The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join host Ed Rawlings to learn how to get the most out of your Unraid server, stay up to date on relevant news and topics, and get to know members of the Unraid community!
The Uncast Show
Techno Tim Time
In today's episode, we go in-depth with our guest, Techno Tim, who shares all about his early career in tech support, his current roles in tech, and all about growing and creating his incredibly successful YouTube channel.
Join us as we learn all about Tim. He opens up about the importance of audience feedback, even the critical ones, in honing his content creation skills. From overcoming the steep learning curve of AV production to confidently presenting his authentic self on YouTube, Tim's journey is filled with valuable lessons and relatable struggles that resonate with anyone navigating the digital content landscape.
This episode is a treasure trove of practical tips and insights for those interested in home lab setups. We discuss Proxmox clusters, Intel NUCs, and the exciting realm of 3D printing. Tim shares his thoughts on supporting paid software like Unraid, the evolving market for high-performance home lab hardware, and the nuances of building and optimizing home lab environments. As we wrap up, Tim offers essential advice for new home lab enthusiasts and gives us a sneak peek into his upcoming projects. It's an episode brimming with tech wisdom, personal anecdotes, and a glimpse into the future of homelabbing.
We hope you enjoyed this as much as we did as we got to know the super nice and all-around great guy, Techno Tim!
https://technotim.live/
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Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Uncarshed Now. Today we've got an amazing guest for you. It's none other than Techno Tim. If you're like me and many of our viewers, you've probably been following Tim for years. As a leading YouTuber in the self-hosting community, tim's channel has become the go-to resource for anyone looking to optimize their home labs and IT infrastructure. His expertise in home labs self-hosting is unparalleled, so we're super excited to have the opportunity to deep dive into Tim's journey, gain his insights and experience and see the future of home labbing through his lens. So, whether you're just starting out in home labbing or you've been doing it for many years, I'm sure you're going to really enjoy this conversation. So, tim, let's start. So thank you very much for taking the time to come on to the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1:So, you know, let's sort of kick things off by learning a little bit about your background. You know how did you actually start your journey in tech in the first place?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So I mean, my curiosity started when I was, when I was a lot younger. You know I can remember way back. This might date me, but I remember, like we had a VCR and, like you know, the tape getting caught in the VCR and everyone in the family thinking, oh, it's broken, we need to buy another one. And uh, you know, I just found a Phillips screwdriver, opened it up and kind of saw how it works and fixed it and like, from there on, I can remember I was always always interested in, like, electronics and tech. Um, you know, shortly after that, a little bit later, we got our first computer. And well, while most people had PCs, our first computer was like a Commodore 64 that we got at a garage sale and so, like you know, even though we were probably five generations behind, it was something that I could play with and tinker with. And, you know, ever since then I've been just like hooked on technology Went to school, went to college, min to college, uh, minored in, uh, uh, computer applications, majored in Japanese, and that's, that's probably a story for a different day.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, yeah. And then, uh, I, I've just always been interested in tech. Uh, when I, when I got out of college, I I had an opportunity to start, as you, a tech support at a local health care system hospital and uh, I, I, I, you know, did tech support. I fixed printers, I network stuff, I imaged pcs, you name it. I was doing it replacing hard drives, and so that really gave me like a lot of breadth and depth, uh, into it in general, how to, how to support it, how it works, how it works in the enterprise, and uh, it also taught me a lot of stuff about customer service too. And so it was. It was like into IT in general, how to support it, how it works, how it works in the enterprise, and it also taught me a lot of stuff about customer service too. And so it was like a great.
Speaker 2:I look back on my tech support days fondly and I love them. Some days I wish I could go back, but it's more nostalgia. But I look back at those days and think, man, I learned so many valuable skills and it really opened the doors for anything I wanted to do after that. I think you know a lot of my, a lot of my opportunities after that came from, like, my motivation, what I was interested in, and a lot of them came from just being in the right place at the right time too, but I think a lot of it has to do with you know what you're passionate about.
Speaker 2:Think a lot of it has to do with you. You know what you're passionate about and if you know, if good leaders see that people have a passion that can be harnessed, you may as well harness and let them do that. Uh, you know as much as they can. So I don't know. And then I yeah, it goes on and on and on. I mean I got into system administration, I got into networking, I got really uh deep into infrastructure and then, uh, then I decided to become a software engineer and I built apps, built websites, built corporate apps, worked for very large retailers, built their apps, and then they went the opposite way and worked for startups and did cloud. So lots of stuff.
Speaker 1:So, so what inspired you, then, to actually start the YouTube channel and share your knowledge to everyone else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. That's also interesting too. I mean, originally I started out on Twitch and I was streaming video games and I love playing video games. I don't play them enough anymore because now my my hobby is YouTube, kind of sort of. But I started streaming on Twitch and I had a lot of fun there. But I noticed, you know, I wasn't getting a ton of interaction. Twitch and I had a lot of fun there, but I noticed, you know, I wasn't getting a ton of interaction and at the same time I'd always flip-flop between gaming and home labbing.
Speaker 2:Like that was just my cycle, like I'd play games. I played the new Legend of Zelda game, I'd geek out on it for four months and I get tired of the game. And then I go back into home labbing and build out, you know, upgrade all of my machines, network all of my machines, do whatever, build something new, and then, once that was in a good place, I get bored of it and go back to gaming. So there was always this going back and forth. Well, once I started doing Twitch, I realized like, well, now I'm putting all that time into gaming, I have zero time for home labbing, and, you know, building and tinkering. And so one day I just decided you know what, building and tinkering.
Speaker 2:And so one day I just decided you know what I, I'm doing this stuff on the weekend, I'm, I'm, I'm learning about all these things. I'm just going to record it. I'm just going to record what I do every weekend and what my project is the prior week and, uh, that's exactly what I do to this day. I mean, you know, I I don't know if I was right place, right time, you know, but this pre-pandemic and and you know, I just started recording what I was doing and I realized that there are a lot of people out there who, who know what I'm talking about and do the same thing. That was, that was a big eye opener for me, because prior to this, like no one no, no one I know does what I do, you know, and and very few people in real life, like, um, understand even what I'm talking about. So it was a big unexpected surprise to find such a large community that's the great thing about the internet, tim, isn't it?
Speaker 1:you kind of find so many like-minded people like um, where I live, like it's all very old people and all they care about is how tall the grass is. You know, if I talk to them to them about anything that plugs in that isn't an electric lawnmower, they don't want to know. That's the great thing about the internet is we do get to have our little nerdy niches and groups.
Speaker 2:It's super fun? Yeah, it is. I almost thought it was too niche for YouTube, but I learned later, the more niche you are the better because you, you, you know you're not lost in the sea of other things. So, and that category has grown like that, like home labbing has grown since I started tenfold. There are so many channels that are popping up that are so awesome. I keep adding, I keep seeing new people and new projects every day popping up on my, on my home YouTube homepage and my watch later is just full of new people and I love it. I love to see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, why do you think there's more and more people getting into it? You know, why do you think it's so different now? Is it just that it's easier, better products or just a better knowledge that people have that it? You know that they don't trust kind of big tech and they want to self-host. You know what do you think the reason is? People are, you know, kind of flooding into the self-hosting scene yes, all of it, I think.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, all of it. I, I think it's. I think people see other people well, one, I, I think there's just a large amount of people doing this, even though, like I thought, hey, I'm on an island, I'm doing this by myself. I think, um, having, you know, a handful of youtubers doing the same thing, kind of open the doors for other people to say, hey, I can do that too, but I have my own perspective on that and here's how I do it. I think it's a combination of that uh, seeing more of it. Uh, people getting motivated or inspired by other people doing it and saying, hey, I, I want to do that too.
Speaker 2:Uh, I think the pandemic had a lot to do with it too. Like it, now everybody knows how to, you know, do a web conference properly besides me getting started today, um, and and recording and audio. Like a lot of people you know, double down on. Uh, you know, in in in. Like investments in av, and uh, people had a lot of time on their hands. Down on on. Uh, you know, in in in. Like investments in av, and uh, people had a lot of time on their hands. And then, on top of that, yeah, we have a lot of great products that are getting a lot of great traction, uh, whether open source or not, uh, but getting, uh, you know there's a also this shift, um, for some people, away from the, for some people it's to the cloud, but either way, like there's a lot of people you know making decisions on, you know what what they want to share with companies or what they don't want to share with companies, and then there's a lot of great hardware coming out.
Speaker 2:If you think about you, just this massive shift from big and powerful to small and mighty, like it's accessible to anyone now and I got a lot of advices back there too. It's, you know, I could have a whole home lab on a tiny $200 mini PC and it's going to perform just like, just like, almost like you know, a five-year-old enterprise server. I mean, you know you got to temper your expectations a little bit, uh, but for what most people are going to do on those large enterprise servers, they could also do on these very small mini pcs too. So it's like compute has gotten a lot better over time and a lot more efficient, and it's uh, it's just incredible what you can do on on such affordable devices now too. So I, I think it's a combination of all that and you know, you know, I I feel like this is uh, I don't want to see a new hobby, but just it.
Speaker 1:I I think this hobby as a category is growing too right yeah, like I think you know, um, you know our fathers were into tinkering with cars, like our generation we're. You know, unless we're real good mechanics, we can't because it's too difficult. So we tinker with our home servers.
Speaker 2:So maybe it's our generation, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah, auto mechanic yeah, that's that that is a good point. Yeah, instead of, like you know, tinkering in the garage and and turning bolts, you know, on an engine, on an old car and fixing it up, you know, we, we're fixing up the old servers, you know, in our basement.
Speaker 1:As someone who's you know, you've contributed so much to the community, you know what's been the most rewarding aspect. Do you think of sharing your knowledge? Is it, you know, just other people getting into it as a hobby? Or you know other YouTubers starting up and seeing the? You know what you're talking about before. What do you find most rewarding and what keeps you going?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a combination of all of that. I think the very first thing that was rewarding to me was just realizing that there was a community of people out there. Like my whole life, I've always been different. Like my whole life, like you know, I rarely find anyone who likes the things I like, who wants to talk about the things I want to talk about, who even knows what I'm talking about or even interested in those things. So in most social situations I just I don't have a lot to say to contribute to most conversations, not because I'm antisocial, it's just because, you know, my brain works a little different.
Speaker 2:So I think the biggest thing was realizing there's a ton of people out there that like to do this stuff too. They're super passionate about, you know, the products they choose, the hardware they choose. Why they choose a specific hardware or brand and it's funny, it's like it's almost like tech brands are our sports teams at least. For you know, that's kind of how I see it too. You know you're going to root for team, you know red or team blue or team green or whoever your team is. And I feel like you know I I'm not, I'm not huge on sports, but you know, I, I kind of feel like that. There's that rivalry and there's that, you know, kind of. You know the, the, the brands that you like and support, um, but yeah, it's it, you know.
Speaker 2:So, first of all is realizing that there's a huge community out there. Second, it's something that probably people in the youtube community say not to do, and it's read the comments and I can't help it. Like I, I read comments, you know, and, and the good and the bad, like I, I read them all, um, because, um, you know, I, I, someone told me a long time ago that that feedback is a gift and, and and I look at it that way too Um, doing a lot of product development stuff with, with software, feedback is a gift. It's hard to get from people, and so, you know, while some comments might be trawling and some comments just might be, you know, whatever a lot of them are, are I, for me, kind of kind of heartfelt, like people will say, like, oh, I, you know, I'm so excited I finally got this working. Thank you so much. Or this is the first tutorial I understood, you know. Or or, uh, I feel, I feel, for me, uh, reading the comments where someone, um can finally understand a piece of technology or how something works, or they got something going and they want to share that excitement and they're so excited that they type a comment that's.
Speaker 2:That's the kind of thing that I I really enjoy. I really enjoy just seeing people learning and get getting really excited about technology, like so excited that they're going to tell me their whole entire home lab, you know know stack, in one comment, like I love those because I cause I feel for that person, cause I, I'm like I think you know, when I was on the other side of that, what you know, I, I felt that way too. I wanted to tell someone who knew what I was talking about my whole stack, cause at least telling that person they, they would understand what I'm talking about. So it's, it's a lot of honestly. Honestly, it's a lot of little things that that, um, that that I don't know give me, you know, motivation and and, uh, the reward you know I'm looking back to when you first started.
Speaker 1:You know what challenges did you face when creating content. You know um did you face any challenges and, if so, how did you actually overcome them?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I faced a lot of challenges and I think these are things like people learn over time, after doing it, cause there isn't a like there isn't. There isn't a great guide on here's how to build a YouTube channel. I know Don't get me wrong there's a thousand million probably people on YouTube telling you how to grow and how to do this, uh and, and how to edit and which camera to use and um. So there I. I had a lot of challenges. I still have those challenges today. A lot of I mean just basic AV stuff. Like I'm a tech person, my hobby has never been AV. I've never done anything in AV and all of a sudden I wanted to do AV. That was that was a challenge for me. I realized, hey, when you're in a room that's plaster and wood, like that's not great for audio I.
Speaker 1:I never had any idea that my first videos. I just used the microphone on the um on yeah book and, oh, my sound was so bad. Looking back, I almost feel like I should delete our first videos because I'm there with you.
Speaker 2:I'm there with you and on top of that then I, you know, I, I had my face and I'm like stiff as a board and you know, I and I, I didn't know how to act Like a lot of people will say, not that I'm acting, but like like my real voice wasn't coming out, like like it kind of is now. I mean, it's a little bit lower now, cause it still happens. Now it takes me a long time to like get my personality out and uh, kind of be comfortable with with everything, with all my isms, you know, with with a little bit of stuttering, with a little bit of talking really fast followed up by pausing. Like you know, I, I, uh, there's a lot of things. Like you, you start to become really self-aware when you do this stuff and that's still hard to overcome.
Speaker 2:And part of the reason why I do a Twitch stream on Saturday is because that's kind of like the real me. That's, you know, like this is right now, like live interactions are kind of the real me, and when I do scripted stuff I try so hard to be me, but it's, you know, it's kind of hard when you're, you know, looking at a teleprompter and notes and and talking about stuff, but I, I think most of it, um, most of the challenges are are, for me, were like soft skills, like you know, how do I, you know, how do I act like a normal human being, like like I've been trying to do my whole life, so which which is, uh, you know it's, it's, it's debatable whether I'm accomplishing that or not.
Speaker 1:So you're doing a great job, you know. I do love your channel, you know oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:I, I appreciate it, like I really do. I I appreciate it. Um, yeah, and you know, then it was, there was editing. Like I don't know how to edit, like do I do? You know j cuts, l cuts. Like you, you start to learn about all these editing techniques and how to sound natural and you know how do I splice in these clips. So I'm not, like you know, cutting every, you know two seconds or 10 seconds after every sentence.
Speaker 1:So do you do all your own editing tim?
Speaker 2:yeah, I do, I, I do my own everything. Uh love some help at some point, but at the same time, I enjoy every piece of the process somewhat. There are some parts where it's easy to procrastinate and then there are some parts where I'm super excited to finish up and so, yeah, I do it all. That's another thing I don't think a lot of people realize. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, you know, it's a lot of work, especially in tech.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's like this everywhere, but at least for a lot of my content, it's like I'm either teaching something or I have to test something, and so I have to do all that pre-work ahead of time, before I even like think about, like, writing an outline for a script. That's what I have to do. So test this, build this I mean very similar to what's going on back there build this whole thing, test it, make sure it works. Uh, kind of write documentation. While I'm doing it, then you know, uh, come up with a way to kind of explain it to an audience and hopefully get it within, you know, 15, 20 minutes. I've, uh I've been known to release our videos and then you know, and and I, I guess they kind of do okay too. But, um, you know there's there's just so much you learn about youtube, uh, and the algorithm is always changing and so it's just like you kind of. It's. It's really hard to to, yeah, to to bundle all of that up and still stay relevant. It's tough.
Speaker 1:You, you um cover. You know really wide, wide range of topics. How'd you actually um decide what to focus on for your next video?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. So my, like I mentioned earlier that that that my channel is always what I worked on last week or the week before and it's still that way. Um, you know, it was a little more organic in the beginning because I had a lot, I feel like I had a lot of like infrastructure and like pipes to lay down, like really foundational stuff so that I can then teach stuff from my home lab. So in the beginning it was, you know, really nuts and bolts, like here's I'm building my network, here I'm building my server rack, getting new servers, you know, laying down this foundation. So then I can do the rest of my content. And now I'm at a point where, like, my home lab is super solid. Well, for the most part, I, you know, I I have, uh, I migrated some of my servers to a co-location in downtown Minneapolis here, uh, still a hundred percent self-hosted, just someone else's, you know, supplying power and network. And then you know, I'm kind of standardizing some of my home production, and so things are really, you know, getting pretty solid. And so now it's it's fun, because then I get to think, okay, what do I want to do next? Right, not, not, what do I have to do, and even the have to do's are super fun. But now it's like, okay, like what's something that's that's really cool, that like I would like to learn about next week or play with next week, and so a lot of it's like that.
Speaker 2:It's a, it's a combination of, you know, what I want to do, what I'm interested in. I have a backlog of videos, always that you know. Any one of those could be, you know, come to the top. They could be surfaced to the top. What are people interested in? What's popular right now? You know it's. What are other YouTubers talking about, you know? And so it's kind of like all of that together and then trying to figure out you know what, what my angle or what the story is or what it is that I want to teach or tell, and so you know it's. It's been organic, like you know.
Speaker 2:And then, and then there's the whole like brand side of it, which all new to me, you know there's. You know, once, once you start doing stuff, you know brands see what you're doing and they, they, they, they want to help out or they want to hop on for the ride. It's a lot of that, and so you kind of have to balance, like, hey, if I want to do this for a living, you have to make money. If this is going to be your job, otherwise it's a hobby. If this is going to be your job, otherwise it's a hobby. And so at some point you know, either, if you you're not, if you're not big enough to live up ad revenue, um then you have to, like you know, partner up with brands and do cool things. Uh, and most of the time it's it's more than you could do by yourself. Anyway, so it's, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:I think it's a win-win, uh, if it's done right you know, talking about how you kind of focus on what video is going to do. Just a question to see if you're kind of similar to me really is do you have like a whole bunch of videos that are half finished and you kind of like you start doing one video? Then you have like you think, oh, this is such a good idea, and you think I've got to start videoing this, and then you kind of forget some other videos that you've done. Six months later you kind of look in some folder and you think, oh yeah, I forgot about that. I don't know. Oh, or is that just me?
Speaker 2:I don't know um, honestly, no, I, I, I wish I was like that, because that, that, that to me, that feels like how you have this moment of inspiration where you want to do this thing and you start filming it and then you know something else you know gets. Take this place, like I wish I did that more, like that's to me sounds, sounds, sounds awesome. I don't, unfortunately. I I have kind of ideas, so I have notes and I have lots of ideas and I'll add notes or ideas throughout the day as I think of them, like, and I've gotten better at this, and and this is something that I that I learned I have to do is like, whenever an idea pops into my head, I have to write it down, cause, like it's not so much just the idea, it's it's how I see that idea uh, come to fruition, or what I want to say about that idea. And I think, yeah, I'll remember it.
Speaker 2:No, I, I never remember. I remember the idea, but not what I was thinking like, like how this will relate to the person, and so I'd gotten a lot better at having a lot of notes on different videos, and then I keep adding to them. I keep just, you know, sprinkle them on and then. So then, when it's finally time to film, I am like, okay, like let's, uh, let's let's pull this all together, but I wish I was uh.
Speaker 1:I wish I was uh. I wish it was more like that. More you know, you don't tim, you really don't. I wish I was more organized. So do you? Do you carry an actual notebook, pen and paper around with you, or is it all kind of digital notes?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's digital. I I mean I, I like the idea of that and I I've loved the idea of that forever. I mean, you know, that's that's. And I think a lot of people love the idea of that. That's why, even like, a lot of tech companies still give out these moleskin notebooks, because I think people like the idea of like, hey, I'm a note-taker, I'm gonna do this on pencil and paper. Pen and paper, I mean a lot of people still do for me I can't.
Speaker 2:I can't because it's it's not with me at the grocery store, it's not with me, you know, when I'm walking down the street or walking my dogs or anywhere. And so, it being digital now it's just so easy because I pull it up, I can find the doc and I can really quickly like get something out of my brain. While it's still in my brain and I have that thought, you know, and it's weird, that's kind of how my brain works Something will pop in my head. I'll be like that's how I explain it. That's going to be my intro. Hurry up and write this down and, you know, write kind of what what I'm thinking. Um, it's mostly how I can explain something to someone, to where they can understand something and, um, those things are kind of hard to think of in the moment and what?
Speaker 1:what do you use for your note taking? Is it open source thing or unfortunately.
Speaker 2:No, um, I, I, you know, I've used a combination of stuff like I used to do it all in markdown and it used to be just like my local stuff. It used to be a markdown and, uh, I, you know, I've tried everything from from notion to apple notes, to google docs, to google keep, to one note, to uh evernote. I mean, I've done a lot of note taking stuff and we're talking like going back 10 years, you know, and so like things that over time I've used. The things that stuck were one note from microsoft, um, that I used that for a while. I switched to uh Apple notes for a while and then I, um, it kind of I don't know, I'm not a fan of like when any note taking app copy and paste your your styling too, so, anyways, these are nitpicks. And then, uh, then I use Google key for a long time and I was like, yeah, this is, this is great, except for it's a little too basic. So, so lately I've just been, I feel like I feel like I need a better system, uh, but I've I've been using Google docs yeah, I use Google docs for it and I found that, like, if I just create a doc per idea.
Speaker 2:Then it's a lot easier for me to like put those ideas in there. I mean, it's the same idea. If I was going to use OneNote I would have a new page for this thing. But yeah, it's not sophisticated at all. It used to be. I used Notion for a little while too.
Speaker 1:Tim, one thing I'm not sure if you ever tried. Have you tried Noteslm, google's Noteslm? Have you tried that at all?
Speaker 2:I haven't. Is this like one of their beta products?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you can kind of like log into it just um, with your normal google account, but what it allows you to do is you can add various different sources so you can write your own notes. You can like copy and paste text, you can put pdfs in, you can put web links in, and then you can like question it and the ai analyzes that data set of notes, and so you can kind of put notes in about things you're kind of thinking about and working on and then you can ask the AI to analyze all of those kind of sources in your notes. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll have to check it out and this is a Google product, then right. Did you? Ah, yeah, I'll have to check it out. I mean, I just I just got for Google. I thought you know what they're offering a free trial Like. So I've done a little bit of AI stuff, a lot of self-hosted AI stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was watching your videos recently about the self-hosted AI. Yeah, that's something I want to definitely do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we could touch on it then or later. But you know, I recently started. Since I'm using Google Workspaces, I was like, you know, they're offering me a free trial of Gemini. I may as well be informed on it. It's kind of two for one I get informed and I get some value out of it. I'm on the two-week free trial.
Speaker 2:This is kind of like where I see AI going, where AI isn't its own product, ai is integrated into the products you already use or into a product you're going to use, and it's uh, it's pretty nice in Gemini to be able to every email you pull up, there's a summary on the right from Gemini, gemini, even if the thread is, like you know, months long, like some of my email threads tend to be, uh, in this space, you know Gemini, summarizing stuff you could ask it. Stuff. You could ask it all kinds of stuff about documents, contracts. I mean not that I, you know, not that I don't read contracts, but when I'm like, did they say this in this contract? You know it's very easy to ask Gemini, like you know. Hey, did they, you know, did they mention exclusivity? You know, I'm not going to search for the word, I want the idea. Did they mention you know any kind of exclusivity in this contract, and gemini figures it all out, so I think that's coming along too.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, I'm on the free trial. I don't know if I'm going to stick on it, but I need to try out this. Notes llm too um, just um.
Speaker 1:Last question I got about your youtube channel is where did the name techno tim come from?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, a lot of people ask this uh, oh man, it's um, oh man. So when I was in college, electronic music was pretty popular. Everybody, even now, still calls a lot of electronic music just techno.
Speaker 1:I must admit, adam Tim, when I've been searching for your channel, sometimes I've typed in techno Tim, and the autocorrect has changed it to time and so I'm doing a search. I thought, oh for God's search. I thought, no, I didn't want techno time, I wanted techno.
Speaker 2:Tim, yeah, yeah, autocorrect, I noticed does that on on mobile? Um, these are all all things I had to figure out and overcome, um, but so, so, like going way back when I was in college, uh, uh, I liked electronic music. I liked more of, like I don't know, trance and kind of EDM and like all this atmospheric kind of electronic music, cause it was new to me, like I'd never heard anything like it, and it was new to me and it was a new genre. I've always been into hip hop, I still am, uh, but you know, in college I that because I thought, wow, this is a new way of listening to music that's electronic, as hip hop for a long time was, I mean, you know, especially nineties and two thousands. So, anyway that I would play it and I lived in the dorms and, uh, you know, my, my, my dorm room was right by the bathroom so everybody could hear it.
Speaker 2:Like, if someone has to go to the bathroom, my door's open, I'm playing the music. And so, you know, people would always tease me about it and my RA would always make a point to say, tim, turn your techno music down. You know, it became a joke. Even though it wasn't that loud Everyone could hear it as they walked by to the bathroom. And so I know a hockey player lived next door to me and he just started calling me techno Tim and it stuck and like all through college like people wouldn't even call me Tim anymore, they just called me Techno. Like for a long time my name was just Techno, you know, and it was just. I just knew that that's who they were talking about. So, anyways, that became my, you know, like my gamer tag for a lot of stuff and I just thought like hey, I'm just going to, I'm just going to use this. And I thought it kind of fit because, you know, is it for technology or is it for music, and so because I was before I asked you.
Speaker 1:I was wondering, I was thinking I wonder if it's got anything to do with techno music or is it just techno and technology. So yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and yeah. And just touching on a point earlier, for a long time the SEO was pretty bad for me because I'm like you know, when people would search for me, they'd find all stuff about techno music, a DJ called Techno Tim and all of this stuff, and I was like man, I'm, you know, I'm like 10th, I'm on like page two of Google when people search, and so I had to do you know, you know, I I mean me, not me personally had to do a lot of work, but as my content grew and people searched for me more, now I'm higher on that list on seo. But yeah, that those are things you don't think about, like when you pick a name is like you don't you kind of want to pick something kind of unique, because then your seo is is easy, you know, for people to find.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to to move on to a different kind of section of the podcast I like to do I call it rapid fire questions where I'm going to ask you just some pretty random questions, tim, and you just got to kind of answer them just simply. So I know the answer to this one already, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Dark mode or light mode?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, dark mode I. I mean, I got love for light mode too. I'll have more love for light mode too. I'm probably hearing a little bit, uh, but dark mode it's got to be. My eyes are sensitive to light, so and your preferred web browser oh, the one I use, or the one I have to use.
Speaker 2:Uh, no, it's, it's chrome. Uh, only because it's convenient. I've been using it forever. Um, yeah, you know I love firefox. Uh, you know, safari even has its you know perks, but chrome is the one I click and your favorite tech gadget that you own wow, that that is tough.
Speaker 2:I I could say super generic it's my phone, because, man, I couldn't imagine being out with my phone and that has like the biggest impact on you know, on everything. But if I had to pick something that wasn't obvious, that's tough. That is tough. If I had to pick something that wasn't obvious, yeah, that's tough. I would say my phone, but if I could have, I guess, something else.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's really cool, but I have this HDMI capture card that does 4K, quad 4K inputs and it was one of my biggest purchases way back in the day when I was making zero dollars on youtube and uh, I'm still using it today. And back then, you know, a 400 purchase for something that was a hobby was a lot of money, but I, I love it. It's this 4k capture card, uh by uh by um black magic, and uh, still use it today. It's, it's pretty awesome. So, anyways, that's my favorite, uh favorite gadget that I've gotten a lot of use of over time okay, so your next um favorite question is what's your favorite retro game or retro console?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, this is tough. Um, my my favorite retro game like what, what will I? Will I pick up, um, and so you know the console's tough too. Uh, yeah, this is tough. Like I, I love the Legend of Zelda series. I can play them all. Two Links Awakening is so hard. It's one of the few I've never beaten yet.
Speaker 2:Uh, on NES, uh, but I think like, while I have these fond memories of playing NES really young, I think like I really love, I like N64 a lot, nintendo 64. Ocarina of Time is like a game that, like you know, still I still remember like the music I was listening to, what grade I was in and what food I was eating when I was playing that game. So a lot of nostalgia around ocarina of time. Um, you know, I don't know, I love the whole series. Uh, I'm gonna have to go with nintendo 64 because it was so unique, the controller was so unique, uh, and the z targeting and everything was was so unique. And then ocarina of time, on top of that, was like like the game of my life when I was younger.
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna go with those two right, um, next favorite thing your favorite youtube channel other than your own? And, of course, like it's going to be space invader one. But you're not allowed to say that anyway so favorite favorite youtube channel.
Speaker 2:Thanks for qualifying okay. Uh, um, this this one's tough too. You know, I someone I've always looked up to and respect. I mean both Jeff from Craft Computing and Jeff Geerling, both of those two, you know, I've always, I've always looked at them as showmen, as good storytellers, as you know, good technologists overall. And so you know, now I got to pick betweenff and other jeff. That's a long running joke I have with those two as well. Um, I picked jeff. Yeah, sounds good to me.
Speaker 1:Um, you've already answered this question, so I'm going to slightly change it a little bit. Um, the question was the first computer you ever owned, so I'm going to change it to the second computer you ever owned, because your first one was the c64. So what was your second computer you ever owned then?
Speaker 2:the second computer I ever owned was a hp pavilion and it had a AMD K6-2 processor and I think it was 500 megahertz and that thing was awesome and it was so awesome and I owned it in a time where I didn't fully understand computers and I didn't fully understand PCs. They were still magic to me. And you know, real quick funny thing is like when I, when I, when I went to college and use this PC like I didn't even know, like I didn't even want to open it up, like my RA had to come and physically put the network adapter card into that PC because I didn't know how and after I saw him do that it was all over. That's when I was like it was that easy to put in a PCI card. Okay, I got this, this, you know voodoo express video card. After that, like you name it. So that was, that was a little bit of catalyst for me to get into.
Speaker 1:Like pc building and pc tearing apart was seeing how easy it inaccessible I think it's got easier nowadays, like a lot of um of the kind of younger guys. Nowadays, like you know, they put a hard drive in the computer. It's just you plug it into the sata cable. But do you remember when we had to put the little jumper on the ide if it was the kind?
Speaker 2:of like primary or secondary drive you know, oh yeah, slave or master you like. You had no idea. Like how many can I chain in a row? And is that still slave or master? And is this ide, oh?
Speaker 1:one. It was nice when the kind of auto select bit came along, wasn't it where you could put it? Put it on the jumper. Supposedly it was meant to work that out itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, but sometimes you had to override it or something, because I remember having, like I think, four, four, you know, on one ID, you know having four hard drives in one and on the other one, having, like my CD burner, my DVD burner and two other spaces for drives, like it was out of control so I'm moving on like I'm software, now your favorite open source project.
Speaker 1:What would that be, tim?
Speaker 2:wow. Um, onto software um, this one's tough because, like I use a lot of open uh source software tools when I develop um, you know I'm a huge fan like I. I like to do a lot of open uh source software tools when I develop. Um, you know I'm a huge fan like I. I like to do a lot of front end. I do front end, back end, cloud, whatever you name it for software. Like me writing software myself. Like in that space, I I love react. I'm a huge fan of react. React, I think has changed like the game for everyone as far as front end is concerned.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to like self-hosting stuff, like I don't think there's a bigger project than Home Assistant, like I'm still so amazed I think it's one of the biggest projects on GitHub ever still. And when I heard that stat I was like, is that true? And then I started thinking about it. I'm like this has like hundreds, if not thousands, of people contributing to this thing. Um, that's, that's trying to help people do something really awesome. So I would have to say home assistant uh, you know part of it. Uh, because, like you could honestly make a career out of home assistant right now if you wanted, like you could, you could, you could spend so much time Like if you started configuring today, you can make a career out of it, and you would still wouldn't be done. You know in, you know in 20 years. And that's not me being facetious, it's just like talking about like how much, how many integration points they have and how many modalities they're like surfacing in this really awesome UI, so I would have to go home.
Speaker 2:Assistant. It's a. It's one that I battle with a lot of times, you know on config, or why is this working this way? But it's one that I battle with a lot of times, you know on config, or why is this working this way? But at the end of the day, it is really powerful and it's massive. Like it is as far as like Mindshare and how much code and how many contributors are. It is massive. There's nothing else out there left.
Speaker 1:That's a great choice. I'm glad I'm not being asked these questions. I'm glad I'm the host and I don't have to choose. Moving on to the next question, a bit more easy maybe, um star wars or star trek oh, yeah, I got.
Speaker 2:I was asked this one. Uh, just a couple weeks ago I have to go star wars only because, like it's what I know, you know it's, uh, it's, it's what I gravitated towards, uh, when I was younger and uh, you know, when I was younger I felt like there was more action in it, so I was kind of drawn to that and so, you know, I I think either people introduce you to both when you're younger, or one or the other, and so I was never introduced really to star trek other than on tv when I was younger.
Speaker 1:So, you know, star wars I was, and so I I've always gravitated towards that, and so um, and my final question um, probably my favorite question I ask people is if you could go either forward in time or back in time, which would you pick?
Speaker 2:Oh, this one's so tough, this one is so tough. Um, honestly, I think I would go back, uh and um, like I'm, I'm excited for the future, I, but I but I also want it to be a surprise, uh, and be able to help change the you know, I guess, how it's uh, how it plays out, and so I feel like going backwards in time could help that. And so, for me, I, you know, I I pulled the Marty McFly, you know I go back in time but I tell myself, all of these things you don't need to worry about. And then I, you know, try to help, I don't know, fix something, all while not making my family and friends disappear or me disappear from the picture. So, you know, I don't know, I've always enjoyed like Back to the Future is one of my, one of my most favorite.
Speaker 1:I think they call it the perfect movie in film school apparently.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's good, I think it's a fitting name for it. It's my number one and and it also proves that, hey, sequels can be almost as good as the original, just like Star Wars do. But you know it's, it's so fantastic, like I love that. So I, you know it's, uh, it's so fantastic, like I love that. So I, I've always enjoyed, like, this idea of time travel and going back and, like you know, trying to fix things but not interrupt things, and so I, I would go back because I, I I loved marty mcfly in uh, in, uh, and back to the future, and oh, man, two was even so good, like at the end of two, when he's going back in time to see himself back in time and he's above, you know himself playing the guitar, where he going back in time to see himself back in time and he's above, you know himself playing the guitar.
Speaker 1:It's like when I first watched that?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, it was so good, it's amazing yeah, yeah, yeah, just the. That really blew my mind when he, like in part two, went back in time to see himself in the 50s, back in time, playing the guitar, I was like this, this could go on forever, this, you know. And then he could go back in time to see himself, you know. I was like, oh, this is so great so I need to watch the series or again. I love it.
Speaker 1:So I would say back in time. So, um, we can move on and just talk about your home lab a little bit, tim, if that's all right. Um, so you've been building some new servers and stuff you know fairly recently. Can you talk through the servers that you have in your home lab? What kind of hardware do you have in your lab currently, sort of computer and server-wise?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been changing a lot. So I used to have three one-use servers that I built and that was kind of my Proxmox cluster all in one and that ran all of my Proxmox cluster all in one, um, and that ran all of my workloads. Uh, just recently I'd say within the last three months I had an opportunity to host some of those in a co-location downtown, so I moved those there and so I have a Proxmox cluster downtown that I'm self-hosting and managing from here, um, so now in my home lab I've kind of had to figure out OK, what does my compute look like? You know a kind of modern compute look like. And so I have three. Just if I'm going from the top down like a lot of networking, I'll kind of skip over that, excuse me. And then I have three Intel NUCs. So I have three 11th gen Intel NUCs in a cluster for Proxmox.
Speaker 2:Because I realized as part of my testing to see if I could really really move some of my stuff to the colo, I decided to shut down and migrate all of those workloads to my Intel NUCs. And these are Intel NUCs. I was just playing around with putting Proxmox on running Kubernetes just to kind of test it all out. But then I migrated those workloads there and I shut down my one use and then I never turned them back on. I'm like this is awesome. Like these, you know, these three nox can like do all of this.
Speaker 2:I was pretty impressed. Of course it didn't have the ram, the amount of ram, the ecc, like you know, hard drives, uh, uh, any kind of redundancy, but but it did work. So, um. So after that I decided, okay, move my stuff, some stuff, to colo so I could play with like remote networking and site-to-site vpn, um, and then my three intel nuts are running proxmox, uh, then on top of that it's running two kubernetes clusters and then a lot of different software in there that I run and test and whatnot. Also in that rack I have a storeinator that 45 Drives gave me, and that's been awesome to kind of play with and tinker with you recently customized and you put the SSDs in and you moved um 3.5 bays out that's right.
Speaker 2:Did you havea 3d print?
Speaker 1:um the bracket no good question.
Speaker 2:No, I haven't yet. And so that my those drives are just freestanding. It's kind of it's. It's not ideal, uh, but it's working. I, I, I need to get a 3d printer because I it's just a skill I think I need to learn at some point. The longer I wait, the better they get. And I'm kind of waiting for this point where it's like I have enough things to print to, where it justifies the cost of paying and also it's a good time to buy because the technology isn't evolving as fast as it is. Someone saying like the next generation ones are going to be even better. But you know, that's, that's what every everyone says. It's fixed in the next version. So so I, you know I'm at this point. Where do do I? Do I buy one?
Speaker 1:now I've got a bamboo lab, some X, one carbon, and it's great. It's really, it's great, it's really. It's an amazing 3d printer. But I can't do CAD, so I'm relying on kind of other people's, um other people's work to print things out. But a friend of mine, um is very kindly, said that every Sunday he's going to set aside um a few hours and teach me to use I think it's called Rhino. Um, um, hopefully he's very, very going to be very, very patient because, yeah, I'm not the most um artistic kind of person to be able to design things I, I hear you, I, I'm there too, I I'm a little more.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm I'm kind of okay with design stuff, but when it gets into like engineering, you know, when it, when it comes down to millimeters, I'm not good at that kind of stuff, you know I'm kind of like, you know I'm a measure once cut, three times kind of person, um, uh and so. So, uh, while I can like sketch some stuff out and, you know, kind of make it work, when it comes down to you know where I have to get out calipers and measure stuff. That's where I'm, you know I, I know I'm in over my head, so but I would love to. I, I, you know I have this idea still, I, I still love to do it where in in in that store, even hl 15 because they're basically the same model is have basically um drive cages, that um, you could choose whether or not you want 3.5 or 2.5, and they'll just be stackable. That's kind of my idea and that's all spawned from.
Speaker 2:I put my NVIDIA 3090 that was in my Windows PC into that server so I could do some AI tests, and so that's too big and gets in the way, and so I thought, well, if I take out one row of fans, the SSDs will fit all the way across. I don. Well, if I take out you know, one row of fans, you know the SSDs will fit all the way across. I don't even know if I'm going to need 15 SSDs, who knows. But I decided for that AI box. So that's that's next to.
Speaker 2:You know, it's a storeinator. I've done a ton of stuff with it. But now recently I've decided this is my like application server it's probably a better way to call it application server that's going to run apps. It's going to be a hundred percent flash, it's going to have a lot of ram, decent compute, but it's going to have a 3090 or some kind of video card in there, uh, to run ai and ml workloads, if I need to, and transcoding for plex. So basically, you know, gpu tasks are going to go there, cpu tasks are going to go in the xeon, that's in there, and then it's just all flash, because why not? I don't want to have to worry about spinning drives in that. In that I've seen in um your videos.
Speaker 1:Why you've got like um. Is it like a slinger slinger case I'm not sure that's how it's pronounced the cx um 4170a. Have you used that for anything? I I thought that case looks really nice it is so that, yeah, it's I think it's pronounced sliger I could be wrong I.
Speaker 2:I could be wrong, um, but I you know I, so I haven't used the case yet. I like it looks so nice.
Speaker 1:I love the white stuff it looks beautiful.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I, I agree, I agree. I I asked him like, can I have white? And they're like, absolutely, uh, but no, sliger, a great company here in the us, uh, they make uh a lot of like beautiful, uh, pc conversion cases, or I should just say server, you know cases. The reason why I like this one so much is because it's one of the few that can fit a radiator for AIO coolers, for liquid cooling, and so I always thought in my head like I would love to build, you know, a rack mount server that had, you know, an AIO cooler, liquid cooling. One because I can say my server has liquid cooling, and two because, I don't know, it just sounds really nice. And so, yeah, they sent me it a long time ago and they're like, yeah, use it for anything you want. If you find a use for it, yeah, absolutely use it.
Speaker 2:And so I just have this awesome case I'm just waiting to use, and so it's not in my server rack. I actually have a mini server rack here in the office and that case is going to house my new Windows build that's coming soon, as soon as Intel releases their 15th gen, and hopefully it doesn't have all these problems and hopefully it's okay. But that's a special case that I've been waiting for. Honestly, if I don't end up putting the Windows build in that case my current Stornator case I'm just going to shift stuff around and put everything in the Sliger case because then I don't have to worry about the whole 13-inch video card problem, because it has way more depth than the Stornator. But yeah, that case is awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've got a couple of for you, um for you, servers that have got the front mounted radiator in the front as well, but they just don't look as pretty as your case.
Speaker 2:You know, I was like yeah, so I can make awesome stuff. They make awesome stuff and pretty affordable too. If, like, if you look in this space like pc conversions or build your own server, like you're paying a server tax, you're basically paying a home lab tax. I think over time you know this as this category kind of grows, uh, manufacturers and companies are realizing like, hey, you know, we can slap on an extra 20 just because. Just because it's going to go in someone's home lab, I feel like, um, and whereas some of these cases were, you know, a third of the price that they are today and I don't know if that has to do with other things, but I've been realizing a lot of this stuff, like even even secondhand parts, are getting more expensive because I think for a long time people were just giving it away. You know, quote unquote giving it away Like just get it out of here, I'll take whatever. You know, I just don't want it anymore. Now they realize like there's a huge secondhand market for all of this old enterprise stuff, so I'm not just going to give it away anymore.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, prices have definitely increased in this category, which is totally fine, like I love that there's a second or third or fourth life for this stuff, which is totally fine. Like I, I, I love that there's. There's a. There's a second or third or fourth life for this stuff, which is awesome. Which is awesome. And at the end of the day, if it gets more use for another five, ten years, hey, that's less time in the landfill and uh, and at the same time, the person who had it, you know, made some money, and the person who got it got it a little cheaper. So I still run.
Speaker 1:I've got to my left here. I've got three gen 8 micro servers. Um yeah, I upgraded the cpus to xeons because they all came with seller on, but I've actually got a little three node proxmox cluster there. I thought I need to do something.
Speaker 2:You know, I couldn't throw them away yeah, yeah cool I hear you, like you find all kinds of uses for this stuff. You know, like I, I find all kinds of uses. I I've been this way forever. Like, yeah, well, now that I I upgraded this, well, now this old server is going to become this server, and well, I don't have a rack. So let's go build this little rack or hack this ikea thing and put it over here, and this will be the server that's over here versus the server that's over here. So I've done it so much to the point where now I'm like, okay, in my studio I'm going to have a mini server rack and all of my you know, my windows, my Mac and my Linux box and my audio gears all going to be in this mini server rack. And so now I'm like building up this whole mini server rack in my office, which which has a lot of use for me actually, by the way, and it's super nice.
Speaker 2:A lot of people say you know, like, why do you use a server rack? Can't you just put it on shelf? Sure, like, absolutely Like, you use what you have. But I found like, for me, spending the money and buying like a rack that fits and does exactly what I want is is worth it for me because it also forces me to think about cable management and it gives me places to put cables too. You know, I've done the, I've done the wire rack server rack for a long time, or the ikea rack server rack for a long time, and, um, it's just tough, to tough to manage cables when, when, when you're, when you're using something that doesn't have, you know, any cable management in mind yeah, I, you know where I put my servers.
Speaker 1:I kind of built wooden shelves. To be honest, I really wanted rails, but, um, I wanted to build my servers inside an arcade cabinet so, but I couldn't fit rails? It would, it was just too wide, so I kind of have to slide it on the wood.
Speaker 1:And then I've got different size pieces of wood that I have kind of vertically to slide it on the wood. And then I've got different size pieces of wood that I have kind of vertically that will fit underneath the different heights of the servers when I pull them out so they don't topple over then yeah, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 2:Inside of an arcade cabinet. Uh, yeah, that sounds awesome. A buddy of mine, you know he did a video game in jukebox repair when I was younger and he, his whole garage was filled with like old cabinets and games and it was so awesome, a lot of fun times playing there. And actually he now he owns a company, a mobile company, where he drives them to people's parties and people play it. So I don't know, I, I love, uh, I love the old arcade games like nothing, nothing like having an arcade cabinet and uh, you know, just like a good sturdy one, like something you could play mortal kombat or street fighter on, where you know you can be rough with it and and smash the buttons.
Speaker 1:I, I don't know, I love I've got um in the arcade cabinet. I've got um, a vm running bataseria with a um. It's only a quadro p2000 pass through to it but it plays all of the games and um. So it kind of actually the cabinet actually works um through a vm. Um, yeah, off my kind of main unraised server that's awesome I thought it was pretty yeah, that is awesome.
Speaker 2:That is awesome. That's uh, that's a dream one day to have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, basically, uh, yeah, uh, that is sarah, yeah it's um a linux distro that's just based, it's just for retro gaming. Um, you kind of put your roms in and stuff. It will get. It will scrape all the artwork and um and that kind of thing um like like a plex. I'll have to check it out gaming kind of thing, yeah okay, yeah, I'll have to check it out.
Speaker 2:I I think I remember the name. Yeah, I've used retro pi and emulation station for a long time. I actually have it running on one of those, but maybe I can shift gears real quick before this next video and start running it.
Speaker 1:So you know you're saying you're thinking of getting 15th gen Intel. Did you consider the new Ryzen at all for your Windows build? Or you're not an AMD fan?
Speaker 2:You know it's hard. Like I've had AMD before, Like don't get me wrong. Like I said, my first processor I guess you know x86 processor was AMD. Then I used AMD XPs, mds, athlons, dual MPs and for a while, like that was great. And I feel, like you know, amd and Intel always tick-tock back and forth. Now it's swung way, way to the AMD side and maybe a little bit back towards Intel with the last couple of releases. That being said, like I have, but I'm so familiar with Intel, like I'm, you know, when it comes to like I totally understand why a lot of people pick AMD.
Speaker 2:Some of my reasoning, though, for picking Intel is, you know, more than just like raw power, you know, or cores, you know, some of it has to do, you know, with things like QuickSync or AV1, you know, to decoding, encoding. Similarly to like why I pick NVIDIA a lot too. And people you know ask, like why do you always go with NVIDIA? And similarly, like, ok, I get NVENC, encoding, decoding, I get pretty good graphics, you know 3D rendering, performance, and then I get like world class AI, ai stuff, you know. So it's like, you know it's kind of it's the whole package thing, and that's where, at least for me, for intel, like I know, I'm gonna get, you know, super compatible hardware and software, even on the motherboard, that if I want to run linux I don't have to worry about anything. And that's probably a thing in the past too. But I could always guarantee, like, if I buy a board that has an Intel NIC, intel Wi-Fi and I use an Intel chip, if I install Linux on it I will have zero problems. And maybe that's all changed with AMD and Ryzen series. But you know, I'm just going to say it's more what I'm familiar with. You know I've been using Intel stuff for a long time and I do have AMD stuff here for a long time. And, uh, I, I do have amd stuff here. Uh, but when I but when I choose my personal builds, I usually choose intel and I'm not against, like I, I've thought about thread ripper I, I I've had a thread ripper type machine in my cart so many times.
Speaker 2:But then I end up saying, well, I'm gonna wait a little bit. I think it's what a lot of people do like build this dream system on amazon or whatever. That's a thread ripper. And then you're kind of like, yeah, that's a lot of people do like build this dream system on Amazon or whatever. That's a thread ripper. And then you're kind of like, yeah, that's a lot of money. I think I'll hold off for a little bit.
Speaker 1:I've done exactly the same. I've had thread ripper in my cart and I'm thinking that's a lot of money. And then also electricity is so expensive in the UK, I'm thinking that's going to be a lot of money if you turned on servers that are, like you know um consumer grade hardware. But I used to use amd um. I swapped to intel fairly recently for the igpu, really um, you know, for the quick sync. It's just so good. It just really frustrates me that nowadays we get so few pcie lanes in consumer motherboards. It's, you know, we kind of don't have that kind of like enthusiast motherboard like we used to have years ago. It's kind of you either have, like you know um, the consumer grade one that's designed for a couple of nvmes and a graphics card, and you know, if you're not doing gaming then you need to go and get like a full kind of full-blown, you know enterprise style hardware, and then you don't get.
Speaker 1:Then you don't get the um the igpu. Yeah, it's not fair.
Speaker 2:Yeah I'm there with you, 100 I. I'm there with you and you know, I, I always question, like, like, how did this happen? Like you know, how did how did this happen? Like we, we, we had workstation boards. Then they're getting to take away, then we have enthusiast board and who knows what's going on now.
Speaker 2:But if you get a xeon, you don't get an igpu, so you don't get quick sync. And if you go the desktop way, you do get an igpu, where you get quick sync, but you only get, you know, 24 lanes, which is a video car, or 20 lanes, which is a video card, and nvme drive. So it's like what is going on? Like, like, give me, like I, I, like, I, I don't support this, but I, I, I understand why companies do this, at least at least on the um, uh, on the processor side, um, like core counts and stuff like that, but like lanes I, I guess I can kind of understand. I don't know if that's an artificial limitation, you know, or it's a technical limitation, and same with QuickSync, intel QuickSync, I don't know. I just feel like, okay, if you're going enterprise, like you should still have all those things. I know this is going to drive up costs. That's probably what they're going to say. It's going to be more expensive. If we put an IGPU, it's going to use some, some of your lanes, but I don't know they're, they're, you know they're.
Speaker 2:There's not a good choice. Uh, for, yeah, for an enthusiast really is is hey, I, I want a desktop class processor. Uh, because of power, because, whatever, I don't need 32 cores, it is fine. And uh, you know, I don't want to spend all that power. Give me a few more lanes, not asking for like 50, but maybe 30. I don't want to spend all that power. Give me a few more lanes. I'm not asking for like 50, but maybe 30. I don't know. And then, yeah, give me my HPU. It's tough.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's because you know people aren't using kind of multiple graphics cards all together for their gaming nowadays? Do you think that's why we don't have that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that is a big one, yeah, and big one, yeah, and I that's a good point, I think that's how we got there. Yeah, because no one's doing, you know, the, the, the, the dual cards anymore, so they're just like I. I think that, yeah, I, I think that gaming has shaped a lot of the way that, like that, pcs are manufacturers, even cases are manufactured. Now it's like, hey, why do you build a pc? You build it to game, you know. I'm just thinking like, what marketers or what people are thinking, hey, everyone's grabbing, gravitating towards building a gaming pc. Well, what do you need again? And a gaming pc? Really, you only need one video card and nvme the rest is all you really need a gaming pc.
Speaker 1:Tim is rgb lights. You don't need anything else that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that is right.
Speaker 2:Save some room for rgb, that is exactly right.
Speaker 2:But you know, I think I think that's just shaped, I, I feel like that skewed like everything towards, like, well, you know, a gaming pc also, you know, fulfills like a lot of these enthusiasts needs. And I don't think it does at all because, you know, I I have a hard time saying, like I'm going to spend two to $3,000 on building my next windows machine, um, but I only get to put a video card and an NVMe drive in it, like, hey, what about the gadget I was just talking about earlier, like my, you know, my HDMI input that has four HDMI inputs, that's PCI express. You know eight, like now, that's going to share lanes with other things and and I don't want a xeon running in here, you know, for for many reasons, um, so it's, it's just tough. And then, on top of that, like, even if I could get the you know, the workstation version of the xeons, if those are even still sticking around, I, I haven't followed the news on that um, those are pretty expensive. And then you're getting into motherboards, uh, that $600, $700, $800.
Speaker 1:Some of the motherboards are crazy prices, aren't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, in general, especially for the workstation ones I think Asus has them I get it Like limited, run, limited, totally niche. But man motherboards overall, like remember when you could pay $30 or $40 for a motherboard, I feel like I'm getting old. But this is not too far in our past. I mean, I'm talking about maybe, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago. You know, paying, like you know, $100 for a really good motherboard. You know, not too far away.
Speaker 1:I feel like yeah, it's a shame, you know. Um, hopefully, as home labbing gets a bit more popular, maybe maybe vendors will kind of see there is a market there for some middle ground stuff. You never know yeah yeah, I hope so yeah, I hope so.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think, yeah, I think this, like I keep saying this category is growing. I think it is, is, and now you see, you know, you see like 45 drives they're, they're building, you know they're building systems for home labbers and home lab is actually in the name, like. So I still feel like we're we're pretty early on. You know there's, there's other companies that are doing awesome things too, that are that are targeting specifically home lab enthusiasts, where you know if, if you still sometimes, when you search for this on the internet, bad seo, uh, they think you're growing, uh, uh, some kind of garden in your house or doing some kind of chemical experiment, you know a laboratory, uh. So the fact that now, when I search for a home lab on Google, where it's starting to show computers, I think that that's a good sign that like, hey, like the category is growing and I'm no longer getting like home massage kits or laboratories or like grow kits for my house, you know.
Speaker 1:So, moving on from hardware, I'd like to talk about software and I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about Unraid. I know you've kind of used it for the first time this year. You know, how did you actually discover it? Was it kind of people on your channel said you know, check it out, or is it something you've kind of had on the back burner to check out for a while?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, a little bit of both. Like I've heard of hunray for years, I've heard of unread for years, linus I'm sure that's where, like 99% of people heard of it for the first time Um, and so I, you know, I, it's always been in the back of my head. I've been building like all different kinds of systems and I thought, yeah, that would, that'd be cool to check out one day. Um, and then, like there was this sense of urgency when licensing was changing and so, like you know, I, I, I thought like, oh, okay, well, if I'm ever gonna try, let's just buy it now. So, you know, if I try in a couple years, whatever, it's still around for me to try, not that, you know, not that I wouldn't mind supporting people in software. Uh, anyways, because I always say to people like, hey, support thing, the things you like, because if you don't, they're not going to be around in the future and I'm more than happy to pay for something that I get value out of. But I thought like, hey, this is a good time to like, buy it, put it on the back burner and, uh, and try it at a later time.
Speaker 2:Well, as I was, like you know, kind of just ripping apart some of my systems, that, yeah, I I gave it a spin and uh, but yeah, I, I it was. Uh, and a lot of people have recommended it too. It's it's. It's funny how you don't know what people use until you talk about it, and I, I think Unraid is one of those things. I think Unraid is one of those things and, uh, I wish more people in Homelab would, would, would talk about it. Um, cause, as soon as I mentioned it, like people you know in my discord server that I've talked to for years, it's like, yeah, got one running right here. I'm like dude, where have you been? Like you've never talked about it. Like I don't, I don't know what it is, but, uh, I wish more people would talk about it because it is awesome um.
Speaker 1:Have you um tried the unraid 7 beta yet, tim? Have you um spun that up yet? Or is that something you?
Speaker 2:I haven't. So I I still have the latest six on my usb drive and you know it's, it's uh, I could boot up my other system with it at any time. It's kind of nice that it's on usb, because then you know I can just boot it up anytime, just reboot my machine and there we go. But I have no, I haven't tried. Seven I heard it's coming, I saw your video on it and uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm super excited.
Speaker 1:Maybe I can show you some things about it today. And um, um, like um. For those who don't know um, tim um has made two videos about unraid um, his first one where you know he first installed it and a second one where he compared it to his current nas system, which was um, um true NAS scale, I believe, tim and um. You know. What I want to say to everyone is you know, um, both systems are really awesome and um it's. It's very funny when people get very kind of territorial about kind of um. You know, like it reminds me of um, when, when you're telling me about kind of Commodore 64 earlier, tim actually is um. You know, like it reminds me of when you're telling me about kind of Commodore 64 earlier Tim actually is.
Speaker 1:You know, I remember at school it was kind of like we had a computer over here called the ZX Spectrum. I don't know if you've ever heard of it in the States, but it was a kind of it was. It was a terrible computer and Commodore 64 was just much better. And all the people that said Spectrum wasn't they were all wrong. But but yeah, but you know, um. You know one thing I've kind of kind of like you know I run vms all the time. I for everything I do, um pretty much, and I just kind of think of an operating system as really just a tool and um, you know it's the same with anything there's pros and cons of everything, you know I I thought it was very interesting to hear your thoughts on the product and you know I know lime technology, are very interested to hear feedback and your feedback was very interesting to hear your point of view from someone who's never set up on raid before and, you know, is coming as a first-time user seeing what's there. I might kind of go through some of the kind of points you made in your video, tim, if that's all right.
Speaker 1:Like the first thing that many people kind of think about is probably, I guess is like you know you mentioned as your first point is the fact that you can get TrueNAS for free and Unraid you do have to buy a license for it. You know everyone kind of likes free, but you know the kind of difference between TrueNAS and Unraid is TrueNAS gets a lot of income from the enterprise clients so and that kind of feeds down to the community version, which is really awesome. But obviously Unraid doesn't have the enterprise users and so don't have the same kind of revenue stream. And what I say to people kind of like you know, I hear a lot of people say I don't want to kind of pay for Unraid.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying this to you at all, tim, I'm just saying this to friends who have said this to me. They get the Xbox game, that's the Dulux pack. That's like £90 for one game and they're quite happy for that. Yeah, so that's what I think about with the free versus paid. But it is something that a lot of people, you know they do have to, you know, think about for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just if I could chime in. Yeah, I totally agree. I'm not against paying for anything. Like I pay for stuff. I support people on Patreon, I support stuff on, you know, people on YouTube, like I totally get it. And I always say to people like thing, support the things you like. Like, if you like something, support it because you know if it goes away like you won't have that thing anymore. And I totally get it. Like you know, lime tech is a business. They have good employees. Uh, they have people to pay. Uh, you know they provide jobs for people and so the small fee on getting an operating system that you get so much value out of helps support the company that helps support the people that help support their community. Like I totally get 100.
Speaker 2:Like I, you know I've worked in a couple small startups and I get it like I, you know, I, I've been there, I've been, I've been in positions before where I'm like am I getting paid next week? You know. So I, I, I, you know, I totally get how it works and I totally understand.
Speaker 1:I totally get it Like people who maybe they can't afford to kind of like spend, you know, $50 on an iOS. Maybe they're kind of like they're at school, they don't have much money and they want to get into. They want to get into this kind of space Like you know. You know the point of people you know saying that it's an advantage to be free.
Speaker 2:for sure yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I totally understand and I will say, like, just going into the value piece, you know, um, you do get a ton of value for what you get, like, like, for what you pay, like you spend. Yeah, like you could, you could build all the parts and pieces if you wanted individually and spend weeks and weeks and months kind of getting it to work, but it wouldn't be fully integrated all in one package and just work out of the box. So it's like where do you want to spend your time? Do you want to spend your time tinkering to the point to where you're spending most of your time building something like it? Or do you just want to buy it and focus really on why you bought it?
Speaker 2:You didn't buy it to just want an ass. You bought it to provide services for your network. You bought it to, you know, provide uh applications for your network and so, yeah, that, that uh it. I think about this a lot too, even with servers. It's like I don't build a server just to build a server. It's like that server is going to provide some kind of value for me, and so that value isn't realized until I do that thing.
Speaker 1:And so I feel like with Unraid you realize that value a lot sooner than you do if you try to build it yourself. I think a lot of people who build Unraid they build an Unraid server because they've got a lot of different size hard drives and they start off thinking I just want to build my own NAS, I don't want to buy a whole load of new hard drives, I've got all these different size hard drives. And they find out that they can put an Unraid array together and build it. And then they build it and then it's after that they go oh I can run docker, oh I can run vms, and I think, right, okay, now I'm going to buy some whole new hardware and build a new server. Because they find out they can run applications and um and vls and stuff.
Speaker 1:But you know, one kind of like um sticking point I think it is for a lot of people is um the fact that it does run off a USB flash drive. So it boots off a USB flash drive and then the system runs in RAM. And I know that a lot of people you know can worry about that in case the drive fails. And you know what are your thoughts on that, tim, from someone who's not used Unraid before, and coming to seeing kind of Unraid running on a flash drive, you know how does that kind of make you feel personally, does it make you feel, you know, a bit worried that if the flash drive fails, you know that's a bit of a problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I kind of go back and forth on this because, you know, I I remember in the VMware days, like running it at home, I was like so impressed that it could run off this USB drive and it's all in Ram and that's not taking up an extra sata, you know drive or it's not, you know, using something I need for storage. So I was like blown away by it and then doing more stuff like I do now. It's kind of like, yeah, it would be nice if it's, if it's on its own drive, because then I just don't have to worry in general about you know, something happened to it, me bumping it, or you know whatever, whatever the this, you know the slow boot up or you know, or anything like that. So I I uh, you know I'm kind of on the fence about it. I I do wish there was not, I wish it was an option. I'll say that I I do wish it was an option where you could choose.
Speaker 1:I I agree with you. I think it would be very good to be able to choose either or personally, um, but you know, I can see the. I can see the advantage of a flash drive is you don't have to use a drive, and I like it you know I can just unplug my usb flash drive, take out all the hard drives out of my server, just chuck it into some other you know another box and plug it in and it just is the same and it works.
Speaker 2:That's nice yeah, yeah, like I was saying, it's still plugged into my, still plugged into my store, nator, so I can boot off it right now and like there's no, there's no change yeah, yeah, I, I get there's pros and cons to both and I, I, I uh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just curious like it's it. Uh, I mean, I feel like I feel like the pieces are in place, at least for the authorization and stuff like that for key management. I just always wondered, like you know, I don't know, I'm just curious about the choice and I'm sure it's like a lot of technical stuff and it's like you know it's because it's been that way since day one. But I mean, people I talk to in general would be like, yeah, it'd be a nice option, and again I get it Small company to in general would be like, yeah, it'd be a nice option and again I get it small company like where do you spend your time, you know.
Speaker 1:So you know. I was just wondering if I could actually show you one of my servers, tim um I'd love to, I'd love to see it and you know you're not allowed to laugh at it if it's only got a little bit of storage compared to yours, or and it's not kind of enterprise hardware yeah, so promise not to laugh and I will show it hey no, no, no, no hey I like my first home lab computer was like this compact 300 megahertz computer from like it was like antiquated 10 years before I got it.
Speaker 2:So um so no, I, I never, I never questioned anyone's home lab.
Speaker 1:So anyway tim hit. This. Here is my kind of main Unraid server. I've got my kind of Unraid array at the top here which is made out of 16 terabyte hard drives with an Unraid array with a 16 terabyte parity and the rest is data drives. I've got a small Zpool here which is a pretty kind of risky Zpool because it's just a stripe. I wanted to have the extra base. I only had um two, two terabyte nvmes here and I run vms off this, on um, on this zpool. But what I do do is um.
Speaker 1:One thing that unraid can do that's very interesting with zfs, in my opinion, is you can actually put a zfs drive in an unraid array and it kind of makes it like a hybrid zfs. So obviously you know one driver. Zfs normally has no redundancy, um yeah, and you're not gaining any kind of speed from having it. You know drives working together, but what I like to do is put one zfs drive in my unraid array. So I know this drive fails, I can rebuild it from the parity because you can mix file systems in Unraid. I could have like ButterFS, xfs, zfs. So what I do with this, you see, is I actually use ZFS replication. I snapshot the VMs and I replicate them to this 16-terabyte drive here.
Speaker 1:So that kind of gives me a little bit of backup. It only replicates once a day, but it's enough for my kind of home lab like I. This is the machine I run at assyria from. You'll notice here as well with the um nvmes. Now there's a little bit more metrics here.
Speaker 1:We can see the temperatures and how much power is being drawn yeah if we look at this here, called zfs master, um, a plugin I definitely recommend you installing. If you do install Unraid and put ZFS there, it gives you kind of control over the data sets. You can see all the various different data sets I've got here which you don't kind of get in stock Unraid, and from here you can kind of, like you know you can, take snapshots of the data sets, can kind of, like you know you can, can take snapshots of the data sets, um. But I just want to take you to the dashboard rather than just show you my main unraid array. Here is we've had some really nice improvements on the dashboard here. Um, we can see obviously this was in six. You know you could see all of the running containers and vms um and the v VM running here, actually this PopOS one, if you can see behind me I've got like a VM running that's got the kind of matrix thing for my background. So that's running from this VM here.
Speaker 2:That is awesome. To be honest, I thought you were in front of a green screen.
Speaker 1:It looks so good. So you know, we've got obviously the normal kind of things like um, you know the cpu stuff and you can kind of minimize it here. But I remember you you said you don't know how you can kind of get rid of things.
Speaker 1:There's a little green padlock at the top here it goes red, like I don't really like seeing the motherboard thing personally, because I know, what my motherboard is I don't need on the dashboard so you can just kind of get rid of the ones that you don't really want. And this here has been really nicely improved. The RAM usage we can now see how much RAM services are using. You see 13 gigs here. My VM usage is 16. And my CFS art cache is at 21 gigs at the moment.
Speaker 1:So it's massively improved, I think here, um, for being able to see you know what's running on the server itself. We've also got kind of more things in to do with vms here, like this is the only vm running on the system at the moment, um, and you can also see this from the vm page as well. But we can see the guest is using, you know, 12 of its cpu working hard doing the matrix stuff in the background, um, and the whole host cpu is only um, you know, using five percent and you know other metrics, so that's something that's pretty nice um yeah, so you can tell who the noisy neighbor is now if something's gone awry.
Speaker 1:And here this just says where my disks are in my server. These NVMEs are saying it's hot because I haven't actually set them. And here I know you've installed the GPU plug-in yourself and it puts the metrics here up. Um, this here I quite like because I have a tas motor plug that goes into my whole kind of like server rack, inverted commas, so that this is how much whole of the um servers are using at the moment, or there's three running there and it's using about 500 watts.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's awesome, that is awesome so it's nice you can put things in. There's, you know, tail scale. When you install that, that comes in there's a whole bunch of different things and there's a smart error on there.
Speaker 1:It's just a CRC error on one of my hard drives that I'm not too worried about. But yeah, so the dashboard has been really improved, but you know, you're right, it's not responsive. It would be really nice if it was. I totally agree. And um, I I totally hate um using a phone to operate the unraid um dashboard yeah, like being a front-end developer I, I being a front-end developer too.
Speaker 2:Like I noticed that right away and uh, I was like, oh, this is, this is tough, but I, I get it priorities, but you know, I'm sure it's something that the team will be working on in the future.
Speaker 1:But you know, like I say, we were trying to get Unraid 7 out the door. I'm going to switch across to another server here. This one's actually not started up. This is another Zpool I've got with. I don't know about six SSDs there. What's been added into 7 that wasn't in 6? In 6, we couldn't add like a L2 arc, we couldn't add a slog and that kind of thing. That's now been put into the GUI so you can just kind of add all of that kind of thing in. It's not something I kind of want in mine here. This VM I just use mainly Sorry, this server I use mainly for vms, to be honest. But you can see here as well, there's no unread array, so you get the choice now of having an unread array or not.
Speaker 1:So basically you just have bunches of pools got you know when you were talking about the cache drive to accelerate the reads and writes, that's 100, correct what?
Speaker 1:you were saying it's like you know, you can have the unread array and you can have it right to a cache first, but you can actually have it right to any pool you want, I see, and you can actually move it from pool to pool. So these two z pools here, I can have it right to here first, or have it right to my faster pool first here, which is nvmes, and then later move to that if I wanted to. Or I can just keep it how it is so that's you know something that's um pretty good, I think.
Speaker 2:Just coming on to docker, I know that you um had a problem with adding gpu to a container yeah, so yeah, it's uh kind of a I I'm sure I mean I know a lot of people figured it out, but, um, yeah, the problem is getting like a GPU added to Plex. I have the drivers installed, installed the container toolkit. I've even looked at the Plex container and saw that you need to add I forget some extra flags to say hey, it's NVIDIA and how many cards to pass through. But yeah, then transcoding for some reason is still not working.
Speaker 1:I can probably tell you why that is. You know, what you'll find is whether it's got the part to add the GPU or not. Depends on the person who made the template. Really, one thing you noticed is you'll look for Plex and there's, like you know, six different Plexes and I can totally understand that. That's kind of um quite confusing for a lot of people. Like you know which one? I often have people ask me. They say, ed, I've just set up unraid, how do I know which plex to install? And that's a really good point. But if I take this stable diffusion container here and I just click on to edit here, you see this container actually had already the nvid this part here for nvidia devices. But you have to put the actual id of the gpu. I'm not sure my true nas is actually running as a vm, to be honest, so I don't run any kind of services on it. I've sort of seen like I'm correct me if I'm wrong. You get the option you can choose kind of like GPU one, gpu two. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, Docker, yeah, that's how it is. It's like zero or one and then all you could use all. Sometimes Docker has been changing how it actually works. Is that for?
Speaker 1:every single container Like oh, does the container have to support the GPU, or can you just like is it that up to the user to kind of figure out whether it supports it? Do you know?
Speaker 2:Well, like Docker proper, like you can add it to any container, whether or not the container supports it now Like with Compose right, there's this new way of doing it which says the GPU is available to you if you want to use it, and yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, that's how we'd add the GPU and you could just add it yourself by clicking that. But the one thing that people forget is you do need this Under extra parameters. You need the runtime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the runtime. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it should work. I'm not sure why yours isn't. Obviously, you need to enable it in Plex as well, but I don't need to tell you that yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll probably revisit it soon, when 7 comes out. I'm absolutely going to upgrade.
Speaker 1:But another reason I think people have to be careful in Unraid with passing through kind of GPUs as well is you can pass them through to VMs, and if you pass it through to a VM whilst transcoding is happening, it will crash the whole system because it just basically rips it out from out of the host and I don't know what would happen, like in um in scale, if that's even possible to do, but um to use the same gpu for a vm and and then start the vm up, and I don't know how it's dealt with there.
Speaker 2:But no, no, I think, I think would you do hardware pass through to a vm. It's exclusive, I mean there there are ways to like divide up a gpu, uh, on the host and then give pieces to each vm not on scale, just like in general with kvm, but nothing, scale doesn't support that you know, we can kind of like combine to vfio devices so the host never has them.
Speaker 1:But I don't like doing I don't personally do that. The reason I don't do that is um is because some of my servers have only got one GPU and I want to use it with containers sometimes and VMs other, and also I find that if.
Speaker 1:I, um, if I bind it to VF, io, um, and it's not being used by the VM, it's got no power management. So the GPU, I've got a 3080. If I bind it to VFIO and it's not passed to a VM, I'm using about 80 watts idle, which is just too much for me.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, yeah, yeah, because, yeah, I see, because it's abstracting it from the host. So it's like, yeah, the host has no idea about power control anymore, so kind of that's.
Speaker 1:That's kind of one reason why. But we've had huge, huge, huge improvements in the vms. Um, I'm very obsessed with vms, it's kind of one of my favorite things in life.
Speaker 2:No no, a lot of people choose between VMs and containers.
Speaker 1:If I had to lose one and I was never allowed to use you know one or the other again, I'd say, okay, I'll never use Docker again or any containers. Just give me VMs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I get it. They're, they're super flexible. I totally get it.
Speaker 1:So you know here. You know this is like my kind of VM page. There's a few here, but if I was to add a new VM now, for instance, and let's say Windows 10, there's kind of a lot more here, you'll probably see, than there was kind of on your 6.10. So obviously we've got the same, adding all of the um, all of the cores, and I thought your comment about being able to just choose how many cores you want without pinning couldn't agree with you more.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, because like you don't always need to pin, it's great to be able to pin, yeah, yeah, like like it guarantees that core to that machine so you don't ever have to wait on CPU cycles. Like totally get the use case, especially like if you're going to, you know, pass through gaming or something, then you don't always need that kind of you don't need, you don't always have that situation.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you just want the Linux scheduler to deal with it, what cores to use it itself. You know if it's a different type of VM for sure. Also, we can turn off the migratable here, which gives it a little bit better performance what?
Speaker 2:yeah sorry, what does the migratable do? Is that uh?
Speaker 1:it turns off um the flag for the cpu to be migratable between one host and another, so it kind of stops it, always checking for that state, most people running on raid. Obviously they're not going to be like live migrating. So, um, people say it gives it better performance for the vm if you turn off. So that's just an option to actually turn that flag off and just sort of scroll down here.
Speaker 1:I won't bother kind of setting everything up, but with the graphics card here I can choose um. With the graphics card here I can choose um, choose the graphics cards in here. So you know, if I was to choose my 2080 ti here. Another thing you can do is you can actually in the gui you can set it to multi-function now, which you didn't used to be able to do and put the sound counterpart on. I'll probably put the wrong one on, but so so that'll just make it appear, as you know, like it's on the same bus, etc. But before you had to go in and edit the XML, which was a real pain because you would come out. You know, because what would happen in Unraid when you edited the XML is you would save it, but if you came and made another change here it would strip it out again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, because of the template. Yeah, yeah, out again. Yeah, yeah, because the template. Yeah, yeah, I could see how that could work.
Speaker 1:And, as before, you can add um a v bios um, which is essential. Obviously if it's your primary gpu you have to have the v bios um. As you know usb devices, you know there's two check boxes. If you kind of check both of them it will pass it through. If it's there if you don't call me in, you do one. Then if it isn't there, we'll kind of go, hey, I can't find that device and not start.
Speaker 1:Then here we've got some advanced tuning here. You can put in QMU command line arts there. So I use those personally for Mac VMs, windows 98, of all things. Because I passed through a c bios um, a c bios card, yeah, actually a um, a voodoo, voodoo 3 2000. I passed through with a pcie adapter and you get a black screen. Let's put some um bits and bobs in there. So that's nice that we can kind of put anything in there. And another thing we can do is evdev pass through um straight from the gui. So you can see here this here is actually my arcade controls um, that j, um jpack thingy. And evdev is like kind of actually faster than passing through a whole. It's very, very low latency. So, um, you can like pass through keyboards and mice that way with evdev um, which is really good as well for things that don't have usb support. For us is that don't have usb support, such as windows 95 and things like that you can still actually pass through keyboards and mice.
Speaker 1:So that's some of the kind of you know. I think personally that we've got some of the best and easiest kind of ways to set up VMs. You can literally kind of set it up very, very quickly and once you've got something set up, you can actually create your own template. So say you kind of think, yeah, I always use my 2080 TI, do this, that and the other, and you've got certain you know tweaks that you're doing. You know you can.
Speaker 1:You can change all the kind of like um clock off certain things here for different vms yeah you can actually make um, you can actually make your own template here, cool and then yeah, yeah, that's super helpful and, you know, save the template. So that's pretty cool, yeah, so kind of. My favorite section is VMs, for sure, and going back to kind of like Docker. I know one thing you mentioned is backing up app data. That is super, super important for sure. We do have a plugin called AppData Backup for people who are. I've got to go back to the VMs bit actually, just to show you something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to ask about snapshots and backups and restores.
Speaker 1:You can create snapshots, yeah. All right, nice but what you can do as well. What's really cool you can do a memory dump at the same time if you're backing up a running one. So that's, pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like, yeah, it'll snapshot it in memory. So, yeah, you probably use that from live migration too, I assume. But I mean similar type of deal, you know you can choose as well.
Speaker 1:Whether you use like a QMU snapshot or if you've kind of got ZFS as the underlying storage, it will use that to do that. So that's something I think you'll definitely appreciate in 7, tim that you can snapshot your. Vms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how do you restore that then? Out of curiosity, was there a restore?
Speaker 1:option. Obviously you have to take the snapshot first and then you can just restore to the snapshot. Cool, and you can kind of clone as well. But, you know as well for the Dockers, docker containers you can. You know what I personally do for snapshotting is I use just the FS snapshots Again, all of my containers are here.
Speaker 1:Where are they? So, yeah, I'll just take a snapshot of um, like a snapshot of the mb data there. Yeah, it's super fast too. Yeah, and like, obviously, because it's like zfs, you know you can, you can do it while it's running. Obviously, you shouldn't really do it as a database. I did make a script that automatically backs up all of the app data and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is super nice. Super nice to be able to do that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, so there's been a lot of improvement. We're hoping to really kind of build out the zfs implementation going forward, as I know kind of like you know, true, nas has a sort of best in class zfs implementation. You know you can do kind of like replication, snap snapshots very easily and um backup backing up very easily, so that that's something that will kind of be built out and kind of getting better and better as as time goes on. Basically so, um, yeah, I think I pretty think I've shown you kind of be built out and kind of getting better and better as as time goes on. Basically so, um, yeah, I think I pretty think I've shown you kind of everything um, yeah, I think yeah, so I awesome, so this is awesome, uh, and this is one of my favorite servers here tim n1 n100 like I know.
Speaker 1:I know you like your oh yeah, yeah. It's just incredible what it can actually do, oh yeah this, this here, yeah, um, you won't believe what it, what it's, what it's doing.
Speaker 2:It runs my home assistant and my pf sense all right yeah, wow, and it runs jellyfish.
Speaker 1:There's a kind of well mb runs on my kind of main server but this is always running jellyfin in case I shut the main server down so the family don't kind of have a riot on my kind of main server, but this is always running jellyfin in case I shut the main server down so the family don't kind of have a riot and start kind of going crazy. They can't watch it.
Speaker 2:I know what you mean. Is this a? Is this a b-link device? Is this a b-link or is this one of those?
Speaker 1:it's a little tiny one I got from aliexpress. That's got four 2.5 gig um things on the back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really awesome very. Yeah, it's really awesome Very tiny, yeah, pretty awesome, yeah, yeah, yeah. N100, I love it. I actually have an N200 back here too that I've been testing too. Oh wow, but N100, I love it, I just can't believe how efficient it is, like 10 to 20% it's using? Yeah, it's just sipping power too%. It's like using yeah, it's just sipping power too, like it's probably using like 15 Watts or something, 20 maybe.
Speaker 1:It's just crazy, isn't it? Like I almost kind of don't trust it, cause I think it can't be that good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you know this is. This is kind of Intel's answer to you know a lot of the ARM stuff, and I think it's only the beginning. Intel's trying to say, hey, we could do low power too, but at the same time you can still use x86. So I think we're going to see more and more of this. You ever tried.
Speaker 1:SATS TV oh.
Speaker 2:I haven't you must do.
Speaker 1:You got to Tim. It's super cool. What it is is. You can basically make your own kind of tv station, okay oh, I've heard of that. Maybe I heard about it on your channel but you know you may have heard it on um self-hosted podcast that's where I first heard about it.
Speaker 1:Um so yeah basically you kind of like can put your favorite kind of shows and stuff into it and it just ran, it will randomly play them, or or you can make like your own tv schedule and what people are doing is they're kind of downloading um from what's that place called um internet archive 1980s adverts, and so they put ad breaks in. They've got things like the 18th thing and they've got the 80s it's just something I've just literally started playing with.
Speaker 1:I haven't really kind of finished it yet, but it just seems really awesome, because sometimes you don't know what to watch, do you? And so if you're kind of working in your kind of home lab and you know and you want to watch something in the background. You don't have to choose, you know it can just be, playing random episodes of stargate or something, so I think that's pretty pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:I like it. Yeah, I like that idea because, like you know, like, like, sometimes you know, you have analysis, paralysis, like we have so many choices on what to watch that we just can't even choose. And now, now a lot of people want to go back to the old days where, like, no, you, you, you, you know, you, uh, you, you schedule something for me, I'll just watch it. You know, same with radio. Now too, I see a lot of people just like, yeah, just play something.
Speaker 1:You know I don't care. You know yeah, so yeah, um. Well, you know, that's the kind of end of um, of showing you kind of unraid on raid, I think. I think I pretty much um showing you everything really Um yeah, it looks, it looks.
Speaker 2:I think it looks awesome, like I'm I'm super excited for it. Like, when it gets released, I'm definitely going to install it on my USB drive, like I, I still have it.
Speaker 1:And also like for the record, like um, the beta is there.
Speaker 2:Can I upgrade the beta to the final then?
Speaker 1:just upgrade to the beta, give it a try and get used to it, and then, when the stable comes out, you just upgrade to the stable without any issue at all that is awesome.
Speaker 2:I'll have to check it out. I know, yeah, that is, that is awesome. Yeah, yeah, I'll have to check it out. And, uh, you know I, I, I know, uh, you know I after, so just uh, kind of clear the air. I'm I'm a huge fan of unraid. I have no, no hard feelings. I, I know that. Uh, you know I, I, I learned a lot about youtube 10 minutes, I think I learned more about youtube, uh and the the 10 minutes after I posted that video. Then I have like the last year and a half, and so you know, I don't.
Speaker 1:I don't think you said anything wrong in that video at all, tim um like it's your opinion, like you know, it's like I called someone, everyone's allowed to have their opinion. You know people shouldn't like it is it is, it is I guess it was.
Speaker 2:It was the first time, um, I feel like that I created something that, for me, uh, created some controversy and uh, I don't like to do that, like I'm not there to create drama.
Speaker 2:And uh, um, you know, and uh, in the future I know how to frame stuff up like that. Like 100% unraid has a hundred percent of a lot of great use cases and uh, uh, you know, I, I should have highlighted those more Um, and I and I totally get and some I didn't even know, like a lot of people were like, hey, what about this low power use case where, you know, I use my cash drives during the day but then, you know, it'll sink once a night? I was like, never thought about that, you know. And so, like there are so many use cases that that that you know. And so, like there are so many use cases that that that you don't know, that you don't think about unless you're part of the community. And, uh, you know, honestly, I haven't been running it for a long time and I haven't, you know, been perusing the forums for a long time you know, how could you have known?
Speaker 1:I mean, like some, there's lots of little nuances and, like I say, I think you know. I'm pretty sure you said in your video that you know people don't always know what plugins to install.
Speaker 2:So you know when you kind of install it a vanilla install.
Speaker 1:You know, you don't always know.
Speaker 2:You know what's out there, yeah yeah, and even all the tweaks it would. And I know like hey, like subscribe to Space Invader. 1. You're going to learn all the tweaks. You know You're going to learn all the tweaks. You know you're going to learn all the tweaks and all the things to do.
Speaker 1:Just I'm switching gears a bit. I just wondered like, um, if you've got any kind of like things you're running in your home lab that you find super useful, like what, what would be to all of the kind of self-hosting community? What would you say is some super cool things that you run, I some super cool things that you run. I know you run plex. Um, you run home assistant. Is there any kind of like maybe kind of lesser known self-hosted projects that you think are pretty cool?
Speaker 2:um, well, I mean, there's a couple like um, there's a couple like I. I mean this one is is only because it's fresh in mind, but like the olama uh, running olama with your own LLM and being able to run open web UI. So basically, giving you a self-hosted, private version of ChatGPT that you can run in your own home that is all local is pretty incredible. It's pretty awesome to play with and to tinker with. And you can get started with mostly modest hardware, like, if you just want to explore it, you can do it on your CPU. But if you have something like a 20 series RTX or a 30 series RTX basically anything with eight to 12 gigs of Ram a lot of people have it for gaming machines Uh, you could, you could use that to to play with some AI stuff and that and that's super fun, cause I, you could use that to play with some AI stuff, and that's super fun because you know there's a lot of people who want to know, like, what's the big deal with ChatGPT?
Speaker 2:But they don't want to use ChatGPT, and so I think this is a great way to say, hey, here's what LLMs are, here's how these type of chatbots can help, but you don't have to use one of the big companies.
Speaker 1:You can test it out as a developer. Tim, can any of these self-hosted AIs help you with coding at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's a good point. So, once you get so, alama is really the kind of the engine and thei and uh kind of loads and hosts your models. Once you get that into place, there are plugins then, um, not even plugins. Yeah, there are ways to hook into olama, into like vs code or whatever notepad editor you use, so you can get some some help while coding. And so, yeah, my last video I I talked through that and how I wired up vs code, uh, to my existing ulama instance and you basically get like a free co-pilot, like experience. So microsoft github has this co-pilot program that you pay for and it'll suggest code as you type or it will explain code or write tests for you or you name it. It can do it. And so you can do things like that too. And I've hooked it up and it's actually really cool.
Speaker 2:Like I, you know, I thought like, nah, I don't know, I don't know if this is going to work, and, sure enough, like it was able to analyze, like my YAML files. Like I thought, yeah, like code, I get it. Yeah, it's going to know how to write JavaScript. Sure, but then even in my YAML files, it was suggesting properties that I didn't define yet, with a suggested name, and I'm like, yeah, that's, that's exactly what I was going to type. So I just hit tab and so tab completion right there, is really cool, um, and you know, obviously can write programs for you.
Speaker 2:Uh, I don't use it in that way. I use it more for, like you know, tab completion and sometimes explaining code, like sometimes, you know, I write a lot of software. Um, the next developer who has to look at my software heaven forbid, they have to do that. Uh, they might not know what my intentions were or what I'm trying to do, and I'm pretty good at writing comments. Uh, but every now and then you might need some help saying, like, what is this code actually doing?
Speaker 2:And, and I think that's great, I think that's great to be able to have that kind of help, you know, in context, while you're working on things and and so, like, you can actually do that with your self hosted AI stack too, and so I've been playing through some of these things. You know, I even wired it into Home Assistant and got the voice chat assistant in Home Assistant. Now, that very simple, very simple to wire up, and you, now, it's like we don't have a device named home, you know, and so like, empowering and giving even your home assistant a little bit intelligence is really cool, because then it's, you know, however you want to say it, it's an LLM, it's natural language, it'll figure it out. You can say how many lights are on right now, you know. You don't have to worry about keywords or anything like that. It's smart enough to know that, uh, hey, it's, uh, it can figure out your intentions. So, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 2:And then another one it's, it's not known at all, it's, it's very small. Maybe you know it, but it's this thing called change detection, and so I think this is pretty cool.
Speaker 2:This, it's this container for websites I'm sorry yeah, yeah, I think I saw it on your?
Speaker 1:did? I see it on your channel, maybe, yeah yeah, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it's, it's a little lesser known, but I think it's fun because it's uh, you know, for me it was a way to monitor things online. Um, not so much for, like, monitoring a website itself whether it's up or down you use Uptime Kuma for that, or something else. This is more about checking websites for specific content. So think if, like, hey, you wanted to monitor the stock not stock prices, but the inventory of a certain product you know and it's out of stock and you want to know, hey, when's it back in stock? Like, this is a great little program for it. And then, once I released the video, I realized that people are doing this for all kinds of stuff. They're like scripting the automation of their login. You know. They're scripting the login to their financial site to see you know how much money they have. You know in that, whatever the site is, just to keep an eye on it, just in case something changes. So I'm like, wow, like people are using this for really, really awesome and obscure things.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting use case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is pretty, it's fun too. Yeah, I'm like man, I have ways to monitor that outside of logging in like that, but it's pretty cool. So just think of anything you want to do on the web like that, but it's it's pretty cool. So just think of anything you want to do on the web if you want to automate it and record those steps and then do that over and over and over to check something. Yeah, change detection is is pretty fun for that. So I don't know, that's what I've been having a lot of fun with. I mean that and ai stuff, but uh, that's one that's, I think, lesser known, that uh, it's fun to play.
Speaker 1:you could like put it on like a website if you're waiting for, kind of like, an update for some software. Yeah, exactly, pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Exactly that's what I use it for Firmware updates and software updates. And the cool thing is because, like, a lot of those web pages don't contain deep links, you know, to their software. You have to go here, click here, click on this version. You can script that then and and change detection. You can record all those steps and then you can monitor. You know the result and then you never have to do that again, like you don't have to. Like you know, pick this model, pick this version, pick this piece of hardware and click bios. Like change detection, you can automate that and it'll do it for you. So it's pretty cool, it's fun to play with. For sure, like, is it super critical? No, but it's nice to know when you know I have new firmware updates for something that you know I used to check on manually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fun. I think. I'll definitely be installing that one when we finish the podcast, I think. And also one that I really want to install um, I know you've done a video on it is um, it's not called netboot xyz something very similar to that, like the kind of pixie boots netboot xyz yeah you got it.
Speaker 2:Netboot xyz. Yeah, yeah, netboot. Yeah, yeah, that's super, yeah, it's uh, it is, it is, it's uh maybe we should explain to the audience what it is so yeah, yeah, sure so quick, so two minute rundown for everyone yeah, it's a.
Speaker 2:it's an open source project that allows you to um host like a pixie boot server, so a network boot server where you can boot your devices to the network and hook into that and then install your operating system from there. So if you think, hey, I have this this. This PC doesn't have an operating system on it. I don't want to get a CD, I don't want to get a USB and I want to choose an operating system later, you know you would boot up the machine, hit F12 or F7, whatever it is to boot to network. It would communicate with the net boot XYyz server and then you could pick your operating system, you could pick any version of linux you want, you could pick tools, and so having something like this on your network is super valuable, especially just for the tooling. Just for the tooling, you know, for having g party, you know, if you kind of buy, like, say, a broken computer off ebay or a laptop there's.
Speaker 1:You can just plug it in, boot it up and you know you don't have. You know, even if it doesn't have a hard drive in, it can't be.
Speaker 2:So it's super cool that's right, yeah, good point, good point. Or, or you could you know, host, uh, dban on it, dan's boot and nuke. So if you just want to, hey, I'm done with this machine. I want to wipe the drive. You just boot to network, select it and walk away. So nothing to install, nothing to do, and so this container helps you do that. And uh, you know, in my tech support days, like I thought I thought pixie boot was so much, I thought it was magic, I thought it was so great, and I always thought like to myself, like if I ever get pixie boot at home, that's how I know I made it. Well, I finally got pixie boot at home, haven't made it yet, but, uh, I got a pretty cool network boot system yeah, it's, it's really, really awesome.
Speaker 1:I just I'm not sure if it's possible. If you found out a way how to do it is um, um, because you've got, it downloads the um images, kind of like live from the, from the internet, and you can also host your own images, can't you? Can you do a hybrid of the two? So if you don't have your own, it then does it, or is it kind of either or?
Speaker 2:I think it's, um, I, so I think you can customize that menu all together. So I mean it, it's, it's. You know it's going to be pretty complicated, but I think you can customize that menu like you could say you know local ubuntu or web ubuntu and then you know, pick your where it's going to be pulling those sources from. So, yeah, that is one thing. It does pull them from from github. A lot of those images are hosted there, um, you know, and, and that's you know, a lot of people will balk at that because of security, and I totally agree. And so you have to make that choice. Do you want to pull these images down? They're hosted on GitHub and they're hosted on places where anyone can inspect the code and see what it's doing. It's all open source, but you're right, so you can host it internally too. I haven't done it, but I know you can customize that whole entire menu. I should probably do a follow-up to that, please do, on how to customize it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and anyone who wants to install it, watch Tim's video about how to do that. I think it's pretty cool, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you comment like, how do you use this locally, then you know I might, uh, I might, then uh decide to do that video on how to do it locally, but that that that video was, um, surprisingly popular. Surprisingly popular. I thought it was just like hey, here's me, you know, tinkering around again. I need a network boot for a couple of things. I'm so tired of booting from usb, like you know, and and don't get me wrong like, uh, what's it called? Uh, the, the boot drive vent, ventoy yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, ventoy. Like I was just using ventoy yesterday, like I totally get it, ventoy is there and that's a thing, but there are times when I just don't even want to. You know, plug a usb drive into a device.
Speaker 1:The amount of times I lose either a usb flash drive or the receiver for a keyboard. I tell you, I actually threw away a keyboard last week and then I found out the receiver was in the back of my mr fpga, when I really and I kept that microsoft keyboard for six months looking for that and I thought I'm just gonna throw it in the bin.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, fair enough, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:It's harder to lose your network connections, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, I agree and it's. Yeah, I think it's awesome, it's fun to play with. It was a surprise that it was that popular.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, with it was a surprise that it was that popular and so, yeah, I, maybe I should follow up on that. Hey, this is the part two. Here's I, yeah, I'm definitely going to be um, putting putting on together very soon yeah, it's super, super fun.
Speaker 2:It's super easy to go, it's super easy to get started too.
Speaker 1:It's uh, it's, it's literally a docker container that you just have to open a few ports and you're done um, I don't want to keep you sort of too long all of your day, but if I can just ask you a couple more questions if you've got time, just keep you a little bit longer. I just wondered, like you know for kind of new home lab enthusiasts, any common pitfalls or mistakes that they should avoid. Can you give them any advice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, I would say this one's tough because it kind of depends, and so here's how I think people approaching it should wrap their head around it Don't overbuy. I guess I should say don't overbuy. That's a common thing. Even I did when I first got into it. I'm like, yeah, I need enterprise grade. I'm buying an enterprise used enterprise server, I'm going to get a server rack and I'm going to build all this stuff and while I love doing that stuff and I am not against it Um, you could.
Speaker 2:You could dip your toes in the water with something like we were just talking about a little bit earlier and 100 and 200,. You could dip your toes in the water for $200, $300 for 10 watts of power. You could dip your toes in the water with a Raspberry Pi too. But if you're going to be spending that kind of money, you get way more out of an N100 than you do a Raspberry Pi. Not trying to start any drama, but you get a lot for your money nowadays with with like, like low power intel stuff, not to mention quick sync, all that stuff we were talking about earlier with you know, mb, uh, netflix sorry, plex, pretty much netflix yeah, like you know my n100, it will transcode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mb stuff, you know, it's just it's just yeah, it's just unreal yeah it really is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I, that's, that's. I think my one tip is, uh, one you know. You know, don't be intimidated. Like, don't be intimidated. Uh, ask lots of questions there.
Speaker 2:What I've realized in home lab community too people love to share, people love to give their opinion, people will love to help. So, if, if, if, if you, if you feel like, hey, I don't fully understand this or I don't know how to do this, there is always someone there that's willing to help, because they went through the same thing, and I think a lot of home labbers, like, want to share their experience or want to share what they figured out, and so that's an opportunity for them to share what they've learned. And then you know, for me it's don't overbuy. And maybe that's, maybe it could be, you know, framed up as start simple. You know, keep it simple, start simple, grow as you need to. You know, grow as you need to and you might find that you might get by with.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe it's an N100. Maybe it's not that, maybe it's, you know, still a mini PC, but it's an AMD Ryzen in there, or it's an Intel, you know i7, and that's enough. So you know, rather than go all out and then work your way back. You might be better off starting small and working your way up, because somewhere in there you're going to find what works for you, and then at the same time, if that N100 doesn't work for you, you could either sell that, pass it on or start to build your empire of home lab machines.
Speaker 1:I think that's excellent advice, tim. I couldn't agree more to be honest um any um upcoming projects or content you're working on that. You can kind of give us a little sneak idea that you might be doing yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So, uh, I, I have a uh, I don't want it to. Well, maybe I'll let it come out of focus. This is going to be out really soon, so you probably can't see that, but it's this mini rack, so something that I've kind of been playing with. Jeff Geerling did a video on a mini rack for pies and that company also sent one to me. Even though I said, hey, like you know, jeff Geerling did a great job, like you know, jeff Kearling did a great job Like, uh, you know I don't have much to add they said, hey, we're, we're, we're a community of, you know, we're a company of tinkerners.
Speaker 2:To, you know, take it. If you find a project that fits you know, great. If you don't, that's fine too, but we'd love your feedback. And so I'm building like almost a full data center in this tiny mini, you know, 10 inch rack, and it's actually been pretty fun. Uh, and on top of that, radow brett, uh, another home lab youtuber, he, uh, he, he just challenged me and so, he, he created this one that is like so over the top, like I don't know how I'm gonna beat it, and then on top of that, he kind of challenged me to beat it. So, uh, a little little friendly competition and at the same time, I I get to get to put my hands on some hardware.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, mini rack stuff. There's always going to be more Colo, like remote networking stuff. There's always going to be things in my home lab that need to be upgraded or fixed, and there's always going to be software that I'm using that I love to share with people. My channel is always a combination of hardware and software, and so I like to kind of keep those close together as possible. Sometimes I just do all the hardware, sometimes it's all software, but I like the combination of the two, because that's when people can say, oh, I, you know, I, I, I get it, that's how I can use it, and I want to do that too. So, yeah, but awesome, I don't know more. More stuff, it's, it's all in my head. I don't know More stuff, it's all in my head. I need to get it out and probably use more than Google Docs, as I figured out through this conversation.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to see the mini rack video. That's exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's going to be awesome. There's building a mini rack and then there's beating Ray Dal and I kind of want to be awesome. There's building a mini rack and then there's beating Ray Dal and I kind of want to do both.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck, I'm not that competitive. I want to see you beat him, man.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yeah, not that competitive, but when someone calls you out specifically, that's where you kind of I don't know. I feel like I've got to rise to the occasion.
Speaker 1:And if I can ask um for people watching um, where can they get hold of you? Um, obviously, youtube, um, all the links are going to be in the description, but you know where can they find your work tim yeah, so I I host uh most of my stuff on techno timlive.
Speaker 2:That's an easy way to to find everything uh you need to get to, so from documentation, to my videos, to my new shop, to uh, yeah, other social media, that's probably the best place to go. If you google techno tem now, now you will actually find me instead of a dj, so I I fixed the seo piece over the last couple years.
Speaker 1:So we're not gonna have like a video of you d djing on to technic um technics. What have 32 tens or whatever they're called?
Speaker 2:no, technically yeah yeah I wish I could, I wish, I could, I wish it were that cool um, well, it's been absolutely awesome speaking to you, tim.
Speaker 1:You know it's been so enjoyable. Um, I probably want to speak to you for another two or three hours if I had my way. So for any of you guys watching, please subscribe to Tim's YouTube channel and head over to his website. Again, thank you very, very much for your time, tim. Thank you for taking the time out to come and speak to us here. We've really enjoyed speaking to you and you sharing your expertise with us, and best of luck with the challenge against Radar and best of luck for your future YouTubing.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Yeah, honored to be here. I've watched a lot of your videos. It's nice to finally put a face with the name and a name with the channel. So, yeah, I could talk to you all day too. Like I said, it's rare for me to find someone to talk about this stuff, so I always look forward to it and I look forward to talking to you especially.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, Tim.
