Self-Hosting for Privacy and Attention Made Easy | ZimaOS

Hello friends. How is it going? I have, um, I've decided to do a spontaneous stream. This, I don't usually stream on Wednesdays, um, but I, I got the itch. I got the itch to do a little home labbing.

So, one, one of the fine folks on, on our Discord sort of reached out to me and was like, "Hey, really loving the attention economy stuff you've been talking about lately, but a lot of it is like, a lot of the way that I've been approaching the attention economy stuff lately has been very like abstinence-oriented." Um, which is, you know, that's one approach. Um, and sort of mentioned they were missing the more like home labby, how do we, how do we do some self-hostingy stuff that lets us engage with film and movies and TV and and things like that without the attention capture damaging patterns and participation in the, uh, surveillance capitalism stuff, you know, the other half of this channel, really. And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, how do we do that? Why haven't I been doing that?" Hey, Nick Gestalt, how's it going? How are you doing? Um, so Steven Hall, hello. Hello.

So, yeah, I've been, um, I've been, I've been thinking about very beginner, I don't like the term beginner-friendly. Let's call it low-maintenance, low-maintenance approaches to self-hosting. Self-hosting for if you're not somebody who's like, home labbing because you love to learn how Linux works, the command line is fun for you, like that kind of thing, right? That's how I do my home labbing because I'm like, I want to become a Linux expert. This is fun. I want to learn how Kubernetes works. I want to design my NFS stuff from scratch, uh, so that I can learn NFS syntax and what's the difference between NFS V3 and V4, like all of that, right? Um, but I've also been conceptualizing, hey, plus, hey Nick, how's it going? Have we ditched the Linux, uh, searcher stuff for today? Yes, we have for today. Today is Wednesday. Um, I, I'm doing, I'm doing my weekly streams on Mondays. Today was just a spontaneous. I thought it would be fun because I came up with, I ran into something. Also, hello, Alex not the lion. Hey with ducks. We got a huge, we got a huge set of people today. This is fun. I'm excited already. Okay.

Um, yes. So, one of the things that I've been thinking about is cloud, cloud, cloud features, you know, that kind of thing as a home appliance. So, you could very easily self-host. Hey Tim, how's it going? And, um, I very naturally, I think very common the response to that feeling I was like, "Oh, I have an idea for a thing that would be cool." If you're a developer or you're techie in any sort of way is to go, "How do I build it?" instead of, "Does it exist?" Um, how do I pronounce your name? Is it, uh, is it Joeazino? Help me pronounce your name and I will do my best to get it right. Um, so yes. Oh, sorry, also, let me, let me, um, let me, I didn't do any of my setup before the stream. I have this little monitor that sits under, under all my enough and I didn't configure it today. Oh, that's not what I wanted. So, I'm going to do that. Sorry. I know I'm very chaotic during these streams. Um, I hope that's part of my charm instead of being super annoying. Yes.

So, I was thinking about self-hosting Cloud Box as an appliance. Kind of like one buys a dishwasher. You're like, "Yeah, I spend $1,000 on a dishwasher and then I have a dishwasher. It washes my dishes. I never think about how the dishwasher works. It just works, right?" How do we handle that? Home Labby and Hi, geniuses. Hello. I like that. Red Cater, Redcat R. Is that how, how do we do that? Oh, that's the wrong one. So, um, and then I came across Zema OS, which, um, I, I played around with a thing called Casa OS prior to Zema OS, and that's what it's, uh, what it's based on. Stephen asks, "How could I join the Discord? Been been excited about the cohort and wanted to share a few things." Um, oh, well, let me, let me go pop into the Discord. I'm just going to pop this closed and go like this. And then we're going to do a little this guy. And then we're going to hit invite. Copy. And there you go. That's the link. And I'll see you in the Discord. Okay.

So, Zema OS. Zema OS seems incredibly intuitive. Um, I, I spun it up in a VM a little while ago. Can I do? No, that's not what I want. I want this one because Proxmox doesn't work very well with Firefox. Also, somebody mentioned, somebody mentioned a little while ago that they started Proxmox. What is it? Nick, Nick Gestaltstead. Uh, thanks to you, I took my first steps into Proxmox. Nice. I love, I love me some Proxmox. Like it is just so flexible an environment to experiment in. Uh, so I started, speaking of experimenting, I started experimenting with, um, Zema OS on this little VM and it wasn't great because I underpowered this VM and so it wasn't a great experience. And we're going to explore it on some like real hardware today. But check this out. So this is Zema OS. I've already done this. Whatever. Okay, dude. Whatever. We're going to try this again with hardware, and I will show you once we get there. But it's, it seems to me a very user-friendly interface for managing Home Labby stuff, right? You can very, they have an app store and you can app store launch Jellyfin and you can app store launch install Image, which is like Google Photos, but, you know, they're not spying on you and all of that fun stuff, right? And so I'm like, "Okay, hold on. This feels really nice. Like this is, this is a good idea." They even have their own Obsidian sync option and tool. They have, uh, they have a Chrome extension, which I haven't explored yet. They have, um, some other fun stuff like an app, um, so you can actually like a mobile client for it where you can also sync from your mobile device to your Zema OS setup and that sounds pretty cool. Uh, the pricing is also really reasonable. So, they have a free tier, but $29 USD for a lifetime license. I, I'm not somebody who's like opposed to paying for things, right? Um, $29 seems very reasonable to me, especially when we're comparing it to something like HexOS, which is also a NAS-based operating system, which is really just TrueNAS Scale with a pretty little wrapper. Um, but it's extremely expensive. So maybe get, yeah, $200 per server, and that's in the early phase. It's going to be $300 US later. So when I see Zema OS's pricing for $29 USD, I'm like, "Okay, cool. This is nice." Also, the Zema Cube is this appliance-shaped thing. A personal cloud, right? So, they're already thinking about it with the same verbiage that we've been using. Crafted for creativity. It ships with Zema OS. It's a NAS. Um, you got remote login, so they have Tailscale like features built in. Um, you can do local, local AI stuff with it if you want. Uh, there's some really, really spicy ideas. So, I really wanted to take a look. Um, so yeah.

Anyways, what do we got? I have, I have a few opinions here. "I think my lab is similar to that except for adding more services. I found when it's stable, it works great and is low maintenance, but adding more stuff is complicated." Yeah. Um, Alex not the lion says, "As much as I want to be a home labber, I know for me it will go as far as Home Assistant, Image, and Jellyfin, and that will be it. I much enjoy the 'it just works' approach." Yeah. And I've been thinking like, we need to appeal to this, um, to this set of people who just want an appliance, right? I think this might be a strong start. Nick says, "That's right. I had problems with Firefox shortcuts on Proxmox and I switched to Ungoogled Chromium." Ah, interesting. "That also how I ended up in the Apple ecosystem because their stuff just works mostly as long as you stay in it." Yes, that's true. "Starting at the second lap is considered cheating in most sports." Yes. "Do you and anyone else reading this think it is worth to host an email server in the home lab as well? I looked into it and it seems to be pretty complex." That seems, yeah, I've shied away from the email thing because email is such a vital tool that I don't want to ever risk my email going down. So, I'd rather outsource this to to people and companies that like know what they're doing. If you're privacy-oriented, I think, um, I think, I think maybe like Proton Mail might be a better approach. Um, if you're down for like a comp, if you're down for that complex project, then, you know, have at it. Power to you. But I'm a little afraid to do it myself. Uh, what is Umbrel? I've heard about Umbrel and then I've also heard some not so good things about Umbrel. Um, so, um, this is interesting. Personal cloud. Ah, your cloud in your home. Okay. Okay. So, I think maybe we're going to start exploring some of these. The super, yes, this, this looks very much in line with this concept as well. Comes with an app store. Home. $500 bucks for their little box. Up to 4 TB of SSD storage. This might do well. It's, it's a little, it's, they're advertising Bitcoin a little much for my taste, but that's okay. I, I, you know, I'm not going to get into all that, but, um, this, yeah, this does seem very in line. We got an N150. Nice. Uh, low power RAM means it's probably going to be, this is going to be pretty, pretty power efficient. I like the idea here. "Connect to your router, power it up, visit umbrel.local local on your browser to access Umbrel." I like that a lot too. Can I install this on anything? Seems I can make the switch from a Raspberry Pi-based Umbrel to your Umbrel Home with ease. Tight. Okay. $500 bucks. What else we looking at? So, four terabytes of storage is not enough storage. And also, $400 difference between 1 TB and 4 TB is giving Apple. Uh, but I do want to take a look at this. This, this seems cool. What do we got? Um, doing this. She didn't think this through. Says, "Nathan, doing this is my long-term goal for open source also." Awesome. Yeah. Right. Like I, I've been sort of thinking in this direction. I know a number of the members of the community have been thinking in this direction as well. And so I, I, I, I know I've been neglecting this for the past almost two months now. I've been neglecting Home Labby things. So I've wanted to get back in. Um, cuz yeah, it's, it's time. But yes, I'm going to start with Zema and then we'll, we'll maybe take a look through Umbrel as well. What else? "If you think it's a project worth supporting, I'll send you a short planning doc via PR. Wanted to grab to try and grab a spot on the wiki." Oh, okay. Mhm. Yes. Uh, I will, let's explore it today and then we'll, we'll talk about, um, about putting this on the wiki. Thank you, by the way, for supporting the wiki. I'm really excited for where that's going to go. We, we have a lot more work to do with the wiki before it's really quite useful, but there, you know, one step at a time. Okay. "With email, you also suddenly have to deal with your messages not going to spam." Yes. Um, "It's okay, I guess. I prefer Firefox." Half of it. Yes. "Incoming SMTP shouldn't be on dynamic addresses." "It blew my mind that a 512 GB SSD costs like $50 bucks now." Yes, exactly. Um, "I meant that I meant the earlier thing you said about open source that just works." Also, "Note I've never sent a PR before." No worries. I mean, we'll, we're going to do our best to be extremely, um, supportive of anyone trying to make contributions, right? Like, we don't want to scare anybody off. We want to be supportive and guiding people, not saying, "Hey, you did it wrong. Do it again." We're going to say, "Here's how you can make your PR shaped in a way that we can make use of it." And things like that.

Anyways, okay. So, let's, let's get to this. Um, this one I think is, this is the, the USB stick that I've got plugged in right now. Yep. Okay. Tight. So, I'm going to just download Zema OS. And I think I might already have it. Yeah, I forgot the command for doing LS by, uh, most recent. But we have zema OS installer image. I think I can just DD that, right? So if I do, let's do a TLDDR on DD and then I think I can just do a sudo DD input file is, uh, zema OS, this guy, and the output file equals dev, uh, SDA. I think that's right for my LS block. Yes, SDA. And I probably want status equals progress. Okay. Hello Daniel. How's it going? And, uh, Okay. "I've seen many things about Docker to make hosting, for example, an email server easier, but I have no idea about Docker and stuff will be important soon, I assume." Yes, it definitely will. Uh, community question. "Is the visual style of the wiki finalized?" It is not. I don't think so. Um, Nick, Nick, do DF, DF. What is DF as opposed to DD? Make sure it's SDA. It is, right? We, we check this, right? It's LS block and it's this guy, right? Because I, I've got NVME drives for other things. So, I think we should be fine. Think we should be fine. What is DF? Is this a thing? DF Linux command. Oh my god. Right. Yes. You wanted me to do this instead of LS block. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. What does DF stand for? Report file system space usage. Okay. Cool. Yes, we should be cool. I think people glaze how hard, how hard Docker is. Docker using Docker Compose is not too hard. Um, but you, you have to have some level of familiarity and comfort with the, with the, um, with the, with the command line, which is prohibitive. Anyways, we're going to start this up. Discree. That's what it stands for. Okay, good to know. Sweet. Yes, you must always check. Yeah, I, I realize that, uh, SDA writing to SDA like that is probably pretty scary. Um, I'm all NVMe, but still. Okay, Umbrel. Let's take a look. Umbrel Reddit self-host and see what people's opinions on Umbrel is. Umbrel in a Docker container. Why would you want Docker containers and Docker containers? I mean, okay. Modified Rasbian, uh, with a half-decent web interface and using Docker in the background to manage the apps. Yes. Okay. See, this is what I expect to be happening. I thought it's dis free. It's way faster than the opposite, than the opposite du-sh. Okay. Uh, how much of this is open source? So, here's the Umbrel app store. Do they have like a GitHub? I guess if it was open source, they'd probably be talking about it. Reddit, Discord, GitHub. Okay, maybe not. Okay, cool. Get an Umbrel Home for the full experience or install Umbrel OS on a Raspberry Pi 5. So, how does it handle storage? Good afternoon, Chad. Damn. All right. I bet Docker is actually pretty easy if you wrapped your head around it, but I never had the need to dive in deeper. But dabbling in CLI, I do really enjoy actually. Nice. If you get deep into Docker, you can run Docker management stuff in Docker if you set up VR run Docker socket or Oh, yes. With like the Portainer stuff and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, I completely fell in love with the Adwida mono font. Oh, cool. Fun. So, you can run Umbrel to manage Docker stuff and provide a web UI, but the process itself is Dockerized. That's kind of interesting. Okay. Um, Zema OS or this? I, I was reading about Zema. I don't know how open source Zema OS is. I guess we pick the more open source one, right? Okay. I mean, they both have at least major components of it open. So, yeah, I'm happy either way. "Never heard of either." Yeah, first time for me, too. "Docker and Docker can be useful for build runners." Oh, true. I guess that makes sense. Yeah. So, did you decide to not go the route of building all yourself and use complete storage OS? No, not exactly. So, um, I'm still doing my own thing because I'm doing it to, to, to learn, but I'm interested in, uh, exploring these more like polished, hand-like, uh, self-hosted interfaces as for people who aren't interested in diving into all of those details or maybe don't have the time because I want to help people out get started with self-hosting without, you know, having to do NFS and ZFS stuff themselves. That's kind of what we're exploring today. Okay. Did we? Oh, yes. Right. I'm waiting on this. We're still waiting. DD takes so long. "Official, unified, accessible anywhere, anytime." Well, what else do we have? We grab Umbrel OS. This reminds me of those like neon KDE things. Uh, this is the Zema board NAS thing. Yes, their OS is like just installable. You can just, you can just grab it. So, I figured might be a cool place to start. Um, does Umbrel have the built-in? They use Tailscale but they don't have that sort of built-in thing. One of the things I really liked about Zema is they have a built-in connect from anywhere idea which seems really, really useful. Um, overview. So, what we'll try later is I'll, I'll just whip out my laptop and then hotspot the laptop and see how they're just to test out their like remote connectivity feature. It seems to, I, I would assume it's just like WireGuard-y kind of Tailscale shaped. Um, but yeah, we're going to give it a shot. BTOP UPS co-creation is part of our DNA. Building the Zema OS with our community. Nice. Yeah. Oh my god. Go faster, please. Peer-to-peer networking. Okay. Sweet. So, peer-to-peer connection keeps your data between devices without touching any server or cloud. Everything is encrypted and travels directly from source to destination. So, even when accessing your NAS from a cafe or hotel Wi-Fi, nothing leaves your private network. So, this is kind of, kind of interesting to me. Let's look at docs and look at the remote access stuff. Um, Hannah Montana Linux. Is that a thing? KDE's Dolphin is KDE's Dolphin and Hannah Montana Linux had a similar color scheme. Yeah. Right. Like I've seen this kind of thing a number of times. Um, remote. Yes, I want these two. "Data on the go. Ever wished you could check your home security cameras or access files from your home server while traveling but were hindered by inaccessible data." Community member Grandel successfully accessed Zema OS from Norway, connecting to servers in Ireland and despite being on mobile roaming, experiences seamless connection. Um, okay. Interesting. One of the problems with this is the, the Zema, they don't have an official Zema client for Linux, which is a little bit annoying. Um, well, massively annoying to be honest. Woohoo. Okay. So, what I'm looking for here is how they tell you to do remote access stuff. Oh god. Yeah. No, not dynamic DNS. That's not going to be the thing. Um, Hannah Montana Linux is a real thing from years ago. So is the North Korean government-sponsored Linux variant. Uh, Zuanarch. I recently clicked into a bunch of videos, including yours, about attention and attention spans. Do you think attention spans are a problem or is it just what you choose to spend your your time on? I think attention spans are a real issue. Like, here, let's do a, let's, let's do a little aside because this matters. BBN gives you Bieber fever. Oh my god, there's a BBN. Uh, yes, attention span does matter. Um, this is, this is a real thing. So, two, two sort of like scientific things we can, we can go down. First off, there was a massive paper recently released, um, something like 100,000 separate data points demonstrating. I need to find that exact paper so I can reference it properly for you. But it basically demonstrates like, yes, short-form content does rot your brain. It does reduce your ability to pay attention to things. And so the next question is like, well, how much does it matter if we can pay attention to things? And I think like this tremendously. It matters tremendously. And I'm going to go through the, the construct of flow as one of the ways that I think attention matters tremendously. So, flow is this concept of like optimal experience. You're completely immersed in some sort of experience, usually because it is like sufficiently challenging but also not so challenging that it crushes you. So, it's like very engaging. You feel like you are, you are challenged and overcoming throughout the course of like an hour or two, something like that, very often. And the, the experience is just completely immersing. You don't notice time passing. One sec. Where are you? All right, whatever. Okay, I couldn't find it. Anyways, um, there's a book on flow and it's one of the most impactful and meaningful experiences we can have. And if you can't pay attention to something such that you can fully immerse yourself in it, you just can't experience flow, right? Like, you, you need to be able to be fully immersed in something to experience flow. Flow is very tightly connected to our, like, our, our feeling that we have meaning in life. It's, it's just like a very positive affect experience to have. So, yeah, in general, attention matters. Short-form content, very bad for us. Long story short. Okay. Um, uh, "I could play a game or read story books for hours straight and the problem there would be that I chose to spend that time on games instead of something useful." Well, I mean, if you enjoyed the experience, right? Like, um, I'm, I'm not, I'm very anti doing things for the productivity of it. Um, and like unless that productivity is meaningful for you, like, you don't need to constantly be productive like at all hours of the day. Um, and so if you were immersed in something that you really enjoyed, then that's awesome. You're like, now, if you find that it's hampering other aspects of your life, right? Like, now you're, let's say you can't, you can't do the things that you need to do, right? You can't do your homework or something like that, or or you can't focus at work or during meetings, then yes, that, that could be, that could be problematic. Anyways, uh, attention spans a bad issue. "I'm in class watching this, migrating all my accounts to Proton and configuring YNAB all at once." Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of stuff. "My only short-form content is Nathan get it because he's not tall." I'm not short. Okay, let's do this. There we go. And why is this [Music] boom? Okay, so let's do some, uh, some Zema OS installation. I'm going to be over here, I think. Yeah, that should be fine. Yes, install Zema OS. Can you all see this fine? Is this, is this going all right? I'm gonna assume it is. Yeah. V for Vindicta. Solid name. Very cool. So, I'm, I'm, I'm honestly really looking forward to testing this out. I think this is going to be a decent, like, if we really like the Zema OS experience, I, I feel like I'll make a YouTube video on this and probably reach out to some, uh, reach out to Zema and see if I can get like a Zema Cube from them to review because that would be awesome. Steven Hall says, "Untra for YouTube extension lets you remove thumbnails in YouTube which makes me get bored of it very fast." Yeah, that's, I mean, like, I'll admit as I make my YouTube videos, right? Like, I try to make my thumbnails catchy in, in to some extent, right? If I didn't have thumbnails, my videos would like, without thumbnails, the click-through rate on most videos would go go down substantially, which is a good thing for you and your attention. So definitely sounds like a reasonable and useful intervention. "Do you actually use Plan 9 or do you have its mascot as a profile pic for the LOLs?" I think Nick probably would have used Plan 9 at some point. "You may now remove the install media and reboot." Excellent. By the way, that was my Kodi install. Rest in peace, my Kodi machine. Oh well. Okay. Are you guys getting any of this? Yeah, looks like you are. I saw a failure in there, which is interesting. "The SSH service is disabled by default." Okay, cool. So, here we are. And I'm just going to try to pop this open and see what we get. 10.88.111.20. Awesome. Okay, so I can pop back over here and we can take it. We can take it from here. "Best console-based installer ever was early Solaris. It included Tetris while you were waiting." Doesn't, doesn't Emacs have Tetris as well? I mean, I guess every time I bring up Emacs Emacs features, I'm like, doesn't Emacs have everything as well? But that does sound kind of fun. "Hi, Nathan. Hi, chat. What is Zema OS?" Hello, Loi Turtle. Zema OS seems to me, we're exploring it today together, a an easy way to do self-hosting. It kind of gives you a nice GUI, um, web user interface to handle self-hosting without having to do too much like nitty-gritty detail stuff. Let me actually hop over into YouTube. Where would this be? Yeah, testing out Zema OS. Maybe let's give this a better, better name. Um, it self, self-hosting for, uh, privacy and attention made easy. Zema OS. Let's try that. Maybe that'll be a little bit more descriptive than whatever I came up with. Okay. So, we're going to create an account. I don't need to save this. And so it helps us define a RAID array for our hard drives, which is great. It also does, uh, cloud, like cloud-style file management. Also awesome. Access anytime, anywhere. Remote login with the Zema client. This is cool. And it has apps. So, okay, cool. I can't, there's no Zema client for, for Linux, unfortunately. I think there somebody made one and we might explore that in a second. "Between Zema Cube and your local PC or Mac, Zema client enabling automatic switching between network ports, Thunderbolt, and remote access while enhancing connection stability." Okay, whatever. Remote access. We're going to explore remote access later. There's no Zema client for Linux. Stop pinging me about it. Okay. "Didn't Torvalds say once, 'If Lisp would have been a decent programming language, Linux would run in an Emacs window.'" That's pretty funny. I, I haven't heard that quote, but I like it. Okay, so right away we're presented with this dashboard. And this dashboard seems decent, right? So I can go into files, and it's got documents, it's got downloads, it's got gallery. Media is already set up to work nicely with, um, with Jellyfin and we have backup. So, oh, okay. So, and it's got this like drag and drop idea. So, let's try putting something here. Let's go. Um, do I have, where is Big Buck Bunny? So, legally, all of these are Big Buck Bunny, by the way. These are actually, this is part of my Jellyfin demo server and they're all just Big Buck Bunny because, um, you know, you can use Big Buck Bunny. Okay, so this is pretty cool. If I go into media, let's move this. Wow, that just plays. I'm already really impressed. So, migrate from conflict, overwrite selected destination media, movies. Can I do new folder? Um, Big Buck Bunny. Okay. Confirm. Nice. Start. Okay, great. Media, movies, Big Buck Bunny. It's still in, it's still in documents, though, which is weird, but okay. Um, let's go back to the dashboard. So, files looks nice. This is like pretty, it's a file system. It's a file manager. That worked tremendously. Let's go to App Store and we're going to install Jellyfin the NAS. Thank you. Thank you. I, I was pretty proud of that, too. Um, by the way, Kimu libvirt still uses Plan 9's 9P protocol to communicate with its client agent inside of VMs. It's still a lot. Martin Lea, hey, hello from Argentina. You know, I've had a number of people from Argentina show up into stream. It's, is there like, I have to ask, is there like a, an, a large self-hosting community from Argentina? "I've recently discovered your channel and I love the vibes. I'm about to start reading Digital Minimalism thanks to you. Leaving this in the background while studying." I love that. Welcome. Thank you for for dropping by and thank you for such for the kind words. Uh, Zenarch says, "What would the world be like if Nyx was available when Torvalds made Linux? Scary. If this lives up to the promises, it looks pretty hype." That's what I'm thinking, right? Uh, "I've set up similar stuff on my normal Ubuntu server and it's fun, but it gets annoying to maintain manually." Yes, exactly. Okay, look at that. Jellyfin just pops up. Like, how incredible is that? It's just there. So, let's open it. Okay. And we can go through the quick start, quick start guide. Okay. So, that's that's the documents. I'm going to be, uh, I'm going to be Nathan. We're going to give it a password. Uh, not now. Add media library. Okay. Folders. Oh, no. Can I do, can I just do this? Okay. Content type. No. So, do I need to point to TV shows and me and movies separately? I don't remember what my Jellyfin looks like. Uh, so if I go to my Jellyfin, is my Jellyfin down? Yep, it is. What do we got? Oh, I should name my K8s cluster the polycule. That's funny. I think one note I have for them is that, uh, is I think they should have SSO out of the box. You should just have have admin for everything you install. That would be nice. "Jellyfin needs one media type per folder if I recall correctly." Okay, good to know. Good to know. Is my stuff back up? What is going on? Okay, I'm going to give that a sec. Um, okay. So, a little bit of preconfiguration for common apps would go a long way to making this better. And we're just going to go with defaults. Next. Sure. Oh, whoa. That's not a good idea. Okay. Finish. So, should just be able to log in now. Yeah. And that's that's Jellyfin. Now, I more or less know how Jellyfin works. I know how file, like folders work and stuff. So, there's a lot of knowledge that I'm taking for granted here that makes this really easy. Nonetheless, it is a lot easier than say, I mean, managing Kubernetes or something. Okay. So, here's mine. Um, by the way, all of these are Big Buck Bunny. Okay. Okay. We're all in agreement. That's all Big Buck Bunny. Anyways, so there we go. We have Jellyfin up and running in like seconds. Um, yeah. "Separate them in Jellyfin." "Different scrapers, right?" "Different scrapers." Okay. Um, "Next class time where teacher doesn't allow any technology. So, chill stream though. Hope to catch some more. Good luck with everything." Thank you, Oliver's. Um, "Actually, I never read about people from here self-hosting things, but there must be a lot of them." "I'm sure r/devs is full of complaints right now, not self-hosting." Oh, "Have you looked in the study I suggested last stream about the impact of short-term content on people?" Not yet. I haven't had the chance to read it, but I will. "Have you made any videos about Graphene OS?" Not yet. Um, I haven't been able to just buy a, a Pixel to test it out. "I've not looked too much into ZMOS. I was looking into HexOS a while ago. Is Zema just a competitor to Hex? And which would you recommend?" Um, so far it looks like Hex is more like, you know how to manage your NAS and care about managing your NAS and this is a really nice and it's a nice interface. Zema is like, you want cloud in a box. You don't need, you don't want to know that much about computers. You just want your cloud in a box. That's what I'm getting out of this and it kind of looks cool. Um, also Zema OS's license is like $29 USD whereas HexOS is $200 USD. Uh, "I definitely remember Big Buck being in Scott Pilgrim." Awesome cameo. Yeah, it was fantastic. "Big Fringe Bunny is a great one. Loved it." Yes, exactly. "Big Buck Batman was a great trilogy." It was. Yes, exactly. Okay. So, let's install some more stuff. Let's install Image. So, I mean, that goes, um, what do we, what else do we want to do? I don't think Zema has the iOS client yet. Let's, let's see if we can get a Linux client. Yay, Zema. No, Zema OS Linux. "Hey, Nathan in chat room. Home lab fun today." I see. Indeed. Indeed. Uh, I got excited by the idea of these like easy to use HomeLab self-hosty operating systems and so we're exploring one together. Okay, how do I install this? "Download the latest release from the release pages and then app image it or Debian download." Well, I mean, I would just use the official one. Okay, we can app image this releases. Uh, where's the downloads? Let's go app image. And we're going to go CD into our downloads folder. Um, and we're going to, where, where might I want to put this? Let's do a sudo move. And this is zema.client and I want to move this into, what is it? It's, uh, CD slash. I think I want to move into opt, uh, Zema client and I'll put it into there, slash opt, Zema. There we go. Does that mean it'll show up? That would have been nice. Maybe I didn't chmod it yet. Okay. Chmod plus X Zema. Okay. Now, does it show up? No. Oh, hey Zema. Okay. Hey, Nathan. Okay, what do we got? "I think we can design hints from Apple." I think we can take design hints from Apple where they hide a lot of complexity but present an easier to use system. Agreed. "Can we scroll through their apps?" Yes, we'll do that shortly. Uh, Alex says, "I was using Pika Pods to host Image until recently. It was like $15 bucks a month to host 20 gigabytes of photo from one trip to Canada." Oh, that's expensive. "Windows XP startup." I love Windows XP sound effects. "Just a few years ago, Synology had an easy and complete solution. Video Station, uh, DNA, UPN, video app on TVs. Today. Video app no more. HDD SD SSD lock-in drive to home. Users off their products." Hm. Yeah, that's, that's not, that's not what we in the business would call awesome. Okay, cool. So, we have this thing. Can we scan local, local network? No. Okay. Well, let's do remote access. Maybe we can do this connect. That does not seem to be working. And this is bare metal, right? So, there's either an issue here with the client that we're using or there's an issue with, um, with the Zema connector itself. So, what if we do? Let's try the ZVM, which lets us set up, um, words. Let's do words, virtual machines. There we go. And let's just, let's just do a Windows 11 virtual machine in here while we poke around around Image. Okay, interesting. We got some tips. "Is the remote access a priority solution or is it like Tailscale or something?" I don't know yet. I don't know yet. Um, it looks to me like Zema OS is, is open for the most part, but I don't know. I don't know what, uh, I don't know about their remote solution. I would love to get a little bit more detail on this. Does anybody know data migration. What is in here? What is in this repo? Okay, this is not the code. I guess I should have noticed when it was 100% shell. So, looking pretty closed off. Not, not exactly what you want to see personally. So, yeah, I will have to look more into what their, like, the openness of their code is. Okay, love Image. It got me into self-hosting Linux and even deeper into privacy. Nice. Oh, hey Dixie. How's it going? "Click on the settings icon in the upper right corner of the app. In the Image server tab, map your album storage location, the volume section." Okay. I like that they're sort of warning me on the first launch of Image how that ought to work. So, we're going to do one of these. Not now. And then let's do a little login action. Okay. So, their versions may be a little bit behind sometimes. That's good to know. Um, yeah, I don't want the map thing at the moment. Nope, we're good. Enable store. What's this? "When enabled, this feature will auto organize files based on a user-defined template." Oh, nope. Too many things. Okay. So, a 3-2-1 backup includes. I like that they're telling me a little bit of basics. So, three total copies, copies of your data, including the original files, one off-site and two local copies. Two lo, two, two local copies on different devices. So, two different devices. This includes the main files and backups. One off-site copy in the cloud or at another physical location. Yes. Cool. Wow. This is just so Google-feeling. This is very Google-feeling. Okay. Sharing favorite albums. Okay, I've, let's go back. I've already forgotten what the instructions were. Nice. Okay, luckily they told me. Um, in the Image server tab, map your album storage location in the volume section. Image server tab. Wow, there are a lot of features in here. Uh, ah, I got flashbanged. I want to see. Oh, let's do this. Sorry, I know we're doing a lot of things at once right now. I want to see if I do gallery. Okay, there's Image library profile upload library. Do I have any f? Oh, I actually have quite a few. Nice. So, if I go here, we can just get a bunch of my like test thumbnails. Wow, those uploaded fast. Holy canoli. Okay, sweet. So, what happens now? Are they present? They're not. So, the files gallery does not map particularly nicely or library. Yeah, that didn't get picked up or something. So, what can I do? Let's maybe migrate them. Um, select. Wait, let's do retain the original. Ah, I see. Okay. If I go to media, nope, not gallery, Image. Upload. Let's try that. Okay, so now they're not here. That's kind of what we expect. And then gallery upload. That's there. What happens over here? Do I see files yet? No, I don't. Albums. Nothing. Explore. So, why aren't we seeing things? "In the Image server tab, map your album storage location in the volume section." Default is data, gallery, Image. Okay, so we're, it's not defaulting to the correct thing and the Windows 11 VM didn't work. Well, we're getting some stuff here. It's very obvious that Image is a Google Photos clone, indeed. Image is very nice. "Is this your first time in Image?" It is. I, I don't keep a lot of file, like images anywhere. So, "Nice phone client too, huh?" ZOS uses ZeroTier for remote access. Bananiel, can you tell us more about ZeroTier? I don't know much about it. Um, and if you do, that would be helpful. Pin purchase, purchase. Oh, wow, that's really nice. Okay. Uh, app settings, default local loop, videos, account usage, authorized download, utilities, albums. Where is the server tab? I do not server online storage space. Should I relaunch? Can I like power, power it down and power it back up? Uninstall. Check and then update. Restart. See what happens when I restart it. "You can also buy on CD." Hell yeah. Hey, how's it going, Simra? Finally caught one of your streams again. Welcome. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. "Check their homepage." Let's do it. Image, buy merch. Nice. Whoa. Holy canoli. That's $143. Ah, it's because of the key. Okay. "One thing I see people mention when self-hosting personal media is keeping on-site and off-site backups. How do you handle that with self-hosting? Is that feasible?" I don't know. I don't know yet. I, I'm thinking about like doing off-site backups as a, like my solution being doing that with my dad because he's got, he's got stuff as well. So, that might be how we handle it, but that's obviously not viable for everybody. "Check under the settings on the dashboard. Go to Image server and look under volumes on the dashboard." Okay. "Which is administration." Ah, okay. Cool. Uh, Tatalk says, "Setting up Proxmox for the first time. Let me know how it goes." That sounds exciting. Okay. What are jobs? Generate thumbnails. Cool. Transcode videos. Awesome. Settings. Server stats. Cool. So, it hasn't detected them yet. External libraries. So, we can probably do no surfer settings, metadata. Well, now that we found where this goes, we can click this again and it'll tell us map your album storage. Album storage location. Album storage location. Image settings. It's not an external library. No. Oh, that's cool. Theme, trash, user, version, check. Okay, let's go to docs. Kubernetes features. There's an Image CLI. It's cool. Uh, administration, maintenance mode, server. Is it really external libraries? That feels wrong. Okay. Path. Specify a folder to import this. And it has no, and I have to give this manually. So, right now I'm trying to assess it from the perspective of somebody who's like, you know, not super tech-savvy. That's kind of where I'm trying to go from. Um, and so that's why I'm being a little bit more critical than say normal Image. Okay. So let's try this and see what happens. Validate one path failed validation. Okay, cool. No. Okay, definitely not that. "Use the upload function to send your photo." Okay, see, I was hoping that I could use the Zema OS interface interchangeably. That would have made me happy. "Surprise stream." Yeah, Hope Soup. Great name. Um, "I was considering using my parents as an off-site location and hosting stuff for them as well." "Your videos inspired me to set up a Jellyfin server and it's been super cool. Keep up the great work." Oh, thank you. "Fun fact, Zema in is winter in Slovak or cold too." Nice. Is the season already? Indeed, it is. Maybe it's set in the Zema UI. Okay. All right. So, yes, this, this was not what we were hoping for. Okay. Yeah. [Music] I mean, I know. I know. Okay. You know what? Let's try just up uploading something and see where it puts it. So, here's an ugly thumbnail. Um, close. Where did it go is the question. Gallery, Image, Media, Gallery, Doc, Downloads, Documents, Image. Where is it? It's not in library. It's not in encoded video. It's not in backups. It's not in profile. Okay. It generated some thumbnails and then an upload. Oh, interesting. So, Image does a bunch of stuff. Stop. Okay. Okay. Dixie, what do I do? What do I do? Read my message. Okay. Where? "Check under the setting on the dashboard. Go to Image server and look under volumes." Okay. So, we go here. We go here. Administration settings. Not here. Is it on the? Oh, the Zema OS dashboard. From here, we go settings. Here. Oh, potentially, potentially here. Look under volume. So here. So it's this data, app data, Image, Image PG data. Why would this not just download to your or why would this not default to your existing gallery? Like it already sets up, it already sets this up that way. And this is a map from Zema OS to the Image container. Okay. Image Postgress. This is database. Ah, Image server. I'm in the wrong tab again. Okay, cool. So now data, gallery, Image. Got it. So let's go here. Now, out of curiosity, data, I don't have a data and I think it's because like we don't have additional LAN storage. Maybe the additional storage would be called data normally. Howdy. Hello. Hello. How's it going? Um, okay. So, I think, I think we got, we got the idea now. So, I can just go gallery, select. Yeah. Okay. Data, gallery, Image. But if I do this, I can do, um, and so there are a couple of separate folders. So we can go back here. There's, let's just do albums, I suppose. Gallery, Image, upload. See, like, why is it configured this way? It's so frustrating when I actually know for once. No, no problem at all. Thank you for the help. Um, yes, it doesn't have the path mapping volumes without it. Don't know if there's an abstraction. I like it to be really abstract and simplified doing the same as in Docker. I'd prefer a CLI. H, fair enough. I'm currently making a new project in SvelteKit and went to make a ticket list when Linear informed me I've reached the two project limit. So now I'm planning to make a Swift app for ticket management. H, okay. So, I'm just trying to make it so that my mental model of the, the Zema file system, right, maps to Image in a way that makes sense to me. So, Zema has gallery. My expectation was that gallery, especially because it contains Image now, would be sort of one-to-one with, um, like I could just manage these exactly the same, but that does not seem to be the case. When I upload to Zema or to Image, it creates these like sort of, I don't know, hashes or something, which is fine. Like, I don't have a problem with that, but I, I don't like that it's broken my mental model and that I have to go in and do a bunch of configuring, right? Cuz it's fine for me to, to figure that out with a stream of extremely helpful people.

It's not fine for somebody who's like doesn't know these things, doesn't have help. That becomes overly complicated.

So, I'm also in my head trying to think about a set of self-hosted applications that could replace a cloud set simply and easily. So, I'm now I'm thinking about another like there are other image things, right? There's another photo prism. I wonder if maybe photo prism might be easier.

"You're holding it wrong." Yeah, I bet Zeba has a different gallery from the slashdata gallery. Yes. So, I've noticed that and what I'm finding like I don't like that that's the case. Yes, the goal is the goal is to bind them. I figured out how to do that. I I realized I didn't do there because I figured it out and I was like, "Okay, we're good now."

Um, what I want is something that's a little bit more intuitive and simple to use people because I expect here here's here's I'm doing a terrible job explaining what I think. My expectation is this. People who are using Zema OS are going to be um and are not, let's say, proficient home labers are going to step in. They're going to want to they're going to understand a file folder system as like I don't know that's because that's a computer. They're going to see that on on Zema OS and the dashboard and they're going to want to use that as their primary means of connectivity. And I think it's going to confuse people if the way that they interact with that file system is different from the way image interacts with that file system.

Um, and so I want something that connects to it in an intuitive way. Jellyfin was pretty intuitive, right? I uploaded to the media movies folder, right? And then I could just link those. That was fairly easy. I would prefer if the jellyfin installation on ZMA OS like came preconfigured with that mapping. That would be really nice.

Um, because I'm thinking about trying to make it as easy and simple as possible, right? I agree. I have no self-hosting experience and this is confusing. Yeah, see, right? Like that's what I'm talking about, right?

Um, for me, I'm using external galleries. That makes sense. No experience. I don't know about things like CLI. I can navigate sort of in PowerShell and I know zero bash. Yeah, usually can't get things installed. So, it's trying to split up, I guess.

Casa OS looks the same. Yes. So, Casa OS is um what Zemo OS is built off of. So, anyways. Okay. So, we're gonna try photo prism admin cas. So, it comes pre-done. Not now. Okay. It's not quite as attractive. Um, but it may be sufficient.

So, I I don't actually look through photos very often. Um, do you for people who have like a collection of photos? How would you interact with that? Would a web browser be sufficient for you? Would you um do you put it on like a smart TV thing and interact with it that way? How do you how do you interact with photos?

Okay, so folders, no albums found. So now we have photo prism and my question is how has this manifested in the files? I'm going to close a couple of things. Files. So now we have I'm going to guess again gallery. So nothing has been created in gallery for photo prism. So that's interesting. I don't know kind of what it's expecting here. Let's take our uh take these and I'm going to copy. Nice. And then I can just go to gallery and paste and see what happens. Does it pick up on anything? Albums unsorted. No. Oh, stuff library complete rescan. I might have to do this. Oh, in it's indexing a ton of stuff. Okay.

Did you stick a photo in? I have some photos in it. I don't think most technical experts are aware of how much they take for granted because the very site of a terminal will be a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people. Yeah, agreed. If you use it from your phone, it's very easy to just upload all of your stuff. Okay, that's that's pretty sweet, too. Uh, do we have Aha, that worked nicely. I liked that. I probably could have done right. Like that was fairly simple. H I just set them in an order or at random. I successfully installed four apps programs on Linux Mint this week. Hell yeah. That's awesome.

Okay, so that worked a little bit easier, but I still had to go to like library. What did I have to do? I went to library and then I went to complete rescan, right? And that's a little bit strange that it like I had to force it to scan. One would expect the scan happens on launch. You know what I mean?

What would be the easiest low power cloud storage option? I was thinking a Raspberry Pi, but though it might be slowc basically just a Google Drive clone self-hosted Google Drive clone. Um, I'm not sure. Let's Google Drive uh clone self-host. Anybody have any ideas for that kind of thing? Here's my interventions. By the way, you can see I I do it. I really do. Um, let's do this. Okay. Own cloud. Next cloud. Yeah. Next cloud. Okay. A pi. Yeah, a pi also won't be good enough to run um that kind of thing.

Did you already try image? I did. I found that image image handles files in a really weird way that I found kind of annoying. Um, you basically have to go through their interface and it like changes the interaction. Whereas photo prism just sort of like picked up everything right away, which was nice. But this interface isn't isn't as pretty, which is, you know, something people. I ran Nextcloud off of a Pi4 and it worked, but it was pretty annoying. Yeah, I've heard bad things about Nextcloud.

Okay, so interesting. Image or Photo Prism. It seemed promising. I PhotoPrism was a little bit more intuitive to use. Um, you know, so we'll see. Let's uh let's play around with some more stuff. So, we have Jellyfin up and running. That worked beautifully. We can play Big Buck Bunny, right? Like this is this is phenomenal that this works so quickly and easily, right?

Um, let's do App Stores. Uh, what else would be useful? I mean, there's Adguard home, but to run Adguard home, you kind of have to know a little bit about your router. We can, but like me making a tutorial on router things is not going to go over well because everybody's going to have a different router UI and all of that and setting upstream DNS. I that's going to be kind of a pain. Tail scale. This is nice sync thing. Um, what is this? What do you all feel like playing around with? Any ideas?

Can you try setting an external library in image? Uh, sure. So, let's go back to image. I did try that. I found it unintuitive so far. like I have to go into administration and then I have to go to external libraries, right? And then I created an external library and then I did edit import paths and I don't know where this is pointing yet, but people won't screw around in files to upload photos. See, I get the feeling that when they see this this file manager thing, they're going to want to use it because it's familiar. people like, you know, and then they're going to be like, why doesn't that map one to one with the way image handles things? That might be a little bit confusing.

Um, I'm not saying this is bad, right? Like image is this is nice software. Uh, I'm just saying that might that might throw people off. Um, difference between Adgard and Pi Hole? Uh, I don't know actually. They both seem to accomplish similar things. Do users in Photo Prism share the images? Uh, I'm not sure yet.

Okay, Vault Warden is great. Yes, absolutely. Maybe File Stash and a small N100 box. They're not really more expensive than an Ras. Yes, agreed. N100 over Raspberry Pi most of the time. Calibbra for books. Agreed. Definitely. Oh, this will be bad. This will be container path, not the true path. And it imports not works with image. Yes. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Uh, that looks like Windows to me. Yes, that's Thank God you're here. like the the the perspective of I'm not a comfortable home lover is super useful for this conversation right now. So, thank you so much. You added the volume now. Try it again.

Uh did I I don't think I finished that. So, if I if I go back here to image, I have to go to settings. Then I have to go to image server and then I can add um and then I can click this and I can go to gallery select and then this I can map to like user source app uh library for example. Will that just put things in there? I realize that I'm not using this the way that it's intended to be used. Right? So bear with me. I am sort of trying to break things on purpose right now. Right.

Um, okay, it's doing a quick restart. Yes, Bryce, I will be doing that video soon. Um, I'm there's um there's a paper I really like on that. Actually, let's do a quick a quick thing. Um, healthy screens. So, this is a website um launched in conjunction or like to support a research project uh by a couple of really fantastic folks studying smartphone addiction. Um, and so I've been trying to get I I reached out to one of them. They they reached back out to me. They were like, "Yes, please share our research. I'd love to work with you on the 30-day cohorts and stuff like that. Um, however, I don't I'm not super comfortable with interviews, which I I kind of wanted for the video. So, I'm reaching out to their second author soon. Um, take a look at this quick and easy way to dumb down your phone in the meantime.

Okay. Person because I Yeah. And I can tell you at a high level how computers and programming work. I simply have no practical experience. Also, do these easy installs include backups? Um, yesish. Yesish. Okay. We have this one photo. Oh, I guess I have them in library. I'm not going to adjust this because now I can do the external folders thing. So I can go here go administration external libraries configure this edit import paths and this is actually going to be like what what was it user lib is it so yeah now I'm like I have to know a certain amount about kind of Unixy file paths I have to know that there's a distinction between the containers folder structure and the the hosts folder structure and that is you confusing. And then do I have to request that it rescan? Probably. Scan settings. Save. Scan all libraries. Yeah, sorry. There's a lot of there's a delay in chat, which is Yeah. And I've already got it set to fairly low. Okay. with external library with with the external library feature. That's not bad, but it took a while to get that going.

Uh, that's what I'm wondering. As Nathan is seeing, image doesn't scan the directory. So, you either need to back up the DB itself or re-upload everything from the web gooey again. Yeah. So, image works well if you want to use image for everything all the time. Yeah, which is fine. That's not a bad way to handle things. Um, it it just is a little bit strange. So, so what exactly is happening now? We have Yeah. So, I've made quite a mess of things, which is interesting. So, now we've got all these files here. I don't even remember if I put them there. So, there's upload. We might uninstall and reinstall image later and try to use it again as simply as possible. Um, but yeah, interesting.

Okay, image. I like the UI of image. I like the feel of image. I like that it looks familiar. Um, it's just this file system thing that that that bugs me. Okay, let's try app store and see what else might be interesting to people. So, we have jellyfin and we have image. This gives us photos. This gives us video. That's a lot of nice stuff to work with already. Um, what else might be nice? Adgard home for sure. We can think about that. Calibbra. So, let's Calibbra. Let's install that. I thought the dire warnings were suggestions. However silly you'd think a non-technical end user is, they're 10 times more silly than that.

Can you stick a screenshot or something in? I want to see if they rescan automatically. Oh, that's a good question. Okay. Uh, let's grab this. Oh, actually, home, Nathan. Pictures. Uh, home. Where's pictures? Okay. So, we're going to go. So, I put it in gallery, right? So, now it's reading gallery from the external thing. We're going to do this and then we're going to take a look at image and see what it does. And so, I think I think to get it to rescan, what we would have to do is go to our external libraries, go here, scan settings. No, no, no, no. So, it looks like we wouldn't There's no way to set like a cron job. It looks like Oh, maybe jobs. Okay, that's kind of fun. Uh, is there a way to say, "Hey, do your do this regularly?" Create job manage concurrency. Oh my god. Okay. It's a setting an image to scan automatically. Settings. Okay. Settings. Image. Database. Job settings. No. External library. Periodic scanning. Okay. Cool. And it is on. It's just not instant.

Okay. For example, you're in a browser that's pointing at an IP address. And I have absolutely no idea how you did that or how I'd replicate it. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, there there's still a lot of work before something like this is like super Oh my god, why am I at a 100 CPU right now? Let alone how I'd set that up in a way that does not allow any old person to access it by typing. True. Okay. Q's Google Drive. That's kind of cool. Local location of Okay. So, we have Calibbra. Do I need to do Have you ever used a local domain? I have in the past. Oh, it's the machine learning and image that is using your CPU. Interesting. Why do they do data app data? That is so Windowsy. Beta media books. So if I had an additional drive, would it have a data drive? Is that is that what this would be? And so because I don't have an external drive, it's like a lot of the stuff that would make sense does not make sense cuz that seems that also seems reasonable to me, right? Cuz yeah, we have this, we have trash, but where is data? Like we have this, where's data? Where is that? Oh, it was all caps, right? Would that even matter? We've tried this already, right? That doesn't exist. So, it's pointing to I mean, I could go in and sim link it, but then I have to go in and sim link it. Data app data app data is I assume because ZMA does bind mount for persistent data and not Docker volume. H. Okay. So, I go to Calibra web discover unread books books book. Don't I need a Calibbra server first? Isn't this just a guey? I forget how that works. Anybody? Any Calibbra users? How this work? Portable. Okay. God, this this looks like I'm about to get a virus. Hey, hey, BM Rollo. How's it going? This Calibbra web is its own thing. Yes. Okay. Nathan, hello. Yes, I use book lore. Okay. Lots of book options. The reason I'm interested in Calibbra is because there's like a Coobo integration that I'm I want to try. Um, yeah, I'm using Calibra GTK app and Calibra Companion on the e-reader, but no web UI at all. Okay. Oops. So, location of database app Calibbra web. So, yes, this is within the container. Um, and this hasn't been configured very much. So, this is not Yeah, let's try heard of this. We're going to try that. Is there an integration cava? uh coobo in casa OS is there there is a big bear repo same on zema I think so yeah I think that's what we're using okay so looks like cava doesn't have like e-reader syncing so that is a Calibbra only feature. Okay. Booklor also has a Coobo integration. Now you're speaking my language. Okay. But I need to highlight. Do you see how easy it is for me to start up a new application from this little app store? That's why I have so much hope for this. That's why I think it's cool. DDRM on Calibbra is also very nice for books. You kind of bought bought adjacent.

What's the benefit with Zema over Cassa OS? Um I'm not really sure. I went to Cassa OS and then it said explore the next generation. We have upgraded Cassa to Zema. So I was like okay. So Cassa is deprecated, right? That's why That's why I I went with this. Yeah. So, it looks like many of these things would require learning how to mount properly. So, okay. What was it? It was book lore. Okay. And unfortunately, that's not in the thing. Oh, we can add additional reposi. Wait, if we can add additional repositories. Okay gang, if we can add additional repositories, right? Doesn't that mean that we could create our own repository that has a bunch of the preconfiguration done for you? So when you install our version of Jellyfin, it it mounts to the correct places. Couldn't Could we do that? Ah, mounting. So um Oh, this this is there's a lot of lore behind this. So uh a computer has its own uh set of like hard drives and stuff like a physical computer, right? And so those hard drives are then interpreted by the computer. You can you can sort of treat them as the file system, right? Where you can see all all of the different folders and where your files are. That's the the physical computer, right? Now on that physical computer, you can run containers. Containers are kind of like they sound, self-contained computers that generally run like a very limited number of applications. Usually in the case of these kinds of containers, it's like one application, right? So it could be like jellyfin. But because it's like a little contained computer itself, it believes that it's and even though it's running on the the outside computer, it believes that it has its own file system and it can't see the outside file system, the one that like from the computer it's running on. So when I say mount, usually what that means is we're letting the inside computer, the container, see the files on the outside computer, right? And so when I say mount, usually it means like we're we're giving it we're giving that container access to other file systems. So that sound about right. Looks like the community repos on Synology or QAB. Yeah. Normies always add repos. Oh, okay. Okay, this is really good. This is really good. Normies always add repos. Yeah, because this I mean this is a really strong start kind. Yeah. Um not instead of unsandboxing the container, think about it like you're you're just poking a small uh No. Um, you're not completely unsandboxing the container. You're just providing it one small looking glass through just the one small place instead of completely unsandboxing it. Yeah, I would I would in fact always add repos. That's correct. Okay, I mean this is good to know. Like I need to know how people are using this so we can think this through. Huh? Then we can add a containerized application. Yeah, this is going to be way too much work for most people. So, let's see. Zema OS repository. Oh, sorry. I'm still on my face. Sema OS repository. Let's see. Do are there common are there common repos to add to the app store that that people like? Oh, hey, cool. Custom app store containing Linux server.io images. App store play. A not so serious casa OS app store. Mainly local Chinese applications. Cool store. Cool apps updated versions. Home automation. Big bear. Not. It is maintained by Big Bear tech world. Big Bear Tech World. Okay. Interesting. Sort of like how a dev might plug an API into a server or how I might somehow let my Weasel instance see something in my C drive. Yes. Yes. Like that. On most such systems, communitydriven add-on repos are the common way to get malware infections. Okay. Yeah. True. Um, you know what? Okay. I Oh, wow. It's already 5:30. We've been having a good time. I I did want to see how far you could push these little N100s with LLM. So, we're just going to do that real quick. And then I'm going to start thinking about some of these cuz book lore is not included. We kind of wanted book lore. Let's try this and see if that gets us book. I have this Green Day song stuck in my head. What is it? It's off dookie. Um, you know the song that goes, "Do you have the time to listen to me whine?" That one. It's going in my head. Lama server. Boom. It's deny by default that this is a situation where containerizing is really useful but causes complexity when trying to get things usable. Yeah. Interesting. to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once. You know that one. Horse power off. Are you sure? Yes. Uh, so I still need to play around with remote access and a couple of basket case. That's the one. Thank you. Basket case. I'm so glad everyone here knows knows some Green Day. better stop. YouTube will block you. I don't think I I don't think I sing well enough for them to to recognize it as the the same song. Oh, yeah. So, we never quite got the Linux client working well, did we? Right. like this this Zemo Linux client didn't scan the local network uh local network. Zero devices found. Yeah. Am I just not set up for remote access yet? Oh, yeah. No, it's it's turned on by default. Okay. Bunch of millennials. You hit too many notes for their content ID. I should sing worse. And I don't I there's no point in my phone is such a piece of garbage that there's Oh, wait. Maybe my tablet. [Music] Anybody use um Apple's new liquid glass interface yet? Have you have you all done the update? If you're an Apple user cuz I hate it. Oh, okay. The ZMA client is out on iOS. Sweet. It's asking me for my password because I turned off Face ID stuff and I don't actually remember my password. Okay. Well, never mind. Cool. Done it. Hate it. What is this? Having a disposable computer to to mess about with is a great idea for learning. Join command send. So, for some reason, this client just doesn't work. Ah, Nvidia driver was unable to open. Why do I need the Nvidia driver? Wow, weird. Okay. Liquid. Done it. Hate it. Liquid glass. Ah, yes. Yeah. Liquid glass sucks. Uh, okay. So, I think there's there there's something fruitful here to discuss. Um, there's something fruitful here. Whether it's Zema, whether it's Umbrell, people are trying these these like self-hosted as an appliance things. There needs to be some more work, but okay, this is not working. Let's go Lama, I guess. Yeah. And then but there's no like super curated set of repositories. And then also it looks like Zema OS is is closed. Are you running Zema in a VM? No, I'm running it on bare metal. Um, uh, open source Yes. Okay. But I saw the Proxmox tab. Oh, yeah, fair enough. I did try ZMA in a VM earlier and that didn't go well. Ola is running tight. So then I would need to do like a web UI, right? Yeah, let's just do that and then probably point it to Olama. Olama is running. Awesome. I know a lot of techsavvy people who would never entrust their family's photo collection to anything else than a turnkey NAS. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, yeah, I definitely wouldn't like if I were taking my home lab more seriously in terms of like this is infrastructure I'm very serious about using and it has to work very well instead of the experiment that I have, I definitely would have gone trunaz or something like that as opposed to and I would have bought nicer hard drives, reliable hard drives instead of some scrap instead of the like hodgepodge of ZFS stuff that I slammed together and NFS nonsense. Um, yeah. Okay. So, what did we discover? What did we discover so far? ZMA OS has some promising features. That's what we discovered. And we've also heard of Umbreal Umbreal OS and that also seems really interesting. I like that it comes pre-done with like umbrell.local. That's quite nice. So, it looks like you could just buy the device and plug it in. That's strong. That image is great and everyone should use it. Yes, image was quite nice. I I I admit H I'm not going to lie, I hate their color scheme, but that doesn't really matter. Okay. Open web UI. [Music] Okay, this looks cool. System data app data. H Okay. Sorry. You you ever notice when you're watching my stream that as I get like kind of I get kind of tired and hungry at some point and then I just stop talking. What the f what? Unravel secrets. It's a It's an LLM thing, dude. I think uh open web UI will be very slow for you. I imagine it will be. Um I'm I'm just here to sort of push this thing to its limits for fun. The umbrell machine looks nicer than my main rig. Fair. Okay. Honestly, yeah, me too. Okay. Well, this interface is very um you know, chat gpt. How do I tell it what my where my LLM service is? Yeah, no model selected. How do I feed it one? Wow, they really just copy pasted this. That's hilarious. From Olam. Pull from.com. Oh, I don't need the Olama server. I can just pull a model. Okay. So instead of providing me a list and querying for me, it sort of just tells I have to like copy paste the exact same thing. I guess you have to specify in settings. Yeah. Advanced parameters. No external tools. Okay. Probably this uh I think so. This probably huh? import add a connection open API think under connections you have to spot add connection okay oh tool servers I think those are separate specify in settings admin settings huh this is models. Import presets. Export presets. Manage models. Oh, hey, it found it found. No, it's running its own lama here. Okay, cool. Um, so I don't need two lamas if I want this chat interface. However, can I enter something here? No, I can't. So, is this Zema better than Mint? Oh, these are different beasts. Mint is for your desktop. Zema is for your like self-hosting. Um, like your like your home lab. I I like Okay, I'm going to start drawing I'm going to start drawing a distinction between the home lab and self-hosting. In my mind, a home lab is something where you're exploring the technology for the fun of learning the technology, right? And that sort of thing. It's a lab, meaning you're experimenting. Self-hosting is hosting, right? Hosting things you want to use. I would I would argue that not everybody who self-hosts is a home labber. Just just so that we can like have some consistency with our terminology, right? So, I would call Zema OS a really decent starting point, a nice tool so far that needs a little bit more polish, but is getting somewhere. Um, that helps you self-host, but maybe doesn't help you home lab as much. You know what I mean? It is. Okay, hold on. More user friendly. So, Are we sure? This doesn't seem right. This is saying uh Okay. All right. Well, whatever. Let's do um what's a really small model. The fact that it doesn't give you like a searchable list is bizarre to me. Models. I want like a real real little guy. Deepseek R1B 1.5B. Yeah, something something little. Can I do that? Okay, awesome. Uh oh, sorry. I saw OS and thought it was just like a normal Linux OS. Oh, no problem at all. Never apologize for asking questions. We're here to learn together. I frequently ask chat questions and poor Dixie has been doing their best to uh to help me out and I have been nothing short of like belligerently just going around their very good recommendations. Um okay, let's try this. Sure. Tell me a fun fact about the Roman Empire. And let's at the meantime we can do this to check. Oh, interesting. I didn't realize Deepseek was one of these thinking ones. Deepseek is thinking way too much about this. Okay, cool. Thought for 18 seconds. I mean, that that's actually surprisingly useful. How do you spell strawberry? ask about Zema OS. Good idea. So, you know, the question would be what I'm interested in is is there um I want to see if it can do this. I want to see if um an N100 is powerful enough to do enough llming to basically just interpret just interpret enough to do like voice assistant stuff because I have this home assistant voice thing I want to configure. What? Okay. So, it is losing its mind. Yeah, I'm not surprised. It's it's it's pretty small. Pretty small. Models this small I don't expect to do very well. Quen quen coder. Oh wow. Just 30B. We're not doing there. What time is it? If it does, it's better than chat GPT. Okay, let's give it a shot. Uh, maybe we'll start a new chat because it seems to really care. What time is it? Uh, okay. Oh, okay. Let's do size. Okay, let's try this. Oh, it is. Oh, I can hear the fans spinning up on the little PC. Strawberry wins again. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And you can see we're pushing this machine to its limits. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Um, search model. Can I do this? No. Pull. Okay, cool. I wish that had like a like a an active search. That would be nice. Um, okay. So, what do you all think so far? What are our thoughts on this? I'm fairly impressed and I want to check out Umbrell later. I can't stop customizing my Hyperland setup. Yeah, you're doomed. You're doomed. I'm sorry. Okay, what am I interested in now? So, whatever. I don't think I have to be logged in. Might try installing this to see if I can use it. Okay. Let me know how that goes because that that could that could go a long way. Okay, cool. Whatever. Okay. So far as a Nazos, it's similar to similar level as U Greens. A bit behind Sinno, way nicer than QAP, but overall the same ballpark. Okay. Interesting. What is Sinno? What is Sinno's DSM disc station manager? Okay. Okay, cool. Synology app. Maybe it's time to shut down some of the apps. Poor little machine. True. Yeah, it's working pretty hard. Stop. Stop. Stop. Okay, we'll leave it there. What is Oh, wow. It opened up a browser. It's got like its own little browser guy. Huh. Well, that's actually fairly impressive. Never shut down image. Never. Does image not respond well to being shut down? Or is that more a joke? I got you host installed sort of, but I have to type magic bash strings my friend gave me to make it work. I'm determined to make that work, but once it's set up, I'll probably uninstall it and try Zema. Yeah, I looked at I looked at Uno Host. This looks This strikes me as as probably probably better um or better is the wrong phrase. More accessible. More joke because then you can't use it. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so so so all right, we're we're we're going to call it a stream soon, but I have some thinking some thinking to do because obviously I've got to make a video this week, right? And I'm thinking about what to make it on. And I don't know if I'm quite ready. I agree, but I'm engaging fully with some cast fallacy. Fair enough. Been there. Um, okay. I don't know if I'm ready to do a Zemo Zema OS video. I think I would have to explore some features a little bit more. Don't like the Docker part. You don't like the Docker part? Wh which which part exactly do you mean? Like the way that it interacts with Docker that it uses Docker like what what part? Um H yeah because how would I like what would what would I be saying? How do I make something that's really useful to people is the question, right? Do I know this well enough? Can I pitch it in such a way that it's like this is now useful to people who want to get started self-hosting but don't know how I could walk through the installation process. I could guide them through installing a couple of useful things but it's not quite there. The whole mounting and uh mounting and port thing. Yes. Okay. That was that was confusing. You can run a virtual Synology NAS on Proxmox. That's pretty cool for me. Cass OS made me start up my self-hosting but now I still use it but I don't but I get under the hood and use docker compose beside it. Okay, kind of agree though. I'm not sure there is a simpler solution which is maintainable. It gets convoluted fast. Yeah. H okay. Right. H It's very close. It's very close. Do you know what I mean? like it's but I'm I'm like it falls short. Okay. The evaluation that I use when I'm thinking like should I make a video on this is will it be useful to somebody not will it be like the endgame solution of all things. I think some people will find this useful and I could do a tutorial and I could show off how to get started with Jellyfin and I could show off how to get started with something like image and cava and that would be useful. It would be like hey look you're up and running self-hosting but it feels fragile. I also don't have a NAS to run it on so I can't show them any of the data like the the storage stuff. I'm not going to have another .naz anytime soon. So, it's not like that's a I'm either making this or I'm not. Okay. If one of these tools somehow partnered with a DNS provider to make reverse proxies easy, that would be awesome. That would be very cool. H if you made a tutorial, I would attempt to follow it, but the odds of me completing it are probably low. Okay. And do you feel that that's because this is too complex? Do you feel that like you've already got other things that you're interested in? What would be what are the blockers there? That way I can start to think about like well how can we how can we fix these blockers or like overcome these setting up your own NAS isn't something I'd recommend to beginners. Losing your data is way too risky. Yeah, wait. ZMA OS is an OS and not just an overlay on top of a Linux server. Well, it it is an overlay on top of it's like my understanding is it's adapted Debian that launches the the Linux server. Yeah. Lack of knowledge versus lack of effort or caring. Yeah. H see the thing is I'm I am excited about this though and I want to talk about it. Buying such a nice Zema cube with Zema OS pre-installed could be a recommendation. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking, right? But yeah, because that that is very close to the appliance situation. And then yeah, and I I could always suggest that you use a cloud provider for like vital things because they do have this backup feature, right? So you can do plus, you can do cloud, you can do Google Drive, blah blah blah. You link it, you say here's new backup. What exactly does this do? Oh, select a source. So I can say take my ZMA OS media and then I can say put it on some cloud provider and that's and there's a backup raw dog terminal noey is the way. I mean that's how I do it but that's not accessible. Wald garden to zema instead of something else. walled garden to ZMA instead of something else. I mean like I don't view this as a very walled garden personally. Right. Because I do have a command line on the other screen. Right. If I jump over here, right, we've got we've got a command line. We can do stuff. It's just Linux. But but it's also this, right? It's also this cuz originally Cassa OS was just like a script you in you run on a Debian server and then it launches you Cassa's web UI. Yeah. See, I mean same here, right? Like I I also want to get off of cloud and I want to help people get off of cloud. But at the same time, some things are so vital that you don't trust yourself with the data yet. But I guess that's always a risk. Like if you're taking control of it, like your your options are either take responsibility, right? Take full your your options are take full responsibility or delegate some of that responsibility to cloud and allow them to do whatever they do to you. Right. Well, okay. Okay. I don't have to make a full pitch, right? I can just introduce people to the idea. Here's an idea we've been thinking about as a community for a while. We've been thinking about these like cloud cloud features as an appliance in the home, right? so that people can have data privacy without having to become like self-hosting experts. And I've been looking for solutions that are, you know, as close to this idea as possible so I don't have to build from scratch or so that our community doesn't have to build from scratch. Here is one of the things that I found at Zeba OS. I'm going to walk you through some of the way like first we're going to discuss the importance of like data privacy blah blah blah. Um and then we're going to get into some of the barriers, right? Like generally home labbing is is a very difficult thing. it requires a lot of techn technical expertise. Here is one of the solutions I found that is fairly close or that that is taking steps towards ease, right? Um just being able to self-host without having to be a home labber. I could even introduce the distinction we talked about earlier, the the distinction between self-hosting and home labbing. um and say, you know, this has taken us away from having to deal with Docker Compose, be in the CLI, be a little bit of a Linux expert and allowed us given us metaphors that we're comfortable and used to, a file manager like Google Google Drive, an app store like you would find on Mac, right? And you can just install apps and here's a couple of apps that I would find really useful, right? Jellyfin for video, Calibbra Web for for or or Kavita for ebooks, um Image for photos. You can even do some AI stuff. That's pretty cool. And then there's the ZMA Cube. ZMA Cube takes us a step further. So, you don't have to do do the installation process yourself, which is one of the things that I imagine will be most prohibitive. Many, many people will struggle just to install an operating system because that's weird. You have to flash a USB drive. You then have to plug it in. You have to hit F11 and F12 and and and maybe F8 and sometimes delete and then also maybe escape. and then maybe maybe you'll get to your boot menu, right? And that's a lot of knowledge all at once being shipped that device could be extremely valuable. So, and then I could say like am I ready to endorse this as a product? I don't know. However, I think that the concept of cloud as a as an appliance is really valuable and there's a lot of work that needs to be done in this space, but this is taking steps in the right direction. We'll be exploring more of these further on the YouTube channel, probably taking a look at Umbrell and also taking a deeper look at some of the applications we can use um uh that help free us from the attention economy and to a greater degree like surveillance capitalism. And but yeah, for now I highly recommend you take a look at this if you have some amount of technical expertise but maybe aren't uh don't want to manage an entire home lab yourself. You just want to self-host boom video. I think yeah, I think that could be a good video. What do you guys think? Sorry, I know I just went on like a big rant. That's how I think about videos, by the way. That's that's my creative process is I I imagine pitching it to people. Um, and and when I say pitch, what I mean is uh not I want you to do this. Pitching it as in I think this is helpful to you. How can I explain that sufficiently? If I can't explain it, then it's probably not that helpful or I don't understand it well enough. So that's why I do that. Okay, let's read through this. Um a smart thing to do would be to back it up somewhere. For me, that's my spare PC. In a similar situation, when one of our project manager asked me today which weather station to buy, I didn't recommend fine offset plus ESP32. Would I do but pre-built net atmo? Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe also teaching people that cloud is just someone else's computer. That's a really good idea. I like that. Liking this pitch. Yes, though. For one at my skill level, home labbing and self-hosting are in disccernible. Okay, that's good to know. You can sell common people the box. They plug it via LAN cable and connect it from other devices. Yes, I had to flash Uno host like four times. I mean, you've seen my stream. I have to flash things like four times, multiple times. Uh that that either never goes away or I don't learn. Apple approach to home lab. Yeah, a little bit. Honestly, I have zero idea why I had to do that. Fair enough. Or like you recommend ubiquity instead of open work plus open sense. uh when they ask for home network gear. Techies have fun at tinkering, but for everyone, yes, I I would agree with this. And this this strikes me as closer to the ubiquity environment than say the nonsense that I've stitched together, right? I think it's an excellent video idea. Okay, great. That was a good outline though for one at my skill. You are most of us. I think it's important to know that Windows does something weird when you try to load off of a off of a USB. Does it really? Haven't played with Windows in a while. If Zema is smooth enough to improve spouse approval factor, that's huge. My home lab is too complicated for my spouse who looks using but no setup. Who likes using but no setup. Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think it's like um spouse approval factor comes down to like the applications, right? And how easy it is to access them and if you can access them remotely. like it needs to be as easy for the non-technical partner uh to to use it as it is for them to use Google Drive, right? I recently upgraded Windows 10 Box to Linux. I got very lucky and had no problems flashing my USBs. Congrats. Welcome to the Linux club. I'm typing this into Vivaldi on my new Linux Mint box now. Nice. That's awesome. Did Did you Did you come for my Linux Mint YouTube video? Is that what that is? or did you find Linux Mint on your own and then stumbled on my video or my stream? Either way, you're more than welcome to be here. Okay. Okay. So, it sounds like we have some basic approval for this con for this video as a concept okay. Trying to flash Uno host gave me some weird error. H USB port itself. So, Windows booted at at all, the install would fail. Huh. I think I think I totally missed the point of the conversation I just got in. Fair enough. Sorry. We're uh I I'm I'm just thinking about if I like Zema OS enough to make a reasonable video about it. And I think I do. I think I do. So, I think I Yeah. Yeah. news feed. Oh, I found your stream from somewhere else. I think I followed gardener Brian's guide for Abuntu and Mint, but I joined your Discord before I upgraded. Oh, cool. Okay. Sorry, off topic question. On some networks, my VPN wire guard won't connect when it's on. I can't access internet. Feels like I'm blocked out. Any idea why? No idea over here. Not from me. Maybe somebody smarter. Maybe keep some difficulty level at solution recommendations. Like, how much do you want to tinker and control yourself? Not exactly a skill thing. Everyone's okay with being lazy, too. Yes, I agree. Okay, thanks, Tim. Really appreciate the the feedback on that. Also, looks looks like Zema is Caso Caso OS. Yes. Okay, cool. Join your community because I liked your idea of home labing with a purpose in helping people self-host and be more digitally minimal. Awesome. Well, I'm glad. Those are all my purposes. Sounds like sounds like you found the right place as long as I continue to make good stuff. Okay. All right. I think I thought this through. I'm gonna I'll write up I'll write up some stuff and we'll chat. And this Friday, I will not forget Kaiju Friday. I I keep doing it and I won't I won't forget. Uh you're also not the only one who didn't think this all through. Okay. Yeah. I think I like this idea. I think I like this video. I think it will be helpful. um both to people interested in starting to self-host maybe sort of breaking the ice to like hey it doesn't have to be incredibly difficult you don't have to be on the CLI you don't have to copy paste docker compose you don't need to make a make file all that crap and then maybe as a call to action to more technical people to see how we can improve this experience yes I send the weekly kaiju to my friend that's a I love that awesome Japan always forgets about Godzilla from one movie to the next. Okay. Yeah, cuz I would love I would love um if we could like as a community fork Zema or create an image or an ISO that comes with a number of these Docker containers or images the Docker pre-installed and configured to be to have like sane file defaults for like a core set of applications, right? the basically the I want to replace cloud for photos, video, uh, photos, like the sort of Netflixy stuff and ebooks and maybe audiobooks and music. if we could get like those five things down, make the installer super easy, um, and then also share them as a repository of Docker containers or Docker images that are preconfigured, that could be really valuable. That could be really valuable. Okay, I came in late on this stream, but if ZMO OS can make it easier for people to self-host via a gooey or something, that sounds like winning. Okay. Yeah. Civer's tech independence article was an awesome reference. Followed the instructions and set up my own VPS. Moved my domain running through Google Workspace to hosting my own email. Nice. I think having an AI was huge in helping me set it up. I'm all for your push button vision for this. Okay. Also, don't forget music. Yeah, same page. I'm a huge music lover and I I one of my projects I really want to get off of um I want to get off of music streaming as much as possible. That sounds like a lot of work. It does. But we have a community of really highly intelligent, capable technical people and a community of people who don't have that technical expertise but are really solid communicators about what their blockers are, what's stumbling with them. Um, so when you put those two things together and an abundance of time, which is I mean it's not like we need we need to make this to keep a company going in the next three months or something. It's like we have time to just work towards this then we could build something cool. An RS RSS thing would be helpful too. Okay. Found that file system on CAS OS is less stupid. Found that the file system on Casa OS is less stupid. Okay. Interesting. Might play with Cassa then. We'll see. It's work worth doing. It also might help to add things like offline Wikipedia. Oh yeah, I'm really interested in that as an idea as well. Okay. Okay. This has been really really helpful for me everyone. Thank you so much for uh for for spending the time with me. I think I learned a lot. I think I learned a lot. I think I think there's some some interesting potential here. Yeah. Anyways, this was fun. Sorry, I had my like deep in thinking face and it's like Anyways, yeah, thank you all for your time and attention. Uh, this was this was this was a good time. I will catch you Monday for the next stream. And unless I do a stream tomorrow to check out Umbreal, we'll see. I I don't think I will. Um, but I might get bored. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh hopefully I'll have a video out somewhere between Friday and Sunday. I'll let you know. Well, I won't let you know. You'll see it. Okay. Thank you all so much. I'll catch you I'll catch you next week. This was fun.