Episode: 2299
Title: HPR2299: What's in My Bag
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2299/hpr2299.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:59:35

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This is HPR episode 2,299 entitled, What's in my bag and in part of the series, What's in my toolkit?
It is hosted by Shane Shenan and is about six minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, here are the five items in the bag I take to my job.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Anastos.com.
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Hacker public radio audience, welcome. This is What's in my bag.
My name is Shane Shenan and I'm a computer instructor at a private career college in Ontario, Canada.
Now I'm not a server admin or an IT guy in the regular sense, I'm just a computer instructor.
But there are five things that I carry in my work bag all the time and I tend to use these quite a bit.
The first thing in my bag is an LED flashlight just in case of power outages.
Now they don't happen too often but when they happen my computer lab is completely in the dark.
There's an exit at the end of the building and since my computer lab is in the basement of this
building, there's only light at that end but in my computer lab proper when the power outage hits
completely dark. Since we're far from the exits, there's not even any of that emergency light in nearby.
So it's nice to have this LED flashlight in my bag close at hand.
I also have a flash drive in my bag of course. Very useful for transfer in files from my computer to
a student's computer or vice versa. But it's on the fun side, this flash drive is a Star Wars
flash drive. It's got R2D2 on it. So it's nice to have something kind of with a humorous tone
in the classroom. It reminds me that things aren't deadly serious all the time.
Also on the fun side I have a set of Rory story cubes. If you've never seen them, imagine a set
of 9 dice. But instead of numbers, on each face, there's an illustration. Just a little drawing.
I use these when students are learning how to save files for the first time.
I have them open up notepad or wordpad. And then to give them an idea of something to write about,
I have them roll one of these story cubes. I'm going to roll one of these now.
Okay. It came up with a picture of a tree. So the student might write the tree had green leaves
period. And then they save that and close wordpad or nopad and then open it back up and roll another die.
Oh, this one isn't I. So they might write something like, I need to see my optometrist.
So these story cubes are just to give some students just to hand out something they can write about.
So they won't have to think about the topic entirely by themselves.
Now I don't use these with everybody. My students are all adults. So if I suspect that somebody might
think that these are two childish, I don't even bring them out. But occasionally I have a student
who gets a kick out of them. Okay, let me look at my phone app here. What is the next thing
I was going to talk about? Oh yeah, my notebook. So I have a pocket size notebook and its main
purpose is not for teaching, but to unload my brain. So say I think of something that I want to
remember. Instead of the old way, we're out writing on a post-it note and stick that post-it note
into my pocket. I found I was carrying lots of scraps of paper around by the end of the day.
Instead, if I have an idea of something I need to do at home or some project I want to start on,
then I just write it in this notebook. And I've kind of got a modified bullet journal style for
this. The first four pages of the notebook are reserved for index. And then as you make new topics,
you reserve two pages for each topic. So every spread, every two pages is reserved for a topic.
So I've got everything here from spiritual stuff like scripture or prayer to more tacky stuff like
what I want to do with my Raspberry Pi or things that are done after installing the latest install
of Ubuntu. So everything goes in here just as a way of unloading my brain so I don't have to
think about it during work. And then when I'm bored or I need something, I go back through the notebook
after work and I see projects that I might have wanted to do. For example, there's a category here
called miscellaneous projects. Let's see what's in here. Oh yeah, one of the things I had in here
was to install open red alert, open RA. And I checked that off. That's something I did a few months
ago. Or I've got different ideas in here in the miscellaneous projects area for creating
avatars for my Twitter account or my mastodon account, things like that.
Okay, we're nearly at the end of this. The last thing that's in my bag is my Blackberry Z10.
Not the newest phone, not the flashiest for sure. But I got it for cheap. I got it for $100
when Blackberry was unloading phones before whatever came after the Blackberry Z10 was.
So I paid only $100 for it. I had it for a few years now. And I'm going to get myself a nice
android sometime, but this phone is a dude in it for now. Mostly I use it for listening to podcasts
or keep it my calendar, things like that. But it's always on me and while I'm at work, it's in my bag
most of the time. So that's it. Not the most high-tech watch in my bag. But I hope you might have
heard something here that's interesting or something that you want to find out more about.
Anyway, thanks for your time and I'll talk to you guys later.
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