could it be that is pretty funny how hard can it be is usually the the beginning of most good stories right it's certainly the beginning of every good top gear episode so you were part of linux server dot io yeah it was originally my blog so blog .ktsd .me sort of morphed into linux server .io and me and a couple of guys just started writing docker files honestly and writing documentation and coming up with some standardized stuff like you know it's kind of hard to think back to back then but nobody was really doing the base image thing nobody was really doing standardized documentation or or you know ci pipelines or anything like that it was all just kind of a bunch of people pushing stuff to docker hub and hoping for the best and i just figured that there was a gap there and you know it was uh right when i was doing my computer science masters like conversion like career change like i was working at the apple store and i kind of got bored of fixing iphones and resetting gladys's icloud password three times in 10 minutes and so i thought right well this linux thing looks kind of fun so i took a career change course and here we are that is so crazy i had to go to linux server .io slash blog and i had to confirm that this is accurate because like linux server .io if you've been in this world like you are obviously that you're the original person of this so i'm not speaking to you i'm speaking to the audience when i say this then you know that there's a lot of really good docker images out there that are hosted and maintained and supported by linux server .io and i had no idea if i went to page 16 of the pagination of this blog i would find ironic badger again and again and again holy moly that's what i love about podcasting is august 2013 look at that yeah i mean yeah i knew that you were cool but i didn't know you were this cool alex you're pretty cool man well i mean i'm not involved with the project anymore that they they do a fantastic matter like you begin a movement

that's

cool a fantastic job maintaining a bunch of stuff and they're always adding new containers and things like that but yeah after a while it just it it made sense to split out my personal blog from linux server .io so blog .ktz .me does exist again and i don't write as much as i should but yeah wow okay gosh this is not supposed to be an interview show this is supposed to be friends and we're supposed to talk about things not interview you but i feel like gosh now i need to ask you more questions about just i suppose so you mentioned cs degree i think you said master's degree in cs is that right yeah when you were when you're speaking there i was enamored by your history and then trying desperately to listen at the same time and catch the details you know we podcasters have to multitask right we have to guide the conversation keep it entertaining and also listen which is which really i think overall is a muscle memory skill set you over time build but i'll digress i can't believe this back in 2013 this is a long time i mean this is not that long ago but it's i mean tech moves fast it's like a decade ish ago like it's 11 years at this point

yeah

and back then you were crazy if you were running containers in production and now you're kind of crazy if you're not right like is there any other way yeah well i mean amazon might have you think otherwise but i think i mean there are certain use cases where containers just don't make sense you know like um i worked for a bank in london for a bit and they had like oracle databases and you know crazy like even 10 seconds of downtime cost more than my annual salary to the company you know so it's like

the

stakes are a bit higher and they just they want oracle to do their thing and the databases are just a monster but uh you know what i what i found interesting was you know you mentioned perfect media services how we ended up down this road i was looking for the first post and it was february 2016 was the first perfect media server like post on linux server it was putting together some of the pieces of the jigsaw and the absolute most important piece was something called merger fs the developer of software actually lives in austin you should probably get him on this show and talk wow uh he works for morgan stanley he's pretty interesting guy he was at texas linux fest so i got the chance to meet him uh antonio his name is anyway this is the magic source because it allows merger fs allows you to take multiple hard drives of different sizes of different file systems and bring them together under under a single mount point so you could have 10 hard drives you know of any size of any file system and then you just go to a single directory on your linux system and all 10 of those drives appear under that one system as if they were just one big drive which if you think about it that's what a lot of people have been trying to do for a long time using raid is to try and take this jbod is just a bunch of disks and kind of bring them together in some kind of a unified fashion but the downside of of raid or zfs or any of these kinds of drive pooling systems that existed before was that you had to commit up front to like use your vdev layout as part of your zfs pool for example like you you can't easily expand the cfs pool even now they've added dynamic raid expansion but it's still like mirrored v devs are probably still the best way to go and then you know that means you've got to buy a minimum two hard drives at a time and back in 2016 like i didn't have the scratch to do that like i just wanted to buy a one two three four terabyte hard drive whatever was the biggest one back then throw it in our media server and call it good for a you know six months to a year until i could afford another one and that's kind of how it grew i mean things are a little different now hard drives are in the 20 terabyte range but still the same principles do apply merger fs so it sounds like maybe you're probably a fan of zfs obviously but maybe do you not use zfs then in your media server do you prefer merger fs right different tiers so my media collection as i'm going to skirt around the bush a little bit here because we have to be a little careful but yeah is backed up on the internet so to speak like if that went away tomorrow i wouldn't lose any sleep how many terabytes is that i don't know i keep getting to sort of the hundred terabyte ish range and then having a mass clear out right back down to like 20 or 30 again and really slowly creeps back up over time as family members request things and all that kind of stuff but for anything that actually matters that's on zfs because it has all the bitrock you know protections that doesn't ever doesn't ever serve you up a mildly corrupted file it just refuses to to serve that bit if it can't get the correct checksum stuff for it also you know backing that stuff up with zfs send and i use jim salter's tool syncoid sanoid and syncoid pairing to do all the snapshots and replication and stuff like that with zfs so i use both now i have a you know three or four hard drives dedicated to media and then i have a couple dedicated to photos and drone footage and well now i do youtube so a bunch of youtube video like a roll and b roll stuff that i'll never look at ever again but i'll keep it into you know because one day i might need it you never know gotcha well then let's uh dip our toe a little further into the zfs or as i would say zfs because i get the difference let's not go there but uh i like the way you say it it's cool i just use whatever because my my name has a z in it z in it like i just alex ktz zfs zfs like i don't care yeah yeah i i suppose then are you do you go into the true naz world then do you simply go ubuntu or maybe nyx os or do you you know serve the master of true naz and just bow down to scale or core i don't know how hardcore you are but where how do you feel about that well it's an interesting question because up until fairly recently true naz free naz whatever was bsd only right it's kind of ruled out for me because bsd is just different enough from linux that my muscle memory gets tripped up every single time but with i think is it scale is the linux scale yes scale is the linux one and now that's the primary development target things are a little different and i thought right i'm going to try this out true now scale is now the future of the product and it's where ix systems are taking it and okay this must be for real until i found out they deploy all of the apps on top of true naz as kubernetes templates i just why why do they do that why do they do that i don't know like can we not just have a docker compose file like everybody else or you know like unraid does with app templates or something yeah i like compose i'm a big i mean i don't i don't really run containers unless it's via docker compose honestly i just think i'm not gonna like run the command ever as just plain old docker i'm always gonna have a compose file it gives me a directory to to change directory to to manage data sets that might be non -volume that's docker you know like i might store data locally in that directory versus a volume or just an environment file or just any sort of config that lives alongside of the dark compose yama file i feel like that gives me a home and i don't docker unless it's docker compose really personally totally agree which makes sense for linux server io because that's big thing that that that they do really is they provide these images but then they also provide compose templates right alongside of it that is pretty much copy and paste which is great for gateway people who are like oh like we said before plex is a gateway you find it you learn about doc you learn about containers you start going further into the linux world next thing you know you're at least a linux novice if not a version of an expert maybe a moldable expert i don't know that's kind of where i feel like i'm not at expert level by any means but i'm certainly not novice i'm in that middle ground and it really is because i didn't want to run this thing on mac and the primary issue i had was not with the mac platform was with the inputs the literal hardware i would have usb -c disconnections and data corruption because macintosh computers these macs are not really designed to be nas hardware while they can be the thunderbolt port is so fraught with issues they even have like adapters you can adapt to the port to make sure the cable doesn't wiggle at all and i would have this thing literally racked into a rack like a mac mini or something like that right and any movement whatsoever on the rack even if you you know move the chassis a little bit to do maintenance on your rack like which you are going to do i would have you know port disconnection issues and i've lost so much data i'm like i'm just kind of done this is like this is not how it's supposed to be i love mac i love the operating system i love all the ease of it obviously we i use it daily as a driver for that's my go -to operating system but when it comes to that kind of reliability with a connected drive macintosh just doesn't compare to what you can do with a motherboard some ram a cpu and linux on top of it yeah usb connectivity has always been a bit yeah of a risky business

yeah

any kind of where it's not contained with a lockable pin yeah so let's go back to merger fs we kind of dovetail a little bit there talking about our flavor of file system which i feel like any given person who has dabbled with or played with zfs which i've never used merger fs so i've never done this i like the ideal of it but then again i'm just so i don't even care i guess about the you know the true or what you would call the hidden cost of zfs i think you link to it at least from one of the pages you mentioned where you're talking about merger fs on uh perfectmediaserver .com i don't mind the hidden cost of zfs i feel like you know what if i want reliability of my data i don't mind commanding linux i don't mind mainly installing zfs and managing it and i don't mind throwing a couple extra hundred bucks at ram just to make sure i have i mean i i run zfs on ubuntu on a zima board as a backup target right i don't care if it's got enough ram because i'm not i don't care about performance i'm not accessing that data i'm backing up to it so i don't really care so there is and then people will say zfs is inefficient with ram i think it's actually efficient with ram like it's using it on purpose it's not accidental it's by design right and it's better suited for ecc right if you're reading the same thing from a spinning disk two or three times it's going to put that at the top of the cache like you're in the middle of a video edit or something right it'll bring those assets into ram and they'll sit there so they don't have to go into disk every time so it's super efficient i mean yes it uses a lot right that's kind of the point of ram is it not yeah that is the point of it i'm i'm gonna see if i can go and find a response i don't do a lot of tweeting i would say or xing or posting on x but a potential mutual adjacent friend of ours christian lempa which you may know from youtube potentially i like christian like his content but he he shared this sentiment recently and i think he was really just probing for feedback he says i'm wondering if zfs in a home lab a simpler and less and this is where i was like going off on like the inefficiency a less resource hungry file system seems like a great alternative and he puts the thinking emoji and i just responded with kind of what i said here zfs is resource efficient why would you not want all that it offers just to save a few hundred dollars on ram it is a very amazing file system now the expandability talked about earlier where you have to you know have rate expansion or dis -expansion yes there are limitations there but i think those limitations come with knowledge of how it works so mirrored v devs or whatever you might do to expand your pool there are limitations there and you know going back to merger fs which i've never used how does that compare to zfs when you have to expand it when i know you mentioned you don't use it for certain data but like where you use merger fs versus zfs merger fs literally globs together any disks that you supply underneath a specific glob point so for example you could have three or four disks in your air quotes array today and you could pull one of those drives immediately it would disappear from the pool there'll be no data loss because the magic of merger is that each disk has an individually readable and addressable file system on it there's no striping of the data downside is that there's no parity either so you need a third -party tool to generate some kind of redundancy for a merger fs array so something like snap raid which is a snapshot it basically takes a snapshot of the of your data disks and then calculates parity on that a little bit like unraid although unraid does that in real time versus snap raid which does it as a you know like a cron job that you run every day or something with zfs as we've said you have to expand the v devs very carefully but with with merger fs you can add and remove drives willy -nilly because each disk is individually like an individual file system it doesn't matter it's not gonna there's not gonna be any data corruption or anything like that so if you are just storing a bunch of movies and tv shows and you don't need the utmost in bitrock protection and all the fancy stuff that zfs offers you it's a very cost effective way to build out a small system the performance is pretty good too so it's based on top of fuse which is a software layer of like a file system that basically runs in user space rather than kernel space so that there are some performance limitations it will easily saturate a gigabit connection don't get me wrong but you'll use a little bit of cpu as you do it so things like the zima board that are a little bit less powerful may struggle to saturate a gigabit connection with motor fs for example whereas with zfs because of all the caching and stuff they might be fine doing the same thing so really it just depends the answer in linux and the answer in building servers the infrastructure is always it depends i just for example this weekend wrote a blog post about doing a bunch of quick sync hardware video testing to like figure out is an 8th gen intel cpu that much better than a 13th gen versus an arc pro for basically people running plex media servers and the outcome much to the chagrin of reddit was it depends it depends on what your budget is it depends on on how many streams you're doing it depends on what the availability of specific used hardware is in the marketplace this month etc etc and the same is true across you know when you build a certain system whether it's a media server whether it's a a network whether it's you know deciding what to have for lunch like there's always compromises you've got to make oh like my cheese i've run out of cheese so i can't this particular thing like oh well i can't get this particular brand of whatever thing i like it's a tenuous analogy but bear with me i'm following you i just think that there's a lot of there's a lot of it depends in our line of work and it annoys people sometimes that that's the answer but it's it's the truth well when i went to that post i was like where is your definitive answer here and all you gave me was data and i was upset so i'm with them i was just looking give me the silver bullet alex which cpu is it i'm buying it right now well okay okay so the answer is if you have if you have budget coming out the wazoo just buy the newest stuff because it's got the most codec support it's got the fastest cores alongside it's all the software and codes that you might want to do a faster it can run vms it can run a million containers and not even break sweat but if budgets are concerned and this is this is where like the whole reason i got into linux in the first place was something called pci pass through because i was a poor student doing my masters and i couldn't afford a second computer so i was like right i'm i'm at my desk at home writing a dissertation i want a desktop computer and i couldn't afford one so can i just throw a graphics card in my server and then do pci pass through and then make two boxes behave like one and we all remember the lioness video seven game was one cpu i think from a long time ago it's that kind of principle and you know it's just uh it's just a rabbit hole you can always find rabbit holes to go down with linux and for me pci pass through was the the one that got me and then self -hosting has been the one that's got me after that yeah for sure what's up friends this episode is brought to you by our friends over at coda coda is the collaborative all -in -one platform that brings teams and the tools they need to have together i'm a big fan of their docs and hubs designed for collaboration because it helps you bring all the things you need the documents the spreadsheets the power of different applications integrations and even some intelligence from ai it's so cool how you can bring the roadmap the standard the pdr's the upcoming launches the okrs the resources all the things that you and your team need into a single place i love that that is so cool and it's not like they're not playing the numbers game they have 50 000 plus teams that run on coda uber ted toast the new york times and even our friends over at square and right now might just be the perfect time for you to try out coda stay aligned by managing your playing cycles in one location you can set and measure okrs as i mentioned before with full visibility across your entire team you can communicate and collaborate on documents road maps and so much more instantly so if you want a platform that empowers your team to collaborate effectively and focus on shared goals you can get started with coda today for free head over to coda .io change log that's coda .io change log get started for free coda .io change log it's interesting how some version of not good enough got us to where we are my version was trying to run plex and various data stores basically via the platform i had available to me which was a macintosh and i had repurposed mac minis etc and yours was sinology you know do you recommend sinology to this day do you is there places where you think that platform fits or is it just never a thing for you like would you give it to your grandmother or to your mom like who who is sinology for i'm laughing over here because my answer is going to be it depends oh gosh come on well you can't say that anymore

no

more well it does because there's a lot of there's of useful features in sinology for small to medium businesses they've got a lot of stuff with 365 integrations and google suite backups and you know veem support for all sorts of like windows host client backups that kind of stuff they did some skullduggery which kind of ticked me off a bit with hard drive incompatibility so unless you use sinology branded hard drives after i think it's three or maybe five years they'll start throwing warnings whether the hard drives good or not saying you are not using synology supported stuff and i'm like

dudes

yeah it's a hard drive like i know you want to lock people into your stuff but that's just dudes that's just not cool so yeah uh i mean even my issue with the synology was similar to yours where i was coming from soft raid on a mac i don't know are you familiar with soft rate by any chance i think i looked at it a long time ago but not recently i mean it's like a it's similar to like i guess an installed file system like zfs in the fact that it's software raid not hardware raid and i think the recently in like in the last couple years began to have a windows version of it so i think for a while there it was only on a mac and i found out about it because of uwc which is a pretty well -known hardware manufacturer for a lot of mac peripherals and so they have these things called thunder bays in four drive six drive eight drive i think rack mounted versions of it and then soft raid was the preferred thing you would run as software to do the raid and so that's kind of how i found out about it and my disks and system in that case while the unreliability of the cable is known the reliability of the software and the speed of it and the hardware was amazing if it weren't for that cable i'd still be there like if the cable didn't disconnect i'd still probably be back in that world so whatever point i'm getting to is that my my experience with synology was not terrible it was slow moving from a very fast system like the right speeds no matter what configuration i did with it and this is back when i was only on one gigabit ethernet because 2 .5 and 10 just wasn't available to mere mortals like us at the time this was multiple years ago and now it's sort of a everyday thing now but i just could not get right speeds and i'm like this is just crazy like how are these things in like the very just very slow just very slow and so i got frustrated with the fact that well i'm gonna spend a lot of money on the xeon processor in this analogy because i'm like i'm go big or go home kind of person i'm gonna put ram in it i'm gonna stuff it with hard drives 8 terabytes i think was the time was the drive size at the time and it was the xeon processor i'm like this is and i didn't know i thought just throw a xeon processor that's that's how you get to speed okay that's not exactly how you get the speed that's how you get the computation but not speed in my experience was just that it was like well very expensive hardware for really not that greater performance personally and so that's what sort of set me on like the only way to get there is to learn linux and bite the bullet and dive deep in eventually i built my own thing my own box and whatnot chose the motherboard chose the cpu and that was a very fun very rewarding experience because to this day i'm like steeped and loving all things what we call home lab now right it wasn't called home lab dad but it is now and that's what unifies us this single word it's okay do you speak home web okay we could be friends kind of thing so and it all started from a plex server slippery slope it is a slippery slope yeah it absolutely is so i i guess you would not recommend or you do recommend synology in certain cases but you would not personally use it yourself because you've you've transcended that they're an appliance aren't they they they are good at doing so remote backup system for example i have one in my infrastructure at my and i use

so

i've got two off -site backups one is at my mother -in -law's house which is a my old english so when i emigrated six years ago i left my old server in england full of the old hard drives and i'm like right i'm just going to leave this in a closet it's just going to run until the end of time when we went back a couple of years ago i upgraded the cpu and and dusted off the hard drives and stuff so it still works it still goes just fine it's got like 20 terabytes worth of zfs drives in it and it's a remote endpoint that i connect to of a tail scale the other one is the synology box at my mom's house and i use something called restic which is a file -based backup system and i configure that using a tool called autorestic and i use that combined with minio and s3 running on the synology to do file -based backups because obviously zfs send is a block level thing whereas restic is file -based so you've got two like a like a separation of concerns there if there's ever any issues with my zfs snapshots getting borked for some reason like i've got a completely separate system again over tail scale to another box somewhere in england using restic so that's what i use it for and the performance i couldn't care less whether it's you know half gigabit or 10 gigabit speeds or whatever because it's over i mean my my spectrum upload is going to be the limiting factor no matter what happens so restic autorestic tail scale gotta mention tail scale right you know i love tails well yeah corporate shield time i mean they do pay my mortgage now but i used them well before i worked there in fact they sponsored self -hosted again long before i worked there and i made a video for them about a year ago i made a video about them i shouldn't say for them i made a video about them a year ago which caught their attention and they said do you want to come do that for us full -time and i was like yeah sure so that's that's what i do now very cool well yeah we are also sponsored by tail scale as you are well aware of and i also used tail scale before that i think i even pursued tails come like hey i love y 'all can you please just find a way to make a value proposition between us because i feel like we reach your audience and that was pretty easy for me that's cool how you made that video and i've i was checking out the youtube channel for tail scale recently and i was noticing how when you took that over i don't know if you actually took it over but you're more prominent there if not the most frequent there how much better the production is of it how much better the content is like there was i think tail scale up was a conference and there was content there but it wasn't it was just sort of like you just throw content there it was a content bucket it wasn't a driving force of the information around the product which i think you've done a really good job of producing those videos i i again i don't know you too deeply i've been a fan over the years but i wasn't like so steeped in knowing all the things you've done you do a really good job with producing those videos and that takes a lot of i would say skill and then also on camera personality like you do a really good job of the content and the production part of it 95 percent is the accent though i think yeah i mean you do have you know that is you know your your secret sauce i can't maybe i could do that i don't know

i

don't have your accent that's for sure every every american that ever tries to do a british accent that i've heard that goes hello governor like cockney oh i don't even try i i don't even try to uh impersonate the british language or accent at all it's just not can't do it

can't

do it no when people ask me to try and do an american accent like i always turn into a southern yokel so i try not to right like are you do you know matt ryer by any chance is is that name familiar to you matt ryer no matt ryer is also i believe he lives in london i could be wrong where exactly he lives but he always uh when we podcast with him he's a friend of ours he works at grafana but he's also done tons of stuff in and around the go world he always tries to mock slash impersonate me in particular in my accent and he just doesn't do a good job in my opinion but whatever i digress

we

did pretty good eh we made it sort of like 35 minutes in before we mentioned tail scale i was you mentioned them not me though he's always pleased when that happens but yes i know i know i brought it up it's just how it goes they might actually be sponsoring this episode i don't know i think we got them on the schedule still yet i'm not sure where they'll land but i think this maybe it may not be but uh i'm happy to mention tale scale sponsored or unsponsored because i'm a true fan of tale scale like it's the only way for me i mean i i can do my own vpn stuff but it's just like why i think an overlay in most of my case is exactly what i need so you know i found interesting you mentioned about like video production and things being a bit of a difficult thing to do i don't think when i took the job i'd appreciated quite how much being full time in making content was a lifestyle job like you know when you go to sleep at night you sort of noodling on an idea how do i position this particular thing or you know you're just driving you know taking the kids to school or something and and it's always there at the back of your mind do you find the same thing with doing a podcast oh yeah on the regular like you do absolutely i think you know for example yeah if i know we have an upcoming conversation happening you know usually in the week or the couple weeks or a topic i want to broach the exact same thing i'm thinking like who's the best person to talk to about that should that be you know based on a project should we have them on friends and talk about it in a you know a more for a more talk show format where it's like more loose and less interviewy absolutely yeah i think that's uh and you kind of always have to be thinking about not so much unique ways but not just simply slapping some people together and just talking you kind of have to have some purpose and then i'm thinking like for example i'm having brian cantrell on this week which actually will come out next week on the actual podcast but recording this week on wednesday he and i just get brian to shout into some servers really loudly and that upset them yeah precisely remember that video from like forever ago no what was the video uh brian cantrell uh in a data center with a latency chart of some zfs servers showing him shouting like as loud as he could into the server rack and how that vibration of the hard drives caused a latency spike it's like a super old what yeah it's it's pretty interesting i'll see if i can find it back in his joint days i bet yeah probably yeah well he and i are both i guess to put it mildly super fans of silicon valley the tv show i assume both actually but yes the tv show the tv show for sure yeah silicon valley the tv show and i i'm wondering if it would upset people if we just talked about that the entire time

and

i don't think i'm going to do that but like as part of this whole i'm driving my kid to school or i'm driving from here to there or doing this i'm in the backyard cutting grass listening to a book but also side chatting with myself in my own brain this future of how will i present x to y kind of thing is definitely there right it's like would that really upset people if we talked about like what are my most favorite scenes could we could we spend 20 minutes with that what if we spent 30 minutes what if we just the whole time about silicon valley the tv show would that really upset people it's got to be when russ hanneman turns up with his car with the doors that do this not this right and not that yes precisely yes or looking for thumb drives and in the trash heap you never know they did a remarkable job with that show honestly of of making it believable yet entertaining yet obviously fake at all at the same time are you a super fan of silicon valley then i would i i don't know what fan qualifies as but one of my servers is named anton in honor of oh yes the garage server of guilfoyle so my pie holes are guilfoyle and dinesh i have two files

i

used to have richard in there and i think gavin was in there as well but then i minimized because i had two locations for a while and i only have one so i only have two in one location so richard and gavin were uh i tend to name my servers after favorite fictional characters mooncake is one from final space magrathea is another from hitchhiker's guide and oh yes oh yeah that would be so awesome you're right i have a zoidberg somewhere lurking around too yeah i think steeping culture geek culture sci -fi culture into tech things i make or build like my main service called endurance because i love the movie interstellar and that ship was awesome and endurance is an awesome name and so my uh my proxmox box now it used to be a standalone ubuntu server now it's a full -on proxmox box that actually has a lot of different services in it but the main box is uh is endurance i love that so i didn't know you were a silicon valley fan so i guess i would classify a super fan to be somebody who's watched all six seasons multiple times oh well yes then yeah i'm a bit of a mike judge fan to be honest with you okay i never really i was a bit young for beavis but king of the hill office space just he's just a genius i think that guy yeah office space definitely resonated with me less of a king of the hill fan less of a beavis and butthead fan definitely more of his i guess more adult yeah beavis and bud was a little too immature for me

i'm

still working my way through king of the hill for the very first time how was season six or seven or something but it's one of those ones i just put on every now and again i'm like oh yeah this is kind of but it's amazing how it's still totally culturally relevant and it was really yeah yeah like it's basically a show about parenting and you know masquerading as a an entertainment show of the time and a lot of the stuff a lot of the stuff particularly as i view america with a bit of an outsider's lens i feel like mike does a really good job of of again in silicon valley of doing the same thing of giving you the perspective of an outsider like ridiculing the people but also empathizing with them at the same time yeah i mean there's just i just i feel like silicon valley the tv show is an absolute masterpiece every time i re -watch an episode i see something new and unique and different and there's like a little detail always in there and one i shared recently i believe it was i believe i shared it in our slack and maybe via dm to somebody but it was the it was the fellow that was at the data center and i believe if i can look it up really quickly his name

it

was at mallet data center his name is john that's right john browning and there's a scene where he is standing in front of the servers and you can clearly see him current because he's the person standing there the camera's facing and you see his name badge on connected to his shirt pocket and you see young john clearly in his name badge right it's got his photo on it his name and he's so young and so seemingly full of hope and then obviously the current image of him is hair pulled back kind of frizzled defeated for the most part but content with what he's doing and you see this you know juxtaposition between john browning now to john browning probably when he started at this data center years and years ago like this photo was taken probably day one of him being an employee there and he's just so young he's probably in this i would say 19 early 20s in the photo and then obviously john browning and the as we know him as the character is not in his 20s he's more probably i would say closer to his 50s and as that character ages then he and gilfoyle strike up this relationship through through that chess game yeah and it's like i'm gonna move one piece and gilfoyle keeps getting beaten and he's like ah yes it's just yeah i do like that character yeah i mean that well all the characters i think are very special in a way like monica care monica's character arc was really interesting uh initially we thought they would have she and richard would have some sort of relationship that never happened i think they cancelled that because it doesn't seem like this should be a love story so like let's tease it but let's just like put the tension there right i think she saw his thing when he was going to the bathroom and there was a joke later on about her seeing it again when he goes to the bathroom because laurie bream put her down at the end of the hall right in front of the men's bathroom as a way of of retribution are all vcs quite so i've never dealt with one personally like directly uh are all vcs weird like that i know they were portrayed perhaps a little rigid you know i think it's a stereotype to some degree but i think there's a lot of truth in the stereotype because every time i speak to people who i know personally and well where i believe them to tell me the truth thoroughly tell me that they've had unique experiences with venture capitalists are they all like that i don't know but i think there's some version of like some truth there now i think laurie bream's character was uniquely packaged let's just say like she was uniquely odd because i think to be in that kind of position you have to be such an analytical person and potentially removed from empathy to succeed right there's a certain breed of person that's highly successful in that kind of strategic position that the ones who thrive the most are the ones that have lack of empathy or probably right not very good with understanding because if you want to make a decision that's right for the business oh yeah of you know like outsourcing a certain entire department and making hundreds of people really redundant locally like the whole chinese factory situation they cover right you know with gavin he's like i don't care this is not the new china i want the old china yeah yeah right yeah why are these kids here singing to me get them out there working like it's a bad it's a bad demeanor to have as a human being but that was his he's like we got i'm here for a reason build my boxes well it sounds like you and i could probably talk about silicon valley for a whole entire show too so maybe we should i mean it depends if we're agreeing on whether jackson hole is closer than oh it's it's definitely further i think gavin proved that with the 10 flights he made uh what was his name his sidekick

what

was his name i try to remember all the hoover was his name love that character too gosh that mean like the way he was gonna like throw down on uh patrice was her name when she was talking crap he says like some would argue that none of the things you ever invented was actually good for the company that never made money it would have been better if you didn't invent those things at all and uh he's gonna like swole up on her and like attack her and gavin was like stop that hoover anyways back to some home lab stuff gosh we could probably go on about that so i was also catching up with your current stuff your blog as you'd mentioned blog .ktz .me which is a cool domain and you mentioned a while back and i haven't played with this personally yet and i know you have a youtube video on it it is on the tail scale user or i suppose channel on uh on youtube and you build an open sense box here in your blog back in 2023 like last year sometime like not that old so if you built this recently it's still current for you like november to now is not that far so this is not ancient history but it does

it's

a bit it's not this year well that box is actually pretty ancient i built it the week i emigrated to america but i only finally got around because doing a podcast that as i do i quite often mention open sense and things and folks are like oh alex what's what build are you running for it and i'm like well it's this really old i3 what is it 3225 it's a third gen intel chip that you know these days is worth about six dollars so the build is still relevant i actually got fairly recently a unify pdu pro which lets me look at the individual power drawer of each plug socket that you know each device is plugged into

and

i thought that box pulled somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 watts unfortunately it pulls more in the region of 25 to 30 watts just old older hardware is less efficient that kind of thing

so

i am kind of on the lookout for a replacement i might get one of those um n100s or or something similar that does that has a like a handful of two and a half gig nicks on it or i might try and build something with sfp plus in because i've i've gone 10 gig in the house since i built this box also i hear reliably that my spectrum woes may be over soon the 18 t are apparently going to be servicing my neighborhood with fiber which goes up to five gigs so i might actually need more performance from the firewall soon anyway

but

if you are looking for a fairly cheap ish kind of you know build it yourself firewall it's pretty hard to beat an open sense box so solving that sort of itx based system with a really old cpu for pennies off ebay it just depends again i'm now i'm banned from saying it but it depends on what the availability of different hardware components are you you may find it's hard to find a very old specific intel motherboard with two nicks on it for example which the dq77kb is the one that i used in that build because it has the dual nicks you could look on ali express and find a more modern more power efficient system for not much more money so it really depends on what you're looking for well there's a couple things in there that we can talk about which is one should you run your own router firewall versus just buying unify which you mentioned unify and the power switch at least the ud what was it the i've got a lot of unify gear in the house yeah and i'm a fan of unify and you know in all honesty my home web is not so precious to me that i need to run all the services like maybe you might because like you're more professionally aligned with that being a true thing for you so that you can leverage the ideas and the content for your tail scale job and your personal podcast that's the excuse i give amex every month anyway yeah

so

i guess the one thing is is power efficiency you've mentioned a couple times which i'm becoming more and more power efficiency focused not so much that i'm like wow that's drawing so much i need to cut it down but at the same time like here in the us and i would say in a lot of places there's inflation of prices for groceries inflation of prices for our power and like i know that my power bill in this summer is likely going to be around three to four hundred dollars a month and that's insane right it's just insane to think like that's that's a norm well when i emigrated six years ago the power price per unit so kilowatt was about 10 or 15 pence a kilowatt hour or something like that in london where i am in north carolina it's 12 cents a kilowatt hour give or take so so far as i'm concerned in my personal infrastructure like 12 cents it's about a dollar per year per watt give or take and i'm totally fine with that you know if it's a if my rack which i i've got the data now to prove this pulls three four hundred watts am i getting three or four hundred dollars worth of utility out of that spend every year well most definitely because as you mentioned i use it to it's like a carpenter with his chisels right i'm using it as part of my day job but it gives me a lot of utility in terms of plex and jellyfin and all that kind of stuff but on the uk side my old uk server for example that's at my mother -in -law's house it's gone from 10 or 15 pence a kilowatt hour up to 40 or 50 pence a kilowatt hour in the last couple of years which isn't quite a big difference and i you know it's not my power bill that it's affecting but i i'm still cognizant that i don't really want to be running really old dual xenon boxes for example that are hot and noisy and drawing down hundreds of watts just sat there doing nothing so that kind of base idle power draw is is a big attraction for me if i can get that down under 100 watts for a big a big server that's got you know half a dozen hard drives in it or whatever then i'm all about that so you would not say that you're you're aware of the power draw but you're not fixated on reducing everything to as low as possible

you're

you do shop for efficiency though right generally my stance in life is pragmatism it's the reason i'm talking to you from that book today it's the reason that i don't necessarily as much as i don't disagree i don't agree with everything that plex has done in terms of like user data sharing over the last couple of years i still run a plex server just for a couple of bits and bobs here and there although i'm getting closer every day to switching it off and going jellyfin full -time that's all right that's another discussion you know it's it's just pragmatism first like i want to achieve a certain task i want to achieve a certain goal with technology with computers whatever and sometimes you just have to sacrifice a couple of a compromise compromise on a couple of scruples to get to get there well let's go there and light me because i i have i don't have a reason to entertain jellyfish necessarily uh i'm not in the details necessarily of the amount of user data sharing that plex is i do think that i've always wondered what will happen when the person who is me that is really only using plex to serve up my own data my own movies it seems that they're moving more and more into some sort of streaming thing which i think is sort of turning their back on or turning away from their core audience or at least what what got them to where they're at now is that wrong or right i don't know that's absolutely right i mean if you think about the business model of plex there isn't really a huge amount of money in letting people serve their own content on their own boxes that you you're just not injecting yourself into that transaction anywhere whereas if you are streaming stuff through some internet -based tv service you can claim that you were the originator of that traffic and probably gain a couple of pennies per stream over time that's going to add up you know office space style but the the issue with plex is that fairly recently so six months ago they decided it was okay this is just one example in a long string of fu's to their user base i think they decided it was okay to send all the people you were friends with on your plex server your watch history like they sent you a little email like a newsletter saying hey did you know alex just watched silicon valley and you think to yourself well that's that's cool i didn't know alex was into silicon valley for example or star trek or whatever it is but then you extrapolate what needed to happen in order for them to send that email they know what content must be on your box because they've done some kind of a content id to say this file is silicon valley okay we know they do that through the metadata stuff anyway but we know we now know that that must be stored on their servers somewhere they've then cross reference that with you and your user id and then they've gone and decided it was okay to actually make that publicly available air quotes public to people within your friend network on plex which i don't believe was part of the original idea behind plex like the whole point was to share files from my local box and not involve a third party and allow that kind of data collection to happen i just i just think it's completely unacceptable for them to collect that data in the first place let alone share it so i was right tailscale did in fact sponsor this episode so i'm gonna put an ad in here for my friends over at tailscale love alex he's awesome this conversation is great i hope you're enjoying it but he also does some really awesome videos on the youtube channel for tailscale and recently he did a tutorial kind of a walkthrough of using tailscale with home assistant and what it took to set it up and access home assistant remotely via tailscale take a listen under home assistant we're going to go ahead now and install another add -on so i'm going to go ahead and install the visual studio code server add -on whilst that's doing that i'm going to go ahead and go back to the tailscale add -on that we installed earlier and just grab the piece of configuration that we're going to need from the documentation in the documentation page do a command f or control f and search the page 127 .0 and there you go we just need these four lines of code here home assistant by default blocks connections from untrusted proxies such as the tailscale proxy in this case we're going to add the 127 .0 .0 .1 as a trusted proxy in the list here so i'm going to go ahead and copy this to my clipboard i'm going to go ahead and click on start and then also show in the sidebar and you can see we're basically in visual studio code but in a browser and this is running directly on home assistant and has access to your configuration files and what have you underneath all we need to do is paste those four lines into our configuration .yaml file and restart home assistant so i've pasted the four lines i'm going to go to the hamburger menu up here click save and then settings and restart home assistant we want to go back to the add -on section and under tailscale we're going to have to go to the configuration tab for the add -on and click on tailscale proxy this is going to turn on tailscale serve this is what will automatically generate you a tls certificate using let's encrypt for your tailnet .ts .net tailnet name so if i click on save here it will take a moment but it's going to restart the tailscale add -on and so now i should be able to go to https home assistant velociraptor .ts .net and it's going to load my entire home assistant instance over tailscale with a tls certificate using the name from my tailnet and i can log in just as if i was using the ip address and port number that i was before and you can use this name from anywhere on your tailnet so any device that's connected to your tailnet such as a phone for example that can now connect to home assistant whether you're in the house or whether you're at the coffee shop or whether you're in iceland looking at volcanoes it doesn't really matter where you are if you're one of the few out there who have not tried out tailscale yet for free you can do so today up to a hundred devices and three users totally free at tailscale .com no credit card required just go there sign up get a hundred devices three users totally free that's where i'm at i use tailscale totally free and you can too i'll link up alex's tutorial in the show notes check that out tailscale .com do it now and how does jellyfin compare when you compare well it doesn't have a component at all so one of the big issues with plex is that if your internet goes out you can't log into plex even though the software is running locally even though the files are local you can't authenticate so you can't access plex jellyfin is completely self -contained and completely local fully open source compared to plex which has a closed core and jellyfin as as a consequence doesn't provide some of the niceties that plex does like friend sharing you have to do this all user management you have to do it all yourself there isn't really an easy way for remote friends and grandparents or whatever to access stuff on your server without opening up ports in your firewall or getting them to use something like tailscale you know there's a it's a lot more do it yourself like you've got to bring a lot of the pieces of the jigsaw together yourself with jellyfin and some of the clients are they're good but they could be better they're not quite as polished as plex for example they don't have a samsung tv client i mean i don't know the last time i went to a random tv app store and didn't see a plex client with jellyfin unfortunately that's just not the case yet so let's look at the business model and it's with plex the business model is monetize the user's data it looks like and with jellyfin well it's a free and open source project with no financial incentive really they're just a bunch of cool people making cool like it's the spirit the true spirit of what open source means yeah i i think where i struggle potentially with open source and i'm obviously a huge fan of open source but where i see interface meet open source tends to lack in comparison to something that is funded i .e plex has a phenomenal user interface they've got apps for every platform and i think if you lean on open source in that way because there's no financial incentives you know there's going to be some sort of diff between one you know like my nvidia shield version of my application for plex versus or jellyfin versus the apple tv version i also run the same household and i just that's where i'm like i don't want to lean on open source now i would love it if it was amazing but you know who's going to make it amazing i have no idea i don't want to sound like a anti -open source person that's just where i'm like could be you adam no gosh no it could be oh it would absolutely not be me i would support welcome right that's that's the oh that's the running joke isn't it that is the running joke and that's i think that's the the beauty and the challenge of open source is that prs are welcome and that if you want change you be the change and i'm down for that i would be way down for that if i was younger it's not where i would value my time i would exchange a lifetime license fee like i've done with plex in a way to pay for it versus pay for it with my time simply because it's just not where i'm at i would welcome anybody else who feels they have that time to do so and get get value from it that's how open source works is you also show up and you give value and you get value in your career your opportunities or you get value as a user or you get value as a sponsor of the open source or whatever it might be i'm not that person at this moment nor will i be in in the foreseeable future so

not

anti open source but just like so which is right then plex or jellyfin dare i say the answer is it depends it depends it probably does depend well i think it gets more clear to me and you know i may have to make compromises on my user experience if plex keeps going the direction it goes because i've already gotten like this feeling of they care less about the kind of user i am for plex even though i've given them a lifetime pass like i've i've bought the lifetime pass that they've asked me for i've exchanged the request of me as a consumer and i have done it a few times too because i have other users that are in my in my network and so have multiple lifetime lifetime passes but i see more and more that plex is less less seemingly like they're for what i'm trying to do with with plex itself and so maybe jellyfin is my future it's obvious when you look at the features they they choose not to prioritize like what well audiobook support for example has been high up in their user forums for like they have this up voting feature that plex pass users can upvote request certain features audiobook support for example has been high up that list for many years and they just they're not interested now if they were interested in becoming like the premiere like um self -hosted like fully local file serving thing they wouldn't be adding all of these streaming services and you know all this other stuff that nobody's asking for really other than somebody who needs a bottom line padding somewhere you're right i mean i think so i use plex amp oh plex amp is fantastic though like i think it's great it could be improved in what way it's just not as modern as it could be it's not as fast as it could be there's a level of caching you can do at the client level that it doesn't do there's definitely like ux improvements in particular i think the ui is not the worst ever i would say it's okay there's definitely ways it can be improved upon when it comes to like but the recommendation engine the bit that actually matters is pretty good and it's on par if not better than what you get from the spotify and apple musics of this world yeah and it's all local and you know i i really appreciate like their mood playlists and uh the stuff like that that it figures out for you yeah i did hear a rumor and i don't know how true this is that they are working on some kind of a spotify connect style plex amp feature that will let you stream to multiple endpoints a bit like sonos do a bit rune does from plex amp and if if that comes then it really will be unquestionably the greatest self -hosted media player but a music player i should say yeah i think uh i'm down for that i mean i think audiobook is probably next i'm a big despite core doctor being what i would consider a friend and multi -guest appearance here on this show and other shows we have here telling me that i shouldn't be i'm a fan of audible i mean they've really done a great job cultivating good content now their demeanor as uh drm and lockout and artistry and you know strangling the market forget all that stuff okay and i get the books i want audible as you say has done a lot like amazon and walmart before them and see us before them right they've all done these things to strangle mom and pop and local you know independent media outlets right and at least audible gets people paying for books and authors get paid that is a huge plus if you're interested in liberating your audiobooks from the drm that audible encases them in there's an app i can wholeheartedly recommend called libation which then lets you download the i think it's an mp m3u file or it's like a i forget the i forget the aax maybe format i forget the format exactly it downloads that strips the drm and then spits you out a encoded file at the end which you can then throw into your plex media server audiobooks folder and if you're an ios user you can use an app called prologue which does almost everything you could ever want to basically be a self -hosted audible clone so i've got all my audiobooks just there is that right and these are all books that me and my wife have paid for on audible and so there's no piracy going on here at all like we support these authors and it's fully drm free so if for whatever reason audible decide to rug pull not i'm suggesting they're going to but they might if they decide to change the terms of service on us that you know books are more than 10 years old you can't listen to anymore without re -buying them or something who who knows that's never going to happen to the thousands of dollars worth of books we've bought on audible yeah that's good i'm gonna i'm gonna look into that after this podcast and uh libation and liberate my audible because i mean i i'm i don't know how you are since you re -watch silicon valley you may re -listen to your audible books there's a couple books that i re -listen to i'll probably listen to both versions of the martian the one with will wheaton and the one with the other reader that i can't remember his name they're both amazing i like will wheaton's version of it because he's got that will wheatonism that he is i'm a big fan of reporter as a as a voice actor so i'll pretty much i discover new things to listen to and enjoy because of ray porter being the narrator of the book love ray porter i can just spew out if you want to listen to anything i got to recommend you personally or the audience listening i have no problem yeah let's hear let's hear a couple at least okay i'll pull up my list here hold music please i enjoy listening to there's a good balance when i'm falling asleep of like technical they've got to be interesting and slightly technical but not so interesting or technical is that they actually hold my attention but not so boring as they don't hold any attention whatsoever so i find a really good one that's a fine line yeah is uh adrian newy's how to build a car

for

f1 nerds really it's a little bit of a life story of adrian newy like the big the famous formula one car designer uh and that's that for me is my sort of like i need to fall asleep but my brain's racing right i'm gonna put the uh adrian newy book on and i'll fall asleep in 10 minutes flat every time well i've got my list up and i will say beginning with will wheaton i know i mentioned reporter but will wheaton he read or sorry narrated ready player one and ready player two both of those books are in their own places phenomenal i think ready player one is a book is obviously a lot better than the movie although the movie was still pretty cool i would say i discovered nick jones which i believe is also a fellow uk inhabitant i don't know what do you call yourself nationally

where

you're from uh i think he's from the uk nick jones but ray porter read his his series and it was gosh what is i'm trying to find the because there's like six books in this series i'm trying to find the one that's the one i can recommend that begins it it's the joseph bridgeman series if you look that up joseph bridgeman nick jones i've read them all or listened to them all they're all phenomenal it's kind of like an interesting take on time travel really really cool a more recent one that i took a little bit to get into because i'm not really into like military although i've been in the military i'm not really into like military fiction i say and i got into jack carr's series on the terminal list and the terminal list is now a series on apple or sorry amazon prime and you can go check that out i haven't watched the series yet but the terminal list as a book and then the follow -up true believer i think there's one more book in the series maybe a couple more it's really solid i dig it quite a bit and then i think my all -time favorite series ever is the bob evers it is we are legion in parentheses we are bob it is so good it's a software developer it's not spilling the story it's a software developer that dies and comes back ai that's the whole entire premise of the story so like if you read the jacket cover it would say a version of that you know that series is like five i think it's going to be six books deep but ray porter reads it for the author dennis e taylor whom i think is he's actually a software developer himself from canada turned author and he has some really like there's a lot of entanglement in the story around the bob averse and we are bob and we are legion and all the different books that have come after it there's such a because it deals with relativity and space travel and time dilation he has software he's home baked and written to maintain the chronological order of details it's that entangled like that's cool to me like behind the book is a software developer turned author that wrote his own software to maintain the chronological order and time dilation details of all the travels that happen as part of the reporter pretty much anything he reads i will at least pay attention to it and consider you know diving deep into it the narrator makes all the difference it does yeah i think uh that person really has their job set for them one i really had higher hopes for was this book by nathan heistad and jasper t scott and i think it was called final days it had a really good beginning like it had potential and then it just got really really different and then it ends it's not a bad finale for how it should end but like it's just if you go and listen to it it's worth listening to but it's not a re -listen in my opinion i will re -listen to stories again a year later a year or two later because my wife says i'm weird like that but i just really enjoy things you know and so we don't have this plethora of really good things coming out and so i have to kind of go back to what i know and because i have a human brain that forgets the details or wants to immerse myself even more in some of the other details i don't mind re -listening i could probably go on but that's enough for now i met one more project hail mary by andy weir that's a really well -known one though because it was just a andy weir is the guy that wrote the martian which became a movie matt damon was the primary character in there i cannot wait for project hail mary to become a movie like just because i love both sides i love the deep deep book and this book project hail mary is super deep in the details takes a turn you would not expect it's a phenomenal book reporter obviously narrates it and i'm sure it would be just as good as a movie i noticed that ryan gosling is slated on the uh on the on the slate for hail mary how'd you feel about that you know i don't know honestly i think i would say not judging based on his barbie performance because i didn't watch barbie and i'm not against it i just haven't yet i feel like i eventually have to and i'm stuck ryan gosling it's just always very dry in his delivery

and

if you like that great yeah there's so i re -watched drive recently and it had been so long since i watched drive the first time with cheese the character in i had forgotten the entire movie and i actually questioned while watching it like have i really watched this before that's that's how far i had been if i recall there's a lot of very serious looking goes on in drive there is yeah i don't know if i'm that excited about him being the star in that in project hail mary the movie i don't know i think i can't say for sure i think first man was a really good movie that he was in there's several which was basically the story of going to the moon that's why it's called first man first man on the moon there's a lot of good things about ryan gosling as an actor i think he does a pretty good job in most cases it could be ryan reynolds that i think he was also slated to be and i think he's maybe good for it too i don't know there's a comedic angle to the story too there's a lot there's some humor in it so i don't know i would also be certainly happy with a no -name actor being found and discovered yeah because that's a breakout kind of role we don't see enough of that these days i don't think we don't are you a big movie fan i assume since you're unplexed you must be a big movie fan then right i think so yeah i mean i enjoy a good movie as much as the next guy yeah if you had nothing to do for the next four hours and you can go sit down and nobody's going to bother you at all whatsoever and you got your favorite drink of choice whether it's tea or an ipa or scotch or bourbon i don't know what your flavor is whatever it is whatever you're a little snack you know whatever it might be everything's set and you're sitting down to watch a movie rewatch or brand new what are you going to sit down and watch well every year on my birthday i do just that and i always oscillate i have two movies that guy richie did in the 90s lock stock and two smoking barrels and snatch and i i'm forbidden from watching these movies on any day that isn't my birthday so i don't ruin them because i've watched both of them already about 20 times

and

i just love the dialogue i just love the pacing of the movie i love the cat the plot like it's just like it's almost shakespearean tragedy in the sort of farcical nature of of how so many different threads come together at the end um so those those two i can't pick between them that those are probably my absolute favorite movie movies of all time matrix is up there too maybe probably a little bit down the first one of course of course yes yeah probably probably those three are my top top three so the matrix lock stock and two smoking barrels and snatch i've never seen lost stock and two smoking barrels i have seen snatch but i have not re -watched snatch i am jealous of you because it's such a fantastic movie

well

now i have to acquire it and then watch it because i do not own it and i don't know about you i prefer to watch movies even if i have the disc i'm gonna i'm gonna rip it and put it on plex before i even think about putting in a blu -ray player i'm just not gonna do it yeah i'm just not gonna do it it's not gonna happen what i love i suppose about you know and i haven't like gone deep on how all this works i'm just a user not a depth person when it comes to the mkv format and what's behind the scenes there but i'm happy that when i rip my 4k discs that i keep hdr and all the audio codecs that go with it so it's as if i'm watching the original there's no loss which i think is awesome because i have an hdr 4k projector and the bit rate's really high too this is something that netflix and and amazon and all these guys they advertise 4k well okay yes the resolution's technically 4k right but the rate between a blu -ray even and a 4k file that you'll get even if it says dolby vision through like apple tv plus or whatever the bit rate of the you can just tell like if you have an oled tv or something and you're looking at this thing and you can just tell one is significantly more it's got more meat to it than the other more fidelity to it right it's not like lossless audio where you have to be have you have to have the perfect headphones and the perfect speakers and all that and quiet room and actually be focused and listening to hear the timbre of the snare or something like no high video bit rate makes a huge difference yeah so i assume you you own snatch you have it on your plex machine i bought the dvds as a student long long long time ago so i count that as a purchase do you have then the hd version then or have you just sort of gone back to the og dvd uh because sometimes people are like you know what like even aliens i saw this recently there's a there's releases now on 4k of movies from our past so aliens which was the second in the series from ridley scott alien was the first one aliens plural was the second one and this has recently just come out on 4k blu -ray disc for at -home purchase and whatnot and i heard there was a big uproar about this because there had been people who had watched it on every format since it's you know released back and i think the 80s i think it was the 80s that they were like i missed the grain i can't like it looks amazing but it doesn't feel like i'm watching the same movie and you kind of aren't because the way you perfect the transfer from the original tape to the transfer process they have to 2k and then an upscale to a 4k or the transition might be for them there is a grain loss there is a colorization process for sure all that stuff so i guess my question really is like do you watch the dvd version of it because you're a purist or can you would you be okay with the the blu -ray version of

it

now i think that the transfer is really important so you look at things like the criterion collection and they go through huge they go to huge lengths about how they do the transfers from from the negatives to you know like remaster them for for high definition releases and i think you know the release makes a pretty big difference but you can lose some of the nuance by having it be a different format than what you watched it in originally in fact just a couple of weeks ago we went to we didn't realize it was may the fourth but we ended up going to the cinema to watch star wars episode one at the cinema on may the fourth obviously star wars day you didn't do that on no we didn't and it was anyone i stood up at the end

we

stood up at the end of the fourth band no i know and we stood up at the end of the movie and i looked at my phone and i said to my wife it's may the fourth that's why this is on that's why that makes sense we only realized at the end but that movie held up and i will tell you in the in the setting of it being in a proper cinema like i had a vision pro for a couple of weeks and that thing i thought was the best movie watching experience i've ever had like for on a plane and stuff i i still hold that to be true but nothing quite beats going to an actual cinema with popcorn and the noises and the people around you giggling at jar jar binks his stupidity and like you know it's just we we figured it out a long time ago like the cinema is where it's at like can we just keep that going and well then you also have directors uh like christopher nolan who when he creates films he creates them for the cinema and tenet one of his more recent films and i think potentially even oppenheimer too is criticized for the at -home experience because it doesn't sound right in quotes sound right and the dialogue is a little off that's because like cinemas sound different because it has a massive center channel that all the action and initial kabooms and dialogue come from like it's just a massive speaker it's seer series of speakers even and the the sound design of the system the actual hardware system is uniquely not even apples apples different than anything you would ever have at home that being said i don't know about you and what how how deep you go but i had to in my newest house i built which we moved to austin two years ago we built a house in my last home i was for the first time ever in my life i actually had a room dedicated to be a media room and it was big enough to actually be a theater and because i'd built it i was able to wire it and so because i was able to wire it i can play speakers wherever i wanted and i could also place where i could put a projector because the room was big enough and so i did that in this newest house as well and for those who listen to the show they may have heard me say this already but you're you're new here so i'll tell you and but maybe repeat for them i have a 4k laser hdr projector it is the epson ls 12 000 if you have researching projectors this is a really phenomenal one to get it home for your for your home theater i have clips thx cinema speakers in wall center channels behind the screen of 120 inch acoustically transparent screen that allows you to have the speakers behind it so my center channel is behind the actual screen when i did all the installation i made sure that the speakers were on an even playing field an even plane so that whenever the flint the plane or helicopter or whatever happens and it goes around the room that it all it doesn't it's not like low then high then low then high it's on a single audible plane and uh and then i topped it all off with actual cinema seats and so we have got two rows set of four instead of three because we have family who comes over and that's my that's why i'm such a curious when it comes to like what i mentioned before the hdr being present in the 4k transfer from the disc through make mkv to being played through plex and you didn't fancy a kaleidoscope like blu -ray disc auto changer then uh i haven't tried it i think they're like 25 grand so i can understand why not oh gosh yeah i think okay yeah so the i thought you were talking about software i'm like yeah i would never um i would probably never no yeah i would never spend 25 grand for a player i can't say i would that's for sure when i could build my own right when i can run it on linux and stream it across my home network that is my home lab that's the way that's where it's at so for me i agree with you we got there me bragging basically about my system was was because you said cinema and i agree i don't go to the cinema almost ever anymore unless i need to get out of the house or there's a reason to really go and watch the opening of a particular film like uh john wick 4 for example my wife's like hey you know what you've worked really hard i bought you tickets i will not go and buy myself tickets to the cinema i love the cinema i went and watched it in imax on a massive screen it was phenomenal i loved it it's not a replacement for my home system but at the same time like i wait for movies to come out on blu -ray or 4k blu -ray purchase them and then put them on plex and my my initial experience with any new content is usually in almost every case when i've purchased it myself because i like it a lot on plex and in some cases i'll watch it streaming but for the reason you mentioned about bitrate and stuff like that i just generally don't want to do that there's a pragmatic angle to you know being in the family room sometimes and not having the perfect or bit perfect copy play but with a self -hosted media server it doesn't really matter you can just play the 80 gigabyte rip whether it's on a you know cheap roku tv in the kid's bedroom or on the 100 inch projector screen like it it'll just scale and transcode and do what it needs to do yeah behind the scenes the only issue i've had and uh maybe as host of self -hosted you know this and you've heard this but whenever i play 4k files to an apple tv that is getting access to the network via wi -fi there's always lag and frame drops but my nvidia shield that is on the same network the same wi -fi does not have that issue i had something with the vision pro i don't know whether this holds true to the apple tv or not but something to do with the specific five gigahertz wi -fi channels that the pro was using had to be a certain channel in order to stop stuttering when i was doing like moonlight game streaming across the network i don't know if that's worth some research on the apple tv side but could be because i mean they're both on the same wi -fi network it's not a wi -fi issue it's not as a bandwidth issue on the wi -fi i and it's every apple tv that is access now i know not bandwidth but airtime okay if it's changing channels and it has to basically retune the channel of the radio that's broadcasting as well as receiving and that switch has some latency and then has to go back to the other channels that other devices are on etc

well

what else can we talk about as we as we let people go from this hour and a half fest of home lab and it's been an hour and a half hasn't it media and audiobooks and self -hosting and a little sprinkle of tail scale in there

a

little sprinkle a little sprinkle you gotta pay the bills you know what else i don't know you're the host you tell me else any darks in any good anything left in your pockets we haven't talked about cars at all we could probably talk about volkswagen golfs until the cows come home but i suspect that's a very niche topic it is very nice and i probably couldn't follow you very well i'm oddly have never been well at one point in my life i was a car guy never a person who worked on them i certainly enjoy vehicles and i'm more a pragmatist when it comes to vehicles nowadays i don't upgrade them after i purchase them i don't do anything unique to them they are simply a utility you know and i'm probably the worst because i drive an f -250 and it just is my massive diesel truck and it pulls me and takes me in most cases i'm the only person in it but i do pull things with it so i use it as a truck frequently it's not just a you know a texan ferrari so they say you know it's which is you know in texas f -250s are super common refer you to our previous conversation though about trading time for convenience yeah with plex and jellyfin versus cars and like uh like anything it's a compromise

yeah

it is a compromise all right alex well i'll drop some things in the show notes for people to yeah to to point back i had no idea that you were part of and the inceptor of the inventor of i guess the originator of linux what has become linux server .io had no idea before this call i love that surprise that's so cool it is fun i'm a big fan of your podcast self -hosted big fan of home lab as you know big fan of tail scale who employs you so keep doing what you do and glad to call you a friend glad to have you on the show yeah well thanks for having me it was a pleasure and at some point we have to return the favor and have you on self -hosted i would uh i would say yes and be there no problem good deal and i will see you in raleigh in october i hope yeah you will see us in raleigh in october we are making plans with our good friend todd over there at all things open big fans do for ketchup he's been busy we've been busy are you doing a live show you know what we tend to do the hallway track we tend to set up a booth and i think you saw us how we had set up last year yeah i saw you last year i was a bit chicken to come over and say hi because we hadn't met yet yeah well next year you have to and you have to get on the mic too or i guess this year not next year i'm thinking like last year next year but yeah you get what i'm trying to say

yeah

i think that's uh jared and i we love covering the hallway track there's so many stories in the hallway that you get to peel back as part of how we've done that and we perfected it over the years and it's just we like it a lot there's some people who listen that don't really care for the sound of the people there but i'm like you know what that's what makes it the hallway track like if we were like in the studio would it sound like we're at the conference i've had similar comments on my youtube channel of like i'm i'm in in my basement doing a server upgrade and i've got my phone out in front of me like this you know doing the selfie thing and people are like dude get a tripod and i'm like that misses the point yeah that's not the point like if you watch any adam savage stuff like you'll know what i'm talking about like he's in his workshop and he's tinkering around and he's got his phone balanced on like a little arm and it sort of wobbles just a little bit as he's talking and he made a really good point in it he was doing an interview the other day that each of those decisions enhances the narrative and tells a story part of the story at least like i'm in the midst of moving around my shop so of course my camera is moving and the same is true of the hallway tracker yes there's people talking in the background but i'm at a conference with other people that's the whole point that's part of the narrative we want to take you there that was our point was like we want you to feel like when you listen

you're

standing right there as if you were there even though you're in europe or japan or places we have listeners that are not in really north carolina if you can't be personally present it takes you there there's a balance of course if all you can hear is is room noise then that's a problem but i know you guys do a good job with audio so

and

we do yeah we we run it through a system an rx plugin that tones down the background sound enough elevates the foreground de -elevates i suppose or diminishes the background to some degree but we still have a present we do some processing on it we definitely eq we edit so that there's less of the um's and ah's in there not just the um's and ah's but just the stuff that happens when you have a natural conversation

and

in a lot of cases it's uh it's a better artifact in the end so yeah we'll we'll see you there at all things open big fans and what was the steakhouse you mentioned before not sullivans but what was the other one angus barn is it angus barn like angus beef angus barn okay that's in downtown uh it's like a 10 15 minute uber away okay make a reservation because it's often extremely busy would you say like a weeks in advance like if i if i knew we were going in october whatever the date is just just make one as soon as you can hang us because it fills up pretty quick and it's got a bit of a price tag i warn you up front but it's good stuff any good steakhouse is gonna have a price tag

yeah

of course we uh we usually drop some coin when we go there because it's usually like we haven't seen each other in six months or four months jared and i and so like let's go out and celebrate our hard work and uh enjoy some time together the last time when we're at sullivans i got a smoked i think he did as well a smoked old -fashioned oh that sounds good and they bring it out in like this lighthouse kind of thing like this glass casing with a bunch of smoke i feel like i'm at like a catholic mass or something like that if you've ever been a catholic mass during ash wednesday or whatever like when they're smoking the place up and like they bring it out and they reveal they open up this big you know puff of smoke comes out and it's a smoked old -fashioned so good i mean that's a that's a staple good steak good bourbon good conversation stuffed bellies hard to beat it yeah the uh angus barn is sort of up by the airport area so just give an idea of distance it's not it's not downtown but it's not super far either maybe you have to join us then yeah since since we'll be in the same place i'm sure i'm sure there'll be a few tail scalers there because we've got a booth looking for something to do with an evening so yeah let's make that happen one of the two nights let's do it you know all right alex bye friends so the perfect media server does it really exist i think it's just a theoretically a pipe dream and based on my experience getting to where i'm at today with my media server and then hearing alex's story and then the story of linux server .io and then obviously perfect media server the site which we'll link up in the show notes it's a constant iteration to better and that's it you will never be at the end to have literally the perfect media server although i do like mine a lot and i'm cool with that just keep trying keep iterating and always keep learning and enjoying the process a big thank you to our friends over at century for sponsoring this show make sure you use our code changelog to get 100 bucks off century and when you use that code guess what else happens they give us credit and they keep sponsoring us which is awesome so if you have a friend who needs century or you need century or anyone needs century just tell them use the code changelog and you'll be helping us century .io our friends at tail scale as well as employing alex thank you so much for helping us both and giving alex an awesome job to do and for us just to give us an awesome telnet an awesome overlay mesh network i love tail scale as you already know and they just happen to sponsor this episode and that's how it works sometimes and of course to our friends over at coda check them out we love them they're awesome but a massive gigantic huge humongous thank you to our friends and our partners at fly that's the home of changelog .com launch your apps launch your databases launch your ai all near your users and they have an immense budding like -minded developer first cloud that's happening there and if you're not paying attention well you might miss out hopefully our usage and our love for fly invokes some curiosity in you go check them out fly .io and to the beat freak in residence break master cylinder those banging beats i just love them i had not every single episode every single episode it is a joy to choose and select all the music that goes into the episode so much fun there is a bonus so if you're a plus plus subscriber stick around if you're not well go to changelog .com slash plus plus 10 bucks a month 100 bucks a year closer to the metal all that awesome stuff no ads bonus content and a sprinkle of extra love on top with some free stickers if you give us your address it's better you know what i think it is better changelog .com slash plus plus that's it we're done thank you for listening i almost mentioned during the show but we turned a different direction have you heard of protectly yes and they have a 10 gigabit version their six port volt i think it's energy efficient because it doesn't have any fans and it's got you know all this stuff yeah i'm curious if that would be that's very similar to the one that i'm looking at on aliexpress that's got an n i think it's an n305 in it it's better