Episode: 3281
Title: HPR3281: HPR Community News for February 2021
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3281/hpr3281.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:08:33

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3281 for Monday 1 March 2021.
Today's show is entitled HBR Community News for February 2021, and is part of the series,
HBR Community News, it is hosted by HBR volunteers, and is about 69 minutes long, and carries an
explicit flag.
The summary is, HBR volunteers talk about shows released, and comment posted in February
2021.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair, at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Falon, and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
Today, this is HBR Community News for February 2021, and joining me today is, hello, it's
Dave Morris.
It's usually this, you know, that's a bit of a bad news.
Yes, anybody else cared to join, then we'd be very welcome.
Exactly, and this is the HBR Community News show for February, and in the community news,
we look back at the shows of the previous month, make sure everyone's get a mention, and
that's about that.
So as we normally do, Dave, would you like to welcome in the new hosts?
Yes, we have two new hosts, which is quite a turn up for the books, and wonderful to
see.
And I check with how the first person says their name, and it's O9L, is the pronounciation.
O9L?
Yeah, yeah.
So, and the second person is some guy on the internet, which is an app brand new to
them.
Yes.
So, the first show of last months just happens to be the community news for last month,
which is episode two, three, six, one, and we had zero comments, but Dave, we're not
being controversial enough.
No, no.
So, before I'll say it again.
We tried last time.
We tried to.
Yeah, bad things.
Nobody cares.
Bad bad things, but nobody cares, as you say.
Um, Swift 110.
My thoughts on diversity in Linux and open source, where he gives some background to
the story and certain frustrations he experienced in life loads of comments.
First by Norris, storyteller, thank you, Swift 110 for the episode.
You have a gift for storytelling telling, I hope you continue.
This is an important issue.
I don't know how to help, except for more stories like this, I look forward to hearing
from Swift one time again.
Excellent.
And Bill N1VUX, probably is pronounced differently, says, well said.
I agree with Norris, if one tends, quite the story teller.
I could tell you where a man of taste when I saw the Thinkpad, your prior EPS listing.
T420 is a great Linux platform, especially sweet if bought refurbished, smiley face.
What it's worth, Wikipedia says, Langston terraces were a second federally funded projects
in the nation.
Yeah, that's a illusion to the discussion in the show.
You're asking good questions, he says, one of the newest housing projects in Boston has
a technology center within the campus, co-sponsored by MIT, southendtexcenter.org.
And a bunch of local teams were disestablished.
Some of the core volunteers here moved there.
Very good.
Kevin Oberlin says, part of the discussion.
I thought this show was timely, and I would welcome part of the discussion.
Free software and open technology create possibilities, but they are guaranteed if people don't
take the necessary actions.
Excellent.
Blizzak.
Oh.
What's going on?
What Dave?
Blizzak.
Yes.
Yes, he did the maximum length of the comment.
I did a part one or two.
Oh, indeed, indeed.
Yes.
I did notice that having proved them and stuff, but yeah, it's, I hadn't really tweaked
that.
I just do the mechanics of this.
I really think.
Do we read the comments or do we narrators for a separate show?
Two important discussion, not to read this, Dave.
I vote for reading personally, yes, yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Please send in a show because it's a show.
Amazing stuff.
We have a comment bloomed.
Yes.
Yes.
So as Blizzak says, systematically kept out part one.
Obviously got to hit them, had to go back and do change the title.
I enjoy hearing stories about African American experiences like this.
There was, as you mentioned, a great black migration that happened in the States.
It sounds as though you've done quite well for yourself and you have a strong community
around that cares about you getting ahead in life.
That's awesome.
And we all need something like this in our lives.
Thanks for sharing your backstory about you and your family.
I do appreciate someone talking about something else than their newest laptop, or the latest
distro of their favorite operating system.
This is a podcast, and like most podcasts, there's lots of rambling and lots of pundits.
I think you're making some broad generalization about people of color, POC in America, even
though you're a member of that community.
I know you've stated this from your experience.
For instance, you feel that people of color are not vocal in the floss community is because
they're somehow afraid.
I don't believe this at all.
I think many people of color are unaware of many floss technological tools, but so
a lot of other people who are not black, brown, or women, being ignorant or unaware of
something does not make you afraid, or sure your family was apprehensive being part of
that great migration, but they did it.
So did millions of other African Americans, and he cites the Wikipedia page about that
subject.
POC consume a lot of technical information just like other folks in America.
They use computers, cell phones, tablets, etc.
Additionally, they spend lots of money on tech-related items.
Tech companies want POC communities, all communities, so that matter to consume their products.
They have no interest in these communities participating in its implementation.
For instance, are we to believe that Apple couldn't hire a POC as part of their QA team
for their watches?
He cites an issue about Apple watches and against darker skin than maybe some people
have.
And yeah, that's the end of part one.
Do you want to do part two?
No, because then people would be comparing our narration to the same thing with each other.
All right, all right.
Systemically kept out part two from Blizzak.
I think the main reason you don't see people of color in the Flash community is the
same reason you don't see lots of Black folks in lots of other industries.
People of color have been purposefully kept out of tech jobs in America.
It's the same reason you don't see women in many of these places as well.
I would post you like that many of the people who contribute to Flash also work in tech
in some way or another.
Notice the word many, not awe, or most.
So you know, I'm a Black man, US citizen who lives in New York city.
Sorry.
I work as a software engineer and I'm also interested in Floss.
And that's Blizzak.com.
Now if there are not more shows from that, I don't know what absolutely, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Okay.
I'm just kidding.
Yes, please, please, please.
And also excellent article.
I was not aware of this.
I will browse it later or better yet.
If Blizzak or anybody else wants to do a show on the Great Migration, please do so.
Yeah.
Well, I agree with that.
I have to say that my ignorance on that subject was stunning when I discovered that I had
it.
I don't think, you know, the sort of teaching that I'd had in my lifetime not really covered
this subject to anywhere near enough.
Yeah.
It's and as I said before on this, on this, on this episode on this podcast show, whatever
thing we're doing here, this, that's in Ireland, the essential history.
If it didn't involve being oppressed by the English, then there's also covered.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, as many, many people pointed out the English were fairly busy oppressing their own
people at the same time.
So yeah.
There's lots of lots of nastiness going on over the place.
Right.
Next day, on 9L, my beginnings in tech are rambling about how I got into technology.
Hiya.
There aren't many links for anything here, putting something in this tool node seems
important.
Yes, it does.
I feel a bit barricade because I barged into doing this show, but it was also an excellent
introduction.
Yeah.
So keep in coming.
Yeah, yeah.
It's good to hear.
It's always good to hear somebody making their first steps into being an HPR host and all
that sort of stuff.
So yeah.
It's a good.
Congratulations.
Well done.
The following day, 9L and there is something I haven't heard about in a while.
Introduce some basic 9L and walks and walk through, setting it up by Norris just.
So this was actually quite a nice one and kind of useful, even on a small network, I
imagine.
Yeah.
We serenaded work.
I was not indirectly involved in doing so, but yeah, it was, it did prove to be very,
very useful in a small university environment.
So I've always been tempted to do it myself, but I've never got ran to it, but yeah, good
good show and some superb notes.
Not so you love it.
Exactly.
Yes, it's one of these ones where you've got, I know for sure, I heard that on some podcast
somewhere.
So yes.
My Chromebook experience, which is turning out to be a little bit of a series now, following
St. Floater is two episodes.
This is Hooker's Joining the Frey about his experience with Chromebooks.
So pretty cool.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, it does sound pretty useful thing to have if it suits your needs.
The thing about stop receiving updates in 2024 and it being sort of fairly, fairly useless
thereafter was something.
I mean, did I get that right?
Yeah.
It updates stop and then it's effectively junk.
I'm not sure it isn't in the hands of somebody who could repurpose it, but that, that
upsets me.
I don't like to hear that sort of stuff, you know, things that would build up to lessons.
But yeah, but they are bottom of the range laptops.
So not just a finite day, good Lord, no, they are bottom of the range laptops and I really
noticed here when my kids have had laptops and they would argue that, yeah, they hate
it when I put Linux on them that really hate it.
They much prefer the Chromebook experience largely because they're used to it.
But that said, the laptops when you put Linux on them are just unusable now, you know,
when they're out of date, they're really just unusable.
They can't open web pages now with so much crud on web pages and stuff that they're
just going to hold.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's a, it has a limited lifespan for all sorts of reasons.
Some of which are deliberate, but yeah, yeah, I would not buy one personally, but that's
just me.
Yeah.
And the keyboard drives me absolutely not not having, you know, the proper F1 keys and
control keys and they, the keyboard has like the power off key up where you have the
delete key.
So great.
The delete key is the power off key.
So you press the delete button and your laptop turns off.
Yes, I know you can turn that off at all, but still it's monumentally frustrating.
Yes.
Anyway, moving on.
I've been trying to get her to do show about this particularly because it would be good
in that series, but not, not interested, just the way I'm afraid, yeah, and you can
lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink upgrading Debian on my raspberry
pie.
And it's where mistrex covers the process of upgrading Debian from GSEA to stretch 9 on
this raspberry pie.
Backing up in case things were wrong, oh, yes, what a good idea.
Yeah.
Usually two nanoseconds after you should have realized, yeah, whoops, yes, I wrote down
it as a torture tale, it has sounded quite painful, but it's, it's, it's glad, I'm glad
you got it, got it work in in the end, that was excellent.
And it was entertaining to listen to and knowing that it was going to be a happy ending
as well.
Yeah.
Very good.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
It's a ripping media in 2021, this operator, and this is how to use YouTube DL script on
Windows.
It's actually quite, quite complicated, I mean, it reminds me very much of how difficult it
was by Linux back in the day when you simply download this, patch the kernel, put this
in some of these flags.
I think this stuff, and you can upload your monitor up and all those good things, yes,
it's, yeah, it, I couldn't, I mean, I have a strange viewpoint on these things because
I'm really not interested in doing this, because I don't care about the stuff that, that
you can get in this way, mostly, because it's, to my mind, it's junk, but that's just
me.
I'm old and probably walked in my opinion, but yeah, it does send a lot of pain to achieve
what you want to achieve.
I watched a lot of YouTube stuff on the big clive and stuff like that, and electronic
stuff.
It's educational, but it kind of would help that those producers wouldn't care if it was
YouTube or some peer-to-peer network that would distribute their videos, peer-to-peer
or something.
So you know, because they're getting the money to pay to you on anyway, so why would they
necessarily care?
Yeah, anyway, yeah, next day, what do we have?
Video game review, ARC Survival Evolved OnSpy Enigma, I've never heard of this one, did
you?
No, no, it's a, it's a close book as far as I'm concerned.
It sounded like fun, actually, it does sound quite entertaining, but I can't see me running
out about it, to be honest, but it seems something my son would be very much into, which is why
I'd be very, very quiet.
I imagine my kids would be, would be a lot more interested in it, I know, yeah.
Sorry Enigma, just following day, Linux in laws, the first year of the five-year plan,
comrades, yes, we bring you the five-year plan, and there's one comment, Claudio, thanks
for the invite.
I'll have my agent contact you later, winky-do-wink, they're number one fan.
So, the following day, in this gimp episode, we had an example, use of layers, creating
new header image for my WordPress site, using layers in gimp, quite nice, and as always,
detailed references in the show notes, even to where he's getting the clip art from.
Yes, yes, yes.
I thought this one was getting on into the more practical aspects of things, you know,
in terms of something that I could actually see myself doing, would go back and look
at the resources here when I needed to do it.
So, yeah, I mean, obviously you've got to do the set scene before you can do something
like this, but it's a lot of fun.
Yeah, yeah, really, really interesting stuff, as with everything that a hooker, he starts
at the beginning and works his way through to the end.
Absolutely.
It heals to me very much, yeah.
And there might be a free-doss series in the offing, whoop, whoop, whoop, word on the
mastodon is.
Then following up so that I think had to be my favorite one, sorry, everybody else thought
an interview with a six-year-old, it's got to be awesome.
So, the zopper anchor as well, brilliant, I love this.
And there's a comment from Lovebug who says, love this, knowing how difficult it can be
to engage a small child in front of a microphone without them going all shy or grabbing hold
of it and making farting noises.
This was amazing to listen to, to use the entertainment as the voice of experience,
and that is right there, brilliant stuff.
Oh yeah, I forgot to say about the other episode, their effempake on Mara's now.
Awesome.
Oh really?
Oh wow.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
The next one.
The next one much, has something.
Yeah, the images are pre-processed before they're sent back.
Oh, cool.
Excellent.
And some reference to the fact that the planet's got the most Linux on it, or something
to that.
I did make it all out.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Very good.
Next episode.
In GNU Linux, there is no other diversity.
We're all just data.
How I experience GNU Linux and the topics of diversity, some guy on the internet.
I'm just some guy on the internet.
This was another one of those comments, let's book one, so that's welcome.
Hearing your Linux journey was like hearing somebody read mine out loud, although my journey
started a few years before years.
The Windows 98 ME migration was my knowledge to look into alternative operating systems.
Like you, most of the communities I have encountered have been very friendly and helpful.
I've not dealt into the art world, but have encountered that type of attitude elsewhere.
Eliteism exists everywhere.
How we react to it is up to us.
That side, you're welcome to one of the best communities on the web.
There you go.
That's very cool.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, you find eliteism in all sorts of places.
Yes.
I've encountered it as a programmer way back in the day on various operating systems.
You go on a news net and ask questions and you get a range of things.
Some people would tell you to f off and some people would be very helpful and give you
answers.
You've got a whole range of stuff like that.
I've never understood the mentality myself, why?
I'm more than happy to point to somebody.
Here is the manual.
The section you're looking for is this page and it's here and this is the paragraph that
you're looking for.
Oh, I didn't even know it was manual.
I can understand the art community might be tempted to suggest people to go there because
they're wiki is excellent by an art and just as in general, if you have any Linux issues,
if you end up in the art wiki, you're usually finding out what your GUI tool is doing
in the background.
So it gives you insight that way.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a great resource.
But yeah, to be arrogant about it seems ridiculous really because to be proud of it and should
be pushing it forward to people who get something from it, you know, it might be you, but
there you go.
Thankfully, it's diminished a lot and I think Ubuntu has gone some way into encouraging
that nice behavior on the internet.
Yeah.
Critical credit is due.
Embrace Firefox Dave, that's our browser.
Some guy on the internet out there and I cannot disagree with them.
What's Mozilla doing?
Well, I don't even know what he was referring to and what they were doing in the show, but
I really think Mozilla could do it focusing on producing Firefox and Thunderbird and
yeah.
Yeah.
They seem to be becoming abandoned in some way or turned into something that we're not
going to want.
Probably.
Yeah.
Very, very strange.
It was nicely, nicely explained and recent, I thought, okay.
My custom DWM setup, me talking about how I've customized DWM, added and moved patches
and written various scripts.
This is RRF tab.
Yes.
Comment is of me or you, who's turn it?
It's my turn, it's my turn.
You threw me with that name there because it's our fab.
I was trying to work it with you, you found it, and a tea.
Where did you get the tea from?
I don't know.
No, no, no, yes, it's a bit like a tea, I bet, I bet a quick glance would be easy to do.
These things just throw me into a spiral, sorry, it's my dyslexia, Dave, there you go.
I know, I know, but yeah, my brain just, it's probably got something wrong with it.
It's too old to go into spirals, when it shouldn't, anyway, and then for that, which I have,
Magnalo says in his comment, might return to DWM, enjoyed this episode, which I began
listening to and then switched over to the video version.
I used DWM as my main desktop many years ago, because perhaps eight to eight or so, and
it brought my rather underpowered laptop alive.
In the end, I abandoned DWM because I had to use netbeams every day, and for reasons
I'd never understood, it wouldn't work with DWM.
Back with KDE again for now, yes, I like extremes, but you've noticed me into giving DWM
another word, his phone is edited DWM to down, I would imagine.
So, yes, he's going to have a shot of DWM.
Yeah, cool.
I did watch the video and it was great, it's a sort of thing that where a video really does
help, admittedly, audio is great and all, but I didn't fully understand, I've never
used DWM, but it gave me a better insight into what it is, what you can do with that
and stuff.
Yeah, it wasn't too bad, there were a few hears and see there in the episode that I was
able to extract the majority of it, because I was hoovering at the time, so I didn't have
the option to go in front of a computer, but there are one or two points and that's always
a risk when you're doing a video, forced to do the audio and then record the video.
Yes, yes, yes, it's quite nice to have video as an enhancement to the audio though, that's
definitely a good thing, but I'm sorry, but there's no way I'm ever going to run DWM.
KDE is where I'm happy with KDE these days, so I'm going to stay there, I think.
I am loving Alex Cutie, just simple guitar, you've got all the niceness of KDE, all the
configurability and that's small and light, that's all I need.
Yeah, KDE's come along a lot since I used it way back in the earlier days on Fedora,
I think it was way back when.
So yeah, for me it's perfect, my kids say, why are you using all that stuff down and I
say I like all the ability to tune it and change it in the middle of it, but why, why would
you want to do that?
Yeah, because I want it to be the way I want it, because I can, yes, yes, yes, so there's
a similar drive in our fab's discussion, he sees tune things to the umpteenth degree and
make it for him.
Next day, D1 mini closed lid to scan thing and the hours, this thing has saved me and
I'm sure it's very, very specific to give you an idea, it was a use Weemos to monitor
when a lid is open or closed and the network scanner, so, you know, it's basically just
a read switch, which is a magnetic switch, magnet comes in, then a JSON file turns, yes,
you know, or open to closed or something, but it could equally be burglar alarm, triggered
or gays door or garage door open or whatever you want to do with it, this is that's basically
very, very simple thing.
Yeah, yeah, very nice, I like this.
I did play with the read switches during my student days, making little gadgets that
animals were supposed to operate and push and whatever.
So yeah, it's a very nice technology, but yeah, the Weemos made what I was using, it's
just fantastic thing.
It's like having a little Arduino, you can program it in an Arduino as well and put sensors
and all sorts and, you know, you can have like this thing somewhere and feed it with five
volts and, you know, I intend to get some to monitor MQTT and semi outside temperatures
and, you know, vibration and stuff like that, whatever, I don't know, what do you like
time?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, lots of, lots of possibilities, a lot of people are doing
this stuff.
I'm still looking over the fence at them doing it, haven't done much yet, though, I do
have Pi, Pico here waiting to be used for something or other and those sorts of things.
And if you give the ESP8666 and stuff, yeah, we've asked this cool because it just got
the Wi-Fi built in, so, you know, there's no messing around with anything, you just give
your Wi-Fi credentials and it's a computer on the network, but yeah, perfect, perfect.
Following day, taking advantage of a little known feature we do here in Haka Public Radio,
the narration, Deepkey sent in a script to Klatu who read it, and if you're going to
have somebody read it, why not have one of the best voices on HPR?
Read it for you.
There you go.
Indeed.
Interesting that HD Radio is a thing.
Actually, I didn't know much about this at all, it did prompt me to go and look at the
Wikipedia entries about it and compare it with the European, what's it called, DAB?
Yeah, yeah.
It both seemed to suffer from similar issues that greedy organisations try and force the
transmissions down to the minimum bandwidth, so you get crappy audio at the end of it and
certainly DAB is a nightmare in terms of that.
Very, very, very poor radio signals or quality of audio on most channels, yeah, I don't
always like in Europe.
I don't actually know why anybody would listen to the radio anymore.
No, no.
So my question is more fundamental than that, like, listen to the radio, either way.
Well, it's this thing about having radios in cars and stuff, I mean I've got DAB radio
in my car and so I don't actually listen to it very much, but on occasion for a long
ish drive I might switch the radio on, but there's not usually much I want to listen to,
so I just put a podcast on the phone or something like that, but yeah, yeah, but there's occasions
where you want to use it, but the DAB is not that brilliant, the quality of it, even though
the speakers in my car are not bad, some of the channels sound just awfully sound worse
than old shortwave or stuff that I used to get when I was a kid, you know, this interradio
Luxembourg from a little transistor radio, it sounds like that in some cases, not quite
as bad.
It doesn't keep fading in and out and stuff like that, like it used to, but yeah, it's still
pretty grim.
Microsoft in my Debian repo, this is by Archer72, who Raspberry Pi added the BS called
repo to the Raspberry OS, which is formerly known as Raspberry, and people were annoyed, and
this is how you get rid of it.
Yes, yes, excellent, there's been some great responses to this.
I think the Raspberry Pi foundation were stunned, either by the response, they hadn't appreciated
what the way people would take it, but I think a lot of people with less of a purist, just
judging from what my son said, he said, oh, BS code's great, I use it all the time.
So it sounds like a good idea to me, but then he's in the mode of, I need to think to
get the job that I have to do done, and there's a thing, and it's available, and I can use
that.
So, you know, the finer points passing by, personally, I agree with the people who are
objecting to it, just to put my cards on the table, sorry, you were going to say.
Yeah, I think that people, you know, there's the whole concept that free software is one,
blah, blah, blah, but I actually think we've lost, because, A, I've been a lockdown and
I'm very depressed, but B, because people are using the software, but they don't understand
why the software is there in the first place, and I'm seeing, yeah, there's great support
for Linux, but now they're supporting proprietary applications that are just don't care what
operating system they're running on.
It's just a matter of convenience, it's standardized blob that they have there.
So, they've just, we haven't won, we've just been used in a worse, yes, yes, yes,
that's a lot of truth in that, yeah, yeah, however, I can completely understand the devils
I've got here, I can understand why they will put it in the repo, and it doesn't come
as any surprise to me that the Raspberry Pi Foundation would put it in this repo, I think
the Raspberry Pi Foundation never met a secret of the fact that their, that their goal is
not free LibreOpens or software, it's to get something to run, get technology into
everyone's hands, and that just happens to be easiest used in free LibreOpens or software,
they've got lots of proprietary bundles on their, on the thing, and this is just another
piece of proprietary code.
People should not be surprised about it.
It shows a certain lack of sensitivity for the, for a quite large proportion of the
audience, was my thing, well, not really, Microsoft, you know, Microsoft says that they are
a big fan of free software, yeah, the hatred for Microsoft is something that many people
certainly will have in spades probably, and for, for very good reasons, you know, do you
trust the, the, the, the X-Murderide, it's a big stream, but I mean, do you trust somebody
who has shown that at some point in there, in their existence, they want to, to destroy
you, you then say, oh, okay, they're actually nice now, so we'll just trust them and let
them do an early one, yeah, and that's a, it's a difficult one, yeah, and the actions and
people say, yeah, yeah, but they're, they're open source now, and that you have to trust
them, but guys, their business model has had been, and always was, embrace, extend, and
extinguish, so, what protects us from that was the free LibreOpens or licenses, and that's
the only thing that's protecting us from that, it's not to say that there are not, Microsoft
may have changed, that's fine, so let's wait the number of years that they've been hostile
to Linux, let's wait that equal amount of time that they're not hostile to Linux and see
after that, then make the judgment call, not just two years down the road, and I've, I've
known that as far as trust goes, you know, the, come across some articles and discussions
here in the house, when trust is broken, how long it takes to recover that trust in somebody,
so if you lose trust in somebody, you need seven actions, seven good actions before you
start trusting that person again, so equally, you could say the, the art stick for Microsoft
as to whether they're good guys versus bad guys, whether they've changed is that we need
to wait seven times the length of time that they were hostile to Linux to see if they've
changed.
That sounds reasonable to me, I have to say, no, it would be reasonable as waiting seven
times the length that they were hostile to us, when they're in a position where they
could extinguish us to see what they do, then, anyway, Dave, if that doesn't get controversy
in this show, I don't know what will, why get quite a lot of agreement, yes, yes,
anyway, yes, yes, but again, on the record, I think there are some good people over there
and they're doing, they're going in the right direction, I will not accept they, oh,
they've submitted more codes to the Linux kernel and the last blah, blah, blah, that is
not an argument, that was a matter of convenience, business interest, because there, as your cloud
was getting killed because they weren't able to run Linux efficiently, so they had no
choice but to develop that code, so outside of that code, take that code away and then show
me stuff, visual studio, yeah, okay, but is that really something that we want to be
depending on?
Yep, so, yeah, any who, God, I don't know where all that, all that came out of it, there's
a lot of it around it, actually, I thought it was purely agnostic on this whole thing,
yeah, well, what did you expect from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, there are the ones who
include Minecraft on the thing, which is a closed application, yeah, true, true, true,
anyway, did we do a minor victory against designing observables, secular people, we should,
think we should, extracting a bit more life out of the device that Apple will rather have
you dump, oh gosh, this is a recurring theme, theme this month, but there's a great show
by Beezer, I'm liking it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know what
it is about people like over there, Beezer seems to be getting iPads reigned upon them,
and, oh, I'm a blank, embarrassing, you know, forgotten, matchbox renovation seems to be
getting, oh, like, Tony Hughes, Tony Hughes, all these IBM laptops throwing it away,
oh, why does nobody have me stuff, I guess old HP laptops that were dead 15 years ago brought
in here, can you use this, yes, that's a boot crop, perhaps, what's a boot day, yes, yes,
oh, no, no, it's the same here, I don't have access to a lot of goodies, in fact, I've
just been clearing out some of the old computers, you know, the sort of baseball style things
that I acquired from work, when they were, they would use, take them out of student areas
and then say, right, I only want them, but they went in the skip, I brought several of them
but they're on the way, way out, but, yeah, they were rubbish, all too rubbish,
as a guy said to me, the other one time, when I went looking for a replacement disc for
the original iPod, I wanted to buy one for Myezer Aspire, they happen to have the same
hard disk, and he was charging like 150, 200 quid for it, what the hell, there he goes,
yeah, it's a collector's item, it doesn't even work, dude, right, yeah, okay, minor victory
against built-in obsolescence, love this old, yeah, good, yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's
the sort of thing that's good to hear about, nicely, nicely put, nicely explained, excellent,
and designed in obsolescence is a disgusting thing, especially in the context of a planet
that is going downhill fast, and yeah, I've just been listening to a climate change podcast
who say, don't be so negative, but it's hard not to be, and that sort of attitude is
a major contributor to the problems, yeah, the right to repair initiative, and I mean,
one of the reasons I wanted to get into electronics tape was, was basically cause the kids break
something, you know, something electronic, a CD player or something, and I just know that
I, you know, just feel it in a water, that there's something in there broken, that's probably
worth $0.05 shipped, you know, and since then, the amount of stuff that I've fixed has
been amazing, actually, with just pastors busted or connectors have soldered free or, you
know, don't be afraid as the AV blog says, guys, if it's already broken, you can't get
only more broken. That's true, actually, that's true, yes. I had a, I have a second hand,
or how have you call it, a remainder switch, a managed switch that I got from, from where
I used to work, and I had a power outage problem, we got two back, and I think that killed
it, and it's really useful things, 24 ports, one gigabit switch, which is, which was intended
to be and was becoming the heart of my house network, but really liked to fix it. And there's
hardly anything in it, it's mostly fresh air inside the case when you look inside.
Have you got a, have you got a bulb meter, a DVM? Yeah, yeah, I've got the, the NY Bill recommended
altimeter-y thing, yeah. Open the thing up and start tracing the voltages. You can't,
you can, or thing number one, have a look around, is there anything black burnt?
Well, yes, I've done that, and I've looked for popped electrolytic capacitors as well, which
is sometimes a sign, but there's probably stuff that's died without it, without showing any,
any signs, particularly, but it always ended off to NY Bill, and he could use it as an excuse
to get an electro-scaling microscope or something. Yes, indeed, indeed, I'd like to see that.
It's quite large though, it cost a fair, fair fee, quick descent.
This, I'm holding in my hand the component tester, which was 16 books, and I assembled one of the HPR
New Year's shows, and I soldered the floating, and I sent it off to NY Bill and he fixed it,
but in the process of fixing it, he bought a microscope with a class six grand or something.
Yes, yes, yeah, a microscope would be a fun thing to have, but not a bad price, yeah.
USB one, which is actually not bad, you know, one of those other people things,
the new Raspberry Pi camera, there's a microscope attachment for that, and so it's not cheap,
but I think you get a pretty reasonable USB microscope from that, actually, so
something to put on my Christmas list for Santa too. My wife is getting three cuddles out there,
and I'm not. It's annoying. Okay, fine. How can you tell we're in the middle of a lockdown?
Anyway, where are we? Linux, in laws, legacy programming, and languages. This was a good overview
of Cobal. Reminds me of the scour, not Cobal, but just different types of languages and where they
came from, etc, etc, etc. But who was it that was telling me about Cobal? Remember a conversation
was with McDalu on the way back from Fostem that they're actually paid, oh no, that there,
if you wanted to be a Cobal programmer in the morning, you could start, and they'll pay your
exams to learners, and they'll you be guaranteed a job, and etc, etc, etc. There's so much Cobal
out there. Oh, yeah, yeah, nobody interested in learning it. It's a weird language. I have played
back in the day. We had a Cobal compiler on one of the machines I was managing,
and just to see if I could, I decided to write some code for it in Cobal, and it's great for doing
stuff where you've got nicely defined record structures. You can say, read that line in and slice
it up this way, and you show a picture effectively of how it's to be sliced, and it does that
really, really smoothly. But soon, you want to do anything more complicated. I found it a little
bit difficult to get my head around, having been an alcohol programmer before that. So anyway,
yeah, yeah, wouldn't fancy being a Cobal programmer for rest of my life. I have to say, well,
better rather than stuff and chickens do. True, true, true. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I'd
convince my son on that subject, but yeah. But you're right. Yeah, I've certainly heard of
there being a big demand for Cobal programmers. So yeah. But yeah, the show itself was great. I did
enjoy this. Yeah, exactly. The, I find myself sympathizing with Martin's view of alcohol and
Pascal and modular two and stuff. Never used modular two, but definitely out of Pascal.
Say, why so? Well, his view was these are structured programming languages versus object oriented
stuff, which he wasn't quite as keen on, which I tend to think, although I use object oriented
stuff quite a lot, it seems to me to be a model that's unnecessary in many cases of time.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's a glorified function for the case where you sometimes think
you might want it, but guarantee by the time you need to come and reuse that object, your needs
will have changed. So yeah. Yeah, I knew. It was, it was an interesting look at these things.
So I only found it to be quite, quite a good, good reference to these things. And I knew a lot
of these older programming languages, so I didn't cover all the ones that they didn't cover the more.
But they did a good job of thing. Never used small tools, I'm sure you've got something to play with.
Yeah. Only who? Next day. Well, we need for the activity problem network. This keynote addresses,
address looks as where the federators social media can go if we make it work. And it was Evan
from Rudro Mo. Thank you for not buttering that. I don't equal opportunity name butcher.
Yeah, it was, it was a very interesting overview of the talk actually. It was a whole subject area
that I don't have a huge of knowledge and I do use federated social media a bit,
but looking at it from a sort of design point of view is quite an interesting thing to be doing.
So yeah. Yeah. I must say I'm enjoying a mastodon a lot more than I thought I would.
And HPR is on mastodon. Our email address is our email address contact, blah, whatever it is,
our handle is at HPR at bots in dot space. Yes, well chosen, well chosen.
You know, because I was looking for somewhere to go and then come across somebody mentioned,
I can't remember who hands up. Thank you very much bots in space. It's exactly
freely available in source place and it's exactly the sort of thing, you know, just bots coming in.
So they can completely black us, black us if you want.
Mm-hmm. Yep, yep, yep. No, it's good. It's good. My son's homework in his MSC recently was to
write a telegram bot which he said was the task was right about the wood you would use in a coffee shop.
So it would not quite sure to say you'd finished making a cup of coffee or something,
I'm not quite sure what it was, but it's remarkably easy to do. And the whole thing is very
I'm sure there is a joke in there about coffee shops, but okay.
Yes, yes, I don't know. Well, I don't know the other two. I don't know quite where the, yeah,
the plan to set all these students on doing that particular thing came from, but it seems
to think it was quite a fun thing to do. Okay, was that it? I believe that was it. That's all the
shows. Indeed, it's all the shows. We just got comments to deal with. So we missed a comment
last month because it came in after we finished recording, yeah, and that was a comment to
Swift 110's Apple products I've owned episode. And it came from Windigo who said, Ipad screen.
I've yet to crack a screen on any of my devices, not on wood, but hearing the story of your iPad
made me winces if I had. As a silver lining, it made a very enjoyable episode. Thanks.
Very good, very good. Do you want to do the next one? There's all and I'll reply to my own one.
Okay, don't. So yes, there was a comment on show 2356 going back to 2017, which was Ken show about
to enabling SSH on the Razbian image as it was in those days. And the comment came from Leo B who says,
do yourself a favor and run this guy's fork of the script, this being Ken script. And he refers to
the GitHub repo run by Steve Sainer who is a host, I believe, is he not?
Who, yeah, who's done some work on this. I think he, I had a quick look, didn't dig deeply.
And I think he thought what the work that a guy called Sesame Mochow had done on your original
code just just by the by. Anyway, that's not the comment. Going back to the comment,
it removes some of the checks, some complexities and other things that confuse the original setup.
Great episode and lots of good management tools through this approach.
And I replied, yes, absolutely, please use Steve's script. But since Boston, the show, I've done
a follow up show, 31 73. And I'm maintaining my own version on my own GitHub repo. And the reason
I'm doing that, I'm still encouraging people to use Steve's one, but yeah, just somewhere for
my own script, because it's particular to me. Yeah, so I updated the link in the in the episode as
well. Cool. Okay, I'll do the next one. Nourst says, on Nourst's show about Ansible for Dynamic
Host Configuration Protocol, Windigo says, it's an interesting approach. I'm currently battling
with splitterized and DNS and DHCP on my local land using PiHole and the underlying DNS mask server.
I'm very happy to have this episode as a plan B. It's a very clear way to roll your own
network services without having to worry about manual configs and fragile setups. Thanks for
the great episode. Yes, it's always good to have a plan B.
Cool, cool, cool. Next is a comment on show 3241, which is a community news in January.
That's why we've had no comments, Steve, because people are amongst behind in their podcast,
what can we do? I don't know. We're in trouble now with all the feedback we've got to get in the show
in about four months, too. It's from Clackair, who's entitled, is it NoSQL and Redis? Dave said,
this preceded NoSQL, I imagine, and he was referring to key value stores in general, I believe,
which are indeed older than relational databases and are a layer on top of which relational databases
are built. When I initially heard it, I thought it referred to Redis specifically, and thought,
no way, Redis came out in the middle of NoSQL boom. I was wrong by two days, my face.
Redis came out on 2009-0510, and the term NoSQL in the current sense was coined on the 12th of
that same month, and he refers to the Wikipedia entry, and on Redis and also on NoSQL, NoSQL,
had people pronounce that. Anyway, whatever. So yeah, you're going to do the next one, and I'll do
my... I was just looking at that days, and, oh, this is HFIR started back then, and is it all
already been running for nearly four years? I'll look back to have a look at one of those
technological where we started in the whole technological boom and stuff. We started before,
I like a good idea. If somebody could point me to a good place where known dates within
at least free software, realm started, or technology realm, you know, iPhone commotion this day,
they Nokia sold so many phones on this day, you know, that's sort of thing. Anywho,
Jackie, annunciation to Redis, pronunciation, most people pronounce Redis. Not Redis, we just... Redis.
Why am I doing this on Dave? Why am I doing this on Dave? It's often used as a cash
to avoid expensive database lookups, much like one would use, for example, Memcash. And I've always
interpreted the name to hint at, I don't need to make that heavy multiple table of joins because
I already read this just a moment ago, but not his, that's mine. I never looked up what the official
story of the name is. Wouldn't be bad, actually, Redis. Yeah, I don't understand that actually,
yeah, yeah. So I said, because it was something I'd said on that show, as I answered,
Claire Kaye, back key value storage. What I couldn't recall at the time was the name Berkeley DB,
which was the sort of grandfather of the internet, I think, that's all, yeah. I used this for a while
when it was owned by a company called Sleepcat. Later, it was bought by Oracle. We were open,
held up, users at the university I worked at, and this ran on top of Berkeley DB files. I failed
to remember all of this in the show itself, of course, it's my face. Archer 72, I had a comment
to next cloud these way, which I was joking about, that he put it in, because I have one
called next cloud, the hard way, and it's coming towards show name. Yes, Ken, the show name was
somewhat intentional. This was only after I saw your future show on the internet archive,
where while I was preparing show notes, and I thought it would be a nice play on words.
Love it. Look at that.
Yep, yep, yep. Missing tags, Dave. Do you want to look at the mailing list first, or do I have to?
You do. Well, yeah, 21 shots on Tuesday, which we missed, unfortunately.
Ah, had intended to join, but there was a mix-up, and then there was a thread from
started by Kevin about the Raspberry Pi thing, which prompted the show that we were just
commenting about. Should I go through them? Yeah, it was basically just a conversation about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's it's it's watering the bridge really, isn't it? I mean,
there's some interesting comments there, but I'm sure people can go and read them.
Okay, RPG Club. Herey, herey, herey. During the month of March, the HPR, RRPG,
role-paying game club is going to play Starfinder, a science fiction fantasy game set in the
far future, based on D&D rules, the D20 system. No purchases necessary. No experiences required.
We're an inclusive group whose main goal is to have fun and to make friends. If you want to join us,
let us know, and I will send you further details or discuss any questions you might have resources
include. Link in the show knows. Pre-generate characters are available. I, so we play at 1600
UTC on Sundays on the HPR mumble server. So that is CH1, teamspeak.cc, port 647,
477 information on the HPR website. Again, 1600 UTC on Sundays starting on the 7th of March,
7th of March. And guess who has been roped into creating a character for Starfinder, Dave?
Hmm, I wonder, I wonder. But his son, I still don't know how he managed to get me to do it,
but I now find myself looking forward to four evenings of doing maths cleverly disguised as a
science fiction game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You think I could have pronounced names just with
the Cmitwender add-up dice rules. I do it this heavily into D&D stuff, but she has,
she's part of a group that plays over some one of these systems that I can't remember the name of.
But yeah, so she's completely self-sustaining that I don't need to be involved at all.
So I'm really happy about that. I genuinely, genuinely know nothing about this,
other than I got conned into creating a character, just get him to show up, and then
I'm now kind of involved with this character, and I want to see what happens. But in
40 years later, the present, and now we're talking to Ken Fallon, the president of the Starfinder D&D
so I could have him, I could have him. Yeah. Anywho, wherever you have anything else interesting,
yes, HPR bots in space, we just come to that Kevin O'Brien set. If you're a master done and if
you're not, why aren't you, make sure you follow HPR and boost the suits just for just one
a day for the daily offering. Yeah, I've started doing that myself as well.
Mm-hmm. Yep. I do, and I remember consistently yet.
Open Bug Bounty was a question we got anything else to say? No, no, we're also on Twitter as well,
so I'll do it over there as well. And the Open Bug Bounty, we got a random person sent on the
same bug thing, and it's looked very much like spam, to be honest, but it turned out to be genuine,
and we fixed the issue, which was I had PHP info in a file called php.php.php. Yes, I'm a moron. Thank you.
So yeah, that's quite useful then. Yep. March RPG Club. First Sunday of March 1700. Yes,
I'm going to be running a tabletop role-playing game called Starfinder. If you're reading this,
then you're invited to join. No experiences required that you can imagine, come,
contributors to an ethical podcast like HPR, we're eager to teach new players.
It tries every hook. If you don't own a copy of Starfinder yourself, please download the
pre-generated character sheet from Blah, the game will last weekly until early April. Early April?
I don't know, it's just March. But we do not need to commit to playing every week. We consider
two people core and we play for two hours on Mumbai details we've already given you.
Cool. Is that it? That's all. On the mailing list, we can talk about tags and summaries.
Please, you wish. Yes, some Giza called Dave Morris added 10 well updated 10 shows with tags and
all summaries has needed. So there you go. You will come up from a long slumber and manage to do
some fully backed slipkinn. Only 414 left. Only 400. Yeah, yeah, it started putting the
that number in which I shall continue with because it's quite nice to see that to the number
going down. You didn't look at the page that's reference, of course, but just thought it'd be fun.
It really does help finding shows because I've used that an awful lot lately. Looking back
for things. Yeah, yeah, I'm famous of using it quite a lot as well. It's quite fun.
Okay, that's it. That's all I have to say. I could go on, but who wants to listen to me?
And there's no events. It took pretty much to the end of the match. So there's no point in doing it.
We did a post. Oh, we did a post. Yes, yes, yes. That was the thing I was going to comment on. Yes,
indeed. It was fun. Yeah. I think all of the videos are now available. When I looked at some of
the ones I was interested in, they were available. I wasn't sure the entirety was now on the site,
but I imagine they are. So yeah, you could watch the videos in real time,
well, at the point at which they were meant to be available, they were available, and you could
watch them stream at that point. But then you had to record it though. They had been recorded.
They were all recorded before the event and then just put out at the time. Yeah, which was a great
way of doing things. I thought it worked really, really well. And there were tons and tons
and tons of stuff as you might expect. And it was some really good things to attend to.
Then after the presentation was done, then the presenter was in the matrix chat. And I was
blown away by the technology, by element, how seamless that was. Within an IRC chat has
gone on underneath and people are asking questions in the room. And then the videos run on
there in the top corner. And it was just absolutely seamless. Right down to the annoying people
turning off the mics on one people. And then you could go to the whole way chat. So a link would come
up and then you could go out to the hall and talk to the presenters and whoever else was interested
in that topic for ages. So very, very good. Excellent, excellent. Yeah. I was just looking at
stuff on the website because element wasn't behaving all that well for me. But yeah, so I still
got a lot out of it. It was really good. I got to see more stuff there than I did by going
a couple of years. I've been five years maybe. I've never I only slid the language picking.
I normally only ever walked into the first, you know, the opening intro thing and then
started doing the recordings. But this is the first time I was the whole day going from
talk to talk to talk because at least you could get in, you know. Well, exactly. Yeah, I used to
going there physically, I used to make a timetable of what I wanted to go and see and stuff.
But the problem was you'd come out of one thing and the next thing would be the other side of
the campus and you'd get there and there was vast cues and they said, no, sorry, we're full
go away. So and in the early days, you couldn't watch it, watch the streamed version of it either.
You know, it seemed just have to wait until it came out. I didn't always come out as a video because
they had problems with recording them. So yeah, this was this was a different legal together.
For the there were people who went to a particular track of the day and then just stayed in the room
and did not, you know, didn't go to the toilet for the entire day. I did try that. So yeah,
actually I did go and sit in the pole room and listen to everything that came up, which was good,
which is quite fun. It's kind of what I ended up doing anyway because I followed like the
main track I didn't jump from one thing to the next. So that was kind of cool. Yeah, it was good
time. I was listening to a lot about Pearl Six, which has now been renamed as Raku. It's an amazing
language but very, very, very strange. Yes, it was fun. Yeah, there's lots to be seen. There's
still lots to be seen. Just go on the archive site and you'll find links to all of the videos
that are available and you can spend a huge amount of time looking at them if you're so minded.
I really enjoyed the new radio stuff. Yeah, really some good stuff there in the track.
Didn't miss the whole thing with the stands. I didn't feel like the stand experience was well
replicated, but hard to do though, I guess. Yeah, the stands were really something
that I'll suddenly go and sort of chat to somebody about whatever they're talking about then.
I imagine for some people, if you go to the, if you go to Fastam, just as a guest of somebody who's
there and then you go over to a booth like Debian or Postgres SQL and the only thing they seem
to be doing is selling t-shirts cause. That's all anybody's interested in. They're coming up to
the guy's door. Yeah, do you have this size t-shirt? That's all the things to be doing too
enough, too enough. I don't have to stick it. Stick it all out. Stick on due dads, fluffy things with
eyes. You can stick on the back of your laptop and all that. Pretty cool. Okay, shall we wrap this up?
I'll add this and we'll send it up to the mothership. Yep, yep, yep. Sounds good. Okay,
tune in tomorrow for a little exciting episode of The Hacker. Public radio. Join us now. Don't
join us now. Don't share this. Do share this offer, but keep it up. Keep the viruses to yourself.
Keep the viruses to yourself. All right, thanks to you. Bye. Okay, bye-bye, man.
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