Episode: 2891
Title: HPR2891: HPR Community News for August 2019
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2891/hpr2891.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:50:44

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This is HBR episode 2008-191 entitled HBR Community News for August 2019 and is part of the series
HBR Community News, it is posted by HBR volunteers and is about 37 minutes long and carries an
explicit flag. The summary is HBR volunteers talk about show release and comment posted
in August 2019. This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair as an honest host.com
Hello everybody. Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is the Community News for August 2019.
My name is Dave Morris and strange and wonderful thing has happened. Not so
wonderful actually. A strange turn up is that I'm here on my own. There's nobody else around.
I haven't heard anything from any of the other the usual crew. Ken Fallon's not not around
seemingly. So because we need this show to be prepared and out for Monday I'm going to try and
soldier on and do it on my own. So sorry there's only one voice to this time. I'll prove
make it quite quick so you don't have to listen to me too long. So first thing there were no new
shows in the month of August. There were no new hosts in the month of August I should say.
We'll start with show 2869 which is from Brian in Ohio who is building a recumbent
bicycle and he's following in the footsteps of John Culpe who made one some number of years ago
and gave us lots of information about how he'd done this and it sounds very interesting indeed.
There's lots of good links here and lots of information. No photos. I was disappointed there were
no photos but Brian I think slipped up. I've got to put the photos in so there's a show coming up
which we'll fill in that gap. So John Culpe says as a comment to this show recycled
recumbence what a pleasure to hear this show and to know I had some small partner in inspiring you
to do it. That's tremendous. I haven't ridden my recumbent in about a year mainly because when we
moved to the new house I didn't have room for it. It's still at my old house in the storage shed
but we've recently cleared out some space in the garage and I hope to bring it over and start
riding it to work again. It still rides great and still elicits many comments from all who see it.
Best of luck with yours. Mine is definitely the most satisfying project I've ever done. By the way my
daily ride now is the 1985 Swin World Tour I was working on in a SPR episode 2154. I love this
bike too. The next show was from Hoca who's talking about health and health care and he's talking
particularly about the hierarchy of evidence in determining what is good health care and so forth.
It's not enough to simply say a study show as he says in his notes with that. We're also looking
at what kind of study it is. How powerful the results are. We look at different kinds of studies
and rank them from top to bottom. This has been a great series most appreciated hearing this
very very interesting. There's another one coming up later on in the month so we'll get to that
shortly. So the next show was a 7-1 which was the community new show for last month so we won't
dwell on that particular one. Next show is Mr X who is talking about shoelaces and he makes
reference to a TED talk where the method of tying shoes Terry Moore is the author of this one.
How to tie your shoes talking about how it's difficult if you're left handed or if you're using
the less tight or granny knot style of doing things which can easily undo itself.
What an interesting subject I thought. No comments on this particular one. Tutoto gives us a show
entitled Death Angel card game. This is a card game that can appeal to children and adults
and can cater for up to six players which sounds very good. He links to where it's described
in a bit more detail and he mentions some aspects of it in his show. So yeah it's great great
sort of stuff if you're into into board games especially if you have children. Next show is from
John Culp who is still finding amazing things in various thrift stores. This one was Salvation Army
and it cost him 99 cents and it's a variable speed cassette recorder from I think GE's general
electric is it. I think he says so in the show. He found as it was in non-functioning state with
the battery compartment being corroded and the belt had disintegrated pretty much but he managed
to fix it including a broken spring in the battery compartment and he got it playing and he
demonstrated it to us on the on the recording and there's some excellent photographs here if you
want to go and look at them. I've always very impressive. John is quite able to turn his hand to all
manner of repairs. Very yeah resourceful fellow I think. Next show was the missing series pictures
from from Brian in Ohio. Pictures about his recumbent bicycle construction and he's he's got
some pictures of the bikes he picked up to act as donors and some the work he's done on cutting
them up to to make his his bike and he references a site with information about how you would make
such a thing how you would build design and build a recumbent bike. So very cool stuff,
very cool stuff. Pictures are great, most interesting and yeah would have missed them had they
not appeared. Next window go makes an appearance after seeing him for a while. He's he's I don't recall
when we last heard from him but that doesn't seem to have been a while but he's he's a busy man I
know and he mentions this in the show because his the sounds off from from his daughter so anyway he's
doing some cooking he's doing a recipe which he's got from Hello French which in I was interested
to find it's also a company that sells in the UK and but this is it is an adaptation of sausage or
and he does the the thing that I would never think to do which is to effectively dictate his show
as he as he's cooking. There are three comments on this during the show Windigo mentioned that he
might have put too much salt in and bookworm comments salt many times if you know there's too much
salt especially in soup you can add half a peeled potato and it will absorb the salt. The potato
can either be cooked and eaten or discarded. Windigo says thanks bookworm I will definitely give
that a try. I was motivated to comment on this one I said love this I was right there with you in
the kitchen. I went to go great show I love the detail in the ambient sounds I was repairing a
giant batch of rata two years I listened for my kids who don't live with me but for whom I make dinner
two or three times a week. Hearing you taking the picture I dashed to the nose to look at it but
nothing you forgot to add the picture. I've got a thing about pictures obviously so we're going
back to the comments still the meal sounded great I said best wishes Dave and the next show was one
that I submitted which is me talking about using a tool called Zenity with PD Menu it's under the
heading of bash scripting but it's not strictly bash scripts I'm writing it's little bits of
bash command line stuff used with PD Menu. Zenity is a tool for displaying all sorts of dialogues
like calendars and day-trentry boxes and this sort of thing I found it I found it really useful
and interesting I hope people will also find it at least the useful resource for future reference
Tutoto gives us another show in the series on Haskell where he is talking about type classes
in that language I didn't completely follow this I must admit I didn't understand how defining an
EQ this is EQ class is it yeah it's a class how it actually I'd defined what equality actually
means but I think as I've said before I'm really missing a lot with this not not Tutoto's fault
but just the this is flying over my head still one day it's gonna suddenly you know that that
lightbulb's gonna come on all right I hope so anyway but these brilliant and like I just said
resources this is a fantastic resource for future reference so if you want to get into Haskell
and you do find that you can then going back and looking at these are going to be so useful I think
so many of our hosts were stepping up to the plate this month because we were pretty low on
shows I think and they they wanted to make sure that the gaps are filled and Mr X is one such and he
was back with start of a group of shows describing how he listens to podcasts and he's referencing
the various ways in which he downloads podcasts and listens so many certainly had Sans a clip which
is the way I tend to listen to stuff in the past and he's using a Raspberry Pi instead of server
I think he said well as a server because Raspberry Pi is well up to that sort of thing these days
but he's particularly using the package called music on console MOC I don't know if you actually
call it mock but anyway it's an end curse's console audio player and there's there's a pointer
to information about it and so that's how he plays back his podcasts he doesn't I was puzzled at
this and wondered well then how do you move around and listen to this to stuff as you're you know
moving around your house and garden or whatever but he hasn't said so he hasn't explained that in
this show I don't think but he will do a hooker again is talking about the health and health care
subject and he's talking about evaluating a study we've developed the standards to judge so
now let's do an example and this is the last one in this particular group at least for now
but he he provides a very clear description of how to check a study properly rather than going by
the really awful information you find in most newspapers and other information sources these days
where it seems that whoever has found the information and is then digesting it and regurgitating
back to to us has got no idea what they're talking about they don't understand what it is at all
science journalism and obviously this is this is more of a science thing seems to seem to not
to contain scientists with people with any science scientific knowledge and but a hooker's giving
some hints and tips here about how one can do this oneself which is which is amazing being
subsufficient is very important in this case I think next is Ken Fallon who is doing a show
which follows on from John Culp's show 1771 where he's talking about audacity and labeling
tracks and he can is using that plus silence finder to take the audio from an LP which is
which is in the form of tracks and slicing it up into into those tracks as otherwise it would be
very very laborious and the method Ken's using is amazing I didn't actually know you could do that
so it's an excellent recipe he's got here John Culp comments automation is nice he says thanks for
the shout out Ken I love this clever use of the silence finder I've never tried this but I will
definitely will next time I'm transferring an LP nicely done so now we're at show 2882 and this
is from Gabriel even fire who we haven't heard from for about six years and he's back talking about
Onix which is his open network inspection command suite which he spoke about back in show
1350 and he created this tool suite which would allow the manipulation of packets and in other words
data traffic in in all sorts of ways and so this is the start of a series of shows about this
package and where he's going into quite a lot of detail and this one he's talking about basic
commands I think this suite is very impressive personally and I love the way he goes through their
use in a methodical way I installed the original but had problems with it but I've reinstalled
this one and tried some examples and it's great but I've got a comment about this I'm going to
read out in a minute so my comment was great project and excellent show I installed onix after
your first show about it but didn't use it much I haven't had a great need to do network
monitoring or troubleshooting in the interim I reinstalled after this show and followed along
with your examples and found the very help the capabilities of Onix seem very impressive I'm
looking forward to hearing more Gabriel comes back to say good to hear thanks for the feedback day
and glad this that this installation went more smoothly than the last one next episode is in and
I've scripted about half of the one to follow so he's remembering that I stumbled over the installation
back in episode 1350 but but now everything is nice and smooth and in installing so yeah it looks
looks like it has a lot of promise does this looking forward to hearing more about more of a
tutorial and how to use it. Tutoto is next with another game tabletop gaming type game with a
reference to it on boardgamegeek.com and this is called Pass the Pigs and it's a sort of childhood
game from his childhood and you throw two pigs two toy pigs and they depending on how they fall
how they land which orientation each individually and in relation to one another which I find quite
fascinating you get to you get points so you get points taken away so I can see that being really
appealing to young kids so yeah good stuff. John John Culp is still going through three stores and
flea markets and stuff and this time he's managed to find a most wonderful thing which is a Tazcam
four-track cassette recorder there's a picture of it on the in the notes here he found it in a
bin full of junk he said and it was filthy he didn't have a power supply and so it cost only five
pounds but he managed to hack up a power supply from somewhere else and he took it apart completely
in washed and cleaned everything and got it all all back together again and working so this particular
show is although there are pictures of him doing this is largely about him using it to do some
four-track recording which is so it's amazing I'll skip on to the comments for Clinton Roy says
fantastic thank you so much for this episode I've never heard someone go through this process
it was wonderful to go along the ride with you to Toto says awesome this was really great
episode to listen to reminded me of times when we met around with four tracks of students
Jezra says super fun what a fun episode thank you did you determine the HPR melody by ear or
did you have them to stumble upon some sheet music I should have said that what John actually did
was to record step-by-step in four tracks with with four instruments a version of the HPR theme tune
so John replies by ear thanks for the comments y'all there's no sheet music as far as I'm aware
I sat down and wrote her a chord sheet about ten minutes before I started recording
haha I've been doing this a long time and it's not a very hard song it does have one strange chord
progression that I have to think about a couple of times before I figured it out but otherwise
it's pretty easy also ran through the melody a couple of times on the harmonica it was fun
I have sometimes I'll do a proper job of it and make a recording without any annoying mess-ups
that can actually be used as the outro music which as an aside I'd have it very much like to hear
next comment is from McNallow who says four tracks for the win or TW love this show
had a four track man which was a model up from this I think Porter sound 04 I got it in 1987 or 1988
and recorded a lot of music on it pushed it to its absolute limit by bouncing tracks in fact I
still have that four track and all the cassettes so I promise here with Deed out from the back of the
cupboard and see if it works in an upcoming HVR show thanks John superb stuff John cop says
can't bounce hey McNallow that would be great to hear you do a show about your four track
one of the things mine can't is bounce multiple tracks down to one and free up tracks for more
so I guess he means sort of compress still up multiple tracks and then compress them down to one
the Porter 02 is really minimal bouncing is a key feature of typical four tracks and it would
fill us a little bit of a gap in my coverage if you talked about that for us I'd love to hear that
the final comment number seven is from Johan v great show he said I was listening to this big
smile on my face it was great fun to hear you actually create this piece of craftsmanship
so yeah yeah my two pennathies that I was brilliant I loved the love listening to it and
I would love to hear more about what you can do with four track of course I've never had any
experience with this sort of stuff sounds amazing so to show two double eight five is the second
onyx show from Gabriel even fire and in this case he is dealing with working with a sample file which
is included in the onyx distribution which you can download with Git to work with and he's
he's dissecting it effectively with the tools in the in the package so I tried several of the
actions myself and found that there's some really useful tools there and I'm have had a little
go at using this to monitor network traffic on my home network just to see what an earth is going
on it's a subject that I'm quite interested in I've never really done it professionally not
with IP TCP IP stuff or with x25 way back in time but yeah this this is great I'm looking forward
to more of these as I probably said last time it's there's some there's some excellent tools here
and the explanation are brilliant I'm really enjoying this so next we have operator who is talking
about whether his title is info second and he's talking about IT and information security and
particularly about getting into that into the field of information security so he's some he's
to all intents and purposes talking about how to get a job in information security you do need
a background in IT and be prepared to repair things that are broken and have that sort of mindset but
but he does give some excellent advice here for somebody who might be hunting for a job in this
area so yeah an excellent show I think and next we have Lost in Bronx who is starting a new
group of shows sub series or something like that sort in the tabletop gaming series where he's
play testing a new role playing game that he he and his his collaborators I guess are putting
together based on his star drifter series of books and short stories so star drifter if you've
not heard of it is Lost in Bronx's book series and you can find them on archive.org they're not
linked here but I think you'll have no difficulty in in finding them if you do a Google search for them
and yeah what they were doing here is there's a round a round table grouping which we're looking
at the rules of the game discussing them and refining them and it to me it sounded
most interesting the hearing something behind the scenes aspects of this this process you had
a couple of comments here from one from Tutoto who says eagerly waiting for more I'm sitting
on the edge of my seat waiting to have more of this to listen to interesting topic and very close
to my heart obviously Tutoto being a turn club game fan Ken Fallon comments a future podcast
in the future feed and he gives a link to a feed on the hpa website rss-future.php which will
give you access to shows which have not been released yet so that's a way of
giving into your impatience and and getting an early look at stuff here and I don't do this
very much because we like to to say that we don't listen to stuff before it comes out and that's
that's the case unless it might be something very very rare occurrence it's very very rare occasions
do we do that but you're free to do that if you wish. Tutoto has been extraordinarily busy this month
and he's produced another show 2888 pattern matching in Haskell the one named the series of
Haskell another one of his his tutorials effectively and it's it's a look at how you you would
make make functions which effectively are matching patterns and I felt I was almost grasping this
so think about Haskell in many cases it's just sort of on the edge of understanding so I'm hoping
get beyond that into full understanding before before too many years are out calling it pattern
matching confused me a bit because I was thinking in terms of regular expressions and that type of
thing but that's that's not effectively what it what it means but there's another reason why
Haskell's a little bit difficult to understand I find because the terminology is is strange
I still haven't got my head around what a monad is but anyway that's for another time so yeah
brilliant thank you very much for these as always very very well documented and a great source of
reference for the future Mr. Axe gives us the next show which is part two of his how he listens to
podcasts and of course the answer to the question that I didn't pose was I'll pose in my head
of how do you listen to your Raspberry Pi that's running MOC mock playing your podcasts and still
walk around the house and and do two things and the answer is a quarter headphones so he talks
about this and gives some pictures of the headphones various ones he's he's had over the years I
guess and starts talking about how to control MOC from a remote place and he's talking about
using a small laptop to do it perhaps but there's more to what to follow explaining the details
excellent idea for sure I think I found it quite fascinating and it's it's an alternative way
to the way I do podcast listening I put them onto my onto a stack of players that I have that
I've talked about before but this is this is a great alternative most intrigued I seem to find
different solutions to the to the problem that you think you have the definitive solution to
so yeah it's a great thing about HBRA the one thing just scrolling through the photos here he's got
a picture of a Nokia N810 which he said at one point he used to used to to playback I think he
said he used it to playback podcasts a wonderful little phone fantastically I never had around
myself seen them never managed to get hold of one I did have the other one the end 770 briefly but
it must have been a dead one because it didn't didn't live very long but yeah the shame there's
not devices like this around I would I mean smartphones are all fine and dandy don't like touch
screens very much because fingers are great where my fingers are great lumpy things and it's really
hard to be accurate with them anyway that's and I'll stop wittering about this so the final show of
the month is from a hooker who is talking about penguin con and he he does this as an annual
thing goes to penguin con every year and gives a report on his experiences there which I found
I always find to be most interesting sounds like a great great convention another thing I will
probably ever manage to get to but still sounds really good I'm glad he does this during his
talking about the events they said he'd been along to a workshop I think he said where there was
they were doing some training in soldering and he said it as soldering and pointed out that for the
the people on the other side the Atlantic he would use the word soldering and sort of quizzes
as to whether that is the way we say it over over here so I commented couldn't hold myself back
I said hi hooker I always enjoy your reports from penguin con this one was great
as you are a flexion on the pronunciation of the word solder S.O.D.R I have a few remarks the word
is derived from the Latin solidare to make solid yes the British do generally pronounce it to rhyme
with colder and folder seems to make sense given that its form is very similar pronouncing
folder as fodder even in dialect would be very confusing for example the French equivalent
is su day S.O.U.D.E.R and I've said in in the comment sounds to my ears like S.O.D.A.Y. su day
I've seen it suggested that the USA pronunciation is derived from the French so I say language is fun
I recently bought a Chinese hot air soldering gun an SMD rework station from Amazon I particularly
like the legend on the box which says soft and spiral wind can welds all chips soft and spiral
wind can welds all chips which I think is one of the words lived by I say smiley face but it's
it's just a rather wonderful word putting it it's like a like a haiku or something so that's it
that's everything that's all the shows all the the comments with those shows now what we do is we
also read out and talk about the comments which have come in during the past month but relating
to older shows shows before the current month and there were several there were seven comments
on two previous shows in fact but and the show one the first show was 2859 which is one of the
new year's eve shows put together by honky magoo number part seven but there was I believe some
discussion about guns and the whole issue of the USA and the right to to bear arms and carry guns
AK-47s and all of that stuff Mike Ray sent in several comments on this and I tend to agree with
with a lot that he said not necessarily in the way he said it but that's just a matter of opinion
of style or something but I don't think it's entirely appropriate for me to to read this out
far from anything else that long and detailed and you probably do better reading them
rather than me reading them to you reading them yourself might be the better way of going ahead
and of course they're all there the end of show 2859 so I'd encourage you to if you if you would
like to follow through with this discussion that you go and look at them there the other show that
had comments in the past month was 2863 which was from Beezer where he spoke about simplified
application architectures for improving security he was talking about the ways that applications
can that you're writing things that you're compiling and writing can bring in tons and tons of
external libraries and you don't necessarily know how safe they are so perhaps static
a static linking process would be the way forward the comment is from Clackier and it's entitled
dynamic versus static linking doesn't matter thank you for your thoughts you said I started listening
thinking I would agree but I didn't vulnerabilities do not generally come in through technical
details like what style of linking is used your attack surface remains the same
bendering the code doesn't help either that's just a distribution and versioning issue the only
real way to reduce dependencies is to reduce the write the code ourselves or make sure we fully
understand that our dependencies here's an article that goes further into this and he gives a
link which I won't read out so yeah that's that's a very interesting view I tended to side with
these over Clackier's comments helped to clarify my thoughts a bit now I think so thanks for that
so next we usually look at the mailing list and there's a threaded discussion the messages are
threaded on the website and there's a link in the notes here which will take you to a particular
place and there were two main threads really first one was from Ken Fallon I'm not going to read
these out but I'll just try and summarize them briefly first one is from Ken who is putting forward
the idea that we need to be filling up the next two weeks worth of shows as a priority rather than
just the the next one weeks worth of shows and the reason for that is because each weekend I
upload the next weeks worth of shows five shows to the internet archive archive to all that is
and that's where our feed gets the the shows from and sends sends them to your pod catcher so getting
ahead of the game that that way means that the complexities of being ready for the coming week
are eased somewhat and the comments to this are pretty much supportive I think so we leave it
at that the second thread is from Lost and Bronx and he's talking about an idea for a new
HPR series and he's referring to the late Lord Dragonblood who had a series called Ten Buck
Review where he reviewed movies from the bargain bin at Walmart that were $10 or less and
Lost and Bronx is suggesting that a series be started for HPR called Lord These Film Reviews
where an online source is used to to get a get hold of a movie someone like archive dog and to do
a review of it and with some of the ideas from Lost and Bronx's random elements of storytelling
series being used to to do that analysis which sounds like a brilliant idea I think so
it's Lord These Reviews because the series is dedicated to him so that sounds to me like
a fantastic idea there's quite a bit of discussion about this which essentially I think I'm
right in saying ends up with everybody being pretty much in an agreement with that as a as a
suggestion so so I'm not going to go through the detail of it because it's there for you to
read yourself on the website so and time is time is at the essence here I think now
Ken likes to go through the lwn.net community calendar at this point I'm going to skip that one
because there's there's I'm not quite sure I'm equipped to point out the most important
bits and pieces there except to say the old camera's coming up in October but you probably
know that already and a number of HDR people will be there so I'll leave you to to examine that
yourself the links in the notes final thing is me mentioning that I've added 10 more shows to the
the group of shows which have tags and summaries so try and do a number every month
can't always get to them just manage to manage it by matter of days this one this month so
gradually wittling away at the number so if you get to contribute you would be very very welcome
so I'm going to leave it here and I'm just speculating having looked at the mailing list that
the reason Ken isn't here I hope there's nothing no problems at home or anything he may have
forgotten it because I I fail to get the weekly monthly I should say message out to the list
saying Saturday is the recording of the community news and I have no idea why it failed it just
it was sent but it I didn't notice that it never came back to me on the on the list so something
needs sorting out on the mailing list I think so but anyway hopefully this wasn't too tedious with
me rabbiting on uh for getting on towards an hour now I guess hopefully less when I trim off
the uh silence but um anyway I hope you found it useful and uh that's it goodbye
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