We're joined by Xe Iaso, who discusses a creative solution to relentless AI bots and the unexpected delights of running an outrageously overpowered homelab.

Special Guest: Xe Iaso.

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• ⚡ Grab Sats with Strike Around the World — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 110 countries.
• 🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
• 🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Podcasts and music powered by community. Share, discover and support over 4 million shows and emerging artists.
• Xe Iaso's Blog
• Support Xe on Patreon
• Block AI scrapers with Anubis - Xe Iaso — I got tired of this and made a tool to stop them for good. I call it Anubis. Anubis weighs the soul of your connection using a sha256 proof-of-work challenge in order to protect upstream resources from scraper bots. It's a reverse proxy that requires browsers and bots to solve a proof-of-work challenge before they can access your site, just like Hashcash.
• Building native packages is complicated - Xe Iaso — Normally when I make projects, I don't expect them to take off. I especially don't expect to front page news on Ars Technica and TechCrunch within the span of a few days. I very much also do not expect to say sentences like "FFmpeg uses a program I made to help them stop scraper bots taking down their issue tracker". The last week has been fairly ridiculous in that regard.
• TecharoHQ/anubis — Anubis weighs the soul of your connection using a sha256 proof-of-work challenge in order to protect upstream resources from scraper bots.
• Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance — In a “cry for help” blog post in January, FOSS developer Xe Iaso described how AmazonBot relentlessly pounded on a Git server website to the point of causing DDoS outages. Git servers host FOSS projects so that anyone who wants can download the code or contribute to it.
• The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab - Xe Iaso — Tonight I’ll tell you what gets me excited about my homelab and maybe inspire you to make your own. I'll get into what I like about it and clue you into some of the fun you get to have if one of your projects meant to protect your homelab goes hockey-stick.
• Talos Linux — Talos Linux is Linux designed for Kubernetes – secure, immutable, and minimal.
• Apollo: Sunshine fork — The easiest way to stream with the native resolution of your client device
• ansible-vault-bitwarden: Manage ansible-vault passwords securely with Bitwarden CLI
• Amcrest 4MP ProHD Indoor WiFi Camera — – 2. 4ghz WiFi IP camera features immaculate 4MP (2688x1520P at 30fps video using excellent low light capability utilizing the CMOS image sensor and chipset. Cover more ground using super-wide 90° viewing angle and remote pan/tilt.
• IPTV+: My Smart IPTV Player on the App Store
• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup

Two April Fool’s cranks dive into the internet’s highs and lows. Plus, Ang prepares for a road trip, your calls, and a wild tale from the Pacific Northwest.

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• Nixon For President (April Fool, 1992)
• Flying Penguins - BBC - YouTube
• Introducing our newest feature: Grandma mode - YouTube
• Terry's unveils new Mint Chocolate Toothpaste | Scottish Grocer & Convenience Retailer
• Groupon Rebrands as G-SPOT
• Text to Bark 

• Keeping On by Through The Day, Through The Night 

Linux 6.14 lands with big improvements for gaming, laptops, and filesystems—but why is a Windows feature sneaking into our kernel?

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Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• LinuxFest Northwest 2025 Schedule
• LINUX Unplugged LIVE Sunday — Sunday 10:00 AM · 1h · HC 108
• Linux-Powered Payments: Running a Lightning Node with nix-bitcoin — Sunday 1:30 PM · 45 min · HC 204
• Linux 6.14
• Linux 6.14 from Linux Kernel Newbies
• Btrfs Support for uncached buffered I/O
• FUSE and io_uring
• Windows NT synchronization primitives for Linux
• NixOS/nixos-hardware: A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks.
• NerfyGek0/MeshtasticIOAddon — Documentation of how to use Meshtastic serial and MQTT functionality to automation custom hardware
• Pick: Eloquent — Eloquent is a proofreading software for English and more than 20 other languages.
• Eloquent - Flathub
• languagetool — Style and Grammar Checker; it finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect.
• LanguageTool standalone server

Our terrible sleep habits keeping us up at night, Chris shares one of his biggest pet peeves, and is Angela's DNA data about to be sold to the highest bidder?

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• 🌊 Grab Sats with River!
• ⚡ Strike Makes it Quick it Grab Sats in 100s of Countries
• 💬 Boost with Fountain

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• Doctor's Best High Absorption Magnesium Glycinate Lysinate
• L-Tryptophan 500mg
• Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor
• 23andMe filed for bankruptcy. What it means for your data 
• What 23andMe bankruptcy means for customers’ data - YouTube
• What it's like to live on a boat in Boston during the winter - YouTube
• Longmont tells homeless living in RVs to 'move along' - YouTube
• Wing Commander™ 1+2 on GOG.com

• 4am 4ever by Kurtisdrums

Canonical's VP of Engineering for Ubuntu reveals why they're swapping coreutils for Rust-built tools. Then we break down the GNOME 48 release, and why this one is special.

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• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Jon Seager
• Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years — We should look deeply at the tools we ship with Ubuntu by default, selecting for tools that have resilience, performance and maintainability at their core.
• Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu — Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.
• GNOME 48 Release Notes — The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. Named “Bengaluru”, this release pays tribute to the dedication of the GNOME Asia 2024 organizers.
• awesome-tuis
• Pick: Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux🐧
• Ulauncher on GitHub
• Hotkey In Wayland · Ulauncher Wiki
• Browse Ulauncher Extensions
• Gitmoji Extension
• Todoist task management Extension
• mariob88/ulauncher-todoist-integration
• Turn Off Screen Extension
• Home Assistant Extension
• qcasey/ulauncher-homeassistant
• Obsidian Extension

When your go-to tools flip the script, our thoughts on Plex's new changes, sensors, and the creeping cost of easy.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a Zero config VPN. It installs on any device in minutes, manages firewall rules for you, and works from anywhere. Get 3 users and 100 devices for free.
• Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility.
• Keebio: Sign up for their newsletter to get 5% off your first order.

Support Self-Hosted

Links:

• ⚡ Grab Sats with Strike Around the World — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 110 countries.
• 🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
• 🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Podcasts and music powered by community. Share, discover and support over 4 million shows and emerging artists.
• Important 2025 Plex Updates — We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
• Major Plex news - Plex is now charging for remote streaming?! - YouTube — Now they went and did it. Plex made remote streaming a paid feature. Alex breaks down the latest Plex news in todays video.

Some games are good. Some games are evil. We played the evil ones... a lot. Also, we're unleashing our shiny new listener call-in line. What could go wrong?

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LINKS

• Zuma Game Play
• Farkle Game Play
• Star Trek: 25th Anniversary 
• Star Trek 25th Anniversary - Demon World - YouTube
• Star Trek™: 25th Anniversary on GOG.com
• Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force - YouTube
• Star Trek™: Voyager - Elite Force on GOG.com
• GREAT INVESTMENT IDEA: 4172 North Toronto STREET, Milwaukee, WI 53216 | MLS #1909360 | Zillow
• Tornado Hits FOX 35 Orlando During Weather Report: VIDEO - Comic Sands

• Lost Cause By: Ollie

We have stories to share, guests joining us, insights from our week at Planet Nix, and Brent's big bombshell.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• Flox - Nix for Simplicity & Scale — Flox is all about simplifying your development workflow—think reproducible, portable dev environments powered by Nix, but without the steep learning curve. Whether you’re a solo coder or part of a big team, Flox lets you manage and share environments effortlessly, so you can focus on building great software instead of wrestling with setup headaches.
• Planet Nix
• Talk - Kelsey Hightower's Perspective on Nix
• Talk - Aneesh from Anthropic - Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It
• Talk - Eelco Dolstra Intros Configurable Flakes
• Talk - Mike Kelly - Building a Chromebook replacement with NixOS
• Eelco Dolstra - Configurable Flakes
• Aneesh Agrawal - Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production
• Fireside Chat with Kelsey Hightower: An Outsider’s Look at Nix
• Building a Chromebook replacement with NixOS
• Why do people love NixOS so much? | Mike Kelly
• How to convert an old ChromeBook into a NixBook | Mike Kelly
• Olympia Mike's Nixbook | GitHub
• Flox | Nix in the Wild
• The NixOS Foundation Board Announced
• Guilty Pleasures | The Launch 🚀 13
• Pick: pyatv: A client library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices — This is an asyncio python library for interacting with Apple TV and AirPlay devices. It mainly targets Apple TVs (all generations, including tvOS 15 and later), but also supports audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the HomePod, AirPort Express and third-party speakers. It can act as remote control to the Music app/iTunes in macOS.
• Pick: atv-desktop-remote: A simple app to allow you to control an Apple TV from your desktop — The latest version works with tvOS 15 and up. It requires Python 3 to be installed on the system to work properly.

We learn about Angela's guilty pleasure and Brent's life-changing news!

LINKS:

• McDonald's Bagel Breakfast Sandwiches Commercial (1999) - YouTube
• Steak and egg bagels 
• Man accused of stealing, swallowing $800K diamond earrings previously stole from Tiffany & Co. - YouTube
• Suspect steals and swallows $700k worth of jewellery
• Solid gold toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace - YouTube

• Hocus Pocus By Trickster

We are digging into a superpower inside your Linux Kernel. How eBPF works, and how anyone can take advantage of it.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• eBPF Perf Tools 2019 | SCaLE 17x
• SCALE2019eBPFPerf_Tools.pdf
• Oracle Releases DTrace 2.0.0-1.14 For Linux Systems
• Gentoo Linux Touts DTrace 2.0 Support
• bpftrace (DTrace 2.0) for Linux 2018
• Full-system dynamic tracing on Linux using eBPF and bpftrace
• A thorough introduction to eBPF
• BCC - Tools for BPF-based Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more — The BPF Compiler Collection: BCC or BPF Compiler Collection is a set of tools leveraging eBPF for kernel tracing, Linux IO analysis, networking, monitoring, and more.
• BCC Tutorial
• xdp-tools: Utilities and example programs for use with XDP
• ply: a dynamic tracer for Linux
• Liam's Multi-Monitor Setup
• Pick: netop — Network Top -- Help you monitor network traffic with bpf
• Pick: bpftune — bpftune aims to provide lightweight, always-on auto-tuning of system behaviour.