Episode 19 Transcript
Tod Kurt Welcome to The Bootloader, I’m Tod Kurt.
Paul Cutler And I’m Paul Cutler. We’re happy to be joined today by Andy Piper. Andy’s a technologist, maker, and open source advocate with a passion for community. He’s currently head of communications at Mastodon and a longtime supporter of the Fediverse. Outside of work, he’s a pen plotter, artist, hardware hacker, and co-host of the long running weekly tech podcast, Games@Work.biz. Andy, welcome to the show.
Andy Piper Thanks very much. to meet you both online in a podcast recording session. I know we’ve both all been following one another for quite a long time. And I’m a big fan of both this show and the CircuitPython show as well, Paul. So I appreciate what you both bring to both the Fediverse and also to the makerspace. It’s a really fun community we have.
Paul Cutler
- Oh, thanks for the kind words. - Thanks. - So the show works like this. We’ve each brought two things to share, which we’ll chat about for a few minutes, but no more than about five. Andy, what’s the first one you brought us?
Andy Piper So maybe it’s just me and I’m a techie, I’m always interested in playing with new stuff, but it feels to me right now that a lot of people, lot more people are starting to tinker with running their own home labs. So usually clustered containerized virtual machines for hosting web apps on hardware and home networks. And I learned Linux back in the day, so 20 years plus ago by taking an x86 machine, putting Linux on it. And over time, I kind of have stopped doing that. I migrated stuff to the cloud. It’s too much effort. But right now, I’m back in the game, trying to build stuff and play with things again. So I’m running something called Proxmox on a mini PC to run a number of different containerized apps. And these are complemented by a few other bits and pieces. I’ve got some other Raspberry Pis and my NAS at home. My pick is not Proxmox specifically, But it’s a really nice piece of software that I came across in the last few weeks that you can self-host, that lets you quickly create a customized dashboard for anything you want, really. So the app is called Glance. You can find that on GitHub at Glance app. And I learned about it because it started showing up on Hacker News and Lobsters, which are a couple of daily news sites I look at on the tech side. And it got a load of new attention as a result. It usually happens if it shoots to the top of one of those sites that’s going to get a load more visitors. So Glance is a pretty simple, nice and clean web app. You configure it on the server via a text file, which is in the YAML format. And it has a number of built-in and also community-contributed widgets that let you build dashboards, fairly classic layouts, either a single page or some sidebars. Could be everything from the weather, the news, from different sites or RSS feeds, video channels, now playing information, system data, the status of your favorite Minecraft server, and trending links on Mastodon or Blue Sky. In fact, after I came across it, somebody from the community contributed the trending links on Mastodon widget. It’s fully and easily themable using just regular CSS. It works really nicely on mobile, as well as on desktop. And I know there are some alternatives around and they’ve been around for a long time for building dashboards for home labs. But Glance is working really great for me. It’s been really nice as well to watch new contributors discover this project and support it and not completely try and overwhelm the maintainer. They’ve been really helpful and friendly. I just wanted to talk about that.
Paul Cutler
That’s pretty cool. Like you, I started with Linux 20 some years ago as well. I still know the bare minimum of containerized apps using Docker and stuff. I’ve got a Synology NAS and I’ve got half a dozen VMs running there, but it’s not something I play with a lot. I came across an app called Heimdall five or six years ago that does something very similar to Glance. And after you brought Glance to the table, I actually went back and looked and it’s still actively developed. But I think I’m going to do what you’re doing and give Glance a try, especially with the Mastodon integration that you mentioned. I kind of like that idea.
Tod Kurt Yeah, this is this is like most of the dashboard stuff I’ve seen has been very sort of system administrator focused. Like a lot of like, oh, here’s the uptime of the server, here’s the throughput of this network router. This one is very focused, it seems to me, on like human information, like, you know, Reddit feeds, weather, mastodon, whatever, you know? And that’s pretty cool. It’s like, I love the idea of having a local version of that. You could run it on your local LAN-based computer or maybe on some Docker image somewhere in the cloud somewhere that you can get to anywhere in the world or whatever. So yeah, I think I might play with this. This is a looks pretty, it looks pretty clean, pretty easy to configure just a YAML file.
Andy Piper
Yeah, it’s the kind of thing that I kind of want as my start page in my browser as well, just to sort of like put a bunch of my, you know, regularly visited links and sites and tools on the on one of the pages and just have a little dashboard to when I start my browser. So yeah, it’s a really nice piece of software, I think.
Paul Cutler
Well, your timing is great too, because I just switched browsers and I’m using Vivaldi now and I like it, but I was just thinking I could use a new start page and I think this is gonna be the perfect Oh, yeah, so your start page.
Tod Kurt Yeah, that’s a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and hey, what do you mean? You’re just to have like a bunch of servers in your house. What am I gonna do with these Raspberry Pi’s? Intel and Intel NUCs that I have sitting around All right, Tod, what did you bring us so this is about sound fonts general MIDI and a $50 mini rompler So what’s a rompler? So we all know what MIDI is. It’s a serial protocol for transmitting musical performance info. It’s basically digital sheet music. But it’s kind of worse than sheet music because MIDI doesn’t contain anything describing what the notes should sound like. It’s just like play a G# on channel one. A G# on what? A piano, a guitar, a timbale? Not long after MIDI was created, the General MIDI standard, like salute the General MIDI, was created and all it is is a document that says for program channel 2 you should play an electric piano for program change 33 play acoustic bass and so it’s a list of instrument names and their associated program change numbers that you should send over midi to switch to that sound of course that kind of just moves the problem down the road of what kind of electric bass or acoustic bass what kind of electric piano There’s the what the heck is a seashore effect, which is program change 123 And so there have been many different sense in the world that have implemented general MIDI and they all sound a little different Some of the really low-cost ones sound really crappy some of the really expensive ones that have huge multi sampled boss and or for pianos sound amazing for their Grand piano sound and so it so you can never really guarantee you your performance that you’ve created and sent out to someone That the person will get the same idea of what you’re trying to get across So a few years after general MIDI came out This file format called sound fonts was created and sound fonts is essentially just a zip file of wave files It’s a bit more complex than that because it actually contains like some synthesizer information about like how to structure and how to loop the the sample you have but it’s essentially just a collection of Sounds and they can be tailored to whatever you want So you couldn’t theory ship both the general MIDI file of your performance and the sound font to exactly recreate what your intent was. And the really cool things is that sound fonts have been around for like 30 years, something like that. And there’ve been all these open source sound fonts that you can just download. Like one of the ones I just learned is called the Salamander Grand Piano, which is a 1.2 gigabyte multi-sampled Yamaha Grand Piano. It’s like they sampled every key at multiple velocity levels. and it’s under a Creative Commons license. So you can just use it for your own performances. And so that’s all sort of prologue. What I’m really interested in is that there’s an open source software synthesizer called FluidSynth for Linux, Mac OS. It’s basically just a command line tool and it works for sound fonts. It’s basically a sound font player. It’s got APIs in C, Python, Ruby,.NET, a bunch of other languages. And I found this out because on the Floyd Steinberg YouTube channel, He demoed this little $50 mini rompler. Rompler is a sort of term of art in the music space for things that play samples but can’t sample themselves. So like basically a sound font player. But this $50 rompler is made from a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pimeroni i2s DAC hat, running a little Python script that he wrote that takes in MIDI and sends that information to FluidSynth and then provides a little UI via the buttons and screen that’s on the Pimeroni Pirate Audio Hat. And so you get this little box, it’s smaller than a deck of cards, has a little screen with buttons, and it can play synths or play samples that sound better than a lot of these synths that cost thousands of dollars. Because you can just load up the coolest new sound font you found and put it on there. Or you could load in the chip tune sound font that makes all the general MIDI sounds sound like something out of a Nintendo. (laughs) And so I built one of these a couple days ago, and his script is pretty early days. It’s really small, it’s like a 30-line Python script, but it works. Here’s the piano sound. That’s one of the just generic sound fonts. It’s not even a special one, and it sounds great. That’s one avenue I’ve been playing with. It’s like, “Oh, I can use some of my almost circuit Python-based Python knowledge to do real Python on a Raspberry Pi.” [LAUGHTER] But then also, I found this independently because I was playing around with this command line tool called SF2 Extract that lets you poke into an SF2 file and pull out those WAV files as WAV files and use them. And since CircuitPython can play WAV files, I’m like, ooh, SF2 files provide a rich garden of WAV files I can use with CircuitPython. (laughs) And so that’s what I’m gonna be playing with. I don’t know if we’ll ever get a CircuitPython sound font player, but maybe, you know, in the future. - So FluidSynth is pretty interesting. It doesn’t come with a UI. It’s just really a back-end. » Yeah, it’s totally just a back-end.
Andy Piper
I’ve just found that there’s a package called QSynth that you can install to give a QT UI on top of FluidSynth. » Oh, right on. » Pretty much like a rack mount synth type thing.
Tod Kurt
It’s very interesting. These sound font players, they don’t really have much UI because they’re all general MIDI responders. You just send it the general MIDI commands from your MIDI keyboard or whatever. Their UIs are usually pretty minimal, which as someone who likes knobs and buttons on a synthesizer, I find
Andy Piper a little not offensive, but a little questionable. » I’m just looking at a little. I’m looking at a dashboard of knobs and buttons on my screen now that would let me do some of those things, but I don’t have the keys to press to make the noises.
Tod Kurt
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Cutler
I recommend checking out the video. It’s about 10 minutes long for the Rompler specifically. And it’s pretty neat. And when you actually see it in action with the buttons in the screen and you see how small it really is, that was pretty darn cool. - Yeah,
Tod Kurt I’ve not played much with the Raspberry Pi zeros because they were always so painfully slow compared to even just a normal Raspberry Pi. But this was like the impetus for like, okay, I’ll deal with the slowness of it because like, ooh, once it’s running, it doesn’t matter how fast the shell response is because it’s just running a program. - That makes a lot of sense. - All right, Paul, what’s your next one for this week?
Paul Cutler
- My first item doesn’t sound that exciting, but I thought it was kind of cool. It’s about automatic filament detection for 3D printers. OpenSpool and SpoolEase are two open source projects with a similar goal, to provide automatic filament detection for your 3D printer. For example, Bambu Labs Filament includes an NFC tag that allows Bambu Slicer or Orca Slicer to get information about the filament that is being loaded, including the color, the temperature to print it at, the brand, the type of filament, such as PLA and PETG, and that kind of a thing. And with OpenSpool, it goes both ways. You can read Bambu filament details for other 3D printers as well. Both projects are similar, while you’ll need to buy some components, including an ESP32 for OpenSpool and an ESP32-S3 for SpoolEase, along with an NFC reader and some other miscellaneous parts and some NFC stickers. Both projects have a complete bill of materials for you to build the project. You build the NFC tag reader with those parts, 3D print the case for it. OpenSpool does sell a kit on Tindy with everything you need fully assembled for just over 60 bucks. Once built, you could either create your own NFC tags and program each tag with your filament settings or use RFID-enabled filament from Creality or Bambu, for example. Just scan the RFID tag and your filament settings automatically loaded into your slicer. And this isn’t just for Bambu Labs printers. Open Spools roadmap has future integration planned for Octoprint, Prusa Connect, Clipper and Moonraker and more. If you have lots of filament and you want to save a little time on loading new filaments in your printer, maybe check out one of these projects and pick up the
Andy Piper parts. I actually have the Open Spool sitting next to my Bambu X1C. Having said that, I haven’t used it very much yet. and because of the changes that Bambu have announced around their firmware, I’ve not upgraded to the one which is going to lock me out. I’m waiting on the X1 Expander board that was a Kickstarter to see where that goes in the future. When I was debating about what pics to bring to the show, I was going to talk about the new Bambu printer, but decided because I’ve got a love-hate slash tension thing going on with Bambu, I really like my printer, but I love open source more. Right. So I’m excited by OpenSpool. I hadn’t come across OpenEase, and I hope that projects like this can encourage big companies to consider the community a lot more and what they can actually bring and help to improve outside of the direct product that you buy. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for the ecosystem there.
Paul Cutler Bambu, when they first announced the firmware changes, the developer of OpenSpool, I believe, posted a Reddit thread saying, “Hey, we might be one of the reasons why they’re changing their firmware.” Right, ‘cause you’re threatening Bambu’s filament business with something like OpenSpool. ‘Cause now you can make your own RFID-enabled filaments. So interesting, and I’m with you. I have a love-hate relationship with my Bambu now, where I was recommending it to everyone over the last year or two, but with these changes,
Tod Kurt I’ve kind of got a wait-and-see approach. - Yeah, I’m still on a pretty old Prusa, and I was on the verge of getting the Bambu this like news came out and I’m like, God dang it, because I have I have totally printed things with the wrong filament selected in the slicer and I was like, oops, you know, why is it coming out crap? And I was looking forward to like, buying the Bambu filament, just just purely for the auto setting capability. I love that OpenSpool is an alternative. I might actually hook this up for my printer, even though it’s on its last legs, I think.
Andy Piper All right, Andy, what’s your next one for us? I’ve just said that I’m a big fan of open source and open source hardware and of course that’s one of the reasons why I love this show. I’m also really looking forward to the Open Source Hardware Association summit that’s going to be in Edinburgh in my side of the pond this year. I know the Open Source Hardware Association are looking for additional supporters and sponsors. If you’re able to help out, then go take a look at their website. That’s coming up in May. I’ve been finding myself using Linux and my Framework 13 a lot more as my daily driver. I have Macs and I occasionally use Windows. I have had a role in developer relations up until recently where I’ve always needed to switch between platforms to try things out for people. One company I really want to shout out to though is MNT Research, and they’re out of Germany. MNT have been making some laptops under this brand called Reform for a number of years and they are completely open to the greatest extent they can make them. And what I mean by that is occasionally there’ll be some kind of proprietary blob, you know, Wi-Fi driver or something that you need to load in. They go as far as possible to find open components. They have a whole ethos starting from designing using FreeCAD and KiCAD for the hardware, pre-installing Debian for as much open source, non-commercial software as possible. And they use CrowdSupply, which is kind of an open hardware version of Kickstarter to crowdfund each model. The machines are all hand-assembled by real humans and tested by them in Berlin before they ship them out. And yesterday, actually, as we record this, MNT also published a new page on their website that goes into more detail about their philosophy, calling out that they build on and share back to the open source community, which I absolutely love. And they have an active community on IRC and in their discourse forum and in the Fediverse. So top marks from me across the board there. The actual pick though, is the MNT Pocket Reform laptop, which I’ve been loving as kind of a smaller footprint portable device. It’s about the size of an A5 sheet of paper or sort of half letter size paper. It’s more chunky than your average laptop. It’s not this super slim, you know, iPad Svelte device. And the reason for that is that it’s completely user serviceable. you can unscrew the panels on the top side, the back of the screen, and on the bottom side underneath the keyboard, and actually access all of the parts. You can pull out and replace the processor board, the memory, the Wi-Fi board. You can access the batteries underneath the keyboard. Another really interesting thing here is that the system controller is an RP2040, and that means it’s possible to integrate additional sensors. So one other user has already added a pair of Adafruit triple-axis accelerometers, one in the lid and one in the base, to essentially come up with a lid closure detection mechanism. So when the two are level, it thinks that the lid is closed and will switch things off, for example. And that was just using the quick connector. So it’s super easy to do things. You don’t have to sort of go soldering here. There’s another RP2040 for the keyboard controller. You can choose from the CPU modules. and the whole thing is modular and upgradable. The thing I’m very excited about currently is that some folks have been laser engraving and sharing designs for their replacement top panels. So I really definitely want to sort of get some nice cosmetics for mine. So MNT Research really wants users to buy into their ethos and philosophy and approach, and you do pay more for that. But I want to really give a shout out to the company and also to the community. I’ve written a couple of posts about my journey with the pocket reform on my blog. And I recommend others take a look and see if they could be a fit
Paul Cutler for them. - So you’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately. Do you find yourself taking the pocket reform with you as opposed to your framework?
Andy Piper
- So what happened this year was I went to FOSDEM, the free and open source conference in Brussels in the end of January. And I took, I didn’t wanna take my Mac with me, didn’t feel very open source friendly. So I took my framework and I took my pocket reform. And the first day I used my Pocket Reform exclusively, I did have a problem, and I think it was to do with my power charger, my UK power charger on EU power and shorts and things happened. So I had to return it to get it fixed under warranty. But I do love it as a travel machine. It really sits in a satchel really easily. It feels a bit heavy, again, if you compare it to sort of a super slim iPad type laptops you can get sometimes. But I do love it. It’s an acquired taste. It’s got a smaller screen, and that means that it’s not super well adapted to use its screen for heavy GUIs. So I find myself using a lot more text mode apps on there. You can, of course, plug it into an external display and just go full desktop and do whatever you want. but when I’m using it, I typically am using it for sort of text editing, coding, systems management type stuff. It’s really fun.
Paul Cutler
- As an old GNOME developer, it warmed my heart a little bit to see that it’s shipped with GNOME by default and the Debian distribution. - Yeah, I’m really
Tod Kurt interested. I’ve, on my electronics workbench here, I often have my laptop, but I’ve got, I like the bigger laptop, the 15 inch laptop, and it’s a little bit ungainly, and having something as small as the MNT Reform, it would fit much better on the bench like because I need to have a terminal window up into some serial gizmo and do some debugging. Yes, I think this might be a good bench top little computer.
Andy Piper
They have a full-size reform and they just announced the reform next, which is their next generation of that, which I think they’ve moved from a trackball in the first one to a trackpad on the second generation of the full-size laptop. But this one is, again, it’s a small device, it’s I think it’s about seven, eight inches. And yeah, I really love it. So I wanted to give him a shout
Tod Kurt out. - Yeah, what other laptop can you get nowadays with a trackball? That’s awesome. - Exactly. (laughing) - All right, Tod, what’s your second one for us? - I’m gonna talk about the DIYR design lamps and speakers and fans. So there’s a website called DIYR, D-I-Y-E-R, that showcases high design lamps, speakers, and fans that evoke a trendy minimalism of Scandinavian designs like Ikea. But DIYR is different. It stands for DIYR, stands for Do It Yourself Revolution. Each product they show is actually essentially construction instructions on how to build it. It’s got STL files for the 3D printable parts. It says which electrical components to buy, what tools you need, how to start it all, and assemble it together. The instructions are understandable and diagrams are very clear. They’re very IKEA-esque to me. And the results look like these high design home wear products you’d find at a furniture store. One of the ones, the examples I like is called BTNM or button medium, I think. It’s a USB-C or battery powered desk light that has an embedded capacitive touch switch. So you just like kind of wave your hand near it and it’ll turn on and off. And their designs are all really modular, so the BTNM head can go on their STR HNG structure hinge, which is their sort of desktop lamp arm, or it can go on their STR WAL structure wall, which is a wall mount, sort of this graceful arc that you attach to the wall. And these lamps aren’t like these NeoPixel lamps you see on Thingiverse. These lamps use the high power LED modules that output 400 lumens or more with a high CRI color rendition so you actually look good under them. They’re like real lamps and we can build them ourselves. And all the designs are Creative Commons CC, sorry, by NC-SA. So it’s a non-commercial, feel free to share and share alike, that allows transformation. So one of the things I was worried about is that some of the smaller lamp heads have a different LED module that I think is not available currently, but there’s a bunch of other LED modules that are out there. So you can take the STLs and modify them a little bit. It looks really fun. I want to try building some of these because it’s totally the way I think of it. It’s like, “Oh, let’s get the touch sensor module and the battery power module, the LED module, solder them together, put them in a 3D printed enclosure,” and it just happens to be a 3D printed enclosure by a design person who actually knows how things look good. Yeah, go check it out. The website’s a little bit designy, but once you get into the instructions for the parts, it’s actually pretty clear. And that’s diyr.dev. So what’s the first thing that you want to build? I think the lamp, the little desk lamp, which is a combination of the BTNM and the STR HNG. Okay. My wife and I,
Andy Piper with our pen plotters, tend to do a lot of overhead photography, pointing down at the desk, and then you want lights and nice setup there. So we’ve got a table with some, actually, IKEA bars for decoration, so for outdoor decoration. So I guess they want you to put flower garlands and things around your picnic table and things. And this deer stuff looks like it would be adaptable, potentially, for attaching to those kind of bars. So I’m very excited to have a look through this website.
Tod Kurt
- Oh, neat. All right, Paul, what’s your last one for this week? - So you’re listening to a podcast right now, which means you either like podcasts or you really like Tod, but you might be familiar with read it later apps like
Paul Cutler Instapaper or Pocket. These apps allow you to save an article on the web to their service and read it later with the ads and extra stuff you find on the website stripped off. I’ve been using Pocket for years and love it. Michael Kennedy, a Python software fellow and host of the Talk Python to Me podcast has created a new service called Podcast Later that does something similar, except it creates a personal podcast for you of the articles you save on the web. You download one of the open source bookmarklets, and when you come across an article you wanna save, you just bookmark it. Behind the scenes, it uses a text-to-speech service and to convert it and have your choice of a male or female voice to read the article back to you. The Podcast Later homepage includes two samples you can listen to, one for each voice check out the voice quality and it sounds really good. The service creates a private podcast feed just for you that you subscribe to, meaning that it works in any podcast app. And if your podcast app supports Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you can even listen in the car. A few months ago, my partner came to me and asked me if a service like this existed. I didn’t know about podcasts later, and I pointed her at Google LM. She fettered an academic paper, but she didn’t like the experience because Google LM read it back to her, but with two co-hosts talking about it. It wasn’t just reading the article, it’s these two people talking about it, which didn’t make a lot of sense. If I had known about this then, I would have pointed her at it even though it’s a paid service. Plan started six bucks a month for saving about 100 pages or 25 per article and four hours of playback a month. I should mention, I am a former student of Michael Kennedy’s TalkPython training courses, and Michael did help me answer some questions for me when I first started podcasting. But Michael didn’t alert me to the offering. I came across it on my own.
Andy Piper
That sounds like a really interesting way of consuming information. I know I tend to open lots and lots of tabs across lots and lots of devices and then fail to go back and read things. If I could just throw them all something like this and then get a summary or not even a summary but having the articles read to me later on would be really interesting.
Paul Cutler
Yeah, I agree. It would be great for when I’m doing dishes or walking the dog. like you, I’ve got a backlog of articles in pocket that I just haven’t got to. So I’m really
Tod Kurt tempted to try this out. Yeah, no doubt. Like, like sometimes what I’ll do is, um, on the Mac, I’m sure this, you can do similar things on other OSs, but on the Mac, you can kind of select a bunch of text and do right click and say, start speaking and it’ll, it’ll speak the text. And so I’ve done that sometimes with long articles where I’ll just do select all of the entire webpage and then have it speak, but like webpages are not really made for, for auto transcription like that. It takes it’s gonna take some sort of like AI system that is that presumably this is using to Pull out all the things that aren’t the actual article Otherwise I’m sitting through you know, two minutes of it talking about some banner ad right So this is awesome
Paul Cutler Well, that’s our show a big Thank you to Andy for joining us for detailed show notes and transcripts check out the bootloader net and until next time stay positive