The Uncast Show
Owning an Unraid server gives you the ultimate control over your data and reduces your dependence on The Cloud. Join us 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
Ed & Stefano Unleashed: A Year Of Unraid Upgrades, Open-Source Wins, Rising RAM Prices, And The Steam Machine Rumors
We kick off 2026 by revisiting the biggest Unraid 7 changes (native ZFS, optional Unraid array, UI refresh, built-in file manager, official API) and what actually matters in daily homelab use: foreign ZFS imports, VM snapshots, GPU acceleration, and where containers still win on efficiency as RAM prices climb.
We also cover:
- HDMI 2.1 on Linux (what’s blocking it) + why DisplayPort may be the practical choice
- RAM market chaos + counterfeit return headaches
- Plex transcoding comparison: P2000 vs iGPU vs Intel Arc + AV1 wins
- GitHub walking back a plan to charge for orchestrating self-hosted runners
- A GPL enforcement case (Vizio) and what it could mean for compliance expectations
- Privacy creep: ACR TVs, GPS-locked streaming, and “smart” appliances collecting too much
- Practical exits: self-hosting where it counts (Nextcloud, LibreOffice, etc.)
Other Ways to Connect with the Uncast Show
Welcome everyone to the first episode of 2026. A happy new year to all of our viewers and listeners and a happy new year to Stefano as well. Now I hope you've all had a good break. I hope you've eaten too much like I have and maybe done a bit of tinkering with your servers over the holidays. And actually, Stefano, this is a bit of a special one for us because do you know that the Ed and Stefano show is a year old now? One year. Yeah, we are we are one year old, so that's pretty awesome, I think.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, how was your Christmas and New Year? Did you manage to survive? Any server disasters? Any tech gifts or anything?
SPEAKER_03:Um report? Actually, not a whole lot. I uh went on vacation and I had everything turned off while I was gone. Um and uh yeah, there's I didn't I didn't get any tech or anything like that, just socks. Um air tech socks. Uh but uh yeah, that nothing really just really gave everything to my kid and um the other kids in the family and stuff like that. So pretty well. Ate a lot, a little too much.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What did you get me for our one year anniversary?
SPEAKER_00:Uh I I got you a I got you a love a lovely ring. Oh yeah?
SPEAKER_03:I can't wait till it arrives.
SPEAKER_00:Uh and and um a meal voucher. Nice.
SPEAKER_03:No free back rubs?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what did you what did you get me? I hope hopefully you got me a voucher for the new Steam Machine when it comes out. But we'll talk about that later, because I'm actually super excited about that. And um I'm almost as well, I think I'm probably more excited than I was about the Terminator game that I was rattling on about about six months ago, if anyone remembers me going on about that.
SPEAKER_03:I remember.
SPEAKER_00:But anyway, Stefano, like what's the date today? It's the 3rd of January. The on the 9th of January 2025, that's when Unraid 7 was actually first released. Literally, in a few days' time, Unraid 7 will be a year old. Uh seems like it's longer to me for some reason. Um but yeah, it's um only been a year. And I thought, you know, we'd go through all of the big stuff that's landed this year because to be honest, you know, quite a lot has changed in Unraid 7. Um, so the first thing really is the big one. Um let's start with ZFS. Um, this was a headline feature when 7 came out, and I know it's something that's been really everyone being excited about. And for anyone who isn't paying attention, it was a pretty big deal to have native ZFS support built right into Unraid. Another thing that came out with 7.0 was not having to have an Unraid array, as in the power to drive with multiple disks. So that's one of the features that sounds almost like what it defines Unraid to be. So that was actually made to be optional. But talking about ZFS, Stefano, um I've been trying to make you use ZFS what probably for a year now.
SPEAKER_03:I think since it was N beta, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Have I been successful as yet?
SPEAKER_03:No. Not at all. No. I I think I am using ZFS on a cache somewhere, but that's the only place.
SPEAKER_00:Ah, okay. Okay. Well, this year, 2026, is gonna be the year we're gonna get Stefano to New Year's or at least try out a small little Z pool and see if you like it. It's an awesome file system.
SPEAKER_03:So uh Link Plus or Link Station, whatever their brand is called, they're supposed to be sending me a NAS. Oh and if they do, that will be on all ZFS NAS. However, I learned that my emails to them go uh to spam. So I'm not sure if they actually receive my replies to them.
SPEAKER_00:So is that Linkstation going to be like all SSD NVMe, or is it Yeah, yeah. Oh, that that would be super nice.
SPEAKER_03:And I figured that'd be a good use case for ZFS.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, it'll certainly be pretty quick. And what what network speed does that NAS have?
SPEAKER_03:Uh this will be the N2, so it's supposedly capable of 10 gigabit.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, nice. But anyway, um as well, another big thing we had at the beginning of last year was the built-in unraid file manager. It always used to be a plug-in in Unraid 6, and we got it built into the OS. So that's something we've had over the over the last year.
SPEAKER_03:It's also something I don't think I've used yet.
SPEAKER_00:I use it pretty much every time I go on my server, to be honest. I really like it for editing files, like editing config files and things, just clicking on the file and being able to edit it in the GUI, saves having to kind of like you know, use nano in the terminal or use a share and try and open it with something on your on your PC.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I guess I'm just like so accustomed to either SSHing or opening the terminal that like for years now that I just I don't even bother with the file explorer stuff. I probably should try it out at least. But it's just like second nature, just like, oh, terminal, type in whatever I gotta do and close it, and then I'm done. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Another big thing I use it for is just for uploading a file into the app into a share. So say I've got like a config file or something like um, you know, and I want to just like get it in there, just click upload and put it in there.
SPEAKER_03:I think your Go config or something?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, just just anything you want to kind of put onto the you know, onto the server that's like a small file. I'd I just find that super useful. I don't really use it for copying things and moving things around, to be honest. I'll normally do that through CLI. I personally just prefer to use rsync through CLI for that myself, a bit like you, Stefano. But yeah. I still think it's an awesome addition to to Unraid. One th one thing I'd love to be able to see is actually to be able to extract zip files in the file manager. That's something I'd really like to see. But there is a really cool plugin that you can actually extract files with. I can't remember what it's called. Um I'll try and have a look on my server at the moment as I have it installed. I only found out this one the other day. Uh it's called Extractor, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, of course. Yeah, so I was kind of hoping you would say win win RAR for Unraid.
SPEAKER_00:Uh so it's extract. So you you can um zip things and you can unzip things. Um so it's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03:So yeah, it would be nice. Like Unraid's gonna be like a full-fledged operating system here soon. We're gonna have to have people that are like remove all the bloat. Remove unnecessary features.
SPEAKER_00:Jumping forward to the autumn now, um, when 7.2 came out, we had the new responsive UI. Um just wondered if have you ever tried to manage on raid from your phone at all, Stefano? Is that something you do?
SPEAKER_03:Um I have not tried to manage it from my phone, no. Uh well, I mean, technically, yes, a long, long time ago, but before the responsive stuff, I played around it with the responsive UI and I was like, oh, this is neat. And then I was like, I'll just stick to the using a PC.
SPEAKER_01:So there's no more kind of like squinting anymore.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And fat fingering the wrong container.
SPEAKER_03:It's so much better today than it used to be for sure.
SPEAKER_00:I find it quite good. Like if I'm kind of lying in bed and I've got En be on and I like EarthSatz TV. I've got my little Star Trek channel that I watch, and I think, oh, EarthSatz TV is not running. And so I can just get my phone out and make sure it's not that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I I actually did um uh having to use it with my iPad not too long ago because I I want to say we were um trying to maybe like watch something or like my Jellyfin, I couldn't access my Jellyfin server for some reason. And so um I, you know, had my iPad on me by chance. And I I did use it that one time now that I think about it. And it was much easier than it's ever been and and was able to just like restart Jellyfin and was off of the races.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and going forward, there's gonna be a lot of changes to the web UI as well. That's something to look forward to in 2026. Cool. Moving on as well in 7.2, we had the built-in API. This one got me genuinic excited for what's coming. For anyone who's tried to integrate Unraid with things like home assistant and other tools, it's always kind of been a bit hacky, but the API um fixes all of that and um is gonna open up a lot of doors going forward. And moving on as well, VM improvements. We've got a lot of love this year for VMs. Cloning and snapshots finally landed in Unraid 7.0. Um, you do you use VMs much on yours, Stefano? Or are you more of a Docker man?
SPEAKER_03:Um yeah, just use containers. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I I really love VMs, I've always liked them.
SPEAKER_03:You know, yeah, VMs uh have always been really great. Um, but I I've been trying really hard to learn, you know, containers and use containers as often as possible. And so for like the last four or five years, I just try to use containers whenever possible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I know not everyone uses VMs on Unraid, but you know, those unraid VM improvements was a long time coming. Really nice to have snapshots and there's plenty of other things that are being built into the dual screen features is nice, like being able to have dual monitors on your virtual machine.
SPEAKER_03:That seems really cool. Uh finally having uh graphics acceleration is really cool. So I think the VM, if I were to try and do it again, I could see myself using it now uh because it's improved so much more than it was you know five years ago. Uh so I could see myself getting back into it, but I'm so accustomed to containers, I'm not sure if I could ever go back to VMs, to be honest.
SPEAKER_00:The thing is as well with VMs now with with the memory price of what it is, VMs are not really as efficient as containers. Now, if you if you're running like a say a Windows VM or something, you're probably going to allocate 16 gigs of RAM to that. And if you can run a similar workload in containers, well it's gonna be a lot more efficient.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So to talk a little bit about that, um, so even at work, um, I noticed that uh a lot of uh developers, their default ask for VMs uh in terms of RAM allocation goes, is always about 32 gigs, pretty much no matter what um they're running. And you know, that's just seems in my mind, because I'm so old now, like that just seems like an absurd ask. Like I remember creating VMs where I was like, okay, six is the most I'm gonna give, and even that felt like too much. But yeah, you know, today I think the new minimum should be 16. However, you know, in the professional world, it seems like 32 gigs is the true minimum because of how bloated all the software has gotten. It's put so much stuff into memory. Um we have a question in chat from Devin Persana, I think is how you say that. Or DevA Persana. Uh he says, is it possible to buy Unraid from India?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is, yeah. Um I think you know, just go onto the Unraid website and click buy and you should be able to buy it from India, no problem.
SPEAKER_03:Uh yeah, you're right.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, if for any reason you can't just open a support ticket and someone will try and help you and make sure that you'll be able to do that.
SPEAKER_03:All right, sorry for that little tangent.
SPEAKER_00:No problem. Um, so yeah, so talking about VMs, my home assistant VM uses two gigs of RAM only. Um I do see some people running home assistant with kind of eight gigs, but a lot of kind of little VMs, you know, I I love home assistant in a VM as opposed to a container because it's just much easier to use. But I think a lot of people, you know, we've got so used to having cheap RAM over the last you know multiple years. Yeah. In a few of my servers, I've got 128 gigs of RAM and I don't use anything like that. I just bought it because I wanted to have the number saying 128 gigs. Yeah. Not because I not because I needed it. But I think a lot of people don't realize how little RAM you actually need. The Unraid install is what, 700 megs?
SPEAKER_03:It's it's so small, I've never even considered how big it is.
SPEAKER_00:So, you know, you can you can run things like Plex on like 8 gigs of RAM, Plex containers and various other kind of stacks that go along with Plex that we don't mention unless we're on the C.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I so like I've always tried in the past to like, oh, I have all these RAM slots, I'm gonna max it out. And that's like what Dev and uh Deva Persana says too. Like, that's how I always used to be for my servers, um, because RAM is so cheap. I actually didn't do that on my most recent uh Dell R7920 build, and I kinda wish I did, um, because it's like RAM is just skyrocketing even in the used market. So it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:What's RAM now? 32 gigs is about$350.
SPEAKER_03:I think it really depends on like you know, the speed. There's a lot of dependencies there, for sure. Like, you know, A dye versus B dye, uh, timings, like all that stuff has become very uh uh dependent.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, all of all of mine's DDR4. I think I've got one machine with DDR5 with just 32 gigs. A little um a little mini PC I've got. Nice. Yeah, no upgrades for me this year. I'll be staying with 13th gen Intel on my servers, unfortunately, because I'm not gonna pay that type of money for DDR5.
SPEAKER_03:I hope that your 13th gen CPUs never blow up. No, update those BIOSes.
SPEAKER_00:They've been really stable actually. Like, you know, you had 14th gen, didn't you, where you had all the problems.
SPEAKER_03:Sitting right there, yep. Still working on it.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, is that the one that was in your rack the other day when I came over to yours?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I recently pulled it out, and uh there was two microcode updates. I applied the latest microcode update, and it's finally stable. I can actually like game and do things with it. Oh wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's a good start to the new year. So it is.
SPEAKER_03:Unfortunately, I already have a game, I I bought a replacement gaming PC. Uh so now I'm not sure what to do with this gaming PC, and I don't need any more servers because there's a server right there that I also don't know what to do with.
SPEAKER_00:Well, better better too many gaming PCs than not enough, eh? That's what I say.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I don't know what to do with it though, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, um going back into kind of Unraid over the last year. We also got the foreign ZFS import. So for anyone who was thinking of migrating, 7.1 added the ability to import Z pools from other systems such as TrueNAS and other kind of Ubuntu systems. You could just plug in the drives, import them, no reformatting, no copying, everything else off first. That that was a really nice feature, I think. Being able to migrate easily is a really good thing when considering a new operating system. Oh, yeah, 100%. If you can migrate over from what you had before, otherwise it's a real stumbling box.
SPEAKER_03:That's like that's that's so cool that they they gave you that gave us that ability.
SPEAKER_00:And also we had the additional file systems that came in where we can add um ext4 drives, um, NTFS directly into the array. So you could just pop those in and you could have them all parity protected. So if you had a bunch of old drives on your shelf that may have had photos and things on you've had for years and years, you could just pop them into the Unraid array and add a parity drive and they would all be parity protected. And looking forward into 2026, I'm gonna just bring up and share my screen. Here is the newsletter, Unraid 2025 a year in review. I'll put the link in the show notes so you guys can kind of find this if um if you don't know where to look for it. But scrolling down here, we can have a look at looking ahead to 2026. So we've got some pretty cool things coming in 2026, but I was just looking here at multiple arrays, because I know a lot of people have been really excited about having multiple unraid arrays. So the unrayed array will just be treated as a different sort of pool, basically. So you can have like a CFS pool, you can have a ButterFS pool or an unraid array pool inverted commas. But I think when this happens, it's going to be really awesome because then when people do have like a bunch of old drivers on a shelf, they may already have an unraid server, but they don't want to put it into the main array. So they can just chuck all of their old photo drives and that kind of thing, add another drive in there, and then they can have a separate kind of like archive thing of their photographs that they've collected over years and years with a parity drive. So if one of them fails, they can just rebuild and without having to copy data anywhere, they can just use the drives they've got. That's something I'm really excited about, and I think that's when, in my opinion, the additional file systems will really shine is when we have multiple arrays.
SPEAKER_03:Um I I would uh personally probably use it to something like I'd have multiple or multiple arrays. One array would back up immediately to the other array, and then I'd still have my backup server. All right. So here so then that backup array would then back up later to my actual backup server. So that's like two redundant copies, all local. That'd be pretty nice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, definitely. I I'd I do a similar thing with some of my ZFS pools. I have one ZFS pool back up to another in the Unraid server, and I have it back up off-site as well.
SPEAKER_03:So I know that um I know that a lot of people are gonna be more probably more excited for internal boot because just like perusing the forums and on Reddit and places like that. I feel like internal boot along with ZF. I think in internal boot may have been the most requested feature I think I've ever seen. With ZFS being the second most requested feature ever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um I have been lucky enough to actually have a little demo of the internal boot and I have seen it work, and it's very, very it's very cool. And there's something that I think is is very clever about it. I'm not gonna say what it is because I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say, but um it it's pretty cool and um something I wasn't expecting to be a thing.
SPEAKER_03:I'm I'm really surprised so many people are having issues with USB drives. Now I know that like there's been a lot of um fake USB drives. That's not the right well, that's the right words, but not really one I wanna counterfeit. Yeah, counterfeit USB drives, and then maybe production quality has gone down somehow, even with modern, you know, robotics and stuff. You know, like my USB thumb drive is like 10, 15 years old at this point, almost old enough to drink alcohol in your country. And um, you know, it's been fine. All the other more modern USB drives I've bought have been fine. Like I don't know if I'm extremely lucky, or maybe if you know there's other like uh environmental uh issues at other people's houses or home, home labs, whichever case, uh that are causing these U USB drives to really terminate. I've never in my entire life had a USB drive die. That one.
SPEAKER_00:I think I I think I've had one die to be honest. Uh you know, so as well, I've been quite lucky. But the the other day I was um developing a plugin and keeping on installing it again and again while testing. And it seemed like the flash drive actually died. Uh-huh. And it it didn't actually. I thought it had. Probably just lock or something. I d I just reformatted it and put everything back on and you know, from a backup and it was fine. So I don't know. It's it's FAT32, so it's not the most robust file system, FAT32.
SPEAKER_03:So when this feature rolls out, are you gonna continue to USB boot or are you gonna have an internal boot drive?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's a really good question. Um I like both. I l I really like the idea of internal boots because I can then have like mirrored boot drives. And um obviously that's gonna be pretty cool. But I also do like booting from a flash drive because I like sometimes being able to just pull my flash drive out and put it in another server, yeah. Another bunch of hardware. Um that would be more difficult to do, obviously, because I'd have to remove the boot drive to better kind of boot that way. You know, I'm lucky enough that I've got more than one server. Um I will certainly be switching my main server to internal boot, most definitely.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think I'll probably continue to running uh USB boot. Um just because most of my servers have a USB thumb drive or a USB port, sorry, internal or on the motherboard. Um so for me there's basically no reason to to change. Uh I'm obviously I'll I'll try it out just for funsies, but I I can't see myself doing it in the long run because um I I don't know. I just don't see any uh real reason to change at this point anyway.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, what one thing I think would be nice is when you're actually installing the OS remotely somewhere else. Um kind of like in in a data center or something.
SPEAKER_03:And you know, that's actually a good point. I didn't even think about installing an operating system now because like how do you install Unraid on an internal boot drive. Like if it's an NVMe, I mean I guess you could plug it in via USB C or something, but it seems like a lot of extra work.
SPEAKER_00:How do you mean? Sorry, so it's so you're losing me a bit there.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. So let's say you want to install Unraid on an NVMe drive. All right. So how do you install Unraid on an NVMe drive? Do you have to get an NVMe drive enclosure and then plug it into your PC to install?
SPEAKER_00:Um the answer is no, you don't. Um and the other answer is is I don't think I can really go into this too much.
SPEAKER_03:Come on, Ed. Just give us like a little nugget, man. It's not like they're not watching anyway.
SPEAKER_00:No, you won't have to remove your NVMe's or whatever boot drive from your Unraid server. You'll be able to use the internal ones there, and you won't have to kind of do anything fancy to do it. It's it's a very easy process to switch.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, so what about a what about a brand new install?
SPEAKER_00:I'm not gonna say anything else, Stephanie.
SPEAKER_01:Can we buy okay we're moving on?
SPEAKER_03:If Unraid, hold on, hold on, hold on. If Unraid doesn't do this, I might be a little a little cross, all right? Unraid should sell Unraid branded USB installers so we can install Unraid on our NVMe drives. Is that the future? Blink twice if yes, blink once if no.
SPEAKER_00:Double yes. Anyway, moving on. So we were meant to be talking about last year, not this year really. I kind of only went onto this year, just onto this year because of multiple arrays. Yep, so we had the importing um foreign CFS pools and um other file systems, but also we got wireless networking. It's a bit of a niche, it's a bit of a niche one. Um, but 7.1 did add Wi-Fi support. And you know, I'd love to know anyone in chat, are you running a server on Wi-Fi?
SPEAKER_03:So I I actually do know of a use case where this might be more useful than I uh previously thought of. So people in camper vans bring around like mini servers so they can watch their media like when they're on camping point.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And they and with travel routers being like all the rage right now, um you know, they don't have to they don't have to wire everything up anymore. They can everything can just be wireless.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a really good point. And also, I guess if you want to bring your server to family over Christmas, yeah, you can do you can just bring it with you and and connect it to their Wi-Fi. I actually use it, I've got a couple of servers, and I use it in conjunction with um a flash drive from other servers. I plug the USB flash drive in from one of my servers and then plug in a USB Wi-Fi, and I can use some of these little mini PCs and run Unraid on them when kind of doing testing and that kind of thing. And then use it for like a test server. But it's always we're having to, you know, if I got it on my desk kind of over on the left here, there's it's way away from my switch, and to get a network cable there would be just really a hassle. So that that's what I use it for when testing things out. Um I find that really useful.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I could I could totally see situations where it's you know it's definitely good that they added it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's really yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's definitely definitely useful.
SPEAKER_03:I was honestly surprised like when I first heard that it didn't support wireless networking, because I was like, I had never even considered using a server with wireless networking. You know, that's not just something that comes across my mind. So when they were like, oh, we're adding wireless networking support, it's like, wait a minute, you couldn't wirelessly network before. It just seems so uh I guess like wireless networking is so common these days, you would just assume that that's like one of the default features.
SPEAKER_00:I think what a lot of people used to do before is um have you seen those little kind of um you like plug it into the mains and it connects to the Wi-Fi, and then you have a LAN cable that comes out of the plug.
SPEAKER_03:Oh yeah, it's kind of like those old USB adapters.
SPEAKER_00:So it's kind of um Wi-Fi to Ethernet and it just draws its power from the main socket, so you kind of can plug it in anywhere, then you can yeah, people would do it back in the day with games consoles and things.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um but yeah, a lot of people.
SPEAKER_03:I think I actually had one for my uh Xbox. Yeah. It might have been USB though. I don't I can't really remember.
SPEAKER_00:So around the same time as Wi-Fi networking, we had the Unraid 20th anniversary. So that was pretty cool. The Unraid turned 20 this year. It's pretty impressive. Um, it's been going since 2005. And so this year it's gonna be 21, so it will be old enough to drink in your country this year, Stephanie. Yeah. And um that we did a whole day, 20 days of Unraid back in August with various discounts and competitions. Um what else have we had this year? We've had uh new docs, a new dock site that was all um rewritten this year. Um so it's much easier to find things now. And also the team's grown quite a bit. Um I think we're up to 16 staff now across seven countries. So that's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_03:That's a lot of people. A lot of people. Unrayed's been growing so much.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, you can like I say, you can read all about everything here. So that's been Unray's year um from the big ZFS launch in January through to the new UI and API at the end of the year.
SPEAKER_03:Dual CPU fetish says a server friend list would be great, integrated with Tail Scale, and you could share your network shares to other servers in your friends list, similar to how you set up Tail Vault, but just out of the box instead.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that'd be that'd be super cool. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I added out the instead part.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that's a really good idea.
SPEAKER_03:And um That is a good idea.
SPEAKER_00:I I will mention it to the team and see, you know, what's what's said about that, but also you know, put that in in the feature request on the Unraid forums. I think that's a great idea. You know, post it there if it isn't already there.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Oh how does so I know uh we have like a an API bounty program, right? So how does that work? So like let's say dual CPU fetish is like, you know what, uh, I have a new fetish of sharing my folders and I also want to learn how to program. So if he like if there's an API feature put out and he does this, he can get paid for that, right? How does that work?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so the feature has to be open. You just go onto the feature web page where you can see various things that are open, and you can click that you want to do that, and if you manage to complete it, and it works basically. You can claim the bounty and get paid. Nice. But you can't make up your own kind of like features. Feature, yeah. It has to be ones that are requested.
SPEAKER_03:So what you're saying is is I put their feature request, you accomplish it, and you get paid.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So anyway, moving on in our list. So let's move on from Unraid and talk about some of the other stories from the tech world. This next bunch is all about open source and software freedom. It's been some wins, some frustrations, and some questionable decisions this month. So the first thing is is HDMI 2.1 is still being blocked on Linux machines. So this one's been rumbling on for a while, but I think it's worth talking about. The HDMI forum is still blocking 2.1 support for Linux, and this affects Valve's new Steam machine. So its hardware obviously fully supports HDMI 2.1. They've kind of tested it on Windows and it works fine, etc. But it can't be enabled on Steam OS because the HDMI forum won't let open source drivers use it. And apparently it all comes down to what's it called? Um HDCP, I think it's some copy protection stuff. Uh because they're worried that open source means people can bypass it. So us Linux users are stuck with HDMI 2.0 limitations, which means 4k at um I think 2.0 is 60 frames per second max, isn't it, Stefano, for 2.0?
SPEAKER_03:Something like that. That sounds all right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So how do so it but Linux display port works fine, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, display port.
SPEAKER_03:So there's ways to bypass HTCP with DisplayPort. So why I don't understand why the HDMI forum would be so hesitant.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. I don't know. I guess because it's just copyrighted, isn't it, HDMI and um and display ports open source.
SPEAKER_03:So that makes some more sense now that you uh I didn't even think about that. Yeah. In fact, so this is okay. So this is why so there's like there are a lot late I've been talking to a lot of like Gen Z kids uh a lot lately. And a lot a lot of them are very pro uh DisplayPort.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, really?
SPEAKER_03:That's yeah. And I'm very I wouldn't say anti-DisplayPort. I prefer HCMI, but maybe because I had a lot of problems with DisplayPort in the past, and so that's led me to continue using HCMI. So maybe, maybe now's the time for me to start actually like enjoying or learning more about DisplayPort and and like actually using it.
SPEAKER_00:I I really like DisplayPort. Um Yeah, I know that you I get higher I get higher frame rates on DisplayPort to my monitor than than I do and the full resolution of I've got a big ultra-ride monitor in front of me, and I've got you can't see it, it's off camera. I've got um a Thunderbolt hub there. If I connect it by HDMI, I don't get the full resolution of the monitor. I have to use it. That's weird. I have to use Thunderbolt, and that's from that's from a Mac thing, so you know, yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so um, you know, I think this will push people, more and more people to DisplayPort, hopefully. I think I think a lot of reasons display port isn't so common is because you don't find it on things like TVs. Yeah. So the average person on the street, they'll think, oh, I'm gonna, you know, I've got a PS5, you just plug that into HDMI. And if TV started having display port, I think HDMI would probably kind of fall by the wayside, in my opinion. I don't know what you guys in chat think about that, but yeah. I don't also uh anyone in chat, you know, do you prefer HDMI or display port? And what do you use?
SPEAKER_03:Hear me out. USB cables for everything, no more HDMI, no more display port.
SPEAKER_00:Because USB will carry video.
SPEAKER_03:It well, thun Thunderbolt will, but I don't know if USB Does USB C 3.1, whatever, Gin, whatever run now not carry video, really? Alright, hear me out.
SPEAKER_00:We it it does carry video, but I don't know if it has the bandwidth to carry like really high. You know, Thunderbolt does, like Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 5 definitely would.
SPEAKER_03:Even better. We just switched to Thunderbolt, the spirit of technology. Yeah. That will die on its hill.
SPEAKER_00:I really want to move on to my favorite kind of thing this this month.
SPEAKER_03:I'm trying to delay you as much as possible, Ed. I can hear the frustration in your voice as I continue to delay.
SPEAKER_01:Let me watch this because like there's gonna be other people who like this too.
SPEAKER_00:So, talking about Steam.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Um, it's a good segue into the fact. And let me bring it up on my screen here. So, speaking of Valve and the Steam machine, Stefano, you know, and everyone who kind of watches this probably knows I'm a huge Half-Life fan. And there are now credible rumors that Half-Life 3 might actually be announced as a launch title for the Steam machine.
SPEAKER_03:I saw Half-Life 3 in the reposit the game repositories about a decade ago. What? So you know how like the Steam you can browse. Well, not maybe not you and I, but there's ways to browse the Steam repository to see what games they have in their repo. Like when they first launched Steam OS, you could see all games in the repo, and there was HL3, and so that's when they everyone thought Half-Life 3 was going to be released.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, right. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry, sorry. Hopefully it's actually um credible rumors this time.
SPEAKER_03:Real this time.
SPEAKER_00:But I'll be honest, if it's true, I'm just buying a Steam machine on day one. I don't care how much RAM is, I will I will I will sell a kidney to get that. Um one of my favorite all-time games, Half-Life. Are you a Half-Life fan? You I I bought you Black Mesa, didn't I? Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_03:You did, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I played it and then got stuck in that one part and I never touched it again. But it was fun while I played it. Uh and yeah, I I've uh had Half-Life 2. I played it, loved it, it was great. Uh I've actually played every Half-Life game now. Uh I played a little bit of Alex, but uh that was on borrowing a friend's um VR headset, which I can't remember it was. Uh and that was that was pretty cool and and enjoyable, but also just I put it down and I just never picked it back up for some reason.
SPEAKER_00:So same. That's probably one of the Half-Life games I didn't play all the way through. It was just too uh the room I'm in here is not particularly big. Okay. So if I wanted to play it, I had to kind of clear my chair out of the way.
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um kind of move a few things out of the way, and it was just such a lot of setup, and then having a wire going to the um to the headset and things like that, it was just a big lot of hassles.
SPEAKER_03:All right, Sim in chat says that he will take a holiday for Half-Life 3. I assume that you, Ed, will also take a holiday from all videos. How long of a holiday will you take if if it actually releases, Half-Life 3 releases?
SPEAKER_00:Um it would have to be it will have it'll have to be, I will I will take a week's holiday to spend a week to complete it.
SPEAKER_03:All right, let's pretend for a moment. Uh they release the Steam Machine on a on the on the Saturday we're supposed to stream. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let's say that it gets delivered to your house and Half-Life 3 is actually released on the Saturday we're supposed to stream. Will you be there for the stream or will you be paying Half-Life?
SPEAKER_00:I will be there for the stream playing Half-Life on the stream.
SPEAKER_01:We'll be playing together.
SPEAKER_00:Live reaction.
SPEAKER_01:Everyone's gonna want to see that, aren't they?
SPEAKER_00:But I'll just be a bit embarrassed about how bad I'll be at playing it, but you know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Uh we we we can't change that.
SPEAKER_03:So do we do we have any idea like about if the pricing model changes with uh with the way that the RAM market is right now? Because I know that Mac or I'm sorry, Apple hasn't changed their prices of their machines yet with the way RAM has gone.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's an interesting angle because apparently Valve's actually been holding off on announcing pricing because of how volatile the RAM market is.
SPEAKER_03:Dude, good move. They played that that played out so well for them. Imagine they made the announcement and then like two weeks later RAM prices go up.
SPEAKER_00:And they're like, oh yeah, we have to change prices too. Yeah, and and talking about RAM prices, apparently what's been happening, um, and we uh we actually were talking about this a little bit yesterday, I think, Stefano, when we were chatting, and you were talking about when you bought a hard drive off Amazon, an eight terabyte drive, and it came and it was a totally different brand to what you had ordered. Yeah. But people have been ordering RAM off um Amazon. They've been sent some RAM that's like maybe DDR4 with a DDR5 heat spreader on it. Yeah. Because obviously someone sent it back to kind of get some you know cheap, cheap RAM. I've actually had that happen before. I've bought a long time ago, I bought some DDR4 RAM and it was DDR2 when it arrived. Um Wow. Because I often look for the Amazon warehouse deals to try and save, you know, a few dollars.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And um That's sensible. Um but sometimes people just send things back and it isn't it they don't really check very well. And apparently that, you know, that's happened quite a lot and it's happening more and more now because of the RAM prices. So then the person will complain about it to Amazon, and Amazon don't give them another lot of RAM. They say send it back and they'll give them a refund. And just over the week or two, the prices have gone up like kind of 10%, 20%. So they buy it at the price thinking they're getting it, but something comes and it's fake, and then they have to rebuy it at a higher price.
SPEAKER_03:So well, it's probably I know that situation sucks for sure, but it's probably a better situation than if you had bought RAM from Corsair on January 1st, only to have your order canceled by Corsair, and then the I don't know, the next few hours or the next day later that uh they raised the prices of their RAM, and then you could buy it again after they canceled your order.
SPEAKER_00:Are you serious?
SPEAKER_03:100% 100% serious.
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, that that should be against the law. That's really bad.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, well, allegedly the reason why this happened, according to Corsair, is because uh they there was a system error where that RAM was actually out of stock uh and they were they meant to make it available for pre-order or some shenanigans like that. And uh so because of that system error, that's why they canceled everyone's orders and then immediately raised the price afterwards, which honestly doesn't make sense because it's like if you listed the price by mistake and it is a system error by mistake, why would the price change? You know?
SPEAKER_00:Stefano, that's just a coincidence. That's a coincidence.
SPEAKER_03:The the system error was the price, right? The price, the price was the wrong, what's the wrong price. And then sorry, sorry. I don't know if you heard about this also, but there have been some claims that Walmart uh has been doing the same thing. Uh for anyone that isn't familiar with the United States, Walmart is a giant box store in the United States. They sell basically everything. Uh anyway, so people have been buying RAM online from them, and then their their orders have been getting cancelled, and then the products are relisted at a higher price as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So um, you know, I wonder how much RAM pricing is affecting hardware launches right now, other things as well. You know, what worries me is I think these high RAM prices is going to really kind of hurt the gaming, PC gaming industry a lot.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, at this point, like graphics cards are more expensive than ever, motherboards are more expensive than ever, RAM is at an all-time high. Pretty soon SSDs and or any flash stories is also gonna see a skyrocket. I mean, this PC gaming could quite literally be dead. Um, or at least like maybe not dead necessarily, but you know, trying to find those like super budget builds. I mean, is that gonna even be a thing anymore?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but a a lot of YouTubers apparently are doing videos like gaming videos about doing gaming on older hardware and you know seeing how viable it is on older systems like with DDR4, DDR3. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's only gonna work for really well optimized games, but if you play like a game like Escape from Tarkov, you have to have basically a latest and greatest CPU or you're gonna have a bad time.
SPEAKER_00:You've got to at least have a 4090, haven't you, Stefano, like you.
SPEAKER_03:Uh I think that is the minimum spec, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:32 gigs of VRAM.
SPEAKER_00:What would what would you do with that Escape from Tarkov?
SPEAKER_03:I don't know. I was thinking about that the other day. Like, what games would I play? And uh I don't know. That's a good question, Ed.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know what I would do. But over the last year, I've actually managed to pronounce the game correctly. I'm not calling it Turok anymore, am I?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Escape from Turok.
SPEAKER_00:That's actually that's that's only taken me like a year.
SPEAKER_03:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:But no, I think I think things like RAM pricing is going to accept um it's gonna affect CPU sales as well, because people are not gonna be buying new CPUs because they're gonna think, well, I can't afford the RAM to go with it because CPU prices have stayed about the same. They haven't really been affected. Maybe it will even push the price of CPUs down because the sales won't be there for it, and they're not gonna be able to push the price of them up at all because they're not wanted by anyone else.
SPEAKER_03:So perfect Natch pretty much has has said in chat what pretty much everyone's been saying online for a while now. You will own nothing and be happy. Cloud gaming will be the average consumer where you are paying for the privilege of using NVIDIA or Microsoft's high-end hardware.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's not true.
SPEAKER_03:True words haven't been spoken. And what's funny is NVIDIA can't even keep up with demand for their cloud gaming, and they keep trying to increase the price of their tiers to reduce the number of users that want to pay for it, and they're like, okay, well, we keep increasing the price and people keep paying for it. So now let's reduce the amount of hours they're allowed to pay or play.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, I heard that um Talking of GPUs, that Microsoft have bought a whole bunch of GPUs and they don't have enough power to actually like electricity to be able to use them in the data centers, and they're just kind of hoarding them. And um people are saying that they'll probably go out of date by the time they do have enough electricity to use them in the data centers, and then they'll need kind of new ones, and so that's kind of causing problems as well. So, anyway, switching gears a little bit, we had some GitHub news. Um Basically, owned by Microsoft. Yep, owned by Microsoft. So a bit of context for anyone who isn't a developer. GitHub is basically where a lot of software projects live. It's like a big collaboration platform for code. And one thing it offers is something called GitHub Actions, which lets you automate tasks, things like testing your code automatically whenever you make a change or building your application ready for release. Now, normally GitHub runs these tasks on their server and they charge you for that. But a lot of people, um, especially kind of companies and self-hosters, run these tasks on their own servers instead. So you're using your own electricity, your own hardware, your own internet, and GitHub basically just coordinates it. So what GitHub proposed, and I should probably bring up the page here. I'm not doing a very good job here. So what GitHub GitHub proposed was actually charging people for that coordination, even though the actual computing was happening on your own machine. So you'd be basically paying them for the privilege of your server talking to GitHub. So everyone kicked off about that, and luckily they've backed down. So basically the short version is GitHub tried to charge everyone for running things on their own hardware.
SPEAKER_03:Well, bandwidth is expensive, Ed. They gotta pay for that bandwidth.
SPEAKER_00:But yeah, you know, it raises the question about where GitHub's heading under Microsoft's stewardship, isn't it? Really, I think.
SPEAKER_03:There's no question in my mind that it would uh inch it a five, so not surprised.
SPEAKER_00:You know, hopefully, you know, it's not a sign of how things are gonna go forward with GitHub. But makes sense.
SPEAKER_03:Uh before we move on too far, Ed, so uh Woolley asked in chat, or really stated it, I guess. Either way, uh he's thinking of retiring his NVIDIA P2000 and either replacing it with an Intel Arc A380 or an Intel Arc B580 for Plex transcoding. Do you think he should keep or replace his P2000?
SPEAKER_00:P2000, I really like it. It's good, but it doesn't do um certain codecs. Um the the ARC will be much more efficient and um more future proof.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, like so my my I initially started typing this in a chat. My initial response is like if it's working, it has all the features you want, keep it. If it's if there's something new that you want to use or uh have access to, then maybe upgrade.
SPEAKER_00:Like it does, it does AV1, doesn't it? Um is it an A V1?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, A V1.
SPEAKER_00:And there's certain things like um the P2000 doesn't support B frames in H265, the ARC does. But you know, really how much you know can you do you want those extra features?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, just it really just depends on what you expect out of your Plex stream, I guess.
SPEAKER_00:So I I used to have a P2000, I don't have it anymore. Um I ended up giving it to a friend. When I got my um my 13th gen Intel, I just using the IGPU in it, and that transcoding works really, really well, and it's more energy efficient than having to run the um additional graphics card on its own.
SPEAKER_03:That's funny, the uh server behind me, I don't know if you could see that. I'll only try it to there we go. That has a P4000 in it, and it's uh been in there for quite some time. I'll probably continue to use that for I don't know, ever.
SPEAKER_00:What year did what year did that GPU come out?
SPEAKER_03:The P4000? I have no idea. I'll Google it real quick. Um I know uh February 6th of 2017.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, 2017. Anyway, moving on. This one's a bit of a legal story, and I think it's kind of a bit of a win for us in a way. And it's quite interesting for open source. So there's a TV make, and to be honest, I've never heard of it before. I don't know if you ever had Stefano called Visio. Have you heard of Visio TVs?
SPEAKER_03:Super popular in the United States because they have some of the cheapest TVs on the market.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so I haven't heard I haven't seen them over in the U in the UK before, but you know, maybe they are here, I'm not sure, but then I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:That's because they don't allow electronics in the UK.
SPEAKER_00:But so anyway, the TV manufacturer, they use open source things in their TVs under the GPL license. And so for those of you who don't know what a GPL license is, the GPL license basically says if you use this code, you have to share your changes. So, you know, you're using the open source code, and if you make changes to it, you have to share it with everyone else, and that's the that's the terms of the license. And Vizio refused to do that. And the interesting thing is, is the judge has now hinted that it's not just developers who can demand that source code, but the actual TV buyers might have a legal standing too. So this could be a big deal for how companies approach open source compliance going forward.
SPEAKER_03:So is this a United States thing or a EU thing?
SPEAKER_00:It's a United States thing.
SPEAKER_03:No way. The United States?
SPEAKER_00:I think so. A judge actually did something Yeah, in a Californian court here.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, okay, California. That makes more sense.
SPEAKER_00:So I think that's a really cool win. Yeah, you know, if they're using like, you know, GPL licensed software, they should stick with it. You know, you can't you can't do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. A good win for open source there. I was pretty happy when I read that. So anyway, all right, Stefano. This next one is for you. And finally, and I'm sorry in advance, but Mozilla has announced that Firefox is going to evolve into an AI browser.
SPEAKER_03:The day they announced this, I switched the Brave browser. I switched to Brave. And Brave has been awesome. Well, I don't I don't know why I didn't switch sooner.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, this is all all of these tabs are on Brave, and you notice there's no ads on anything I've brought up.
SPEAKER_03:So Brave has been awesome. I I am completely I've seen the light.
SPEAKER_00:Well, they have they have got a stupid AI thing in it called Leo that I just turn off.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I don't know. I so far it's been pretty non-invasive, so I I haven't even noticed that there's no changes I've made to Brave Brave browser. I've just been using it.
SPEAKER_00:So it's pretty good. It runs on um on Chromium under the hood, doesn't it? Let's say yeah. It it's very nice. Anyone not using Brave, yeah, give it an install, give it a try and see if you like it.
SPEAKER_03:You know, I think you probably few people in chat are using Brave, it seems like. Yeah. Yeah. I uh so Firefox, right? Oh, they were like, okay, we're going to they made the announcement, and I've never had a Mozilla account. I created an account and said, please do not implement this change. But of course, um, like almost every CEO, uh green line must go up. So if they're not doing some AI initiative, uh, they're afraid to not get investor funding. So of course Mozilla has to do something AI related, um, and they're forcing it upon us. However, uh, you can uh opt out. I don't I think it is enabled by default, but you have to opt out.
SPEAKER_00:But I'm pretty glad because I've been trying to get you on Brave for I don't know how long now, but Mozilla's done my job for me. Yes, they have done to it. So thank thank you very much, Mozilla.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and they're like definitely on to Brave. I can't believe how out of touch Mozilla is. Like I couldn't imagine being a developer. You're sitting there and you're like, I know our users don't want this. They've obviously worked very closely with users over the years. Nobody's asking for this, nobody wants it. And of course, some CEO is like, we're gonna do it anyway. And literally everyone's like, no, no, no. And it it's coming anyway, no matter what. So great. Can't wait. Actually, I don't, it doesn't matter for me because I I I literally uninstalled it from my the computer I'm on right now and haven't been using it. I've been on Brave.
SPEAKER_00:So So I'm gonna I'm gonna totally kind of segue off onto something different.
SPEAKER_03:Um before you go too far, there's some questions about Brave in chat.
SPEAKER_00:Oh sure, go go for it.
SPEAKER_03:Uh so one of them is um does Brave or Dant asks, sorry, does Brave work with web flashers like S foam uh flasher or whatever? I don't know what it's actually called. He said that, and I quote, end quote. I also don't know what that's called.
SPEAKER_00:To be honest, um that's a question I can't answer. I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_03:What is Web Flasher? Is that like Flash from 2008?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. I would have to have a look I would have to look that up, to be honest.
SPEAKER_03:Alright, I'm gonna look that up while you talk about what you want to talk about.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's probably what I'm gonna talk about is gonna make you a bit angry. Um Me? Angry? No. But I was um listening to someone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation giving a like a talk about various things. Okay. And he was saying about Google search, and I found this hugely interesting. So I think that Google got, I'm not sure when it was, they went to went to court about being a monopoly, and I think they ended up winning the case that they weren't. But there are various emails that came out, and in those emails there were discussions about Google search, and the the gist of it was was they were saying there's so many people use Google search that we can't really get more users because it's just so saturated, we've got you know billions of users using it. So, how can we improve our revenue if we can't get new users and we get our revenue from people seeing ads? So it was decided, and apparently the original people who worked on Google search were really, really kind of upset about this, but it was decided that they would make Google search worse. So for every search that someone would normally do, it would take them two searches to find the same information, so then double the amount of ads go in front of people's eyeballs because they couldn't expand the user base. So instead of expanding the user base, they made it um. They made the product worse. Yeah, they made the product worse. So people have to do two searches to find what they want. And that kind of ties in really, doesn't it? Like, you know, a lot of people are using AI to try and do searches for them now because Google searches isn't very good. And totally disconnected from reality. They want more ads, so they made the product. You know, I always thought as time goes on, technology and products get better, but that's not always the case. Everything they can deliberately get worse. Everything.
SPEAKER_03:I mean Google it was literally revolutionary. Well, I can find information, but then just like this this this greed is getting insane. And then to literally make your product bad just to make a few extra cents, or I guess dollars maybe for each ad being served is insane. Like you're gonna push people away just like Firefox pushed me away from their product after 20 years of use. I don't even use Google anymore because it's so bad.
SPEAKER_00:I I'm just glad I still use Ask Jeeves.
SPEAKER_03:Oh man, that was awesome back then.
SPEAKER_00:There was one as well, Metacrawler. Do you remember Metacrawler?
SPEAKER_03:No, I don't.
SPEAKER_00:I think that was one that kind of combined lots of search engines together. And I remember the early in the early 2000s I was using that, I think. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So someone brings up a good point. A G AJG. Wow. Brave's AI is built into the browser. It's pretty cool because or I'm sorry, it's pretty good because it doesn't require an account and is free. How do I actually, so I'm in Brave right now. How the hell do I even like disable this? Because I don't even know it was enabled. It's so it's it's like so well done because it's not invasive that I didn't even know it was on. Yeah. Oh, I see it now. Leo, okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's just yeah, it is it's a terrible name for an AI, isn't it, in my opinion. I don't know. It seems all right. Yeah. I I just think it could be a more cool name.
SPEAKER_03:What's cooler than Leo?
SPEAKER_00:Something more sci-fi, man. You know?
SPEAKER_03:Isn't Leo short for Leonardis? Leonardo, yeah. Leonardo? Yeah, I'm probably never gonna use it, but it's it's out of the way. It's how AI should be. It should be like a background tool to help, not at the forefront.
SPEAKER_00:You know, how many people when they do a search, do they just totally, you know, you get that stupid AI summary at the top nowadays when you go on Google and things. How many people just find that's just so useless and mostly wrong?
SPEAKER_03:Um me 100% of the time. Yeah. I don't even look at it. That's how bad it is. Well, there we go. Thank you for the the how to disable it. Anyway, sorry, sorry, go ahead. I was just I I'm working with chat here. Working with chat.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, anyway, um moving on. Let's talk policy for a little bit. This is just kind of one story, but I think it's frustrating.
SPEAKER_03:One more, one more thing. Okay. UnRAID. If they add AI, what happens?
SPEAKER_00:What sort of question is that, Stefano? I love it how he sits back on his chair like that. That that question's got him. What's he gonna say to that? Do I abandon all hope if Unraid announces that they will be having some Yeah, the only time Unraid will ever announce AI being in a product is when it's self-hosted from your own GPU in the server?
SPEAKER_03:It better be.
SPEAKER_00:Say that word to me, Stefano.
SPEAKER_03:LLM LMs. Also, in chat, if if Unraid adds some sort of AI, will you be welcoming it with open arms or will you be revolting with pitchforks and torches like I will be?
SPEAKER_00:Um personally I wouldn't like it, and I don't know anyone, anyone on the team who would like it in the operating system at all. So there'd be no point. But if people want to, I I'm gonna tell tell everyone something. If you kind of want to, you can actually install things like um Gemini into any Linux system and that includes Unraid. You can actually install it and use it from the terminal of Unraid.
SPEAKER_03:I think the the bigger takeaway here is just looking kind of at chat and talking to you, is as long as you are the one that is able to do like go like implement it, that seems a lot better. It's kind of like, you know, uh ads on your TV that you bought. Like I didn't opt in to watch ads, I bought a product. Why am I seeing ads on my TV? On my smart TV. Well, I don't have a smart TV, so it doesn't it doesn't affect me.
SPEAKER_00:So that that's that's how Nextcloud implement their AI in Nextcloud is they have like they have a traffic light system like red, orange, and green. So red means it's just totally not open source in the data. So they warn you of what ones are and you can choose which you use and which you implement into Nextcloud. And like green are all self-hosted ones, so you can have self-hosted LLMs integrated into Nextcloud. And that's been for about two years now. Um, I went over to Berlin and met Josh, the co-founder of Nextcloud. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Two years, two years ago they had that.
SPEAKER_03:And um God, time flies by.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's crazy. So yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So there's a uh quite a few people that self-host in chat. One person uses uh OSS. I haven't heard Omarky Arc Linux occasionally. I haven't heard of either of these. A use case for Unraid having AI that I that one I can think of immediately off the top of my head. Uh, this is kind of to talk about dual CPU fetish. Uh the one I can think of at the top of my head is you uh could have like a little tooltip that's like, oh, you're trying to enter in commands on the command line, or hey, can I help you find uh this feature that like say like file manager, you're trying to use file manager and trying to learn how to edit a document or something? Like it could pop up and help the user, or maybe even like a search, a smart search function to be like, hey, help me figure out how to enable SSH or show me where to enable SSH. That's the only kind of like use case I could imagine for unraid enabling. Did I just give uh I just give uh ideas to the team? That's terrible. Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_00:But um, you know, another another use case for I was high when I said that. Would would be I think duplicate files, finding duplicate files, having some kind of intelligent search for duplicate files. I'm staying out of those conversations. But anyway, I'm moving on to um the policy section now, which is interdoing right to repair. I'm sure you guys all know about right to repair. One of my favourite YouTubers, Lewis Rossman, he is a advocate for right to repair, and um actually started watching him when he was making repair videos for repairing Apple Macs. And um you know, right right to repair, there was a provision in the US military bill that would have required defence contractors to provide repair information and technical data so the military could basically fix their own stuff. Both parties supported it, the administration supported it, it passed in both the House and the Senate versions of the bill, and then suddenly in the final negotiations it got stripped out and the defence contractor lobbyist killed it. So here's the bit that gets me is the Army Secretary gave an example. There's a control knob, apparently, on the Black Hawk helicopters, and if you use Lockheed Martin to replace it, it costs$47,000 to replace this little control knob. But the army could make the same part themselves, apparently, for$15. So$47,000 versus$15. And they're not allowed to do it because they don't have the right to repair their own stuff. I think that's pretty bad.
SPEAKER_03:Um All right, hear me out. Double's advocate. All right. So these contracting companies could sell their future products, let's say Black Hawk Black Hawk version two, right? Okay. But this time, the Army can pay a higher up front cost for the version two. However, they also get all the access to parts, plans, uh, anything that any information they need to repair it themselves. So it's kind of like a um maybe there'll be some competition between Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky trying to sell helicopters to the army, where now they're like, well, if you buy ours, you can actually repair it yourselves and have access to all the maintenance manuals and all that jazz. But if you buy Sikorsky, you won't get any of that stuff and you'll have to pay them$47,000. Reality, probably not, but maybe that could be a future as well.
SPEAKER_00:It's pretty crazy, you know, not being allowed to repair your own things, I think. You know.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, that's a whole nother like that's definitely a big issue. You should definitely be able to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, so moving on, couple of stories here, and they're both quite interesting, I think. There's a lawsuit in Texas. Um, let me move on to the page here. The state of Texas is apparently suing some TV manufacturers, I think Sony, Samsung, LG, HiSense, and TCL, basically for spying on its users. And when I say spying, I mean yeah, it's kind of properly spying. Some of these smart TVs have something called um ACR, which is automatic content recognition. So what it does is it takes a screenshot of whatever's on the TV every 500 milliseconds. So that's basically twice a second. And it's not just what you're watching through their kind of apps on the TV, it also captures anything you plug in through your HDMI into the TV. So if you plug your laptop in or you've got an Nvidia shield and you're watching your Plex MB or Jellyfin, it will be taking two screenshots per second all of the time. And all of that gets uploaded to their servers and is used to build advertising profiles for you on based on what you're having on your screen. So, you know, as well, apparently to enable it just takes one click. And to disable it takes 15 clicks, apparently. So I've heard. Um So it's pretty crazy. I don't use a smart TV at all myself. I think my TV has got some smart features in it, but I will just plug the NVIDIA shield in. So what I just say is people who've got these type of TVs just never connect them to the internet. Because even if they're trying to do that, if you don't connect them to Wi-Fi, they can't do that, can they? They can try, but they're not going to send anything back anywhere.
SPEAKER_03:So I think some of these TVs have to have an active internet connection for you to use, or at least you have to plug them in initially to create an account for the privilege of using the TV that you purchased. Once it's set up, then you can probably remove it from the internet. But I think most of them require an active internet connection to even be used.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, some of them maybe not most. Some My TV is quite old, made by a company called Philips. And I think every now and then it nags it. I I accidentally maybe press something on the remote and it says that it I need to connect to the internet. And so I just switched it off and turned it back on.
SPEAKER_03:My TV's so old that it's not a smart TV.
SPEAKER_01:And I you've got to say the story about your TV, Stephanie.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah. Yeah. So back in the early days of Bitcoin, you know, like 2010-ish, we were mining coins, all that stuff when you know coins were dirt cheap and basically it was all just fun and games before it became serious. I actually bought my Samsung TV for seven Bitcoin, which I think at the time would have been about anywhere between like a thousand to like maybe seventeen hundred dollars tops.
SPEAKER_00:And where where did you buy the TV from? Because back back then allowed you to use Bitcoin online sometimes, didn't they?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, Newegg was trialing Bitcoin transactions back then. And so I bought it from New Egg. And um, I still have that TV to this day. It's the most expensive TV I've ever purchased. It's actually appreciated in value. Um I guess not technically.
SPEAKER_00:So basically, you spent$800,000 on a TV if you kept the Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, if I would have kept the Bitcoin, I would have$800,000 instead. Um nonetheless, you know, but that was probably the best purchase I've ever made because I I get to sit here and look at stuff like this and just be thankful that this TV one still works to this day, is still a great TV, like color-wise, black-wise. I mean, it's it's L C D, so the blacks aren't that great. But I mean like it's still like the perfect TV for just consuming movies and and stuff on. Even it's even 120 Hertz. So it's like really well ahead of its time. And if it dies, I mean, like, what do you buy? What do you buy to replace a TV like that when you have to have an account just to watch TV?
SPEAKER_00:I think the way forward is to buy basically like a dumb display, which they use in um business like shopping malls and stuff, you know, like commercial displays. Yeah, to buy a decent a decent commercial display that doesn't have any tune or anything in that just has hopefully a display port and not an HDMI port.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, those are those are pretty pricey, and I could see myself doing that for sure. But I'm afraid I think they've actually started rolling out smart features to those. And you know, like I just I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So anyway, the good thing is is like um the attorney general apparently is suing the TV companies. So hopefully that might put an end to those shenanigans. If God, I hope so.
SPEAKER_03:I I wish smart TVs didn't exist. There's no reason for it at all.
SPEAKER_00:No. Well, there is to um target adverts for you.
SPEAKER_03:Well, yeah. I remember Roku were talking about they had some sort of patent on the HDMI port for Oh, speaking of Roku, so I learned uh last weekend, um, actually. So if you have Hulu, for instance, right? And you you're you pay for Hulu, okay? All right. So you pay for Hulu, you go on a on a trip, let's say um out of the country to France, and then you're like, hey, you know what? I want to watch Hulu. Well, Hulu's like, oh, hang on a minute. Your IP is different. Uh, and also we can see that your GPS location is different. So we're gonna block you from being able to watch the service that you pay for uh because you're on a family trip. And you're like, well, hang on a minute, why? I'm uh I'm paying a customer. This is my device. I've watched Hulu from my device before. So you're like, oh, no big deal. I'll just use a VPN, right? So you VPN to home. Well, guess what? Uh it still knows your GPS location, so it's like still blocking you from using the app. So then being witty, you turn off your uh location services, yet you're still blocked because Hulu requires location services to be enabled for you to watch their content that you're paying for. So you can't watch the media that you want while you're on vacation. Isn't that crazy?
SPEAKER_00:It's pretty bad, man. I wonder if there's any way of spoofing your location.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I mean, yeah, you can definitely do that stuff, but is it at what point is it like you're a paying customer? You should you should be able to watch wherever you want. Yeah, definitely. Like, uh I don't know, you shouldn't have to do any of that stuff. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:The amount of effort you gotta go through just to do anything. What? Why do you think they even care? I don't know. Like, I don't understand it's kind of licensing of the programs, like they worry that people in France might be pushing something, and if someone signs up for Hulu and lives in France, the licensing is only allowed in the United States and hasn't come to France yet, and it messes up their deals and stuff. They can get in trouble saying, well, people are watching this in France and there's no license to watch that there yet with kind of original releases of programs.
SPEAKER_03:I don't maybe, but like even so, like, okay, so let's say you're traveling on vacation, right? Is one day or two days that bad to just let the user like you can collect data and be like, is this person trying to violate our terms of service, yes or no? And if it's like if it's streaming for a week straight, then sure, cut them off. Fine, I get it. You're afraid that they're violating policy or whatever, but like, come on, dude. It's pretty and then they wonder why piracy's back in action.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, talk talking about traveling, because this next one actually is going to affect me directly, and probably probably a few of our listeners as well.
SPEAKER_03:It was planned, I swear.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we planned this segue perfectly. I d I don't know. Uh broken clock's right twice a day, isn't it? Yes. We were we were lucky with the segue. So uh there's a proposal in the US that would require um tourists from I think from 42 visa waiver countries, including my country, the UK, and some other countries like Japan and Australia, to provide five years of social media history when applying for I think it's called an Esther, which is like a kind of visa waiver form. Now, the funny thing is, Stefano, is you know that I'm not really on social media. I've got YouTube, and I think that's about it. So if they look at my history, they're gonna be a bit confused, I think, because it's just videos about me learning how to plaster a wall and watching videos about living off-grid and camper vans. Well, that's on my kind of personal YouTube.
SPEAKER_01:Obviously, my Space Invader one is just about, you know, kind of Docker containers, unraid in Linux.
SPEAKER_03:I don't know, Ed. I've seen a lot of stuff on your channel talking about some US policies and disagreeing with them.
SPEAKER_00:I think they're I think they're gonna they're gonna um think I'm planning to plaster the inside of a van and disappear into the wilderness or something when they look at my history for that. I promise I'm not. I've just got a VW camper and um that I like tinkering with and a house that needs a lot of work, but I think I'm gonna have good luck explaining that.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I've got a I've got a great story about your VW camper for everyone in chat. Yeah. And totally unrelated, I know. And maybe beer talk, which I know we're not allowed to do, but I'm gonna do it anyway because it's funny. So when I went to visit Ed in the UK, what I guess three, four years ago now, man, it was a long time. Uh, we were riding around in this VW van, and for some reason, I think it had some sort of like uh uh uh gas leak. So it spelled like sulfur um or eggs, spoiled eggs, whatever way. And we're driving around, and you could just smell it so bad everywhere we're going. So we had the windows down, and uh and as we're passing by people in the UK, I'm like, oh, sorry, sorry. Because it smelled bad and you know you they could smell it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh man, it was crazy, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_00:It was it was the leisure batteries in the end, and they were they were over and something with the sulfur is making some kind of weird smell. Nice, yeah. So that that was pretty crazy.
SPEAKER_03:But all right, so when you when you come back to the United States with your family, are you gonna willingly turn over all this media history?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I don't actually have any. That's the problem. I don't I don't have Facebook, I have I have Twitter that I very, very rarely go on for my Space Invader 1 channel. But um, you know, as well, talking about kind of VPNs and stuff, what you're talking about with Hulu and talking about social media, you know, um it's not just a US thing about kind of social media and stuff. Governments everywhere are grappling with the social media and online regulation. Like just over Christmas, the UK is talking about age-gating VPNs, so you have to prove your age to have a VPN, because um we had some law come out that you have to kind of prove your age for various websites last summer, and then they said people are trying to get around it with VPNs, so now they say they want to make you prove your age to have a VPN, and like Australia as well, they want to ban social media for the under 16s, which I kind of think I th I think that's probably quite a good idea, in my opinion, because I don't think it's good for children's mental health. But the thing I don't like about it is it will mean that every single person who uses social media will also have to prove that they're over 18.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly. Exactly. That's the issue.
SPEAKER_00:That's the thing I don't like. Yeah, there's better ways of restricting it, I'm sure. When everyone has to prove their age to go on social media, 99% of people use social media. So what it just means is the internet will no longer be anonymous at all.
SPEAKER_03:But honestly, at at this point though, with with everything with uh the internet becoming uh nothing but bots and AI, I mean, is an is anybody's profile really real?
SPEAKER_00:I think we spoke about the dead internet theory before, haven't we? It's a hundred percent dead. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:We're we're there. We are there now. In fact, I I'm a robot Ed. Let me take off my mask.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I I'm created by Gemini.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:This whole stream is fake.
SPEAKER_01:You've all been con.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but yeah, you know, um a lot of changes, you know, around the world into kind of social media um and the internet. The internet is definitely in some kind of transition phase. Yeah, I just I just hope that it doesn't become too restrictive.
SPEAKER_03:When you when you came to the United States, did they have those uh camera stations that take a picture of your face before you uh pass through uh customs?
SPEAKER_00:Um they had they had a little camera on like the desk where you show your passport.
SPEAKER_03:Is that what you uh no, so they um so when I came to UK, they had basically like a a booth. It's not really a booth, but you just walk up to the camera, it takes a picture of your face, and then they're like, okay, welcome to UK. Uh in the United States, we have those cameras as well for domestic flights. Um and I was just curious if you have them because I've been gotten in trouble several times now by making silly faces to the camera.
SPEAKER_01:So trust you, Stefano, you would do that, wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean it's they don't need I have my documents, they don't need to take a picture of me, so I don't understand why it exists. What scares me more is they're just taking a picture of me and build putting in some database somewhere, then eventually all that data is gonna get lost on the internet, and then now my information will be lost one more time to bad actors. But yeah, no, so like I totally go ahead.
SPEAKER_00:The thing that annoyed me, I came back from the US back into the UK, and um I think I have these kind of like booze. I I think it might have actually been in I was going through Amsterdam, but it was either Amsterdam or UK, and you can go into this little booth and a camera comes down like that, and you have to put your passport in, and it just would not work. It was trying to check my face was the same as the thing, and it kept going wrong, kept going wrong. And then they said, Okay, you're gonna have to go out and go around through the kind of main queue and and send me round to another bit to go through somewhere, and it took absolutely ages. I was really cross about that. I was thinking I just had a really long journey when I got delayed coming back from the United States, I think by about kind of 10, 12 hours. So I was already really tired, and I had to go through Amsterdam.
SPEAKER_03:That's my problem with a lot of these like Yeah, those AI features that that scares me with most of them. It's like because they they implement them really quickly and then try to fix them later on, kind of like copilot. The implementation and it's like, we did it, but now we've got to fix it and make it actually work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're talking about Microsoft.
SPEAKER_03:What?
SPEAKER_01:Um Did we segue again?
SPEAKER_00:We're just too good at this stuff. So so anyway, Microsoft's putting up their prices again. Um, but it is the first commercial price increase, I think, since 2022. Uh and that lady looks very happy about it, doesn't she? Like, I love paying more money. I I love it. Look at that. You know, pricing update and the lady smiling.
SPEAKER_01:It's like, oh it's really good. I'm so pleased about that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. It's an AI generated image too, which is even even better by co-pilot.
SPEAKER_00:From July this year, Office 365 is going up by 13%. Um awesome. Microsoft 365. I'm not really sure what the difference is between Microsoft 365 and Office 365. I don't know. But that's going up eight percent. And it's not just business, government clients are gonna get hit too, including um the military as well. Microsoft's justification is they've added 1,100 new features across Microsoft 365, security co-pilot, SharePoint, etc. So I think that brings us to a pretty obvious question. How many of those features do people actually ask for?
SPEAKER_03:Um none were asked for, for sure. Uh, but like Sim or Sam, either way is fine, says the emotion well, he says they added new icons. Yeah, and I would agree. I was thinking the whole time, I was like, yeah, a lot of those are probably just pictures. That's how that number got so high. So yeah, there's probably just new icons. Actually, it was all the rebranding. So they didn't add new features, they just rebranded and I'm calling them new features.
SPEAKER_00:So, so what you're telling me is you do you think all we're doing really is substitize subsidizing co-pilot development, whether we use it or not?
SPEAKER_03:Uh, I would say more than likely, yes. Um, however, I'm a bit hesitant because Microsoft XDR, so uh basically their defender for cloud, is actually a very, in my opinion, very good. Um, and also you can put um Microsoft Defender on Linux endpoints, which I know that sounds absurd, uh, but the kind of auditing and metrics and insight you can gain into your uh remote clients is actually very valuable. And so I think personally that that's a very good product. Um so I'm not surprised that they've increased prices, but I still suspect most of it has to do with co-pilot, more so than uh some of the better features that they've added for like Microsoft XDR, for instance.
SPEAKER_00:Do you think um these price increases are gonna push companies towards um alternatives like Google Workspace or even self-hosted things like Nextcloud?
SPEAKER_03:Nope. No, I don't think anything is gonna change. Yeah. Maybe for smaller companies, maybe I could see that being a problem, but most of these larger businesses, I think, are just so integrated. It's kind of like VMware. Like, where are you gonna go? Um, and also, you know, uh Microsoft's expanding their Azure uh local or Azure Cloud Services, so for virtual machines and containers. They're dumping a lot of money in that to kind of soak up a lot of the VMware users who are leaving VMware and looking to go to uh other hypervisor um providers. So this is probably a part of that as well. I mean, there's really no way to tell, but you know, my cynicism definitely thinks it's probably just a fun copilot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And speak and speaking of copilot, now this story would be funny if it wasn't so ridiculous. But Microsoft released another ad for copilot showing off all of these like amazing features.
SPEAKER_03:Um let me see if I can I know that copilot failed to uh work on Mac OS, and it's been so if you're a Mac OS user copilot, it's just been an absolute mess if you can even get it to work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so basically they they show they showed an ad of all of these crazy features that were meant to be really good. And the Verge tested them and none of them worked. That's awesome. The ad showed um copilot controlling Christmas lights through some interface, and that interface doesn't even exist. They just made it up for the commercial. Um they tested it with real Philips Hue lights, complete failure. And here's the thing: the the second ad they've done with this, the first one got called out for showing fake features, and then they've just basically gone and done it again. So it isn't the first time, this is the second time they've done that.
SPEAKER_03:Um Microsoft does this all the time. So they're they're basically known for having. So have you heard of like GovCloud?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, so um, so you have commercial, right? So basically all the corporate entities use commercial uh Azure, right? Uh well, if you're a government entity or like a government contractor or somehow do something with the government at the state or federal level, whatever it be, they also have their gov cloud Azure instance. So um, well, it doesn't matter. So anyway, they have they have basically two different kinds of like cloud instances, right? And so um there's tons and tons and tons and tons of features available in commercial. However, if you're using the gov cloud instance, there may be these very crucial uh features that are missing. And you know, you're like, hey, how do I do this thing? But if you're in gov cloud, you know, you're reading this Microsoft, this uh uh what do they call those help files or whatever documents, you're reading their documents. It's like, oh yeah, you just click on this, you go here, you go there, and you enable it and you do XYZ. But if you're in the GovCloud, those options literally don't exist. So this is like right up Microsoft's alley where they're like, oh well, these are these these features are an alpha, and you we haven't released them to the commercial product line yet. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, AI assistants, you know, some of them they can actually do stuff, but you know, it looks like Microsoft approaches just pretend and hope no one checks. Yeah. But that but then I guess it's not just Microsoft like um Apple intelligence in Siri.
SPEAKER_03:I never used it. I've had it turned turned off from day one. And they keep re-enabling and I keep turning it off.
SPEAKER_00:Apparently it's absolutely hopeless. That's what I've heard. I don't know if people in chat use it, but I've just heard it's you know, a year on, it's still no good.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Some of the people in chat are we're talking about using Google for Business as an alternative. So I started with my so SPX Labs, you know, started with Google for Business uh over a decade ago now. And it was started off at about$5 per user. And you get the full suite of Google products, which was at back then, that was an amazing deal. I remember telling everybody, like, hey, this is if you have your own business, you're gonna want this, you know, because you get the shared cloud like word or pages or whatever that whatever Google calls it. You get their docs, right? You ask it through the cloud, you can edit through the cloud. And those things those have actually gotten genuinely really good over the years, especially their um uh Excel alternative. Uh I can't even think of the name of it. That's crazy. I use it all the time. Sheets. Yeah, thank you. I use it all the time and literally can't think of the name of it because I just call it Excel. It's kind of like Xerox. We just called it Xerox back in the day, even though Xerox is a company.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But anyway, yeah, Google Sheets.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Hoovers. Uh yeah, thanks. Perfect. Um, but anyway, so um all that stuff's gotten really good. But anyway, it's gone from$5, and I know this doesn't sound like a lot, but SPX Labs is now paying$16.34 for my single user to have access to the full suite. And while no new features that I'm aware of, I mean, there's been, I guess I wouldn't really call them features. Improvements to software are not features, in my opinion. I'm not aware of any new feature that I've actually been using this entire time, but yet I'm paying more money, and I can't quite understand why. Like Gemini, cool, don't use Gemini. Didn't ask for Gemini, don't need it, but I'm pretty sure I'm helping fund Gemini, which is what some people brought up in chat. Yeah, yeah. I think you're probably what's the alternative? There are no alternatives. Self-hosting. If you have the time to self-host, those are your alternatives, but um, that's a lot of effort, especially if you're a business owner.
SPEAKER_00:Like I don't know. I don't know. I I would push people towards Nextcloud and bus and businesses and just get Nextcloud to host it for you.
SPEAKER_03:But how long until Nextcloud and Shittifies? I mean, this is the problem that we've seen time and time again. There's a great product that comes out, we start using it for a long time, then they start selling, and you're like, okay, fine, we'll pay for it or whatever.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know. Like how having met a lot of people who work at Nextclouds, I really don't think that.
SPEAKER_03:Until they get bought out by Microsoft. Yeah, if they could get that.
SPEAKER_00:If they were to get bought out, that would be another thing. But but their ethos and they're extremely passionate about privacy and um God, I hope so. And that kind of thing. They're they're trying to do some kind of um pushing kind of the EU to do some thing against Microsoft because they put OneDrive baked into the OS and is like a kind of anti-monopoly thing. And they kind of push OneDrive so much and they say it's, you know, um I think they're kind of trying to team up with other things like um Dropbox and people like that who are saying, you know, Microsoft shouldn't be doing this because they've got the market share of OSs. And they just basically because what you can't do with what with um if you go on I don't use Windows anymore, but on Windows, when it says do you want to kind of back this up to OneDrive, you can't say, Yes, I want to back it up, but say, I actually want to back it up to Google Drive or I want to back it up to Dropbox or I want to do it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's no alternative option. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's either you back this up with Windows and it goes to OneDrive and you have to pay us and you don't have any other choice.
SPEAKER_03:So um it's actually worse than that. When you boot up your Windows PC, if you've had OneDrive disabled like I have for a long time, because my PC is just for gaming. I don't put documents and stuff on it, right? Anyway, so when you boot it up, it's like, hey, we noticed you still don't have OneDrive activated. This is big, your whole screen is filled with this, right? And they're like, Do you want to activate? And you're like, no. And they're like, are you sure you don't want access to these amazing features? Like, yes, I'm sure I don't want to access this. For the 12th time, I don't want OneDrive. And it just like every time there's an update, you get this your whole screen is filled with this stupid OneDrive nonsense. And they're doing it also with co-pilots. Like, I don't want it, I just want to play games, leave me alone.
SPEAKER_00:But I think is I think didn't Microsoft recently say that they're going to make Windows 11 the kind of go-to gaming thing that is going to be the best ever for 2026. And because they're getting a bit worried about gaming on Linux, I'm pretty sure they're doing that somewhere. I can't remember.
SPEAKER_03:But this all I can say is those words just exemplify what is everything that is wrong with Microsoft. They're trying to do too much. They have lost focus on just trying to deliver a good product, a good singular product, and are absolutely trying to cram everything they possibly can into Windows 11 and make it do things that is simply not designed.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the thing is, in my opinion, Stefano, Windows is no longer a product they're selling. It's just a delivery platform to sell other products.
SPEAKER_03:What's sad about that is even if you buy a license for Windows 11, you still are force-fed ads and things of that nature. And then you're like, oh, well, you could disable them. Like, yeah, but most people aren't gonna take the time to disable a lot of that stuff. Also, LibreOffice is really good too. Uh AJ, thanks for pointing that out.
SPEAKER_00:I use LibreOffice on my back.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I I force my parents. My dad's a he's a longtime Excel user. I'm talking like you know, multiple decades, right? Uh, and he was like, Oh, I gotta have it, I gotta have Microsoft products. I was like, just try it, just try LibreOffice. He tried it, never went back. Totally worked fine for him. You know, he's into macros and all those things, and he figured it out. And I've literally never heard him complain after switching to off or LibreOffice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I really like it personally. Um I've got no reason to buy Microsoft Office for my Mac.
SPEAKER_03:I almost kind of feel bad for Microsoft in some ways because like imagine being a company and you're like, hey, we can offer cloud storage, and then you offer like OneDrive, right? You're like, hey, this is our cloud service, and then you get sued because they're like, hey, you have a monopoly. It's like, yeah, we're trying to diversify our product offerings. It'd be kind of like suing Unraid if they're like, hey, we want to also give you the option of storing some of your data in the cloud, and then somebody sues Unraid because you want to use their cloud storage.
SPEAKER_00:I wouldn't say I'd feel sorry for them because it's fine.
SPEAKER_03:I said I almost feel sorry. Almost feel sorry.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, okay. I'll let you off as long as we've got that almost there. Anyway, just moving on a bit, um, I will share my screen again. Circling back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier about memory prices, is the laptop maker framework. They've announced another memory price hike. And what I find interesting is like, you know, how transparent they're being really.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They're basically saying the RAM market is volatile, prices are going up.
SPEAKER_03:It's such a double-edged sword.
SPEAKER_00:And they're saying that you you should buy your memory elsewhere.
SPEAKER_03:I I think that's you know, yeah, it's cool that they give you the option, but I mean honestly transparent. Is anyone gonna save any money buying RAM from elsewhere?
SPEAKER_01:No, no, no, of course not.
SPEAKER_03:It's kind of funny that the rest of the market has finally caught up to Apple RAM pricing.
SPEAKER_00:Anyway, what type of fridge do you have, Stefano?
SPEAKER_03:Uh I have a Samsung fridge.
SPEAKER_00:You do have a Samsung fridge? Well, this one's for you.
SPEAKER_03:What'd they do to my fridge now?
SPEAKER_00:Gemini is now had into fridges and it might actually be useful. Well, hmm. I'm not gonna say it's gonna be useful.
SPEAKER_01:But um Useful to who, Ed?
SPEAKER_00:Samsung Samsung's putting Google Gemini into refrigerators. So the refrigerators, I think, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Stefano, they've already got cameras in them so you can monitor your food, yeah?
SPEAKER_03:I believe the smart refrigerators do, yes. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I I think that's a bit a bit much personally.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's a little silly. There's a lot of like it's kind of I've been to people's houses that have them, and it's funny how excited they are about their refrigerator because it's like, oh look, it tells me when I'm low on this or that. It's like if you don't do not regularly eat out of your refrigerator, you don't know it's like in there. That's it seems such a strange concept.
SPEAKER_00:But you know, they're so they're adding AI. They've already got the cameras, yeah. Yeah. So they're add adding AI to recognize what's in there and help with with your shopping list. But let's be honest about it. What it really is, it's gonna be advertising. Your fridge is gonna be recommending products to you, isn't it? And probably more expensive ones. Probably ones that someone have paid Samsung to recommend, maybe.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, more than likely.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, it's gonna in it was gonna integrate into something like Instacart or whatever.
SPEAKER_03:And that's where I was going. That's exactly where I was about to go. Like, oh hey, we're out of that sour cream you always buy. We recommend buying this one, and then Instacart delivers it to your door and it's all automated.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Anyway, that's exactly why we self-host, isn't it, Stefano? That's you know, because we don't like this way things are going. So, you know, we like to keep our date our data private, and we you know, I don't want a smart fridge, I don't want a smart TV.
SPEAKER_03:Are we the old people now? Like we're like anti-change. It's like this is the future, old man. AI, everything. Yeah. Convenience. It's so convenient. I'll sell everything for convenience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but you know, I just find convenience is very expensive as well. That is true.
SPEAKER_03:Convenience is very expensive.
SPEAKER_00:I'd rather have something not so convenient and cheaper.
SPEAKER_03:Um, I was in Atlanta actually a couple weeks ago. And um, I didn't know Atlanta had authorized Waymo and those little robots that deliver stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03:Um, but I was thinking like, so like if you were to order food or like soda or something, those little robots, um, if anyone's even close to them, they just come to a stop. And then the the springs, I guess, or the shocks that they have on them make it like jostle back and forth a lot because it comes so hard stop, and then it shakes everything. So I was like, man, someone's food is in there and it's just getting shooking around everywhere. And then um the way that drivers treat robots in crosswalks versus humans. So the robot has technically the right-of-way because the crosswalk sign is green for anyone to go across it. Well, drivers, uh, when it's the robot, absolutely do not care if that robot has a right-of-way and will cut it off or nearly ram the thing. And its default behavior is to stop. So all you see is this robot like every two seconds just jostling back and forth.
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, that's crazy. Have you have you heard of the um drone delivery things they have in China?
SPEAKER_03:Uh no. I know that we're supposed to be getting them in the United States at some point.
SPEAKER_00:So it's kind of it's not like drone delivery of things like Amazon products. So you go to in the city, you cut um what what's the city, that really high-tech city in China called? Um begins with that.
SPEAKER_03:I can't remember where all the time. It's like maybe like Shanghai or Hong Kong or it's not Shanghai.
SPEAKER_00:But uh anyway, that it's irrelevant what it's called. Shenzhen? Shenzhen, that's it, yeah. So you have these you have these little kind of like kiosk things, and you go there and you have like menus and you can order food. Yeah. And and I think it sends it through to various restaurants, and then a drone just delivers it and it lands on the top of the kiosk thing, and then it goes down and comes out in the thing, and the drone flies back, and you get your food from restaurants within about kind of like five or ten minutes, and it kind of flies over. It's really crazy. It's it's like, you know, you know, I'm living in the future.
SPEAKER_03:That is pretty wild. It's like, you know, it's it's funny how all this stuff is always like cool. Like, you know, having a refrigerator that could look at your, you know, um like milk, like, oh, your milk's really low. Hey, you might want to refresh this. Like all that stuff is obviously very cool and I enjoy it. The problem is it always gets twisted in this like maniacal way, and it's like Yeah, it's all it's pretty cool, but um, you know, if it wasn't always trying to advertise you things, it would be it'd be great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Anyway, all right, I think you know, probably that's us for this episode. First one of 2026. We've covered a lot of ground and raids had a massive year. Open source is still fighting the good fight, and governments everywhere are trying to figure out what to do about the internet, and Microsoft, well, is still Microsoft. So anyway, I want to thank everyone for watching, listening. We really appreciate everyone who tunes in, especially you guys who watch the live show and leave comments, etc. And if you're new here, welcome. We're gonna be doing this every month. It will be live, and then on the following Wednesday, it will be released as a discoverable video in the normal video section. Um, so next month we'll be back with more. Um, Stefano, any final thoughts?
SPEAKER_03:Uh just a big thank you for all the support. Honestly, you Ed and I are paid to be here. I don't know if that's obvious. I'm paid to be here. I don't know about Ed. And without you guys supporting Unraid and you know getting everyone else to join it, you know, we may not be here. So big thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you very much for watching, guys. And I really, really hope you all have a great 2026. And I hope you know your servers all run well, your your parity checks all passed, and have a great weekend and a great rest of your 2026. Catch you later.
SPEAKER_03:See you guys later.
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