Docker Is Dead, Apparently

What we cover

• Silo: A new Go/Postgres media server that speaks the Jellyfin API, and it’s sUUupppper fast.
• Steam Frame: Valve’s VR headset gets pricing, and we discuss who is buying one.
• QuickBytes: Portainer 3.0 goes enterprise, JetKVM Mini shocks us with it’s cheap price, Apple drops a foldable, and Immich 3.2 gets a memory lane.

First up, Alex introduces us to Silo, a self-hosted media server built on Go and Postgres that is super fast. Silo arrives with a clean UI, multi-node transcode workers, native apps for every platform, and the real kicker: it speaks the Jellyfin API, so your existing clients work out of the box. We talk about the pros and cons to it’s approach and how it fits into the ecosystem (as well as some controversy over periods).

Next, Valve finally put a price tag on the Steam Frame: $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB. That’s cheaper than many expected given the RAMpocalypse, though reviewers note you’ll spend more for some necessary accessory kits. Three of the four hosts are on the wait list. The conversation covers the impressive ARM architecture running Proton and FEX translation layers to play Windows games natively, the surprisingly thin standalone game library (Half-Life: Alyx is the headline title, from 2020), and the battery life concern of roughly 1.5 hours in Performance mode. Still, the hosts are betting on Valve’s track record of iterating on hardware the way they did with the Steam Deck.

Finally, the QuickBytes round hits four stories. Portainer 3.0 is going enterprise-only and pivoting hard to Kubernetes, leaving Docker fans wondering what comes next. JetKVM Mini brings matchbox-sized KVM-over-IP to the masses for just $33. Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, a $2,000 foldable with a 7.6-inch inner display and Apple Pencil support. And Immich 3.2 delivers the features Stephen’s been waiting for: a dedicated memories page, improved search, and better handling of shared assets across platforms.

Tags: silo, media server, self-hosting, jellyfin, steam frame, valve, vr headset, linux gaming, proton, arm, portainer, kubernetes, docker, jetkvm, kvm-over-ip, iphone duo, apple, foldable phone, immich, photo management, tailscale

Links

• Silo Media Server - https://siloserver.org/
• Steam Frame - https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steamframe
• Portainer 3.0 Announcement - https://www.portainer.io/blog/portainer-3-0-is-coming
• JetKVM Mini - https://www.jetkvm.com/products/jetkvm-mini
• Immich Blog - https://immich.app/blog/v3.2.0-release

Transcript

Alex: So Steven, you upgraded to macOS 27.0 on the day of a recording. Are you a madman? 00:00

Stephen: I did it the day before and I didn’t touch it. And then everything’s logged out and I’ve had to reset up everything. And that makes me a fool. And I know that. But as an official nerd, I like hitting that upgrade button because I want all the fancy new things. And in perfect Mac order, nothing really seems different. And so, alas, I just went through a bunch of effort. 00:06

Adam: Do you get the kind of the annoying part of an update in Mac? Because I get all the, you must re-authenticate every single damn thing that you’ve ever done on this computer. 00:27

Stephen: That’s literally what I mean, yeah, 100%. 00:36

Alex: Yes. 00:38

Alex: macOS these days is very reminiscent of Vista and how that used to be of like, are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? No, no, but really, are you actually sure? And it drives me insane. And so I’ve been going through a little bit with my robots lately, trying to get codified into my Nix config. Disabling gatekeeper, disabling system protection utilities. Like, I am so cheap. In Windows, at least despite all the other flaws, you can just turn off UAC and make all of that noise go away. Apple, you’re not watching, but if you are, which you’re not, please turn it off or give me a way to turn it off. 00:39

Geoff: Please. 01:16

Geoff: Or you could just move to our Lord and save your Linux. I mean, I haven’t had that particular problem when I’ve updated my Fedora image. 01:18

Alex: Dude, let’s just not go there about updating Linux boxes, which, by the way, I did just before we recorded this show, and it broke for about 10 minutes, our recording setup. Everything. 01:27

Stephen: On Arch, by the way? 01:41

Alex: No. 01:43

Alex: What is it running? I can’t remember. I think it’s probably Debian. 01:45

Adam: Is it Debian? 01:48

Adam: I thought it was an Ubuntu box. Do I need to go figure this out now? I don’t know. Kind of. 01:49

Alex: I’m not sure. 01:53

Adam: Eh. 01:54

Alex: Right, should we get into the topic doc that we have right here in front of us? I found a new media server this week. I’ve been all 01:56

Stephen: about Jellyfin lately. 02:02

Stephen: So version 12’s out then? Have you upgraded? Did you try? 02:04

Alex: Well, I actually, I think upgraded to version 12 quite by accident because I was apparently running the latest tag, which is, you know, YOLO, whatever. But I found a new media server. We’ll come on to Jellyfin in future episodes. I think you’re probably bored of hearing about it. It’s a perfectly adequate media server if you’re doing videos. If you’re doing music, eh, use something else. If you’re using audiobooks, it’s fine, maybe. and the clients have gotten a lot better with Jellyfin right with that out the way i found the new one called Silo and no i’m not talking about the apple tv show the media server is literally called Silo it’s written in go and it uses postgres on the back end and unlike Jellyfin it’s um it’s fast like actually fast 02:07

Geoff: It really is. 02:56

Geoff: I mean, you posted a tease in our Discord for the host chat, and I spun this up, and it was relatively easy and painless to spin up. And yeah, I was immediately struck by the UI is clean, but it’s got metrics on feedback for who streamed what for how long, what’s next, all that stuff. It was responsive when I was clicking on things. It’s a pretty slick interface, and I think you missed The ultimate hook of it is that it speaks the Jellyfin API so any Jellyfin client can work with it on the back end. 02:57

Alex: Yep. 03:34

Alex: Because I was actually talking with Wimpy about this the other day, and he and I were going back and forth about, like, well, should we just build a media server of our own? And then Martin threw this into my DMs, and I was like, oh, well, why do we need to build anything? And so Silo has a bunch of clients for all of the main OSs, you know, the iOS, the Android, tvOS, et cetera. But it also, when you think about what the problem’s been with Jellyfin for the last five plus years, it’s been the clients. And so Silo not only has a perfectly functional and pretty decent set of clients already baked and official clients out of the box, it also, like Geoff just said, speaks the Jellyfin API. So I could point Neptune at this thing and go… Boy, howdy. I hope you hear it in my voice. This is really exciting. 03:35

Adam: Yeah. 04:33

Adam: No, it’s cool. 04:33

Adam: The amazing part to me is like, how did we just hear about this thing? It seems so far along the path and mature and stable in all these ways. So I’m just like, where did this come from? Actually, how did you find it, Alex? That’s a good question. 04:35

Alex: Wimpy gave it to me. 04:51

Adam: Oh, he gave it to you? 04:52

Alex: Well, like he dropped it into my DMs and was like, well, we don’t need to build a media server anymore. Because we were literally talking about it because he’s been working on this FFMPEG Go bindings library so that he could start to use Go and all of its parallelization. Such a hard word to say. All of its multi-threaded capabilities to run library scans with more than single-threaded performance. Imagine that in a modern app. And then he found this media server literally built on Go, and we were like, well, I guess we don’t need to do that then. So it’s kind of designed for massive scale. Like it’s a bit of a microservice, so you have to spin up a separate database and all that kind of stuff. But it’s, I mean, literally you could run, I don’t doubt Netflix levels worth of traffic out of this thing because of the way it’s architected. which means at home it flies. It is like smooth as butter, gents. It is real nice. It also supports some stuff that Plex have just recently removed, like watch together. So you could, you know, do remote watch parties, which is nice. You can do multi-node transcode worker pools. Which is super nice. That was 04:54

Geoff: a cool find. 06:11

Geoff: Like seeing that you can have, like if you’ve got three boxes around your house and you want to be able to transcode multiple things, you can have… Because Jellyfin support… There’s some hacks to get Jellyfin to do that, but it is not officially supported and easy to do. 06:12

Adam: I sit here thinking like, oh, that’s the feature I’ve been looking for. Like what… What’s the 06:26

Geoff: scenario? 06:34

Geoff: I don’t really have a use case, but let’s say you’re doing Kubernetes or you have three of those little mini HTPCs lying around, like the little one-liter boxes that don’t exactly have a ton of horsepower but have enough. you could distribute your transcoding across all of them so that way you don’t have to have one box with a NVIDIA RTX 5090 to handle all the transcoding. You could have multiple boxes do it for you. 06:35

Adam: Good luck 07:05

Alex: buying a 5090. 07:06

Adam: I think Steven’s thinking along the lines that I am. I’m like, I get an Intel with QuickSync and I’m pretty golden for like 8, 10 streams. 07:07

Stephen: No, no, no, no. So I have like a dedicated ARC card, not just like the built-in. And if you go past two transcodes of, say, like an AV1 or what have you, you’re going to start seeing a lot of frames dropping per each one of those. And so if your friends are streaming enough and everyone’s transcoding off that one card, you’ll start to see quality going down because it can only push so many frames. And so on my card, two is the best performance. But after you get past that, it starts to significantly drop. And so… not really a huge problem because most people just direct stream and i don’t know if this is a thing on on Jellyfin but i’m sure you guys have direct streaming as well but yes um but anyway it so it’s not a huge deal right now but yeah if you had a whole bunch of people with terrible clients that required trans codes and it was doing like a high quality rip or trans you know trans uh you would want you would want multiple boxes to start chipping 07:17

Adam: specifically for av1 08:18

Stephen: Well, no, I mean, like if you had like a 4K MKV file that was H.265 or whatever, and it had to, you know, downplay that to 1080, and then you had a whole bunch of people that are doing the exact same thing, it’s going to start taking up frames. 08:20

Adam: Agreed. 08:35

Adam: A whole bunch of people is the thing. I guess I have, I’ve never run into these sorts of scenarios that have been super limited. 08:35

Alex: Geoff has, and he’s been working on an app in the background for offline downloads. 08:41

Geoff: Now, 08:48

Alex: that’s a situation that could certainly benefit from from some parallelization. I find that word so hard to say, you know, like the night before you get on a plane, you want to grab the latest season of whatever. And you’ve got eight episodes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could throw two episodes per box you’ve got in the house? You know that that’s the kind of use case for me that as a single family household user type situation. You know, I’ve got a good friend who lives in Miami and he has five kids and three of them are at college streaming from his server. And like, so it doesn’t, it doesn’t like, there aren’t that many people with more than two or three customers running from, I say customers, like users going through their media server, but they are out there and you might be one of them. You just haven’t realized it yet. 08:49

Adam: Yeah. 09:39

Geoff: Adam, by the way, I did go back through the commit history. This was released at first at the end of May of this year. So it is relatively new. And also for those who care, it is, I’m not going to say heavily vibe coded. There’s a lot of codecs and clawed co-assisting on the commits. Take that for what it’s worth. I don’t really know the developers. Alex, I think you’ve interacted with them a little bit because you wanted to get Tailscale into it. They seemed very nice to you. Oh, 09:40

Alex: they’ve been great. 10:07

Alex: Really, really great. 10:09

Alex: Switched on people who know their product, actually. Yes, I know there’s a bunch of AI-assisted contributions to it, but… There is no way to really tell longevity of a product other than just sticking it in the oven and seeing how long it takes to bake, you know. So time will be the true test of this project. I’m glad you brought that up, actually. But I wanted to add Tailscale to the, yes, I know I’m not a paid shill for them anymore, but I wanted the server to natively speak Tailscale. And so I opened a GitHub issue and walked through the API with them and asked them, do they want a plug-in to core? Do they want TSNet baking directly into? Because it’s written in Go, same as Tailscale, it should be really easy. And they basically rewrote the API in about a week to handle plug-ins. So now I’ve submitted, admittedly, I vibe-coded it. So again, take that for what it’s worth. I vibe-coded a plugin for Silo that adds Tailscale natively to the Silo server as a plugin. And you can do things like exit nodes, you can do tags, you can do custom hostnames, whatever. Which means that any of the remote targets that you have, like your phone or your Apple TV or whatever, that already run Tailscale can now just talk directly. No need for reverse proxies or anything like that. It’s using Tailscale serve. You get a TLS and you’re good to go. 10:10

Geoff: I mean, also, you could do distributed transcoding over that, too. I wonder. 11:31

Alex: Yeah, I mean, probably. I 11:38

Geoff: mean, maybe not for real time, but, you know, thinking, you know, if there’s a way to do back downloads, you could do distributed, you know, for that. That would be an interesting use case. 11:39

Alex: The limitation there, let’s say the box is on the other end of a very thin pipe, is getting the bits to the transcoder and back again. 11:49

Geoff: Yeah, true. 11:56

Alex: But, yeah, theoretically… 11:56

Alex: Yeah, that could be fun. Can we have like a bit flip hosts transcoding pool going, please? Thank you. 11:59

Geoff: Yes, I’m all for that. I mean, I will say I did run into a bug and I’m still trying to figure I got to get it fixed where my seasons or my TV shows are named apparently a little bit uniquely where I like to put periods between my seasons and episode numbers. 12:05

Alex: Yeah, you see, you’re just wrong with 12:21

Geoff: that. 12:23

Geoff: Okay, fine. 12:25

Geoff: But that’s the way I like to do it. Jellyfin, it works just fine. There’s a 12:26

Alex: standard, man. 12:30

Alex: Okay, so naming episodes should literally just be S number number, E number number. 12:31

Geoff: I 12:37

Geoff: like my periods. 12:39

Geoff: I like my periods. 12:41

Geoff: Reach out to us at bitflip at, you know, contact at bitflip.show if you have, you know, if I’m wrong, fine, but at least it should support what I do because if it didn’t work for Jellyfin, I wouldn’t be caring, but it works for Jellyfin, damn it. So I want to work in Silo. 12:43

Stephen: I will straight up ban anyone that says that we’re wrong and he’s right. 12:56

Adam: I love it 12:59

Alex: Now a quick bit of housekeeping before we move on. You can find everything we do over at bitflip.show and we’re also on Mastodon at bitflipshow. If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email, contact at bitflip.show. And if you enjoy the show and fancy supporting what we’re doing, you can head over to bitflip.show slash support. Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to our Terabyte supporters, Maurizio, Badneck Mask, and Alex Taylor. We really appreciate you guys helping us keep this thing going. So, uh… 13:04

Geoff: i do want to say 13:31

Alex: one 13:31

Geoff: more thing i’d really we haven’t been plugging our youtube channel and we actually got a decent number of views in our last one so check out our youtube channel youtube 13:31

Alex: just changed how they measure views oh true uh basically every youtuber got like a free 40 bump overnight well so just bear that in mind 13:40

Geoff: still we got we got viewers if you want to see us on youtube come watch us on youtube you can come see our lovely mugs 13:50

Alex: A view used to count as at least 30 seconds, and YouTube about three weeks ago changed it to be frame number one. Now it counts as a view. Right. It was quite a big change. Because if you’ve ever looked at the stats of a YouTube video, you’ll know that the 30-second drop-off is like a cliff. So let’s enjoy the bump whilst we can, eh? 13:57

Adam: Does that capture the autoplay for things like Google TV? Oh. 14:18

Alex: Uh-huh. 14:23

Adam: Okay. 14:24

Alex: Yeah. 14:24

Alex: Yeah. 14:26

Geoff: so anyway yes Steam Frame finally got pricing you know monday it’s not as bad as i was expecting i don’t know how you guys feel but i was expecting like twelve thirteen hundred dollars given the rampocalypse it’s 1060 in us dollars for the 256 gigabyte version And $1299 for the one terabyte? I think that’s right. But 14:27

Alex: you need to spend another $150-ish on all of the accessory kits, according to many, many reviewers, to make it, 14:52

Geoff: you know. 14:58

Geoff: At least $60 for the ergonomic kit, because that gets you the hand straps. It gets you the extra strap for over the head. I think they’re even 15:00

Adam: more critical than that. They said, from the reviews I was watching, it has to do with the light blocking shrouds, even. Yeah. To get the ones that are, I guess, more reasonable for smaller noses is what I was saying. 15:07

Alex: Yeah, so I won’t have a problem with this conch in front of me, but yeah. 15:22

Adam: I’ll be trying too. 15:25

Alex: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because on the one hand, I think this probably, again, this is the same thing as the Steam machine. This was probably going to be in the $750-ish range before everything went to hell. But a lot of people are comparing it to the Quest, the Quest 3 specifically, at sort of $500, $600. Any of yous ever tried that? 15:27

Geoff: No, I got a buddy who has a, I don’t know if it’s the two or the three or whatever, but he basically said he got it. He played with it for a day or two, and it’s kind of just sat unused. 15:49

Alex: Such is the life of many VR headsets, to be fair. 16:01

Adam: And that one in particular, it’s got the name Meta on it, which means it’s not coming in my house. 16:04

Geoff: Yeah. 16:09

Geoff: I think GamersNexus actually had a whole bit on the meta privacy, you know, the fact that scans your whole, I think there’s some contention over that, but I’m kind of with Adam on that one. Anything meta that has cameras is just not coming into my house. 16:10

Alex: No, unless you could jailbreak it. And even then, maybe not because. Yeah. So is it worth five or six hundred dollars to you to give the middle finger to Mr. Zuckerberg? I guess is the question. 16:25

Adam: Yes. 16:39

Adam: I think at least two of us are on the list now. Is there three of us on the waiting list? Yeah. Three. 16:40

Alex: I didn’t buy the Steam machine, and I put those pennies aside waiting for this, and here it is. So I’m going to buy a VR headset running Linux, like straight up. 16:46

Adam: Hell yeah. 16:56

Adam: Yeah, 16:57

Alex: come on. 16:57

Alex: Also, 16:58

Adam: guys, they are doing such cool stuff with this. Have you guys looked into – so there’s FEX, which is the translation layer between x86 and ARM, but there’s also Lepton, and I am equally excited about that. So that’s an Android. They’ve basically forked WayDroid. What’s Lepton? They forked WayDroid and they’re basically doing a translation layer for containerized Android apps on Linux, which is equally exciting to me. I’m like, yes, I’ll buy this. I will support this. No problem. In addition to that, I think that this unit uniquely, possibly, it solves multiple problems for me. The whole completely cordless, high-quality streaming thing with that little dual connection setup, they have that dongle that goes in the USB, but it’ll also use your PC’s existing Wi-Fi. Yeah, right? Or has its own Wi-Fi. Yeah, it 16:58

Stephen: has Wi-Fi. 17:54

Adam: Yeah. 17:55

Adam: Uh, and it will look for the lowest latency path for each packet, which is like an amazing thing that they’re doing. Uh, so I am actually pretty excited to use this as a virtual desktop setup as well. Not just for the gaming part. Um, cause I was looking at some of these, what, three, $400, uh, uh, something air or real air or something like that. Xreal. 17:56

Alex: Are they high enough resolution though? 18:25

Adam: They’re like at least 2K. Yeah, they’re 2160, I thought. 18:28

Alex: Is that enough? 18:32

Alex: Because the Apple Vision Pro is not enough for me. What was its resolution? Yeah, I don’t know. I’ll look it up. 18:33

Geoff: It’s enough for me. I saw the price and I was like, ooh, yes, I immediately got on the wait list. Then I saw some of the reviews and the one thing that’s kind of holding me back a little bit is the battery life. I think they were saying if you’re playing a locally run game on the headset, it’s like an hour of performance mode, which you basically want to do because that’s the 144 hertz, high refresh, high performance, high quality. And even if you reduce it down, it’s still maybe an hour and a half. Even if you’re streaming, it’s like an hour and 50. So it’s sub two hours for battery. Now, yeah, you can plug in the battery pack and you can run it that way. 18:40

Alex: Do you see yourself gaming in a single sitting for more than that? And yes, Adam has the solution in his hand, I 19:26

Geoff: think. 19:32

Geoff: I know a battery pack is the answer. I don’t know. It just seemed… If you want to do an all-day headset, you’re doing your remote desktop through it. It just seems… Seems a little low. So 19:32

Alex: the Steam Frame per eye is 2K. The Vision Pro is nearly 4K per eye. So it’s 3660 by 3200. So I will be really curious to see if text is crispy enough for you. We’re not talking a few minutes. We’re talking hours. These eyes aren’t as young as they used to be. 19:44

Geoff: True. 20:03

Geoff: No, and I’m going to have to get those prescription lens inserts because I’ve heard that there’s not quite enough room unless you have like a really, really small glasses. They’re not going to fit inside the frames. 20:04

Adam: Yeah, I heard you basically just need to plan on it. 20:14

Stephen: Doesn’t it have adjustment for, is it just astigmatism, or what’s the adjustment for? 20:17

Geoff: It’s the pupillary distance, the distance between your eyes and the mirror. Yeah, okay. 20:21

Alex: Yeah. 20:25

Alex: Yeah, so if you look like the thing from Ice Age, like Sid, with your eyes out here. 20:26

Adam: They got you covered. 20:31

Alex: Yeah. 20:33

Alex: The FEX stuff is really cool, though, because you can run Half-Life Alyx, which is included with this headset, directly on the headset for, like, an hour to an hour and a half, like, I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that’s a miracle. It’s an ARM chip, so they’re doing not only translations in some games from Windows calls to Linux with Proton, they’re then translating those Proton calls with FEX to ARM. I mean, it’s turtles all the way down. 20:36

Adam: Well, I 21:07

Geoff: think they’re even saying that they didn’t, like, the Steam developers were like, there’s no way we can make this happen, and then somehow they magically made it happen. I mean, I give huge props, huge props to them for figuring that stuff out. I mean, it’s, 21:08

Adam: it’s impressive. 21:23

Adam: Are you sure that Alex was, um, I, for some reason, I thought that specific game was native though. No, 21:24

Geoff: no, actually I think you’re, I think they did make it native. You’re right. They did 21:34

Adam: for that particular one, which 21:38

Geoff: yes, but, but still the point, the point still stands of running a game through FEX and Now I’m 21:40

Alex: curious. 21:47

Alex: I watched the Dave2D review and I think I agree with it pretty hard. His point was new VR hardware in 2026 with the flagship title being Half-Life Alyx, which was released in 2020 now. Where are the games? Where are the compelling use cases for VR? I mean, I think I’m going to buy one. But at the same time, I’m expecting not to use it that much. I mean, maybe I’ll get a racing sim again or something, a steering wheel or something, and then I’ll use the snot out of it. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little nervous because I’m not seeing anything really bundled with it as like… When the PlayStation 3 came out, it was like you had to buy Grand Theft Auto with that, or Project Gotham Racing, or whatever it was. Where are the games? 21:49Geoff: Yeah, I think that’s been my concern. I haven’t really been on VR because I’ve been kind of waiting for the compelling use case. I’m probably getting it because I, one, want to support Valve on this because I think what they have done is nothing short of incredible. And I think supporting them on all their efforts and everything they do is worthwhile. Two, I know people were thinking it was going to be $750, and I think they may be right, but it’s still not as bad as I was expecting it to be. They set my expectation at about $1,000, and they said it was going to be cheaper than the index. So I was kind of thinking it was going to be in that ballpark to start off with. So decent price, but I agree with you. I’m a little worried. It’s going to play it a little bit. But then again, I thought I wouldn’t play my Steam Deck all that much. And the Steam Deck also didn’t come out to rave reviews and look where the Steam Deck is now. So that’s what I trust. I’m going to trust in Steam and trust in Valve and trust in Gabe and the improvement that they can eke out of the hardware and the improvements they can make. And we’ll see what they pull off. 22:41

Adam: Lord Gaben, I think, is going to pull it off, honestly. If you look at how the Steam… So using the Steam Deck as the bar, right? So how that was on launch day versus how it is today, night and day difference, in my opinion, as far as not the number of games, but stability of the games, the performance of the games, the polish of the entire experience… So I think, and you know, that’s effectively, there’s not a whole lot of custom bits in there. And this one is a whole lot of custom hardware that they had to develop for this thing, including all the lens structures and all of that stuff. So I kind of think that it’s just maybe an early launch that, and that’s where you’re seeing a lot of these semi negative reviews on the thing. But I think that they’re going to shore up a lot of that. That’s my hope anyways. And even if not, I think it’s going to fulfill my needs. I don’t have necessarily the highest bar. I never tried the index or some of these other higher end VR setups and getting behind something that valve is doing specifically with the translation layers that we’re helping support with this product. Uh, and how I’m going to use it for the like, uh, display streaming functions. I’m going to be happy with it either way. I think I don’t need like AAA games to make me happy with it, but I hope they come out with more. 23:42

Geoff: I’m just going to say, I went back and I looked at the Verge’s original review of the Steam Deck, and it said, Steam Deck review, it’s not ready. Early access memories. If you’ve read the Verge’s review of the Steam Deck, it’s the same basic idea. It looks like, yes, it may have been released a little early, but I think you look at the trajectory of the Steam Deck, and I think it might turn out to be Maybe not a hit, maybe not the same breath as the Steam Deck, but I think it’s going to be at least a successful product. 25:03

Stephen: All right, so question. Do you guys want the 3D VR experience where you get to live life out as like if you were a Pikachu and you’re talking to other people in a big room? Or do you guys just want to play your games that you already have with a gigantic screen in front of your face? 25:37

Adam: Option B for me. 25:52

Geoff: I’m thinking that option B is probably the best use case for me. Like the kids want to watch something on the TV. I don’t, I can sit there with my big screen still and play a game. 25:54

Alex: That’s fair. 26:03

Alex: Okay. 26:03

Alex: So I had the Apple Vision Pro for the two week rental period, the Apple Vision Pro. And, uh, There were a couple of experiences with it that really made me go, hmm, this could be something. And there was a couple that didn’t, with VR specifically. So the first one was flying on a plane. Apart from the fact you look like a massive dork. Who cares if it’s a plane, right? It was amazing to watch a movie on a plane that way. I’m sat on the moon in my plane seat watching whatever it was. And the other one was just… melting into the couch you know when i just want to switch off for a bit and like because there’s no audio distractions because you have your airpods in and there’s no visual distractions the the trouble with it though is that’s both an amazing feature and because it’s so isolating and With a five-year-old, well, she was three at the time, I think, it’s just tricky. As a family person, it’s tricky. But if you live alone or you do a lot of flying or you’re a consultant on the road or maybe actually the consulting thing’s great because you’re in a hotel room and you think, right, I want a 49-inch display. Let’s go. Those are the situations for me where VR is compelling and a racing sim. 26:04

Geoff: Well, I guess time will tell on the Steam Frame. I mean, I’m going to get one. Sounds like Stephen’s going to… No, Stephen actually didn’t. No, Stephen. Okay, Stephen’s shaking his head. Adam’s a yes. Alex is a yes. Okay, so three of the four. We’re recording this on Wednesday. They release the queue. The lottery starts on Friday. So maybe when this is out, we’ll know who gets to spend their hard-earned cash. So we’ll see. 27:29

Alex: Bold of them to assume we can afford an iPhone in the same week as a Steam Frame. Or the other way around. 27:54

Geoff: Good point. 27:59

Geoff: Moving on, we have a couple of news stories that we kind of want to talk about. And instead of dedicating a whole 10, 15 minutes to it, we kind of felt maybe we pull back the Quick Bytes segment for a little bit. So we’re going to do these in kind of rapid fire, talk about it for a little bit, see what people have to say, and then move on to the next one. So I’m going to lead off with Portainer 3.0 is coming out, and they are making a massive shift. in the way that they package this so it is there’s maybe there’s been a community edition version that’s been available for anyone to run that is going to stay on the 2.0 branch 3.0 is going to be enterprise only now you can still kind of get three nodes you can maybe get around it but it is not the focus anymore they are clearly going business the other huge change is they’re kind of abandoning docker and they’re saying kubernetes is the future 28:03

Alex: We had Docker’s dead, 28:58

Geoff: apparently. 29:00

Geoff: Apparently, Docker is dead and the future is uncertain. I don’t know if I agree with that one. Anyway, that’s what’s new. What do you guys take on that one? 29:00

Alex: Definitely don’t agree that Docker’s dead. No. Or dying, even. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s certainly in business land. Like, if you’re deploying containers at any kind of scale, yeah, sure, fine. Kubernetes makes sense. And if that’s the market they’re going after… Great. It just means Portainer’s never really been for me anyway. A few years ago, it was years ago now, Portainer 1.0 maybe was even pre then. We actually, when I say we, linuxserver.io back in the day, We reached out to them and we were a featured container catalog partner in one of the early Portainer releases. And then they just quietly removed us and didn’t tell us. We were like, OK, screw you guys. We’re going home. So I haven’t really been much of a Portainer fan since then, to be honest with you. 29:12

Geoff: Yeah, no, I pivoted to, I run Dockhand now, which is same idea, but I think a little bit cleaner. I just like sometimes having a GUI to quickly go in and see visually, okay, is everything running? Oh no, there’s an issue. I got to go and fix that. We should do a 30:04

Alex: roundup of like Dockhand versus Arcane versus Komodo is another one. Yes. There’s a few good ones out there now. 30:20

Stephen: Doesn’t Unraid 30:28

Adam: do this too? 30:29

Adam: Doesn’t 30:30

Alex: what? 30:30

Adam: He said Unraid. 30:31

Adam: Oh, 30:33

Alex: just you wait, boyo. We’re cooking on some good stuff for version 8, which is coming soon. 30:33

Geoff: But yeah, no, we should do a roundup because, I mean, I think that there definitely is, you know, I know people in the audience use it, I’m sure. So we can come back to this one a little bit. Yeah, we’ll come back to this one. But I think JetKVM was listening to our last episode. What do you think, 30:39

Alex: Alex? 30:56

Alex: Yeah, I think so, too. They’ve announced they’re going to release… This is a bugbear of mine. Like, you have my attention. Give me a buy button when you send me the email saying you’re announcing a product. Please don’t say we’re announcing that we’re going to sell something. Anyway, JetKVM have announced a new mini version, which is about the size, I think, of the Nano KVM-ish. It has a full-size HDMI port, so maybe they were listening to some of my critiques. Open source firmware, same as the main JetKVM. There’s an Ethernet version, not PoE, sadly, and a Wi-Fi-only version, which will be available round about Halloween on October 26th. It is also going to eventually support a reworked ATX control board, DC power control board as well. And they’re going to change that protocol now to work just over standard USB and not the RJ45 or whatever connector this one used. So that’s a nice addition. The amazing headline thing, though, they’re $33 because they’re based on an ESP. 30:57

Geoff: Yeah. 32:11

Alex: Each. 32:11

Alex: Yeah. 32:12

Geoff: That got my attention. I’m going to order like two or three. I don’t even have a use for them. I’m still going to order like two or three. I’m just going to buy 32:12

Adam: five now. 32:17

Adam: Exactly. 32:18

Adam: It’s like it’s an instant buy when you come in at that price point for this. 32:19

Alex: Well, I mean, so we’re working on an event for work, me and Adam, and we’re like, we need to get somebody remote access to this hardware at the BIOS level. And we’re like, yeah, I’ll just throw a JetKVM in front of that and put it on Tailscale and you’re good. I mean, they just open up so many amazing use cases that never used to really be possible. So I love these things. 32:23

Geoff: Yeah. 32:45

Geoff: No. 32:46

Geoff: And then we had a good chat in our Discord when the, I don’t know, you guys are foldable fans, but Apple, did Apple announce something? I heard they announced something, but I didn’t see any media about it. 32:47

Adam: Oh, you got 33:00

Geoff: me? 33:00

Geoff: Thank you, Adam. 33:01

Geoff: Go ahead. 33:01

Adam: As he stated, what an interesting thing to release the Steam Frame on the same week as an iPhone. Not just one iPhone, but a foldable iPhone. I’m sure everybody is shocked that that was coming. Right? Everyone? Shock and awe. But from the reports that I’m reading, maybe they did it. Best is what it seems to be. I’m kind of excited about it. I want to play with one of these things. It’s got a 7.6 inch inner larger screen. One of the things I like is that they actually made it work with the Apple Pencil. And I thought that Apple would never do this because they’re the kings of I don’t want to touch something that would be an overlap between my product lines. Um, so for me, if it also allows for that function, which I cannot remember what it’s called, where you move the mouse from one device to another, I just won’t have a normal iPad anymore. I’ll just have an, uh, the iPhone Duo and call it a day. The price is, um, brings a tear to my eye. Let’s just 33:03

Alex: go back to the stylus thing for a second. Does anybody remember Steve Jobs saying anybody that ships a stylus is just wrong? Yeah, because he was against the Palm Pilot, right? But 34:06

Stephen: I want to add one extra thing here about this Apple Pencil. The one that Alex was just flinging up in the air, he won’t be able to use that one. It’s my fidget spinner on this desk. But you won’t be able to use that one. 34:19

Adam: USB-C only? 34:31

Adam: Why not? 34:32

Stephen: It’s the USB-C one. What? You cannot use the one that recharges via the magnets. 34:32

Adam: Because it doesn’t have the charging capability. 34:38

Stephen: I don’t even care. But they just don’t allow you to do it. They can’t. 34:41

Geoff: Sorry. 34:43

Geoff: See, that is such an Apple thing to do. It is such an Apple thing. Wait a second. Let’s sell 34:45

Alex: a pencil charger. 34:51

Alex: Come on. 34:53

Alex: It’s Apple. 34:53

Adam: Okay, fine. 34:54

Adam: I don’t think it… To me, I’m not… I have the pro pencil. I’m like, whoop-dee-doo. I don’t care about the fancy parts of it. I use it to write things down. I’m not an artist though, okay? So for me, if it just allows me to take my notes and I can use it to move things around and switch pages when I’m reading something, I am gonna be a happy camper. Again, for me, if they allow you to do the thing where you can move the mouse from one device to another, Sold. Dunzo. But I kind of feel like they won’t. I think that’s going to be the linchpin. There’s not going to be a keyboard case, and they’re not going to allow that function. So we’ll see. 34:56

Geoff: Nope, because that’s not Apple’s preferred. That’s not the way Apple wants you to use it. They want you to do it. They want to sell you an 35:33

Alex: iPad. 35:39

Alex: I think there’s a slightly more insidious reasoning as to why they wouldn’t let you do that. It’s product line cannibalization. Correct. MKBHD did an interview with Craig Federighi where he actually managed to get him to admit on camera that this thing is going to cannibalize the iPad mini. It was so funny watching him squirm in his chair. He’s like, oh, I don’t know if I should answer this question honestly. And then towards the end, his mouth got the better of him, I think, honestly. Because then the next dance, he was trying to defend what he just said, which I thought was so, so Apple. But… It’s an interesting device. I don’t know if I’ll buy one, but I’m glad that it 35:40

Geoff: exists. 36:22

Geoff: I can’t justify $2,000. I struggle with the idea of a foldable. I see the appeal of having a small device that turns into a larger one. It’s not 36:23

Stephen: small. 36:32

Stephen: It’s the size of a passport. 36:33

Adam: Mm-hmm. 36:36

Adam: It’s a thick boy. Oh, is it a thick boy? 36:37

Stephen: You’re not putting that in your casual front pocket if you’re worried that it’s going to be lifted out of the back pocket. That’s kind of the thing I do, right? If I go to a big city or whatever, I throw the phone in the front pocket because I don’t want it just pulled from my back pocket without me knowing. 36:39

Alex: Just imagining Steven going to the big city and wrapping his credit cards in foil. That’s what I do, yeah. My father-in-law, bless him, used to do that. May he rest in peace. 36:53

Adam: What do you guys think about the micro… Sorry, just 37:07

Alex: sidebar. 37:11

Alex: We went to this garden centre one time. We went to buy this chimenea with him, right? You know what the chimenea is? What is a 37:11

Stephen: chimenea? 37:18

Alex: It’s like a little garden portable fireplace thing. They’re popular in England for some reason that I don’t fully understand. Like the potters can come out of it. We did his garden center. We got to the checkout. We had to carry this thing through. We didn’t get a trolley for some reason. We got to the checkout, and he decided to pay with a credit card, but it was a debit card. So he’d wrapped the debit card in tinfoil. And he’s at the register, just unpeeling this card. Put it in the thing, put his pin in, and then put it straight back in the foil. And he’s like, aha, I see. Security. They didn’t even have the tap to pay. So England’s had chip and pin since like 2002. So it’s been a long time. And then tap to pay has been a good 15 years in England. So they call it contactless, not tap to pay in England. And the limit used to be, I think it was £10. And then they lifted it to £20. And then during COVID, they put it up even further, I think, to £100. or something like in the states though you can buy literally anything with tap to pay you can pay like a thousand dollar bill with tap to pay it’s kind of crazy actually 37:19

Stephen: do you is does it use the standard uh like Interac 38:32

Alex: Like anyone, 38:37

Stephen: have you heard of Interac before? No. So in Canada, all of the debit transactions are through the Interac network, has its own logo and everything else. And it was a free standard that was made. And people, like they just gave it to the banks. And then the banks were like, thank you. Now we’re going to start charging 38:38

Alex: for 38:59

Stephen: it. 38:59

Alex: I actually used to work for the company in London called WorldPay that used to handle 50-plus percent of every credit card transaction that happened in England. Because they used to be part of this thing. This is a bit of ancient history that’s relevant to this much of the audience, I’m aware. But you might find it interesting. They used to be called Streamline back in the day, back when they had the old ZipZap machines. Right? You remember those? Oh, man. To take a credit card? I remember them. 39:01

Stephen: Oh, yeah. 39:27

Stephen: Yeah. 39:28

Alex: And then we’ve got an off topic from the iPhone, I’m well aware. Anyway, Streamline was part of the NatWest group, I think, or was it Royal Bank of Scotland? I think it was NatWest. And then when the 2008 bailout happened, the British government basically bought the bank and said, as part of this manoeuvre, you have to spin off any business that is profitable… from the bank we cannot have anything profitable on our books and thus the company WorldPay was born because they were Streamline originally and that was who i worked for in london it was a it was a good time 39:29

Geoff: but 40:03

Alex: yeah 40:03

Geoff: yeah getting back to the topic i don’t do that 40:04

Alex: i 40:07

Geoff: don’t know the the i don’t find the idea of a foldable that interesting the trifolds i do find interesting but those are also exorbitantly expensive 40:08

Alex: I meant to tell you guys, at the airport, I was in Chicago last week for an engineering offsite. There was a guy next to me. I think he was just like a traveling consultant. So he pulls out this ThinkPad next to me with my single MacBook. And then he unfolds the screen to the left. And he unfolds the screen to the right. And then he gets out this like tripod thing that like magnetizes to the back of his ThinkPad or something. and then sets up another screen in front of it. So he’s got laptop, left, right, and top. And I’m just looking at this thing going like, okay, what’s next? Mary Poppins over here, what’s going on? It was so cool. I actually said to him, dude, that’s a sweet setup. And he’s like, oh, thanks, man. 40:17

Stephen: Yeah, sweet. 41:01

Stephen: Yeah, super sweet. 41:02

Stephen: Nerd. 41:05

Alex: And that was me saying that’s the best 41:06

Geoff: part. 41:08

Geoff: Holy shit. 41:08

Geoff: Moving on, I think Immich 41:12

Alex: also… iPhone, are we doing any more on an iPhone or is that topic? 41:15

Adam: It’s interesting. 41:19

Adam: It’s very expensive. 41:20

Adam: We shall see how it works. They seem to be leaning into it with the changes that they made to the graphical interface, which is pretty interesting. I thought 41:21

Alex: the animation as you opened the thing was pretty slick. Yeah, 41:32

Stephen: I agree with you. I’ve 41:34

Adam: seen that. 41:35

Adam: That’s pretty 41:35

Stephen: slick. 41:36

Stephen: Yeah, but did you see people on Reddit? They were just like, yes, same day. We’ve also developed the same thing for our foldables on Android. Check it out, guys. 41:36

Alex: Fair. 41:44

Alex: Yes. 41:44

Alex: Okay, fine. 41:45

Alex: Imitation is wonderful. 41:46

Alex: Yeah, for sure. 41:47

Alex: Coming up with that in the 41:48

Stephen: first place. 41:49

Stephen: That’s true. 41:49

Stephen: That’s true. 41:50

Stephen: I’ll give you that. Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. Adam, you go out and you use the dollary dues that you have and buy one of these things. And you can rent it for the two weeks or whatever they allow you to. And you can tell us if you’re going to keep it or not. 41:50

Adam: It sounds good. 42:03

Adam: And my brother does work for Apple. So there’s that handy dandy little family discount. 42:03

Geoff: Lucky 42:09

Adam: you. 42:10

Adam: Lucky you. 42:11

Alex: All right, last topic. Three of your closest friends that because I know that he gets at least a few of those a year. 42:12

Geoff: Yeah, for sure. 42:18

Geoff: Yeah. 42:19

Geoff: Moving on, last thing we want to talk about briefly is Immich because, you know, Immich is the photo sharing sweetheart. That’s kind of like a Google Photos replacement and is awesome. But they’re coming out with version 3.2. And Steven, they made some big changes. Is that right? 42:22

Stephen: They did. 42:37

Stephen: First off, who’s actually running that out of all of us? 42:38

Geoff: Me. 42:41

Stephen: No, Adam, you’re not? Okay. I wasn’t an Immich guy before, but then I thought, hey, I’d really like to not have my images sitting on some person’s server, be it Apple or Google. And so I took many videos that Alex has done about this and took it to heart and put this out there. So Immich, lovely thing, lets you store all of your photos in the same way that you might imagine out of Google Photos or Apple. But it’s always been a bit sparse on some of the nicer things that come along. Search being one of them wasn’t fantastic, but they’ve released version two of their search API. And you can actually, on the UI, you can do a lot of things like the last 30 days or geolocation, this sort of thing, right? But the big thing that I wanted was having, let’s see here, where’d it go? The dedicated memories page. So that was always something I really liked on the Apple stuff. You have a memory of being at, I don’t know, a kid’s event for your little one, the beach or what have you. And it does these memories, so you can just click on those and whatnot. So they’ve added that, and I think that’s kind of a nice… A nice thing to throw in there along with probably my second best, uh, favorite feature is the assets on the map. So you can see where you’ve been. You can say last year, you know, I went to the following places and it has a little number and shows how many photos in that area. 42:42

Geoff: Nice. 44:16

Geoff: Nice. 44:17

Geoff: I I’m looking forward to upgrading that one. If this Immich for me is just one of those things where I run it. It doesn’t get a ton of use, but it’s really nice to have when, you know, I need to go find a photo or something. 44:17Alex: Yeah, I switched off Google Photos cold turkey a couple of years. I don’t know if it was that long. Whenever version one came out, I was like, right, she’s fully baked. I think finally we can do this now. I just love this project. I cannot say enough good things about it. I mean, the pace of development has slowed significantly of late. but I’m okay with that. I mean, it’s a photo app. I don’t want an update a week breaking my scheme. I mean, we’ve talked about this on the show before. There’s a balance a project has to find, and Home Assistant does this really well, of the monthly update. You know every month there’s going to be a set of breaking changes because they’re adding and removing providers. Immich, Alex, and his team over there at the Futo Foundation, thank you if you’re listening. You’re doing amazing work. We love you guys. 44:28

Stephen: This really saved me from switching back and forth with Android and 45:23

Geoff: iOS 45:28

Stephen: because it allows you to, um, I guess the situation I was in is that I end up with a lot of duplicates because your Android phone throws it to Google automatically and then your iPhone to Apple. And if you try to import all these things, how are you ever going to say, oh, I have three copies now or two copies now of my wife’s photo or what have you? And so Immich has this lovely thing where it will detect duplicates. And you can tell it, hey, I just want the highest quality one. So whatever the highest resolution one is, keep it, discard the others. So this has been a really helpful project for me. 45:30

Adam: Can you tell me what the issue was for… Because actually I kind of love that workflow on my iPhone in that I have Google Photos and Apple Photos on there. And it will… load to both so they’re both in the cloud they’re both backed up in separate clouds and such the only thing that gets annoying is that i have to remember to go to google photos to delete if i delete it there it deletes it in the apple photos and we’re good to go and then i have like my my backups that i actually have on my own personal nas so that didn’t work that way for you 46:08

Stephen: So Immich solved the backup portion because I always feared that Google thinks you did something terrible because the AI in the background thought that you did something terrible and you lose your access to your account. So I always feared that first off. But the other part was the family connections that Apple does. My family pretty much only uses iPhone. And so we have all these family shared albums. So what I’ve done is I’ve effectively just put an iPad with my iCloud account sitting there. And so anytime any one of those folders or the shared folders get updated, it uploads into Immich automatically. That’s kind of what it did for me. So it’s solved the backup strategy of my images in a reliable way. 46:41

Adam: That’s great. 47:28

Adam: Actually, I love that. I’ve not thought of using it specifically for that use case. I think I’m spinning up Immich. Thank you, Steve. Yep. 47:29

Alex: Coming to a YouTube channel near you, no doubt, at some point in the near future. All right. Well, thank you very much for watching and listening, everybody. We really appreciate every single one of you. And you can find more of us at bitflip.show. And again, you can contact the show. Contact at bitflip.show is the email address. 47:38

Adam: Thank you all for listening. 47:56

Geoff: Thank you all. 47:57

Geoff: We love you. 47:58

Geoff: We’ve said it again. 47:59

Alex: Thanks, everyone. 48:00