Episode: 4651
Title: HPR Community News for May 2026
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4651/hpr4651.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:02 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4651, for 2026-06-01
Today's show is entitled, "HPR Community News for May 2026"
The host is HPR Volunteers and the duration is 00:49:24
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "HPR Volunteers Josh, Ken, Rhon talk about shows released and comments posted in May 2026"
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Follin and you're listening to Take 2 of another episode of Hacker Public Radio Community News for May 2026.
And joining me from somewhere in the U.S. is...
It's Ron from Baltimore, Maryland.
And from somewhere else in the U.S. is...
Josh Knapp, host of the website, and I'm in Southern California.
Super. I was just going to do that for you, shameless plug.
Ron is our lead developer, and Josh is our basically patron.
When you hear admins on HPR, this is Josh.
When the site goes down, I contact Josh.
So Josh is doing all the real work over there, and thank you very much for that.
How are you doing tonight, guys, this morning for you, I guess?
Holding in there, just starting my work day, and took a little bit of time out to join the show.
Ron?
Oh, I'm doing good. It's lunchtime here.
So, worked out perfectly.
Super duper.
Well, enough chit-chat.
This is the HPR Community News for the HPR Community.
And HPR is Hacker Public Radio, which is a podcast that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday,
on any topics that are of interest to hackers.
Around about this time, we normally ask somebody to read out the new hosts.
But unfortunately, for as many months in a row, we have had no new hosts.
And the new hosts stopped coming in as soon as we stopped putting in the warning in the reserve shows.
Did you notice that?
I hadn't noticed it, but it does seem to be a nice prompt for a new host.
Doesn't it just?
People kind of need that whole, the project is going to end before they step up and volunteer.
So, to prove me wrong, I expect next month that we get several new hosts coming into HPR.
So, let's do this thing.
And if you are a new host, please, first of all, make sure you introduce yourself by saying your name.
And secondly, tell us how you found out about HPR, because it does help.
I keep a mental note of where people are coming from.
It does help me a lot.
And it also, we have a limited amount of time and budget and stuff.
So, if you're coming because I met you at a conference, then tell us if you're coming from one of the guys who's met you at a log fest or that you are on Mumble or on Mastodon or somewhere,
then tell us that we know that the time we're investing in these platforms are working out for us.
Okay.
Without further ado, what we do here on this show is once a month, we give a summary of all the news and events around the project.
And we also use this as a way to cut down on the noise.
A lot of people just subscribe to this feed and then go back and listen to the shows that they find particularly interesting for that month.
So, what we like to do here is go through all the episodes.
And we will start with the one that was the first of the month.
And that was by E. Hookah on Friday.
It was playing Civilization V Part 2.
And this one was about players, leaders, starting biases, unique abilities, unique units, building improvements, and dominations, etc., etc.
I'm finding this interesting.
Are Josh and Rona you into gaming?
I can't say that I am.
Yeah, I absolutely am.
I actually stream on Twitch on the weekends, and I'll play a bunch of different games.
Most recently, I've been getting back into Final Fantasy XIV when I have free time.
And I think this weekend, we're either going to do a horror game or pick up the Devil May Cry series again.
Just because I played a character in a tabletop game that was based on Dante from Devil May Cry.
Okie dokie.
And I'm just, no offense, I'm sure that meant something to somebody, but it was like, I have no clue.
I have a vague recollection of the titles, but I've never played any of these games.
Okay, moving on to the next show was the Community News for April 2026.
And we had four comments on that episode.
In response to Ken Fallon, HPR 4631 Community News, Ken said, in response to something that
I had said about in episode 4628, with regards to me wanting to avoid subjects that some people
may view as being politically controversial, he made the statement in previous Community
News with regards to comment, and I had made in response to another listener.
I want to clarify that 4628 was recorded and uploaded before Ken had stated it the first
time, so when I said that it would benefit, without the benefit of earlier clarifications.
Okay, that's fair enough.
My assumptions were based on what I observed from being in community practice of posting
fairly low-stress topics that people can relax to and not get into a flame war.
I had assumed that this was an unwritten rule and arose through common practice.
I'm going to attempt to very briefly answer my comment on Brian in Ohio's question on the
relative safety of different types of electrical power generation.
However, the answer was getting long enough that I suspected one of the Community News presenters
would probably tell me to put it into an episode.
He knows me so well.
Continuing, I will therefore make a short episode on it and submit it after the episode I currently
have in the schedule.
Spoiler alert, however.
So far as I can determine, the tiresome upon which to make any sort of objective relative
ranking on electrical power generation sources simply does not exist in a form that would
allow an apples-to-apples comparison across all industries.
The net result of any discussion of this topic will come down to a belief and opinion rather
than provable fact.
I will, however, attempt to provide some context in which to think about these questions.
I'll take the next comment.
From Candy Heart, new episodes, thanks for the episode suggestions about the process
programs, but I don't really want to work on any episodes.
I'm still recovering from the stuff that happened February, March.
And I'll do the next two.
And I replied to him going, sorry you feel under pressure.
Take your time.
Hope it goes better soon.
And then we had from Ahmed.
Thanks for the encouragement.
Thanks, Dave, for encouraging me to record an episode.
I hope to be able to do so soon.
Currently, I have very limited access to electronic devices, 30 minutes every three days, except
for my MP3 player.
Very interested to hear that show.
So moving on to the next day, we had HPR New Year Show 2026, episode six.
And there were no comments on that one, but it was a doozy.
See, yeah, you could tell it was in the middle of the night.
Spaceballs was coming up.
Oh, I can see it's flagged.
Well, I guess a lot of these are flagged as explicit.
Yeah, for sure.
And they are by default.
Bug versus feature.
Chronic dehydration.
Okay, yeah.
Atlantic highly migratory species fish guides.
All right.
This is a typical New Year show by the sound of it.
So anyway, moving on the next day, we had Ham Radio License by Lee, and the Foundation
License is your gateway to the amateur radio world.
This was Lee talks about the curriculum on the Amateur Radio Society License.
Did this tempt anybody to go for their ticket?
I am finding it tempting.
I haven't pulled the trigger on like getting the materials yet, but I do like his presentations
on the topic.
Yeah, it's good.
It's very rewarding, actually.
It's nice.
And the following day, we had UpgradeFailSource.
Operator goes over how he rebuilds Plex root file system, and the scripts that he uses
are in the show notes.
And somebody want to take the first comment?
First comment is by your name, and why is audio so bad?
Oh my God, sorry.
I guess I had a mic in my ear, but it was not working.
So you got the mic in my pocket, I guess.
Sorry, folks.
So I'm guessing that they had an audio problem during their show here.
Well, what happened was, and I responded.
So my comment says, already reported and fixed.
Hi, your name.
We already received a report that there were problems with the audio, and as such, we replaced
the episode with another one from Operator from the backup queue.
So what all everybody else was listening to was not the same show that your name was listening
to, just for 100% clarification.
As you were listening to this before it was released, I assume you're coming from the future
free feed, future feed.
You will need to refresh your cache on your podcast shares you're using for to get that
episode.
Thankfully, this is only on the future feed, and the listeners to the main feed will get
updated episodes without the issue.
I did contact Operator about that.
He hasn't got back to me yet.
So the episode, I think what happened was he thought he was using an external mic, and
it switched to the mic of the phone, and he put his phone in his pocket.
So it can happen.
Oh, yeah.
That's technical difficulties can happen anytime.
So, but it's good to know that people are listening and reporting comments.
Probably, if you want to, that sort of thing, just contact us, me directly on Mastodon or
wherever, or email at admin at hackerpublicradio.org, and we'll take care of it.
Normally, I catch that sort of thing, but we don't listen to the episodes before they're
posted.
We just listen to spots, and the three random spots that I happened to pick landed on a face
where the phone was on the table or something.
So, ah, well, there you go.
So the next one was from Lee, and it was what I did at work today, part three, section one,
and I've just listened to section two coming out, and this is where Lee goes through basically
thinking out loud rubber duck programming, where he's talking to the HPR audience while
doing some work.
I am on record as finding these interesting, but what do you guys think?
It's interesting to hear other people's process going through things.
Yeah, I like listening to this process, and on some of the topics, not so much this particular
one, but on others, it feels very deja vu-y, like some of the tech and stuff that he's using,
particularly some of the older, crustier stuff that still holds on at your work office, even
though you'd like to move on.
Okay, continuing on, we have the next episode was Unix Curio Part 6, the at and bash command.
Batch command.
There were four comments on the show, and the first one was from Candy Caneater.
Still useful, in my humble opinion.
At and batch still have plenty of uses in things like scripts.
It does provide a POSIX way of scheduling a task in the future, which could be useful for
scripts that want to offset certain effects without having to run its own daemon.
Something like the batch could also be used with cron as a sort of run at some point
after this time trick.
So if you have something, you happen to be doing something intensive at that time, you
can put it off until it is more optimal.
Also, AT can read, can just be used plain to run process a few hours from now.
It's pretty useful for like starting an intensive process overnight without having to remember
to start it before going to bed.
Okay, comment two by Norris.
AT for scheduled reboots.
I use AT to schedule reboots for systems that have kernel updates installed, but I don't
want to reboot right now.
Something like at midnight space enter, reboot, enter, control D.
Yeah, that's a good one, actually.
Yeah, I would usually do a one-off cron job, but that actually probably makes it a little
bit easier.
Although I also have to babysit a lot of servers.
Comment three by Vance.
Good points.
Nice to hear that others find AT to be helpful.
Perhaps some of these curios are not as obscure as I thought.
To delay running something on a personal system, I would probably be more likely to use sleep,
time, semicolon, command as a quick and dirty method.
This would also put the output in the same terminal session, but I can see how AT could
be more elegant.
For rebooting, a lot of systems have the shutdown command, and looking around, it's far more common
than I expected.
This takes a time argument for when to execute the shutdown, so you could also use shutdown-R
0000 as a way to reboot your system at midnight.
Some implementations might differ on how the time is expressed.
As with Perl, in the Unix world, often there's more than one way to do it.
And Whiskeyjack says, at and batch.
I happen to have a number of VMs set up that I use for testing, so I was able to do a quick
check to see which distros have the at and batch installed by default.
It turns out Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, SUSE, and Alpine do not have it by default, whereas
ARM, a Red Hat clone, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD do.
While they can be installed later, it may be that it's not more commonly used now because
you cannot rely on them to be there as a standard feature.
I was struck by the thought that batch may be useful for things like testing software by
being able to kick off a long series of tests that run in the background while you get
on with doing other things without the background tests affecting whatever else you are doing
too much.
Audio and video processing may be an example here.
Perhaps some listeners would think up of creative ways of using the at and batch and tell us about
it in a future episode.
This sounds like it'll lead to some interesting ideas.
Thank you, Whiskeyjack.
Picking up the whole send in a show vibe from us.
And speaking of which, Whiskeyjack sends in the next show the following day, Simple Podcasting
Episode 3, Analyzing and Filtering.
And the summary is this episode is in the third on a podcast series that he's doing.
And obviously it's about analyzing and filtering.
So I found this interesting and I was a med note on it because I want to reuse some of
this stuff in a, if I ever get the time to do a ham radio episode.
Yeah, I really like this episode too.
As Ken knows, some of my audio editing techniques don't always work out the way I want them to.
And so it's always good to have some more tools to try if I want to do this on my own.
Cool, what you can do from the de-essing.
I thought that was pretty cool as well.
Also, you went into quite a nice detail about what the filters do and how they work and stuff.
So that is excellent.
Okay, the following day we had an interview that I did with Ronnie Lam, Nico Ricken and Gertjan
that I met up at the NLUG Spring Conference.
And yeah, this was a part of the NLUG and they had this conference and I went there and
couldn't resist pulling out a mic as you do.
Hey, you always get some good interviews, I think.
And this was really interesting.
And it's always nice finding something so close.
I feel like I should be looking around.
I mean, there should be something relatively close to me here.
But like you say, you go years and you don't even know it's in your backyard.
And I guess when I came over first, I was afraid of the language barrier.
But then at a certain point, you know, you don't look around.
And it was only when I think Jeroen was on, Jeroen, who's one of our hosts, is on Mastodon
and he was, you know, firing off.
He's very much into the local Dutch scene.
So I go, hey, we should be promoting these guys.
A really good interview with another people there.
It's actually a four-letter agency, but it would be considered a three-letter agency in
the US.
God, I would have loved to record at that, but they're awesome.
There wasn't any option to do that, alas.
Following day, we met Robert A. Heinlein.
Heinlein?
And there were two comments.
This is a, of course, a hookah's science fiction.
If you're doing anything, you should do it well, Kevin O'Brien says.
Antoine says, nice tip, great tip on writing.
He chose, well, one without subjectivity.
No further questions needed to be answered with those.
Pa-pum, direct lines.
Nice to know Heinlein from your show.
And comment two by Kevin O'Brien.
I enjoyed doing it.
As you can tell, I'm a big fan, so it was a pleasure to start writing about him.
But I am a fan of many of the older science fiction writers, and I have more to come on
Heinlein as well as some other writers.
Yeah, I'm enjoying these, because these were, a lot of these were the stories I was reading
coming up, particularly as a teenager in the 80s.
So it's been great.
I'm still trying to catch up on his Doctor Who stuff.
And his Asimov, I'm finishing off with Asimov and re-reading Arthur C. Clarke, so I'm way
behind.
Kevin, you need to put a year between these shows so I don't have time to do all the research.
The following day, breaking the rule about having two shows, I had, well, this one was
allowed on the grounds that it was an interview, and I requested it.
I think I requested it on the mail list.
We will see when we get to the mail list thing.
If I didn't, I should have.
Anyway, they, this came up, it was, I found out again about another Dutch open source conference,
and I apped the Peter, or I apped the team, and Peter got in touch, and it is a free conference
to promote open source software, and it's held in Eindhoven, and that's the region where
the old Philips was, and where are they, a lot of the manufacturing for making the machines
that make the fabs work, or come from down there, so I expect great things.
So no comments on that.
I am rapidly, I am going to attend that.
We have a new banner, and so we have a booth there, and I'm also giving a talk on the Saturday
in the main hall, so I am busy.
Rowan has been wondering why I'm desperately updating the About page and the comments thing,
which I should have done once ago, but leave everything to the last minute.
Let me know if you need any help cleaning stuff up.
No, it's fine.
It's just, you think, okay, where did I, I wrote an email at one point about this thing,
and then I need to put it there, and I don't want to be too waffly, and just the facts, man.
So, although I am starting to use the describe thing in HTML to do the open and close, so
the big how to record a show can be a lot smaller, and if you're interested in a particular, you
know, what's CC by SA, what does that mean?
You can click in it, and it expands out.
Nice.
Yeah, I've been looking at that for, like, that whole page, a lot of, like, the FAQ and
the different things.
Yeah.
I think it would be nice.
And there was a lot of the stuff repeated, so I'm trying to put it together, and we use a
lot of terminology, like response shows that weren't defined anywhere, or, you know, even
what a janitor is wasn't defined anywhere, so a lot of tidying up.
So, I'll be busy doing that all week.
The next day, we had Community News.
We did not.
We had Hacker Public Radio New Year Show Episode 7, in which we talked about PFSense.
Let's see.
What weirdness.
We went Trinity Desktop.
Waffle House.
Yep.
Dunkin' Donuts.
NTP Pool.
Geeks for Linux.
Command Line.
S-Trace Command Line examples.
The Tor Project.
Duolingo.
Pizza Hut, Domino's.
Moza Pizza.
This definitely is into hackerspace, all right.
And we end with xfce.org.
Brilliant show notes.
Again, like, it's amazing how they put those together.
That is.
And it makes it very nice when you sort of want to go grab and you don't have to sort
of slip through seven hours of audio to figure out where that link was.
That's what you're listening to as you're passing.
Yeah, the following day we had Kevi and Dave with BeerGarden13 triple IPA.
Now, personally, IPA, one IPA is enough for me, as in I don't want any.
And the triple, I can only imagine how hoppy that would be.
What do you reckon?
My in-laws and my husband actually own a brewery.
So IPAs, yeah, the IPAs are very popular with them.
I apparently have stronger bitterness taste, like, tastes bitter more than most people.
So I can't be anywhere near them.
I'm too hoppy and I just die.
I do like hops.
I can't really, I'm trying to think of any.
I've probably had a triple at some point, but I don't really remember.
But it might be a little bit much for me.
Although I guess I know what brewery I'll be visiting if I ever make it to California.
Yeah, and they've got other stuff, too.
The seltzers are actually good.
That's my preferred drink at the brewery.
But I would, I might, I have actually been thinking maybe trying to jump on with them one time,
too, like, so I'd have an excuse to go get a nice beer to put in there.
I think, did you put it into the show notes what the next one is?
You didn't.
I know I have it somewhere.
Or I guess I could reach out.
Yeah.
But we, I'll need to check for that at the time of posting what the next one is and update it.
Archer72 shares his fix for the newsboat question about the CCDN PHP thing.
And yeah, so this is where the newsboat, it's like an aggregator, isn't it?
When downloading the HPR feeds, it puts CDN PHP.
So we send all the, all the feeds go to Josh's site and there's a PHP script on there.
And then it redirects out to either the Internet Archive or several of the content distribution network things.
Good news on that, another person has come forward volunteering a node.
So that's, that's nice.
It's always handy to have more nodes on the network.
But in order to fix that properly, I would need to get enough nodes on to get rid of the Internet Archive because they've got a weird, they've got a non-standard way of saving the files.
You know, it's their servers so they can do whatever they want really.
But this was a fix that Archer72 put in place.
So let's see what Ahmed has to say about that fix, whether it works or not.
But it's apparently an itch that Archer72 needed scratched.
Well, who am I to judge?
Because I look at my get pod script and it's like 400 lines long and a thousand commits.
Yeah, it's, it's great.
I love it.
I'm just glad I, I'm just glad mine come in with the right names on them and I don't have to deal with all that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a, I have one thing with one podcast, I think, and it, they add advertising to it.
So, they add a, they keep changing URL.
So every time they change the post, the entire URL changes.
So all the episodes download every single time.
Like, nuts.
Anyway, there is no, the spec is so vague, the RSS spec.
That's, yeah.
Anyway.
The following day, we had zero hour Friday afternoon APK hacking.
APK vibe happening like a boss with operator with perfect show notes.
How did he get these perfect show notes?
You may ask.
Warning.
AI generation show notes ahead.
Your mileage may, your mileage may what?
V?
W?
W, which I'm usually used to V being there.
Yeah.
So the AI, AI thing hallucinating at the end.
But they are nice show notes.
I did go to the trouble of reading them.
It is amazing what you can do with AI at the minute.
It, it really is.
And that's actually when I do the show that I have planned, I plan to go over that because
it's changed software development significantly, both for good and bad.
Yeah.
And the amount.
Yeah.
I just saw the amount of hits that we're getting on the website.
I mean, you're blocking by the time it gets to us.
It's already gone through every thing, every barrier that you could possibly put in place
for it.
And we're still getting hammered with AI stuff constantly, 24 seven.
It's absolutely nuts.
I think, um, I have out with, uh, my mother-in-law's, uh, church website.
Um, not as much now as I was, but like a couple months ago, but all of a sudden they're, they're,
the plan they're on, I guess they get like so much download per month, which was more
than, you know, it was like 20 gigs.
I mean, more than they would ever see, even, even though they host, they post like their
weekly sermons and stuff.
And then all of a sudden, like on the 20th of the month, they would like two or three months
in a row, they would get these, you've reached your data limits and like what's going on.
And of course, I don't know if they're using, it was CPanel and their logs were always cut
off before I could actually see anything, but I'm sure that it goes right at the time
when everybody started seeing the spike, it was just like download after download after
download.
So it was, you know, there's no way they had that many people watching, downloading those
things.
And I'm sure it was just AI bots just going over and over.
Um, I think finally their host provider realized what was going on and it's sort of died out.
So, but yeah, it's, you have to be aware of what's going on and a lot of hosting providers
are having issues right now.
So there's, there's no two ways about it, but again, that's a whole nother topic to
be discussed on another day.
Thank you for the ideas.
Yeah, please.
I'd love to hear your perspective on that.
I really, really would.
Uh, I have my own perspective, but unfortunately I can't talk about it due to reasons, but I'd
love to hear your perspective on it.
Following day, mobile gaming, Elspeth and Lee at this point, Lee is jumping out, cutting
out this segment and send it over to Elspeth.
So on the count of three, we all have to say, hi, Elspeth.
One, two, three.
Hi, Elspeth.
Hi, Elspeth.
Anyway, in this, Tile Survive, Nopaligo and Arrows Go.
And this was under gaming, under general, but it could have been under mental health as
well, I guess.
An interesting episode.
All, all, always good to hear these guys.
Yep.
Somebody want to pick Candy Cane Eater's comment?
I can take it.
Oh, you want to do it, Josh?
Go ahead.
Sure.
So from Candy Cane Eater 07, my opinion on mobile gaming.
I used to play a lot of mobile games back in the day, but nowadays I really can't stand
most of them due to the predatory nature of them and every single one needing the same
freaking art style that feels like a 3D version of corporate art styles.
Technically, I do actively play the desktop ports of two mobile games being Progress Bar
95, a really simple old computer-themed game about filling a progress bar, I'm going for
100%, and Bellatro because I'm actively developing a mod.
But besides those, I haven't played one.
As for the ADHD stuff, I usually have my laptop or MP3 player with me to help with that, but
also sometimes play 2048 or Solitaire on my laptop as well.
That'll do it.
We were so close to having him on today, but almost, almost.
Then, I'm keeping an eye on the dates to make sure that we don't go over.
Unix Curio number seven was compression, making your files smaller.
And I'm really, there were two comments on this, but I'm really enjoying this Unix Curio
series because there's a lot of history in here, and the research in this, you know, in this
case, a lot of these things I've been aware of and read man pages, but it's nice to get
a whole concise summary of the thing.
Yeah, this is...
And the show notes are excellent, by the way.
Yeah, the show notes have been wonderful, but yeah, reading through some of this, I can
tell you where I picked up because I'm like, oh, I know what these things are, but I never
had to deal with pack or compress.
I think my first, like, interaction was with PK-zip out of these.
And there's a nice chart at the bottom of the show notes, given English text, source code,
binary programs, wave audio, the compressions of the various different formats.
So, geek out, my friends, geek out.
Oh, this is a wonderful, wonderful, like, layout of everything, and it's something that somebody
interested in as far as, like, history on computer science, I think this would be a great one
to listen to.
You can just imagine some computer science student going, oh, compression, what the hell
am I going to do?
Hold on, lands and this and goes, yeah.
Or worse, the following, the day after they submit the report, they go, what?
Anyway, there's a comment left.
Who wants to read that?
Whose turn is it?
I can take it.
Comment one by X-Man Monk.
Great series.
This has been a great series, and I hope you find more topics to cover.
If I can think of any, I'll add another comment here.
And Kenny Canator said, thoughts, I'm always annoying when a good technology is locked behind
a pavement, but at least this time it backfired.
I'll miss this server.
It's one of my favorites.
So, cool.
Moving on.
I do kind of, like, once I started listening, I kind of remember, because I think that was
right when I first started more getting into, like, Linux and the GNU stuff, like, the patent
stuff from back then.
I kind of remembered that whole issue, like, staring in the back of my mind.
And, like, that was like that.
And then you had the MP3 stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's been interesting to hear.
Yeah.
Just the research, like you said, is great.
It's done a really great job.
The following day, we had Simple Podcasting Episode 4, Audio Analysis Fun, and no surprise,
this is Whiskey Jack covering audio analysis fun.
Weirdly enough, I can't say there'd be a lot of other people in my house that would find
this fun, but I definitely agree with them.
And yes, Fast Warrior Transforms, what could be more fun than that?
It's amazing how, when I was in college, how Fast Warrior Transforms would keep me awake
at night, and now, like, it's something that I am actively interested in.
And this is the one where he exports it into an Excel or into a text file for importing into
Excel.
Well, CSV.
And it's not Excel, it's LibreOffice, but you know what I mean.
Yeah.
I would never have thought to do that.
I was on the bus, and I was going, did he just export an audio file and import it into
a spreadsheet?
Yes, he did.
Yes, he did.
That reminds me of something that MC Frontalot, I'm sure some of you are familiar with him.
Yes.
Some of his ARGs and, like, hidden tracks have had spectrographs in, like, part of the
system, so this is, this is right up in there, and I love how nerdy this gets.
Yeah.
Did he do the original twat theme, or at least he has sampled on that?
And now with my cable, I'm able to get things stable.
You know, we should never have gotten rid of that theme that was.
Ultimately.
I don't remember, honestly.
Time needs to just slow down.
Either that or an external memory device.
Yeah.
Okay, that was Wednesday.
This is today, as we're recording, what I do at work today, part three, section three.
I've been continuing one where Lee is working with Joplin, PHP, MySQL, Sublime Text, Nmap,
Markdown Fence Code Blocks, and dbrunSQL functions.
I have to admit, I didn't quite get to this one yet, but I'm sure it'll be.
It's another classic episode.
It's scary how much of the stuff that I use, the PHP stuff on HPR, joplinapp.org, what was
that again?
An open source code platform notetaking app.
Yeah, that's right.
But interesting approach.
So that was that, and now the site is preventing me from looking at Friday's episode, so I'm
going to have to go to the schedule.
Who wrote this site?
Kishka.
Well, it could also be getting flagged by the WAF.
I do know that you guys trigger tons of WAF rules.
Most of them are legitimately bad, like people trying to hack the site, but there are some
WAF rules I'm like, oh, I need to adjust this so that the site works.
Can you explain what a WAF rule is?
So web application firewall rule is essentially a request matches a regex, and when it matches,
the connection is dropped or you get served an error page.
It's one way to protect websites from known attacks and attempted vulnerable.
And I reckon Josh is there going, press enter, and sets a countdown.
How long before Ken sends me an email?
Josh, this perfectly normal thing, SCPing a SQL database, for some reason doesn't seem to be
working.
Yeah, no, we've had to take a more aggressive stance on some of the security elements, unfortunately,
because the attack vectors that people are using now are all the more, like, important
to cover.
Yeah.
A show on that will be cool, by the way.
Just really be honest.
Absolutely.
From the front lines.
So tomorrow's episode, which will be last Friday's episode, by the time you hear this,
is Civilization Part 5, Part 12, which I have listened to.
A diplomatic victory strategy, which was interesting.
Puppet states and all that.
Basically, without conquest, that you win a game based on a diplomatic victory.
All pretty cool, I have to say.
And there are obviously no comments on that, because it's not in the main feed as yet.
So we'll cover them, obviously, in the next episode when we get around to that.
Now, going back to HBR4651, which is the one that you're listening to, and scrolling down
to the other comments from past shows, we had Ahmed was talking about how I use Newsboat for
Podcasts and Reddit by Archer72.
Let me mosey over to that one.
And how did I find HBR?
I found HBR from another podcast.
I think it was called Linux UK Logcast or something.
It ended anyway.
And then Candy Canator says, I found HBR through this old program called G-Potter.
It's a recommendation podcast had it in there, and it seemed like cool to tune into.
Interesting.
Well, that's those two.
And are ye now able to see where I could share my screen, actually, now that we're
doing it on Jitsi?
Let's see.
Can I share my screen?
Start sharing screen.
Hello.
Can you see that?
There it is.
You can click on the button, and it goes bigger.
Okay, so we are now reading Cheap Yellow Displays Part 2, and Archer72 had a comment called Morse
Code.
Somebody want to read that one out?
I'll do it.
Hey, Trey.
I heard this episode on Morse Code, and I thought this link would be useful.
I think it's a whiskey technical gohotel.com.
Link in the show notes is what we're going to do with that one, yeah?
To Dr. 72.
And then we had Antoine with some watched, sorry, movie recommendations for hackers, and
Antoine says, some watched.
And Josh, do you want to get this?
Yep.
This is from Antoine.
Antoine?
Okay.
Some watched from this show, and because of this show, I came to watch Gattaca, Surrogates,
Matrix, and the first, oh wow, what an epic in two.
The second, loved a lot too, a bit mellow, dramatic in the message.
It aims to inspire, but very well done.
The third, at first, I lost interest in the beginning and stopped.
Seemed that this movie aged bad, but tried again days later, and loved to know Matrix.
Very worth it.
Thanks for the recommendation.
The first only, the second, I didn't like from the beginning, so no.
And also for the lives of others, applause to it.
In a few weeks, I came to watch more movies than I had for many months, and it was very
enjoyable.
I may come here futurely when wanting to see something, to check another recommendation.
Thanks.
That's kind of cool.
That was, by the way, the Adulterary put a list of movies together that they had on
CDs originally.
You know, where hacker references, like, this is Unix.
I know Unix.
So Vance had an episode called Unix Curious Part 1 Shell Archives.
And Mr. Morris says, great reminder, I had forgotten Char.
I'm way behind with listening to HitPure episodes.
Sorry for the late comment.
In the early 1990s, the university I worked in for in Edinburgh installed DeckAthena, a commercial
version of the MIT Athena project.
As a consequence, I ended up with a Deck MIPS workstation on my desk running Ultrix.
We had used NetFeed by then, and we would download stuff like pictures and various new groups using
tools that I had assumed was Char.
Files arrived as a series of posts with encoded contents, which we would reassemble in a newsreader
and then decode.
I had forgotten about this.
Thanks for the reminder.
Printing colored images was challenging in those days for us anyway.
I recall we had a thermal wax printer to do it.
Dave, you need to do a show on thermal wax printers, please.
And then it looks like Vance responded.
Comment six by Vance.
Color printing.
Glad you enjoyed it, Dave.
I did work at one place that had a color thermal transfer printer and got to use it a couple
times.
They also had a film recorder, though I never used it myself.
This would put a computer generated color image onto photographic film.
After being developed by a photo lab, the resulting film slides could then be shown using an ordinary
slide projector.
Very fancy stuff until digital projectors became available.
Cool.
And then we had Linux Curio again by Vance.
Base name and dur name.
Vance had a correction in there, which was,
In a recent conversation, a friend pointed out that historical BSD versions were not necessarily
developed or released in numerical order.
Instead, 2.x BSD versions were created to run on the PDP-11, while 3.x BSD and 4.x BSD
ran on the Vax, until support was added for 4x for other processors.
Both evolved alongside each other.
In the audio series for this episode, I implied that the base name utility first appeared in
BSD in version 2.9 in 1983, while it actually was in 3.x BSD in 1979, shortly after Bell Laboratory's
7th edition Unix came out.
Similarly, I incorrectly said that the first BSD dur name appeared in was 4.x BSD 1993, when
it was, in fact, in the Net slash 2 release from 1991.
Sorry about that.
Probably others like me have fallen into this trap and assumed a later versioning always
came later, but I should have paid closer attention to the dates.
Discussion of history does not appear in the show notes above, just the audio.
P.S.
Glad you are liking it, ex-manamonk.
More on the way.
Crikey.
Okay, and Whiskey Jack's episode, Simple Podcasting, episode 2, Basic Filtering, Henrik
has a comment about generating sine waves.
Henrik says, generating sine wave.
Very interesting show.
One thing in particular I find useful for testing speakers is the command to generate
a sine wave at various frequencies.
I have tried the FFmpeg command version.
Josh, can you do the Whiskey Jack one?
So, response from Whiskey Jack, I'm glad you found this episode interesting, including
the part about generating sine waves using FFmpeg.
I cover this topic again in HPR 4658, Audio Revisited, which comes out Wednesday, 2026,
June 10th, and in which one of the topics I discuss is characterizing hardware, such as
speakers and microphones, in order to understand their limits.
It also helps to understand the limits of your own ears as well.
In that episode, I also cover generating a chirp signal, which is a tone which sweeps across
the audio frequency range from low to high, which is also useful in understanding hardware.
I can recall many years ago, salesmen in stereo shops using special CDs, which had these signals
on them, which they would use to demonstrate the capabilities of the high-end speakers they
were selling.
If you have ever wanted to have such a thing for yourself, you can generate it using FFmpeg
or socks.
Cool.
And Faster Pussycat Kill Kill by Vance had one comment from Steve Barnes saying, thanks
for the context.
It's great not just to learn new commands, but to hear someone explain some of the history
and the fundamentals behind Unix.
Cool.
And then Nuclear Power Technology Follow-Up had a comment from Anton, which is O slash, what
would that be?
A hand up, I guess?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
You want to do that one?
Sure.
It says, likes too much.
There are more nuances than I could expect.
Thanks for answering my question.
Maybe that's like a raised hand.
I don't know.
I guess it's a raised hand.
Yep.
It makes sense now.
Lowercase O and a forward slash for anybody following along.
I can read the comment, the second comment by Whiskeyjack.
So Whiskeyjack says, reply to Antoine.
Thanks for your comment.
Questions like the one that you asked me are very helpful because they caused me to look
into and think about things that I might have otherwise have overlooked.
When doing the research to answer your question about Magnox reactor patents, I was struck
by some of the parallels between open source slash free software and the early history of
nuclear energy.
While this one seemed like a stretch, in both fields we see how things like patents are
more likely to hold technology back than they are to advance it, and how personal connections
between people can matter more than the technology itself.
I've just finished the script for another follow-up episode in this series, and I hope that people
find this one interesting as well.
Pretty cool.
Looking forward to that now.
And that was that for that month.
So let's go on to the mailing list discussions.
And the mailing list is where we discuss things and make policies on HPR, as he says, buying
time, waiting for the episode to load.
Let's scroll in there.
We had a comment by JTT Trey, and 22nd of May, there was a meetup in B-Sites Knoxville.
And I think we mentioned that in the last episode.
I hope we did, because otherwise...
Yes, I remember.
Yes, I remember that discussion.
Ah, permission to reserve.
There you go.
I did reserve it.
Yes.
Very good.
I'd like to reserve earliest possible snot for promotional interviews.
So there you go.
Jumping the gun.
And Todd replies, giving permission.
Okay with me.
And I replied, saying we have a general agreement that it's okay to reserve a slot for interviews,
so I don't expect anyone to have an issue with it.
So to cut down the spam and the amount I need to read out of the community news, please
only reply if you've got an objection.
Silence is taken to be approval, unless someone comes up with a pretty good argument against it.
You didn't want to read out 50i agrees?
Yeah.
It gets a little bit.
Request for accessibility support with Orca.
Not directly related to HPR, but I know that we do have a lot of low vision impaired people here on the network.
And so I saw this one coming through my feeds on Mastodon, and I'll read it out.
As I know, there are people here who have thoughts on Orca.
I wonder if you could help them out.
And there's a link in there to what's the best way to copy my Orca settings to use them at the login screen.
I'm on Debian 13, stable, with Mate and LightDM.
I copied my home.local share Orca to varlib lightdm.local share Orca.
Nothing doing.
Anyone got any help?
That one, yeah.
Then we have, are you available to record the community news show?
I think we can skip over those, can we?
Yeah, I think so.
Please, please let us skip over those, and I'll stop sharing.
And we will go back to the events calendar, and I see that none of the events that I'm actually going to are in there.
So guys, what was it like being on here live?
If you want help with editing, I'm happy to help you out.
I know this might be a little bit of a challenge.
It's a mess.
So hopefully, for the people listening to this, they won't notice anything, but there were several issues with Mumble at the beginning of the episode,
and we switched over to using the HPR room on Jitsi, which actually worked out quite well.
Hopefully, the only issue is the recording.
Sometimes I get feedback on the recording, so I hear myself in an echo.
So we'll see.
Otherwise, I'll have to push it out and just beg forgiveness from the community.
Because I can go to Ireland in about eight hours.
So, yeah.
Best effort.
Best effort.
Exactly.
Anywho, guys, it was great to see faces for the first time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would like to just mention that for any Docker fans out there, and I guess I probably owe you an episode on this,
but I did just merge my PR for a Docker image that you can now, like, build on your computer with instructions and stuff to try out running the site generator.
So if you're interested in, if nothing else, just interested in letting me know how bad my instructions are and how difficult it is to actually use it,
that would be great for people to try out.
And hopefully, maybe it'll spark if people just want to host a node, it'll make it a little easier to get things up and running.
Yep.
Because Perl is finicky to get installed, I've found.
Yep.
Perl is very finicky.
And that's, I've been slowly moving to, like, Python and Node for a lot of things just because some of the older languages are difficult to transport between systems.
And containers work great until something drops the dependency and we're all scrabbling.
Yeah.
But that was my own personal plug for today, but it's been fun.
And it was nice actually seeing people for once since we haven't had a chance to meet in person yet.
Cool.
Um, right.
With that, tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of...
Hacker.
Public.
Radio!
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