hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3949.txt

Episode: 3949
Title: HPR3949: How I use virtualisation to tame my Social Media addiction.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3949/hpr3949.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:48:53

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3949 for Thursday the 21st of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, How I Use Virtualization to Tame My Social Media Addiction.
It is hosted by nightwise, and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Nightwise talks about the command line applications he uses to fight his
social media addiction.
Hey there, Hacker Public Radio.
This is Nightwise from the Nightwise.com podcast, checking in with a long overdue show.
Day I wanted to talk about the virtual machine that I have been setting up in my home and
how I use it to use Linux every day.
I bounce around from operating system to operating system.
Sometimes I work on a Linux that stops sometimes on a Mac, sometimes on a Windows machine,
or even on an iPad.
And I would like to have a little Linux in my life now and then.
And one of the ways I do this is by using virtual machines, having one or two Linux virtual
machines running on one of my systems at any moment in time.
Lately I have been much concerned about the time that I spend on my phone.
I'm IT professional and digital marketing is one of the things that I do.
Hunts I am immersed in the world of Facebook and Instagram and all it has to offer and
have to be a prize of every new thing that comes out.
And in that regard, I have these things on my phone and I am very much aware of how powerful
these platforms are to let entrepreneurs promote their products and their services, but
also how much time they suck in when you are a consumer.
Social media platforms and of course your phone, your smartphone, are a part of the
attention economy where people sell ads to people who pay attention and that being sucked
in by your phone and by social media is part of the design of some of these social media
platforms.
They are not about connecting people, they are about creating a somewhat addictive platform
that sucks you in and many of you might have woken up after a 50 minute scroll on TikTok
that you didn't intend to do or see that your average phone time has been four hours
today on social media and YouTube and stuff is kind of the same.
So I am very much aware of how I use social media.
What's the connection between the Linux VM and fighting the attention economy?
One of the things that you can do in order to guard yourself against the somewhat addictive
nature of some of these social media applications is by building in roadblocks, building in small
hurdles that don't really stop you but make it harder for you to quickly when you're bored
or you don't want to do something, go on social media and start scrolling.
I know what this feels like so I thought what kind of social media tools do I actually use
in my daily geekiness, in my daily geeky side and those are for the most part Reddit, Discord
and ILC.
Now especially Reddit to me especially on my phone is a big time thing.
Before I know it I start scrolling and I spend too much time on my smartphone just scrolling
and looking at the pretty pictures.
With Discord it's a little bit of the other way around, Discord is a great place to chat
real time with all kinds of people but it also has had a little bit of a destructive nature
because when something is set in a channel or you get a ding dong you are interrupted
or you are tempted if you disable all those notifications to go and check the channels
manually to see if there's anything you're missing out on.
IRC, well IRC is IRC, it's nerdy as it is, I don't have the IRC app on my phone but
I do want to remain connected to the channels that I frequently talk in, that is on IRC.Liberat.chat
hash command line hash ubuntu off topic hash our cast planet of course and hash ubuntu dash
okay so I wanted to be able to access these things and still make it a little bit nerdy and harder
to do so that I'm not really distracted so I combine both by going towards a virtual machine.
Running a virtual machine on my Windows workstation I've got a fairly powerful i9 workstation
with 32 gigs of RAM, 256 SSDs and an 8TB hard drive, kind of a powerful machine that I used
for a live streaming during COVID. With the Hyper-V application I'm using I have two or three
virtual machines running that run Linux and I kind of assign CPU and memory to them as they are
charged, as they are taxed. This for me was a very interesting way to optimize the resources that
I have. I used that station as that machine as a workstation but I need to do some video editing
and stuff but I also have these Linux virtual machines running in the back who are mostly idling.
One's my Plex server, one's a test machine and one is the machine I frequently SSH into and here's
the kicker already SSH. I SSH I connect to this virtual machine via the command line. The great
way of using virtual machines and being dynamic in the amount of memory and CPU I assigned to
the virtual machines is that I can optimize the resources that I have but I can also be able to
access the virtual machine remotely. And I do that with tailscale. Tailscale is a great virtual
private network that allows you to install clients on a variety of platforms that can be iOS, that can be
Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, even your Synology. And what happens is you get a virtual private network
adapter with an IP. And if you log on machines to your tailscale network they are accessible for
everybody inside your tailscale network and you need to have a login in a password to install
the tailscale client and connect it to the tailscale network. Then you get an IP and those
IPs then act as if they are on a local land. And for me that has been a very very interesting to
work with. I've been playing around with having my home servers running and God knows what but
found it to be very tiresome to be fapping around with ports and forwarding ports and opening
my firewall and making sure everything is secure. And what I now do is I just install a tailscale
client on every single machine that I have and I let them into connect. And because it's a land,
all the ports are basically open. So I can use SSH, I can use RDP, I can use Samba, I can use HTTP,
whatever I want to use to connect to said virtual machine or set machine from set machine kind of
works. What I've started to do is I have this one virtual machine running, this Linux virtual machine
that I can access via SSH from my smartphone. And on the virtual machine I've installed a couple of
command line versions of these fairly addictive social media applications. So
for discord for discord I am using the app discord which gives you a text user interface
to discord. You don't have all the animated gifts and the pretty pictures but it kind of turns
discord into some IRC like thing. The app also supports mouse control for a text user interface
app that's pretty good. And it is quite joyful and quite like to work with. The second app I have
running on there is TUR, T-U-I-R. And TUR is a command line Reddit client which allows me to
browse Reddit and browse all the sub-reddits I'm connected to, then subscribe to, let's me post
some read comments. And then there are errors of course IRSSI which is my favorite IRC client.
And I didn't mention this that I also love to read my news feed. And for that I've installed
newsboat which is a text user interface client that allows me to read my RSS feeds.
This is of course on Linux very nerdy. I love the command line because it's geeky. It helps you
focus and it's not as destructive and addictive as the graphical user interfaces of those
special apps because basically you don't see pictures and that I've found out kind of helps
to keep it a little bit more business-like or sober so you don't end up scrolling for hours
and hours because it's a text user interface. The second thing I like about this is I can connect
from anywhere. When I have the tail-scale client installed on one of my machines I open up a terminal,
I connect to that Linux machine, open up a teamwork session that has all of these absolute
open and I basically run anything from anywhere. Even if I disconnect I stay in the chat rooms,
I stay in IRC, my discord remains operational. It's like I'm picking up a session from whatever
machine that I'm using so that's nice. The third thing is I talked about speed bumps about
making sure that you have some hurdles to go through when you want to do addictive things on your phone.
Well instead of having the discord app and the reddit app on my phone I just have the SSH app on my
phone and I connect to this Linux virtual machine via the command line. I've got a shellfish I think
is the name of the iOS app that I have on my phone that allows me to connect to Reddit to the SSH
session on the Linux machine and open up the command line versions of the different apps that I'm
using and I've especially found this to be very productive. I mean if I really want to look
something up on Reddit I can if I really want to go on IRC or discord I can but I have to log in
and the interface is fairly sober so it becomes a very functional way to use these platforms.
It's a little bit of a hurdle, it's very nerdy but it's also a very safe way to do it because I'm
connecting over SSH through a private VPN so that's always nice when I'm on some kind of
roaming network or on a public Wi-Fi and that way I really get more out of my social media
without having it be distraction or even an addiction on my smartphone.
What I've noticed in using it on my phone for the last couple of months is that when I'm bored and
I want to look something up instead of you know opening up Instagram and just scroll scroll scroll
or opening up Reddit or opening up Discord is that I now look for something else. I go like
yeah okay I need to log in you know what I've got a book right here so I use Google Play Books
as my ebook client which allows me to read books and as I switch devices from my phone to my iPad
kind of pick up where I left off and this way I have been using my time much more effectively
by when I'm bored on my phone I pick up the book that I'm reading by connecting over SSH to the
command line version of the social media apps that I have installed on my Linux virtual machine.
By using said virtual machine as kind of a terminal or a server for my different workstation terminals
to connect to and that can be from Windows from the Mac from IRC I have a from from iOS I have a
uniform interface to connect to and it allows me to let that virtual machine actually do things
I've scripts on there that do run ffmpeg scripts and download stuff without me having to be
physically behind the machine or me being physically connected to the machine as I disconnect
from my teamwork session the party goes on and waits for me to connect from another machine
and I have a more optimal use of the resources that I have I just have one powerful machine now
that I use as a workstation when I want to and when it's idling it's running those virtual machines
that I've set up which I can connect to when I'm not behind set machine and they can use the memory
and the CPU power that I have a lot of them getting more out of the workstation that would otherwise
mostly be just idle so that's my approach of how I use Linux virtual machines and the terminal
to optimize the resources I have optimize the time and the attention that is at my
disposal and also kind of makes something that is nerdy fun to play with and kind of secure
and great way to use open source software if you have something to tell about using nerdy things
what's your project share it with the community pick up a microphone and record sending
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the community we can all learn from each other until next time this was nightwise from the night
wise.com podcast or at kin can i g h t w i c dot com signing off
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