8:32
So, you're getting into home labbing, you're taking off with your NAS, you're doing lots of fun things, you got all your remote apps, maybe you've set up remote access, tail scale, pangolin, whatever. What it's the coolest next accessory for your home lab? Might actually be a cell phone plugged into your home lab NAS or your home lab server. Cell phone plugged into your home lab NAS can unlock a lot of really interesting possibilities in terms of apps running on your phone that's not your phone. Let's discuss. Okay, so it might sound a little weird. It's like why would you run an app on a phone connected to a NAS when you could just run an app on your phone? Well, there's a lot of really good reasons. Privacy, one. Control of the app because the
app's not going to be able to track your location because your location is not going to move. Uh, separation of concerns. What if you lose your phone? What if it's What if it's confiscated? Your data's here. I like running as little as possible on my phone to the point where I pretty much just use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot because I don't really trust my phone. I mean, it increasingly where we are in 2026, it's about surveillance capitalism and your device is increasingly not your device. I mean, look at the double speak from LG, in my opinion, about functionality. And it's like, oh, we just you know, we just fingerprint stuff for ad tracking or for analytics. And it's like how much of that is going on
in your phone? How much of that is from Google? How much of that is from third-party app providers? Third-party apps really don't police a lot of things. You know, Pokémon Go can track your location and do a lot of fun stuff. It's like, well, I still want to play Pokémon Go. Well, I mean, I don't, but maybe. So, what if you could run Android apps on a real Android phone remotely and you just do screen forwarding? That would give you a lot more security. And we've to start at doing that in the how-to. But not just Android apps. I mean, there's some apps that don't really care about having a real phone.
They'll work fine on a virtualized phone. So then you start to be able to compartmentalize concerns. Maybe you can have some virtual machines running on your Proxmox NAS. This is the Minisforum N5 NAS. This runs Proxmox great and in all of its different configurations. You can get the N5 or the N5 Max, which also will do AI stuff. Whatever. Basically, any NAS where you can run a virtual machine or some other workloads. I'm doing it on Proxmox. I wrote a guide to do it on Proxmox. Even not just Android, you can also run desktop applications. So Apache Guacamole is a remote desktop client that's actually terrible for mobile. But you can use Guacamole and connect and
get some stuff done. In 2026, there's a lot of vibe coding going on. There's a lot of people doing dev. There's an explosion of people that see things and it's like, I just want to solve this problem and I want it to be a little bit less annoying and terrible. someone is thinking along the same lines as I am because they did Pocket Guac. And Pocket Guac solves a lot of the problems of Apache Guacamole as a web client. And it lets you It's like a remote desktop type client, but it's web-based for uh you know, virtual machines that you might be running on here. It can do RDP and VNC and some other protocols, but it gives it to you as a web page. So you can go on your phone to a web page that's hosted by your NAS. And your connection from your phone to
your NAS is through Tailscale or whatever you want to run. And so when you run and interact with an app on your phone, it's really just remote control of something that's running over here, which is pretty awesome and maybe gets you thinking creatively about what you want to do. There's a thread on the level one text forums like, what services are you self-hosting? And as you self-host things, it's not just the web page interface where it's like, oh, this is designed for this like image or something like that. ScumVM. It's interactive point-and-click LucasArts Adventures. Instead of running it locally on my phone, maybe I have multiple different phones. Maybe sometimes I want to play on my phone and sometimes I want to play on my laptop.
Instead of having to fool with synchronizing saves back and forth or where I am in a particular point-and-click adventure, I'm just using this as an example. I can just remote into it from whatever device it is. It's actually running here, but because this is always connected on my Telnet, it always works. And even if you feel like you're left out because you're on Starlink or some other ISP that doesn't give you a real internet provider, the network connection provided by something like Tailscale or Pangolin or NetBird, which we're going to be taking a look at, works through carrier-grade NAT. You'll be able to connect to your NAS over the network
and get it done. And that's really what this how-to is about. It's like thinking a little differently. Now, the other reason that I'm doing this video is because I think this is probably the future. Like there's there's there's too much money to be made in surveillance capitalism. The only way that we can really fight against it is regulatory for people to understand and how invasive and corrosive it is and pass laws against it, but also to just do away with the incentive there because if you're somebody who's sticking your neck out saying this is pervasive and corrosive and terrible, odds are that it's going to increase the likelihood that, you know, the machine tries to find something that you're doing that they
don't like that they can, you know, nail you for. We've seen that with the guy that was running GrapheneOS. Like on your phone is not official Android and it doesn't necessarily require root. You don't necessarily have to have a rooted phone, but there are banking applications that say, oh, GrapheneOS, we don't like that. But if in your GrapheneOS you remote into a real Android phone connected to your NAS and it's doing screen sharing so your NAS can see what's on the screen, then your banking application will happily run on this real Android phone that has screen sharing enabled, which is great. If you're traveling and, you know, border patrol goes fishing because you're somebody
that has stuck your neck out for protests or for whatever reason, then, you know, they might confiscate your phone. And it's border patrol is allowed to do inspections for contraband. But as we saw quite famously with the guy that was running Graphene OS, law enforcement will happily misrepresent reality in order to create a silly reason for doing a contraband search. In this scenario, there is credible evidence that this guy was detained and had his devices confiscated at the border for a contraband search, but law enforcement was actually doing a fishing expedition because this person was a protester that was already in the systems. It's like this is probably one of the most egregiously anti-American sentiment
things that I have seen in a long time, but this is how technology is weaponized against the individual. It is like how dare this person speak up and say, you know, it's like, I don't think we should be doing Cop City or whatever it was. And it's like you turn your technology against you. Your phone is a secret or I don't really secret, but it's like personal in a lot of ways. I think personal's the word that I'm looking for. You know, your thoughts it's an extension of your mind, your thoughts, your diary, this kind of thing. I don't like the idea that my phone can run arbitrary remote code that is not mine. And if I'm using my phone, but my phone is actually, you know, partly over here or
partly somewhere else, then it increases the surface area that somebody that is trying to spy on me surreptitiously will trip up and there will be better logs. I don't believe that any devices that we have as citizens, whatever they are, should be opaque in terms of what they're doing. I want a log. I want to be able to see what my phone is doing. Can I get on my phone and get access to a network log and see what sort of that it's sending over its cellular connection. And everything is engineered to be as difficult as possible. If you modify your device to be able to do inspections on that kind of thing, suddenly a whole classes of applications don't run. It's like who really owns what in that scenario? And the
mind-blowing thing is that Android has a lot of compartmentalization. If you look at the features in GrapheneOS to do with like your contacts and your contacts can be sandboxed and you can also have the Play Store. And the Play Store can be sandboxed in certain ways. This is stuff that the GrapheneOS dev team has put a lot of work into, sure. But Google engineers have been thinking about this kind of device security and this kind of isolation for a long time. That's why those features are in the operating system to begin with. But there is some sort of executive roadblock or parasitic execu-lizard decision making at the top that prevents those good, privacy-respecting, reasonable features from making it to the end users. And so
they have to come to the end users in the form of a third-party OS like GrapheneOS. And it seems like that the incumbent powers that are making those decisions hope that nobody notices uh how egregiously their personal rights are being violated in the name of surveillance capitalism or profit or whatever it happens to be. I think part of the American ethos is the freedom to tinker, the freedom to peer inside. It's like oh, this is they're doing some really dumb stuff here. I'm going to make some improvements and I'm going to patent my improvements on their thing and then we can both make money together. It should never be the situation where just because the person who vends you the phone gets the basically the right
of first refusal off of any amount of money that you're able to make through this platform. That's corrosive. That's terrible. That's a terrible attitude. And I've seen more and more uh people sort of adopting that attitude. It's like well, it's Google's phone. They can do whatever they want. I would agree with you if there was a truly open capitalist market where I could just have a phone that worked reasonably and didn't depend on a lot of the infrastructure in the plumbing. It's like, oh, well, everybody can found a power company. So the power company could just charge you a $1,000 per kilowatt hour. It's going to be inelastic demand. Even if the power company's charging you $1,000 per kilowatt hour, you're still going to use
at least some electricity to keep your food cold, probably, maybe to heat your shower, although probably not at $1,000 a kilowatt hour. But they're still going to make money. And so it becomes a race to find how much money people are willing to tolerate to extract from them. And this is true of a lot of convenience industries. This is true of a lot of other very large companies that shape a large part of our lives. And so I think this is why it's so important to de cloud yourself and self-host and explore things like running an application on your phone. And yes, the software isn't perfect, but the how-to is interesting. And being able to run applications remotely on a phone uh opens up some possibilities you
didn't have before. And I just thought it was interesting. I thought it was worth sharing. I'm going to do this level one. Take a look at the how-to and fun times and let's let's build some even more better software. Pocket Guac guy did. You can too. All right. I'm signing out. I'll see you later.
