New Year. New Freedom Tech Goals

Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the Ungovernable Misfits, Ex, Nosta, YouTube, Rumble, and Twitch feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern or 2PM UK time, but you can also catch up later on the Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

Essentially, if there's a news item tool or topic that can help you take back some control in today's digital panopticon,

then we wanna talk about it. My name is Q and A, and I'm head of customer experience at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools. And as always, I am joined by my good friends Max, the head honcho of the Ungovernable Empire, and Seth who is COO over at K Wallet.

This is a live and interactive show, and you can help steer the conversation by commenting live, pre submitting your questions or topic suggestions on socials, boosting the show via podcasting two point o apps, sending tips, or just simply sharing the show with your friends.

Top support for last week's show, excellent show, I might add, with fluffy pony comes from anonymous who said absolutely nothing but sent us 500 sets. Thank you for your support, whoever you are.

Without further ado, let's dive into the show, shall we? Max, Seth, how are you doing, gents? Had a busy week?

You could say that. It's been a it's been a long one. The barn burner, if you will, but almost break down. Burner. I've never heard of a barn burner. What's that? It's like Me neither. Burning the candle at both ends, but but, like, even more, it's like, just fuck the whole barn. Let's set this thing alive.

I don't I don't really know where it originates. It's I'm sure it's a a good old Southern saying. I would assume I mean, like, the the way it's generally used is, like, it was a crazy, eventful, chaotic Right.

A barn. Like, really good a really good basketball game that was, like, start to finish crazy, you could say with a barn burner. So there you go. You teach me your muffin related slang. I teach you about I'll teach you about cupcakes and all these sort of things that you really need to know. Very

good. There's been a barn burner here as well, but, probably less productive than yours. Just sickness in the house and then me just, fixing a thousand things at the house, like boilers and plumbing and leaks and, one shower when we flush a toilet in one room, shit comes up from the shower, in another, and just just general,

nice jobs like that for me this week. That sounds pretty grim, if I'm gonna be honest. Mhmm. Oh, yeah. I'm doing it for myself. You're you're dominating the podcasting space, but then right after you hop off a a live podcast of world domination, you get to go unplug a toilet. Like, you know, it's good for you.

Nothing humbles you more than smelling your own shit, quite literally. It's exactly what I was about to say. All your family shit. Yes. Wow. Any yeah. Anyway Indeed. Enough enough of shit. Yeah. Last just wanted to say as well, last week was awesome,

and I'm still sort of high from that. So anyone who missed that one, you have to go and have a listen to that. Fluffy was an incredible guest. I really enjoyed doing the live Monero monthly as well.

And, just yeah. I've been really happy with how these live shows have been going and the, participation we had and everything was awesome. So excited for today. Yeah. Agreed. There's a lot of,

history based stuff that, was completely new to me, so, I also found it completely fascinating. You you you know, we you're going right into the depths when even Seth learned something about Monero's history. Right? Yeah.

Truly. Those are brand new stories. I knew I knew all the people that were involved in them, and none of them had ever mentioned those stories. That was it was absolutely awesome. One of my my favorite podcast episodes I've ever done, much less of this show. It's been it was a blast.

Nice. Well, before I introduce today's topic or topics, should I say, I'd just like to issue a public apology for those of you on central time that are joining the call late and having to catch up on the podcast feed.

Whoever is behind the the ungovernable account I I won't name any names, Max. But they they mentioned that we'll be live at 9AM central central time, which I believe is maybe in, like, one or two hours from now. So if you missed the show because of that individual, please file all of your complaints to max@ungovernablemisfits.com.

Yeah. And I will deal with the individual who has done that. We do have an inclusivity policy, Ungovernable Misfits. It does mean that, unfortunately, we do have to hire the odd Canadian.

And, again, I'm not mentioning any names, but, yeah, point your point your problems and and complaints towards anyone Canadian who might be involved with Uncoverall Misfits. You sound more American by the day, blaming Canadians for all of your problems.

You're you're blending right in. Yeah. Thanks, mate.

Alright. Well, it's a brand new year, and we thought what better way to not necessarily kick things off because we we you know, this isn't the first show of 2026, but I wanted to have a discussion about our Freedom Tech plans for this year and also to hear about the Freedom Tech plans of all of the ungovernables.

So things like what are we upgrading, what products or software are we ditching, what new skill do we wanna learn. It's gonna be very wide wide ranging. I've I've looked at the notes and we've we've got all things from local storage to training dogs.

So this is gonna be a bit all over the place listeners, so stick with us. But I do want it to be interactive as well. Some of you have posted your plans up front and I'm gonna bring some of those on the screen later in the later in the show that week so that we can riff on them as well. But to kick off the show, yeah,

I just wanna I'm just curious, like, what are your FreedomTech goals for for 2026, basically? I am going to put a u first, Max. Give us one of your your FreedomTech related goals or plans for 2026.

Just one? Just one for now. We've got an hour. Okay. As you've already mentioned it, dog training is one. We're getting a new head of security.

I wondered about that one in the show notes. I had no idea what you were talking about. Yeah. Set the scene, ma'am. Set the scene. So, yeah, since moving,

anyone who listens to the show a lot will know I I lost my, my dog not too long ago. And I had said, like, that's it. I'm not having another one. Like, I just don't want another responsibility and thing to love and care for.

And it fucks me up. Like, him dying actually fucked me up more than anything has in probably the last decade. So, I'd said no. But on reflection, when I think about security, physical threat has become more of an issue clearly from the news stories that we've,

listened to over the last sort of year, eighteen months. Everything there is ramping up. The world's getting a little bit more crazy. And, you know, security cameras are fine. Learning some self defense is fine.

Having a few weapons in the house is never goes amiss, but the best alarm system and security I think that you can have, for yourself and your family is a bloody great dog that can take chunks out of people that is properly trained to protect. And so that is on my list, properly training a new, member of the family.

Nice. Have you are you decided or going public with, any breeds? I'm not gonna go public with exactly which one it is, but I'll give you one of a few that it could be. It could be a Doberman.

It could be a Cane Corso. It could be a Rottweiler, and it could be a German Shepherd. It will be one of those very good protective breeds. So I see that have the first to say hi when I come to the a big dog.

It's gonna be, yeah, like, eighty kilos plus of solid muscle that's trained to fuck people up. Yeah. And then once that's trained, we'll be getting more. Because I just think, like, I I think it's an overlooked security for the home. Like, it we've we've had them for hundreds or thousands of years for security,

and there there isn't anything better unless you have some sort of, like, military grade attack drone, maybe could be on the same level. But these things are, like, inbuilt, ready to protect the family and,

amazing at at alarming you and letting you know that someone's coming. And, also, just a deterrent, as soon as someone pops their head over the fence and goes, oh, you've got one or two or three of those fucking things. Yeah. Unless it's extremely motivated, they're just gonna go to the next house. So,

yeah, that's that. Yeah. Couple of things on that. I agree. I have one already. Also very good at letting you know when the postman's here so they can send packages. But the thing I like about them is that they don't need any WiFi, they don't need any storage, and you don't have to worry about, like, when attacked on Friday.

Yeah. You can wipe out no storage. Yeah. They'll never grass you up. And yeah. I I agree. That's a that's a good one. And quite

might be a bit weird to consider that as as Freedom Tech, but I guess when you're talking about your family's protection in and around the circles that we mix in then, yeah, I agree. I don't think there's there's kinda much better, really.

Hey, man. Dogs, open source. We've been fine tuning them for, like, five thousand years, a lot longer than the other technology we have. Like, if if it's if it's Freedom Tech Friday. Also, Q, I we're, like, literally the same person. I went to unmute to talk about how you don't have to firmware update or connect it to Wi Fi or anything.

You jumped in, so I like, I'll mute myself. I'll chime in afterwards. And I'm like, what? It's literally the exact same points. Okay. So Spend too much time together, I think. Uh-huh. Seems that way. Seems that way. What about you? My points.

What about you, Seth? What's on your list? Man, I I've talked about it a little bit on the show, but I think I've I've devolved a bit, and I just haven't had the time or bandwidth to go as hardcore as I have in the past or would like to. So a lot of mine are honestly more about, like, habits than

than hardware or something like that. But my I think my biggest one that's really tech related for this year is I've just been I I built a Synology NAS network attached storage for those not in the the acronym game.

I built that, but by building, I mean, I inserted five hard drives into it. It's very straightforward. Did that, I think, two or three years ago now at least, and have used that for storage for all my home networking stuff, all of the services I run. I run all of the services themselves on a separate mini PC,

but then just use the NAS itself for storage. And that's been really, really nice for my family. Photo backups, I do not use it for primary photo storage, but photo backups, I do use it for file backups, the odd video or music, stuff like that. And it's been just a really, really useful tool that I lean on more and more, even, like,

me and my wife are on MacBooks now, so even just the the native backups directly to the NAS and not having to trust any iCloud or anything like that with backups is very nice too. But that you you go through storage very quickly when you start doing that, especially when you start letting friends and family use it for stuff as well. So

what started is 10 terabytes, and I thought it would be more than enough. It's just not enough. I'm constantly cleaning stuff out. So this this year, definitely something I'll be doing is

I don't know if I'll if I'll change which NAS I'm using. If I do, I may wanna build a free NAS server, but that takes time, and I don't know if I have that time. But at the very least, I'll be figuring out a a higher storage capacity solution

so that I can have something that will will scale for years because I I hit that that 10 terabyte limit much faster than I expected. But it it is just a NAS generally is something I feel like everyone should have, especially if you're doing self hosting and even more so if you're doing self hosting for friends and family.

It's just it's a it's a win win. The one you mentioned, Seth, Synology, I think you said. That's been mentioned to me before, I think, by Urban Hacker, actually, said that that would be the one to go for. Is that kind of the the most simple,

hardest to fuck up, like, out the box option for people? Yeah. I mean, it just it works. It's very straightforward. You plug in hard drives. They have their own RAID, or you can do the normal RAID zero, RAID one, RAID five, RAID 10, whatever.

But their their own in house RAID is is a really good compromise between capacity, speed, and redundancy. Software is good. It's not, like, incredible, but it works well. It's easy to to forward through reverse proxy, like traffic or something like that.

Not open source, not FreedomTech probably in the traditional form of the word. Something like a free NAS or TrueNAS would be better in that sense, but those also are just not gonna be as plug and play. And for something as simple as a NAS where I'm not relying on it to do complex things, I just literally want a box that serves

hard drive space. Like, that's all I want out of it. It works really well for that. So I I I do enjoy it.

I definitely want to play around with something that is free and open source, and that gives me the same capabilities. So that would be probably a stretch goal for this year is to switch to something else from the Synology and maybe just keep the Synology around for for other storage users that that I don't care as much about.

Mhmm. What sort of stuff are you using this for? Obviously, you've mentioned photos, videos, and things like that. Is it also for, like, basically, all of your digital content? Is that is it all encompassing, or is it things that you won't include? And and if so, why?

No. I mean, I'll I'll put pretty much everything on there. I mean, I I lean on it less than I used to now that, like, Proton Drive is pretty solid. Now that I'm doing, like,

notes, nook instead of other note solutions and I've self hosted, like, I don't use it for everything, but not because I wouldn't want something on there. I think the only thing, like, we talked about before on the show is I wouldn't want it to be the sole home for, like, all of my

extended family's photos. Like, I just I don't want that liability. Don't wanna Too much for a risk. Screw up something and lose it or to alternatively have to deal with the backup somewhere else. So I basically use it as my

my backup for the good end to an encrypted drive solutions that I use, like Proton Drive, so that I'm not reliant on Proton, but I will still use Proton. So yeah. I mean, I'll I'll use it for pretty much everything. It's great for media storage and serving as well. I use Plex,

but JellyFin is very similar. I I've have used JellyFin for a very long time, and it is open source and Plex is not, but I I got, like, lifetime grandfathered in to Plex's subscription, like, fifteen years ago.

So it's essentially free for me to use, and it just works better, again, when friends and family are using it versus something like JellyFin, which I just always ran into little problems with, like, media detection and stuff. But, yeah.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. It's not something I've ever delved into. I'm I'm probably, if I'm being honest, a little bit too reliant on things like Proton Drive. Kinda got all my eggs in more basket there and having some some kind of local redundancy might be a good idea.

But yeah. Agreed. Something I I would like to explore. For for me, my first one would be actually reducing my screen time, and I know we've we've kind of done a a whole show dedicated to this around,

you know, notification management and minimizing the amount of time that that I'm spending on devices because, you know, the nature of my job is I'm almost always looking at some form of screen.

Thankfully, most of the time, that's, you know, the widescreen in my office, and it's not straining my eyes as much. But I just looked at my and I I promise I have literally just checked this. My phone screen time, my daily average on my phone, allegedly this week. I'm struggling to believe this. It says nine hours a day.

I believe that. Which seems like a ridiculous amount considering how many hours, you know, I work and then how many hours I've got in my free time as well and sleep on top of that. It seems like I I would struggle to achieve that, but I'm guessing my phone is not lying to me. So I'd already have I I believe that.

I'd already had reduced my screen time on on my list to to talk about on the show before I'd actually checked that that shocking number. So, yeah, one of the things I'm gonna be doing is is being even more strict around what apps can annoy me and when and how they annoy me. You know, you can you can kind of

cut down on what type of notifications you get. You can just cut notifications off completely. You can set timers on apps, which I've started to do as well where basically I can use a specific app for, like, thirty minutes a day, and then the phone will be like, yep. Your time's up. Obviously,

you can bypass that if you want to, but I guess there's gotta be a some level of personal responsibility that comes into this as well. So so for me, I'm gonna start leveraging more of the the tools on my phone and probably on my laptop as well to kind of cut down even further and minimize the amount of

distractions, the amount of screen time so that I can focus on, you know, just being a bit more present in and around family time and personal time. Because I maybe we can tie this in set to to something that you've got as well, which is similar to mine. It's about committing to more regular breaks throughout the day.

I I don't know whether that stems from a a similar place of of mine of kind of having just spending way too much time working or looking at screens. But for Something I wanna do as well is just kind of

mini digital detoxes throughout the day, you know, maybe digital detox is too strong of a term to just go out for thirty minutes without your phone, but, like, it's a start. Right? Yeah. I think

I mean, I definitely have a lot of the the same focuses for this year. And, like, the screen time thing, the one thing I'll say that really bugs me about the iOS screen time is you can't, like, exclude an app from the tracking. So, like, we have, like,

baby cameras that are local only, so no weirdo can get access to them. But I I need to be able to watch those throughout the day, like, kidnap, stuff like that. And so, like, oftentimes, I'll have two or three or four hours of screen on time that's just watching baby cameras.

Like, I I wish that didn't count because it it makes it hard to read the rest of my my info for the week. That is my one kinda quick soapbox complaint about the screen time stuff in iOS. But, yeah, I mean, on, like, the the breaks topic, I think all three of us were were productivity

maximalist. Like, we're always trying to get get stuff done in limited time. And I think something that easily falls to the wayside for me is, like, actual solitude. Like, not I'm listening to music or a podcast or something like that, but just, like, actually not

doing anything that forces my brain to work and give myself time to just, like, think and be creative, and come up with ideas and, yeah, just really kind of slow down. So something that I had like, I did a a really good exercise at an HRF event last year, Human Rights Foundation event,

and part of the outcome of that was that it would be really useful for me to take, like, two just, like, two breaks for, like, fifteen, twenty minute walks. In my neighborhood, I have really good walking places, so I can I can do that quite easily?

And, like, my commitment specifically was I'm not gonna listen to music or podcast or anything like that while I do it. Not bring my phone. Just just roll and have some some peace of quiet and solitude, which I think is something that people often forget about, and it's often where where the best ideas come from, where the

there's there's so much of us that that needs that time. So that's a big focus for me is slowing down and doing doing those two two breaks a day. I will say I've done that exactly zero times since the start of the year, so I'm not exactly off to a good start, but it's a it's it's a goal. Hashtag goals. You know what? You know what? I I

actually struggle doing nothing. We we kind of like trained ourselves to be busy or interacting with some form of device, like, all the time, be it the TV, the phone, the laptop, the iPad,

listening to a podcast, or doing something. Like, if I ever find myself in a position where I either have nothing literally nothing to do or I'm trying to do nothing. I really struggle with I struggle.

Can I give you a tip that you might like? Go on. Find something that is a very simple task that you can do without any extra simulation. An example would be, like, no podcast, no phone, no nothing, and you're raking leaves in the garden outside or washing your car or

doing, like, something that takes very, very small amount of brain to do. It's kind of like a form of meditation. I used to do it when I had motorbikes. Just unplug, get on the motorbike, and just ride for an hour.

And you are thinking you're kinda doing something, but you can only focus on that one thing, and it shuts the rest of the brain down is the other it's like the flip side of it. So you're either going, only focus on one thing that if you fuck up, you die,

or something that's very, very simple and takes very small amount of your brain. You're basically on autopilot, with no extra simulation. And that is kind of the same as the rest, but you're still doing something productive.

That that's a good point. I I do have stuff like that. Like, I'll go out on my mountain bike and stuff where, you know, I I can't really listen to a podcast because I need to focus. Otherwise, I will hit a tree at 25 mile an hour, and it's gonna hurt.

If I if I'm doing the more can't say that. It's happened many times. If I'm doing the more menial tasks, like you say, washing the car stuff, like, my default is I'll do it with a podcast in.

No. That's your problem there, mate. You gotta you gotta unplug and just just live in the moment, listen to the birds tweeting or in The UK, people breaking windows with bricks, that kind of thing.

The sounds of Max. Yeah. The sounds of the city. To you. What else is on your list, mate? Trying to think what's probably the next most home assist is the, next most important one for me.

So, I took your advice when we did, the episode on home assist. I bought all the bits and pieces, and then I got way too busy. And then, they just sat in boxes, but I have now set up my node. I've I've set up HomeAssist. It's ready to go. I've got everything unboxed and and ready to go. So security cameras with sensors and

some clever AI stuff in for for, like, detection of human beings and setting different zones where if a zone is crossed, it starts to record or alerts me on my phone and things like that.

And then, like, simple stuff like lights, I'm I'm extremely tight, so I spend sort of probably half my day going around, like, following my missus and kids just fucking turning off lights constantly.

So so putting sensors in and things like that.

Just getting, like, really nerdy and geeky with the smart home stuff, but without leaking all my information is is high up on my list. And probably, you know, within the next six weeks, a lot of that should be done.

Well, I hope we haven't got any more goals for 2026 because that one will see you through the whole year. It will see see me through the next decade, probably. Let's be honest. Yeah. Yeah. And and our technical assistant friend as well. Yes. Yes.

But it's a good one. It it's I enjoyed going down the the home assistant rabbit hole, and it it it it can be as as big or as small as you like, really, because, like, the the ecosystem is, like, never ending. It's huge. There there are home assistant capable devices in every conceivable part of your home.

So you can, you know, like you say, you can just do the basics like home security and having your lights automated, but you then you can go

right down the other end and have, like, you know, all of your yeah. You can have some nice storage and have it linked up to to your TV with with Plex and all that sort of stuff. Like, it can all be interlinked into, like, this one fancy home hub so that you can make yourself feel like Iron Man if you want to.

Do you wanna hear a a cool flex talking about TV? Cool. I've not had a TV for a year now. It's quite nice. Do you know what? I think I could survive without a TV, but I bet you've been watching your laptop quite a lot, though.

Not really. Not really. Like, we'll put on some, I don't know, whatever, like, YouTube, like, kids thing or, like, Spider Man, they like and stuff like that. I put on those sort of things for the kids, but no. I I don't think I've watched a single

maybe I've watched, like, one or two movies or something in the last year. Just like I've just fucked it all off. I don't have time and also just, like, productivity and stuff. And if I'm gonna do something that isn't work or cleaning up sick or shit, it's like go in the garden and do something useful.

Man, I'm not That's it. My hats off. Yeah. I'm I'm not as not as hardcore as you. I I like my high quality movie one or two nights a week thing. I I certainly don't watch TV. Like, I don't use my TV for TV.

But Good movies. It's nice. Yeah. Built a good sound system and a nice OLED. Yeah. I I can get behind a really good quality viewing experience. I bet that, Seth, your setup for movies is incredibly good.

Sound bars, and you've thought out exactly where everything's set up, and you've really nerd it out on, like, the quality of the TV and the the lighting. And I just I just know that that, like, if you're sat there, it's it's so close to perfection.

It yeah. I I won't I won't lie. It's definitely a lot of thought and research has gone into it, especially the sound system. I love music too. So when I have a a a calmer day at work and I just need to get some, like, writing or catch up messages done. I'll just sit on the couch and

blast some music in Dolby Atmos and revel in it. Very nice. Glorious. Can you queue before we move on to anything, can you just give a a quick rundown of of what Home Assist is and why anyone would use it? Do you mind for, like,

people who might not have heard that episode? Because I I think it's the coolest thing I've heard for a long time, and I think it I think it enriches people's lives quite a lot.

Yeah. So Home Assistant is basically it's just an open source piece of software that you can run on any computer that you like for ranging from a Raspberry Pi all the way up to, you know, a dedicated kind of desktop machine that that runs headless.

That basically allows you to make any smart home gadget or any pretty much any kind of interface or software service be able to talk to one another. So, again, that could be simple stuff like, you know, having a self hosted dashboard for your security cameras.

It could be having one place so that you can control all of your lights using the the Home Assistant app on your phone. Then you can take it up a step and have, like, automations and scenes where you can be like, okay,

you know, obviously, the the computer knows where it is in the world because it's plugged into your network. So it says, when it's sundown in The UK where I live, turn on the lights in these rooms.

And then when it's sunrise, you can turn them off and, you know, the the world is literally your oyster in terms of, like, how you can customize it.

Then you can kind of take it to the next step where you can have you know, you can start to string those things together. So instead of just simple automations for your lights, you could link up your security cameras and your lights. And like Max said, if you got a security camera that has zones in it, it could be like, if after 10PM,

the zone on camera four sees or detects a person, turn on these lights in the house or give the dog a little tap so that he starts barking. Like, the the world is literally your oyster in terms of, like, what you can do with this thing. If there's a smart home connected device,

it will talk to home assistant, and you will be able to do cool shit with it and have it talk to your other devices so that you can, again, like I said, turn your house into Ironman's house.

Mhmm. Yeah. Very cool. I love it. Yeah. It's a good one. It's a good one. But prepare your wallet and prepare your brain because, like, as with any self hosted software, it's a it can be a bit of a minefield to to get going. But if you if you're gonna go down the rabbit hole, check out the Zigbee range.

It all runs locally over, like, a local radio mesh network, and it's way more robust, and it all talks to home assistant. But feels like we could do a whole show on that one again, I think. We'll we'll come back to it. We'll do another show once I fucked it all up and then eventually

cleaned it up and got it working again. We'll we'll do that. Absolutely. Okay. For me, going back to more towards the the technology side, I wanna start leveraging AI a little bit more, I think.

I'm of the opinion that this is gonna become much less of a choice and more of a necessity, particularly in the kind of industries that we all work in and around. Being literate and and useful with these types of tools is gonna be crucial to kind of stay ahead or get ahead.

And eventually, as it becomes more proliferated across the, you know, the whole of the tech industry to just if you don't use it, you are quite literally gonna gonna fall behind. So I'm kinda conscious of that, and I'm wanting to to use AI tools selectively to improve my productivity

both in and out of work to kind of manage my life and kind of offload certain tasks. But I I wanna try and do that with, again, I use the term selectively. I wanna try and do that without kind of giving away, you know, all of my life secrets,

which can be difficult when you're interacting with this sort of stuff because generally speaking, the latest and greatest and the most powerful stuff is either, a, very expensive,

or, b, kind of you can't self host it and you have to kind of share that information with, you know, whoever's running that AI service. So it it it's a tightrope that I'm starting to walk down because I I do think it's gonna become a necessity very soon, Particularly in and around, like, design space and software space,

like, there's literally if you you've got your finger on a pulse on the kind of AI Twitter, there are excellent and mind blowing good new tools coming out every single day these days. Now the the difficulty I'm having at the moment is,

obviously, I can't afford or don't have the time to go and test them all out and pay for them all because you'd be spending thousands of dollars every month. So as I'm starting to go down that rabbit hole, I'm just trying to be careful of, you know, selectively choosing which ones I think

are are worth my time, my effort, and maybe the privacy trade offs of that. And then on the flip side to that, something I also wanna do is experiment with self hosting some some AI models because I've never done that. And and I do see a use case in my life. A prime example this week is

I've been going back and forth with with the tax office in The UK because the there's just issues with my pension that I need to sort out. And that has been it's quite literally made me wanna blow my own brains out because, Max, I'm sure you've been on the phone with the tax office many times in The UK. It is the worst experience

you could ever have. And I think the Americans have a have a meme as well where it's like going to the DMV, correct me if I'm wrong there, Seth, where that's, like, a horrendous experience.

Yeah. That that sounds about right. It's it's the nightmare everyone tries to avoid, but no one can because it's federally mandated. Yay. Indeed. So I I do see a a a time

where I would want a a locally hosted one where I I have unanswered questions around, like, what am I eligible to claim for this thing or that thing, and what should I be getting, and what am I not getting? And I'm not gonna ask ChatGPT that because I don't wanna give ChatGPT,

like, you know, how much am I earning and what's my tax bracket and things like that. Whereas if I could quiz something, you know, a greater power locally, safe in the knowledge that, you know, I'm not giving Sam Altman all all of my, know, personal information, then I would like to be able to do that.

What's your take on the the whole AI side of side of things? Go on, Max. I was just gonna jump in there and say, you know, we had Marks on for Freedom Tech Friday, whatever it was, cup cup about a month ago.

I had him on for a confab, which is gonna go live, I think, on maybe Monday. It's ready to go now. We actually go into a lot of these topics, and he has some good suggestions on, locally run and hosted options, some that you could run on, like, an Umbral or some that you could run on a separate PC.

We had some suggestions around that. And then, obviously, more deeply going into Maple AI and then new options, which is like a similar account based system to what you'd have on the MOLVAD.

So you don't have to give any of your personal information, which is actually a really, really nice way of setting it up, I think. So there are options out there. And if I think exactly the same way as you may. Like,

you have to have this stuff at this point. It's not good for everything, but you actually do have to have it, especially for, like, fiat world bullshit. And then, you don't wanna be feeding, you know, ChatGPT your personal info. So it is a necessity going forward. And I think, you know, either locally hosted or, something like Maple or,

a combination of the two is is probably the fit.

Yeah. It's, I think, a a a no brainer that you have to use something. I'm curious what you end up using. Hopefully, I need to talk about that when you when you do settle on your preferred solution.

Obviously, I've talked a lot about how I I use Coggy quite regularly, and I specifically for my needs with deep research, which is the majority of what I'm using AI for. It's it's really, really useful Mhmm. And has good privacy assurances, but it is just the the VPN model of you're you're trusting that they're not logging,

which I obviously trust Coggy, but that's that's a trust thing. That's one thing that I really do like about Maple. I it hasn't been as functional for me in my testing, but I haven't tried it in about six months. So I know that it's it's been improving steadily,

But I'm I'm very curious where you land and and what you end up using it for. I think we we definitely need to revisit that later. Yeah. I know Maple's recently added web search, which was a major limitation of of both Maple and all of these local models that you can have is that, obviously,

if if you're running it local, it's kind of like a a snapshot in time where it knows about all of the information up to us the point that the model was was created effectively. And if you need up to date information, then you simply can't have that, whereas Maple might also strike that balance where

your there's no personal information there. It has the the the the web search where it needs to. So, yeah, that's that's a good call actually, Max, at the angle. Might need to re revisit that one.

Before we I'm gonna bring up some some listener ones and just we're just gonna riff on the the the topics, and there's a couple of questions as well. Do you guys have any other goals or things, you know, big plans for free and tech wise for this year that you wanna bring up before we move on?

Honestly, the only other big one that I want to do this year and this may be ironic coming from someone who oversees CakePay, which is a a debit and gift card service, is finding a good reloadable debit card that both my wife and I would be able to use as our only payment card

is a goal. You that, mate. Oh, damn you. Yeah. Definitely let me know what you're using. I I I have gotten lots of recommendations, and none of them have been great so far,

but there's a few that I've been wanting to try out. I I definitely will need to hear what what you're up to, Max, because I want one that isn't clunky or painful for for the wife to use or something, but lets me

lets me get some privacy back. Because that's the one one financial piece where there's obviously just places I can't pay with crypto. I can't pay with Monero or Lightning or whatever. And I wanna be able to do that more and more directly from crypto. So yeah. It's yeah. Like, that's the perfect, like, scaling out and use

for having this stuff. Like, what's the point in having it if you can only sell it and, like, go to exchanges or, like, whatever? You you gotta actually pay for fucking stuff in life. So it's Yeah. Like a game changer. So I'll message her about that. That's a good one. Okay. Nice to you. I'm definitely definitely curious to hear.

I the only other two I have is running a new Monero node. My old one died when my lap well, it actually died because the software died, and then that node blew up. Literally, battery swelled and and blew up. And then so I'm not sure yet. We talked about that a little bit, how to do it.

But every time I message or put something on Twitter, I get, like, techie nerds like you two saying stuff like, oh, just spin up a VM and then docker it and do this. And I'm like, fuck it. This I don't speak this language. I just would like tell me a thing where I can just do it and it works. So that's on my list, to set up. And then

probably a bigger one than anything really is, like, key management and inheritance planning. I keep coming back to everything I've done over the last decade is too complicated. In most aspects of my life, everything's too complicated, and I'm trying to simplify things down.

Especially after having kids, like, the way you think about, these things is completely different. Before I was like, oh, you know, you die. Didn't really matter. Like, you're dead. You don't have to fucking worry about it. And I was like, now being dead is the the least of your problems. It's like, do your kids eat?

So so that's something I'm I'm kind of rethinking, looking at different options, how to do it. Like, do you do things where there's time locks? Do you you know, whatever. There's there's loads of different options. So that's something I'm not necessarily gonna act on straight away and move slowly, but to

at least start looking into and trying to find a, a good workable system. And I think probably most people listening to this are in a similar situation where maybe there could be some improvement.

And and most of the listeners who are listening are also probably in the same sort of age bracket and stress bracket where, like, people have heart attacks. People people get sick and die, and it's like it's not impossible. So it's not something you can just keep pushing back and not thinking about.

That's a good call actually because the the last one I had on my list was was very similar to that around inheritance. And not necessarily I'm not tied to the idea of doing it this year because I'm not sure the tools are gonna be quite ready yet.

But, basically, I want bit key style recovery and redundancy and simplicity without all of the trade offs that come with it. And it feels like where the direction that's tools like Liana are heading with MeScript and and like you suggested there, time locks and things like that.

That will be I think as long as that continues on its current trajectory and the tools continue to improve, that will be the next time I do a big upheaval of my personal security stash is to is to move to something like that. Again, it's too early right now, but I just

you know, as as time goes on, generally speaking, the the stakes tend to get larger. Fingers crossed. Yeah. And I get older and you get closer to, you know, needing to think about it. Yes. You need to think about inheritance and you have kids and you're like, well, fuck. What happens? Like, I I I I'm way more open now to

thinking that I need that additional redundancy or my family needs that additional redundancy without all of the the additional trade offs that you get with, you know, something like a BitKey

or Mhmm. With something like a traditional multisig where, you know, that there's no decaying aspect to it or anything like that. So feels like we're heading that in that direction. I've been cautiously optimistic about it for

probably a number of years now. And as we we all know, once you've been around for for long enough, you know that everything's always at least five years away. Mhmm. So I'm keeping my eye on that one.

I I think Nunchuk are doing a wonderful job of it as well. I should I wanna give them a a good call out. They've got some good mini script stuff in there now. Clearly, the the site the the the hardware devices needs to catch up as well, and it needs to be available everywhere.

But we're we're getting there, and I I think that's gonna be the the next big big move or big change I make on on the Bitcoin side, I think. Yeah. That's important. I'm I'm gonna have, Kevin Lowak Lowak, on the show soon to talk about Liana because, that, and like you say, Nunchuck as well, do seem like

they're making this sort of stuff a little bit more accessible, and I wanna dig a bit deeper and ask the retarded questions that people need to, know. So, yeah, hopefully, he'll be on soon to answer those sort of things.

That that's twice I've teed you up, this call now, Marks and and Kevin. So it's almost like we planned it. It we actually didn't, though, which is amazing. No. I know. I think yeah. We're in sync. We're just so this in a while. We're so in sync.

We've I was I was naming one of the shows the other day. Which one was it? It was, like, not the Freedom Tech Friday. It was

I can't it's one of the shows, it was, like, 300 episodes or 200 episodes or something like that. I was like, fucking hell. We've known each other way too long. Yes. Certainly has. It's it's been a while.

Right. Been a drain. I'm just gonna yeah. You could say that. I'm just gonna rattle through some of the some of the the listeners'

suggestions and jump in if you have any any any comments on this. But while we're talking about our overlord, Jordan, he's gonna be using Kagi a little bit more. He wants to use physical notebooks a bit more effectively. I'm interested to learn more there as to

why you would want to do that because that seems like a terrible idea to me, personally. Like a pen? Like, handwriting? Like, with his hands? Like, do you remember those? That's what that's what I still lean on, to be honest.

I man, I'm too I'm too keyword native when I try to handwrite anything. Good luck. If I can read it, we're we're we're really lucky. But most of the time, it's it's gonna be painful, and it's gonna be so slow. I just can't I can't write fast enough to satisfy.

It's painful. Also, like, I'm I'm a big to do list guy. Right? And if I've got, like, let's say, there's 20 lit items on my list on Monday, inevitably, there'll be at least five by the end of the day that that are still there. I don't wanna have to write I don't wanna have to write those again on Tuesday

because I want the tasks to flow over. Like, if I could just do control c, control v, I'm gonna do it. I get it. There's something, though, for some for some things, writing something physically down with a pen and paper, just feels different, maybe is slightly more likely to get done. Like, I'll I'll do it for things that are

some to do lists and things like that. Like, I'll lean and look at that more than I would on a screen where I've got 10,000 other things popping up and distractions and stuff. When I've physically written down, you will do this today. You can't.

I will do it because I I look at it in there, and I'm like, right. You've you've said you're gonna do it, and you've physically taken the time to put it in your notebook, so you will do it. Like, yesterday, I was exhausted, and I was like, you've said you're gonna do these pull ups. You said you're gonna do them.

And I'm like, yeah. I'm fucking exhausted, but it was in the books. I'm like, I am gonna do them, and I did do them. And so there is something a little bit different somehow, at least for me.

If it works, it works. Keep it up. Yeah. Keep it up.

What else have we got? Delta Mike said he's gonna be exploring privacy phones. I think we can all default to to GrapheneOS there. But drop my memory, what was the name of that one that Ricardo talked about? Because I I I made a mental note. I didn't put it on my to do list, which is why I've forgotten it about it to explore that.

Can you remember the name either of you? If not, I'll have to go back and check the tapes. Wasn't he talking about purism?

Or was there any other things? There was a there was a phone one as well. I'll have to go back and check the tapes. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of the the device that he was talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember what he said. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm gonna go and check those out as well. What else have we got? Smoke said that he's gonna employ the eighty twenty rule across their entire tech stack with regards to FreedomTech. One laptop that can also boot TailsOS.

One phone, one key signer, less is more. Yeah. I think that's a good summary of of what we've been talking about today is is kind of just minimizing your your pain.

Mhmm. Because the the more stuff you have, like, especially as you get older and you got more, you know, more important things to do, like, also worry about, like, kids, etcetera. Having two laptops and worrying about the latest Linux drivers and things like that is just way down on your list. So, yeah, I feel you there, Smoke.

Yeah. Tam Tam Bam on Noster said they're gonna order some mesh core gizmos to explore uncrushable comms. The dream is to use it for BTC. I have no idea what that is. I'm I'm guessing it's some form of mesh networking Yeah. Stuff.

It's gotta be. There's there's a few different ones out there that people have been using. I I assume that's what it's for. Eldorado said, this is just in January. They're gonna catch up on all of the ghost manuals, complete the Linux course on Hack the Box Academy. I've never heard of Hack the Box Academy.

But I've not either. Yeah. Oh, and he's gonna mine some Monero as well. Nice. Nice. This is a great name, by the way. San Joaquin Victory Gardens. I'm I'm gonna gonna presume that's a place, maybe. I think it's they're sentient, apparently.

Yeah. They said they're they're gonna onboard family members. That that's a good one. It's it can be a tricky one depending on who your family members are. I think Yeah. I've got as far as getting my wife on signal, and that's about it. I don't know whether you guys have had any success recently.

I have have gotten record before. I'm not good at this for crypto stuff, for Bitcoin, etcetera. I have not had success. But for simple things, especially like advanced data protection on iOS, for getting them on signal instead of text messages, that sort of thing has gone well,

but a lot of the things that require a little bit more life change, like even switching to ProtonMail from a Gmail or something,

just because it's people get so used to their email and don't wanna create create new accounts or change the email address on accounts. It can be it can be tricky to do those, but I'm happy even with just getting people on signal and having all my family chats and everything there.

It's a it's a it's a slow a slow job, but slowly but surely. That's an important one. It's like getting getting them off sending pictures of the kids and stuff on unsafe apps, I think, is, like, one of the biggest things you can do. And and Signal does make that easy.

It's something we've managed to do. But they they do still, like, slip up occasionally. Like, oh, I need to, like, send a photo on fucking WhatsApp. And I'm like, do you not listen to the last 300,000 times that I've told you not to ever send pictures of my kids on any other app? And it's like, oh, yeah. Sorry. And then it gets deleted.

So people still you you have to you have to, every time you sit at the dinner just drill them with this kind of stuff.

You do indeed. You do indeed. I didn't mention at the top of show, but I have a very hard stop at the top of the hour. So I'm gonna start winding this up or down, should I say. Mhmm. Gwydian on Nostre pre submitted a question and specified it was for you, Seth, for obvious reasons.

He said and this is summarized by the way, Gwydian. I had to cut it down to fit in the the question box on screen. So it's summarized, but I think I've got the gist of it. I think receiving no KYC sats to Kate's upcoming LN wallet to then exchange to Monero with Crookedor will be a big improvement when compared to on chain

Bitcoin swapping to Monero. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I I think generally that's true. I think something like RoboSATs and swapping directly into Monero is that would be, as far as I can think, by far the most private way to acquire Monero.

So, yeah, it definitely will be a a very big use case. Unfortunately, Lightning is such a pain in the ass that a lot of providers have not implemented it. We're obviously we're we're pushing pushing providers to add it. We do have a couple that support it right now via Trocador, or

we're trying to get some more directly integrated as well. So that definitely will be a point of emphasis so that you can do it directly via Lightning. But I think, honestly, Lightning Network's complexity scared off pretty much all of these exchanges, DEXs, etcetera, over the years,

and we're we're trying to win them back over now that Lightning's actually getting reasonable to implement from a, like, internal centralized instant exchanger wallet perspective. So we'll definitely push on that. But, yeah, I I think that that will be the

the best way to do it when you can. Obviously, RoboSATs is really, really good, but it doesn't always have the best liquidity depending on what payment method you wanna use. But I I think that that kind of chain will be will be great.

Yeah. Definitely looking forward to that one. And he did have a a follow-up question as well that said, have you tested the Spark implementation on Blitz Wallet? And if you or whether or not you have, how does Kate implementation differ? I didn't actually know that Blitz had Spark implementation.

So hopefully, Seth, you know about it, you've probably done some benchmarking if I know you well. Yeah. They've they've done a good job. So they're if I remember correctly, they're not using the Breeze SDK and implemented the the Spark SDK from the Spark team itself directly.

I don't think they've rolled this out to everyone yet, but I think their idea is that they'll kinda do the graduated wallet concept with Spark as one of those things. But you can you can try it right now. I know they were talking just today or yesterday about also token support on Spark to let people use use Stablecoins

natively on Spark, which which I think will be a a good thing for a lot of people to be able to to use Stablecoins, but stay in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But, yeah, overall, I mean, it's it's spark under the hood. So in terms of how it will actually differ to the end user, it shouldn't differ at all,

but the the exact approach will differ in terms of what best you can use. So so the main difference, correct me if I'm wrong, would be the, essentially,

you're using the the Breeze SDK. So Breeze is kind of running the the I forget the terminology you use now for for the, like, the Spark service provider or or something like that, whereas the Blitz one would be using Spark themselves. Is that right?

At first, both will be using LightSpark specifically as the, like, the lightning gateway, essentially.

But it would definitely the the goal and one of the reasons why we wanted to go with the Breeze approach is that they will be adding other Lightning service providers, Lightning gateways, Spark service providers. There's a million names, but they'll add different

people who you can use to make those Spark to Lightning payments and vice versa. But initially, it's gonna be using actually the same one because that's the that's the main one right now, but Breeze will definitely be be adding to that.

So so where does Breeze actually come into it then? Where are they sitting within the system? What are they offering when when you say you use the Breeze version versus going directly to to Lightspark? Could you kinda spell that out?

Yeah. I mean, primarily, it's it's that they have taken the the approach that Spark does, all of the implementation details, but they've written their own SDK with their own bindings into other languages, like Dart, which we need, like, or Flutter.

So it's much simpler of an implementation, because there's no there's no native deader deader flart. I'm dying. Flutter or flutter or dart, man. Oh, that's that's that's how long this week has been. Really? Clip that. Yep. That one's going it's going viral.

Yeah. They have no native Flutter or Dart bindings, so we would have to write those anyways ourselves. So it would just greatly increase the implementation time. But on top of that, Breeze also are,

at least right now, making a lot of improvements and changes from a privacy perspective, just little tweaks that help to provide better privacy to users that aren't done by default in the native SDK. So, again, that's something we would have to manually do ourselves if we wanted to do that.

So they're just they're making it much simpler to integrate, and they'll also make it simpler to use a different Lightning gateway

down the line at the same time. So but it's not that different under the hood. It's really just from an implementation perspective. It's way easier for us, and it has better privacy out of the box for us. That's not to say that blitzes will be worse on privacy depending on the options they choose. But,

yeah, it's a it's a it's a much more plug and play approach. They've done a great job. Awesome. I have tested the the Cake one, and it is excellent. I'm very, very impressed with it. Just to wanna sign off, when when can everybody else get their hands on it, Seth?

Yeah. Public beta should be next week. I know we've been pushing it back, but it's coming with a complete redesign for Cake from the ground up. And we wanted to get that to a really good state where the public beta can help us to test both the completely new UI for Cake Wallet and the Lightning implementation.

So it's it's taking a little bit longer. The Lightning's really been ready for a few weeks now, honestly. The private beta's gone gone really, really well, and people like yourself have had good feedback that we've been able to

to implement, fix, and improve. So on the Lightning side, I'd say we're we're ready for runtime, but we're we're finishing nailing down the complete redesign of cake to to launch both at the same time in a public beta,

which we should have the core of what we need ready by next week. It won't be complete, but from the UI side, but the the core of what we need. And then we'll keep iterating on that until the full release mid February.

Okay. My apologies. You quickly now, mate. I promised you that I would, do some testing. And then, I got sick, and then the family got sick. And then I think it was Christmas,

and I've just completely forgotten about it until now. So sorry about that, mate. That's just, sounds like a whole lot of excuses. Expected. You're dead me, Max. Yeah. You're to me. It's expected. Shame. Yeah. Shame. Shame.

Okay. We are at time. I I always enjoy these kind of wide ranging kind of question or or loose topic based ones. Listeners, if you wanna hear us do do more of the same, please get involved. Drop your your questions. I love the question based ones, means I don't have to do any prep whatsoever.

And we get you involved with the show, so please do get involved if you, you know, tag us any of us on on socials, and we will add it to our never ending list.

But with that said, we will close out the show, and we'll be back the same time next week. Don't listen to Max when you're listening looking at times. Check my tweet. I will have the the correct ones, and we'll see you at 9AM eastern, 2PM London. Have a good one.

Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London.

Thanks to Seth, Max, and Q for keeping it ungovernable. And thank you to Cake Wallet Foundation and my Nim Box for keeping the Ungovernable Misfits going. Make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com to see mister Crown's incredible skills and artwork.

Listen to the other shows in the feed to hear Kareem's world class editing skills. Thanks to expatriotic for keeping us up to date with Boost's XMR chats and sending in topics. John, great name and great guy, never change and never stop keeping us up to date with mining news or

continuing to grow the mesh to Dell. Finally, a big thanks to the unsung hero, our Canadian overlord Jordan, for trying to keep the ungovernable in check and for the endless work he puts in behind the scenes.

We love you all. Stay ungovernable.