Episode: 757
Title: HPR0757: Episode 0: 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0757/hpr0757.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:57:50

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Talent, on loan from the port.
Bonus Nachos, everybody. My pseudonym on the internet is Epicanus, and I am, among other things, a wannabe podcaster.
Or perhaps I should say, Augcaster, but that's a topic for another episode.
I've actually been trying to psych myself up to commit to doing a monthly series for hacker public radio.
Each episode of which would be a minimum of 10 to 15 minutes of what I would call fact-based editorializing,
on primarily but not exclusively computer-related topics that I hope would be useful to or at least thought-provoking for other digitally inclined folks.
So that's what a run-on sentence sounds like.
Anyway, I've even got two episodes mostly outlined already, along with a selection of concepts for further episodes after that.
The problem is, I've been sitting on these outlines for many months now, stalled and apparently in need of some motivation.
I mean, there are, of course, some obvious benefits to doing HPR episodes.
For example, it's rumored that contributing to HPR can greatly enhance one's virility, and can cause explosive increases in one's desirability to sexy women,
hunky men, cuddly farm animals, and, or shiny kitchen appliances, depending on your personal tastes.
Also, the improvement in one's personal confidence that will inevitably result from the successful publication of a popular hacker public radio episode
will allow you to intimidate others and gain social and political influence.
These obvious vulgar advantages aren't enough to motivate me by themselves, though.
After all, I'm already on special medication to keep my manliness under control, since having random strangers reflexively cower submissively when I walk by,
and having everything I touch sprout hairdo to secondhand masculinity gets annoying after a while.
There are risks involved in enhancing one's virility.
What I really want to have to deal with the stream of paternity suits from various women, men, farm animals, and appliances that I've somehow impregnated despite never even meeting them before?
I mean, I swear the blender has me confused with somebody else.
And have you ever tried to use a hairy toaster? Even aside from the obvious fire hazard, there's the smell! Oh god, the smell!
I suppose I could go get an operation to deal with that.
But if I were female, there's the risk that the HPR-induced potency could cause spontaneous parsinogenesis.
And although that might be handy if I thought I might need to spare kidney or bone marrow donation someday,
I suspect it would still be more trouble than it's worth.
And, either way, what if I end up with so much political power that I rule the whole world?
Do you have any idea how much work that would be?
If I was always busy trying to deal with getting the childishly squabbling countries under my iron fisted authority to play nice with each other,
I'd never have time to record HPR episodes.
After some consideration, I decided that if I went ahead and did a sort of practice episode and actually got it done and onto hacker public radio,
perhaps that would finally get me out of this rut onto the metaphorical road to fame and glory, or at least determine how bad I suck at this.
I know I could do the traditional, how I found Blinick's episode, but the thing is, I'm having trouble convincing myself that anyone really wants to listen to me babble about my discovering the dead end nature of MS-DOS and windows techs.
A desire to broaden my skills to include Unix environments.
My subscription to a dial-up shell account on a Solaris system where I and my copy of Unix for Dummies, TM, got started learning,
literally less than a year before mainstream news media started publishing the first wave of, hey, what is this internet thingy articles?
My cursing at slip account users hogging up all the modems to browse the newfangled worldwide web thingy.
My fortuitous discovery of a way to run my own Unix-style system with the miracle of Slackware and how, having learned the lessons of Slackware, to this day I consider myself a moderately hardcore ping-winista,
although I've migrated from Slackware to Gen 2 and most recently Arch Linux.
Eh, boring.
My nerd history is just not all that interesting, is it?
That still leaves me needing something to talk about and to get started, though, and some motivation.
Actually, for motivation, I just kind of want to be heard.
There's something oddly appealing to me about having people all over the world hearing my voice and considering what I'm saying.
Sure, they may decide I'm a useless loser, but at least they paid attention to me for a few minutes dang it,
and hopefully at least gave some thought to what I had to say, and that's what really matters, isn't it?
Okay, yeah, there's a well-known phrase for this kind of motivation that is used within the uncouth underbelly of the internet.
Fortunately, I'm sure the high-class folks listening to hacker-public radio would never use a vulgar term-like attention-hor, so I should be okay there.
As a substitute, may I recommend Acknowledgement Corteson instead?
In any case, what's the point of speaking if nobody hears you? Well, that take care of motivation, but I actually need something to talk about to get started.
Fortunately, I've just managed to finally get myself a new computer after over two years of my full-time computer being an Intel-atom-based, Tripoli PC-901-Netbook,
and maybe someone else out there would like to hear about the Linux supporting vendor that I got it from.
Like any good Linux fan person, I preferred to direct my money at companies that support Linux, so I went looking for places that would sell me a small, full-powered Linux laptop.
More specifically, what I was looking for was compact, say, no more than 14 inches, with Ethernet and wireless networking, an optical drive, a decent-sized hard drive, plenty of RAM, video that's well-supported for Linux with open-source drivers, and the fastest CPU that I could reasonably afford.
Oh, and not being anywhere near as wealthy as I think I deserve to be, the system would need to be reasonably close to, say, $800 or $900 at most.
There are a number of reasonably well-known companies that sell Linux systems out there, for example, Frostbite Systems, Zareason, System76, Emperor Linux, and even, supposedly, Dell.
Let me start with the posters at Dell. I work in an academic environment where I supposedly get a small discount from Dell, so having heard that they support Linux, I decided I'd start looking there. What a waste of a couple of hours that was.
Although Dell would be happy to sell you an expensive Linux-based server with Dell-branded hard drive controller that only works with over-priced Dell-branded hard drives, finding anything else Linux-based from Dell's a depressing exercise and futility.
The obvious thing of typing Linux into the search bar and hitting enter is useless, as most of what comes up when I last tried it is a long list of Red Hat and Suza subscription prices.
Searching just the laptop section for Linux seemed to be a bit more useful at first, but none of the laptops seemed to actually allow anything but Microsoft windows on them, including the ones that showed up implying that they were available with Linux in the search page.
Liars. I tried the online chat to ask them for full-powered Linux laptops, where I was told to check the business computing section, where I found Dell's Linux offerings.
One pathetic cheap desktop workstation, a couple of netbooks, and one pathetically underpowered until Celeron-based laptop.
An online chat with the business section confirmed that these token offerings are all Dell has. Dell, you suck!
As for the real Linux supporting companies, Emperor Linux appears to buy other companies windows laptops and install Linux on them.
That's a noble cause, and I should add that as far as I know Emperor Linux may be the earliest and longest running of the real Linux laptop companies, and therefore presumably has very good support.
It does make their prices quite high though. Besides, I can take a retail machine, defend a straight it, and install Linux on it myself, so for me there's no advantage here.
The reason and system 76 had a couple of models down near my price range, but they all appeared to come with i3 processors by default, so I think I could stretch one or two of the models to an i5 upgrade and still be in my budget.
Frostbite had similar issues, with slightly better prices, but all of the models with decent hardware were also gigantic 15-inch beasts.
Okay, maybe you don't think 15-inch is all that large, but remember I've been quite happily surviving on a 9-inch netbook for over two years, and I've grown to appreciate a more compact system.
At this point, I was trying to decide between just settling for a low-end i5 system from the reason or system 76, or just giving in and catching an i5 or i7 windows system on clearance somewhere and reformatting it myself, which I was pretty sure I could do on my budget if I was patient enough.
Before I could scrounge up the money to act, though, I was lucky enough to run across a company called O'Hava Computers.
O'Hava, spelled O-H-A-V-A, looks like a fairly new company, apparently based in Virginia.
For those of you who either aren't US natives or, like me, went to public school, Virginia is roughly in the middle of the eastern coastal region of the United States.
Relatively near to Washington, D.C., by the standards of someone who's lived in the wide open barren wastelands of the western United States.
Anyway, O'Hava appears to be dedicated exclusively to web services and Linux-based open source services and products.
Their website specifically mentions the content management system, Jumla, the monitoring system, Zavix, red mine for project management, FOSWiki for Wiki stuff, and big blue button for conferencing.
They also mention a mysterious Open NC, which is an unspecified network computing platform, which I would guess is based on X2Go or FreeNX or something similar.
In addition to the support and consulting business, they also sell suspiciously reasonably priced computer systems.
For my purposes, they offer a model they refer to as the OpenBook DO, which is a 14-inch widescreen laptop with a Core i7 processor, which supplies built-in Intel-based video, an external VGA connector, a properly Linux compatible wireless networking card, an SD card reader, a DVD read-write drive, a built-in webcam capable of up to 12VD by 1024 capture,
and a base of 4GB RAM and a 5400 RPM 320GB hard drive, and a choice of Fedora, OpenSusa, or one of the three most-reason Ubuntu releases.
Base price? $800.
Choosing an upgrade to a 7200 RPM half-terabyte hard drive and the maximum of 8GB of RAM brought the cost up to a whopping $870.
This seemed way too reasonable to my cynical mind to be real. I wondered if maybe the company was really just one or two guys who had gotten a cheap deal on a truckload of surplus generic Chinese systems and had formed a temporary shell company to unload them quickly.
Since I also wondered if there really was no Ethernet port on them, I sent them an email asking about it and requesting a copy of the output from lspci-v.
I figured the latter request would tell me two things. Firstly, if they even had any actual basic Linux experience, and secondly, give me a good idea of what specific equipment was really in there.
Well, three things if you count this finding out whether they'd bothered to respond at all.
I'm happy to report that within a couple of hours they'd not only gotten back to me, but the response was neither vague marketing crap designed to brush me off, nor DAW what's lspci.
It was, in fact, the output of lspci-v on one of these systems, and an assurance that yes, there actually was an Ethernet port.
Gigabit Ethernet, in fact, plus a follow-up note letting me know that newer models had switched from the railing based wireless shown in the output to an Intel chipset.
From subsequent email exchanges, I learned that the warranty was minimal but acceptable to me, and that the company name was made up despite the fact that O'Hava is coincidentally a tiny island in French Polynesia.
I was also happily able to arrange for second-day air shipping, although normally they just ship by standard freight at no charge.
Convinced to that the risk was reasonable, I went for it.
It showed up a couple of days ago, and after taking a brief look at the default Ubuntu install long enough to say, eeeeeeewww!
At the new interface, I wiped it and installed arch Linux like I wanted and started testing, and now I can give you a review.
First, the downsides. The warm tea is pretty basic, lasting two years covering parts and labor on the hardware except for the LCD screen.
If the LCD needs replacing, it costs $175.
Otherwise, though, for the price, it seems reasonable and covers any non-accident or abuse-related failures of the hardware, and I'm assured that they don't throw a tantrum and void the warranty if you decide to upgrade your own RAM or hard drive.
Provided, of course, that you haven't damaged the system yourself in the process.
As far as the hardware itself, as you might imagine for the price, it really does appear to be a generic cheap Chinese product.
With a generic black and silver colored plastic chassis, other than the custom ojava logo on the lid, the label on the bottom literally says Notebook, Model V4109, and, of course, Made in China.
The obligatory sticker on the front, advertising the features literally just says Notebook, along with wireless card, high-definition camera, highlight widescreen, and so forth.
It came in literally as just labeled Notebook Computer.
Now, that said, so far the system seems well worth the money, and has been performing nicely for me.
I did run into some, quote, problems, unquote at first.
For example, the wireless card wouldn't work.
It was there, but it wouldn't detect any networks.
I was baffled annoyed by this, for a bit, until my tests with the command line tools popped up a message about being unavailable due to RF kill.
Wait, you mean that button actually works?
Sure enough, pushing the Turn the Wireless Network on button, made the wireless network turn on.
Go ahead, whipper snappers laugh at me.
But when I was your age, we didn't have these newfangled keyboard switches to turn the wireless card on and off.
If we wanted the wireless turned off on our laptops, we had to pull the PCM CIA cards out, and we were thankful for it!
Sorry, where was I?
Oh yeah, I also noticed the webcam wasn't detected either.
Running LSUSB didn't show any video devices, nor was there a slash tab slash video zero.
Yeah, it took me a few minutes to notice that there was also a Turn the Webcam on button.
That one works too. Stop laughing, damn it!
There's also a Bluetooth on-off button, but that one doesn't work, because there is no built-in Bluetooth on this model.
No big deal. I'm pretty sure if you don't have one already, you can get a basic Bluetooth dongle for about 5 bucks US these days.
And I found that I used the built-in Bluetooth on my old netbook about three times over the last two years, so not a big deal for me.
Otherwise, everything seems to work nicely in Arch Linux right out of the box.
I intended to do some tweaking of the touchpad configuration, but even the default seems to work fine, and I'm getting 3D accelerated video output without any configuration fiddling.
HDParm says the drive reads at a raw 100 megabytes a second, and after two years of running on a tolerable but constrained atom processor,
the dual core hyper threaded i7 is I buggingly fast.
Also, the half-terabyte of storage is 25 times larger than the solid state drive I was stuck with on the triple EPC, and the 8GB RAM is by the standards of what I'm used to, obscenely generous.
Time for the ultimate test. I loaded up the most system-taxing game I have. Magic Carpet 2.
Yes, I know it's a 15-year-old game. However, being an old MS-DOS-based game, I have to run it in the DOS box emulator, which requires a fair chunk of CPU in order to pretend in software to be a VGA card, a 16-bit ISA soundblaster card, and in a set of MS-DOS disks and so forth.
On the triple EPC, I was able to play the game at a just acceptable speed, if I ran it in the low resolution 320x240 mode, with most of the special effects turned off.
On the new openbook D.O., I can run it in high resolution, and it plays fine. I'm sure native Linux games will run just beautifully, but I haven't gotten around to testing that. Hey, I'm a real nerd. The computer IS the game.
While it's too early to tell if the system is going to suddenly explode in a ball of green flame halfway through the warranty period or something, I must say at this point, I'm quite pleased with my speedy new laptop from O'Havoc computers.
I need my laptop Bunnies, by the way, because it's quick, you know, like Bunnies.
mock me if you want, but as far as I'm concerned Bunnies is a perfectly acceptable name, so there.
I will also have done the recording and editing on this episode using Bunnies, so you know the sound works too.
This will hopefully be the first of a series of shows since I'd like to contribute regularly, and I'm kind of assuming this works a lot like sex or a new role of toilet paper.
That is, after the first one, the rest are easier. There you have it. Thought Kindness, Episode Zero.
Now, where am I coveted hacker public radio stickers? I need a second sticker to visually balance the penguin power and sticker I put on there. Thanks for listening, everybody.
Oh wait, almost forgot. I do want to explicitly solicit some feedback here about where I'm trying to go with this.
Currently, the next episode, which originally was going to be the first episode until I decided to do this one, it's intended to be what I describe as a defense of audio-free tardation.
On the subject of legally free media formats and distribution methods.
The other episode that I also have mostly outlined is planned to be on the concept of geotagging. Beyond that, I have a few further general concepts for episodes.
If anyone's still listening is willing to provide a little encouragement, criticism, or commentary on this or future episodes, or just to inform me that I suck before I further pollute your media player with my voice, please point your web browser to hpr.dogphilosophy.net.
And let me know how I sound. Okay, I'm done.
Thank you for listening to hacker public radio. hpr is sponsored by caro.net. So head on over to caro.nc for all of our community.
No, no, wait, wait, wait, I changed my mind. On second thought, instead of a connoisement card design, I believe I would prefer the term social media streetwalker.
Yes, yes, that's that's much better. Okay, making over that. Thanks.
