Episode: 280
Title: HPR0280: Aftershow
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0280/hpr0280.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:32:13

---

Thank you.
The following was an unintended impromptu after show conversation between Kajari and
330 and was recorded after an episode of the Lotta Linux links.com Linux user podcast.
How did he go into we just continue?
I guess so.
Say, until it kicks us off, you know, it's usually how Saturday goes.
330, what do you all hope to start it?
What was that?
I do you hope to start it.
I still can't understand you.
There's some kind of extraneous noise.
All right, hold on.
I'm calling from the cell phone.
What's that?
Do you hope to start it?
Oh, we do it right at midnight Eastern Saturday on FoxU.
We've got a really easy redirect.
You go to live.linuxcranx.info.
It'll take you right to the FoxU page.
I had to call in from the cell phone too, so by then I met work.
Yeah, it's good for me because it's only 9 o'clock in Pacific time, but
which right after Vince gets to bed, I can go onlinuxcranx.
I'm right at the club working for Hope, who all the drunks are in and there's quiet outside.
Yeah, there you go.
I have a question for you, Kajari.
Yeah, actually, I'll solicit your opinion.
If you don't work for, well, they recommend that if you don't do a distribution that you don't
compile Ganoma on your cell own.
But if you're doing it for distribution, what do you get the documentation to compile
Ganoma on your own?
I think what you do is you hope that one of the known developers also helps to make
packages for your distribution, and you'd be really nice to them so that your package is
always compiled.
I've compiled Ganoma on my own in the past.
I have too.
And it worked except that I couldn't, I was having trouble getting accessibility support working
because you have to put, you have to build packages in a certain order and the order isn't documented.
Even the maintainer of the accessibility packages is unsure of the build order for his own packages.
No.
Plus they develop on Solaris, so that doesn't help Linux users quite as much.
I wonder why Slackware gave it up.
Yep.
Because the no accessibility at least is developed on Solaris.
And while the rest of the projects are developed on Linux, there's sun codes sprinkled throughout
most of the desktops.
Because sun manages the Solaris port of Nome obviously, so they run it all over the place.
So yeah, nobody's really.
You can even run Ganoma on Windows apparently.
So, I mean...
I need to find that.
I've got Katie E running.
Yeah, in theory, if you can run, I've seen GTK ported to Windows, so you should be able to run Ganoma
where you're supposed to be able to run it everywhere you can run GTK.
Because the GTK is the first thing you install when you build Ganoma.
It turns out you're supposed to build the accessibility infrastructure and then build GTK and then build Nome.
Which is where I screwed up because I didn't know that until I got the whole desktop built.
It's like, oh, I should have built that first.
Thanks.
Thanks for letting me know.
RM-FR-slash this whole big system that I built so I can start over.
Yeah, you should look at the page.
They might even have binaries for it.
I don't know.
But you should look.
Windows 7 isn't nearly as horrible with Katie E running inside of it.
Because you have to use Windows Explorer.
I've been using Conquer.
It's almost comfortable.
Except that you still don't have a shell, right?
No.
And it did blue screen after my first reboot.
Yeah, well, if you could get a shell installed, then it would be because any OS without a shell is kind of useless, really.
Yeah.
Let's say I do have putty running.
So I just SSH into my...
Oh, well, that's not too bad.
My Debian box in a minute.
Well, there you go.
Yeah.
That fixes your without a shell issue.
Yeah.
But assuming that you didn't have anything other than Windows boxes, you'd be kind of hosed.
Yeah.
I thought they said PowerShell was included by Default.
Yeah, but it's not an actual shell.
It's a shell that thinks that it's Unix, but really isn't.
Hey, there it is.
PowerShell version 2.
Oh, your prayers are answered 330.
Ah, not really.
Say, like I said...
Because it still doesn't know what a Simlink is.
Oh, say no.
What the problem is is that it's still Windows underneath the KDE for looking facade.
Yeah.
Who is it that was saying that like RM and whatnot are all just Simlinx to the DOS commands?
Not Simlinx, but if you type RM, it's like an alias for...
Yeah.
The Dell or whatever...
Whatever the DOS command is for that.
I don't remember.
It's Pintuil.
Yeah, it's Deal.
Oh, okay.
Maybe I do remember.
Maybe it's because I used it when I was like five and it just hasn't left the brain.
Although I love sitting down at it.
You know, a broken Windows computer and you're like, okay, LS.
And then it returns for that.
It knows nothing about that.
You're like...
The worst one I did was I typed Find a Dash name and a bunch of other crap at the desktop.
And it was beeping at me because I never even thought about it.
I didn't...
I just...
I was walked over to Windows Box.
They said, where is this file that I need to edit or whatever?
And I didn't remember where it was.
So I just immediately started typing Find and then the usual Find-off shows.
I think somebody called in from a sawdow.
Did he call in from something?
Maybe that's the...
Maybe that's the window with this machine factory.
I see that as they're building the third death star.
Bet you they'll close off that ventilation shaft this time.
Yep.
Or not.
But that's pretty cool.
Did you get things like VIM and whatnot installed and...
What's really good is if you right-click on just like anything in the OS,
it says it has an option to open with VIM.
Oh, sweet.
Like everything.
And I'm like, oh, I would like that living.
Nice.
Well, you could probably add that.
Because you know that you can...
Have you ever edited a binary with VIM?
No.
It'll actually...
If you open like slash bin slash LS or whatever,
it'll let you edit the binary data.
Why?
And of course it converts it to characters that you can display on your screen
and it tries to convert to hex whenever possible to make it easier for you.
But you can actually edit the binary.
See, I've almost got this window 7 installed looking usable.
There you go.
Well, I got a kega running on it.
That's pretty cool actually that you got a kega.
What you should do is for the next free-litx helpline,
you should phone Colin in with two inst...
If you have two sound cards in the box,
you should phone with both instances of a kega,
phone from the Windows 7 one,
and then phone from the one in your regular install.
I would be amusing, I think.
Well, crap in a bucket.
I'll talk to you guys later.
Take it easy.
All right.
That poor bugger is still having grub trouble.
I think he's running into the fact that his grub doesn't run on pure 64,
so you have to build it with multi-lib,
and grub has to be a 32-bit executable.
It can't be a 64-bit one,
because the build process passes
dash M32 to GCC, so it generates 32-bit code.
And I think that's what he's running into,
because he said his grub seg faulted before I got to stage two.
I still don't see why people are just so feverishly trying to do everything 64-bit.
Well, I don't either accept that it's the native mode of the processor.
So the processor, I mean, other than that,
there's not really, it doesn't gain you anything,
unless you have more than a gig of RAM, then it gains you something.
Well, I mean, because if you have a gig of RAM or more,
then it helps you, because you don't have to enable the high-memory support.
Let's say, but you don't have to worry about that until you hit...
I think it's three-and-a-half gigs.
Well, no, you still have to worry about it,
because if you don't have high-memory support,
the kernel can only see 896 megabytes of your RAM.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so as soon as you hit a gig,
you have issues with high-memory support,
because you've got to enable high-memory
in order to access the last 100 and however many bytes of 104 megabytes
or whatever it is of your RAM.
So, the funniest thing, though,
was that you're going to get a laugh out of this.
I was fixing a guy's desktop a while ago,
and they gave him one of those,
one of those Lenovo stuff that are other desktop,
and it came with FISTA.
The box had half a gig of RAM.
It was a 64-bit chipset,
but they put in the regular Semperon processors
that were 32-bit.
Yeah, he got the one that they didn't expect people to buy.
Apparently.
It said Vista Capable on the box.
I ended up dumping Arch on it for him,
because he couldn't do anything with Vista.
Vista, you would like load it,
and it would just sit there.
Hey, but it loaded,
so that's all it required to get the little bad load.
It sat at the login screen,
and when you went to log in,
it just had the little hourglass thing
that spins around telling you something is loading,
and it would just hang there.
That's not an issue that's a feature.
Yeah, right.
Well, at least it didn't believe the screen, right?
You just got the hourglass screen,
which is whatever color that is.
I don't think it's blue though.
I don't think it actually changes color
because that would make the hourglass spin longer.
Yeah, okay.
But he said it was a blank screen,
because of course nothing can load in windows
unless the login finishes, right?
And whenever Windows does something,
it shows you that hourglass saying
stuff is loading.
So he said that it was just a screen
with the little spinning thing
in the middle of it.
I wish we could have got a screenshot.
Yeah.
That would have been priceless.
Get a screenshot,
and then use it for the logo for a Linux podcast.
Yeah.
Oh, pretty funny.
So we ended up, I put Arch on it,
because that was the easiest thing to bootstrap
from the live CD that I had handy.
Yeah.
And it's really, if you set it up for a newbie,
it's not too terribly difficult,
because I didn't give him root access
so he can't break his machine.
Yeah.
So if it breaks, then,
because he doesn't even,
he's just learning how to type yet.
So he doesn't even,
he can't horribly damage his machine.
Yeah.
And if he wants to do something
that he needs to be root for,
then I will just SSH in
and give him a new root password,
which I don't know.
I love SSH.
Oh, yeah.
SSH and R sync are great.
SSH is still like new and amazing to me.
Yeah.
Well, what's cool is that
you can run, like,
the combination of like SSH and screen
is cool because you can,
you can log into like four different boxes
and still have access to several windows
on each of those boxes.
So it's, it's just cool.
You can basically do whatever you want to do
in a secure way
and not worry about stuff getting broken.
So my favorite thing to do though
is that I use a SSH dash capital X
and I'll do it.
Oh.
I'll pull the X-11 desktop over.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what I'll do is I'll fire up
something like ice weasel
on a windows box.
Pull it off my devian box.
Nice.
Every crevice.
Whoa.
Yeah, I guess it would.
I think what the hell is that?
You know what you should do?
Were you around when I was talking about how
people asked me for like a pen sometimes?
Yeah.
And I go, um,
no, will a laptop work?
Oh, wait, you can't use Romans.
You can't use, uh,
friggin' vi without a screen.
And they go, what's vi?
I go, oh, it's a special editor for blind people
because some people think that vi stands for visually impaired.
So I go, oh, it's a special editor for blind people.
It doesn't work with a mouse and you have to have the screen disabled
before it starts.
And they go, wow, man, you're really weird.
Because these are people who don't even have a clue what windows
is never mind.
Let's say they even say,
they even go beyond that, you know,
just any serious vi use or seem weird.
It's like what you mean you don't use any other input,
but those,
I guess it's not as bad as Emax.
You don't have to have an extra finger per hand.
Well, the problem I have with Emax is that
hitting control and some other letter is fine.
But the problem is there's so many key bindings in Emax
that you end up like to save and exit.
You end up doing something like control X, control X,
control X, control C.
And that's like four keystrokes just to exit the damn editor.
Well, you're not supposed to ever exit.
That is your operating system.
Yeah, which is, I mean,
I only want a text editor,
because I subscribe to the Unix philosophy of, you know,
have a bunch of tools that do whatever job they're supposed to do perfectly
and then just pipe them together.
But Emax is just weird.
I never learned it because I looked at the configuration file
and it was like, that was my first introduction to Lisp.
I didn't know what Lisp was.
I knew it was a programming language, but I've never actually seen it.
And I looked at Emax.
The first thing I see in the configuration files,
all these parentheses and punctuation in weird places.
What the heck is this?
Turns out that I look in the manual.
Emax is written in a customized dialect of Lisp called E-Lisp.
Nice.
So not only is it Lisp,
but it's not even standard Lisp.
It's like some different specific one to Emax.
So if I want to configure the editor,
now I have to learn some, you know, programming language
that is never going to be useful anywhere else outside of Emax,
so I can look.
It's like, no, I think I'll just learn VI.
It looks simpler and while it might be a bit harder at the beginning,
at least they don't have to learn a programming language.
Yeah.
I tried to learn Lisp once.
And failed?
Oh, miserably.
Yeah, I didn't even say I was going through like a tutorial.
Like, you know, it's like this and this and this.
And it still wouldn't compile.
Man.
I was like, what the hell is going on?
Well, I should, because people actually,
a couple of people suggested that I install this speech extension for Emax
because it's supposed to do things like syntax, highlighting,
and announce indentation as you come across it and stuff for
so that coding is supposed to be quite a bit more efficient.
That's all, okay, I might install this.
But I don't know.
I just can't get around the fact that I have to learn like all these extra things
and it's just, it might be worth it, but I don't know if I want to learn Lisp
to customize the editor and then,
all this extra stuff and I don't know.
But, man.
Yeah, I think you've got to be an alien to use Emax or something.
Everybody swears it's a whole lot easier if you remap,
a cap slot to control or use a sun keyboard.
Jesus, yeah.
But then, how is that easy?
Well, the thing I don't get is why people try to type Ctrl-X,
for instance, with their left hand.
Like that is not proper, though, because you'd have to bend your,
even if cap slot was your control key, you'd have to bend your hand
in some weird ass way.
I'd just shift it over to my pinky to hold it.
Well, yeah, but that's why the...
That's why...
That's why they have two control keys and two alt keys and stuff and two shift keys
because if you want shift A, you hold the right shift key.
If you want, you know, shift G or whatever, shift H,
you hold the left shift key.
I've never done it purpose.
Hell, I'm the one that uses variations of Gnome perm,
where you have to hold Ctrl-Shift and X or C,
whichever, or V, I guess, for your tasting.
With one hand?
Yeah.
Wow.
You're probably gonna...
See, I have the advantage that when I was learning to type,
my mother is like that she used to teach typing.
Ah, and so she's like, no, you need to press the shift key with your other hand.
If you want a letter on the left side of the keyboard, you press...
And so she was...
That's what alt and control and shift are, why they have two of them.
And she was like, very picky about how I learned a touch type.
So my technique is like pristine, which is not common.
Plus, I don't use a mouse, so it doesn't make sense to have one of my hands off the keyboard.
But...
Yeah.
So that's why I never get carpal tunnel or any of that stuff.
And then I switched to Divorac later because I figured that even if I was properly touch typing,
I would still have RSI from all the weird jumps that are in querity at the speed that I type.
Because if you have to type, you know, minimum in querity very often,
if you have to properly touch type that, your hand is going to be very sore.
Or actually the worst one I think is...
We actually did, me and my friend were designing sentences that would be deliberately designed to be a pain in the neck to type on query.
So like they would have a whole bunch of words that are on like one hand.
And we tried to have as many keystrokes that were on the same finger as possible.
Because we were bored, so we were trying to figure out how to...
Anyway, so it was amusing.
And, you know, it was a completely different one.
And, have we ever talked and moved forwards?
I did really check it out.
A較奇, how did you actually unlock that in bed, you know?
No.
I hope this Dave Yates isn't recording this still, but he said he was recording it from
the cell phone, right?
Uh, no, I think the talk-shoes are recording it.
Yeah, so if he gets the feed from talk-shoes, it'll have like this ridiculously long conversation
he'll have to edit.
But, but this is all stuff he could use later on in a show.
Oh, he could if he wanted to.
He could just, you know, interject, you know, like he was trying to drive the conversation
and...
Oh, yeah.
With enough editing, you could make this, you could make this work out.
Yeah, you could actually.
And we just take a while.
Too bad Vince didn't bark now instead of doing the regular show.
Yeah.
He'll probably edit that out, though, because I don't think he wants me to, I don't
think he wants people to then squat in the middle of his podcast.
I'm pretty sure.
But...
Yeah, that, uh, that, uh, other podcast we did on the weekend was pretty good.
Mm-hmm.
I got a lot of good feedback.
Every time I go on somebody's podcast, they seem to like it, so I guess I can't be too
bad.
I always think I sound like shit, though, but everybody does that.
Yeah.
I don't really like the sound of my own voice for whatever reason.
Ah, nobody likes it.
Nobody likes her own voice.
No.
Yeah.
But...
That was funny.
Who did that interview with Richard Stallman about the free beer?
I don't know.
Monster Bee put it up there.
That was hysterical.
I still haven't made it all the way through it.
Because it's funny, because he starts out, he's like, well, first of, I don't even like
beer.
Yeah.
Because I think people put too much emphasis on getting drunk, which is a reason to drink.
I do, I do have to say I do agree with him, because I generally drink because I like
the flavor of the beer that I'm drinking, but, but it's just funny the way that he said
it, and then he, and so then they have to get into the, because you have to be careful
when you talk to him, because he's analyzing everything you say, like perfectly.
So then he goes, well, do you like the idea of a free beer, and stuff, it's funny, it's
funny.
I think it would be amusing, though, if they just called it free beer, because one of
the metaphors on the free software page, it says it's not free as in beer, it's like free
as in freedom.
So it'd be kind of funny if they actually had a free beer.
Let's say there really is, you can get the recipe for it.
Oh, is there?
Yeah, because I was going to make it in, because I was actually going to put it in bottles
with like labels that had, you know, that had like a, a canoe on it, you know, like the
canoe logo, yeah.
Yeah, because I was going to do it for a free beer.
Yeah, I was going to do it for a, and a Boone to a release party.
And you should make it, and if you do that, you should charge people like, you know, ten
cents for the free beer, so that they could understand that free software is not about
the fact you didn't pay for it.
Yeah, I think I will, because that would be such a cool way to get a concept.
You see a big sign that says free beer, and then it's like, but it's ten cents wide
to make a point, right?
You don't actually want to charge them for the beer, because it was free.
I mean, you could charge them for the beer if you wanted to, but the point is you should
charge something, and then make a point of having it called free beer.
Give them all the documentation for it.
Yeah, the bigger rent out, for now, for how much of this you put in it, and how much
of that, what type of bottle and everything, yeah.
Yeah, how to build a bottle, just in case you had a crash bottle, how to put the cap on
it, yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sure that would go over well.
Yeah, then you tell them that what you do is you tell them that the beer is free, but
if they want, if they want the freedom to use, yeah, you could do something like, if they
only pay a little bit, then they only get like two pages of code if they want the rest,
and they get the rest of the recipe, and so forth.
You could do a lot of it.
It would be a great marketing tool, I think, because everyone likes beer, and it would
be kind of cool.
I'm not everyone likes beer, but a lot of people don't like beer, because I even like
beer, and I don't usually get drunk on it, but that's because I have a stupidly low
tolerance for alcohol, and if I drink anything other than beer, I tend to get hammered rather
quickly.
That's the way it is.
Well, I only had like two sips of whatever it was, it sucks.
I stay that way on purpose.
Well, yeah, but you don't wake up until 330, because you don't have anything to get up
for earlier than that.
Oh, no.
I can't.
I stay until 5 a.m.
I'll tell you.
Eaters.
Oh, yeah.
We should actually start doing that, though, with his name, because he's key complained
yesterday that we were getting longer and longer with his binary digits for his name.
I think we should actually do that.
The first time he comes in, like the first time every week that he comes in, we should
write it in 8-bit.
The next day comes in.
We'll write it in 16-bit.
The next day comes in.
We'll write it in 64-bit, or no, 32-bit, and 64-bit, and 128-bit, and so on.
Just keep adding leading zeros.
We should make the bot do it, so we don't have to type out the zeros.
Oh, yeah.
Let's say the bot in Freelynics help line, you could actually set it up to do that.
Yeah, I know.
That's what I mean.
Because he's always in that channel.
Man, I'm liking that bot.
I'm going to...
Oh, yeah.
That's a good idea.
Sam and then he'll...
All of his configuration and stuff, and just let him crank and change the name.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
He's a great bot.
Oh, yeah.
No, that bot's cool.
I like the...
I like the...
Did you see the one where I insulted Windows, and it came up with Windows?
You are nothing but a petrified sack of yeasty vomitors of this.
I mean, some of those insults, I would not have thought of that one.
I don't know where he gets some of those things, but...
I think it's just randomly throwing nouns together.
It looks like nouns and adjectives, you know, this whole random one looks together.
It might be, but it's funny as hell.
It's like, every once in a while, you get a really good one, and you're like, oh, that
one looks like some free-done.
Yeah.
Like someone thought that one out ahead of time.
Yeah.
No.
You think so, but...
And of course, CyberCod has gone and added a bunch of other plug-ins, and he's done
some great thing.
Like...
And he'll take things that people say that are slapped-related and add them to the slapped
thing.
Yeah.
It's funny.
So now you can slap people with a big box of Unix books and some of the mastering regular
expressions book and other things, and you can slap people in the head with a moose,
which I find amusing.
Of course, you'd find that amusing.
As if you'd be able to lift that.
See, I could actually slap people around with events if I wanted to, because I can lift
events.
But it'd be kind of hard to slap with events, because you can't really hold events in
one hand, and it's a little big for that.
But you really just got grabbed by the tail and get enough forward momentum going.
Yeah.
The stupid thing is, he'd probably let you do that, because he's just like what they do
when they breed the dogs is that they have basically no, they have their own breeding
stalks.
So the dogs that make it through the program are not at all aggressive at all.
They just kind of, oh, I'm supposed to go to work now, cool.
Oh, and then I get to sleep when I'm done, cool.
How long do I get to sleep for?
He's more interested in playing with his toys than chewing on people.
Or at least that's what they tell me.
I think it might be different if he thought that I was in danger or something, because
you know, he really wants his food, and he wouldn't want anything to happen to me, because
then he wouldn't get his food, but we don't really know.
So, yeah, you should do that.
You should install Emax in Windows 7, too, just because you can't, and then you can
freak people out, and you can, what you should do is you should install Emax and Vi, and
then link it to Notepad somehow, so that if they launch Notepad one time, they get Vi,
and the next time they get Emax.
Well, first of all, I'm trying to find ways to just outright pull Notepad out of it.
Yeah, well, that's what...
The only editor is Vi, and I can't pull Internet Explorer out, because then you can't
do updates.
Well, who wants to update that crap anyway?
Well, if I'm doing it as a test, because I wanted to see, I've always got this prescribed
way to help people move from Windows to Linux, to replace all the applications they use,
and then once they get there, and it's still screwed up, they can switch over to Linux,
and it's all the same, because like you just changed everything out from underneath
them.
Yeah, you just changed the OS, but they already knew how to use the applications, so they
don't care.
Yeah.
So, like, and I'm doing things, well, in between those, I always install Woobie, because
I have people over to a Bootoo, just because it's, I don't have to mess with it at that
point.
So, it's targeted for, it's targeted for new users, unless you're blind and you go to
school at Wisconsin.
Well, yeah, then...
That all bets are off, but...
Yeah.
But...
So, that's the reason I'm running this, is to see if you have one to get a feel for it,
because...
Yeah, so that you can actually know...
Yeah, they go, oh my god, my laptop's doing this.
What do I do?
And I look at it and go, huh?
I've been up before.
Yeah, exactly.
I'd like to do that too, to help people use Windows, but it's impossible for me to get
it installed, so it's kind of a problem.
But...
Or, I mean, to help people move to Linux, like, I'm trying to get my mother, for instance,
to not use Internet Explorer, and I would have a six-use in all those things, because
it's just terrible, I mean...
Because every time, like, once or twice a day, it's like, good, my program crashed.
How do I move my file from here?
And it's like, look, why don't you just go install Thunderbird, because it doesn't come
with Windows.
Well, screw it.
It comes with Windows.
It actually works.
Yeah, but actually, it's kind of cool, because I, speaking of Firefox and stuff, I've
actually got it where it behaves very close to text mode browsers now, because they have
this mostless browsing extension, which numbers all the links and things on a page.
So I can just hit the quick find thing and punch in a link number, and it goes over there.
So if I'm reading something with Lorcan, it's automatically reading stuff.
I don't have to go and tab to the damn link or form field or whatever, because that gets
annoying very quickly.
If you, especially if you have this massively large web page and you want to click a link
that's sort of halfway down the page, that is very useful.
The thing is, there's so many useful, and I have this other extension that solves captures
and remove some of the automatic refresh type things from most Ajax pages, which I find
helps, because it's not helpful to have a page refresh out from under you while you're
still reading it.
It's like, yeah, you're like, I was reading that, but thanks anyway.
Yeah.
And of course, it's bad, because what happens is the page gets reloaded and you get booted
to the top of the page.
So if you were halfway down the page and it refreshes, you get booted back to the top of
the page.
It's like, no, it's not helpful.
Like if it would refresh, but not move your reading cursor, it would be fine, but that's
not what it does.
It makes you back to the top of the page, does it let you know that it refresh, or does
it just happen?
And you go, wow, this guy's really redundant.
Yeah.
Actually, in Windows, it just happens.
It doesn't let you know, because I've seen, I've had people complaining about this in Windows
screen readers.
It's smart.
It'll, if Firefox is doing something, because the way Ork is implemented is smart.
What they do is they expect a tool kit to, like a program, if it's properly built with
accessibility support, will notify the known accessibility infrastructure, hey, my window
just got focused, or, you know, the user just hit the tab key or something.
All the events that your window manager or your tool kit sends get communicated to the
accessibility infrastructure.
So it knows immediately what you're doing.
In other graphical screen readers, like the one for OS 10, no, the one for OS 10 actually
works similar to Ork, but in Windows, what they do is they try to construct an off-screen
model of what they think should be on the screen at the time.
So if a page refreshes, the screen reader is like, huh?
Where did the new info come from?
And then so it just sort of happens, and then all of a sudden the off-screen model changes,
but the screen reader didn't know that the refresh was coming, so it couldn't tell you.
Whereas if that happens with Ork, I get a nice, you know, loading whatever, please wait.
And then when it's finished loading, it says finished.
And the web vision extension, the same one that solves captures and stuff, it also clicks
when a page is finished loading.
So if you start hearing clicks, then you know your page got refreshed and is now finished
loading.
So it's cool, plus, yeah.
And it's also cool that Firefox warns you about pages that automatically redirects,
so you don't just get booted over to some other page unless you tell it that it's okay
to have that happen, which is extremely useful, because there's nothing worse than you're
on your favorite, you know, Linux weblog or something, and you get booted to peter64.org.
Which thankfully I can't look at, because apparently it's pretty terrible.
It's, you were the luckiest person on the planet, and I don't even get the music either
because he used Flash.
No, I think if you have MPlayer plugin, you can make a Nash, I think you can make it
work.
I don't know though.
Sorry, if I'm not responding very quickly, I'm responding to, yeah, I'm responding
to Gorkhan in an email about cranks going awg only.
Well I think it's good.
We have to, cause like Clotu said on his bad apples thing recently, if you don't, and
I have agreed with this for a while, one, awg warbist sounds a lot better, I don't know
if awg fiora looks a lot better, I hope it does, but I don't know, cause I can't look
at it.
Yeah, I don't know, because I can't look at it.
But if it looks as good compared to the other MPG formats as awg warbist sounds compared
to say MP3, then you should definitely use it, because the thing that people don't realize
is what I realize is most of the reason that I prefer to use free software is because
I trust the quality of it.
I had never used a free software application that was really terrible, because there's something
about when you're doing it in your volunteer time, it's something you're doing because
you want to do, so you end up doing your best work then.
Like all of the GNU stuff tends to be extremely high quality, there are like Windows users who
insist on installing GCC so that they can do their development, because they know that
GCC is very standards compliant and very picky about how it does things.
So yeah, you should definitely support awg, and if we don't use it, then of course hardware
manufacturers are not going to, but if we get a whole bunch of podcasts that drop the
MP3 feeds, and enough people complain, we can forward the complaints to the hardware manufacturers
and say, hey, you won't support our format, we have 12,000 people or 50,000 people that
are using it, you know, do you want to lose that many green dollars?
Hey, I got in a conversation with somebody last night, I can't remember who it was, the
life of being I can't think of who it was, but they were asking why people still made
one free software, they couldn't understand it.
And there really isn't a good reason, the good reason is they don't know.
The only good reason is ignorance, because people, it's unfortunate that the word free in
English has two way different meanings.
Like in French and other languages, there's a different word for free as in freedom.
What we actually should call, because it's confusing, so what we actually should do is change
the name to like liberating software or something, because because the thing is, people see
free software, they immediately think of free as in I didn't have to pay for the software,
but that's not what it is.
As I said in the IRC yesterday, I would be more than happy to pay for free software, I
just want the code damn it, if I have to pay for it and it's good enough, then yeah, I'll
pay the guide to help work on it, if it will help development.
So because I don't have to pay for it and because I'm a poover, I just donate my time instead.
But yeah, I think it's mostly ignorance though, I think it's because people, they're used
to what they have, so why do they want to use anything else?
What kind of keyboard is that?
It's very clicky or somewhat clicky.
Oh, my connection must be crappin' out, or there must be a network, something or other
screwing up, hang on.
Let me reconnect.
Welcome to talk to you.
Welcome to talk to you.
All right, where's the damn?
There you go.
Did that reconnect everything then?
You don't sound like Zoke anymore, so.
Okay, that must have reconnected it then.
Sorry, Akiga has this stupidly complicated interface that isn't obvious if you're just
looking at what the heck it's doing.
Well, it isn't obvious because I'm graphically challenged, but.
I need to, as soon as I figure out how to code things efficiently, I will have to work on
a command line client so we don't have this massive waste of resources.
But if you can figure out how to launch Nautilus without the desktop thing, that would be sweet.
There should be a menu key somewhere or something you can edit that does that, but I don't know what I'm looking for.
Because actually all I care about is.
But all I use is like the run dialogue and no terminal.
I don't care.
Sometimes I'll pick things from the menu, but that's only because I haven't bothered to look up what the command name is for it.
I've noticed that, because I use Terminator, which is.
I have no idea how to explain it to someone that isn't cited.
Yeah, it's a terminal emulator, yeah.
Yeah, but you can graphically split it into chunks.
Oh, cool.
Like if you were partitioning a room.
Okay, so you can have one part for one window, one other part for another.
I guess I can explain it.
That makes sense.
Yeah, you just have to explain it in some way that doesn't require me to look at a picture, which you just did.
But I do so much in that.
Yeah.
And then I go outside of it, because it's just a gnom term that you're splitting up.
Yeah.
So I start trying to control shift things in the rest of the desktop.
Yeah, I've been guilty of that too, because what I do is I'll use like, because Orca doesn't read the terminal as well.
I just use pigeon because it has a script that if I'm in another window and some message comes in on IRC, it will tell me that I got a message.
And if you say my name in IRC, then I get a nice little sound.
And they get a different sound for private messages, and you customize all these things.
And then what I did is I installed that.
Have you played with that?
There's a purple plugin pack that you can install, which makes your pigeon have like all the common IRSSI commands.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It's sweet.
So I don't have to relearn anything that I didn't know from IRSSI.
So like, I have the windows in a certain order, and then I know which tab is which.
And so if I want to flip to a certain channel, I don't have to go up and click on the tab.
I can just type like slash win 11 for instance, and it'll go to whatever number 11 is.
Or you can use the alt keys to like alt and the number keys to switch windows if they're less than 10.
So they know how to do the left to do the ones over 10.
You can't with the alt keys because it only assigns the first nine hot keys.
So in IRSSI itself, if you start doing alt Q, W, well, because mine's quality Q, W, E, or whatever the key.
Yeah.
It's a second row below that.
It'll work in pigeon.
Let me see.
Let me see.
I have like a whole bunch of windows open.
So let me see.
Let me go.
Let me see if that works.
It might.
Let's see what happens if I hit alt Q.
Nope.
That particular one doesn't because pigeon just uses tabs.
But you could bind it though.
Yeah.
You could put something in your...
There's a frequently asked questions on pigeon about how to change the key bindings.
You edit some GTK.
I think it's GTK RC or some file that you edit and you tell it that whenever you press alt Q and whatnot in pigeon, it will go.
I knew that you could do that in IRSSI.
I just unbounded it because Q, W, E, R, T, Y.
I could have bound it to something else though.
I should have...
Oh no, that's what I did.
I remapped it for whatever apostrophe, comma, period, and so on.
The same keys that are in the same part of the keyboard, but different because I switched keymaps.
Which is another cool thing about Lilo, which is the bootloader, is that you can actually...
You can make the bootloader come up in a different keymap.
That's interesting.
Which is cool, so that the only time I have to type query is when I have to type stuff at a live CD's boot prompt.
Unless I've gone in and remastered the live CD like I did with my GR on LC.
Which has the advantage that if I get one of those keyboards like we were talking about with the blank keys,
then it would be ridiculously hard to get physical access to one of those keys.
Unless you knew how to touch type.
And you have to know how to touch type.
Or whatever e-mapping you're using that week.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah, because that's the other thing is I could change the keymap on the fly if I was going away.
That's a good way to be secure.
And then of course, I typically don't have a monitor connected.
So the first thing you'd have to do is pull the monitor out from under the desk.
But if I was going away, I could put the monitor in the garage somewhere and you wouldn't know where it was.
So you'd walk up to a machine that only has a keyboard and a tower and some speakers.
And the keyboard would have all blank keys.
So you wouldn't even have a clue what key you were pressing unless you knew how to touch type.
And then you wouldn't even know if you'd got feedback unless you could understand the synthesizer that I'm using.
Which wouldn't of course work until the operating system has started loading.
So if you didn't know that this was the case, you'd have to put in a rescue CD and boot with it.
But because there'd be no keys that you could look at on the keyboard,
you wouldn't know how to reboot the machine.
Because from what I hear, they don't even code them with saying that they don't even label the modifier keys.
So if you don't know where control is, you're not...
Oh yeah, there's nothing on it.
Nothing on the keyboard, yeah.
Which of course for me, I don't care because I'm just getting it for the mechanical switches.
Because it turns out that it ends up...
Even if I was...
Because I was going to buy one after the current keyboard crapped out.
Because it turns out that even though it's a little bit more expensive,
because they ship in Canada, it ends up being less expensive than if I ordered a Model M from Unicomp.
So I have to do like an HPR thing about keyboards and keymaps when I get it.
So you would be the person to do it.
Yeah, because I'm the only person stupid enough to remount their keyboard.
And you're the only person that is that intimately knowledgeable about keyboards.
Well, I didn't start out that way, but when you...
It's your primary interface.
When you don't have a mouse, you better make the keyboard as efficient as possible.
Because if your keyboard isn't efficient, it's like, oh, well, I'll just use a GUI and I'll click, right?
I don't really have that option.
Plus, I also have the other disadvantage that I cannot physically write print.
So if I want to print something or communicate with somebody in a written form
that they can read, it better go through a computer.
Which means I spend a stupidly ridiculous amount of time in front of a computer not even by choice.
And so part of the reason I got so knowledgeable is it's like, well, you're going to have to spend 12 hours a day or more at a computer.
So you're either going to hate it or you're just going to have to accept that that's how things are and learn everything you can about it.
So I took the latter approach, but there's a lot of blind people and such that they do nothing but bitch about how their windows
doesn't work and how they hate their computer.
And it's like, no, just accept that that's your input method and use it.
And the only reason I bothered to, like, I used to be able to type courtyate like 90 words a minute, and it was fine.
The only reason I switched to Divorak is because I used the shell a whole bunch and actually two of my friends had got carpal tunnel from being on IRC for less long than I usually have to use a computer.
So it's like, well, you know what? This is probably hurting your hands.
But it's one of those things where you don't know it's hurting your hands until you stop doing it.
It's like, wow, that feels a little better.
So I just remapped it actually. And it's weird because I didn't know, like I even tried a couple of those.
You know, those like Microsoft ergonomic keyboards with weird layout.
And I found that it broke touch typing because you can't, when you touch type, you're not supposed to rest your wrists on the keyboard, right?
Because it keeps your fingers from bending properly.
Well, you can't do that on a natural keyboard because if you do that, it hurts like hell.
Because of where the keys are.
So they're designed so that your hands are supposed to be flat on the keyboard, but that's not how you touch type.
And so, I mean, if it's the first keyboard you've ever used, it'll be fun because you can learn to type on that.
But I mean, I had, like I said, my mother was able about making sure that my technique was perfect.
Which, that's how I got 90 words of minute on Quirty.
Because you don't do that unless your technique is perfect, which is why very few people do that.
It's also why very few people get carpal tunnel from Quirty and are willing to admit that it was from Quirty.
But, because most people just type with one hand or they use a mouse or whatever and it's not that big of a deal.
But if your primary input is in the shell, you can't not type a whole lot.
You just stuck with it.
So, I found out about remapping the keyboard from a post on the LFS list.
Someone was complaining they couldn't figure out how to get their keyboard remapped.
And I knew how to do it because I read the section of the book and I had experimented with it, but I couldn't figure out why you'd want to remap it.
And so then I started doing research and finding out that, yeah, you in fact do want to remap it because it's less work for your fingers.
And then I thought, okay, I'll try and see how well I make out.
And then when I noticed that now that my typing speed is to the point where most of the typos I make on IRC are because my fingers are moving too fast and they don't hit the keys in the right order.
Yeah, I've got that problem too.
Yeah, and that happens worse on DuVorac because your fingers are the keys you need are mostly on the home row and your fingers aren't jumping over each other to hit keys that you need.
So often when I think I've made a typo I haven't and whenever I make typos it's because I either leave out letters or I hit them in the wrong order because, and on my laptop, I usually leave them out because the keys are very hard to feel that they got pressed.
So they'll just type in a whole bunch of stuff and find out that half the sentence didn't actually make it onto the screen.
But yeah, I mean, I'm in sort of a weird spot because if it would be very bad for me not to be able to type properly.
And I learned on one of those really quicky keyboards so I've never really gotten you know how if you I guess it would be like if you took your mouse and you switched it with one that only had like one button or they put the button in a different place or something.
It would really screw you up.
Yeah, I say it's like if you bought an Apple mouse.
Yeah, it will only has one button and you'd be like what the hell?
Oh, no, the new one has no buttons.
What?
Yeah, it's all they're all touch sensitive areas.
Oh, you got me.
Yeah, so you're kidding me.
Like if you go to click and drag a selection.
Yeah.
Like because you run out of space.
Yeah, try to pick it up.
It loses like the laser loses connection and it depresses.
Bloody hell.
That's just like, well, it's like whenever I have my laptop, I always disable the touchpad because it's one of those touchpads where you just put your finger on it and it moves the mouse pointer.
Well, since I started using X, I had to disable the touchpad because I would like put something or I would reach across the keyboard to hit like I don't know.
I don't know.
One of the media keys or turn the laptop off or something and I bumped the touchpad and it would left click and open some window.
No, that is not cool.
I think I'll just turn in the touchpad off.
But it's cool that Linux lets you do that.
You can say, no, don't load the driver for the touchpad.
Because in Windows, if you try to do that or Mac OS 10, if you try to do that, it would probably screw you up.
Did I tell you about the time I crashed the kernel because I typed on a Bluetooth keyboard and I typed too quickly so the wireless got confused?
No.
I thought, oh, because I don't actually need to look at a screen, right?
I thought, well, if I get a wireless keyboard, it should help because I didn't want to get a line of sight one because those are repainting the ass because you have to, it's like a remote.
You got to put the keyboard in a certain spot and it's like, no, screw it.
OK, I'll get a Bluetooth one because it had a range of like 10 meters or is it 10 meters? No, it was 20 meters, I'm sorry, something like that.
Stupid range, right?
So I thought, oh, this is great.
And I had wireless headphones.
So the thinking was that I could plug the wireless headphones into my sound card and just walk around with headphones in a keyboard and not have to sit in front of the computer.
And this is great except that if you're a fast typist like me, which there apparently is very few of those around.
If you try to use a wireless keyboard, it turns out there's a millis.
First of all, you couldn't pair the Bluetooth keyboard with Linux because it required some windows or macOS specific software to pair the keyboard because they didn't give you the pin code.
That it uses.
So the only way you could get the pin code was to use the software because it wasn't in the documentation anywhere.
So you have no idea what the ID and stuff is to pair the keyboard with.
So the only way to use it in Linux was that because Bluetooth has isn't up or can't be paired when you're boot your computer.
What they do is by default they have a proxy mode like it's a dongle that you plug into a USB port and then there's the keyboard talks through Bluetooth.
So there's a proxy mode that makes the computer think that it's a USB keyboard while the computer is booting and then when it pairs with Bluetooth it stops talking USB and it starts talking Bluetooth.
Well that never happens in Linux because there's no way to pair the keyboard.
So what happened was that there's a millisecond delay from the time that you press the A key until the time that an A gets sent to the keyboard driver in the kernel.
So what happened is that I crashed the keyboard by queuing too many key presses and so the thing deadlocked and I couldn't even reboot the machine.
I had to hit the reset button because of course the only keyboard that was plugged in was the Bluetooth one.
So that I thought okay well I'll try it on a Mac because I had the G4 towers sitting there and I'll try it on the Mac and see if OS X does the same thing because I thought maybe the delay was because of the fact that it was doing this weird USB proxy thing because I wasn't pairing the keyboard.
So okay well actually first I thought it was the fact that the Bluetooth keyboard was defective so I took it back and got another one and then I realized that no the Bluetooth keyboard is fine it's just that it's not pairing properly.
So then I okay I'll check with Mac OS X so I plug it in the G4 tower and I plug in the keyboard and this time of course the Mac goes oh you plugged in a Bluetooth keyboard let me pair it for you.
So it does that and I'm thinking everything is fine so I go into the usual work that I would do I launched that I started an IRC session in some client that was accessible with voiceover because I figured this would be a good test.
I'm going to start beating away on it as per usual and exactly the same thing happens I crashed the OS X keyboard driver so that I could not reboot the machine I couldn't do anything it was just dead locked.
What was that click? I had muted my mouse because my two smaller dogs were being a pain in the ass.
Yeah so that's what happened I crashed OS X keyboard driver too. So then I thought okay well it says because on the box it says it works with windows in Mac OS X so I walk over to the parents windows box and I plugged it in I wonder if it works any better here.
So I type on it and crash it then I set the key map to Cordy and got her to type on it because she's an expert typist and she types quickly too.
So we both crashed the Bluetooth keyboard on windows. Wow so we just decided that Bluetooth is only meant for one finger typists or people that don't really know how to use a keyboard.
So and then I took it back and got a USB keyboard instead which I haven't had any issues with.
And they were more than happy to exchange it so it was.
So the evening show back up again it was probably like well and I guess it helps that the USB keyboard that I bought was a hundred dollar keyboard so it was in the same price as the Bluetooth range so I guess it you know.
Because I don't tend to buy a cheap keyboards because when you use the shell as much as I do if you buy a cheap keyboard it'll be dead in a week.
It's like anyone that does something you know extremely seriously.
Yeah I mean you don't have to buy one because it's going to be broken.
Yeah exactly. You'll spend more replacing it than you will or you just bought it.
Yeah that's why I don't bother with on board sound because by the time you go and what's the point of buying really good speakers if your sound card is so shitty that it can't reproduce any of the frequency.
And then of course the cat ate my really good speaker chords so now I have to get new speakers and I need a new power supply because I think speak up killed it but yeah.
I say you're talking to the dude that you know download the you know like pulls the low quality MP3 that people put up on their site to try and coach you into buying shit.
Yeah download those and listen on your buds so yeah well your buds are such that they sound so shitty anyway that low quality MP3.
Yeah is actually not going to sound that bad because you can't your buds are so tinny that you you can't really hear half the frequencies anyways.
Let's say and even if I say to have proper decent headphones or speakers I still wouldn't be able to hear them.
Well I think you would if you knew what you were looking for.
Dude I've been the way way too many pop out concerts.
Oh okay maybe you wouldn't then.
I don't hear much of anything before.
Yeah maybe so beer sounds much like ear I guess.
Let's say like I had a bunch of about the only thing I can really tell is there a bunch of old black flag recordings from the like early 80s.
Yeah that they did on a four track.
Ooh and I can tell the difference between those and everything else but yeah because those are so terrible that yeah that make it years weed to even think of listening to them.
Yeah so I'm more of a the enjoyment of the music not how good it sounds.
Well I think they're sort of one in the same like because I noticed I didn't realize like I just sort of I looked at the documentation and it said that it recommended Q6 for music for aug morbis.
So that's what I started encoding it because I didn't really understand the quality metric that they use.
Okay Q6 if it says it goes to 10 maybe Q10 is good but they recommend Q6 should be good for most people so that's what I tried.
But when me and Cobra 2 were yak in the quality settings and he has better equipment than I currently have because by the CAD 8 my speaker cord and I'm using the onboard sound.
So he goes well why don't you try Q7 it's not that much bigger.
Well I tried Q7 and I because my speakers are so crappy I plugged in some some headphones so I could hear it better.
And it was like I was hearing notes that I couldn't hear at the other quality setting.
So that made the music more enjoyable because now all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of different sounds that I didn't get before and it's like wow.
And it's still not flat but it's almost close enough to flat that it's usable.
Like it's not quite flat but on the shitty equipment that I have the difference is so minimal that it doesn't matter and even when I get better equipment because he tested it on a system very similar to what I was using before and he said it didn't really have artifacts.
Art of facts that were terribly unpleasant so yeah but so I think it does depend a little bit on what you're it depends what you're listening to.
If you're listening to punk there isn't a lot of different sounds that you're going to enjoy anyway because all you have is but if you're listening to notes per song anyway.
Well yeah but I mean I was testing it on some you know Beethoven and some other stuff and it's like oh I didn't realize that it was to the point that even though it was compressed I could still hear most of the fret noise on the bass.
That's pretty interesting which I mean I couldn't hear quite all of it but the stuff I couldn't hear was like maybe the initial attack was a bit quieter or something.
Like it was it was to the point that the only reason I could have told the difference was because I'm a musician and you listen for my new changes and sounds so that you don't you sound somewhat musical right.
But I mean it was to the point that in a blind test I would have been hard pressed if somebody just walked up to me and handed me a couple of files and said which ones flack.
I'd get if I wasn't familiar with the files and if they weren't necessarily music files it would be anyone's guess whether it was flack or Q7s.
Because we always test with music files but if you test with like tone generators the quality is so good at Q7 or warmest set.
If you weren't already familiar with the type of sound you should be hearing there's no way in hell you would tell the difference.
And of course in your case you could probably encode punk at Q0 and still preserve most of it.
I'd be like wait there's tones. What do you think I thought this was an empty CD?
Yeah yeah that's pretty funny but no I really don't know why more people don't use warmest.
I suppose the hardware player issue is a problem but I mean netbooks are getting so damn small these days that you could buy one for the same price you'd buy some of the portable media players.
Like I mentioned that on the channel I'm like well I kind of need a portable player for my podcast and they're like why don't you just get a netbook.
I was like yeah especially now that you can stick so many of these distributions see this is what's cool part of the reason I use Gnome as well instead of speak up is I don't have to patch the kernel or do anything fancy.
If I just want to use any distribution that has Gnome installed I can get work so I can throw somebody or others ee ee boom to or whatever the hack on a.
And if we make open box work with you know accessibility then I could conceivably dump like crunch bang or something on a ee PC and just have it work.
Which is extremely useful because there's nothing more annoying than not being able to get at your computer.
Yeah saying I think that like the ten inch.
Tripoli has like an almost full size keyboard.
Yeah well I would definitely need that because I have I have very.
Big hand like I have very big hands and I have really long fingers so they don't.
Long fingers and small keyboards do not work well.
So like I found with the Tripoli it's not that the keyboard is small it's that there's not a lot of movement on the keys.
Oh it's like a laptop keyboard then where do you hit the key and you don't know if it got pressed.
Like if I am working the most yeah because I mean I can yeah my laptop is flat too like I can barely type I can barely type on my laptop keyboard.
That's why right now even though the big box is down I've got a I've got the lid closed on my laptop and I've got a USB key my regular desktop USB keyboard that I use plugged into the laptop.
Because well you've seen my typos on my laptop right yeah the times where I was away and I came in on IRC and like you'd get half a sentence.
Because I can't if I can't feel that my key got pressed then I assume that it did because I need like I don't look at the screen when I'm typing and I don't look at the keys when I'm typing.
So I think of saying something and I type as I think and if it doesn't come out on screen I have no idea right.
We were actually you as well I think you had gone away or something and something hadn't come out right and we were talking about we were talking about having you know whether you had it reading back to you or not.
I was like can you guys imagine how annoying that would be.
All right I thought it I typed it now I have to hear it again.
Well exactly and not only that but imagine that I don't people for instance if you install or go by default and you don't change any of the settings it will echo every single key stroke that you type.
So if you press an A it's going to like if you were going to type the word word what you would hear is W O R D space you know and so forth.
Wow and that just breaks rhythm right and because how you get quick at typing is the same way that you get quick at musical instrument it's a rhythm thing right.
And if you can't build a good rhythm where you you can think and type and think and type and so forth then you can't be efficient at it so all the touch type is that I know that are blunt have key echo turned off.
In fact the only time key echo is useful is so that you if you're like if you're trying to learn a new the reason it's on by default is because they are hoping to target the new user who's never used a computer.
And so they don't know that the key that they pressed is in fact the A key so they need confirmation and I I used it because when I switched keymaps to Dvorak I had to I switched cold turkey which was probably a very bad thing to do but I figured I would learn it quicker.
But I mean talk about hell in a shell man. I didn't even I couldn't even type LS so it's like all right you know what I'll slow this thing down and try to be accurate and turn on key echo and memorize the layout so I memorized the layout well I found a course which I still have bookmarked and it basically told you you know your home row is this and you're and then it went through each finger and it said okay.
You know P is your left index finger moving up okay I can deal with that it went through the whole keyboard and described which fingers were supposed to press which keys which is perfect for me because it's like okay so I know which fingers belong on which keys and I already knew how to touch type courty so I didn't have to learn how to touch type I just had to relearn where the keys were.
But so I turned key echo on from that because I didn't want to take my hands off the keyboard to see what I had typed but for the most part I typed so quickly that key echo would be useless it would basically just queue up speech events to the point that you'd end up crashing synthesizers.
Because if work ahead to speak every keystruck that I pressed the synthesizer would be constantly speaking and it would it would just be useless because it would it would get into this like all you wouldn't even hear the complete key press you'd hear or something
close to that and it would just it just wouldn't be helpful so yeah generally when I type I expect the key that I typed to get pressed and if that doesn't happen it's like well I found that out now so now I'm going to be slower but it doesn't even matter how slow I type I can type really slow on the laptop.
But like you say because I've even seen you screw up on your EE keyboard for the same reason and it's like oh he must be relying on the same problem that I had with my laptop where you don't feel like the keys are being pressed down because you're you're off looking at your screen right instead of your keyboard so yeah you don't feel that the key got pressed.
Which is why it could and of course I learned and I think everyone that wants to touch type should use a mechanical switch keyboard like the model M with the springs or whatever because I learned on one of those.
So when the first time I got like a modern keyboard it was like this is weird man because I'm so you're so used to because when you if you hit a key on one of these other keyboards not only do you feel the key get pressed but you feel it get released too.
Yeah so you know that you typed exactly one you you didn't accidentally because sometimes what will happen is I find myself on the modern keyboards because I don't know that a key got pressed I'll hold it down a little longer or I'll hit it harder which has unfortunate side effects if you hit it harder you wear out the foam rubber thing under the key cap quicker and if you hold the key down now you might have three keys instead of one.
And I could turn off key repeat but there are times where I actually want the key repeat functionality like if I'm you know if I turn off key repeat then I can't you know do something like you know hit.
Oh I don't know but if you're quickly going through a document in VIM for instance and you just want to scroll down some random number of lines because you're not sure where in the file you need to be you can just sort of hold the J key but if you turn key repeat off you can't do that.
Plus key repeat is the standard default behavior so you should try not to hack your keyboard you can hack anything else on the computer but you don't want to be hacking the way a keyboard works any more than you have to because that's like your main interface to the machine and that doesn't work properly you can run yourself into a whole pile of stuff like the time I accidentally
while I was doing a slackware install and speak up was misreading the dialogue so I accidentally had selected left handed devorak instead of just the regular standard one which was not cool.
Yeah so I don't do that.
Until recently I had tried to not mess with anything I tried to keep everything about as default as possible because I was constantly you know I would constantly come across people that had no idea what Linux was.
I didn't want to give them some kind of you know one it could be a taste issue you know you know if I have a bright green but if you know if I had colors that were not complimentary you know up against each other you know it would look bad they would think wow Linux looks bad.
Yeah it would be the equivalent of somebody having like a sound file with a big or the equivalent of somebody playing two notes that are supposed to be in harmony but they're not so you get this ridiculously jarring and yeah.
Yeah and I didn't want to I didn't want to make it you know didn't want to make it look bad so of course my my desktop is so customized that if you look at it especially if I figure out how to turn that not the not all this desktop thing off yeah you get a desktop and like I'm what I'm actually thinking of doing is because I always have a no terminal open is I'm actually thinking that I should turn off the not all this desktop thing.
And turn off the splash screen so that as soon as I log in it dumps me to a terminal because then I even though I can't use speak up because it's in the kernel and as a pain in the ass at least I could log into gdm and it would look like I had a shell immediately because that's generally how I like things but you know some new windows user they would see a.
The other thing that would be cool is if you could get the terminal to come up in full screen mode instead of having so I that's one less key press I have to press but.
You might be able to just script that yeah I'm going to look at that maybe I can do some filling but point is that if if cited people saw my like I've been there's been times where in the past where I haven't been running X because I've not been able to.
Where I've had because one of the other things that's cool about no terminal that you can't do from a console is you can make the screen ridiculously large which means that I can set the screen resolution to something stupid because that way I don't have to scroll the screen as often in the terminal.
So I can because if I have to scroll the screen and so one more key stroke I got a press so I don't do this now of course because I found out that if you the side effect of that is that if you over enlarge the screen you end up like I just for the hell of it I set no terminal one time to use one point font and I set the screen resolution to something like 1920 by 1440.
Holy damn so it had something like it was to the point that somebody would send me an email message and the entire email message would be on one screen line wow because it had something like 2,357 characters per line and there was something like 15,000 lines in the terminal.
It was some stupid it wasn't 1500 either way it was retarded because and so that I found out that you know what it's really not useful to to fiddle with the screen resolution and move the make it so the screen is so large that email messages show up on one line because if you need to review the text in an email message and it's all on one screen line.
It becomes very difficult because screen readers only know about lines and words and characters so if you have one long email message on a line and you didn't and you wanted to quickly review and quote something that was said in the middle of it.
Well now you have to go word by word because you only have one line so you can't review line by line which would be the natural way to review large somewhat larger chunks of text.
So I quickly put it back to whatever gnome defaulted to and now I don't make ridiculously large screen sizes anymore because I've discovered that that really isn't that useful.
But it was cool that I could do that because the other thing is that if I needed a larger screen I could put it at like 72 point font or something but you can't you don't have that kind of flexibility with a console because it's not in graphics mode and even if it's using the frame buffer.
You can make it a bit larger but then you slow down the speed of your console because now it's got a launching in sort of a pseudo graphics mode and it's just not really as efficient as using X to control because X was designed for graphics and text consoles were designed for text.
So yeah, I just find that that works better.
You guys are all playing with the geometry settings for gnome term because I actually run X on my server because I use it kind of as a second monitor because I'll run there is the on the server graphically it's there.
And you screen to connect it on my desktop but the way the monitor is set up it's just right in my peripheral vision so when it scrolls I see that there was movement and I flip over into my terminal and look kind of like how if I'm doing something in like a document or whatever in a terminal window.
See most of what I the reason that I use X is because it does exactly that or can let me know what's going on in another window where I speak up can't it can only read one item at a time.
So I knew exactly that so if I'm if I'm reading a like something in Firefox or a terminal and I hear message from blah blah blah it's like oh somebody is talking an IRC cool and then if it's directed at me I get a nice little sound hey oh somebody wants my attention.
So yeah I played with the geometry setting so that I actually at this age in from my mobile nice and use a RISC nice yeah saying I really cool yeah I freaked out my brother I did a an apt-get upgrade yeah from my phone at this age in he was like that's ridiculous that's cool.
But I think I will get when my laptop dies I'm actually thinking of getting it one of the EEPC things because when I have my big box up the only thing I use the laptop for is you know whenever I want to be portable because normally I don't that's what I have a laptop for it's to be portable but and then I could do stuff like
I could have you know I could use the EEPC to do stuff like if I want to go outside and be an IRC I could do that and whatever and it has a USB port so I could plug in a big keyboard.
So I couldn't I think what I would probably do is since I'm terrible at typing on small keyboards and the fact that it's like a laptop keyboard and doesn't doesn't have a lot of movement on the keys because if you're typing on it then I most definitely will.
Because I can't even type of my damn laptop but we already knew this so I'll probably plug in the big keyboard and if plus it's smaller than a laptop then mostly what I use my laptop for is to SSH into the big box when I'm outside anyway.
So if you have trouble with like SSH and screen lagging.
Yes.
Okay because that makes my typos even worse because it makes mine worse too because you don't know when typing and nothing's happening.
Yeah it's like okay where did my key because you'll do something like control AC and you'll start typing in the shell thinking that you've got a shell window up.
Right. One thing is that it took like a while for your thing to actually create the window and so then you just get this burst of like the last 10 things that you typed.
It's like okay.
It's worse when you can see it because you're hitting the key or hitting the key and nothing's showing up.
Yeah it's like what the fuck.
There's something wrong with the key.
Because there's a jam underneath.
And then you have like 14 F and then it lags when you're backspacing to get the backspacer or anything else.
So I'll give you a hit if you need the backspace.
If you're in a shell or if you're in IRSSI or anything that's using read line with the EMAX key bindings.
If you hit control E it'll put you at the end of the line and then if you hit control U it'll delete everything from the end of the line or from wherever your cursor is to the beginning of the line.
So like because I always do that in fact it's a bit of a strategy that I have because it turns out that LILO does the same thing at the boot prompt or ISO Linux.
So if I boot from a live CE or immediately start whaling on control U because that way the control U will it'll look like there's keyboard activity so I won't time out when I get to the boot prompt.
And also has the effect of clearing anything that was previously on the line that the boot loader puts up.
So then I can just type in whatever parameters I need to pass to get something that I can talk at when I can speak when I'm booting.
So I almost never use the backspace key because if I need to delete something that I type there's keys on the keyboard to do that.
Backspace is really only meant for like single character deletions but I'm such a good typist that I generally type it right the first time unless my keyboard doesn't click and the keys don't press and yeah.
Or your screen session lags in your screen session lags and I've got damn it and it's worse when you're on flaky wireless at a hotel because you expect there to be a bit of lag.
So then you start wondering if your wireless in fact dropped your connection and then you start running you start pinging the wireless network to see if it's up which makes your screen lag even more.
Oh man yeah no that's definitely a bad thing.
The other thing that I noticed was if you use 1000 Hertz timer interrupts and you have a multi-core processor it turns out that the computer if you look at the kernel messages it initializes one timer per CPU.
So it ends up interrupting itself to pull for events so often that your key presses lag.
Yeah I don't think I'll be worrying about that anytime soon.
Yeah or and single processor.
Well I got the very early dual cores but my laptop is a single processor but yeah.
I can't wait to be able to actually have some money.
I'm going to get the I keep telling myself I'm going to buy that Lenovo that has two screens on it.
I think it's a think pad that has a pullout screen.
Yeah it starts out at almost $4,000.
Well you know actually what I'm thinking of doing is because you said you don't have any money I don't have any money either.
We should start a company or something so we can get money.
I tried that it's really hard to do a software company.
Oh yeah you don't know how to code.
Well I can code but I don't know anything about business.
I say really all I know about is communicating with the community.
You took your business courses from Jono.
Yeah pretty much.
So there needs to be a community of people to communicate the other community of people which are part of the overall greater community of the communities.
Yeah or something similar to that.
I think you're just in a beard there somewhere.
Yeah something like that.
Or maybe it's the bearded community of death metal community bands that organize the greater Ubuntu community of the Linux community.
Hello.
Hello.
How goes it?
Yeah who's on here?
The same people that were on here when you left.
I was wondering why I'm the little girl I have to stop you.
It's hurting for it since you left.
I finally figured out I got one of the first money for that.
It has moved that's off yet so we were just talking about random stuff.
So now you're going to get this massive recording.
Hey that worked.
That worked.
You can cut it up later and put it in the future episode.
I may do that because I don't have time to listen to it all or not.
But I think that's the story we wanted to hang out.
So we're in the call but I learned something there.
I thought I had to sketch for two hours.
I thought what I thought that was for us to get it but that's cool.
No it's going and going and going.
I may this may be my HPR episode this month which I'll record.
Well in any case it should be credited to my account because I just I suggested that we just keep talking until it boots off.
330.
330 said that it was that you what they usually do on the cranks which is true so.
Yeah we talked about like 5 a.m.
Well we'll just call it me in 330's HPR that I didn't people couldn't.
Because the nick was screaming for content so there's an hour of crap.
I can set it up and I can post it on my web server and when I'm down I just want to use it.
Sure it might be something useful in there.
I don't know what the hell we want.
I don't know.
What are you just talking about random stuff like how to get people not to use windows?
Well I'll be whatever y'all want me to with.
I mean it's y'all content.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I can have it as like extra after show content or I can put it on my site and give one of y'all the link to it and y'all can use it whatever.
Well if you want if there's something usable that you want to edit out of it go for it.
Okay.
I mean we're good.
Unless you have a problem with that 330 but.
No I as far as I'm concerned this is public domain.
Have fun buddy.
Yeah.
If people are that interested in the fact that our screen sessions lag repeatedly and we can't type on laptop keyboards then.
Well y'all think it's worth publishing.
Y'all can publish to the action or go to the site like it didn't happen.
It doesn't matter to me.
I've said worse things.
All you need to do is see season zero of the Linux crags episode where I didn't realize it was supposed to be a podcast.
I thought it was just a bunch of people that were already drunk anyway so I was trying to act as drunk as possible.
Okay.
Anyway.
I want it or not.
I don't care.
Unless you want it.
I'll carry you in advance.
You can do what you want.
If you want to kick it off I can hang up to you.
Yeah.
I can put it together.
There's too many chances I got the change that's tried to start 21 things people work.
Oh okay.
Yeah you can boot us off if you want.
Yeah go ahead.
Well I almost hate to do it but I need to get an edit.
Well you got to have a podcast to edit so yeah boot us off if you want to.
Okay.
We're not as important as you.
We don't have podcast to edit.
Yeah.
All right then.
All right.
I can buy it.
That was funny though.
I got it.
Come back here.
It's like who's on the call.
It's the same people that was one when you last.
That's getting figured out.
I said he's hit the screen.
What is it?
Is it called?
Oh yes.
I thought the way that I thought what am I going to mess it up.
Yeah I was like wait a minute.
That sounds like deviance.
What the heck.
I thought he said he was going to go home and edit the podcast and then I realized that it was still on the.
I'll answer that.
Okay.
I'm going to kick out of there.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Bye.
Get it work.
Oh no.
Oh no.
You can't.
That's what.
I think I am going to get off here.
You're just going to have to hang up anyway if you can't, you can't kick us off even if you want to do it.
That's funny.
I wonder if it's like talks you does that thing where they don't schedule calls anymore and you can just,
it just automatically keeps the call up.
Because remember they changed it this month and you set up that one line so people could just randomly phone in.
I wonder if they just changed it on a global scale so that calls you no longer schedule.
All right, well I'm not going to torture people.
We're out 24 hours of Vince barking.
Yeah, bye.
Thank you for listening to Half the Public Radio.
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