From Video Games to Unraid

What we cover

• A trip down memory lane with Adam
• IEMs and Geoff’s terrible hearing
• Nvidia Shield v. Apple TV showdown
• Booklore implosion and rebirth as Grimmory

In this episode of BitFlip, Alex, Adam, Geoff, and Stephen talk through Adam’s tech journey from old game consoles and early PC gaming to enterprise storage, FreeNAS, iXsystems, and now Unraid. It is a fun look at how childhood hobbies can turn into a career in infrastructure and support.

The crew also dives into the strange and expensive world of in ear monitors, the growing frustration with the Nvidia Shield, and why good home media hardware still feels harder than it should be. There is plenty of nostalgia here too, with side trips into old Linux distros, XBMC, and the joys of tinkering.

To close out the show, the hosts unpack the latest self hosted community drama around Booklore, open source ownership, forks, and what happens when trust breaks down between a maintainer and their users. It is a mix of practical tech, opinion, and the kind of conversation that happens when a few infrastructure nerds get together.

Topics: gaming, retro gaming, linux, unraid, zfs, headphones, IEMs, audio equipment, Nvidia Shield, Apple TV, Booklore, Grimmory, drama

Links

• https://florisse.nl/shield-debloat/
• https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/inside-nvidias-10-year-effort-to-make-the-shield-tv-the-most-updated-android-device-ever/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rs275q/psa_think_hard_before_you_deploy_booklore/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rvmnru/what_happened_to_booklore/
• https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory

Transcript

Alex: Hello, and welcome to another episode of BitFlip. I’m your host, Alex. This is the show where we discuss the pragmatic side of infrastructure and the wider conversation about technology. I’m Adam. 00:00

Geoff: I’m Jeff. 00:10

Alex: And from the land of the never-ending snow, I’m Stephen. I thought you were going to say the never-ending story then, and I was almost ready for a horrible scene with a horse in a pot of mud somewhere. 00:11

Adam: AI has saved the horse from the never-ending story. 00:22

Alex: No, 00:27

Adam: you can’t ruin a children’s classic. It did. I’m sorry. Or it fixed it, depending on how you look at it. 00:27

Alex: I just remember that flipping giant tortoise of a mountain that goes everywhere. It was disgusting. But anyway, what are we going to talk about tonight, lads? I think we’ve got a few interesting things on the docket. 00:34

Adam: Well, on my side, I definitely wanted to talk to all you guys about IEMs, in-ear monitors, and the rabbit hole that that is. 00:48

Alex: I was convinced the Unraid shill was going to talk about Unraid, but I think we’ll get there tonight at some point. Don’t you worry. What else have we got on here? Smart home AI matter stuff. The death of the NVIDIA shield might be. I 00:57

Geoff: think we’re going to talk about book lore a little bit too. 01:09

Alex: Yes, there’s been another one, hasn’t there? We talked about Hunter last week. 01:13

Geoff: Yep. It happened again. 01:17

Alex: It happened again only two weeks later. But anyway, I promised you in the first episode of this here show that we would introduce the hosts over the next few weeks. And it’s Adam’s turn this week. And I’m very pleased to introduce Adam as he is the VP of something, I forget what exactly, at Unraid. 01:19

Adam: I am the VP of Quality and Support at Unraid. But today I wanted to just start where my tech journey started, which was back when I was a little kid, probably similar to a lot of people listening. 01:41

Adam: Video games were the gateway drug for me. My brother and I were completely addicted to them and to the extent that we would even write our own stories and draw our own character art for games that we wanted to make in the future. 01:55

Adam: So it was pretty… 02:10

Geoff: That’s 02:11

Adam: cool. 02:12

Geoff: What was your first console? 02:13

Adam: First console was an Atari. I don’t remember which model exactly, but we would play Joust and… What was that? Jungle Hunt was probably the best game on that, graphically. So, but we had the gamut, like the full gamut. Like we used to work our butts off just to be able to buy more games, buy more consoles, because we insisted upon having most of them. 02:15

Adam: We did not have a Neo Geo, which I don’t know if you guys remember the cost of that. 02:41

Alex: So the only thing I really know about Joust is that it’s in Ready Player One as some like lawful item. 02:45

Alex: Tell us a little bit about Joust. 02:54

Adam: That’ll be a really short story because games back then were very simple. You are riding what appears to be an ostrich, but it can fly. And then you basically bound from platform to platform. I don’t even remember how you defeat your opponents, but… For sure you’re trying to avoid being hit in some way. And then you’re on another level that has a different orientation of platforms and you repeat that over and over and over. 02:56

Adam: So 03:27

Alex: what’s the, you know, Top Gear does the car history. What’s the game console history? 03:28

Adam: The game console history. So the Atari hardly even registers for me, honestly. Like that was not the gateway drug whatsoever. From there we got the NES and that was the one that really got us with the Mario games. 03:34

Adam: And the really cool add-on games that they had, like the pad that you could run on, I don’t remember what it was called, the power pad or something like that, but there was the whole, you could play through the Olympics with your friends and you could cheat like crazy by just standing on half of it and madly pounding one foot. 03:50

Adam: And then duck hunt and all of that. So that was really like what got us into it and all the neighborhood kids as well. 04:09

Stephen: So you said Duck Hunt, but you skipped NES? 04:17

Adam: No, NES is where I started. So Atari was just a footnote. 04:20

Stephen: I misunderstood. 04:25

Adam: Yeah, Atari was just… 04:26

Stephen: I thought you said Super Nintendo was your first… 04:27

Adam: Oh, no, no, no. NES. So the Atari was a footnote. We got way into the Nintendo. We had basically every add-on adapter you could imagine, the power glove, the… 04:28

Adam: there was like this add-on to the cartridge that allowed you to basically add like cheat codes to it or something like that even. Game Genie. Yes, the Game Genie. And from there, we had the Super NES, the Genesis, the Master System, TurboGrafx-16, Atari Jaguar. Yeah, and then PlayStation and all the more current ones once we… 32X even actually on the Genesis. So we were seriously into it. I spent a lot of money and obscene amount of money for a little kid. And again, we were working for our parents. We actually started a side business, like doing neighbor’s yards cleanup and whatnot to buy more of this stuff. Yeah. We were pretty serious about it. And so in high school, I, you know, I’m going to make video games for real. So I went into all of the computer related courses that were available at the time, which were very few. I think it was a, it was a regional occupation program that I got into just to be able to get some like basic office certs for Microsoft Windows applications. 04:43

Adam: It must have been running NT or something, or 95. I don’t recall the actual version. 05:53

Stephen: If you said NT, it was probably 4. Okay. Because 4 was around a lot in the early days for schools, right? Because they actually did the networking. 06:00

Adam: Gotcha. 06:09

Stephen: But I digress. Continue. 06:10

Adam: So the first PC game was for sure Doom. And then… I would say at the same time there was a game called Abuse. Do you guys remember this? And it was a multiplayer game that we played over the network. very basic like pixel graphics. But the multiplayer is what got me, like the ability to play your opponent who is sitting next to you or throughout the computer lab. 06:12

Adam: And then I think we got into Duke Nukem, which was just kick-ass graphics at the time and awesome music. Duke 06:37

Stephen: 3D, right? 06:46

Adam: Yeah, yeah. So I went through these basic courses, went to college, and I’m still on that path. I’m going to be a computer science major. And then I figured out that I hated coding and that it was not fun at all. And I hated debugging code. So I stopped basically at my C++ course there, got through all the like prereqs. But what I did love was getting some time on the server there. And I think they were running SCO UNIX. at the time, which was a local company that was actually originated where I grew up, in Santa Cruz, California, or Scotts Valley, which is right around the corner. 06:47

Adam: And I was fascinated by a new thing, which was this shared time on this singular server that I’d never really experienced before. And the CLI fun of logging into the terminal and just puttering around, probably not doing anything effective, but I just found it fascinating. 07:27

Adam: So… 07:45

Alex: After a while, the only video game you actually need is the Linux terminal. It is just the one true video game. 07:46

Geoff: What, your Steam library isn’t like 500 games? 07:54

Alex: Yeah, my Steam library may well be 500 games. I’ve probably not played all 500 of them, let’s be real. 07:58

Geoff: Steam sales starting on Thursday, I think. 08:06

Alex: No, no, please. Not 08:08

Geoff: again. Spring sale’s coming. Get your pocketbook ready. Tell 08:10

Alex: you what, I actually just played an amazing game with my daughter. So she’s five right now. And we played Untitled Goose Game. Ever played this? 08:14

Geoff: I have friends who have played for it, but yeah, I’ve heard of it. I have never played it. 08:24

Alex: Essentially, you’re an asshole of a goose. And you run around stealing stuff. And for a five-year-old, there is nothing better than running around this little village, honking at people and stealing vegetables. I tell you, I swear, it’s the best game ever. 08:29

Adam: It is also kind of endearing even for adults, I would say. It’s relaxing and the art is super beautiful in that game. So I enjoy, I think my daughter played a little bit of that as well. 08:45

Alex: Yeah, so if you have any recommendations like Untitled Goose Game, or indeed you want to correct Adam on what the best video game of all time is, you can actually, we’ve set up an email address, if you can believe it, contact at bitflip.show. 08:56

Alex: You can write in, and we don’t promise to feature every piece of feedback, but we’ll try and read them all, and… Yeah, that’s kind of where we’re going to take the show, like a little bit of background about the host. We haven’t finished with that yet, of course. But yeah, contact at bitflip.show. So how did your journey land you? You got from Windows NT to a Unix-based position. How did you then land up in iX Systems? What was the journey there? Yeah. 09:10

Adam: uh so the majority of my adult life like and i would even say baby adult life i worked in different flavors of it from selling computers at good old circuit city when that still existed to 09:40

Alex: okay for someone that never lived in california what’s i can take a guess but what is circuit city 09:53

Adam: the equivalent of best buy today but yeah it’s just a brick and mortar shop but you could buy anything from tvs to pcs to cell phones which i also sold there 09:59

Geoff: Do you know what a Radio Shack is, Alex? 10:09

Alex: I think I remember Radio Shack. I mean, it kind of went out of business a long time. When I was a kid in England, she wanted to say that you all are spoiled with Best Buy, by the way. In England, there is nothing even remotely close to Best Buy. So before any of you complain about Best Buy… Just remember, it’s pretty good, actually. 10:11

Geoff: I was just about to complain. But then there’s Micro Center, Alex. Oh, but yes, 10:31

Alex: Micro Center. 10:35

Geoff: Yeah, OK. 10:36

Alex: So how does Micro Center compare to Circuit City? 10:37

Adam: uh extremely favorably yeah okay no comparison 10:41

Alex: yeah 10:46

Geoff: i mean i i think adam’s right that best buy and circuit city are kind of similar i was kind of saying radio shack is kind of think radio shack but on much larger scale to kind of get circuit city it wasn’t really all that nice 10:46

Stephen: yeah i have a question we had radio shack up here in canada So my question though is, is it the same Radio Shack in the sense of what was in it? Up here, when I was a kid, we had different electronics, little projects and whatnot you could buy there. 11:01

Stephen: And then later they kind of got away from making your own electronics and they started just being more like a Best Buy where they had, you know, some smaller TVs and they had stereos and whatnot. 11:19

Stephen: And they still had some circuitry stuff that you could purchase, you know, like resistors, LEDs and whatnot. But then later, as I was probably in high school, that was completely gone and they just really became a really not great version of a Best Buy. 11:31

Stephen: Did you have the circuitry stuff? Like, could you make stuff? 11:47

Adam: Yes. They had components like that. For sure they did. At one point, yes. At least in California. And then they just kind of became, I feel like they mostly just became like a cell phone reseller for a time. And then they had, that was like the majority of what they stocked there. And then, 11:50

Alex: yeah, poof, they were gone, sadly. Yeah. So from there 12:06

Adam: again, like working in IT and help desks, then I was running a, so I was in support for the majority of it, but I was hands on keyboard actually helping customers. 12:08

Adam: And I worked for West Marine in Santa Cruz, California and went up the ranks there. And then I was supervising the desktop support department. Got a little bit of a taste of like virtualization at that point. And we were just turning the corner into Windows 7 in those days. Wow. So in fact, I think my last project. 12:20

Alex: 2004, 5, 6? It must have been 6 or 7. Chronology. 12:42

Geoff: 6. 12:48

Alex: I can’t remember. When was Windows 7? When was Windows 12:50

Geoff: 7? XP came out in, like, 2000. 12:55

Alex: October 22? 2009? Are you serious? Oh, God, that’s really late. 12:58

Geoff: No, 7 did not come out in 2009. 13:04

Alex: Yeah, it did. 13:06

Geoff: I forgot Vista. Excuse me, I forgot 13:08

Alex: Vista. Microsoft would rather you forgot Vista 2, honestly. Yeah. 13:10

Adam: So Windows 7, that’s when I was leaving. But I got a little bit, like I said, I got a little taste of VMware there and got some really fun experience just with setting up phone lines and working on a PBX. 13:16

Adam: in a real corporate office. From there, I hopped to some other jobs, again, working in IT in support on Helpdesk. And then I got into a county job in my local area in Santa Cruz, and I was supporting the business services department there. 13:31

Adam: So working on very old servers that like they’re amazing that they’re still running their core infrastructure off of these things. And like the financial apps coded in COBOL just for a little bit of reference there and the backup disks SCSI. And this is not that long ago, just to be clear. So then hopped over to the County of Santa Cruz proper. And that’s when I was actually working on a server team. I was in the data center there and I really got into enterprise tech. I became the storage admin running NetApp boxes. We had a NetApp cluster. I helped introduce the pure storage in that location. We had an old legacy Dell EMC. So really got into the different layers of enterprise storage and I found it super fascinating. 13:49

Adam: The abstractions, right? Just to be able to present your end user with this very simple share, but in behind it, all the different layers and 14:45

Adam: And the logic to it. So I just found that super fascinating. And in my free time, as I researched things back then, I found FreeNAS. And I was like, holy crap. How 14:55

Alex: is there? I forgot it was called FreeNAS back in the day. Yeah. 15:07

Adam: Yeah. I was like, how is this free? Because if you go into the office and you’re working on a million-dollar NetApp, and then you find this free thing that… 15:10

Adam: effectively does 95% of the same things as that NetApp. I was like, what’s the catch? And I was aware of Linux, Unix operating systems at the time. I’d actually toyed with Linux desktops throughout the years. Well, years prior to that. 15:23

Alex: What’s the first Linux that you remember using? 15:41

Adam: The first one was Mandrake. And actually, that was one of the better ones. 15:44

Alex: Nice. 15:48

Adam: Because Mandrake was aware of some of the challenges with the wireless cards back then. And they gave you the, I think they called it the NDIS wrapper. That allowed you to utilize some of those. I think it let you utilize the Windows drivers or something along those lines and made my Wi-Fi work. But it was a very different time back then. It was kludgy as all get out. 15:49

Alex: Yeah. I want to go around the horn here, actually. I want to hear what Jeff’s first Linux he remembers was. 16:15

Geoff: My first Linux? Yeah. My first Linux was in law school. I started, I had one of those, um, you remember those, the netbooks, like the EPCs from, I think it was Asus or Acer. I can’t remember which one it was. 16:20

Adam: They were great. 16:35

Geoff: Um, I had one of those little, I had one of those little clamshell things and I played around with Ubuntu must’ve been, uh, 1204. 16:36

Geoff: I’m guessing probably the first one I played around, I played 16:46

Adam: around with, 16:49

Geoff: um, That was kind of my first one. It was ugly because I needed to use office in law school and it just did not go well. 16:50

Geoff: Libre office and all the other stuff was not nearly on the same level and so it did not go well. 17:03

Stephen: How about you, Steven? So I had to just look this up while our friend was talking here. But it was definitely Ubuntu. And I know this for a fact because fast internet was not really in my area in any way, shape, or form for quite some time. 17:10

Stephen: So it was always like 56K back when I would have been starting my journey here. So apparently back in… 2011 is when Ubuntu stopped doing the whole Ship It program. And by that is that they would send out the actual CDs so you could request it and then they would send it to you, right? 17:27

Stephen: And this was fantastic for me because it didn’t take me forever to download an ISO. Honestly, I don’t even know if back then I would have understood what to do with the ISO, but I could get this CD sent to me and pop it in and 17:51

Stephen: and experience that so it would have been some i’m guessing very old version of gnome but yeah it was definitely 18:05

Alex: i remember the there was one particular summer so in england when you turned a long time ago at least when you turned 16 you were allowed to leave school if you wanted to but i ended up going to something called sixth form so when you’re age 17 it was optional and 18:12

Alex: But in that summer, so for me, that was 2004. That was when American Idiot came out. And that summer, I was completely obsessed with Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I think there was like a TTD patch back then. And then Open TTD came a few years later. But 2004, I just remember American Idiot, Transport Tycoon, and messing about with Ubuntu. And my friend texted me on, I think it must have been MSN Messenger. Maybe it was IRC. I don’t remember. Well, first you do apt-get update, and then sudo apt-get insta. I’m like, what is all this? This is crazy. And then nothing worked. And, of course, you wipe and go back to Windows. So I’m looking here on Wikipedia, and it looks to me like that puts my first release, roughly, roughly, as I’ve been to 4.10 of Warty Warthog, 18:26

Alex: which is kind of crazy. The first name that actually sticks in my mind, though, is Dapper Drake, which was 6.06. That was an LTS as well. It was released in June 2006. But Linux has come a long, long way since then. 19:18

Stephen: Did 19:33

Alex: you have 19:34

Stephen: the desktop effects that you had? Dude, that was the 19:35

Adam: whole point. The whole point was the compis. 19:37

Stephen: That 19:39

Adam: was the point. Wobbly windows. 19:39

Stephen: Yeah, that was the whole point. So I remember trying to get the graphics drivers to work. No, they 19:42

Alex: always just worked out the books. What are you talking 19:47

Stephen: about? Of course, yeah. But I remember trying to get those to work because it just wouldn’t render in the fancy snow. But that was, for the longest time, the thing that I was trying to figure out. And I think… That just started my journey of endless things that you had to install first before you could install the other thing and going down the rabbit hole. 19:49

Stephen: Yeah, that was my first journey in Linux of 20:10

Alex: doing that. That’s the Linux experience. All right. Heck of a tangent, Adam. Sorry to interrupt your story, but… 20:11

Adam: No problem. I love the fact that we are hitting different, you know, threads of everybody’s past with this stuff. So it’s good. So again, so I found FreeNAS in my free time and loaded it on a box at home. And that was the gateway to my storage addiction personally with, you know, Linux ISOs and such. 20:18

Alex: Yes, the gray area of the internet that we all know exactly what it means, but we must not speak of it. 20:42

Adam: Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So I started going down. I’m like, oh, what is this running on? What is this FreeBSD thing? Can I administer this directly via the CLI? All these different rabbit holes playing with FreeNAS. And that was my intro to FreeBSD that I’d never touched it before. And then just the serendipity of the universe. One of my good friends who lived in San Jose was actually looking for a job and he We were talking about it and he’s like, oh, I’m looking at this IX systems place and there’s a possible job for me there. And I’m like, IX systems, they make free NAS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s how great it is. And here’s all it does. So apparently part of his interview, he actually talked about me with the hiring manager and suddenly had an introduction and, uh, 20:49

Adam: made that a very difficult decision actually in my probably one of the more difficult career decisions which was to leave my pension that i had built up through two county jobs over i think at that point it was probably seven years or so um and uh go towards something that i actually cared a lot more about personally 21:38

Adam: And so I made that choice and I hopped over to IX systems and learned all about ZFS, learned all about FreeBSD, the industry, et cetera, what customers are looking for there. 21:57

Adam: And I came up the ranks of, started as a sales engineer actually. And then I hopped over to support and then, you know, one thing led to another and I was running support. 22:10

Alex: So ZFS to you is the one true file system, is it? 22:23

Adam: it is 22:28

Alex: yeah 22:28

Adam: i’ll fight you 22:29

Alex: you know i’m largely in agreement with you just that darn license can we not i mean ubuntu now shipped zfs it must be a decade ago it must be i think it might even be 12 years now uh can we not just can oracle not just relinquish and do the right thing doesn’t larry ellison got enough money 22:32

Geoff: No, 22:54

Adam: no, he 22:54

Alex: doesn’t. 22:55

Adam: He’s just slowly waiting in the background. He’s like, let’s see how ubiquitous this can become before I pull the trigger. Yeah. Yeah, it is seriously irritating because all of the hurdles, it would be such a better Linux experience with CFS if it was easier to implement on that side. 22:55

Adam: And I don’t mean on the server side because it’s fairly straightforward to implement there, but all that you could do with the desktop if you could boot effectively from CFS without having to go through the machinations of making sure that your kernel versions are aligned and whatnot. 23:15

Adam: The thing that I loved about that and what drove me and what really kept me at that business and kept me stoked for that job was the fact that we were providing something that was so deep and so amazing to the world for people to learn with. 23:33

Adam: So that was, I had liked open source. I had liked Linux. I had liked Linux. Unix-based operating systems, but that’s what really got me and grabbed me and helped propel me and make me work really hard at that job because I felt like we were doing something good for the world along with just really cool technology and awesome people to work with. 23:46

Alex: so unraid had zfs before you came along i was convinced that you and you brought a few a couple of people with you from ix didn’t you i was convinced it was like that was like strategic hires because tom and crew were like right we need zfs we’re going to go to ix and poach a couple of people 24:06

Adam: not so it was already there uh it was actually announced on a jupiter broadcast uh podcast one of the higher ups at LimeTech at the time was talking about CFS implementation. I’m like, ooh, and that just totally got my attention. Again, the whole all-in-one aspect, you can call it hyper-converged, whatever you want, became pretty attractive to me at that time. 24:24

Adam: And so I started to, you know, research and look around and I actually found that I met the leadership of the Limetep group, and guess what? The co-CEO and her husband were locals in Santa Cruz, California, where I grew up. They had lived there, I think for eight or 10 years. The founder, Tom, had grown up in San Jose, California, just over the hill. So we had all these different like connection points And nothing really happened with that. We just became friends. And then I think three or four years passed. We stayed in touch with just with like emails and check-ins and such. And then their business evolved and it got to a point where they were making some major changes and I got a call. And lots of thinking, lots of… personal introspection for me, because again, I had cut my teeth at IX for, I think it was eight years at that point. I think I was there a total of eight and a half years before I left. So I just followed my heart again and I’m like, you know what, this is exciting. This is a completely different customer. And I could get behind that because I was like, this is actually something that I want to implement in my home. And the fact that they were so customer focused at Lymetech with Unraid and cued into what their core audience wanted, just really excited me. 24:50

Adam: So I joined on as the VP of Global Support That was almost three years ago now. And that’s grown, and I brought one of my IX guys with me, and we really, like, developed and built out the department. 26:21

Adam: And then more and more is happening, and suddenly I’m starting a quality department at LimeTech and Unraid. 26:37

Adam: So that’s my newest venture in 2026 here. So now I’m the VP of Quality and Support, but… Again, I am so, I feel so much gratitude for my tech story because it’s shaped my life. It’s been like such a blessing to be able to work in a field that I had a personal passion for. And I know a lot of people don’t get that opportunity. And I just, I went for it and it’s, you know, it’s worked out. 26:45

Alex: What’s the old saying? Do what you love and you never work another day. 27:14

Adam: That’s not true. 27:18

Alex: I absolutely 27:21

Adam: work. 27:21

Alex: Yes, I do. I can actually relate to that. All right, let’s move on to a new topic. Thank you very much for that, Adam. Let’s talk a little bit about in-ear monitors, which I know is another thing that you’re looking for right now. And in our little host’s back chat, Adam was like, I want some in-ear monitors. And I think a couple of us here were like, I have opinions on that. So what are you looking for, Adam? 27:22

Adam: I was looking for in-ear monitors primarily because this podcast has spurred a whole new interest for me on how to podcast and the tools for audio engineering and such. 27:46

Adam: So I’m like, oh, what are these? In-ear monitors, IEMs, and oh my God, what a rabbit hole. Before I even started, I instantly pinged Stephen as the resident audiophile. 27:57

Stephen: Okay, so I’m definitely, I’m going to say pretty into it for the IEMs. I probably have five or six, so decently into it. My suggestion to you was the critical stuff that he has released on his own. This guy does a lot of rankings and whatnot and testing and what have you online. He has his own website, does a ton of YouTube stuff, but he started making his own basically and by that i mean he has companies in china that that make his designs and whatnot and release them but 28:13

Geoff: yeah that’s that’s where i started you i don’t know if you 28:48

Stephen: purchased one of those um but i think the iem market from china is such an amazing low cost way to get into things now they go much higher in price but you can really dip your toes in at a fairly low price and get amazing quality audio 28:52

Adam: I feel like if you were a good friend, you would have said, just don’t, just don’t start down this path. Like this is going to be like a mechanical, a custom mechanical keyboard mess. Like you wouldn’t believe you’re going to spend hours researching waveforms. All of these things, you could have just said any of this and tried to stop me. And I would have been maybe better for it, I’m not sure. But I did not buy the specific Kroonier that you recommended. That was actually one of the collabs that Kroonier did. He actually has a… One that he is actually, it’s under his own branding called the Krim Ear Daybreak. And in my travels of the interwebs, I found that that was actually rated as like the most, the best IEM of 2025 on a lot of people’s scales. 29:08

Adam: Not because of You could go higher, obviously, in price and certain types of qualities of these things. But for the price, which I believe is like $180, and for all the qualities that Kryn or Krynical brought to it with his customizations of the tuning of that, that was the one that seems to be the winner of the day. 30:00

Adam: But… 30:25

Stephen: Do these ones cover the Harman curve in kind of the same way that he tends to release? 30:26

Adam: He has different variations of that, though, because Kryn is not the hugest fan, this is my understanding, of the standard Harman curve. 30:31

Adam: He likes some variation that gives a little bit of clarity to the mids, I believe. So… again this is the rabbit hole that i started to go down 30:41

Alex: harman curve you’re you you have jumped straight to like nerd level 27 like how long have you been researching these things uh so like what’s your use case like is it to just monitor what we’re doing as recording a podcast like 30:51

Alex: some IEMs are really good for blocking out ambient sound like when I play the drums for example I have a set of Shure earbuds that I use they’re 535s I think and they’ve got a very flat frequency response so that 31:09

Alex: Basically, I wanted the sound to be colourless because I’ve had these buds for 10, 15, probably more years now. So when an audio engineer is putting a mix into my headphones, it’s just there’s no colour to the sound and the mix is exactly what I’m hearing around me. 31:24

Alex: Like, what kind of thing are you looking for? Is it for music? Is it for audio? 31:41

Adam: Ideally, I mean, there is no one end-all be-all is what I’ve found from all the different reviews that I’ve read of these things and watched of them. 31:45

Adam: But ideally, I wanted something that was a nice in-between that I could use for gaming, that I could use for our podcast, for monitoring, for music. 31:54

Adam: all the above, because I knew I was going to go make some more purchases of probably an audio interface, maybe a little soundboard. 32:05

Adam: And the reason that I like to go down these rabbit holes, first of all, I like to understand. And There’s just a lot of fascinating aspects to IEMs that I had no clue that this sort of like subculture even existed. But yeah, so something that’s in the mid as far as being able to provide a really good experience of those different things that I listed. 32:15

Adam: And I am okay with being in the realm of the buy once, cry once sort of thing for these. So I was actually prepared to spend more than the 180 for them, 32:40

Geoff: but 32:51

Adam: I stopped it. Once I saw, like, there was a pretty consistent consensus on the best one for 2025. Yeah, 32:51

Geoff: I’m just going to be the non-audio file in the room, and I have, like, cheap whatever. Again, I… It’s one of those things where I have a nice sound system in my theater, and I can tell the difference between your stupidly cheap $100 speakers, and maybe I hear a slight improvement for the $500, but then you have the $10,000 speakers, and everyone’s like, oh my god, they sound amazing. 32:59

Geoff: I’m like, they sound exactly the same. I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t hear a difference. 33:25

Adam: You got to learn about source components and how clean your signal is. And are you actually giving them enough power? Trust me. Actually, don’t learn about any of that. You should just stop and be happy. 33:33

Geoff: No. No, I don’t have time for that. I just want something that I put in my ears and it makes music and noise. That’s good enough for me. 33:43

Stephen: Okay, but here’s the thing. Are you okay with knowing that there’s better, but you don’t necessarily know the difference? So are you fine with that? Or if someone handed you a set of, say, like those nice IEMs and you put them in, are you going to be bothered by going, oh, that’s actually the difference. 33:52

Stephen: I can hear a part of that song that I love, but have never heard that part before. Are you okay with knowing there’s a difference? 34:15

Geoff: See, I don’t know if I can hear a difference is my problem. I mean, I’m somewhat musical, and I have a pretty good ear for, like, certain differences, but I play something like 128 kilohertz versus 192, and I can’t tell a difference. 34:22

Geoff: I can’t even tell a difference between, like, even 256 or whatever, you know, whatever title 34:36

Alex: loss. Stephen, there’s no point. I mean, he’s lost. It’s a hopeless case. 34:41

Geoff: No, no, there’s really not. I can’t hear a difference, so you’re just wasting your time. 34:46

Stephen: What I do want to do, though, is I want to find a set of decent, not overly expensive IEMs. And whether we pool money together or whatever, I want a set sent to him. And I want him to listen to his favorite song. And I want him to tell me that he doesn’t hear a difference. Because if he’s going from, like… the base model air pod things that you might once upon a time have received with your phone versus even like the base level of a decent IEM at like I don’t know $80 $70 if you don’t hear a difference I don’t know if that you could be a host here 34:51

Geoff: I’ll take you up on that offer because I get I can hear a difference between the crap 35:31

Alex: Hold on, hold on, hold on. Jeff is a bit busy rewinding his VHS tapes right now. Honestly, that’s the kind of level of clarity difference we’re talking about between a $10 set of earbuds and even a $100 set of IEMs. 35:36

Geoff: That I can hear a difference between. It’s the difference from like blu-ray to ultra high def you know that kind of a difference where okay 35:54

Alex: maybe but some of that speaks to listening and a lot of people just consume music without listening to it if that makes sense so there’s there’s this whole world of like critical listening and i’m not necessarily just talking about people that sit in 36:03

Alex: what’s the name of that, is it Herman Miller, the Eames chair, you know, with, yeah, the Eames chair with the footrest and the big, like, massive speakers like American Psycho Man has, right? 36:18

Alex: Now, we’re not all that level of audiophile, but some of us, like, you know, I’ve got a pair of Kef LS50s behind me, I like being able to hear a kick drum, and I like being able to hear that the kick drum sounds like what I think Stephen Wilson thought the kick drum should sound like when they recorded it. 36:31

Alex: And for me, as a musician, that’s why I care so much about it, because I want to be able to hear what I’m playing and hear the timbre of the beater that hit the skin of the drum. 36:50

Alex: That’s how anal I get about this stuff. i appreciate for a lot of people like i mean i listen to music instrument first my my wife often takes the piss out of me because i’m i have no idea what the lyrics to songs are not the faintest clue every single drum fill though i’m on it you know so like there’s just different ways to enjoy music and listen to music and really it’s about jeff i know we’re giving you a hard time but it’s about finding your threshold of like 37:02

Alex: where you draw the line of listening versus just consuming. And it’s a very personal thing. 37:30

Adam: I will also say there’s a satisfaction in just understanding. that I get from the thing that I purchased. If I deeply understand how it works and all of the background to it and whatnot, I get a different level of satisfaction from that, from having something that I looked into to that level and learned about. 37:38

Adam: And we talk about pragmatism. And sometimes the journey of just learning something is worth it to me. So I’ve enjoyed this rabbit hole. It has been a lot of hours though, Stephen, and you could have warned me, but it’s been fascinating. 38:00

Alex: All right, we’ve got a couple more topics to get through today, so let’s get a move on. Now, we were talking in, again, our host back channel on the Discord, which, by the way, you can join. There’ll be a link in the show notes down below, where we have a Discord server. You know, we are looking at alternatives. We know Discord. I think they’ve rolled back their age verification stuff right now, but it doesn’t fix the core problem that we’re relying on, like a centralized thing. 38:18

Alex: But it’s where the people are right now, and no clear alternative has yet emerged. as soon as it does, or as soon as we can be bothered to host our own thing, I don’t think it’s Matrix, sorry, but I don’t think it is, then we’ll move. 38:43

Alex: But for now, it’s Discord. So as I say, we were talking in our back channels about the Nvidia Shield and how lately it seems to have just become kind of unusable. 38:58

Alex: And I realized that maybe about six months ago, maybe three or four actually, I completely stopped using my Nvidia Shields and switched completely to Apple TVs because I got so frustrated with them. 39:10

Alex: that ebd shield i’ve been using we documented it in self-hosting many years ago for the fact the one under my tv in my lounge is 10 years old and it’s still getting software updates but the recent updates adam have been annoying 39:22

Adam: i would say beyond annoying i’ve and i thought it was just me until i talked to you about this um Yeah, to the point, it’s become nigh unusable at times. And I think maybe there’s, I thought it was a memory leak. I wasn’t sure what was going on with it. I even did the factory reset just to start clean because it’s been through many an update over the years. Didn’t have any effect. And it’s just, it’s been a pretty bad experience where it will, when you try to switch applications, it’ll almost completely freeze. 39:38

Adam: And you think like, is it even going to, do I need to restart the thing? And then it would go through. It 40:12

Alex: got to the point where I repasted mine because I was like, well, maybe the CPU is overheating or there’s something else. You know, the paste in there was 10 year old. So it was pretty crusty. Didn’t make any difference, sadly. 40:17

Geoff: So I bought one, I guess coming up on two years now. And I bought a second one for the upstairs TV and they’ve both, I’m just curious. Did you guys like de bloat them at all? Or did you take any of the crap off there? Or did you kind of leave the stock? I 40:30

Adam: factory reset it. So there was literally nothing on it. It was still, I mean, other than I didn’t purposely de bloat it, but after the factory re reset, it still had the same issues. 40:47

Geoff: I will drop in the show notes. There is a post by someone who basically listed all the commands to strip out a lot of the junk. Even stock had a lot of junk that you could remove. I don’t know if that’s making the difference for me, but I have not had the issues you guys are talking about. 40:59

Alex: What are the custom ROMs for the NVIDIA Shield? That’d be pretty nice. Like, do anybody remember XBMC or Rasp BMC at the beginning with the Raspberry Pi? That was pretty stripped down, pretty basic. I suppose the trouble with it, though, is that a lot of the digital providers like Netflix and, you know, all the big guys… They’ve got DRM keys that are required to stream content from their platforms. And if you start messing around with that base image, then sometimes that stuff just doesn’t work anymore. 41:16

Stephen: It’s also the Dolby Vision stuff too, right? There’s a lot of licensing and whatnot that goes into being able to use half of the codecs that the movie world wants to use. Dolby Vision for me has been an annoying one because a lot of the ISOs, my Linux ISOs that I’ve downloaded may have that and it doesn’t play well with certain players. 41:49

Adam: Not only Dolby vision, but I believe Linux or excuse me, Netflix even limits your quality level. 42:11

Adam: If you’re using, I believe that was a big problem. And then you had to use like wide vine or something on Linux for a while to 42:19

Geoff: get. I’ve definitely had issues on my desktop Linux where I can’t like go to Peacock and watch Peacock live on my desktop. Cause it’s not a supported browser. Um, actually going back to xbmc that actually was my gateway to a whole lot of linux stuff because i actually ran xbmc to watch all my linux isos 42:25

Alex: the one thing i did do to my shield was replace the stock launcher when they incentivized it and put all the ads in a few years ago with uh project tv launcher um as like the default and that’s nice it’s clean it’s like like a launcher of old to be honest 42:45

Alex: um i just wonder like the business model of this thing you know nvidia probably aren’t putting too many man hours into the updates of this thing now it’s as you say it’s 10 years old it’s using the nvidia the nintendo switch one tegra chip so again it’s it’s getting up there in in years now 43:02

Adam: just figured out why they’re slowing down NVIDIA is actually using the GPUs on all these in the background to power their AI engines. 43:24

Alex: There we go. There it is. That’s why NVIDIA is the world leader right now is because 43:33

Adam: of you and I and our Shield TVs. 43:38

Geoff: I will say, though, if you didn’t see it, there was an article in The Verge a month and a half, two months ago about NVIDIA talking about the Shield and how much they still love the Shield and how much they plan on, you know, they didn’t commit to providing new hardware. 43:40

Geoff: But there clearly, apparently, is still some love for the Shield in NVIDIA. There are still people dedicated to supporting it. Well, 43:54

Alex: the only alternative, really, is the Apple TV. Really, with a proper 10-foot interface that separates sitting with a keyboard or mouse on your lap with a home theater PC from having something that is friendly for the rest of the family to use. 44:02

Alex: And even the Apple TV is not without its faults. In fact, far from it. The remote experience is just dreadful. The arrow buttons on that remote suck. And the fact that the Plex app also doesn’t actually use hardware acceleration. You’ll find that sort of 20, 30 minutes into a high def movie, the video will just go super duper like low frame rate because it’s overheating. 44:20

Alex: So then you think, right, well, now I’ve got to use Infuse instead of the native Plex app. Infuse is pretty good, to be fair. It’s not perfect either. I would much rather the Shield just worked because for many years I had SmartTube with SponsorBlock and it just skipped over the ads and it was amazing. 44:45

Alex: Can we bring back the Shield? There’s a guy on YouTube who’s made a new router. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. Tomas, I think is his name from Europe somewhere. And he’s made a DIY router from the circuit board up, everything. Can we design as a community a new set-top box that runs Linux and runs all of these first-party apps like Apple TV and Netflix and all this stuff? 45:07

Alex: I mean, that’s a pipe dream, isn’t it? 45:33

Geoff: It is because unfortunately the problem is DRM. DRM, like I was interested at one point of trying, what was the name of the browser? There’s so many different, you know, browsers of the month, but I think it was either ARC or one of the other ones, and they were not going to be able to get DRM support inside the browser because WinVine wants like $100,000 to license the software in order to run it on whatever you’re doing. 45:36

Geoff: So… Until we can get rid of DRM, unlike streaming services, I really don’t think… 46:02

Alex: I’m glad you put that last caveat because I’ve got a way to get rid of DRM. I’ve not worried about DRM 46:09

Stephen: for many years. DRM has brought back all of the high C’s. That’s all I’m saying. 46:17

Alex: It’s a crying shame, honestly. There is an open goal here for somebody. If they can find a business model to pay those kinds of exorbitant licensing fees… You know, 100,000 is a lot of money. But, you know, if you charge, I don’t know, 100,000 people a dollar each, I mean, I think that math checks out. But, like, I think that pays for itself, you know. There’s got to be a solution in here somewhere, 46:22

Stephen: doesn’t there? 46:48

Adam: And, hey, if you want to look for, like, something that was great, just copy the original version. shield and how that experience was because in my opinion that was peak streaming yeah 46:51

Alex: that 47:01

Adam: thing was crazy responsive you could play any file media type you liked um the ability to sideload apps was super fun on that too i had some some good times putting interesting things i think i put even like i did some crazy 47:02

Stephen: did any of you ever have the controller 47:18

Adam: i did 47:21

Stephen: yep i still have it still right because i think the originals came with that right 47:21

Alex: No, I think in the old days you bought the fancy model that didn’t come with a spinning hard drive, and it came with a remote control. 47:27

Adam: It 47:35

Alex: looked a little bit like the Apple TV remote back then, like the Apple TV remote does now, but it also came with a gamepad, like an Xbox 360-style gamepad. 47:35

Alex: It wasn’t very good. The ergonomics weren’t very nice. I’ve still got mine in the drawer downstairs somewhere, but it did the thing. Back when NVIDIA Game Stream was a play they were making before they ate the world’s computing supply to make AI work. So speaking of AI impending doom, there’s been yet another drama in the self-hosting community this week. We touched on Huntar last episode, and this time around, book lore has imploded. And I don’t think that’s an overstatement to say that. This is another self-hosted application for managing digital books this time, which allows you to sync across devices and allows the easy sharing of books between different devices. 47:45

Alex: Last Thursday, one of the users, economymeat9506, posted on the r slash self-hosted subreddit a topic saying, public safety announcement, think hard before you deploy book law. 48:32

Alex: And we’ve heard this before, haven’t we? Similar story. And there was a thread which, Jeff, you were taking a look at. 48:48

Geoff: This user kind of went through and AI was one of his complaints. He said that the developer was posting like 20,000 lines of commits a day, which is just not practical for a person to do. 48:55

Geoff: But kind of the bigger issues were sort of His behavior around like he was just being he was deleting things that people that were unflattering towards him, like either on the GitHub or in the Discord. 49:08

Geoff: He would, you know, people had submitted PRs and had gone several rounds of revisions and stuff like that. He would then use AI to reimplement the PR in his own way. and then merge that and then kind of either close or delete the other PR, which upset a lot of developers, obviously. And then he threatened to take book lore, I think it’s business, was it business standard, business source licensing instead of the AGPL v3 that it was, because he felt that anyone who was forking the repo was stealing from him. 49:23

Geoff: Yeah, 49:55

Alex: that’s not how open source 49:56

Geoff: works, is it? And betraying him. No, it’s not how it works. And then I think the last thing he did was he removed the API documentation from a future release and then took away third parties being able to use OIDC because he was coming out with a paid iOS app and he wanted everyone to pay for the iOS app. 49:57

Geoff: So needless to say, that thread blew up 50:18

Alex: on Reddit. People on Reddit grabbing pitchforks and going after an open source developer for wanting to earn some money. 50:21

Geoff: No. 50:29

Alex: Yeah. 50:29

Geoff: No. And so by Monday, the Booklord Discord was deleted. The GitHub repo was made private, if not deleted. And now we have a new product or new project. So Grimmery is the new product. And it is, I think I saw someone say that they’re coming up with a release. We’re recording on Wednesday. They’re coming out with a release tomorrow. So by the time this comes out, There should be something. And it’s the successor to book lore. They have a lot of the same developers without the one who caused all the drama. So we will have to see how that goes. I mean, I host book lore and I think it’s fantastic. So I’m going to be watching. 50:31

Alex: Yeah, it’s a it’s a fork of book lore and it’s licensed under the GPL three. Which I think was part of the problem with switching to a BSL license, to be honest with you, is that the developer of Booklaw basically felt that people said the app wasn’t his because it was open source and had 100 and some 120 odd contributors. 51:11

Alex: it was no longer his app it was the community’s app and he got very upset by that and to some degree i can kind of understand because you know it’s his name above the door type situation but there is part of me that hadn’t really thought about this before where if 51:38

Alex: If you open up your code to the world and you accept even one contribution, you don’t have the same level of… You’re diluting your ownership a little bit every time you do that. 51:55

Alex: And I hadn’t thought about that before. It’s a really interesting thought experiment as part of this whole… whole implosion, really. Now you can send us an email at contact at bitflip.show. You can also join us on Discord or follow us on Mastodon. There’ll be links to all those things down in the show notes. You can find the show at the website bitflip.show. You can find more of me at alex.ktz.me. And if you want to find out more about Adam’s gainful employer Unraid and their incredibly amazing, magical and revolutionary 7.3 release, Adam’s going to give you a 10 second download on that right now. 52:10

Adam: 10 second download. So 7.3 is a huge release for us. For the first time in Unraid’s history, you can boot from an internal drive. Not only can you boot from an internal drive, you can boot from a ZFS mirror, which is pretty slick. Not only can you boot from that ZFS mirror, you can have a data partition on that and go and host all your VMs and Docker containers. 52:49

Adam: And we give you a transition path so you don’t even have 53:12

Alex: to start fresh. Welcome to the 1900s, Unraid. Honestly, that is tremendous. Well done. Amazing. 53:15

Adam: Me 53:24

Alex: too. That is great. Unraid’s where I cut my teeth many, many years ago on properly using Linux at home. I have a very big soft spot for Unraid. And I’m very glad. As you heard at the beginning of this episode, Adam is one of the hosts of the show because we’re going to be able to keep our finger well and truly on the Unraid pulse. 53:24

Geoff: And you can find me on Mastodon. I’m Fuzzy Mistborn or at Fuzzy Mistborn dot com. 53:42

Alex: Adam, 53:47

Stephen: where can we find you? He skipped 53:47

Adam: me. I thought we were going in a different order. 53:49

Geoff: Oh, I 53:52

Adam: thought we were in this 53:53

Geoff: thing. I’m so sorry. 53:53

Alex: His turn was the Unraid Shilling Fest. Oh, I know. 53:54

Adam: I used it. I used my turn. You can find me. I don’t even know what my freaking Mastodon handle is. You can find me on Mastodon. You’ll find me on there. It’s not a big deal. Things on the website. I’m just going 53:59

Alex: to leave this in the edit because this is just absolutely brilliantly shambolic and I love it. 54:18

Adam: Why not? 54:23

Alex: I mean, we aren’t professionals. We’re proving that right now. Why don’t we let the audience see that too? Stephen? 54:24

Stephen: That’s fantastic, Adam. I don’t have really any socials to share, but you can definitely email me, stephen at 54:31

Alex: lostpackets.ca. Wonderful. And if you want to try and help Stephen find his packets, I’d be very grateful, because to be honest with you, I’ve been wondering where they are myself for many years. True story. Well, that was bitflip.show episode number two. Thank you so much, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Bye, everyone. you 54:36