The Return of the Lemming

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Linux Lemmion. I’m your host, Rasta Calavera, and this is the revival of the podcast. And along with the revival, this is going to bring a lot of new topics to the show. I’m mainly really excited about podcast 2.0 features, and I’ve been experimenting on how to implement some of those features in the theme that I use for the podcast website and the blog. It’s called the Castanet theme. And that’s really what powers the static Hugo site. If you’re unfamiliar with podcasting 2.0, there’s links everywhere. Show notes, blog posts, wherever. Podcastindex.org would be the place to really go check out all the new podcast namespace features and different things like that. Some of these ideas, like the value tag, that’s a huge one. So putting in a value tag into the RSS feed allows a content creator to extract monetary value from their audience. And this can be done using digital currencies. Most commonly, it’s done using Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. And you can send micro payments to your content creator to show appreciation for what it is that they do. You can stream value to them as you’re listening to their production. You can send one time value in the form of a boost, and you can attach a 500-character message to that. It’s pretty dang cool. And there’s a lot of different ways that people can do this. Right now, I actually have a podcaster wallet that is through Fountain FM. I’m working on getting my own self-hosted node using a program called Umbrell. And man, I’ve been waiting about three months for that thing to sync up to the Bitcoin network. So I’m at about 95% now, so I’m getting kind of close. But the value tag is really, really cool. Also, the chapters tag, I’ve always been intrigued with podcast chapters. I want to find a way to do this so that I can automate the process and I’d have to do it manually. So that’s really exciting. There’s a thing called the lit, the live item tag that lets people know if you are live streaming. So you could be just sitting around getting ready to listen to a podcast, you get a little notification saying, hey, your content creator is going live. And you just pull it up in your podcast player and listen to it. And you can send value as you do that. Pretty amazing. So I’ve been playing around with the live item tag using a ZuraCast. I’ll talk more about that later. Transcripts. They’re really cool. Just in the last couple like months here, AI, open AI and whisper has just blown up across the community. It is a stack of AI and machine learning models that you can run on your own personal computer. You can throw audio at it and it does really high quality transcription of that audio. And then you can go ahead and use that transcription in a podcast. It’s amazing. So I’ve actually got the transcripts tag working right now, which is pretty cool. So podcasting 2.0 is this whole big thing. And honestly, that’s really what made me come back. You know, obviously I took a break, COVID and just family stuff and everything else made me super, super, super busy. But podcasting 2.0 really wanted to pull me back in. So here I am doing this again. And it’s been a lot of fun doing it. So I’m very excited about podcast 2.0 stuff. And that’s going to be a big push in the documentation. So as the show comes back, I’m going to really try to focus on like little mini series that are very centered around different topics. So the topic of podcasting 2.0 is going to be something that I revisit from time to time to time. And also with like the blog posts, there’s going to be a little mini series in there as well. So yeah, really just trying to focus down on these little topics, kind of like a season, I guess, I’m thinking blog posts will come out first, because that really helps me center my thoughts and kind of shape what the actual podcast audio is going to look like. And then once those blog posts are all done, it’ll manifest as audio and you’ll be able to hear it. So speaking of audio, my entire process has been turned on its head. And I’m starting from scratch, which is pretty brutal. So starting from scratch, you know, there’s a podcast that I listened to called podcasting for value. It’s hosted by Josh Dennis, and he had a guest on on episode 24 recently, Steve McLaughlin. And they talked a lot about, you know, just good podcast etiquette and good podcast setup and just like the basic things that you need to do to have a good sounding podcast didn’t implement any of those for this one. So this one’s going to be rough, but I’m going to go back, I’m going to listen to some of those things, kind of adjust some of my tooling, and hopefully get back to some good high quality audio. In terms of just like general documentation lately, AzuraCast, I mentioned that with the lit tag, the live item tag. That’s a super cool project. They’ve got rock solid documentation. I’m going to go through that soon. I’ve got a poll request with the LSIO group for their project send container. That was a rough process to get that in there, to say the least. You know, I’m a little rusty in terms of like contributing back and they’re kind of one of the higher caliber projects and they have little leeway for low effort contributions, I guess, which mine, mine wasn’t a low effort contribution, but just the way that they do things, it is so automated. It’s a lot of, you know, RTFM or GTFO over there. So it was a pretty brutal wake up, but I’m happy to contribute and I’ll probably contribute more in the future, but I’m just going to take a little break, toughen up my skin, and then I’ll go back. But I’ve also been contributing to the SSH Wiki, the self hosted show. That’s been kind of laying low for a while and there were some really good episodes about data sovereignty that kind of energized me. So I contributed to that. We’ll talk more about that in detail. And Jupiter Broadcasting as a whole has just done super amazing things. They opened up their entire podcasting website to the community on GitHub to contribute to, which is amazing. The stuff that they’ve done as a community over there is just fantastic. I’ve been watching on the sidelines. Like I said, I’m trying to get my skills back to where they need to be and then hopefully I can do some contributions over there, help out with some documentation, different things like that. My entire setup has completely changed. I kind of alluded to that earlier in the beginning. I used to run everything on a Raspberry Pi with four gigs of RAM with an external hard disk connected to it using a powered USB hub. That is gone. No more. I retired that in favor of a Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny with an i5 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM and a two terabyte hard drive. So huge, huge upgrade. And that Pi is still living around. It’s that umbral server that I mentioned earlier. So it’s now got a single job and that’s all it’s ever going to do. So I’m done with that. I also purchased a Synology NAS, a disk station 418. Got it off of eBay for a super great price. I’ve got two eight terabyte disks in there and a single two terabit disk in there. I’m using it to backup computers, photos, media, etc. Just really hoping to eventually fill out all four bays with eight terabyte hard disks so that I can just really have a good solid NAS setup and backup solution going with some dependable redundancy. And I really I made these two large purchases because I don’t have any time anymore. Like my time bubble, I had a surplus of it and then it just came crashing down and collapsed on me. I’ve changed careers twice within the last year. Families just been super busy. So my time for tinkering has gone down to zero. So I invested a little bit so that when I do have time to tinker, I can really focus on stuff that brings me joy rather than just frustrations. And along with that upgrade. Actually my Docker usage has drastically shrunk. Mostly I think because I just don’t tinker a whole lot anymore. I do want to slowly bring that back. So when I was running the pie, I think I averaged like 14 containers on that machine and now I’m down to four. So pretty big decrease there. But there are some applications I’ve really been missing like Mealy, Wallabag, Linkace, YouTube material, different things like that. So I really want to get back to bringing those. My holdoff is I had poor backup strategies and migration strategies when I got all that new hardware. So I lost a lot of my original configs and volumes and I’m just having a little remorse with that, my own ignorance. But once I get over that hump, I will bring those back. But speaking of backups, since I have that nice fancy NAS now, I’ve been exploring the best way to backup files to it from my main machine. And our sync has just been an amazing tool to explore. So I’ll do a write up on that at some point as well. I’m currently using Zorin as my daily driver on my laptop. And that can do automated backups using duplicity and the NAS server. Zorin might be kind of a weird name for a lot of people out there. It’s definitely not like the forefront of Linux distributions, but I enjoy it. Long time ago, I actually purchased a license for it during a DLN charity stream. And then with every new release out of habit, I’ve just been buying another license. So I have these paid licenses. And I was like, I should probably use this thing that I pay for. So I threw it on the machine and you know, it’s been nice. It’s been good. It’s a nice desktop experience. So I’ve been playing with Zorin, living in Zorin and have been enjoying it so far. So that’s the big welcome back. Here’s what to expect. We’re going to be doing series. These series are going to be kind of small hyper focused things. They’re going to be easily searchable on the web page using different tags and things like that. So that’ll really go a long way, I think. And I do want to try to boost discoverability of the show. So I’m going to be trying to promote it a little bit just in, you know, my own little corners of the internet. I’m not going to spend money to promote this thing that would be ludicrous, but really just, you know, I want people who are podcast curious, techno curious, whatever to reach out and, you know, participate. That was the original intent of this whole thing. You know, I wanted to have a community driven podcast where somebody could have a cool idea and be like, you know, I don’t want to go through the trouble of trying to create a podcast. Well, here is a platform for you, dear listener, where you can bring your idea to the airwaves. And if you can record your own audio and get that audio to me, then you can be a Lennox Lemming and you can have airtime and put it out there for the world to hear. So yeah, other people that, you know, are pod curious, techno curious and want to dive into this a little bit, please reach out, get in touch, find me on GitLab, GitHub, Matrix, wherever. I’m out there, I’m around, and we’ll put your stuff on the air. So with that, that’s going to bring us to a close of the revival of the Lennox Lemming 4 episode seven.