Episode: 923
Title: HPR0923: 12 Gazillion Buttons
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0923/hpr0923.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:01:44

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Hello, it's PR listeners. My name is Jezra and I'm here with my buddy NY Bill. Bill, say
hi. Hello, awesome. Well, all right. Let's get this cell, ball the rolling. First off,
I'd like to say Happy Birthday to Moss Garden, Ultra Turquoise, Hannah. Happy Birthday.
Happy Birthday. Yeah. So right now we've got 2011 coming to a close. Coming our way very fast is
2012. By the time most people hear this, it will be 2012. So you had mentioned somewhere in a
online computer forum that I happen to know you from. Did you have a certain prediction for 2012
and I'd like to hear that again so we can discuss it. The probably the canonical Unity tablet one?
Absolutely. I don't know. I can just see this coming down the line. Doesn't it seem like
Unity is a very touch interface friendly? Have you used Unity? No, not at all. But I know the idea
behind Unity is to have one unified interface for desktop tablet, possibly phone or mobile device,
whatever you want to call it. And it seems very touch friendly, large icons and everything's used
to be done in one on one window. So it's not very virtual multiple desktops like a typical Linux
system? It wasn't. I confess I only used it probably 20, 25 minutes. I don't think that's
probably long enough to give it a real kicking in the tires, but it wasn't my thing. But I can see
where they're going with it. One user experience, if they were going to go public with it, if they're
going to put out a product to non-tex, non geeky people, you'd want one user experience,
ease of tech support. If someone was calling in for help, you wouldn't want people like us who
tweak the heck out of our systems. It seems that's Unity's one type of experience, is that?
Yeah, I could definitely see Shuttleworth and the canonical company saying, okay, we have
this product and we need to get it out there. So who's going to put this on their machines? I
could see them going to actually Dell. I could really see them going to Dell as a manufacturer
because Dell makes them, well, they were making the streak for a while. And I can definitely see
in the future, very large screen mobile devices, not quite tablets, smaller than your standard
seven-inch tablet. I mean, like a five-inch screen mobile works as a phone, it's a tablet,
and it has this one interface that is the same as a desktop Linux or tablet Linux.
And they also seem to be coming out with some like the Ubuntu one like cloud services and
things that would support a tablet type of device. Oh, yeah, what is Ubuntu one?
I think it's cloud storage. Like just storage? I know they do, they do a music, do Hickey thing.
Yep, I think if you purchase music, it actually gets stored there in the Ubuntu one.
I've kind of been out of the Ubuntu loop for like a year and a half, though.
I probably should have researched that Ubuntu one thing a little further, but the Unity thing,
that's like even my wife used Unity and not being like a geek like us, her perspective of it was
it seems like a tablet interface. There's no shutdown button, but if on a tablet you would have
a hardware button, so I don't know. Yeah, the an ACPI button that press and it sends the shutdown
signal. Yeah, actually my buddy was saying that he had been doing a lot of research on the Windows 8
recently and he actually felt very similar that he said that it would be fantastic on a tablet.
He's and he was you know excited about where the UI of Windows 8 was going to go,
which kind of scared me, but I'm just kind of seeing a trend of like consumer devices are going
to be devices like an appliance. You turn them on and you do a few things with them and you don't
tweak them a lot or install new stuff. It's stuff is coming out of markets and
it seems that's the direction things are going. That's my 2012.
Like an off the shelf router, you buy it, you plug it in, you turn it on,
it may be running Linux for the most part, you don't care. You can go and install your own software
on some event if you want, but for the most part you turn it on, it does what it's supposed to do
and you're happy. And people keep talking about this year's Linux desktop. This year is
year of the Linux desktop. I'm going to have to disagree and say no year will ever be the year
of the Linux desktop because I think 2012, this is my prediction, is the year of the network
to clients so that and people always come say no, I don't need my refrigerator to talk to my
network. Well, maybe those people don't, but there's going to be someone who does. Someone who's
going to say with some sort of near field communication, their refrigerator is going to tell them
your milk is old, it's gone bad, get new milk or press a button and it sends something out
to the store and gets it ready for you or delivers it. Or your power consumption at home is too high,
do you do you want to power down the refrigerator a little bit? Do you want to turn something else
off, turn something else on? Do you want to adjust the heat in your house, the thermostat controls?
I think all of everything will start not everything, but quite a few appliances are going to be
going towards being networked and they're all going to be controlled by people's pocket
machines and by a pocket machine I mean a mobile phone or a tablet. Or a Unity tablet?
Yeah, it comes off. It comes all right.
Yep. Me, I will be controlling everything with my Nokia N900 or makes device in my pocket.
Nice. Which I've been using quite a bit recently and I'm really liking it. What a damn shame.
Yeah, they keep dropping the ball on pretty much everything.
Yeah, well, yeah, I think there's no hope for Nokia anyone. That's good, Ben.
And let's see. So that's my prediction for 2012. Is that there's going to be more appliances
networked and that is going to kill the desktop because the majority of users don't need a desktop.
The majority of computer users need a cheap tablet so they can get online and see what people
are writing on Facebook or Google Plus or whatever is the sweet social networking site these days.
Cars are starting to come out all. I mean, you got a computer right in your dashboard.
Which can have some scary implications. Yeah.
Having a touchscreen computer in the car can be bad. I don't see really how it can be too much
worse than having say a push button AM radio unless it's designed in such a way that it has
menus and is super busy for the user. Oh, I'm sure. And it's going to cause problems. Oh,
sure. Here's how to make it absolutely terrible. Let an engineer develop the interface.
Here's how to ruin your product no matter what it is. They were trying to pass a law that
can't use your cell phone. You can't use any portable device, not even MP3 player, no texting.
I mean, this is like this was like nationwide. But the one that's in the dashboard, you're still
able to use the one that comes from the manufacturer. And I put on my tinfoil hat and I just see
backroom deals being made that you know, you're going to need a separate cell and data account
for your dashboard and a separate one for your phone and tinfoil hat stuff. Go ahead.
Well, there's nothing wrong with that. I can I can see that as well. I definitely see the advantage
of having a computer in a car and being able to have a mesh network while driving down the
freeway. Something that would say four miles ahead, there is traffic congestion. You may want to
take this exit. Oh, well, thank you car computer. That's very helpful. But what I don't want to see
is oh, hi, I'm an engineer and I put in 12 gazillion buttons into this thing. So you spend more time
pressing buttons on the interface than you do with keeping your eyes on the wheel or you don't
have your hands on the wheel. Or at a red light, you can play Tetris. Oh, that's not bad. I love
Tetris. Really Tetris on the Game Boy. Probably one of my favorite countries. This is awesome,
but we have enough distractions on the road. I hit it my horn three times today. People are almost
hitting me. Oh, yeah, people can be crazy drivers. So speaking of user interfaces and this is
something that I've discussed with a few people before and it's always really bothered me.
The remote control to my former DVD player has like 40 buttons on it because an engineer
developed it. The remote control for my television probably has about 35 buttons on it because an
engineer developed it. I've seen the remote controls for the Google TV devices and it's full
on, it's full-size keyboards. I haven't seen it. And yeah, well, you will. Yeah, the guy
knows the Google is coming. And people say, oh, there's the remote control for these devices
is monstrous. It doesn't matter what it is. Someone says, oh, the device has X, Y, Z feature,
so we should put a button on the remote control that handles X, Y, Z feature. When what they need
to do is put an on-screen menu on the device that can be accessed from the remote control.
But that's what they need to do. I can just see some types. Not getting into menus and not liking
it and suddenly their TV is all blue and too much green. But when they're creating the device,
having a, oh, yeah, well, yeah, I guess I should probably think of a good example first of
what one of these possible features are. Me, I just need to select what I want to play and hit play
and let it play. Maybe fast forward, rewind. That's it. Volume up and down. That's it. That's
all I want. That's all I need. If I need something else, put it in a configuration file somewhere.
We're sorry, not a configuration file. Put it in a menu accessible configuration.
That's what I would like. This man hates features. Yeah, it's your features to me are just big piles of
cane. Are you willing to be shot? It's true. I hate features. I don't know if it's like a
selling point of some people when they go buy a TV that looks attractive to them that the remote
controls five inches by an eight inches and has LCD and 600 buttons. I'm not sure. I'm with you.
Pause. Maybe mute fast forward. Yeah. And then rewind or whatever the new term needs to be for
rewind because it's not a tape. It's not a cassette. It's not VCR. It's not an eight track. It's
not real real. There's nothing to wind. We're getting old now though, so we don't know these new terms.
Yeah, there is no new term. That's the problem. People still dial a number on a phone even though
phones don't have dials anymore. But it's the nomenclature and that's just it's there. I need to
come up with a new word. I will change everything. That'll be great. So looking forward. Would you
like to warm up this topic for us? Well, you said our predictions and what are we looking forward
in the next year? For me, it would be Northeast Linux Fest. And you went last year to Northeast
Linux Fest. Three of us carpooled down. Three of us from the lug. All right, so
well, we can talk about lug later, but tell me about the Linux. Tell me about Northeast Linux
Fest. It's just great getting together in a room full of fellow Linux geeks. Basically, you're
there amongst friends. It's like a camaraderie, like instant friends. And then it's nice seeing
people that you know online. You've only ever talked to in text and you meet them, shake their
hands. You finally put a name to a face. That's what I really enjoy actually just hanging out with
everyone. Awesome. So I've got in the next year as far as Linux meetups go. Aside from my lug,
I've got the scale, the Southern California Linux Expo, which I guess is in its 10th year. I've
never gone before. I haven't really gone to any Linux based events other than my lug. And
the me go conference in San Francisco. Okay. So other than that, I've never gone to a large
system. Yeah, one of the big ones, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty big from what I hear.
So that'll be interesting. Yeah, Northeast Linux Fest was pretty small last year, maybe
a hundred people. So you actually felt like you really got to get around and meet everyone. I
don't know how big it's going to be this year. It sounds like it's gearing up to be a bit larger.
Well, that's awesome. Well, I hope you have as much fun this year as you did last year,
but it sounds like it's going to happen. We're already talking about Carpool and so it should be good.
Nice. So other things looking forward to in 2012, I'm looking forward to the Raspberry Pi
finally coming out and shipping. Yeah. And for any listeners who don't know what the Raspberry
Pi is, it is a very small single board arm powered system on chip that has HDMI out, RCA video out.
Did I mention it's small about size of a credit card? Yeah, they are tiny. Yeah, they are very small.
I've been keeping my eye on it, but I'm not sure how or when we're going to be able to get one.
25 bucks. That's what I find to be pretty awesome. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm not sure how they're
doing that actually. 35 bucks for the onboard network. There's a version that comes out with
onboard network and it is 35 bucks. Me, I would go 25 bucks because I would just throw. It's got
USB so I can throw a wireless USB card in there. Yeah, I've been keeping my eye on it. I would
really like to get my hands on one. I heard they're going to make a limited run, but the first production
units are going to go to developers. So we'd have to say we're going to be developers. Well,
I'm actually working on something that could possibly run on it. And so I will definitely,
yeah, if they're only going to developers, then I'm going to submit my project. You're a developer
there. Yeah, absolutely. I recently joined a 2600 group and we get into a little more
hardware hacking over there. So that would be a great, that would be a great little project.
What is the, I've heard about 2600 group before and obviously it's not in reference to the Atari.
So what does the 2600 come from? 2600 is the frequency of a dial tone. That's where it comes from.
And it's an old, oh geez, I don't know how far it goes back late 60s or something, but it goes,
it's back in the hacker culture and the phone freaks. And it was a magazine for a long time and it's,
now there's a podcast off the wall and there's off the hook. And it's just kind of like,
like we go to logs and these are a little bit more hardware hackers go to 2600 meetings.
Oh, well, I'll have to check that one out. But to be honest, everybody in our 2600 group are also Linux
users. So it kind of, it all blends together. I think, yeah, as far as hacking hardware,
hacking software, it's different parts of the same culture, really. It's just that inquisitive
mindset that you want to just learn more and know more and how is this working? And why is it not
broken yet? Or why is it broken? What did I do that happens to? Well, yeah, we try not to talk
about that one too much though. So is there anything else coming up? 2012 that you're really,
really looking forward to hardware software. You put me on the spot with that one. No, I can't
think of anything other than Fests. I'm hoping to get to some of the, there's Ohio Linux Fest and
there's Southeast Linux Fest. If I can figure out how to get down there and, yeah, I'm looking forward
to Fests. Awesome. And lug. Well, tell me about your lug. And then I'll tell you about my lug.
All right. So let's trade some lug stories. My lug is the North Bay Linux users group NB lug.
I'm a little biased when I talk about it because I'm on the board of directors.
My position is director at large. And by that, I have certain responsibilities, which are to
promote Linux and to promote my lug. And my lug meets on the second Tuesday of every month
at the O'Reilly building in Sebastopol, California at 7.30 p.m. How many members would you say?
Like in general, in general, members and then in general, how many show per meeting?
I have actually no way of knowing how many members there actually are to be a member. One needs to
simply show up and, and they're a member. Depending on the topic of conversation. So the way our lug
usually works is someone will give a presentation about something Linux related. And then there'll be
a, and this could be like a half hour to an hour long presentation. And then there'll be some
questions and answers afterwards. Or sometimes there will be just a sort of hack fest where hey,
you know, bringing your project, we're all just going to sit around and talk about what we're doing
with Linux. And depending on the topic of the conversation, it can get really, really full.
And by full, I mean like 45, maybe 50 people. Our last meeting, the president Kyle Rankin gave a
presentation on how to hack into your own Linux based router. And he had a specific router that
he was working on. And he's actually giving that presentation again at scale is pretty interesting.
Cool. It was how to through a web interface trick your router into running shell commands.
Nice. So our lug is upstate New York. I'm not on the board. So I don't know. I mean, if you guys,
if somebody's interested and in upstate New York, you could probably look it up and find it online.
But yeah, we're once a month too. And basically, it's just a room full of Linux geeks and we talk about
whatever we want. Some people get off in pockets of people working on a project. But somebody comes in
with a problem and other people's help them and you can get pretty loud. A lot of shouting, a lot of
BSD Linux fighting. I haven't seen a fight yet. But no, it just, I don't know. It starts off as a murmur.
And then when everybody starts getting excited about whatever they're getting into it, sometimes you
can come away horse because you've been shouting over people. But it's good fun.
So all you listeners out there, go find a lug. If you're not a part of a lug, join one. It's a good
place to meet people or start one. Yeah, or start one. If there's not a close by lug, start one up.
Coffee shop, a pub, probably coffee shop. College would be a, that's just hang posters and get a room.
You could probably get a bunch of people together quick at a college. College.
It was so long ago. I don't know. You guys had rooms?
Yeah, now it's all tablets and laptops and he used to be books and pencils.
Oh, there's damn kids. The year after I graduated, they got a grant to get a computer lab
to teach what I was there for. So at college, yeah, I went for graphic design. I learned the
old rulers, razors, you know, pencils, drafting boards. Nice. I learned the old way.
You couldn't get a job after I got out. They all said, well, computers could
experience the I have. And I said, I don't. And like a year or two later, they got a grant from
someone and put in a hole. I don't know if it was Max or what it was, but I was just, I was there
at the wrong time. Right at the wrong time. Oh, they're probably all Windows machines running
AutoCAD. Could be I haven't been back since. Yeah. But you know, you know, you had experience with
with the Vic 20 and the 64. Yep. Yep. Back in back in the when and that doesn't that didn't count.
No, they didn't. They didn't care about that. What could you draw? They had a koala pad,
which you could probably do four colors of 16 colors. No, that didn't count. Now it's damn shame.
Speaking of the Commodore, well, just the name. You know, they're made, they're coming out,
they came out, coming out with new Commodores. I saw that a couple of juice about a year ago.
Yeah, I guess they bought the name and it was like an atom-based thing, wasn't it? Yeah, as far
as I know, they're like atom-based Linux box, I think it was. Yeah. So the machine, it seems
like it's a mini ITX motherboard inside of inside of the keyboard. The first, so it looks like
it looks like the Vic 20. Yeah, the first ones I saw were just kind of like a square metal
looked like their own proprietary box. But then the new one, I saw a later picture and it was like
it looked exactly like the old Commodore 64 or the Vic 20. Yeah. So I may have a couple models
and the CD tray comes out the side. Exactly. And the Linux they have, I didn't really look into
it too much, but it's monstrous. It is like every package ever made. Have you ever noticed they
start rolling out things that are from our childhood when we get old enough to have some disposable
income? Especially like movies and stuff to keep, to keep remaking movies that or toys that we
had when we were kids are kids, so that you might want to bring your kid. Oh, let's go see this movie.
Oh, okay. Then here's my prediction for 2012. There will be something I really liked in my childhood
and some jazz ass is going to make a fucking 3D movie about it. In 3D. Oh, 3D. 3D. Just 3D.
3D is just a headache machine. So they're going to take this story that I loved as a kid,
they're going to get some shitty actors, they're going to get a ton of computer-generated explosions,
and they're going to make it 3D. And everyone's going to hate it, and then the movie industry is going
to complain that they're losing so much money because of piracy. Oh, let's not go down the soap
line. Oh, yeah, well. This has nothing to do with soap. That's a soap line. Or beep-buck. That could be a
whole episode, that debacle. Yeah. Well, I think for, no, actually it wouldn't because that would
be preaching to the choir for the most part. That's true, yeah. Soap of bad. I didn't want to get
too political right there. That's why I didn't start. Okay, okay. An employee company don't
mention religion or politics. It's one of those things. My biggest concern with you discussing
politics is that your avatar is a primate holding a fire. If you can, if you can get past that,
I'm actually a nice guy. So we did actually, well, for, we briefly mentioned, well, I briefly
mentioned a project as development, possibly for the Raspberry Pi. And so, hey, Bill,
got any projects coming up? Hardware. Software. Hardware. Software.
Have a little of each. Hardware with the 2600 group. I just bought a teensy board. Have you ever heard
of these? No, not at all. A little tiny or do we know compatible development board like 16 pinouts
USB. And I'm going to try and run a Commodore 641541 disk drive to USB. That's my project. I did
it to a parallel port once and it was just so nostalgic when you actually like put up an M64
emulator and get that old drive to start making those old noises. It was very gratifying. So I'm
going to see if I can get it to work with USB. Now, do you still have data on drives that would be
accessible through that device? Through the 1541. And I don't mean through the teensy, but I mean,
what it was five and a quarter drive. Yeah, like floppies that are actually floppy. Yeah, I still have
all of them. I have two drives, two Commodore monitors. My 64 is dead.
I don't know if one of the chips burned up or something, but yeah, I still have all my old floppies
and most of them are like hacks and cracks. There's a big scene back then. Now, yeah, I mean, say this
might be a bit of a personal question, but what do you have on these disks that you haven't transferred
to something? Or is it just there for nostalgic reasons? Yeah, it's kind of nostalgic with me.
I mean, there's nothing you'd, there's nothing you'd really want to transfer. There's old programs
that I used to write. There's some basic I used to do or sometimes you get the old magazines like
compute and you'd type in a program that's in the magazine for like a day and then you would
correct syntax errors for like the next two days. I mean, there's, there's stuff I saved and there's
just a ton of games and things. But it's, it's, yeah, it's just nostalgia. You know, I understand.
Sometimes it's as nice to kick back and play some Gallagher. I actually don't ever even turn it
on and play it. I don't know why I keep it around. Just for things like that, like hacking on it.
I mean, whoever thought a 1541 drive can run on USB, but what's your, you got any hardware hacks
going on? You're talking on the red phone right now, aren't you? Yeah, I'm talking on the red
phone, which is, well, I guess it's a hardware hack. It's just a, the receiver from a cheap plastic
phone that I wired up to plug into the headphone and microphone port on my laptop so that I can
use it as a phone. I like phones. Actually, I think the red phone was the, the reason you and I,
well, we've known each other for years, but the reason you and I like talked first because I think
you set up a mumble server and you mentioned like one time on Identico or maybe a forum just,
oh, can you help me test this? So I put on mumble and we used to talk, you know, back then.
Yeah, I needed, I needed the tester. I needed a subject and you, you stepped up to the change.
And I was very happy. I'm always there. Hey, buddy tester. Hey buddy, yeah.
I still use it every day. Oh, yeah, you know, I'm not using it.
Until, yeah, I need to set up my own identity. Sorry, my own status.net instance.
Actually, that, that will go right into projects because if we're going to talk about software,
that is my software project. So it sounds like it's yours too.
Well, so I looked into it, it, it will be, well, at least setting it up. I also looked into
our status, which is a Ruby on Rails based. Okay. Federated micro blogging instance.
Application. Some type of API that it can talk to different.
Yes, that talk to, like, Identico and status net. Yeah, it goes through a,
with O status to federate. Yeah. I took an old laptop and I threw a crunch bang on it and
the lamp stack and status net 1.0. And I got everything up and running, but I was just using my,
my external IP address. So my next step, I have to get a domain. Oh, and figure out all that stuff,
you know, for some, so you can get, because I use a dynamic DNS service for routing stuff to
my actual house. Yeah, that, that was one road I could have, I could go down. I do, I think we have
dynamic IPs with, with my internet service provider, but I've had the same IP for about three years now.
So I don't, not really sure how that's working out, but I SSH, SSH back to my house.
And my IP has never changed. So I suppose I could go that route.
You could go that route and it would be sort of in, in line with Eben Moglin's freedom box,
which is have your instances of whatever it may be, micro blogging or some sort of social network
stuff, have it on a machine in your own house so that you know exactly who has physical access
to the computers that your information is on. Yeah, that's a good point.
That was the idea of the freedom box. And I think that was, that came about when there was
a lot of discussion about the Pogo plug, plug computers, or like the Shiva plug, those, the small
wall wart size computers. A couple of them float around the log and looked at it. Yeah.
I think that'd probably be a nice project for the Raspberry Pi. No, yeah, nice.
No reason why it wouldn't work. So hardware-wise, and not too much of a hardware hack,
I have a wooden box here at my place that was a former box that held probably six bottles of one.
Hmm. Some winery had these, they make these pine boxes, and for shipping out their wine,
and then when they're done, they just have all these dead tree bits laying around, which I think
is terribly wasteful. And so they crush them up, and they throw them in a dumpster.
And so I got my hands on one, and I'm probably going to
gut my current home server, and my current desktop. Frankenstein smashed them all into one machine,
and put them in this box, put it in my box. Right. So what I'm going to end up with is a one gigahertz
machine running fan lists, so it'll be nice and quiet, and have a bunch of hard drives in there.
Maybe one fan. I'll put it in one fan. Nice. Yeah, we're going to need to see before and after picks.
Yeah, absolutely. I'll definitely document that one. The only other project that might be coming up for me is
I just got some SD cards, Class 10, like a fast SD card, and I just want to do a couple of persistent
installs because I want to distro hop when I'm at the lug, but I leave crunch bang on my EE,
that's all it's like ever done on it. But I do want to fool around with backtrack a little bit, so
what is backtrack? Hacking, cracking, it's a distro that's kind of tailored towards penetration,
and cracking, got it, metasploit, and all that stuff. Now, well then I will give you my IP address,
and you will let me know. So we're around 45 minutes of monster edits. Do you want to do the
listener feedback we have? Oh, contact information. Yeah, contact information.
If you like more information about anything we discussed, feel free to contact us. You can contact
me Jezra at Jezra.net. And I'm around online in Identica, or forums, or sometimes IRC,
but I will be getting an email just soon. As soon as I figure out that domain stuff,
I'm going to make an email that I can put up on HBRs or anywhere else. So it'll be out soon.
Oh, we didn't say goodbye.
Um, bye, everybody.
Oh, fuck, goodbye.
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