 Welcome to Vlog Thursday 3, excuse me, 366, a hiccup to since I said start, you know, because that makes it more fun, seven some technical difficulties that were undoubtedly created by me. The difficulty all circled around the fact that the video capture card was just displaying blank, but, you know, rebooting it fixes it like rebooting fixes so many things. So here I am. Oh, I see Jason Slagle. I don't know if he's still here, but he joined early. So first he gets he sees it because all this it's tied into our slack notices for videos that get published and everything else. Ah, fun stuff. Let's see here. Newsletter is the first thing I want to talk about. That's going well. The only thing I haven't finished with the newsletter. I've only done two of them so far. You sign up for the newsletter on Lawrence systems.com. And I'll pull that up. Why not? While we're talking about it, we pull up what I'm talking about. So that would make a lot of sense, right? Scroll down share screen. There we go. Down here at the bottom. Stay up to date with the newsletter. This is going well. Quite a few people have signed up for the newsletter. The open rate is really high because there's not many people signed up. Therefore, the first 500 people, and I think it's a little over right around 500 or so right now, they signed up and of course they're going to open it because they were the 500 interested people. Some people will sign up later. Undoubtedly forgot they signed up and go, why do I get this newsletter from time to time and it'll just, you know, be one of those things. But nonetheless, the newsletter has been a way for me to communicate not just videos I made but other tech interests I have every two weeks. I'm dropping them on the first and 15th of each month. That's the cadence I'm trying to stick to. And I have just, you know, interesting tidbits that I find and stuff from other creators that you might find interesting is focused obviously very technical based on the topics that I cover. That's, you know, a thing I plan to grow because it's a good way to I think to connect with your audience. I regret not starting it sooner but hey, if you, the best time to start would have been, you know, a while ago. The next best time is now and now is when I've started. So I figured it's my thing for 2024. If you're interested, it's going, you just drop your email address in there. But someone had a really good point they brought up. I think it was last week. And this is something I'm hoping to get fixed soon. They asked for an RSS feed. Now I can give you, because I'm currently running it through MailChimp, I can give you the MailChimp RSS feed but I don't want to base by RSS feed on MailChimp. So instead I'm building an automation that will take each one of my newsletters automatically turn it into a blog post with an RSS feed that's tied to my website. That way if I ever change the backend, I don't lose a bunch of people. So that is my current plan is to get that implemented maybe in the next week or so. This is one of those things that eventually I need to probably hire someone. It's not that I don't know how. It's a matter of bandwidth of how much time do I spend creating videos? How much time should I spend fixing things like setting up the backend RSS? So there's always things I'm more than happy to outsource those tasks. The other challenge of course without sourcing those tasks is I don't mind giving someone access to my website. But then I got to also give them access to more such as building it with automation using Zapier. That's probably the tool I use to automate it. But now I got to trust that person to be able to do all that. You'd love to see how I set that automation up. It's really not, it's just Zapier. I use Zapier already for my automations for things. This is just more using Zapier where Zapier actually is how my videos get auto published in places. This is how if you go to my forums, for example, this is all Zapier integration. Share this tab and we look at the latest things like the blog post here. Unpaid worker bot. All the posts by unpaid worker bot are simply posts done by the Zapier system. It's tied to this with an API and it's tied to my YouTube with an API. It's tied to my LinkedIn with an API. It used to be tied to Twitter with an API and then Twitter destroyed the APIs and says we don't want auto posts. We only want bots. We don't want, you know, sensible automation companies like Zapier connecting to here. We'd much better have Bitcoin pump and dump scams going on there. Oh, sorry. That's my rant about Twitter. But nonetheless, I digress. We shall move on to a couple other topics I have here since I pulled the rest of my notes because I was actually working on this topic. Pull up my agenda. There we go. Newsletter. Did I mention the new book? I think I mentioned last time the book I read, which I just added that to my site so I can actually pull that back up on my site. I'm trying to keep a better track of the different books that I really enjoyed. You'll find them on my website under. Tech books we love. I have all the we love stuff. I put things we love. Tech books, partners, creators. So there's a whole list of different books. This is the latest book I just added called Tracers in the Dark. It's been on my to-do list to fix the scaling. For some reason, when I zoom in, it makes that book look, the book slightly, I think it's just I grabbed the wrong image of the book. It's slightly smaller. But when everything's at 100%, it's only slightly misaligned. That's a detail I'll fix later. But these are all the books on there. I also want to think I mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again because I've been adding more to it. I have a list of different YouTube channels and podcasts that I like. And you may like to this is all tech centric. So you'll find it all on my website. I'm keeping that up to date and I've still been adding more people to it as I like them. I think that's going to be a really important thing is being able to curate more of this information, which is also I think the newsletter is going to become more important. There's so much garbage content that keeps filling up on YouTube. All of these, Kyle Hill did one because they're targeting a lot of the science videos. And he talked a lot about how there's just all these AI generated, AI red channels that are just creating thousands and thousands of videos. And they're trying to flood the YouTube system. So you kind of got to find the diamonds in a rough sometimes because their SEO system seems to favor some of those, or at least they're gaming the YouTube SEO system just with brute force. And so, yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of curation that's going to become more popular in the future. Now, I will mention I'm going to be at MSP GeekCon. I was just at Codemash last week. That's why I did a short blog and I'll be at MSP GeekCon, which I did a video on. This is going to be there. So I'm trying to make sure I let people know where I'm going to be. I don't know, I may publish a page on my site because I'm booking up different conferences to go to, and I'm probably going to be going to a few hacking conferences. So I'll let people know if they want to say hi or run into me there. I'll be at, you know, insert name of conference. I know I'm going to GeekCon, but GeekCon's in the fall. There's a few in between that'll be at as well. I figured out which ones. All right. Next thing to talk about, though, like the topic I want to cover. And when I put these topics in the title, I tried to make sure I get to them reasonably fast. And that's going to be Home Assistant. I had a great time talking about Home Assistant with people at the Codemash event. And there was a talk there at Codemash about this. And I was, I loved it. This person had a great talk. I'm going to pull up some of their resources to talk about this. And the Home Assistant, and this came up the other day, share this one here. And the Home Assistant, I run on a Raspberry Pi and people are asking why. And this is actually what I was doing just before I came over here to do the live stream. And I think that's not even what messed up my card, my capture card of why it was freaking out. I was cloning cards for the Raspberry Pi. This is my Home Assistant. I will find when I do my video where we got the 3D print because my Home Assistant's actually mounted in my rack. And I use a Raspberry Pi and someone says, Tom, why aren't you, everyone seems to want to virtualize it. And I'm like, I've been running on dedicated hardware 24 seven. So whenever I update or reboot or any of my other things I may want to do to any of the other hardware, this is always just doing its thing. Matter of fact, if for some reason I needed to shut down my network because we're at a power loss, this uses so little power. This would probably run for, I don't know how long a really long time on a UPS. So certain home automations because, you know, I do have a generator, I could limit to running on this. I don't know. I really like the Home Assistant system. But I am going to be diving into a video on it. And one of the things I wanted to talk about, let me pull up the Home Assistant resources. I think the biggest thing with Home Assistant that I find, and this is where I can always use some feedback from all of you to help me make a better video, is trying to figure out what products to buy, which ones work well with Home Assistant. Lots of things claim, if you go to Amazon, you wander around. But then you get these claims that they work with Home Assistant and they do, but they don't work well, or they work but require much more configuration time than maybe you're willing to put. I always look for devices and this is one of the things I plan to do with my Home Assistant video is when I found devices and I'll have a whole list of them that will all be, you know, all laid out in my forums or wherever I want to put this list, where here's all the devices I have, here's all the ones that are easy to configure, easy to set up. You don't have to spend time goofing with the firmware, swapping things out. This was something me and Jay from LearnLakeCV, he had a couple of them. He's like, oh, you just got to swap the firmware on these. He had a couple of the firmware was really tedious to update. And they had another update that caused another problem. And like you had to find the old, you know, bin file for this. I'm like, this is tedious. I don't want tedious. I want people who can adopt things right out of the box. I love that you can go more in-depth with Home Assistant. And I am in no way telling anyone not to go more in-depth with Home Assistant. But I think starting at the deep end of the pool is hard for a lot of people. My goal is to make it easy for people to have an easy list of devices that you could just buy, press a button, adopt them into your Home Assistant and just start using it. I think that's the best way to get that. This is one of the reasons the cloud is so compelling to people is because they want to use things that are easy to use and they don't want to set it up. And you're already going through some level of setup when you talk about the, you know, having to find a piece of hardware like a Raspberry Pi to run it on there. This is actually, I'm going to borrow this because this will be out. This will be one of the slides. I took the picture. This will be a slide I include in mine is explaining the differences between ZigBee and Z-Wave and why I prefer both of these protocols to be used. And this is because I don't like a bunch of Wi-Fi devices. This is where a lot of people get concerned about Wi-Fi and go, well, what about, you know, are you worried about buying insert name of some random third party untested potentially IOT problem device? And then you're like, well, we can block the internet from it, but then it's still on your network and doing whatever it does. If you choose protocols like ZigBee and Z-Wave, you don't have to worry about that. They're not internet based. These are just devices that easily connect, that talk to the device itself. As a matter of fact, this is the card that I'm using. This little Nord tech device, pretty simple. It's got both ZigBee and Z-Wave on one little USB. So this is sticking out of my, I have two of them. This is just plugged into my Raspberry Pi running home assistant and I'm able to talk to both protocols. So I can look at ZigBee devices. I can look at Z-Wave devices. I can control them simultaneously. Is ZigBee easy to hack? Well, that's the thing. There is a level of security in there, but what protects you with the Z-Wave, and this comes down to your threat modeling you do, they do have like a level of security. I don't know. I haven't dug in depth because it's not on my worry list of hacking someone hacking my ZigBee devices. First, if, in a matter of fact, just pull the slide up, you'll notice the range on these. You can go about 50 to 100 feet. So you got to be outside of my house in order to mess with my Z-Wave or ZigBee devices. This is the first challenge is, if someone's in really close proximity hacking away at your devices, they can do the same thing with Wi-Fi. If that's your threat model, don't have wireless devices end of story because Wi-Fi is even more hackable or now let's say hackable. Wi-Fi has good security, but for a denial of service, for example, that's easy, just de-off it. You can just spread noise and de-off Wi-Fi for people and cause problems. So if you have a threat model that says, I need to protect against people, you know, interfering with my wireless signals, well, then you should do things and I'm more hardware made. Didn't this stuff drive live saying, I see at a firmware cage fight with a company? Yeah, I don't remember all his, I don't watch much the line of stuff. So what's the model on the USB devices? Well, I do have some of that started. So let me get this going and I'll drop a link for everyone. I don't have all my devices in there or maybe by the time you're watching this in post, it will. But this is most of my home assistant parts and you're going to find them in the link here. kit.co slash loren systems slash home assistant parts. This is all the home assistant stuff that I've added and I got it because I bought more stuff, I got to add more stuff to that list. But that is, that to me is like I said, a big thing in the video. It's got the specifically the model, little USB and a bunch of other devices that I bought from my home assistant. AHA has remote backup so I'm able to back it straight up to the NAS. Yes, backing up home assistant is not hard to do. What I did though was I went and cloned, let me go grab it real quick. I'll show you maybe because someone will undoubtedly complain that I'm using an SD card, but I use these. These are high endurance. I'll try to put a link to these in there, but they're pro endurance Samsung SD cards. And what I do is I clone, I pull the card out and I clone one card to another. So now I have a complete clone of a working system. I have a backup to all the settings but the bigger challenge is what happens if the thing dies. Well, I got to reload it and then I got to restore those settings and that might be a little bit tedious. So cloning it once in a while and I realized it's been almost five years, four years, four years ago that I installed on that SD card. I can't remember exactly how long it's been running, three or four years, somewhere around there. I think it was 2020. It was around 2020 when I installed it. 2019 or 2020 is when I set up the home assistant on there and I figured that card is seen enough over that many years of writing. So I went and replaced it with another high endurance one. There are specific ones you can buy. Most of the failures I've seen with SD cards is because people buy the best budget one they can get. Like they buy the cheap Micro Center ones and things like that. And yeah, those seem to fail a little bit more often but the pro endurance ones are ones made for like cameras that do looping, recording like security cameras. These don't write as fast but I don't care about writing fast. So they're pretty good for a long-term storage. So Linus had an issue with the GE, GSCO and their Z-Wave firmware update process. Yeah, you need Ethernet to ZigBee Z-Wave Bridge. I have no idea if they make that. No idea. Maybe that's a big maybe. Like I said, my solution is it runs wonderfully well on a Raspberry Pi 4. No issues. Why even have a VM or any extra complexity to it? I love the simplicity of it. I never managed to get remote Z-Wave working within my home system VM. Check out the Aragon 1 Pi case as M2 support. Yes, I thought about that too. It's a consideration. It's an expense. I didn't feel like spending. By the way, the way I'm setting this up is this is rack-mounted. This is a 3D-printed rack-mounted case. So if you notice, let me see if I get a better picture of it. There are rack ears. Oh, here's the picture. Here we go. Let me crop this one in. There we go. See, it's only got rack ears on one side because, well, it doesn't eat another side of rack ears. But this just mounts into my rack. So I like how tiny this is. It doesn't take up a lot of space. Not that it's a big deal to get one of those cases. You can also get the home assistant devices directly. So if we go over to... I thought about buying one of their devices, but I just don't have a problem with mine. Share this tab. Where is the... I got to find it on their site. There we go. They have their own you can buy as well. So lots of different options. But like I said, I went with a Raspberry Pi, and they've since come out with this as well, the Sky Connect, ZigBee, and Thread, because this supports the Thread as well. So there's even more support they have. And I have more USB ports. So for some reason I need to do that. That's the possibility. My first goal, HA, is to connect to some Internet of poop devices that I have. Yeah. Now, there's actually... You can get an SSD case with a plug in your C, 3B, 4W, 3B plus. Cool. Rack-mounted R-Pi cases. Yeah. There's a few different rack-mounted R-Raspery Pi cases you can get. There's plenty of 3D printing options. I mean, maybe someone sells it. We have a 3D printer, so we just print them. Makes it easy. But something that people may find relevant here, and this was kind of funny. Let me just find the link to it, because I thought this was perfect. Now, this kind of blew up on social media. The person who had the GE washer or whatever it was that was using way too much data. And this came up in the talk where they were talking about how do you monitor the dryer or washer. And this is... I'll throw a link in here. This is brought up at the talk at Codemash. And this is a DIY system to monitor the energy usage. This way you can determine whether or not someone was running the dryer. And I think this is where Home Assistant really shines. If you are a tinkerer, you are a real... I want to deep dive into electronics. This is all stuff you can build for little of nothing, a couple little pieces, and you can build a power monitoring. And the way they're monitoring the power is just with the little clapper on the cord. So you're actually monitoring the power usage via the electrical signal, so you're not tapping into the power. You're just kind of watching what goes across it. And then you can determine whether or not your washer is done or your dryer is done doing what it's doing. It's kind of a... I thought this was a really clever hack, and this person does that. So he doesn't have to wonder when his clothes are done drying. He can actually see the power usage drop. That sets off an automation to let him know that the clothes are done. And he'd use this same setup to monitor different random things. Yeah, just do induction. It's really clever. I was not in my head going, yeah, that's pretty cool. What else did this person have? They had a few different scenes. I'll share the GitHub from the person who did the talk as well. I just do that link in there as well. This was the person who gave the talk. They walked through their automations getting started. And they also are using... I'm not using this. This is the Z-Wave MQTT. And that's a whole different topic at all. I'm not using the MQTT right now. That gives you all kinds of fun stuff, but even goes beyond what I'm even doing right now. Now, I have customized my Home Assistant a little bit more. I have the Zoos ones as well. I do like the Zoos stuff from Home Assistant. I think it's great. The way I've customized this, I've removed some of the Synology cameras. I still have all my Synology integration, but I moved them all over to here so I can just see all the cameras at a glance. But there's a couple pieces I want to talk about with Home Assistant. First, I'm going to break it probably into two videos, or maybe I'll just do one, because I have the Home Assistant. But then I also have how I'm integrating Home Assistant. So when the Synology recognizes a person in the driveway, it will turn on my lights, for example. That is another automation that I built where I tied the Synology and Home Assistant together using web hooks. And it just makes it so simple to do. I think it's a good talking point on Home Assistant on there. Other than that, and I can't change them now, or they would turn off the camera, but this runs all my studio. This is how I boot up the studio computer. That's how the space heater turns on and off. And this turns on all the lights. I think you'll be able to see these behind me if I turn them on. It'll get a lot brighter behind me. Yeah. This is an automation for the bench I have behind me. So it just brightened up because there's a workbench I put in. And I also put this big button here. If you're wondering why it's a big button with all these lights, that's because it's easier on my phone to just press the big button instead of looking at it. So it's on my phone. I put this as the last one. So I open up Home Assistant. I flick with my thumb to go to the bottom. I press this button, and it turns on all my studio bench lights. Yeah. The latency is like nothing. One of the advantages you get is the fact that all these features are pretty much instantaneous. Like, maybe do this right here. What can I change that you can see that's behind me? See the purple behind me? That's the left back. Which one is that? Blamp, lamp, lamp, studio workbench. Now I think this one actually does a fade. Nope. That one you can't tell. What could I change? I think I could turn these lights out. Yeah. These ones won't turn off the camera, but they will turn off all the lights. So you can see these are a lot of lights. Some of the lights themselves have a longer delay. It's pretty much instant when I do this and it changes the scenes. So yeah, very low latency. I've not done any unified integration because I don't need to. I don't have a use case for it is mostly why. Like Jay from LearnLinuxTV, he's one as far as to have firewall rules that can be changed from Home Assistant. You can tell Home Assistant to change rules in PF Sense. I don't have a need for that. I think it's novel, but you can do it so there's an automation that changes the setting in your firewall. And I don't, I have to look at what unified integrations are supported, but I don't remember any of them being interesting to me and because I don't use any of the unified cameras. If I had unified cameras, maybe I'd use it if I don't have any unified cameras. So there's not much there that I want to do. Have you tried using blocky and traffic for Ingress Reverse Proxy on scale or do you prefer to use HA Proxy and ACME? HA Proxy and ACME is my go-to for, it's integrated into PF Sense. It works really well. If you're broke, don't fix it. I don't have a need that is unmet for me to want to try it. I know a lot of people like traffic and I don't know any reason for you not to use it, but I would have to have another, you know, system set up running traffic that I don't need. Half the battle is naming all those switches, the other half is remembering what the name means. Oh yes, you should always be very descriptive when you set things up in your Home Assistant because if you're not, you'll be very confused. Setting groups and areas, it helps a lot in Home Assistant. So the setting things up be like studio or house lights. I don't have that many different house lights on automation right now. But if I do, I will be creating different groups. Like there's no automation in any other rooms besides, my living room and kitchen are kind of one and the same. That's where all these automations are. And then I threw in, which my wife unplugged it right now because we don't have any outdoor decorations, we have for different seasons, but not whatever season January is. We just have a little button that shows up whenever she plugs it in, and it allows us to turn the automations for, or whatever the decorations are outside. It's an outside plug. This is what my wife's dashboard looks like because she doesn't need to control the studio stuff. The only other thing I got to add on there is the Roomba. I just haven't, I keep forgetting to do it, but you can put the Roomba on there and tell it to go or not to go if I want it to stop doing things. You know, it's kind of nice too because I mostly just need to glance at my cameras from time to time. And one of the things I like about pulling all my cameras in here, and this works the same exactly on my phone, if I just want to look real quick outside, I can look real quick outside and see what's out there. Actually, that's interesting. You can see all the little squirrel marks. I think I'm assuming squirrels running around in the snow. I can see if there's a package on my porch or someone on my driveway. Those are the only things I really need to know. And then I can just, you know, go back over here. All right, that's weird. I got a message from somewhere. Oh, there we go. Unified integration was great for device tracking on phones with home and away automations. Yeah, that is one thing you can do. You can do just network monitoring of them. You can also, and I'll pull this up, if you use the Home Assistant app on your phone, actually this is going to be, I wish I could show this in, try to think of the easiest way to display this. So if I do this, man, I try to figure out if I can show you how fast this is. So here's my phone. Come on, let's see if it'll focus on the right spot. Hold on, this is getting tricky. I got to get everything prepared, figure out where my mouse is. So if my phone will focus, and you see where it says like under desk, when you click things on the screen, I mean, I'm clicking them, if you can hear the click in my mouse, there's milliseconds is how fast you measure the delay. So with the phone syncing that fast and using the app, combined with you telling the app to allow information and flow back and forth, which I'm fine with, it's going to my Home Assistant, not to the cloud. This actually allows me to set parameters based on the phone information pulled in there. So you can do the presence detection with the app on the phone to let you know where the phone is. Matter of fact, one of the things I want to do is I want to start playing with some of the geolocation information and see how much more data I can pull in from the app. But one of the things is kind of novel and I don't use any of these features, but let me look up the entities on here. And pull it up, because I think this is just really cool. Yeah, here we go. Just got to share this. Let me zoom in a little bit. If you notice, though, I can see the... This is my wife's phone. She has the app on there. Mobile app. I can see what her battery level is. So my wife's... The battery on my wife's phone... She's not here. She's at her sister's house and her battery is at 91%. I have my wife's hand on here. I have mine on here. Here's my Pixel 7. Battery health is good. Battery power usage. Here's a whole history of my phone in the charging cycles. I mean, it's kind of cool that you can do this and it's my data. This is all in my system. It's just... It's really not... I don't do anything with this data, but I have it. So definitely you can do quite a bit... Quite a bit of things with the app tied to the phone. It's been on my to-do list to figure out what else I can do. Actually, I got to remove some of these because it says Pixel 7, but it's not. One of the things you can do is when... Actually, if I type in charging... So if I say Pixel 7 Pro is charging... See if I do this. How quick will it notice that? Oh, my phone's at 100%. I don't even know if it'll show it's charging. Oh, it does. So that's... I just plug my phone in. So now I think it knows my phone is charging. You can actually build automations off that where you can say, when phone is charging, do these things. So I could actually have an automation where my phone, when I set it down to charge, maybe turns on all the lights because it knows I'm sitting in my office. There's fun things you can do with it. It's kind of fun. Hit the wrong... Hit the wrong button. Go back over here. There we go. Oh, let's see. It's just useful for presence detection. Yeah, I don't need that as much. So production scale machine that could run traffic. No, I would not run any apps in Trunas scale that I would call production. I find it buggy. I even saw the Saunov thermostatic radiator valve. Nice. Have you had volume buttons fall out of your Pixel 7? Or do you have a case? I have a case. I've always put a case on my phone, so it hasn't been an issue. How do you like your phone to serve from outside of network VPN to expose server? I do not directly expose the server to the internet. It does work through the Nabucasu. That is... There's two ways you can do it. So you can do it through Nabucasu or you can use VPN. I would recommend VPN. But right now I'm testing out the Nabucasu because it's probably the easiest one that I'm going to recommend people to set up. And I've had no issues with it at all. It's got two factor authentication. It's not directly exposed. It's through a relay system. So I think that's fine. But yeah, figure out what your risk tolerance is of how you'd want to handle that. Whether or not you want to relay it through Nabucasu or just use a VPN. I use a VPN most of the time. But right now, like I said, I'll be honest, I've got it set up with Nabucasu because I wanted to see how well it worked and it works quite well. I use a charging, not charging, on automation at bedtime. Hey, I know who you are. Yeah, links will be blocked. Email, vlog Thursday at LawrenceSystems.com and that is easy way. But yeah, you do the tutorials. I think I subscribed to some. You taught me a lot about DaVinci Resolve. I have the hardware in my first homelab, Asus Z90, 32 gig, 3200 CPU RAM is my old PC. I want to learn to control the network with it. Awesome. Since you have the Pixel, you have better support for D-Google ROMs or do you have any thoughts on using one? No, I don't. If I D-Googled it, the phone would be less useful to me. When she's out of Wi-Fi, does the VPN on her phone upgrade? No, the Nabucasu solves it for my wife, too. I migrated Homocystinal SVM from PHP VirtualBox to Asus Store NAS to Proxmox pretty easily. It takes about 10 minutes. No problems. Nabucasu is the company that makes the Home Assistant. So if you sign up for Home Assistant Cloud, it'll take you to Nabucasu. They're the company behind Home Assistant. What was it? Home Assistant.io. I'll throw a link to that here. But if you Google Home Assistant, you'll find their page. Yes, YouTube definitely autobox links. That's my thing, too. I do it to support the Dev team as well. Zero tier is a good solution. Zero tier or tail scale. Either one of those should be fine for doing that. You can create buttons when sending notifications to your phone that can open other apps on your phone. Well, that's cool. I've not tried that. Do you have a video comparing ubiquity cameras versus Synology cameras? Any thoughts? A lot of thoughts. The problem with the Unify cameras is you're limited to only what Unify offers. Synology's bragging point is we support thousands of cameras. So you're limited to whatever cameras that support Synology, which is, like they said, thousands of camera. And even if the camera's not officially supported by Synology, you can usually find support for it because the Synology supports the OVIS standard. The standard that a lot of cameras follow. So you can have a model that's varied from their actual support list and still have it work. Synology also offers way more features on the back end. The problem with Unify, the good and bad, they give you an easy-to-use app, an easy-to-use system. But it's like it's limited to these features. You either like the features it has or don't use it. You don't have a backup feature, for example. There's not a, hey, let's back this NAS up to another data point. Then you'll be like, well, there's a hacky way to do it. There are some scripts, and now you see some of the challenges and shortcomings on there. I've heard of Harvester. I don't use it, so I don't really have an opinion on it. There's a lot of different ones out there that people ask about. It comes down to how good is their documentation and support? That's really what's, you know, it's not just a product that works. You have to have a product that has good documentation, good support, doesn't implode every time there's an update. You know, how do the updates go? That's a problem even for VMware. The VMware updates of the last year, there's a few of them that seem to cause more bugs. And that's just, you know, a lot of people have that as a complaint. And now that VMware is, well, heading the road that they're heading down with a broad comment at the wheel of them doing full community destruction, I don't expect their updates to get any better. The reason I like XCPNG is the updates go so smoothly. That is a huge factor because it's not installing it and does it work today? It's does it work over time? That's the question. How is Nebuchadnezzar any different than exposing HA directly to the internet, aside from not exposing your home IP? When you relay something, it's a little bit harder to find because you'd have to understand how they structure their URLs and are doing the relaying. They have a really long link that they send. So there's some obfuscation. It doesn't mean someone couldn't figure out a way to reverse engineer and enumerate it, but it's as opposed to if you're just exposing it directly. The other thing when you expose it directly is you'd have to deal with certificates. If you go the Nebuchadnezzar route, you don't have to deal with certificates. Now certificates aren't a big deal to me because I have HA proxy. Matter of fact, if you've seen the URL internally, it's home.studio.launchsystem.com. That is the URL for my home system internally or one amount of VPN. Own VIF, yes. Sounds like you also support RTSP, yes. VMware's acquisition of Broadcom is a problem. It's a predicted problem. It is going exactly how anyone who knows anything about Broadcom, anyone who took the time to read the SEC filings, anyone who took the time to listen to the CEO talk of how they're going to close the $8 billion revenue gap. There's only one way to close an $8 billion revenue gap. And it's the way they said they were going to do it. They were going to raise their rates. They were going to lay off people. End of story. And they're going to get rid of anything for free. They don't give away things for free. I don't have an interest in Twingate. It's a paid commercial product. They're a little vague and a lot light on details of how it works. It's a black box opaque commercial tool provided by Twingate. They're popular because they keep sponsoring YouTubers. So people keep asking about them. It's a good strategy, but I prefer open source tools way more than I prefer a closed source. Hence, you know, the inshidification cycle, as Corey Doctorow puts it, this is what happens with these companies, especially when they're running on VC firm money. They get a bunch of investment money and the return on investment is grab as much market share as you can, extract as much value as that market share, rinse and repeat until they have ratcheted up the price until it's become unreasonable. Then sell your shares of said company and get a pat on the back for all the profits you made and let the company fall and burn. It's an aggravating cycle with a lot of these companies. The nice thing about when it's open source, there's less of a path leading to that. Also, most of the open source backers generally stay private and keeping some of the VC and private equity out of it is a better path to a long-term sustainable project. Yes, this is a more accurate answer. You are correct. Nebuchadster doesn't expose HA to the Internet. It exposes a secure API to their website. Yes. That's a more accurate way they do it. One of the best number cards for XP and G, I would use Intel cards. I use HA proxy to help from your videos, access most of my stuff. Nebuchadster is a great way to help support the devs. For sure. In short, Broadcom is a problem. Broadcom is just being Broadcom. I think my favorite thing is I posted this article over a year ago. The register did a good breakdown of all the things in the behavior of Broadcom and their intention. Like, I was thinking, I like the honesty. We're not going to pretend we're a good company. We're going to tell you that by buying VMware, we can raise prices. We can raise prices substantially because many of these companies are not going to switch. It's too hard for them to switch. The smaller companies that can switch will, and they're going to make a lot of noise, but we make most of our money, most of our revenue. I think they said like 90% of their revenue comes from these large companies that are not likely to swap their infrastructure. So they lose this bottom 10% of people who make a bunch of noise on the Internet and complain a lot, but their top-line revenue doesn't look any worse and away they go. They got rid of all the free stuff, so I don't know what the... I don't really know what the plan is. There was a recent article, they got rid of the last of the free things. I don't know what the future holds for that. My guess is they don't care about the community because they have... The community built them, but they don't need it to go further so they can drop it. And by the time you don't have a pipeline of people using VMware, and this is how communities work, you get a group of base users using it for a long time. They love it, so they start using it at work. It's what they all recommend because what they know is what they use in their home labs and you build that community up. Then when you cut off that community, you didn't stop your top-line revenue, but you did stop the future of your product. But by the time these CEOs leave office, they can just get a pat on the back for, you know, oh, look at this person. Five years in that building, they made X million dollars. Look at their VMware deal. They bought them for 60 billion dollars. They sold them for 90 billion dollars and made a bunch of money in between. Then whoever buys it next is, you know, no one wants to touch it because it doesn't have a pipeline of inbound community. It's on the outbound side. You can tell them a little bitter on how a lot of these systems work. How much do good hypervisors cost? I think XCPNG's pricing is very reasonable. You can look that up. I don't have that link handy. I would rather use NetBird, HeadScale, TailScale. Yeah, NetBird is pretty cool. Eight billion. They're looking in the SOFA of Fortune 1,000 companies. That's their SOFA. That's the couch cushions by which they will extract some value. There's a lot of buzz about Zero Trust and networking realm. Has your company been asked to build an important Zero Trust network? Yes. I thought about doing a rant on Zero Trust. I don't know if it's a good fit for my channel. Yes. Zero Trust is my favorite marketing term. I'm thinking that you can buy Zero Trust or you can buy Security Solution. Yeah. Too much marketing. It doesn't necessarily mean what people think it means. Look up the NIST. I think it's NIST's got a good definition of it. Google's planning and outlining password authentication. Do you have a recommendation for S&T email service notifications on all the appliances? Yes. I've talked about this before. It is called... Is it Duo Circle? I'll find a link here. Do, do, do, do, do. Where did it go? We'll bring this over here. Duo Circle. I use them. I think they have a free service still. So Duo Circle for email. Chelsio and Milanox. They seem fine. Some of my systems do have those in there. I always recommend the Intel because they're so easy to find and they're cheap. Yeah. I think I access some ships with some of those too. Any bets on VMware profits crashing in five years? Corporate hypervisors start migrating. I think it might take more than five years, but it's a matter of time. It's a matter of when. Not if, I think, but mostly upset with regulators. Oh, that's a whole different topic. Yes. Any plans on creating a video for HAProxy low balance failover? Not on my to-do list. Maybe one day, but I have a lot of other videos I want to finish first. There's so little demand on a failover video for HAProxy. In the time it would take me to make it that I would prefer to do some of the other videos first. I try to prioritize, you know, a content that I want to do combined with what the demand is for things. There's some balance in between. Mostly I create videos that I think are interesting that are sometimes even mostly about what I actually do in my day-to-day job, if you will, of working in tech. So more of my videos are focused around that than the edge cases. Have any recognition for an Intel card or manufacturers? If you look up the Intel X520 10 gigs, you can get genuine Intel ones used for really cheap. X520 DA2. Those ones, like Sam Sheridan said here, X520 DA2, you find the ones with the Intel chips on there, 40, 50 bucks on eBay. I've bought some of them cheaper. I found a box of them on eBay. Some of them were selling a few of them cheap so now I got plenty of them. But yeah, they're easy to find. They're trustworthy. They're not too expensive. Oh, let's see. Have you looked at ZimaCube? Would you use one for your business when you pre-made NAS? I'm a skeptic on the ZimaCube. I can't really see more. Watch my friends who are reviewing the ZimaCube. When I see my friends, other creators might be listed on there. So that's going to be... It's going to be an interesting topic, I think. I don't know. I think it's neat, but I don't know if I'm completely sold on it. I'm waiting for the reviews to come out. I don't have one and it's not on my to-do list to buy one. Does Tailscale block you from seeing a network drive? No. I can't think of a reason it would. Dual Circle sounds like a Google product. They'll probably be canceled in 18 months. Yeah. It's not a Google product, but yes. Can you play with AI without escaping your network? Is there any use for AI in whole lives, especially for art writing, video editing? I heard some AI is great for spot video clips. Yes. Matter of fact, there's a ton. And I think this is where the bigger future is in AI. Everyone knows and associates AI with ChatGPT. That's a form that is AI in ChatGPT. Yeah, that made it popular, but you can get a ton of these language models. Matter of fact, I would actually recommend you follow on YouTube. He's one of the creators I have on there. He's done a couple of recent videos on this. Let's see here. Jim's Garage. He just did one here. I think he's got a video on it. One Nass. Oh, yep. He's got a stable diffusion tutorial, for example. And I'll drop a link to his video in here. Yeah, I made friends. I reached out and became friends with Jim. Just genuinely nice person. That's why he's listed on there. He's got some really solid videos on this, but he's got a few videos on doing some of the AI stuff and how to run it yourself. I know he's got one other one on here. Nonetheless, I think he's straight up got some solid homelab things. Oh, he's even got a whole frigate video here. He's got a headscale video. I've seen he's doing similar stuff that's really related to the homelab. So that's why I reached out to him. Very good channel, Jim's Garage. Highly recommend it. Oh, yeah. I use AI. This video will have an AI tool build out all the chapters. It takes a little while to process from the time I finish this live stream, but it goes back retroactively. We actually use another tool commercially at CNWR. We summarize all of our meetings with AI tools as well. So there's definitely some really cool things you can do with it. I want to be able to switch between a NetGate 4200 and 4100 and EVM Pro as my main router a few months to have a better solution unplugging one into the other. Not really. Well, no, I actually, yes. We had one of these for a client. Let me pull one up because this exists. Where did this go? There we go. This exists. So yes, you could do this where you use one of these old boxes. There's probably a couple very... There's probably other variations of this. This one's DB9. But yeah, there's... I don't know how good these are. I've seen them in use before. It's kind of funny that they still make them. So they're... You could do that. When you use something like Proxmox, do you install VMs on different drives or keep all the VMs or containers on one drive? Usually, you group the drives into a RAID array, and then I install it on a RAID array. Can you use a 10-gig Ethernet switch, specifically a Mac? My 10-gig Mac. Many reviews stay connected. My FlexXG seems to come up with 10-g Mac devices. Have no idea. I don't have any 10-g Mac devices, and I did not know that was an issue. I'm moving to Mikrotik for my 10-gigs switches. Yeah, there's some really neat AI stuff you can self-host. We've had a couple different language models. We were testing at the office, and it's kind of surprising how good they were. OpenVPN working well with different subnet. Subnet means the host names aren't resolved in PFSense. They don't register to use in QDNS. What's the best way to reference? I don't use the Kia 1 because there's certain features not working. So I don't have a workaround for that, other than making a bunch of manual DNS entries and forcing your DNS to be in there. That's probably... If you are going to use the Kia 1 where it can't register, then just force them all in there into DNS entries. Yeah, I do want to do that because... Let me pull this back up. I just finished this. This is what's behind me right now. This is my second shooting area that I have for that. So yeah, I wanted to finish this. I'm going to do a kind of a homelab, lab tour where I work on things, projects I have. So yes, I will be doing a tour really soon. Here's another view of it, kind of from above. I was just standing on a chair. I'm a little complain about Kia DNS. I believe it has many features. Kia DCP, I think you mean. I only have two 10-gig devices. My better off keep my 3-com 24-port gigabit switch and adding a 10-gig switch. I mean, it tends on your budget. I like when things are all in one switch because it's convenient, but if your budget allows for that, awesome. If not, then yeah. It's just adding one more switch and it just comes on the budget really. Consolidation is great, but if you go, well that's more expensive, then go the route that works. Functionality-wise, you get the same result. Yeah, I trust east-west switching and Wi-Fi. Yes, I don't like them as much for the firewall either. They're better than they used to be. I don't know, I don't really have an opinion on different PDUs. I mean, I have I think I have an APC right now. I don't have a strong opinion on different power delivery units. There's some people that may buy ASIC ones, but you're not going to see that in most of the consumer stuff at all. You don't get to the ASIC firewall edges until you get to some of the larger enterprise stuff. New to XP and G, I use my laptop for an ICER repository. I created a share, private network created a share, full access, user ping works for servers and laptops, still not able to use it as an SR. That's probably a better forum post, because I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do. Using a laptop as a storage repository. That's why I have my forums. Those are easier places to post that. What's your best bang for the buck for a layer three switch? I mean, Mikrotik is probably provided you don't mind dealing with the quirkiness of a Mikrotik. Mikrotik's really the most affordable in the market. That's why they're so popular in a web. I prefer for the Unify. I just like how simple the Unify are. So it comes down to do you want to deal with the quirkiness and the interface on one of those, then someone will start an argument in the comments of just learn the command line. It's better and people are going, but I don't want to learn the command line. I just need a couple of VLANs set up. Is it worth spending time learning the command line for a couple of VLANs? I don't know. January 24 homelab tour gives you a good starting point for December 24 year in homelab review. Yes, it does. I'll look at which one I have. One I have I know has a maybe I can find it on Amazon. The one I'm using in my rack has a cover on it. That won't let you you got to lift the cover to hit the button. I have way too many things in here. They put a rack. Whoops. I bought a few of these apparently. I bought three of these. I have the this is the one that's in my rack right now. It's only 15 amp. Maybe that's enough for you. My homelab does not use a lot of wattage. I'll throw a link to this one for anyone interested in it. I moved from Unraid to TrueNAS and the performance is night and day better plus DFS is amazing. Yes. Does your company help clients find co-location? Do you have a preferred fighter list? I like because I've worked with. Deft is nice. But I know I don't have a list of all and I don't. Yeah. That's not really a service we offer. I saw some covers but this one she turns out cheap was worth it probably look at 3D printing something to stick over it. No, that's the solution to any thoughts on anything. Kaseya here. I pretty sure I'm already been banned from attending Kaseya events. The thoughts on Kaseya are screw them. They suck. If I wasn't banned that would mean I've now broke their non-dysparishment clause. It's a shame they acquired Datto. Datto had some promise. They sold it and I think the funniest thing I heard someone say someone was complaining about Kaseya buying them and them ruining the company and then also saying that the owners of Datto were such good people blah blah blah and I was like you know the funny thing about it is and someone pointed out as one of those after hours bar discussions go they said hey somebody actually asked olderers there was multiple signing lines the owners did not have to sell to Kaseya they cashed out and sold to Kaseya so you can blame them as much as anything but my thoughts on Kaseya in general is screw that company they're not a good company I would not touch anything that Kaseya owns I have no interest in it if you don't know who Kaseya is if you work in the manager's provider space you'll certainly hear their name come up a bit they're one of the big providers in that space turn my phone off it's making noises there we go anyone found out a way to specify firewall roles for VPN clients and UDMP not that I know of I see Travis yeah Travis knows who Kaseya is is there a rule of thumb how much figure your snapshot data protection pools should be IE2 terabytes a data snapshot well let me explain it differently because there's not a rule of thumb for that the way the rule of thumb works is referred to as your data run rate so if we go here and I pull up my churn ass and let's look at my snapshots so here is the LTS video doing snapshots every day so let's actually look at the snapshots themselves this is one thing that takes a while I do have a lot of snapshots actually you should probably put there we go if you notice that my snapshots aren't using that much data and the reason for that is I don't produce that much data so the snapshots you can have lots of them but if there's not any change in the data you don't have a large amount of data that they take up so some days because if I don't add a video maybe I just changed a couple files each snapshot might be only like on this day here nothing happened I was probably when I was traveling so there's only kilobytes of data from maybe some automation that was saving oh these ones have no nothing used at all because I wasn't there so there's once again a lack of data being used on these so it doesn't change so it's not like a rule of thumb it's about how much data change is there between the snapshots don't run out of space have you ever checked out TrueNAS Scale UI on mobile I think it's actually pretty well optimized no I never think to log into my TrueNAS box on mobile I don't have a need for it so to use a traditional UPS still transitioning over to portable power stations and the runtime of lithium batteries has been a game changer I well I have a lithium UPS so kind of do snapshots grow over time like to do in VMware no they don't work the same way the snapshots are block level snapshots in time of the data so the delta between one snapshot to the next doesn't grow over time necessarily it grows over the amount of data that's changed over time yeah snapshots sizes are in relation to the amount of data that was changed from the previous time yeah because you generally let them expire like I only keep my snapshots for my videos for two weeks if I haven't noticed something's gone in two weeks maybe I didn't need it so two weeks of snapshots is fine for me that way they expire out as long as my creation of data change is not in two weeks better than the volume of storage I have I'm not going to have a problem with them does hitting the like button help the algorithm I'm going to go with yes how many companies that you manage moved away from VMware that's a good I'll have to really put some thought into that one quite a few I'm sure and quite a few more here in 2024 we do a lot of consulting so a lot of people reach out to us because we're offering a solution so sometimes they're not our clients they're people who reach out to consulting to become our client so we can help them do migrations so it kind of skews the number but yeah license renewals when they come up we're going to be looking at alternatives quite a bit mash the like button a vert server using NFS and iSCSI shares the same land vert server is spinning up VMs using these shares can I take the VM as separate subnet is this routing data I mean if they're on the same subnet no you want your storage subnet and your hypervisor subnet to be the same that's the more ideal situation if a snapshot is a delta ah you know there's a talk it's shared in my forums I'm trying to think of if I can remember exactly what the talk was titled but it it breaks down the complexities of how that works so what happens to the previous snapshot the ZFS engineering teams the years of coding that have went into ZFS allows for some really fanciness for that to work perfectly smooth so yes what is your experience moving an organization from vSphere to XCPNG say 4000 VMs on 50 host I think the largest I've done so far is only 2000 VMs I still think that's the largest there might be another client well by now they're bigger I don't know once we help them they didn't need my help anymore we just consulted with their team to get things going and go from there but I do I think it work there's definitely lots of companies running larger workloads you can head over to their forums there's a lot of engagement you can do and talk to the team at XCPNG about what what it looks like at scale VMware world becomes Cisco yes lots of licensing headache do you sync the in a copy of data backup server do you snapshots on one server I use a combination of things my videos are big so I don't have them in syncing that that's an impractical way to handle them I also don't worry about real-time backups for my videos so that's all done with snapshots that are replicated to other systems now my real-time backups are things that are done in syncing and anytime I create a file that's important to me it's always in a folder tied to syncing so I have excuse me yawning a little bit I have that all set up to automatically the moment a file is created it is synced and replicated to multiple server locations here and off-site I love syncing it's it's my favorite go-to open source tool for synchronizing things here's it running on my desktop and any file I change goes to these two servers this is a local server and this is a remote server across the VPN so instantly when I edit a file it is synced between here and then whatever is synced to both of these is also synced to any other desktops that I use for example like my laptop the moment I open my laptop it instantly syncs all of my things my phone is on here too whatever my phone is on the same network my phone has syncing on it and this way anytime I take a photo or picture on my phone it immediately syncs it to provided I'm on the same network I don't do it remotely because I don't need the bandwidth chewed up I wait till it's on my Wi-Fi but yeah ZFS is the billion diorophile system yes have you seen those new PoE mini PCs at CES those could be fun I saw some videos Linus and level one text on them I didn't look at those sounds novel though yeah definitely interesting all the weird things I like all the weird things that come out of CES maybe I'll go in here I don't know my interest level is kind of low on it I like I don't know my cousin she's a YouTuber she she does dog and family videos but it was kind of it was kind of interesting because she went and I didn't watch her video on it yet but maybe I'll go next year with my cousin it sounds like she had a good time building a home assistant with ZigBee switches depressed by the limited thermoset options never considered a mixed calm deployment z-wave here I come hey awesome and thank you for the donation much appreciated yeah the um I'm not gonna lie with my home assistant I'm using an ecobee love it or hate it that's what I use because actually this is what was already installed in my house it does the job I can set my temperature it lets me knows what's going on I don't love that it the ecobee is tied to the ecobee cloud as well but I don't know I live with it I think it ecobee seems better than the Google one but I you're right though there's a lot of limitations when you're looking for something that's directly controlled there's options out there you can certainly build your own do you know what number is Cisco clients to convert to unify at this point ah I don't know not sure not sure definitely a uh probably that number is probably decently big all right I need to close more windows I have too many of them open there we go I use the how are they started Aquara Akara AQARA ZIGB sensors for monitoring in house conditions and HA response to all cells my tuya heat pump to what we need yeah the um the Aquara ones I've looked at they look pretty cool some need a little bit more complicated home assistant set up but there seems to be a lot of there's a good community around it which something I mentioned earlier when people were asking me about different hypervisors it comes down to the community around it can you find documentation and support for the things you want to do and if you spend some time in the home assistant forums there are a ton of very helpful people in there that really have a lot of great suggestions for things and I think that's just awesome uh Cisco's been buying a lot well Cisco buys a whole lot of things that's for sure their their company built hugely on acquisitions uh we sell implement unified Cisco uh metal with our client or Maraki yeah and Maraki yes we do a lot of Maraki with our customers too it works uh cnwr was selling Maraki before we merged so there's still some Maraki after we merged we also sell Unify Digi Blur has a great community for help with HA and many of its add-ons awesome yeah I what did I just order I just ordered some more stuff that'll be here tomorrow I wanted to finish off I randomly just go through and buy more things for my home assistant like I I'll like oh I need this or I want this and then I try to make sure I don't buy things until I'm gonna use them so these are uh a couple more things oh yeah this is someone just mentioned this is the last I'm buying this because I want this to be able to set a scene so this is one of those little button presses it's got a single press double press long press I want to play around with this and I think I only need one in my studio but I want to be able to come in my studio and switch between different scenes by one pressing or long pressing it and I'll see how that works once I have that integration done it'll be cool but what happens is I walk over to my bench and I want to be able to have the lights come on I might do a motion sensor for the lights as long as I'm standing at the bench but I kind of like the idea of changing the scene because one of the lights the purple light that you see behind me what happens is there's actually two purple lights and one of them when I turn on the bench lights I turn off the other purple light because if I'm filming it blasts purple on the side of my head and it looks funny I actually doesn't bother my eyes at all because it's a top down light but I end up with a purple halo I switched Nest to a Honeywell Z-Wave thermostat well that's interesting I didn't know Honeywell made a Z-Wave one that's pretty cool the Cisco look we can start this argument right now Base 9 was the best Star Trek of the older series I say older because Strange New Worlds really I love Strange New Worlds but yes Cisco DS9 hands down that's my favorite that's probably right there at the top that series was just wonderful any update on the homelab video yes because I got the I fixed some problems with it that happened minor issues I don't think it's worth mentioning in a video they had nothing to do with 45 drives but I've got all my problems sorted out with it so yes soon have you seen any buttons like that can be hardwired not battery I don't know I never really looked for them because my understanding is people told me some of the battery ones last like two years so I'm like okay cool Quark is my look as long as you know all the rules of acquisition Quark can be your spirit animal what VMS are the most popular in the USA I don't know maybe ask that question differently I think it was popular in the US is relatively popular elsewhere for some of that stuff but I need to go grab a drink and I want to remind people I haven't got many emails lately from people which kind of surprised me let's see here make sure I didn't miss any someone asked about PF Blocker I think I answered that one last time do you use any present sensor GHA I have not because I don't really need one but everything present sensor from everything smart home looks like the best one out there for sure I think that one's really cool they just did a video on it so yes but let me go grab a drink and I have a little be back soon where's that button at that makes that happen alright I'm going to roll my be right back video and I'll be right back I just got to go grab a drink I am all out of tea I think I'm drinking enough tea I got to get something a little stronger thanks for the opinions Tom awesome I think that's where I left off where do you host your emails so for LawrenceSystems.com that's G Suite or Google what do they call it today I'm calling it G Suite but I know it's called like Google apps or whatever for CNWR we use Office 365 I use the battery battery operated Accor Accara sensors AQARA however I'm supposed to say that I have three of those that offer 10 minute humidity those are cool switch bot if you use the screen and Gobi has one that worked well for me I need a bluetooth yeah there's a there's a lot you can do with the little ESP32s those are definitely really cool woke up the house with that music is it loud I have used zero of the unified phone systems what's the new drink I think we're going to go with water I realize it took my watch off put my watch back on there we go but water now water's gone this is my evening drink of choice is makers actually I kind of I kind of wouldn't mind having a beer but there's not a beer here so I'm doing that well there is a beer but it's not a beer I want to have today any other cool service using ideally like syncing look them up and I'm setting it up now you know syncing if you look at like my daily workflow and maybe I should put some of this together what is my daily workflow and the workflow is like tools I'm trying to think of how you'd word them like tools I use every day syncing definitely for synchronizing all my files I use my Synology quite a bit Synology handles all of my streaming needs it's where all my videos live it's where not videos like YouTube but like personal videos I use Synology photos that way I can self-post the backups I do like the Synology ecosystem quite a bit I also use a tool called log seek and log seek is really cool maybe not for everyone but people I don't like apps that are all these cloud based and proprietary apps for things like note taking and this is journaling and note taking all in one this is something I like I have a lot of data and I have to manage all that data and I don't want a third party managing that data I don't want a third party having access to any of that data or potentially having access to it I also like things that are open source because being open source means I don't worry about a sudden change in the way the product is done where they're like hey you can't use this product anymore we're stopping version updates and we're locking it all down to this proprietary thing so this is one of the tools if you are asking like one of my daily use tools it's called log seek I've just left a link there this is my go to for how I handle doing notes and everything else and workflows and making this is my digital second brain if you will that's one thing I use a lot of trying to think if I'm looking at the tools I use nothing really comes to mind is like my daily use I mean I use barrier but I use that to control multiple computers in one when I do my home lab tour I'll talk a little bit more about the things I use home assistant I mean home assistant is definitely that is even on my day off use because of it being on my phone it's it has all the automation so let me know what's going on it's automates different scenes in my living room for times of day and light changes so yeah you're looking for something to replace one note it is a it is a big change to move to something like log seek it is a different it is a different workflow is a different way of thinking to use something like that oh um worth noting so in log seek and we'll pull this up real quick in log seek you can do this is like a screenshot here you can do code blocks in here um it'll do code blocks I I actually really like that is it's all in markdown so when you're logging when you're doing things in here they find someone probably has an example of what it looks like they got different markdown guides of how it works uh it's just not not the site I was looking for you can look up look up log seek videos there's a few people that did videos on it I'm not likely to be among the people doing videos on it but once you kind of get the hang of how it works and grab an understanding of it it's definitely great oh let's see oh you like the Kroger label uh netgate 4200 this video is brought to you via hey not by but via a netgate 4200 let's talk about that the netgate 4200 is plugged in and running so this is what I'm using right now as my firewall um it works fine it's this is where it's setting I think the box is kind of ugly uh but yeah it's sitting next to my Synology DBA 1622 that's what does my video recording and uh this is the box that's running I have no problems with it it works great I've it's been completely trouble free um I don't have really any complaints outside of uh ugly case see my problem with things like obsidian is obsidian is closed source so I know a lot of people like it and I have friends that use it that like open source but just they're really into there so yes uh it's one of those things I do all of this um I prefer everything all my note taking apps to be completely open source if possible and log seek is open source this is obsidian is not open source have you deployed log seek self-posted uh log seek is a local application so yes essentially it's self-hosted it's not a web page it is the locally running application it runs on my I do have a MacBook Air it runs on my MacBook Air it runs on my uh desktop is there a safe way to use a gaming PC for your in a house maybe stream that game session video from anywhere in the house I don't there's probably tools for that isn't doesn't steam have something for that I just I don't game enough to tell you the answer to that question I don't remember I I tried Trillium notes I remember what I didn't like about it I love my neck eight sixty one hundred I would hold off buying it on a rack mount no neck eight was going to go come out with eighty two hundred series yeah yeah log seek is the thing I liked about log seek they have a very active community lots of plug-in support and they're essentially following I believe it's called the Zettlecaster method where did it go this is actually a good read I'm going to share this as well the collectors fallacy this is an old post this is about thinking about things in the Zettlecaster method um but yeah this is all about collecting having a second brain essentially how you collect things how you journal how you group information together but the collectors fallacy is a fun place to start as a discussion topic because it talks about the tent of all of us to gather data and feel good and useful about it to collect as a reward itself as knowledge workers were inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought for intellectual simulation we pile up promising books and articles we store half the internet is bookmarks just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge yes you can't do that you got to separate the news from the noise and figure out what's important this is a good this is just a good read if you're trying to get your head wrapped around how to do this I seen moonshine mentioned there's another um parsec was the other one parsec moonshine there's a couple different projects I've never used them I've heard people mention them you know I actually talked to their engineers about this it's not even an issue that comes up in the old and days in the early days of e-m-m-c probably true in modern times e-m-m-c e-m-m-c has become substantially better and it's just not a concern like it used to be steam lake or main light if you want uncompressed quality you have to go with something like hma or ethernet not ip or kvm yeah novel idea being able to game anywhere but I don't I game so little I was trying to debate if I want to play any games tonight I this is the game I play I have you know I do live streams for a while I don't even I I actually started playing God of War I thought that game was pretty cool I'm probably got an hour or two in God of War that's there's there's the extent of Tom's gaming he played God of War an hour in the last month I just don't play a lot of games I try to find like the last time a game really captured me was the Witcher I thought the Witcher was a great game I played it I put a lot of hours into it I enjoyed it I thought about redoing it again because I enjoyed it so much but so much of my free time is like I wander over to my bench and take things apart I'm overly fascinated with that and I post way too much on social media you know I'm on Twitter I'm chatting with friends and things like that so yeah yeah I think that's what it is God of War I don't know what version it is it's the one that was on sale when I went to the game store with my son I was like hey I'll buy this game it's cheap and it looks cool I don't know what I don't even know which one it is it's for PlayStation 4 it's my couch game I agree with you completely and one of the things I do is I read a lot of books and I don't not just the books that I have posted on my website but I read a lot of other books I've been I kickstart sponsored some of Corey Dockrow's latest fiction books so those are Corey Dockrow just sent me you know because I forgot to email him back he sent me his latest book I was like awesome you know so I was part of the Kickstarter campaign for that and he's got a new one I think I back that one is I've backed several of his books I just give him the money let that man keep writing so yeah I read more than anything else I grab a good book and like alright let me just burn through this book this book this book that's how I turn my brain off is go for walks and read books or podcasts listen to a decent amount of podcasts the transition from gamer to around the profound yeah no I didn't read the expand series but like I watched it and I thought the expanse was amazing so yeah I imagine the books are probably even better this is the picture I actually used for the thumbnail I was I realized the Bly KVM I did the review of this little KVM and I wanted to be able to control the neck gate and via the USB port the Bly KVM you just SSH into it and connect it to your neck gate and there you go now I have access to it this is actually really convenient but this is what this looks like take apart and yes if you want to put an M2 in your you can put one in there it goes right here if you really feel the need to mount a mount the 4200 with an M2 drive first law trilogy Joe Ambercrombie no I have not gamer homelab tinker yeah I've always been a tinker though that's more so there's never been with the exception of maybe in my 20s I was into unreal a bit maybe late 20s probably late 20s I was into I'm sure I remember when that fell I put up in my later 20s unreal tournament was huge I had a group of friends I played with a lot online and yeah I've lost track of all those people I never talked to them anymore it's like we all just kind of faded away and we only really knew our gamer handles and so it all just kind of faded I think it's funny my gamer handle for anyone that was there would be looking for me would think I'm still gaming because my daughter assumed my gamer handle I gave her all my game accounts and she started you know when she was really young I just let her use my gaming handle because she was logged in as me now my daughter is quite the gamer and she's ended up she doesn't live stream on twitch or anything like that but she's ended up on some big twitch live streams because she's good at what she plays so it's kind of funny to see that my gamer handle has now shown up in different places and yeah I think that's kind of funny me and doing a game she plays I don't pay that much attention like I don't I sometimes will play games but I was playing one game with my kids but I'm bad at remembering the names of the games I play so it's whatever my kids invited me to hahaha hey Tom what do you use as CNWR for internal documentation we're using a big one note file at work and we think we can do better uh then checking with Dachisaurus, MKDocs, WikiJS and Bookstack the integration and automation is what keeps us from using all those things we're using hoodoo right now and it's just because of all the integrations that we have with it to automate a lot of our backup uh not backup automate our documentation process so yeah I like all those other solutions and I used one for years at lauren systems but um we're using hoodoo now is your daughter interested in continuing family legacy of becoming a youtuber twitch star that is a no she has no interest in my daughter does not stream so that is not an interest on not an interest she has at all I have offered both of my children uh well there's actually I got five kids so three step kids and two um biological kids but you know treat them all the same uh I've offered any of them help in the idea of streaming and zero of five kids have any interest in what goes on in a studio no interest at all yeah it's not my gamer tag anymore it's uh it's my daughters yes uh do you use lion guard with hoodoo yes lion guard ovic I probably should do an updated video on this but if you look on the business technicality channel uh you'll find a video me and jason did talking about our client defense matrix and we have a list of all the tools we use there are a lot of tools um so I I've given some of the gear away in the past um selling it no the usual stuff we have a lot of stuff that just sits in racks because we pull it and use it from time to time like I I don't I don't actively use that meekers meekertik switch I reviewed a while ago but every now and then because I keep it plugged in I update it log into it make sure it works and maybe someone has a question that I'll look up in the meekertik system and I'm like hey cool this switch is still getting updates blah blah blah um the rest of the gear I offer sometimes it goes to employees um employees internally I always try to get first dibs on things and we're trying with 30 people working at CNWR roughly 30 um we're trying to work on maybe some plans where I can get more of that equipment to people I don't like anything sitting around but I always want to offer it to our internal staff first what Tom doesn't know yet is part of the office is getting reorganized oh yeah Tom doesn't care I mean as long as the office is clean when I go visit it which that's that's the extent of what Tom cares hey look it's look there's not boxes everywhere the the office can get a little sketch um it just it's just there's no big projects being delivered at the office right now but when there's a lot of office projects yeah things get sketchy there where did it go yeah here's see this is my office setup this is where I'm sitting most of the time is right here the camera that you see right here um that's the camera I'm looking and pointing at so I see that's why when I turn this way I'm looking at the big screen I'm looking at this screen here the long one and then there so this is actually the desk I set it my uh for my studio I gotta do an updated studio tour which will also lead to the updated homelab tour would love to see Brett get like a Raspberry Pi or something technical yeah I don't don't expect Brett to get a Raspberry Pi how do you like to monitor Bob did that once was something difficult trying to raise my head so I don't mind it because it's for editing reasons the well there's two things on there when I'm not editing videos that's where all my slack notices are uh slack and signal the two things I use for all my messaging mostly are there um yeah so that's pretty much um it's not a big deal it's not because my monitors are low I'm almost I don't know you can see how they're not very high I don't have them up high so my neck is only going up a little bit to see so it's not a big deal yeah Travis rebuilt his uh Travis made some changes some updates to the Travis area where he's where he's set up uh at our office uh fun stuff that wallpaper homelab set up right uh nope that wallpaper is AI generated me I generate a lot of stupid images mostly my chat tpt history is embarrassingly dumb it's mostly make a pun out of this I love chat tpt for doing dumb things what did I have it draw the other day is it in the list still ha ha ha alright someone will find this funny or I found it funny if you want to know the dumb things Tom uses AI for uh can I share the wallpaper uh I can I can't share it on a live stream I don't if you message me in my forums or email vlog Thursday at LawrenceSystems.com I can share it out but let's talk about my friend Jeff Geerling real quick so Jeff Geerling what did he post the other day Jeff posted this so Jeff posts that he's doing an interview about a raspberry pi and immediately I was like you're interviewing Jason Statham about a raspberry pi and I was like alright that was it the next thing you know I'm on AI and making Jason Statham holding a raspberry pi because this is what I asked a few and I got in a discussion on LinkedIn with with the raspberry pi foundation and sharing pictures of this with them because this is to me what AI is it's a wonderful regurgitation machine and uh can make silly things for me in puns really and things like that so yes that's that's what AI is to me uh can you share the chair yes I'll share my chair oh let's see let me figure out what chair I have I bought this one back in July so this is the chair I'm sitting in right now a good chair is an investment so I bought this chair in uh July 28th of 2023 so six months of my butt being in this chair I'm still happy with it I think it's very comfortable it just it's a great chair highly recommend it I'll throw a link for anyone interested in this particular chair no it's not a cheap chair for sure yeah it's not it's not the budget chair I'm not gonna lie I got sick of budget chairs and them not being up to snuff uh this chair on the other hand excellent how does one with little IT background get a job at a small company best way to find them had back surgery have the change from industrial maintenance um learn it and knock it on doors tinkering your home lab get your A plus get your net plus get any of the basic certs out of the way that shows that you have some comprehension of things and just start knocking on doors uh you'll end up working help desk is the most likely position they'll start at but you just start absorbing everything around you figure out how people are solving the problems and uh progress your way up yeah there's um there's no real easy like one word answer for how to get into tech it's more just pursuing it and uh running forward I've been in it too long so I don't really know I actually I should take that back I understand like applying for jobs is way different than it used to be just because I was applying with my son you know he's uh looking for a job he does not want to work in tech he does not want to work with dad and so we applied at places but boy you apply just everything online like there's not not really a go even to smaller places like they just have you scan an app and that's how you do that so kind of interesting got three servers running to your nascale and learning my way through it that's the best way to do it yeah help desk is it's where a lot of people start you you might even just find happiness there are some people just like the customer service stuff and I'm like awesome you know if someone's got to do it I don't necessarily I like people I'm not a not I'm not a anti people person but I also am more technical and more in-depth technical so I've learned to be better in my people skills but it's not it's a more forced habit for me versus some people are really good with people you know naturally good with it so yeah but there's always places hiring for help desk it's your entry way in there but it's not a not a bad place to start hey Tom hello cistec 911 Tim I think I got all the messages caught up hey Tom's greetings from Bulgaria love your videos how's the partnership going are you still focused primarily on the technical implementations partnership is going well I debate about doing a follow-up video it's not a real fit for my channel to talk about the business stuff maybe I'll post on business technicalities but partnership me and Jason are both like I feel surprised I thought I would have like there was an unknown before you merge like there's going to be a conflict there's going to be something me and Jason absolutely disagree on and we're going to argue with each other because we both are people with opinions and we feel very strongly about the opinions we have that turns out me and him share a lot of the same opinions on things so anytime he's like well I don't it there's a couple times when we had to make some changes that I thought Jason like I felt like he came ready to debate it but I immediately disarmed it because he says I think we should really do this and here's why and I said say no more I agree with you oh he didn't have to like get to his points matter of fact we still got to them and I agree I remember what the topic was I remember thinking he seemed ready to debate with me on it but I was like there's no debate you're absolutely right on this topic and we moved on so we me and Jason got along surprisingly well we actually have me and Jason we have a lot of the same mannerisms and behaviors apparently Jason will disappear from the office without saying goodbye that is not going to be a trade I have and there's also that I Jason say if I'm not yelling at you you're doing fine or something like that and it's completely me I'm not a person I don't give it's not it's not that I don't want to and if someone asks yes I'll answer the question like hey you're doing a great job or things like that but I'm very similar like probably my mannerisms are yeah if I'm not but I know it's been actually the merger has gone really well you just got done building a 40 gig circuit going from building a 40 gig circuit with a 100 gig backbone from Georgia to Kentucky also helped us will give you a lot of insight in a lot of different areas always someone to talk to yeah he said it's definitely it's where you start and maybe where you find some happiness working in tech can't find a video bearer's S3 backblaze is it easy if you type in backblaze I've only done one backblaze video on TrueNAS so it's an older video but the concept is still the same that's actually something maybe I'll do an updated video on is setting up backblaze with TrueNAS I have to look at that old video to see how much different it is backblaze is still you know I store less there because we have multiple locations now my studio is a location CNWR South Gates a location CNWR Toledo is a location I have enough places to store all my data that it doesn't matter as much about storing it in a cloud because as long as I have extra copies off site I'm happy I've been holding on to things in backblaze I can probably just let them go save some money so you just set up backblaze on core and it was super easy yeah I mean it's the integration it's not that much different than when I did the video several years ago there's not much that has changed it's one of those it just works you set it up and away you go and backblaze is reliable and dependable I haven't really had any issues with it but now that you guys are reminding me that I'm always looking at what am I spending money on that I probably don't need to anymore this is probably that thing I don't have we were housing client data in there but now that's been migrated somewhere else and so yeah I might migrate that any knowledge to Microsoft Secure Access I wouldn't trust Microsoft with that that's my thoughts on it I'm assuming you mean next cloud not own cloud but yes the update seemed to break I'm not a fan I don't use next cloud much I don't have a good use case for it for my day-to-day operations maybe one day but I don't know it's definitely buggy on TrueNAS I won't argue with that I think it's better as a standalone maybe in your it's own VM maybe in a Docker version of it but yeah I don't think it's great on TrueNAS people I don't use it but enough people use it that have problems with it that seems to be an issue if you have Stream Deck Mini they're powerful so got a 15 key one then realize you can have pages and folders yes you can that's something I think is kind of cool too you can take this and matter of fact where's the button hey look more buttons another page I like the fact that what this button right here does it looks like a shutdown button but when you press this I can sleep I can reboot it I can hit lock most of the time I'm just going to do a shutdown the computer now I've tangled it in my keyboard there we go but I like the Stream Deck they're definitely just handy little devices I like it because it's small I actually am happy I don't have the big one because I don't have this giant thing on my desk I got the little one but with that I love talking to everyone we've gone for two hours I think I'm going to play some God of War and it wouldn't be exciting to watch me I'm not a streamer I'm not a game streamer so sorry for anyone who would prefer to watch me do that people ask me like hey should Tom just do these live streams like do you just watch me stare at a screen for a while and zone out that's handy when your computer is in another room yes it is because my computers are not in this studio both of my computers are on the other side of the wall I point that way because it's actually that wall but yeah all my computers have wires coming through the wall the power of my monitors there's not a computer in this office it's part of the how I can keep the sound down so when I'm rendering a video or doing any of that it's all completely in the other room all the noise, the heat and any disturbances caused by my computers are all in the other side it also makes the wiring a lot cleaner in the office the wiring is not as clean on the other side of that wall I'm not going to lie I'd like to build a learning lab for our employees been following some of your tutorials with a budget 2 to 5k which you recommend prioritize I mean that's plenty to build a virtualization box and maybe a few switches it kind of depends what you want them to train on for our staff the virtualization stuff not that they're training on virtualization they're doing a fast virtualization server that they can spin up and run VMs on that is definitely definitely handy so if they have a question and they want to run something in the lab this is what our lab looks like you know Eric has his virtual machine here he can spin up anything he wants on it he's got a bunch of network adapters attached to it and for any of these network adapters we can change any of the settings on here to be able to swap it to a different network that represents itself physically on another switch so having all of that oops is what's really handy so to me virtualization server, a bunch of VLANs and a clear map of how to use it that's what you need what other game do I play? nothing right now just God of War how long are HDMI cable runs? do you need active cables? nope from the wall to the computer so there's like 8 foot cables so I do have one because where my bench is I think it's a 25 foot cable but it's not active or anything it's just a standard HDMI cable yeah our storage servers are fast our systems all boot off MVME drives I've got if you look up like Ryzen XCPNG I've got all the parts for our build video in it but they're Ryzen servers with MVMEs they're nice and fast but with that I'm going to leave or I'll never leave if I don't go I'll never get to go play my game so I'm going to stop this here thank you everyone for joining see you next time join my forums looking forward to seeing you there say hi in the comments email vlogthere'satlarnsystems.com and awesome