Episode: 1761
Title: HPR1761: HPR Community News for April 2015
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1761/hpr1761.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:58:37

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This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
We get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio and with me tonight is... Hi, it's Dave Morris.
Dave, you're back. How is life? Not bad, not bad. Yeah, sorry I missed last time. Not feeling too
well, but there you go. That's life. I have been fighting with Windows scripts. Have you ever done any
Windows batch files at all? No, I kept clear of it. I used to use Siguin on Windows so I could avoid
all that stuff. Yeah, that's cheating. I have had to do some batch files and I used to do it before
way back in the day. Bosses really, there's no loops, no nothing. It's just, oh my god, it's
amazingly primitive for the 21st century, I'm surprised. Well, I'm fairness, I guess the guys
have got PowerShell and that sort of thing so it does a lot more. Oh yeah, yeah. I have colleagues,
ex colleagues who swear by that and say it's very good, but I have no experience with it.
Never mind, and I think they're from the guys who know that you use it. The versions, depending on
the version of Windows, you're using the versions of PowerShell different from one to the other.
However, this is not this week in Windows. It is, in fact, Hacker Public Radio Community News
for April 2015 and for those of you joining for the first time, welcome to HPR.
HPR is a community podcast network where the show is provided by people who listen, that is you.
So nobody's getting paid for any of this and our infrastructure is kindly supported by anonosthost.com
and joining as new hosts this week's work. Good thing you've got, you're going to be compressing
out the silences. Of course, there was a silence there while I switched to the right.
So this week's new hosts are M and still void.
Both of those I guess I could have done or say, there you go.
That's his tradition. Tradition that somebody else does it for you, yeah.
Don't worry, I'll put your people to his yes, please. The night is young, the night is young.
Anyway, as is our tradition here in HPR on the first of April, if it falls on a weekday Monday to
Friday, we run a pro food show. And this month was this year was no exception, credit card pin
breach. And if you are anybody knows of a good one to do, please get in touch when we have plenty
of time so that we can schedule that for you for next year. It was good. It was good. I like the
joke. I'm afraid I didn't listen to more than about 10 minutes. I've listened to every HPR show,
so I had to listen to that. I could have speeded it up about a hundred times for outside with the
done it. Yeah. Okay, the following day was an actual real show, theaters of the imagination lost
and brought the dramatic audio media, which is pretty good. He is, yeah, I like this good review
of three different recordings by such. Yeah, yeah, I was impressed with the Tazcam recorder he was
talking about, though it's a bit pricey here. I don't know, I forget what it was in the States.
Exactly. I have the Zoom H2, so H4 would be nice to have, but we make do what we have.
Absolutely. The following day was mailing list Eskis by David Morris. And an excellent show,
because you kind of, you know, I asked you to do this as well, because I kind of came into it and
you know, top posting and bottom posting and all that sort of stuff, and the reasons why you might
do it, and the logic behind it and the email threads are very, very excellent. Also the Epobs
norths were absolutely excellent. Yeah, I think they could do with some improvement just chatting to
John Culpe about how he does them. I might take on his, it probably will take on his methodology,
but I thought it was an interesting experiment. I got a few positive comments about the Epobs stuff,
so yeah, I don't know how I sort of felt that the show is maybe a little bit too boring come
all, but the really extreme geeks. There we go. It's there. Oh, I did enjoy it, so there you go.
That was the main thing. Good. So then the next one was HVR Community News, which we can skip over.
I was a bit too much at talking about that, and then a re-recording of 50 and 50s, how to get
yourself in an open source podcast presentation from Linux Fest, Kansas Linux Fest. Real pity they
weren't able to get those recordings in. Yeah, absolutely. There's a nice idea for a talk. If I'd
seen that in a schedule, I'd have been tempted to go along and listen to it, but yeah,
good for him. Yeah, I'm glad he took the time to record the first, because that was pretty cool.
Yeah, that was very thoughtful of him. Then we had Lord Straggendloop, went to scale 13 and
didn't he do a fantastic job on the recording of these interviews. He worked really hard to,
must have worked really hard to get these that some tremendous interviews here. I hope it hasn't
had an adverse effect on his health now as a result of that. He said he was feeling a bit
unwell towards the end, I think he said. I heard him talking on TLLTS about the experience,
but I've got for him to be tackling that. Fantastic job he did.
Yeah, absolutely.
The funny cause I had interviewed Matthew Miller a few weeks ago on a Boston. So here we are,
two shows, two different parts of the world, pretty awesome. Yeah, full circle there.
The following day was Paul's SQL in space, which is brilliant. I know that one will be right
up your alley. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I love that. That was the thought about the
relativity problems, contacting these things on satellites, plus Postgres, which is my,
I think everybody calls it, it's a really bizarre name, Postgres SQL, but it's still pronounced Postgres
by most people, I think they stuck the QL on the end relatively recently, just to show that
that it's a database, I think. Yeah, I'm Brian Lunduk, interesting interview.
Yeah, he was, he was quite amusing, wasn't he? Yeah, he was, I enjoyed that. Yes, not been
as personal as he was, as you know, really, so, uh, fair enough. No, no, he's, uh, there's a human
being, oh, I shouldn't say that, you know, really, but it came across as quite an interesting
guy to talk to. You sound sort of person you'd want to speak to yourself about.
Exactly. They have a podcast called Bad Voltage, so if you want to know what my jab about
the personality thing is, go have a listen to that, but a good podcast, quite entertaining.
And then the last, uh, and that one was the next interview was the open solar
Susa Bill service, which I'm surprised more people are not using it. It seems to be a fantastic,
fantastic thing, little gem. Yeah, I've heard, heard things about it and good things about you,
but I've not heard of many people using it. Um, not sure what that means. No wonder is, uh,
because I've heard people, uh, that Debbie and her very, um, you know, have requirements
about exactly how packages are supposed to be built. And if I suppose there's a not invented
here sort of mentality, but it will be useful for other people, you know, if you have a small
project here, it's the dev just to unload it. Yeah, sure. It is meant to be a generic, uh,
toolkit, I think that would make anything, I guess. I don't know that much about it, but, uh,
was my impression. So the following day we had a hookah with his liberal for series, uh,
introduction to liberal office impress, which is the PowerPoint. And actually, in this one,
he's more talking about, um, general things about your presentation. And actually, you know,
get it, get a pen and paper and write your presentation. That's, you know, that's advice I have
given to my own children when they've had to do a class project. Yeah, it was important to give
everyone an idea of how to think about stuff. You say his name three times folks and he appears.
It works. I didn't even see you coming in. Hi, come on. Hey, how you doing? Tired, tired,
very tired. So we're up to 1746, aged interviews from scale X. I was doing the editing for these,
so they, um, I was up against time. So the show notes were, uh, for the other ones are a little
truncated. So there were quite a lot of interviews here. The LPI, one course source,
elementary OS, open source robotic tools, cis lugging, open X, and thin pen, and penguin, and
codey, all nice little snippet of interviews actually. And then the following day, there was
the so-called pearl longer, so it seemed to be at every, uh, event. Again, open stack, girls in
tech LA, snow drive co-op, and salt stack. I was really interested to hear about the girls in tech
LA. There's a, um, a girls in tech Amsterdam as well, so I would like to get in touch with them to
see what they're promoting. Yeah, and it sounded really good from what they were saying.
I've, uh, started taking, now looking at, uh, speakers and presentations, just now that
has become in my mind, you know, when you, you kind of don't know stuff, and then when it's brought
to your attention, I'm now looking to see, okay, here's a, here's a conference, and the keynote
speakers, there are no female present presenters, and there are no, um, you know, there's predominantly
white male, you know, there's only white males given presentations. And, uh, you know, you, oh no,
it's not a problem until you actually look at this, and you go, yeah, this, this could be your problem.
And this isn't just limited to tech, taking, you know, a lot of the conferences I've been looking at,
um, and you go, well, surely in this field, but surely could have found, you know, somebody,
other than, you know, standard white males to give a presentation.
But you have to make an effort and look. Absolutely. And I think, I think the, um, I think what happened
with the, um, when you, when you start in a Linux Fest, I heard, uh, one talk about, you know,
how the golf speakers, they looked up the conferences, the other conferences that there were,
to see what speakers were available and they invited them. So that kind of is self-reinforcing,
if you're only doing that, and there are no, you're just picking from the same pool. So,
might be no harm, just people who are organizing conferences to think a little bit outside of
the box and, and contact girls and techs, blacks and, blacks and technology and other, um, tech groups
out there, you know, 20 minutes of googling and, you know, you might get some contacts. At least,
you know, you tried, you know what I mean? And yeah, stepping over to the box. And, uh, Lordy asked
that this, the 1749, which was, uh, interview with Justin King, browser-based, um,
emulator computer that he had his own episode and I completely agree with that, uh, well-worthness.
He was a very bright young lad. He, he, he, he, he spoke so well too.
Very much, uh, very, very bright. Um, and I, I wonder though, um, you know, a lot of the,
his opinions, I, I suppose you question them because I, I was questioning, um, his approach to
free software and stuff as, uh, as a parent, I wonder, do I impose my views of free software, uh,
and, uh, proprietary software on my kids? I know I do, I try not to, I know I do. So I just wonder,
is that coming out as well? Is that a good thing or a bad thing or is it just a fact of life, I guess?
It's a fact of life, I think, isn't it? I mean, however hard you try not to pass opinions and ideas
across to your, your kids, they still pick them up somehow or other. So, you know, and then,
then they filter them and, and keep some and throw some away. I, I don't think it's necessarily a
bad thing unless you really hammering opinions into them. No, no, not so much, but, um, I don't have
proprietary applications in the house and the certain types of forms I want, allow on the house,
unless they want them, they have to buy themselves. Yeah, I do the same. I don't see how you can raise
children and not give them some of your values. It just has to happen that way. Yeah, I just want them
to, to be thinking about it at least. Yeah, that's a good thing. Okay, okay, moving on to accessibility,
John Culp put this in. I loved these and actually reading the show notes when I was posted,
I didn't really get what he was on about until I heard the episode, not to say that I was just
in a rush and really paid that much attention, but some of these are really cool. Yeah, John,
the way that John works is, is fascinating. And he, he's, he's highlighted some very interesting
tools here. I certainly, I started playing around with X Clip and it was a great way to, uh,
to actually, um, fill the clipboard without, you know, if you're trying to cut and pay something
large, X Clip with a file name is a fantastic way to, uh, to, to, to, to paste things into a form or
whatever it is you're trying to do into an editor, perhaps. So that was very helpful. I've had that
where, um, I wanted to put stuff from the clipboard, you know, highlight something and then run,
run a script, uh, when it goes in and that would actually really help my return to that in the
future. But I definitely followed a lot of these things under, yeah, this is stuff I need to, uh,
I need to go and look into. And Steve Bickel did our, uh, in this third show, how he got into Linux,
thanking CrunchBang a long way. Yeah, he was a guy mentioned Sonic Pie as well, which, uh,
if you looked at that, that looks very impressive. No, what was that again?
Sonic Pie is a, is a package that I think must have been developed for the Raspberry Pi,
but it's also available on, uh, Macs and Windows, I think. And it's, it's a,
it's a music generation interface with the, I assume it's just a language that's been developed for
making, uh, making music. It's quite fascinating. Cool. How did I miss that?
Trunk kid silence will, uh, take out the bit where I go and Google that again.
Cool. That looks interesting. Yeah, it looked like something to, to play with.
Something for kids, really. I mean, it's, uh, and old kids like me, but, uh, it's, uh,
it would be great for, for youngsters, I'm sure, to get into music generation on the, on the various
machines. And then, uh, the following day, we had 1752, uh, PangleCon 2015. It's over. Yep.
Yeah, it was last weekend. Good crack. Well, it was wonderful. Not a great time. I've just about
recovered from it. Excellent. Uh, nobody recorded any shows for us. Unfortunately,
uh, not certain of that because one of the, uh, unexpected pleasures, uh, 5150 came.
Oh, fantastic. Good news. And, and I think he may have gotten at least one interview that, uh,
is going to show up. Yeah, he wanted to get one with Bruce Schneier, but Bruce was only there
Friday night. Um, so that made it kind of hard to get anything in there. But, uh, I, I do think he
was looking for other interviews while he was at the, uh, event. He was also a guest on, uh, Sunday
morning, Linux review where we did a live, uh, broadcast from the PangleCon. So it was,
it was great to meet him in person, you know. Yeah. I mean, up until now, it just
been this voice. Yeah, it's funny. Actually, uh, you think, uh, strange that you happened
at 51. It's a very after all. It's going to be done the road.
Well, uh, Kansas is not exactly next door. It's only that far on the map.
Yeah, like as far as from one side of Europe to the other,
it's only two inches on the map. I gotta call up at that the first time I went to the state.
I'll tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it would, uh, if I was driving it, it would, uh,
be more than a day. Okay. But that was cool. And we'll note out here more about that on
other podcasts. The next, um, show, I think AMP was the first time host, if I'm not mistaken.
Yes. Yeah. And introducing his five year old to sugar on toast. I love this episode. It's cool.
Yeah, I, I, I really enjoy those sort of, you know, microphone in the background type of,
type of shows ambient sound type of things. And, uh, listening to something like this is,
is fascinating. I particularly like the two, uh, dual language approach.
I think it's going along. Very, very, very good. Start them young. That's what I say. Keep them
coming. And now we have two other people who I know, uh, listen to HPR and their follow,
for me, a show. So we had the next day, D7 Y7, uh, John Cope, uh, Bob's music. And this did kind
of make some sense to me as I was listening to it. And I'll say, yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. Uh,
I've been a musician for quite a long time. But it was, it was good hearing his take on that.
What do you play? Well, uh, I don't play an instrument any longer. In fact, I just finished
selling off, um, all of my stuff there. But, uh, I also sing. And that's really what I'm sticking
with now. Excellent. I tune in at the end for we'll hear, uh, have, uh, sing us, uh, the free
software song. Uh, well, sort of kind of. Fair enough. Um, yeah. No, D7 liked it next year.
Yeah. That's great. Go ahead. Just putting my two pen, I think I, uh, I was intrigued by this,
the dissonance and consonance thing. I'd been to a talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival where
they were looking at, uh, human brains, um, and their reaction to these, these things, um, where
a dissonance is not resolved. So it was quite fitted in with my limited understanding of what they
were talking about there. So, uh, cool. Yeah. A certain amount of it seems to be universal.
I've seen people do studies about how certain musical things, uh, persist across all cultures.
So, uh, it seems to have to do with how the brain is wired. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating to think
why though. And, uh, you know, when it started to develop and are there, are there, uh, higher
primates that have this as well? You know, that would be an interesting study if it hasn't been done.
Yeah. And their little musician, uh, joke is that, uh, we used to talk about, uh, bizarre
chord we would refer to as a perverted 27th chord. I, uh, found it interesting from the point of
view of, uh, some of the, um, concepts with hammer radio and, um, what happens when you modulate
two signals together. Yeah. Well, it's all based on frequencies and how they interact.
Two things I need to ask at the end of the show, Dave, if you can remind me,
but carrying on, liberal for some press, moving around by hookah, do we get any more in this month?
Well, that was another introduction to the menu and the various different. Yeah. I've got to get
some more stuff written and recorded, um, because I'm running out, but I'm working on it.
Good to hear folks. And if you're not working on your HPR show, well, you should be.
I am actually a bit concerned about the number of uploads in the last period of time.
They seem to be all coming from the same one or two hosts. So basically, if you have not
submissive to show this year, please do so. Thank you. Then we had the Ranger Fall manager.
And this is another one where I pass Dave Morris will be, uh, poking an ear off about this one.
It's a file manager in BIM or with BIM bindings at least. Yeah, I had to go and download this one
straight away and play around with it. It's really interesting. I haven't quite spent enough time
on it yet, but I can see lots of potential there. That was, it was great to bring it to our attention,
I don't think my BIM school is strong enough to be used in this, to be honest, or, uh, good to know
what's there. I do fool myself into thinking someday I will be doing all my computing just on a
screen session somewhere. And then we have Dave with useful bash functions, many of which I intend
to just copy and paste and put everywhere. Well, that was the point really. Um, that's why I offered
them to, to the world. Although that having to over type yes would drive me nuts. Yeah, well,
you can, you can cancel that. Oh, you can, maybe I should produce another version which doesn't,
doesn't do that. I thought it was a great idea when I, when I did it and that, and I got used to
doing it. And then I thought, actually, I'm getting really annoyed with this. Maybe everybody else
will as well. So, but can you edit the yes and all when you put it in? Oh, the, what it's doing is,
it's putting up a read line line, which is pre-populated with, with the default that you've put in.
So you can, you can, um, scroll back and, I mean, you can curse a back, um, or you can delete it,
or you can edit it or do what the hell you like with it, just like you could on a command line.
Well, for something like yes or no, I might be useful, but for something like, uh, you know,
I quite often generate URLs from things. And then I might want to go in and just edit
something from hcdp to hcdsbs or a parameter, or a parameter around, and that will be actually
quite useful to do. That's, that's the sort of thing I had in mind when I, when I created that,
there's another, there's another one coming in the same family, um, that, uh, pre-populates things.
So, um, you, you, you might have worked out what the, the, the answer to the question would be,
um, uh, somewhere else in the script, and then you would bring up the, the thing saying, I think
this is what you, this is what you mean, and is, and then you can just accept it or you can go and
edit it. That's everything. Very excellent, very excellent. And I presume in your upcoming shows,
you'll have a show about how you can put these into libraries and how you can make them available,
and make sure they're on all your computers and everything. I did mention how I put these all
into a file and then, uh, source them in my scripts, but, uh, really, that takes you off into,
into Git or something of that. So, it's, uh, maybe it's, uh, in my queue of things to possibly do.
I don't know. I'm sure there's other people who know it better than I do. It could do about the job,
but we'll, we'll see how we go. Actually, if you do have that, that would be handy.
Pulling stuff from Git and, uh, sourcing it. I'm still looking for somebody to do a show on
the proper locations for, you know, files, uh, start-up files, you know,
bash scripts, environmental variables, that sort of thing, that's universal, of course,
that will work in terminals and SSH, you know, where do you put them, personal, system-wide,
blah, blah, blah, that sort of stuff. You won't have to answer now. It would be handy if you could
answer it sometime, not necessarily you did, but they'll general public it.
So, the next day, C-Prompt, taking three perfectly good shows and stuffing them into one,
uh, radio-topia, you are XVT256C and Crash Course in astronomy. All of these could have been their
own show, C-Prompt, you could all be in one show, all of the things were own show, why? Why?
Well, now, one of the things that we could do, if you wish, is that I am supporting Crash Course
on Patreon, and that's something I check in every day for any new files that they have uploaded
to YouTube. I'd be happy to record a show about it. Yeah, please do so, please do so. No,
there I'm money, I'm only messing with the Curtis. It's fantastic shows, and put them three small
snippets like that together is a cool thing, I've done one or two shows like that, three little
things, and I record a show about it. I've heard about this, you are XVT256C thing, um, where before,
but to be honest, I always thought there were too many letters in it to be something I could ever
type, and he didn't mention, but the words VT means virtual terminal, but which, I think he did,
did he not, I thought he did say the whole way through without XVT. Okay, maybe it was in his notes,
I'm sure I saw it somewhere, it was my memory failing me. I like his, I do like his format,
his cool stuff idea is a good one, because it's just sort of nice little news,
bike snippets about subjects that have caught his attention, and there's a great things to share
like that. Absolutely, so the next day we had Firefox OS from Stillboid, first time host,
and I was really glad to see this one, because I'm just generically interested in
something more flexible, format, well actually something more free format. Yeah, the gig's phone
sounds good, doesn't it? I followed up his links there and had a good look around,
looks, it's quite a tempting phone, well for people who don't want to spend too much on phones,
that is like me. Yeah, I'm right there with you buddy. Not sure about Firefox OS just at the moment,
but we've been interested in to give it a go just to have a look. And this phone comes with a
ruchus android, does it? Yeah, yeah. And I think it's quite a reasonable spec.
I've forgotten exactly, because I went hunting for other phones after I've read the details of
this, and they've all merged together in my head, but it did seem like quite a nice phone for
not too much money. I'm just on here on the website and have a look. Oh, by the way, yes,
if people have recipes for bread making your own bread, could you please record a show about
just failing that, could you email me recipes please? As I would like to have recipes for making bread,
homemade bread, easy ones that don't require a lot of things, we can get you started. Okay,
we've heard it here for first. And oh yeah, that was the last one for this month, correct?
That's right. I know who could get annoyed if I skip on, but I just hit the next, next,
next button. Okay, Dave, how about seeing as you've completely taken over the you do,
the comments, and I will do the mailing list discussions. So we had James, but mailing list,
by the way, if you're new to HBR is where pretty much all the policy decisions are made,
yeah, it's kind of low volume. You better read, listen, read, and listen to Dave's mailing list
etiquette, or he gets very annoyed, goes on, flame wars and everything on there, catches you off,
finds out your IP address, your home location, and then sends people around to take care of you if
you top post. That's me to tea, absolutely. Yep, yep. So we had James saying
thanks for the credit card, print breach thing, he's gone and informed his bank to get a new credit
card. Sight links on HBR, yeah, they did a CSS with Borked and wasn't shown properly for Mike
and other visually impaired people. So I think that's fixed now with massive help from
and when to go. And I've met one or two alterations since and think you have as well, Dave. So
anybody out there under any circumstances ever comes across something wrong with the site,
don't think somebody else is going to tell us about it. You send an email to adminatacapublicradio.org,
you send it to the email list or you phone the dial-in number, you tell us about it, you know,
because if we don't know about it, we can't fix it. Yeah, simple as that. And if something's
happening with the CSS that stops people from being able to do access the site, then we just disable
the CSS until we get a fixture like we did here. Then we have a question about Libra Office card
from Mike Ray and it was answered by James and yeah, about how you access some stuff in Libra Office.
Then John Colp emailed saying that the HPR boss is malfunctioning. There is something you need
to be aware of. If you have a Gmail address, anything come from the HPR thingy is being marked
as spam. So if you have a Gmail address, you need to go into the spam thing and write list
your email address. Say it one more time. Regardless of what email address you're using, HPR will
probably be marked as spam. So when you click on the button and it comes back, thank you for
smithing a show. By that stage, you should already have had the email. So if you don't find it,
check in your spam folders. Thank you. David Whitman asked for to reserve the 8th of July.
Nobody objected. So that's that. And 50 and 50 was looking for to see who needed
the Zoom H1 recorder. It looks like he brought it himself today to Penggukon.
I think that if you have the recorder as a Penggukon, you may never know.
Then we had a question from John Colp about screencasts putting embedded audio into ebooks.
And this was super fascinating. If anyone has not had a chance to watch the video,
it is definitely definitely something that you should download and watch.
Yeah, absolutely. It's very, very interesting to see that workflow. The amount of work there is
quite astonishing, but very impressive. Yes, but not only that, he is really used in the computer,
like people in the visual computers to be in science fiction movies back in the 50s.
Talking to his computer, having the computer do stuff for him. It's fantastic.
And John was asked for 11th of May to be reserved. No objections were given. So,
therefore, go ahead. I think he, I don't know if he ever followed up on that, but he did mention
I've been chatting with him on Gnu's social a bit. And I think he said he was going to try and
record a thing with his mother and the opportunity slipped by, so it never came to be, I think.
Oh, bummer. Okay, well, good try. I got that right, by the way. That was my impression.
Then there was a question about Libra Office and from Mike Ray about
about fonts, Libra, Liberation Sans, what type of font to use and interesting discussion about
what fonts you can expect on your system. Kevin even replied, because he wants for my catcher.
The archive.org API, he had a question about and you replied back to it as well.
Even Jason Scott, who is from textfiles.com and has done many movies and stuff about archiving.
If you have a spare evening, Google him. Yes, he's an impressive guy. He often comes onto
one of the 2600 shows off the hook. He's very often appears. Yeah, he's an impressive guy.
I think Mike decided to go with the pearl solution. Last thing I heard from him anyway,
so he was messing around with the script that I'd written for HBR, so I've not heard any follow-up.
I'm sure he'll be hearing this and we'll come back with an answer, but he managed to solve
everything to his satisfaction. Coming back with an audio recording for HBR, no doubt.
Anyway, I had a message about disabling CSS and it's back. John Colp, if there's a problem with
some device, an iPad browser, tell me about it. Don't be saying, oh, it's fixed now on my device.
Tell me before when there's things wrong with it. Thank you. Thank you very much.
And we changed the FTP password, so if you want us to go to the mailing list or better yet,
just reserve a show and click the upload button and then a little humility.
And then we had a comment about this community news show coming on, and there was a,
I got us an email about Hack and the Box in Amsterdam, which is
justly expensive. But it seems to be one of those events that is very popular in the security
community, but there's usually quite a lot of stuff coming from that. So,
so, anyway, there it is. I invite them to join, but he hasn't. And that was that. If anyone's
gone, please bring a recorder and get some interviews. And I think if I'm not mistaken,
Frank Bell replied to that saying that he put it on Linux, Linuxquestions.org.
Something that I didn't know they, I didn't know they had a events schedule over there,
which is good because you might use that instead.
Never saw that message. So, could it go to the list?
Maybe it just came to me. Okay, that's fine. I just, I, there was a point at which I thought
odd messages were being dropped. Yeah. I just wondered if that was a case. I think it was,
oh no, it's just me, sorry, sorry, Frank, but yes, thanks, Frank, who can't take me off list,
to say that you put on Linuxquestions.org. And if you have the events coming up, put them over
there as well, no harm to have things in one place. So, Dave, talk us through the comments,
seeing as you completely came over, stumped on my ground and took over a complete control of
the commenting system. Absolutely. Who would do a thing like that? I mean, it's just shocking,
isn't it? This is terrible. Yeah, pushing you away and the next thing you're going to be
running community newslicks. More than welcome. Done it once with the, with the hooker. Yeah,
anyway. Yeah, so we stumbled through. We did okay. I think we don't, I feel, I feel we,
feel confident that we held our own there pretty well. So, the first, the comments list now
is sensible. Therefore, I'm just working through it from top to bottom. And there was,
there was a comment from, is it, spectacles not working, brain not working, the show from
Nightwise about, excuse not to record for HPR had, which was from Andres saying, yes, it was
great. And there's a consequence that that was, that was who was, who was, who was our new
amp. He called himself amp on HPR. That was the show that he about introducing his five-year-old
sugar on toast, which he did as a consequence of Nightwise's prompting, which is fantastic.
So next was some comments about 1732, which was John Culp's show about renovating the public
domain counterpoint textbook that he did last month. And there were a couple more comments about
this. And there was one from, oh, one about the, the question of which is a slash, and which is
a backslash. So, Robert Stachos was suggesting a way of solving that one, remembering which way the
top corner of the slash is pointing, which I thought was quite an innovative way of doing it. And
John, John himself mentioned his YouTube video that we were speaking about earlier.
Yeah, it's good to have that in the show, not?
Then we had 1738, which was the credit card pin breach, which was, we all believed,
was a fascinating and deeply meaningful show. And Jim Zat said, thanks for this informative
episode. And he was shocked to hear both yours. He was fascinated here, shocked to hear
that credit card pin and voicemail pin were listed in there. So that's very nicely.
Of course, I won't be a problem anymore when we have our near-fuel communications.
Yeah, right. I just waved a credit card or a debit card over a machine and got it,
had it take money out of the thing. That's it. It's happening here now. They're just
they're changing all the pin machines to do that. And it drives me, it puts the fear of gold into
me. Just 20, you can do it to a maximum of 20 euros before they ask you for a pin.
Yeah, yeah, that just seems nuts to me. Some guy with a big laptop walking down the train,
20 euros, 20 euros, 20 euros, 20 euros. Get out of the train and there you go.
I know, I know. So we're all going to get a little Faraday cage wallets from now on, hey?
I have one. I have one. It is impressive. So next was a comment from Mike Ray to last
to the March, yeah, last month's community news. And Mike said, oh, he was commenting on the fact
that we we had generally didn't get some of his his literary references, I think, in the previous
previous community news. It was largely me, I wasn't sure why he was talking about not being very
literary. So he said, pearls before swine. So Kevin got points for knowing what it was about.
Fortunately, I've done a lot of reading. Well, good for you. I think it's showed the rest of us up.
Next we had John Colt commenting on Lord Dragon Blutes episode where he spoke to the
to the young fellow whose name I've forgotten for the moment. And John was saying that his son is
the same age as Justin King. Thank you. I mean, difficulty finding the name in the episode.
Yeah, see it now. Yeah. So if you have children the same age, then it's fascinating to see
how others others deal with with the world. HPR 1750 was John Colt's episode about
ex-clip and ex-do tool, et cetera. And John made a correction to it. Now I could get very geeky
here and and comment on the fact that he was using some a sequence of characters here that completely
messed up the the comment system. And only by virtue of lots of fiddling around on my part to
their managed to get it to actually be represented properly. Really, we should have edited the original
rather than correction in the comments. I think I can't remember what it was now. I think
is backslash less than through the comment system into a screaming loop. Well, it just dropped it,
dropped the line at that point. So very, very weird. Anyway, we got there in the end.
Then I made the comment that I thought it was amazingly impressive what could be done with these
tools and blather. I did as is my wand asking why he didn't change his script a little bit. And
so anyway, I think he had an answer to that which I can't immediately find.
Oh yeah, we were talking about using an environment variable versus an alias. And that's just one
of the things that you do when you're putting stuff together. You don't necessarily think of
all possible alternatives. Mike Ray enjoyed it. And sorry, just some little scripts.
Sometimes you start off. Yeah, if you have a script that's going 15 years, you know, the
the level of knowledge that you had back 15 years ago is, you know, things have moved on as well.
Oh, we've all done that. We've looked back and thought, why not? Did I do that? And the answer was
well, maybe that was the only way you knew at that particular point. You're just having a bad day,
you had to finish it quickly or something. Yeah. But sometimes, you know, I always reckon that
if you have a suggestion for an alternative, it can be can set up an interesting discussion about
better ways of doing things perhaps. Yes, definitely. I know some of the things that you put in
are where you've commented on my scripts have improved and created, but I can't help but think
people would be better in the show. But then again, that's kind of what prompted me to ask you for
to do the bash scripting show, but you're happily doing it all. Absolutely. Everyone a winner
or something, I'm quite sure what that means, but you know, I mean, every time you ask for
something, you often get what you ask, that's all I mean. But yeah, so where we got to, oh yeah,
John was commenting, I think Mike had, Mike Ray had mentioned, had commented on John's show,
and the use of blabber and so forth, and John was offering help. And there was a little bit of a
two-in-fro about setting up blather to do things. I think Mike was planning to use that as well.
So good for him. Don't know quite where the outcome was. I'd like to hear more.
Then we had 1754, which is another one. John shows about the, the D7 one.
5150 thought that D7 might be something to do with clinging on battle cruisers. John,
I sort of came back in confusion, but I didn't get the list, so that's my side.
And we had a comment from the love bug, who's context I can't quite place now. What show
what shows is? I can't remember now. The bug cast? Yeah, of course. Thank you.
I'm saying that it was very helpful to somebody who is a musician. So a whole business of music
theory is a winner, I think, especially in John's hands, it seems. Exactly. And John had a,
he had a tradition of that show, the song, the full song, and unfortunately, as this was not
a copyright, it couldn't be laid, which is a mother. I pulled myself.
Then we had 1756 about Ranger, a file manager. John Colp came back with the comment that he thought
Ranger is phenomenal. And if you, if you looked at it, it is rather nice. It's sort of three,
three columns of information with the directory on the left and the contents of the directory
in the middle and the contents of what you're currently looking at on the far right, whether it be
directory or file or whatever. I'm not sure I'm doing it justice and describing it like that,
but it is very clever. I like it. I've been an MC user, a midnight commander user for many,
many years, which is great, but this seems a lot better. You have to work a little bit to get
it to exactly what you want, but that's not unusual. As I said, it would be one of interest to you.
Absolutely. You see, that's not to say that that's a sure wasn't of interest to the mass public.
This is why you cannot judge HBO channels by the number of downloads. It's the number,
the amount of impact a particular show has on a particular people. It shows perhaps like that one
people using VI already in the movie thinking, oh, right, I'm going to switch my, my everyday tool
to this thing. And you might only have might have had a huge impact on something like 20 or 30
different people, but that's still a huge impact. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm just
vocalizing this very well. No, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's a good thought.
So next was 1757, my show on these bash functions, where I got a comment from Bill Ricker,
who said, like the podcast and he liked the idea of the EPUB notes, but I think he was saying
that the rendering of the code in the notes was a little bit strange. To be honest, I haven't,
I'd looked at it through a caliber on the desktop and it looked fine, of course, but if you try that
on a phone, or a phone would be horrible, even on a tablet, it's not really very nice. And I'm not,
I don't know, whether how useful it is trying to ePUBs or for code, code stuff, you know,
because if you want to use 80 column code, then I'm not quite sure how you do that. You just shrink
it down to it fits. I don't know. But the fact that I was using PAND or to generate it was,
I commented on in reply, saying that maybe we can do something better if we go for a better way
of generating the EPUB stuff. But we'll see. You can, on my Nexus 7, you could view the current
thing if you went into landscape mode, but then it's so narrow, it's quite hard because I'd put
bits of code and then comments about what it did underneath. So it's really difficult to just keep
scrolling up and down or page to page to read the code, then read the comments. It's not,
not ideal. I hadn't really thought of that very, very much. It's, it was just a, you know,
sounded like a good idea to have some some ePUB notes. And I thought, see how it goes, see what
people think. And so it needs work. But maybe there's some potential there.
Yeah, I like the idea. So if it's mainly text, if it's primarily text, and I think it could work
quite well, but embedded bits of code might not, I don't know. Anyway, we'll see.
It was a comment by a hexadecimal number 0xf10e, commenting on my, my throwaway comment about exit
codes, I said, 0 is true and anything else is false. And I sort of said, it seems old that one
is false, but because that was a pretty stupid thing to say because it's non-zero that's false.
I heard this in the way to the train ride and I was thinking myself, what are you on about?
Because I had this email discussion with you about what the correct form of error codes was
about a year and a half ago. And you were very adamant that one was this and zero was that.
Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, this is the trouble of unscripted ramblings, which I'm doing here,
of course, can sometimes come back and bite you if you're not completely thinking through what
you're saying. There was a case in point. So as I said in my reply, yeah, I'm easily confused.
But I must say the way that Unix does this is a little bit, well, it seemed primitive to me as a
old-time mainframe programmer because a lot of mainframes worked on the principle that an error code
was a thing that mapped into a text file, which was known right across the operating system.
So when your program returned an error code, that error code mapped onto a universal error message,
which you could then get back as pop up or a display or whatever. You could look up after the
event. So sorry, Unix, you would give me an example of that at all. Quite follow.
Well, I was thinking the last the last operating system I used to use OpenVMS. It had a concept of
what what what it called an error text module. So as you built your your bit of software,
your application, you built an error text module. You then define quite long error numbers,
you know, great long hexadecimal things. And then you you associated them with a short piece of
text, you know, a file not found or something. And then a longer piece, if you wanted to, it said
the file you are blah, blah, blah in the context of whatever the program was doing was we couldn't
find and that's probably because you're et cetera, et cetera. And when you then run the program,
you could associate that error text file with it. And if the program hit that error,
it would then invoke the error message thing. And you could also make the error messages
visible across the entire operating system. So so that you know, you could share that error
message and text throughout many applications if you wanted to. So that was that was the way that
a lot of mainframe systems did did that back in the day. Yeah, was that clear? Yeah,
you got that. Yeah, thanks boss. So going on to 1758,
C prompts, cool stuff, part three, 5150 said, oh, he's making a comment about the night foundation,
which was the car and all that stuff, kit and David Hasselhoff.
Which comment was this because I just couldn't get that?
This was this was comment number one on 1758, yeah, where he says, kit, I double T,
well, I can't remember what that stood for. I might be expecting a story about the night foundation
would have taken me into the shadowy world of a man who does not exist. And that was all about,
you know, what was what was that called? Night Rider, wasn't it? Oh, yes,
so the radio tovia was sponsored by part by the night foundation. Okay. Yeah, cool, sorry,
big slow. So I think 5150 was on for when he was doing these things. That's the one,
that's the one. Yeah. And then my friend ZeroXF10E made a comment on the fact that Curtis had lost
a file by doing weird things with naming and so forth and saying, use versioning, you know,
hg, Git, Fossil, whatever. And committed. And so that way you back it up and get it back,
if you make the things. That's all very well to come. But I have, I listened to him do that.
I have literally spent hours and hours and hours with that very same thing. And to this point
where I have it on the posted note in my head, two things, two posted notes. One is if I'm
put in more than two echo statements and I don't see them coming out, then I'm running the wrong
file. And the other one is if I'm doing anything with XML parsing and nothing comes out,
it has to be namespaces, two golden rules. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, being careful about the naming
of your files is certainly quite important, I think. But I think the Git thing is
whatever other repository is valuable comment. Yeah, but sometimes you pull out, you don't want
to go in and you don't want, it's only something a small little thing, and you make a copy of the
program just outside of the report just to check something. As you don't want all, why is this
book not found echo or echo? I'm here. Why is it not going in here? You don't want that
necessarily appearing in the public Git repository or in the, all right. So you just pull it out
and then four days later, you're still there. And this thing is growing and you think I really
should check this in now. And of course, you plan to do that two seconds before your hardest crops.
So yeah, yeah, I have to tell you, maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I sometimes operate with two
repositories of a given thing. If it's going to go public, then there's the private repository where
I make all these really stupid mistakes. And then there's a public repository where what I do
is to do is to ask the files from the private to the public and then commit them there and pump them
up to where it's GitHub now that I'm using. But so the garbage doesn't necessarily go that way.
It doesn't always work, mind you, but that was the theory anyway. Yes, but I think your
mind is a lot more disciplined than others. Yeah, it's only a small bug. I mean, it can only be a
small thing. Let's take it out here and just try and see what's going on. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know.
It's easy to say. So anyway, see prompt came out and said, yeah, he's just started to use Git for
this sort of thing and we'll continue to do so for the coding he does in the future. So, well,
good, good for him. That's how we all learn these things.
Falling over things is a very good way to learn that they're there, isn't it?
So the last one was 1759, which was still voids episode on Firefox OS.
And John Culp welcomed him aboard saying it was an excellent job and he was interested in Firefox OS
and the possibility of hacking it in the future. So that sounds intriguing. Since it's a web-based
thing, then it might be more hackable than the many other things. So yeah, I'd like to hear more
about that myself. Yeah, that's what I would like to, I wanted to have a talk with the Firefox OS
guys. They have a big book that I asked them, but nobody wanted to give me an interview. Interesting.
So that's the end of the comments. Yep. Two things I wanted to ask. One was about the bread.
People have recipes for bread. Easy recipes. I'd like to hear. And secondly, I want to ask,
I've been struggling with the analogies for basic, for some reason, electronics.
I'm getting it hard to get stuff into my head. I'm beginning to see both spectrum, but I was
thinking as an analogy for voltage, the difference between voltage and current. Now we had an
episode about current. So current is fairly obvious. You river goes past and you have to put
something into the river to paddle wheel and the river to measure the current go past.
Would voltage then and equivalent analogy be the width of the river? The wider the river is,
the higher the voltage for the same current. So that's something for the listeners to think about
and continue to send in electronically shows, continue to send in shows in general.
Didn't whoever, I've forgotten who it was, did the voltage current show?
Did you not mention voltage as well and talk about pressure in plumbing or is that my imagination?
Yes, but this pressure is good analogy because if I see pressure, I would see the current
increase if you add more voltage, but it doesn't. It's kind of works if you have a behind the dam.
So I'm wondering is the width of a river be a more accurate property? Probably not.
Actually thinking about that. But that's something for people who are screaming down the microphone
and going, can you're so stupid? No, it's not. Then you just take out your phone right now, record
an episode and send it into us. Thank you. I'm actually thinking of I have a lot of these silly
questions and I'm thinking of a, you know, if there was some people who are harder hackers or whatever,
just who could tolerate stupid questions or reasonably ignorant questions from myself.
You know, just about the, you know, what is light? What is the wavelength? Why is white? Why is pink?
Pink? That sort of thing. Yeah, the harmonics, the modulations, that sort of stuff.
But I'm having a lot of fundamental issues with my ham radio courses,
getting the concepts into my head. And usually I'm in the past when I'm able to get a concept
into my head, then I'm able to understand it and learn it easier. So if somebody wants to help
me out with that, get in touch, thanks. Gentlemen, do you have anything else? I'm good.
Nothing more here. Alrighty. Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of HBR.
And Dave, could you save your recording? Because I don't have a backup here on the NAS.
And yeah, taking a south would be a hookah with his rendition of the free software.
So come on now and join the party. You'll be free hackers. You'll be free.
Yay. All right. That was good. That was great. Thanks guys. Tune in tomorrow for another
exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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