Episode: 1566
Title: HPR1566: HPR Community News for July 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1566/hpr1566.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:10:29

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Important HPR announcement recently, our friend, 5150, lost his home that he shares with
his father to a house fire.
Both were able to make it out okay, but he is in the hospital with second degree burns.
His father is elderly and has been moved to assisted care while he is recovering.
A fund-raising campaign has been set up by Daniel Frey which has already raised $1,423.
Please consider donating.
A link is on the main HPR website.
Thank you.
It is Monday 4 August 2014.
This is HPR episode 1566 entitled HPR Community News for July 2014.
It is hosted by the HPR Community and is about 40 minutes long.
You can contact the host by a mailing admin at hackerpublicradio.org or leaving a comment
on this episode.
It is part of the series HPR Community News which is a monthly look at what has been going
on in the HPR Community.
This is a regular show scheduled for the first Monday of the month and is open to anyone
to participate.
The summary is, Dave reviews the happenings for the month with a brief visit from Pegdwell.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15 that is HPR15.
Get your web hosting that is honest and fair at An Honesthost.com
Hello everybody, this is the HPR Community News for July 2014 and I'm Dave Morris and along
with me tonight I have...
I'm Peggwell.
Hey hey.
Hi Peggwell.
That's nice to have you along.
I thought I was going to be completely on my own tonight but I should say the reason
I'm running the show tonight is that Ken, Ken's on holiday, can you believe that?
How is it that he manages to escape from the HPR chains and get away?
I don't know.
But anyway, I said I would stand in for him.
I'm just glad the dude finally took a break.
Yeah, no, no.
He was rushing about anything's finished before he left and I think there was a distinct
air of panic going on there.
So I really got to talk him into sharing this load a little bit more.
He's given me some access to some of the bits of it so maybe he and I can share it a bit
or maybe we can share it out to anybody else who's interested somewhere down the road.
So yeah, it's difficult to put it for it all to be on one guy's shoulders, isn't it?
Yeah, that's why I haven't done an HPR show in a long time.
Yeah, yeah, it's, anyway, it's nice to have you along tonight.
Right, so tonight we have two new hosts to mention and our hosts are Skyner.
I think he pronounces it, not quite sure, hopefully it is, I'm right.
And Mike Ray, and the way we're doing this just as an aside is that our new hosts are
the people who've been released during the month as opposed to people who've got shows
in the queue.
So I thought that that was probably less confusing than the other way around, but just to explain
it.
So have you heard many of the shows on HPR yourself, Pegwell?
I've heard quite a few.
I haven't heard anything lightly because I have been very busy.
Okay, have you heard the last month's at all in any of the things in the last month?
Yeah, not really.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
So let's start with the, we'll go through the shows from from last month and start with
show 1542 on the 1st of July.
And that was CT who's, who was talking to, was interviewing Agnes, who is an IT lawyer.
And she had a particular interest in privacy aspects of things and had some quite interesting
things to say.
Did you hear that one?
I did not.
It, as usual with CT's shows, he does some very good interviews, so it has quite a
skill at interviewing and so we always welcome these.
After this, the next one after this was Ken Fallon, who did one of the traditional shows
what's in my Ag, what's in my toolkit, whatever.
And Ken seems to be carrying around a pretty amazing bag full of one hell of a lot of stuff,
including two laptops as far as I can see.
And multiple raspberry pies.
This guy's a sort of computer center all in himself, the trots around.
One of the good things about this particular show that I like was was all of the links
and documented the various items in a lot of detail.
And it was really quite good to be able to go and follow these up and see what is this,
what is he doing.
So thanks for that Ken.
It was good.
Next was a show 1544, which was from semiotic robotic, who is doing this series of newscasts,
open source news breaks where he's been telling us, giving us various headlines from the
source.com website, some pretty cool stuff going on there and always links to, to take
you there and to read them.
So it's definitely worthwhile to go and have a look at these I find.
Have you followed any of these up, peg wall at all?
Obviously not peg wall stepped away for a moment.
No problem.
Next we had a hooker with another in the series of Beaver Office shows.
I'm hopping about between two tabs here and not doing a very good job of it, so if you
wonder why I'm sort of sensitive, I've lost myself, it's probably because I have slowly.
The series is developing very well.
He's talking now about Leaver Office Calc, which is a pretty impressive bit of software
I would say and on some trading at the moment, particularly on charts and graphs.
I've used charts and graphs in this thing and struggled a bit.
I certainly find that a hooker's controlled and steady stepwise working through this
stuff is really quite helpful.
Begg will ask if he can interrupt for a second just to mention it, another thing.
So just take a moment to do that.
Very recently, a HPR contributor and co-host of the Colonel Panic All Cast and various
other shows has suffered through a little bit of tragedy, his house burnt down.
He, him and his dad escaped, but so we have started a GoFundMe campaign for $51.50.
So if normally I don't come on to things to go give this person money or something like
that, but the guy could probably use it.
So if you want to give him like 10 bucks, I'm sure that would mean a lot.
So please check out the GoFundMe link and just give what you can.
Thanks Begg.
Well, that's great.
I did.
I prepared some notes for this particular show and in there, I've put some a section on
the mailing list discussions and have made reference to this particular thing with a link
to a damn prize campaign page.
So people will be able to follow the notes to find that particular thing.
So yeah, yeah.
Thanks a lot for that.
Okay.
Pegwell's going to step away now.
So thanks very much for that.
So next in the shows for this month, last month, I should say, it's August now, was
1546, which was the last community news show, which some sort of thing, community news,
one hour, 35 minutes.
That was followed by 1547 from David Whitman, which was a show he'd reserved for his birthday,
which was August the, I would July the 8th.
And it was entitled My Linux Experience Birthday Special.
So this was a very interesting show, starting with Reminiscence of a particular cake that
his mother made, sounded great.
And some history of how he had got into Linux.
So I love these shows and I particularly like the idea of doing a birthday show.
I think nice if more people were able to do that type of thing.
Next we had 1548, which was Peter 64's show on Tools for Home Automation.
And this was Peter and Jonathan NATO talking about, to some extent, about accessible computing,
but also about some of the possibilities in the various items of software for automating
your home.
Assuming that Peter's heavily into this type of thing, which sounds very, very cool,
the, some of the pointers there I found quite intriguing.
I always wanted to do this, but never quite got around to doing it.
So there were some good pointers there for following his lead.
Next, Curtis Adkins, C-Prompt, which is a show called Cool Stuff Part 1, is talking about
a bunch of items that he's classified as Cool, and I very much agree with him.
I was talking about Beyond Pod, and you are listening to site and particularly full
device, a wallet ninja tool, and finishing off with a reference to band that he was a
member of.
So that was, that was good.
I enjoyed that.
1550, show 1550 saw the next in JWP's series on file systems.
This one was about the EXT 3 and 4 file systems, sure we've all used.
These are, these are a good pointers to stuff about file systems.
It makes me want to go and dig deeper.
You show notes would have been helpful, perhaps in a few links, but to, to appreciate the
fact that this is, this is being done as a, it's up to, to people about what's out there
in terms of file systems.
So 1551 was, you host Skyners talk on Bitcoin mining.
He was describing how he had created a Bitcoin mining system, went into quite a lot of detail
about what, what this consisted of.
It's an interesting subject, and there's quite a lot of useful points there, and it was
a very detailed talk.
Again, I would have quite liked a few more notes personally, just to give you some better
idea of what, what the parks were, what the bits were, but good luck, good luck in running
this and make, yeah, make a lot of money that way.
So 1552 was the next in the series from semiotic robotic.
This particular one, he points at an article where Mark Johnson was interviewed.
Mark Johnson, I hadn't quite realised, was, was involved with the open source.com people.
And this is the same Mark Johnson as involved with, no, I'm sorry, not really excited
to lose.
UUPC, podcast, and is also involved with organising, I'll camp this year.
So that, that sounds mostly true.
I hadn't realised Mark was based in Oxford, so obviously why I'll camp, it's going to
be there this year.
So that was, next we had another contribution, show 1553 from Tuxjam.
This was show 33 and a third.
How we got into Linux, where both Andrew and Kevin were talking about their road to Linux.
And I thought this was a brilliant show, I really enjoyed this.
Very different experiences, the two hosts on the, on the way to Linux.
The terrible Irish accent at the end, that's very funny.
The next show was 1554, which was audio book club, where the, the, the, the crown conspiracy
audio book was, it was discussed.
Now I've not been personally following these.
I did start listening to this particular one, but I just don't seem to have the time
to, to, to listen through to, to books like this.
I think I've probably listened to too many podcasts to, to really participate in this,
but they, they did a really amazing job of reviewing this book.
They also mentioned coming up soon would be reviews of two more books from contributors
to HPR, particular in the notes here is mentioned, Street Candles from Nostin Bronx soon.
So 1555 saw next in a hooker's series, the 33 in his, the Ibrafus calc series in talking
about charts and graphs, it was followed by 1556 from thisleweb looking at tools for
screenplay writing.
So this is, this is an area that I know nothing about, never, but really being a writer.
quite surprising how sophisticated these things sound in terms of how they guide you with the
production of scripts. But it's quite a fascinating insight, I thought. Next we heard Ahuka again
in his series on Privacy and Security, talking about encrypting email on Android and managing
keys and so forth. This he was talking here about the K9 Android client and APG. Now I know a lot
of people have got into this. Personally I haven't, I do have an Android phone but I haven't
particularly wanted to read my mail through K9 but I think maybe it's something I should be looking at.
But this was very timely. I only talk about show 1558 from Christopher M Hobbes was entitled Lunch
Breaks where he was talking about using lunch break to get away from lunch room or from the desk or
cafe or wherever and get out and do some exploring around location or in your location or wherever.
A very interesting idea, actually very nicely put together and well thought over thought.
I certainly worked in the city of Edinburgh and always used my lunch break, I don't work,
I don't work anymore, I'm retired but I always used my lunch break to get out and look around
Edinburgh, find out more about it which is an interesting city. But I've never done things quite
like this of looking at stealth urban exploration as an interesting concept. Next we had a contribution
from Nightwise, show 1559, he was talking about that decision that you need to make sometimes
to whether to buy you the new gadget or if you reuse what you have already and I do very much
agree with that philosophy, not being one for buying stuff when I don't have to, I live in
Scotland, Scots are supposed to be quite mean, I don't think it's that, I think it's just good
good practice. So I thought this was a well-reasoned discussion and rather highlighted rather well
the fact that we are under heavy pressure to to check out devices and buy new all the time,
which I do not agree with. Next we had JWP with the next in his file system series which was
on riserfs. If you look up riserfs it's quite a fascinating file system using a journaling approach,
one of the very earliest ones I think available on desktop at least. So it's quite an interesting
thing to find out about. There's lots of information about it. Mike Ray gave us his first show
in 1561, how I got into accessible computing. Mike was telling us about his own position,
visually impaired and some of the software that's available to assist with this and other
accessibility issues. The main thing I came away with from this was that Mike seems to be a really
busy guy and it's really good to hear from him and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him. I know
he's got another show coming up next week so thanks Mike, very good show. 1562 next from Sigflop
was one of these shows that came away from feeling a little bit stunned. She was telling us about how
to produce Android applications by cross-compiling on Linux system. It's very impressive. It's
really detailed stuff as always and definitely deserves deeper examination. I've had a quick look at
the various files that she's the two files that she's offered up here. See if I could make
her a tale of them and I think it will need a lot more thought than I've given to it so far
to fully understand what she's doing but wow thanks for this very good. MrX was next doing us a show
1563 starting programs that boot on the Raspberry Pi and this was a discussion about how to amend
the file etcrc.local call it etc. He also seems to call it Etsy but there you go. Anyway rc.local
is the one of the chain of files that gets run at boot time and he's using it as a means of
starting up long running tasks such as instance of a mixer which re-roots audio output to the
headphone socket. He starts up a diddy wiki instance. He runs a screen session chicken attached to.
That's actually very cool. I was quite impressed with that. I need to think more about this
completely thought about that the business of doing that it's got multiple sleeps so that although
the three tasks are being fired off one after the other they wait different amounts of time so that
they don't run in parallel which don't quite see why. What's wrong with running them in parallel?
Do they actually trample on one another if they do run parallel? Be interested to know what the
the reasoning for that is. Maybe on a Raspberry Pi they would interact with one another.
Not really see why they should. Anyway it's just one of these things that I'm intrigued by
which is a good reason that I can't see here but anyway it's a fascinating show thanks for it
stir ex it was certainly food for thought. Last in the month series we had show 1564 from
semiotic robotic doing another list of headlines for the open source comm site. I
must admit I haven't actually had the chance to follow these up but I do try and go and look
follow his links after listening to the show because the the open source comm site is
it's well worth the read it's got some excellent articles on it so that's this month's show's
rather rushed through I'm afraid it's hard to have a conversation when it's just the one of you
talking about these things. So in previous months we've followed this with a quick review of what's
been happening on the mailing list. Now one of the things I've been doing behind the scenes is to
produce various tools and odds and ends to help with the running of things and one of the one of
these is a show note generator for this particular show. I wanted to be able to pull details off the
mailing list so I could do a summary in the notes but it's proved to be quite difficult to do because
well the mailing list is not accessible and is not being archived as a mailman list normally is
and on the g main g main site where everything goes now it's not that straightforward to get the
messages off in an easily workable way but I haven't really looked at it in great detail. Anyway
that's just a preamble to to my quick review of what's been going on. I've included this in the in
the notes so that if you're not a member of the mailing list you can go and look at stuff
meant using the g main link and you might see something in this list that is of interest to you.
If you do follow the mailing list then this will help you help to remind you or you can simply skip
over it. So first item was a hookers interview by semiotic robotic which was highlighted on the list
who could did a nice interview on the open source.com site. Then there was a discussion of
Oddcamp 14 wondering who was going to go to it and whether we could run an HBR table. We do
actually have a reserve table but not quite sure who's going to be able to man it at the moment
did find out through the mailing list who has the table kit as well. Then Ken received a message
from Montana saying that right Montana ethical hackers. We want to broadcast the HBR content
on a show end of the dial hacker radio which obviously the answer was yes. Then the fact that the
mumble server has moved was was mentioned and then there was some discussion about last month's
community news where and other other community news episodes where Ken and I had been
bantering about database design. I was suggesting a way of doing many to many relationships in
the database that runs HBR. So we have shows with multiple hosts and obviously we have
the pool. We have multiple shows for hosts so there's a many to many relationship between hosts
and shows. Ken wants to do it by a method that I certainly don't agree with. Anyway this initiated
a response from Mike Ray who offered and to do a show which is currently sitting in the queue
waiting to go next week. So that was that was great. Thanks Mike for that. Please just find out
that Mike thinks about this the same way that I do. There's quite a lot of discussion on the list
about the audio book club. Talk about the next recordings coming up and the mumble change
and one point discussion about the beads for Austin Bronx's show particular book. I should say
Austin Bronx's book. Then there was a slightly misunderstanding about what have been said on the
last show relating to Jonathan Nadu and Orca which was resolved fairly easily I think. I'm
quite interesting discussion about what's actually going on in the accessibility world as well.
There was a brief discussion about the production of shows in the audio and the use of HTML
or show notes if possible. Then the subject of should we publish the HPR download stats came up
and seems that the consensus is that we should Ken has accepted that and is going to be doing
this as time permits. Then we had 5150's devastating news that he announced to us that
by his house had been burnt down by and pleased us in his father okay but 5150 had got some
burns which needed treatment and as Beggwell mentioned in his flying visit earlier on there is a
fund anything site that's been set up by Dan Fry called help 5150 and I've linked it in the note
so feel that you can contribute anything towards 5150 and getting himself back on his feet again
to do. Then we had another large discussion about the future of the hosting site that HPR runs
on at the moment and Josh Napp who been the administrator behind the scenes really is setting up
his own hosting company called Anonisthost.com link in the show notes to which HPR will be migrating
the website will be migrating there. There is going to be an acknowledgement thank you to
Josh's company in the intro. I think that yes definitely the last few shows that have come out
this month contain this already. Ken has been going through the cute shows and replacing the
intro part and similarly with the outro as a new outro that's been being added. There's quite
a lot of discussion about what this intro and outro are going to contain and there was also a
discussion about the there being a summary of the show after the intro whereby people could determine
whether this was a show they wanted to listen to without actually having to listen to to much of it
all look at the website to find out what it was. The moment I think we're going to be using text
to speech to generate this but it's still pending and I'm not fully up to speed with the details of
this. Finally in the mailing list discussions Ken announced that the new intro outro and template
files are now available. He has generated new show note templates samples because the header the
required header that you need to add to your show notes has been changed and these details are
available in the samples and I explained in a lot of detail on the to pay our site and I've linked
to that. So one of the things that the my script generated show notes doing after I'll
discussion with Ken is to generate a summary of the comments that have appeared on the website
and at the moment we're going to put up these these notes with this summary it's just a one-line
summary per comment so it's not going to use massively complex notes there's no point in having
the full comment in the notes when the comment exists elsewhere anyway but it's maybe useful to
have a pointer to the fact that comments were made because there've been many instances lately where
people have put up shows and had comments about them and have not known that they've been comments
because they've there's not an easy way to know unless you're monitoring the comment RSS feed which
I'd recommend doing if you're into RSS that's what I do to see what's new but having a list of what's
happened in regard to comments in the show notes here seems like a good idea if you think otherwise
then let us know but we're going to go with that for for this this time anyway so I've organized
these the list of comments of which there are 13 in the past month in reverse chronological order
grouped by show number and just go to them fairly quickly firstly there was a comment relating to
show 367 somebody's obviously going going through the show history the archive some form
other which is great this was a show put up originally by by Chad Chad Wallenberg so I think yeah
he sang a song titled Screw You Hacker after his his server had been hacked and this was Georgie
somebody called Georgie who was commenting on the song as me of Richard Stoll and he says
it is interesting then there was a comment about show 1199 from Dan Fry sorry Don Fry not Dan
this was Frank Bell talking about old time radio and Frank got a lot of comments about this over
the time the show was posted back in let me see 2013 early March 2013 this was another comment
I'm not really sure what this is about cannot register forgot password hmm sure that's that's
in relation to maybe Frank understands that next was show 1284 which was John Colp talking about
Lava with Jezra and there was a guy called Ash who had been asking for help with setting this up
and he was a case where it was really hard to know that there was a request for help
through the comments and John wrote back by the comment system some suggestions to Ash 1538
had a comment on it and this was John Colp's show about overhauling the School of Music website
I commented on way back machine and how you can look back through that which is part of the archive.org
to look at snapshots of a website back in time and I used to work for a university here
did use the way back machine quite a lot find some of our awful awful awful websites that we'd
created back in really days of the web might funny to look anyway John came back and said thanks
for the tip does he wants it to go away I don't know whether he's having the same reaction that I did
to some of our ancient websites you nothing about how to make HTML in those days HTML1 and it was
probably and it was die anyway this is the nature of hindsight 1549 was cool stuff part one by
Curtis Edgings that I talked about earlier on and Poki was commenting on it saying cool stuff
and Skyna's show on Bitcoin mining was also commented on by Poki so it was very interesting I think
in front of me here he asked have you made any money yet or something to that effect which is
yes have you made any profit from this yet so it's Poki well question good question and good luck
with that good luck indeed um 1553 was Poki's comment so it goes a comment on show 1553 about
toxic gem episode that should while ago yeah Poki also enjoyed the episode there was a comment
on show 1554 from Colin who I believe submitted a written contribution to the to the review so
he was pleased that his comments were well taken I collins in the UK if I remember right he joined
us on a community news to back and so I think the timing for the audio book club is a bit difficult
for us UK based people I don't think was what the reason he couldn't couldn't make it if you got
work in the morning I think I might have 1858 was a show that got a lot of comments and this was
Christopher M Hobbs show on what he does in his lunch break and people appreciated this mark
waters was was impressed with it Ken said get a recorder portable recorder and get some interviews
with people as you you know as you visit places you're getting tours I think Ken's point was if
you're getting a tour of a place from somebody an impromptu tour then see if you can record it
sounds like a great idea I think it would be a really interesting thing to be listening to I think
okay was very keen on this show as well see somebody who does something very similar and
last was a comment from Beezer who seems to have done a number of these types things and offered
a few hints on how you could look like you have a right to be there if you're going somewhere where
maybe you should a little bit question a little questionable as to whether you should be there
look like you should somebody once told me that if you you know if you look look
part and you know maybe carrying a clipboard maybe it was from times long why when gone by when
people did carry clipboards you had one then you and looked sufficiently official then get away
with a lot never tried it myself and finally there was a comment on show 1563 which was mr x's
show to mention just briefly they're just recently I should say and this was from et alas who made
some suggestions about writing a function to do the the incremental sleep for firing off some of
these background sub shell jobs that Strax was talking about sounds like a good idea so that's
pretty much it in terms of comments it's been a good good number of them this month
there is just one tiny thing to mention before I wind up and under the heading of any other
business I guess if we have that yeah I think we did it one time anyway it said sort of blow my own
trumpet thing to some extent but it's also a an hpr trumpet blowing thing
pew one of the shows I did back in time last year I can't remember which show it was now
was about some scripts I'd written to download stuff from magnatune tune is a is a music site that
I'm a member of and I as part of what I did there I put the scripts up on the guitarius
site as a free download I never got any feedback for the show expect it but it's always nice if
you feel like it feel like you want to say something somebody's done a show then do so because
it can make your day if you get something some comment to the effect that you've done something
that people liked or or even didn't like it anyway this show was I just found it 1204 my magnatune
downloader anyway during July I suddenly got an email out of the blue which was a bug report
and a guy from I think Switzerland was saying there's a problem with your script and I'm getting
his error message it actually turned out it was a problem with magnatune their XML had was faulty
for a particular album the guy was downloading I showed him how to to contact them and get it change
which they did very quickly and he was able to get the the thing that he wanted but it was just
really to say that sometimes the things that we do through HBR have a wider audience than then
you might think I did actually update the scripts on guitarius and I wanted them out to this guy
so they're a little bit more resilient to faults like this in the future so it's nice that I have
one customer of something I produce for HBR so I just thought I'd share that with you because I
thought you might find it either amusing or intriguing okay well that's it thanks for listening
you've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org we are a community podcast
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