FLOSS Weekly 721 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week, Shawn Powers and I talk with our old friend Kyle Rankin, who's a friend of this show as well. Kyle is super smart about all kinds of stuff, but here's a cool thing. He's a hacker that is now the president and CEO of a major company supplying Linnux Hardware Purism, and they have the Purism laptop and the Libra five phone and a new thing called Lap Doc that could unites these two things. And we talk about convergence and supply chain and how that affects the hardware business and all kinds of other stuff. And that is coming up next,

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This is FLOSS Weekly episode 721, recorded Wednesday, March 1st, 2023, hacking, convergence, and Hyper Purism. This episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by FastMail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity, and make email yours with fast mail. Try it free for 30 days@fastmail.com slash twit. Fast Mail is also giving twit listeners a 15% discount on the first year when you sign up today. And by Collide, that's Collide with a K Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta, visit collide.com/floss and book a demo today. Hello again, everybody everywhere. I am Doc Searls, and this is FLOSS Weekly. Brought you this week with Shawn Powers himself. Hello. Hello. With with the zero in his last name for the o It's true. Yeah, because there, there are a number of you, even though you're sh Shawn does not, is spelled with an H <laugh>.

Shawn Powers (00:01:57):
It is, yeah. It's you know, my name is Shawn Michael Powers, I have green hair, and my first name is spelled the least Irish Way of

Doc Searls (00:02:06):
<Laugh>. You do have green hair and you've had it long before St. Patty's Day came along.

Shawn Powers (00:02:12):
That's true. That

Doc Searls (00:02:13):
Is true. Yeah. For those of us who are visually impaired for this show you, you did this to celebrate your daughter to Yeah. To

Shawn Powers (00:02:21):
Support her, to

Doc Searls (00:02:21):
Support her, to support her, because,

Shawn Powers (00:02:23):
But it's become, now I'm unlike the, you know, people who leave their Christmas tree lights up all year round, <laugh>, you know, come this time of year I look ahead of the curve for St. Patty's Day.

Doc Searls (00:02:33):
Yeah. And my whole neighborhood here in Bloomington, Indiana it does the same thing. They leave their, I don't think they're actually Christmas lights, they're just lights that they have there, and they're, they don't take 'em down. I don't think they're lazy. It's just kind of a look to it. But, you know, that's each, each to their own. Yeah. I had a joke about it, but I forgot it. So we'll just let it go. <Laugh> <laugh>. Fair enough. It did. Jumped in and then jumped out. So, so this is today is a another Lennox Journal reunion. We have Kyle Rankin on. Did you have a, a few quick words before I jump onto to Kyle, because we got off to a late start. I wanna make sure we

Kyle Rankin (00:03:13):
No, I'm excited. We can bring Kyle in. He's part

Doc Searls (00:03:15):
Of his family. Yeah, I see him in So, so, so Kyle, before you talk, I just to let the listeners know I, Kyle and Shawn and I were have, are both longstanding staffers with Linux Journal back in the decade or in the decades, I think in our cases. But now he's the president of Purism the maker of laptops and phones that are Linux space, that author of Linux hardening and hostile networks DevOps, troubleshooting the official tu server book and pic hacks among other books. He was an award-winning columnist and tech editor of Linnux Journal and speaks frequently on free software. So welcome, welcome, Kyle. There's actually more to you than that, but that <laugh>, usually I wanna shorten people's <laugh>. They send me three paragraphs of, of, of of startup. So where you're in California somewhere, right?

Kyle Rankin (00:04:09):
Yeah, yeah. I'm in Northern California up in sort of the wine country region. Actually, not, not far from the studios.

Doc Searls (00:04:16):
Oh, really? Alou, we could have had you in

Kyle Rankin (00:04:19):
Yeah, could've been.

Doc Searls (00:04:20):
It's down the street,

Kyle Rankin (00:04:21):
An official place. It's down the street. Yeah.

Doc Searls (00:04:23):
That's cool. That's cool. So you're in, not Petaluma, you're like some other place like Santa Rosa.

Kyle Rankin (00:04:28):
Oh, I'm in, I'm, no, I'm in Petaluma. So

Doc Searls (00:04:30):
You're in Petaluma. Oh, down the street is right

Kyle Rankin (00:04:32):
Down the street. Yeah.

Doc Searls (00:04:34):
Yeah. That's cool. So, so why don't we just start with what you're doing now. Where's, where's Purism at? I last I heard the whole hardware industry was, was struck by supply chain issues and stuff like that. What, what's going on now?

Kyle Rankin (00:04:51):
Oh, I mean, it's, that's still the case. It's, I, I liken it. The last couple of years have sort of been what everyone experienced at the beginning of the pandemic when you went to the grocery store and you couldn't find toilet paper, and then you went to the second grocery store and you also couldn't find toilet paper. And then a couple people bought up all the toilet paper and then was reselling it for a markup on Craigslist. That's basically been the hardware chip supply chain market for like the last three years really. It hit us earlier than a lot of people. I think we felt it sooner. And it, it's continues. I mean, even to this day we've, we've gotten ahead of it for the most part now, but it's taken a couple of years to get there. A lot of, we've had to basically change how we build hardware in many cases where we're focused more on like a lot of people sort of doing away with just in time supply chain.

(00:05:45):
 A lot of, you know, it made sense for the longest time to just, we are, we are shipping through this many units in a certain amount of time. Let's make sure that when we ship through those, the next batch is just arriving and to ship through, just continue manufacturing like that. Well, this doesn't make any sense anymore because you may go to manufacture another batch and find out some this random chip that's not even necessarily you wouldn't think it's very important, like a little $4 chip somewhere. That is, you can't build anything until you have it and it's back order for two years or something like that. And so that's been, that's been our life for the last couple of years is, is struggling with all of that stuff. I mean, it's, it started with big things like the C P U for our phone happened to be the same C P U that's popular in automotive infotainment systems.

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And, you know, if you look at the news, you've seen what a struggle the auto industry has had procuring chips and they've had to, you know, pause production and things like that. Well, we, we've also been fighting for the same chips. And so in many cases what we had to do, we're fortunate in that we're like a, our needs are small enough and we're a small enough company with enough in, in-house talent that in some cases, like we'll have a chip that is in short supply and we can, our engineers can figure out an alternative. That's basically the same thing with the slightly different skew we can find that in other cases, we've just had to bite the bullet and buy way more expensive. You know, that that toilet paper that the person was selling in Craigslist at like a, you know, a 50% markup, a hundred percent markup we've been buying that toilet paper just because we needed the toilet paper <laugh>.

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 So it's been like, it's been crazy. We're starting, I mean, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. We just, I mean, it, it's funny, like just recently we, we've just, we're finishing the last production run for that we have planned right now for the Libra iPhone. And it seemed like everything was, all of the ducks were in a row and we had all of the chips that we needed and everything. And then we go, we start, we get ready to start production. It turns out, oh, well, no, not in this case. We still have a couple of these chips that we thought we had, but then they're in short supply and we can't get them now. And so, like, it's been, it's been crazy. But again, it's, I I see that lessening probably next year. Now, if you were to ask me last year, I would've said, yeah, I think sometime in the 2023 that chip supply chain crunch will settle down. But now I probably another year just because it's, it's not spread evenly distributed. You know, what happens is everyone will scramble to make particular chips to su supply a demand. Well, when they're doing that, they're not making other ones. And when something leads a shelf, it may not be restocked for a while. So yeah, it's, it's been crazy.

Shawn Powers (00:08:35):
So I'm curious if, you know, trying to take a, a positive spin on a miserable situation for everyone. Have you found, I mean you, I hope you elaborate in a little bit here. I know you do a lot of the manufacturing stuff, but have you found some, I guess, innovation to use the, the buzzwords, right? Or changes you've made because of the ongoing shortages like, ah, we're doing this or we're focusing more on, on that? Or has it just been like a hurry up and wait and, you know, oh my gosh, it's toilet paper, grab it and, and do what we can or, I mean, has it been all bad news or is there any sort of systems that you've been able to inventor or put in place to make things a little bit smoother or more resilient? Because honestly, it's, it's pointed out a lot of struggles that are, are supply chain system has in it, in that when a, a hiccup can cause so many issues across so many landscapes.

Kyle Rankin (00:09:35):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what it, a couple of things. What it, what it's meant for us in one case is that we as much as possible have done away with just in time supply. So we stock way more inventory than we used to just because there could be a disruption where we get, we find out that there's, you know, some missing parts of missing something, some lockdown somewhere, and then we have a three month delay in something that we needed, you know, last month kind of thing. So we've been addressing that a lot by just stocking more. I mean, that's, the downside to that is then you have to have you, you have way more cash invested in inventory than if you're just sort of cycling through as you need it. But we've had to do that for pretty much every product is is once we start having it in stock, we're trying to stock way more than we traditionally would.

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Cuz you can't necessarily count on the supply chain to be consistently delivering as fast as it always has been. So that's one thing. I mean, the other thing that's been beneficial, I guess is having, having to take more time to build the hardware in particular, the phone has meant more time to develop the software as well to get it to a, to a better place. Because, you know, in, in many cases for this phone, we're building a lot of stuff sort of from scratch ourselves in house because there's, they're before we sort of announced the project there, most of the approaches for mobile, like Linux on a mobile device was a mobile only and mobile focus distribution. So they would, it might, it would be Linux, but the applications were specifically poured for a mobile platform. So it would be designed to fit there.

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So if you're a developer, you would write a specific mobile only version of your app to run on these platforms. In our case, we were, we wanted to do something different and have it be basically run the same desktop applications. They just fit when you shrink them down the fit on the phone screen. And that required, you know, developing new libraries that have now been upstreamed into gnome developing software like phone applications to make actual phone calls. Imagine that and that run on desktop Linux as well. Thi all, all those sorts of things needed to be developed and a new shell, a new desktop shell, because gnome shell wasn't at the time mobile aware really. And so all of these sorts of things had to beat someone, had to make them, and we were in a position to do it.

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And that's what pretty much all of the proceeds from z selling these phones went to was all of the software development to get mobile Linux ware or, you know, adaptive or Convergent Linux, I guess where it is today, which is you, you know, you have quite a few applications and all the new genome applications are sort of being developed with this in mind where you can they are adapt to a phone screen, they can adapt to a large screen. And the libraries are sort of built into lib awe, which is a, a major library that people would use when they're developing G T K applications now. It's just sort of built in. So like the default approach is one that makes an adaptive application, which is sort of good for everybody, even if you don't use it on a phone.

Doc Searls (00:12:44):
Well, I want to ask about the, the laptop and, and, and your, how would this actually unifies your product lines? But before we get to that, I'll, I'll let everybody know that this episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Fast Mail Free email isn't free and you pay with your privacy for over 20 years. Fast Mail has been a leader in email privacy. At Fast Mail, your data stays yours with better productivity features. For as little as $3 a month Fast Mail prioritizes your privacy. Your personal data is kept safe and away from third parties with better spam filters and absolutely no ads. All Fast Mail data is stored in the US and Fast Mail is fully GDPR compliant. Mask email protects your personal data by allowing you to create multiple addresses to use when you sign up for various websites.

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Okay, so Kyle, you, you've got a new thing called doc, and because we haven't covered it yet. You, you make a laptop and a phone. You were mentioning the Libra five earlier. That's your phone. Tell us more about them and, and now pull this in together with Lap Doc and how that's going.

Kyle Rankin (00:16:20):
Yeah, I mean, so this, at least for me personally started, I found out now over 10 years ago because I read a Linux Journal article that I wrote 10 years ago where I was talking about sort of my dream at the time, which was so slightly before that, maybe a year before that even. I was at a conference and I saw someone with an N 800 series, little, little tablet portable computer at the time. It was like very, it ran Lennox, it was this, this cool little device. There

Doc Searls (00:16:47):
Was a Nokia that, yeah, the

Kyle Rankin (00:16:48):
Nokia, yeah,

Doc Searls (00:16:49):
They were cool. Yeah, they were cool. The drawer over there in the back

Kyle Rankin (00:16:52):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they were at the conference and I, I saw them, they had that screen, they popped out like a little, a little portable keyboard and started typing. I'm like, you know, that's, that's the future is having your computer that has all of your applications in your pocket there, and then you could plug it into a big screen and it could be a big computer or you could keep it in your pocket and use a small screen. And ever since I was wanting that solution to exist. And so like 10 years ago, the closest that you could get was a Android device, like a droid four in my case, plugged into this, Motorola made this docking station that you could dock the phone into, and it essentially ran, at first it ran sort of this pseudo Linux environment, and then later it basically just ran Android bigger. And it, it wasn't exactly what I wanted really, but it was close. It was like, this is, if I can only get Linux to run on this, it would be amazing. So like, yeah. Kyle, is

Shawn Powers (00:17:48):
It, this is the same time though when, I mean, you and I both had the, the Nokia N 900, I think we got it at scale mm-hmm. <Affirmative> years and years ago. Wasn't there something already, was it the Atrix or, or something that sound a something?

Kyle Rankin (00:18:03):
Yeah, the atrix, that's, that's the dock I had, but I, so Motorola released like this Atrix phone.

Shawn Powers (00:18:09):
Oh, so that was the Motorola device was the Atrix.

Kyle Rankin (00:18:11):
Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah. And then their dock was compatible with, for example, I had a Motorola Droid four, and that they had this little mini like micro SB and a micro H D M I connector on the side that you would slide, you'd sort of dock it into the stocking station. And in the case of the droid, it was, for some reason, they decided to make it backwards. So you had to actually open up the dock and, and flip it around or whatever. But yeah, so I, back then, the thing is, is no one really used it. So I got mine, like it was a, it was a whole thing. And then I got mine like a couple years after it fell out a favor for like $69 U like not used brand new, but just, you know, surplus device on a fire sale.

(00:18:51):
 And I think, like, looking back, I think the reason that it never really took off was because it wasn't doing what I kind of call real convergence or true convergence. Where what it was, it wasn't taking your computer and putting it in your pocket as much as it was taking a little phone and putting it, you know, and, and just making it bigger, you know, so like phone apps are not really designed to be I mean, they are now on a tablet, they're bigger, but it's, they're mostly designed to be on a small screen, you know, so having them on a big screen, you don't get the same experience. What most people I think, want with convergence is, I want a, I want my desktop to follow me around. I want my same compe apps I use on my desktop to be in my pocket and all my, all of my data too.

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So, fast forward to now for the last basically two years, I've been prototyping a lot of different laptops, which are basically a sort of a, a trade name for a docking station that isn't a laptop shell. So it has no c p o of its own no ram or anything. It's just a battery, a keyboard, a mouse in a screen, and ports that you can connect to your phone. So when you connect to your phone the phone sees it as another display sees a u SB hub that has a keyboard and a mouse in it, and you can type on the keyboard and use the mouse and everything works like you would expect. And it, it makes it, it makes it seem like your phone is now a laptop. You can use it just like one, well, in the case of, you know, before you would use that, if you weren't using it with the Labrum five and you're using the say Android, you would, it be, would be more like using a tablet, I guess, because you would be using the same phone apps.

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In our case, I've been demoing this out because it sort of demonstrates all of the work we've been putting into conversions, which is when I tell people I'm not running mobile Firefox, I'm running desktop Firefox with all of the desktop Firefox plugins I want. And there's no better way to, to demonstrate that than to have your phone. You dock it into the stocking station, it sees both displays, and then I drag Firefox over to the big display, and then you see, oh wait, it morphed into the full size regular desktop Firefox. And the same thing's true for a lot of other applications where if you're used to standard genome applications, it's really kind of neat seeing them on a small screen and then drag them over, like, oh wait, that's what, you know, files looks like when it's on a big screen. So for the last couple of years, I've been trying out different solutions to see, you know, I I've been wanting to offer this on our site for a long time.

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Cause I really think it showcases the best features of the Labrum five. But I wanted to have one that I, I felt good about recommending. So I've tried all kinds of different docs out there, and there's a, there's a, I mean, it's a small segment of, of technology, you know, there's only a handful out there, but all of, all of them the one I kept going back to that I liked the most was made by nex. It's called the Next Stock 360. It's like a little it's, it can, it's one of those 360 degree, it can fold into a tablet kind of devices. And the way that I found myself using it was I would get a little magnetic mount and mounted to the back so that I could dock. When I docked my phone, it was at the same level, at the top of the screen with the top of the screen to the laptop.

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So it turned it into basically two displays. And I used it that way. So I, you know, I've, I decided two years ago now to start an experiment where I said, well, what if I replaced my personal laptop? My work laptop has a couple of other obligations. I can't necessarily try it with that yet, but for my personal laptop, what if I, I took the, if I just replaced my Libra 13 at the time, laptop with a laptop in my Libra five phone, what would that be like? So I tried it out for a month, and it works surprisingly well. The things that I do on my personal computer are, you know, answer emails, browse the web, watch videos, chat, things like that. I'm not doing like video editing or things like that on my personal laptop. And it worked out really great for a month.

(00:22:55):
And so I figured, well, maybe I will try this experiment a little bit longer. And a year later I was still using and, and now two years later, I mean, that's just what I, what I use. I mean, that's my personal computer now is a phone connected to a laptop, and I found it to be just incredibly convenient. So all that to say, after trying out a couple of different solutions, we basically packaged up essentially what I used on a daily basis. The the next DOC 360 a magnetic mount so you can mount it to the back of it. So it's very easy to mount the phone so you can actually use it on your lap. And then a, a shorter u SB cable, because I found like there's, there's a really nice long u SB cable that comes with the next doc, but I found it's much more convenient to have like a little short u s BBC cable that's just long enough to reach up and allows enough space for you to fold it backwards into a tablet if you want to.

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So yeah, so that's what we have. We just put it on the site a couple of weeks ago, and so far there's been a lot of, I mean, there's been surprising amount of interest in that solution, I think because a lot of people, I think a lot of people have the same wish that I did, which is, wouldn't it be so cool if you just had this one computer that you kept with you? And it would, could be a desktop computer, it could be a laptop, it could be a phone, it could be whatever you want. And I think that's, a lot of people want that. And so there's a lot of technologies that have sort of promised that in one way or the other, but because of how they did it either by just making everything mobile only and stretch to fit the screen or whatever, it hasn't really achieved the promise that it was supposed to. But I think now the solution does

Doc Searls (00:24:34):
<Laugh>, we we're furiously talking to each other on a back channel here. I, I actually, the, the topic here is maybe it's relevant, maybe it's not, which is with a magnets, magnets close to the machinery, and I'm always afraid the random iPad or something else, that strong magnet on assists next to a hard drive. You don't have that problem. Obviously, your, your pur, your Purism and your Libra phone are immune to that issue, but never spoke, see about magnets. Might as well ask the question.

Kyle Rankin (00:25:06):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that was a bigger concern back in the day of spinning platters and things just because there's a chance that you might, you might pull on that platter or pull on the reed head or in right head while, while it's spinning. In fact a good friend of my bill Childers had something like that happen to one of his computers one time where he had a, a external, but this is back in the day, he had an external rotating drive that he plugged in via U S B, and he put some sort of magnet on it accidental, not accidentally, but he just sort of put it on their haphazardly. And I joked with him, oh man, you're going to break your, your hard drive. And he just sort of laughed about it, and then later on took the magnet off.

(00:25:47):
And then sure enough, two days later that U s b hard drive was making the click of death. So it had some sort of effect. But no, I've, I've used it on, I don't, there's nothing to my knowledge that the magnet would affect negatively on the Libra five. Like, I've been using this solution for two years now. And it is a strong magnet. It has to be because you're holding something up vertically, you know, and just a little bit of friction other than the magnetic force to hold it, hold it on. But it holds it very securely. So it's a very strong magnet. But yeah, I haven't had any adverse effects on my own phone at least.

Shawn Powers (00:26:21):
Yeah, and I think these days, my goodness, every phone has magnets. I mean, you know, like documention, the iPad, you know, they have magnetic mounts for pencils. I think the new know iPhones have magnet stuff for sticking to either to their battery case or to charging it. It's, it's pretty ubiquitous everywhere now. But again, well, doc and I are kind of old, so, you know, I mean, I, I'm, I still remember putting a magnet too close to my monitor and, you know, having to degos it because the, the c r t started to have the psychedelic rainbow effects on the side <laugh>. So, yeah, I, I, I think that the, the magnet panic that Doc and I both think about when we think, oh, strong magnets get it away from everything I don't know that that's an issue anymore. I guess I, I do, I don't know how that works with credit cards. I guess a super strong magnet if it's still using the magnetic strip, which is also going by the wayside. But, you know, it's still on most cards. I don't know. I, I think that's just a, we're old, so we, we shouldn't have to worry about it. Magnets aren't scary anymore.

Kyle Rankin (00:27:21):
Well, and when you think about how wireless charging works, you know, on a phone now, yeah, it's very strong mag magnetic fields, essentially to my understanding. So

Shawn Powers (00:27:32):
Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:27:33):
<Laugh>,

Shawn Powers (00:27:35):
So it's too long. Didn't read John and Dr. Old

Kyle Rankin (00:27:38):
<Laugh>. 

Doc Searls (00:27:39):
So okay, so, so you sell the Purism laptop and you sell the phone. Is there one bottle of each there multiple models of each? I wanna get a more of an idea of what your product line and you sell the thing too as well, right?

Kyle Rankin (00:27:58):
Yeah. So we have right now we sell we have one laptop in our product line, like a Leap 14. It's a 14 inch laptop. And we sell two, we have two phone models. We have a Libra five and then a Libra five s a, which has made in u s a electronics other than other than where the electronics are manufactured, the, the chip or chip, it's identical and it's running the same o s and everything. We also have like a, a mini computer is that's, you know it would set on your desktop, or some people use them as like myself used them as home servers as well. And then we we have in the past offered a sort of a one U2 U server product that we're looking to, to resume soon. But there's <laugh>, that's another example of where supply chain is kicked in.

(00:28:42):
You have a, you have a product line and like it just disappears from the supply chain. You can't get it anymore. So we've been researching alternatives. And then now the laptop kit, which is, you know, sort of we're promoting it right now to connect just to your phone and turn your phone into a laptop. But it does work with the, with the Libra 14 laptop too, as a second display. If you wanted to bring the secondary display, you can just sort of plug it in over U S B C and use it as a second display. But again, the, for us, at least for starters, we're sort of promoting, this is primarily for the Libra five, just because it, it unlocks all this stuff that the Libra five can do that you may not know that it can do. If you just use it as a phone, for instance.

(00:29:24):
There's all, there's like thousands of applications. It runs all the same, it runs the same OS as our laptop, and it has access to all the same applications. But if you're on a phone screen, only a subset of those applications actually fit on the screen and are touchscreen friendly as far as input goes. But if you connect it to a docking station or a LAP Doc, then you can run all of those other applications full screen, like Gimp or Libra office or any of, there's plenty of other applications that can benefit from a lot more screen real estate. And they're all installable on the Libra five, and they're the same applications that we have on the, on our laptop. But with the laptop, you can, you know, use all these other applications from running directly from your phone that you didn't know that you had access to maybe. So that, I mean, that's the reason we're mostly promoting, at least for now with the leap of five, because I think it's just this great combination.

Shawn Powers (00:30:16):
Now you have you know, you're, you're actually solving the shortcomings and the problems that you have experienced with, you know, like, oh, some things work, some things don't work. So I mean, you're, you're developing the software to go with the hardware so that it does exactly what you want, which is a pretty great way to go about doing it. But are there, you know, there are, there are certainly some things that have caused you issue with your with your experiment, so to speak. Now, in, in my, my comparison here is when for some students, a Chromebook is a perfect choice. You know, if they want something very inexpensive they want to be able to browse the web, run some, you know, web-based apps, and I mean, there's more and more Chrome maps available. So a, a very cheap Chromebook is, is a good solution for some people, but it has things that are prohibitive for certain types of tasks. And what sort of pain points have you found with this convergence idea, whether with the existing doc or with the, you know, the, the system that you're setting up, and are they issues that you think are going to be able to be programmed away, either by you or by the community as it hopefully grows? Or what do you think, what do you think the path forward looks like?

Kyle Rankin (00:31:34):
Yeah, so probably the first one would be getting applications to be mobile friendly or adaptive aware of functional with a small screen and touchscreen friendly. So the Linux desktop forever has not really been focused that much. There's been people throughout that have been trying to move everyone in that direction, but it hasn't up until, up until recently, really a a lot of it was our pushing to get some of this done, and other people within the community that weren't with Purism, also pushing to get this done to make applications that way. So it's better now than it was, say, two years ago when I first started this experiment. But what we would find is there, there were programs that were just almost there, you know, like it would, you could put them on a mobile screen and they would mostly fit, and then you would go to a settings window and then the settings window would bleed over the edge of the screen and maybe you couldn't see it.

(00:32:30):
 There's a lot of little sort of paper cuts like that, that in many cases when we can, we've gone through and refined it. And then with a lot of the new, the fact that a lot of the libraries that we've helped develop to make it easy to develop these kinds of applications are out there. Newer applications are starting to be sort of adaptive by default, which is great. But yeah, that's probably the biggest pain point, is you wanna use an application that you're used to using on a desktop and you launch it and it doesn't fit yet. It, it's sort of, I'd liken it to where we were, as in on the web maybe, you know, 15 years ago when mobile people started browsing the web with a mobile device and websites weren't what they call responsive web design. We call it adaptive, cuz responsive makes you think of speed instead of, you know, fitting the screen.

(00:33:17):
But what we now call responsive web design, which is if you're on a a phone, it knows you're on a phone, or even if it doesn't know, it knows the dimensions of the screen in the website looks good on whatever size screen you happen to have it beyond. Well, the web didn't start out like that, you know, 15 years ago everyone was developing for a sort of a set desktop screen. And so if you were browsing the web on a mobile device, you either ran, I mean, that's one of the reasons for the prevalence of all these sort of mobile apps was it was easier in some cases for people to make an app to use their website instead of making their website adaptive for the phone. We're running into the same thing. I mean, we're at the same place now with desktop applications that as the web was 10, 10, 15 years ago with having apps or having the websites fit.

(00:34:05):
And everyone now, I would say is, you know, everyone would, the web is better now, better designed since everyone's taking into account having websites adapt to whatever screen they happen to be on. And I think desktop applications will be better for factoring that into, but yeah, that's, that's the first pain point I would say is having applications you want to use that haven't yet been updated to fit on the screen. And every, you know, every month or two we're we and other people in the community are helping to update those to make them fit better. I guess one of the oth, I mean, that's the, that's the main one honestly, that I, I hit the most is, and these days not as much just because the applications I've sort of settled into one of the, my selection criteria is whether it's adaptive or not.

(00:34:51):
 And for the most part, the applications I want to use are, the only thing I run into every now and then is even websites, they just sort of assume you're on like a 12 core laptop with 32 gigs of ram, and then there's all all of these ads and crazy things flying by that's using up all your resources that sometimes I've run into that and just having, I guess, having good browser plugins and that turned a lot of that stuff off helps a lot. I've noticed if you tell a website that you're a phone even if you're a desktop, if you tell it you're a phone, you will get a much faster, smoother <LAUGH> website in most cases from, from people.

Shawn Powers (00:35:27):
I, I know Doc has something that he wants to, to tease here, but I did, I had a quick question before we change topics. So I, I, I saw the videos that aunt put on screen while we were talking and the transitions between the phone and the desktop or lap dock or what, whatever the terminology is, is just smooth as butter. Is the stuff that you're doing depending on wheland or does it use XW window still? Or, or what is the what is the underlying system or requirements that you're using or, or is it, does it just not matter? Is it just another desk or just another screen?

Kyle Rankin (00:36:04):
Yeah, so we're using Wayland, but yeah, it's, to answer your question, it's just another screen. So when you plug the phone into the Lap Doc, it, it's just like you plugged it into a u sb docking station with a, a monitor on the other side. It just sees a screen that's a certain size in a keyboard and a mouse and it, and you open up your display settings and you can see it sees two screens and you can decide the orientation and then everything else, just like you were plugging it into a monitor. Now, to make all of that work with the phone, our phone Shell has some knowledge of how to it, it can be, for example, touchscreen aware because the laptop screen is a touchscreen. And so we have a little tweaks application that once you plug it in for the first time, you tell our shell, our phone, shell hey, this is a, not just a display, but it's a touchscreen.

(00:36:51):
And once you do, then it knows, okay, well my touch, if you touch the screen, it'll send events and then you can start using it like a touchscreen and, you know, scroll down and touch your laptop screen, which still feels kind of weird to me. Cause I'm not used to, yeah, I always, always was always worried about smudges, but yeah, so you can just use it like a regular touchscreen. But yeah, it's, it's Wayland, but there's nothing really special about it other than it knows it's a display port display Port u s BBC screen.

Shawn Powers (00:37:18):
Okay, so you're using Wayland, but it isn't necessarily like specific wheland technology.

Kyle Rankin (00:37:25):
Exactly, yeah.

Shawn Powers (00:37:25):
It's such a thing. Okay. Yeah,

Kyle Rankin (00:37:26):
It's just, it sees a screen you plugged in a u a screen over U USS bbc.

Shawn Powers (00:37:29):
Okay, cool.

Doc Searls (00:37:33):
Boy, there's, there's, there's so many <laugh> avenues to, to go down here and I want to go to some things we've been talking about for years. I wanna revisit again around hacker culture. But first I have to tell everybody that this episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures unsecured devices can't access your apps. Collide has some big news. If you're an Okta user, collide can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance. Collide Patch is one of the major holes in zero trust architecture, device compliance. Think about it, your identity provider only lets known devices log into apps. But just because a device is known doesn't mean it's in a secure state. In fact, plenty of the devices in your fleet probably shouldn't be trusted. Maybe they're running on and out of data os or maybe they've got unencrypted credentials lying around.

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(00:39:32):
To sum it up, collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and most importantly, 100% fleet compliance. Visit collide.com/floss to learn more or book a demo. That's K O L I D e.com/floss. So Kyle, you know, when you're, when you were talking about you know, pretty much everything you offer there and that you've got servers, you know, are among in your product line and you run them at home I'm remembering, and I talk about this too often, probably, but, you know, I used to have servers under my desk, you know, my mail server or my web server with Linux Journal. We had a server that was a Linux Journal, one where we'd, I'd put an article on there and Aron job to push in the middle of the night, but I had a static IP address of my own and pretty much all hackers, and I'm not, wasn't one of them, but kind of more of an aperture there.

(00:40:34):
But we, we lived in a world back in the nineties where we had full independence as, as individuals on the internet. And we are about, we're in clouds now and we're, we're one or two steps away. Well, in the meantime, and you've talked about this at, at a, at a, a conference we were at, it's a couple years ago or maybe three or four years ago in, in Bristol about what's, how far we've gotten from that, that original state where we had a sense of autonomy and agency and the rest of it. And I'm wondering what hope there is to get back to it, cuz you're probably close to, closer to providing tools for that than anybody else. I know.

Kyle Rankin (00:41:14):
I think that there is more of an interest over the last even six months of people having more autonomy, more control over the technology they use on the web. There's been more concern recently I've seen of from people about everything is consolidated into one or two services and those services are things that that are controlled by like a single company or something. So for example, there's been an big influx in Tamadon recently because people wanted an alternative that that was to Twitter that was federated. And I think along with that interest, like people started seeing wait, if something is owned by a company or an individual, then they can make decisions regardless of how they may affect customers. There's sort of a cycle often with companies where at the beginning they will create a service online that's very popular cuz the goal is to get as many users as possible early without a plan yet to monetize them.

(00:42:19):
 Then it gets rapid growth and a lot of people start using it and then eventually they need to figure out ways to turn those free users into revenue in some way. And often it's at the expense of the, the user. And I think a lot of people that were embracing all of those services after the heyday that we're talking about hadn't yet experienced, like we experienced in the early nineties, the problems with vendor lockin and the problems, if you have everything hosted and controlled by a single company, that they can just sort of make, make decisions without your consent necessarily or your control and you don't really have an alternative. The there's, because a lot of the people these days that didn't experience that when we did are experiencing experiencing it now, there's been a lot more interest and well, hey, maybe, maybe we should have more open protocols in general for things that we rely on at least, you know, whether it's social media all the different types of social media services.

(00:43:19):
I've seen a lot of people interested in, well maybe we should resume doing blogs or even things like r s s, which, you know, many of us are still u are still using now. But a lot of people sort of abandoned people are saying, well, you know, actually there's, there's something to be said for having a universal service, a universal protocol that you can choose the client that is consuming it and you don't necessarily have to use a, a client that is owned by a particular company to consume this, this data, whatever it is. So yeah, I'm, I have more hope in the last year than I have in the past just because I'm seeing, I'm seeing more interest. I, I felt like what had some of the things that have happened over the last six months with regards to social media, I think had to happen before people would be uncomfortable enough to seek an alternative that maybe isn't as well polished and definitely isn't designed to keep your attention necessarily.

(00:44:18):
Like there's, there's not, I don't think anyone at Mastodon has, has hired a psychologist to figure out how to make the interface more addictive or whatever, you know? They're not, that's not really the focus. It's sort of the focus is sort of the opposite of that, I guess. But yeah, I i, I have more hope now because I'm seeing more interest in people saying, you know, it's not, it's worth having more control over the technology that I, I use because I had to, you know, a lot of people are saying I had to abandon ship and move. I've already had to migrate to something else. And if I'm going to do that, I wanna migrate to something that I have more say over

Shawn Powers (00:44:56):
And something that you could migrate instead of, you know, it's not your data. So yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah, I I I, I think I, I see also, and it doesn't even have to be necessarily servers under desks. I think it just has to be not tied to specific companies where other oops, where stuff is owned by somebody and your data is owned by somebody else. You know, it can be just an open protocol. I, I think, you know, and that's, that's what you were saying. I I, I know that you weren't saying any, anything other than that, but I mean, yeah, like personally I host a lot of stuff, you know, at a, I call it my micro data center at my farm where I have, you know, commercial fiber, but I, we don't have to have that in order to have a, a healthier, more distributed, marketable way to handle our data.

Kyle Rankin (00:45:46):
Yeah. And the, I think the standard of could you host it under your desk? If the answer is yes, then it's, it's not so much whether you're hosting it under your desk, but whether you could, if you, if you had the capability and chose to, could you, and if the answer is that you could, then you have an open protocol that you don't have to host under your desk, there's, there will be plenty of other providers that if they see a market reason to provide it, they will do that. I mean, that, that goes for email. I mean, some people host their own email, plenty of people do not, but the fact that it's an open standard means you have a choice. And there's all kinds of providers out there offering that choice. The same thing, for example, WordPress, you know, people who want to use that as for website development can host throne instance, or they can use one of the, already the hosting environments that other providers offer and just sort of in, there's competition in that space because of that. And also means you can import, you can take your data from your hosted at your own instance and move it to a hosted instance if you need more resources or whatever, or vice versa, if you want to take it in house yeah, that's the benefit. It's, it's not really about hosting it yourself, it's more just one of the tests for this is could you host it yourself? And if you had to know how and, and hardware, and if so, then you're, hey, we're looking at a open protocol.

Doc Searls (00:47:07):
So I'm, I'm wondering is this sort of a more general version of or angle on that same broad topic of where is agriculture now in general and how has it changed over the years? Because agriculture way back was, you're doing everything on your desk and you're doing everything in your basement or wherever else it is. And you were, you were saying a show was saying too, you move a lot of stuff into the, into clouds, but what's it about now? And, and because, and especially how you're seeing people using your gear that you're selling them. I don't know if you have any much of a window into what happens to your stuff after it's been sold, cuz I know you don't inspire on people and a lot of other people do. Companies do. Where's it at

Kyle Rankin (00:47:55):
Now? Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of, yeah, a lot of our own experience would just be anecdotal from people who, who choose to, to contact us later and tell us how they're using the products. I have some sense just from support requests that I've helped with over the years, sort of where some of our customers are. But y so as far as, we'll, I'll, I'll take a step back and talk about hacker culture to begin with. So I, right now I would say hacker culture as a is, is much, much, much more diverse than it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago, because technology is far more accessible. Technology these days is part of every single person's life when they, you know, if they're in the, in the past it might be, if you want to go into certain businesses, you may need to then learn how to use a computer and get some level of computer literacy.

(00:48:40):
But, you know, 30 years ago that wasn't necessarily a given. And so people who were focused on computer programming and that sort of thing were a subset of the population just because it wasn't a ubiquitous thing. But now everyone grows up using technology and they're exposed to it constantly. And technology as a result is way more accessible than it was 30 years ago when the only people using a particular technology were the geeks that were writing that software, for instance. Now there's an assumption that you need to have things that are friendly to use, that are convenient and are accessible to everybody. And so the culture's reflecting that now, you know, to the point that, you know, computer programming is now almost is like shop class in the 1970s where there's this assumption that you need to go to, you need to take your computer programming class in high school so that you have at least an option for a, a job when you get out of school.

(00:49:32):
You know whether that will bear out over the long term, who knows? But, but that's at least where we are today, where, you know, your average, your average student in whatever school is now being exposed to computer literacy, not just using a computer, but writing software for it because it's so much more accessible. And I think that's what's caused, and that was part of my talk in Bristol, was the culture clash that this has, has caused, because traditionally you have a, a very, you know, traditionally geeky, nerdy culture because you kind of had to be, you had to have some of those attributes in a certain level of, of aversion to socializing, to, to be to get into computer programming in particular, a lot of this technology many years ago. That's not true anymore. So you have sort of, that culture still exists and it's has been involved in free software, for instance, forever, but there's also just more popular culture because all of this stuff is now mainstream.

(00:50:33):
I mean, your average person now is talking about what's going on on the internet, what's going on with technology and writing in some cases, writing software and learning to do it in high school or middle school, elementary school even in some cases. So that culture is more of just sort of like the, the, the average culture I liken it to, and, and the clash is a result of, I think I likened it, I think in the talk to some, some geeks throwing a d and d party and the word gets out that there's this really cool party at this person's house and then all of the, everyone else in high school all the jocks show up and turn it into a kegar. And then there's this conflict. And I think that we are still seeing that conflict sort of bear out today in the free software community. But I think in the tech community at large, where everyone, everyone just the like across the spectrum are involved in technology now, and there's it's, it's a culture clash just because they're, they all come from different backgrounds and have different expectations.

Shawn Powers (00:51:33):
That's interesting. And using you personally as an example, I mean, the, the last time we were at a conference together, you were wearing a pirate t-shirt and you know, you were, you were considered pretty, you know, cutting edge hacker life. Now you are the president of a company. I mean, that's, it's become part of just standard culture, like, like you said. And so is there, I mean, that, that does mean that since standard culture is now including what used to be specialized, nerdy geekdom for lack of buzzwords if that's part of the standard culture, is there now a fringe that has kind of taken over as that subset? And I, I don't expect for you to be able to identify that even, because, you know, I mean, you're now the president of a company, right? But I'm curious, I mean, there must be some what happens at DEF com, right? What happens at DEFCON now, I guess is my question, because that, that used to be the, the kind of people that you more than me were <laugh>, you know, back in, you know, a decade or two ago. Is there still that, that fringe group that is the, the elite nerds, or has culture just become that?

Kyle Rankin (00:52:52):
I think there's definitely, like that culture remains. There's still, I mean, most of those people are still around <laugh>, you know? Right. They, they, and they still have the same sensibilities for the most part that they did in the past. And that, and that even among younger people who are entering into this, this field or entering into this community, I think there are still people that are like that for sure. It's more, it's more of an and than an or or whatever. There's still a fringe of people that are super nerdy, super geeky socially awkward and, you know, and have issues with talking to people. I mean, it took me forever to go to a conference and be able to go to a room where I didn't already know people and dare to strike up a conversation. I mean, this is an achievement over the last like five years maybe.

(00:53:35):
 Where I realized I could do that finally. And before that it was difficult. And a lot of people are still in that boat. I think it's just, it, even if you go to Defcon, there will be all of those people who still have like a punk rock aesthetic and all of that. But then you also have all of these other people that just look like everybody else in the world which I think is really cool where you just have everybody that's involved in and they're like, yeah, yeah. What are you, where are you involved in? Yeah. I'm just like, I'm hacking cars right now, <laugh>, or, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm picking, I'm learning how to pick locks and, you know, just your average people now because it's, again, technology is part of everyone's life now. You didn't have to, you didn't have to have a special interest to get a computer or, you know, and use a computer and, and use technology. It's just sort of baked into society now.

Doc Searls (00:54:22):
So we're getting down toward the end of the show and this is where we ask, is there any questions that we haven't asked that you'd like us to have asked?

Kyle Rankin (00:54:33):
Hmm. I mean, not really. I really enjoyed the conversation. I, I really liked, I liked going back to that, that Bristol talk in particular. Cuz I,

Doc Searls (00:54:41):
I that's a great talk. It was a great

Kyle Rankin (00:54:43):
Talk. I know. Thank you. Yeah, we hadn't thought

Doc Searls (00:54:44):
About that. Brit still online. We should put it in the show notes cuz it was good.

Shawn Powers (00:54:47):
Are there questions that we asked you wish we hadn't? No, just kidding.

Doc Searls (00:54:50):
<Laugh> <laugh>. We'd rather we hadn't asked. Well here's, here's one that was like, I'm guessing it was, it was pre pandemic, so I guess it was 19, something like that. Eight 18 or 19. So like four or five years ago four or five years from now, where are we at? Where, where is Purism at? Have you added other things to the product line? What, because you're in a, you're in a manufacturing business, you've got a fairly stable kind of client base, I imagine, but you wanna grow. Wait, where's it going? Where's the Yeah, the field going as it were.

Kyle Rankin (00:55:26):
I mean, if I'm, if I'm going, if I'm going by the past couple of years and also where, you know, kind of what we're trying to build toward and the changes like that we've incrementally made, I think I see us in let's say five years. Within the next five years. I mean, we trying to have, bring more and more production. I mean, we've been trying for a while to do, do more in the US and do more in our in, in facilities in the US as we can because there's a lot of benefits to that just from a supply chain standpoint, having things having manufacturing right next to fulfillment so you don't have to ship things across the country or across the world from one factory to another is, is pretty beneficial for a lot of reasons. I see us wanting to do more of that.

(00:56:12):
I'm, I'm interested to see where some of these alternative architectures go, CPU architectures go, you know arm and Risk five and a and a lot of others like that. They're not, in many cases, they're just now sort of on the cusp of being able to offer a counterpart with enough resources. I mean, we've seen Apple go down that road recently where they, where they've now have a, again, <laugh> have an alternative to Intel that is working on a, in a desktop form factor, like in a laptop form factor. I would like this, I would like to see US have something like that, but that is free every step of the way when we try to do it. When we do a new product, our goal is to make it more free than the previous iteration whenever possible. And sometimes that's, it's, it's incredibly challenging because so much of, in, in particular in hardware, there's this assumption that everything will be closed.

(00:57:11):
 And if it's open, it's sort of locked in to like a particular kernel version. For instance, like a lot of arm devices for instance, it, it sort of works. There's some proprietary drivers, but you have to stick with this kernel version for the life of the product and then it's disposable. So I guess in five years I'd like to see us, of course have a wide product line similar to what we do now. I would like to see us expand our services offerings more. I think we've talked about the benefit of having open standards and I, I would like to see us offer more of those kinds of services. We all, we already offer some like a, like a social, social media, like a Mastodon instance and chat and things like that. I would like to see us do more of those just so that people have an alternative that they can choose that is supported if they don't wanna host it themselves.

(00:57:57):
If they do, then they can of course host it themselves to, and in fact, one of the things that we've wanted to do that we just haven't been able to get the resources together to do it, is to make all of the services that we offer also have very simple recipes. So someone could host it themselves if they chose to, if they wanted to go to the effort. I, we wanna sort of help enable people to do that, that want that because it's, you know, our goal has never been to lock people in to what we're doing. You know, I've spent so much time thinking about security measures in the context of, well, if I do it this way, that's sort of the industry standard way. That means that I'm in empiricism or holding their keys, you know, for them. And they have to come to us for permission for things and I never really like that.

(00:58:39):
And so I end up having to reject a lot of that. And so same goes for services. You know, we, if you want us to host the service for you, that's great, but we would love for you to have the capability to do it yourself too. So yeah, I guess, I guess for the future I would love to see more more like convergence I guess. Cuz that's just what I'm all about right now. I love the, the ability to have a single device that you, that just, you follows you everywhere and has all of your data on it and has all of your, you know, all of your apps and everything's very convenient. I'd like to see us do more with that, I guess. And then have future products ultimately that possibly on architectures or, or on, you know, intel architectures that are freer. They're starting to open up some of their stuff as well. But on architectures that allow us to have, you know, full free software both on software drivers and the firmware.

Doc Searls (00:59:33):
Well, that's great. And and we are in fact now out of time. Last two questions quick and easy to answer. And you've been here before, and you have answered this before, but why not It's remedial. Your favorite text editor in scripting language.

Kyle Rankin (00:59:48):
All right, so I'm a, I'm a long-term, long-time vi person. I use VI and Vim in particular. Everything I do is based on those key bindings. I climbed a learning curve forever ago and never looking back. All of my books and all of my magazine articles are written in them first before they go into whatever the layout program that the publisher uses. So that's all done in them. So that's that. What was the second one? The

Doc Searls (01:00:13):
Scripting, scripting,

Kyle Rankin (01:00:13):
Scripting language. If you were to ask me 10, 15 years ago, it would be Pearl, but you know, that's, that's fallen out of favor these days. That just sort of shows my age. So honestly, honestly, a lot of I do a lot in Bash really like my, I do tons of stuff in Bash. In fact, a lot of Pure Boot, which is our sec, like security, like camper resistant boot firmware, the user space of that, a lot of the heavy lifting is done with Bash, which maybe not a lot of people realize, but a lot of it is Bash, which is kind of interesting.

Doc Searls (01:00:43):
And for, for those who wanna know more about Bash, we had Brian Fox on the show sometime in the last year. Good show. Good show for that too. Bash gets a lot of, a lot of love, actually. That's not, you're not the only one to answer that. So this has been great having you on the show, Kyle and I, and thank you for kind of coming in. We had to, we had a, a bit of a scheduled juggle that we had to do and, and and needed somebody today and I knew you were good and you paid off, so thanks a lot for being here.

Kyle Rankin (01:01:12):
Oh, well it's been my pleasure. Thank you for, for inviting me.

Doc Searls (01:01:17):
So Shawn <laugh>. Yeah, that was good. We of course we expected that <laugh>.

Shawn Powers (01:01:23):
Yeah, I mean, you know, Kyle's a good friend of mine too, so

Doc Searls (01:01:27):
This was a, yeah, he's a friend. It

Shawn Powers (01:01:28):
Was pretty easy to, to check. It was, it's kind of hard not to maybe get too friendly, like pick on him about stuff, you know, that that might not be appropriate if I'm picking on him for like his posing in his pirate shirt and I mean, that was his profile pick for the longest time, but now he's like the president of a company, I guess we all grew up, but no, Kyle's great. He's, you know, something that you, you might not, might not be able to tell, but he's one of the, if not the most intelligent and smart people that I know. And he comes across as really humble, which is, which is a credit to him because I do system administration for a living and I often use Kyle's books if I have to figure something out because he's just, yeah, he's, he's incredible. So

Doc Searls (01:02:18):
Happy to those familiar with Dune. He is a minta, you know, the Minta is like the smart guy you went to for, you know, to figure some stuff out or, you know, like Dr. Spock may be in a way and in the Star Trek series, but the Minta I think is closer to it. Yeah, no, he is super smart and, and pretty much pick a topic and, and he'll be able to hold forth on it and yeah,

Shawn Powers (01:02:41):
We didn't get to talk about, I mean, weaving. He is a, he has a loom. He, I mean, he just does everything

Doc Searls (01:02:48):
<Laugh>. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, well next time we'll get, we'll get to, we, we'll get to that too. So, so what do you got to plug?

Shawn Powers (01:02:57):
Oh, I, not too much. I mean, you mentioned Bash, so if you go to my YouTube channel, there's a, there's a bash playlist there to learn some bash stuff if you're interested in that. And yeah, I've just been been focusing on, oh, there's me, I'm right on the screen. Yeah, <laugh>. Oh, I don't have green hair. That's, it's been a while. So yeah, I guess that's it. Just my YouTube channel and that kind of stuff. You've

Doc Searls (01:03:21):
Kind of got brown side or blonde sidewalls going on there over here?

Shawn Powers (01:03:25):
Yeah, I

Doc Searls (01:03:26):
Get seat upside down. Like it used Easter rig, you know

Shawn Powers (01:03:29):
It's true, like somebody dipped me and then didn't get, get my head under far enough. I don't know if that says about whoever dipped me was myself, but yeah, I just looking to get the top and it kind of got down for

Doc Searls (01:03:41):
Do you do it yourself or did, did, did, do you have salon help? To to get that,

Shawn Powers (01:03:47):
This, this most recent time I did myself. My daughter, the one who I, you know, originally dye my hair to support has done it the past few times. Like she bleached it out and then made it green. But this time I, I did the, the bleaching in the greening myself, which explains the lack of

Doc Searls (01:04:04):
<Laugh> of uniformity. It does not look like a professional job. <Laugh>, I

Shawn Powers (01:04:08):
Suppose. Very few things in my life look professional,

Doc Searls (01:04:10):
So <laugh> Well, your background there does and yeah, actually a messy background. You don't have one though, but yeah. Well, this be great. And so next week we have Tim Poser and Brian David coming back. We were on radio and the legacy of radio and audio and a lot of interesting stuff. We had a very long list of things we wanted to cover. This is back in December and November and

Shawn Powers (01:04:39):
Yeah, I was the co-host and I was you,

Doc Searls (01:04:40):
Your co-host for that. So, so there we are. And, and and we couldn't get through all of it and so we said, gotta come back. And so they are, they're coming back next week, so, so that'll be, that'll be the topic then. So we will see you then next week. This is, I'm Drss Flo Weekly. See you then.

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:56):
Hey, we should talk Linux. See you operating system that runs the internet. Watch your game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. Then you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning ciit man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club twit exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit.tv/club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.