Episode: 2651
Title: HPR2651: HPR Community News for September 2018
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2651/hpr2651.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:05:02

---

This is HBR episode 2651 entitled HBR Community News for September 2018 and is part of the series HBR Community News.
It is posted by HBR volunteers and is about 80 minutes long and can in an explicit flag.
The summary is HBR volunteers talk about shows released and comment posted in September 2018.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everybody my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Joining me tonight is... Hi everybody it's Dave Morris and how are you Dave?
Pretty good, pretty good. Excellent. This is HBR which is a Hacker Public Radio
Community Show which is a bit of a misnormally because it is a very broad definition of hackers
and it's public and it's not really radio as such but we are the longest one of the longest
podcasts out there and this show is done once a month and this month is for September 2018 where we
look back at the happenings in the HBR community. It's recorded on the Saturday before the first
Monday of the month and Dave if you'd like to introduce the new host please.
Yes we have one new host who was on last month's show actually. Your own Yirun sorry is that right?
The Barton? Yirun Barton I believe it's pronounced but you you would know better actually.
Yirun Beaton I think. Beaton okay but I think he has deliberately anglicised it for us.
Yes he's very flexible obviously. Yes so that is very professional for those of us
joining for the first time. I lower the bar so the rest of you don't have to. HBR is a community
podcast network meaning the shows are contributed by people just like you so if you have
anything that is of interest to hackers you can submit it here and we will post it without
listening to it and we do our listening in the month and then we comment on what has been said
and just to give you feedback knowing that yes your show has been heard because as I was explaining
here earlier on today we don't often not all shows can be guaranteed to get some feedback.
I think people are a lot better at doing that now but back in the day you could always
guarantee to get feedback on your episodes. So we go through the shows here and then we will tell
you read out any comments and we'll tell you what's been going on in the mailing list and
in and around the community. So let's start with the HBR community news for August 2018 and there were
two comments on that. The first one was do you want to do the first one? Well I was involved in these
two comments because the commenter baffled sent two comments which are effectively the same
and I think we sort of got a wise cross just to what he actually wanted to do with them.
So it's really just one comment but he he wanted to enhance the original one so I can just read
the the second one actually because it's so cool for him. So he says cool show. Hey I just wanted
to let you know that I thought it was a fun and interesting show. Thanks also for the mention he
was one of the people who sent in tags the previous month. Now he says can I do this? Just wanted to
they meant add to the comment? Well the answer was no sorry. Just wanted to add my two cents
the front notices to podcasts. I like the eSpeak announcements considering and he's I think he's
mistyped so I think he's saying that he's blind and that may be why he says I'm a link but I think
maybe that's a type of thing. Anyway the theme music would be nice to have alternating versions
to make them less tedious. Yeah cool and that was relating to the ongoing discussion in which
we'll cover in the news section later on. The mailing list section. Yeah yeah related to the
changing the intro and the branding. So the following day we had the show was by Tony Hughes
and it was a Liverpool Maker Fest 2018 series and an interview with Robert and Karl about
robotworks.co.uk. So I like this this one. Yeah yeah yeah these these are great some really
interesting people and why this Liverpool make their sense fantastic yeah I feel a bit jealous
every time he goes and I think yeah yeah that's something you should actually give us some
notice probably and might see what we can do because I can't actually fly there but I can
can actually tell you that I I probably won't be able to go to any events either. Sorry I'm very
tired tonight so I'm a bit muddled so my apologies everybody it can't be okay yes it can happen
to us all can that so a bit flustered. The following day we there were no comments on that episode
unfortunately the following day we had another show that didn't have any comments and it was
LM. LM I think it's a programming language and this was by Turo Tto and man where is he getting all
this stuff I don't know he's he's a busy fellow in he's it's a long edge yeah yeah he's right
out there with him and Clackier go no this is normal it's finding his obscure programming language
it's very very yeah I had a little look at this but it's a bit over my head as we've discussed
before it's a language that generates JavaScript for a website yeah so so that's that's pretty
cool sounds just like something as as before something once you get into you know I don't know
where forever will I think I've got a file anything that he and Clackier do under yeah yeah no we
did a we did the show on HBR five years ago about that yeah everybody knows about Elm
yeah yeah I don't do Wikipedia that thank you very much so more down to earth was sorry no that's
that was not meant in the geography fashion but gist tags and metadata by Tlatu an interesting one
actually on just how you can put a tag on your gist reposal yeah yeah I I knew this was possible I've
never really dabbled with it much I think I don't use Git properly and so it's not been relevant to me
I keep a whole bundle of things in one repository and they all have different version numbers so
giving the whole bundle a version number it doesn't fit with what I do but maybe that's because
I don't do it right so there were no comments on that one but the next day we had a uruans show
about running your own mainframe on linux for fun and profit and dodo didomi says this is embarrassing
enjoy the show but given the fact that I'm a long time herteries user and a greybeard mainframe
I'm embarrassed I didn't do this show actually I recorded this show more than once but thought
it wouldn't make sense to someone new to mainframes I think you handled the problem well maybe
this will inspire me to create some mainframe shows I agree the musics youtube channelers were
checking out for anyone interested in mainframe all I won't say I'm angry I'm just very very very
disappointed dodo dodo yeah I want you to go to the corner and think about what you've done and
bring a podcast recording device with you and record us some shows well yeah yeah I he's mentioned
his mainframe credentials many times but but yeah we've been waiting a long time for that
it's not as if we didn't ask Dave it's not no no no no indeed indeed so Gavtrus says memories oh
this episode brought back pleasant memories when PCs were just toys made to run the word perfect
Lotus one two three Harvard graphics and attach my extra TN 3270 emulator thanks for the ride
excellent that's very good but that just goes to show I have yet to see any episode I don't think
there's any episode that everybody universally liked but there's always an episode that's that
every episode suddenly somebody has liked yeah yeah yeah no I'm sure there's loads of people who
who would would like to to hear more about this sort of sort of absolutely I went to I went to
your own talk at dog camp I think I mentioned it last time and it was a really full room there was
a lot of people were interested in hearing what he had to say and enjoyed his talk it was an
excellent talk so you know it's a subject that a lot of people want to want to get into just from
the historical point of view or you know the nostalgia yeah exactly exactly another one from
the following day was Liverpool Makerfest an interview with Noel from JMU FabLab and guys if you
have not gone to the website for this one you really need to that is one fantastic piece of
3D printer yeah it's very impressive stuff isn't it it's they're doing some amazing
things this was the JMU FabLab the John Moore's John Moore's University so yeah they obviously
doing some cool stuff there yeah this isn't this isn't a two hundred dollar Chinese 3D printer
that printed this stuff I can tell you no no no it looks like something very classy yeah I'd love
to just yeah I'm so sad I couldn't go to this this thing and get first-hand experience of
what these people are doing there you go no comments on that and people less speeches no doubt
and we have converted to text by be easy five comments on this basically long and short that
is converted to text from anything to anything first comment from some weirdo called Ken Fallon
while this guy can't spell either those those that I know I use literally every day
can't wait to try out the rest please do a deep dive series on each of these no pressure
and Beezer says value of text conversion I'm a big fan of plain text and CSV is they're probably
the formats that were last conceptually forever unlike the office formats we use today including
ODS node ET and so forth you may lose the layout information but the meat is always preserved
the PDF to text converters only work with documents which have been generated from a word
word processor application scans of a printed document generally only produce an embedded JPEG
image yeah good point that yeah yeah a few years ago I created a system that employed many of
the commands you mentioned in your episode to convert a document into pure ASCII text and create
a non repeating list of all the words it contains along with an instance cap using SQL by applying
this to the contents of a document library the database was used to populate a search by keyword
system for that library populating the database from several hundred word and PDF documents took only
a couple of minutes the subsequent keyword searches were very fast and produced a list of relevant
documents ranked by the number of instances of the keyword it was very easy to combine keywords
using SQL and and more qualifies okay I'm calling I'm calling that entire comment a show so if you
could turn that into a show that would be awesome thank you it sounds very cool I'd love to hear
more about that also I have even with the ones where it scans it into a PDF image you can there are
places online available that will take a PDF and do optical character recognition on us yeah okay
and I've found that sometimes you know if you've got multi column but if you do a little bit of
text editing on it and convert it into left column and right column it makes it easier for those
things to work would be cool if people have some command line experience with OCRs that can be run
on the Linux command line that would that would be nice yeah anyway Jonas says Ranger etc I'm a
diehard vimmer and never heard of Ranger I'm looking forward to using it more I asked a couple of
my online Linuxy buddies and they used years ago but had less when they had less substantial
machines I still love command line stuff even with my best machines everything is super quick in
the terminal thanks for the mention and your great shows I explore jq for sure I work with databases
and save a couple of columns in json it would be nice to query the exports in a more friendly way
jq is awesome I use it every day if if nothing else just if you get json guys and pipe it into jq
q open quote a full stop a throws quote and that gives you a nice pretty json just as a as a
bye bye yeah yeah I've discovered it in the past so six months ago and found it wonderful really
so I said great show you hear the cat in the background what she wants I do I do it I do it it's
microphone so sensitive I can't pretend it's not happening can you take her out of the mic please
I said and stored Ranger after listening to your shows 1756 and I put a link but never used it
and completely forgot about it I was surprised to find out my system and have been playing about
with it a lot since listening to this show I'm a long time text and command line user but I tend to
use midnight commander the times I want to do a lot of files searching and manipulation but I have
to admit I use dolphin sometimes in two pain mode when doing things like copying files off an SD card
I shall add Ranger to the mix too I think I agree with Ken we need shows about all of the tools
in your list exclamation mark anyway this was a very welcome episode thanks yeah that is true
there were I loaded all of them and there were a few missing medium for use all the time because of
of what I do so I used quite a lot of these in fact medium for I I know a lot of stuff is best in
that proper utils use all the time but there was one or two that were not available on fedora
and I couldn't find them anywhere cat talk I think it was in cat p p t yeah I hadn't used it
I used to use cat talk a lot because I refused to use windows as much as I possibly could
and that was a great way of dealing with documents people send me from windows but I got slapped
about in the end for doing that Ranger I loaded it actually and I was thinking it might be a
nice one for tell you why I ordered a I got to order a pine book all right okay so um yeah
99 dollars the shipping was actually 33% of the price of the thing so 34% to be honest
like to pay 34 dollars in shipping to get a hundred dollar laptop but yeah and I was thinking
of having that as my on the train laptop and just doing everything in the console if I can perfect
yeah yeah no window manager just you know hardcore text only anyway flakki says q never heard of
q before very cool I will very likely find a use for this tool not very google google name
but I found it here and that's true I could not find it either yeah no I don't I see my I went
and chased it the link and was was playing around it in solid and played it it's really clever
yeah it's amazing yeah yeah yeah what a brilliant idea yeah I'm just going to go and let my cat out
so could you mind carrying on with that no that's not a problem ding and he even got the number
of the local RSPCA in Scotland can you please email it to me so we can save dear it's cat anyway
the following day we had dirt cheap magic magic the gathering for cheap skits and this was
plateau basically going to secondhand stores getting cheap cards and he also explained what magic
of the gathering was and how it worked and stuff like that so I really enjoyed that show because
I had no clue about this topic and it seemed to me like a very good way to enter into games without
being overly anal about the about the rules of the games and stuff yes I also enjoyed this
because of the similar reasons just just refused to play play by the rules to to some extent is
a nice nice approach like that and also yeah recite the old yeah recycling thing I can probably
understand why they do it but yeah it's cool um following the bash tips number nine making
decisions and bash very nice show as always they they extended show notes are to be followed I've
given up Dave and I just I just watched the extended show notes as I'm reading listening to the
episode okay I've given up pretending that I'm not going to be able to follow because I you have
the show notes there makes no sense for me not to use them so that's why I do and you in one
in this show explain to me why I'm getting that command not found that I needed to do the space in
between the two I always knew I had to do that and now I know why this yeah I know I know the
rules of answers I'm finding these things out for myself too you realize so you know this is not
me being brilliantly clever it's me so saying why I don't understand why I have to do this all
the time and then I find it and then I pass on the message so yeah if it if it helps somebody I'm
very happy and I reply gone ah always knew I needed spaces and now I know why I'm sure that's not how
I spelt it did that there might have been a change there I don't know how that happened but yeah
yes to you readers um a certain person I know asked for center center effectively a challenge
edit this if you can and I didn't have the means of editing comments but now I do so so yes I took a
chance yes well you have to look after yourself one day so yeah yeah no I'll find some other
sucker they don't you worry there's always going to be somebody who's going to get annoyed
I know listening oh then I'll make it perfectly clear to people you knew what you were getting into
um evaluate oh yeah I'll continue on evaluating things to zero seems strange no to stealth stop
using wc-l and count grip outputs instead yeah good point uh Johan v says really interesting I haven't
listened to hbr for a long time but a couple of days ago I had some spare time and I decided to
listen to this episode I liked it a lot and did I am a little more aware about what I'm actually
doing while writing if statements and those square brackets and bash and checking return codes thanks
the interesting show why I have to do the next one as well thanks for the feedback Ken yes the
arithmetic stuff evaluated true false but counter intuitive I think yes grip is quite a battle
tool for using scripts Johan v glad to find the show useful I'm trying to explain things I never
fully understood before and to share what I found as I do so just on that point for people who
were listening to the show and think oh that is a series that I find interesting um I was listening
to you random and this came up here as well how to I'm just interested in one particular show how
do I do that so if you go to the hbr website and you go to the link getchels under rss
syndication if you go to advanced settings you can see some of the options that we do but
actually another thing instead of going there so you go to getchels right there is a complete
episode guide and each of the episodes no sorry in-depth series guide and in the in-depth series guide
each of the series has a rss feed for that particular series so if you were interested in following
Dave's bash tips show I think this is under bash scripting yeah so if you're interested in just
bash scripting you can go to that under so getchels complete episode guide and then scroll down
to bash scripting and you get a feed like a hbr underscore org underscore rss.phb question mark
series equals 42 and then you can subscribe to that so there you go and was that the comments
and that show so the next day we had another rambling drive into work which was from mr x and
yeah I like to like to run down on the various different microphones and stuff and the love the
love bug says audio quality good to hear from you again I really enjoyed this episode the audio
quality was definitely on point those little lapel mics are really great don't worry too much
about the structure of this episode you were recording it to make a point and you made it really well
so thank you yeah yeah good show I enjoyed that mr x got slightly confused but between myself and
and Dave the love book so I helped him to fix that in the in the notes so I didn't want to take
credit where I wasn't to yeah no worries too do too many dives in the world live true enough true enough
and this was another interview with the microbit foundation which I found I found her story really
fascinating how she ended up working for microbit if it was really nice yeah yeah yeah the the story
of the microbit project and getting these devices out into kids hands was was quite interesting I
haven't got the full picture so it's only a partial success because the teachers were not really
up to speed with it but you know it's yeah exactly it's moved move forwards since then but typical of
these projects yeah they don't they don't think the thing through properly so my Swedish and
German podcast part this was by Falky and some more Swedish podcasts there are no comments on that one
but there will be shortly the following day we had random elements of storytelling the payoff
in the storytelling lost and Bronx essays I think on on storytelling I I like these they make me
think the clarify stuff that I've always found obvious about stories or storytelling or when he says
it I go oh yeah that's right not obvious obvious wasn't a word but yeah that should have been
obvious yeah I know it make I found myself a little bit more analytical when when reading and
listening to stories is a is a consequence it's it's it's really helpful from that point of view
yeah it gives you an insight into a little bit pulls back the cartoon a bit how a story is put
together you know like when because I did some amateur dramatics you when you go to the theater you
as always you can enjoy this story but there's always the oh the appreciation of the artistry in
doing the lights or bringing up the sound or moving somebody onto the stage and now I'm beginning to
get that additional benefit to reading stories that's coming up yeah absolutely thank you
LMB and no need to apologize for the audio quality because I'm in the car no because any show is
better than no show and it's certainly not that bad anyway sure it's not that bad either
yeah it's fine and you can read the next one Dave oh well yeah well yes I'll do the
the claquée one because it's easy ha ha you don't you got the wrong order can love you says claquée
now that's how you don't waste a good opportunity to make an HPR episode I'm observing and learning
so this was this was a bookie doing effectively a correction to his previous
podcast which sort of threw us slightly because we thought well why didn't he just ask us to
change it but he wanted to change the the audio as well so yeah but he included a different
podcast feed than the one he'd mistakenly put into the original show which Ken's going to
pronounce in a minute yep so claquée says the original show all I love the original show and I love
that Ken and Dave is going to have to pronounce it just for reading out the community news do you
listen to this other podcast back when it was archived and cj was one of the people involved it
was a very good show and I miss it oh that footwork is brilliant yes I like that yeah forky says
regarding that podcast yes I listen to the other podcast and I miss it for sometimes I listen to
the first podcast after it ended but that's not really good replacement to be honest the other
podcast is one of those podcasts I meant with get tired of we really need some good Swedish and
German in the tradition all quality of SGU so the podcast was called yeah it was
solid it's said at 10 minutes perhaps yeah to go on rulers no no I I saw that coming through
and I said to my son he did German at school and he said I don't know and so well that's not
much use I actually went and downloaded that and I could not get a snippet of them saying it so
anyways the following day linking LEDs and in my bill says this is where in my bill had sent me a
555 timer and I basically just followed somebody's tutorial and bogged it up in the way
point out putting in the right resistors and capacitors and stuff ha ha nice job Ken it made me
smile when I heard you happy it was finally blinking and we got some live troubleshooting as well
good stuff you know how I remember the way an LED went way back when one leg of the LEDs is cut off
so cut off stands for C so you get a cathode the short leg is the kettle if you had a leg cut off
you would be pretty negative about it so the short leg is negative love that
cut off yeah yeah it's nemonix amazing I love it just a little nemonix device I met up to
have me remember I still think of it to this day yes and I I was actually in the train trying to
remember what that was I was thinking oh I've come to it in the community news so yes I might cut
that off and put it up here on my LED thing um now that you need to build one of those oscilloscope
kids now that you can see how fast your thing is blinking see how I did that how we're going to
get more shows and I was thinking about this but I think gone from a blinking an LED with a 55
timer to soldering an oscilloscope kit that he needed to write and program firmware is a little bit
like gone from kindergarten mats up to you know advanced advanced for your transforms and stuff
yes I might do a few in between be quite an achievement mind you but yes I was tempted to
bug one really made up to be honest yeah I haven't done so yeah so I was actually thinking of doing
a analog mechanical 555 chip and I have some thoughts on how you would actually build an analog
555 chip that would be good yeah to to says great show these troubleshooting shows
one of my favorites I did tinker just a tiny bit with electronics at school but never invested
enough time to really understand what electricity is all about especially the analog electronics
is a sort of black magic to me smiley face but I love listening when someone is working with it
explaining what they're doing it's only working their way through a problem or slowly working
doesn't describe me on ratio you got there though you got there yeah this is exactly
well put in the wrong wrong thingies but what was very useful actually in troubleshooting was
saying it out loud by recording the episode I was checking it to myself when I assumed that
everything was was working correctly yeah taking out the right components you know it's a bit
it's these assumptions that that mess you up you know because you you think yeah I've got that
right and it takes ages before you spot that that you've made made that assumption that you should
have done anyway yeah I might do a few more of those will be will be nice but yeah because I'm
planning on doing a few anyway because as I always found electronics a bit of a black
black magic never really understood so I had said this a hundred times before but I'll say it again
cause why not I have a mechanical engineering background I can understand how you physically build
transistors and stuff and then having gone into IT and working with me back to programming
we kind of understand the concepts of and the noregates and stuff but then the bit in between and
it's been really nice over the last two or three years to be figuring out the bridge in between so yeah
yeah looking forward to so Liverpool McFist Steve and Jared from the Liverpool Astronomy
Society one of the first astronomy clubs outside of London very cool yeah I had not realized that
they they were so so old and yeah venerable I think it's the word yes very significant I would
imagine did you hear that quite a lot yeah yeah yeah usually somebody saying would you like a
seat and now I'm going to man the bus you know Spurrow Sodge can't stand up there like that
we move on more quick tips only key the only key and nerf guns so the nerf guns I got and the only
key is a part is a physical device to send in passwords and stuff I got that was pretty good yeah
it's like the you be key I think it's not quite didn't quite work out what exactly what it was but
yeah stuff like a PGP pass phrases and keys I should say PGP keys it's pretty cool yeah quite cool
yeah yeah yeah your operation comes out with nice interesting ones from time to time I can't
imagine working somewhere where everybody's got nerf guns and a shooting or another yeah I know
I know one company where they had us and it's kind of went very very quickly overboard
yeah yeah yeah explaining the controls and the new amateur HF radio part one and I for one
love this and my bill puts it very succinctly who's who's reading this one you know me still catching
up okay and my bill says thanks pal yeah do continue this series I recently only got my
tech license and going for a general soon it's nice to have somebody explain what you might see
if and when you get an actual radio because walking into this cold it just looks like a lot of
buttons yes it does I really enjoy this yeah and I downloaded a picture of it as well just follow
me yeah me too me too yeah what an amazing looking device and yeah it looks like a proper radio
to me yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely liked everyone of those just just for the buttons you know
can be empty inside and bash tips part do this time it's serious no comments on this one let's see
what we covered the while until loops what did did you yeah and you did if then but one thing
you didn't cover was the differences in the shells that are opened for an if and then loop versus a
wild loop what you're talking about again you mean you yeah you mean that try try this yeah this
is your homework for next month try doing a ff mpeg loop so do a loop where you call ff mpeg
to transcode something for and try with for loop for i in asterix mp3 do and then while you know
cast blah blah blah what I'm trying for a while loop one more work and one more oh yeah I have
covered this actually I did it in a in another show on bash scripting the the thing about if you
put while in a pipe at the end of a pipe then you get a separate process and if you you can get
into all I think I think we're talking about the same thing anyway you get into all sorts of
tangles because that that separate process doesn't communicate back with the process you started it
from yeah and then just exit out yeah yeah so if you if you I fell over this myself and then found
out why and it's the thing where you you you have a counter you set the counter to zero outside the
loop then you feed something to the while loop through a pipe and then you keep counting and then
you report the the count at the end and you get zero yeah because the the counter got through
it thrown away when the process stopped but the way to do the way to solve that is to and it will
be in the next show they're not answering that question specifically but the the while examples all
use a redirection through the the done part of the the while loop if you do it that way and the
the thing that comes after the less than can be a be a a file name or indeed it can be one of those
I can't remember the names of the process expansion things in brackets with with a less than
or a greater than on the front which runs a whole process and then feeds the output the process
through back up to the the while loop I've already written these shows so it's so I can't add it
add to them now but I have covered this and explained it in an earlier earlier one of the
bash tips shows maybe not enough but yeah okay I was wondering I should my next one in the series
should be just sort of picking up some of the loose ends that that are around I might do that
some stage okay anyway but do try that because I'm not sure that we that that's exactly what happens
because it does the first one and then it just stops okay okay get give me an example when you
have a moment and I'll I'll have a look at it and see if I can work out why okay following day
was my pocket knife by Shane Shannon and there's one comment on that another one I want to make is
I he very cleverly put a sandwich over the there's a notebook which has got HBR topics on it
and very cleverly put his sandwich over it so all I can see is I something something something I can't
I can't see exactly what what topics he's promised as if you mentioned the folks if you if you
mentioned them or I was thinking of doing a show on HBR on this then you all are statue that is
you owe me a show button I think he might be wise to that yeah I said mail bag WTF what
pray is a milk bag sorry milk bag what is a milk bag we use milk bags in Canada and I'm fascinated
by that also I want a soundscape tour around the fault Niagara Falls thank you very much yeah yeah
definitely agree with that one yeah the milk bag is a strange strange idea I think
okay don't ruin the show don't ruin the show it's something I'd like to hear the answer
during this episode I was thinking what is the fascination with pocket with knives in continental
America I don't get it but then he did give an example of where he uses his knife all the time
it just seems to be used a lot more than here I don't like to know I've got the equivalent the
duerol comes from the same place in France tier which is which is another pocket knife with a
lock which people just have to cut bits of the baguette and drink a cheese and stuff I bought it
in France for that very purpose okay this is I want people to send in quickshaws what knife you have
on why yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah very something I think I was talking about one myself actually yeah
I think we need a pocket knife series yep definitely it's like the pen series which is
died day pen series dead nobody cares anymore of our pen's day I can't I can't work them into
to ban tips since it's a permit okay that was it with the shows then we had what they
comments from previous month and we'll start with a zoax episode derby can't interview with Paul
Cobblubitz and that was from 2018 nine oh sorry no that show was to 2015
December 2015 to be honest and it was 2008 very interesting I love zoax stuff and that show was
about a senior security consultant trusted sec involving physical penetration so good
again proving that people go back and listen to their shoals even quite orjo I do remember that
and I just kind of quick peep and the guy was talking about a thing he called a Lloyd do you
remember talking about that on one of these shows because we were trying to wake up one
on earth it was something like a sort of card that you could poke through and fasten locks or
something was it yeah I can't remember vaguely vaguely and I have to listen that one again now and
Archer 72 sent an update to his own show showing where the code has been for DVD ripping code change
from the repository repositories of move basically yep and plucky replying to comments on his
own show which was 2557 from the fifth or 22nd of year purely functional static site generator
and the comment is with a mix 2.1 reading to ml files has become a built-in function just
built-ins from tumble space path to file. tumble I can't imagine this being unrelated to more
civil as implementation of nicks you basically has conversations with himself on his own comments
who's on yours yes yes interesting to listen to it and nothing wrong with that comment on
who this cancer show have you caught up yes I have yes yes very this one the author is a person
thank you who cut for your it's a good handle thank you who cut for your bravely honesty and openness
on this subject HVR has a broad spectrum of listeners though once it suspects many of people who
are younger than yourself are acutely aware of family history of certain cancers this show gave
great insight into what one should expect if a diagnosis becomes pressing concern particularly
with the state of modern medicine also thank you for for reiterating one should always consult
a medical professional for advice on which to make a decision about treatment or any other
course of action well said are at least are a few to be honest cycling to Brussels by nightwise
duffles says very nice your descriptions were excellent and enjoyable thank you very much for
sharing this trip through town you see you don't need to it doesn't have to be hard guys it doesn't
have to be hard just press record and talk or press record and walk as some people have done
and not spoken at all yeah true it's been more than one of those very popular shows
so shall I do the next one please do yes two six two five my thoughts on language learning
communication applications by do d d dummy and claques says accordion outro thank you mister extra
lovely accordion outro hadn't heard it before and it goes on to say I'll do that one as well
shall I give you a give you a interesting idea says claques I'm a tool person so I really like
the idea of using your tools to push yourself forward in your language learning it's hard to say how
it would turn out in practice but I'm optimistic as you mentioned mixing vocabulary and languages
but are very different grammars could become a bit strange but code switching that is jumping back
and forth between languages is common and frequent with bilingual people and it frequently happens
mid-sentence so I guess that just shows that people are pretty good at making it work even in radically
different languages the area where I live has mostly Chinese Hong Kongers but many of them speak
a lot of English in the office and at home and it's pretty much fun to listen to the kids in the
playground in the playroom talk to each other it's real soup of Cantonese and English yeah
sounds good that yeah and that's it because we we did render Jay Butler's comment last time
stupid yeah yeah and we're talking about the Dutch and all that stuff Roger and we're onto
the thread which was opened by myself about hpr branding and we just do it here yeah basically
run down what the current branding is should we change anything show snops this is that adding value
do we continue to tank our holes should we remove it or put it into the outro should we refresh
the hpr music make it shorter should we do the htrio outro text be changed and the other changes
yeah I think we should go through all of these actually Dave yeah you want to do BJBs or hold on
the second yep so BJB says I'm a bit new to the community but that said here is my opinion
I'm okay with the setup as it is if we could make the intro outro music a little quieter
to more closely match the show that would be nice while it's lit and I can I comment on each of
these as we go yeah yeah go go and I'm just commenting here without my personal opinion this is
me as an admin commenting if we the only way right okay we take the shows in and by default we do
automatic leveling on the entire show but that doesn't always work if there are peaks in the show itself
so in order to do that we would need to manually download the shows and manually add them and I
worked that out that it would be about 40 hours or so a year for somebody to be doing that and
you're getting into the range of that being a you know that's a natural job to continue to do that
or to do that and also we don't always get the shows right on time for example this show
today needs to be posted by Monday but we've had shows where we've had very little time to edit them
and you're not always in the space where you can download the shows your own vacation or something
and you need to download it over a crappy connection so the whatever we do whatever solution we come
up with the encoding has to be something that can be scripted that's what I'm saying okay carry on
so she says while it's a little boring to hear but thank you every time it's polite and thankful
to the hostages I'm okay with having it up front one thing I was thinking about that was that we if
we do pick an intro we could do quite a lot of that during the intro so we could do we could have
the team music starting to play we could have the this is episode blah blah blah blah I want to
thank our host blah blah blah blah and then the intro music fades out so we could compact the
whole add down to be on the same in the same period if you don't want to know yeah absolutely I
think I had a quick scan through these before we started and I think it was Bob John Mann who said
something very similar that sort of doing a fade and then then voiceover type thing for the intro
which is which is a great idea yeah I think that's a great idea so going back to bjb and what's
a hacka podge and what's a hacka podcast with that little text to speech having it read having
it read the show synopsis is it's good and excuse has any to include some tts and my comment on
that is yes but I would always love I know there are better Linux voices out there because we could
have poppy from the one to uk podcast is a text to speech voice and I would love him his voice
to be used here in hbr but I cannot I really beat my head against a wall I do not have the technical
skills to get that going if there's somebody out there who knows how you get poppy's voice
configured so that I can then contact us and we'll get you whatever technical tools you need in
order to facilitate that yeah that would be great yes also after listening to a podcast or
other content it can be good to have a little filler between shows so you have a few minutes to
think about the content before being bombarded with more content so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
the actual music is fine with me also enjoy the occasional community members reinterpretation
be it whistled song and or played on the accordion smiley face yeah cool uh the next one is by
devil and whilst I agree that the team music could do with turning down a bit I also think that
some hosts could do more to improve the levels on their recorded segments this is an observation
I have to many podcasts not just hbr a tiny amount of post production effort would make a huge
difference on the final episode I agree but I also disagree because our goal here is by its very
nature we're here as means for getting people into podcasting and there are plenty of people who
so I want to hear those shows I want people coming in and by your very nature as time goes on you
get better mics and you become more confident and you hear your show and you ask people and people
like Dave are very very good at very good at giving them very good at helping people not sounds
like pedantic but they I know he has helped people improve the quality of their podcasts so there's
plenty of people who are here to help so yeah point is though we can't always guarantee that and I
don't really want to make it oh no one must have perfect audio before what is on hbr if you know what I
mean can't quite imagine that but yeah thank you point do the next one so this is my
ray tts bit he says I'm most interested in the name of the host and the duration the duration I
can get from my pod catcher I guess most pod catchers get this but the name of the host is only
available if I look online first which I don't do it one o'clock in the morning which is when the
new cast drops out want to comment on that the duration is kind of important because sometimes you
hear you have five minutes not not everybody will have their player even available you know it's
now I have my phone in my pocket and listen on my headphones and I don't even want to take it out
so by knowing that the show is five five minutes or it's a three hour show and I've got 10 more
minutes left on my commute I might skip that show onto the next one because there's 10 minutes and
I can get it in so having that definitely is a feature people use it so Mike says based on the
host I sometimes just to lease it without going any further usually when I've heard the duration
the name the host I jump ahead 30 seconds and miss the host message on the music almost a bit
but tedious as it is I think thanking Josh is necessary and polite after all he does for HBR
couldn't agree more absolutely personally I hate that bleeping music smiley face but it's just as
much part of HBR is the Nike flashes to a bright sweatshop produce sneakers music is too loud as
others have said but although sound quality can sometimes be annoyingly bad and cannot occasionally
make it difficult to listen a poorly recorded show is better than no show as Ken has often said
however I might try reducing the volume on the intro and outro and see how that works
yeah we did that several years ago as well the the person we we put up for for people to grab was
was we turned the volume down but yeah okay so case in point he says seek flops excellent recent
episode on getting the Cisco phone she found in the garage working contained a bad echo but what if
a brilliant but what a brilliant episode it was hacking at its best and worthy of HBR it for
nothing else but the just obvious just the obvious delight in the voice and dialogue and the host
getting it to work so it's dangerous to complain about sound recording quality to do so you risk
not digging up some gems absolutely perfect I shouldn't comment on any of these because I think
all the comments have been said okay the next one was from Kevin I've never had a problem with the
current set up so I vote to keep everything as it is okay short sweep to the point yeah good point
so next is from Bob drunkman who says in his answering Mike Ray step-by-step music is too loud
actually I think the music is at a good level but the show itself is much too quiet as Dave Lee said
a bit of post-production can be extremely helpful and this can probably be automated I guess if
if somebody can help with that that would be great what I'm doing now is fairly basic but if there is
a way to automate this better please get in touch I am not in any way proud about these scripts if
there are better scripts better ways to do this get in touch so Bob says I do love the music
but it's a bit long perhaps the format can be number one 10 seconds of intro music conveniently
the fan purse just sounded twice at 10 seconds second point fade intro music to 30 percent start
voice over of the TTS shows and obsis third point with luck the TTS shows and obsis is over just
before the intro music runs out if not the intro music repeats sans fanfare at the 30 second mark
but fades perhaps the intro music can just keep repeating until both the shows and obsis and
the sponsorship thank you were done point four sponsorship sponsorships thank you five music fades
completely the show starts six outro is great as it is and a good example of voice over music
besides it Bob Bob who has no business providing advice until he submits another show was emerald
we saw that Bob we heard you and that is actually very good feedback and we could even
I can even do different how you get fix that issue is you do make several different versions
of the show length so we find what the maximum up until now show has been with intro on TTS and
you know if it's a new host and it's in a series and there's a long thing there's a there's
actually a limit to how much that could be and then we can record edit various different versions
of the intro that are you know one minute one minute five seconds one minute ten seconds woman
of the whole way up and then pick the appropriate one because we would be able to calculate it
beforehand yeah yeah so I like this the only thing this does though Dave it means that people
would no longer be able to add their own intros to the show true true which was to feature subject
and that's feature subject is now if there's one thing that we have not been able to do is fix the
has people sent the introna or have they not and if we say okay you can use any entry you want
but it's from this list so yeah if we so your show will not have an intron and then we will add
the intron automatically always that would be one one thing which would solve the automation issue
in my mind my mind being the HBR automation person mind not the HBR country with your mind
which may have a different opinion no fair enough but could you could you offer a menu of the
the the available intros because that would that would give an opening for people to create new
intros and and submit them and have them accepted or whatever and then somebody who likes the
an accordion start or a avasinian nose flute intro can can choose that well the outro as we said
before in the last discussion was that you know HBR inspired music for the outro for the intro
we have had some submissions from your runes friend and they have been the intro music exactly so
it's that team and they happen deviated from it the thing about the intro music is it is very
from a branding perspective it tells people this is a HBR show and it needs to be very
recognizable so therefore if you're doing an intro you will I would expect and this is me as a
HBR contributor talking not a HBR admin I would expect that the HBR shows that the community
approves HBR intros yes you pick from it you can pick from this predefined list if a new
intro comes in then the community decides do we add that to the list or do we not add that to
the outro I'm not that pushed up yep okay sure we go on indeed there's a comment from an email
from Lost in Bronx who says I know it's been brought up in the past but if we're revisiting
the whole thing is there a better voice available for e-speak these days I like the idea of having
the host announced along the simple description of the episode but every time I recommend an
episode to someone outside the HBR community I have to warn them to ignore the horrible robot
voice at the beginning it really sounds quite bad compared to others that are out there but I don't
know what free software options are currently available if this this one is still stated the
art prescriptible voice is then nothing to complain about since nothing can be done but if
some better voices do exist now perhaps we could look at swapping out the one we currently use
yeah and as I said I definitely know the polky voice is polky from the Ubuntu UK podcast
has who works for Ubuntu canonical actually and works on Ubuntu for canonical it will be
absolutely awesome if we get that voice because or a voice like it ideally whatever polky did to
record as my voice could have man on my wife who does the outro can do the voice I always wanted
to text the speech but I could never figure out how to do it so if somebody knows how to do it please
please get in touch can that fallon.io can ask fallon.io thank you so cobra 2 adds to the HBR branding
discussion I always liked festival over e-speak the voices just sound more real to me I find that
shows where the host does all the mixing of the intro outro music sound the best as far as levels go
I don't really care my ears have been blown out of the word a few times and a few more isn't going
to make me deaf what are your thoughts Ken well you've heard them all from and that's been point
of view personally my favorite theme has been the twat theme and I never understood why we switched
away from it to the HBR theme the HBR theme is HBR though now so there's and the idea behind the
HBR theme at the time was that it's it sounded like a new show like you're listening to the
evening news for the three try county area so the important news brought you by the HBR community
that sort of feel yes absolutely so yeah what the the the twat theme is like now my cable I'm
stable and it's got a really nice beat to it but you know as with everything it's personal preference
and so that's my personal preference but there you go that's why some I tend to dream when I'm
doing anniversary shows I tend to drag out the twat team whenever I the twat team theme whenever I
can today was a techie to yeah theme yeah because I understand the twat is a rude naughty word
not over this side of the pond but everything's a rude word somewhere other
the reason too much to refresh it dude yeah yeah um so we have a comment from
Nigel Verity who says my only gripe is with the electronic voice a point I raised on an earlier
thread a few months back so that we have a lot of listeners to whom English is a second language
e-speak does not lend itself to clear and ambiguous diction I could just about get value from
a podcast in German but I'm certain I'd struggle to understand an intro in German using e-speak
I prefer a gentle and clear human voice the voice which appears in the outro would be perfect
but I do appreciate that it's a bit of an imposition on somebody to take the upcoming episode
scheduled and recorded it all the snippets I'd volunteer to do it but anybody who served my
few episodes would know my voice is just not the one for the job that's visa this is handle yes and
the outro is my wife so she could definitely record what is needed for to record a computer voice
based on her voice by the way if you do an e-speak and you you can change the phonetics so that
we'll speak German with a German accent so I have a script that uses the Dutch
pronunciations and this reads this reads a piece of text Dutch obviously with a Dutch accent
and it works out quite nice so Mike Ray comes back to that comment and says while I always get
very outtight about people criticizing e-speak which is in my humble opinion one of the most
wonderful pieces of open source ever and as without direct unlawful blind computer users throughout
the globe than almost anything else I know that it's not understandable in some languages as it is
in English but we only use it in English so you think e-speak is bad jump in your time machine
and listen to the voices we had to use 30 years ago or so in the days of DOS Dolphin Orpheus was
pretty much all there was and that was awful this is bound to be some Dolphin Orpheus there is
bound to be some Dolphin Orpheus on YouTube somewhere and having said that Dolphin Orpheus is still
still allowed blind people to do a lot of good work and to learn how to use a PC if you listen to e-speak
long enough for example as a blind computer user you just concentrate on the work not on the voice
bit like not caring about your wallpaper while you're actually working e-speak also has very
small code footprint it runs comfortably on an old Raspberry Pi with only 256 megabytes of RAM
where others won't but s-box pico is nice at least in English it has rubbish language supporter
I think it only works in English and French I'm not sure if it has a batch mode which allows
automation of the conversion of a fragment of text into an audio file I don't use s-box pico on
my PCs though because it's much bigger than e-speak so won't run comfortably at a very fast rate
pretty much anything else cost money I use e-speak on a daily basis just completely have learned to
all have not learned to have become so accustomed to it that it is it's just I don't even hear the
the accent or the what's the word I'm looking for Dave well I guess that's the sort of rendition
yeah rendition thanks yeah cool I'll read one from Jason Dodd the more I think about this the more
this reminds me of a tech upgrades Stevens Hawking's had a couple of years ago where there are lots
of good upgrades he didn't upgrade his voice not all that different from the HPR voice he didn't
change it because it had become his voice need nevertheless I don't come for the intro or reading
of the summary I come for the show if it's changed and I don't have to make the change I'll be
all right now then think about it if the intro outro announcement show summary pitches for the other
show thanks for the whole role put at the end of the show I could just get more show it fair enough
yes yes could be using a skip button yeah skip button um called for shows because we ran out
to shows and we're kind of okay now again but again they shark tooth problem arises we run out
to shows we get more shows in we run out to shows but it's winter in the northern hemisphere and
traditionally we tend to get more shows in but please keep sending in your shows thank you have a
nice day um Corba 2 asked about the uh old bandwidth issues and just wondering when the site was
having bandwidth issues has s3 ever been brought up as a possible solution to the storage in the
bandwidth and Josh replied saying yes it was but there were some cost issues I'm donating the
server and the bandwidth because it's sort of a fixed cost for me at the bandwidth is a fixed cost
for me so putting the s3 files would have a floating cost much harder to predict or a control
and uh Corba 2 replies floating costs suck a lot should storage and performance ever become
up again I would suggest was ab.com as a variable alternative to the s3 storage objects it's
winter about for five dollars a month or sixty dollars a year today's prices I've been using them
for a couple of months now as a backup solution for my personal stuff and expanded storage of my
next cloud instance catch 22 is that they built three months after you delete something so
interesting good to know and another hpr tune came in oh I forwarded from urune uh I was blissfully
ignorant recently seemed to have started the discussion about the hpr theme personally I found
it sounds very much out of date but that's just me anyway I talked to a friend of mine called Bart
and he uses a communication pro and he uses music communication proxy uh who is both uh
lovely geek nerd and also in my humble opinion a brilliant music composer anyway a few hours
after sending him the event so far he replied to me with both new arrangements for the current tune
and uh rules garden files so that we can play around with it upon somebody saying it sounded
hackerish enough he made a three p version and attached to all the files and they're all linked
on the website are you still there yes yes sorry I was just turning the page so yeah
so um in response to that uh and at that point there were just two tunes uh lost and broke says
these are great wonderful themes I personally prefer the first version that was one that it was
me who said that it doesn't sound too hackerish maybe something else um didn't I prefer the first
version since I don't tend to focus on geek subjects pass along my compliments please
and Tony Hughes said hi guys and girls I've just listened to both prefer the original non-3b version
I think it sends both modern and geeky enough the show that's my personal opinion I could
dip with either prefer the first and you know what I'm going to do uh Dave is uh so see I will put
in all the things that we have received so far into this so I won't do our current theme because
that's at the beginning of the show so that that was by slick zero oh how would you pronounce
such Dave if you go to media team music hacker public radio forward slash media forward slash team
dash music all of his well I think it's he's sort of uh it's a sort of an italianized name so I would
pronounce it my strategy oh as per the italian would be so it's a sort of my stroge type variant my
strategy I guess okay you'll play that now
you will have the 3p version of that now
so
Then we will have the AK version of this now.
Now we will have the AK version of the AK version of this now.
And we will do the MrX version.
Roll-A-Coster music version 1.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 3.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
Roll-A-Coster music version 2.
