Episode: 1152
Title: HPR1152: 2012-2013 Hacker Public Radio New Year Show Part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1152/hpr1152.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 20:07:32

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Music
And we started up again and you're chaining back into part three of what is Haka
Public Radio's New Year show and that's it, Karil.
The main problem with us wishing people in North Korea a happy New Year is that they
won't be able to hear us.
And I hope they release the source code to their Linux distribution and they're currently
violating GPL.
When you read flag, is that what you're talking about?
I think it's red something.
I thought the red flag was Chinese, but it's a red star, that's a Chinese.
Oh right, that's it, yeah.
Which sounds like a great arcade game, doesn't it, Red Star OS?
I think the Red Star Army was the bad guys in that Game Boy game.
I think it was what it was called now, though.
I've got actually red flag on an actual tiny little atom that I bought just Haka on
anything else put on.
For Linux, that's the most commercial version of Linux that I've ever seen because I think
you have to pay to get the repositories.
Red flag or red star?
I mean, this, this, this one that they're, the repose for the version that's on there
are most percated because you go to update, you can't do anything.
And if you hit their website, you can't, you can't get any help on anything unless you
subscribe.
I think red flag was a red hat clone for China.
Yeah, it could just be like the RHN network or something that you need to either uninstall
or, yeah, pay to play.
You can just see Bradley Cooper being overjoyed at being given North Korea as this year's
assignment.
Right.
North Korea's GPL violations that year, that's your target.
They just need to get Class II to switch it up the red hat and celebrate a centauss.
Yeah, yeah.
So Jonathan, um, white man had a follow up question for you and he was an, and actually
I had a question relating to his, but he wants to know if you prefer a, an accessible
GUI environment to a command line, only environment or, or would you rather have just command line
only, but there aren't all the, uh, all the applications you need.
Yeah, that's a good question.
Huh, I've, I've tried to do strictly command line stuff, but like with E-links or like
links and stuff, the problem with that is if there's like logins on websites or like
JavaScript and stuff and none of that works with like E-links or links.
So that's one problem.
I could get by with like, you know, a mail client like Alpine or mutt or whatever, I could
use that, um, pigeon as a command line version called Finch.
So everything in pigeon works in Finch from the command line.
So I could probably do most things from the terminal, but you know, unfortunately there
are some applications that are strictly like GUI based.
So kind of stuck using the GUI, I personally wouldn't care.
I wouldn't use whatever I could get worked on the fastest on.
So if I could get my workflow to strictly command line stuff and not have to do GUI stuff,
I would totally do it.
But it does seem to be potential there.
I mean, if you look at the way we now put in virtual machines, uh, as heads for the
cloud, um, is there potential there to make accessible, um, tech work spaces as, as
cloud environments?
Hmm, yeah, I guess there would be at some point.
You could essentially access a headless environment, like you were saying.
I can see a potential in that.
I shall make a point of, uh, bringing that up, uh, when I get my feet under the type
of the company, I'll make a mention of that to join because, uh, this seems to be
light to you there, doesn't it?
Yeah, definitely.
Is there a distro or a sonar or a distro that you can just pop a CD into a headless
machine and plug in a keyboard in the set of headphones and, and go to work?
Yes.
I believe, uh, I believe the Ubuntu 1204 and 1210, I, for a while, they were requiring
that a monitor was plugged in.
Like if you put the disk in, it wouldn't boot up, but I think as of 12 or 1210, you can
put a disk in, it'll boot off the disk, even if there's an monitor plugged in and, you
know, you'll hear orca talking and you can just walk right through it.
I think that you might have better success with, uh, Puppy actually, because Puppy is compatible
with all the, um, Ubuntu repositories, um, but it's designed to work off a USB disk.
Um, so you, that might be an easier route.
Yeah, that's right.
You can try that.
And, and we're talking about like a server here, not a desktop computer is what I was
asking about.
Oh, um, hmm, I guess there would be a way I could implement a server kind of distribution
where, because I, I know the Debian installer is, uh, really accessible.
So I probably have to figure the way I had to like tie in the Debian installer.
I mean, if I was going to do that, I guess I would just build a total Debian, like server-based
distro with the talking installer and be a lot easier than to try and take a Debian
installer and tie it into good, why does it matter?
Why does it matter?
I don't understand the question, like, if you can get something installed, then you can
turn it into a server.
I mean, who cares if it's got LXDE running in the background, is that taking that many
resources?
Yeah, probably.
I think LXDE takes up like 35 megs or something.
No, I didn't mean to give you a task, John, then I was just wondering if it existed.
Uh, not to my null.
I get, I guess the best bet were to take a, uh, as of the Debian Weezy, uh, net installs.
If you did that, there's an accessible installer net.
So you could just get the net install of Weezy and build up your own server right from
that, if you want to go about that way.
Okay.
Yeah, no, I, no, I, I thought X was fairly heavy, though the client too was why I was asking.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yes, I don't know.
You know, I, for a while, I sort of thought the same thing, and then I, I was talking to
Red Hat back when we had a Red Hat, uh, license or whatever, um, and it seemed like
all the, the support people kind of assumed that you were running X, you know, like every
call I would make, they'd be like, go to this window or something.
And I was like, uh, don't exactly have that.
So I don't know.
Kind of surprised me.
And ever since then, I've, I've kind of, uh, on, on a lot of the, like, the desktop machines
that are acting as servers, I go ahead and install X just, just so it's there.
And it doesn't seem to bother me.
So Clot 2, when you called in, did they refer to you as Mr. Clot 2?
No, no, they, they didn't.
Mr. 2.
Yeah, Mr. 2.
Did you say chivaly?
Did you say chivaly and get transferred to someone with a minimum knowledge of two programming
languages?
Yeah, I've had issues with, with that.
What about, how to feedback, um, is that going to be usual to you at all?
Yeah, it's actually pretty useful on, like, an Android phone where, like, you know, you
drag in your, uh, finger across the screen and it lets you know, like, hey, you're kind
of, like, it vibrates when it lets you know you're kind of in a different region.
So it'll, it'll read to you what you're schooling across as your fingers going across
the screen, but also will give you a little feedback of the phone vibrating or whatever
letting you know, hey, this is a new region of the phone that you're on now.
Maybe I just heard it wrong.
Did you just say it lets you go now?
Exactly.
That's beautiful.
Yeah, I, um, we had a, we had a show, I think it was the accessibility show, right?
Where someone came on and she said her brother was deaf and he couldn't feel his phone
buzzing anymore because of the stupid little haptic vibrators instead of the actual spinning
motor with a weight on it.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe that could be a nice, uh, hacking project for, um, Raspberry Pi if he could, um,
get some low breeze for haptic feedback into, into Pi as well.
Clot 2, you have like a, a mobile like a raspberry Pi, don't you?
No, I'm, I'm working my way there.
I'm, I'm looking at all my options, but I've not actually implemented that yet.
But I'm not, that's not a project I've forgotten about.
He's something we were talking about a year ago, the feedback motors.
I don't know, 50 and 50, what, what about them?
Oh, uh, on, on the New Year's podcast a year ago, wasn't this something that came up,
the, how, how to create feedback motors, what we, what we could use, uh, uh, you know,
could you, could you take one of the little motors out of the vibrating, uh, uh,
razors or something like that to build one?
I don't know what we talked about last year.
I was drinking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know if you can remember that.
Caught to, when was it that, uh, you were working on Red Hat stuff because I've talked to
Red Hat support recently and they didn't expect that I was running X on any of the servers
I was working on.
It was almost exactly a year ago.
And also I only ever dealt with like the first tier support.
So I don't know if you, we had a very basic academic license.
So we got, I feel like we got people, and I've said this before,
it felt like I was talking to people, it felt like I was talking to myself.
Like they knew exactly as much as I did.
It was really kind of interesting and kind of cheered me up because I was like,
I could be working at Red Hat.
I know, I, I know that much about Linux at this point.
Nice.
So were they, were they just assuming that you had a rack of servers with a KVM switch on it?
Or what, what, I don't know.
I didn't exactly ask what they imagined I was doing, but that's kind of how it felt.
Yeah.
That's, that's weird because I've run into managing servers remotely,
just like in systems engineering, where I would just SSH into it and work on it that way.
And I figured that that was the normal way that most people did it.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's what I thought.
You know, I mean, that's how I manage my servers and that's kind of the,
the little bit of training on servers that I, the formal training that I've had.
That's that, that was the assumption there as well.
So I was really surprised when they kept like literally two or three phone calls that I made.
That it was, it was very consistent.
They would always refer to, you know, where, where to go in the GNOME desktop,
to find that system setting or the system config, you know, thing.
And I was like, well, I don't have X, but I'll, I'll bring that up, you know,
in incurses or whatever.
So yeah, I was, I was a little bit surprised by it myself.
Well, I think that the thing there is that the red hat,
when they actually offer their training, actually shows you how to do everything
under the GNOME desktop and X, whereas those was who've actually been admitting
for a while, actually always do everything from the command line and through a shell.
And so, you know, it's really, depending on what level of support you get,
it's going to depend on what they think your level of knowledge is and that's going
to basically dictate how they actually handle your stuff, especially if you have a support
contract that you actually have an account representative and stuff like that.
They're not going to assume that you're running an X server on your server.
Yeah. And like I, I, I know that I got, I was at the bottom run for, for support,
for sure. Like I just, I got that, I mean, they were very, they were great.
I would have renewed the license if it had been up to me, because they always had,
like, they would always have that one idea that I hadn't had yet, or they would,
they would know about one tool that I didn't know about, you know, so it was definitely worth it.
And it was great. I really enjoyed it, but I definitely felt like I was getting people
who were just barely ahead of me in their knowledge.
One thing to do with Red Hat, this is a little hint for anybody who has like a basic
contract or anything. If you run a sauce report and attach that to any ticket that
you open with them for their support, that will actually get you a little bit further
with them, because as soon as that's there, they're going to try to analyze that.
And that might help you get past this. Oh, do you have X install type thing?
Cool. Yeah, this was me interfacing with Red Hat as an engineer for corporation.
So I'm guessing that this wasn't level one support or lower level.
Whichever way you want to go on the support chain.
Yeah. We had two, we had two licenses.
One was the, the, just the really, really super basic one that was for one building.
And then in the other building, I had it licensed just the academic one,
which was like, I think self-support only so you could sign into the knowledge base.
I don't think I could make calls.
So I got it, those were the two levels I was at.
I never, never really got elevated anything beyond that.
And that's fine with me, because if I'd had to go higher than that, then that meant
my problem was very serious. It was always just silly stuff that I'd overlooked.
You didn't just, every time you talk to them, be like, so you're still using RPM, huh?
It wasn't just that every time.
Did I troll them? No, I did not.
I chose not to do that.
Not so much trolling. It's more of a griefing thing, you know, but you guys,
you people, you people have, you have RPM issues that I've never had.
I mean, I just, I don't have that experience.
I don't have that negative, uh, coral, uh, that negative association with RPM.
I just hasn't happened to me.
I've run into problems in the past and, uh, I just recently after hearing your,
uh, podcast about, uh, Slack, where I give it a try.
And it's been really pleasant, especially knowing, uh, about all those Slack builds.
And once you get everything up and running, it's pretty good.
I like the fact that it has like a base install of all the packages you need to
basically get the work done from the beginning.
So getting the Slack builds up and running doesn't require you to go download
and install all the other stuff.
Yeah, I, I mean, and that solves your RPM issue too.
But yeah, I mean, I, I love, I think with Slack builds on, and, and, and
Slackware being such a robust installation in the first place, you're,
you're pretty set up pretty quickly from the get go.
I, I like their model a lot.
That was a two to two to Slackware.
I wouldn't be here even because that's, that was the very first distro I ever found.
Like 12 years ago.
I started out on soos, but it ended up being so unstable.
Then I found Slackware and it just booted up right to the shell.
And I was sort of forced to learn how to do the command line, how to compile
packages and do most of the, the stuff from the command line and it even
configure X and all that back then, it was problems with audio.
So I had to try to configure also the right way.
And only would able to have one audio stream working at the same time.
So it was, uh, get your hands, uh, you know, dirty doing all the stuff,
but you learned a lot.
I came through an original route.
I came through the, um, lint spy route.
That's where we're going to empire.
No, not really.
Oh, yeah, Sandra or whatever it is.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So you liked it enough to stick with Linux, I guess.
How'd you like it?
Like in general?
And they, they had some of the ideas like they, um,
uh, their repositories were all set up through a web interface,
uh, long before that was popular, um, so they got into the app store idea,
which made, um, uh, making it usable, very easy, um, uh,
and that was before a bunch who went quite some mainstream and that's where
I went to after, um, lint spy started, uh, collapsing.
Yeah, see, now this is an interesting question that you bring up because, um,
like, I mean, I think that idea is great.
Having the repository interface be like, I don't know, web based or,
at least look web based, like, you know, pretty with big buttons and icons and
text that you can read.
I have yet to find a repository interface that I think is worth any good.
You know, I mean, I would much rather deal with repositories on the command
line than ever deal with any of the gooey ones that I've, I've seen so far.
Is it just me or am I just not looking in the right place?
How do people feel about that?
What about synaptic?
Oh, my gosh, I hate that.
I hate synaptic.
Really?
Really?
Yeah, maybe I haven't used it lately.
But I mean, my only memory of it is that it would have, you know,
you would search for something that would bring up a bunch of things that were
not relevant as the top hits and you'd click on them and they'd just, like,
no pretty icons for the new user to kind of like, yeah, that's what I want.
A word processor.
I know that's a word processor because there was a piece of paper on it and a pin.
You know, I don't know.
It just didn't strike me as visually fun.
Mints for three more.
It's just a synaptic is just always seems slow to me.
Of course, probably it's because my low bandwidth because the first thing it does
before you before it even comes up is do an update.
But I have the same experience as claw two.
I never could find what I wanted it.
I was, was a lot better off if I didn't know what it was.
I wanted to install to Google search and find the package and then just do it through app
yet.
Okay.
Now, but what you said there, Clature didn't make sense to me because you said that
dealing with repositories in the graphical user environment was problematic for you.
And that's, I think that's why everybody said synaptic because dealing with,
you know, repose there is great.
But you're actually talking about looking for software in the repositories.
And that's maybe a little bit of a different story.
Oh, I'm, yeah, no, I'm an inter, yeah, I'm in browsing repositories.
Are you saying you thought I meant adding and removing repositories?
Yeah, adding, removing and managing them is pretty easy and synaptic.
Sorry.
Yes, you're right.
I agree with you.
Yeah, no, I meant browsing.
Oh, yeah, probably more specifically.
I'm really talking for that mythical new user who I guess I'll never actually have to deal
with, but I still think I will.
Oh, yeah, then I think Ubuntu's got it.
They're, they're, I forget what it's even called.
I haven't used it in a while, but is that it?
Yeah, for browsing, that might be the best one.
I meant, I was going to say Mint has taken the software center and I think there's is nicer.
Simply for the fact that it's less complicated, it's less, you know, they've simplified the
idea and they've baked it down to something which is much less complicated at face value.
Okay, I'll have to look at Mint and I guess Ubuntu's just, I'm just always curious to see
these.
Yeah, I wouldn't bother Clattery.
I don't think you're the target audience mate.
Yeah, you're probably right.
So, but let me ask you though, because you said you'd rather have the command line version,
but how is that help the new user?
Because you're not going to get icons or anything there either.
Yeah, I guess I'm speaking as two different people.
I'm speaking as the sort of nagging conscience thinking, oh, we need to have pretty things
for new users and then what I actually want for myself, which is completely the opposite.
So, yeah, you're right, that makes no sense.
Yeah, I think I find that the best browser for me is Firefox or Iceweezer when I'll
just search for a package on the Debbie and they've got a pretty good search online
search for their repos and then I'll read the description there and then I'll just install
it on the command line.
Oh, that's an interesting way to do it.
Sort of split it into two.
One thing that I don't think any of the software managers or package managers or anything
you've done, and we found this out in tech and coffee earlier this week is equivalency
to Windows and Mac popular software.
The classic example that popped up was if you were looking for a GUI HTML, a whizzy
week kind of thing, and trying to find one of those that's equivalent to the popular ones
like Dreamweaver or whatever you use in the Windows environment, that's very tricky and nobody's
really got a handle on that yet as far as I can see.
But that's what I'm saying, is that not the job of the package manager or the GUI wrapping
around the package manager, I think that's small, the job of the social web and people
recommending it, and so you're just going to Google.
That's fine if you're hooked into those networks.
Yeah, I think the whole idea, that's one of the reasons for Ubuntu doing their software
center thing is to actually go ahead and give the newer users the quick way to find the
most equivalent applications to fit their needs, and I kind of have some issues with that
in some respects, because I think a lot of times there are applications that they're promoting
over other ones that maybe aren't as good, but by the same token, I think that's the
general idea, and maybe that's the right thing for a distro-like Ubuntu to do.
Yeah, possibly.
I don't know how their algorithms work for how they rate their software, but is it just
done within Ubuntu software center, or do they pull data sources from elsewhere, I don't
know?
Well, it's always going to be a wisdom of soul, I think, because which one is the correct?
Take the bog standard text editor issue, which do you recommend as the best Unix text editor,
and then you get into the whole fi emax blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
I think.
Yeah, but I think that's slightly different, because your average new user would imagine
would use something like jet it or mouse pad or something, they're not going to be looking
for them, are they, or are they, I don't know?
No, they're not, even GVM, they couldn't handle, I mean, it's just not something that a new
user does.
Actually, there is a version of them that is designed for general users that doesn't
actually force you to use the command line or anything like that.
You can actually do everything through shortcut keys, I forget what the name of it is, but
it is actually there, so it could be used.
I say the same thing about emax, those sound chaser, and because there's, I mean, gooey
for emax, it can be done, but I just think people, I don't know, I think there's a lot
of just preconceived things of how things should work, and if it doesn't work that way, then
they can't deal with it.
Yeah, it's surprising the issues that new users have.
I mean, I introduced a friend of mine who was a long time Windows user to move onto a
little while ago, and he just wanted to get a Linux distribution working on an old laptop
that he had, so we could have a poke around, and one of the buffers he hit into straight
away was with his scanner.
He wanted to scan a few old photographs that he had in, and he said, my scanner doesn't
work with it, and I said, how do you know it's not working?
And he says, well, I plugged it in, and I couldn't see any of the driver's packages installed,
and I couldn't see the scanner interface, and I couldn't get across to him.
You don't need one.
You just open the, well, probably GIMP would probably be the way he wants to go.
You just open GIMP, and just grab the scanner from there, and it's all integrated, and
there is no middleware, and there is no thing.
So it's not necessarily a problem with Linux, it's just a different way of working that needs
to be explained to maybe a little bit more clearly in the GUI.
Oh, I think you've just summed up most issues with Linux.
I mean, at this point, I mean, I honestly don't, I mean, the fact that we all use Linux
all the time, I don't think there are that many problems with Linux as we're using a user
environment at this point, it's just, it's literally just that people grow up on other
stuff and can't adjust to the idea that it might be different on another platform.
It's actually hurting Linux in this case because it is too good and you don't need drivers
externally.
That was the weird thing, the fact that it hasn't got a whole raft of middleware that you
have to install to get things working, it just could become very alien to them, and this
was an argument I was having about recommendations on packaging, you know, where you get the
little works with Mac symbols on boxes and works with Windows 7 and works with Windows 8 and
stuff.
This is, it doesn't, that's the thing, what you actually have when they say supported
by Windows or made for Windows is we've got the middleware hack fixes in the box.
So why don't they make works with Linux on it because that's if you're lucky because
nowadays they don't even do that, they don't do it in the box, you still have to go to
the website and get all the fixes that they've discovered since they shipped the thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you just go, no, it doesn't work with Windows and you can hopefully get it hacked together
to work with Windows 8.
Yeah, I spent a good two hours over Christmas break discovering what you're talking about
right now, something that advertises itself to work on a computer platform that I don't
use and it just would not, it didn't work.
I actually bought a raid card about four or five months ago and it said, it said that
it supported Linux 2.6 at a minimum, it was like Linux 2.6 plus and I just had plugged
it in and I just booted to Ubuntu server and it worked immediately and I was just like,
oh, and like I was sort of taking a back that they had actually, you know, thought to make
that work just out of the box.
Yeah, but I work on the other day, creative one and it actually says just works with Linux.
It doesn't even have a qualification about, you know, which distro you need or anything
just as works with Linux and plugged it in and it works with Linux.
It's lovely.
That's your all on about how brilliant Linux is, I spent a whole afternoon trying to
configure a printer from my mother and I know who was on Mint and I could not get the
thing to work and beat my head against the wall.
What brand of printer was it?
Well, actually what happened was her printer was under the desk and every time I plugged
it in, there was a pop-up coming up in the screen and the pop-up was gone by the time
I came back.
So by the time I finished it, all I had to do was press the print button, everything
was already configured, new where I was, everything was enabled for, it was just the pop-up
button that disappeared that microseconds longer than it took me to get from under the
desk back up to see what was happening on the screen.
Actually, which version of Mint we use in there, Ken?
I have no idea.
I was going to say because I am becoming a massive evangelist for Linux Mint because it's
the latest version especially is just brilliant.
They've introduced this new thing on the little, I don't know whether you're supposed to
call it a taskbar or a tray or whatever you call it these days.
It's, they've changed a little thing in the notifications where all the notifications
don't just disappear once they've gone through Debus.
They actually sit there, almost like an email inbox, so that if you've missed a notification
you can click on the notifications and it lists all the ones that you haven't acknowledged.
It's brilliant.
I think you could do that in KDE already.
Yeah.
That's probably where they got the inspiration for it's only annoying.
No, it's not.
But they've now got it.
Fight, fight, fight.
You and your cute razor stuff, you're all anti KDE now, that's a nice feature.
No, it's terrible.
Well then turn it off, it's in the config panel thing, system settings.
Or could I just add it to a database that I don't need on anymore?
Yeah, well, yeah, there's that.
There's an alternate one that works more like the one on Unity that you could install.
They basically made it whole modular, so you could replace the whole notification system
for a different one if you want.
And the other thing we've meant that I was going to say was when I installed this latest
version is it 14 now, but yeah, I have a HB wireless printer and as soon as I booted
up for the first time, it just automatically configured the printer on the wireless network.
I was like, wow, that's very cool.
How did you handle the passwords for your wireless network or is it unsecured?
Well, I was connected, my main PC is connected to the wireless network on Hardline, so obviously
it's got a cat5 cable into the router.
The printer was already connected to the wireless network securely.
So when it found another thing on the network, it just said, oh, there's a printer, lovely,
you can go have that.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.
How did you get your printer to connect wirelessly with the password?
Because every wireless printer I've tried to hook up, it wants you to use some Microsoft
program to put your key in.
This one had one of those old, so add a red button on the router and a red button on the
actual printer as well.
Oh, that thing, yeah.
Why if I protected setup?
That's the baby.
Isn't that thing supposed to be terribly insecure?
Yes, it is.
I actually use it to crack people's Wi-Fi all the time, whenever they lose their stuff
or can't get to it.
Is that the thing that shows up when you're out and about and it says HP setup or something
like that?
Yes, it's always.
Yeah, okay.
Is Linux meant still a derivative of Ubuntu or are they transitioning away from that
more?
Both.
They have their main distro is still based on Ubuntu.
They have a side distro as well, which is the Debian addition.
I thought the Debian addition was kind of dead with the main dev of that moving over
and running a solace OS.
Your information sounds like it might be newer than mine then.
I've not looked at the Debian addition for a little while now.
Yeah, I've heard that, I mean, I've known a couple of people who have tried the Debian
version and by and large, they didn't seem overly impressed with it.
I think it seems like it's a safer bet to go with the Ubuntu based one.
Well, yeah, I mean, the main thing I certainly found with the Debian addition is I couldn't
find what I added to Debian that wasn't already in Debian.
So if you want a Debian addition, just get Debian.
Philip, would you like to talk?
Hello.
Why would that even run a distribution based on Debian?
That isn't Debian.
I don't know, really.
Maybe added Polish Ubuntu is based on Debian.
If you wanted a better default, so different defaults, different installer, if you wanted
a different sort of package, if you wanted KD as a default desktop, or maybe if you wanted
maybe a little more current KDE packages, because Debian is a little slow with that.
And the 4.0 transition was kind of rough, so you wanted the latest one.
It might want to have one that has the Debian core packages, but KDE has its own different
repository that's part of your distro.
Yeah.
Someone, I think they emailed, it was an email message to me, and they were basically saying,
thank you for working all crunch bang and stuff.
And they said something which kind of stuck with me, and that was the Debian, it's an absolutely
fantastic system.
It's almost as if it's a communist state, and they imprisoned all their artists, and
basically, you know, so what you get with Debian is pretty much what the upstream want
you to have.
They do very, very few changes, so, you know, in a similar fashion to how Ubuntu started
and they just made Ubuntu look nice and aimed at users, I think that's what you get downstream
from Debian.
You get that little bit of added polish, which is you may be lacking Debian, but I don't
think I'm not saying that as a negative to Debian, because that's what I love about Debian.
I think it's just...
It's sort of like a rock that the rest of the community is tied to, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so, definitely.
And then how in some of that is Debian any different than Slackware from what I hear from
a lot of, you know, die hard Slackware guys that, you know, or even, you know, Slackware
more so in some cases that it's even more vanilla than Debian.
Yes, Slackware is pretty much vanilla, but I use KDE and I like the oxygen looking
feel and the air theme for the plasmoid, so I'm pretty happy with the way it looks.
To be honest, I don't think you can have too many rocks to be tied to, you know, it's
kind of reassuring that there are these very stable distros and, but importantly, more
than one of them, so you've got different directions to go in if you want to.
But I guess the biggest point I'll come back to with Linux meant for me is, why do these
guys keep tying their ship to Ubuntu?
I mean, it just seems like more trouble than it's worth with as much as they're starting
to separate themselves from Ubuntu, unless it's just they don't have the developer resources
to do some of the things that just letting Ubuntu handle form is easier.
I think that's right, but I think that's maybe a little bit harsh on Ubuntu in that we
have a tendency, I think, in the community to forget just how much good work they do underneath
the interface. So if you take Unity out of the equation and then look at the sum of what
Ubuntu adds to Linux as a whole, that's a very big body of work that needs to be done.
I think that's why they do it is because they want to create an every man system, which
goes in a slightly different direction at the interface level, but still has all the
good work that Ubuntu does.
I mean, just install Ubuntu Server and you'll see that, I mean, that's a great piece
of software.
Amen.
Debian is a great piece of software on the server.
That's true.
I'm kind of a fan of CentOS on the server side of things.
Yeah, I just like my operating system to be less binary in that.
What do you do if Microsoft happens to distribute what you want and need, but you haven't got
any choices if you hooked into that toolchain and it doesn't do what you want or need?
That's what it's all about, freedom from that.
Going back to the Mint Ubuntu thing, I think I'm not sure how much of it stems from
the Ubuntu installer because I think the Ubuntu installer is ubiquity.
That's probably one of the better installers on the market and I think they do a really
good job at that, so I'm not sure how much of Mint being based on Ubuntu is purely
down to the fact that the install is so good.
Yeah, both installers I've found have been extremely good and they're still pushing on
that front as well.
Yeah, they're constantly developing ubiquity and it's in comparison to, because for Crunchbang,
I use the standard Debian installer, so it doesn't run for way that.
You can run from a live environment, but it's best not to, let's put it like that.
In comparison to ubiquity, I would imagine for a new user, it looks quite clunky.
It's not.
It's really powerful and you can do lots of stuff and you can precede it and make it
pretty much doing anything you want, but from a user standpoint, I don't think there's
any real comparisons.
I think ubiquity is head and shoulders above pretty much everything else.
Out there.
I think the Mint developers probably know that and that's why they're happy to stick with
Ubuntu.
I've also got the added proprietary stuff.
In comparison to Debian, things like installing Nvidia cards on Debian can be a bit of a
pain in the ass for some people, especially new users, but Ubuntu, they've pretty much
got it down to a fine art where it's just a couple of clicks of a button and it's done
for you.
There's also one thing that gets underrated and forgotten about is the wooby thing from
Ubuntu as well.
That's brilliant.
If you're trying to convert a Windows enthusiast over that, I think it's very easy.
I think they've stopped.
They've stopped actually stopped developing that, I think.
They've stopped developing it, but it still just works.
It does do a very good job.
For anyone who's wanting to check things out, I just point a virtual box anymore.
I've just kind of started telling people that who have an interest in trying it, that
I think a dual boot is kind of a dangerous situation to get involved in.
I've been a fan of the dual boot.
If you set it up properly, that's the whole thing.
It's kind of tricky to get it all set up.
I have been burned on a dual boot because of printer drivers once.
I've just, I've worn, you know, I just think virtual box is a better choice.
I would agree with that mainly.
I've just put one little caveat in that I've only ever been burned on dual boot when
I've tried to install a Ubuntu first or, you know, Linux first and then Windows second.
And that sort of indicates to me the benefits of a Linux system because you, Linux will
play nicely with virtually anything else which has to be installed, whereas Windows doesn't
want to know that it's been installed alongside everything else.
You have to sort of go in around it.
What about big Windows updates?
Does that ever clobber your...
I'll tell people to do for a dual boot is to put a second hard drive in their machine
and to use the boot option or the boot from option through their BIOS.
Yeah, that's probably a really good alternative if they have a second drive back.
You also install to SD card which works pretty well as SD card.
I've got a Windows 7 installation on an SSD playing alongside a mint installation perfectly fine
and haven't had any problems with that yet.
It's just if you try and tell it and go through all the, you know, the registration key and
license key installations on a new Windows installation where there's already a Linux installation,
that's where you get the problems.
Sounds like the problem isn't dual booting but Windows.
That's what I was alluding to, definitely.
That's one thing I definitely do not miss like having to do with all those licenses and
registration.
I just never had that since using GNU Linux.
Hasn't everybody forgot about a live CD to we want to forget.
Oh no, I don't I love live CDs.
Yeah, me too, I absolutely need them, but the people I've dealt with are typically just
savvy enough that they understand how to do some things and a live CD the couple times
I put people in front of it, it kind of throws them because it's running a lot lower than
they think it should be and I've actually seen better performance running something inside
a virtual box than off a live CD and it gives them the option to be able to install things,
play with things and a little better than a virtual or than a live CD will.
Hey, Lord D, can you increase your mic volume just a little bit?
You're coming across very low, probably lower than me even.
Turn it all the way up to the level.
All I can do is try to eat the one a little better.
I use virtual box at work.
I've got a, the host machine is a Windows 7 machine and I run crunch banging a virtual
system on top of that.
I've got dual monitors and it works brilliantly.
In fact, if you didn't know otherwise you wouldn't, you'd be mistaken to think that it
runs on the bare metal, it's pretty quick, so I love virtual box.
I think it's brilliant.
Is that why I use Qemoo?
Yeah, that's what I use.
Yeah, I'll use that for testing crunch banging images, but I'm not self-finished burning
them.
Do you use a GUI wrapper around it or do you configure it directly?
It just runs for a shell script.
I just type it into the shell.
Does anyone remember KQEMU and whatever exactly happened to that whole thing exactly?
I think it's still around.
Yeah, pretty quickly.
I got used to all the line commands, although now they've changed them a little bit, but you
just get used to that and then you don't really need the GUI wrapper anymore.
Did you do a show on that or no?
I thought I did.
On the nightcast with Nightwise talking about Proxmox, I was just KQEMU was a kernel module
for QEMU that sped it up, and I just wondered if KQEMU became KVM or something, or if that's
something completely different.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No.
QEMU can use KVM now, for sure.
I didn't know that's what you were.
I thought KQEMU was a GUI wrapper or something.
Now for sure, advertising break joints, virtual solutions can use KVM.
I thought you didn't work for them yet, Black Crow.
Starting early.
Early, that's just the worm.
I feel like we should forward this to whoever your manager is going to be in order to get
some points with you.
I was pitching to Airbus about how he could use virtualised toolchains to replace redundant
equipment.
I already got that one sorted.
Do you do like Unix stuff now at your current job, Black Crow or Linux or what?
Yeah.
I finished with Airbus on the 21st of December, and what I was doing then was using Unix
boxes to take surveys of all their licensing arrangements.
So I'd surveyed the entire company once every 15 minutes to see who was using what tools.
That's where it was before.
That is oddly similar to what I do, Black Crow.
Yeah, it's becoming a very popular field.
I mean, when you're talking about, say, a KTSE costing somewhere in the region of 5,000
pounds per seat per year, you have to know how many of them are being used.
Same by a rewatch, Jurassic Park.
Saw the scene where they said it's a Unix system.
Oh, yes.
That's actually the only part of Jurassic Park I've ever seen.
It was on YouTube.
You should watch it.
You should watch it.
I'd rather go back and watch the movie or read the book, I mean.
But what about the part where the philosopher actors open doors?
That's in the book as well.
We don't get to see it.
We actually had a lady called Sue who was deeply eccentric.
She just wandered around the place.
She's only about four foot high.
She just wandered around the place with a sort of hunchback, mumbling to herself, and
she was the IBM mainframe controller.
Oh, nice.
That's hilarious.
What did the mainframes run on, do you know?
Yeah, X, probably, maybe, I'm guessing.
Sue, carried them around on a back.
Yeah, I think that's what the hunch was.
And it was very strange.
It was like, oh, she keeps hold of the dinosaur enclosure.
She was like me.
Burned it up was a bit of a Unix, though.
Yeah, X.
I'm sure somebody will Google it from too busy writing scripts of the minute, but it
was an experimental version of Unix that they were running there.
If you're talking about in Jurassic, actually, I'm pretty sure that was irx.
They had a 3D file manager, that was a weird FSN, go to wikipedia.org, FSN, FoxTrots
here on November.
Wonder what they were using for the login manager.
Actually, if we're going to go old school, what was the system that they were running in
wall games with Matthew Broderick?
That film was on today, I think.
Oh, cool.
That was like a mainframe operating system, like a PDP operating system, I believe.
It was a one something, p slash pm or something like that.
Oh, CPM.
Well, okay.
So the machine that in Matthew Broderick's room is actually an old MSI, I am S-A-I,
8080 machine, which was just an S100 bus that you plug the CPU card into.
It's typically had an 8080 processor, and yeah, they did run CPM on them, which was,
which actually was a digital computing product at one point, and that's actually the operating
system that DOS was based on.
I've done going to geek heaven.
I am reading right here that it's actually called I Am DOS, the version in war games.
It's a modified version of CPM.
Oh, okay.
Well, that could be.
One of my first, one of the first machines I ever worked on was actually one of those
MSI, 8080 boxes, and I got to play with the toggle switches on the front panel and
try to program it that way.
It was never successful, but it had fun trying to do it.
That's what's missing from computing these days is there's not enough switches and little
flashy lights.
I missed them.
One of the more interesting file system or file system managers I ever saw was actually
a version of the original doom, where you could run around and shoot things inside of
the game that represented files, and when you shot it, it would delete the file.
Can I just stop everyone just to say happy new year to China and Beijing, Hong Kong,
Manila, Singapore?
Happy new year, happy new year, China.
They have their own date system, so they don't apply, surely.
Yeah, actually, you're probably right.
Well, the new browser on this, this is great.
We've got to count down on one of our many monitors on our table.
Yeah, I think you guys don't have enough think pads.
All right.
Oh, yeah, we do like I think pads in this family.
I don't know where I saw this gag just going back to what we were talking about at night
off buttons and flashy lights, but there was a gag in the TV program somewhere.
They might have been, and they said, but if the serve guy stays in there like 24, 7, how
does he eat and somebody replied, oh no, he doesn't, he's just learned to photosynthesize
from LED lights.
Nice.
Awesome.
The CIT crowd.
Oh, is that it?
Was that it?
All right.
Now, all right.
So, if you guys used, I hate to bring it over to the Windows side, but there's been
something puzzling me forever, is back in probably 2001, 2002, before I'd even heard
the Linux, I bought a Windows computer and there was a program on there.
I think it was called Vizio, and when you opened it, everything kind of seems like it was
all red and line art, and I don't know, it seemed maybe it was a file, which I don't
know what that thing was.
I never figured out what the heck it was or what it was supposed to do.
Did anybody ever see that thing and know what that was?
That's still a news.
Yeah, it's a spreadsheet application, basically.
Really?
I thought it was for drawing a dog.
It's a dog.
Yeah, yeah.
I got confused.
I think Vizicale, which is the old spreadsheet versus Vizio.
I use Vizio work.
It's really good for doing the diagrams, flow charts, stuff like that.
Does it save the open document format?
No, but in the latest version of Libra Office, we'll finally have Vizio support.
My personal opinion, Vizio, was an excellent application, open to version two, which coincidentally
was when Microsoft took it and turned into a big pile of fraud after that.
Thank you.
Goodbye.
I wonder if there was any coincidence.
For the people who use Vizio, how does something like DIA stack against it?
It's ugly compared to the, it works exactly in the same way.
It's actually easier to use.
The problem is, again, it's an entrant market now.
Everybody's got diagrams in Vizio, and the Vizio diagrams are tidier and, you know,
nice 3D, arty graphics, whereas the ones in DIA tend to be ugly, 2D, ugly ones.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I can't on that.
The reason is that they're starting to build some of those capabilities into Libra Office
as well, into the drawing app.
Does anybody use the new Collegra Office?
There's a review of it in this month, or the latest Linux format magazine.
I'll just turn to that, because I happen to have it here, surprisingly, and see what it
says about it.
I haven't used it, but I've been curious as to how they're doing, are you asking because
you tried it?
I've used it.
I actually kind of like it.
I think they finally made an interface that's designed around widescreens that they're
actually in use.
They have everything in a sidebar that is all accessible.
All the buttons are all there.
You could do quite a bit of interesting things with the text boxes and whatnot.
You could rotate things and drag on objects.
It has the basic supports for headers, footers, and page counts, that sort of thing.
I like it.
It also has good importing of the Microsoft formats, but it doesn't save to them.
I tried it not too long ago, and the thing just crashed and burned pretty hard on me, but
I haven't tried it since two or three updates ago.
The thing I'm most interested in is checking out author when it comes out.
That seemed like a really neat idea, basically creating a tool designed for authors to publish
ebooks.
It seems like Caligra is really positioning themselves not to be in office suite, but
a suite of tools for people doing creative endeavors instead.
Creta actually has their own foundation now.
I was going to say the Linux format has some very interesting conclusions when it comes
to office suite and Caligra in particular.
One of the sections of their review is on other tools, what else have they got?
Caligra has the most productivity apps.
It has plan for project management, which can create Gantt charts and flow for drawing
flow charts.
The latest addition includes an app for writing ebooks called author that's similar to
iBooks author, and Connectsport ePubs, besides a general purpose note-taking app called
BrainDump.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for me to call the end of my day already.
I will see whoever's around later this evening.
Bye, Lord Dave.
Take it easy, man.
See you later.
See you later, Lord Dave.
Bye, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
Bye, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
Bye, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
See you later, Lord Dave.
Kate's pretty good, actually.
I use Jeanie.
I'm using Kate right now.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
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I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
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I can't tell you what I use.
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I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
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I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
I can't tell you what I use.
Speak out.
糨
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Hi!
Hello!
Hello!
Hello!
Yes.
I should've never read my new year's one before, so...
I should've known it before, so...
But.
She can't promise me the colour.
I should've known it before, so...
I should've known it before, so...
I should've known it before, so...
to go upstairs. Are we going to be getting drunk later? What did you say? What did you say?
Are you going to be getting drunk later? No, we don't drink beer. Oh thank goodness. Did
you dad buy you fireworks? No, did I? Did I? It's only Ken Fallon that's the irresponsible
father in this chat room. I think we should have them too. As long as you let them off outside.
Ken is going to strap his kids to them. Sometimes the thought has crossed my mind.
Well we've got them champagne. Did you get champagne? We've got champagne. We got it when we got
marriage. We haven't opened it yet. If you have enough sparklers, you'll be surprised what you can do
with them. That was a conversation, killer. No, wait, who said that? Sorry, I missed
who's little lights lit up. It was me. Were you at Southeast Linux Fest that year? No.
But maybe that was a reference to something that happened that almost took a couple of lives,
I think. Someone had like 300 of them rubber banded together. Yes, I thought it would be a great
idea to light them. It was insane. You could also grind them up. Oh, oh, interesting. I wouldn't
listen. Would it? I was just turning into the Jolly Rogers cookbook. Yeah, I think so.
Might as well just buy a barrel of gunpowder. Yay. Well, if you grind them up, make sure you don't
create any sparks. So anti-static spray is a must. And make sure you're grounded.
Where does our wrist wrap? Did you get that kit? Make sure you're grounded.
Yeah, they're looking at me with it. You'll be grounded if you try any of this.
They're looking at me with their eyebrows raised, not knowing what you're talking about.
Good. Are they excited to be getting a little baby soon?
Yes, we are. How's mummy is she feeling any better? She's okay now.
What did Santa bring for Christmas?
I'm washing my sister's DS game. Leggo? Yes. Lots of Lego, didn't you?
Lots of Lego. We got Lego. We got Lego from Santa. I may have seen a photograph of it all.
Wow. Did you get a redberry pie? What?
No, but daddy did. Oh, you got to share. Well, I've got three of them now. So, you know, there's
always that option. One for each of the kids that you keep producing.
Did you get any new socks? Did you get any new socks? Yeah, I did too.
I got new socks too. I was thrilled. I got so many socks. I got wearing socks right now.
I got two. Oh, I am. In fact, I'm wearing socks. Becky bought me for Christmas.
They've got my fits on them. When we said she's not going to put on the socks.
I've got Philip, Waldorf and Statler socks. Oh, that's cool. That makes a lot of fun.
Family goi socks. I'll go back to you. You scoff, but socks is the tickle me Elmo of 2012.
Oh, I love, I'm not scoffing. I love socks. I go through socks at an alarming rate. I don't know,
I must be walking wrong. That I always wear out the heels and the toes. No, that's not my thing.
Oh, I got it. Okay. I'll try it. It's not too walking around barefoot with deserving camping.
Yeah, I do a lot of walking, but I feel like I must be walking incorrectly or something.
I don't know. I'm going to work on it this year. I got my new socks are completely synthetic,
and they seem to be lasting forever, so I asked for more of those for Christmas.
I bet that's it is the change of everything to cotton because I've got, I mean, I've got socks
from when I was in college and they're perfectly good, except all the elastics gone out of them.
But yeah, the ones I buy today seems like they last six weeks and I got to get another pair.
We'll ask how long it was since you went out of college.
25 years.
You are joking. You're wearing socks at 25 years old.
Where am I just having thrown them out there, but they're in the bottom, they're in the bottom of the
drawer for when I when I run out of good socks, then I get a pair of those out that the
one thing is that they want to slide on, but because the last is bad. But I'm still in it.
There are there's no holes in the bottom or anything like these these ones I buy now,
you know, I got to buy a new package of socks every six weeks, it seems like.
I'm still in telling jokes at 25 years old. There's nothing wrong with 25-year-olds stuff, you know.
You sure? There was a kickstarter for something called Socrates that uh,
well, it had um carbon fiber and um, what's that material um,
Kevlar. Kevlar woven in with it. So uh, the socks won't wear down.
Do you kids want to get down five-year-old socks next Christmas?
I don't think so. No, me neither.
Anyway, one of us is not doing this anymore.
Yeah, Karah is disappointed. Oh, okay.
Can I just tell you a very quick story that happened on Christmas Day?
The kids got a lot of clothes for Christmas and uh, we we went to church on on Christmas Day
morning and Amy went into and spoke to our minister and said, we're wearing all new clothes,
all except, what did you say? Pants. Awesome.
And she didn't say, she didn't say quietly like she did now, she shouted it out.
I'd go, oh my new pocket clothes except my niggas.
And I laughed when I was saying it.
That's been on camera. Emma, Becky took Emma to see, um,
each artist guide to the galaxy once in the cinema. And what does she say?
There was a, Emma was quite young at the time, was she about seven or eight?
And right at the end of the show, the film, he, he swears, he says something naughty.
And Emma said, he just said a swear word.
In a packed cinema. Brilliant. At the top of the lungs, probably.
I've had a mom, so yes.
So Dave, we've all been, we've done like a round robin and explained to everybody what we're
using our Raspberry Pi's for. You said you got three of them. So what, what are you using for?
Well, um, I have got two 256 Meg ones that I got from the original launch.
One of them was being used as a, um, an XBMC media center, um, which I have now, um, since
swapped out and used the 512 one that I just received on it instead.
So I have two 256 Meg Ram Raspberry Pi's sitting in the box doing nothing.
So any suggestions of something practical to use them for would be very welcome.
IRC. But was that IRC? Yes, like an IRC, um, relay or something.
So you can stay persistently connected to wherever you're IRC.
I'll like a BNC box. Right. Right, yeah. Well, I could use my VPN for that.
So, but I mean, being on the back end of a, of a broadband connection is not,
persistence, not really the buzzword. How about, uh, getting a USB, uh, wireless card and using
as a wireless print server? That would be a good idea. We do have a, uh, three-com print server,
but it only, um, it only satisfies one USB connection. So we can only get one printed to it,
and there's two that want to print connect to it. So I suppose, yeah, we could do that.
Come, what are you going to say? Thanks.
You won't go. I just want to go over.
Yes, thank you.
Print servers, they're just comical. Clearly, yes.
The, um, so have you not got any use for it for the bug cast that you could use it for?
Um, I suppose if I got a, um, a decent, uh, like a portrait monitor, I could stick it on the
screen and on the wall and use it as a, um, a show notes thing rather than having to switch back
some forwards from between when going from my laptop. But I can't really think of anything
practical to use it for. I mean, we've already got a VPN, a, a VPS. So, you know, I've got a,
a nice cast server running on there. Actually, at this moment, because we're relaying this on,
on one of our, of course, Oscar servers. Um, but I can't think of anything else specifically
that, um, that I could use it for on the show. Uh, a soundboard, possibly.
Is my name fab? I don't know. Is, is your name fab?
Uh, who's the Indian? Sorry. Who was that?
What, well, you want to say something? What do you want to say?
We got new DVDs and we only watched two of them. How many DVDs did you get? Gosh, how many are left?
Um, I don't know. I haven't counted, really. What about me?
But we're watching only on Julia and the smooth.
Cool. Did you get any Muppets DVDs? Muppets are my favorite.
No, but we did get little and like puppet toys.
Oh, those are pretty rad. Can you make them talk?
You can if you actually talk, talk with your hand in them going like the Pac-Man movement for the
mouth. Yeah, I was going to say unfortunately hand signals don't work on audio conversation.
They weren't made, they weren't made out of 25 year old socks, were they?
No, they were not. They were real puppets. This kid knows Pac-Man. That's incredible.
When that's awesome, when the Google Doodle was a workable Pac-Man game, she saw it for the first
day and every day for about the next month. She said, oh, can we play Google Pac-Man,
play Google Pac-Man? She loves it. Did she beat it? I know.
I would be even more impressed if that was true. Oh, give it give it give it time. She's seven.
Come on. That's true. Maybe you could set up your Raspberry Pi as a dedicated Pac-Man client.
Yeah, use Mame. Mame is pretty good. So we got Mame running up on a Raspberry Pi.
Yeah, it wouldn't run. That's pretty intensive.
Oh, it's a bomber of Raspberry Pi Mame cabinet would be beautiful.
It would be. No, I think I saw on a tech artist technical article. I thought there was someone
who was maybe it wasn't Mame, but it was something like that on a Raspberry Pi. I'll dig up the article.
I saw that too. They put the little cabinet, but it was like there. It couldn't have been
Mame because they only had four games with this emulator and none of them ran very well,
unfortunately. Oh, okay. Has anybody clustered Raspberry Pi's yet? Oh, yeah. Yeah,
there've been some super computers made by Raspberry's. Yeah. And how they've been connected?
You don't know. There's a GPIO port. Right. There's a Southampton University. They created,
I think they created the first super computer of Raspberry Pi's. Awesome. I might give that a check.
Doing it just Ethernet? I thought they would piggyback in the GPIO ports, but I could be one.
Well, there's someone that used the Ethernet and just like a cluster. Yeah, that's the Southampton
one is that they connected via Ethernet. No, that's funny. We got a spinning top and then we actually
we discovered it was actually a spinning top like spinning top shape. How you mean? Did it
draw swirls all over your floor? What? Did it draw swirls all over your floor when you
spun it like a top? No, there's a pen lid on it. Oh, thank goodness for lids.
Sorry, Becky, did you want to say something? I just wanted to ask Amy when she's going to record
her own episode. I don't know when, that's the pencil face daddy lets me. Do you want to do it though?
Yes, I would like to do that. They have co-hosted. Amy, I think it was an episode five and it wasn't five
for 12. Amy co-hosted and we've had the kids on one of the more recent shows and I have to say
the show just descended into complete and totally mayhem. It was interesting to say the least.
Your nanopodmo as well. Oh, yeah, they did that as well but that doesn't say it doesn't count.
Of course it counts but yeah, that was quite manic as well. It kept me in use for 12 minutes.
I was going to say my sister noticed how technology has changed kids recently. I've got one
nephew that's six years old and another two nephews that are both two and all of them do the
same thing which we never did as kids and that's when you take a photograph either with your
camera phone or with your normal cameras these days as soon as the pictures take and they run
round and have a look at the LCD screen to see what the pictures like and of course when we were
kids you didn't do that because they had to be sent back to the developers and yet to get the
the film developed before you see the phone and you saw wow how massive a change is that.
If you're like my parents you didn't take that many photographs so you had to wait till the
role or film was filled up so it was like two and a half years later before you actually saw
the pictures. Yes, that's about right, yeah. You never had a Polaroid then? No, we weren't push kids
like you were. No, I didn't have a Polaroid either actually. We couldn't afford a Polaroid,
they were quite expensive back in the day. Yeah, they weren't cheap. Comparatively expensive,
should I say. I don't have a cheap. The camera wasn't expensive, it was the film.
Did you guys ever hear that song that George Rab song? It's when I was your age. No, it's a line
in there about having to bring your film to a man who lived in a booth. It's a pretty funny song.
That brings up something I thought of the other day maybe I bet it would fit. I've got a couple
old antique brown on the cameras but of course there's so many of them. They're not worth
anything. I was thinking of that might make a good case, got one and put an RPI and figure out
something to do with it. Oh, you know what that reminds me since we're talking about that. My wife
I think was an 8 by 10 or 5 by 7 glass plate camera. That's cool. My wife finally gave up her film
camera and got a digital one and she just got her last roll of film back from the developer and
you know had it put to CD and of course it was the wrong person's CD. We got the wrong
people's film. The very last one. What a way to hand it, huh?
Tell them and say hey I would like my actual pictures. Oh yeah, she went and got it back.
Fortunately they had the right negatives in the little folder with it. Yeah, I have to say as
technology battles go it seems like film did like the worst job of trying to hold its own. You
know it just it it didn't do us any favors as it was dying. I mean I guess it's still dying but
I mean they haven't gone down in price. It's just getting messier and messier. It's just
they're making themselves less attractive. The better digital cameras get. It's really bizarre.
But this is still a market for film. That's the thing. The film gives certain things that digital
imagery can't give you the graininess and the the the tonal quality of film is actually
fasting period at that of of digital. Look at the difference between video recorded
films or television programs and filmed television programs. There's such a difference and there
is still a market for it. Yeah, that's not for recently said to me that the big difference between
film and digital is the resolution on film is infinite which is kind of profound. No, it can't
not. It's not it's infinite because it's organic. There's no pixels there. No, but there's
chemicals and you're limited to the size of the chemical. Well, it's over highlights. I mean,
it's over highlights on film. So there is definitely a limit. But what he happens is when you look
at film you actually have an infinite number of frames because as long as you can actually move
faster you can actually have more highlights and there is no limitation there as far as that goes
accepting for whatever your motor moves at. What I thought was always interesting about this
switch to digital is that a company like Kodak actually really kind of botched everything.
They early on knew that digital photography was going to come into things and they actually had
a number of the patents and things and stuff and yet they didn't do anything to try to bridge
the tool between film and digital. In a lot of ways, I'm kind of glad they didn't take advantage of
their patents because we've been a lot worse state now, wouldn't we? Right guys, we're going to be
heading off very shortly. Just thought I'd mention we spoke about having the kids on the show.
The last time we had the kids on the show, I said it was quite recently. It wasn't. It was over two
years ago. August 2010. I posted the link into the mumble chat room if anybody wants to pick
that up and carry a pick it up and listen to it later on. But we're off and we will be back later
on. Say goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's.
Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's.
Has anybody heard about the Franken camera project? What? Say it again. I'm just looking at that right
now. Is that Franken camera? No, it's like a programmable open source camera. It looks pretty good
and they have like an API that can make a regular, you know, crummy cell phone camera make pretty decent
pictures. What's the advantage of this over, you know, a lot of like the DSLR type cameras? I
mean, it would seem to me that DSLRs actually have a higher resolution than working with like a
camera phone and they have the optics in that that you get with this. The advantage of this camera
is that you don't have to wear like a nerdy t-shirt to let your freak flag fly. You can actually
program it and have it control the camera in ways that it normally wouldn't do. So basically,
you're at the mercy of whatever your camera functions are with a Franken camera. You could program
your own routines or tell it to focus in certain ways and do digital tricks with it that normally
your camera wouldn't be able to do. There's also a lot of differences between like in digital cameras,
there's a lot of differences between what what amounts of compression they're applying to what
you get out of the camera. So, you know, in terms of color correction and stuff like that,
there could be a big variation there. I don't know much about all of them that are out there,
but that's one different. You could just shoot in raw though, too. Yeah, you want to say the
ping PNGs? Oh, no, they say to JPGs. Yeah, I've seen raw and JPGs is the two options. I have a
new cannon rebel and it will shoot as either a raw or a JPEG. One or the other.
Not a big fan of JPEG. Well, the way I've seen it, and I don't know if this is the way that it
works on yours, but it'll shoot raw and then it'll save like a copy, a JPEG copy of that raw. So,
the the JPEG I think is just sort of mid almost as a quick and easy preview, something to look at
and kind of play around with before you actually switch over to using the raw.
I can set it as either actually. I can set it as just JPEG, just raw or both.
Oh, okay. I had to update Photoshop to get it to interpret the raws from my camera.
Have any of you guys heard of this CHDK thing that might man's talking about in the IRC?
No, I hadn't heard about that. Oh, yes. Yes, I have heard about this,
also along with Magic Lantern. Oh, yeah, I've heard of Magic Lantern, yeah.
It's very much like Magic Lantern. This looks very cool. It's like Rockbox, but for your camera.
There was one model of camera. It was one of the ones with the better sensors. They would use it
with Magic Lantern, and then they would use it for like professional videography. So, people would
like shoot films that way, because you would actually get better quality on that than you would
get with anything anywhere near that price range, except for like renting a red.
What's it called again? Magic Lantern.
Have you used that? And how do you say your nick?
Fathano. Fathano. It's like Fathalo. Like the blue. Okay.
I have used Magic Lantern, yeah. It's a 5D Mark II, or a 7D, or is usually the cameras that they
would use, which are way cheaper. I don't know now how I'll look to see how much they are.
I think they're about, you said the 5D, is that what you said?
The 5D Mark II is $1800. Was it that low now? Is that just the body then?
That is just the body. Okay. Oh, it's even less according to my scripts and Chrome. You can get
it for $900 on eBay, apparently. That would be worth it, too. Those are nice cameras for digital.
Very, very nice. When I saw the DSLRs, like when I really started to shoot DSLR for real, like on
projects, I just, that's kind of when I was just finally like, okay, the trouble involved, the cost
and the trouble involved with film is no longer worth it now. When I started seeing the burst
fires, the burst fire stuff, that's what I do. It was a technology that couldn't be competed with
by any other traditional means. I don't know what burst fire is, what is that? You can rapidly take
pictures and succession for things like fast photography, and you're getting up to like 15
frames per second that you can take. It's insane. That's really cool. Another thing is it could take
burst shots and you could focus at different lengths and then combine the pictures together to have
like a wide focus view. Right. Yeah, yeah. I've seen that. That's really cool. Adjust your focus
post photography. It's really cool. There was that demo a while ago where they unblurred the
picture in Photoshop. This is for the CS5 demonstration. They were just like, oh yeah, so we figured
out an algorithm to unblur photos and they just did it and then the audience just completely lost
it because they realized what that means. Yeah, wow. I'd never seen an audience do anything like that,
especially on like a YouTube recording. It was really weird. Have you got a link to that YouTube?
I am pulling it up because it's YouTube.com. Yes, there you go YouTube. That'll be narrowing it
right down. Thank you. No problem. YouTube. I think I'm spelling it wrong. It's Y-O-U, not just
U. It's Y-O-U. If you're using KDE, just open up KRunner and type Y-T colon. I found it.
How do you spell to? T-O-O-B, isn't it? Right. That's what I thought. It's still not coming up.
It's coming up with some pronsite. Now I'm only kidding. Greetings from the US. T-U-B-E. Why are you T-U-B-E?
Are you on the East Coast or West Coast Geospart? Geospart, yes. I'm in Charlotte, North Carolina,
normally from New York there. Oh, cool. Wow, this YouTube thing is pretty cool. There's like
videos and stuff here. Oh, is that right? I just get a bunch of things that say you don't have
flash installed and I generally navigate away. Why don't I do? Install flash and you get to see
cool commercials. And you can start out block over that. People can comment on your videos as well
and you get really helpful feedback on your videos. I never seen that being the case. The
comments I usually see on YouTube just seem to be just horrible. But Clad 2, as far as being able to
watch YouTube videos, get this Slack build of YouTube-DL and then you just copy the URL,
put it into the command line, YouTube-DL, then paste in the URL and it'll fetch the video.
And then you can just open it up in like VLC or whatever media player you use. Or you could just
use J-Downloader. Yeah, okay. I have to admit, like this is kind of bad that they're coming up with
hacks around this. But for the longest time, I could get out of following YouTube links by just saying,
oh, I don't have flash installed. But now it's like, that's no longer a valid excuse, unfortunately.
I actually was like one of the first people in the HTML5 beta. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did sign up for
that or put myself on that as well. So that does get me around it a lot too. One thing I've been doing
is, on my browser, I've been setting it to disable cookies by default and I've just been
only allowing the websites that use the cookies that I choose. Which makes me a little hard when
I have to add the things, wasn't it, but at least I don't have to worry about anything going wrong.
But so far, YouTube works pretty well. I usually just tell people that I'm awmish and then they usually
leave me alone. That's what I'm going to switch to. And they're like, you have two degrees in
computer science. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Let's go make butter. What's a computer
science? That's like a cat, right? Did you hear about the Amish terrorist, the faction that went
around cutting off men's beards? No, I hope this is not a lead into a joke. This sounds really
interesting. No, it's true. He's right. It's being prosecuted as a hate crime actually.
I heard about the Hindu guy that got pushed in front of a train. That's the worst. That's
horrific. So this video of this old guy pushing this woman onto it train tracks and the boyfriend
beat him up. Well, that accelerated quickly. Not escalated.
So did we get here just because the Amish can use trains? How did we get off the one story
and under the other? Can the Amish use trains? I guess if they're cold. Well, they don't own
the trains. So I guess they could. They can use the trains for transportation. They just can't
use it as like a way of life. Unless it's their job, I guess. I think the thing about the technology
is that they can't own anything more than any other body in the community. So that's why everything's
down to that base minimum. So everyone should just get Android phones then is what you're saying.
It gets complicated because there's no one group called the Amish. There's, you know,
they're splintered into a bunch of different groups that have different rules. Sounds like they
would fit into the Linux community quite well then. It does. They've got the bids and everything.
Oh man, RMS may actually be Amish. That would make so much sense. I hope not.
Nice. He's an atheist. Yeah, I guess that's true. That breaks it. He's also the most religious man
of ever see. I think perhaps. What do you define as religion? It all comes down to what you define
religion and be. Well, would it be appropriate at this point to say that the best interview I've
ever heard was done by Pokey? What was that two months ago, Pokey, that that ran on HPR?
No, not be appropriate to say that now. Sure would. Wait, that was the RMS one that I heard.
That was you? Yeah, that was me. Yeah, that was awesome. That was a great interview. That's
actually probably my favorite interview with them that I've ever heard. It was actually, I had to
say it was everybody because very few of those questions were my own. Most of them came from
IRC and from like, you know, just my HPR pals who I just asked you have anything you'd like me to ask
people, give me questions to ask. It was the way you presented them though. I've seen somewhere
that there's a definition between a religion and a cult where it basically defines the differences
being how many churches you have, i.e. more than one and how many people you've killed, i.e.
more than one. Do you know what the difference between a cult and a religion is? A cult is religion
or a religion is cult plus time. Religions what I believe in, a cult is what you believe in. Exactly.
Alistair belongs to a cult. I've always heard that a cult was a religion that was like harmful to
you, like, measurably harmful. Aren't there a lot of religion? You could say that into a lot of
religion. Yeah. There was that woman that was denied abortion and then she had a the fetus
diner in her and then she ended up dying of infection. That was based off of religious grounds.
I think that was in Ireland. Yeah, that's in Ireland. I didn't know Ireland had that backwards,
like, old laws on abortion until I heard about that. That's really bizarre. No, they don't,
they don't have backwards laws about it. They have, she was denied it by the hospital. They were
supposed to have granted her that. Oh, okay. See, I had I had read the headline and I guess the
headline was misleading then. They linked it, they linked, they definitely linked it with Catholicism.
Yeah, I was going to say there were Catholics, I think. I don't think all people in Ireland are
Catholics. No, there is some legislation on the Irish statue that does actually make abortion legal
and they've only in the last few weeks passed law that it's okay to have an abortion if,
you know, if it's life threatening. So it is on the statue. Yeah, I just
don't know. There was a referendum over 30 years ago in Ireland where it's called the X case where
a the high court passed a law saying that the abortion would be allowed in the case where there
were serious risks to the life of the mother. And there was a referendum that that was enshrined
in the constitution. The thing is the weak-minded politicians didn't put in the law in place,
so despite having a referendum where they were required to put a law in place, they didn't do that
because of their pro-life lobby. And speaking to all the doctors and everybody in Ireland,
there is nobody who would interpret that what happened there as in any way being the correct
course of action to have occurred, so there will be probably repercussions as a result of that.
You've also got years and years of history to overcome in Ireland and the facts that, you know,
for a very long time abortion was, you know, frowned upon, it was an absolute no-no, it was, you know,
an underground activity that was carried out in like, you know, sort of like back streets and,
you know, women's parlors because it was, you know, just, it didn't happen, you didn't,
it wasn't talked about. No, I think it was. It's right now there is, I think, almost universal
horror as what happened with that lady that her life wasn't considered. Well, whatever series
of events that occurred to cause the loss of her life, there was actually an absolute shock and
horror from people about that because we've had this abortion debate for over 30 years and even
before that, there's been I think two, if not three different referendums and each time
people are very clear about, yes, we don't want abortion, but yes, on the other hand, we do
want to save the life of the mother and that's a very difficult thing to both into law because
you can veer either side of it and what happened in that hospital was, from what I understand,
was they said, somebody just said, no, we're not allowed to do this when in natural fact,
another doctor in another hospital somewhere else would have had no problem or well,
probably would have a problem, but would have carried out the procedure that was necessary in order
to save the mother's life. I think that's even not defending the Catholic church, but I think they
some of the more sane hierarchy seemed to be supporting that sort of line, a lot recently,
from what I've seen them come out with, you would question that as well, but there has been,
since I was born, there's always been quite a lot of debate and we've had a lot of discussion
about where it's been convenient for I think the government in Ireland to just put girls
on the boat and they head over to the NHS and they get the job done and they come back in
and it's been very cowardly approach to a problem that needs to be solved.
Another thing is Uganda's killed the Gaze Bill. Oh yeah, I read that too.
That needs to be killed to death badly. Greetings and salutations everyone.
No, this is not Chad Wallenberg. This is Claudio M, just passing by to say happy new year to
everybody. Hope everybody's doing well. It's not the new year yet, but I hope the holidays are all
treating you well. Happy new year Claudio. Happy new year Claudio. Happy new year Claudio. Happy new year Claudio.
Happy new year Claudio. Yeah, happy new year Claudio. And what do you mean in the new year yet? We've had,
we're almost on our sixth one, 10 minutes from now. Ah, that is true. Got to think globally.
No, I figured somewhere it's already the first six somewhere is actually.
It's not new years if you have to work through it like me. Yeah, good point. Thankfully,
I don't have to worry about that. Yeah, it's Becky tracking where that is. Was it? Yeah, we're
coming up 10 minutes and it will be Indonesia, Thailand, the small region of China, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, regions of Mongolia, Antarctica, and a small region of Australia.
Well, a very happy new year to everyone that's in all those locations. And hope everybody else is
prepping for some new year fun. I get a chat. Does anybody heard from him like the last six
months or a year? He doesn't even seem to come around anymore. Yeah, he's at the clinic. He's at the
conferences. Just want to make sure Claudio hadn't done away with him and buried him in the
clinic's basement. So that's what that smell was. Oh, I guess I should take care of that.
A little for breeze. He'll take care of it. Sudo for breeze. By the way, Claudio, congratulations.
I've been following you on Google plus and pictures of your lovely bride.
Thank you very much. Okay. Yes. I'm a very, very happy and very lucky man. I'll tell you that much.
Right on. What's wrong with her eyes? What even was wrong with her eyes? Nothing's wrong with her
eyes. Really? She can see you just fine. Yeah, she can. You know, Claudio, you should post
ASCII art of your wedding pictures in IRC for those of us who don't Google plus.
Do we know it? And I'll look into it. I keep trying to convince my wife I'm as good looking as you
as she don't buy it. Man, you really have some low expectations of yourself then. You could say
that again. That's why I'm very rarely disappointed in me. Man, you really have some low expectations
of yourself, don't you? Classic. Oh, thank you. I don't know. I kind of figured the line can't go
any lower, so I'm glad to be down there. Well, I don't think I can get any farther than the floor,
Sandy, given that one episode of DevRandom. That was like 10 feet under. That's where I figured.
That was awesome. I was rolling on the floor, but not literally like some others, but yeah.
Well, I've been married for 33 years. I just hope that you're as happy as I am in 33 years.
I do too. Thanks, Ahuka. By the way, Ken, my wife and I have made a decision. We're going to
visit Ireland. It's probably going to take us a year or two to save up the money.
Cool. If you need some tips of where to go, give me a shout. I will be consulting you, sir.
Avoiding hospitals and goldware.
Do not let them convince you to kiss the Blarney stone. Oh, yeah, please kiss the Blarney stone
and post pictures, especially in asking for the people on R.C. You don't want to know what the
locals do to that thing when there's no tourists around. Of course, now that you said that, of course,
we do. Just make sure you just infect the first. Not to mention, of course, the long
cues just to kiss the stone. No one wants sloppy Blarney stone seconds.
Well, I think the music is going to be a big thing for me. We have a Kaylee here around the end
of the year that I went to on Saturday night and just had a great time. Ahuka, will you be going
to Southern Ireland or to Northern Ireland? Oh, yeah. Only one island. Shut up, Ken.
Yeah, I haven't. We just made the decision that we were going to do it. And I think my brother and
his wife made join us as well. Southern Ireland is beautiful, especially the Waterford and Trimor area.
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know exactly how we're going to do it if we're going to try and get
like a package tour or roll our own or whatever. There's a lot of planning and discussion to happen.
But for both of us, it's kind of a bucket list thing that you know.
You're a lot cheaper to go do a to do it yourself. And there are really, really good deals now
with hotels because half of the hotels in the country are owned by the National Asset Management
Institute. And they have no interest in making a profit at all. Just keep the things open.
So that they can sell them later. So you can pick up the phone and ring right. I got the steel
somewhere right there. I want this sort of deal. I want free Wi-Fi. I want free parking. I want
black. I want breakfast. I want dinner. I want the whole nine yards.
Cool. But it's a bit more work, obviously, a bit.
And you tell him you wanted for less than 30 shillings. These shillings, right, Ken?
I think they use yours. Farthings.
Yours for what they're worth now. I thought they're paid with potatoes.
Right, that's it. You're fucking bad. That's it. Yeah, you're out.
That's a little bit racist there, Muffela. They might be worth more than $1.
All right. We all now racist father.
His big willy father.
All right, everyone. I'm going to bow out. I wish you all a very happy new year if you haven't
already rung it. And I hope the holidays were really good to everybody. I'm going to start
getting the kids ready and all of us here ready for some festivities later. So have a great one.
Before you go one thing, last year you said that you didn't want to take over Linux
basements. I think it's time now that you did. Yeah, I've been thinking about it. Trust me.
I just got to find the time. Time is very limited now. I've got other priorities. I'm sure you're
all aware of. Yeah. Yeah, hey, thanks for stopping in and take hello to the kids for me. I sell
one of them on the Minecraft server the other day, but didn't stay long. Yeah, they've been mine
crafting this whole Christmas break. So been two weeks. And since I worked for the school
system. So I'm off these two weeks as well. So I'm definitely enjoying the time off.
And yeah, and lots of mine crafting around here, you know, whether I like it or not, it seems.
Yeah, of course.
It beats the heck out of texting. I heard they're reporting minecraft to the Raspberry Pi.
That's another use for it. Yeah, they are. They're they're they're porting it to that and I'm dying to
get one of those. Happy new year. Happy new year to YouTube, bobobex. Happy new year to everybody.
Enjoy and hacker public radio. Number one, love it. Thanks a lot, man. Great to see you here from
you. Same here, guys. Take care. Happy new year. Bye, Claudio. And with that, we're about to roll
over to our next our next New Year's time zone. Go on then, Sam, try to see you do it this time.
I don't have them all written down. So I don't have a thing here with a list of them.
So in New Year, then to Indonesia, Thailand, small region of China, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Laos, regions of Mongolia, regions of Antarctica, and a small region of Australia. Happy new year.
Happy new year. Happy new year. Happy new year.
All right, now I'm leaving. Bye bye. I'm not doing the next one in an hour's time. I can't
fall for now. I can't pronounce them later. Yeah, well, if you just post them, someone will do them.
Don't post them now. It'll scroll by. It's my enema and the cocoa islands.
I haven't brought this a chance to bring this up, but I've mentioned on the mailing list before
that we're sort of under underrepresented in those areas of the world we've been saying. Happy new
years to the last three hours. So I'd like to invite anybody in those areas who's listening now,
or listening on the stream, or later, if you're hearing this as the podcast,
you know, would really like to meet some people from that area of the world and include them in
our discussions, because we all too seldom hear from that part of the world. And it'll happen
again once we move past the West Coast of the United States and out there into the Pacific Ocean,
except for Hawaii. We don't really talk to anybody out that direction. So please,
don't feel like language is any sort of barrier. We'd just like to make connections out there.
Well said.
Becky and I are just going to pop out and get some dinner and stuff. So we'll probably
be back later. Have fun. Can I go with you Phil? I'm super hungry.
Chinese is. Hello, Joe. How are you doing, mate? Hey, what's up, mate? I don't know. I'm just
figured out coming here. I'm also going to hang out and rebroadcasting all this in the hangout as well.
Cool. I'm sorry. Posted. You were rebroadcasting. That's cool.
Hi, George. How are you doing that, by the way?
Well, I'm just basically, I don't know. I have no clue. I just basically haven't both going
at the same time. And some people are listening to it via the hangout. And I'm trying to
coax people to come in, but you know, I think some of them are scared. In fact, one of them is
looking at me sweating all through his forehead right now. Is that George Tosha? Of course it is.
Oh, sorry, George. Sorry, I was, I didn't connect you. Hello. Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, Alistair. You probably didn't get when I was talking about you joined a cult earlier.
You know what cult I mean. Ah, I do. Now, I have mentioned the wonderful people
at Tekken Coffee, but I'll mention them again, because I have enjoyed joining that community.
It's a good bunch of people over there. Well, thanks. Thanks.
And, and, and anybody's walking to come over and sample some of the Kool-Aid. I'm only kidding.
It's a joke. Cool. I appreciate you joining us on HPR for sure.
Thank you. Thank you. Are you sticking around, George?
I'm going to, I'm going to be in here for a bit. I'm probably going to leave this going.
About 45 minutes or so. I'm going to take a quick lunch and head out and do something,
but I'm actually working today and I'm possibly working tomorrow from like seven to two or something.
All right. Well, if you're about a bit later off, I'll catch up on the chat.
Sweet. It's cool.
Okay, so you have a great meal. Think about me when I'm not having Chinese and
probably having something out of the microwave. Yeah, that's not going to happen.
Okay, folks. Let's take this opportunity to stop again and think we're more than six hours in,
so this will be the end of first Hacker Public Radio.
I think you're on the third. Yeah. Well, how are we going to do this? Because there's going to be
more than 26 hours of shows. Hello, everybody. You're listening to the next episode of Hacker Public
Radio. Anyway, there's going to be, I don't know, what? 24 hours we've done, six hours, seven hours now.
Um, so if we're going to squash them into one week, or do we have them go over two weeks?
Anyone? Might as well just do two weeks. Could you set it up so that you
script it to cut out silence and dead spots and condense it down a bit?
Yeah, I'll do that. All right, but that's not going to take massive amounts of time out.
Looks like the MP3 streams are down, folks. Just give us one second.
Yeah, that computer's not even logged in right now.
Looks like Kevin's working on it. Okay, the aux streams are available for our listeners who count
here. Yep. And if you need MP3, the new radio.net is also up, though it's not in the automatic
rotation. That might have been that six hour timeout we were talking about. Yeah, it could be,
yes, sir. Has anybody's mumble client been disconnected and reconnected?
Not mine. Not here. Then again, if we're active, I don't think it will disconnect and reconnect.
I think it was the only time out if you're not active. Mine did about 45 minutes in,
it disconnected and reconnected one time, and it stopped my recording for a while, which I didn't
realize. Yeah, mine did that about an hour ago, and just I went to reconnect and it connected.
Yeah, mine reconnected automatically, too, before I even had a chance to do it manually.
But I didn't realize it had stopped the recording, and then it didn't automatically restart.
Oh, Poki, what are we going to do with you?
Oh, exile? No, that would be too good.
That we won't have anybody to edit this mess.
Oh, Ken volunteered this year. I'm good.
Oh, Ken loves editing, you know that.
I love editing here.
Loaded in Odacity, chopped the first bit off, chopped the last bit off,
do remove silence, slap on the intro and outro and we're done.
There you go. That was easy.
And looks like the MP3 stream's on its way back.
Okay, don't forget to hit record again, Ken.
I've been recording all along.
Oh, are you doing it from a different machine?
You know, I discovered recently that that's kind of a dangerous way to do it,
recording from a second machine and not recording from your primary,
because if anything happens to that network stream, you wouldn't know it.
Yeah, well, my primary one, the pulse audio just crashed for the first time ever.
I had to reboot my machine, well, a few minutes ago.
Nice.
The MP3 streams are backverified. Welcome back to all our listeners and MP3 land,
freedom-hating people you are. Although dots said don't move to the extreme,
because it's currently going to be switched from one server to another.
Sure, insult everybody and then get my lollipop.
Thank you, thank you guys.
Did it? What is Doors ET? Did anybody figure that out?
He's what now?
What is Doors ET? Did anybody find that out?
Oh, yeah, that's his machine that's streaming out to the new radio.net.
I'm on that one now, actually.
Okay, the streaming server thing seems to be working a little better,
but for some reason, still not picking up the bug cast,
ice cast server. Amazing.
Kevin, are you around? Kevin, wish you're?
He's in the chat hall. Very soon, folks, I'm going to go off to let off some fireworks
with my children. So, if you need me, what would be your children's strap to them?
Sometimes I feel like that, but as a good parent,
good parenting sometimes is not doing the things that comes into your head.
Right, is that good? As a good parent, he doesn't strap them to the fireworks.
He only lets them light them.
This is why I own two hours, not children.
You can strap the show hours to the bottle rockets,
and they'll actually take off on my children.
No, I hadn't had that idea, but now you've said it.
Well, if you get the big ones, not like the tiny little thin bottle rockets,
I think you could probably get a show out and get some air.
Well, there's a thought.
Tweet!
It's like a variant of the weather balloons in the lawn chair.
Oh, I love the Darwin Awards.
Are they still going?
I hope so.
I guess there's still stupid people, isn't there?
As long as there's an America, I have hope for the Darwin Awards.
I didn't want to say it.
Sorry, that is very racist.
I'm an American.
Even so.
Wait, America's not a race.
It's true.
This is true.
It's a good job, isn't it?
Yeah, it is until it's not until somebody attacks you, and then all of a sudden you're
It's a good job.
That's not a race, because there'd be too fat to get anywhere quickly.
Here is I.
Trying to bring up the tone with the conversation.
It says me at 21 stone, by the way.
I'm frankly offended those comments were made in the fake American accent.
Well, I have to say they sneak sugar into practically any of the package foods that you get
in America.
That's not sugar.
That's corn.
That's high fructose corn starch.
Not sugar.
That's sugar, like substance.
As desperately as they want to call it sugar so that they don't have to label it as such,
you know, as high fructose corn syrup on the package, it is not sugar and your body
can not handle it the way it can handle sugar.
It's not a great farmer.
What was that?
I'm the rare underweight American at 12 stone.
I don't know what the heck a stone is.
It's 14 pounds.
Hey Ken, the ZHPR music one that you've got recording there is still keyed up.
I know if you leave it keyed up like forever, it'll eventually have problems.
It's not a bad idea to key it up every now and again so it doesn't get kicked.
But if it's left like that, you get like lag errors.
Okay, it's off now, thanks for the heads up.
You get the kind of thing that happens to John DeVore, and Adam Curry, if you guys ever
listen to the no agenda podcast, they use mumble and they have problems all the time just
because they leave it keyed up constantly and never give it a chance to re-sync when
they're not keyed up.
Well speaking of bad Americans, I recently lost three and a half stones.
Wow, that's a lot.
I lost one and a half if it's 14 pounds, I lost about one and a half stones recently.
Yeah, for those who didn't get my stone reference earlier, that makes me 294 pounds.
That's okay, I'm sure whatever stones you guys lose, I'll find.
I thought you guys were talking kidney stones for a second.
That would be even worse.
That's not fun at all.
Boom, boom.
That too will pass.
I'll out.
My father just recently passed one.
There are a lot of fat people here in America, too many, because I'm in the Midwest.
Well, if you stop drinking a lot and you start eating vegetables a whole lot more, cut
out sugar and stop eating a lot of bread, it could lose quite a bit.
I do none of that except to eat bread, I do eat bread.
But all those things are tasty.
That's pretty much all I did was stop eating bread and I dropped 20 pounds in about a month
month and a half.
Did you say cut?
Did you say cut out, bread?
Yes.
Yeah, good stuff.
Don't do that.
Oh, man, bread is like my favorite.
I love bread, especially those good bakery loaves, but yeah, they had to cut them out
pretty much.
As Scott Pilgrim said, bread makes you fat.
It depends what kind, but most kinds do, yeah, so the high gluten and it's difficult to digest
the way it's made.
Yeah, I've been doing the paleo diet and that bread is definitely not allowed.
Is that where red steak raw comes from?
No, I had that before I went on the diet.
That's hard on.
That's weird and self-fulfilling, then.
Yeah, it was just justification for the name he's always liked.
Yeah.
Well, I went vegan, I lost some weight and then I like, no, I need the steak, so I went
paleo and I lost the rest.
It's one important point here, guys, on a health-related issue, and I can tell you this
from personal and family experience.
If you change your diet and take bread out and that improves things, you need to go and
see a doctor and get a celiac disease test because that will probably indicate a gluten
intolerance and it's a serious health issue.
So if you're finding that cutting bread out improves your health in some way, that might
indicate a serious problem which you need to pay more attention to.
Cool, good to know.
Brother make me sick, it just made me, it just generally led to a higher weight.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I've been going through.
Yeah, it's one of these things that's all to do with the way that gluten in the bread
is actually digested, but if bread leads to either weight gain or weight loss, it can
be an indicator to this disease, celiac disease, which if you find you have that, then there's
a whole bunch of other things which you can cut out fairly easily from your diet which
will just improve your overall health just a thousand percent, it really will.
What are the other things that you could cut out if you're in that ballpark, but just
to say, it seems to me like what you're saying is mostly for people who are extreme cases
of feeling benefit when they cut out bread, most people probably could benefit from cutting
down the high gluten bread with their digestion and weight gain, you know.
Well, it sort of creeps into quite a lot of foods, but the obvious ones are pastas and
also choosing just slightly different foodstuffs, like for example, ketchup and things, between
the brands, some will have a lot higher gluten content than others, so just changing your
brand of ketchup might have some effect, but left undiagnosed, it can creep up on you
with time, celiac disease gets worse over a period of time, if you catch it early in
the progression of the disease, the outcomes are generally better.
Is it just created by the gluten, because it's just worth noting that most old varieties
of bread making materials are very low in gluten, so you can still consume bread, make
it in a different way from whole grains and fermented, you know, sourdose, and using
the old varieties, you know, rye and some old varieties of wheat and stuff like that.
If you really, if you really can't manage without bread, yeah, there are a lot of commercially
available gluten-free breads, which are very good, even Domino's pizzas recently started
doing a gluten-free pizza base.
It's just not fermented, unfortunately.
One thing I can do is you can make a meat, you basically take a sausage meat or meat and
put that as a base for the pizza instead of the bread.
Yeah, I mean, so go ahead.
Yeah, there's a lot of help you can get with it, but it's mostly just knowing that you
have it and getting some good dietary pointers and just slight adjustments that you can
make to your diet, which improves it a hell of a lot.
The trouble comes is if you carry on with it for a long time, the villi and the intestines
get worn down and they don't regenerate and the longer that goes on, the progressively
worse it gets.
I'm already eating gluten-free.
Yeah.
One of you say you were paleo, does that involve low fat generally, or do they have different
interpretations of paleo, what some have lots of fat and some mostly lean meat, or how's
that?
Well, you know, I'm not going to intentionally eat a lot of fat.
I just eat it with the meal and I try to trim off some of the stuff if it's there.
As far as oils are concerned, I stick to olive oil for most of the stuff.
And I try to balance my meats with my veggies, so I'm not just going to eat a big thing
without having a decent amount of veggies like I try to at least have as much or even
more veggies as I do for me for any given meal.
Maybe you misinterpreted me, I'm a big proponent of meat and fat, you know, no vegetable oils.
We consume a lot of butter and fat and meat per breakfast in a lunch, I don't have any
kind of obesity problems, but maybe you haven't heard of the West and A Price Foundation
because I mean there's a lot of criticism over the paleo diet for their exclusion of fat
because it's actually very important to eat all the fat when you have meat, otherwise
you can't create problems.
You can't deplete your body from vitamin A, my wife just calls me my ear.
Well, I do eat the fat, it's just that I don't eat a lot of it.
I think that you, it's a myth though, the only reason I mention it, you know, it's a kind
of myth and most people have believed the lies being told to us about fat being bad
for us.
But you can't really eat too much fat, it doesn't do you any harm, in fact quite the opposite
and there are many, many individual groups of people who mostly lived on fat, you know,
it's a lie that you get fat from eating fat and for all of you who like cream and butter
and all of those lovely rich things, I mean it doesn't make you fat at all, unfortunately.
Is that coming from the same theory as the Atkins diet came from?
No, I don't think so, I mean, if you look at the look up the website, WesternAprice.com
or dot org, am I just did a hack a public radio episode about it but it hasn't quite come
out, I think in a few days it will, but it's basically a dentist, a US dentist in the 1920s
on 30s who went around the world, he was a dentist and he was trying to find out why people
had bad teeth and he found individual groups of people who were sticking to their authentic
diets over hundreds or thousands of years and first of all noticed they had perfect teeth,
you know, was surprised but pleased and then went on to study what they were eating and
they were all eating slightly different foods but none of them were the Atkins diet, none
of them were paleo, none of them were vegetarian and basically the foundation has sort
of built up on top of his work and he's got a wonderful, amazing website, so you could
easily be very overwhelmed with all the content on there and the sort of deep research
and work. I do eat the bone marrow. Oh, that's wonderful, that is.
Maybe we just killed a bull that we've had for two years and first of all, we're such
a luxury to go and, you know, your freezer get as much beef or meat but the thing we love
most is the liver, all the internal organs, they had such a massive heart and, you know,
have plates and plates full of heart, the tongue, you know, all the internal organs,
you know, if you want to eat your eyes, just eat the eyes of the animal, you know.
I love heart, that's one of my favorite meats to cook up whenever I can get hard, I
get that. I like that because I like the consistency of it, I like, and it's usually also
cheaper than, and a lot of people overlook it, they say, oh, it's gross, it's disgusting,
well, it's also delicious.
You have chemicals, testicles, you know, go for the testicles, they're all, all these
funny because the expensive parts, which are the lean steaks, they're the things which
aren't good for you, you know, they will be good if you consume it with the fat and, you
know, all the Louis, I think that's what it's called in English here, more the fat around
the internal organs, if you feed the cow right, of course.
But all the internal organs, they can be so cheap because people have forgot that they're
the most valuable, fortunately, so you can get them great and cheap.
I just bought like two pounds of chicken hearts for like a dollar and a half.
That is wonderful.
It has to be said, there's a wonderful thing in French cuisine called a duck confie,
which is ducks, various parts of duck, which are cooked and braced and then preserved
in just pure duck fat, which then solidifies and then re-cooked again, oh, I love duck.
I just, yeah, duck confie is something you should try proper, you know, from a French recipe,
absolutely unbelievable flavor.
Oh, better still, just, so it better still just get your own goose and cook the whole
thing, you know, it's lovely.
But my wife introduced me to a dipping bread into all the fat around the, after you've
baked the goose, that's lovely.
I recently made a leg of lamb and then after that was all done, I boiled the bones and
made a nice stew out of that and that came out really good.
I see what is absolutely superb, a very underrated piece of meat is lamb shoulder, but you
have to do it very, very slowly.
If you get a whole shoulder, you want to be talking about a minimum of four hours cooking.
But if you want to, that is the most wonderful piece of meat going really, really tasty.
But very, very fatty as well.
Have you guys heard about grass fed as opposed to grain fed and the differences in quality,
you know, organic and grass fed?
According to Paleo diet, they recommend grass fed whenever possible.
I find it kind of difficult where I am to get a hold of that unless you want to spend
a whole lot more, but the lamb was grass fed and that tasted a whole lot better.
Yeah, we're lucky in the UK, in the UK, most certainly, most beef and lamb is grass fed
as standard, we're very lucky in that respect.
Are you really sure about that because I'm a big listener of farming today and so I hear
all the journalists going and visiting farmers and they isn't the impression I get from
the way they're keeping their animals, you know.
Oh, sorry, that might be a bit more regional to where I am.
I live in the southwest and my brother and nor is a beef farmer.
So I tend to get less supermarket stuff anyway.
I guess the stuff you would regularly get in the supermarkets would probably be more
grain fed and more intensive farmed, but here in the southwest it's very easy to pick
up.
We have more proper old school butchers who are outside of the supermarkets and they have
more direct link with the farm industry anyway.
So I'm guessing talking from that perspective really.
So you know what your brother feeds the cows specifically yourself, but during winter
the rations don't include the cow cakes that they make for them.
No, no, he makes quite a good living aside from the beef.
Many of his excess soilage is obviously very valuable and when the actual meat side of
the business doesn't do well, he makes that up with any excess soilage he can sell off.
So yeah, it's the real deal grass.
That's nice to hear because I haven't heard many other people just feeding 100% a hay
or a silage or grazing.
Over in the U.S., it's FDA standard that all beef has to be grain fed for two weeks before
it's slaughtered to flush out anything in the system.
So a mixture of, he's kind of like fattening up, but it's just like corn and grain.
I wonder exactly what they try to flush out, you know, all the good things.
Corn prices went up and they were feeding them candy.
That's the reason I asked about what they feed in the UK because I heard an episode on farming
today where they were talking about all the out of date like breakfast cereals from supermarkets,
chocolates, pasta, they were all being sold in masks of this one company in the UK that was
reprocessing it into cow food, you know, and that was like, my God, you're joking, aren't you?
Well, this is the trouble up on the soapbox time.
This is the trouble with the supermarket.
It takes over whole rafts and dictates to the whole supply chain, exactly what happens
within the whole field.
And that's the trouble just encapsulated that if you put one part of the chain in control of
the whole rest of the chain, then you get these practices become popular.
I'm not sure you can blame completely the supermarket because it's all the consumers are
complicit in it, you know, because we all want not to think about it too much, but get the
cheapest price, you know, and the education isn't there to actually inform people what's going on.
It's a shock for me sometimes, I listen to the farming today and I'm surprised what practices
are being carried out, you know.
To a degree, I agree with you to a certain point, but when supermarkets deliberately put themselves
in a monopoly position and eradicate all the possible routes of competition, then you can't blame
the consumer when the consumer has no other choice, which in many cases they don't.
It's like the Walmart problem, it sounds like.
And it's happened slowly over the years.
So I mean, in the beginning, the consumers maybe didn't realize the big pound these supermarkets
would have eventually, you know.
So it's always a bit cheaper over this little supermarket.
Let's go over there, but of course, that gave power to the supermarkets for them to get
bigger over time and hence the problem.
So it's a slow growing cancer, you know.
I got a question I want to ask you, farmer, guys, just before we get too far off.
And I know, I think somebody else had just asked about rabbits, but I want to know from you,
farm, guys, what's the deal with eggs?
Because I know if I buy grocery store eggs and, you know, and buy, like fresh chicken eggs
and crack them open, they are not nearly the same.
They don't taste the same, they don't look the same.
They cook about the same, but how come grocery store eggs are so yellow and
runny and fresh eggs are orange, almost red?
And I've got to come in here.
As somebody who gets all my eggs from five hens in the backyard, I can tell you exactly why
that is. And it is diet.
Can I jump in and say as well, as a man who has 20 chickens in his shed sleeping,
I would absolutely agree with you, it's diet.
Yeah, not to give them grains unless you really have to in the winter if it's only slow,
snow, let them have as much free forage of eating bugs.
It's amazing how excited they get to eat worms and little bugs and stuff like that.
And then you get orange eggs.
Yeah, what you get with commercially farm chickens is they only get fed things called layers pellets,
which are just the worst end of the food chain compacted into these dry pellets
with very little nutritional value to the chicken, whereas the chicken is the most
incredibly omnivorous animal you've ever seen in your entire life.
They will eat almost anything and they're designed to do that.
It's incredible how much a common garden chicken will lay waste to give them the opportunity.
They will, they are unbelievably destructive but wonderful creatures.
I saw a good setup where they had a big field and they had a cage enclosure for the chickens.
And the chickens to state whatever was in the thing and each day they would move it one
cage place forward rotating the whole field so they didn't have to worry about
cleaning up after them and each day they had a new supply of grass and whatever bugs were in that
area. The chicken extractors.
Brother Mouse did an episode on this backyard chickening, probably 2010 it was one of my favorites.
It's a really good method but it doesn't quite give the chickens the free range to really find
the bugs they want because they're in a limited space and the bugs can hop out or they
need to hunt around and dig in different places so it's better than the commercial but if you
have the chance to have them free range you can easily train them to come back to the same place
every day if you have a little orchard for them to be under it is better still.
Well the thing by me I have to worry about coyotes and raccoons and some other animals that
might try to kill them off. Up here we got foxes, bears, raccoons, coyotes, pretty much the gauntlet
stray dogs. Yeah I understand what you mean. It's in ideal conditions but those chicken
tractors are really nice ideas still if that's what you're limited by.
And don't be fooled, a chicken is a feisty accretia then you'd imagine.
Once you get to a healthy weight they can defend themselves to a degree, they're not totally vulnerable.
One thing I'm hoping for is the chicken assaurus, did you ever hear about that project?
Well the birds evolved from the dinosaurs and they still have some of the DNA that's just
a lot of those genes are switched off so the project is trying to find the genes that code for teeth
and arms, claws and a long tail and to re-enable it in the chicken so you basically have a dinosaur
looking chicken. Thanks for that Dr. Frankenstein. I don't know whether or like that idea.
Me neither, hi. I think it's not such a good idea actually but did we worry about Jurassic Park?
So I'm reading on the Western A-Price Foundation website,
Dude Man and he on their dietary guidelines it says things like
microwave radiation is to be avoided and fluoride and drinking water is a bad thing and a lot
of stuff that generally is it looks pretty pseudo-scientific. Do you know anything about this?
I'm not sure that that's pseudo-scientific. There's a lot of evidence to show what actually
happens to food for example in a microwave. There's a lot of references. My wife is translating
one of the books into the Czech language and it's amazing the things she comes across from the
amount of study. I definitely wouldn't dismiss it and the biggest factor which is impressed us is
the difference is in people's shape and development of their teeth. Like ask any other dietician
why people children have to wear braces when they're younger and let them explain why and how they
can avoid it without any surgery or intervention and just by what they eat and I don't know any other
nutritional expert that will tell you exactly how it occurs and all the other changes in physical
shape of growth of children and maintenance of health of adults. So look a little bit further still.
Another thing that kind of brings it down is it's harder for the average American to eat some
of these from the farm. Healthily fed animal foods is the governmental policy sort of favors of the
big factory farm over the smaller free range family farmer. Yeah I mean that's definitely part
of the problem and part of what they're trying to educate the public on. I mean they're not saying
I mean we live really pretty perfect lives by what we eat because we produce it all ourselves
and he's taken us 10 years to get the practice to be able to do that you know but in the beginning
we were we were buying not perfect types of food you know but everybody can focus on some of the more
nutrient dense food even if it's not of perfect perfect food origin you know even if it's from
commercial sources and you know it's it's metro prioritization and doing a little bit you know
cutting out the things which aren't so good and introducing gradually more of the things which
are good and understanding but most of all you know not falling for the the state and the money
led propaganda which is really really abundantly and when somebody mentioned earlier that
you know you you can't always blame the supermarkets personally speaking I have absolutely no
problem at all lumping a whole heap of blame onto the supermarkets because the the trouble is
the nobody's tackled changing their ethic some people have had some success changing some of their
practices but it's whether we are actually encouraging them to improve their overall ethic
to move away from profit being the only good to something a bit more valuable to society I don't
I don't see how we do that I don't quite know how we do that but it doesn't seem that anyone's
trying to change that fundamentally it seems to me grabbing a stick by the wrong end to be honest
you know because they're a business at the end of the day and it's also not really constructive
trying to find someone to blame it seems more constructive to think and to study properly
what food is actually good for us you know and then how we can source it ourselves maybe you can
get some stuff from the supermarket but for individual people to actually you know vote for their
feet and create change that way after all it was them who created change by giving the supermarkets
power gradually and progressively over time which which got us into this situation you know well
but it actually goes back to the suppliers for the supermarkets and probably the best way to
change the suppliers attitudes is to actually put pressures on the supermarkets to actually
carry things that are actually appropriate for us as opposed to saying we're not going to support
the supermarket and go to someplace else that's just going to make them hurt more and it's going
to make them get cheaper worse stuff that's going to hurt the overall population.
Well we only have to look at the milk market. We only have to look at the milk market to see a classic
example of how it works I mean I don't know how it is in the US but currently in the UK most milk
producing farmers are actually producing milk which is being sold on the shelf at a lower price
than they can actually produce it for on the farm and that's purely because milk and milk
distribution has been placed into an almost exclusively monopoly position towards four companies
and the independent producers of milk have been wiped out by the big supermarkets so I don't see
you can take responsibility away from the supermarkets for the market situation
if there's nobody else to compete with them. Not on the US and the US is basically most people get
the milk at the supermarket and it's usually from big factory farms milk places.
Just wanting to sort of summarize even not wanting to deliberately be controversial but the milk
in those supermarkets isn't really fit for drinking and actually causes so many problems
and is the reason why milk currently today isn't healthy to drink. There's a half true there.
If you just go to warmmilk.com you'll learn the story but basically the milk needs to be
as it comes out of the cow and the cow needs to be fed the right food and the cow needs to be
the right kind of food. We need high fat milk and all of this is explained in very very big detail
in the Western A price and warmmilk.com. I currently got some bacteria in the milk as well
because you've got flora depends on it. You need the bacteria which is supposed to be there and
you don't want it cured by a pasteurization and homogenization. When it goes rotten and off
it stinks the high heaven but when it's raw and fresh it only gets better when it goes sour.
If you let it get sour and don't drink it quickly it's amazing. It's an amazing thing
warmmilk and I find it difficult to imagine going back and not having it to be honest.
We've been drinking it for 10 years. But does the milk actually need to be
gargled first like they do at white power milk? I'm not sure what you're talking about so
here's a joke. Back the chickens real quick. How much land do you need per chicken would you say
for them to be free range? Well we we have an area where they go which is about one one just
around our farm buildings which is half a hectare which is one one acre but but we don't even
notice any impact for them and that's about 20 chickens so I will guess at least a thousand
square meters maybe two thousand square meters and then you might even not notice any impact
and I know it might be different in the US with more aggressive predators but in Europe and the UK
if my understand as long as you've got some tree cover so the predator birds can't come down and
get them then you're pretty safe I think if you've got a fenced in area to have them free range
that's at least been our experience there's a lot of tree cover yeah they're beautiful beautiful
creatures they really are I went out to so I went out to the barn just yesterday and I'd given up
collecting eggs and I heard one of them just clocking up oh god this is going to be one more egg
and I looked underneath her and there was about 15 eggs I'd missed over the winter you know
so we were really happy to have some eggs again so how often do they make the eggs?
well it depends on the breed you can get some breeds which you know lay in very intensively
almost all year round and one egg every day but it's again it's like it's a compromise between
an old variety which might be more sturdy and more more healthy but it might not lay so many eggs
so regularly and I would personally go for a larger quantity of older variety of chickens you know
which haven't been so modified for sort of high production but they tend to be hard here
and more self-reliant and self-sufficient you know how do you keep them in the winter I mean
over in New England it gets pretty cold sometimes do you have like heated enclosures or what do you
do well out here in we're in central Europe in Czech Republic and we have pretty deep snow it
gets down to minus 20 or minus 30 on occasions ours just sleep inside a shed as long as I've
got a place out the wind it doesn't matter necessarily if it's cold you know what you can do is
make a like a small boxed enclosure just open it in the morning for them somewhere off the ground
out of the wind and the rain just at night and they're they're really pretty sturdy creatures you
know as long like all creatures nor humans if you give them good food then they'll have much less
health-related problems and if you don't demand too much from them you know but that's a problem
with all the the kind of industrial and when you put any business element then you start to think
well how can I get just a few more eggs a few more liters of milk you know and then the temptation
to pump it up a little bit with grains and then a bit more grains and and then you can run into
health health-related issues you know which you might not connect with food directly but they are
you know like humans. What do you feed them in the winter? We give them scraps from our food
we we have we boil potatoes for our pigs and and give them away from cheese making we give them
some grains but we sow them in some warm water and you know let them start to ferment a little
bit so or we we killed a bull recently so they were eating all the meat scraps from after we'd
boiled all the bones and everything like that pretty much anything you have you know but try and
make it rarer and you know minimize the grains if possible because it's it's just full of gluten
you know you're probably better boiling rude vegetables or you know maybe turnips or potatoes
or so on like that instead of corn and grains they seem to be the kind of the modernized poison
for for feeding in industrialized animals and maybe even you know a worse culprit is the soil
being you know unfortunately which humans are being persuaded to eat but which is very poisonous
I don't eat soy and all that's part of the paleo too is cutting out like soy and legumes for
the most part yeah that there's a real so it should interrupt you continue now that there's a
real there's a lot in common between paleo and understand and the western a price but I'm
understanding the problem with with paleo is that they they exclude or don't emphasize that you
should eat more and more and more fat that it's a catalyst for many aspects it depends on the
there's several different you know strains some people were saying oh eat a lot of fat a lot
of animal fats and some people were saying lean meats so I think it's very much up in the air
and whether you should have lean meats or or very fatty meats I um you know I was me my wife
had been studying it kind of for the last 10 years and so in treat and interested you know one
point we're interested in macrobiotics or vegetarines and but we could never quite find the depth
of knowledge the foundation to justify why you know for the the macrobiotics my wife was in
Japan for two years and what they said was that Japanese motivated diet just had no relation to
what the natives in Japan that she met and heard of reading so you know that kind of put a nail
in the coffin of that one but what were they well I mean they were reading very much what the
Western A price diet is you know pork fat pork fermented vegetables broths you know um when
the vegetables were eaten they were eaten in small quantities but as kind of condiments as a
kind of real a real tomato sauce you know but fermented all the vegetables will be fermented and
like a sauerkraut and pickles but in much smaller quantities on the side of the plate you know
but a bigger emphasis on organ meats and fats not to mention of course the the fish and the eggs
and everything like that now have you ever raised any rabbits we we did try and we we had some
rabbits from a neighbor I love Czech Republic because a lot of people still have animals and it was
our our first animals we tried but to be honest the rabbit is a poor man's food and the rich man's
food was you know the rich person had a cow but the poor poor person had goats or rabbits you
know because it's not so fat it it it survives more marginal marginal areas and here in Europe at
least it's a problem with meximatosis and other other places with rabbits and we we couldn't get
out red our our rabbits to survive unless we either injected them or gave them a kind of
food specially made for them which had been got some kind of medication in them and we didn't want
to do that but the biggest problem is that the meat is too thin and they're fluffy and cute
I read a little thing once about rabbits and squirrels and how there's tons of them out there
but but you can starve to death eat nose
it is the best way I think I was thinking about doing deer hunting getting some venison
it's harder than it looks have you got some land
okay it's only hard because you're using the gun use a truck it's a lot easier
I know what I'd like to do is jump out the tree and strangle them
bait man use bait sometimes that's illegal that's a whole well no it's not strictly illegal
there are ways to do it legally it's illegal to hunt over bait but you can bait out of season
well at least down south yeah up here you can bait but you need a permit and landowner permission
and it just it gets into stuff that I wasn't ready to get into my first year hunting you know
I mean there's a big enough learning curve as it is to have to deal with bait but to answer your
question dude man no I don't have any land just just a yard oh I was only gonna encourage people
you know chickens are amazing because sometimes it's a bit wasteful to keep killing an animal
and you know I'm not a vegetarian but I don't like killing things although we do but chickens are
great because they've got quite a long life and they make so many eggs and eggs are just you know
wonderful you know they're fed on good good food and we'll have you so I think anyone can have
there was a guy earlier who said he had an apartment with some some chickens didn't he?
I'm a very small garden outside so anybody can keep them I think they have apartments that have
them over here but they're usually used for fighting so you use you keep your chickens years at a time
when I was growing up we'd keep chickens through you know like the the beginning of the year
till summerish and in fall we'd slaughter the chickens get more chickens and then
rents washing repeat yeah I mean it depends if you're gonna have them for meat or for eggs I mean
I think a better system is to keep them for the longer run because then you're not gonna do
so much killing and you actually get more return from the eggs then for the lifetime of the chicken
and for the input and when you do kill a chicken because he's too old the meat will be yellow you
know and there'll be such wonderful fat in there because the chicken has had time to mature an age
just like all the animals you know killing them too young the the meat and the fat and whatever
you're gonna make bone broth from hasn't hasn't sort of accumulated the wealth of nutrition that
we're hoping to get from them you know so I would recommend against the just going through that
short-sighted cycle and rather going for the long haul well the reason we went with the short cycle
hang on I got a cough and the reason we do the short cycle is there's a chicken house
that's up the road from my parents place and they get rid of their chickens every fall
because they have to clean out and wipe everything out and so we get free chickens that are already
lying and they're not even a year old yet and we just use those yeah I understand it's only
that the the quality of the it's gonna take you a while to to get some good food into them and
change their diet and I'm not saying that the wherever you get them from is terrible but it's
gonna be commercial and you know that the chickens gonna be laying different quality of eggs and
then you could get if you did it yourself you know it's not difficult if you just have a few old
chickens it's not difficult the first as long as you have a cock the first 10 eggs you have put
them in a small incubator and 30 days later you've got your own little chicks you know and
easy to breed them yourself and and no trouble to keep them over the winter they're they're very
easy keepers dude man can I ask how you got into doing this stuff like living you know farm
hippie lifestyle yeah you won't believe it was it was a linux it's it was Linux
really yeah yeah yeah I mean because I never just I was amazed by the freedom and the the sort of
attitude of openness and sharing with source code you know and because I just had free time at
the job I was doing and I didn't want to be doing proprietary stuff and this was like the good 12
or 15 years ago I couldn't find any kind of job to get into for open source and I thought I can't
stay at this anymore so the more I've read about it on the internet more I realized I had to do
something and of course the first year it was just a few chickens and a few rabbits and a go-to
too and it built up gradually you know yeah definitely research along the way and I mean my wife
never thought that we'd have cows but basically because of the Western A price foundation and
the new aura and respect towards butter I realized that there was no choice but to get the cows
because we wanted butter and the first time you know we were scared of big animals like a cow
so we got a donkey to begin with and I was scared of him to be honest now I had some problems with him
but since then we've got more cows we've had bulls we've got some horses now and everything but it
is a little bit you know one step at a time but it's definitely in the realms a possibility for
a useless computer program because that's what I was and I'm still cool sounds really cool
but sorry guys to dominate this a little bit you someone mentioned food and it's a bit of a
passion of mine oh no I have a perfect time for me to get on starving now well and on this note
I think we have another new year's passing here was it like Myanmar and some other countries
the new bar is left and they were the ones with the they had a map going that that was showing
and where it all was yeah they mentioned it before they left and I don't remember what all
countries other than Myanmar no I don't remember either and I didn't see a link it's time and date
dot com I just couldn't find the the thing that they were looking at everybody frantically searches time
and date dot com I think I just found it I see what she meant about not being able to pronounce any
of them though phenom pen maybe uh Chongqing air kuchsk possibly Singapore or my too far behind
now I don't know but with that kind of mispronunciation you my friend or a true American
thank you I know you it's a strip of of Russia and China definitely are in the new year
okay everything's going well Ken I'm just panicking there my 3g connection died so what did I miss
hopefully not an interesting conversation about food I'm cold better of that yeah no we weren't
talking about food Ken we were talking about strapping kids to fireworks still yeah we just
sit off a few small ones one of them actually you fell down and come streaming
straight towards the kids and I said right when I saw it falling down and I said right come on
run back here and the day then it just landed where they were show of hands guys who's surprised
anybody anybody because your hands were so well and I know this is why you don't
yeah yeah this is why you don't buy fireworks for your kids Ken you make them yourself don't have them
it's actually when I come here it's a very funny thing for for me to have fireworks because
fireworks are banned in Ireland for obvious reasons fireworks is can yeah in the states it's
it's kind of like buying a state by state basis but normally what happens is you have someone
and you go on a family trip to another state you buy it and then you smuggle it back to the
the state that has the restrictions on it so it's easy to get them in the northeast you
always go to New Hampshire or if you take a trip down south you always bring it back up but uh yeah
that's more or less what happens you can always live in New Hampshire like some of us do that sounds
good so when I was growing up you wouldn't see fireworks at all because you know if you were
called for fireworks you would call for explosive material and you were going down to the farm
for a while so when I came over here I couldn't believe it like the amount of fireworks at the
neighbors fire off it's absolutely incredible oh Ken you would love some of the trailer parks we
got here I mean it's every Friday night from July until end of summer so true where are you
who me yes I'm in New Hampshire I mean that's the southern corner of southern south eastern
corner of New Hampshire over by keen uh yeah a little south of that I'm in Rochester actually
oh sorry not south that to be east to be quite a ways east of of keen keenes in the western corner
the state what's that you didn't work up or I did it didn't hear you so what do you think about
those free stators um I wish there'd be more of them and get here quicker are you one
well not by choice but uh yeah I was already living here and thinking like that before that
movement started I've been following that I might try to uh move up there eventually
you guys want to explain what that is cult no it's a movement actually you'd probably
be better at it than I would be because I don't pay much attention to them it's basically trying to get
as many uh libertarians to move up to New Hampshire to uh influence the system and make uh the
state more libertarian oh interesting that's a cult I could get into possibly and their logo is a
sweet hedgehog perfect uh porcupine oh looks like a hedgehog but yeah I guess that is a porcupine
sorry for looking in but what's a free stator uh that's what they were just uh libertarians that
move up to New Hampshire uh for uh to try to influence the system maybe uh create more freedom
in their life and the the ideas as I understand it is that New Hampshire is a good place to start
because our state constitution is quite a bit more it's it's quite a bit freer than even
the US constitution and the US constitution was largely based upon the New Hampshire constitution
and a lot of it was actually cut out um to be more agreeable to some of the other states but I mean
you know for instance our state logo is live free or die and uh you know I frankly would would
hope people get here faster because we have more people more liberals coming up from
from Massachusetts and coming over from Maine um and even Vermont to some degree but just
our our state has turned very liberal lately and it's uh it's uh it's not gonna end well
wait what do you mean liberal you mean like what do you mean uh democrats basically okay
where it you know they they come here like especially especially for Massachusetts
their Massachusetts is very very democrat very liberal where they have just like everything
is a service everything is taken care of for them um and they just they pay tremendous amounts
of taxes and hearing New Hampshire you take care of stuff on your own and we don't pay many taxes
up here other than uh our property tax and when these people move up from Massachusetts and they
start demanding all these services um you know our economy really can't handle the the tax
increase that all these services cost and a lot of them uh you know the laws that they want to pass
and stuff are just they they kind of take your freedom away take away your liberties
i mean another thing New Hampshire has no sales tax so there is quite a bit of people that uh
live right on the border and go into New Hampshire and go shopping yeah there's that we have no
sales tax and we have no income tax and uh but but our property taxes are are really high compared to
other places in the US and surrounding states everything has to be paid for yeah absolutely
and i and i think it's just it's just a matter of you know do we pay for it collectively and and
leave things up to politicians to bargain for them and uh you know we know the kind of corruption
that happens there or do we you know try to take care of things agree to do it on our own you know
what i mean and it's just you know it's six to one half it doesn't know the other but um
you know it's nice to have some choice i will just point out that our new year's marathon has
now hit religion and politics weather up next and we got some nutrition already so
oh you got twenty one hour when you have twelve hours to fill um you got to talk about all
number of things i guess see that's the funny thing too you you mentioned having to fill time and
that's the kind of the idea that i went into it with last year when we when we just did the
twelve-hour show like how are we going to fill twelve hours and man cool people just show up
like this and it fills itself you don't even have to worry about it it's so great
well that's good i you know the thing that uh i was real happy to be here this year and
this seems like as good a time as any um because you did the uh the new year's marathon last year
and i i was listening to it on hacker public radio because it came out is i don't know eight episodes
or something and i thought i really need to be a part of it so it was it was as a result of last
year's marathon that i started recording shows for hacker public radio that's awesome that was
absolutely the goal that was that you know anything else that came out of it was bonus but that
was the goal was that it would get people excited definitely got me excited i've i've recorded
quite a few programs by now yeah and the good ones too i'm trying to get my wife to listen to your
your office series she's uh she's a teacher so i think it'd be useful for
and it's just started to poke i i've got at least four more that are loaded up and in the pipeline
and i'm writing more stuff now so uh you know this could be 20 or 30 episodes before i'm done
don't really enjoy your um podcast on where to find good ebooks and whatnot that was really nice
i love yeah that was good yeah uh it all closed together for me
well thank you uh you know one of the things that i come at that from i i hope it was fairly obvious
this idea of market incentives um i was professionally an economist for a number of years so i
have a certain bias towards thinking that way and uh you know i'd like to see um uh yeah i'd like
to see more companies that are putting this stuff out because they see uh an economic benefit in
doing it that came across pretty obviously uh now that i actually think about it in that context
that you were actually an economist because it was definitely from that standpoint
looking forward to it uh hookah uh i'm hoping my small company can uh start listening to them because
nobody there knows office it's a fantastic site series of hookah you know you should be applauded
first as i said to you on an email uh privately it should be required reading for every person
and every company in the in the country it's gonna say country but countries will be the
a better uh explanation but you know maybe we should at some point we'll collect all the emails
and publish them somewhere but um i was uh the way i get into this was that i was a professor of
economics at a fairly small college and then i was asked to become the faculty development officer
because i seem to have a better handle on technology than anyone else on the faculty uh and that
led me to developing all of this training and it was Microsoft office that i started with because
that's what the college was using um and then when i got into Libra office it was well this is all
the same stuff really and so that's one of the things i keep emphasizing to people is if you learn
the basic concepts right you can use any office suite that you happen alike so someone could
listen to what i'm doing and get the basic ideas for Microsoft office or word perfect office
and use all of that stuff uh hookah are you going to do something uh could take three or four
episodes to uh uh how to fix uneditable stuff that co-workers put out oh that's that's not even
a whole episode there's a recycle bin up in the upper left hand corner of your desktop
and drag and drop is all it takes or start from scratch yeah absolutely well you know by definition
if it's uneditable then it can't be fixed right well sometimes it's uh yeah i guess starting from
scratch everything's a long process if you have to fix what's already there so what do you mean by
uneditable do you mean uh stuff that's so tragically written and poorly put together that it's a
nightmare even to try and read it are you talking about like PDFs that can't be opened in any other
format no i'm talking about uh this is mostly outlining we do a lot of outlining and procedures and
stuff and i don't know people just put in number outlines to make it look good and uh call it good
i i don't think that's the best way to do outlining frankly no no that's the well i consider uneditable
yeah one of the interesting things is uh i've been focusing on styles a lot right now because
it's such a key concept when you're working with this and uh the trick that a lot of people don't
get is that the way to outline is use heading styles and then you can take what you're doing
and you can bring it right into um the presentation graphics program that will create all your slides
for you just by reading it yes uh with the type of documents i'm thinking of uh that have been
produced over years literally uh where you're supporting some old product where manufacturing
and what happens is these people had no concept of styles yeah that's uh that's unfortunate
and um yeah i don't other than trying to explain to people no this is really the way you need to do it
uh i'm not exactly sure how to deal with it um i i started off by taking a look at how this stuff
is done on the web and we know w3c has talked about separating presentation from content
and i use that as a jumping off point to basically say well you should approach
office productivity in much the same way the presentation and content are two different things
and then get this idea of what what is the functional meaning of each element
yes that in that kind that concept uh i i'm gonna try and uh get it throughout throughout the
company if i can but uh a lot of it's just lost cause yeah that's that's too bad because it's a
really great concept i you know maybe at some point we'll throw so much computing power at
everything that it'll overcome our sloppiness but uh for the moment i'd just as soon
learn how to do it the right way yeah i'm talking of a small company that doesn't even have an
IT department the IT department is the boss's son uh yeah been there done that well i've done
training in uh small companies as well where uh people not all of the people with the vast majority
people were very receptive to um you know going for a days training on
word and a lot of them got really into it and uh started correcting other people's documents
then after the training so i don't think for a lot of people it's i don't think it's necessarily
intentional that they want to produce crappy documents it's just they haven't they haven't seen
another way and it hasn't been explained to them the advantages of doing it correctly
i had an interesting uh experience with that at at this college i was at they had a program
for people who needed to finish their bachelor's degree and the idea was that they might have had
in a couple of years of college and then had to drop out now they're 40 years old and realizing
they're never going to go anywhere in their career if they don't finish their degree so we set up
a degree completion is what we called it and it was a series of seminars that they could take over
18 months and as part of this you had to demonstrate a certain level of computer literacy and you
could do that just by taking a test but if you didn't feel comfortable taking the test i created a
class well you know the class mostly focused on office productivity that was the biggest part of it
and everyone who was going to take the class would put it off until the very last moment because
they thought it was going to be terrible they didn't want to do it and then they take my class
at the end they'd be yelling at me why didn't anyone make us take this earlier when we could have
used it yep yeah exactly that's not my fault you put it off until the end i wasn't the one who made
that decision well who could i tell i put in the chat on your latest episode my pet peeve i have
yet any any of the companies i do consulting for sit down the secretary's computer and need to
open up their Microsoft Word and the zoom level isn't at that default 50% of the screen wasted
because there's gray space on either side of the document and you're seeing you're seeing the
entire margins now i guess that some of them probably do like that they can see further
vertically in the document but if you're going to do that by one of those rotating monitors but
it's just it's absurd that till they just sit down and like you said they don't configure it at
all they have no idea the interface for it is also kind of cripples the vertical space because
you know the ribbon takes up a lot of vertical space and it's designed at a time when wide screens
were coming popular so i mean i made absolutely no sense that's one of the things that i liked about
colligra as they they put it on the side instead of putting it up on the top and using a big vertical
bars well there's one of the things i like to do is i will use some of that space by having
my styles window open all the time well if you want to conserve vertical space the best i found
is to have a system that has a global menus i set up in kde i put this panel on the side like
on unity and i put the menu button that opens up the file edit no menu bar in a button just
says menu that's right underneath the launching button and then i set it to automatically put the
windows into full screen mode and one in full screen mode to not show the the decorations and i put
the decorations into a window control panel that's hidden up at the top so i when fully maximized
there's no menu bar no window decorations and just all app and it actually works out pretty well
yeah interesting i i don't i don't think i'd actually like that but maybe i should give it a try
was i when you start talking i said oh man there's there's one of those global menu people
it's a global menu plasmoid that i use it's uh but the there's also more options in kde uh there's one
this i think an app menu you could put in the actual window decoration and uh then you can also
put one in the panel and or you could just have one in the panel that just says menu and then
it goes the file edit you know so uh there's definitely more options if you go the kde route
well it's pretty much by definition if an option exists anywhere it's in kde that's very true
the thing is you need to have um you need to have i think the the package installed for it it's
uh i think app menu dash qt or something like that uh it it comes on default i think on the
boom to base like kubuntu um i recently migrated to slack where i haven't compiled it yet
but um i'm gonna go look to do that maybe i'll try to get my hands dirty and create a slack build
well what are the slack builds and global menus platoon must be you i know that's like yeah that's
all i really needed to hear i agree with that that kde is quite customizable but i also find it
hardest customize and and unity is okay as well but i've been actually customizing groom shell 3.4
in my jay to quite recently with extensions and i'm like sort of a mate quite first time
quite recently i'm quite amazed at what i like what i think is that bridge really because it is
quite customizable with extensions well one of the things that i think links all of this and we
take a look at whether it's kde or office productivity suites or whatever they have a lot of
capabilities there's a lot of customizability but you have to invest the time to learn how to do all
of this stuff well they're trying to make some of this stuff easier um i know that they're they're
making it so you could download uh the window manager scripts uh right off of the config
dialogue uh just like you would like a desktop theme and they're trying to make it so it's easier
to download some of these add-ons so uh but you have to learn that there are add-ons and
how to uh get them which is a big stumbling block for many people
yeah i i i love kde that's been my desktop of choice for a long time and and i know that i don't
know half of the things i could do with it um but i just haven't sat down and spent enough time
to figure it out as i might try to uh plasma active you mean like literally on a tablet or just
like the interface itself uh the interface or the tablet either one i've not tried it on a tablet
i did play around with just like that uh i guess it's the active interface but you know that one
where it's just kind of like a search bar in the middle of your screen and you can search for your
applications and then they all launch full screen i i've messed around with that i think that's a
nap i think that's a netbook uh interface oh okay that's yeah you're right that's what i've messed
around with it didn't love it but no i've not tried active yeah plasma active is the kde netbook
interface and um i haven't tried it but i've been reading on sites about every now and again and
looks quite interesting so i hope it kind of ends up on devices and so on in the future
it definitely looks interesting they're uh they're trying to go away from the the file-based uh
you know system and go based on uh meta data tags and uh activity based the
organization so basically whatever you have open you could easily pin to your activity
and the activities are basically separated based on what you're actually doing so you could
easily create an activity which has its own separate desktop which i couldn't have applications
associated with it uh files associated with it bookmarks associated with it
and be able to easily open them up once you go and switch that activity and each activity can
also hold windows too so it's almost like uh like a more advanced uh virtual desktop
anyone actually use activities no i tried i can't figure it out i hate them
yeah i looked at the last time i actually played with kde and i just couldn't figure it out it
just was a clumsy interface the thing is uh here's a trick if you want to use activities there's
a couple things you might want to try yeah but one has to be a trick it should be here's something
that we have in our desktop it's a core feature of it let's let's let's hear the trick first
okay there's the activity bar uh plasma and what you do is you put a uh an extra panel on one
corner of the screen that uh is like auto hide and uh whenever you want to switch the activities
you just put your mouse down then the panel pops up and you could easily switch between the activities
and another thing you can do is you could set uh the mouse action on the desktop to uh switch
on uh scroll or a button press and you could quickly navigate that way too well okay so i mean
well great you can switch between thousand virtual desktop yeah like how how do you get your activity
to like let's say i want a video editing activity and a music editing activity how do i get those
two activities to be distinct from one another that's the well i don't know yet for for activities
they actually for the kde apps it saves the state so when you press the activity management thing
and you press stop it saves the state of each of the activity so if you had like a bunch of like
let's say you had kade open with a bunch of uh config files you were working on uh and you stop
that activity while uh that window was open in that activity it would save the state and the file
of what you're doing there so when you uh re-open that activity it would pop up with kate with
that file that you're working on okay but say you say you have a shell or something open and
you're processing something you're saying that that's going to be suspended for the entire time
that is not continuing to work in the background while i'm doing something i there's two things
you could you have them opened and then you could stop them so all the open ones you could switch
between but you could also stop the activity which would suspend the the application only the
suspend only really works for what i found the kd app applications that have like some sort of
session management but uh the the thing is that uh the there have a new interface and a new paradigm
they're trying to work with which is called the share light connect and uh being able to
associate uh files with activities even on the desktop so you could set the folder view to uh
your activities and basically whatever and you could connect files to an activity uh it's
in its infancy it's being worked out in plasma active uh but once the the share light connect is
open it'll be easy to pin the the application i mean the files you're working on to an activity and
make it a whole lot more useful i don't sorry i just don't see this activity thing has been
useful because okay i i just think it's too complex it's not obvious to me yeah i think probably
what it's suffering from is the same thing that nipa muck and all that stuff is suffering from date
they introduced it in a completely non-working state at four dot zero and it's just been there
and we're at four dot well technically ten now i'm on four dot eight but you know we're we've
it's been this whole development time and it still isn't working and so we're just kind of
staring at these options and they're not even functional yet so why are they there i think well
i'm on plasma active the the thing is they have the activities like writing your face it's
right there and it's easy and accessible to use them and the desktop definitely did not have that
it wasn't a parent it's like here's like this extra thing you don't have to use it but
it has a whole bunch of features that you could if you want to uh i don't even see it having
features that i could use i mean i literally do i want to make an activity for someone
for like a me that they want to sit down and they want to do their music stuff so i want
certain applications like qjack control i want that to launch i want lenex sampler to launch i want
certain things to happen and i i unless i'm just missing it which is totally possible but i haven't
seen it online yet like i how to i can't figure out how to get those things to be bound to an
activity i can write a shell script that will launch them all and so and then a desktop file that
they can double click to trigger the shell script but not i can't get it just to switch over
an activity and bang there's your workflow yeah i think i think the thing that i from what i've
seen and heard about the kd activities it's like it sounds like it's an interesting concept
but it sounds like it's like flawed from the start like it doesn't actually do the things that an
end user expects it to do as far as being able to set up things like for a project type thing
have an activity for a specific project and have it actually be persistent so you can actually
use it as a method of navigation and it doesn't sound like it works correctly in that respect
well that's the thing right now at least on the desktop there's no easy UI to say
here i'm working on this file i want this to be on my activity or be able to open it up
hey do you know if is it you said no easy UI is it something that you can do and i can
fig file or something do you know well you could you could kind of i think in
4.9 you could right click on an application in like dolphin and say associate this with a
current activity or something like that okay and you could set the folder view to use the
activity folder okay okay so you're it's almost like on a mobile phone where you put
applications on a certain screen like on and yeah okay okay but the share like connect once
that hits the desktop any applications that are designed for it it'll basically gets the
information of what file is currently open and if you do share it basically gives you things like
upload this to flicker or email this to a contact or that a like would basically add
metadata to nipple mark like add a tag like this add it five stars and connect would associate
that file with the current activity so you have a quick easy UI to basically do the kind of
interact with the kind of kde technologies and actually make them useful interesting I still
think they shouldn't have advertised it until it was ready but that's cool yeah but it's completely
tied into kde so now an application like case or some some application that wants to take
advantage of any of these things is completely tied to the kde desktop and can't be migration
to handle the one I honestly can't see I can't see myself using this outside of kde I can't see
myself using it at all you know this is something that I would be using for someone I set up a
computer for and said here's your look here's the environment I've constructed for you and here's
how to use it well this is mostly the whole paradigm is going to be hammered out in in plasma
active that's basically the testing bed to basically get everything down because they don't want to
break the desktop again and they'll slowly trickle things out but one of the interesting things
that you will be able to do is once you have the ability to associate files with an activity
there is a it's currently in the works to be able to lock an activity and it encrypts all those
files on that activity so you can actually use it to hide stuff and and use a kind of workflow like
that or what concerns me as well about it is the fact that none of this is file-based it's
completely gone away from the units many of the Unix philosophies for for start one small thing
do one small thing and do it well everything is file-based this is now a metadata database
he linked in through mine types essentially a mess and yeah I think you could access activity
stuff through I think a KIO KIO so you could open it up in dolphin but and most of the KDE apps
but I'm not sure about the non KDE apps and command line sort of things I wonder I'm not sure if
there is a bridge since it sounds to me like the activities is designed in a way to help you
manage your applications and windows and files and stuff but as a knock-on effect you're
instead of doing that manually now you're managing your activities so it seems a bit strange
yeah the UI definitely isn't down yet and they haven't really worked out the whole concept on the desktop
yet that's one thing that was lacked they had the capabilities it's just that they had no way
I mean the user had no good way of doing it which is the big big problem you have these things but
no one really could do anything with it but it's just starting to really come around and I'm
saying the big big thing would be when the share like connectors that is lands on the desktop that's
what I think of it really push it forward I think there's still some people here need convincing
and maybe I maybe I'm just missing it maybe I just need somebody for five minutes or a presentation
just to get somebody vision but I think it's a north lot of buy-in just it really goes
completely back to a desktop philosophy that I have completely given up on well here's the idea
of being able to run one application from one desktop and another application from another
desktop all intertwined with you know scripts running on the console well yes scripts are definitely
a good thing basically that the whole idea behind activities is that at least initially you have
all these plasmoids and they can specialize your desktop to do different things but they're limited
in space and you have multiple different things that you use your computer to do so the idea is if
you have another activity you could use it to hold different things like you could set up a separate
activity that has that uses the folder view to your projects folder or you could set up an activity
that basically you know manages things you could set up activity that has maybe a picture of
you know a picture of your family while you're at work and then when you go home you have something
else it basically the idea is to separate your different activities and have a separate
specialized desktop for whatever task you're doing yeah but do people really work like that and
if they do why don't they just use a different window or but yet login is a different user I mean
all of those things which are supported by the majority of desktop environments we have out there
yeah I'm with Ken I don't work like that I tend to you know if I'm doing a job I use the
application I'm using for that job and if I start doing something else I open another application
I might put it on a virtual desktop I might not you know I don't think that that clean vision of
having different spaces or areas for different activities such as you know video editing or
photo editing I don't think computing really works like that things tend to merge into one another
don't worry yeah the workspace is in desktop environments I mean I yes there it's been
now in game 2 it's that in KDE it's there come whilst they're a bit differently in game 3
XFC has it Alexey has in so on but I I never really use the workspace is I just tend to just
stick to the one one workspace or window if you like yeah that's fine but there if you want to
use them what I'm saying is they are supported you know whether I've got dual monitors or not
I'll use works you know if I'm just on my laptop I might use I might throw the IRC window into
the second into a second workspace or if I've got dual if I've got an attached monitor I'll
whack it onto the second monitor but kind of the point being that I don't as Phil says I don't
work like that I do I'm say even in work I'm busy doing something I'm writing some code so I've
got code page up then all of a sudden somebody comes in says hey we need to check this spec or
this interface so you open up a few words or word documents or PDFs or something and then you're
printed them off and then you need to take a screenshot or something because you need to file a bug
report you know the next thing you're SSHing into a Linux box and comparing something on a Windows
server and then and then three or four hour later you find you've got about a gazillion window
open and you start closing them all down to start again yeah but yeah at that time you need them
and sometimes what I'll do in that case is if it is getting really cluttered I'll feck all the
windows remote desktops to a virtual desktop I'll move all then I'll divide it by activity but
you know I can't automatically say it just requires an awful lot of thought oh Johnny you've come
in and now there's an urgent matter let me just hibernate this activity while I open up
something else sorry for pulling the piss about it but I genuinely don't work that way and
I've never seen anyone who does yeah that I can't can't see it myself either yeah there it is
very small and it's almost like a new paradigm of looking at it and maybe it makes more sense on the
mobile devices like the tablets so I guess we're just gonna have to see just what happens but I'm
looking forward to some of the newer developments and the newer AIs around that yeah don't
sorry I think I think I'm I'm ragging on you cause I'm really glad that you that you come on and
are explaining this stuff to me and I love my frustration with it is they put in this foundation
they have a vision which is grand they put in all this foundation which is grand but they're
loading up services that I believe I don't need running on my machine like on my SQL database and
and a ss sorry my brain is just fried tattoo I don't know I was just thinking my ass is kiddie runs
yeah I have that virtuoso the thing about streaky a streaky is getting axed for four dot 10
finally but never mucks getting their own internal indexer so they're doing everything in house
and apparently it indexed a whole lot quicker and uses less resources and as far as on the horizon
when kde ports to cute five they're also moving over to frameworks five which moduleizes their
their frameworks and makes it a whole lot more attractive for an average cute developer to
bring in those libraries and and since they've been working on plasma active they've been
thinking a lot more about trimming down the fat per se so you can fit kde on lower resource the
devices yeah but again why yeah again and like I said all these services running that were going
to allow developers to build on top of it and the developers didn't rush in well I like like the
pin I like I finally fell in love with the akinati it's running in the background I can have it
a sink with my cloud accounts I have it I pulled down all my contacts off of Facebook and I was
able to liberate that made it a whole lot easier to build a nice functional address book with
nice pictures and rather complete and you know it it it's finally getting the point where it's
it's really usable and getting gaining more and more features and my the contacts actually
and your schedule can actually show up in your clock app when you click on the clock app it opens
up a calendar and it will show you all the the things for the day it's actually getting quite
integrated nice okay that's fine that's lovely but you know what there is not one desktop out there
not one desktop out there that addresses the real need that every business has and the reason that
Microsoft is still winning on the desktop to this very day yeah and that is integration seamless
integration with Microsoft exchange came ill doesn't do it thunderbird doesn't do it and there's
no reason now before it was like a psychological thing we don't want to support an undocumented
interface well since the EU thing has come along that's been no argument so I think there is
something that you can set up akinati for maybe some sort of groupware thing yeah it's a
different replacement not an exchange okay this is just another by the way thing and just
allow me here is a hpr segment going around about this because people are chasing fantastic
desktops and interesting technologies and the latest thing the latest thing in broadcasting across
the network and bonjour let's everybody jump on that and desktop search is going to be the next
thing let's jump on that and interfaces everywhere you know unified interfaces touch screen interfaces
everybody jumps in the latest thing but the one thing that will help people get Linux deployed
on the desktop is a viable seamless replacement to Microsoft exchange and actually I have an answer
for this at the end because I've been researching quite a lot and when I say seamless integration
with Microsoft exchange if you look at any any device that's been out there Microsoft Windows
phone the original version took over from because it had seamless integration with exchange rim took
over from that because it had seamless integration with exchange calendar and outlet the iPhone took
over from that because of the seamless integration with Microsoft exchange Android has taken over
quite a lot from the engineering at least because of the seamlessly integration with Microsoft
exchange so I would argue right here and right now the reason we have one and many other things
Linux is one on many other areas is simply because we do not have a good connector to Microsoft
exchange and what I mean by that is if you go to your boss and you say hey boss I want to run Linux
and they will go here she will go yeah fine doesn't bother me but you need to be able to do your work
and you can't look them in the eye and say I can do my work if you don't have if you're not able to
communicate with everybody if you arrive 20 minutes for the meeting then you're instantly told
oh I cannot use I cannot use this this desktop of yours you need to switch back to the
corporate desktop because we need you to be here on time that's fair evolution's got a plugin
for exchange evolution is shite yeah I was just about to say and I will tell you why it shite
back 10 years ago when it was you know that monkey mechelle de cassas he had a zimian I bought
the connector for for exchange from them because it was proprietary at the time and when I
purchased it it didn't work because we had a self-signed search and ever since then I've been
using that into integration it has simply not worked the solution of course has been
devmail has anyone used that it devmail is a application that's run it's a Java app that runs
and what it does is is you start it up and you give it the connection to your outlaw web access
server and it uses the same protocol that apple ipad uses uh Microsoft mail on the apple ipad
and with that it will allow you to connect via iMac to your Microsoft exchange server
it will also allow you to connect a devmail server up it will also allow you to connect
and yes so I've got a pop I've got iMac I've got SMTP I've got HGTP Caldev and I've got a local
LDAP port however this is my round absolutely brilliant software you should you should definitely
support it it's devmail and it is the URL is devmail.sortzforge.net if you're not using it you should
and I've been using it for sorry I obviously not I Bob my friend Bob no actually I have been
using it and it is really really very nice so could you back up can and explain what exchange is
to some of us you don't know this sort of thing right Microsoft exchange is a mail server and it's
a coloring server and it's also a um company directory so you can look up people's emails and
that sort of thing it is the backbone of every small yes it's awful as maybe but it's the backbone
of every small business they get a Microsoft server and it comes with this small business server
thing it's got exchange and people connect their outlook email client to it and they're able to
schedule meetings with Bob Tom and everybody and they're able to shout schedule and meeting room
and a projector something and it all works and then it syncs with their phones and everything
works fine it is the backbone of business and when I say backbone it is literally companies just
operates entirely on on email and their outlook and their exchange yeah I've got your back
it does that we our company uses it so you know and on a Linux desktop my only option is to use
they there's a thing called is it where exchange web or something basically turns exchange into
an email client an on a web base client but it in comparison to our look it's got very limited
and I work for the government and we definitely have no choice other than to use microsoft
exchange you know open-source technologies not even an option absolutely it's everywhere and if
you're if you're talking to a set of before but if you're talking to your managers and they really
don't care they could care less what you're running they really could and so long as it's secure
you know because when you think about you know I've been thinking about this for a long time
and how best to do a topic on it and this was the best thing is a rant just here on the new year show
so on you you can't stop me but when I think back to like microsoft didn't always own the desktop
it was the fact that years before you had a thing called lotus mail if anyone remembers that
and then they that owned the desktop and it was it was brutal because you had to take the
sorry it was ccmail it was called ccmail and you had to take the thing down every night to reclaim
the database or to reduce up all the hard disks and people all the unique skies are thinking yeah
but we have mail sorted we run mail on the back end but they haven't exchanged sorted and none of the
developers seems to me have ever worked in an area where they've worked for small shitty businesses
that run these not criticizing people yeah but small companies who just want time to be able to
talk the managing director to be able to talk to they to the sales guy in the fields that's all
they want to be able to do and if it's able to do that they could care less what it runs up
has anyone ever used zebra at all how does this fit into this whole quandary it's it's a
replacement for exchange but it's not okay for right here's the thing here's how technology comes
into a company you know because we've heard about people why has Linux not succeeded on the desktop
reason one yeah anyone want to give me a reason they've heard and i'll smack it back down to to
being no good connector to an exchange because there's no good connector to exchange
excellent good night actually i'll give you a different take though at several of the companies
i've worked at they didn't use exchange they actually used lotus notes instead now here was the
worst part about this there is actually a lotus notes client that will run under Linux however
companies don't want to get it even though it's pretty much free they still will not approve it
which basically keeps us from using Linux on our on our PCs well don't get me started about
lotus notes but yes but they you know if you hear people saying hardware manufacturers want
ship Linux that's absolute Rolex because the hardware manufacturers will ship anything that
makes them they don't care they'll ship Linux happily because it's cheap they don't have to pay
anybody first but the fact is people need to be able to buy it or it's no good for them
the the fact remains as if you look at the recently the how how technology gets into a small
company or even a big company for that matter it's not that the IT department sits down and makes
a strategic decision to do that that's how upgrades happen that's how you go from windows 95 to
2000 whatever that's how upgrades happen but that's not how technology is introduced to companies
it's introduced by the employees themselves if you don't believe me look at the ipad coming in
and before that look at the blackberries coming in it was brought in by people had to set
whole set up a home the gutter for Christmas it's really handy it's really useful i needed for my
job da da da da da da all of a sudden ipad started appearing everywhere agreed or not as people
seen that agreed and has anyone does anyone want to argue with me that a business case was ever
done by any IT department anywhere to get ipads in
rujip please do push the talk
so um sorry i've annoyed everybody on my set of time time for another timezone isn't it
and you can't can't talk about that for an hour okay let's
start our recordings for a second and restart them again please
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