 And welcome to the homelab show, episode 52, open source content creation. We wanted to do something, I wanna call this homelab adjacent, but it may be more relevant than you think when we get into the topic. And it's about using open source tools to publish and create content. Now, the obvious stuff is gonna be like, yeah, video content like Tom and Jay do for YouTube, and I don't really wanna be on YouTube is what some people might be thinking, but we're talking in a broader aspect because a big part of not just documenting and creating a documented note about how you did something, some of the really interesting things come out from people who take the time to stand up a server, publish their writings. I really think of people like Jeff Geerling on this who's using a massive amount of open source tools, completely outside of YouTube, like specifically about the blog posts he takes the time to write up that help educate the community. And a lot of people as a interested passionate homelabber just putting a simple blog up there and throwing out like, hey, I did these things. You'll be surprised how well that may do sometimes, you know, whether you're publishing it. And your own blog is great. Obviously you may wanna share other places, but having a place that you own the content with a serious open source tools has always been an important aspect of it. We're gonna get into all those little details today. So that's why we chose this as a topic. It's gonna be- There's a lot of overlap here. There's a lot of overlap here. Before we do this show, let's talk about the open source tool and the place we hosted that brought you this show because it's one of them we're gonna mention and that is Linode. Linode is where we host the homelab show using WordPress on a Linode server. And that's an aspect we're gonna be talking about here is how you may wanna use WordPress to document things and publish things in the WordPress blog. And where would you host that? I mean, you can host it on your own server, but maybe you don't wanna have your IP address tied to the WordPress instance and posting it somewhere like Linode would be a great idea. And they have an offer code for you down below if you go to the homelab show, I'm sorry, linode.com slash the homelab show is where you can get your offer code and get started with Linode. It's a great place to host lots of the projects we talk about on this channel, on this YouTube podcast. And it's just been a great service. And if you're downloading a podcast and your podcast app, it was literally downloaded from a Linode server. So it's a highly recommended service. We don't just have them as a sponsor. We use them as the tool for deliver this content. So thank you for those for sponsoring the show. We appreciate it. And I forgot to turn off my phone for that. So for anyone that noise was in the background, my phone is now on mute. First I thought I heard that annoying gnome water droplet sound that happens when you press backspace too many times on the terminal. And I don't understand why they're here. But that's what I thought I heard. I'm like, you haven't disabled that yet? Yeah. So yes, I do normally, you know, cause I don't wanna hear that either, but I have a similar noise on my phone. So boy, I don't know if we can get to every tool on here. I see people posting in the live stream comments like, you know, Blender, Gimp, Credo, Lant, Inkscape and those are all great tools as well. But which one should we start with Jay? Well, I think a quick, I wanna start with a couple of quick things first. One of which is kind of not, I mean, it is, but it's not related. We should probably mention PenguinCon. Oh, should we mention PenguinCon? Yes. I think so. Yeah. For any of our, in this maybe a crossover audience, if you look up PenguinCon, me and Jay are going to be there. So if you wanna reach out and say hi, that's coming up pretty soon. It's at the end of April here in 2022. So we will be there. If everything goes well, we will also be presenting there and doing the Home Lab show and some other things. So we have ideas that aren't confirmed other than we confirmed that we're going to be there. Yep. So if we have an audience crossover that wants to meet any of us in person, that's where we'll be. Yep, that's a good thing to get out of the way because I mean, we like meeting some of the people we interact with. So that's really cool. It's been a long time since I've been able to do that. Getting back to the content at hand here, one thing I wanna mention is, I think this is gonna underscore everything that we're gonna be talking about. I think we kind of take this for granted, but it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to have any content, you know, via any form of media that people can actually see it, you had to align with either a news company, a record producer, or I mean, a record label, a movie company, you had to be in Hollywood, you have to know somebody, you know, it was just so hard. Like even if you wanted to like write a book and get that out there, I mean, who's gonna print that for you? Who's gonna deal with all that? Probably a publisher, guess what? Publishers get like tens of thousands of submissions and you really have to stand out. But we're in a position now where we could create anytime we want to and anybody can do it. And I think that's just so amazing to me how easy it is for someone to get, you know, their music, their video, their book, their whatever it is they make to get that out there to the people. Yeah, and this is where it's not only computers that made this easier, on top of that, there's some really powerful open source tools. So that makes it one level easier again when it comes to getting things published. These tools have become much more advanced, much easier to use, which is usually contradictory. As they become more advanced, you should become impossible to use, but they've actually done some good jobs on a few of these tools to make them relatively easy, but still offering a high, you know, availability of services and features. And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about today. Because I think it's important, as I said, not just standing up some of these servers in lots of the projects we talk about, but also figuring out ways maybe you want to publish things, even if it's not directly related to technology, maybe technology's your hobby, but you are also passionate about something else that you want to share. I want to make sure, you know, as I think there's enough crossover in the audience that this is an interesting topic. Yeah. And so one of the things to start with is, I think the, and we kind of already talked about it with the Linode mention, but it's just truly important. Even if you don't use Linode, you can still do this, but we'll use Linode as the example here. But having, you know, your own DMZ of sorts, you have, I mean, HomeLab, I think most of us, we don't have a static IP. I do, I'm also a business though, so that's an unfair advantage there. Obviously, if you could get static IPs, that's great. Most people have dynamic. That makes things a little bit harder, but I think anyway, my point is kind of thinking about the layout of where your services are going to be. So if you're going to set up a blog, you can absolutely do that on a Raspberry Pi inside your LAN, forward a port over to it, or use some kind of a load balancer or something like that. Perfectly valid. It could be a, you know, a Proxmox VM or whatever it is you use. It could be a virtual box instance running on your laptop as long as you don't shut it down and then people wonder why they can't access the website. But, you know, also consider having, you know, what you want outside of your network because I don't personally like having everything share the same IP for many reasons. One reason is cause if you knock out one thing on that IP, you're knocking out everything if it's shared. You know, putting that aside, if your home IP address leaks out, and which it will because I mean, if someone figures out that the IP address is the same on everything you're doing because it's all in the same box, but also it's probably your home IP, then, you know, you put out some blog posts that someone doesn't like or they don't like your opinion and they want to do something about it. Next thing you know, you get DDoS. Obviously the chances of that happening are very, very low. I would say the chances of one service failing on a shared box is higher, but if you put, you know, things that you want the public to see on a VPS instance, you know, Linode or whatever you're using there, you could actually help keep that separation between public and it's more than a DMZ. It's in a different data center. So you could consider what you're gonna run locally and what you're, you know, possibly considering not running locally. Yes. And if you want to know about exposing your public IP address and some of the bad things and worst case scenarios, follow Jeff Gehrling. His adventures in DDoS have been between his Twitter account and there. I even joked that the more he creates content about it, I'm wondering if they're DDoSing him to have him create more content about it. So it's been a thing that he's covering. Maybe you should just start another YouTube channel and secondary one and just kind of be like the hacking or hacking victim adventures. I don't know what to call it. I'm not very creative today, but that's exactly who I was thinking about. It kind of just put it, you know, to the top layer of my memory right now to talk about this. Cause again, the likelihood is low, but it can happen. It does happen. And if you have things separated, you can control the threat surface for that. Basically how far it goes. Absolutely. All right. What's the first tool that we should start with? Well, there's a couple of things that we could start with on a, you know, if we want to work from like the simpler things up to the more advanced. One thing that I want to kind of get out of the way is LibreOffice. And I think, I don't think that's going to be the first thing many people think about because I don't know. I mean, LibreOffice is great. Everybody thinks of it as, you know, thinks of it when they think of Office Suite and Linux, but it's kind of like so common that some people just don't even remember it's there until they go in and meet it, right? So I need to print a spreadsheet. So obviously I'm going to open up LibreOffice Health, but if I'm not working on a spreadsheet, I'm not like, oh man, I can't wait until the next time I work on a spreadsheet. I don't even think about it. But thinking specifically about Ryder, I feel like there's a lot of myths about this because the, in general, Linux community, especially the newer people, they're under the impression that Microsoft Office is better, which is not true. That compatibility is horrible, not true. I, just to give you guys, you know, my mindset here, every book I've written was done on LibreOffice. So if I was able to write books with LibreOffice, when my publisher uses Microsoft Office, we're able to send files back and forth, no problem, and the books did get published. I think there's something to be said about that. There absolutely is good, but one problem that I think kind of creates this mindset, and this is kind of a pet peeve of mine, is when a popular distribution, their latest stable version includes a very old version of LibreOffice, that's several versions behind. I think, honestly, that's why we have these compatibility issues, because often someone could be just using an older version of LibreOffice, they're using whatever their distribution provided them, and every update of LibreOffice, it's not just security, they're actually improving Microsoft Office compatibility. And if you don't have a recent version, you're not going to benefit from those fixes, and then, yeah, maybe you might run into some issues there, but I bring up LibreOffice because, again, I write books and anyone can do this, you don't need a publisher like I have. In fact, I've written sci-fi novels that are not popular, and I'm okay with the fact they're not popular, but I wanted to do it. I didn't have a publisher, I used, I think it was CreateSpace just to do the printing, and you can do that yourself. Yeah, and the fact that you can use it for book rating in not just as a hobby, but as a professional service like Jay's doing, LibreOffice, like I said, it might be a little bit underrated product when it comes to that. It's just really, it's a great tool. Who will just stop there and say that? Yeah, so I think there's nothing else to say about LibreOffice other than, I just want to bring home, if you are having problems with compatibility, try the latest version via Flatpak and see if you have the same problem. It'd be interesting to see. I think in most cases, that's probably a better way to go to use a universal package for it anyway. But the point is, if you want to write, you can write, nothing's stopping you. We have the tools and you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars in licensing fees for Office 365 or whatever it is they're calling it this week. You could just do it right now. Yeah, and I see someone in the comments and you can tie together and this is, Jay's got some newer videos on this topic using the hosted file sharing system. Next cloud? Next cloud, well, it took my time. I'm tying Next cloud with that. I believe there's some document sharing that you can integrate in there with your users, with Next cloud and with LibreOffice. They all play nice together. Oh, and not only that, they improved it. So when I first, I did the previous video, not the most recent one because I try to update it every now and then because people like Next cloud said, why? You had to use a container to get online office editing. So what would happen without the container is if you click on, I don't know, a Word document, it'll just activate the file download dialogue in your browser to download it locally. But Next cloud supports online editing, which would be you click on the document and an editor inside the browser opens up just like Google apps or whatever, you can just start typing right there. And that used to require a lot more memory because you had to run a Docker container, you had to have another Apache virtual host file to map to that. And there's nothing wrong with that because it works fine, but now it's supported without needing to use a container. And the Next cloud instance that I have that I use personally was created like before this. I think I need to go back and convert it over to the new way. My new video shows the way forward of activating this that was different from the first time around. So that's a lot easier to get going on Next cloud than it used to be. Yeah, now another one I'll mention and this is very related to HomeLab. This is why we did this video right here was because I don't know where else to fit this project in but everyone asked, what did you use to draw those diagrams and it's diagrams.net. That is one of my absolute favorite really cool tools for drawing and laying out your network. Even if you don't plan to publish this publicly, this is still a great content creation tool that's free, open source, can be running your web browser, can be run as a flat pack installed, runs in Windows, runs on Linux. It's very, very versatile and completely because it's the same program, the files it creates are cross compatible and to go a step further, they're embeddable. So if you need to share information with people who aren't even using it because it's as long as they can get to a website, you can actually embed the drawings within a website and have them editable. This is a really nice feature and there's at least one side project with it where diagrams.net has the option to was developed by Cyberdrain Kelvin. I think it's in his GitHub but he's worked on a couple of things because it's scriptable and the way it generates things. He's done some exports oddly with PowerShell because it was more related to doing some Windows work but listing out network information to import all the nodes so you then can start drawing the connections. I've actually got an idea to look and see if this can be expanded further into different, I would love to see if someone can get this working link with Nmap, for example. I'm not aware, it's not something I'm aware of exists but it's something that could be done where you take network exports, get all the nodes imported into there and start drawing it. Now I use it for just a lot of my demonstrations in YouTube but we use it internally at my office to diagram networks that we're designing for clients or when we're re-engineering stuff. We'll even suggest when people need to interact with us like, hey, go ahead to start building at your network rather than just ask a lot of questions like when we interact with other IT teams that's a great tool, they can send it over to us, we can go, oh, okay, this is what it looks like now and then we can start adding to it but it's documenting your network and taking the time to really think about how all the interconnects are and visualizing with the tool like diagrams.net, formally known as draw.io. diagrams.net isn't just the name that's actually the website you go to. So I- I was just about to mention draw.io as an alternative so they're the same? They're the same. So yeah, the controversy between them is that the .io domain, there's been some controversy with that particular TLD so they're hedging their bets and bought diagrams.net as well. They have an article if you read about it, there's some concern about the longevity of .io domains. Oh, okay. Yeah, and they're valid concerns so if you're based everything on your .io domain there is that potential that could be a problem so that's why they hedged their bets and moved to diagrams.net. They were uncomfortable with some, they have a whole write up and it's a way off topic and not a scope to go into it. They have a write up that does though. Well, that's great. So now we know or now we know to go look for that. So, and I didn't know that myself. So there you go. Even I learned something from this podcast. Yeah, it's a great tool. It's just in documenting your network, take the time to do it. If you ever wanna do this professionally, it'll help you. Even if you do it just as a hobby, it'll still help you. You'll be happy that you did it because you'll try to figure out when something goes wrong, you're like, where's that connected at? Oh, I'd made a map. Right, yep, no, absolutely. So this is definitely a great tool. I didn't know about the desktop app. It looks like they have a snap package, app image and all that. They got them all covered. Yeah, so you can get it. You can install it. They have the dev version. So that's awesome. Yeah, so there's another pick for, you know, something that we would absolutely use, which is documenting our awesome homeland. Yes, absolutely. Now what's the next one on the list here? So I think some kind, in no particular order, I'm just gonna go over a couple of things that I think might help. So obviously not everyone is going to be creating video. So I don't wanna spend too much time on it, but also keep in mind, if you don't care, excuse me, if you don't care about video that some of this might actually map out to other things. So for example, I am, thanks to Tom, recording all my videos straight to the true NAS. So I got it in my head a long time ago that if I had like a file share where all the footage is being recorded to as I record it, that over a one gig connection, which is what my recording PC is, everything is 10 gig, but not that. And the reason why is because I'm using all the PCI Express slots for capture cards and there's none left for a 10 gig card, but it has one gig. And I just assumed that, you know, since I'm recording 4K that it's just going to choke. That's just a lot of data to go over to a network share. And uncomfortably what I've been doing and I, you know, now that I'm not doing this anymore, I can't believe I'm saying this. I was using sync thing for this, which was okay for a while. But if you think about every laptop, you know, every computer using sync thing and syncing the footage directory. And if I have, if I pull out a laptop and this has happened for a meeting and it might not be a laptop I've used for a while. So it has to get caught up. My average raw video file is probably somewhere between 40 to 60 gigs a piece. It's not uncommon for, you know, some of my videos that I do to have like a hundred gigs of footage that I was, you know, editing and playing around with. Then the laptop has a catch up. That's a huge amount of data that's all of a sudden being synced every time I open up a computer. It wasn't so bad with 1080p, but now 4K is, oh God. Anyway, I made the assumption that recording to a file share wouldn't work. And then I got into a meeting with Tom as we do regularly. And he's like, yeah, that'll work fine. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. So the point here is that if you have a NAS, you know, make it the central location for things. In my case, OBS is dumping footage straight to it. 4K footage, you know, 60 frames per second. It's not, you know, a small, these aren't small files. And it's not really creating much of a dent in my one gig connection to the TrueNAS. And then when I, you know, want to pull the files to my editing piece, you know, that's 10 gigs. So when I pull the, you know, video files down, that's even faster. So that workflow works for me. And I just can't believe I didn't try this sooner. I think I was just over complicating it with sync thing. And now it's better. And I even have these recurring snapshot tasks that happen. So it also, you know, sends all the data offsite as well, even the footage that hasn't been edited yet. So I still have that protection. But if I accidentally delete something, then I also benefit from, you know, TrueNAS being able to go in and use a snapshot to pull something back, which I think I've already needed to use when I deleted something very important. So it's working out pretty well. So that's one tip right there. If you don't do video editing, you know, you could just insert thing you do here and try to see if it can be a central resource. Yeah. And someone did say maybe laying out networks. We've talked about NASA's before. I don't know if there's a whole video topic on, or podcast topic on how to deploy them. Because individually I have series of videos on how to set up a analogy or how to set up a TrueNAS to the big topics I've covered. You connect them as fast as you can afford or you think is reasonable. You know, someone said, like, Jay has 10 gig, that's great. 10 gig's really reasonable. Right now the prices have come down because it's been around for a long time. Longer than people may realize. And especially if you're doing short range, it's not like you need to use any high-end cables or anything like that to get the interconnects done. You just need to switch with some 10 gig. And if you're really on a budget, those are even relatively inexpensive on eBay. And I've mentioned, you know, there's some inexpensive ways to build that out. Yeah. And in my 10 gig cards all came from eBay. Not one of them was bought new. So, you know, I know some people might be thinking, well, he's on YouTube and he gets profit from it. So of course he has 10 gig. Well, there was a time not that long ago, I thought 10 gig was too expensive and just out of my reach. But I mean, $70 for a 10 gig card and it has two end points on it. I mean, that's not the worst thing in the world. And yeah, a lot of people probably don't have the money to buy like a 10 gig card for everything in their house. But, you know, you buy one, some months later buy another and it doesn't have to be all at once. And the cables cost about the same as any other cable. So it wasn't actually pretty comfortable to upgrade. It wasn't, it's not as expensive as you might think. And then I actually was amazed by how simple it was as well. So. Yeah. The Mikrotik makes a little four port 10 gig switch. I've reviewed it on my channel. If you type in Mikrotik 10 gig, you'll find it. The Mikrotik switch is, I think still under 150 because the price has varied because of limited stock. The normal MSRP is only like 129 for one. And it gives you 10 gig connectivity between devices, only four devices, but four maybe enough for your home lab to, you know, if it's just you in an ass, you may only need two. Yeah. So for me, I have 10 gig on the Proxmox servers, TrueNAS, my desktop and the game streaming PC that I built in one of my previous videos. Cause I want to stream, I don't want bottlenecks. I want to, and you could argue that 10 gig is overkill for streaming steam games, but you know me, I have to be overkill. So it's not like I have a hundred of these or anything like that. Now I think the case could be made to do an episode or a segment, depending on what you think about how to carve the storage in your NAS, like how to structure your data sets, basically. There could be something to be said about that and also snapshot tasks and some errata that I've discovered could be another topic. So maybe that's something we'll kind of float around off camera and just see if we think it'll land. But getting back to the point here, central, having things centrally available is great. And as an aside, I don't want to spend too much time on this because it's more, it's an aside, but I've had nothing but problems without OFS for whatever reason, I don't know why yet. Now with Plex, it works just fine. I've recently switched over to system D auto mount to do what auto FS was doing and I find it a lot faster, a lot better. So that's just an aside. You could have mounts on demand via auto FS or system D auto mount. And I'll probably do a video on system D auto mount at some point, I might do a video on TrueNAS but I feel like I have to figure out why I was having so many problems with it before I could do a video recommending other people use it and until I can do that, that video probably will never happen. And that's a topic we could make into a podcast is talking about different mounting methods in Linux and how you connect things. That is probably a fair thing. You're used to the Windows SMB shares if you're using Windows, but once you get outside of Windows and you're into the different connectivity of things like a Proxmox server like Jay mentioned or different virtualization stacks, there are more than one way to connect it. And of course, if you're running Linux on your desktop, once again, there's more than one way to connect it. Even if you're running Windows, I've talked about more than one way to connect that as well in terms of mounting ice-guzzy mounts that are popular in good use cases for. So maybe we'll do about connectivity on the network. I think that's probably a good topic on there. Please use our feedback form to confirm that we're right about this or just throw some comments down here in the live stream. You wanna do a Q&A at some point coming up anyway because I think it's about due for that. Those are always fun. So other tools that, I don't feel like we could totally get through all of these. There's just so many. So for the longest time, let's talk about video editing. I think that's just something we should probably get out of the way. Video editing is fun. It can be frustrating on Linux sometimes. Specifically, Kaden Live is great. I've been using it for years to edit my videos, but ever since I switched to 4K, Kaden Live, oh my gosh, it is just- It has trouble. Horrific for me. It would use over 40, 45 gigabytes of RAM when idle. Now keep in mind, I'm not actively editing at this point. I'm not rendering anything. Nothing is playing. It's just on the screen doing nothing and the RAM just goes crazy. And then the auto memory killer will just totally kill it. And so my mindset is I used open source first and I will beat that software to death before I give up on it. So using Kaden Live for years tells you that it's not like I tried it for a week, right? I've been using it for a long time. And for 1080p, even though it's problematic and crash prone, it still worked fine enough and it was good. So that's why I switched to DaVinci Resolve recently. I'm not gonna spend any time on that because that's a pretty, I mean, you can download it for free, but if you want the paid version, it's pretty expensive. But at least for starting out, Kaden Live is great. And once you, who knows, maybe they might fix the problems that I ran into and then it won't even have those problems for anybody. So maybe that'll work out fine for you. I also use Audacity for fine-tuning the audio in the videos that I do. I probably will walk away from that soon when I figure out how to do that in DaVinci, but we have the tools available, I think for open source is Kaden Live. I've tried other tools. I just feel like, I don't know about you, I just feel like Kaden Live is the best, even though I'm not talking very fondly of it right now, it really is good until it's Kaden. Outside of editing 4K content, because I have over a thousand videos published on my channel that I did with Kaden Live. And it does a good job. You can get a lot done with it. There's an active community now on Reddit for it, which there wasn't before. I'm glad to see that we're seeing more engagement. So I still wanna keep watching the project grow. I still think, and even myself, I still use it because it has some clever things you can do if you wanna make video type of memes and some of the stupid things I post on Twitter for those of you that follow me. A lot of that I just wanna put made with Kaden Live because it has some really easy way it deals with like a wide, wide array of video formats and video outputs. Now this, I bring this up because there's a lot of people that may want to create little bits of content or maybe some edited footage, maybe from a camera they downloaded or something like that. Kaden Live is a great go-to free tool that is both on Windows and Linux for this. So I've even had time when people ask me, hey, you made that little time lapse you posted with your camera system, Tom, how'd you do that? I said, oh, I just literally grabbed it in Kaden Live, dragged the video file in there, set the speed to X number, and that was it. Now I have a time lapse and maybe you wanna do it to do a frame grab or something. You know, it's just a nice tool to be able to do something like that. So even if you're not publishing content for YouTube like me or Jay, I still think it's a good tool to have on your system when you need it. Cause every now and then you'll go, I need a little clip out of this. I can only download for my camera system, you know, a five minute clip, but I only need three seconds to show something, look closer at something, or just wanna watch a time lapse of the snow. What if that case is, Kaden Live is a great tool for that. And it's an awesome way to get started with editing. And if you're not like super crazy about video stuff and you're just editing your own family photos, you know, a couple of times a year, then honestly, it's everything you need. And I see, and there are other ones out there, OpenShot being another one that's popular. I use that in a very, very beginning and it's still in act development, you know, years later. OpenShot's kind of cool. I thought they had a cool title generator, but I haven't used it in a few years, but it's valid. They seem to be less fine grained the last couple of times I tried it on trying to split up the video. It doesn't seem to do frame by frame quite as easily as Kaden Live did, but I'm more familiar with Kaden Live. And I see a few people mentioning Blender. Blender is a really extensive suite. The good and bad about Blender. You can do a lot of great things with Blender. It's also very complicated. It's a learning curve. I don't know if I, I mean, I'll throw it out there that it exists. There's people who do some really amazing 3D stuff with it and video editing and special effects things with Blender. There's a big community around that because it's a well-supported project. But it's something you really have to sit down and take the time to learn to do. It's not as near as easy to pick up as Kaden Live is in terms of from not knowing how it works to getting something outputted. You can do a lot with Blender. You just got to have the learning curve covered to get, to really get into it. Yeah, as someone mentioned, you know, exporting or using like, or editing against 1080p as someone is saying, Aristokat is saying in our chat room. And then, you know, with all the pointers and metadata to just render a 4K video from it. The problem here is the lack of GPU rendering. So what would happen? Kaden Live would sometimes take three hours for me to render one video, three hours, versus like five to 10 minutes in Davichi Resolve. And the reason for that is because the GPU is better at video. It's, you know, graphics acceleration. Video is graphics. It kind of just works out that way. And Kaden Live is still, I think they're still considering that alpha, I believe, for GPU rendering. And I've tried it. And it is every bit as alpha as they claim it is. I had to completely start over in a project. There was no going back at that point. And I don't even remember if it saved me any time because the video it was rendering out was just not something I could actually use. When they get that fixed, it's probably not going to be a problem, but I mean, it's very CPU heavy. So it's going to use your CPU, not your GPU. And I have, how many logical cores? Like I want to say 48. Yeah, I have 48 logical cores on my desktop and it still takes several hours. I mean, just think about that for a minute. So it's not the fastest thing in the world, but as long as you don't enable GPU processing and you're not doing 4K, you should be totally fine. Even if you are doing 4K, you could just leave it render overnight or something and just grab the file when you wake up. Right, so yeah. Capturing that video, how did we get that video? And this is something me and Jay use, but this is really popular. And also, once again, a helpful tool. And maybe even, because a lot of homelab people get stuck doing technical support for people, our family members and such, OBS Studio for doing screen capture. Hands down, that's softer out there. And if you're in the gaming world, you're familiar with it as well because it's frequently used by streamers as well to capture the video, be able to output whatever's on the screen, a section of it and put all the live transitions together. It's a very plug-in friendly, extensible product that gives you a great way to capture a window, a video, a whole desktop or a whole output and then have a whole series of scene setup. And this is completely free. This works again on Windows and on Linux. It even has, for those of us that have to deal with things like Zoom meetings, has the option to set up a virtual camera. So you can create input systems to build a virtual camera. I actually use this a lot because that way instead of sharing just one camera, I can actually switch between multiple cameras even on Zoom or Teams meetings. You set whatever the meeting software is to use your OBS virtual camera and then you can change all your scenes and inputs to feed that camera. This is actually a really great feature to mess with people in meetings. It really is. No, it really is especially showing the desktop when you don't even have rights to share the screen because they didn't give you rights to share your screen but you just switch the camera over to your desktop capture and just do it anyway. And then your actual webcam is showing your desktop or what should be your webcam or everyone assumes is your webcam. OBS is fun. I can't go back. When I made the decision, what was it, 2017 or 2018? I was making the decision like, I really want this YouTube channel. I'm gonna push this thing and really try to get the production quality. I know it's gonna take me years to achieve this but I'm gonna keep working at it. And when I first started, is that your studio? Because you're letting me use your studio. I would hit the button to record on your camera and then there's an audio track, there's like a desktop track. Actually, no, the audio track and the video track are one and the same. I'd have to like clap a number of times to sync the audio to the desktop capture. It was just a pain to get that lined up. And then we started using OBS. And I'm like, yeah, I'm never going back to that. Multi-track thing ever again because it's just so convoluted and unnecessary. Yeah, it makes it really simple and don't underestimate the value of any of you who have taken the time. And even though there may not be many views on some of these videos that got uploaded, taking the time to show Tom how something works in the game because I'm a very casual gamer. I will get stuck in places going, I don't understand where I'm supposed to go. And I'll find some video with less than 1,000 views on it. But I'm like, hey, I typed in, how do I do this in that game? And someone just uploaded a clip. They didn't narrate it, they didn't do anything. They just showed how to get somewhere or solve a puzzle that I got stuck on because I'm a very bad casual gamer. And I will absolutely go to YouTube and search for it. And OBS is a great tool that you can just download, name the clip, how to do this thing in the game. And Tom will probably watch that video. I watch so many videos from people that have less than 1,000 views because it's helpful. It's what comes up. And I'm not even sure. I mean, the algorithm on YouTube is weird. We're not gonna talk about that because that would give you the assumption that we know what it's about and we don't, we totally don't. It's us versus the algorithm, that's the only thing we know. If we did understand it, then we made a whole podcast about it. They change it tomorrow just despite us. But yeah, those videos do matter. I've watched a number of those. Sometimes I'm playing a game that not many people play just like you mentioned games. And then there's that one person who's playing it and gave me the information I needed. So if you wanna get information out there, just do it. Just get it out there. And there's one reason we're doing this video is to show you, it's one, it's easy. It's very available to you to get these tools in use and put out there. And it's also good for if you wanna document even your own things. Like you wanna record your screen for what you did to get something done, make some notes on it and have a screen recording. These are really helpful documentation tools and learning tools is the unfortunate thing we deal with a lot as consultants is going to be, people don't know how they got to the situation or in that they called us on. This is a big problem because it makes it harder for me to consult with someone like, I don't know what I did, it's broke. Well, you were typing a bunch of commands. Yeah, I didn't document all those commands. You can just turn it on and screen record all the things you did. And then you can scroll back to that moment in time that you type something and maybe document it. This is actually a pretty handy way to look at doing documentation. You should just hit and record. Now granted, I know things like bash history and things like that are gonna be better and more accurate and more concise and searchable. But sometimes it's not just bash history. You went through and changed a whole lot of places and just being able to document that might not be terrible even for your own reference for how you set something up. Especially if you're doing something like configuring a web UI, you make some notes, but maybe recorded it. I just wanna put this in people's heads to get that out there. It's also provided you're not revealing anything personal, not a bad place to throw this up on somewhere like YouTube or platform of your choice. YouTube just has the best discoverability, which is why we're here publishing this on YouTube. But these are just good things to do and helpful for you as the homelabber trying to get things documented and get information out there. And I think a question might come up. How much, like if I did wanna start a YouTube channel or I did wanna start creating videos, even if it's not YouTube, whatever it is, just personal videos, I don't care, what would it, how much does it take to get started, what gear do I need? So first of all, simple screen recorder is free and you can install it on virtually every single distribution that I've ever used. If you can run it, it is another alternative. I'm sorry, I wonder, but I'll, yeah. Screen recorder will basically just allow you to capture video of your screen. That's what it does. And you can put a hot key on that. So you don't have to go to the store and buy a capture device. I mean, it's always better if you can, but you don't need that. Honestly, it's probably fine. Some people can argue that that's good enough for someone's entire career, if they wanted to make a career out of it, just using that free tool. That's up to you, but it's free. And if nothing else, it gets you started. So what would you need to get started with video? If you wanna do face shots, like you're on camera invisible, or wanna know what microphone to get, just use your phone. I was blown away by this. Gardner submitted. You already know where I'm going with this. Gardner submitted some B-roll for a video I did recently and I asked him offline, I'm like, what camera do you have? That looks really cool. It's like, I just used my phone. I'm like, what, that looks great. Like it blew me away that he just used his phone and some of these microphones on these smartphones are so good nowadays that you could literally just buy a 15 or 20 US dollar mount or a tripod for your phone. And that's it. Like you might have to do some echo cancellation and post or something like that with Audacity, another free tool. But honestly, that could be it. You just, if you wanna record your desktop, simple screen recorder, if you wanna be on camera, if you care about that kind of thing, or you wanna microphone that sounds decent, your phone probably has everything you need right then and there. And if you are concerned about lighting, then, you know, what I did on my YouTube channels, I went to, in the early days, I went to Lowe's of Home Improvement Store and I just bought a 1600 Lumen light bulb in the room. And I'll tell you what, the room was way too bright, uncomfortably bright, but it was fine. Cause I mean, for videos, it was like everything a camera ever wants, 1600 lumens and your videos well lit at that point, and it cost me $10, I think, for that light bulb. And I think I just put it in a different lamp, so I wasn't always having to deal with that. 1600 lumens. Yeah, it doesn't take much to get started in that, so. So if you wanna get started in doing video, that, you know, I'll lend it right there, cause that's basically all there is to it. And I'll throw in there too, if you wanna put things together and composite them, OBS plus a webcam, easy thing to do. I just double check the price, the C920 is still as old as it is, it's still really good and expensive webcam that you can find in the $60, $70 range and probably cheaper used. You can do that for, a lot of us already have webcams built into our devices, because well, it turns out remote meetings are still a pretty popular thing. Not everyone, it goes into the office still, which is good, I think that's a great thing. So just using some of what you have, and someone said out of the phone's open source, no, that's not the, there's not much in the, I know the Pine phone exists, but that's a whole nother topic. Open source phones are, we're a ways off from that happening. So just say that. The Pine phone isn't even a commercial product, that's just a, you wanna thing to develop on? Right. Yeah. So WordPress is something that I think we should probably discuss, because that is very likely to be hosted in a homelab for people that are homelabbers, which is our audience, cause that's why they're listening. WordPress is one of those things where I like it, I really do. It's a target. We have to get that out there. I mean, anything that- That's getting managed and updated. Yeah, you keep it updated. Everything that's that popular ends up becoming a target. It's just kind of the way it goes. My line of thinking is use as few add-ons as you can get away with, cause sometimes you will need add-ons, and I don't think there's gonna be a single person who won't need at least one. But if you have like 30 of them, each one is going to lower your security a little bit. So just choose what you really absolutely need. WordPress is fine. There's also Hugo, if you wanna go a little bit more advanced, it's actually easier to understand the code in Hugo, but maybe a little bit more, I should I say like different or unique for how to make it serve or make it accessible. But what I like about Hugo is that it's flat files. So you don't have to maintain a database, you just dump the files, you can put them in Git. You could even set up a system to where you commit in Git, your new blog post. And if you have like a cron job that's totally pulling down your Git repository, then it, you know, within an hour, if that's what you set it for, it's gonna have that blog post up there. If something happens to it, you just delete the instance, recreate it, pull down everything via Git, and then there it is. So that's an alternative to WordPress as well. I think I might switch one of my sites to that actually at some point, just because I like how much simpler it is in terms of how it's designed. The WordPress is fine. That's what a lot of people are gonna go with. That's pretty much the standard right now. So yeah, there's a lot of documentation on WordPress is which helps it. It's an open source project. It's constantly under review. It's constantly under attack. And then that attacks leads who sometimes they find problems with it. So it's constantly being updated. Just going with the smaller product, it may be harder for that company. I'm not saying not to do it, but just taking into consideration of the security record or how well vetted that product is against security. And as Jay said, it's really the problems will come along with WordPress and all the large analysis done against WordPress has always been done with the plugin architecture. By making the plugin architecture, it's allowed WordPress to grow and be very extensible as a product. At the same time, when you let anyone write a plugin, anyone writes a plugin, whether they've did this securely or not, it's the unfortunate nature of many people that stop when their code works, not when their code is secure. So this leads to potential compromises and problems found within the WordPress ecosystem and the plugins, not the core system itself. The core system is actually really solid, but it's really good though, as a product to get it out there to be able to make blog posts that are easy to do. It easy to do matters because if you look at more convoluted and more complicated ways, and maybe your core function, things you want to do isn't learning that convoluted or more complicated way. You don't wanna deal with things that aren't nice and WYSIWYG because you're focused on programming but don't really wanna take the time to publish a blog, but you'd like to post the different discoveries or your journal of your adventures in programming. WordPress can just be a really simple way to take, grab, step as a code, throw them in there. They're cool references to help engage with the community. They're also great public references for you to go back. Well, that's what I was doing in 2020 and here's that blog post I wrote about how I solved the problem and now I'm Googling for it because I forgot that I solved it two years ago. And it's all in your own blog. So, you know, I do it all, my videos sometimes are even a reference back for me. Obviously that's a more complicated way to do it, producing the entire video about how to set something up but WordPress write-ups are really solid as well for doing that. It's an easy tool to maintain. It's got good automation update. And as I said, lots of documentation on how to get it going, how to set it up and lots of cool things people have done in terms of customizing it because of the templating engine that it has. I would say too, yeah, that's totally great in absolutely the case. You know, WordPress is a great way to go. When it comes to asking for support, I just wanna create this mindset for anyone who doesn't already have it. You more than likely, if you post in like a WordPress forum, like help me out with this, this doesn't work, what can I do? The response you'll probably get most of the time is just a blanket link to a extension and pretty much nothing else. Like that's what they do because it's a culture, right? If, you know, don't reinvent the wheel, that makes sense. If there's an extension that does the thing, that's not over complicated, just use the extension, but that's also possibly a bad thing. What I would say is look at the extension, obviously before you install it, that should go without saying, but specifically look at how long ago it was last updated. So if you see an extension was updated three years ago, that somebody's recommending you use, don't use it because it's gonna be a problem. And if you get to a point or you already are at the point where you are somewhat of a subject matter expert on WordPress and you wanna help other people with it, that's awesome to help out in the forums. But before you recognize or before you recommend an extension, you should also look at the date and not recommend it if it hasn't been updated in a long time because that happens a lot. People get burned out, they just walk away, they could have the most secure add-on you could possibly achieve and then it's all, it all doesn't matter if they walk away from the project and then two years later, there's a big vulnerability and they're nowhere to be found to fix it. And if you're not paying attention to this, oh, that hasn't been updated in a while. That's a red flag and most people don't think about it because the thing wants to be updated, I'll click on it, but these other things aren't asking to be updated right now. So I'm not gonna worry about that even though one of them might not have been updated for five years. So you just gotta keep an eye on those things. Yeah, lots of stuff to consider on that. So someone said in good point there, some of these same rules do apply to apply to Chrome and Firefox plugins. Anytime a package maintainer abandons an add-on for something, it is a potential problem because no one's actively engaging anymore with it. So this is just a broad topic and something to think about when you have anything on there. Now there is the, it doesn't need to be updated because there's nothing changed, but still it's nice to hear at least a point release once while to know that there's still a package maintainer behind the things I use. Yeah, not, I mean, and that could be, that could go easily the other direction because there's nothing updated, no need for a change, but other things were updated. It may be something in the code wasn't a problem, you know, forever until now because the underlying WordPress update created a situation where something could be used that wouldn't have been usable in the past. So some people will say, well, you know, if I talk about a terminal emulator, well, why do I care about a security vulnerability? It's not like you're forwarding a port to your terminal emulator, which is true, but at the same time, you know, you're communicating back and forth over the network and that could be something someone can use. So not being updated is one of those things that makes me nervous, but when it comes to browsers, I especially hate extensions. I could have an entire episode just dedicated to me telling you, don't use browser extensions at all unless you have no other choice, like a password manager, I totally get it. You know, that's very common. Keep the extension to a minimum. Just, that's why I squirmed when Mozilla was like, we're gonna start recommending extensions now. I'm like, are you mad? Yeah. Do you realize what that's going to cause? Like member back, like what, 10 or 20 years ago, I can't remember how long ago it was when you go to the average person's house and they ask you a computer question, they bring up their browser and there's more toolbars than space for content in the window. Yeah. So it's kind of like the new version of that, I guess. Yep. Now we're getting towards the end here. So we'll just throw a little bit of rapid fire here. Really cool tool to use for people who are artists and my friend's wife is an artist and she does a lot of work with this. She was like, I can't believe this is as good as some of the commercial products I've used. And that's gonna be Krita, K-R-I-T-A and it is Krita.org. It is a free and open source made for artists like drawing type tool. And wow, it's impressive. Like I'm not an artist, so I don't really use this. I loaded it because I wanted to see how cool it was and I'm impressed, but in terms of when it comes to actually drawing things, that's not my skill set. But for those that do have that gift and want to explore that digitally without having to buy some commercial products and are looking for something open source, check out Krita, it's great. GIMP is pretty cool too. I do all my thumbnails for things on the YouTube channel and for the Home Lab show on GIMP. I actually do a lot of photo editing, not photo editing, graphic editing. You can obviously edit photos in GIMP, but GIMP, I will admit it's not Photoshop. And I do have some Photoshop experience when I did graphic design work and it's great to, I mean, Photoshop's amazing. GIMP is not quite there yet. It's not at feature parity, but it's still good enough. I'm able to manage my YouTube channel and get a lot of the basic graphics done with it. It just doesn't have some of those advanced plugins that I'm really used to in the way things are handled inside of Photoshop. I say used to, I haven't really used Photoshop in probably 10 years now, but when I was using lots of Photoshop, it was impressive how well that worked. And for those of you that are into photography, there is also Darktable, which is a help to manage all of your photos and organize them and things like that. And I think that goes in there. I mean, there's a lot of these tools you can use such as that for managing a content workflow, even if it's just for your personal photos that you wanna touch up and organize, these are great tools for that. Yeah, I use Darktable as well, specifically for converting raw images that I take with my camera. So that's what I do. Oh, in Inkscape, don't wanna let that one. For doing vector graphics, Inkscape, I know some commercial designers and there's actually a couple of YouTube channels. There's a guy who shows how to create logos and all kinds of fun advanced features in Inkscape. It's more for vector editing. I think the Adobe product is in design that it's similar to, but it's actually a really powerful tool. And I've seen some really great things come out of people using Inkscape. And that's another nice thing. There is some YouTube channels, a little bit more obscure, but for many of the things we talked about, even Kayden Live, there's now a series of small YouTube channels come up that kinda teach you the ins and outs of a lot of these tools. So not only are they very accessible to you in open source, you can load them on your system and cross-plat, many of them, not all of them, but many of them are cross-platform. There's also, you may have to do a little searching, but on YouTube, you'll find some small YouTube channels that have tutorials on how to get started with them. Yep, there's no shortage of those. And especially when I was learning Kayden Live, there was a bunch of videos that taught me pretty much everything I needed to know for what I was using it for. So I think that's absolutely the case. I see someone through in here, CorelDraw. I haven't heard those words in years. I used to use CorelDraw probably in the 90s, I think is when I got into that. I'm forever, it's been a long time. I don't know what the status of CorelDraw is anymore, but I remember it being a pretty cool too. I used Corel in Bryce 3D, if you can remember that forever ago. You know, I started with Photoshop when it comes to editing images. And then when I switched to GIMP, I never looked back. I can understand that the general consensus is that GIMP isn't, like you said, a future parody. I don't, I mean, for me in my use case, it may as well be, I never looked back, never had a problem, but there's probably features that I don't use that Photoshop users do that makes the difference. But for me, like GIMP is everything when it comes to that use case. Yeah, well, I just Googled because I couldn't resist Bryce 3D still around, I guess. Wow. Is it a patent holding company or an actual product? It's a 3D modeling animation we find on our website. I guess it's, yeah. So they, they still, it still seems to exist. And it's 1995. I just wanted to mention it. This is completely off topic. It just popped in my head. I forgot. I used to like playing with Bryce. It was always fun. Probably there's a few people as old as me that played with it too. That's probably around the same time I was using Borland for a C development. Oh yeah. I remember that too. Borland, Z++. Boy, I don't know if anyone really wants to listen. Maybe me and G will just completely do a separate, me and G will reminisce about old software, but not a podcast. This is just something we'll do as a YouTube video. I wonder if you should just live stream and have like no point whatsoever and just kind of just talk about technology whatever natural direction that ends up going. You just see what people, how people react. I call that vlog Thursday. Yeah, she probably gets something similar than that too. People ask me questions and I talk about things and someone throws an off topic thing in there and I talk about that too. So, well, all topic that's still tech topic. It's just, you know, Tom, did you ever use Bryce 3D? Not a question that usually comes up, but someone may ask that now. I think somebody will probably bring it up. Turbo Pascal, there. Maybe somebody put it in a container or something. I used to do Turbo Pascal. So, yes, that was one of the first languages I learned besides basic. Basic was technically the first language and the second language I learned was Turbo Pascal. I also did some COBOL. But that was, this has now become off topic which is also fine because it's the end of the show. Right, yeah, that's fun, so. It's fun. So, the tools we listed, I definitely encourage everyone. They're all free tools we talked about here with the exception of the last couple off topic ones. But all these different free open source tools are great. If you're interested in media creation, give it a try. You might like it. Even if it's not about tech, it's about media creation. That's why we said about content creation, the tools you can use and getting started in it. It's easier than you might think. And I encourage more people to do this. This is something, it's become easier and easier over time over the years as computers have become more powerful for you to do all this yourself. So, that's why we shared this. Hopefully, you learned a couple things or just enjoyed some ramblings by me and Jay. Thanks. Let us know what your questions are. So, maybe the next one will be a Q&A. If not the next one, it'll be here pretty soon if you guys have enough questions. So, yep. All right. Take care. All right. See ya.