Self-Hosted Awesomeness
We discuss our picks of the best self-hosted apps (with Home Assistant and media-related apps off-limits) including Hermes, Frigate, Healthchecks, Pangolin, Pi-hole, and more.
What we cover
- Some of our favorite self-hosted apps!
- Stephen’s Pick: Hermes for a self-hosted memory and orchestration layer that sits in front of Claude and ChatGPT (but is self-hosted), complete with Telegram integration (and other chat apps).
- Geoff’s Picks: Frigate for machine-learning-powered NVR and object detection, and Healthchecks for catching silently failed cron jobs.
- Adam’s Picks: Pangolin as a self-hosted alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels, and Pi-hole for whole-network ad blocking, with a detour into Technitium and NextDNS as alternatives.
- Alex’s Picks (and honorable mentions): Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) for archiving links, and Paperless-ngx for document management, as well as Dawarich for location history and Termix for SSH/your other connection needs.
In this episode, the BitFlip crew brings their favorite, must-run self-hosted apps, and to keep things interesting hometown favorites like Home Assistant, Plex, and Jellyfin explicitly off the table.
Stephen walks through Hermes, a self-hosted layer that sits in front of Claude and ChatGPT and keeps context and memory persistent across conversations, regardless of which backend model is doing the work. He talks about linking it to Telegram for on-the-go note-taking, running it in its own VM and VLAN out of caution, and his early experiments with spinning up actual sub-agents for specialized tasks.
Geoff shares his two picks: Frigate, a machine-learning-powered NVR that handles object detection for security cameras with hardware acceleration, and Healthchecks, a dead-simple way to catch cron jobs and backups that fail silently. Adam presses him on Frigate’s acceleration options and some clever automation ideas, while Geoff explains how Healthchecks (paired with Runitor) has saved him from finding out about broken jobs the hard way.
After that, Adam unpacks his own picks: Pangolin, which he describes as self-hosted Cloudflare Tunnels with built-in authentication and reverse proxy features, and Pi-hole for whole home ad blocking. That leads into a debate with Adam and Geoff about Pangolin’s shift toward a business-backed license, and a side-by-side of Pi-hole, Technitium, and NextDNS for DNS filtering.
Finally, Geoff relays a few of Alex’s picks: Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) for archiving and tagging saved links and Paperless-ngx for scanning and organizing documents. Geoff also shares some honorable mentions of Dawarich for location history recording and tracking and Termix for SSH’ing on the go.
Tags: self-hosted AI agents, Hermes, Frigate, NVR, object detection, Healthchecks, cron monitoring, Pangolin, Cloudflare Tunnels, Pi-hole, Technitium, NextDNS, Karakeep, Paperless-ngx, Dawarich, Termix
Links
- Hermes:
- Frigate:
- Healthchecks:
- Pangolin:
- Pi-hole:
- Karakeep:
- Paperless-NGX:
- Dawarich:
- Termix:
Transcript
Adam: Welcome to episode 10 of BitFlip. This is the show where we take a pragmatic look at infrastructure and the wider world of technology. Sometimes not so pragmatic when I’m leading the show. You guys are welcome ahead of time. My name is Adam. 00:00
Geoff: I’m Geoff. 00:14
Stephen: And I’m Stephen. 00:16
Adam: And today we’re doing something a little bit different, guys. So we took on a little challenge here that we wanted to talk about our version of the S tier, two S tier self-hosted apps per host. And the challenge included that we couldn’t go with some hometown favorites, such as Home Assistant, and we couldn’t go with Plex or Jellyfin. I don’t know if it was restricted to all media, but 00:18
Stephen: No Radarr stuff. 00:45
Adam: generally that was kind of the, 00:45
Geoff: No Radarr 00:47
Adam: yeah, 00:47
Geoff: stuff, 00:47
Adam: yeah. 00:48
Geoff: which basically rules out most of the media stuff. 00:48
Adam: Correct. 00:51
Geoff: Radarr. 00:52
Adam: Yep. Yep. 00:52
Geoff: And also for those 00:52
Adam: So 00:53
Geoff: wondering, Alex is not feeling well tonight, which is why he’s not joining us. But we have some of his suggestions at the end of the episode, so we’ll talk about what he was going to talk about. 00:53
Stephen: Everyone can click off now. 01:02
Adam: or send him all your love and good vibes so that he gets better quickly. 01:07
Stephen: Or that. 01:10
Adam: You 01:10
Stephen: Or 01:10
Adam: could 01:10
Stephen: that. 01:11
Adam: do both of those things if you want. 01:11
Stephen: 100%. 01:12
Adam: So, uh, Steven, you’re gonna, you’re gonna kind of lead the way here with your two S tier picks, 01:13
Adam: correct? 01:19
Stephen: Yes, it’s not going to be two because I’m horribly overworked because I’m self-employed. But before we get 01:20
Stephen: going, 01:25
Stephen: I just want to bring attention to our stream sponsor for Semgoy. If you’re looking for alcoholic wipes, you can do no better. They don’t actually sponsor us, but everyone that’s on Patreon does. And I like you. So I have in my topics something that I don’t know how to say because it’s one of those Internet things that I read. And in my mind, it goes one way and I’m sure someone will say something else. But we’re going to go with Hermes or Hermes. The thing 01:26
Geoff: Hermes. 01:57
Stephen: is, is that do you think 01:58
Geoff: Hermes. 01:59
Stephen: so? Because if you go to their website, it sure does look like a bunch of French guys built it. But hey, I could be wrong. 01:59
Geoff: Fair, but I say it’s the Greek god, and the Greek god here for us English-speaking 02:05
Stephen: OK. 02:09
Geoff: people is Hermes, so therefore 02:09
Stephen: Okay, so let’s 02:10
Geoff: I 02:11
Stephen: go 02:11
Geoff: say 02:11
Stephen: with Hermes. 02:11
Geoff: Hermes. 02:11
Stephen: That’s 02:12
Geoff: Hermes. 02:12
Stephen: fine. Okay, Hermes. So I’ve been using this lately, and it has quickly become the best self-hosted thing that I have going for me. I have been playing with, you know, Claude, and I’ve been playing 02:12
Geoff: What 02:26
Stephen: with… 02:26
Geoff: is it first for those at home who may 02:27
Stephen: I’m 02:28
Geoff: not 02:28
Stephen: getting 02:28
Geoff: know 02:29
Stephen: there, 02:29
Geoff: what 02:29
Stephen: I’m 02:29
Geoff: Hermes 02:29
Stephen: getting there, 02:29
Geoff: is? 02:29
Stephen: I swear 02:29
Geoff: Okay, 02:29
Stephen: to you. 02:30
Geoff: okay. 02:30
Stephen: And I’ve been getting to… So I’ve been using Claude, and I’ve been using ChatGPT, right? And so the problem that I’ve had is that which AI model have I been using for what conversations and what projects, right? And so I was thinking like, how do I get to a point where I either have to keep a silly list of what I was talking to who about and such, or is there a way to just bring everything into one? And so Hermes sits on top of these LLMs and keeps all of your contacts local, right? You can self-host it or you could put it on a VPS or whatever. But basically it’s kind of like a gatekeeper to the conversations that go out to Claude or ChatGPT. It will remember things pretty much infinitely. I’m assuming that there’s like a database limit, but I don’t think I’ll ever get there. But basically you can build your own personal assistant that remembers all of your conversations without having to worry where you had them. The big thing for me has been that I’ve linked it to Telegram and I understand that you know, ChatGPT or Claude, I’m sure can work kind of in the same way where you have like a 02:31
Stephen: mobile connect thing. But I really like it being on Telegram because I just use that app anyway. Just today I was at a client’s location and I wanted to take notes about the infrastructure that I saw and and what I need to do here to implement a phone system and whatnot. And I was basically just taking notes and talking directly to Hermes. I would put in a bunch of information and I would say, you know, we’re doing a phone quote. 03:51
Stephen: You know, what are some of the other things I may not have touched on? And because I’ve created a document that I shared earlier in the morning about what the main 04:23
Stephen: things that I go over for each one of these quotes, it was able to say, hey, don’t forget to ask the following things or look for the following things. So normally I’d really only have boring self-hosted apps like Home Assistant and whatnot. But like this one is pretty recent and has made a bigger impact in my daily life than I ever thought that it would. 04:32
Geoff: So it’s kind of like I think I know a little bit about Hermes. It’s kind of like open. It’s like a next generation version of OpenClaw. That kind of a fair way of talking 04:56
Stephen: Yeah, 05:05
Geoff: about it. 05:05
Stephen: I think that’s a fair way of doing it. I never fiddled with the other one. I saw OpenClaw as kind of being like the first generation of a product, and I’m sure it’s probably quite good as well. I solely went off of, well, Alex used it, and then a couple of other YouTube guys really spoke highly of this. And so I thought, I can just spin this up in a VM on my infrastructure and realistically, I’ve got nothing to lose here other than a couple hours of fiddling and it’s turned out great. 05:05
Geoff: That’s cool. 05:36
Adam: So the, I guess the killer feature is the fact that it’s on your local infrastructure and your, or what do you consider the killer feature 05:37
Stephen: Well, the killer 05:47
Adam: for 05:47
Stephen: feature 05:47
Adam: it to be? 05:47
Stephen: is that it’s remembering all of the conversations I’ve had. And I know that ChatGPT has been doing this for a little while, but it’s remembering all the conversations I’ve had, regardless of whether I’m using Claude in the background, or if I’m using Chat, or if I switch to something else. You can completely change the providers of the backend compute. 05:48
Adam: Mm-hmm. 06:09
Geoff: Hmm. 06:10
Stephen: and just continue conversations. You can even, I’ve only scraped the very surface, but you can even create profiles in there. So you could create a profile if you had multiple businesses. You could have like a personal assistant. You could have an assistant for your accounting. You could do all sorts of things and switch profiles so that it builds context on those things. Of course, you could always just do it for your whole life, but I think that that might get a little confusing to it. I don’t know yet. Maybe it doesn’t. But the other thing you can do is you can attach multiple accounts for like your Claude and for 06:10
Stephen: ChatGPT. And you can kind of say, hey, if you’re going to do this complex code thing 06:43
Stephen: and go off on on Claude and use Claude or whatever, so long as you still have that. Yeah, it’s just like a wrapper on top of all of the services that seems to be working great. 06:48
Adam: Can you constrain the tools as well? So 07:03
Adam: I’ve seen Hermes in action before. So my good friend Marty lives up in Kentucky and I was seeing him orchestrate amazing things. It was a little unnerving because he had names for them and 07:09
Adam: they were 07:21
Adam: referred to in a way that was a little too human for my liking, but it was impressive. And they had almost like different personalities, but different points of focus is what I would say. And so there was kind of almost like a team of them that would work together in this kind of interesting dynamic way for different tasks. 07:22
Stephen: Yeah. And you’ve been able to do this, I suppose, with Claude and whatnot too. There was always a bunch of videos and stuff that I saw on Instagram that kind of alluded to having like a team of agents working for you doing different things that are specialized. And I tried this in just Claude and what it ended up doing initially was just kind of pretending that it had multiple agents. 07:42
Stephen: Right. 08:08
Stephen: So like it created I told it to create this team for web development and and I wanted a graphics guy. I wanted a 08:08
Stephen: back 08:16
Stephen: end DB guy and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it said I can do that, but I’m not going to create separate agents. I’m just going to look at those problems from the perspective of those things. Later, I found out that you actually can get it to spin up actual sub agents. And you can even tell it, you know, you’re the manager of these sub agents, but make sure that they actually are sub agents and to be able to do the work faster. Of course, your token count flies pretty quickly, your usage rather. And so you kind of have to be careful there. I have not touched that in Hermes. I do think that it is a thing. And I think that I can create a whole, I don’t know, staff of these guys to be working for me. And I definitely will explore that because I’d really like to be able to call upon a web designer or whatever, but yeah. 08:16
Geoff: so i guess i have two questions one does can it use your chat gpt or claude subscription or do you have to pay like by the token with the api 09:07
Stephen: So right now, I have it primarily using Codex, which is the ChatGPT one, and it can just use my subscription. I don’t have to use API, and so it’s not eating away at my dollars in a big way. Honestly, I don’t even have like a huge ChatGPT subscription. I think it’s like the base kind of model one that allows you to use Codex. And I’ve just been it feels unlimited, but I don’t 09:17
Geoff: Okay. 09:43
Stephen: I don’t consider myself a ridiculously heavy user for what I would use chat GPT for. 09:43
Geoff: Fair. I mean, I kind of built something similar because I wanted a very stripped down chat bot kind of a thing that had some AI stuff. So I built one that could do… It can read my calendar and it can say, hey, here’s what’s coming up in your calendar. It can integrate with Home Assistant and pull out the weather. And I can do basic reminders and tasks and stuff like that. But… Okay, what I threw together with, you know, Claude code probably isn’t anything on what Hermes can do. So I’ve been intrigued by Hermes and I might spin it up. 09:48
Stephen: You really should. Everything you’ve described is absolutely something it does. It 10:22
Geoff: Okay. 10:25
Stephen: natively talks Home Assistant and everything else. But I think it’s really well thought out. I’ve just run it in its own VM running like Ubuntu server. I don’t know if there’s any benefit to running it on like a desktop so that it might be able to take over GUI applications. I don’t know. I’ve not looked at that aspect, but right now it’s just sitting in just a terminal and it just it has its own little box and I’ve even put in its own little VLAN because I’m a paranoid fellow and I am scared about what it can do like honestly I don’t know yet right I have not 10:26
Geoff: Yeah. 11:01
Stephen: connected it into my email that scares the the Jesus 11:01
Geoff: Oh 11:04
Stephen: straight 11:04
Geoff: yeah. 11:04
Stephen: out of me um there’s not a lot of Jesus in me if I’m honest but um yeah I just haven’t given it anything of of super value i’ll say certainly it knows my name it knows my company’s name and i really don’t mind telling it that stuff but at the end of the day when it’s working with chat gpt and whatnot it’s still sending that data out and so i guess at the end of the day you’re still confined to whatever agreement that you’ve agreed with chat gpt and whatnot about what your personal data is being used for that said if you ever start getting into the local llm stuff You can attach it to that and then truly all of your contacts would be local. But I feel like I could probably talk way more about that, but then no one else will talk about anything. So I think at this point, because I don’t have a second app, I’m going to throw it off over to our friend Jeff here. 11:04
Geoff: All right. So my two are a little different. So my first one is Frigate, which is a NVR, which is a network video recording app, which is basically your security cameras around your house or property or whatever else you want to record stuff on and want to keep track of what’s going on. Um, It’s similar to if you’ve ever ran Blue Iris or if you ran Shinobi or ZoneMinder or any of the other number of apps out there that have ever done NVR type stuff. It’s very similar to that. But I think it is by far the most polished and most functional one I have tried. I loved Blue Iris when I ran it back in the day. But its Achilles heel was it needed a Windows box. I tried running it in a virtual machine and doing Quick Sync. 12:03
Geoff: Never got it working properly. I tried it even in Docker. As you can imagine, that did not go well. So about… Four or five years ago, I moved over to Frigate because I got tired of having, you know, a dedicated Windows box. I wanted to be done with it. And so I installed Frigate. A bunch of my friends have been running it. And it’s really slick what it can do. I mean, again, it does your basic recording. You put cameras into it and it’ll record the cameras. It’ll do whatever you say. I want to record this camera, this camera, this camera, give it the IP addresses. Cool. It can do that. the real secret sauce is that it has done machine learning on actual security camera footage. And you can actually train it yourself on something. I’ll talk about that in more in a minute, but it actually is trained on security camera footage. So when it’s, you know, it’s not trained on just every type of image that’s out there. It’s trained specifically on, this is what a security camera is going to look like for its image quality and, you know, what’s going to be in it. And then this is a person. Um, And so I have managed to, with the training that I have done, because I’ve been able to, you know, you can go in, you can say, this was a person, you missed this one, or no, that was just a light pole. That’s not a person. Don’t, you know, don’t trigger on that one. I basically have eliminated any false positives or any misses, you know, around my house. So basically, every time there’s actually a person walking around, I get an alert. Uh, and I can feed that into Home Assistant where it integrates very well with Home Assistant over MQTT. And then I can get a learn on my phone. I also can do like filtering with, you know, Home Assistant a little bit. So that way if like, you know, my front door is open, I don’t need to get a ping because usually I’m going to be there looking at whoever’s coming or 12:50
Geoff: it’s 14:32
Geoff: me walking out the front door. Um, but it is. Yeah, I’ve had a couple issues where it’s not necessarily the most performant, and that needs to be my setup, where going through recordings, I have to kind of refresh the page a few times to get it to load. But for me, it never misses. Basically, it always records. I have never had an issue going back and finding what I need, and it just works. I don’t know. Do you guys run it at all, or do you guys have anything like that? 14:32
Stephen: I wanted to run this, and Alex actually sent me his Coral TPU thing, the little Coral USB. 14:59
Geoff: TPU, yeah. 15:06
Stephen: Sorry, yeah, TPU. I just never ended up putting it in there, and I think I read quite recently that that’s not even used anymore. Maybe there’s a better option for that kind of thing, but it always intrigued me that I could use a little USB stick to actually power all of that looking up as to what is a dog and what is a cat and whatnot. 15:07
Adam: I think I have two of those Coral TPUs. But interestingly, along the lines of what you were saying, Stephen, I believe that’s not like the 15:30
Geoff: Yeah. 15:37
Adam: typical method for acceleration anymore. I think most people are using like the Intel 15:37
Adam: iGPU 15:43
Adam: is a good solution for that from what I’ve read. But what I always thought was super cool about those little TPUs is just for like a small form factor box. Again, if you’re not running Intel, perhaps, or I was going to set up a little Unraid server. you green has this cool little all flash uh server box and it had a wi-fi slot i’m like i don’t need wi-fi in my nas so i was thinking i could just pull that put in one of those little coral tpus and that would be a pretty slick solution but i’m wondering jeff do you have it accelerated at all are you just using the cpu to do that 15:44
Geoff: So 16:21
Adam: or what’s 16:21
Geoff: I 16:22
Adam: your 16:22
Geoff: still 16:22
Adam: solution 16:22
Geoff: – I have a Coral TPU USB that I got back in the day. And the issue – what happened with Coral is Google killed it. Shocker. Google killed something, 16:22
Stephen: Mm-hmm. 16:31
Geoff: people. Can you believe it? 16:31
Adam: This is my shocked face. 16:35
Geoff: Yeah, exactly. So I’m holding on to that thing until it dies. But no, basically they have pivoted and they now – there are some dedicated – acceleration units that you can use but basically it now supports the iGPU on Intel it supports Rockchip on AMD and then it supports NVENC on NVIDIA so basically if you have any kind of GPU it can do the necessary acceleration to do the image processing for you and basically the same speed as what i can do on that little box i have over there 16:36
Adam: slick um follow-up question do you know you mentioned some things that gave me a warm fuzzies because i haven’t thought of ZoneMinder in probably a decade at this point 17:10
Adam: but um is there really i couldn’t think of anything else in that field that it’s even competing against so much these days it seems like that is kind of the option for um for the self-hosted solutions open source also outside of um going with like a windows like blue iris those are the two that i always hear about now 17:21
Geoff: I mean, Blue Iris obviously is still a thing. I haven’t run it. I don’t know what the current status of Blue Iris is. I think Shinobi is still kicking. I do think Zone Minder is kicking. There’s another one like iSpy or iAgent is another one. And there was one that I had my eye on for a while called Viseron. I think it was what I called it. And again, it was very similar to what Frigate was kind of offering. But it just never seemed to take off as much as Frigate did. So Frigate, I think, Frigate for me is just one of those, I use it all 17:42
Stephen: you 18:14
Geoff: the time. I love getting notifications of when I’m getting packages or whenever someone’s walking around my house or kids are showing up or whatever. It is incredibly handy. My other one is also in the same kind of ilk of super handy apps that you may not always think of. And that’s Healthchecks. Healthchecks.io. So it is an app you can run. There’s a self-hosted option. And then you can pay for an option. I think there’s even a free tier. You can do a couple of alerts. And its job basically is… You probably run cron jobs or jobs in your networking self-hosted infrastructure that you need to run. And what happens if they silently fail? You’ll never know unless you find out your backups didn’t run and your hard drive dies and you don’t have backups for the past six weeks because your cron job failed. There was some upgrade that happened and you didn’t know about it. So Healthchecks, you basically put a… ping command basically at the beginning of your whatever your command is you know whatever your cron job is and it basically will send you can you can customize it pretty heavily i have a couple of mine that will send a like start command like hey i started the job and then i can 18:14
Geoff: end so that way you know how long a job took to run it’ll let you can include the last like i think thousand characters or ten thousand characters of whatever command line you are your command you’re running so you can see the output um And if it completed successfully, you won’t get a ping. It’ll stay green. If it fails, you can get pings on email, Telegram, Notify. You basically name it. You can probably get a ping from it that you’re – whatever’s down. Yeah. I had a power outage over the weekend from a freak storm and my entire server went offline. And so I was getting pings for like a good like 10 minutes of this is offline and this is offline. I’m like, I know because the power went out. But still for the I’ve had a couple of things where things are silently upgraded and it stopped working. And it was very handy for me. OK, that job failed. Let me go figure out why. 19:28
Stephen: There’s absolutely also scenarios where you do want to use their free tier, right? Because if your internet were to go out and then the communication stops, you’re probably not getting notifications about things, right? 20:20
Geoff: Right. 20:32
Stephen: So you throw that out there on their free tier. So I’m pretty sure you’re right. I think they do have a free tier that has a small amount. It’s super handy. Of course, yeah, self-host that. But I also use this and it’s been super clutch for me. 20:32
Adam: So like, I think, I think I need to add this. I was going to add, so is there any other competitive products that do specifically the health check aspect? So very familiar with like Uptime Kuma. That’s like a very common one that people talk about. And, but that’s to me, that’s just like a smoke test ping versus something that’s actually looking for output and giving you some like meaningful, 20:47
Stephen: I 21:08
Adam: um, 21:08
Stephen: don’t 21:09
Adam: testing. 21:09
Stephen: know. I don’t know if Kuma does like if you could do like a curl. I don’t. Yeah, it doesn’t monitor like curl stuff. So the health checks is very specific to running jobs and seeing the status of those jobs. Like did your backup run? Did this go versus, you know, Uptime Kuma? Does it ping? Was there high latency? Stuff like that. 21:09
Geoff: Yeah, and I 21:33
Adam: Interesting. 21:33
Geoff: use something called Runeter, which is like a wrapper in front of health checks. That way I don’t have to have the whole – because basically every health check gets its own unique ID, which is how it knows whatever ping, whatever the command is. And so with Runeter, I don’t have to have the whole like, you know, ping health checks dot whatever URL slash whatever. I can just say Runeter, you know, UID this and then my command. And it just I can basically establish a lot of that stuff ahead of time. And it’s really kind of handy. I’ll have a link to this stuff in the show notes for people if they’re interested. But yeah, health checks is one of those things where you don’t know you need it. Until you find you actually need it. So it’s just it’s just one of those things where it just silently sits in my home lab. But when something fails, I know versus finding out later, which is never fun. 21:34
Adam: This is kind of interesting coming from Geoff, who’s not scared of data corruption silently happening in the background. 22:25
Stephen: Yeah, for using like really bad file systems or just like file systems that aren’t as great as our Lord and Savior ZFS. 22:31
Geoff: You guys, you guys, I have good backups. I know about BitRot. I am fine knocking on wood. 22:40
Stephen: Enjoy your pixelated 22:46
Adam: Everything’s fine. 22:47
Stephen: family photos. It’s all fine until it’s not. 22:48
Geoff: All 22:50
Stephen: Okay, 22:50
Geoff: right, fine. 22:50
Stephen: Adam. 22:51
Geoff: Well, Adam, what do you got? 22:51
Stephen: Yeah. 22:53
Adam: I got some stuff, but I actually have one more. Can I ask you one more question though, Geoff? 22:54
Geoff: No. Yes, 22:59
Adam: I 23:00
Geoff: go 23:00
Adam: just want 23:00
Geoff: ahead. 23:00
Adam: to take one step back to the Frigate thing. I was wondering if I’ve actually seen some pretty creative automations that people have done with Frigate things like, okay, it recognizes somebody who’s on the camera at your front door triggers a two-way conversation. Then it can, you can like press a button and basically automate the opening of your garage door. So people can deliver packages and like interesting workflows like that. Have you used it for anything like that? 23:01
Geoff: I have not used it for stuff 23:29
Geoff: like 23:31
Geoff: that. I absolutely could. But I haven’t necessarily found a use case for that. But that’s just me in particular. I mean, again, Frigate is one of those things where, I mean, it can tell if it’s a cat, if it’s a dog, if it’s a horse, if it’s a, I’m going to say it’s a llama. I mean, it can, I think it can even differentiate now between like, you know, FedEx, UPS and USPS and Amazon and name 23:32
Adam: wow 23:57
Geoff: whatever deliveries. It is impressive what it can actually identify and track. So I’m sure 23:57
Adam: okay 24:02
Geoff: it’s just up to your imagination of figuring out what you actually want to be alerted on and do. 24:02
Adam: that sounds like okay we’ll have to talk about this maybe we can play with that later um to jump into my S tier self-hosted applications uh i actually put some thought into why i wanted to say that these things were S tier specifically Uh, so I’m going to precurse with that in that this is solving things that are kind of fundamental to self hosting one of them and could be a blocker for people. Um, and then the other one is kind of solving 24:10
Adam: many problems within a singular tool. So I’ll just 24:40
Adam: start with that. That’s kind of why I chose these two. Now, the first one that I chose, it’s called Pangolin. And I affectionately just say that it’s self-hosted Cloudflare tunnels. It’s how I typically explain what it does. You don’t necessarily have to run it. It’s got multiple uses, but you could use that as a local reverse proxy and it’s got really cool built in authentication tooling as well. And you can add on additional identified what’s called IDPs like Authelia and such into it. But I think the killer feature is you want to host this thing on a VPS. 24:43
Adam: you put it on a VPS and it starts solving interesting problems for certain people like myself who might be stuck behind CGNAT. Um, I think basically it’s going to, it does NAT punching. So it’ll actually punch through the CGNAT goes out to your VPS and you’re able to effectively share your, your applications. not even, not just share them, but with an authentication layer that’s built into it as well, that has a bunch of really interesting options. So you can do it by email and password, basic stuff like that, but you can do it by IP, you can do it by, you can use OIDC, you can use all these different functions to authorize people to access these apps. So a couple of the problems that it’s solving is again, because that NAT traversal, uh for people like myself who are stuck on poor internet connections and 25:23
Adam: so i thought that that was a pretty killer feature because it could be a non-starter for people i want to share apps out with my my grandma guess what i’m not going to grandma to install Tailscale and then sign up for an account and she lives on the other side of the country and etc etc 26:19
Adam: right these barriers to entry But if I get this set up, I’m the technical one. I can own that on the VPS. I can get this deployed and make it super simple for them to log in. Now grandma can see my image deployment and see the family photos, for instance. So I think it’s really an awesome offering like that. I almost, I was very upset for a moment last night. Geoff and I were talking about this and I felt like he had a gotcha waiting for me, which, you know, you 26:35
Geoff: I 27:07
Adam: could 27:07
Geoff: still 27:07
Adam: consider 27:07
Geoff: do. 27:07
Adam: that 27:07
Geoff: I 27:07
Adam: if, if, 27:08
Geoff: still have a bit of an axe to grind with them, but you go ahead. 27:08
Adam: So when we were looking at the website, so previously it was completely free and open source. There was no sort of tiering. There was nothing like that. It was just a free open source offering to the world. It has since gotten some corporate backing here or business backing at least. And so if you go to the site, it actually looks like it’s got the free tiers kind of constricted. It only offers five users and five sites. Sites are not what they sound like. So I was thinking sites as in applications that you’re sharing with, but that’s not the case. It’s actually like locations or IP, or you could think of it as a physical site. You have multiple applications still shared from a singular site. But the user 27:12
Stephen: you 27:55
Adam: limitation is kind of a pain point is what I would think. And I’m like, oh, how can I get around this? Maybe I can be a bad boy and share credentials. 27:56
Adam: Anyways, but in looking a little bit deeper, that is actually a hosted version that they are paying for the infrastructure for. uh, this is not, that’s not even the self-hosted version of this thing. Uh, so you can go onto their, their GitHub and you can utilize either the community edition of it or the enterprise edition of it. You can still host either of those. And, um, um, there’s no restrictions whatsoever. So It’s pretty awesome offering, in my opinion. It actually has an interesting license, too, if I remember. I don’t 28:03
Geoff: And again, 28:40
Adam: want to get this 28:40
Geoff: that 28:41
Adam: wrong. 28:41
Geoff: that that’s my issue. And I think that’s one of a lot of people’s issues is that they started completely open and they’ve pivoted to a commercial business license, which we have all seen. Once you start down that path, it’s a matter of time before something will get paywall that will only be available to paid customers. No matter what they – it’s just inevitable. I would – I love – when I first saw Pangolin, I thought, this is really cool. I want to try it. And then I started seeing the shifting, and I’m like – it goes back to the conversation we had last episode with MB. And it’s like once they shifted to a closed-source license for anything, it’s really not open-source anymore. 28:41
Adam: The thing that makes it very much okay in my opinion is that I can still self host the entirety of the product. There’s no restrictions there. And I have examples of things of other open source free community edition tools and whatnot that have lasted for 20 years. And yes, that maybe there is some like enterprise level tiering, right? Where they’ll say, okay, if you want this version, so I’ll just use TrueNAS as the obvious choice there. You know what? Having that enables them to sell a product, which enables them to hire engineers, which enables them to develop this product and keep it going on and on and on. And I’m happy to support products like that. maybe slightly biased, obviously, because I worked for iX Systems. I work for Unraid. We sell a product that is mostly open source. It’s actually very similar to this sort of an offering. But even this is like, this is the fully free version. You don’t have to pay them a dime. So I think it’s, this is kind of, I would prefer that it was completely open source, but I understand that why they would do this. And for the sake of sustainability, I am totally fine with that, honestly. 29:22
Stephen: So does it use, does it use a application per, per each client, just like Tailscale would like, I assume that there has to be some sort of like a sign in the thing that you do that makes that all work. Right. 30:42
Adam: Yes. It’s got some interesting, so you would have, it’s got a connector on the server that you’re, you’re basically sharing the service from and it’s called Newt and it’s got, they have some fun little names actually of the sub components for this thing. So it’s got Newt, which is a lightweight user space WireGuard client deployed on the remote network sites, establishes the outbound tunnel to Gerbil, which is what would live on your VPS. And let me get the definition for Gerbil real quick. 30:56
Stephen: Does 31:27
Adam: That 31:27
Stephen: Gerbil 31:27
Adam: is the 31:27
Stephen: go down 31:28
Adam: WireGuard 31:28
Stephen: the holes? 31:28
Adam: manager. 31:28
Geoff: Yes. 31:31
Adam: It manages 31:31
Geoff: It 31:32
Stephen: That’s, that’s 31:32
Adam: the tunnels. 31:32
Stephen: what 31:32
Geoff: tunnels 31:33
Stephen: it, 31:33
Geoff: down the hole. 31:33
Stephen: it tunnels. It goes through the tunnels. 31:33
Adam: Yes, 31:35
Geoff: Yes. 31:36
Adam: yes, 31:36
Stephen: Okay. 31:36
Adam: yes. 31:37
Stephen: Okay. 31:37
Adam: We’ll leave it at that. Now I’m thinking 31:40
Stephen: Yeah, 31:41
Adam: of Gerbils 31:41
Stephen: no, 31:42
Adam: and 31:42
Stephen: it’s 31:42
Adam: some 31:42
Stephen: fine. Just 31:42
Adam: old, 31:42
Stephen: don’t 31:42
Adam: terrible 31:43
Stephen: use a flamethrower 31:43
Adam: jokes. 31:43
Stephen: or else it goes a little further. Anyway, continue. Yeah. 31:43
Adam: Oh God, that’s the one. Okay, 31:46
Stephen: That’s 31:47
Adam: we’ll 31:47
Stephen: the 31:47
Adam: stop 31:47
Stephen: one, 31:48
Adam: now. 31:48
Stephen: but continue to continue. 31:48
Adam: Um, so it’s got, and then it’s got Badger, which is, uh, what is that? That’s 31:50
Geoff: Badger, 31:55
Adam: the 31:55
Geoff: badger, 31:56
Adam: traffic 31:56
Geoff: badger. 31:56
Adam: plugin 31:56
Geoff: Badger. 31:56
Adam: that enforces their zero trust. Um, that one is actually unique to them. So that’s their kind of authentication layer, which is Badger 31:57
Stephen: English 32:06
Geoff: I 32:06
Adam: and 32:06
Geoff: think 32:06
Stephen: or US 32:06
Adam: under the hood. 32:06
Stephen: version? 32:07
Adam: Definitely English. 32:09
Stephen: So friendly 32:11
Adam: Definitely 32:12
Stephen: badger. Okay. I get it. Fair. 32:12
Adam: friendly, um, respectable, 32:14
Stephen: Okay. 32:17
Adam: I would say. 32:17
Stephen: Yeah. 32:18
Geoff: that’s my other problem, though, with Pangolin is that it uses Traefik and I’ve never been a big fan of Traefik with all of its labels and all of that setup. I think if they used a different or allowed me to use a different reverse proxy, I would be a little bit more open to it. 32:19
Adam: That’s so interesting to me because they put an amazing wrapper around a complicated product that is Traefik. I mean, Traefik is enterprise level, has a million different capabilities to it, right? But I don’t want to set up and manage those things. But guess what? Pangolin does that for me. 32:34
Geoff: Fair. 32:53
Adam: So win, win, win, win. Again, it solves a lot of problems. So big fan. Oh, DigitalOcean also has a one-click deploy for it. If anybody wants to try it on that service, I’m not affiliated. Just looked that up last night. So 32:53
Geoff: Alright. What’s your second app, sir? 33:08
Adam: my second app is Pi-hole. Pi-hole, and I was torn on this because there’s several options here. There’s AdGuard, there’s Technitium. What’s the newest player 33:12
Geoff: Technitium? 33:23
Adam: in town here? Technitium. I’m terrible at pronouncing that. But Pi-hole is the most ubiquitous. And I feel like that’s the one, first of all, I’ve used it. I haven’t deployed Technitium yet. So I feel like I should stick with that one. But what does it do for us? So again, why is it S tier? It is doing the whole home ad blocking. And that benefits your entire family. That can actually save you money if you’re on a metered connection. That 33:23
Adam: can actually help from like bandwidth constraint connections also because you’re not downloading all of those stupid ads. You can have some control over access. It’s DNS filtering effectively, but you can have some control over your family’s access to things. So if you have young children and you want to block things like adult content or gambling sites, things along those lines. And completely free. This one, this was actually what I was thinking of when I was thinking of the license. It is EUPL, which is interesting. And I had to look into that. Yeah. So European Union public license. It is GPL compatible. So it’s a copyleft license. It says it’s similar in spirit to GPL and compatible with GPL V2 and V3. Completely open source, completely free product. And I feel like everybody should be running it honestly in this day and age. 33:52
Geoff: Or 34:50
Adam: So 34:50
Geoff: AdGuard or Technitium. One of these absolutely, I think, 34:51
Adam: one of them. 34:53
Geoff: is a first thing you should really install when you’re doing any kind of home lab networking stuff. 34:54
Stephen: No. 35:02
Adam: Oh, not 35:03
Geoff: No. 35:03
Adam: so much 35:03
Geoff: Yes. 35:04
Adam: there, 35:04
Stephen: No. 35:04
Adam: Steven. 35:05
Stephen: Okay. 35:06
Adam: Go ahead. 35:06
Stephen: First off, it also does DNS encrypted. So you can encrypt all your DNS. That’s actually a huge part of what Pi-hole is fantastic for. But my question is, why do you want to self-host this really at its core? Stick with me. I’m all for self-hosting. The thing is, is that if you’re hosting this on a Raspberry Pi or your VM machine or what have you, Proxmox, what have you, And you have to take that offline because something breaks your DNS. No, I know you’re going to say something. Your DNS goes down. Right. And so that that kind of sucks because then you’re like, I need to Google how to fix. Oh, I can’t Google that. Right. And so that’s a gotcha. Now you’re going to say, well, I can run a second DNS server and 35:07
Geoff: Bingo. 35:59
Stephen: that’s all 35:59
Adam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 36:00
Stephen: fine and dandy unless you understand that if you’re in Windows anyway, the secondary DNS thing doesn’t quite work like you think it does. That kind 36:00
Geoff: Yeah, 36:10
Stephen: of sucks. 36:10
Geoff: fair. 36:11
Stephen: It chooses 36:12
Geoff: Yeah. 36:12
Stephen: one or the other and it doesn’t just load balance them or anything. So then you go, well, I can be clever and I can actually just use a virtual IP. And if this one goes down, this one takes over. But that’s a lot of effort and a lot of technology in the way of just doing something simple. So my thing is, is why not use something like NextDNS? You get that functionality. There’s a free tier. You can even host all of your logs in Switzerland instead of the States. And you can add all of the same blocking lists and have pretty much all the same options. And there’s even some some interesting things to allow some of the tracking through for AdSense. not the evil AdSense of like Google, but the ones that allow you to keep like preferences and whatnot 36:12
Stephen: to websites. Um, there’s a bunch of awesome stuff in there. Um, they have a free tier and if your VM goes down, you still have DNS. 37:04
Adam: Okay. So here’s the counter in that if you’re controlling your local DNS, you can do some unique things. I don’t, 37:15
Stephen: Mm-hmm. 37:23
Adam: full disclosure, I’ve never, never used that tool, 37:24
Stephen: Mm-hmm. 37:27
Adam: but, um, with Pi-hole or these other options, you can do interesting things. Like if you want to set up a Lancache, uh, where you can do some manipulations of where things are actually looking for things like your, your downloaded Steam games and such. Um, It’s also valuable from just a perspective of understanding how DNS dnsmasq, I think it uses dnsmasq under the hood, how 37:27
Geoff: Pi-hole 37:52
Adam: that works, 37:52
Geoff: does, yeah. 37:52
Adam: how to manage your own 37:53
Adam: DNS. It can be a learning tool. And then I would also, the addition I would say is that while I chose Pi-hole, I believe Technitium actually has a replication function built into it. And I personally wouldn’t be for setting up a VIP for this and then, you know, load balancing and stuff like that. I’m not going to take something like that to that level for my home lab or my home environment. However, I would absolutely have two little inexpensive boxes, one that is replicating to the other and just be offline for a couple minutes if I have to online the other box. Again, I didn’t choose Technitium because I’ve never used it. However, it is very impressive. It’s more, definitely more feature rich. However, it’s more hands-on to manage some of the functions. So it’s not inherently, Technitium is not inherently out of the box built for ad blocking. That’s actually functionality you have to add onto it. Its main purpose is really deep DNS management. 37:54
Stephen: you 38:53
Adam: But it’s capable of that. Uh, and again, with this replication function, it seemed like the do all thing that people are going to for these sorts of tools, uh, unless you’re just going to go straight CLI and use BIND or something like that within your OPNsense box, 38:55
Adam: which you can still do. Um, so, so yeah, I think the learning function, if you want to do it yourself, um, and some of the, well, you tell me again, I don’t know, can you do things like set up a Lancache and whatnot? 39:09
Stephen: I haven’t looked at the Lancache part. I have just solely been using this for business stuff, right? And so I have profiles on there that I have for customers because I pay 39:23
Stephen: for it. And then that’s largely how I do a lot of my DNS filtering for clients. But it’s just this ability to use all the block lists that I was used to was pretty big. Again, you can set your own DNS records. And so if setting up a Lancache is just a matter of writing a DNS record that Steam then looks to, yeah, I could do that. That’s not a problem. So I’d have to look up that feature, but Anything that I was using Pi-hole for, and I used it since it had come out, because it is a fantastic 39:32
Adam: Hmm. 40:03
Stephen: thing. Anything that I was using Pi-hole for, this has taken over for me. And not that I want to be a shill on Tailscale’s end, but it natively works with Tailscale. And so anytime I’m connected to Tailscale, I can say this Tailnet uses this DNS, which is NextDNS. So I get all of the blocking for all the DNS when I’m out on my phone out and about. And I understand you can, you know, connect to your DNS that is your Pi-hole back in your own, your own thing. But you don’t have to have a Pi-hole running if you’re on the Tailnet. 40:04
Geoff: Interesting. 40:40
Adam: Steven, how would I have chosen this as a self-hosted S tier item if I had gone with something like NextDNS? 40:40
Stephen: Oh, I don’t want to get into the is it self-hosted if no, it’s OK. But no, I do love it. Pi-hole 40:49
Adam: Oh no. 40:55
Stephen: is a fantastic thing. I’ll give you that. It’s a good one. 40:55
Geoff: All right. Well, I think we’re going to I think we’re going to wrap that one up and move on to some of the stuff that Alex had on his list because he kind of gave us a, you know, glances to some of the things he had. And 41:00
Adam: Oh. 41:09
Geoff: I don’t know. I had so many things I couldn’t. I had I have some other honorable mentions I want to throw in. So some of the stuff that Alex had, one of his ones was Carrot Keep. I don’t know if you guys have run Carrot Keep, but it used to be called, I think it was Hoarder used to be called. It is one of those save now, read later type apps where you can click a link and save it. And it’ll do an archive of it. It’ll do a PDF. It’ll do an HTML version. It’ll do all kinds of different archiving versions for you. 41:10
Geoff: I have run this one. I think it’s really, really slick. It also has some cool AI functionality. I’m not saying cool, but it will read whatever you’re saving and do some basic processing and 41:39
Geoff: do 41:49
Geoff: tags automatically for you. It’ll help you categorize it into different folders or menus or whatever you want to do. And I’ve definitely found it to be the most feature-rich. I ran… linkwarden for a good while. And I liked that one, but it stopped being able to handle certain websites very easily. And just the development just kind of seemed to slow down versus Carrot Keep just seems to every, every link I basically thrown at it seems to work. Uh, even if it’s behind a paywall, you can use something called SingleFile, which 41:49
Geoff: is 42:19
Geoff: an extension you can install and it’ll basically screenshot and send that off to Carrot Keep for you. Um, so again, very handy app. If you want to save notes, if you want to save like, uh, you know, user manuals, whatever, whatever things on the internet that you want to save, this is a pretty useful app. 42:19
Adam: question about that. How is the interface once you’ve saved it? So sounds awesome. I would absolutely use that. And especially for like tablet use, if it’s got a nice interface. So that’s my question. How’s the interface once you want to come back to these, these documents or these, 42:37
Geoff: So again, you can, I would encourage you to spin it up and try it yourself because it’s not that hard to spin up. But basically you kind of open up a page and it’ll have like, you know, it’ll have like a kind of what it’s like a processed version where it’s kind of stripped out all the stuff and everything. It’s just the text. But then you can see a, here’s what it looked like as a PDF. Here’s what it, you know, it’ll replicate as an 42:54
Geoff: HTML page. And basically everything that was on the HTML page, it will replicate for you. and you can kind of just browse through that way. So there’s a lot of different ways of looking at whatever you save. 43:15
Stephen: That’s what I was worried about, right? Because if you had a whole bunch of links and you come back to them three years from now and you’re like, ah, that how to, that how to put that Honda motor into my Honda Fit. Let’s look at that. And then the form is just gone. Then you’d be, well, that link was nice, but the form is gone, right? So that answers that question. That sounds pretty handy. I might have to try this one. 43:27
Geoff: Yeah. So that’s another good one. Another one that Alex had was kind of similar vein as paperless, paperless NGX. And specifically, there’s been a lot of different there’s been paperless than paperless NG. And I think they’re 43:47
Geoff: on paperless NGX. Similar kind of idea, but this is just for your straight up PDFs and other kind of files you want to save. I run this and I think it’s great because I can throw my tax documents in there and I can easily be able to find my tax documents later on. or I just got a new scanner and my wife can scan into it. It throws it onto an FTP page and then paperless can then pull up that and ingest it automatically. So that way it’s easy for us to get the documents that we’re scanning. Um, it’s just one of the, it’s good. One of the, one of those apps where you just run it and you kind 43:58
Geoff: of 44:29
Geoff: forget it’s there until you kind of need to find, Hey, wait a minute. Where’s that receipt I got for the TV that I bought five years ago. It’s in paperless. Um, 44:29
Stephen: Did you say you run an FTP for this? 44:40
Geoff: I said for the printer only speaks FTP. I tried to do like, you know, other ways of saving the, you know, 44:43
Stephen: What? 44:50
Geoff: of uploading the documents, but the only way it would do it was via FTP. So I run 44:50
Stephen: What? 44:55
Geoff: an FTP, I run an FTP server for my printer. 44:55
Adam: What printer do you have? 44:58
Stephen: Yeah, what 44:59
Geoff: A brother, 45:00
Stephen: is this? 45:00
Geoff: a brother printer. 45:01
Stephen: Okay. 45:03
Geoff: Anyway, yeah, 45:04
Stephen: Cool story, bro. 45:05
Geoff: it’s actually a relatively new printer and I love it. So you’re not going to convince me that I, you know, need 45:07
Stephen: I’m 45:11
Geoff: to get rid of it. 45:11
Stephen: sure it’s awesome. 45:12
Geoff: But yes, I know FTP. 45:14
Adam: Brother works very well with Linux. 45:15
Geoff: Yes, it does. That’s 45:17
Adam: It does. 45:18
Geoff: the main reason I got it. 45:19
Adam: Yeah. 45:21
Stephen: Speaking about being brothers, I think we should interject and say a big thank you again to our Patrons. If you would like to become a Patron, Jeff, how would they do that? 45:21
Geoff: So they can go to bitflip.show slash support, and they can find out all the wonderful ways of supporting us. 45:32
Geoff: And they can be, there are different tiers you can be, and you can even be in our terabyte club, our terabyte tier, and you get a special shout out in the show. So Adam, do you want to do the shout outs for this episode? 45:39
Adam: Oh, please. And thank you. Yes. Especially because we have my favorite of patrons on the list yet again. That is the epic, the notorious poop loser.net. We love you. Poop loser. 45:50
Adam: Never change. We also have Alex Taylor. Thank you very much, Alex. Again, We love you just as much. Actually, we love you all equally like our children, but poop loser just has an amazing name. And then finally we have, um, I’m going to murder 46:07
Geoff: Okay. 46:23
Adam: this and I apologize ahead of time. Mariko, which is our, uh, our patron who’s also very lively in the discord channels. And that is a bad net mask as you may have seen him out there in the world. So thank you all very, 46:24
Adam: very much. you guys are really helping us out. You’re, you’re making it so that we don’t eventually, the goal is that we won’t have to pay for this out of our own pockets and we can just create content for y’all and, and, uh, it’ll be self-sustaining. So that is where we’re moving. And thank you for sticking on there as the terabyte supporters. 46:39
Geoff: And we also appreciate all of your reporters. We did it. We did do a behind the scenes episode if you missed that. So you can go into your Patreon and you can find Adam and I talking about what we’re using to record this episode, actually. Kind of an interesting we had some technical difficulties along the way. So you can hear about us struggling to get some things to work. 47:01
Adam: There may have been multiple takes 47:22
Geoff: Yeah, it took multiple 47:23
Stephen: Yeah, 47:24
Adam: may 47:24
Stephen: it’s 47:24
Adam: have 47:24
Geoff: takes, 47:24
Adam: been 47:24
Stephen: okay. 47:24
Adam: multiple. 47:24
Geoff: but we 47:25
Stephen: It’s 47:25
Geoff: got 47:25
Stephen: fine. 47:25
Geoff: it done eventually. Some other kind of ones that I had on my list that I kind of just want to mention that I think are kind of handy. Dwarich is, I think, how you pronounce it. It’s a German developer, so I think it’s Dwarich is what you say. And what is it? It’s a self-hosted Google Timeline replacement. So if anyone used Google 47:25
Geoff: Timeline, I sure did. And I had a whole bunch of Google Takeout where I could throw into this. Actually, it can take your old Google… If you still have your Google Takeout of all your 47:45
Adam: Oh. 47:56
Geoff: Google location history, you can dump all that into this and it’ll process it. And it’ll do it all locally. So you have this fancy, wonderful map of… where you’ve been. And so there’s a lot of different ways of getting the location data into it. It’s got its own app for both Android and iOS. It works with things like GPS logger or some other, you know, tracking apps like, um, What’s the other big one? OwnTracks. OwnTracks, I think, is the other one. So it works with OwnTracks, too. The way I do it is I have GPS logger that feeds into Home Assistant, and then Home Assistant is able to then 47:56
Geoff: send the data to Dwarich. So that way I’m only having to run one tracking app and… Also, I filter out a little bit of the stuff that goes into Dwarich because I’m like, if I’m home or at the office, I don’t need to have every, you know, 30 seconds. Exactly. I don’t need to see myself pinging around every, so like, you know, it only does a ping every 30 minutes when I’m in those locations versus if I’m moving, it does more often so I can see more often where I am. Yeah. They have made some improvements to things. They’ve improved the UI. They’re on like version two. It was a little rough in the beginning and I lost some data with some of the transitions and things that they’ve done, but it’s still just one of my favorite apps of just remembering where I’ve been, which is useful every now and then. Sure. 48:31
Adam: i have two comments on it 49:19
Geoff: Sure. 49:20
Adam: comment one you completely held out on me when we were talking about this previously the fact that you can ingest the the google’s uh google’s um what’s it what was it called 49:21
Geoff: Google Timeline. 49:31
Adam: Google’s. Yeah. You never mentioned that. That is the killer. I would do that in a heartbeat. I’m going to host this thing 49:32
Geoff: Yeah. 49:38
Adam: because I loved my Google Timeline. I used to, you know, I’ve traveled a lot for work. I’ve been all over the world effectively. 49:38
Adam: And it was so cool to be able to go back and look at those breadcrumbs and the time and date stamps and all of that and to see those paths. And now running it today, I will say there is a possible side effect and that could be depression because when I look at my timeline and I see that I have not moved in multiple days as a work from home type of person these days, that might make me very sad in my heart. But that sounds amazing. I’m for sure going to spin that up. 49:46
Geoff: Yeah, I will say one gotcha is you probably want to self host your own Photon instance, which is basically a 50:17
Adam: Hmm. 50:23
Geoff: reverse geocoding app. Because they originally were, you know, there is a public instance of Photon that you were, you know, but everyone was hitting it and basically it was causing their server to crash. So you can self-host the Photon thing. It just requires a lot of storage space for all the data point points but i basically went through my google timeline and like the initial ingest was taking like days and then i went back and redid it again once they kind of improved everything and it went to like 20 minutes for everything for like 50:23
Adam: Oh 50:54
Geoff: 10 50:54
Adam: wow. 50:54
Geoff: years of google location history so definitely one to self to look into the last one to quickly mention is if you ever wanted to self you ever wanted to ssh into your servers when you get a lot of servers and you’re either on the go you’re remote you’re on your phone it’s a if you use Termius at all Termius is awesome it can do ssh it can do rdp it can do Guacamole you name it it can it can manage your docker containers it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite apps where i can like i’m at work or i’m you know remote and i see something is not working i can remote in real quick and say restart that docker container and we’re good 50:54
Stephen: Well, fantastic. 51:31
Geoff: so 51:31
Adam: I now want guacamole. Is anybody else hungry? You said guacamole. 51:31
Geoff: no not hungry 51:36
Stephen: No, no, 51:37
Adam: No, 51:38
Stephen: not hungry. 51:38
Adam: it’s too 51:38
Stephen: Well, 51:39
Adam: late. 51:39
Stephen: gents, I think honestly, I’ve speaking for myself, I’ve picked up a couple of things in here that I hadn’t tried, but I think I’m going to have to spin up thinking this probably the same for you two from what I’ve seen. 51:39
Geoff: Yeah. 51:50
Stephen: But I think that’s likely being as we’re at 55 minutes, all that we have time for on this fantastic episode. uh thanks everyone for for showing up and listening i really enjoy all the comments that we see on youtube when there are some uh and occasionally we will actually answer back on there too um 51:50
Geoff: Yes. 52:09
Stephen: so 52:09
Geoff: And don’t forget 52:09
Stephen: yeah 52:10
Geoff: to don’t forget to please email us if you if you have an app that we either didn’t mention or, you know, we missed something. Contact at bitflipshow show, please. We’d love to hear from you or reach out on Mastodon at bitflipshow on Tech Hub. Again, we’d love we’d love to hear from people. It always kind of brightens our day. 52:10
Stephen: Honestly, the emails. 52:27
Adam: Absolutely. 52:28
Stephen: Yeah, we talk about it all the time. Someone will, you know, ping our little group and we’ll be like, hey, check out this email. Anyway, this has been episode, where are we? 52:28
Geoff: Episode number 10. 52:38
Adam: 10. 52:39
Geoff: Can you believe 52:39
Stephen: Episode 52:40
Geoff: we’ve been 52:40
Stephen: 10. 52:40
Geoff: doing this 10 episodes? 52:40
Stephen: I honestly, I didn’t think it was 10, but this has been episode 10. Thank you so much for listening. I’ve been Stephen. 52:41
Adam: I’ve been Adam. 52:49
Geoff: And I’ve been Geoff. 52:50